Kind is an abstraction from natural regularities, and as such is a fixed or static identity. Abstractions, like number, are static, although obviously their instantiations are not. — Janus

I agree.

Derrida wants to say here that the old ontological metaphysics, built around the notion of ‘presence’, is over. It means that the present that eludes our consciousness is the other, always unknown side of what sustains ‘pure repetition’. The primary part of whatever we are doing now, at this present time, is completely absent from what we can see or feel. Yet, it is not clear how the absolute break, ‘pure repetition’ is related to iterability. What is the process of production? The identical is not the ultimate gap, but the structure of operative recursive connections, maintaining temporal stability and persistent self-reference — Number2018

Consciousness for Derrida and Heidegger implies self-affection, a selfless turning back to itself to reflect on itself.
To be conscious is always to be self-conscious. This is the origin of identity, A=A. To say that experience is not conscious to itself does not mean that ‘the primary part of whatever we are doing now, at this present time, is completely absent from what we can see or feel’. On the contrary, differance, as the in-between of transit, is precisely what we see and feel.

Derrida famously wrote:

“The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling
presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence..(Limited Inc)

His thinking about identity was strongly influenced by Heidegger’s notion of Being as event. Heidegger introduced us to a beginning for thinking that is ontologically prior to the overt distinction between the present and the absent, the same and the other, familiarity and subversion, schemes and their dislocation, something and nothing, the relevant and the strange, binding and separating, identity and difference, being and becoming, good and evil. What Heidegger elaborated in the guise of the ‘as' structure, temporality and the making of the work of art marries these gestures within the same paradoxical moment. Heidegger constantly struggled to come up with an adequate way of articulating a notion of transit, othering and difference that the grammatical structure of language mitigates against, an essencing which is neither simply present nor absent, neither something nor nothing, neither future, now nor past.

I get the argument that the concept serves a purpose in how we talk. The claims about what exists in nature seems to contradict the limits presented regarding such description. But how does that let us say what exists in nature? — Paine

I should have said that it is the nature of a meaning intention that contextual change intervenes in the repetition of the same ‘identity’. For Husserl, number in itself is not tied to anything but itself. Enumeration, as an empty ' how much', abstracts away all considerations that pertain to the nature of the substrate of the counting, including whether that substrate offers itself up for measurement in qualitatively or quantitatively changing increments. Enumeration represents what Husserl calls a free ideality. Derrida characterizes this feature of number in the following way;

“I can manipulate symbols without animating them, in an active and actual manner, with the attention and intention of signification(crisis of mathematical symbolism, according to Husserl) .”

“Now, Numbers, as numbers, have no meaning; they can squarely be said to have no meaning, not even plural meaning. …Numbers have no present or signified content. And, afortiori, no absolute referent. This is why they don't show anything, don't tell anything, don't represent anything, aren't trying to say anything. Or more precisely, the moment of present meaning, of “content,” is only a surface effect.”

Numeric idealization is unbound (within the strict limits of its own repetition); no contextual effects intervene such as was the case in the attempt to repeat the same word meaningfully.

Flocks of birds, schools of fish, all comprise collections of ‘the same kind’. There are repetitions and patterns and instances of ‘the same kind’ in nature. How is that not so? — Wayfarer

It comes back to the issue of identity. Same kind is not identical kind. The same only continues to be itself slightly differently from one moment to the next. Iterability produces

"an imperceptible difference. This exit from the identical into the same remains very slight, weighs nothing itself...". “It is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition.”“Pure repetition, were it to change neither thing nor sign, carries with it an unlimited power of perversion and subversion. (Derrida)

Kind and generality consist in identity. Each particular is unique, so there is no identicality of particulars. Things are counted as being of the same kind, so there is identicality of kind — Janus

Exactly. We invented the concept of ‘same kind’ in order to count, but same kind doesn’t exist in nature.

