Metaphysics as Selection Procedure
Metaphysics as a discipline has always been an odd field to define, if only because of it's seeming broadness. My working definition for a while was metaphysics as being that which relates to the 'first and last things': where things come from (origins), and where things are going (ends/teleology). But I've never quite been comfortable with this, if only because of it's looseness as a definition. Recently, I've been drawn - thanks to my reading of Gilles Deleuze - to thinking about metaphysics as a matter of selection: to 'have a metaphysics' is to have a way to 'select' among the kinds of things that 'exist'.
Thus, one can speak of metaphysics proper beginning with Parminides, who advocates to think of things in terms of either 'Being' on the one hand, or 'non-Being' on the other: that which is and that which is not. For Parminides, his 'selection procedure' consists of only 'selecting for' things that 'are', while consigning to nothingness that which 'is not'. In Plato, similarly, it's a matter of 'selecting' between what best participates in the Idea or the From (of the True, the Beautiful, the Good, the Just, etc), and that which does not: Model and Copy, Reality and Simulacra. Finally, in Aristotle, it is a matter of 'selecting' what falls under a particular genus and a particular species: Being is 'distributed' according to what categories they fall under, and it is a matter of selecting between what falls where.
So much for the Greeks. This notion of selection can be found operating in Leibniz and Hegel too. Although the particularities of Leibniz's metaphysics won't concern us here, for him, it is a case of God selecting for the 'best possible world', according to a rule of 'converging series' (it's no accident that Leibniz was an inventor of calculus!). In Hegel, the selection plays a very strange role, because Hegel - to be reductive - selects for everything: but the price he pays for this is the valorization of contradiction. Whereas all the phliosophers before Hegel partition the world in (at least) two spheres in order to distinguish between them, Hegel simply grasps the nettle and instead of making a (metaphysical) distinction, says that contradiction belongs to the nature of being itself: all distinction becomes a matter of contradiction, which resolves itself in the 'Absolute' from which nothing is excluded (there is nothing to select between).
Apart from very nicely threading itself through the history of metaphysics, thinking of metaphysics as selection also has the advantage of making it fairly distinct from the question of ontology. Ontology - as the study of 'what' is - takes metaphysics for granted, as it were: insofar as metaphysics selects for 'what is' against what 'is not' (in all it's various permutations, as per the examples above), ontology studies how that-which-is 'works'. Ontology says: given that metaphysics has delimited the field of study, the job of ontology is now to figure out the manner in which that field operates. Thus one speaks of a Cartesian or Spinozist ontology, where being is thought of in terms of substance, and so on. At the level of ontology, it's no longer a matter of selection, but a matter of how what is selected functions.
Anyway, hopefully the historical part doesn't throw anyone off who isn't familiar, but part of this is a recapitulation of chapter 1 of Difference and Repetition, which I'm reading right now, and this is helping to organize my thoughts.
Thus, one can speak of metaphysics proper beginning with Parminides, who advocates to think of things in terms of either 'Being' on the one hand, or 'non-Being' on the other: that which is and that which is not. For Parminides, his 'selection procedure' consists of only 'selecting for' things that 'are', while consigning to nothingness that which 'is not'. In Plato, similarly, it's a matter of 'selecting' between what best participates in the Idea or the From (of the True, the Beautiful, the Good, the Just, etc), and that which does not: Model and Copy, Reality and Simulacra. Finally, in Aristotle, it is a matter of 'selecting' what falls under a particular genus and a particular species: Being is 'distributed' according to what categories they fall under, and it is a matter of selecting between what falls where.
So much for the Greeks. This notion of selection can be found operating in Leibniz and Hegel too. Although the particularities of Leibniz's metaphysics won't concern us here, for him, it is a case of God selecting for the 'best possible world', according to a rule of 'converging series' (it's no accident that Leibniz was an inventor of calculus!). In Hegel, the selection plays a very strange role, because Hegel - to be reductive - selects for everything: but the price he pays for this is the valorization of contradiction. Whereas all the phliosophers before Hegel partition the world in (at least) two spheres in order to distinguish between them, Hegel simply grasps the nettle and instead of making a (metaphysical) distinction, says that contradiction belongs to the nature of being itself: all distinction becomes a matter of contradiction, which resolves itself in the 'Absolute' from which nothing is excluded (there is nothing to select between).
Apart from very nicely threading itself through the history of metaphysics, thinking of metaphysics as selection also has the advantage of making it fairly distinct from the question of ontology. Ontology - as the study of 'what' is - takes metaphysics for granted, as it were: insofar as metaphysics selects for 'what is' against what 'is not' (in all it's various permutations, as per the examples above), ontology studies how that-which-is 'works'. Ontology says: given that metaphysics has delimited the field of study, the job of ontology is now to figure out the manner in which that field operates. Thus one speaks of a Cartesian or Spinozist ontology, where being is thought of in terms of substance, and so on. At the level of ontology, it's no longer a matter of selection, but a matter of how what is selected functions.
Anyway, hopefully the historical part doesn't throw anyone off who isn't familiar, but part of this is a recapitulation of chapter 1 of Difference and Repetition, which I'm reading right now, and this is helping to organize my thoughts.
Comments (188)
Out of sincere, non-rhetorical curiosity, is your current reading of D&R especially colored by any particularly secondary source or interpretation?
I guess, if you wanna go whole-hog immanentist, that the metaphysician's act of selection must itself be ontologically explicable. & so this is how you avoid the perspicuous concern that @Moliere raises about metaphysics bleeding into epistemology - you make being itself a process of 'laying claim' or 'selecting', so that the metaphysican's act is but one instance of a universal process.
One interesting thing that Deleuze's reading brings out is that each 'selection' procedure has what he calls a 'differentiator': In Hegel it's contradiction, in Leibniz it's what he (Leibniz) calls 'vice-diction', in Plato it's myth, and so on. There's always a kind of 'hinge' which sorts out what belongs where (what does the selecting - a kind of metaphysical Laplace's Demon). Anyway, it seems to me that your question bears upon what Kant will end up calling 'critical' philosophy: a matter of justifying one's initial pressupositions without falling into 'dogmatic metaphysics' (metaphysics which has not sufficiently justified it's own notion of selection, nor the 'hinge' which does the sorting). My suspicion is that after the critical turn, one can't - in the manner of Plato - have an epistemology simply 'follow' one's already-established metaphysics, and it needs to be entwined with it somehow (from the 'start', as it were).
It's an open question how one will go about doing this, and whether, after it is 'done', one can neatly parse 'metaphysics' and 'epistemology' as two separate spheres. My intuition is that to speak of epistemology as a kind of self-enclosed sphere of study is a 'pre-critical'/'dogmatic' (in the Kantian sense) kind of move, and there needs to be a transformation of what 'epistemology' itself is, if one is being properly critical about things. This doesn't quite answer your question, but eh...
Yeah, this is exactly right. If anything, Deleuze's problem with previous thinkers is that they aren't clear about the nature of selection: what is it's status exactly? Part of what motivates D&R - and why he relates the history of metaphysics through selection - is to provide that clarification which he finds missing in all those previous thinkers. Deleuze's doesn't simply want to provide another in a long line of 'selection mechanisms'; he wants instead to justify his. This is why univocity becomes so important: univocity 'ontologizes' selection, it gives it the status of being itself. Thus re: the 'hinge' of selection in my post above, Deleuze's own 'hinge' will be the eternal return: it's the eternal return that 'selects' what returns, and of course what returns is 'difference'. How to understand that though.... In any case, I'm on chapter 2 right now, and it's the 3rd upon which everything turns I think, as far as 'method' and it's implication with ontology goes.
Yeah, Deleuze's account of individuation for 'things' will more or less parallel his account of the individuation of 'the thinker', who only ever thinks by way of an 'encounter', just as individuation only ever takes place by way of a 'heterogenesis'. It's univocity all the way.
Quoting csalisbury
I'm reading Henry Somers-Hall's philosophical guide along with the book atm (chapter-for-chapter), but what's really motivated me to pick up D&R again is having read Anthony Wilden's System and Structure a couple of months ago. Wilden doesn't actually talk about Deleuze at all (with the exception of a dismissive footnote in which he brushes Deleuze off as an uninteresting neo-Kierkegaardian), but reading Wilden (and his treatment of negation) really, really helped me figure out so much of what I think Deleuze is up to.
Also, having now read some of Gilbert Simondon's work (especially - vitally - the essay "The Genesis of the Individual"), I'm convinced that no one can read D&R without having read some of Simondon first. Like, you cannot read D&R without Simondon, you just can't. Everything Deleuze writes about affirmation, ?-being, 'problems', negation, the dialectic, etc, owes itself to Simondon (OK maybe not everything....) - but it's through Wilden and Simondon that I'm approaching D&R this time. Not exactly secondary reading, but yeah, definitely a set of lenses. Also maybe Zourabichvilli's book (Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event) which has been really important to me for a while now.
Re: this thread in particular, I don't know many/any secondary reading that really focus on the question of selection. Everyone seems to approach chapter 1 though the lens of difference (which, yeah, OK, the chapter is called 'difference-in-itself'), but it's real subject matter seems to me to be selection (of difference).
The only question I would have is that if I am correct in stating that there's a risk of bleed-through, then I'd be interested to see if there is a manner of differentiating the epistemology from metaphysics given said definition of metaphysics. (or if, in fact, this is not a concern worth having given said definition) -- I haven't read the book, but it's the question that your opening sparked.
A way to get a handle on what that does and doesn't amount to, in contradistinction to science, say, is (1) to keep in mind the methodological distinctions between the sciences (which focus on empirical experimentation) and philosophy, and (2) to keep in mind Wilfried Sellars' definition of philosophy (which helps one understand philosophy's methodological approach): "The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term."
Metaphysics is also technically comprised of "first principles" and philosophy of religion, but philosophy of religion broke off into its own field by the scholastic era.
Re "first principles," that is most easily understood in the sense of Kantian "transcendentals"--first principles are necessary preconditions for making what obtains possible. That's still a part of metaphysics, but it's more or less subsumed as part of ontology now.
Note, this can explain why both religious totalitarian and atheist communist countries are now largely relegated to the third world, while the US with its strong traditions of separation of church and state and rugged individualism has become the de facto empire of the world.
I used to be impressed by this but now not so much. I mean, I like Sellars, and even then I find this a kind of nothing-definition of philosophy. One of those horoscope-like profundities that seems nice but really doesn't say much at all. Not a dig at you, it's just a statement I find far too trivial and overquoted.
Metaphilosophy, divorced from the social climate of any particular bout of philosophy, seems anchorless to me. I immediately suspect that some crap is going to be smuggled in. Is that true of Deleuze?
In time period P:
How did people sort out what's real and not-real? If a philosopher claimed that it's all a Magnificent Lie (whether it was Rumi or Dennett), what motivated that assertion? Did the people of the time assume divinity? Did they assume inner/outer? That kind of question is fruitful to me...
But yes, I would agree that much of metaphysics is simply selecting what exists, I would just call this ontology. Meta-analysis of metaphysics, like metaontology, occurs during and outside of the ontology room.
I know this is not the topic of the thread, but I don't agree with this characterization of Aristotle (I think he's a much better reader of Plato). I don't think he was much concerned with "genus" and "species" (these are latter terms), this concern being much more the product of Porphyry (who was a neo-Platonist). Rather, I'd say that he was much more concerned with what is essential and what is inessential; in the case of living organisms, this distinction is rooted in the form of life of that particular organism (so he's very distant from current taxonomical paradigms, which focus more on anatomical features; for Aristotle, anatomical features are something to be explained, not what does the explaining). In other words, essential features of an organism are those which actively contribute to the organism's way of living, whereas inessential features are those which are a mere byproduct of the essential features.
This is not just nitpicking, because Deleuze's argument against Aristotle (in the first chapter of DR) depends on his Porphyrian reading of Aristotle (and here I think he may be operating under the influence of Le Blond), and I'm not sure if it can be patched once Aristotle's subtler points are in view.
Of course, that doesn't detract from your general point, namely that metaphysics is concerned with selection. I think that's an interesting thought, specially since you presumably select something for some purpose, and one could ask what purpose this is (I think Deleuze's reading of Plato is especially nice in this regard). But I'm not sure if I agree. Generally, one would say that one doesn't select one's metaphysical picture, but rather that that picture is somewhat forced upon one. Take, for instance, Lewis's argument for natural properties. Lewis's claims that his division of properties into natural and non-natural properties was almost forced upon him because they did much needed work in a variety of areas (he lists "duplication, supervenience, and divergent worlds; a minimal form of materialism; laws and causation; and the content of language and thought"). So I wonder if it's really about a selection.
Quoting StreetlightX
Rather than selection and hinges - which both speak to transcendent mechanism, imposed distinctions - metaphysics has groped its way towards immanent and self-organising symmetry breakings. It seeks nature's own logic in terms of dichotomous separations - immanent distinctions in terms of reciprocal, dialectical or inverse relations where vague possibility is strongly separated into complementary limitations on actuality.
And this mode of thought already shows itself "naturally" in your OP. Metaphysics is divided into first and last.
Some similarly sharp reciprocal distinction is sought between metaphysics and ontology in terms of metaphysics being the hinge between what is and what isn't, then ontology becomes a sub discipline studying what is (with the unspoken implication that it then itself gets organised as a hierarchy of dichotomous symmetry-breakings in Aristotelean genus~species fashion).
And thus what also shows through in the OP is the Pomo urge not to acknowledge this naturalism. Pomo politically favours multiplicity over any totalising discourse. It favours equality over hierarchy.
This of course is merely further naturalistic symmetry breaking or dialectics - the dichotomy of the one and the many for a start. Or the part and the whole. But it encourages the misreading of Aristotle which Nagase picks up. It is an attempt to bend the argument away from the direction it naturally wanted to go.
The metaphysical thread that links the naturalism of Anaximander, Aristotle, Hegel and Peirce (I don't know about Deleuze :) ) is that the full story of self-organisation is triadic. In the beginning is the monadicity of a vagueness, a perfectly symmetric potential. Then that becomes divided against itself by a dichotomisation or symmetry breaking. That then results finally in a hierarchical state of stable asymmetry - a persistent state because the two critical aspects of the world are now arranged orthogonally as opposed limits.
So that is why for instance Aristotle pushed both the dichotomies - like matter vs form - and the hierarchies, like genus~species. The two are different aspects of the one whole. You need the symmetry-breaking to get the divisions started, then the asymmetric local~global state of organisation which can put these division stably at the "opposite ends of existence".
