However a symmetry breaking approach predicts that words and rules will co-emerge as each other's other.

What exactly do you mean by that?

At first I took it to mean that a symmetry-breaking approach would explain the interrelation of words and rules as each other's other, and show how language depends on both. But that isn't a prediction, really.

What do you mean by prediction?

Because this is a weird thing, right - the symmetry-breaking approach is predicated on this emergence of language. If it didn't happen, if language hadn't already emerged, there would be no symmetry-breaking approach at all.

Can you call something a 'prediction' if what it predicts is itself already having come into being? Isn't it less a prediction and more of an autobiography told on its own terms?

Kinda unrelated, but I think the missing ingredient in all this is Sloterdijk's theory of 'spheres' which is basically Heideggereanized Attachment Theory. We begin with the familiar and the unfamiliar along the lines of Love (trust) and Fear (isolation). We learn the world through someone whom we trust and they teach us how to move around in it and make sense of it. The things we learn are things brought into the ambit of home (home meaning, here: that space of safety and intelligibility in which we can meaningfully navigate). Culture and knowledge is transmitted through these sorts of spheres - which is why kids just beginning to explore, always look back to their parent, as they make their first tentative ventures.

ex: This is good and its 'doggie'. 'doggie' means [petting, playing-with etc ]

or

this is not-good and its 'matches' matches mean [time-out, grumpy mommy etc]

I really like this idea, and like how it retains the valuable ideas in Heidegger but modulus the man-alone-and-thrown stuff which can lead you to think you're a Wizard in a world of empty-talkers, looking to intercede on their behalf through anchorite communion with [ profound thing]

I think this is really hard to 'see', and it's again something I'm struggling to articulate, but maybe if you throw more words at me you can midwife me.

Yeah, I think you're onto something too, and I can't quite place it either. Let me throw some more words then:

But isn't a 'pair of like objects' a type? I mean, one of the things I want to say is that there are no types in general. There are only these types and those types but never types per se (or, putting it so as to avoid performative contradiction: 'types in general' are themselves a particular kind of type). So I want to grant you your point but also deprive it of it's power. — sx

I think here you may inadvertently be granting the point more power. A [pair of like objects] is definitely a type, but as you say, there are no types in general. It's exactly for this reason that I don't think we can generalize from the conditions under which monkeys can identify pairs of objects (qua pairs of objects) to a broader set of necessary conditions for identifying any type. I think it's worth noting that the Hegelian approach you've outlined is perhaps the apotheosis of treating all types as types in general. The dizziness that sets in when we realize that any type can be treated as a token and any token as a type (or when we realize that any level can be either object-level or meta-language) - the dizziness of a kind of fractal infinity that stretches inward and outward, with no firm ground - is linked directly to a procedure of thought that is indifferent to the things its thinking about. The weird dialectical combustion that's happening is taking place at a level of abstraction so abstract that it creates a kind of cognitive ouroborous. It's the place of thought par excellence that treats all things as things-in-general.


--------
Aside, that may or not be relevant:

[one way to dramatize the beginning of Hegel's Phenomenology is to imagine a kid trying to show their parent something. The parent doesn't understand - say what you mean! No, just look, the kid says. I don't know what you're trying to show me, says the parent, you need to say what you mean. The kid finally gives up, and accedes to the linguistic demands of the parent. He wants to find a way to say what he means, and will try to do so on the parent's terms. But he's routed at every turn by this or that contradiction. He never loses faith in the possibility that one day he will say what he means, so he will follow every contradiction through to its bitter end, in hope of finally reaching the point where he will succeed, and communicate. He works diligently, painstakingly, toward this end. Some of his peers look on: Their parents were less demanding, had some innate capacity to share a moment in silence with their children, without experiencing the anxiety of needing to report on it. They look on sympathetically but sorrowfully. They realize that the game was rigged from the beginning. There will never be a moment where he can communicate, the very structure of linguistic demand imposed on the child ensures that. He will be led from contradiction to contradiction endlessly, like some tortured soul in a fable. They see that in some moments the child even recognizes this

"When consciousness feels this violence, its anxiety may well make it retreat from the truth, and strive to hold on to what it is in danger of losing. But it can find no peace. If it wishes to remain in a state of unthinking inertia, then thought troubles its thoughtlessness, and its own unrest disturbs its inertia."

These friends recognize that the child holds onto the dream of the final moment when all its struggles will be rendered meaningful, in order to sustain this pursuit.

And maybe, in bad dreams, the child sees a dim future figure, an exotic Algerian, who, like him, accepts the demand of the parent, but who, unlike him, refuses to believe that the child can ever succeed. In the dreams the child knows that the Algerian is right, but wonders why he still accepts the demand.



/End Aside.

----------

but - and I'm struggling to articulate this - what I want to say is that token-type distinctions always bear on relations, for structural reasons. To identify even an apple is to identify it as similar to other (hypothetical) apples.

What I'm tempted to say here, or at least something that seems plausible to me, is that this is a retrojection of higher-order linguistic abstraction onto a more basic ability. To see an apple as an apple is to recognize it as an apple. Does this imply other apples? I'm not sure. I recognize Paul when I see him, as paul. This doesn't imply other hypothetical Pauls. There is only one Paul. Perhaps the way in which I recognize him is a flood of affection - It's paul! I can imagine this same sort of thing happening with a little kid seeing a dog. "Doggie!" the kid says, but the kid doesn't recognize the dog as a particular dog among many. It's more like a welling-up of excitement. Perhaps, for the kid, 'doggie' is just the way one expresses the welling-up of excitement at seeing a dog. And, importantly, in this conception - it's not just that welling-up of excitement is one instance of welling-up in general. It's the same thing, from the same source. the welling-up doesn't relate to itself - it just is that welling up. Perhaps one says doggie, the same way one does a certain dance move to express a certain feeling.

