We don't educate children the way we train horses, and this is for more or less the reasons you gave. When a 4th grader is taught math, or is taught the golden rule, or is taught to think before they act, or is taught to recognize when they are angry and count to 10, they are being educated in the form you indicated. But in fact it is the parents who are primarily responsible for education in this deeper sense of civilizing the child and teaching them how to be human. — Leontiskos

We shouldn’t train horses the way we train horses either. Now that we understand that other animals are cognitive, emotive creatures that construct their worlds on the basis of goal-oriented norms, we can jettison mechanistic behaviorist ways of thinking about non-human animals, and perhaps also move beyond Aristotle’s animal rationale distinction between homo sapiens and other species. We are beginning to learn that moral thinking does not start with humans. For instance, the sense of justice has been studied in the wild.

In discussing the most basic interactions of non-human animals, Mark Bekoff and Jessica Peirce consider data from the study of animals in the wild and suggest that a basic sense of justice is interwoven with cooperative behavior (including a cluster of behaviors that reflect altruism, reciprocity, honesty, and trust) and empathy (including neighboring phenomena of sympathy, compassion, grief, and consolation). Although it still may be controversial to think that non-human animals engage in practices that can be considered moral or just, clearly some of these aspects of cooperation and empathy are to be found in the earliest intersubjective interactions among humans.

Play involves action and interaction and the ability or possibility of the participants to continue in play. It's defined by a set of interactive affordances. When one animal starts to dominate in playful interaction, closing off the other's affordance space (or eliminating the autonomy of the other), the interaction and the play stops. Self-handicapping (e.g., not biting as hard as the dog can) is a response to the other's vulnerability as the action develops, based on an immediate sense of, or an attunement to what would or would not cause pain rather than on a rule. Role-reversal (where the dominant animal makes itself more vulnerable) creates an immediate affordance for the continuance of play. If in a friendly playful interaction one player gets hurt, becomes uncomfortable, or is pushed beyond her affective limits, this can generate an immediate feeling of distrust for the other. That would constitute a disruption of the friendship, a break in this very basic sense that is prior to measures of fairness, exchange, or retribution. Robert Solomon captures this idea at the right scale: “Justice presumes a personal concern for others. It is first of all a sense, not a rational or social construction, and I want to argue that this sense is, in an important sense, natural.”

What separates civilizing, rationalizing education from indoctrination? Are we not teaching children as we teach horses, with one distinction being that in the case of the horse we assume there is no rational cognition mediating between the stimulus and the reinforcement?
In fact, if conceptions of the good and virtuous life are assumed to be non-relative, we bypass environmental contingencies and reinforcers in favor of innate, a priori givens. We teach the golden rule and how to count to ten when one is angry, not recognizing the contradiction between indoctrinating students with a recipe for blameful anger against violators of such a rule, and teaching techniques for moderating tempers which we train to be fired up in the face of transgressions against the golden rule.

Here is another short video for his talk on "Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality." — Corvus

Here is an argument for why your brain does not ‘hallucinate’ your conscious reality.

…to perceive the world isn’t to hallucinate and get things right. To perceive is to explore the world with your sensing and moving body. Perception creates meaning through sensorimotor exploration. You don’t get a being with a sense of self by taking a hallucinating brain and tacking on some sensory inputs and motor outputs. You get a being with a sense of self by taking a brain with a capacity for imagination—for imaging its past and future—and embedding it within a sensing and moving body. Perception, therefore, isn’t online hallucination; it’s sensorimotor engagement with the world. Dreaming isn’t offline hallucination; it’s spontaneous imagination during sleep. We aren’t dreaming machines but imaginative beings. We don’t hallucinate at the world; we imaginatively perceive it.

Merleau-Ponty maintains that the relation between self and world is not primarily that of subject to object, but rather what he calls, following Heidegger, being-in-the-world. For a bodily subject it is not possible to specify what the subject is in abstraction from the world, nor is it possible to specify what the world is in abstraction from the subject: “The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects”. To belong to the world in this way means that our primary way of relating to things is neither purely sensory and reflexive, nor cognitive or intellectual, but rather bodily and skillful. Merleau-Ponty calls this kind of bodily intentionality “motor intentionality”. His example is grasping or intentionally taking hold of an object. In grasping something we direct ourselves toward it, and thus our action is intentional. But the action does not refer to the thing by representing its objective and determinate features; it refers to it pragmatically in the light of a contextual motor goal effected by one's body.

I highly recommend Thompson’s paper for a more detailed
introduction to this thinking.

https://evanthompsondotme.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/sensorimotor-subjectivity.pdf

Liberalism as we now understand it is the idea that no conception of the good life is to be imposed, and everyone is to be allowed to pursue their own notion of the good life — Leontiskos

Might we say that, particularly for post-Marxist positions, there is a teleologically oriented notion of the good life that is process (dialectical materialism) rather than content-based?

They are similar because how we learn is similar, and because the proximate goals of "reinforcing x behavior," are similar.

I'd argue that they can't be the same thing. When we train animals, a behavior, or lack of it, is the end itself. The Aristotlean distinction between continence and virtue makes no sense with animals. But with people, we want them to want what is good — Frankfurt's second order volitions — and we want to convince them that it is good to act in this way.

The difference is that the person and their excellence, excellence in our eyes and theirs, is an end in itself. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I’m reminded of the reason that positivism, in the form of stimulus-response theory, came to dominate psychology. It was meant to counter the idealist atomisms of armchair psychologists. Only what was observable and measurable counted for the behaviorists. Eventually, after finally circling back to William James, it became clear that behaviorism’s understanding of objectivity relied on hidden metaphysical assumptions. Cognitivism sought to remedy behaviorism’s blind spot for the irreducibly interpretive elements of meaning, but came under fire themselves for being disembodied, and ignoring the body , the social, and the intrinsically normative, goal-oriented nature of human and animal behavior.

But without a conception of the human good, virtue, and freedom, education and training for human beings degenerates into the sort of thing we do for animals — Count Timothy von Icarus

It seems to me the development of psychological theory from logical atomism to behaviorist understanding of human and animal behavior to psychoanalysis and cognitivism , and finally embodied enactivism, has taken the field farther and farther away from non-naturalistic, non-evolution and ecology-based models of the good, the virtuous and the autonomous.

What would be your explanations or arguments on the gaps and the model and modeled? — Corvus

Sensory-motor embodied enactivist approaches to perception and consciousness are based on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception. Evan Thompson explains:

“ Whereas physical structures, such as a soap bubble, obtain equilibrium in relation to actual physical condi-
tions of force and pressure, living systems seek equilibrium, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, “with respect to conditions which are only virtual and which the system itself brings into existence; when the [system] . . . executes a work beyond its proper limits and constitutes a proper milieu for itself.”

