My point was that there is no indissoluble logical or rational connection between intent, responsibility and blame — Janus

When we deem someone responsible for what we see as an unethical action, when we believe it was intentional, deliberate, this is precisely what blame is. Blame is synonymous with the attribution of intentional capriciousness, waywardness to another, their straying from the path of right behavior.

Of course they are intelligible without the implication of blame. We can say as Jesus reportedly did: "forgive them for they know not what they do". The idea of intent and responsibility may be inherent to those ideas, but the imputation of intent and responsibility is not indissolubly linked with the idea of deserving blame.Blame is precisely the assignment of intent and responsibility to an action that one deems to be unethical — Janus

Forgiveness and turning the other cheek only make sense in the context of blame, which implies a belief in the potential capriciousness of human motives. From this vantage, if, rather blaming and condemning another who wrongs me, I respond with loving forgiveness, my absolution of the other presupposes my hostility toward them. I can only forgive the other's trespass to the extent that I recognize a sign of contrition or confession on their. part. Buddhist perspectives talk of substituting compassion for anger. Others say we move beyond anger by forgiving those who wrong us. Traditional religious ideals of unconditional forgiveness, of turning the other cheek, loving one's oppressor need to be seen as conditional in various ways.

In the absence of the other's willingness to atone, I may forgive evil when I believe that there are special or extenuating circumstances which will allow me to view the perpetrator as less culpable (the sinner knows not what they do). I can say the other was blinded or deluded, led astray. My offer of grace is then subtly hostile, both an embrace and a slap. I hold forth the carrot of my love as a lure, hoping thereby to uncloud the other's conscience so as to enable them to discover their culpability. In opening my arms, I hope the prodigal son or daughter will return chastised, suddenly aware of a need to be forgiven.

Even when there is held little chance that the sinner will openly acknowledge their sin, I may hope that my outrage connects with a seed of regret and contrition buried deep within the other, as if my `unconditional' forgiveness is an acknowledgment of God's or the subliminal conscience of the other's apologizing in the name of the sinner. This kind of unconditional forgiveness forgives in the name of a divine or natural moral order that the guilty party is in some sense answerable to, thereby linking this thinking to the normalizing, conformist impetus of conditional forgiveness.

No, not addressing the question of blame. but rather of value and disvalue. Love is generally preferred over hate, courage over cowardice, selflessness over selfishness, kindness over cruelty, help over harm and so on. Murder, rape, torture, theft, deceit, exploitation and the like are universally (perhaps sociopaths excepted) condemned as being evil acts. As far as I can tell these facts about people are the only viable basis for moral realism, not some imagined transcendent "object" or whatever. — Janus

We can associate disvalues with people that don’t involve blame, such as ugliness, physical weakness, cognitive slowness. But are concepts like murder, hate, deceit, exploitation, cowardice, cruelty and evil at all intelligible without the implication of blame? We only blame persons for actions that they performed deliberately, with intent. Is it possible to be an accidental, unintentional murderer, coward, deceiver or hater?

I beleive that all forms of blame, including the cool, non-emotional, rational desire for accountability and justice and well as rageful craving for vengeance, are grounded in a spectrum of affective comportments that share core features. This affective spectrum includes irritation, annoyance, hostility, disapproval, condemnation, feeling insulted, taking umbrage, resentment, anger, exasperation, impatience, hatred, fury, ire, outrage, contempt, righteous indignation, ‘adaptive' or rational anger, perceiving the other as deliberately thoughtless, rude, careless, negligent, complacent, lazy, self-indulgent, malevolent, dishonest, narcissistic, malicious, culpable, perverse, inconsiderate, intentionally oppressive, anti-social, hypocritical, repressive or unfair, disrespectful, disgraceful, greedy, evil, sinful, criminal, a miscreant. Blame is also implicated in cooly, calmly and rationally determining the other to have deliberately committed a moral transgression, a social injustice or injustice in general, or as committing a moral wrong.

Only when identity is understood as a derived modification of difference can the concept of union free itself from Platonic dogmatism and metaphysical presuppsitons.
— Joshs

Where does that critique come from? What's the theory behind it? — Wayfarer

I dont know, but it’s got a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Just kidding. Actually, that’s a kind of thinking common to Foucault, Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida. They all trace it back to Nietzsche’s Eternal Return. They read it as eternal return of the always different. Deleuze wrote

In accordance with Heidegger's ontological intuition, difference must be articulation and connection in itself; it must relate different to different without any mediation whatsoever by the identical, the similar, the analogous or the opposed. There must be a differenciation of difference, an in-itself which is like a differenciator, by virtue of which the different is gathered all at once rather than represented on condition of a prior resemblance, identity, analogy or opposition.

On Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, Deleuze says:

When the identity of things dissolves, being be­gins to revolve around the different. That which is or returns has no prior constituted identity: things are reduced to the difference which fragments them, and to all the differences which are implicated in it and through which they pass.

They might tell you they convicted because of facts A, B and C, and they may beleive that, but the reason they convicted and the reason they believe facts A, B and C mattered are just because of other causes in their head. That is, free will is necessary for meaningful decision making, and if it doesn't exist, then all decisions are either pre-determined or random. — Hanover

You act as though no determinists are behaviorists. For behaviorists there are no billiard balls in the head, since nothing going on in the head can be objectively measured. All that counts are the billiard balls outside the head (environmental stimuli) conditioning the body’s observable behavior in consistent and predicable ways. Skinner’s Walden Two was about a socially engineered society based on billiard balls outside the head.You don’t need individual free will for that, just a structure of enculturation that can be identified and modified. It was a behavioral justice system, based on rehabilitation, re-socialization and re-education. A person was responsible to the extent that they were responsive to social conditioning. Is that thinking really so far removed from holding persons accountable with the assumption that they are responsive to the influence of social pressure? There would be two aspects involved here, the system of enculturation beyond the control of the individual which is responsible for their maladaptive , anti-social behavior, and the individual as locus of behavior, responsible not for that history of enculturation but for recognizing it and being amenable to reform by a justice system.

If it's strong emergence, it's dualism. Weak emergent freedom is a contradiction in terms.

A causally closed system doesn't have to be one that has no environment with which it interacts. Robert Rosen devotes most of his book Life Itself to that. Also, how the heck do you whip out a quote regarding any topic you happen to be talking about? That's amazing. — frank

I wasnt familiar with Rosen’s work. After a quick glance I’m impressed with the direction he’s gone in. Yes, for enactivists like Varela, sensory-motor coupling between organism and environment produces an operational closure and resulting autonomy.

…the crucial property of an autonomous system is its operational closure. In an autonomous system, every constituent process is conditioned by some other process in the system; hence, if we analyse the enabling conditions for any constituent process of the system, we will always be led to other pro­cesses in the system. ( Mog Stapleton)

But doesn’t Rosen accept that emergence within dynamical
systems represents a kind of freedom without dualism? Isnt that the point of such systems?

how the heck do you whip out a quote regarding any topic you happen to be talking about? That's amazing. — frank

I just make it up. I figure nobody will check.

Anyway, to the extent this slippery slope actually does occur in court, a typical gap between the left and the right on personal responsibility does center around how much freedom, if any, someone has over their actions. Arguments related to upbringing, general environment, intelligence, prior exposures with violence, etc are often better received by those on the left that believe that behavior is better informed by external circumstances than the right, who hold firmly to responsibility coming entirely from within.

These differences in ideology are just that, usually based upon political leanings and the like, but not upon any real analysis of what the implications of determinism are. — Hanover

But what are the implications of determinism for the courtroom? I have claimed that reductive determinists like Sapolski, even though they reject the concept of personal responsibility, don’t remove the value of declaring a person culpable, if culpability implies that the guilty person’s behavior can be modified through some corrective procedure ( punishment, rehabilitation, etc) administered by the legal system. If our actions are determined by past environmental conditionings, then they can be redirected by new social conditionings. Someone declared legally sane will be assumed to be at least minimally amenable to such conditionings , whereas someone with unmedicated schizophrenia may not be able to process in a coherent way the corrective input.

