Godel showed that there would always be true but unprovable statements within any axiomatic logic system. If these statements are incorporated into the system as axioms (which are precisely those statements that are accepted as true without being proven), either those new axioms will contradict the existing ones, or they will result in the emergence of further true but unprovable statements. No system can ever fully incorporate all these true statements as axioms and remain consistent. — cherryorchard

An important difference between Gödel and Wittgenstein is that for the latter the synonymous concepts of hinge propositions, forms of life and language games are neither true nor false. They are outside all schemes of verification, since such schemes presuppose them.

Philosophy might ask what reality is, but it wouldn't necessarily be particularly interested in describing it. — Ludwig V

I wonder if you could flesh this out a little. Doesn’t philosophy attempt to answer its own question concerning what (as well as how and why) reality is? Isn’t that what is entailed by a metaphysical position? In my view, both philosophy and the sciences describe reality. The main difference is in the conventionality of the vocabulary.

There is an unusual - to me - twist to this, however, in the phrase "material phenomena". There's a perfectly respectable use of the word in science to mean "that which needs to be explained" or, possibly "data". But the limitation of phenomena to "material phenomena" is unusual, and puzzling. I scent reductionist tendencies here. — Ludwig V

Philosopher of science Joseph Rouse is one of Barad’s biggest champions. He considers her notion of materialism to be a version of naturalism that avoids the pitfallls of other naturalistic conceptions of nature.

I interpret Barad as developing a revised conception of metaphysical natu­ralism. The crucial point at which she departs from other naturalists is in the conception of nature itself as disclosed through scientific work. The familiar naturalisms treat nature in terms of regularities, laws, causal powers, or causal functional roles. Nature so conceived is anormative. The semantic and epistemic normativity governing how one ought to think and talk about the natural world, and the ethical or political normativity of how one ought to act within it, must be understood as either arising from or reducible to an anormative natural world. Although she does not put the point in quite this way, I take Barad to claim instead that nature as revealed by the sciences is itself normatively constituted.

This claim needs careful exposition, however, both to clarify the sense of “nor­mativity” being invoked, and to understand Barad’s argument for it. Barad starts from a commitment to both strains of naturalism. On the one hand, an adequate ontology must be accountable to the scientific work through which an understanding of nature is achieved; otherwise, it would be an arbitrary philosophical imposition upon science. On the other hand, such scientific work must itself be comprehended as part of nature to be understood. Her position then develops in three distinct steps. First, she argues for the ontological priority of “phenomena” over objects. She then argues that phenomena in this sense must incorporate conceptual-discursive normativity. Conceptual-discursive norms are not something imposed upon phenomena “by” us, however. On the contrary, we ourselves only become agents/knowers as material components of the larger patterns of natural phenomena.

Thus, Barad neither reduces conceptual-discursive normativity to anormative causal relations, nor imposes already-articulated conceptual norms upon the material world. Instead, she is arguing that the natural world only acquires definite boundaries, and concepts only acquire definite content, together. Once that conception is in place, Barad goes on to argue that our participation in the phenomena we understand scientifically makes ethical and political responsibility integral to conceptual-discursive normativity as well.

https://digitalcollections.wesleyan.edu/_flysystem/fedora/2023-03/28634-Original%20File.pdf

I mean, clearly she is not a physicist — Apustimelogist

Suit yourself. Barad's Ph.D. is in theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. She held a tenured appointment in a physics department before moving into more interdisciplinary spaces.

↪Joshs
I don't think this example is actually apt to what you said it was going to demonstrate in the first sentence. You are more or less comparing quantum mechanics under a specific interpretation with Newtonian mechanics; but quantum mechanics is not going to satisfy the requirements of apokrisis for explaining higher level things like complex biology any more than Newtonian mechanics; so this demonstration doesn't really say anything about the relationship between different scales or levels — Apustimelogist

It may not satisfy the requirements of apokrisis, but the model of causality it expresses is designed to apply equally to the micro and the macro level.

what you are saying is very clearly interpretation dependent and so I don't see any reason why I shouldn't just reject Barad's ideas (Maybe you have a link to them? The quick search I did earlier didn't give me anything immediate) given that I advocate a completely different interpretation. At the same time, some would argue that you don't need to conceptualize quantum mechanics as non-linear since on face-value it is linear and deterministic in terms of Schrodinger equation. — Apustimelogist

Reject it only after you have demonstrated that you understand it. Have a look at Meeting the Universe Halfway.

https://smartnightreadingroom.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/meeting-the-universe-halfway.pdf

“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. (p. 151).

“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 intra-action (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 particular
material 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). Objectivity is a matter of accountability for what materializes, for what comes to be. It matters which cuts are enacted: different cuts enact different materialized becomings….

This is a reworking of causality that not only goes beyond its classical conception but also goes beyond that of complex systems theory as well: ‘‘emergence,’’ in an agential realist account, is dependent not merely on the nonlinearity of relations but on their intra-active nature (i.e., on non-separability and nontrivial topological dynamics as well). Events and things do not occupy particular positions in space and time; rather, space, time, and matter are iteratively produced and performed. Traditional conceptions of dynamics as a matter of how the values of an object’s properties change over time as the result of the action of external forces won’t do. The very nature and possibilities for change are reworked.

I'm still curious about this. It sounds to me like you are describing a priesthood (of which you are a part?) which you think should be listened to as authoritative on all matters related to human minds.

Can you say how I am getting something significantly wrong there — wonderer1

You likely wouldn’t refer to the scientists whose work leads to replicated, accepted results according to the consensus of a worldwide scientific community as a ‘priesthood’. I’m assuming the reason is because you are making a distinction between ideas which must be accepted on faith and those that have been validated through accepted scientific method.

