who makes the exact opposite claim: bodies are trapped by souls. The point? The physical is more sublime than the mental. — Agent Smith

None of us can even imagine a state where basic awareness is not, because we would still be aware of the imagining. Even in dreams we are aware.

Moreover, these traditions maintain, there are not two different types of awareness, enlightened versus ignorant. There is only awareness. And this awareness, exactly and precisely as it is, without correction or modification at all, is itself Spirit, since there is nowhere Spirit is not. The instructions, then, are to recognize awareness, recognize the Witness, recognize the Self, and abide as that. Any attempt to get awareness is totally beside the point. 'But I still don't see Spirit!' 'You are aware of your not seeing Spirit, and that awareness is itself Spirit.'"

I think the update is simulation theory. — Tom Storm

Interesting discussion so far.
Philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.
— Richard Feynman — 180 Proof

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. — Nietzsche

An example of a successful metaphor rehash is the brain-in-a-vat gedanken experiment. — Agent Smith

It's time we updated the metaphors we find so useful and adapt them to current times so that people can relate to them more easily. — Agent Smith

Eliot challenges the common perception that a poet's greatness and individuality lie in their departure from their predecessors; he argues that "the most individual parts of his [the poet's] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously." Eliot claims that this "historical sense" is not only a resemblance to traditional works but an awareness and understanding of their relation to his poetry.

This fidelity to tradition, however, does not require the great poet to forfeit novelty in an act of surrender to repetition. Rather, Eliot has a much more dynamic and progressive conception of the poetic process: novelty is possible only through tapping into tradition. ...The act of artistic creation does not take place in a vacuum. The introduction of a new work alters the cohesion of this existing order, and causes a readjustment of the old to accommodate the new. The inclusion of the new work alters the way in which the past is seen... In Eliot’s own words, "What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art that preceded it." Eliot refers to this organic tradition, this developing canon, as the "mind of Europe." The private mind is subsumed by this more massive one.
...
Since the poet engages in a "continual surrender of himself" to the vast order of tradition, artistic creation is a process of depersonalisation. The mature poet is viewed as a medium, through which tradition is channelled and elaborated. The poet is a depersonalised vessel, a mere medium.

there could be physics metaphors — Agent Smith

Maybe metaphors occur as systems — Agent Smith

they're also, in a certain sense, pitfalls for they, I surmise, constrain a person to a particular point of view, a one-dimensional way of looking at things that though helpful can result in tunnel vision. — Agent Smith

If analogy is such a prevalent thing in our cognition, then it would seem to be necessary (though perhaps not completely possible) to find some way of talking about this phenomenon without participating in it, in order to reach a true understanding of it and the world in general. — _db

That is, today's understanding of morality is superior to 500 years ago. We're not just flittering randomly over time regarding what is good and evil, but are getting closer to the truth. — Hanover

So, assuming moral truths are relative to society, the times, the culture, one's idiosyncratic upbringing and experiences, tell me why the rapist ought be judged wrong despite his view it is right? — Hanover

For both Heidegger and Wittgenstein, then, the source of the intelligibility of the world is the average public practices through which alone there can be any understanding at all. What is shared is not a conceptual scheme, i.e., not a belief system that can be made explicit and justified. Not that we share a belief system that is always implicit and arbitrary. That is just the Sartrean version of the same mistake. What we share is simply our average comportment. Once a practice has been explained by appealing to what one does, no more basic explanation is possible. As Wittgenstein puts it in On Certainty: "Giving grounds [must] come to an end sometime. But the end is not an ungrounded presupposition: it is an ungrounded way of acting.
...
This view is entirely antithetical to the philosophical ideal of total clarity and ultimate intelligibility. Philosophers seek an ultimate ground. When they discover there is none, even modern philosophers like Sartre and Derrida seem to think that they have fallen into an abyss -- that the lack of an ultimate ground has catastrophic consequences for human activity.
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There is, however, something that average everyday intelligibility obscures, viz., that it is merely average everyday intelligibility. It takes for granted that the everyday for-the-sake-of-whichs and the equipment that serves them are based upon God's goodness, human nature, or at least solid good sense. This is what Heidegger called "the perhaps necessary appearance of foundation." One cannot help thinking that the right (healthy, civilized, rational, natural, etc.) way to sit, for example, is on chairs, at tables, etc., not on the floor. Our way seems to make intrinsic sense -- a sense not captured in saying, "This is what we in the West happen to do." What gets covered up in everyday understanding is not some deep intelligibility as the tradition has always held; it is that the ultimate "ground" of intelligibility is simply shared practices. There is no right interpretation. Average intelligibility is not inferior intelligibility; it simply obscures its own groundlessness. This is the last stage of the hermeneutics of suspicion. The only deep interpretation left is that there is no deep interpretation.

