It seems to me that the confusion of primordial underpinnings with science mostly come about by philosophers, including us, who come up with philosophical positions which aren't consistent with what we know from observation, including science. One prime example of this is the whole hard problem of consciousness. Some say that it is a problem that will never, can never, be resolved by a scientific approach. When I describe to them the kind of work psychologists, including cognitive scientists, are doing, they dismiss it out of hand — T Clark

Yes, I don’t believe there is any domain philosophy tackles
that science can’t venture into. I think we agree it’s just a matter of style of expression. The move from philosophical to scientific language is toward a thinner, more conventionalized and less synthetic account of the same or similar phenomena (Nietzsche vs Freud, Merleau-Ponty vs embodied cogntivism).

Also, you point out that some say "psychological concepts like ‘mental’ , ‘physical’ , ‘value’ and belief’ are confused derivatives of more fundamental truths." I would put it differently. I think I can make the case that philosophical concepts like "truth," "ontology," "objective reality," and "morality," are high-falutin, often confusing, ways of talking about human thinking and experience. — T Clark

I would add that empirical concepts are in their own way ‘high-fallutin’. But what does this mean? To me it means using terminology which doesn’t overtly take into account its linkage to meanings from other aspects of culture. The more richly and explicitly we reveal these interconnections, the less high-fallutin the language becomes.

Where I think I'd disagree -- I'm not sure how to differentiate, but I feel that both philosophy and science articulate their presuppositions in a rich and comprehensive manner. This is part of why they look similar. — Moliere

Give me any scientific theory, and I’ll show you how philosophical questions can reveal the metaphysical presuppositions making its assertions intelligible. This job of uncovering metaphysical commitments is not something that the sciences normally engage in , since by their nature they take for granted such presuppositions in order to do their work. This is what I mean by richness and comprehensiveness. Science by its nature stops short of exposing its underground plumbing.

And what you're inclined to say about what goes on down there, and about what people are doing who study what's on the ground, it's more and more likely to be bullshit, something that sounds good to you, all alone, a thousand feet above them, when you can no longer see what's down there in any detail — Srap Tasmaner

I could point out the danger of not seeing the forest for the trees by spending all one’s time on the ground. You could point out the opposite danger of losing sight of the grounding facts by seeing them from too great a distance. But does the philosophical-empirical distinction have to be understood in terms of breadth vs detail metaphors?
Dont the best philosophers through history also have a comprehensive knowledge of the sciences? For them, isn’t it less a question of sacrificing detail for the sake of breadth than of enriching the understanding of the details by supplying what is hidden from their gaze, the underground plumbing so to speak? Let’s take Husserl’s method of bracketing, for instance. By putting out of commission our knowledge of the detailed facts of science, he stays as close as possible to those details, while burrowing beneath them to reveal the presuppositions animating their sense.

You describe philosophical thought as united by a "mode of discourse," that features certain attributes, whereas psychology is characterized by "a set of presuppositions." This is quite similar to an idea Leontiskos was talking about earlier, that the lack of presuppositions may be what makes phil. unique. Are you also trying to make this distinction? — J

No, I don’t believe there can be philosophy without presuppositions. Philosophers arise out of a contingent culture which shapes the sense of the questions they ask and how they interpret the answers. For me the distinction between philosophy and psychology has only to do with the how richly and comprehensively those presuppositions are articulated.

I think it is reasonable to say that philosophy is the study of thought, beliefs, knowledge, value, which are mental phenomena - the structure and process of the conscious mind. As such, it is a branch of psychology.
— T Clark

Also, are you arguing that there is not a philosophy of mind and a psychology of mind? Given my position, why would that be a contradiction — T Clark

In my view, philosophy in its most general sense refers to a mode of discourse melding comprehensiveness, unity, and explicitness. One can make any kind of thinking in any disciple more or less philosophical by moving in one direction or another along this spectrum. So a psychologist can become more philosophical, more ‘meta’, by moving from cognitive psychology to philosophy of mind. Does this mean that philosophy is a branch of psychology? No, because there are many philosophers who define psychology as an empirical discipline, the scientific study of mental phenomena in all its guises and levels of focus ( cognition, emotion, sociality, biological ecology, neuroscience, genetics, etc).

