Pattern Recognition as the Essence of Philosophy
I don't have a question or a thesis, I'm just going to throw some shit out there, and see what sticks.If anything sticks to you, throw some back or complain to the mods, or take a shower, or whatever.
Wiki disambiguates, but I am trying to recognise a pattern in the ambiguities.
The obvious beginning is in psychology, and from there the connection to machine learning seems natural, medicine is just an application of the psychology. The biology things a surprise to me and if anyone can explain it in words of less than five syllables and two hyphens, I'll be most grateful.
Sherlock Holmes (based on a medic by the way) comes to mind as a recogniser of patterns; reader of footprints and human motivations and so on, like the mythic 'tracker' reading the animal trails. Like the reader of confused posts looking for a point or a topic.
And so I arrive finally at the beginning, which was @Tim Wood 's thread, Simplicity, virtue of.
Because to recognise a pattern is to simplify, and it is the thing that science and philosophy and literature and music all lean towards; the making sense of complexity and its subsumption into a pattern.
It is the very substance of the faculty of understanding, and the whole basis of prediction. It is surely what big brains are evolved to do.
{If you haven't read the William Gibson novel, it's recommended, and there is a BBC radio adaptation. that is also good if you can get it.}
Wiki disambiguates, but I am trying to recognise a pattern in the ambiguities.
The obvious beginning is in psychology, and from there the connection to machine learning seems natural, medicine is just an application of the psychology. The biology things a surprise to me and if anyone can explain it in words of less than five syllables and two hyphens, I'll be most grateful.
Sherlock Holmes (based on a medic by the way) comes to mind as a recogniser of patterns; reader of footprints and human motivations and so on, like the mythic 'tracker' reading the animal trails. Like the reader of confused posts looking for a point or a topic.
And so I arrive finally at the beginning, which was @Tim Wood 's thread, Simplicity, virtue of.
Because to recognise a pattern is to simplify, and it is the thing that science and philosophy and literature and music all lean towards; the making sense of complexity and its subsumption into a pattern.
It is the very substance of the faculty of understanding, and the whole basis of prediction. It is surely what big brains are evolved to do.
{If you haven't read the William Gibson novel, it's recommended, and there is a BBC radio adaptation. that is also good if you can get it.}
Comments (114)
If recognise means impose, then yes, preferably.
Does it? ...Which is to ask: nominalist or platonist?
Forgive me if I impose, haha.
Two other ways of putting this come to mind, each of which has a sort of icky loop in it:
(1) Patterns aren't found in real things, but in abstractions, the real things considered only in certain of their various aspects. Which aspects? Well, um, the aspects that are relevant for ... the pattern.
(2) A pattern is something that repeats, something that goes on, something we can extrapolate the rest of given the first bit. We can predict because there's a pattern. How do we know there's a pattern? Well, um, because we can ... predict.
But those loops are only icky if you were hoping for a static, crystalline, logically structured universe. If you're cool with something more dynamic, more interactive, something with feedback loops, something evolution could get ahold of, then not icky at all but just what we were looking for. Or expected. Whichever.
I hope he didn't say that because I've been feeling somewhat kindly toward LW lately and I have a strong allergic reaction to that idea.
I think it's the suggestion -- in the versions I've seen of it around here over the years, mostly third-hand Kant, I guess -- that the template is arbitrary, that either we cooked it up without reference to reality or it just fell from the sky somehow. And thus the only word for what we do to reality with it is "impose". We "impose" on reality our belief in space, in time, in the permanence of objects, and so on. And we could just as well have "imposed" some other conceptual scheme "on" reality, even an incommensurable one, as they say.
I think that's all horseshit. We don't impose anything. Reality isn't out there and our conceptual scheme over here in a drawer full of conceptual schemes. We are part of reality, organisms embedded in an environment, and a conceptual scheme is what evolves through continued interaction of the two and untold layers of feedback.
Pebbles are not abstractions, are they?.
Quoting tim wood
A pattern is an ordered structure. stuff has structure and the structure is real as is stuff.
The patterns of petals on flowers tend to conform to the Fibonacci series. This is the mathematics of gene expression, not of human brains. In the limit. Pattern in information equates to compressibility.
