What is "the perceptual manifold" on your view? — creativesoul

The perceptual manifold is basically all qualia constitutive of qualitative experience. I was curious how you would explicitly fit the concept of correlation together with a concept of qualitative experience.

How do you causally relate the plurality of correlation to the perceptual manifold? I have my own ideas but I'm trying to see if I can validate or improve the model.

So I gather that you mean a cognitive process of making correlations is interposed between perception and language, with varying degrees of generality, and some kinds of correlations can be made without language while some cannot. If my interpretation is accurate, what does this correlative activity consist of? How would you characterize its composition?

All belief consists of mental correlations drawn between different things. Sometimes one of those things is language use itself. When this happens, the language begins to effect/affect the creature(I suppose we can say) as a direct result of 'causing' it to draw correlations between the language use and something else(or other things).

The language is sometimes said to 'inform' the thought or belief. Linguistically informed belief is belief that is existentially dependent upon language in a very specific way... that an integral part of that particular belief is language use.

All metacognition is linguistically informed, for example. — creativesoul

Can you provide a specific instance of this? I'm not sure I've accurately grasped what you have in mind.

Think I agree with the way you partitioned the concepts. A distinction certainly exists between perception/belief as somehow etched in cognition, language as a mechanism for expressing /interpreting these perceptions/beliefs, and the kind of perception/belief acquisition that only occurs in conjunction with language use.

The question I have is whether language use is intrinsic to the structure of the concepts in language-influenced belief and related perceptions or merely a passive means of representation for what is being etched in cognition by a perhaps substantially nonlinguistic mechanism despite the greater complexity or experiential indirectness. That's what I'm getting at with the idea of structure: does language use pattern language-acquired thought such that the thought cannot even occur without language use, or is language more superficial? To what extent is the logicality or associational structure of language itself a constituent component of the thought itself? Does this vary by conceptual context and nonnegligibly between different minds?

All metacognition is linguistically informed, for example. — creativesoul

I'd be interested to get a description of your concept "metacognition". What is the relationship between cognitive structure and linguistic structure in this case?

Centrality of linguistic evolution to the hominin and human mind might explain why we spend so much time insulting each other with symbolic meaning. Maybe some kind of innate predisposition exists to impulsively incite communicators to keep up. Also explains the human obsession with humor and our unique characteristic of formulating statements as questions, a more passive tone mitigating tension that arises from inborn inclination to conceptually interpret differences of perspective, ability, and general inequality into a posture of conflict, why we spend so much time laughing our asses off? Could account for negative thought patterns and critical thinking, a kind of sublimated insulting. Deeply rooted synesthesia of imaginative reasoning, motivation and language makes sense of psychoanalytic results, how patients evince sometimes bizarre unconscious complexes, infantile wishes and general nonsense while their psyches are being prodded in detail using communication. With civilized society, perhaps the drive to insult runs amok, as categories of psychopathology assailing what we fail to recognize as simple human nature, laws structured such that a niche for flagrant nonphysical offenses is created, and more. Lots of avenues for consideration.

A hypothetical scenario for how human language evolved, tell me whether or not you think its plausible.


Hominins and humans started to use objects more and more technologically from a combination of causes such as need, accommodating physique, convenience, preference and insightful reasoning. Technological behavior exerted selection pressure on utterance to assume a more object-oriented form, as proliferation of nounlike expressions.

Expression became slightly more structurally complex so as to better conceptually orient the noun represented objects of increasingly complex technological contexts by verbalization, probably in consort with usefulness of describing experiences remotely.

Prehistoric hominins or humans grasped the idea that utterance can be used as a technology for organizing experiences, memories, facts and behaviors, so rudimentary description became a deliberately invented system applied to practical and eventually recreational purposes.

Innovation of this utterance technology progressed for functionality, artistry, and status-attainment. Some selection pressure was exerted towards cognitive ease of acquisition, ultimately leading to unusually advanced grammatical prowess, with the origins of this innate biology in a long tradition of purposefully inventing verbal ability as technology, art form and status symbolism having been largely forgotten.

Lots of selection pressure existed for expansion of linguistic content and meaning, coevolving with the cognitive facility to imagine and manipulate novel object and concept arrangements as well as conceive and project self-meanings, our complex social identities.

Essentially, language wasn't merely expression of technological concepts, it WAS one of the first technologies, also probably the most popular and lasting, so that human intentionality self-evolved/instills a massive synesthesia of imaginative reasoning, motivation and language in its own brain, producing our ridiculously bizarre but extremely potent psyches.


Am I putting too much emphasis on free will in this equation?

It will be interesting to see how researchers progressively construct theoretical models and accompanying definitions from the empirical results going forward. I suspect their experimentally derived accounts of "schematic thinking" will eventually allow for some synthesis with the vocabulary of phenomenology.

