The Mathematical/Physical Act-Concept Dichotomy
If the moment of conceptualization takes place through difference and identity, mathematic description and analysis can not take the place of computation. To compute is to enact, which aims ultimately to destroy the concept as its opposite. In our day by day reality we polarize computation (act) and concept (theory), such that there are institutions devoted to research and those that create consumer products.
In polarizing the two, the product of the concept is the computation, where the computation and conception are dialectically one and the same. This runs against the grain of our programmatic world where programs are conceptualized and then implemented as a computation. We believe computation can be offloaded onto machines, as is shown by our adoption of digital logic and perceived aides like matlab, mathematica, etc.
The rationale is computation has no use besides supplying a product and realizing a ready-developed notion. So then, full implementation of pure mathematics must then be avoided if we wish for it to maintain computation as a part of it and the two are to continue to be kept as separate opposed entities. Or rather we must maintain a different structure with computation as a part of the concept; for example, 5x5 is 25 partly because of it’s form rather than the notion that five of five things leaves twenty-five things.
This methodology would render it less accessible, more elite, and to be read in a religious aspect. But over and over again the more I revisit this the less possible it seems to extract it from its rooted notions and ideology in the sanctified, the questionless question posed about the nature of the soul and of god. It doesn’t seem possible to do sanctified mathematics and not live sanctified lives without being overcome by contradictory actions. Could anyone consider their formal belief in 5x5 to be much different or higher than someone else’s formal belief in creationism? The alternative seems to be that we must remain bound to lock away the potential to protect against the self-destructive tendency; another quasi-Christian ideology.
To commit to polarization would make the concept less and less real, as its computation became easier and easier it would require less and less intervention of mind.
In polarizing the two, the product of the concept is the computation, where the computation and conception are dialectically one and the same. This runs against the grain of our programmatic world where programs are conceptualized and then implemented as a computation. We believe computation can be offloaded onto machines, as is shown by our adoption of digital logic and perceived aides like matlab, mathematica, etc.
The rationale is computation has no use besides supplying a product and realizing a ready-developed notion. So then, full implementation of pure mathematics must then be avoided if we wish for it to maintain computation as a part of it and the two are to continue to be kept as separate opposed entities. Or rather we must maintain a different structure with computation as a part of the concept; for example, 5x5 is 25 partly because of it’s form rather than the notion that five of five things leaves twenty-five things.
This methodology would render it less accessible, more elite, and to be read in a religious aspect. But over and over again the more I revisit this the less possible it seems to extract it from its rooted notions and ideology in the sanctified, the questionless question posed about the nature of the soul and of god. It doesn’t seem possible to do sanctified mathematics and not live sanctified lives without being overcome by contradictory actions. Could anyone consider their formal belief in 5x5 to be much different or higher than someone else’s formal belief in creationism? The alternative seems to be that we must remain bound to lock away the potential to protect against the self-destructive tendency; another quasi-Christian ideology.
To commit to polarization would make the concept less and less real, as its computation became easier and easier it would require less and less intervention of mind.
Comments (82)
True mathematics takes philosophical intuition. 5+5 is 5 and 5 and we call it ten. But that is naming, not adding to equal something. Mathematics is a process, not just an identity game. I don't know how a computer does computations if it became alive but it would be another species so we couldn't really know anyway
Once the intuition is fully ‘subjected’ such as “we do addition to…” then we are fully back in the dichotomy again. But without a doubt the recourse to intuition is essential to mathematics.
Explain further why act and concept might be opposed
Au contraire, over many years I have found that computation enriches and supports concepts. :roll:
This is a linear perspective of what is a multi-dimensional relation, polarised as abstraction. Computation as act refers to minimal variability and Concept as theory to maximal variability - the qualitative limitations beyond which a ‘concept’ cannot be defined.
In our day to day reality, the act of creating consumer products must be informed by the research, or risk creating a product without a consumer. In this sense, computation can refer to minimal adjustments only, through to redefining properties of the product or the consumer - ie. the range of qualitative variability in the concept/theory.
Conversely, it is in the act of creating products intended for consumers that continually ‘enriches and supports’ theoretical research, as describes. To create a consumer product is not to destroy the research, but to challenge its accuracy.
To a certain extent what we really call 'computation that is not conceptual' occurs when we are told that two things are mutually related and we have a natural need to see this for ourselves. Most rigorous students of mathematics will require some form of proof. But I argue that proof is not so separate from what we consider as computation. When we think of the meaning of the word 'proof,' associations come to mind of testing, demonstrating or approving. In some ways what renders those concepts valid is that they can be shown, so much that this showing exposes the conceptual relationship.
This is why we don't learn simply by being told that the relationships of mathematics are true but are given our own problems and examples in which to demonstrate that the relationship to a certain extent is part of an abstract whole with it's context joining with it, and that we only separate the two in a sort of contingent manner.
Working on math problems is computation. What does this oppose? It is concept as act. I don't know how this relates to technology
So more and more we work in such a way that the idea is that there is one entity whose ‘job’ it is to develop the ideas and another that implements them. It’s more of an analogy to computation than anything; in ideal form the implementer sees a ‘black box’ —not of course how it would practically happen — that they need not understand anything else but the output for the given input. It’s just one example.
Are you trying to say that I’m simplifying my observation that as a whole Western civilization has built this dichotomy through it’s activity, or are you saying the dichotomy itself is oversimplified as an absolute fixed idea?
I'm unclear as to what problems this is causing
If you could give a specific example, your post would be more clear. As it is, I can't figure out what you're saying.
The op sounds like Hegelian marxism to me
We all get our ideas from giants
Like COBOL, "Common business-oriented language," hyped in the 1960's as a way to let business people write their own programs without the need for professional programmers?
Quoting kudos
The fantasy would fail, just as it did for COBOL, graphical programming, and every other "non-programmer" programming paradigm ever hyped. You could do your homework and write an article on the history of failed approaches to the idea of programming without programmers.
Quoting kudos
Not only don't I think it would, but we have six decades of actual real-world experience that the idea doesn't even work. It turns out that you need programmers to write programs. COBOL became a success only because professional programmers used it. Business people never did.
But how would higher-level tools to let nonspecialists write programs enable a "deeper experiential understanding?" Does driving an automatic transmission give you a deeper experiential understanding of how transmissions work? Does flipping a light switch give a deeper experiential understanding of power generation and distribution? Of course not. The higher-level the interface, the less actual understanding is involved.
The entire purpose of high-level abstractions is to relieve the end user from the burden of understanding what's going on under the hood. If you want someone to understand how software works, they should program in assembly, not high-level languages. You go down the stack, not up, in order to understand what's going on. You go up the stack to get things done without the need to know what's going on.
None of this his anything whatsoever to do with your OP, which seemed to be about the distinction or dichotomy between programming and mathematics. Here you're talking about methods of letting non-programmers write programs, an idea with six decades of abject failure behind it. [I'll concede spreadsheets as the one known success. Maybe simple SQL queries executed by business people, though the organization still needs to employ an army of database administrators]. You didn't explain your OP at all.
For most mathematicians proof is separate from computation. But one can go down the rabbit hole of computerized proofs if one is so inclined. For me, I use programs I have written to gain insights into problems I pose for myself. For example, if a number of computer examples imply a certain idea is not true, I will adjust my thinking, and move in another direction.
I think your ideas of proofs and computation are suspect.
Here we can see clearly the dichotomy, so if it were unclear before it should be very much clearer now. In our day to day life we have light switches and power generation as separate entities. In the mind we have it organized that way as well. Our subjective relation to technological means conditions us to believe in things that do and things that make do. Shouldn’t it make sense that we think of Mathematics in the same light? After all, we all use Matlab/Octave/etc. Nobody wants to compute a giant integral that will take all day.
This type of reasoning is tempting but can be fallacious, for the reasons previously explained. The concepts of mathematics are most commonly acknowledged as valid through proof; proof that heavily involves the form of computation. We can only create once we have seen for ourselves that the dualism was never wholly and fully mutually exclusive. If you had never heard of power generation perhaps the best way to prove it to you might be to use the switch, at least as an aide as opposed to persuading you by recourse to theories of electron interactions that haven’t been observed and haven’t been synthetically proven from prior knowledge. Those theories are like light switches to the subject of what that switch means to us as human beings.
Programmers know that distinction as interface versus implementation. It's not a particularly deep idea. If you swapped out a coal-fired power plant for a nuclear one, the operation of the light switch would not change even though the underlying implementation is completely different.
Quoting kudos
Well yes, civilization is composed of layers of abstractions.
Quoting kudos
It's unavoidable. You can't master auto mechanics to drive a car, and power generation to turn on the light. You are stating everyday commonplaces as if they held some kind of deep insight.
Quoting kudos
Sure, and we do. We take theorems as given without necessarily caring about the centuries of hard work it took to develop the insight to prove the theorem. It's human progress. You don't have to invent concrete to lay down a highway.
Quoting kudos
You seem to be confusing the computation aspects of mathematics with actual mathematics. Possibly you're not overly familiar with the latter.
