Referring to the unknown.
Kants thing in itself, direct notions of eternity, nothingness, etc, at first thought, seem to represent thing which are unknowable. They purport to represent things outside of human cognition. But, surely, all there is is human cognition? In such an instance, there is no unknowable, in the way it is commonly assumed, instead, the unknowable is always knowable.
For example, knowing that it sounds silly, someone asks, so you know the thing in itself then? And I'd say, what are you referring to, in your mind, when you mention the thing in itself?
Surely if you can think it, I can know it?
Is this just an instance of taking reason on its own too far?
For example, knowing that it sounds silly, someone asks, so you know the thing in itself then? And I'd say, what are you referring to, in your mind, when you mention the thing in itself?
Surely if you can think it, I can know it?
Is this just an instance of taking reason on its own too far?
Comments (197)
Whenever ( :chin: ) I encounter these words and others of its ilk (so-called unknownables) my mind actually draws a blank. Thanks for the update (I see myslef as a computer, in need of broadband and the latest "updates". I hope you don't hold that against me. It's not a choice.)
Anyway, an analogy seems to be the first port of call :point: Tesseract. Just like 4D objects (inconceivable so they say) cast 3D shadows, these shadows being more mind-friendly, unknowables too should/could have shadows that our minds can, in a sense, grasp.
My two bitcoins!
As for the second part of your answer, that seems to be similar to Kants idea that the 'thing in itself', that which lies beyond appearances, is recognised indirectly through appearances.
Should I just be satisfied with the unknown being these blanks, and leave it at that?
It's a good point. The only problem is that we can't say that all there is is human cognition. What does it even mean to say that all there is is human cognition?
There are some ideas that represent things outside of human cognition, but then there are ideas that don't represent anything, or are products of human imagination as opposed to some other natural process independent of humans. These things we can be said to know, as we are the creators of such things. However can we say that we know the Earth, Sun and Moon in the same way that we know Paris is the Capitol of France?
I know that Scientific realism is the common sensical position, and I have a lot of time for it.
I guess I'm considering a view of idealism and realism at the same time. For example, I say that physical nature exists independantly of human cognition, which is a realist statement, but then I realise that such a statement, that nature exists independantly of human cognition, is borne of human cognition, and wouldn't be possible without it. Then I get stuck in a double bind.
Ask yourself what reasons there are to wonder whether nature exists, given the fact that you interact with it every minute of your life. Ask yourself what reasons there are to believe that you are somehow separate from nature given the fact you interact with it every minute of your life. Then ask yourself whether those reasons provide a basis on which you should doubt what you clearly don't doubt if your conduct in your day to day life is any indication.
Well, if you're going to put your money where your mouth is, I suggest that you contemplate on, mentally engage with, contradictions which in my humble opinion is the unknowable of unknowables (did I say that right? I dunno!). Look around you, go for a walk in the woods, go eat out in a deli with your friends, walk up to your arch enemy and see how fae reacts, eat a burger, take a swim, go AWOL, and so on - can you or did you already see, the shadow of dialethia?
Yesterday, @Janus had a little back and forth in the "I've got an idea..." ("citizen philosophy")" discussion. I claimed that Kant's noumena are similar to Lao Tzu's Tao. I didn't make a very good case and we didn't take the discussion far, but I still believe my comparison makes sense. The primary document describing Lao Tzu's vision of the Tao is the "Tao Te Ching." It starts with the following:
[i]The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.
The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.[/i]
That's from Verse 1 of Stephen Mitchell's translation. Here are some definitions of the Tao from various sources, keeping in mind that the Tao that can be defined is not the eternal Tao.
Quoting Aidan buk
This is the heart of the question that Lao Tzu, and I think Kant, are getting at. How can you know something that can't be put into words? As the verse says, the unnamable, the Tao, is reality. The world we deal with conceptually consists of particular things - cars, apples, electrons, galaxies - which manifest from the Tao by being named. Some translators call these particular things "the ten thousand things," which I love. Putting things into language is what brings our world into existence. This is my particular interpretation, with which many disagree.
I'm certain that there are many people here on the forum who can find fault with my comparison of the Tao with noumena. I'm not claiming there is an exact correspondence, but it is clear to me that at heart the two men were talking about the same experience - knowing what can't be put into words. The unspeakable.
Then I'm a bit confused. You wrote:
Quoting Aidan buk
Which is a restatement, in a sense, of the first verse of the Tao Te Ching. You seem to have a grasp of what it means to refer to the unreferable. The important thing is that it can't be put into words. There are ways of experiencing the world directly without words and ideas as intermediaries. It's something I experience all the time and I assume you have too.
Welcome to phenomenology.
Husserl writes:
“Certainly the world that is in being for me, the world about which I have always had ideas and spoken about meaningfully, has meaning and is accepted as valid by me because of my own apperceptive performances because of these experiences that run their course and are combined precisely in those performances—as well as other functions of consciousness, such as thinking.
But is it not a piece of foolishness to suppose that world has being because of some performance of mine? Clearly, I must make my formulation more precise. In my Ego there is formed, from out of the proper sources of transcendental passivity and activity, my “representation of the world, ” my “picture of the world, ” whereas outside of me, naturally enough, there is the world itself. But is this really a good way of putting it? Does this talk about outer and inner, if it makes any sense at all, receive its meaning from anywhere else than from my formation and my preservation of meaning? Should I forget that the totality of everything that I can ever think of as in being resides within what is for me real or possible.”?
Dan Zahavi:
“ For Husserl, physical nature makes itself known in what appears perceptually. The very idea of defining the really real reality as the unknown cause of our experience, and to suggest that the investigated object is a mere sign of a distinct hidden object whose real nature must remain unknown and which can never be apprehended according to its own determinations, is for Husserl nothing but a piece of mythologizing (Husserl 1982: 122). Rather than defining objective reality as what is there in itself, rather than distinguishing how things are for us from how they are simpliciter in order then to insist that the investigation of the latter is the truly important one, Husserl urges us to face up to the fact that our access to as well as the very nature of objectivity necessarily involves both subjectivity and
intersubjectivity.”
Again, the best analogue is Antigonish...
"Being in itself" is the philosopher's "little man who wasn't there".
Kant invented this nonsense. Husserl and friends elevated it to an academic career.
Could you give me an example of ‘being in itself’ for Heidegger or Husserl? What do you suppose they had in
in mind?
Andy Clark on phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty:
“Merleau-Ponty stressed the importance of what I have called "continuous reciprocal causation "- viz., the idea that we must go beyond the passive image of the organism perceiving the world and recognize the way our actions may be continuously responsive to worldly events which are at the same time being continuously responsive to our actions. Consider a lovely example, which I think of as "the hamster and tongs" :
“When my hand follows each effort of a struggling animal while holding an instrument for capturing it, it is clear that each of my movements responds to an external stimulation ; but it is also clear that these stimulations could not be received without the movements by which I expose my receptors to their influence . . . . The properties of the object and the intentions of the subject are not only intermingled ; they also constitute a new whole .” (Merleau -Ponty)
Or should that be:
...so...?
There's your problem.
There's this thread, for example. While it might arguably be the product of human cognition, it isn't the very same as human cognition. For one thing, if it were we could then ask which human... and would we answer "Aidan buk"? but there were contributions by , , , , , , and I.
So there are other things besides your own cognition.
And there is the screen on which you read this. That's something quite different to what it writ here, apparently. And the thing on which you sit or stand; There's that, too. From there the list of things grows.
The odd thing about cognition is that it is sometimes about something else.
Hence there is something else.
Oh.
What's odd is that you seem to think that this helps. I don't see how.
I've found that a better question is to ask how the thing in itself is different from the thing.
I don’t know that words trap to any greater extent than thoughts do. It’s the construing that constrains ( as well as enables) , whether that is verbal or pre-verbal.
All is half truths except for this sentence?
My fault for trying to respond to a critique without an argument behind it.
Including this sentence, because this sentence is also a product of subject-object interaction. Except rather than half truth I would say contingently constructed sense.
That's because you like to obfuscate.
It's the principle of explosion at work. Start with a nonsense like "the thing in itself" and everything follows. That struggling animal moves in response to every reply.
Didn't you say much the same thing as I did here? I understood what I said...
I think we know many things which cannot be put into words or at least definitively explained in words. Much of what we know is pre-cognitive, but I don't think that is the same as the different things the Daoists and Kant, in their different ways, were trying to get at.
From the relatively little I know (compared to the specialist) of Daoist ideas I have formed the impression that they are positing, by hinting at, a universal movement of life and energy that flows as an undercurrent to our common life as it is conceived, in all of us. This universal dance of life will be intuited directly by those who are able to work effectively on their dispositions such as to quiet the dualistic mind that blinds us to its mistaken views.
I think Kant was concerned with the logical, epistemological requirement that there must be noumenal things which appear to us and which we conceive of as phenomenal things, but the 'real' nature of which cannot be known, since all knowing is only of appearances. Kant, to my knowledge, denies the Spinozistic idea of rational intuition, which for Spinoza (and the Daoists) is the source of ideas of the eternal and the universal. Kant says we have only practical reasons, moral reasons, for believing in God, immortality and human freedom, and I think he allows of no faculty of insight beyond that
Perhaps our resident Kant specialist @Mww might weigh in on this question.
I wouldn't go as far as to say that our naming of things brings our world of things into existence, and I don't think Kant would either. I think our world of things is already precognitively implicit insofar as we are affected by the body and its environment. Surely animals without language are inhabiting their bodies and environments without requiring language. I think language makes things determinate for us in highly abstract ways. I think that is the difference.
Yes, but saying one knows them is also wrong. They just are the case; explanation stops here.
That doesn't sound right to me. To say something is the case evokes the very propositional character of knowing whose limitations are in question. We cannot, as defined, say what the things we know which cannot be pout into words are, but we can say there are such things, and we can gets hints of and hint at this. Our bodies know many things our minds cannot tell of. Animals also, in their different ways, know many things. It is the arts and poetry in particular that can deal with this kind of knowing I would say
Yes!
