A non-conscious being is not actually 'a being' but an object or a thing
— Wayfarer
So while sleeping or comatose, a person is just a "thing", and not a "being", like a sofa or toilet? — 180 Proof

Does it count that I once dreamt I was a toilet?

. The human sense of touch allows each of us to 'learn' the difference between rough/smooth, sharp/blunt, soft/hard, wet/dry, pain etc.
The attributes of rough/smooth are in the main, down to the absence or presence of indentations and/or 'bumps' on a surface. There is also the issue of rough/smooth when it comes to textures like hair/fur/feathers, when rough can be simple tangled or clumped hair, for example.
An automated system, using sensors, can be programmed to recognise rough/smooth as well as a human can imo. So if presented with a previously unencountered surface/texture, the auto system could do as well, if not better than a human in judging whether or not it is rough or smooth.
The auto system could then store (memorialise) as much information as is available, regarding that new surface/texture and access that memory content whenever it 'pattern matches' between a new sighting of the surface/texture (via its sight sensors) and it could confirm it's identification via it's touch sensors and it's memorialised information. This is very similar to how a human deals with rough/smooth — universeness

According to enactivist embodied approaches , bottom up-top down pattern matching is not how humans achieve sensory perception. We only recognize objects in the surrounding spatial world as objects by interacting with them. An object is mentally constructed through the ways that its sensory features change as a result of the movement of our eyes, head, body. Furthermore, these coordinations between our movements and sensory feedback are themselves intercorrelated with wider organismic patterns of goal-oriented activity. These goals are not externally programmed but emerge endogenously from the autonomous functioning of the organism in its environment. Key to meaning-making in living systems is affectivity and consciousness, which in their most basic form are present in even the simplest organisms due to the integral and holistic nature of its functioning.

Here’s Evan Thomason’s description of an enactive system:

“…traditional neuroscience has tried to map brain organization onto a hierarchical, input-output processing model in which the sensory end is taken as the starting point. Perception is described as proceeding through a series of feedforward or bottom-up processing stages, and top-down influences are equated with back-projections or feedback from higher to lower areas. Freeman aptly describes this view as the "passivist-cognitivist view" of the brain.

From an enactive viewpoint, things look rather different. Brain processes are recursive, reentrant, and self-activating, and do not start or stop anywhere. Instead of treating perception as a later stage of sensation and taking the sensory receptors as the starting point for analysis, the enactive approach treats perception and emotion as dependent aspects of intentional action, and takes the brain's self-generated, endogenous activity as the starting point for neurobiological analysis. This activity arises far from the sensors—in the frontal lobes, limbic system, or temporal and associative cortices—and reflects the organism's overall protentional set—its states of expectancy, preparation, affective tone, attention, and so on. These states are necessarily active at the same time as the sensory inflow (Engel, Fries, and Singer 2001; Varela et al. 2001).

“Whereas a passivist-cognitivist view would describe such states as acting in a top-down manner on sensory processing, from an enactive perspective top down and bottom up are heuristic terms for what in reality is a large-scale network that integrates incoming and endogenous activities on the basis of its own internally established reference points. Hence, from an enactive viewpoint, we need to look to this large-scale dynamic network in order to understand how emotion and intentional action emerge through self-organizing neural activity.”

As long as we are the ones who are creating and programming our machines by basing their functional organization on our understanding of concepts like memory storage , patten matching and sensory input, , their goals cannot be self-generated. They can only generate secondary goals derived as subsets of the programmed concepts , which we then respond to by correcting and improving the programming. This is how our appendages and organ systems function.

Can we ever ‘create’ a system that is truly autonomous? No, but we can tweak living organic material such as dna strands enclosed in cellular-like membranes so that they interact with us in ways that are useful to us. Imagine tiny creatures that we can ‘talk to’. These would be more like our relationship with domesticated animals than with programmed machines.

↪Joshs

I think you overstate the case. It is not simply a matter of style but of philology and context. We need to be aware of how key terms were used and how they have changed over time. With regard to context, the beliefs and arguments he is directly and indirectly responding to as well as political constraints — Fooloso4

Alrighty then. Can we not say that the beliefs and arguments , philology and context Wayfarer is directly and indirectly responding to are being reinterpreted by him from a post-Cartesian perspective even when he thinks he is reproducing a context of thought from 2,000 years ago?

You are capable of learning, what would you list, as the essential 'properties' or 'aspects' or 'features' of the ability to learn? — universeness

Learning is the manifestation of the self-reflexive nature of a living system. A organism functions by making changes in its organization that preserve its overall self-consistency. This consistency through change imparts to living systems their anticipative , goal-oriented character. I argued that computers are our appendages. They are like organ systems within our bodies. Just like the functioning of a liver or heart cannot be understood apart from its inextricable entanglement in the overall aims of the organism, the same is true of our machines with respect to our purposes. They are not autonomous embodied-environmental systems but elements of our living system.

