Is seeing being aware of your eyes, and what your eyes are doing, or is it more properly described as being aware of the things which are being seen? — Metaphysician Undercover

Seeing is first of all the feeling of light, color, and contour. Derivatively of this we then say that we see 'things.' We always see things by way of the former, but we never come to the former by means of seeing things. The sensory components of sight come first, and are never left behind. We are not aware of our eyes as objects, but rather feel their motions from the inside. We could never see unless we had self-sensing visual feelings.

Are you saying that the frog is aware of all of its internal activities which cause it to catch the fly, but is never aware of the fly itself? — Metaphysician Undercover

The frog only needs to be compelled by hunger and instinct to behave in a certain way, which due to forces beyond its control or understanding lead it to being fed. It has no idea what a fly is, let alone awareness of any particular flies. Nor is this either sufficient or necessary: we could put it in a different environment where the same passions triggered in it caused it to survive by other means than eating flies, and it would never know the difference (so it does not need to be aware of flies at all), and on the other hand we could make it die in the presence of plenty of flies, by removing its impetus to action.

I'd prefer not to do Sense and Reference because one, I think probably people will be overly familiar with it (I'm sick to death of it myself), and because I think it's too short to warrant a reading group. It seems like more of a one-time discussion sort of thing.

If it was Word and Object, I have skimmed it and so am familiar with its overarching structure, and think it would deb possible to just go through a chapter of it each week, making the group as a whole last seven weeks. I'm less familiar with the structure of S&P, so we'd have to work it out some other way.

In any case those listed above are just suggestions: if there's something else someone has always wanted to read, or already has read and is interested in commenting on in depth, that would be good too.

After all, if it was not aware of itself and the environment, then how could it possibly do what it does? — tom

If a rock was not aware of its environment, how could it possibly do what it does?

The problem is, that awareness is prior to self-awareness — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't think there is any such thing as awareness that's not self-awareness. All feeling is feeling of oneself, of the movements of one's own body.

All living things derive their means for subsistence from their environment, so awareness of the surroundings is developed from the necessity of subsistence. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes and no. The frog need not be aware of anything external to survive: it only needs to respond to certain motivating passions in ways that have evolved accidentally to result in an unintended external effect of which it's unaware and can't understand. Any tiny miscalibration here will result in it dying, and it will be unable to appeal to what is around it to save itself, because it doesn't/can't understand.

yeh yeh

One of the disasters of phenomenology was making intentionality foundational, and so failing to see how anyone could relate to themselves on any model except for the way they relate to an object. Therefore the system leaves no room for self-consciousness as anything other than a form of reflexivity. Consciousness goes outward first, and so must loop back around on itself, like an eye displacing itself and then looking backward. These are powerful metaphors so deeply ingrained that they're IMO impossible to dissuade people of once they have a certain temperament. With these prejudices in place, of course you're going to end up thinking the outside is more fundamental.

This is part of the legacy of Western philosophy known as ontological monism, which takes the transcendent and distance as fundamental, which Michel Henry criticizes. I think it's backwards: you can get to exteriority from auto-affection, but not vice-versa. If you begin with the outside, you only get a sad facsimile of the self, as 'another inside of me.' That is what is fashionable in philosophy now, but it'd be a nice to see a return to the other direction, which was championed by the Cyrenaics and Descartes. The picture we have of the competing view is a sort of 'mutual emptiness' that Schopenhauer criticizes when he asks: 'this is all very well and good, but what the devil has any of it got to do with me?'

I'm passionate about this topic because I think unlike many things in philosophy it matters, and is going firmly in the wrong direction, away from life as lived and toward an abstraction of it. And once this abstraction is loved for its own sake, it takes a lot of hard work to get back to something interesting.

As for the thesis about consciousness of others here, it doesn't even do what it wants of course, because it also sees other people as things. And so just like we have a facsimile of the self, we have a facsimile of other people. Lingis' description, what we see of it here anyway, is bloodless and facile, and does not at all capture what experiencing another person is like.