What binds all these domains of study together as psychological is a shared acceptance of a set of presuppositions concerning what it means to be empirical, scientific, objective , natural and real. Those philosophers who don’t consider their mode of inquiry as belonging to psychology, who believe that disciplines like philosophy of mind (and writers like Daniel Dennett) ‘psychologize’ philosophy, argue that psychology forces us to confuse the primordial underpinnings of being and existence with the contingent results of a science. They may argue psychological concepts like ‘mental’ , ‘physical’ , ‘value’ and belief’ are confused derivatives of more fundamental truths that no longer belong to psychology, but are instead ontologically prior to it.

What you describe could also be taken as showing that philosophy is a trap: inquiry is in danger of getting stuck there, no longer producing knowledge. (Which, let's be honest ... — Srap Tasmaner

You feel that philosophy is longer producing knowledge? How long has this state of affairs been the case?

There are many other important and useful discourses besides the rational/philosophical. They may even lead to vital truths. — J

Even more to the point, there are many other useful
discourses WITHIN philosophy besides that of rationally generated consensus and the primacy of rationality itself.

Eventually, the chemist himself will have to reach for physics, because while reduction is a myth, and the laws of physics are not enough to do biochemistry, biochemistry is constrained by physics and you can eventually reach a level where the explanation for what happens and what doesn't comes not from chemistry but from physics. — Srap Tasmaner

It’s easy to say that in theory the higher order sciences reduce to an order below them, and all reduce to physics, but the reason this does not work out in practice is that the complexity of the phenomena which make the higher order sciences ‘higher’ in the first place tend to lead to innovations in theory which then eventually lead to an adjustment of the basic concept of the lower level science. For instance, until recently physics notoriously ignored the central importance of time for understanding the nature of physical phenomena. It took the influence of the ideas of evolutionary biology to trigger a transformation in thinking within physics.

I'm sure there are more versions. Add on if you like.
— frank
Neat topic.

Better to stop at Anscombe — Banno

Have you read Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self?

↪tim wood I feel your pain, like half of America and about 90% of Australia, I'm vastly dissappointed by the re-election of DJT — Wayfarer

You may want to think twice about that percentage.

https://this.deakin.edu.au/culture/trumps-australia-why-are-more-australians-supporting-trump

philosophers have no business offering opinions within a scientific discourse
—

Dope. — Srap Tasmaner

How about opinions that directly challenge the presuppositions of a science? Heidegger’s ideas about emotion, and Merleau-Ponty and Husserl’s models of perception were decades ahead of the psychological sciences. Have you ever read Phenomenology of Perception?

agree that philosophy begins with a problem or with questions that need to be asked. I suppose amongst the problematics of Platonism was the nature of knowledge, the good, the true, the beautiful, the just, and such large and difficult-to-define questions. But also notice the significance of aporia in those dialogues - questions which can't be answered and for which no easy solution presents itself — Wayfarer

Notice further that framing the essential questions of philosophy in terms of the nature of knowledge, the good, the true, the beautiful and the just already poses the questions by way of a pre-understanding of what these concepts mean and constrains the direction of their answer, such as whether and in what sense they lead to aporia, and how to interpret the meaning of the aporia.

It's yet another field where we the plebs must defer to the experts, like we already do with scientists, doctors, lawyers etc. — goremand

Except that these days we’re beginning to discover that such supposed ‘experts’ get their expertise by dipping into cultural practices that we all participate in, so the knowledge they would like you to think to exclusive to their special elite is in fact a specialized version of knowledge already circulating widely through the larger society.

