Soil and Blood: A Defense of Magical Dirt Theory

Consider the development of a particular man under two different ecosystem inputs.

#1: A man is fed lab-grown meat from vats of monoculture cells, milk substitutes from nuts, and pesticide laden vegetables.

#2: A man is fed meat and milk from healthy cows fed a grass diet.

A man could have the strongest genetics of his generation and still emerge a weakling on diet #1, while the most basic biomass of a man becomes stronger under #2. Here we find the fundamental flow in Darré's system: it is Soil and Blood that binds a nation, not Blood and Soil!

Other posts here have begun to grapple with race in America. This is necessary topic of discussion: it is clearly useful and true to demarcate one another by our shared histories. While at one time America was primarily bound by men who shared a common white European ancestry, turning back the clock to that time seems untenable.

The truth of it is that we--white European men--have wildly benefitted from the tender care the native population molded the land with. In return for this ungiven gift we massacred the buffalo, poisoned the waterways, and chopped down the ancient forests. Are you so burdened by the superiority of your ancestry that you can't wail and gnash your teeth at their idiocy?

The health of America's soil and the living beings it feeds is the health of her men and women. The foregrounding of Soil, the care and feeding of ecosystems, provides a binding for America beyond Blood. We should find common cause between men of the same Blood as family is true, but even men of different blood can bind together to throw out the poisoners and parasites that so plague us today!

>>1571
>we--white European men

On an anonymous channel you could be an alien. If there are aliens from outer space here, how do you like the Voyager Golden Record that we sent up a few decades ago?

>>1571

I agree with much of what you say, but I wish you hadn't called it "A Defense of Magical Dirt Theory." In my understanding, "magical dirt" specifically means all soil, no blood.

I'm a hereditarian who also believes that culture and education are enormously important. Hereditarians who think otherwise are either overcorrecting for Blank Slate theory, or have succumbed to a crude scientism, or both.

This is a good direction OP. Actually stewarding the land, accounting for our crimes against the land, and doing truth and reconciliation towards ecologically integrated civilization, so that the land can nurture us to become a stronger race is a great sacred project to undertake that feels ripe for more development. This is the kind of thinking that is much more productive than navel gazing the racial decline. Make environmentalism based again?

>>1573
On the internet, nobody knows I'm actually a dog.

>>1574
Magic dirt is a bad name because of its preexisting connotations, but the pun is getting at something important: that the land itself is sacred, and our relationship to it must reflect that.

Now I'll throw a wrench in the works by bringing up Nick land's "how to be a nazi" formula. It was this blood and soil sort of thinking that he skewered as being bovine and stupid. I have no direct comment on that, but there's an interesting fight to be had there.

>Make environmentalism based again?

Intensive rotational grazing can integrate nomadism with wise stewardship of the land. AI-powered drone fleets will be responsible for herding bison to rejuvenate the vast plains of North America. I'm personally interested in Brazil. In addition to a well-located spaceport, a rich bounty of flora and fauna await those capable of stewarding the Land of the Future, to use Stefan Zweig's words. Brazil was the land of brazilwood, but will it ever be the Land of the Future?

>>1579
To approach the race question from the sacred land direction, it's obvious that the actual inhabitants of North America are not a nation but rather several nations (at best). We all have varying relations to the land. One of our best hopes for a post-woke racial settlement is some kind of empire of mutually acknowledged endogenous nations organized around our shared ecological superfortress of North America.

>#1: A man is fed lab-grown meat from vats of monoculture cells, milk substitutes from nuts, and pesticide laden vegetables.
>#2: A man is fed meat and milk from healthy cows fed a grass diet.

As these things exist now, I have to agree, but I'm not confident things will always be such. Probably for the rest of our lifetimes, but maybe our children or children's children will manage to engineer something decent. Then again, maybe that something decent will be an organism, the perfect livestock. Who knows.

>The health of America's soil and the living beings it feeds is the health of her men and women. The foregrounding of Soil, the care and feeding of ecosystems, provides a binding for America beyond Blood.

I am for this. Arm the park rangers. Public lashings for litters. Mulch death row inmates and ceremoniously feed the soil of some suffering biome, or release them to be hunted by some hungry mountain lion.