So say something useful instead. After all, the meaning of an utterance is its use in a game.
Maybe I said the same thing, but what phenomenologically informed cognitive science wants to emphasize, in contra distinction to computational, representational models of cognition, is that there is no generic outside. What I experience as my outside ( the keyboard , chair , room, etc) is what is pragmatically useful to me relative to my goals as a functionally integral cognitive system. I’m not just talking about how I use objects but their very sense. Similarly, each organism is shaped by an environment unique to its mode of functioning.
In other words, my outside is constrained, shaped and co-produced by the anticipative directionality of my cogntive system.
If this is what you meant then we are in agreement.
It's an odd word. It might have been clearer if we had different words for knowing that and knowing how. If it can't be put into words, then we can't know that it is the case. And in that way we don't know anything that can't be put into words. Despite all that, we also know how to get on with doing stuff... here, let me show you...
Hence the Rule's end.
Why decided to experience it as outside? Why put in place the subject-object?
That's what is here: Quoting Joshs
It's not that you are wrong to do so, but that it's not the only way to see things.
What ?
Not sure I follow. The subject doesn’t decide to experience an object as outside. The outside imposes itself on the subject. The ‘subject’ here isn’t an entity but merely a pole of an interaction.
I think you're talking about just the insight that Lao Tzu, and I think Kant, were describing. And they're not the only ones. Many philosophies have a place for the unmediated direct experience of unspeakable reality. Words are used to shape those experiences into bite-sized, easily digestible pieces that will stack evenly on the shelves.
Certainly we cannot know that anything that cannot be put into words is the case. We know how to do many things the way of knowing of which cannot be put into words. So, I agree there is knowing that and knowing how, but I also think there is what I would call knowing with, the knowing of familiarity; an example being the biblical sense of knowing as expressed in "a man shall know his wife, and they shall become as one flesh".
Picture yourself in what nowadays is called a "flow" state; when you play so smoothly that there is no distinction between you and the guitar; when you cruise the corner perfectly, no distance between you and your chosen ride; when you look up to find that you've been coding for hours but it seems a few minutes.
Think we need to simmer things down.
Are there "pre-cognitive" things that can't be put into words that are different from what Lao Tzu and Kant are talking about? I don't think so, but I'm not sure of that at all. I'll think about it. And it's not that they can't be put into words, it's that when you do, they become something different. That difference between the Tao and the 10,000 things is at the heart of our experience of the world.
Quoting Janus
There are more than a hundred translations of the "Tao Te Ching" along with dozens of commentaries written 2,500 years ago and last week. Each one of these has a different understanding of that Lao Tzu was trying to say. I've been in several reading groups and no one could ever agree. [irony]It is only through long study and meditation that I have finally reached an understanding which is clearly and unequivocally what Lao Tzu always intended.[/irony] So, no. That's not how I see it.
Quoting Janus
I don't know what "rational intuition" means, but it doesn't sound like anything I'd ever use to characterize the Tao as described in the Tao Te Ching. I don't know if Kant would have recognized Lao Tzu's ideas as similar to his. Probably not. I believe he was working about a century before eastern philosophical texts started to be available in Europe.
Quoting Janus
I'm certain you're right about Kant. Lao Tzu writes (Mitchell Verse 40):
[i]All things are born of being.
Being is born of non-being.[/i]
Non-being generally refers to the Tao and being to the 10,000 things. I think this way of talking about reality makes sense, although I acknowledge it calls for a change in how we think about "being" and "existence."
I agree with this. It doesn't make sense to say I know or understand something if I can't put it into words.
I agree with this.
In a flow experience , am I melding with the object or is the object melding with me, or is it not necessary to choose one or the other option? I think in order to have this experience of timeless immersion there must be a unity of similarity linking one moment of the flow to the next. This requires that each new event have a sense of belonging to the previous as variations of an unfolding theme. What occurs fulfills my anticipating into it. The flow isn’t interrupted by the unexpected and this is what makes it appear timeless. The anticipative aspect is what drives this experience and keeps it unified , and this is the subjective contribution.
This!
Yeah, because it would seem that a loss of distinction between subject and object would be a loss of cognition.
It's also called "in the zone" It's a football allusion
But feeling is already an expressing , and as such it IS a kind of talking.
How so?
All is half truths except for this sentence?[/quote]
Quoting frank
How we conceive self and other is crucial metaphysically. @apokrisis is fond of evoking Howard Pattee's "epistemic cut". Pattee would say a cut ( a separation ) is necessary to separate the knower from the known, and thus maintain a subject object distinction. The counter argument is that a subject / object boundary has not been identified and so the cut is applied arbitrarily. Pattee acknowledges that the cut's location is arbitrary.
So the question becomes, what is the boundary of a subject ( self )?
In my understanding a self is a self organizing system identical to the body of knowledge (derived from information) that creates it, and this body of knowledge extends to a universe of some conception. So a boundary of self is related to the information a self possesses, which extends to the edge of a universe. This would mean that the object ( other ) is also contained within the boundary of self . The other thus becoming an object relative to self, within self, thus no separation possible. The other is understood entirely by a body of knowledge possessed by a self, so no separation is possible. No mind independent other can exist, so a self cannot be separated from other.
This conception of self has a central density of information then extends outward, similar to a hurricane, to wherever and whatever it has information of.
How would you conceive a self, and thus a boundary of "subject"?
You're changing the meaning of the word "talking." Talking uses words. This from the web:
Talk - speak in order to give information or express ideas or feelings; converse or communicate by spoken words.
The word I use is "experience." I have many experiences that do not involve words. It's probably true that most of my experiences don't involve words. I think that's true of most people. Let me think about that.
Quoting T Clark
I left something important out. I know that what I call experience, wordless awareness, is different from knowing or understanding using language. It feels different in a profound way. It uses different parts of me. If you don't feel that same difference, then there's probably not much further we can go with this discussion.
That doesn't mean you're wrong. It just means you experience the world differently than I do.
The problem is in the claim to know as that already presumes cognition has the aim of accurately representing the outside world. All the epistemic quandaries arise because somehow whatever the mind is doing must be a faithful simulation of the reality beyond it, or else cognition is a kind of fiction - an untruth, a failure to correspond, a faulty description or mistaken belief.
But a pragmatic or embodied approach to cognition argues that the mind is a semiotic and action-oriented model of reality. We navigate the world via a self-made realm of signs - an umwelt. We don’t even want to know the thing in itself. We merely want to have some kind of map by which we can coordinate our behaviour and achieve a stable sense of being.
So the problem of knowledge is not about whether the mind knows the world as it objectively is - whatever that could mean. The goal is to operate with a model of the world in a way that seems to work - the chief product being the sense of being a self in a world where our purposes are served, our being is stable, and our uncertainties are minimised.
So we know from psychology that the redness of an apple is a subjective phenomenon. Physics has no colours. And a representationalist approach to cognition or knowledge could make that seem an epistemic crisis.
However being able to read surface reflectance as if it were a set of different hues is a way to make the hidden shapes of things pop out in noisy natural environments. The brain freely invents the experience. And yet the invention is more than useful. We can be super certain that the red apple and the green leaves are separate parts of the same tree even if the reflected wavelengths are almost indistinguishably similar from an energetic point of view.
Quoting Pop
The epistemic cut approach works better as it doesn’t try to reduce the world to the model anymore than it reduces the model to the world.
The world is the physical realm and so is the entropy rather than the information. A system of sign then connects this physics to workings of an informational model. The advantage here is that we have both the necessary separation - the one that produces a self - and yet also the bridge of a particular interaction. When a mind and world are in a meaningful interaction, the entropy (as information uncertainty) of the one decreases while the entropy of the other (as overall physical disorder) increases.
There is no flow of information or entropy from one side to the other - with all the philosophical confusion that one-sidedness creates. Instead, there is an interaction between a self and the world, an organism and an environment, where each has a specific reciprocal effect. The order in one is increased to the degree the order in the other is dissipated.
Quoting Pop
So the cut has been identified. Life and mind are divided from what they model by this contrast between the growth of stability, memory and habit on one side of the equation, and the increase in entropy production on the other.
This semiotic cut allows the boundaries of the self to be flexible - but not arbitrary - across all levels of life and mind. An immune cell works to protect what it identifies as part of the body’s self and dissolve what is deemed to be other.
Then I could carefully protect my favourite coffee cup - treating it as an extension of my self - or carelessly dispose of a beer bottle by smashing it against the nearest wall because I generally regard it and my environment as non-self - a realm of waste, an entropic heat sink.
First......thanks for the vote of confidence. Second.....what’s the question? Perusing the posted comments, I come up with this:
Quoting T Clark
But then, this is two different questions. The first makes no sense, in that it is impossible for anyone to know of that which I merely think, which makes explicit I have made no objective expression of it. The answer to that question, then, is, no, you cannot.
From that, the second question elaborates by installing the common method of an objective expression, re: “put into words”, but at the same time, while reconciling the impossibility, fails to imply a communication, which is the sole raison d’etre for any objective expression. The answer to the second question then becomes....to know a thing it is necessary to conceive it, and to conceive a thing it is necessary to represent it, but the mere representation of a thing makes the naming of it only possible and not necessary.
Even taking into consideration what was really meant by the first question was, if you can tell me about what you think, I can know it, this is still not true, for I must first understand what you say before I can know what you mean by the words you use to express your thoughts.
By the same token, taking into consideration the second question really meant to ask.....how can I know you know something that can’t be put into words (or some kind of expression)....then it is the case I cannot. It remains however, I can learn things, on my own account, without ever using a word.
It behooves the modern philosopher to remember the human community requires language, but the human individual does not.
So.....let’s straighten out this switch-back laden mess, shall we?
