Could you elaborate on the use of "care" in this context? — Wayfarer

I'm simply saying I accept a causal ontology in which finality always plays a real part. That finality may seem completely attentuated - as in when talking about the entropic desire of the Second Law. But it is still considered real, even if only a material tendency and not a semiotic relation (as in an organismic function or purpose).

See, your principle of indifference doesn't allow that this difference is real. What I claim is fundamental to reality, particulars, with differences, you are saying is just an illusion. — Metaphysician Undercover

Hardly. It allows me to distinguish between accidents and necessities for a start.

Is an oak tree still an oak tree if it is bent and twisted, blasted by lightning, ravaged by pests?

We are right to say an oak tree is an oak tree because we can point to some shared information - a genome and a history of adaptation which that genome represents. So the genome stands for what is necessary. And then that defines what are merely accidents that particularise oak trees - the differences in form that make this one distinct from that one. It is a matter of indifference if one oak tree has a broken limb, or a different pattern of branching, or whatever.

So my approach introduces a sound basis for separating reality into its formal necessities and accidental differences. Forms, constraints, bounds or limits are "real" to the degree that they "care".

Now humans can pretend they care about absolutely every detail. You can take the point of view where the slightest crinkle in the 1001st leaf of an oak tree is enough to distinguish it from its twin. There is no limit that you are willing to place on your ability to care.

Fine. That is a very idealistic and absolutist philosophical position. It is a very familiar stance, being the reductionism that underlies the classical mechanical/atomistic view of reality.

But here I am talking about a full Aristotelian four causes view of reality, one that is based on systems thinking or holism. This seeks to distinguish between formal necessities and material accidents. And so it talks of the constraints that encode a finality or general desire.

The flip-side of this is then that the constraints must also encode a limit to that desiring. The principle of indifference is what makes finality even possible. It says desires can be satisfied well enough for the purpose in mind. The fact that we can care is made a definite causative fact by their being, in complementary fashion, a limit to the degree we need to care. Accidents can be allowed to happen once they don't make a difference.

So your approach to this is metaphysically lop-sided. You want to argue for the primacy of form and finality. Yet in pretending that all differences can matter equally, you talk yourself into an incoherent position.

Ambiguity is never removed in an absolute way. — Metaphysician Undercover

Right. So as I was saying about the principle of indifference....

However, in any case, he would miss the point because he would be comparing portions of reality that we are not interested in. — Magnus Anderson

Right. So as I was saying about the principle of indifference....

I find your argument to be illogical.

OK. So I am saying that out there in the real world, there is only dissimilarity in the limit.

Absolute difference is a “thing” only in the sense of being the limit towards which reality can approach, yet never actually reach.

This is supported by the various fundamental physical laws that science has arrived at.

A merely logical argument against my position doesn’t hold water here. Likewise, saying that humans can impose measurement frames on the Cosmos is not an argument as all such frames are based on choices and so on the principle of indifference. Coordinate systems are mathematical conveniences, not the material reality of which I speak.

What physical evidence do you have to offer that says material being can reach either the limit of the exactly alike in all possible respects, or the exactly unalike in all possible respects?

Your replies are all over the shop. Focus a minute. What essential point do you mean to dispute? I can’t see one.

Seems you are trying to build a lot from some logical contrivance when the conversation is about physical reality.

Really, all your responses are off the point.

Does the Cosmos care about your centimetres? What is it that makes a difference from the Universe’s point of view?

Two objects are said to be completely different if they have nothing in common. Are you saying there is no such a thing as two objects that have nothing in common? — Magnus Anderson

I think you will find that objects have being objects in common. Sets have being sets in common. Etc.

If I’m stating a fact, I’m speaking in signs.

And yes, I can mean to speak of the facts of the world. That is the realism in the indirectness.

What I make, I will call "banana bread", and what you make, you will call "banana bread". But what I make, and what you make are not both the same thing, they are similar. — Metaphysician Undercover

Jeez. And so you agree that there are differences that don't make a difference!

Sameness - like difference - is just the idealised limit. All real things are never absolutely the same, nor absolutely different. They are just relatively alike or relatively unalike.

Where is the problem?

OK, ordinary probability is fine. So if I roll a 7 with a pair of dice, does it make a difference if I roll a 4 and a 3 instead of a 2 and a 5?

Sometimes differences don’t make a difference. And that is determined by the context.

So the probabilistic view accepts no two things are the same. But then the differences might not count.

Under the LEM, I either threw a 7 or I didn’t. But it doesn’t matter how that 7 was composed ... unless you introduce some further constraint that makes it a particular concern.

