Physics and Intentionality
The discussion deals with three intimately related issues:
1. The separation of objective and subjective data by the fundamental abstraction of natural science.
2. The intentional nature of the laws of nature.
3. How an intentional understanding of the laws of nature resolves the mind body interaction problem
1. The separation of objective and subjective data by the fundamental abstraction of natural science.
2. The intentional nature of the laws of nature.
3. How an intentional understanding of the laws of nature resolves the mind body interaction problem
Comments (323)
The second point of discussion deals with the laws operative in nature, as opposed to what we may call "the laws of physics," which are approximate descriptions of the laws operative in nature.
(1) We explain things by immaterial laws of nature. Asking, “What is the law of conservation of mass/energy made of?” betrays a category error. Natural laws are not made of particles or fields, but are immaterial principles operating throughout the cosmos.
(2) These laws are immanent, operating in matter, and transcendent, depending on no single species or instance of matter, but controlling all matter regardless of constitution or properties.
(3) The laws explain things here and now because they act here and now. If laws did not act, we could never experience their effects. For energy to be conserved here and now, the law of conservation of energy must act here and now. The explanation is a concurrent, co-existing cause, not a Humean prior event. “Explanation” has two meanings. One is a word string describing a causal structure. The other is the cause so described. We are discussing causes in nature.
(4) These laws are aspects of reality, not fictions. Laws of nature are not invented, but discovered. While the laws of physics are human products, the realities they approximately describe antedate humans. If they did not, they could not explain the evolution of either the universe or life.
(5) Since the laws explain why energy, momentum, and electric charge remain constant, science requires explanations not only for changes, but also for constancy.
A pivotal thesis is that the laws of nature are essentially intentional. One way to see this is to reflect on what I call "Logical Propagators."
Logical Propagators: Logical propagators are propositions or judgments allowing information about one space-time point to be applied to another. Using conservation laws to explain a stone’s existence required our premises be true at the time and place of their application. It is inadequate for a law to be true at another time or place. To be effective, an explanation must be operative when and where applied. Consider an argument whose premises are only true sometimes. For a conclusion to follow, the major and minor premises must be true simultaneously. If one premise is true now and the other later, the conclusion is unsound. For example:
All now in the room can hear Mary. (Time specific)
John will be in the room tomorrow. (Time Mismatch)
John can hear Mary. (Invalid)
This is invalid because of the temporal mismatch. There is nothing profound here.
Still, we routinely draw conclusions true at one time from data true at another. Scientists and engineers make predictions, and we base our lives on past experience and future expectation. Whenever we do this, we rely on logical propagators. Consider:
All in the room when Mary speaks can hear her. (Timeless)
Mary now intends to speak in the room tomorrow. (Logical Propagator)
John will be in the room tomorrow. (Time matched)
John can hear Mary tomorrow. (Valid)
The second premise uses a fact today to make an assertion about tomorrow. It is because Mary now intends to speak tomorrow that we can validly draw the conclusion. Absent her committed intention, the conclusion would be as unsound as before. Logical propagators link information at two times.
While propagator propositions are in the logical order, they express a reality transcending a single time. In asserting existence (“There is a ball”) or a property (“The ball is rubber”), we are saying something true at one time. A committed intention, however, points to future information. It is a present tendency with a path to fruition. If we are careful, we can call real tendencies “logical propagators.” They control the development of earlier material states into later ones, but are not material states. They are logical because they transform information. They are propagators because they propagate information from one time to another.
There are two species of logical propagators: committed intentions and natural laws. If Mary commits to speaking tomorrow, she will speak tomorrow. If billiard balls or quanta are in state S1 at t1, then, by the laws of nature, they will be in state S2 at time t2. Both predictions are true ceteris paribus (other things being equal), because unforeseen factors may intervene. Mary could die. An earthquake could upset the billiard table. A cosmic ray could disrupt a quantum system. Humans are more complex, so more things can intervene, but the principle is the same.
Since committed intentions and natural laws are two species in the same dynamic genus, this is not a metaphor, but a shared dynamic. The time-development of human behavior under committed intentionality and that of physical systems under natural laws equally play out immanent dispositions or logical propagators. Both allow us to predict future information from present information. Both express immaterial principles in observable behavior.
What is the observable sign of intentionality? Is it not a systematic time development ordered to ends? This is how naturalists understand intentionality. Eliminativists’ theory-theory is based on human intentions and natural laws having a common dynamic so that intentions become theoretical constructs for behavioral prediction. (Goldman 1993: 351-8). Dennett (1987) argues that physical systems behave exactly as though expressing intentions. Dawkins (1989) writes of the selfish intent of genes. Shared dynamics is a fact relied upon by naturalists.
Another way of seeing the intentional character of the laws of nature is to employ Franz Brentano's analysis of intentionality as characterized by "aboutness." As my intention to go to the store is about effecting my being in the store, so the laws of nature are about effecting the sequence of states predicted by physics.
Reflection:
Given Hume’s critique of causality, our grasp of time-sequenced causality is not adequately based on observing physical events. However, it is warranted by our experience of willing. Being aware of our own committed intentionality and its subsequent incarnation, we expect analogues in nature. Contrary to determinists who give time-sequenced causality priority over volition, will is the prime analogue and causality derivative. Association plays a role, but, as Hume noted, association does not warrant necessity. The idea of causal connection over time derives from our experience as agents.
I will continue with point 3 in a later post.
Do you think a Thomas Aquinas would have made that statement? You see, I think not. I think the awareness of ourselves as knowing subjects, separate from the domain of objective facts, is one of the hallmarks of the modern period. Whereas the hylomorphic dualism of Aquinas assumes that the intelligible forms of things are known directly by the intellect, or 'received into the intellect', in a way that transcends the apparent duality of subject and object (per this blog post); not that Aquinas would have expressed such an idea, as again, I don't think that the medieval mind was self-aware in the way that the modern mind later became as a consequence of the upheaval represented by Galileo and Copernicus.
My understanding of 'eliminative materialism' and its related denial of the subjective, is that it is a consequence of this awareness of the separateness of the knowing subject from the object of analysis. And that this comes sharply into focus with the foundation of modern science, and its assumption of the distinction of 'primary qualities', which are those qualities that are subject to exact mathematical analysis, and 'secondary qualities', which are associated with the subject.
[quote=Thomas Nagel]The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. [/quote]
Mind and Cosmos pp. 35-36
So, Dennett's 'eliminativism' is a direct consequence of the application of this paradigm to 'the subject' - which is why that he claims that consciousness itself is an illusory construct of the 'unconsciously competent', physical components of the brain.
Well, yes and no. The laws don't cause material events in the sense of a willing, planning, intending mind. So they can't be essentially intentional in the usual psychological definition of intentional. It can only be some kind of analogy.
It is also true that physics needs to recognise final cause in some proper fashion. The one thing we have learnt about the Big Bang universe is that it was born with an inherent general direction. It has a thermodynamical arrow of time.
Also, pure determinism can't be correct. Quantum theory shows that probabilistic spontaneity is part of the equation. And so at best, the "laws" speak to generalised constraints on action. Events can be directed towards propensities, but they can't be absolutely controlled.
So physics knows that the classical Newtonian/mechanical model of "cause and effect" is the coarse grain view, not the fundamental view. But the job then is to expand the classical metaphysics just as far as needed to make more sense - not jump all the way over to a mentalistic or idealistic metaphysics.
So the metaphysical project - from a physicalist point of view - would be minimalist. Let's recognise that classicality is the coarse-grain picture. Now how do we incorporate the "intentionality" without claiming that the universe is like a brain making intelligent, personal, particular choices?
A broad difference between physical intentionality (propensities or teleomaty) and mindful intentionality (biological functionality, or psychological purpose) is that physical intentionality is a matter of historic constraint. A system develops a record of its past as some kind of memory. And that history constrains all further free possibility. The physical future is still free - a matter of unconstrained accident - but also a freedom that is shaped into some definite set of likelihoods.
Then psychological intentionality is quite different in that it involves a model of the physical world which allows the anticipation of its future states. And so, by being able to predict the propensities of the world, an observing self becomes included in the future outcomes of that world. The self becomes a player who can act to constrain outcomes, even at a future date, so as to serve locally particular goals.
So physics is just history. A state of constraint limiting freedoms. And psychology is anticipation. A self with purposes is being inserted into this more basic equation so that self-serving actions can be added to the evolving mix.
I think you are aiming to conflate the two stories. Physicalism - seeking to make a minimal expansion to its causal metaphysics - would agree that finality has to be part of its fundamental story now. But it can already see how psychological finality is its own semiotic story. It is discontinuous with the physicalist picture in the important regard of introducing a modelling relation with the world.
What do you mean when you say that these laws are "operative"? You say that the laws are immaterial yet they operate, acting to control matter.
Here's a comparison. Human beings obey laws. They know and understand laws, and act to control themselves in a way which conforms to the laws. In this way they act to control human beings from within their own minds. However, we still have the option of disobeying the laws, if we so choose. So this "acting from within", is really the individual acting in choice to follow the laws. The laws are actually passive, not acting at all.. Is this the same way that matter is controlled by laws? Does the matter know and understand the laws, choosing to obey the laws, but still maintaining the capacity to disobey?
If this is not the way that these laws operate, or act, to control matter from within, how else could they act to enforce themselves from within the matter?
Keep coming....you’re getting there.....
The Laws of Nature are immaterial, transcendent and immanent, principles which act (operating, controlling). So, they are independent of, and determine, existence. From a theological standpoint, they can be equated (or at least associated) with God.
Generally, law (mass noun) is a set of constraints and freedoms which control action. So, laws act; constraining and/or permitting (i.e., controlling) action performed by objects (phenomena and/or noumena).
For example:
1) Human Positive Law controls human action.
2) The Laws of Nature control natural action.
The Laws of Nature are an explanation (cause) of existential change and/or stasis. Then are they efficient cause?
If the observable sign of intentionality is "systematic time development ordered to ends" (efficient cause), what is final cause?
I understand data transformation with reference to mathematical function (correspondence) and the process of encoding/decoding, but would appreciate a definition of "logic" in terms of data transformation which works for both the Laws of Nature and human committed intentions.
For example:
Logical Propagators control material development across time. So, "logic" in this context would be defined as: a rational (measurable and/or reasonable) principle?
If these laws are immanent, within matter, as dfpolis claims, and they act within every piece of matter, how is it possible that the very same law acts (having causal impact) within each piece of matter throughout the entire universe?
You say that these laws can be equated with God, but I think that they are inconsistent with God. Such laws would cause all matter to move in a deterministic way, but God allows that we have free will, so the two are inconsistent. Which do you think is the case then, is all matter controlled by laws inherent within, in a deterministic way, or is there freewill, allowing matter to be moved according to the intentions of the freewilling being?
Eh, we still don't care.
I see in this scheme: constraint and freedom, determinism and indeterminism.
Quoting gurugeorge
You may not. This seems to be the central point of this thread, and it's the point you wish to dismiss. That's something of a shame, isn't it? :confused:
Yes, I think he would.
Quoting Wayfarer
Consider:
-- Summa Theologiae Ia, q. 87, art 3.
You're right that, beginning with Descartes, philosophers have posited that we know our mind independently of knowing the other; however, this isn't what Aquinas and I are doing. I'm following Aquinas in saying that in knowing the other we can grasp that we have the power to know. ("that which is first known by the human intellect is an object of this kind, and that which is known secondarily is the act by which that object is known.")
In other words, every act of knowing has two objects. One, (the objective object), is the thing we seek to know, say an apple. The other (the subjective object) is what our act of knowing the objective object reveals about ourselves -- e.g. that we can and are seeing, that we can and are being aware. In the Fundamental Abstraction we fix on the objective object to the exclusion of the subjective object.
Quoting Wayfarer
No, he does not assume "that the intelligible forms of things are known directly." He follows Aristotle's analysis in De Anima, saying that we know material objects via the senses -- by abstracting intelligible features from phantasms (bound sensory representations). He says explicitly that we have no direct knowledge of essences -- knowing them only by sensible accidents.
Quoting Wayfarer
The modern mind-body problem begins with Descartes, who antedates Newton and whose mathematical physics is a joke. The distinction of primary and secondary qualities seems to start with Locke -- long after Descartes..
Nagel Has a poor grasp of the history of science -- accepting mythic over documentary history. A good remedy would be reading in the history of medieval science. good starting point. James Hannam, The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution is a good starting point, despite missing a few critical points. Medieval physicists developed mathematical concepts (such as inertia and instantaneous velocity) essential to classical physics -- providing the foundation on which Galileo and Newton built.
So, there's nothing about a mathematical approach to the material world that gives rise to either Cartesian duality or the modern mind-body problem. The actual cause is Descartes's profound ignorance of the tradition -- leaving him to work out both physics and philosophy de novo.
Nagel sees an important point here, but, I think, mischaracterizes it. Leaving out the subjective is a rational methodological move, but no more "essential" than the willing suspension of disbelief in watching a drama.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree that Dennett is applying this paradigm; but it is utterly irrational to think, as Dennett does, that the paradigm is adequate to the full range of reality.
My logical propagator argument shows that the laws of nature are in the same genus as human intentions, not the same species. My comparison with human committed intentions is certainly an analogical argument. Still, since the analysis does not address the issue of an intending mind, we need to be agnostic as to their origin and its character.
Quoting apokrisis
This is a common misunderstanding. Quantum theory restricts probability to observations and asserts that states evolve deterministically between observations. (E.g. P. A. M Dirac, Quantum Mechanics 4th ed. p. 108) Since there could be no observations before the advent of intelligent observers, quantum theory sees the evolution of the universe and of life up to recent times as completely deterministic.
Quoting apokrisis
It is not my intention to do so. Recall that I said that all knowing involves both a known object and a knowing subject.
Quoting apokrisis
The model physics finds adequate today is that all of the past is summed up in the present physical state (with no detailed "memory" of how that state arose). Future states are completely determined by the laws of nature acting on the present state. There are no "probabilities" involved unless one wishes to predict a measurement (observation).
Quoting apokrisis
We agree. The question is how to form a coherent understanding of both physics and personal agency.
Quoting apokrisis
I am not seeking to conflate anything. Broadly, I'm saying that physicalism (as opposed to physics) is an instance of Whiteheads Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness -- that it confuses an abstraction (resulting from the Fundamental Abstraction of natural science) with the complex concrete reality from which it is abstracted. We have two disjoint abstractions -- the objective world of physics, and the subjective world of Cartesian mind. What we need is to understand is how the concrete world bridges these abstractions. In other words, the mind-body problem is not a problem of the lived world, but of confusing our abstractions with reality.
I mean that they inform future states. Of all the metaphysically possible future states only a determinate future state is actualized at a given time. As information is the reduction of possibility, the laws inform successive states of the cosmos.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We have no evidence to suggest that matter is aware, let along aware of the laws of nature. Because of the Fundamental Abstraction rational agents are not adequately accounted for by physics. Thus, it is not surprising that we act in ways not described by physics.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We know, as a contingent fact, that matter exhibits an orderly dynamics, which by analogy with human ordinances, we call "obeying laws." This does not imply either awareness or choice on the part of matter. Asking how the laws work is like asking what dynamics links the dynamic of a system to the system it is the dynamics of. That kind of question misunderstands what "dynamics" means.
They do not determine "existence," but the time-development of material systems.
However, the relation to God has deep historical roots. Jeremiah, who introduced the idea of fixed laws of nature into Western literature (Jer. 31:36; 33:25 -- a generation before Thales), conceived of them as divine ordinances, and Aquinas used them as the evidentiary basis of his fifth way. Newton thought God "tweaked" them to give us the observed orbits (the "hypothesis of God" rejected by Laplace). I'm not making the God case here -- I'm looking at the laws in se and in relation to the mind-body problem.
Quoting Galuchat
If you define an efficient cause as one that actualizes a potential, then in actualizing potential physical states, they are an efficient cause.
Quoting Galuchat
We need to understand that formal, material, efficient and final causality are different ways of conceiving the same event or process. They need not be separate "things" as a logical atomist might think. A final cause is the foundation in reality for the form of a state to be actualized. It is those aspects of present reality that determine the form of what will come to be. In the model of physics, future states are determined by the initial state (present form) and the laws of nature. So, the final cause is the form of the present state together with the laws of nature, jointly conceived as determining the future state.
To make my point about different ways of conceiving the same process, think of the supposed opposition between mechanism and teleology. If a mechanist is a determinist, she is, ipso facto, a supporter of teleology -- for she posits the immanence of the future form Final causes do not act from the future to "pull" the present state into the future state, they are immanent and active throughout the process. My desire to go to the store (final cause) does not pull me to the store, it guides my intermediate actions to effect my arrival at the store. Thus, teleology and mechanism are two projections of the same reality. Instead of being contraries, they are complimentary -- related as ends and means. Mechanism fixes on means, teleology on ends.
Quoting Galuchat
In talking about the logical order, I'm discussing information. Information is the reduction of (logical) possibility and results from the actualization of intelligibility. Both physical and intentional states have an intelligibility that is prior to our knowledge of them.
While information properly speaking belongs to the logical order, a state's intelligibility, as a source of information, may be called "information" by an analogy of attribution -- just as we say food is "heathy" not because it's alive and well, but because it contributes to health.
So, I'm using "logical" to refer to the information (intelligibility) specifying a state, whether that state be physical or intentional. "Logical Propagators" in nature, then, transform the intelligibility of one state into that of another.
It's a matter of choice. Some of us do. You seem not to.
It's like when someone at a party excitedly tells the assembled audience about their dream from last night and everyone stifles a yawn.
That's great. Thanks for the clarifications.
Why would we need to be agnostic when intentionality is something neurocognition studies? We have reason to make a definite distinction between brains and universes, purposes and laws.
Quoting Dfpolis
Given that it is probability states that evolve deterministically, then I would say that makes it literally part of the equation.
Quoting Dfpolis
And yet the principle of least action is basic to physics. And classical determinism is an emergent feature of reality at best. Events are certainly constrained by contexts. And the constraint can be so universal - no detailed memory of its origins, as you say - that it is pretty absolute and deterministic looking. But then underneath this classical emergent description lies the deeper quantum one.
So you are taking an approach to the laws of nature that seems really dated.
The idea that transcendent laws could some how reach down, God-like, to regulate the motions of particles was always pretty hokey. An immanent view of nature's laws is going to be more useful if we want to make sense of what is really going on.
Quoting Dfpolis
Sounds good. But I'm not getting much sense of how you mean to proceed from here.
Talk of "laws" is definitely nonsense if we are to understand that as meaning anything like the kind of law-bound behaviour of reasoning social creatures like us. But the irony, as I say, is that our human concept of law is all about reification. We create these abstract constructs like truth, justice and good, then try to live by them. A lot of hot air is spent on debating their "reality".
And yes, the realms of the material and the mental are rather disjoint abstractions. But the problem is not that they are modelling abstractions. That is just how modelling works. The problem is that they don't work very well - at least to explain "everything". Materialism does a pretty good job of modelling the physical world - as a finite state automata. But that then sets up this dualism where everything materialism leaves out - mainly formal and final cause - gets left unexplained as part of the "mental".
However physicalism has moved on. You now have a better dichotomy in play - information and entropy. And these are not disjoint realms. They are formally reciprocal. So - while still being just models, just abstractions - we can understand how these two aspects of being are bridged in concrete fashion.
So first up, science just is modelling and hence abstractions are how it goes about its business. That won't change.
Second, physicalism can now be better understood in terms of information and entropy rather than mind and matter. And that semiotic view even explains why science - as an informational process - should be a business of abstractions ... so as to be able to regulate the world insofar as it is a concrete and entropic realm of being.
I think it may have started with Galileo, but I can't remember where I encountered that information, so I may be incorrect.
You are generalizing too much without any justification I would say.
As philosophers we are not interested in subjective experiences because they a particular to each person, but because they they are tokens of types of experiences such as knowing and willing.
I would be interested in your comments on this passage, which I linked above, but I reproduce here in full, as I think outlines a very different model of epistemology to the one you are providing here:
~From Thomistic Psychology: A Philosophical Analysis of the Nature of Man, by Robert E. Brennan, O.P.; Macmillan Co., 1941. (Additional paragraphing and emphasis added).
Quoting Dfpolis
I think I agree on these points. So we may be arguing towards the same general picture. Reading your other replies, I am clearer now that you want to focus on your logical propagator story.
Broadly I take a view on causality that is Aristotelian and Peircean. Which then cashes out in the kind of current physicalism which sees information and entropy as bridging the old mind-matter divide.
So we do have an information theoretic turn in fundamental physics that takes a constraints-based view of natural laws. The laws exist emergently and immanently as contextualising states of information - the holographic principle. And then material events are the observable concrete happenings that emerge locally as actualised states of being.
Being the informational side of the equation, the constraints on a system embody the downward acting formal and final causes. So we can speak of logical propagators as representations of intentions.
Talk of an "informational realm" is pretty general. Having established it as a legitimate part of modern physicalism, the issue becomes how to describe the structure of the realm. And it is pretty standard to apply logic rather directly to our ontological modelling. You have quantum information approaches where the issue becomes how can one ask two opposing questions of reality at the same time. You can inquire about the location of an event, or the momentum of an event, but not get a complete answer on both in just a single act of measurement.
So yes. Seeing reality as being shaped top-down by an intelligible or logical structure is the new metaphysical perspective I would say. Plenty would believe the Universe is a computer, even.
But then your proposal strikes me as having a particular problem. It seems to have to presume a classical Newtonian backdrop notion of time - a spatialised dimension. And modern physics would be working towards an emergent and thermal notion of time as a better model. So any logical propagator would have to unfold in that kind of time, not a Newtonian one.
On the other hand, the classical is what does emerge in a coarse grained fashion. So, with care, a Newtonian notion of time, and hence of logical intentions unfolding in time, does make sense.
And that is again where I would insist on a clear distinction in terms of history vs anticipation.
Brains are the kind of devices that can record personal memories. So they can form a prediction, expectation or goal and remember that in such a fashion that the information does act to constrain future eventualities. You get the clear intentionality of Mary planning to speak in the room tomorrow and all that logically follows from her having that intention today - and being likely to still be in a similar state of mind tomorrow.
But the bare physical world - the world that does not have this kind of anticipatory intentional modelling of its tomorrow - has only its tendencies, not its plans. So it is "intentional" in an importantly different way.
Yes, the full physical description needs to recognise final and formal cause. And an information theoretic perspective now gives physics a suitable mathematical, or logical, framework for describing the world as being constrained by its history - its "memory" in terms of holistic informational states. We can see how "law" gets baked into the fabric of the Cosmos as a fact of its dissipative development. It evolves a structure that stands as a context to all further material events. All this is a great advance on the old notion of transcendent laws floating somewhere above everything they regulate in some kind of eternal and perfect fashion.
Yet still, Mary can today form a plan of what she will do tomorrow. But an iceberg or hurricane can only form a propensity. A small hairline fracture in the melting berg today is possibly highly likely to be the vast chunk that calves off tomorrow.
We could even model that in terms of deterministic Poisson statistics. Likewise we can predict which way the hurricane is likely to swerve as it knocks about the Carribbean islands. There is a statistical band to which it must be constrained - given a set of measurements we might obtain to day to encode an informational picture of it in terms of a set of dynamical parameters obeying some intelligible framework of state-dependent laws.
So physics is certainly made intelligible by its propensities. The today does actually constrain the tomorrow. And that is the best we can mean by formal/final cause as even human intentionality is only ever an intention. Things can go awry for Mary in ways she didn't expect. Worst of all is that she might not even remember.
So everything can be brought back to the notion of constraints. And how that is then neatly matched by the capacity of reality to surprise. Spontaneity can be limited and yet not eliminated. A physicalism based on information and entropy is then in a great position to model that. Entropy treats the material now as uncertainty, surprise, fluctuation, or other action in want of a shaping, constraining, hand.
The ship of science is thus better balanced. The old materialism did make the mistake of reification - seeing matter in fallaciously concrete terms. An entropic view of materiality reduces it to random fluctuation - something that would be nothing if it weren't taken in hand. And then bringing in an informational view of the physics allows for the explicit modelling of the formal/final causes that do the hylomorphic shaping of the active material potential into something that is reliably substantial.
Again, if the back story is understood in that light, then I think I can see where you are going with logical propagators. However the sharp distinction between ordinary physical systems, and living/mindful organisms, must still be maintained when talking about "intentionality".
So the laws cause matter to behave the way that it does, by informing it? I assume that they exist as information then.
Quoting Dfpolis
How could matter interpret the information which the laws provide, in order to act according to the laws, if it is not aware of that information Don't you think that information is useless without something to interpret it? Do you know of any cases where information does anything without something interpreting it?
Quoting Dfpolis
Well that' a really bad analogy then. Human beings obey laws by being aware of them and choosing to obey them. If matter exhibiting "orderly dynamics" is not a case of matter being aware of, and choosing to obey laws, then how is this analogous? Why would you even think that matter exhibiting orderly dynamics is a case of matter obeying laws, when this has nothing in common with what we know as "obeying laws"?
Quoting Dfpolis
Actually, describing dynamics as laws operating within matter is the real misunderstanding of what "dynamics" means.
I would disagree strongly with that. As I see it, knowing and willing are objective relations; their intentional objects are not subjective, but objective (and shared, public).
How does form in-form matter then? You are just repeating the usual issues created by your own particular notion of hylomorphism. It is because you presume the material principle to be already substantial and passively existent that you keep encountering the same logical difficulties.
The way physics is making sense of hylomorphism is as the informational constraint on entropic degrees of freedom. So nature is taken as dualistic in a sense. It is divided into the necessary and the accidental. The substantial or actual is then the third part, the middle part, where the two combine as a fact of physical development.
This means the material aspect is best understood in terms of fundamental contingency - action that could happen in any direction without purpose or coherence. Prime matter would be active, not passive. But active in the sense of pure undirected fluctuation with no stable identity. It would be utter flux. Which then gives form and purpose a useful job to do.
The other aspect of the actualised is then whatever history gets recorded in a fashion that it becomes a material or immanent constraint on further flux.
A shower of rain falls randomly on a new bare hillside. Little rivulets form and combine. Eventually, because the hillside can erode and form patterns - information - a deeper system of brooks, streams and rivers develop. We have bodies of water that seem now fixed and permanent features of the landscape - substantial beings. The accidental gets channeled to become the necessary. It is a physical law what happens to every rain-drop now.
Although of course - taking this process view of nature and its habits - we can see that the drainage pattern can still evolve with time. Accidents continue to happen. The channels will keep readjusting so as to maintain a steady and efficient flow through their network.
So you are stuck with the intuition that the material substrate must be a rock-solid and passive - that kind of materiality. But understanding materiality as undirected flux is how you can make room for the matching thing of a constraining purpose that is encoded as information and gives steadying shape to the flow of that flux as now a material process with a direction.
If you simply refuse to accept that prime matter is essentially active - or indeed, the complete lack of any stabilising constraint - then you will keep failing to make any sense of a naturalistic metaphysics which hylomorphically invokes the "other" of that stabilising constraint.
(Of course, I realise that your theism also depends on failing to make sense of a naturalistic metaphysics. :) )
You describe this in a way completely different from dfpolis. You describe matter as complete freedom, whereas df describes it as having laws, constraints, inherent within. So you cannot claim that this is the "way physics is making sense of hylomorphism", because there is total inconsistency here. In reality, physics has no concept of matter, so hylomorphism makes no sense to physics, and that is why those, like you and dfpolis, who try to bring it to bear on the principles adopted by physics come up with completely inconsistent notions.
Quoting apokrisis
I do not think that forms "in-form matter" at all. Matter is completely conceptual, it is the concept which human beings have developed to account for the temporal continuity of existence. In modern physics the concept of matter has been replaced by the concept of energy as the means of accounting for temporal continuity. So we cannot bring back "matter" as a concept, it has been antiquated and demonstrated as insufficient. "Matter" expressed the temporal continuity of individual material objects, while "energy" expresses the temporal continuity of relations. Now physics needs a principle to account for that part of reality which exists in relations. This is not "matter", because matter, as temporal continuity was subsumed under "energy", so that part of reality which exists in relations is now lacking in temporal continuity. Nor is it energy, which refers to the relations themselves.
So "form" refers to the relations, and the relations are also assumed to have temporal continuity as energy. In modern physics form and matter are unified, temporal continuity is part of the formula. Therefore matter (temporal continuity) is assumed to be inherent within form, and this is the energy of those relations. There is no separation in modern physics between the energy and the relations, so there is no room for hylomorphism without producing the necessary separation.
Three points.
1. I'm anything but agnostic on the existence of God. I am a theist.
2. The points I've discussed in this thread are an insufficient to decide the existence of God. I have not discussed the origin of the laws or what their existence betokens. Even if we say that intentionality betokens an intending mind, that does not tell us that mind is God. So the agnosticism is wrt respect to what has been established, not with respect to the existence of God in general. Elsewhere i have used the continuing operation of the laws to argue the existence of God.
3. The existence of God is a contentious issue that could easily sidetrack the conversation I want to have.
Quoting apokrisis
What evolves deterministically is a wave that can be used to calculate a probability. That does not imply that the wave itself is probabilistic. Observations always involve an interaction between a relatively isolated quantum system and detectors made of bulk matter. We have no way of knowing the detailed initial state of the detectors, and calculating their interaction with a quantum system is beyond our mathematical wherewithal. This twofold ignorance is a sufficient reason to see the relative unpredictability of measurements as epistic rather than ontic.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm unsure why you think classical determinism is "emergent." "Emergent" means that a feature is logically irreducible to some prior knowledge base. Given that our knowledge of reality is a posteriori, I see no reason to see determinism as "emergent" with respect to some set of prior features. It is just another contingent fact. What am I missing?
Let me say in anticipation, so we aren't talking at cross purposes, that I do not think that human agency is predetermined. The determinism I'm discussing is my best understanding of what physics tells us -- based on years of advanced study and decades of reflection.
Quoting apokrisis
I am not concerned with whether my views are dated or avant garde. I only want sound analysis consistent with the known facts.
Quoting apokrisis
My view combines Newton's insight that the laws we learn on earth apply to the whole universe (and so are transcendent) with the fact that the laws are inseparable from the matter they act to control (and so immanent).
Quoting apokrisis
One step is to discard the ill-defined modern concept of "substance" and return to Aristotle's view that ostensible unities are fundamental our understanding of the world. So, we are not a material "substance" interacting with a mental "substance," but single beings who can act physically and intentionally -- which lead us to examine how our intentional acts relate to our physical acts.
Part of the answer rests on the fact that the laws of nature and our committed intentions act in the same theater of operations.
Quoting apokrisis
Clearly, "laws" has different meanings in the natural order and the social order. Still, the meanings are not equivocal, but analogous. They are both sources of order, but the order is effected in different ways. Also, historically, when the notion of fixed laws of nature first appears in Western thought (in Jeremiah), it is taken for granted that they are the acts of a lawgiver.
Quoting apokrisis
While I certainly agree that our abstractions are not "things," we shouldn't assume that they're mere constructs. Abstractions arise from the mind fixing on some notes of intelligibility in reality to the exclusion of others -- so they have an objective basis. Constructs, on the other hand, are invented to fill gaps in our knowledge and have an inadequate basis in reality.
Quoting apokrisis
Exactly.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't expect it to. The Fundamental Abstraction is a useful methodological move. It whittles the complexity of reality down to a scale more proportioned to our limited mental capabilities. The problem is forgetting that it is an abstraction -- committing Whitehead's Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness -- and thinking that physicality exhausts reality (as physicalists do) or, as you suggest, reifying the abstraction into a res extensa (as Cartesian dualists do).
Quoting apokrisis
I would be happy to see how you develop this line of thought. I am not one, however, to abandon one conceptual space in favor of another. Each gives us a different projection of reality. So employing several can only enrich our understanding.
Quoting apokrisis
The idea that the sciences are defined by their various degrees of abstraction is well developed in Aquinas Commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius. Applying the language of information theory to this insight is a recent development.
I am not sure how you see abstractions as "able to regulate the world."
I would be happy to learn of its roots in Galileo, if any.
I would be happy to comment. I follow Aquinas on a number of issues, but depart from him on a few points where he has a Neoplatonic, rather an an Aristotelian, position. Specifically, I reject (1) his notion of prima materia (prime matter) as a completely unintelligible passive potency and (2) his claim that we can have no intellectual knowledge of particulars. This are related positions and it is hard to reject (1) without rejecting (2).
I have published my reasons for rejecting (1) -- "A New Reading of Aristotle's Hyle," Modern Schoolman 68 (3):225-244 (1991) (https://philpapers.org/rec/POLANR)
My main reason for rejecting (2) is that It makes the application of universal knowledge to particulars impossible. To apply any science to reality we need a judgement of the form "This particular is an A" (where A is a universal). On Aquinas's theory this judgement can't be formed by the intellect (which doesn't know any particular), nor can it be formed at the sensory level (because A is a universal).
Now to your text. Brennan gives an accurate and competent presentation of Aquinas's theory. So, let me say where I think it breaks down.
First, this seems to reify the form. Objects are intelligible - they have various aspects the intellect can grasp (notes of intelligibility). A subset of these notes corresponds to each concept the object can evoke in us. One subset evokes the concept
Second, while different material objects have different matter (different atoms), we understand that an object is this particular by grasping, intellectually, is place in the world -- its relation to other objects. This individualizing relations are just as intelligible as the notes that define the kind of object we are dealing with. So, yes, the matter of an object does not enter us in cognition, but information that allows us to judge an objects particularity does.
Third, abstraction is not a mystical process that removes the "form" from individuating data. It is simply us attending to some notes of intelligibility to the exclusion of others. So, when he says "To understand is to free form completely from matter," that is simply wrong. (a) An object's matter never enters our senses -- its action does. (b) If it were true, we could never understand anything other than forms (the intelligibility required to evoke species concepts such as
This is simply a dogmatic claim -- and one contradicted by experience. We have universal concepts not only of substantial forms (e.g. humans, cats and planets), but also of accidents (e.g. height, hair color and age).
If you read Aristotle's De Anima you will see that concepts arise when the agent intellect actualizes notes of intelligibility latent in the phantasm (bound sensory representation). If we actualize the notes common to a species, we form the concept of a species form, but we can just as well actualize the notes of intelligibility informing us of an object's particular and individualizing traits (its "accidents").
Since the notion of "agent intellect" is very abstract, it is good to ask how this concept relates to experience. What mental act makes neurally encoded information actually known? Clearly, we come to know when we become aware of them. So, the agent intellect is simply our awareness -- and abstraction is focusing our attention, our awareness, on some aspects of experience to the exclusion of others.
Note that the word nous, which Aristotle uses for intellect, is a cognate of noos (vision).
I would say that we are in the realm of intellect when ever we are aware. Sensory processing absent awareness is just what Freud called the unconscious mind.
As you can see, this is not my understanding, nor, I think, that of Aristotle.
I know Aristotle's views quite well. While I respect Peirce, I don't know as much about him as a should. What should I know of his view of causality?
Quoting apokrisis
It seems to me that the "divide" is between subjectivity considered in isolation and objectivity considered in isolation. If so, the divide can be bridged by considering them holistically. The concepts of subjectivity and objectivity certainly relate to information, but I don't see what role entropy, as a measure of disorder, has to play.
Quoting apokrisis
I am not talking about an information realm, but about physical and intentional theaters of operation and their relation.
Quoting apokrisis
While this problem is based in reality, it is due to a misconceptualization of reality not to any ontic inconsistency. As Aristotle points out in Metaphysics Delta, real quantities are not actual numbers but specific forms of intelligibility: either countability (for discrete quantity) or measurability (for continuous quantity). Thus, quantum states do not have actual numerical positions or numerical momenta -- rather they are susceptible to location measurements and momentum measurements.
There is no a priori reason to think that different measurement operations will be interference free. The Principle of Quantum Indeterminacy simply tells us that this logical possibility is real. We cannot simultaneously measure canonically conjugate variables (such as position and momentum, time and energy) with arbitrary accuracy. This may be a surprise, but it has no profound metaphysical implications.
Quoting apokrisis
First, my concept of time is Aristotelian, not Newtonian. "Time is the measure of change according to before and after." I see no conflict between it and any recent development in physics.
Physics does point to a regime, the big bang "before" Planck time, when our
There is no knowing without a subject knowing, no willing without a subject willing. So, our experiences as subjects are essential data in understanding the reality of knowing and willing.
I'm not denying that there are objective acts we call "knowing" and "willing." Nor am i denying the intersubjective availability of many of their objects. Still, these acts are asymmetrically relational and so cannot be fully understood without examining both terms of the relation.
No, not as abstract information, but as an intelligible aspect of reality.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I did not say it interpreted the laws. It simply acts in a uniform, orderly fashion and that uniform mode of action is the foundation in reality for our concept
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
As I said above, we are not dealing with actual information, but with intelligibility. When we become aware of the intelligible order in nature, we form the concept
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
All analogies fall short. That's what makes them analogies instead of veridical descriptions.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
If there were no note of commonality, there would not be an analogy. The common note is that, both are a source of order in their respective spheres.
"Given Hume’s critique of causality, our grasp of time-sequenced causality is not adequately based on observing physical events. However, it is warranted by our experience of willing. Being aware of our own committed intentionality and its subsequent incarnation, we expect analogues in nature. Contrary to determinists who give time-sequenced causality priority over volition, will is the prime analogue and causality derivative. Association plays a role, but, as Hume noted, association does not warrant necessity. The idea of causal connection over time derives from our experience as agents."
Hume's view of causality is nominalist. Consider reading Armstrong's "What is a Law Of Nature." Armstrong (a physicalist and realist regarding universals) postulates that laws are relations between universals. For example, electron is a universal: it is a type of object with a -1 electric charge as a constituent property. Electrons and protons have as a relation between them: attraction. This attraction-relation is a relation between those two universals (electron, proton), and is therefore a "law." The law exists in its instantiations: each actual pair pf electrons have this relation. Armstrong's postulate is supported by the success of science (whereas Hume's constant conjunction makes the success of science surprising), and I suggest should be more compelling at least for realists. However, it doesn't appear to be consistent with your thesis of intentionality, and that seems a flaw for your position.
As I said, I can't remember where I encountered that item of information, but a google search yielded this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary/secondary_quality_distinction
In that article the following is quoted from Galileo:
"I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we locate them are concerned, and that they reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated"
—Galileo Galilei, The Assayer (published 1623).
And this from Descartes, who also preceded Locke:
"[I]t must certainly be concluded regarding those things which, in external objects, we call by the names of light, color, odor, taste, sound, heat, cold, and of other tactile qualities, [...]; that we are not aware of their being anything other than various arrangements of the size, figure, and motions of the parts of these objects which make it possible for our nerves to move in various ways, and to excite in our soul all the various feelings which they produce there."
—René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy (published 1644/1647).
And so the crucial question becomes how do you measure intentionality in your scheme?
Information and entropy complement each other nicely as measurements in the two theatres of operation as physics and biology are coming to understand them. If you have some personal idea here, then you will need to say something about what would count as a measurement of your explanatory construct.
You are confused. The point I was pushing was how physics is no longer based on that kind of material atomism. It agrees that it is form that gives persistent shape or individuation to raw potential.
So substantial being is again understood in hylomorphic terms. Of course, this ain’t much trumpeted. But it looks undeniable.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
And energy in turn has become entropy and even information. There is a trajectory here. Persistent being is now dominantly described in terms of form or ontic structure.
And to complement that, we need an equally updated notion of the material potential that is getting shaped into something. That is where Aristotle is not much help. But Anaximander’s Apeiron or Peirce’s logic of vagueness is.
It seems to me, then, that you’re actually rejecting Aquinas’ hylomorphic dualism. And as I commented before, I don’t think your analysis can account for ‘the unreasonable efficacy [or predictive power] of mathematics’.
I see the metaphysics of it like this: that the types or forms of things correspond to their original ‘ideas’ in the divine intellect. The rational soul [unlike the sensory faculties] is able to grasp those forms or ideas by identifying their kind, type, etc; this is the role of the ‘active intellect’. Actually, yesterday I read the Catholic Encyclopedia entry on intellect, which comments [among other things] on the fact that Aristotle’s comments on the ‘nous poetikos’ are regarded as controversial, difficult and obscure and have generated centuries of analysis. But the key point to me [as a neophyte neoplatonist] is that ‘The active intellect "illuminates" the object of sense, rendering it intelligible somewhat as light renders colours visible. It is pure energy without any potentiality, and its activity is continuous. It is separate, immortal, and eternal.’ It corresponds with a passage in Augustine on ‘intelligible objects’ that has always been a source of interest to me.
