The enactivist approach doesn’t deny the role of electrochemistry or physical principles active in living organisms. But it emphasises that the behavi...
This view understands interpretation not as conscious self-awareness, but as a more basic responsiveness to environmental signals — a kind of primitiv...
I didn't ignore them intentionally - I just didn't notice them (and still don't know which comments you're referring to. The word ‘fallacies’ appears ...
Biologists do that. Biology doesn't shrug. Right - the beginning of intentionality, as I said in the OP. The origin of the self-and-world divide. I re...
Thanks — I follow the systems logic you're articulating (well, up to a point) but I think there's something more that needs considering: the emergence...
It is not so easy. Are human ends and purposes completely separated or cut off from the processes and activities of nature? (Leaving aside kicking the...
There was a book I looked at once - didn't read it - called "What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America" by Thomas Fran...
Agree that it's a hard problem! However, and this is something that I picked up from one of the sources I mentioned earlier, organisms try to persist ...
Heaven forbid :yikes: But to truly win a battle, you must fight your opponent on his strongest grounds. Brilliant post, as always — your framing of em...
But is it an analogy at all? Isn’t it pointing to something real — not metaphorical, but actual? Let me try a different analogy. One of the motivation...
But he also refers to natural things, acorns and foals. Elsewhere the distinction is made between artifacts and organisms, but here the distinction is...
I get what you're saying, especially if telos is taken to mean forcing reality into the shape of our own agenda. But it doesn't necessarily mean that....
Agree. It's appalling what is happening in Gaza and it's turning many people otherwise sympathetic to Israel (like me) against them. This has been a r...
I think the deeper philosophical issue here revolves around the problem of self-organisation — or what Aristotle might call self-motion. How can livin...
:clap: https://i.postimg.cc/NfV2KTQD/Deacon-Blues.png Screen grab of a lecture given by Terrence Deacon some time in the past. Excerpted from How Natu...
Yes, at first glance it does seem obvious that evolution has moved toward greater complexity and intelligence — after all, here we are! But what’s usu...
I wouldn’t want it to be thought that the OP is advocating any form of intelligent design. That wasn’t the intention. The word 'design' almost always ...
That is true, in a way, but it was because the thinkers of those times were schooled in, and trying to improve on (or supersede) the metaphysics and p...
I read a lot of snippets, excerpts, and reviews, but of those books, I’ve only read parts. So I thought it a worthwhile aim, now I’m pretty well retir...
Exactly. Following Descartes, Enlightenment philosophy generally valorized the ego — the self-aware, reflective individual mind — as the seat of certa...
The point isn’t that purpose is a substance-like feature found in some things (like organisms) and absent in others (like rocks). That’s still thinkin...
The ‘universe as a whole’ is the subject of scientific cosmology. It’s what is examined through the astounding technology of the Hubble, James Webb an...
Of course, but the sense that the universe is, in Bertrand Russell’s words, ‘the meaningless outcome of the collocation of atoms’ is very much a produ...
The idea that the universe is purposeless is a modern invention, arising in the early modern period with Newtonian science and Cartesian philosophy. T...
You have a choice, and you have preferences, which an instrument does not. Its reaction is strictly determined, whereas yours is unbounded. You could ...
Not when it's applied to physical objects. But as I said in the OP, physics achieved its enormous successes by concentrating on what could be quantifi...
The only thing that seems likely is something about Trump’s relationship with Epstein. But if you look at what all the Trump followers were saying bef...
I really think there’s nothing to see, although that does make wonder why they don’t just put them up. I guess they’re saying Trump won’t release them...
Nothing of the kind, it's an accurate description of basic scientific methodology. When you publish a scientific paper you may or may not get pubic re...
Right — but that idealised observer is precisely not a concrete subject. It's a perspectiveless abstraction, stripped of embodiment, situatedness, or ...
If it's possible to overdose on schadenfreude, then I'm in trouble. But it's just hilarious to see the whole 'MAGA' movement convulsing over the very ...
'Reference frame' is from relativity theory. It is true that relativity theory and quantum theory undermine the idea of absolute objectivity. That's o...
It means precisely the same thing. No, they're not seeking to remove perspective, they're seeking an observation, outcome, or finding which will be th...
The “view from nowhere” isn’t a critique of what scientists do, but of what scientific objectivity aspires to — a standpoint purified of subjectivity....
I agree. That's why I say 'probably'. But then, as I mentioned, the essay which prompted my response was one by Massimo Pigliucci, who is quite a visi...
It’s important to recall that The View from Nowhere is itself a critique of the limits of scientific objectivity. Nagel’s argument is that while the d...
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