*. I agree that Aristotle's hylomorphic model is vastly superior to the Cartesian, and also note that Aristotelian metaphysics is enjoying a comeback in the biological sciences. — Wayfarer

How would your respond to the suggestion that to return to Aristotle from the vantage of the 21st century is to filter his ideas through the entire lineage of Western philosophy that came after him and transformed his concepts? The implication is that for someone who has assimilated the insights of Descartes and those philosophers who followed and critiques him, to prefer Aristotle over Descartes is to re-interpret Aristotle from a post-Cartesian perspective. In this sense your ideas are much closer to Descartes than to Aristotle even as you draw on an Aristotelian ‘style’ of thinking generated from within that post-Cartesian framework. One might say that to return to Aristotle is to move farther away from him.

Processing speed is akin to the speed of anything and memory capacity is really just how much space you have available to store stuff along with your method of organising what's stored and your methods of retrieval. These concepts have been around since life began on this planet. — universeness

First generation cognitive science borrowed metaphors from cognitive science such as input -output, processing and memory storage. It has evolved since then. The mind is no longer thought of as a serial machine which inputs data, retrieves and processes it and outputs it, and memory isn’t stored so much as constructed. Eventually these changes will make their way into the designs of our thinking machines.

not much is known about human intelligence, so to speak of the intelligence of something that isn't even biological should make one quite skeptical. Something in our thinking about these issues has gone wrong. — Manuel

:up:

The moment of 'singularity' will happen when the system becomes able to 'learn' in the way we learn. That is the moment it will be able to program itself, just like we do. But it will have a processing speed and storage capacity way, way beyond humans and will also have the ability to grow in both of those capacities. That growth may well become exponential. That's the point at which I think it may become self-aware and humans will not be able to control it — universeness

I disagree. Concepts like processing speed and memory storage are artifacts of Enlightenment -era Leibnitzian philosophy, which should remind us that our computers are appendages. They are physical manifestations of our scientific and technological models of a particular era. At some point , as we dump reductive concepts like ‘speed of processing’ and ‘memory storage’ for more organic ones, we will no longer design our thinking appendages as calculating devices ( exponentially accelerating or otherwise, since human creativity is not about speeds but about the qualitative nature of our thinking) , but use wetware to devise simple ‘creatures’ which we will interact with in more creative ways, because these living appendages will not be based on deterministic schematics. Currently, our most complex machines cannot do what even the simplest virus can do, much less compete with a single-called organism.

Even the computerized devices we now use , and the non-computer machines before them, never actually behaved deterministically. In their interaction with us they are always capable of surprising us. We call this bugs or errors , but they reflect the fact that even what is supposedly deterministic has no existence prior to its interaction with us interpreting beings, and thus was always in its own way a continually creative appendage

Machines that we invent will always function as appendages of us , as enhancements of our cognitive ecosystem. They contribute to the creation of new steps in our own natural evolution, just as birds nests, rabbit holes, spiders webs and other niche innovations do. But the complexity of webs and nests don’t evolve independently of spiders and birds; they evolve in tandem with them. Saying our machine are smarter or dumber than us is like saying the spider web or birds nest is smarter or dumber than the spider or bird. Should not these extensions of the animal be considered a part of our own living system? When an animal constructs a niche it isnt inventing a life-form, it is enacting and articulating its own life form. Machines, as parts of niches , belong intimately and inextricably to the living self-organizing systems that ‘we' are.

Aquinas says that we cannot know essences (including our own) directly, but infer them from the actions flowing from them. Nietzsche (or maybe his sister) seems to want to do more, saying that there is nothing out of which what we observe to be dynamically continuous flows. I think that is metaphysically impossible, as potential acts are not yet operational. So, they cannot operate to make themselves actual. Consequently, something already actual must be the source of our phenomenological acts. — Dfpolis

I know this is straying off-topic, but I would love to know how your readings of Aquinas and Aristotle influence your political leanings. This, and the moral philosophy that goes along with it, is where one’s views really matter in the world. Would it be fair to say you sympathize with social conservative perspectives on many matters?

It appears to me, that what's coming out in this thread, is that there is a form of scientism within which the practitioners attempt to reduce all forms of causation to a single determinist form. This is the manifestation of an urge to reject dualism for monism, and dispel the spiritual woo-hoo. The common method of procedure is to conflate formal cause with final cause, and represent final cause as a type of formal cause, instead of as a distinct form of causation. Ultimately this renders the whole of material, or physical existence as somewhat unintelligible, because the two are fundamentally incompatible — Metaphysician Undercover

I’m wondering how this relates to phenomenology, which it seems to me attempts to reduce all forms of causation to a single non-determinist form, thereby dispelling the spiritual woo-hoo without falling into materialist determinisms.