Maybe the relativity is located deeper than language and culture, but is actually a relativity within the individual self, which might explain the conflicting results, with schematic thinking induced in only some investigative situations. Intentionality of the psyche could be composed of multiple modes or holistic settings, which some casually call "headspaces", and the self might mature as a kind of mode-selection phenomenon, so that while most of even conscious brain processes are not within full intentional control, the self can participate in conditioning or "neural priming" the psyche it resides in, then choose and sustain holistic activation orientations as brain region combos at will in many cases, a capability beneficial for more intensively sociocognitive circumstances.

Could be why education into high functioning rationality is such a nerve-wracking experience: humans have to master impulsive psychical inclinations and also reorg or reject socially adaptive headspaces for analytical purposes, attaining the unnatural self-consistency and noncontradictoriness of intellectual integrity, inspiration for Plato's cave analogy? Maybe this is why philosophers don't make "good" politicians lol

By worldview I just mean the collection of beliefs, opinions, valuated facts as an individual's general outlook on reality. I was wanting to explore how language links percepts and complex conceptual perspectives in both effective and fallacious ways.

As far as intuitions I have into my own thinking and observations of thought, which is all I really have to go on at this stage, it seems like language assists in differentiating and expanding concepts into richer conceptual frameworks. Verbal explicitness, especially in writing, makes the conceptual structures of thinking so artificially fixed as a definitional framework that constraints and boundaries in one's reasoned associating leap out as glaring, arbitrary and modifiable delimitations. Its like the ideas become a more tangible frame of reference to build upon and remodel. Language allows the content of thought to adopt much more complex architectures, and working out ideas linguistically remakes the mind itself somehow also, but to what extent I'm not sure, and in many contexts this function of language isn't even operative perhaps.

Those are some basic thoughts on the topic, I don't have a mechanistic sense of how any of this occurs neurally or psychologically aside from the observation that facility in making more and better kinds of generalizations seems to be greatly enhanced by critically assessing written language, which I think intersects with Husserl's kind of phenomenological theory as to how intuitive form gets translated into logical form and maybe vice versa as we cognize. With analytical language, its like you can revolutionize your own mind at will, as evinced by the stages of development that some of the most influential academics have displayed in their literature, Freud, Wittgenstein, maybe Heidegger, etc. But similar personal evolutions occur in completely nonlinguistic domains such as visual art, so there's obviously much more going on.

This entire nexus of perception, conception, language, theory, self and logic is kind of mysterious to me.

But at no point would the lack of a word for that object be the obstacle and he wouldn’t get our concept of a computer even if he was told what the object was called. — Congau

I was thinking about that, the concept is adjuncted by language, but the actual thought itself is only fractionally, maybe even negligibly linguistic. Its almost like the conceptual process is more foundational to the mind than the linguistic process, but language happens to most explicitly demonstrate it and maybe motivationally prompt it by some kind of superficial conceptual maneuver.

Something very interesting is how the two hemispheres ‘communicated’ in the physical world actions NOT directly. The ‘communication’ was happening ‘outside’ the brain. — I like sushi

Can you elaborate some? What relationship might this have if any to theoretical modeling, if that makes sense.

Been thinking about this issue a lot lately, and have reached some studied insights that might be of interest to you.

A few of my blog posts at WordPress.com would probably give you some ideas.

The Nature and Human Impact of Qualia proposes a simple physical model.

If you want some background in biological and psychological concepts informing the theory, I suggest reading The Origins and Evolution of Perception in Organic Matter

The second half of my post Orthodoxies and Revolutions in the Science of Human Perception explains this theoretical framework's epistemological foundations.

An even more basic exposure to core concepts of experimental quantum biology involved, drawn from a recent book published on the subject: Quantum Mechanical Biology.

A lot of this is speculation, but also plenty of factual detail to ponder along the way. If you've got any derivative ideas, I'd be interested, I love discussing this topic!

I think information is a term for the factual meanings contained in and produced by symbols such as those of a written language. The concept has been generalized so that whenever causality is systematic enough to seem instructional, such as in genetics or memory recall, these causes are rather imprecisely called information or data storage. The environments that cause these phenomena are then erroneously regarded by some as fundamental information. Perhaps analogy to the core, not substance.

Then maybe we need a new term: how about subobtive experience? lol

The problem was the explanatory gap, not the distinction between traditional explanations. Subjective substance collapsed with objective substance resolves the explanatory gap. Doesn't mean counseling or expression in language is any less reasonable than or independent from neuroscience.

Matter doesn't merely generate or correlate with qualia, it is qualia. Next problem!