Why are drugs so alluring to some and growing in popularity amongst (quite a few) Americans? — Shawn

Well, at least with regard to psychedelics, for some they help to catalyze higher states of enlightenment. Here’s Timothy Leary’s account of his acid acid trip:

My previous psychedelic sessions had opened up sensory awareness, pushed consciousness out to the membranes. Psilocybin had sucked me down into nerve nets, into body organs, heart pulse, and air breath; had let me spiral down the DNA ladder of evolution to the beginning of life on this planet. But LSD was something different. Michael's heaping spoonful had flipped my consciousness into a dance of energy, where nothing existed except whirring vibrations and each illusory form was simply a different frequency.

It was the most shattering experience of my life. And through it all, sitting with his head cradled in his knees, was the architect of this enlightenment, the magician who had flicked the switch to this alchemical show, Michael, the trickster. The effects of the drug began to wear off by dawn. I was still higherthan ever before, but some structure was coming back. The flow of electronic vibrations was slowing, and I felt myself freezing into a mold plastic. There was a terrible sense of loss, of nostalgia for the radiant core of meaning.

I walked up to the Fergusons' room. They were feeling the same despair, ejected from paradise. I knelt before Flo with my head in herlap. Tears came down her eyes, and I found myself shaking with sobs.Why had we lost it? Why were we being reborn in these silly leather bodies with these trivial chessboard minds? For the rest of the morning I was in a daze, stunned by what had happened, trying to figure out what to do with these revelations, whatto do with life routines that were completely artificial.

I remember driving to my office in Cambridge the next day, still feeling a strange electric noise in my brain. Why did I return? Where had I lost the flow? Was it the result of fear, greed, past stupidities? And would I ever again break through to that other illusion, dance at the center of the great vibration dance? Then I realized what I was doing. I was imposing a pre-acid mental game on the revealed mystery of life. It all had to do with trust and acceptance.

It has been twenty years since that first LSD trip with Michael Hollingshead. I have never forgotten it. Nor has it been possible for me to return to the life I was leading before that session. I have never recovered from that ontological confrontation. I have never been able to take
myself, my mind, or the social world quite so seriously. Since that time I have been acutely aware that everything I perceive, everything within and around me, is a creation of my own consciousness. And that everyone lives in a neural cocoon of private reality. From that day I have never lost the sense that I am an actor, surrounded by characters, props, and sets for the comic drama being written in my brain.

I'm confused as to why you think this is an argument against solipsism or its' underlying observations.

You point out that the definition of 'I' or 'self' is unclear. I agree with this.

I think you are then making an (unstated) assumption that if we cannot define the strict meaning of words then arguments involving those words are meaningless and we shall all just give up. — Treatid

I was only introducing a commonly accepted definition of solipsism, which isn’t unclear at all, and wondering if it corresponds to your use of the word. And if it doesn’t, how does your use differ? You keep on referring to me my, I. Would you be amenable to getting rid of these terms and instead just describing a constantly changing center of activity that we mistakenly refer to as a ‘self’? What other things do you believe can be definitively said about this center of experiencing without having to dip into mathematics and logical axioms?

Can we say this center has memory , consciousness of a past, present and future? If we throw out the language of propositional logic and math , aren’t we still able to keep a range of neuro-psychological descriptions of human experiencing? Is your purpose in this thread simply to critique the assumed pre-eminent role of math and logic in the ascertaining of truth ( in which case you have a lot of company, not only in philosophy but in the social sciences)? Or is your aim also to critique what you understand to be the cutting edge of ideas in philosophy and the sciences ( in which case you run the risk of reinventing the wheel)?