Quoting tim wood No. "Recognition" is the term that denotes the mental aspect. You are muddying the waters. You define pattern as the ability to recognise similarities and that implies that pattern recognition is the capacity to recognise the capacity to to recognise similarities. Ugh!
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
And so do I.
Yawn. The presumption behind this question is that substance is the only real. But take an example "some ducks in a row". And you doubt that this row is real and ask me what are rows usually made of. So I reply, "usually they are made of fence posts, but in this case, it is made of ducks." Does that answer your question?
Edit. What are footprints made of? they are made by feet in the pattern of a foot, and they are made of mud, sand, clay sometimes fossilised and hardened over millions of years. And they are as real as anything.
So what does it mean? But alas, I am banging my fingers on these keys in what I think is a meaningful pattern and you discern nothing of it, but impose your own meaning. Ain't no use to talk to you.
Epsitemically, there's no final settling down to either "this is patterned" or "this isn't". You've no way to know that a pattern you perceive will continue as it has up until now. (Hume says hi.) But when a pattern you've been following breaks, how could you possibly know whether the break is "genuinely" stochastic or itself part of a larger pattern? For that matter, there could be pattern anywhere you don't perceive it, or anywhere you do but not the one you think. In short, you cannot know whether you can predict anything, meaning both: can't know that you can, can't know that you can't. So we predict, defeasibly.
Aprokrisis would have a whole metaphysical lecture about this, but I'm not inclined to fill in for him.
I'll only say that it's hardly a surprise that there is this sort of oscillation. It is what you'd expect in an experimental system driven by feedback, evolving and incorporating and growing. Of course we keep finding patterns and of course they keep breaking and of course we keep finding new patterns.
Is it ironic if I've already started repeating myself?
Isn’t the fundamental characteristic of a pattern that it is a repeating sequence? I mean, I can write any number of series of characters, alpha or numeric, that suggest a pattern such that you would have no trouble guessing the next set or next member of a set by recognising the pattern. But there’s no discernible pattern in the sequence of prime numbers or (I think) the genetic code, which (I think) is endlessly variable. Kind of agreeing with @180 Proof on this one.
Actually from Chinese culture, an example comes to mind, which is the principle of ‘li’, derived from ‘the grain in wood’. It suggests a quality of naturalness or spontaneity which is esteemed in Chinese art. But it’s not a repeating pattern - unlike for example the patterned motifs you find in Greek pottery or Islamic architecture. So it’s not really a pattern, but still a principle, if that distinction can be made.
And there are patterns in for example crystal formation that have no specific meaning - other than something you or I might attribute to them. The emergence of meaning is co-extensive with the emergence of organisms (vegetative semiosis, one of the things I learned about from Apokrisis.) But again, is DNA strictly speaking a pattern? Now there’s a big question, but I’m thinking it’s not, because again it’s irregular. If it were a simple pattern, then you’d be stuck with something like a crystal. It’s the irregularities that make change possible. (Is this anything to do with symmetry breaking? :chin: )
That's really lovely, and very on point because that "spontaneity" you mention, that's chance under another name. And yet woodgrain is an excellent example of some kind of pattern, just a pattern that incorporates chance within certain constraints (or now and then overflows those constraints in ways which are in turn somewhat predictable), which feels very, very close to the sort of thing I was attempting to describe. Lovely idea.
What does the ‘out there’ do? Are you following the Kantian line which argues that pattern, logic, time and space are all mental processes? Is your argument metaphysical or empirical?!
Patterns are what's common to things i.e. those qualities/quantities that repeat in them. In philosophy a pattern goes by another name, essence. One may be given a set of items and if one finds a certain quality/quantity repeats, is common to all the items, we have basically discerned a pattern/essence in/to these items.
Quoting 180 Proof
[quote=Hillary Putnam]It's a tendency in philosophy to look for the generalization that covers all the cases and we always lose but we can't resist trying.[/quote]
What I’m wondering, specifically, is how you are defining what takes place at the ‘mental’ end of the subject-world encounter and how you would talk about what takes place outside of the mental. You mentioned row and pattern. What exactly is it about these entities that make makes them mental , and what does that imply about what constitutes the substance or content of the non-mental? For instance , is what a row and a pattern have in common the fact they they are abstract relational concepts? Are all causal relations also purely mental? What about temporal sequences? Is time a mental construct not existing in the world , as many physicists believe?