Quoting kudos
Yes but you're the only one committing the fallacy. You talk of Matlab is if it were a stand-in for actual mathematics. And it's not clear what fallacy you are talking about. It's not a fallacy to use a light switch. It's just an example of a user interface, just as a web browser frontends the entire global communications infrastructure of the Internet.
Quoting kudos
I'm guessing that you haven't seen much math, because once again you conflate mathematics with computation. Some proofs involve computation, but most don't.
Quoting kudos
Yeah ok. Whatever point you are trying to make is deeply unclear, and muddled by your lack of specific experience with mathematics, as opposed to computation.
Quoting kudos
But the operation of a light switch proves nothing to anybody about power generation. The entire purpose of a light switch is to relieve the end user of the burden of even thinking about power generation.
Quoting kudos
Buzzwords and word salad. You are saying nothing. Your exposition is devoid of meaning. Feel free to convince me otherwise.
You seem to be making a big deal out of the fact that there are interfaces and implementation. Which is fine, if trivial. But your attempt to connect the idea to mathematics falls flat, since you think mathematics is computation. And you haven't made any point about it in any case.
ps -- I'm not giving you a hard time just to do that. I can not understand what you are saying, and the parts that I do understand, are wrong. I'm challenging you to be more clear.
In this proof Euclid employs some computation of a number of prior theorems of his own to demonstrate the relationship. Who knows, maybe that’s even how this theorem was proven in the first place.
Your confusions look to stem from thinking there is a problem with dialectics. Yet reasoning depends on being able to divide the world in a way that allows it to be reduce to a model - a rational system of general rules and particular instances, or deductive theory and inductive confirmation.
So maths has its general rules - its algorithms. Proofs show that the algorithms are sound according to various reasonable-seeming axiomatic principles. There are even more general ways to test some particular algorithmic generality!
And then you can test an algorithm by running it with actual measurements, actual data, actual numbers instead of generalised variables. You can plug the particular values into the general statement and make a further judgement about whether the computational result seems sound when matched against the reality of whatever it purports to be modelling.
So your muddles start by wanting to reject the dichotomies at the heart of any rational modelling exercise. They are in fact the essence of the intellectual enterprise. It's the same for maths, science and philosophy.
is where our thoughts depart, because I’m not sure how you mean the word ‘model.’ And the world does not need to be divided for reason to exist; that is, if we take division to mean creating separate mutually exclusive parts from a whole. Take reference to post-Newtonian physics (an area I admittedly don’t have a great deal of experience with), wherein many new and interesting discoveries have taken place in which divisions in reality — as you call them — have been blurred; space, time, mass, acceleration, etc. A model is something man-made and man-invented that is fashioned in the likeness of something else. But on the contrary, much of what constitutes reason could be attributed to factors beyond the reach of the individual.
My position is Peircean (CS Peirce). So the dichotomous division of things is only to create the separations that then allow the third thing of their interaction. This is the basis of a holist metaphysics.
And then - again as argued by Peirce - modelling may be a human practice but it is also completely general as the logical process of semiosis. We don’t have a free choice about how to model as the essential reasonableness of a logical relationship is something which even the Cosmos can’t avoid in developing its own concrete state of being.
So humans can construct models of reality anyway they choose. They can live according to magical or animistic thinking. But as soon as they start down the path to a dialectical logic, they are embracing the same symmetry-breaking logic of physical existence itself. It is the only route to evolving complex order as we find either in our models of particular physical phenomenon, or in physics as a general metaphysical phenomenon.
This is why maths proves to be “unreasonably effective”. The process of its own development apes the constraints that self-organised consistency places on any form of uncertainty - informational or material.
Maths of course has its own ideas about its metaphysics. It is torn by a reductionist dilemma about whether to call itself an arbitrary modelling exercise or a revelation of Platonic necessities. Folk get very passionate about which side to bat for.
My point is that Peirce in particular offered a foundation that absorbs both horns of the dilemma to leave the Hegelian synthesis. The arbitrary and the necessary are the division that must emerge into the light to allow for the third holistic thing of them standing in an interesting variety of relations to each other.
Maths enjoys its game of playing off absolute necessities (axioms) against absolute arbitrariness (x = pick any number). And in constructing two exactly opposed extremes, it makes itself a large enough model of a rational world to encompass a world that is in fact rationally organised.
So it is all connected. There is a world to model because it has general organisation plus arbitrary detail. Physics works because it models the world as laws and measurements. Maths works because it enshrines that same division at a level so abstract it feels possible to talk about all possible worlds.
Embrace the dichotomy and move on to find why triadic holism is what works when it comes to rational inquiry.
Physics works in a certain way and with certain limitations. The limitations are imposed by the fact that physics begins with certain presuppositions that make both it and maths possible, but those presuppositions remain unexamined by it. Even as physics moves beyond the notion of materiality and naive objectivty , it retains the idea of the object as persisting presence to itself. This makes possible duration and extension , which in turn make possible counting, measurement, calculation. But the enduring thing-form-pattern is an idealization. As an idealization, it is quite useful
within certain limits as a way to anticipate our world, but it’s presuppositions are profoundly leas useful in making sense of human behavior, particularly the relation between affectivity, cognition and action.
Quoting apokrisis
Again, a Peircian dialectical logic is useful for physics in its present form, but at some point it will recognize the need to move beyond this, as many in philosophy and psychology already have.
By computation do you mean reasoning?
Nonsense. The history of physics shows a continual revision of the suppositions in exactly the way I describe. Newton comes along with one mathematical framework that embeds a set of particular symmetries. Then Einstein comes along and shows how that classical dynamics is just a special case of an even more general symmetries (needing even less in terms of those particular presuppositions).
The way forward has thus been clearly marked for many decades. Okun’s cube describes how all the more particular physical schemes must eventually arrive at a quantum gravity theory that successfully generalises all three Planck constants - c, G and h.
So you can challenge the game plan. And there is a whole academic industry in that. But also there is a reason why physics thinks it has got a grip on the way to formulate its ground suppositions, and even better, how to attain ever greater generality by eliminating the need for as many of them as possible. The correctness of this approach is proven by its experimental success.
Quoting Joshs
Now you are talking about the grounding of life and mind science. And I am the first one to say that physics - of the Newtonian kind - is inadequate to the task.
Quoting Joshs
The irony there is the Peircean view is quite the other way around. It goes from the psychology of cognition to a description of the material world as itself a semiotic system. So it is as anti-Newtonian as you can get. But it also turns out to predict the informational turn that physics had to take once it encountered the dialectical marvels of quantum theory.
Out of curiosity, why is it a dilemma?
Because folk see dichotomous opposition as a logical contradiction rather than a relation of logical reprocity.
I have no doubt. But even with all these revisions there are still core presuppositions going back to Galileo and Descartes that have not been challenged within physics itself , only outside of physics , in particular by Husserlian phenomenology and Heidegger.
Heidegger traces the origin of empirical science to the concept of enduring substance.
“Mathematical knowledge is regarded as the one way of apprehending beings which can always be certain of the secure possession of the being of the beings which it apprehends. Whatever has the kind of being adequate to the being accessible in mathematical knowledge is in the true sense.
This being is what always is what it is. Thus what can be shown to have the character of constantly remaining, as remanens capax mutationem, constitutes the true being of beings which can be experienced in the world. What enduringly remains truly is. This is the sort of thing that
mathematics knows. What mathematics makes accessible in beings constitutes their being. Thus
the being of the "world" is, so to speak, dictated to it in terms of a definite idea of being which is embedded in the concept of substantiality and in terms of an idea of knowledge which cognizes beings in this way. Descartes does not allow the kind of being of innerworldly beings to present itself, but rather prescribes to the world, so to speak, its "true" being on the basis of an idea of being (being = constant objective presence) the source of which has not been revealed and the justification of which has not been demonstrated. Thus it is not primarily his dependence
upon a science, mathematics, which just happens to be especially esteemed, that detennines his ontology of the world, rather his ontology is determined by a basic ontological orientation toward being as constant objective presence, which mathematical knowledge is exceptionally well suited to grasp.* In this way Descartes explicitly switches over philosophically from the development of traditional ontology to modem mathematical physics and its transcendental foundations.”(Being and Time)
We have provisionally taken into consideration
the question about "being-in-time." It is easy to see that we cannot deal with it as long as we have not clarified what "time" is and as long as we have not clarified what "being" means, as it relates to a thing, and as it relates to the human being, who exists.