So the OP shows several prejudices in the reading of the history of metaphysics. First it thinks transcendently about what needs to be immanently self-organising. Then it wants to resist both the notion of the dichotomy and the hierarchy, and so falls somewhere muddled in between in Pomo fashion.
For the sake of post-dialectical politics, dichotomies are safely neutered as "teasing paradox". And hierarchical organisation is mistaken for "the egalatarian freedom of multiplicity".
My current metaphysical problem relates to 'mind' in the analytic literature. There's a lot of talk about 'the causal closure of the physical', over there; and yet from Russell onwards there's a good century (as I'm discovering) of grave doubt about whether any philosophy can reasonably bottom out (forgive me) at a discipline like physics that has largely given up on talk of the causal and can barely bring itself to think much of time's arrow - except, that is, for the vital touch of (statistical) asymmetry between past and future that apo will like.
But isn't physics bottoming out in the statistical and the informational - the very turn that the last of the great systematisers, Peirce, foresaw?
The statistical is the ontology of self-organising emergence. Information is Janus-faced in talking about mind and world in the same coin - the inherent uncertainty or spontaneity of a "degree of freedom".
So science certainly is pursuing a naturalistic course when it comes to metaphysics. And it now describes "everything" in terms of propensities and distinctions - or Peircean habits and signs.
And again, I question whether C S Pierce sought to ground his metaphysics in what we take to be 'the physical'. A characteristic statement of his:
Schelling, to whom he refers, is in no sense physicalist. I think both of them wish to avoid a mind-matter dualism, but neither of them would subscribe to physicalism.
In respect of the OP, I found a pithy quotation the other day which I think speaks to it:
Even though 'the way our knowing operates' seems to be more the subject of epistemology, a systematic reflection on the nature of knowledge nevertheless seems fundamental to metaphysics generally, insofar as we have to be clear about what constitutes knowledge, before arriving at judgements about what it is of.
So physics is then idealist in saying reality is only what can be measured by someone? If it ain't a number on a dial, it isn't real? :)
I think if you get beyond Scientism you will see that science (pragmatically) takes idealism more seriously than anyone else.
Quoting Wayfarer
As I say, the whole point is giving up on the lumpen materialism of the lay person. Do you think quantum physicists can believe in the reality of "stuff" anymore?
Quantum field theory - our most advance formulation yet - doesn't even pretend to deal with "real fields". The "field" only describes a spread of observer probabilities. It is a calculus of how we might expect the needle on the dial to bend.
And how many times have you now wheeled out that exact same Peirce quote and apparently forgotten my lengthy response on its proper contextual interpretation?
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes. Metaphysics divides according to the classic dichotomy of epistemology and ontology - or the observer and the observables.
And Peirce was radical in finding a pan-semiotic metaphysics that could unite the two again. Quantum physics shows that now to be absolute necessary for any further progress.
Alternatively, this is what all the possibilities distill down to. If you understood the natural sciences in their broad sweep, this is where we are at.
I've been reading a bit by, and about, Sean Carroll. He's a respected quantum physicist but also physicalist. Hey, I'm on board with a lot of what you say, but then you say you're a physicalist, and that's where you loose me, but I don't want to spoil this thread, let's take it up elsewhere.
But not in a strict materialist sense. I would be a pan-semiotic physicalist - meaning that my ontology involves both matter and sign (or matter and symbol).
So signs and symbols are "made of material" in some sense - but in the most minimal possible sense, as a sign is that which manages to isolate itself from the thermal entropic flow.
Thus a sign is the forrmal inverse of matter in the pan-semiotic scheme. It is "anti-matter" in the truest possible metaphysical sense, ;)
I agree that it's almost certainly a Porphyrian Aristotle in the background here, but in truth, I don't think I did justice to Deleuze's reading in the OP. In reality, the engagement with Aristotle in D&R takes place almost exclusively with respect to Aristotle's impositions upon difference. If anything, what is 'selected' for is not where individuals fall under in terms of genera and species (as I put it in the OP), but the kind of difference which is given legitimacy in Aristotle. Aristotle 'selects for' specific difference, while ruling out, as ontologically illegitimate as it were, generic difference - hence the turn to equivocal/analogical Being.
Quoting Nagase
As I said to Moliere earlier in the thread, the associations of language here might lead us astray, because despite it's 'voluntarist' tenor, 'selection' is anything but voluntary in Delezue, and selection is always the result of an 'encounter' with or 'interference of' a 'question-problem complex' which forces one to creatively engage and fabulate responses as a result (the quoted phrases are Deleuze's). The kind of 'phenomenology' - if we may call it that - of Lewis being 'gripped' by the necessity of imposing the sorts of divisions he does is very much in keeping with the Deleuzian conception of philosophy as involving a 'pedagogy of the concept', where creation - or in this case selection - is very much a matter of imposition, of 'subjective dissolution', if we may put it that way.
Why 'alternatively'? I don't understand the natural sciences in their broad sweep, but I'm open to the idea that you may. Whatever leads to the model, the model itself is remarkably stable, quite satisfyingly fixed. What I'm interested in is your understanding of the status of this model in relation to all the other fragile, tenuous structures out there. Is the model itself of their kind? But how could something as fragile as they consistently and truly explain such a diverse range of phenomena? It's as though the tenuous, ephemeral, doomed dissipative structures were able to construct something quite-fixed.
Let's get romantic and non-crisp and quote yeats:
"Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come."
whatta dream right
But is your model that kind of non-natural enamel bird? or is it of a piece with nature?
My argument would be that I describe the meta-model. So it is the most general level description that captures the abstractly utterly necessary. And then - as the model itself models - it would support a hierarchy of increasingly less specified, increasingly freer, sub-descriptions. Thus the model indeed models itself in all its potential for local variety as well as its central certainty.
So if for example the discrete~continuous defines some ultimate dialectical bound on existence - in the limit, everything would be either discrete or continuous - then that also then means everything can then in actuality be some kind of mix of the continuous and the discrete. Everything would be intermediate cases in a freely various fashion.
So it is not a bug that the core metaphysics is a tightly curled mathematical knot that then becomes the generator of rich organic variety. That epistemology exactly mirrors the ontology it claims. It is its important feature.
If you think you have spotted a weakness in this regards, it shows that you are operating from - ironically - a classical, mechanical, mindset. You understands machines and their weakness. But then you still remain trapped in that paradigm in making that the antithesis you hope to reject.
You have accepted your enemy's legitimacy in his own terms by engaging me in those terms. Yet I've already long moved on to a fully organicist point of view (in which machinery, of the semiotic variety, is the useful emergent feature).
Quoting csalisbury
I'd rather stick to mathematical rigour. It's more beautiful and true in the end.
Quoting csalisbury
It arises out of biophysics, for instance. So it is based on particular nano-scale facts that we couldn't even hope to measure 10 years ago.
Doesn't it worry you that you might be building your own confident world-view on very obsolete data?
Don't you mean he argued for generic sameness?
That's the logical point. The general and the particular are asymmetric or dichotomous in that one is about sameness, the other about difference - in the familiar "mutually exclusive/jointly exhaustive" fashion required by fundamental thinking.
So do you choose a closed worldview that doesn't update its beliefs, or instead an open one that builds in continuous inquiry?
I don't understand the significance of your mechanic/organic distinction here. Is it a rhetorical thing of I cited poetry and 'if you want to play that game, well, guess what, *you're* actually the mechanical one and what do you think of that?'
Or are you saying that trying to find flaws in someone else's model is to be 'mechanistic' (??)
Either way, I'm not trying to poke holes in the model itself - I'm trying to understand how, as a part of nature, it relates to nature as a whole (a triadic metaphysical nature, if you want, not a spatiotemporal matrix with arbitrary laws and a starter pack of matter/stuff.) The model itself certainly couldn't exist in that symmetrical purely potential apeiron-thing/space/whatever. Yet, using the model, we can talk truthfully about it. There are, apparently, truths about the apeiron even before truths can be spoken. So maybe that's what this all boils down to. What's your theory of truth?
(footnote: what's up with the discrete/continuous bit? there are two opposites which function as limits and things operate somewhere in between? That's a solid example of the fruit of science and speculation? It sounds like a readers digest version of Bergson lol jk i love you apo but it does sound like that)
It seems to me to be open in the form of a promissory note: that science will continue to come up with new kind of things that exist, that ever new and different metaphysics may be based upon. But this would be considering metaphysics only to be concerned with the way the world hangs together, and the assumption that all and everything we can possibly know must be part of the world as it is conceived in empiricist or physicalist terms. And even if it would allow for new kinds of existents it would never allow for new ways, (beyond new technologies or models) of knowing them; so it would not allow for new kinds of ways.
Open. By design. So it is axiomatic. The process claims only to minimise our uncertainty.
If you believe in some different epistemology derived from an alternative axiomatic basis (one less idealist perhaps) then go for it. Justify away. (Revelation, Platonism???)
(some background - one of my longtime friends is dating a guy going for a phd in math - we discuss his work sometimes and he displays the patience and graciousness of a specialist talking to a layman. He's good with metaphors. But he wouldn't pretend that a crisp distinction between x and y is 'mathematical' because he respects his interlocutors well enough not to pretend that stark differentiation *is* math. I assume, based on your assurance, that you have similar mathematical facility (right?) so i wonder what accounts for the difference in approach?)
About this 'minimizing uncertainty' - I was reading a review by Galen Stawson the other day, in which he observed that 'physics, with its equations, only ever gives abstract structural descriptions of reality. It never tells us anything about the intrinsic nature of matter, in so far as its 'intrinsic nature' is more than its structure. Eddington and then Russell developed this point well in the early 20th century: ‘Physics is mathematical,’ Russell wrote, ‘not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little: it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover. For the rest, our knowledge is negative.’ He went further, observing that ‘as regards the world in general, both physical and mental, everything that we know of its intrinsic character is derived from the mental side’ and – again, many years later – that ‘we know nothing about the intrinsic quality of physical events except when these are mental events that we directly experience. 1
Whereas, I think naturalist methodology assumes the reality of the objects of experience, and assumes that, given our status as observers, we are able to arrive at some definitive theory of their nature. That is the underlying assumption of the 'mind-independent' nature of the subjects of observation; what is 'there anyway', in the absence of observers. That's what I believe a lot of modern empiricism tacitly assumes.
Wiith respect to your reference to Platonism, the thread did start with the Parmenides. It is a highly enigmatic work and not easily summarized.
From Wikipedia.
According to McEvilly, The Shape of Ancient Thought, references such as 'the meeting place of night and day' and 'the union of opposites' represent non-dualism which, he contends, was a significant cross-cultural influence on the Greek and Indian philosophers, partially from trade but also from the common source of mythological cosmologies amongst the info-european peoples (e.g. Orphism). 'Outside human paths', 'whirling chariots' and 'goddesses' are arguably references to trance or visionary states of being.
Clearly it's a challenge for interpreters - I think it's was always regarded as a difficult text even by Plato. But I make that point, to illustrate the kind of challenge it represents. I don't think, for instance, you could appeal to it as a kind of 'proto-naturalism', like you might arguably be able to do with some of the other Pre-Socratics.
If I understand Deleuze correctly ( I'm talking chapter II of DR here) time itself is a kind of traumatic aftershock, the effect of a disrupted equilibrium.To be in time is to be called upon to act, to set things right (that whole hamlet/time-out-of-joint analysis. (which, imo, is a a kind of rehabilitation/surpassing of Heidegger's call/conscience analysis in division 2 of B&T) ) You could say, maybe, that to exist as dasein - to be in time - is to be forced to select, and that what we'll select is already largely determined by the trauma that produced the time we exist in (as?) Our freedom, then, wouldn't concern what we select (do I choose x or y? vanilla or chocolate? the left door or the right?) but would be the spiritual process of navigating to the place/moment where we have (1) the courage to 'throw the dice' and (2) the moral fortitude (and practical capacity) to affirm what lands. Selection would be simultaneously voluntary and forced.
That may sound wishy-washy, but I don't think it is.
If you want the full answer from the biosemiotic perspective, that would take some explaining. You might want to google howard pattee + biosemiosis, or stan salthe + infodynamics, for the sharpest analysis in terms of dissipative structure theories.
But the simple systems science answer - which bases itself directly on Aristotelean naturalism - looks at it in terms of the four causes.
So the mechanical is reality modelled in terms of just material and efficient cause. In other words, formal and final cause have to be supplied by an external creator, a transcendent mind. Then the organic is immanent by contrast as all four causes, including formal and final, arise internally through self-organising development.
Quoting csalisbury
If you have no problem coping with Pattee and Salthe, then great. Let me know how you go.
Quoting csalisbury
I'm not talking about maths as maths. I'm talking about the particular maths I would employ - such as symmetry breaking, statistical mechanics, hierarchy theory, quantum mechanics, non-linear dynamics.
So there are certain mathematical/logical structures that I would appeal to here, not maths in some general sense as a practice.
And remember my response to the OP was that SX ought to use crisp formal mathematical concepts in place of his vague terminology. I said he should think in terms of reciprocal relations - as in dichotomies - rather than his "selection". Or hierarchical relations rather than his "hinges".
So if you want examples of what a more mathematically rigorous approach looks like, that was already it.
Well does matter have an intrinsic nature? Hasn't structural realism been the answer since Aristotle's hylomorphism?
Quoting Wayfarer
Not sure why scientists call themselves modellers then.
That's why Parmenides is so useful as the dichotomous contrast to Heraclitus in teaching Ancient Greek philosophy 101.
But remember Heraclitus was actually a dichotomous thinker - flux and logos, or local degrees of freedoms and global "ratiional" constraints. While Parmenides only leveraged Zenoian paradox and made zero sense if taken literally.
So I'm happy if Parmenides has to be crossed off the list of proto-system thinkers. He was never on it to begin with.
As far as selection is concerned, it takes place at the level of the first and second syntheses of time (contraction of habit and synthesis of memory), while the third synthesis (eternal return) ensures that a selection must be made at every point. It's basically the imperative of an inescapable 'NEXT' which forces the affirmation of selection at every 'point' in time. So it's a question of whether we comport ourselves to affirm the singularity of this imperative (throw of the dice), or whether or not we 'fall' back into treating time in terms of probability and 'bare' repetition - generality ("things have always gone on this way, so..."). Can we make ourselves equal to that which dissolves the solidity of our identity at every moment (the Deleuzian ethical imperative: become equal to the unequal within us)?
