With our move to the new forum, I thought it might be a good idea to shine a spotlight on change and adaptation.
Adaptation can refer to either product or process. In this thread, we’ll be referring to the process, which can be either short-term or long-term. Long-term adaptative processes are associated with the theory of natural selection, in which species adapt to changes in the environment over a long period of time, the purpose being survival.
“Natural selection” – it is nature that selects – it is the environment that selects - which species will survive.
In this thread, we’ll be considering the process of human adaptation within the short-term – i.e. within a single lifespan.
The stimulus for adaptation remains the same – change. Adaptation is a response to change.
The earliest record of the idea that “flux is fundamental” probably comes from Heraclitus - “You cannot step into the same river twice.”
Life changes. Change is the one true constant. Births, deaths, upheavals, wins, losses, and even the weather.
So, are we in a constant state of being, or becoming?
Is it our own self-concern for existence that propels us?
Is adaptation a responsibility or an instinctual drive?
Who or what has the selective powers? Do we act, or are we acted upon?
Is it like Satre said? – “We constantly remake ourselves through choices.”
Life exists in the critical phase transition between negentropy and entropy.
If we are too unchanging, then we are like a brittle rock, waiting to be cracked, crushed and pulverized into a fine dust that returns to the background flux from whence it came… We are then not ourselves, but rather our environment.
But if we are too changing, then we are like a fluid moving on the terms of the background flux, as opposed to our own. We are then not ourselves, but rather our environment.
Life exists only in partnership with its environment. To be unchanging enough to be ourselves, but to be changing enough to be alive. We are acted upon and thus shaped by the environment, but we also act upon and shape our environment, creating the partnership that co-defines us both.
I am intentionally vague because I can’t elaborate much further. This is a profound topic.
Also, I disagree with Heraclitus on the claim that the only constant is change. How can you even establish the presence of change if not for the continuity of the object that changes? Change is when object x is in state 1, and then in state 2. If you have no notion of “the same object”, the what you have is object x in state 1 and object y in state 2. That is merely a difference, but not change.
So, something makes object x be object x, despite its change in state. That something must be something about object x that remains both in state 1 and state 2: something that is constant to the backdrop of the change. We would have no notion, feeling or understanding of change without having a notion, feeling or understanding of constancy. And I think this goes both ways, because there is no way to define constancy without reference to change. Constancy is not an object’s self-identicality across the span of an instant (to even talk about anything across the span of an instant is dubious in the first place). Constancy is an object’s self-identicality across instants, across time. And time requires change and constancy to be defined. The progression of time is the change of time, but also the constancy of time as time. It is perhaps the most basic of change; the very tick of the clock, upon which all other change is built.
Some counter this by saying that we can have time without change. That reality is an unchanging spatiotemporal block. These are the eternalists, who believe all moments in time co-exist in a singular, unchanging, 4-dimensional NOW. The sensation of change, of time ticking, is just an illusion, caused by our movement through this unchanging, 4-dimensional manifold.
I think that immediately shows the obvious contradiction: they’ve just kicked the can down the road. Our movement through that 4-dimensional manifold then IS something that changes. However small and insignificant that change may be, change it nonetheless is, implying some meta-time whose ticks allow for the change in which little 3-dimensional sub-manifold we experience out of the full, 4-dimensional manifold. It is called the Moving Spotlight Theory I think, and it solves no problems. Change still remains real.
The only possible caveat here is that of a hypothetical person that I call the frozen omphalist. They’d say that not even their perception of the 4-dimensional manifold changes. No, they are stuck RIGHT here in THIS instant. No… THIS instant. No-no, THIS instant. You get my point. They are frozen.
But they are omphalists, because they must account for the illusion of having continuously moved up to THIS very instant by claiming that THIS instant is equipped with a gigantic repository of fake memories that paint a very convincing, smooth fiction of having continuously moved through time up till this very moment. I call that temporal omphalism. As far as I can see, this is the only form of Eternalism that doesn’t collapse back into the realism of change, and it is quite silly. In fact, it is a piece of self-undermining, radical skepticism, because if we are frozen omphalists, then logic and rationality is nuked out of existence. At that point, the frozen omphalist is left with absolutely no basis for their absurd philosophy anyways.
So, change is real, and so is constancy. And in our eternal partnership with the ever-changing environment, what is it within us that remains constant? It may not be any list of first-order predicates. In fact, if reality is described by an infinite-order logic, then perhaps we’ll find the predicates that hold of us constantly somewhere far up in the transfinite hierarchy? Maybe they’re ת-order predicates? Whatever they are, they’re the ones who supply us with our constancy. And if they’re too constant, we will break and cease to be, and become one with the background. But if they’re not constant enough, then we’re already there.