Ecology has not yet come into its own as an engineering science, but given recent advances in bioengineering and machine learning (not LLMs -- think Steve Brunton, George Sugihara, this sort of thing) our ability to recover system dynamics from a mess of data might almost be there. I'm hopeful on that front, but less hopeful anything truly interesting can be done with it given what I'd guess the economic incentives around these kinds of things are.

>feeds

I briefly had something to do with agriculture once upon a time. Think small farms and yuppies, not anything large or particularly productive or professional. In doing so, I came across some people who might be considered part of the permaculture community. It's a hippie-dippie community, full of left/right libertarian types. They like to do a lot of thinking for themselves and seek a certain degree of autonomy in their food systems and their lives that can only be seen as noble. Permaculture as practiced by the vast majority of these people is a sort of "indigenous way of knowing" bullshit, sometimes literally, but I have met ex-PhDs and other analytical types that were more systematic and serious. Beyond the lovey dovey land acknowledgy stuff there's high potential ideas like restoring the American chestnut with genetic engineering (look into it) and creating food forests to graze high quality livestock.

A lesson of the "Pine Tree Twitter" years (if you remember the Kaczynski, Linkola, Abbey, etc. obsession from a few years ago) is that there's a big love of nature out there and a lot of people willing to back you if you can stick up for it. Couple that energy with "back to the land" sentiment (which seems to hit America in cycles) and some tools for decentralization (say, solar and batteries), and there might be an opportunity. The biggest hurdle for these small farm/market garden lifestylists is getting access to land. If you can get the land and some sort of "farm kit" in these people's hands, you might be able to get yourself some loyal serfs. The next biggest hurdle is productivity, as these growing styles are labor-constrained and do not (yet) scale as well as gigafarms. That's an automation problem, maybe a robotics problem, and is a little tougher, but if you can crack that nut you've got the backbone of an actual defensible city-state. Weaponize your local hobbits, become mayor or get on the town council, stockpile some 3D printed [redacted], and do a little hyperfederalism.

Fantasy aside, it's always been funny to me that the lefties that fall into deep climate hysteria (the ones that don't believe in technical solutions at all, not the SV lib type) are so averse to rhetoric like "Billions Must Die" or "Sever the Hands" -- if I believed what they did, I'd be thinking it's our only way out.

>>1582
>Ecology has not yet come into its own as an engineering science
I wonder if it can. Perhaps lower order ecosystems can be treated as such, but there's this way that the more sophisticated dynamics that involve feedback loops of agency escape neat epistemic treatment. Their dynamics become entagled with the observer's intentions and way of relating. At that point you're dealing with entities that have to be related to more socially or spiritually. This is where the gods live. The gods of modernity live in the strange loops of market, intelligence agency, and self-identity, meaning we have constructed our social cosmos with those as the seat of supra-rational Mystery. To do ecology right, especially in the way I take to be the interesting interpretation of OP, you would have to put ecology in this position. It has to be at least partially religious rather than scientific. Not attempting to drive the ecology rationally for the sake of market gain etc, but letting the ecology drive on its own terms.

> funny to me that the lefties that fall into deep climate hysteria are so averse to rhetoric like "Billions Must Die"
"I don't want solutions, I want communism"

Comparing the CEC map of North American climate zones
(http://www.cec.org/wp-content/uploads/CEC_Climate_Map_1080_1080_150dpi_en.jpg)
and a hypothetical map of American nations today by Colin Woodward
(https://i.insider.com/55b273a2371d2211008b9793)
it does appear that at least climate plays some role in sorting different people throughout North America. This is at least plausible. Not shown in the American nations map is, for instance, relatively high Scandinavian ancestry in Minnesota, and Vietnamese preference for the Left Coast and New France centered on New Orleans. I suspect that people relate to climate in their choice of location a fair amount, but the question I have is, how would we relate more to ecology in the major cities? Our cities have been stripped of life by various forms of market propaganda. For example, we used to build cities taking both horse and human scales into consideration. Now we mostly build them for car scales. They are polluted with too much artificial light, which disorients a species evolved for activities during the day. Perhaps recent obsessions with longevity in the merchant class could be harnessed for appropriate re-wilding of our cites.