In just the same way, you are still the same MU you were a month ago ... even if most of your atoms got swapped by the continuous metabolic turnover of your parts.

Without the principle of indifference, our ordinary world metaphysics would indeed be weird.

There is no such thing as a difference which doesn't make a difference. That is contradiction. If it has been identified as a difference, then by that very fact, it has made a difference. That's the point of my argument. To say that there is a difference which does not make a difference is pure sophistry, it's self-deception if you believe that. — Metaphysician Undercover

You sound so Old Testament about this. Yes, it may all be horribly wrong in your chosen metaphysics, but it follows simply from a probabilistic view of reality.

The principle of indifference is a fundamental constraint on actuality in that view. It explains why we get the “weird” statistics of quantum entangled states and the quantum indistinguishability of particles among other things.

So sure. Reality appears composed of concrete particulars. But the emphasis is on appears. It isn’t really.

I was reading a nice article on Peirce/Schelling/Hegel/Emerson that you guys might appreciate. It says something deep about a "philosopher's" notion of the divine.

Returning to the Unformed: Emerson and Peirce on the “Law of Mind”, John Kaag
http://www.pucsp.br/pragmatismo/dowloads/lectures_papers/kaag-paper-04-10-12.pdf

The gist is that Hegel is like all those who make ontological arguments that presume the intelligibility of the world must reflect the already existing intelligibilty of a comprehending and reasoning mind.

But really, ontology has to start by facing the "monstrous ground" of the unformed. Pure indeterminancy or spontaneity.

Any creation story has to begin with uncomprending irrationality as its basis.

At the beginning of Peirce’s “Law of Mind,” he makes a statement that all of us know: “I have begun by showing that tychism must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth, and a Schelling-fashioned idealism which holds matter to be mere specialized and partially deadened mind." Perhaps we are less familiar with Emerson’s comment at the beginning of his “Laws of Mind” in 1870 when he states that, “I am of the oldest religion.
Leaving aside the question which was prior, egg or bird, I believe the mind is the creator of the world, and is ever creating; - that at last Matter is dead Mind.” Peirce suggests that this intellectual overlap between himself and Emerson – about matter being “deadened mind” – was a function of their shared indebtedness to German idealism, and I would argue, particularly to Schelling.

...For Schelling, they were meant to signal a break from the idealism of Hegel, which involved the working out of a well-articulated notion of reason. Schelling’s positive philosophy sought to systematically describe the relationship between the self and the objective world, like most idealist writings of his time, but it also required an account freedom that was not found in Hegel. For Schelling, as opposed to many other idealists of the time, the “alpha and the omega of philosophy was freedom.” Freedom depended on a type of existential contingency that could not be reduced to Hegelian self-mediation.

...For Schelling, as opposed to Hegel, one of these preconditions of freedom is difficult to articulate because it is the “unformed,” or what Schelling often calls the abyss or Abgrund. It is this abyss of the
unformed that serves as the curious ground, or more literally, the groundless ground, of freedom for Schelling.

...Here we begin to get a sense of what Peirce meant by “being stricken” by the “monstrous mysticism of the East.” With these eastern traditions comes a monster: the unspeakable notion that appears in Schelling’s Essay on Human Freedom, namely the idea of the Abgrund. Commentators of Peirce, such as Niemoczynski brush up against the meaning of the Abgrund (which I think he accurately identifies, following Heidgegger, as the ontological difference between nature natured and nature naturing), but he then quickly turn to the closely related concept of Firstness, which he defines as the “potentiating ground” of existence.
A surprisingly large amount is then said about Firstness – how it is possibility, potentiality, “an infinitude that sustains, enables, and empowers all else” (124) By the time we return to the topic of the Abgrund, we find, according to Niemoczynski, that “like Firstness, it remains a pre-rational ground of feeling and possibility lying incomprehensibly at the basis of all thing.”
But then he goes one step further, and perhaps one step too far: the Abgrund is the place “where the life of God swells and surges forth from within ontological difference.” I believe that this theistic reading of the Abgrund, which is certainly consonant with Boehm and Schelling, is misleading if attributed to Peirce.
Certainly, Peirce writes the “Law of Mind” on the heels of his often-cited mystical experience, at a point where he even self-identifies as a religious man, perhaps for the first time. That being said, I am uncomfortable, deeply uncomfortable, with something about this reading, namely that it invites to us rest in rather comfortable philosophical conclusion, to develop a system of religious naturalism with clean hands.
Peirce was many things, but he was not restful, and he did not have clean hands. Indeed, a quick look at his papers at Houghton Library makes one thing perfectly clear: his hands were always dirty and always moving. Approaching, experiencing, recoiling from the Abgrund, the name of the unnamable. Repeatedly. Ceaselessly. If Peirce regarded the Abgrund as the locus of God’s life, this fact did not translate into his development of a well articulated religious naturalism (like Robert Corrington’s) or a systematic philosophy (like Robert Neville’s). No, the Abgrund remained, for Peirce at least, necessarily monstrous. It repels and repels repeatedly.
This explains why Peirce and Emerson remained unwilling to systematize existence. They believed that the “unformed” of existence called for a particular kind of response. Emerson writes that “To Be is the unsolved, unsolvable wonder. To Be, in its two connections of inward and outward, the mind and nature. The wonder subsists, and age, though of eternity, could not approach a solution.” Analysis is not sufficient to approach a solution. The best that one can do is dwell in the problem.