“ Thus, Merleau-Ponty says, whereas physical structures can be expressed by a law, living structures have to be comprehended in relation to norms: “each organism, in the presence of a given milieu, has its optimal conditions of activity and its proper manner of realizing equilibrium,”and every living being “modifiesits milieu according to the internal norms of its activity.”

“...autopoiesis (in a broad sense that includes adapativity) is the “self-production of an inside that also specifies an outside to which it is normatively related,” and thus that autopoiesis is best seen as the “dynamic co-emergence of interiority and exteriority.” “the (self) generation of an inside is ontologically prior to the dichotomy in- out. It is the inside that generates the asymmetry and it is in relation to this inside that an outside can be established.”

↪Joshs Do you think Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Husserl are postmodernists???

You think Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is postmodern thought? I beg to differ. I think that what Wittgeinstein says about mathematics there is quite true philosophy of mathematics. — ssu

The Tractatus is not post-modern. But Wittgenstein’s later work, which turns its back on the logical grounding of mathematics put forth in the Tractatus, had a strong influence on many postmodern thinkers, including Rorty and Foucault. Lyotard, who popularized the term postmodern, devoted a chapter of one of his books to the later Wittgenstein. Heidegger was of central importance to postmodern poststructuralists like Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze. Husserl is not generallly considered to be postmodern, but I believe his work on the philosophy of arithmetic and logic contributes ideas that are taken up by postmodern thinkers.

Do you agree with these speakers' points? Why or why not. — Corvus

We have an empirical reductionist (Seth) arguing with two transcendentalists. I prefer the reductionist, but I think there are better ways of addressing the hard problem naturalistically than Seth’s representationalist-computational approach. It still leaves us with an inner vs outer gap of map vs territory, the model vs what is modeled. It is not interactional enough, too focused on correspondence and not enough on enaction, movement and embodiment.

I don't have enough maths knowledge to drill down into this, but no doubt axioms or presuppositions (and their justifications) lie the core of postmodern investigation.
— Tom Storm
I don't think so. I still think that their focus is on the societal aspects of mathematics, starting perhaps with the way it's taught. What they will (unfortunately) refer to is Gödel's incompleteness Theorems, but... basically I get the feeling that the just mention it to say that they are aware of incompleteness results existing. But that's basically it. If they say something more, it's quoted by Alan Sokal in "Fashionable nonsense".
Or if I'm wrong, please quote the text that shows your point. — ssu

Deleuze, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Husserl have a lot to say about the foundations and meaning of mathematical reasoning. For Heidegger mathematical thinking is inauthentic, for Husserl it doesn’t understand its basis in subjective processes of constitution, for Deleuze number is ordinal before it is cardinal, and for the later Wittgenstein it is socially constructed.

In the logic thread I proposed "logos" for the logic-like function of the world. I wonder what a good term would be for "the apparently mathematical in nature?" Quantos? Mathematicularity? Máthēma? Quanticularity — Count Timothy von Icarus

We could always dust off mathesis universalis.

We can bypass the whole reality vs illusion mentality by focusing on the inexhaustible variety of ways our constructions of the real can allow us to do things in the world, and find ways of making those constructions more inclusive and open-ended, rather than reifying one construction as more ‘truly real’ than others.

I don't really know how this works either. Didn't we just reinstate the Cartesian veil? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Our constructions are real. They are of the world. More specifically , they are world-organism interaction, but not in the guise of an interior peering out at an exterior. Constructions are of movements , doings, performances, not passive contemplations of an epistemological nature. To know is to change the world in some fashion and to be affected by the feedback from that change. The cycle of interchanges between our bodies and an environment define what ‘objects’ are on the basis of what we do with them , and how they respond to our doings. There is no veil here since neither pole of the body-world interaction has a meaning or existence part from the interaction, which remakes each pole in every interchange.

Such constructions might well be open ended, and inexhaustible, but they aren't unconstrained. Many — most really — ways of trying to do things run into immediate problems. If you want to patch a tire, there are myriad ways to do it right. Yet, just as certainly there are many more ways to do it wrong (e.g. pouring spaghetti on it, drinking potions, etc.) than ways that will make the tire hold air. These constraints I think, can usefully be thought of as reality, without losing the insights re intersubjectivity. We could take Husserl's conception of the "zig-zag" in perception as the phenomenologically basic case of this. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Let’s look at a how Husserl’s zig-zag works. When Husserl talks about a real spatial object, what he means is an idealization. In the case of fixing the tire, we first have to constitute the real object we call the tire. We do this through a progress of objectivating acts that adumbrate perspectival appearances and synthetically correlate these with input from our other senses modalities as well as kinetic information. The object is an idealization founded on the synthesis of these correlated objectivating intentionalacts. Since the object is constituted on the basis of similarities and correlations with respect to prior intentional syntheses, which themselves are build upon earlier commonalities and likenesses, the ‘real ‘ world
that we constitute, both in terms of what we recognize within it and what goes wrong, what surprises us, what goes missing or breaks down, what turns out to be ‘illusory’, are already prefigured and organized by us around the possibilities of our own bodily performance as zero point of activity. In the zig-zag, when we go back to reflect on the ‘beginning’ of a process of constitution of the real, this beginning is already framed on the basis of the highest level of constitution we have achieved. As Derrida explains,

“…consciousness discovers its path in an indefinite reduction, always already begun, and wherein every adventure is a change of direction and every return to the origin an audacious move toward the horizon.

In sum, the constraints that are placed on the ways in which we are able to constitute the real via objectivating intentional acts arise out of an outside whose alterity is never completely foreign to the nature of the subject’s bodily functioning.

…the denial of order in the Universe tends towards nihilism, in the sense that it denies the possibility of causal connections and any intrinsic meaning. That is what made me think of Nietszche and Heidegger, as it was among their central themes. — Wayfarer

Heidegger’s main target of critique was the subject-object binary that he traces back to Descartes and continues to exert its effect on philosophy through Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche. This binary makes possible the metaphysical basis of modern science and technology. According to the modern scientific notion of the subject-object relation, the subject is seen as a self-reflective consciousness that posits and represents the object before itself. Heidegger considers this self-presencing certainty of the subject to be the basis of modern mathematical thinking. That is, as the certainty of calculation. Only because being is understood via the persistent presence of subject and object can modern science and technology, as well as humanism, be thought. What is real is what is consistently present, and the object’s reality is made possible by its being represented by a self-present subject. A=A because, more fundamentally, the ‘I’ equals itself.

