On materialistic reductionism

Democritus: "By convention sweet, by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention color: but in reality atoms and void." And pray tell, whence convention?

Democritus' model was very influential but has been shown to be wrong.

This is what Chalmers calls don't-have-a-clue-materialism:

"I don’t have a clue about consciousness. It seems utterly mysterious to me. But it must be physical, as materialism must be true"

It seems to me that most of your arguments would apply equally well to any kind of reductionist project. No?

Reply to Moliere What other kinds of reductionism are there?

Incidentally, one of my favourite quotes, from one of Dennett's books, speaking of what we see 'through the microscope of molecular biology':

Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe.

Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 202-3.

Reply to Wayfarer That's not a reductionist argument though. It's a causal one. Rather than precluding the existence of consciousness or saying it's the same as its cause, it merely argues an experience is caused an object which is not itself.

Here's where we see the reductionism of immaterialism. Supposedly, the given argument has rejected the existence of consciousness by saying it's caused by other states. An assumption which only makes sense if it is taken that consciousness has nothing to do with the material-- without that reduction, the possibility of material states causing the distinct instances of consciousness cannot be discounted.

Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness

Here's where we see the reductionism of immaterialism. Supposedly, the given argument has rejected the existence of consciousness by saying it's caused by other states. An assumption which only makes sense if it is taken that consciousness has nothing to do with the material-- without that reduction, the possibility of material states causing the distinct instances of consciousness cannot be discounted.

(Y)

It's a point I've made before, although it should be noted that Dennett does mean it in the strong reductionist sense, I think. What makes the immaterialists reductionist--or perhaps I should say not anti-reductionist enough--is that they accept that material basis and material causation entail an 'explaining away', just as some materialist reductionists themselves believe. Which is why they can seem eager to deny all materialist description.

Reply to Wayfarer It seems to me that any ontology where it is fair to formulate it as "Everything is X" is reductionist. Depending on how you splice it it seems some idealist ontologies fit that description.

Not sure if that's the right way of putting it. Another thought is that any given reductionist would agree to a sentence of the form, "This appears like A, but it is really B" - but that wouldn't necessitate a reductionism in the sense of the arguments put forward up above, I wouldn't think. In some sense this is just a way of explaining a phenomena and isn't necessarily reductionism in that everything is reduced to one thing, but a reduction does take place.

To use one of @Thorongil's examples: One of the first theories of morality was what is now called Divine Command Theory -- What God says is good is what is good. Full-stop, end of story. This would be a strong version of reductionism in the field of morality.

One might even be able to posit that any answer to the question "What is Good?" is, in some sense, reductionist (perhaps reductionism can come on a scale, though). Which might cut to what I would say is the main problem with reductionism, in general -- is that it overgeneralizes, and details which are important to the particularities are often lost with such overgeneralizations.

It seems like some models of materialism posit that the brain secretes consciousness, but into "what" I don't know. It is as if people have a hidden dualism whereby the hardware is turning into software (or whatever shows up on the monitor). The physical brain stuff creates this mental software (monitor) stuff. But there is no monitor for the mental software to project to. Unlike a computer where there is a monitor to project the information (and the monitor itself exists within an observer's point of view), there is only brain stuff doing stuff, but never in any "outside" observer's point of view. There is no "monitor" for the hardware of the brain to project into. This leaves the hard problem of consciousness.

Moliere:What God says is good is what is good. Full-stop, end of story. This would be a strong version of reductionism in the field of morality.

I don't see that as 'reductionist', though, because there are no 'primitive elements' being proposed. It might indeed be criticized for authoritarianism but 'reductionism' consists of the analysis into the most simple underlying parts or components.

It's not so much generalisation that is the problem, but the treatment of all manner of questions as if they're ultimately engineering problems. 'Once you understand how all the parts fit together then you can solve the problem.' So the thing which reductionists hate about 'consciousness' or the mind is that it is so slippery and undefinable. J B Watson, who invented behaviourism, believed the very notion of 'mind' was a superstitious relic; his successors, such as Dennett, argue along the same lines.

That is why reductionism is generally associated with 'scientism' - it's because it's a typically engineer-oriented attitude. It only wants to deal with questions which are amenable to that method, and doesn't want to acknowledge that there could be problems of any other kind.

Quoting jamalrob

It's a point I've made before, although it should be noted that Dennett does mean it in the strong reductionist sense, I think.

Any explanation which is given in mechanistic terms, in terms of atomistic simples such as "molecular machinery" is reductionist "in the strong sense" that's what 'reductionism' means, after all. The characteristic species of claim made by reductionist thinking is that whatever is to be explained is exhaustively explainable, at least in principle, in terms of some simples and their deterministic or mechanical interactions. Implicit in this claim is the further claim that that the thing to be explained just is, despite any appearances to the contrary, really nothing more than the sum of the interactions between its most primitive constituents.

Note that if the claim is that the explanandum is exhaustively explanatory and given entirely in terms of simples, then it necessarily follows that the simples are all that is ultimately real in the explanans. I think all such claims are inherently incoherent, simply because no explanation can itself be comprehensively understood to consist in a set of mechanical interactions between atomic parts.

Reply to Wayfarer I look at reductionism more along the lines of the phrase "reduces to..."

I don't know if there is any single treatment of reductionism, or if it's at all possible since it seems to me to be a bit of a squishy term, but it's not the materialist alone which wishes to "reduce to..." -- such as certain idealisms -- so even if you don't accept the moral theory example then there still remains certain reductions which are not materialist alone. Hence, some of the arguments would apply equally to them because they, too, are "reducing to" such and such.

I don't disagree with the arguments, it should be noted. Only that certain materialists are the only culprit.

Most definitions of reductionism are terrible, and tend to resolve into some sort of useless tautology; "reductionism means that everything can be reduced to..."; To treat reductionism rigorously however, is to recognize that 'reductionism' simply means context invarience. It says: here is an explanation of the thing, and this explanation holds irrespective of context. Reductionism means explaining the thing from the inside-out, and never the outside-in, hence the reductionist refrain, "such and such is only....

Thus, if 'material reductionism' means that 'things can only be explained in terms of material phenomena "(atoms, molecules, synapses, etc)", this in turn means that atoms, molecules, synapses and so on function as they do (however they do) irrespective of context. This is demonstrably, scientifically, false, at every level. Each and every one of these so-called 'primitive elements' have behavior which is profoundly context-sensitive. As such, despite the usual cries of science as being 'reductionist', the actual science of nature evinces no such thing. Reductionism is thus not just 'unscientific', but frankly anti-scientific - and it is so because it imports assumptions which are not empirical. As Isabelle Stengers says, science, as an empirical study ought to never say "such and such is only", but rather "this..., but in other circumstances that ... or yet again that..."

Nobody who knows anything about thermodynamics or synaptic plasticity could ever, in good faith, subscribe to the idea that phenomena in those fields can be explained only on the basis of atoms, molecules, or synapses. If anything, the triumph of contemporary science is to show how wrong was the emphasis on context-insensitivity in classical, Newtonian-influenced science. The very fact that 'atoms' are grouped together with 'molecules' in the OP (molecules being atomic compounds with properties very different from the elements which make them up), should show, on it's own, just how arbitrary and trivial is any demarcation between the 'primoridal elements' and 'epiphenomena' or what have you.

Ironically, I suspect those who want to save the idea of spirit or other mystical woo would prefer if science is the reductionist project of the 18th century, if only to carve out a little breathing room for their own immaterial phantoms.

Quoting StreetlightX

Ironically, I suspect those who want to save the idea of spirit or other mystical woo would prefer if science is the reductionist project of the 18th century, if only to carve out a little breathing room for their own immaterial phantoms.

Not a bad little rant against reductionism. How do you solve the problem I posed earlier in thread regarding the hardware and the software? Hardware on a computer can eventually run software which can then cause pixels to appear on a monitor which in turn appears in the existence of a human point of view. Where then does the human point of view appear or project into? It is obvious that we can say neurochemistry and environmental inputs (in part) cause consciousness, but where do the mental aspects of a particular organism "project" onto? "Where" or "what" is this mental? It's as if materialists are saying material "things" are secreting some sort of mental realm (a dualism of sorts). "What" this mental realm is, is never explained except by referring back to the material causes.

Some materialists it seems, think that with a wave of the hand, they can eliminate that which they look to explain (the mental) as being "really" some sort of illusion (which is itself is never explained except by its material causes, thus begging the question). An illusion is actually not used correctly here it seems. Rather, they are simply giving a non-intuitive account of how the causes work to create the mental, but the unitary-what-its-like aspect is really not being explained. There seems to be a category error of getting at one phenomena with another. Unfortunately, reductionists cannot use the usual means of reducing one category to another, as the underlying ground of a point of view is always assumed in every other phenomena (things "emerge" in something), but this is the limits for emergence as this particular phenomena (the mental that is), is not emerging in any larger point of view. Therefore, it keeps running into a loop whereby it must constantly refer back to its causes with no room for it to emerge into something.

I dunno, the whole hardware/software/projection just seems like a misplaced metaphor to me. It's not useful to speculate upon just-so stories like that.

Quoting StreetlightX

It's not useful to speculate upon just-so stories like that.

I edited the quote above so it has a bit more explanation. Don't take the analogy too literally. It is just an introduction to a larger point. The actual 1-1-1 of the analogy (obviously it is just simplified version of what happens) does not mean the broader point has no merit. Don't pay attention to the computer analogy part if that is what trips you up.

Quoting John

Any explanation which is given in mechanistic terms, in terms of atomistic simples such as "molecular machinery" is reductionist "in the strong sense" that's what 'reductionism' means, after all. The characteristic species of claim made by reductionist thinking is that whatever is to be explained is exhaustively explainable, at least in principle, in terms of some simples and their deterministic or mechanical interactions. Implicit in this claim is the further claim that that the thing to be explained just is, despite any appearances to the contrary, really nothing more than the sum of the interactions between its most primitive constituents.

Note that if the claim is that the explanandum is exhaustively explanatory and given entirely in terms of simples, then it necessarily follows that the simples are all that is ultimately real in the explanans. I think all such claims are inherently incoherent, simply because no explanation can itself be comprehensively understood to consist in a set of mechanical interactions between atomic parts.

Yes I see, but we're working with some unclear distinctions here, and I suppose I was trying to cover all the bases. In one sense reductionism is a method: the practice of explaining complex things in terms of simpler things, a practice that need not be exclusive or applied everywhere. This methodological reductionism is what I'm allowing for in my post. But yes, I should probably assume ontological reductionism in this discussion, a theory that entails Street's context invariance. Thus what I called reductionist materialism in the strong sense would become reductionism tout court, as you suggest, and the merely methodologically reductionist materialism could become part of a non-reductive materialism, in which other (higher-level) explanations are not only not ruled out, but also recognized as the best or only explanations in some contexts.

StreetlightX:Ironically, I suspect those who want to save the idea of spirit or other mystical woo would prefer if science is the reductionist project of the 18th century, if only to carve out a little breathing room for their own immaterial phantoms.

It's more that the scientific populists are still advocating the reductionist view. Dennett, and others like him, get a lot more press than actual philosophers of biology.

Reply to Thorongil A nice critique, and I mostly agree with it. Some scattered thoughts...

A response to one of your arguments is that reductionism does not actually assume what it attempts to disprove, but takes it as a convenient starting point, because that is just how we see the world. What is evidently real may not be what is really real. So even if reductionists begin with a thing to be reduced, they are not committed to the reality of that thing, since the reduction can reveal it to be illusory (or a convenient fiction, an imaginary product of mid-range animal perception, etc). Reductionism thus begins with what is evident and works to uncover what is real beneath it. But this is just mereological nihilism, and as far as metaphysical commitments are apparent in science, I don't think it is a popular view. How many scientists would deny that water exists?

A more moderate reductionist may respond that in beginning with a thing to be reduced, they merely begin with what is evidently real and dig down to find what is more real. Thus they end up with ontological levels or some kind of dualism, which is likely not where they wanted to end up. Another way of putting this is that water does exist, but is nothing more than its parts, such that the privileged way of explaining anything is in terms of parts, if only we knew enough. And the same would then go for Moby Dick and the mind: they exist, but they are nothing but their material parts (and processes?).

This second view is more than a methodological reductionism, but falls short of the target of your critique, so maybe it escapes the charge of assuming what it sets out to disprove, because it doesn't set out to disprove evidently real things at all; it just privileges a certain kind of explanation. But how do they justify this? As you say, they're begging the question.

So, do reductionists believe that water exists? If so, it looks like they might not be full-on reductionists in the exclusive ontological sense at all, or else they're inconsistent in the way you've described. And if not, then they're mereological nihilists. For them, water is merely simples arranged waterwise, so the ontological commitment is to the existence of simples and to the non-existence of meaningful arrangements of those simples.

Quoting StreetlightX

Ironically, I suspect those who want to save the idea of spirit or other mystical woo would prefer if science is the reductionist project of the 18th century, if only to carve out a little breathing room for their own immaterial phantoms.

This is exactly the problem I have with some of the criticism of reductionism. It must assume that science and materialism are crudely reductionist, because today's science and materialism leave no space for the mystical woo. Thus it would be disastrous for the mystics to accept that science and materialism today are not crudely reductionist in the way that bad pop-science philosophy sometimes suggests.

On the other hand, I suspect you may underestimate the social and ideological importance of this crude reductionism. Fighting against bad pop-science philosophy may be an important battle, even if it's not very philosophically interesting.

Reply to jamalrob

8-) Nothing to disagree with here, Jamalrob...

Quoting Moliere

It seems to me that any ontology where it is fair to formulate it as "Everything is X" is reductionist. Depending on how you splice it it seems some idealist ontologies fit that description.

I think this could be an important point. One could even draw a distinction that cuts across those which are commonly made around this issue: between, on the one hand, views that are materialist insofar as they deal with whatever science discovers, taking this to be independent of interpretation; and on the other hand, views that are idealist insofar as they pre-emptively reduce things to a familiar substance, be it mental or neural or subatomic. Seen in the light of this distinction, crude reductionists are a species of idealist. Perverse?

Any examples of 'idealist reductionism'?

Reply to Wayfarer Everything is mental.

Reply to Wayfarer Or, developing one of @Moliere's examples, "This table appears like an external object, but is really a product of your subjective experience". Notice how similar this is to "This table appears like an external object, but is really a construction of your brain".

Yep, same shit, different name.

I don't see subjective idealism as reductionist. It has many issues and may indeed be untenable but for reasons other than being reductionist. Reductionism is associated with particular kind of scientific mentality - granted one that is declining in many ways - but one which reduces the problems of philosophy to issues that can be understood through the techniques of the physical sciences.

Reply to Wayfarer Sure, but I'm playing with concepts. The way we tend to talk about these things might not be the best, and it may be that the philosophical problems with each are the same.

That's reductionist!

Reply to Wayfarer I know that's probably tongue-in-cheek, but let me interpret it as making a serious point, namely that one can uselessly call anything reductionist if it explains something in other, perhaps simpler, terms. But in saying that idealism is reductionist or vice versa, I'm being much more specific than that: I'm talking about the similarities between certain ontological positions, or views on what best explains the world.