In any case, thank you once again for your clear exposition, as always - it is an honourable thing to have a clear disagreement with someone as learned as yourself. :grin:
Quoting Janus
I wrote the following yesterday before you added the above quotations, but I think they still hold good
The distinction between primary and secondary did indeed become articulated by John Locke, who is one of the founders of modern empiricism, and whose political and philosophical writing was hugely influential in the formation of modern liberalism.
I don't think that Galileo himself explicitly referred to 'primary and secondary qualities' but in effect, what has happened since the 'scientific revolution', is that the ‘primary qualities’ of objects have been generally identified with those characteristics and attributes which can be depicted in quantitative terms. [Hence ‘the reign of quantity’ to adopt the title of Rene Guenon’s polemical anti-modernist tract; and the general stance that only what can be measured ought to be considered real.]
So - I am drawn to a form of dualism, but emphatically not the Cartesian form.
So you are against substance dualism? Do you favour some kind of 'dual aspect' theory or something else? Is it something you can articulate?
Bear in mind, in a post above, DFpolis actually mentions that ‘substance’ in the philosophical lexicon, is the translation of the Greek ‘ouisia’. And that word is nearer in meaning to ‘being’. I think there is an ineluctable tendency to reify substance, which Descartes’ dualism always falls victim to. I have mentioned previousy that in Husserl’s critique of Descartes in Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl says this notion of ‘thinking substance’ has had disastrous consequences ever since, and that it was not properly thought through or articulated by Descartes, even though it represented a genuine insight. But if you translated res cogitans and extensa as ‘thinking being and extended substance’, it would be less misleading. And then, my point about ‘being’ is that it is never ‘an object of cognition’, as we’re never outside of or apart from it. [That is an insight from the Upanisads at the basis of nondualism which is sorely lacking in Western philosophy.]
So if you combine the ‘insight from non-dualism’ with ‘the reality of intelligible objects’, you come to an understanding that the physical domain is subsidiary to or derivative from the ‘realm of form’ [which is the exact inverse of modern materialism]. The rational intellect is what grasps, sees or understands that ‘domain of form’ [which enables humans, for example, to ‘see’ into the domain of possibility and create novel inventions among other things]. But that understanding of the ontological distinction between intellect and senses is precisely what has been lost due to the cultural impact of empiricism which [among other things] depicts mathematics in terms of adaptive necessity and humans as a kind of simian [which is the contention of the radical anti-modernism of many of the “traditionalist” thinkers such as Rene Guenon and Julius Evola.]
Sure there's no knowing without a subject knowing - but this doesn't mean that:-
Quoting Dfpolis
Subjective experiences are "tokens of types of experiences such as knowing and willing" only in the case of knowing and willing about one's subjective experiences. (I had a dream, wish I didn't feel anxious, etc.)
But as I said, nobody (well, nobody except psychologists and your therapist :) ) are interested in that type of knowing and willing, most of us are interested in the type of knowledge that crosses the abyss between man and man, that is objective and shareable, common.
Your dream as such has no effect on me, but your knowledge of some hidden trail can be part of my world as well as yours (which is a poetic but potentially misleading way of putting it; actually it's part of the one, shared, objective world).
These issues I have been touching on recently as you can see in these exchanges with Dfpolis:
--Janus
-- Janus
I think being can be understood both as a noun and a verb, as a state and an activity. We never perceive being as such, that is an abstraction, but we do perceive being as beings, and in fact it is from such encounters that the notion of 'being as such' is abstracted. So, I do think that 'substance' should be thought as coterminous with 'being': and that being is in its different modes both an activity and an abstraction. Thus res cogitans could be thought as thinking being and res extensa could be thought as extended being without conceptual inconsistencies or confusions arising, but the fact of their being two ways of understanding being does not justify thinking there are two radically different kinds of being, because to think this just is to fall into substance dualism of the Cartesian kind. Also, being as an activity is synonymous with becoming, and it is only as an abstraction that it appears to be static as opposed to processual.
I think the view that the physical domain is separate from the "realm of form" is incoherent; and thus that the idea that one is "subsidiary to or derivative from" the other is completely wrongheaded. It seems to me that you are reacting to a version of "modern materialism" that you say stipulates that matter is prior to form, by jumping to the other pole, and thus making the same kind of mistake inversely.
Quoting Janus
The basis of the argument is that:
Quoting Wayfarer
This is also noted in the entry I noted from the Catholic encyclopedia:
The sense in which the domain of ideas is 'separate', is what is at issue. But it is the ability of the rational intellect to grasp such ideas, which differentiates the human intellect. The fact that in day to day life, these are not separate or separable doesn't invalidate the notion of their being separate domains or 'magisteria'. So - where is the incoherence here?
Actually there isn't really any foundation in reality for your concept of "laws of nature". We have descriptive "laws" such as the laws of physics which are really just inductive conclusions. Some people have decided that these inductive conclusions which we call "laws" must have corresponding "laws", in nature, which are acting on matter to make it behave in the consistent way which allows us to make the inductive conclusions which we call "laws". But just because the inductive conclusions are called "laws" it doesn't really follow that whatever it is in nature that is causing matter to act in consistent ways,.is anything like a "law", it's more like a cause. Wouldn't you agree? Whatever it is which acts on matter, causing it to behave in the way that it does, can't really be anything like any laws that we know of.
You did say that what you called "laws", is operative, it's acting in a causal way. So when we see matter acting in a way which can be described by laws, what you are really saying is that the actions of the matter are just the effects of these "laws". The laws being the cause, are what is really acting, and what appears to us and our senses, as natural phenomena, the motions of matter is just a reflection of the real activity, which is the "laws' in action. Would you agree with me that the matter in motion is just a reflection of the real activity which is the laws in action?
Consider Plato's cave allegory. The cave people see reflections, shadows, or images of the real activities. They don't see the real activities, only the philosopher sees through these reflections to the real activities behind them. Carry this over to your discussion of laws. As cave dwellers, we see matter moving around. But this is only a shadow, or reflection, of the real activity which is what you call the "laws" acting to move the matter around. You, being the philosopher see through this to the real activity which is the "laws" in action, causing the appearance of moving matter.
Quoting apokrisis
I think that you are not quite grasping the concept of "matter". It was introduced by Aristotle as a means to account for temporal continuity. When change occurs, there is always an underlying substratum which remains the same, and this is called matter. This allows us to say that a changing object maintains its identity as the same object despite undergoing change. It is essential to the concept of "change". Without this concept, change becomes unintelligible because at each moment of change there is something new. This is not "change", but a ceasing to be of the old, and a coming to be of the new. Without "matter", which is the thing which stays the same from one moment to the next, we'd have to say that the old universe ceases to be, and is replaced by a new universe at each moment of change. Instead of ceasing to be, and becoming anew, at each moment, we allow that there is temporal continuity, the matter stays the same from one moment to the next, so it is the same universe from one moment to the next, but forms change.
Quoting apokrisis
What I was saying is that the concept most often used today, to account for temporal continuity, is energy rather than matter. This is expressed as the law of conservation of energy. So from one moment to the next despite changing its form (information), the quantity of energy remains the same, and this quantity of energy is how temporal continuity is represented. The law of conservation of mass is more representative of the concept of temporal continuity of "matter", but mass and energy are convertible.
I'm simply not agreeing to your half-baked thoughts on the issue.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Your view is familiar. Along with its defects.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I'll repeat. A constraints-based view of substance says limits on instability create stability. So in every moment, something could accidentally change. And very often in life, things do. But to the degree there is a global order or law in place, such accidental changes are suitably restricted. Things can't change enough to matter.
This is a perfectly intelligible ontology. Tell me one thing wrong with it. And it fits the facts as science knows them. Unlike your story.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You are still a century out of date. Energy is now countable as quantum information. Degrees of freedom are the conserved quantity. Cosmology measures the entropy of event horizons. Things have moved on.
My point was that this is completely different from dfpolis' position that laws are inherent within matter, so no such "accidental change" is possible. Yet both of you claim to have a metaphysics which represents modern physics. Is modern physics that confused that it supports contradictory metaphysics?
Quoting apokrisis
Right, and df's ontology, which is contradictory to yours, fits the facts as modern science knows them also. Unlike my story which avoids those contradictory facts of modern science altogether. So-called "facts" which support contradiction are best left where they lie.
Quoting apokrisis
And you think that is a step in the right direction, dissolving temporal continuity into degrees of freedom? How would you quantify one degree of freedom, to ensure that it is maintained, in continuity from one moment to the next?
Dfpolis was taking a position on Hyle. I disagreed with that, making the argument that he was treating the material principle as already having formal organisation in having an inherent and active intentionality. So in terms of "prime matter", his starting point had already crossed the line and ceased to be prime.
However, that is also a reasonable view if we are talking about the actual world where it is only in our conceptions that we are wanting to insist on some absolutely dualistic separation. So it is also the case that any notion of prime matter is simply a state of being that is the least tellic, the least organised, the least shaped and directed.
And as we have discussed multiple times, I would then go beyond that qualification to say that both matter and form would have to co-arise from something even more extreme - a state of "actual" vagueness. It is at this point any conversation we have completely breaks down. You were already lost at step one - the idea that prime matter reduces to a notion of undirected flux, making matter already an active thing, just a chaotically unformed kind of active thing.
So I am quite sympathetic to Dfpolis on the characterisation of Hyle as already intentional and active - given my qualification that that is then the least intentional form of activity we could possibly imagine. It would be simply a blind and formless striving to be.
And I am completely opposed to your characterisation of prime matter as some kind of passive substratrum that awaits a shaping intentional hand to magic it into a world of objects. This is just the materialism of atomism. And Aristotle was a good deal beyond that.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Talk about wishful thinking.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Physics does that by counting the microstates of a bounded system. So what is conserved is all the possible configurations of some collection of parts. A block of spacetime can contain some maximum number of different arrangements.
So that is how the model achieves conservation. And now the ontology works the other way round. It is the closure by being bounded - constrained - that underwrites the energy conservation. In general relativity, for example, energy is no longer conserved as a necessity. This is because the spatiotemporal boundaries are no longer globally fixed. They have a plastic geometry.
So energy conservation becomes an output of the model. The modelled world starts open. You add constraints to close it in suitable fashion. It is no longer a universal fact to be taken for granted - even if our actual Universe does look pretty closed in terms of its energy content.
And remember I asked you a direct question:
...I'm sure you were just about to give an answer.
That's not surprising. As I've told you already, it is strictly implied within the concept of matter, that prime matter is impossible in reality. It may be a useful concept, but to imagine that it ever had, or will have any real existence is not only fictional, but an impossible fiction dictated by the concept itself.
Quoting apokrisis
If you are talking about a state of reality which is the most lacking in form possible (highest degree of privation), then this is not prime matter. So why talk as if it is?
Quoting apokrisis
OK, so you have here a state where the form is so highly deficient that it is unintelligible to you, so you call this a state of "actual" vagueness.
Quoting apokrisis
This though, your "step one", is an unwarranted assumption, or unjustified conclusion, and this is where you go in a contradictory direction to dfpolis. You have no principle whereby you can say that matter is an active thing. Dfpolis assumes that there are "laws" acting causally within matter, and this is what allows it to be active. "Prime matter" according to the concept of it, is pure potential, and cannot be itself active, yet you claim it "reduces to a notion of undirected flux". This is false.
It appears like you have assigned a highly deficient form to this matter, a form which is unintelligible to you, which you call "actual vagueness", and then you want to say that this form of matter is real prime matter. But prime matter, according to the concept cannot have any form, and that's why it's impossible in reality.
Quoting apokrisis
As I told you in my last post, I do not say that there is a prime matter which awaits shaping by a hand. Matter is conceptual only, there is no such thing as prime matter, nor is there such a thing as the "in-forming of matter". This is an absurd mischaracterization of my position it is purely ad hominem.
Your argumentative procedure appears to consist of two aspects, asserting over and over again your beliefs, and instead of understanding and addressing the stated beliefs of others you attack them with ad hominem.
Quoting apokrisis
That's pure fiction. "Possible configurations" is constrained by the physicist's capacity to determine these possibilities. Quantum physics demonstrates quite clearly that the physicist has not the capacity to determine the possible configurations. Where is the particle? The physicist can consider that it is possibly anywhere, and everywhere, but the physicist cannot consider as a real possibility that it is nowhere. Since your "maximum number of different arrangements" will not even allow the possibility that the parts are nowhere, your "degrees of freedom" is simple fiction.
Your constraint is your refusal to recognize that matter is purely conceptual, in the mind only. You want it to be an active thing within the reality which you model, when in reality it is just a symbol in the model. And you seem to have no idea of what it represents in the reality which you are modelling. Therefore, you assume that it represents "vagueness", the unintelligible.
Quoting apokrisis
Right, instead of considering "nowhere" as a possibility, you are forced to relinquish accepted spatiotemporal boundaries such that your possibilities are no longer globally fixed, and are now literally "anywhere". Say good bye to any "degrees" of freedom.
Quoting apokrisis
I already answered that question. It is completely contradictory to dfpolis' position in which laws are inherent within matter. And, both of you claim to represent the principles of modern physics. So, modern physics allows both, that "something could accidentally change", and that accidental change is impossible because the laws of nature are inherent within matter. That's what's wrong with it, it is a representation of deep inconsistencies within the discipline of physics.
Of course I didn't mention the blatantly obvious thing wrong with it, but since you asked again, that statement is contradictory itself, and we've been through this before. If something can change so much so that it is identified as a change, then we cannot say that this change does not matter. The fact that it has been identified as a change indicates that it matters. This is just another representation of your nonsensical, and contradictory notion that there is a difference which doesn't make a difference. The fact that it has been identified as a difference indicates that it has made a difference. That there is a difference which is not a difference is blatant contradiction. That you can identify a change as a change, and claim that it doesn't matter, after it clearly has mattered to you, because you have proceeded to identified it as a change, is simple dishonesty, lying.
Thank you for the reference. I think the proper formulation is to say that secondary qualities depend on the relation of particular sensory modalities to physical conditions, while primary qualities are independent of particular sensory modalities.
With respect to Galileo, they are more than bare "names." They are modes of sensory interaction.
Quoting Janus
I think Descartes has it wrong as well. We are not aware of the "various arrangements of the size, figure, and motions," any more then we are aware of our brain states when we know the contents they encode. What we are aware of is the action of various kinds of physical states interacting with our senses. These are presented as qualia.
I think we are misunderstanding each other. By "subjective experiences" I don't mean experiences, such as dreams, devoid of objective content. I mean experiences informing us about our self as a subject in a subject-object relation.
I pointed out earlier that even our most objective experiences inform us not only about a physical object (the objective object, e.g. what we're looking at), but also about ourselves as experiencing the physical object (the subjective object, e.g. ourselves as able to see, know, direct our attention, etc.).
The Fundamental Abstraction of natural science, then, focuses on the objective object (the thing seen and known) to the exclusion of the subjective object (us seeing and knowing).
These seem like incompatible positions. Physics has nothing to say about the logical order and universals belong to the logical order.
I see no reason to think that universals exist independently of the minds thinking them. They have a foundation in reality, in the potential of each instance to evoke the same concept, i.e in the intelligibility of their instances. But, being potential is not being actual.
As universals have no actual existence outside of the mind, they can have no actual relations outside of the mind.
Quoting Relativist
If that is all you are thinking about, it certainly does. Hume was not addressing the ground of necessity in nature, but the ground of our idea of necessity. So, we need to look beyond Hume's epistemological analysis to a more ontological one.
Quoting Relativist
I am not sure what flaw you are thinking of. So, just explain how the concurrent ("essential") causality of the laws of nature can give rise to Humean-Kantian or "accidental" causality (time sequence by rule). If the laws remain the same at each instant of time, integrating their operation over time gives us laws with a determinate connection between successive events. So constant intentionality explains the success of physics. (As anticipated by Jememiah.)
No, although of course I may be mistaken, I do think I understand your position. I've read Hegel, etc., too. I'm just disagreeing with it and trying to "cut it down to size" (so to speak) :)
The only "subjective object" around is the person knowing, willing, etc., but that is just the objective human animal accessible to all, and its qualities can be understood scientifically (e.g. its/our means of knowing, its/our capacity for knowledge, etc.
On the other hand, if you mean something like "the knowing subject caught in the act of present knowing," then that's a misunderstanding of what knowledge is. It's actually not a momentary subjective relation in that sense (the momentary, present relation between a notional abstract subject and the abstracted contents of that subject's knowing).
Knowing is a whole bunch of things with family resemblances: various forms of tacit knowing and know-how (including things practiced and now unconscious, like driving), knowledge by acquaintance (which is closest to the momentary, present sense of "knowing" - one might call it "gnostic" knowing), knowledge by description, Platonic recollection (probably closest to the kind of tacit expectations about environment investigated by evolutionary psychology). There's nothing in common between them except the abstraction of knowing as a generalized relation between subject and object, but there's nothing to investigate, nothing to be discovered about that abstraction, it's just an abstraction lumping all the disparate cases together.
That whole line of thought from Descartes, via the rationalists/empiricists, through to Hegel, Fichte, etc., around this (most succinctly expressed by Schopenhauer with his "no subject without object, and vice-versa"), and as toyed with by the Postmodernists, is I think grossly mistaken.
What could those "separate domains or magisteria" be beyond being conceptual distinctions, abstractions? The other alternative is that they are, substantively speaking, different kinds or orders of being; in other words different substances. So again, this is either substance dualism or aspect dualism. You seem to want to contend that you hold to some 'third position', but I can't see that there is any coherent third position to occupy unless it be either idealism or materialism simpliciter; both of which seem to be inadequate to explain human experience.
Matter and form are just the useful conceptions that divide reality for us. Being is a whole. So we are speaking of taking a dialectical opposition to its limits so as to have a causal tale that makes a generalised sense. It sustains a mode of metaphysical analysis that works better than any other general scheme.
So you are confused to say the fundamental source of materiality would somehow exist by itself in concrete fashion - even as the hypothesis here. That is not hylomorphism. And that is why I in turn invoke the further foundational concept of the vague and the crisp to allow for conception of the development of the dialectically divided themselves. You can start with a hylomorphic state of matter~form without either of these aspects of causality being clearly in effect.
It all makes logical sense. If there is a beginning in a symmetry, then a symmetry breaking can follow. A lack of distinction is the perfect ground for the birth of distinction.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Of course it is conceptual. Metaphysics is about developing the most useful constructs for making sense of existence. It is all modelling.
But also, some modelling actually works. The hylomorphic division into material and formal cause works. As does the attempt to understand reality as being divided with degrees of sharpness into the dichotomy of stasis vs flux. Or chance vs necessity. Or atom vs void. Or now, information vs entropy.
For me, matter and form both have to be active in the sense that both have to themselves develop. And both have to be causes - a reason for concrete change. Yet still, those other contrasts, like active vs passive, will start to apply somewhere along the line. We wouldn’t hold on to these other dichotomies of existence if they didn’t have strong explanatory value.
But a characterisation like active vs passive doesn’t seem to make much sense until reality has developed enough to become crisply divided against itself in this categorical fashion. Everything is relative. And so action can only be treated as something general and actualised once hylomorphic being is developed enough for action to be measured against some kind of countering passivity in its world. To be a thing, somewhere, it also has to not be a thing elsewhere.
So you are wrong to say all this metaphysical talk is purely conceptual. It is an attempt to dissect reality in terms of its actual logical oppositions. But also, it is definitely an exercise in modeling. So it is conceptual. But what seems missing in your replies is an understanding that what is central to the conception is the dialectical logic - the logic of symmetry breaking - that is at the heart of a hylomorphic analysis of nature.
You keep thinking vagueness should be a thing in my arguments, then getting angry because monistic existence of that kind is impossible. Vagueness could only ever be relative to crispness, you say.
And I agree. That is the very point I make. Metaphysics only makes sense once all the conceiving is understood in terms of how the logic of symmetry breaking or dichotomisation would work. It is the mechanism by which primal divisions arise that is the key take home here. Categories are limits - the complementary limits of some deeper process of dichotomisation.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That’s a really weird mash up, not an answer. It is just you lumping everyone else into a general category of those who seem to be in disagreement with MU. You right, thus everyone else is definitionally wrong. :razz:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No. It says the criteria has been changed. A different point of view has been adopted.
My approach starts by granting the reality of finality in nature. And goals are constraints. Once a purpose has been adequately served, anything more doesn’t make an intelligible difference.
So I simply apply that commonsense view of finality or intentionality to nature as a general principle.
Every river is different. But not in a way that makes a difference to nature, in terms of its general purpose of maximising entropy.
So regardless of what you say, this way of conceiving of existence is already basic to the metaphysics of science. It just makes obvious sense.
That's fine, but I was merely pointing out that I remembered coming across the information that the idea of distinguishing between primary and secondary qualities, however that distinction might be explained, did not have its origin with Locke.
Having said that, I follow Whitehead and other process thinkers in believing there to be no substantive difference between primary and secondary qualities, no "bifurcation of nature" to quote Whitehead, so I don't hold with the notion of there being substantive qualia at all.
Right - hence the discussion about the characteristic of typically modern thought which is that the real attributes of anything are what are able to be measured or expressed mathematically. Other, qualitative aspects of cognition are then relegated to the subjective [and implicitly secondary] domain. That is the main characteristic of scientific naturalism, is it not? That what is real is measurable?
Hence the conundrum posed by the ‘observer problem’ in quantum physics. In fact, it is this very problem which shows some fundamental issue with the whole project of modern [as distinct from post-QM] science - that is, science as it was conceived from the time of Newton until the time of Einstein. That was when ‘modernism’ began to unravel - which it definitively has, hence the chaos and anarchy of post-modernism.
Quoting Janus
Here's an example:
Quoting Dfpolis
Here's another:
[quote=Howard Pattee]The concept of Biosemiotics requires making a distinction between two categories, the material or physical world and the symbolic or semantic world.[/quote]
Those are conceptual distinctions, so I don't think you have answered the question at all. Of course physics does not deal with semantics; who in their right mind would want to claim that it does?
Do you want to say the logical order and the physical order are two substantively, as opposed to merely conceptually, different orders of being? If you want to say that, then I would say you are a dualist in the Cartesian sense.
I'm pretty certain you can't answer this question without 'incriminating' yourself, so I don't really expect a straight answer from you. :wink:
I'm curious how you would describe a concrete scenario prior to sentient life emerging on Earth with respect to universals.
For example, consider a molecule of water consisting of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Among the universals here are the kinds water, molecule and atom, the numbers one and two, and the relations between the atoms.
Philosophically, first there's the question of whether water molecules (as particulars) could have existed prior to sentient life on Earth (in a similar sense to Einstein asking whether the moon exists when nobody looks). If so, there's the second question of whether the relations between the atoms, their structure and their quantity would also have been real prior to sentient life on Earth (i..e, that a water molecule really has two hydrogen atoms independent of mind).
My reading of Aristotle's immanent/moderate realism about universals is that the answer would be "yes" to both those questions. You seem to be saying "no" to at least the latter question.
My view is that the mind is inextricably involved in every judgement about every matter, even those things that are so-called ‘mind-independent’. But this is precisely what was lost sight of in the advent of modernity. It comes from treating mythological naturalism as a metaphysical principle, which it isn’t.
It is, unarguably, since you're talking about judgments. But Einstein's question is whether the mind is inextricably involved in every matter (including matters prior to life having emerged on Earth and thus prior to judgments about them).
This demonstrates your misunderstanding of the categories of matter and form. This is a categorical separation, it is not a dichotomy of dialectical opposition. That is the difficult part of understanding this division. It is a categorical difference, so it is impossible to reduce it to dialectical opposition. All dialectical opposition is contained within the category of form, is/is not, have/have not, etc., all are formal dichotomies. This is why matter is left as indefinite, it is what is not suited to dialectical opposition. So there cannot be dialectical opposition between matter and form because that would put matter into the category of form.
Consider wayfarer's quote from Pattee above. The categorical separation is a requirement. And, the logical dichotomies of dialectical opposition all belong to the one category. Therefore the division between the two categories cannot be presented as a dialectical opposition, because that would annihilate the categorical separation, placing the two categories into the one, as a logical dichotomy.
Quoting apokrisis
You can say "for me matter and form are both such and such", but unless you remain true to the conception, of what use is that saying? You are not talking about matter and form anymore, you are talking about something completely different. Why use those words unless you remain true, or perhaps you are trying to be misleading?
Quoting apokrisis
Actually this is where you seem to go astray, you feel a need to model reality within your dichotomous logic. You do not allow for that part of reality, that category which is classed as outside of dichotomization. All of reality is forced into your logical box of "symmetry". So instead of putting matter where it is placed by Aristotle, as categorical separate from form, it is simply a mode of formal existence which you call symmetry breaking.
Quoting apokrisis
See, you are placing the "categories" within the logic of dichotomization. All categories are therefore representations of formal dichotomies. So you deny yourself the possibility of a category for things which are outside of formal dichotomy. That is where matter is placed by Aristotle, in a category outside dichotomization. But you deny yourself the possibility of any such category, by placing all categories within logical dichotomization, saying that categories themselves are limits. That categories are not limits is clearly evident when you consider the category of infinite.
Quoting apokrisis
The point is, that your purpose is to state an example. In your example, a change occurs. So for the purpose of your example, the change qualifies as a change because you call it that, a 'change'. If you proceed to argue that the change is so insignificant that it doesn't even qualify as a 'change', then you cannot hold it up in your example, as a 'change', saying "look at this 'change' it's so insignificant that we can't even call it a change". Why are you calling it a change then? To do so is simple deception. You are saying we can't call it a change, but to make my demonstration, I will call it a change.
Quoting apokrisis
If science operates in this deceptive way, I pity the poor scientists who are being deceived. Is this like saying light is not a wave, because waves require a medium and there is no medium, therefore it doesn't qualify as a wave, but we'll just call it a wave anyway?
We can only measure quantities and intentionality is not a quantity.
Quoting apokrisis
"Intentionality" does not name a construct. Constructs are inventions designed to bridge our ignorance. The concept of
Information is related to intentionality, but quite different. Information is the reduction of (logical) possibility. It can be merely intelligible (capable of being known), or it can be actually known. My knowing information is an instance of intentionality because my knowledge is about what I have been informed of.
Merely intelligible information is not intentional. It's defining characteristic is not being about some intended target, but being an aspect of physical reality. Bits encoded in my computer's memory are electronic states with no intrinsic meaning. (The same computer state can encode many meanings as discussed in my "#24 Mind: Just a Computer?" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57466ekUlGE). It is only when my computer's encoded information informs an actual thought that we have intentionality.
This has nothing to do with logical order, it relates what is. It just entails that the same property can be instantiated in multiple particulars. Look back at my example. "-1" electric charge is a property that exists in every instance of electron. Four-ness exists in every state of affairs that consists of 4 particulars. These are universals.
I don't reject hylomorphism, but I do reject Aquinas's version. See my "A New Reading of Aristotle's Hyle" The Modern Schoolman 68 (March, 1991): 225-244 (https://philpapers.org/rec/POLANR).
Quoting Wayfarer
And as I answered before, the integration of constant laws over time gives us the predictive power of physics.
Quoting Wayfarer
Having been schooled in the Thomist tradition, I have given a lot of thought to this point.
1. The Divine Mind is perfectly simple -- leaving us with no ground for distinguishing diverse ideas in God.
2. Ideas are abstractions. Abstractions leave certain notes of intelligibility behind to focus on others in order to scale the complexity of reality down to human representational limitations. Thus, they are a "stupid human trick," and completely unnecessary in God, Who knows reality exhaustively, "numbering the hairs on our heads."
3. The well-documented evolution of species shows that there are no fixed species "forms."
4. As God is unchanging and so timeless, there can be no before and after in God. Thus, there is no need for exemplar ideas ("design plans") prior to the creation of individual members of a species. In other words, God does not "design" in any way analogous to human engineers.
God does intend what He creates, but we need to avoid thinking of creation in anthropomorphic terms.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree that the agent intellect (our power to be aware) actualizes the intelligibility encoded in sensory representations (phantasms) -- giving rise to ideas -- ideas of both species and of accidents. So, I see no reason to believe we're any more aware of essential than of accidental notes of intelligibility. Through experience we come to see what is common and what variable in various examples of a species, and so form, for example, a better defined
Aquinas agrees that we have no direct knowledge of essences, but know them through accidents.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is true. The way to avoid the controversy is not to try to get into Aristotle's mind (an impossible task) and not to treat Aristotle as an authority. Rather, we should treat Aristotle as a colleague -- standing beside him, and looking at what he is looking at. When I do that, I ask myself what aspect of my experience is he calling the "agent intellect" (nous poetikos)? What experience makes encoded information actually known to me? This is the phenomenological approach.
It seems clear to me that my awareness makes sensory data actually known. I can react to sensations, automatically (without awareness) and then i do not "know" what I'm doing, but as soon as I become aware of a bit of sensory data, it is no longer merely intelligible,but actually known. Thus, nous poetikos is just Aristotle's name for our power of awareness.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, St. Augustine is a man of great insight. The more of him I read the more I see.
I also appreciate a sensible and respectful dialogue.
Quoting Wayfarer
First, I think we are all pretty much agreed that Galileo distinguished primary and secondary qualities without calling them by those names.
Second, the dualism I see is a consequence of what I have been calling the Fundamental Abstraction of Natural Science. It partitions reality into the physical and the intentional, but one point I hope to make is that physicality and intentionality are not separated in nature -- only mapped onto orthogonal (non-overlapping) conceptual subspaces.
Our conceptual space has a foundation in reality, but its structure is not predetermined. (Making our earlier discussion of Exemplar Ideas even more relevant.) We can abstract alternative concepts and project our experience into the resulting space.
Reading Aristotle, it seems clear that he didn't partition reality into the physical and intentional. The discussion in De Anima, for example, moves fluidly from the physical mechanisms of sensation to the intentional mechanisms of ideogenesis. In Physics i, 9 which I have been discussing in another thread, he explains physical change using "desire" as an explanatory principle. He brings "desire" in again to explain how lesser beings can be moved by the Unmoved Mover.
So, the duality of modern thought is culturally caused -- embedded in the way we have chosen to conceptualize reality.
This would come as a surprise to most scientists. We do not see ourselves as engaged in fiction writing, but in describing reality and especially how specific phenomena reveal and fit into the order of nature.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This contradicts the previous sentence. How can you say there is no basis in reality for the concept of laws and then say that we arrive at the concept by induction from an evidentiary basis (a foundation in reality).
Does Newton's hypothesis of universal laws of nature go beyond its evidentiary basis? Certainly. That is the nature of hypotheses. Does that mean that there is no foundation in reality for the concept? Of course not. The hypothesis has been confirmed by over 300 years of observational data.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
First, "cause" and "law" are not mutually exclusive terms.
Aristotle and the medieval logicians explained this kind of naming convention. They knew terms can be predicated not only univocally (with the same meaning) and equivocally (with completely different meanings), but also analogically (with different but coordinated meanings).
One type of analogical predication is an analogy of attribution. For example, food and a urine sample are not "healthy" in the sense that a person is healthy; nonetheless, the senses are related by an underlying dynamic. Food is not healthy because it's alive and well, but because eating it contributes to personal health. Similarly, a urine sample is not healthy in itself, but as a sign of good health.
In the same way, the laws of nature are not same as the laws of physics, but they are dynamically related and so laws in an analogical sense.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Of course the laws of nature don't work like legislative acts. Still, the analogy is sufficient for the "fixed laws" to have been called "laws" or "ordinances" since their first appearance in Western literature (in Jeremiah 31 and 33).
Since you agree that something acts to produce the observed behavior of matter, it is pointless to argue about naming conventions.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Of course. The concept
Good question! I tentatively submit that Nature has no intention. It just does what it does by being what it is. It is bound by no law or principle. It follows no instructions. It just is.
Surely the laws of physics are laws of nature? The contrast, I think, is with human laws, which bind our behaviour, or are supposed to. :wink: They have authority. [Although this authority, over us, is given by us; it's not intrinsic to our laws.] Laws of nature/physics are descriptive of reality. They are non-binding. They just help us to understand. And they have no authority. On the contrary, they reflect reality, which is the master or reference, not the law(s).
Since I haven't read Hegel, and don't particularly want to read Hegel, the fact that you mention him gives me strong reason to think that you're burdening me with (Hegelian) baggage that isn't mine -- and so don't understand my position at all.
Quoting gurugeorge
Agreed.
Quoting gurugeorge
Of course, the physical aspects of the human animal are available to all, but since the intentional aspects of the human animal have been excluded from natural sciennce by the Fundamental Abstraction, they are not physical. Experience shows that my intentionality is not intersubjectively available, though parts of it can be inferred from behavior. Further, the behaviorist approach to psychology has long since been discredited.
So, what can be known by a purely physical inspection of the human animal is limited, and does not exhaust its intelligibility.
Quoting gurugeorge
I agree that we can know our intentional operations "scientifically," if we mean by "scientifically" via empirically based rational analysis (without a priori limits on the kinds of experiential data allowed).
If, on the other hand, by "scientifically" one means to restrict, a priori, the data to the space of physical concepts, then such an approach is both non-empirical (being based on an a priori exclusion of experiential data) and irrational (being based on belief system inadequate to the full range of human experience).
Quoting gurugeorge
"Knowing" is a term with a vast range of analogous meanings. Preference for any one meaning does not invalidate other meanings of the term, So there is no "misunderstanding of what knowledge is." At most, my preferred meaning is not your preferred meaning. I am happy to concede that, but doing so does not grant your preferred meaning privileged status -- nor do I claim privileged status for my meaning.
I have defined what I mean by "knowing" as "awareness of present intelligibility." If humans are aware of neurally encoded information, then "knowing" in this sense exists. If knowing in this sense exists, there is no rational grounds not to examine its nature insofar as possible. If you wish to examine "knowing" in your preferred sense, I encourage you to so so.
Quoting gurugeorge
My definition does not speak to the duration of "knowing." It is not restricted to transient awareness, nor does it require eternal awareness. So, criticisms based on the assumption of a "momentary, present relation" address no essential feature of my concept of knowing. And, to avoid any confusion, I accept that "knowing" in a different sense can name the possession of latent, neurally-encoded contents. In the same way, I'm not considering "knowing how" (= the acquired ability to perform a task) -- and on and on as you note. It's not that there's anything "wrong" with these kinds of knowing - they're just not the kind of "knowing" I'm considering here.
So, now that we're agreed that "knowing" can mean many things, and that knowing in the sense of awareness of present is a subject-object relation, maybe you can say what you are objecting to.
I am using these as separate terms of art. By "laws of physics" I mean approximate human descriptions of the ordering relations in nature. By "laws of nature" I mean the laws operative in nature that effect the observed order.
As to the question of how laws of nature relate to human legislation, that is more about naming conventions and the psychology of analogy and association. I am not trying to make any philosophical point from the fact that the same word ("law") is used in both cases -- although clearly Jeremiah thought that the laws of nature were divine ordinances.
Nor do I. I see "qualia" as naming the contingent forms of human sensation.
Yes and yes.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, but the observer problem goes even further -- abstracting away the observing apparatus (even though it is physical and subject to physics). Thus, the observer's apparatus is lumped in with the human observer as part of the neglected subjective object.
There were no actual universals prior to subjects thinking them. There was common intelligibility. In the biological world, this can be traced back to the genetics of common descent. In the inorganic world, common structures often (but not always) reflect a common dynamics. For example, I suspect that most planets have the same origin story. Geological laminae are typically due to sedimentation. Spheroidal surfaces are mostly due to surface tension (drops and bubbles) or gravity (large astronomical bodies).
Quoting Andrew M
All of these are intelligible aspects of the molecule, not actual universal ideas. If we could see on hydrogen atom, we could form the universal
Thus, there is an objective basis for universal ideas, but there are no actual universals until some mind e3ncounters their instances.
Quoting Andrew M
All of these are real and intelligible, but not actually known until someone becomes aware of them.
The one fine point here, made by Aristotle in his definition of "quantity" in Metaphysics Delta, is that there are no actual numbers independent of counting and measuring operations. So, while counting the hydrogen atoms in a water molecule will always give <2>, there is no actual number 2 floating around the molecule.
In the same way, as we learned from Special Relativity, it we measure the distance between the nuclei, the answer will depend on how we perform the measuring operation.
No, they are a bunch of particulars with the same intelligibility -- the same power of evoke concepts.
Until a concept is actually evoked, there is no actual universal.
Analogous to: there is no actual electron until some measurement is taken. This is not coincidental.
Real numbers [and the like] don’t begin to exist by virtue of there being someone around who learns how to count. The mind evolves to the point where it is able to count, that is all. The same goes for ideas and universals, generally. They are the constituents of the ability to reason but they’re not the products of reason. Otherwise they would be merely subjective or socially constructed. But the grasp of universals is what enables the discovery of principles and laws.
I think the basic ground of contention between Plato and Aristotle revolves around the manner in which it can be said that universals exist. (I think Plato himself never was clear about that and it was subject to much more later development, particularly by the later neoPlatonists.) But my understanding is, that the sense in which numbers exist, is different to the sense in which phenomenal objects exist. The way I try and express it, is to say that numbers are 'real but not existent', although I know it's an imperfect way of putting it. But this is based on the argument that numbers (and here, 'number' is a symbol for universals generally) don't come into and go out of existence. In this they're unlike sensory phenomena, which are invariably compounded and temporal. But they're real, in the sense that the laws of mathematics are the same for all who think. So that is the sense in which number is transcendental.
When we think of any number, we're actually grasping what the tradition called an 'intelligible object', although again that is an imperfect expression, as numbers aren't actually 'objects' in any sense but by analogy. But this is very much the meaning of the passage that I mentioned previously in which it is said that 'Intelligible objects must be higher than reason, because they judge reason. Augustine means by this that these intelligible objects constitute a normative standard against which our minds are measured. We refer to mathematical objects and truths to judge whether or not, and to what extent, our minds understand mathematics. We consult the rules of wisdom to judge whether or not and to what extent a person is wise. In light of these standards we can judge whether our minds are as they should be. It makes no sense, however, to ask whether these normative intelligible objects are as they should be: they simply are, and are normative for other things'.
The point is, we mind operates according to these principles - they are what enable us to think rationally and to discover and exploit principles.
(This is the theme that I'm studying. I had the idea yesterday to google the phrase gradations of being which yields some interesting readings in this area, the first being Aristotle's Gradations of Being In Metaphysics E-Z by Joseph Owens who seems to have been a formidable scholar in this field.)
Your logic is a little out of whack. If you are framing matter as the indefinite - in opposition to the definite - then that is just putting matter in the category of the metaphysically dichotomous.
Dichotomies might be regarded as an intelligible form, but the whole point is that they are the intelligible form that subsumes differentiated categories, such as form and matter, into a higher level method of logical categorisation. Dichotomies talk about form and matter as being the limits of a common process of division.
So you are making the reductionist mistake of trying to reduce dynamical processes of opposition to mere standalone categories. And yet you know the logical definition of a dichotomy to be "mutually exclusive/jointly exhaustive". The coherent relationship - the asymmetry, or broken symmetry - is what it is all about.
I'm providing you a taste of a physicalist metaphysics. You have at least twice referred to my description as statements of faith, when all I've endeavored to do is to show there to be alternate metaphysical accounts. Your reaction here is pretty revealing about whose position is a product of faith.
Then there ain't anything to meaningful to talk about.
Concepts have to be cashed out in their appropriate percepts. And it is clear that you are doing the usual dualistic thing of wanting to claim that intentionality needs to be measured in terms of it being a qualia - a feel, an affect, something mental, something ineffably subjective and hence beyond simple objective measurement.
But taking the discussion in that direction is not much use if we want to deal with intentionality in some useful scientific modelling sense. For a start, it changes the subject at a basic level. You are stressing the abstracted "aboutness" of consciousness rather than the more prosaic thing of that aboutness being a modelling relation embodying some actual goal.
So yes, modelling the world involves the general thing of being able to take particular - personal and individual - points of view. We could say that there is that general quality of first person perspective which makes awareness intrinsically a matter of "aboutness". But that now leaves out the goal-centric nature of an embodied mind. The aboutness is also always about something that matters. Intentionality might speak to the existence of a subject, but it also speaks to an object in the same breath.
So intentionality ought to be measurable in terms of its objective satisfactions. It is not a free-floating subjectivity. It is a goal-directedness. And that is the bit science can measure. It can ask the question of what the Cosmos appears to be trying to achieve in general. Finality can be approached from that end, rather than having to start with ineffable "feelings" of aboutness.
