And I speak to the homuncular incoherence of leaving out the social construction of the “we” that has an “actual body”. — apokrisis

In case it's helpful, I agree with the following:

According to Apel, in light of these innovative traditions, the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant must be fundamentally reconceived. In particular, the conditions for intersubjectively valid knowledge cannot be explicated in terms of the structure of consciousness or the cognitive capacities of the individual knowing subject but only through a systematic investigation of language as the medium of symbolically mediated knowledge. The pragmatic turn, initiated by Peirce and Charles W. Morris (1901–1979) and continued in the early twenty-first century in speech act theory, further implies that an adequate explanation of how meaningful communication is possible cannot be achieved by a semantic theory alone. Rather, it must be supplemented by a pragmatic study of the relation between linguistic signs and the conditions of their use by speakers.
...
Apel argues that the most important contribution of philosophical hermeneutics, Gadamer's in particular, has been to show that interpretation is not another method of investigation in addition to the methods used within the hard sciences, but an unavoidable dimension of all understanding. Every empirical investigation of a domain of objects implies at the same time a relation to other subjects, to a community of interpreters.
...
The so-called Münchhausen trilemma—that is, that all attempts to discover ultimate foundations result in either logical circularity, infinite regress, or an arbitrary end to the process of justification—can be overcome by moving from the level of semantic analysis to the level of pragmatics and recognizing that some presuppositions are necessary for the very possibility of intersubjectively valid criticism and argumentation.

https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/apel-karl-otto-1922

Another view, similar.

Feuerbach made his first attempt to challenge prevailing ways of thinking about individuality in his inaugural dissertation, where he presented himself as a defender of speculative philosophy against those critics who claim that human reason is restricted to certain limits beyond which all inquiry is futile, and who accuse speculative philosophers of having transgressed these. This criticism, he argued, presupposes a conception of reason is a cognitive faculty of the individual thinking subject that is employed as an instrument for apprehending truths. He aimed to show that this view of the nature of reason is mistaken, that reason is one and the same in all thinking subjects, that it is universal and infinite, and thatthinking (Denken) is not an activity performed by the individual, but rather by “the species” acting through the individual. “In thinking”, Feuerbach wrote, “I am bound together with, or rather, I am one with—indeed, I myself am—all human beings” (GW I:18).
...
This loss Feuerbach finds reflected in three general tendencies of the modern age: 1) the tendency to regard human history solely as the history of the opinions and actions of individual human subjects, and not as the history of humanity conceived as a single collective agent, 2) the tendency to regard nature as a mere aggregate of “countless single stars, stones, plants, animals, elements and things” (GTU 195/14) whose relations to one another are entirely external and mechanical, rather than as an organic whole the internal dynamics of which are animated by a single all-encompassing vital principle, and 3) the tendency to conceive of God as a personal agent whose inscrutable will, through which the world came into being from nothing and is continually directed, is unconstrained by rational necessity.

Feuerbach’s basic objection to the theistic conception of God and his relation to creation is that, on it, both are conceived as equally spiritless. Rather than consisting of lifeless matter to which motion is first imparted by the purposeful action of an external agent, Feuerbach argues that nature contains within itself the principle of its own development. It exercises “unlimited creative power” by ceaselessly dividing and distinguishing its individual parts from one another. But the immeasurable multiplicity of systems within systems that results from this activity constitutes a single organic totality.

Nature is ground and principle of itself, or—what is the same thing, it exists out of necessity, out of the soul, the essence of God, in which he is one with nature. (GTU 291/86)

God, on this view, is not a skilled mechanic who acts upon the world, but a prolific artist who lives in and through it.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/

I interpret this in terms of inherited logical-semantic norms ( bound time) being applied in individual nervous systems. My thinking is largely not mine except that I host some of the timebinding self-referential conversation. I work on my little piece of the blockchain.