And then there’s Nietzsche’s take on causation:

If I have anything of a unity within me, it certainly doesn’t lie in the conscious ‘I’ and in feeling, willing, thinking, but somewhere else: in the sustaining, appropriating, expelling, watchful prudence of my whole
organism, of which my conscious self is only a tool. Feeling, willing, thinking everywhere show only outcomes, the causes of which are entirely unknown to me: the way these outcomes succeed one another as if one
succeeded out of its predecessor is probably just an illusion: in truth, the causes may be connected to one another in such a way that the final causes give me the impression of being associated, logically or psychologically. I deny that one intellectual or psychological phenomenon is the direct cause of another intellectual or psychological phenomenon – even if this seems to be so. The true world of causes is hidden from us: it is unutterably more complicated

Basically the problem was that this particular mod hated my guts and would initiate or join any pile-on concerning myself. All water under the bridge — Wayfarer

If you miss him you can find him on Discord now. I had a little exchange with him there concerning Deleuze. The mod had to step in to keep him civil. Plus ca change…

Why is it an example of the Enlightenment instead of an expression of Scholastic philosophy? — Paine

I don’t know what DPolis would say, but I like the way Rorty articulated the stakes. Rorty argued that Descartes “opened the floodgates to an entirely new conception of the difference between mind and body” compared with Scholastic and Greek thought. In other words, he didn’t invent dualism , he redefined its terms.

The novelty was the notion of a single inner space in which bodily and perceptual sensations ("confused ideas of sense and imagi­nation" in Descartes's phrase), mathematical truths, moral rules, the idea of God, moods of depression, and all the rest of what we now call "mental" were objects of quasi-ob­servation. Such an inner arena with its inner observer had been suggested at various points in ancient and medieval thought but it had never been taken seriously long enough to form the basis for a problematic. But the seventeenth century took it seriously enough to permit it to pose the problem of the veil of ideas, the problem which made epistemology central to philosophy.

Once Descartes had invented that "precise sense" of "feel­ing" in which it was "no other than thinking," we began to lose touch with the Aristotelian distinction between reason-as-grasp-of-universals and the living body which takes care of sensation and motion. A new mind-body dis­tinction was required-the one which we call that "be­tween consciousness and what is not consciousness…Once mind is no longer synonymous with reason then something other than our grasp of universal truths must serve as the mark of mind.”(Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature)

What type of philosophy most exemplifies what philosophy is or should be to you?

Logical, analytical, linguistic - e.g. Frege
Phenomenological-existential - e.g. Sartre
Social-Ethical - e.g. Dewey
Metaphysical - e.g. Whitehead
Empiricist - e.g. Russell — Pantagruel

I think these categories are too broad to do justice to the authors you associate with them. How about putting forth a grouping of philosophers based on family resemblance?
For instance:

Hume
Locke
Spinoza
Leibniz
Descartes

Russell
Frege

Hegel
Schopenhauer
Marx
Kierkegaard

Zizek
Lacan
Freud
Badieu
Butler
Adorno

Davidson
Quine
Sellars
Rorty
Putnam

Dewey
Peirce
Meade
James

Heidegger
Merleau-ponty
Sartre
Husserl

Deleuze
Foucault
Derrida
Lyotard
Baudrillard

Now that I’ve complied these, I see that they fit rather
easily into categories:

Enlightenment
Analytic
Hegelian-Post Hegelian
Structuralist-Critical Theory
Post-Analytic
Pragmatist
Phenomenology
Poststructuralism

↪Joshs
After setting my previously expressed peevishness aside, I became curious about your thinking in terms of periods of time. Why is it an example of the Enlightenment instead of an expression of Scholastic philosophy? — Paine

You could be right. I was giving him the benefit of the doubt.

↪Joshs
I see/hear your challenge to the thesis of the OP. I agree with an element of it but also am trying to challenge your statements — Paine

What I wrote addressing the OP was just me swinging wildly trying to make sense of an at-first alien language. Now that I put it in the context of Enlightenment rationalism it starts to make sense, and its irrelevance to the post-Darwinian, post-Hegelian delineation of the Hard Problem Dennett and Chalmers are grappling with also becomes clear.

↪Joshs
I am disappointed by this remark.

It is one thing to challenge a point of view and another to ask for shared judgement in your register. — Paine

I was advocating for shared judgement in his register, not mine. Otherwise we will just be talking past one another.

According to Kant, it is not that the mind organizes or categories facts, it organizes and categorizes the manifold of sensory intuitions according to the categories of the understanding. — Fooloso4

I don’t think this will make sense to him. I really think he is operating from a pre-Kantian and pre-Humean framework.