"Beneath the uniformity that unites us in communication there is a chaotic personal diversity of connections, and, for each of us, the connections continue to evolve. No two of us ever learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives."

"Different persons growing up in the same languages are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike."

-Quine

As I understand it, the standard libertarian line on this would be that gangsters or feudal lords just are little states – or conversely, that the state is just a large gang.

I haven't read it. But offhand my experience is that Gnosticism has several unusual religious elements that make this hard to swallow.

For one, it does not try to convert in quite the same way as the other Abrahamic religions, nor does it tie its identity to any ethnic group or even wider sociopolitical community like the surrounding pagan religions. It is more of a mystery cult writ large: emphasis is on the exclusion and specialness of those in the Gnostic community, which implies their rarity. Thus, 'I will choose one in a thousand, two in ten thousand,' etc. Gnostics are oftentimes even outright discouraged from participating in the world and its affairs ('be passerby') and warned that 'merchants,' which seems to mean anyone who takes its affairs, metaphorically financial affairs, seriously, is going to miss the kingdom.

For two, it often explicitly disavows the coming of a transcendent heavenly force in the future, instead preaching that the 'kingdom' is already present on earth, and that it is ignorance that prevents mankind from seeing it. The emphasis has always been on gnosis, and not on a sweeping change in material affairs. Indeed the implication seems to be that a change in material affairs can't truly change anything, since the world is just a kind of prison, or afterthought, or shadow play.

For three, it doesn't seem consonant with Gnostic theology that any sort of earthly authority or power structure could be a coherent goal. The closest Gnosticism came to having a political, as opposed to a spiritual, influence as when Valentinus almost was elected Pope. Even if he was, I'm not sure how much Gnosticism could seep into the Church – genuinely preaching it would seem likely to shrink the Church's membership. I remember reading that for a very brief period there was actually technically a Gnostic state somewhere in the Middle East, when its petty king was converted by a Gnostic confidant. I can't recall the name, though. That situation does not seem stable.

I agree that totalitarianism has echoes of millennialism, though. At the very least it's messianic.

But again, this is not a coherent criticism unless you take humanism for granted. What does 'value in relation to the whole of humanity' mean, and why should anyone care? It seems there must be an appeal to humanity's abstract essence in order to care about this to begin with.

It is undoubtedly descended from, or even a product of, the decay of the Judeo-Christian worldview. — Wayfarer

What I'm saying is that it didn't come from its decay, but from its arising and development. Although I was referring more to humanism than scientific materialism. While historically related I'm not sure how necessary a relation that really is.

I think the original failing with Christian orthoodoxy was bound up with the formation of the Catholic church and the exclusion of gnosticism. Have a look at this scandalous article. It would never get published in a real journal, but contains more than a grain of truth.

I may as well show my cards and say that I agree, and that Gnosticism is for me anyway the 'real' Christianity.

including virtues are merely arbitrary insofar as they are entirely culture specific. — John

No, you see, they're not arbitrary, because they're culture specific. It's trying to unbind them from culture that makes them arbitrary.

Your universalistic assumptions are so deeply embedded that you're unable to imagine value outside of them.

I'm conflicted over Christianity because it is part of my heritage and something that deeply resonates with me. However, it has within it the seed of modern humanism, and I think that the contemporary ideology I've been criticizing is essentially an advanced form of Protestantism, which in turn is just a sort of proto-secularism. This sort of atheism is, in a weird way, the natural conclusion of Christianity's development, which from the outset has been hostile to religion, as even Deep South Protestants will tell you, and Christianity is founded on the renegotiation and diminishing of God's concrete role in favor of the individual and his/her conscience, as well as the essence of humanity in the abstract ('neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female,' and so on). Christianity sans Christ, in other words, is sort of the outcome of Christianity itself – all the tools are already in the New Testament. I think the association between worldwide colonialism/conversion and the new progressivism is not accidental: both are deeply, deeply Christian and follow its impetus to level all things into abstract humanity.