Quoting Dfpolis
Sure. But the information theoretic turn in physics is based on the realisation that the material world has a fundamental capacity in terms of intelligible bits. The bits might be signal, or noise. But there is a foundational limit on semantic possibility in this basic fact about syntactical quantity.
So what the formal dichotomy of information and entropy does is create a baseline ontology. It says that material energy and formal variety are not only both conserved quantities in nature, they are essentially exchangable. They are two views of the same stuff.
And having united the material and formal aspects of nature like that, right at its root, we can then start to make sense of the semantic aspect of being. Nature - considered as a memory, a record of syntactical markings - is now understood as being composed of atoms of form. And that gives us the ground to make the further distinction of the marks that are being interpreted in terms of being meaningful, or meaningless, to "someone".
We thus can move on from information as uninformed syntactical possibility to information as actually informed semantics - the reduced kind where the variety is collapsed in sharp fashion to a state of signal vs noise. We arrive at a condition of aboutness or intentionality where we know what marks or signs matter, what other marks and signs we can now treat as completely ignorable and meaningless background chatter.
So nature has to first provide the variety. And then develop the mechanism that sorts it into figure and ground, meaningful and meaningless.
Having built in a mathematics of measurement at the root of this ontology - one that understands reality to be composed of individuated marks or material degrees of freedom - we can hope to quantify our notions about semantics or intentionality. We can set up a definition of mind in terms of its ability to reduce the chaotic variety of the world to the simplest binary model of signal and noise.
For instance - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_approaches_to_brain_function
So you can see why I am being insistent on demonstrating that you are talking in concepts or qualities that are capable of being quantified. Physicalism has moved beyond hand-waving on the issue of semantics, intentionality, finality, etc.
Material variety and formal possibility have been united within scientific physicalism. Time to move on to the empirical modelling of semantics that this allows.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
This seems the old debate between “nominalism” and universals, forms or eternal objects which seems to have been ongoing for at least the last 2000 years.
Are “universals, forms, eternal objects” real, do they exist in some ethereal realm or some other reality?
Some it of course hinges on one’s definition of “exist” or “real”?
One’s religious inclinations (or lack thereof) also likely play a role in ones attitude towards the question.
The religiously inclined seem more likely to postulate a preexisting realm of ideal, permanent, eternal forms, universal laws which are created by or exist in the mind of “God”.
Plato seemed to propose that the realm of forms was more “real” than the realm of ephemeral imperfect objects of sense impression, so called Platonic realism sometimes called Platonic idealism except the realm of forms was separate from and independent of the realm of men’s minds.
Several other philosophers including Whitehead propose that universals are “actually deficient” and can only be recognized by their instantiation in perceived “objects”. The nature of “objects” being another subject of considerable philosophical inquiry.
Pierce, semiosis and signs also seems to be a rejection of nominalism.
It definitely rejects nominalism. But also Platonism.
The key psychological shift for me is to see that the general can be just as real as the particular ... because the particular ain't actually as real as nominalism pretends.
So it is the shift to a contextual view of existence where there are no ontic individuals - atoms of existence - just various relative states of individuation. Persisting regularities produced in the course of a larger process.
In the end, nothing just exists. It all emerges - form and matter. And so it is our notion of the real itself which gets deflated. Nothing qualifies for being real in a hard nominalist sense. Although nature can approach that kind of strong realisation with arbitrary closeness.
From this review. Note 'the distinction between reality and existence' - you won't find that in many places.
Quoting prothero
Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 2?3.
It seems to me a particularly good way of viewing it. Universals are "real" but do not have "causal efficacy" until they ingress or are incorporated into "actuality". Without universals however the universe would lack the constraints under which order, novelty, creativity, value and experience can develop.
Of course, for judgements are acts of mind. That does not mean that existence depends on our judgement of existence, a la Berkeley's esse est percipi.
Quoting Wayfarer
Not quite. Necessarily, before anything can be measured, it has to be measurable. If the electron did not exist, it would not be measurable.
Let me suggest that existence is convertible with the capacity to act in some way. For anything to be measurable, it has to respond to our efforts to observe it. Imagine "something" that did not interact with anything in any way. it would be impossible to observe, let alone measure. If if had no interactions, it could not evoke the concept
Quoting Wayfarer
There's no reason to think numbers exist before someone actually counts -- although nothing can be counted that isn't countable. If you have an argument to the contrary, I'd be glad to consider it.
Quoting Wayfarer
Not on the view I am defending. Rather than being baseless subjective or social constructs. ideas are the actualization of objective features of reality, i.e. the intelligibility of the known object.
Let's reflect on your view that universals are real. Lets take *2* (a substantial universal as an example. If this were so, then in knowing the "twoness" of H20, I would either know *2* or I would not. But, if the object of my knowledge were the substantial idea *2*, it would not be the hydrogen in the water molecule. If *2* were not the object of our knowledge, then *2* plays no role in the formation of my concept <2>. So on your theory, either we don't know the "twoness" of the hydrogen in H2O, or *2* plays no role in knowing it. Either way, *2* does play no role in us knowing there are two hydrogen atoms in a water molecule.
Now consider the judgement . On my account, the same neural representation that evokes the concept also evokes the concept <2>. If this were not so, if something else evoked the concept <2>, then we could not attribute "twoness" to the water molecule -- it would belong to whatever evoked it.
On your theory, there are universals: *water molecule*, *hydrogen*, *2*, etc. Presumably, these inform the corresponding concepts:
Second, we need connections between these various concepts. On my account this is provided by one thing (this water molecule) having all the required notes of intelligibility -- so that in knowing that object, all the relevant notes of intelligibility are present. On your account, there is no basis in reality for the judgement.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is the problem Aristotle solved with the concept of potential (dynamis). Intelligibility is the power to evoke a concept without actually being that concept. Thus, it is real, but not yet actual.
Quoting Wayfarer
Certainly, intelligible bodies and universal ideas in our minds pass in and out of existence.
Quoting Wayfarer
Because they reflect the same notes of real intelligibility.
Quoting Wayfarer
Your "intelligible objects" must have minds or they could not judge, could not be aware of the truth of a proposition.
Quoting Wayfarer
It certainly makes sense to ask if norms are justified. We do not receive norms from on high, but develop them as a result of experience.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, he was very learned. I have a book with his collected articles.
No I don't think there's any surprise here. I know some physicists, and they recognize that the laws of physics are descriptive principles based in inductive reason, and not representative of some "laws of nature" which are operating to cause matter to behave the way that it does. This assumption that there are "laws of nature" which are acting in the world is ontological, not scientific.
Quoting Dfpolis
Descriptive laws are passive things, they are human descriptions. There is no basis in reality to assume that there are corresponding active laws of nature causing the occurrence of what is described. For example, let's say that there is a descriptive law which says that if the sky is clear, it is blue. There is no reason to believe that there is a law of nature which is causing the sky to be blue when it is clear. That's nonsense, the reason why the sky is blue is not that there is a law acting to make it that way.
Quoting Dfpolis
You are either completely missing, or totally ignoring something here. Notice you say "the observed behaviour of matter". The activity here, which produces "the observed behaviour of matter" is the activity of observation. So if there is an activity involved in the production of these "laws" which are derived from those observations, it is the activity of observation. To assign that activity over to the thing observed is a category mistake.
:up:
Quoting Dfpolis
On the contrary, I take it to mean something quite similar, although I prefer Kant's 'transcendental idealism', which he took pains to differentiate from Berkeley's 'subjective idealism'.
But what scientific realists advocate is actually what Kant would describe as 'transcendental realism', i.e. the implicit acceptance that the world would appear just as it is, were there no observer. But the problem with this is that it forgets the role that the mind plays in organising cognition. The world is not truly 'there anyway' - or put another way, the 'there anyway' world of scientific realism is also a mental construction (in the sense that Schopenhauer means by 'vorstellung'). Now that doesn't mean that, if I close my eyes, the world ceases to exist - like Kant, I too an am empirical realist. But the entire vast universe described by science, is still organised around an implicit perspective - in our case, the human perspective, which imposes a scale and an order on what would otherwise be formless and meaningless chaos. But having imposed that order, it then forgets where it has originated, and believes that what it has discovered and knows has a reality over and above what is imputed or understood by the knowing subject.
Schopenhauer:
Quoting Dfpolis
Whether it exists, or the mode in which it exists, is exactly what is at issue. As you no doubt know, this question is at the heart of the so-called 'Copenhagen interpretation' which says there's not an electron lurking within the probability wave until we measure it; the probability wave is all there is, until the measurement is made. That is why Bohr remarked something along the lines that the particle doesn't exist until it is measured; which is why the ontology of the 'probability wave' is still such a vexed issue.
Quoting Dfpolis
But you have to know what 2 denotes - in other words, you have to be able to count - before you can make any deductions about the composition of water molecules. It's the fact that 2 = 2 and always has an invariant meaning that makes it a universal. Furthermore, that formula H[sup]2[/sup]O thoroughly specifies the chemical compound called 'water' - the symbols specify something exactly. That is the sense in which concepts are deterministic, in a way that no physical thing can be. As Gerson says of Aristotle's argument in De Anima, 'thought is an inherently universalising activity - were materialism true, then you literally could not think'.
Quoting Dfpolis
Not my invention - the passage is from St Augustine
That's a good case in point, actually.
H[sub]2[/sub]O specifies a molecule of water. H[sup]2[/sup]O specifies H squared times O.
So, what universal does “2” denote?
Quoting Galuchat
The symbol "2" (or "II" or "two") denotes the number 2.
If you were to wake up on another planet and saw two aliens suns rising on the horizon, you might assume this was a probabilistic event. One unique data point can appear random since there is no pattern yet formed in the mind. If we watch the suns rise day after day we will begin to notice a pattern, then the event becomes more deterministic. Probability is a subset of determinism. This can be demonstrated via the concept of entropy.
Bohr noted the same thing. As a probability wave function, the electron is like watching the alien suns rise the first day. We now know it is there, but we don't know if this location is consistent, so we assume probability. Once you measure it, the fuzzy position is reinforced with more data, so a pattern forms and it becomes more deterministic. My concern about statistical based science is it implied a chaotic mind that cannot form the patterns needed to reach determinism. it stuck in the front end of observation where things appear more random.
If you suffered from Alzheimer disease and your short term memory was compromised, the world would look much more probabilistic, since one would not be able to remember the related data points of yesterday, to form a pattern. Each observation would appear new and random. Statistics may allow you to cope with this state of mind.
Note: In terms of entropy, and probability being a subset of determinism, entropy is a measurable quality, even if hard to define. The concept was developed during the early days of steam engines and work cycles. When doing an energy balance there was always lost energy that could not be accounted for. The amount of lost energy was measurable and was defined as the entropy.
What was observed in terms of measuring the entropy, was entropy turned out to be a state variable, meaning for any given state of matter, the measure value was always constant. Water at 25C and 1 atmosphere of pressure always has an entropy value of 188.8 joules/(mole K). We may model a glass of water as due to random collisions, yet all that random adds up to constant.
A state variable was a pattern that was observed. If the entropy of the universe has to increase, and increasing entropy creates more complexity, in the future, the future state of the entropy will also be a constant measured value, determined by that state. The future state may appear random, since we don't know how to predict future states we have never seen. However, that future state will have a new entropy constant, that is already predetermined by that state.
If we apply this to life and the DNA, what appears to be random changes on the DNA for future evolution, actually defines a new state of the DNA, with a new constant entropy, that has increased a fixed amount from the previous state. The jump is determined by the free energy difference. It looks random because biology does not think in terms of the pattern called state. It has a chaotic mind that is stuck in the foreplay of probability.
Free will and choice uses the random foreplay of determinism, yet in the end, it is jump of a fixed amount of entropy, determined by the brain.
Symbols are objects having intersubjective meaning. In this case, they are graphical or written code for mental representations of multitude, magnitude, etc. Both symbols and their associated mental representations are actualities.
What would be a general description of the number 2 which would apply to all instances of mental representation associated with the symbols "2", "II", "two", etc.?
Obviously, that is exactly what I said I am not doing, so your capacity for misinterpretation is overwhelming.
Quoting apokrisis
Actually, you are making the reductionist mistake, as I explained. You reduce all aspects of reality such that they are described by logical dichotomies. With a clearer perspective of reality, you would understand that the primary divisions are categorical rather than dichotomous, and that the dichotomous is just one category rather than the entirety of reality as you describe. And if that category of "dichotomous" is claimed to be "exhaustive" then it is nothing but a false description. Categories are neither mutually exclusive nor jointly exhaustive, and this underscores the imperfections of human knowledge. To claim that the dichotomous is "exhaustive" of reality is ignorance of this fact.
Quoting Dfpolis
I don't think that this is actually the case. Hallucinatory things may be measured. So just because one provides a measurement of something, this does not mean that the measured thing is real. Imagine that I find Bigfoot's print in my backyard and I take a measurement of that footprint. So I have a measurement of Bigfoot's footprint, but the marking I measured wasn't really a footprint from Bigfoot, it was caused by something else.
Clearly, we cannot say "if the electron did not exist, it would not be measurable". A faulty description of the thing measured means that the measurement is of a non-existent thing. It takes 24 hours for the sun to orbit the earth, is such a measurement of a non-existent thing (the sun's orbit around the earth is non-existent).
Quoting Dfpolis
You are completely ignoring the creative, imaginative, aspect of ideas. If you had respect for this creativity you would not claim that "ideas are the actualization of objective features of reality", because you would have to respect the fact that they are subjective creations. Ideas are an act of the subject, not an act of the "objective features of reality".
This problem is inherent in your description of the relationship between existence and measurement. "Measurement" is an act carried out by the measurer. The thing being measured need not be active at all, in order for it to be measured. Yet you claim that a thing must act to be measured. Therefore you have completely turned around the act of measurement, such that you describe it as an act of the thing being measured rather than an act of the measurer. And so, this is a false description.
Would you care to clarify how meaningfulness depends on being a quantity? It sounds like the long discredited claim of Logical Positivism.
Quoting apokrisis
My, what a bundle of confusion!
1. It seems from the context that by "percepts" you mean sensations of the physical world. The physical world is not something separate from us as mindful creatures knowing it. (I'm not saying that it depends on us for its existence, but rather, when we think and speak of it, we do so as part of nature, not as "gods" looking down on it.) Our intentions occur in, and are part of, the natural world. We are only able to think
2. There is no a priori reason to give precepts of the physical world a more privileged standing than our awareness of mental acts. And, you can offer no a posteriori reason because your methodological dogmatism prevents you form considering, let alone judging, the data of self-awareness.
3. In speaking of "qualia," you violate your own methodological axiom, because the concept
4. I am not a dualist, nor am i "doing the usual dualistic thing of wanting to claim that intentionality needs to be measured in terms of it being a qualia."
a. I am not a dualist. I have defined substances are ostensible unities The human capacity to perform different kinds of operations does not transform us into pluralities. Further, we only think of physical and intentional operations as "different" because we project them into different (intentional) concepts. In reality, my intending to arrive at the store and my walking to the store are simply different aspects of the single act of getting myself to the store.
b. I have said intentionality is not a quantity and therefore not measurable. So I'm not claiming
"that intentionality needs to be measured in terms of" anything.
c. I have not raised "qualia" in making my case, nor do I intend to do so.
5. I have not mentioned any "feels." I have pointed out that the act of seeing an apple, for example, not only gives us data about the apple (as objective object), but also about ourselves (subjective object) -- for example that we can see, be aware, direct our attention, etc. None of this involves "feels." So please spare me the typical physicalist pap.
6. As I pointed out above, you have made no case reducing "meaningfulness" to measurability.
7. If you wish to deny that we have a power of awareness, or that in being aware of sensory representations they become actually known, please do so. Just direct your comments to what i actually say instead of what you wish I said.
Quoting apokrisis
You're quite right. I want to put the conversation on a track that will resolve the problems that have confused Western philosophers since the time of Descartes -- not go around the traditional squirrel cage.
Quoting apokrisis
No, I have already discussed intentions that are commitments to goals -- e.g. my going to the store.
Quoting apokrisis
First, we have intentions independently of whether our desires are met, and second, knowing is also a kind of intentionality, but generally doesn't commit us to a goal. Still, if satisfaction is a topic that interests you, I encourage you to investigate it.
Quoting apokrisis
When we first become aware of an aspect of reality, we have no idea if it will be "important" or not. It's only after we have mulled it over, examining how it relates to the rest of what we know, that we come to judge its importance.
Quoting apokrisis
I have not been talking about "free-floating subjectivity" but about subject-object relations.
Quoting apokrisis
This is a philosophical or religious question, not one for natural science, which is concerned with the nature and history of the physical world.
Quoting apokrisis
I know of evidence supporting this claim. "Formal variety" is not a physical concept, nor is it a conserved quantity on physics. Further, there is no relation in physics linking energy and form as there is linking energy and mass.
Quoting apokrisis
Really?? By whom? What does "atom of form" even mean?
Quoting apokrisis
That is not the well-accepted definition of Shannon -- who has defined information as the reduction of possibility -- which is surely not "uninformed syntactical possibility."
As you have completely lost me, there is no point in my commenting on the rest of the post.
I have already said that the laws of physics are human descriptions. I agree that these are arrived at inductively. When I say "laws of nature" I am not discussing the laws of physics, but that which they approximately describe -- the cause of the particular phenomena that are the evidentiary basis of our inductions.
However, when one goes on to say the laws of physics are "not representative of some 'laws of nature' which are operating to cause matter to behave the way that it does" one is making a claim inadequate to the actual practice of physics. For example, we explain the time-development of the cosmos in terms of the laws of nature. This makes no sense if the only "laws" are descriptions formulated by modern thinkers. Why? Because such laws did not exist during the epochs of the universe they are supposed to have effected. It is also difficult to see how human descriptions could effect purely physical process, even at the present time. Finally, descriptions that describe no reality are, by definition, fictions. If we're willing to imbue fictional descriptions with explanatory power, we should all study J. K. Rowling more closely.
Thus, unless the laws of physics are more than fictions, there is no reason to think that physics has any application to reality. I conclude that those holding these views are voicing philosophical dogma rather than reflections on the actual practice of physics.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So, your claim is that physics is a species of fiction writing.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is a hypothesis contrary to fact. In fact, it is not even a good generalization. Clear night skies are not blue.
Do you have an actual example you can use to make your point?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is false. We explain why the sky is blue by applying laws dealing with the scattering of light, which are based on Maxwell's electrodynamics.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You are confused. Generally, our observations inform us of activity that happened before we observe it (in the case of astrophysics, often billions of years before).
Our observational interactions usually play an insignificant role in the activity being observed. Of course there are exceptions to this, such as quantum observations.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
First. I am not sure what you have in mind here. How do you measure a hallucination?
Second, hallucinations have a basis in reality. It's just not the basis that normally produces the "image." For example, instead of being caused by a pink elephantine animal, the image may be due to an intoxication induced neural lesion
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So, you're saying we can have hallucinations with no real cause?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I am not sure how you confusing "something else" with Bigfoot advances your case. I never said you had to know what it was that you were measuring, just that it had to be real to be measured. In your example, the footprint (which is what you are measuring) is quite real.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is nonsense. A man robs a store. On the way out, he passes height marks by the door and is measured to be 6'2" tall. A witness says he has blue eyes, but really he has brown eyes. By your logic, the robber does not exist.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No. I've said that we often bridge our ignorance with constructs that are not adequately supported by evidence.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Actually, ideas result from a subject-object interaction, not from either in isolation.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Please explain how this would work in a concrete case. I want to measure my grandson's height. I press a ruler down on the top of his head, and his head presses back (Newtons' third law) as I mark the wall. I want to measure the width of a fabric. I lay a tape measure across it, and compare its marking to the edge revealed by light the fabric scatters into my eyes. I want to weigh out a pound of sugar. I put it on a scale and it presses the pan down against the spring as the dial moves. I want to measure the momentum of a bullet. I shoot it into a ballistic pendulum, and see how far back the bullet moves it.
So, what is your counter example?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, again. I say that the measurement results from an interaction, not from the act of either in isolation.
I can't think of a single reason to support Kant's Transcendental Idealism. He invented it to avoid Hume's very sound analysis showing that time-sequenced ("accidental") causality is not necessary. Then, having done so, he invented anomalies that would not otherwise exist (such as the opposition between a supposedly necessary determinism and free will). It's better to go back to the Aristotelian moderate realism and avoid all these confusions.
Quoting Wayfarer
I would call that naive realism. Just because a Fuji apple, illuminated by by white light. has the objective capacity to evoke a red-quale in me does not mean that the apple has objective "redness." If I illuminate a "red" apple with green light, it will look black.
So, what our sensory interactions with the world reveals is the world's objective capacity to interact with our senses. This capacity is real, but potential until the world is actually interacting with our senses. So, it is not that we impose forms of sensation orforms of thought on the world. It is just that we activate some of the world's potential modes of interaction, and not others. We don't sense how Fuji apples scatter infrared our untraviolet light because we can't see infrared our untraviolet light. So, we know reality, but we don't know reality exhaustively.
We can reflect this in formulating our ontology by saying that existence is convertible with the capacity to act in reality, and essence is the specification of an object's capacity to act. Since actual sensory interactions give us information on (but do not exhaust) an objects possible acts, they inform us about the essences of things without beginning to approach divine omniscience. Necessarily, sensation also informs us of its object's existence.
Thus, phenomenal sensations put us in touch with noumenal reality, just not exhaustively.
Quoting Wayfarer
I certainly agree that our knowledge is a projection (dimensionally diminished map) of reality. it is limited by perspective, by our limited sensory modalities and by the conceptual space we employ in representation and analysis. That does not mean that we impose order on nature.
First, we are not "apart" from nature, but part of nature. So, it is silly to say that order is not found in nature because we are its source. Since we are part of nature, necessarily, any order found in us is order found in nature.
Second, I see no evidence that we are the sole or even the main source of the order we find in nature. If order is found in our sensory life, then it is found in the interactions informing our sensory life. And those interactions are informed as much by their objects as by their subjects. How can completely disordered objects participate in orderly interactions?
Meaning is a semantic relation. Prescinding from theological considerations, it is a truism that there is no meaning apart from agents such as ourselves able to impart and interpret meaning. This is not a statement about insensate reality, but about the nature of semantics.
"Form" is quite different than "meaning" because it is not semantic, but constitutive, Form specifies an object's actuality -- the specific ways it can act here and now. If different kinds of objects did not have different forms, they would not interact with us in different ways. If an object did not exhibit continuity of form, it could not interact with us in similar ways over time. So, forms, unlike meanings, do not depend on subject-object interactions for their reality. They are ontologically prior to such interactions. If an object could not interact with us in this way, it cannot interact with us in this way.
Of course, there is no evidence that the human mind imposes "forms" as those of space, time and causality. So, before bringing in the vast structure of post-Kantian thought, you need to show that its foundations are deeper than Kant's unwillingness to accept Hume's counter-cultural observations.
Quoting Wayfarer
There are a lot of mutually incompatible conjectures that call themselves "the Copenhagen Interpretation," and even more interpretations that do not. I assign no evidentiary weight to the many "interpretations" of quantum theory. I am happy to discuss the actual physics of the matter -- as supported by observational data and the successful application of mathematical formulae.
Quantum physics uses a deterministic formalism for everything other than observations. I have good, physical, reasons to think that the relative unpredictability of observations is epistic, not ontological. (it can be understood by modelling detection events using multi-electron models in a fashion consistent with other successful applications of the same physics.
Quoting Wayfarer
That's exactly what i said. The concept <2> arises from counting operations, not from the mystical apprehension of a Platonic Idea, *2*.
Quoting Wayfarer
What makes <2> universal is that it applies equally to all real and possible sets of two elements.
Quoting Wayfarer
Almost. Abstraction is universalizing, Awareness of a particular is also a form of thought, and is not universalizing.
I have no problem with the notion of incorporeal reality. I have a problem with substantial universals and with exemplar ideas.
I think actually defining what number is is a very difficult thing to do. If you look at the Wikipedia entry on philosophy of mathematics you will find it is very long, detailed, and with hundreds of references.
The idea which interests me is mathematical Platonism. It's derived from, but not the same as, the philosophy of Plato, and is based on the contention that abstract objects - numbers and the like - are real but not material. And the argument for that is, basically, that real or natural numbers are the same for all who think, but are only intelligible to a rational mind. So it's all very well to say that this is simply 'the operation of counting' but that doesn't amount to any kind of insight into the ontology of the issue. And the reason the ontology of the question interests me, is that I still believe that the ancient intuition of the 'chain of being' or 'gradations of being' is actually true (see this entry), but that there's no way to understand it without a sense that there are different levels or domains of reality, of which 'the formal domain' is one. And that sense of different levels or modes of being is exactly what has been lost in the transition to modern thinking, where 'existence' has a univocal meaning (which *I think* is the meaning of the allusion in the title of Herbert Marcuse' book One Dimensional Man.)
Quoting Dfpolis
Life is too short. But I will offer up Kant's well-known aphorism, that concepts without percepts are empty, and that percepts without concepts are blind. If according to your philosophy, all knowledge is gained by experience, then dogs, horses and cows ought to be able to speak and count, because they too are the subjects of experience. But of course they do not, because they lack the innate intelligence, the rational intellect, which is the seat of all such powers. And that innate ability has to exist in order to interpret experience and to infer and to predict, and so on. And whilst it may be informed by what it learns from experience, it is an innate capacity.
The reason would be that I have studied the relevant neuroscience and psychology. Self-awareness is a cultural meta-skill, a gift of language. And so all its "data" is socially constructed. That is the place I would start on that subject.
Quoting Dfpolis
Sure. I'm all for an embodied, ecological, enactive, etc, approach to neurocognition. But that is what underwrites a semiotic understanding of the issues. The natural world for us is an umwelt - a system of meaningful sign.
So on the one hand, our perceptions are always embedded in an active modelling relation with the world - the noumenal thing-in-itself. There is always that necessary aboutness or intentionality. But still, the mind is the product of forming that model of the world. The phenomenal is the other side of the relation. We experience our own umwelt - our experience of a world with "us" in it.
There is an irreducible complexity here. A triadic Peircean story.
And that is why I stress the necessity of being able to cash out any concept in acts of measurement. There always has to be a percept that answers the case in terms of a "fact". The aboutness is really about the umwelt we form as our sign of the world. It reflects all that we could afford to ignore by way of information - the entirety of the entropic physicality of the world - so as to construct an interpretation in terms of personalised meanings.
Look, I see an elephant. It is grey. It is angry.
A chaos of physical possibility has just been reduced to a collection of signs that have meaning for me. Indeed, I am "me" because there is that point of view which forms exactly that set of signs in response to some chaos of physical possibility.
So what I was after was some proper definition of intentionality from you to support your case. Talk of the "data of self-awareness" suggests you are way off the mark.
But I guess in mentioning data you accept that all generalities must be cashable in terms of their particulars. If we have an idea of a quality, then we must be able to quantify that in the sense of point to some sign, citing some particular act of perception or measurement.
I say the elephant is grey. You say look closer. You see more colour, more shades. I shrug and say "gray enough" from where I stand.
The satisfaction of theories are always negotiable. But the way that claims are satisfied is a standard epistemic process.
Quoting Dfpolis
And what I said was that intentionality is a quality. A general conception. And qualities are only intelligible to the degree they can be particularised or quantified.
You can't actually have a clear conception of something - like intentionality - unless you can point to its specific located examples. That is how intelligibility works. Induction from the particular to the general and then deduction from the general back to the particular again.
If "intentionality" is an intelligible construct, you will be able to present the specific instances which support the general case - the acts of measurement which make sense of the claims of the theory.
Quoting Dfpolis
As I say, I fully endorse that enactive, embodied, etc, approach to cognition. I've studied it for many years. I agree that our subjective self is what emerges along with the objective world as the result of there being that modelling relation in place at an organismic level of semiosis.
But when you talk of the data of self-awareness, this is the meta-cognitive stuff that folk often refer to as an abstracted notion of selfhood. This is where the dualism normally starts - the mind becoming something actually separate from the view it is taking.
Again, there is the bit in the middle. The umwelt. And it anchors a state of interpretation. The dualistic error is to see the umwelt as the actual noumenal world being presented to a self, making that self now also its own mentalistic thing.
Our percepts are already only a self-interested system of signs. They are a reduction of the physical world to habits of meaning. And a selfhood is imputed because the habits establish a persisting regularity to a point of view. We can always find "ourselves" in the self-interested logic of that perceptual umwelt.
So I was asking how your concept of intentionality can navigate that enactive understanding of psychology. If you actually do take an ecological and embodied view as you say, then you ought to find it natural that intentionality can be quantified. You would be happy to point to the particular signs that it exists as a general fact of some kind.
Quoting Dfpolis
Perhaps now I have. :)
Really?
I assume that the unstated premise here is that dogs, horses and cows know as we know, If not, your claim makes little sense.
I think that the behavior of known non-human species can be explained by the known mechanisms of neural data processing -- without positing that they aware in the sense that makes intelligible contents known contents. If you have evidence to the contrary, I would be glad to consider it.
Neuroscience has done a good job in showing how neural nets can acquire and employ information. Their models do not require a knowing subject or an agent intellect because they do not involve the formation or deployment of concepts.
You seem to think that I'm claiming that sensory experience alone is sufficient for concept formation. I make no such claim. I have always said that concepts require the operation of awareness, Aristotle's Agent Intellect (nous poetikos).
Isn't the idea of a physical world itself "a reductive habit of meaning"?
I don't agree. As I said, I know some physicists, and they do not practise physics as if the descriptive laws of physics represent some "laws of nature"[. They work to understanding existing laws of physics and establish new ones, without concern for whether there is such a thing as laws of nature. Like I said, this is an ontological concern.
Since you didn't like my last example, I'll give you another. Suppose there is a law of physics which describes the activity of matter which is attributed to gravity. Why would you think that this law of physics represents a law of nature, rather than thinking that this law represents a description of how the activity of matter is affected by something called gravity?"
Quoting Dfpolis
The fact that laws of physics can be extrapolated, projected, to a time when there was no human beings, doesn't support your claim that these artificial laws represent natural laws. That we can project the law of gravity to a time when human beings did not exist, doesn't prove that the law of gravity represents a natural law of gravity, rather than it being a description of how mass behaves when influenced by something called gravity.
Do you see my point? The laws of physics are descriptions with very wide (general) application, so they are generalizations. In order that they are real, true laws of physics, it is necessary that the things which they describe (gravity, Pauli's exclusion, etc.,) are real. There is no need to assume that there is a "law of nature" which corresponds. That is just an ontological assumption.
Quoting Dfpolis
You've obviously misunderstood what I've been saying. I hope that I've made it clearer for you.
Quoting Dfpolis
No it is not, that's the point, it is not a footprint, therefore "the footprint" is not real. And the thing measured, being a footprint, is not real. So you cannot base "existence" on measurability because we often measure non-existent things.
Quoting Dfpolis
No, by my logic his "blue eyes" do not exist. Where's the nonsense in that?
Quoting Dfpolis
I take a ruler and lay it beside something, measuring that thing. Why do you claim that it is necessary for that thing to interact with me in order for me to measure it. There is a medium between the thing and my eyes, which allows me to see the thing, but there is no interaction between me and the thing. And so long as there is a medium between the measurer and the thing measured, there is no interaction between the two. Clearly interaction is an unnecessary, and unwarranted stipulation on your part.
I think from my cursory reading of the texts that Aristotle's 'Agent Intellect' amounts to something considerably more than 'awareness'. Again, animals have awareness and are the subjects of experience, but humans are distinguished by rational intelligence (and I hope the definition of the human as a 'rational animal' is not controversial.) What interests me is the nature and the objects of the rational intelligence. It's all very well to say that we interpret the 'notes of intelligibility' from the perception of sensory objects, but it seems to miss a central point, from my reading of it, which is: what is it that makes objects intelligible.
Again, that quotation from the Catholic encyclopedia (and I have no religious affiliation with Catholicism, but Catholic philosophy it is the only source that preserves it, that I know of):
But then, that is rather like Brennan's account that you previously criticized. So here:
Quoting Dfpolis
It's interesting to note that the encyclopedia entry on the agent intellect says that:
And the passage that was taken from De Anima as support for this endeavour was this one:
I find the last phrase significant, as I think it went on to form the kernel of the medieval doctrine of 'the rational soul'. But the point of the Platonic epistemology, which despite his differences, Aristotle still had a lot in common with, was to identity that in knowledge and experience which was of the nature of the eternal, the timeless, 'the deathless and everlasting', as the passage says, beyond the merely quotidian concerns of survival and procreation.
Whereas at this point, I'm at a loss here to see how your account differs from today's mainstream orthodoxy of evolutionary psychology. Wouldn't it be just as easy to account for the way you conceive of rationality in terms of evolutionary adaption? Something like pattern recognition, that the organism has evolved all the better to cope with the exigencies of survival?
That is why I would accept a restriction on knowing the noumenal. But indeed I go further. I am saying the umwelt is a kind of double fiction. It contains both the self and the world as its double aspect.
When I see that yellow flower, the yellow is the sign that there is a physical world ... for the mental "me".
And now that we can conceive of the physical world in terms of quantities of information, we are extrapolating that semiosis of signs to make it foundational to our ontology. The world itself is understood in this Janus two-faced fashion. The self~world distinction - where self stands for some individuated point of view - is reduced to make it the way we understand the world in general.
Of course, it is still all just ideas - our usefully organised impressions, the tale we tell to form an umwelt. But it offers a neat resolution - one that is dual aspect without slipping into the pan-psychic.
Reality itself can be regarded pan-semiotically as a system of signs. It is formed by its own reductive development of intelligible habits - it's laws or other regularities that frame every event as confirmation of some generalised intent.
So as I say, both "mind" and "world" can only be constructs. The "physical world" is our useful fiction - the one that makes most sense in opposition to that other useful fiction of "the conscious mind".
But then, it becomes something when physics itself starts to embrace that semiotic twist and begin to measure the world in terms of atoms of form rather than atoms of matter. Information or entropy? These are now just two sides of the same coin - the one basic Planckian unit of reality measurement.
So that little move secures the scientific self in a completely objective description. A neat new trick.
Well actually, the job ain't done yet. The major chunks of theory - quantum mechanics in particular - can't formalise the definition of "the observer" in the way they have formalised "the observables".
And yet even here, huge progress is being made. You now have a decoherence version of QM - one with thermal statistical mechanics bolted on - which allows the "environment" to replace the "experimenter" in the effective collapse of a wavefunction.
Again, there is still the huge problem that decoherence just spreads out the uncertainty so it becomes completely diffused - without actually being collapsed. However it is still scientific progress. And recent turns in quantum interpretation keep becoming more overtly semiotic.
So the brain forms a rather particular view of the physical world - an umwelt that is useful for decoding reality in terms of a universe of "medium sized dry goods". We know from psychology that it is all an interpretation, a system of sign, and not the thing-in-itself. Qualia like yellowness mediate a relation between a "mental me" and a "material object" - both aspects of this being useful fictions of thought.
Having grasped the semiotic nature of experience, we can then push that back towards the reality we seek to experience in more true and naked fashion. And surprisingly perhaps, that is not some crazy random move. It turns out to work amazingly well. It fixes physicalism by giving back some of the essential stuff that went missing - like intentionality or formal/final cause.
It would seem better then to say that the idea of the physical world is really a reduction of the noumenal to a habit of meaning. I would further modify what you say and call self and world fictive rather than fictional, since they have their roots in reality, but are not real in the sense we might think when we hypostatize them.
Quoting apokrisis
Should I be offended? :joke:
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, the ideas of form without matter or matter without form both seem incoherent. So, our understanding is ineliminably "dual aspect" in nature.
Quoting apokrisis
So, it would seem that, for you, intentionality in it's inorganic guise is entropy, and in its organic guise is negentropy, and the same may be said for formal/final causation?
I can't comment on the QM stuff you wrote, because I know too little about it. :smile:
Was there a difference?
Quoting Janus
Again, is there a difference that matters? If fictional is specific to the literary, then fictive is perhaps more suitably general in being a product of the imagination. But it seems like hair splitting.
Quoting Janus
Sorry, I couldn't resist that little joke.
Quoting Janus
Intentionality would be the negentropy - organic or inorganic. Even energy has stuff it is itching to do.
So what would match that in a double aspect or dichotomous fashion would be uncertainty - an indecision of some fundamental kind. And entropy is the uncertainty of a state of material disorder or unpredictability.
Meaningfulness is then a low entropy/high information condition. A negentropic or intentional state.
Confusingly of course, Shannon information is defined in exactly the opposite terms. It is defined in terms of entropy or fundamental degrees of freedom - a capacity for nature to surprise you and confuse any intentions you might have had.
So information now means its exact opposite - meaningless syntactical variety.
And yet that's fair because entropy is how you wind up justifying that you can completely specify the state of a complicated system, like a gas of a gazillion particles, just by knowing a couple of critical numbers, such as a temperature and a pressure reading.
So lift the covers of the scientific modelling and the two-facedness of it all can be seen. We have to construct an image of the ultimately meaningless so as to have a backdrop against which to measure the "other" of the ultimately meaningful.
Newton had a backdrop in space and time. That foregrounded the "other" of a located event.
Modern physics is now reinventing itself using just information/entropy as a generalised backcloth - one on which even space and time, along with energy, can emerge as the locally measureable.
So that is what I mean about folding mind into the physics. The unification of information and entropy, the atoms of form and the atoms of matter, means that this new metaphysical backcloth is ready and waiting to host all your neuroscience, as well as all your physics. It is a backdrop so mathematically general that it allows a common approach to measurement to be taken to absolutely "everything".
Which is exactly what is happening with the Bayesian brain approach to theories about mental function.
So the usual notion of how mind science is suppose to work is that one day it would all be collapsed to a story of physics.
But no. Now - in a pan-semiotic or information theoretic approach - both physics and neuroscience are being collapsed back to a still deeper metaphysics. One that is beyond the old Cartesian dualism.
And, for metaphysical thinkers, this then becomes the new umwelt. When you look at minds or worlds, you see them as essentially the same thing - the same semiotic process.
This is certainly the great breakthrough Peirce made a hundred plus years ago now.
The idea of the action of gravity is indispensable to the scientific understanding of the evolution of the Universe, so, that gravity was universal prior to the advent of human life is entailed by that understanding. How would the idea of the universal action of gravity at all times and places differ from the idea of a universal natural law of gravity; a law which is real in more than a merely nominalistic fashion?
Well, yes, because then we would not be reducing the noumenal to the physical world. If all our experiences and ideas, including the physical world, are habitual reductions to intelligible meaning, then these reductions are natural outcomes of the noumenal, but can never constitute exhaustive knowledge of the noumenal in the sense that it might be said that we could, in principle at least, exhaustively know the physical world, since the latter just is the empirical world of our own experience and understanding.
Quoting apokrisis
But I don't see the world and the self as products of the imagination, but rather as products of nature. Perhaps you are right about the definitional difference between fictional and fictive being hair-thick. The imagination is also a product of nature, but the thing is I want to maintain a distinction between more and less arbitrary products; with purely fictional productions tending towards the more arbitrary end of the spectrum, obviously.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't see a significant difference between this and Whitehead's notion of prehension, and the pan-experientialism which has grown out of it. (But let's not become embroiled in that argument again; I only mention it in response to your referring to his purported "pan-psychism" again a few posts ago).
Anyway, I thought it was the universal "desire" of energy to reach a state of equilibrium or maximal entropy which you understood to be the general "intentionailty" at work in physical nature, with even the negentropic self-organizing accumulation and utilization of energy which constitutes biological life as ultimately serving this same entropic "intention" or formal/final cause.
Not getting it. Making the distinction of the noumenal is agreeing that we can't reduce reality to some claim of "direct perception". And then my semiotic point is that we wouldn't even want to. The goal is to be able to ignore reality in practice. That is what carves out the space for us to impose "our" desires on nature.
So my focus is pragmatic. It is not about exhaustive knowledge but effective control.
The problem with "knowledge" as a goal is that it lacks an obvious intentional point. So pragmatism starts by admitting the aim of a mind is to achieve things in the world. Control already builds in intentionality in a way that knowing doesn't.
Quoting Janus
Right. The self~world distinction - the epistemic cut of an unwelt - does arise directly out of nature. That is the definition of an organism - the evolution of life and mind.
But now we are humans engaged in metaphysical-level semiosis - modelling that employs the language of maths, logic and measurement. And it is how that very high level view, one that aims to be generically objective, which is talking metaphysically about "selves" and "worlds".
So humanity has evolved semiotically to the point where we are doing this. And it has some use. It is how we have been constructing a cultural and technological level of organism. The Noosphere even.