An easy solution to the problem of how objective brain states produce subjective mental states:

The vast variety of different kinds of neurons and glia in the brain may be an indication of why there are such widely varying classes of qualia - visual, aural, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, and so on - a gigantic miscellany in possibilities for additive electromagnetic quantum resonance.

Each unique arrangement of biochemical ingredients is comprised of different qualia, just like differing matter is of different sizes, shapes and colors.

Whether or not a squirrel licking nuts means affection or in the case of a human for that matter is probably a judgement call, but I think we can agree that a newt licking nuts is closer to a human subjective mental state than Newtonian mechanics lol

This is slightly longer than your typical post, but I think you guys will find it interesting. Proposed solution to the hard problem!


Scientists have identified entanglement in photosynthetic reaction centers, within which light-activated electrons of multiple chlorophyll pigments are actually more like a single perturbing quanta field than a particle transport chain, with energization transmitted to centrally located reaction center molecules responsible for initiating biochemical pathways that drive much of cellular metabolism in plants, stimulation that can take place from any direction and while diffuse electron wavicle structure is in any orientation. We can liken this type of quanta phenomenon to a subatomic body of water, where translation of light into kinetic energy at any point in the electron field generates a holistic ripple effect that never fails to evince statistical signs of reaction center activation in nearly identical proportion to UV exposure, total energy yield from any quantity or orientation of ultraviolet photons.

The key functional role of ‘entanglement systems’ or hybrid electron waves spanning multiple molecules to a biological process as basic as photosynthesis makes it seem probable that this type of phenomenon is one of the core components of physiology, a pillar of life’s chemistry.

Photons of different wavelengths have additive properties when combined: any two primary colors synthesize to produce a secondary color, all visible wavelengths together produce white light, and so on. Like photons, electrons also have a wavelike nature and no doubt additive properties within single atoms or small collections of molecules, which are probably minute enough to evade detection by the naked eye, and most likely decompose quickly in an inorganic environment due to decoherence from thermodynamic “noise” of kinetic entropy characterizing large aggregates of agitated mass.

However, in a physiological context, mass is much less subjected to entropic effects of kinetic motion, being stabilized as emergent structurality in biochemical pathways and additional types of molecular systems, so that these additive properties of electron wavelength may possibly be sustained for a prolonged period. Not only this, but electrons can hypothetically be entangled in multiple ways at once, creating a superposition in which additive properties of numerous entanglement structures are simultaneously congregated into larger entanglement structures, systems within systems that we might want to distinguish from the relatively simplistic situation inhering in photosynthesis, a categorically different phenomenon of hybridized ‘coherence field’. If coherence fields are found to be supported by the molecular assemblages of cellular biochemistry in the nervous system, especially likely to be discovered in the brain, their extremely complex additive properties may be what we know as ‘qualia’. In this scenario, qualia are not merely an immateriality supervenient on atoms, but instead a kind of exceedingly complex “color” or electromagnetically quantum resonance, material states intrinsic to tangible structure of the physical world.

The question then is how what we know as our conscious self-awareness can emerge from this basic qualia phenomenon. How do qualia give rise to the qualitative “experience” of a perceiver? A possible explanation is that biochemical and physiological structures exist, particularly in the brain, for synchronizing these sustained coherence fields, analogous to the clock mechanism of a CPU, so that qualia are metaorganized into a large array of experiential modules, parts of which compose the self-aware mind. Activity of these compound modules may manifest as the standing brain waves detected by EEG (electroencephalogram).


In exactly what way consciousness emerged via evolution is a mystery, but we can be fairly certain about what eventually had to obtain in order for it to be possible. Initially, electrical properties in aggregates of tissue such as the brain needed to be robust enough that a stable supervenience of electromagnetic field (EMF) was created by systematic electron fluxing. Quantum effects in molecules of the body are sensitive to trace EMF energy sources, creating a structural complex of relatively thermodynamic mass containing pockets of relatively quantum biochemistry integrated by sustained radiation. EMF/quantum hybridization is likely responsible for our synthetic experience of qualia, how we perceive unfathomably minute and diverse fluctuating of environments as a perpetualized substrate, perturbed by its surroundings but never vanishing while we are awake and lucid, the essence of perceptual “stream of consciousness”.

Nonlocal phenomena are ever underlying the macroscopic substance of qualitative consciousness, its EMF properties as well as bulked three dimensional matter in which nonlocality is partially dampened, and quantum processes in cells interface perception instantiated in bodies with the more or less nonlocal natural world mostly still enigmatic to scientific knowledge.

