Emergence is incoherent from physical to mental events
Claim: Emergence only works from physical to physical events. Emergence is incoherent from physical to mental events. Thoughts?
Implication 1: Objects need a subject or there is no object.
Implication 2: Subjects need objects, yet how does the experiential perspective (aka experience) come from non-experience?
I am not a solipsist per se nor do I necessarily think the world has to exist without a subject, but that conclusion or topic may be separate from the main claim here which is about emergence, so I'd like to keep the debate about emergence and how experience can emerge de novo from non-experience.
Folks like @apokrisis seem to say there is an illusion created by social learning. I always rebut this with the idea that the illusion is its own phenomena regardless of cause which takes "place". It is a process happening that is not an object, which is completely different than all other phenomena which are treated as object qua object and this is clearly not object but subject. The difference may be on how radical this departure is, and the nature of subject itself which is the inner space "experience" itself, not what causes it.
Implication 1: Objects need a subject or there is no object.
Implication 2: Subjects need objects, yet how does the experiential perspective (aka experience) come from non-experience?
I am not a solipsist per se nor do I necessarily think the world has to exist without a subject, but that conclusion or topic may be separate from the main claim here which is about emergence, so I'd like to keep the debate about emergence and how experience can emerge de novo from non-experience.
Folks like @apokrisis seem to say there is an illusion created by social learning. I always rebut this with the idea that the illusion is its own phenomena regardless of cause which takes "place". It is a process happening that is not an object, which is completely different than all other phenomena which are treated as object qua object and this is clearly not object but subject. The difference may be on how radical this departure is, and the nature of subject itself which is the inner space "experience" itself, not what causes it.
Comments (221)
Yeah, I don't really think the whole "mental events are just physical events inside you" is saying very much except redescribing what mental events are in a non-standard way.
Your experience is simply equivalent to God's experience. The table is there for you because it is there too for God. This relies upon a world entirely made of spirits and that nothing is material.
I believe I'm borrowing from Leibniz here.
In my head your question only goes two ways.
Either all experience is physical
or
Everything is 'experience' and our reality is simply God's experience.
Materialism requires that we jump across an epistemic chasm, unwarranted. If we have no reason to trust our first-hand experiences of consciousness then we have absolutely no reason to trust materialism as a theory of mind.
Hmm, I'm not sure why God has to be in the picture here. Are you equating mental events with God? How about rephrase it "Everything is 'experience' and our reality is simply experience."?
Yes. The materialist explanation is: "Don't ask how, it just happen(s)". That's it. The contortions in language that are used in the other similar thread to hide this simple statement are mind-boggling.
It is our minds that are exploring and creating as we live. Why deny this continuous experience of life?
Yes, I agree. I am not sure if it is a lack of understanding of the problem, evasion, or what, but this essential basic problem seems to be either missed, ignored, or denied it seems.
Quoting darthbarracuda
That seems to be the uncomfortable conclusion- a sort of panpsychism. I don't even like the conclusion. It's not like I rather have it that way. To me, a more elegant theory would be purely materialistic, but it doesn't seem like the two categories are ever really merged without some very sophisticated panpscyhist theory of sorts. Also, panpsychism does not have to be brute mental events, it can be as sophisticated in its dynamics and process, but the experiential point of view is at least in the mix and accounted for. Thihs is related to the idea that it is incoherent for mental states to"arise" (or be related to) physical states as what is arising and what is arising in, is not accounted for, but simply comes on the scene through magical fiat (i.e. and so it just "is" when these such and such events are correlated).
"our reality is simply experience"
Ah, but now Whose experience is it? For there to have been an experience we understood someone or something experience it. So you have to define a base level of 'experience' and I used God, only because I was referencing Leibniz.
I personally do believe it be materialism. We didn't know quarks were a thing a few years ago. And a few years from now we might discover more about the reasoning behind mental events such as they are actually constituted in reality through physical events. The way we know have quarks that explain certain nuclear forces. Forces that a few years ago were seen as the end, that's it, no deeper we go. Just like how we still think the mind's experience is undefinable.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Indeed, but it only asks you to do so temporarily until science has caught up to how to explain it.
Depends on what one means by mental events, I guess. Such canned statements are pretty meaningless without showing what philosophical scaffolding underlies them.
If you think of mental and physical as belonging to the same ontological category, then there is nothing strange about the idea of the relationship of emergence holding between them. If you frame these two concepts as belonging to radically different categories, then of course the idea of emergence will be incoherent.
This is the huge unwarranted "chasm" @darthbarracuda was talking about. It is incoherent for mental events to simply "be" in relation to physical events- they are two radically different things. EVERYTHING else is an object until we get to mental events.
Correct, so I guess the claim is they are two radically different categories then, and that the former theory of ontological sameness is itself incorrect based on its radical difference that cannot be explained by heaping on yet more physical theories.
Or does it only mean epistemic emergence and all the true causes are at the bottom level and the top level vocab is only useful/indispensibly for us à la: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance.
I think both are problematic, but since Apokrisis is not really a materialist his philosophy can get around the first issue. The phenomenal identity would be identical to the semiotic relation (with its physically real sociological augmentation= I am) which is similar to the classic: Water = H20. You really only have to accept abstract functional states can also have phenomenal identity.
I doubt classical materialism can/should have that.
Quoting schopenhauer1
First let's establish what emergence is from a metaphysical point of view. It's not as simple as saying that a phenomenon suddenly starts happening that never happened before. That still entails something coming from nothing and seems quite incoherent. So how do you conceptualize emergence?
But I would probably agree with you that I cannot see the mental emerging from the physical (whatever that is supposed to mean).
Read the rest of my claim. If we have no reason to trust our first-hand experiences of consciousness then we have absolutely no reason to trust materialism as a theory of mind. Science is given an epistemic free-bee as an unexplained explainer. My experiences are of higher epistemic certainty than a more distant scientific theory. If a scientific theory threatens something of higher epistemic certainty then the wise choice is to reject the scientific theory.
You would have to explain this in order for me to talk more definitively on this.
I'll just accept the almighty Wikipedia's stance on emergence for now:
In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is a phenomenon whereby larger entities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities such that the larger entities exhibit properties the smaller/simpler entities do not exhibit.
Emergence is central in theories of integrative levels and of complex systems. For instance, the phenomenon of life as studied in biology is an emergent property of chemistry, and psychological phenomena emerge from the neurobiological phenomena of living things.
In philosophy, theories that emphasize emergent properties have been called emergentism. Almost all accounts of emergentism include a form of epistemic or ontological irreducibility to the lower levels.[1]
Thanks.
Quoting Agustino
See response to JupiterJess for emergentism.
I read a book once by a really mathy person. Its called a Strange Loop.
He uses the analogy of a pool table. He posits very small particles that bounce indefinitely around the pool table. Some of these thousands of particles over time eventually clump together resulting in slightly larger particles that bounce indefinetely. By zooming out enough the static made by the thousands of particles become unrecognizable by how small they are; and we get to see the billiard-sized balls bouncing around the table. Now no longer do we have the microscopic view of thousands of particles lets call this reality A. Now we have the over the top view of a normal number of balls bouncing, and you do NOT see the static of particles, lets call this reality B.
Our whole lives we walk around in reality B. It's the level that we see it, the level that our brains can reliably create experience out from.
Is it wrong to say that reality A isn't real? Yes. Even though the human without a microscope had NO CHOICE but to say that reality A isn't real.
To equate the analogy to our discussion:
We see a table irl. The idea of a table pops into our heads. This is reality B. All we have ever known.
Isn't it then a fairly small jump to consider that a larger phenomena (matter, thoughts, planets) is simply comprised of smaller physical events that we cannot measure YET?
The problem I immediately see with this, when applied to philosophy of mind, is that we see emergentism in physical-to-physical systems. It's quite a different thing to say there is emergentism in physical-to-mental systems due to them being two different kinds of things. Which is why the materialist has to hold that the mental, just kidding!, isn't actually really mental but simply a physical state.
I am very much in agreement here. The radical difference has to be minimized (read ignored, denied, or miscategorized) in order for the chasm to appear to be bridged, when in fact nothing was bridged. The key here is the difference between a physical-to-physical system, and a physical-to-mental system.
So how is this relating to the problem of emergence of mental events? Your thought experiment there just keeps proving my point that physical-to-physical events can be described in emergentist models, but physical-to-mental events cannot be. The very act of "seeing" A or B needs mental to presume any claim to begin with.
Sure, I have a longer post typed out, but I think this can be understood in fewer words.
How would your namesake express the identity of consciousness? It it identical to a particular manifestation of the Will?
You in starting this discussion have already agreed to framing "these two concepts as belonging to radically different categories" Just like I have with framing them similarly.
Quoting schopenhauer1
The analogy simply expresses that big things may come from smaller things. If you don't see even the possibility of a larger event such as a thought coming from smaller events, It's fair to assume you don't believe in atoms, or evolution, or stars.
No man, that is not the claim. I already expressed my agreement on emergence of physical-to-physical events. It is physical-to-mental that becomes the issue, being that they are so radically different. Mental is experiential- a subject, where all other phenomena are not mental, are object, or so it seems.
More-or-less yes. According to Schopenhauer, Will is an undifferentiated (striving-like) principle. The flipside of this is the world of representation which is mediated by time/space and the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason which has the condition of causality of events. Platonic Ideas are in his theory too, free from the PSR, mediating Will into objects (a bit vague how that really enters the picture), and then the world of appearances is the world of time/space and essentially the tragic playground where the principle of Will fights against itself. So, short answer, yes.
And like I said, just stating the claim is not informative or productive. "Mental," "physical" - these are just words that don't stand in relation to anything in particular, until you unpack them and show how you use them in ways to which we all could relate. It's quite possible that, given your meaning, the claim is true, and even banal and self-evident. And then there would be no argument, because those who think that mental could emerge from physical obviously mean something else.
Quoting schopenhauer1
The problem with this is that it's not at all clear what emergence is. Apparently, you say that non-existent properties will arise from existent ones. I can see how this would happen in certain cases. For example, I can see how the uniform distribution of molecules in a closed container will occur over time out of their initially random motion. So I can see how uniform distribution emerges out of the conditions of random motion in a closed container. But I cannot see how something entirely new - like imagine a physical force - emerges from absolutely nothing. For example, we know that gravity is very weak in quantum mechanics so it's not even detectable. But it still exists - if it didn't exist, I couldn't see how it was possible for it to emerge - and become noticeable - on the macro scale.
In other words, nothing really emerges unless it is simply constructed out of pre-existent things. The notion of emergence in any other sense implies that something comes out of nothing, which is impossible.
From "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?" article about Thomas Nagel's theory: Nagel begins by arguing that the conscious experience is widespread, present in many animals (particularly mammals), and that for an organism to have a conscious experience it must be special, in the sense that its qualia or "subjective character of experience" are unique. Nagel stated, “An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism - something that it is like for the organism to be itself.”[1]
Mental is thoughts, qualia, perception, concepts, first person (subjective) point of view. Physical is matter/energy, force, and their interactions. Neural firing patterns is physical. The thought of neural firing patterns is mental.
It is what created that post you wrote. Or do you think a group of chemicals got together over tea and decided to write it? Incredible what academia can do to minds.
Does anyone seriously, I mean seriously, doubt they have a mind or do they think it is a matter of Cosmic Thermodynamic Destiny to enjoy hot dogs with mustard and sauerkraut?
I tend to agree. The horse seems to be put before the cart. Saying that downward causation is true, does not mean emergentism, it is a consequence of a more complex event affecting its constituent less complex parts, but the more complex event does not have to be discrete from its cause.
Subject is wrapped up in object so intrinsically that there is no one without the other. But this does not say anything in favor of physicalism. In fact, if anything, it works against it.
You might have to go through that one step by step.
But back to my question. Is emergence something that happens on the mental side of your equation or not. If so, how? If not, why not?
Help us understand what you mean by "mind" here.
No, as I said, mental is wrapped up in physical. I can say green is a certain wavelength of light. It is measured as this, I can measure it, quantify, it explain its math, but the concept of wavelength, light, and the actual experience of green is mind.
I find it hard to imagine having a mind without any body or other sensory input. In particular not even concepts such as simple numbers would be obtainable by "pure mentality". Such a thing is surely unimaginable.
Do dogs have souls? How about the most recent common ancestor of dogs and us? Yes? What about spiders? What about the most recent common ancestor of us, dogs, and spiders? Or the most recent common ancestor of us, dogs, spiders, and sawgrass?
I don't know, but I'm sure at least all the animals you mentioned have a "what it's like aspect", a subjective point of view which I guess is mind or at least experiential.
So now you are saying the mental is "wrapped up" in the physical. But somehow, that ain't causal?
So where are we headed? Mondalogy? Correlationism? And could that even work in a post-determinism physicalism where the physics is not clockwork any longer?
Define what it is to be "wrapped up".
But there's not something it's like to be sawgrass, right?
Is there something it's like to be E. Coli?
Of course, it is all as we experience it. Exactly and precisely. No illusions. No supernatural forces of any kind.
If one wishes to understand the nature of transformation, it is necessary to continue to peer deeper. Exactly what is quanta and how does the mind interact with it too create the sense of solidity where there is only the quantum cloud? There is much more to discover but mind is not an illusion and it is in constant play throughout our life, and it is most certainly not a soup of chemicals dining at a McDonald's.
I'm not sure about causal- mental events perceive the causal. I guess it could be a correlationalism. Mental events are correlated with physical. Physical can build up into more complex parts, meanwhile, mental is not accounted for. As I said before, the radical difference of experience from other phenomena makes it so that it is nearly impossible to bridge that gap of how objects cause experience. Though they are correlated.
I entertain the notion of panexperientialism such as Whitehead's notion as experience does not seem to come de novo from physical parts but seems in the mix all along. I don't necessarily like the answer, but it is only one that seems to work to solve that problem without getting experience from magical fiat.
Is "panexperientialism" going to include, say, rocks? Clouds? Neutrinos?
Supposing it does, does that solve your problem? Maybe you allow something "experience-ish" to be attributed to a grain of sand. Fine. What about the "what it's like to be an X"? Are you extending that to everything, or still reserving that to some smaller class?
Good questions. I don't know. If Whitehead was anywhere near right with his speculation, it might be something like this (from http://www.iep.utm.edu/processp/#SH1b):
Although the system is a monistic one, which is characterized by experience going “all the way down” to the simplest and most basic actualities, there is a duality between the types of organizational patterns to which societies of actual occasions might conform. In some instances, actual occasions will come together and give rise to a “regnant” or dominant society of occasions. The most obvious example of this is when the molecule-occasions and cell-occasions in a body produce, by means of a central nervous system, a mind or soul. This mind or soul prehends all the feeling and experience of the billions of other bodily occasions and coordinates and integrates them into higher and more complex forms of experience. The entire society that supports and includes a dominant member is, to use Hartshorne’s term, a compound individual.
Other times, however, a bodily society of occasions lacks a dominant member to organize and integrate the experiences of others. Rocks, trees, and other non-sentient objects are examples of these aggregate or corpuscular societies. In this case, the diverse experiences of the multitude of actual occasions conflict, compete, and are for the most part lost and cancel each other out. Whereas the society of occasions that comprises a compound individual is a monarchy, Whitehead describes corpuscular societies as “democracies.” This duality accounts for how, at the macroscopic phenomenal level, we experience a duality between the mental and physical despite the fundamentally and uniformly experiential nature of reality. Those things that seem to be purely physical are corpuscular societies of occasions, while those objects that seem to possess consciousness, intelligence, or subjectivity are compound individuals.
Wow. Thanks for the very thorough answer, since I don't know Whitehead at all.
Here's what I don't get right off though: we're trying to understand the difference between stuff that's A and stuff that's ¬A (speaking, ahem, loosely); Whitehead tells us that stuff that's A is B, and stuff that's ¬A is ¬B, the two different sorts of organization you describe. Could be helpful. Science does this. Why does this rock move the needle of my compass but this other one doesn't? Because one of them's a lodestone, and here's how that works, and here's how you can test it to see if it's true, and so on. If you posit an explanatory B, that gives you the opportunity to test for the presence of B by means that don't involve A, predict A when you've got B and then see if A turns up.
But in Whitehead's case, I assume we deduce the presence of the B-style organization only and everywhere we would before have just said we have something A. The description you give is evocative, it's interesting to think about, but it just piggybacks on what we already know. There will never come a time when you can say, here's something with B organization, let's see if it's got a soul.
Correct. It's speculative metaphysics. I don't necessarily expect it to be tested.
Admittedly, not my cup of tea, so I appreciate your patience with me.
From my point of view, it looks like a change in vocabulary. Does it look like something else to you? For instance, does it help you answer the question why there's something it's like to be a bat but not something it's like to be a rock? (Assuming there isn't.) Do we say it's because the constituent occasions of bats and rocks are organized differently? That looks to me like saying the sleeping potion works because it has a soporific power.
I am not completely satisfied with the answer, but again, at least it accounts for mental occasions and does not get it from magical fiat. Thus, though fantastical in one way, it is more plausible in relative comparison. Like I said, I'd rather an elegant physical theory, but just because I want it, does not mean that it must be so. I do think the radical difference in categories of mental events and physical events makes it incoherent to have mental events emerge from physical without there being some sort of "sleight of hand" where mental is really not accounted for- it just "shows up on the scene" with enough physical interactions going on.
So your argument here says the physical parts can evolve complexity. We have the functional circuitry that is a brain connected to sensory organs and muscle systems. A machinery that is "computing" in some general sense we can understand. And then the mental is just there as a correlation? It is not caused by any of the functional goings-on, but it somehow completely mirrors them in a non-caused fashion?
And when I ask if this mind has any causal structure of its own, you don't even attempt to answer? It is enough to say the mind seems "wrapped up" in that physical process. We just somehow find the two things in the same place, but you "know" there isn't a causal connection, even if can't offer any reason to arrive at that strong conclusion.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Quoting schopenhauer1
So now we have Whitehead. Isn't this a claim about emergence? If there is organisation of the actual occasions of experience, then this gives rise to full consciousness. And if there is instead disorder and conflict, then emergence does not take place, as fulll consciousness depends on a further global level of integration.
If your answer isn't monadology, then is it now emergence? So you might find mental emergence a valid causal story. And perhaps you then are happy with physical emergence on the same grounds. The form of the Whiteheadian explanation certainly follows the usual physicalist account of emergence.
Yet for some reason you refuse the idea of the emergence of the mental from the physical, where many others might just say the mental is the name we give to this particular physically emergent property.
Does this sum it up so far?
I'll be willing to say that the mental is "caused" by the physical, but the question is, what is this mental that is being caused? That is what does not make sense. It is correlated with such-and-such interactions, but to say that "thus mental emerges from interactions" is tantamount to a magical process of dualism is going on.. Something you would seem to be against if you were scientifically minded.
Quoting apokrisis
Correct, some emergence may be going on here, so I guess it does answer the question "do mental events have emergent properties?" But notice, mental events don't just "come on the scene" based on non-mental interactions- they are there to begin with, so the emergence is happening at the mental level with the mental substrate being his idea of "actual occasions". There is some sort of experiencing regarding the non-hierarchical arranged actual occasions. What a non-hierarchical "democratic" arrangement is like in its experiential nature, I have no idea of course.