Ultimately we have to still live in a biological and physical reality. We are constrained by all that. But it is at least thinkable that we can pass through the technological Singularity and launch some further level of semiotic beasthood - the Matrix or some other god-awful cyber-reality.
So of course all this is the product of nature in an ultimate sense. Again, that is what pan-semiosis would claim. It is nature all the way down, and all the way up.
But we have actually constructed the era of the machine. And we can't be sure what kind of umwelt that is going to evolve as part of its nature.
Another reason for wanting a well-developed theory of these things.
Quoting Janus
I'm happy to debate the difference any time.
Quoting apokrisis
I didn't word that so well. I should have said: Then we would not be reducing the idea of the noumenal to the idea of the world.
Quoting apokrisis
On the contrary, I think many people love knowledge for it's own sake.
As Aristotle says: All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing (one might say) to everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things.
Quoting apokrisis
We have already "debated" it ad nauseum, and not productively either, since we have never managed to be talking about the same things or in the same way. :broken: :brow: :zip:
If gravity is the property of something, (say the universe, or things in the universe), then it is not a natural law, it is a property, so it should be understood that way. When I say "On a clear day the sky is blue" you ought to interpret that I am making a descriptive statement about the sky, not that the statement represents a natural law. Why would you think that we ought to interpret descriptive statements about the universe or about fundamental particles as representing natural laws?
Quoting Wayfarer
If after deliberative cogitation, you have no description for an abstract universal called "number", it would be reasonable to conclude that you've never actually used such a concept in mental modelling, much less in controlled or automatic problem-solving and decision-making.
Given this situation:
You are a field officer in charge of a company which has engaged with hostile forces. The enemy has taken a small hill across the river where you are encamped. You have spotted an enemy convoy of several companies 5 miles away approaching your position. You radio for air support which will arrive within 5 minutes. They will be dropping napalm on the convoy. You have two routes of escape: one is under vegetative cover at a 25% gradient, the other is across level, open terrain. Carrying 100 pounds of kit, your soldiers can travel three times faster over level ground than they can over steep ground.
If:
You are thinking in terms of abstract universal numbers instead of in terms of quantity (multitude, magnitude), space (location, area, distance), time (instant, duration, synchronisation), motion (direction, trajectory, velocity), and thermodynamics (heat content, flow),
Then:
You are dead.
They differ because one is a simple description, while the other is formulated as a 'law'. Gravity is what it is, and does what it does. It achieves this without any external input or guidance; there is no law, if by law we assume something that somehow binds or forces certain behaviour(s). Humans formulate laws as a way of expressing their understanding of stuff. They are only descriptions, nothing more. So your description of gravity as acting universally is simple, correct and useful. Your description of a law adds nothing that I can see. :chin:
...nor is the 'law' 'real', if I understand your intended meaning (of 'real') correctly.
I have also studied neuroscience and modern psychology, and found nothing in them to suggest that introspection was dispensable. So, being open to reality, I accept introspective ans well as physical data. Data selection is a great sin in science, but here you are trying to defend it.
As i note in the sentence you quoted, you are in no position to judge the data of self-awareness because you refuse to examine it. When I studied science, we started with observational data and used it to judge theories. Apparently your education had you to start with theories and them use it to reject data.
Neither the a priori selection of data nor giving primacy to theory over data reflect the scientific worldview. Instead, what I see in your response is a worldview laden with unexamined cultural presupposition. You state your faith position that "Self-awareness is a cultural meta-skill, a gift of language," without offering a shred of evidence or a line of argumentation. Then you follow up with the dogmatic non sequitur that "all its 'data' is socially constructed.
Let's see why this view is absurd. We may begin by asking how language works. Contrary to your apparent presupposition, it does not magically transfer ideas from speaker to listener. Rather, it causes the listener to re-construct the thought the speaker is trying to convey by reflecting on her own experience. If you tell me that a musical passage is redolent of Haydn, and I have never experienced Haydn's music, I have no idea what you mean. Thus, the effectiveness of language is based on shared experience.
Thus, were i to speak to you of "awareness" or "self-awareness" and you had no experience of either, you wouldn't suddenly develop a baseless theory of subjective experience (as you want us to believe). You'd nave no idea what I'm talking about. Thus, your claim that "self-awareness is a cultural meta-skill, a gift of language" is not only unsupported, it assumes a magical theory of language,
Moving on to your dogma that "all its 'data' is socially constructed." This does not follow even if we assume that self-awareness is "a cultural meta-skill." A skill is an acquired proficiency in doing something. If I'm learning microbiology, I may be able to look into a microscope without much training, but it is only with the acquisition of our culturally-transmitted scientific heritage, i.e, with a specific skill, that I will be able to identify what I'm looking at as Yersinia pestis. Does this mean all data on Y. pestis "is socially constructed"? Of course not. So, your conclusion is a non sequitur.
Return to the fundamental question, what rational justification do you have for ignoring the data of subjective experience?
Quoting apokrisis
If you mean the natural world in se, it is more than, and metaphysically prior to, the umwelt, If you mean the world as understood by us, we certainly do understand it via the instrumentality of essential signs. Language uses instrumental, not essential, signs and so is of minor interest in relation to nature either in se, or as understood.
Quoting apokrisis
This is at best confused, at worst simply wrong. If you mean by "mind" the contents we know, then yes, they necessarily enter into our model of reality, but that is a non-standard meaning of "mind." If you mean our capacity to be aware, process information and direct our activity, mind is clearly ontologically and temporally prior to the contents entering our models.
Quoting apokrisis
This, again, is confused. We do not primarily experience our experience (the umwelt). We primary experience the objective world from our own standpoint. The totality of that experience is our umwelt. Of course, being self-aware, we also know that we are experiencing the world.
Quoting apokrisis
This is different from "experiencing the umwelt." I said earlier that knowing is a subject-object relation. So, of course we experience the world with our self in it. (There's no warrant for scare quotes.) Still, the primary object of experience is objective reality, not our experience of objective reality. It's simply that our experience of reality is not exhaustive, but limited.
Quoting apokrisis
What might that "irreducible complexity" be? Instrumental signs are physical structures. Objects are either intelligible aspects of reality or mental constructs, and interpretants are thoughts evoked in an intellectual subject. Which is "irreducible"? Which cannot be further analyzed?
Quoting apokrisis
How does the Peircean triad entail the necessity of measurement? This seems more like free association than logic.
Quoting apokrisis
What "signs" are you thinking of? If they are your thoughts, they do not fit Peirce's analysis of instrumental signs. Your thought of the elephant before you is your awareness of the dynamic presence of that very elephant. Your neural representation of the elephant is identically the elephant's modification of your neural state and that iws what I'm calling the elephant's "dynamic presence." So, it is not a "sign" of the elephant you're aware of, but the elephant acting on you that you're am aware of.
Again, if the "signs" you are thinking of are your thoughts, there's no difference between those signs and their "interpretants." Here, sign and interpretant are identical. So, the triad becomes a dyad -- meaning that our thoughts are a different kind of sign from those considered by Peirce. But, if that is so, it is an error to apply Peircean semiology to thoughts.
Quoting apokrisis
This is baloney. No amount of "negotiation" will make Martian "canals" into evidence of Martian civilization. Your example depends on a linguistic ambiguity that can be resolved with adequate care. Posits stated in the same words, but with different meanings, are not the same theory, but different theories. Claiming they are the same is the fallacy of equivocation, not "negotiation."
Quoting apokrisis
This is a faith claim, not an argument. Of course only particulars are intelligible, because there are no substantial universals to be intelligible, but that does not imply that only quantities are meaningful.
Don't you have an actual reason for your claim that only quantities are meaningful? (I note that the claim itself is not a quantity, and so entails its own meaninglessness.)
Quoting apokrisis
Another faith claim -- which is manifest nonsense. Mathematicians have the clear ideas such as
Quoting apokrisis
You seem to have missed the difference between induction and abstraction, despite my pointing it out.
Quoting apokrisis
1. Intentionality is not a construct. It is an idea abstracted from intelligible instances.
2. I have given specific examples. Here are more: Jill knowing she's sitting, John hoping for continued good health, Mary willing to go to school, etc.
3. Providing examples is not an act of measurement.
4. A concept is not a theory. It is not even a judgement.
Quoting apokrisis
Subjective awareness does not "emerge" from modeling. It is our objective capacity to know intelligible contents. if we lacked subjective awareness, we could not know the world, let alone model it. What can emerge is the concept of being a subject, but the emergence of concepts is not the emergence of the reality conceptualized.
Quoting apokrisis
This is word salad. There is no actual signing without agents creating and/or understanding signs. So there is no "non-organismic level of semiosis."
Quoting apokrisis
Anyone who thinks the mind is "separate" from the objects it knows has undercut the very basis of knowing -- a dynamic interaction of subject and object.
There is nothing intrinsically dualistic in abstracting concepts of subject and object, for different concepts can be grounded in the same, unified object. It is only when one forgets this, as Descartes did, that dualism results.
Quoting apokrisis
This is certainly not the view of Peirce. Signs do not know as selves know, nor are they capable of having interests, They are merely instruments of knowledge.
Quoting apokrisis
You have shown me no connection between my understanding that we know the world from a unique perspective, and the possibility of performing counting and/or measuring operations on all that we know.
Fair enough.
How would you use universal numbers to solve the problems and make the decisions in the situation I described above (abstracting all particulars)?
Also, converting from one system of units to another results in different numbers without affecting the measured phenomenon, so would the field officer using two different systems of units (e.g., metric and imperial), and modelling each set of universal numbers arrive at two different solutions and decisions?
Can there be numbers or systems of measurement apart from particulars?
As I understand it, to say there is a universal law just is to say that there is a universally invariant form of action, a natural behavior which operates at all times and all places regardless of human awareness and opinion.
Animals have what we might call "medical consciousness" -- an objectively observable state of responsiveness. We have no evidence that other animals have consciousness as subjective awareness. The only evidence that we humans do is our own personal experience, the testimony of others and reasoning by analogy.
Animals don't provide us with accounts of their own subjectivity and it seems to me that purely neuro-physical model of animal psychology is adequate to explain their behavior. I do not claim to know that animals don't have subjective awareness. I just do not see any reason to believe they do. This may seem hardhearted, as we empathize with animals, but empathy is not evidence.
Returning to Aristotle, let me ask you: in your experience, when do sensations pass from merely intelligible to actually known? Is it not when we become aware of them? If so, then what we call "awareness" is what Aristotle calls the nous poetikos. In focusing our awareness on various aspects of the sensible representation, are we not actualizing different notes of intelligibility? Abstracting different concepts?
I am happy to call us rational animals. Reason, as opposed to neural data processing, requires us to be aware of the data we are processing.
Quoting Wayfarer
In a different post, I suggested (based on Plato's Sophist) that we explicate "existence" as the bare ability to act in reality. So that anything that can act in any way exists. We can also reflect that any "thng" that can never so anything (can't resist penetration, scatter light, etc., etc.) is indistinguishable from no thing.
Similarly, we can think of essences as specifying an object's possible acts. For example, humans have immanent activity (so we are alive), are able to sense, reason, beget, etc. and it is these capacities that define us as human.
In sensing things our interaction with them modifies our neural state. Their modification of our neural state is (identically) our neural representation of them. Because of this dual attribution (its action on us = our representation of it), we can think of the sensory object as existentially penetrating us.
This puts data about the object's essence in us -- because its action on our nervous system is one of the possible modes of action specified by its essence.
When we become aware of the contents of the neural representation, we become aware of some of what the object can do, and so are informed (in part) about the object's essence.
That is how I see the object's intelligibility (its essence) informing us.
There are at least two profound mysteries here:
1. What we are aware of is not our neural state. We are unaware what neurons are firing or even that we have neurons. What we are aware of is the intelligible contents encoded in the neural representation -- but not all of them:
2. The same neural state that encodes data about the object also encodes data about the state of our sensory system. For example, the state encoding the image of an apple also, and inseparably, encodes information on the activation of rods and cones in our retina. Yet, when we become aware of the neurally encoded contents, it is not information on our retinal state that we know, but information on the object we're looking at.
I can think of no physical mechanism that can separate these two kinds of inseparably encoded data. It seems to require an additional factor -- something connected with "apple" data that is not connected with "retina" data. It is almost as if we can make a direct, intentional connection with the apple as the target of our interest.
I hope this helps answer your question.
Quoting Wayfarer
OK. To be clear, I am not denying that awareness/ the agent intellect, can and does produce universal ideas. I'm saying it can do more -- that we can also be aware of particulars -- for if we did not have the capacity to grasp both the universal and the particular at the same time. with the same faculty, we could never form judgements like
Yes. The issue was, was the agent intellect part of the human person (which grounded an argument for immortality) or was it outside of the human person (God making intelligibility actually known) which would undercut the argument for human immortality. I see this as resolved (in favor of an intrinsic power) by taking the phenomenological approach I'm suggesting.
This is the point i was driving at above in identifying our neural representation with the object's action. The same reasoning applies to knowing: The subject knowing the object is identically the object being known by the subject. This identity underwrites an ontological inseparability.
Quoting Wayfarer
First, I do not see awareness as belonging to the physical order.
a. For all of the standard reasons you quoted from the Catholic Encyclopedia.
b. Because it is excluded from the physical order by the Fundamental Abstraction of natural science.
c. Because it can separate (via abstraction) the physically inseparable.
d. Thoughts, as mental signs are radically different from physical signs such as brain states.
e. Because Daniel Dennett showed that no physical model can explain the data of consciousness.
f. Because some instances of awareness are devoid of physical content, and so not dependent on neural representations. (I'm thinking of the vast literature on mystical experience and especially of W. T Stace's phenomenology of introvertive mystical experiences.)
Second, there is no viable model for the evolution of awareness.
a. There is no physical model of awareness, so there is no plausible mechanism an evolutionary theorist can work to explain.
b. To be consistent, physicalists either have to:
i. Deny the reality of consciousness (Eliminative materialism) -- in which case there is nothing to evolve, or
ii. See awareness as an epiphenomenon -- along for the ride, but having no causal efficacy. But, if it has no causal efficacy, it can have no effect on reproductive fitness. That leaves evolution with no way of selecting it. Thus, evolution cannot explain the advent of awareness.
There are many more differences (discussed at length in my book) but these should give you an idea.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is a common confusion. Proficiency in pattern recognition and other data processing techniques can certainly evolve, but "pattern recognition" involves no actual "recognition" -- no awareness of the data being processed. To have an idea, not only do we need content (which can be neurally encoded and processed), we also need awareness of that content. We have no physical model of awareness, and no hint as to how to discover such a model. (David Chalmers' "Hard Problem of Consciousness.")
You don't have to know what it is in order to use it. For the same reason, expert mathematicians have conflicting philosophies of maths, and scientists have divergent philosophies of science. It doesn't stop them being mathematicians or scientists but it does indicate that the meta-philosophical questions raised by and in these disciplines, are not necessarily solved from within their own domains.
Quoting Galuchat
Pure maths comes to mind. Have a read of Rebecca Goldstein on Godel.
:up: Thank you for the lucid explanation, no further questions at this point.
I take it that all you mean by this is that what you term "awareness" (which I would call 'reflexive self-consciousness' to distinguish it from animal awareness) cannot be adequately explained in terms of sheer physics? I would agree with that and say that this is also true of biology in general.
Or are you suggesting that it is part of some separate (supernatural or transcendent) order? If you are asserting the latter, then I can't see how you should not be classed as a substance dualist in the Cartesian sense.
If reflexive self-consciousness is dependent on, and evolved along with, language, and linguistic capability confers survival advantages (which it obviously does), then I don't see why reflexive self-consciousnesses could not have evolved.
Hah. Your replies depend on such diligent misrepresentation of my arguments that it is pointless pushing them further.
But note that I was very careful to distinguish between a biological level of semiosis (the animal mind), a social level of semiosis (ordinary language), and a metaphysical or scientific level of semiosis (involving formal logical models)
So of course the nature of a sign or act of measurement is quite different at each of these levels. But the general mechanism is the same.
If we talk about an elephant, we are cutting across all these levels. There is of course the elephant as it would be perceptually for any speechless animal - like a fly, a lion, your cat, another elephant.
Humans, as primates with three cone colour vision, would be privileged in seeing the elephant was grey and not red. So we could talk about the specificities of our biological umwelt in that regard. There are some measurements of reality that our evolved neurology is equipped to make, and yet not others.
Then of course, we have also our linguistic and logical levels of discourse about "elephants" as objects of the world. Now you might understand me to be talking about elephants when I point to some statue or mention "Dumbo".
Or in a more formal and scientific setting, you might suddenly see a world of difference between Loxodonta cyclotis and Elephas maximus. Some fool ordinary person might call both "just an elephant" - being generically that. But you would be alert to the particular signs that mark a distinction between two very separate breeding populations. As a scientist, you will know how a logical structuring of your perception results in you literally seeing a different world than before. You see things "properly" when it comes to natural phenomena, in contrast to the ill-educated layman you were just before.
So you can't escape the fact that all mind is modelling. It is a business of reading off a self-centred understanding of the world. And all we need to know is what immediate signs tally with our long-run habits of interpretance. We are organised to comprehend reality as a set of measurements.
Is there an elephant in the room? I can't see one, but I can smell one. There is enough of a sign that I perhaps ought to keep looking.
But it seems - your presentation is confusing - that you are happy to collapse this triadic psychological process to a dualistic mysticism. That pretends to be a monistic direct perception. We look and we see the data that is there. Even when we look at our own "minds". It ain't qualia - perceptual signs conceived meta-cognitively as just that. The mind has just regressed in familiar homuncular fashion, curled deeper into its snail shell, and it is surprised to find there is an internal world along with an external world.
But what world is this "mind" now in that it can see both inwards and outwards? And so the nonsense continues.
How does one use an unknown concept?
To claim an "invariant form of action", is to make a generalization about action. How do you jump from making such a generalization about action to the conclusion that there is a "natural law" which is the cause of that type of action which is described by the generalization?
Suppose that every time you drop an object in air, it falls. This indicates an "invariant form of action", so you can make a generalization. What principle allows you to say that there is a "natural law" which is the cause of this action, rather than something else, like gravity, which is causing the action?
Furthermore, isn't the real "cause" of the action you picking the objects up and dropping them? So you think that there is a natural law which causes this "invariant form of action", when the "invariant form of action" is really caused by you carrying out that similar procedure over and over again.
If gravity operates always and everywhere then it just is a natural law; that's what the term means.
You will recall that this discussion was precipitated by your assertion that:
Quoting Wayfarer
In contrast to Einstein's thoughts on the subject:
Einstein, A. (1933). On the Method of Theoretical Physics. Lecture delivered on 10 June 1933 at Oxford University.
Actually I do have another Einstein reference that I think helps make my point. He said elsewhere:
Now, I believe that to be true; but I also believe that the Pythagorean theorem, or anything of that kind, can be only known by a rational intelligence. It is not an artefact of experience per se; and it will never be understood by any creature who is not capable of rational thought and the ability to count. So what I mean is that, while I agree that it is independent of your or my mind, or any individual mind, it is nevertheless an intelligible object, something that can only be grasped by a mind. And I think that resembles the kind of principle that Platonism has in mind, when it speaks of ‘ideas’.
[Although I am also extremely dubious that ‘physical reality can be truly grasped’, as it is [per Plato] inherently unintelligible, which I think the conundrums in current physics make abundantly clear.]
The appearance of gravity is dependent on the existence of mass or energy, therefore it is a property of these things. The occurrence of gravity induced activity is the effect of the existence of these things of which it is a property. The activity is not caused by a natural law.
Here's a coupe questions concerning that quote from Einstein.
What principle do you think he uses to claim that inductive reason cannot derive A (the axiomatic structure of a theory) from E (the experiences of the world of perceptions)?
Also, in the last sentence, what do you think is the difference between "pure reason", and "pure thought"?
He seems to deny the capacity of pure reason to derive A from E based on the assumption that there are no rules of logic which will allow for this. But are rules necessary for "pure reason"? There are no specific rules which one follows in inductive reasoning. So Einstein seems to be denying the capacities of inductive reasoning based on this assumption. The problem is that one can deny the certainty of the conclusions of inductive reasoning, based on this assumption, but you cannot deny that the conclusions are being made. So in reality, A is derived from E by means of inductive reasoning, but since inductive reasoning is free, and lawless, the certainty of those axioms is dubious.
Now we need to consider the relation between "pure thought" and "pure reason". If one of these is necessarily controlled by laws, as Einstein implies that "reason" is, and the other is not, then we have a distinction. The agent which acts to control thought, to abide by rules, is the will. The will, as it is free, may allow thought to proceed outside the constraints of rules, allowing knowledge to evolve. This free thinking appears to be classed outside of "reason" by Einstein. However, the reason why A cannot be derived from E, appears to be that "inductive reason" does not follow rules. Therefore to even call induction "reason" would be contradictory. It ought to just be called "thought".
Effectively, you are saying that, regardless of their misguided philosophical beliefs, they practice physics as if there are laws operative in nature. When "They work to ... establish new ones," are they making up the new laws out of whole cloth -- as a fiction writer would -- or are they looking at the results of experiments and observations to see how nature actually operates? If they wish to retain their positions, I am sure they are doing the later. In other words, they are seeking to describe what is.
Further, when they posit a new or improved law, do they merely see it as describing the results of past experiments and observations, or do they expect it to describe future phenomena? All the physicists I've worked with expect the latter. And if you ask if this is a rational expectation or a baseless faith position, surely they would say it is entirely rational, i.e based on some reason. Certainly they are not such egotists as to think that they, or the description they have formulated, is the reason why nature will continue to operate in accord with the order it exhibited previously. So, despite any errant philosophical views, they expect nature to continue to conform to their description, not irrationally, or because of an extrinsic reason, but for reasons intrinsic to nature -- reasons we call "laws of nature."
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
These are not contradictory views. We can project the same phenomena into different conceptual spaces and so give differing, non-contradictory accounts.
Why do I say that the concept
Still, when we speak of "gravity" in physics, we are not just saying "things fall," but that of all the possible ways of falling, actual falling always follows a unique, mathematically describable, pattern. Since information is the reduction of possibility, the the exclusion of other possible patterns tells us that actual falling is informed. Informed by what? In your thinking, by nothing -- it happens by magic. For those with a more scientific turn of mind, it is informed by a determinate potential, an intrinsic intentionality, that generations have thought fit to call "the law of gravity."
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So, it could be magic? Yes, if we reject the entire structure of scientific thought -- based on the thesis that all phenomena have an adequate explanation. As I've pointed out, rejecting this principle allows one to say that any confirming or falsifying observation or experimental result is a "brute fact" that "just happened" -- and so of no value in understanding the structure of reality. For example, on your magical account, the results of the 1909 Geiger–Marsden gold foil experiment could be a "brute fact" requiring no cause. Fortunately, Ernest Rutherford rejected this nonsense and saw that they could be caused by a dense atomic nucleus.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
First, I have been careful to distinguish "the laws of physics" which are approximate human descriptions from "the laws of nature" that they describe.
Second, I would challenge you to test your suggestion that gravity is not real by stepping off a tall building, but charity prevents me from doing so. Remember, "real" does not mean "substantial." The real need not stand alone. It can be an intelligible aspect of something else.
Third, it is metaphysically necessary that whenever a potential is actualized, it is actualized by a cause adequate to actualize it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I understand that you see the laws of physics as generalizations of past events -- events that are similar, not for any objective reason, but purely by chance. I infer that you see their success in new cases as equally uncaused and fortuitous. Thus, if you began floating instead being weighted down by gravity, or if your keyboard disappeared in midword, you would see no deficiency in physics -- because you see no reason why the past behavior of nature foreshadows its future behavior.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is pettifogging. You called the depression you were measuring a "footprint." I accepted this, not as a statement of origin, but as a naming convention. My point was not that you were measuring a footprint, but that, whatever you call it, what you were measuring is real. If there were no depression, you could not measure the depression. Even if you do not name it, it is real.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is not what you claimed earlier, viz. that what you were measuring was unreal because you mischaracterized it as a "footprint." Naming conventions have no affect on the reality of what is named.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Because if the object you are measuring did not scatter light into your eyes you would not know what to measure.
The existence of a medium is completely immaterial to the question of interaction. A number of media lay between us, still we are interacting. Media are only relevant to how we are interacting.
Yes, I mean that subjective awareness (as distinct from medical consciousness), is outside of the competence of physics because the Fundamental Abstraction of natural science leaves behind andy and all data on intentionality.
Biology is also outside of the competence of physics, for a related, but slightly different, reason. When we are doing physics, we abstract aware the data contextualizing the entities (e.g., electrons) we are considering. Meanwhile, the core concern of biology is part of the very contextual data physics abstracts away. Physics allows any number of structures to be possible, but biology is concerned with actual living structures and their interactions. Because information is not possiblity but the reduction of possibility, physics does not have the information that constitutes biology.
Quoting Janus
"Supernatural" is an ill-defined term of opprobrium in naturalism. Unless you define "natural" clearly, it is hard to define "supernatural." So, if you're identifying as "nature" the subject area of the natural sciences, then since the Fundamental Abstraction excludes data on intentionality, you could say that intentionality is "supernatural." But, if you define "nature" as the object of human experience, then intentionality is completely natural.
I am also quite wary of "separate." To me it implies either physical distance, or dynamic independence. I do not say how we can justify thinking of intentionality as either. As intentional objects are not measurable, the concept of physical separation is inapplicable. As we form concepts by experiencing physical reality, and our commitments find fruition in physical behavior, I do not see how we can say that the physical and intentional orders are "separate."
They are, however, distinct: intentional concepts are not physical concepts.
I certainly do not see myself as a substance dualist. We each a single, unified being, but a being that is able to act both physically and intentionally. The fact that we can form disjoint concepts of physicality and intentionality does not mean that these concepts have separate foundations in reality.
Consider a red rubber ball. It is an adequate foundation for the concepts
Quoting Janus
Language does give us an important evolutionary advantage. Still, one of my arguments against epiphenomenalism is that if consciousness can have no physical effects, we could not speak of it -- for we could form no neural representation of it. So, my argument is about the inadequacy of physicalist assumptions in explaining it -- not against evolutionary selection per se.
A related issue is that for evolution to select awareness, it has to first arrise. As Dennett points out in Consciousness Explained a physicalist model explaining the data of consciousness is impossible
You are quite welcome.
I have done my best to understand your position and arguments. My present conjecture is that by "measure" you do not mean an operation that produces a number, but "observe." I have given you a number of chances to clarify this, but you have not done so.
Quoting apokrisis
I see no clear relation between the nature of a sign and the nature of an act of measurement. Certainly we use signs to record measurements, but we use signs in many, many cases with no relation to measurement.
Quoting apokrisis
No. I would see the same world with greater attention to detail, not a different world. As philosopher, I recognize that my representation of the world is only a projection of reality -- a dimensionally diminished map. So, I am not surprised, nor do I think I am dealing with a new reality, when some new dimension is added to my representation -- when, for example, I learn to recognize the difference between African and Indian elephants.
Quoting apokrisis
This is a very vague and questionable statement. First, my mind is not only information (which you might call "models" and Aristotle calls the "passive intellect"), but the capacity to be aware of that information (the "agent intellect"), and the capacity to direct my attention and other actions to effect ends (the will).
Second, with regard to the information itself: Do I have instruments of thought such as concepts, judgements and chains of reasoning that are distinct from their reference? Of course. Do any of my instruments of thought exhaust reality? Of course not. Are these instruments all "models" in the sense of including constructs covering areas of ignorance? Of course not. Do I have any such constructs? Yes. Do I have models that include both accurate information and constructs bridging ignorance? Certainly. Is that all I have in my mind? Certainly not.
Quoting apokrisis
There is nothing "improper" in having an
All human understanding is limited. So, there is no need to apologize for limited knowledge, unless those limitations are the result of being closed to reality. The relevant question is: Is our knowledge adequate for attaining our goals.
Quoting apokrisis
I have no idea what you're talking about. I assume the triad is Peirce's. As we have not discussed my understanding of signs, I don't understand how you can pass any rational judgement on it. Also, I have repeatedly said human beings are intrinsic unities, not dualist compounds.
Quoting apokrisis
You seem not to have internalized anything i have said.
Quoting apokrisis
Who have you been reading? I have made no appeal to a homunculus.
Quoting apokrisis
There is only one reality. If you would reflect on it, you would find that your mind is not only aware of the elephant you are seeing, but the fact that you are seeing it. If you find this puzzling, simply accept it as a contingent fact of reality. If it does not fit your theory, then your theory does not fit the facts.
Well yes, but isn't a human-formulated 'law' an opinion? Such a law can't be human-independent, can it? After all, the universe will continue to behave as it does if we disappear. And while we're still here, our 'law' has no effect except to describe (for the convenience of humans) what nature does all by itself, without laws or anything like them. Laws are for us. Nature doesn't need or use them; it just does what it does. Just that.
According to current scientific understanding mass warps spacetime, and this is a universal phenomenon which is called 'the law of gravity', or simply 'gravity'. Gravity is not an "appearance" it is an action or effect. The "activity" is not caused by the law, it is the law.
We don't invent the law-like behavior of nature. Sure, the Law of Gravity is also a human formulation as well as an invariant natural phenomenon which does not depend on us for its action.
I find nothing to disagree with here, unfortunately.
I would like to note, though, that if mind is considered in the way Spinoza does, as an attribute rather than a substance, and if extensa and cogitans are understood to be incommensurable ways of understanding organic entities, then it would be a category error to say that mental phenomena cause physical phenomena and vice versa: instead there would be a kind of parallelism between them. So mental events cause other mental events, and physical events cause the physical events correlated with the mental events. They are the same events, seen from one side as mental and from the other as physical.
It is just so funny how you repeat the standard comforting formula of words as if they could make sense.
There is "me" who sees "my mind", and even sees the "me" seeing its "mind". And what is this mind seeing. Why, its "the world". Or no. In fact its sees the one reality. Or is that "the one reality", given that reality is whatever any mind happens to make of it? I mean "it".
Quoting Dfpolis
Ah, "the facts". The signs, the acts of measurement, the particulars, that attest to a theory not being false. Or at least not useless for the purpose that "I" had "in mind".
I think it's funny that you purport to be able to get beneath the phenomenological description of experience: on the basis of what...experience?
That is what makes a semiotic approach so epistemically consistent with its ontological claims. I'm surprised you haven't figured that out yet.
Well, semiotic thought is relatively new to me. :grin:
So, as per Dfpolis' example, you can't "get beneath" the elephant you are seeing (and please don't make the obvious joke). It's the reality, the phenomenology, of what we experience, and of ourselves experiencing it, that must be the starting point. Of course, we also have to acknowledge that we do not see the whole of reality. So the self and the others and the world of common experience is fundamental, along with the acknowledgement that that experience is also, in a sense, a functional selection proper to our evolved kind, from a vaster reality.
You have a theory about how things are. And also of course, the notion of the evidence that rightfully sustains that belief.
So how you are progressing is exactly as I have described.
Isn't that conceptualism about universals rather than moderate realism?
Quoting Dfpolis
The term universal normally refers to what particular things have in common (what you're calling the intelligible aspects). For a moderate realist the universal is immanent in the particulars, not the mind.
Quoting Dfpolis
Agreed.
Quoting Dfpolis
I can't find this - could you quote the specific text you're thinking of there?
Quoting Dfpolis
Agreed. Numbers aren't particulars.
I don't see your point. You appear to have misunderstood me.
Quoting Dfpolis
Right, physicists expect things to continue to be, in the future, the way that they have been in the past, just like we expect the sun to shine in the day, and it to be dark at night. This has nothing to do with whether or not they believe that there are laws acting to ensure that this will continue, that's just your ontological assumption.
Quoting Dfpolis
I agree that there must be reasons why we expect that things will continue to be, into the future, as they have been in the past, but I disagree that the reason why we expect this is because we believe that there are laws of nature acting to ensure this. The reason why we expect this is that we have experienced it in the past, and it has been consistent. We have experienced in the past, that things continue to be, into the future, as they have been in the past, except when something acts to change this, so we conclude by means of inductive reasoning, that that this will continue.
We do not expect that things will continue to be as they have been because laws of nature are acting to ensure this, and this is evident from the fact that we allow that things change. When we act, for instance, we can break this continuity, destroying and creating things. So clearly we recognize that there are no laws acting to ensure continuity, unless we as human beings are allowed to play God, and override the laws of nature. So it is impossible that we expect that things will continue to be into the future, as they have been in the past, because we believe that laws of nature are acting to ensure this, because we commonly act to override this continuity, thus that would be contradictory.
Quoting Dfpolis
Newton's laws refer to the activities of "forces", they do not refer to the activities of "laws". To interpret newton's laws in this way, as referring to the activities of laws, is a gross misunderstanding of Newton's principles.
Quoting Dfpolis
Why would anyone think that the cause of uniform activity is magic? That would be even more ridiculous than thinking it is laws which cause uniform activity. It's quite obvious that uniformity of activity is caused by similar conditions of existence. If the conditions of existence are the same here as they are over there, then there ought to be a uniformity of activity between these two places. When we determine those conditions of existence we will see exactly why there is such a uniformity. Why must you posit something more, like magic, or laws to account for the uniformity of activity? Are you suggesting that the laws act like magic, to ensure that activity is uniform?
Quoting Dfpolis
It is you who is suggesting that gravity is not real, not I. I recognize that the activities we attribute to gravity are caused by a real thing, gravity. You suggest that these activities are caused by some magical "laws of nature", which are forcing matter to behave the way that it does.
Quoting Dfpolis
What did I ever say to make you think that? That's ridiculous.
Quoting Dfpolis
Strictly speaking, that's not true. I am interacting with the media, and you are interacting with the media, and we are not interacting with each other. By ignoring the media which separates us, you create a misrepresentation, (which is completely wrong I might add), of our activities. For all I know, you're a bot. And what do you know about me, which makes you believe that we are actually interacting? I think you know enough about physics to understand that two objects do not directly interact, there is always a medium between them.
Quoting Janus
This makes no sense to me. Sorry, I can't follow that statement, that an activity is the law.
The "we" of experience is more fundamental than the skeptical or solipsistic "I" who doubts or denies the reality of others who share the experience of the world.
If you are claiming experience as fundamental, you are already making a fundamental distinction. The conceptual claims have started.
No the rocks and trees are not part of we people, but part of our world. "We people" is as instinctive for us as the implicit "we baboons:" is for baboons, I would say.
I also say that experience being fundamental is prior to all claims; it is pre-teflectively fundamental for us just as it is for animals.
Quoting Janus
You seem to be struggling to accept my point. On the one hand, your words seem to acknowledge what I'm saying, but your syntax appears to have been crafted to restate the primacy of (human-created) laws over reality.
We have, I think, already agreed that these 'laws' are descriptive, not proscriptive. So law is a synonym for a description or model of natural behaviour. So when you say this:
Quoting Janus
what you're saying is "We don't invent the natural-behaviour-like behavior of nature", which is correct but (as you can see) circular, and not very useful. Let's be clear about this. Gravity was discovered; the laws of gravity were created, by human scientists, to model or describe natural behaviour. I don't dispute that these laws fulfill that purpose well, and that their predictive power has been thoroughly tested, and found to be useful. But the fact remains that these laws are secondary, or derived. The master, the reference, is reality itself. Gravity, in this case, is the master.
Quoting Janus
The "Law of Gravity" is not "an invariant natural phenomenon which does not depend on us for its action", it is a human creation. It is gravity that is "an invariant natural phenomenon which does not depend on us for its action".
It does no-one any good to confuse the reference and the derived model. :up:
I am not sure why agreement is unfortunate.
Quoting Janus
I don't think i'd call mind an "attribute," but i know I wouldn't call it a "substance." I'd prefer to call it a "power" or "combination of powers." It may be nitpicking, but I also wouldn't say "phenomena" cause things. I'd say "actions" cause things. Still, I see the point you're making.
The Fundamental Abstraction doesn't partition the world into the mental and the extended, but into subjective experience and objective physicality. Of course, our experience of being a subject is an experience of having a mind, but having a mind is more than being a subject. In the same way, being objectively physical is more than being extended, and even more than being a physical state. It also includes observable orderly behavior, which is the foundation in reality for our concept
Because Descartes got the partition boundary wrong, modern philosophy has struggled with the very question you raise: how can the mental and the physical interact? Let us be clear, it was Descartes who got this wrong. Aristotle saw ideas as arising from sensory experience and sensory experience as firmly in the physical order. He even dissected bodies to find the conduits conveying sensory signals. The Scholastics followed him in this combined view. Aquinas, for example, insisted that there could be no concept without a correlative phantasm (what we now call a bound neural representation).
Because of Descartes confusion, naturalists feel that if they show the mind depends on the brain, they have somehow reduced the mental order to the physical order. But, as I have just pointed out, the notion that human thought depends on depends on physical instrumentality goes back at least to Aristotle.
So, we must not think of "mind" as belonging to some separate, dynamically isolated order of reality. Clearly, normal thought depends on the brain, and the brain is a data processing organ and control system. On, the other hand, because of the Fundamental Abstraction prescinds from data on being a subject, the natural sciences lack the data and concepts to form judgements involving the concept
This problem, this irreducibly, is not a problem with reality, but with the conceptual space we have chosen to employ and with naturalist's hopes and expectations for it. Clearly, our minds are integrated wholes. The brain processes data by firing neurons, emitting neurotransmitters, etc, and we are subjectively aware of some of the contents so processed. Thus, knowing involves both physical and intentional operations. In the same way, we choose (will) to attend more to one aspect of experience than another, and the corresponding physical representations are activated. So, again, in willing, our minds seamlessly combine physical and intentional operations.
May we not wonder, then, if our conceptual space is failing us? We have
This is why I've reflected on the concept of logical propagators, pointing our the generic similarity between the evolution of physical states according to the laws of nature, and the implementation of a willed goal. I think this is the key to understanding the link between willing and willed movement. Although, i have mentioned it above, we need not leave the mind to see instances of this. If our willing to attend more closely to some contents were not supported by an appropriate neural response, the relevant contents would not be activated. Thus, intentional commitments must have physical effects even to think.
How are we to understand this? If the laws of nature and committed intentions are two species of the same genus, there is no reason why our intentions cannot perturb the laws of nature. The brain has evolved as a control system, and it is the nature of control systems to use small inputs to effect large outputs. Thus, a small perturbation to the laws of nature is all that its required to effect our willed commitments.
This possibility (that human intentionality can perturb natural intentionality) is one that can be and has been investigated experimentally, with results that rise to the level of statistical certitude (z= 4.1, 18.2, 16.1, and 7+ depending on study) -- as I discuss in my book, and in my video "#22 The Mind Body Problem" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJwNSzzxhLM).
This leaves unresolved how neurally encoded contents inform our concepts.
Do you have an actual argument? Can you point to an error of fact or reason here? Or does your entire critique rest on the claim that my position is "so funny," You are entitled to your sense of humor, I to my facts and analysis.
Not unless I also denied that the universals we think have a foundation in reality. I do not. I have said that universals result from the actualization of notes of intelligibility in objects of experience. So, I am a moderate realist.
Quoting Andrew M
Intelligibility is the immanence of universals in the object. This immanence is potential, not actual. It is the objective power of the object to properly evoke specific universal concepts.
Quoting Andrew M
1020a "'Quantity' means that which is divisible into constituent parts, each or every one of which is by nature some one individual thing. Thus plurality, if it is numerically calculable, is a kind of quantity; and so is magnitude, if it is measurable."
If you are describing "what is," your description is based on reality. I am calling that reality, the one being described, a "law of nature."
If I am misunderstanding you, I am truly sorry. Perhaps you could correct my misunderstanding.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So, your position is that this expectation is entirely irrational -- ungrounded in reality?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is not an argument about reality, but about what to call the aspect of reality effecting the continuing order. I am quire flexible on naming conventions. What name do you suggest/like?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is a reason why we might expect them to continue, viz. intellectual laziness (the unwillingness to consider the possibility of change). It is not a reason why they actually continue to behave as they have.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, we recognize that nature changes. These changes have nothing whatsoever to do with us "allowing them." Since we do recognize that nature is continually changing, the constancy of the order ("laws") of nature is all the more surprising and indicative of a reality effecting that constant order.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It would be best to research your sources before making claims. Let's read a bit of Newton's Principia. In the preface, he tells us "I had begun to consider the inequalities of the lunar motions, and had entered upon some other things relating to the laws and measures of gravity, ... and the figures that would be described by bodies attracted according to given laws..." [italics mine].
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That is for you to explain -- you are the one denying that they have a natural cause.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Only if the same logical propagators are operative in both places -- in other words only if the laws of nature are universal.