Nevertheless we can use 'doggie' as a stepping-stone to a different sort of game that involves relating pieces of the world to a static conceptual grid. The first 'game' provides the foundation for the second. However there's something peculiar about the second game in that sometimes it wants to be the Only game (speculation: the second game involves order, in some ways is order. There are no surprises. In this respect, its an excellent, if potentially soporofic, way to allay anxiety.)

The upshot of this conception - which I'm not saying is right, just a possible alternative not precluded by the OP - is that the work universals are doing might take place in a 'middle space' between bluzzing blooming etc and type-token sorting. Which is to say: why do we want to say that an apple has to be a self-relation (some internal self-difference, which underlies its self-sameness.)?

This may actually work with the Sellars thing, I'm not sure, but it seems to lay the ground for 'levels of games' each with their own internal logic, and each related to other things. The specter of bootstrapping that haunts a world without givens could be explained as a sharpening of distinctions already present but unreflected upon in patterns of behavior/feelings/thoughts and words. Only once this kind of pattern is sufficiently in place can we even begin to have something like knowledge (and its linguistic expression.) I.e. We can't talk about 'red' unless we already have a pattern of behavior/experience/feeling etc that has been linked to a linguistic pattern.

This is a really cool experiment, but the first question that comes to mind is how did they test the monkeys on whether pairs were pairs of similar objects? Associating a particular toy with pairs of like objects [qua pairs of like objects] is a bit artificial. By artificial, I don't mean anything negative. I just mean it's not the type of thing that crops up spontaneously outside of experiments. It's a move that appears to be made with a certain problematic already in mind. If the testing (after the associative-training phase is done) is designed with the same problematic in mind, it might give misleading results. It seems possible that what's being tested for is something wholly different than the natural capacity for identifying tokens as tokens of a type. I can't see any reason why someone couldn't make the case that the monkeys had to be able to see cups as cups and shoes as shoes in order to then see pairs as pairs. In that case, the experiment would only show that concrete associative tokens are necessary for thinking of [pairs of like objects], rather than types in general. (To be honest, that's my gut reaction to the experiment, as presented in the OP)

Now the reason that this is the case is that at every point we are dealing with relations. This point is often overlooked by those who think of tokens and types in Platonic terms, where types are idealities 'instantitated' or 'embodied' by tokens. — sx

But isn't this test designed to focus on relations from the get-go? It's a test of whether monkeys can identify groups of similar objects - naturally it's going to focus on relations, because its testing for the ability to recognize relations. It's rich and suggestive, but this seems like a big leap.

Ok, I'll bite, so what is the thing they're ignorant of, here

See, so. I see Sellars as one of the few AP guys who 'gets', really 'gets' Kant. And also has time for Hegel (a tradition carried on, of course, by Brandom.) Heidegger is the natural outcome of all that. (Anyone can say what they want about Heidegger, but he 'got' the tradition. I think that's beyond dispute. What's open for dispute is what he did with that tradition [i agree with the poetry stuff, not so much with the nazi stuff. and i think he wasn't quite ummm he was right about the poetry stuff but limited in poetic receptivity.) I think Sellars, like any good drunk, was chasing a vision that eluded any of his pupils. Call him the F Scott Fitzgerald of AP

What I'm trying to say @apokrisis is that reality is irreducibly polyvalent. The triadic thing is what the mind tends towards, often to great effect. But it's still just following a comfortable tendency to its terminal point. Life is weird. Entropy is comforting. Maybe we can trace everything back to the three parts. But just, like, hanging out a cocktail party (or looking at a good painting, or reading a good novel) if you bring it back....you lose something. And maybe you can recast what you lost (you can) but that doesn't mean it wasn't lost.

What is this non-Peirce part then? What is being left out exactly?

Remember that the triadicism incorporates dualism (as the dialectical or the dichotomous) and the monadic (as the vagueness which is the pure potential, the ground of being).

From the point of view of triadicism, nothing at all has been left out. There's the stoop, the non-stoop, and the third thing. You don't have to leave the stoop to understand it. Heck, there's war, non-war, and the third thing. Lazily explain that to the soldier going by, 'oh no, i get it, trust me'

Or to take another metaphor (cringe). You can create a theory of literary criticism that goes like this: All literature is three part: It's the struggle against the father (the canonical author who precedes you), the refusal to struggle with the father (a rejection of the struggle), and the underlying thing (where the struggle comes from, what causes us to either struggle or refuse to struggle. ) (this isn't just metaphoric, this is Bloomian criticism, a real school)

The very structure of this criticism ensures that, if I'm committed to it, nothing will fall outside it. Eliot struggles with Whitman. Pynchon struggles with Melville. Ashbery appears not to struggle with anyone, but thats just the flight from the struggle, which is its own struggle. The structure is such that I can recode anything within the structure.

"you're leaving something out' says the doe-eyed writing major. "ok, what" says the professor. "Well, the, um, like that bit in josh's story, it loses something if" "No, it falls well within. So. Josh talks lyrically about this, but its exactly the thing that Cheever, Josh's favorite, would never talk about, so he's clearly evading the struggle, ok, so...""

But what if I'm actually really lazy and I need that hostility to motivate me to keep working on the arguments long after I am already satisfied with them? :)

If you're satisfied why keep working? And why would you be lazy if you didn't? And why, god help you, is hostility the crucial ingredient?

That is ridiculous. I will always come out and play if people can muster their own moves.

No way. You'll come out and play if you recognize their moves as something you can beat with your own. This is how it gets rewritten in the mind 'their moves aint shit, less they're moves that i can countermove to'. lo and behold: Everyone worth moving against, can be beaten.