For free will, you need to be causally closed. You have to actually be causally separate from the rest of the universe. In other words, determinism/free will is essentially: causally monolithic universe vs. causal dualism, or primal unity vs duality. For free will, you have to be supernatural. There's no way around it. — frank

Juerrero discusses this distinction between a closed and an open system. The key point concerning emergent freedom is that it is made possible top-down self-organizing constraints.

A system with no external structure—no environment with which it interacts—is a closed and isolated system. Only the entire universe is closed and isolated. A system's external structure can affect its internal structure and not just as efficient cause. This feature falsifies the thesis that secondary or relational properties are epiphenomenal and subjective. That kind of interaction between open systems and their environment also marks the limits of modern scientific methodology. It is possible to get only so far (pretty far, to be sure, with some processes—but not with others) by isolating a system from the context to which it belongs.

Once Newton's and Descartes' writings became widespread after the mid 17th century our understanding of causality changed drastically. Organisms, which the Aristotelian tradition had treated as systemic totalities, became reducible to causally inert aggregates located but not embedded in their context or environment. Once wholes were reduced to the epiphenomenal sum of their constituent parts and all causality effectively limited to efficient causes that are, moreover, reversible-in-principle, bottom-up causality was eviscerated of any power to create truly emergent new forms, and all forms of top-down causation—from wholes to parts—were disallowed.

The person could have chosen 100 ways to build a bridge, but he chose Choice 87 and the reason he chose Choice 87 was because the various pool balls slamming together in his brain led him to Choice 87. How do you propose he chose Choice 87? — Hanover

I agree with you that each choice belonging to the process of building a bridge belongs to a causal sequence of mental acts, but this is not the kind of linear efficient causality we use to describe the behavior of billiard balls. You cannot arrive at an adequate account of cognition by trying to reduce it to this kind of causation. Cognition is a form of intentional causation, which arises from the spontaneous global organization of subordinate parts. Global organizations produce meaningful normative expectations, out of which creative possibilities emerge. When we try to trace back this behavior to the behavior of its parts, we find that these parts have no identity beyond their role in the global patterns , and as these patterns change, so does the role of the parts.

Knowledge presupposes some kind of union, because in order to become the thing which is known we must possess it, we must be identical with the object we know. But this possession of the object is not a physical possession of it. It is a possession of the form of the object, of that principle which makes the object to be what it is. This is what Aristotle means when he says that the soul in a way becomes all things. Entitatively the knower and object known remain what they are. But intentionally (cognitively) the knower becomes the object of his knowledge as he possesses the form of the object.
— Aquinas Online, Cognition in General

This theme of 'union' in some ways echoes the idea of union in many different schools of the perennial philosophy. This is what is lost in the transition to modernity, particularly with the advent of Cartesian dualism and the separateness of mind and matter. — Wayfarer

I think Modernity began a deconstruction of the idea of unity determined as identity, but it didn’t take this deconstruction far enough. Only when identity is understood as a derived modification of difference can the concept of union free itself from Platonic dogmatism and metaphysical presuppsitons.

The fundamental unit of the universe is a relationship.

The universe is a network of relationships that changes.

Why? Because we can see that is what it is.

The universe changes, so it must be composed of stuff that can change. The universe is connected so it must be composed of things that connect. The universe is diverse so it must be composed of differences.

Objects do not have these properties. The universe is not composed of objects.

We label the things Relationships. — Treatid

Kind of like this from physicist Karen Barad?

“In an agential realist account, matter does not refer to a fixed substance; rather, matter is substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency. Matter is a stabilizing and destabilizing process of iterative intra-activity. Phenomena—the smallest material units (relational “atoms”)—come to matter through this process of ongoing intra-activity. “Matter” does not refer to an inherent, fixed property of abstract, independently existing objects; rather, “matter” refers to phenomena in their ongoing materialization. On my agential realist elaboration, phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of “observer” and “observed”; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting “components.” That is, phenomena are ontologically primitive relations—relations without preexisting relata. The notion of intraaction (in contrast to the usual “interaction,” which presumes the prior existence of independent entities/relata) represents a profound conceptual shift. It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the “components” of phenomena become determinate and that particular embodied concepts become meaningful.”

“In my agential realist account, scientific practices do not reveal what is already there; rather, what is ‘‘disclosed’’ is the effect of the intra-active engagements of our participation with/in and as part of the world’s differential becoming. Which is not to say that humans are the condition of possibility for the existence of phenomena. Phenomena do not require cognizing minds for their existence; on the contrary, ‘‘minds’’ are themselves material phenomena that emerge through specific intra-actions. Phenomena are real material beings. What is made manifest through technoscientific practices is an expression of the objective existence of particularmaterial phenomena. This is, after all, a realist conception of scientific practices. But unlike in traditional conceptions of realism, ‘‘objectivity’’ is not preexistence (in the ontological sense) or the preexistent made manifest to the cognitive mind (in the epistemological sense).

Or this from Deleuze and Heidegger?

In accordance with Heidegger's ontological intuition, difference must be articulation and connection in itself; it must relate different to different without any mediation whatsoever by the identical, the similar, the analogous or the opposed. There must be a differenciation of difference, an in-itself which is like a differenciator, by virtue of which the different is gathered all at once rather than represented on condition of a prior resemblance, identity, analogy or opposition.

Or Deleuze’s summary of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return?

When the identity of things dissolves, being be­gins to revolve around the different. That which is or returns has no prior constituted identity: things are reduced to the difference which fragments them, and to all the differences which are implicated in it and through
which they pass

It seems that there is almost universal agreement about the most serious ethical issues — Janus

I assume you mean the almost universal agreement concerns when to assign blame and culpability?

So the formal cause of a deliberate choice is rationality and rational motives. Why does an engineer build a bridge one way and not another? Because he (freely) reasons that this is the best way to build a bridge in such-and-such a circumstance. But there are a thousand different ways to build a bridge, and he might have built it differently. He is doubtless aware of all sorts of different ways that he could have built it. The final blueprint (or bridge) is not accounted for by randomness/spontaneity or determinism, for randomness does not produce bridges, and determinism cannot make sense of the fact that he was able—though his rationality—to build the bridge in a thousand different ways — Leontiskos

Would you argue that we must divorce rational human creativity from the evolutionary engine of biological creativity? Is the freedom of human motive and thought completely absent from the rest of the living sphere, is it an emergent function, are there degrees of freedom at different levels of biological complexity? Or did a god gift humans with a freedom which he denied the rest of nature ( in which case we would exist apart from nature)? Piaget argues that human cognition is an internalization of the most general organizing principle on life, assimilation of the substances from the world into the organism’s functioning, and accommodation of that functioning in order to adjust for the novel aspects of what it assimilates.

On the order of the development of human culture, this reciprocal equilibration between assimilation and accommodation takes the form of cognitive-affective schemes through which we makes sense of our world (assimilation) and the modification of those schemes (accommodation) to adapt to changing circumstances that result from our technologies and other knowledge. the direction of cultural history takes on a spiral shape, as each accommodative adjustment of our cognitive system makes this system simultaneously more complex , more differentiated and more integrated, and thus more stable. This model was a way for Piaget to integrate the religious, the moral and the empirical. And it avoids the reductive determinism of Sapolski while remaining an entirely naturalistic and deterministic model.

One more thing I should mention is that Piaget , like Dreyfus, phenomenologists and enactivists, beleived that the vast majority of our creative achievements rely not on rational rule-based ‘top-down’ processes , but bottom-up initutice coping directly attuned to contextual
circumstances.