...Figuratively speaking, a monster can be any object of dread or awe, anything with a repulsive character. The Abgrund, however, is no object. In fact, it is no-thing at all. How can no-thing at all be
monstrous?
Perhaps a word from Emerson in 1870 might help us understand: “Silent…Nature offers every morning her wealth to Man. She is immensely rich; he is welcome to her entire goods. But she speaks no word, will not as much as beckon or cough only this – she is careful to leave all her doors ajar, - towers, hall, storeroom, and cellar. If he takes her hint, and uses her goods, she speaks no word. If he blunders and starves she says nothing” (bMS Am 1280 212 (1) Harvard Lectures. Introduction “In Praise of Knowledge”).
To one that listens with all ears (to a listener like Peirce) “saying nothing” and being-silent is truly monstrous.

...For Peirce, the groundless ground, the Abgrund, serves as a warning and reminder to those that would like to tell exhaustive and determinate stories about existence, human or otherwise. It poses an unshakable question to those in search of hard and fast answers.

Apokrisis, following Peirce argues that there is vagueness, and violation of the law of non-contradiction which is an inherent aspect of all universals, it is essential to universals. — Metaphysician Undercover

If a difference doesn't make a difference, is it really a difference?

The Laws of Thought are framed for dealing with actual differences - differences that make a difference in relation to some generality. So particulars exist in that they contradict some generality. They only partake in that generality in a specific way.

A white horse and a white rhino are both white animals. So is the fact of their being a horse and a rhino a difference that makes a difference qua the universality of the class of "white animals"? Is it not a pointless distinction to say they are different kinds of animals in this context?

And remember that vagueness and generality are not the same in Peirce's view. They are dialectical opposites.

The vague is where distinctions don't even apply as there is no general context, no formative constraints, against which any such judgement could be made. The PNC has nothing to latch on to.

And the general is where all distinctions are subsumed under a common identity. As with the notion of whiteness applied across the class of animals. No particulars are excluded as the general can include them all within its class. Therefore now it is the LEM that has nothing to latch on to. And that becomes definitional of generality.

I defined indirect in saying that we see signs and not facts. I defined indirect as a triadic interpretive process rather than a dyadic observational one.

If you couldn’t get that from my post then I’ll leave it there.

I'm not following your point.

Peirce likewise was not an atheist, although the spiritual side of Peirce is not mentioned much by his scientific affeciandos. — Wayfarer

It doesn't matter much that Peirce was a believer of some kind any more that it does Newton, Darwin and Einstein were.

As to exactly what kind of theist Peirce might have been - or the various stages that went through - that is a tough question. He wasn't your usual.

His biographers note the strong influence of Emersonian transcendentalism in his circle at the time.

Here's Peirce himself saying he was reared in Cambridge at a time: "when Emerson, Hedge,
and their friends were disseminating the ideas that they had caught from Schelling, and
Schelling from Plotinus, from Boehm, or from God knows what minds stricken with the
monstrous mysticism of the East.”

They couldn’t maintain the code, which had been very heavily customised over many years, — Wayfarer

That seems the likely story. But Porat is still listing it as part of his investment portolio. So all part of some grander clickbait marketing strategy?

http://mutually.com/trending/

Our investments include CringeChannel, BioArts, CyberDissidents, iBeatyou, Indiegiftbox, Loot app, Memegen, Occupywallstreet, Philosophyforums & Thedatingring

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Zombie PF lingers on in fine company!

I haven't denied that the modes of our experience are culturally mediated, but there must be raw experience that underlies that. You can experience that yourself if you just gaze out your window without thinking about anything. — Janus

As I've just posted, I don't find it possible to literally "not think about anything". And neuroscience explains why that would be the case.