Quoting Aidan buk
From the get-go.....this is wrong, from dedicated, strictly Kantian epistemological metaphysics, insofar as if a thing is represented, it is already cognized. Cognition is varied and distinctly sourced, but basically, if a conception is possible, a cognition follows. From this, the conceptions listed in the OP as “unknowable” are still cognitions, otherwise there is no means for the explanation of their representation in objective expression. The assertion would be truthful if stated as, “they purport to represent things outside of human knowledge”. And of course, “truthful” herein must be taken only as the logical conclusion derived from the speculative methodology employed to prove it.
Quoting Aidan buk
This is also wrong, insofar as human cognition is absolutely necessary, but is in itself, insufficient. There is always an object of cognition, which makes explicit a vast manifold of possibilities that are not themselves cognitions. Cognition is pervasive, constant, all-encompassing, but is still not “all there is”. Cognition is always the rational means, but never only the ends. That being experience, or ignorance.
Quoting Aidan buk
Having determined cognition is not all there is, if follows that the unknowable is still possible, as an end for which there is no object to cognize, or, the object that is cognized is in contradiction to some other cognition.
Which leads inevitably to the idea of knowledge itself. Knowledge as “it is commonly assumed”, is a posteriori and is called experience, in which the object cognized is a real thing in the world, and that thing has an apodeitically determinable relation to the subject that thinks about it. The other knowledge, just as common but unassuming and altogether a priori, having nothing whatsoever to do with experience, insofar as the object cognized is an impossible real object in the world hence can never be an experience. These are the objects of thought, conceptions the validity of which we know of but the reality of which we know not that.
In a very limited sense, therefore, it is true the unknowable is always knowable, but it is a different knowledge, under very different conditions, with altogether different ends, which makes explicit these must always be mutually independent. Simpler to say knowledge of is private only, knowledge that is both private and subsequently possibly public. And these are themselves merely the words substituted to placate those who find value in nitpicking in the subjective/objective dualism, which is, of course, exactly what they represent.
Simply put, I suppose, one can say he knows, e.g., transcendental objects are thinkable, but he knows he can never experience such a thing. In this way, one might be permitted to say he knows the unknowable. He doesn’t; he’s only misplaced subject/predicate in two propositions, arriving at differences he doesn’t recognize.
————-
Quoting Janus
“....If the question regarded an object of sense merely, it would be impossible for me to confound the conception with the existence of a thing. For the conception merely enables me to cogitate an object as according with the general conditions of experience; while the existence of the object permits me to cogitate it as contained in the sphere of actual experience....”
....and that should be sufficient to validate for your thinking.
—————-
Quoting Janus
Couldn’t be otherwise, could it, really? Yours goes to show the temporality of the human cognitive system, often ignored.
“....For, otherwise, we should require to affirm the existence of an appearance, without something that appears—which would be absurd....”
——————
Quoting Janus
I might offer that reason makes things determinate; language makes determined things mutually understood.
Again.....thanks for the invite. I’ll show myself out. I mean....really. Where’s the good cognac, anyway?
It's like the boundary between a mountain and a valley. We think of a mountain as an independent thing, not noticing how the concept is bound to it's negation. If there were no valleys, there would be no mountains and vice versa. We're bound to divide things up like that for the sake of explanations and narratives.
But if the concept of self is dependent on the concept of the external; it implies some independent thing, like a higher truth
I think it is the consciousness and thought which is able to tell the subject and object, the internal and external, known, unknown, the objects and limitation of reason, and the objects of intuition and faith.
calculation, cognition, conceptualization and perception.
I believe in collapsing the distinction between feeling,intention, perception and action. Thus, to feel is to construe, which expresses.
Is it anything like this?:
“Our usual way of thinking divides experience into discrete entities: thoughts, feelings, memories, desires, body sensations, and so on....These experiences are cut apart from each other. If you were now to say to yourself, "How do I physically sense this situation as a whole?", even the question is confusing. It involves an unusual way of sensing. We are used to letting "physical" and "body" refer to just sensations. Can we physically feel a situation? We usually think of "situation" as outside, and we split that off from our inside.”
“ A characteristic of this felt sense is that it is experienced as an intricate whole. One can sense that it includes many intricacies and strands. It is not uniform like a piece of iron or butter. Rather it is a whole complexity, a multiplicity implicit in a single sense.”
“Thus intellectual meanings are in their very nature aspects of subjective feelings. Any moment's subjective feeling implicitly contains many possible meanings which could be differentiated and symbolized. Everything we learn, think or read enriches the implicit meanings contained in subjective felt referent. For example, after reading a theoretical paper, my "feeling" about it will implicitly contain many intellectual perceptions and meanings which I have, because I have spent years of reading and thinking. When I write a commentary on the paper I symbolize explicitly the meanings which were implicit in my "feelings" after I read the paper.
Clearly, such "feelings" contain not only emotions, but attitudes, past experiences, and complex intellectual differentiations. Thus the "feeling" which guides the adjusted person implicitly contains all the intellectual meanings of all his experience. As his "feeling" functions, it is a modified interaction of these implicit meanings. When an individual is said to "act on his feelings," this complex total functions as the basis of action. It includes implicit intellectual meanings; it is not mere emotion.”(Gendlin, E.T. (1959).
I can also talk to myself , as if I were speaking to someone else, neo sued in fact I am
speaking to someone else. I can also think ‘pre-verbally’, using the felt as a of a situation. But to me words are merely more richly articulated versions of a felt sense.
The felt sense is a vague , impressionistic sketch of what the word crystalizes. What the verbal and the pre-verbal , the merely ‘felt’ and the conceptualization have in common is that they are both ways of construing new events.
The subject-object boundary is none other than the finite, discreet nature of time. Time is nothing outside of the experience of time , and the experience of time is that of my immediate past ( and by implication all of my prior history linked to it ) being changed by implying into a new event which occurs into that implying. The now is always a differential. It is what occurs to me by changing me.
I don't understand the distinction you are making between the representation and the naming. How is it represented if not in words?
Quoting Mww
No. That's not what I "really meant to ask." I think my question is clear. Also, what did you have in mind when you wrote "some kind of expression."
I read it a couple of times and still don't really understand what he's getting at. There is this:
Quoting Joshs
Which I disagree with. It's like he's trying to define the problem away. What does it mean to say that a "feeling implicitly contains many possible meanings." I think he has it backwards.
I think it's the other way around. Words are chopped up and stacked representations of something much richer.
Quoting Joshs
The crystallization you refer to is achieved by throwing away much of the information included in the original experience.
The distinction resides in the point-of-use of a speculative human cognitive system on the one hand, and the talking about the conditions under which that point-of-use system operates, on the other.
—————
Quoting T Clark
Ok, fine. I’ve been wrong before.
—————
Quoting T Clark
Intentional communication.
Stop thinking of it in dualistic terms and think of it monistically, or else you're left with explaining how physical things interact with ideas.
What does it mean for something to exist independently of human cognition, or human congnition exist independently from physical nature? Are they not causally related? I think you are confusing the map with the territory.
Yes. I agree. I would use different words. I would say in a moment of consciousness all the information in ones possession converges to a point. All of ones historical information ( biological and social ), bodily sensation, and environmental information is integrated to a point. And this point will be slightly different in successive moments of consciousness, and awareness of this difference creates the “change” that we experience as time.
I don't understand. Can you give me an example.
Quoting Mww
Again, an example would be helpful.
That's a really accurate way of putting it, cheers!
Quoting Joshs
I don't see any progress in explaining this.
Quoting Banno
:clap: :lol: :100:
Isnt this what we are told words are supposed to do, give us only this generic dictionary meaning? But is this really how each of us experience the meaning of a word? Do two people ever experience the meaning of a word in the same way? Does one person ever experience the meaning of the same word in the same way twice? If you read any of of the same words I just wrote twice do they connote the same exact sense each time? So what exactly is it that a word locks in? I know we say that this is supposed to be what words do, but what does a word, used this instant, in this context, lock in that a feeling, felt in this instant in this context, doesn’t?
I say that a ‘feeling’ is a particular change being made in the way we relate to a situation, just as a word is. What give a feeling the richness a word doesn’t have? Is it some intrinsic , immediate mystery? Or is it a discrete relational difference , a change made in my comportment toward the world?
Aside from the difference between a feeling and a word, what’s the difference between a feeling and an intention or a perception?
In Yogic logic, one of the practices is to turn thought off completely. Such a mental state is surprisingly innately pleasant, for me at least. Walking along a beach, or through a forest, just absorbing it thoughtlessly and nonjudgmentally has this affect of connecting me with the surroundings that is lost once thought returns.
Quoting apokrisis
Ha, ha. But a subject object assumption has huge consequences for understanding.
Mostly I like your thinking, but I sense you share with Pattee, a dualistic bias. Of course this is your prerogative, but the epistemic cut has Cartesian origins, so does not make much sense to me.
Would Pattee say a Ribosome makes an epistemic cut in regard to an RNA? Would he, like Descartes, make an epistemic cut when the object is his body? What about in a state of introspection?
My introduction to systems thinking is fairly recent. I have found info dynamics to be far more instructive then thermodynamics. Information is the co-element of any substance. If a substance beyond energy ( electromagnetism ) is ever discovered, we will know of it from the information we have of it.
As Pattee says himself:
"As a matter of practice, symbolic expressions do not appear to take place by physical necessity,
nor do physical laws appear to restrict symbol sequences (e.g. Hoffmeyer and Emmeche, 1991).
Because of this, some mathematicians and physicists believe in the reality of true Platonic
symbol systems independent of physical laws. Nevertheless, it is the case that no symbol vehicle
or symbolic operation can evade physical laws. This means that in spite of the apparent
autonomy of biological information, physical laws impose several conditions on the material
embodiment of the different forms of information."
Published in Biological Theory, Summer 2006, Vol. 1, No. 3: 224–226.
The Physics of Autonomous Biological Information
And this Zeilinger paper: Quantum Information and Randomness Johannes Kofler and Anton Zeilinger
Quoting apokrisis
I would agree that there is an interrelational evolution. The entropy in the past was well dissipated, but this is changing now as we head toward hot house earth. Possibly we are already seeing the effects. The increase in entropy will require a corresponding increase in order, If we are to survive. The dissipation bottleneck will effect everything, without exception. I wonder what obscure insights you might have, apart from the obvious?
