"Popper's notion of falsification has an ethical appeal. I don't see how it can be justified. Just as Turing machines are one way to make the intuitive notion of an algorithm definite, so falsifiability is an attempt to crystallize a sense of what makes science science. I think that technology and its supporting theory that works whether or not one believes in it is another good candidate."

I was going to bring up Popper to you. I wonder if you could talk a little more about what sort of view of what science does makes sense to you. I think it was Bacon who coined the hypothetical deductive method as what science does. Do you agree with Bacon that there is such a thing as THE scientific method , and if so, what is it?
When you say that Popperian falsification cant be verified , does that mean you disagree with the whole claim he is making? Have you read Thomas Kuhn? Do you prefer Popper to Kuhn?

Does science change by revolutions in its paradigms or does it progress incrementally, mostly preserving facts from earlier theories and adding to them? Does it progress toward an asymptotic limit of truth?

"Sometimes it may be the artists or the engineers. And sometimes maybe philosophy is in the way.

Quite possibly, but I'm going to make you a dare. Name an engineer or artist who you think defined a new cutting edge before any philosopher.

BY the way, how could an engineer do such a thing when they represent an application of basic science. Isnt an engineer by definition a conventional character, translating what has already been established into something that can be marketable? Isnt marketability function of recognizability? That is, if a large enough mass of consumers dont see the value in a new device, then it will not succeed. Automobiles were originally scoffed at as impractical whimsy(this was of courses before infrastructure like auto repair and parts stores, gas stations and paved roads).

"To go even further, even ancient tribesman probably thought more present-at-hand. They had relations to their surroundings for sure (themes of ready at hand), but they were constantly trying to figure out how to use those surroundings to fit their needs (present at hand)."

Using one's surroundings to fit one's needs, as you say, is a ready to hand relation with a tool. What would be present to hand about the situation would be extracting the tool-object from one's needs in the contextually meaningful surroundings and simply thinking of it as a contextless, purposeless 'thing', this tool with its properties and attributes. normally , we dont do that when we engage with objects, because we are busy making meaningful use of them. We dont even notice the tool until something goes wrong. Then the meaning of the tool is in what went wrong with its use, not as 'thing with properties'.

In Heideger's lecture 'What is a Thing', he says a commonly held assumption is that of the 'natural attitude' toward things, as if , beneath the changing fashions of theoretical definitions of objectiveness, there lies a universal, non-theoretical practical understanding of what a thing is.
Heidegger then goes on to skewer this assumption.He argues that there is no such thing a a natural, pre-theoretical notion of a thing.He believes the present -to-hand and the development of logic went hand in hand as Western inventions. A primitive tribesman would likely have a different notion of what we commonly call things and objects than via the present to hand.. And I think Heidegger foresaw an era to come when we would replace the idea of the present to hand with a different thinking, just as the present to hand emerged at some point in Western history. This would imply that a future empirical science would not have to base itself on the idea of present to hand.

In fact , one could argue that today's enactive embodied cognitive approaches replace objectivity with intersubjectivity, which might still fall under a Heideggerian critique , but goes a long away towards emancipation from the thinking of a mind-independent world, or a correspondence theory of truth, or the idea that we have ever have theoretical access to objects severed from a larger implicit context of interactive use and significance.

Now lets talk about getting shit done, the rock-bottom irreducibly physical-material thingly-bodily- corporeal-fleshly realer-than -real basics of surviving, the real shit. I'm thinking about how Silicon Valley's minions are spreading out over the earth, and how the closer we seem to get to the immediacy and hands-on-ness of the really real shit the more likely it is that such tasks are being given over to robots. Extrapolate forward 100 years, when a majority of humans will work at tasks in virtual' reality.
They will code, design, organize, plan, orchestrate. All kinds of stuff that involves creating, manipulating and interpreting language. But an almost complete elimination of tasks involving physical objects, excepts as housings for screens or implanted neural devices communicating image and text.

In the future the real may be completely virtual, bout wont it still mostly be about getting virtual shit done? About creating and maintaining tools? Of course, the writing and teaching of a book of philosophy is also the creating and maintaining of a tool, but what of your adjectives?

Heidegerrian thought is clealy not necessary, useful functional, repetitive minutiae mongering, or pragmatic tinkering, is it? Heidegger is on the side of complexity and richness. Real meaning is on the side of survival and getting shit done. A quick question. What if it were the case(and it isn't for most people) that reading Heidegger produced for everyone an extraordinary , lasting euphoric pleasure that was far superior to anything that 'getting shit done' could produce, would you still call minutia mongering more meaningful? In that case you're defining meaning in terms of a distinction between pleasure and survival. Of course, if my hypothetical were true, then many would sacrifice their lives to such pleasure(as they do now to euphoria-producing drugs).

There would then seem to be a constant battle among humankind between what gives pleasure and what is necessary for survival, with some arguing that true meaning is higher than mere survival, and others arguing a Darwinian position that pleasure is merely epiphenomal, a biproduct of adaptive brain structures those only meaning from an evolutionary standpoint is in their capacity to foster continued survival of species, gene or whatever.
In a way this is a variant of Rousseau's philosophy of the cultural as parasitic on the natural , which Freud picked up on in 'Civilization and its Discontents'.
One could point out here that the survival of a complex post-industrial service and information- based society would seem to be a survival with distinctly different features than the survival of an ant colony.

One might want to divide 'survival' into two components,1) the very sucess of self preservation and persistence, which would not differentiate between an amoeba and a philosopher, and 2)the level of complexity and , internal differentiation of a particular living system that happens to be surviving.

Let's say for the sake of argument that we say that meaning requires both components, such that the more complex and differentiated a human's life is, the more meaningful it is, and it is thus directly tied into human desire and motive.

This is kind of the 'complexity theory' of meaning. By this measure , all those grunts trying to simply 'get shit done' are striving not just for simple self-preservation, but are getting shit done for the sake of a motive for self-complexification(what people call personal growth or self-improvement).

