Speculations about being
The question of Being - that there is something rather than nothing - is a special question that cannot be approached conventionally through the use of profane instruments or observation tout court.
That the universe came from nothing, or creation ex nihilo, is prima facie, absurd. That the universe "came" into being seems to imply, from the semantics, that it came from or entered into somewhere or something that existed before. Before there was light, there was darkness - but this darkness is not "nothing". There must have already been something, a "firstness", "primary being", or some such eternal substance that holds up the rest of the architecture of existence as the foundations hold up a building, or the canvas displays the paint. First there is the "there is". It is not a being but Being itself, an infinite, eternal, all-encompassing and penetrating reality. We know this because we ourselves are fundamentally an emanation from this mysterious primordiality.
When we ask, did the universe come from nothing?, I have to wonder if we aren't confusing words. Precisely, nothing cannot be positively defined, for otherwise it would be something. The "nothing" is the primal Being, the darkness surrounding the light. Creation and annihilation are akin to dawn and dusk. Take away all the light, all the beings, and there is still the ominous Being, hiding and lurking in the background; that eternal ennui of awareness without content, endless striving. In my mystical and esoteric moments I am drawn to the idea that what we call the world is a temporary dream in an endless sleep; that consciousness is an insomnia in a population of dreamers, or a momentary divorce from the unconscious deep. The idealist/panpsychist undertones are clear.
The entire world could end and there would still be this original Being. Strip the world of everything, including the world itself and there still is the "there is". There is, and there always will be. If existence is a story, then it ends where it begins in the eternal return to this original and fundamental reality.
That the universe came from nothing, or creation ex nihilo, is prima facie, absurd. That the universe "came" into being seems to imply, from the semantics, that it came from or entered into somewhere or something that existed before. Before there was light, there was darkness - but this darkness is not "nothing". There must have already been something, a "firstness", "primary being", or some such eternal substance that holds up the rest of the architecture of existence as the foundations hold up a building, or the canvas displays the paint. First there is the "there is". It is not a being but Being itself, an infinite, eternal, all-encompassing and penetrating reality. We know this because we ourselves are fundamentally an emanation from this mysterious primordiality.
When we ask, did the universe come from nothing?, I have to wonder if we aren't confusing words. Precisely, nothing cannot be positively defined, for otherwise it would be something. The "nothing" is the primal Being, the darkness surrounding the light. Creation and annihilation are akin to dawn and dusk. Take away all the light, all the beings, and there is still the ominous Being, hiding and lurking in the background; that eternal ennui of awareness without content, endless striving. In my mystical and esoteric moments I am drawn to the idea that what we call the world is a temporary dream in an endless sleep; that consciousness is an insomnia in a population of dreamers, or a momentary divorce from the unconscious deep. The idealist/panpsychist undertones are clear.
The entire world could end and there would still be this original Being. Strip the world of everything, including the world itself and there still is the "there is". There is, and there always will be. If existence is a story, then it ends where it begins in the eternal return to this original and fundamental reality.
Comments (306)
Lawrence Krauss would say that nothing is not actually nothing. Due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, it's postulated that before the big bang was the quantum foam - endless perturbations winking in and out of existence at the smallest of scales. However, 13.8b years ago one of the fluctuations did not wink out of existence ...
On the other hand, mystic physicist John Hagelin would postulate more or the same thing, except that he would say it was intelligent - "pure intelligence, pure awareness etc" and termed it the "unified field".
String theory would posit this as hyperspace or, "the bulk". A different kind of space that is not subject to normal rules of space and time.
Meanwhile, as Krauss points out, it's not lost on physicists that the only postulated singularities happen to be the BB and in black holes. Does that mean the universe is a black hole? Maybe.
That'll work. :)
So you are speaking of spiritual stuff - simple substance. And we know mind is about the complexities of brain architecture and a semiotic modelling relation with the world.
Quoting darthbarracuda
No we are not. Not if we are actually a structure of modelling.
An emanation from a primordiality is structureless substance talk. So you are presuming a particular metaphysics - that of Romanticism.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Bingo. Yes they are.
So many thoughts coming up as I read this, I can't even focus to finish reading your post. Lemme try...
This is one of the best OP's I've read in awhile.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Indeed; all the arguments for and against God's existence are completely boring and irrelevant. This problem you're talking about of "something and nothing" is far more compelling. There's no logical proof to demand that a "firstness" exist. Firstness is just first.
Quoting darthbarracuda
"Nothing" can just be "no": Does 2+2=5? No. That's probably a pretty bad example because it's just a mathematical impossibility, but I think the sense of that sentiment stands; nothingness as the underside of thingness isn't problematic to me; you find it in apophatic theology. For instance, asking questions about God: "is God 'x'?" "No." "is God 'y'?" "No." etc. The nothingness of the apophatic indicates a something. So the nothing serves a purpose in relation to the something. There's not 100% something in the metaphysical universe; there's some something, and some nothing. I hope that makes some sense; if not, let me know.
Quoting darthbarracuda
You may know that this is in line with the Kabbalah, as well as Jakob Boeme and Nikolai Berdyaev, and to some extent Tillich. I'm sympathetic.
Quoting darthbarracuda
:fire: This concept I've found is better enunciated in story rather than philosophy. The works of David Lynch (reference my avatar), Philip K. Dick, George MacDonald, and David Lindsay express this notion better than any philosopher I know.
Quoting darthbarracuda
The question is how to make the "insomnia" permanent.
What anthropomorphic jargon from your own tradition do you prefer?
However, Krauss was severely criticised for equivocating the meaning of 'nothing' in his book which purported to show that 'the universe comes from nothing'. One reviewer, David Albert, a philosophy lecturer with a degree in physics, and author of several volumes on philosophy of science, said that:
I think the question of being is something that doesn't actually strike everyone. Some people, I've observed, just don't have an ear for it, it just doesn't even strike them as a question. But to others, it's a really weird thought - why is there anything at all?
Savour it, roll it around in your mind, and it just gets weirder and weirder.
The question is really the root thought of all religion and mysticism, as well as philosophy. But it sometimes gets discussed by people to whom it has never actually occurred natively, it's just something they've read about, that hasn't yet struck them fully and properly, as a live puzzle, rooting them to the spot in amazement.
And the basis of much anthropomorphic thinking- the anthropic principle itself even. Berekely's subjective idealism also comes to mind, at least as far as the anthropic tendency goes.
As I was saying to the previous post, there is an anthropic tendency when thinking of the problem of being (why anything?). I am not necessarily against this thinking, but it can definitely lead to "the world is illusion" ideas. Again, that's not necessarily bad, just a characterization. Schopenhauer's Will, for example is primary- all else are manifestations of the roiling, seething, striving, "force" or principle. It is beyond space/time (we cannot fathom this of course) and thus bootstraps itself into having no start, no end, no cause, no finality. The illusion arises from the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and from there the individuation process of processes and/or objects occurring in space and time. However, I never got how the "illusion" exists alongside the primary reality (Will). If there is illusion, it seems intractable. In other words, the illusion IS something, even if not what we think it is. Thus we can never get to just a unitary reality, but always binary.
seriously?
If science is not about the nature of being, then what is it about?
The province of science is to explain what it can explain, not to claim dominion over what it cannot explain.
And science is no more equipped to explain "nothingness" than is a spickledefork.
You can capitalize the first letters in your sentences if you want to. There's no rule against it. Most editors can be set to do it automatically.
are we limited to H's conception of the nature of being?
there are a thousand definitions of metaphysics that all sound very much like "metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that explores the nature of being, existence, and reality." I am pretty sure that big bang thing fits in there somewhere. and that is sciency for sure.
the best you can say is that science is interested only in a particular realm of being. but certainly they are interested in the nature of being of those beings that fall within the realm of being in which they are interested.
and thanks for cluing me in about that capitalization thing.
Same. I like the idea of 'awakening' being the same thing as 'falling back asleep.'
When I was a teenager, I worked at a weird kind of lake-island resort in Maine. The vacationers owned houses there, it was accessible only by ferry, and they'd stay a few summer-months a year. We - the staff - would cook and wait on them, run the ferry, do maintenance etc etc. We - the staff - lived in a kind of bunkhouse, on the island, and would spend most of our off-hours getting very intoxicated. There was one kid on the staff, a hardcore stoner, who had this goal: To get so stoned, it would feel just like being sober. This became a kind of running joke, and we'd give him shit about it: Why not just not smoke? etc etc.
But there's something about that idea I always liked.
'preciate the name drops fam
:smile:
Being is not a thing, it is not an entity or a special kind of being. Beings have Being (yet it is not a property), they participate in Being, they come into Being. It is difficult to explain what Being is, yet we intuitively understand what it means to-be. This is captured in the cosmological question: why something, rather than nothing? And furthermore, in the Levinasian route, we understand the il y a, the "there-is" without anything being. As I noted before, every object could disappear and there would still be this Being.
A scientific explanation of the origins of the cosmos skips over the ontological distinction. There's nothing wrong with this, because it is not in the aim of science to inquire about Being. With science, we are led to theories of extravagant and alien things, processes, events - extraordinarily dense black holes, infinitesimally small "strings", mysterious quantum particles that have mirrors billions of light years away, symmetry breaking, entropic decay, etc. However, all of these already have Being and so are inappropriate to answer the question of Being. Metaphysics aims to find what makes it the case that these things are rather than not, beyond the causality that science describes.
Metaphysics is not looking for causes, but onto-theology obscures this in its search for the Ultimate Cause.
Quoting Noble Dust
This sounds Platonic. The things that exist participate in Being insofar as they instantiate aspects of the perfect Ideas, but these things are not in themselves perfect.
What I am thinking however is that nothingness implies somethingness. To say "nothing exists" is a malformed proposition, an incoherent idea, for the fact is that if nothing existed, then this includes the fact or proposition that nothing exists. "Nothing exists" is a performative contradiction. And "something exists" tells us something substantial that is not captured by science. It is not about whether a frog exists, or a star exists, it is about whether or not something exists tout court and what it means for this thing to exist, regardless of what this thing actually is. Its identity is irrelevant: all beings, despite empirical differences, nevertheless equally participate in Being such that we can say they exist without having to make any additions.
You may rest assured, I am familiar with the concept of being.
If memory serves, you suggested that the issue raised in the OP was not properly a philosophical consideration.
If I misunderstood, then my apologies.
If I understood correctly, then offer some arguments that actually support the claim.
I will wait here.
That there is something more to the world than the world, that the foundation of the world permeates every facet while simultaneously extending beyond the finite, is an idea that I think is at the heart of religious sentiments.
I disagree.
The only meaningful thing implied by nothingness is that considerations were given to the apparent temporal aspects of being.
To treat "nothing" as implying "something" is to reduce it to a present to hand entity.
It is an existenzial of Dasein (and it is experienced as dread).
We can forget about something out of nothing. It has no metaphysical logic.
What is logical is an unbounded vague everythingness that develops a logical or orderly structure.
If everything could be possible, if everything could actualise even by accident, then most of those impulses would be mirror opposites and cancel each other out. They would negate each other’s possibility of being. So in fact only some integral of the total could manage to actualise. The variety would be self limiting as to what could be the developed case.
Quantum field theory already describes that. It is how the vacuum works. Existence is a sum over histories. We have the strongest scientific support for the idea.
So we know that there is being. We know that being is the definite structure that results from the constraint of anythingness. We know that the principle of least action rules nature right down to the quantum limit.
The “how” of being is really quite well understood to a large degree.
Is there anything left to puzzle over? Of course.
It isn’t “why something rather than nothing” as now nothingness isn’t even a realistic possibility. The Heat Death vacuum is as near as we could get. And that is alive with virtual quantum fluctuations. To be empty is just to be self cancelling in terms of the mirror actions.
But still, something about the idea of bare uncaused fluctuation feels in need of explanation. It is the lingering material aspect.
It is nice that ontology has this last little puzzle to keep chewing on. But what is an action ... without a direction? Or without a reaction? What will we have left when we do strip away the last shreds of shaping structure or context?
But what is existence?
Quoting apokrisis
Existence is a sum over histories. But a sum over histories is an entity, or a series of entities. I want to know what the being of this series is.
What I'm trying to hammer in is that every time science explains existence in terms of entities, it fails to capture the metaphysical distinction between being and Being. Being is not a "thing", it is not measured but is a necessary condition for something to even be able to be measured. Thus there is a difference between "four feet long" and "being four feet long."
It's half of a single concept: existence/non-existence.
Persistence. Stability. Equilibrium. The limitation of flux or change.
Quoting darthbarracuda
So it would be better to say actuality is a sum over potential histories.
Entities are a fiction in this hylomorphic view I am taking. There is nothing individual, just the many things that are individuated.
So yes, if you believe in "existence" and "entities", then you are stuck with a metaphysics too impoverished to deal with the questions you want to ask.
It is not until you get beyond that thinking - based in actualism and substantialism - that you would understand what even Aristotle or Anaximander had to say on the issue.
Quoting darthbarracuda
But does science still do that? Or does it now understand entities and existence in terms of ontic structuralism?
As to the difference between being and Being, you yourself make it sound pretty semiotic - the difference between a sign and the thing-in-itself.
So reality can be quite "psychological" in that the problem physics has to overcome is telling a tale of the Cosmos that has observers along with the observables. Physical theory has to achieve this goal of internalising the semiosis that indeed actualises the potential.
That is the big question. My routine point is that we can't just toss "mind" into the theory - some spiritual, substantial, notion of consciousness. But we do have to weave in something like a "point of view" - a semiotic relation.
And Being is all about the having of a point of view, isn't it? Well, maybe you understand it differently.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Hmm. Are you sure you haven't got this back to front? To be measurable demands something more primal - a separation of an observer from an observable. It is that semiotic distinction that has to arise for either "to be". And right at the beginning, the relation would be symmetric. It would be merely a brute reaction (Peircean secondness) where neither side was clearly yet the one or the other.
So being four foot long follows the measuring of four feet. It is the broken symmetry where some observable is "four foot long" in terms of some observer - some now encompassing reference frame that serves to individuate that length as an actual concrete event.
Being is actualised stable existence to the degree that it has been "observed into fixed quiescence".
So again, you are starting your metaphysics from a presumption of already individuated material being. Yet that kind of classical state - an object oriented metaphysics of a world of medium sized dry goods - is only a late-in-the-day emergent outcome of cosmic development. It is what has condensed out due to expansion and cooling, a result of there being a well-establish reference frame of cold vacuum against which a few bright flashes of concrete activity will stand out in apparent isolation.
You are insisting on a metaphysical starting point that science has already shown to be not primal. So you haven't even begun to explore the options that science offers in terms of what primal actually looks like to the best of our investigative knowledge.
What is this "thing-in-itself" without simply referencing the mapped signs that describe it (i.e. not having circularity)? In other words, what is the thing-in-itself as it is in-itself?
Of course this might then become some kind of ultimate reality that obsesses folk who want an exhaustive account of all those indifferent differences as well. They want to take every possible point of view .... even when the very point of the semiotic relation is to create that selective thing of there being just some actual concrete point of view that represents the indifference the observer can afford to have towards the thing-in-itself. The mediating sign by itself becomes enough. Until some difference that makes a difference arises and an observer is forced to modify a habit.
What is this "our" and "it"?
The separation of the observer from the whatever by the semiotic formation of an umwelt.
So “we” are the point of view shrugging our shoulders about the thing-in-itself because that world of possibility has been reduced to our own world of experience - some configuration of habitual signs.
Try thinking about all this triadically rather than dyadically. It may then click into place.
It is precisely this that we are trying to explain, thus saying an event is composed of these other events doing stuff, isn't the full story.
Quoting apokrisis
Why is there somethingness related with habitual signs? Why not just habitual signs PERIOD.
Quoting apokrisis
There's always a Dues Ex Machina, it seems. That is why it is not clicking with me, as you are explaining it. There is "secondness". What is this aspect of the triad, for example?
What if 'being' is thought not as a static noun, but as a dynamic verb? Then be-ing and be-coming are synonymous (since change is ubiquitous). Being is not a being in the sense that it is not a thing, but a process. It is then no-thing but it is not nothing.
I’ve given the sparsest possible description of the semiotic relation - the point of view that is the taking of a sign and then a shrugging of “whatever” about anything that might be thus ignored. There is then that basic trick being a lived and mindful process. And it gets really complex. The point of view becomes not some single static instance but itself a constantly adapting and predictive state of affairs - the self that is assimilating a world as a flow of perceptual experience.
In a curious way, I think your dualism is convincing you that any such talk of the self - as just the emergent fact of a continually adapting neurocognitive point of view - must be talk of some “thing-in-itself self”. Beyond the play of habitual signification - the realm of the phenomenal - there must be the noumenal self. The soul, the spirit, the will. The force behind the scenes that gives selfhood a sturdy dualistic reality.
So as I say, you are trying to make sense of what I say from a dualistic position. But that is then why it seems a necessity that there is both a real self and a real world beyond the realm of the phenomenal. You can’t be content with a theory of mind that is merely one of semiotic emergence, no matter how hierarchically complex the tale.
A triadic paradigm has the extra dimension to see that hierarchical complexity in a holistic fashion. It can see emergence because it can see development - the change from the vague to the crisp.
So think about that. You must keep thinking that my triadic account leaves out the noumenal self that “has to be there” ... according to the paradigmatic conditions of dualistic representationalism. No noumenal observables without also that noumenal strength self ... experiencing a phenomenology of sign perhaps. :)
If you're going to write a book called 'A Universe from Nothing', then it behoves you to know. Otherwise, you might look suspiciously like you don't know what you're talking about.
There is another good analysis of Krauss' 'metaphysical muddle', in an article of that name, by (gasp) a theologian.
All he is saying is that there is always "something", but that "something" is relative. That relativity means that something very much less dense material can be perceived as "nothing" by more dense material.
It was a book called ‘A Universe from Nothing’ that purports to explain exactly that point. From the David Albert review:
But - hang on - actually it’s not. No, it’s just ‘a game’. Not so devastating after all then.
It doesn't have to be selfhood. This is comprised indeed of complex interactionism- perhaps of the triadic variety you extol. It is the brute actuality, the "secondness" in Peircean terms, that seems glossed over here. That is perhaps the nexus here with the experience that you seem to have a blindspot of. What is the isness of being? If you say it is X description (i.e. Peircean triadic semiotics), that is the same as saying what is green and then going into optics, wavelengths, etc. It is a description, but it is not metaphysics. Its all description of the empirical parts, and not getting at the phenomena itself as it is in-itself.
Quoting apokrisis
Well, yeah, its not getting at the phenomena of what the internalness other than a description of its parts.
Quoting apokrisis
I think you cannot see the problem outside of its parts. There is still a leftover- what the phenomena is in itself. There is something that is internal going on. I'm looking for green and you are giving the components without the feeling. What is even more of a blindspot of your philosophy is that your own philosophy leads to panpsychism.
Secondness is the particular. So it arises from firstness as brute reaction and then becomes a repeatable act of individuation after the thirdness of a global habit is formed.
So it starts out as accident. Then it becomes a habitual regularity - the reliable repetition of a difference.
And as to your dualistic moaning about the phenomenal being absent, I’ve just explained how it is you who ache for both a noumenal self and a noumenal world. Peircean semiotics is an internalist metaphysics. It is the view from the phenomenal. But with enough dimensions to capture the structure of phenomenal being.
Self and world are not dualistic realms. They are the complementary limits on a phenomenology rendered finally intelligible by that structure-recognising move.
Okay, let's say: Possibility, brute reaction and habitual regularity. There IS something going on betwxit the three and that IS is consciousness. This is a slippery slope to panpsychism. If you take the IS out, there is nothing except mere description. I'm sorry.. it's not moaning, its just what it IS. My umwelt IS the dynamic complexity of this semiotics playing out.
No, I don't see how you get blood from a stone. Causation is not the whole of metaphysics. Ontology of being. The umwelt has a point of view, I presume. There is something of what it's like to be an umwelt. The dynamic process ITSELF AS IT HAPPENS.
In other words, any semiotic process can be said to have internal states. Otherwise, what is it about animal experiences, that make that process ONLY have internal states (i.e. a point of view).
I imagine you will give an answer.. Then we have to ask what IS this internal state that is only animal internal states? Causation again is not the ontology of the internal states. It is merely a description. That isn't what we are asking though.
You are then going to characterize it an illegitimate question to ask, in which case you are missing the whole point of the metaphysics of the problem. Just because it is a (practically) unanswerable question, doesn't mean its illegitimate.
There’s no place for speculation in metaphysics. …though, at this forum, such speculation is popular.
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I’ve covered metaphysics here.
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By “metaphysics”, I mean the topic of what-there-is that is discussable, describable, arguable, assertable.
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Other than that, the matter of what-is, I refer to as “meta-metaphysics”. So, as I mean “meta-metaphysics”, of course little can be said about it, and what little can be said can’t be asserted or proved and can’t be called description.
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Those are two different "what-is" topics.
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Whether there’s metaphysically something instead of nothing depends on what you mean by “something”.
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As Materialists mean “something”, there’s no reason to believe that there’s discussably, describably and assertably anything.
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Our physical world and your life are real in their own context…only. There’s no metaphysical objectively real and existent solid rock at the basis of it, holding it up. There’s no reason to believe that it’s other than only a hypothetical story.
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People here seem to have a hard time with that. …hence all the pointless metaphysical speculation here, mostly to try to somehow save Materialism.
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…unless the physical universe still is nothing , by the materialist’s meaning of “something”. ...nothing but a system of inter-referring abstract facts. There’s no reason, no evidence, to believe otherwise.
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There’s no need to ask why, metaphysically, there’s something instead of nothing. As most people mean “something”, there metaphysically isn’t anything.
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If you’re talking about what’s discussable, describable and assertable,--in other words if you’re talking about metaphysics--then no, there’s no reason to believe in some objectively-existent metaphysical basis for our “physical” world.
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In metaphysics? No.