Quoting apokrisis
I think future generations are going to be paying for this sort of thinking. They will look back and blame this sort of thinking for the trashing of the earth. This sort of thinking arises from dualism, of course I am as guilty as anybody else, but I would dearly like to promote a different way of thinking. One where mother earth is respected, as a consequence of the way people think about themselves as being at one
with the earth and each other ( monism ) ( panpsychism ).
:up: I like that explanation.
I think I understand what you mean - in a sense you are saying there is no mind independent object, and all this thinking about it never leaves mind. I agree, and believe idealism would agree with you.
Sorry if I'm butting in, but I'd like to give it a shot, as I understand it.
Representations are what we have of the world, the way whatever sense-data/information interacts with our senses and cognitive faculties that leads us to postulate objects in the world.
So say you peek out your window and you see something (assume it's a tree) . This thing you see is usually called a "tree", but your experience of the object is nowhere near exhausted by merely naming it. There's the different colours, the smells, the type of wood, the shade it offers, etc. ; you can see the front side now, but not the opposite side, you imagine it has one.
In short, naming something is a very brief and concise way of expressing something which is much richer in experience than a single word could convey. It's the difference between all the ways you could think about trees and how you interact with them as opposed to merely naming them.
But I'm confident @Mww will give you a better example. :)
Hah. I used to question Pattee about this dualistic framing. I was was with others like Salthe who stressed a triadic systems approach. But then Pattee became a born again Peircean like the rest of us.
So Pattee was never a substance dualist, and always in the modelling relations camp (given his close connection to Rosen). That ain’t dualism as usually understood. Which is why Pattee had no trouble becoming the leading biosemiotician.
Quoting Pop
This is exactly the issue I’ve been working on. The cut seems pretty sharp when you are talking about the coded information vs the material product, but in fact we do then have the further issue of precisely how the two sides interact. In some sense, the informational side of life and mind becomes a machinery - a set of switches. While the material side has to become matchingly “switchable”. And it is only over the past decade that biology has been able to see life operating at the nanoscale and understand what all that means in practice.
So yes, too much talk about a cut may draw attention away from the fact that what gets separated also then must interact. Yet the fact of that interaction was always understood, and now it can be observed in the structural biology of the nanoscale.
This is true. But codes also evolve towards idealised abstractness. After genes have come the three further levels of semiosis in neurons, words and numbers. Each operates at a further remove from the constraining hand of physics, and so each digs even more deeply into the possibilities of a coded control over physical dissipation.
Simple life became complex life, then human society, and now human techno-existence. The semiosis and its ability to entropify keep stepping up levels.
Quoting Pop
Chiefly that there is no hope of halting the runaway train. The thermodynamic imperative to entropify fossil fuel is so strong that it has formed its own “mind” now. Human society embodies the urge to keep accelerating the energy burning and waste production.
So in terms of semiotics and dissipative structure theory, a political resistance to change is no surprise. If there is an entropy gradient and the intelligence to dissipate it, then the system will keep adapting its order to do just that.
Quoting Pop
Earth has seen these catastrophes before. When Cyanobacteria invented the free lunch of photosynthesis, they poisoned the world with oxygen. Near total extinction followed. But then life managed to add oxygen-based respiration to its redox toolkit and a clever balance was restored. One half of life produced O2 as waste, the other produced CO2. And so life got a Gaian grip on the planet’s climate by building in a cybernetic balance of the two critical gases.
So we know that success looks like. As Hans Morowitz pointed out, life as dissipative structure must be open for entropy and closed for materiality. It has to be based on a complete recycling of its own waste, just in the way a rainforest makes its own soil and even rain.
The human system is all about the entropy and does near zero recycling. Why would we expect it to last much longer in any form? Why would it deserve to with such a disregard of basic design principles?
Will big tech save us? I give you as prime examples the marvels of unrepairable Apple phones, the entropic idiocy of bitcoins, and the big oil sponsored ruse of “green hydrogen. :grin:
It's so disappointing isn't it? I cannot see any near term solutions. But theoretically, the entropy build up should create even greater molecular complexity, so for humanity this might lead to a higher consciousness - just a wild hopeful thought. :smile:
I disagree. That's not how I experience either feelings or words.
Quoting Joshs
Probably the word "feeling" is not the right one. I generally use the word "experience." The experience includes everything; sights, smells, sounds, touch, heat, cold, along with interoception, i.e. our internal sense of our bodies. It's all of those things at once. It is possible to experience the world directly in this way without words or concepts. I can do it...sometimes. Mostly not, but enough to know that it's possible.
Quoting Joshs
It's not a mystery. The experience comes first. The words are something added by processing and interpreting the experience. Maybe the words are the mystery. Cue eerie music.
I'm mostly ok with this. Naming can be brief and concise because something is lost. Something is also changed. The thing-in-itself is different from the thing.
I think one place where the thing-in-itself really differs from the Tao is that the Tao is everything all at once undifferentiated. Kant seems to think that apples are separate from the rest of everything before they become things. Before they are named. That doesn't make sense to me. Keeping in mind that my experience with Kant is limited, so I may be misrepresenting him.
I don't know anything about "yogic logic," so I'm making some assumptions. I'm ok with what you've written, as long as we stipulate that "turning thought off completely" does not mean walking around in a haze. Many western philosophers have interpreted eastern meditative practice that way. In that kind of state, you are paying attention, fully awake and aware, and actively participating in the world.
In considering issues like this, I have come to the conclusion that information organizes on its own. That information is self organizing due to the anthropic principle. Initially this sounds weird, as we identify most deeply with that which organizes the information - we do the thinking. But this sorts itself out if we conceive of ourselves as a body of information ( which to my mind is the best definition consistent with constructivim ). Then it is the case that information organizes the information!
This is a sort of melding of constructivism and informational systems theory.
**The Ribosome and RNA are bodies of information, and they are constrained by this in how they can integrate.
:up: Yes, unfortunate, but seemingly inevitable.
I'm not an expert on Kant myself, but I know a bit. Nowhere near Mww. I'm more of a Schopenhauer guy.
I suspect the Tao and the thing-in-itself is not that different, the idea in transcendental idealism is that we contribute space and time to things. Without us attributing this to nature, everything would be undifferentiated. So in this respect, it's not that different. And yes, naming changes things in a sense, absolutely.
For Kant we cannot know anything about things-in-themselves, outside a few negative comments (what it cannot be, for instance).
For Schopenhauer, the nature of the thing-in-itself is will (an unconscious striving) which is akin, roughly, to energy. Everything in nature is an object for a subject (us).
We however are both: an object like other objects but also a subject of knowledge. We have knowledge from the inside of an object, our bodies. Our bodies are driven by will as is everything else in nature.
There are plenty of connection between Eastern and Western thought in some areas.
:up:
Hard to give an example of a distinction. One must accept the premise that there is no language in pure thought, that pure thought is predicated on mental imagery alone. But the human system cannot express itself in mental imagery, hence the invention of empirical symbolic representations of pure cognitive representations, that is to say, words for conceptions/intuitions, symbols for quantities, other symbols for spatial extensions, and so on.
You must have read a book, being sufficiently engrossed by the words contained in it, that you no longer see the words, but translate them automatically into imagery. You see what the words say. How would that even be possible, if it wasn’t the way the cognitive system works in the first place?
The representation always presupposes that which is represented; words always presuppose that to which they relate.
—————
Quoting Manuel
Exactly. “Tree” presupposes the plethora of ancillary conceptions that represent that object as a particular thing. And just because we understand the particular thing “sun” without any need of supplemental conceptions such as hydrogen, heat, EMR, doesn’t mean we haven’t already conjoined these all together. This is quite apparent from the fact we know a priori we cannot look directly at the thing called “sun”, which makes explicit there is something about that object not contained in the mere word that represents it. Sometimes, “much richer in experience” is dangerous.
Quoting Manuel
How so?
Not before. After. Objects are already things, therefore not by becoming things, but by becoming phenomena. Phenomena precede naming. Apples are separate from the rest of everything else after they are named. “Apple” represents the separation.
Apple is merely a word that represents some real physical object with certain empirical properties; that object, that thing, before it is given to human perception, just is in the world, just whatever it is, just whatever that happens to be. And no more than that can be said about it.
I was nodding my head in agreement till you got to this. That's not how I see it. There is a sense in which things do not exist until they are named. Yes, I know. That is not the standard way of looking at existence, but is sometimes a useful way to think about it.
Quoting Mww
I can't remember anything from when I was a baby, but I'm pretty sure I learned not to look at the sun from experience.
I have a general experience X, it's mine alone. There are only several words I can use to convey my personal experience to another person, I choose the word that most closely resembles X. I use this word to express it to other people. The words I use is the way I can publicly express X, but X is much more complex and nuanced than the word I use.
There's no way to directly share X experience with another person.
That's what I'm trying to get at by saying that naming something changes it.
I'm ok with this.
Quoting Mww
But this has me scratching my head. How can an apple be a thing if it has not been separated from the rest of everything else.
Quoting Mww
How can a thing be a thing or an object before it is separated from everything else? The Tao does not contain or include apples. It's just the Tao, which is the name we use for that which can not be named.
I'm stepping on thin ice, so forgive me if I retract this right away - There are ways of sharing experience other than using names and words. That's what art and music do. Physical and emotional intimacy. Now, stepping out even further on thinner ice - maybe that's what showing someone how to do something does, e.g. teaching someone how to ride a bike.
What we do by naming, using words, is tell stories. We are telling stories about the world. One of the things stories do is apply human values to the world. Forgive me now while I vastly oversimplify. We talk about apples because apples are important as sources of food. We name snakes because they are dangerous. We separate green out of the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation because sometimes in the world things which reflect light in that range of wavelengths are important to us. We didn't name other wavelengths because they didn't influence our lives, or we didn't know they did. Now we talk about radio waves because somewhere along the line, they became important.