One of the points I was making earlier is that there's too much bound time or 'knowledge' for a single nervous system to contain. Yes we can and do compress, but there are mortal limits, and I'm not sure that we can be sure that we are in the 'best' part of the blockchain. It might be in the interest of the tribe that we all have the feeling that we are, so that we broadcast our results effectively.

Basic skills like fishing or stitching clothing can just disappear. You need a critical mass to allow the specialisation that keeps innovation alive and developing.

The genius is standing on the shoulders of countless others. Some genius once said that. — apokrisis

:up:

I agree, at least if we are thinking about history. But this doesn't cancel the (fleeting) reality of the music of that castaway composer. We don't have to think in terms of history. That to me is a tempting but still optional framework/criterion.

Is human evolution a story of individual hominid genius or collective hominid habit. Paleoanthropology points firmly to the later. — apokrisis

That may be, but it looks like our collective habit is the potential for intense individuality (differentiation, specialization, invention.)

I’m OK with that. Time binding is actually a semiotic concept in my book. — apokrisis

If you want to PM me a link to your book, I'm curious. Or link it publicly, whatever you prefer.

Tis true, and now I'm wondering now, what role my body being there played. I'm a big guy too, but she had only known me for a couple of hours. — wonderer1

Ah but part of the calculation, because she saw that he saw that you were with her -- carrot and the stick.

I'd love to know what thoughts went through Meri's head. Would she have done the same if it had been just her and Barb there? I'd guess yes. — wonderer1

Ah, but was there time for thoughts ? It'd be nice if we had a Life Computer to examine alternative futures safely, because we could always rewind.

Does this mean that cooperation is not an evolutionary adaptation? — Joshs

Well I daresay biological evolution played a big role in it. We needed the brain, maybe the expressive face, etc. Something like memetic evolution also seems important --competition at the group level. I presume lots of things happened in an interdependent stew.

If you are a mathematician, for instance, there are almost no standards of social grace that obtain. — apokrisis

I was trained to be one, but I'm mostly infected with the need to play at philosophy.

Shakespeare stands accused of the literary sin of plagiarism – turning the prose of others into poetry. But no one minds that as he just told the stories better. — apokrisis

It's the depth and complexity of his characters that's especially celebrated (Bloom's The Invention of the Human.) The 'personality' layer of reality is one possibly focus of knowledge that aims at comprehensiveness.

Once again a code is putting itself in charge of the physics needed to give itself existence as a structure that can grow and evolve. — apokrisis

:up:

I think we agree on the necessity of embodiment, at least in the abstract....

You want to be able to quantify the "genius personality" in terms of some individualistic paradigm of the human mind and spirit? — apokrisis

No. I never mentioned quantity. I'd say maybe reread some of what I wrote. I think you are casting me incorrectly as a subjectivist or Romantic. But my interest in the existential is better understood as part of a goal to leave nothing out. Someone like Karl-Otto Apel seems to get the massive sociality of language right, correcting the typical subjectivistic tendencies. But someone like Husserl or Merleau-Ponty includes the vital account of how the world is revealed through or by individual human bodies.

My key commitment is basically that we have actual bodies in an actual world. But the world for us is always through (embedded) individual sense organs and individual brains.* As Apel emphasized, language is ferociously subjective -- no private language, but doves can't fly in a vacuum and a language is truly dead without bodies that trade in it. We may model the movement of bodies in the world, but this modelling must be done by actual bodies in the world or 'model' loses its sense.


*The world apart from all human cognition might be round square (nonsense, for a human), but the world is independent of the cognition of particular humans. The lifeworld is implicitly a human lifeworld, symbolically rich.

Computationalism works as very rough metaphor. But it is another foundation of sand. — apokrisis

'Software' is just a metaphor for the time-binding sociality of reason. For instance, the linguistic-conceptual idea of the self is part of our heritage. Children are trained into it, but they can also modify it, before they are replaced as 'carriers' or 'thin clients' or torchbearers in the relay race.

The problem with the subjective stance is that even the self as a first person viewpoint is socially constructed.