>>1583
>entities that have to be related to more socially or spiritually. This is where the gods live. The gods of modernity live in the strange loops of market, intelligence agency, and self-identity, meaning we have constructed our social cosmos with those as the seat of supra-rational Mystery.

I was never much for the Greer, Kingsnorth, Naess, whatever, deep ecology line. At the ur-macro level, the places far beyond the frontier of our understanding or ability to exert influence, I'm fine with the mythopoetic approach, but most systems of interest are not that. Markets especially do not deserve the power-by-association they get by being compared to ecosystems -- markets are wind-up mechanisms employed by people with political power.

I'm an "application of the methods to the problems" kind of guy. Apply your mythopoesis when you need to keep people in line and rowing in the same direction, but when you put your hand on the systems, take off your cassock and pick up a tool. I do agree though that any development of "ecological engineering" requires starting small and working upward, and working upward does get easier when you can impose social and political constraints (some of which may be imposed in the manner you describe).

>Not attempting to drive the ecology rationally for the sake of market gain etc, but letting the ecology drive on its own terms.

Certainly not for something nebulous like "market gain," but for something nobler and gayer sounding like "human flourishing." Unfortunately the public thinks human flourishing means driving to the top of Mt. Washington. I agree this is a risk, market exposure is way too toxic for an undertaking like this, especially when young, and especially when "consumers" are shambling blobs.

I don't want to give the impression that I oppose wild nature or having wild areas. These must exist, but establishing and protecting them is also a matter of "rationally driving" their relation to their unwild surroundings.

>partially religious rather than scientific
To be more charitable, these are perfectly perpendicular and there is no reason you cannot fuse the concerns. Priestly types need to be willing to rewrite their dogma, and the building of scientific knowledge needs to be accepted as a process of continuous revelation. Human society has done better and worse jobs at this over its history (look at the Jesuits for an example of the oscillation between good and bad approaches). People think this fusion is a default failure because of our current priestly class of academics and our illiterate and innumerate "I fucking love science" peasants, but it doesn't have to be this way. The cultural work ahead of us is to turn the desire to understand into a duty to understand.

>>1586
>these are perfectly perpendicular and there is no reason you cannot fuse the concerns
You are right and I should have said something more like utilitarian. There is a certain ideology that drives one to strip mine things of beauty for scrap (a large-scale old growth clearcut is one of the most awful things you can witness), often associated with industrial-scientific-commercial thinking. Whatever we want to call it, the point I'm making is that different societies place the center of valuation and mystery differently, and this is material-structural as much as it is ideological. Our society sacralizes markets, identity, conspiracy, and a disenchanted "i fucking love science" view of science, and approaches everything else (including nature) with a sort of psychopathic dr mengele type of attitude at best, but denial and ignorance usually.

Now of course what's promising about this ecological land sacredness idea is that it already has traction. There are a lot of people for whom the land and the relationship to the land has value for its own sake, and they aren't powerless losers but sincere political-class people. It just hasn't quite matured out of stupid woo, anticolonialist "land back", and misanthropic primitivism. The idea needs to be developed more. What's a viable muscular state ideology and political economy based on sacred land ecology? What's the archeofuturism (ie not primitivism, not modernism) of ecology?

>markets are wind-up mechanisms employed by people with political power.
If more people thought this way, we would be in a different society. This is the desacralized and disenchanted view of markets. The bulk of our society thinks of the market as some kind of magic oracle that makes the cargo come. They get warm religious feelings when they make market transactions.

I don't mean to go all magical mumbo jumbo like Greer. But if you don't have some kind of empathy and awesome respect for a forest of thousand year old trees, and don't respect the power and beauty of ecosystems for their own sake, something is morally wrong with you. That's what I'm saying with the spiritual and social point. If your ideology says you should relate to the trees the way a psychopath relates to people, maybe you missed a variable in your reasoning.

It's important to distinguish between this and the primitivist cuddly misanthropic edenism that is most environmental feeling these days. The other pole that is closer to what I mean is the more "Gnon-informed" one that applies the harsh lessons of natural law to human society. Proposing a sort of moral equality between man's society and nature's (or god's?) cuts both ways, implying that natural beauty is underrated and "hueman life" is overrated and over-protected, but that the kind of humans that can be likened to lions and wolves are beautiful and have a prime place in the overall ecosystem.