Are you rejecting Kant’s central premise or offering a critique of Kant which preserves this premise?
— Joshs
I am rejecting the premises that (1) the mind imposes forms on experience, (2) we cannot know noumenal reality (the ding an sich), and (3) that we synthesize facts. We know reality, but not exhaustively, as God does. We know it in a limited way, as it relates to us. — Dfpolis

At this point in my reading of your work, I find I understand it most coherently by placing it within a pre-Kantian and likely pre-Humean historical context. That is, despite your embrace of Aristotle, your thinking on God and nature is much more compatible with Enlightenment philosophical ideas circa 1650-1750 than anything produced in Classical Greece. I suspect the clarity of your work would greatly benefit by close readings of the writings of Spinoza , Locke and Leibniz. This is the wheel I think you’re reinventing.

The flexible environment must also be included along with the flexible organism because, as I have already said, the organism which destroys its environment destroys itself. The unit of survival is a flexible organism-in-its-environment. — Gregory Bateson, Form, Substance, Difference

Yes, the adaptive continuation of a system of interaction with a niche, rather than the survival of a human self(genetic or tribal) , is the focus of selective pressure.

Kant attributed apriori categorical content to the subject.
— Joshs
I am neither Kant, nor a Kantian. I think his approach is fundamentally wrong.

I am an Aristotelian. — Dfpolis

Aren’t we all Kantians now , including those physicists who extend the scope of Quantum theory? That is to say, even though Kant’s ideas have been subject to a variety of critiques within contemporary philosophy and science, I know of no major theorist who has rejected his key premise, that the mind contributes to the organization of our experience, and this organizing, categorizing and synthesizing activity of the mind is the condition of possibility for empirical knowledge. What most disagree with is Kant’s claim that the mind’s organizing capabilities are grounded in a metaphysical a priori. Are you rejecting Kant’s central premise or offering a critique of Kant which preserves this premise?

So far, you have not criticized one argument in my paper. Instead, you have accused me to the errors of others and made unsubstantiated claims. Perhaps if you addressed what I actually wrote, we could make more progress. For example, in an earlier post, I listed 7 problems I have with the Standard Model. You could explain why these are not real problems — Dfpolis

As you have pointed out, your use of the term Standard Model is you own invention. This is a bold and risky move for an outsider to philosophy of mind. By creating a single overarching category de novo, and attempting to squeeze a diverse assortment of philosophical views within it, you are turning your back on an entire community of thought. Perhaps your Aristotelian-inflected model is a truly fresh perspective, but it could also be a reinventing of the wheel born of a lack of exposure to the relevant philosophical
history, beginning with Kant. After reading your article I am tending toward the latter conclusion. As you grapple with a solution to the Hard Problem alongside those you mention in your paper, it is clear that what you have in common with your interlocutors is the acknowledgment of contributions from two domains , the subjective and the objective. For you there is no split between what you call intention and the physical world. You say there is an identity between them: “the object informing the intellect is, identically, the intellect being informed by the object.”

Where you differ from ‘SM’ concerns how much work you expect intention, intellect and will ( form, potency) to do vs the physical pole (act, matter) . That is, how you define their relative attributes , functions, capacities and essence.Writers like Chalmers and Dennett will argue that concepts like ‘material’, ‘physical’ and ‘natural’ have evolved alongside our philosophical understanding. As a result, much of what was formerly attributed to the non-physical in the form of the subjectively mental can now be placed within the category of the objectively natural and material( although ‘physical’ is a more contentious term). This includes epistemological and logical-mathematical forms of meaning. This gives the subjectively mental little to contribute other than an affective feeling of what’s it is like to experience. For you, by contrast, epistemology, logic, Will, intentionality, propositionality and mathematics still belong to the subjective pole as pre-given capacities or attributes. Is it your hunch that these are divinely given?

..

There's a Wikipedia entry on proprioception if you want a quick initial briefing on it. Google will turn up lots of other material. I haven't seen a philosophical piece on this yet — Ludwig V

The phenomenologists, beginning with Husserl and continuing with Merleau-Ponty and current philosophers like Shaun Gallagher, devoted much study to the relation between proprioception and body perception. I highly recommend Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.

You mean the dualist split between matter and subjectivity?
— Joshs
There is no such split. All knowing is a subject-object relation. Without a knowing subject and a known object, there is no knowledge. In other words, subjectivity never occurs absent objectivity -- the essence of each is to be a relatum in the relation of knowing — Dfpolis

Kant said something similar to this: ‘Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without conceptions blind’.
And yet he was a dualist. How does the Cartesian split manifest itself in his thinking? One can point to a split that evinces itself not merely in a lack of relation between subject and object, but in the way that each side of the binary is conceived in terms of its assumed internal composition. Kant attributed apriori categorical content to the subject. While these categories only function in relation to objects , their content is generated independent of exposure to objects and is of a different order with respect to objects.