But, like I said, I accept there is free will, but I take it as a given, without which nothing makes sense, not even the ability to reason and decide what to believe. I'm just willing to admit that the concept of free will in logically incoherent upon deep analysis. — Hanover

Not really. For instance, there’s this from the dynamical systems camp:

On Philosophy's “To Rethink” List: Causality, Explanation, and Ethics, by Alicia Juarrero

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alicia-Juarrero-2/publication/233457599_On_Philosophy's_To_Rethink_List_Causality_Explanation_and_Ethics/links/5575b21e08ae7521586b3e57/On-Philosophys-To-Rethink-List-Causality-Explanation-and-Ethics.pdf?origin=publicationDetail&_sg%5B0%5D=0NjQFpRPXmA4n3INiO1ZKZIaCrDljK6p4EkfC8ZlxCBONfYRxHCud5H57elzj_Xi35PtChTXMzRYYft5ijsLKQ.qHZcduDNTVgD4nVOmRQlwEHrp3qXQL4HgM396ozByHc1nwl3rBWCYu2nhbDhOCAVPYdYulAO79Gl6T5i62YO5w&_sg%5B1%5D=Htt1q7IrdBIzqbSNJLn7BWyexOJBqAJOK0ztVn8ErUyU-BMZd0j850net-v0JD5YGV_sKCO4AkTHDoMNhZQv4RJbDClpP-fI5sHt-VPJ8Q1b.qHZcduDNTVgD4nVOmRQlwEHrp3qXQL4HgM396ozByHc1nwl3rBWCYu2nhbDhOCAVPYdYulAO79Gl6T5i62YO5w&_sg%5B2%5D=3WPBhM5_o3uTs5KbE62jpuZ-40k8xof2UnVEBDAMM4NHAx91yyDnH6YWAg4EgvlLy3GkaHDWNdKYncE.9TvQxv4LQF_Nbmjnse-StQ3yrWG73OtJbZ7DvsTmhH2VO-iEUCxO9y1h-2n3OXV1Ww_2CAyyyPKxVNBG5kjpFA&_iepl=&_rtd=eyJjb250ZW50SW50ZW50IjoibWFpbkl0ZW0ifQ%3D%3D&_tp=eyJjb250ZXh0Ijp7ImZpcnN0UGFnZSI6InB1YmxpY2F0aW9uIiwicGFnZSI6InB1YmxpY2F0aW9uIiwicG9zaXRpb24iOiJwYWdlSGVhZGVyIn19

Sapolski seems to agree with Hanover that <I am morally responsible iff I could have done otherwise>; it's just that whereas someone like Aquinas would use moral responsibility to affirm libertarian free will,* Sapolski would apparently deny libertarian free will in order that he might deny moral responsibility (because moral responsibility and the justification of retributive punishment go hand in hand).

*
Man has free-will: otherwise counsels, exhortations, commands, prohibitions, rewards, and punishments would be in vain. — Leontiskos

If blameful retributive justice is a function of a belief in the potential arbitrariness, randomness and capriciousness of motive, then what makes Cartesian desert-based approaches , which are assumed to arise from the deliberately willed actions of an autonomous, morally responsible subject, harsher and more ‘blameful' in their views of justice than deterministic , non-desert based modernist approaches and postmodern accounts, which rest on shaping influences (bodily-affective and social) outside of an agent's control? Aren't the latter accounts more ‘arbitrary' interpretations of behavior than the former? On the contrary, the very autonomy of the Cartesian subject presupposes a profound arbitrariness to free will. We say that the subject who has free will wills of their own accord, chooses what they want to choose , and as such has autonomy with respect to ‘foreign' social and internal bodily influences. The machinations of the free will amount to a self-enclosed system.

This solipsist self functions via an internal logic of values that, while rational within the internal bounds of its own subjectivity, is walled off from the wider community of selves and therefore can choose value in a profoundly irrational or immoral manner with respect to social consensus. Therefore, the very autonomy of the Cartesian subject presupposes a profound potential laxity and arbitrariness to individual free will in relation to the moral norms of a wider social community. Modernist deterministic moral arguments of those like Pereboom and Nussbaum surrender the absolute solipsist rationalism of free will-based models of the self in favor of a view of the self as belonging to and determined by a wider causal empirical social and natural order .If we ask why the agent endowed with free will chose to perform a certain action , the only explanation we can give is that it made sense to them given their own desires and whims. If we instead inquire why the individual ensconced within a modernist deterministic or postmodern relativist world performed the same action, we would be able to make use of the wider explanatory framework of the natural or discursive order in situating the causes of behavior.

It’s not as if punitive justice is absent from Sapolski’s deterministic account. If human behavior is assumed to be the product of both biological and environmental conditioning influences, then it stands to reason that it is possible to rehabilitate and recondition a person who is exhibiting anti-social behavior. The difference between this sort of reductive deterministic justice and a justice that assumes divine free will is that moral evil implies a more violent, inexplicable and arbitrary deviation from social norms than psychiatric and biological pathology, and so requires a more violent method of corrective justice.

I happen to think that Sapolski’s reductive determinism is still too punitive and blameful , still too close to traditional free will accounts. There are more human, more sophisticated naturalistic-deterministic models available, like the complex dynamical systems approaches I mentioned.

rational decisions are also bound up with agency, and they cannot be deterministic if they are truly rational, and also because of the evidence that the rational agent is able to reflect on their own reasons in an infinitely recursive manner — Leontiskos

It seems to me the issue for ethics isn’t freedom vs determinism, but what kind of freedom and what kind of determinism. Let’s take , for instance , the neurobiologist Robert Sapolski’s determinatist account. His target is traditional views of free will , and his claim is that they justify a harsh, retributive justice because the free-willing individual is radically arbitrary with respect to an ordered system of natural forces. When one wills in a way that breaks from established moral norms, one is not able to make use of an explanatory structure that allows us to understand their actions in a predictive matrix. He contrasts this with the deterministic biological and psychological models he embraces, which purports to trace all behavior, all allegedly free choices, to a history of pre-existing causal chains that lead back to initial hormonal, genetic and environmental conditions that act as efficient causes. In essence , as we pile up new choices upon old, for Sapolski little or nothing new is added to the meaning of those initial conditions, since the causal chain leading from origin to fresh decision is nothing but a mathematical calculus, like describing the. behavior of billiard balls.

Now, I think Sapolski has a point when he claims that use of reductionist models from the natural sciences has played a significant role in replacing brutal forms of punitive and retributive justice with more humane ones. But it is not as if arbitrary freedom plays no role in his notion of determinism. We can reveal the arbitrariness of this reductive form of empirical determinism by contrasting it with more sophisticated biological and psychological models that incorporate complex dynamical
systems analysis.

According to this approach, global processes of self-organization that emerge out of the interactions among parts of a biological system cannot be reduced to a linear causation based on the properties of the parts, in contradiction to Sapolski. For instance, the evolution of human cognition and cultural knowledge produces, at each new stage, new constraints and controls which not only close off certain possibilities of behavior and thought , but open up new degrees of freedom. This represents a more intricate and less arbitrary notion of both determinism and freedom in comparison with Sapolski’s reductive determinism. Significantly , dynamical systems theories integrate subjective and intersubjectve aspects into a single organization, allowing for a reciprocal dependence between individual autonomy and group autonomy. This moves us away from the notion of the solipsistic autonomous free-willing subject, without merely substituting anonymous external natural causation.

Banned @PL Olcott for a lot of threads with aggressive cranking in them….Being very rude about the pseudoscience you're peddling — fdrake

Makes me think of Feyerabend’s definition of a crank.

It is here, by the way, that the distinction between 'respectable' people and cranks must be drawn. The distinction does not lie in the fact that the former suggest what is plausible and promises success, whereas the latter suggest what is implausible, absurd, and bound to fail. It cannot lie in this because we never know in advance which theory will be successful and which theory will fail. It takes a long time to decide this question, and every single step leading to such a decision is again open to revision. Nor can the absurdity of a point of view count as a general argument against it. It is a reasonable consideration for the choice of one's own theories to demand that they seem plausible to oneself. This is one's private affair, so to speak. But to declare that only plausible theories should be considered is going too far. No, the distinction between the crank and the respectable thinker lies in the research that is done once a certain point of view is adopted.