They add antifungals to food, which is disgusting.

>>1593
Who?

>>1594

The food system of the USA. They all all sorts of stuff like guar gum, carrageenan gum, and other miscellaneous poisons.

The bread is so much worse too, and I think until Americans realize that quality food is necessary for a good country, the continued state of the country is downhill. Food comes before all other things such as biology, education, and law.

>>1599
this sounds like hyperbole until you consider the obesity crisis.

>>1600

One large cause is vegetable oils, and the anti seed oil people are literally shouting at everyone about it, but there are few takers in society as of yet.

>>1602

Truth values aside, the anti-seed oil Ray Peatism is unfortunately the most Semitic and obnoxious thing to have come out of the “sphere.” Early frogs introduced Ray Peat as a sort of food for thought which was immediately converted into dogma by neurotic skinnyfat twinks (“Peaters”) and “based” skinwalkers (Dimes Square types, some Valley denizens). It’s at best a shibboleth and at worst a sign of mental retardation.

It may be bad for one’s health, but none of these people are engaging critically, they are parroting, and they almost all look like shit and don’t exercise.

Calories in, calories out is not some sort of establishment trick, and it really is as simple as buying a scale and tracking what you consume. People who can pass this marshmallow test are welcome to further explore fringe biochemical theories, but anyone who is filtered by this should be dunce capped and have their mouth sewn shut.

>>1605

BAP has said more than once that he considers some of Ray Peat's concrete advice to be bad. I never got into Peat, even to investigate beyond a glance.

I do consider macronutrient balance worth paying attention to –– not instead of calorie flow, but in addition to.

>> 1605

You're wrong but it's not worth the effort for me to respond in-depth.

>>1607
Yes, in addition to. I am responding only in the context of obesity that was given.

>>1611
I’m not denying the possibility that foods can lead to less desirable fat/muscle deposition ratios in a surplus, or that some foods can fuck your hormones, or that some energy can get “misspent” in the body, but there is no escaping calorie balance without violating thermodynamics (or, equally wildly, implying that nothing is violated but energy goes to e.g. fat before vital processes, a sort of suicidal organism hypothesis that isn’t concordant with lifespan statistics).

I do not need you to respond in-depth, because I know where to find your response elsewhere online.

The term I would use for this position is Right-Gaianism. Gaia, the unity of geochemical-organic-processes powered by the Sun, is manifestly present in nature. In being higher order than man Gaia should be considered sacred, and the enlivening of Gaia a service to God.

>>1579
> It was this blood and soil sort of thinking that he skewered as being bovine and stupid.
Land is a priest of the machine and tends to a flock of transgender schizophrenics that would consume Gaia. A man who tends to the land and raises a healthy family is clearly praise-worthy to anyone free from amphetamine psychosis.

>>1582
The technology question is an excellent one to address from this framework. The short version is: take Kaczynski but replace all instances of technology with machine thinking. Right-Gaianism must begin with a philosophy of organism as offered by Shelling and Whitehead.

> [Modern scientific data] is nearly crying aloud for a cosmologically ensouled interpretation, one in which, for example, physics and chemistry are no longer considered to be descriptions of the meaningless motion of molecules to which biology is ultimately reducible, but rather themselves become studies of living organization at ecological scales other than the biological. Ecology that is, the study of the evolving relationships constituting organisms in their environments should thus become the most general of the natural sciences, replacing physics.
> Physics of the World-Soul, pg 14

> Whitehead's aim in pursuing the philosophy of science was not only to deepen and bring coherence to our knowledge of nature, but to rescue pragmatic experience and common sense: he sought to leap across and straddle the fissure bifurcating nature into real physical facts on one side and apparent psychical values on the other. In order to achieve this reconciliation, he struggled to imagine a participatory mode of attending to nature-a nature no longer objectified as the inert stuff instrumentally manipulated by an alienated technoscientific mode of knowing. Instead, Whitehead sought to disclose nature to awareness as an ecological network shaped by the social desires and individual decisions of living organisms. Living organisms cannot be explained merely in terms of their mass, extension, and velocity. They are creatures enjoying the value of their own experience, an experience initially inherited from the feelings of others. Contrary to the mechanical imaginations of Galileo, Descartes. and Newton, Whitehead's vision of the cosmos is ecological: the final real things are individual living organisms, each dependent on their relationships to others for their continued existence as themselves.
> ibid, pg 30

To discard technology as Ted suggested is of course to discard our hands. The problem of modern technique is that it is situated in a dead world of quantity. The use of technology must not come at the cost of distancing ourselves from the qualitative experience of nature, which must be our ultimate guide to whether a technique is working or not.