In physics initial conditions ("the conditions of existence") alone do not determine final states. To arrive at the same final states we need to apply the same dynamics (aka "laws") to both sets of initial conditions.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Please! Where have I said any such thing? To say that there is a law of gravity is not to say gravity is unreal, but that gravity acts in a consistent way over space and time -- something essential to the practice of astrophysics.
Nothing you say later in your post requires additional comment.
If you are describing "what is," your description is based on reality. I am calling that reality, the one being described, a "law of nature."
If I am misunderstanding you, I am truly sorry. Perhaps you could correct my misunderstanding.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So, your position is that this expectation is entirely irrational -- ungrounded in reality?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is not an argument about reality, but about what to call the aspect of reality effecting the continuing order. I am quire flexible on naming conventions. What name do you suggest/like?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is a reason why we might expect them to continue, viz. intellectual laziness (the unwillingness to consider the possibility of change). It is not a reason why they actually continue to behave as they have.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, we recognize that nature changes. These changes have nothing whatsoever to do with us "allowing them." Since we do recognize that nature is continually changing, the constancy of the order ("laws") of nature is all the more surprising and indicative of a reality effecting that constant order.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It would be best to research your sources before making claims. Let's read a bit of Newton's Principia. In the preface, he tells us "I had begun to consider the inequalities of the lunar motions, and had entered upon some other things relating to the laws and measures of gravity, ... and the figures that would be described by bodies attracted according to given laws..." [italics mine]. in presenting his famous three laws, he labels them collectively "Leges Motus," and each individually a "Lex."
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That is for you to explain -- you are the one denying that they have a natural cause.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Only if the same logical propagators are operative in both places -- in other words only if the laws of nature are universal.
In physics initial conditions ("the conditions of existence") alone do not determine final states. To arrive at the same final states we need to apply the same dynamics (aka "laws") to both sets of initial conditions.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Please! Where have I said any such thing? To say that there is a law of gravity is not to say gravity is unreal, but that gravity acts in a consistent way over space and time -- something essential to the practice of astrophysics.
Nothing you say later in your post requires additional comment.
You misunderstand me: I am saying that according to ordinary usage "the law of gravity" applies to both the human formulation, and to the natural force. In the latter one of its senses, 'the law of gravity' is synonymoous with simply 'gravity', in other words; but the addition of "the law of" signifies that gravity is a universally acting force; in other words it is understood to be "law-like" or "lawful".
Well, it doesn't make for good debate, is all. I was joking really, though, since agreement doesn't foreclose on the possibility of further fruitful discussion, obviously.
Quoting Dfpolis
I agree that Spinoza's conception of mind and matter as attributes of substance is inadequate, but it does serve as a starting delineation, that avoids Cartesian dualism .
So, here I would respond to your first sentence by saying that the most basic quality of subjective experience is that it is, to some degree, mental; and likewise that the most basic quality of physicality, phenomenologically speaking, is extension.
And as to your point about the experience of being a subject being an experience of having a mind; I would say that it is that but also much more than that, just as having a mind is much more than just being a subject. Each is more, from different perspectives, than the other, in other words. As to "being objectively physical" being more than being merely extended or a 'physical state'; I agree, without caveat.
I also agree with what you say about Descartes' error being the beginning of the rejection, based on misunderstanding, of Scholastic thought, that subsequently led to all the fantastically fecund nominalistic errors of German Idealism, and its postmodern outgrowths. At least, that is the way I am beginning to see it based on my reasonably fair familiarity with German Idealism and my admittedly scanty acquaintance with Scholastic thought. You seem to be making a similar point.
Quoting Dfpolis
I find this passage intriguing, but I fear I am not familiar enough with the background against which you are making your suggestions to make any intelligent comment.
The same goes for your further comments about 'logical propagators'; I am intrigued, but I think I would need to know much more in order to enter into any discussion about that.
The point is that the very idea of there being operations of symbolic signs, which rely entirely upon convention, entails that there is a shared world of experience; "our world", in other words. Without that the advent of symbolic signs would be impossible.
OK, so my point is, that if the thing being described is reality, then why not call that thing being described "reality" rather than "laws of reality"? And if the thing being described is nature, then why not call that thing "nature", rather than "laws of nature". To say that the thing being described is "laws of nature", rather than "nature", just because the descriptions are formulated as "laws", makes no sense.
Quoting Dfpolis
Since you seem to have lost track of my objection, replying to so many different people, allow me to refresh your memory.
Matter behaves in particular ways which are regular, orderly, and which we describe with laws, the laws of physics. I think we both agree on this. Where I disagree is when you jump to the conclusion that there are another type of "laws", "laws of nature", which are inherent within matter acting within matter, causing it to act in these regular, and orderly ways. I've been asking you to support this conclusion, or assumption, whatever you want to call it, but you've been beating around the bush.
Here's the reason why I do not agree with you. If there are such laws inherent within, and acting within, matter, then free will is impossible. Matter cannot act in any way other than the way determined by the laws of nature. Someone who adopts your position might appeal to some sort of compatibilism, but it is quite clear that there is no room for free will here, because matter cannot behave in any way other than what is determined and dictated by the laws of nature. This is contrary to the concept of free will, which allows that the human soul, and mind, has the power to move matter in the way that it wills. The will's capacity to move matter cannot be forcibly restricted by the matter itself (having laws inherent within), or else it would not be free. However, experience demonstrates to us that the will is in fact free from any confines of matter, as the constraints on the will are completely formal. So your position of laws acting from within matter must be rejected.
If instead, you want to continue with your position that there are real "laws of nature" acting in the universe, then you ought to place them outside of matter. These "laws of nature" would be not much different from Neo-Platonic Forms. They must be independent from matter though, because they are responsible for the very existence of matter. Have you ever considered that matter itself must have come into existence, and so there must be a cause of it? This would be the "Forms", or "laws of nature". They cannot be inherent within matter though, because the thing which inheres within is dependent on that thing within which it inheres for its existence. In the case of the relationship between the laws of nature, and matter, it seem quite likely that the existence of matter itself is dependent on the laws of nature, therefore the laws of nature are most likely independent of matter.
Quoting Dfpolis
See, Newton is referring to "laws" as human constructs, like "measures".
Quoting Dfpolis
Now you are conflating descriptions with causes of action. Look what you wrote. "To say that there is a law of gravity is not to say gravity is unreal, but that gravity acts in a consistent way over space and time -- something essential to the practice of astrophysics." So, you say "gravity acts in a consistent way". Gravity is the thing which is acting. How can you replace "gravity" with "the law of gravity", or any "law", to say that it is the law which is acting rather than gravity which is acting? Either it is gravity which is acting, which is understood as a property of mass and energy, or it is a law which is acting. But the "law" here is only understood as a description of how gravity is acting, so it is impossible that the law, rather than gravity, is acting. The two are clearly quite different
Do you recognize the difference between descriptive laws and prescriptive laws? Descriptive laws, like the laws of physics, are just that, descriptions which are formulated as "laws". Prescriptive laws tell us, human beings, what we ought, and ought not do. Descriptive laws are not causative in the actions of matter. Prescriptive laws my influence the activities of the matter of the human body, through the means of the human mind, intention, and free choice. These laws are causative in the sense that they influence the way that we act with our bodies. However, there is a medium of free choice, free will, which exists between these prescriptive laws and the activities of the matter of the human body, caused by them.
You are proposing another type of causative laws, laws of nature. But the only model we have, of laws acting in a causative way on matter, is the one which has the medium of free choice between the acting law, and the actions caused by the law. Are you prepared to allow for a medium of free choice between your proposed acting "laws of nature", and the actions of matter which are caused by these laws?
That is arguable. What impressed the Greeks the most about nature (physis) is that it changes. Still, Aristotle might argue that change is only possible because natural bodies have parts outside of parts (are extended).
Quoting Janus
Agreed.
Quoting Janus
Yes, but my background is the reverse of yours -- I'm fairly well-versed in Platonic, Aristotelian and Augustinian and Scholastic thought, but have a sketchy knowledge of Kantian and post-Kantian European thought.
Quoting Janus
We're sailing in largely uncharted waters. So, I'd rely more on look-outs than charts.
I've mentioned a couple of problems. (1) In becoming aware of neurally encoded intelligibility, we have no idea at all of the neural matrix which encodes it. (2) Somehow we distinguish the object modifying our senses from the modification of our senses by the object -- even though both are encoded in a single neural representation.
Exactly right. But that is the analytic view of how to understand experience.
You were talking about where epistemology has to start. And I would agree that it is with "brute unanalysed experience" experience ... whatever that then means from some subsequent properly derived, fully analysed, internalist understanding.
So the fact of semiosis would be what ensures a commonality of umwelts. To the extent we seem to understand each other via a common system of sign, we will be of the same mind, share the same experiential being. We can safely impute that of other beings.
And thus I know my cat has a mind to the extent that we can communicate. Likewise other humans. And conversely, not trees or rocks so much.
But what do we then say about "experience" itself, now looking back from a more informed semiotic viewpoint.
Well Peirce for one did try to say something, and even develop that explicitly as a triadic logic.
You don't have to try to answer the challenge I've set for your position. If you can't see the incoherence of talking about the data of self-awareness when claiming to have got beyond dualism, it's not my problem.
So, I'm saying that the shared experience of a common world is fundamental, which entails that there being others who experience as I do is not merely an inference from the subjectively experienced fact of my own experience, but the very condition of there being my own experience or a triadic sign relation.
On the basis of this I reject the idea that the self and the world are socially constructed fictions, although I do acknowledge that our ideas associated with self and world are evolutionary insofar as they are mediated by social contexts and interactions, as well as all the domains of human inquiry and artifice. There must also be something fundamental to human experience which is wordless and cannot be captured in terms of signs at all. I think this, among other things, of course, is what Peirce means by 'firstness'.
That is why I said earlier that "we the people" is as fundamental to, and implicit in all, human life as "we the baboons" is fundamental to, and implicit in all, baboon life (although in the latter case the idea obviously never becomes self-reflectively explicit, due to the baboons' lack of symbolic language).
So, as you ask, "what do we then say about "experience" itself, now looking back from a more informed semiotic viewpoint?".
Are you wanting to ask a kind of "chicken and egg" question? Do signs constitute experience in a kind of 'atomic' sense? Or does the holistic sign relation constitute experience? If anything I would have to say the latter, and that the evolution of the sign relation just is the evolution of experience. neither is prior to the other, in fact they are coterminous; the sign relation just is experience; although looked in the abstract as distinctly different things, they are each impossible without the other.
Although as said above I don't think this entails that everything about our experience can be adequately captured by any form of language, the closest would be its evocation by the arts. This leaves room for the mystical; although as I said to @Dfpolis in another thread, I don't think the mystical, or the apprehension (or prehension :wink: ) of pure being, can ever become a science, due to its inadequate potential for inter-subjective corroboration.
You mean "world", or unwelt? And so the noumenal - analytically - falls outside that phenomenology? It is the division that is fundamental, even if the division ain't usually experienced?
And also, it can only be fundamental in the sense of being fundamental to a particular level of semiosis, a particular community united by a common system of sign?
Quoting Janus
Well, the self certainly is. A linguistic community is fundamental to the production of a linguistic self. And some kind of semiotic community is the shaper of any kind of selfhood.
These are in fact the consequences of your own first move - the one where you say the shared is what is fundamental. The self must emerge from that, if you are correct.
I of course make it easier by saying that co-emergent is in fact what is fundamental. It all begins with a symmetry-breaking or division. However you are taking the substantialist view that existence begins with something being already definite. You are calling that "experience" at the moment.
Quoting Janus
Sure. But your problem is that we become human through language and its narrative framing. That is how we can even get to a position to wonder what "wordless experience" would be like. By which time it is too late. And it is only going to be make worse once you start using poetical social constructs about oceanic feelings, or whatever else you have picked up in your cultural wanderings and drugged states.
Quoting Janus
Now you are talking of co-arising like me. There are atomistic and holistic aspects to it. And they complement each other because one constructs and the other constrains.
But you are still trying to ontologise experience as a substance of some kind. It is the thing that evolves.
My position is semiotic. Experience is what it is like to be modelling the world in the fashion a brain does. It doesn't need further explanation. We can just ask how could it not feel like something to be in that kind of modelling relation?
So the focus of the explanation is the "how" of the modelling relation itself. And this is analysed as the development of systematic and purposeful habits of interpretance based on the construction of "worlds of sign", or lived umwelts. The habits and the signs co-arise as two parts of the model - exactly in the way that theory and measurement have become the epistemically formalised basis of scientific semiotic models of the world.
Brains are already developing theories and taking measurements to generate your "brute experience". It is the same semiotic process. Just coded in genes and neurons, rather than words and numbers.
Quoting Janus
Of course. Your argument has to reach your favoured conclusion. There is little point me commenting on that. Art is just straightforwardly the social construction of selfhood. That is not even disguised.
In so far as there are some quibbling and nitpicking going on in this thread, allow me to quibble in some napoleonic way. I would avoid using the word "orderly". Organized? Yes, as in quantized outcome. Yes, as in organized chaos. Nature could change, even abruptly -- so out goes your order. But we don't suppose nature could change without organization. Dynamics is organized activity, but not necessarily orderly.
I define awareness as a perceptive and cognisant condition.
So, rather than "becoming aware of neurally encoded intelligibility", I think it is more accurate to say that we:
1) Become aware of (perceive and know) sensations (physical data).
2) Form an idea (mental data) based on awareness, and
3) Categorise the idea (more mental data) through the faculty of understanding (a mental function).
Moreover, we are unaware of (don't perceive or know) "the neural matrix which encodes" physical and mental data.
I think I understand you quite well. You seek to confuse a human invention - the 'law' of gravity - with an attribute of the universe - gravity. You also seek to understand the 'law' as the master or reference, and the universe as being governed by that law. You are wrong in every respect. Gravity is only "understood to be "law-like"" by those who fail to understand the difference between the two. Gravity is not law-like. Your law is gravity-like. It is a model or description of gravity. Gravity is. It doesn't do anything; it just is what it is, and cannot be anything other than what it is. Gravity is not conscious or intentional. It's gravity. And it is not governed by any law.
Gravity and the law of gravity are similar only in the sense that one is a model, a copy, of the other. There is no question as to which is the reference, despite your struggle to muddy the waters. Sorry.
You obviously do misunderstand since I haven't stated or even suggested that gravity is "governed by any law". If gravity is indeed omnipresent, then it simply is a law. If nature must always behave in a certain way, what do you think it is that determines that invariance? Is it forces?
If the forces always must behave the same way, then we can say the behaviour of the forces cannot be contravened, and this is what is meant by 'lawlike' or 'lawful'; and this is not necessarily to posit some other transcendental Principle that governs the forces. It is simply to say that force always acts according to a law.
There is a difference between acting according to a law, and being governed by a law in the sense of some extra governing principle. That's why I say gravity itself is the law. I hope I have dispelled your confusion.
Omnipresent? Present everywhere? Who mentioned location? :chin:
A law is created by humans.
Gravity is a feature of the universe, and was not created by humans, it was discovered by them.
Gravity is not a law any more than a pulsar or a mushroom is a law.
You are trying to impose your beliefs upon reality. Good luck with that.
We're done for now. Happy trails!
Because "reality" and "nature" are so general no one would know which aspects we are referring to.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Actually, the primary use of "law" in this context, (going back to Jeremiah) is to name the regularity of nature. It's derivative application (by an analogy of attribution) is to human approximate descriptions of the laws of nature. The underlying analogy is that as civil laws order social behavior, so laws of nature order natural behavior (an analogy of proportionality).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
When you say that "Matter behaves in particular ways which are regular," you are admitting the existence of laws of nature -- unless you go on to say that the observed regularity is purely fortuitous. So, are you saying that the regularity is purely fortuitous, occurring for no reason, or are you saying that there is some aspect of nature that makes it so? I am saying the latter.
"Laws of nature" does not name substantial things. It names the aspects of reality you are describing as regularity in behavior. So, there is no need for me to justify more than you have admitted in your first sentence above. Let me state it in the form of an identity: Laws causing the regularity of nature is identical with the regularity of nature being caused by laws. In other words, if nature is reliably orderly, whatever the explanation of that reliable order is, I am calling it "the laws of nature."
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I wish you'd said this earlier. When I started this discussion, I pointed out that the Fundamental Abstraction of natural science prescinds from the consideration of the knowing subject. The knowing subject is also the willing subject. So, when I am discussing the laws of physics and the laws of nature they describe, I'm not discussing reality in all of its complexity, but only the aspects of reality delimited by the Fundamental Abstraction -- which does not have the data to justify conclusions on knowing and willing -- on subjective awareness and freedom.
To forget the self-imposed limitations of natural science is to commit Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness. We cannot assume that a science adequate to the physical world in abstraction from the knowing and willing subject is adequate to dealing with subjects knowing and willing. I began turning my attention to this yesterday in an exchange with Janus beginning with:
Quoting Janus
So, to respond to your objection, if the universal laws of nature, as described by physics, fully determined the actions of knowing subjects, then yes, free will would be of no avail. But, we have no reason to think that the laws, as described by physics, apply to more than the abstract world physicists have chosen to study. Specifically, we have no reason to think that these laws fully determine the actions of subjects, given that natural science has chosen, ab initio, to exclude subjects as such from its consideration.
As I discussed in more detail with Janus (and in even greater detail in my book), since both the laws of nature and human commitments are intentional (species of logical propagator), it is reasonable to ask whether human intentions might not perturb (modify) the "universal" laws of nature. Experiments provide us with statistical certitude that human intentions do perturb the so-called universal laws. So, we have every reason to believe that human actions are not fully determined by the "universal" laws of nature.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Clearly, the laws of mature must act immanently to order natural processes.
I have not suggested here that the intentional nature of the laws points to an ordering Mind (as Aquinas does in his fifth way, and I do in my book). As I have said before, I do not want to side-track the conversation by bringing up the contentious issue of the existence of God. Still, to make my position clear to you, I agree with Jeremiah in seeing the laws of nature as divine ordinances. So, theologically, we can say, with Aquinas, that "man, by reason, participates in Divine Providence." In other words, that we are granted the power to be co-creators so that our will, combined with the Divine Will, controls the course of nature. In this projection, the "universal" laws of nature are God's general will for matter and we are granted the limited power to add further specificity by making willed commitments.
I hope that this clarifies my position for you.
i have no problem with your formulation. Mine attempts to accommodate a neuroscientific approach to mind as much as possible.
Quoting Dfpolis
I would say that phenomena (physical actualities) are perceived, not encoded in neural representations.
Perception being the experience caused by sensation (sense function).
Sense being the reception and transduction of exogenous and/or endogenous stimuli, resulting in environmental perception (exteroception) or corporeal perception (interoception).
Therefore, what "modifies" our senses are physical stimuli originating from the environment, or from our own body.
I think communication is a good analogy for the process which connects phenomena to awareness.
In Shannon's Mathematical (Quantitative) Theory of (Data) Communication, it is data which is encoded, transmitted, conveyed, received, and decoded. Information (defined as a measure of improbability) is the result.
This clearly provides an incomplete definition of information (for example, not addressing the semantics inherent in human communication), but I find the framework of communication it presents to be useful.
Following Floridi, I prefer to define information in more general terms of data, which, in addition to mathematical information, applies to semantic, physical, and biological information (among other types).
Noting that Floridi's description of data bears similarities to Merleau-Ponty's concept of form, I consider the two terms to be synonymous, referring to asymmetries.
So,
1) Information becomes: communicated data (form), and
2) A process of physical communication provides a connection between phenomena and awareness.
For example, in seeing an apple:
1) Apple colour and shape are encoded into reflected light.
2) Reflected light is transmitted from the apple surface,
3) Conveyed through a transmission medium (e.g., air) capable of propagating energy waves,
4) Received by an eye (Sensory Stimulation),
5) Encoded into a neural signal (Sensory Transduction),
6) Transmitted to the brain (Neurotransmission),
7) Received and decoded by the brain (Sensory Processing),
8) Received and decoded by the mind (Perception & Cognition).
Mental representation happens at step 8. I have no idea what a neural representation is.
Quoting Dfpolis
Quoting Dfpolis
Quoting Dfpolis
For my cognitive psychology project, I have found it very useful to maintain a physical/mental distinction in conceptual analysis (as the above example demonstrates).
That is why I would prefer to describe intentionality/logical propagation in general terms which can apply to both physical and semantic information, not exclusively in terms of the latter.
No, the analogy is that, as civil laws order behaviour, natural behaviour orders human laws. :up:
Quoting Dfpolis
No, there is no admission of laws, and no fortuity either. Nature doesn't need either. It just is, and it does what it does without the need for any sort of support or guidance. No laws. No luck. Just reality, being real.
Quoting Dfpolis
No it isn't. In one case, the laws are the master and nature follows them; in the other, nature is the master, and the laws follow it. The latter is the truth. The former is sciencist dogma, and wrong. As you have phrased it, it's the difference between cause and effect; they aren't interchangeable, as you seem to think they are.
I like to project reality into different conceptual spaces -- to think about the same thing from different perspectives. I think doing so, and comparing the resulting "pictures," helps me understand an issue more fully. Often features that are prominent in one projection are missing in another. Trying to understand why this is so allows us to critique the alternate approaches. On the other hand, features common to different conceptual schemes are understood with greater depth.
Thus, I have no problem saying that we perceive physical reality (actualities), but I find it helpful to look at perception from from a neurophysical perspective as well. I third useful projection is semiotic, recognizing that neural states considered as instrumental signs are very different from concepts, which are formal signs. (A perspective gleaned from Henry Veatch's Intentional Logic: A logic based on philosophical realism.)
The problem I am discussing in (2) comes from reflecting on an observation of neurophysiologist Anthony Damasio that our knowledge of the external world started as neural representations of body state and evolved into representations of the external world as the source of changes in our body state:
Now, for an animal merely processing data to generate adaptive responses, it makes no difference whether a neural state is conceived (by us) as representing a body state or a world state -- as an exteroception or interoception in your terminology. All that is required is that certain types of neural inputs generate corresponding adaptive outputs.
But for humans, with our powers of abstraction and conceptual representation, there is a world of difference between exteroception and interoception. Think of seeing an apple. The image projected on our retina results in a pattern of rod and cone activation that modifies our neural state. There is no difference between the neural state that would inform us of this pattern of rod and cone activation (and so be an interoception) and the neural state that would inform us of an apple being seen (and so an exteroception). Yet, when we see an apple, we become aware of the apple and not of our retinal state. How is this possible?
As I pointed out this distinction has no survival value, and so it is how to see how it could be selected by evolution. Further, there is no difference in the brain state encoding the exteroception and the interoception, so there can be no physical basis for the distinction. It is as if our intentionality, our interest in the apple rather than in our retina, is determinative of what we become aware of.
Of course, there is nothing mysterious about this when we think about seeing apples in the conceptual space of traditional epistemology or psychology. There, we have sensations and, in some cases, become aware of them -- perhaps abstracting concepts. What is problematic is how to integrate this projection of perception and ideogenesis with our neurophysical understanding of sensation.
Quoting Galuchat
I agree both with the usefulness of the information theoretic framework and with the need to supplement it with semiotic considerations.
Thank you for the reference to Floridi's article. I confess complete ignorance of Merleau-Ponty.
Quoting Galuchat
I have no problem with this schema and only one problem with the example:
Quoting Galuchat
I have no idea what it means for the brain to "decode" the neural signal. It surely processes neural signals, but what difference can there be processing in which one form of neural signal is input and another form output, and "decoding" when the output is simple a neural signal?
A nitpicking objection is that I see the brain, with its data processing capabilities, as the information processing subsystem of the mind with awareness (the agent intellect) as part of another, intentional subsystem. So I would state (8) in a slightly different way, saying that the intelligible information carried by the neural signal is actualized by our awareness (aka the agent intellect).
Quoting Galuchat
A neural representation is a modification to our neural state that encodes information in the same way that an E-M signal carries a representation of transmitted information.
Quoting Galuchat
I agree. I suggest you look at John of St. Thomas' distinction between Instrumental and formal signs, which is quite useful in articulating this. I got it from Veatch and discuss it in my book. The most convenient place to see it is in my video "#25 Mind: Ideas vs. Brain States" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMiQKYCEj14). Failing to make this distinction can lead to considerable confusion.
Of course, it is metaphysically impossible for nature to "just be" without a concomitant cause..
Why? Because an infallible sign of existence is the ability to act. If there is an action, then, necessarily, there is something acting. Nature changes, and its future states of nature are not actual in its present state. They are merely potential. As future states are not actual or operational, they cannot operate to make themselves actual; nonetheless, they are actualized, which is an action. So they need something else, something actual or operational to make them actual -- namely an operational cause.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
Of course it is. If A is doing B, necessarily, B is being done by A. There is no question here of master and disciple, only of different ways of stating the same reality.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
I do not think cause and effect are the same. Causes operate to actualize. Effects are operated upon to be actualized.
There is survival value to perceiving the world as it actually is (or at least a functionally accurate representation of it), since we have to interact with it to survive. What am I missing?
There is survival value in generating an "appropriate response." Whether you're moving in the right way in response to data on your internal state or on the state of the world makes no difference to survival.
Some forms of life went down that path (e.g. cockroaches), but that does't seem nearly as flexible as the sort of perception primates, and especially humans, have. It enables us to adapt to changing conditions.
OK, so the question is, will you adhere to the analogy? As civil laws order social behaviour through the means of the free will choices of human beings, do you assume that the laws of nature order natural behaviour through the free will choices of matter? If not, then you have no analogy. If so, I would object on the basis that matter has no soul and no free will to make such choices.
Quoting Dfpolis
What physicists choose to study is irrelevant, because the laws of nature, as you have described them are independent of what physicists study. The point is, that either matter is bound and determined to follow the laws of nature, as you claim, in which case there can be no free will, or matter is not determined by the laws of nature, in which case free will is possible. If the laws of nature inhere within matter as you have stated, acting to cause the activities of matter in this way, then it's irrelevant whether these laws are known to scientists or not, matter is still determined by them, and the human body being composed of matter is thus determined by the laws of nature. it is impossible that matter could behave in a way other than what is determined by these laws, and free will is impossible.
Quoting Dfpolis
Again, this is irrelevant, and you are only trying to create the illusion of free will. Either the activities of matter are determined by the laws of nature, or they are not, regardless of what the laws of physics say. To imply that there could be an undiscovered law of nature which allows for free will is to state a deception intended to give an illusion that free will is possible under your assumptions. However, this undiscovered law of nature would have to allow that the activity of matter is not determined by the laws of nature. And this is contradictory to your fundamental principle which holds that the laws of nature inhere within matter and therefore the activities of matter is determined by the laws of nature. The "undiscovered law" would have to be exactly contrary to your stated first principle. So it is deception, because you imply that your fundamental principle could actually allow for free will, but it would only allow for free will if there is an undiscovered natural law which contradicts your fundamental principle.
Quoting Dfpolis
No, I think it's impossible that human actions are not fully determined by the laws of nature, or that human actions could modify the laws of nature, if the laws of nature inhere within matter. A human action is an action of a material body. If a human being could act in a way which is inconsistent with the laws of nature, this would indicate that the laws of nature are not inherent within the matter of the human body, causing the activities of that matter. So it must be one or the other. What you propose would be contradictory.
Quoting Dfpolis
I would like to know how you base this assumption that the laws of nature must act immanently. Traditionally, there is a duality between what you call "the laws of nature" (immaterial Forms), and material forms, (physical things). The Forms act to order natural processes because they are prior in time to these material processes, as God is prior to nature, being the creator. It is only when one decides to abandon this dualism that it becomes necessary to say that the laws of nature act immanently, in order to account for the fact that matter behaves in an orderly way.
However, this move to materialism leaves intentionality unintelligible. It denies the possibility of free choice which is essential to intentionality. Without a separation between matter and that which causes matter to behave the way that it does (Forms, or laws of nature), there is no room for possibility. Matter must behave the way that it does because it has no choice as to which laws it will follow, if the laws inhere within it.
But the question is on what physical basis can we draw the distinction?
It really is nothing more than a matter of different interpretations of the ambit of a term. I really don't care if you disagree with my interpretation, and I have no investment in trying to convince you of anything; I've just been trying to explain to you how i see it. We'll have to just agree to disagree now since it seems to be bugging you.
Thanks very much for your feedback.
I will need to wait until tomorrow to consider it in detail.
I suppose I mean "umwelt" or "world" in the phenomenological sense. (The noumenal would be more properly what is real but not revealed to us, and hence kind of irrelevant to this discussion). So, in that phenomenological sense the shared world of any community is fundamental to the experience, the "innenwelt' of the individual. It would seem to be so even with the social animals.
But the point is that they are united by a common form of experience which gives rise to the possibility of a common system of signs. It is the affective aspect of experience that is really determinative; what matters to us, and this is rooted in what we are at the most fundamental level, which is ultimately inaccessible to our rational investigations because we cannot step outside of what we are to 'see it from the outside" so to speak, or escape the historicity of our perspectives in order to gain a view which is free from our own presuppositions.
What you say is true of 'a linguistic self", but there is a deeper pre-linguistic sense of self and other, upon which the linguistic self and other is parasitic, and without which it would be impossible, and that is what I am referring to.
No, I am not saying it is definite at all; nothing can be defined precisely except linguistically. primordial experience is precisely not definite, and it is you who are trying to render it definite by talking about it in terms of 'symmetry breaking', rather than accepting the natural limitation of our discursive knowledge. In that respect I see you as a kind of positivist.
I disagree; I would say that we come to define ourselves as 'human' "through language and its narrative framing", but that that is not the whole of the story. Of course the pre-discursive part of the story can only be hinted at, but why is that a problem; that is what, inter alia, the arts are for.
This is one of your typically toxic caricatures, and it seems to me that all it shows is your own prejudicial rejection of anything you haven't personally experienced and/ or cannot put into a convenient box.
It's not my favored conclusion, but my favored inclusion. You, unfortunately, have your diametrically opposed favored exclusion; which leaves the fullness of your account severely wanting. Art is (or at least can be) much more than what you say, but for you to see that you would need to experience that 'much more'. Hopefully one day you will.
I lean toward the representationalist account of phenomenal consciousness. Objects in the external world are represented in our minds, and these representations are intentional (i.e. they dispose us to behave a certain way). It is the way we remember aspects of the world so that we are better equipped to act in it.
Reperesentationalist theory of consiousness doesn't solve all problems of consciousness, but it's a step in that direction.
Huh. Internalism makes no epistemic sense without the assumption that there could be the external as its other. So given this is about the foundations of epistemology now....
Quoting Janus
I was saying it is the other way round. Otherwise this ontologises experience as substantial being.
Quoting Janus
And what is that founded on except some process of neural semiosis? We have our evolutionary biology in common. We grow up in the same physical world. So sure, it may ban aspect of neurocognition. But once we are talking about affect as a rational semiotic process, it is the mechanism of the sign relation we are making ontically basic.
You can’t have your cake and eat it. If you want to make experienced affect basic, then you are talking a very different story. The usual one of substantial being and not semiotic process. So you have to decide which horse you back.
Quoting Janus
Sure. I’ve said that a thousand times. The vertebrate brain is based on the forward modelling that makes a self-world distinction basic. We have know it is our head that turns and not the world that spins. But the animal sense of self is not an introspective one. It lacks that social structure.
Quoting Janus
If you can’t deal with reasonable arguments then best you don’t reply.
I agree with that, but we are discussing what is phenomenologically basic, and by definition the noumenal is not a concern of phenomenology.
Quoting apokrisis
I wouldn't put it that way. If experience is to be considered ontologically, rather than merely phenomenologically basic, even then it would be ontologized as process, not as substance. Again it is the "chicken and egg" problem. On a different analytic perspectives we could say that semiosis is fundamental, or we could say that semiosis and experience are co-arising, or we could say that affective experience is fundamental; the point is that there is no absolute, presuppositionless truth of the matter.
Semiosis and experience evolve together to greater complexity in an upwards spiral it would seem.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, but I am not claiming it is ontologically basic; I am merely saying that phenomenologically speaking, from the perspective of the ordinary unreflective individual who would never automatically, and without considerable education, begin to interpret experience in terms of signs, affect is basic. That is where we all start from, and I think that this is the kind of commonsense understanding that Peirce says philosophy should never discard or contradict.
Quoting apokrisis
I disagree again. The animal sense of self in social animals obviously does not lack a social structure (although it is obviously not self reflectively explicit even as it is not with many human beings) and it does not depend on introspection.
Then all you are saying is that people brought up in contemporary western culture would learn to say these kinds of things as that reflects folk epistemology. It is hardly fundamental.
Quoting Janus
Well I am arguing that ontologising experience as a semiotic process is the fundamental epistemic move. And this stands in contrast to ontologising it as a substance. So I am taking a hylomorphic and semiotic position on the question.
If you too are rejecting a substantive sum in regard to experience, you would need to communicate that in your choice of words, the direction of your arguments.
As it stands, I haven’t seen that. You still want to make experience - affective experience - basic. And then say at worst it is a chicken and egg situation.
I don't think so. It's about whether science and its laws control reality, or describe it. It's about whether reality is human-independent, which is why it's significant, and not a trivial matter of semantics.
It's about whether the law-of-gravity is:
Quoting Dfpolis
Our discussion seems unconnected with whether nature has a cause. :chin:
Quoting Dfpolis
You think that a rock, which cannot act, therefore does not exist?
Absolutely.
It is the use of the word “representation” to describe phenomena such as neural conditions and signals that I object to, because none of its contextually-relevant connotations (e.g., picture, figure, image, idea) reasonably apply. Whereas, referring to phenomena such as paintings, sculptures, dance movements, and music as representations would be an appropriate use of the word. The difference being the latter are semantic (have meaning for a mind).
It is especially inappropriate to use the word “representation” with reference to neural conditions when Antonio Damasio (as well as Sherrington, Edelman, and Crick) thinks that perception involves constructing an image in the brain:
“When you and I look at an object outside ourselves, we form comparable images in our respective brains...But that does not mean that the image we see is the copy of whatever the object outside is like. Whatever it is like, in absolute terms, we do not know. The image we see is based on changes which occurred in our organisms...when the physical structure of the object interacts with the body...The object is real, the interactions are real, and the images are as real as anything can be. And yet, the structure and properties in the image we end up seeing are brain constructions prompted by the object... There is a set of correspondences between physical characteristics of the object and modes of reaction of the organism according to which according to which an internally generated image is constructed.”
Damasio, A. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens. p.320. Heinemann, London.
“But this is confused. What one perceives by the use of one's perceptual organs is an object or array of objects, sounds, smells, and the properties and relations of items in one's environment. It is a mistake to suppose that what we perceive is always or even commonly, an image, or that to perceive an object is to have an image of the object perceived. One does not perceive images or representations of objects. To see a red apple is not to see an image of a red apple, and to hear a sonata is not to hear the image or representation of a sonata. Nor is it to have an image in one's mind, although one can conjure up images in one's mind and sometimes images cross one's mind independently of one's wish or will. But the mental images we thus conjure up are not visible, either to others or to ourselves – they are 'had', but not seen. And the tunes one rehearses in one's imagination are not heard, either by oneself or by others.”
Bennett, M.R., Hacker, P.M.S. (2003). Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. p.138. Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
What I am attempting to describe in succinct terms is the reception of neural signals from sense organs at these locations in the brain where sensory processing takes place:
1) Primary Sensory Cortex
2) Somatic Sensory Association Area
3) Visual Association Area
4) Visual Cortex
5) Primary Motor Cortex
6) Somatic Motor Association Area
7) Prefrontal Cortex
8) Broca's Area (Speech Production)
9) Auditory Association Area
10) Auditory Cortex
11) Wernicke's Area (Speech Comprehension)
This processing activates schemata, which effectively “decodes” neural signals into meaningful data for the mind to act on. However, I accept that these terms may be faulty from a neurophysiological standpoint.
Thanks for the references to John of St. Thomas, Henry Veatch, and your video on Ideas and Brain States.
First, you do realise, don't you, that "A is doing B" and "B is being done by A" are identical, and probably not what you meant to say? If you reverse the A and the B, and you reverse the sense of the verb, the net result is unchanged.
What you actually said, translated to use letters, as you seem to prefer, is: "A causing B is identical with B being caused by A", which is obviously true, and which I missed the first time I read it. Sorry. :blush: But what you said is not, I suspect, the observation you intended to make.
Your observation states that, in both cases, A is the cause, and B is what is caused. So there is no contrast, no distinction to be drawn. You miss my point entirely, it seems. :chin:
Nature behaves as it does because it cannot do otherwise. There is no volition or intention on nature's part. And there are no rules or laws that cause nature to act as it does. It does what it does because it is what it is. There is no evidence of cause or purpose*, only of behaviour.
Over the past centuries, we have observed that two separated masses attract one another. We label this phenomenon "gravity". We have tested this observation again and again, and we have always found it to be so. In time, we created a mathematical model of this behaviour, and we called it the "law of gravity". We tested this law, and found it to be a good model, a good description of how nature behaves. And we have since used this law with success.
But nowhere is there any evidence for this law governing or controlling nature. This law is not the magical spell that lies behind gravity, and causes it to act as it does. If it was, we would be able to observe the law itself, out there in nature, and we can't because it isn't there. Gravity is there.
So, to be clear, I assert that gravity is the master; the law of gravity models and describes this master. If there is any contradiction between the two, which one is wrong? The law of gravity. Gravity itself is part of reality, the ultimate reference, and cannot be wrong.
* - I'm assuming we don't wish to consider God's input into all this, in this particular discussion? :wink: :smile:
There is noting to "adhere" to. The analogy only explains the naming convention, not a prescriptive rule.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Of course not. Analogical predication is partly the same and partly different. I said what was the same. An important difference is that humans are free, rational agents and insensate matter is not.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is a little too facile. While the laws of nature exist independently of our knowing them, our knowledge of them depends on actual study. If physicists have not studied a dynamical regime, that regime will not be in physics' verified range of application. We saw this in the early 20th century when the descriptions of Newtonian physics broke down for relativistic and quantum regimes. So, until we studied the effects of human intentions on the laws, we could not say what those effects were. Now that we have some data, we can be assured that our intentions do perturb the laws.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You have not exhausted the possibilities here. The third option, which now appears to be the case, is that we do follow the laws of nature, but they vary in response to human intentions. So, physical change does follow the laws of nature, but our will is a factor in determining those laws.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Really? How does my saying that our will contributes to the determination of motion "create the illusion of free will"?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Indeed! But, if the laws of nature depend in part on our intentions, how does this undermine free will?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I am saying no such thing.
I am saying, first, that we have known for millennia, that our willed intentions cause observable motions. We have simply not put 2 and 2 together to conclude that to do so, they need to perturb the laws of nature. (Although the Scholastics came close by saying that "man by reason participates in divine providence" and that we are "co-creators" of the natural order.) And, second, that scientists who have chosen not to restrict their studies by the Fundamental Abstraction have now established, to a statistical certainty, that our intentions do modify the laws of nature.
Thus, I'm positing no "undiscovered law," but pointing out the nomological implications of discoveries already made.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Since human beings are physical and intentional unities, our will, as part of that unity can be said to "inhere" in us. So, there is no intrinsic conflict a principle of action inhering in a physical being and exercising freedom.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I am not sure what your objection to immanence is. Surely you reject the notion that there are substantial laws, extrinsic to the matter whose actions they order.
All forms are "immaterial" (not made of matter), even those that cannot exist without material support. I have never said that the laws of nature can be actual without material fields to order. Physical things are not forms, they are informed matter.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The laws of nature have an ontological rather than an temporal priority (as does God). To have ontological priority is to be an actualizing or an informing principle. But such principles must be concurrent with the processes they actualize and inform, or they could not fulfill their dynamic roles.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What "move to materialism"? Have I not been discussing the essential role of intentionality as an immaterial aspect of reality?Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You are confusing "separation" which is a physical concept with "distinction" which is a well-grounded conceptual difference.
No, rocks scatter light, gravitate, resist imposed forces, etc., so thy exist.
Well, as far as I am concerned it is uncontroversial; science and its formulations of laws certainly do not "control reality"; so if you think we have been arguing about that you're wrong, plain and simple.
No, I'm not saying that at all. It's not about what people say, but about what fundamentally seems to be to any percipient; a world of affordances (to use the language of Gilbert and Heidegger) and of others (even for the solitary predator).
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, but only phenomenologically basic; I am not making any claim about its being ontologically basic. I've pointed this out many times before, and you keep falling back into imputing such an ontological claim to me.