In any case, I stand by the initial point - that the absence of presuppositions is what was intended by epochē, both in Husserl and in the original skeptics. — Wayfarer

I’m not denying that. I would say that there is no such thing as a presuppositionless philosophy. If philosophy begins with questioning, it is also the case that to question is to already have in mind the matter about which one is inquiring. What opens up the space within which the matter appears as intelligible is prior to philosophy, and in relation to which philosophy has no more claim than do literature, poetry, music or science.

↪Joshs Probably not obscurantist enough for him to blather about — Wayfarer

He only seems obscurantist because you don’t understand him. That’s the curse of great philosophy. It takes hard work to gain the rewards.

Isn't there a relationship between not entertaining presuppositions, and the epochē of ancient skepticism, revived by Husserl? Recall that ancient and Pyrrhonian skepticism differed from modern skepticism by simply 'withholding assent from that which is not evident' and strictly attending to the quality of phenomena as they appear. — Wayfarer

Yes, and Heidegger critiqued Husserlian phenomenology for harboring its own presuppositions at the very moment that it was invoking a return to the ‘things themselves’.

Scientific theories can and do in fact put into question presuppositions passed down through the history of philosophy.
— Joshs

They do, and the issue here is the nature of how they "put into question" those presuppositions. Is it possible to do this without invoking further philosophy -- as opposed to some allegedly pure scientific approach? That's what I'm doubting (and I bet you'd agree), though as I say, I don't think most scientists are engaged in some nefarious conspiracy to demolish philosophy with bad arguments. They're just doing their thing, and rarely get the chance to reflect on their presuppositions. — J

I think what we’re talking about here isn’t a dichotomy between something called science and something called philosophy , but a spectrum of explication. Philosophy isn’t a content of meaning to be invoked or not. It’s a dimension of discursive style which pertains to the degree of conventionality, richness, synthetic unity in a description . Any mode of explication can be more or less philosophical depending on where it locates itself on this spectrum.

And I would say that these cases like the neo-Freudian rely on philosophical thinking to debunk philosophical discourse, and therefore result in a kind of performative contradiction.
— Leontiskos

Yes, though many an honest scientist is probably unaware of doing this until it's pointed out. — J

Scientific theories can and do in fact put into question presuppositions passed down through the history of philosophy. I suggest that it is mostly these specific philosophical presuppositions that psychologists , biologists or scientists in other fields are attacking when they critique philosophy. There are exceptions, such as Stephen Hawking’s blanket dismissal of philosophy in general, as if the past limitations in philosophical speculation precluded any new kind of philosophizing. That new brand of philosophy would only be ‘higher’ than the disprove of theoretical physics in the sense that it is able to enrich it , and even surpass it, by making explicit what is only implicit in the scientific theory. But then who’s to say that explicit thinking is ‘higher’ than implicit thinking? Does literature offer higher truths than music?

Another way to put this is that science isn’t going to tell us what thought or meaning or understanding are. Thus, “it is misleading to talk of thinking as of a ‘mental activity’.”
— Antony Nickles
This is an extra ordinary remark. Thinking is a paradigm of a mental activity. Surely, what he needs to argue is that mental activities, in particular thinking, is not the kind of activity it suggests, because of the contrast with physical activities. Is doing a calculation with pencil and paper a mental or a physical activity? — Ludwig V

Wittgenstein, like Heidegger, is substituting a practice theory for a cognitivist account. Thinking isn’t in the head, it is in the interactive performances that co-determine both the person and their world via our patterns of engagement with each other.

↪Joshs - This is elsewhere referred to as deautomatization — Leontiskos

The use of magnets? Interesting.