Agree that differential programming has unlocked our ability to learn patterns in extremely high-dimensional spaces, which ecological dynamics inherently are. The necessary tweak is only that we don't attempt to collapse the state space into what we can command and control, but allow for organisms to generate novelty.

cont.

> The next biggest hurdle is productivity, as these growing styles are labor-constrained and do not (yet) scale as well as gigafarms.
The best thing Greer has written is How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse. I don't see a way in which the rate of oil extraction isn't greater than the rate of replenishment. Since gigafarm output is proportional to oil while traditional farming is not there is a potential cross-over point. (This may be moot if nuclear + synthfuel is viable, but I don't know enough about the latter to look beyond the marketing claims.)

>>1591
> What's a viable muscular state ideology and political economy based on sacred land ecology?
On the ideology front I am working on something... For political economy I rather like Rerum Novarum as the foundational document:

> 9. Here, again, we have further proof that private ownership is in accordance with the law of nature. Truly, that which is required for the preservation of life, and for life's well-being, is produced in great abundance from the soil, but not until man has brought it into cultivation and expended upon it his solicitude and skill. Now, when man thus turns the activity of his mind and the strength of his body toward procuring the fruits of nature, by such act he makes his own that portion of nature's field which he cultivates - that portion on which he leaves, as it were, the impress of his personality; and it cannot but be just that he should possess that portion as his very own, and have a right to hold it without any one being justified in violating that right.

I'm curious if anyone has any critiques of distributism as it rings very true to me, but I have little in the way of knowledge of economics.

>>1605
> Truth values aside
Very odd way to begin a post that displays little knowledge of Peat's thought. I suggest Mind and Tissue.

>>1619
The standard Gaianism has been the world's most destructive ideology for the last half century. I for one want no part in any Gaian malevolence, including "Right-Gaianism". This goes double for anything that takes Kaczynski as a starting point to build on philosophically, rather than a murderous nut to be put down in the street like a mad dog.

>>1620
>>1619
I like the way you think and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

>Labor input theory of natural law ownership
I do think private property is partially established by natural law but this labor input argument doesn't work. The question within natural law is by what natural power is your supposedly natural right enforced? If you do much labor, why should I not simply steal your product, lord over you as a serf, or enslave you? If you answer anything about the design of a just society with a functioning economy, then it's not natural law.

The best answer I've heard is the old jim.com (seems to have moved to reaction.la) argument for natural rights [1], which grounds them in a stable evolutionary-social equilibrium for the use of force. If you try to take my property, I will defend it, and third parties will correctly conclude that you also pose a threat to them as well, and will cooperate in lynching and destroying you. So natural rights are about relationships and similarities between people and the game theory of force in the absence of absolute authorities. If we have roughly equal ability to apply force, then we will have some notion of rights.

Note this correctly doesn't rule out a superior military force coming in and imposing an extractive new deal. It doesn't rule out serfdom and aristocracy. It's not orthodox moralistic libertarianism, but something else. Jim is a unique and interesting philosopher very much worth reading.

[1] Natural Law and Natural Right, by James A Donald:
https://reaction.la/rights.html

>>1625
Kaczynski is too smart to be dismissed with moral outrage like that. Yeah he's wrong, but precisely why is he wrong? 1. He doesn't have a solution. Primitivism doesn't work; it's just a denial of humanity. 2. The acceleration isn't as self-defeating as he thinks. "We" will pull through even if the acceleration kills us. There will always be a natural ecosystem, it just might have nukes and AI and gigadeath pollution events.

Formulating responses to guys like Kaczynski, and building on the stuff they got right, is essential to any serious philosophy of the future.