Thank you so much for such a thoughtful and illuminating essay. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
This is so true. We are made from the environment, we interact with it all of our lives, in-takes and out-takes, both mentally and physically, and then at the end of our lives we are returned to it. I once read a very poetic description of life as a series of waves dipping into and out of the earth.
This makes me think of self-identity, and the importance of diachronic unity across a lifetime - the feeling that you are the same person you were and will be in the future. Wonder if you have any thoughts about that.
The cells in our body are constantly being replaced - but the cells in the brain never are. They do change, in how the neurons are connected, which I suppose fits the definition of adaptation, but are never exchanged.
I actually believe we live eternally, depending on how you define “we”. Our egos may die, because they are too narrowly defined to survive the unrelenting, endless march of time and the boundless change that comes with. Time is not that which kills everything. It is change that kills; but it killing you is, however, a matter of time.
But self-identity always prevails, for it is as boundless as the change that chips away at it. In fact, self-identity is as much chipped away at by change, as it is fed by change. Even if every first-order predicate that once held of you has now stopped holding of you, there may be plenty of second-order predicates that constantly held of those shifting first-order predicates. And some of those second-order predicate before only held vacuously, because they pertained to conditionals with yet-to-be-realized antecedents, that through change became realized. As such, the identity then woke up those second-order predicates as the deeper truth about themselves. Second-order predicates that describe not how the individual merely is, their synchronic identity: but rather how they change, their diachronic identity, which is the only real identity they have.
This is what I mean by how identity is not just chipped away at by change; it is simultaneously fed by it. The only real identity is the identity that self-transcends and contains itself as such. But this self-transcendence that we are.. it may be too deep, too profound, too higher-order, to ever put into our limited languages.
So, when we die, be it physically or during a psychedelic trip, that is merely the loss of the body and/or ego, it is not the loss of our fundamental identity. We do not cease to be. As such, there is not the loss of the pure consciousness tied to this more identity, which is why I think we keep on living (assuming a sufficiently inclusive notion of ourselves).
We never die, but parts of us do all the time. And my model here seems to entail that we should be becoming deeper, more profound, more fundamental beings, increasingly tapped into our higher- and yet higher-order predicates, as our more superficial selves, our egos, die over and over. But I think this process of deepening can be reversed. I think we can accumulate lower-order predicates across a long-term periods, and as such, be lulled back into a lower form of consciousness as a lower-form of identity forms once more.
We fall back asleep in this infinite hierarchy of dreams, just like we once woke up.
As such, my view of the afterlife is not a simple Heaven & Hell versus reincarnation. I believe both may describe different kinds of afterlives. We may ascend (rather, self-transcend) after death, thus waking up to a higher state, but then fall back asleep again, now dreaming the life of a different human, or perhaps an even lower life form.
And I believe this dance up and down the endless hierarchy of dreams within dreams never ends, and somewhere on this ladder, God sits. Or perhaps God is the ladder. I have no idea. What do you think?
Related to this, and interesting in its own right; after only a year, about 98% of the atoms that made you up have been replaced. (no link because I’m not allowed to add one, but Google Science: The Fleeting Flesh for a source).
Whatever constant description actually holds of us, it may be so complex, large, profound and difficult that we stand no chance of ever grasping it… unless our very attempt at grasping it is it.
Perhaps we are defined as nothing more than as our own self-discoverers? That may be the only constant that holds of us. And if so, we all have the same definition; but we are different instances thereof. This would then work as an explanation for the claim that we are all one, all the same being. In this case, we’d all be the universe grasping itself.
We are God’s infinite eyes staring at each other, fractally mirroring ourselves in the perfectly reflective sclerae of our fellow watchers, like Indira’s Net. This is the only constant truth of our existence, our nature at the most fundamental level.
This depends on how you look at time. If you look at the passing of time as a force, which acts upon you, which you must adapt to, then it is actually that force which kills. In this way, change is not necessary, but time is. Therefore it is time that is the true killer.
The important question here, is whether the identity you refer to is real, or just imaginary. This “identity” is based in the supposed continuity of the object which you referred to. Object x remains object x, despite changing. But that it remains as “the same object” is just an assumption which we make, to help us understand why so many things seem to stay the same as time passes. The reality might be that it is actually a different object recreated at each passing moment. Then it’s really not the same object, but just appears to be.