In other words, getting shit done has an arc to it, a kind of developmental telos. Getting shit done always implies a motive toward getting shit done better, and getting shit done better naturally aims toward getting it done in a richer, more complex, more differentiated and integral way. This isnt what the grunt is thinking, but it is what underlies their sense of satisfaction and what it means to them to be doing a good job, or a better job. In situations whether one is just trying to get paid and doesn't find their work rewarding, this anticipatory sense making still applies, but in this case one has to follow what they are preferring to the work.

My favorite writers in psychology and philosophy(George Kelly, Jean Piaget, Heidegger and numerous others) see human experiencing as anticipatory. These writers do away with the distinctions between motive , affect and cognition. They see human beings as already in motion(not physical motion but in process of experiential change). So they don't have to posit extrinsic or internal movers, drives, pushers and pullers of human incentive. The only motive is sense making in a world that appears to us as always changing from moment to moment. Sense making is anticipatory, future oriented.
So motive is naturally aligned with being able to assimilate all variety of new experience.

I didn't mention the key component of their thinking. It is that thinking is hierarchically organized as an integral totality. That means that when we approach the world we interpret the meaning of experience globally. From the most mundane practical minutia to the most elevated, abstract spiritual or philosophical concerns, all of this functions in the background of each of our engagements with the world at every moment. So those lowest level pragmatic 'getting shit done' experiences imply , are authorized by , are understood in relation to and meaningful extend those most global, abstract and complex meanings by which we defined ourselves ethically, spiritually, socially. A human being is, from moment to moment, a single integrated worldivew in process of self-transformation, Getting shit done is our ways of preserving, extending and transforming that worldview. The 'getting shit done' pragmatic minutia mongerer of today in the tech world is extending his worldview, which , being a 21st century empirically sophisticated worldview, has internalized Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and liekly Knat, whether they have read a word of those authors or not. Each eyeblink and and sneeze
and intended action of getting shit done refers to, addresses and strengthens their Platonic-Aristotelain-Caretsian-Kantian construct system. So maybe you can see that, thinking about the real and tools the way that I do from this vantage, there is no conflict or separation between the most abstract and ephemeral meaning in our lives and the most supposedly 'real', 'getting shit done' meanings. each presupposes, feed back from and extends the other.

My working right this minute on soldering together these two circuit components is not just the isolated activity that it seems . Everything that led me to sitting down in this chair and doing everything necessary to begin the task , including deciding why i want or need to do it, what my goal is, etc. arise out of the global, integrated context of my construct system. When I lose myself in the details of my task, that global background is never absent but informs and directs my actions and motives.

Edit — Joshs

"I'm not not interested in that (I've looked into Noe briefly already), it's just that I'm more into (and more likely to be paid for) understanding the guts of a convolutional neural network for computer vision. Also my sense is that the world won't reward me much for being the intellectual tourist I might prefer to be. As far as phenomenology goes, Heidegger was great, but there is also just living more in one's body. Books are great, but let's not forget old fashioned experience. "

Lots of distinctions being thrown around here:books vs experience, bodily living vs abstract thought.
What I like about Heidegger was his tearing apart the supposed distinction between 'bodily' and conceptual. Of course , we don't need to rely on Heidegger for that. In a less radical way , today's enactive, embodied approaches also dissolve such distinctions between what is body and what is cognitive. I think what you're getting at is that you are more comfortable with applied fields because they suit your style of thinking better. But I wouldn't confuse your personal preference for mode of ideation with some supposed defect in the style of thinking associated with many continental philosophers. Everyone has their preference in terms of how to best articulate, process and expand their creative thinking. I do think a non-linear sort of development of ideas can be talked about in relation to cultural history that involves a holistic relationship between different modes of expression(empirical, political, philosophical, ethical, artistic, literary, etc).

No one modality takes preference over others(not the scientific-technological) in terms of something like rapidity of progress or better access to truth. Each modality of culture depends on all the others in complex reciprocal ways in articulating truths of an era within their own vocabularies. Persons working within a particular modality can confuse their own biases and preferences for some universal priority of their discipline. Heidegger thought poetry could articulate Being better than any other modality, Some physicists still think their field is the queen of the sciences and that the
sciences are superior modes of access to truth and progress than other modes. Some mathematicians believe their field is grounded in Platonic universals and is protected from the contingencies of empirical science. There are musicians and artists who prioritize an affective-intuitive language of expression over empirical or philosophical.

My own bias is that the best philosophers of an era tend to act as a crystal ball, anticipating ahead of the rest of culture to ways of thinking that unfold eventually as new empirical discoveries and artistic movements. Whether I can justify that or not, the important point for me is that it is possible to translate what is essential in a philosophical articulation of ideas into psychological or artistic or literary or any other modality of ideation of that same era(Im Hegelian in that way, I believe in the idea of cultural worldviews and their evolution)., so I am not wedded to one disciple over another. Do I want my subjective idealism in the form of Kant, Einstein, Picasso or Joyce? They are all essential to me even though my preferred vocabulary would be Kant. Do I choose Freud, Nietzsche, Foucault or Dennett? They interpenetrate each other's thinking in so many ways, it would be a crime to excluded any of them. And still, my personal preference is Nietzsche, for the incomparably rich language.
The particular milieu you have chosen to embrace is your priority, but dont make the mistake of universalizing it.

Noise is an unfortunate but necessary byproduct of difficult ideas. In grad school, I thought the empirical trajectory was my best bet for attaining the solidity of stable fact. I eschewed philosophy, thinking it obsolete. A few years later I was to do a 180 degree turn. What I mistook for solidity was just a different sort of noise than that of philosophical debate. For all the substanceless sycophants in the philosophy world, (and there are many), there are as many empiricists reinventing a wheel that a philosopher built generations earlier.
If you want to escape noise , choosing one side over another isn't the answer. The trick is to locate that small minority within the scientific and philosophic communities who are truly onto something.