Let me put it this way. I believe that what the testing aspect of scientific practice does is conventionalize and define precisely a set of ideas so that they can be shared among a larger community. Scientific practice is not able to render a paradigmatic set of ideas true or false, what it validates or invalidates is particular aspects within an already established paradigmatic framework that it operates under. The creative, world-changing work of science has to do with its movement from one paradigm to another, not its validating or invalidating facts within a given paradigm. This movement is more revolutionary than evolutionary, and the genesis of paradigms relies on faith , not empirical test.

A new paradigm is not ‘more true’ than one it replaces. This is not to say that there are not good reasons to prefer one paradigm over another. To say one has faith in a new scientific paradigm is to see it as aesthetically more pleasing than the alternatives , as organizing the world in terms of more intimate and harmonious patterns than its rivals. I endorse the work of the researchers I mentioned not because their ideas are empirically more ‘true’ than their rivals, but because they introduce a new way of organizing experience that I see as less arbitrary than the paradigmatic framework employed by the current consensus. Their work will only seem authoritative to you if you perform the gestalt shift they are attempting to get you to do and you see for yourself what they see. Their world either pops into focus for you or it doesn’t , like those magic eye hidden 3-d images. No amount of vetting by empirical test will make this happen. You have to do the work yourself to make it authoritative for you. You are your own priesthood when it comes to paradigms, worldviews, metaphysical groundings.

…any kind of observation or perhaps description about the smallest scales of reality will have more information about reality than all the scales upwards simply by the fact that descriptions on higher scales necessarily coarse-grain over details, while at the same time all the observations on higher scales are effectively redundant in terms of how they would correspond to a mind-independent reality. Doesn't matter what the descriptions are, which is why in previous posts I tried to make an effort to not mix up physics and smallest scales of existence. If you were to take a correspondence view of truth, then obviously the smallest scales would carry the most information about distinctions one could make about the mind-independent reality beyond one's senses. Because if higher scale descriptions are coarse-grained over, they lose information about correspondences — Apustimelogist

Let’s look at an example where this dependence of a higher on a lower scale of explanation falls apart. Newtonian analysis of colliding billiard balls or falling dominoes assigns fixed , universal qualitative causal properties to physical bodies, measured in relation to fixed temporal and spatial girds external to these bodies. Because these qualitative properties are assumed to be fixed, if we know the initial conditions completely , we can simply run off the future behavior of the interacting billiard balls or dominoes on a computer programmed with the right correlations between qualitative attributes and numeric relations.

Now let’s take a non-linear model of a particular sort, an account which begins from the assumption that no attributes of a physical object pre-exist its actual interactions with other objects, and that each actual interaction subtly changes the qualitative properties of the objects involved. Karen Barad is a physicist who uses this approach to interpret the results of the double slit experiment in quantum field physics. Put differently, when a cause produces an effect, the object being affected mutually affects its cause such as to modify the qualitative nature of that cause,

When we compare this model with the Newtonian one, it reveals to us that the latter description produces its universal, fixed results by ignoring and flattening the subtle quantitative changes in the nature of the phenomena (the ‘bodies’ and their temporal-spatial frame) that take place through their interactive reciprocal affecting. Such idealizing distortions don’t present a big problem with respect to the needs of the lower sciences. Conceptualizing the world in abstractive , generalizing and flattening terms is what makes possible a field like physics or chemistry, and the useful technologies which emerge from them. But what is useful when we want to build an iphone is profoundly less useful when we are trying to understand human behavior or the nature of living systems. The simplifying, universalizing of abstractions of physics obscure all that is most relevant and meaningful about how we understand each other (the fact that they also obscure much about the physical world doesn’t keep our planes from staying up in the air).

I'm not seeing how how that is a source of evidence, as to the views of most everyone well informed in the life sciences. — wonderer1

That isnt a source of evidence concerning the views of most everyone informed in the life sciences, its a source of evidence concerning the views of a particular community of scholars who integrate phenomenological insights with pragmatism, biology and embodied , enactive cognitive science. They would lose the popularity contest, but It should be added that the kind of evidence that matters to them doesn’t concern whether today’s physics is correct or incorrect in some objective sense, but how its practices and results can be viewed under a different light, according to a model which doesnt invalidate it but leads to alternative ways of relating the physics, the biological and the cultural.

I would think that most everyone well informed in the life sciences would recognize the usefulness of physics in such an interdisciplinary project. Do you have evidence to the contrary? — wonderer1

I certainly do, but it involves a familiarity with the substance of scholarship integrating naturalism with phenomenology. And again, the issue of usefulness has to do not strictly with the results of physical experimentation but with the theoretical interpretation of those results.

…we can see historically how the concept of nature as physical being got constructed in an objectivist way, while at the same time we can begin to conceive of the possibility of a different kind of construction that would be post-physicalist and post-dualist–that is, beyond the divide between the “mental” (understood as not conceptually involving the physical) and the “physical” (understood as not conceptually involving the mental). (Evan Thompson)

It seems strange to me that someone would even consider the question of whether physics is up to the job. To me, it is so clearly a matter for extremely interdisciplinary thinking. — wonderer1

.

I didnt say that all physicists are not up to the job. There are a handful who try to force an interpretation onto the established body of results which allows the field to bridge the conceptual gap between itself and recent thinking in the biological and psychological sciences. Without such significant work of reinterpretation, I don’t believe that physics can be a useful participant alongside the life and social disciplines.

Biology is not reducible to physics because a living body, though it is a physical object, cannot be explained without reference to concepts that have no place in physics. They cannot be understood without taking a holistic view of the organism and what helps to keep it alive - a concept that physics has no room for.
Except I heard that some physicists are talking of causality as information. But I don't know anything about the background. — Ludwig V

So I think the point here isn’t that psychology and biology are not in principle reducible to a more fundamental description like physics. It is that today’s physics is not up to the job because it is mired in older metaphysical assumptions. It would have to re-invent itself as a new kind of physics. Maybe it wouldnt even call itself physics anymore.