Names, words, say "Pay attention here. This is important."
No, you're right. We do all those things too.
We hope that the art we do can come close to conveying our experience.
I understand that. A pressure wave is not a sound until after it has passed the auditory apparatus, true enough. Still, the thing, as pressure wave, must exist and affect the sense mode perceiving it in a certain manner, in order to be determinable as a sound.
————-
Quoting T Clark
An apple is an apple because it has been separated from everything else. The thing, before it became named as an apple, is only separated from everything else because it is of a separate space and time than everything else, but no less a thing for that. The thing only became an apple because we said it did. Could have been given any name not already used to represent another thing.
The thing just is; the name is merely stands for how that thing is be known.
————
Quoting T Clark
So...a name for the unnameable. I see no benefit in that kind of logic. But I have no familiarity with Tao and such, so there is that.........
————
Quoting T Clark
Perhaps, but far and away too close to empirical anthropology, and very far from epistemological metaphysics. I have very little interest in the former, and great interest in the latter. I want to know how the method by which naming occurs, not so much the post hoc employment of it. The former makes necessary I understand myself, which I control, but the latter only makes possible another understands me, which I cannot.
Anyway.....good talk.
True, but that doesn’t explain any changes in the thing.
Quoting Manuel
Just because you’ve described a thing with certain words, and the thing is more than the description, doesn’t signify a change in the thing. It is merely an incomplete description of it.
Take your experience of a Jack Russell terrier. Use the words four, legged, furry, floppy, ears, bright, eyes.....and all I might know from that is “dog”. Add in “greater than 50% white, black lips and nose, ears never below the eyes, less than 15lbs, less than 13” high”......you’ve changed what I understand of your experience, but the thing of your experience remains as it ever was.
Right? Did I miss something?
Essentially yes. As you give more detailed analysis, I get a better picture of the dog you saw.
I'd say that in describing it as being over half white, black lips and so on, those are names you give that approximate your experience. The experience for you is private. It's a first person phenomenon.
When you attempt to describe it, you're shifting to a third person description. The change occurs in the shift of perspective. The object in experience will remain the same to you, but in the description, no matter how detailed it is, I cannot enter your body and see the dog with your eyes and conceive it with your mind.
I'll make my own description in my own mental image, likely different form yours. Perhaps the black I imagine is lighter than yours, or I have a kind of terrier in mind that is bigger than yours, etc.
So yes, no change in the "object itself", so to speak, but the object as you describe to me changes from what you actually experience.
Cool. That was my only contention.
Quoting Manuel
Quite so. And necessarily. What I describe is a representation of the thing of my experience. You do not perceive my experience but only a description of the representation of the object of my experience. For you, then, you have nothing other than your representation of my representation. In effect, the object of description changes, but the object of description is not the thing of experience.
:up: My only quibble: is reason (beyond the most basic concrete animal kinds) possible without language?
As to good cognac I can offer you only the representation of it that my reference to it may evoke.
We're in full agreement then. :cool:
Quoting T Clark
Quoting Mww
Quoting Mww
Because you cannot describe the cognac exhaustively, using words, you cannot share the experience of the cognac?
Worst host ever. Keeps the cognac to himself because Kant convinced him that we can't share the experience.
Anyway I generally prefer armagnac. Purely therapeutic, of course.
You're equivocating on "share".
(Cheers to whichever Mod did the adulting here.)
Then things get philosophical and someone says something like that we only know what the armagnac tastes like to each of us; we can't share what it tastes like in itself... and the little man appears, because the taste of armagnac-in-itself is as nonsensical as the little man who wasn't there.
And then someone adds that the taste-of-armagnac-to-Banno might be different to the taste-of-armagnac-to-them, that we cannot share this either... so now we have three nonsense entities, the taste-of-armagnac-in-itself, the taste-of-armagnac-to-Banno, and the taste-of-armagnac-to-someone-else...
And so we start referring not just to the unknown, but to empty place-holders. Philosophers behave as if there were such things, but others will share the taste, maybe discussing the hint of caramel or toffee.
The philosopher hasn't noticed that they are not referring to any thing.
I don’t think the Wittgensteinian approach completely resolved the problem because the idea of an intersubjective locus of meaning makes no sense without subjectivities that interact. We can say that we only know what the armagnac tastes like to each of us without assuming that there is such a thing as the armagnac-in-itself, just as there is no such thing as a self in itself or a self for itself or a ‘what it is like’ in itself.
Wittgenstein was right to argue that the sense of anything is only produced in interaction , but this interaction is not the same thing as a pure ‘sharing’ in which the sense of an experience is a outlet ‘we’ phenomenon. There can be no pure ‘we’ sharing of any sense because then this shared ‘we’ becomes a thing in itself.
Quoting Joshs
This is a misunderstanding of Wittgenstein, relying on meaning rather than use, while giving primacy to the subjective. You would maintain some variation of a private language, disguised as "subjectivities". Go ahead, but then you can say nothing interesting about them.
But we've had this discussion previously, I think. Back here:
Quoting Banno
Quoting Aidan buk
I think your intuition here is good.
You talk in terms of cognition. In the middle of last century there was a move to rephrase issues of cognition in terms of language - the linguistic turn in philosophy. The philosophers of then - Wittgenstein, Austin, and others - would have rephrased your point by saying that notions of eternity, nothingness, etc, seem to represent something unstatable - they purport to represent things outside of language. But, surely, all there is, is what can be said - the limits of our language are the limits of our world.
One cannot sensibly talk about those things of which nothing can be said. The "thing in itself" is an invocation of this edge of the world, the end of the map; in previous discussions with @Mww we met at this edge and agreed that "here be dragons"; there are plenty of folk who think that they need not stop at this edge, blithely pursuing the snark.
The interesting thing is that what cannot be said is of the highest import. Instead of being said it is expressed in art, and found in what folk actually do, as opposed to what the might say.
The exception being Cilantro; for some people it tastes like soap. It oddly correlates with whether or not an individual can smell stink bugs. I want to say they identified a genetic marker. So, when the same interactions do produce non-trivial little men it is noted.
...thanks for sharing...?
Yes, we can even talk about it when we don't share similarities in taste. Odd, then, that some folk say we can't share.
I think it must be so. If not, what’s the point in the old adage “think before you speak”. Besides, while thinking is a necessary human condition, language is merely a contingent human invention.
Quoting Janus
HA!!! Exactly what I tell the missus when the sauce didn’t turn out quite right.
Would mind independent objects be what Kant called "Thing-in-Itself"? Kant seems think they exist, but outside of the reason's boundary. They cannot be known, but are postulated?
[s]On the right track. Question: does the number 7 exist? if so, where?[/s]
'The thing in itself' is otherwise designated as 'the noumenal'. From the wiki entry 'In philosophy, noumenon is a posited object or event that exists independently of human sense or perception. The term 'noumenon' is generally used in contrast with, or in relation to, the term phenomenon, which refers to any object of the senses.'
But the interesting thing is, the Greek word nooúmenon is the neuter middle-passive present participle of ????? noeîn "to think, to mean", which in turn originates from the word ???? noûs, "perception, understanding, mind."
So, the 'thing in itself' is at once independent of sense or perception, but at the same time, 'an object of nous', so only able to be grasped by intellect.
So there's something profound about this distinction, going back to the origins of philosophy with Parmenides. The 'objects of sense' cannot be known, because they don't truly exist - they don't have an inherent reality. Whereas the objects of reason are inherently real, immediate, not mediated by sense, and also not composed of parts, neither coming nor going. But they also don't exist.
I think that in reality, whatever is experienced has some elements of both. The task of philosophy is to discern them.
If the limits of our language are the limits of our world, then those things of which nothing can be said, must be within our world... what with us having just used language to refer to them.
Quoting Banno
Hmmmm......so if what cannot be sensibly talked about is of such high import, go ahead and write a song about it? Paint a picture of it?
In such an event, we are given an expression representing that which cannot be sensibly talked about. Instead of talking about that which cannot be sensibly talked about, it remains that we are talking about the representation of that which cannot be sensibly talked about. How familiar is THAT!!!!
Ahhhh.....so it must be the case that it is the artist himself that realizes he cannot sensibly talk about that of the highest import, so rather expresses it in his art. Then, of course, it is impossible for an observer of the expression, to correlate his interpretation of the of it correctly to the artist’s understanding of that which cannot be sensibly talked about, for which he has rendered a representation. The observer cannot say with any certainty the artist has addressed that of the highest import in any way at all.
And it is said there is no logical entailment in subjectivity. (Sigh)
————-
Quoting Banno
Ok, so now, that which cannot be sensibly talked about is to be expressed by what folk actually do, which is the same as general objective activity. One aspect of general objective activity is creating art, but that’s been covered, so some other things folk actually do is required, which reduces to.....what is it that a folk can do that expresses that of the highest import which cannot be sensibly talked about, that isn’t art, or artful?
Easier, perhaps, to ask what he cannot do, which is, of course....speak. Talk about. Without doing art (logically declared too subjective), and without doing language (theoretically declared impermissible), all that’s left is physical action. Stands to reason...... “found in what people actually do”.
(Any philosophy so easily dismissed, in this case, language, had no solid foundation to begin with.)
For the sake of simplicity (???) it shall be the limit that people do things by accident, reflex or reason. All things done by accident, reflex or reason are things people actually do. Accident or reflex cannot justify intentional acts, so either those must be eliminated as causality for acts of expression of that which is of highest import, or, intentional acts cannot justify expression of that which is of the highest import. The latter seems logical inconsistent, so tacitly grants authority to assert that acts expressing that which is of the highest import, to be necessarily intentional acts. Whatever it is a person does, in the expression of that which is of the highest import, he must do intentionally.
The expression of that which is of the highest import cannot be talked about, nor can it be successfully expressed in art, but can be found in peoples’ intentional acts. Intentional acts cannot be accidental not reflexive. Therefore, any intentional act is conditioned by reason as necessary causality.