And when you do, you will likely find that they have found each other. IF you want to read the best new approach to the empirical understanding of visual perception, you can do no better than Alva Noe. But you will have to listen to his praise for Edmund Husserl's and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. Yes, he found out they had been onto something, the same thing he was just now discovering, but they got to it decades earlier. If you want to read some remarkable new research on autism, schizophrenia, child development of empathy, I highly recommend Shaun Gallagher. But you'll also have to make your way through his praise of Gadamer's hermeneutics(as well as phenomenology.) Yes, Shaun noticed that these philosophers were onto something. That's why he co-founded the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. Dan Zahavi is one of the best interpreters of Phenomenological philosophy today, and he has immersed himself in the project of integrating phenomenological method with empirical fields. Such endeavors were encouraged by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty themselves.

" To live antifoundationalism might just be to do excellent work in something besides philosophy."
Or it could be to understand 20th and 21st century anti-foundational philosophy well enough not to confuse its attempts at rigor for sneaking in foundationalism through the back door. Rorty badly misread Derrida and Heidegger this way, It's a typical Anglo-American weakness. We tend to be threatened by the thoroughness of a continental style, having only our own thinner emprically-parasitic intellectual traditions to fall back on. You sound like Rorty, exhorting us to abandon philosophy for other endeavors now that metaphysics is out of fashion.
At the same time that we pat ourselves on the back for avoiding the supposed errors of the overly theoretical continentals, we haven t figured out a way to think anti-foundationalism without falling back on the crutch of empiricism. They have, and we fault them for our inability to read them well enough. Their abstractness is no match for our anti-intelectualism.

Who are you r anti-foundationalist heroes, those who you believe have avoided whatever excesses you are trying to point out?

"Note that they show us. They represent the notion of accurate representation (accurately, one would hope) as an 'automatic and empty compliment.' Let me emphasize that I like the spirit of this statement. I also like the spirit of logical positivism. Certain anti-metaphysical positions can't resist becoming meta-physicians themselves as they try to prove (metaphysically) that metaphysics is impossible or worthless."

What if showing is transforming? What if representing is an an altering interaction? What if the constraints imposed by reality are normative constraints that are only relevant and coherent within a contingent scheme of understanding? Do you support Kuhn's anti-foundationalism or do you think he goes too far?

Neither Derrida, Heidegger nor Nietzsche would say foundational metaphysics is worthless. They would instead say that it doesn't understand its basis. I would not call Heidegger and Derrida anti-metaphysical. Derrida in particular says that we can never simply escape metaphysics. He calls what he does quasi-transcendental.

WIttgenstein may be anti-foundatinaist but not radically so. His approach is what I'd call emanciaptory, fitting into a Kierkegaardian mode where truth is contingent within cultures but one can still justify a trajectory or telos to history. I think this is Kuhn's move also, allowing for a pragmatic notion of progress. The radical anti-foundationalists are post-strucrturtalists like Deleuze and Derrida, who question the ability to justify the meaning of a valuative directionality to truth, meaning, value.

You beat me to it. I was going to use that exact Heidegger quote.

We don't need to prove in order to build. In terms of its effect on society these days, I'd say those scientific and technical fields interlaced with the cognitive sciences are the most important today, in terms of their contribution to robotics and in general technologies which simulate cognition in living organisms.
This interdisciplinary field of mind science is about as 'messy' as philosophy(there is active interchange between a.i., cog. science and philosophy of mind, and increasingly including continental phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty ) with multiple branches and sub fields and internal divisions and debates. And yet, out of all this chaos will come increasingly sophisticated modes of thinking and associated devices that are already dramatically changing our cultural and political landscape worldwide.

"The truly basic questions in philosophy are not matters of fact. They are matters of opinion. Not truth, but usefulness. "Metaphysics" is a dangerous word, with different meanings for different people."

A story scientists tend to tell themselves is that science is about fact and philosophy about opinion. Until you get to philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn, for whom scientific change involves revolutions in theoretical conventions that imply a hopeless entanglement of fact and interpretation from the bottom up.
You don't think that the very foundation of modern empirical science is set of (unexamined) metaphysical assumptions? And that 'progress' in science amounts to a continual transformation in those metaphysical assumptions?

The illusion is that there is agreement in science but not in philosophy, and therefore the hard sciences are more precise and rigorous. The reality is that the best thinking in philosophy is in the most fundamental sense more precise than that in the hard sciences and therefore shows up more effectively the differences in viewpoint of those who participate in its debates. The reason that science is by its nature less precise is that it is by definition conventional. That is, it takes as its framing presuppositions certain philosophical ideas but does not make those presuppositions explicit in its thinking. It forgets they are there. The pragmatic operational language of science, based on a logico-mathematical grounding, is designed to be abstract and general enough as to mask the differences in interpretations of it among its participants. Such differences in interpretation only come to the surface as debates about meta-theory(The Copenhagen interpretation in physics, etc).

In a room of 20 physicist working on a particular physic problem , each one will bring their own interpretation of the meaning of that physics, but the linguistic-conceptual scaffolding of the sciences is broad and inexplicit enough as to mask such differences , whereas the the richly, sweepingly self-examining nature of language in continental philosophical inquiry is designed to allow such differences to emerge. Thus, the illusion prevails that physics is a more precise and 'true' mode of inquiry than philosophy.

Yes, he would say illusion. The problem with that approach is it ignores the 'sibjective' conditions of possibility that have to be constructted in order to have any notion of what objectivity is supposed to be.

I have to confess I'm not sure how you want to define reality.

If I may make use of Richard Rorty here instead of Heidegger, the postmodern pragmatist sees 'reality' as resting on the idea of truth as the mirror of nature, a correspondence between human constructions and an external world.

"I argue that when extended in a certain way they let us see truth as, in James's phrase, "what it is better for us to believe," rather than as "the accurate representation of reality." Or, to put
the point less provocatively, they show us that the notion of "accurate representation" is simply an automatic and empty compliment which we pay to those beliefs which are successful in helping us do what we want to do."