Well it is first neurobiologically constructed. Pragmatic modelling means I can chomp my food with out chewing off my tongue.

But the kind of self that exists the social world where individuals can be acclaimed as "genius personalities" is a social construction. And needs to understood as such. Otherwise you are building your philosophical cities on foundations of sand. — apokrisis

The self has a social aspect (language centered around semantic-logical coherence norms) and a biological basis, a body guided by its own brain that can live alone for decades in the woods, writing poetry, because it carries its own version of the tribal software with it (including its use of 'I' and its performed self-referentially symbolic identity). 'Language speaks' and 'the subject is a function of language,' yes, but individual living brains are necessary for this social game. This isn't Descartes. It's just sanity.

An actual organism models the world, yes ? It seems to me that the idea of the model depends on the commonsense notion of animals in the world -- a world that is really there, but not (for me anyway) some obscure unknowable (Kantian) Reality -- instead just a 'lifeworld' (the world of a nonreductive holist) with depth and about which we can be wrong. A pure indirect realism falls apart because (for instance) it makes the sense organs their own product.

I've read several of Beiser's excellent books on German philosophy, which sketch the intellectual scene of Kant in great detail. Also read with great pleasure A Thing of This World, which traces Kant's revolution through a great historical sequence of modifications. Kant => Hegel => Heidegger is one important path.

Personally I'd choose Popper as a great 'updated' Kant who does justice to the 'active knower.' While we depend upon our embodiment in the world to do so, we largely construct our knowledge of the world. Creativity plays an absolute central role. To me that's the essence of the Kantian Copernican revolution.

When I was 16 or 17 I read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, and not having much in the way of exposure to philosophy, I was impressed and felt ready to argue with any atheist I had the chance to. — wonderer1

Wow. Same book and same attitude for me at the same age. I loved that dude back then.

I would think human intuition was a huge component of the training ingredients, but I would think there was a fair bit of slow thinking thrown in as well - in reaching a diagnosis to tag each X-ray with. I'd guess that in some cases there was evidence in addition to the X-ray. E.g. biopsy results.

In any case, you bring up a good point - that the training data involves more than just the X-rays. — wonderer1

You bring up a good point too. I was sloppy in my terms. I meant basically that models trained on human decisions are 'parasites' on human skill (including slow thinking) that impressively learn which experts to trust (in what proportion, etc., tho in a nonlinear fashion.) FWIW, I was primarily interested in the math details of SGD and backprop. I whipped up software for exploring the math basically, wasn't terribly interested at that time in applications. I typically approximated functions. Very cool that the same function has so many algorithmic expressions --justifying the set theory conception in terms of a set of ordered pairs.

.

One is that I think the lack of really caring about one's masculinity is itself a masculine trait. Who are you to tell me what kind of man I am? I can get by on my own without your approval -- like a man. — Moliere

I think this is basically correct. I'm biased and old blah blah blah but to be 'a fucking man' is to not be small and pushed around and defined by other motherfuckers who should be shoveling my snow.
More seriously, I'll shovel my own snow, because I don't need to bully folks to have a good time ( I know lots of servers, served tables myself once, and I've seen babyish games in adults.)

Anyway, a true boss can afford to be magnanimous, and prefers to be, because it feels good-- 'selfishly'. The idea of the gentleman seems to point at this. Poldy Bloom from Ulysses comes to mind. He's maybe too passive, but that artistic device is a foil against which his generous, confident, and selfsufficient soul shines.

A big advantage AI has over humans for tasks like this, is the ability to be trained on such a huge dataset without getting bored and quitting. — wonderer1

:up:

I studied neural networks for a little while, and we might also add that human intuition is the raw ingredient (if I'm correct that it was supervised learning based on a dataset of human diagnoses.)

Sometimes philosophy looks a bit like ancestor worship. — wonderer1

It is weird how one generation's rebel becomes the stumblingblock conformity of the next. One funeral at the time ! But Hegel is probably right that the errors tend to snowball into something less silly -- for those who can bear to drop the errors and move on, of course.