“Thinking becomes I-think; the I-think becomes: I unite originarily, I think unity (in advance). By virtue of the guiding-thread that already dominates, knowing as self-knowing is the utmost identity, i.e., what is an actual being; and as such a being it is at the same time in the possibility for conditioning every other objectness in its manner as knowing…”

Heidegger traces the modern conception of will, value and causality to the presumed self-identity of the subject as that which posits and represents objects to itself (subject-object relation as propositional assertion S is P). For Heidegger the modern notion of subjectivity is nihilistic because the order (mathematical, objective) it attributes to the Universe is based on a presupposition concerning the certainty of the self as persisting presence. To perceive the self , or objects, in terms of Self-identity, self-persistence, present-at-handness is to distort and flatten meaning, to fail to understand , to fall into nihilism. His notion of Being (or Beyng) as fundamental ontology overcomes the idea of being as persisting presence in favor of Being as occurrence, happening. Being is more primordial than concepts like subject, object, consciousness, willing and valuing. We fall into nihilism whoever we take these as fundamental.

In order to feel sandpaper:
The sandpaper must contact our skin.
The contact must register with sensory nerves.
The nervous signal must conduct to our brain.
Our brain must translate the nervous signal to sensation. — hypericin

This strictly one-way input -output model of sensation contrasts with recent approaches. Evan Thompson explains:

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

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

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

There are similar arguments against systems being complex versus simple. But once you start deciding that key ways we cognize the world are illusory, it seems hard to know where to stop — Count Timothy von Icarus

We dont have to assume our cognitions are illusory simply because we recognize the inextricable role of the subject and intersubjective community in the construction of our understanding of nature. This reinstates the Cartesian veil separating appearance from reality, and a correspondence approach to empiricism. We can bypass the whole reality vs illusion mentality by focusing on the inexhaustible variety of ways our constructions of the real can allow us to do things in the world, and find ways of making those constructions more inclusive and open-ended, rather than reifying one construction as more ‘truly real’ than others.

I think there is a deep, unsettled conflict between humanism and naturalism in modern philosophy, and it lies at the heart of the inability to move past the appearance/reality dichotomy.

Humanism wants man as the measure of all things, and proclaims our freedom when it proclaims that ethics, aesthetics, meaning, and even the objects of sense perception are our own invention. And yet naturalism would say these all have a causal history, having come into being through the same step-wise progression of physical state evolution (the logic of the world) that moves planets and dust particles. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Humanism presupposes objective empiricism and vice versa. Both originate in the Christian( which is indebted to the Platonic) notion of an absolutely certain ground for truth. In the wake of Descartes, God was replaced by the human subject , the consciousness of the ego, as the source of absolute certainty. According to then modern scientific , and humanist, notion of the subject-object relation, the subject is seen as a self-reflective consciousness that posits and represents the object before itself.

“Thinking becomes I-think; the I-think becomes: I unite originarily, I think unity (in advance). By virtue of the guiding-thread that already dominates, knowing as self-knowing is the utmost identity, i.e., what is an actual being; and as such a being it is at the same time in the possibility for conditioning every other objectness in its manner as knowing…”( Heidegger)

Heidegger considers this self-presencing certainty of the subject as the basis of modern mathematical thinking. That is, as the certainty of calculation. Only because being is understood via the mathematical self-identity of subject and object can modern science and technology, as well as humanism, be thought. What is real is what is consistently present, and the object’s reality is made possible by its being represented by a self-present subject. A=A because , more fundamentally, the ‘I’ equals itself. Once you deconstruct the self-identical unity of the human subject , you simultaneously pull the rug out from under direct and interdict realism.

I'd argue that the claims of liberals and collectivist identify movements can't be adjudicated because they each have the origin of the good lying not in reason, which can adjudicate, but in the individual or collective's desires. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What is the origin and nature of desire within the human being? It has been suggested, in different ways , that desire is a function of biological drives. Freud’s libidinal energy and Nietzsche’s Will to Power are two examples of biological adaptivist approaches to desire. Deleuze’s desiring machines is one of the most intriguing ways of navigating between the individual and the social, the reasonable and the affective, the human and the natural. To be more precise, his model of desire abandons the distinction between personal and social, reason and emotion, humanity and nature. Desiring machines are what we are made of, but they are pre-personal. Desiring elements are like nodes in a complex system; they never function alone , but always as an ensemble , out of which subjectivity , the self, the ego, is just a bi-product. Desiring machines are at work everywhere , as much in the world of physics as in the living world. Their functioning accounts for the paradoxical operation of reason, its temporary stabilities as well as its penchant for revolutionary transformation.

. The left has a consistent difficulty in distinguishing someone who doesn't oppose Trump from someone who endorses Trump. They assume that everyone who hasn't opposed Trump therefore endorses him. From what I have seen Peterson hasn't opposed Trump in this upcoming election, but neither has he endorsed him — Leontiskos

That would seem to place Peterson to the right of American conservatives like George Will, David Brooks, David Frum and Ross Douthat, and venerable Republican fixtures like National Review, all of who unequivocally oppose Trump. That doesn’t jibe with my assessment of Peterson’s political views. I’m assuming his non-opposition is a business move, to avoid alienating some of his fan base.

How do we know whether quality or quantity is fundamental? Or rather two sides of the same coin? Does a quality, to exist, need not to show quantity too, being either one or many, zero being not existing?

The idea of the mathematical universe is not that quantity or quality are fundamental, but that all the properties that there are are mathematical. There are no non-mathematical properties, science seems to support this — Lionino

There are, of course, widely varying ways of understanding the relation between quality and quantity. For instance, one could follow Henri Bergson, who distinguishes between non-numeric qualitative duration and the empirical multiplicity of magnitude.

“Bergson presents duration as a type of multiplicity opposed to metric multiplicity or the multiplicity of magnitude. Duration is in no way indivisible, but is that which cannot be divided without changing in nature at each division.'On the other hand, in a multiplicity such as homogeneous extension, the division can be carried as far as one likes without changing anything in the constant object; or the magnitudes can vary with no other result than an increase or a decrease in the amount of space they striate. Bergson thus brought to light "two very different kinds of multiplicity," one qualitative and fusional, continuous, the other numerical and homogeneous, discrete. It will be noted that matter goes back and forth between the two; sometimes it is already enveloped in qualitative multiplicity, sometimes already developed in a metric "schema" that draws it outside of itself.