Maybe you're raising the often brought up objection to radically relativistic philosophical positions which deconstruct foundational metaphysics. The argument goes something like this: "If your claim is that no metaphysical ground for reality can justify itself, then isn't your very claim a sort of ground in itself"?

It would be unfair to answer this question by suggesting that it is only an issue when one has failed to understand the nature of a thinking that frees itself from foundationalism. Instead, I would say that there are many ways of constructing a philosophical position, .The sort of philosophical position that embraces a radical relativism doesn't see itself as a concept that sits above or beneath or outside of the flux that it points to, but instead embodies that flux within its own terms. Heidegger's notion of Being, Derrida's differance and Nietzsche's he's Will to Power are already bifurcated within themselves. they are less to be thought of as originating concepts than they are enactments, performances, transitions. They are self-reflexive and historical , meaning that each time one references such a 'grounding' , it is a historically new manifestation of itself. Mobility , transition, absence, the in-between, these notions can be talked about and referred to to. In doing so, we are not pointing to static concepts, but enacting what we are pointing to.

Dennett attempts to sidestep the problem by denying there is any such thing as subjective experience in the first place. At the opposite end are philosophers of mind like Chalmers who want to imbue all of material reality with subjectivity(panpsychism). The best approach to my mind is one that recognizes an inextricable entanglement between the subjective and objective in our accounts of empirical reality and inner consciousness.

The hard problem of consciousness is an artifact of our continuing at some level to follow in the footsteps of Descartes and maintain a separation between the subjective and the objective. One result of this is our notion of consciousness as the subjective experience of an objective world. Approaches such as those(embodied enactive cognitive science) which tap into phenomenological philosophy(Merleau-Ponty) attempt to dissolve the hard problem by overcoming the subject-object split.

This is a complex issue. For Heidegger the real has to do with the present-to-hand, and the present-to -hand is the transforming of our relations with the world into narrow, formal conceptualizing that is based on subject-predicate relations. When we determine the presence of a thing in terms of a propositional subject-object statement we cut off our experience of something from its context of use and ossify it as what it is in itself. We attribute to objects self-persistence and self-identity through time, but in doing so, we forget about what gives beings meaning in the first place. In objecting to the 'real', Heidegger is objecting to the idea of being able to understand anything independent of a context of relevance.

Heidegger writes:

"...statement means pointing out. With this we adhere to the primordial meaning of logos as apophansis: to let beings be seen from themselves.""Statement is tantamount to predication. A "predicate" is "stated" about a "subject," the latter is determined by the former." "Positing the subject, positing the predicate, and positing them together are thoroughly "apophantic" in the strict sense of the word. "Like interpretation in general, the statement necessarily has its existential foundations in fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception. But how does the statement become a derivative mode of interpretation? What has been modified in it? We can point out the modification by sticking with limiting cases of statements which function in logic as normal cases and examples of the most "simple" phenomena of statement. What logic makes thematic with the categorical statement, for example, "the hammer is heavy," it has always already understood "logically" before any analysis. As the "meaning"
of the sentence, it has already presupposed without noticing it the following: this thing, the hammer, has the property of heaviness. "Initially" there are no such statements in heedful circumspection. But it does have its specific ways of interpretation which can read as follows as compared with the "theoretical judgment" just mentioned and may take some such form as "the hammer is too heavy" or, even better, "too heavy, the other hammer!"

The primordial act of interpretation lies not in a theoretical sentence, but in circumspectly and heedfully putting away or changing the inappropriate tool "without wasting words." From the fact that words are absent, we may not conclude that the interpretation is absent. On the other hand, the circumspectly spoken interpretation is not already necessarily a statement in the sense defined. Through what existential ontological modifications does the statement originate from circumspect interpretation? The being held in fore-having, for example the hammer, is initially at hand as a useful thing. If this being is the "object" of a statement, as soon as we begin the statement, a transformation in the fore-having is already brought about beforehand . Something at hand with which we have to do or perform something, turns into something "about which" the statement that points it out is made. Fore-sight aims at something objectively present in what is at hand. Both by and for the way of looking, what is at hand is veiled as something at hand. Within this discovering of objective presence which covers over handiness, what is encountered as objectively present is determined in its being objectively present in such and such a way. Now the access is first available for something like qualities. That as which the statement determines what is objectively present is drawn from what is objectively present as such.

The as-structure of interpretation has undergone a modification. The "as" no longer reaches out into a totality of relevance in its function of appropriating what is understood. It is cut off with regard to its possibilities of the articulation of referential relations of significance which constitute the character of the surrounding world. The "as" is forced back to the uniform level of what is merely objectively present. It dwindles to the structure of just letting what is objectively present be seen by way of determination. This levelling down of the primordial "as" of circumspect interpretation to the as of the determination of objective presence is the speciality of the statement. Only in this way does it gain the possibility of a pointing something out in a way that we sheerly look at it. Thus the statement cannot deny its ontological provenance from an interpretation that understands. We call primordial the "as" of circumspect interpretation that understands, the existential hermeneutical "as" in distinction from the apophantical "as" of the statement. There are many interim stages between interpretation which is quite enveloped in heedful understanding and the extreme opposite case of a theoretical statement about objectively present things: statements about events in the surrounding world, descriptions of what is at hand, "reports on situations," noting and ascertaining a "factual situation," describing a state of affairs, telling about what has happened. These "sentences" cannot be reduced to theoretical propositional statements without essentially distorting their meaning. Like the latter, they have their "origin" in circumspect interpretation."

The issue is how we are to understand what a tool is. You mentioned Heidegger's distinction between the ready-to-hand and the present-to-hand. When you talk about tools in terms of the 'real', and in contra-distinction to a text or something in my imagination, you are thinking about them as present-to-hand. Heidegger's critique of the dangers of technology concerned not its products but this way of thinking about it that he also called "enframing', or standing reserve'.