As I see it, both PoMo and AP are essentially reductionist and never escape that monism - whether they fetishise the monism of the one or the many. — apokrisis

I remember liking Gadamer. — apokrisis

Pragmatism. What use is knowledge that ain't useful.

Even poetry is supposed to be useful according to its promoters. — apokrisis

So maybe vocalisation is a privileging medium here after all. The paleo record seems to say so. — apokrisis

So I say that the holism of pragmatism is the best path to approach metaphysics. Natural philosophy, systems science, etc. That gives you training in the habits of thought which are actually required to grasp the whole that is meant to be at the end of the trail. — apokrisis

My trajectory would have been biology => ecology => artificial intelligence => human evolution => social pyschology => cognitive neuroscience => complexity theory => systems science => Peircean semiotics; — apokrisis

And then you learn that the mark is in fact part of some larger mental structure - some community-level habit of interpretation. As more marks get made, you might start to think you could crack this cuneiform code.

So at the level of some single mark, it could be "just physics" - a complete material accident in a world composed of material accidents over all possible spatiotemporal scales. Or it could be "all mind" in being a purposeful act of encoding information.

A mark could be a switch. Or not a switch. And so it sits there right at the epistemic cut as an information bit that might also be understood as an entropic microstate. — apokrisis

The fact that understanding operates by means of such anticipatory structures means that understanding always involves what Gadamer terms the ‘anticipation of completeness’—it always involves the revisable presupposition that what is to be understood constitutes something that is understandable, that is, something that is constituted as a coherent, and therefore meaningful, whole.
...
The prejudicial character of understanding means that, whenever we understand, we are involved in a dialogue that encompasses both our own self-understanding and our understanding of the matter at issue. In the dialogue of understanding our prejudices come to the fore, both inasmuch as they play a crucial role in opening up what is to be understood, and inasmuch as they themselves become evident in that process. As our prejudices thereby become apparent to us, so they can also become the focus of questioning in their own turn.

the possibility of its being repeated another time-breaches, divides, expropriates the "ideal" plenitude or self-presence of intention,...of all adequation between meaning and saying. Iterability alters...leaves us no room but to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say) — Joshs

It is the principles of codes that is at stake, whether they be verbal, numerical, neural or genetic. — apokrisis

One metaphysics to rule them all. — apokrisis

Reality is dichotomies, or switches, or ampheks, or signs, or quantum operators acting on infinte Hilbert spaces, or symmetry breaking in general, all the way down to ground. Which is then defined by the Planck triad of constants - that stand in their own final set of reciprocal relations. That becomes the Big Bang cut-off that says you can't go any smaller or hotter as the fabric of reality now becomes just a vagueness - the dissolution that is Wheeler's quantum foam. — apokrisis

The difference is that Peirce is thinking mathematically. Just check out the amphek as the epistemic cut switching device that makes possible the whole of Boolean algebra - a fact known to Peirce in 1880 and not rediscovered until Sheffer in 1913. And even Sheffer got no credit until Bertrand Russell stumbled across it in the 1920s and was compelled to incorporate it into the second edition of his Principia Mathematica. — apokrisis

The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit; and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise. If beliefs do not differ in this respect, if they appease the same doubt by producing the same rule of action, then no mere differences in the manner of consciousness of them can make them different beliefs, any more than playing a tune in different keys is playing different tunes. Imaginary distinctions are often drawn between beliefs which differ only in their mode of expression; -- the wrangling which ensues is real enough, however.

So Peirce is mathematical rigor underneath all the neologisms. Derrida and PoMo in general are more like the blind people in a dark room giving the elephant a good touch up and feeling moved to poetic outbursts. — apokrisis

It is a system of metaphor that structures our everyday conceptual system, including most abstract concepts, and that lies behind much of everyday language. The discovery of this enormous metaphor system has destroyed the traditional literal-figurative distinction, since the term literal, as used in defining the traditional distinction, carries with it all those false assumptions. — Lakoff

Analogies—which we make constantly, relentlessly and mostly unconsciously—are what allow categorization to happen, he said. "Our minds are constructed with an unlimited quality for 'chunking' primordial concepts, which then become larger concepts."