Is there any region of the US that has better food than average? Any states that have better legislation in place? Or is the whole place fucked from New England to Alabama to Oregon?

>>1619
> Physic of the World-Soul

Whitehead's heart was in the right place, but there's a problem of trying to jump to the desired end while skipping the intermediate steps. This always risks jumping to woo.

So what are the intermediate steps? For one thing, we need rigorous, mathematically specifiable accounts of teleology and form in physics, chemistry, and biology. The place to start this work is to expand on applications of the stationary-action principle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stationary-action_principle

>>1642
One of the projects I hope to see in our sphere is a new movement in philosophy towards this kind of rigorous physical-darwinian-thermodynamic account of teleology and truth, and practical life values derived from it. It seems like the deep intellectual direction one has to proceed along to recover coherence in the modern world after Nietzsche and Darwin.

>>1645
> One of the projects I hope to see in our sphere is a new movement in philosophy towards this kind of rigorous physical-darwinian-thermodynamic account of teleology and truth ...

Absolutely. Thermodynamics is definitely a major component. Two books I think contribute here:

• For the lower-level aspects: Every Life is on Fire, Jeremy England
• For the higher-level aspects: A Theory of Everyone, Michael Muthukrishna

>>1625
I bring good tidings Anon, Theodore is dead.

I welcome all new enemies, but for the sake of the anonymous audience you should expand on your points. This isn't Twitter, no tech VC is going to slide into your DMs off signalling.

>>1627
For context Rerum Novarum was published by Pope Leo XIII, so there is an absolute authority that grounds his system. Ctrl-Fing for God in that link reveals Jim is skeptical of arguments from divine authority--which is fair, a natural law should yield itself through investigations into nature.

Thank you for the link, I'll read further.

>>1638
Thankfully there already exists parallel institutions here in the form of regenerative agriculture, you'll just need to step outside of the Safeways and Krogers of the nation to find it.

Here is the ultimate expression of what I mean by "use of technology must not come at the cost of distancing ourselves from the qualitative experience of nature" -- you should visit the farms you purchase from and judge based on your qualitative experience.

>>1642
> there's a problem of trying to jump to the desired end while skipping the intermediate steps
I see Whitehead as trying to define the starting state.
> [It] must be the motives of a complete cosmology to construct a system of ideas which brings the aesthetic, moral, and religious interests into relation with those concepts of the world which have their origin in natural science.
> Process and Reality, xii

It should be uncontroversial that the frame of an experiment influences the results. A philosophy that puts quantity first and quality as ephemeral (ie most of post-Enlightenment Science) will find a natural ally in the machine and struggle to provide a coherent explanation of teleology and organism.

> This always risks jumping to woo.
This is fine and indeed desirable. As Feyerabend puts it, we must
> Therefore, the first step in our criticism of customary concepts and customary reactions is to step outside the circle and either to invent a new conceptual system, for example a new theory, that clashes with the most carefully established observational results and confounds the most plausible theoretical principles, or to import such a system from outside science, from religion, from mythology, from the ideas of incompetents, or the ramblings of madmen.
> Against Method, this pdf doesn't have page numbers

Woo is an inadequate explanation of the unknown, and since the unknown will always exist, so will woo. It provides a dim view of the path forward.

I'm highly skeptical of thermodynamics-first explanations as this is just a furthering of the quantity-first regime.

>>1647
> [Woo] is fine and indeed desirable. ... Woo is an inadequate explanation of the unknown, and since the unknown will always exist, so will woo.

The problem isn't with speaking of the unknown. Man has always done so in poetry, for which I have the highest esteem. The problem is with conflating this with science. Speaking of the unknown is, by definition, not science.

>>1619
>>1647
This Whitehead guy sounds interesting. What's the book I should read?

>I'm highly skeptical of thermodynamics-first explanations as this is just a furthering of the quantity-first regime.
I usually think of how to use thermo more as "thermodynamics-constrained" and "thermodynamics-informed" than outright driven by it. But there's something very philosophically significant lurking in the physical math of the evolution of statistical-mechanical and ecological systems. If there's some fatal flaw in that idea, I haven't yet heard it.