If I may, this is why speaking of reductionism in terms of context invariance can be so powerful: it defines a formal interpretive gesture that doesn't take for granted the 'nature' of the 'stuff' that everything else is being 'reduced' to. Whether it be mind or God's will or primordial stuff, the entire way of thinking is suspect from the get-go. Idealism and base materialism are just two sides of a rotten coin: in each case one aspect of reality is idealised over the rest, granted True Reality or some such nonsense which is more or less the defining gesture of metaphysics as such. Derrida's whole shtick about 'the metaphysics of presence' is about nothing else. In every case, the tangibility, the 'reality' and efficacy of the real, the here and now, is denied and referred to an (transcendent?) elsewhere which is meant to hold the 'key' to everything else.

If I'm feeling particularly 'reductive', the whole history of philosophy is more or less the history of a hatred and fear of the world, an attempt, in its search for 'first principles' and so on, to deny the sticky, messy substance of the world. That's the dark side of what it means to be defined as 'footnotes to Plato'.

Just so reductionism doesn't think it's being picked on... it's a solution to the mind/body problem. Since Leibniz's idea didn't catch on..

How do you explain the causal relationship between mind and body (recalling that physics originally meant body (the way the word is used in medicine... your body vs your mind))

No solution. I figured.

Quoting StreetlightX

If I'm feeling particularly 'reductive', the whole history of philosophy is more or less the history of a hatred and fear of the world, an attempt, in its search for 'first principles' and so on, to deny the sticky, messy substance of the world. That's the dark side of what it means to be defined as 'footnotes to Plato'.

This is an appealing idea, but maybe it's an unavoidable result of the nature of philosophy. The very practice of philosophy is a performative repudiation of the messy, sticky world--unless, I suppose, the philosopher is aware of this. Maybe if philosophy can be said to have progressed it's to the extent that it developed this self-awareness.

Quoting jamalrob

This is an appealing idea, but maybe it's an unavoidable result of the nature of philosophy. The very practice of philosophy is a performative repudiation of the messy, sticky world--unless, I suppose, the philosopher is aware of this. Maybe if philosophy can be said to have progressed it's to the extent that it developed this self-awareness.

We can rail against philosophy's tendency to reduce everything to some very basic "X" substance. But just as mistakenly, philosophy has a tendency to reduce everything down to "X, Y, Z, and the kitchen sink" explanation of a phenomena and think that by being more detailed in its explanation, it has actually gotten to the root of anything metaphysical, when it actually did not answer anything metaphysical, simply physical or rather simply a model of the physical.

It's not 'hatred and fear of the world' but recognition and acknowledgement that nature doesn't contain its own cause. That is what is behind scepticism of the 'sensory domain' which according to reductionist philosophies is the only reality. The Allegory of the Cave is as apt now as when it was written.

And again, that is not a reductionist explanation. Physicalist reductionism has to be understood historically as having developed as a consequences Cartesian dualism, deism and Protestantism, whereby the 'sense of the spiritual' which pervaded the medieval and ancient 'sacramental worldview' gradually withdrew beyond the sky and into the privacy of individual conscience. All that remained was 'matter in motion' and ultimately explicable in terms of the laws of physics. But that picture too has now been thoroughly superseded, we're only left with the skeleton of the skeleton.

I see two senses of the word reductionism being used here.

One is the familiar one of a reduction to mechanical or atomistic ontological models of reality. The other is the simpler thing of just being the reduction to an ontological model.

So we can oppose reductionism to holism - contrast two different ontological models. Or we can talk about the epistemic fact that all knowledge of the world is a semiotic modelling relation and reductionism is formalising the fact that we seek models to structure our experience in rational ways.

So to reduce in the modelling sense is to break the messy substantial world of given experience apart into theories and measurements - formal ideas and relatively informal acts of inductive confirmation.

Even the naive brain models in this fashion. If a baby sees a dog disappear behind one end of a wall, it will learn to look to the other end in the expectation it will reappear in a moment. So the baby has a theory or idea. And then checks that model against a measurement - the act of watching the other end of the wall in expectation that its idea of the world will be empirically confirmed.

Quoting StreetlightX

If I'm feeling particularly 'reductive', the whole history of philosophy is more or less the history of a hatred and fear of the world, an attempt, in its search for 'first principles' and so on, to deny the sticky, messy substance of the world. That's the dark side of what it means to be defined as 'footnotes to Plato'.

But is reductive modelling - the familiar division into generals and particulars, concepts and percepts, theories and measurements - a bad thing or the natural thing?

I argue that this philosophical/scientific practice is simply a formalisation, a conscious refinement, of how minds already work. We break the world apart into its formal structures and material events for a very good reason. This is how modelling works.

And pragmatism accepts the anti-realist epistemic point that to exist in a realm of our own reductive conceptions is as good as it gets. Our view of reality is always trapped inside the model we spin. That is obvious enough when it comes to concepts or ideas - the stuff of theories. But it is also true even of the measurements or confirming impressions.

The baby sees a dog re-emerge as expected and so its belief is confirmed. But is it the same dog? Can this baby yet tell the difference between a dog and a goat? Etc.

Science just goes all the way and constructs theories that are confirmed in terms of numbers - symbols read off dials. The Kantian impossibility of actually grasping the thing in itself is dealt with by reducing even material experience to acts of counting - signs of the theory in mind.

So reductionism in the broad sense is the acceptance that all knowledge is a modelling relation. And that in turn leads to a dichotomy of theory and measurement which is what it is to model. And so reductionism is going to be at its best when taken to its epistemic extreme as it is in scientific reasoning - when experience is fully structured in being fully broken apart into formal concepts and answering acts of measurement.

Reply to Wayfarer That's precisely the fear and hatred of the world being spoken about. The idea that somehow, states of nature are more than themselves, that they somehow come from different realm.

It's a simultaneous hatred of the world AND the meaning expressed by it. We ignore what we know about the world (e.g. that our experiences exist and are part of nature, that states of the world cause each other) and try to make it about a fiction instead (the "final cause" outside the world).

In doing so, we also ignore the infinte. The unity of the world, which is necessary, is misread as a finite state given by final cause (e.g. God, the transedencent)-- such that we think unity isn't there ( Nihilism) unless final cause if there to add it in.

The Allegory of The Cave is only an apt description of ignorance of the world. And it that ignorance of the world that immaterialism, with its reduction of the world to fiction, covets.

Quoting StreetlightX

If I may, this is why speaking of reductionism in terms of context invariance can be so powerful: it defines a formal interpretive gesture that doesn't take for granted the 'nature' of the 'stuff' that everything else is being 'reduced' to. Whether it be mind or God's will or primordial stuff, the entire way of thinking is suspect from the get-go. Idealism and base materialism are just two sides of a rotten coin: in each case one aspect of reality is idealised over the rest

I think it's right that the human tendency to reduce everything to some ultimate substance is suspect. "Mind", "God" and "primordial stuff" cannot be thought as the same. We can imagine that ultimately "all is one", but that 'oneness' cannot be any category known to the discursive intellect.

So, I would not agree with you, that "Idealism and base materialism are just two sides of a rotten coin", but I can agree with you that "in each case one aspect of reality is idealised over the rest". I would say instead that idealism and materialism are two sides of one true coin, and that when only one side is seen, the trouble begins.

The flip side of reductionism is eliminativism, so it won't do to eliminate the mind, God or primordial stuff, because to do any of that kind of eliminating is to begin to become fixated on one side of the coin. The wholism of the materialism/idealism coin is thus the exemplar for the wholism of the reductive/ expansive coin, the analytic/ synthetic coin, the eliminative/intuitive coin, the exclusive/ inclusive coin, and so on.

So, there is nothing wrong with the reductive, analytic, eliminative and exclusive tendencies, or with the expansive, synthetic, intuitive, inclusive tendencies, per se the problems start when one set of principles is thrown away and the other clung to.

Quoting StreetlightX

If I'm feeling particularly 'reductive', the whole history of philosophy is more or less the history of a hatred and fear of the world, an attempt, in its search for 'first principles' and so on, to deny the sticky, messy substance of the world. That's the dark side of what it means to be defined as 'footnotes to Plato'.

I would say that hatred and fear of the world manifests in the tendency I mentioned above; the tendency to throw away one set of principles and cling to the other. Modern scientistic thinking wants to eliminate religion and spirituality and reduce what is thought to be real to the sensory domain of perceptible objects; it has forgotten to listen to the 'still, small voice" of intuition. This 'forgetting' or 'ignore-ance' is a manifestation of a fear that there might be an order beyond what may be grasped by the discursive mind, the elimination is done for the sake of tidiness and a sense of intellectual security. Now, I would say the physical world is a manifestation of the spiritual world, or even better that it just is the spiritual world (although not all of it) but that belief is based on intuition and it cannot be tidily formulated; but I really have no argument that could convince you of that. The deepest ontological commitments that people hold, whatever they might be, are decidedly not arrived at by argument.

You mentioned Derrida; I think Derrida, as interesting and inventive as some of his ideas are, is an arch eliminator; his project consisted in the elimination of the metaphysics of presence and the semantics of inherent meaning, after all! This boldly attempted elimination of his seems to me to be the manifestation of a desire to apply a discursive antiseptic to the "sticky messy substance of the world"; or at least the part of the 'sticky mess' represented by spiritual yearning, intuitive insight and mystical experience.

Quoting jamalrob

leave no space for the mystical woo.

The very employment of the materialist catch cry "mystical woo" is characteristic of the chauvinistically and mindlessly bad form of reductionism represented by scientistic thinking.

In fact modern science and materialism really have nothing of relevance to say about the spiritual or the mystical; and that is as it should be.

Reply to John Derrida is really an advocate for metaphysics. What he argues against is reduction of the world and logic to a particular discouse. The major point of his philosophy is to stop confusing the presence of our metaphysics with the full extent of meaning and the world. His project is really to eliminate reductionism, a metaphysical point: no instance of discourse gives the entirety of meaning or the world.

Reply to John Maybe, but I'm quite happy to use it too.

Reply to John Only because you maintain the reductionism of the elimativism/idealism, rather than moving on to a different metaphysic, one which has no interest in saying "the other side" has nothing to do with meaning.

"Mystical woo" only amounts to reductionism because your metaphysics are still locked into the idea that identifying causes of the world means saying nothing else is relevant.

Reply to TheWillowOfDarkness

Yes, I agree that he may be taken that way; and his later involvement with apophatic theology may attest to that dimension of this thought. In fact, I would say there is a tension in his thought, precisely because it seems to pull in both directions.

Reply to TheWillowOfDarkness

Sorry, no idea what you are trying to say here.

Reply to John Only because there is a certain reductionism within Derrida's thought. In the eagerness to avoid reduction of meaning to anyone discouse, it leaves too little behind of any discouse. To say that any discouse has specific relevance, even Derrida's own, is regarded as ignorance of reductionism.

Here we may turn Derrida's (apparent) discursive scepticism against him. If we take his challenge to discouse literally, we are supposedly never right to insist on the meaning of one discouse over another, even his own. Thus, Derrida's metaphysic tends not to be-- by both his critics and supporters-- described in terms of what it's trying to get at (no discouse is exaustive), but rather as a supposed mess of contradiction which says our discourses have no meaning.

Reply to John How is it reductionism to say, for example, that "mystical woo" isn't responsible for consciousness? If I say that states of experience result out of states of the body interacting with the environment, what has I left out? What truth am I missing?

You are leaving out the fact that not all states of consciousness are in the form of "states of the body interacting with the environment" and/or the fact that that is not the only way we are able to think about it. To think states of consciousness as states of the body interacting with the environment is merely one way to characterize consciousness, that may be useful for certain purposes of study but has no provenance beyond that. To say that it is the only right or valid way to think about consciousness is to be tendentiously reductive.

Reply to TheWillowOfDarkness

So, if meaning and metaphysics cannot be determined we are left to rely on... what... intuition?

Quoting apokrisis

And so reductionism is going to be at its best when taken to its epistemic extreme as it is in scientific reasoning - when experience is fully structured in being fully broken apart into formal concepts and answering acts of measurement.

It's when models cannot be made near the fringes of thought that the models break down.

Quoting Wayfarer

It's not 'hatred and fear of the world' but recognition and acknowledgement that nature doesn't contain its own cause. That is what is behind scepticism of the 'sensory domain' which according to reductionist philosophies is the only reality. The Allegory of the Cave is as apt now as when it was written.

If by apt you mean the most irreparably destructive and philosophically regressive force of the last 2000 years, then sure. Hiding a noxious resentment of reality - generally coupled with a healthy hatred for the body, manual labour, temporality, and women (whatever doesn't reek with the stench of socio-economic privilege really) - behind a slogan doesn't make it any less venomous.

Reply to John I never said any such thing. States of body cause conocious states is what I argued, not that conocious states were states of body.

I'm doing anything but leaving out that which is not states of body. My argument is actually saying states of consciousness are not states of the body-- they are instances of existing conciousness not any part of the body.

This is what I mean about you maintaining reductionism. Like any reductionist ( whether they be materialistic or idealistic), you view the existence of consciousness as nonsensical. So much so that you read any argument about consciousness as reductionist, even when it's exactly the opposite.

Now that this confusion is resolved, I'll ask again: what exactly is missing in an account of conciousness that says states of consciousness (which are NOT a state of the body) result from states of the body interacting with the environment?

Reply to John What else would we have? Anytime we "derive," we are relying on what we already know-- X must mean Y. We can't "derive" without first knowing something. As such, what we derive is reliant upon the relationship we already know by intuition. We can't get outside what we know (or don't know) to conclude what must be true regardless of knowledge.

Quoting schopenhauer1

It's when models cannot be made near the fringes of thought that the models break down.

It is a genuine issue that modelling is procrustean. If you have a hammer, everything is a nail. Existence might be ontically vague, and yet still we want to model it in terms of definite counterfactuals.

So yes, this is an issue. But also - pragmatically - we can be aware of it. Even model it.

That is what science means when crackpots come up with ideas that are "not even wrong". Or they produce theories with too many parameters and so can be adjusted endlessly to fit any data.

Reply to TheWillowOfDarkness

I interpreted what you said to mean that states of experience both are bodily states and that they always are of bodily states. What else could "result out of states of the body interacting with the environment" mean?

Reply to John I know you did. That's my point. You always jump to that reductionist position, even though I hand't argued it at all. The idea consciousness would, itself, be a state of the world is considered impossible.

As for what it could mean, nothing more than the ordinary description of cause and effect: X (body interacting with environment) which then results in a distinct state, which is neither the body or environment (an experience).

It's no different to saying, for example, that letting go of a rock causes it to fall. In that situation there is a cause (hand realising the rock) which results in a distinct effect (the falling rock). Yet, we don't go around saying we don't know how the falling rock is caused, unless we somehow explain how it's the same thing as the hands which released it. Consciousness should be no different.

Reply to TheWillowOfDarkness

So, consciousness, or experience, is not a state of the body? What is it then, according to you?

Reply to John Consciousness. A state of the world that is consciousness. No reductionism. No need to be defined by an other terms.

I've said in the past that people do not take the existence of experiences seriously. This is what I mean. Anyone who thinks there is a "hard problem" thinks considers existence consciousness to be impossible. They either try to reduce to the brain (reductionist materialists) or trying to pose it as a transcendental infinite -- a reduction of the world to meaning-- that has nothing to do with the world (idealists).

Quoting apokrisis

But is reductive modelling - the familiar division into generals and particulars, concepts and percepts, theories and measurements - a bad thing or the natural thing?

I argue that this philosophical/scientific practice is simply a formalisation, a conscious refinement, of how minds already work. We break the world apart into its formal structures and material events for a very good reason. This is how modelling works.