The whole thing is Nietzschian from top to bottom basically (with a Bergsonian spin re: memory): do we act actively or re-actively to the singularity of the Moment (cf. the parable of the Moment in Zarathustra). The difference from Nietzsche (this is Bergson) tho is that selection takes place not with respect to future 'choices' (as you said, 'x or y? vanilla or chocolate?'), but with respect to how we bring the past to bear on the present: "This is why destiny accords so badly with determinism but so well with freedom: freedom lies in choosing the levels [of the pure past]". Sorry if it seems like I'm just recounting my reading and using you as a foil - I kinda am.
Information theory, specifically the minimum description length principle seems at first glance to be the closest thing to a theory of naturalised epistemology, given its natural identification of ontology as an empirically updated data compression code that is not critically dependent on the a priori/a posteriori distinction in the way that classical metaphysics assumes ontology to be. Perhaps deleuze reached a similar conclusion through introspection.
Yet the identification of information theory as a transcendental principle of a naturalised metaphysics that lies as a foundation of certainty beneath all other knowledge and understanding looks to be a mistake for the same reason as earlier, namely that it is just another example of a rule of logic with no meaning outside of praxis, and that to conceive of it as being metaphysical is to appeal once again to an absolute and private notion of rule following or of logical necessity.
Quoting StreetlightX
StreetlightX, are you able to explain a basis for the assumed "eternal return"? I ask this, because there must be a principle whereby a "return" is necessitated. And, whether or not a true selection is indicated here, would depend upon the nature of this "return".
"Return" implies a repetition of the same. By means of return, the very same would be repeated, unless difference was selected for. If there is difference within this repetition, then it is false or misleading to call it a "return". The difference therefore, must be separate from, or independent from, the return, which is I beliueve, by definition of "return", a necessitation of the same.
If Deleuze proceeds on a principle of difference, then selection of that difference is allowed for, but true "return" is denied. Then this so-called "return" is not a return at all. If there is no return, then the very thing which ensures the continuity of existence, that actuality which forces the immediate selection of difference from the realm of possibility, at each moment of time, must be accounted for by some principle other than return.
As I said, I don't think this does justice to the complexity of Aristotle's metaphysics, for a couple of reasons. First, I'm not even sure it makes much sense to talk about specific or generic difference for Aristotle---as mentioned, this seems to be a Porphyrian element extrinsic to the way Aristotle himself thought. What matters is the form of life of an organism, not whether some "specific difference" occurs. Second, this has as an important consequence that Aristotle doesn't "select" for "specific difference" in opposition to "generic difference", since those terms simply don't apply. So, third, that is definitely not the underlying reason for "the turn to equivocal Being" (pace Deleuze's convoluted argument). There is a lot that could be said in regards to this last question, but here I'd note only that (i) the Greek term for "to be" is already equivocal, as can be gathered from Charles Kahn's remarkable studies to this effect (The Verb "Be" in Ancient Greek) and (ii) this linguistic data buttresses, along with Aristotle's logical analysis of the way assertion works and his biological investigations into the diverse forms of life of various organisms, his idea that being is equivocal.
So basically, I think Deleuze may have been to quick in his dismissal of Aristotle, and there may be some problems for his argument for univocity in the first chapter of DR because of this. But I may have already strayed too far from the OP, so I won't pursue this line here.
Quoting StreetlightX
That sounds reasonable.
Yeah, same, it confused me at first and now it just bugs me. It's pretty clear that, for Nietzsche, the eternal return is a thought experiment which serves as an ethical heuristic. It's not an ontological thesis at all. Maybe you could make the claim that Nietzsche's work as a whole supports this ontological idea that Deleuze has dubbed 'eternal return' (I have no idea, I haven't read much Nietzsche since high school) but either way, it's still a bad term to employ.
No, I mean I understand the broad difference between mechanic and organic (teleology) and I think anyone who's spent much time on this board has been beaten half to death with the whole immanent vs transcendent thing. I - we - get the difference (the implications are another matter.) So, but no, that's not what I was I confused about.
What I didn't understand was your suggestion that my asking after the ontological status of your model meant that I was still thinking in mechanistic terms. I still don't. I'm hoping you could shine a little light there?
And I'm still curious what your theory of truth is. Or if you even care about that kind of thing? and, if not, why not?
The biggest problem I have with this explanation is that it's not really true - you constantly use 'crisp' and 'rigorous' and 'mathematical' to refer to non-mathematical neat dichotomies, as with that true detective analysis way back when. I'm sure I'd struggle a whole bunch with pattee and whomever, so I understand the need to simplify. What waries me is the way you play fast and loose with a whole bunch of terms, as though you suspect your audience won't know the difference. The way you talk about math and science - Idk, man, it's not the way other people who know hard stuff well talk about it to the uninitiated. At least in my experience. There's something a little coquettish to your style lol jk I love you apo, but there is.
Anyway, I wasn't referring to your initial response to the OP, because you never mentioned math in it. But if that really was what you were doing in that post - suggesting mathematical substitutes drawn from irl scientific fields - your inclusion of 'dialectic' alongside 'reciprocal relations' etc. is odd. 'dialectic' is certainly not a 'crisp formal mathematical concept.' So are you using 'mathematical' to mean something which extends beyond actual, like, you know, math? Or are there 'crisp' concepts which aren't mathematical, and 'dialectic' is one of them?
There's this thing you have with 'crisp' - which is very interesting. I mean it's interesting that the word you use most, and seem to find immense satisfaction in, is not itself any more 'crisp, formal, mathematical' than 'selection' or 'hinge.'
Do you find that interesting? What do you think about it? It seems interesting right!
Your line of attack was "your own model is clenched and curled up super tight brooking only those findings and ideas which will reinforce".
My reply was that my model is like that only in the sense of a seed waiting to unfurl. So it is in fact a recursively open-ended and hierarchically generative model - a properly organic one.
Mine is a semiotic approach that is based on the search for a core symmetry breaking process. And this core process has been identified by a series of key writers - starting with Anaximander and his notion of apokrisis or "separating out". :)
In modern times, Peirce's semiotic, Rosen's modelling relation, Pattee's epistemic cut, and Salthe's basic triadic system, are all even sharper approaches to an answer based on the understanding that reality is a product of "matter and sign".
So my claim is that semiotic metaphysics is the "true" model of organic causality. And then that this model is best understood in terms of its "other", which is going to be the standard issue lumpen materialism that can be generally classified as "classical mechanics".
The mechanical view of causality revolves around a familiar family of principles (and their "others), namely reductionism (vs holism), determinism (vs contingency), monadism (vs anti-totalising), locality (vs quantum nonlocality), atomism (vs continuity).
So what I said was that in your attempts to criticise me, you tried to use the notions of mechanical discourse to show me as "other" to what you implicitly hold to be "the correct position". And I replied by pointing out that that only shows you are wedded to that mechanical discourse. You rely on its "truth" to ground your "truth". But to deal with my position, you would have to appreciate how it stands quite outside this little 18th century romanticism vs enlightenment spat you might be imagining.
Quoting csalisbury
How can you still be curious, honestly? What more do I need to say except Peircean Pragmatism? Or Rosen's modelling relations?
Truth is a triadic sign relation. It is a process of constraining uncertainty using semiosis.
Quoting csalisbury
True Detective turned out to be shit as philosophy, so I don't even remember whatever it was that has got your goat here.
And note that "crisp" is a technical term that a biosemiotician would oppose to "vague". So it has a particular communal meaning. Although I like it because it is also quite a self-explanatory everyday language term.
So when I use "crisp", I do mean it "mathematically". That is I am defining it dichotomistically as the "other" of "vague". And thus formally, I am saying crisp = 1/vague - the relation being the reciprocal or inverse operation that is a dichotomy.
In case you don't follow that, crisp = 1/vague means that crispness is defined as being the least possible amount of the vague. An infinitesimal quantity. Or the furthest possible countable distance away.
Quoting csalisbury
Perhaps you see by now that it can be?
Quoting csalisbury
I'm guessing you might be feeling increasingly embarrassed at your half-arsed taunts by now.
As to 'crisp', I'd never thought of it as being inversely related to 'vague' but now its mathematical pedigree is clear to me and, yes, I'm quite embarassed.
edit: ok did the googling - it's a set theory thing, right? why didn't you say that! What I'm still not clear on is how any of many of your usages of the term can be anything but metaphorical ? What I'm saying is your distinction between 'crisp,' mathematical' terms and bad vague metaphors has some merit, but when you use it against others it often becomes something of a bastardized version of itself - clearly, terms are crisp or vague based onthe context of their usage, not as a function of whether they're derived from a mathematical field (as 'dialectic' for instance, is not.)
So do you accept that my approach is "clenched and curled up super tight" because it describes the generative algorithm at the heart of my "semiotic organicism" and not - as you implied - simply because I suffer from some stubborn unwillingness to consider any other metaphysical possibility?
Your charge was that I am guilty of holding to "a set and sedentary framework". I am replying that is hardly unreasonable if that framework happens to be the right one - and I can happily show how I've arrived at it by a process of elimination.
If you want a scholarly discussion, you can have it. But by your own admission, you "haven't read" any of the relevant scholarship. Let me know when you've made a start.
OK sure, I can understand that. But you've already said that this eternal return "ensures that a selection must be made at every point". So I take it to be a kind of necessity rather than a selection itself. As the thing which necessitates selection, it cannot itself be selected for, it is a necessity. So if eternal return is a metaphysical principle of Derrida's, then metaphysics goes beyond selection, according to this necessity.
However, I see that you have defined a separation between metaphysics and ontology, and eternal return appears to be an ontological principle. Am I correct to assume that there is a separation between selection, as metaphysical, and eternal return as ontological? Ontology deals with "what is", and this is necessity, while metaphysics deals with selection.
I think that there is a question concerning the relationship between these two. In the op it is said that metaphysics selects the field, and ontology operates within that field. But when you refer to Deleuze, the inverse is implied, that the ontological, eternal return necessitates selection. However, you also said "it's the eternal return that 'selects' what returns, and of course what returns is 'difference'". Now, there seems to be some ambiguity in your posts, could you clarify one thing for me? Do you think that the eternal return actually selects, or does the eternal return necessitate selection?
I don't really claim anything as mine or original. That is why I am at pains always to start with Anaximander - the first bloody metaphysician! :)
If you want the path I followed, it began in ecology, shifted to computer science, then paleoanthropology, then neuroscience/philosophy of mind, then complexity science, and finally arrived at the nascent field of biosemiotics. At which point I then took a decade detour through cosmology and the possibility of pan-semiotic approaches to physical science generally. And right now, I'm sort of back to biology, completing the circle with biophysics and abiogenesis having really started to shift into top gear intellectually.
So you are right. Early on I accepted the argument that biology is bigger than physics, and that science's failure to deal with the problem of mind could be put down to a lack of a suitable organicist metaphysics.
But then it turns out that we didn't even understand life properly in the 1970s and 1980s. So it is revolution stacked on revolution. What could be more thrilling?
The other thing is you seem to get something out of reasserting its principles - in distilled terms -over and over again, in all sorts of diverse threads. It doesn't seem to be primarily for the benefit oreducation of others when you do it. Not most of the time anway. It's usually more eristic. What makes philosophy enjoyable and worthwhile, for me, is the uncertainty and periodic aha moments - but so having found the right answers, why still do it? You talk a lot about othering - and seem drawn to the act of othering other, less sophisticated otherings. As though - this is the insinuation - your model feeds on its difference from false models. and has to keep feeding.
Where I'm going is trying to understand how your model and its modellers (qua modellers) operate in the world it models.
Strikes me to be a feature of immanence.
When selection is transcendent, it's a form which makes selection, which sets the limit of the world or state--e.g. my rectangular screen is rectangular by the form of the rectangle. It's made rectangular by the form, as if from was actor which moulded the formless world.
With immanence though, form cannot be this defining actor. Since forms are expressed by existing states, rather than acting as their foundation, no form can make a selection. My screen is rectangle, but it cannot be the form of a rectangle selects that limit.
I'm only have a very casual familiarity with Deleuze, but here is seems like "eternal return" is used to fill the place form no longer can. It strikes me as sort of an absolute freedom, an infinite, distinct from all states and present regardless of form. I'm inclined to read it as sort of saying nothing-- no state of the world, no logical expression of form-- selects.
My rectangular monitor is and necessarily expresses the form of a rectangle. It's defined out of the world. From the moment this monitor was finished (i.e. existed in the sense we are talking about), it was rectangular. And it is necessarily rectangular until that state changes (e.g. it's smashed out of shape).
In this respect, I'd read "eternal return" quite literally here. Selection always returns. No matter what is (or is not) a difference is defined. Expression of form is necessary. I'd say it's almost a combination of the two you are asking about: that which selects (eternal return-- "nothing") and that selection is necessary.
But I am extremely wary of Craig Venter and his ilk. On the one hand, science is a method, or the method, of exploration of the natural world, but when it comes to developing the techniques required to engineer or even manufacture living beings, it is close to 'playing God', carried out by people who really do believe that science is replacing religion as a path to the absolute.
However:
Stanley Fish, Does Reason Know what it is Missing?
Whereas the kind of approach I'm pursuing, is not actually trying to create an alternative or competing model, but to cultivate a different cognitive mode, or way-of-being. This requires, among other things, becoming internally aware of the limits of knowledge, not in the sense of a boundary, but of the limits symbolic knowledge and verbal knowledge - scientia itself. That endeavour is not hostile to science, but it is wary of the sense in which science has now assumed the mantle of 'arbiter of truth'. So it's sceptical about science whilst also being able to appreciate its vast utility,
//edit// pleased to have noticed Steve Talbott's Getting Over the Code Delusion on the above-mentioned bibliography.
Your characterisation of my position is accurate enough here. But I don't see the problem.
Surely a model by definition is going to be an atemporal truth? The map is not the territory, and all that....
Quoting csalisbury
Again, where is the problem if what I am asserting is itself paradigmatic? My organicism is developed at a level that undercuts the familiar discursive norms. So it always finds itself encountering that which it must speak its objections to - the brute classical materialism of the analytic mind, and the dazed romanticism which is the continental reaction to analytical sternness.
Quoting csalisbury
First, its fun. Second, its useful to expose something I now hold with such certainty to the most randomly varied kinds of response. If I talk with fellow semioticians, it's quite boring because everyone understands and agrees with the generalities. So it is useful to stand up in front of a tough and disbelieving crowd. I've got so lazy that I need that stimulus to be bothered enough to continue the attempt to refine my position.
So you would be wrong in thinking that I have arrived at some actual terminus. As I say, for me personally, biophysics is currently taking off semiotically in the same exciting way that dissipative structure theory was rattling along in the 2000s, or complexity theory was in the 1980s.