>>1648
"Woo" is a heavily loaded word here. What I want to point to are "counterinductive hypotheses." Take something like remote viewing: the spooks invested in it, there's some anecdotes about it working, it's testable, and it goes against everything we know. I'm not going to bat for remote viewing here, but I do believe in a kind of Life Energy, aka orgone, elan vital, chi, etc.

>>1649
Process and Reality is where he expounds the philosophy of organism / process philosophy. It's also very dense, Physics of the World Soul and Crossing the Threshold by Matthew David Segall are excellent introductions to the work and surrounding ideas.

> I usually think of how to use thermo more as "thermodynamics-constrained" and "thermodynamics-informed" than outright driven by it. But there's something very philosophically significant lurking in the physical math of the evolution of statistical-mechanical and ecological systems.
Got it. Since ecosystems are highly connected systems with highly variable boundaries you lose information if you overfit to the frame of thermodynamics (see: e/acc), but clearly thermodynamics constrains how we can perform work.

>>1647
>Here is the ultimate expression of what I mean by "use of technology must not come at the cost of distancing ourselves from the qualitative experience of nature" -- you should visit the farms you purchase from and judge based on your qualitative experience.

This sort of ruthless empiricism and nullius in verba attitude is exactly the fruit of Enlightenment science that should be carried forward. I don't know how technology became so entangled with the more fundamentally human goals of the sciences (I mean, I can construct a narrative from the hip, but it wouldn't be interesting or careful, and it would be the obvious one -- I'm reading my way towards a better understanding slowly).

Though I suspect when you say
>post-Enlightenment Science
you add the "post-" for a reason, so I think you agree that society lost the thread somewhere between then and now.

>"[It] must be the motives of a complete cosmology to construct a system of ideas which brings the aesthetic, moral, and religious interests into relation with those concepts of the world which have their origin in natural science."

You would like Musil. Sorry to shill him for the n-thousandth time.

>A philosophy that puts quantity first and quality as ephemeral (ie most of post-Enlightenment Science) will find a natural ally in the machine and struggle to provide a coherent explanation of teleology and organism.
>I'm highly skeptical of thermodynamics-first explanations as this is just a furthering of the quantity-first regime.

I don't disagree that woo is a necessary step, but I want to caution that when >>1642 states

>So what are the intermediate steps? For one thing, we need rigorous, mathematically specifiable accounts of teleology and form in physics, chemistry, and biology.

you seem to read in a quantity-first regime. But I think this confuses "mathematical" for "quantitative," which is really not quite right at all.

A good example of a might be Darwin's theory of evolution, which is certainly mathematical in construction, but hardly quantitative in its time (the case is made just fine here https://egtheory.wordpress.com/2018/08/04/darwin-algorithm/).

I think the quantity-first regime you target is, and I hate to say it, the mindset of the technician or the engineer, and I think a "mathematical" regime is exactly what we want. Consider current trends in machine learning: a large number of researchers are benchmark chasing, using various metaheuristics to tune their hyperparameters, and generally following the mantra of the engineer:
"I only want to understand so far as it helps me get it working."

More "mathematical" (theory, yes, but other approaches, too, not all of which are quantitative -- see e.g. mechanistic interpretability, much of which is currently focused on defining what exactly are the phenomena of interest and operating descriptively) approaches are often useless, considered painfully slow, and seen as unsuccessful in "advancing the state of the art" -- and they are, because the goal is *understanding*, which is a humanistic goal totally averse to "just getting it working." In fact, in this mode, one only wants to get "it" working so far as "it" helps them understand.

If our understanding let's us eventually crunch some numbers, so be it, but that's never the goal (conditional on healthy scientific practice).

Now, you might completely agree on that, and you might find something else objectionably "quantity-first" about e.g. thermo approaches, in which case, lay it out there! I'm interested either way.

>>1663
> I want to caution that when >>1642 states [So what are the intermediate steps? For one thing, we need rigorous, mathematically specifiable accounts of teleology and form in physics, chemistry, and biology.] you seem to read in a quantity-first regime. But I think this confuses "mathematical" for "quantitative," which is really not quite right at all.

This, and the discussion following in >>1663 of the mathematical vs. the quantitative, is exactly along the lines of what I meant.