Quantum features of biochemistry have likely been refined evolutionarily so that mechanisms by which relative nonlocality affects organisms, mechanisms of EMF/matter interfacing, mechanisms targeting particular environmental stimuli via functionally tailored pigments along with further classes of molecules and cellular tissues, and mechanisms for translation of stimulus into representational memory all became increasingly coordinated until an arrangement involving what we call ‘intentionality’ emerged, a mind with executive functions of deliberative interpretation and behavioral strategizing, beyond mere reflex-centric memory conjoined to stimulus/response. Qualitative consciousness precedes the degree of unification we experience as humanlike awareness, for qualia can exist and perform a functional role in consort with quantum effects and additional gradations of nonlocal reality while an organism is almost entirely lacking executive, centralized control in the form of intentions.


It can be tested experimentally and explains how qualia and matter coexist.

If you observe animal behavior outside a laboratory setup, its obvious they experience affection, recognize purpose, understand the world logically and even have a sense of humor, all with similarity to humans. I think the idea that animals, including humans, are "governed" in some sense by inborn instinct or behaviorist stimulus/response is a historical relic. The question is how a concept of conditioning that is clearly false for most mammals and birds at the very least became so mainstream.

Ah! That clears up a lot, thanks. — Wayfarer

Perhaps it could be called educational holism lol

The way your OP is set out, you seem to be asking human language evolved, yet you're saying now that natural selection 'as traditionally construed' had minimal impact. So that's confusing. — Wayfarer

I doubt human rationality evolves primarily as either ecological or social function, but more from an individual mind, language modules etc., selecting its own arrangement on the scale of a single lifespan. The cognitive components of rationality were naturally as well as socially selected, and cultural environments sometimes further rationality while also being molded by it, but its emergence is more like what Carl Jung called "individuation", a complex psyche making itself by what we experience as willpower rather than adaptation. Its a very different kind of evolution, maybe some wouldn't even call it that.

From what I read, dozens of theories exist as to how human language developed, and it seems to me that all of them contain a kernel of the truth. We may never know which causes were the most influential or preconditional, but looking at the many proposed explanations surely gives a strong impression of why the origin of human language was inevitable. It has an important relationship to nearly everything we intuit that humans are and do.

The idea of semiotics arising from thermodynamics and entropy is wild. I suppose whenever causality gets translated into a different form, such as with cell membrane surface proteins, genetic coding, perception, or even physical changes in general, the substance of that process basically amounts to "information". Distinctly human semiotics must be a product of combining informational translation as the essence of action/response with complex intentionality.



I agree that animals reason. Seems to me that human rationality does not differ from the rest of nature simply as cognitive function, but it has been elevated to the status of value system in many cultural settings, an intellectual discipline, which seems to be unique.



I also think natural selection as traditionally construed along with reproductive success had minimal impact on the evolution of human meaning and rationality. Once we acknowledge that most evolutionary causes are almost entirely unrelated to survival of a species, the theory seems to become much more explanatory.



I'll have to look into Husserl, phenomenology sounds interesting!

I did some reading as you suggested, and gather that the origin of human language is one of the most speculative topics in science and philosophy, so I won't figure it out exactly. But maybe the following is a basic explanatory framework that doesn't neglect any of the many existing theoretical ideas. Do you notice I've lacked to account for some important possible cause with these generalizations?

Emergence of human language participated in loosening up social constraints upon the self, disjuncting acts arising out of introspective conceptualization from brute negative or positive feedback that is exacted in relationships between individuals based around exteroceptive, proprioceptive, affective and interoceptive states (thanks for the terminology CeleRate!). This gave the species’ already functionally essential and quite advanced facility with structural association-making and abstract meaning, its ability to mentally organize phenomena within inferential frameworks of the symbolic, liberation to grow at a rapid pace. More schematized thinking coincided with improved technological prowess, and generally heightened cognitive flexibility made the mind capable of molding human nature via thought and the construction of culture. Behavior entered the domain of meme manipulation, sublimating the species into greater reliance on pure intellectuality, more complex intentionality in general, and making subtle personal insights readily transmissible to the wider community. Memetically-boosted degrees of freedom for motivation, cognitive behavior and communication allowed individuals to actualize themselves in psychically deeper ways through both personally and socially innovative meaning, which incidentally granted human collectives a surplus of proficiency at adjusting to novel conditions, with an increasing endowment of brain plasticity sufficient for expeditious adaptation to every environment on earth.

Not sure I've grasped the relationship between language, symbolic thinking and technical problem-solving.

I'll play the role of Don Quixote for the hell of it. This is my basic theory, tell me if you think its a valid starting point or totally bogus.