So the concept of ontological grounding is not perspective-dependent? H'm

Consider what philosophers have said:-
1 Everything is physics
2 Everything is language
3 Everything is experienced
All true. They are all perspectives and there can be more than one perspective on anything. Physics, from my perspective, is not unique in any respect. — Ludwig V

As you are aware, the Continentalists are fond of ontological groundings that have built into their very premise the genesis of perspectivalism as an irreducible primordial a priori ( Nietzsche’s Will to Power, Heidegger’s Being, Merleau-Ponty’s Flesh of the World, Deleuze’s desiring machines, Husserl’s Transcendental Ego).

What I was implying is that all of the events that led to the development of neuronal structure- whether on an evolutionary or developmental scale - can be in principle described purely in terms of particles and how they move in space and time. In principle, such a thing could be simulated using a complete model of fundamental physics - it would just obviously be orders of magnitude too complicated to ever be possible to do.

From this, it would follow that higher-order descriptions are both in principle: redundant, in the sense that they are describing behavior that could be described purely in terms of smaller scales; and also incomplete, in the sense that any higher-level description would have to be missing out on details that actually occur in reality on the smaller scale but are not included in the higher-order description.

Obviously that doesn't mean we don't need the higher level description - but clearly, higher level descriptions will be grounded on the details of smaller scales. How could it not be? — Apustimelogist

What you’re calling the lower level physical description, the irreducible ground floor for the understanding of all higher order descriptions (chemical, biological, psychological and cultural) has evolved over the history of philosophical and scientific inquiry. And it has evolved in such a way that all of the higher order resources of cultural knowledge arebrought to bear on redetermining in each era of inquiry the nature of the lowest level. Another way of putting it is that the very highest level of cultural understanding is inextricably intertwined with our models of the very lowest level. This may not seem like an objectionable claim in itself, but what if I were to suggest that it often happens in the historical course of scientific inquiry that insights gained from scientific and philosophical investigations of phenomena seemingly far removed from the subject matter of physics, that supposed ground floor level of study, can point the way toward paradigm shifts in the models describing the nature of that lowest level?

But how can new theories of language, intersubjectivity, perception, cognition and affect pertaining to a higher level like psychology challenge the way we understand causality at the lowest level, rather than simply representing more complex manifestations of these physical laws? The answer, as physicists are increasingly discovering, is that, try as they might, they cannot bracket off the external world from our psychological relation to it. As a result , just as models of the world that physics employs lurk under the surface of many human sciences as guiding presuppositions, psychological and philosophical presuppositions lurk beneath the surface of physical models. Given that physics emerged out of Enlightenment presuppositions assuming a split between subjective phenomena and a world of objective, external causes, physics can be slow to recognize when it has fallen behind the insights of higher order fields like evolutionary biology and human psychology. An example of this is the way that time has been treated within physics as irrelevant. In recent years, physicists like Ilya Prigogine and Lee Smolin have argued that physics desperately needs to learn from evolutionary biology how essential time is to the very essence of physical reality. Jean Piaget wrote:

In all fields of knowledge the situation arises periodically where the concepts in use divide into two levels, of which one is more complex, hence 'higher', and there is then a tendency to reduce the higher to the lower or a contrary tendency as a reaction against the excesses of the former. In the field of physics, for example, mechanical phenomena have for long been regarded as elementary and for that matter as the only intelligible elements to which everything ought to be reduced: whence the futile attempts to translate electromagnetism into the language of mechanics. In the biological field there have been attempts to reduce living processes to known physico-chemical phenomena, attempts that failed to note the possibility of change in Aa discipline which is continually being modiied; and the reaction was an antireduvtonist vitattsm, whose sole merit was the entirely negative one of denouncing the illusions engendered by such pre- mature reductions. In psychology there has been the attempt to "reduce' everything to the stimulus-response scheme, to associations,etc.

If these remarks appear strange, this is no doubt because physics is far from complete, having so far been unable to integrate biology and a fortiori the behavioural sciences within itself. Hence, at present, we reason in different and artificially simplified domains, physics being up to now only the science of non-living, non-conscious things.

Why use the higher-level description then? Obviously it is required because it is less complex and doesn't require precise resolutions, maybe it is also closer to our everyday levels of descriptions. The reasons for using the higher-level description or a lower-level description are clearly about epistemic, explanatory needs, not ontological ones - — Apustimelogist

This was true in the early days of the social and psychological sciences, when they were consumed by physics envy. But this is not true any of the high level, psychological and philosophical accounts that are important to my understanding of the world (embodied, enactive cognition, phenomenology, poststructuralism, later Wittgenstein, etc). Relative to these perspectives, it is the physical account which is less complex and closer to our everyday understanding. It seems to me that there are one of a number of reasons for your view.
1) You are not actually treating the higher order psychological account as consistent with the lower order one, but you are just assuming without examining the details that the higher must be reducible to the lower since of course the physics has been rigorously validated empirically.
2) You interpret the higher order as subsumed by the same theoretical logic as the lower one, and so miss the radical departure of the former from the latter’s grounding assumptions.

So how do you derive the structure of a neuron from the laws of physics?
— apokrisis

You pretend to be doing physics; but you are merely reworking Hegel — Banno

And why not? Physics was until recently ( and for many still is) a reworking of Leibnitz and Kant.

The fact that you may need higher levels of explanation to make a dynamic system intelligible doesn't negate the fact that ot may be at the most fundamental level just a consequence of simple billiard ball causality. It could not be any other wa since such explanations you talk about are by their very nature not fundamental — Apustimelogist

Physicist and philosopher Karen Barad is among the community of ‘new materialists’ who argue that “relations are not secondarily derived from independently existing “relata,” but rather the mutual ontological dependence of “relata”—the relation—is the ontological prim­itive. The notion of intra-actions constitutes a reworking of the traditional notion of causality.”

