I’d reverse that. Neuroscience always operates at a delay with respect to more abstract psychological subfields. When cognitive science came on the scene neuroscience continued to rely on stimulus response models. When first generation cognitivism made way for embodied enactive approaches, neuroscience held onto computational, representationalist thinking( see predictive coding theory , for instance ). There have been a few exceptions , like Antonio Damasio, but in general if you want to know where neuroscience will be in 10 years just follow today’s philosophers of mind.

t I believe language is simply a way of capturing sensory data (5 senses) and/or superimposing data sets so obtained and averaging them as it were to extract patterns from them. In both cases, words, nothing more than auditory/visual/tactile symbols, are assinged either to individual sense datum or to the pattern observed in them — TheMadFool

This is an adequate model if youre programming a computer , because computers don’t have to understand what is programmed into them. We do. What you described is merely computation . Computers aren’t capable of affective, goal-oriented relevance, which is essential to the understanding of language.

To do neuroscience, you have to be able to make predictions, and to develop theory you have to have some of those predictions be reliable. This makes it the only player in Explanation Town, — Kenosha Kid

Are you then making the argument that the most satisfying explanations of aspects of behavior such as cognition, motivation, affectivity, empathy and perception is being offered by neuroscientists rather than , for instance, philosophers of mind , clinical psychologists or phenomenological philosophers?

I'm reminded of people typing on computers connected to the internet that science cannot possibly work...
— Kenosha Kid

Those guys.....deserving of little mention and even less respect. — Mww

Could you humor me and mention some names?

equally a mistake to think this is a theory about the structure, or explaination, of our being in relation to time — Antony Nickles

It would certainly be a mistake to think this is a theory about being in relation to time understood in any conventional sense. It is a theory about Being understood as temporality. This notion of time presupposes Attunement , Care and Understanding. Put differently , if one comprehends what Heidegger is getting at with temporality , then one is grasping the ethical thrust of Heidegger’s philosophy. Temporality is in itself already an ethics

Thoughts are, let's just say, immortal, they survive the Grim Reaper's menacing scythe. — TheMadFool

This is the issue that Derrida went on and on about.
Spoken and written language, and all other sorts of gestures and markings which intend meaning, exemplify bound idealities.Even as it is designed to be immortal, repeatable as the same apart from any actual occurrences made at some point, the SENSE of a spoken or inscribed utterance, what it means or desires to say, is always tied to the contingencies of empirical circumstance. Language is designed to transmit intact the pure meaning of a thought. But it is also the nature of language that it be expressed. And because it must be expressed it must expose itself to interpretation and new context.

Do you suppose that’s where Sartre’s famous dictum ‘Hell is other people’ came
from?

his personal real world relationships with some of those involved in the conflict. And he was generally the sanest and most mature of the lot of us. — Foghorn

I wonder if his friends, the ones involved in the conflict, are infuriated by his impartiality.

why do we so often deliberately seek out the experience of being driven crazy? — Foghorn

For the same reason we like thrill rides and horror movies, so we can learn how to cope better with the demons and threats that we already know are out there’s, are always in the back of our mind and infiltrate our dreams nightly.

Not my circus not my monkeys — skyblack

It’s possible that it seems to you that a vacuous ‘addiction to conflict’ motivated the arguments precisely because you were not invested in the topic. If you think about topics where your ‘circus and monkeys ‘ were at stake , would you attribute such motives to yourself?

Ok, here’s my take: We’re not addicted to conflict, we’re addicted to sense-making, and it drives us crazy when someone spouts off with an opinion that sounds completely outrageous to us. And nonsense that affects people’s lives, which falls into the general category of politics, drives us the most crazy , and draws us deepest down the rabbit hole.

I think the stated topic was most likely a prop, which served to help us hide our conflict addiction from ourselves. — Foghorn

I agree the topic was a prop, but not because it was hiding ‘conflict addiction’( why do non-political topics on this site normally not generate the same heat?). The middle east was a proxy for issues much closer to home, having to do with our relationships with people in our own communities.