I think Tegmark’s idea of a mathematical universe is tied not just to the simple idea that we can locate cardinal and ordinal numbers in everything in the universe, which I think Bergson would agree with. Rather , he is wedded to a specific theory concerning how number applies to things in terms of mathematical concepts. Tegmark’s theory cannot allow Bergson’s idea that matter goes back and forth between qualitative and quantitative multiplicity. Instead, he wants to enclose qualitative differences within the platonism of fixed mathematical structures and schemas. For Tegmark, platonic schema has the last word, where for Bergson qualitative change in nature does.

The mathematical universe does not address matters such as solipsism, différance, phenomenology or idealism. It takes our perception of things as they are and goes from there, just like science does. Just like the correspondence theory of truth assumes there exists an outside world to which beliefs would correspond to — Lionino

Husserl’s position on the relation between qualitative and quantitative change is more radical than Bergson’s. His phenomenological project aims at taking our perception of things as they are after we have bracketed our presuppositions. For instance ,Husserl would ask you, when you look at a table in front of you, what do you actually see, a three dimensional object or one perspectival view of that object which hides the back of the table from you? Do you see an unmoving thing or one whose appearance changes as you move your head and eyes, or walk around to the back of it? How do we come to think of this thing we only ever see in perspectively changing dimensions in terms of a fixed set of properties Tegmark would say that , yes, we construct these objective properties , but that doesn’t mean that what we construct doesn’t correspond to the real mathematical nature of physical matter. Husserl depicts Tegmark’s realist view in the following way:

“Each individual object (each unity, whether immanent or transcendent, constituted in the stream) endures, and necessarily endures -that is, it continuously exists in time and is something identical in this continuous existence, which at the same time can be regarded as a process. Conversely: what exists in time continuously exists in time and is the unity belonging to the process that carries with it inseparably the unity of what endures in the process as it unfolds. The unity of the tone that endures throughout the process lies in the tonal process; and conversely, the unity of the tone is unity in the filled duration, that is, in the process. Therefore, if anything at all is defined as existing in a time-point, it is conceivable only as the phase of a process, a phase in which the duration of an individual being also has its point. Individual or concrete being is necessarily changing or unchanging; the process is a process of change or of rest, the enduring object itself a changing object or one at rest. Moreover, every change has its rate or acceleration of change (to use an image) with respect to the same duration. As a matter of principle, any phase of a change can be expanded into a rest, and any phase of a rest can be carried over into change.”

But Husserl argues that the above description does not take our perception of things as they are for us in the most primordial sense. Once we have bracketed all of the presuppositions we draw from memory to fill in for what we don’t actually experience in front of us, what we actually experience is devoid of the quantitatively measurable constancies that Tegmark’s mathematical universe depends on.

“Now if we consider the constituting phenomena in comparison with the phenomena just discussed, we find a flow, and each phase of this flow is a continuity of adumbrations. But as a matter of principle, no phase of this flow can be expanded into a continuous succession, and therefore the flow cannot be conceived as so transformed that this phase would be extended in identity with itself. Quite to the contrary, we necessarily find a flow of continuous "change", and this change has the absurd character that it flows precisely as it flows and can flow neither "faster" nor "slower." If that is the case, then any object that changes is missing here; and since "something" runs its course in every process, no process is in question. There is nothing here that changes, and for that reason it also makes no sense to speak of something that endures. It is nonsensical to want to find something here that remains unchanged for even an instant during the course of its duration.

“Can one speak in the strict sense of change in a situation in which, after all, constancy, duration filled out without change, is inconceivable? No possible constancy can be attributed to the continuous flow of appearance-phases. There is no duration in the original flow. For duration is the form of something enduring, of an enduring being, of something identical in the temporal sequence that functions as its duration…Objective time is a form of "persisting" objects, of their changes and of other processes involved in them. "Process" is therefore a concept presupposing persistence. But persistence is unity that becomes constituted in the flow, and it pertains to the essence of the flow that no persistence can exist in it. Phases of experience and continuous series of phases exist in the flow. But such a phase is nothing that persists, any more than a continuous series of such phases is.

This is related to your newer thread, where you make the point that reason must be allowed to transcend its conditions and environment, having authority in itself — Leontiskos

The reason that anything appears reasonable is precisely because of the way that actual conditions, context and enviroment intertwine with background history to redefine what is at stake and at issue in the determination of the goals of reason. Trying to separate reason from the real contexts of its instantiation is a recipe for dogmatism. Understanding is enacted in pragmatic interactions, not transported from a transcendent authoritative realm to grace the present from the past. We’re not trying to enshrine eternal verities , but adapt to continually changing conditions by extracting from them anticipatable regularities.

Each night for a month, an angle came to me and took me on a tour of the heavens, and I was as awake and aware as I saw the wonders there as I ever am in my everyday life.

Further, my wife, and some reputable friends I had over heard me talking in my sleep and claim on their lives that they saw me glowing and levitating of the bed. Additionally, the angle who proclaimed God's revelation to me told me about the future, which I wrote down, and all that was said came to pass — Count Timothy von Icarus

What’s missing here is definition. What do ‘angel’ and ‘heaven’ mean? It’s not a question of these concepts being wrong but of being so vaguely defined that they don’t give a basis for measurement, for agreement or disagreement. The question isn’t whether something happened, but what exactly it was, whether it can be repeated and predicted within some scheme of causality. Dogmatism is associated with an unwillingness to expose an experience to all possible forms of questioning. In Schindler’s paper on gender, he disagrees with gender theorists on the relation between difference and identity.
He wants to place differences within categories which unify from above, as the general ruling over the particular.
This transcendence of the general can be considered as a form of dogmatism, a flattening and totalizing of contextual variation that the later Wittgenstein saw as the central confusion of philosophy.

I'd say this is actually the claim that any non-Scientistic methodology is dogmatism, which is a remarkable claim. Also, is Joshs statement itself a form of dogmatism? Ironically, these forms of Scientism are very often themselves forms of dogmatism — Leontiskos

Oh, there are plenty of other ways of determining what is the case besides using Popper’s method. I’m not a Popperian, I’m a Kuhnian, so I don’t think science itself should proceed by the method of falsification. But perhaps you can explain to me what kind of non-dogmatic method of truth-making allows Schindler to assert that liberal politics is evil because it doesn’t accept the truth of the resurrection.

The complexity of integrated circuits in modern computers approaches rapidly the complexity of the human brain. Traditional computer-programs give the program a limited range and programmers can quite easily foresee the possible outcomes. AI is different though. Not even the designer can predict what will happen as these programs in a certain way program themselves and are able to learn depending on the scope of available data. — Pez

Computers are our appendages. They are like organ systems within our bodies. Just like the functioning of a liver or heart cannot be understood apart from its inextricable entanglement in the overall aims of the organism, the same is true of our machines with respect to our purposes. They are not autonomous embodied-environmental systems but elements of our living system. As long as we are the ones who are creating and programming our machines by basing their functional organization on our understanding of concepts like memory storage , patten matching and sensory input, their goals cannot be self-generated. They can only generate secondary goals derived as subsets of the programmed concepts , which we then respond to by correcting and improving the programming. This is how our appendages and organ systems function.