Ah, ok, so I guess what threw me is that what you and Janus are talking about ( feels to me) like exactly the kind of thing that Sellars is gesturing toward. I think he's kind of outside the nominalist/universalist net. To me the stuff in the OP feels less like an erection of a nominalist metaphysics (or an attack on a realist one) than a clearing away to make room for a less constrained approach. (Your quick sketch feels very close to what I think as well)

I think the first thing to do when you think about people being alienated from production is to create a picture, in your mind (or in words) of what it would belike to produce without being alienated from that production. And then think about what's good and bad about that situation.

To talk about man being alienated from his production - that sounds bad (and probably is). Conjure a picture of someone in an amazon warehouse - bad news, guy seems miserable.

But what are they lacking? and why does the amazon warehouse strip them of that? and then, only then, what to do?

(a kind of pessimist methodology. Things are bad. Now assume things are always bad and have always been bad. Take that as a starting point (there's some truth to it). Now the burden is to show when things weren't bad, and why they weren't, and how we can maybe fix that. It's easy to decry things. It's very hard to explain how to make things better.)

So I got salty, apo, and I hope you'll forgive me that. I have this personal struggle with Theories of Everything where I'm sometimes drawn to them, sometimes frustrated with them, sometimes [everything else]. You're such a perfectly archetypical TOE poster that I think I sometimes skim over what you're saying and want to grapple with you on the benefits/costs of TOEs in general. I did that the other night, skimming over the particulars you'd brought up.

So I do regret that. But stilll. I mean if i see your name pop on on any thread, despite the subject, I'll have a hunch about what you'll say, and I'm usually right. I may not get it, quite, but I'm in the ballpark. You never come out and play - you always bring it back to peirce. The scope is limited, I mean. If the whole world is an x-partite thing, why do all your posts have to carve away illusions until they fit in that x-partite scheme? If your posts distill everything, then isn't there another dynamic which is the world undistilled-versus the world brought back to the distilled-core? And isn't that dynamic itself a core part?

Sometimes, talking with you, I imagine a hyper-smart guy on the stoop who wants to frame everything on the street in terms of the stoop. Whereas its more like - come out here and tussle man! we like you, lets have some fun! Its not a matter of Peirce is right or wrong here. It's more like - to what extent does wrapping up this - and any - conversation into the same peircian thing further or enrichen the convo? Your posts didn't enlighten me on Sellars, I mean, but they did remind me of what you believe. I could apply that to any convo tho. Just come and tussle!

@Bitter Crank

I think the problem people are having with 'social capital' isn't that they think the stuff talked about in the OP is unimportant. Like, all of those subindexes all point to (in my opinion) absolutely vital stuff which any community will be utterly fucked if it loses.

I think the problem with the term is more like this. All of those disparate aspects of life can only come under a single heading once they've up and left. To take an analogy: empty nest syndrome. Let's say you married early, had kids (five red-cheeked cherubs) and spent the next thirty years tending to them. They leave. You feel awful.

Now how/why do you feel awful?

You could, if you wanted, break it into categories. (1)Felt Lack of Purpose Upon Awakening ( no one to help get ready for school) (2) Lack of Interest in Hobbies (You used to spend the days baking food, or mending clothes etcc.) (3) Decline of Communal Dinners (family is gone)

etc etc


Now say someone came into town, came to your apartment, tallied you on these categories and said aha! lack of Family Capital. Then they say....

Well, what do they say? When some community is lacking [x] and its a very big deal, and its a national deal, who comes in to help? Who comes in to fix things? Social Capital expert is who. The person who comes into town and looks around and says hey you guys enough of that, time to start working on social capital! What's your experience with experts like this? Do they not, almost uniformally, seem disconnected from the place they're trying to vitalize? If they threw a bingo night, wouldn't they kind of leave out the special sauce that made doug's bingo night work? And isn't that kind of linked to the fact that they're consciously trying to fix the Social Capital Deficit that they did their undergrad work on, whereas Doug was just trying to have a good night? Intuitively knew what would work and what wouldn't?

Your kids left. It fucking sucks. What do you now? Someone who breaks your homelife into categories and appraises them and then offers a Homelife Capital solution - how helpful is that going to be?

tldr: 'social capital' may very well be pointing to a real problem. It almost certainly is. But the very approach implied in 'social capital' qua deficiencyindicates a failure to grapple with whats going on. "Social Capital" is a technocratic word, and it tows in its wake a technocratic approach. But what if technocracy is the thing that cut social capital out in the first place (my opinion: It is. Look at the people who were whispering to Reagan and Thatcher as they put into place the policies that gutted rural communities. And look at the people whispering to Clinton while he did the same stuff with a democrat face. Why would we listen to that same sort of person, with that same way of talking, to discuss solutions?)

Yes, the statement that the apple is red is not the apple being red and requires intersubjective conditions. As to the apple being red, I probably should have said "a percipient" instead of "the percipient", with the further qualification that a percipient has to be suitably equipped to see red.

Are there any properties, in this relational scheme, that wouldn't require a percipient/sapient? Property-as-relation, as you've outlined it, feels like it tends, as if by some innate propensity, toward a kind of transcendental idealism (which is fine, I just don't know whether you'd agree with that characterization.)

The point is that nominalism only covers half the story: what we say, and does nothing to explain what we see. We don't see universals (absolutes) we see resemblances (a kind of relation); it is language which reifies the resemblances as absolutes or universals. As I mentioned in an earlier post resemblance itself becomes absolutized. It is the web of intersubjective experience and expression that provides the context that saves us from an infinite regress. Or to put it another way around; it is forgetting that context that leads to an illusion that there would be an infinite regress without universals to form a terminus and foundation. The salvation of the virtuous hermeneutic circle.