There might be something specifically autistic about what Baggs is doing, but the phenomenology doesn't reduce to the autistic cognitive style which promotes stimming — fdrake

One way researchers have attempted to simulate savant skills in neurotypicals is by applying powerful magnets to the brain to impede more rapid processing of complex stimuli. Without the ‘distraction’ of this more complex mode of processing, it was found that subjects began to do the sorts of things savants excel at, in the way that savants do them, by bypassing the ‘normal’ conceptual routes. I suspect that non-autistics can shift into a state of mind that favors a stimming-type intensity of processing by a variety of means, such as hallucingens, which can predispose one form of processing over others , and sleep deprivation, which impairs concentration on high-level cognitive tasks. Perhaps Baggs was misdiagnosed as autistic, but her cognitive challenges nevertheless
enabled and reinforced the pre-conditions for robust stimming.

Indeed.
— Joshs

That strikes me as incredibly reductive. The specificity of Baggs' conduct has been dissolved into a broader glut of sensorially infused and creative sociality. — fdrake

Incredible indeed , oh the horror of it all. No, I was just too lazy to spell out the kinds of differences between autistic and neuro-typical cognition that can explain the preference for stimming on the part of autistics. Such as the difficulties the former have in rapid processing of complex stimuli. We all have to learn at our own pace , and that pace is dictated by a balance between novelty and familiarity. There is a direct connection between the less intense exposure to novelty set by stimming and the kinds of savant feats performed by the likes of Daniel Tammet, who can articulate pi to 22,00 places, which he does not via number crunching but by the unfolding of an imaginary landscape.

Reductively analyzing stimming behavior in terms of arousal mechanisms misses the creative sense-making motivation behind it. Stimming is not a thermostatic mechanism, its pleasure comes from learning to organize a chaotic hodgepodge of sensations into regular patterns.
— Joshs

Didn't you say the same holds for everything we do though — fdrake

Indeed.

being mesmerized by the changing visual patterns of fireworks, ocean waves, a roaring fire.
— Joshs

Those ones probably don't count as stimming. Since they're not repetitious in the context of the stimmer's life. — fdrake

One doesn’t simply passively observe such patterns, but actively engages with them by moving one’s eyes and head to intervene and enhance the action in the direction of anticipatory sense-making.

Just for clarity, by hypersensitivity I mean a much lower than average ability to down regulate arousal associated with that sensation. That is, a hypersensitivity to a sense engenders states of enduring and heightened arousal associated with that sense — fdrake

Reductively analyzing stimming behavior in terms of arousal mechanisms misses the creative sense-making motivation behind it. Stimming is not a thermostatic mechanism, its pleasure comes from learning to organize a chaotic hodgepodge of sensations into regular patterns.

I crawl around on the floor, and lie on the floor wriggling around, at least once a month. It absolutely makes you look at the world differently and allows you to tap into perspectives you have neglected since childhood. — I like sushi

My condo is carpeted so I can do most things on the floor rather than on chairs. I eat dinner, watch tv and internet , and often sleep on the floor. That may not be related to ‘stimming’, but people don’t appreciate how many activities of neurotypicals qualify (fidgeting, rubbing one’s chin in thought, being mesmerized by the changing visual patterns of fireworks, ocean waves, a roaring fire.)

The word varies, the object does not. — Manuel

I’ll just say that the passages Antony had us read offers an alternative to the realist thinking implied by the idea of an object in itself.

There seems to be a lack of necessity between our using words like "red", "book" and so on, and assuming there has to be something in the world which is "captured" by these words. But we seem to act as if this does happen; that a "book" is necessarily means that thing made of think wooden pulp with letter in it — Manuel

That there is nothing in the world ‘caputured’ by a word doesn’t mean that the word’s meaning isnt of the world. We could instead say that the use of a word produces a kind of world, or form of life. Rather than thinking of words as inside the head (subjective feeling,etc) and things as in the world (neutral, value-free) and meaning as the fit between them, we can think of words as already of the world, as practices engaging interactively with it.