I'm tempted to say the same thing about ISIS and Islam, and that moderate Muslims and progressives just have their heads in the sand: that is, whether or not even more than a small minority of Muslims are a part of ISIS or even just have sympathies with it, ISIS is in a way just Islam developed to its logical conclusion, as progressivism is Christianity developed to its logical conclusion. Christianity and Islam are poisonous and dangerous left unchecked for different reasons, our cultural attachment to them, whatever it might be, not withstanding. My sympathies for either of them are waning. Both share in the original sin of Abrahamism, or monotheism, or whatever you want to call it. You can force everyone violently to become part of one culture, which is Islam's modus operandi, or you can destroy every culture in the world, which is Christinaity's.

What do you take humanism to be, and why do you reject it? — Agustino

I take humanism to be the valuation of human beings for the sole reason that they are human beings, a valuation that can't be augmented or diminished by any particular circumstance or quality of the human being beyond belonging to this abstract class. The humanist believes that all human beings have an intrinsic worth, and this worth is not gradable or essentially modifiable.

I reject it because I would rather celebrate individual cultures and accomplishments on their own terms, even if this means accepting that there is no abstract human essence in which all of them share (so that it is in theory possible for multiple cultures to exist with mutually incompatible values, or mutually incompatible ideas of what it is to be human). Forcing every unique culture into this abstract valuation necessarily destroys all of them insofar as they are not mutually compatible, and they can't be mutually compatible so long as they're real and substantive. So it isn't possible to be humanist without trivializing culture.

I found nothing to respond to in what you wrote except this. How do you determine genius in the absence of any criteria of cultural value? — John

Why would cultural value be relevant? Does approval of something make it genius? Clearly not. Does disapproval of something make it not genius? Clearly not. The point of genius as I understand it is that it seems to come from nowhere, from resources that can't be reduced to its environment. Genius by definition can't be predicted, and so it is unbound by the way in which it assimilates into its prior context in a way that non-genius material isn't. To that end it's indifferent whether the surrounding culture assimilates and understands it. It might very well do so, but in doing so the culture yields to the genius; the genius doesn't yield to the culture. And if the two never hit, then the genius is still so on its own terms.

Also, you seem to be contradicting yourself in apparently valorizing genius as being beyond all culture and yet denying the importance of the unique individual. — John

What I said was that the unique individual is generally not important to a culture; I then mentioned genius explicitly as an exception to this in noting its rarity.

Many of your comments seem to me relentlessly offhand and facile, even perverse. They seem more to be expressions of your dissatisfied temperament than to be well-considered expressions of the intellect. — John

Tbh it would help if you read more carefully before responding. I'm fine with these sorts of criticisms but e.g. the 'contradiction' you thought you found above could have been remedied by paying attention to the post.

Unlike Classical Liberalism and Modernism, where the human is understood as an abstracted being (effectively as God or tradition were before it), it understands humans are always come from and are embedded within culture. — TheWillowOfDarkness

It isn't much different, in that instead of an abstract human, we have an abstract conglomeration of demographics, and those demographics just proliferate and proliferate endlessly though none of them mean anything.

Seems a bit superficially dismissive. And I don't think apologetics of any kind was what Hegel was actually interested in.

Have you actually attempted to read Phenomenology of Spirit or Science of Logic or even done significant reading in the secondary literature? — John

I don't care. I'll be dismissive of what I think deserves to be dismissed. Hegel was certainly an apologist, if you've read Phil. of Right.

I've read the Phenomenology.

I don't understand this at all. A society could not be "constructed to maximize the freedom of the individual" "except insofar as this is something the culture privileges", so I don't know waht you are trying to say here. — John

Modern secular humanist society tries to maximize the freedom of the individual by treating the individual as nothing but an abstract particular, a human. It provides no avenues for being free, but merely tries to make freedom in virtue of destroying cultural bonds that might stop this abstract human from developing in whatever direction it pleases. It's the difference between an absence of culture, only being able to see culture as restrictive, and a positive commitment to liberty as a culture.