When we sleep, our brain really does try to shut down.

In REM sleep, the brain is active yet the sensory gates are slammed shut at the brainstem. Yet then we erupt with bright imagery and a confused narrative chase after some thread of story.

And even in n-REM sleep, where the neural activity is turned as low as possible, there is still a desultory inner chatter - a meandering disjointed ruminative thinking.

A conditioned brain can't just uncondition itself.

So there are good grounds for disputing your claims that there can be "raw experience" in some foundational sense.

Sure, we can be less talky. We can turn our attention towards a peaceful world and away from our interior chatter. We can lose ourselves in sport, or music, or dance or other absorbing forms of action.

But none of this answers neurologically to an idea of "raw experience".

'There is, however, an unconditioned, an unmade, an unfabricated. Were there no unconditioned, unmade, unfabricated, there would be no escape from the made, the conditioned, the fabricated' — Wayfarer

Yeah. There is no escape from it. And the question is why would one even want to escape from it?

If you do Zen, you will know that you can't actually still the mind. Your inner voice is always itching to yap away. Your training to ignore it, let it go, not pursue it, focus on something as unstimulating as possible, is only an attempt to get it to fade into the background a while.

Once you are shaped by linguistic habits, it is only natural for the brain to want to generate a linguistic response to every attentive moment. Whatever is passing through focus demands some kind of spoken comment. It is no different from seeing objects in the world and automatically having the start of the thought of what to do physically. See an axe and already your mind will be leaping to axe-wielding feelings and actions.

So Zen imagines what the mind might be like if it stopped doing what it was designed for. The mind is designed to find some meaningful point of focus in any instant and become flooded with the behavioural responses most appropriate. These include vocal framing responses in humans. We've already got to be getting going with the commenting as part of "being conscious".

That makes a philosophy of Zen very odd to me. I can accept that meditation may be very good for the modern mind. We now have a culture that could be said to be ridiculously wordy. The weight of comment we want to pack in to cover off every passing instant of awareness might be uncomfortably unbalanced. So unwinding back to a more unconditioned state would be a valuable skill to have in that context.

But to make a complete unwinding of the thinking self a cultural goal would be a strangely self-denying one. For me, the "highest plane" would be the balanced state of a mind well adapted to its world. So not too much talk, and not too little.

If Zen is understood as gaining control over that balance, then that makes sense. But note how that is then a meta- state. It is the gaining of control by stepping back another level to discover the variety to be controlled. So it is not about actually returning to some more primal state. It is about stepping back to make decisions on where on a spectrum of less considered states you might want to set your current state. You now have to have a clear idea of what you don't want to be so as to be the thing you do want to be.

Being "primal" is thus even less primal in being comprehended or measured in terms of what it is not. To achieve that kind of mastery is indeed a higher state of consciousness in being more meta-.

As usual, you miss the fact that subject (that which we say perceives) and object (that which we say is perceived) are both part of the experience. — Magnus Anderson

But that is what I am saying. That is what makes knowledge indirect.

We don't see the world directly - which would be a simple dyadic relation of self and world. We see it indirectly via a system of sign. It is a triadic relation. In-between me and the world are the states of sensation which represent to me the world as I could best understand it in terms of my goals and needs.

So the red I experience stands on the side of the experience. The world isn't actually coloured. It just scatters patterns of radiant energy. At the first step of the retina, this energy is transduced into a neural signal, some change in firing rates of a network of cells. The result is that I see the red of the post-box. It serves to sum up the world in a way that is ecologically useful.

Red and green are barely any different as actual quantities of energy. Red light is about 700 nanometres in frequency. Green is about 540nm. So even if the world reflected an even balance of both, an eye that just registered the energetic content of light would struggle to tell different "colours" apart.

But the visual pathways are set up to turn that slight contrast into a binary signal. Retinal cells are designed so that a "green" receptor is switched off in the presence of "red" light. They signal the absence of green in the presence of red, as well as signalling green in its presence. So a slight difference in frequency is turned into an absolute on-off mental response.

So yes, there is a world of energy that drives the sensory processing. There are real patterns out there. But what I am drawing attention to is the transduction step which creates - for us - an internal realm of signs. And that triadic relationship - where we use constructed experience as our map to navigate the world - is a Kantian epistemology.