Hofstadter used as an example the word "hub," as in "Denver is the hub for United Airlines," and displayed a hand-drawn chart mapping words representing some of the linked concepts that are "chunked" together to make up the commonly used term. His examples ranged from basics like "wheel" and "node" to higher-order concepts like "spoke" and "network." Higher-order concepts are glommed together from lower-order ones, he said.

There's no fundamental difference in thinking with basic concepts and very large concepts because we don't "see" inside them, he said. "We build concepts by putting several concepts together and putting a membrane around them, and kind of miraculously these [interior] concepts disappear."
...
Underground competition is going on in every word choice, in every situation and at all times, Hofstadter said. "We are trying to put labels on things by mapping situations that we have encountered before. That to me is nothing but analogy."

Concepts like the "Transcendental Ego" appear to be more of a product of a death denying ideology (orphaned by facts) than a legit philosophical topic that could allow us to arrive to wise statements about our ontology. — Nickolasgaspar

How can you enrich this conversation without any data...just with faith based claims!? — Nickolasgaspar

Antecedent to epistemology, Sellars’s treatment of semantics essentially constitutes a denial of what can be called a semantic given—the idea that some of our terms or concepts, independently of their occurrence in formal and material inferences, derive their meaning directly from confrontation with a particular (kind of) object or experience. Sellars is anti-foundationalist in his theories of concepts, knowledge, and truth.

...
The observational/theoretical vocabulary distinction, thus conceived, was taken to have ontological implications. We are committed to the existence of the given, for that is what ties thought to reality. Theories, however, are merely tools to enable us to explain observation-level empirical generalizations. Presumably, some empirical generalizations may be first derived with the help of a theory, but they are subject to more direct investigation and corroboration, so the theory is not essential to it. Thus, there is no ontological commitment to any entities that theories postulate; they can be viewed as convenient fictions, devices of calculation.

Sellars thinks that this instrumentalist picture gets almost everything wrong. In his view the observation vocabulary/theoretical vocabulary distinction is merely methodological and is, moreover, highly malleable; it therefore possesses no particular ontological force. There is no given, so it can play no semantic role. Meanings are functional roles in language usage, and nothing in principle prevents a term that might originally have arisen as part of a theory from acquiring a role in observation reports. The well-trained physicist “just sees” an alpha-particle track in a cloud chamber as directly and non-inferentially as the well-trained child just sees a dog. Furthermore, what is observable depends on the techniques and instruments employed, and these are often loaded with theoretical baggage. “Pure” observation uncontaminated by theory is outside our reach.

My intention was to point out that those ideas are not Philosophy. — Nickolasgaspar

Why was the Catholic Church so historically powerful? Because is fostered precisely this image of the human condition.

If you make everyone self-conscious of their need to constantly watch over their every impulse and weigh it against a culturally-defined norm, then you indeed own their "souls".

Modern neo-liberalism just continues this epistemological tradition. If you can make every citizen guilty for their failures to be self-actualising entrepreneurs, then again you own their "souls" and they become the building blocks that creatively strive to make the social hierarchy that your "consciousness model" embodies. — apokrisis

The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.

Yeah sure. But this is the Kantian throat-clearing level of the discussion. It should be the bleeding obvious. How many times can one kill the corpse of Cartesian representationalism?

But yes, I realise that is a rhetorical question. Every second post on this forum demonstrates that the grip of this zombie metaphysics is as strong as ever. And I've just said why. Humanity - as a social organism - depends on Cartesian representationalism as its standard operating system. — apokrisis

Language starts first out in the tribal space to co-ordinate tribal action. Then it became internalised as inner self-regulatory speech once the value of that trick became culturally apparent.