In order to be thought a genius at all there work would have be (at least) culturally relevant, wouldn't it — John

No. Genius is independent of cultural merit and needs no approval.

Postmodernism is largely a reaction to, as well as a symptom of, humanism and secularism, part cry for help, part nihilistic game, part genuine observation on what happens in a world that starts losing its cultural bearings and is forced to see itself in terms of shifting demographics (and so the notion of prefacing speech acts with 'as an X...' and the notion of a demographic for one's sexuality, and the notion of intersectionality and kyriarchy, become possible).

So pomo doesn't traffic in culture so much as the reflection of it.

So says the great pontificator! Why would you say that? Do you believe there is no evolutionary logic to historical development? — John

At best, it can only act as retrospective apologetics, which is what Hegel was interested in. Granted, whenever something happens, it always seems necessary in retrospect, due to natural solipsism / lack of imagination. The same solipsism that leads to humanism I guess.

I think what you say here is very one-sided: there could be no heritage absent the presently available expressions of unique past individuals. — John

I think the more you look at a tradition, the more the illusion that any one individual is important to it dissolves. Geniuses are few, and culture arises without being able to say who wrote the folk song or invented the tradition, etc., because no one did. This is not to say individuals are secondary or have no values, for the simple reason that there cannot be a culture without individuals. But I don't think the notion of a society constructed to maximize the freedom of the individual makes sense, except insofar as this is something the culture privileges. This is not IMO the modus operandi of secular humanism, which is interested in the destruction of culture through multiculturalism, not in maintaining a coherent culture of liberty.

Of course if a person wants to operate entirely freely, outside of a tradition, I think this is possible insofar as 1) they grow up in some tradition to begin with, to be a coherent human being, and then 2) abandon it in favor of being a 'lonely soul' (think Emil Cioran or Ralph Ellison). Even here one's loneliness tends to be a reflection of the previous culture, although I think works of genius are especially likely in this space.

Secular humanism (at last once we get past Modernism and Classical Liberalism) views the individual as part of a culture of humans as they exist. — TheWillowOfDarkness

It does not. The point of 'humanism' is the value of the human in the abstract. There is no human in the abstract. Equality = leveling off. Cultures are permitted to exist under secular humanism only as trivial consumer choices.

Nah, cultures are literally dying off by the year.

I don't really believe i the 'expression of the individual,' I guess, in that there is no individuality to express outside of a heritage. I'm not saying any individual culture is guaranteed to be great or even not horrible to some individual or class of individuals. But what we're seeing is the option of having a culture essentially forcibly removed. And Hegelianism is bunk.

In short, culture. Men don't live on bread alone. A society considered merely as an abstract multicultural material superstructure isn't livable. A body can live in it (maybe), not so much a person.

Modern secular humanism's vision of a human being as an abstract particular with material desires and preferences, devoid of religion, history, culture, and nationality is a vision of the human as non-human. It is possible for materially functioning society to be spiritually bankrupt in this way. We are not just things plopped here out of nowhere, but what we come from informs who we are. The message of a modern Western state is: "you are no one."

No, I think it's more that in any society you're going to have a core of people who that society 'is for,' who are at home in it and feel they were raised in it, and so belong to it and are invested in its continuance. Then you'll have people who are there basically by accident and along for the ride, who will never feel comfortable there, and that all things considered the society itself would be more comfortable without. It's the former people's problem, not the latter's, how the society is supposed to continue, because the latter have no stake in it and can't be expected to cultivate something that is hostile or alien to them, or that they have no interest in maintaining.

The problem is that as the core of culture erodes, and we're left only with competing subcultures, the latter group grows larger while the former group disappears, and soon you have a collection of people that form a society 'for nobody,' that nobody is obligated to maintain. The solution is not to rally individuals to fight for something they have no stake in, and in fact once a society is 'for nobody,' it may very well not be worth saving.

Alright. I just wonder about what's hiding in the 'social order,' and why sexual appetite is supposedly such a problem.