But then in the next breath you are quite taken by panexperientialism, an utterly different ontology. That jumping about from one explanatory basis to another is what makes it hard to have a discussion. It allows you always to deny any attempt to provide a deflationary account of "the mind" as you reserve the right to invoke mystical being at any point.
Don't tree-occasions, grass-occasions, snake-occasions, and all the other related occasions in a body produce, by means of a network of plant, animal, and mineral interactions, an ecosystem. Or am I misunderstanding what you're trying to say.
The entire world would instead operate instead as a totum, to where it determines it's parts as a relationship with itself - as oppose to a composite.
This is the more sophisticated view.
Unfortunately reductionists can point to the liquidity of water or the magnetic field of an iron bar as simple reductionist models of emergence, or collective behaviour.
H2O molecules already have weak electrostatic forces due to their asymmetrical form - a faint polarity. And so when a gaseous collection of molecules cools enough to let this faint attraction become the dominant organising force, you get the new property of a liquid state. But that faint attraction was "always there". So no mystery as to why the liquid state emerges as a global property.
So reductionism has a good theory of emergence in terms of pre-existing, but very faint, material properties. This then allows reductionism to ignore a bigger story involving top-down causes that actually shape those lower level properties.
So "emergence" turns out to be more than just one kind of thing. A thread about emergence has to make it clear which variety it might have in mind.
Isn't the critical fact of emergence that the emergent properties cannot be predicted from or traced back to, the properties of the constituents? The properties of water can be, at least in this case.
That's pretty interesting.
I've recently been bogged down with simple refutations like those to top-down systems. Do you have any books that recommend solutions to these kinds of problems in favor of top-down systems?
There are plenty of popularisations, like Arthur Koestler's Ghost in the Machine, Fritjof Capra's Tao of Physics and its follow-ups, Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach. Yet they tend to miss the mark for me.
The trick here is that reductionists are right about their version of emergence. That has to be given credit. But then there is still the larger picture which is the kind of emergence that hierarchy thinkers or semiotic theorists would be talking about - where top-down constraints shape the parts.
They speculate that this technology could develop into practical telepathy with much more refined capabilities in the reasonably near future. If that happens, would that change this discussion?
That was the original holist proposal really, back around the 1920s level of understanding with guys like Broad, Smuts, Alexander and Lloyd Morgan. Back before there were mathematical models that could predict - at least by simulation - emergent properties as the result of collective behaviour.
So back when modelling was stuck with simple linear equations, then that kind of emergence might as well be magic. Properties may as well pop out as there was no maths that could predict them.
But then with computers and non-linear maths becoming a practical thing, we have had an explosion in the modelling of such emergence. In a sense, the reductionists have claimed back that part of what holism was trying to steal away. :)
I hate to ask you this. I already have "Life's Ratchet" on my reading list, along with references from other posters, but could you give me a reference or two.
Um, since when did correlation mean emergence? You'd have to explain that bit of straw man.
Quoting apokrisis
We agree on something.
Quoting apokrisis
Though you do not account for mental events, just how their physical correlate interacts in its realm. Or you jump over the gap and presume the very thing to be explained, thus conveniently skipping that hard part.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't think so. Actual occasions would be the experiential aspect of what is measured.
Quoting apokrisis
What do you mean by deflationary? Reductionist?
James Gleick's Chaos and Roger Lewin's Complexity are still great.
I couldn't begin to answer this in a style that would do justice to Whitehead's process philosophy so I'll quote from this website https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/03/07/objectiles-and-actual-occasions/:
[quote=Objectiles and Actual Occasions blog by larvalsubjects]When Whitehead calls actual occasions “drops of experience” great care must be taken not to be mislead by his choice of language. Ordinarily we think of experience as something restricted to living and sentient beings. Experience here refers to the way a sentient being receives the world. For Whitehead– and I think this is one of the least meritorious dimensions of his metaphysics —all entities are drops of experience. Whether we are speaking of a rock, a subatomic particle, or a human being, these actual occasions are drops of experience. Objectiles are drops of experience not for us, but for themselves. That is, just as a human being might be said to be the sum of their experiences, a rock is the sum of its experiences. “…In the becoming of an actual entity, the potential unity of many entities in disjunctive diversity… acquires the real unity of the one actual entity; so that the actual entity is the real concrescence of many potentials” (22).
“Disjunctive diversity” refers to a set of existing objectiles or actual occasions independent of one another. Whitehead remarks that
[t]he ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive ‘many’ which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesizes. The many become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively ‘many’ in process of passage into conjunctive unity. (21)
Concrescence refers to the manner in which things grow together to form a unity. Consequently, in the case of a tree, we can see how the manner in which the tree is a conjunctive unity of a disjunctive diversity belonging to the field that it inhabits or in which it becomes. The disjunctive diversity relevant to the becoming of the tree consists of photons of light, water, carbon dioxide, minerals in the soil, etc. These photons of light, molecules of water, carbon dioxide, and minerals are themselves actual occasions. The tree itself is a concrescence or assemblage of these other actual occasions producing a conjunctive unity that is itself a novel entity. The tree is “built” out of these other elements, but is also something new in relation to these elements.
It is here that we get Whitehead’s famous doctrine of “prehensions”. The term “prehension” refers to relations among objectiles or actual occasions or the manner in which one objectile draws on aspects from another actual occasion in its becoming or process. “…[T]wo descriptions are required for an actual entity: (a) one which is analytical of its potentiality for ‘objectification’ in the becoming of other actual entities, and (b) another which is analytical of the process which constitutes its own becoming” (23). When Whitehead speaks of “objectification” he is referring to the manner in which some aspect of another actual occasion is realized or integrated in another actual entity. Thus, for example, the tree becomes or continues its adventure in space-time through a prehension of light, but in prehending photons of light it transforms these prehensions through photosynthesis. Thus Whitehead will say that, “…every prehension consists of three factors: (a) the ‘subject’ which is prehending, namely the actual entity in which that prehension is a concrete element; (b) the ‘datum’ which is prehended; (c) the ‘subjective form’ which is how the subject prehends the datum” (ibid.). The ‘subject’ prehending in my above example is the tree, the datum prehended are the photons of light, and the result of photosynthesis is the ‘subjective form’ this datum takes in the becoming of the tree.[/quote]
Boy, I really don't understand, but I appreciate your effort. We should probably leave it at that.
You did it again. As soon as you feel pinned down to a specific position, you switch the story.
You just about grudgingly tied the correlational story of this mind stuff that tracks the fortunes of the matter stuff - as it becomes complexly organised and shows new "emergent" features - then immediately pull back from the causal implications.
You almost admitted to the causal link - in saying the mental is somehow "wrapped up" in the physical, and therefore more than merely just some "correlation". Now you have to rescue your ghost in the machine by a hasty retreat.
Mind and matter can travel in the same bus, eat in the same restaurants, but never actually be found in the same section of those places. There must be no actual mixing of the races.
Quoting schopenhauer1
So you will repeat to your last dying breath. I get that.
But here I am asking you to show the firm ground to your own questioning. Not having much luck so far.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Naturally immanent and not transcendently supernatural.
But this wrapped up could be the very experientialness of matter itself, perhaps. I don't see how it can be wrapped up in any other way other than being a strict dualist- the mystical kind you don't like. If you claim that mental is always there, then you are either a panpsychist or you are a dualist. Dualism means that there is some sort other stuff outside of nature. Panpsychism, to use a word you like, is "immanent" in nature at the least, as its equated with it and not transcendental or some other realm.
Quoting apokrisis
Actually that is the opposite- if panpsychism has it, they are a neutral monism of sorts.
Quoting apokrisis
And I think that panpsychism is immanent. To propose mental events comes on the scene magically seems to be mystical mysterious theory. That is something you would not want to get on board with I'm sure, but unintentionally, you may be doing just that.
As a side note, you should read that quote I provided in the last post to T Clark. I think its closer to your Pericean logic than you might think.
So explain to me how this story of correlation actually works then. If the material becomes convolutedly organised in a way that produces emergent organisation and global properties, why does the mental follow suit? Is it being caused to do so by the material changes. Or does it just like going along for the ride for some reason?
Classic correlationism is monadology. So what is this new version that you appear to be suggesting exactly?
And if instead you are claiming panexperientialism or some kind of dual aspect monism, then maybe you can now claim a free ride. But you get into other kinds of idiocy. If experience is a property of matter, then in what sense does it do anything (as properties are normally about the capacity for doing things). Panpsychism becomes just epiphenomenalism by another name unless it is causing matter to behave. So your correlationism looks right out of the window if you want to grant actual occasions the power of agency.
It's not up to me to make sense of the many positions you want to dance between. Although I would agree that none of the ones you have indicated so far in fact bear much critical examination.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yes. Of course. :-}
Quoting schopenhauer1
Making the dualism immanent is not a good solution. Naturalism is about nature as a coherent unity.
[quote=Objectiles and Actual Occasions blog by larvalsubjects]When Whitehead calls actual occasions “drops of experience” great care must be taken not to be mislead by his choice of language. Ordinarily we think of experience as something restricted to living and sentient beings. Experience here refers to the way a sentient being receives the world. For Whitehead– and I think this is one of the least meritorious dimensions of his metaphysics —all entities are drops of experience. Whether we are speaking of a rock, a subatomic particle, or a human being, these actual occasions are drops of experience. Objectiles are drops of experience not for us, but for themselves. That is, just as a human being might be said to be the sum of their experiences, a rock is the sum of its experiences. “…In the becoming of an actual entity, the potential unity of many entities in disjunctive diversity… acquires the real unity of the one actual entity; so that the actual entity is the real concrescence of many potentials” (22).
“Disjunctive diversity” refers to a set of existing objectiles or actual occasions independent of one another. Whitehead remarks that
[t]he ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive ‘many’ which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesizes. The many become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively ‘many’ in process of passage into conjunctive unity. (21)
Concrescence refers to the manner in which things grow together to form a unity. Consequently, in the case of a tree, we can see how the manner in which the tree is a conjunctive unity of a disjunctive diversity belonging to the field that it inhabits or in which it becomes. The disjunctive diversity relevant to the becoming of the tree consists of photons of light, water, carbon dioxide, minerals in the soil, etc. These photons of light, molecules of water, carbon dioxide, and minerals are themselves actual occasions. The tree itself is a concrescence or assemblage of these other actual occasions producing a conjunctive unity that is itself a novel entity. The tree is “built” out of these other elements, but is also something new in relation to these elements.
It is here that we get Whitehead’s famous doctrine of “prehensions”. The term “prehension” refers to relations among objectiles or actual occasions or the manner in which one objectile draws on aspects from another actual occasion in its becoming or process. “…[T]wo descriptions are required for an actual entity: (a) one which is analytical of its potentiality for ‘objectification’ in the becoming of other actual entities, and (b) another which is analytical of the process which constitutes its own becoming” (23). When Whitehead speaks of “objectification” he is referring to the manner in which some aspect of another actual occasion is realized or integrated in another actual entity. Thus, for example, the tree becomes or continues its adventure in space-time through a prehension of light, but in prehending photons of light it transforms these prehensions through photosynthesis. Thus Whitehead will say that, “…every prehension consists of three factors: (a) the ‘subject’ which is prehending, namely the actual entity in which that prehension is a concrete element; (b) the ‘datum’ which is prehended; (c) the ‘subjective form’ which is how the subject prehends the datum” (ibid.). The ‘subject’ prehending in my above example is the tree, the datum prehended are the photons of light, and the result of photosynthesis is the ‘subjective form’ this datum takes in the becoming of the tree.[/quote]
Following is an excerpt which describes the necessity of any Creative Force in a complete metaphysics, which was why it is primordial Whitehead's process metaphysics.
http://people.bu.edu/wwildman/bce/whitehead.htm
Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)
The Necessity of God and the Divine Natures
"The system thus far described is incomplete in that it cannot adequately explain the foundations of the creative advance into novelty which characterizes the universe. As Hosinski points out, there are three questions which remain unresolved (see Hosinski, 156-163). The first relates to potentiality. If actual occasions merely prehend the objective forms of the past, the world would be a very dull place."
"The second as-of-yet unanswered question regards the origin of subjectivity. One can explain the steps involved in the development of a subjective aim in the process of concrescence, but one still needs to locate the origin of the initial subjective aim."
"The final question which remains unanswered is as to the order and value evident in creation. Whitehead asserts that there must be certain categorial conditions which undergird the unfolding of the creative process."
"The answer to these questions as to the origins of potential, the initial subjective aim, and order and value is God. God is the atemporal actual occasion which provides the world with its aims and with the eternal objects which guide creation. God must be an actual occasion, for according to the ontological principle, the reality of the initial aim, general potential and order and value must issue forth from an object of experience. God is not an afterthought to the system, but rather an integral part to its operation and description of both process and reality. God is the reason (and therefore the entity) which makes the existence of other actual entities possible. God "provides the limitation for which no reason can be given: for all reason flows from it. God is the ultimate limitation, and His existence is the ultimate irrationality" (SMW, 257). This is not to suggest that God is truly irrational, but God is the precondition for the existence of rationality."
Sure. In strangulated language, Whitehead is making the essential systems argument. The whole shapes its parts, the parts (re)construct that whole. You have a causal interaction in which the material system forms a functional relation. A tree turns photons (as free energy) into some material structure that is meaningful to "it" as an autonomous lifeform. And you can situate that tree within the physical world where that also makes sense. A tree is like a more sophisticated tornado in that it is a form that survives as entropy "blows through it".
So Whitehead is trying to employ a systems ontology. We even get a nod towards triadicism.
The tree is the global entity that embodies a purpose - it is the general habit that "prehends". The photon energy is then the "datum" - the external material flow it seeks to regulate. And that photon energy gets turned into the material structure needed to compose the tree, maintain that regulatory structure.
So you have the basic causal logic that describes a hierarchically-organised system - the kind of structure that emerges dissipatively in nature as a material process.
But then Whitehead just pastes "mental" over everything in unwarranted fashion. Everything gets labelled as "experiential".
As I've said, you take it obvious that the "mental" exists. You know that because you believe you know that there is also this other thing called the "material". The material only explains half of reality - by definition. The mental is the half that it does not explain - again by definition.
So there is this baked-in ontology to be blindly applied. The existence of a dualism is taken at face value. The game therefore becomes to shoehorn that division back into nature at some fundamental level. And Whitehead plays that game. No need to justify that photons have experience. They must do once ontic dualism is presumed.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Here is the essence of the systems view. The fundamental dichotomy it is talking about is differentiation~integration. So local degrees of freedom in interaction with global states of constraint.
As a causal logic, it might be hard to get your head around. But it is basic to neuroscience understanding. It was what Gestalt psychology demonstrated. As a process, awareness is about doing both together. Integrating and differentiating. Awareness is the high contrast "representational" state that forms by lumping and splitting at the same time. The sharper the supporting detail, the more vivid the coherent whole.
So yes, the functional logic is all about this interaction between two complementary directions of action - integration and differentiation, or the emergence of constraints and degrees of freedom. Normal causal analysis gets hung up on wanting to argue "either/or". But systems causality is irreducibly "both".
However it is a functional logic that is agnostic about whether it is applied either to the "mental" or the "physical". It is prior to the kinds of dualistic pronouncements that reductionist thought is wont to make.
You have already decided reality is ontically divided into two disconnected categories. But I say wind that back. Start again and show your working out. Consider that the problem here is a product of your analytic tool kit. There could be a holistic understanding of causality - one that is triadic, and indeed semiotic - which avoids the strife that dualism creates.
So Whitehead is annoying just for his strangulated language. But he is grasping after a systems causality - just like many others were in his day. However he then just slapped dualism all over this half-articulated picture.
Which of course is why he is remembered. Giving into dualism like that suits many folk's agendas, especially the theistic and anti-science ones.
Because he is honest to himself. He doesn't run away from the obvious not does he concoct wild tales to cover up what is there.
So did Einstein when he spoke of the God of Spinoza. It is called intellectual honesty.
http://www.wayofspinoza.com/einstein-shares-his-belief-in-spinozas-god/
Yeah I could see that as a motivation.
It seems to me though, that once everything's mental, explaining why some things appear not to be is the new Hard Problem of Unconsciousness. Of course we don't have to deal with a bunch of rocks and clouds insisting that they don't have qualia dammit, so there's that.
The whole thing feels sketchy to me, but I couldn't guarantee there's a metaphysics that wouldn't, so I guess I'll leave it be.
This to me is an empty statement. How is this answering the question? A tap dance around the hard problem I am sure.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't think disconnected. Clearly connected. All us occasions of experience. Experience that interacts and prehends other experience is just what we call the objective, duh ;)!
Quoting apokrisis
But with words such as dissapative, downward causation, etc., you have never proved much to solve the problem. What are mental states then? Oh that's right, you are going to follow the Daniel Dennett routine of denying that mental states exist, but then never explaining the illusion itself. Of course!
Quoting apokrisis
Because without the so-called "dualism" the problem is not even dealt with. Either your version of Peircean logic is simply magical mental fiat, with leprechauns and all with their magic "illusion" making, or you think information is somehow experiential, which is more Whitehead's approach.
As usual, when you are under pressure to defend your claims, you divert to ad homs like eliminative materialism. Telling.
Hi, Rich. I can't help but point out that this looks like slapping the name "God" on brute fact. He is that "for which no reason can be given." How many times did you claim in our discussion that this postulation of (epistemic) brute fact was "lazy"?
You also accuse apo of "hiding his spirituality under a rug." But I asked you if you were a theist and you didn't answer. You just repeated the same mantra about what philosophy should be. IMO, you should just argue theism if that's your position. I still maintain, though, that there's not much content in most versions of "the philosopher's God." Such "Gods" tend to be no more than the terminus of actual conceptual content. They anthropomorphize and mask the threat of global contingency.
Whitehead calls it God. Bergson the Elan Vital. Einstein "the God of Spinoza". Peirce the Mind. The ancients The Dao.
It is the Creative Force that is peering out of the eyes that gives the Universe potentiality and novelty.
There is no getting away from it unless one plays the spiritual hide-and-seek game of Thermodynamic Purpose and Cosmic Goals within thousands of words of saying nothing. It is always there.
Thanks for the directness. I'll even say that we ourselves are certainly describable as "creative force," the "mind," and so on. I'll even say that something like "meaning making" is "always there." One might say that "being-there" is a self-interpreting entity. I also like the Tao Te Ching. As far as I can tell, I was "thrown" into a state of always already "being there" with a past, creatively fashioning a future from this past. In short, I think can agree on some things, if not on the terminology.
Yet I also believe that the world was here before I was. I've seen pictures of myself as a baby, I don't remember being a baby. So there's a tension between these visions. I can live with this tension. At best (seems to me) we can weave the little stories we use locally into an always grander and more cohesive total narrative. Must the fact of our personal experience of creative evolution negate narratives of the emergence of this personal experience that are woven in with physical science? I don't think so. The total experience of life is always richer than any usefully reductive narrative applied locally. Metaphysics is a genre of poetry even. It is itself a manifestation of this same creative evolution. Sometimes I get the sense that you would like the creativity to stop, since you're sometimes dismissive of truly creative posts.