That which cannot be talked about, that which is of the highest import, iff found in what folks do, must first be thought, insofar as reason is the only source of intentional acts**. It follows that thought cannot hold the same impermission as talk, with respect to that which is of the highest import, for it is the ground of whatever the intentional act is, which expresses it.
Ohhhhhh yeah hic sunt dracones. Not only to challenge one’s bravery, re: Da Vinci with his globe, but also to challenge one’s intellectual boundaries, re: That Other Guy, with his critique.
(**the connection of thought to reason would be necessary in a complete theoretical dissertation, which all this isn’t, so trust me....it’s been done)
Don’t mind me none. Sunday morning forum editorializing; been doing it here and there for years, however rhetorically.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Banno
Im not relying on meaning in Wittgenstein’s sense, and I knew using that word would cause trouble here. For me there is nothing but use, and I also dont mean ‘subjective’ in the way you think I do. Showing is using , which is changing. This takes place before we can talk about a community of language users , because primordially we dont yet know what a community of people or voices or bodies is. Before any of this is the way temporality, prior to any constituted notion of community , throws me outside of myself. The
‘me’, the ‘I’ , the ‘self’ always returns to itself differently. It is already its own social outside prior to the concept of a language community. You can only think
of this as a subjective inside , a box with a beetle , if you are misunderstanding what it is that is supposed to be changed by temporality every moment. You would have to begin with something present to itself first, which is mot what I am arguing for.
Derrida discusses this relation between temporality and language games.
Derrida says all speech is ‘writing’ , so when I speak or write to myself, I am speaking to the other. This is the origin and only site of the social.
“That totally affects a structure, but it is a duty, an ethical and political duty, to take into account this impossibility of being one with oneself. It is because I am not one with myself that I can speak with the other and address the other.”
“From this point of view, there is no difference, or no possible distinction if you will, between the letter I write to someone else and the letter I send to myself. The structure is the same.”
In response to a question about the connection between time and language , he says:
“In the structure of the trace you have something that perhaps Wittgenstein would call 'public': , but what I would simply call 'beyond my absolute re-appropriation' : It is left outside, it is heterogeneous and it is outside. In short, then, perhaps there is here a possible link with Wittgenstein, but it will have to be reconstructed around the history of these notions of 'private ' and 'public', and I am too concerned with and interested in politics and history to use them so easily.
Now the next question, again a very difficult one, has to do with the distinction between the other and time, between alterity, intersubjectivity and time. Again, you make recourse to Wittgenstein in a way which I cannot address here.
. No doubt, for a meaning to be understood and for discussion to start, for literature to be read, we need a community that has, even if there are conflicts, a certain desire for normativity, and so for the stabilization of meaning, of grammar, rhetoric, logic, semantics and so on. (But, by the way, if these imply a community, I wouldn't call it a community of 'minds' for a number of reasons - not least those touched on In response to your last question regarding the 'inner' .)
But this is not really the context in which I connect the question about the other who is 'radically other' (that is, is another 'origin of the world' , another 'ego' if you want, or another 'zero point of perception') with that of 'another moment' in time (between this now and the other now, the past now and the now to come, there is an absolute alterity, each now is absolutely other ). So how do I connect the question of the constitution of time (and the alterity within the living present) and the question of the other (of the 'alter ego' as Husserl would say) ? Well my
quick answer would be that the two alterities are indissociable. A living being - whether a human being or an animal being - could not have any relation to another being as such without this alterity in time, without, that is, memory, anticipation, this strange sense (I hesitate to call it knowledge) that every now, every instant is radically other and nevertheless in the same form of the now. Equally, there is no ‘I' without the sense as well that everyone other than me is radically other yet also able to say 'I', that there is nothing more heterogeneous than every 'I' and nevertheless there is nothing more universal than the 'I'.”(Arguing with Derrida)
For Heidegger(1982), temporality as pure self-affection is not the essence of subjectivity but the essence of Dasein, which is not a subjectivity but what lies in between the subjective and the objective.
“The Dasein does not need a special kind of observation, nor does it need to conduct a sort of
espionage on the ego in order to have the self; rather, as the Dasein gives itself over immediately and passionately to the world itself, its own self is reflected to it from things. This is not mysticism and does not presuppose the assigning of souls to things. It is only a reference to an elementary phenomenological fact of existence, which must be seen prior to all talk, no matter how acute, about the subject-object relation.”
“To say that the world is subjective is to say that it belongs to the Dasein so far as this being is in
the mode of being-in-the-world. The world is something which the “subject” “projects outward,” as it were, from within itself. But are we permitted to speak here of an inner and an outer? What can this projection mean? Obviously not that the world is a piece of myself in the sense of some other thing present in me as in a thing and that I throw the world out of this subject thing in order to catch hold of the other things with it. Instead, the Dasein itself is as such already projected. So
far as the Dasein exists a world is cast-forth with the Dasein’s being. To exist means, among other
things, to cast-forth a world, and in fact in such a way that with the thrownness of this projection, with the factical existence of a Dasein, extant entities are always already uncovered.”
So here with Derrida and Heidegger we have the tow poles of self-world interaction; the anticipative protection outward from my past into experience, and the absolute novelty of what I anticipate into
Thus the self continues to be itself only by being absolutely other than itself to moment.
I was thinking about this some more. It struck me that your response to my post is a good example of what I was trying to describe. Because of one word I used, "stories," you dismissed the rest of my thoughts as "empirical anthropology," rather than engaging with them. I wonder if I had just written "One of the things [s]stories[/s] words do is apply human values to the world" you would have been willing to pay attention to what I wrote.
Is the sharing of a perceptual image or a sound recording also the telling of a story?
I think language is fundamentally different from other modes of expression. I got in a discussion with my physical therapist the other day. He plays jazz saxophone. I asked him if music means anything. He hadn't thought about that before. My position is that music, and visual arts, don't mean anything. Meaning comes with words.
Sorry. There just wasn’t a trigger in your comments sufficient to inspire me to engage with them. I did explain myself, which I considered to be enough, so.....
Indeed.
Quoting Banno
But don’t the components of a painting tell a
story? When we look at a written word, we begin with the geometries of lines and curves and angles , and then recognize letters , and then words, making use of context to anticipate the next word. Don’t we do the same
thing when we look at a painting, begin with geometries of line and shape and shadow and color and then piece
together larger meanings from these simpler perceptions, the story the painting tells?
I could describe in words da Vinci’s last supper, or show the painting. Could the words used to describe the scene ever convey more than the visual image?
Yep. IS that somehow an objection, or are you just elucidating what was said? A defence of Art History?
Quoting Mww
This is far from simple, and overly intellectualises actions in an almost Kantian way...:wink: by expecting actions to be the expression of explicit deliberation. They can be, but are not always; more often the explanation for one's actions is post hoc.
Eventually that sort of ratiocination comes to an end, and all there is, is "It's what i do".
That painting is full of symbols that relate to events before and after the Supper. I think you need words to convey past and future.
Quoting frank
If only words convey past and future , how is it that visual images convey the present?
When looking at the painting, why couldn’t we deal with those symbols that come to mind relating to events before and after the event in either verbal form or via images of the past or future? We could
conjure in our heads extensions of the scene moving either backwards or forwards in time, just as we can verbalize such shifts in time
Can visual images convey the idea of the present? How?
Quoting Joshs
The visual image of that painting doesn't tell you that there are symbols embedded in it, so how could they come to mind by simply looking at it?
Experiencing art is multilayered. With conceptual art, it's really not the visuals. You have to know how to access what people see in Warhol. That takes words.
But further, the style of analysis offered here is on a par with that of talk of being-in-itself in that it remains ungrounded... there's no way to determine the truth conditions for "temporality as pure self-affection is not the essence of subjectivity but the essence of Dasein".
Basically, I don't see much appeal in such verse.
I've shared this feeling that @Mww's comments are somehow incomplete.
How does the visual image of the word ‘hello’ that you are looking at now tell you that there is a symbol embedded in it? What is a symbol? What is that that allows you to ‘decode’ a seemingly random pattern of dots into first a series of lines, curved and angles, and then further into letters, and after that into words? Isnt visual interpretation and thus symbolization involved every step of the way ? When we see a picture of a chair , aren’t we doing f something similar, beginning with the perception of a seemingly random spread of dots and from that we construct lines, angles and other shapes, and then finally recognize these features as all
belonging to a single object? Do we need a name for the object in order to recognize it as an object? How are lines symbolizing letters which in certain sequences symbolize words different from lines symbolizing pieces of a visual object which in certain combinations symbolizes the whole visual object? Isnt it symbolization the whole way down in both cases?
I'll agree with this, but add that it is by way of a definition of meaning. Music and visual arts can can of course still be profound. There is a strong sense in which setting out the meaning of a piece is detracting from it.
Very true. Tell me more about how you transcend the subject-object binary. I don’t see it in any of your writings. Tell me how some of the cognitive scientists you are interested in do this.
In coming up with my first original ideas in philosophy, I didn’t know how to articulate them in words. Why?Because they were still too tentative , to much like a loose sketch , to internally inconsistent and unfocused. It took me a few years before i could write down the first word to describe these ideas. Over time my vocabulary became richer and more precise. Dinthis detract from
the peofundity of the original ideas? On the contrary , the verbalization made it possible to make much more rapid progress in transforming what I began with. Eventually I abandoned a lot of my original
vocabulary , but this was only made possible by creating it in the first place so I could see more clearly what it was I was so enthralled with. I think creativity is a cycle beginning with tentative , incipient music-like intuitive stabs at the new. One hears a new music in one’s
head. If one is a musician one doesn’t have to take this process any further, but if one is a scientist or philosopher one warns to enrich, tighten and define what is at first only a feeling so that it becomes a coherent , clarified concept rather than remaining only a loose sketch.
I’m not saying the verbal is more profound than the musical , but neither is the musical more profound than the verbal, or the painterly.