I'm not sure what society needs, and I haven't given it too much thought because I don't think it's my problem, but whatever you mean by conservatism, I imagine it's historically tied to coercive hierarchy, ecclesiasticism, war, and taxation. I doubt those things are much good for anyone. What is better, I don't know – my best guess is, first family, and second, culture, not subculture or counterculture, which is about all we have right now, but real culture, which includes traditions inculcating beauty, splendor, taste, thought and pride. These are not things that warlords and kings and churches produce, or anything else I imagine Burke has on offer. All I am saying is that disapproval of the current state of things shouldn't lead to a hysterical panic looking for anything reactionary to oppose it.

I'm not a humanist or a liberal or a secularist, so I have little sympathy for the current signs of good breeding in the world of thought. In my wetter moments I tend to think in terms of a mysterian hard polytheism. But it is hard to have sympathy for monarchy and snake oil as if that were the only alternative. Disillusionment is preferable to panic here.

I may be being flippant about this, but I just don't see how this addresses my post.

All I can say is that we're apparently not talking about digital boundaries 'somewhere, wherever they might be, and I don't know or can't know in principle,' but rather digital boundaries that are well-defined in formal systems. The former seems to be more an epistemic matter anyway: to imagine a digital boundary is indeed to imagine it somewhere perfectly precisely, even if one can't say for whatever reason exactly where. We can bypass the epistemic issues by setting them in a thought experiment, and still the problem remains. If this was a conceptual mistake, then we shouldn't be able to say, for any given part of the continuum, whether it fell on one side of the boundary or the other. But this is just to say either that 1) there is no digital boundary, or 2) there is no boundary at all, which are not situations we're interested in ex hypothesi. The issue about perception v. conception also seems to miss the point in that we're not talking about literally perceiving a boundary but rather being able to tell. in the thought experiment, where it is by thinking about it.

But to be honest my interest in this topic isn't proportional to the amount of time I'm spending typing about it, so I'm going to stop replying here.

Suppose you introduce a boundary by separating one piece of a continuum from another. By hypothesis, we are now at least treating the continuum as digital, which means the border must be somewhere. That is, there must be some piece of the continuum that is on one side of the border, and another piece on the other side (or at least, we treat things this way). And there must be no distance between these two points, or else the border itself will have distance, and the question of the digitalization of how long the border is then just repeats the problem whole again. But then, the only way for this to happen is if we can identify two discrete pieces of the continuum, and say that one is on one side, the other on the other. So for any piece of the continuum, once the boundary is there, we can say definitively which side it's on, and as a result there now is, or at least we take there to be, an absolutely discrete cutoff between one side of the boundary or the other.

But where is that boundary? How can we tell, in virtue of placing the boundary? How can we tell where we've put the boundary at all? One way is to say, we just look at which things fall on either side of it: but this begs the question, since if we could determine precisely to begin with, before knowing where the boundary is set, which side each was on, then there will have ipso facto been digitalized distinctions between those two things that lie on opposite sides of the border all along, since we need to make this digitalization in order to place the border. But if we do not assume this, then we have no reason to say that the border was placed at once place rather than another, and we literally cannot figure out exactly where it is, or which things digitally fall on either side of it, hence the border itself becomes analog, and contrary to hypothesis we have done no digitalizing in placing the border.

...and where does the boundary get introduced?

But, the digitization was supposed to be effected by the introduction of the boundary?

This raises the question of 'where' the boundary is set, given that by your own stipulation there is no preexistent 'place' for it to go (a boundary can only act as such at a place if it is put there), which would require the very identity you're denying exists to begin with before the placement of the boundary.

How about this: for any analog measurement, a digital measurement that allows an open interval of an infinitesimal works just as well, down to an arbitrarily precise measure, and an operation like negation can operate on that analog by preserving the size of this infinitesimal open interval at the opposite end?