By contrast , contemporary naturalist-evolutionary accounts of subject-object relations conceive the genesis and content of the subject pole in the same naturalist terms as the object pole. Essentially the subject pole contributes recall of previous states to the interpretation of objective sense. Furthermore, there is no transcendent or self-identical self, ego, ‘I’ underlying subjectivity. The ‘I’ that wills in each willing is never the same self, because its nature and identity is subtly reorganized as a result of each encounter with a world. So the self at the heart of subjectivity is an always changing construction. It changes alongside the objects which also change their sense due to the fact that , as you say, we can represent the same reality in different ways.

Where does awareness begin in the animal kingdom?
— Joshs
I do not know. Do you? I do know that humans are aware.
Certainly not with humans.
— Joshs
There is no evidence to support this. We are ignorant of the possible experience of other species… What we do not know is if these responses in other species are conscious or not. — Dfpolis

You should impart this important bit of news to the burgeoning field of consciousness studies in comparative psychology. Explain to them that their evidence doesn’t count for you as evidence. Or you could take your own words to heart: we can represent the same reality in diverse ways.

There is a long list of capacities that were assumed at one point to be associated exclusively with humans ( tool-making, language, cognition, emotion). Given the intimate proximity between cognition, emotion and awareness, now that multiple sources of evidence point to the presence of the first two capabilities in other animals, it is not a leap to hypothesize consciousness also. Furthermore, increased understanding of consciousness in humans reveals it to be a less important aspect of cognition than was previously thought to be the case. Most of our everyday activities are performed unconsciously, automatically. Consciousness is simply not needed for adaptive cognitive functioning in many situations.

what we symbolize in thought ... the way these tentative symbolizations talk back to us
— Joshs
You realize that these "tentative symbolizations" need not be the work created, but part of the agent and her agency -- her thought process? So, this need not be the work acting causally on its creator. My thoughts, creative or otherwise, are my acts of awareness — Dfpolis

The work created become part of the agent and her agency. This goes back to the issue of the Cartesian constancy of the self. Only if we assume that subjective agency is split off from the objects that it interacts with , only if we make the thought process into a solipsistic internal activity, do we construe acts of awareness apart from the work acting causally on its creator.

The organism is nothing but its adaptive interactions.
— Joshs
Not quite. It is a structure able to interact in what was an adaptive way in its native environment. Whether its species will survive depends on the rate at which its progeny can adapt to environmental change. — Dfpolis

Is a bird simply what is contained within an outlined drawing? Or is it also the niche that sustains the animal
and in which it is embedded? Isnt it purely arbitrary to define a living organism by a slab of cells that form a contiguous mass? A living system isn’t a structure designed by a deity or nature and then dropped into a world, it is inseparable from its particular environing world. It is a system of processes in which the dividing line between niche and animal can only be drawn artificially.

The difference is that biological desire need not involve awareness, while will proper does. This is a move from the physical to the intentional theater of operation — Dfpolis

You mean the dualist split between matter and subjectivity? Where does awareness begin in the animal kingdom? Certainly not with humans. Does it emerge suddenly or gradually as a function of neural complexity? If will and awareness is a gradual evolutionary development, then, as been suggested by biologists and neuroscientists, then in some sense one may see it in incipient form already in single-called organisms that have sensory capacities and show learning and adaptive goal-oriented behavior.

Will in the proper sense is a conscious commitment, and as such transcends the merely biological.

You can see this from the fact that willed commitments can be extremely unadaptive and harmful -- both to the individual and to the species. E — Dfpolis

Willed commitments are organized on the basis not strictly of the survival of my organism, but as I have been arguing, are designed to maintain adaptive sense-making , which is as much a social as an individual process.

Now, how about an argument that shows that one conscious being cannot commit to the good of another, even if it is unadaptive for the one committing — Dfpolis

Humans evolved as cooperative social creatures. Like many other mammals, we are born with certain moral emotions , such as the protection of our young and the ability to experience pain at the suffering of others in our group. Sacrificing oneself for the protection of others is seen in other animals. Anthropologists hypothesize that conscience evolved in order to protect tribes from the violence of alpha males. Even behaviors which on the surface appear unadaptive, such as suicide or homicide, are driven by a combination of such moral emotions.

It is not the self strictly defined as a body, that our biologically evolved motivational processes are designed to preserve. Rather, it is social systems ( friendship, marriage, family, clan) that sustain us and that we are primed to defend.