What do the sensations enact? — fdrake

A sensation, as a figure against a background , enacts a change in that background, a new dimension of sense. I take ’s analysis of word symbols as also applying to sensations. Recognizing a sensation is like using a word. In both cases, we are not simply hooking up a symbol with a mental process, but transforming ourselves by being affected by something in the world.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/943241

Were you meaning to construe the sensations as symbols? — fdrake

If I recognize a visual pattern as a a unitary object of some sort , I am construing it conceptually. Does this mean that the elements of the image are symbols referring to the recognized meaning? Not exactly. I don’t think they refer so much as enact. I think the same is true of words.

All perception is conceptual. This means that we don’t hear acoustic frequencies, we hear the train whistle. Furthermore the meaning of that train whistle is linked to its relevance within a larger mesh of involvements that define our interests in a given context of purposeful activity. The whistle signifies for us, it is significant, meaningful only in relation to our larger concerns. We are used to thinking of language as communication with other persons. Of course, we also use language to communicate with ourselves And there are many kinds of languages we can use, such as music , visual art, dance, etc. An autistic can create a sort of art by interacting with the physical surroundings and with their body, producing sensations that they sculpt into intricate patterns by which they communicate with themselves. It s a language of thought using sensation rather than verbals symbols.

I do not find any value in working for professors whose only concern in life is the furtherance of objective truth accompanied by a crusade against people who are of the opinion that "wrong understanding" is a thing — KrisGl

Well, in me you have a kindred spirit, but you will be hard-pressed to find more than a tiny handful of contributors to this forum who endorse anything other than some variant of realism.

↪Joshs From own experience I can confirm it is absolutely possible to live in the moment. That is, without a notion of past and future and without any thoughts. I also know from own experience what flow is, that is another state of mind.

What I see in your answer is that it is written very theoretically — Carlo Roosen

Yes, this is what they call philosophy. I’m glad you are able to draw from your own experience but there are now things called ‘books’, and quite a lot of these have been written in recent years in philosophy , psychology, neuroscience and related fields on the subject of consciousness. There is even a journal called Consciousness Studies. Exposing yourself to some of this ‘theory’ may protect you from reinventing the wheel.

Throw a dice or a coin, and cover it with your hand before you see what it shows. Then observe your state of mind, not knowing the result, while you know the answer is there, in "fundamental reality" as well as "in the future". All I want is that you confirm my model with a real-life experience. Then look at the dice or coin, and note how the answer becomes "conceptual reality" as well as "past". Most likely you missed the 'now', the moment you saw it, that is an advanced level.

I am pointing to a way of looking you can no longer find in today's western philosophy. But it is simple and crucial. I call it "verifyable". That means, things cannot be proven in objective (3rd person) terms. But they can easily be confirmed by each person individually (1st person). Just take the step of actually doing the experiment, it doesn't work if you perform the experiment in your mind.

Eastern philosophy is where you can find more on this, although it is rather vague. Try the "Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle, if you can handle that. — Carlo Roosen

If we truly live in the moment, we would experience absolutely nothing. A single experienced moment of time has three parts. It consists of the immediate past that forms a piece of the now, and the present event which occurs into that just past. A single ‘now’ also includes an anticipation into the next moment. If the immediate past were not a part of the now we wouldn’t be able to enjoy something like music, because the current note would have nothing to connect it to the just past note. We could t perceive anything in our world because most of what we see, hear, touch and smell in an instant comes from memory. We wouldnt have joys and hopes and pleasure because these are about how the present fulfills the past and points desiringly to the next present.

I don’t think inner peace is a matter of living in the moment , since th very idea of the moment is incoherent without its being part of a triadic structure of past-present-future which all occur simultaneously in what we call an instant of time. I think the key to satisfaction is in how harmoniously we anticipate beyond the moment.

The psychologist George Kelly made anticipation the very cornerstone of his psychology. In the following passage , he answers to the claim that the goal should be to live in the moment.

“For example, what about those rare and delectable hours when we can lie in the grass and look up at the fleecy summer clouds? Do we not then take life, savoring each moment as it comes without rudely trying to outguess it? Does one not feel very much alive on such occasions? Certainly! But this, too, is an anticipatory posture. To be sure, it is not the frantic apprehension of popping little events. It is rather a composed anticipation of a slowly drifting universe of great and benign proportions.”