As a person who learned some angular math, I'd say it's much easier to be a bad philosopher than a mediocre mathematician. Yet I love good philosophers more than good mathematicians. What they are trying to do (some of them) is beautiful and (to me) essentially human.

.

He was singular and different because of the generality or universality of what he had to say. We can focus on him to understand what we all ought to think. — apokrisis

I think there is truth in this, but perhaps the genius and richness of Shakespeare is precisely his seemingly inexhaustible undecidability. I don't see the place of true 'infinite' irony in your system, tho I think you have a healthy sense of gallowshumor given your grim-to-many views.

Kierkegaard said that if Hegel had called his Logic a mere thought experiment, it would have been a greater work. This is not (I don't think) about the sentimental appreciation of humility but a metaphysical point --- Hegel's implicit theoretical acknowledgement of a world beyond his personality, which would have been Hegel's transcending of his own system. Holding it in suspension as a mere possibility implies a much richer world.

Hegel's resistance to the Irony of his Romantic literary peers looks like an 'irrational' existential commitment, a tonal preference, a non-autonomous foundation.

I think this is a properly balanced view. It's not either all social construction or the sovereign individual, but somewhere in between. — Janus

Thanks! I also see it that way. Scylla and Charybdis, right ?

If evolution can code for cooperation , [ then ] it can just as easily code for the opposite. — Joshs

That does not follow. At least in the human context, that seems highly unlikely. We are born helpless and mute. Our killer app is language, which depends on trust and cooperation.

I saw myself as offering a mere piece of the story. What options should we not expect to find ? What options can we rule out ? I can put on my devilworship hat and say some freaky things. Or I can put on my goodboy hat and say some nice things. But I was aiming at something drier, something minimal.

I think we agree very much that knowledge is primarily social. Language is tribal software. The individual nervous system 'runs' and updates the software of the tribe. But the hardware is not some fantasy of the software. We are stuck to some degree in this Flesh < truly a key metaphysical concept when it's our flesh , my flesh > , seeing through/with these human sense organs, speaking from a single mouth in an adversarially cooperative conversation -- a person that's not only generic tribesman but also a genuine experiment -- a tender tentacle the tribe uses to explore possible strategies. (This helps us make sense of individual coherence norms, because inconsistent leaders lead the tribe to ruin in the context of unforgiving nature.)

Meaning has to be smuggled in somewhere to give life to the syntax. You want to claim it starts with the individual and so artfully arrange your thought experiment to achieve that illusion. I say go back and start again. — apokrisis

I say that one cannot remove either the world or the individual nervous system. I'm arguing against rampant subjectivism in another thread.

I'm a holist focused on the (human) lifeworld that can't really be broken up except in terms of useful lies. As Hegel put it, the ideality (fantasy status) of the abstract is the core of idealism --which is of course a realistic holism, calling out the limits of abstraction (finite, disconnected pieces of an actually unbreakable continuum).

Better yet, let’s imagine the infinity of randomly typing monkeys banging away until the end of time.

We agree that they “must” produce every possible work of genius of any kind? And hence this proves something about genius? — apokrisis

This is where someone like Husserl comes in. The world exists through particular 'meaning-bestowing' nervous systems. Those nervous systems are in the very world that they disclose. Meaning is 'dormant' (a 'spore' or 'virus') in/as a script without a reader.

I think that maybe you don't sufficiently address the importance of the subject. It's one thing to transcend any particular subject. It's another to transcend embodiment and the existential situation in general altogether.

...the nature of which is the point at issue. — Wayfarer

The 'nature of which' implying a fact of the matter. The very idea of a 'nature' invokes a fact about a world that includes and transcends both of us.

It seems to me that you are stubbornly picking a bad 'hill to die on.'