It is the reason for saying we can't know the world directly. Experience is grounded already in a pragmatic structure. Right down at the first step - neural transduction - energy has been turned into signal. A particular logical operation has been applied. Wavelength has been turned into yes-no contrast. Everything real or physical about the world has been discarded as information to leave just the signalled output of a mechanical operation. A retinal ganglion cell summed its inputs and changed its firing rate in some way.

Reductionism isn't a bad thing per se. Reduction is a very useful tool. It allows us to create models of reality which in turn allow us to make predictions. We cannot make predictions without reduction. — Magnus Anderson

Note that when I talk about reductionism in contrast to holism, it isn't about information reduction. I am of course a big believer in that. As I have just argued, that is what neurology is set up to do. The brain doesn't want to see "everything". It wants to reduce all the available energy of the world to a simple yes-no choice about what to do. And its starts doing that at the very first step of the neural processing hierarchy.

So the holism vs reductionism deal is about Aristotelean causality. Reductionism is taking the view that only bottom-up material and effective cause is "real". Holism is the larger view which accepts top-down formal and final cause as also "real". So it is about making models of reality which are just bottom-up, versus making models of reality which are about the triadic interaction between the bottom-up and the top-down (triadic, as the real is what emerges from these two complementary directions of cause).

Scientifically, both reductionist and holist models would be reductionist about the world. They are both models after all - maps of the territory. And the best maps are the simplest. They discard the most information.

Reductionist or bottom-up models are fine for most routine human purposes as we are only concerned with how to harness the material/effective causes of the world. We don't need to worry about the formal and final causes of things because that is going to be provided by us humans. We will supply any necessary design and reason when it comes to actually doing something with the modelled knowledge.

However when we come to describing nature itself, then we do have to include formal and final cause in the story we tell. We do have to speak to all four of Aristotle's causes.

The experience that is prior to any speaking. — Janus

But the linguistic framing begins when we are infants and becomes an engrained habit. So this is not about what you report to me using words. It is the very fact that you have the habit of "reporting on states of experience". Your thinking is culturally framed at base.

... all of them too much, and not enough. — Banno

Nice one. Truth neither needs a definition nor could one be defined. That will keep post-truth at bay.

(I declare ... bullshit! :) )

But I'm between your position and Janus's. I think Janus was just trying to point at the that-it-exists of experience. — 0rff

And I want to acknowledge that the Hard Problem has something to it, while also deflating it as much as possible. The way it is usually presented is much too strong.

So for example here, I would counter that experience can't simply exist. It requires someone that it exists for.

Janus said at one point he was not talking about qualia or particular sensations when he talked about raw feelings. He meant just the bare feeling of being "a self". Yet this doesn't sound right either because of such a selfhood involves at least some vague feelings to be "a feeling". The distinction of the knower and the known still lurks in that way of talking.

But I agree with Janus's general point about what is excluded by the scientific method. We have a tendency to privilege the publicly quantifiable as the 'really' real. — 0rff

My approach is Peircean. When I talk about scientific reason, I mean what he meant. So I am arguing something more inbetween the position you probably think I have and the one I believe Janus has. :)

So as an epistemic basic, I agree with the idealists that we can't transcend the conditions of experience. We don't get to peek at the Kantian thing-in-itself in any direct perceptual fashion.

But then that is what justifies the scientific method as the best epistemology can get.

The Peircean approach is semiotic. What we see of reality is the signs we form of its existence. We live inside our experience spinning theories that can then be inductively supported by acts of measurement.

This is just the basic form of all cognition or mindfulness. It is how the biological mind works. When I see the red of the post box or smell the perfume of a rose, these are just habitual signs that anchor my interpretations of the world. They form my "umwelt".

Redness or sweetness are symbols. They signify an appropriate response. We "know" from science that red is just something we feel because our eyes transduce some balance of radiant electromagnetic energy. We know that sweetness is just a response to some corner of a floating molecule connecting in lock and key fashion to a particular variety of odour receptor.

So our minds don't experience reality as it actually is. They just co-ordinate their habits of response in a functional fashion with the world that is presumed to exist via a robust shorthand of sensory signs.

At this point, people always bring up the perception of motions and shapes. Sure, they say, colour and smell are secondary qualities, but objects have forms we can directly perceive. Yet psychological science says not so fast. Even the primary sensory qualities are acts of interpretation. Tricks like the waterfall illusion and the motion after-effects it produces show how even "a feeling of moving" is a quale. It is sign we read into the world as something we experience.

So a biological level of consciousness is already about living within an umwelt - a system of signs that reliably coordinates us with the world. It is not some kind of veridical representation, a picture that recreates the world in our heads. The post box is not red in some thing-in-itself fashion. But the ability to coordinate behaviour in terms of such an experiential code - see red, see shape, know what that means - is a powerful thing.