If you're up to a quite challenging, but extremely fun philosophical book, I suggest you try Novel Explosives by Jim Gauer. If you want a lighter read, Ubik by Philip K. Dick is quite fun and leaves you feeling quite disoriented.
What you say is true. We see this "blooming buzzing confusion" in William James' term, as evidenced by an utter bombardment of sense data what with trees, apples, rivers, grass, birds and everything else that happens to be in your field of vision at the moment.
I think this leads to a natural intuition: all this diversity had to come from somewhere and furthermore, they must be related somehow, otherwise how could different things even exist? From this we abstract away things that we think make sense to parse out: the sky is blue like this river, the leaves are green like the grass, the butterfly flies, like a bird.
From these properties, we attempt to establish regularities or patterns that hopefully say something about the world. But, as has been the case in human history, our initial approach to things via intuition frequently misleads us, but serves as a heuristic to further refinement.
I get up in the morning. Breakfast. Go to work. Lunch. Get home. Dinner. Sleep. Lather, rinse, repeat (Shampoo algorithm).
:lol: Girls were never my strong suit. I'm too boorish.
Anyway, what's so abstract about the paterrn whiteness I see in clouds, snow, and other white objects?
Why thanks!
Quoting tim wood
There are plenty of patterns in nature, I’m not disputing that. I’m taking issue with the claim in the OP which is much stronger than that.
That’s not a pattern. If you had a row of stones, 4 black, 1 white, repeating - then you’d have a pattern. ‘Whiteness’ in that sense is nearer to a Platonic universal.
Define ‘thing’ without using a notion of pattern or relation.
What do you mean by "...describe how that works..." I see the color white in all white objects. That's all there is to it.
Repetition, either qualitative or quantitative, is a pattern.
Very imaginative!
Let's not complicate the issue. Does your life have a routine, a pattern to it, or no? Before you answer that question, remember that if you say "no", your life would have to be completely random. In short, are you, as one poster remarked, predictable?
I feel a pattern emerging...
Nothing repeats? The sunrise, the tides, the seasons,..
The sun rose yesterday just as it has for thousands of years before yesterday and it rose today too. Pattern: sunrise (repetition of an astronomical phenomenon).
So, there are no patterns. Nothing repeats. Then what is this: Born -> Infant -> Child -> Teen -> Adult -> Senior citizen -> Death
?
Definitions of abstract:
1. existing in thought or as an idea but not having a physical or concrete existence.
"abstract concepts such as love or beauty"
2. extract or remove (something).
"applications to abstract more water from streams"
We need to extract the pattern!
You're missing the woods for the trees. It depends on how broad/narrow the definition of sunrise is. If you want the sun to come up at exactly the same spot every day, obviously there's no repetition but if you define sunrise as the sun popping up anywhere on the horizon, there's a pattern, a repetition.
I love the wisdom in this message. Purely Divine!
(And I will definitely quote you.)
The message resonates deeply with my understanding of what our lives are striving towards. For me, it is the basis of the ultimate goal (heaven, nirvana, enlightenment, perfection, etc, etc). We (and all components of life/existence) are notes (tones) arranged in space and time (akin to musical notes) and we can only achieve harmony if we understand our nature/character and position ourselves accordingly for the sake of the overall 'music'. Because, outside of the 'music', what significance is there? And, without proper positioning (discipline), what sense do we make (even to ourselves)?
The claim is ‘pattern recognition is the essence of philosophy’. Big claim! And also reductionist, in my view - a ‘nothing but’ kind of claim. I don’t know if philosophy can be said to have an essence, although I’ll defer to Pierre Hadot’s definition of classical philosophy [sup]1[/sup].
So, as I say, I’m not saying patterns don’t exist in nature, as you seem to be doing. (Google it.) But I’m taking issue with the idea that everything comes down to or can be understood in terms of patterns.