Just stop using those terms.
See Intersubjectivity;
also Subject and object:
Quoting Banno
I don't agree - in so far as I understood this. One might be tempted to think the muso "hears" the way they want the song to sound, and engages in a fight with the instrument to make it so; but I rather think this a bit too romantic. Rather, they have an idea for a direction they want to explore, which becomes clear as the process proceeds.
I don't think the song is sitting in the muso's head, complete, just needing to be birthed. I think it develops as it is played. Embodied Cognition.
I don't think it does. I learned to treat it as a symbol.
Quoting Joshs
Or how do I tell that a mass of differing shades of green is a tree?
There's nothing in the visual that says "tree". It would seem that the idea is coming from me.
Quoting Joshs
I think wording is important for long term memory, except maybe taste and smell, which are wired directly into the frontal lobe.
So information about an unnamed object will slip through your mind's fingers.
So what is "hello" a symbol for? Are you claiming that "hello" names something?
What does ‘my own’ mean? Empiricism and Idealism each have their own ideas about this, but in the end they are two side of the same coin. The social constructionism of Ken Gergen and Jon Shotter argues
that it is possible to conceive the relationship between two or more persons not in terms of "interacting" individuals, but of elements of an inseparable system in which the relationship precedes the individual psychologies.
I agree with them as far as this goes. But I still don’t know what subjective and objective facts are , assuming we allow for both. And I don’t know what a joint or shared interaction is. I see everything you just said about subject and object , and intersubjectivity , to apply to a dynamic that comes into play before we assume the notion of participants in a language game. How do you describe a participant in such a game ? Why is the joint action, the language game ‘public’? It certainly isn’t private. It isn’t located in a container or self-reproducing continuity. But public implies
at least two. Two what? Subjects? No that’s not right.
Dimensions of a whole? And what do these two or more share in the joint action of a language game? In the moment of the sharing is there a dissolution of the plurality into a singularity of sharing , a single sense distributed among the plurality?
The quoted word usually refers to use. We were talking about mention.
Plus I think it's probably time for your Ativan little buddy.
I don't mind that you didn't want to respond. I was using your response as an example of the pitfalls of depending on language unselfconsciously.
Sure. What I said about the evolution of a philosopher’s new idea applies also the the musician. Within their own medium , in struggling to compose something new there is a move from the tentative and incipient to a crisp , clarified and focused musical product. I’m just saying that articulating their ideas in words is not a
necessary part of the process, unless the song includes lyrics. But just as forming a vague idea into words doesn’t lose the profundity of the ideas for the philosopher , turning a vague impressionistic inconsistent musical sketch into a finalized written score doesnt lose the profundity for the musician.
Nor I.
I've used this long quote about four times in the past month. Now I have to do it again. This is a quote from "October Light," by John Gardner. A French horn player describing what he hears when he listens to a composition. I've hidden the text to keep the post short.
[hide="Reveal"][i]Then it had come to him as a startling revelation-though he couldn't explain even to his horn teacher Andre Speyer why it was that he found the discovery startling-that the music meant nothing at all but what it was: panting, puffing, comically hurrying French horns. That had been, ever since- until tonight- what he saw when he closed his eyes and listened: horns, sometimes horn players, but mainly horn sounds, the very nature of horn sounds, puffing, hurrying, . getting in each other's way yet in wonderful agreement finally, as if by accident. Sometimes, listening, he would smile, and his father would say quizzically, "What's with you?" It was the same when he listened to the other movements: What he saw was French horns,. that is, the music. The moods changed, things happened, but only to French horns, French horn sounds.
There was a four -note theme in the second movement that sounded like ..Oh When the Saints," a theme that shifted from key to key, sung with great confidence by a solo horn, answered by a kind of scornful gibberish from the second, third, and fourth, as if the first horn's opinion was ridiculous and they knew what they knew. Or the slow movement: As if they'd finally stopped and thought it out, the horns played together, a three-note broken chord several times repeated, and then the first horn taking off as if at the suggestion of the broken chord and flying like a gull-except not like a gull, nothing like that, flying like only a solo French horn. Now the flying solo became the others' suggestion and the chord began to undulate, and all four horns together were saying something, almost words, first a mournful sound like Maybe and then later a desperate oh yes I think so, except to give it words was to change it utterly: it was exactly what it was, as clear as day-or a moonlit lake where strange creatures lurk- and nothing could describe it but itself. It wasn't sad,. the slow movement; only troubled, hesitant, exactly as he often felt himself. Then came- and he would sometimes laugh aloud- the final, fast movement.
Though the slow movement's question had never quite been answered, all the threat was still there, the fast movement started with absurd self-confidence, with some huffings and puffings, and then the first horn set off wit h delightful bravado, like a fat man on skates who hadn't skated in years (but not like a fat man on skates, like nothing but itself), Woo-woo-woo-woops! and the spectator horns laughed tiggledy-tiggledy tiggledy!, or that was vaguely the idea- every slightly wrong chord, every swoop, every hand-stop changed everything completely ... It was impossible to say what , precisely, he meant.[/i][/hide]
Emphasis mine. Art is the same as music. It means nothing at all but what it is.
Quoting Joshs
No. The painting will always convey more. More importantly, what the painting conveys is different from what any interpretation provides.
Yes, I guess it comes down to what we think "means" means. In everyday language, "meaning" is often used to mean significance. That's not what we're talking about. So, yes, the best music and art is profound, even if it doesn't mean anything.
From where, to where?
Display might be a better choice.
I like the quote.
:up:
Agree. Of course there is also the issue of what the composer was trying to 'say' with the music. Much classical orchestral music (for instance) is intended to evoke particular emotion and is often intended to tell a kind of narrative - often to accompany a poem or fable or story.
The problem is people hear what they hear and one person's exquisite musical narrative is another's cacophonous nonsense. No use telling a 16 year-old kid who is into K-pop that Mahler's 6th, a tragic symphony, may be the fist nihilistic composition in music.
I was using Joshs' language. I think "convey" and "display" are both fine.
I think you have the gist of it. It makes no sense to infer a mind independent object, since we can never encounter them , since we need to construe ( perceive in terms of historical understanding ) an object with our mind before we can become conscious of it. This is how constructivism would put it, and it leads to an idealistic understanding.
Convey (from web) - Make (an idea, impression, or feeling) known or understandable to someone.
Second definition.
Information was moved.
Information always exists as, and travels over, a physical substrate - as the perturbations of the substrate.
The perturbations ( neural activity ) in an artist's mind, are expressed in their actions or an artefact, the information of which is conveyed to the audience as vibration ( music ), or light waves, to be reconstituted as perturbations of neural activity.
So the mind activity of one mind finds it's way into another mind, via information.
What I would avoid is falling into the notion of meaning as the movement of something from one place to another.
(Edit: Quoting Pop - like that. Maybe this needs a thread of its own.)
The thing might refer to either or both of the thing-in-itself and its subjective manifestations. The thing-in-itself explicitly excludes all subjective manifestations.
Yes, I've been meaning to do a "What is information thread", but time is a little constrained at the moment. Perhaps on the weekend.
Yes. Just that.
Quoting Banno
Yes, but I was talking about causality, not explanation.
Quoting Banno
Only the intentional acts.
Quoting Banno
Simple = boring. Wouldn’t you rather be challenged than bored?
Isnt the painting itself an interpretation, and always a slightly different one every time we return to it , the same way that a novel or a poem means exactly how one interprets it at any given time , but is interpreted slightly differently every time we return to it? Or these words I’m writing now and you are reading now, don’t we , each in our own way, see their meaning as exactly what they are, at any given reading, which changes its sense from
reading to reading?
As long as we are conscious we are construing our world moment to moment on the basis of how the next event is similar and different with respect to the previous. This is the basis of all language. As we perform this construing moment to moment , we perceive each event both in terms of it’s unique content and its affective relation to what went before it , how it either carries forward or changes a previous mood , a feeling disposition, a motivational attitude , the way in which events matter to us.
Music is a language that particularly well suited to convey these shifts in feeling from moment to moment. That does not mean that it is content free. It can’t be , because the shifts i. feeling that we experience when we listen to music have to be about something. Music is ideational. It tells a story via affectivity but also via a vague, unspecified content that is undergoing these feeling and attitude fluctuations. One can think of notes as profoundly impressionistic words. Written and spoken words , on the other hand, ade best suited for conveying crystallized content , leaving out what is nonetheless intrinsic to their sense , their affectivity.
Every word you are reading right now presents its own music. It either carries forward a previous feeling or changes it. It has built in emojis, which we hear in spoken intonation and emphasis but have to fill in ourselves when we read a written text . But no word ever spoken or written or received with the intent to mean something is devoid of its own accompanying musical feeling tone. The feeling tone is always intrinsic to the context of the word ( what the person speaking or writing it intends to convey by it or how the recipient intends to interpret it ), not separate and added on.
So words can be impoverished in the encoding of affect, and music without lyrics is impoverished in fleshed-out meaning content , but words and music convey both affect and sense content. What is only conveyed implicitly in one language via the contextual intent of the speaker and recipient) is conveyed explicitly in the other.
Regarding your quote , of course when we hear the first notes of a song we notice the physical instruments -and other such surface details. But as we become absorbed i. what the music is saying , where it is taking us, we are transported , just as when reading text we at first notice physical details of the page , the font and size and color
of the letters. If it is an engaging novel , by the time we get caught up in it we may complete forget we are reading words on a page. Instead , we are in the drama.
You're describing art as if it's like a phone call. I think it can be sort of like that, but sometimes an artist might make a painting that she herself doesn't understand, and wouldn't be able to put the experience of creating it in words.
That's basically the scientific definition. Information is distinctions.
Yes, if we think of convey via the metaphor of displacement in physical space. But instead we can think of words like convey , express , transport ,articulate, trasmit, elucidate, repeat , not as the spatial displacement of an unchanged entity but as a reproduction which alters what it reproduces in the transmitting of it. To convey a meaning is to alter what is expressed.