As we've been through elsewhere, I simply don't put all that much stock into this epistemology. I acknowledge it's usefulness - for the sake of science in particular - but I'm far more interested in other modes of knowledge which of which I think modelling is fundamentally parasitic upon. To use a reference you're familiar with, I take as symptomatic Robert Rosen's point that the very construction of the modelling relation cannot itself be entailed by anything in particular - he refers to it, specifically and often, as an art. This is not an accidental use of the term. As someone who believes in the primacy of the aesthetic as a grounds for knowledge, modelling relations constitute a highly constrained - that is, particular - form of knowledge, whereas my own interests lie in the direction of a more general understanding of what it is to know. We are sensate bodies long before we are inference-mongering, reflexive intellects.

Tied up in this are other, more philosophical considerations too; when you acknowledge the procrustean nature of the modelling relation, part of what this entails is never putting the nature of the 'questioning subject' itself into question. You say that it's enough to be 'aware' of it; I think we can do much more. Philosophy simply has a wider mandate than what is legislated for by science, and I think it's an artificial, artifactual limitation that would seek to constrain it's exploration to modelling relations alone. Not to mention that too often, reductive epistemologies are uncritically and naively projected into the world itself, making it all to easy to mistake method for reality. This is to say nothing of the socio-political and ethical considerations that might come into play with respect to who can be said to legitimately possess knowledge. There are just too many shoals upon which one can wreck oneself if one simply sticks uncritically to modelling relations as a paradigm of knowledge.

Reply to Wayfarer Wouldn't Berkeley count?

Not to mention various proposals brought up on these forums.

[quote="StreetlightX]If by apt you mean the most irreparably destructive and philosophically regressive force of the last 2000 years, then sure.[/quote]

You frequently treat my posts with loathing and disdain. What I am advocating is not venomous, it's not regressive or any of the other negative epiphets you describe it with. I don't want to get into a slanging match - if you have a founded criticism of my views then I would be open to it- but I really think it is simply prejudice.

Quoting StreetlightX

We are sensate bodies long before we are inference-mongering, reflexive intellects.

Great. But what does that mean? How is being a sensate body not to be in an anticipatory or Bayesian modelling relation as a neuroscientist for instance would understand it?

Quoting StreetlightX

As someone who believes in the primacy of the aesthetic as a grounds for knowledge, modelling relations constitute a highly constrained - that is, particular - form of knowledge,

Why would one believe in that primacy? What is the argument?

And then how does aesthetics work as a method of knowledge (as opposed to say unargued, unsubstantiated, belief)? I've never seen that explained.

Quoting Wayfarer

You frequently treat my posts with loathing and disdain. What I am advocating is not venomous, it's not regressive or any of the other negative epiphets you describe it with. I don't want to get into a slanging match - if you have a founded criticism of my views then I would be open to it- but I really think it is simply prejudice.

But they are, they really are - just because you don't see it doesn't mean these ideas aren't fucking horrible. I can honestly think of no more morally repugnant and irresponsible idea than the notion that "nature doesn't contain its own cause." Have you ever once stopped for a moment to think about the implications of this idea? Can you imagine a more repressive statement for the affirmation of the status quo? The divine right of kings, which held humanity down in the shitter for so long, is nothing less than this idea. The idea that women are inferior, that sex is dirty, that the body is base, that manual labour isn't valuable, that white people are better than the rest of the world, all these ideas and more have found their basis in the awful, disgusting notion that 'nature doesn't contain it's own cause'. It's vile, a repudiation of any possible happiness other than what is mandated by some extra-natural Idea which would, if it could, make the world itself disappear so as to be frozen in the image of of Timeless Beautiful Utopia where no actual things ever happen. It's a hateful, inhuman idea.

Reply to apokrisis Check out something like Mark Johnston's The Meaning of the Body or Maxine Sheets-Johnston's The Roots of Thinking. Deleuze and Levinas have also written some wonderful things about this, but I would not expect that'd you'd ever read them.

Quoting StreetlightX

Check out something like Mark Johnston's The Meaning of the Body or Maxine Sheets-Johnston's The Roots of Thinking[/]i. Deleuze and Levinas have also written some wonderful things about this, but I would not expect that'd you'd ever read them.

Sure. I've checked that kind of stuff out in the past and found it not compelling. I just wanted to see you support your claims in your own words for a change. Will the ideas seem so convincing when they haven't been cut and pasted?

Not with an attitude like that.

Quoting StreetlightX

I can honestly think of no more morally repugnant and irresponsible idea than the notion that "nature doesn't contain its own cause." Have you ever once stopped for a moment to think about the implications of this idea? Can you imagine a more repressive statement for the affirmation of the status quo? The divine right of kings, which held humanity down in the shitter for so long, is nothing less than this idea. The idea that women are inferior, that sex is dirty, that the body is base, that manual labour is valuable, that white people are better than the rest of the world, all these ideas and more have found their basis in the awful, disgusting notion that 'nature doesn't contain it's own cause'. It's vile, a repudiation of any possible happiness other than what is mandated by some extra-natural Idea which would, if it could, make the world itself disappear so as to be frozen in the image of of Timeless Beautiful Utopia where no actual things ever happen. It's a hateful, inhuman idea.

If I may: I don't disagree with your substantive points here, but I think there's another side to the story, which is that materialism has not--at least not so many have noticed--managed to correct "the chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism". Actually existing materialism demonstrates all the faults that @Wayfarer criticizes: it is crudely reductionist, it erases meaning, and it renders human beings as passive billiard balls rather than as active agents--thus it is just as supportive of the status quo as the philosophico-religious tradition you rightly rail against.

This means that a tactical alliance between mystics and progressive materialists might sometimes be a good thing, especially if those mystics are the only prominent advocates for human meaning beyond what we have. I mean, nobody in the realm of politics fits the bill.

StreetlightX:I can honestly think of no more morally repugnant and irresponsible idea than the notion that "nature doesn't contain its own cause." Have you ever once stopped for a moment to think about the implications of this idea? Can you imagine a more repressive statement for the affirmation of the status quo?

You're reading many things into my posts that I never say. Any religious philosophy would say that 'nature doesn't contain it's own cause' (although, perhaps oddly, I'm not actually advocating theism). It's simply an observation about the limitations of naturalism, as such: that the things, entities, forces, forms of energy, which can be counted, quantified and measured, don't account for the order of nature; that the 'order of nature' is something different to 'the nature of order'. And from that, you get 'the divine right of kings' and repression of women?

And as for the substantive claim - it is manifestly and demonstrably the case, with respect to the state of the hardest of hard sciences, in this point in time. I don't even have to make the case.

The shit you're seeing is on the inside of your spectacles, SLX.

Quoting jamalrob

If I may: I don't disagree with this, but I think there's another side to the story, which is that materialism has not--at least not so many have noticed--managed to correct "the chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism". Actually existing materialism demonstrates all the faults that Wayfarer criticizes: it is crudely reductionist, it erases meaning, and it renders human beings as passive billiard balls rather than as active agents--thus it is just as supportive of the status quo as the philosophico-religious tradition you rightly rail against.

True :( But at least now not even the science is on the side of the crude materialists; this is manifestly not enough of course, but that we can be educated on this stuff is the minimal, crude hope that I hold out.

Quoting Wayfarer

You're reading many things into my posts that I never say. Any religious philosophy would say that 'nature doesn't contain it's own cause' (although, perhaps oddly, I'm not actually advocating theism). It's simply an observation about the limitations of naturalism, as such: that the things, entities, forces, forms of energy, which can be counted, quantified and measured, don't account for the order of nature; that the 'order of nature' is something different to 'the nature of order'. And from that, you get 'the divine right of kings' and repression of women?

Yes, exactly right - religious philosophy, which has been instrumental in repressing the status of woman around the globe, and well, the 'divine' in 'divine right of kings' should tell you just how close that connection is. I'm not saying that you've said any of this - perhaps the chief problem is exactly that you haven't, that you don't recognize, in the horrible idea that "the order of nature' is something different to the 'nature of order', the lodestone of almost every and all justification of brutality and socio-political repression in history; a denial of agency and ethical responsibility - other than, of course, to the autocratic dictates of the so-called 'order of nature'.

I'm not just making this up - read up on the history of these ideas and the way they have been put to use - read something like Susan Moller Okin's Women in Political Thought or John Protevi's Political Physics, or Adriana Cavarero's In Spite of Plato, and see how the focus on the Ideal has came at the price of women, of manual labour, of the entire realm of the aesthetic - on basically the underprivileged and anyone who isn't a well off white dude.

I know a lot of what I say is non-PC and it gets on a lot of people's nerves, but I don't have a tenure to defend or anything in print. I spend my days writing instruction manuals for corporate IT systems and then I come to internet fora to discuss philosophical ideas. I understand how that the hatred of religion is a big part of the problem - we're socially conditioned into that, on account of the way religions were construed in Western history. Everyone is going through that, it is in Jungian terms part of the 'shadow' of Western consciousness.

But what mystical idealists are seeking is a relationship with the origin of order, an actual vital connection with what underlies everything. Whereas, most think of religion as a horizontal, historical institution, spread out in space and time, a part of the social order, a source of repression and conformity. Whereas what has always interested me is the source, the 'God that is not God' or the God beyond God (which I have since discovered is also even part of Christianity). But anyway, having a connection to that is an end in itself, indeed the only worthwhile end. It is and also is not religious - many who have sought it and taught it have been among victims of religious orthodoxy.

Anyway, I'm very pleased we have lanced this particular boil, you're a contributor whose learning I have great respect for, and I really don't want you as an enemy.

Went upstairs to watch TV only to hear f****ing Brian Cox declaring that 'the whole marvellous universe is just built out of very simple building blocks'. It's not true, Brian, for heaven's sake! Last night he was also on TV confronting this certified nut-job who has just been elected to the Australian parliament, and who believes that climate science is a global conspiracy. Last night, he was great. Tonight, he's just a lumpen materialist again.

What a strange world.

Reply to Wayfarer The point is that, in considering the "order of nature" to be outside nature, we draw meaning not in terms of the world, but in terms of fictions which are not the world. Our eyes turn away from agents, what they do to each other and how they act towards each other.

Life and knowledge become not an act to understand human life and it's interactions with the world, but rather a quest to ignore it. Instead of respecting the meaning of our lives and how we treat others, insight into life becomes a question of serving the supposed "order of nature."

The world is put aside to worship the order which lies outside. We fail to understand our lives and how they relate to meaning-- Kings rule because all that matters is the divine order, men dominate over women because "it's the order of nature," etc.,etc. Everyone is too busy looking at the utopia of God's authority to notice what's happening in the world.

By the 'nature of order', one might be referring to, for example, the sequence of prime numbers or other such intellectual objects and formal laws, which are not natural objects, or found in nature. They can only be intuited by a rational intelligence capable of understanding mathematical relationships.

WillowOfDarkness:We fail to understand our lives

Speak for yourself.

Reply to Wayfarer

For sure, but that only speaks to the problem. Are people formal laws, prime numbers or intellectual objects? What about the rest of our world? No. They are far more than that. Indeed, they often confound the meanings of "order of nature": parts of the world act in ways we have never measured before, Kings cease to rule, men cease to have authority over women, etc.,etc. The world is always more than this notion of rational intelligence which is meant to give us everything.

Indeed, here you sound exactly like the materialist reductionist-- just worship the "order of nature" and you will have all the wisdom you ever need. Reduce life life to this formal law, this prime number, this underlying vital connection everything-- like measured atoms are to the materialist reductionist.

It is, in your words: "the only worthwhile end." Like materialist reductionist, you reduce life, only you do it to the idea of connection to everything rather than atoms.

The materialist reductionist is only dealing with the hangover of the immaterialist reductionist. Their inability to take consciousness seriously is because they've brought with them the idea of "the cause outside nature." The reason they deny consciousness is because they think it's impossible for a cause of consciousness to be within nature. In their minds, they have to exclude consciousness for material causality to make any sense. Like the immaterialist, they are too busy caught up in the worship of the order "consciousness is outside the material" to understand the world that's in front of them.

Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness

The materialist reductionist is only dealing with the hangover of the immaterialist reductionist. Their inability to take consciousness seriously is because they've brought with them the idea of "the cause outside nature." The reason they deny consciousness is becasue they think it's impossible for a cause of consciousness to be within nature. In there minds, they have to exclude consciousness for material causality to make any sense. Like the immaterialist, they are too busy caught up in the worship of the order "consciousness is outside the material" to understand the world that's in front of them.

This seems like a Straw Man to me. I have never encountered a physicalist (normally in the guise of a scientist) who denies the existence and causal power of abstractions. At the foundation of biology there is a theory of replicators, variation and selection, all of which are abstract. Information theory is explicitly counterfactual and computation is all about abstractions.

It is unsurprising therefore that physicalists believe that since life is caused by abstract entities, then so is consciousness. i.e. consciousness (whatever you mean by that) is a software feature.

Therefore physicalists are forced to conclude that artificial life is possible as are artificial minds, which would, of course, be artificial people. It seems rare to have a testable metaphysics, which seems a compelling reason to adopt it if only for methodological reasons.

Reductionism has been an extremely successful methodology in physics, but few physicists actually commit the error of believing that only explanations in terms of the laws of physics can be fundamental.

Reply to TheWillowOfDarkness

OK, so since you believe that consciousness is not a bodily state, I presume that means you also believe it is not a physical state; from which would seem to follow that you believe there are "states of the world" that are also non-physical states.

Reply to John

Nope. Conscious states are material. They are part of the same world as bodies-- just a different state of the world.

"Non-physical" is the immaterialist reductionism talking again. Supposedly, states of consciousness are meant to belong to a different realm because they are distinct from bodies. It's part of the ideology which denies existence to consciousness, putting it in another realm as if it had nothing to do with rest of existing states.

Reply to tom It's not abstractions which are at stake. The failure of the materalist reductionist is to ignore the presence of consciousness and it's relationship to causality.

The materalist reductionists are actually very good at abstracted causality. They give rules which measure causal relationships all the time. Where they fail is to describe causality in terms of the many present states.

Materialist reductionist pick out an abstracted causes to conciousness perfectly well (e.g. the brain). In this respect they are better than the immaterialism reductionists who just say "Consciousness woo."

They do not describe consciousness as a presence though. The one thing the cannot say is: "Material states of consciousness exist and are caused by various states of the world (e.g. brains).

Nothing is caused by abstract entities. Causality is always a matter of an actor and an effect. Things cause other things. The case against the materalist reductionist is not built on a failure to understand abstracted causality. It's argued on the basis of non-abstract causality-- on the failure of the materalist reductionist to describe causality in terms of the things which act.

Quoting jamalrob

What is evidently real may not be what is really real.

Inasmuch as materialism is a realist metaphysic, I see this claim as advancing some sort of phenomenalism or idealism, so we can no longer be talking about materialism. My claim is that, according to it, there should be no "evidently real." In saying that, we're still presupposing something other than what is alleged to be real, which simply will not do. Nothing could appear to be anything other than what it is were materialism, as realism, true. To admit the existence of appearances is to be a phenomenalist/idealist of some kind.

Quoting jamalrob

And the same would then go for Moby Dick and the mind: they exist, but they are nothing but their material parts (and processes?).

Moby Dick has no material parts, though.

Reply to Wayfarer >:O

I find Cox irritating at times as well. The current crop of science popularizers is pretty poor, in my opinion. There's too much ass kissing of pseudo-science like string theory, parallel universes, and the like. That and I find it hilarious the patently absurd claims so often made about the big bang. These guys need to take a basic logic course something ferocious.