Reason can discern relationships, causes, principles and patterns. But not all of the former can be reduced to the latter. I’m not a computer scientist, but I’m pretty sure that any pattern could be output by an algorithm, but that not all algorithms generate patterns.
I suppose I have to concede that the word ‘pattern’ is also used as a metaphor, like in a ‘pattern of behaviour’ or a ‘pattern of deceit’ and so on. But the essence of ‘pattern’ is ‘a repeated design’ and as such it’s not a kind of supreme explanatory metaphor.
———————-
1. ‘ The goal of the ancient philosophies was to cultivate a specific, constant attitude toward existence, by way of the rational comprehension of the nature of humanity and its place in the cosmos.’
Red herring, my favorite!
Quoting Wayfarer
Essence = Pattern
Definition of essence: the properties or attributes by means of which something can be placed in its proper class or identified as being what it is.
Definition of pattern: a repeated (decorative design).
Ring any bells?
Quoting Andre Ariew (Oxford Handbook of Biology)
If we expand population thinking to events, then regularities that occur in events such as the sun rising emerge from collectively perceived potential/significance of individual events. Patterns are not real in nature, only individual events exist. It is language concepts, then, that reify patterns such as ‘the sun rising’.
@tim wood
I maybe completely off the mark here but doesn't all that amount to saying patterns are basically hallucinations - our minds quite literally seeing what isn't there? Are there no patterns at all? :point: paraedolia?
What about the auto-repeat on my record-player? It makes the LP play untill Im deda or dead (which might not take too long). What about births of children? Keep on repeating. What about me taking meth every morning? Repeats itself. What about life appearing after the next big bang? It repeats exactly if lucky. Or unlucky. What about quarks and leptons, being exact repetitions of of one another. What about you saying the same things every time, ending up in the same patterns every time? ?
Personally, I think there’s a difference between saying that there are no patterns ‘out there’ and saying that patterns don’t exist. A pattern exists as a property or quality of a relation: a relative regularity. This pattern would dissolve the moment the event deviates from predictions. When we (used to) travel across the globe, the event of ‘the sun rising’ would deviate from qualitative predictions. Timezones help us to re-conceptualise a relative regularity in a new location.
Ugh! Not likely! Where did that come from?
Just a feeling...
No, seriously - where the hell did that association come from?
If you’re going to make comparisons like that, you’d better be prepared to back it up.
Forget that I said anything at all.
Let's get down to business, shall we? Patterns are repetitions either of entities or processes:
1. Entity pattern: &, &, &,... [& is the entity being repeated]
2. Process pattern: 1, 2, 3,...[+1 is the proccess being repeated]
Now, @tim wood claims that patterns are mental (all in the head), we could even say it's projected onto the world (look up pareidolia) by our minds - I guess tim wood means to say we see what our minds want to see. However, that means there's no necessity for the world to behave in ways that correspond to the patterns we seem to discern in it unless tim wood wants to claim that our minds have some causal power over the world, able to make it do what we feel it should do (pattern), a preposterous claim, don't you think? I can, for example, imagine a pattern in the world, this pattern being (say) adding nitric acid to plants make it grow but me imagining that hypothetical pattern doesn't seem to make that pattern actual.
I'll take a quick early morning stab at this...
What is meant by the 'essence' of something?
The property needed to make it what it is.
What is philosophy?
A process of critical thinking. a way of thinking, with a view to a deeper understanding of life and our place in it. A study of fundamental questions posed which might help in more effective decision-making.
Involves: awareness or identification of a problematic issue; reflection and reasoning; responding by selecting best possible action, given current knowledge and experience. Consideration and evaluation of effects/results.
This kind of thinking process can be repeated as often as necessary.
We can begin to recognise patterns of thought.
Patterns which can be described as negative, positive or neutral.
Depending on circumstance and context.
A negative thinking pattern might be our 'usual' way of thinking *
Sometimes, we need help to see beyond our own patterns or those of society.
We can ask if our thoughts are helpful or harmful.
The essence of philosophy? Also, psychology, sociology - anything related to aspects of being human and making sense of the world.
We want to have the best or healthiest body/mind/spirit possible.
Knowledge is the key and power which enables this.