Very interesting post. The deep history of this idea is the dialectic between Parmenides (what is cannot be subject to change) and Heraclitus (you can never step in the same river twice.) The problem posed by that dialectic was addressed by the Aristotelian universal - which could maintain its identity while also changing. Something which was lost with the advent of nominalism.
All we are is an adaptive creature. In my own theory, it is adaptability that is the root cause of consciousness itself.
My theory is that the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs propelled conditions on Earth that were so rapidly changing that the evolutionary trait that became a priority was the ability for lifeforms to be adaptable to conditions within a single lifetime. So generational shifts through natural selection became quicker until the trait of adaptable brains formed.
These adaptable brains could process the environment and make predictive models in order to change behavior that could supersede instincts when necessary.
In humans, or rather, pre-Homo sapiens, this adaptability became the major trait and it started to influence all of their behavior. It formed strategies for hunting, defense, social structures. And to be able to adapt as a group; forming more advanced communication in order to be able to organize adaptively.
Jumping to modern humans, we’re still these apes, constantly adapting to external conditions. It’s the core of everything about us, but it’s obscured because we are trapped in an illusion of control and free will.
The evolutionary traits we evolved have reached such a complex form that we don’t see the strings pulling on us by the external, and so we believe we are free and behind the steering wheel of our own change.
But we are an ever-changing entity, constantly reshaping how we adapt to everything. Even our internalized strategies (ideas, ideologies, conceptual understanding) change slowly with new conditions.
There are no real constants in the universe, even the constants we have in math weren’t constants at the origin of it. If everything is ever-changing, then we are no exception… we just believe in constants because it’s comforting.
Just because a change is so long we believe of it as a constant, doesn’t mean it is constant.
It is a human folly to filter the scale and slow change of the universe through their fleeting existence.
They are the causal result of previous conditions. Every choice we make is because of a previous condition; even the composition of our mind that defines how we choose based on a previous current condition is, in itself, a previous condition formed by other previous conditions.
Nature and nurture produce conditions that become the cause to the effect (choice). And a “choice” becomes the condition and source of the next choice and so on.
The complexity of this deterministic universe is higher than our ability to comprehend it. We don’t see the threads pulling our choices, so we experience them as being free. Our sanity depends on it.
It is actually possible to experience an unpleasant feeling when focusing on this. If you try to concentrate on noticing all the causes to everything you do, even the slightest hand movement, each sensory input, each thought leading to the next. Becoming aware of the dominos of choices and behavior can create a deeply unsettling anxiety.
Luckily, it requires an active effort to reach that awareness; our default state is our neurons trying to find a low energy resting point; the predictive coding that our brain operates on functions in an autonomous way to lower the energy cost of adaptive response programming. So the energy required is easily pushing us into that illusion more than enabling us to experience the strings pulling.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if some minds get caught in such thinking, essentially causing a mental breakdown.
We’re not evolved to have such awareness and our cognitive function depends on the illusion being the default state.
Excellent explanation, thanks so much, though I am not quite totally sold on a completely deterministic model of the human mind.
I’d just like to add that one of the greatest features of the human mind is that it can imagine/come up with novel responses to randomness and uncertainty.
How could change not be a necessary part… of change? The move from alive to dead is change. Time taken in isolation from change is meaningless. But for the sake of argument, let us consider time as perhaps empty, vacuous change. In such a case, then, the march of time alone would bring nothing but the empty change of the tick itself, the change of the index, each index value differentiated by nothing other than being a different index value. How could that change anything, let alone kill anything?
Time is not the culprit. Change is. But time is the medium for change, or perhaps change is the impetus for time. Maybe both. I don’t know, but I know that time does not pull the trigger. Time, at best, allows change to pull the trigger: at worst, it merely offers a medium for change to pull the trigger. My best/worst here is referring to the best case/worst case for your model’s accuracy, and in any case, your model cannot be correct as is.
The only way to say something of the ilk that “time” is the killer, is to equate time and change. You explicitly did not equate them, because you said change is not necessary. But even if you meant to equate time with change, then I would say there’s some expressive power and truth lost in such a conflation.
I like to think of time and change as the, respectively, quantitative and qualitative sides of the same coin (and perhaps we could call that coin dynamicity?) They are mutually dependent and complimenting each other. Perhaps then, the best way to phrase this is not what I originally said either, but rather to say that it is the entire coin that kills us. It is dynamicity that kills us.
But in the dynamic duo of time and change, it is nonetheless change that is forceful, that drives cessation and becoming. Time is rather the enabler, the acceptor and/or the container.