The question is exciting specifically with regard to natural science, especially with the advent of Einstein's theory of relativity, which established the opinion that traditional philosophical doctrine concerning time has been shaken
to the core through the theory of physics. However, this widely held opinion is fundamentally wrong. The theory of relativity in physics does not deal with what time is but deals only with how time, in the sense of
a now-sequence, can be measured. [It asks] whether there is an absolute measurement of time, or whether all measurement is necessarily relative, that is, conditioned.* The question of the theory of relativity could not
be discussed at all unless the supposition of time as the succession of a sequence of nows were presupposed beforehand. If the doctrine of time, held since Aristotle, were to become untenable, then the very possibility of physics would be ruled out. [The fact that] physics, with
its horizon of measuring time, deals not only with irreversible events, but also with reversible ones and that the direction of time is reversible attests specifically to the fact that in physics time is nothing else than the
succession of a sequence of nows. This is maintained in such a decisive manner that even the sense of direction in the sequence can become a matter of indifference. “
Quoting apokrisis
Pierce’s model of firstnessn shows the same limitation as that of physics. It tries to model change and transformation by beginning with intrinsicality and immediate self-presence and processing from there to relation and change. Instead, difference and transit must be considered primary and the intrinsic and self-present drives from it.
“Let us begin with the body as we just re-conceived it, rather than the traditional order in philosophy which begins with perception first. Then relations or interactions are added, and then language and thought.
For example, Peirce called sensations "firstness." They are assumed to be opaque: What I mean by opaque is exemplified by bits of color, smell, or touch. These are just what they are. Examine them as deeply as you might, in color there is just color. (See Moen, 1992, for a reading of Peirce in which firstness is not opaque.)
When reality is assumed to have opaque things at the bottom, then any relations among them must
be external relations, brought to them. Nothing within a color or a smell inherently insists on its being related to some other color or smell. There is nothing within a color, but color. To relate these opaques, some force or movement must impact on them. Peirce called it "secondness."
Then, thirdly come the relations of language, thought, and universals, kinds, conceptual forms. This order stems from the seeming opaqueness and unrelatedness of the sense-data of perception.Anything more complex must be brought to them, imposed on them from the top down.
Empiricism depends on adding our procedures to nature, "torturing nature" as Bacon said. You must always bring something to the sensations because they have nothing within themselves.
Merleau-Ponty moves far beyond all this but his "first flesh" and "second flesh" still retain something of the old order of first and second. Let us upset that ancient order altogether. If one begins with the body of perception, too much of interaction and intricacy has to be added on later. Perception is not the bottom. There is an implicit interactional bodily intricacy that is first—and
still with us now. It is not the body of perception that is elaborated by language, rather it is the body of interactional living in its environment. Language elaborates how the body implies its situation and its next behavior. We sense our bodies not as elaborated perceptions but as the body-sense of our situations, the interactional whole-body by which we orient and know what we are doing.” Gene Gendlin
Yes, I do mean that in a certain sense too. Do you suggest it is an example of reason and no computation?
In doing math research, one frequently uses previous results (theorems or axioms) to verify steps in logical arguments. And sometimes actual numerical computation is required as well. But it may be that your definition of computation means use of a computer in a larger sense than merely number crunching. Euclid's theorem you presented is a logical argument with no computation I can discern.
If one is not careful in reading Hegel he will simply get an interpretation of philosophy that is not less than schizophrenic
And I’m not seeing how phenomenology contributes any interesting comment on this particular OP or the general application of reasoning.
I love Hegel. I've read all his published books (except philosophy of right). You just have to be careful because he is easy to abuse
I’ve hear quite a lot of readings of phenomenology, but claiming that phenomenology builds up a barrier between mind and word is about as far removed from Husserl
as one can get. All I can figure is that you’re succumbing to a common tendency to misrepresent phenomenology as introspection, attending to the inner. No wonder you think it has nothing to offer the understanding of the application of reasoning.
I'm thinking that because you are failing to show how it has. You are welcome to start showing any time soon.
Phenomenology has been developing since Kant. I don't think Peirce is so different from all those continental thinkers anyway
You could say the departure point was similar to Kant and Hegel. But he saw that the obvious project was to fix their shaky conceptions of logic and so cement what could even be meant by ontological structuralism, or the systems/process philosophy view.
Quoting Gregory
You mean it has become increasingly inured to the failures of its early ambitions? :smile:
Phenomenology is about the unbreakable connection between the self and the world as long as we are alive. Peirce agrees with this. Kant, Reinhold, Fitche, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and yes Peirce provide variations on this theme. It doesn't seem right to be too dogmatic about the minor details
Is Peirce a Phenomenologist? - https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/menu/library/aboutcsp/ransdell/PHENOM.HTM
Note the Cartesian roots of phenomenology and its steady retreat into the primacy of subjectivity. Peirce argued for the irreducible triadicity of a semiotic modelling relation and an expansion of that from a statement about epistemology to a story of ontic and cosmic generality.
I vote that Peirce's works be permanently purged of odd words and replaced with human language
Yes. I was rereading Hegel and Heidegger today and I'm really annoyed when philosophers hide ideas behind pretention. I try to find the true meaning behind the bullshit
The problem is the Cartesian monistic subject = the Peircean triadic model. If it's equivalent functionally, what does it matter? One calls it a hydrogen atom, another protons/neutrons/electrons, and another two up quarks and a down quark, two down quarks and an up quark, gluon particles, and an electron.
Perhaps we are talking about cause.. but is that ontology? Ontologically, the mind is being what the mind is being. Or in a process approach.. The process is being what the process is being. But, you see, whether being, process, or whatever, there is a "there" going on "there". and that "there" is the thing that is highlighted not just the observable phenomena related to "there".
The three choices are the monisms of materialism and idealism, the Cartesian dualism of two varieties of substantial being,, and then the trichotomies of any holistic or systems causality.
So there is no equivalency. Reductionism ain’t holism.
No, there are four choices. The 4th is interactionism, which doesn’t begin, like Pierce , with a ‘firstness’ consisting of an intrinsic in-itself content. Such a concept, contrary to Pierce’s claim, is not an entity feee of suppositions but a construct depending on a very old notion of substance. This is a variant of empiricism , and suffers from the limitation of any empiricism, that which it has in common with idealisms of various stripes.
Yes, let’s note that more closely:
“ it might be more misleading than helpful to do so [consider Peirce a phenomenologist] is encouraged by Husserl's intellectual affinity with the Cartesian philosophy, which is evident not only from his explicit self-identification with that tradition and his characterization of phenomenological method as starting from a Cartesian methodic doubt process, but also from his insistence on the necessity of finding or establishing absolutes of one sort and another: absolute starting points, absolute foundations, absolute clarity, absolute indubitability, absolute certainty, absolute givenness, absolute data, absolute immanence, absolute self-evidence, and so on.“
It sounds to me like this author is relying on superficial summaries from secondary sources. Only in the most general way did Husserl borrow from Descartes .In all specifics phenomenology isvastly different from the Cartesian project. Rather than focusing on the word ‘absolute’, the author should describe what this starting point is for Husserl, an irreducible interaction between subjective and objective poles of experience. This means there is reified self. But neither are there intrinsic qualia ( first ness) of experience. This is what the reduction shows us, but Pierce rejects
the reduction. According to your author:
what "phenomenology" primarily meant to him was the idea that the objects of phenomenological study as such are not studied with any implicit or explicit assumptions, presuppositions, or assertions as to their reality status, which made it possible to develop semiotic or logic (in the broad sense) in a way that presupposes no metaphysical framework, and therefore involves no a priori assumptions about, say, the mental or physical status of the phenomenal entities.
But by founding experience in intrinsic firstness Pwirce begins with a major presupposition , that objects of perception are self-present entities. He need to reduce
this naturalistic idea in order to see that it is an idealization deriving from
continually changing senses of experience that become constituted i to a single ‘this’.
“The power we have of "creating meanings" is not creational in that sense but only in the more modest sense in which we have the power of creating houses out of wood or pots out of clay: we take words--and, of course, other signs or representations--and put them together, i.e. arrange and rearrange them, just as we do other materials, and if we are good at this then of course we create unique artifacts, but there is no creation ex nihilo here. Given the frequent talk by phenomenologists about "constituting meanings" and the like, it seems important to stress here that one will find nothing like that in the Peircean philosophy. (This has important implications for the way in which intentionality is treated by Peirce, about which I will say only that it is not a topic of the first importance in his thought because he regards it as a conception to be explicated by more fundamental conceptions rather than as itself a fundamental explicating conception.)”
Peirce maintains a notion of objects of experience as independent of the subject who does the experiencing. His focus on the social might at first appear to be compatiblewith Wittgenstein’s notion of language, but Pierce doesn’t seem to see the intrinsic role of subjective and intersubjective context in the experience in perceiving and in language.
You may find the following from enactivist Evan Thompson from his latest book, Mind in Life, useful:
READERS FAMILIAR WITH MY EARLIER BOOK, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991), might be surprised by the importance I give to Husserlian phe-nomenology here, given the cridcal attitude toward Husserl that book expressed. What accounts for this change of atdtude? The purpose of this Appendix is to clarify this matter.