Quoting StreetlightX

and see how the focus on the Ideal has came at the price of women, of manual labour, of the entire realm of the aesthetic - on basically the underprivileged and anyone who isn't a well off white dude.

What a load of crock. First of all, whatever effects the political appropriations of philosophical or other ideas may have, that says nothing whatever as to their truth or falsity, except insofar as these ideas are intrinsically political to begin with. Social Darwinism, for example, is to genuine Darwinism as fool's gold is to real gold. It's not an intrinsically political idea to begin with, so to blame Darwinism for whatever deleterious political effects are done in its name would be absurd. Second, the kinds of oppression you cite are found throughout history and across the globe. Might there have been a fanciful utopian notion in the heads of those white Christian slave traders who enslaved by the thousands "black dudes" and others? Yes, but so too might there have been a similar idea at work in the minds of Muslim North African slave traders who enslaved by the thousands "white dudes" and others. I repudiate all progressivist and utopian projects, but to suggest that this is also to repudiate certain other philosophical ideas which may stand, unjustifiably, at the base of such projects is to fallaciously impute guilt by association. There might truly be an eschaton, but if so, the point would be not to immanentize it.

What political appropriation? If you think classical philosophy hasn't had it in for the body, if you think it hasn't constantly and repeatedly devalued sensation, if you think it hasn't, time and time again, denigrated the value of manual labour, if you think it hasn't consistently placed women in an inferior position to men, if you think it hasn't striven after the timeless and the eternal, and if you think these things are merely incidental to any philosophy which would 'find the cause of nature outside of nature' or somesuch, then either you've a poor grasp of the history of philosophy, or you're OK with those sorts of positions. These things are not 'political appropriations' - they're written right into the fabric of those philosophies. When someone says "this limited, tiny sphere of being is what I think matters more than anything else' (be it spirit or molecules or God), then by definition everything else is of a lesser value.

That time and time again what seems to 'matter' is what so happens to shore up the status quo is not just a happy accident. When, in the Great Chain of Being, women are placed a step or two above animals, but not so high as man, it doesn't exactly take a ingenious act of creative 'political appropriation' to translate into societal doctrine. And I say this about any doctrine of reductionism, into which I include idealism (it's in the damn name) no less than base materialisms.

Reply to StreetlightX So more like a philosophical appropriation or expression of politics, rather than a political appropriation of philosophy.

Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness

Nothing is caused by abstract entities.

Speaks the arch-reductionist! This is patently false. People are abstractions and we cause lots of things. We alter physical reality to comply with our cultural preferences. You cannot explain why a collection of copper atoms sit in Trafalgar square without reference to Winston Churchill, his cultural significance, historical events such as war and causes of war, and that in our society we like to make bronze statues of important people.

Reply to jamalrob That seems to be it, which is precisely backward to me.

Reply to StreetlightX If you think all of your examples cannot be met with counter-examples, then you are hopelessly naive. Plenty of philosophical systems overly exalt the body, greatly value sensation, cheer labor, and place women on a par with or even higher than men. And am I really to be told that idealism, of all philosophies, is the great unchallenged majority view throughout history? That is sheer, unadulterated nonsense. From my perspective, which is not a totally uninformed one, it has always ever been an embattled minority position and subject to scoffing "refutations" of the kind provided by Dr. Johnson's foot in response to Berkeley's writings, for example.

Quoting StreetlightX

These things are not 'political appropriations' - they're written right into the fabric of those philosophies.

Hogwash. When in your armchair you raise your scepter and cast judgment over "idealism" in smug confidence that such a weighty abstraction is utterly translucent of what it signifies, while assuming that what it signifies cannot but be linked to some nefarious plot to make people lazier, lower their opinion of the female sex, and other bizarre insinuations, then you're merely shadow boxing with me and providing a raft of hasty generalizations.

Quoting StreetlightX

When someone says "this limited, tiny sphere of being is what I think matters more than anything else' (be it spirit or molecules or God), then by definition everything else is of a lesser value.

But you are simply adding values, sensation, social equality and nature to the list. So all claims still need to be argued.

For instance, you seem to be appealing to nature and yet railing against hierarchical organisation. Perhaps you just don't understand hierarchies sufficiently well, but there is plenty of reason to believe nature truly has to be hierarchical.

So maybe - almost certainly - you are projecting a Romantic fallacy on the world. And arguably nothing has done more harm to modern civilisation than the unnatural confusion that is Romanticism (as a way of life, as opposed to some diversionary cultural fun).

Reply to TheWillowOfDarkness

If something is physical you should be able to explain how it is so. Its easy to explain how the body, for example is physical. To support your contention then you should be able to explain how conscious states are physical.

Reply to tom Such descriptions are not abstract. In pointing out the connectionss of things in causality, atoms, statues and people, we are doing the opposite of abstraction-- we haven't supposed talking about the how the world works is just a matter of speaking in terms of measured atoms or the mathematical equations of physics.

Reply to John I did in my previous posts: states of conciousness are states of the world, are linked in its causality, making conciousness of the same realm as any state of the world.

Reply to TheWillowOfDarkness

This is in no way a description of the physicality of consciousness.

Reply to jamalrob It's worth pointing out the influence of this link has greatly diminished in the secular West. Over the last century, in stated philosophy at least, we've been slowly undoing this immaterialism within social tradition.

It would not be amiss to say most of cannot see just how intertwined they are. Since our culture shifted to understand the world (particularly people) in term of themselves rather than otherworldly order, we now laugh at the latter. The underlying immaterialist influence had been mitigated by culture that says it's bullshit-- we can almost treat it like it's "innocuous" whim precisely because it suppressed in culture.

If it were accepted as profound, as a couple of commentators here wish, it would again become a (more) dominate justification for social oppression. To pose The Order (e.g. men naturally better than women, white people naturally better than black people, etc., etc.) would be supposed as coherent description of the world.

Reply to John How so? What do you think "physically" entails? And how do bodies have it but not conciousness?

Reply to TheWillowOfDarkness

The words 'physical' and 'material', mean, respectively something like 'able to be quantified and modeled mathematically' and 'able to be sensed'. The body and the other objects in the world qualify under these definitions; consciousness does not. So, it is an empty assertion when you claim that consciousness is a physical state unless you can describe in what way it is such.

Reply to John
So you don't sense pain? Happiness? You don't intuitively feel others have thoughts and feelings? You don't know the child who touches the hot stove will suffer?

Experiences are sensed all the time. Much of philosophy is just irrationally prejudiced against the idea because it doesn't involve a particular sensory experience. The result is we ignore and dismiss the existence of consciousness. Conciousness becomes this thing which "doesn't makes sense" because we told ourselves it's impossible to sense, that it can't be part of the world we know.

This is the reductionism of idealism-- if I can't see, hear, smell, taste or touch it, then it can't be part of the world. Everything is reduced to a set of particular sensations rather than being recognised itself.

Quoting StreetlightX

We are sensate bodies long before we are inference-mongering, reflexive intellects.

I think you've hit on something here. If the most important part of our knowledge is a natural result of our embodiment, which in the process of 'human relating' becomes occluded by multitudes of confusing cultural and discursive accretions, then philosophical reflection which is necessarily another discursive accretion, necessarily the work of "inference-mongering, reflexive intellects", is not the way, but merely the way that may clear away the accretions and consequently our confusions, and makes way for the way. It is like Wittgenstein's ladder, or the "raft' of the Buddha; useful only for our preliminary orientation.

The spirit is not to be known by discursive reasoning, but by the natural activity of embodied intuition. So, I would say that the nature of order is the order of nature, but it is not limited to the order of nature discovered by science. There is a whole other order of nature to be revealed by the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious and the spiritual.

Reply to TheWillowOfDarkness

No, apart from bodily sensations of pain, those things are not "sensed" as entities at all. Those kinds of things are intuited.

Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness

This is the reductionism of idealism-- if I can't see, hear, smell, taste or touch it, then it can't be part of the world. Everything is reduced to a set of particular sensations rather than being recognised itself.

I haven't said that at all. I have said that if it can't be sensed then it can't be part of the material or physical world. You can speculate that things which cannot be sensed might be part of the physical world; but such a speculation is empty unless you can describe how such things are part of the physical world. So, you are playing the reductionist here by saying that the world is reducible to the physical world.

Reply to John Do you remember our earlier discussion on knowledge in this thread? All sensory knowledge inuited. If I'm to recognise the bookshelf in front of me, I need more than just the object in front of me. If I did not intuit the distinction between the bookshelf and the wall, I would not know either. To sense something is to invited it. The distinction between sensing and intitung you are trying to draw is incoherent.

But you have said it. According to your argument conciousness cannot be part of the world because it's not sensed/intuited/experienced in the same way as other things.

Your appeal to speculation is a contradiction. If something cannot be part of the physical world, then there's no way it "might be true." The "cannot be apart" excludes any such possibility. If something might be part of the (physical) world, then "cannot be a part" is false.

I'm not playing the reductionist. My point is that the world cannot be reduced to the objects that we say are "sensed" in opposition to "intuited." The material extends beyond them. There are things which are not empirical sensations of a point in space.

Quoting John

The spirit is not to be known by discursive reasoning, but by the natural activity of embodied intuition. So, I would say that the nature of order is the order of nature, but it is not limited to the order of nature discovered by science. There is a whole other order of nature to be revealed by the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious and the spiritual.

The problem with this thesis is that animals might be all about embodied cognition but Homo sapiens is a linguistic species. Our brains are shaped also by discursive reason from the earliest stage. We need culture to complete our development - our brains are designed for that because of their greatly delayed maturity. Even the teenage years are a phase of neural development that seems to have been absent in Homo erectus.

So SX is quite wrong in treating "sensate bodies" as if they were the primal natural condition of humans. We have already evolved past that stage because language created something much larger.

Sure, it is important that we are embodied in a world - the basic point of a modelling relations or semiotic approach to epistemology. But we are embodied in a cultural world too. So it is a Romantic fallacy to talk about "going back to nature" to recover the special goodness that is ... ecstatic dance or whatever.

Humans can't un-invent being linguistic and hence rational in the way grammatical habits structure all thought.

Reply to apokrisis Language is a feature of sensate bodies. Culture is something human bodies do. So is logical reasoning. Language is an expression of sensate bodies not an opposition to them.

There no going back to nature because our embodiment has been here all along.

Reply to apokrisis

I am not denying that the experience of embodiment is greatly elaborated by our linguistical natures. The two are inseparable, and language (including bodily, visual, musical, rhythmical and so on) is as intrinsic a part of spirituality as it is of the arts and of course the sciences and all other discourses.

But there are many confusions caused by the 'either/or' dualistic nature of discursive reasoning, that, for some people at least, cannot simply be dropped, but need to be worked out by the very discursive reasoning that is causing the problem. "Words got me the wound, and will get me well, if you believe it" (Jim Morrison from Death of My Cock). That is what philosophy, when it is not merely mental masturbation, is all about, in my view. Philosophy is a clearing house.

Reply to TheWillowOfDarkness

Well, at least we agree about something!
:)

Reply to John Until we start talking about it terms of consciousness. Then you'll insist experiences aren't of the same realm as bodies, speaking as if experiences/sensation/language were not part of that world we know.

Reply to TheWillowOfDarkness

Yes, I know objects are intuited as well as sensed. But that is not the point, or rather it goes to the point in another way than you think. The intuited nature of objects, their identities, is not physical or material at all. An object has an identity as a physical object, but its identity, per se is formal, not physical, which just goes to show that even objects cannot be reduced to the merely physical. Of course they cannot be reduced to the merely ideal either. That is what I was getting at in an earlier response to SX, where is said ( more or less) that idealism/ materialism are not "two sides of a rotten coin" as SX contended, but two (when considered in isolation), rotten sides of a true coin.

Reply to TheWillowOfDarkness

I would never say that. Experiences are certainly part of the world we know; but it makes no sense to say that an experience is a physical entity. To say that would be a category error; experiences are (or may be) of the physical.

Reply to John
I'm not talking about the identity of an object though-- the presence or absence of an object isn't its form. My point is the object is material (all existing thing are of the same realm), not that its meaning is exhausted in existing or not existing.

Reply to John If that is so, how come you still insist on the 'hard problem?' What is missing in the account which says states of bodies cause states of consciousness?

Reply to TheWillowOfDarkness

As I see it the physical aspects of an object are sensed; the identity of an object is intuited. Why must all things "be of the same realm". Do you have an argument to support that statement?

Reply to TheWillowOfDarkness

I don't insist on a "hard problem" at all. I think the relationship between the physical and the spiritual is something than can be intuited; but it is not a "problem", "hard" or otherwise, that can be solved by discursive reason.

Quoting jamalrob

So more like a philosophical appropriation or expression of politics, rather than a political appropriation of philosophy.

I don't know if 'appropriation' is the right word - all philosophies lend themselves to certain political emphases over others, and appropriation suggests a kind of exteriorly of politics from philosophy, which I think can't be maintained.

Quoting Thorongil

If you think all of your examples cannot be met with counter-examples, then you are hopelessly naive.

Oh please, you may as well start your own hashtag: #notallphilosophy. If you think the systemic tendencies of philosophical history are simply refuted by a few counter-examples, then your accusation of naivety is itself hopelessly misplaced. And like I said, I'm not just talking about idealism in the sense of 'it's all in my head', but any kind of philosophy which would seek to idealize some aspect of reality over others as being the Really True Thing That Does All Of The Stuff Unilaterally, including atoms, spirit, Prime Movers, or, when it comes to the human, DNA and brain.

Quoting apokrisis

For instance, you seem to be appealing to nature and yet railing against hierarchical organisation.

Funny, I don't believe I've used the word hierarchy once in this conversation, but feel free to conjure up disagreements as you are consistently wont to do.

Quoting StreetlightX

Funny, I don't believe I've used the word hierarchy once in this conversation, but feel free to conjure up disagreements as you are consistently wont to do.

In case you forgot....

The Great Chain of Being. Among the most important of the continuities with the Classical period was the concept of the Great Chain of Being. Its major premise was that every existing thing in the universe had its "place" in a divinely planned hierarchical order, which was pictured as a chain vertically extended.

http://faculty.up.edu/asarnow/greatchainofbeing.htm

Ah yes, because my acerbic off-hand comment about an ancient philosopheme is no different to my position on hierarchies tout court. Methinks you no inference-mong so good.

Quoting StreetlightX

Ah yes, because my acerbic off-hand comment about an ancient philosopheme is no different to my position on hierarchies tout court. Methinks you no inference-mong so good.

So are you making a point about the lower and higher rankings of things or not?

Your complaint was that women get ranked lower than men (if above animals), that sensation is ranked lower than cognition, that manual labour is ranked lower than intellectualising. And you seemed to be claiming this was a hierarchical positioning that is "against nature". So my reply is that this anti-hierarchical tendency - very familiar from Romanticism, Marxism and Post-Modernism - is a load of wishful piffle. It is something that you won't argue here because you cannot justify it.

But please keep pretending it was all some kind of careless slip of the tongue. Now that you can see where this is going, time for you to hop of the bus.

Who said it was careless? The idea of the Great Chain of Being is possibly among the most philosophically damaging ideas ever espoused. Don't think I can be more unequivocal than that. But I guess equivocation is kind of your thing, like how this automatically means all notion of heirarcy ought to be expunged. But then, your powers of projection and equivocation are surely higher up on the heirarcy of blunt thoughtlessness than mine.

Reply to apokrisis
More like you are confusing stated hierarchies with nature: a manifestly grotesque equivocation of the meaning of people and the world with principles of what the world is meant to be.