The ability to cognize abstractions, such as mathematical truths, may be an evolved trait; however, the abstractions themselves are not products of evolution. Instead, they represent cases of exaptation, where a cognitive capacity evolved for one function is repurposed to engage with another: in this case, the realm of objective (or 'transjective') truths that transcend biological adaptation. (This is what I mean by 'transcending biology'.) It challenges the reductionist view that everything about us can be fully explained through the lens of biological adaptation. — Wayfarer

The most valuable idea buried within the biological concept of exaptation is that meanings , purposes and other living patterns of organization can be re-invented in ways that are not logically derivable from the previous schemes of organization. The limitation of the concept as it is usually employed is that it makes such inventiveness secondary to and derived from deterministic causal mechanisms. I think people slip into reductive determinism to ground process of change for the same reason that you want to ground human rationality in something that transcends or precedes exaptation. That is, if I were to propose a notion of exaltation not based on mechanisms of efficient causation, you would find it not grounded enough. Becoming, untethered from any conception of the right path, the true source, the objectively real, is just meaningless chaotic drift.

But not all relativistic philosophies of becoming see historical change as directionless from an ethical or empirical point of view. The direction is always toward the most intimate engagement with contextual circumstance that is possible via mindful skilled coping. The use of propositional, logical, mathematical axioms and conceptual abstractions flattens and conceals the intimacy of change in our perceived world , which reinvents itself just as continually as humans invent understandings to anticipate and cope with it. Our mathematical abstractions appear to ‘slow down’ the creative becoming of the world enough to make us convince ourselves that the world gives itself to us ‘naturally’ as transjective universals. The price we pay for such illusions is a world that is alternatively self-identical and arbitrary.

An inherent violence attaches to the becoming of the world in the extent to which change is construed as arbitrary. The perceived arbitrariness and externality of change is in turn a function of how we understand beings to BE in themselves as mathematically self-present.

I say that blame is not any more rationally justifiable in cases where harm is caused by humans than it is in cases where harm is caused by other animals or natural events. — Janus

I happen to agree with you on that, but just to make sure we’re on the same page, do think that any of the following cognitive assessments can be rationally justified, and if so , which ones and on what rational basis?

the cool, non-emotional, rational desire for accountability , condemnation, contempt, righteous indignation, perceiving the other as deliberately thoughtless, rude, careless, negligent, complacent, lazy, self-indulgent, malevolent, dishonest, narcissistic, malicious, perverse, inconsiderate, intentionally oppressive, anti-social, hypocritical, repressive or unfair, disrespectful, greedy.

Most philosophers find anger to be a rational assessment in certain situations. For instance, Robert Solomon argues that anger can be ‘right'. Striking his own balance between subjective relativism and objective rationalism, he says

“Anger, for example, is not just a burst of venom, and it is not as such sinful, nor is it necessarily a “negative” emotion. It can be “righteous,” and it can sometimes be right.”

Philosopher Jesse Prinz writes:

…we have strictures against killing innocent people; and we have strictures prescribing equal opportunity. These principles are grounded in reason and subject to rational debate. . But justice also requires passion. We don't coolly tabulate inequities—we feel outraged or indignant when they are discovered. Such angry feelings are essential; without anger, we would not be motivated to act....Rage can misdirect us when it comes unyoked from good reasoning, but together they are a potent pair. Reason is the rudder; rage propels us forward.

Existentialist philosopher John Russon offers:

“Anger can be unjustified, to be sure, and in that case it enacts a fundamentally distorted portrayal of the other. But anger can also be justified, and in that case it can be the only frame of mind in which the vicious and hateful reality of the other is truly recognized.”

The social constructionist Ken Gergen writes that anger has a valid role to play in social co-ordination “There are certain times and places in which anger is the most effective move in the dance.”

Eugene Gendlin, a phenomenological psychologist and philosopher allied with Heidegger, considers anger to be potentially adaptive. He says that one must attempt to reassess, reinterpret, elaborate the angering experience via felt awareness not in order to eliminate the feeling of anger but so that one's anger becomes

“fresh, expansive, active, constructive, and varies with changes in the situation”. “Anger may help handle the situation because it may make the other change or back away. Anger can also help the situation because it may break it entirely and thus give you new circumstances.” “ Anger is healthy, while resentment and hate are detrimental to the organism.“

Do you agree with any of these philosophers about the rational value of anger?