As odd and disconcerting as it seems to have mind being there like "turtles all the way down", your informational theory does not work without that concept. You exhort me to not think in nouns but "processes" and I agree and give you some details with Whitehead's ideas as a basis. But then, you don't like the idea of processes being experiential. But this is where your hidden dualism lies, because eventually one process is going to be experiential (i.e. mental events/ minds) and you will to have explain WHAT that is compared to the rest of the processes. Either the processes have an inner aspect, or it is all just "dead" interactions or purely-mapping (i.e.information transfer) if you want to try to be Peircean about it. Now, you are going to make a grand move to invoke DOWNWARD CAUSATION (read that with resounding echoes)- the core of emergentism, and the core of its failings when related to mind-body problem. Downward causation works in physical systems as the radical difference is not there. It is still using the language of math/physics/mapping. Instead now we have experientialness- a completely different phenomena that doesn't speak in quantities and maps, but qualities and first personhood. In other words, as I keep saying, you are getting an emergent phenomenon illegitimately from quantity to quality (what I call magical fiat). I don't think you mean to do this, but you are doing this.
What distinguishes philosophy from mythology is the former should be peering into existence while the later exercises pure imagination. That is why philosophy occupies different bookshelves from fiction and science fiction in the library.
But what I really object to is pure fiction being hidden under the umbrella of science. Scientists, as of recent, have become quite accept at declaring pure fiction as "fact" in their non-stop drive for billions of dollars in government and industry funding. It's quite pathetic.
Philosophy should be bound by the quest to understand the nature of nature and the nature of life, not by how much money a department can raise from the pharmaceutical/medical industry or the government departments that they control.
Quoting t0m
What physical science is attempting to do is to negate personal experiences, and turning it into some sort of illusion, purely to suit its own materialist biases. Only material is real because science can only deal with material? Do we have a new kind of Church with a new set of priests? I object when a search for understanding is replaced with a search for more money and when those who place understanding in a higher regard than money are marginalized, ostracized, and vilified. There is something really wrong with the science industry nowadays which is why I have several friends who quit it. They were disgusted.
I've read both of those, but I don't remember a discussion that emergent properties can be predicted. It's been a while since I read them, maybe I should take another look along with the other references you gave. After "Life's Ratchet."
I've tried to read all the posts in this thread. Boy, it's hard. If someone has said this before, I didn't pick it up - If some of us think of God as immanent in the world, does that mean that God is an emergent phenomenon from the "brute facts" of the universe?
Thanks for bringing up the Tao Te Ching. As I've said elsewhere, it embarrasses me that everything I say seems to end up back there. I've said this elsewhere too - to me, the ability to believe two apparently incompatible ideas at the same time, the tension you talk about, is the sign of a mature intellect.
Many people consider most religions what you describe as "mythology."
Quoting Rich
Generally, I come down with t0m and Apokrisis in this discussion, but I do agree with this. Back to the Tao Te Ching again - It is human awareness, consciousness, that brings the 10,000 things, t0m's brute facts, into existence. Most science misses that completely.
As it may be. I am describing what philosophy means to me.
Quoting T Clark
That we exist and continue to create is an observation of life. That there is purpose, novelty, and potential is also a matter of observation. It is what is.
A soup of chemicals gathering together and magically/mystically deciding that they are going to have a barbecue with another soup of chemicals is pure mythology. It is conjured up literally out of thin air so that scientists can claim supremacy over material "facts" and "truth" and tuck everything that we experience under the rug of illusion. Everything that science can't explain becomes mystical while at the same time science explains nothing. Just stories.
May I suggest, as Sheldrake suggests, that science is now suffering from its own delusions brought about by the love of money.
This is a complete misinterpretation of the scientific view of this subject. @apokrisis has pointed this out. In another post, he recommended "Life's Ratchet." The argument that life can arise out of inanimate matter without intervention by an intelligent actor seems more than plausible to me. Admittedly, I don't understand the subject enough to make the argument.
It's just a story. The story of how chemicals mysticaly began to think, imagine, feel, emote, and create, encouraged by Cosmic Goals and Thermodynamic Purpose. Pure mythology. A game of hide-and-seek which is a direct derivative of God and God's Natural Laws. It is a religion.
If that's true, then all knowledge, all concepts, are just stories. Which I actually believe. But that's a different discussion.
That some scientists can make a living spinning stories had no practical value to me. Understanding how the body naturally heals does.
Philosophers tell stories as much as scientists do. Humans are story telling creatures. Everything we say is a story about what can't be spoken.
Apparently this is what is happening. I am suggesting there is a difference between philosophy and fiction writing, not that humans don't get carried away with their imagination in all endeavors.
Developing the skill of observation (with all facilities) is a lifetime endeavor. Writing imaginative stories begins in grade school. It is a matter of desiring to understand, developing the skills, and having patience. The act of meditating for 5 minutes is all that is necessary to begin the development of a keen awareness of life and nature.
I would say that telling stories is a lifetime endeavor as much as developing the skills of observation. Expressing the results of those observations is a story. I'm guessing you and I are not going to resolve this. Again - it's metaphysics. The measure of metaphysics is not truth, it's usefulness.
There is a difference between developing an idea from pure imagination as troubadours do and understanding patterns in nature. It is the difference between writing about skilled sailors and being one. Writers have far more latitude in the tales they can spin. Sailors' have their lives in the game.
Good question. For me, we participate in or even are in our totality what might be called "God." We might even say "Christ," to stress our existence as incarnate concept of word. Dasein or "there-being" or human reality in its fullness is a self-interpreting entity or situation.
We try to trace everything in the causal network back to an origin. I don't see how we can avoid epistemic brute fact. What is current brute fact can perhaps always be assimilated in a larger or grander explanation, but I think this just shifts the role of brute fact to some other entity. Since I believe in something like (philosopher's) "matter" or thing-in-itself-ness (despite the absurdity of this from another perspective), I looks to me like "God" would be an emergent phenomenon. Or we can widen "God" to include all being as a single clump. Then God is a brute fact interpreting itself.
I like this. Since I'm studying Heidegger at the moment, I'd add "know-how" to the stories. I suggest that theoretical knowledge is "stories," while "know-how" is more elusive. Know-how would be knowing how to ride a bike or knowing how to sing. Lots of this "knowledge" is "pre-theoretical." This is the kind of stuff that philosopher's tend to overlook, because there's not much they can do with it but point out its existence. Yet much of human reality is the performance of this know-how. (Note that the keyboard disappeared for me as I was typing these thoughts. The know-how of typing was an invisible background or support for the conscious task of putting these thoughts together.)
This would be more or less Whitehead's viewpoint, only because he acknowledged the creative impulse that was undeniable. Ultimately, it must be incorporated in any metaphysics though sometimes neatly hidden away in some manufactured concept and/or phrase. The alternative is "Everything just happened" (the initial miracle) and then keeps happening (the ongoing, never-ending infinite miracles).
It's plausible that the worldy institutions of science are imperfect. It's also plausible that money is involved in this imperfection. But hating on science itself because individual humans or institutions are imperfect doesn't really make sense to me.
Quoting Rich
I'm not a fan of scientism, of the scientific image of reality being adopted wholesale as a metaphysical image of reality. No particular image exhausts the real. They are simplifying maps for different purposes. That last sentence is itself one such map. It's a map that helps us deal with the cognitive dissonance of a collision of narratives.
Science exploded triumphantly, as I understand it, by moving from explanation to description. Galileo watched that chandelier sway and saw a mathematical pattern in its swaying. He didn't paste on a metaphysics. Things just do behave like that. We expect them to continue to behave like that. Going beyond descriptions of publicly observable patterns is metaphysics, not science. Or that's roughly how I see it. Certainly some scientists are "reductive" metaphysicians who would call personal experience an illusion. But I don't see how science itself can make such a claim. To speak of "illusions" is to become metaphysical.
The "alternative" is not that much of an alternative. If God is a brute fact interpreting itself, then "everything just happened" and keeps happening. We can find order via this self-interpretation. We can tell stories about our origin and destination.
I will say that some acknowledge our intimate experience of creative evolution or being-there more than others. Some do perhaps sweep this under a rug. But in some cases this is simply because it's not relevant to their narrative.
It's not a minor or side issue. It, along with the collapse of the integrity of our financial institutions, are major social and political issues as money has taken precedence over the welfare of people. Is it a coincidence that the U.S. spends almost 40% more per capita than other countries for medicine (almost 20% of our GDP) yet produces the worse outcomes? And what have we with the new prescription opioid epidemic that is killing tens of thousands of people each year while pharmaceuticals go unpunished due to their control of academic and government institutions. This is not a benign issue.
Quoting t0m
Yes. And scientists slyly hide under the umbrella of science as they broach into the metaphysics and ontology of life. In order for science to justify the billions spent on controlling the mind/body they must first reduce humans to a sack of chemicals. .
Out of curiosity: How do you generally feel about holistic systems like Hegel's, Schelling's, or Goethe's? Mostly organicism, naturaphiloshopie - the world as a macroanthropos.
Yes, you're right. I was overlooking know-how. I'm talking about words, concepts, ideas. Know-how under normal circumstances is not a story, but if I explain the skills to someone else, it is. And when I'm just learning a new skill, before it becomes unselfconscious, I tend to do a lot of explaining to myself. Those are stories too.
Absolutely. I was, of course, sure that you were aware of know-how. It's very Taoist, isn't it? This know-how? Mastery is making a process unconscious, automatic.
I think we're very much in agreement that theoretical knowledge (including the theoretical knowledge of non-theoretical knowledge) is all just stories. To the degree that philosophy is the science of science or the knowing of knowing itself, it's especially a story about storytelling, telling the story of self-interpreting story-telling "being-there" that is never finished naming itself. It's something like the self-consciousness of this story-telling. It's a cat chasing its own tail.
[quote=Kojeve]
The concrete Real (of which we speak) is both the Real revealed by a discourse and Discourse revealing a real. And the Hegelian experience is related neither to the Real nor to Discourse taken separately, but to their indissoluble unity. And since it is itself a revealing Discourse, it is itself an aspect of the concrete Real which it describes. It therefore brings in nothing from outside, and the thought or the discourse which is born from it is not a reflection on the Real: the Real itself is what reflects itself or is reflected in the discourse or as thought. In particular, if the thought and the discourse of the Hegelian Scientist or the Wise Man are dialectical, it is only because they faithfully reflect the “dialectical movement” of the Real of which they are a part and which they experience adequately by giving themselves to it without any preconceived method.
[/quote]
In other words, any story about reality has to include the stories that "reality tells about itself," including this meta-story itself. Any theory of existence that leaves out "mind" or theory itself must be shallow or merely partial (however useful), since it doesn't even explain its own presence as explanation. Perhaps all meta-stories are more or less partial (and more or less useful.)
I also like the "wise man" as being a phenomenological descriptive poet. Language need not always be an argument in terms of the given. It perhaps more importantly reveals what in retrospect appears like fact. For instance, if Heidegger or the Tao much earlier points out "know-how," it's hard to deny the "truth" of this know-how. But by bringing it to mind can change the kinds of things that we bother to argue about. I'm especially interested in pointing out unnoticed structures or assumptions that force the contingent to look necessary, constraining the freedom of thought.
For me, it is a move towards the correct organic causal logic, but then still mired in the ultimate goal of making religion and romanticism come out right. There is a desire to argue for an ultimately transcendental or supernatural response in answer to the apparent brute materialism and personal meaninglessness of Enlightenment physics.
So a tick for the analysis of general causal structure. But then a problem with an unwillingness to just go with the immanence, the naturalism, the self-contained organisational principle, that that causal structure is pointing directly at.
Yes. Mechanical reductionism deserves a good bashing. That is a big motivation for any holist or organicist.
But I trust to science to be clever enough to get to where it needs to go. If science is the one that has the biggest problem with reductionism, it is also in the best position to fix that.
And that isn't an anti-philosophical stance. It simply reflects the reality that science drives any progress in metaphysics these days.
Story telling is also very Taoist. It's how we bring the world, the 10,000 things, into existence.
I love the phrase "the 10,000 things." I remember reading somewhere years ago that there are about 20,000 words in the English language. That seems about right, that was 2,500 years ago. Plenty of time to double the number of words. I'm sure there are a lot more than 20,000 now.
Good point. That's also very Hegelian. The "Concept" is a self-othering little fellow. Making distinctions enriches our conceptual picture or story of reality. Reality thickens. Even if things in general are running down, there are uphill pockets (we ourselves). That's an interesting aspect of apo's theory. We are meaning-making backflows.
On the individual level too our vocabularies swell. To some degree this is the meaning of life for me. I just want to continue enriching my mind, weaving a more and more fascinating story. I want the backflow to pile up high, just because it feels good, perhaps. There's a love involved.
I haven't read much philosophy. I must admit I've always looked down on Western philosophy in particular. So much emphasis on tedious distinctions. So many words - every philosopher seems to feel the need to rename things that have already been named 15 times by 15 other philosophers. Each philosophy breaks the world up into different pieces. So much pomposity and triviality.
One thing I've found on this forum is that there are smart people who use philosophies as tools. They keep them in their tool box and pull out the one they need when it's appropriate. They use them to figure things out rather than to justify their confused, unsupported musings. I put you in that class, along with apokrisis, fdrake, mysticmonist, timeline, and others. I was going to say that it makes me want to read more philosophy, but that's not really true. It makes me wish I wanted to read more philosophy. I view sloth as a virtue, not a deadly sin.
I really like this forum.
When I was in high school on the JV soccer team, some of us played the last part of the varsity season on that team after our season ended. We would run sprints in little groups as the coach (my biology teacher) called out "Strikers!", "Midfielders!" and so on until he got down to "Ev'body else!" and we would run.
All these years later and still just "and others" if even that.
I actually understand. I don't think a person can love philosophy without also hating it. No one hates (bad) philosophy like a (good) philosopher. As I understand it, it's a quest to cut through the BS and the confusion. But bad versions of this quest only further muddy the water. I also resent the constant reinvention of the wheel, the barrage of neologisms. I tolerate this only when I think there's something new hidden behind this bad habit of presentation. Heidegger is a great example. I couldn't really love the guy till I found the short lecture The Concept of Time. The only new term in it was "Dasein" or "being there," and this was justified. The rest is understated and terse. It offers the gist. Then one becomes willing to wade through the massive Being and Time. Sartre did the same thing in Being and Nothingness. Sometimes I think this is just a way of hiding "groundlessness" in a pseudo-scientific framework. And maybe it's the game one feels forced to play to be respected.
I think it's mostly the usual intellectual vanity that fixates on jargon. I tend to be suspicious of one-jargon minds as still too green to stand on their own as the unique collision of the stories they've been told. The green mind must always lean on some respectable/famous justification for its own creations.
Your tool-box metaphor reminds me of pragmatism. It gets "behind" the tedious disputes by looking at what we are really trying to accomplish with such disputes. It unveils language as a tool. It is language that unveils language as a tool and is therefore a tool itself. Then we have existentialism, at its best, (along with religion and literature) describing what exactly it is that we want. One of the things we want is to figure out what we want.
Not at all. It is a precise description of universal change that had lots of practical implications. The problem it's that in Western culture, because it is not practiced, because it is not understood, because it is characterized as poetry (I don't know how many times I had to sit through lectures given by academics who had no idea what Daoism was describing), it is treated as a story. People rather sit and read or watch as opposed to doing, experiencing, and understanding.
To understand the nature of nature and the nature of life one must experience and observe and with such knowledge one gains enormous practical skills about life. One doesn't learn how to navigate a sail boat by watching and reading about it though I know those who claim that it is all that is needed. Bookworm philosophy yields nothing but stories. Experiencing philosophy yields knowledge and skill. I don't watch sports, I play then and learn time in the process.
Gilligan, the Skipper too, the millionaire and his wife, the movie star, and the rest, here on Gilligan's Isle.
That's not how I see it. To me, the Tao Te Ching is a joke. "The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao." Then 80 verses of speaking about the Tao. Lao Tsu knew it was a joke. He knew about storytelling. He knew that the Tao Te Ching was storytelling.
Panexperientialism. So, are you going to address the last post? I'll repost it for you:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Oh course. You know nothing about it other than what you read. And you have no idea what you are reading. Daoism and all of philosophy for that matter is experiential. Arm chair philosophy is pretty useless. Without practical experience it is all storytelling.
It's OK. Most people rather watch sports than play it.
Ah, smug snootyism, one of the most satisfying and least valuable philosophies.
Right then. So how do you deal with the criticism that claiming agency at the level of particles is causal overdeterminism? What use is there in granting choice to particles unless there is evidence of them making choices?
There is this basic problem of claiming a mental aspect to materiality as a brute fact. We can certainly track material being a long way down. But mental being seems to disappear as soon as the complexity of a neural modelling relation with the world disappears. You haven't yet said why emergence can't explain this, only that you "can't see it yourself".
Zing! (Y)
But I did say how it can't explain it:
Either the processes have an inner aspect, or it is all just "dead" interactions or purely-mapping (i.e.information transfer) if you want to try to be Peircean about it. Now, you are going to make a grand move to invoke DOWNWARD CAUSATION (read that with resounding echoes)- the core of emergentism, and the core of its failings when related to mind-body problem. Downward causation works in physical systems as the radical difference is not there. It is still using the language of math/physics/mapping. Instead now we have experientialness- a completely different phenomena that doesn't speak in quantities and maps, but qualities and first personhood. In other words, as I keep saying, you are getting an emergent phenomenon illegitimately from quantity to quality (what I call magical fiat). I don't think you mean to do this, but you are doing this.
I'm not following your logic. Didn't you cite Whitehead employing a systems-type emergence argument to explain why rocks aren't conscious and yet brains are? One has something extra the other lacks - global constraint to organise and create generalised integration.
So given a basic acceptance of this approach to causation, why can't experience be a materially emergent property?
Yes, I hear you claim a categorical dualistic difference. But I am waiting for your argument that supports that as the necessary conclusion.
Quoting apokrisis
Because integration in every other phenomena that consciousness apprehends (i.e. the physical events) is radically different in its non-qualitativeness. Everything else is quantized. Qualities are emerging from quantifiable mapping, which seems about as magical as it gets in philosophy land. You use the word, integration, how is this not magical fiat where you are getting quality from quantity? How is mapping = to experiential quality other than if the mapping has some quality there to begin with (i.e. Whitehead's logic)?
But that is back to the circularity of how you choose define mind in opposition to matter. You can only arrive at your dualistic conclusion because it is the distinction you have already assumed. Mind and matter are separate, therefore mind and matter are separate, amounts to a tautology, not an argument.
I agree that this dualistic framing is socially acceptable. It is standard cultural practice. But you have to come up with something better than demonstrating that the customary definition of "the world" leaves no room for "experience".