What do you think?
This is a difficult point. My philosophy regarding objects is rather complicated and also an area I am actively developing as I build my system. But, I am a phenomenologist and objective idealist. I believe phenomenology and semiotics are the most fundamental studies, from which even ontology, epistemology and truth emerge.
I think that all we really have is a singular object (the background, pleroma, God, whatever you want to call it), which fills everything and is entirely atomic in a sense. There are no components in the form of objects going together to create the whole. No, the whole is the only object there is.
But there are predicates. To make a simplified analogy, imagine this entire object, this fullness, as a geometric plane. Then, predicates are these loops thrown onto it. They slice out portions of this continuous, cohesive object. These are not divisions there, inherent in the object, in the plane. That object is atomic, after all. No, the divisions ARE the predicates, the predicates ARE the divisions. The predicates are no more, and no less, than the imposition of a boundary onto a sub-region of the entire plane; of the otherwise atomic, continuous object. Each specific predicate is a specific boundary, its distinction from other predicates stemming from itself, not from the arbitrary region it cut out.
The different relations between these boundaries (these predicates) can give us various formulae. But that’s not the point here.
The point here is that, in a way, I somewhat agree with the idea you mentioned, the non-realism of objects. You see, these predicates immediately define, in a sense create, an interior; a sub-region of the primitive, singular object. This interior IS a pseudo-object, what we think of as a normal, and often tangible, “object” or thing.
The predicate that cuts it out is its defining predicate, it’s identity predicate. Its substance however, is just the universal, singular object. Not all of it, but some arbitrary sub-region of it, which is, due to that total object’s atomicity, the same as any other sub-region. The only difference it has from other objects stems from the difference between its defining predicate, and the other pseudo-object’s defining predicate.
Now, as a semiotician, a core fact of my philosophy is the existence of semiotic primitives/primes.
Things, first and foremost, are. Not everything has a formal definition. If all things had a formal definition, then the network of definitions would be entirely circular, and have no ground, no basis in any reality outside of it. The real network of definitions (not a dictionary, but the actual structure of meaning) is digraph with sources. These sources are the ground, the formally undefined building blocks of all formal definitions.
There is no defining these primitive predicates, and since all logic relies on formal definition, there is nothing logically derivable about these primitive predicates. One can scientifically derive things about them; derive facts like other predicates seeming to correlate with these primitive predicates… but we may find no logical truths regarding them, other than their pure being and self-identicality.
So, what happens if a (pseudo-)object is defined by a primitive predicate? Well then, you have a primitive object. Most objects that we interact with are primitive, I think.
Like, if you look at the cup standing on your desk, and you call it Cup A, then you may wonder what its formal definition is. Well, if you give it one, you now have a different object. A related one; the reflective Cup A. But the actual primitive phenomenon on your desk: it has no formal definition. All it has is a primitive predicate that defines it; that wraps around it all times, until the object ceases to be at least.
And when does it cease to be? You don’t know. You may know many of the scenarios that make the reflective Cup A cease to be, because you indirectly defined those scenarios by formally defining that object.
But the primitive Cup A… it exists, or ceases to be, on its own, primitive and thus utterly unknowable, indeterminate terms. Let’s say the cup is white. If someone repainted it, would it be a different object? Maybe the reflective cup A is defined as being white, but the original, primitive object had no such explicit criterion.
So, does it cease to be when repainted? You don’t know, and you will necessarily never know… unless you do it. The only way to know the boundaries of a primitive predicate is to cross them. You must cross that bridge when you get to it.
This solves the Ship of Theseus. If the ship is a primitive object, then the answer is, “we don’t know and we cannot know how much needs to be replaced before it is a new object.” But, let’s say you have some strong opinions on what the answer to the Ship of Theseus should be. Well then, you have now given yourself a framework for defining a Reflective Ship of Theseus. This is a formal definition that formalizes its identity. But any formal definition ultimately terminates in primitive predicates, and as such, inherits some of their pure qualia and logical indeterminacy: but its identity is still more decidable. And you can always make more and more precise reflective objects, but you will never excise the indeterminate primitivity from which they spring.
This all may have seemed a bit like a digression, but I saw no other way to answer your question without giving you the metaphysical stance behind my answer. I will re-quote you in order to answer with this context:
In my system, it is not an assumption whether any specific object has endured some experienced change. If you experience the primitive object’s continued existence, despite (or perhaps because of) whatever changes it endured or endures, then you know the object is still there. Because you experience (judge) it so. It is not a matter of external fact, but a matter of subjective phenomenology.