OK, but the usage in the analogy is other than your usage, so it doesn't actually explain your claimed convention. In the analogy there is a God who imposes law and order on nature, through His free will choices, but in your usage there are laws inherent in matter, with no free will act involved.
Quoting Dfpolis
This doesn't make any sense. You are saying that Newtonian laws of physics were broken down by human intentions, therefore human intentions perturbed the laws of nature. Do you not maintain the distinction between laws of physics and laws of nature?
Quoting Dfpolis
This third option only results from you nonsensical equivocation between "laws" of physics and "laws" of nature. That's why I insist that "laws of nature" ought not be used. It fosters deception through equivocation.
Quoting Dfpolis
But we do not need to perturb the "laws of nature" to have free will, if we properly expose, and represent "laws of nature". So there is no issue of putting 2 and 2 together. This assumption of the need to perturb the laws of nature only arises if you assume that the laws of nature inhere within matter, which is a false representation. Then, to have free will we need to override these laws. But if there are no such laws inherent in matter, as the concept of "matter" is normally understood, then matter is free to be moved according to infinite possibilities. This allows for the possibility that free will acts "participate in divine providence", as you suggest, by participating in the laws which move matter, rather than by overruling, or perturbing the laws.
Quoting Dfpolis
If you describe a human being as a unity of "physical" and "intentional" aspects, then you have distinguished these two parts as distinct. If the "principle of action" inheres within, then we must identify which distinct part it inheres within, the physical or the intentional. If it inheres within the physical part, as you claim, then it is impossible that the intentional part could exercise freedom of the will, because it is already bound and determined by the activity of the physical part. The intentional part would need a further principle of action which is more powerful and active than the principle of action of the physical part in order to exercise freedom. But why complicate things in this way? Why not just place the principle of action in the intentional part, such that it can exercise freedom over the indeterminate physical part, thus allowing for freedom of will?
Quoting Dfpolis
Do you recognize that a law is a form? If so, how can you say that all forms are immaterial, yet also reject the notion that there are laws extrinsic to matter. It appears like you do not recognize that a law is a form, and that is why I must keep harping on your use of "law". In all cases where the word "law" is used, descriptive and prescriptive laws, the law describes either what is or what ought to be, and a description is a form. In no way is "law" ever used in any way other than as a formula, so your usage is completely nonsensical.
Quoting Dfpolis
To say that God, as the creator of physical existence is not temporally prior to physical existence, is simply false.
Quoting Dfpolis
Placing laws (Forms) as inherent within matter is clearly materialist. How do you support an immaterial aspect of reality when you have already stipulated that the part of reality which some assert to be immaterial, i.e. laws and Forms, inhere within matter?
This is why apokrisis' semiotic approach to the act of perception is much more realistic. What the mind constructs, the so-called "image", is only a representation in the sense that a symbol is a representation. The "image" is more like a symbol, which has a specific meaning to the mind. So there need not be any sort of resemblance, likeness, or representation in that sense of the word, if the image is just a symbol constructed by the mind, having meaning to that mind.
First, I think that we can agree that "representation" has many analogous meanings, and while there are good reasons to prefer your usage, if we are careful not to equivocate, we can use other meanings.
Second, I agree that thinking in terms of "neural representations" is projecting the reality of perceptions into a very incomplete conceptual space. The concepts of picture, figure, image, idea, etc. are left out of the neural projection, and so anyone who thinks solely in terms of neural representations is committing the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. That said, the firing of retinal rods and cones, for example, does create a neural representation that is processed by the brain -- and interfering with that processing degrades our perceptions. So, refusing to consider the role and reality of neural representation leaves our analysis critically incomplete.
Third, our neural representations are neither instrumental nor formal "signs." Instrumental signs are things that must first be understood in themselves before they can signify. For example, we must first grasp that the smudge on the horizon is smoke, and not dust, before it can signify fire. We must make out the lettering on a sign before it can tell us a business's hours. Formal signs, (ideas, judgements, etc.) Work in a different way. We do not first have to realize that
As I said, neural representations normally are not signs in either of these ways. (One can imagine that some neuroscientist could examine our brain state and determine that the signs she is observing encode the image of the apple we're seeing, which would make it an instrumental sign, but that is not the normal case.) Normally, we do not know what our neural state is, and so the neural "representation" is not used as an instrumental sign of the thing we are perceiving. It is certainly not a formal sign, as its essential being is neurophysiological, not semantic.
So, theories that see ideas as brainstates suffer from semantic confusion, and theories that see self-awareness as a species of proprioception are equally confused.
Forth, as I said to you in relation to Damasio's observation on the biological representation of reality, it does not seem that a neural representation can encode enough information to allow us to distinguish between exteroception and interoception -- between representations of the environment and representations of bodily state. So, we need other channels of information to explain our experience.
I agree for the most part. Locke erred in saying that all we know is our ideas. Rather ideas are means of knowing reality. Still, I am not a naive realist. Apples are not "red" as we see red. Apples have objective properties (say an absorption spectrum) that, in normal light, with normal color vision we will see as red -- that will evoke a "red" quale. In other light, if we are color blind, etc. the evoked quale may differ.
This does not mean we aren't seeing what "is there," or that all we see is a construct. Instead it mans that "what is there" is more complicated than imagined by the unreflective mind. All of our perceptions are subject-object interactions -- inescapably both objective and subjective. (Quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur -- Whatever is received is received according to the mode of the recipient.) Still, it is not constructed, but received.
I think we are agreed on "decoding."
Quoting Galuchat
You're very welcome. I found John of St. Thomas and Henry Veatch very useful.
So the body creates the world.
So you espouse fatalism?
Absurd
And what is this ontological priority of the 'laws of nature?' I assume you are saying that the laws of nature have a primacy over being-in-the-world?
And so you are fundamentally deterministic.
And in bad faith.
If there was nothing (no one) to acknowledge the abstraction
My, my. A little charity, please.
Working backward:
1. I am a determinist when physics is an adequate abstraction.
2. I am not a determinist with respect to human will -- where physics is an inadequate abstraction.
3. I am not saying "the laws of nature have a primacy over being-in-the-world."
4. I am saying that they actualize a specific logically possible line of action.of insensate material being.
5. The ontological priority of laws of nature is that they actualize the potential motion of material being. What actualizes is ontologically prior to what it actualizes.
"Indeed where would consciousness come from if it did come from something? From the limbo of the unconscious or of the physiological. But if we ask ourselves how this limbo in its turn can exist and where it derives it's existence, we find ourselves faced with the concept of a passive existence; that is, we can no more absolutely understand how this non-conscious given (unconscious or physiological) which does not derives it's existence from itself, can nevertheless perpetuate this existence and find in addition the ability to produce a consciousness. This demonstrates the great favor which the proof a contingentia mundi has enjoyed.
The appearance is not supported by any existent other than itself; it has its own being. The first being which we meet in our ontological inquiry is the being of the appearance. Is it itself an appearance? It seems so at first. The phenomenon is what manifests itself, and being manifests itself to all in some way, since we can speak of it and since we have a certain comprehension of it.
In a particular object one can always distinguish qualities like color, odor, etc. And proceeding from these, one can always determine an essence which they imply, as a sign implies its meaning. The totality "object-essence" makes an organized whole. The essence is not in the object. It is the meaning of the object, the principle of the series of appearances with disclose it. But being is neither one of the object's qualities, capable of being apprehended among others, nor a meaning of an object. The object does not refer to being as a signification; it would be impossible, for example, to define being as a presence SINCE ABSENCE TOO DISCLOSES BEING, since not to be there means still to be. The object does not possess being, and it's existence is not a participation in being, nor any other kind of relation. It is. That is the only way to define its manner of being: the object does not hide being, but neither does it reveal being. The object does not hide it, for it would be futile to try and push aside certain qualities of the existent in order to find the being behind them; being is being of them all equally. The object does not reveal being, for it would be futile to address oneself to the object in order to apprehended its being. The existent is a phenomenon; this means that it designates itself as an organized totality of qualities. It designates itself and not its being. Being is simply the condition of all revelation.
...
... The being of the phenomenon, although coextensive with the phenomenon, can not be subject to the phenomenal condition -- which is to exist only in so far as it reveals itself -- and that consequently it surpasses the knowledge which we have of it and provides the basis for such knowledge.
Jean Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness
Friedrich Nietzsche
The Gay Science
I think you misrepresent signification here. For something to be a sign, for it to signify, all that is required is that it has meaning. So there is no need for the sign to be instrumental, or formal, in order that it be a sign. As long as the thing has significance, it is meaningful, and is a sign, despite how vague and indefinite that meaning might be to the mind which creates it as a sign, or which interprets it. This I think is the difficult reality of signification, we can recognize that a thing is a sign, without having any idea of what it signifies. This is to recognize something as meaningful without knowing what the meaning is. For example, when I hear people speaking a foreign language I recognize the sound as meaningful without having any idea of the meaning. And, I can say things without clearly knowing what I am saying. So there is no need that the sign be either formal or instrumental in order to be a sign. especially when that which is signified is vague and unclear. Hence ambiguity is very real.
Quoting Blue Lux
I don't follow you.
And...?
If you are asking whether there are any conditions that give rise to human perceptions and understandings, but do not themselves exhaustively appear in those perceptions and understandings, then, yes.
If we don't exhaustively know what the conditions are then we can't say (exhaustively) what they are, can we? The point is that it is universally accepted that there are such conditions, whatever different thinkers might think those conditions are, and so to say that there are no conditions that give rise to the world of phenomena would seem to be about the most absurd thing we could possibly say.
Why must 'the world of phenomena' (the only world) have been given its being as if... it were created?
Thanks. So to clarify, my claim is that there are three atoms in a water molecule independent of anyone counting them or even conceptualizing numbers at all (e.g., prior to sentient life emerging on Earth). That would seem to be a premise of moderate realism about universals.
Is that your view as well? Or is it your view that there are potentially three atoms in a water molecule when no-one is thinking about or counting them? That is, that sentient life is required for there to actually be three atoms in a water molecule.
Have I denied that the intentionality of the laws can be traced to God, or that God wills freely?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, I am saying that applying the laws of physics outside their verified range of application was and is unjustified. I am also saying that until well into the 20th century, we had no adequate data on whether human intentions modify the laws of nature. So asserting their invariance when human commitments are involved was unjustified.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There is no equivocation if we define and apply terms with care.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, if you use a different definitions, your expression of the same reality may well be different. We need only recognize the reality. Our different express of that reality is of minor import.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, and the success of physics is a stroke of completely unjustified good luck.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Your objection is purely linguistic. I see no real distinction between "participating in" the laws and "perturbing" the otherwise universal laws. I've never said we "overrule" the laws.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Not "parts" which can be physically separated, but aspects that can give rise to independent concepts.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I have already said that both our willed commitments and the laws of nature are intentional. The consequent motions are physical. So, there is no need to confine it to one "part" or another. Again, there are no "parts" -- only a whole that can be conceived in various abstract ways.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I made no such claim.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Because doing so would mean that the laws of physics are entirely inapplicable to us. In point of fact, they provide reasonably accurate descriptions of our motions.
Let's be clear, because I think you are confused as to my position.
1. Our intellect and will both belong to the intentional order.
2. "The physical," as I conceive it is not reducible to a material state. It is what we study in the natural sciences. The physical world is both material (specified by state descriptions) and intentional (having a well-defined order I am calling "the laws of nature."
3. When we apply the methods of natural science to the human mind, we can grasp its physicality (its material structure and its operations insofar as we follow the so-called "universal" laws of nature). It cannot grasp (because of the fundamental abstraction) our subjectivity (our awareness and will). Thus it misses the dynamics that allow us to exercise freedom.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It depends on how you define "a form." If you man a Platonic form, there are no such things. If you man a Scholastic Substantial Form, they are species specific, and do not grasp the "universality" of the laws of nature. If you merely mean "immaterial," yes the laws of nature are immaterial in the well defined sense of not having material constituents.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The laws of nature, not being spatio-temporal objects, have no intrinsic location. Instead, they "are" where they operate -- and they operate on and in matter. So they are "in" matter in an operational sense. So, if "by matter"nyou mean the empirical stuff that we can observe and experiment on, then the laws are intrinsic because they are revealed by such observations and experiments.
If you mean by "matter" an abstract principle, coordinate with form, we have had that argument and come to an impasse.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
A law of nature does not determine what is, the material state does that. it determines what will come to pass -- what potency will be actualized. That is the point of its being a logical propagator.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
If God is perfect, he cannot change for every change would add or remove a perfection. Since time is the measure of change according to before and after, God is timeless. So we cannot predicate before and after of God.
Also the laws of nature necessarily act concurrently. If the law of conservation of mass-energy is not operative here and now, mass-energy is not conserved here and now.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No it is not. Denying the existence of immaterial reality is materialist. I am not doing that.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I have not said that they are the only immaterial realities. They are not even essentially immaterial, as neither forms of matter nor laws of nature can exist independently of matter.
If we understood the world we experience to be merely perceptual phenomena the question remains as to what it could be perceptions of. What determines the fact that we all perceive the same things in the same places at the same times? It seems far less obvious that we are really all one mind. since we don't experience each other's experience, than that we are inhabiting a world whose existence is independent of our perceptions of it, and that the commonality of our perceptions is due to that and the constitutional characteristics we all share.
The world IS our consciousness. It is obviously not that we are the world but that consciousness would not be without the world. This is not to say, again, and resort to that dualism assuming that consciousness and the world are fundamentally separated. The Cartesian dualism has plagued philosophy for too long.
The commonality of our perceptions could never suffice to substantiate the assertion that an objective world determines us. I refuse to accept that, because it is anti-freedom.
But I understand your point, and perhaps my point is addressing something else. But I just don't see the world from that perspective. I don't see the world at all.
I am, rather, the 'seeing' of the world.
If you are talking about God, I agree that the cosmos is utterly dependent on Him. Still, I don't think that God's existence is so easy to see that atheists are missing the obvious.
Rationality requires that everything have an adequate explanation, even if we don't know it, So, any ultimate explanation must be necessary and self-explaining. What is necessary cannot change, because any change shows that the aspect that changed was not necessary. So, it must be distinct from the changing universe -- not part of it.
Quoting Dfpolis
But they don't act! Rock are passive; actions are, er, active. :wink: :chin:
I have a problem with this, because if awareness were one and communal I would be aware of every other persons experience and they of mine. I am not. I am directly aware only of my interactions with the world -- of myself standing as a subject to the objects I encounter.
Quoting Blue Lux
I do not find my thoughts "constantly overruled by ... the genius of the species." I often find myself at odds with the thinking of others and with anything that could pass for a "herd mentality." Nor am I alone in thinking that, at times, I am "a voice crying in the wilderness."
Rather than my thoughts being "overruled by the character of consciousness," I find them informed "by the character of consciousness" -- as I become aware of some aspect of reality apparently missed by others. And, again, I do not find myself alone in this. Each person has their own standpoint and subjectivity -- giving rise to their own, unique subject-object relationships.
Quoting Blue Lux
I do not find this in my experience. Perhaps you can provide an example to help me see what you see.
Quoting Blue Lux
Mystical experience stands as a counter to this -- being the awareness of an underlying ineffable unity.
Quoting Blue Lux
Again, mystical experience stands as a counter to this -- it does not "inform" us -- does not limit what is possible, but expands it. So, we have an intellect that can and does know what is.
I am sorry, but no. To actually signify a sign must actualize meaning in a mind. If it does not do this, it is only a potential sign.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We can recognize it's potential to be a sign. If it does not actualize a meaning in a mind (and meanings exist only in minds), it is not an actual sign.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is a different case. The language is actually signifying to those using it, just not to you.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
If you are speaking, the sign is instrumental. Your audience must first recognize your words for them to convey your meaning..
Of course communication can be defective. Your utterance may be malformed. It may not be correctly understood. That has nothing to do with the question of what constitutes a well-formed, operational signs.
This is a misinterpretation of Nietzsche. What he is saying is quite akin to Heidegger's Das Man or the they, an inauthentic display.
In communication experiences are translated into what he calls the herd mentality. With regard to religion, Carl Jung adopted this idea and elucidated upon archetypes or archetypal structures in which people adopt certain explanations of their own personal, unique meaning, replacing it for what can be assimilated by others, instead of resorting to a de facto alienation from a society they wish to gain fulfillment from.
Quoting Dfpolis
Thinking in relation to others changes the authenticity of your own meaning into its herd analogue. You speak so to to be understood. People adopt values and absolute truths so to dismiss the inherent ambiguity of life, which is paradoxically the precursor of art. This will to a lack of ambiguity and a demonstration of human life that attains the value of absolute or normal or conventional is that which boxes the human into a construction of their own lives as not with reference to their own subjective feelings and meanings but with regard to everything they are not, which is all that is communicable.
For instance. I am gay. My thoughts about my life, if this was fifty years ago, would be overruled by the genius of the species, that herd mentality, that overruling aspect of the they which would have labeled me as deviant or inauthentic, according to transpersonal absolutist constructions.
Quoting Dfpolis
Okay... I love someone. When I communicate this... This love that is 'mine' becomes just another relationship. When I create something significant to me, I communicate it to the world, consciousness delivers me over to the herd mentality where I have to be intelligible by others, which is not guaranteed, and thus what I have created loses in a very real sense its meaning, because its meaning can not be apprehended by everyone.
Mystical experiences are at base experiences. They are not different than ant other experience. They are just defined differently. There is absolutely no evidence in experience of the divine or the supernatural or the mystical... Only that which is not understood or cannot be adequately represented by 'knowledge,' which is also, at base, an illusion.
Anything not composed of material constituents.
Quoting Blue Lux
Either consciousness is made of matter or it is immaterial. If consciousness is made of matter, then it "is the result of interactions of matter." If you deny this, you are left with consciousness is immaterial.
Scattering light and attracting bodies gravitationally are actions.
"Thinking in relation to others" is the inescapable foundation of successful communication. If you have not already, you will find that I'm quite able to maintain my own, authentic position while communicating with others. I think you are capable of the same.
Quoting Blue Lux
Yes, there are people who twist themselves into knots to "fit in," but they are rather low on the path to satisfy Maslow's heirarchy of needs or growth in Fowler's stages of faith. There is certainly nothing "universal" here.
Quoting Blue Lux
Only if you let it. If you know history, you know that many have stood proud of their orientation. Of course there have been, and are, social pressures and even criminal penalties, but many found ways to work around these while continuing to be authentic to themselves.
Quoting Blue Lux
We all have thoughts and feelings that others do not or will not understand or accept. We feel cut-off and long for a union of souls that most of us never achieve in this life. (Perhaps mystics do.) There is no "having to be intelligible to others." It is rewarding when we are, but we create value by valuing. if you value your creation or your love, it is valuable. If you do not, it is valueless for you.
So, your creations do not loose value when others fail to appreciate them, however disappointing that may be. You imbue them with value when you value them. If others also value them, they add new value, but if they don't, they can't take away the value you have imbued them with unless you allow it.
If there really were a single consciousness, everyone would value and devalue the same things. It is your uniqueness that allows you to create value where none existed before.
Quoting Blue Lux
Oh, but they are. Other experiences are defined by the information, the reduction of possibility they convey. Most mystical experiences convey no information. They do not reduce what is possible. They open us to new possibility. Mystical experience shows us that it is possible to achieve the unity that we long for in love.
You may be able to maintain your own meaning, and you always do, but this is irrelevant, for the act of translating your own authenticity into that which is accessible by others implies a stripping down of that authenticity in terms of the they, which refers to the everydayness of existence. Your own authentic position can only be understood by an assimilation, which loses meaning in the process.
Furthermore, Nietzsche was not saying that meaning can never be communicated. It is that meaning is often not communicated at all, and it is precisely in these meaningless structures of 'knowledge' or reference that constitutes the herd constitution of consciousness. Consciousness is an objective, transpersonal entity in terms of the they. It is not with reference to anything authentic, which is at base incommunicable.
Quoting Dfpolis
Maslow's hierarchy came after Nietzsche, and it is precisely the understanding that Nietzsche tries to communicate which sets the tone for an understanding of such a hierarchy at all... The fact that consciousness needs to transcend this herd mentality... This is what Nietzsche was referring to.
Quoting Dfpolis
The problem is not necessarily authenticity itself but alienation as well, which is not synonymous with authenticity.
Quoting Dfpolis
This is not the case... It is that consciousness is often completely unintelligible in terms of the they. And an authentic consciousness would have as its object its being authentic.
Quoting Dfpolis
This is not analytically true. It would be synthetically true. Consciousness is consciousness of others, and valuations are either accepted or rejected by virtue of the herd consciousness that is not ones own. Nietzsche's solution to this meaninglessness or nihilism is the Ubermensch. Quoting Dfpolis
If love is a mystical experience by your definition, then love is probably not a mystical experience, because love is most definitely a communication. Love is not mystical, but human, real, authentic in terms of the one defining it and experiencing it. An objective love makes absolutely no sense.
But you are more than merely "the 'seeing' of the world", no? Are you not also the feeling of yourself?
Quoting Blue Lux
I agree; the tree is something for my consciousness, but the salient question is whether my consciousness is something for the tree.
Quoting Janus
I am not the feeling of myself, because myself cannot be felt. But I am also feeling itself. I am transphenomenal experiencing.
And yet the tree can be something for my consciousness, despite that it is not itself consciousness. I had thought that earlier you were saying everything is consciousness; maybe i misunderstood you.
Quoting Blue Lux
The feeling of your body, your emotions and desires, and of your own existence is what would normally be termed 'the feeling of yourself'.
So, the world both is and is not consciousness...depending on how you look at it?
It seems to me that the world and consciousness are essentially one. Consciousness belongs to the world and the world belongs to consciousness, because consciousness is always consciousness of something it is not...
But I have my own problem. Can consciousness can be consciousness of itself? I think this is true, but consciousness of being conscious would be consciousness of consciousness (of) something it is not... So consciousness of consciousness would be consciousness (of) being... And consciousness is fundamentally being-in-the-world... Correct?
Being is thus not consciousness but is the condition of a consciousness... But consciousness has been said to be the condition of all revelation... And so the revelation of being would be of consciousness...
It is a puzzle.
I think we can experience objects, feelings or whatever and also experience our experience itself. Also, what is a different thing again, we can be conscious ( in the further sense of being reflexively self-aware) of our experience of objects, etc. and also be conscious of our experience of experience itself.
Yes, you have denied this, not explicitly but implicitly. That's what I've been trying to explain to you, the implications of what you stated, that the laws of nature are inherent within matter and operative from this position as causal in the actions of matter. As such, these laws are explicitly material, and since God is understood to be immaterial, as the cause of matter and material existence in general, it is implied that the laws cannot be traced to God. If they had an immaterial source, then they would be independent from matter, and not inherent within matter.
Quoting Dfpolis
So how can you make sense of this proposition? You are saying that it is incorrect to associate invariance with the laws of nature. How are they even "laws" then, if they're subject to change?
Quoting Dfpolis
Quite clearly, if you "perturb" a law you change that law. And to change a law is to replace the old law with a new version. This is to overrule the existing law. This is completely different from "participating" in the law, which is to accept the law and act accordingly.
Quoting Dfpolis
It was your suggestion that the human being is a unity of intentional and physical. If these were not stated as distinct parts, then what do you mean by this?
I think you and I have completely different notions of "intentionality". I associate intentionality with the will, the intellectual appetite. So "the good", as that which is recognized by the intellect as desirable, is at the root of intentionality.
Quoting Dfpolis
This is nonsense. Human beings have physical bodies. They also have intention. To give priority to intention does not necessitate that the laws of physics are not applicable to the human body. It just means that the laws of physics are not applicable to intention.
Quoting Dfpolis
I see problems with 2, and 3, here.
In #2, I see that you use "intentional" in a way completely different than I would. I would say that "intentional" means to act with purpose. You see "well-defined order", and you conclude "intentionality". But you are missing a premise necessary to draw this conclusion. That premise would be that where there is order, there is intention. You haven't provided that premise, or supported it with argumentation, so your conclusion that where there is well-defined order there is intentionality is not yet sound.
Furthermore, you clearly divide the physical here into material and intentional. You assign "the laws of nature" to the intentional. But the proposition you made in the op, which I objected to, was that the laws of nature inhere within matter. So now you have contradictory positions
Now, in #3 you claim that we can understand the human mind's "material structure" by following the "laws of nature". This is problematic in two ways. First, in #2 you have assigned the laws of nature to the intentional, rather than the material. So how could we understand the material through the laws of nature, when the laws of nature are an aspect of the intentional?. Second, we cannot follow the laws of nature in the application of natural science even if we wanted to, because the closest thing we have is the laws of physics, but these are distinct.
Quoting Dfpolis
How can you say that the laws of nature inhere within matter, yet they are immaterial? Doesn't this seem contradictory?
Quoting Dfpolis
What I would like to know is how you conceive of the laws of nature operating "in" matter without reducing the laws to being matter itself. To be within, is a spatial concept, so you've already negated your claim that the laws are not spatio-temporal. But let me try to proceed, removing the spatial necessity, to understand "in". We would need to remove all space from within matter, so that matter cannot consist of parts in relation to each other. Therefore there is no parts, and matter is indivisible. The only relations we can talk about are the relations between one "particle" of matter and another. There are no such relations inside matter, as there is no space here, these relations are extrinsic to matter. But the non-spatial laws are here, inside matter, while the spatial relations are outside matter.
First, how are these non-spatial laws, which are inherent within matter, anything other than matter itself? If this is non-spatial, and it is the entire "inside" of matter, how is it not "matter"? Second, how could these laws act? We describe motions and activities as relations between material bodies, according to the space between them. If for instance, a law wants to put some matter in motion, from within, it could move that matter in any direction. However, other matter exists in the environment, and this restricts the possible motion. Aren't these restrictions to motion, what ought to be properly called "the laws of nature", not the cause of motion? And the restrictions are proper to the relations between matter, just like the laws of physics which describe motions are proper to the relations between physical bodies. So the laws of nature are not property of matter, or inhering within matter, but are properties of the relations between matter. And, they are not the cause of motion of matter, they are restrictions to the motion of matter. For the cause of motion, we have to look further, to intentionality.
Quoting Dfpolis
I'm not talking about potential signs, I'm talking about actual signs. What I am saying is that to actually signify, all that is required is to actualize meaning, to be significant. But meaning is often vague and indefinite, so the sign does not need to be formal or instrumental. This is the case with many emotions. Something triggers an emotion, that thing is a sign because it actualizes meaning. But what it signifies is unknown. So many things like art, and music, actualize meaning, they signify, and are signs, but there is nothing specific which the sign "represents".
Quoting Dfpolis
No, the point is, that to be a sign, all that is required is to actualize meaning. We are not discussing what is required for "well-formed operational signs". Those are a particular type of sign.
I would agree that there is no idea of number independent of an agent's thoughts.
Yet there would still be three atoms in a water molecule even if there were no intelligent agents in the universe. For that sentence to be true, none of the referents can depend on an agent's thoughts. So at least some universals such as three (and more generally number) are independent of mind (though not of the particulars that give them meaning).
I don't think your realistic interpretation of three is necessary to make the sentence true. The referents in the sentence are the molecule and its atoms, which, if counted, will number three.
If we can be aware of realities essentially independent of matter, then awareness need not be contingent on matter. I think mystical experience shows that we can, If you are interested, I suggest you start with W. T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy -- which is phenomenological, not religious, in perspective.
Stace makes the point that some types of mystical experience are completely free of sensory content -- and therefore of the need for neural processing.
Quoting Blue Lux
This need not be so. I try to communicate by getting others to stand beside me and see what I see. If I succeed, they see what I see, but from their own perspective, and as relevant to their own experience. So they may actually see more than i see -- increasing, rather than diminishing, meaning.
Quoting Blue Lux
I have no idea why you would say this. Consciousness is not a thing, not an entity, but a power that intelligent beings have. It is also ultimately personal -- it is what makes me the knowing subject in subject-object relations. If it were transpersonal, I would be directly aware of what others experienced. I am not.
Quoting Blue Lux
Again, I don't know what this could mean. Yes, sometimes, even often, we fail to communicate but when you say "these meaningless structures of 'knowledge' or reference ... constitutes the herd constitution of consciousness," I'm at a loss. There is no awareness, no consciousness, without some object of awareness. If we communicate nothing, there is nothing to be aware of.
Quoting Blue Lux
I've read Maslow's paper. He does not mention Nietzsche. I've never read Nietzsche, but I had no problem understanding Maslow. So, it hardly seems necessary to know Nietzsche to understand Maslow.
Quoting Blue Lux
OK.
Quoting Blue Lux
It seems to me that to be authentic is to act in conformity with your self-understanding -- not twisting yourself to conform to the expectations of others. If so, then doesn't "having to be intelligible to others" cut across the core of authenticity?
I'm not saying that we should ignore others, or even their efforts to understand us. I'm saying that if they refuse to understand us, or even if they try and fail to understand, that is their problem, not ours.
Quoting Blue Lux
I mean if there were a single consciousness, there would be a single mind. We would all know and see things the same way, and so value the same things.
Quoting Blue Lux
That is not what i said.
Much has been considered and written in the field of semiotics since John Poinsot's Tractatus de Signis.
Why have you recommended this work over those of modern semioticians (e.g., Saussure, Peirce, vonUexkull, Morris, Sebeok, Lotman, Eco, Deely, etc.)?
No, I have not. I'm not responsible for you extrapolating beyond what i have said.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You are confusing being material with the laws being dependent on matter for their expression. For example, the form of a vase is immaterial (not made of matter), but it is inseparable from the matter of the vase. I have made it quite clear that the laws are immaterial -- it is a category error to ask what they are made of.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This makes no sense. On the one hand you say that "God is ... the cause of matter." On the other that because the laws are material (which they are not), they cannot be traced to God.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I am saying that over the widest field of their application the laws of nature are invariant and so rightly called "laws." Still a large range is not universality. Are American laws against speeding not laws because there is no speed limit on the autobahn?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In the Thomistic context in which I am using the term, "participating" in Divine Providence means being a co-creator with God.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I mean that we can perform both physical and intentional operations, and that our intellect can discern the difference between these kinds of operations. In the same way, a rubber ball is not part sphere and part rubber. It is one thing with different aspects the mind can distinguish.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It is not that we have different notions, it is that I am showing the intentionality of the laws by looking at their intrinsic character rather than their Source.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Not so fast. If decide to walk to the store, each step is a physical process closely described by the laws of physics. It is also a product of my intention to arrive at the store by walking. So, there is no either-or here. It is a both-and situation. An adequate account has to incorporate both the physical and the intentional realities at work here.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Are you denying that God has a purpose in maintaining the laws of nature? I am not. I am just not bringing God into the conversation so as not to be drawn off on a theological tangent.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There is more than one way to skin a cat. I offered less contentious arguments, viz. my logical propagator argument and that based on Brentano's analysis of intentionality.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We've discussed this before. The form of a vase inheres in a material vase, still it is immaterial.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That is not what i said. I was discussing the method of natural science and its self imposed limits, and pointing out the data excluded by this approach.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In 3, I said we can study the physical structure of the mind (the brain), by applying the method of natural science. I did not say we were studying the mind's "matter." Let me say it yet again: "Physical" does not mean "material." Describing material states is only a small part of physics. A much greater part is studying the laws of nature, which are intentional.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Did I say we were following the laws of nature? I said we were applying the method of the natural sciences.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In the same way that a vase's form inheres in the vase without being the matter of the vase.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Same answer.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In the same way human committed intentions act -- by actualizing a specific potential motion.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Do you have an example of a sign that is neither formal nor instrumental?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
An emotion is not a meaning, it is a state of being.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Then, it is not a "sign" in the standard sense of the term. As you say " to be a sign, all that is required is to actualize meaning." Of course, you can equivocate on "meaning." I am taking a meaning to be informative -- to represent something,
Because his distinction between formal and instrumental signs clears up a number of confusions found the philosophy of mind (e.g. in representational and cybernetic theories of mind), as well as theories involving "a language of thought." It also brings into question the primacy of language that undergirds analytic philosophy.
More generally an intentional approach to logic allows one to dispose of a number of paradoxes such as the Liar and Jourdain's. Arguably, it makes Russell's theory of types unnecessary and gives a simple resolution to issues such as those raised by Quine in Word and Object.
That said, I do not pretend to more than a smattering of Saussure, Peirce and Deely. If modern semioticians have resolved these issues, I would be happy to learn more of them.
Quoting Dfpolis
Matter is an abstraction. The material is an abstraction. Ergo realities independent of matter is an abstraction.
Quoting Dfpolis
Communicating has nothing to do with getting others to see what you see, for that assimilation of theirs is going to label what you see as an abstraction, which will only reconfigure their own experience. No meaning is exchanged. And it can not be proven that there is actually an increasing meaning... Such an increasing would have to be objective... Transpersonal and devoid of meaningful meaning.
Quoting Dfpolis
We communicate an objective abstraction of meaning. It isn't that nothing is communicated. Actually... It is precisely that nothing is communicated. Nothing, in this sense, has a being.
Quoting Dfpolis
Nietzsche -> Freud -> Adler -> Maslow
Quoting Dfpolis
Consciousness is inevitably consciousness of others, and so it is not a conscious twisting of conformity... The de facto configuration of being intelligible by others is the source of in authenticity, namely of the they.
Quoting Dfpolis
What is said was. Consciousness is a transpersonal entity-in-terms-of-the-they. Consciousness is very much so an entity in terms of the they... It is something supposedly to have... And you are right... Consciousness is not a thing. It is this understanding that allows for the separation between an authentic consciousness and an inauthentic consciousness. The reconciliation is in empathy perhaps. Maybe... MDMA.
Consciousness attaining the label as transpersonal does not mean that you would be directly aware of others experiences. The transpersonal label is what establishes the point of reference known as objectivity, which is metaphorically the source of all inauthenticity.
Quoting Dfpolis
The single consciousness is the consciousness of objectivity, which does not define consciousness as a whole but is consciousness in a very real degree.
No, it assumes realism.
Quoting Dfpolis
It seems to me that you could say the same thing about the particulars. That is, the referent of the sentence is the world which, if observed in a specific way, would present as a water molecule and its atoms.
Whereas on a realist premise, three atoms in a water molecule is understood to be a consequence of natural circumstances independent of humans, not of our looking or counting.
But the form is separable from the matter, that's how we know things through abstraction, the form of the vase is brought into the mind. If the form of a vase were inseparable from the matter of a vase, you could not say that the form is immaterial because it would be of necessity united with matter, impossible to be otherwise, and therefore material. To say that it is both immaterial, and inseparable from matter is contradiction. You are handing "form" the contradictory properties of "inseparable from matter" and "immaterial".
Quoting Dfpolis
Actually, what you are doing, as I said, is jumping to a conclusion. The existence of order does not necessitate the conclusion of intentionality, the existence of purpose does. So when something is seen to have order we cannot conclude intentionality until it is demonstrated that the order is for a purpose. Then we can conclude intentionality.
Here are some examples. We see that birds build nests, the material is ordered in a specific way so as to make the nest. If we satisfactorily demonstrate that the order is put to that material for a purpose, for instance so that the bird can hatch eggs and raise young, then we can conclude intentionality. Likewise, we can look at the ordering of material in a beaver dam, and if we are satisfactorily convinced that the beaver builds the dam for a purpose, then we conclude intentionality. So we could look at the photosynthesis of plants, and ask if there is purpose to this activity, to see whether or not there is intentionality there as well. How about the activity of the earth orbiting the sun, or of things moving from gravity? These are orderly activities, described by laws, but unless we can determine a purpose for these activities we cannot conclude that there is intentionality.
Quoting Dfpolis
Yes, that's exactly what I said, it appears we agree on this point.
Quoting Dfpolis
As I said though, we have different notions of intentionality. The essential aspect of intention is purpose, that I believe is quite clear. But you want to change this definition such that order is the essence of intention. This is incorrect because intentionality is associated with the end, and order is the means to the end. The intentional being will use whatever appears to be efficient, as the means to the end, and this includes things which pre-existed the intentional being. This demonstrates that it is possible that the means may pre-exist the intentional being, and therefore pre-exist intentionality. Therefore the existence of the means, i.e. order, does not necessarily indicate intentionality.
Quoting Dfpolis
Actually you said "physicality", and in brackets you had "material structure", so I assumed that you were explaining "physicality" as "material structure". If you now desire a separation between "physical" and "material", then that's another thing.
See, you have put yourself in a bind because you refuse to allow a separation between matter and form which is necessary to provide for immaterial forms. You want to talk about the immaterial, forms, and intentionality as if these are true aspects of reality, but then you insist that these things don't have any real existence because they can't really be separated from matter.
So you go on and on talking about forms, the immaterial, and intentionality, as if you think that these are real and you believe in them, when in reality you think that these are just the illusions of deluded minds. This is quite clear when you insist that form cannot exist independently from matter. All that other talk about the immaterial and intentionality is just a hoax, as if you're ashamed of, and trying to hide your materialism. If you're ashamed of it, then rather than trying to hide it, why don't you dismiss it?
Quoting Dfpolis
But that's exactly the question I'm asking, how can you conceive of this. If the form inheres in the vase, as the matter of the vase does, and is inseparable from the matter of the vase, then how is it anything other than the matter of the vase? If it is something other than the matter of the vase, then it is separable from it, by that very fact that it is other than it.
Quoting Dfpolis
I told you, a work of music, or art. It must be a sign because it has meaning, as is evident from the emotions which it arouses. Or are you are arguing that a thing can be meaningful without being a sign? How would that work?
Quoting Dfpolis
I'm not equivocating, you are just trying to enforce an overly restrictive definition of "meaning" in order to support your position. Defining a word such that many things which are normally referred to by that word are excluded by your definition, in order to support an ontological position, is not good metaphysics. That part of reality excluded by your definition is also excluded from your ontology.
Matter is the foundation in reality for the concept
Think of volley balls, baseballs, soccer balls, rubber balls, ping pong balls, etc. All are real balls. None are abstractions. Each is able to elicit the concept
So, realities independent of matter are realities that can act without depending on any material object.
Quoting Blue Lux
In communication, meaning is not "exchanged." It is recreated. Our signs do not actually "carry" meaning. When an instrumental sign is received and interpreted, an association is invoked in the interpreter. If the interpreter sees smoke, she associates it with fire and the associated concept
So, yes, communicating is entirely about getting others to "see," intellectually, what I see. If my communication succeeds, the recipient's mind is not merely "reconfigured." She starts thinking of what I am thinking of. Her thought is not my thought, but each of us think of the same reality from a different perspective.
Of course we can't "prove" that meaning is increased, because often it is not. Sometimes communication fails altogether. Still, we can see it. If I'm speaking of soccer balls, and she is a soccer fan, while I'm not, her associations, the meaning evoked in her mind, may far exceed mine. That's why good art can be so powerful: because it can evoke meanings in its audience which far exceed those in the artist. Thus Michelangelo's Pieta can evoke all of the feelings of sorrow and loss we have experienced -- feelings that are uniquely ours, not Michelangelo's. Still, we may feel as he felt.
So, the meaning of the Pieta is transpersonal. It is not confined to any one person, but shared by many. Yet each shares it in their own personal way -- calling to mind their own sorrow and loss, not Michelangelo's.
Quoting Blue Lux
I've read a fair amount of Freud. Again there is no mention of Nietzsche. Just because Dirrida mentions the two of them together with Heidegger as strong influences, does not mean that Freud's views were strongly influenced by Nietzsche. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and online Britannica make no mention of Nietzsche in their articles \on Freud. Paul Vitz suggests that Freud's theories on the unconscious and libido reflect those of Aquinas, albeit unknowingly.
Quoting Blue Lux
We will have to agree to disagree. I see authenticity as arising out of knowledge by connaturality -- knowing one's self by being attuned to what "resonates" with us. Did you decide you were gay because "they" told you so, or because of experiences that resonated with your being?
Quoting Blue Lux
I don't think that "the objective," what is intersubjectively available, is rightly called "consciousness." It is at the other pole of the subject-object relationship from awareness.
Being at the other pole of the relationship, the objective is neither authentic nor inauthentic. Only our response can be authentic or inauthentic.
Quoting Blue Lux
We may each be conscious of the same object, but our consciousness of that object is uniquely our own -- not only because we are different subjects, but because as different subjects we each have a different relation to the object (a different standpoint and a different set of associations).
Quoting Blue Lux
Yes, existence is prior to essence, and no, existence as a whole cannot be created. Still, individual existents, even whole universes, can be created, ex nihillo.
We need to think about the potential being actualized by each operation. For any potential to be actualized, there needs to an actual being with that potential.