Cardinal numbers do introduce a total ordering by definition, but could only be assigned plain old ordinal numbers (accepting there is no such thing as e.g. 'the 1.5th...' which seems plausible) once we settle on some granularity, which the analog in principle doesn't require. But what the digital can do is go down to an arbitrarily small granularity as required, and then leave the rest to an open interval over this arbitrarily small amount. This is granting that things are analog in themselves, which as I said before is questionable for a mercury sample anyway. Then we preserve the ability to conduct well-defined operations such as negation, the gap being not one of metaphysical import, but of a necessary imprecision of arbitrarily small amount enforced on us by needing to decide on some granularity.

I never said it was, just clarifying whether the project is only of interest to someone with Kantian presuppositions. If you don't have them, whether that's against the layman or not, then the question is of no interest. It's important sometimes to qualify what's at stake before engaging in a problem that might have no relevance, or that you think you've solved in virtue of a prior commitment.

Though that said, the question of whether identity is in the objects really boggles the mind in a way that color doesn't, IMO. Though the ideality of identity is an old, old subject, and I subscribed to it myself for a time, and get the appeal.

Do you think that ordinal numbers aren't used in scales? Don't even the cardinal numbers by definition impose a total ordering?

So in other words...numbers don't imply digital...? I don't understand what your position is. You seem just to have denied this.

Do you think that ordinal comparisons cannot be described by number?

Not sure what to make of the quote. Temperature and pressure are numerically measurable and so divisible: whether effecting a certain division, say by half, involves literally just cutting the thing itself in half or not seems beside the point. Of course cutting water in half is not going to halve its temperature. Why would it, and how does that show a difference in kind between volume and temperature...? This shows that temperature is not the same thing as volume, and so cutting volume in half doesn't cut temperature in half. It doesn't show that temperature isn't halve-able. What a bizarre train of reasoning. You can cut the temperature in half by putting it in the fridge.

I do think there are intensive and non-quantifiable properties, but temperature and pressure in the physicist's sense aren't examples of them. And this reasoning is getting very scattershot, so the goalposts aren't clear to me anymore. If the distinction that matters here is cardinal versus ordinal, one would wonder how you can't have heard of ordinal numbers.

Yeah, it seems that what is digital is the computer as model, not as implementation. We are uninterested in intermediate voltages and so purposely ignore them in order to enact as much as possible a formal configuration that strictly has no physical counterpart.

What do you think 'analog' means?

Do you think that something analog is incapable of 'making distinctions?' Surely, even if a bucket of water is in some way 'analog,' one can still distinguish between being hit with a little bucket of water and a big one, and measure the size difference between the two. If not, I'm not understanding how that I'm 'effecting a distinction' means that I'm committing to something being digital.

This is a little off topic, but the mercury example is a weird one in that quantities of mercury are in a very real sense digital, in that there is a finite, countable number of mercury atoms in any sample, and broken down beyond this we have not mercury but something else.

Not at all. Your example of mercury in a thermometer is precisely an example put to use for the purpose of quantitative measurement. Number in of itself doesn't imply digitization, because in between any two numbers, there is another number. This is, the best I can make of it, exactly what it means to be analog.

I think there is some sort of confusion here. The point is not that there could be 'negative mercury,' but that an amount of mercury could change in height to model the function of negation in an analog way. Suppose for example the mercury is inside of a thermometer which is marked from degrees 0 to 100 celsius, and negation is an operation that converts any degree so represented into its 'opposite,' given by the absolute value of that number minus 50, if the original number is above 50, and this absolute value plus an additional 50, if the original number is below. Thus applying negation to 1 yields 99, to 45 yields 55, to 80 yields 30, and so on. This is perfectly analog, since we can countenance such a reversal, and even apply the operation precisely, despite the fact that we can count the scale the mercury measures as thick (for any two degrees, there lies a degree between, with no sharp cutoffs). Then if we had an analog way of changing the height of the mercury in accordance with this operation by changing the temperature (with how precisely we can change the temperature corresponding to how precisely we can apply the operation), we have an analog negation. This same procedure could be carried over to the notion of a truth value, or whether an individual has a property, and in fact this is what things like fuzzy logic are designed to do.