One needs to commit to very little indeed, seems to me, to avoid outright contradiction. But denying that there is a truth of the matter is a palpable absurdity. The truth is you see there is no truth. Or maybe there really isn't such a thing as the truth of the matter. Sounds profound and openminded but it's silly upon examination.

A measured appreciation of what the subject contributes is maybe the essence of philosophy. But claiming there is only subject is as empty as claiming there is left without right.

Sorry. I couldn't help myself with the "Smith" name. — Moliere

No worries. I think a little comic relief is a nice lubricant.

:up:
I knew you meant the first, but it reminded me of that Joyce joke.

Oh I know of one Smith who not only thought of himself that way, but also convinced enough people to start a religion.

Though he had wives. — Moliere

Nice ! Bring 'em young !

Smith focused on mastering social knowhow, having decided it was the best kind of knowledge. I'd count him in the pragmatist camp, tho not in your subcamp.

A certain kind of inquiring intelligence? — apokrisis

I think we can safely limit ourselves to 'cognitive heroes' for the purposes of this discussion, yes.

So your acts of solitary genius are meaningless until they are understood as having been matched by an equal amount of intelligent response. — apokrisis

To me that's not obvious. Outlandish, but let's imagine a shipwrecked composer with a harpsichord and plenty of coconuts. He soars to new musical heights on that island, though only he ever hears the music. Socially he is nil, but his individual nervous system, running on software downloaded before the connection was broken, is swimming in meaning. Or so he might insist. We might also imagine a mathematician who proves a great theorem but never gets to share it. The hardware can run alone for a number of years, making progress, forging spores that are potentially meaningful to others (the strange nature of script, like a virus). Whether it matters that anything survives the nervous system that enjoys it while alive is up for debate. Maybe I'd rather be happy and forgotten than miserable but remembered, etc.

The game is to differentiate AND integrate. Go in both directions with the vigour that can arrive at a high state of dynamical contrast. — apokrisis

Oh we agree on that. That's good thinking in general, right?

You seem to want to ask how to measure genius,I say the yardstick is obvious. Action and reaction. The push and its effect. A simple reciprocal equation, or Newton’s third law of motion. — apokrisis

What I'm getting at is that personality is the yardstick. My choice of criterion is my choice of heroic costume for the world in pursuit of mates and mangos. Maybe a forgotten politician Smith who lived in comfort and safety and cranked out many healthy children with a pneumatically admirable wife counts himself wiser and brighter than either Shakespeare or Newton, both contemporaries. Maybe he's right. Let's say that he was a master of the handshake and getting himself trusted --demonstrating intense worldly knowhow. He even kept in the shadows because it was more pleasant, less subject to envy, whatever. He didn't care about cultural legacy, knew he couldn't enjoy it as a corpse.

There would not seem to be many proponents of the blank slate these days. The salient question seems to be whether it is merely capacities or tendencies which are innate (like Chomsky's idea of a genetic capacity in humans to learn language) or whether there is also innate knowledge (along the lines of anamnesis, I guess). — Janus

Right, and really that makes sense. Just the fact that our eyes are in the front is no small thing. Even if I build a general purpose neural network, I have to choose the number and width of layers. It's almost absurd to think that the mind is without structure. I suppose the empiricists were primarily trying to wipe out some cobwebs and got carried away.

But yea, a detective, for one example, likely wouldn't be worth squat without this ability or relating and understanding other - including that other with which one is in an antagonistic relation to. — javra

:up:

Right.

Related point and pet theory : Any position that is defined in terms of an opponent has about the same amount of complexity as that opponent. We betray ourselves or honor ourselves in the enemy we choose (sounds like Nietzsche, no?) Sherlock, once his character has been sketched, is given an anti-Sherlock to contend with, as a climax. The 'infinite' position is its own shadow (Hamlet or something.)

But really good chatting with you! — javra

You too! Till next time...

I think the problem is related.