To begin with, we can say that mind as such functions by catalyzing experiential states during which a multiplicity of perceptual phenomena are simultaneously held in particular orientations, as a qualitative contexture. This is memory’s essence: coordination of various cognitive processes into a more or less holistic, prolonged representation of the environment, modulated by sensitization and habituation, ultimately serving to enhance discharge of behavior by integration of the body with a plurality of situational stimuli, allowing the organism to grow bigger without maladaptive sacrificing of speed, and better anticipate the most mercurial causes and effects. Observing squirrels in action provides a perfect example, as they instantly abandon their rooting around, raise up and intensely scrutinize environments at the slightest hint of an unfamiliar sound, usually with no idea yet of what they are hearing. The squirrel’s mind repeatedly primes it for rapid fight or flight response by inducing undivided attention, startling the animal into complete devotion of its physiological resources towards a phenomenal representation of the relationship between body position and surroundings, which probably increases reaction time such that not a few squirrel lives have been saved.

The associational rudiments of an inferencing mentality essentially consist in further cognitively and more or less imaginatively aligning perceptual phenomena of experiential states such that predictive behaviors requiring integrated awareness can be discharged with high degrees of coordination. This happens in conjunction with mental mapping of the environment/mind complex, orienting an organism to its circumstances. Consider a frog catching insects with its tongue: it sees the bug, feels its body, matches up these phenomena within a positional substrate, and lashes out in a rapid burst of hybridized behavior, garnering a meal before its prey even knows what happened. If a squirrel spots a tasty nut, it associates this object with its bodily emplacement and whatever memory concepts it has of food and more, all inhering in a holistic matrix of orientation, then coordinates the act of approaching and picking up the nut with its mouth. Squirrels have a strong urge to stow their prizes, perhaps we could call this an aesthetic of nuts, but are not particularly good at remembering the location. At any rate, their mental map allows them to at least accurately hone in on particular tracts of land where they should be looking some months later.

This environment/mind experiential complex evolves in three general domains. More cognitively advanced organisms such as adult mammals and birds sense their own body as the most salient aspect of the environment. If this is not quite humanlike identity in most cases, it is clearly a foundational self-awareness analogous to the sustained feeling we have of our own physiological states. Thousands of species also have awareness of others’ intentions as a foremost environmental cause, helping them judge what all kinds of animals are likely to do in myriad situations, and often what other animals are expecting them to do as well. Many organisms also attribute a kind of selflike concept to nonintentional bodies, frequently as a possessive extension of their own intentionality.

Perception and conception, awareness of oneself, awareness of other intentional selves, and awareness of nonintentional selves function for mind/body/environment interfacing, and as this combination of reasoning and discrimination evolved, the thinking, motive, and concepts of phenomena they are addressed to somehow transitioned into the precursor of human logic, a cognitive process of assembling mental content as frameworks of more associational complexity, with categorically greater resemblance to the emergent structures generated by what we define as formal inferencing from evidence to conclusion. This is an extremely flexible architecturing that imaginatively fits perceptions together in a wider range of orientations, demonstrated most objectively by human language and birdsong, how they can organize the mind's qualitative states as conceptual patterning manifest in expression, within generalized forms that are much more than reflexively intuitive.


I'm thinking that the many components of this template can fluctuate via heredity and brain plasticity, complex combinations of vestigialization, accentuation and relative stasis, so each species has a somewhat unique cognitive trait profile as variations on the basic theme. Language more or less accesses this foundation while thought occurs.

My instant reaction is to think we should be seeking a comprehension of how life exists in the universe to improve stuff, not assuming that the very existence of all this life implies our universe is somehow ideal. Ruins the entire purpose of the intellectuality when we hem ourselves in with a view that current knowledge must be the foundation for all conceivable circumstances in relation to a particular issue. The fine-tuning argument seems like disingenuity diminishing certain beliefs about spirituality that should actually be respected for entirely different reasons, one more teleological shenanigan to possibly estrange all kinds of dudes and dudettes from the pursuit of mutual progress. But maybe this is looking at it with excessive seriousness, could merely be a good conversation starter about physics. I'm not inclined towards the view of reality as governed by absolutes, and not a fan of ideological camps.

Who says life can't adopt as many different forms as existent universes? Maybe life can exist in many possible universes. The "laws" of physics are based on models of our universe, not every possible universe.

Water and carbon are some of the most common substances in the universe. Quantum superposition of phase states in elementary particles such as atoms has been proposed as a means for molecules to evolve in many ways simultaneously, which possibly makes emergence of basic organic chemistry from the inorganic extremely rapid, maybe an almost inevitable occurrence in numerous circumstances. Enzyme/replicator hybrids called ribozymes have been found in the cytoplasm, likely descendants of a missing link between metabolic and genetic mechanisms. Fossil records of the Cambrian explosion prove that adaptive radiation in eukaryotes can happen very quickly once sufficient symbiosis between prokaryotes is attained. It has been shown in the lab that novel symbiosis between microscopic organisms such as amoeba and bacteria can develop in only weeks. Plausible explanations exist, and the more that science progresses, the more probable biological evolution seems. We're lucky, but not such that macroevolution from atoms to earth's current ecosystems by mutation and natural selection isn't a viable theory. And this has absolutely no implication for whether or not God simply exists.