And even for the crystalline metaphysical nub, there are huge issues still to sort out. It may be the case that Peirce, Rosen, Pattee and Salthe (plus 100 others) are all blindly feeling the same elephant, but each of these has developed their own particular slant on the central machinery of organicism.
So they may be good on the hierarchy theory aspects, the modelling relation aspects, but they don't really bring out the dichotomy aspect, the symmetry breaking aspect. And famously they also don't have properly worked-out models of vagueness either.
Thus when I talk about the necessity of fully mathematical treatment, that is as much a goad to myself. It sets the target - a unitary description that is actually mathematically crystalline.
Hierarchy theory, non-linear dynamics, statistical mechanics, etc, are all mathematical enterprises. But to use the elephant analogy, that's still talking at the level of trunks, tails and legs. It is not yet a maths of pan-semiosis, a maths that captures the essential generative seed in fully abstract or universalising fashion.
And maybe, like all theories of everything, we can never get there. It's a mirage, an impossible dream. I'm perfectly willing to listen to and respond to rational arguments in that direction. But then in my own lifetime all I've seen is a rollercoaster of scientific thought heading in this direction.
I mean who knew before the 1970s that you could mathematise chaos? And its been one damn thing after another in that regard.
Quoting csalisbury
Another thing I've often said is that I don't in fact reject the classical reductionist paradigm. Pragmatically it works and is widely believed for very good reason.
So the actual situation is that reductionism (or mechanicalism) fits in as a necessary part of my organic whole. And indeed, that is precisely why semiotics is about mechanism - stuff like codes, switches, boundaries, memories, networks, hierachies, etc. Semiotics simply inverts the relationship where the "messy organic dynamics", the "vague apeiron", is what is ontically fundamental, and mechanism is emergent regulative structure or habit.
So my position is based on the proper othering of the mechanical - the one that incorporates machines into nature. And it thus opposes itself to the kind of mechanicalism that wants to pretend that nature just is some kind of machine.
That is why I am not strongly opposed to the enlightenment and its resulting machine-model of reality. Turn it around, invert it in proper fashion, and it slots right into the bosom of a properly mathematical and empirical organicism.
But romanticism and its philosophical offspring? Sorry, but that is simply a tale of muddled wrongness. It is false in fundamental ways.
So to deal with your insinuation, of course my argument is going to be that every crisply developed view must achieve that development by "feeding off" the matchingly definite image of its "other". That is simply being self-consistent - matching ontology with epistemology.
Now maybe one must manufacture that counter-image in some sense. Perhaps it dosn't really exist. And to the degree it doesn't really exist, then I would have a problem. It would reciprocally weaken the image I was hoping to sharply develop.
So I am happy to consider that possibility. Indeed, I am here doing just that. But then it is up to you to show that the anti-crystalline nub fails to exist in the normed discourses of, say, AP or Pomo. If my diagnosis is so faulty, you can point to the faults.
When it comes to Contiinental philosophy, you may even have a point in arguing it can never be pinned down in the way I require because it is explicitly post-structure! Anything goes. There is no core to defend.
But that is to miss my criticism. To the degree that continentalism fails to be explicitly romantic, my argument is that it is being quite deliberately - that is crisply - vague.
Just open up any PoMo text at random. You get all these very definite seeming words, sentences, jargon, patterns of textual reference. It certainly looks crisp - an attempt to pin down ideas. But really you are dealing with a formless chaos, a dissonant noise, that folk with furrowed brows form a tight tribal circle around and make respectful murmurings. Genius is that which no one could understand.
Whoops, the accusation of romanticism is back in the frame again. How eristic of me. ;)
Postmodernism isn't vague. Just needlessly obscure sometimes. The lack of structure is its insight. Things stand on their own rather than being pre-defined by something else. Structure is an expression, not a constraint. The "inability to pin it down" has nothing to do with what it's saying (or not saying), but rather the desire of people to reduce the world to a structure, just as you are doing here.
Often what people want is not answers, but the illusion of solution to problems or fears, a structure which supposedly reveals what will be, such that we can say particular outcomes are guaranteed or some sort of horrible problem is avoided.
Above all, post-modernism says the world is messy, sometimes horrible and frequently containing unavoidable problems of horrors. It's a complexity which the lovers of structure cannot stand.
This ties into the "vagueness vs crisp." For the lover of structure, the crisp is the enemy. If the world is full of discrete states, then they stand on their own. There is no particular instance of logical structure required to make them so. The appeal of the "vague" world is to those who want it to be empty without a particular concept of structure. It forms the idea thing necessary confirm to that structure or are else impossible.
And the biosemiotic crowd were the loud critics of Venter and genecentrism.
I mean that's why folk like Salthe and Pattee are practically invisible. Society is not set up to fund and honour those who explain why its most grandiose technological dreams are doomed to ecological failure.
Quoting Wayfarer
It would be great if we could all be happy and just get along. But as you know, my pan-semiotic view is that humans are secretly driven by the desire of fossil fuel to entropify. And you can't fix what you can't properly diagnose.
You live in Australia. Which country has better education? Which country is worse at greening its politics? So how the hell do you plan to cultivate a better collective mindset when it is coal-mining putting most of the dollars in your pocket?
Yep. Pomo in a nutshell.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
As usual, you are talking about someone else and not me.
My brand of structuralism is about accounting for the emergence of complex structure. So it is triadic in that it involves the hierarchical process of possibility encountering necessity and resulting in actuality. The messy real world in fact is an expression of simple needs that explain "everything".
What could be more chaotic than chaos? And yet what do we now know that has simpler generative rules?
So the wheel has turned again (while philosophy hasn't been watching) and the time reads "post-post-structuralism".
What you say doesn't really make sense. You claim that immanence denies the possibility that form may act to select. OK, form cannot select. So, what selects then? Your answer, form is necessary, and "nothing" selects. How is selection important if nothing selects? Why not just dismiss selection as an incoherent concept of transcendentalists?
No, that's the argument of those who desire the simple structure. Yours. The position unwilling to see, for example, harm and suffering inflicted upon the world. One which takes instances where some part of the world is damaged, destroyed or dismissed and quotes it as "pragmatic" or the "rule of nature."
It's an unwillingness to admit the world's own responsibility in defining itself, an inability to see how presence of the world amounts to one outcome occurring over any other. Instead of being honest--e.g. "this part of the word has a terrible impact on some people, but we must accept that to achieve an ethical outcome," you treat it as some inevitability of nature, which has nothing to do with how us or the world behaves.
[quote"apokrisis"]What could be more chaotic than chaos? And yet what do we now know that has simpler generative rules?
So the wheel has turned again (while philosophy hasn't been watching) and the time reads "post-post-structuralism".[/quote]
The rules down't affect the chaos. Rules are an expression of chaos-- these particular states follow this rule... until the states change or disappear. Those rules are a guarantee of nothing. Not a constraint, but a creation of chaos. At any time they might alter to something different. Chaos (which we might call "vagueness" ) produces expressions of form and rules (states of the world which work (or do not work) to various concepts of rules we have).
In other words, you do it backwards. You take what is only logical and never exists (vagueness) and say it's what they world is prior rules. With the other hand, you take what does exist (things which express form) and equate them with only the logic (form, semiotics, crispness), as if presence in the world was defined by logical concepts rather than states of existence.
The wheel has certainly turned from "post-modernism" in the sense of "no such things as truth, (though it's debatable how much that was actually position, as opposed to a strawman)" but philosophy is not bilnd to it. A lot of it found within post-modernism itself, which is really about many truths handled in terms of themselves.
My impression is that it speaks about selection in similar terms as the transcendentalists, as some sort of force acting to create, to show what immanence means in those terms. What's the ground? (under my reading) Nothing. It's actually giving an answer in terms of that question, rather than just claiming its incoherent.
It a bit like answering the question "What causes God?" Yes, we can say that such a notion is incoherent. But saying "nothing" is also truthful.
Well, because selection is important. It's means differences between things. Without out, there could not even be absence, for it would amount to a difference. An absence of selection is incoherent.
Here we can see the nihilism of idealism too. Why is selection only important if something selects? How is difference not important is it is just selected? Does being selected by nothing somehow mean a selection hasn't occurred?
That's why we not ought to say selection is an incoherent concept of transcendentalists. It would amount to denying any difference in the world, assuming "selection" is used as it has been in this thread.
I think I know what you're getting at, and part of the complexity here is that Deleuze ontologizes the selective principle. That is: if every metaphysics implies a selection, Deleuze's whole objection to the history of metaphysics is that it never sufficiently justifies it's particular 'method' of selection. Why Being and not-Being in Parmenides? Why model and simulacrum in Plato? Why converging and diverging series (best of all 'possible worlds') in Leibniz? How to positively discriminate between these differing, 'selective' claims to reality? Deleuze's solution here is to make selection a principle of reality: reality just is that which selects.
So in this sense you're right: metaphysics and ontology run together in Deleuze, and in so doing, he immanentizes metaphysics. Metaphysics no longer becomes an arbitrary imposition of a rule of selection onto reality (from the outside, as it were) but is rendered 'ontological' to begin with. So part of the complexity of Deleuze is this running together of metaphysics, ontology, and even epistemology and ethics, which is kind of what happens when you stick to the thesis of 'univocity', in which being is "said in a single and same sense of everything of which it is said" (think of Spinoza here, who is the principle inspiration, and whose principle work of metaphysics is given the title of the Ethics).
The question of exactly how to make sense of all this remains however, and this entire account remains abstract and incomplete without an account of the subject of selection: if being is what is selects, what is selected for? Deleuze's answer is: difference. While the whole first half of D&R sets up this 'problem' of selection and it's immanentization, the second half (chapters 4 and 5) will go on to provide the account of difference which works to complete the full picture. I won't go into that, but hopefully this kind of schematic overview gives a taste of whats at issue in all of this rather abstract theorization.
But Aristotle does employ the genus-species distinction, specifically in relation to difference, in book Delta of the Metaphysics:
"We call contraries (1) those attributes that differ in genus, which cannot belong at the same time to the same subject, (2) the most different of the things in the same genus, (3) the most different of the attributes in the same receptive material, (4) the most different of the things that fall under the same capacity, (5) the things whose difference is greatest either absolutely or in genus or in species.
...Things are said to be other in species if they are of the same genus but are not subordinate the one to the other, or if, while being in the same genus they have a difference, or if they have a contrariety in their substance; and contraries are other than one another in species (either all contraries or those which are so called in the [5] primary sense), and so are those things whose formulae differ in the infima species of the genus (e.g. man and horse are indivisible in genus, but their formulae are different), or which being in the same substance have a difference. ‘The same in species’ is used correspondingly." (Book ?, 10).
And in book Zeta: "Nothing, then, which is not a species of a genus will have an essence--only species will have it, for these are thought to imply not merely that the subject participates in the attribute and has it as an affection, or has it by accident; but for everything else as well, if it has a name, there be a formula of its meaning--viz. that this attribute belongs to this subject; or instead of a simple formula we shall be able to give a more accurate one; but there will be no definition nor essence" (Book Z, 4).
These are certainly not extrinsic formulations imposed upon Aristotle from the outside.
But say we do come up with the theory of everything, do feel the whole elephant, all we're doing is describing the world we find ourselves in. Fine, it's a good start, but we will not be in the position to answer the philosophical questions about our existence, the mechanisms of our existence, the extent to which what we can come up with, or understand (this theory of everything) is perceiving, or tabulating the basis of our existence. Not to mention any of the purposes of an intelligent creator involved in this circus, or any of the things or beings behind the veil of our predicament.
We are still as blind as my cat is to what I think and talk about. My cat might be highly intelligent, she seems so at times, she might know every inch of the house, the garden and local area. She might know of every mouse, vole and bird, their habits etc to the nth degree. But she is still oblivious to the intellectual world I live in and always will be. It is an utter impossibility for her to know this aspect of her world and the extent to which it is subtly controlling and manipulating her life and circumstances. She is securely veiled from participating in my intellectual world.
Perhaps we will at some point start to pay some heed to what may be behind our veils and start to ponder the bigger picture.
Yep. If God exists, my metaphysics is utterly screwed.
My cat, if she knew some of what I do and how much she is dependent on and under my control. Might run away thinking that I might put a bell collar on her. Or that I was free to give her unlimited treats ,fresh fish and meat, rather than her cat biscuits, she might go on hunger strike. Unless she is privy to my rationale(purpose) for my behaviour, she might find it all unintelligible, pie in the sky. She might not realise that my purpose is actually to give her food and shelter, freedom friendship and a privelidged(relatively) lifestyle and wouldn't dream of doing any less.
Provided she were to continue as she is now(her behaviour), in her ignorance, once she was privy to my world, I would happily give her that capacity(if it were in my control). But I know that without considerable tutoring, if atall possible(due to her evolutionary inheritance), she wouldn't, she would probably become uncontrollable, derranged. So I wouldn't do it if it were possible to do so.
So it is fortunate that she is veiled to those realities at this stage in her(and her species's) development.
Just draw the parallel with humans.
You're being kind. But of course it would mean that my position was complete nonsense. And worse still, according to your pet-keeping God metaphysics, I've been actively fooled about the nature of existence for the old fool's twisted pleasure.
She might be wrong, it might all be nonsense and I do something weird instead of catching giant mice. But she hasn't been fooled and it doesn't harm her and my continuing symbiotic relationship. No harm done.
Perhaps we all of us on this site are hopelessly wrong, I don't see a problem. We are probably making some progress and at the end of the day, what purpose is being right meant to achieve? If we knew the actual truth of it all, we might all shoot ourselves in the head, or go on strike(go off message).
I guess this is my sticking point - maybe I'm not thinking about it the right way - but if we're talking about a theory of everything (or something that aspires to approach, even if asympototically, such a theory) then the map/territory distinction gets a little weird. If the territory the map covers is everything, then the map has to include itself - the map become a part of the territory. That's what makes me a little wary of all theories of everything, this kind of recursive implosion. But, again, I'm open to the idea that I'm thinking about this the wrong way - I'm just not sure how else to think about it.
Edit: So I did a google search and found and read Pattee's (quite-followable!) "The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut." His summary of Van Neumann captures a similar idea nicely: "The most convincing general argument for this irreducible complementarity of dynamical laws and measurement function comes again from von Neumann (1955, p. 352). He calls the system being measured, S, and the measuring device, M, that must provide the initial conditions for the dynamic laws of S. Since the non-integrable constraint, M, is also a physical system obeying the same laws as S, we may try a unified description by considering the combined physical system (S + M). But then we will need a new measuring device, M', to provide the initial conditions for the larger system (S + M). This leads to an infinite regress; but the main point is that even though any constraint like a measuring device, M, can in principle be described by more detailed universal laws, the fact is that if you choose to do so you will lose the function of M as a measuring device. This demonstrates that laws cannot describe the pragmatic function of measurement even if they can correctly and completely describe the detailed dynamics of the measuring constraints.'
Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but how does the existence of God disqualify your system? If anything, God is meant to act as a unifying role, bringing all the pieces of a metaphysical system together.
You will first note of course that Pattee is saying the map is an atemporal truth. It is the rate independent information or model used to constrain the rate dependent dynamics, ie: the world of material possibility.
And then why does the map have to include itself? Semiotics is expressedly about a modelling relation. It is irreducibly triadic in that regard. That is its major distinction from other more simplistic and familiar metaphysical frameworks.
So what semiotics talks about is the functional wholeness of a relation between map and territory.
You also have to respect the shift from epistemology to ontology. So if we are talking about ontic strength semiosis - as biosemiosis and pansemiosis do - then the map is actually in a relation that is adaptively making the world. It is not just a description (to be interpreted by a transcendent mind) but the act of interpretance itself by which a world is achieving crisp and stable existence.
You could think of the map more as a blueprint - an encoding of formal and final cause along the lines of a genome. It describes the landscape as it is meant to be.
So selfhood becomes the entire production - just as it is in standard biology. Selfhood is immanent in the modelling relation. And selfhood is only even possible due to there being the kind of semiotic epistemic cut that Pattee, following von Neumann, describes.
A scientific or metaphysical theory of everything would then - in the semiotic view - have that same character. It would be a "map" of the modelling relation, or sign relation, itself. It would be a representation of the fundamental algorithm of self-organisation if you like. So it would be speaking about physical existence in terms of emergent selfhood or universal individuation.
You fear the recursive implosion after I have advertised the advantages of what is in fact a recursive explosion - the open ended generativeness of a fundamental relation. But perhaps you can see that is not an issue now. Simplicity can beget complexity, but simplicity can't get simpler if it is already as simple as it is possible to get.
To use another analogy, a circle can be distorted in all sorts of ways to make more complicated shapes. But you can't get simpler than a perfect circle. So a circle doesn't suffer a recursive implosion. It instead emerges as the crisp asymptotic limit on any implosion.
My system - being all about material self-organisation - says there is no God. So His existence would be a terminal fact.
That's one of the advantages of my semiotic physicalism. It's not wishy washy on such matters like conventional physicalism.
For fuck's sake. Why would I accept the very thing that shows a mechanical model of causality is fatally flawed?
(And God-talk is of course all about pretending to have fixed the problem with incoherent hand waving and incantation.)
So could God have made circles simpler. Or even more complex?
And remember that in semiotic metaphysics, that which does not make a difference does not exist. So either your God has to make a difference or talk about him is meaningless noise.
And that didn't work out so well, did it? Modern physics finds itself dealing with the inverse issue of how to regulate the inherent dynamism (or indeterminacy!) of existence.
The problem is not starting "movement". It is stopping it. Regulating it. Structuring it.
So we can't know what difference is or isn't made, we can't claim that circles are universal. But this Is not to conclude that squircles exist as well. It's apophatic in nature.
So if there is a God present, it is the God of semiosis. Although I agree you would be quite justified to ignore it as existing.
Sorry. Gods that exist in ways that don't make a difference don't exist according to my definition of existence. So all you are doing is trotting out the modern theistic formula which seeks to avoid the cold hard facts of science by pretending cold hard facts can be both true and yet not really matter.
Which is why the only consistent position I could hold is that if God does in fact exist in ways that don't make a difference, then my metaphysics is holed below the waterline. No lame excuses.
If I don't accept lame excuses from theists, I can hardly accept them from myself.
Hence the third category of vagueness - the land of no brute fact which can give rise to the yin and yang of mutually co-arising brute facts such as stasis and change.
Yep. The cosmology that captures the public's attention is exactly that which taps straight into the mechanical thinking that has become endemic via technology in modern society.
So of course multiverses, string landscapes, eternal recurrence, and so forth are what everyone talks about. It seems like the sort of thing science ought to be saying. Existence is utterly contingent. Structure can only be a cosmic accident.
So all you are pointing out is how far my organicism is from the populist mainstream that would find it easier to believe we all exist inside a Matrix simulation.
Is it a brute fact that the third category of vagueness is the land of no brute fact?
The reason I don't think that amounts to an argument as such is that it can only ever be suggestive, not conclusive. It is quite feasible to say that these constraints exist as a simple matter of brute fact or chance, and I guess it is even feasible to argue that there are indeed an infinite array of 'other universes', and so on. This question is related to Kant's antinomies of reason - it is impossible, by exercise of reason, to arrive at a definite conclusion about such questions.
Now natural theologians will argue that on this basis that it is reasonable to believe that there is an intelligence that set the wheels in motion. And I think it is! But it can never be conclusive as it's not an empirical argument, by definition. But from the viewpoint of natural philosophy, it's a matter about which judgement ought to be suspended, one way or the other (i.e. either against it, or for it). So, again, it's a good argument for agnosticism, but of a very deep kind, not simply a casual shrug. ( Similar points arise in John Horgan's interview with cosmologist George Ellis.)
Don't be silly. It is a deduced fact. Just like the complementary notion of there being instead a first cause. Both derive from the axiom of sufficient reason. One just puts reasons in the past, the other puts them in the future.
So the mechanical view says there is some thing that exists. Therefore it must have a further thing sufficient to cause its existence.
My organicism instead acts from the observation that existence is always dichotomised. Therefore there must be a prior state in which such dichotomisation is dissolved. Symmetry breaking implies the symmetry that got broke. And so, following that logic through, we arrive at the ontic definition of a vagueness or Apeiron.
So at the singularity, we are talking about the Planck triad of constants. And these are pure ratios that thus encode a naked reciprocal or dichotomous relation.
The singularity is thus not singular. It is not a dimensionless point. The very first moment of existence is already divided, even if that division is yet to be expresed. The symmetry is broken, even if it hasn't yet moved off from its own absolute symmetry.
So the basic dichotomy the Planck triad captures is that between spacetime extent and quantum action - the size of the container versus the density or temperature of its contents. At the Big Bang, these two aspects of physical being were "symmetric" - both at their material limit in terms of compactness. And the difference was pure, not something that could be measured in terms of some numbers that would speak of transcendent reference frames.
The stuff Rees was talking about was mostly the after the fact constants that emerged against the fundamental Plankian backdrop. And modern physics hope is to account for these also as pure mathematical constants that reflect further structurally inevitable symmetry breakings.
You see this:
http://www.space.com/13347-big-bang-origins-universe-birth.html
Seems very much like 'creation ex nihilo' to many people.
Silly question. You already know that my position isn't tied to a mechanical notion of time.
Yeah for sure - Deleuze cites Kierkegaard as a principle inspiration for his thoughts on repetition, although he ultimately criticizes him for subordinating repetition to faith and the grace of God. Speaking of Kierkegaard and Charles Peguy (French poet/essayist) together:
"Athough Kierkegaard and Peguy may be the great repeaters, they were not ready to pay the necessary price. They entrusted this supreme repetition, repetition as a category of the future, to faith. ... How could faith not be its own habit and its own reminiscence, and how could the repetition it takes for its object - a repetition which, paradoxically, takes place once and for all - not be comical? Beneath it rumbles another, Nietzschean, repetition: that of eternal return."
This is why Deleuze ultimately opts for Nietzsche as his ultimate point of reference, rather than Kierkegaard: while both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche oppose the generality of law to the singularity of repetition, only in Nietzsche does repetition remain a properly temporal and hence immanent category. Kierkegaard's recourse to faith on the other hand, "invites us to rediscover once and for all God and the self in a common resurrection. Kierkegaard and Peguy are the culmination of Kant, they realise Kantianism by entrusting to faith the task of overcoming the speculative death of God and healing the wound in the self".
This though, all comes after a long interlude where Deleuze heaps praise upon Kierkegaard for coming really close to thinking repetition in the way he thinks it ought to be thought of as: as a faith in the future as such, a future without Grace (à la Abraham)
Actually, I think K's faith is the acceptance N talks about. Anyway... they both talked a lot about the significance of the image of Christ. A mash-up of the two is interesting.
Quoting StreetlightX
Cool.
Yes, not only do I appreciate how your view leads to this shift, but that's precisely what I'm trying to hone in on. Like Von Neumann's measuring tools, the model is both map and territory. But it's kind of this unstable thing, right? like it's both - but it can't be both at the same time. That's the first parable: As a being in time, you can only choose one or the other - you can't have it both ways. And if you try to, you lose yourself in recursion.
But, so in the von neumannian scenario cited by Pattee, we're dealing with the circumscription of a local region (that recursive explosion - where one would need a new tool, M', to measure M+S, and so forth - requires an indefinite expanse which would allow one to keep 'zooming-out'. The regions keep getting larger but, for all that, always remain finite, bounded areas. You have this infinite spatiotemporal matrix which always allows for a larger field)
The theory of everything, on the other hand, deals with universal principles. It's not trying to measure a contingent, ontic* state. It's trying to provide a rulebook. The rulebook of all rulebooks.
But, if we're good immanentists, then any TOE is simultaneously an attempt to provide a rulebook and a (dynamic, unfolding) example of those rules in action. As you've said.
So when you say this:
well, yes, that which constrains has to be atemporal, but it's a weird kind of atemporality isn't it? It's out of time, yet of time - precipitated from temporal dynamic material processes (tho always implicit within them), yet able to turn around, as it were, and regulate them. (The poetic image is a sort of golem, whose mud frame (look closely!) is continuous with the mud ground, as he stands regulating or explaining the actions of smaller, simpler golems)
But a model qua TOE isn't merely constraining and controlling a local set of dynamic processes - it envelops everything - both the dynamic processes and the atemporal. It is somehow outside of the dialectic, touching the absolute**, and invites the very idea of the transcendent mind you rightfully decry. It's a fixed thing - a holy trinity of sorts - which explains the fixity/nonfixity/relation-between-the-two which characterizes everything.
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* side-note, but I don't think I understand your usage of 'ontic.' I think we may have different understandings of the term. I think you may understand by 'ontic' what I understand by 'ontological.' But I may be wrong. How would you define 'ontic'?
**If there's an ancient feud I see playing out in new terms it's not Wordsworth versus Newton but Kierkegaard versus Hegel
I've always wondered about this. Because it's not quite clear what Kierkegaard meant by God.
(He did a lot with God. A lot of it was leveraging God qua absolute against his fellow protestants. There was def this kind of radical-fuck-you-with-the-twist-of-I'm-playing-your-game-more-faithfully-than-you-ever-could thing going on. So that's part of it. For me that's the real significance of his analysis of Abraham and Isaac. But ----)
Couldn't this be recast as passive versus active thing? While both doing similar things, Nietzsche would be active and Kierkegaard would be passive. Granted, this would get a little complicated because Kierkegaard would be adovocating the active assumption of one's passive role in relation in god. And Nietzsche would be advocating the passive acceptance of that which one has to then actively affirm.
At the limit, they kind of bleed into each other (and you then think of Heidegger's whole active/passive solicitation of being, where it's not quite one or the other)
Peguy is interesting, though. And I only know him through Deleuze. But: the celebration repeats that which it celebrates - while the event itself only exists to generate its future celebrations. This seems somehow closer to Deleuze's own analysis, only I can't quite put my finger on it.* What's your take on the peguy/celebration thing?
*He invokes this same Peguyian analysis, in the ABC interview, in order to explain alcoholism. I find this fascinating and I think he's right. The first drink anticipates the drinks to come - and each drink to come looks nostalgically back to a blissful early intoxication. It's not just alcohol - this is a perfect model of all addiction. I'm getting a little rhapsodic, but it's too perfect.
I don't understand your objection. The model describes a territory that is itself being viewed as a modelling relation. Seems simple enough.
Quoting csalisbury
But that is the argument for the epistemic cut or semiotic sign relation. It is because the measurement function - the observer - can't be understood as "just physics" (because recursion ensues) that the observer/measurement has to be understood in terms of a symbolic level of action.
So the passage you cite identifies the fundamental problem of physicalist explanation. And that homuncular regress is what semiosis fixes.
Quoting csalisbury
Again, there seems no problem at all. That is how a memory functions. You have all these regulative habits you've learnt - like perhaps the rules of cribbage. Then along comes a cribbage playing situation and all your dormant skill gets a chance to do its thing.
Quoting csalisbury
A TOE would be maximally general. And it would then encompass all the more constrained physical models.
A model of quantum gravity unifies quantum field theory and general relativity. General relativity unifies special relativity and Newtonian gravity. So physics already is organised in this nested hierarchical fashion.
And it is definitional of a TOE that spacetime becomes an emergent feature, not a fundamental ingredient. That is the point.
So being "outside" of time, and space, and matter, are all desirable properties.
And that in turn is the argument for pansemiosis. The fundamental problems of physics can't be fixed with just "more physics". That risks the recursion that can only be "solved" by the appeal to mystic transcendent causes.
And so the trick that worked for human self consciousness and biological autonomy - semiosis/the epistemic cut - would be the way to fix physics as well.
Physics is at an impasse with quantum theory because it cannot offer a formal model of the observer that collapses the wavefunction. And semiotics is precisely that - a formal model of observers.
No this is not what I'm doing, you assumed that I was going to talk about God, that I am a believer and that my line would be what you allude to here.
I'm not going to talk about God, it's you who brought it up. Perhaps you will respond now to what I did say which is and was in bold when I said it.
Again incorrect, as I said the world including your metaphysics would be identical. Anyway I didn't say God doesn't make a difference, I said we can't determine what that difference would be.
I'm not interested in discussing the presence of God with you, its rather an irrelevance.
Remember the world of my cat, she is living a life which all makes purfect sense, all is known and understood. But she is unaware that there is a concealed layer of agency in her world which is veiled from her, as I pointed out;
Now as I said to begin with, like the cat we cannot know what is behind the veil. This means we cannot answer the philosophical questions about our existence. We cannot say that circles are universal, or that squircles don't exist.
I pretty much know nothing about Peguy either, but I've puzzled over that passage for a long time too. What I make of it is this: repetition (in the strong, Deleuzian sense) belongs to the order of singularities. Only singularities repeat, and what they repeat is precisely their own singularity. The new always retains it's status as new, rather than becoming subsumed as a particular in an order of generality. Moreover, this 'spiritual' repetition is the very condition which enables what Deleuze calls 'bare' or mechanical repetition - one can celebrate Bastille day to the extent that the fall of the Bastille eternally repeats its own singularity, outside of the order of extensive, historical time (Aeon, and not Chronos).