You are continuing to the Great Chain of Being which views the world as defined by something outside itself-- the principle of hierarchy that supposed to determine states of the world. Everyone and everything is supposedly "divinely planned" by semiotics rather than being themselves.

Quoting StreetlightX

But I guess equivocation is kind of your thing, like how this automatically means all notion of heirarcy ought to be expunged.

Why always so thin skinned and confrontational? If you can explain how your rejection of the chain of being is done within the context of a more general acceptance of the naturalness of hierarchies, then please just do so.

I've already made my point - that you seem simply intent on making the lower higher in good Christian fashion. In your own words, sensation, manual labour and political correctness are all of real value, while cognition, intellectualism and dead white males are somehow all dangerous to what matters.

But that is as trite an analysis as the position it attacks. For example, as I say, humans are naturally already more than mere sensate bodies. We are fundamentally discursive beings. So it is phony and romantic to claim that human embodiment is rooted in biology in a way that might invalidate its - ever increasing - roots in the cultural.

You probably can't deny the logic of that, which is why we are having all this ad hom diversionary posting now.

Ah yes, I must be like those pesky feminists, who, in fighting for the equality of women, must hate all men. The logic is undeniable, thanks Dave. #notallphilosophy

I mean honestly, if you've any ear at all for for the history of philosophy you'd know that the idea of the Great Chain of Being is just about the most 'unnatural' idea there is: it is literally a divinely ordained order which, like Wayfarer's dictum, posits the 'order of nature' as beyond - outside of - 'the nature of order'. If you think this jibes well with your naturalism, then either you're a terrible naturalist or a worse reader of philosophy.

Reply to apokrisis
That logic is precisely the problem.

Culture and discourse are embodied practices.
They formed out of biology interacting with the environment. And yes, this means there is no Great Chain of Being, just a whole lot of states of the world, various interactions of biology and environment. Culture is not a force that exists above and separate to our embodiment.

Quoting StreetlightX

Ah yes, I must be like those pesky feminists, who, in fighting for the equality of women, must hate all men.

Non sequitur. Drop the pose of the valiant hero and deal with the argument.

What argument? You have the reading comprehension of a fifth grader who continually extrapolates things I don't say from the tiny snippets of things I do and then has the gall to ask why I'm not defending myself in the face of your interpretive ineptitude.

Quoting StreetlightX

What argument?

Humans are naturally already more than mere sensate bodies. We are fundamentally discursive beings. So it is phony and romantic to claim that human embodiment is rooted in biology in a way that might invalidate its - ever increasing - roots in the cultural.

Yes, because claiming that we are sensate bodies means to "invalidate humanity's roots in the cultural". Seriously, when you're done making shit up, get back to me.

Quoting StreetlightX

We are sensate bodies long before we are inference-mongering, reflexive intellects.

I didn't make your shit up about the primacy of aesthetics. So again, what justifies this "we" that exists pre-linguistically. When was the last time Homo sap was pre-linguistic, if ever?

And what do you think language is if not a (particular kind of) aesthetic phenomenon? To use language is to know-how to employ concepts and words in the same manner in which we begin to know-how to walk, see, climb. We feel our way around the world no less than we feel our way around the thickets of language. In the words of Emanuele Coccia, "language is a superior form of sensibility." There's much to say about language - if not culture itself - as a fundamentally digital (and hence self-reflexive, hierarchically structured) form of behavior, but again, there's no fundamental break from sensibility that digitality effects; not to mention that language, contrary to popular understanding, is primarily phatic - concerning intersubjective relations between speakers - rather than non-phatic - concerned with the relaying information between speakers (although the relations between the two are complicated). Language is edification, command, promise, hurt and exploration first, and 'communication' later.

StreetlightX:if you've any ear at all for for the history of philosophy you'd know that the idea of the Great Chain of Being is just about the most 'unnatural' idea there is: it is literally a divinely ordained order which, like Wayfarer's dictum, posits the 'order of nature' as beyond - outside of - 'the nature of order'.

I think something like 'the great chain of being' - bearing in mind that particular terminology, and the Western model of it, are particular instances of a more general idea - is absolutely essential. Otherwise, there is no room for levels of meaning, levels of reality, or kinds of being.

I recall you got similarly hostile when I had a sig which said 'beings are not objects' which occassioned another scolding. I failed to see then, and still do now, why that is a shocking or inflammatory statement. But I don't want to engage in a flame war, I am trying to refrain from being sarcastic or dismissive. If there are real differences then they ought to be debated with civility.

In any case, I say there is an ontological distinction between beings and objects, and the nature of that is not something which is, generally, visible to the natural sciences (although I think it is something that semiotics recognises). But that 'vertical dimension', which is an heirarchy, is essential to philosophy, and I won't resile from that.

Depictions of hierarchical ontologies:

Traditional:


The Great Chain of Being

Contemporary:



Buddhist:

Quoting StreetlightX

If by apt you mean the most irreparably destructive and philosophically regressive force of the last 2000 years, then sure. Hiding a noxious resentment of reality - generally coupled with a healthy hatred for the body, manual labour, temporality, and women (whatever doesn't reek with the stench of socio-economic privilege really) - behind a slogan doesn't make it any less venomous.

Blimey!

Quoting Wayfarer

I think something like 'the great chain of being' ... is absolutely essential. ... Otherwise, there is no room for levels of meaning, levels of reality, or kinds of being.

I guess my most immediate reaction would be: why should there be 'levels of being' at all? To what conceptual exigency does the idea of 'levels of being' respond to? The traditional answer is of course something like, 'because God', but then, this is a philosophically useless answer as far as I'm concerned.

Moreover, it simply doesn't follow that without a 'GCB' we can't speak of 'levels of meaning' or what have you. There are plenty of hierarchies in nature that aren't divinely mandated, and they formed through perfectly 'natural' means. Contrary to what Apo - who in his incessant, nasty desire to read what I write in the most uncharitable manner - thinks, I fully accept that there are little chains of nature strewn through and across the universe, chains which come and go, each with their own immanent dynamics.

What bothers me is the the 'Great' and the 'Being'; every time a gay person is told that their sexuality is 'unnatural', what conception of 'nature' do you think is at work here? When a woman is told that it's only 'natural' that she be submissive to her partner, which nature is being appealed to? One where 'everything has it's place in the divinely ordained order' of course. I'm only barely being polemical when I say I think these ideas are venomous.

Reply to StreetlightX I hear you. Hadn't thought about it from that perspective.

Reply to Wayfarer
To put into the context of Beings, the problem is that objectification is located in The Chain of Order, not in Beings that are objects.

If something says: "You're an object" it doesn't constrain my meaning. I could still mean basically anything-- I could be Prime Minster, a great artist, an equal among others, more than what anyone else says I mean etc.,etc.

To be an "object," a state of the world, means exactly nothing. Existence preceeds (or is regardless of) essence to quote the insight Sartre doesn't fully realise the implication of.

There is no order I am reducable to, no assertion of meaning which can capture or constrain who I am. Any imposition of Order others assert of me, I defy in my expression of infinite meaning.

Now they might force all sorts of horrible things on me, they might make my life a misery or even destroy me, but they can never take my logical identity. I will always be a state of the world which expresses a meaning more than the Order they try to reduce me to.

Treating people as objects is not defined by saying they are objects. It's formed in reducing them to an Order which supposedly grants the wisdom of who they are and what they mean.

The Chain of Being is abhorrent because it treats people and the wider world as a means to achieve an imagined utopia. Order steamrolls the Being of everyone and thinks them mere 'objects' to be used.

Quoting StreetlightX

And what do you think language is if not a (particular kind of) aesthetic phenomenon?

It would be nice if you defined what you mean by aesthetic in this (apparently) ontic context.

Sure, I agree that neurobiological evolution results in embodied valuation. There is an emotional reaction to all that is the focus of attentional processes. So there is no doubting there is a phenomenology.

But to call it "aesthetic" is an appeal to something much more Platonic and ideal in normal usage - the holy trinity of truth, beauty and the good. And really, none of those has much to do with neurobiological level responses. Rather they too are discursive formations that have developed culturally.

So it would be quite wrong to mix up the two levels of valuation - the biological and the cultural. Especially when you mean to use the cultural sense to describe the embodied neurobiology.

Quoting StreetlightX

In the words of Emanuele Coccia, "language is a superior form of sensibility." There's much to say about language - if not culture itself - as a fundamentally digital (and hence self-reflexive, hierarchically structured) form of behavior, but again, there's no fundamental break from sensibility that digitality effects; not to mention that language, contrary to popular understanding, is primarily phatic - concerning intersubjective relations between speakers - rather than non-phatic - concerned with the relaying information between speakers

So clearly I argue that language is not a particular kind of aesthetic phenomenon, but instead a general kind of semiotic mechanism. And so philosophy would need to consider the way language does mark a new level of break.

Again, there is continuity of semiosis in nature - at least from a Peircean pansemiotic perspective. So biological organisation and systems of meaning (your aesthetics/sensate body) are also explained by semiotic mechanism (messages, switches, paths, codes). But then there is a radical stepping up of things because of language and cultural evolution.

Now a point about semiotics as a theory of meaning - why it is not a hollow term like "aesthetics" - is that it can be explained in material terms. Or rather, as formally dichotomous to materiality.

Symbols create a further informational dimension to reality - one hidden within the material world with its dissipative flows. This is what Pattee's epistemic cut, or Rosen's categoric distinction between metabolism and replication, is about.

Just as a computer's circuits can symbolically represent any idea for the same physical cost, so DNA can represent any protein (and hence the organisation of any metabolic process), and words can represent any thought (and hence the organisation of any social process).

Thus we have a physicalist account with semiosis. Symbols can regulate material flows because they exist in a dimension of information orthogonal to those flows. They stand apart to create a source of action that the physical world simply can't prevent .

So unlike this vague notion of aesthetics or phenomenological value, semiotics speaks to an actual fundamental physical break that is matter~symbol. And then - in foregrounding the issue of the machinery - it also says why there is a radical difference between animals (with just genes and neurons) and then humans (with genes, neurons and words - and numbers now too).

So to talk about language as a superior form of sensibility is crap. Sensibility is the product of genes and neurons (even animals are aware and anticipating). But words and numbers play out at a new cultural and abstract level of semiosis.

Yes, the two are intertwined intimately in neurodevelopment. Language structures sensibility - and needs in return to be grounded in sensibility. But they evolve in separate worlds. The senses evolve biologically, discursive structures evolve culturally. And it is the right kind of thing for words to be doing to regulate that sensibility in pursuit of social goals. That is nature in action. Selfhood - and the aesthetic attitudes that might seem bound up in that - is a social construction.

So this is about orientation. You wave the banner of embodied cognition as if you are anti- the notion of symbolic abstraction being still part of nature. Whereas I see it as part of the continuity of nature - nature's other hidden dimension. You say language is just more sensate bodilyness - a means to co-ordinate intersubjectivity. And sure, that is the everyday part of it - getting the social group to feel the same way. But then language does also develop an intellectual life of its own that clearly goes beyond immediate human needs and wanders off into metaphysics and mathematics and cosmology.

We were already the vessel for social ideas playing out way above our heads. And now even abstracta has taken off as almost a lifeform of its own.

Again, I have no problem with debates over whether this is a good or bad thing, a natural or artificial thing. There are arguments both ways. But the point is that semiosis gives you an ontic framework that its precise here. Whereas your use of "aesthetics" as a theory of meaning seems vague, ill-founded, and unilluminating so far. It seems merely to exist as a way to force through whatever popular PC politics is the predominant meme within your own social peer group. As you have employed it to date, it is a tool of rhetoric, not philosophy.

Quoting apokrisis

So this is about orientation. You wave the banner of embodied cognition as if you are anti-the notion of symbolic abstraction being still part of nature.

No, this is you projecting again; as is consonant with your Hegelian drive to turn all distinction into opposition and all difference into dichotomy. My whole point is that 'symbolic abstraction' is very much a part of nature, and one can only stare blankly at your so-called commitment to the "continuity of nature" while consistently pitting nature and culture, sensibility and intelligibility against one another. Where you see division I simply see mutual function - no wonder then that every time I lay the emphasis on something you reflexively think I must somehow be 'against' it's opposite. But your psychological quirks have little to do with anything I write.

In any case, I have no issue with symbols regulating matter and so on, but what you seem to miss is that they can only ever do so on the condition of them being sensible. Symbols would be nothing - empty formalism - without their capacity to affect make an affective difference. I would suggest that your blinkeredness to this matter is simply a lack of education; your conflation of sensation and phenomenology (when, in actual fact, it is well known that phenomenology has often been pitted against the notion of sensation), as well as your conflation of aesthetics with the notion of the Platonic Idea of Beauty (when in fact, aesthetics has a far wider and far richer history than it's Platonic one, as designating the sphere of the sensuous as such) seem to bear this out. I would offer you suggestions for further reading, but you wouldn't follow them up anyway.

Quoting StreetlightX

Symbols would be nothing - empty formalism - without their capacity to affect make an affective difference.

So when cells respond to genetic messages, you would call this "affective" in a regular phenomenological sense?

Reply to apokrisis

The point is the affect is embodied. It not symbolism which sends and responds to the message. Bodies do that. Without bodies all you have is a meaning which is not expressed by anything in the world. So it is for every instance of knowledge, symbolism and culture. Those differences are worldly, are stuff bodies do. There is no chain of being. The intellectual and cultural are not seperate from biology.

Indeed, with respect to differences in the world, they are only there because of it. If human biology suddenly lost its lingistical response tomorrow, the organisation of human society and interaction would alter overnight. The culture you consider so transcendent of biology would be gone. Biological states cause its presence or absence. Our world is not present by symbols. Its differences are bodily, a range of objects expressing the symbolic.

Quoting StreetlightX

but what you seem to miss is that they can only ever do so on the condition of them being sensible

Those who believe the hard question to be legitimate would then ask how it is that sense exists without committing a category error of replacing the phenomena itself with simply a model of physical cause(s) (i.e. the reason for sensation are these sound waves are hitting these neuroreceptors which cause x, y, and z, and so on..use any physical model to the zillionth degree of detailed explanation and it is all the same category error). No one doubts the cause which can be adequately predicted and verified by physical models, refined with further research and so on. It is the equivalency of the models with the phenomena that is at question.

Quoting StreetlightX

My whole point is that 'symbolic abstraction' is very much a part of nature, and one can only stare blankly at your so-called commitment to the "continuity of nature" while consistently pitting nature and culture, sensibility and intelligibility against one another. Where you see division I simply see mutual function

That's great if you understand that a dichotomy spells mutuality - and thus is an anti-reductionist notion. Or in fact, a holistic notion as the mutuality spells a mixing and so an irreducible triadic complexity of process - a hierarchical organisation.

Such was the shrillness of your earlier posts that this kind of holism wasn't coming through. But I'll take your word for it that this is what you meant all along. ;)

Reply to schopenhauer1
Well, that's actually the problem. Models are considered to have nothing to do with the world, so no casual description will ever make sense.

Since causality is understood as symbolic but not worldly, no description will ever make sense to them. No matter how much we describe, the cry will always be: "but you've only describe a model. The world being like that doesn't make sense." According to them, we can never know the world. Knowledge doesn't make sense to them.

Quoting StreetlightX

If you think the systemic tendencies of philosophical history are simply refuted by a few counter-examples, then your accusation of naivety is itself hopelessly misplaced.