Saying our machine are smarter or dumber than us is like saying the spider web or birds nest is smarter or dumber than the spider or bird. Should not these extensions of the animal be considered a part of our living system? When an animal constructs a niche it isnt inventing a life-form, it is enacting and articulating its own life form. Machines, as parts of niches , belong intimately and inextricably to the living self-organizing systems that ‘we' are.

Why is the complex behavior of current AI not itself creative, apart from the user's interpretation? Because the potential range of unpredictable behaviors on the part of the machines are anticipated in a general sense, that is, are encompassed by the designer's framework of understanding. Designing a chaotic fractal system, a random number generator, mathematically describing the random behavior of molecules, these schemes anticipate that the particulars of the behavior of the actual system they describe will evade precise deterministic capture. Industrial age machines represented a linear, sequential notion of temporality and objective physicalism, complementing representational approaches to art and literature, today's AI is an expression of the concept of non-linear recursivity, and will eventually embrace a subject-object semantic relativism. Current AI thus ‘partners' with newer forms of artistic expression that recognize the reciprocal relation between subject and object and embed that recognition into the idea the artwork conveys.

And just like these forms of artistic expression, non-linear, recursive AI functions as an archive, snapshot, recorded product, an idea of self-transforming change frozen in time. In dealing with entities that contribute to our cultural evolution, as long as we retain the concept of invention and machine we will continue to be interacting with an archive, a snapshot of our thinking at a point in time, rather than a living self-organizing system. In the final analysis the most seemingly ‘autonomous' AI is nothing but a moving piece of artwork with a time-stamp of who created it and when. In sum, I am defining true intelligence as a continually self-transforming ecological system that creates cultural (or biological) worldviews (norms, schemes, frames), constantly alters the meaning of that frame as variations on an ongoing theme (continues to be the same differently), and overthrows old frames in favor of new ones. The concept of an invented machine, by contrast, is not a true intelligence, since it not a self-modifying frame but only a frozen archive of the frame at a given moment in time.

Can we ever ‘create' a system that is truly autonomous? No, but we can tweak living organic material such as dna strands enclosed in cellular-like membranes so that they interact with us in ways that are useful to us. Imagine tiny creatures that we can ‘talk to'. These would be more like our relationship with domesticated animals than with programmed machines. Think of humanity as ecosystem 1, the encompassing ecosystem whose intelligence evolves over time. Computers belong to ecosystem 2, the sub-ecosystem operating within, and a dependent part of, ecosystem 1. As a dependent part, it cannot evolve beyond ecosystem 1. It evolves with it.

let's just assume for the sake of argument that D. C. Schindler is a giant hypocrite, and you were able to decide this by scrambling after short YouTube videos. Who cares? What does it have to do with the arguments of the OP? Is this not more ad hominem? — Leontiskos

The argument of the OP rests on an analysis of the weaknesses of pragmatism and discourses of power relations. The claim is made that truth is relative on those occasions when it suits the purposes of those in charge, and is absolute on other occasions. That’s a familiar critique. For instance, Todd May writes:

Despite themselves, Deleuze, Foucault, and Lyotard predicate much of their political work on several intertwined and not very controversial ethical principles. The mistake, made by Deleuze and Foucault in avoiding ethical principles altogether and by Lyotard in trying to avoid universalizing them, is that their avoidance is itself an ethically motivated one. In the conversation cited above, where Deleuze praises Foucault for being the one “to teach us something absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others,” he is laying out a principle of behavior that it would be unimaginable to assume he does not think ought to bind the behavior of others. In resisting an essentialism about human nature, there may have been a resistance to telling people not only what they want but also what they ought to want.

Where they must form an ethical commitment, and this is a commitment in keeping with poststructuralist political theory, is at the level of practice. Some practices are acceptable, some unacceptable.

I dont agree with this assessment. i think that cultural history develops, such that a parallel progress can be traced in all domains of creativity, from philosophy and science to the arts and ethics. But this is a progress of construction, of invention rather than revelation. Human ethical knowledge , like knowledge in other fields, is the building and transformation of a niche. Through a pragmatic process of reciprocal interaction ( power relations are in fact shared patterns of valuation) we come to learn how to perceive the world through the eyes of the other more and more effectively.

I believe that when someone writes a serious and thoughtful OP the initial posts have a particular responsibility to respond in kind if the thread is to succeed. Ad hominem quips intended to provoke are particularly pernicious at the very early stage of a thread. At best they derail. — Leontiskos

I don’t necessarily disagree. I should have posted the youtube link right away , since I think it is relevant to the OP that Schindler’s arguments are supposed to represent a bulwark against dogmatism, and yet he presumes as fact the appearance of god in the world, and presumes the manner of his appearance. I don’t understand how that isn’t dogmatic.

even Nietzsche would agree with it (namely that we cannot pretend to go back to a pre-Christian era). The second prong is that liberalism as Schindler defines it requires a denial of the ontological impact of the Incarnation, and that this is objectively evil (as privation) regardless of any good intentions involved. The second prong requires Christian premises, namely that the Incarnation had an ontological effect, and Schindler is not unclear about this fact — Leontiskos

All post-Hegelian philosophy recognizes the dependence of contemporary thinking on all that came before. But one can show how modern thought arose out of Christianity and the Greeks without assuming a cumulative progress that subsumingly retains the meanings of that history.

I honestly have no clue who he is outside of having had the book recommended to me. The book doesn't seem particularly conservative so far; — Count Timothy von Icarus

To be honest, I had no idea who he was either till you mentioned him, and then I scrambled to find some of his youtube lectures and an article called Perfect Difference: Gender and the Analogy of Being. But he does say that liberalism is the political form of evil, and defends this by arguing that god has already revealed himself in history , so for liberals to deny god is to deny this real history as the foundation of the Good , regardless of their intentions.

Another top-rate contribution from Joshs. :roll:
At least this time your ad hominem doesn't have such elaborate wrapping paper. — Leontiskos

I have an antipathy toward religious philosophy, and others (perhaps yourself?) have an antipathy toward atheistic postmodernism. But, as my posting history will reveal, I’m perfectly happy to get into detailed and respectful discussion on such issues. Otoh, a perusal of your comment history shows a tendency to scurry away from contentious debate while heaping insults on the other party. You haven’t been on this forum for very long. I’ve been here for 6 years, and if you wish to read all of my contributions over that period, you will find nothing that compares to the harshness and direct hostility you have demonstrated toward certain posters. What you will mostly find are over-long posts filled with too much information.