I suggest that such non-linear reciprocal affecting between cause and effect is more fundamental than the mechanistic billiard ball or domino form of description we might try to foist onto neural processes as their ‘real’ basis.
— Joshs

This doesn't make any sense since all of the complex behaviors neurons do are emergent from very simple ones at smalled scales - described by morr fundamental laws of physics - such as ions crossing a membrane barrier — Apustimelogist

I am not denying that complex psychological phenomena can be analyzed in terms of a supposed grounding that is itself irreducible to something more fundamental. What I am saying is that while some believe that complex dynamical processes are phenomena that simply emerge out of a lower level of nature that physics already describes perfectly adequately, I’m arguing that the full implications of the non-linearity of complex systems in living beings makes it impossible to derive them from physical models as they are currently understood. At least not without the modification in interpretation of causality that writers like Barad offer. Given the fact that it is through our conceptual
models that we come with theories of the oldest , simplest and most primordial beginning of empirical reality, it is not surprising that new insights into the nature of conceptualization can lead to new ways of thinking about that oldest, simplest origin. As apokrisis argued,

“How we can develop a logical understanding of the world is then our best model for how the world itself could come to have that logical structure. Epistemology becomes ontology in its most direct possible fashion.”

Does physics ground mathematics?
— Ludwig V

Do the smallest scales of existence ground our use of math?

Absolutely. — Apustimelogist

Actually, the most complex scale of existence grounds our use of math. Mathematics is a conceptual invention.

Can you explain in what sense you do mean "mechanistic"?
— Ludwig V

I just mean mechanistic in the sense of one event causing the next event and the next event in a way that is divide of any kind of extra meaning. Like knocking down dominos where one falls causes the next and the next and the next in a mindless ways. But I am not assuming any limits on complexity or non-linearity or recurrence or anything like that — Apustimelogist

The billiard ball model of causality does assume a limit on non-linearity. More precisely, it ignores it entirely. Efficient cause is itself a theoretical perspective, one which only emerged at a particular point in the history of science and has undergone numerous modifications. It was developed for , and is most useful for dealing with the behavior of non-living phenomena, but runs into trouble when we try to explain living systems this way. I would go even further. What we learn from the models we develop to describe cognitive systems can be applied backwards to natural
science domain. This is the only way to get beyond the hard problem, which resulted from taking the sorts of causality physics deals with as the gold standard. For instance, what makes the fall of dominoes ‘mindless’ is the determination of an effect as the mere consequence of a pre-assigned cause. In a dynamical system, the effect is not the mere product of a pre-assigned cause, but modifies the cause. Cause and effect are reciprocally affected by each other. This provides such processes with an anticipative intentionality that may be characterized as mindful in some sense.

As chatgpt says

Complex dynamical systems exhibit nonlinear effects and a type of causality called causal spread, which is different from efficient causality. The interactions and connectivity required for complex systems to self-organize are best understood through context-sensitive constraints

I suggest that such non-linear reciprocal affecting between cause and effect is more fundamental than the mechanistic billiard ball or domino form of description we might try to foist onto neural processes as their ‘real’ basis.

I know Apustimelogist already answered, but I want to add the following link to flesh out the very literal sense in which synchronization occurs — wonderer1

I prefer the somewhat less reductionistic account of intersubjective coordination that enactivism offers:

“Interactions are not simply bits of information to be processed by individual cognizers, but rather, interaction processes move the participants in their sense-making activities, and these include affect. Participatory sense-making reaches directly into the precarious network of self-maintaining processes that constitute a subject's identity. Thus, our encounters with others may not only modulate our very self-maintenance, but to some extent even enable and constrain it. This means that the constitution of our subjectivity can be strongly dependent on the history of social encounters. Thus, self-constitution and self-affection happen with and through others while-importantly and basically-at the same time always retaining an aspect of closure.

This sharing in inter-affectivity comes through participating in a process that is not simply the summation of individual activities, but a jointly created and literally embodied pattern that affects each of our affections. (Hanne De Jaegher)

One of the obvious features of life in general and people in particular is that they are autonomous. Whether those systems approaches can answer all the questions is another issue. On the surface, it looks as if they leave out the notion of a person, which implies that their scope will be limited — Ludwig V

How do you reconcile the notion of person with philosophical and psychological approaches which deconstruct the concept of self?

Francisco Varela provides “a great amount of neuroscientific detail about distributed neural networks to explain the idea of a selfless virtual self, an agent that emerges from a pattern or aggregate of personal processes” ( Shaun Gallagher).

As unenlightened beings, we mistakenly believe on a deep emotional level that there does exist a real “I” or ego within our mind and body, and therefore our experience of ourselves and others is profoundly egocentric… One mentally imposes an intrinsic “I-ness” and an intrinsic “otherness” onto phenomena, but “I” and “other” are simply relative designations imputed onto elements in which there is no inherently existing “I” and “other.” Each “I” is an “other,” and each “other” is an “I.” (Evan Thompson)

“The 'I' (which is not the same thing as the unitary government of our being!) is, after all, only a conceptual synthesis - thus there is no acting from 'egoism'”…
The concept of the 'individual' is false. In isolation, these beings do not exist: the centre of gravity is something changeable…
“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.(Nietzsche)

I wanted to revisit this, and ask about the reading habits of these three men, and whether there was a lot of similarity between the reading habits of these three and what you would expect of religious monastics?

Even someone who superficially appears socially isolated, may be interacting with diverse others via reading and writing. I'm not sure that comparing those three to monastics is very apples to apples, but you tell me. — wonderer1

Both Heidegger and Nietzsche felt isolated from the ways of thinking of their time. Heidegger believed that Nietzsche and Holderlin were closest to his own philosophy, but that even they fell short, and Nietzsche believed that he was writing for an age to come. Certainly in Heidegger’s case, I think his core philosophy was developed in his 20’s, and the interaction he had with his students and colleagues over the course of his life had only the most peripheral effect on the further development of his ideas. The greatest influence on his new work was his old work, not the ideas of those around him. In this sense , his intellectual life was monastic by necessity, and I think this is true of most philosophers.