I still don't really understand. Everything you're saying here reads like a defense of nominalism. I don't mean that in the sense that you're saying one thing, but what you're really implying is another. I mean that if i came across this paragraph and read it on a surface level, just for what it intends to say, it would strike me as being anti-universal. I don't necessarily disagree with what you've said here - I'd have to think about it - I'm just confused as to how you intend it to be read.

I definitely agree with this, in that I'd hold that most properties that appear simple aren't really simple (I was just agreeing that, even if redness or triangularity are simple, there are other properties that aren't obviously simple). Of course, they can't all be complex, since any theory must have its primitives. So there is a distinction here to be made.

My only disagreement is that I don't think (Carnapian?) explication is what is doing the work here---rather, I think just plain explanation is. We are not explicating a usage, we're explaining the structure of the world.

Gotta show my cards here - I'm fairly ignorant of most analytic philosophy. I've read a little Wittgenstein, and a few papers (Quine, Davidson, Sellars) but, when it comes to AP, I'm more like the guy fixing drinks at the country club and listening in while the others talk. Frege & Carnap (even Russell) quit the club long before I started working, so all I know is what I've heard the others say about them.

All of which is to say: You seem to have a comfy familiarity with the language and customs of AP. I don't, so most of the words I use (like 'explication') I'm just using ordinary-language-wise, and any shades of technical or esoteric meaning will likely be totally accidental.

The point I was trying to make was that, given that any property can be notated simply (has this janus-faced thing of being complex while nonetheless being able to present itself in a single symbol or word) I don't understand the criticism of jumblese on the grounds that it can't handle complex properties.

It seems like the argument would be not that jumblese can't handle complex properties, but that it can't handle explanation. That may be true, I'm not sure, but it seems like a significantly different thing. And my first, gut-level thought, is why can't it? It seems like explanation is just a concatenation of different 'moves'. Something like: I ask you to hold this thing in mind. all the moves I make will be a way of expanding our communal understanding of that thing. And then you make the moves. Predication is one convenient convention for doing that, but making use of that convention doesn't commit one to any sort of metaphysical or ontological truth. That's at least how I understand it.

Unless you just mean on a typographical level, like how if we're bolding a word, or changing its position etc, how is it typographically possible, in jumblese, to do represent all these moves?

How does a nation build social capital, when social capital mostly has to come FROM individuals, rather than be given TO individuals?

The Social Capital Index is composed of 7 sub-indexes: Family Unity, Family Interaction, Social Support, Community Health, Institutional Health, Collective Efficacy, and Philanthropic Health.

Why is 'coming from' opposed to 'being given to'? Those subindices all feel like things that are 'given to' individuals in a such a way that they can then 'give' them to others.

Maybe there is an implicit thing here. When you talk about things being 'given to' individuals - are you talking about stuff that is passively received? A government handout that doesn't assess the character of those to whom it hands out?

Isn't terminal the new foundational here? And the reason I see Peirce as metaphysically complete is the ontology is the epistemology. He started with the logic, the reasoning method, that makes the world intelligible to us. And then realised that the same logic was what made the Cosmos intelligible to itself - the way it developed its own rational state of being.

So it is an epistemology that works as that is how the ontology itself works. And we "know" that because modelling the reality that way is what works.

There's a difference, though, between works-because-it-establishes-some-relation-with-the-outside and works-because-it-totally-captures-the-outside.

Think of it - logic-genius (which I'm sure he was) tussles with logic for a long time. Then he realizes this logic he's been tussling with is part of the fabric of the universe itself. A strange and beautiful revelation. How does he see the world now, the parts of it he allows himself to confront? Through what lens does he view it.? Does he or does he not edge the fragments of the world he experiences toward this or that aspect of his solitude-won system?

Isn't terminal the new foundational here?

Yes, exactly.

If I say - as part of my univocal metaphysics - that certainty only asymptotically approaches its limits - then you say, well, that ain't good enough for you. The glass that is 99.999...% full is, gulp, sad.

My metaphor wasn't about the fullness of the glass. It was more like: its sad to drink alone, at the end of the world.

Your view. My view was formed by encountering the fundamental problems of neurocognition and philosophy of mind, then finding Peirce sorted out the epistemology/ontology for life and mind in general. And for 20 years, biosemiosis has been roaring away.

So if we must do battle by cheap metaphor, why not say Peirce is the key that unlocks every door, or the language that expresses every thought? Who said rhetoric was dead.

No, I'm sure you're smarter than me, and I mean that.

But

"The language that expresses every thought" is....

"The key that unlocks every door"

I don't want to drag you into tawdry battles you'd normally avoid, but these kinds of metaphors....How do we fold peirce upon himself, in order to talk about unlocking everything or expressing everything through reference to one thing?

tldr: if you have a peircian hammer, everything looks like a peircian nail


and if youre smart to boot, really perfect that hammer

then

There's a simpler way to put this: The world was rich and full of excitement and texture when I was young. Recasting all of that in Peircian terms seems possible, but then, having done so, I feel like something is lost. I can say that I only lost my youthful illusions and now am acquainted with the truth. But then what did I lose? How did the Perician engine at the heart of everything generate something that is lost when you recognize the peircian engine? This is romanticism, sure, but do you see what I mean? Something eludes it, the Peirce thing, and you can only bring it back by quashing it. You have to kill it to touch it. In other words: The whole peirce thing still relies on an outside itself. do you see what I mean?

My hunch is that the peircian engine only explains itself, and casts the whole world in a way that makes it fit. It's supple that way. Even that which exceeds it, gets brought back in the fold. But why does it have to keep demonstrating itself, as if compelled to?

[ All of what you've said, in terms of physics/cosmology, strikes me as unimpeachable (or at least unimpeachable by me.)

The thing I really wanted to focus on was the "has to explain" part. As in "An atom already has to explain why it endures in "uncuttable" forever fashion."