The crank usually is content with defending the point of view in its original, unde-veloped, metaphysical form, and he is not at all prepared to test its usefulness in all those cases which seem to favour the opponent, or even to admit that there exists a problem. It is this further investigation, the details of it, the knowledge of the difficulties, of the general state of knowledge, the recognition of objections, which distinguishes the 'respectable thinker' from the crank. The original content of his theory does not. If he thinks that Aristotle should be given a further chance, let him do it and wait for the results. If he rests content with his assertion and does not start elaborating a new dynamics, if he is unfamiliar with the initial difficulties of his position, then the matter is of no further interest.

However, if he does not rest content with Aristotelianism in the form in which it exists today but tries to adapt it to the present situation in astronomy, physics, and micro-physics, making new suggestions, looking at old problems from a new point of view, then be grateful that there is at last somebody who has unusual ideas and do not try to stop him in advance with irrelevant and misguided arguments.

I think it is clear now that there is no harm in proceeding as Copernicus did, and as Böhm does, in introducing unfounded conjectures which are inconsistent with facts and accepted theories and which, moreover, give the impression of absurdity - provided the suggestion of such conjectures is followed up by detailed research of the kind outlined in the preceding section. (Realism, rationalism and scientific method)

..

We have no reason to believe that non-human life does more than process data. So, the application of the sensation-perception distinction to non-human life is gratuitous. AI shows representations generating appropriate responses can be fully explained with no appeal to subjectivity, qualia, or concepts properly so-called (signs that do not need to have their physical structure recognized in order to signify).

In perception, the world is not just "doing its own thing." We only sense it because it is acting on us. So, in perception, "what is happening in the world" and "what is happening to me" are inseparably bound. What is happening is the world is acting on me — Dfpolis

Some of the assumptions here (animal cognition as internal processing of external data, perception as a one-way relation between an independently constituted external environment and an organism) are content with older neurobiological thinking, but autopoietic enactivist approaches view things differently, as Evan Thompson explains:

Cognitivism made meaning, in the sense of representational seman­tics, scientifically acceptable, but at the price of banishing conscious­ness from the science of the mind. (In fact, cognitivism inherited its consciousness taboo directly from behaviorism.) Mental processes, un­derstood to be computations made by the brain using an inner sym­bolic language, were taken to be entirely nonconscious. Thus the con­nection between mind and meaning, on the one hand, and subjectivity and consciousness, on the other, was completely severed.

This radical separation of cognitive processes from consciousness created a peculiar "explanatory gap" in scientific theorizing about the mind. Cartesian dualism had long ago created an explanatory gap be­tween mind and matter, consciousness and nature. Cognitivism, far from closing this gap, perpetuated it in a materialist form by opening a new gap between subpersonal, computational cognition and subjective mental phenomena. Simply put, cognitivism offered no account what­soever of mentality in the sense of subjective experience.

The cognitivist metaphor of the mind as computer, which was meant to solve the com­putational mind-body problem, thus came at the cost of creating a new problem, the mind-mind problem. This problem is a version of what is now known as the "hard problem of consciousness".

Enactivism asserts that via sensory-motor coupling with an environment, an organism enacts a world. The organism’s interactions with its environment are characterized by a certain functional autonomy, such that what constitutes its world is determined on the basis of its normative goals. Subjective consciousness arises out of this normatively driven activity.

The term the enactive approach and the associated concept of enac­tion were introduced into cognitive science by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991) in their book The Embodied Mind. They aimed to unify under one heading several related ideas. The first idea is that living be­ings are autonomous agents that actively generate and maintain them­selves, and thereby also enact or bring forth their own cognitive do­mains. The second idea is that the nervous system is an autonomous dynamic system: It actively generates and maintains its own coherent and meaningful patterns of activity, according to its operation as a cir­cular and reentrant network of interacting neurons.

The nervous system does not process information in the computationalist sense, but creates meaning. The third idea is that cognition is the exercise of skillful know-how in situated and embodied action. Cognitive struc­tures and processes emerge from recurrent sensorimotor patterns of perception and action. Sensorimotor coupling between organism and environment modulates, but does not determine, the formation of en­dogenous, dynamic patterns of neural activity, which in turn inform sensorimotor coupling. The fourth idea is that a cognitive being's world is not a prespecified, external realm, represented internally by its brain, but a relational domain enacted or brought forth by that being's autonomous agency and mode of coupling with the environ­ment. The fifth idea is that experience is not an epiphenomenal side issue, but central to any understanding of the mind, and needs to be investigated in a careful phenomenological manner

Why do you want to do the rational or right thing? Don't you have reasons?
— Harry Hindu
Yes, of course. That's why, when I do something for those reasons, there is no compulsion, no restriction of freedom - except in the sense of opportunities voluntarily foregone — Ludwig V

Are you familiar with the work of nerobiologist Robert Sapolsky? He presents a kind of extreme version of determinism. For him, our reasons are conditioned so tightly by past experience and biological shapings ( hormonal, genetic, physiological) that there is barely any room for to r addition of novelty. I agree with his claim that seeing ourselves determined in this reductive way by our past leads to more ethical, compassionate behavior toward those who commit acts of violence and other anti-social behaviors than religiously based notions of feee will, which tend to embrace harsh, retributive forms of justice. My problem with Sapolski’s determinism is that it isn’t deterministic enough.

The power of a determinism is in the power of science to predict and explain events that would otherwise be experienced as ordered, chaotic and arbitrary. Sapolski’s determination substitutes the arbitrariness of reductive mechanism for the even more arbitrary notion of divine will, which makes its way into traditional ideas of individual free will. But he relies on models of simple causation, and as a result human metering is treated like a machine with parts that have pre-assigned functions. What is lacking is the concept of reciprocal, relational determinism, which puts the organism in dynamic touch with its environment on the basis of its moment to moment functioning. In this way of thinking, our present actions are still the result of a determined history, but they don’t simply regurgitate pre-assigned properties.

Because Dennett’s quote references organic molecules, and Varela’s references ‘simple agents’. If ‘simple agents’ are e.g. cellular, then they’re already at a different ontological level to organic molecules. Dennett’s model is strictly reductionist with solely bottom-up causality. As soon as you take emergence into account, and the top-down causality associated with strong emergence (in Vervaeke’s terms), then it’s already radically different to the ‘flat ontology’ of reductionism (the thrust of the first 20 minutes of the Vervaeke keynote I listed to today.) — Wayfarer

I think you’re on the right track in thinking Dennett’s approach too reductive. But it’s important to appreciate that his model of cognition stands as a critique of symbol-manipulating logical models of which use the serial computer as a metaphor. In its time, parallel distributed connectionism, which Dennett embraced, was considered an important step beyond Cartesian descriptions of mental processes. Connectionism doesn’t claim to reduce directly to the molecule-physical level.

Chemistry has been shown to reduce, in some sense, to physics, and this is clearly a Good Thing, the sort of thing we should try for more of.

Such progress invites the prospect of a parallel development in psychology. First we will answer the question "What do all believers-that-p have in common?" the first way, the "conceptual" way, and then see if we can go on to "reduce" the theory that emerges in our first answer to something else—neurophysiology most likely. Many theorists seem to take it for granted that some such reduction is both possible and desirable, and perhaps even inevitable, even while recent critics of reductionism, such as Putnam and Fodor, have warned us of the excesses of "classical" reductionist creeds. No one today hopes to conduct the psychology of the future in the vocabulary of the neurophysiologist, let alone that of the physicist, and principled ways of relaxing the classical "rules" of reduction have been pro-posed. The issue, then, is what kind of theoretical bonds can we expect—or ought we to hope—to find uniting psychological claims about beliefs, desires, and so forth with the claims of neurophysiologists, biologists, and other physical scientists?

We are going to have to talk about the ephemeral, swift, curious, metaphorical features of consciousness.