Heidegger determines technology in its instrumentality as an 'enframing', or 'standing reserve'.
“The merely instrumental definition of technology is in principle untenable”.

Heidegger doesn't say tools don't have the being of the 'real' . He says an 'objective',. present at hand, enframing way of thinking about beings requires a derivative modification of primordial heedful circumspective ready to hand engagement with the world. For Heidegger, humans aren't simply 'dependent on' tools, as if there was first a subject and then a present-to- hand object that one engaged with in certain useful ways. Rather, the essence of the ready to hand , as 'use', circumspective engagement', having something matter to one, precedes both subjectivity and objectivity. Thought most primordially, Dasein doesn't 'use' or 'depend on' tools. Dasein is always already in between, in transition, in creative engagement with a world, prior to its being a subject.
Enframing cuts off our thinking about tools from their relational context of heedful circumspection and narrows them down to theoretical propositional statements, which is what we are doing when we point to a tool as a real, objectively existing thing. Only then can we talk bout something like a tool being 'invented' For Heidegger, the ready to hand is not the invention of a thing that we then use in particular ways. It's meaning is wholly enveloped in its use, and this use is particular to me and my context of relevant purposes and engagements. So , thought in this way, the ready to hand doesn't distinguish between invention of and engagement with what we call present to hand things. This is because all being is being with ,and all being with is a modification and transformation of being. That is, all being is creative, inventive. The notion of objectivity and reality, as derivative ways of thinking, are not necessary to explain technological invention. What objective thinking does is arbitrarily separate certain types of relational contexts, those you would call tool invention, from all others, including making music and philosophy.

you speak about the critical importance of the presence or absence of tools throughout history to particular cultures. In my own life, the development of my philosophical thinking has had an infinitely more profound effect on my life than exposure to any 'objective' technologies. That is as it should be, given that there is no way in principle to distinguish between philosophical creation and technological creation. As Heidegger says , the essence of technology is nothing technological.

Absolutely nothing is more real than this. And the reason is that the very claims of reality to being able to 'get things done' via its connection to the natural and the lawful already presupposes what it aims to prove. For notions like 'lawful', 'natural', 'real', all derive from the same metaphysical pre-supposositions concerning the conditions of possibility of there being such a thing as an object.

The deconstructive move of Heidegger or Derrida aims not to disprove, but argue that the very idea of 'correctness' as agreement between a subject and object of a proposition stands at the basis of the determination of objectivity and the notion of the 'real'.
Is there anything about a physical device that we understand identically , whose inner working everyone can describe identically? Are there ever two people who use a device in the identical manner? IF not, then what distinguishes such objects from texts?
And of course, I dont need to point out the profound ways in which any other cultural product, from music to the political to the philosophical, can reorganize communities.

Havent you heard? the 'physical just a construct that we use, and have been using a long time, thanks to Aristotle, Galileo and Descartes. But we are beginning to realize that it is a more and more problematic construct, becoming less and less useful to us. Eventually ,we will be ready to jettison it altogether. But dont worry. that wont require the negating of all our scientific achievements, just the reinterpreting of them within a much more power context of thinking than that of the 'objective and the real, whose conditions of possibility we owe to a metaphysics which believes in substance and self-identicality. This metaphysics is what makes possible propositional logic, upon which the objectivity of the object is based. But it misses aspects of the world that it will be necessary to model more effectively than a philosophy of the real can do for us .

Derrida' s main focus was exposing the ways in which presence has been prioritized throughout the history of Western philosophy. It has taken the form of privileging speech over writing, nature over culture, and these days it involves theorizing something that somehow escapes interpretive contingency, that which we call the 'real'

" the minutia mongerer who makes real and useful functions from the science, math, and materials."

Every creative soul is a minutia mongerer. Beethoven's minutia mongerings were as 'real' (whatever that is supposed to mean) as Jobs', The difference as I see it isnt that you cant hold a symphony in your hand, but that the realness of Beethovben's music was richer, more powerful, more precise in a way than the final, exhausted incarnation of ideas that a technological instantiation represents Think about what happens we we move along a hypothetical spectrum of 'realness' from , say, Kant to Goethe to Schoenberg to Joyce and Picasso to Frege and Russell and Goedel and Turing and Von Neumann to finally today's device inventors.

Just for the sake of argument let's say that the essential discoveries made by Kant were carried through into these subsequent creative products in the arts, mathematics and then technology. That is to say, that each new product was the translation of ideas originally put forth within a philosophical context into a variety of cultural vocabularies(literary, poetic, artistic, scientific, technological). Each new mode, then, was an application of a previous mode, and the dissemination of ideas that were initially held by a tiny few to a wider and wider spectrum of society.

Finally , the originally philosophical ideas become widespread in the form of machinic 'text', and then we say they are 'real', as if somehow something magical is happening with them that wasn't before. But what really is this magical thing, this 'reality, this 'materiallity', this 'I an hold it in my hand and play with it so it has more 'reality' than an a measly idea'?

And if a technological device more 'real' than the philosophical and scientific ideations that made it possible, then keep in mind that this process of 'realization, of further and further application of application, doesnt stop with technology. It makes its way into business and finance theories and then into popular modes even more conventional and widespread in culture. These modes should then be considered even more 'real' than those of technology.

It would seem arbitrary to pick, out of all of these phases of application, that of the technological and crown it as the queen of the 'real'.

My goal in choosing relativistic, interpretation based thinking over mind-Independence is the opposite of obfuscation or continental philosophical self-abuse, which is of course widespread. The appeal of enactivist, hermeneutic, and post-structuralist discourse for me is supremely practical. What is most important to me is how one can understand one another more effectively not only in an ethical context but also psychotherapeutically. What I see in Heidfeger and Derrida I also see in psychologists like George Kelly and pragmatists like Dewey. What we gain by jettisoning a certain mind-independent objectivity is not a muddle of chaos and indeterminacy, but the opposite. a more effective way to follow each other's thinking.