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Otherwise? Yes, many feel that there is—but it isn’t a topic for assertion or proof.
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Words don’t describe or discuss all of Reality.
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Yes.
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Not everyone would agree that Reality is eternal ennui and endless striving. :D
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Of course there’s something to that. Sleep is more natural, the natural and usual “state-of-affairs”. What we have, experience and are in sleep is more fundamental.
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A life, or (probably more accurately) a sequence of lives, an appearance with such things as identity, events, time, and striving, is a blip in timeless sleep.
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Why is there that blip? First, of course, it isn’t, really.
It needn’t be called “real”. But, because there are abstract facts, there are hypothetical experience-stories. And you and your experience are one such hypothetical experience-story. Real? Not really, but seemingly real enough to you its protagonist. Real in its own context.
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Idealism, yes.
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Yes, Materialism doesn’t hold up. It’s proponents always angrily, sputteringly, leave discussions when asked to define some of their terms or justify some of their claims.
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Panpsychism could qualify as one way of expressing a meta-metaphysical feeling, one shared by many people, that Reality is alive and has intent.
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But Panpsychism doesn’t hold up as metaphysics, at the metaphysical level.
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That’s exactly what physical and metaphysical existence are: …a hypothetical story.
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…an end that is experienced at the person’s eventual end-of-lives.
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(But don’t count on that arriving at the end of this life.)
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I take that last part of the post to refer to an impression about what-is, beyond metaphysics, discussion, description , assertion, argument and proof.
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It’s an impression that many agree with.
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Michael Ossipoff
How could a living, running, intentional model of the world - a model which includes a model of “ourself” - fail to feel like something?
Alternatively, change could be fundamental and somethingness is what we get when unbounded fluctuation is stably bounded.
How does a star exist when it is both a violent fusion explosion and a gravitationally collapsing ball of gas? You have two extreme and uncontrollable types of change in the one place. But a star can exist for billions of years because these two opposed kinds of change must find a stable equilibrium balance.
So all somethingness could be the stable equilibrium balance emerging from violent underlying change.
Any precisely opposed directions of change will have this result. And if it seems unlikely that such dichotomous pairings would arise in nature, consider the fact that if this is how existence works, then for anything to exist, only neatly complementary actions capable of striking a stable balance would be around to be observed. Everything out of balance would not be the case.
So a reasonable position is that anything might have been the case. And that is a maximally unstable or dynamical starting point. But if stable balances were possible, then stability would have to emerge. The fact that the forms of such stability - such as realised in stars - might seem rare is beside the point. They would be the ones that actually prevail as only they could prevail. And we know they could prevail, as here we are here to note the fact.
Can we find something changeless in everything that changes? What is it to be something other than to be a unique process of change? Under a process view the ontic "divisions" between entities would then be according to differentiated modes and rates of change. The identity of entities is that which is understood to endure, but the notion of changeless endurance is an abstraction.
One of the most intractable questions in philosophy is Why is there something rather than nothing? Very little progress has been made in answering this question. But we know there is something; 'I think therefore I am'. So, at least Descartes exists, or at the very least, 'there is thought' (Bertrand Russell). At any rate, we can begin with the assumption that there is something rather than nothing.
The something that is, is existence. Existence is not a verb, it is a noun. It is the substance that is and always has been. Existence is God and is not contingent upon any previous state. Existence is not a property of anything, rather, existence has properties. To show that existence is not a property assume X has the property 'existence'. In this respect we consider X and existence to be distinct entities (otherwise X is equivalent to existence and there is nothing to prove). We now ask the question; Does X exist (as a distinct entity)? There are two answers;
1. X exists.
If this is the case existence, as a property of X, is superfluous since X exists anyhow. Therefore X is equivalent to existence.
2. X does not exist.
It is incoherent to say a non existent X has properties, let alone the property existence.
This means that if existence is not a property, it is not contingent. That is, not dependent on any previous state. All other realities are properties of existence. The universe is a set of properties of existence. Properties of existence 'inherit' their existence. We can say 'This milk bottle exists'. By this we mean that the milk bottle is a property of existence and the substance of it is existence, because existence is the only substance that is.
In principle we can deconstruct the bottle into glass crystals and we can deconstruct the crystals into molecules, atoms and so on until even the atoms are deconstructed into energy because energy is the substance of matter. It may even be possible to deconstruct energy into a deeper form of energy but this deconstruction cannot go on indefinitely; it cannot be 'turtles all the way down'. We must come to some ultimate substance that supports the properties 'atom', 'molecule', 'crystal' 'bottle'. This substance is that which is from the beginning, existence.
Even though philosophy cannot say why existence is or what it is, there are a number of things we can say about it;
1. Existence is.
2. Existence has vast creative potential because it has emerged into a universe and everything in that universe.
3. It has the potential to become life, because life is found in the universe.
As I understand it @apo's pan-semioticism is a claim that reality, at all levels, exists in the triadic sign relation, which consists of an object, a sign and an interpretant. You seem to be saying that because the interpretant is the central player in this drama, and because there is something it must be like to interpret, that this leads to panpsychism. But could it be panpsychism if there is something it is like to be an interpretant, whereas there is nothing it like to be an object or a sign?
Also panpsychism would seem to consist in the claim that everything has a mind, which seems to make little sense. Whitehead's panexperientialism, on the other hand, seems to make much more sense. For Whitehead nature just is what is experienced, not just by humans, but experienced by any and all entities. The electron experiences the binding force of the nucleus, the hillside experiences the erosive power of the wind and rain, that kind of sense of experience. So, I think Whitehead would say that the interpretant is also the experient, at all levels in nature. but this has nothing necessarily to do with "having a mind'.
I am thinking more in terms of the Whitehead variety of panpsychism (i.e. panexperientialism). I am claiming to apo that the thing in-itself version of pansemiotics is panexperientialism (a variety of panpsychism). Thus, he is stuck on the components and not the event at question itself (i.e. the point of view or the IS of the event itself).
At what point does modeling not feel like something?
OK, but I think it is misleading to speak of "panpsychism" in the context of Whitehead's philosophy. As far as I know he never used the term. He may have never used "panexperientialism" either, but at least the notion represented by the latter term is in accordance with his metaphysics. This may seem like a minor quibble, but I think there are very important inherent distinctions between the two ideas, and it would be best not to conflate them.
In any case there is still the apparent problem that the "point of view or the IS of the event itself" is for the interpretant, or experient, and not for the sign or the object. Perhaps this is also a problem for @apo, if he wants to say that there is no ontological (as opposed to merely ontic) primacy to any of the three elements of the sign relation. The question is whether this is merely an apparent, or a deeper, problem.
So you accept modelling would reasonably feel like something. My job is done.
The alternative question is whether we have to model in order to feel, which leads to the question as to how far down modelling goes in nature, and whether there is anything in nature other than modelling. To me, characterizing all experience as modelling would look somewhat tendentious; that is intrinsically cognitivistic.
My disagreement is not necessarily with modeling, though @Janus brings up a good point that I'd like to see your response to. My disagreement in this particular argument is whether the modeling ENTAILS feeling like something from the point of view of the IS of the modeling in-itself. In other words, if the modeling feels like something, who is to say this feels like something doesn't go all the way down? Just like different gradations of modeling- different gradations of feeling (or more appropriately, experiencing).
What do you mean by that? Are you saying that unity/identity/wholeness exist as an abstraction only in the mind?
Not exactly, I am saying that changeless unity, changeless identity, and changeless wholeness are mental abstractions.
But what is it that is fluctuating in the first place?
The fluctuation?
Consciousness, as a biological phenomenon, is a result of a brain modelling a self in a world. The sign relation captures the irreducible complex nature of that relation.
Pansemiosis would be an extension of that triadic analysis to a non conscious, because non modelling, physical reality.
Organisms are sentient because they have internal models of themselves in the world. The Cosmos is then in some sense a globalised model of itself. The model is not internal but now the actual shape of the system itself.
This makes sense given the information theoretic and holographic turn of current physics. Science has had to give up on matter as substantial being. Instread reality is composed of contextual limitations on individuated events.
So semiotics began as a way to understand language as a causal structure. Then Peirce extended that to include the grammar of logic, and speculatively, a self-organising tale of cosmology and existence.
Semiosis was about the growth of intelligibility and reasonableness - both within human thinking and also in the actual world within which humans arose.
Modern biology showed that life and mind are properly semiotic - language-like in their code-based modelling of states of meaningfulness.
And now modern physics is showing how a world of quantum events is about the power of contexts, or states of interpretance, to determine or individuate particular occurrences - the signs that compose the unfolding history of a universe.
So pansemiosis has the same triadic logical structure as biosemiosis and even just ordinary language use. But there is a huge difference between an organism that is modelling its world and a world that is just in some sense its own model.
Consciousness doesn't cross that line. The Cosmos is not aware, except in the loosest metaphorical sense. Even trees, slugs and ant colonies are not aware in the kind of way we really mean.
So pansemiosis remains a million miles away from panpsychism, panexperientialism, pantheism, etc, etc.
Is there any sense in which we can say that there are unities, identities and wholes "out there" in nature? Must we not say, then, that there is some principle of unity at play within nature itself? And furthermore, how is it that the mind is capable of creating such abstractions in a world of pure change?
The answer is obvious. Complex brains do complex modelling. When I use my eyes, I create a model of a world from some pattern of illumination falling on my retina. And key to that model is also the "me" that is place in time and space as a "receiver" of that point of view.
So that is an example of how the modelling is a model which is of a self in a world. And that is then what we would expect the model to feel like.
But if a slug doesn't have the equipment to make sense of the scrambled EM radiation striking it, then there is no "world" in terms of some self-centred point of view. We can just as reasonably draw a conclusion about a slug having the kind of experience that would follow from not having that level of reality modelling.
None of this is rocket science. It is obvious from the type of modelling being done what we might expect that type of modelling to feel like.
We can't then experience what it is actually like to be a slug, or an echo-locating bat, just because of that scientific account. But we can still answer questions about how far down some kind of experiencing would go when it comes to organisms and their self~world modelling.
Wrong question. If nothing has yet been prevented from being the case, then what isn't the case?
A fluctuation is just a way to talk about the barest first imaginable kind of substantial state of being - an action with a direction.
So materialism sees an atom as its simplest possible starting point. But if you flip to a dynamical point of view, that becomes a fluctuation. A fluctuation is what we would call the first expression of any limitation on naked and unbounded possibility. The starting point for in-formed being would be an action in a direction. And being fleeting, both the action and the direction would disappear with it.
When we take for granted the already existing self, sure it seems so.
Quoting apokrisis
What is this "me"? This "illusion"? If you go back to mere description, you have lost the trail.
Quoting apokrisis
There is some modeling going on, no? Everything is modeling right? Perhaps the modeling is nothing like ours, but something is happening. There is something of what it is like to BE a slug, not just to describe the slug.
Quoting apokrisis
That there are more complex modeling-types, doesn't negate the question at hand, that there are also possible gradations of being-types.
Quoting apokrisis
And how far is that?
I think you're conflating experience with consciousness.
That's just you still imposing your dualistic framing on any words that pass your eyes.
A modelled selfhood would be an illusion to you because you - unwittingly still - ache for a noumenal self that exists beyond the phenomenology of self.
To me, that self is simply a modelled construction - along with the world this self is living in. So the whole of this makes for an Umwelt - the world as experienced with a "you" in it.
So it is only once you move up to a triadic framing that the whole of what is going on can snap into place.
If you go back to mere dualistic yearning for the noumenal, you have lost the trail.[/quote]
Quoting schopenhauer1
It is up to you to define the kind of experiencing that concerns you here.
Does a slug lack the kind of visuospatial sense of being a self in a world that higher animals find second nature? What do you think? Where would be the lingering mystery according to you?
It seems to me you're still trying to reify some changeless thing as that which changes. Maybe it's a problem with language. A fluctuation is a fluctuating. Say it is temperature that is fluctuating; there is no changeless entity: temperature that is fluctuating; the fluctuating is temperature, since temperature is never changeless.
Think what you like. I'll wait until you define the difference.
From a neuroscience point of view, what most folk really mean by conscious experience involves attentional level processing by a brain capable of that. So more than just reflexive sentience. But less than human-level self-consciousness, which depends on linguistic competence and culturally evolved constraints.
I would say there are changing unities, identities and wholes in nature; but I wouldn't say they are "out there" in any absolute sense. Out where? They could be outside your body, but that would be a merely relative 'out there'. I would say that it is regions of differing modes and rates of change that constitute any unity in nature. perhaps you could say they are regions of different intensity.
As to the ability of the mind to abstract; I would say that abstraction is a mental process that is another aspect of change; I think it is an illusion that anything changeless is created by the process of abstraction. Sure, there can be ideas of changelessness, but those ideas are not themselves changeless..
The pan-experientialist view is based on the idea that everything that exists experiences, in the broadest sense of that term, just as the pan-semioticist view is that everything that exists interprets.
The link is that everything that interprets must first experience. A sign cannot be interpreted by an interpretrant unless it is experienced (not necessarily, or even mostly, consciously) by the interpretant.
The interpretant is thereby more primordially the experient. Feeling is prior to response. Affection is prior to cognition. experience is prior to interpretation. Of course interpretation then goes on to modify experience, which leads to further interpretation and so on: I am not denying that.
I'm not sure how to answer this. The answer that the question seems to beg for is "nothing", but that seems incoherent.
But there is presumably some stable entity that has a temperature, which endures through fluctuations in its temperature.
Quoting Janus
I'm not concerned with absolute vs. relative at the moment. I am only now concerned with the question of whether the concept of change depends on the concept of stasis such that we cannot think change without also positing an underlying unity or substratum.
The answer to both those questions would be that there is no actual stasis beyond the relative stability of enduring different regions of intensity. So, a bar of iron, for example, is a region of a certain kind and rate of change. It undergoes fluctuations in temperature. These are changes due to the environment (the regions of different intensity) surrounding the bar of iron.
There will also be changes that are inherent to the bar of iron itself, changes at the elemental level. But there is no absolute stasis, just as there is no absolute boundary between the regions of intensity which are the iron bar and its surrounding environment.
I agree that we need a concept of stasis (as well as concept of unity and identity) in order to think about change; I haven't been arguing against that. I have been arguing against reifying such concepts, and imagining that there are real entities which correspond to them.
But "experiences" is an empty, question-begging, sort of term.
Sure, everything that is individuated can then react or relate. We can measure that in terms of a model of a spatiotemporal/energetic framework - some set of global symmetries that could be locally broken.
But this "experience". How do we measure it in any sense?
The usual way is to distinguish according to reactions and relations which have something extra by way of autonomy, intelligence and self-interest.
So there just ain't any good reason to claim that the whole of nature has experience when the only intelligible definition of experience is the one that points to the difference it makes in terms of reactions or relations to have something extra by way of autonomy, intelligence and self-interest.
Quoting Janus
A sign is itself the wholeness of the sign relation as a process.
So see what you did there. You slipped in the mediating sign as something dead, static, inert - a mere physical mark that symbolises and thus needs an interpreter with a mind to read it as being about something real out there in the world.
This is the weird thing you and schop both want to do. You want to oppose realism with idealism. You want to oppose an ontology of dead matter with an ontology of living mind.
But that is just doubling down on noumenalism. It is compounding the epistemic error identified by Kant and fixed by Peirce.
For me - accepting that phenomenology is all we got - I treat the idea of "matter" the same way I treat the idea of "mind". I don't buy noumenalism about either of them .... even if the matter vs mind dichotomy are a productive kind of phenomenological distinction to make in constructing our metaphysical models of existence.
So I don't believe in quarks and electrons as "bits of matter", just as much as I don't believe in them as "bits of experience". However, for the sake of scientific modelling, they are measurably more like how we conceive of bits of matter than how we conceive of bits of experience.
And if physics does get around to the semiotic common ground of understanding quarks and electrons as "bits of interpretance, the signs of a triadic relation" then I would be happy indeed.
It would still be all a pragmatic phenomenological tale, not the noumenal truth of the thing-in-itself. But a ground that is common to both the material and the experiential would give scientific explanation the unified view of nature it is always seeking.
Starting with nothing is incoherent as nothing can come from nothing.
But starting with everything is coherent as at least then you only need to limit it to arrive at the something we know to be the case.
And a state of everythingness is effectively a state of nothingness anyway. We know that if we tried to do everything at once, nothing would get done. Any particular action would be at the same instant cancelled by us trying to do its opposite as well. No change would actually result until some possible actions were suppressed, allowing the others to now be released.
So retroductive argument leaves you little choice.
We exist. There is something.
We then notice that the somethingness of our Cosmo is always the result of symmetry-breaking - a constraint or limitation of a larger space of possibilities.
And as we go back as far as we can see - all the way to the quantum-scale Big Bang - that is all we see. A chaos, a quantum foam of spacetime fluctuations, that is a radically indeterminate everythingness, right at the point where symmetry-breaking begins to suppress some actions and so now concretely release some others.
We can then either choose to believe what we are seeing or continue to complain reality is not behaving the way we would expect - the way it should if it were instead some kind of miraculous something out of nothing.
You can't. And I know you don't want to countenance anything you can't measure; but that says more about you than it does about the immeasurable. Experience, feeling is immeasurable; interpretive responses are not (or not always, at least).
Quoting apokrisis
This is not true. The statement that the riverbank experienced the erosive force of the river is a perfectly intelligible one. The conscious (and subconscious) experience enjoyed by humans is different in degree, not in kind, from the experience of 'higher' animals, 'lower' animals, plants and even inorganic entities. And this has nothing at all to do with consciousness or even mind.
Quoting apokrisis
No, I haven't slipped in anything at all. I'm not saying that the sign or the object are dead, static or inert; what I have said is that, in a relational sense, insofar as they are signified object and interpreted sign they are not the interpretant, or by extension, the experient. So for example the tree does not experience me looking at it, but it does experience the rain; it thus does not interpret me as anything at all, but it may interpret the rain as a sign to start growing.
So, it is not an ontology of living mind or living matter, but an ontology of life; something which is both living mind and living matter, and neither (exclusively) living mind nor living matter, that I am advocating. i am not advocating idealism or realism as they are usually understood, but a kind of hybrid of both. One day you'll stop seeing through the lens of your own presuppositions and understand what I am saying. It seems to me to be fairly close to what you are saying, but differs on a couple of fundamental points.
Bollocks. It says more about the history of intellectual advance and the very nature of pragmatic inquiry.
Quoting Janus
Let's not kid ourselves. We might well choose this more mind-like framing so as to highlight deficiencies in a more matter-like framing. But my argument is that both remain just framings. And you ache to make the mind part of the noumenal, just like you accuse materialists of thinking the material has noumenal status within our phenomenology. Neither such move is valid.
Hence all you can say is that reality is mind-like ... in this measurable fashion. And here - please note - you accept the physical erosion of the river bank as your supporting fact. If I said the dirt just dematerialised, or grew legs and ran away, you would say no. The river eroded it. The river washed that dirt away downstream. Look, here it is washing muddily into the sea. What more proof do you need?
Quoting Janus
You did it again.
You framed semiosis in dyadic Sassurean fashion so as to leave the interpretant bit dangling free of the relation. It now has to stand noumenally outside as the mind doing the interpreting, experiencing the meaning, making sense of the inert sign and what it may have to say about the world lying beyond.
Quoting Janus
I have no trouble understanding your defence of a dualism that would allow you to claim noumenal status for "mind".
Of course anything at all that we say will be a "framing"; but some framings make more sense than others, and I am making no claim that any framing is the reality.
So, there you go again re framing what I said so that you can attack it. I would prefer to say that it is bodies, (or regions of intensity), not minds, that experience in the affective sense which is prior to any mind-like cognitive framing, modelling or interpretation of the experience.
The problem for your position is that it is incoherent if you try to eliminate the affective experiential dimension since you cannot coherently explain how there can be interpretation without some prior, or at least present, experience. Unless you want to claim that interpretation just is, in some primordial, 'proto' sense, experience. I might not argue against that. but then pansemiosis and panexperience would be synonymous.
Quoting apokrisis
Again you display your tendentious misunderstanding; I am certainly not defending any kind of dualism, and I nor am I claiming "noumenal status for mind"; I don't even know what that could mean. What do you think it means? Tell me and I'll tell you whether I would want to claim that.
You may be mistaking me for Peirce, it was he, not I, who said that matter is "effete mind".
Yes, I do see that. :smile:
Isn't this a contradiction?
Your original claim was that Being is identical to becoming. I am trying to undermine that claim by showing that becoming (change) presupposes something more fundamental and, as such, cannot be identical with Being.
However, I am not arguing here that Being is some eternal, immutable, first cause. It seems to me that the reification of Being is incoherent. Unfortunately, we can't seem to help but reify it in the course of attempting to think about it. At the same time, we can't help but think about it.
This seems to suggest that metaphysics (in the classical sense) is both inevitable and impossible at the same time.
Quoting Janus
So your claim here is that there can't be conscious experience without affective experience. But note how this unpacks.
What matters is some distinction between an interpreting selfhood and then the signs of being that self. You are claiming that experience has this essential structure of a witnessing ego living in some internal world of recalcitrant affect - all these affective events that come and go of their own accord and speak to the third thing of whatever reality they in turn reflect. Some generalised realm of spirit or idea or mind, I guess.
So you speak of the "me" who stands witness, doing the interpretation. You speak of the affects, which are the percepts of stuff happening - look, there a flash of pain, there a flicker of anxiety, there a jolt of surprise. And to the degree that the witnessing self and the perception of the passing, uncontrolled or "primordial", affects are distinct from each other as interpreter and sign, together they must speak to the deeper reality that could be the intelligible cause of a play of affects. Your framing certainly points attention towards this further thing-in-itself - some noumenal world of generalised mind - even if you prefer to remain diplomatically vague about that implication.