Many people say: "Some day, but not yet. This enterprise is all just premature." And others say: "Leave it to the philosophers (and look what a mess they make of it)." I want to suggest that it is not premature, that in fact there is no alternative but to start looking as hard as we can at consciousness first. If we don't look at consciousness and get clear about what the destination is, and instead try to work our way up by just thinking about how the brain is put together, we won't know where we are trying to get to from where we are and we will be hopelessly lost. This is commonly referred to as the defense of the top-down strategy, and in looking at Jaynes's book again this morning I find that in his introduction he has one of the clearest and most perspicuous defenses of the top-down approach that I have ever come across:

We can only know in the nervous system what we have known in behavior first. Even if we had a complete wiring diagram of the nervous system, we still would not be able to answer our basic question. Though we knew the connections of every tickling thread of every single axon and dendrite in every species that ever existed, together with all its neurotransmitters and how they varied in its billions of synapses of every brain that ever existed, we could still never—not ever—from a knowledge of the brain alone know if that brain contained a consciousness like our own. We first have to start from the stop, from some conception of what consciousness is, from what our own introspection is. (Jaynes, 1976, p. 18)

Would you say Thompson's view is compatible with a post-modern understanding of 'reality'. Do you think Thompson's views are in any way limited or 'skewed' by his Lindisfarne Association upbringing — Tom Storm

Thompson has worked closely with another enactivist, Shaun Gallagher, who has published pieces such as Conversations in Postmodern Hermeneutics, so I think he would be comfortable with the label. When Thompson discusses his childhood, he has as many critical as positive things to say about the varieties of spirituality he was exposed to. I think he came away with the idea that there was something of value which was worth pursing further , but he did so with a healthy dose of caution and skepticism. I think even to this day he doesn’t have anything like a fully thought-out stance on spirituality.

I take Dennett as a textbook example of scientific materialism, which I think is impossible to reconcile with any 'sense of the sacred' (and which is perfectly consistent with his role as 'evangelical atheist'.)
…through the microscope of molecular biology, we get to witness the birth of agency, in the first macromolecules that have enough complexity to ‘do things.’ … There is something alien and vaguely repellent about the quasi-agency we discover at this level — all that purposive hustle and bustle, and yet there’s nobody home.” Then, after describing a marvelous bit of highly organized and seemingly meaningful biological activity, Dennett concludes:

Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe.
— From Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, quoted by Steve Talbott on 'The Illusion of Randomness' — Wayfarer

How does the above quote differ from this by Varela?

"...lots of simple agents having simple properties may be brought together, even in a haphazard way, to give rise to what appears to an observer as a purposeful and integrated whole"

And how does Varela goal of naturalizing Husserlian phenomenology differ from a materialism?

It is our general contention indeed... that phenomenological descriptions of any kind can only be naturalized, in the sense of being integrated into the general framework of natural sciences, if they can be mathematized.”

Let me share how I think it differs from Dennett. Varela and Thompson have no interest in abandoning naturalism and the Darwinian framework that explains the genesis of organisms and human cognition. But they realized that the implications of insights coming from Eastern meditative traditions, phenomenology and cognitive science required a re-definition of the meaning of the natural, the material and even the dynamics of evolution. This is not such a radical move, given that the concept of materialism has undergone many transformations over the centuries. The crucial way in which Varela and other enactivists have rethought materialism is by making the relations between elements more reflexive and reciprocal. Rather than thinking materiality in terms of the relations among pre-assigned causal properties of elements of a system, the properties of the elements depend on the dynamics of the system as a whole as they feed back to affect and change the nature of the elements. The irreducible unit of a dynamical system is the assembly as an agential , ‘subjective’ whole. This makes possible the understanding of the organization of living systems and consciousness as more functionally integral and normatively motivated, and integrates organism and environment more fully, than via the reductive, atomized materialism of Dennett.

This new materialism, as it has been called in some quarters, doesn’t restrict its notion of agency and subjectivity to living things with cognitive systems , but applies equally to the physical world independent of any interaction with sentient creatures. Materiality is fundamentally agential in that it produces elements from within assemblages that are inherently perpsectival , from within which matter ‘matters’ in a particular way.

The kind of spirituality that Varela and Thompson derive from this model rests on what is immanent to dependent co-arising. Is this so terribly far removed from Dennett’s delighting in our developing ability to care about a world whose meaning is produced by, as Varela put it,

“..lots of simple agents having simple properties that are brought together, even in a haphazard way, to give rise to what appears to an observer as a purposeful and integrated whole"?

And don’t Vervaeke’s machinic technologies of relevance realization inhabit an intermediary position between Varela and Dennett?

“…manipulating Relevance Realization affords self-transcendence and wisdom and insight precisely because
Relevance Realization is the ability to make the connections that are at the core of meaning, those connections that are quintessentially being threatened by the Meaning crisis. That would mean if we get an understanding of the machinery of this (Synoptic Integration Construct of RR), we would have a way of generating new psycho-technologies, re-designing, reappropriating older psycho-technologies and coordinating them systematically in order to regenerate, [be] regenerative of these fraying connections. Relegitimate and afford the cultivation of wisdom, self-transcendence, connectedness to ourselves and to each other and to the world.

Dennett's materialism would be categorised as a form of nihilism, according to the Brahmajala Sutta, 'the Net of Views', which meticulously documents the 64 (magic number!) varieties of eternalist and nihilist views. It is the first and longest text of the Pali suttas. — Wayfarer

I recently listened to a series of youtube videos by Verveake. He references Dennett in some of them, always positively. Honestly, comparing Vervaeke’s and Dennett’s understanding of cognitive science, I can’t find a lot of daylight between them. One might wonder, if Vervaeke derives his spiritual views from his understanding of the science, and his and Dennett’s empirical perspectives overlap substantially, how did they come to such sharply different conclusions concerning religion and spirituality? My answer is that I don’t think they did. What Dennett always attacked was a traditional form of religious belief, and Vervaeke is also critical of a personified deity. If we look closely at what exactly his faith consists of, it depends heavily on what he calls relevance realization, which is his answer to what he believes is a meaning crisis in today’s culture. I happen to think the meaning crisis pertains more to his personal journey than to a culture-wide phenomenon, and that his proselytizing on this topic has certain cult-like tendencies about it, but that’s a bit off-topic.

To back up a few steps, Vervaeke considers what is unique about humans to be our ability to determine what is relevant, what matters in an incoming flow of information relative to our situational context. What’s important to understanding the basis of his notion of meaning , and spirituality, is that meaning relevance is not determined solely on the basis of our needs and goals, but must also be grounded in the real. He is not a direct realist, but believes that reality is relational, and not disclosable in some final fashion. There will always be more layers to unearth, and yet he believes firmly in fundamental empirical truths, as inaccessible as they may be. We can see the importance for him of truth in his scientific work, which is centered around research attempting to show that we allow video games and advertisements to deceive us concerning what is real. Self-deception plays an important role in his thinking.

His spiritual perspective relies on two aspects of his scientific work, meaning as relevant relationality and as grounded in underlying truths. He is no relativist , because he is convinced that the sense of belongingness we all need so much is worthless unless it is anchored in a firm ground which provides us with a guiding empirical and moral compass. I think Dennett believed the same thing about the dual importance of relational interdependency in cognitive processes and grounding in the real , but being the pragmatic Yankee that he was, he shied away from a language that had the taint of religion.

If you haven’t seen Vervaeke’s interview of Evan Thompson, I recommend it. I think it shows how a difference in interpretation of enactivism and 4EA cognition leads to different approaches to the spiritual. Even though Vervaeke claimed that his own work was strongly influenced by Varela, I dont think either Varela and Thompson buy into Vervaeke’s realism, and Thompson’s subtle distancing from Vervaeke in the interview reflects this. Thompson derives from his empirical work a reverence for the mystical, a sense of wonder an awe towards the world. This wonder doesn’t require a belief in a real grounding for what exists, if the real is understood in Vervaeke’s sense of that which is beyond deception. Thompson’s focus is on what creatively emerges rather than on what is connected to a pre-existing foundation.