How about a psychological viewpoint!

We can with no trouble imagine an interminable future, but it is impossible to comprehend what an eternal past would be in comparison to the content of human experience; we know of nothing that has no origin, with our cognition being hardwired to look at everything as caused. An infinite regress of causes defies our mental makeup to seek the root of things, which in circumstances of the ordinary leads us by increments to a closed system of mechanisms that further phenomena fit into as progress. This enigma is reinforced by incipience of our own perception at infancy; to have existed forever as potential in a past that never began is nearly inconceivable.

We thus look to creational explanations for even the universe as a whole, that it is a cycle of big bangs or some other kind of cycle: the closest we can get is a notion of perpetual rebirth. Our profoundest myths and scientific accounts of the cosmos presume a beginning, even though the whole idea is based on mere reflexive presuppositions of our thinking, that what is permanent but changing must come from something or somewhere. There may be a conceptual null set but there is no null substance, and there is a conceptual infinite set but no perceivably infinite substance, the paradox that forces us to choose philosophically between spontaneous generation out of nothing or an uncaused cause, or remain suspended in uncertainty.

Perhaps some dynamic of neural or otherwise substantiated structuring exists that is common to all the most cognitive species, responsible for grouping of particulars into kinds as a basic conceptual phenomenon, in behaviors as diverse as mate selection, social stratifying, nest-building, technological inventiveness, naming, philosophical reasoning towards superordinate essences and fundamentals, scientific classification, theoretical modeling, and so on. Maybe the act of generalizing will one day be correlated primarily with tissues of the cerebrum, a brain structure which is unique to the biggest macroscopic animals, comprised of the most intricately interconnected and rewritable neuronal wiring and synesthesia, possibly responsible for generating an experience of so to speak “knowing what you are doing” psychically, the integrating of vastly dispersed perceptual phenomena via both more or less inferential reasoning and various degrees of self-awareness, a process of association-making that facilitates behavioral priming.

Do I know what I'm doing yet? lol

I suppose that people then and before were capable of genus, species thinking, which is what Plato means, but that in practice they didn't. — tim wood

Biologists constructing a taxonomy, ancient philosophers an account of nature's essence, prehistoric humans a spear, animals a nest, are these all analogous as conceptual or neural structuring, a cognition of particulars into functional kinds?

Not an easily summarized topic, but this should give you a general idea.


There were two main facets of early modernity's empiricism: a proposal of hypotheses with the intention of corroborating intuitions, enabling the positing of progressive theory, and a critical dismantling of previous theories, providing a recursive niche for improvement. These complementary aspects of science were consistently inculcated at university and infused themselves into the general intellectual climate as modern skepticism, what could be called systematic doubt, and what came to be much later known in the 20th century as positivism, the pursuit of comprehensive theories as well as precepts to guide subsequent development.

The philosophical underpinnings of science, a foundation still under construction in the Early Modern 17th century, tended to adopt one of two general approaches in taking the not yet synthesized skeptical or positivist turn, either rationalist, essentially falling in line with an analysis based on pure conceptualization traceable all the way back to Plato's abstract, Socratic dialecticism, or a materialist strategy founded primarily on observation of the natural world more in likeness to the thinking of Aristotle. Philosophers, with the newly coalescing scientific instincts of their cultural milieu, mused from a starting point of mental ideations or physical facts, usually attempting to either construct a complete system, or deconstruct knowledge in order to reach explicit recognition of what can be known with certainty.


The first major grappling with ontology of history can probably be attributed to the German Georg Hegel, who at the start of the 19th century postulated an abstract concept of spirit as the general mechanism of temporal change; the essence of this view was expounded in Phenomenology of Spirit. His theorizing's central tenet was that history is dialectical: a novel manifestation of 'spirit' - spontaneous impetus - comes into being, a 'thesis', which then prompts responsive impetus, an 'antithesis', finally resulting in 'synthesis', the combinatorial form of a new thesis out of which the process continually reasserts itself. In this schema, our history is like parallel movement steadily expanding in width, drawing more and more of existence under its influence, into the scope of its relatively systemlike, interweaving, temporal strands of substantiality. Propagating threads of spirit bind into an enlarging whole as internal conditioning occurs until they achieve a sort of organized equilibrium, which draws growing swaths of the environment into its mutating general form, just as dialectical communication in pursuit of truth increases the breadth and alters the configuration of human knowledge.