In The Embodied Mind, we asserted (i) that Husserl was a method-ological solipsist (p. 16); (ii) that his theory ignored "both the consen-sual aspect and the direct embodied aspect of experience" (p. 17); (iii) that his theory of intentionality was a representational theory (p. 68); (iv) that his theory' of the life-world was reductionistic and representa-tionalist (that he tried to analyze the life-world "into a more funda-mental set of constituents" (p. 117) consisting of beliefs understood as mental representations (p. 18)); and (v) that his phenomenology was a purely abstract, theoretical project lacking a pragmatic dimension (pp. 19,117). We concluded that the Husserlian project was a "failure" (p. 19) and even wrote about the "breakdown of phenomenology" more generally (p. 19). This assessment then motivated our turn to the tradition of Buddhist philosophy and mindfulness-awareness medita-tion as a more promising phenomenological partner for cognitive sci-ence.
As Chapter 2 indicates, however, I no longer subscribe to this assess-ment of Husserlian phenomenology. Our earlier interpretation of Husserl was mistaken. Husserlian phenomenology has far more resources than we realized for productive cross-fertilization with both the sciences of mind (Petitot et al. 1999; Varela 1996) and Buddhist thought (Thompson 2005; Varela 2000b; Varela and Depraz 2003). In particular, I now believe (i) that Husserl was not a methodological solipsist; (ii) that he was greatly concerned with the intersubjective and embodied aspects of experience; (iii) diat his theory of intentionality was not a representational theory; and (iv) that his theory of the life-world was not reductionistic and representationalist. Furthermore, al-though I think phenomenology has tended to overemphasize theoret-ical discussion in the form of textual interpretation (to the neglect of phenomenological pragmatics as well as original phenomenological analyses and philosophical argumentation), I think it is too facile to say simply that phenomenology is a purely abstract, theoretical project lacking a pragmatic dimension. It follows that I would now not charac-terize Husserlian phenomenology as a "failure." Nor would I assert that phenomenology suffered a "breakdown" owing to its neglect of phenomenological pragmatics.
My viewpoint has changed for two reasons. The first is that when Varela and I were writing The Embodied Mind (during 1986-1989; Eleanor Rosen joined the project near the end of 1989) our knowl-edge of Husserl was limited. We were familiar with the main published works in English translation (Logical Investigations, Ideas I, Cartesian Meditations, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenome-nology) but had not studied them carefully enough, and we did not know about Husserl's writings on passive synthesis (then untranslated) and intersubjectivity (still untranslated). We were both more familiar with Heidegger and were influenced by his (largely uncharitable) reading of Husserl. We also had little knowledge of other phenomeno-logical thinkers who were deeply influenced by Husserl (Merleau-Ponty excepted), and we had studied only a litde of the secondary lit-erature on Husserl.
The second reason is that we accepted Hubert Dreyfus's (1982) in-fluential interpretation of Husserl as a representationalist and pro-tocognitivist philosopher, as well as his Heideggerian critique of Husserl thus interpreted. Dreyfus has been a pioneer in bringing the phenomenological tradition into the heardand of the cognitive sci-ences through his important critique of artificial intelligence (Dreyfus 1972, 1992) and his groundbreaking studies on skillful knowledge and action (Dreyfus 2002; Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1986). Yet his work is also marked by a peculiar interpretation of Husserl. Dreyfus presents Husserl's phenomenology as a form of representationalism that antici-pates cognitivist and computational theories of mind. He then re-hearses Heidegger's criticisms of Husserl thus understood and deploys them against cognitivism and artificial intelligence. Dreyfus reads Husserl largely through a combination of Heidegger's interpretation and a particular analytic (Fregean) reconstruction of one aspect of Husserl's thought—Husserl's notion of the noema. Thus the Husserl Dreyfus presents to cognitive science and analytic philosophy of mind is a problematic interpretive construct and should not be taken at face value.”
Ok. Philosophy professor and president of the CS Peirce Society vs some random angry dude on the internet. Gee, it’s tough to decide who to give greater credence to.
Quoting Joshs
I don’t believe so. I agree it would be problematic if Firstness were understood as bare qualia. But the whole point of his triadic systems approach is that it is an irreducibly complex scheme. So firstness becomes so from the point of view of it being embedded within secondness and thirdness.
I don’t mean to come across as angry. I’m not angry, I’m enthralled with ideas and use every opportunity to discuss them. I chose to debate with you because I admire your knowledge of physics and logic. Your author may be a Pierce scholar but he is not a Husserl
scholar. I have published articles on phenomenology in journals like the Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology, so yes, I think I’m more of an authority on Husserl than he is. I also collaborated with Gene Gendlin, one of the central figures in American phenomenology. But I don’t think credentials are the issue here. We should stick with the arguments.
https://independent.academia.edu/JoshSoffer?from_navbar=true
But you seem to want to make this some kind of war between the glory of phenomenology and the glory of Peirce. That is also amusing, and while I can play that game, I hardly take it seriously.
I have no beef with phenomenology. I just see it as a quasi psychological enterprise that adds little to the psychological science I already know. I was doing embodied ennactivism before it suddenly became a thing.
Encountering Peirce was utterly different. It had such a crystallising effect on the circle of systems theorists and theoretical biologists I was part of that they all suddenly started calling themselves biosemioticians. Peirce is the only one to really get to the heart of things with his focus on the science of symbols and codes. His philosophy was causal and not merely descriptive.
Credentials become an issue to the degree we make arguments from authority rather than actual arguments. But I’m glad you could cite someone as good as Evan Thompson. It shows you do have something to back up your statements.
Again I find it weird how the social history of all this goes. In the 1980s, Varela and his autopoiesis was always off to the side of biological systems thinking in being both boldly correct yet missing the essential semiotic chunk that completes its story. So it was funny to always be looking across the water over several decades, seeing that enactive camp develop momentum in psychology, while I had gone from psychology to biology in pursuit of the fuller perspective available there.
Even biosemiotics was fractured into two major camps, one that got completely the wrong end of the stick. :razz:
So what I am saying is that human discourse always divides itself into camps - leaders with followers. You have to have fun with that while also seeing what they generally hold in common, while picking out the critical mistakes holding them back.
I think the term affect is already pointing up completely wrong paths. An affect would be instead a habit of interpretance in a Peircean scheme.
Cartesian representationalism is in error as it leads to the cogsci model of the brain as a system that turns sensory inputs into cognitive outputs - some kind of neural data display … witnessed by some kind of homuncular regress. The central problem of dualism is built in.
A Peircean semiotic approach fits the Bayesian Brain/embodied cognition story that reverses this to say the brain instead outputs states of expectation that attempt to predict its sensory inputs … so that it can ignore them. Consciousness is based on this negative exercise of doing your best not to have to feel, think, attend or otherwise react in a way that would disrupt the persistent collection of habits which constitutes the self.
So that is rather Buddhist - thinking of Evan Thompson here. By being able to suppress affect in a general pragmatic way - treat the world as already comprehended and unremarkable - we then make it possible to have actually meaningful responses to whatever could count as some actual shock to this self our habits of interpretance constitute.
Encountering the unpredicted, our brains go aha! They have to stop for a split second of confused disorientation and do the attentional work that brings the world back into frame. We re-establish a new state of interpretance that updates our large collection of world-ignoring automaticisms.
So you can see why talk of affect is already signposting a wrong direction for me, and for a Peircean approach too. Consciousness is not built on the successful representation of phenomena but a generalised suppression of the need to react in anyway that is not already fully involuntary and automatic.
Sure, that is then followed by the intense affect of being disoriented and then doing work to reorientate. But the demand of introspection - to be that kind of self that is aware of all its qualitative and affective contents - gets the cognitive neurobiology entirely wrong. The first rule is to predict the world so well that it has nothing at all to teach you. So there is an anticonsciousness that results in the thing of an experiencing ego lost in its own little semiotic umwelt or private habits of interpretation.
Doesn’t this become constructivist woo just as wooey as any Cartesian subject?
So a psychology of habits is all about a deep buried structure of rationality that develops in a considered way over a long durations and many situations.
And affect, or the fleeting minor updates of disorientation and reorientation that indeed highlight a momentary disconnect between self and world, is thus something fairly epiphenomenal rather than central. The rational structure is the ground. The affect arises to the degree we just fell out of our pragmatic state of automaticism - the feeling of being mindlessly in the flow.
As I keep emphasising, there is this background Cartesianism that is a cultural dichotomy that folk want to play out in the serious science too. The enlightenment produced its own social reaction of romanticism. This rocks on into even modern philosophy as rationalist AP vs woke and feels touchy Continentalism.
All good fun. So long as we realise that Peircean rational structure is the correct answer in the end. Romanticism can’t be taken seriously as it is atavistic dualism.
What are you talking about? Constructivism is just the standard social science position. It’s well founded in theory and evidence.
Now, where were we? :chin:
Hypothesis/Theorem - Concavity and Points of Inflection Based on 1st/2nd Derivatives
One of the most distinctive features of a graph is the direction in which it curves of bends... A positive second derivative, f''(x) > 0, tells us that the slope f'(x) is an increasing function of x.
This gives us a general overview of the theorem, or more generally the concept as we're calling it in it's most opposed form. This is enough as it is for some, but most textbooks will go further and demonstrate how this is the case.