Perhaps the actual being of a water molecule is smeared out in some quantum fashion that does not coalesce until it is observed. That is possible and if so, then the exact configuration we observe would not be actual until we interact with it -- observing it. Still, experience shows that every time we observe a water molecule, we find two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. So, whatever its unobserved state, that state is fully determined with respect to the kinds of atoms we will find. Since information is the reduction of possibility, and there is no possibility that we will find any other atoms, we can say it's atomic structure is fully informed.
So, we know there is some reality, prior to our observation, that is determinately H2O. Further, that reality is doing things. For example, it is contributing to the gravitational field.
Now, what about the "threeness" of the molecule? It is also a determinate potential, but it is not doing anything that the physicality of the molecule is not doing. It has no operations of its own. it is just a non-operational aspect of the molecule waiting for someone to come along and count it. Whe we do count it, we actualize its intelligibility, forming a subject-object relation with this aspect of the water molecule.
The whole reality of the
The form of a vase is not physically separated and brought into the mind, What we do in abstraction is mentally distinguish the form of the vase from its matter.
How does the form enter our mind? Dynamically, not physically. The form acts on us via our senses, but all the while, it remains inseparable from the matter of the vase. If it ever ceased to be in the vase, it would cease to be the form of the vase.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That is not the definition of "material" I am using. "Immaterial" only means not made of matter. Something immaterial can be completely inseparable from matter, or it can exist apart form matter. If it can exist apart from matter, it is called "spiritual." Forms of vases and laws of nature are immaterial but require matter to be what they are, and so they are not spiritual.
As shown by mystical experience, human awareness can operate in ways not dependent on matter, and so is spiritual.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
When a process is ordered, in the sense I an using the term, it acts in a determinate way. If it acts in a determinate way, it will have a determinate end at any point in time. To have a determinate end is to have a purpose.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I disagree. We can determine their intentionality by applying Brentano's analysis or my logical propagator approach.
Also, the human failure to discern purposes is not an argument that there are no purposesQuoting Metaphysician Undercover
Not at all. Order is one sign of intentionality. Purpose is another. The ordering of means to ends is also a sign, Aboutness is a forth. Being a logical propagator is another. Being a product of intellect or will are still others.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There are no means without ends they are subordinate to.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In a dialog, we should employ the principle of charity -- attributing intellectual integrity to our dialog partner, and looking for the interpretation of what is said that gives it the most sense and rationality. I've said nothing to indicate that I'm writing in bad faith, and I take offense that you have chosen to accuse me of bad faith simply because you don't grasp what I'm telling you.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Because neither the matter nor the form are the actual being we call a "vase." Each is an aspect of the vase that we can separate in our minds, but not in reality.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Emotions are not meanings in the intellectual sense, just in an extended sense that does not apply to signs. Consider what you've said in relation to my original statement, which was that brain states are not signs of the contents they encode because they are neither formal nor instrumental signs. How does the fact that music and art can evoke emotions relate to my claim -- or support your objection?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Not at all. The question being examined is how neurally encoded contents relate to the ideas they support. This is a question about information, not emotions. So, the only relevant kind of meaning is that relating to information.
I am not denying the reality of emotions, nor the capacity of art to evoke them. I am only saying that is not what we are talking about now.
If you know Nietzsche well... It is all in Freud! Totem and Taboo. The interpretation of dreams. And many more.
What should I do now? Is it even worth replying?
Quoting Dfpolis
You are claiming that there are realities which are independent of matter here. Classically these realities would be understood as independent Forms. However, you also argue that forms cannot exist independently of matter. So what type of existence are you giving to these "realities which can act without depending on any material object? If there are actual realities which are independent of all material objects, and they are not "Forms", how else would you classify these immaterial things?
Quoting Dfpolis
This is not true though. It is how we have conceptions, blue prints, plans, these are forms of things which are not in the material thing which they are the form of. The form of the vase, can exist in places other than the vase itself. The difference between the essence of the vase as a form, and the form of the vase which includes all of its accidents, indicates that "the form of the vase" need not include all of the vase's accidents. So the "form of the vase", without the accidents of the material vase, exists independently of the material vase. It is only if you insist that "the form of the vase" must include all the accidents, that it becomes impossible for the form of the vase to exist independently from the material vase. But you have not justified this insistence.
Quoting Dfpolis
You keep insisting on this, and I've asked you to justify this assertion, which you have not. I've also explained why I think that this is logically impossible, and you haven't addressed my argument either. Let me explain again.
If something is completely inseparable from something else, then it cannot be identified as a distinct thing. That very description, "A is inseparable from B" dictates that A and B are not distinct things. They are inseparable and are therefore one and the same thing. If B is material, then by the law of non-contradiction, it is impossible that A is immaterial because this would indicate that the same thing is both material and immaterial.
In order to provide that the immaterial is united with the material, you must allow that they are separable, and identifiable as distinct and separable parts, to avoid violation of the law of non-contradiction.
Quoting Dfpolis
Should I assume that for you, immaterial realities which are independent of matter, are "spirits" then? How is a spirit not a form? Why do you assume that a spirit, which is immaterial, can exist independently of matter, but a form, which is immaterial cannot exist independently of matter Do you think that a form is a type of spirit, or that a spirit is a type of form, since you class them both as immaterial?
Quoting Dfpolis
I don't see how a process could possibly have a determinate end. By the law of conservation of energy, energy continues, and therefore activity continues with time. It would be impossible to say that process ends, unless activity ends. Any designated "end" is a judgement. so this argument fails for that reason.
Quoting Dfpolis
OK, we clearly have completely different notions of intentionality. But I don't remember your logical propagator approach, could you describe it again for me please.
Quoting Dfpolis
Yes, the ordering of means to an end is a sign of intentionality. But order without any indication of an end ought not be mistook for a sign of intentionality. I agree that a failure to determine the particular purpose of any particular action is not an argument that there is no purpose, but my argument is that unless you can determine a reason to believe that there is a purpose, it is unreasonable to assume that there is. The existence of order, in general, does not provide us with that reason. As I explained, intentional agents take already existing things and use them as means to ends. It is in relation to intention that the thing becomes a means, but they still exist as the things which they are, prior to becoming means. As you say, means require ends, but the things which become means exist prior to becoming means. And this includes order in general, it exists as order prior to becoming the means to an end. Unless you can demonstrate that order requires intention, i.e. that all order is purposeful order, your claim that whereever there is order there is intention, is unjustified.
Quoting Dfpolis
Right, but the point is that to produce a separation in the mind, which is impossible to produce in reality, is to produce a piece of fiction. This is why your endeavour violates the fundamental laws of logic, you are describing an impossibility, like a square circle. you can say that there's such a thing as a square circle but we know it's fiction. You can say that matter and form are separate aspect of the vase, but if in reality they are inseparable, then this is just fiction. So either matter and form are separable in reality or else the separating of them in our minds is nothing more than fiction.
Agreed. However if there is some reality that is determinately H2O then there is some reality that determinately has three atoms. The latter is simply a logical consequence of the former. If observation is not required for the former to be true, then it is not required for the latter to be true either.
Quoting Dfpolis
Activity (and change) is a characteristic of particulars, not universals. The number of atoms is simply a function of the water molecule itself, independent of human ideas about it. It is not merely potential information, it is actual information, even if the agent doesn't count the atoms or have a concept of numbers at all.
Our discussion reminds me of a past thread entitled Is information physical. I'm curious whether or not you would agree that information is physical, in Rolf Landauer's sense.
Does that also mean that Freud is about Thomas Aqunias?
How does Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which is empirical, come out of these speculations?
Quoting Blue Lux
Dialog depends on shared ground. So, for me it starts with common experience, not our separate theories.
Quoting Blue Lux
If, as you say, existence is prior to essence, then the power to act is prior to limitations on that power. That means that Existence, able to do any logically possible act, is most primary.
While there is a contraction in non-being acting to create, there is no logical contradiction in Existence making something without prior matter (which is what creation ex nihillo means).
As for Jung, he rejected Freud to found his own school.
The bottom line is that Maslow's hierarchy of needs is an empirical finding that does not depend on the theories of his predecessors.
Nietzsche's idea of accepting someone's own darkness and becoming "beyond good and evil" is a cornerstone of Freud and Jung. Freud did not adhere to the common conceptions of how things were. He went beyond in order to establish a psychology, which is precisely what Nietzsche says in Beyond Good and Evil.
Creation ex nihilo means a creation out of nothing or from nothing. This is absurd.
Existence making something, namely that which is beyond itself (objectivity) is absolutely impossible for such a subjectivity could not even have the representation of an objectivity, much less be affected with the will to create it.
I just started reading this thread. Sorry for the late addition. This point to me seems to have connection to Schopenhauer’s main thesis regarding will as metaphysically primary. Just thought that was interesting. I would characterize your approach as a certain “flattening” which is not necessarily a bad approach. I would define a flattening approach as one where two unrelated phenomenon (human intention) and physical events connect in a deeper principle. The obvious criticism I can see is that your claim is making an unsubstantiated comparison. Just because there are two similar mechanisms that doesn’t mean they have the same metaphysical origin but are perhaps similar but convergent and parallel phenomenon.
Thank you for your comment.
I am not suggesting the primacy of will. We can't will eftectively unless we know the existential situation.
I would suggest that my approach answers the question of how human intentions can have physical effects -- in the same way as the laws of nature do. It is also supported by observational data confirming that intentions have a measurable effect on physical processes.
But I don't know how to publish. I have many things I would like to publish but I don't know where to start. I am naive in this regard.
You will have to do better. The claim of absurdity is not showing logical impossibility.
If existence is a subject, it can only be such in relationship to itself as object -- thus knowing objectivity. In understanding its own capabilities, it understands its power to share existence.
The only subject of Descartes would be consciousness. But consciousness is not existence. Existence is being and being preceeds essence. Consciousness is always consciousness of something it is not. Consciousness of consciousness is simply consciousness. There need not be an idea ideae of this. This is due to the illusion of the primacy of knowledge
i took the following as granting subjectivity:
Quoting Blue Lux
If Existence is not limited by essence, it can do any logically possible thing, including knowing itself -- which means it is a subject.
What existentialism has delimited so far for an understanding of human existence is that consciousness is a type of being, but is separate from just any type of being, like that of the phone I am typing on. There is a difference between the being that has being as a question and the being that being would question. It seems the two are tied together intrinsically, but this connection or entanglement is not transparent.
Philosophical thought up until now, I think, takes for granted the conclusions made by Descartes about the subject, and furthermore about objectivity. There is this contention that consciousness is a subject and the world is outside of consciousness as object. This seems obvious. It seems that when I say something, for instance, "I am," 'I' am the subject that is predicated, determined by an existence, as if existence is a predicate. Kant has shown this is illusory. Being is not a predicate: being is the foundation of such a statement and is not a quality that one can have or lack. Existence is the base upon which we found knowledge of anything. Knowledge itself is not prior, and knowledge cannot speak in terms of being as a quality or predicate.
Consciousness is a sort of being, but it is not phenomenal. It is transphenomenal (Sartre). This is to say that consciousness is what it is not and is not what it is. Consciousness is what it is conscious of; however, it always escapes itself. It is not exhausted in the contemplation of an object so to be absorbed into that object to become a thing in itself. Consciousness is not a thing. The objects of consciousness, furthermore, are 'things,' but what makes a thing a thing? How is there something finite and singular that one can be aware of instead of simply everything? "Nothing is finite without an infinite reference point." This infinite reference point is consciousness.
Consciousness is 'founded' upon nothingness, and only upon this foundation can anything be. This is why we ask the question of why anything exists when it doesn't seem to have to exist, because consciousness, this transphenomenal being of 'the subject', is not unless it is (of) something it is not.
This is why Husserl's Intentionality is so significant. Because this prior problem of Descartes, this irreconcilable dualism of subject and object is at base an illusion. The two are one. However, another problem materializes--another dualism... That of the finite and the infinite.
Knowledge of something is inevitably infinite. One can not absolutely know an object so to be that object. This is why the primacy of knowledge is an illusion. All that we know is nothing (Socrates). This is not to say that we do not know anything, but that we know the Nothingness that is the foundation of our being so to have a conception of what we are not. This is the interpretation.
So what are we if there is no absolute subject? Are we nothing? Then what of the personality? What of this reference of knowledge in that 'I know something' or "Know thyself?"
Is, aside, the result of this a faith in monism? I do not believe so, because there is again the dualism of the finite and the infinite. In knowing thyself or knowing anything it seems that an ascertaining of infinity is essential. But this infinity is not the noumena. The essence of something is ascertained. The appearance of something does not hide the reality of that thing. It shows the series of its appearances: it is in itself an infinite series of appearances, contained finitely within an appearance. One can ascertain something, and thus apprehend its essence, which is its existence. The essence of existence is existence.
We are indeed 'something,' but this something is not a subject that is active or passive. It is beyond this activity or passivity, for the active and the passive is fundamentally athropomorphic. Our being is not something active or passive, the result of something or its own cause. It is uncreated, to be established in our own experience and with our own experience, aside from some sort of ideal of what we are that could possibly be proven with a statement... Which is precisely what Descartes wished to do... Found being upon the primacy of knowledge. The opposite is the case.
There is a facticity of human existence. Existence does not mean anthropomorphic existence. It is the existence of being, which is clearly not limited to what is human or 'consciousness.' The essence of consciousness is existence and it is in a sense capable of being anything it is (of). We cannot do any possible thing because of our facticity. But existence, that is, the existence of everything can do any possible thing, but only if it can. For is it not true that what can happen will happen?
Quoting Blue Lux
But is being limited to human consciousness? How can we know that there is a being of anything other than consciousness, for is that not the 'method' by which anything supposedly 'other' materializes at all? Has this principle of Intentionality really provided a solution to the differences between idealism and realism? Is it true that there is any being outside of consciousness? Have the words merely changed? Is the dualism of the finite and infinite just a mutation? Intellectual subterfuge?
I don't think so. I think it is true that consciousness is consciousness only (of) something it is not and furthermore that human being is not being in relation to the world but being-IN-the-world. And this is Heidegger.
Actually, I am only defining what I mean by "independent of matter" -- not making an existence claim. Examples could be Platonic Ideas, the "intelligences" Aristotle proposed to explain circular motion, angels, God as Aristotle's self-thinking thought or Ibn Sina's Necessary being. None of these require matter to exist, though many interact with matter.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Of the ones I enumerated, I would only call Platonic Ideas "independent forms," and, as you know, I have no reason to think Platonic Ideas exist.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Aristotle's Self-Thinking Thought is a good example. Its sole activity is complete self-awareness. (I do not conceive of God as so isolated, but Aristotle did.) So, I would classify them as intentional, not material beings. Lacking matter, they have no potential to be other than what they are and so are immutable.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Our idea of a vase is a projection both the matter and form of a vase. We know that a vase shape is not a vase. Only that form in the right kind of matter is a vase. For example, forcing a gas or liquid into that shape would not make a vase. At the same time, the concept of a vase does not specify the kind of solid a vase is made of.
Also, it is an abstraction, not the actual shape of any one vase. The form of a Ming dynasty vase is not the form of an Art Deco vase, still both evoke the concept
Of course, real vases, the concept of vases and blueprints for vases are all related, but they are not the same. The form of any actual vase has detail abstracted away in the concept
So, there is no single entity, no reified form, that passes from plan to physical vase to concept.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Look at this in a different way. Food, people and a urine sample can al be said to be healthy, but they are said so in different, but related senses -- by an analogy of attribution. Food is healthy, not because it is alive and well, but because it contributes to the health of those who eat it. A urine sample is not not alive and well either, but it can be a sign of good health. The meaning of "health" in these three cases is not the same (not univocal), but it is not entirely unrelated either.
In the same way, the "form" in a plan is not the same as the form of a real vase, but, as food contributes to health, the plan contributes to the making of a vase. In the same way, the "form" in the concept is not the same as the form in the vase, but it is a sign of the form of the vase. Thus, we are not dealing with one form moving from plan to implementation to cognition, but with three, dynamically related, analogically predicated, kinds of form
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, I do insist on this because being mentally distinguished is not being physically separated. I have also explained it to the best of my ability, but you insist that I fit my explanation to your Platonic preconceptions. As with our discussion of hyle, my view is never going to fit your Platonism. All I can do is ask you to put aside your commitment to Platonism and consider the facts of the matter without preconception. If you cannot do that, we had best agree to disagree.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Hurray! That is why I am not a Platonist or a Cartesian dualist. Distinct concepts need not imply distinct "things" -- only different notes of intelligibility in the same thing -- like rubber and sphericity in a ball.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No. Even formally, your argument makes no sense. As long as A and B are not identical, there is no reason they can't have contrary attributes. Being rubber is not being spherical, but a ball can be both. Rubber is material, but it is a category error to ask what sphericity is made of. Still, there is no contradiction in the ball being both spherical and rubber.
The reason this works is because logical atomism is nonsense. There is not a one-to-one correspondence between independent concepts and the things that instantiate them. One thing can instantiate many logically distinct concepts.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
They need to be logically distinct. They need not be separable in reality.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, I am defining a term, not making an existence claim.
So, I am not "assuming" anything here. I am saying if something can exist independently of matter, then I'm going to call it "spiritual."
Forms, like the form of a vase or a mouse, have one defining characteristic: to inform the matter of the vase or the mouse. If there is not matter to be informed, then they cannot be what they are.
For some aspect of reality to be independent of matter (for me to call it "spiritual"), it must have at least one function that it can perform without matter. For example, if humans can know something independently of matter, they have a spiritual aspect. If everything we can do depends on matter, we have no spiritual aspect.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I said a determinate end at any point in time. That does not mean the process is over -- only that it is well-defined -- that it has a determine form in time -- and that that determinate form in time is its "end." Of course, if the process is part of a larger system, its end need not be the end of the whole. It can be a means to a higher-level purpose.
You named several natural processes you see as exhibiting purpose. Those processes depend on the operation of the laws of nature. If those laws did not operate in a determinate fashion, spiders could not construct webs to catch food. So, the determinate operation of the laws is means to ends such as you enumerated.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I gave it in my second post on this thread (the third post on page 1). "Logical Propagators" is printed in bold at the beginning of the section.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We have many reasons to think nature is ordered to ends, but I can't talk about everything at once. I barely squeezed my discussion of evolution into 35 journal pages. ("Mind or Randomness in Evolution," Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies (2010) XXII, 1/2, pp. 32-66 -- https://www.academia.edu/27797943/Mind_or_Randomness_in_Evolution).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, fictions are statements that do not reflect reality. Our understanding generally reflects reality, but always in an incomplete way. To be incomplete is not to be fictional. All abstractions are projections -- partial understandings, but they may still be adequate to our human needs.
I'd say that if something is not involved in actual operations, it is entirely potential. So, the fact that the threeness of H2O is not doing anything of its own is sufficient to deny it actuality until it actually informs a mind.
Quoting Andrew M
I only read this far:
Quoting Wayfarer
This seems to me to be confusing intelligibility with actual information. I follow Claude Shannon in defining information to be the reduction of possibility, and clarify by saying "logical possibility." Before we receive a bit in a message, the bit has been encoded and so in the real order it is actually a 1 or a 0, but to us, who have not yet received it, it is logically possible for it to be either. So, the kind of possibility that information reduces is logical, not physical.
That being so, actual information belongs to the logical, not the real order.
Of course, natural objects have the capacity to inform us. Encountering a horse elicits the idea
The case for coded messages having intrinsic information is even weaker. For example id we are using FM, we may decide that a frequency lower than the carrier is a 0 and a frequency higher is a 1, or we may decide the reverse. The signal has no idea what convention is being used, and so does not know if it means yes or no. The same is true of computer states. where not only is bit encoding arbitrary, but the order of bits in a byte or word is as well (are we to read bits right to left or left to right?).
So physical states can be intelligible, either intrinsically (as with horses) or conventionally (as with encoding). They are not, however, actual information until they act to reduce the logical possibilities open to some intellect.
No, they aren't. But when humans encounter or consider meanings which they find to be significant, they become emotionally attached to them. So the presence of these emotions is evidence that the humans involved have recognised meaning. OK? :chin:
i'm more subject-oriented -- trying to understand reality rather than theories and personalities. So, I know a fair amount about traditional logic (formal and material), science, the philosophy of nature, epistemology, the philosophy of mind, ontology and fundamental issues in ethics, and much less about speculative metaphysics, existentialism and post modernism.
Quoting Blue Lux
Excellent. The primary question in my mind is how adequate theories are to the full range of human experience.
Quoting Blue Lux
We need to be very careful in using "separate." I try to reserve the word for things that can be physically separated. Separate can also mean "dynamically independent" -- that the things we're talking about cannot interact. So, if you start by saying "consciousness is separate," you can create a lot of problems not found in reality. For example: (1) If there is no interaction between consciousness and the rest of existence, how can we know the rest of existence? (2) If they are separate, how our decisions have physical effects (the mind body problem. (3) Less obviously, we know ourselves in knowing the other. I only know that I can be aware because I am aware of objects. I only know that I can will because I will to do things. Thus, self knowledge is very problematic if our consciousness is separate.
A better term is "distinct." It means that the aspect of reality we are thinking about elicits a different concept than some other aspect of reality. The shape of a ball is distinct from its material, but shape and material are inseparable.
I see the questioning-being questioned polarity in terms of a subject-object relation. Unless I stand as a subject to some object, I can't question it. -- and that brings me back to the separation issue. Being in a subject-object relation is not being separate, but dynamically united. The subject knowing the object is identically the object being known by the subject. (These are just different ways of considering a single act)
Quoting Blue Lux
Yes, they are, but no, it's not transparent how. Aristotle discusses this in De Anima iii in one of the most difficult passages in Western philosophy. He concludes that knowing is the joint (simultaneous) actualization of two distinct potentials. Before we are aware of an object, it is intelligible (has the potential to be known), but not actually known. At the same time, we have the potential to be informed, but are not actually informed (about the object). In coming to know, both potentials are made actual by the same act: the object becomes actually known and the subject actually knows in virtue of a single act. Thus, subject and object are united in the act of knowing. That means there is no separation to be bridged by some speculation.
Quoting Blue Lux
Only post-Cartesian thought. Aristotelian and Thomistic thought has always seen Descartes as ignorant of the tradition and so confused. Doubt, in Descartes's sense, is not an act of intellect, but of will. Descartes writes that he was in his chamber, and so he knew his actual situation, but by an act of will, he chose to suspend belief in what he knew. As knowing is an act of intellect, not will, Descartes method did not challenge his knowledge, but his belief (his commitment to the truth of what he, in fact, knew.)
Modern philosophy wants to make knowledge a species of belief: "(causally) justified true belief," but it is not. I can know I'm in my room, as Descartes did, and choose not to believe it. I can go to a play or movie, know the events portrayed are fictional, but willingly suspend my disbelief to "enter into" the drama. In the primary sense, knowledge is an act of intellect, belief (and doubt), acts of will.
Quoting Blue Lux
Not to me. If I'm aware of seeing an apple, I have information on the apple as my intended object (the objective object), but the same act also informs me that I can see and be aware. Thus, I am also informed about myself (as the subjective object).
At the same time, the world is acting on and in me, informing me. If it did not, how could I be informed? The apple acts on me, penetrating me dynamically (existentially if you will). My representation of the apple is identically the apple informing me about itself. The representation is both mine and the apple's. The apple's modification of my sensory system is identically my sensory system being modified/informed by the apple. These are not two things, but the same thing being conceptualized in two different ways.
Quoting Blue Lux
Kant was hardly the first to recognize this. Aquinas is quite firm on the point.
Quoting Blue Lux
When we are conscious of something, we are in a state of partial identity with the object we are conscious of (as I explained above). Still, consciousness does not escape us. We are aware that we are conscious -- that we have the power to be aware. There is no more to consciousness than that. There is no hidden power to be discovered. Consciousness is just a contingent fact of reality, viz. that we can be subjects in relation to objects.
Quoting Blue Lux
Right. It is a power humans have.
Quoting Blue Lux
As Aristotle noted, things (substance = ousia) are ostensible unities. Systems with interdependent aspects. As we have finite minds and finite sensory capacity, we do not interact with everything equally, but focus on things we can point out (ostensible unities). The presence of physical things is mediated, and so more distant objects have less impact on us.
Quoting Blue Lux
I think this is just word play. We have finite minds, and so we cannot grasp infinity per se. If we cannot and do not grasp infinity, it can't be a reference point.
We come to an understanding of infinity by the via negativa -- we start with knowledge of limited being, and then deny or mentally remove the limits. This leaves us without any positive concept of the infinite -- only the idea of removing determinations. As determinations inform us, the result is information-free.
Quoting Blue Lux
Aristotle seems to have been the first to note that our intellect had to be determination free if it is to receive its determination from its objects. That does not make it non-being, but no determinate thing. It is not non-being because it is a power that is operative. If it were non-existent, if could not operate to make intelligibility actually understood.
This is what leads Aristotle to distinguish the active and passive intellects. The active intellect is our awareness -- our determinate power to make intelligibility actually known, The passive intellect is what is determination-free. It is our determination-free capacity to receive information.
Quoting Blue Lux
As I pointed out, Aristotelians never had this problem. We always saw knowing as the union of knower and known described above
Quoting Blue Lux
I have no idea what this can mean. To be is to be able to act in some way. Consciousness is not a thing because it does not stand alone, Human consciousness is a power discovered in the organic whole that is a human person. So, it it is founded on anything, it is founded on a web of dynamic relationships.
Quoting Blue Lux
No, all human knowledge is a projection (a dimensionally diminished map) of reality. To demand that it be exhaustive is to make Divine Omniscience the paradigm of human knowing. (I call this the "Omniscience Fallacy.") "Knowing" names something real humans actually do. The role of philosophy is not to deny that we do something we call "knowing," but to illuminate what is involved in doing it.
Quoting Blue Lux
I have no idea what primacy you are denying here. Of course we cannot know or be known if we do not exist, so existence is prior to knowing -- an insight that goes back at least to Augustine. Still, we cannot will if we don't know the existential situation, so clearly knowing is prior to willing -- something also seen by Augustine.
Quoting Blue Lux
We do not "know nothingness" because it has no intelligibility to be actualized by our awareness, and it is impossible for nothingness to be a foundation because it no power to support anything. We know being, and then, by negation, come to understand the absence of being. So, our notion of nothingness is quite derivative and absolutely dependent on first grasping the notion of existence. To say that it can be the foundation of anything is unreflective word play.
Quoting Blue Lux
I have no idea, again, what being an "absolute subject" could even mean. To be a subject is to be one pole in a subject-object relationship. To be an absolute subject, we would have to be an unrelated relatum. So, the idea is oxymoronic. We know ourselves in the act of thinking of the other.
Quoting Blue Lux
How can a finite mind know infinity? Only by first knowing what limits are, and then denying them. So, again, any knowledge of infinity is derivative on a prior knowledge of the finite.
Quoting Blue Lux
Yes, appearance does not hide, but reveals a things essence -- not exhaustively, but in part.
I have suggested elsewhere on this forum, that existence is the bare capacity to act (to do any act), and essence is the specification of a thing's ability to act. When something acts to reveal itself - to present an appearance -- it is doing one of its possible acts and so is informing us of part of what it can do, an aspect of its essence. It could act, and appear, forever, and never exhaust its repertoire of possible acts -- even if it is a finite being -- for it may it may continually find itself in new contexts and relationships. So, even the most humble thing can be a source of constant surprise.
Because existence is indeterminate -- the unspecified ability to act -- and essence is normally limiting (a finite being can do this, but not that), the essence and existence of finite beings is never the same, it is always distinct. Since an infinite being can do any logically possible act, its essence does not limit its existence, So, for an infinite being essence and existence are identical -- the unrestricted ability to act.
Quoting Blue Lux
Not at all. The active is what actualizes a potency, and the passive is what has its potency actualized. No potency can be self-actualizing because it does not yet exist. And, surely, the actualization of a potency is an act and so requires existence. There is nothing anthropomorphic in one thing having existence prior to another.
Quoting Blue Lux
If we were uncreated, we would never have come to be. As it is, we were potential and now are actual, actualized by beings that were fully operational when we were merely potential. Further, our next moment of existence is as potential as our first once was, and so we require on-going actualization (creatio continuo).
Quoting Blue Lux
This does a disservice to Descartes, who was a poor philosopher, but not that bad. The primacy of knowledge in Descartes is epistemological, not ontological. Cogito is not the dynamic origin of sum, but its sign.
Quoting Blue Lux
No. Definitely not. You can got to the store at a certain hour, and you can stay home at that same hour. You will not do both at that hour. You may do neither.
Yes, art my be redolent of emotional events that are very meaningful to the person. But, that meaning comes from within. It is not latent in the art. The art is not a carrier, but a trigger.
OK, so you do not believe that immaterial things exist. I assume also that you do not believe that they are real. So I have assigned the name "materialist" to you. But then you claimed that immaterial things do exist, in an inseparable union with material things. I've explained why this is illogical, and you have yet to reply to this problem. So I'm back to the designation of materialist. You really do not believe in immaterial things.
Quoting Dfpolis
Right, now consider what you've said here. Is the form of the vase, in the sense of the blueprint for it, or conception of it, not independent of the material vase? If you agree that it is independent, then you ought to allow that the form of the vase is separable from the material vase. And, as is evident in the case of blue prints, the form precedes the existence of the material vase, so the form is independent from the material vase, in an absolute sense. In no way is it dependent on the material vase. But, as a "cause" of existence of the material vase, we must assign to this independent form some sort of actuality, real existence.
Quoting Dfpolis
I agree that the form which is the plan for the vase is not the same as the form which is in the material vase, because it does not contain the accidents which are proper to the material existence of a vase. Clearly we cannot say that the two distinct "forms" of the vase, the independent immaterial form, and the one which is united to the matter are "the same" in a strict sense as required by the law of identity, unless we can demonstrate continuity of the form, and show that being united to matter is just a change.. But this is not what is at issue here. The question is whether the form can exist independently of the material thing, Clearly it does, in the case of the plan for the thing. And, since the existence of this plan or form is supported by the human mind and soul (as attributes), which are elements of spirituality (and you assume these to be true independent, immaterial existents), then why is not the independent form an immaterial existent?
Quoting Dfpolis
I've put that commitment to Platonism aside, and I've told you the logical problem with your description, irrelevant of any Platonism. It is because of this logical problem, which you still have not addressed, that I cannot accept your position.. If two things (such as matter and form) are united in such a way that it is impossible to separate them, then your claim that they are distinct things is invalid. There is only one unit here, a material entity, and your claim that there is matter and form is unjustified because one cannot be separated from the other.
Quoting Dfpolis
As I said, if your logical principle is not supported by reality, then all you have is fiction. Why would I adopt, as an ontological principle, a designated fiction, something which is not only unsupported by observable reality, but stated to be impossible in reality? That would be ridiculous.
Quoting Dfpolis
There is no such thing as a point in time. That would make time discontinuous, but time is continuous. By the time you say "now", it is already a later time. If your "determinate end", or "well-defined" process, requires a point in time, then you need to reconsider.
Quoting Dfpolis
Correct, and that was my point. You claim that matter and form are logically separable, but not separable in reality. Therefore your separation of a material object into matter and form is pure fiction. This is why, even when I put aside any form of Platonism, I cannot accept your principles You insist that your separation of matter and form is fictional. So we're left with one thing, the material object. If you fess up to your materialism, and argue materialism, without the claim that there is something immaterial united to the material object, then you'd have a more consistent argument and a better chance at convincing me.
Quoting Dfpolis
I don't see how your logical propagator argument can be used to conclude that if there is order then there is intentionality. You need to demonstrate that there cannot be order without an end. Your propagator argument seems to assume that if there is an end there is intentionality, but it doesn't account for the problem which I brought to your intention, that order doesn't necessitate the conclusion of an end.
After my previous experience with you, and reading this response, I have decided that you are either arguing in bad faith or are constitutionally incapable of grasping the points I am making. In either case, it is my prudential judgement that responding to you further is a waste of my valuable time.
Quoting Blue Lux
If this were so, then we would be unaware that we are conscious of the other.
But Shannon's definition of 'information' was wholly and solely concerned with what is required to encode and transmit information. And the same can be said about most of the discussion about information in computer science and information technology. I don't think Shannon has anything like a general definition of information outside that context, and I don't know if it is possible to arrive at one, as the term itself is polysemic, i.e. its meaning varies, depending on the context and intention.
I know there is a tendency to say that 'information' can now be designated as a kind of explanatory sub-stratum underlying life, the universe and everything. On the one hand, this is typical of the approach of systems theory and semiotics. But the fact that biological systems encode and transmit information has also been used by intelligent design advocates as an argument for an originating intelligence (summarised here.)
In any case, the thread that the above quote was taken from was concerned with a metaphysical question, not a question about information science as such. The argument revolves around the idea that the same information can be represented in a variety of ways. On that basis, I argue that the information and the physical representation are separable - because you can exactly specify the content of some proposition, whilst varying the manner and medium of its representation. Rational intelligence is what enables the human mind to do this, and we do it quite instinctively, taking it for granted in some sense. But the faculty which does this, is not itself physical - in fact, it seems closely related to Aristotle's intuition of the 'active intellect'.
So as that is not a physical capability, then it suggests a form of dualism, which is close in some respects to hylomorphic (matter-form) dualism. It was in that context that I discovered the Brennan quote on 'sensible and intelligible form' that we have previously discussed.
As far as I'm concerned, mine is a novel metaphysical argument, although I would be happy to be proven wrong in this regard.
Yes, I agree that Shannon was concerned with data transmission. That does not mean that, having abstracted a concept of information, that definition expressing that concept is inapplicable to other realms of discourse. If I actually inform you that your house is on fire, then the possibility that it is not on fire is eliminated, and so what is logically possible to you is reduced. This is a consequence of the Principle of Excluded Middle, which may be thought of as justifying logical possibility, and the Principle of Contradiction, that reduces it once we are informed.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, most terms can be analogously predicated. The question is: Is being polysemic relevant here? When Landauer said ""whenever we find information, we find it inscribed or encoded somehow in a physical medium of whatever kind," was he using "information" in a different sense? I do not see that he was. He, like Shannon, is discussing encoded information. If you think they mean different things, please say what differences you see.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
I am familiar with ID, and don't think that it's a cogent attack on evolution. On the other hand, naturalists are certainly wrong in saying that evolution shows that nature is mindlessly random or that order can emerge from ontologically random processes. I take a middle ground in my paper "Mind or Randomness in Evolution," Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies (2010) XXII, 1/2, pp. 32-66 (https://www.academia.edu/27797943/Mind_or_Randomness_in_Evolution).
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree: it can be.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, but the logical independence of intellectual (intentional) and physical operations does not justify substance dualism a la Descartes. There is no reason a unified human person cannot act both intentionally and physically.
Quoting Wayfarer
I do not recall seeing the independence of information on media used in this kind of complete argument previously, although many people, including me, have pointed out that information is independent of medium.
Again he is using 'information' in terms specific to 'information science' whereas I'm considering it in a broader and more philosophical sense and in relation to the metaphysics of meaning rather than information science as such.
The example I gave in the OP was that of the transmission of a single item of information across different kinds of media - semaphore, morse code, and written text. My argument is that the fact that the same information can be represented in such vastly different ways, says something very important about the nature of abstraction and representation, and indeed reason, which is generally taken for granted or not noticed.
This is an understanding that is still preserved in Neo-Thomism; a Maritain essay I have been referring to recently articulates this point, when he says 'what the Empiricist speaks of and describes as "sense-knowledge" is not exactly sense-knowledge, but sense-knowledge plus unconsciously introduced intellective ingredients; sense-knowledge in which he has made room for reason without recognizing it.'
This 'extra ingredient' is itself reason, which is not explained by science, but which science relies on. It is nowadays almost universally assumed that science understands the origin of reason in evolutionary terms but in my view, this trivialises reason by reducing it to biology (a point which is central to Thomas Nagel's argument in his essays in The Last Word as well as in his most recent book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False .)
Quoting Dfpolis
But that is the main point of contention between naturalism and its critics. In other words, to accept the truth of that, is to reject naturalism. (Again, Nagel questions naturalism's claims in this regard whilst not accepting a necessarily theistic alternative; he proposes a kind of naturalistic teleology, although that is enough for the mainstream to categorise him alongside with young-earth creationism :-) )
Quoting Dfpolis
I think the problem with Descartes' dualism is that it incorrectly reifies or "objectifies" the "thinking subject". This leads directly to Gilbert Ryle's "ghost in the machine" criticism and has become a fundamental component of modern materialism, by depicting the nature of mind in a way that is impossible to defend. This criticism of Descartes is spelt out in Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences. But nevertheless, my view is that mind/body or mental/physical is a real duality so I'm a lot nearer to dualism than the alternatives.
But that is still a dualistic way of expressing it. The scientific question is how to actually model that functional unity ... which is based on some essential distinction between the informational and material aspects of being.
For what it's worth, I say this has been answered in the life sciences by biosemiotics. Howard Pattee's epistemic cut and Stan Salthe's infodynamics are formal models of how information can constrain material dissipation or instability. We actually have physical theories about the mechanism which produces the functional unity.
Quoting Wayfarer
But also, these are just different ways of spelling out some word. So the analysis has to wind up back at the question of how human speech functions as a constraint on conceptual uncertainty.
Semiotics is about the interpretation of marks. So "information" in the widest sense is about both the interpretation and the marks together - the states of meaning that arise when anchored to some syntactical constraint. A definite physical mark - like a spoken word - is meant, by learnt habit, to constrain the open freedom of thought and experience to some particular state of interpretation.
The Shannon thing is noting that this is what is going on and then boiling it down to discover the physical limit of syntactical constraint itself. So given that any semantics depends on material marks - meaningfulness couldn't exist except to the degree that possible interpretations are actually limited by something "solid" - Shannon asks what is the smallest possible definite physical mark. And the general answer is a bit.
That analysis thus zeroes in on the point at which information and matter can physically connect. It arrives at the level of the mediating sign - the bit that stands between the world and its interpretation.
So it is confused to talk about a "single item of information" being transmitted in different mediums. If these are all just different physical ways of saying the same thing, then it comes back to different ways of "uttering that word". It is thus "uttering words" that is the issue in hand. So how do words stand for ideas? Or rather - rejecting this representationalism - how do words function as signs? As physical marks, that can be intentionally expressed, how do they constrain states of conception to make them just about "some single item"?
Quoting Wayfarer
Biology ain't trivial. It is amazing complexity.
But anyway, reason is explained by the evolution of grammar. The habit of making statements with a causal organisation - a subject/verb/object structure - imposes logical constraint on the forming of states of conception.
Animals can abstract or generalise. That is what brains are already evolved to do. See the patterns that connect the instances. But with language and its syntactical form - one that embeds a generic cause and effect story of who did what to whom - humans developed a new way to constrain and organise the brain's conceptual abilities. We could learn to construct rational narratives that fit the world into some modelled chain of unfolding events.
So psychological science can explain the evolution of reason. Animals already generalise. Language constrains that holistic form of conception to a linear or mechanical narrative. Life gets squeezed into chains of words. Eventually that mechanical or reductionist narrative form became completely expressed itself as the new habits of maths and logic. Grammar was generalised or abstracted itself. A neat culmination of a powerful new informational trick.
This does not tell me that, or why, Shannon's definition of information does not apply. What specific difference in meaning do you see? Please remember that, as I have pointed out, the possibility by information is logical, not physical, possibility and logical possibility belongs to the order of reason.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree
quote="Wayfarer;209098"]But that is the main point of contention between naturalism and its critics. In other words, to accept the truth of that, is to reject naturalism[/quote]
That is why the subtitle of my book is The Irrationality of Naturalism,
Quoting Wayfarer
As always, the devil is in the details. As a moderate realist, I agree that there is a foundation in reality for the concepts of
I reject Descartes's opposition of mind and body. Obviously, the mind is dependent upon, but not fully explained by, the brain. So, the mind is partially of the body. Still, the brain's neural processing capabilities are only one subsystem of the mind. The other, which I call "the intentional subsystem" provides awareness and direction -- intellect and will.
Yes, and inescapably so, because we have two orthogonal (non-overlapping) concepts. Such concepts cannot both indicate the same aspect of reality -- the same notes of intelligibility.
Quoting apokrisis
"Scientific" in the old sense that includes philosophical analysis, not in the modern sense of being in the domain of natural science. My discussion ot the fundamental abstraction shows why this is so.
That said, I do have a model, discussed at length in my book, and in more popular form in my video "#21 The Two Subsystem Mind" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWuS8DXc1l0).
Quoting apokrisis
But intellect and will do far more than "constrain material dissipation or instability." They have the power to actualize intelligibility and to make one of a number of equally possible alternatives actual while reducing the others to impossibility.