Now if you can explain your position differently, go for it. But it seems clear that you are adopting the basic structure of a triadic semiosis, as all good psychological models will wind up doing. And so your (implied) claims about the noumenal - a realm of mind that is the cause of the affects - have to be judged on the usual pragmatic grounds. They are justified to the degree that the signs are measurements which reliably support a habit of interpretance.
So sure, if I have a pain, or hesitation, or a startle, these are all signs of something happening "out there" which have a habitual meaning for "me in here". Affect is a form of perception that feels very intimately connected to the self as a thing. It is the level of sensation that builds the sharp distinction between self and world. It is the construction of a boundary to the ego.
But that is the sensible psychological model of what an organism does to be a body with intentionality in a physical environment. And you are instead cutting away that actual world by saying "we" only have our experience. And that experience is primordially composed of affect. The physical world has now vanished from sight (well, it was always phenomenal). But in its place - because you still speak in terms of an interpretant and its signs - there still has to be a ghostly beyond of some (now "experiential") kind. The mind or spirit as a general noumenal thing-in-itself that is the ultimate ground of being.
Where does all this confusion start? Note how asserting anything about "experience" at all is already to assert a structure, as now there is also everything that experience isn't. So as soon as you talk about being "inside" the phenomenal, the noumenal "exterior" comes into play.
This is the bind that led Peirce to the logic of Firstness or Vagueness (although I agree, he didn't always quite stick to it himself). If you are going to have some foundational notion - a starting point for a developmental tale - then it can't come pre-loaded with distinctions like inside vs outside. It has to be conceived of as a "state" to which the principle of non-contradiction fails to apply.
So when it comes to the question of how "we" could have developed, we find ourselves already in that developed state - the one where there must have been a first accidental or fortuitious division followed by its hierarchical stabilisation as now a habit of interpretance.
In biology, that first primordial division would be affectless. It would simply be some biosemiotic distinction that starts a division between an organism and its world. A spherical membrane separating an inside and outside is a definite start. Membrane pores to regulate a difference between the chemistry inside and outside would be a next step. A beating flagella to mark a "conscious" difference between the direction a cell wants to go in, vs those it doesn't, is yet another.
So a lot of semiotic distinctions would get built up before we start to reach your world of a "self separated from the affects that are signs of a more generalised realm of mind". For an organism to develop the semiotic sophistication of seeing itself as a self in a world because it can sense its own boundaries as a general thing is hardly a primordial state of being. It is hierarchically complex, or recursive, already. The modeller modelling itself now.
Thus again, note how you attempt to slap the label of "experience" across everything in sight as a way to flatten all the semiotic complexity. Sure, the Peircean approach agrees that we start stuck inside our own highly developed phenomenology. We can't escape our "experience". In that sense, it seems a primordial condition.
But we can pay attention to the logical structure of that experience. And we can see that the perception of affects requires a higher order of recursive modelling complexity than the perception of "the world outside". To see our affects as affects requires that we don't just hold a model of the world, we hold a model of us as selves in that world having an experience of ourselves as phenomenologically bounded beings. We are so aware of the modelling relation that we feel aware of having to make a choice about which of two worlds - the ideal or the real - that we actually exist "primordially" in.
No. The stress is on "effectively".
And a logic of vagueness is based on the suspension of the principle of non-contradiction. It is rather the point that what seems to stand in contradiction - everything and nothing - would be indistinguishably the same thing in primordial vagueness.
So I simply tried to show how that does make intelligible sense if we think of "everythingness" in terms of an everythingness of fluctuations.
How much do you actually wind up with if I give you an infinite amount of the infinitesimal? Is it everything or nothing? What does your maths say here?
It is to make a transcendental claim, to be sure. But it is not a transcendental claim about the conditions, in a synthetic a priori sense, for possible experience; it is a claim about the precognitive conditions for actual experience. And this consists in what we know directly from experience, that actual experience begins with the body, and the precognitive ways in which it is affected.
Of course, when any attempt to articulate this kind of thing, to make it "crisp", is made it might be thought to make it look like it is all cognitive all the way down, but that is an illusion created by language. And of course, also, once analytical thought gets going, skepticism about what I am claiming is known pre-cognitively becomes possible, but that is all part of the possible deceptiveness of analytical cognitivist thinking.
It would probably help you to broaden your perspective and get this point if you were to read some Merleau Ponty or Whitehead, but you have probably already decided that you know better than they do. :wink:
I still don't understand why you think becoming presupposes something more fundamental. Can you explain?
Quoting Aaron R
If being is not immutable, then I can't see how it is different than becoming. I think the notion of being as unchanging arises from the abstraction of becoming, change, process into the idea of sheer duration. This linguistic reification creates the illusion that there is "something" which endures changelessly.
So, we are never able to capture reality fully in discursive thought, because we think in fixed categories and generalities which have within them the inherent illusion that they are changeless, and we are thereby lead to believe that what we are thinking about must also, in some absolute sense, be changeless. The best we can do with metaphysics is to create novel networks of concepts that give us a sense of that change. Being a painter, I like to draw an analogy with the way the best paintings, although they are fixed images, evoke the living-ness of becoming.
The point about metaphysics being both impossible and inevitable is a Kantian one about the transcendental realist illusion of rational thought.
Again, any claim of direct knowledge admits that there is a distinction to be made with indirect knowledge. So you are talking about a noumenal knowledge of the thing-in-itself. And if that is primordial, then it makes no sense. As why would indirect knowledge become a thing if knowledge could already be direct?
Just examine the structure of words you are forced to use to express you own claims.
There is some "we" who knows directly from our "own experience" of ... something or other concerning the primordial condition of "our" bodies.
Much better to just start with interpretance as an embodied state of being. To be embodied is to have already begun down the path of being in a triadic modelling relation.
There is no "self" as some kind of focal entity that stands apart from its embodied condition. There is just that habit of interpretance that is reliably making the embodied distinction of being a self in a world. And this habit can even point to the signs that prove the distinction to be a hard one - hard to the point of a mind~world dualism. It can proclaim, look at all these little affects running about inside my head. Here are the veritable signs that "I" exist ... embodied within my own embodiment in semiotically recursive fashion. The existence of "precognitive" bodily affects is my measurable proof of that claim.
Quoting Janus
No. It is using science to explain the neurobiology of affect as a form of perception - an organism learning to measure its own boundaries so as to be able to behave as a bounded organism.
You might want to treat affect as mystical primal qualia. But you know that a baby doesn't even know that its own hands belong to it until it learns to bring them under a suitably modelled sense of control.
A learner driver on an icy road feels like everything that happens is an out of control imposition from the world outside. An expert driver on the same road will feel the wheels as part of their own embodied state of being.
You can't just ignore all the actual evidence from the developmental histories of habits of experiencing or interpretance. It is not an illusion of language. The illusion of language is presuming that because we have words for speaking about "selves" and "qualia", that these things might be real in the sense of being primal, simple and noumenal.
Quoting Janus
Thanks for the reading tips. But of course I have read them. And Peirce as well.
So what I "know better" is that Peirce resolved all the metaphysical issues in the neatest way to be found.
Have you read him yourself? If you had, it wouldn't in fact take long to come across many more such hostages to fortune as "matter is effete mind". What is more "pre-cognitive" than the way he often talks about Firstness as pure spontaneity of feeling?
You could quote-mine Peirce for days to support your own preferred position here. I would be left lamely having to reply, well that was exaggeration for effect, look to his logic for a real understanding of what he should have always said to avoid misunderstandings of the transcendental or noumenal kind. :)
I don't have time for detailed reply right now, but I want to make it clear that I'm not talking about things-in-themselves, or noumena or the self, or qualia, or anything like that. All I'm saying is that we are affected pre-cognitively by bodily processes that are experienced as feelings that cannot be precisely discursively articulated, and that we are directly aware of this. Do you want to deny that this is so, and claim that the totality of what we are is exhaustively down to what is produced processes of cognitive construction?
Sure. There is plenty of perceptual stuff that we don't notice until we learn how to pay attention to it.
And it is my psychological claim that learning to be this self-conscious kind of conscious self is discursive. It is not biologically natural to frame any kind of percept - affective or otherwise - in this kind of self-conscious fashion that would single it out as "a percept", or qualia. To pay attention to these kinds of "precognitive" goings-on is a learnt, language-scaffolded, socially-constructed, culturally-evolved, discursive skill.
An animal doesn't "feel its pains". It just reacts due to being in pain. And so do we until we learn to take a discursive view of pain as being a sign that speaks to the presence of a mind. We have a higher level of semiotic modelling that now sees the "self" that is the experiencer of the experience, the observer of the observable. Our response to being in pain is no longer a direct embodied state of perceptual cognition. It has been elevated to a disembodied state where we see ourself as a mental being suffering a mental assault.
So you say that affect is primordial. But perception of any kind is primordial in this sense. It is still cognitive, but pre-discursive level cognition - the cognition which goes further to model the self as something essentially disembodied, unphysical and mind-like.
So yes. I am happy to say it is cognition, or semiosis, all the way down to the ground. That is exactly what neuroscience and social psychology tells us.
The division between reason and emotion, cognition and affect, is a Romantic/Theistic notion that doesn't really hold water.
It is sort of true in the sense that the nervous system and brain represent many layers of cognition. So right down at the reflexive level, responses are hardwired and instinctive rather than elaborately reasoned.
But even something so primal as pain - an emergency signal that just says back off quickly right now without hesitating to think or discuss - if filtered through a whole series of processing levels in a large mammalian brain.
The spinal cord can think for itself - whip our hand off a hot stove before we have even possibly felt anything. A short loop creates a reaction before the nerve signals could even reach the brain. That is precognitive in the most literal sense because it takes at least a fifth of a second for the brain to become involved enough to integrate anything in a felt fashion - and half a second if it is a unexpected surprise.
Then there is a big pain area in the brain stem and yet also further pain areas in the "emotional" cortex - the cingulate lobe. There, complex interactions take place.
One bit of cingulate can really amplify the pain, the other can suppress our awareness of it. It all depends on the general context of whether we need to fight through because bigger things are happening - we are fighting for our lives - or instead, we are doing bugger all and so that slight unnoticed pain in your back that I just mentioned is now turning into a burning agony demanding some response.
And all that before we get anywhere near a human socially-constructed sense of pain - accepting of course that, hypnosis or self-distraction techniques apart, pain is canonically about the least controllable feeling we have. As a biological emergency signal, it is designed to grab our attention so that the totality of our cognitive resources become devoted to a suitable response to it as a signal of something wrong.
So yes. The brain has this layered architecture. Affect seems foundational as that which is least ameniable to social construction. Cognition is at the other end of the spectrum. When it comes to the most highly discursive aspects of what the brain is doing - like reasoning - it is pretty easy to just shift attention by changing the subject.
But from a theory point of view, it is semiosis - a modelling relation - all the way down. And if you call that the same as saying it is cognition all the way down to the ground, I can live with that. Just as I would also accept it being affect all the way to the top.
Even when I'm talking about the super abstract - like semiosis as a triadic structure - it has cognitive meaning because the talk comes with some matching "felt state". There is some kinesthetic representation I have in mind of things all intertwined and connecting in a now familiar way. Thought is not a bloodless exercise of computation. We live our thoughts fully if we are doing it properly.
Sorry to respond so late. Rocky past few days.
I'm convinced of this, though, to my core, especially the last paragraph.
This is extra-philosophical, but the best model I've found for this is Proust talking about involuntary memory. You can have everything arranged just so in your thought. You can voluntarily try to remember the past, and it'll fit into your just-so arrangement. But sometimes you'll get a hint of something (a scent, an image, a feeling) that will activate a much-deeper much-realer connection with reality. That'll make all your philosophical thought seem like lego-models, in the face of what actually is.
And then that connection and understanding will fade. But it's so much more....something - it feels realer than anything else, in a way that is absolutely authoritative, from within itself.
They have a term for this in Kabblah too - the 'reshimu'
This is from some chintzy kabblah site, but so be it:
"The reshimu is compared to the fragrance of the wine which remains in the glass after having been poured out of it.
The reshimu is the consciousness of knowing that one has “forgotten.” It is the consciousness which arouses one to search for that which he has lost, the awareness that God is “playing” with His creation, as it were, a Divine game of “hide and seek.” A forgotten melody lingers in the back of one’s mind, and although he is unable to remember it he continuously searches for it, and whenever he hears a new melody (that might be it) it is the reshimu which tells him that it is not."
-----
This quote too, Gravity's Rainbow:
"Moving now toward the kind of light where at last the apple is apple-colored. The knife cuts through the apple like a knife cutting through an apple. Everything is where it is, no clearer than usual, but certainly more present. So much has to be left behind now, so quickly"
Finally, that's all I was trying to get at.
(Though I doubt that you see this as a dismissal of "qualia". You are still going to complain that no amount of scientific theory is managing to deliver your missing explanation of why anything should feel like anything. As if that is what theories are meant to do. Theories only feel like something when you can live them in action. That is use them to constrain experience to have some particular quality that you had in mind as a suitable metric. So semiotics explains that because it explains how we construct constraints on experience so as to be able to feel, see - and even count - a world composed of suitably individuated particulars.)
Quoting apokrisis
I mean, I guess that hinges on what you think 'theories' are supposed to do. So, specific theories - theories explaining this or that phenomena according to this or that model - yeah, they shouldn't bow to any personal feelings. Theories of Everything - well...
Do you see it as a defect that I should in fact start from the phenomenological stance that would have to ground any grand intellectual assault on a ToE?
Which sin do you want to hang me for? Being too subjective, or too objective, for your tastes? :razz:
I'd never hang you.
My theory about theories is that theories are useful for some finite thing, idk what, depends on the theory, the subject matter.
my theory about theories that aren't that kind of theory is that they're not good.
Or is even a unifying meta-theory a dangerous thing to have? There should be as many meta-theories as there are individuals to have them?
I mean if there is no largest model, then also, no model could be too small, could it?
(Whoops. I didn't mean to be so bold as to advance a single meta-model of models there. So like ... just whatevs ... its all good, eh brah?)
The brain's capacity to switch consciousness on or off may be mistaken for the actual generation of the qualia, like an intelligent home system being mistaken as the generator of the electricity it regulates.
AI makes clear that intelligent activity is possible for nonliving entities, and by the same token qualia may be possible in living entities without them having intelligence.
I think you are being pedantric. I already warned about the difficulty of language. I should have written:
"And this consists in what is known directly from experience, that actual experience begins with the body, and the precognitive ways in which it is affected."
And I think you know this is what I meant. Why go for the low-hanging fruit in these discussions?
You say you are happy with "cognition all the way down", as long as it entails affection all the way up. But I still don't agree that is helpful to understanding the situation. The fact that the idea of precognitive affect makes sense, whereas the idea of pre-affective cognition does not, is telling I think. It's easy to see in nature that affect is prior to cognition and I don't see why humans should be any different.
A good human example is the affective aesthetic response. No rule can be derived from it. It is impossible to explain what is so good about the greatest works of literature, poetry, painting, music and so on.
I’m sure he has. But this comment inspired me to google Peirce + Whitehead, which brought up an interesting essay called Uexküll, Whitehead, Peirce. Rethinking the Concept of ‘Umwelt’ from a Process Philosophical Perspective. Regarding Uexküll, his Wikipedia entry says that he 'established biosemiotics as a field of research' so he’s a heavy hitter. The section on transcendental apperception particularly interested me, although I didn’ understand the section about Whitehead. [Consider this a footnote.]
I simply say it is semiosis all the way down and all the way up. Different levels of the same embodied relation.
Sure, we have percepts that are understood as being signs of how we feel, and percepts that are signs of the way the world is. But surely your own drug experiences will have told you how uncertain and constructed those kinds of boundaries actually are.
Cognition likewise is a confused term. Discursively, it means something about working things out in some intellectualised fashion. And yet animals are also said to think things through in dispassionate fashion without the benefit of words. Even a jumping spider has the brains to stop and work out a roundabout path to its target. So cognition doesn’t claim anything particularly specific in mind science. Originally it was just a branding for a generally functionalist/symbol processing turn in 1960s psychology.
Quoting Janus
Yeah. But where do I take that mechanistic view of organisms in the first place? That is what semiosis is opposed to - even if the mechanical gets incorporated into semiotics as being systems of rigidly fixed constraint.
But again, refer to your own drug experiences. Didn’t you think this or that was the most sublime thing ever, simply because you were high?
Feelings by themselves are not trustworthy. They only become reliable signs of anything when framed within a well adapted “cognitive” context.
Temporal epilepsy and schizophrenia can leave you feeling you are bathed in the divine. Your pet psychological theory needs to be able to account with little facts like that.
I'm interested in your understanding of this as compared to Peirce, especially his aversion to substance ontology:
Talk of "qualia" is unnecessary.
From the point of view of the physical story, as described by the Materialist, consciousness is the property of being a purposefully-responsive device. Experience is that device's surroundings and circumstances with respect to and in the context of its reaction to them in keeping with its purposes.
No need to speak of "qualia", "supervienience", or something "emergent".
Physicalists get themselves into a confused snarl that isn't necessary, even within their metaphysical belief.
But I don't believe in the metaphysics that makes the physical world primary.
Whatever you know about the physical world is from your experience, and there's no reason to believe that your experience isn't central and primary.
I've already discussed how there uncontroversially are infinitely many systems of inter-referring abstract implication-facts, including an infinite subset consisting of experience-stories, one of which inevitably has the events and relations of your experience, and is your experience-story. ...and that there's no reason to believe that this physical world is other than the hypothetical setting of that hypothetical story.
...a story about your experience, in which of course your experience is primary and central.
Objections to that account have consisted of complaints that it disregards the necessary distinction between logical and "substantive" facts or truth. But people making that objection never answered about what they mean by "substantive".
Michael Ossipoff
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no, its 1/crisp :lol: :lol: :100:
'just whatevs, it's all good, eh brah? '
What voice are you trying to caricature? Is this supposed to be a stoner? A teenager? A jock?
It wasn't "this or that" it was everything. It wasn't "thinking it was sublime" it was seeing and feeling it's incalculable depth and subtlety, its alien yet familiar beauty in an indescribable ecstasy. Impossible to describe adequately.
Quoting apokrisis
To say that feelings are not trustworthy is a category error. Feelings do not tell you about anything except what and how you feel. I am not arguing for or against the reliability or otherwise of 'cognitive contexts", That's why I keep arguing over and over with @Wayfarer about his belief in "ancient knowledge" and his idea that mystical or religious experience can tell us anything at all about metaphysics. For me metaphysics is a game that is played for the sake of conceptual and affective enrichment.
I am pointing out that the context of feeling is itself a (potentially) vast realm of direct experience that requires no particular interpretation, but which may be associated with diverse sets of symbols and practices to enrich human life. There is no need for "the theory", the TOE, our lives are in need of enrichment, not dogmas as to the final nature of reality.
So, again, you are projecting your own anxieties when you impute a "pet psychological theory" to me. I am not proposing anything like that at all. If anything, essentially I am a skeptic.
Local to where, though? Most likely Australia, I would say. :razz:
That like anything else drugs open up different possibilities for experience.
Thanks, I'll check it out. Don't feel bad about not understanding the Whitehead section. I've been reading him on an off for more than twenty years and I am only really beginning to understand what he was getting at. In general Whitehead is beginning to come into his own only now I think. There certainly seems to be a lot of Peirce in Whitehead (judging from what I have read of Peirce, which has not been a real lot, but just slowly, over the past fifteen or so years, working through two volumes of his selected papers), but he also goes well beyond Peirce in important ways, I think.
If you are interested check out Stengers, Shaviro and Massumi on Whitehead and Deleuze (who is also beginning to come into his own, and seems to have a great deal of commonality with Whitehead).
Quoting Janus
Does that seem enough of an answer to you?
You are claiming a heightened and truer state of experience from what the neuroscience would say must be a faulty misfiring of the brain. Not sure how you resolve that contradiction, until you tell me.
Oh please. If you can make any sense of Whitehead and how he goes "well beyond", here is your perfect chance to lay that wisdom out.
That's true. I have a few friends from New Zealand, and they are, apart from their lazy way of pronouncing 'i's' pretty much indistinguishable from Australians. The term is believed to have most likely originated in Melbourne, although no one knows for sure.
Quoting apokrisis
I am claiming a heightened state of experience, not a "truer one". An ecstatic experience is not necessarily "truer" than a banal one. So, the contradiction is, again, a projection of your own.
Quoting apokrisis
Well, Whitehead developed a whole complex metaphysical system which is certainly not Peircean through and through, although there are commonalities. It takes a long time to make sense of Whitehead, which I am beginning to do. I suppose the same can be said for Peirce. I've made less progress on that front.
So what follows from it merely being "heightened"? Where does that leave us?
The contradiction still has to be answered. Or are you conceding that it is resolved by accepting the neuroscientific view would say the affective state is an over-excited one?
A well functioning brain with affective states that make cognitive sense - that would actually ground a mental response pragmatically in tune with the world as it is - would only be excited to an appropriate degree. Thus you can have the non-functional affective responses that are either under-excited or over-excited - too flat or too aroused.
Or did you have some other story on how there is no contradiction between how the feeling feels and what it would be for a feeling to be a suitably functional ground to neurocognition?
Quoting Janus
Right. So you have made your judgement. But you can't give the grounds for it.
I guess it's just a gut feeling. So at least you are being self-consistent then.
I have been able to function as well, if not better, than normal when in such states of heightened feeling, so I don't see them as necessarily being "over-excited", disordered or dysfunctional.
Quoting apokrisis
Nothing to do with a "gut feeling".
Are you denying that Whitehead has produced a complex, comprehensive and systematic metaphysics that owes something, but by no means everything, to Peirce?
I just don't see any important similarities. So I would welcome you explaining what they might be.
Every time I try to delve into Whitehead, it just seems maddening rubbish. Every time I take another dip into Peirce, it feels the opposite. So please tell me what I'm missing.
In the meantime, here is how others have summarised the connections between the two....