All causation is reciprocal
— Joshs
Really? So an artist creating a work is acted upon by the work that does not yet exist? My learning a song causes the song? Perhaps you can explain what you mean. — Dfpolis

The creative process is a reciprocal back-and-forth between what we symbolize in thought in a particular artistic medium (exploratory chords on a piano, a sketch on a canvas, practice dance steps , a few lines of prose) , and the way these tentative symbolizations talk back to us ( and of course other with whom we share these creative first steps also talk back to us) and guide us with either positive or negative feedback.

First, the idea of differential drives is simply wrongheaded. We desire food, water and air. If I asked, "How much food (or money) would you be willing to take for all your air?" you would think I was crazy. This is because our desires are incommensurate. We need a satisfactory, not a maximal, amount of food, water and air, and, indeed, of all the things we naturally desire. So, they cannot be traded off against one another. Accordingly, the idea of a maximal good or utility or anything of that sort is nonsense — Dfpolis

My point about differential drives is that psychologists and biologists today view organisms as self-organizing systems whose functioning is defined by reciprocal interactions with an environment. There is not first an organism and then its interactions with its world. The organism is nothing but these adaptive interactions. ‘Will’ derives from the overarching tendency of living systems to maintain consistent goal-oriented adaptivity in the face of changing environmental conditions. Our drives ( need for air, food, water, sociality) are interconnected within the functionally unified purposes of the organism as a whole, ‘Will’ makes no sense outside of this reciprocal feedforward-feedback adaptive relationship between a living thing and its world. To desire is equal parts affecting and being affected by. The idea of a divine will , a first or final cause existing outside of a continually changing system of interactions, is an empty, incoherent concept. All causation is reciprocal , contingent and relative to a system of exchanges . What gives Will its meaning , even for a hypothesized god, is its relevance to the aims of adapting to a changing world. Will prior to world is like the smile before the Cheshire Cat.

Yes, I see the laws of nature as God's general will for matter — Dfpolis

What happens to God’s will if we determine the origin and nature of will, following in the footsteps of Nietzsche, Freud and embodied approaches in cognitive science, in terms of a differential ecology of drives? In a twist on Aristotle, Nietzsche suggested we could understand the “mechanistic world as a kind of life of the drives”.

Perhaps he is concerned that if he make clear his theological grounds it would lead to rejection of his argument. — Fooloso4

I have to admit that scholars in the sciences who show their theological affinities run the risk of discrimination.

Upon further examination your ontological commitments are with God — Fooloso4

Ya got that right:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/347359286_Does_God_Gamble_With_Creation

But, a further quibble, my narrative is not constructed. It is lived. Afterwards, narratives may be constructed. — Ludwig V

Is lived experience not itself a process of continual construction or construal, even prior to the creation of narratives? I m thinking of phenomenological , constructivist and social constructionist approaches.

I deny that anything happening in the body is the direct object of perception, “the perceived”. Rather, these are the actions of the body, “the perciever”. — NOS4A2

Hallucinogenic chemicals modify the appearance of perceived objects in many ways; in terms of size, shape, color and degrees of movement or rest. They dont have this effect at the level of the sensory receptors but at deeper levels of processing in the brain. Manipulations of the receptors can decrease the amount of data received by the brain ( blurring, loss of peripheral vision, color-blindness, etc) but not qualitatively distort objects the way hallucinogens can. i suspect that the longer one remains under the effect of a hallucinogen , the greater the likelihood that one’s visual system begins to ‘correct’ the distortions.

I say this because research subjects who wear glasses which turn their visual field upside are able to see the visual field normally again while using the glasses for a certain period of time. The distortion of the visual field by the glasses takes place at the level of the receptors but the correction by the subject’s perceptual system takes place at a deeper level of processing. If these deeper levels of processing have such power over what objects we see and how we see them, don’t this suggest that perception is a model we construct of the world and test against it, rather than a direct reception of data?

. Brains cannot live, let alone perceive, on their own. So perception is an act of an organism, brains and all. — NOS4A2

What if we considered this particular act of the organism, what we call perception, not as the act of representing external objects or stimuli, but the act of manipulating and changing an object, and anticipating the feedback from the changes we make in our environment. Then the necessity of a body would not be merely for keeping a brain alive, but for allowing it to physically move itself relative to objects , and move those objects relative to the embodied brain. This account of perception explains why it is that young animals deprived of the ability to manipulate objects in their environment don’t develop normal perceptual capacities in spite of having normally functioning sensory receptors.

I have been conditioned to believe that the act of seeing and that which sees is the same thing. I can see my eyes at the same time I use my eyes to see. Seeing and pain are activities of the very same body that stands before the mirror. — NOS4A2

The mirror metaphor is apt here. The question of who perceives what presupposes that perception consists of a mirroring or representing of an outside by an inside. An alternative approach ditches the mirror metaphor in favor of a model of perception as knowledge-guided active sensory-motor exploration.