Yes, and this is particularly true in the case where one is distancing themselves from philosophy. One could raise the question without leaving the philosophical frame, but it seems clear that that is not what is happening here. This would be the difference between the question, "What is it that we are doing as philosophers?" and the question, "What is it that those philosophers are doing?" — Leontiskos

I agree that Wittgenstein presumes to step outside of philosophy, as he characterizes it, in order to critique it. But what if he had instead claimed that a desire for certainty was made possible by the emergence of the very conception of certainty as a peculiarly modern philosophical invention, a development which formed the basis of the modern sciences? In this case he would be making neither a psychological claim, nor a metaphysical claim (desire for certainty somehow being a universal a priori, as Heidegger claimed that falling prey to the world is an a priori), but rather an assertion concerning a movement within history of philosophy.

certain hinge beliefs ground all of our systems, and these hinge beliefs tend not to change or change very little over time. Again, examples include: "There are other minds," "There are objects," "We have hands," and "The Earth has existed for a long time, etc." These hinges should be in a group of their own because they tend to be the most solid and beyond the reach of any reasonable doubt. They seem to be core hinges. — Sam26

In one sense , it shouldn’t matter that certain hinge beliefs change slowly, because they do change. The river bank changes much more slowly that the flow of the river, but over long enough periods of time it can be seen to change as continuously as the river. The sense of every hinge proposition you mentioned (“There are other minds," "There are objects," "We have hands," and "The Earth has existed for a long time”) has already been put into question by writers like Husserl and Heidegger. To be clear, they are not claiming that these are false assumptions, but that their assumed intelligibility can be shown to be confused from the vantage of a different starting point.

I understand "no self" - perhaps more accurately no-self - as the self "under bare poles." That is, not any sort of negation of self, but instead the self itself. This implies elemental, fundamental, primordial, original, even maybe primitive — tim wood

Let’s take the no-self as Varela and Thompson understand it within the framework of enactive cognitive science:

…the word self is a convenient way of referring to a series of mental and bodily events and formations, that have a degree of causal coherence and integrity through time. And the capitalized Self does exemplify our sense that hidden in these transitory formations is a real, unchanging essence that is the source of our identity and that we must protect. But this latter conviction may be unfounded and can actually be harmful. If there were a solid, really existing self hidden in or behind the aggregates, its unchangeableness would prevent any experience from occurring; its static nature would make the constant arising and subsiding of experience come to a screeching halt.

…cognition and experience do not appear to have a truly existing self, and the habitual belief in such an ego-self, the continual grasping to such a self, is the basis of the origin and continuation of human suffering and habitual patterns. In our culture, science has contributed to the awakening of this sense of the lack of a fixed self but has only described it from afar. Science has shown us that a fixed self is not necessary for mind but has not provided any way of dealing with the basic fact that this no-longer-needed self is precisely the ego-self that everyone clings to and holds most dear. By remaining at the level of description, has yet to awaken to the idea that the experience of mind, not merely without some impersonal, hypothetical, and theoretically constructed self but without ego-self, can be profoundly transformative.(Embodied Mind)

Anyway, I'm logging out for a while, posting here has become too much of a habit, and it profiteth nothing. I need to develop some other interests — Wayfarer

Hope you dont log out too soon. Im fascinated by Vervaeke’s quest to marry spirituality and cognitive science. As you know, Varela and Thomson have also gone down this road. I’m working on a paper comparing enactivism and poststructuralism, particularly when it comes to ethics.
Just last month, Shaun Gallagher gave a talk (posted on youtube) answering the question as to whether enactivsm has anything to say about ethics. His answer was that if we embrace forms of enactivism that follow Dreyfus’s notion of unreflective skilled coping, then we end up with a form of phronesis as ‘cleverness’, but with no orientation toward the Good.

Gallagher offers that Varela’s incorporation of buddhist themes of mindfulness gives enactivism a way to make skilled coping about more than cleverness. We can see it instead as directed by an ethical knowhow that achieves a benevolent posture through the giving up of egoistic habits of grasping. The awareness of the no self within the self leads to a compassionate stance toward others. This seems to be where spirituality comes into play for Varela and Thompson, and it illustrates how the progress of a science can come around to affirming what the spiritual disciplines knew. The science of enactivism can support a spirituality not only on the basis of its alignment with buddhism but also with certain strands of phenomenology. God is a core element of the phenomenologies of Scheler, Stein, Vattimo, Marion and Henry, and something like God lurks within Levinas’s thinking.

I know that Thompson has struggled to locate himself with respect to various spiritual communities since his upbringing in the midst of the Lindesfarne commune. As you may know , he wrote a book called ‘Why I Am Not a Buddhist’. He seems to be wanting to find a path of spirituality that doesn’t end up as a doctrine or a foundationalism . I can’t help but feel that, while he and Vervaeke share so much in common in terms of philosophical and psychological theory, he would find Varveake’s form of spiritual anchoring to be too essentializing. Part of the difference between them at be that Vervaeke seems to be more of a realist when it comes to cognitive science than Thompson is, and scientific realism may be a better fit for the kind of religiosity that Verveake is pursuing than enactivist relativism.

Hierarchcal signal passing in their model lets you represent nonperceptual, nonsensory and even nonconceptual data through how data is passed through our states as a simultaneous modelling and control structure. You could read that in terms of a state level plurality in representational type (what does each state represent? lots of different things in principle!), an indifference to type (throw everything in lol, it isn't even a thing or type yet)... And also on a broader functional level of embodied agent level patterns representing+(in)en/acting the world.

Moreover, Barrett's work explicitly construes normativity as a site of constraint and novelty in the landscape of emotion - like you would not expect to see a smile on a disgusted face, but you might see a smile as condescending depending on the context. They see their projects as compatible. — fdrake

I acknowledge that pp models have moved in the direction
of ecological embodiment, and that enactivism itself is a big tent that overlaps with pp at certain junctures (Andy Clark and Daniel Hutto are examples of this).It is actually a small group of enactivists that I am interested in (Shaun Gallagher, Thomas Fuchs, Jan Slaby, Evan Thompson, Ezekiel De Paolo, Hanne De Jaegher, Matthew Ratcliffe). Their brand of enactivism draws strongly from
Merleau-Ponty, Dewey and hermeneutics. I don’t know to what extent Barrett’s work is representative of pp, but if her model of emotions is the best that pp can come up with, it falls far short of what Ratcliffe has achieved, and exemplifies the extent to which pp hasn’t transcended its behaviorist roots sufficiently. Affect and intention are much more intricately intertwined than Barrett’s approach recognizes. We dont have some general body-maintenance feedback first and then have to decide how to explain its meaning by relating it to a current situation. Emotions come already world-directed. There is never just some generic arousal that then has to be attributed. Feelings emerge from within experiences that are relevant to us in some way. We are never without a mood.

There was something that struck me about Barrett’s youtube lectures on emotion. She decided to spotlight what I consider to be a relatively minor feature of emotion processing as a prime example of how pp differs from older, essentialist approaches to emotion. In her examples, the brain uses active inference to decide whether certain physiological sources of information amount to anxiety as opposed to indigestion , a heart attack or some other physical malady. I understand her aim is to show that deciding that one is experiencing an emotion is the end product of a complex process of prediction testing that takes into account as many sources of information as are available from the person’s interaction with the world as well as their interoceptive states.