You've raised a lot of good points. Let's start out with an overview. The way of thinking I'm describing in my posts on this thread is not the only way of seeing things. It's a way that I find effective in helping me understand the way the world works. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying I've found this helpful and maybe you should try it out to see if you like it. And you don't even have to choose. You can think of it either way or both ways. Or maybe my way of seeing things doesn't work for you.
Quoting Joshs
Quoting Joshs
Interpretation means "the action of explaining the meaning of something." As I've said, I don't think music and art mean anything. No, I don't think visual art tells a story. As the quote I provided says "the music meant nothing at all but what it was." That means all the music, not just the first few notes.
Now about poems and novels - I'm going to punt on that. There is a sense where they don't mean anything in the same sense that art and music don't, but I'm not interested in defending that position right now.
Quoting Joshs
I haven't thought about this before - do only things that mean something count as content? Is music content free? I'll have to think about that.
Quoting Joshs
I'm going beyond my level of expertise, but I think you're right - we are constructing and reconstructing our world on a continuing basis. I don't see that as primarily a linguistic process.
Yes, that is true. Nevertheless the work is always presented within a structure, and is symbolic of the artist's mind activity, and so as structured information makes its way to the mind of another, where it either resonates or does not. I have a definition of art here.
I admit I could have phrased it better - I'll work on it. :smile:
All true. I would just say the piece itself is like a seed. Some seed falls on rocky soil and comes to nothing. Some seed falls on fertile soil and becomes a jungle.
A piece of art is like a single child who grows up to be a million different people, each in its own psychic universe.
This relates to what @Joshs is saying above and what Shannon calls entropy of information. The information that is understood is in some way already established information. The information that is not understood is potentially new information, that may in time be understood, through a revisiting and reinterpretation of the work.
Quoting frank
That is spot on, and beautifully expressed. :up:
This maintains the misleading reification that there is a something that is expressed, something reproduced. It isn't always so. Better to say something is done. Instead of looking for meaning, look at what we do when we use words.
Addenda: Just read your reply to @T Clark; nice work.
Are you identifying the artist's neurological states as the source data? Then the artwork is the channel and the viewer is receiving information that she uses to reconstruct the artist's neurological states in her own head?
Exactly. That is precisely what I'm trying to get at. In some sense the pattern in one mind becomes a pattern in another mind, and If it resonates similarly in both minds, then it is understood, becomes meaningful, and is successful.
It's definitely an interesting idea. I'm reading a sci fi novel now in which one person's memories and skills can be recorded as something like ROM and can be installed in someone else's head.
It makes sense, but I'm not sure we know enough about consciousness yet to know that this is really what's happening.
Quoting Pop
Could be. I often wonder what an aesthetic sense really is. If I follow my aesthetics while gardening, am I using the scene around me to transmit information about my neurological states?
You are making choices, and they are often aesthetic choices.
You can make your garden as you personally would like to see it, or you can make it to conform to an aesthetic sense of what a garden should look like in your community.
An artist makes these same choices. They can discover for themselves what their personal aesthetic is, or they can pick a demographic, and conceive what an average understanding of art is in that demographic, and make an art product accordingly. This is what I would call Kitch art.
To some extent, this is also the case for contemporary artists. They make art to interact with an art scene.
There is, must always be something that is expressed, something that is repeated, but in so doing the repetition alters. But don’t make the mistake of treating what is repeated as a presence, an object or subject.
I will defer to Derrida on the relation between reproduction, repetition, meaning , subjectivity and pragmatic ‘doing’ in your sense.
Repetition is altering, and this is what Derrida calls `iterability':
"The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence..(LI53)."
"Through the possibility of repeating every mark as the same, [iterability] makes way for an idealization that seems to deliver the full presence of ideal objects..., but this repeatability itself ensures that the full presence of a singularity thus repeated comports in itself the reference to something else, thus rending the full presence that it nevertheless announces"(LI29)). ...the possibility of its being repeated another time-breaches, divides, expropriates the "ideal" plenitude or self-presence of intention,...of all adequation between meaning and saying. Iterability alters...leaves us no room but to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say) (Limited, Inc,p.61)." "The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition.”
This situation is valid not only for linguistic signs, but, Derrida says, for all of what philosophy calls experience, "even the experience of being"(Limited,Inc.,p.9)
So what is left of idealizing notions like self, ipseity, internality , intrinsicality , subjectivity and objectivity is the element, the mark , which is only a differential, an in-between.
Why?
Initially I missed your point. Yes, I would say the scene around you and your neural states are the same thing. And this is what is so fascinating, and so difficult to get about information, in that it has its origins in, as you say, the distinction, or the perturbations, the distinctive patterns, or that it is "the difference that makes a difference" -Bateson..
** It is the integration of these differences that creates consciousness.
That doesn't seem to follow. Even granting that ongoing experience carries a something forward, it does not follow that there is a something that is expressed.
The implication is that there is something that is the same in each expression. This is an assumed, almost unconscious transcendental argument: You understood the meaning of my utterance, therefore there must be a thing that we call the meaning of that utterance that has been transfered from you to me.
Look a the way @Frank and @Pop almost desperately propose a "pattern" as their best candidate for the thing that moves... as if we each have a pattern in our brain waves that is somehow the same as the pattern in the Mona Lisa.
But perhaps all that is going on is not individual but public. It's clear that there are shared activities around our utterances. We might look to these rather than to an inferred private item that is transferred from one to the other.
Quoting frank
My understanding of the meaning of your utterance is just a sense that is produced via my construal of your utterance. That sense may include my assuming that what you mean to say is exactly the same as what I am construing as the recipient of your utterance. Or I might make no such supposition. I may instead assume that I construe something that is likely similar enough to what you intended to convey that we can have a useful interaction , but whether that is in fact the case must be born out by my observation of your subsequent behavior. I may later decide that you intended to convey something very different from what I was assuming and I will either have to resign myself to concluding that your utterance is incomprehensible to me or begin exploring ways of making sense of your utterance that is useful to me.
So nothing has been transferred from you to me. You fell into an utterance , and I received an utterance that was somewhat different from what you experienced ( or so we can both demonstrate to each other by repeatedly surprising each other with mutually unpredictable behaviors ) but close enough for both of us to be able to benefit from the interchange.
“ For about three centuries now Anglo-Saxon man has labored under the somewhat mislead-ing assumption that knowledge is transmitted through the senses. This was John Locke's great notion in 1690' In expressing it, he provided the essential spade work for both modern experi-mental psychology and the courageous empiricism of Sigmund Freud. But great ideas, like great men, sometimes have a way of eventually blocking the very progress they once so coura-geously initiated. Thus it is, even after continued experience in psychotherapy, most of us still hold doggedly to the belief that one man's understanding of the universe can be somehow encoded within a signal system and then transmitted intact to another man via the senses. The signal system is often called "language." Indeed, Pavlov's psychological term for "language" was simply "the second signal system.” George Kelly
So you're saying that things like the desire and sorrow of a certain person at a certain time are equivalent to a unique neurological signature, the associated information of which can be transmitted over some (lossy) media.
I think you'd like Integrateted Information theory. Have you read about it?
I'm pretty sure you and I are the only ones in the thread who know something about information theory. I don't think there's any point in trying to explain it.
Yes, we have discussed IIT.
The pattern is one aspect of consciousness. There is also a force acting on the neurological patterning. The form the pattern takes, how it is integrated, is driven by an emotional force. What this emotional force is precisely is a mystery. But it is significant to note, the emotional force is not equal to the pattern. Cannot be conceptualized as a pattern can be. Rather is something causing the pattern to integrate in a certain way.
Oh! Why can't it be conceptualized as a pattern?
If the rest of the folks on the thread would like us to take this discussion elsewhere, let us know.
The issue as I see it, is what makes information integrate? And I postulate the anthropic principle ( the combined laws of the universe ) makes information integrate. So what we feel is those laws making our information integrate.
What was your point here?
Ah. Well this really would be a separate thread if you're interested.
If you think before you speak, how could you do so if not rehearsing what will say; that is by "speaking" inwardly? I don't deny that there is the 'animal' kind of thought I mentioned earlier, which my consist in various kinds of "visualization" or imagining; visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile, as well as motor, proprioceptive (have I left anything out?). These are all concrete kinds of thinking, but I question the possibility of abstractive thought absent language.
Quoting Mww
:grin:
Quoting Banno
I think Joshs covered it well.
Sounds good.
By composing what you will say. Can’t rehearse what hasn’t been composed.
Quoting Janus
Assuming abstractive thought to mean the understanding of conceptions that have no immediate correlation to concrete things, we must first grant that understanding is an activity in general, without a necessary regard for concrete things. The absence of concrete things is nothing more than the absence of perceptions, hence absence of intuitions, or, phenomena.
There’s a famous artist from the Pacific Northwest named Dale Chuhuli. He has a display at Seattle Center, full of utterly amazing....and VERY expensive.....stuff. Complex. Wonderful, even. He names them, but the casual observer, just looking, may cognize the beauty within, without ever assigning a name to the object. Now, granting that beauty is a judgement predicated on feelings, thus are not cognitions, the conditions which satisfy the feeling, must be themselves cognitions. Hence, abstractive thinking, re: understanding concepts belonging to a feeling of beauty, and not to a concrete object in the form of a glass sculpture. All without the necessity for language.
I would certainly need language to tell you about it, but that’s not the same as thinking about it.
OK, 'composing' will do. as I was thinking of it rehearsing and composing are the same. Whatever you want to call 'thinking before you speak' the composing is done in language, though, no? I know that's how I do it; I guess I can't speak for anyone else. But I find it impossible how one cou;f for example, compose a poem mentally if not in language
Quoting Mww
That explanation seems fair enough, but I don't see what argument you are wishing to support here.
Quoting Mww
I'm not sure what you are saying here. Is it that the feelings and imaginative associations evoked by the work are abstractions?
.