Also some key notions of Whitehead were fully anticipated by Peirce. On one hand, much of the characteristics of Peirce's category of Firstness strikingly anticipate Whitehead's 'eternal objects' (Stearns 1952, 200; Hartshorne 1983, 82); Peirce's Secondness is equivalent to Whitehead's 'prehension', or feeling of (previous) feeling, or sensing of (previous) sensing, and Peirce's Thirdness includes Whitehead's "symbolic reference" or more generally, "mentality". As Hartshorne concludes this comparison, "Whitehead is in some respects clearer than Peirce, in others less clear" (1983, 85). On the other hand, when Peirce stresses the rational nature of the universe he is anticipating Whitehead's emphatic protest against the "bifurcation of nature", the sharp Cartesian division between nature and mind which "has poisoned all subsequent philosophy" (Stearns 1952, 196). In contrast to many modern and contemporary philosophers since the time of Descartes, the thought of both Peirce and Whitehead can be interpreted as largely successful attempts to break out of the imprisonment 'within the circle of our own ideas', to transcend pure subjectivity (Platt 1968, 238).
Perhaps any similarities are merely fortuitous, and not a matter of Whitehead being influenced by Peirce at all; again that is a matter for the specialists. I may have gotten the idea from something i read in Buchler whose 'ordinal naturalism' was influenced by both Peirce and Whitehead (and Dewey). So, perhaps I was wrong to say that Whitehead owed much to Peirce, but whether you like his system or not, I don't think it can be denied that Whitehead's ideas go well beyond Perice's in the scope of development.
And why can't that be denied? Only because you won't spell out how exactly Whitehead goes beyond Peirce in your estimation.
I think every supporter of Whitehead I've ever come across only is so because he said "experience is basic". He rejected the logicist project and turned to God and universal mind. He mixed in quantum physics too. So he sounds like the sort of guy one should proclaim as a metaphysical genius.
But I've yet to meet anyone who believe they understand Whitehead well enough to stop and explain him in ways that makes sense - especially in relation to Peirce and other structuralist thinkers. Funny that.
I'm not sure exactly how God functions and is necessary in Whitehead's system, but I think it as the universal prehender of 'eternal objects" which he understands to be all the ways in which actual occasions (processes) can form or relate to one another. God is seen as the lure to feeling towards "creative advance". There is no "universal mind" in Whitehead as far as I have been able to tell. He is no idealist, he advocates a kind of dynamic structural realism which consists in endless change (process). God, for Whitehead, if it exists, is an empirical, processual entity like any other.
Anyway it's a complex, interesting (to some) metaphysics. Is it "true"? I don't think that question makes much sense. Perhaps it is "more true", meaning 'closer to the mark' than traditional substance metaphysics is. Whitehead himself said that no metaphysics can capture reality adequately. So metaphysical systems can only be more or less adequate, more or less rich in concepts that may lead to creative new insights or ways of thinking about things.
Commonalities with Peirce (off the top of my head):
Tychism=creative advance indeterminism meaning a genuinely open future).
Firstness= universal and primordial feeling or "everythingness" (in your terms)
pan-semioticism (although I'm not sure Peirce himself advocated that) = pan-experientialism ( and that is a matter of interpretaion :wink: )
It seems to me that these ideas are central to both thinkers. Hey, I'm no expert on either thinker so I'm just taking a stab at it. Feel free to critique and point out the differences between the two, since you have read both and read Peirce way more than I have. I'm here to learn which means obviously changing my mind if necessary.
Are we talking about processes or actual entities, transcendence or immanence, material things or mental things, creativity or constraints? Whitehead. He say yes!
I would say Whitehead accounts for all of those. He doesn't "absorb" oppositions or contrasts and explicitly rejects any kind of Hegelian synthesis or sublation where they are resolved through absorption or subsumption, rather than being maintained and upheld as contrasting relations And what do you say?
Peirce says initial free spontaneity becomes regulated by globally developed habits of constraint. That is a very general systems science statement.
Whitehead says the human mind seems creatively spontaneous in pursuit of their wishes, so why not fundamental particles too? That is mystic woo.
Quoting Janus
Yes, Peirce said such things and I say that is OK in a metaphorical way that gets at a basic unity of nature. If we accept phenomenology as our necessary epistemic starting point, then that is what Firstness looks like from that descriptive position. Then we move to what it looks like once we have developed a more general scientific and cosmological framework. Now it becomes what we would understand by spatiotemporal fluctuations. We would understand Firstness through the lens of quantum theory.
But at times Peirce also looks to have slipped into mystical woo. How much that was due to social circumstances - like his financial dependence on religious benefactors - is an interesting biographical question.
However my position is that the woo is completely dispensable. The epistemology and ontology doesn't depend on some undefined notion of "experience" as it does with Whitehead.
Quoting Janus
Peirce's speculative cosmology is pretty well advertised. You wouldn't call it pan-semiotic?
And again the difference is between spelling out a structuring mechanism - semiosis - and simply saying everything has experience as an inherent property, even when there is no measurable support for that vague claim about nature.
It is not even controversial in science that life and mind have semiotic structure. Nor I guess that they all support grades of experience. Organism have the organisations that give them lived points of view of their world (via an Unwelt, a mediating system of signs).
So what would be speculative in science is saying the Universe also is semiotic structure all the way down. Except this is what quantum physics and a general information theoretic turn in physics suggests.
And it would be non-experiential semiosis to the degree it did not have "a point of view". Semiosis at the cosmic level becomes just a developing set of boundary conditions. A totally generalise or objective state, not one that is locally individuated and particular to some subject.
So I am happy that pan-semiosis can account for the similarities and differences of the levels of nature's complexity as they are actually measured and observed.
I don't see any of this in Whitehead except from the very superficial gestures towards a contextuality and holism in his direction of thought.
I didn't say he resolves them. I said they sink without trace in his ambiguity.
Hegel at least saw it as a hierarchical spiral where each level of synthesis makes the ground for a fresh bout of symmetry breaking. We can understand what is suppose to be happening in terms of a metaphysical mechanism.
Whitehead talks about stuff getting stuck together to form more complex arrangements. If you look for a mechanism, it is just the same old bottom-up composite story. Bits of experience replacing bits of matter. With - as you note - something vaguely Platonic about God as a possible source of the global something or other.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iAWTYcwlEg
Creation ex nihilo is the creation "of time" not "in time".
This turns on the word "before". It does not refer to time but rather is more like the steps in a mathematical proof whose validity is eternal. Becasue of natural causality (not ex-nihilo) we can set up causal chains extending infinitely backward or at least for some period of time but those proofs fail to take into account the fact they they are contingent and therefore not ex nihilo. They just happen to be..
The real question is why there is the existence of anything at all. To make it hader the question is not answered in the same way as a regular question. The "answering", if you can call it that, is more like a awareness of the eternal deficiency of all contingent being and is more like the awareness of a question than an answer. Sometimes we refer to that as mystery.
No "cause" is posited as a contingent being for that would, in religious terms, make God a creature and require a further cause of God. Instead there is a kind of question that becomes and a realization of the superfluousness of nature itself. The very existence of being is the "answer" but it is not like being was there and created beings. Rather being is an awareness of the facticity, the emerging and enduring in the eternal sense of all contingent beings.
In human being this question is not superficial. It engages the survival instinct in unusual ways and reproductive intimacy becomes involved.
If we consider existence as the 'thereness' of the eternal void and being as life, creativity, consciousness we can see that existence (which is a substance, the substance) emerged into being.
Or why existence is. See last post.
A very nice talk, but I'm puzzled by what you would see as its take home message.
I would say it clarifies something important as far as I'm concerned. And that is some language games are better than others ... from a metaphysical point of view. Rorty says Whitehead's approach is poetical. And I would say that's the problem. Peirce's approach is at another level because it is mathematical.
So when it comes to language games, there is this rather vast step up from ordinary language (and its own highly refined forms in terms of poetry, music, art) to mathematical-strength language (as in logic and other universally abstract grammars).
Metaphysics has always depended on mathematical-strength language - principally the dialectical argument that speaks to symmetries and their breakings. So while I agree with Rorty's Wittgensteinian point - philosophy is a self-evidential language game designed to disclose "worlds", or metaphysical umwelts - we can also recognise why some metaphysics is at another level. The mathematical beats the poetical as the mathematical is designed to talk about universal abstractions while the poetical is very much about embodied sociocultural meaning - the umwelt that happens to be defining what it would mean to be human at some moment in the story of human development.
So it is not that the poetical is wrong, or inadequate. It is the right tool for the particular task being done - the invention or social construction of the world that humans "find themselves living in by learning to live within it". The poetical can sketch out the map of what is culturally meaningful, and we become structured by that to the degree we can use this map to navigate a life.
But then mathematical language is a different order of semiosis. It has a larger ambition in terms of being a way to construct maps that disclose a world. It wants to go beyond a merely human identity to "see reality as it actually is".
Now we can both recognise the Quixotic nature of that ambition, and appreciate how unexpectedly and surprisingly powerful that next level of semiosis actually is. We can achieve much more than might have been thought - even if it all remains a (mathematical) language game.
This is why Platonism, Logicism and Computationalism seem to have something to them. They are only mathematical umwelts - the worlds disclosed in a language game. Yet they are a clear step up from the sociocultural boundedness, the subjectivity, of a poetical umwelt.
Again, poetry is fine. But maths and poetry are tools with different goals. They aim to disclose umwelts of essentially different kinds. And metaphysics is about mathematical-strength umwelts. Peirce was playing that game. Whitehead did and then dropped out.
Whitehead's process theology is a comfortable fable that tells a lot of people the sociocultural message they want to hear. Hey buddy, you live in a world that is fundamentally experiential and divine. Therefore experience and divinity do make meaningful sense. Like all good theories, a formal closure is achieved by reading everything in nature to be essentially "human", from the smallest event to the super-human scale of being represented by the Cosmos itself.
From this point of view - an umwelt contructed by a poetical use of language - you can actually wall yourself off from all that nasty mathematical metaphysics. That becomes scientistic baggage to be left at the door of belief. Welcome to the cosy world of pan-experientialism. Take off your work boots. You are home again.
If you read carefully you will see that I didn't say that you said he resolved them. In any case the Whitehead you caricature is light years away from the Whitehead I read. It makes me think that you may have read (some?) of his work, but didn't understand it at all, or perhaps better, failed to engage with it, since reading any great philosopher is always going to involve one's own interpretation.
In all the time I have participated on this forum and the old one, I have never seen you show any interest in any philosopher other than Peirce (with the exception of perhaps Kant, Hegel, Aristotle and Anaximander insofar as you believe they agreed with or anticipated Peirce) or any approach other than semiotics. It seems you think Peirce was the greatest philosopher who ever lived and that no thinker who comes after him said anything worthwhile unless it was something that had already been said, or implied, by Peirce.
I don't read philosophy in order to discover the One True System. I read it to diversify my ideas and familiarize myself with creative new approaches. I don't believe in ideas so much as entertain them if I find them interesting and enriching. It seems to me that you suffer from an anxiety, a horror even, that you might entertain any idea which does not correspond to Reality as it is portrayed by science, Good luck with that; I don't share such anxiety or proscription.
It's true that the human cannot find a home in your "mathematical strength umwelt" which means that it is not really an "umwelt" at all, but an ivory tower construction. Your preoccupation seems to be with making it taller and more impregnable than any other! Size, and hardness, it would seem, really does matter to you.
Such pedestrian ad homs. Not worth a response.
Quoting Janus
So what? I've always said my interest is in systems thinking. That is the particular philosophical issue which I want to track through its historical development. It is the one relevant to naturalism as a metaphysical project.
Quoting Janus
Such hostility.
I agree it is a little surprising that Peirce sums up so much in pivotal fashion. But read it as a fluke of historical circumstance - a case of being in the right place at the right time.
If you listen closely, you would also see how much I say Peirce left rather muddled. If you want hero figures, I would point to Howard Pattee and Stan Salthe as two contemporaries who have added a hell of a lot of polish to anything Peirce was in a position to say.
But this is a philosophy forum. So talking about the philosophical legacy makes more sense in the context provided.
Quoting Janus
Fine. You have your projects too.
Quoting Janus
Don't you feel embarrassed by this level of insult? It is pretty clear which one of us is being thrust into a state of high anxiety by being confronted by their "other".
Again, do you think I should be apologetic for pursuing naturalism as a metaphysical project, going wherever it seems to lead? Am I being such a bad boy? Why are you shaking such a worried and angry finger now?
(Although I can appreciate that you view me as an alarming intrusion on your own chosen familiar umwelt. Your taste for intellectual diversity has its limits, after all.)
LOL, no I don't feel embarrassed because it is not intended as an insult but as the expression of a genuine impression. I honestly think your thinking is mired in reductionism inasmuch as you think that everything can be explained by science, and that any thinking which is not scientific is therefore pretty much worthless.
I have no argument with "pursuing naturalism". I am interested in Whitehead's ideas and he also pursues naturalism, for example. You should know from my exchanges with @Wayfarer that I do not hold with any supernaturalist thinking simply because I don't believe such thinking has any inter-subjective provenance.
And I am not "shaking a worried and angry finger" at you. My criticism is not on account of what you pursue, but on account of your polemical tone and tendency to re-interpret what others say in order to attack it on your own terms, rather than just recognizing that you and your "opponent" are really talking past one another, or concerned with very different things, and that the time has come to just agree to disagree instead of insisting on the superiority of your own views, and continuing to insult those you are supposed to be engaging in discussion with.
I don't view you as "an alarming intrusion on my umwelt". Insofar as I understand what you are getting at I mostly agree with what you say, as far as it goes. But I believe that your perspective can only encompass the scientific image of the world, and fails when it comes to the manifest image, to use Sellar's terms. So, I don't believe that you have demonstrated that your ideas are cogent when it comes to the 'humanities' aspects of human life.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, and it is interesting to note that they are both scientists, not philosophers (and of course Peirce was also a scientist as well as a philosopher).
You say it is fine that I have my own projects; and i agree; it is fine that you have yours too. I am more interested in the phenomenological, humanities side of philosophy, and you are more interested in the scientific side of philosophy. I don't pretend that the scientific project is subsumed by the phenomenological; but you do behave as is if you think the phenomenological is subsumed by the scientific. And yet you have never convincingly demonstrated that it this is so. It's puzzling, perhaps you just like to disagree for the sake of it?
So you "honestly" think that. Thus you call me a liar when I explain otherwise.
Last time I checked, I seemed a functional member of society. I past the cultural tests even on a "poetical" level of expression. I have a life that seems worth the living.
I'd agree that I also live a highly abstracted life as well - the one that exists in that mathematico-scientific space. But again, more than most who do that, last time I checked, I actually manage to bridge the two umwelts in a way that many appreciate. I get well rewarded for the insights that result from being able to do that.
Quoting Janus
If you want to dispute their cogency, that is what I'm here for. If you just want to attack me as a person, then maybe take a closer look at your insecurities.
No, I don't want to call you a "liar" at all. But, you agreed earlier that your thinking is reductionist in this, but not in the 'mechanistic', sense. And I have never heard you say you found anything of interest or value in, for example, Deleuze, Heidegger, or Whitehead, or in fact any 'unscientifc' thinker, for that matter. You always seem to be dismissive of such philosophers.
But you do express yourself poetically. I have really enjoyed some of your expositions, and have said so on several occasions. And I haven't said there are no insights, phenomenologically or humanistically speaking, to be found in what you say. The value in what you say does not exclude the value in very different kinds of discourses, though. It's not a matter of it being a contest between competing attempts to produce a theory of everything. I don't agree with Peirce's formulation of truth as being what the community of enquirers would at the end come to agree on; for me, this seems to be a very scientistic notion of truth.
Anyway I would apologize if you felt insulted, but I know there is no need, because you, like me, do not take anything said on here personally, or at least so you have avowed on several occasions if my memory serves. :smile:
Sure. Reductionist in the sense that modelling, and cognition, are about forming the umwelts that successfully distance "us" from the "thing-in-itself".
So reductionist in the way that forms the autonomy of being a self in a world. Hence reductionist in a way that speaks to "being human" as an example of that relation.
Quoting Janus
Yeah. To the degree they are meant to be saying something interesting about the metaphysics of nature, I find them not wildly exciting. They are peripheral figures, rather late in the day, at best. And Whitehead not even that.
But I can't remember you saying much about Deleuze or Heidegger either. So I'm not sure what missed insight you mean to draw my attention to. What would repay that investment of my time?
Quoting Janus
What do you want? If you think I ignore different discourses, that's bad. If I make posts giving my reasons for dismissing them, that becomes insufferable.
And if I go about my project of tracking the history of metaphysical theories of everything, you get on my case with your own theory of everything which is a rival theory of everything in wanting to reject every totality by fragmentation, implode every constraining unity by asserting creatively unbound pluralism.
Do I just impose all these dichotomies on you, or instead reveal the dialectics tacitly in play?
You really are sounding so bloody hard done by.
Quoting Janus
OK. You don't agree. Next step, you justify that if you think I should care. Why is it wrong?
And it is more than just "very scientistic". Peirce was trying to define science as an inquiry into truth - forever rooted in phenomenology and pragmatism.
So it sounds like you are accusing him of being "overly" correct. What you see as the bug was the feature.
Quoting Janus
I don't take it personal. But I will respond in kind. And finding people to disagree with is what it should be about. Who wants to be surrounded by the like-minded all the time? That is why I ask you to actually set out some concrete arguments when we have the luck to stumble into an area of basic disagreement.
If you could show me Whitehead said something I simply couldn't afford not to understand, that would be terrific. So ball in your court.
Yes I didn't watch it all the way through until after I posted it. I still think he had some interesting ideas about language games.
Quoting apokrisis
At least you admit it is a language game.
Quoting apokrisis
How is this not a bias for mathematical totalizing? Also, Whitehead's philosophy was very structured and internally coherent.
Quoting apokrisis
You over-characterize my view to make your point. That isn't necessary. I am not a devote of Whitehead, but rather, I saw similarities with his philosophy to your Peircean semiotics, and thought that it included a kind of semiosis that had the ghost already in the machine and organic, rather than the ghost popping out of ex nihilo. And by ex nihilo, I don't mean that it has to come late in the game, but it is coming out later nonetheless (i.e. wherever you decide that it should on your emergent scale). It's less to do with my romantic longing for things to be human and more to do with the Problem of Mind itself. It's easy to beg the question as you are doing and have the answer waiting by handwaving the question at hand, but I first want to grapple with it, and see it for what it is without bypassing the very hard question I am trying to answer. You do have holes in your theory. You have newborns with no experiential qualities. You have animals with no experiential qualities. You have not convincingly connected matter with mind. Rather, you skipped a step from the physical to the mental by using a lot of word-games related to "modeling". Despite your arrogance, condescension, and general uncharitableness, I am still willing to engage with you and see if you have something to fill in the major gaps. Notice, I try not to do this back to you. Perhaps you think I should, but unless provoked, I see no need for it. Thus, my bias against some of your approach does not negate me from being open to the ideas you present, but with the obvious gaps closed more convincingly.
I don't have much time, so just a couple points. Whether they say something interesting about the metaphysics of nature is akin to whether you find a particular poet interesting. This is of course, from my point of view. From your point of view it might hinge on whether what they say is consonant with the latest science. Two very different points of view there!
Quoting apokrisis
So, Peirce allowed that there might be other kinds of 'truths'; aesthetic truths, spiritual truths, that the community of enquirers would never come to agree upon?
Quoting apokrisis
See, I could never do that because you're not interested in Whitehead's ideas and any exegesis of them would be too much trouble. The point is that I'm not trying to convince you that Whitehead's ideas should be interesting to you. Are you saying they should not be interesting to me? Because if you're not, then we have been talking past each other and effectively arguing about nothing.
Yes, a semiotic one. And by that I mean a triadic Peircean one and not a dyadic Sassurean one.
Quoting schopenhauer1
It is that bias. That is its point.
Quoting schopenhauer1
So is Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, or Toy Story. That is a requirement of poetic worlds too. That is what makes them realities which our imaginations can inhabit.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Huh? To the degree there is a constructed "self", there is a matching unwelt. So animals and newborns are clearly experiential due to their relevant degree of biologically constructed selfhood. But not in terms of a linguistically structured one to the degree that remains absent.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Feel free to fuck off anytime you like.
Who would ever do such a thing?? :scream:
No doubt we all do it at times, and would benefit from having it pointed out when we do. Some do it more than others, too. :wink:
No it bloody isn't. Not if naturalism is the position that there is something more at stake here than merely "interest".
Some things are actually measurably the case because they are said from within frameworks that make predictions. These frameworks also have their internal logical coherence as well as their measurable external correspondence. So they are truth-apt in the two complementary senses needed. Rational and empirical.
Quoting Janus
You can read him for yourself. It is an important question why - given all his monstrous system mongering - he said so little about the aesthetic. He wanted to. But found when he got to that bit, there wasn't much that was substantial enough to formalise.
Certainly he did make some gestures. He came up with a really toe-curling notion of "universal love" or agape. But Peirce scholars - after the first theistic flush of interest in his unpublished manuscripts - tend to note the way he falls silent at about the point Hegel and Kant start to turn up the deontological volume.
He of course made his famous "neglected argument" for God - or some kind of godhood that he said was quite unlike the regular notion - as an idea that can't be avoided by a community of reasoning inquirers, hence it must be the truth.
But I will say again, I don't find that bit convincing. However if you water down the conception of the divine enough - like Peirce had to do to make it consistent with his excellent understanding of evolutionary theory and developmental cosmology - then it is not as if there is some biblical difference from what I see as pure athetistic naturalism. In other forums, where many of the well-read Peirceans were theologians, I never got into any bitter arguments on that score. But those were also academic discussion boards of course.
So for example, Peirce picked out something essential about evolution and cosmology. He rejected the blind mechanical determinism of his day to insist that chance or spontaneity must be as basic to nature as their constraint. Darwinism, for example, could be only half the story as it could only remove variety from nature, not create it.