Notice that when many talk about being in the moment , they equate this with being in the ‘flow’, but a flow isn’t about isolated, disconnected moments, it’s about experiencing them as linked to each other in a smooth, harmonious , meaningful way.

I’ve learned that the principle is called ‘relevance realization’ or ‘the salience landscape.’ It’s a guiding principle for all organic life. But self-aware rational beings might have requirements beyond those of other life-forms - think Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Other organisms are not able to consider the nature of existence in the way h.sapiens is, so questions of truth or falsehood don’t arise as part of their ‘salience landscape’. — Wayfarer

It’s true that most philosophers make qualitative distinctions between human and non-human mental processes. For instance, Joseph Rouse, who embraces Barad’s agential realism, argues that non-human animals have what he calls one-dimensional normativity, an ability to organize their thinking intentionally on the basis of normative goals. But for any given species, the overarching goals don’t change over the course of their life, so the only meaning of correctness or incorrectness for them is survival of their way of life. To reset their goals they would need the capacity for two-dimensional conceptual normativity, which only humans have.

Most organisms act to maintain and reproduce their lineage through ongoing responsiveness to life-relevant features of what thereby becomes their biological environment. Con-ceptually articulated ways of life are two-dimensional in the deeper sense that they are oriented not only toward continually maintaining their biological lineage but also toward determining what that way of life is and will be. This sense of two-dimensionality is “deeper” in that it enables those organisms to differentiate how they take their environment to be from how it is.

I think this is the latest version of ‘man the rational animal’ , and given how the supposed gap between human and non-human mental capabilities has had to be continually adjusted lower over the years, I suspect that Rouse’s distinction will eventually prove to be untenable.

Thanks. Looking forward to it.

We’ve talked a lot on TPF recently about thinking and being – not just Irad Kimhi’s book of that title, but the larger issue of how thought mirrors reality. Does the Law of Non-Contradiction state a logical truth? a truth about how things must be in the world? or, somehow, both? neither? — J

I take it Richard Rorty’s book ‘Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature’ didn’t leave much of an impression on you.

But to me that requires the existence of the kind of agency that only begins to appear with organic life (by no means only conscious agency.) That is the reason I'm open to biosemiosis but not to pansemiosis. — Wayfarer

I think whether and how living and non-living processes can be integrated within a single overarching framework is secondary to the kind of model we adopt to integrate mind , body and world within a framework that overcomes the dualism implied by the hard problem. Agential realism doesn’t eliminate all distinctions between the living and the non-living, or between human cognition and living self-organization in general. Some phenomenologists , unlike agential realists, reduce the physical and the material to the living consciousness (Henry, Husserl), whereas Heidegger famously said that humans have world, but animals are poor in world and rocks have no world.

In Thompson’s Mind in Life book, he writes approvingly of Pattee’s approach, so my question is to what extent your thinking , or Donald Hoffman’s thinking, is on the same page as Pattee and Thompson with regard to the relation between mind, body and world, and to Thompson’s biological panpsychism. I think Hoffman learns the wrong lessons from evolutionary theory. He says that the fitness payoff function of evolution contains no information about reality ‘as it is’, so the cognizing subject remains on the appearance ( or ‘illusion ‘ as he call it) side of the appearance-reality distinction, thanks to the gimmick of evolution. I don’t know about Pattee, but Thompson would never describe sense-making in these dualistic terms. Sense-making isnt the result of an arbitrarily produced evolutionary mechanism that just happens to be adaptive for survival, but instead is based on the the fundamental living principle of self-organization To be a living system is to maintain a normative pattern of interacting with an environment in the midst of changing conditions. Sense-making is about pragmatically relevant actions , not concordance with ‘reality as it is’, whatever that’s supposed to mean. This doesn’t make what sense-making reveals as an illusion, or mere appearance as opposed to the really real. It shows us that this is what ‘reality as it is’ IS in itself.