And getting back to science, that just takes this basic semiotic logic to its ultimate level. Now we are actually talking about a mathematical level of sign. The theory predicts that I will discover my instruments will show certain numbers if I take a look.

All the bogus stuff about "seeing the thing-in-itself" is completely abandoned. There is no pretence, like there still is with talking about seeing red or tasting sweetness. Science deals directly in full-on signage. It says this is how nature works. And that's true because these are the numbers you will read when you make a measurement.

Yes, it is highly abstract. And folk still want to have their intuitive mental pictures. They want to imagine atoms bouncing about or forces pulling or whatever. They want a biological level of feeling - or sign.

But still, science reduces reality to a pattern of numerical signs. And we know that really works. Functionally, it has been immensely productive.

Again the protest will come, but what about experience, what about feeling, what about actually awareness of the world as it really is? However there is good reason to privilege the mathematical representation of existence.

Hence this OP. There must be a reason why physics has turned information theoretic. Counting is actually physically meaningful. We might as well admit that reality is a pattern of bits, a set of numbers, as far as we can tell. That is certainly a more accurate ontology than thinking of it in terms of a realm of "medium-sized dry goods", as is the usual "realist" case.

Deity is both transcendent and immanent - at once beyond the world, but also within it. — Wayfarer

Surely the debate is normally over which it is, not that it is both?

Generally I take the distinction to mean that the causes of being are either fully within that being, or in some important fashion, causality comes from without. So, speaking theistically, either the divine is immanent in being, or the divine is a cause that stands transcendent to that being.

But perhaps you are taking my constraints approach where what develops are limits. So being is both the cause of its own structure, and yet that structure appears to lie without. As the kind of limits on possibility that maths describes, the limits are where being ceases. And so they are boundaries that are outside what they encompass. Or at least that is how they look when we draw them in as the metaphysical line marking the edges to existence.

It is our EXPERIENCE that limits what kind of reduction we can perform. — Magnus Anderson

As usual, you missed the fact you also had to mention the "you" that has "the experience".

So where else is the source of our knowledge? — charleton

Yep. The cognition does have to come from somewhere. The "you" has to be accounted for.

And clearly I account for it in evolutionary fashion. I don't invoke a soul.

What is useful is not the very same as what is true. It seems that this is a distinction that you cannot male. It is presumably useful to believe what is useful - but that is a quite different point. — Banno

Yep. You can conceive of no middle ground between absolutism and relativism. And so - forced to make your choice - you side with absolutism.

One can certainly say that Pragmatism takes the middle road in talking about the "usefulness" of beliefs. It is all about functionality in some sense. That is just Pragmatism recognising that all truth-telling is embedded in a self~world relation. There is a purpose to any assertion - despite all your attempts to maintain otherwise in a dry logistic fashion.

So Pragmatism admits that truth is rooted in some kind of purpose. But then it does go on from there to provide a rationale for what could count as optimised truthfulness in speech. It stresses the communal context which legitimises any habit of speaking.

That is the end-game you seem to want to recover via Wittgenstein, Davidson, et al. But you keep putting road blocks on your own path.

Immanent and transcendent are mutually-defined, i.e. like ‘high’ and ‘low’ or ‘left’ and ‘right’. Been meaning to write an OP about that. — Wayfarer

Well that's true. Except you are talking only of simple anti-symmetry here, not the proper asymmetry of a reciprocal or inverse relation.

So higher and lower, or left and right, are symmetry-breaking of the simple single scale kind. Like positive and negative, or clockwise and counter-clockwise, it takes hardly any energy to reverse the direction and erase the difference. The symmetry-breaking is only the smallest possible step away from being reversed.

A proper metaphysical strength dichotomy - like chance~necessity, discrete~continuous, flux~stasis, matter~form, etc, are symmetry-breakings across scale. They are hierarchically divided. They are as far apart as possible due to being defined in formally reciprocal fashion.

This is a big difference. So the question becomes whether immanence~transcendence is being understood as just a simple pair of cancelling opposites - adding a bit of up to a bit of down erases any difference. Or whether we are understanding them as being defined reciprocally. So transcendence would be 1/immanence. And vice versa.

Discrete and continuous are poles apart as a metaphysical dichotomy because discreteness is defined by being the least possible form or any continuity. It is 1/continuity. And continuity can likewise be defined as 1/discreteness.