Further Intuition
This means that the tangent turns counterclockwise as we move along the curve from left to right... Such a curve lies above its tangent except at the point of tangency... Similarly, if the second derivative is negative, f''(x) = 0, then the slope f'(x) is a decreasing function, and the tangent turns clockwise as we move to the right.
Here the writer demonstrates the phenomena, or 'shows' us it in action. This helps the reader to believe the notion is real and to see how it relates to past experiences or concepts, particularly the concept of the tangent and the derivative about which the reader is assumed to have some experience with.
A point across which the direction of concavity changes is called a point of inflection. If f''(x) is continuous and has opposite signs on each side of P, then it must have a zero at P itself. The search for points of inflection is mainly a matter of solving the equation f''(x)=0 and checking the direction of concavity on both sides of each root.
Here is the argument for the second concept is put in place.
3x Examples With Discussion But I Will Only Show One for Reference
(Example Function) is very easy to sketch by inspection if we notice the follow clues: it is symmetric about the y-axis because the exponent is an even number, its values are all positive, it has a maximum at x=0 because this yields the smallest denominator, and y->0 as |x|-> inf. It is therefore intuitively clear that the graph has a shape shown in fig 4.10. There are evidently two points of inflection, and the only question is, what are their precise locations? To discover this, we compute... (calculations and further discussion)
Here the author 'computes' directly the above mentioned theorem showing various easy ways to implement it. Here the 'identities' and 'differences' present in the conceptual definition are given higher precedence than its grounds; we can more closely see the relationships at play, how they could be related to other theorems and to themselves. This is borrowing some more language from Hegel.
Exceptions - Written as Three Remarks But I Will Only Show One for Reference
As we have tried to suggest in these examples, knowing that f''(x0)=0 is not enough to guarantee that x=x0 furnishes a point of inflection. We must also know that the graph is concave up on one side of x- and concave down on the other. The simplest function that shows this difficulty is y=f(x)=x^4. Here f'(x) = 4x^3 and f"(x)=12x^2, so f''(x)=0 at x=0. However, f''(x) is clearly positive on both sides of the point x=0, and therefore -- as we already know from the graph -- this point corresponds to a minimum, not a point of inflection...
This section shows us a few examples where the above stated theorem appears not to work. The author chooses to demonstrate the invalidity/error as it would appear in a solution. Note that they have left it to the reader somewhat to develop their own 'narrative' regarding why this particular case does not fit the universal mold.[/i]
This is a textbook designed for learning rather than a journal where a theorem is actually proven, but I think if you looked to those sources you might find something of a similar structure. Why choose this form of showing various examples and exceptions to the rule at work as opposed to trying to summarize the concept through more basic language?
Except that the changes in the flow afe precisely what affect is. That is to say , the flow or stream of consciousness consists of continuous qualitative novelty moment to moment. I am affected moment to moment differently by what I experience. There is no self on one side and the world on the other. The self is nothing other than this organism-environment interaction in which experience always matters to me, is significant to me in one way or another, and this has a ‘feel’ to it. Affective tonality is never absent from experience , regardless of whether I am having difficulty making sense of the world or not. Feeling is never mindless , it is precisely what orients and informs our sense making and logical schemes. What grounds any logic is the valuing that generates it , and values are in turn grounded affectively as qualitative feeling. There is no such thing as affect-free thought , or feeling-free reason.
By contrast, Friston's free energy model posits minimization of surprise(disorder) in pursuit of homeostasis as the normative aim of a living system in a non-equilibrium steady state, and defines autonomy on the basis of a markov blanket distinguishing between internal and external states, but these are weak notions of autonomy and normativity, in contrast to many enactivist versions. It's not surprising, then, that Friston chooses Freud's realist model ( Friston's characterization of schizophrenic disturbance as ‘false belief' indicates his realist bent) as a good realization of his neuroscientific project, given that Freud, like Friston, turns autonomy and normativity into a conglomeration of external pushes and internal pulls on a weakly integrated system. This is posited as an ‘internal' environment indirectly exposed to an outside, in classic Cartesian fashion, as Barrett express here: “ Like those ancient, mummified Egyptian pharaohs, the brain spends eternity entombed in a dark, silent box. It cannot get out and enjoy the world's marvels directly; it learns what is going on in the world only indirectly via scraps of information from the light, vibrations, and chemicals that become sights, sounds, smells, and so on.”” From your brain's point of view, locked inside the skull, your body is just another part of the world that it must explain.”
By contrast , autonomy for the enactivist isnt the property of a brain box hidden behind a markov blanket, distinguishable not only from the world but from its own body, but the autonomy of a brain-body system, whose elements cannot be separated out and for whom interaction with a world is direct rather than. indirect.
“One of the basic propositions of the enactive approach is that being autonomous is a necessary condition for a system to embody original intentionality and normativity. Sense-making is the interactional and relational side of autonomy. An autonomous system produces and sustains its own identity in precarious conditions and thereby establishes a perspective from which interactions with the world acquire a normative status. Certain interactions facilitate autonomy and other interactions degrade it. Information-processing models of the mind leave unexplained the autonomous organization proper to cognitive beings because they treat cognitive systems as heteronomous systems. These models characterize cognitive systems in terms of informational inputs and outputs instead of the operational closure of their constituent processes. As a result, they do not explain how certain processes actively generate and sustain an identity that also constitutes an intrinsically normative way of being in the world.”(Thompson)
The late George Simmons taught at Colorado College, not far from where I live. He is a marvelous author, and his Introduction to Topology and Modern Analysis is my favorite math book. The material you quote shows how well he conveys ideas to the reader, going from a formal statement of a theorem to examples of great clarity illustrating that theorem. This is the way mathematics is taught.
What you call computing seems to be simply looking at examples - frequently involving numerical calculations - that give students a more comfortable framework for understanding concepts. Examples of this sort go hand in hand with formal theory, making the latter more palatable. There is no conflict. No pitting one approach against the other. Examples and graphical interpretations are part of heuristics. There is no "opposition".
I know nothing of Hegel and what he thought in this regard.
When I taught a senior level course in complex variables I would try to give the motivation behind theory, avoiding the strict formal proofs in favor of simplified approaches that might appeal to intuition. Now, a graduate level course in that subject is more sophisticated and entails stricter arguments. Even there it's possible to spark intuition.
But paying attention to fluctuations is a linguistically-scaffolded and socially-constructed human practice. Animals have the same brains but lack the language code to construct a habit of self regulatory introspection.
Animals merely extrospect - live in the flow as habitually as possible with no extra duty to be accountable for every possible “affect”. Human society depends on training individuals to view as independent actors in a socialised context. And so there is this semiotic of affect where we have to give a causal explanation (or excuse) for of every response.
I hit him because I was angry/sad/mistaken/playing a game. Affect is just the currency of this cultural discourse. See Rom Harre’s The Social Construction of thr Emotions or Vygotskian psychology in general.
So for neurobiology, phenomenology is already a semiotic extra. A misunderstanding of consciousness as a process, but one that flows naturally from the socially constructed belief that all experience should be attended and reported.
Quoting Joshs
That is the cultural myth, the poetic ideal. But I can drive through town without registering or feeling anything particular for long periods in regards to the world.
If you look, you will always find some affect to remark upon. But you don’t actually need to look. And indeed, attempting to be conscious and attentive of well learnt habits is the way to disrupt them and start unlearning them. You never want to be thinking of your golf swing as you are hitting the ball.
Quoting Joshs
You are heaping on the romantic mythology. :smile: Sure, the brain has a positive match or mismatch feeling in terms of its pattern recognition. We can employ that to recognise our cat or know that we know the right answer to a problem. The neurobiology of this valuing (or orientation response) is well traversed. Certainty and doubt are very broad judgements that all brains need to make. Judgments about mathematical or logical patterns is then a socially constructed specialism built on the general foundation of a capacity for recognising successful pattern fitting.
Quoting Joshs
Hah. Well it sure as hell surprised me. I spent quite a bit of time with Friston before he formulated his Bayesian Brain story. Out of hundreds of neurobiologists at the time, he already stood out. He knew I was a savage critic of Freud as an old romantic coke head. Yet he never let on he might give the bugger a respectable nod.
Quoting Joshs
I’d have to go back to what Friston wrote in that paper (I only skimmed it with averted eyes). But I don’t think he would have argued against embodied cognition. The depersonalisation and thought intrusion of schizophrenia is a classic example of how the division between self and world is a fluid and constructed boundary. The Bayesian Brain doesn’t just model the world, it models the self in the world. We can chew our food without biting off our tongue because it is all part and parcel of the modelling relation.
Wow, what a coincidence; I agree that his writing was superb. This happened to be the book that really acted as a gateway for me into Mathematics. It seems at times to give the history, essence, and practise of the topic equal weight with the memorization of formulae.
100% correct. And this is exactly my position in a nutshell, that computation and the concept or theorem are different but that their opposition rests on a sort of ‘grounds’ for their being so. Their meaning is denatured when reduced permanently to a real and tangible, fixed and absolute opposition. That’s part of a much more complicated idea from Hegel’s philosophy, but that wasn’t invented solely by him; we are all practically aware that this is true.