In the 20th century, a philosophy by which to understand the nature of human knowledge was still being pursued, and American philosopher Willard Quine made eminent contributions in this area. He formulated a positivist concept influenced by Wittgenstein's vision of logic, theorizing the episteme as a gigantic mutating web of interrelated beliefs and theories. Quine addressed the nature of truth with a concept of 'confirmational holism': verifying hypothesis or theory in one area of our body of knowledge changes, even if only slightly, the general structure of the whole, especially beliefs in closest proximity to it. He regarded math as "indispensable" to epistemic progress, one of the most important types of conceptualizing in our attempts to process information and make sense of reality.


Contemporary science's reply to Humean skepticism, the uncertainty involved in any extrapolation from past conditions or integration of dispersed information, is statistics. This field supplies techniques for quantifying probability of error in the relationship of any particular datum to any potential geometric model of a data set, making decisions about how to fit figures to information much more exact as deviations are pooled mathematically and processed collectively according to well-defined standards. General implications of spatially and temporally complex or large-scale math for hypotheses and theories have thus become much easier to assess, corroborated or controverted with greater overall precision.

Descartes' skeptical challenge to rationality has been met by the central scientific tradition of peer review. Once a research project has been completed, academics present their work at conventions; attendees ask questions, getting as much clarification and further analysis as desired. Results are also published in journals so the whole scientific community has an opportunity to reflect upon and discuss new facts and theories as well as incorporate ideas into their own professional endeavors. This collectivity is massive triangulation to the most valid perspective on reality; "I think, therefore I am" is blown up to massive proportions, as "We can agree, therefore we know". It is not a perfect system, for groupthink and irrational bandwagons occasionally take hold, in addition to personal rivalries and the occasionally crucified reputation, but science often involves real honesty, transparency and accountability, a combination fostering as much intellectual integrity as any subculture has yet achieved.

The observational side of positivism has matured in the context of science as an implementing of progressively more technologically advanced instruments, enlarging the scope of human perceptivity so that we simply have more information at our disposal, increasing efficacy of theoretical modeling and enriching our image of the world. The conceptual side of positivism has crystallized into the scientific method, an analytical procedure that is essentially recursion producing ever more potent hypotheses as investigators design an experiment, collect data, process results, draw conclusions, and utilize those conclusions to make further predictions, modifying theory as they go. The method has been clarified and generalized to such an extent that it is simple enough for even schoolchildren to grasp, and students are typically instilled with this mode of thinking at a very young age.


Hegel's vision of history is coming to fruition in the context of Quine's confirmational holism: research trajectories of all the many scientific fields are starting to interact with each other, sharing their theoretical paradigms and information so that the episteme is becoming more integrated. The first examples of this movement were contributions of biochemistry to medicine, then neuroscience to psychology; these interdisciplinary efforts have been spectacular successes, giving inspiration to astrophysics (astronomy and physics), biogeochemistry (biology, geology, chemistry), environmental science (ecology, politics, economics, sociology), ethnic studies (anthropology, sociology, psychology), quantum biology (physics, biology, chemistry), with many more instances as well as all their subdivisions.

Modern empiricism has synthesized conception and observation, our rationality augmented by math and our perception enhanced by technology, instating a culture of technical method with seemingly unlimited potential to harness natural environments. Empiricism has settled into three main scientific fields: physical matter, individual psychology in humans and additional organisms, and the study of societies; nature as inanimate, intentional, and collective. In the context of human decision-making and public policy, these domains - material, mental, and cultural - are starting to blend into consciousness of the future as universal in its human meaning, a species-wide sphere of action characterized by intrinsic mutuality of progress.


How could you not agree? lol

you need to keep in mind that objectivity and subjectivity are mutually exclusive. Claiming that evolutionary processes are subjective to humans means that it is not objectively true. — Tilla

My point of view is that objectivity is invented as a kind of collective subjectivity based on science and technology. Maybe that seems unorthodox, but while perception is somewhat independent of logically rational thought as a cognitive function, what might be referred to as so-called "external", it varies enough between individuals and is modified by the construction of truth at such a core level that even the concept of time upon which evolution is rooted proves extremely malleable, as reflections on spirituality and modern physics (theory of relativity, quantum mechanics) show.

you make in that passage claims about survival of single people, and then jump to the pleasure of people depending on the survival of everyone in the universe. You have an huge gap there, why should anyone care about the survival of someone in some far away country on your account? — Tilla

The argument is somewhat lengthy to make. If you're super curious, I address this primarily in the "Norms, Customs, Conscience and Power" and "The Ethics of Progress" essays. Basically, the ideas depend on an analysis of history.

a. What exactly does evolutionary relativism mean?
b. What does universal ethics mean? — Tilla

Relativism refers to the phenomenon that reality's appearance depends on a multiplicity of perspectives manifesting within an interpreting perceiver's frame of reference. In our case, the interpreting perspectives are those of human beings united into a progressing objectivity of technology and scientific knowledge, which cultural idealists strive to make universalizably practical as possible. Evolution is an important component of universalizable objectivity's scientific foundation, giving knowledge the universal form of chronology so as to make prediction of the future maximally rational and thus conceptually integrating for every individual. This enables mass behavior to be more effectively orchestrated.