It's treated the same as any relatively scarce illness — AmadeusD

Did you get Covid?

↪wonderer1 Yea maybe my word choice wasn't the best. I guess I think emotions provide the motivation for thinking, but I suppose a thinking process can work just fine once it gets going without further emotional input — Brendan Golledge

You sure about that? Is the sense of why and how something matters to us ever absent from a task? Is there ever such a thing as an absence of mood? Heidegger would say no. He refers to such concepts as affect, feeling, emotion and mood as attunements:

“Attunements are the fundamental ways in which we find ourselves disposed in such and such a way. Attunements are the 'how' [ Wie] according to which one is in such and such a way. Certainly we often take this 'one is in such and such a way'- for reasons we shall not go into now-as something indifferent, in contrast to what we intend to do, what we are occupied with, or what will happen to us. And yet this 'one is in such and such a way' is not-is never-simply a consequence or side-effect of our thinking, doing, and acting. It is-to put it crudely-the presupposition for such things, the 'medium' within which they first happen. And precisely those attunements to which we pay no heed at all, the attunements we least observe, those attunements which attune us in such a way that we feel as though there is no attunement there at all, as though we were not attuned in any way at all-these attunements are the most powerful.

At first and for the most part we are affected only by particular attunements that tend toward 'extremes', like joy or grief. A faint apprehensiveness or a buoyant contentment are less noticeable. Apparently not there at all, and yet there, is precisely that lack of attunement in which we are neither out of sorts nor in a 'good' mood. Yet even in this 'neither/nor' we are never without an attunement. The reason we take lack of attunement as not being attuned at all, however, has grounds of a quite essential nature. When we say that a human being who is good-humoured brings a lively atmosphere with them, this means only that an elated or lively attunement is brought about. It does not mean, however, that there was no attunement there before. A lack of attunement prevailed there which is seemingly hard to grasp, which seems to be something apathetic and indifferent, yet is not like this at all. We can see once more that attunements never emerge in the empty space of the soul and then disappear again; rather, Dasein as Dasein is always already attuned in its very grounds. There is only ever a change of attunement.

a mechanistic component cannot be inherently interpreted in terms of a semantic component. If you look at a brain performing a plus task, our description of 'plus' is not interpretable in terms of our description of how neurons are actually performing the task.

Neurons are precisely what is performing a plus tasks for you. The biology and dynamics of neurons account for everything about your ability to do a plus task.

Physics describes the smallest scales of existence which grounds everything else and upon which all higher scale behavior depends and emerges from. — Apustimelogist

In principle it is true that physics grounds all ‘higher’ scales of natural phenomena , but in practice it is not true that that a mechanistic account based on efficient, linear causality describes the neural processes underlying conceptual thought. There is no such thing as an inherently mechanistic component, only an account which explains the functions of a component in mechanistic terms. This is a useful account for describing phenomena in the service of accomplishing certain kinds of scientific and technological tasks, but is inadequate for others. Looking at the neural activity at the level of detail of chemical reactions will only reveal a chain of linear causality. Looking at the level of global self-organizing processes of a living system will reveal a non-linear reciprocal causality that moves between the global and the elemental.

As Alicia Juarrero explains:

The bottom-up causality of nonlinear far from equilibrium dynamics is thus truly creative; it produces qualitatively different wholes that are not reducible to sums, com­pounds, or aggregates. Once self-organized, furthermore, these emergent global structures of process actively and dynamically influence the go of their compo­nents, but not qua other. In contradiction to the received views on causality, that is, the whole also actively exerts causal power on itself top down. Self-organization, in short, strongly counsels for a wider denotation for the
term cause, one reconceptualized in terms of “context-sensitive constraints” to include those causal powers that incorporate circular causality, context-sensitive
embeddedness, and temporality. On this interpretation deterministic, mechanistic efficient causes become the limit of context-sensitive constraints.

Knowledge doesn’t represent the reality of things in the world, it anticipates and enacts relations of active interaction with a world.
— Joshs

So how does that impact my position given that I've already been explicit that I am rejecting Cartesian representationalism – the ontology that permits all representation to be misleading – and instead promoting a Kantian/Peircean enactivism? A modelling relation view where our beliefs only have to be "near enough for all practical purposes or observable consequences". — apokrisis

How does Peirce understand the relation between model and what is to be modeled? Would he agree with the following from Rouse?

Models should be thought of as simulacra rather than representations. The crucial difference is that representation too often denotes a semantic content that intervenes between knowers and the world, whereas simulacra are just more things in the world, with a multiplicity of relations to other things. What makes them models, with an in­tentional relation to what they model, is their being taken up in practices, ongoing patterns of normatively accountable use.

The recognition of models as simulacra extends the interconnection of meaning and power beyond the immediate relation between speakers and their interpreters. To see why this is so, consider a question sometimes asked rhetorically about meaning: how could merely representing things differently possibly have a causal influence on them? A similar question about simulacra cannot have the same rhetorical effect: simulacra are transformations of the world, and more significantly, they transform the available possibilities for human action. They do so both by materially enabling some activities and obstructing others, and also by changing the situation such that some possible actions or roles lose their point, while others acquire new significance.

your pluralism relies on the claim all knowledge can be doubted, while my pragmatism says it is only unreliable belief that needs to be adjusted. — apokrisis

Rouse follows Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Heidegger in dissolving the basis of Cartesian doubt. Descartes’s understanding of the basis of skepticism, the gap between the perceiving subject and the perceived world, is based on unexamined presuppositions concerning the nature of subjectivity and objectivity which produce this gap (and this doubt) in the first place. We always stand within one social framework or another of practices of meaning, and the concept of doubt simply doesn’t arise at the level of the framework as a whole. It is only within the structure of a particular contingent framework (language game, paradigm, form of life, constructed niche) that we can doubt particular facts and talk of truth and falsity.A language game provides us with the presuppositions that make doubt or validation intelligible. When we move from one language game to another, it is not a question of doubting or invalidating the previous game, but of entering into a new world. What constitutes reliable or unreliable belief is only determinable within each game, but does not apply to transitions between them. Did Kuhn say that Newtonian physics was replaced by modern physics because the former was an unreliable form of belief, or because, while both were reliable in their own way, the latter solved a greater number of puzzles?