If we did in fact take the dichotomy to be real, fixed, and absolute, it would look a bit like a sort of computation that is fully a means. The concept would take the form of a sort of thing with a real existence in its place and the result would be a dogmatic form of mathematics where ideas are handed down in themselves without recourse to each other. In our minds it is closer to a type of negation that we reveal through action. I think you would find it difficult to explain why 5+5=10 simply through reasoning and theorizing alone without demonstrating any relationships, differences, or identities. Computation constitutes a form where we take the concept as most opposed to the act for a specific purpose.
It isn’t a question of paying attention to the changing flow via introspection When we move our head , our entire visual field changes, a d the object in front of us now appears via a changed perspective. It is not the same visual experience of the object but we consider it to be the same object because we construct a subjective abstraction according which spatial objects are self-identical entities with fixed properties and
attributes. Logic and math would be impossible without this abstraction. The exactness of math derived from the assumption of the persistent self-
identicality over time of objects. From this assumption we derive extension, duration and magnitude.
Animals also must construct abstractive idealizations so as to locate and track moving objects, but these abstractions are local and contextual. Animals dont need formal language to construe situations perceptually and cognitively. They use is a non-formal semiotics.
Quoting apokrisis
Ive critiqued a similar view from Ken Gergen and John Shotter. Before I am shaped by social interaction in linguistic contexts , I am already shaped in a more immediate and intimate manner by time itself. That is , every aspect of my previous history is exposed to an outside and transformed in a subtle way moment to moment , prior to interchange with others. I am already other than myself moment to moment , but in such a way that a thread of
pragmatic continuity characterizes my changing self.
It may appear that I am simply my socially constructed habits, but every ‘habit’ that structure me is subtly transforms i it’s sense, role and meaning
every new moment of experience.
In other words , the social begins not with exposure to other persons , but in temporal experience moment to moment. When I am engaged in contact with other persons , the way that I interpret that interaction and the linguistic senses of words and phrases and gestures and norms is unique to me. The same is true of every participant i. the ‘same’ interchange. It is the same differently for each of them, but such a difference is subtle enough as to go unnoticed.
lQuoting apokrisis
If you are awake during your drive you are always , every moment , experiencing new and differentiated perceptions and cognitions of one sort or another. If I rode next to you and ask you every ten minutes or five
minutes or two minutes what you were just experiencing you would report something new. And every new experience is a change in how you are being affected by your world in some qualitative fashion( affective tonality, attitude, motivation).
I am curious as to your take on Andy Clark. He has made an effort to distance himself from the computational representationalism that characterizes writers like Barrett and Friston. So you support his efforts? I’d also love your response to Dan Zahavi’s phenomenological critique of what he calls the neo-Kantian tendencies of at least some predictive processing models.
https://www.academia.edu/34265366/Brain_Mind_World_Predictive_coding_neo_Kantianism_and_transcendental_idealism
It’s interesting to me that you consider philosophies which treat affectivity and temporal transformation as primary to be exemplars of a romantic idealism. Since
that group includes not only the phenomenologists but also social constructionists like Shotter and Gergen, Heidegger and poststructuralist authors such as Foucault , Deleuze and Derrida, I assume you consider all of these as romantics?
Constructivism for social science is one thing.. Constructivism (or a form of it) for an answer to what experience is, metaphysically, is another. You always seem to go back to "Well what is a color?" thing. A complex cause for something is not the thing itself that is happening. The color red can be any number of descriptive phenomena, but the experience is another thing. Is causal relations the metaphysical phenomena only for you?
Good! Glad to hear. :cool:
Isn’t that my point? We don’t even notice saccades as that is noise habitually filtered out. It is already expected from reafference. If the world spins and jerks, we already predict that as a consequence of motor planning. And that then generalises the phenomenology to the point of being selves moving our heads within a fixed external world.
Quoting Joshs
Yes. Generalisation or habits of interpretation are at the basis of semiosis as a way of bringing organisation to confusion or uncertainty. So that starts with genetic and neural abstraction and continues on to human word-based social abstraction and then human number-based technological abstraction. Same thing moving increasingly towards its ultimate Platonic extreme.
Quoting Joshs
Well yes. Social semiosis is founded on neurosemiosis. The habits of linguistic self consciousness are founded on the habits of organismic consciousness.
We are embodied selves that then learn the extra displacing trick of thinking about ourselves in a rationalising disembodied way.
Quoting Joshs
I felt he was re-inventing the Vygotskisn wheel. But I also supported him in bringing the constructionist model to a wider audience - the mind science crowd.
Quoting Joshs
As I argued in response to the OP, the analysis of all phenomena breaks naturally into a dichotomy of the local and the global, the particular and the general, the discrete and the continuous - the many ways of talking about a hierarchical systems causality.
So the connection is much deeper. Any time humans have to reason about anything, they will arrive as this generalised kind of opposition.
If the enlightenment was all about global general laws or principles - Peirce’s synechism - then romanticism was all about is other of local exceptionalism and independent free choice. Or Peirce’s tychism.
So in the same way, a concern with tychic affect as “other” to synecectic habit, or the temporality of located events vs spaciality of concrete structure, are cultural oppositions that derive from discovering that analysis always results in a dialectical choice.
My criticism is not with the oppositions themselves but with the failure to see through to their triadic synthesis. That is why I push the systems view and Peirce.
Quoting Joshs
Just skimming the introduction I see the mistake is in thinking that the task is to predict our perceptions rather than the effect of our actions on the world. So the representationalism stays baked in to those who might think that way about neurobiology. His target is Frith and Metzinger - both of whom failed to impress me in this area.
So my approach - a Peircean semiotic one - is that cognition makes no sense except to the degree it is a material engagement with the world. Our internal representation is an umwelt or an experiencing of the opportunities for meaningful actions. If I see a door knob, my hand is already prepared to grasp and operate it.
So the kind of thing folk were talking about in the 1990s as affordances or deictic coding. Or even back in the cybernetic 1950s with perceptual control theory. Nothing is ever new under the sun.
This is why I stress that our reportable phenomenological experience is all about a semiotic modelling relation that is not merely a model of the world, but a model of ourselves as a free agent standing in contrast to the brute constraints the world might wish to impose.
And then, I stress how even to frame consciousness in terms of reportable phenomena and temporal experiential flows is to bake in the Cartesian representationalism we want to avoid. We want to understand consciousness and selfhood in terms of a collection of well-adapted action habits.
Representationalism makes us passive observers of a world that …. we have internally constructed … for some weird reason no one can explain.
A triadic modellling relation instead is all about how brains are tied into their worlds in real-time by non-stop choices about opportunities and actions.
Representationalism starts with a dark screen and demands it be painted with some particular image. Semiosis starts with the unbound possibility of Firstness and thus sets the opposite problem of how to be able to constrain that overwhelming variety - the blooming, buzzing, confusion - to some focused and rational plan of immediate action.
That is why phenomenology starts on the wrong foot. Representationalism still lurks. The foundational issues haven’t been addressed. To talk of the quality of experience rather than the quantity of information (Friston’s free energy) that can be dissipated, is to show which paradigm still truly has you in its grip.
It is those who argue against physicalism that keep bringing up colour experience as their best case. I’m just happy to take on anyone’s best argument.Quoting schopenhauer1
Monism is simple. Dualism is a simplicity compounded by a simplicity. It is only with a trichotomous causality that you arrive at actual irreducible complexity worth talking about.
Out of curiosity, did you know my old high school friend Zach Hall? He created a department of neurobiology at UCSF in the 1970s.
Never heard of him. :smile:
Checking his publications I see that he was focused down at the molecular biology end and my interest was all at the general systems level. So that’s not such a surprise.
Or even back in 1927 (Being and Time).
Quoting apokrisis
Quoting apokrisis
Let me give you what I think is an example of representationalism and you let me know if it is consistent with your understanding. Beck's cognitive therapy and Ellis' rational emotive therapy exemplify the oppositional relationship between a rationalist interpretive template and an assumed independently existing reality that commandeers that schematics. The image produced is one of the person standing back and placing interpretations on events in the world rather as they may sort objects, by mechanistically applying a pre-existing program.
This scheme is oppositional; the outside world is at a remove from the cognizing subject, whose internal representations are not in immediate and direct contact with that outside. When am internal representation is invalidated, it is by an ‘external’ reality that has nothing in it that is contributed or constrained by the subjective model.
Gene Gendlin critiques the representational
view of perception from a phenomenological vantage:
“ The currently underlying conceptual system leads us to assume that what exists is always something that can be presented before us. So there are always two, what exists and also us, the before whom. Contact with anything real is assumed to be by perception. Perception (or even more narrowly, sensation) is supposed to be the beginning. Perception involves a split between a here and a there. We sense here what is over there. Perception involves an inside and an outside; we sense in here in the body what is out there, outside, ‘external’ to us. I call this the ‘perceptual
split’. The here-there generates a gap, the space between the here and the there. This space is supposed to contain everything that exists. To ‘exist’ means to fill some part of that ‘external’ space. Only the ‘out there’ is supposed to exist. What exists is considered cut off from any other living process because perceiving is the basic starting process. But being perceived is not supposed to affect real things. They are conceptualized as inherently cut-off from living process. To be real
they need only to fill the perceptual gap space.”