“Imagine a team of engineers operating a remote-controlled underwater vessel exploring the remains of the Titanic, and imagine a villainous aquatic monster that has interfered with the control cable by mixing up the connections to and from the underwater cameras, sonar equipment, robot arms, actuators, and sensors. What appears on the many screens, lights, and dials, no longer makes any sense, and the actua-tors no longer have their usual functions. What can the en-gineers do to save the situation? By observing the structure of the changes on the control panel that occur when they press various buttons and levers, the engineers should be able to deduce which buttons control which kind of motion of the vehicle, and which lights correspond to information deriving from the sensors mounted outside the vessel, which indicators correspond to sensors on the vessel's ten-tacles, and so on.

There is an analogy to be drawn between this example and the situation faced by the brain. From the point of view of the brain, there is nothing that in itself differentiates ner-vous influx coming from retinal, haptic, proprioceptive, ol-factory, and other senses, and there is nothing to discrimi-nate motor neurons that are connected to extraocular muscles, skeletal muscles, or any other structures. Even if the size, the shape, the firing patterns, or the places where the neurons are localized in the cortex differ, this does not in itself confer them with any particular visual, olfactory, motor or other perceptual quality. On the other hand, what does differentiate vision from, say, audition or touch, is the structure of the rules governing the sensory changes produced by various motor actions, that is, what we call the sensorimotor contingencies governing visual exploration.” (O'Regan & Noë: A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness)

I have no satisfying answer to the argument from illusion. But if perception is decidedly direct, it seems to me that any hallucination or illusion is the result of some act or reflex of the perceiver and not of the perceived. I don’t think any of this precludes direct realism. — NOS4A2

My point is that the filling in from memory that I associated with illusion is always operative when we perceive something. Perceptual psychologists tell us that most of what we see when we recognize objects is filled in from memory. What we actually take in though our sense receptors is very informationally impoverished.

You’re right. I also challenge them to instantiate who and what are the objects of this relationship.

For me, a thing only perceives modifications of itself. And as the self is self-identical, there is no intermediary. If a bomb goes off two feet away from you, but it doesn't alter your body in any way, you haven't perceived it. That's my suggestion anyway.

That’s where I’m at too — NOS4A2

In an optical illusion, a picture of a three-dimensional object is presented with gaps in it. The illusion is that viewers dont see the gaps. They fill them in. Where doesn’t this filling-in come from? It comes from memory. A figure is drawn in the dirt. Someone sees it as a series of squiggly lines. Another sees it as a chinese word symbol. Would you agree the person seeing the image as a word is filling in from memory what is not actually being perceived from the world, similarly to the optical illusion? If I think I see a tree ahead of me , and on closer inspection it turns out to be something else, am I filling in from memory what I am not actually perceiving? The process involved in filling in would be a melding of information coming from the receptors and that coming from memory. Does that sound reasonable to you?

:up: There are two things about philosophy that are not quite polite to mention. But they are important, nonetheless. Answers are not the point, and in fact are the death of philosophy. Similarly, agreement about the answers are welcome as an episode, but disagreement is what keeps us going. — Ludwig V

I suppose it depends on what you mean by answers. A given philosophical position can be seen as an answer to a question that a previous philosophy stimulates. It does this by offering a way of understanding that allows us to clear up confusions or problems that are generated from within the history of philosophy (skepticism, nihilism, dualism and the Hard Problem). An answer can resolve by dissolving rather than solving.
What Ive said about philosophy is true of science. The power of a scientific theory is not in the specific answers its predictions give, but in the way it re-poses problems relative to the theory it replaces. Questions and answers pre-suppose each other in philosophy, not just in the sense that an answer is a response to a question but in that philosophy must offer answers in order to generate new questions.

There are various reasons why an author might be or seem to be deliberately obscure. But there is a difference between an obscure writing style and deliberately hiding something. — Fooloso4

Yes, and I think most of the authors people complain about on this site are neither deliberately nor accidentally obscure. They are trying to be as clear and comprehensible as possible in their writing , and it is the inability of many readers to grasp the originality of the ideas that is the source of the mistaken impression of obscurity. The authors are hiding something from these readers, not deliberately but as a consequence of the difficulty of the concepts.

This is true of Wittgenstein’s work. I think that it is a mistake to assume he is deliberately hiding something. Rather than contemplating the ways in which the average reader was likely to interpret him, and then proceeding to craft a style which deliberately hid ideas from them, I suggest he put all his focus into optimally communicating to an idealized kindred spirit, knowing that if he succeeded in doing that it would automatically have the effect of ‘hiding’ his thinking from those who would be inclined misunderstand it under any circumstances.