So we can easily trip up the atomists by saying that their search for an explanation failed by their own lights - they stopped too soon, and without realizing that they were being false to their own, implicit, ontological/methodological directives.

What is an explanation? would be another way of going about this. How does something explain something else? And why do we think what we talk about when we talk about explanation is baked into the structure of everything?

When you talk about Peirce, it seems like you're talking about the terminal state of a certain way of looking at things. It seems quite refined, and finished. But why should I think this represents a core metaphysical truth rather than a completed way of thinking about the world? The final formalization of 'explanation' maybe.

The achievement of a Peircean approach is to do the most to minimise this aspect of the Cosmic mystery — apo

That's a sad achievement though, isn't it? Why would that minimisation be an 'achievement'? What's left, after that achievement? But to trumpet the achievement? louder at first, then softer. But trumpeting nonetheless. because there's nothing left anymore, but to....

This is gonna bring things far afield, but I'm interested.

I can't say much of anything about physics, because I don't know much of anything about physics. My hunch is the research probably bears out what you're saying. I'm just gonna approach conceptually what you've thrown down conceptually, to see if you can help me untie some conceptual knots.

My feeling is that when people naively resort to atomism, the whole maximally-located, maximally-durable thing is exactly what they mean by 'simple'. I mean any term, right, has to include its opposite and differentiate itself from it. The very act of trying to locate some 'simple' necessarily takes place in non-simple discursive space (for lack of a better term). The spirit driving the search for the simple, I think, is one that sees anything less-than-maximally located or less-than-maximally-enduring as relying on things that are maximally-located, maximally-enduring. It says this (everything) comes from that.

An atom already has to explain why it endures in "uncuttable" forever fashion. — apo

'has to explain.' Does it? So, for instance, the whole Pierce triadic thing. Does it have to explain itself or not? and, if not, why not? It just is? The world is messy and complex and all sorts of weird stuff etc etc, but, if you look it it the right way, looking for the fundaments, then maybe eventually you end up with Peirce. I'm not sure. But what stops me from saying this procedure is as infected, at heart, as the atomist thing? It wants to find the base of everything - then it thought a while and said, well, not the base, but the engine. But it still is driven toward the central thing, even if the central thing is a weird triadic relationship.

"it already has to explain."

Why?

The idea of predication as implicit relation is interesting. I went and looked up your earlier post

Another thought I had is substituting the idea of relation for the idea of predication. So, a red apple would be a particular relational complex comprising the apple, the light and the percipient. There would be no universal predicate redness unifying all the different red apples, but merely a set of "family resemblances" or relations.

Quick thought. When we say 'the apple is red' we don't mean 'the apple is red to me.' If Tom, god bless him, were to see the apple, he'd see red as well. But we also don't mean by 'the apple is red' 'the apple is red to tom and me'. The relation as you describe it, above, is a relationship between three 'things' (for lack of a better word). But the relation of 'is red', if it is a relation, doesn't involve any particular percipient. (Though, of course, a particular percipient is required to stand in front of a red apple in order to say, to their loved one, 'listen babe, this apple is red'. By which I mean: the meaning of the sentence and the conditions required for someone to say it are two different things)

I don't know if that really means anything significant, or is relevant to the conversation at hand, but figured I'd throw it out there. (tho it does kinda echo Sellars' short fable about colors and ties in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind)

I agree with @Nagasse in that I don't believe any form of nominalism can provide an adequate solution.

You both may very well be right, I'm not sure, but I don't understand the connection between this statement and predication as relation. The way you formatted the post suggests they're related, but I'm missing something. If anything, your discussion of predication-qua-relation seems anti-universals.

I've been thinking about the difference between 'atomic' properties versus 'complex' ones.

Is this an absolute difference in kind?

The complexity of solubility, in the example above, comes out in its being defined --- which is to say it comes out in explication. Another way to put it: If I make a 'move' in a language game calling some x soluble, I thereby implicitly approve of other, more complex moves about x. Explication is only possible given a previous, implicit, familiarity. You can only define or explicate something if you're already in some way familiar with it. Knowing how 'soluble' is used - knowing, through exposure to patterns of language, what things can or can't be said of x after it has been established that 'x is soluble' - this then allows one to approve or disapprove of more complex elaborations.

For instance, as @fdrake's example draws out (I think)- we've only been able to so precisely define what it means for a function to be continuous through a process of explication based on implicit familiarity. @Nagase is right, I think, that we're led to this definition by the object (?) itself, but we're only able to do so if we have a pre-explicit understanding of continuousness. In other words: For a mathematician to recognize a new formulation of 'continuousness' as valid, they have to compare what they've been tracking by the term 'continuous' with what this new formulation tracks. The scope can't be too wide or narrow. It's only because we already 'know' what it means for a function to be continuous, that we can recognize a new formulation as accurate, even illuminating. (There's a kind of meno thing going on here)


But isn't this true of any property, even the simplest ones?

The 'internal structure' isn't really 'internal' - it's laid out in patterns of usage and webs of explication.

In other words: Any property is susceptible of being indicated through a simple notation, and any property also harbors a complexity which comes out in explication and usage (I think that's the significance of the 'myth of the given' - things aren't simply 'given' because to know what something is requires having some minimal ability to explicate)

With respect to isomorphism, he even distinguishes between a 'first-order' isomorphism (where word mirrors thing) and a 'second-order' isomorphism in which what are correlated are patterns in the causal order, which language itself is part of. This is why he qualifies linguistic objects as natural-linguistic objects — sx

Ah yeah, the 'second-order isomorphism' sounds pretty close to what I had in mind. One analogy that comes to mind is user interfaces. They don't provide a simple 1:1 graphical translation of the underlying program (which is kind of hard to imagine), but are more like higher-order subprograms that orient the user and structure their interaction with it. That they able to do this means that the 'patterns' of the UI, however different from the underlying program, are still highly correlated with it.