This, arguably, requires recognition of patterns and ways to think outside the box of patterns.
The aim is to survive - in a better way. Processing philosophically or otherwise.
--------
* https://thebestbrainpossible.com/negative-thinking-depression-mind/
I don’t think that’s what Tim IS saying, but I’ll let him clarify that one. Suffice to say, our minds determine predictions we make in relation to the world, and any relative regularities we perceive help us to construct patterns in our predictions, which inform our actions.
How do you think we perceive relative regularities in a process? How do we even consolidate a process at all? By constructing an abstract representation from a series of periodic observations in the past. So are we really seeing the pattern ‘out there’, or are we perceiving it in our mind and then attributing it to our predictions about the world?
:lol:
I'm happy, happy enough if you agree that patterns can be used to make predictions because that means you're testing the world to see if the pattern you abstracted is correct or not, correct in the sense whether your predictions come true or not. In effect you're acknowledging the existence of an "out there" in this.
If patterns are mental than @timwood must be a pattern..
Only in the sense that any information we receive is incomplete. Not testing the world - testing our predictive representations of the world. It’s not about whether my predictions ‘come true’ or not, but about whether they are useful in determining future interaction. Incorrect predictions can be just as useful as correct ones.
Jordan Peterson!
Now why is that?
What are these turns made of?
No, I won't. :grin:
How would it even be possible to discern, with apodeictic certainty, whether there are intrinsic patterns in Nature, or, there are occurrences in Nature that appear as intrinsically orderly to an intelligent observer?
Given that order is a relation between two things, what sense does it make to say order is intrinsic to two things, one of which is not an observer sufficiently intelligent enough to estimate it? It follows that it makes no difference whatsoever, and is therefore utterly meaningless, for there to be patterns as an intrinsic condition of the empirical domain, if there is no intelligence to which the pattern is comprehensible.
Ironic, though, that it takes an intelligence to determine that which constitutes a pattern, or an orderly occurrence of some kind, then declare there is no such thing as a pattern or orderly occurrence without him as a witness to it. In effect, he is both the author and the arbiter, over that of which he has absolutely no control.
(Sigh)
A row is a relation between ducks, just as a beach is a relation between pebbles. They do not require the say so of a philosopher. But if, as you claim there is no relation between the post that I type, and the post that you read, then there is no possibility of any communication. Unless the pattern is maintained from my keyboard through many causal transformations to your screen, we are not even discussing. Irony of ironies, all is irony.
Perception & Memory
1. Perceive A, parts & whole. Record in memory
2. Perceive B, parts & whole. Cross-check perception of B with memory of A. Match! Pattern. No match! No pattern.
I don't see where intelligence comes into it, unless the definition is very broad indeed. I would have thought something like sensitivity or responsiveness is enough. A tree grows into a gap where it receives more sunlight and away from an area permanently in shadow. There is something here, some relation between the tree and its environment generally, and between the tree and the sun, as a unique part of its environment, something quite predictable, a pattern, a kind of order. Are you inclined to ascribe this pattern to the tree's intelligence? Or to mine for noticing?
Quoting tim wood
And again, what does "mind" do here that sensitivity or responsiveness can't? A tree grows as it does because of the effect of sunlight on chlorophyll (or something like that), not sunlight in the entirety of its being, not each photon as a numerically distinct individual (if it is). Things respond to each other "abstractly", in the sense that only certain aspects are relevant, only certain aspects responded to. What matters is that when the thing does this or is this kind of thing, I do that. A tree is toppled by a boulder tumbling downhill in much the same way it's toppled by a car tumbling downhill; only the mass and rigidity of the object striking the tree is relevant. The color of the car is irrelevant. The exact mineral composition of the boulder is irrelevant. Abstraction, in this simple sense of selective sensitivity, is not a property only of mind.
Sorry, I'll try to behave myself.
Btw, I'm still not clear on the thesis we're all ignoring
Quoting unenlightened
if only because it seems more natural to me to think that everything works this way, so philosophy does too.
((Extra data point: Herbert Simon used to argue there's no such thing as intuition, only pattern recognition. A chess grandmaster seems, to the beginner, to have intuition because he has orders of magnitude more positions and patterns stored away and he recognizes them.))