—recognition and thus the workability of cognition itself entails difference and similarity, which in turn entails diversity and kind and thus generalities and number — Janus

Recognition does involve difference and similarity, but number requires the concept of identity , the repetition of the exact same. We look at an aspect of the world and construe that aspect on the basis of ways in which it appears similar to previous events and differs from others. When we count 1,2,3 instances of a ‘this’, we assume that the categorical whole , the ‘this’ , of which we are counting instances ( apples, people, trees) , remains identical in its meaning for the duration of the counting. If the ‘this’ changes its meaning and became a new ‘this’ every increment of the counting we could only ever count one instance of it before having to start the count over. What allows us to enumerate is a convenient ignoring of the fact that similarity in the real world never means identity. So we invent the device of numeric identity, the exact same, which is very useful but at the same time covers over intricate changes in what is being counted.

As Heidegger expressed it:

“The same never coincides with the equal, not even in the empty indifferent oneness of what is merely identical...The same…is the belonging together of what differs, through a gathering by way of the difference. We can only say "the same" if we think difference.
“The most insidious manner of forgetting is the progressive "repetition" of the same. One says the same with a constantly new indifference; the mode of saying and interpreting changes.

John Vervaeke is completely on-board with the 4E approach - embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended by way of extra-cranial processes and structures. I am reading up on that and trying to understand it better. But he also advocates for a kind of modernised neoplatonism, and remains committed to natural science. He's not a post-modern theorist (although I'll look out for anything he might say about — Wayfarer

I would say that Vervaeke subscribes to what I would consider a more conservative variant of enactivism than do Gallagher, De Jaegher and Thompson. I agree that he is not a postmodernist, and that his approach is quite likely consonant with yours.

↪Joshs I disagree with everything you've written there, or at least find it all irrelevant to the question — Janus

You find it irrelevant to the question because you have paired down your definition of blame (strictly the product of sui generis will) so severely that most of the ways in which it is treated by contemporary psychologists and philosophers is off limits to the discussion.

As regards the contention that number is invented, this doesn’t account for the consilience between mathematics and nature, the subject of Eugene Wigner’s well-known essay The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. By abstracting from the observable and measurable properties of objects and their relations, many things have been discovered that would be otherwise unknowable. Wigner can't explain it, but he also doesn't attempt to explain it away. — Wayfarer

Mathematics only seems unreasonably effective because we don’t notice the sleight of hand we perform by forcing aspects of the world into idealized objects that persist identically and then apply mathematical calculations to these constructed idealities. Our invented axioms don’t represent a world, any more than our scientific theories represent a world. They enact a world by our inhabiting it , moving within it in a particular way, like an animal constructs a niche. We don’t say that the spider’s web or the bird’s nest is an unreasonably accurate representation of their world. We say that it produces a lived world unique to the animal , that it navigates in a specific normative way. Mathematics, science and technology are how we navigate our constructed world in ways that express how we build that world . We create these patterns of interaction in a back and forth with the environment within our bubble, and then exclaim in wonder how unreasonably precise the response of our niche is to the very patterns that constrain it to respond in that way.

Von Uexkill illustrated how creatures like us build a ‘bubble’ around us that we consider world. In the following, he takes us on a

stroll into unfamiliar worlds; worlds strange to us but known to other creatures, manifold and varied as the animals them­selves. The best time to set out on such an adventure is on a sunny day. The place, a flower-strewn meadow, humming with insects, fluttering with but­terflies. Here we may glimpse the worlds of the lowly dwellers of the meadow. To do so, we must first blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around each
creature to represent its own world, filled with the perceptions which it alone knows. When we ourselves then step into one of these bubbles, the familiar meadow is transformed. Many of its colourful features disappear,
others no longer belong together but appear in new relationships. A new world comes into being. Through the bubble we see the world of the bur­rowing worm, of the butterfly, or of the field mouse: the world as it appears
to the animals themselves, not as it appears to us. This we may call the phe­nomenal world or the self-world of the animal.