Probably worse that that, your actual claim here winds up being contradictory of your now professed pan-experientialism. Somehow you know that material integration/emergence is non-qualitative. And yet even Whitehead seems to accept that the claims about differentiation and integration reflect what are usually considered material descriptions of the world. He is talking about the physical structure of rocks vs the physical structure of bodies with brains. Otherwise how could we tell a rock isn't integrating information, binding together occasions of experience? Are we to believe its apparent material structure might say its not, but its mental aspects are somehow doing just that despite the materiality not going along on that correlational ride?
This is what is so ghastly about panpsychism. It falls apart under the slightest prod like a mouldering corpse. But ah well.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Jeez. You asked me to comment on Whitehead. I just agreed that he at least did argue for standard systems causality - emergent organisation or the birth of autonomy as the result of a symmetry-breaking process of differentiation and integration.
Hence panexperientialism/panpsychism. Didn't know you advocated for it ;).
Quoting apokrisis
Again, the ability for occasions of experience to differentiate and integrate means that processes have fundamental "what it's like" aspects- processes are experiential, not just quantifiable.
Quoting apokrisis
No no, they are integrated too, but Whitehead claims it as a "democratic" concrescence rather than a hierarchical one (what you may call integration perhaps). Mentality is there:
[quote=https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/#3 ]The basic unit of reality in Whitehead's system is an event-like entity called “actual occasion,” which is the procedural integration or “concrescence” of processes of data transfer (“prehensions”) into unities that become new data. Each actual occasion is the growing together of the total available information of the universe at that time, according to certain principles, repeating and reinforcing certain patterns (“eternal objects”) and thereby creating new ones. Whitehead's process metaphysics is arguably the most comprehensive descriptive metaphysical framework we have to date[/quote]
[quote=http://www.iep.utm.edu/processp/]Although the system is a monistic one, which is characterized by experience going “all the way down” to the simplest and most basic actualities, there is a duality between the types of organizational patterns to which societies of actual occasions might conform. In some instances, actual occasions will come together and give rise to a “regnant” or dominant society of occasions. The most obvious example of this is when the molecule-occasions and cell-occasions in a body produce, by means of a central nervous system, a mind or soul. This mind or soul prehends all the feeling and experience of the billions of other bodily occasions and coordinates and integrates them into higher and more complex forms of experience. The entire society that supports and includes a dominant member is, to use Hartshorne’s term, a compound individual.
Other times, however, a bodily society of occasions lacks a dominant member to organize and integrate the experiences of others. Rocks, trees, and other non-sentient objects are examples of these aggregate or corpuscular societies. In this case, the diverse experiences of the multitude of actual occasions conflict, compete, and are for the most part lost and cancel each other out. Whereas the society of occasions that comprises a compound individual is a monarchy, Whitehead describes corpuscular societies as “democracies.” This duality accounts for how, at the macroscopic phenomenal level, we experience a duality between the mental and physical despite the fundamentally and uniformly experiential nature of reality. Those things that seem to be purely physical are corpuscular societies of occasions, while those objects that seem to possess consciousness, intelligence, or subjectivity are compound individuals.
b. Perception and Prehension
Every actual occasion receives data from every other actual occasion in its past by means of prehension. Whitehead calls the process of integrating this data by proceeding from indeterminacy to determinacy “concrescence.” Concrescence typically consists of an occasion feeling the entirety of its past actual world, filtering and selecting some data for relevance, and integrating, combining, and contrasting that original data with novel data (provided by the divine occasion) in increasingly complex stages of “feeling” until the occasion reaches “satisfaction” and has become fully actual. Because this process of synthesis involves distilling the entire past universe down into a single moment of particular experience, Whitehead calls a completed actual occasion “superject” or “subject-superject.” After an occasion reaches satisfaction, it becomes an objectively immortal datum for all future occasions.[/quote]
This is just repeating the same old. What causes mind as we mean it - human minds rather than rock minds - is a physical structure. The evolved complexity of a nervous system doing information processing.
Then "experience" gets slapped on by fiat as the bit of magic which explains why material complexity alone couldn't do the trick.
It is exactly like saying that a living organism is only living because there is all this biological structure. Plus a vital spirit that then ensures the structure has the added quality of animation.
So in that case, a pox on both houses as where experience is slapped on at the starting point in one, it is slapped towards the end of a process in another. I guess they both suffer the same problem. Not enough words like "integration" "downward causation" or "negentropy" will make the magical fiat go away. Experience not inherent in the system becomes an outright dualism, one that is not accounted for.
Well it is only you slapping on "mental" as a term. I questioned your customary division of the phenomenal into the "self" and the "world".
Thanks. So in the same way you can identify that as being identical to conscious experience, can the same not be done for a particular semiotic process? So the phenomenal bit is being identical to that metaphysical process which sees itself as something living in the world. If not why not?
This is really what the identity theorist wanted but they failed so it moved on to functional identity.
"In answer to the question “why are these states conscious?” it can be replied that this is what it means to be conscious. If a state is available to the mind in this way, it is a conscious state (see also Dennett 1991). " http://www.iep.utm.edu/hard-con/#SH3b
The problem with this is that it forgets that this is only an epistemic identity. Its ontological identity is still bundles of neurons which do not have the character of "phenomenal first person experience". So the difference between the two (semiotic and the materialist functional) is that holistic ontological identity is built into its theory.
I don't necessarily buy the Peircean metaphysics being posted but I can see it as a better solution for the hard problem than the materialist one.
I'll try and tackle the issues of emergentism at a later date. I am fairly familiar with that page and systems science. From what I recall (it has been a couple of years since I read it) Bedau's essay linked on that page is fairly useful. http://people.reed.edu/~mab/papers/weak.emergence.pdf
But I will repeat: Not enough words like "integration" "downward causation" or "negentropy" will make the magical fiat go away. Experience not inherent in the system becomes an outright dualism, one that is not accounted for.
How is changing terms going to help? Please explain WHAT mental is compared to physical without magical fiat? I can say "hocus pocus" (downward causation) and say mental states now exist, doesn't mean I explained anything about how qualitativeness exists (aka qualia). Also, the ability to apprehend qualities (even undifferentiated) are not learned. Other animals probably have them too.
This is the debate apokrisis and I are having pretty much. How can neurons interacting "be" mental states? Even if they cause them, how are they one and the same- both qualitative and objective? Schopenhauer's theory proposes that all is really Will. The body being objectified Will means that it is a monism with two sides. One side is the inner "thing-in-itself", the other is the body which is its objectification. I'm not really advocating for his view per se though.
[quote=http://www.iep.utm.edu/schopenh/]At the same time, there is one aspect of the world that is not given to us merely as representation, and that is our own bodies. We are aware of our bodies as objects in space and time, as a representation among other representations, but we also experience our bodies in quite a different way, as the felt experiences of our own intentional bodily motions (that is, kinesthesis). This felt awareness is distinct from the body’s spatio-temporal representation. Since we have insight into what we ourselves are aside from representation, we can extend this insight to every other representation as well. Thus, Schopenhauer concludes, the innermost nature [Innerste], the underlying force, of every representation and also of the world as a whole is the will, and every representation is an objectification of the will. In short, the will is the thing in itself. Thus Schopenhauer can assert that he has completed Kant’s project because he has successfully identified the thing in itself.
Although every representation is an expression of will, Schopenhauer denies that every item in the world acts intentionally or has consciousness of its own movements. The will is a blind, unconscious force that is present in all of nature. Only in its highest objectifications, that is, only in animals, does this blind force become conscious of its own activity. Although the conscious purposive striving that the term ‘will’ implies is not a fundamental feature of the will, conscious purposive striving is the manner in which we experience it and Schopenhauer chooses the term with this fact in mind.[/quote]
Of course you will. The same tautology over and over again. Duality is what you presume and dualism is what you conclude. The circularity is why you are on auto-repeat.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I have repeatedly - at your demand - explained that I ground my approach in semiosis. So the "duality" or dichotomy of matter and sign. Because it is dichotomy - a symmetry breaking - rather than a duality, how there is both the differentiation and the integration gets accounted for. And then development explains how the simple becomes the complex - how the dichotomised leads to the triadic or hierarchical with time.
If you don't get it, cool. In this thread I was asking you to justify your ontology, not seeking to explain mine yet again.
What is the difference between triadic processing in non-minds and triadic processing in minds in terms of what it is like to be a triadic process? You snuck in another word- "hierarchical". The word soup does not end in trying to explain away how the experience of minds somehow "appear". So you think using the term triadic hierarchy will somehow explain how one type of "process" is different than the rest?
1) Minds are a process
2) Some sort of informational process is happening or interactions of events
3) Disjunctions and integrations occur
Could you be clearer and say minds are the result of a process, and so not a brute fact on which the process depends. Could you say it is not mind but instead "minding", or at least "mindfulness", that characterises the material outcome, to make it clear a reified substance is not presumed which remains separate to the process itself?
These have been immediate sticking points so far.
It is hardly sneaking anything in in calling semiotics a triadic or hierarchical process. What else was Peirce describing? And what else has natural philosophy been saying since Anaximander and Aristotle?
So yes, a "system" is a quite specific kind of process. It has hierarchical structure.
I'm not denying hierarchical structure, I am denying that hierarchical structure means that there is a smooth transition from non-mind-like structure to mind-like structure (hence the name of this thread). Processes are not all the same- one is radically different, and that is indeed the sticking point. Triaidic hierarchies in map land vs. triadic hierarchies in experiential land. The thing is though, you are so close to being on the cusp of saying that, like Whitehead, the triadic hierarchies are experiential in their prehension and novelty all the way down (which is NOT the same as saying full blown consciousness all the way down in the animal sense).
In your wet dreams. Even when arguing for pansemiosis, I am clear that life and mind are different in having an epistemic cut that puts hierarchical constraint "inside" the organism. I am arguing for the evolution of autonomy, not against it.
I am just rejecting your mental substance just as I would if you argued for elan vital.
You want to treat consciousness as some pure quality. You take it for granted there is a self who introspects on a Cartesian theatre of ideas and impressions. You argue that there is all the physical complexity of some information process - and then for no known reason, there is the added radioactive glow of phenomenal experience to light up the brain's dark circuits.
But then you turn out to be undecided on whether your ontology is one of dualist correlation or panpsychic monism. How could I be close to agreeing with you if you find it hard to agree with yourself?
I tried to be clear where I agree with Whitehead - on the generality of a holistic systems causality. Then where I fundamentally disagree - on experience or agency as a fundamental property or constituent of nature. Just go with the positions I actually argue when in doubt.
Explain the epistemic cut without too much jargon. Explain hierarchical constraint "inside" the organism without too much jargon. Define it first, provide examples maybe. Then from there explain how it applies to the solving the mind-body problem. You can be lengthy but not jargony. I'm demanding this because I've seen your tendencies. We can either have a constructive, beneficial discussion or an ongoing hostile debate where no one gets anywhere. Ordinary language sometimes prevents talking past each other. And no snarky remarks about reading this or that (name drop systems philosopher). Anyone can simply say to go read their favorite philosopher and end the conversation.
Quoting apokrisis
To me, saying minds are the result of a process is cleaving too close to "minds are epiphenomenal". Is that your take? I'm pretty sure you don't mean to say that.
Yeah. I mean anyone woulda thunk dis was a philosophical forum or sumthink. Next people will be making their case by posting large slabs of impenetrable text from blogs called larval subjects, or suchlike. I mean it's not like we can just google unfamiliar terms and start to educate ourselves.
Get over yourself man.
Okay, I'm done talking with you. I'm asking you to teach, and you are going to taunt and insult instead.
Okay, I'm making another attempt at actually trying to have a fruitful dialogue. I was trying to understand your position better, and have to explain it more succinctly in relation to the conversation at hand. I was trying to see if our versions are actually more similar if we make our positions more clearly stated and see where we agree and disagree. Dual aspect monism is more where my theory lies. However, I don't see how it can be wrong to think about what it is like to be the process itself from the process' point of view. Afterall, you seem to be making a connection with the semiotics of cognition and the semiotics of materials. It would seem that we have: semiotics of material, material matieral.. then the ghostly steam of semiotics of mental mental mental. This stark split, you seem to point out as a epistemic cut, which seems to be Howard Patee's idea of the epistemic cut which seems also similar to downward causation of top to bottom systems. I just don't get how pointing to the fact that there is a difference of the final process (cognitive events) and the material constituents (material events) and that mental events can change physical events, says very much except a tautology of common sense (mental events exists and affect physical events and vice-versa). That does not seem to be answering the question.
1) It starts with the proper nature of explanation. An explanation of nature in terms of causality is a model - a rational account with observational consequences. This is going to happen because of that. The account thus depends on posited counterfactuals. If the particular predicted events don't happen, then something must be a problem with the general statements which are the theory.
On that score, it follows that you can't even have a theory if you can't identify counterfactuals. There has to be something to measure in terms of the claims being made.
So as I have said quite a few times to you, I agree that any theory of nature encounters a "hard problem" when it runs out of factual distinctions. About the Cosmos or Being itself, we can ask "Why anything?" and that question drops down a great big silent well to the degree we can't offer a measurable counterfactual. Show me the alternative to the simple fact of Being and then we can start to account for its existence employing counterfactual argument.
The same applies to other ultimately self-referential lines of questioning like "why is the mind a mind?", "why is red red?", etc. I accept a terminus to explanation - a hard problem of epistemology - if we run up against the brute factness of qualia, just as much as if we run up against a brute factness in regard to being.
But then you would have the complementary responsibility of not presenting me with "theories" that are "not even wrong". You can't employ brute fact to attempt to prove some naturalistic causal account.
That is precisely the problem with any variant of panpsychism. It presumes experience as a brute fact in a way that defies counterfactual analysis. It says be sure that matter has an experiential aspect, the intrinsic property of being aware, but there is then no way to measure that, to demonstrate that, because I have also constructed the theory in such a way that the presence of experience at the foundational level of matter makes absolutely no bleeding difference to anything you could observe.
The theory is just a tautology. It claims its results in a way that admits to no possible test. It founds itself in brute fact and then hides that while happily agreeing with anything a physicalist might have to say about the correlation of mentality with the complexity of material structures or the functionality of information processes.
Frankly, it is either a case of intellectual stupidity or intellectual dishonesty to advance panpsychism in any of its familiar forms. A theory isn't a theory unless it can be falsified. And panpsychism makes its claims in a way that put it beyond falsification. It becomes a tale of mind all the way down. And then mind does less and less until it is apparently doing nothing. We have the mind of a rock. But that is OK. because all the counterfactual heavy lifting is granted by the panpsychist to the standard material side of the equation.
The rock is a bunch of disunified occasions of experience, or some such utter guff. Brains have the material structure to produce a monarchy, a unity, of these occasions. Or more utter guff.
I'll stop there before even attempting to defend semiotics (sign processing, the epistemic cut, hierarchical complexity, systems causality, etc) as our best candidate theory of mind. The misunderstanding you have is at the most basic level of epistemology - what would even count as "a theory" or causal account of nature.
Okay, well-stated and very clear. Thank you. I actually agree with much of what you stated. I am not comfortable in the home of panpsychism/panexperientialism. I think one of your best critiques in your previous post was when you stated:
Quoting apokrisis
I don't want to make a rebuttal really, but just a reasoning for why this option might be attractive. If experience is there all the way down, experience is accounted for as a foundation. It is the ground- the non-counterfactual "is" (or perhaps in Kantian terms- the "thing-in-itself; that is to say, experientialness).
What is the other option? To me, the other option is dualism. However, dualism seems to imply a strict split between material and mental which we both agree seems at odds with science. Dualism seems to posit a transcendental split between matter and a ghostly mind that correlates/interacts but is not equivalent to the material on which it correlates. This to me seems problematic. What I fear about your brand of semiotics philosophy is that it has a hidden dualisim (because it is not accounting for the nature of the difference between quality and material interactions) in that there is a spooky-like quality that results from the semiotic process. What is this spooky-like quality? Well, if we hit a wall of the hard problem because there is no "counterfactuals" that can be tested, that indeed is the very problem that we are getting at. Otherwise, yay for semiotics and systems approaches to neuroscientific/biological problems. However, this hard ground at the bottom of the well, it really doesn't say much- thus the very speculative and imaginative answers to this question.
Now, perhaps ideas like sign processing, the epistemic cut, hierarchical complexity, systems causality, etc. may be the light which leads out of this cave, but it has to be done with at least keeping in mind what I stated earlier about how the experientialness of certain processes should not be taken for granted as just "there" as the result of a series of processes without account for what "there" is.
I think I understand what you are getting at. Cosmic Goals and Thermodynamic Purpose are much more palatable words.
Philosophers can be quite interesting when they gather together to invent new stories and phrases. The exact difference between these concocted phrases and God is zero. You can throw panpsychism in there as well. Ultimately the Cosmic Cause has to be there somewhere. I just prefer to call it Mind since that is the only thing we all experience. I guess I like to keep it simple.
What is mind-boggling is that people actually take this Thermodynamics Purpose seriously. Humans just love their myths. This never changes, pre-historic or modern, always weaving myths.
Kind of sounds like a postmodern stance- everything is just narrative. Here was something I found on Stanford Encyclopedia under postmodernism that sounds similar to what you are getting at:
[quote=https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/]Indeed, for Lyotard, the de-realization of the world means the disintegration of narrative elements into “clouds” of linguistic combinations and collisions among innumerable, heterogeneous language games. Furthermore, within each game the subject moves from position to position, now as sender, now as addressee, now as referent, and so on. The loss of a continuous meta-narrative therefore breaks the subject into heterogeneous moments of subjectivity that do not cohere into an identity. But as Lyotard points out, while the combinations we experience are not necessarily stable or communicable, we learn to move with a certain nimbleness among them.
Postmodern sensibility does not lament the loss of narrative coherence any more than the loss of being. However, the dissolution of narrative leaves the field of legitimation to a new unifying criterion: the performativity of the knowledge-producing system whose form of capital is information. Performative legitimation means maximizing the flow of information and minimizing static (non-functional moves) in the system, so whatever cannot be communicated as information must be eliminated. The performativity criterion threatens anything not meeting its requirements, such as speculative narratives, with de-legitimation and exclusion. Nevertheless, capital also demands the continual re-invention of the “new” in the form of new language games and new denotative statements, and so, paradoxically, a certain paralogy is required by the system itself. In this regard, the modern paradigm of progress as new moves under established rules gives way to the postmodern paradigm of inventing new rules and changing the game.[quote]
Yes, this is attractive because it sounds like it is saying something. But unless this being the case makes some reasonable causal difference, then it is just empty words.
So in what way does the presence or absence of experience make a difference at the microscale? What would we expect to observe as a reasonable or causally-motivated counterfactual.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Again, please remember that I am not claiming to answer this question. I only simply aim to give the most useful account. And a big part of that is starting with a deflation of your implicit assumptions about the nature of experience - questioning what you believe about observers, representations, qualia, etc. I also state up front the limits of any explanation I might have - the stone wall that exists if counterfactuals can't be imagined.
So sure. Anything I say is going to be understood by you of falling short of your explanatory requirements. But my reply is that your requirements are the result of faulty epistemology.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Except that my approach does travel a long way before a lack of counterfactuals kicks in. There is a huge amount of textbook science to traverse before one begins to feel any sense of the air growing thin.