How does participation in a meaningless activity demonstrate compassion for victims? — Foghorn

If those involved in the discussion considered it meaningless they would not have reacted so strongly to each other.

none of us in that thread are in a position to challenge those committing the atrocities, however we might have defined them. — Foghorn

If we believe the person we are engaged in an argument with thousands of miles away harbors the same reprehensible views as those who are committing the atrocities , then the two become inseparable in our minds. We put ourselves in a position to challenge those committing the atrocities precisely by winning the argument against the commenter who we see as complicit.

he was joking

The difference between the middle east discussion and a general philosophical thread is that the former thread applied philosophical and political theory to a real world situation in which people are suffering and in which some commenters have a lot invested emotionally. Some participants identify strongly with what they see as victims of moral or even criminal immorality and cruelty, and they see their opponents on the thread as proxies for the perpetrators of these wrongs. To lose an argument is to let an atrocity go unchallenged. Other participants may not have been emotionally invested in one side or other in the Middle East but instead perceived the moral wrong being committed as intolerant bullying by politically obsessed commenters.
The ‘conflict addiction’ in all cases comes down to a compulsion to address a perceived injustice.

An idealist or skeptic can at least hold the materialist model as a useful if often unreliable tool, without falling into traps like claiming qualia isn't real, based solely on data received as qualia, while transmitting said argument to others solely through means that they will experience as qualia. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It sounds to me like qualia is serving a function for the idealist much like materialism is for the empiricist. In both cases we have the claim for an intrinsically real object ( qualia or material thing) whose pure self -identity can be located independently of its interactions with an outside.

It would be useful for Jack Torrance. Maybe for a QAnon member? — frank

So your facts are real and QAnon’a
facts are fake? You might be surprised to discover what a vast web of interpretive plumbing your ‘facts’ sit on top of , and how subjective that deep foundation is.

Unless someone considers themselves eliminitavists, which I think is just crazy. — Manuel

An eliminativist , like Dennett for instance , is also relying on a form of idealism.


From Rorty:
“ Dennett wants to say that it is as silly to ask whether beliefs are real as to ask whether his lost sock center is real. I quite agree, but not for Dennett's reasons. My reason is that it is silly to ask whether anything is real - as opposed to asking whether it is useful to talk about, spatially locatable, spatially divisible, tangible, visible, easily identified, made out of atoms, good to eat, and so on. Reality is a wheel that plays no part in any mechanism, once we have adopted the natural ontological attitude. So is the decision to be, or not be, "a realist about" something. So is the decision about what position to occupy on the spectrum that Dennett describes (with Fodor's industrial-strength realism at one end and what he calls, alas, "Rorty's milder-than-mild irrealism" at the other). Dennett should, on my view, drop his claim to have found "a mild and intermediate sort of realism" - the juste milieu along this spectrum. He should instead dismiss this spectrum as one of those things it is not useful to talk about - one of those metaphors that, like those which make up the image of the Cartesian Theater, looked promising but turned out to be more trouble than it was worth.”

Quite true

yessir

It needn't be the case that idealism is opposed to realism at all. — Manuel

That’s right. Realism is actually a form of idealism.

The important consequences of Idealism and materialism is that they express two poles of the same binary. Both are inadequate ways of explaining the relationship between subject and object. As Merleau-Ponty says:
“ “We must now show that its intellectualist [idealist] antithesis is on the same level as empiricism itself. Both take the objective world as the object of their analysis, when this comes first neither in time nor in virtue of its meaning; and both are incapable of expressing the peculiar way in which perceptual consciousness constitutes its object.”

it does all depend on one's state of mind, because if you can't find a book that is coming from the right place there is no point. It is a bit like suggesting that a classical music lover should try heavy metal or trip hop music. — Jack Cummins

But there are powerful , often subversive ideas embedded in a piece of music or a work of literature , and the particular bits of technique and style that belong to that expression are unified by a thematic meaning , which can also be called a worldview. No matter how many stylistic changes a writer like Dickens or Shelly or Kafka might experiment with, their work as a whole amounts to variations on a theme, that theme being a worldview , at the same time psychological and philosophical. Often, Our dislike for a form of music or literature isn’t just subjective preference , but an inability to assimilate the worldview expressed by that creation. It has seemed to me that the persons I know with only a passing interest in and acquaintance with pop music , and an intense interest in classical music invariably identify with a more traditionalistic worldview. When I listen to classical music from the 1700’s through the early 20th century I am inspired to think via older philosophical tropes , but this same music represses my ability to push the boundaries of my thinking.

I have always found the novel to be a far better expression of truth and wisdom than academic philosophy and science. — Mystic

I became disillusioned by novels at a relatively early age.I found myself noticing that the author was applying an implicit psychological understanding of others to the narrative structure and characters , and I couldn’t help but compare their insights to those of various psychological theorists. The psychological insights of the novelists always proved inferior. Dickens , for instance , is a Romantic moralist, and I think there are better ways of understanding people. I haven’t yet come across a novel that has caught up to the leading edge of philosophical and psychological thinking.

when it comes to the latter, his fans like to draw a distinction between the man and his work, so you may comfort yourself by doing the same. — Ciceronianus the White

It sounds like you think some of them are his fans independently of his work. Are you a fan of Woody Allen’s early work? Is it a comfort to you to draw a distinction between his work and his personal life? Personally, I’m not interested in comfort. I’m interested in philosophy. How about you? So let’s cut the sanctimony and talk philosophy.