Given my debate history with Count Timothy, he is probably familiar enough with my idiosyncrasies to see my short comment as a provocation, to which he might choose to respond with something like “What do you mean, decidedly non-conservative writers like Ian McGilchrist and John Vervaeke idolize Schindler”. And we could take it from there. I’m not sure why you’re so threatened by me. Many of us here make blunt comments from time to time, but my goal here isnt to alienate, but to clarify my own stance through back and forth argument with others.

However, in his "Plato's Critique of Impure Reason," D.C Schindler makes a solid argument that these are two sides of the same misological coin. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Really? D.C. Schindler? I didn’t realize you were that conservative.

Numbers are not assigned to things, but they are all that things are, and our scientific theories seem to support this to a certain extent. Fundamental particles are in fact a collection of numbers, among which mass, electric charge, isospin, weak hypercharge, spin, lepton number. You may say these are the qualitative core(s), but that is a simple rebuttal that suffers from the same gaps as just stopping at the fact that they are quantitative. — Lionino

Numbers wouldn’t be assigned to things, but since number implies a process of identical repetition, it would commit things to a certain structure, that a thing repeat some attribute or property identically. Why does quality suffer the same gap as stopping at the fact of quantity?Doesnt quantity require quality but not the reverse? Can there be a quantity without a quality, category, whole, entity, species to be counted? Put differently, when Tegmark says mass, electric charge, isospin, weak hypercharge, spin, lepton are numbers, don’t we have to ask what it is that continues to be the same again and again ( number) in these entities, qualities , categories, properties?

Ball would be a human label (baggage) emerging from a collection of things (atoms and such). It is always changing as everytime it bounces it loses atoms off its surface, but then we end up not in metaphysics but in a discussion of semantics — Lionino

This isn’t just semantics but the fundamental basis of number as the repetition of ‘same thing, different time’. As soon as we say something ‘is’ a number, we have committed ourselves to a certain way of defining that something, as persisting self-identity. If Ball is a human label, what is a collection of things in themselves? The ball may change every time it bounces, but, what do we say about the atoms it loses off its surface? Are these not treated like the ball , as self-identical objects in motion? Or as fields of forces with assigned properties which are enumerated as identical repetitions of the same entity?

a lot of philosophy relies on the validity of the idea of repetition and of identity. We can throw those out at a very fundamental level, but at some point we will have to grant them if we want to progress.
There is no such thing as tissues, just a collection of cells that are made of molecules. Yes, but we can't derive biological laws from chemical laws due to the sheer complexity and also to possible emergent features. We must grant that there is such a thing as tissues if we want to come up with medicine. — Lionino

you could say sociology comes from psychology, which comes from neurology, which... from physics. But you can't say the converse, that physics comes from biology or that chemistry from neurology. The more derivative a field is, the more baggage it has, specifically because it goes away from the foundations of the universe. Another issue is that sociology and psychology are very unreliable (papers have very low reproducibility) while physics is almost always reliable — Lionino

A main reason why we cannot reduce the higher order sciences to the lower ones is that typically, the lower ones , such as physics, use a more traditional scheme of understanding than the higher ones. Physics today for the most part stays within a model of realist causation , although there are strands of newer thinking within the field, such as Karen Barad, which are allowing physics to catch up with the thinking that has been available within philosophy and psychology for a while now. For a long time, physicists, including Hawking, denied the relevance of time for the understanding of physical phenomena. But Lee Smolen and others, thanks to their embrace of ideas from biology and philosophy, are showing the absolutely central importance of time for understanding physics. So while it should in theory be the case that we can reduce philosophy to cognitive psychology , cogsci to neuroscience , neuroscience to biology, biological to chemistry and chemistry to physics , it turn out to be a circle , where the most complex human sciences come up with new ways of thinking that eventually make their way down to the natural sciences, which are reliable precisely because they are so abstractive. But the broad, simplifiying abstractions of physics have their downside, such as pushing into the convenient category of randomness whatever their simplifications cannot model.

We can progress in different ways. One form of progress relies on repetition of identity. Another form of progress relies on showing how the repetition of identity is derivative from differences upon differences. The first form of progress leads to normative ethics based on an empirical realism that assumes we are all living in the same natural world, thanks to the grounding of empirical certainty in the identical repetition of properties within natural objects. Since it assumes a verifiably same world for everyone, there are correct and incorrect, true and false understandings of this same world for all. As a consequence, political polarization, holocaust, atrocity and other forms of social violence must often be explained on the basis of wayward intentions and motivations of individuals and groups ( greed, dishonesty, evil, immorality, hunger for power, sadism) or ignorance (‘drinking the Koolaid’), rather than the result of an ethically legitimate worldview askance from one’s own.

The poststructuralist can claim all he wants ("every change in degree is simultaneously a difference in kind"), but until he proves Π, I can just ignore him on this topic because it has explanatory power for me to do so. Mathematical universe is a theory about the universe, it takes our perceptions as they are, without doubting our modes of cognition as they appear, without taking phenomenology into account. — Lionino

Again, I’m not denying that physics has explanatory power. Accepting poststructural thinking doesn’t take away any of that power. It leaves it completely intact, but enriches it. My mode of perception makes things appear for me exactly as I described it to you. Since we are accustomed to seeing our world in terms of self-identical objects , it take a bit of practice to make ourselves explicitly aware of what is already implicit within that perception. Husserl’s method of phenomenological reduction through bracketing our naive naturalistic attitude ( which physics remains stuck within) is one way of gaining entry into this implicit intricacy hidden within the abstraction of self-identical persistence that we place over what presents itself to us as a continually qualitatively changing flow of sense.

It stands that, unless we admit of computers being conscious or souls or the like, the only relationship between being alive and consciousness is that the former is a necessary condition for the latter — a counterfactual if you will — Lionino

Otoh, autopoietic systems theory and embodied, enactivist cognitivism understands a living system as functionally integral and normatively oriented around goals and purposes, which allows us to trace back the precursors of cognition and emotion to the simplest living organisms.

Evan Thompson writes:

“…the genuine interiority of life is a precursor to the interiority of consciousness, and hence the conception of nature presupposed in standard formulations of the hard problem or explanatory gap for consciousness-namely, that living nature has no genuine interiority-is misguided.

I think consciousness is what dictates the term “alive.” — Arbü1237

As in “This bacterium is alive”?