I think there is more than one systematic tendency in philosophy, yes. :-|

Quoting StreetlightX

And like I said, I'm not just talking about idealism in the sense of 'it's all in my head', but any kind of philosophy which would seek to idealize some aspect of reality over others as being the Really True Thing That Does All Of The Stuff Unilaterally, including atoms, spirit, Prime Movers, or, when it comes to the human, DNA and brain.

In other words, a monumental abstraction that is, likely by design, well suited to damning nearly everything one doesn't like without much need for close analysis or argument.

Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness

Well, that's actually the problem. Models are considered to have nothing to do with the world, so no casual description will ever make sense.

Since causality is understood as symbolic but not worldly, no description will ever make sense to them. No matter how much we describe, the cry will always be: "but you've only describe a model. The world being like that doesn't make sense." According to them, we can never know the world. Knowledge doesn't make sense to them.

Who is them in this case? I can't tell if we agree or disagree.

Reply to schopenhauer1

Those who consider there is a "hard problem." Or those who consider descriptions of the world to be talking about something seperate to the world.

Most likely disagree. I'm saying this who think there is a "hard problem" are fools concerned with worshiping ignorance-- when we know something about the world, they say it's impossible.

Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness

Most likely disagree. I'm saying this who think there is a "hard problem" are fools concerned with worshiping ignorance-- when we know something about the world, they say it's impossible.

I think you are building a strawman against the "hard problemers". They are not saying knowledge of models are useless. They clearly predict things that can lead to other conclusions that follow predictable patterns, etc. No one ever stated that the models are not a (very good) approximation of the causes of events. It may even be the full and complete picture- it would not matter. The point is the models themselves are not the reality. The models are the descriptions of reality. So, no one is nasaying the efficacy of the models, but simply claiming the models are not reality itself. My experience is not x,y,z physical descriptions as propounded in a number of academic journals (or all the ones related to the phenomena I seek to understand). That may be the causes behind the experience, but the experience itself is not the descriptions.

Reply to schopenhauer1 But that's the problem. The issue isn't a failure to recognise models work, it's the inability to understand the world is acting. In other words, they do not understand how descriptions work. Supposely, to describe anything that occurs in the world, we have to be that state ourselves-- supposedly description of me experience fails because it's not the being of my experience.

Knowledge doesn't work that way. To describe doesn't require being. It just needs an awareness. Descriptions don't need to be what they are describing. Indeed, that's exactly what characterises a description: a state of representation of something else.

"Your experience (you are really referring to the being who experiences)" being more than any description of it cause (e.g. brain) or even description of your experiences (e.g. sadness, knowledge of this forum, happiness, etc., etc.) is to be expected. This doesn't mean descriptions fail. Or that what is described isn't part of the world. It merely means any person is more than any description or them.

The difference between being (existing) and describing (representing) always means there is more to the world than any description, no matter how accurate. Even if I were to spend hours stating what you'd done in life, it would still only be a description. The world contains more than just my description: you. Not a failure of description, but the truth that more than my description exists.

Quoting apokrisis

So when cells respond to genetic messages, you would call this "affective" in a regular phenomenological sense?

Put it this way: the quality of affect (and affect is nothing but a quality) is determined by (among other things) bodily differentiation, developmental history and spatio-temporal differentiation in an environment (primarily enacted through movement). As such, the human experience of language - or rather human language tout court - is shaped by the fact that we are motile, kinesthetic, haptically sensitive and habit-engendered beings. As the work of those like George Lakoff and Jerome Feldman show, our ability to language is constitutively premised upon our bodily experiences; the body is not just a 'vehicle' of a speaking, rational being, but contitutively determines, depending on the kind of body it is, the way in which language is used and understood (this lies at the basis of Wittgenstein's intuition that even if a lion could speak, we wouldn't understand it; the affective, sensorial worlds of lions and humans are simply too different). Here is Feldman:

"There is now very strong evidence that essentially all of our cultural, abstract, and theoretical concepts derive their meanings by mapping, through metaphor, to the embodied experiential concepts we explored in earlier chapters ... By linking abstract language to embodied knowledge, we are able to tap into all of our rich experience of the world and social systems as the basis for inference." To the degree that bodily - that is, affective - knowledge is our 'first' source of knowledge, language itself is built off of this primary fund of corporeal meaning: " Each primary metaphor is directly grounded in everyday experience linking our (often sensory-motor) experience to our subjective judgements. For example, the primary conceptual metaphor Affection is warmth arises because our earliest experiences with affection correlate with the physical experience of the warmth of being held closely." (Feldman, From Molecule to Metaphor).

This is what it means to speak of language as a 'superior form of sensibility', and what I mean when I say that symbols regulate matter to the degree that they are of the sensuous. It's simply not enough to speak of symbol and matter without taking into account the absolutely crucial role that sensibility plays in language. Sensibility is the very condition by which symbols affect changes - that is, communicate, regulate. So to bring it back around, I imagine that cells, to the degree that they both are and exist in less differentially structured environments, and possess a smaller range of interactive possibilities, would similarly inhabit an affective world of far lower intensity than, say, a human, without simply being a material vehicle for semiotic manipulation (a hylomorphic formulation, which, like all hylomorphisms, ought to strike one as immediatly suspect).

Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness

Knowledge doesn't work that way. To describe doesn't require being. It just needs an awareness. Descriptions don't need to be what they are describing. Indeed, that's exactly what characterises a description: a state of representation of something else.

I don't disagree with you here. Again, no reason to get upset or overreact.

Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness

"Your experience (you are really referring to the being who experiences)" being more than any description of it cause (e.g. brain) or even description of your experiences (e.g. sadness, knowledge of this forum, happiness, etc., etc.) is to be expected. This doesn't mean descriptions fail. Or that what is described isn't part of the world. It merely means any person is more than any description or them.

Again, I do not disagree, and again your implications with the word "fail" is moving back to strawmaning the position to saying that descriptions "fail". But I know the "sense" in which you mean fail so I will not hold you to it too much.

Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness

The difference between being (existing) and describing (representing) always means there is more to the world than any description, no matter how accurate. Even if I were to spend hours stating what you'd done in life, it would still only be a description. The world contains more than just my description: you. Not a failure of description, but the truth that more than my description exists.

Again, we do not disagree. The question is, how does one get to being without committing a category error of always referring back to the physical causes?

Quoting StreetlightX

"There is now very strong evidence that essentially all of our cultural, abstract, and theoretical concepts derive their meanings by mapping, through metaphor, to the embodied experiential concepts we explored in earlier chapters ... By linking abstract language to embodied knowledge, we are able to tap into all of our rich experience of the world and social systems as the basis for inference." To the degree that bodily - that is, affective - knowledge is our 'first' source of knowledge, language itself is built off of this primary fund of corporeal meaning: " Each primary metaphor is directly grounded in everyday experience linking our (often sensory-motor) experience to our subjective judgements. For example, the primary conceptual metaphor Affection is warmth arises because our earliest experiences with affection correlate with the physical experience of the warmth of being held closely." (Feldman, From Molecule to Metaphor).

This is what it means to speak of language as a 'superior form of sensibility', and what I mean when I say that symbols regulate matter to the degree that they are of the sensuous. It's simply not enough to speak of symbol and matter without taking into account the absolutely crucial role that sensibility plays in language. Sensibility is the very condition by which symbols affect changes - that is, communicate, regulate. So to bring it back around, I imagine that cells, to the degree that they both are and exist in less differentially structured environments, and possess a smaller range of interactive possibilities, would similarly inhabit an affective world of far lower intensity than, say, a human, without simply being a material vehicle for semiotic manipulation (a hylomorphic formulation, which, like all hylomorphisms, ought to strike one as immediatly suspect).

This is getting close to panpsychic ideas. Although, sensation itself is not explained without being self-referential or just saying as a brute matter-of-fact "sense exists, now let's build from there".

Quoting schopenhauer1

This is getting close to panpsychic ideas.

Not at all; I listed some quite specific conditions that need to be met for anything of the kind to occur: spatio-temporal and bodily differentiation, as well as self-other (environmental) interaction, primarily in the mode of movement; bodily differentiation itself is generally the result of phylogenetic developmental trajectories (i.e. evolution), with motility also being an evolutionary development in the service of sustaining a metabolism. The panpsychic thesis anything and everything has some mysterious measure of mind can... do nasty things to itself in the butt.

As for the notion of sensation being referential, this is not entirely surprising. If to partake of the sensuous is to meet (at least) the conditions above, then only a being of that kind would be able to make sense of the sensible. Evan Thompson, speaking in the context of the theory of autopoiesis, and employing Hans Jonas's dictum that "life can only be known by life", puts it nicely: "In observing other creatures struggling to continue their existence—starting with bacteria that actively swim away from a chemical repellent—we can, through the evidence of our own experience and the Darwinian evidence of the continuity of life, view inwardness and purposiveness as proper to living being. … The proposition that life can be known only by life is also a transcendental one in the phenomenological sense. It is about the conditions for the possibility of knowing life, given that we do actually have biological knowledge. One way to articulate this transcendental line of thought is as follows:

(1) To account for certain observable phenomena, we need the concepts of organism (in the Kantian sense of a self-organizing and immanently purposive whole) and autopoiesis. (2) The source for the meaning of these concepts is the lived body, our original experience of our own bodily existence. (3) These concepts and the biological accounts in which they figure are not derivable from some observer-independent, nonindexical, objective, physicochemical description … To make the link from matter to life and mind, from physics to biology and psychology, we needs concepts such as organism and autopoiesis, but these concepts are available only to a bodily subject with firsthand experience of its own bodily life.” (Thompson, Mind in Life).

Quoting StreetlightX

Not at all; I listed some quite specific conditions that need to be met for anything of the kind to occur: spatio-temporal and bodily differentiation, as well as self-other (environmental) interaction, primarily in the mode of movement; bodily differentiation itself is generally the result of phylogenetic developmental trajectories (i.e. evolution), with motility also being an evolutionary development in the service of sustaining a metabolism. The panpsychic thesis can go... do bad things to itself in the butt.

Quoting StreetlightX

(1) To account for certain observable phenomena, we need the concepts of organism (in the Kantian sense of a self-organizing and immanently purposive whole) and autopoiesis. (2) The source for the meaning of these concepts is the lived body, our original experience of our own bodily existence. (3) These concepts and the biological accounts in which they figure are not derivable from some observer-independent, nonindexical, objective, physicochemical description … To make the link from matter to life and mind, from physics to biology and psychology, we needs concepts such as organism and autopoiesis, but these concepts are available only to a bodily subject with firsthand experience of its own bodily life.” (Thompson, Mind in Life).

This last sentence seems to not say much. In order to know life, there needs to be another life form that understands what it means to have firsthand experience? Well, isn't that with every concept, even beyond biological concepts? In order to understand math, you probably need to be a being that can derive, invent (or discover if you wish), use, and understand math- basically a living being that has the capacity to do this. Or at least one that has the capacity to make a computer that can do this.

Edit: I guess perhaps I'm trying to say that how is it that saying "In order to know life, you have to be life" saying much? Maybe don't use the math example, but I'll keep it in there since I had it posted.

I think the point is more that on can imagine, at least in principle, explaining say, algebra to a disembodied being (assuming which we could get round the fact that a disembodied being couldn't 'know' anything at all*); "if you take one 'x' and you put a little multiplication sign between that and another 'x' you get 2x." i.e. you manipulate a few symbols and voila, you've learnt something. Whereas with affectivity, you're kind of left with a proliferation of synonyms; at the very least, if they ask 'what is a feeling?', and you reply by suddenly shouting in their face and asking 'did you feel that?' That's what it is." Sensation is what one might call 'indexical' in this sense. It's like trying to explain what the word 'here' designates; 'here' is a kind of performance in space and time, an ostensive act, a gesture towards a spot; sensation analogously is a kind of 'life-performance', you 'need to be there' to 'get it' as well - but to 'be there' is to be the kind of being that can in the first place.

*This math example is incredibly contrived, I should note: having a sense of spatiality - itself derived from being a moving body - is foundational when it come to being able to understand mathematical concepts.

Interesting discussion. On the one hand I think it's inevitable that language as used by people has to be grounded bodily somehow, but there's also no doubting that it has emergent formal and mathematical properties that aren't traceable in any straightforward way to them. Language as a formal system is something you can at least in part demonstrably 'teach to a machine,' and formal semantics is empirically successful in being largely algebraic (there is even a logic of indexicals that does not, strictly speaking, need to appeal to embodiment).

Quoting StreetlightX

It's like trying to explain what the word 'here' designates; 'here' is a kind of performance in space and time, an ostensive act, a gesture towards a spot; sensation analogously is a kind of 'life-performance', you 'need to be there' to 'get it' as well - but to 'be there' is to be the kind of being that can in the first place.

I agree with you about the idea that sensation cannot be simply stated and have it understood without the context of being a fully embodied being who already has sensations that could understand its context. However, to me that is simply a given. It is almost a tautology, though I guess it could be differentiated with some philosophies that may say that this is not the case. Anyways, I think this is simply begging-the-question because your answer to my response of how is it that we can explain sensation otherwise "it exists as a brute fact" is that we need to be a (proto or actual) organism to know what sensation is. That really only answers "what" can explain this, but not "what" sensation is, What essentially this translates to is this scenario:

Person A: "Sensation is X, Y, Z physical phenomena."

Person B: "Well, that is just a description using a model. The actual sensation needs to account for the actual "feeling" of the sensation."

Person A: "Well, you need to be an organism to know this feeling, so when I say "heat", you as an organism that can feel heat, just "knows" what it is".

Person B: "But how is this an explanation? You simply stated the obvious that sensations are what people feel and can relate because they intuitively understand the concept from firsthand experiences. This does not explain how it is sensation exists from non-sensation. This internal feeling of the organism.. the external and internal, the evolutionary trajectory, these are all descriptions similar to your x, y, z, but does not provide the actual understanding of how it is that there is this completely new form of reality that is different from previously. To deny this is a "different form of reality" is to state 1) That the form of reality existed previously or 2) To have no explanation really- simply question-begging.

Quoting StreetlightX

*This math example is incredibly contrived, I should note: having a sense of spatiality - itself derived from being a moving body - is foundational when it come to being able to understand mathematical concepts.

Actually, I agree with you, hence why I realized using math was not a good idea because you would think that I was saying that math can be recognized by non-organisms, when, in fact, I am saying that math, like sensation needs to have organisms with moving-body, internal/environmental relations (in other words sensations). I was just trying to say that it seems quite obvious that just like explaining sensation, explaining math needs someone with similar embodied experiences (i.e. people who also have sensations).

Reply to schopenhauer1 The point is there is no catergory error. Experiences are physical states. They are of the same existence as everything else. Not in the reductive sense of "only being a brain", but in sense of experiences being of the world. To be an experiencing being is to be material, a distinction of the material world, which may be described.

A proponent of the "hard problem" does not agree. They view the world to be of their experience rather than experience to be of the world. The reason they struggle with Being is because their position is trying limit existence of anything to their description. Deep down they cannot understand the world is more than what we say about it, for they view our world to be limited to our experience.

When we have a model, they insist we only describe our experience and not the world. Understanding Being is closed to them because they limit knowledge only to properties and parts which are stated in language. They deny the world can be more than what they say.

This is why they say "doesn't make sense" whenever that which is more than language-- identity, causality, meaning-- is spoken about-- they foolishly think the world only extends to their experience. For the world to be more, to be a person who is more than what is said or thought, is thought to be impossible.