Most folk love the hard problem because it means they can prattle on about the mind without having to actually study much mind science. Because no can know the answer - according to the hard problem - then no one need feel guilty about not even making a start on the vast amount of understanding that does exist.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Or translated: even if there is a lot of heavy duty theory to be mastered, luckily I can just ignore that fact as I've misrepresented how pragmatic explanation works.
I've given you the simple answer many times. If you understand how the brain models the world in a really detailed fashion, then it is hard to imagine all that being the case and it not feeling like something.
Yes, that may not mean much to you. But how much neuroscience have you mastered?
The counterfactual here would be if you knew as much as me on that front and still just saw no reason to think it would feel like something. Willing to conduct the experiment? Got 40 years to spare? :)
There is non in speculative metaphysics- it's like defining the noumena when phenomena is based on time/space/causality/principle of sufficient reason. As you stated, there is a hard problem, and its relatively intractable.
Quoting apokrisis
Well, let's be clear, your approach is rather theoretic in itself, not strictly scientific per se. In other words, you are taking a somewhat unorthodox approach of totalizing science under a broad theoretic framework of Peircean semiotics which is not strict science qua science per se. Science per science has somewhat self-contained and discrete frameworks with less of an overriding pansemiotic bent. However, if for the sake of argument, we conflate your pansemiotic (non-traditional) approach with the more discrete approaches of the various hard sciences for the sake of argument, if you noticed I did say:
[quote=schopenhauer1]What is this spooky-like quality? Well, if we hit a wall of the hard problem because there is no "counterfactuals" that can be tested, that indeed is the very problem that we are getting at. Otherwise, yay for semiotics and systems approaches to neuroscientific/biological problems. However, this hard ground at the bottom of the well, it really doesn't say much- thus the very speculative and imaginative answers to this question.[/quote]
So I am not denying the easy problems are hard (in the sense that they are not easily obtained- I recognize the extremely hard work of hypothesis, experimentation, making sense of the data, publication, review, and repeat). but that the easy problems don't dissolve the more philosophical questions which are the proverbial intractable ones which are only gotten at with speculation.
Quoting apokrisis
I think you are creating a straw man here and seeing enemies where there are not any. I am not an expert in neuroscience indeed- I have some basic knowledge of some concepts. I probably know more and have generally read up on more books related to the concepts than the average person, but definitely less than an expert in the field. However, I never denied the hard science that goes into understanding how the brain functions- how the different regions of the brain form networks. One great author on this front is Gerald Edelman, for example. Christopher Koch and Francis Crick also write some good work on this front. There are countless many more in academic publications and numerous books in the science sections of the library. I am in no way trying to leap over the fact that indeed, many answers of cognition and the correlates to consciousness have been and will be found through the usual scientific methodologies of neuroscience and related fields. I also think theories should take into account what the evidence provides from the hard sciences.
That being said, we must define what the debate is. The debate is the nature of mental events. Now, usually if you want to be good at communicating your ideas, you don't want to automatically condemn the opponent, no matter how wrong you think they are. You want to bring them to a point of enlightenment by starting at their point of view, and systematically breaking it down showing the inherent contradictions that make it unstable. Now, you are trying to do this by stating that panpsychism, though attractive due to its totalizing of mental events, has no way to disprove it. That is a good place to start. It is not even provable, so where can one go at this point? It is of a highly speculative nature as it is not grounded on what can be gleaned from empirical data. The only data we have is the fact that we know there is an internal aspect to certain processes. So all speculative metaphysics for you is illegitimate and so that, for you, this is where the argument stops. However, speculative metaphysics can have its own logic. It may not be grounded in empiricism, but it can have its own logic and rigorous structure that can be debated on its own merits, even though its speculative in its way in answering certain intractable problems. That is satisfying to some and perhaps unsatisfying to others.
So, for example, you have a notion of entropy and that the universe is in general entropifying while certain parts of the universe (i.e. living organisms) are negentropic locally but contribute to entropification as a whole. What does this mean for you? How does this contribute to our view of existence in general? Does that inform your theories of mind? You seem to be attached to semiotics. What does semiotics add to the scientific disciplines, that the standard models don't already say? How does semiotics solve problems that science qua science is not doing anyways? Isn't it redundant? How does semiotics really make a difference in these fields?
Anyways, I am interested in how how qualities arise due to epistemic cuts and downward causations, as long as the actual question at hand is not abandoned, which is how it accounts for mental events.
Quoting apokrisis
Again, I don't discount neuroscientific explanations for how the neural correlates of consciousness model the world. However, we do know that there is a qualitative "something what it's like to be". If this is a process that exists, and we are both naturalists, then it is a natural process. But how odd it is that this one event of qualitative inner experience is a feature of the universe. If it is the result of a long series of physical and biological events, what is this feature that results in comparison to everything else in the universe that does not do this? That question is not meant to recount the neuroscience that goes into the event, by how it is that this radically different phenomena of experience is even a feature. One can say "it is the model understanding itself" but that is a tautology. The model is modelling. But if this is the only model that has qualitative aspects, what is the qualitative aspects in comparison to the non-qualitative aspects? I know that is beyond what you call "counterfactual thinking" which is just a fancy word for empirical testing, but that is why it is a question on a philosophy forum and not a neuroscience one perhaps.
Again, I am content with useful explanations. I don't see consciousness as a monistic substance and so I'm not expecting some kind of magic causal mechanism of completely unexpected kind that suddenly switches it on. I see it as a particular kind of process - a modellling relation - and so awareness is simply about how such a relationship is going to feel.
If there is visual modelling, then there is the appropriate kind of visual experience. As would be expected. It is hard to imagine it would not. Especially when we now know so much detail about how visual processing works.
The neuroscience explains so much about our visual phenomenology. It is not a mystery why we can experience bluish red but not greenish red. The design of the nervous system tells us why this must be the case.
Multiply that kind of exact causal account of phenomenology by a thousand other examples and really there just doesn't seem a basic mystery. There is no reason to treat awareness as a reified thing, a dualistic substance, which is the form of description you keep reverting to. It is just so obvious that the mind is whatever integrated set of habits get put together to forge a useful modelling relation with the world.
So your version of the hard problem hinges on consciousness being a substantial entity or state. It is, as you keep repeating, a particular quality.
I just don't feel the force of that argument as the level of mindfulness so clearly correlates with the complexity of the processing going on. Dennett would state it in more extreme fashion, but it is in the end a composite of multiple modelling processes tacked together to achieve a job. There is no one magic way of "doing consciousness", no special threshold to cross. It is a kitbag of useful habits that have evolved and yield whatever they yield.
So it boils down to our contrasting expectations. You want the one big answer that creates sudden causal magic. I instead see a ton of little answers adding up.
For me, it is about finding a metaphysical framework that best accounts for "mental" type processes whether they are very simple or instead a highly evolved collection. And that is what semiotics or the modelling relations approach targets. The commonality of the kind of process in question.
What we have going on here, is narrative replacing actual experience, observation, and intuition (the detective work).
It is so much easier to read about something and then write about it than it is to experience it and explore it. So we write obscure, obtuse, opaque, overwrought narratives filled with palatable words which say and mean nothing, instead of actually spending the necessary effort to actually learn. It is a mouse on a treadmill going no where.
So we have, instead of insight, we have stories. Stories about how neuro-science knows this (e.g. the origin of qualia) and they know that (e.g., the origin of thought). And the same people who believe in these stories believe in God because They Want To. They want to believe that science and God know what they are doing and are watching out for them. They want to feel safe in this unknown, probabilistic universe in which nothing is determined and everything is constantly changing (psychologically there is no difference between Determinism/Materialism and God).
My approach is different. To accept Mind as real and fundamental because it simply IS. It is what we all share. To accept uncertainty because that is all there IS. And from this point on departure, actually learn skills about life that increase my ability to navigate through life without relying on either the myth of a omniscient and benevolent God or Science. Tales are not useful when navigating through life, but skills are.
What is this "feel" qua feeling? If you are going to say it is a metaphysical limit that cannot be answered, then does that qualify "feel" as a basic property of the universe like charge or spin?
Yeah. Having said let's not start reifying any processes, I would then immediately agree with you about reifying a process.
I talk about "to feel". You want to turn that into "a feeling". Can't you see that your nominalism must have its metaphysical limit?
I've explained that limit in terms of counterfactuality - the limits of intelligible explanation. I've also said that in practice, that epistemic limit is at the very far end of a lifetime's worth of biology, neuroscience and social psychology. Gorge yourself on the knowledge that is available. Stop obsessing with that knowledge running into some ultimate limit. The details we can't know turn out to be insignificant.
Why is red so red, and not instead ... well anything whatsoever? Why do we need to care? Have we already understood the story of colour processing so well that we have arrived at this issue as a scientific matter?
As I say, my view is that people who promote the Hard Problem are generally looking to put down that vast weight of scientific achievement. They want the last laugh - without having to get their hands dirty reading actual neurology textbooks.
So my response is that - knowing all that there is to know about how brains model worlds - why would we say it wouldn't just obviously feel like something to be doing all that?
Of course, if you haven't seriously studied the science, there is going to be no reason it would. That is the other side of the message I hope you can see by now.
You realize this comes off as a lot of "don't look at the man behind the curtain".. So here we have limit- a very deep problem and you are saying simply back off from it. That doesn't sound suspicious at all :-} . Also, I am interested in what you say, but the question at hand is not one of causation but one of metaphysics in respects to the aspect of the "what it feels like".
Quoting apokrisis
No, you are slightly changing the question. What is this "feels like red" aspect to things? Not, why is red red and not green or some such other issue that I never stated. What is "feels like qualia" as opposed to all the form and matter that causes red that can be empirically derived from third-person mapping? You keep pointing to causes and not the aspect itself. What is this aspect of "feels like" itself as it is in-itself? Is this event of "feels like". If you answer "the feels-like aspect is just what it's like to be this particular process" then what IS this "what it feels like to be the process" as compared to every other part of the universe which is not this aspect of "what it fees like to be the process"? It is a question of what it is in-itself- its ontology, not its causation. Causation does not necessarily = what it is. You can say it is process, that is getting closer to ontology because you are getting more at the is, than the cause. However, clearly just saying it is process does not describe why this process is different than other processes in its ontology. You seem to only go back to causitive answers and then don't want to be bothered with the hard question of ontology. Sorry, but that's the question at hand here as it relates to physical processes that are not "what it feels like to be a process".
Quoting apokrisis
That is simply a generalization that you have that really is not justified. It's a bias you have. I can imagine someone very steeped in neuroscience who still respects the Hard Problem- in fact I can probably find some with a simple Google search!
Quoting apokrisis
I don't disagree with you! The modelling obviously feels like something to be doing that. But what is "feels like that" aspect of the process in the first place! That's the question, not the cause or the third-person empirical structures that can be mapped.
Quoting apokrisis
But you assumed I never gave credence to the serious study of the science. It's not a one or the other thing here. I am a naturalist essentially, and know the scientific stance is the best one to gain causal and explanatory understanding of what is going on. It is you who keep assuming I do not because I ask a question about the this hard limit on a philosophy forum.
No. I'm saying get off your damn chuff and approach it properly, or not at all.
Spend enough time studying the relevant science. Then see what you feel like saying on the matter. Stop saying you can't see a finishing line and therefore you are not even going to get started.
Quoting schopenhauer1
It's about a reification, not the process, you mean.
Well, the idea that the Hard Problem is not about a failure of causal explanation is certainly a new wrinkle, I have to say.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Again, you might want to check with Chalmers on this one.
But if you now want to adopt a faith-based ontology - one that thinks ontology is "brute fact" rather than intelligible account - then of course nothing I say could impact on that. Reason has left the room.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Great.
Quoting schopenhauer1
What it is like to be doing that. No need to reify the feeling as something further that must be caused, or worse yet, have brute fact existence and yet you still demanding of me its causal, intelligible, reasonable explanation.
But we agree there is a "what it's like aspect" going on right? Whether we call it brute fact or whatever else. It is an event happening in the universe. Experiential events are happening. If you were to say that this is triadic-modelling system (or X other constituents) that is switching the subject matter. So, do we agree, experiential events are happening?
But what you are missing is that I am asking about the degrees of generality or particularity in the processes that we might want to name.
I want to be able to label the most absolutely generic process. I call that semiosis. The conscious human mind is a particular example of that (although a most hierarchically developed and complex example).
Or I might want to talk about some sub-process of the human mind, like visual encoding. This would be a story about semiosis - the general process - in some much more particularising context.
Then in moving between so many different available levels of "semiosis in general/semiosis in particular", your presumption that "the human mind" is in fact some critical level becomes challenged by the facts. It no longer carries any conviction when I hear you speak of "the mind" in this privileging fashion.
Sure there is the undeniable feeling of a "point of view". To be a self is to be located ... in a world that is experienced as being the other of just that.
So the mind becomes defined in terms of this boundedness. There is a persistent identity that develops by a self/world distinction becoming engrained habit. Even if someone cuts off my leg, I will still feel a phantom limb until someone cuts out that bit of my brain as well.
So again, why being an embodied self feels like being an embodied self is something we can explain in terms of some persistent habit of semiosis that does occur at a particular level of organisation.
But more generally - when the issue is what is continuous across all the hierarchical scales - the idea that mind only exists at some one privileged brute fact scale of being is one that carries remarkably little weight. It just becomes an obvious habit of reification, a way folk have got used to talking about mindfullness, points of view, and selfhood.
But how is seeing, hearing, feeling a reification? I simply call that experience and more specifically "qualia". How is that reification when there is an event of experiencing qualia happening? I don't think there is a privileged brute fact scale. I just think some sort of experiencing is happening and that experiencing is something in-itself. You do not want to recognize this because it is not quantifiable and that doesn't compute for you. Instead of dealing with it, you will simply go back to what is quantifiable. This is a dodge. Qualia is qualia is qualia. Electrons are electrons are electrons. Qualia is happening. Whether it "seems" like it is happening does not deflate the qualia event, as the term qualia just gets switched out with the "seems like qualia" is happening. The physical correlates are important, but looking at the correlates won't ever answer the qualia. Oh and switching electrons to process.. does the same thing..
On what grounds do you make that generalisation?
I think you say it is because that is all kinds of "mind", whereas I say it is all kinds of "minding" - or actually more generally, all kinds of semiotic world modelling.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Well that is what your talk about "mind" must imply. Although I agree that framing matters dualistically turns "minding" from an embodied process to the name of a reified and disembodied realm. Res cogitans.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Ad hom away. The fact that you refuse to think about this the proper way is your problem.
Quoting schopenhauer1
That is hardly anything I would say, is it?
Why do you have to build this fictional me? ... apart from your need to have something symbolic to tear down in my place.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Here we go. Back into the physical causal correlates having just been claiming causation is irrelevant to your "deep ontological question".
You again just ignore the fact that semiotics doesn't even presume "the real physical world" as its ontological base. Remember, semiosis starts with phenomenology and recovers the naive realist/idealist divide as the dichotomy of matter and sign.
I reject brute materialism just as much as I reject brute mentalism. Instead, both of these complementary aspects of reality are the polarities that emerge via semiotic development.
It is a different logic than you are used to. That's what gives you so much trouble.
Is there a difference in aspect when we discuss semiotic world modelling on one hand and minding on the other?
At the psychological level, it is self and world that emerge to organise experience, give it a useful phenomenological structure.
Then pan-semiotics would be the general metaphysical level that sees this emergence in terms of formal constraints and material degrees of freedom.
How does that emerging look? And what is the nature of this event that is emerging?
Clearly there is something novel going on- despite it all being pan-semiotic though. This self/world modelling is very different than other modelling in terms of the felt aspect that no other modelling has. Do you not disagree?
A lot of it is language I don't usually work in, but the general theory seems to be how physical systems turn into symbolic representations that store memory, or something like that. How is it written, stored, and read.
You mean how should you understand semiosis as if it were Turing computation? Yeah, that'll work just fine. That'll will let you preserve the mystery of the writer, the storer, the reader.
Really, if you want answers, spend weeks or even years getting to learn a different way of thinking. And Pattee is a really good and clear start.
I don't know why you persist in thinking that I don't trust in the empirical sciences or that I don't get the general gist of how complex systems arise. There is just ONE particular phenomena that I think is harder to explain ontologically from a mapping point of view. That's it. I don't even have an ax to grind, or a particular reason to want to be skeptical other than I see the hard problem as almost intractable. You want to characterize it though as if that means I don't agree with evolutionary biology, neuroscience, biology, physics, and chemistry in one fell swoop simply for being a bit conservative on its application to this ONE problem. It's also not the case that, I am now some religious mystic or anything either. At this point, I am just more of a mysterian in terms of its intractableness, with an understanding of panexperientialism's attractiveness in solving the problem, though I really don't necessarily feel comfortable with that view either.
It is not what you trust, it is how you would understand. I'm pointing out that your line of questioning immediately reveals your ontological framework. So you are asking the right questions if the brain were a computer. When you understand how they might be the wrong questions is when you will start to know that you might be getting the organic approach that is biosemiosis.
You actually have to give something up to be able to go forward here. And I agree it is not easy.
You are funny. I must have unwittingly drank the Koolaid of the non-Peircean brand of panexperiential process theory at some point and must be deprogrammed from my current state of hysteria :P!
You really haven't described the process of emergence of self/world modelling. I can see how constraints and downward causation can lead to let us say, DNA message coding/decoding and programming in general. I just don't see it creating qualia from fiat. It all seems either a) qualia does not exist (which is denying the very thing you are using right now) or b) epiphenomalism which is essentially just saying "I give up.. it just exists as some mystical steam rising up at the end result of physical processes". I know you are not B, so you seem to fall under A.
Here, I'm willing to go along with the theory for arguments sake- there is a subject/object split that happens between interpreter and what is interpreted. How does this not devolve into panexperientialism though? If "mental states" are a well-formed umwelt/world image that is ramped up from previous epistemic splits all the way down to the very beginning of epistemic splits (the apeiron I guess in your terms).. it's really looking at the process from the other side of the equation. Instead of all experiential it is all semiotic- but in this case the two are the same unless you are trying to reify this particular semiotic event!
In other words, both are saying the same thing- both panexperientialism and pansemiosis are totalizing nature to a certain process dynamic. Both vigorously deny that there is any difference all the way down in what's going on. Functionally, they are the same!
(I mean even just the way you call it the "split" rather than the "cut" tells me you aren't really bothered by precise thinking here.)
One question, off topic of mind-body problem- what does triadic modelling (like I guess Pattee's cut and just about every other physical process it seems according to pansemioisis) add to the biological and/or physics traditional frameworks? Is this overarching theory a way of describing how physical/biological systems emerge hierarchically into more complex phenomena? Is this theory non-standard for most scientists? If so, why? If it is non-standard, why is it not recognized? In other words, this is very theoretical and more to do with playing around with experimental/applied concepts and already established theoretical concepts.
That is why Pattee, Salthe and other hierarchy theorists get semiotics.