In enactivist approaches like that of Matthew Ratcliffe and Varela, the emphasis is not on WHAT is taking place when one has the sort of experience Barrett describes, but on HOW one has it, in the sense of how one is finding oneself in the world, one’s comportment toward events. It is not that they are denying feedback from bodily states needs to be interpreted in order for one to have an emotion. I think it is that the various forms of input into affect , the hormonal , physiological-kinesthetic, behavior and social, are so tightly integrated through reciprocal causality that the question of WHAT one is feeling ( angina vs anxiety) is usually much less pertinent than the issue of how the world as a whole is altered for us when we are anxious or sad or elated. It isn’t that pp doesn’t have the tools necessary to account for mood as global attitude , but I wonder if beginning from computational representation turns integrated holistic comportment into a struggle rather than a given in most situations, something that has to be wrung out from the data first as a what question and then as a how question.

Representational models just seem to me to be clunky when it comes to handling full-fledged ongoing , real-time
reciprocal causality. When Barrett was describing the butterflies one feels when giving a public talk, instead of
suggesting it could have been mere indigestion( which of course it could have) , she could have talked about how one’s heart races where one looks up at the crowd , and calms down when one quickly turns back toward the lecture notes , how it races again when looking back up and then calms when one remembers to imagine the audience naked, how one’s reflexes seem to be in overdrive at every noise from the crowd, how one’s legs seem primed to race one’s body out of the room. She could have talked about this constellation of thoughts , feelings, sensations as a coordinated dance, each component implying the next as a meaningful whole rather than a combination of arbitrary elements. Most importantly, she could have talked about the particular ways in which this anxious comportment shapes and orients one’s inclinations to relate to other people. I recognize that the dance of emotion is composed of differences in equal measure to similarities , but representationalism seems perhaps to result in an emphasis on arbitrary difference at the expense of what makes the components of emotion belong together as a meaningful whole.

How is the way the world appears to change related to the aims of the system, and what lends coherence to these aims? Is there in fact a system at all for Barrett in the sense of an integrated normative directionality? I get the sense that for Barrett all these sources of input into the system are a jumbled accumulation of semi-independent and semi-arbitrary bits of information , and that human goal-directedness is not much more than a more sophisticated, action-oriented pattern-matching version of S-R( judges in a cited study rule more negatively before lunch than after, thanks to the brain's interpreting of the arbitrary negative interoceptive reinforcement from the ‘body budget'). I imagine Barrett as a psychotherapist treating the client's aims, goals, desires and feelings as being at the mercy of internal and external circumstance, and in fact signifying nothing more than an arbitrary transition from dominating circumstance to circumstance. Better yet, to the extent that her model is in line with that of Friston, the reductionistic plumbing metaphors of Freud's id-ego-superego psychodynamics seem to be a good fit for her approach.

You still can have predictive processing in situated and embodied cognition. Friston and Barrett's collaboration in active perception is all that. — fdrake

The ‘how' of finding oneself in the world that enactivists talk about depends on their viewing a cognitive-environmental system as normative in character, that is, as functioning as an autonomous whole in a certain reciprocal causal exchange with its world. This normativity creates the criteria for what perturbs it , not discrete packets of environmental information that it has to match itself to. And this normativity allows us to talk of emotions as just special versions of an affective attunement toward the world which is always present in cognitive functioning, indicating how interactions with the world either facilitate or degrade the system's autonomy. I could be wrong, but I don't see how one could call a cognitive system's attempt to match external input with internally generated representations fully normative. Friston's free energy model posits minimization of surprise(disorder) in pursuit of homeostasis as the normative aim of a living system in a non-equilibrium steady state, and defines autonomy on the basis of a markov blanket distinguishing between internal and external states, but these are weak notions of autonomy and normativity, in contrast to many enactivist versions. It's not surprising, then, that Friston chooses Freud's realist model ( Friston's characterization of schizophrenic disturbance as ‘false belief' indicates his realist bent) as a good realization of his neuroscientific project, given that Freud, like Friston, turns autonomy and normativity into a conglomeration of external pushes and internal pulls on a weakly integrated system. This is posited as an ‘internal' environment indirectly exposed to an outside, in classic Cartesian fashion, as Barrett express here:

“ Like those ancient, mummified Egyptian pharaohs, the brain spends eternity entombed in a dark, silent box. It cannot get out and enjoy the world's marvels directly; it learns what is going on in the world only indirectly via scraps of information from the light, vibrations, and chemicals that become sights, sounds, smells, and so on.”” From your brain's point of view, locked inside the skull, your body is just another part of the world that it must explain.”

By contrast , autonomy for the enactivist isnt the property of a brain box hidden behind a markov blanket, distinguishable not only from the world but from its own body, but the autonomy of a brain-body system, whose elements cannot be separated out and for whom interaction with a world is direct rather than. indirect.

“One of the basic propositions of the enactive approach is that being autonomous is a necessary condition for a system to embody original intentionality and normativity. Sense-making is the interactional and relational side of autonomy. An autonomous system produces and sustains its own identity in precarious conditions and thereby establishes a perspective from which interactions with the world acquire a normative status. Certain interactions facilitate autonomy and other interactions degrade it. Information-processing models of the mind leave unexplained the autonomous organization proper to cognitive beings because they treat cognitive systems as heteronomous systems. These models characterize cognitive systems in terms of informational inputs and outputs instead of the operational closure of their constituent processes. As a result, they do not explain how certain processes actively generate and sustain an identity that also constitutes an intrinsically normative way of being in the world.”(Thompson)

The reasons we offer for our beliefs probably bear little resemblance much less connection to how our brains settle on their current favored predictions; reasons are rationalizations, but they meet the standards of discussion, not of "belief formation." which is a completely different thing.
Our brains, like the brains of many other animals, are busy keeping us alive by running predictive models of the state of our body and our environment as it might impact that. But we're not privy to much of any of that, and what we are aware of is something cast in a form usable for communication with other minded beings like ourselves. — Srap Tasmaner

You’re relying on a particular neuro-cognitive approach , predictive processing, to ground your understanding of such social processes as logic, reason and belief. According to that model, we are indeed not privy to the ‘subpersonal’ processes which underlie conscious behaviors like rational argumentation. But a different approach, neurophenomenology, arising out of the enactivist tradition, while agreeing with predictive processing that there is no homuncular self to be found among all of the bits of interacting brain elements, produces a more functionally integral picture of how neural assemblies are formed and interact within the brain. It doesn’t separate an internal realm of representational, computational processing from an outside world but sees brain, body and world as mutually enacted through sensory motor coupling. This allows enactivism to embrace what Buddhist traditions already understood, that cognition is fundamentally the exercise of skillful know-how in situated and embodied action rather than the kind of abstract belief-based reasoning you have been talking about.

Wittgenstein himself warns in the preface that PI isn't a very good book and not the book he intended to write — sime

Wittgenstein’s standards for himself were so high that he refused to publish any work in his lifetime except the Tractatus. There is a tendency among those who struggle to understand his ideas to attribute the disarray in Wittgenstein scholarship to the supposed incompleteness of the work. But I believe that even if Wittgenstein had been thrilled with PI and declared it to be exactly as he intended to write it , this would make no difference to the disagreement in the field of Wittgenstein interpreters. Every great philosopher produces camps of readers fighting tooth and nail against each other’s interpretations of the master. The so-called ‘gatekeeping’ associated with Wittgenstein scholars is far from unique to him. Just look at the battles within Nietzsche (Leiter vs Deleuze) or Heidegger (Sheehan vs Capobianco) scholarship. If Heidegger is correct, perhaps none of today’s readers fully understand Wittgenstein.

“…a philosophy is creatively grasped at the earliest 100 years after it arises. We Germans are now precisely beginning to prepare ourselves to grasp Leibniz.”

Even when a significant body of published writing is available from a philosopher , many prefer their sloppy unpublished scribblings. Heidegger recommended we ignore Nietzsche’s published writing in favor of his unpublished notes. Many consider Merleau-Ponty’s greatest work to be his unpublished , unedited and incomplete Visible and Invisible.