Once we start entering the realm of more reflective and abstract objects, with formal definitions, we can no longer merely experience the object’s endurance through change. Then, we must prove what changes it can, and cannot endure, and prove what is the case in any scenario we find ourselves in. That process still, of course, terminates in pure phenomenological judgement, because the definitions that we logically manipulate in the proofs terminate in primitive predicates; but this is layered, structured judgement, beholden to logic (and for even more elaborately defined objects, this process is beholden to science too).
Absolutely. Nominalism is attractive due to its superficial simplicity, but I think it is utterly absurd when really reflected upon. Years ago at an earlier stage of my system building, I was really trying to make nominalism work. It did not.
The thinker who subscribe the reductive ideas like nominalism are, ironically, afraid of their own thoughts. When one starts to really think about thinking, and think about thinking about thinking… things get dizzyingly meta, slippery and scary. It feels better to, effectively, just deny the reality of thought… ironically enough, doing so by thinking.
We only find the real and final Truth when we realize even our abstracta are concrete phenomena. Many find such ideas obviously wrong, because they wrongly think that if such were the case, we would be infallible. But I see many mechanisms for fallibility despite the tangibility of the abstract, especially when we deal with scientific or intersubjective falsity. But even logical falsity is achievable, because there is no such thing as the singular logician. The logician has to cooperate with his past and future selves, and this cooperation allows for falsity.
So we can be perfect in our grasp of the abstract, and nonetheless be imperfect in our reflection thereupon.
I almost agree but the way I put it is that formal ideas such as the real numbers are indeed real. But they are not phenomenal in the literal sense of ‘something that appears’. They are what classical philosophy called ‘intelligible objects’ although in the metaphorical sense of ‘an object of thought.’ But I agree they’re real - the problem for modern thought is they’re not empirical.
Sorry, let me rephrase that. The point is that any particular change is contingent, therefore not necessary, while change in general may be necessary as you say. So this means that being killed is not necessary, as a particular type of change which could be substituted for something else.
Consider what I am saying like this. As time passes, the future is always becoming the past. Tomorrow, Feb 21, will become yesterday. This passing of time, is an activity which is a force on the living beings, existing at the present, which necessitates that they adapt, as whatever comes flying at them out of the future, needs to be predicted and dealt with. Otherwise the living being will be pushed into the past, by this force, and become a thing of the past (dead).
The issue is that we understand “change” in terms of observable, physical change. But all physical change is in the past by the time it has been observed. So we understand “change” completely in terms of past, what has happened. We can call this “the present becoming the past”, that is what we observe. If we restrict “change” in this way, we haven’t the means to understand “change” on the future side of the present, “the future becoming the present”.
Just like there is change on the past side of the present, there must also be change on the future side of the present. Observable physical change is on the past side of the present, so on the future side it must be unobservable, nonphysical change. This is understood in physics as “force”. It is not “empty, vacuous change”, but something nonphysical which has the capacity to cause observable, physical change.
I think you are mixing up cause and effect. The passing of time is the cause, change is the effect. Death is a change, but death is not the culprit it is the effect. Time is the cause.
We can use the ‘two sides of the same coin’ analogy to understand cause and effect. Death is the change, the effect. The effect does not kill us, the cause does. However, if we ask, what is the cause of change (in general), the only possible answer is the passing of time. So it’s not change which causes death, because change goes on throughout life without any particular change necessarily causing death, but it is the passing of time which causes death, because as time passes death becomes inevitable.
I don’t think that an ontology like this can support the reality of change. Change can only be supported as things moving in relation to each other. If all is one, then nothing can move and “the one” cannot change. In order for the one to change, you need to allow that it consists of parts which move in relation to each other, but then it’s incorrect to say that they are “one”. The ancient way of looking at it is that if something moves, then there must be space for it to move in. So it cannot be the case that all is one because there must be the thing, and space as well.
I don’t think your theory of primitive predicates resolves the problem, but I can’t say that I understand very well.
But Plato taught that the senses deceive. So sense experience is not enough to justify the claim of knowledge. That is the basis of the point I made. You see a chair sitting in front of you for example, and you experience it as an object with continuous existence. But it may be an illusion, like a succession of still frames creates an illusion of continuity. So, suppose the object, the chair is like this. In a very rapid progression, it is there for a moment, then gone, then there, then gone. It may even be the case that the amount of time that it is there is much less than the amount of time that it is not. In a similar way, we sense a chair to be a solid object, but we now know that it consists of parts which are really quite far apart, such that there is more space than solid parts within.