We are social beings, primarily accountable to one another, offering reasons for our actions and beliefs. We have a strong and grounded concept of individual bias and delusion. It makes very good sense (plays a vital role in our lives) to model the bias of others in our tribe. I 'translate' the report of Larry who always lays it on thick or of Sally who always minimizes. I try to look through their reports to see what's really going on (what I'll believe anyway.)

But things get wacky and confused when we pretend we can see around the human nervous system altogether. I don't think it makes sense for us to see around our 'species bias.' This concept of species bias is problematic, possibly a version of the round square, since we'd have to be on both sides of a line at once. It's way too easy for humans to write checks they can't cash, which Kant himself emphasized ! That's the spirit of his work, right ?

Of course eyes are objects, but it is not as objects that they are significant. The significant factor is sense perception and its interpretation. Plainly we are subject to illusions, for instance optical illusions. More subtly, we are subject to delusion - misinterpreting what the senses tell us - and even more subtle errors, such as errors of judgement. — Wayfarer

Sure, and illusions and delusions depend upon an actual world, something taken as real. Presumably "we are subject to illusions, for instance optical illusions" is offered as a truth about the world we both live in. As I said before, reasonable and in fact crucial considerations of fallibility are push to absurd extremes, stretched until they snap into nonsense.

"wisdom" consists in being able to simultaneously entertain different perspective such that one's thoughts and actions satisfies all these otherwise disparate perspectives with the same breath, — javra

:up:

This reminds me of Keats writing about Shakespeare -- and the way that Joyce and Harold Bloom in their own ways treat him as a 'spiritual' figure.

What is that an objection to? Who is treating the sense organs as illusions? — Wayfarer

Idealism consists in the assertion, that there are none but thinking beings, all other things, which we think are perceived in intuition, being nothing but representations in the thinking beings, to which no object external to them corresponds in fact. Whereas I say, that things as objects of our senses existing outside us are given, but we know nothing of what they may be in themselves, knowing only their appearances, i.e., the representations which they cause in us by affecting our senses. Consequently I grant by all means that there are bodies without us, that is, things which, though quite unknown to us as to what they are in themselves, we yet know by the representations which their influence on our sensibility procures us, and which we call bodies, a term signifying merely the appearance of the thing which is unknown to us, but not therefore less actual. Can this be termed idealism? It is the very contrary.

Now Kant is pretty clearly using our ordinary experience of sense organs and presumably contemplating the way some kind of 'raw' experience of Reality is automatically and unconsciously 'cooked' for us by our cognitive system, sense organs and our conceptuality (I'd say hardware and software). For Kant, what we see (even the framework of space and time) is largely our own creation. We can never see around it (the instrument, the transforming lens) and recover 'raw' (true) Reality. Hegel famously drags the limits of this metaphor into the light.

The problem here is that Kant, following Hume and others in the tradition of MS, took the ordinary experience of the body with sense organs for granted -- while his own theory says that the very framework of space and time, and of course also the ordinary experience of sense organs (eyes on your mother's face), is mere appearance. So he's built his system on the very thing he calls mere appearance. He saws off the branch he is sitting on.

No, they're not. Your eyes are organs of sight, but your eyes are not what you look at, unless you have some cause to do so. Yes, you can see the eyes of others, and in some metaphorical sense see 'with the eyes of others' (like 'standing in another's shoes'), but they're not objects, unless you're wanting to examine the eye or other sense organs objectively. — Wayfarer

I'm not averse to discussing some of the complexities of sensation, but your denial that eyes are objects in the world is indulgent -- contrary to ordinary English. 'Wanting to examine them objectivity' is way too fancy here. Kant himself invokes the sense organs. That's the context.

An object is (first definition) something perceptible by one or more of the senses, especially by vision or touch; a material thing. I see others' eyes directly, my own in a mirror. I'm not being metaphorical.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=objects&atb=v379-1&ia=definition

I suspect you want to skip to some profound point about metaphysical subjectivity. Maybe we'll get there, but not if you absurdly deny the existence of eyes.