Or I think so, I don't really know much about compsci

tldr: how does Sellars envision the relation between language and the world, having discarded correspondence models?

I like Sellars' account.

If we discard a mapping relationship (such that certain words are somehow 'tied' to their referent) then it seems like we have two patterns: Linguistic (qua behavior -- language as a game that is played) and the world itself, as it unfolds. In discarding correspondence, we still, right, believe that some relationship obtains? The pattern of linguistic gameplaying is somehow linked up with the pattern of the world unfolding.

So if it's a matter of two patterns that aren't isomorphic (i.e there's no 1-1 semantic correspondence, or syntactic isomorphism) then what we have, instead, is basically a kind of (linguistic) behaviorial ecosystem thats linked up to a bigger system. It's not independent of what its linked up to, but neither is it a carbon copy. It's the pattern that works.

Is that fair? I really like this, but I'm trying to link it to your recent trend toward ecosystems and forces.

Ah, so I think we're almost on the same page. Or we are, as far philosophy goes. I like the theological notion of 'grace' by which I mean a (passively received) strength to actually (actively) do what one knows one ought to do. That, of course, introduces a whole problematic extrinsic to what we're talking about, that I can't - and wouldn't want to - justify in philosophical terms.

Hey, hi! long time.

So. I am familiar with the distinction you're drawing, and I think the distinction is fair. The space of reasons is different than the space of [bodies clunking into one another, so on and forever]

The distinction is clear and i get it. So two ways to go at this, one more relevant to the one above, and one more relevant to the one i care about

(1). The space of reason, the intelligible waltz of justification and rationality and all that - that could be chalked up to an aesthetic gloss on a more primordial clunk and clatter of bumping bodies. The chain of reason and justification could be an emergent cloak of rationalization to drape above the din and clatter.

Now, I personally don't believe in (1). I think it a fair and justified fear and criticism, but I don't believe it.

(2) The problem with this secondary, autonomous, order is that it offers no incentive, one way or the other, to do this or that. Absent a new form of incentive, it's hard to see anything but an retroactive reframing of material decision in more stately terms. You're balancing a moral mechanics on a mechanical mechanics. And so the thing you're looking for immediately slips away.

A form of rationality, like this, I feel, will inevitably fall back into the lower-level system from which it came from.

What you need to make it actually constitute a system of its own is a value in which it believes.You need a third level. An ethical way of life is, precisely, not knowing one what will do. That is the linchpin of the whole thing. If you conflate knowing what one ought do with one knowing what one will do, you lose humanity in a blink. Ethicality, properly, is valuing something as a value in itself, and knowing that even though you know this or that is the right thing, not knowing what you'll do.

This gap between knowing what you ought do and not knowing what you will do --

That's where all the 'good stuff' ethically and spiritually and even aesthetically speaking comes in

NB - I'm not being romantic. I'm talking about structural differences

Fearless, but not feared

@fdrake @unenlightened

Guilty of not having read this thread thru (it’s long!).


But i wanted to talk about this subject and this thread is what presented itself.


I’ve had a crisis of faith w/r/t identity politics these past years. I believe wholeheartedly that there are deep deep eternally-scar-leaving traumas attendant on growing up within-yet outside- a culture.

As a young guy, I had body dysmorphia, bad, which made me feel unfit to take up the symbolic mantle of personhood offered me. I couldn’t, because i couldn’t bear people looking at me.

I won’t diminish or not take seriously my suffering just bc im white and male, bc that suffering was very real. It rent and cobbled me for the entirety of my twenties. BUT i will say that I imagine that the suffering of others, even more peripheral to the dominant culture, is much much more acute than mine, in ways i only have dim imaginative access to.

I don’t scoff at it, but i do question the logic of identity politics qua formal political movement. There are incredibly important actual benefits to being formally recognized, none of which i want to minimize or discount.

What bothers me is when identity politics becomes not a means to flourishing, but an end in itself. When the end is to be recognized as having been wronged. Now, again, i think there are innumerable real, systemic wrongs . And they should be brought, writhing and ugly, into the light of impartial condemnation and rectification.

I’m talking about the fostering of a way of thinking about self which holds as an ultimate goal the recognition by an external authority as being someone with a legitimate plaint. That authority can be the administration of one’s university or the twitter community.

As a kid in college, i had misshapen ambitions that revolved around being recognized as ‘clever.’ The university and its faculty, directly and indirectly, both sanctioned and perpetuated this tendency. Maybe i got in at the end of the baby boomer model of education as self-actualization vs self branding. It doesnt matter bc both models are terrible. The point here is the gold star/ no good conditioning i internalized shaped my way of going into the world. To this day - and even here - i want to be seen as a clever, good guy. (Maybe unelightnened can sympathize, as a true-blue baby boomer - The smart guys seem like the hindu guys + the hard-stuff known passably well + alan watts.) This stuff goes deep.


So the question is how does that play out when we turn good, deep, felt and real literature of oppression (take your pick, my favorite is Baldwin) into a model of being. We know slender well-moneyed boys who like beckett are absurd, and we’re right. Is that the extent of absurdity? When literature of oppression is offered as a model, the way beckett once was, when an auhority figure nods or scoffs, in this way or another, what happens?

Well, people will be incentivized to simulate oppression even when they’re actually oppressed. And the flimsy film of performative oppression will fire up detractors and lend credence to their false cause.

This is the problem of teaching expression of oppression. The form itself corrupts and devalues the very real content. If everyone who reads the nyt loves the bluest eye, then the bluest eye had been castrated.