In the phenomenological approaches that I endorse, there is not a subject that reproduces anything from an outside. There has not first been an original external ‘production’ from a real world and then an image or copy or model of it generated by a subject. There is in fact no subject to speak of except as a pole or a zero
point for actions. This zero point implies a functionally integral past history that implies into what occurs, and what occurs protends beyond itself. Am I talking about a representational scheme when I refer to this integral history? No. First of all , this history ( we could call it body memory if you like) has no existence apart from or outside of what is occurring into it. Secondly, this implicit intricacy is changed as whole in its function, sense and meaning by the occurring which it implies into. There is no static memory, no reified schemes. To occur is to change a set of remembered relationships that are themselves the manifestation of precious changes is relationships. The concept of a static , self-inhering ‘object’ is a very high order abstraction. It is nowhere to be found in the fundamental workings of experience. What is to prevent such a system from seeing the world as nothing but a chaotic blooming buzzing confusion? Because the organism is radically implicative, anticipative. It is wholly oriented toward anticipating the replicative aspects of events( not duplicative; experience never doubles back on itself). It isn’t set this way by some internal gyroscope or other rationalist grounding.
Quoting apokrisis
Talking of the quantity of anything is to start from an entity that is presumed to have a countable aspect to it.
What does it imply to make a measurement, to state that it takes certain amount of time for some process to unfold? A time calculation counts identical instances of a meaning whose sense is kept fixed during the counting.
Where does this idea that there is anything fixed to base a counting on originate? As I said before , it comes from our idealizing of experience from which we produce the abstraction of what you called ‘real’ time , which Heidegger calls the vulgar or everyday concept of time, the model of time as an infinite series of now points. Events occur IN time according to this thinking because time is considered as an empty form just as the objects ( or aspects of objects) that it counts are assumed as ideally self-identical.
The concept of quantity is a qualitative idealization, a covering over of the relevant pragmatic meaning and significance of an experience by restricting ourselves to staring at it as an inert self-identical pattern, scheme, entity, object , ‘firstness’ that is measurable and calculable.
Quality by itself has no place in phenomenology. It is differences in and relations between qualities that are key. In fact, the hallmark of this thinking is that qualitative content in itself is of little importance for the understanding of the nature of experiencing and its various levels of constitution. Affect isnt some intention-free surge or energy. It is none other than the moment to moment fluctuations in organizational integrity and coherence of the organism-environment system. Im fact , my favorite writers abandon the tripartite distinction between affect, cognition and action. By rethinking what would be modeled as qualitative inherence ( Pierce’s firstness, Friston’s physiological quantitatively measurable qualities) as intricately relational movement and transformation , phenomenology offers what is at the same time amore immediately mobile and transformative , and more ordered and intricately relational depiction of experience.
I ask you what sits there relatively immobile in your system and you mention automatic subpersonal processes, measurable quantities , fixed habits. You ask me what sits there relatively unchanged in my model and my answer is a absolutely nothing. And let me make clear what I mean by ‘change’. I don’t simply mean the rearrangement of subordinate elements within a superordinate scheme that does not itself change along with its elements. Put differently, in my approach every moment of experienced time , for every person ( and animal ) not only is utterly new in the world , but occurs into a past which , by being paired with what it occurs into , is an utterly new past.
The challenge of understanding the phenomenologies I endorse is seeing how such a radically change and difference oriented thinking allows us to experience stably anticipatable themes in the world , and to do so progressively more effectively.
You might fear that throwing about such terms as quality, affect, change and temporality leads us into the dead-end of the ineffable and subjective, that it opposes the key strength of science, its ability to carve out order and predictability from the apparently inaccessible and inner. But the aim of science and philosophy was never a choice between the qualitative and the quantitative, especially since the quantitative is itself a species of the qualitative. The challenge is to uncover ( or better yet, produce ) the intimacy and order within the process of time and qualitative affective change.
]Quoting apokrisis
I don’t see tychic affect and synecectic habit as ends of a dialectic choice but as both presupposed in each moment of experience , as inseparable aspects of the same event. If I understand it correct, Tychism as Peirce understands is rejected by phenomenology
since what occurs happens into to an implying , a projecting forward. Thus no experience can ever be a complete surprise , but is anticipated and recognized at some level.
Quoting apokrisis
Via what sort of causation is one part of this collection of habits related to other parts? Is a habit experienced as relavant and mattering to me or is it devoid of meaningful
sense?
So note how this places perception as after the fact. The world happens. The brain processes it’s sensory inputs. Some state of sensation leads on to a plan of action. Somehow a selfhood - a coherent running point of view - is imposed on the brain’s data crunching.
But the brain is set up to predict its world. This prediction involves two levels - habits or automaticisms, and then attentional level processes. Habits take about a fifth of a second to emit, and attention takes about half second. One is a quick filter because the brain has a prepared local routine, the other is slow as it requires a global reorientation of the brain’s state.
This matters as it explains the temporal nature of experience and highlights that the priority is habit and thoughtless action.
To return a tennis serve demands well drilled habit that can be primed by anticipation of the future location of the ball and the thoughtless movement of the body and racquet before the ball has got there. If the ball takes a bad bounce, even habit needs about 200ms to make an adjustment. Attention lags 500ms behind as it must reconcile a failure of expectation with a memory of what actually happened, and so set the scene for a new anticipatory state. The brain is already adjusting its odds predictor for the next serve, while also prompting the player to gesture unhappily at the poorly maintained court surface as a public explanation of a failure to connect cleanly.
So this is embodiment. It is all about a coordination of a self and a world. It starts with some general set of habits plus some specific state of anticipation - a mix of learnt reactions and whatever plans and intentions resulted from the last attentional reorientation. Then set up to act, we react as thoughtlessly as possible. If something surprising happens, attention deals with the reorientation. But the key is arriving at some new and updated state of self-world relation. Attention isn’t delivering a passive representation. It is itself the generation of a better state of adaptation, intention and preparedness.
And note further that self and the world are two synchronised halves of this relation. A bouncing ball and a swinging racquet are tied together - as physics and information - by the continuity of an intention. The world is being defined as a place where anything could materially happen. The self is a constraint placed on what should ideally happen. The ego is not there to witness an internal display or appearances or impressions. The self is simply the forging of a constantly updating point of view.
If our collection of habits worked, then attention was unneeded and we don’t have to change, remember or add anything . The collection of habits is held stable. But to the degree we were surprised or the tiniest bit out in our automatic response, then there was something to learn and alter.
By the way, the neural networker who got all this back in the 1960s was Stephen Grossberg - the adaptive resonance theory (ART) guy. He realised that memory based processing had the basic problem of a plasticity-stability dilemma. Either it would be too stable to learn, or too good at updating and so prone to catastrophic forgetting.
For this reason, brains would have to divide the load and dichotomise as I describe. It would have to go in one direction and form an extremely enduring level of stereotyped habits, then go just the far the other way in having the complete flexibility of a roving spotlight of attention which treated every moment as something surprising and new.
Quoting Joshs
So here you have the usual mode of thought where someone is already winding up to reject one pole of a dichotomy by jumping to its other. But the brain itself has to have an architecture that gives voice to both sides of a dichotomy. It needs both the stability of habits and the lability of attention. And it needs different circuits (prefrontal vs striatum) so as to really push both complementary modes of processing.
In the same way, we wind up feeling both extremely in the flow of an embodied self-world relation, and then at times completely detached or disorientated. One kind of self goes with thoughtless habit, the other with a sharp crisis of attentional reorientation. (Was that really the shadow of a burglar at the window? Or am I a silly bugger who imagines things?)
Academia organises itself to find dichotomies and set up opposing camps of thought. But if the dichotomy is a meaningful one, then both views must be right as they form the two bounding extremes of the one complementary relation.
Quoting Joshs
So if I say stable habits, you say plastic experience. We have opposing arguments and that is what is culturally expected of us.
But neurobiology tells us that establishing a critical balance between both is what it is about. In terms of selfhood, the contrast is between the world ignoring selfishness of our set of static habits and our world dominated self that becomes reduced to the role of the constantly startled passive spectator of a parade of imposed percepts.
Both are true of the selves that we are. We couldn’t be plastic without having stability as our backdrop. And we couldn’t have a stable set of habits unless there was an attentional machinery to learn some lesson from every error of prediction - every moment where the self-world dichotomy didn’t flow quite as easily as it could.
Quoting Joshs
Again, here you are winding up to reject the other end of the very dichotomy that you would wish to make your stand on. It is like sitting on the branch you are trying to saw.
Think of a dichotomy in its mathematical guise - a reciprocal relation. We can speak about quality to the degree it ain’t quantity, and vice versa. Quality is 1/quantity, and quantity is 1/quality. They can be a dichotomy - mutually exclusive/jointly exhaustive - because each is the dialectical measure of its “other”.