I do sense the fact that many of the ‘analyticals’ are really pretty rigid in their concentration on ‘language games’ and the like and they often use the famous last words of the Tractatus to stifle discussion of what I consider significant philosophical questions. But, you know, c’est la vie. One moves on to another thread — Wayfarer

None of the supporters of Wittgenstein’s later work I follow would be comfortable with the label of analytic philosopher. The ones whose work I resonate with ( Cavell, Rorty, Rouse, Lyotard) incorporate language games into thinking which tends to be hostile toward analytic concerns. And they also tend to either dismiss or reinterpret those words from the Tractatus on the basis of what they see as his radically different later approach.

Wittgenstein provides himself with no way to account for the knowing subject along with their intentions and locutions. Language becomes a fact, a given, which must be parsed according to "common use" and cannot be parsed vis-a-vis the intentions of individual subjects — Leontiskos

I don’t know if this would be helpful to you, but let’s compare two approaches to intentionality and language within cognitive psychology, Cogntivism and 4EA (embodied, embedded, extended and affective). The latter is also referred to as enactivism. One of the founders of enactivism described cognitivism as:

…the idea of a world or environment with extrinsic, pregiven features that are recovered through a process of representation. In some ways cognitivism is the strongest statement yet of the representational view of the mind inaugurated by Descartes and Locke. Indeed, Jerry Fodor, one of cognitivism's leading and most eloquent exponents, goes so far as to say that the only respect in which cognitivism is a major advance over eighteenth- and nineteenth-century representationism is in its use of the computer as a model of mind.

There are more recent adumbrarions of cogntivism that move away from the idea of the mind as mirror of nature, but they retain the idea of cognition and language as something that takes place inside of a brain via representational , symbolic processing. Enactivism rejects this inside-outside representational model in favor of an approach that draws from pragmatists like James and Dewey, hermeneutic philosophers like Gadamer and phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty, who was also a child psychologist and wrote much on the psychology of perception. What enactivism learned from these thinkers is that mind, body and world are not separable
entities, but are inextricable aspects of an ecological
system that is based on dynamic sensory-motor coupling between the organism and its environment.

When we perceive a feature of our environment, we are not producing an internal representation of an outside, we are enacting a mode of interaction with our world oriented toward normative goals and purposes shaped on the basis of previous interactions. Perceptually, we construct the meaning of what our world ‘is’ on the basis of what we intend to do with it. These normative expectations and intentions are not just subjectively but equally intersubjectively formed. Language use, like perceptual and cognitive processes, is not just ‘in the head’,not the product of Chomsky-like grammatical modules, but emerges and has its meaning refreshed through actual contexts of social engagement. Enactivists are not denying that there is a certain autonomy to individual cognitive functioning, but it is never a compete autonomy. Enactivists like Shaun Gallagher incorporate notions of the good from Aristotelian phronesis in revealing the ethical nature of social interaction, such as in striking a balance between the needs of individual autonomy and group autonomy in concrete situations.

What enactivists find valuable about Wittgenstein is his recognition that linguistic meaning and intentionality cannot be fully understood via models that begin from the idea thatmentation is a matter of rational representation of a world performed inside a brain.

To speak for oneself is already to speak in relation to a cultural perspective,
— Joshs

Did you just reciprocal co-constitution Wittgenstein scholarship? — fdrake

Was this an attempt to parody pomo? I’ll be back a bit later with my parody of your parody. For now, I’ll just suggest that an effective parody requires that one has first mastered the material one is parodying.

If one takes your approach, no person is speaking for themselves in response to the text but are parroting "so and so's" who speak for others. That means I am not speaking for myself but advancing someone else's view.

So, the humility you are asking from me is a keeping of a gate. And you have shopped out the work to a contractor. — Paine

You are not a solipsistic island dropped into the midst of society. Whether you know it or not, your reading of Wittgenstein will have enough overlaps and resonances with a particular community of Wittgenstein scholars that it will be useful to say , as shorthand, that you identify with the new Wittgensteinians or the old Wittgensteinians, with the therapeutic approach or the non-therapeutic approach, with the Oxford reading or the American reading. This doesn’t mean you think in lock step with any particular reading of Wittgenstein. To speak for oneself is already to speak in relation to a cultural perspective, Whether one feels in tune with it or in opposition to it, one is in both cases tied to it. Explicitly communicating this awareness when discussing philosophical ideas is not the same thing as advancing someone else’s view, but giving others a better sense of where you’re coming from.

I imagine that I can demonstrate that your objection to the quotes from my sources is the result of your opposition to a therapeutic reading of Witt. Whether or not that is the case, instead of wasting time telling me that so and so is misunderstanding him, let’s reveal the difference in underlying metaphysical commitments that separate your reading from mine. Once we locate the general region of scholarship that situates your approach, and differentiates it from mine, we can get into the nitty gritty of your thinking in its uniqueness. I think an approach to reading a philosopher that respects the value of what different communities of thinkers say about him is more productive, and less prone to the risk of gatekeeping, than one that is mainly interested in determining what is the ‘correct’ view of him , while ignoring the way any reading is ensconced within a community of practices.

Of course I prefer my approach, and you prefer yours , but there will never be just one Wittgenstein.

↪Joshs
This, too, fills in a space left empty by Wittgenstein. It mischaracterizes the role of "forms of life." The work does not mark out what a "legitimate role" is. — Paine

I have a feeling a quote from any of my favorite interpreters of Wittgenstien will likely deemed by you as a ‘mischaracterization’ of his views. Ironic term to use in a thread on ‘gatekeeping’. Don’t you think a more humble stance to take toward a thinker who has spawned communities of readers with sharply divergent views of what he meant might be to simply say that you prefer so and so’s reading of him to my sources?

How can it be that an approach which claims to privilege the common use of language does not use language in a common way?
— Leontiskos

Yes. Especially with regard to feeling and concept talk — fdrake

The ordinariness or commonness of the words contained in Wittgenstein’s later work isn’t to be determined by seeing how often they have been used by the wider culture, but in how Wittgenstein employs them to connect with and carry forward what is immediately relevant to the reader. It is these concerns that are common, and where the meaning of language finds purchase.

I don't understand Wittgenstein to be denigrating the role of the philosopher in PI 194. It is an expression of humility toward what has been created around the philosopher. If all the problems of philosophy are without value, then one should stop. And yet Wittgenstein is out there digging in ancient grounds. — Paine

I think Lee Braver has a point when he characterizes this quote by Wittgenstein as:

branding the problems of philosophy simply foreign to mundane life.Their very existence is due to this separation, to the disorienting extrapolation from our usual sense of a term to situations where no proper usage has been settled A philosopher theorizing is a bit like a dog trying to fetch a snowball thrown into a snow­bank, looking up quizzically when no amount of digging unearths it. The great philosophical debates represent, for Wittgenstein, divergent applica­tions of pictures that have been carried far beyond their legitimate role.

↪Joshs
I think he is good-intestioned, not malicious but if my critiques of a philosopher could never get beyond the philosopher in question, I don’t know what to call that. As if, the only reason Wittgenstein is (can be or is) wrong is because we don’t know enough Wittgenstein…just knowing his philosophy obviously shows Wittgenstein is right, right? Let me present to you more Wittgenstein so we can see how right Wittgenstein is. — schopenhauer1

Le me tactful suggest you have a chip on your shoulder and it’s causing you to blame the messenger rather than your difficulty in deciphering the message. You have the advantage here. 90% of the contributors to this forum do not ally themselves with postmodern , poststructuralist or deconstructive philosophy, and I’m including within those groups the later Wittgenstein, at least as people like Antony and myself read him. Let me make it clear: when I talk about deciphering the message, I dont mean agreeing with it, swallowing the koolaid, joining the cult. I mean having the capability of summarizing its content effectively so that one understands what one is disagreeing with. I dont agree entirely with Antony’s take on Wittgenstein , and I am critical of many aspects of Wittgenstein’s ideas, but I have no problem in thinking from within the world that Antony spins out so as to have lively engagements with him. Some others who have engaged with him remain outsiders to that world and resent him for it. To them, he is indeed an ‘elite gatekeeper’.