Your take on Heidegger would be much more interesting if you maintained your conviction that he was a full-fledged anti-semitic Nazi but nevertheless considered his philosophy to be among the most advanced of all Western thought. Your current stance is too convenient. You can dismiss him out of hand and lose nothing.

”A Swabian peasant trying to sound like me" is what Dewey is reputed to have said about everyone's favorite Nazi. — Ciceronianus the White

I’m a great admirer of Dewey, but Heidegger’s work, along with Derrida, Gendlin and a few others , moves a step or two beyond Pragmatism. Dewey connects affect and intention-cognition , but still retains a distinction between the two that Heidegger was able to transcend. His analysis of the relation between the self
and the social is also more advanced.

Pretty powerful stuff, isn’t it?

But on Heidegger himself, it's seeming to me that he puts activity prior to substance. If this is true it radically changes the position of materialism. It is not matter that acts, but action as a substantial verb encountering a world of matter — Gregory

I think this is true. I find Husserl helpful here. He said that a so-called real spatial object is a continually changing flowing series of adumbrated perspectives. It appears to us a a singular unity , an ‘it’ , because we form an objectivating intention whereby we convince ourselves
that each new perspective belongs to the ‘same’ object. We never actually attain this perfectly unitary ‘it’ but for all intents and purposes we can treat this flowing series of experiences as aspects of a single object that endures as self-indentical over time. So the object is an ongoing idealization that forms the glue tieing together a series of intentional acts into a synthetic unity. Self-sameness is the derived product of activity.

“ We are continuously directed toward the object itself; we execute the uninterrupted consciousness of experiencing it. The consciousness of its existence is here a belief in act; by virtue of the accord in which the perceptive appearances flow off in original presentation, retention, and protention, an accord of continuous self-affirmation, belief is continuous certainty of belief, which has its certainty in this originality of the object in its living being-present.”(Experience and Judgement)

Hence my puzzlement that Joshs thinks "We find something better and only then do we see the limits of the previous approach". Recognising the problem seems an essential first step. — Banno

It only can be seen as a problem when one has already made an incipient , perhaps only vaguely articulated step beyond the borders of the old conceptual scheme. The explanatory power of the old scheme represses the discovery of anomalies. Potential internal inconsistencies seem mere errors in interpretation. But eventually the very success of the worldview plants the seeds of its destruction.

Don’t mind Ciceronianus. He’s just bummed that he doesn’t understand Heidegger’s philosophy. Turning him into a cartoon villain gives him an excuse not to try and read him.

To my eyes Heidegger's ontic is dualistic (me and a hammer) but his ontology is not so, — Gregory

To Heidegger the present at hand object is assumed by empirical science to be self-identical. It persists as itself. Only in this way can it have duration and extension , so that it ‘occupies’ time and space, with its fixed properties. . But Heidegger says that understood most fundamentally , nothing Dasein discloses ‘occupies’ time and space as enduring and extending itself. Why not? Because each moment of time changes the sense of what it ‘is’ we are experiencing. There are no countable moments of a being. If that is the case, the. how did modern science end up with the notion of self-identical objects in causal interaction in a mathematical-geometric time-space grid?Heidegger derives the present-to-hand from the ready-to-hand as an impoverished modification, where our relevant pragmatic engagement with beings becomes leveled down and distorted ,to ‘just staring at’ something, which he calls a failure to understand. “ “When we just stare at something, our just-having-it-before-us lies before us as a failure to understand it any more".

In other words , we create out of our constantly transforming relevant engagement with beings an empty abstraction cut off from its origin as relevant engagement in order to produce the method of mathematically based objective science.

just as a hammer can be thought of as a wooden stick with a metal piece on the end of it, weighing a certain amount and of a certain dimension or having other properties, but isn't thought of such when we're absorbed in the activity of hammering, likewise the world isn't simply "material." — Xtrix

Does that mean for Heidegger the world is more than material, that it is at least material? Is a material thing
something that has a countable duration i. time and an extension in space? Does Heidegger accept this description and only want to remind us that the subjective aspect contributes such notions as usefulness to what an object is? How are duration and extension derived? Do they presuppose some basis on which to measure duration and extension, that is , some feature that remains constant and self-identical such that it can be counted?