A universal ethic is emergent from the fact that conditions of human survival are nearly universal. Being able to at least minimally depend on survival is a prerequisite for any satisfying quality of life to be possible, so cultural idealists who want to better the general standard of living find implications of this effort more or less equivalent for all human beings. Working towards achieving basic standard of human living on a universal scale is justifiable because this is necessary for pleasure to be experienced, makes humans more likely to behave amicably, and gives a substantial amount of pleasure to the charitable individual practicing these values independent of politicized consequences. Essentially, a universal ethic is capable of enhancing community health. In actual practice many complications exist, but working towards the ideal is rock solid in its reasonableness.

If you want a full dose of the rationale or merely a selection, these essays from my blog at WordPress.com thoroughly explain it.

Human Motivation and its Place in the Development towards Contemporary Culture

The Nature and Origins of Ethics

Norms, Customs, Conscience and Power

The Ethics of Progress

Enjoy! lol

Theories of mind indicate both voluntary functions and involuntary functions. The determinist claims that even voluntary functions are composed of involuntary functions. But the concept of "involuntary function" along with every additional concept is analyzed and applied more or less voluntarily. So it seems existence of the concept "involuntary" strongly suggests but does not prove that deterministic phenomena exist, and the general realm of concepts appears more or less non-deterministic. This forms a non-continuous spectrum ranging from relative determinism to relative non-determinism infused with and bounded by massive uncertainty. Voluntarily doing what you want is relatively non-deterministic, and not being able to voluntarily want what you want is relatively deterministic.

I read Kant as emphatically on the side of intent, the what goes in, and not at all on the side of what comes out, the consequence. — tim wood

Saying no one should lie because the categorical imperative implies so might be missing the point. But if pressed for a simple example, I think Kantian idealism could be amenable to claiming that because it is possible to will not telling lies that damage someone's well-being as at least hypothetically a universal law, it is a valid ethical ideal. This is because its outcome if adopted by everyone would be to make human society universally better, not only because it makes sense in my own mind or in the context of how I feel. The categorical imperative is a way to personally validate behaviors that can possibly have universally positive consequences independent of a politicized process. It is basically reinforcement of universal common sense about social cause and effect in a way that integrates with Kant's general theories of reason. It presupposes that everyone would come to similar conclusions about real world practice in a vast assortment of cases, whether or not the decisions are publicly communicated.

Am I misinterpreting what Kant means by "universal"?

Kant claims pure practical reasoning about causal circumstance is involved with moral decision-making. He is arguing that these rational conclusions can be promoted by a mechanism of personalization, the categorical imperative, independent of politicized agreement. I'm not leaving Kant out, I'm presuming him as a partial facet of behavioral generalization's nature. Kantian thinking decides based on applicability to outcome no less than the consequentialist, but is only concerned with formulating universal principles, the foundation of ethics, not assessing the further issue of civic and psychological mechanisms that can enable those principles to be introduced and maintained in the real world of corruptional, inclement or dilemma situations. Kantian idealism produces universals constraining selfishness, short-sightedness and exploitation in an essentially consequentialist existence. His theory is not being excluded.

You are quite the contrarian lol The issues you raise are not a flaw in the theory, but a topic to be studied, and I'm as curious as you! I provide some speculations in my essays, though detailed knowledge will depend on scientific research projects.

The idea is that qualia are a basic property of matter, like mass, energy, shape, and size, emergent from dynamics of entanglement that have been modelled in a preliminary way by quantum physics. Entanglement is key to the functioning of photosynthetic reaction centers, also magnetoreception, and will probably be discovered in all kinds of cellular structures. If entanglement is found throughout the body, especially in the nervous system, additive properties of its particle wavelengths may be what produce qualia as conventionally conceived, perhaps organized into larger-scale systems of hybridized entanglements I call coherence fields. Electricity is an extremely strong form of coherence field, and EMFs such as brain waves may also be a type of coherence field. What we know as sustained qualitative experience might be generated by mechanisms that integrate, synchronize and amplify these coherence field effects to create a more or less synthetic consciousness. Corroborating this theory by investigating organic tissues such as those of the brain then suggests that consciousness as cumulative material qualia can exist beyond the modularity characterizing organic bodies.

I've already talked about this at length in the "qualia and quantum mechanics" threads. If my theory is experimentally verified, it resolves the mind/body duality issue by describing qualia as emergent from basics of matter as such, not in a way peculiar to the most sophisticated organic mechanisms. This accounts for many more phenomena of the natural world. You might want to read the essays I site in the OP also.