But you left out the rest of the question.
Quoting unenlightened
Are you saying that computers and enzymes have perceptions and memories?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I'm not clear either, but it is to do with this; that pattern recognition can be a human faculty or an enzyme's capacity. That it can be learned or it can be a way of learning. That it is intuitive, or it is a calculation. I may be wrong, and it can be that there is only an analogical connection between the various usages - that is what I would like to explore.
With other people, not you.
That's one way of imposing a pattern, yes. But the imposition I'm talking about isn't the physical intervention. It's what you thereby facilitate, which is reference, albeit silent. By the intervention you help the pebbles to refer, in a pair-wise manner, to certain appropriate relation words like 'larger-than'.
I admit that 'appropriate' gives pause to the nominalist who calls reference an imposition, rather than a fit. But it can be a fit to previous reference (and hence more or less appropriate), rather than to natural joints. I think someone made a similar point (about it never being from natural scratch), above, while fulminating against the very idea of an imposition.
I've now also admitted that I equate 'pattern', as a count noun, to predicate or sort or kind, which may be anathema.
You say you equate it, as an abstract mass noun, to compressibility, or simplicity.
Like 'information', perhaps it can be both, at least.
I think we have a problem with more than ‘rowness’ if we’re trying to determine the contribution of the subject to the experience of what we want to call the object. For instance, you said we discover features of the duck by bodily interacting with it. We reach out and squeeze. We then receive all kinds of feedback from the duck, such as tactile( we feel it bite and kick) , kinesthetic( we feel it’s resistance against our grasp), auditory ( we hear it quack), and we see all these behaviors. Perceptual psychologists will tell you that the data we actually receive from the world is very minimal. We fill in the rest based on expectations gained from prior experiences. In fact, our expectations and the data from the outside are so inextricably intertwined that it becomes impossible to separate out what is the subjective contribution and what is the objective contribution to our experience of the duck.
Once we remove from from the picture all of the background knowledge we bring to our experience of the ‘duck’ , all that is left is a constantly changing flow
of meaningless data. If I draw a Chinese linguistic form , someone who reads Chinese will
recognize it as a particular word concept. I would see it as an abstract series of shapes. A snake might see it as separated lines and curves. Which is the ‘real’ object? It depends on who is interacting with it. When we expereince a thing , whether it’s a neutrino or a duck, we are interacting with it in complex ways.
But what if we try and imagine the object independently of our interaction with it? Can’t we just disassemble the patterned complexity that we see ( construct) as the object into its components? But if the object for us , as a result of our constructive activity imposed on it , is nothing but this complex of relations, do the components exist in themselves pure and unrelaronal? Physics seems to be coming to the realization that there are no intrinsic and non-relational properties in the world. To be an entity is to be changing in some way i. relation to something else. This would seem to place the basis of pattern , in the form of irreducible relationality and transformation, at the heart of the so-called outside world. It may turn out to be the case that relational pattern , rather than intrinsic content , IS the basis of objective reality.
When you compare the hardware and the software of a computer, I’m sure you note
that the hardware is the ‘physical’ basis of it and the software is the ‘patterned’ implementation of the hardware. Would you want to argue that the software is somehow less real or secondary with respect to the hardware? But you wouldnt deny that the software allows us to make real changes in our brains and in the world. Furthermore , there is no way to reduce
e software language to a hardware language of physical causality without losing what is essential to the software description. But if software language is only secondary and derivative , there should be a way to convey all of the meaning of the software language via a hardware description.
This has led semiologists to conclude that codes and patterns are intrinsic to nature ( genetic code) , not just to minds.
By looking.
More so by communicating via the internet: bouncing the signal my words are transformed into around the world and collecting them into an equivalent image on your screen to the one on mine, to be confirmed by your making a sensible reply. Your looking on its own or my looking on its own might be a phantasm, but our communication cannot be. the pattern is demonstrated to be preserved in the invisible world.
Science is true because the magic works.
I wouldn' t call that Nature. Einstein hadn't internet means. Yet he saw the true Nature of the pattern of Mercury.