Zizek has a nice passage about this in his otherwise rather meh book on Deleuze: "the standard opposition of the abstract Universal and particular identities is to be replaced by a new tension between Singular and Universal: the Event of the New as a universal singularity. What Deleuze renders here is the (properly Hegelian) link between true historicity and eternity: a truly New emerges as eternity in time...* To perceive a past phenomenon in becoming (as Kierkegaard would have put it) is to perceive the virtual potential in it, the spark of eternity, of virtual potentiality that is there forever. A truly new work stays new forever—its newness is not exhausted when its “shocking value” passes away. For example, in philosophy, the great breakthroughs—from Kant’s transcendental turn to Kripke’s invention of the “rigid designator”—forever retain their “surprising” character of invention". (Organs Without Bodies)
Moreover, singularity itself belongs to the order of difference - pure, aconceptual or sub-representative difference (difference-in-itself) - insofar as (this kind of) difference is precisely what resists subsumption into conceptuality and identity. Singularity is the hinge which relates difference and repetition to one another.
*In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze, following Peguy, will actually refer to a time of the 'aternal', rather than either the eternal or the temporal, and also to a 'dead time' that corresponds to a 'meanwhile' or 'para-time' (un entre-temps), a kind of dimension of time that runs diagonal to our usual concepts of time and eternity.
--
As for Kierkegaard, I'm sure at some point it's possible to read him as meeting Nietzsche down the line - there's enough richness and ambiguity there to last for millennia - but at some point it's a choice between Christianity and not, no? It's the difference between "God is Dead" and "God is effectively Dead, You're On Your Own and All You've Got Is Your Faith, But Really, Imperceptibly, In A Way I Cant Really Talk About Because Its Not a Matter of Talk... God is There, He Really Is".
Jesus. No. You're tangling yourself up in the clothes. The whole point is standing there naked. What is the wound in the self?
It's not at all like asking what causes God, because God is conceived of as a real actuality, you are talking about "nothing".
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Yes, being selected by nothing means that a selection has not really occurred. Selection is an action, and if nothing carries out this action, then the action has not occurred. It is very common to have a described action, like "going to the store", but if nothing carries out this action, it has not occurred, and it is just a fiction. It appears like you are trying to reify "nothing" so that nothing is a thing which acts. Then you say "nothing selects", and claim that selection is a real action, rather than a fiction.
If you have an inkling of what I'm saying, I'll proceed deeper to what really concerns me. What is at issue here is the nature of "the same". "The same" is very important epistemologically, as the basis of "identity", the basis of "one, of "unity", of "the set", all the geometrical figures, etc.. "The same" is the foundation of all of these, and therefore the foundation of epistemology itself. Identity is how we know that you and I are talking about the same thing, and unless we are talking about the same thing, any knowledge which we may claim to have, is really nonsense.
So consider your quote of Aristotle to Nagase:
Quoting StreetlightX
Notice that all the differences referred to are said to be different, because they are observed to be not the same. So for Aristotle, difference is really just a determination of "not the same". What is "selected for" is similarity, whatever is noticed to be "the same". This is what produces essence, properties which are the same, and are selected for. If X,Y, Z attributes can be predicated of the subject, it is of species A. This is a determination of "the same". If the subject lacks attribute Z, it is different, but by means of X and Y, it may still be the same in genus.
So what Aristotle describes here is selecting for similarity, not difference. Something which is different is outcast from the species, it is not selected, but it might still be selected for the same genus, on the basis of similarity though, not difference.
These are "subjects", which Aristotle refers to, subjects of the mind, the subject matter of knowledge. I think, that Deleuze is looking from an ontological perspective, from the perspective of being an object itself, rather than a subject, and claiming that what is essential to the object, as a particular individual, is difference. So difference inheres within the being, as essential to its nature as a particular object. Therefore selection, even if it is an act of selecting for the same, like we do as rational human beings in the act of identification, is an act of difference itself, as the difference inheres within the act of the object.
Let me put "difference" and "same", with respect to selection, into a temporal perspective now.
Quoting StreetlightX
The Deleuzian perspective of selection which you put forward here is non-voluntary. There is a selection which is imposed at each moment of time. This is the object's existence in time. One might say that selection is necessitated by the passing of time, and that selection is a selection of difference, such that the object is different with each passing moment. But if we consider voluntary selection now, this type of selection has the assistance of "will-power". Will-power is the power not to choose, not to select. When we use will-power not to select, then no difference is selected for, and we maintain the status quo, the same. This is how voluntary choice, as a form of selection, is based in a principle of "the same". It is based in will-power, which is inherently the desire not to select, avoiding the difference which is created by the selection which is inherent within the passing of time.
The naïve argument would be that the will-power, the power not to select, is itself a selection, the choice not to choose. But this position is untenable when selection is seen as a selection of difference as Deleuze assumes, because the will-power not to choose is not a selection of difference, it selects to have things maintained as the same, undecided. Therefore the will-power is a non-selection when selection is defined by difference.
What I see is two sides of the same coin, the Deleuzian side in which difference is necessitated and therefore selected, by the passing of time, and the free-will side, by which we choose, or select things to remain the same. The problem with the Deleuzian perspective, as you present it, is that you have provided no basis for consistency in metaphysics. Consistency is provided for by maintaining the same principles, not difference. So this perspective portrays metaphysics as having no principles of consistency. But clearly when we do metaphysics, we seek rational clarity, and we select according to some principles of consistency. This is extremely evident in the op. The op mentions numerous philosophers, referring to a vein of similarity. These similarities have been selected in order to create a consistency. Without this, metaphysics would be inconsistent nonsense.
So makes a difference here, meaning counterfactual? To broaden your idea, I think this notion that if there are no counterfactuals, it has no value or useful understanding is skipping over a large amount of phenomena. For example, though for example, mental illness can often be described in systematic inventories of this or that mental phenomena, each individual human has experiences so nuanced as to have no alternative for counterfactual examples. It just "is". It can be described, analyzed, modeled, but the actual experience, the first person perspective of that particular person is unique. It is unique in that no one else can experience it, but even more importantly, it is unique in that no matter how much detail in framing the experience into information, the event itself can never be replicated into information.
You couldn't have set out any better the exact premises that Deleuze's philosophy explicitly sets out to undermine. Showing these assumptions to be illusory is precisely the project that is announced at the very beginning of Difference and Repetition, and is carried out throughout the rest of the book:
"[The concepts of] difference and repetition have taken the place of the identical and the negative, of identity and contradiction. For difference implies the negative, and allows itself to lead to contradiction, only to the extent that its subordination to the identical is maintained. The primacy of identity, however conceived, defines the world of representation. But modern thought is born of the failure of representation, of the loss of identities, and of the discovery of all the forces that act under the representation of the identical. The modern world is one of simulacra. Man did not survive God, nor did the identity of the subject survive that of substance. All identities are only simulated, produced as an optical 'effect' by the more profound game of difference and repetition. We propose to think difference in itself independently of the forms of representation which reduce it to the Same, and the relation of different to different independently of those forms which make them pass through the negative".
So what you call out as bugs are exactly the features of the Deleuzian philosophy of difference, one which is at every point opposed to the primacy of the Same and of Identity: opposed, in other words, to the entire Aristotelian schema of Being. Central to the arguments of D&R is also an attempt to point out that far from the Same as being the 'foundation of epistemology', thinking epistemology in terms of the Same is absolutely ruinous for any critical thought, and it's only by thinking the Same on the basis of the Different that thought as such can get off the ground. As it stands, I've not relayed any of those arguments here, but then, neither have you in your assertions about the primacy of Identity. In any case, what you call your 'concerns' are exactly what Deleuze joyfully assents to.
Sure, just to be different, Deleuze can but forth a metaphysics of difference, and claim all the things which you have stated, identity and the Same have failed us, so we must base epistemology in difference, but who is going to select such a metaphysics? If selection is characterized as non-voluntary, and individual human beings experience selection as voluntary, then why would any human being choose such a metaphysics which is contrary to one's own experience? And as soon as one allows that selection is voluntary, then there is no apparent reason for one to choose Difference over Same. As I described above Same is what allows us to communicate, proceed with logic, and obtain knowledge. If we choose Difference we select to isolate ourselves within our own thoughts unable to communicate.
So here's the point, as I said in the last post, the two perspectives are two sides to the same coin, two different ways of looking at the very same thing. Each of the two perspectives are inherently different, and this validates Deleuze's argument for difference. One cannot dismiss Deleuze on any claim of unsoundness. However, I assume that we are talking about the same thing, and this allows us to have intelligent communication. I validate my assumption of "the same thing", by referring to similarities. Of course one can focus on the differences, and insist that this is not two different perspectives of the same thing, moving to deny the validity of the Same, but what good is this? The thing I am talking about is metaphysics. If Deleuze wants to talk about something which is different, not the same thing as what I am talking about, that's fine. But if he calls it "metaphysics" he is acting in deception, implying that it is the same thing which I am talking about, while claiming that all he refers to is difference, without the assumption of difference within the same thing. I know that my metaphysics is the real metaphysics because it allows for voluntary selection, Deleuze characterizes selection as other than voluntary.
It is illogical to claim that there could be phenomena that aren't distinct and therefore counterfactual in the fact that, given different conditions yet to be discovered, they wouldn't be there.
People have individual, personal experiences that cannot be shared. How can that be communicated? No other thing can have these experiences.. It may change some event to communicate and participate in these experiences, but the actual experience is only experienced by the individual. There is something that cannot be made a map, but is simply territory.
Go ahead and school me if you think I mischaracterize you apokrisis. "Private revelation", personal experience or anything else is still had by the individual and cannot be experienced by anyone else and cannot be mapped to anyone else either. Prove me wrong if you like.
That we have a private experience that cannot be mapped? That's what I dispute about what I perceive to be your pragmatist stance.
So we have a pragmatic metaphysics? I agree, but for me the pragmatism is a reading of nature from an alternative perspective. I build in insights from the apophatic enquiry, discovering what we don't know is equally as illuminating as establishing what we know we can say.
You have read me wrong on this point again, I didn't say realities beyond the veil(I will label x ) make no difference, I said we can't determine the difference. It might be all around us, but we just don't see it. The apophatic truth is that we don't know what the world would be like absent x, with an x added if there is none, or if either state is or is not an impossibility(i.e. x is a necessary being).
Further more and this ties in with Schopenhauer1's point , we can't determine to what extent the veil is involved/tied up within ourselves. We don't even know if our experience of being is mediated through a veil by a hidden source, or, need I say, the extent of our ignorance of the self.
What this boils down to is we don't know if we are actually doing metaphysics, or just playing at it.
For selection to be an action of something is a contradiction. For someone to take some action, difference needs to be already defined, else there is no one to take the action and not action to take. Selection must occur regardless of states of the world, else the different meanings expressed in the world would not be defined.
In this way you misread my analogy to God. The subject of the inquiry is not "nothing." It is selection. Just as someone says: "But what is it that causes God?", I am asking: "What causes selection?" In both questions, the subject (God, selection) is treated as real and I am asking what thing acted to make it so. For either question, "nothing" is a truthful answer because there is no thing which causes either.
You seem to imagine that naive experiencing of experiences is possible. But to talk about the self that stands apart from his/her experiences is already to invoke a pragmatist's sign relation.
How is the actual experience experienced by the experiencer "framed"? Only afterwards in analysis or description, not the experience itself.
Quoting apokrisis
That's because I am choosing to have the experience of introspecting and analysis that these philosophy forums demand when explaining consciousness.
You are just repeating what I've already dealt with. Of course beyond the known knowns, and the known unknowns, there could be the unknown unknowns. Pragmatism takes that for granted.
But the point then is twofold.
First, if there really are unknown unknowns, they still remain open to being discovered if they make a difference.
Then second, they would have to be unknown unknowns about which we could care. Pragmatism is also about truth in terms of the purposes that can define being a self, being an observer. So it is a Janus faced epistemology in defining both observer and observables in a fully consistent fashion.
Thus there could be differences that don't make a difference - to us. In fact, to now switch to the ontological view relevant to the OP and its confusions about selections and hinges, the world is presumed to be full of potential difference. Variety begins unconstrained - the definition of vague. And then "self-interested" constraints or habits develop to regulate variety, turning it into a crisp contrast between signal and noise, meaning and irrelevance.
So again, pragmatism has no interest in denying the unlimited possibilities of difference. And that is because it speaks to the regulatory possibility that is the separation of that kind of vague potential into differences that make a difference, and the differences that don't.
The clue is in the fact you have to mention the experiencer.
No.. I mapped the experiencer to you on this philosophy forum.
Right because what you say exceeds the norm.. Anyways, I was just guessing what you were trying to get at with your last statement. To go even further, it looks like you do not even acknowledge the distinction between a primary and secondary consciousness.
I find this question to be a little be strange. Is not the point of the map that it is secondary, only a representation of a territory which is some other state? If so, doesn't that make all experiences [i]maps[/i which respect to what they show]?
In that case, I don't think the "private experiences question" makes any sense. The supposed failure of knowledge, not being the territory, was never attempted in the first place. Knowledge was always only a map (i.e. something known, not the existence something). The controversy about "private experiences" seems to be a storm over nothing. If experiences are only maps, knowing what someone is thinking or feeling is no more difficult than anything else. One just has to have that particular map (e.g. this person is sad). Access to the privacy of experience (i.e. being that experience) isn't needed for knowledge.
No, communicating the experience is the map.. making it "information" a "difference that makes a difference".. there is still the actual experience which is not the map itself.
But if that is so, then we are only dealing with a known unknown. And if my epistemology accepts that there can be unknown unknowns, then it is reacting to that very known unknown. It builds in the fact that we could be blind - and explains the degree to which it could then matter.
Quoting Punshhh
Fine. But you are not showing that they have a demonstrable advantage - except as a way to block open minded, publicly conducted, ontological inquiry.
Matter to what?
And to what degree have you enquired?
Are you sure you can see through the mist?
This is your perception perhaps.
I have not begun yet, I am still familiarising myself with the established terminology.
Anyway it's late and I need my beauty sleep.
Sorry. which of those questions is about pragmatism rather than being an expression of pragmatism?