The thing about objective realism is that when it is applied to the understanding of individual cognition , affectivity and motivation it reifies psychological phenomena into arbitrariness. There are exciting writers working in philosophy of mind and cognitive science today, such as Shaun Gallagher, Evan Thompson and Alva Noe. these are scientists who also happen to endorse relativist, interpretive enactivism as a way of understanding human empathy, schizophrenia, autism, perception affect, etc.

If youre tired of the lazy sycophantic regurgitations of Heidegger and Derrida in much of today's continentel writings you should give these writers a try. They are well-versed in Husserlian and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, as well as Heidegger, Gadamer and many other continentals.

At the end of the day, if we are more conservatively minded, then we reach no far than the imaginative vistas that our current technologies evoke. If we are more radically minded, we recognize that today's technologies are yesterday's arts and philosophies., and we look beyond the machines of today to a new frontier.
A machine is just another form of text, and it informs, changes , moves us the way any text does. And its limits are the limits of any text.

As text, a technology has no existence apart from the ability of its users to read and interpret it. It is just one cog in a matrix of cultural readabillty . That's why a technology cannot be a technology until a community is ready to understand it and thereby see it as useful. Technology means nothing without usefulness and usefulness is a cultural artifact. It also defines a certain conventionality and common denominator. By definition, technology can only be what it is because it exemplifies the familiar and widely understood.

What does it mean to 'rely on' something? We certainly rely on technology in a different way than we rely on art, but how can we prioritize technology when all its components of thought derive in one way or another from earlier eras of creativity that include the contributions of artists? What happens with you when you listen to music and how is that different than what happens to you when you use a technology? Only if we make a sharp (and I believe artificial) distinction between the material and the ideational do we end up talking a bout one modality 'making things happen, or relying on those things', and another not being capable of such a happening. One doesn't have to have been directly exposed to the humanities in order those modes to have made their way into the founding assumptions behind a new technology. A whole generation of art is built into an iphone(including Steve Jobs' encounters with calligraphy) .
A technology doesn't represent the leading edge of ideas. On the contrary, it is the tail end of a long process of discovery that begins with philosophy and then the arts. Today's cutting edge technology is a force of conservatism, its leaders are rehashing old ideas in a new form. The next wave of philosophy and the arts will be a reaction against what today's technologies instantiate.

" Is the Lincoln Memorial a mind-independent object? How about the moon? What about what you or I ate for breakfast?"

The question is what it means to say that something is mind-independent. Or more generally, what an object is. The idea of object is an invention with a long pedigree in Western history. We can thank Aristotle, Galileo, and Descartes among others for our carving up experience into the abstractions we call objects. Granting that we invented this construct, we are still apt to defend it on the basis of its usefulness for us.The fiction of the object would seem to enable us to create many valuable technologies. But just because we have found the mind-independent object to be a useful construct for a long time doesn't mean that we cant replace it with an even more powerful construct, one that would seem to sacrifice precision and predictability at one level but in fact may provide an overall more useful explanatory framework over all. We've had to make such a choice many time before in the history of science. Pre-Darwinian biology made use of an elegant explanatory order for the origin of species. The Darwinian evolutionary paradigm sacrificed this elegance in favor of a relativism at the lower bound but a more effective paradigm at a meta level.

The issue of something like the Lincoln Memorial existing independent of us is what exactly can we point to in unison as what we are seeing in common. SOMETHING is there to contribute to our interpretations of it, but what that substrate is cannot be teased out from what we construe of it.

Mark C. Taylor(2001) characterizes this 'enactivist' ethos thusly; “Contrary to popular opinion and many philosophical epistemologies, knowledge does not involve the union or synthesis of an already existing subject and an independent object” Subjectivity and objectivity emerge through an ongoing adaptive process.

The Memorial is an item of language which has to be read off. What something is is a function of what we need it for, what we do with it, how we interact with it. And that changes not only from person to person but from instance to instance when we look at something, If we place a man from 30,000 years ago in front of a bus, how will that person's eyes track the vehicle? It depends on many things. Will they see it as a single thing or a collection of parts? And what is the significance of these parts for them?
Are they seeing the same bus as we are? What about it is the same? We could say their ability to avoid bumping into it maybe, but that will depend on their assessment of what it is made of and whether it is a mirage. Is a series of lines and curves scrawled in the sand a group of letters that form words or is it random patterns? It depends on many things, including what languages we are familiar with and our vocabulary. What is the 'object' or 'same object' that we all can agree on here? And what would it even mean to ask such a question apart from the intentions , background knowledge an context of each person encountering such a situation?

So yes, every meaning is interpretation all the way down, but a better word than interpretation is interactive transformation . An object is the result of a particular active engagement between person and world based on a interrelational framework of intentional directionality, personal history and knowledge, context, culture, for the sake of ongoing purposes. Object means nothing outside of how it relates to our goals.



" When you or I watch the news, for instance, do we not almost automatically sort the facts from the spin? "

This a good example of the disadvantages of thinking of facts as mind-independent. If you believe that, you will be forced, as many are today, to disparage and attack those who are , in a thoroughgoing way, interpreting those supposed facts in profoundly contradictory ways relative to your understanding. Thus the endless accusations of fake news, brainwashed or lying, ethically compromised politicians and duped citizens.

An understanding of facts that sees them as interpretive from top to bottom will , instead of questioning the integrity of others, seek to unfold their interpretive framework from their perspective.

IF we want to just keep doing science in the same way we have been, we can retain the old thinking about the mind-indepdendence of reality. But in order to build psychological theories and machines that think more like we do, and can do more complex cognitive and perceptual tasks, it will be necessary to think beyond mind-independence. Newell and Simon's neural network model of 60 years ago modeled itself on mind-independent objects, but it was profoundly limited in what it could do.

Interpretation all the way down doesn't destroy the notion of objectivity, it simply exposes it as an abstraction masking within itself more interesting possibilities. In a way,enactivist thinking leaves the old thinking intact, but works within it to make explicit its hidden context-dependency.