Your pluralist project appears to be reassert the very Cartesianism you would claim to reject as an enactivist. To retreat into the privilege of "personal phenomenal experience" at the expense of the broader social level enactivism offered by a pragmatist epistemology – Peirce's community of reason – seems a very backward move to me — apokrisis

I’m perfectly comfortable agreeing with Foucault and Deleuze that the subject is an effect produced by social processes of subjectification, and that points of view are only intelligible within larger shared practices of meaning.

A point of view is an abstract of possible observers and ideal observers; it isn't about actual human beings. History, literature, and some approaches to language are about actual human beings, not abstract concepts. Linguistics is another interesting case that straddles the divide. (Is philosophy included here? Depends on what you mean by philosophy. Much philosophy presupposes an abstract observer, but Wittgenstein, of course, challenged that.) — Ludwig V

Don’t forget Nietzsche here.

“Physicists believe in a “true world” in their own fashion…. But they are in error. The atom they posit is inferred according to the logic of the perspectivism of consciousness—and it is therefore itself a subjective fiction. … And in any case they left something out of the constellation without knowing it: precisely this necessary perspectivism by virtue of which every center of force—and not only man—construes all the rest of the world from its own viewpoint, i.e., measures, feels, forms, according to its own force— They forgot to include this perspective-setting force in “true being”—in school language: the subject.”(The Will to Power)

…and Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche:

“The essence of value lies in its being a point-of-view. Value means that upon which the eye is fixed. Value means that which is in view for a seeing that aims at something or that, as we say, reckons upon something and therewith must reckon with something else. Value stands in intimate relation to a so-much, to quantity and number. Hence values are related to a "numerical and mensural scale" (Will to Power, Aph. 710, 1888)

“Through the characterization of value as a point-of-view there results the one consideration that is for Nietzsche's concept of value essential : as a point-of-view, value is posited at any given time by a seeing and for a seeing. This seeing is of such a kind that it sees inasmuch as it has seen, and that it has seen inasmuch as it has set before itself and thus posited what is sighted, as a particular something. It is only through this positing which is a representing that the point that is necessary for directing the gaze toward something, and that in this way guides the path of sight, becomes the aim in view-i.e., becomes that which matters in all seeing and in all action guided by sight…All being whatever is a putting forward or setting forth.

Whenever we set sail on the sea of consciousness, differences in definitions are often the reefs on which our arguments run aground — T Clark

Then perhaps we must let it run aground. Beside, I think I’m getting seasick.

I think I was clear in my previous post that emotions are involved in all aspects of our cognitive life. At the same time, it is true that every mammal that has ever existed has had emotions. Emotions were a part of animal cognition long before anything we would call consciousness had evolved. — T Clark

I happen to believe that the functionally unified, normative, goal-oriented organization of living systems is what consciousness is in its most primordial sense, so what distinguishes humans and higher animals from simpler ones isn’t an all-or-nothing capacity of consciousness, but a matter of degree. Neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio assert that there can be no consciousness without emotion. It has also been suggested that there can be no emotion without consciousness, that unconscious affect is a non-sequitor.

But don’t we - even at the meta-epistemic level - ground it all in pragmatism? A chair is real enough to take my weight — apokrisis

The chair certainly produces predictable constraints and affordances in response to our engagement with it, but the meaning of ‘chair’, that is, what those constraints and affordances entail, are the result of neither of a practice-independent reality impinging itself on us anor world-independent conception forcing itself on the world. Rather, the pragmatic use defines the sense of the reality of the chair, and as our practical engagements transform themselves in tandem with the world that they shape, the meaning of a pragmatic use context, and the empirical and theoretic concepts built from it, changes its sense. Knowledge doesn’t represent the reality of things in the world, it anticipates and enacts relations of active interaction with a world.

t. Pragmatism instead is a positive alternative in being based on a willingness to believe - and then test. Belief becomes an inveterate habit if it keeps passing the test. And that same evolutionary credo explains reality as a whole. — apokrisis

We are already intimately and actively embedded within a world, which means that we are always thrown into beliefs, practical forms of meaningful engagements with our surrounds. Truth and falsity relate to the relative amenability of aspects within those intelligible patterns of engagement. We don’t just test to confirm already anticipated events, we also anticipate beyond what is confirmed and true, in the direction of not already foreseen possibilities that may shift our conceptions. Reality isn’t something we simply aim to explain, but to participate in constructing in new directions.

Emotions developed early in our species evolutionary history and parts of the brain involved in emotions are located in more "primitive" areas, i.e. in the pre-cortex. In that context, what does "values are the root of our emotional experience" even mean? To over-simplify, the emotions were there first. They are part of the foundation of our thinking and were there long before consciousness — T Clark

It sounds like you’re getting your idea of the primacy of emotion in evolutionary history from this model:

The model begins with ancient subcortical circuits for
basic survival, which we allegedly inherited from reptiles. Sitting atop those circuits is an alleged emotion system, known as the “limbic system,” that we supposedly inherited from early mammals. And wrapped around the so­-called limbic system, like icing on an already-baked cake, is our allegedly rational and uniquely human cortex. This illusory arrangement of layers, which is sometimes called the “triune brain,” remains one of the most suc­cessful misconceptions in human biology. Carl Sagan popularized it in The Dragons of Eden, his bestselling (some would say largely fictional) account of how human intelligence evolved. Daniel Goleman employed it in his best­seller Emotional Intelligence. Nevertheless, humans don’t have an animal brain gift-wrapped in cognition, as any expert in brain evolution knows. “Mapping emotion onto just the middle part of the brain, and reason and logic onto the cortex, is just plain silly,” says neuroscientist Barbara L. Fin­lay, editor of the journal Behavior and Brain Sciences. “All brain divisions are present in all vertebrates.” So how do brains evolve? They reorganize as they expand, like companies do, to keep themselves efficient and nimble.(How Emotions are Made, Lisa Barrett)

The above account suggests instead that affect, cognition and consciousness developed in tandem. The defining feature of living systems is their normative organization, the fact that they are purpose-driven to maintain their form of life in changing circumstances. This doesnt mean that amoebas have values in the same way that humans do, but that affectivity and sense-making work together to produce goal-oriented directionality.