Okay, but this theory still seems non-standard. It is an overriding framework that is not assented (or probably known) by most scientists in their respective field. For example, a microbiologist or physicist who work for a company, non-profit, or university research grant, would probably not be publishing their findings in Peircean scientific terminology or even perhaps be aware of this framework. It is highly theoretical and looks like it started mostly as abstract ideas that though based on Peirce, were essentially applied in anthropology (Bateson) and biology (Pattee) and then evolved into the other sciences as people divined more areas where this logic looked like it made sense to them (everything is triadic hierarchies.. it was seen by them as immanent throughout nature). So, to me, though it is using highly technical language and maths (especially thermodynamics, energy distribution in an open system, and the overriding principle of entropy, etc.), it is still not necessarily something that the hard science fields will pick up as "the" theory of the universe. It reminds me of physics forums where every poster had a new idea for the Unified Field Theory (TOE). The postings were by no means non-technical (many deeply involved mathematical concepts and scientific principles involved), it is just that they were/are unprovable, or unlikely to be championed by any actual scientific communities to be proven in any experimental way. Semiotics theorticians (i.e. systems theorists?) can always claim a scientific fact as fitting in their theoretical framework, but it is not actually what the scientists involved were aiming for or even discussing in their work- it is implications taken after the fact and interpreted in a light that matches the overriding theory. All theories can thus never NOT fit into triadic theories because it is always there after the fact, and not as a the explicit hypothetical framework the scientific team was trying to prove or inform.
A counter example would be Darwinian evolutionary theory. Here is an overriding theory at the core of biological sciences. It is a theoretical framework, just like semiotics. It is not a tangible "fact" but a principle that is informed over time and keeps getting strengthened with each passing year with more nuanced details of how evolution/genetics/biochemistry works/worked to explain the variation, novelty, and relatedness of species over time. However, semiotic theory which is only discussed by a small group of theoretical biologists/systems theorists, unlike Darwinian evolutionary theory, is NOT constantly being tested/hypothesized with it being the overriding theoretical assumption or principle the community was trying to inform.
So your complaint is it is too philosophical? Well, OK...
Would you accept that hierarchy theory is regarded as a universal natural organisational structure just as natural selection is held to be held a universal natural organising process?
I mean even science itself is organised hierarchically.
And aren't Pattee and Salthe among those who have literally written the book on hierarchical organisation? Yet now they are really keen on calling it semiosis when talking about evolving systems.
Kind of makes you think.
Well, I may well accept it, but then, if this is THE way to look at nature, why is science itself not really concerned with it? If it is so thoroughly explanatory, its actual usage in scientific theories ranging from physics to sociology would be much more far-ranging. As we have it now, it is positioned in a sort of enclave of an enclave if you will.
Quoting apokrisis
Now, yes there are some fairly well-lettered scientists involved with this theory, but again, they seem to have more of an enclave. Why wouldn't their work be diffused to a far wider range of problems, audiences, and works in general? It seems that everything would lead to this overriding theory eventually, so it would be constantly referred to in many distant scientific papers, aims, and experiments. It would have also more explanatory value in hypothesis and thus be a just as central as Darwinian mechanism, for example. As far as I know, I don't see that.
Now, I will grant you,the appeal of your theory is its totalizing nature. There is kind of an elegant aesthetics of seeing the world in more-or-less a framework that can explain everything in terms of semiotic principles, but it seems to be a niche and not THE theory that science is advancing towards.
More importantly, its main weakness is what I stated before: The explanation is implications taken after the fact and interpreted in a light that matches the overriding theory. All theories can thus never NOT fit into triadic theories because it is always there after the fact. Thus, what can ever disprove it? The traditional fields and experiments do not explicitly try to strengthen or weaken its explanatory ability, as it is rarely if ever tested, if it can ever really be tested.
Err. It's new.
Also it is holistic. Science on the whole only needs to be reductionist. Holism only becomes important when science approaches the bounds of existence - the very small, the very large, the very complex.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Ah. You want to make out this is some small cranky cult of the embittered?
You are funny.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Would you say the information theoretic view is the one over-taking modern science at the general metaphysical level?
I wonder why that is? It surely can't be because reducing material events to the status of signals for "observing contexts" is a better metaphysics.
I mean next folk will be saying the whole Cosmos is an emergent self-organising process in which constraints shape its degrees of freedom.
My goodness, next we will have physicists like Lee Smolin saying this:
So information theory is now dominating frontier physics thinking. And when physicists adopt evolutionary thinking as well, it starts to all sound like what some obscure bearded chappy was saying in 1880s.
Hmm. What could be brewing out there?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Ah. You mean that just like evolutionary theory or hierarchy theory, we are speaking of a general metaphysical framework - a mathematical truism - more than some particular theory of something?
As you say, natural selection was born as an explanation for speciation - the variety of life. (It certainly did not explain the origin of life, or in fact explain the generation of variety, just the removal of variety from a population). But despite this small beginning, natural selection is cited just as if it were ... a general statistical principle.
Well semiosis arises as a science of meaning - a way to account for language use, both in the ordinary sense and propositionally. Or do you doubt that it even applies there?
Quoting schopenhauer1
If you want to propose monism or dualism instead, you could give it a go.
Isn't this where we started? You couldn't even decide whether to be a panexperiential monist or a correlational dualist. Now you are bitching about a triadic metaphysics.
But keep on going. Prove to yourself that the reason you are confused is that better structured ways of thought are not available.
I don't really. I like the elegance of it like I told you. Does it have predictive value or only explanatory value? Can it be tested for, or is it something you think is not testable? To use your phrasing, what is the counterfactual to this, and how can it be proven either way :D?
I'll repost the particular way that biosemiosis has now been cashed out as a theory below.
Of course, the biophysicists involved don't frame their work as "biosemiosis".
And the shift from a focus on genetic codes to mechanical devices - molecular machinery - is very Pattean. Semiosis itself needs to be understood more generally in terms of essentially physical constraints - again, a closing of the apparent gap between the informational and material modes of action.
Life and mind don't just thrive despite material instability. Material instability is what they require as their ontic foundation. This is a profoundly new idea. Or at least profoundly different to the assumption that regular reductionist science makes about these things.
So yes. This is a classic Kuhnian paradigm shift. It is not some particular theory. It is the framework of thought within which theories and experiments are themselves grounded. It is the paradigm within which they could even make sense.
Counterfactually, it might have indeed proved the case that life doesn't arise at some level of critical instability as I describe below. As I say, it was the last thing most biologists would have expected even a decade or so ago.
I mean the ATP-ase enzyme is actually a rotating spindle device driven by a proton gradient?!? Kinesin transport proteins literally walk their way down actin tight-ropes?!?
That's got to be whacky science fiction right - if your paradigm of cellular metabolism is that it is a reaction vat or soup of chemistry.
So your complaint is that this is non-standard and seems more like a metaphysical catch-all than laboratory-ready. My answer is this is a paradigm shift. And it can be seen happening as a series of waves now.
Chaos and complexity theory were a big shake-up through the 1970s and 1980s for example. That is when the connection between material instability and emergent self-organisation was made.
That then sent shock waves through life and mind science. Now we are seeing the results of that in terms of increasingly semiotic approaches. The question of how "immaterial" information can harness material "possibility" or instability has come to the forefront.
Gene theory used to make the semiotic relation between information and matter look simple. Just code for some enzymes and toss them into an organic stew.
(Note here how you just completely miss the fact that semiotics is already as central to biology as natural selection, by the way.)
Well whoops. Genetic information and the sign relation they create is just the tip of the iceberg so far as semiotics goes. Looks like we need a better developed metaphysical paradigm to recognise semiosis in all its grades or guises.
Anyway, here is that post which argues how biological sign has been shown to arise at a particular level of physics. The claims of biosemiosis have demonstrated their foundations.
---------------------------------------------
Biophysics finds a new substance
This looks like a game-changer for our notions of “materiality”. Biophysics has discovered a special zone of convergence at the nanoscale – the region poised between quantum and classical action. And crucially for theories about life and mind, it is also the zone where semiotics emerges. It is the scale where the entropic matter~symbol distinction gets born. So it explains the nanoscale as literally a new kind of stuff, a physical state poised at “the edge of chaos”, or at criticality, that is a mix of its material and formal causes.
The key finding: In brief, as outlined in this paper http://thebigone.stanford.edu/papers/Phillips2006.pdf , and in this book http://lifesratchet.com/ the nanoscale turns out to a convergence zone where all the key structure-creating forces of nature become equal in size, and coincide with the thermal properties/temperature scale of liquid water.
So at a scale of 10^-9 metres (the average distance of energetic interactions between molecules) and 10^-20 joules (the average background energy due to the “warmth” of water), all the many different kinds of energy become effectively the same. Elastic energy, electrostatic energy, chemical bond energy, thermal energy – every kind of action is suddenly equivalent in strength. And thus easily interconvertible. There is no real cost, no energetic barrier, to turning one kind of action into another kind of action. And so also – from a semiotic or informational viewpoint – no real problem getting in there and regulating the action. It is like a railway system where you can switch trains on to other tracks at virtually zero cost. The mystery of how “immaterial” information can control material processes disappears because the conversion of one kind of action into a different kind of action has been made cost-free in energetic terms. Matter is already acting symbolically in this regard.
This cross-over zone had to happen due to the fact that there is a transition from quantum to classical behaviour in the material world. As the micro-scale, the physics of objects is ruled by surface area effects. Molecular structures have a lot of surface area and very little volume, so the geometry dominates when it comes to the substantial properties being exhibited. The shapes are what matter more than what the shapes are made of. But then at the macro-scale, it is the collective bulk effects that take over. The nature of a substance is determined now by the kinds of atoms present, the types of bonds, the ratios of the elements.
The actual crossing over in terms of the forces involved is between the steadily waning strength of electromagnetic binding energy – the attraction between positive and negative charges weakens proportionately with distance – and the steadily increasing strength of bulk properties such as the stability of chemical, elastic, and other kinds of mechanical or structural bonds. Get enough atoms together and they start to reinforce each others behaviour.
So you have quantum scale substance where the emergent character is based on geometric properties, and classical scale substance where it is based on bulk properties. And this is even when still talking about the same apparent “stuff”. If you probe a film of water perhaps five or six molecules thick with a super-fine needle, you can start to feel the bumps of extra resistance as you push through each layer. But at a larger scale of interaction, water just has its generalised bulk identity – the one that conforms to our folk intuitions about liquidity.
So the big finding is the way that contrasting forces of nature suddenly find themselves in vanilla harmony at a certain critical scale of being. It is kind of like the unification scale for fundamental physics, but this is the fundamental scale of nature for biology – and also mind, given that both life and mind are dependent on the emergence of semiotic machinery.
The other key finding: The nanoscale convergence zone has only really been discovered over the past decade. And alongside that is the discovery that this is also the realm of molecular machines.
In the past, cells where thought of as pretty much bags of chemicals doing chemical things. The genes tossed enzymes into the mix to speed reactions up or slow processes down. But that was mostly it so far as the regulation went. In fact, the nanoscale internals of a cell are incredibly organised by pumps, switches, tracks, transporters, and every kind of mechanical device.
A great example are the motor proteins – the kinesin, myosin and dynein families of molecules. These are proteins that literally have a pair of legs which they can use to walk along various kinds of structural filaments – microtubules and actin fibres – while dragging a bag of some cellular product somewhere else in a cell. So stuff doesn’t float to where it needs to go. There is a transport network of lines criss-crossing a cell with these little guys dragging loads.
It is pretty fantastic and quite unexpected. You’ve got to see this youtube animation to see how crazy this is – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-uuk4Pr2i8 . And these motor proteins are just one example of the range of molecular machines which organise the fundamental workings of a cell.
A third key point: So at the nanoscale, there is this convergence of energy levels that makes it possible for regulation by information to be added at “no cost”. Basically, the chemistry of a cell is permanently at its equilibrium point between breaking up and making up. All the molecular structures – like the actin filaments, the vesicle membranes, the motor proteins – are as likely to be falling apart as they are to reform. So just the smallest nudge from some source of information, a memory as encoded in DNA in particular, is enough to promote either activity. The metaphorical waft of a butterfly wing can tip the balance in the desired direction.
This is the remarkable reason why the human body operates on an energy input of about 100 watts – what it takes to run a light bulb. By being able to harness the nanoscale using a vanishingly light touch, it costs almost next to nothing to run our bodies and minds. The power density of our nano-machinery is such that a teaspoon full would produce 130 horsepower. In other words, the actual macro-scale machinery we make is quite grotesquely inefficient by comparison. All effort for small result because cars and food mixers work far away from the zone of poised criticality – the realm of fundamental biological substance where the dynamics of material processes and the regulation of informational constraints can interact on a common scale of being.
The metaphysical implications: The problem with most metaphysical discussions of reality is that they rely on “commonsense” notions about the nature of substance. Reality is composed of “stuff with properties”. The form or organisation of that stuff is accidental. What matters is the enduring underlying material which has a character that can be logically predicated or enumerated. Sure there is a bit of emergence going on – the liquidity of H2O molecules in contrast to gaseousness or crystallinity of … well, water at other temperatures. But essentially, we are meant to look through organisational differences to see the true material stuff, the atomistic foundations.
But here we have a phase of substance, a realm of material being, where all the actual many different kinds of energetic interaction are zeroed to have the same effective strength. A strong identity (as quantum or classical, geometric or bulk) has been lost. Stuff is equally balanced in all its directions. It is as much organised by its collective structure as its localised electromagnetic attractions. Effectively, it is at its biological or semiotic Planck scale. And I say semiotic because regulation by symbols also costs nothing much at this scale of material being. This is where such an effect – a downward control – can be first clearly exerted. A tiny bit of machinery can harness a vast amount of material action with incredible efficiency.
It is another emergent phase of matter – one where the transition to classicality can be regulated and exploited by the classical physics of machines. The world the quantum creates turns out to contain autopoietic possibility. There is this new kind of stuff with semiosis embedded in its very fabric as an emergent potential.
So contra conventional notions of stuff – which are based on matter gone cold, hard and dead – this shows us a view of substance where it is clear that the two sources of substantial actuality are the interaction between material action and formal organisation. You have a poised state where a substance is expressing both these directions in its character – both have the same scale. And this nanoscale stuff is also just as much symbol as matter. It is readily mechanisable at effectively zero cost. It is not a big deal for there to be semiotic organisation of “its world”.
As I say, it is only over the last decade that biophysics has had the tools to probe this realm and so the metaphysical import of the discovery is frontier stuff.
And indeed, there is a very similar research-led revolution of understanding going on in neuroscience where you can now probe the collective behaviour of cultures of neurons. The zone of interaction between material processes and informational regulation can be directly analysed, answering the crucial questions about how “minds interact with bodies”. And again, it is about the nanoscale of biological organisation and the unsuspected “processing power” that becomes available at the “edge of chaos” when biological stuff is poised at criticality.
I see how this can possibly lead from chemical to biophysical, but how is it semiotic?
Would you say that pansemiosis may suffer from being too elegant? What of the idea that the universe is simply messy? Quantum mechanics is probabilistic, for example. But, even if that is not a good example, why should the universe follow some form of logic and not be discrete events that can have some empirical regularities, but no overriding ones? Wouldn't you say that this kind of theory would be self-reinforced by those who already have a penchant for logical systems in the first place?
Peircean semiosis claims the irreducibility of spontaneity or tychism anyway. Othererwise what is there to constraint or regulate?
Then this is logical at the metaphysically general level because it is reasonable in a causal sense. If everything tries to happen, much will cancel out. An average will emerge.
Remember the high esteem with which you hold a statistical principle like natural selection? Well Peirce’s view is that physical existence is probabilistic and falls into the regularity of patterns due to emergent constraints.
Note also that evo-devo has been replacing the modern Darwinian synthesis in biology. This is a recognition that material self organisation - development - is as important as inheritance and selection, or evolution. ... Just as Pattee’s epistemic cut describes.
So as a result of the 1980s paradigm shift brought about by chaos theory, dissipative structure theory, self organising criticality theory, etc, even physics and chemistry seem lively and mindful in that self-constraining order can emerge for purely probabilistic or entropic reasons.
That makes pansemiosis a reasonable metaphysical framework. And biology certainly now recognises that life is not about bringing dead matter into action. It already wants to develop order. The trick then is to find material processes balanced at the edge of chaos - where they are at the point of critical instability and so easy to tip with just an informational nudge.
You can’t be a follower of modern biology and not have noted this paradigm shift. The 1960s genecentric view is out. It is now evolution and development because life has to rely on the more fundamental self organising tendencies of a material world.
Nature is rational or reasonable all the way down in that order cannot help but emerge to make disorder, or entropy, also an actual thing.
I can accept pansemiosis as an overriding philosophy of science, but does it really solve the larger metaphysical problems? Does it, for example, solve what it means for something "to be"? If so, how does it even approach this question? Does it explain the noumena of the in-itself?Most of the time, when this kind of question appears, you seem to balk, claim that we are these lowly substance ontologists (perhaps unfoundedly so), and then proceed to describe epistemological claims, and dodging the metaphysical questions. This is a philosophy forum, so speculating on the nature of being is not so far fetched or uncalled for.
Yes, the noumenal is never grasped. This is a phenenological approach, as it says on the box. Yet the noumenal is going be approached the most closely this way. Hence how semiosis is the pervasive theme of new frontier science.
Now your latest ludicrous charge is that I’m dodging metaphysics. Christ you’re basically such a miserable bugger. Don’t you find any joy in encountering new ideas?
I don't see how this is justified. Other than saying metaphysics is process-based and not substance ontology, that is not well developed. It's okay to not want to speculate, but you see how that could be unsatisfying as far as philosophical inquiry goes.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't see how this has to do with dodging metaphysics. You have a well-developed epistemology, and philosophy of science, no doubt. But part of the problem is that some philosophical topics are trying to ground a metaphysics of being, and that really does not cohere to a lot in the pansemiotic theory which is based on the logic behind the mechanics of hierarchical processes, not what the processes are in and of themselves.
I like your theory. I don't know that it exactly minimizes brute fact, though. What would this mean, exactly? A good theory arguably increases either our power to change the world or our sense of satisfaction with the world and likely both. Your theory seems to offer that.
But I don't see how making the world more enjoyably intelligible or malleable for human desire reduces the facticity of existence. No matter how complicated, rich, and effective the system is, the system apparently necessarily reveals or describes a contingent world. To be clear, I like this contingency. I also like rich, effective theories. I see no conflict. The more theories/lenses the better, as far as I'm concerned.
A semiotic approach to metaphysics says all you need to get things going is naked potential. Just the sheer fact of "something happens". So a propensity towards fleeting and dimensionless fluctuations.
So the first action is neither accidental nor necessary - there is as yet no context to decide that either way.
It is neither form nor material. It might seem like a fluctuation is the suggestion of an action in a direction, but the world as yet lacks the kind of definite history of existence that could determine that it expressed some direction as a definite fact. Well, there just is no world.
And likewise, while it seems the fluctuation might have expressed an action, it didn't have a material effect. It did not react with anything else. Its existence left no mark.