If you are content with letting someone recognize your suffering (even if you hold that they cant actually recognize it, and are constitutively incapable of it) you've ceded something.

You make your worth dependent on someone recognizing your suffering. That’s a good means but its a terrible end. Look at ‘fearless girl’ commisoned by wall street. We’ll recognize your fearlesness all day, it says, just dont try to change, you know, business

I liked your post. I'm a lapsed Christian, but with a great deal of sympathy for christianity and christians.

What I wanted to point out, in my post, is a certain tension in your thought.

And I had to think, what if the christian god exists? what if all this is true? And I decided, that even if I'm going to hell for it, that that God (the Father as distinguished from the Son)is such an incomprehensibly bad motherfucker that I'm not going to lie to him out of fear. Out of respect, I'll be honest and say "I couldn't accept your Son". And that might get me punishment in this world and perhaps for all of eternity, but I'm gonna do it

But I take a more instrumentalist view..You can look at the wreckage of the West as a junkyard swarming with crack addicts and gangsters and figure out what parts you want to build with...An interesting thing about the Hebrew in Genesis is that "the tree of knowledge of good and evil" is not a good translation. Mine would be "the tree of knowledge of what's useful and what isn't"

On the one hand, you say that you value respect and honesty to the extent that you would be willing to suffer for eternity to uphold those values (not a small price to pay!). On the other, you say that you're more interested in what's useful, what's pragmatic. That people, maybe, miss the point, because christianity, qua social force, works.

There are a couple different ways to think about tensions like this.

One, the psychoanalytic approach, is to consider that a contradiction ususally covers over an unspeakable desire. In simpler terms: What you want to say, you don't feel comfortable saying - not in public, or to yourself.

The other is the (quasi) hegelian one. Contradictions suggest that the way you've organized all this intellectually is off-kilter, and you need to rework it, re-set the parameters, in a way that reshapes the cognitive landscape so that these ideas can better nestle.

I'm not sure which applies to you, or if there's a third or fourth option that my be better-suited. You're your own guy, or girl ( but probably guy) and I just don't know.

BUT

I'll give you my hunch, take it or leave it.

The value of respect and honesty over and against god might be a kind of self-valuation. (Stick with me, I'm not just doing a dumb virtue-reversal thing) The supposedly pragmatic take, the one which you think is valid for society as a whole, yet not for yourself, shows that you hold worldly folk to a different standard than the one to which you hold yourself. Take the two together: You hold yourself to a brutally difficult standard, one with infinitely painful repercussions, while casting judgment on the world for casting judgment on christian thought. This is weird because you yourself cast judgment, so why oughn't they? Well because, even by their own standards, pragmatic ones, christianity does the job better. They've cut any higher values out from under them, left only what's pragmatic, yet still they inveigh against christianity even when, pragmatically, it would help.

So where does this leave us? It leaves us in a very weird place. You have gone above and outside christianity and are willing to subject yourself to a horrible fate, in the name of respect and honesty, while suggesting that the others, who think they have gone above and outside christianity, are actually all the more in need of it, because that alone ( by their own standards no less!) can relieve their ills.

We all know how rationalization works. It lets us live out the myths and stories of childhood while recasting them in a sensible, worldly light which is more palatable to our adult selves

With that in mind, consider: You are willing to suffer the most miserable of all fates in service of a higher virtue, while thinking of others as people blinded by confused values, people who ought to follow christianity for their own sake. But - but! - not to the point that you have, which exceeds it, and which entails deep suffering. You may suffer terribly, but they shouldn't.

Well, what's the myth that comes to mind?

Here's the other thing about rationalization (and, in another vein, poetic inspiration). We tend to reflexively devalue the things we most desire. Now, that's not to say we oughtn't criticize the stuff we don't like. Rounded and reasonable criticism isn't always, or even usually, misplaced adoration; It's generally clear-eyed recognition of a problem. But when criticism grows hyperbolic and insistent, well now here's something worth attending to, and closely.

The New Testament is one of the ugliest texts ever written, if you really think about it.

@StreetlightX So that quote from the Second Critique. He doesn't appear to be talking about the noumenality (for lack of a better word) of the self, but rather of the world. It's the knowledge of a fully-determined, frozen, 'block-chain' type universe that presents the horror and paralysis. What's constitutive of ethical (and so, for Kant, subjective) vitality, in that quote, is ignorance of the future, not of the self.

It's been a while since I've read either the second critique or Zizek, so maybe the context bears out the interpretation you've presented.I'm not sure. But I do think it's a step to go from there to the idea of the self as constitutively unknowable. The terms are all very wobbly here. What are we talking about when we talk about the self as unknowable? Do we mean, simply, that we don't know what we'll do in the future? But that isn't even folk wisdom, it's folk being a person, and is entirely compatible with self-acquaintance. I think we do kinda know ourselves, and a lot of times we don't do, but we can learn to know ourselves, and that whole spiritual process is well outside what, I think, Zizek is talking about (which is structural)

Yeah yeah - so I think the subject/object distinction is fine, far as it goes, just needs to be neatly circumscribed, so that it doesn't spill out of its bounds and become the Structure of Everything (as it does in (certain interpretations) of Hegel.) Of course Kant's at least kind of aware of this -the point of the Critical Project, after all, is to pinpoint the boundaries of what reason alone is able to accomplish - but the lion's share of what falls outside those boundaries is described by Kant in terms of utter unknowability and faith. This is fine if he just means that these things are unknowable from within the intellectual system he's building, but it doesn't seem like he means only that, most of the time. He seems like he's saying that, as humans, we have no access, by any means, to these realms. That's flat out false.