Art is distinguishable from philosophy because it is evocative, and can be supremely so through the ability of an artist. Philosophy tries to explain, sometimes in dull detail. These are different things. When philosophers try to be artists, they fail miserably because they don't have the talent. — Ciceronianus

Growing up, art was a talent that came naturally to me. After graduating high school , I briefly contemplated pursing art as a career. But in high school I had stumbled upon a set of insights that at the time I thought of as belonging to psychological theory. These insights had a profound impact on my life, and I have been elaborating these ideas ever since, at first within a psychological mode of discourse and later as philosophy. I chose against a career in art because I needed to be able to believe that I could express the insights I was developing as effectively within the language of art as I could within psychology or philosophy, and the answer I came up with was no.

This doesn’t mean that I believe philosophy or psychology are in general superior forms of knowing. Many intellectuals make the e silly mistake of elevating their own preferredmode of expression to the status of objective supremacy over all other modes. Poets think theirs is the purest way to truth, musicians consider music to be the most authentic expression of meaning, others give preference to the political, the scientific, the technological, or the philosophical. All these modes are all absolutely equal in their uniqueness and their non-superiority over other modes of creativity.

I’ll leave you with this from Deleuze:

[quote

Art and philosophy crosscut the chaos and confront it, but it is not the same sectional plane; it is not populated in the same way. In the one there is the constellation of a universe or affects and percepts; and in the other, constitutions of immanence or concepts. Art thinks no less than philosophy, but it thinks through affects and percepts.This does not mean that the two entities do not often pass into each other in a becoming that sweeps them both up in an intensity which co-determines them.


The plane of composition of art and the plane of immanence of philosophy can slip into each other to the degree that parts of one may be occupied by entities of the other. In fact, in each case the plane and that which occupies it are like two relatively distinct and heterogeneous parts. A thinker may therefore decisively modify what thinking means, draw up a new image of thought, and institute a new plane of immanence. But, instead of creating new concepts that occupy it, they populate it with other instances, with other poetic, novelistic, or even pictorial ormusical entities.

The opposite is also true. Igitur is just such a case of conceptual persona transported onto a plane of composition, an aesthetic figure carried onto a plane of immanence: his proper name is a conjunction. These thinkers are "half" philosophers but also much more than philosophers. But they are not sages. There is such force in those unhinged works of Hölderlin, Kleist, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Kafka, Michaux, Pessoa, Artaud, and many English and American novelists, from Melville to Lawrence or Miller, in which the reader discovers admiringly that they have written the novel of Spinozism.
[/quote]

the mathematics of the phenomenon is pretty much the phenomenon itself lato sensu — when a neutron decays into a proton and an electron, the only things happening are numbers changing — Lionino

Think about what is happening when a number changes. In the first place, what must be assumed about a phenomenon such that a number can be assigned to it? The phenomenon must be assumed to have a qualitative core that remains the same while we count increments of change within it. We usually think of numeric change in terms of the model of motion. When we measure the movement of a ball we count changes in degree of spatial displacement of something that is assumed to remain continually self-identical as the qualitative meaning ‘this ball’ throughout the countable changes in its location. But what if the quality we label as ‘this ball’ never persisted from one moment to the next as the same qualitative thing?

There would be nothing self-identical about which to count increments of change. Put differently, numeric quantification depends on our ability separate difference in degree from differences in kind, qualitative change from quantitative change. This is what ‘same thing, different time’ means. What poststructuralist authors argue is that it is only by abstracting away, that is, by not noticing, the continual qualitative changes in the substrates of our counting that we end up with a universe of objects which appear to behave mathematically. They argue that in fact every change in degree is simultaneously a difference in kind. And this applies not only to objects in the world, but our cognitive schemes. It is not simply that there are no perfect shapes in nature, but that even in our own imagination there are no perfect shapes.

As Heidegger writes:

“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.”

It is only as a result of our own conjuring trick that we produce a world that is remarkably amenable to numeration.

This does not at all mean that our physics is incorrect, that we have to go back and change all our calculations. It just means that there is a more intricate kind of behavior taking place in what the physicists observe and model , a behavior the requires a non-numeric language in order to understand it. The need for this language, and its advantages over mathematical forms of description become more clear in the social sciences than in the natural sciences. This is not because we understand these phenomena less well than we do the physical realm. On the contrary, newer approaches within psychology reveal an understanding, still lacking among most physicists, of the qualitatively shifting dynamics underlying mathematical objectification.

You likely will not agree with any of this, but at least it may give you a better sense of why postmodernists have a bug up their ass about the mathematical grounding of science, truth as correctness and propositional logic.

The universe is not math unless the regularity of the laws of physics is true? I have not read "Our Mathematical Universe" but I am convinced Tegmark addresses that — Lionino

The truth of the regularity of the laws of physics is not relevant to the question I raised. Truth as correctness comes from comparing a model of the phenomenon to the phenomenon. If they correspond then the model is ‘true’ to the observed phenomenon. What is at issue in my question is whether an abstraction may be involved in treating the model and the phenomenon as self-identical during the comparing process. There is no question we have produced a large collection of true mathematical statements in physics, and that these true statements of mathematical physics make many technologies possible. The question is whether we can come to a more fundamental understanding of modeler and phenomenon, subject and object than that which begins from the assumption that both hold still during the comparing process. Such an understanding does not invalidate mathematical truths , it shows them to be derivative and opens up new possibilities for understanding the world and ourselves

This summary of Tegmark's mathematical universe is interesting — Lionino

The universe isn’t math unless the ‘same thing different time’ applies to natural phenomena rather than our pretending to hold it still so as to calculate it.

It takes a bit of mental contortion to construe the kind of object people are talking about in a direct vs indirect realism debate as transparently an intentional one…At least on the forum, productive discussions of direct vs indirect realism tend to require pinning down where the disagreement is between disputants. — fdrake

I have a confession to make. I deviated from the topic of the OP in responding to you and Jamal concerning the meaning of an object’s presenting itself in Husserlian phenomenology. I take Husserl to be neither a direct nor an indirect realist , and his use of the term ‘intentional’ is entirely different in its sense from the various ways it is used in analytic philosophy, or in debates between direct and indirect realists.

Nice summary. I was—or Banno was—hung up on the connoted attribution of agency to an object that “presents itself.” It wasn’t clear to me how we go from the object as “constituted by the subject through intentional acts” to the object as that which is doing the presenting. I’m not saying this doesn’t work, just that the locution is not clear to me — Jamal

The object of an intentional act is neither discovered nor invented, neither simply “forced to present more of itself than it wants to” nor accommodated by the subject as an arbitrary in-itself. The object is “a unity which “appears” continually in the change of the modes of its givenness and which belongs to the essential structure of a specific act of the ego.” “The "object" of consciousness, the object as having identity "with itself" during the flowing subjective process, does not come into the process from outside; on the contrary, it is included as a sense in the subjective process itself and thus as an "intentional effect" produced by the synthesis of consciousness.”(Husserl). So on the side of the subject there is an intentional effect of synthesis (what you call forcing it to present more of itself than it wants to) , and on the side of the object there is presentation or appearance, the aspect of objectification that always resists subsumption within pre-given laws or categories.