I didn't address this because I have nothing to say about 'free-will' that isn't disparaging. Nobody has any idea what a 'will' is, let alone a 'free' one. If 'free-will' is your (completely arbitrary) criteria for a metaphysics, then there's nothing to discuss.
OK, selection is the subject of the inquiry.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarknessNow you ask what thing acts to make a selection.Quoting TheWillowOfDarknessYour answer, "nothing".
My point: if nothing acts to make a selection, then there is no selection, just like if our subject is "going to the store" and nothing acts to go to the store, there is no going to the store.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Since "selection" is most commonly defined as an act or instance of selecting, what you say here is nonsense. In all actions there must be something which carries out the act, or the described act is just a fiction.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
This may be true, but it doesn't change the fact that for selection to occur there must be something which selects.
Quoting StreetlightX
I consider that a very odd response from someone who starts a discussion entitled "Metaphysics as Selection Procedure". If you want to discuss selection without discussing will, then go ahead and have a good conversation with yourself.
For sure, but what does that have to do with the knowledge is question? If I know you're upset by the suffering in the world, the fact that your experience (your "private" experience) and my experience (my "private" experience) are other than the map (knowledge that you are upset) has no negative impact. I know suffering upsets you perfectly well.
Since it is only the map which tells, the fact it's not the territory has no impact on its ability to say something. Anyone may know anything about another experience. They'll just never "be" that experience.
I know that's your point. Mine is that that doesn't make sense. Selection, as spoken about in this thread, cannot be an action. It's incoherent. Without a defined difference, there is no-one to act and no actions to take. The point here is the definition of "selection" you are using cannot apply.
Much like when someone attacks the notion of a transcendent first cause God on the grounds there is no evidence or empirical form. Your usage of "selection" just doesn't get the topic of discussion and so fails to speak about it.
Isn't that identifying why free will is irrelevant to selection? What could be further from free will than the non-voluntary? Something we cannot control, that presents without our decision, without our choice: to be different, to be the distinct actor who gets to make a choice between distinct outcomes.
We did not choose to be those who make choices. We just found ourselves like that. Non-voluntary difference.
OK, so you take a well used, well defined word, like "selection", give it a secret definition, which no one has heard of, or knows about, then claim that the way we normally use that word is contradictory according to your secret definition.
So what is your definition of selection, "defined difference"? Defined difference requires that it must be different from something else, so all you are saying is "not the same". So "selection" means not the same thing as what it normally means. Quoting TheWillowOfDarknessOK fine, you want to talk about selection which is not selection at all, it is something different from selection. So what is it that we are talking about?
No, I cannot exhaust the experience by simply verbalizing/mapping it. I can simply recreate a model of it. It may be a detailed map, but a map nonetheless. That is not simply saying you can never "be" the experience, but you can never really communicate the experience the way it was either.. there is a distinction there.
How logical distinctions are defined. How is it there is difference between myself and the computer screen? Why is one me and the other one not? I'd say "selection" is used because it refers to the presence of one difference over another. If we consider the uniform (e.g. substance, the world) which has no distinction), any distinction that occurs is but one possibility over many.
How come within the unity the world, I am distinct from my computer monitor rather than not? Why are those logical meanings "selected" rather than not? What makes it so that I have a different meaning than the computer monitor?
You act like you don't know what I'm talking about, but I don't think this is true. I think you are aware of what I'm talking about and want to say it's impossible. What I think you want to say is that logical distinction depends on the act of experience. That for selection to occur, for difference to be defined, it has to be performed by an act of will.
So while my usage of "selection" is not yours, I suspect you think your usage of "selection" is the one which applies to the topic we are discussing.
A strawman. There was no claim of exhausting your experience at all. Indeed, I outright said the opposite: what shown in experiences is only a map; it cannot be exhaustive of experiences.
That's what it means to know something: to have a model which is not exhaustive of the world. My point this is no limit on what may be known.
If I know what you are thinking of feeling at sometime, the point is I have a map of a tiny part of you and the world. The failure of the map to be exhaustive doesn't prevent it from telling me your upset. I can know that perfectly well.
If it's a strawman then it's from your confusing statements. According to what I see above:
Models are not exhaustive
Map has a "tiny part" of me in the world
You can tell X thing from the tiny part (like being upset)
Yes, I agree that all these things can be had from mapping the world. But my claim was not that things cannot be communicated, simply the claim that experiences cannot be completely recreated in models. I did not claim that it cannot be useful or effective for a certain outcome by communicating so and so information. Rather, I am claiming contra apokrisis, that personal experiences, no matter how much communication, cannot be conveyed as it is experienced in that moment by that person. The primary experience is not perfectly translated through the map, but a semblance of it through communication can be expressed through language. As Wittgenstein seemed to be saying, we develop the correct language games so that this information can be translated into something others can understand, sent out, received, and hopefully clearly understood as the message was intended.
I've never said there were thing without identity. To speak about difference or selection is not to speak about any thing. We are talking about logical concepts. The expressions given by objects being distinct. We aren't talking about existing things here.
The point is, more or less, than the identity of a thing is wider than merely empirical manifestation or idea. I am different to everyone else. A truth not defined by a a decision of will (e.g. "I now think the distinction of Willow the poster on ThePhilosophyForum" and it happens) or particular empirical distinction (The distinction of Willow is defined by their location in time and space, what other people observe of them, etc., etc.), but given necessary by logic. I am a distinct thing-in-itself. A non-voluntary difference. A "selection" in which I, nor anyone else, had any choice.
For sure, but that's why it's a strawman. In arguing we know or understand what others are feeling (sometimes said in the form: "knowing what it's like to experience" ), one is only ever discussing maps and what they say.
The primary experience was never claimed to be transferred (i.e. to literally be the other person's experience).
Go back and read the arguments with apokrisis. Then see if what you are objecting to is really what the argument was about.
Schop: So makes a difference here, meaning counterfactual? To broaden your idea, I think this notion that if there are no counterfactuals, it has no value or useful understanding is skipping over a large amount of phenomena. For example, though for example, mental illness can often be described in systematic inventories of this or that mental phenomena, each individual human has experiences so nuanced as to have no alternative for counterfactual examples. It just "is". It can be described, analyzed, modeled, but the actual experience, the first person perspective of that particular person is unique. It is unique in that no one else can experience it, but even more importantly, it is unique in that no matter how much detail in framing the experience into information, the event itself can never be replicated into information.
Apo: It is illogical to claim that there could be phenomena that aren't distinct and therefore counterfactual in the fact that, given different conditions yet to be discovered, they wouldn't be there.
Schop: People have individual, personal experiences that cannot be shared. How can that be communicated? No other thing can have these experiences.. It may change some event to communicate and participate in these experiences, but the actual experience is only experienced by the individual. There is something that cannot be made a map, but is simply territory.
Apo: Perhaps you don't understand what it means when I say I am defending a pragmatist epistemology? If you believe instead in private revelation, go for it.
Schop: Go ahead and school me if you think I mischaracterize you apokrisis. "Private revelation", personal experience or anything else is still had by the individual and cannot be experienced by anyone else and cannot be mapped to anyone else either. Prove me wrong if you like.
Apo: Why would I dispute the very problem pragmatism sets out to resolve?
Schop: That we have a private experience that cannot be mapped? That's what I dispute about what I perceive to be your pragmatist stance.
Apo: Yeah, but as soon as your private experience is framed by yourself as an argument, it is social, even if never in fact articulated publicly. So to be mapped is already crossing the line that is the epistemic cut upon which human introspective "self consciousness" is constructed. It invokes the "self" as the interpreter of a sign, the sign being now the observable, the claimed phenomenon.
You seem to imagine that naive experiencing of experiences is possible. But to talk about the self that stands apart from his/her experiences is already to invoke a pragmatist's sign relation.
Schop: How is the actual experience experienced by the experiencer "framed"? Only afterwards in analysis or description, not the experience itself.
So you see.. this conversation was about whether what apo called "personal revelation" was possible.. I took that to mean some sort of closed off event that cannot be shared.. and yes primary consciousness is closed off and cannot be mapped.. it is pure territory.. One can try to map it by communicating it, but the map is not the territory of course..
So the crux of the fight was around whether there is actual any territory or if everything is map.. Apo seems to say everything is map.. Territory is not real or something of that nature.
Well see, you are denying knowledge there. You claim that experiences cannot be modelled, as if it were impossible to have a map of what someone was thinking or feeling. So I more or less agree with apo here. Information (though not experiences) can certainly be replicated. Even feelings can be replicated. (that's how empathy or "lived" awareness of other people's feelings work).
To use the famous thought experiment, any of us may know what it's like to be a bat. All we need to do is think or feel in a way a bat does. While I don't think it has happened very often, if at all, it is certainly possible. It's no more tricky than knowing someone else is in pain. All it takes is the right experience, one of replicated thoughts, sensations or information.
More broadly, the "first person" and "third person" distinction is a red herring. The experience of "there is a computer" is no less "first person" than "I am hungry." Both of instances of private experiences which cannot be replicated. But the information and sensation of either is wholly public: they may be replicated in the experience of anyone.
I wonder what consequences this has for personal identity theories. If I die, and then the brain states that my brain was in, in the past, are observed beforehand and then replicated, I essentially could come back to life. It's not "me", though there actually isn't any "me" at all. There's only the phenomenon of appearing to have a "me", i.e. there are multiple specimens all believing themselves to be special in their own little way, that are in fact the exact same little way. Do I have two arms and two legs? Yes, and so does my clone. Do I have green eyes? Yes, and so does my clone. Do I believe myself to be an autonomous self with a sense of personality and uniqueness? Yes, and so does my clone in the exact same way.
In this sense, ownership becomes reproducible.
But what I think Schop1 find problematic (as do I) with some accounts is how they try to get around the fact that feelings can only be replicated, they cannot be shared. The mind is a private world in itself. The external world is public. Feelings are a totally different thing than material objects; whereas an everyday object can be shared between many different observers and still be the same thing, a mental event must be cloned in order to be "shared".
We don't need to go to clones to know ownership is reproducible. Ownership of experiences have been reproduces for many thousands of years, many millions if we are counted all lifeforms who are aware of something. The reproduction of such ownership is what the continuing presence if experiencing entities means. When I came into existence, a new owner was formed. Thoughts, feelings and ideas were reproduced. They continue to be so was long as I live.
Rather than the dissolution of personal identity, it is its absolute expression. No matter what thoughts and feelings are reproduced (or not reproduced), they are mine and cannot be taken. If a thought of feeling occurs within in someone else, it is their reproduction rather than my experience. In the sense feared, my feeling are never shared. If you think and feel like I do, you do it on your own terms.
Feeling are material objects. Such experiences are no less an existing state of the world than a rock or bookshelf we might see. All experiences are owned, are private, including those of empirical observation. If we are looking at the same mountain, we only see or understand the same thing (mountain). We never are the same thing. My experience of the mountain is not yours and visa versa, even if what we see is identical. Observation of empirical objects must be "cloned" to be shared too. In the passing of knowledge and understanding, there is only replication. "To be shared" means for someone else to have their own experience of a particular thought or feeling, a replication of what someone else knows, thinks of feels.
Yes, this is what I was getting at. Replication, copies. Objectivity (particular universality) can only be shared via subjectivity (universal particularity). Thus subjectivity, or private "closed" states, is a very real part of reality. The relations between things are objective, but the things themselves are subjective. It's not just this way with minds. There is literally a subjective "what is it like to be a rock". Thus the world itself is an array of impossibly deep objects, signaling to each other. This is a very, very rough sketch of the object-oriented ontology presented by Graham Harman.
That's doesn't go far enough though, for each subjective states is also universal. No matter what what anyone thinks, my experiences are mine, for example. Similarly, a rock remains a rock, in all the ways it may appear, no matter what anyone thinks. Effectively, the subjective state is, the sense usually used, is the objective.
Any state, in-itself, is objective. In knowledge (as opposed to existence), nothing is closed. All it takes is the right experience (a subjective state) which is, objectively, an understanding of the state in question. Rather than being impossible deep (unknowable), the world is full of states which may be known and understood. Minds are no exception. Just as we know rocks without becoming "the subjective of the rock," we may know minds without becoming the "subjective of the mind."
It is only objective and universal for the subjective itself. So it is an objective fact that there are subjective systems spread universally across the world.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
We can only observe a shadow of the subjective. There is an inherent isolation at play here. So we may know that someone is experiencing pain if we understand the common behavior indicating that they are experiencing pain, but this is merely knowledge of, not knowledge as.
No, it's not. It's objective for all subjectivities. If I am upset, for example, then it's true I'm upset for any subjectivity, not just my own. For everyone, it's true I'm upset, whether they recognise it or not. I don't suddenly become not upset merely becasue a subjectivity doesn't think or thinks the opposite. Even with respect to the rock, I am upset Willow.
It's not a question of observation. The issue is feeling, experience or knowledge. People may feel someone else's pain without observing them at all. All it takes is for them to have the experience: "My friend is in pain." It can even take the form of the same pain within themselves (i.e. knowledge as).
There is always an isolation, my experiences are never yours, but that has no impact on what may be known of other's experiences.
I don't think this is the correct way to use subjectivity. If you are upset, then it is an objective fact that you are upset, i.e. anyone theoretically can go out and discover that you are upset. "From the point of view of the universe", you are upset.
But to say that "for everyone" it is true that you are upset is incorrect because some people might not know you are upset.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Correct, but this is what I had been saying earlier. That subjective experiences can be known but only through duplication (or inference), not through the sharing of a numerically identical thing.
As I am reading it in this thread at this point, pragmatism is an approach or system of choice or selection in the centre of thought of the practicing subject. Wherein, in what appears to be a mysterious way, one direction, or concept is chosen, selected out of a number of possible alternatives and built into a conceptual framework, or map. Rather like the way a chip processes information in a computer.
Does that get anywhere near the mark?
So in my question, "matter to what?", I am asking for whom, or for what purpose is the selection made?
We say that they are different because we notice that they are not the same. The reason why you are distinct from the computer screen is that we perceive these as be being not the same. So it is a matter of choice, to use one word to refer to "you", and other words to refer to "the computer screen". Such "logical meanings" are "selected", as you say, but that is a voluntary selection. To characterize these as non-voluntary is an error, because I can if I want, switch the names and refer to thing which we call the computer screen, "you", and the thing which we call you, "the computer screen"..