The only difference between us and other animals is that we continually produce new bubbles , new niches, via new technologies. It’s not a question of the human subject positing a world as an epistemological knowing, but the active engagement of the human organism with its surrounding according to stable patterns of interaction which define the person as a living system and at the same time define its world. To be alive means to produce a normative pattern which maintains its dynamic stability in changing conditions. Our sciences enact ,through the feed forward and feedback reciprocity between our actions on and response from the world , a way of navigating through it in a consistently anticipatory manner.

A scientific, mathematical or technological niche( paradigm) have a certain contingent stability, what Kuhn called normal science. During this period of stability we can predict the response of the world to our observations of it in precisely logical ways through our mathematical schemes. But when we replace one niche, paradigm, worldview for another, the old logical relations either become irrelevant or we change the sense of the concepts they refer to (Newtonian vs Relativistic).

I wonder if there is a confusion here between counting and conceptualising counting. In many cultures counting begins with the human body, and the names for certain numbers correspond to different parts of the body - hence, digits. Some of the names for numbers have magical or (un)lucky qualities, or associations with non-numbers.

Then it would be in algebra, the generalisation of counting, that one arrives at 'same thing different time'. But perhaps this is what you meant. — mcdoodle

I was doing a rather static analysis of a contemporary thinking of number, but a historical account would support my argument that them concept of number is invented, and thus there were many concepts of number that appeared over the past centuries. As I said in an earlier post , the modern notion was invented in bits and pieces over time , in different ways in different cultures.

Science is more fundamental than scientific paradigms, but science is also secondary in itself. It presupposes things like sense data, an intelligible world, etc. It is a reorganization of what is pre-given in order to arrive at abstract knowledge — Leontiskos

Heidegger made a similar argument, claiming that science ‘doesn’t think’. What he meant was that it rests on metaphysical presuppositions that it can’t examine. Husserl praised the human sciences for abandoning the causality of the natural sciences in favor of intentional analysis, but argues that this intentional methodology remained grounded in unexamined naturalist assumptions.

.. perhaps it will turn out later that all externality, even that of the entire inductive nature, physical and even psychophysical, is only an externality constituted in the unity of communicative personal experience, is thus only something secondary, and that it therefore requires a reduction to a truly essential internality.” (Phenomenological Psychology)

the most fundamental and essential realities are always indivisible or irreducible. The Atomists say that nothing makes sense without atoms, but they do not complain that atoms cannot be further analyzed; they recognize it as an irresistible conclusion. The spat between the idealists and the materialists is a spat premised upon the search for a unified theory, where there is only one irreducible reality. — Leontiskos

The most fundamental and essential reality for Husserl was transcendental subjectivity, but the essence of this ‘internal’ subjectivity was an irreducible interaction between subjective and objective poles of an intentional act, continually remaking the nature of self and world in their reciprocal dance. For Husserl, the pure ego functions as nothing but an empty zero point or center of activity. Heidegger’s position is more radical. The interaction between self and world is not the function of a reflective consciousness being affected by a world, but a self continually reinvented by a world which transcends it. In both Husserl and Heidegger, the most fundamental and irreducible reality is relational becoming.The freedom in this becoming is to be found neither in a solipsist ‘inside’ nor in an empirical ‘outside’ but in the way that a self is continually exposed to and changed by an irreducible outside , a radical alterity that cannot be dominated by a pre-defined will.

Lee Braver speaks about this outside in terms of

a reality unformed by human concepts, when a true beyond touches us, sending shivers through our conceptual schemes, shaking us out of any complacent feeling-at-home.”