What, your seeing the sun come above the horizon is not an event in nature? Or is not ;the earth becoming progressively illuminated also an event, even if not seen?
But the world is brimful with relations that don't require us to be noticing them, or even involve us at all, in order to exist.
Quoting Joshs :up:
The codes and patterns that are intrinsic to nature that you assert in the second passage quoted above are the intrinsic relational properties of the world, which nonetheless do not need us to create, or even mediate, their existence it would seem.
:up: Hence everything is information!
This would be the tree in the forest problem? If nobody sees it, does it fall? :smile:
Quoting Joshs
Yea, this is the realist conclusion of semiologists. And their patron saint, Charles Peirce, found it necessary to ground all this subject-independence in a Divine origin.
At any rate, realist semiology asks why it should be necessary to attach all phenomena to the subject in order to arrive at a perfectly satisfactory account of the way things are. Postmodern philosophers respond that if we examine closely what it is we are doing when we posit a world independent of us , and a history that can be extracted independently of our present , we will find that the idea of subject-independent phenomena is no longer useful, interesting or even coherent.
Specifically , they claim that when we imagine or theorize about the oldest and simplest forms of existence , those most distant in time from the appearance of human beings, we are not only making use of the latest cultural
understanding to model this subject-independence, but there isn’t a single aspect of our natural history model that isn’t completely beholden to the current framework that defines its terms. The reason for this is that the basis of any inquiry into what ‘is’ or what ‘was’ is a pragmatic affair. What ‘is’ only has sense for us in relation to our aims, goals and purposes. When we ask what exists we are always asking what we can do with a thing. Being and use are not separate issues, they are the same issue.
Now, what if one acknowledges this and still wants to maintain that there is and was a subject independent world? It becomes a powerless notion, because unlike the Kantian thing in itself , the postmodernist ‘outside world’ doesn’t unidirectionally shape our representations of it. They argue that history must be distinguished from historicism. Historicism assumes we can retrieve intact previous eras of human or natural history in order to study them. But the actual historical nature of our experiencing of the world precludes such a duplication of what was. Instead , historical study is always revision and reinterpretation. To return to the most archaic past is always to move into a new future.
Well, something changes doesn't it, such that if we were to be there after it had happened, we would see the tree fallen?
Yes, but it's about a way of seeing things. Whether certain paradigms are consistent with reality, or not. Obviously much must happen outside of our awareness, but it is only the things within our awareness that can create our reality, no?
We can take this deeper, if information is an evolutionary interaction of form, then information causes a physical change to our neural patterning, thus physically informing us of externalities. And we thus interact with that physical informing, rather than an external world. What we are, what it is, is a consequence of that physical neural informing. This way of understanding takes into account such things as colour, sound, smell, taste - things that science tells us do not exist in the external world. In the external world there are frequencies of light, vibrations, discreet particles, etc.
What I am describing is the Enactivist paradigm, which I believe is the best conception of reality I have come across, slightly better than idealism.
I'd say all valid paradigms are consistent with (what we know of) reality, until they're not. If they're not it means they've been falsified by some new observation or experimental result.
Quoting Pop
Wouldn't the process of the physical informing be in part at least the action of an external (to my body) world? How else could we understand it?
I don't have a problem with the enactivist paradigm, providing it is acknowledged that it is not just we humans who are doing the enacting, The appearance to us of the external (to our bodies) world is a collaborative enactment between our bodies and the external world in which they are embedded, and latter provides the medium within which our enactments can occur.
I was referring to human pattern recognition by what I said and yes, the immune system and computers could be treated as functioning analogously but not necessarily identically.
The immune system and computers have their own version of memory and perception but, mind you, it doesn't look like they're thinking like human brains do.
If that's true, then we're addicted to mystery, because without it, we slip into dementia.
Yes, I'm glad you understand how we are enmeshed into the whole biosphere evolving, otherwise enactivism might lead you to some sort of solipsistic ideation, which is total BS nonsense once you have a systems understanding. :up:
That would explain the ubiquity of puzzles. I believe mental stimulation is recommended...
Exactly. We'll manufacture puzzles to simplify if we need more mystery to engage.