Whatever value you can assign to a notion of "the discrete", that becomes then mutually the value you assign to "the continuous" via the maths of the reciprocal.

So there is a proper way to think of these things. One that is mathematical. Are we talking mild additive/subtractive anti-symmetry or fully blown, limit taking, asymmetry - the product of an inverse or reciprocal relation?

All information relies on its physical existence, be that a tape, a CD ROM, a flash drive or a book. — charleton

Laughable. Sure, interpretation must be rooted in physical marks. Something must defy physics, defy the usual fundamental process of entropification and disorder, by rather unphysically standing firm as a 1 or 0 marked sequentially on a tape, disk or other "media". But that still also leaves the interpretation to account for.

And as I say, even the degree to which a mark or symbol is physical, it is singled out by its unnaturalness in terms of any known physics.

The odds against a mud tablet being marked in some particular cuneiform pattern are astronomical if we were relying on normal geological processes like weathering and erosion. The odds against a CD-ROM being formed by normal physics are beyond anything that could be sensibly imagined.

So to suggest that information is "just physics" is about as wrong as you can be. You need a triadic relationship to make sense of what is going on. You need a world of actual natural physics - the entropic one. Then the unnaturalness of the marks or signs which can stand as significantly unnatural against that natural backdrop. Then the habits of interpretation that can latch onto the codes that these marks support.

I'd suggest (and I think you'll agree) that the usual conception of 'raw feels' is already too theoretical. — 0rff

That's what I'm saying.

We start from an immersion in a shared world with shared language. — 0rff

Exactly.

But let's be fair. There is something like a raw feel. Redness just 'is,' in a certain sense, even if it's only revealed by a sophisticated way of looking at things, by peeling it off of the apple — 0rff

I always agree that there is this kind of Hard Problem issue. But then my position is that this boils down to an issue over the lack of counterfactuals. Red just "is" because we haven't got something we can compare it to as what might be "other", given the same observable "psychological machinery".

We can still say quite a lot about red to the degree we can point to counterfactuals. So I can point out that we can see yellowish red (ie: orange), but not greenish red. And this is just an East Problem because we have the opponent channel processing logic of the visual pathways to explain the fact. If the arrangement of the neural logic was otherwise, there would be no reason not to be able to experience a greenish red.

So yes. Ultimately our models of cognition run out of counterfactuals to sustain the explanatory assault on "experience". That is just a general fact about the scientific method. It applies for all scientific explanation and is not evidence that the mind is somehow "unphysical", or primal in not being part of nature.

So there does seem to be a stubborn or dogmatic stupidity in any position that ignores 'consciousness' and 'meaning.' — 0rff

Hope you not talking about me. I give very good reasons for deflating the inflated notions of "consciousness" and "meaning" that folk routinely trot out. :)

According to Plato, that's because the Universe is fashioned on the basis of an eternal model. There's nothing in what you say that contradicts that. — Wayfarer

Well, if its immanent, it ain't transcendent. So we still have a contradiction I hope.

Where we differ is that you believe nothing at all is to be known without the dualistic rational "stepping back" or "stepping out" of the living process. — Janus

It's dichotomisic rather than dualistic. Yes. My point is that what is primal is the process of "separating out" (that being "apokrisis" :) )

We are born into the world already complex in our experience. We then construct a simplicity through an act of separation. We develop a notion of selfhood that is detached from its experiences.

To the degree that you are trying to reunite the two in a return to some hazy notion of the "raw feel of being a self", you are talking about the primality of the process of achieving a crisp division.

But note how you attempt to recover the "raw condition" by way of the opposed concepts of a self and its experiences. You construct your primal state as being the least amount of self which still leaves a self, and the least amount of sensory definiteness that still leaves some general idea of sensation.

So I say pay attention to how you go about constructing some third person point of view about the very thing of "forming points of view". In an indirect way, you are proving my argument. My argument just tries to speak directly about the vagueness which is the true primal condition here. It doesn't conceal that the primal state can only be recovered by stepping back even further.

Beyond the first person point of view which you seem to wanting to make basic, I say there is a zero person point of view which is just a vague firstness.

I say that this metaphor and allusion (the arts) is an alternative discourse to the so-called scientific understanding, and of at least equal importance. In fact I would say it is primary and that scientific understanding is secondary and derivative. — Janus

OK. These are the social goods you want to support with a founding metaphysics. So first you claim that all discourse is equal - science is no better than art. Then you claim that all discourse is rooted in the primacy of "raw feeling" - the place where the self dwells. And so art is better than science because it is part of the foundational "in here", the subjective realm, and not part of the derivative "out there", the discourse that can only pretend to objectivity as a limit.