So again, this fluctuation - the first expression of a naked propensity - is the very least state of Being that we could possibly imagine. We start with a brute fact that is also the very least kind of brute fact that seems possible.
This is what Peirce called Firstness or Tychic spontaneity. His logical term for it was Vagueness. Ancient Greek metaphysics started with it with Anaximander's Apeiron.
So then Peirce says what if a lot of fluctuations are just popping off? Well, they are going to start reacting with each other. They are going to amplify or cancel. Alignment will form. Dimensionality itself will start to emerge like the way rain drops falling on a virgin hill slope would eventually start to carve our regular channels, a pattern of rivulets, streams and rivers.
This third stage is Thirdness or indeed the carving out of habits, the establishment of strong constraints that tell of a developing history of action and the statistical emergence of whatever regularity is thus natural.
So a semiotic metaphysics begins with less than nothing - as nothingness is some kind of already definite state, like a world with dimensionality and some absolute absence of content. And while you might say that this vague potentiality or Firstness is still "a something", a brute fact, it is the least kind of somethingness imaginable.
So is Being a verb or a noun here? Are we describing the process of how things could come to be, or frustrating ourselves because claiming existence as a brute fact leaves us with no counterfactuals to make a description of "what is" even possible?
You driven yourself up a mental cul-de-sac with your insistent reifications. Back up the truck and get back on the road.
Thanks. I did have some idea what you meant by minimizing brute fact, though, so my question was somewhat rhetorical. I was pointing out that this apparently leaves that which every bit as contingent as a whole. A richer theory will explain as much as possible, perhaps, by shrinking whatever plays the role of first cause. For instance, Hegel starts with undifferentiated Being, which in its generality is Nothing, and this leads on to the synthesis of Being and Nothing in Becoming.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't know if that's what some philosophers mean by "nothing." Yes, it's absolute absence of content, but you also mention dimensionality. For my anyway, nothingness is not just empty space. It's what we experience (or do not experience) in dreamless sleep. It's what the world was for us before we are born and presumably after we die.
If I understand you, the smallest fluctuation in [something, I'm not sure] gave rise to all of this. What is "naked potential"? If all of this can be derived from X, then I suppose X will have to be some kind of potential. It sounds like God almost but not quite creating himself ex nihilo. Is what you're describing like the evolution of a personality, fading into differentiated consciousness/world?
For what it's worth, I think the telos is the stronger part of the theory. I'm not especially qualified to judge, but what I find striking is that the order exists only to speed up chaos. The "backflow" emerges from the flow in order to accelerate the flow globally. We help the heat death along. That's grimly beautiful. The beginning is indeed vague. Is this something that is crystal clear in your mind, or is this the sketchier part of the theory you are still working on?
On the video you get to see a protein instantiation called John - with legs! Wouldn't it be cool if when we unravel the quantum level there's assemblies of subatomic particles with tentacles, some called Joan! The video supports my new metaphysics of infinitely fractally embedded agents, IFEA.*
The more realistic and serious simulation animations of proteins in action etc made by the TED talker are indeed suprising and "crazy" (ironically for depicting "sensible" behavior ) - thanks for the link apokrisis :)
*only joking
Even in dreamless sleep, there is a desultory rumination going on. There actually is experience of some deeply disorganised and unremembered kind. And when we try to shut off our minds when awake, or are sitting in a sensory deprivation chamber, the mind still rustles with fleeting visions and half-thoughts.
So phenomenology support a “nothingness” that is an active vagueness of fluctuations rather than a passive nothingness or emptiness.
And I also prefer a foundational tale based on active fluctuation as that is what science has been finding. The quantum vaccuum seethes with virtual particles. It is not empty nothingness but furious action which complete cancels and so amounts to nothing.
So the ontological argument for a fluctuations based picture is derived from Peircean logic, phenomenology and our best physical theories. All roads seem to lead to Rome here.
Quoting t0m
As metaphysics, sketchy is fine. So my interest is in how the concept of a vagueness of unlimited fluctuations could be a proper scientific theory - actually modelled mathematically. That is what would take it forward.
And there is already a lot of such physical modelling that bears on the question. Fluctuation based thinking is pretty common. Virtual particles is one example I just mentioned.
Let me use a stronger metaphor then: the world for us before we were conceived. Nonexistence.
Quoting apokrisis
This isn't the philosophical nothing, though. It's a seething chaos. As you say it's not an empty nothingness. But that is to say that it's not a nothingness. There is a here here. Why is there a here here? One could argue that there is always a here here. But why?
I think the mind reaches for reasons as "handles" that it can turn for its benefit. Give me a causal relationship and maybe I can put it to use. But this tendency seems to founder on trying to explain the whole. There is nothing with which it can be put in relationship. IMO metaphysicians tend to dodge this by trying to sneak an object "out" of the whole, from which the whole can be derived. In your case it's a minimal fluctuation. But the whole includes this minimal, original fluctuation. Why was there such a minimal fluctuation? If there was always such a fluctuation, then why?
Sure, I agree. I like Popper. Metaphysics is a womb. Ideas aren't born sharp and finished.
But I did say that I am talking about a vagueness - something that is less than nothing.
Your approach looks to take the form that the mind is a busy place, when it is attentive and self-consciously thinking especially. And then it can relax and go quiet. And if it kept on going it would have to be completely quiescent. It would become the nothing of the mind ceasing to exist.
Which is fine for idealists perhaps.
But I am talking as someone with physicalist ontological commitments. And so any "nothingness" has to make sense within that framework.
And as I say, my metaphysical goal is imagining the least brute fact foundation for a tale of cosmic development. So vagueness understood as "mere fluctuations" is where that line of thought arrives.
Sure, some absolute passivity seems like a better ontic candidate. Yet we must accept the fact that the materiality of action exists, along with the directionality provided by global organising form. So the best we can do is imagine the initial conditions as representing the least of both these things. A fluctuation is what that looks like.
Yes.
Quoting apokrisis
Of course I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with that. But you are (seems to be) presupposing the scientific image of reality. That makes sense, since your metaphysics includes this image. Still, you do tend to downplay the "wonder" at existence as such. That's fine. I don't think such wonder is sustainable for mostly practical creatures like ourselves.
But can you relate to this wonder at existence as such? You also didn't respond to my other points. That's fine, but it's not ideal.
I don't think of myself as an idealist. There's a world out there, whether I am here to see it or not. If natural science is our best lens on this world (which is arguably the case), I still don't see how natural science could hope to account for the presence of this world (universe, totality) as a whole, but only link intra-wordly events in time and space.
I dispute that the wonder is something separate - mystical, supernatural, transcendent. I am certainly applying the scientific image of reality - Peirce's definition of inductive reasoning. And this follows from the presuppositions of being a natural philosopher - making the assumption the world is a functional unity, and so explainable in its own rational, immanent, developmental terms.
So yes, we may be "worlds apart" on that score.
But that doesn't mean that I just leave some aspects of life unattended. Indeed, rather than downplaying these psychological and cultural aspects of our lived reality, I tend to go after them pretty aggressively according to most people.
So explaining art or morality or whatever in naturalistic terms is not downplaying. But it is certainly an attempt to "explain away" the mystical, the supernatural, the transcendent. That is, dispel their lingering claims to be part of any totalising metaphysics.
I'm not saying that it is any of those things, or not necessarily. The wonder I have in mind especially is revealed logically, but examining the concept of explanation. Epistemic brute fact is revealed, as I see it, by looking at the nature of reasoning. It postulates necessary relationships between entities and makes deductions from postulated necessary relationships.
So I'm making something like a Kantian point. We are hardwired to assume the uniformity of nature. Hume's problem is unanswered, as far as I see it, but we keep building skyscrapers and getting in airplanes. We don't/can't really doubt the laws of nature, despite their logical groundlessness.
But these laws are also applied between entities. We input initial conditions and output predictions. The "box" works. We trust it for the same reason we trust the laws. We trust what serves us. All of this is great. But applying the "machine" of this kind of thinking to the whole of reality doesn't make sense. From what could reality be deduced? From what initial state? The laws themselves are what we would also want a "cause" for, philosophically. But this is absurd. And this absurdity is what is revealed by thinking all of this through.
Good points. Don't take the epistemology for the metaphysics. What is, what is being, what are beings, what is a process in itself, etc. may not be gathered through pure synthesis of empirical evidence through logical construct. But this is where the major divide lies. @apokrisis believes that this process-system of the human mind, being a part of a larger pansemiosis can reveal its own pansemiotic nature through synthesizing the logic of the empirical evidence, and thus get at the root of metaphysics. All or almost all can be revealed empirically and logically to the human mind, and thus there is no noumena that is missing.
Yes, that makes sense to me. I think we do well to question the question and the questioner. I think in terms of motive. Why do we want to know? What does a theory do for us "emotionally?" I don't think we are fundamentally rational animals. The concept-system is itself a tool. If this theory is true, then it puts itself in question as one more "irrational" tool, but I'm OK with that, as long as it keeps working for me on the level of affect.
Quoting schopenhauer1
That sounds about right. I've put some real time into Hegel, but that's the part of him I could never quite take seriously. The "speculative" mode allows for some beautiful thinking, but I can only "betray" the "manifest image" so much and no further. And there are aesthetic reasons for that. If metaphysics is poetry (and I think it more or less is), then that's not my genre. I'm interested in the wicked human heart, in the gallery of fundamental poses. I'd rather be Shakespeare than Hegel. (Not saying that I can manage either, of course.)
*Do you happen to like Heidegger ? His 20 page lecture (not the short book of 100 pages which is also good) The Concept of Time is like his version of the TLP. It's brief, suggestive, beautifully translated. It''s an ultra-condensed Being and Time. I mentioned it because he (as you may know) addresses boredom and restlessness. And then the being of beings is of course revealed against the background of time, which is (as I understand it) in terms of human purposes. We emerge the past, plunging into our future. We the world in one mode as a network of equipment (your instrumentality). But death anxiety allows another vision of being and time.
But the laws can be accounted for at least in terms of symmetry maths and the logical principles they encode.
So all physical laws respect a least action principle. Action takes the shortest path. Also total action is conserved. And action wants to achieve its most degenerate form.
These are all symmetry maximising arguments. So the logic of symmetries is the cause of emergent physical regularities, or the laws of nature. The laws have mathematical necessity. What would be absurd is if the actual world didn’t conform to symmetry based principles.
But why this logic of symmetries? Why is existence such that it would be absurd if the actual world didn't conform to symmetry based principles?
Because symmetries are logical. They are the invariances that emerge as the sum or average of all possible variances.
So if you feel it is logical to ask the very question of "why not this, that or the other", then already you accept variance as your ground here. You accept the essential possibility of action that is directed and yet directionless. You begin vaguely with nothing being as yet limited.
Great. Then assuming the free expression of variation - anything can be possible - leads to the next step. Not everything can be possible at once. Interaction produces limits. Many possibilities will cancel each other out. What gets left after all conflict has gone to equilibrium is whatever symmetry state describes a reality in which differences seek to make a difference.
Freedom can't help have an emergent pattern. This is what we see in statistics. Random action leads to Bell curves.
So the argument is that if you truly believe anything could be the case (as what would stop that being so), then still global regularity must emerge. Chaos also has to be lawful. Absolute variation is also going to wind up absolutely self-limiting. Laws, or the symmetry of an equilibrium balance, just have to evolve within a system which begins in an initial state of free and undirected foment.
Just to be clear, I don't think there is an answer to this "why." I think it's a pseudo-question, however lyrical.
My argument is centered around my notion of explanation, which is more or less this one:
[quote=Hempel]
...given the particular circumstances and the laws in question, the occurrence of the phenomenon was to be expected; and it is in this sense that the explanation enables us to understand why the phenomenon occurred...
[/quote]
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-explanation/#DNMod
My point more or less boils down to the "top level" laws being, by definition, inexplicable. These top level laws are "brute fact." For you these brute facts seem to include some kind of random variation and the laws of mathematics at least. These variations are assumed to be quantifiable. So your'e not starting from nothing. Of course I don't think it's possible to start from nothing, so that's not a fault in your system.
There's also Hume's problem. Your system (I think) assumes the metaphysical necessity of scientific laws? But I don't know of any deduction of this necessity. It seems to be a hardwired prejudice.
Yet there has to be a reason for protesting that there is no obvious reason why possibility ought to be limited. You can't have it both ways here.
Either you are happy with laws as brute fact, or you feel it is reasonable to challenge that. And that very challenge has to ground itself in the openness of "anything might have been the case". Then from there, logically we must continue to the actual consequences of "anything being the case". Laws prove to be emergent via the symmetry/equilibrium argument.
That now brings in the issue of initial conditions as well as boundary conditions. And so it is explanation directed at particular being. Or individuated being. I was arguing in general terms for the emergence of regularity.
Quoting t0m
Well no, as the initial conditions for the emergence of lawful regularity are specified as "vagueness". I'm stating pretty plainly that I'm starting from less than nothing, not from nothing, let alone something.
Vagueness is more an everythingness in being unbounded possibility. But that is less than nothing, because nothingness is an actualised absence of things. It may be an empty place, but it is still a place of some kind. It was once there, even if it is no longer there now.
And nothing needs quantification if we are arguing dialectically or dichotomously - in terms of pure metaphysical qualities. Values are being defined reciprocally or inversely - each in terms of being not its "other".
So if the dichotomy is discrete~continuous, then each is quantified as the inverse of its other. To be discrete is to be as little continuous as possible. And vice versa. To be continuous is to be as distant as possible from being discrete. So continuous = 1/discrete, and discrete = 1/continuous.
Each measures or quantifies the other. And if there is no apparent distance or difference, then the categorisations themselves become vague descriptors. There just isn't a fact of the matter whether things are discrete or continuous.
Vagueness and generality are defined in the same reciprocal fashion. You are imagining that one has to stand outside the totality of the world to see that it has vagueness as some quantified foundational quality. There must be some amount of this stuff that I'm calling a potential anythingness.
But that is just the usual habit of explaining by imagining being outside the thing to be explained. And that is precisely why attempts to account for the Cosmos and the Mind always flounder. By definition, we can't step outside existence itself to explain existence.
However we can minimise the mystery of existence by taking the internalist position. And this is what I'm doing. Or what dialectical metaphysical argument has always done. We can reason about the divisions that arise in mutually-definitional, mutually-necessary, fashion.
And so for there to be the generality of law, there must also be the reciprocally-defined thing of the vagueness of potential. Particular quantities of either fall out of it as we are talking about a self-quantifying relation. Each exists to the degree it isn't its other.
Quoting t0m
Again please respect that I am very clear that I don't start from nothing. I start from less than nothing. The fact that you try to put me back in that frame - talking about the presence or absence of particulars - shows that you are not really dealing with my actual argument.
Quoting t0m
The argument is inductive, or rather abductive. It is pragmatism, which accepts internalism, as I say.
So a belief in nature's laws is a hypothesis that looks well justified. It is the reasonable guess that has been working out ever since.
And of course you only have to look at the history of metaphysics and science to see that the very idea of "laws" is itself not really much believed. Physics believes in limiting symmetries, generalised constraints.
The analogy with human laws sounds too much like nature might require a "law giver". Symmetries, being emergent invariances, do away with that kind of externalist metaphysics.
I understand that. But how is this vagueness itself not your brute fact?Quoting apokrisis
I like it. I didn't start with it, but thinking about explanation led me to my current position. Brute fact is "God" without the mask. I suppose that's the aesthetic appeal. But we are also "thrown" into our individual lives, thrown in an interpretation of our past in terms of our possible futures. So there's a nice analogy. To be clear, this is a for-pleasure issue, just like Hume's problem of induction. It's not a "spiritual" difficultly by any means.
Quoting apokrisis
I agree with the general idea that we can't step outside. I also see that your trying to do a kind of metaphysical explanation that evades Hempel's definition. Hegel roughly did the same thing. Assuming that your or his narrative is rhetorically plausible, is this enough for its adoption? For me ideas are tools. Your theory may indeed prove to be a valuable tool within the sciences. I'm not qualified to say. But I don't see a personal use for it. I do like the later part of the theory, where order emerges in order to speed the general dissolution. That's aesthetically dazzling.
Quoting apokrisis
Your argument isn't easy to follow. Some of your individual points are quite digestible. But, for instance, you now seem to be recanting the minimization of brute fact and denying it altogether.
Quoting apokrisis
Maybe I'm in the dark, but I was taught university physics in terms of laws. I'm not imprisoned by the metaphor either. To me these laws are postulated necessities, codified expectations. Our trust in them is not strictly logical but merely psychological.
I said ultimately it is. But the tiniest possible scrap of a brute fact.
Remember that quantification has fallen out of the picture, so it is the dichotomy of vague~general that is the actual brute fact. And being the pure relation of qualities - an internalist deal - there is no external "thing" in want of explanation. The usual requirement - to have some substantial first cause - is itself cancelled away by metaphysical logic. The only fact left is the fact that the logic of a dichotomy seems inescapably true. And perhaps - in some illogical way we can sort of wave a vague sceptical hand at - it might have been false.
So it is only now logically brute, rather than substantially brute. It is brute as a generality, not brute as individuated being.
So we can doubt that 1+1=2. The next time we do the sum, it might just turn out different. Or at least language allows us to voice such scepticism, even if reason itself really doesn't.
Quoting t0m
Exactly. Presented with logic, you are free to turn around and simply say you reject logic. Absolutely free in fact when the rejection has no pragmatic consequences.
Quoting t0m
Rhetorical? Either it is logical and worth adopting for that reason, or it is not. Either as belief it has pragmatic consequences, or it does not.
It is not about "sounding truthy". There is an actual argument here.
Quoting t0m
Fine. You don't. I do.
Or at least you say you don't. And then you argue that in terms of dialectical reasoning. My view may be scientifically objective, but yours is subjectively personal. My view may be rational and inductive, but yours is intuitive and aesthetic.
So you rely on antithesis to put the maximum possible distance from my thesis.
In short, you employ the very tool of thought you seek to deny here. So - whomfff - the sound of a house of cards falling.
Quoting t0m
Hah. The whole discussion is just for fun. Really, having a theory about the existence of reality - even a "scientific" one - is more an aesthetic enterprise at the end of the day. It is not as if we could use the answer to do much than dazzle and entertain ourselves.
Quoting t0m
I tried to show that the minimisation is not in the notion of vagueness itself - as that still sounds like a quantifiable or substantial concept. It is in the dichotomy of the vague~general. So vagueness is a limit and not a thing, or a state, or even a lack of either of those.
But do you not speak here as if "logic" had a fixed meaning? What you or anyone offers metaphysically is not formal logic, a mechanically checkable tautology. It's a narrative. I agree with you about pragmatic consequences. But those seem potential rather than actual, excepting the aesthetic value which is already present. Try to see this theory from the outside, as one more grand narrative among others. It's yours. Even if it aims at objectivity, it strikes me as perhaps your central creative investment. I'm your fellow poet, working on my own themes. I don't expect you to like this "poet" metaphor, but that's how I see it. The prestige of science, the ground of its "rationality," is the technology it provides to even those who doubt it. The old proofs of the old God were "logical" enough.