That was a pretty deep insight so early in the game for evolutionary theory. In the same way, what did quantum physics later come to tell us about the basic indeterminism of nature? Give old Charlie credit there. And what does a Peircean approach to inferential reasoning - where it all has to start with a creative abductive leap - have to tell us about the current dreams concerning machine intelligence?
So yeah. You can find a few false steps and clumsy moves. But I know the difference when someone can appreciate Peirce in his actual historical context.
If your question is whether a community of inquiry would settle on a truth about every possible aspect of life - even a taste in poetry or women - then of course the answer should be obvious. The actual metaphysical system divides the phenomenal into its necessities and its contingencies. Some things have a mathematical strength inevitability. Others - by definition - are just meaningless differences. That free spontaneity missing from the deterministic science you so deride, as if Peirce hadn't done that already.
So you might like detective novels, I might like something else. We live in societies that encourage quite a degree of personal choice - saying that the choices don't need to be determined because the resulting spontaneous variety is also an essential complementary part of society being a developing, evolving, system.
If you but understood Peirce, you would see how silly it is to try to lump him in with your scientistic foe. He explained why the free or accidental was also necessary, why the whole is a combo of the one and the many, why Newtonian determinism was already a scientific crock soon to be rewritten.
Whitehead withdrew from scientific contact with the world. He retreated into the merely poetic. Peirce took on scientism and so recovered philosophical naturalism for the modern era. But for various reasons - too difficult, too early, too cut off from the Continent's academic centres, not exactly great at greasing up his lesser contemporaries - he was very poorly understood at the time he was working all this out.
I am considering the notion that the so-called ‘firstness’ actually corresponds with, and manifests as, the first person perspective. So that as organisms evolve, 'firstness' is what manifests as the subject, or gives rise to subject-hood, being 'a subject of experience', or being-as-such (as distinct from the imputed being of objects of perception).
I noticed from the article I mentioned on Uexküll:
The point being, this can't be interpreted as a form of 'atheistic naturalism', because one of the fundamental drivers of the process is, as the passage says, 'eludes our knowledge' and in any case 'can't be reduced to physics'. This is reminiscent of other schools of transcendental philosophy, for instance, Vedanta, where ?tman, as 'transcendental subject' is the counterpart or reflection of Brahman, who is to all intents 'the first-person' aspect of the Universe.
But in any case, I don't see why such an understanding would be alien to C S Peirce, who was, as has been shown, quite indebted to both Emerson and Schelling, both of whom have some resemblances to Vedanta, and all three of whom are recognised as generally idealistic in attitude.
And I think the reason Peirce didn't devote that much effort to that side of his work was because he was a working scientist and of a mainly pragmatic bent. But whenever he did write about such matters, it was often from an idealist standpoint.
Peircean math is not utilized in a systematic way either. It's not taught as THE theory of everything that totalizes sciences. However, I can see your system and Whitehead's being used to overlay this and justified in just about the same way. I'm not Whiteheadian scholar, but I can imagine a counter-universe with there is bizarro-apokrisis advocating for Whitehead's system in much the same way as you do the Peirce system.
Quoting apokrisis
Oh, well I've seen you say in the past that newborns have no reference to distinctions (what is green if they don't know what not-green is? etc.) and I've seen you say various similar things about animals. I can try to copy and paste what you've said if you want. The linguistic- socially constructed brain seemed important to you for the "illusion" of experiential qualia and other internal states.
Quoting apokrisis
So I guess you agree, arrogant you are, but don't give a shit. Noted.
It really doesn't. That has to arise as Thirdness. A meaningful perspective or point of view has to have the other thing of a stable context.
I can know that thing over there is a cat because I know it is not a dog, cow or rocket launcher.
Apperception is then me being able to categories that as a "cat". Whatever it is that it might be as the thing-in-itself, to me, I am reading that part of my world, my umwelt, as the sign of a cat. And so I will act towards it as if it is a cat until further notice.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yeah. He had a foot in both camps. So you get to claim him for yourself and reject him also. You win both ways. Congrats.
Then when the content is discussed, you change the subject. Noted.
I wouldn't call it arrogant. But I would call it something.
I did.
"To the degree there is a constructed "self", there is a matching unwelt. So animals and newborns are clearly experiential due to their relevant degree of biologically constructed selfhood. But not in terms of a linguistically structured one to the degree that remains absent."
But I can't be arsed to correct your every misrepresentation of what I have said in the past.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Pfft. I can't even be bothered with an arrogant retort.
Naturalism is essentially the view that there is no ontologically transcendent reality. It seems that what else it is besides that is a matter of taste. Another problem I see for your exclusivist position is the question as to whether nature really is exhaustively measurable, or even really measurable at all.
The further point is that there may be only one method which yields the best practical results and technological advancement; a methodologically naturalistic one; but from that fact it does not follow that the possibilities for naturalistic thinking are exhausted by science. There are probably very many ways of thinking about nature in the metaphysical sense that are not in accordance with, or not directly or primarily based upon, modern science but which could be useful as conceptual schemas for the living of lives. Phenomenology and existentialism, and some examples of post-modern thought could be examples. We don't even need to have a preferred metaphysic, we could remain sceptical about all metaphysical systems and yet nonetheless be interested in them purely as conceptual schemas that allow us to look at the world in different ways.
Why does it seem that?
I say it seems that the alternative you just specified is then ontological immanence. So thanks for agreeing.
Quoting Janus
If it ain't measurable, then it would indeed be a "matter of taste". Pull your answer out of the hat and who cares.
[And must I repeat the same old things in every post? Does absolutely nothing ever sink in here?
It is the bleeding effing point of Peircean semiotics that measurement doesn't exhaust the thing-in-itself. Models never eliminate uncertainty. They simply constrain that uncertainty to the degree it pragmatically matters to form the signs we call our facts. Beyond that point it is just differences that don't make a difference.]
Sure those differences may make no difference to measurement or the practice of science, but they may matter to different individuals in other ways. That is really the only point I've been making here. I certainly haven't been prescribing any particular metaphysical commitments for everyone. And I do agree with you about immanence; I don't believe ontological transcendence can be coherently spoken about, because there is nothing there to intersubjectively share, a point I have repeated over and over.
I can then always say, that is because you have no good answer for it. That has been the main problem the whole time and why others keep on throwing Whitehead your way, as at least if its silly gobblygook poetry, it makes more sense then stones coming to life via the fiat of using words like "modeling" and "umwelt".
We do agree more than we disagree..
umwelts (check),
neurobiological processes and environmental interactions involved in experience (check)
experiential-ness = triadic modeling.. I can get on board with, but it just seems like there's a lot of modeling with no there there in regards to what the modeling IS. Just saying its "emergent" is almost as Woo as saying everything is experience.
Everyone has their umwelt. So the semiotic model applies across the board. That is what it says.
Just as it then defines science in terms of the opinions on which a community of reasoning inquirers would arrive at in settled fashion by the end.
You are just pretending to find fault with exactly what semiotics covers.
Pfft.
Look I know this applies to science; I already agreed with that. I just don't accept that it applies to philosophy ( at least not to the same degree). That is because philosophy seems to me to be a hybrid of science and art, and although there is art even in science itself, the more strictly corroborable nature of science compared to philosophy (not to mention art itself), means it will inevitably remain, to a subtantial degree, a matter of taste or predilection or whatever you want to call it, as to people's preferred metaphysic (if they have one).
What about metaphysics? What about philosophical naturalism.
It doesn't matter to me if people want to go off in all sorts of esoteric directions. Whatever floats their boat. I'm happy to hear of their travels.
And yet also I assert my own right to follow a path. I'd like to know what our best unified understanding of reality looks like. And so that has resulted in a particular journey through science and philosophy.
If that offends your sense of where boundaries ought to be drawn, that's on you.
No, nothing about your journey offends me in the slightest. :smile:
But this is your path we are talking about, not the universal path of the community of enquirers.
Say you had a wave tank, with a wave generator on each side of the tank, 180 degree out of phase. They both pump waves to the middle. Since they are out of phase, the wave crest from the left will meet with the wave troughs from the right; and vice versa, and cancel in the middle of the tank.
In this scenario, we have energy being pump into the wave tank from both directions, but we have calmness in the middle; bottom line of the image below, due to the waves adding and cancelling. It looks like there is nothing going on in the middle.
If we placed a partition in the stillness of the middle, like a large wooden board, this will upset the cancelling waves. This will cause the waves to appear on both sides of the board. The primordial atom of the Big Bang theory was the partition in the stillness of canceling waves, which caused waves of matter and antimatter to appear.
This isa way for something to have appeared from what seems like nothing. The symbolism of brooding over the deep was connected to starting in the stillness of the cancelled waves. A partition forms; space-time, and the hidden waves appear; let there be light.
I want to know what the being of these things are, though. I want to know what it means for a thing, state, or process to be rather than not, as it exists in and of itself.
Your signs and interpretation takes place in the physical world. What is the physical interpreting?
So again, what is modeling in the physical world?
Besides the point "Wouldn't modeling 'feel' like something". That isn't answering what "feels like something is, other than referencing a synonym or causation rather than identity.
Existence in the sense you are using it here means to be individuated. So you are asking what causes individuatation. What are the options you are then willing to entertain on that?
So your phrasing focuses on individuation. And I agree that is key. So is individuation something that happens - is caused by - a process? And if so, doesn't that mean it emerges from - in some sense or other - the unindividuated?
Thus the conversation starts to have a meaningful direction. It is getting somewhere. It is becoming clear that to exist is to persist, to be formed, if not in fact in-formed.
And now that constraints-based developmental view can be contrasted with its "other" that might seek to make existence something eternal and unchanging. We now switch to the materialistic view that asks what is the unchanging stuff or substance which underlies all the more superficial changing and transforming?
Again, the conversation is fleshing out. We are getting somewhere. We can contrast two approaches. We can see that the eternal material story has a problem if cosmology and science generally is telling us that everything develops into being out of some deeper undetermined or unindividuated condition. If there is actually a creation issue, then we encounter the problem that something can't come out of nothing. We are being pushed towards the other alternative. We need to explore that more seriously.
Of course if reality is uncreated and founded on material being - individuation is some kind of emergent and superficial illusion - then no problem for Existence. It just is as you are claiming it has no cause for its Being.
It is only because creation seems a hard fact - we have the Big Bang, as well as all the science saying we have developed and evolved too - that an uncreated story of Existence is not good enough.
So again, focus. Follow the logic of agreeing individuation is what it means to exist in a strong sense as far as you are concerned. Then begin to follow that trail backwards to where it rationally has to lead.
My complaint is that you aren't following either option with any rigour. You are mixing them up to perpetuate a state of confusion.
I agree that the individuated would seem to need to come from the unindividuated. Plurality, diversity, individuality, all come from a breakage of uniformity. The basic, fundamental "theater" is a single unity. Lately, I prefer to simply call this the posteriority. There is the puppet theater, and while the illusion is that the puppets are operating on their own, we understand that there is something "behind", pulling the strings. There is the anterior appearance, and the posterior ... "whatever".
In space-time, we can always move beyond. There is always more. But the posteriority, by its nature, cannot be finite, there cannot be anything further behind it. It is where we move to once we move beyond all else, including space-time itself. It is infinite, but dimensionless. When we talk of nothing existing, we may say that there are zero entities. Yet zero is still a description, an entity. So paradoxically, one comes before zero. There is before there is not.
Is this fundamental reality what we mean when we refer to Being? Do entities Spinozistically participate in Being as clumps of transient solids participate in a non-Newtonian liquid?
Or, to use another representation from a favorite album of mine:
If this is true, it is true only in a qualified sense, in a metaphorical or allegorical sense, because Being is not an entity, nor is it a process, state or event. All of these have Being, but they are not Being itself.
When you are swimming around the coral reefs, the world is domesticated, even if the terrain is different. In shallow waters, the reef (solidity) is primary, the water is secondary. But when you are beyond the reef, where the shelf drops off into the deep and all that remains is the water, you get this feeling, and it really is just a feeling, that reality is far, far more strange than you could possibly wrap your head around. Familiarity is not the norm. It seems to warp your mind. Beyond is the great blue and you realize you cannot go there, it is off-limits, there are no discernible landmarks that could make it familiar, it's just a never-ending abyss. Consciousness must be different for the fish, since the only objects encountered are other living creatures - the ocean, the water, must not even be recognized. Consciousness must be more specialized and advanced, closer to the shore where there are objects that can be manipulated. Fish do not have being-at-hand.
At this point, you hear the bubbles coming out of your respirator, but it sounds funny, it sounds different, almost like you can separate the noise from the ocean, as if the noise exists elsewhere, echoing in the recesses of your mind. It's a very peculiar experience, bordering between panic and awe. It's hard to describe, all I know is that it was simultaneously one of the most real and surreal experiences of my life, definitely something I would classify as "spiritual".
Interpret this as you wish.
(Different video, found a better one):
Yes, parallel with the antinatalism- non-being is only seen through being. The paradox. I also wrote about the "ever vigilant existence" (not literally of course), which gets at some of what you say here:
Quoting darthbarracuda
Right. So now there is a clear direction to concentrate on. Now next steps, avoiding false moves.
Quoting darthbarracuda
OK. I see a problem here in claiming posteriority pulls the strings. I would agree that all individuation might be contextual - shaped by constraints that are outside it, behind it, more fundamental than it.
But note how much ontic furniture creeps in with all those terms. They all conjure up some kind of concrete image of a relation which is dimensional or has an already present causal direction. And there is a confusion if all of them seem equally applicable, and none is being preferred.
So we have to start distinguishing the grades of contextuality that produce individuation. That itself must become a developmental story which begins with a general lack of individuated context.
To be outside is spatial context. To be before is temporal context. To be pulling the strings is energetic context. All these must be dissolved together to get closer to posteriority as a lack of either definite individuation OR definite context.
So posteriority has to be somehow a fundamental resource or potential - where individuation~context springs from - but not itself some kind of actuality with definite dimensions of structure or material.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Yep. But is the anterior the "appearance" or the actuality? Again, the words really matter as they are how ontic commitments creep into the game.
Calling the posterior the "whatever" seems pretty good. It is going to be the unspeakable or ineffable to a large degree. We can point towards it as "something" that must have been "there" - after we have dissolved away both thingness and thereness in our metaphysical acid bath.
But "appearance" is again speaking to a type of relation that ought to be in question. Yes, our actuality must have emerged via development. But it might have been its own cause of that emergence too. The appearance might be the necessary state and not an accidental result of something else.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Good. @wellwisher's quantum symmetry breaking is on the right track. But all quantum mechanics then has to explain why its rules would apply. As regulatory facts or laws, they would need a developmental explanation for their existence as a structuring necessity of worlds in general.
So spacetime extent and energetic content - form and matter - must be folded back into each other to arrive back at posteriority. Jumping ahead, they must have the right kind of complementary or reciprocal nature to cancel each others individuated existence away.
The problem with the quantum fluctuation which naturally splits into matter and anti-matter is that this is both true, and yet does not account for the quantum laws themselves. Time, especially, is the dimension that stands completely outside the quantum laws as a presumed fixed backdrop. That is why quantum gravity theories - which would unite spacetime and energy density - are taking the view that time needs to be incorporated into a final theory as a further emergent feature of the deal.
So, as you say, we must arrive at some kind of big fat zero as the cosmic starting point. And then as quantum cosmology suggest, there is every indication that this does happen because everything that has emerged does all seem to cancel away in the required reciprocal fashion. Spacetime extent and energy content are opposites that cancel in some absolute fashion as we run the clock back to the Planck scale.
Our Universe is composed of the two orthogonal actions of expanding and cooling. Each is the cause of the other. And wind the clock back, they do mutually annihilate to create a "quantum foam". Curvature without connection. Action without direction. Fluctuation without bounds.
Or in relativistic terms - that see this from the point of view of classical mechanisms - you have a cosmic fabric composed of matched anomalies. You have a realm of blackholes and wormholes. Again curvature without connection, or curvature which makes connecting relations impossible. Space is curved like a blackhole everywhere - due to Plank-heat energy density. And time is likewise curved into thermally-closed loops. The Planck density bends time so it cannot even have a causal direction. Every event is its own beginning in being a wormhole.
So physics - by winding known physics backwards - actually tells us some pretty concrete things about the initial conditions. We can see what posteriority looks like from established science. Although we still need a theory of quantum gravity perhaps ... if the asymptotically safe version of quantum field theory ain't already enough. Well there is dark energy also to fold into the quantum story now. We know there are more ingredients to be explained. But we are closer perhaps than many believe to a reasonable view of how everything that actually observably exists is a spacetime extent and an energetic content that cancels exactly to nothing at the beginning.
But that is not then a "nothing" in the conventional sense of an absolute absence. A zero that exists. It has to be a nothingness that is the everythingness of the absolutely unindividuated - the kind of unactualised resource that is a grand symmetry just waiting to be broken in its possible complementary directions.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Now you are offering an image of a quantum foam or geometrodynamical fluctuations - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometrodynamics
This is good. But the danger is again seeing it as a solidity, a state of materiality. There is some stuff that fluctuates, rather than fluctuation being the form that "stuffs" - that causes material being to be individuated as a substantial fact of a world.
Does the fluid take on the appearance of those little fluctuating shapes? Or do those shaped fluctuations create the appearance of there being some underlying fluid?
Which of these two intuitions are you reading into the same picture?
I'm pretty sure we had this whole semiotic conversation before. I would have posted the same links.
And why not drop all the posturing if you want to continue the conversation. Park your ego at the door.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Why would you even feel the need to say that?
Just showing a willingness to exchange ideas, that's all. How can you, of all the posters say that, when you posture almost all the time! Ironic. Pot calling kettle black and all that.
Stop being a time suck. If you want to engage in the ideas, get on with it. Drop the attitude that I need to be grateful for your favours in this regard.
This is funny. The analogy seems to work with the idea of a 'posterior' (behind or backside) coming "before" the 'anterior' (the front or "appearance") (but only if you are walking backwards :rofl: :joke: ), but it is actually a reversal of the meanings of the terms. 'Anterior' should really refer to prior conditions, and "posterior' to the appearances they produce.
That's an interesting definition of naturalism. I've always thought of naturalism in terms of a lack of belief in the existence of "immaterial" entities. Would you be willing to expound a little on what you mean by "ontologically transcendent"?
I don't think your definition is really different. If the immanent is the realm of material entities, then an immaterial entity would be ontologically transcendent; part of an ontologically transcendent reality.
So the stress would be on the developmental and self organising nature of Nature. No outside hand delivering the formal and final causes. Yet also, formal and final cause are just as real as material and efficient cause. A system has real global constraints or habits that have evolved. Local chance or creative spontaneity is real too.
This contrasts with scientific reductionism that would treat any global order as mere appearance. Complication rather than the actual cohesive thing of structure and complexity.
And it contrasts with theism or Platonism where something supernaturally dualistic is needed to provide the world with its order and purpose.
So a general loose definition would say naturalism simply asserts everything that is real results immanently from materiality. And a stricter Aristotelian definition specifies this includes the downward constraints that give nature its form and purpose.
So, do you consider yourself a naturalist?
Yes. Hylomorphism was a good early stab at understanding Being. The problem would be that there was a lot of scholastic rewriting of what it might mean. But the systems view would take it as being essentially right, once shorn of any transcendental or supernatural aspects.
So the significant feature would be the irreducibly triadic or hierarchical complexity of substantial being.
There is monism - everything is one kind of substance or principle, whether it be ultimately mind, matter, whatever.
Then there is dualism - we always seem to wind up needing two realms or two aspects to describe substantial existence.
And then there is the systems view of causality which says there must be a three way relation that together produces substantial existence.
So the Aristotelian story would say that triad is the one of prime matter, form, and the substantial being that emergently results in the middle of that. Substance is the meat in the sandwich.
Or another way of putting it is that we have a reality that is composed of the three things of contingency, actuality and necessity.
Prime matter is pure material contingency - not yet any particular matter with a shape and hence a character, just a generalised potency for action waiting to be formed. A kind of chaotic freedom.
Then necessity is the downward acting constraints, the order or mathematical regularity that chaos cannot escape in finding some route into actual substantial being.
We have physical models of this idea from modern self-organising dissipative structure theory -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh%E2%80%93B%C3%A9nard_convection
And so between the two - pure contingency and unavoidable regularity - we have something actual, something we call substantial because it has a stability and necessity imposed on its contingency and volatility, emerging into persistent existence.
Yes, I can make no sense of the idea of the supernatural. This is not to say that I can make no sense of the eternal, though; it's just that I think the eternal is inseparable from the temporal, it is not some "separate realm".
So basically, hylemorphism without God? That's an interesting prospect, but I wonder if it works. In scholastic hylemorphism God is existence itself. How does the systems approach to hylemorphism account for existence in the absence of God?
Basically I draw on CS Peirce for the broad metaphysics and a modern physical understanding of self organising systems (ie: systems science).
But anyway, to the degree that physical systems can self organise, and that this in turn is accounted for by an unavoidable mathematical logic, we have no need for any kind of god or supernatural/transcendent extras.
So if god exists, he is left with bugger all to do so far as existence is concerned. You could claim he could have made maths and logic come out differently. But there doesn’t seem any particular reason to believe that. And of course there is no evidence to suggest it. So why invoke something that makes no real causal difference?
If there were an eternal entity, then nature would be its temporal unfolding. It doesn't seem to make sense to say there could be more than one eternal entity, because differentiation is a spatio-temporal thing. Also because temporal things become eternal by having been, then the eternal must consist in the having been of everything temporal.Every event becomes eternal by passing away into the objective history of the past. From the "point of view" of eternity, though, all of the past, present and future is always already eternally present.
Spinoza understood this distinction between eternity and temporality in terms of 'substance' and its 'modes'. In his view temporal events are contingent, in the sense of being reliant for their existence on everything else and ultimately on substance, on the eternal, Whereas substance is necessary in the sense that its existence is reliant on nothing "outside itself". But in his system, looked at from another point of view, temporal events are necessary because they are the result of the absolutely necessary unfolding of God's nature. His is an absolute determinism. I take the view that indeterminism is consistent with the eternal presence of all temporal events.