The self-serving structure of this argument is nakedly plain. And it hinges on idealism or dualism being true. I've said enough to show that subjectivity is also a limit rather than a foundation to discourse. The dyad of the self and its sensations are the product of certain socially-constructed point of view. Subjectivity is what we term this selfhood being developed to its highest limit. And an artist expressing his/her raw feelings would be the epitome of that. It is iconic.

Did I say God? I said consider the evidence from psychological science.

Are you on drugs?? — charleton

Are you only a recent visitor to our planet?

This is just to say that it is statements - sentences that make an assertion - that are true or false. — Banno

You mean judged by someone to be true or false about something. If a statement isn’t subject to an interpretation, it is just some trail of noise or some set of squiggles.

it would be misguided to juxtapose conforming to a state of the world, to conforming to a state of belief.

A true statement obviously involves both. — Banno

It's reassuring to see we remain far apart on the essential issue. You want to retreat to a framing where you are again speaking about the relata rather than the relation. The fact you talk about states of the world and states of belief shows you are still thinking of the situation in dualistic mind~world fashion.

This rather undermines the post-truth position you are gunning for - the right to declare some statements as obvious bullshit.

You can't simply assert such truth as what you believe - some view about some personal state of belief and some actual state of the world ... which somehow "conform" to "the truth" both separately and together in mysterious fashion.

If truth is only pragmatically a fact - a fact about a relation between believers and their worlds - then you have to get out of the recursive epistemic knot by reference to enduring communal habits of interpretance. And to pursue that honestly, the entrenched purposes of those communities become a key part of the truth equation.

To speak against post-truth relativism and even irrelealism, you have to do more than just declare bullshit when you don't like what you see. You have to show how it is bullshit from an integrated communal point of view, which also inevitably will embody some sense of purpose.

There is a reason to any "truth-telling". It has a function. And that is neither necessarily the analytic/scientific one of "telling the truth - the objective truth", nor the personal/relativistic one of "telling my truth - the subjective truth".

Pragmatism is about telling the communal truth - the one that best perpetuates the system generating the propositional claims.

This might sound alarming, but it is just the same semiotic principle that got us here. It is how animals know their worlds through their evolutionary fine-tuning. It is nature's way of knowing. And that should be a good enough epistemic grounding.

But my argument is that the very fact we can start to deconstruct the social construction is telling. We find ourselves having to step outside ourselves to see ourselves. The raw feels only seem to come into view because we have stepped back far enough as a distanced “self” - some idealised notion of a disinterested viewer.

We have to manufacture this divide between a knower and the known, a perceiver and the perceptions, an experiencer and the experiences.

So your argument was that raw feels are primal. I reply that I hear what you are saying.

apokrisis - check out this blog article - I'm sure you'll appreciate it if you don't know it already. — Wayfarer

Yep. Thompson was on to what has become the evo-devo point of view. Nature has self organising dissipative structure. So biosemiosis has pansemiosis to latch on to. Simple informational constraints can harness complex structure forming processes. Growth or development are not amorphous or featureless processes. They can easily be steered in ways that result in regulated pattern.

This is what flips the mechanical view of nature on its head. The anti-science view argues that nature is too richly organised for it to be the product of mere mechanical regulation. The chance of life arising seems to involve astronomical odds.

But now we can understand just how little mechanism is actually needed. Most of the requisite organisation already comes for free. The growth of entropy itself throws up negentropic self-order. Nature can’t escape a considerable degree of pattern even when “trying to be random”.

That would be the pansemiotic thesis. Material acts mostly respond to a context. They read off a direction in which things are meant to be happening.

Reductionism presumes the natural state of material events is to be atomistic and independent - exactly as modelled by the particles composing an idea gas.

But a holistic view sees correlations between events as irreducible. The parts of a system are always semiotically entangled. Events don’t happen in some context-independent fashion. The history of the system is always impacting on its present state as a generalised constraint.

Is this what you really felt or what you’ve talked yourself into feeling as a way to feel better? Honestly now. If you were to explore your most immediate feelings and not merely leap to a defence of your current framing, could you recover some less certain “raw state”.

By allowing that there is a difference which does not make a difference, you permit a tainted sameness into you epistemology. The tainted sameness allows that two distinct things, can be said to be the same, because the difference is not significant. — Metaphysician Undercover

It must be hard for you to talk about differences in pressure or temperature when you don’t even believe in macrostate descriptions. Oh the tainted sameness of summing over microstates that make no significant difference.