If you have a room which you do not want certain people to get into, put a lock on it for which they do not have the key.

I take putting a lock on the room that they do not have the key to to be a deliberate act.
It is not that he selects the reader but that the readers are self-selective, they are able to understand it or not. It is for the benefit of these readers who cannot that certain things are kept from them — Fooloso4

Do you think that in my scenario where his focus is entirely on an imagined kindred spirit, the way in which he composed his work would have been different than in your scenario where he not only writes revealingly for such a spirit but at the same time, in a calculated fashion, deliberately hides things from others?

Let’s take ‘On Certainty’ as an example. His main interlocutor here was G.E. Moore. Would you agree his overwhelming focus was on having Moore (and others who agree with Moore) think about certainty in a new way?
if he ‘kept things’ from some other readers, how do you imagine the work would have looked like had he put those thing back into the work? Given that , as he himself admits, he was surprised and disappointed when his earlier efforts were widely misread, do you think he even would have had the confidence to know what to hide from them? How can we choose to deliberately hide things without anticipating ahead of time what things are likely to be misunderstood? I suggest that it is only in hindsight that Witt could know what in fact ended up being ‘hidden’ from readers in specific writings of his.

“I could not help noticing that the results of my work (which I had conveyed in lectures, typescripts and discussions), were in |x| circulation, frequently misunderstood and more or less watered down or mangled.”

The above quote displays a surprised realization in hindsight that his ideas were hidden from many. I think what Witt learned from this disappointment was to no longer expect to reach more than a handful of people with his writing. This preparatory insight is, I believe, the only deliberate thought that pertains to what in hindsight turns out to have been ‘hidden’ and ‘locked’.

He doubts he will be understood by most. But his concern is not simply that he will not be understood, but that he will be misunderstood, his thoughts will be watered down or mangled. I don't think he writes despite the fact that he will be misunderstood but strategically so that what is most important will not even be noticed — Fooloso4

Maybe I can put this another way. If one tries to dilute or dumb down their ideas in order to reach a wider public, one may end up not only failing to achieve the hoped-for understanding among the masses, but making the work incoherent for those most inclined to comprehend it. The only way forward is to write for an imagined kindred spirit, which will have the secondary effect of alienating a wider audience. We see the symptoms of such a choice all
the time on this site, as participants here complain about the ‘deliberately obscure’ writing style of various philosophers.

The fact that there are things he deliberately hides is deserving of our attention. That there are locked rooms hidden in the pages of his work is an intriguing confession and interpretive challenge. The question of where these rooms are and what is hidden in them, is not something that is even asked in the secondary literature that I am aware of — Fooloso4

I don’t interpret him as meaning that he deliberately hides things from readers, but rather that if one isn’t ready to recognize what he is saying, no amount of explication will help. It is not a matter of choosing the right words and phrases, for these will be misunderstood. The last thing he wants is to limit beforehand who has access to his thinking. On the contrary, he was desperate to share his ideas with as many as possible, and to write in such as way as to achieve this goal . The key to understanding Wittgenstein ( or any philosopher) is provided by the reader as much as the writer.

Nowadays, Spinoza's approach is more represented by the so-called four E's. There one sits on a naïve phenomenalism and squanders the opportunity to analyze the complex levels of regulation and their connection analytically. — Wolfgang

I assume you’re talking about 4EA ( embodied, enactive, embedded, extended and affective) cognitive science, otherwise known as enactivism. How does this approach squander the opportunities you’re referring to, and what models within cognitive science do you prefer? For instance, Tim Van Gelder relies heavily on dynamical systems theory. Are you familiar with his work on cognition and consciousness?

When we consider its method immutable we see that it is not an empirical science and will never be. It therefore cannot yield any observable empirical truths about the world. What it can do is examine the concepts we use to think about the world. It can show us their relations, their mutual support or their antinomies. Philosophy then, is thinking about thinking, because the concepts we use to examine the concepts are the very same concepts themselves. It is a circular activity of reflection. — Tobias

if philosophy is circular then so is science , since the empirical world it strives to represent is already prefigured in its theories. But for both science and philosophy, this circle may be seen as a spiral. We construct hypotheses which determine what and how we see, and the world talks back to us in the language we invent for it, triggering transformations in our conceptions. Through this reciprocal movement thought develops. As far as yielding an immutable method, this is neither true of philosophy nor science. In both cases , the methods change as ideas develop in their spiral fashion. In fact, the methods of science and philosophy evolve in parallel, since the difference between what science and philosophy supposedly do is somewhat arbitrarily defined in the first place. They are more of an inseparable mesh than discrete categories and evolve together over the course of history.