Quoting apokrisis
And I reiterate that I see nothing wrong or bad about this. Minimization is desirable. I get that.
Quoting apokrisis
To be clear, I didn't mean to be rude. I was just trying to make a point.
My views indeed are intuitive and aesthetic, as well as rhetorically or dialectically supported. But it was only the passionate pursuit of rational, objective truth that led me to question what really constituted objectivity and rationality. We believe what makes us feel good (what works). If we endure unpleasant realizations, this is both because we are future oriented beings and because the deep pleasure we feel in possessing the objective truth (God for the rationality-identified person) can make up for the pain involved. That's an oversimplification, but perhaps you see what I'm getting at. We are tool-users all the way down. Conceptual thought is a means. This spiel itself is self-referentially a tool that has worked for me.
I also don't believe that you think un-intuitively or non-aesthetically--that you are truly the agent of induction and rationality alone. You're a metaphysician. You may be a scientist, too, but you have the theological itch, it seems to me. So do I, in my own way. I respect the repression of the personal in thought --the taking of the impersonal personally. But I still think we identify with our theories. They are the crystallization of what is sublime in us. So the impersonal man is a deeply personal man, bored with mere triviality or idiosyncrasy. I relate. I've just chosen a different center of interest
Quoting apokrisis
As soon as this using the answer becomes manifest, it's no longer just aesthetics. I realize that Popper's theory is a bit of an idealization of science as it is practiced, but is this theory falsifiable? In some ways I'm being less aesthetic than you are, by insisting on falsifiability and practical utility as the measure of science. I'm the worldly skeptic here waiting to see what happens in the "real" world of ordinary, tangible experience.
To be sure, I'm hardly ideally qualified to anticipate whether or not these results will manifest. But life is short, and that which is not practical now must be either "aesthetic" or some promising development in my own objective/normalized field, where I'll (hopefully) be an accurate judge of world-changing potential.
I empathize with how frustrating it must be to present a philosophy that includes non-elementary science. I'm guessing that (generally) the scientists aren't sufficiently metaphysical and the philosophers aren't sufficiently scientific to appreciate what you're doing.
If you happen to have a systematic presentation of the system online somewhere, I'll check it out if you give me a link.
Still, I was pointing out the degree to which any force your argument could carry would be down to its rational structure. Or are you saying that hinging your argument on metaphysical dichotomies, like aesthetic vs rational, or subjective vs objective, are merely rhetorical tropes - said for poetic effect here, and not something you believe, or that should in fact sway me other than as poetic?
That's a fair question. I think that "world" or logical space is a dimly perceived background or frame. Someone could argue, perhaps, that the correspondence theory of truth is incorrect or false. What what be argued is perhaps that it doesn't make sense away from the world of public objects. We can check whether the cat is on the mat, but whether world history is an evolution of the consciousness of freedom is another matter, for instance. What does it mean to act as if such is the case? For Hegel it involved an affirmation of the slaughterbench of history and a way of looking down on the small morally indignant minds who didn't see that the ideal was actual. He insisted that philosophy wasn't about some mere ought that didn't have the power to manifest but with what is.
What is the rational structure in propositions like this? What is the rational structure of "any force your argument could carry would be down to its rational structure"? This sounds like a psychological hypothesis. Is this an equating of force and "rational structure"? Is seems more realist to understand force in terms of successful persuasion. It may indeed be the case that my argument has no persuasive force with you, but that is arguably because of your contingent investment in a particular notion of the rational or that which ought to be persuasive. I suggest that personalities "compute" from a basis of liquid or fuzzy re-programmable "axioms." These are dearly held, self-esteem-grounding beliefs involving virtue, especially intellectual virtue among philosophers ('intellectual conscience.') These core beliefs are the "handles" by which we can be persuaded, if we can be persuaded at all. This thought itself might not be a live option for those invested in the possibility of trans-practical objective truth.
I do see that this vision of generalized "sophistry" has a self-subverting edge. Hence "ironism" and "groundlessness." Non-practical objective truth is problematized, but so therefore is this problematizing. Yet one doesn't go back to the "naive" value-free or innocent notion of metaphysics. One stands (anxious or amused )in this irony and groundlessness.
Again, the issue is what is one to make of your language use when it employs dialectical structure as if attempting a rational argument. It could be merely just an effect chosen for it aesthetic quality, which is what you seem to be claiming. You don’t mean to be doing philosophy. It is enough to play at sounding like you are philosophising.
That’s fine. It’s fun. It’s an art. And you then give a metaphysical justification for it. We can’t in fact know reality. Rational explanation is always pragmatic and so always just a form of workable pretence. Because I am a pragmatist, even I would have to go along with that, is indeed the strong reply you can make.
But then my reply to that is still that my position takes account of all that and indeed uses it to bolster itself.
My dialectical approach says that what is logical is only a separation towards limits. So aesthetics and rationality could only be two ends of a spectrum, not two actually separated absolutes. It is not a problem that a little of each always remains part of its other.
But by the same token, the separation is the productive thing to achieve - if the object is to objectivise. Being able to switch between aesthetic mode and rational mode is the skill to be cultivated. One can only be rational to the degree one knows how also to be its other, as being rational requires knowing the other to be in fact excluded during the time spent acting in that mode.
So while you appear to be celebrating the possibility of confused mixes of aesthetics and rationality - philosophical discourse as a poetic chain of rhetorical flourishes - my own concern is to achieve the ability to switch crisply between one and the other as modes of discourse. I might agree they spring from the same ground - the muzziness of creative speech as social performance. But then there is a reason to be able to be switch as purely as possible into the mode required for some particular socially agreed domain.
If we are speaking in the metaphysical register, logic has to win. Substance over style, meaning over rhetoric, rational structure over whimsy and political commitments.
Other agendas can be in play. PoMo may play at speaking metaphysics in a way designed to undermine its analytic authority. The politics of disruption are pretty transparent. But why would one grant that legitimacy?
So I am claiming that there is a right way to do metaphysics. The fact that it underwrites good science is no surprise. And also it is not unreasonable to suspect ulterior motives in those who seek to undermine the possibility of rational certainties.
My pragmatic approach already accepts that no truths are certain. So that isn’t even the point. However it also says that knowing how not to let aesthetics or other modes of discourse get mixed up in the discussion is crucial for making metaphysical speech anything much at all.
I'm questioning the strength of the distinction between the aesthetic and the rational, emphasizing that thinking is purpose driven. Roughly speaking, truth is a means. We act on a map of the world. For us this map is the world, even if it includes the assertion of its own incompleteness or tendency to change. But we know that others have other maps, and we try to map their maps so as to anticipate their behavior, persuade them. It's this mapping of mapping that gets complicated.
When you say that I'm not doing philosophy, this is an implicit definition of philosophy that excludes the dissonance that might otherwise be said to constitute philosophy. Thinking investigates thinking "rationally" and finds that perhaps there is only (I ought to act as if there is only) creative adjustment, a dialectic of theory, action, and environment. We act as if the environment is one way, change it in those terms, and experience feedback. Our map changes and the process continues. But this is a map of mapping itself within the map and itself subject to the dialectic. Of course the map-territory distinction is part of the "mapterritory." [I think you can relate to this point. ]
Quoting apokrisis
It's not only fun, though. I include the deep and important matters of "spirituality" and a basic sense of sanity and self-esteem in this. In fact I think they are the center. Our basic commitments open and foreclose certain possibilities of mapping the world.
We agree on workable pretense. I agree with a point you made in some other thread that we filter or exclude so that only what is important or relevant to us is visible. Beings are revealed against the background of "existential time," which is to say as tools. "Care" is fundamental. We are engaged revealers, creators, and interpreters of entities. I think you'll agree. So even the most objective system is arguably just a tool of maximum durability. We succeed as theorists all the more if we create a tool that will last indefinitely like some mathematical theorem. I actually share this impulse with you. It's just that our theory creations are dissonant --which might only help us both along in our projects.
Quoting apokrisis
I agree. We really have a spectrum. Some discourses are more rational or normalized. We know what kind of statements are legitimate. We agree on the criterion. But philosophy is, among other things, a criterion of criteria.The fantasy or hope is that some eternal meta-criterion can ground itself presuppositionlessly. But it would have to be self-justifying or circular. Yet, in fact, despite its presentation as a deduction from nothing, it emerges within time, within history. Speculative thinking can negate the "common sense" of this emergence within time and history. But I don't think "common sense" or "ordinary experience" can be abolished. So such theories are merely "laid over" a more primordial sense of being among objects and persons. We don't stop seeing the table at a place where we eat with our family, even if we "know" that it's "really" particles, etc. Any such "really" smashes against the limit of how we actually experience the world when not in a speculative mode.
Quoting apokrisis
I agree. The difference is only where we draw the line. Math is my other concern, the one that pays my bills. So perhaps we're both using our free time to let the creative metaphysician (earnestly) play. For me the Turing machine is about as purely rational as one could ask. Discrete and finite math is about as normalized as it gets. There's not much room for feeling or preference, though even here creativity opens "entities" that are otherwise hidden. Once disclosed, these entities say non-controversially disclosed.
Switching domains is part of the charm of my theory for me. I try to "tolerate" and empathize with the maps or world-visions of others. The less I cling to a world-vision, the more I can "safely" (without the pain of feeling threatened) feel myself into a local "game" or conversation.
Quoting apokrisis
Respectfully, I think you are being willfully "blind" in this collapsing of many thinkers into a single "PoMo." Your criticism of PoMo is itself along PoMo lines. You look into politics, legitimacy, ulterior motives. But what of your own ulterior motives?
Is there also not some tension between "no truths are certain" and "there is a right way to do metaphysics"? By no means am I saying that we ought not propose such a "right way." Such a proposal would violate its own spirit. I embrace the spirit of trial and error. Creativity is the source, including the source of the criteria for evaluating this creativity. There is a world out there that constrains our creativity, but we are seemingly never finished creatively mapping this constraint.
Yep. So we agree on pragmatism and its approach to rationalism?
What is distinctive is that purpose is included in epistemology. The map is not claimed to be a map of the world, but a map of a self in relation with a world. The ontological assumption here is that even "the self" is a modelled construction.
And so pragmatism simply takes for granted the socially constructed nature or truth, incorporating it into its very epistemology. It is upfront that every act of modelling has an agenda. And this is not a problem, given that the forming of "selfhood" - both personally and collectively - is how purposes or agendas could even arise.
So analytic philosophy is characterised by its desire for objective truth - truth without messy observers projecting their wishes and prejudices on to the reality being mapped. But pragmatism is quite different on that score.
Quoting t0m
I did more that assert that. I'm arguing it.
If you want to narrow "philosophy" to "metaphysics", that's cool. But metaphysics grounds "proper philosophy" anyway. Or that is the position I will argue.
Quoting t0m
OK. You want to argue for infinite regress.
Again, pragmatism handles that already. Sure the sign relation is open-ended. You can build a hierarchy of maps as high as you like. But also - because pragmatism is about the feedback of "serving a purpose" - that puts the brakes on the actual building up endlessly. You would only build as many meta- levels as were proving to be useful.
So pragmatics both demands a hierarchical organisation to inquiry, and provides the rationale for it having a functional limit.
Quoting t0m
Fine. Sanity and self-esteem are valued social goods. They speak directly to the forming of selfhood (in relation to the physical, then the social, world). If spirituality is the pragmatic vehicle for delivering these social goods, great. If instead it is medical or psychological science, also great. We can try both and see what works best.
Quoting t0m
Yes. But I'm sure we disagree about there being a hierarchy of workable pretense, with something having to be on top as it were.
Although this top might itself be a dichotomy - say the maximally objective view vs the maximally subjective one? So a clear separation of powers or modes of discourse. For me, that cashes out in being able to switch between stark scientific objectivity and being authentically part of "my world" in terms of a network of social relations, obligations and engagements.
So what I reject is that subjectivity is to be found "within oneself" - the Romantic story. But one wants to be fully part of the social world which is where one finds one's "true self" as a social animal.
Quoting t0m
Yes. But "just"?
It is significant that a social animal equipped with a habit of speech could even work out what the heck was going on in the Universe in any fashion at all, let alone down to a story with mathematically logical necessity, like the Standard Model of particle physics.
Quoting t0m
But that is the advantage of pragmatism's epistemology. It accepts the need for suppositions - abduction - to get the game going. And it accepts also that purposes are part of the business of truth-seeking. All of this gets bundled up in the method.
Sure, it is always possible something has been left out. But can anyone point to what that is?
The circularity is avoided by hierarchical organisation. The modelling relation may rely on feedback, but theory and measurement are made as hierarchically different as possible. So the circularity is iterative and designed to converge on a limit. That limit is the limit of our indifference. At some point, we could still be wrong, but we no longer have reason to care. Uncertainty is minimised for all practical purposes. And only an analytic philosopher or romanticist would - due to the social construction of their selfhood - persist in worrying about differences that don't make a difference.
Quoting t0m
Of course. That is all part of what I've argued. The rational objective view stands in sharp contrast to the everyday business of living authentically in some actual physical and social milieu. It would be insane to mix up these modes of discourse.
You don't want to treat your family and living room as abstract metaphysical constructs. But by the same token, you don't want to claim commonsense, traditional belief, or folk wisdom, as the better base for metaphysical insight.
Quoting t0m
Sure. I am arguing for that too. But I am saying that metaphysics is the ur-rational discourse. It has to be to ground maths and science. Dialectical categories like discrete~continuous, matter~form, chance~necessity, one~many, and scores more, were how the whole rational/objective view of existence got started.
And so next you might agree that metaphysics needs pure rationality, no aesthetics. But "philosophy" is big enough to accept both modes of discourse. Well, in the end, I don't think it does. I think people who argue that always have a hidden pragmatic agenda - social goals in mind.
Quoting t0m
The question of motives is built into pragmatic epistemology. So no hidden agenda on my part. I seek to legitimise pragmatic epistemology. An important part of that is showing how others - PoMo, theism, even AP - have social reasons to de-legitimate that.
But PoMo especially is a political movement. It's purpose is social change. Well, in France especially, it is a route to being a public person, with all the personal advantages that can bring. C'mon. We can all see the game going on!
Scientists do it too. They get even more "sciency" to push for their social agendas, get their moment in the social limelight.
Mathematicians are different I guess. Always so unworldly. :)
Quoting t0m
Again, not an issue. Creativity is essential both for rational metaphysics or authentic daily life. I am just arguing horses for courses. Both get done better by mixing them up as little as necessary.
Yes, I agree with all of this. But I think we should be reasonably upfront about the intensity of selfhood in ordinary experience. Speculatively the self and non-self emerge as a dichotomy from something neither-both. But non-speculatively a particular person in the world as we know it makes such a speculative "outlandish" claim.
Another example: I understand that "concept" in the speculative sense can be neither physical nor mental. By 'concept' I aim at the distinction itself. The "sign" or the "concept" escapes the "what-is-it?" that constitutes philosophy as that which reveals "what is" in the first place. The concept or the sign is "being" or the meaning of being. Intelligibility itself is perhaps the brute fact. (This is slippery stuff at the edge of language, admittedly.)
Anyway, Hume leaves his study believing in induction and I non-theoretically move among objects and persons. I think this non-theoretical realm is epistemologically crucial.
Quoting apokrisis
Fair enough on the first point. I'm very much enjoying our conversation. On the second point, narrowing is the opposite of what I want to do. I'm not in the least trying to exclude what you're doing. I stress that philosophy is abnormal discourse, the clash of proposed criteria. "Anything goes."
Quoting apokrisis
I think you are neglecting the anxiety of influence. We want to create and impinge upon this social world. If we are truly social, then we are also truly anti-social in our revolutionary ambitions. We negate the given, go around it, puncture it. "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Before a discourse can be normalized and socialized, it is invented or revealed by "poetic" (creative) language.
We do want recognition, but this might just be a love affair: Bonnie and Clyde against the world at one extreme. I suggest that groups are founded on exclusion. Nothing binds like a common enemy.
Quoting apokrisis
Of course it's amazing. But my "just" is just a lack of worshipping the tools. For me the image of the divine is (roughly) the virtuous human being as a whole. Science is absolutely one of humanity's most glorious achievements. But there's also Bach, Shakespeare, etc. To me there's a Romanticism or asymmetry in your prioritizing of the objective. I'm by no means against it. But I can't help but see you as an individual against a background of other individuals with other priorities.
Quoting apokrisis
No, I'm just pointing out the complexity and self-referentiality of our mapping. Generally I'm just sharing a general way of looking at things, not arguing a particular thesis.
Quoting apokrisis
I agree. But I maintain that ordinary life is at least largely the testing ground of metaphysical beliefs. Even if the self is an "illusion," it's a more dominant "illusion" than the logical-rational points that can indeed be made for its status as a fiction or part of the map. So it's not about common sense or folk wisdom (which isn't stable anyway) but about our (relatively) non-theoretical mode of being in the world. This non-theoretical mode isn't stable either. It may include getting on planes these days. But the "know how" involved in navigating this world is perhaps "invisible" to a metaphysics of the "present-at-hand." (Yes, I'm studying Heidegger at the moment. He's, among other things, a "pragmatist.")
Quoting apokrisis
I think math and science are grounded in the successful use of tools. Calculus worked before it was made rigorous. Only after a flurry of successful applications did mathematicians get ontological about the real numbers. What the hell had they been talking about and using all along? I think Fourier series were the breakdown in "equipment" that made the real numbers visible or present-at-hand as entities to be explained (rigorously defined).
I suggest the hermeneutic circle. We have a fuzzy notion of things to begin with. We go back and forth from theory to practice, this word in relation to that word, clarifying. I do respect the German Idealist project of deducing reality from a minimum presupposition. I still find it somewhat fictional or artistic. The actual presupposition is the life history of the author.
Quoting apokrisis
The same kind of critique could read this exclusion as "scientism," a social goal that legitimates only the discourse of rational experts, a "priesthood." The Marxists spoke of "bourgeois sentimentality" and had no choice but to misread existentialists like Stirner, Sartre, and Heidegger. For them thinking was absolutely social. The individual was a dangerous fiction, a temptation. But this anti-individuality can be read as an expression of individuality. The individual identifies completely with dialectical materialism, for instance, blind to the choice involved. That choice threatens the fundamental pose, which is one's view is grounded, necessary, universal.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm sure there's some general truth in what you say, but details matter. And one can learn from someone whose politics one is not interested in. I think Heidegger (before WWII) is great, and this "peak" Heidegger is apolitical. A person can sniff around in retrospect for hints of the latent Nazi, but it's anything but obvious. Indeed, you'd probably find this Heidegger "Romantic" and too asocial when he wasn't being laudably pragmatic.
Emergence is one of the forms of Spiritualist mumbo-jumbo for trying to explain a "Mind" separate from body.
We;re the animal. The animal is unitary. (not separate body and mind).
Our experience, our point of view is that of the animal.
In objective, 3rd-person terms, the experience or point-of-view of an animal or other purposefully-responsive device, is its surroundings and events in those surroundings, in the context of the purposes built into that purposefully-responsive device (along with acquired modifications of those purposes).
Michael Ossipoff