The work of the applied scientist is often popularly described as if it were a series of hostile acts: ‘So-and-so wrested from the soil a new source of food’, ‘Whosits forced the atom to give up its secret’. These are grossly misleading descriptions of scientific behavior.(George Kelly)

Why do you and I want to say, and why do some phenomenologists say, that the things we perceive present themselves to us? I feel I’m missing something obvious. — Jamal

I dont know why you want to say that , but I can tell you that in Husserl’s phenomenology objects don’t just appear to a subject as what they are in themselves in all their assumed completeness, but are constituted by the subject through intentional acts. This means they present themselves to the subject within some mode of givenness. For instance, an object can be given in the mode of recollection, imagination or perception. Within spatial perception, we never see the whole object in front of us; the object gives, or presents, itself to us in only one perspectival aspect at a time. So what we understand as the object as a unitary whole is never given to us in its entirety. This abstract unity is transcendent to what we actually experience.

The posit that they're the same question, or indeed have any kind of dyadic relation, is precisely the kind of structural presupposition which should be held in suspension IMO. I think if you come at that distinction from phenomenology you end up pissing reciprocal co-constitution everywhere and thus take the co-constitution as an unexaminable given. Rather than as an a contingent observation made of human bodies…Becoming-meatbag is something I appreciate in Ratcliffe ("Experiences of Depression") and Scarry ("The Body In Pain"), they really get into how the soul is a story told by idiot meat — fdrake

I wouldn’t say it s a structural presupposition for Piaget, auto-poietic systems theory or embodied, enactivist cognitive science. For them it is something that can be demonstrated empirically. Merleau-Ponty shows elegantly how we can conceive it either as a philosophical a priori or as an empirical result , depending on which hat we wear.
Ratcliffe address the question of

whether one form of inquiry ultimately has some kind of priority over the other. It could be maintained that the two address different but complementary questions. Alternatively, one might adopt a stance of agnoticism, a ‘wait-and-see' policy. Another position, currently very popular in the philosophy of mind and other areas, is the sort of ‘scientific naturalism' or ‘scientism' that gives empirical science metaphysical and epistemological priority over all other forms of human inquiry. But contrary to scientific naturalism is a position that appears, in slightly different guises, in the work of numerous phenomenologists, including Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. They maintain that phenomenology has priority over science. In brief, scientific conceptions of things are abstractions, which depend for their intelligibility on the everyday experiential reality studied by phenomenology, in much the same way that a road map depends upon a road system. Here is how Merleau-Ponty puts it:

The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we want to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression. . . . To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign-language, as is geography in relation to the countryside in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie, or a river is. (1962, viii–ix)

This kind of position is not ‘anti-science'; it is an account of the nature and role of science. And it allows that science can still inform phenomenol-ogy, in various important ways. However, it does give phenomenology a kind of primacy over science, insofar as the subject matter of the former is presupposed by the intelligibility of the latter. It is therefore opposed to metaphysical and epistemological scientism, but compatible with weaker conceptions of naturalism that require only commerce and consistency between phenomenology and science. I suggest that this last conception of the phenomenology–science relationship applies to at least some uses of phenomenology in psychiatry: to adequately explore alternative ways of being in the world, one must first recognize the contingency of a way of being in the world that the intelligibility of empirical science depends on. Given this first step, it is incompatible with strong forms of naturalism. It follows that any attempt to characterize phenomenology solely in terms of how it can assist empirical scientific inquiry will fail to acknowledge an important and distinctive role that it has to play in psychiatry.

For the past while I've been interested in how schemes are generated rather than thinking about how changes shake already formed ones up — fdrake

I would think they were the same question. Cognitive schemes , as manifestations of living systems, only function by making changes in themselves. Genesis and structure are not separate features, although we can artificially separate them for convenience sake.

To my ears, then, construing the world as "presenting itself" is supposed to efficiently connote that the world's nature is autonomous, but what its nature is revealed as is dependent upon us. I think it's a means of saying that objects have a capacity to affect us regardless of our ability to apply concepts to them or those means of affecting — fdrake

You remind me of Lee Braver here, whose Transgressive Realism uses Kierkegaard as a means to reconcile Levinas and Heidegger.

Lately, I've become interested in these moments of revolutionary experience, when our whole sense of what the world is like gets turned inside out and we are forced to form entirely new concepts to process what is happening. According to what I am calling Transgressive Realism these are the paradigmatic points of contact with 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

Whether you can coherently think of the object as autonomous in its capacities to affect us while placing the means by which its nature is revealed as an interaction involving an agent is an issue which clouds all that. Which is a question of whether objects transcendentally condition interaction with them based on their properties. — fdrake

Do you gravitate toward the alternative way of thinking according to which objects transcendentally condition interaction with an agent in a manner neither entirely separable from the nature of the schemes they condition, nor logically derivable from them?

It's quite possible for philosophy to address how people live and what they care about without having recourse to the kind of obscurity, and sometimes even esotericism, analytic philosophy and OLP were and are intended to expose and avoid. — Ciceronianus

God forbid philosophy should be ‘obscurantist’ or ‘esoteric’ (code words for ‘I have no idea what they’re talking about’). I’m not denying it is possible to locate writers here and there who choose to be deliberately obscurantist or esoteric, but mostly these accusations are leveled against philosophers whose work I am very familiar with and understand well, and I see the difficulty not in the choice of writing style of the philosopher but in the unpreparedness of the accuser to grasp the radically new and difficult concepts embedded in the text. I associate analytic philosophy less with a clear and accessible style of writing than with an attachment to a certain set of metaphysical presuppositions (for a long time, they were just bookends to Hume and Kant) that they have lately been in the process of abandoning , leading to the fading of the boundary between analytic and continental in terms of style of language and approach. Joseph Rouse and Lee Braver are examples of contemporary philosophers who have no trouble moving back and forth between the two cultures.

Is philosophy just idle talk? Philosophy in the general sense can be. Philosophy as a discussion of rigorous proofs, logic, and proposals is not — Philosophim

Otoh, positivist and analytic approaches to philosophy almost killed it by cutting off its revelance to how people live and what they care about. Fortunately, in recent years the wall between analytic and continental has been eroding.