Building a bridge, or making a sculpture out of clay, involves a fine-grained sensitivity to context such that one’s desires, intentions and perceptions adjust themselves to the way that what is at stake and at issue is responsive to the world that talks back to
us from beyond our own resources. A common criticism of Idealist notions of that will is that while it gives us the freedom to think what we want , it sees wanting and desiring as already within the control of the willing subject rather than it being the case that we can’t choose to want what we want but find ourselves desiring. My question to you is what, if any, substative properties and attributes do you see as irreducibly associated with the will, properties unaffected by exposure to an outside?

As I've said, fundamental realities cannot be explained by secondary realities. Numbers are not explained by addition, because addition presupposes numbers. That we think everything should be scientifically or "logically" analyzable is a symptom of our intellectual biases. Science and logic both presuppose free will, they don't explain it — Leontiskos

This is not to say that science and logic deal only with secondary realities. That is , an aspect of what science does, the philosophical aspect that allows it to move from one scheme to alternative schemes , frees it from remaining stuck within any particular secondary logic. Meanwhile, there are primary philosophical logics (Hegel’s dialectic, Husserl’s transcendental logic) that describe fundamental realities. There is no inherent limitation in science that should prevent it from addressing fundamental realities, only provisional limitations of the same sort that limit particular philosophies. I would say that the scientific approaches Hanover has in mind don’t destroy freedom in nature (quantum indeterminacy) , but question the coherence of certain unitary notions of the will. I would also question those unitary notions, preferring to see the will as a differential system. But unlike Hanover I don’t see this system as operating via the unfreedom of efficient causality.

It is sometimes said that the natural numbers are objectively real, but I don’t agree. I think they’re ‘transjectively’ real - the same for all who can count, but only perceptible to one capable of counting. — Wayfarer

They are the same for all who can count because that is the meaning of numeric unit, ‘same thing different time’. There is no experience in nature that conforms to ‘same thing different time’. In order to understand the empty, generic concept of ‘same thing different time’, one must start by noticing multiplicities, and then separating out particulars within such multiplicities. There is no concept of number yet to be found at this point in the process of going from multiplicity to the deliberate noticing and separating out of particulars. In order to arrive at the concept of the number unit, one must turn away from the meaningful world of continually changing senses by inventing a new notion, that of the empty, context and content-free particularity, a particularity which can be returned to again and again as ‘same thing different time’ because it has no content, stands for nothing other than a placemark. It is not just that the apples we count are never identical to each other in their attributes, but that the very meaning of the category of ‘apple’ changes as we move from one ‘apple’ to the next in our enumeration. In order to count, we mist ignore this slippage of sense, not only of attributes of the particulars , but of the meaning of the category as a persisting identity. Nothing about the world we perceive gives us the notion of identity of content, which is why we can only count by ignoring the actual
content.

Whatever we look at in the world, or imagine in our minds, changes in such a way that every difference in degree is simultaneously a difference in kind. It is necessary for the invention of the concept of enumeration that we ignore this about actual experience. Such a strange notion of ignoring and flattening the real world had to be invented, and invented in order to accomplish specific purposes. To say that numbers are the same for all who can count is merely to say that all who can count have already invented the concept of identical sameness, since counting depends on that concept. We have become so accustomed to the idea that the notion of repeated identicality is built into the universe that we forget how peculiar an invention it was, the imposition of a subjective idealization onto our experience ofnthe world that precisely ignores , prescinds from , the fabric of reality in order to create the illusion of pure difference in degree that is not at the same time a difference in kind.

…without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the wholly invented world of the unconditioned and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world through numbers, people could not live.” (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)

I guess that debate would focus on whether number and logic were invented or 'discovered'. — Tom Storm

Like other empirical knowledge, we invent these schemes and then discover their usefulness in our dealings with the world. The fact that we find them useful does not make them part of the fabric of reality, any more than our other invented technologies are a part of the fabric of reality.