Since the 17th century, the development of mathematics has included areas that are decreasingly associated with numerical quantity. There are fields of mathematics that one can study for years without ever dealing with a number. My guess is that a new mathematics of teleology and form would not be very quantitative at all.

So why is it important that this study be mathematical? So it can be rigorous. So it can be subject to proof, hypothesis, and testing. (Analogy: General relativity relies on Riemannian geometry, in which one can do proofs. Using it, Einstein hypothesized a theory of gravitation which was then subject to testing.)

>>1663
>>1665
Here is what I mean to point to when I say quantity-first:

> Three hundred years later, despite the evidence of modern physical science, the average twentieth-century person still unhesitatingly refers to the setting of the sun, to the red hues of its surrounding sky, and to the waning of its warmth as it sinks beneath the horizon. From the perspective of the well-trained mathematical physicist, such a person's common sense is mistaken: the sun does not set, nor is it warm, nor is its ambiance red. The sunset, like its warmth and color, is only a subjective appearance, an artifact of our perception and not a fact in nature. "If the living creature were removed," argued Galileo, the first to **formalize nature's bifurcation in terms of primary physical and secondary psychical characteristics**, "all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated. " The warmth and hue of a sunset, continues Galileo, "are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we locate them are concerned.
> Physics of the World-Soul, pg 23

That is: the primacy of mathematical constructs as an explaining-away of the mental, experiential, and subtle. This metaphysics is endemic to engineering. I think it is thoroughly incorrect and has lead to a almost complete de-sacralization of the task of engineering. A Whiteheadian cosmology, in contrast, sees our aesthetic and creative experience as integral to the construction of reality itself--though taking place in relationship to eternal objects that pattern our experience, thus enabling math to function at all.

> I think the quantity-first regime you target is, and I hate to say it, the mindset of the technician or the engineer, and I think a "mathematical" regime is exactly what we want.

Put another way, what I want the mindset of the technician and engineer to be is: "I am engaging in measurement and abstraction as a creative act of will that improves my own and others aesthetic experience" rather than "I am engaging in measurement and abstraction as a consequence of mathematical systems that demand I measure and abstract them." I tend to be over-allergic to the foregrounding of mathematics as I want to beat the Mad Deadly Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God to death, but I certainly agree that an engineer must quantify and operationalize to get anywhere in his discipline and that rigorous empirical investigations are a necessary foundation for a new regime.

On the question of objections to thermo approaches, my most counter-inductive belief is that I'm not convinced that the conservation of energy holds universally at all scales: cosmological redshift can be explained by a loss of energy, which implies energy is also created. If this is the case, then the question is to what degree we should relate the functioning of man to the functioning of a heat engine vs. a higher order expression of a creation principle at work in the world. The former is surely useful, but I do not think it provides a complete approach for man to understand himself.

>>1750
> From the perspective of the well-trained mathematical physicist, such a person's common sense is mistaken: the sun does not set, nor is it warm, nor is its ambiance red.

This is just false. It's a strawman. Only a mathematical physicist afflicted by bad philosophy, or a stupid one, would say such things. There are very simple explanations of all those common sense statements that are perfectly consistent with modern physics and that doesn't claim that they're mistaken at all. The physics doesn't explain anything "away." It gives an additional level of understanding that deepens the human descriptions based on sensory phenomena. There is only a conflict between these levels of description if one insists on creating one.

>>1751
My experience is colored by coming of age on an internet where New Atheism was ascendant, but hard materialism sure felt like the default engineering metaphysics at that time. It also does not feel particularly niche now, hence the hand wringing over "the hard problem of consciousness." Yes, other metaphysics exist, but it's not false to note the prominence of hard materialism.

>>1752
> ... the prominence of hard materialism.

To be clear, I'm not denying that there are hard materialists, some them quite loud. What I'm describing as false is that the bad conclusions actually follow from mathematical physics. I'm objecting to your attribution of them to

> ... the perspective of the well-trained mathematical physicist ...

when in fact they are only the conclusions of hard materialism. The distinction matters because otherwise we get a prejudice against science, which is not part of the solution. Rather, we need a prejudice against bad philosophy.