It's Vygotskian psychology 101. But Vygotsky is another Peirce. Someone totally brilliant, yet caught out by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They both wrote down all the answers, but their manuscripts remained lost to the world until little groups began to rediscover their existence in the 1980s and 1990s. — apokrisis

If vagueness is Firstness - the most absolute form of constraint in being an Apeiron, an absolute absence of constraint - then that already is also the nullity that guarantees the existence of its "other" in the form of the first primal actualisation of a constraint, and hence the full triadic irreducibility of the secondness of dyadic relations, and thirdness of enstructured habit. — apokrisis

So in the "beginning" was the vague. — apokrisis

I would add that this view of consciousness - a little soul inside the physical body that has freewill and is responsible for everything the body chooses to get up to - is socially constructed and has great pragmatic value for the social level of the human organism. — apokrisis

The issue here is not Science vs Philosophy but Philosophy vs Pseudo Philosophy on really bad abstract reasoning. I am not here to argue in favor of knowledge but in favor of wisdom. Claims that do not provide any wisdom or expand our understanding aren't Philosophical By definition.
Philosophy is the struggle to understand the world through wise claims founded on what we already know, not to make up answers on arbitrary presumptions that we can not evaluate. — Nickolasgaspar

We can fill pages of discussion on that topic but nothing originates from real knowledge and none of what it will be said can ever leave the metaphysical realm. This is a text book example of pseudo philosophy. — Nickolasgaspar

The logical positivists' initial stance was that a statement is "cognitively meaningful" in terms of conveying truth value, information or factual content only if some finite procedure conclusively determines its truth. By this verifiability principle, only statements verifiable either by their analyticity or by empiricism were cognitively meaningful. Metaphysics, ontology, as well as much of ethics failed this criterion, and so were found cognitively meaningless.

Thus it is neurobiology that is indeed “the pure mental stuff” here - even if one wouldn’t want to use such a dualistic, Cartesian substance, term. — apokrisis

If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word "pain" means - must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly?

Now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case! --Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle". No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. --Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. --But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language? --If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. --No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.

That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant.

So a constraints based approach says the syntax glues together a set of semantic switches. We have to think of the hairy caterpillar, and not the bald or scaly or feathered or clothed caterpillar. — apokrisis

Stan Salthe wrote the best two books on all this from the hierarchy theory point of view - Evolving Hierarchical Systems and Development and Evolution - probably the two most important books I ever read. — apokrisis

Well, I could never wrap my head around Wittgenstein's "meaning is use" statement. — Agent Smith

But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we have to say that it is its use.
If the meaning of the sign (roughly, that which is of importance about the sign) is an image built up in our minds when we see or hear the sign, then first let us adopt the method we just described of replacing this mental image by some outward object seen, e.g. a painted or modelled image. Then why should the written sign plus this painted image be alive if the written sign alone was dead? -- In fact, as soon as you think of replacing the mental image by, say, a painted one, and as soon as the image thereby loses its occult character, it ceased to seem to impart any life to the sentence at all. (It was in fact just the occult character of the mental process which you needed for your purposes.)

I’m not getting how it is a distinction that makes a difference. — apokrisis

The context is always out there in brute physical fashion. So start by trying to predict and thus already ignore it. Let it then intrude on your world conception to the degree that it feels it must. — apokrisis

Mathematicians in analysis or topology mostly know Brouwer for his famous Fixed Point theorem . — jgill

Or was it that they thought they were picking up essences, misled by a picture - a theory of definition - that held them captive; while all along they were just getting on with making use of their words to get stuff done? — Banno

And it is the judgement being exercised in what exact proteins get made that then adds all the meaning. — apokrisis

So the greater the scope for an endless recursion of sign, the more meaningful it is when we can say almost everything in a remarkably few words.

At the wedding ceremony: "I will". — apokrisis

A taxonomy is a hierarchy of switches. Ideally, the throwing of a switch at each level bisects the space of probability with 50/50 Bayesian exactness.

So I have in my box here a ....? Well, you already know its got to be that small. So its it animal or mineral? Is it rocky or metallic? Is it shiny or dull? Is it more gold or silver? Is it globular or toroid? Aha, I can guess it is the wedding ring. "I will". — apokrisis

Only a chain of switches can reduce its material cross section to the point where it "escapes" the 4D constraints of the real material world. — apokrisis

Each switch can either expand or contract the space of possibility in logarithmic steps while keep the cost of any step strictly linear.

So a linear code gives you hierarchical holism for next to no computational cost. I can't talk as gaily about the Big Bang as the fleck of dust I've just noted on my screen. In 20 questions I can cover almost any space of semantic possibilities that I might practically have an interest in. — apokrisis