For Spinoza the eternal, God, is also nature. But he distinguishes between natura naturans and natura naturata, with the former meaning something like "nature naturing' and the latter 'nature natured'. Substance, the eternal, is nature naturing and mode, the temporal, is 'nature natured', for Spinoza. Oddly enough, these categories as applied to eternity and temporality could be reversed, and make a different kind of sense. I suppose this shows that there is no real separation between the eternal entity and the temporal unfolding of nature. Hence the idea of transcendence, in any ontological sense, is rejected.
Spinoza says God is the ultimate efficient cause of everything, but I don't think this is right, because causality belongs only to temporality, not to eternity. So the temporal is not caused by the eternal, but is the other side of its "Janus face", so to speak. As Plato beautifully said; "Time is the moving image of eternity".
In the scholastic hylemorphic systems god played perhaps the most important of all causal roles - namely, that of ultimate first cause or "ground of being". Scholastic systems also tended to heavily anthropomorphize this entity, being as they were developed by Christian theologians and apologists of the day. Setting aside the question of anthropomorphism, does your system posit a "necessary" component that causally grounds the entire system?
The only final cause recognised in physicalist systems is the heat death of the Universe; life only exists because it provides a more efficient means to that end. The 'second law' of thermodynamics now occupies the role formerly assigned to God. There is no conception of transcendent cause or reasons, by definition, so ultimately it is nihilist.
No, not a straw-man. The second law of thermodynamics is 'the branch of physical science that deals with the relations between heat and other forms of energy (such as mechanical, electrical, or chemical energy), and, by extension, of the relationships between all forms of energy.' If the universe is indeed physical, then that is the boundary of the domain of possibility. As I understand it, the physicalist account is that complex life forms arise as a consequence of negentropy, i.e. they are a consequence of the overall degradation of order in the universe as it tends towards a final equilibrium state of minimum (or is it maximum?) entropy (I can never remember). This happens through a natural process whereby complexity spontaneously emerges and persists in some highly localised domain for some time before eventually perishing.
Quoting Janus
I sometimes reflect on Russell's famous essay, A Free Man's Worship:
So that is very much a statement of that period in history - early 20th century - when science had been thought to displace religious myth and notions of spiritual transcendence. But I think Mahayana Buddhists always accepted that the Universe goes through periods of creation and destruction; that everything created is impermanent is one of the fundamental dogmas of Buddhism. So the fact that 'the universe is destined to extinction' doesn't negate or even really conflict with Buddhist philosophy, as their aim is not conceived of in terms of endless existence in some physical form. Rather:
[quote=Nyanoponika Thera]The spiritual values advocated by Buddhism are directed, not towards a new life in some higher world, but towards a state utterly transcending the world, referred to as Nirv??a. In making this statement, however, we must point out that Buddhist spiritual values do not draw an absolute separation between the beyond and the here and now. They have firm roots in the world itself for they aim at the highest realization of that state in this present existence. Along with such spiritual aspirations, Buddhism encourages earnest endeavor to make this world a better place to live in. 1 [/quote]
This raises a question in my mind: would this eternal entity be inside or outside of space and time? If inside, then differentiation would be possible after all, and it opens up the possibility that there could be multiple eternal entities. If outside, then temporal unfolding would presumably not be possible.
[quote=”Janus”]
Also because temporal things become eternal by having been, then the eternal must consist in the having been of everything temporal.Every event becomes eternal by passing away into the objective history of the past. From the "point of view" of eternity, though, all of the past, present and future is always already eternally present.[/quote]
This would seem to imply that there are a multitude of eternal entities – namely, every entity (event) that has ever passed away.
[quote=”Janus”]
Spinoza says God is the ultimate efficient cause of everything, but I don't think this is right, because causality belongs only to temporality, not to eternity. So the temporal is not caused by the eternal, but is the other side of its "Janus face", so to speak. As Plato beautifully said; "Time is the moving image of eternity".[/quote]
I do not have a ton of familiarity with Spinoza, so what I say here may not be completely hermeneutically correct, but my understanding is that Spinoza tied causality to the principle of sufficient reason. Everything in his system requires a reason for its existence, and causes provide those reasons. Since god (substance) is the only entity in Spinoza’s metaphysics that provides its own reason for existence, it must act as the causal ground for every other entity (modes) in the system.
I will say that I find it difficult to accept many of Spinoza’s propositions. For instance, I don’t not agree with his claim that substances are causally isolated, nor do I think that the concept of efficient self-causation is coherent. These are just some of the propositions that lead him to conclude that there is only one substance, which is yet another claim that I find difficult to accept.
That said, there is an undeniable, austere beauty to the rigor and concision with which he presents his metaphysics that I greatly appreciate and admire.
That sounds more like strict empiricism rather than naturalism. Consider the fact than many arch-naturalists are willing to accept the existence of (for example) abstract entities into their ontologies (e.g. Quine).
Quoting Wayfarer
I would agree that nihilism with regard to ultimate purpose and meaning does seem to one of naturalism's more unsavory (in my opinion) implications.
I wouldn’t worry about that.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
The part played by a prime mover would be the thermodynamic imperative or least action principle.
Modern physics tells us that the finality guiding the Cosmos is a general imperative towards a flat and even balance - a Heat Death. So we can discern in that end the goal that grounds the existence of the Universe.
So the hylomorphic story speaks to some generalised motion that turns the heavens. But now it is about the slithering down an entropy gradient in the most direct way feasible.
This won’t make sense unless you are familiar with the physics of course. But yes, I am saying that there has to be some form of telos in play for existence to be called into being in an immanent fashion.
Quoting Janus
Not:
Quoting apokrisis
But, Quine and his ilk are not representative, in that they’re philosophers, and are sufficiently educated to realise the difficulties inherent in abandoning realism with respect to abstractions. But as a rule of thumb, most nowadays believe that the human intelligence is an evolved adaptation, and that therefore the basic explanation for it is - and can only be - biological in nature.
What is often meant by ‘scientific rationalism’ in philosophy, is that there be evidence of the kind that satisfies the requirements of empiricism. And ‘the requirements of empiricism’ generally turn out to be that you can generate reproducible, quantitative data concerning a testable proposition which can be detected by the senses or their instruments. So what is rational actually turns out to be what is tangible [unless it is something unavoidably implied by mathematical physics, such as dark matter or parallel universes. In which case, even though it’s not tangible, it still apparently carries the imprimatur of scientific rationalism.]
There’s a critique of this attitude that I have recently been reading, Jacques Maritain’s essay on the cultural impact of empiricism, where he says that:
This point is basically the same as that which underlies the ‘argument from reason’ - which is that reason itself is a faculty for which there is not a physicalist or naturalist explanation. This is because reason is founded on the capacity to abstract and compare which is intrinsic to language and rational inference, and which capacities are therefore logically prior to the very empirical disciplines that depend on them. As Leon Wiesleltier said in his review of Dennett’s ‘Breaking the Spell’:
However, I contend that this is what it does, and that it does it by methodically denying the very faculty after which our species is named.
Quoting Wayfarer
I meant that it was a strawman for two reasons: firstly, not because it is not the case that some physicalists (such as @apo) might understand entropy to be a kind of ultimate telos, but because the implication in your statement seemed to be that on account of that physicalism is an untenable position,
Correct me if I'm wrong, but your position seems to be that since entropy is the only possible overarching general characteristic of physical reality (a claim that itself might be disputed, but let's leave that aside) which could count as a meaning for the existence of life, then it is an impoverished view and should be rejected. I then asked you to provide an example of an overarching meaning for life from any other metaphysical system, Buddhism for example, which you failed to do. I challenge you to give me any sensible and self-consistent statement at all about what could be the overarching purpose or meaning of life.
The other sense it which it is a strawman is that there are, under any metaphysical assumptions you care to make; countless final causes (although not "ultimate" ones). A final cause is, to use Heideggerian language, a "for the sake of which", and human life is replete with them. This is also why I disagree with your idea that the lack of an ultimate purpose to life constitutes nihilism. On the contrary, i agree with Nietzsche that the demand for such an ultimate purpose is what leads to nihilism. Such a demand leads to the devaluation of human purposes, which is nihilism. And the authoritarian imposition of any supposed ultimate purpose on a society leads to the annihilation of the value that any merely human purposes have in and for themselves, which again, is nihilism.
I did not 'fail to do it'. I referred to a source, by a Buddhist, about the very question, which explicitly addressed it. As for the rest, you are of course entitled to your opinion.
Where in the quote from that source is the ultimate meaning or purpose of life consistently and clearly given? It reads like suggestive nonsense to me. Like poetry, such a passage might evoke some feelings, yearnings or even vague aspirations, but there is no clear proposition in it that can be rationally discussed and critiqued. So apart from your usual complaints about "something" that has been lost, some mysterious 'we know not what' that is purportedly not understood by modern philosophers, what are you actually trying to say?
I think the idea is that the eternal is not inside or outside space and time, but that space and time are expressions of the eternal. Differentiation is thus also an expression of the eternal.
As a somewhat crude analogy, think of the expressions on your face; is your face inside or outside them? Does such a question even make sense?
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Their multitudinousness would only be a spatio-temporal phenomennon, though.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I think this is right, and that Spinoza explicitly stated that God is the ultimate efficient cause of everything. I don't think of it that way, but rather I think that everything is the spatio-temporal expression of the eternal ( "God" or "substance", if you like). but I also think that spatio-temporal phenomena must in some 'final' sense determine themselves, within the constraints of efficient causation, and of course not inconsistently with it. So, I don't entertain Spinoza's notion of inexorable determinism and necessity.
Quoting Janus
I should mention that my physicalism is of the systems vairiety. So an imperative towards entropy is also matched by one towards negentropy. Thus nihilism is avoided by all things being dichotomies rather than monisms.
And so this is like the Buddhist notion of co-dependent arising. Or Hegelian dialectics.
Even finality is dualised in the sense that entropification take organisation. The Heat Death is a state of extreme order as much as extreme disorder. Everything becomes as much alike as possible.
So a proper Peircean view here is that the Cosmos describes a phase transition from absolute vagueness to absolute generality.
Entropy is a convenient local measure of something that seems to increase with time. But we could just as well measure this transition into a state of maximum generality by 1/entropy, or negentropy. The Heat Death is where change effectively ceases and spacetime finally achieves its flattest, most eternal, universal condition.
Yes, this makes sense, except that I think the final cause Wayfarer is looking for must, according to him, lie outside (be transcendent to) the system, which really makes no sense. So, I tend to think that Buddhist philosophy and Hegelian dialectics are not in any sense philosophies of transcendence in the way Wayfarer seem to conceive it, quite the opposite in fact.
Quoting apokrisis
This is a really interesting point. At the heat death, thermally speaking, there would be the ultimate degree of order, which is changelessness. But in terms of the spatial distribution of (dead, cold) matter it would be the ultimate disorder or lack of order. I've long thought that is a kind of weird paradox about entropy. Wayfarer also refers to it with his "I'm not sure which".
Something that you never understand.
Quoting apokrisis
But without Nirv??a, for the sake of which prat?tyasamutp?da is taught in the first place. I'm afraid your philosophy is nihilistic, which is why, incidentally, you can only ever conceive of Nirv??a as being stasis, which it explicitly is not.
Likewise as with your gloss on Aristotle's 'four causes' where heat death is the final cause; whereas in Aristotle, the final end of existence is the 'contemplation of the eternal ideas'.
No, it's something that you will never admit that you cannot explain. As Wittgenstein wrote in the Tractatus:
1.The world is all that is the case.
2. What is the case—a fact—is the existence of states of affairs.
3. A logical picture of facts is a thought.
4. A thought is a proposition with sense.
5. A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions.
(An elementary proposition is a truth function of itself.)
6. The general form of a truth-function is [p¯,?¯,N(?¯)]
This is the general form of a proposition.
7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
Also: “Anything that can be said can be said clearly.”
Quoting Wayfarer
But that cannot be the overarching ultimate purpose of existence, that would make no sense, so it is merely a final human purpose within the system.
‘Nihil ultra ego’ - nothing beyond self. That’s how we see things nowadays.
Regarding Wittgenstein, see this post.
I think that's not relevant. Even if you, more modestly, claimed that modern philosophy sees nothing "beyond the human"; that might be true of a few modern philosophers but certainly not of all. Physicalism, for example, sees plenty beyond both the self, and beyond the human.
As to the post you cited: Wittgenstein's "mystical statements", say nothing that supports your position; it's quite the opposite; he's just saying the same thing there as I am; that you cannot say anything sensible (in any propositional sense) about the mystical (or ethics) so they must be 'passed over in silence".Of course, you can say things that may have power to convince others, but the power will be, not rational, but rhetorical or poetical, and I have never denied that. So, I really am perplexed as to what you are going on about. Most of it just seems to consist in expressions of your own dissatisfaction.
What do you make of these, then?
- 6.41
- 6.421
I would have thought, according to your interpretation, this is something that ought not to have been stated.
Which modern philosophers do you think that’s not true of?
I don't interpret those as metaphysical statements at all, but Wittgenstein is merely saying that what humans feel value in, what we really care about, is the human side of things, which is not part of the sheer happenings and states of affairs that can be captured in propositional statements and which constitute the (empirical) world.
All of this other, human side of life includes poetry, the arts, religious feeling and faith, love and friendship, trust, care, compassion, respect and so on. None of this says anything at all about the nature of any metaphysical reality; that is the point.
Well, ironically enough the only modern philosophers you seem to favour at all, like Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, the idealists, existentialists and the anti-realists would be the ones who you might say (on certain interpretations, mind) "see nothing beyond the human". It is the physicalists and materialists, the realists, the thinkers of biological evolution, ecology, and 'systems' and process thinkers, on the other hand, who see the most beyond the human.
Correct.
Quoting Janus
This is a very subtle technical point in cosmology. The total entropy content of a “co-moving” region of space never changes. If the expansion and cooling of the universe is a smooth unfolding that maintains its original equilibrium, then the entropy count never changes despite all that cooling and expanding. The change is adibiatic.
So while the Heat Death is often characterised as a maximum entropy state, on a larger view, nothing entropically changes. All that happens is that those degrees of freedom - the initial burst of radiation considered as a bunch of rays - are more stretched out and so as cold as possible. But unless there is something to compare their temperature to, there is no real difference to speak of. The total number is the same.
That again is why we need yet a further dimension of reality - the vague~crisp - to measure the transition from the Big Bang to the Heat Death. The beginning would be seen as a state of maximum indeterminism of those degrees of freedom, those radiation particles, and the end would see them have a maximally determinate existence. They would be in their simplest energy state in the flattest possible world.
Note that at the Heat Death, I am presuming all the cold matter has been fizzled back to radiation again by being first swept up by blackholes which then decay to release all remaining matter back to this simplest possible state.
Although it also works that at the end of time, space gets so expanded that every individual particle disappear over an event horizon. So even if things get down to a dust of protons, there would eventually be just a single proton inside any light cone region of the universe.
Also note that this particular scenario - where there is an actual Heat Death at some point in an eternal future - depends on the dark energy or cosmological constant that provides a faint continuing accelerative push. And making sense of that negentropic force, when talking about the cosmological entropy balance, is yet another headache in getting the sums to come out right.
But anyway, the Heat Death is usually described in very simple terms as a maximum entropy state. That is only a very simple introductory idea. The discussion quickly gets metaphysical and dialectical after that.
And I’m afraid that is bollocks. My entropic approach takes meaning so seriously that it can measure it. Yours is theistic wishful handwaving.
There are some really tantalizing ideas in there apo; unfortunately some of it is over my current scientific head, so I can only get a kind of 'feel' for it. :smile:
I didn't introduce the term 'metaphysical' to the debate. According to Ray Monk, who wrote a biography of Wittgenstein, the point was that "his style of thinking is at odds with the style that dominates our present era. His work is opposed, as he once put it, to “the spirit which informs the vast stream of European and American civilisation in which all of us stand....If we wanted a label to describe this tide, we might call it “scientism,” the view that every intelligible question has either a scientific solution or no solution at all. It is against this view that Wittgenstein set his face."
Well, that's one view of what Wittgenstein was primarily about. Another view is that his main philosophical concern was to deflate metaphysical claims, just as Kant had done earlier, but in a different way. The difference with Wittgenstein's approach was that it was a semantic, rather than an epistemological approach. Kant demonstrated the limits of knowledge, confining it to the synthetic a priori and the empirical, whereas Wittgenstein demonstrated the limits of sense.
I agree that Wittgenstein opposed scientism, but I already explained my interpretation of why he opposed it. It was not because he believed in anything "transcendent", but because he thought that the arts, religion, ethics and other deeply important human concerns lay outside the purview of science.
The term 'metaphysical' was always intrinsically relevant to this debate, since this thread is entitled "Speculations about being".
Which is simply another way of saying that such issues transcend scientific method [where ‘transcend’ means ‘to be or go beyond the range or limits of a field of activity or conceptual sphere’.]
Sure, I have no issue with the term 'transcend' in that kind of context. That's a usage of the term which I, and I believe Wittgenstein would, agree does have a sense
I am no theoretical physicist, but I think that I can understand the basic idea here. In your metaphysic, the least action principle is the prime mover in the sense that it imposes a universal constraint upon the behavior of all physical systems. It plays the role of final cause for the universe at large in virtue of foreclosing possibilities and thereby "forcing" nature down one particular path (or set of paths) rather than others as it hurtles toward its ultimate, "pre-ordained" end - namely, the eventual heat death of the universe.
I'm sure that there are many nuances in the maths that I am glossing here, but does that capture the basic idea?
That may be true, but the point stands that naturalism is not equivalent with the elimination of abstractions from one’s ontology.
[quote=Wayfarer]
This point is basically the same as that which underlies the ‘argument from reason’ - which is that reason itself is a faculty for which there is not a physicalist or naturalist explanation.[/quote]
I am quite sympathetic to the idea that the operation of the intellect cannot reduced to physical processes, but I am also open to considering proposals to the contrary. Much depends in this discussion (as in most philosophical discussions) on how one defines one’s terms. Many times, people end up disagreeing without realizing or bothering to discover that they are using words in fundamentally different ways.
I find on forums, and I think modern culture generally, there is an almost universal assumption that, as humans are an evolved species, then the nature of intelligence can be understood mainly through the lens of evolutionary biology. Now, I'm not the least interested in intelligent design which I regard as type of fundamentalism, but at the same time, I think this reflexive appeal to evolutionary biology is inevitably reductionist. It reduces questions of the nature of intelligence, mind, and consciousness, to questions of biological adaptability, which in turn amounts to a form of utilitarianism in philosophy, and appeals to neuro-science and biology to respect of the nature of mind. Such attitudes are all intrinsically physicalist in origin and intent. I frequently refer to Thomas Nagel's 2012 book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False in this context, as it is one of the few actual philosophy texts which addresses this issue (Aping Mankind by Raymond Tallis is another). But these attitudes are so deeply a part of the matrix of secular culture that questioning them amounts to a form of subversion.
That’s it.
In case you are interested, there is this nice paper on the Metaphysics of the Principle of Least Action, Vladislav Terekhovich - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.03429.pdf
And I highlighted the "mysteriousness" of the PLA in this discussion - https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/178536
Also I follow Stan Salthe on how to keep telos unmystical within philosophical naturalism - http://www.nbi.dk/natphil/salthe/Purpose_In_Nature.pdf
This naturalistic approach recognises nested grades of purpose. So you have {tendencies {functions {purposes}}} as the physical, biological and then psychological levels of telos. The prime mover at a generalised physical level is simply a global tendency, nothing grander. More organised states of purpose then evolve locally within organisms as higher levels of systemhood.
I’m still digesting your biosemiotics paper. I’ll make some comments soon. I just thought I’d add my two cents that I find it harder to apply this principle to the psychological principles without inserting your bias. Appeals to majority can also be suspect as justifications as people can be conditioned to do several routed that are the current norm. Taking what is as what should be is a fallacy, especially when that is is exactly what is the condition at this point of time. I know you think change is possible, but that can go in many variations. Anyways, it may be considered a category error to use the mechanisms that control more physical processes to value.
I’m not even really referring to that in this case. I actually find the concepts in the paper very interesting and gives me a lot to think about in regards to symbols and physical laws. I read the tail end of this discussion here and thought just your pragmatism is harder to apply to value theory. I mean this in terms of physical processes versus value theory.
Maybe read the discussion then. It's not about value theory. Or at least no version in which values would be something with an objective or transcendent existence.
Ok because in the past I’ve seen you defend a sort of ethics whereby the majority’s preferences as they are justified as right simply because it is what the majority prefers.
Well if applied to antinatalism..you’ve said it’s not tenable because the majority will simply stampede over it with their preferences and thus can’t be a true ethical theory. But an ethical theory may not matter how much it is followed. When it comes to values, it is not cut and dry. We discussed chimp tendencies and then I disputed how much that is a comparison being that we are preference based.
...which wasn't the subject under discussion here.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I have indeed pointed out the unintended irony that in eliminating those unwilling to breed, that would strengthen the impulse to breed of those remaining by definition. To the extent that wanting kids is a genetically or memetically evolved trait, antinatalism would act like the culling hand of selective breeding, removing an undesirable trait from a population and so increasing the general propensity to have children.
For antinatalism to win the race, it has to be all or nothing. The whole population has to be convinced it should halt. For reproduction to win out, even a little bit of breeding is enough to keep the game going.
So at best, antinatalism is a Pyrrhic gesture, the stance of the dedicated absurdist. The real "ethical" choice is being made at the collective population level. And that may also lead to human extinction anytime soon. Death of the species by perfectly natural causes. :)
So I have some questions about the Pattee paper:
1. What is the main point between the physical laws and control constraints? When do the local constraints get in the ontological ecosystem? He mentions them as if they are already existent along with the physical laws (or at least how I interpreted it). How do the local constraints come into the picture if all were originally physical laws?