The problem though, is that if I start to switch up words like this, and choose to use them randomly, it makes my speaking incoherent and unintelligible, rendering communication impossible. I have no desire to make communication between us impossible, so I choose to use words in a more acceptable way.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I think it's quite clear that defining difference is an act of will. The use of words is voluntary activity, isn't that quite clear? If it is not voluntary acts which create definition, then what is it? I think I know what you are talking about, you are trying to characterize the use of words as involuntary, but I think that this is an error. To characterize the use of words in this way is simply to avoid the true essence of word use, which is as a willful activity. And this avoidance will simply produce an unreliable metaphysics.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
It's very clear to me that my use of "selection" is the one which applies here. The use of words is clearly a voluntary activity. If there is another type of "selection" which is non-voluntary, as you and StreetlightX seem to believe, then this is not the type of selection which applies here. It appears like you and StrretlightX are operating on some form of equivocation whereby you introduce a definition of "selection" which is non-voluntary, then proceed to discuss voluntary acts of selection as if they are classed as your newly defined "non-voluntary selection".
Quoting TheWillowOfDarknessThe only reason why you are a "distinct thing-in-itself", is that the living functions of the creatures which apprehend you, their perceptive capacities, produce a separation, or distinction between that particular aspect, or part, of reality, and the surrounding environment. This is called individuation. You, as a thing distinct from the rest of reality are created by this process of individuation. That you, as a distinct entity, are called "Willow" is a matter of voluntary choice. Since all logic relies on the use of names and symbols, and the use of such is a matter of choice, then the necessity of logic is reduced to a matter of choice.
This is how living creatures operate, through choice. If you desire to argue that the individuation which the creatures perform, in distinguishing you from the rest of reality, as a particular entity, is a type of "selection", which is non-voluntary, then I would like to see some logical support for this idea. Since it is clear that the naming of these entities is a matter of volition, and the individuating of the entities is intricately entwined with the naming of them, then you will need to provide a clear separation between the naming and the individuating, in order to support your position that individuating is non-voluntary.
No, I think it does.. Upset is a broad category.. the mix of other emotions or the nuance of exact kind of upset that the person was feeling may be indescribable and if describable, not similar to what your version of upset may be when you interpret it as you a) may have misinterpreted it or more importantly b) do not understand the nuanced experience as it was lived by the original experiencer. So while broad categories can be shared, the nuanced version of the event as seen by the observer cannot be completely shown or at the least shown to be the same as the how the interpreter is interpreting the nuanced event from the original experiencer.
Also, I don't think you understood my original argument with apo.. Apo seemed to be claiming that there is no territory.. that all is map. I was trying to say that at the least there is territory, that of individual experiences which are not a map.. they just "are".
Quoting darthbarracuda
Yes, why is this particular conversation with Willow so frustrating? Right when I think we are agreeing he has this congenital need to disagree for the sake of it almost..
You are forgetting that the knower also as an experience beyond words. The sort of emotion and nuance you are talking about isn't just reserved for the person's experiences someone might know about. It can also occur within the experience of the person who knows. When someone knows the experience of another, they do not just have a "category." They have an experience.
So while there is no doubt my understanding of what someone felt may show something different, it is also true that it may show the same. The knower's experience may be a map of another's which has a precise emotion and nuance that words do not do justice.
This notion is incoherent because experiences do not manifest empirically. When we understand the experience of another, we never observe experience. We might observe bodies doing something, but that always relies on our understanding of experiences and their relationships to bodies. Such "interpretation" actually relies on already knowing about experiences.
[quote="schopenhauer1]Also, I don't think you understood my original argument with apo.. Apo seemed to be claiming that there is no territory.. that all is map. I was trying to say that at the least there is territory, that of individual experiences which are not a map.. they just "are".[/quote]
No, I understand that. My point is that, about knowledge, apo is right. Any instance of knowledge is a map. If we are speaking about knowledge, what is known or may be known, we are only talking about maps.
You are right about experiences being "just there," a territory (a state of existence which is not representation) which experiences of knowledge never "access (i.e. to know something is never to be it)." It just has no consequence for what may be known. To what is known, only the maps matter.
The idea that all knowledge is in the form of maps or models is the paragon notion of objectification; in other words, it is the keystone of the scientistic paradigm.
I'd say more than that. It goes deeper. Rather than just a empirical approach, it is a metaphysical one: materialism. When it is recognised anything may be known, transcendent philosophy collapses. It no longer has any wisdom to offer. There is nothing "mysterious" or "inexplicable" anymore. Such notions merely become our reactions to thing we do not expect, rather than a hidden realm of power or truth.
The great prejudice towards recognising the existence of the subject exists for more of less this reason. If that without empirical manifestation (e.g. experiences, logic) may be known without restriction, then the impossible is recognised as impossible. We understand "miracles" are incoherent. In every case, the are just the world doing what it does, rather than a "rescue" from inevitably terrible nature. The wonder of "doing the impossible" is lost. It's revealed to be an illusion of our limited knowledge and expectations.
I love the way you always try to kid yourself and others that what you have to say is something "more" or "deeper".
You make the mistake of thinking that what is posited as "mysterious" or "inexplicable" is posited as something to potentially be discursively known. The mystery of life consists in the ineluctably limited nature of discursive knowledge. That limitation on discursive knowledge is not something that may be overcome; and it is precisely at this boundary that mystery opens up.
I believe you will never get that, though, and will continue raising your perennially irrelevant objections.
I meant in the sense that what was at stake wasn't just science, but a whole logic of metaphysics. What's at stake isn't the practice of science (plenty of people who think something is a "mystery" or "inexplicable" do science perfectly well), but a tradition of metaphysics (i.e. the transcendent vs the immanent).
And it because of what you describe there. The materialist 's point is that there is nothing which cannot be known discursively. They don't mistake "mystery"as something that's meant to be discursive, they argue it's incoherent because there is no knowledge that is not discursive.
Here they agree the limitation of discursive knowledge cannot be overcome: all knowledge is discursive for the materialist. Those positing "mystery" aren't wrong for claiming discourse where it is not, they are mistaken for claiming there is knowledge outside discourse.
As I tried to explain, I find the essence of volition to be found in will-power, which is a resistance to selection. So the idea of non-voluntary selection is very consistent with what I understand as will-power, the will actually being opposed to selection. Like I said, we have two different perspectives of the very same thing. You characterize selection as non-voluntary, I characterize will, as being opposed to selection.
The result of this, is that selection, though it is non-voluntary, must be something other than necessary. It cannot be necessary because the will has the power to resist selection.
For what it's worth.. an example of return can be found in the elements of this moment... now. Where I am it's Sunday night. Sunday night has returned... obviously there have been a bunch of them. Yet in some ways this Sunday night is unique. I may be completely and totally wrong, but I think what's been intended by "selection" in this thread is about the ways this Sunday night is unique.
I'd be happy to find out that's not what it means.. because selection is a very confusing way to put it.
.
You are wrong to claim there is no knowledge via intuition, feeling, experience. All you are entitled to claim is that you recognize no such knowledge. If you did recognize such knowledhe you would know what I am talking about.
There are inherent limits on discursive knowledge, and there are self-imposed limits on non-discursive knowledge. Of course it stands to reason that a person will not see beyond the limits they have imposed on themselves.
I'd didn't deny there was knowledge by intuition, feeling or experience. Indeed, that is the only means of knowledge: all instances of awareness are our experiences.
The materialist claim is the knowledge of any of those means is discursive, a representation which is never the underlying reality.
I don't understand your position at all. If you agree there is non-discursive knowledge, then I can't identify what the disagreement is.
It's not that every moment is a return. You have to name the thing. Sunday. Night. House. Tree. Man. Woman. You should be noticing something Platonic going on.
But which is more real? The Singular Sunday or the unique Sunday? The Singular Will or the unique will?
My position is there is no non-discursive knowledge.
Our experiences (feelings, thoughts, intuition, etc.,etc.) are non-discursive (states of existence) which are the means of knowledge (models, representation, understanding, discourse), which is always discursive. Means of knowledge and knowledge are not the same.
If the states you refer to have no elements of non-discursive knowledge about them at all, then how can it be supportable to say they are related to knowledge? How can any non-linguistic knowledge at all exist if there is no non-discursive knowledge? How could animals then be said to know anything?
The way I see it discursive knowledge consists in giving an account of what you know; of knowing that you know. It is reflective knowledge made possible only by the kinds of categories and generalizations enabled by conceptual language. but in order to know that you know, you must first know, no?
This is a naive interpretation of wisdom. Wisdom is a simultaneous awareness and realisation of one's position in a real world, a known world, and an understood world. The wisdom comes through in the cognitive synthesis of these three perceptions/views/maps. The wise man(or woman) performs an intellectual dance within this synthesis and in so doing reveals deeper insights than can be provided from them individually in their current state of knowledge.
This can be developed into a process of transcendent insight in which the wise man metaphorically climbs a ladder of intuition through this synthesis and recovers insights which are creatively unique. Which are in an epistemological way transcendent.
This definition of wisdom lies in contrast to your naive description above.
My comment wasn't so much on the nature of wisdom as it was the emptiness of the transcendent once things are known to be understandable. Wisdom is a bit of a different topic. It involves more than just knowing things. There are questions of actions, how people are treated and living in a way which avoids damage or suffering. In every case though, it is the self which lives these wise actions. They are given by oneself, not the transcendent. When I say the transcendent no longer offers wisdom, I mean that materialism understands that wisdom and knowledge are expressions of the self.
People may certainly have knowledge and wisdom in the practice of transcendent belief, but the materialist understands that it is them who have the knowledge and wisdom, rather than it being beyond understanding.
What you've described there is not the practice of wisdom. It's a concept of becoming wise. You've generalised and reduced wisdom to the idea of escaping unwise practices. Those who are unwise become wise by exploring and devloping new wise habits which are (as of the unwise state) beyond them (either in understanding or practice).
You are then misreading this feature of the self (and future self) as something which presents beyond the self. As if becoming wise were a matter of access something that was never you or something you grasp. An idea that the self is necessarily unwise, such that wise living can only be given by what is never a part of the self. The confusion of the unwise self for any future self. So, supposedly, wisdom can only be obtained through the transcendence.
This definition precisely the prejudice of the transcendent belief I talked about in my last post in the Living with the noumenon thread. Rather than understand wisdom as something people know about and live, you reduce it to nothing more than a narrative or tradition about becoming wise.
To be wise, you say, we must sit around thinking about how wisdom is necessarily beyond us, else we are nothing but naive fools-- believe or else you are not worth listening to and are living foolishly. What you have defined is not wisdom. It is the tradition that practicing this concept of becoming wise through belief in the transcendent, as if practicing that concept was exhaustive of wisdom. A tradition which pulls so strongly that you can't see wisdom anywhere else.
If someone is already wise, and so doesn't need to go on a grand search of discovery, you claim they lack wisdom. People who come by wisdom easily, without having to go through a laborious process of self-doubt and confusion, you accuse of being naive. Those who describe wise living, and who can then present that knowledge to directly to others (stepping over the doubting and long stringing along of "mystery"), you accuse of not providing any substance.
What you speak about here is not wisdom. It's idea and tradition wisdom is only given in transcendent belief, a notion that we have to live with transcendent belief to be wise because wisdom is limited to being what we are not. A misunderstanding of the self (that which is necessary foolish) that leaves our understanding of wisdom in poverty.
Yes there is natural, innate wisdom in some selves and one could also interpret that every being is wise. My cat for example is a font of wisdom, she knows what I am going to do before I do.
But in a human self there is the addition of an educated self conscious intellect. This results in a clouding of natural wisdom, especially when the teaching is philosophically, or religiously directed. This is because the teaching and effort to learn is impinging of the intellectual understanding of the self who is learning. In this mist, or fog of the processes involved in the building of the intellect, natural wisdom can be lost. Also there is an intellectual wisdom to be learnt, which is in a sense, an aptitude, or tutored process of fine tuning the intellect. This is historically undertaken in religious organisations, and I suspect occurs in academic philosophy. In the esoteric schools, this was developed to a further level in transcendent insight, which you misrepresent.
So in the development of a human being as they grow up, there is a process of seeking/teaching/learning knowledge and wisdom. Which is understood to be sought/discovered/ deduced/realised.
The discursive isn't only a question of spoken language. It's experience. Any understanding or awareness is a discourse, a representation of meaning, rather than a state itself. Rather than merely giving an account of what you know, it is true of any instance of awareness, knowledge and understanding, even non-linguistic experience.
If I have an awareness I cannot put into words, I know something, I aware of something, I understand something. It's still discursive. Words even relate to it-- right now I'm pointing out I can't put it into words. Not only do I know it, but I can tell you there is no way to know it by me giving description in words.
Are we talking about reflective knowledge here? Indeed, how can it be said that reflective knowledge even makes sense? Supposedly, I meant to know a tree's is a tree by relying on a "category" or "generalisation," but how can this be given that any tree in front of me is not any such concept?
I mean how do even know that the object infront of me fits into the category of tree? No doubt you would point out that I can observe the tree an not that it has various attributes that mean it fits into the category of "tree."
But this causes incoherence. If I am noting the leaves, truck, etc.,etc. of the object in front of me, I have knowledge of it prior to using the "category" or "generalisation" of tree. What's more, I must know that combination of leaves, truck, etc.etc., equals a tree (as opposed to anything else), so I must know the object is a tree (i.e. these are the leaves, trunk, etc.,etc of a tree) prior to applying judgment on the basis "category" or "generalisation," else I couldn't conclude either applied to the state in front of me.
Logic shows us knowledge cannot be reflective. We can't derive it from other instances of knowledge. Any instance of knowledge must be its own state, not enabled by something prior, but given in-itself.
I did name the thing, "moment". So I have the principle of identity right here within the moment, as an identified thing. But each moment is a difference from the prior moment, though it's still the same, as "the moment".
And that's what I originally thought SLX was saying about selection.... that it's the selection of what qualifies as a real thing.
Eh... I think the topic has run out of go-juice. Don't you?
I haven't thought specifically about this for some time.On the old PF in a thread about the relationship between 'knowing how' and 'knowing that' I remember saying that I think that the latter is a kind of the former, but that they are both derivative of knowing in a more primordial kind of biblical sense; the knowing of familiarity; or the knowing by acquaintance. Although the idea of familiarity and even more so the idea of acquaintance can carry an implication of separation., whereas the idea I have in mind is more like a knowing by communion.
I saw you briefly in our Derrida's "Voice and Phenomenon" reading group Mongrel. Check out the summary of Ch6 which I'll quote here: "The ideal object is the most objective of objects, it can be repeated indefinitely while remaining the same". Doesn't that described object sound like the present "moment"? And doesn't that description, the possibility of indefinite repetition, appear to be predication? On what principles do you believe that the moment is not a thing?
No problem ?????????????
:)