Quoting apokrisis
No, they are not. The are ways of encoding the same information in irreducibly different media -- thus showing that information is invariant with respect to differences in the physical properties of its material substrate.
Quoting apokrisis
This is just backwards. Thought is temporally and logically prior to its linguistic expression. If this were not so, we would never have the experience of knowing what we mean, but not finding the right words to express it. If we only thought in terms of existing language, we would never need to coin new words. And so, language itself would never have come into existence -- for it began when our ancestors first expressed their thought in protowords and found them understood.
Quoting apokrisis
...
Quoting apokrisis
And where does thought not expressed in marks or sounds fit into your theory? I have just shown its priority, but it finds no place in your model.
Quoting apokrisis
By convention.
Quoting apokrisis
No one is denying that. Still, it is only biology, and so it has noting to say about thought per se -- and neither does semiotics, which assumes the capacity to interpret, to know concepts and judgements.
Quoting apokrisis
Again, just backward of what history and careful reflection show. As I have shown in other posts, the cupola "is" expresses our awareness of the identity of the source of the linked concepts.
Quoting apokrisis
This is confused. Animals and neural nets can generalize by association. Forming associations is not abstracting. Generalization is a kind of unconscious induction on the Hume-Mill model -- effectively assuming that other instances will be like the ones we've already encountered. Abstraction is conceptual and so never unconscious, and it does not generalize by adding the assumption of similarity, but by subtracting irrelevant notes of intelligibility. See my video "#35 Induction and Abstraction" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvqcL9LILiA).
Quoting apokrisis
Please! Reason requires consciousness -- almost universally recognized as the "Hard Problem," and one shown by Dennett to have no solution on naturalistic assumptions.
Quoting apokrisis
This is entirely inadequate. If math we just a habit, then 2+2=4 would be true usually and occasionally wrong. In fact, 2+2=4 always and everywhere. If logic were only a habit, there would be no fundamental reason why you not both exist and not exist at one and the same time in one and the same way.
As I have said many times, 'the law of the excluded middle' didn't come into existence with h. sapiens. What evolved was the capacity to understand such principles, and it was at that point that h. sapiens began to 'transcend the biological' in some sense. That doesn't mean we don't bleed, feed, breed, etc. But it means that we're also in some profound sense more than just that. Be careful you don't totally cauterize the sense of wonder :-)
Quoting apokrisis
But that is not the reason that I say that biological reductionism trivialises reason. I'm not saying biology is trivial. The reason is, that viewing reason as an outcome of biology reduces it to a function of survival - which is the only criterion that "makes sense" from a biologists perspective. Which species survive and proliferate and evolve is the whole subject of biological evolution. But to then say that reason (language, abstract thought) can be understood in evolutionary terms reduces it to the functional equivalent of an evolutionary adaption. As Leon Wieseltier says in his review of Dennett's Breaking the Spell
Which, in turn, is the basis of the 'argument from reason' and Plantinga's 'evolutionary argument against naturalism' and is also a theme in those books of Nagel's that I mentioned. (Particularly his essay Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion.)
Quoting apokrisis
What I mean is, the same proposition, idea, formula, or whatever, can be represented in different symbolic systems, and in different media - digital, analog or even semaphore. I can't see anything confused about that. What I'm arguing is that while in each case the representation is physical, the capacity to understand and interpret the meaning of those signs can't be understood in physical terms. What is doing that, what has that capacity, is not itself physical.
But what does orthogonality itself mean? They are two non-overlapping directions branching from some common origin.
So that is the secret here. If we track back from both directions - the informational and the material - we arrive at their fundamental hinge point.
This is what physics is doing in its fundamental Planck-scale way. It is showing the hinge point at which informational constraint and material uncertainty begin their division. We can measure information and entropy as two sides of the one coin.
As it happens, biophysics is now doing the same thing for life and mind. The physics of the quasi-classical nanoscale - at least in the special circumstance of "a watery world of watery temperature" - shows the same convergence between information and entropy for the chemically dissipative processes that make life possible.
So this is the unification trick. Finding the scale at which information and entropy are freely inter-convertible. That is what then grounds both their separateness and ability to connect.
Talking about their orthogonality is one thing. But talking about their connection has been the missing piece of the scientific puzzle. That lack of a physicalist explanation has been the source of the mind/body dilemma.
Quoting Dfpolis
What is constraint except the actualising of some concrete possibility via the suppression of all other alternatives?
So intellect and will are just names that you give to the basic principle of informational or semiotic constraint once it has become internalised as some conceptualised selfhood in a highly complex social and biological organism.
Quoting Dfpolis
The old canard. Sure, fully articulated thoughts take time to form. First comes some vague inkling of wanting to begin to express the germ of an idea - a point of view. Then - like all motor acts - the full expression has to take concrete shape by being passed along a hierarchy of increasingly specified motor areas. The motor image has to become fleshed out in all its exact detail - the precise timings of every muscle twitch, the advance warning of how it will even feel as it happens.
And then when thinking in the privacy of our own heads, we don't actually need to speak out loud. Much of the intellectual work is already done as soon as we have that pre-motor stage of development. The inner voice may mumble - and stopping to listen to it can be key in seeing that what we meant to say was either pretty right or probably a bit wrong. Try again. But also we can skip the overt verbalisation if we are skating along from one general readiness to launch into a sentence to the next. Enough of the work gets done flicking across the starting points.
So you want to make this a case of either/or. Either thought leads to speech or speech leads to thought.
The neurobiology of this is in fact always far more complicated and entwined. But at the general level I am addressing the issue, Homo sapiens is all about the evolution of a new grammatical semiotic habit.
Animals think in a wordless fashion. Then "thought" is utterly transformed in humans by this new trick of narratisation.
Quoting Dfpolis
Huh? The point about constraints are they limit creative freedoms. But creative freedoms still fundamentally exist. The rules set up the game. Making up new rules or rule extensions can be part of that game.
Semiotics - if you follow the Peircean model - is inherently an open story. It is all about recursion and thus hierarchical development. You can develop as much complexity or intricacy as the situation demands.
Quoting Dfpolis
In your dreams you have. :)
Quoting Dfpolis
Get it right. Generalisation is the induction from the particular to the general. For an associative network to achieve that, it has to develop a hierarchical structure.
I don't understand this division between intentional acts and physical acts. Isn't it the case that many physical acts are intentional? And, aren't all intentional acts physical because we cannot conceive of non-physical activity? How could an act be non-physical? Don't you find this distinction to be very impractical?
When I say that two concepts are orthogonal, I mean that they do not share notes of intelligibility. So, they are not species of a single genus. If there is a common origin it is the null concept -- i.e. ignorance.
Quoting apokrisis
Not in terms of intelligibility which has to do with essence (specification). What thye have in common is existence, and we can trace it to God as its Source.
Quoting apokrisis
There is no reason to think that things are ontologically indeterminate at Plank scales, only that our concepts break down -- which is an epistemological, not an ontological, problem.
Quoting apokrisis
Actually we can't measure anything -- that is the epistemological problem.
Quoting apokrisis
No, it's not. There is no naturalistic model of consciousness and no hint of one.
Quoting apokrisis
You are confusing information as a logical concept with entropy which is a property of physical states. Entropy does not need to be known to play its role. information does. The fact that they share a common mathematical framework does not make them any more identical than apples and oranges. They also share a common math -- we can count them both.
Quoting apokrisis
No. Thinking that there is a physicalist explanation is the fundamental error -- as I showed in my discussion of the fundamental abstraction.
Quoting apokrisis
Constraint is not actualization. It is the reduction of (physical - not logical) possibility.
Quoting apokrisis
No, they are not. They do different things. So the difference here is ontological, not semantic.
Quoting apokrisis
If thoughts took a nanosecond or an eon to form the problem would be the same. We can have determinate ideas for which there are no words. That is why language grows. New concepts require new words.
Quoting apokrisis
Ideogenesis is not a "motor act." It is the actualization of intelligibility. No movement can explain it. I suggest you read Dennett's misnamed Consciousness Explained. In it he shows why naturalistic assumptions are incompatible with the data of consciousness -- effectively falsifying naturalism wrt mind.
Quoting apokrisis
Nor do we need to "speak" to ourselves. That is why we can have thoughts we lack the words to express.
Quoting apokrisis
Mumbling is having the words, but not enunciating them clearly. It does not explain lacking the words.
Quoting apokrisis
No. I'm pointing out which is more fundamental. Sure there are cases where words spark thought -- but they are derivative, not fundamental.
Quoting apokrisis
Thank you for the faith claim.
Quoting apokrisis
Read what you wrote. If the rules constrain thought, we are constrained from making up new rules. So your theory is incoherent.
Quoting apokrisis
I do not need to convince you. I only need to make a sound case.
Quoting apokrisis
So how does that make it the same as abstraction -- which requires awareness?
The motivation for a physical act is not the act. Some physical acts are intentionally motivated, others are not. The difference is that intentional acts is characterized by "aboutness." They are about something beyond themselves -- a goal to be attained or hoped for, something we know or believe and so on. Physical acts are characterized by motion and change: parts moving and transforming into other parts.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We cannotimagine not physical activity. We have no trouble conceiving it. I know pi is an irrational number. There is no change involved in my knowing it per se. Any change is only accidentally associated with it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
By not involving change in any essential way.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No.
The LEM really only "exists" as part of a system of thought - the three laws of thought, indeed. And even within logic - as Peirce pointed out - the LEM fails to apply to absolute generality. It's "existence" is parasitic on the principle of identity, or the "reality" of individuated particulars.
If you do share the view that individuation is always contextual - the big theme of Buddhist metaphysics? - then you would likely be keener to stress the socially constructed aspect of the LEM, not its Platonic reality.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, the fact that "reason" had its genesis in evolutionary functionality doesn't really make it any less of a wonder how it has continued to evolve through human culture.
One view is that if mechanical reasoning goes to its own evolutionary limit, that will be expressed in the coming Singularity - the triumph of the age of machine intelligence. So when it comes to the rational elegance of the algorithm, be careful of what you wish for. :)
Of course, my own biosemiotic approach offers the argument against that. Intelligence remains something more organismal. But anyway, I think you are too quick to dismiss biology as "mere machinery" and so that is why you are always looking for something more significant about life.
Quoting Wayfarer
Again, I think the problem is in calling it "the one thing" as if it were an individuated object. That is where the conflation lies.
A proposition is just some arrangement of words - a sequence of scribbles on a page. And a sentence is marked as starting at the capital letter, stopping at the fullstop. So using an understanding of correct punctuation, we can point to "an item" as if it were an intellectual object.
But that is just pointing at the sign, the marks, the syntax! And what you are interested in is the semantics, the interpretation, the understandings the marks are meant to anchor.
Which is where I say that is all about the contextual constraint of uncertainty. This is the opposite of a concrete object way of thinking.
The meaning of a proposition isn't IN the words being used. Our understanding of what is being proposed is produced by the way we restrict our thoughts in some effective and functional fashion. Seen in a certain contextual light, the collection of marks could seem to stand for some state of affairs.
Uncertainty remains. But what is for sure is how many alternative or contradictory readings we have managed to exclude. Most of the semantic work is about information reduction - how much of the world and its infinite possibilities you can manage to ignore.
So the written or spoken words are quite concrete and definite objects of the physical world. You can point to them, record them, play them back later, translate them into any other equivalent code.
But that is just the syntax - the signs formed to anchor your habits of interpretation.
Interpretance itself is the semantic part of the equation. And it does not exist in the way of a concrete object but as an active state of constraint on uncertainty. It is not a item to be counted one by one. Every sign could have any number of interpretations, depending on what point of view you bring.
Words tend towards limited interpretations because that is how a common language works. We need to learn the same interpretative habits so we can be largely as "one mind" within our culture. But constraint is what produces individuation. And it is a living pragmatic thing.
This leads to the information theoretic definition of information as "mutual information", or other measures where it is the number of bits discarded, or possibilities that are suppressed, which creates semantic weight.
I know a cat is a cat not just because it is cat-like in some Platonic generic sense, but because I am also so sure it isn't anything else in the possible universe. The number of other possibilities I've excluded add to the Bayesian conclusion that it can only be a cat.
As usual, this is the way the brain actually functions. Attention gets focused on ideas by inhibiting every other competing possibility. And this is easy enough to demonstrate through experiment. Thinking about one thing makes the alternatives less accessible for a while.
Quoting Wayfarer
If science can see matter and information as two faces of the same physics, then why can't it understand even interpretation as a physical act?
We know neurons are doing informational things when they fire. We know they are forming a living model of their world.
Perhaps what we - at the general cultural level - lack is then a way to picture in our heads how informational modelling winds up "feeling like something".
And yet the irony there is we are happy to picture little atoms bumping about and thinking we actually understand "material being" when doing that. Any physicists will say, stop right there. We really have no idea why matter should "be like matter". Sure, we have the equations that work to produce a modelled understanding in terms of numbers that will show up on dials. But we are still stuck at the level of the phenomenal - the umwelt of the scientist.
So my approach is based on accepting that we are only ever going to be modelling - whether talking about matter or mind. The aim becomes to have a coherent physicalist account that is large enough to incorporate both in formal manner.
Because it's not something describable in physical terms. What if it's 'meaning all the way down'? Even physics turns out to be a mathematical model - and where does the maths reside? What if the Universe is not fundamentally physical in nature? It seems to be pointing in that direction if you ask me.
Quoting apokrisis
Buddhism doesn't concern itself with the origin of everything but with the origin of dukkha. That is part of the genius of Buddhism. But it's not entirely relevant in the context of Western culture, as our cultural dialectic grew up very differently to that. I mean, had a Buddhist culture given rise to modern science, then it might have taken a totally different direction to the way it's developed in Western culture (although that is of course a huge digression and I don't propose we explore it here.)
Quoting apokrisis
And I don't want to say that you're wrong. You approach the subject through a scientific and bio-engineering perspective - as you say! And I've learned a lot of interesting things from it. Your approach is concerned with modelling, with understanding life and mind from the perspective of systems science, evolutionary biology and so on. But my overall philosophy - my 'meta-philosophy' if you like - is in a different kind of register. It is concerned with what in Indian thinking is called 'vimukti' which is another one of those hard-to-translate terms. But I say there are analogies to that in the Western philosophical tradition, so that's what I'm trying to pursue. I get that not everyone (in fact hardly anyone) is on board with that, which why I often think I should refrain from posting here. (But if there's one thing I've always been, it's talkative. I have trouble shutting up. )
- Because it's not something describable in physical terms.
We have very good evolution simulators out there, which you can even run on your cellphone. You can easily see your critters learning to interpret different stimulus in different manners, creating 'meaning' from the interaction with the world.
Evolv.io was really limited, but its the one coming up to mind right now.
- Even physics turns out to be a mathematical model - and where does the maths reside?
This meme need to stop. It lasted long enough already.
- Perhaps what we - at the general cultural level - lack is then a way to picture in our heads how informational modelling winds up "feeling like something".
There is that. As of yet, talk about qualia are always just 'making it up as they go along', even if it is very well informed or sophisticated. We havent decided yet how to talk about it, really.
There is also that, beyond what you put your finger on, we live in an intellectual culture which, for a large part, has decided that since science had not yet said much about qualia, its chance had come and gone, and every other option was equally valid. 60 years of neuroscience and you still dont have an answer as to how neurons firing could produce a 3 dimensional field of view inside the mushy confines of a wet lump of flesh? Then I guess it could be panpsychism? Quantum particules being created in the synaptic cleft? Access to the realm of pure Ideas?
And then there is simply misinformation, or a lack of curiosity about things which might contradict us. While philosophers are still stuck working out colour ontology, scientists and corporate interest have been busy working out the hardware part of colour perception. We can now identify people who have atypical perceptions, even to the point of being able to say that someone can perceive a colour we cant. We can correct many of these atypical situations and give to people colour perceptions they never had before, and know that these corrections bring them closer to typical perception. Slowly but surely, we are figuring out the terms of this new domain, and these terms are purely scientific in nature.
As for my remark ‘not describable in physical terms’ - what I was referring to, is language generally, or symbolic communication, generally. Even to discuss those, requires introduction of ideas from semiotics and so on, as Apokrisis often points out. I think we make a fairly lazy assumption that ‘science has this worked out’, which I question. That is what Thomas Nagel’s ‘Mind and Cosmos’ addresses.
Could you give me an example of a human physical act which is not about something else? I don't think there is such a thing, because it seems like this would be a completely random act with no reason for it.
Quoting Dfpolis
If there is an "act" which does not involve change in any essential way, how can this be said to be an "act" without contradiction? To act is to do something, and this implies change. "Act" requires change, and therefore "change" is essential to the definition of "act".
Take your example, "I know pi is an irrational number". Unless there is a change between the state of not knowing that pi is an irrational number, and knowing that pi is an irrational number, which is essential to the difference between these two, we cannot say that knowing pi as an irrational number, is an act. If there is no change which is essential to this so-called "act", then it is not an act at all, but something passive.
'Linked to' is not 'the same as'. And I don't recall having appealed to Aristotle as such. I mentioned a forum post on hylomorphic dualism which I will mention again, below.
Quoting ?????????????
I'm interested in Aristotle's idea of 'the active intellect' which is where he speaks of 'nous'. I'm not claiming great knowledge of Aristotle but I notice the wikipedia entry on it says that Aristotle's passage on the 'active intellect' is one of the most highly-studied passages in all philosophy. In any case, what 'the soul' perceives are 'the forms'; individuals are a combination of matter and form (hyle-morphe) where 'the matter' is received by the sensory aspect, and 'the form' perceived by 'the rational intellect' which is made explicit in later Thomist philosophy (as per this blog post.) So what interests me in this, is the way that it suggests that the intellect brings together or synthesises the intellectual (category, kind, number and so on) and the perceptual or sensible, in the act of knowing. It is that synthesizing capability which I believe is transcendent to the physical (and which might also be the subject of the well-known issue of the 'binding problem' and not co-incidentally Kant's 'transcendental unity of apperception'.)
Do you think it would occur to Aristotle to say that the Universe was 'self-organising' in the way that us moderns think? As I understand it, and again granted my knowledge of Aristotle is scanty, he nevertheless believed that there was a 'prime mover' which was the source of the being of all creatures. This was, of course, to be much later incorporated with Christian theology by Aquinas and others in the form of the Christian doctrine of God - whether Aristotle himself would have thought about it in those terms is obviously impossible to say, as he preceded it. But I think it is safe to say that his overall view is worlds apart from contemporary materialism. Yes, he was more robustly empirical than his teacher - of that there is no doubt - but he nevertheless believed that 'the forms' were in some sense transcendent, even if they were only ever known when they were manifested in concrete individuals.
As for the ‘stuff that I am trying to dissociate from matter’ - my argument is simply for the real nature of abstracts. I'm arguing that they’re not a product of the individual mind, but can only be perceived by a mind - so, they're ‘mental objects’. This is a generally ‘platonist’ [small p] argument, as platonist philosophy maintains the reality of abstract objects. So the basic point I’m making is that (for instance) 'the number seven' is not a physical object, but is nevertheless real and invariant for any intelligence capable of counting. The numeral or symbol 7 is a physical thing - you can carve it, draw it, write it or whatever - but what is being denoted by the symbol is a quantity which is only perceptible by a mind. Hence, an 'intellectual object'. As I have pointed out in many posts, this fact about mathematical platonism is an acknowledged problem for materialism (as the SEP article on mathematical platonism says), because it shows there are is a whole class of entities - such as real numbers - that are real but not corporeal. I say that they comprise the elements or constituents of rational thought, so they are constitutive of our understanding of reality. But they're not objectively real - they transcend the division of subject and object, in some important sense. But we don't notice that, because we're always 'looking through them' rather than at them. They are, in some fundamental sense, 'too near for us to grasp.'
Have a listen to about 3 minutes of this lecture.
That's it, in a nutshell. I'm basically just arguing this.
Moving my leg is a physical act. It may or may not serve a purpose It may doe example be the result of a spasm. Bit, even if it did serve a purpose, that would not make it an intentional act in the sense Im using the term. Why? Because there is no need to include the purpose served in defining the act. It is the local motion of a lower extremity -- perhaps specified by the time and place of occurrence. On the other hand, you cannot define a belief or a hope without saying what is believed or hoped for..
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, in general act does not imply change. My thinking
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Note that you had to add something the was not only outside of the act of knowing, but its contrary to knowing in trying to make your point. Nothing intrinsically includes its contrary. So, your argument fails. Being aware is an act that involves no intrinsic change.
I take no credit for it. It is a standard Scholastic/Thomist position.
Quoting tim wood
No, the rock could not endure absent its matter. If you destroyed its matter, the rock would no longer endure.
Quoting tim wood
I would call it "a substance" or "a thing" because it is an ostensible unity. I generally say "aspect" when I'm talking about realities that are not things.
Quoting tim wood
The concept
Quoting tim wood
One can have spiritual endurance. Still, that is because of trials found in the material world. It is maintaining one's spiritual commitments in the face of trial.
According to the traditional metaphysics, rocks (etc) are the lowest link in the chain of being, i.e. possess the lowest 'degree of reality'. They're real, but only in an inferior, derivative or secondary sense. Not that I think there was a lot of thought given to the question - there might have been, but again I'm no classics scholar - but it was just assumed that the sensible or material domain was the furthest removed from the Source (whether conceived as the Neoplatonic One or the biblical Creator).
This is quaintly depicted in a medieval woodcut:
What I believe happened in late medieval and early modern thinking was that this underlying hierarchical cosmology was overturned (or 'flattened out') by various developments in Western culture - principally by the ascendancy of the medieval nominalists (Bacon and Ockham notable among them) who were among the forerunners of modern scientific method. The other, related development was Duns Scotus' declaration of the 'univocity of being', which undermined the notion that there could be, in fact, 'degrees of reality', or that the way in which 'God' existed, was different to the way in which 'creatures' existed. (This development has been documented at length by a philosophical/historical school called Radical Orthodoxy 1.)
So the upshot was that the hierarchical cosmology of the so-called 'great chain of being' more or less died out in Western thought or at any rate, was assumed to have been superseded (although in my view, it was often not deeply understood by those who rejected it. These ideas are discussed at length in books including The Theological Origins of Modernity M A Gillespie 2 and A Secular Age, Charles Taylor, among others. But it's a deep study. )
So to answer the original question as to the sense in which stones exist: I think the pre-modern view can be summed up with reference to an aphorism from the medieval theologian Meister Eckhardt, who said that 'creatures' (meaning, 'created things') are 'mere nothings'. That means, they have no intrinsic reality - they are created and sustained in being by God who at this point in history, was not the remote clockwork engineer of later deism but remained omnipresent. (There's an echo of this idea in Bishop Berkeley for whom 'esse est percipe' - things were real by virtue of being perceived, with the principal perceiver being the Divine Intellect.) However, beings (specifically, human beings) are of a higher order than things, as per the ladder analogy, situated somewhere between beasts and angels, owing to their status as 'imago dei' (although in the absence of belief we are generally now generally relegated to the animal kingdom which again is a consequence of the 'flattening' of our worldview.)
Whereas with the Enlightenment and the ascendancy of science, not only was the hierarchical cosmology (which had been symbolically represented in the Ptolemaic/Aristotelian cosmology) abandoned but what had been regarded as the least real aspect of the entire hierarchy (namely, matter) was promoted to being the only real substance in a clockwork Universe - although that too has now arguably fallen out of favour.
Firstly that is explicitly the ladder of intellect, not the ladder of reality, and secondly the fact that a stone is at the bottom of the hierarchy does not necessarily entail that matter would be; you will need additional evidence to support that contention.
You already said, you are using the word "intention" to refer to an act which is "about" something else. even the spasm in your leg is about something else, and is therefore intentional. Just because you can describe the action as a "local motion of a lower extremity" without referring to what the motion was about, doesn't mean that it wasn't an intentional act.
This is why I think your distinction between intentional act and physical act is meaningless. We can describe any intentional act as a physical act, simply by excluding the aboutness from the description. This is what physicalists, materialist, and determinists do, they exclude intention from the description of the act, and from that description without intention, they claim intention is irrelevant to the act. Because they can describe the act without referring to the intention behind the act, they say intention is irrelevant to the act. So your position is a little more advanced than this, recognizing the importance of intention. But your division between intentional act and physical act is completely arbitrary, depending on how one chooses to describe any particular act. One might not recognize that there is intention behind an act and so leave it out of the description. One might not know the particular intention behind a specific act, and so leave it out of the description. Or, a person like a physicalist might simply choose to leave intention out of the description. In all these cases, intention is left out of the description, so it is called a "physical act", but that's a meaningless misnomer because each of these acts were intentional acts, described as physical acts. Without any hard principles whereby one could distinguish a physical act from an intentional act in the first place, and then describe the act accordingly, the distinction is meaningless.
Quoting Dfpolis
I don't see how you can make this claim. To go from not thinking "pi" to thinking "pi", involves a change. You cannot say that thinking pi involves no change, unless you've been always thinking pi, forever, in eternity. The same thing for acting like a statue. To go from not acting like a statue to acting like a statue involves a change, so you cannot say that you acting like a statue involves no change, unless you've always, eternally been acting like a statue.
Quoting Dfpolis
Of course I had to add something contrary, because that's what change is, what was, now is not. You cannot have change without this contrariety. Nor can you describe an act by describing a state. "Night" doesn't imply any change, but it's not an act. If we add its contrary, "day", we can talk about an act which is the changing between night and day. So it's not my argument which fails, your argument is only successful if your so-called "act" involves a state remaining the same forever. Since remaining the same forever is clearly not a case of doing something, it cannot be an act.
That is from Loyd Gerson, and I'm sure he's not confused, as he has published numerous text books on Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy (his web-page).
And thanks for those quotes, but I still can't see how they contradict the point that Gerson is making.
There's an SEP entry on Active Intellect (or active mind, nous poiêtikos) here. It makes the point again that the very brief passage on the active intellect is a minefield for interpreters, saying 'So varied are their approaches, in fact, that it is tempting to regard De Anima iii 5 as a sort of Rorschach Test for Aristotelians: it is hard to avoid the conclusion that readers discover in this chapter the Aristotle they hope to admire.'
However, the whole chapter (which is brief) is then provided, and I note the following excerpt:
Emphasis added. So - my understanding is that 'this alone [which] is deathless and everlasting' is what became incorporated into later Christian theology as 'the rational soul', a web definition of which is 'the soul that in the scholastic tradition has independent existence apart from the body and that is the characteristic animating principle of human life'. And that, indeed, is not physical, as it is by definition, 'immortal'. Granted, Aristotelian and Thomistic dualism doesn't depict 'body and soul' as separate substances in the way that Descartes was later to do, but surely it can't be disputed that Thomas Aquinas accepts the immortality of the soul; he is a Doctor of the Church, after all.
Quoting ?????????????
Indeed, that is precisely what I am attempting to articulate. That is why I referred to the passage from Father Brennan on Thomistic philosophy, to whit:
That is as succinct a statement of the notion of hylomorphic dualism, which was derived from the 'active intellect' of Aristotle, as I have found.
So the general idea is that - as Gerson says - the ability to perceive the essence of the thing is the 'proper knowledge of the intellect' while the 'proper knowledge' of the senses is 'accidents, through forms that are individualised'. And those 'essences' or 'forms' are indeed 'universals' - this is what the expression 'universal' refers to. And the point about knowledge of these essences (forms, ideas) is that (as Gerson says):
Which clearly is not the case, and could not be the case, with 'sensible objects' which are by definition separate from the perceiver.
Also notice this first sentence:
Again, here, there is an implied or explicit hierarchy - that 'what produces' is 'superior' to 'what is affected' as 'the first principle' is 'superior' to 'matter' - all of which is stock-in-trade for scholastic realism.
(There's a useful primer by Ed Feser on just this point on his blog, Think, McFly, Think.)
Also, as a long-time student of comparative religion, I can't help but see the similarity between the top passage, from Aristotle, and the second, from the B?had?ran?yaka Upanis?had:
-------
4. The bracketed text recurs in its entirety at DA iii 7, 431a1–4. It seems likely that they were inserted by a scribe seeking to provide an explanation of the way in which the active is prior to the passive.
Really? How would you describe my knowing that God exists physically? Note that if you remove what my knowledge is about, you fail to specify what knowledge you are discussing. If I say moving my leg is local motion of a lower extremity, I have lost no content.
Also, I have no idea what you think a leg spasm is "about"?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
As I said, some acts are intentionally done, others not. Or are you thinking that all acts reflect Divine Intent?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But I have specified the defining characteristics. Intentional acts are characterized by being about something. Physical acts are characterized by change.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I have addressed this already. Not thinking of pi is not an aspect of thinking of pi.
No, I don’t believe that. I’m talking about trying to understand ‘matter-form’ dualism. I don’t need to be told ‘I haven’t read Aristotle’ as I have acknowledged that but we’re clearly talking past one another.
The physicalists produce this description on the this forum quite commonly. They refer to neurological processes. I disagree with such descriptions because I think that leaving out the intentional aspect is to produce an incomplete description. You would insist that a description of "knowing that God exists" requires the "aboutness", but the physicalist would say that this is accidental, and so not required.in the description, the activity of such and such neurons is a sufficient description, and what this is about is only relevant to you, who claims it is about God.
I would argue the same point against you, on your description of a leg spasm. It is incomplete, because you are missing content, you are missing the fact that the leg spasm it is a neurological process of a living human being. When you remove this content, you may as well be talking about the movement of an extremity of a piece of rock.
So I think that your description of a leg spasm is incomplete because it leaves out the intentional aspect, just like the physicalist's description of thought as a neurological activity is incomplete because it leaves out the intentional aspect. I believe that all the activities of living beings have an intentional aspect, because intention is inherent within the "soul", which all living things have in common, as the source of all their activities. So I believe that any description of the activity of a living being requires reference to intention in order to be a complete description of that activity. To leave intention out from a description of a living activity is to provide an incomplete description.
Quoting Dfpolis
What I think, is that in general, all the activities of living things display this "aboutness" which you refer to. They are about some further end. Sure you can point to a particular living action, and say, I don't see the aboutness here, therefore there is none, but we do not see intention. Intention is only reveled when we put the action into its appropriate context, and that context is often unknown. To do this is like pointing to a person walking down the street, and saying, that's a random act, there is no aboutness to that act of "walking down the street". Only when we put the act into the appropriate context, is intention revealed.
The problem is, that there is an intentional aspect to the act, must be presumed in order to give the act an intentional context. if you do not presume the intentional context, you will place "walking down the street" in the context of other physical acts by that person, and other people, in an ever widening physical context, without ever coming across intentionality. Instead though, our habit is to place the act into an intentional context, and this is the result of a logical conclusion. if the act is such and such (the conscious act of a human being, for example), then it is intentional, therefore we presume intentionality, and we look to give that act an intentional context. Notice that intentionality cannot be directly inferred from a simple description of the act. We class the act as intentional, based on some logical principle that this type of act ought be classed as intentional, and only following this presumption of intentionality do we seek a context of intentionality for the act.
So to give the act an intentional context, to say that it is an intentional act, requires some principles by which this presumption is made, otherwise the act will be placed in the category of physical act, and the intentionality of the act will be overlooked in any description of it. The common principle employed is that a conscious human act is an intentional act, and therefore we seek an intentional context for conscious human acts. I argue that intention is evident within acts of all living things, therefore we ought to presume that if it is an act of a living thing, it is intentional, and seek to put all living acts into an intentional context. I would not call this "Divine Intent", because I apprehend a separation between the intent of God and the intent of living things.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think the important point to note, rather than trying to apprehend what "active intellect" refers to, is the distinction between active intellect and passive intellect. This places "active intellect" into context, and the passive intellect, as the scholastics found out, is really the difficult part to understand. The nominalist/realist division is started right here, in the question of whether the passive intellect is proper to the individual, or to the collective of human beings. However, as described by Aquinas, the passive intellect is required to account for memory so it must be proper to the individual, but as "passive", the passive intellect gets into the same category of things which matter is placed in, it is similar to matter. But Aquinas seems to take pains to establish a separation between the passive intellect, and matter, because he wants to attribute the intellect to the soul, which is immaterial, so he doesn't seem to be ready to allow that any part of the intellect, not even the passive intellect, is material.
I am not a physicalist. Are you? The rest of your paragraph wanders aimlessly, not responding to my question. "How would you describe my knowing that God exists physically?"
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
As Aristotle notes, the soul is the actuality of a potentially living being. While some of our acts are intentional, the mere fact that an act is our does not make it intentional. Your "logic" is rather like saying that since a paint factory can produce black paint, all its paint must be black.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
All human thought, and all of the language that expresses it, fails to be exhaustive. That does not prevent us from making valid distinctions based on our power to abstract.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Fine. Most of the rest of us do not see that.
I think I have spent enough time with you on this.
No, I'm not physicalist, so I would not describe you "knowing that God exists" in a physicalist way. The point is, that a physicalist would describe it in that way. So you need some principles whereby you can demonstrate that the physicalist description is wrong. You have provided no such principles, just alluded to the assumption that if your thought is about "God" instead of about "myself, or about "another person", or about something else, that this amounts to a substantial difference which cannot be described physically. In other words, you insist that since you describe this act as intentional, that act as physical, therefore they are as stipulated, despite the fact that others describe them in a different way.
Quoting Dfpolis
I haven't shown you the logic whereby I conclude that all acts of living beings have an intentional aspect, so you have no place to criticize the logic I haven't yet shown you. However, I can use your analogy of the paint factory to demonstrate how your position is faulty. First, do you accept the premise, as I explained, that the existence of intention cannot be observed in an act? Now, if we know that a particular being is capable of carrying out an intentional act, we cannot exclude the possibility of intention from any act carried out by that being as we cannot observe whether the act is intentional or not. If we know that the paint company turns out some cans of black paint, and none are ;labeled, we cannot exclude the possibility that any can has black paint. So when you deny that any particular action of a living being (such as the leg spasm) has any intentional aspect, this is what you are doing, denying that the paint in the can is black without knowing whether this is the case or not.
So, when you apprehend from the vast evidence, the fact that every living being produces intentional acts, (they have acts which are about some purpose beyond the immediate act) you have no reason to deny the possibility that any particular living act has an intentional aspect. But when you are in denial, and refuse to acknowledge this fact, you will tend to designate some living acts as "physical", without an intentional element, and this seems to be your inclination.
Quoting Dfpolis
You really don't seem to take having your ideas criticised very well. Instead of defending your position, and backing up your principles with reason, you prefer to end the discussion.
I presume you are not a physicalist because you, like me, see the errors of physicalism. Therefore, it is absurd to rest your case on a position we both agree is defective.
If this is your opinion, then you're completely missing the point of my "case". We both see that physicalism has errors. Perhaps though, we do not see the same errors.
The physicalist claims that if an action can be described without reference to intention, it is not an intentional act (P1). Further, every action can be described without reference to intention (P2). Therefore no acts are properly called intentional. The error of physicalism which I see, is the first premise, that if an action can be described without reference to intention, it is not an intentional act. That is false, as my explanation, and example demonstrate. Intention is not observable, so when any act is described it is not necessary to include intention. If intentionality is referred to, it is added as an extra, unobservable part of the description.
My "case" is that you make the very same error. Your distinction between intentional acts and physical acts is based on how we choose to describe the act. The second premise above, is true, as my example of "walking down the street" demonstrates, any act can be described without reference to intention. Because you make the very same mistake as the physicalist, defining "physical act" according to the description of the act, and it is clear that any act can be described without reference to intention, your division between an intentional act and a physical act is completely arbitrary and absolutely meaningless.
There is a book called "The Hidden Life of Trees", by Peter Wohleben. The author has an extraordinary writing style, he refers to the intention behind all the different sorts of activities which trees are involved in. It is an uneasy read at first, because the man is well versed in the biology and science of arboriculture and the mix of the terminology of science with that of intention is unusual, requiring that one adapt to this writing style. The use of "intention" in reference to the acts of trees appears like the writings of a quack, yet this use of "intention is backed up, and supported by all sorts of scientific facts. The point now, is that the man is not incorrect to use "intention" in this way, describing all these activities of trees as intentional acts. It is just our custom and habit to restrict the adding of "intention" to our descriptions, such that we only use it in reference to conscious human acts. However, "intention" as per its common definition is found in activities everywhere throughout the biological world, and we really ought to start describing the intentional aspect of these activities, following the example that Mr. Wohleben sets. To leave intention out of the description, and describe these acts as "physical acts" is to provide an incomplete description of the act, in the erroneous way of the physicalist.
This is not my position.Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is false on two points. (1) We observe purely intentional acts such as knowing and willing by introspection, so they are observable. They are not intersubjectively observable, it is true, but that is of no epistemological consequence. (2) As acts such as knowing, willing, believing, and hoping can be defined without reference to matter, they are not intrinsically physical. Thus, they are intrinsically intentional.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
False.
I certainly agree that, since the laws of nature are intentional, all physical acts, which are guided by those laws, are intentional wrt to God. They are not all intentional with respect to finite minds.
So, just to be clear, I do not see physical acts as lacking intentionality. That they have intentionality was my whole point in beginning this thread. Still, pure intentional acts are not physical acts.
If that is not your position, then can you explain to me the principles whereby you class an act as either physical or intentional. That's what I'm trying to get you to explain. As I've explained to you, these are two distinct modes of description which may be applied to the very same acts, not two distinct types of acts. When we attempt to describe an act, we choose to describe the physical aspect of it, the intentional aspect of it, or both. I think that I've satisfactorily demonstrated that many acts of living beings may be described as both, they have an intentional aspect, and a physical aspect.
It appears to me, like your position is to assume a dichotomy between physical acts and intentional acts, such that they are mutually exclusive. But I see that this exclusive categorization presents problems, such as the assumption of activities which have no physical dimension. Therefore I am trying to get more information from you, concerning these activities which are assumed to have no physical dimension.
Quoting Dfpolis
OK, let's assume that there are mental acts, which we know about through introspection. Introspection tells me that even these acts have a dimension which is non-intentional, they are about something physical. And so there is a problem. These intentional acts of knowing and willing cannot be completely separated from their physical dimensions. Furthermore, we know that there is physical activity, (brain activity), which goes along with the intentional activity of thinking. So why propose a separation between these? If we want a clear representation of what is really the case, then why not allow that these are two different aspects of the same activity? I assume that the separation you propose is proposed as a principle, a tool for analysis, such that we might seek to understand the intentional aspect of the act separately from the physical aspect of the act, and understand how they relate to each other.
If we take this route of analysis, dividing the intentional from the physical, there is a problem which the physicalist is very happy to point out. ,Knowing and thinking may simply be the result, the effects of, physical brain action. The real activity here may be as the physicalist argues, neurological activities, while thinking and knowing are the results of these internal physical activities. This presents a problem for introspection. We can only observe through introspection, the thinking, knowing, and willing, aspect of these activities, we cannot examine the brain activity through introspection. So it is a problem much like that described by Kant's phenomena/noumena division. All that we can observe through introspection is how these activities are presented to the conscious mind, as thoughts, knowing, etc., but we cannot get to the "activities-in-themselves", which are much deeper within the living being.
So the problem is, that these acts, thinking and knowing etc., already consist of both physical and intentional aspects. The physical is the brain activity, and the intentional is what the thinking is about. Introspection does not allow us to go further, and separate the intentional and physical, in analysis as you suggest it might. So introspection doesn't allow us to observe purely intentional activity without the mix of physical activity, because all that is evident to introspection is thinking and knowing etc., which is already a complete mix of physical and intentional activity. This means that if we want to do the analysis which you propose, to separate the intentional from the physical, we need more than introspection, we need logical principles.
If you contrast the intentional with the physical, then the intentional must be non-physical. This implies that the intentional is, as I suggested, completely unobservable. As you can see, the purely intentional is not observable through introspection. Now, we need some principles whereby "an act" may be non-physical. How would you describe such an act? How does it relate to the fundamental principles of physics, space and time? Is this act outside of space and time?
Quoting Dfpolis
This is your assertion, that it is false that any act may be described physically without reference to intentionality, as is the physicalist's assumption. I challenged you to support this assertion, and you gave me an example or two, "knowing that...". As I explained to you, your examples represent eternal states, without change, and these are not "acts". A state is not an act. So the challenge is still there for you to support your assertion that there is an act which cannot be described as a physical act.
I have repeatedly. You refuse to accept what I tell you or offer a sound reason to reject it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I have already told you many times that this is not my position. Time spent in trying to make you understand my position is time wasted. I'm not wasting any more of my time.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Is that not a sound reason? Are you going to support your claim of two distinct types of acts, intentional acts and physical acts, or not?