How we can develop a logical understanding of the world is then our best model for how the world itself could come to have that logical structure. Epistemology becomes ontology in its most direct possible fashion.

A reasonable person is going to find a reasonable universe – the Kantian point. But then also, a reasonable universe is going to eventually find itself inhabited by minds that can echo its reason. That is how Peirce closes the loop with his pragmatism. — apokrisis

i certainly agree that the way that we characterize the genesis and nature of human reason and logical understanding serves as a model for our understanding of the world. If we believe we can ground this reason in the sovereign epistemology of realism, then this will define our understanding of the world. But how would
the universe look to us, and how would we approach the structure of its reasonableness, if we adopted a post-sovereign epistemology?

What, then, does a post-sovereign epistemology have to say about the legitimation of knowledge? The crucial point is not that there is no legitimacy, but rather that questions about legitimation are on the same "level" as any other epistemic conflict, and are part of a struggle for truth. In the circulation of contested, heterogeneous knowledges, disputes about legitimacy, and the criteria for legitimacy, are part and parcel of the dynamics of that circulation. Understanding knowledge as "a strategical situation" rather than as a definitive outcome places epistemological reflection in the midst of ongoing struggles to legitimate (and delegitimate) various skills, practices, and assertions. Recognizing that the boundaries of science (or of knowledge) are what is being contested, epistemology is within those contested boundaries.

But even an idealist becomes a naive realist when he leaves the house to go to work. That's paraphrasing Simon Blackburn. Which comes back to my take on all this. None of it much matters since the world we inhabit can't be denied in practice and for the most part it makes no difference to how we live if we believe that all is an illusion. — Tom Storm

As my favorite psychologist, George Kelly, said:

To put it simply, it is not what the past has done to a man that counts so much as it is what the man does with his past. The psychotherapist can scarcely fail to be amazed at how differently two of his clients may make use of what has happened to them. If he is alert he will be aware of wide differences in the way they make use of him too. Men are not so much shaped by events as they are shaped by the meaning they ascribe to such noises. This is not to say that one is perfectly free to ignore what is going on. He is not. But man is always free to re-construe that which he may not deny.

We take the stand that there are always some alternative constructions available to choose among in dealing with the world. No one needs to paint himself into a corner; no one needs to be completely hemmed in by circumstances; no one needs to be the victim of his biography.

there is no way of knowing, or of testing, whether animals have emotional states. ‘Thinking animals’ is also a contentious claim, as what ‘thinking’ implies, and whether animals are capable of it, is vaguely defined and probably untestable. — Wayfarer

Positivist approaches in psychology were based on the same assumptions concerning human behavior, which is why they excluded ‘unobservable and untestable’ concepts like emotion and cognition from their models. Fortunately, things have changed significantly with respect to what is considered empirically testable for both humans and other animals.

I believe values (what we care about) are the root of our emotional experience, and our emotions drive what things we think about, and what we think about drives what we do. So, studying the self is really the same as studying values. And that's really the same as morality. And this is also what religion is concerned with.
— Brendan Golledge

I disagree with just about everything in this paragraph. — T Clark

The paragraph does seem to be consonant with recent thinking on the relation between affectivity, cognition and values. For instance, enactivist approaches to cognitive psychology insist that cognitive and affective processes are closely interdependent, with affect, emotion and sensation functioning in multiple ways and at multiple levels to situate or attune the context of our conceptual dealings with the world , and that affective tonality is never absent from cognition. As Matthew Ratcliffe puts it,

“moods are no longer a subjective window-dressing on privileged theoretical perspectives but a background that constitutes the sense of all intentionalities, whether theoretical or practical”

“...affect binds us to things, making them relevant and ‘lighting up' aspects of the world in such a way as to call forth actions and thoughts. Without the world-structuring orientation that they provide, we are disoriented, cut off from the world, which no longer solicits thoughts and actions and is consequently devoid of value. In effect, [William] James is saying that our very sense of reality is constituted by world-orienting feelings that bind us to things...The absence of emotion comprises a state of cognitive and behavioural paralysis rather than fully functional cognition, stripped of ‘mere' affect. A phenomenology without affect is a phenomenology that guts the world of all its significance.” (Matthew Ratcliffe)

Perhaps this is a problem with considering a monastic life to be conducive to developing psychological insight? Considered from a neuroscientific perspective, a monastic life could be considered to be starving one's brain of the input that comes with interacting with diverse people in diverse situations. It doesn't seem to me like a monastic life would be very conducive to developing robust intuitons regarding human psychology — wonderer1

I suspect the lion’s share of those intuitions are formed by early adulthood , which may explain why philosophers like Heidegger, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were able to generate profound psychological insights while living essentially monastic lives.