Quoting The Great Whatever

On the one hand I think it's inevitable that language as used by people has to be grounded bodily somehow, but there's also no doubting that it has emergent formal and mathematical properties that aren't traceable in any straightforward way to them.

This is one of the points I think is interesting here. It is a speculative way of putting it, but it is as if the Universe is talking about itself in having its Platonic organisation emerging as the end game in our philosophic/scientific modelling.

That was the step Peirce wanted to make. Our human instinct for "reasonableness" could be either just arbitrary - just a very limited kind of Procrustean view we impose on existence with no deep justification. Or it could be in fact the very organisational principle by which the Universe itself self-organises into being. The Universe actually is rational in that it is like the development of an "embodied" mental habit, and exercise in rendering vague possibility as crisp logical counterfactuality.

So the contrast is between this pansemiotic metaphysics and SX's apparently panpsychic/idealist approach where he stresses phenomenology/aesthetics/sensibility - the experiential feel of things rather than the rational structure of things.

I don't deny that experience is where it all must start for us epistemically. It is really important to counter the usual reductionist view which simply wants to bypass all the problems of defining what it is to be a mind - in contrast to being a body. So taking an embodied approach to consciousness is absolutely the right thing to do.

But I take that already for granted. And my argument then picks up at the point where we have to turn back to talking about the material world. Peircean semiotics says we must see the material world as generally "mindful" in its mechanisms, but we don't want to then just be idealistic in a dualistic sense of saying that that mindfulness is some kind of dilute substance - a grade of some elemental mentalistic property as panpsychism does.

So the human mind is biologically rooted, and language/culture appear parasitic on that embodied state of sensibility. But language opened the door to a logico-mathematical level of cosmology modelling. And that does arguably - in its potential for Platonic-strength abstraction - create a conversation in which the Universe is speaking of itself now. Its principles are being articulated in ways that are forced onto us by their reality now that we have a suitably universal form of semiotic mechanism in words and counting, grammar and logic.

Reply to apokrisis The weird logical properties of language might somehow be biologically encoded, and many linguists seem to think they are. I'm just saying that much of language is just a bizarre cluster of formal restrictions that seem to be pretty robust across the world's languages and that you'd never guess just by seeing language as an embodied tool, or something like that. In that way it's a narrow view of the subject. Language has lots of properties that do not seem to care much for the cultural or bodily milieu they inhabit, lots of it is foreign even to its users, but still there and mathematically describable.

Quoting StreetlightX

As such, the human experience of language - or rather human language tout court - is shaped by the fact that we are motile, kinesthetic, haptically sensitive and habit-engendered beings.

You have been either missing or avoiding my original point.

Yes, I have always agreed with the embodied or enactive view of mental experience. I was already arguing that in the 1980s against the cogsci functionalism of that era.

But what I objected to was your invoking of aesthetics or sensibility as a naked foundation for anything. My argument is that this is a retreat towards solipsistic idealism and panpsychism in that it tries to make the phenomenology of feeling primary in philosophical positions. And that is a monism which is much too reduced. The right kind of most general philosophic grounding - the place from which to answer all deep human questions - is instead the irreducible triadism of hierarchical semiotic structure.

So the argument against aesthetics in particular is that that is already a socially constructed state of conception - a cultural rationalisation about biologically embodied processes of sensibility or evaluation. To talk about "aesthetics" is already to frame the thing in itself in an abstracting structure of words that embed a collection of cultural prejudices.

And this is just what you demonstrate by launching into rants about what is natural, what is wrong. It seems because you feel a certain way about manual labour vs intellectual activity, feminism vs patriachy, or whatever political agenda motivates you in some moment, then it is your conscious feelings that legitimate the stance. You talk as if any right-minded person would have to experience the same aesthetic response, and so phenomenology wins the argument.

But human emotions are socially constructed. There is the same animal machinery, but words are already getting in there and structuring experience from infancy. So if aesthetics is in the "mind" of anything, it is in the mind of a particular culture. That is its proper level of embodiment - if we must reduce towards a canonical level where the idea formative information, the constraints, are embodied as a state of remembering.

Again, you have agreed in the past about the socially constructed, language dependent, nature of human introspective awareness. To "look inside at ourselves and our qualia" is a skill that has to be learnt - one taught us by our social context, and so a set of ideas that evolved beyond us individually for its own (always philosophically questionable) reasons.

Thus to then turn around and say, no, look inside and there really just is this affective quality which is basic to experience and so the ground of philosophic epistemology, doesn't stack up. One can't look inwards to discover the "aesthetic". One has to look outwards to the cultural history, the rational intelligibility, of its (still evolving) social development as an idea.

And yes, again, there has to be some neurobiology that social contructionism can hook into. If you tell me that there is a Romantic response which is feeling the sublime, then I can check and say yes I get what you mean when I stand alone atop of a mountain, or whatever.

But hey, that is still a really bad foundation for philosophy. I shouldn't ignore the fact you are speaking for a social attitude which has evolved for its own reasons - reasons I ought to take into account against some larger scheme of nature which actually talks about the formation of such discursive structures.

And this is where Peircean semiotics gets it right. It makes that foundational connection between mind and matter - or now symbol and matter, constraint and freedom. Semiotics gets at the common mechanism that directly connects discursive structure and dissipative structure - rate independent information and rate dependent dynamics, to use Pattee's term. Or infodynamics as Salthe sums it up in his semiotic take on hierarchy theory.

Phenomenology is always going to be a misleading exercise if it is set up as a search inside for what is nakedly really there. We end up only creating the very thing we claim to be finding when we check and see that subliminity is an affective response we feel when we set up our state of thought according to the appropriate cultural prescription. Instead, what phenomenological training should set us up to look for - if semiosis is the correct model of course - is semiosis at work inside our own heads, creating its characteristic kind of organisation.

Quoting The Great Whatever

I'm just saying that much of language is just a bizarre cluster of formal restrictions that seem to be pretty robust across the world's languages and that you'd never guess just by seeing language as an embodied tool, or something like that.

Fine, And I'm going a step further in claiming that the emergent constraints aren't bizarre but natural in their developmental inevitability. Human grammar and the laws of thought are Platonic in that sense. They wound up having the only form they could have in taking semiosis to its rationalising extreme.

That was why Greek mathematics and logic was the big deal that got philosophy going. It was the first glimpse that existence could actually be a rational structure in a true sense. And now semiosis is a theory of how rational structure emergently develops with historical inevitability - getting us past the earlier problems of Platonic idealism where it is murky how the perfect forms interact with the messy material world to do the job of imposing necessity on contingency.

Platonic transcendence - an ontology of existence - gets fixed by Peircean immanence, a process view where the rule of law is instead replaced an inevitability of emergent habit.

Check human grammatical structure or logical form and there is a least action principle expressing itself. Of the many possible ways of thinking, it fast boiled down to an optimal structure that was the shortest distance to intelligible and persistent states of organisation - truths so true to seem eternal, and even always there even before they appeared in actuality.

Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness

The point is there is no catergory error. Experiences are physical states.

How?

Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness

A proponent of the "hard problem" does not agree. They view the world to be of their experience rather than experience to be of the world.

That's not necessarily true. That is a false dichotomy. Hard Problemers just do not make the category error of explaining experience by simply referring to causes when we are looking for correlates (how it is that physical things are experiences).

Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness

The reason they struggle with Being is because their position is trying limit existence of anything to their description. Deep down they cannot understand the world is more than what we say about it, for they view our world to be limited to our experience.

Actually many probably think quite the opposite- that the world is more than our descriptions and hence why they say that the descriptions (the material causes) do not seem to answer the "hard question".

Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness

This is why they say "doesn't make sense" whenever that which is more than language-- identity, causality, meaning-- is spoken about-- they foolishly think the world only extends to their experience. For the world to be more, to be a person who is more than what is said or thought, is thought to be impossible.

Again, I don't see how you are getting this. Indeed, I think it is quite the opposite- that Hard Problemers are willing reach for answers beyond mere descriptions in models.

Reply to apokrisis That only repeats the error of Plato. The forms of the world are considered an inevitable outcome of enteral logic. But this isn't true. No form of the world is inevitable. It always takes an action of the world to make it so. For a grammar to be used, someone has to exist using it. It's not inevitable by the logic rule of grammar.

All rules of grammar are true. Even those of language which is never spoken. They are eternal. But this doesn't define they are spoken. Only bodies can do that. The realm of infinite intellectual meaning has no power here.

And this why language ought to be thought of in aesthetic or "phenomlogical" terms. It turns us away from the fiction that the world is made from infinite meanings of intellect back towards the worldly states which constitute it.

The rational structure of inevitablity, world out of form, is the greatest metaphysical blunder of philosophy. It gets the relationship of logic to the world backwards. Form doesn't make the world. World expesses form-- there are rational patterns to the world, but they are an expression of what they world is doing, not a constraint which defines what the world must do.

Reply to schopenhauer1 They aren't willing to reach for answers though, for any answer is dismissed as inadequate. Whatever we say will be "just a model" and so a failure, even our description of our own extension beyond language. Instead of understanding what we are, beings who are more than language, they treat us like we are a mystery-- "We don't really know what we are.Wooooo."

When I say they do not understand Being, this is what I mean. They view our inability to give full description of ourselves as a failure of knowledge. Supposely, to resolve the "mystery," we would have to detail the nature of us, in language no less, as "more than language."

Fundamentally, they cannot accept we are more than language. When confronted with our extension beyond language, they say we don't make sense, that we are logically impossible, rather than realise that existing means to be more than language, so we actually make perfect sense.

Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness

Whatever we say will be "just a model" and so a failure, even our description of our own extension beyond language. Instead of understanding what we are, beings who are more than language, they treat us like we are a mystery-- "We don't really know what we are.Wooooo."

I don't know where you get that from. You are saying really contradictory things. First you said that hard problemers only look at descriptions (models?) and now you admit that they don't do that but instead quite the opposite, that it is beyond mere models. However, Hard Problemers do seem to posit plenty of ideas that are descriptions but realizing that descriptions can only approximate what is happening, using imperfect language.

Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness

When I say they do not understand Being, this is what I mean. They view our inability to give full description of ourselves as a failure of knowledge. Supposely, to resolve the "mystery," we would have to detail the nature of us, in language no less, as "more than language."

I don't know what you mean that we would have to detail the nature of us, in language, as more than language. Language is being used to convey things that are metaphysical- pretty heady stuff, so yeah, it's going to probably involve more than just a straightforward scientific description (if that's what you even mean by "more than language").

Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness

Fundamentally, they cannot accept we are more than language. When confronted with our extension beyond language, they say we don't make sense, that we are logically impossible, rather than realise that existing means to be more than language, so we actually make perfect sense.

Are you perhaps discussing New Mysterians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_mysterianism? This particular set of adherents may fit the description you say, but they seem to only be a subset of hard problemers. Not all hard problmers are New Mysterians. It is only one subgroup's response to the hard problem.

Quoting apokrisis

Phenomenology is always going to be a misleading exercise if it is set up as a search inside for what is nakedly really there.

I should add that my approach also then may lead back to aesthetics in that having recognised its inherently socially-constructed nature, that gives philosophy the useful job of figuring out what that social contruction ought to be. So to the degree we have to invent/discover the right aesthetic evaluative responses to be learnt, then that is the bit which is the work in progress.

So yes, we want a successful individual-level embodiment of cognition. Yet we can't find that in either biology or culture alone. Instead it is how the two levels of semiotic adaptation can arrive at their most fruitful balance in personal experience that is the question.

Now that is the issue with materialism or scientism that simply seems to deny that such a balance might be an end game. But also - where the romantics take offence - it does suggest that the human psycho-social balance is a game playing out within a still larger game of thermodynamics. In the end, philosophy in this vein has to make proper contact with material semiosis - materiality in some generally determining form.

So yes, personally we would want an aesthetic which is a felt guide to how to flourish. We would want to be so embodied in that way of being it is a sensible habit. But to get there, we would have to construct a scaffolding culture.

That is another reason why SX's posts have been quite objectionable in this thread. For instance, Wayfarer speaks for religious traditions that may have proved quite functional in terms of achieving such an aesthetic of flourishing. Likewise the chain of being.

So the level of philosophical analysis might be weak, and yet the historically-developed cultural prescription could pragmatically work.

Likewise, we all almost instinctively support feminism or oppose consumerism, or whatever. But from a philosophical point of view, actual positions must be argued for rather than simply ticked off as standard issue ideological at a certain point in modern cultural history.

schopenhauer1:How?

That's not necessarily true. That is a false dichotomy. Hard Problemers just do not make the category error of explaining experience by simply referring to causes when we are looking for correlates (how it is that physical things are experiences).

Experiences are states of the world. That's what it means to be "physical." Not a reduction of one state to another, but to be a state of the world. Your accusations of strawman are missing what the criticism of the "hard problem" is. No-one is trying to explain experience by reducing it to a correlate. They are saying experiences, themselves, exist. The sort of explanation the Hard Problem wants is incoherent. Description of experience is given by "experience," not by "caused by X." If we have the correlates in question, existing experience and an existing brain together, we have a full account of the cause of consciousness. There no extra link to explain. Our existence beyond of descriptions is a different subject entirely and has no relevance to describing the causality of experience.

schopenhauer1:Actually many probably think quite the opposite- that the world is more than our descriptions and hence why they say that the descriptions (the material causes) do not seem to answer the "hard question".

The "hard question" is incoherent. If the world is more than our descriptions, how there be a description which gives that? The issue with the "hard problem" is not that the world is thought to be more than descriptions, it is that fact is somehow meant to have description. For the Hard Problemer, even the world outside language is meant to be given in language.

schopenhauer1:I don't know where you get that from. You are saying really contradictory things. First you said that hard problemers only look at descriptions (models?) and now you admit that they don't do that but instead quite the opposite, that it is beyond mere models. However, Hard Problemers do seem to posit plenty of ideas that are descriptions but realizing that descriptions can only approximate what is happening, using imperfect language.

I don't know what you mean that we would have to detail the nature of us, in language, as more than language. Language is being used to convey things that are metaphysical- pretty heady stuff, so yeah, it's going to probably involve more than just a straightforward scientific description (if that's what you even mean by "more than language").

You have to remember they view models as only approximate. Using models, for them, means to only approximate what's happening, rather than describing the world. They think we can't give descriptions of the world at all-- that knowledge is only about our ideas rather than stuff that's occurring outside our language.

Solving the "hard problem" would be to state in language that which is outside language. If I could give an account of "experience," that was "experience" rather than a mere description of it, then the supposed issue would be resolved.

schopenhauer1:Are you perhaps discussing New Mysterians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_mysterianism ? This particular set of adherents may fit the description you say, but they seem to only be a subset of hard problemers. Not all hard problmers are New Mysterians.

Nope. They are just a bit more honest than the other Hard Problemers. They realise the argument of the "hard problem" requires consciousness to beyond understanding and so make that argument. This understanding is just as true for any other Hard Problemer, it's just they haven't realised it.

Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness

If we have the correlates in question, existing experience and an existing brain together, we have a full account of the cause of consciousness.

We have a full account? We have two things without the actual thing trying to be explained- the correlate itself between the two.

Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness

For the Hard Problemer, even the world outside language is meant to be given in language.

I just do not think this is what Hard Problemers believe. Language may be an imperfect vehicle, but things can be explained in language. Look at Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy. He has tons of neologisms, not presumably because he likes being obscurantist but because to explain metaphysics that is beyond simply reiterating the object-side (scientific-mathematical mode) of expression is inherently hard to produce. Therefore, language is always in the equation- just perhaps, very hard to understand language.

Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness

You have to remember they view models as only approximate. Using models, for them, means to only approximate what's happening, rather than describing the world. They think we can't give descriptions of the world at all-- that knowledge is only about our ideas rather than stuff that's occurring outside our language.

But often metaphysics are explained using the models and thus are a step removed the matter at hand. They are in the realm of causes assumed to be explanations of the events themselves. In other words, they confuse what we epistemically test/predict as the ontological event.

Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness

Solving the "hard problem" would be to state in language that which is outside language. If I could give an account of "experience," that was "experience" rather than a mere description of it, then the supposed issue would be resolved.

Well, yes it would wouldn't it. Of course, all we have is language so we have to make do.

Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness

Nope. They are just a bit more honest than the other Hard Problemers. They realise the argument of the "hard problem" requires consciousness to beyond understanding and so make that argument. This understanding is just as true for any other Hard Problemer, it's just they haven't realised it.

I think you are confusing "beyond understanding" and "beyond language". Yes, metaphysics may be beyond language, but not beyond (at least a good approximation) of our ability to (at least mostly) understand the matter at hand.

Quoting schopenhauer1

I agree with you about the idea that sensation cannot be simply stated and have it understood without the context of being a fully embodied being who already has sensations that could understand its context. However, to me that is simply a given. It is almost a tautology, though I guess it could be differentiated with some philosophies that may say that this is not the case. Anyways, I think this is simply begging-the-question because your answer to my response of how is it that we can explain sensation otherwise "it exists as a brute fact" is that we need to be a (proto or actual) organism to know what sensation is. That really only answers "what" can explain this, but not "what" sensation is.

We can try this on for size: sensation is the qualitiy of/for a certain kind of existence. Part of what motivates many of the criteria I stipulate is the fact that (spatio-temporal/bodily) differentiation (neither the environment we live in is purely symmetrical, and neither are the bodies we are) and interaction are all inherently qualitative, or rather, they 'processually qualitative'. Key here is movement; to move is not only to feel changes in oneself and in one's environment, it is to define what counts as self and environment in the first place. To move is to be individuated. Moreover, movement is inherently qualitative; Consider what Maxine Sheets-Johnstone writes about the inherent link between the qualities of movement which are the grounds for - what else - 'qualia':

"Any movement has a certain felt tensional quality, linear quality, amplitudinal quality, and projectional quality. In a very general sense, the felt tensional quality has to do with our sense of effort; the linear quality with both the felt linear contour of our moving body and the linear paths we sense ourselves describing in the process of moving; the amplitudinal quality with both the felt expansiveness or contractiveness of our moving body and the spatial extensiveness or constrictedness of our move- ment; the felt projectional quality with the way in which we release force or energy. Linear and amplitudinal qualities obviously describe spatial aspects of movement; tensional and projectional qualities obviously describe temporal aspects of movement, what we recognize as the felt intensity of our moving bodily energies and the felt manner in which we project those bodily energies — in a sustained manner, for example, in an explosive manner, in a punctuated manner, in a ballistic manner, and so on. Temporal aspects of movement are the result of the way in which tensional and projectional qualities combine; that is, the temporal quality of any movement derives from the manner in which any particular intensity (or combined intensities) is kinetically expressed.

On the way to spelling out the nature of these qualities more precisely, I should call specific attention to the fact that movement creates the qualities that it embodies and that we experience; thus it is erroneous to think that movement simply takes place in space, for example. On the contrary, we formally create space in the process of moving; we qualitatively create a certain spatial character by the very nature of our movement — a large, open space, or a tight, resistant space, for example. In effect, particular spatial designs and patterns come into play with self-movement, designs and patterns that have both a linear and amplitudinal quality. The predominant shifting linear designs of our moving bodies may be now curved (as when we bend over), now twisted (as when we turn our heads), now diagonal (as when we lean forward), now vertical (as when we walk), and so on; the predominant linear patterns we create in moving may be now zig-zag (as in a game of tag), now straight (as in marching), now circular (as when we walk around an object or literally ‘go in circles’), and so on". (Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement)

This is why I keep emphasizing the kinds of bodies that we are as key; to be a certain kind of body is to be a qualified body; it is not enough to speak about 'matter' on the one hand and 'sensation' on the other, rather, we are already the kind of bodies that are sensate bodies thanks to evolution and our ability to feel the world that is not only necessarily 'around us', but that we in some ways are. So I refuse to see 'sensation' as 'brute' or 'tautological'; this, to me, is spiritualist empty air, the same kind of which says things like 'God did it'; it explains nothing and leaves us with mysticism and posturing. To leave you with another quotation, consider Brian Massumi's words on the subject:

"When I think of my body and ask what it does to earn that name, two things stand out. It moves. It feels. In fact, it does both at the same time, It moves as it feels, and it feels itself moving. Can we think a body without this: an intrinsic connection between movement and sensation whereby each immediately summons the other? If you start from an intrinsic connection between movement and sensation, the slightest, most literal displacement convokes a qualitative dif­ference, because as directly as it conducts itself it beckons a feeling, and feelings have a way of folding into each other, resonating together, interfering with each other, mutually intensifying, all in unquantifiable ways apt to unfold again in action, often unpredictably. Qualitative difference: immediately the issue is change." (Massumi, Parables for the Virtual)

Quoting apokrisis

But what I objected to was your invoking of aesthetics or sensibility as a naked foundation for anything... So the argument against aesthetics in particular is that that is already a socially constructed state of conception

Again, you keep charging me with 'opposing' this, that or the other; 'naked aeshtetics' vs, 'social construction', 'inwardness' and 'outwordness'; there are all silly dichotomies constructed solely by you, and then projected, with no foundation, onto me. I fully accept - and I have no idea what you think I don't other than to put it down once again to your lack comprehension - that we can speak of 'socially constructed aesthetics' or that even that all our 'inward feelings' or what have you are a product of public habit-formation, etc, etc - in fact I would insist upon it. But because you're working with an incredibly narrow notion of the sensorial, you keep projecting that limited understanding upon me and think that I hold to it. I really don't. If you're talking about a socially constructed aesthetics, you're still talking about aesthetics. But that's exactly what I've insisted upon this entire time. Aesthetics is not some 'base level' of existence upon which everything is founded upon - whatever that would even mean; it is, nonetheless, paradigmatic, in the proper sense of the word - it 'stands beside' (para in the Greek) everything, it co-accompanies even the most abstract rationalisms and formal systemics, without which they would be/do 'nothing', would have no efficacy, etc.

Quoting StreetlightX

Linear and amplitudinal qualities obviously describe spatial aspects of movement; tensional and projectional qualities obviously describe temporal aspects of movement, what we recognize as the felt intensity of our moving bodily energies and the felt manner in which we project those bodily energies — in a sustained manner, for example, in an explosive manner, in a punctuated manner, in a ballistic manner, and so on.

Quoting StreetlightX

we are already the kind of bodies that are sensate bodies thanks to evolution and our ability to feel the world that is not only necessarily 'around us', but that we in some ways are. To leave you with another quotation, consider Brian Massumi's words on the subject:

Quoting StreetlightX

"When I think of my body and ask what it does to earn that name, two things stand out. It moves. It feels. In fact, it docs both at the same time, It moves as it feels, and il feels itself moving. Can we think a body without this: an intrinsic connection between movement and sensation whereby each immediately summons the other? If you start from an intrinsic connection between movement and sensation, the slightest, most literal displacement convokes a qualitative dif­ference, because as directly as it conducts itself it beckons a feeling, and feelings have a way of folding into each other, resonating together, interfering with each other, mutually intensifying, all in unquantifiable ways apt to unfold again in action, often unpredictably. Qualitative difference: immediately the issue is change."

So what makes movement in humans or animals different than movement elsewhere?

We self-move; as biological creatures, we self-relate; we not only sustain ourselves metabolically, we seek ways to sustain that metabolism; movement being an evolutionary strategy to help organisms do exactly that (one imagines - my evolutionary history is fuzzy - that it begins in the sea, with the development of fin-like structures to regulate movement in water currents, before taking off from there).

Quoting StreetlightX

If you're talking about a socially constructed aesthetics, you're still talking about aesthetics. But that's exactly what I've insisted upon this entire time.

Great. Except...

Quoting StreetlightX

As someone who believes in the primacy of the aesthetic as a grounds for knowledge, modelling relations constitute a highly constrained - that is, particular - form of knowledge, whereas my own interests lie in the direction of a more general understanding of what it is to know. We are sensate bodies long before we are inference-mongering, reflexive intellects.

...which appears to stress the differentiation over the integration.

First in your philosophy comes the primacy of biological embodiment - laudable in its greater generality than semiotic mechanism. Then second - in "mongering" fashion - comes the parasitic socially constructed aspect of intellect (which doesn't here seem to be naturally related to the sensate body and the phenomenology of aesthetics).

So maybe I am as dim as you keep trying to claim. Or maybe you really are quite confused in your position. And now I've helped you embrace a clearer understanding for at least a moment.

Quoting StreetlightX

(one imagines - my evolutionary history is fuzzy - that it begins in the sea, with the development of fin-like structures to regulate movement in water currents, before taking off from there).

The origins of motility are worth mentioning as a charming example of the dichotomous logic of symmetry-breaking.

The simplest movement is created by the spiraling tail, the flagella, of a bacterium. Rotate the bundle of threads in one direction and they tangle up to propel the cell in a straight line. Switch the rotation in the other direction and the threads untangle, causing the cell to now tumble randomly.

So the cell can swim down a chemical gradient - receptors telling it to get going straight if it is heading towards food, or away from toxins. Then if the cell is getting no such clear signal, it reverses the motor and tumbles about until something comes up as a signal to get going again.

So it is a neat example of a structural asymmetry - directed action vs random search. And the same semiotic logic persists into the left/right dichotomous division of the human brain. Left for focused directed action, right for exploratory thought and open vigilance. Then in cosmological modelling, determinism vs randomness, constraints vs freedoms, synechism vs tychism, repeat the distinction at a logical intellectual level.

The way we swim through the world is the way we swim through ideas.

Quoting apokrisis

The way we swim through the world is the way we swim through ideas.

Poetic, but where's the sense in it? Get the pun :D.

Quoting apokrisis

So maybe I am as dim as you keep trying to claim. Or maybe you really are quite confused in your position. And now I've helped you embrace a clearer understanding for at least a moment.

Bahaha, douchebag. But you're wrong to boot: I still take the inferential constraints required by modelling to be particularizations of a more general aesthetic without having to place them into opposition, as you are wont to do (or project onto me). The way I'd put it is this: the kind of rationalization you're after is - to use a clunky phrase - a linearization of a multidimentional aesthetic. The notion here is essentially anthropological: the emergence of linear writing, and the kind of abstractions it allows for, is an event in time, in human history. Here is Leroi-Gourhan, who traces the anthropology of writing through it's begging in pictograms, through to ideograms and then symbolization proper:

"The invention of writing, through the device of linearity, completely subordinated graphic to phonetic expression, but even today the relationship between language and graphic expression is one of coordination rather than subordination. An image possesses a dimensional freedom which writing must always lack. It can trigger the verbal process that culminates in the recital of a myth, but it is not attached to that process; its context disappears with the narrator. ... It still prevails in the sciences, where the linearization of writing is actually an impediment, and provides algebraic equations or formulas in organic chemistry with the means of escaping from the constraint of one-dimensionality through figures in which phonetization is employed only as a commentary and the symbolic assemblage "speaks" for itself."

What's interesting about Leroi-Gourhan's approach is that he does not simply and reductively oppose the aesthetic with the rational, but rather finds within the aesthetic a rationality of it's own, which is then progressively constrained for the sake of higher order abstraction; thus he condemns thinking of pictograms as 'mere pictures'; speaking, for example, of the arrangement of figures in Paleolithic cave art, he writes, "What we have here therefore is not the haphazard representation of animals hunted, nor "writing," nor "imagery." Behind the symbolic assemblage of figures there must have been an oral context with which the symbolic assemblage assemblage associated and whose values it reproduced in space."

The larger point is that rationality and aesthetics belong on a continuum, or rather, that there is a kind of aesthetic that just is rationality, which, from the perspective of the aesthetic, does not signify some sort of inexplicable and miraculous break: "Through an increasingly precise process of analysis, human thought is capable of abstracting symbols from reality ... Writing thus tends toward the constriction of images, toward a stricter linearization of symbols." (Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech). Modeling relations, which rely on very precise inferential rules, are enabled by this historical progress of aesthetic linearization, without, for all that, playing into silly distinctions like 'inside and outside', 'naked and rational' or whatever pseudo-dichotomies you see fit to foist onto me.

Quoting StreetlightX

Weself-move; as biological creatures, we self-relate; we not only sustain ourselves metabolically, we seek ways to sustain that metabolism; movement being an evolutionary strategy to help organisms do exactly that (one imagines - my evolutionary history is fuzzy - that it begins in the sea, with the development of fin-like structures to regulate movement in water currents, before taking off from there).

I understand what you are saying about movement being an evolutionary development that "helped" survival, however I am having trouble understanding how self-moving creatures (flagella one-celled organisms let's say) actually = sensation. Is there something in the "self-moving" and "evolution" concepts that I do not get that entails sensation?

Edit: I just picked up on the unintentional pun of "entails" :D. I also realize that movement may cause sensation or be the effect of sensation but how movement + concepts of evolution + concepts of survival = sensation eludes me.

Quoting StreetlightX

Bahaha, douchebag.

Your insults are so funny. Stylistically they are just all over the place. Maybe you should get a copy of a book of someone expert like Dorothy Parker so you could cut and paste?

Quoting StreetlightX

I still take the inferential constraints required by modelling to be particularizations of a more general aesthetic without having to place them into opposition, as you are wont to do

Maybe you don't yet get how dichotomies relate to hierarchies - despite my explaining it to you repeatedly?

The genetic level of semiosis and the verbal level of semiosis both play into the neurodevelopment of mental habits as levels of semiosis.

And the point was your earlier posts argued for a disconnect when it came to human-level cognitive development. You said sensate bodies came before inference-mongering intellectuality, and a lot of other things in the same vein.

You've now been forced to concede that this doesn't accurately describe the human situation at all - which would be a critical issue for any supposed philosophy founded on "aesthetics".

Quoting StreetlightX

What's interesting about Leroi-Gourhan's approach is that he does not simply and reductively oppose the aesthetic with the rational, but rather finds within the aesthetic a rationality of it's own, which is then progressively constrained for the sake of higher order abstraction;

This is obvious. And also the important point when it comes to a semiotic metaphysics. All semiosis is about the "linear" constraint on free variety - a limitation of freedoms, a reduction in dimensionality.

But again, your cite reveals that PoMo simply gets this back to front in treating the reduction in dimensionality as a bug rather than a feature. And this goes along with the anti-hierarchy/pro-flatness, anti-rationality/pro-romantic, anti-syntax/pro-semantics rhetoric that the dialectical-splitting habits of PoMo inspire.

My systems view is of course based on the differentiation that is the basis of integration, the competition that is the basis of co-operation. So while I always talk about the division that is a dichotomy, I also always talk about its synergistic resolution which is a hierarchy.

Thus when I repeatedly pull you up on your tendency to make "confrontational" divisions in ontology, this is not me applying my oppositional mentality on your holistic position, but instead me holistically highlighting the oppositional stance that is your go-to point of view. You show a quite incredible hostility to "otherness" - as you have demonstrated repeatedly to me and others in this thread.

Again, it is really quite funny. So keep it up!