To be more clear. On a big scale, pragmatism can sometimes be directed positively due to circumstances, but it can create or arise from a crisis, isnt it. not necessarily anyone's individual responsibility, but a critical situation forcing brave actions
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elaborate?
briefly
Part of the goal of a second order pragmatics would be to map out the relation between the pragmatics of the part and the pragmatics of the whole - how the former ramifies/multiplies into the latter. What direction is an individual person moving in, and how does this direction relate to the direction the species is moving in?
Elaboration on the other point: If intelligent matter was as averted to psychic/corporal suffering as we are, there would be little to none of it. This is almost directly inducible from the fact that yachts exist in the same world as sweat shops with suicide nets.
I am sorry for bringing so much to the table, but there is a lot that needs to be digested. What do I mean by intelligent matter? Part of the trouble here is that I don't understand that enough myself. I take it to mean energy/matter that is organized - and right off the bat I'm lost in a language of physics that, again, I don't understand much of. Anyway, intelligent matter can be defined in opposition to entropy, which seems to be the force of disorganization that propels the universe to equilibrium. Intelligent matter exists in a disequilibrium, seeing as organization involves differentiating an otherwise equilibrated material.
In as far as our language of motives and teleology can be applied to something as cosmic as intelligence/intelligent-matter, it seems that intelligent "tends to value" organization - and not only that, but it seems to value an acceleration of organization. Note how our technological developments have accelerated. Note how the physical organization of this planet has accelerated in the brief span that we have occupied it. I no little to nothing about the history of the earth, but this accelerative trend seems to be mirrored in the most radical ways possible.
That said, intelligent matter, as it renders itself into increasingly complex systems, does need to have a conservative ("territorializing") function as well, otherwise it would just explode right off the bat.
We, as individuals, can be seen effectively, as far as I can tell, as microcosms of such agencies. The part is the microcosm of the whole, and so on.
How do our values differ from the values of the system? Well, given our time scale relative to that of even just our species, I think it is safe to say that our motivations fluctuate at more rapid rate? Maybe? If the motivation of an individual over their lifetime could be averaged out into a single function, that function would quite likely mirror, or at least correlate to, the motivation of the species.
A huge part of this problem is that consciousness only seems to make up a part of the agency of the individual human. It is as if the conscious mind is only a department in the corporation, a department of relative privilege. What consciousness values is not necessarily a mirror/correlation of what the individual human values. Part of this is that the concept of values is seemingly exclusive to consciousness, hence the difficulty in ascribing agency/motivation/teleology to something that isn't identifiably conscious.