His point is that a ‘best possible image’ is always going to be relative to commitments and material practices which are contingently formed through indissociable interaction between the world and our purposes.
— Joshs

That’s still just epistemology — apokrisis

And I suspect Rouse would consider Peirce’s view of the scientific image as an epistemologically-based first philosophy:

…both orthodox and liberal naturalisms impose on their conceptions of the sciences what I have elsewhere characterized as an epistemolog­ically-based first philosophy. The challenge to familiar meta-philosophical
naturalisms does not concern their intramural disputes
over whether the sciences provide a conceptually unified
or comprehensive image of the (structure of the) natural
world or instead provide a partial and multi-leveled con­ceptual patchwork at multiple scales, ontological levels, or disciplinary orientations. The question is instead whether the sciences aim for or produce a consistent representation of the natural world at all.

But Rouse’s concern here appears epistemological whereas I was talking ontological commitments. Rouse wants to place the scientific image within some wider pluralistic space of materialistic images. I am instead asking about the best possible version of that scientific image. What would it be like to bring our scattered scientific understandings of the world into one coherent image of natural being? — apokrisis

Th epistemological for Rouse is secondary to the ontology of agential materiality, what he calls ‘intra-action’. This ontology erases the boundary separating nature from culture, the manifest image of thought from the scientific image of nature. His point is that a ‘best possible image’ is always going to be relative to commitments and material practices which are contingently formed through indissociable interaction between the world and our purposes.

The pragmatist insists that the world is both found and made: it is made in the finding and found in the making.
That's brilliant. Would you care to share the reference? Then I could quote it too. — Ludwig V

It’s from Is Internal Realism a Philosophy of Scheme and Content?

https://evanthompson.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/j-1467-9973-1991-tb00717-x.pdf

So as a metaphysics, neither matter nor form appear very “real” in any substantial sense. Reality seems derealised in a way that neither naturalists nor theists would think about things — apokrisis

Not all naturalist thinking is limited in this way. Joseph Rouse’s radical naturalism is one example of alternative paths that are being taken by new materialists.

https://www.academia.edu/38199897/Liberal_or_Radical_Naturalism

Thanks for the quote. It comes from Rouse's paper 'Kierkegaard on Truth' - pp13-14 of the downloadable pdf. Here: https://www.academia.edu/30917243/Kierkegaard_on_Truth — Amity

Thank you for adding the link. It’s a fascinating paper.

Wouldn't that be circular?
Most people who are not dualists accept that there is a physical <insert your preferred term> of abstract reasoning, music, laughter &c. To deny that seems inevitably lead to dualism — Ludwig V

Most people would use the word physical here, and then add their preferred term. Many non-dualist philosophers, however, would insert their preferred term in place of ‘physical’ in order not to perpetuate a dualism implied by physicalism.

I think a distinction should be made between types of beliefs. The beliefs you're using as examples here are context-dependent and directly related to the world around us. What I'm trying to get at is fundamental belief, the beliefs that are the foundation of how each of us perceives and experiences the world. These are often not apparent to us (maybe more apparent to those of us who post on philosophy forums, true). They're beliefs about the self. — Noble Dust

I’m not sure that such a distinction between self and world can be made. Heidegger would argue that the self is projected back to itself from its world. That the self projects itself does not mean that this self exists first and then projects itself or not, but that the self constitutes itself in projecting itself from the world. And Kierkegaard said that the truth or falsity of an aspect of the world is subservient to how it matters to us. Kierkegaard perspective on objective truth may thus conflict in some measure with and .

… what of truth attained rather than truth pursued? We are accustomed to taking the uncontroversial as the paradigm of truth. Kierkegaard has argued that such analyses sacrifice significance in the vain pursuit of certainty. Truth, he suggests, fundamentally concerns the uncertain and how it matters to us. The truth of what no one would care to dispute seriously(where what counts as "serious" reflects an interpretation of our shared situation) is derivative from this. Weaker versions of this approach are taken by those philosophers who argue that the decision to accept a research program provides the context within which other claims can be evaluated, and, more generally, by epistemological holists, according to whom we accept a claim only on the basis of previously accepted claims. But they usually have not taken Kierkegaard's further step: this prior acceptance must be a decision about what matters to us, in our lives and in our research. Present-day "rationalists" fear that truth will then be left to be decided by unconstrained choice.

Two responses can be made to this. Kierkegaard does not confuse our ability to devote our lives to one task with the ability which we do not possess, to insure that we succeed at that task. "Spiritually speaking, everything is possible, but in the finite world there is much that is not possible. " Realist philosophers of science have argued that what is thus finitely possible or impossible depends upon how the world is, independent of our desires, commitments, and actions. Kierkegaard has responded that it is only in the light of our transcendence into the world that the world is in one way or another. To describe the world is already to select those features worth describing; such a selection presupposes an interest with respect to which the selection can be made. Without an interest, which for Kierkegaard requires a commitment, nothing could manifest itself as true (or false).

Our commitments do not determine how the world is, but they allow it to show itself as significant in one way or another. Even for the world to show itself as an obstacle presupposes an approach which it resists. Even what commitments we can intelligibly make, and what concerns with which we can approach the world, are constrained by the situation in which we find ourselves. A situation is not an "objective" state of the world, nor just an unfounded belief about how the world is. Our being situated challenges the alleged separation between subject and world. A situation is a configuration of possibilities through which both subject and world can acquire meaning through the subject's involvement and the world's "response." It is the outcome of a history of such involvements and responses.

Our involvement is vulnerable, precisely because we must commit ourselves to it before it can show us new aspects of the world; but what it shows may confound it. And even that is open to interpretation. Kierkegaard's aim was to substitute for a truth which is, but remains unattainable for us, a truth which happens in time and thereby enters our lives. We have moved from his view of a truth which happens individually to the truth(s) of a generation and a society. Truth then belongs to an historical situation and may change. But this does not make the truth arbitrary. Nor is this historical situation insulated from others before it or around it. Our situation resulted from past involvements and is changed by our encounters with others for whom truth shows itself differently. Such a conception of truth may not satisfy those for whom eternity must be the hallmark of truth. But, as Kierkegaard reminds us, such a truth is nevertheless the highest truth attainable for an existing individual. (Joseph Rouse)