What type of being does Man understand? The material world? I haven't seen where Heidegger explicitly denies this, although he focuses on hammering for example instead of hammers. — Gregory

I agree with Xtrix. Heidegger’s account is an explicit critique of materiality and objective causality on which science is based, including Relativity. The material object in modern science is derived from Descartes’ notion of substance as res extentia, a thing which is identical
with itself , purely present to itself. The geometrical description of time and space as mathematical grids independent of what takes place in them is made possible by this notion of object as substance. This fall under the mode of the present to hand.

I think it’s best not to dwell on care. I see care as a bridge between the analysis of being-in-the-world and temporality. We “care” about the world by default— we can’t help it. Just as we can’t help being (or having) a world. What’s more important is the structure of time that emerges from the analysis. After all, it’s not “Being and Care”, it’s being and time. — Xtrix

Yes, but how has Heidegger radicalized the concept of time so that it can be understood as heedful circumspective relevance? Why can’t we help caring about the world? Temporality is at the heart of Husserl’s model also but Care doesn’t apply to his approach. Why not? Because the structure of temporality for Heidegger describes an intimacy between past present and future missing from Husserl. Care is this intimate pragmatic relevance, this for-the-sake-of which orients all experience with respect to the immediate past.

the very distinction between “self” and “world” is very much antithetical to Heidegger. — Xtrix

You’re absolutely correct. Heidegger does not view Dasein from the vantage of a subject-object binary. If one instead speaks of self and world, then Dasein belongs to both poles. Specifically , the self is a constantly changing creation. It exists in unveiling itself by projecting itself on a possibility. What it projects itself on is its world. So the self is its world as the possibility that it projects itself into. Put differently , the self is the tripartite structure of temporality as the past anticipating itself into the future.

Heidegger understands that to be radically, irreducibly, primordially situated in a world is to be guaranteed , at every moment, a world that feelingly creatively impinges on me anew as foreign in some aspect. And it is simultaneously, to feel a belonging familiarity) to what impinges on me in its foreignness due to the anticipative, projective futural aspect of temporality. Heidegger's being-in -the world is always characterized by a pragmatic self-belongingness that he articulates as a heedful circumspective relevance that events always have for Dasein in its world. For Heidegger, self is Dasein, Dasein is attuned understanding , attuned understanding is projection, projection is a happening, an action, historicality, temporality, the over and beyond, self as transcendence, the unveiling of a specific possibility.

...Midgley's point; philosophers are needed in order to point to the smell and the feted pooling. — Banno

They are useful in articulating the situation in terms of ‘smell and fetid pooling’ , but that language isn’t the only form of conceptualization that will change the situation. It will change anyway from within , but the changes will be seen by insiders only in a fragmented and localized way, not as a change of plumbing. As an analogy, Kuhnian philosophers of science will say that the whole edifice of Newtonian physics was turned on its head by relativity, which recognized the smell and fetid pooling of the old paradigm. But scientists will instead say that Relativity and more recent developments only added to Newton in a piecemeal fashion, so no smell or pooling was involved.

I think Midgley right in pointing to social contract theory as the broken pipe in the foundation, and I don't see that there is a clear solution; so I don't agree with you. If you were correct that we see the rot only from the vantage of a new philosophical system, that system would be apparent and ubiquitous — Banno

Most Conservatives in the U.S. wouldn’t know what on earth you are taking about. They would claim that there is absolutely nothing wrong with social contract theory. Why is this? Because they are living within the old philosophical system. The rot you are talking about doesn’t exist for them, just as the limits of behaviorism didn’t exist for Skinner, the limits of Hegelianism don’t exist for today’s Marxists, the limits of realism don’t exist for most of today’s physicists.

Are you saying that the role of philosophy is essentially descriptive? How do you assess Midgley's paper? — Tom Storm

The role of philosophy is creative , as is the role of all
other cultural modalities. I don’t disagree with Misgley’s claims concerning philosophy , but I would want to add that any field of endeavor changes its underlying assumptions over time , it’s ‘plumbing’. Most fields don’t pay attention to this fact , and science in particular has until recently had a habit of denying that there is any underlying plumbing, just models attempting to mirror the ‘real’ world.