Do you have a specific reason why we should disregard solipsism and the observations that lead to it? — Treatid

I can think of reasons to disregard the following definition of solipsism from Enclyclopedia Brittanica:

In philosophy, solipsism is an extreme form of subjective idealism that denies that the human mind has any valid ground for believing in the existence of anything but itself. The British idealist F.H. Bradley, in Appearance and Reality (1893), characterized the solipsistic view as follows

“I cannot transcend experience, and experience must be my experience. From this it follows that nothing beyond my self exists; for what is experience is its [the self’s] states.”

My critique centers on the Idealist conception of self expressed in the definition. If we must remain skeptical about the existence of everything but the sense data we experience, what kinds of presuppositions are invoked in talk of an ‘I’, a self that has these experiences, and where do these presuppositions come from? Do they come from experience or do they force a certain account onto experience, a certain interpretation of sense data wherein a self remains absolutely fixed as the subject of experience, reflecting back on itself as self-identical over time?

If all sense data are fundamentally in a state of changeable, interrelational becoming, then isnt this also true of the self, subject, ego, I? Does any notion of self make any sense outside of its inextricable relations with others? Plenty of philosophical positions deconstruct this notion of the absolute unchanging self in favor of a self which is constructed though social interaction. For them the self is a continually changing product of these interactions rather than an unchanging substance. You can also check out this ongoing thread:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15267/concept-of-no-self-in-buddhism

I propose that universals such as the principles of logic and natural numbers have an ontological status that transcends individual cognitive processes. They are not mind-dependent in the sense that they do not rely on being conceived by any particular mind to exist. Instead, these universals are fundamental aspects of the fabric of reality that reason can discern and understand. — Wayfarer

But how can number and logic be aspects of the fabric of reality when what we think of today as number and logic were invented bit by bit over the course of cultural history? I will go so far as to predict that at some point in the future we will replace numeric calculation and propositional logic with alternative technological languages.

↪Joshs I disagree; blame is attendant upon the idea that the person really could have done otherwise; it is based on a libertarian notion of free will which is entrenched in the western psyche — Janus

It doesn’t have to be a libertarian notion of free will. All one needs in order to justify the concept of blame is to believe that habits of thought can become ‘sticky’, that we can become entrenched in a way of thinking such that it becomes self-reinforcing and blinds us to other possibilities. We get angry and blame when we believe we can get that person ‘unstuck’ , make them see the error of their ways, force or cajole them into an empathy or relational intimacy they have fallen away from. When you raise your voice in anger at someone you know in order to shake them out of their complacency, are you indulging in a fantasy that they have libertarian free will, or is it because you have discovered that it often achieves its effect?

Blame assumes the freedom of arbitrary influences and temptations , or stubborn inertia , acting upon volition. It does t need to assume the will is hermetically sealed within itself. And even when one does believe in libertarian free will , this can still be seen as the influence of outside ‘demons’ acting on the will in evil ways.

.Blame discovers the arbitrary and capricious in a behavioral system, wherever it is to be found. If we are a biological determinist we blame heredity. If we are a behaviorist we blame the environment. If we are a Freudian we blame unconscious impulses. But regardless of what we blame, when we find ourselves getting angry with another person, we believe, however their motivational demons line up ,they can be responsible for showing contrition and mending their ways.

The way to transcend the need for blame is not to substitute for free will a determinism in which we are conditioned by forces beyond our control. This only displaces the target of blame. Rather, it would require believing that human beings are intending sense-makers whose thinking can never be arbitrary, subject to wayward demons and influences. But it would also require that thinking can never be deliberately unethical. I know of no philosophical position that accepts both of these propositions, so in some sense all philosophy is a thinking of blame.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, Deleuze says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fundamental unit of the universe is a relationship.

The universe is a network of relationships that changes.

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

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

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

We label the things Relationships. — Treatid

Kind of like this from physicist Karen Barad?

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

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

Or this from Deleuze and Heidegger?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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