As to the question of the alleged superiority of science-math-technology over other cultural modalities with regard to securing meaning or truth or progress or objectivity or some such thing, it should be noted that changes in worldview within science and technology parallel those in all other modalities within an era. Thus we have Greek or Reconnaissance, or Enlightenment or Modernist or postmodern eras which their own art, science,philosophy, literature, political theory, united by overarching metaphors of meaning.

If science and technology were better adapted toward some sort of 'progress' than the arts or literature , then these modalities would not all evolve in parallel with each other. In fact, it can be argued that it is philosophy which is the crystal ball in each era, pointing toward what will later emerge as the new technological forms. So whatever it is that is most vital in the methods of science and technology with regard to changing ways of meaning making , it is not bound up in what distinguishes them from other modalities, butt rather what is shared among all cultural modalities. There is no such thing as pure science or technology which is not already inextricably bound up with and interaffected by rest of cultural ideation.


Heidegger wrote:
"Because in accordance with its existential meaning, understanding is the potentiality for being of Da-sein itself, the ontological presuppositions of historiographical knowledge
transcend in principle the idea of rigor of the most exact sciences. Mathematics is not more exact than historiographical, but only narrower with regard to the scope of the existential foundations relevant to it."

" I understand the charm of 'no facts, only interpretations,' but I doubt that we can live or speak without absurdity without such a central distinction."

Nietzsche isn't the only philosopher to put the fact-value distinction into question. Quine, Donald Davidson, Hillary Putnam, Thomas Kuhn and Nelson Goodman are among many who have reached similar conclusions..

"To be objective, one would have to have some set of mind-independent objects to be
designated by language or known by science. But can we find any such objects? Let us look at an extended example from the philosopher Nelson Goodman.

A point in space seems to be perfectly objective. But how are we to define the points of our everyday world? Points can be taken either as primitive elements, as intersecting lines, as certain triples of intersecting planes, or as certain classes of nesting volumes. These definitions are equally adequate, and yet they are incompatible: what a point is will vary with each form of description. For example, only in the first "version," to use Goodman's term, will a point be a primitive element. The objectivist, however, demands, "What are points really?" Goodman's response to this demand is worth quoting at length: If the composition of points out of lines or of lines out of points is conventional rather than factual, points and lines themselves are no less so. ... If we say that our sample space is a combination of points, or of lines, or of regions, or a combination of combinations of points, or lines, or regions, or
a combination of all these together, or is a single lump, then since none is identical with any of the rest, we are giving one among countless alternative conflicting descriptions of what the space is.
And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? Neither the space (a) as an undivided whole nor (b) as a combination of everything involved in the several accounts; for (a) and (b) are but two among the various ways of organizing it. But what is it that is so organized? When we strip off as layers of convention all differences among ways of describing it, what is left? The onion is peeled down to its empty core."

paragraphs 14 and 34

Later on in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche says:

"Now it is beginning to dawn on maybe five or six brains that physics
too is only an interpretation and arrangement of the world (according to
ourselves! if I may say so) and not an explanation of the world."
"It is no more than a moral prejudice that
the truth is worth more than appearance; in fact, it is the world’s most
poorly proven assumption. Let us admit this much: that life could not exist
except on the basis of perspectival valuations and appearances; and if,
with the virtuous enthusiasm and inanity of many philosophers, someone
wanted to completely abolish the “world of appearances,” – well, assuming
you could do that, – at least there would not be any of your “truth”
left either! Actually, why do we even assume that “true” and “false” are
intrinsically opposed? Isn’t it enough to assume that there are levels of
appearance and, as it were, lighter and darker shades and tones of appearance
– different valeurs, to use the language of painters? Why shouldn’t
the world that is relevant to us – be a fiction?"

Drives for Nietzsche are ways of valuing. So are scientific paradigms.

"Why should the Mona Lisa still be considered something important in our history, when learning about the now(Current times) is possibly more fruitful?"

Why do most continental philosophers keep commg back to Plato and Aristotle? It 's because they developed a vocabulary and method of thinking that is still implicit in, and relevant to, today's philosophies. Can the same be said about Da Vinci? In a way, yes.

What are considered the 'masters' changes over time, but in general, we keep coming back to past greats because they still have relevance to us because of their ability to invent forms of expression that we can still learn from.

"Being highlighted here is the mistake of philosophers who can't separate fact from interpretation."
No, Nietzsche is arguing that all fact IS interpretation. Truth is perspectival in nature, and all perspectives are value systems.

Rather than starting with a presumed definition of 'art' and then pontificating about its current status in comparison with previous eras, its useful to note how the meaning of art changes along with cultural shifts. For instance , Lets look at the world today vs the 1920's. The amount of wealth is astronomically higher than it was, and in the hand of individuals in a greater number of countries. This means art as an investment is more important than it has been before , and this has spanned a culture of rapid commoditization.
Every large and mid-sized city has a thriving arts scene today as more money is drawn into urban culture.
Meanwhile, the definition of art is more fluid than it was in the 1920's. performance, event, installation, political expression, and much more can be called art today. Today's individualizing technologies splinter artistic communities into infinite subgroups so that there are no longer dominant determinations of what constitutes a movement or trend. You can find art everywhere but your determination of worth and category will differ from your neighbor's.

in fact, a preju- diced proposition, idea, or ‘suggestion,’ which is generally their heart’s desire abstracted and refined, is defended by them with arguments sought out after the event.

This 'prejudiced proposition' is what Thomas Kuhn refererred to as a paradigm in the context of scientific inquiry.

"Things interact, and have properties related to those interactions. That doesn't sound like something new."

It doesn't sound like something new if you are understanding it via an old metaphysics. In order to understand which metaphysics is informing your view of something like a purposefully-responsive device we would need to ask what a 'thing' is.

"What I said about us as purposefully-respsonsive devices is nothing new either."

I'm assuming not. It probably dates aback aboot 200 years to at least Kant.