So you reject a claim of quantification as it plainly means the exact opposite of a quale or ineffable essence. Or whatever kind of Firstness you have in mind.
My reply is if it is indeed exactly opposite, that makes it the other half of the same story. There only is a story as it had two polar extremes to place bookending limits on vague possibility (or actual logical Firstness in the Peircean scheme).
Quoting Joshs
Yes, let’s heap harsh words on the grave of this dead concept. Let’s ignore the dialectical fact that quality can only exist as something definite, and not vague, to the degree it is not what we could mean by quantity. And therefore our concept of quality proves to depend entirely on that of quantity.
The task for neurobiology is to cash out phenomenology as best it can in physicalist terms. And Friston’s neat trick was to quantify a quality like surprise - a central quality for the habit-attention reasons I explained - and use the maths of thermodynamics to construct a testable, measurable, model from that. Surprisal - a feeling - becomes quantified as physical degrees of freedom. And so a sturdy bridge is built between two modes of human discourse,
Quoting Joshs
My approach deals with stability and plasticity as the two poles of the same spectrum. And a good outcome is a system which can go to the extreme in both directions in response to the demands placed upon it.
Quoting Joshs
But memory is already anticipation - a constraint on future action. Every passing psychological moment of time is part forecast, past retrospective account, that together serve to trap the “thing in itself” of the perception in space in between.
Peirce had his own way of talking about this that may be instructive - his triad of antecipuum, percipuum, and ponecipuum. :nerd:
See…..
https://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10289/9037/NZAP%28Dec2014%29.pdf?sequence=6&isAllowed=y
And Legg is a good source on enactivism qua Peirce…
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350088688_Discursive_Habits_Peirce_and_Cognitive_Semiotics
Quoting Joshs
The self is the stable centre that can thus be the launch pad of unlimited instability. The common origin of infinite degrees of freedom. Or at least that is the modern cultural version of the self we intend to construct via philosophical positions like phenomenology.
And it is even true that this romantic fiction is pragmatically effective. It’s been working for Western civilisation since the Greek hoplites beat off the Persian hordes.
I think all of the critical observations you have made concerning the limitations of phenomenology are absolutely valid. That is, they are valid for what ever position you are taking to be what you are calling phenomenology. That is , your model is defined in opposition to ways of looking at the world which it represents an improvement over. If you
closely identify your thinking with Friston’s predictive processing, then we can note that his theory was created for a reason. It corrects for what it perceives to be lacking in previous models of cognition and affectivity, and by implication, in the underlying philosophical foundations. So what preceded predictive processing? Stimulus -response approaches dominated neuroscience for quite a while , and then first generation cognitive science came onto the scene. The main alternative to these empirical perspectives was psychoanalysis. It seems what you are calling phenomenology is entangled in the philosophical presuppositions grounding one or more of these earlier approaches in psychology.
But this leads me to some questions. First, are you are a thoroughgoing advocate of predictive processing models, and if so , which of the researchers contributing to it do you find most compatible with the outlook you have articulated to me? You already critiqued Friston’s embrace of Freud , which I find significant. Are you more or less fully supportive of Lisa Barrett’s work? My reading of her, Friston and even Clark shows them all to support variants of a computational, representational model of brain functioning , and yet you seem to be adamantly opposed to representationalism. Can you send me a link to a predictive processing writer who also rejects representationalism? The only psychologists I am aware of who reject computational representationalism embrace aspects of phenomenology. These include Shaun Gallagher , Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Anthony Chemero.
Here’s Chemero pitting his phenomenologicallly influenced enactivism against his reading of predictive processing:
“…any claim that the sensory-effector system is (must be) any organism's Markov boundary depends on having already defined the knowing self, or agent, as whatever is Markov-bounded by the sensory-effector system. This both makes the argument circular, and introduces a highly problematic notion of the knowing self. It is at least a step in the direction of supposing a homuncular self in the Cartesian theater (Dennett & Kinsbourne 1992), and is weirdly reductive insofar as it supposes the agent to have fewer parts than the organism.
Even so, it may be true that to know the state of a brain it is sufficient to know its initial state, internal dynamics, and the states of its sensory and motor systems (although we note that we are, scientifically, extremely far from this possibility, so assuming its truth is a very
generous stipulation). But assuming the brain to be the appropriate target worth knowing already places the enquiry within the traditional neo-Kantian cognitivist frame. In contrast, from the EEE perspective—at least one strain of which is influenced by the phenomenological critique of Kant (Kaufer & Chemero 2015)—it might be equally worth knowing about the state of one’s hand, the Markov boundary for which almost certainly includes items outside of the body. It also might be worth knowing the state of the tool one is wielding, which is physically external, but in at least some cases epistemically internal (i.e. phenomenally transparent) to the agent.
If one believes that it is the structure of the body and the readiness to deploy skills that condition the possibility of experience (perhaps along with or perhaps instead of mental structures like concepts and schema) then it is far from clear that the brain is the right focus for understanding cognition. And if this is true, the notion that perception is skull-bound and inferential, and knowledge stops at the sensory veil, can’t get any traction at all, even accepting the Markov-boundedness of all cognitively relevant elements.”
“We absolutely accept that Markov models and Bayesian inference are hugely important and successful tools in the study of mind, brain and behavior. But we find the philosophical inferences about the nature of the systems to which these models have been applied to be deeply problematic. Admittedly, it can be hard to resist mapping entities in one’s model of a system to elements in the system itself, but prudence dictates special care when doing so, and we believe that insufficient caution has been exercised by many proponents of predictive processing.
By way of closing, we also wish to urge something further on the field in general, and on Clark in particular. Hohwy (2017) wonders aloud if the EEE tactic to avoid skepticism may also cost us the very conceptions of belief, knowledge, and justification that lie at the center of a good deal of philosophy of mind. We hereby confess that it probably does. This is a development we embrace. For us, agency is about disposition and action, and not about belief.In this we follow the traditions of American Pragmatism and Continental Phenomenology in their critiques of a belief-oriented, representation-centric, model-building mind, in favor of an action-oriented, affordance-centric, world-navigating mind. The first step on this path is the recognition that organisms have access to ecological information. Take that step, and a whole world opens to you.”
(The world well gained: On the epistemic implications of ecological information ,Michael Anderson and Anthony Chemero)
You read Thompson’s enthusiastic embrace of Husserl. Given your critique of what you are understanding to be phenomenology, you must have a similar critic to level against Thomson’s and Chemero’s enactivism . Could you give me specific examples of how their models fall short of the predictive processing models you endorse?
My comments reflect who I found to be making sense when I was sorting this out for myself in the l990s. It just happens that reaction time research in sports psychology, Libet’s findings, or 1950s Soviet orientation response work, was far more informative about the neurobiological architecture of consciousness than anything much in philosophy at all.
Whenever I happen to encounter anything labelled phenomenology, it seems a mixture of the obvious and the not terribly relevant. By contrast, Peirce and biosemiosis cut through to the heart of the central causal issue in life and mind science - how to escape dualism via the irreducible triad of semiotics, or the modelling relation.
Quoting Joshs
I was horrified that Freud should be given any oxygen. But from what I remember, there was nothing particular to disagree with.
Quoting Joshs
Another example of reinventing the wheel. What was obvious to social constructionists eventually became obvious to neuroscientists.
As I said, in terms of “predictive coding0, Stephen Grossberg stood out as a neglected genius. Folk like Rao and Ballard were on the money. Friston was promoting Hinton and his Helmholtz machines, but I found them rather trivial in the sense they were efficient tech with little biological realism.
So on the whole, I felt that enactivism and predictive coding were old hat by the time they became “paradigm shifts”. Same with constructed emotions.
Quoting Joshs
The rejection of representationalism and the primacy of anticipation-based processing were obvious from many other lines of evidence. So my interest was in who could cash things out in formal models.
Quoting Joshs
Well I agree with this general statement but struggle to understand why Markov boundaries and Bayesian brains are somehow the enemy of such an overview.
But then all this stuff is what I was looking into 25 or 30 years ago. My present focus is on the nanoscale of biology where semiosis itself begins. Neurosemiosis is just one level of the larger biosemiotic story.
Quoting Joshs
I was going to do a proper catch up on current mind science later this year. At the moment, I’m focused on life science - the big discoveries there over the past decade. So it is interesting to be reminded of these debates, but I have to be selective about where folk might actually be discussing something new.
So you need three to tango, eh? So as a meta-meta explanation, why does this logic cohere by necessity? Then of course, what brought about this necessity? A roundabout way of saying, why something than nothing? If it starts with some monism-to-triadism, it's a kind of scientistic-neo-platonism.. descending from the unrefined, to the myriad examples of triadic structures.
A man, a woman and a song. Can there be a tango with less? Does a tango need more? Can you count to three?
And the other parts about the origin of the triadic necessity?
A relation is irreducibly triadic. Two things must be separated, and they need the third thing of their connection.