If Heidegger believed that love was ontic and anxiety was ontological, than I think he has it backwards, although I don't think he says this. Intentionality always has to be activated by love of something in some sense. You can't just have will power and anxiety. You would be crippled instantly. — Gregory

Before one can love or hate anything, or have any particular affective response to the world, one must be affected by the world. If you want to think of Dasein in terms of intentionality (although that is Husserl’s concept, not Heidegger’s) one intends an object of experience, which in Heidegger’s
terms means that Dasein projects ahead of itself. You can think of this as the way that each moment of time is an anticipating beyond itself. At the same time, each moment is my being affected by what I project myself into. So there is an aspect of familiarity and astonishment in each new experience. You could say there is an aspect of love and joy here in this structure, as well as wonder and awe, and that is all implied by primordial anxiety. Heidegger also calls it uncanniness.


“Angst individualizes and thus discloses Da-sein as "solus ipse." This existential "solipsism," however, is so far from transposing an isolated subject-thing into the harmless vacuum of a worldless occurrence that it brings Da-sein in an extreme sense precisely before its world as world, and thus itself before itself as being-in-the-world.“ "Together with the sober Angst that brings us before our individualized potentiality-of-being, goes the unshakable joy in this possibility.”

“Transposed into the possible, he must constantly be mistaken concerning what is actual. And only because he is thus mistaken and transposed can he become seized by terror. And only where there is the perilousness of being seized by terror do we find the bliss of astonishment-being torn away in that wakeful manner that is the breath of all philosophizing.”

There's a tension between system building and critical evaluation in philosophy. Perhaps the system builders - your Kant, Hegel, Russel - thrive when the basis of society is unthreatened; and the critics - Socrates, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein - in what might be called "interesting times"? — Banno

The critics are system builders themselves, although not builders of traditional metaphysical systems in the case of writers like Nietzsche, Wittgenstein or Derrida.

the presumed notion of a social contract has its limits. Only then we can look for something better. — Banno

I think it’s the other way around. We find something better and only then do we see the limits of the previous approach. The old thinking only stinks in retrospect , and there’s no necessity for it to crumble under the weight of its own limitations, given that those limitations only emerge from a new vantage of thinking , which isn’t guaranteed.

We don’t need philosophy for this. Every modality of culture ( the arts , politics, the sciences) evolves past its previous presumptions without the direct help of philosophy. What philosophy can do is make explicit what is only held as implicit within other modes of thought.

There seems to be a strong correlation between depression and the ideology of “following” one’s heart. As a lack of responsibility and structure in one’s life decreases the sense of purpose, depression increases. Instead, society tells us to experiment with drugs (antidepressants) and chase false hopes instead of solving the problem. Shunning social obligations and familial responsibilities in order that one might increase a sense of individuality commonly occurs — Ladybug

This part of the OP reminds me of politically conservative arguments about the connection between self-help culture and the decay of the values of social responsibility and obligation and personal character ( David Brooks). Is this what you had in mind?

FWIW, I think depression is invariably tied to a sense of
alienation and disconnection with respect to other people. I don’t think social responsibility and obligation is the answer so much as learning. better ways to relate to the thinking of others.

So is care that important? Not really, and it can often be mistaken as being emotional somehow because of the connotations of the word, when it’s more akin with directed activity or more related to awareness/attentional behavior. — Xtrix

I like your summary of Being and Time but I have a quibble about the importance of Care. I agree that it is misinterpreted as being about emotionality. The difference between Husserl’s intentionality and Heidegger’s Care is that the entirety of one’s history as a totality of relevance comes into play in the supposedly simplest acts of perception for Heidegger. For instance, according to Husserl, in constituting a spatial object , that is an objectivizing intention striving for the harmonious fulfillment of the object as a total unity. And each adumbrated moment of the object constitution affects and attracts ( or repellent) the ego.

Notice that the motivation directed toward the object from the ego and from the object to the ego is restore yes to the intentional act of object constitution. Other motivations can be brought to bear , but via shifts of interest. For Heidegger, by contrast, the entirety of Dasein’s past comes into play in any experience, and this is what Care expresses. We care about each minutia of experience in a totalistic way in relation to our past goals, desires, understandings as a unity. Relevance isnt circumscribed for him in the way it is for Husserl.

“The for-the-sake-of -which signifies an in-order-to, the in-order-to signifies a what-for, the what-for signifies a what-in of letting something be relevant, and the latter a what-with of relevance. These relations are interlocked among themselves as a primordial totality. They are what they are as this signifying in which Da-sein gives itself to understand its being-in-the -world beforehand. We shall call this relational totality of signification significance. It is what constitutes the structure of the world, of that in which Da-sein as such always already is.”( Being and Time).