2. What is the emergent property of protein (what he calls enzyme) folding? I know he talks about strong and weak bonds, but that didn't seem to answer the question.
3. I guess what is the main point regarding biosemiotics in regards to experience?
I believe this may have something to do with what is being measured and what is doing the measuring, but I am not sure if that's where you are going.
So some constraints are global. And other constraints can then be local. Where's the problem?
The Cosmos has its universal constraints on action or uncertainty. Physical systems, like stars or rocks or waterfalls, then express more local or particular constraints. And then organisms can even construct their own local and particular constraints via the symbol~matter deal of biosemiosis.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Your question doesn't make sense.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Experience should be understood as an organismic sign relation.
He seems to make a stark dichotomy between "physical laws" and "local constraints". So were local constraints always in the picture in his view or were they created by the physical laws?
Quoting apokrisis
I meant to say that proteins seem to be the emergent form that is a "description" of the encoded genetic sequences. Where does the emergent property that was not there previously come into play? Presumably, emergent theories claim that new properties are created from the processes of a lower order and cannot be reduced. I don't really see that problem with proteins per se.
Edit: I guess i should add that the analogy to emergent properties of mental states seems tenuous in just that analogy alone.
You seem not to understand that laws are simply constraints that are universal - baked into the fabric of the Universe as a result of its history of development.
So all biology is ruled by the laws that express the cosmological imperative to thermalise. They can't break that law and have to live within it. They are .... constrained by it. The constraint is a holonomic one, to use the technical term.
But then - as Pattee says - life and mind arise by being able to construct their own localised non-holonomic constraints. These would be the various barriers, gates and switches that make it possible to regulate material flows of entropy - to put any available entropic gradients to good use and do negentropic work.
So it is all about nested hierarchies of constraints. It begins with the most general. And then localised complexity is free to develop within those global bounds. Life and mind go the step further in being able to construct self-interested structures that do work. And they pay for that by always having to accelerate the local production of entropy. They have to exist by doing the second law's job more efficiently than happened to be the case at some particular spot in the Cosmos.
There is nothing forbidding the acceleration of entropy rates by negentropic structure. And what isn't forbidden by natural law is almost sure to happen. Indeed, it must happen if it is actually possible.
That inevitability is why we tend to call it "a law".
Quoting schopenhauer1
How does a protein function as a biological message? How is that emergent from some "lower order" rather than that being an emergent result of there being a larger interpretive context. And enzyme tells a metabolic reaction to hurry up. A membrane tells a metabolic reactant to wait there.
Barriers, gates and switches are all physical devices. But they have no meaning that emerges from within themselves. Their meaning is emergent due to a holism of the whole system operating to meet a goal.
So Pattee was focused on the classic issue of abiogenesis. How could life get started unless life - in that holistic sense - already existed? What is the point of a protein if its folded structure doesn't already mean something in terms of some functional system?
If the fundamental property of a biological protein is to "act like a switch", that can't in fact be a property until it is useful from a holistic and functional point of view to have a part that behaves just like that.
So your notion of emergence is the wrong one - the bottom-up/supervenience story that bedevils material reductionists. Pattee is talking about a top-down systems causality where the whole shapes the parts it needs due to a functional holism.
It is the constraints-based view of metaphysics. That is the critical intellectual leap you are being asked to make.
So what was the interpretive context the protein was already situated in?
Edit: I guess this article has something to do with it: https://www.quantamagazine.org/lifes-first-molecule-was-protein-not-rna-new-model-suggests-20171102/
It would have to be some dissipative process that the protein could regulate. So for example, a really primal step would be the appearance of protein that could act as a hydrogenase enzyme switch - convert protons into H2 molecules and vice versa.
So the basic reaction - which happens when acid water meets an iron rich substrate - is there already. All you need is iron atoms bound up in the right protein conformation to begin to have a knob that controls the reaction in a meaningful direction. There is a little bit of something - which can be used in directed fashion to harness energy and begin building complex carbohydrate structures - for evolution to get its teeth sunk into.
It is like a switch floating around in an already active soup. A network of these switches can assemble to create a complexly structured flow - with switch building becoming itself an increasingly complex part of the construction process.
So the first steps are not very "informational" perhaps. They are not the leap to completely symbolic semiosis as we see with RNA. But Peircean semiosis itself recognises grades of semiosis - the three steps from iconic to indexical to fully symbolic.
So the earliest biological structure would have been merely a switch pointing a way in indexical fashion. The interpretive context would be of the most minimal possible kind.
But then what else would you expect right at the beginning?
I don't claim this to be valid reasoning. It is just my childhood thoughts. But it makes sense to me to this day so I share it with you.
I thought that absolutely nothing had no mechanisms within it. No time. No space. No laws of physics, for the laws of physics describe describe very precise mathematical terms a set of complex behaviors, which suggested to me that some kind of mechanism was operating that causes those behaviors. No endless sea of quantum flux, or no other mechanisms that would allow a universe to big bang forth.
Then I started to think that existence was a property, and that something must be there to persist the existence of something --or the lack of something. For example, this white and brown coffee cup in front of me exists, and it continues to exist across a span of time... something seems to be persisting that state of existence. Meanwhile, the purple kangaroo in this room does not exist, and continues to not exist, so something must be persisting the lack of existence of the purple kangaroo just as something is persisting the existence of this coffee cup.
From this, I concluded that if there was absolutely nothing, the existence of something in it was undefined. I could not say that this something exists (within this realm), and I also could not say that this something does not exist.
It was easy for me to understand that something exists, such as this cup, or that something does not exist, such as the purple kangaroo. But to understand how something could not be defined to exist or not exist was more challenging. I spent a few days struggling to comprehend what that could mean before I came to a conclusion.
The conclusion that I came to was that existence was relative. If, hypothetically, it were possible to form a description of something of which, within that description, allowed for itself to exist, then, I concluded, that it exists (with respect to itself). Therefore, if, hypothetically, it were possible to describe something that provided for its existence, and provided the mechanisms that allows for the laws of physics, and for the big bang, for our universe to be created, then this universe exists within that realm.
This explanation has and continues to work for me. It provides for an infinite variation of every possible option for the universe to exist, with respect to its realm of existence. Perhaps only an infinitesimally small percentage of those are configured in a way that allows for humans to be in there, pondering things. However, as long as there is a non-zero probability, the one we are in is going to be configured as needed to allow for us to be here.
Okay, so the I'm assuming the mind then is like an analogy with the proteins. I'd like to see where you go with that though without making category errors. In this case, the function of the protein was to create hydrogen for energy (or that's the hypothesis) and so the protein was fully functional and then eventually was coopted into DNA/RNA/amino acid semiosis later. How is this story analogous to the first internal state (i.e mental state)?
You are presupposing that mental states are a thing. And so you presuppose their dualism to physical states. The whole state-based conception of reality is where you have already gone wrong.
You are trapped by your own habits of thought. So I can't talk you out of that. You have to talk yourself out of it. You would have to learn to think in a different fashion.
Ok, then replace state with experience or process. The question still stands.
Right. So now you are asking what was the first internal experience? :lol:
But perhaps if you understand your question to be, "what was the first internal process?", you can see that life - being organismic - is already the internalisation of some process. Being an organism is already to have crossed a clear line in becoming a subject.
So you can either make the happy dualistic leap from material state to mental experience, which simply jumps to either side of the process view, or you can stop and consider what is actually being said in process terms.
And semiotics is the science of meaning. It is about the process of semantics. That Pattee paper should have grounded you in how that cashes out. It is all about a sign relation that allows modelling to regulate environmental or material instability in a way that produces local autonomy.
That is then the "analogy" (its actually much stronger than that) which allows you to talk about semiotics as a general process. Life and mind are levels of the same trick. One level involves the machinery of genes. The other, neurons and even words.
So your "mentalism" becomes as redundant as vitalism. There just is no mystical substance in need of a proper explanation. To ask for an explanation of "mind" or "experience" is to be already making a category error.
Neurons > Words? The functional aspect (in this case of the internal process) you are trying to explain is already a given. Your story is incomplete. Neurons and sensory tissues that react to stimuli are behaviors the "what it feels like" are the experiences. Sure you can throw around words like "language" into the equation, but then you are putting the cart before the horse. What is this language-experience machine ontologically and how does this just "appear" from behaviors. Sure, you can try to talk over me by saying I just don't "get" it because I'm a dualist-thinker, but then you are just shrugging off the onus of explanation that I am asking for and not really answering anything. Saying, "Wouldn't processes feel like something" also does not answer the question, as that is not really an explanation. We already know the given that processes "feel" like something. Saying it is an umwelt doesn't say much either. What is this umwelt (without using the very terms that you are defining) as compared to other processes? It is equivalent to a synonym (umwelt = experiential process) rather than an explanation.
And why wouldn’t the kind of world and self modelling that brains do, not feel like something rather than nothing?
You’ve never said despite being asked many times now.
What are you defining as self-modelling then (without falling into the "just a synonym" trap. This time self-modelling= experiential process. Again that wouldn't be an explanation, just a synonym, an infinite regress)?
An umwelt is a model of the world with a self in it. It is a world modelled from a point of view that expresses a personal set of interests. So it is a way to understand why experience appears to be imbued with selfhood and thus avoid the usual dualistic and homuncular regress of a self that witnesses its own perceptions in some Cartesian theatre. Selfhood is built into the "picture" from the beginning.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Again, can you now answer my question instead of continuously deflecting. Why wouldn’t the kind of unwelt modelling that brains do, not feel like something rather than nothing?
What does that mean? "Self in it"? That makes no sense outside of already experiencing selfhood.
Quoting apokrisis
And this I really don't understand, as you have selfhood baked into your umwelt. How does that work?
Quoting apokrisis
Because of precisely what I am inquiring above.. How is selfhood baked into this schema? How is that not falling right into the Cartesian theater fallacy you are trying to avoid?
I've explained these things 1000 times. Look up umwelt. Look up proprioception. Look up enactive perception. If you want to discuss these issues, you need to educate yourself on them.
Quoting schopenhauer1
You are just deflecting. If you were serious about wanting to know, you would have learnt enough about how the brain works not to be wasting my time with your Cartesianism.
I didn't mind discussing something new with you - like abiogenesis. But now you are back on your old hobby horse. Boring.
I have and nothing about it tells me that it reveals anything that sheds light on the problem. If anything, it is just a noisier version of the idea that "organisms interact with the world and evolve in order to fit into their environment". This adds nothing to the mind debate. It may add something to evolutionary biology/sociology, etc. but not to this particular problem. If you think it does, I'd like to hear it. But you will just claim that I am ignorant, and thus slip away unscathed from any of the hard work you claim I don't do.
Quoting apokrisis
Sure we can wade through literature on all sorts of neurobiological concepts.. doesn't get me closer to what experiential process is. The problem is, you don't even know the problem. How behaviors are experiences are not explained, and that is enough for me to discount what you have to say regarding this particular problem. That is not to say I discount your knowledge of technical biochemical reactions and evolutionary biology, but so far, I have not seen it used to answer this particular question. You will refute the question itself, thus again, going unscathed.
As you know, I was arguing with @apo over this point earlier too. But I have come to think that what he is saying is that the sign relation just is the experience, the 'feeling-like-something'. So, this would not be to say that the 'bare material' is feeling like something, because there is no "bare material" without the sign relation. I think the point is that when it comes to the question " what is the feeling-like-something ontologically speaking" that the sign relation is where it "bottoms out". What more could we hope to say without positing some additional mental substance; which would be to return to substance dualism?
So, to think of it in terms of interpretation, as Peirce does or to think of it in terms of experience, prehension, as Whitehead does, is to emphasize one or the other side of the same irreducible coin. So, in the light of that I now retract what I said earlier about affect being prior to cognition; neither are "prior" they are, as the Buddhists say, and as I think @apo has been saying, co-dependently arising.
Is he saying that? That would be pan-experientialism, something he vehemetly denies. But anyways, can you explain to me what you think the sign relation is, that is this "feels-like-something"?
Defeatist.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Sure I do. You keep running from the question of why all that umwelt-style modelling wouldn't feel like something.
Well, he will no doubt correct me if I am misinterpreting him, but I think he is just emphasizing the sign relation as interpretative rather than as experiential; but he doesn't seem to be denying that it is always experiential; i.e. that it feels like something "all the way down", or at least that it must be experiential (in some sense) "as far down" as it is interpretative.
Great, what does that mean?
Well an interpretation would be a response which is not merely mechanical, wouldn't it? A response in which there is some degree of creative freedom, and of the possibility of genuine novelty.
O contrare, I like studying these concepts.. I just don't delude myself that this will get me closer to the problem.. Even you have to bring it from mere facts about neurochemistry/biology to a broader semiosis. Sure, we need the biochemistry to anchor us in the substrates, but we need more for what is the case- that is how the processes lead to experiential processes.
Quoting apokrisis
Piggy-backing off of Janus, I'd like to know more on how interpretation works. How organisms interacting with the world is experience. In other words, what is the metaphysics of interpretation?
I don't know. What does that mean?
Isn't that the kind of definition which makes sense of the difference between human and computer responses?
Okay, so explain what the difference is then? What is interpretation vs. mechanical?
You got it.
It is just the same as the equivalent cosmological question of "why anything?" or "what is being?". We can only answer any such question semiotically - via a modelling relation. And modelling in turn relies on measurable counterfactuals. A theory has to impose a falsifiable claim on the reality. And once we get down to asking "why experience?" or "why existence?", what can count for the kind of counterfactuals that would truly make sense of some proper theory?
So I accept a limit to rational explanation in terms of the measurement of counterfactuals. If the question is why is green so greenish, we have pretty much run out of road as we can't even think what other possible alternative could be the case. The question ultimately becomes a hollow one because the modelling relation itself has no counterfactuals it can get a purchase on.
But despite that kind of ultimate barrier, we can then model the world pretty effectively. Neuroscience can give us answers on how experience is constructed as an umwelt to a degree of detail that is well past most people's actual level of interest.
I've been through all this with Schop a number of times, but still there is this plantiff bleat - solve the Hard Problem to my satisfaction. I believe in this stuff called mind. Explain how it gets there - in a world that I also believe is just a bunch of stuff called matter.
He won't be walked back an inch from his Cartesian dualism. He just stands there with his nose pressed against a brick wall complaining.
So stepping back from the business of theorising about both the human mind and the origin of existence itself, we can all marvel that there is anything there to be discussed at all. But then we ought to get back to theory-building if we are actually engaged with these things in a metaphysically interesting way.
Mechanical response is conceived as being exhaustively causally determined. In an interpretative response there must be some agential freedom; you could respond in any of some variety of ways.
No, it just doesn't make sense how behavior can have an internalness. Calling it "interpretive" is suspiciously pulling a pan-experiential move, as I told @Janus.
So we have degrees of freedom. Can you provide an example and then connect this with internalness?
Aren't you going to even make a single solitary attempt to justify your position against the claims of modelling?
Why wouldn't an umwelt-style modelling of the world feel like something?
The point of this exercise is to show yourself that you can't in fact come up with convincing reasons why all that activity wouldn't be "experiential" in a basic "animal experience of the world" way. You having nothing concrete to support the prejudices you are expressing.
It is not the behaviour that has "internalness" here. It is the modelling. So again, stop deflecting and focus on the question as it was asked of you. Discover for yourself that you really don't have any concrete reason to deny an "internalness" to a modelling relation between the brain and the world. You might in fact realise that the semiotic story is all about the organismic construction of an "internal and meaningful point-of-view".
So stop treating my position as merely good old materialism.
Semiotics is a metaphysics designed to get beyond both materialism and mentalism - the standard issue Cartesian substance duality. Start respecting that by answering the question it poses for you - why wouldn't modelling a world feel like modelling a world?
How could an entity without some minimal subjective experience ("internalness") have any degrees of freedom? If an entity could respond in different ways to the same stimulus, what other than some self-regulative "internalness" could give rise to that possibility?
I don't know but, that is definitely a sort of panpsychism that @apokrisis would deny. I think I've seen that posited by some philosophers though.
I mean come on.. Internalness of modelling of the brain and the world? There are so many steps there.. Yeah lets start with sight. Light hits the eye, all this happens right: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/the-science-of-vision-how-do-our-eyes-see-10513902.html
(abbreviated version obviously)...
You can call this process combined with more strictly neural processes (stuff like this: https://www.dartmouth.edu/~rswenson/NeuroSci/chapter_11.html#chapter_11_visual)
And we can add more very specific articles, textbooks, and the like..
Okay, that is the substrate. Where does this modelling "take place"? What is the "space" that this modelling is happening? Where does interpretive space happen? We can't assume what is being inquired about... We know there is internalness, but it is not obvious from the substrates themselves.. and modelling is a process.. but where is this process space occurring? It is all physical stuff happening at this point.. All material. Unless you make underhanded Cartesian theater claims.. I don't see your way out of the bind.
I don't think apokrisis would deny what I said, but he might deny the interpretation of "self-regulative internalness" as 'psyche', though, because this conception bears a notion of mind-as-substantive as opposed to mind-as-process. This is why Whitehead's philosophy is spoken of as a 'pan-experientialism', rather than as a 'pan-psychism'. Experience can be understood as en embodied physical process if you don't have an eliminative or mechanically reductive notion of the physical, thus obviating the need to posit a separate mental substance.
So stop going on and on about material substrates. Start talking about the process ... of modelling ...
Quoting schopenhauer1
What has physical space got to do with it? The model is about an organism in a world. So it is an abstraction as far as that physical space is concerned.
Then I should hardly need to point out that your talk about "physical space" is itself a modelling interpretation. So you are simply doubling down on the epistemological missteps.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I don't see you doing anything but ducking the question you were asked. Your problem is that you are happy with the bind you are in. You think being stuck in an irresolvable paradox is some kind of good thing. You just keep on shaking that dualism in my face while you avoid answering why modelling wouldn't feel like something, when we both know that the brain actually models and that it indeed does feel like something when it does that.
I guess I just don't understand this embodied physical process as much. I wouldn't mind if you told me more what that really means as opposed to eliminative or mechanically reductive notion of physical. There's just a lot of word salad thrown around at this point.. Not that it's necessarily wrong.. I just feel we need our definitions defined first and we can see if we even agree.
No, I don't mean "physical space" in this case. What I meant is more abstract.. If all this physical stuff is happening.. "where" is this modelling happening?
This is fine but my reason for preferring Peirce is because he starts with some actual bit of mechanism or structural relation that we can all understand - language and the way it mediates as a system of sign to result in a "reasonable" experiencing of reality.
And from there, we can see that neurology and biology generally have the same central structuring relation. Beyond that, pan-semiosis can track that "experiential relation" all the way down to the quantum level.
So the Peircean approach makes a concrete proposal that starts in an uncontroversial way with how language and logic work to structure human awareness of reality. And then that can take us down all the way to where quantum physics is again throwing up the same essential question about how physical reality itself could have intelligible form. That's quite an achievement.
Whitehead moved on from the failed project of logical atomism to create some pretty incomprehensible melange of pan-psychism, quantum physics and theism. Yes, he said the right kind of holistic stuff about a process approach to metaphysics. But that is nothing new in itself. And then his actual claims about quantum scale physical action just don't bear serious scrutiny. The "experience" of electrons or photons becomes a hollow term which explains nothing and instead diverts attention from the actual holism and contextuality which is the metaphysical issue for fundamental physics.
Why do you think "where" is a meaningful question if we are no longer talking about a materialist notion of space or time?
As I've already said, the embodied or enactive view of neurocognition is the one that tries so hard to get away from notions like "consciousness happens in the brain as the result of neuron firings".
It is the holism of the modelling relation - an organism in interaction with a world - that is the place where all this mindfulness action is occuring.
You have words but not really explanations. Modeling relations, interactions, organism..none of it makes sense unless there is already a first person point of view in the equation. Yes the “space” does matter. Unless there is some already-there interpreter (first person point of view) this concrescence of behavior has to cohere and “do” its internal thing. I’m waiting to see your explanation of that.
I think you are too dismissive of Whitehead and mischaracterize him as a 'panpsychist' as I've already explained. Also his "theism' is not really theism in any familiar theological sense. I'd need to study Peirce some more before I can judge whether his philosophy is substantially different, (apart from the obvious emphasis on the sign relation and interpretance). Whitehead is beginning (and Peirce also) to be taken much more seriously by philosophers. Have you read Stengers Thinking with Whitehead or Shaviro's Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics or any of Brian Massumi';s work? Here's a quote from the Wiki entry on Massumi:
Massumi situates his work in the tradition of process philosophy, which he defines broadly to encompass a range of thinkers whose work privileges concepts of event and emergence. For Massumi, this includes not only Alfred North Whitehead, the philosopher most closely identified with the term, but also Charles Sanders Peirce, Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari.[7], on all of whose work he draws extensively. He articulates process philosophy with William James's radical empiricism, which asserts the primacy of relation. This is the doctrine that relations are real, are directly experienced, and create their own terms.[
I think there are many interesting pathways and crossovers in what might generally be called "process philosophy". Peirce may well be the main, or at least most original and comprehensive, precursor, but I think all the philosophers mentioned in the 'Massumi' excerpt, and many other semiotics thinkers, Hoffmeyer, Salthe, Pattee (and BTW, have you read Wendy Wheeler's Expecting the Earth?) have their own takes and interesting perspectives on this rich area of thought.
Anyway I do have a question relating to your response I quoted above: would you say that interpretance is operating at the quantum scale? If you would say that then would there not also be in your own terms an 'internalness", which could be characterized as a kind of proto-experience compared with our idea of human experience, just as the interpretance would be classed as a proto-interpretance compared to our notions of human interpretance?
So what is a first person point of view in your metaphysical scheme? Give us a useful definition that excludes interpretance as something models do. Let's see you shake that dualism one more time, tell us how the mind is some kind of unphysical thing rather than some kind of natural process.