Self-replication requires an epistemic cut between self and non-self, and between subject and object.

Self-replication requires a distinction between the self that is replicated and the non-self that is not replicated. The self is an individual subject that lives in an environment that is often called objective, but which is more accurately viewed biosemiotically as the subject’s Umwelt or world image. This epistemic cut is also required by the semiotic distinction between the interpreter and what is interpreted, like a sign or a symbol. In physics this is the distinction between the result of a measurement – a symbol – and what is being measured – a material object. — Howard Pattee

If we compare Pattee’s take on the autonomy of self against its world (‘epistemic cut’) with Thompson’s concept of embodied autonomy as ‘operational closure’, a number of differences emerge. For one thing , Pattee’s distinction between interpreter and interpreted , between cognizer and environment, doesn’t seem to see this relation as reciprocally causal such that the Umwelt is not only defined by the cognizer , but through exchanges between interpreter and world both are continually redefined. This doesn’t lend itself to any neatly defined epsitemic cut on the order of a statistical boundary like a Markov blanket.

Enactivists assert a strong notion of world-involvement,
i.e., processes in the environment play more than informational roles in the consti­tution and actualization of life and mind . To enact a world of significance is to engage in actual acts, which are material events with spreading consequences that are both world-changing and agent-changing. Environmental and biological/cognitive processes are mutually enabled and mutually constituted. They interpenetrate at all scales and they co­ordinate across scales.

Historicity and the co-constitution of organism and environment are internally related in the enactive approach. Concerns about the conservation of organization are mostly linked to the self-production requirement of autopoiesis (the regen­eration of the conditions that continuously give rise to the operationally closed network of processes making up the organism). Concerns about barriers, bound­aries, and in general about an organism’s relation to its environment are mostly linked to the condition of self-distinction in the definition of autopoiesis. From an enactive perspective, self-distinction and self-production are dialectically re­lated, that is, they are mutually dependent, though distinct, mo­ments of autopoiesis. You cannot have one set of processes and not the other as long as the organism lives, yet the processes are not the same. All processes subserving self-distinction are themselves products of self-production

With respect to the Evan Thompson quote, the way I interpret that is in line with phenomenology - it aims to avoid dualistic categorisation by avoiding reduction to purely physical or purely mental. part of 'healing the split' caused by mind-body dualism. But I don't think that supports any form of materialism — Wayfarer

What writers like Thompson, Barad and Deleuze mean by ‘material’ is quite different than the way it is meant in causal reductionism. Materiality has to do with discursive practices , and discourse isn't limited to linguistic practices. Materiality is discursive in the sense that it consists of reciprocal acts of affecting and being affected that form normative systems. For Thompson, material interactions between cognizing agent and environment are about the concrete ways that each defines the other through patterns of exchanges.

But he still differentiates living from non-living right at the outset. 'The living order is characterized by the emergence of a new kind of structure in the physical order.' I can't see how what you're advocating is not reductionist — Wayfarer

Reduction to what? Causal determinism? That’s not what one is left with in Barad’s model , any more than it forms the basis of Thompson’s model of consciousness. And Thompson may not be so far apart from Barad as you might think when it comes to the distinction between the physical and the experiential.

He writes:

"I follow the trajectory that arises in the later Husserl and continues in Merleau-Ponty, and that calls for a rethinking of the concept of “nature” in a post-physicalist way—one that doesn't conceive of fundamental nature or physical being in a way that builds in the objectivist idea that such being is intrinsically of essentially non-experiential. But, again, this point doesn't entail that nature is intrinsically or essentially experiential (this is the line that pan-psychists and Whiteheadians take). (Maybe it is, but I don't think we're now in position to know that.) All I want to say for now (or think I have grounds for saying now) is that 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)."