Lets say instead of thing as physical object we are talking about thing as memory. Some still believe that memory is organized as a stored trailing spectrum of pasts, which we are able to search through. What we retrieve as a particular memory can then be compared with a present meaning.
When we then say that the present is determined by our past, we mean that the past as encoded on memory sits there, acting as a constraint on the present.

A recent, alternative view of memory is that it doesn't sit there as a stored meaning, but only exists as a reinterpretation of the past when it functions as a constraint upon our present. In other words, our remembvered past is changed by our present and there is no veridical memory of the past to locate.
What does this account mean for the functioning of cognition as a purposefully driven device?
It changes the meaning of determinism as regards the effect of our remembered past on our present functioning. If our past only exists as already changed by our present, then it is no longer a constraint in the way the first account understands it to be. The cognitive device is at every moment redefining the meaning of its past such that its purpose is also at every moment subtly being transformed
.
Thus, in this model, the past is being determined by the future as much as the future is determined by the past

Maybe a better word than absurd would be arbitrary. Your model of human motivation, relying on adaptive mechanisms underlying social intentions, presupposes an arbitrary origin of motives like empathy. Heidegger's approach ditches what I call the 'adaptive cobbling' account for a thinking of endless transformation of meaning. Rather than absurd or arbitrary, life is uncanny, anxious.

"Man is that inability to remain and is yet unable to leave his place. In projecting, the Da-sein in him constantly throws him into possibilities and thereby keeps him subjected to what is actual. Thus thrown in this throw, man is a transition, transition as the fundamental essence of occurrence. Man is
history, or better, history is man. Man is enraptured in this transition and therefore essentially 'absent'. Absent in a fundamental sense-never simply at hand, but absent in his essence, in his essentially being away, removed into essential having been and future-essentially absencing and never at hand, yet existent in his essential absence. 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."

"Like all animals, you're a biologically-originated purposefully-responsive device. ...a purposefully-responsive device like a Roomba, a refrigerator lightswitch, a thermostat, or a mousetrap. You don't have any more free-will than they do."

Material causality tells us that objects and forces have inherent, stable and thus calculable attributes. This allows for a procedure of prediction if we know initial conditions of environment and the design of the purposive device. Nothing new is supposedly being created when we predict the future history of the device, just a schematic algorithm being run through its paces. This is the way we have learned to think about human beings as material entities. We have Galileo and Descartes to thank for our basic notion of objective causation.
This kind of causation doesnt really begin to be challenged till Hegel's dialectic, wherein attributes of objects no longer are assumed to be ascertainable outside of their relation not only to other objects in a space, but in relation to a total dialectical history.

Nietzschean Will to Power and Heideggerian Being are two ways of thinking about a primordial movement of thought and intention underlying materiel discourse.

The goal of life and human being is becoming. The notion of survival is borrowed from 19th century physics. It implies a static equilibrium as the end state of beings.
IF instead self-organization and self-reflexivity is assumed as the basis and impetus of living systems, then , as Bergson said, creative evolution is primary, not static self-preservation.
The fact you're asking the question you do in your post is a refection of the anticipatory, inquiring , exploratory nature of human striving.

My perspective is not just personal. If you are interested in reading similar thinking coming from contemporary biology itself, take a look at writers like Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson.

Or you could read Nietzsche. He wrote

" Physiologists should think twice before positioning the drive for self-preservation as the cardinal drive of an organic being. Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength – life itself is will to power –: self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of this. – In short, here as elsewhere, watch out for superfluous teleological principles! – such as the drive for preservation (which we owe to Spinoza’s inconsistency )."

What Nietzsche meant by Will to Power and discharge of strength is a kind of continual self-overcoming, a creative moving into the unknown.

"I thought most utilitarian ethical formulas were consequential not primarily intent-driven?"

What would be the meaning of exhorting people to place the consequence of alleviation of suffering or the greatest happiness as the aim of a moral system unless one assumed that not everyone does consider such goals as their ethical aim? To assume that one person values alleviation of suffering more than another person when weighed in the balance against an alternative aim is intent-driven thinking, as is your assumption that some put agenda X over the suffering of someone. To get beyond this intent-driven thinking is to inquire into why it is that the other person construes agenda x and the nature and circumstances of an other's suffering in such a way that they end up concluding that they are not in fact choosing that agenda over avoidance of another's suffering.

In other words, when they put the alternatives at two ends of a moral scale(for instance, agenda x vs suffering avoidance), the intent-driven moralist assumes that the moral dispute is a result of the fact that both parties see the same quantities being weighted, as well as which way the scale is being tipped and by how much. Then the intent-driven moralist concludes that one party gives less moral importance to the quantity at one end of the scale than the other party does. Then the intent-driven moralist finds it necessary to somehow convince the other party to value the other's suffering more than the moralist assumes that party apparently does.

IF we abandon intent-driven moralism in favor of a sense-making ethics, we no longer assume that two parties agree on what quantities are being weighed, and we thus no longer assume they agree which direction the scale is being tipped and by how much. Does the homophobic moralist value the freedom of choice of the gay person less than a non-homophobic moralist? Do they appreciate the gay person's suffering less than the non-homophobe? Or do they lack a bio-sociological undestanding of the gay person's behavior as non-dysfunctional?

The problem I have with utilitarian ethical formulas is that it assumes human conflict and violence is a function of having the wrong intent. I beleive that even if we could imagine a future where everyone followed the proper ethical intention to the letter, such as avoiding suffering, it would make no significant dent in the amount of conflict in the world
That's because social strife and abuse is not about intent but the gap between ways of sense- making. Our failure to act 'ethically' is the result of our struggles in construing the other's worldview from their perspective. No amount of prorer intent or focus on suffering will solve this problem. Only progress at subsuming another's scheme of understanding as a variant of our own will free us from the need to blame t he other for their 'bad intent', , the current example being the alleged failure to prioritize suffering,(which just perpetuates the problem)..