'Modelling the world' is your main concern, is it not? Your 'meta-philosophical project'?
Quoting apokrisis
But does quantum physics have an intelligible form? It makes accurate predictions, and enables fantastic technology, but what it means is a matter of intense controversy. I mean, at this time, it can't really be claimed that the standard model of particle physics, or the state of modern cosmology, presents an intelligible picture. It might be many things, but 'intelligible' isn't one of them.
Quoting apokrisis
But what about when there's no humans? How to get from where humans are interpreting signs, to everything being signs? How can there be 'representation' without 'interpretation'?
When Peirce says 'matter is effete mind' - what does he mean by 'mind'? I think he got that from Emerson and/or the other idealists. And what they seem to have gotten it from is 'nous' on the one hand, or even Vedanta, in the case of Emerson. But remove that - and what is doing the interpreting?
I don't see how he gets beyond being a panpsychist. If experiencing is a process, then what is its structure exactly? Where is the precise theoretical description of that? If you understand Whitehead, help by explaining how it works in some causal sense.
Quoting Janus
Quantum scale interpretance would have all that interpreting happening externally. Or better yet, contextually.
Organisms are defined by having internal models of their worlds. That is why they need some kind of coding mechanism - an informational way to construct material constraints. Genes, neurons, words, numbers - a way to remember the forms of order that will perpetuate the organism's own existence.
But the physical world is clearly not organismic in that sense. The Universe has no internal model of its world. Why would it need such an umwelt of sign? It already is the world.
However - contra the usual mechanical view of material nature - there is something pretty semiotic going on in terms of how physical contexts shape up local fluctuations or excitations. So the Universe can be considered as a kind of running model of the sorts of local events that ought to take place. The Universe represents a memory of its own development in the structure of habit or natural law it imposes on all material possibilities. It says there can electron like particles as local degrees of freedom because a history of development - a generalised cooling and expanding - has now crisply backed that possibility in.
So quantum scale events become the kinds of thing that are likely to happen because the world has accumulated some generally constraining history. And electron is not a little roaming jot of experience making simple choices. It is a constraint of energetic possibilities to the point we are left with a localised excitation with very little distinctive character.
It is an electron identical to all other electrons and must follow the same dynamical laws. It might be different in terms of its speed or location, but those are not exactly a matter of experience-based choice or any kind of individuated point of view on the electron's part.
So in an organism, interpretance is an internalised model of the world - the informational ability to construct states of material constraint.
But in physics, intepretance just is a material state of constraint. And to model that interpretance then demands an informational brand of physics as the materiality is now that which emerges from constraints. Materiality becomes an output rather than an input from the pan-semiotic or infodynamic point of view.
Again this use of interpretance- what do you mean by this? What, metaphysically is going on when you say this? "Where" is this happening? From a first person perspective of the parts involved? Use the example of sight if you want. How does this not avoid the Cartesian Theater? Instead of panpsychism experience, we have interpretance? Sounds fishy.. sleight of hand. Same concept, different name and a lot of protest.
I don't know. I don't have a metaphysical scheme that fully answers this question. The best I can think of is that all natural processes have a point of view that goes all the way down. This eliminates the need for an abstracted "space" where process concresces into something (the hidden Cartesian Theater). I can't think of a way out of the bind. This doesn't mean this point of view is right, it is just one way out of it.
You mention interprative aspect of process.. to me that sounds like a point of view of the process- the same thing.. You say it isn't.. That's fine, but the Cartesian Theater of there being a "somewhere" this coheres into a first person experience then becomes an issue again.
You might be disappointed if you expect a "precise theoretical description" from Whitehead. For Whitehead what is most fundamental is feeling, the vague sense of our sheer bodily existence which cannot be precisely articulated.
Here is a passage from Adventures of Ideas which gives some account of his understanding of experience; what he calls 'prehension':
[i]§2. Structure of Experience. — No topic has suffered more from this tendency of philosophers than their account of the object-subject structure of experience. In the first place, this structure has been identified with the bare relation of knower to known. The subject is the knower; the object is the known. Thus, with this interpretation, the object-subject relation is the known-knower relation. It then follows that the more clearly any instance of this relation stands out for discrimination, the more safely we can utilize it for the interpretation of the status of experience in the universe of things. Hence Descartes’ appeal to clarity and distinctness.
This deduction presupposes that the subject-object relation is the fundamental structural pattern of experience [a.k.a. the “object-to-subject structure of experience” or the “vector-structure of nature” (189; p. 11 here)]. I agree with this presupposition, but not in the sense in which subject-object is identified with knower-known. [?] I contend that the notion of mere knowledge is a high abstraction, and that conscious discrimination itself is [177]?a variable factor only present in the more elaborate examples of occasions of experience. The basis of experience is emotional. Stated more generally, the basic fact is the rise of an affective tone originating from things whose relevance is given.
§3. Phraseology. — Thus the Quaker word “concern,” divested of any suggestion of knowledge, is more fitted to express this fundamental structure. [I.e.] The occasion1 as subject has a “concern” for the object. And the “concern” at once places the object as a component in the experience of the subject, with an affective tone drawn from this object and directed towards it. With this interpretation, the subject-object relation is the fundamental structure of experience.
Quaker usages of language are not widely spread. Also, each phraseology leads to a crop of misunderstandings. The subject-object relation can be conceived as Recipient and Provoker, where the fact provoked is an affective tone about the status of the provoker in the provoked experience. Also, the total provoked occasion is a totality involving many such examples of provocation. Again this phraseology is unfortunate; for the word “recipient” suggests a passivity which is erroneous.
§4. Prehensions. — A more formal explanation is as follows. An occasion of experience is an activity, analysable into modes of functioning which jointly constitute its process of becoming. Each mode is analysable into the total experience as active subject, and into the thing or object with which the special activity is concerned. This thing is a datum, that is to say, is describable without reference to its entertainment in that occasion. An object is anything performing this function of a datum provoking some special activity of the occasion in question. Thus subject and object are relative terms. An occasion is a subject in respect to its special activity concerning an object; and anything is an object in respect to its provocation of some special activity within a subject. Such a mode of activity is termed a “prehension.” Thus a prehension involves three factors. There is [1. the “subject,” a.k.a. “individual,” “atom,” “monad”] the occasion of experience within which the prehension is a detail of activity; [2. the “object,” a.k.a. “data”] there is the datum whose relevance provokes the origination of this prehension; this datum is the prehended object; [3. the “affective tone,” a.k.a. “subjective form”] there is the subjective form, which is the affective tone determining the effectiveness of that prehension in that occasion of experience. [178] How the experience constitutes itself depends on its complex of subjective forms.
.[/i]
It might be interesting to compare and contrast his three factors of prehension with Peirce's three elements of semiosis.
As to his panspychism; I guess it depends on how you define it. This essay might be of some use:
http://scholarworks.csun.edu/bitstream/handle/10211.2/3304/McHenryLeemon199501.pdf;sequence=1
Have fun.
That is why I don’t take him seriously. A theory of anything must have crisp counterfactual structure. It must impose a measurable definiteness on the world. So a theory that claims to cash itself out in anything vague, like undefined feeling, lacks explanatory force. The PNC fails to apply to the predictions it makes.
What kind of theory is it that says x is always there, just sometimes it is really definite and obvious, at other times it is so faint and vague that it becomes undifferentiated and unmeasurable. The theory just can’t be found wrong as it doesn’t in fact pose a counterfactual account of the world.
Just because a theory puts itself beyond been proved wrong does not mean it is then true. It means it is not even actually a theory. It is a claim that is not even wrong - the most damning of possibilities.
So the Peircean pansemiotic story would be about the claim that the Cosmos has a universal logical structure - the sign relation. It is a basically cognitive story. Reality exists because a counterfactual structure could be imposed on material vagueness or indeterminism.
Thus the highest form of mind - the rational scientist - is expressing the very thing of a world-making causal relation. We form our rational umwelts. The Cosmos likewise is forming itself into concrete being by imposing a counterfactual definiteness on its general being.
This pansemiotic metaphysics has turned out to be correct. Quantum mechanics shows that. The most recent turn in quantum interpretations supports the idea that wavefunction collapse represents the imposition of a counterfactual structure on material possibility. The world asks yes/no questions of itself. If an event happens, history gets made and that now constrains the future.
So the thing to note is that pansemiosis is all about rational cognitive structure. It is where the evolution of the human mind has ended up. And it is all about the logical exactness of counterfactual structure imposed on material indeterminacy.
But Whitehead is taking some ill defined notion of conscious experience as his starting point. And then he is treating cognition as an imposed logical structure that can be thrown off to leave some barer affective potential. Feeling is treated as a concrete materiality. A subjective substance. And right there we have the misstep.
We have a located stuff that is inside some thing. But then that claim lacks counterfactuality as the experience of an electron is something that makes no measurable difference to its behaviour. At least we can credit organisms with a mind as they do act with counterfactual autonomy. We can see they make purposeful choices in terms of their behaviour. As Peirce would say, organisms always have reasons because they have a personal point of view. But electrons give us no reason to think they have experience.
So stick to logic and cognition. To claim that reality is founded on feeling or affect is always going to be Cartesian substance thinking. It is treating experience as a material potential stripped of its logical structure.
But even human affect is completely rational in its structure. Neuroscience tells us that. The whole structure of emotional response is the same old story of a semiotic imposition of dichotomies on an umwelt. Things are either good or bad, arousing or boring, attractive or repulsive, etc, etc.
Feelings aren’t actually vague at all. Our brains are set up to feel either the one thing, or its logical opposite, so that we have a clear counterfactual direction to guide all our reactions. The panpsychic move Whitehead is trying to make - strip away cognition to leave something more fundamentally simple - falls at the first hurdle. Feeling is just as cognitively organised as thinking in the neuroscientific view.
Of course feelings can be vague. But that just means there are times when we are uncertain. A counterfactual response to the world has not yet clicked into place.
To treat the uncertain as the primal sort of works. But it takes the Peircean semiotic story to actually make it work. Mindfulness is all about resolving uncertainty by managing to impose a counterfactual umwelt on it. Cognition makes things definite. So cognition is also primal in complementary fashion. And that is why the Peircean story is properly structuralist. It is irreducibly hierarchical or triadic.
Whitehead want some kind of reductionist monism - pan experience. All is the vagueness of a feeling. But that is closet dualism. It is substance thinking.
Peirce gets it right by refusing to try to reduce from dualism to monism. He steps up to the larger metaphysical model which understands being in terms of a three part sign relation.
While I agree that this must be true of empirical theories; I don't think it is necessarily true of metaphysical theories. That would be like saying that poetry must have a crisp counterfactual structure. I get it that you are not interested in vague metaphysical systems; I on the other hand say there can be great poetic virtue in vagueness. It's really nothing more than a matter of taste, or lack of it.
Anyway I see no point in trying to defend Whitehead to you; your scientistic bent has already disqualified him from possessing any interest to you from the get-go. You and I are obviously interested in very different things; and there's nothing wrong with that; I wouldn't have it any other way.
I'm not at all sure that I agree with your interpretation of Peirce, though, but I would have to investigate that much further, before I would presume to offer an actual opinion on it.
Quoting apokrisis
Here is the very nub of our disagreement laid out beautifully. You presume that metaphysical theories must be like scientific theories. I prefer to think of metaphysical speculations not as theories at all, but as invitations to look at things in new and different ways. I get it that you have no interest in that, because it makes metaphysics more like an art than a science. As I think I already said earlier in this thread I don't think the pursuit of metaphysics is a search for truth at all. It can't be since the truth of metaphysical "theories" is undecidable. Instead the pursuit of metaphysics is a search for beauty through different ways of understanding things. Once you see this, you don't need to worry about truth at all, since it is reduced to a chimera in the metaphysical domain..
And that is my claim. The definition of a theory is that it is empirical in some meaningful fashion.
Theories are generalisations capable of having particular consequences. So they have to be “good” in two complementary senses. They need internal rational coherence (to be generalisations). And they need to relate to whatever they are a model of via the particularity of their consequence. So they need to correspond to thing in question via a clear counterfactual act of measurement.
Poetry doesn’t need a crisp counterfactual structure because it is not attempting to be a theory of metaphysical reality.
It is not rationality being aimed at the world in an attempt to make sense of it. It is instead - at best - an attempt to socially construct a culturally structured self. Art sketches out the kind of world, the kind of umwelt, that we are then meant to “find ourselves in”. It we learn to see the meaning in the cultural artefact, then that is teaching us to be the kind of self who sees that kind of world.
So poetry is semiotic. It is about modelling a “world”. But while metaphysics was about the attempt to model the real world, reality as it actually is, poetry is about the invention of socially useful worlds. So one form of semiosis targets the metaphysically objective, the other targets the socially subjective. It is a mistake to conflate the two as you hope to do.
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I must agree that nothing is not a good word to capture the general idea of the before, but I also perhaps think that it can be interpret in a different measure to make sense within the context of 'nothing lacking nothing,' and "nothing not having something'.
In a sense, the fundamental foundations of our been is by the measurable accounts and progress of the parameters of the Universe in which we live in; those being time, and the dimensions in which we visualize and think inside of. The nothingness that we have the intuition for is a measurable (or in better words, a lack of measure) that we interpret due to the fact we are founded in the after (in something).
In other words, while it might make intuitive sense to our person that something must have followed something, that is only due to mere fact we are in something, and thus think restrictively in something. To put it in a different manner, logically assuming math is a fundamental parameter of the after, then the existence of nothing can be interpret in the existence of something; in the function x + 2 = 3, the lack of existence of the solution -5 implies that there is a nothing to something, but that nothing also implies that there was something so it could be nothing. So in a sense, the implication of something and nothing is a loop in the fundamental logic used in the after. Thus, I believe, this logical loop cannot be assertively answered in the after.
What we can do, however, is interpret things with a different postulation. The function of f(x) = 0 is, in essence, the existence of purely nothing -- without implication of something. That is, this nothing does not imply a something, and of course the lack of something (nothing) cannot imply the nothing (nothing lacks nothing, and nothing not having something). Our range of interpretation in the after, however, stops here -- and I believe, this is what the word 'nothing' implies in the context of the before, not in the context of the paragraph above, as there having something in the nothing.
Now of course this leads down to the question of how absolute zero, nothing, can become something... and that you have millions of creative solutions to the problem. My point is that something cannot prove the existence of something coming from nothing. Whatever is and happened in the before is naturally out of our intuitive ability to understand.
Yeah,I already covered the fact that metaphysical theories are not strictly theories at all, except you conveniently ignored what I have reproduced above.
So, you would need to show that the truth of metaphysical so-called theories is actually decidable in "some meaningful empirical fashion"; good luck with that.
Also I totally disagree with you about characterizing poetry as "socially useful". You would need to show in just what ways it is useful, and that that usefulness is its prime characteristic. The writing and reading of poetry is very often, arguably most often, a solitary activity.
So rather than going on about the solitary splendours of poetry, just tell me how Whitehead counts as a proper metaphysical theory.
You don’t want to say Whitehead is just poetry do you? Or if you do, then I’d probably agree that that is all that it is. We need never mention him again when talking about actual metaphysical theories which make observable claims about the structures to expect when investigating reality.
LOL, I haven't strayed from my take on what constitutes "the argument", if my take is different to yours, then so be it; perhaps we will find no common ground. Would that be so surprising? I don't buy into the rightness of your overarching demand that everything about the human, or even nature, for that matter, must be "measurable" to be of any intellectual value. As I keep pointing out to you the arts are not measurable, and they are of the greatest intellectual value to human life in my view.
Do you have an argument that demonstrates unequivocally that feeling, as opposed to "feelings", which have obviously already been identified and conceptualized and could hence be counted as "cognitive') is cognitive? I have already said I think it is reasonable to think of experience or feeling as interpretative "all the way down"; but "cognitive" in my view, is a step too far.
I would have thought you would count primal pre-conceptual feeling as 'firstness'. I'm looking for a knock-down argument that any unbiased thinking person must accept, and not simply the usual repetition of your understanding of semiotic emergence, symmetry-breaking, triadic sign relation and so on. You should appreciate that without a background and presuppositions equivalent to yours these are ideas which are anything but self-evidently true to others.
Quoting apokrisis
I already said I don't think any metaphysical speculation is a "proper theory", and explained why I think that. You haven't addressed that statement and argument at all, so I don't know what you are after here. Do you have an argument to support your belief that metaphysical conjectures should be classed as (in the same sense?) theories or hypotheses along with empirical conjectures?
Quoting apokrisis
I don't want to say that Whitehead is "just poetry" or that metaphysics is exactly equivalent to poetry. It's not black and white like that. Metaphysics is strictly a logical discipline, it must be internally logically consistent and coherent; in other words it must be a valid form of argumentation. But this is a purely formal requirement that is not a strict requirement of poetry. Poetry is not usually logical argumentation at all. Do you see the difference?
Whitehead's system is internally consistent and coherent; you just don't like it because it rests on premises you don't agree with. I don't expect you to make the effort to study Whitehead in order to really understand him; why would you make such a considerable effort if you don't accept his starting premises? On the other hand, there's no point simply dismissing something you don't really understand, because of your basic lack of affinity with it. All metaphysical systems rest on premises which cannot be demonstrated within the system, in fact cannot be demonstrated at all, because all unimpeachable demonstration is strictly deductive, and all deductions rest on premises....
As I said before metaphysical systems are just invitations to look at the world in creative speculative ways; you shouldn't expect them all to be to your taste, just as you would expect all of literature, music or the visual arts to be to your taste.
Anyway carry on, but I'm done with this pointless dick-measuring.
Sure. And that's no mystery. Anthropology explains it. Art is semiotics. It is all about the necessary thing of the social construction of the self.
But you were promoting Whitehead's pan-experientialism as a reasonable metaphysical theory. And I countered with reasons why Peirce's semiotics does count as a theory - it imposes counterfactual possibility on our experience - and Whitehead ain't, because it doesn't.
If you want to just accept Whitehead as a cultural poet, putting forward an image of what it is to be human, then fine. But the anthropological lens would apply to that position too. I would be asking what social purpose does Whitehead pragmatically serve? Why would there be folk who consider it so important that his "not even wrong" pseudo-theory count for something in cultural discourse?
Quoting Janus
I set out that argument. Name me a feeling that isn't dichotomous in structure, and hence cognitive in the structural sense I'm using.
It's just like the after images seen by the eye. The nervous system is set up on the principle of constructing sharp counterfactual contrasts. It applies to feelings like all other forms of perception.
Feelings are measurements - evidence. And so it is a dialectical counterfactuality all the way down.
Quoting Janus
So you are claiming to be unbiased? And if this forum proves anything, no one needs to accept anything if they don't feel inclined. I mean if you reject the constraints of empirical evidence, then you are free to believe whatever you like. Who could stop you? That is just how it works. So let's not waste time with this strawman.
Quoting Janus
You claimed Whitehead to be a theory. Then it became a poem. So I did lay down an argument for what constitutes a theory. You retreated into saying that metaphysics is just meant to be fun speculation.
And yet if you are honest, you would have to admit that this at least divides metaphysics into different kinds of activity - one of which thinks it important that theories pass the test on both their internal logical coherence and their external empirical correspondence.
So even if yours is a form of metaphysics, you didn't show that Whitehead met my criteria for a metaphysical theory. Which was the thing you were hoping to convince me off, after all.
Quoting Janus
Of course I see that difference. But I said if you want to stretch your definition of metaphysics to include Whitehead as an example of poetic licence, well I can't stop you. What I said was that you can't stretch the definition of a theory so that it is only about internal coherence as we all know about the perils of tautological argument.
If the theory doesn't make counterfactually structured claims, it is never in a position to challenge any of the premises from which it is constructed. It is simply "true" in being able to assume its conclusions.
And that is how Whitehead works. Experience is always just there. It never develops. It exists even when there is no evidence to suggest that. It is the typical theistic story of the invisible hand moving with complete freedom. Anything you claim about why something happened or didn't happen couldn't be disproved. The hand is invisible. It is free to do anything. So if you say it is always there, who can deny it?
Look closely and you can see that it is not that your kind of "theory" doesn't need evidence. Instead it carefully constructs itself so that evidence against it becomes impossible. So empiricism is very relevant to its interests. It must at all costs put itself beyond the reach of the counterfactual. If the theory meets a factual challenge, the game is to refine the theory in a way that puts it again beyond such counterfactuality.
So it is a whole pathological mode of thought. And it is very attractive to many people. Just respond to any call for evidence by moving your "theory" another step away from the risk of having to answer with a clear counterfactuality.
Quoting Janus
Quoting Janus
My position is that Whitehead is transparently failing the test of offering a theory. It ain't got no counterfactual test of those starting premises. And so it is merely a tautology at best. It says that if everything is experiential, then everything will have experience - even when you can't see any evidence for that.
Um. OK.
You tell me how much Whitehead you've read. So fine. Either convince me his theory is properly falsifiable. Or convince me that theories don't need to be capable of being wrong. Tautologies are the way to go.
Quoting Janus
How do you arrive at the premises? It ain't deduction. It's abductive inference.
How do you test the premises? It ain't deduction. It's inductive confirmation..
So if metaphysics is about being reasonable rather than poetic, I think we all know the whole story of how it is meant to work.
Quoting Janus
You keep waving this "get out of jail free" card. It cuts no ice.
What is doing the seeing? There is a ghost in your machine.. and its name is Decartes.
I never said I was unbiased when it comes to favoring some metaphysical pictures over others; in fact if you read carefully you'd see that I have been saying no one is unbiased. And despite what you might like to think, that includes you.
I keep saying that I don't think of metaphysical speculations or systems as theories, and you keep asking me to show that Whitehead's metaphysics is a theory. I think a bit of closer and more charitable reading is in order, apo.
No point responding beyond that to so many obvious distortions of what I said.
Falsifiability is the criterion used to show that a theory is NOT metaphysics.
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