Now, if we introject the subject/object condition/conditioned dichotomy into our core then sure, the self's access to itself is the paradox of two mirrors facing one another. But that mirror paradox isn't some essential metaphysical feature of the self, such that the self is a wound etc.
The weird regress that arises is more like an epistemological error message popping up saying ' System Crash due to: you're trying to apply your Object Cognition program in a way that doesn't make sense at all'.

So I think the Buddhist tack is closer here. (I'm not as confident with Sartre, but I believe he's making the same point when he talks about 'nonpositional consciousness')

Probably important to add that the 'great chain of being' is itself doubled- both object and discourse. Without that double aspect the mediation between atman/wound and self/object couldn't happen. I talked above sometimes, as though the discourse thing could be neatly conflated with a natural/mechanical network of objects.

(hey guys) I think everyone's pretty much right here.

So self-relation is a weird thing, right, because relation implies difference. The most basic form of relation is: there's something here, x, and there's something over here, y, and they relate like this, z. Maybe x (house) is related to y (basement) in a relation of z (being above it).

If you want to relate to yourself, you have to introduce a difference. There's no way around it. To have a relation is to have all 3 elements: the two things related, and the relation itself. If you want to relate to yourself, you have to cleave yourself. 'Relation,' as used here, is cognitive. It's a way of organizing two discrete elements.

What Kant's doing in the passage quoted is treating self-relation as analogous to the relation between that which represents and that which is represented. The subject is less a thing than an organizing principle + invisible locus to which everything appears. If something is (in the mundane sense) it is only insofar as it appears. And if something appears, it must appear to [ ] -- the perspectival space to which things appear. If you put a 'something' in that space, you initiate, immediately, an infinite regress - and here is where Wayfarer (& Sartre but no one likes him anymore) pop up (and are right, I think.) What we have here is a kind of paradox, the 'solution' to which is obvious to almost anyone who hasn't gotten hamstrung, tragically, by anxious philosophical handwringing. The solution: What we are is not an object. We are, in essence, a pure translucence which, if you let the sediment of thought settle, will be as clear as clear water. Or, put differently (Heideggareanly) we are the 'there' itself, in which being takes place.

Yes, but....

So take ourselves as object-- as something that appears, in the perceptual field, to that which perceives.

If we were to appear to ourselves - if we somehow became the sort of thing that could appear - we would have to appear like, well, things that appear - in spacetime, in accordance with the categories etc. In a word, what street said: by allocating to [ourselves] a place in the 'great chain of being.' In other words: We would be trying to render the condition as something conditioned.

But the key thing is, whether you're Buddhist or Zizekian, whether you see a 'wound' or ātman, no matter how you approach the paradox: We *do* appear. To others and ourselves. We do appear. Profanely, yes, and in a limited way. But, tragically or wonderfully, we take a place in 'the great chain of being'. We get a name, we get a role (first in our parents relating to us, then as 'it' in a game of tag, then as position x in sport y and so forth, up to our job).

That's the thing of growing up in a community - you become object, at least partially.

But it's another question, entirely, of whether and to what degree our innermost selves actually are inaccessible. Is inaccessibility a condition of our subjectivity? Well, idk. We're both who we are, and also able to relate to a web of knowledge and representation in which we play a part. We can relate to ourselves abstractly while being ourselves concretely.

So, again, is the inaccessibility of self a condition of our subjectivity?

It feels right, rhetorically; it feels like something you might like to say, depending on your mood. and so Zizek does, often and everywhere. I think there's an argument for it, somewhere, but it hasn't been presented here, and it's hard to find, precisely, in Zizek.

I guess it all hinges on what it is, exactly, thats inaccessible.

@apokrisisi zinged you too in my last post but you may have missed it. Listen: i dont trust anyone - but my girl *romantic kiss*

@StreetlightX it looks bad arguing against joy, so that lets [everyone ever] off the hook. And if a need for control can be chalked up vaguely to a mental illness (that im diagnosed with!) far be it for me to complain. Hope you mean that tho. Full-blooded ocd is a curse. Its not a rhetorical strategy.

I appreciate the conceptually sterilized hystericism you've imputed to me, but I think I'm hysterical in a far more vulgar way, anxiety-at-the-dinner-party. I'm confused, I'm listening to a bunch of people talking, feeling like I don't know if any of it adds up to anything, so 'acting out' if only to get a response. That's where the hysteric's nervous laughter comes from. i got on a public bus, once, years ago and the busdriver complimented me on my sweater, then another dude too. A woman on the bus (with way nicer clothes than me or anyone else there) lost it, crying laughing. I read it like this: "Wtf is this discourse about nice sweaters?! This fucking kid is wearing H&M for christs sake"

I'm certainly not suggesting you have some master plan to justify x or y and here i am trying to sniff it out. You know critical theory, justifications are sneakier than that. Vanishing mediators. Bam crash! you realized you always had the concepts to justify where you are now, if you follow.

I don't think theres anything crazy about implying conservatism one moment and neoliberalism the next. thats basically the gop in a nutshell. But take the model and apply to whatever x.

Anyway im a hysterical bundle of rage and incredulity on a bus of leftists talking ecosystems - ill take it on the chin - and im laughing/crying confused, asking: do you actually believe what youre saying? Whats your career track look like? Is that a zizek sweater from 2006?

Its fantastic youre a bricoleur but that doesn't mean anything. Ed Gein was (literally) a bricoleur - its politically neutral - it just means you use what you got. For what? For what????

That blog post was fascinating! I keep wandering back to psychoanalytic point where the cheating husband's relationship with his lover only 'works' insofar as he is married: were he to leave his wife for the sake of his lover, the lover would no longer be desirable... Of course the psychoanalytic lesson is that our very 'subjective POV' is itself written into the 'objective structure' of things: it's not just window dressing, and if you attempt to discard it, you change the nature of the thing itself.

And I think this slipperiness is what makes it so hard to fix the status of a 'parameter': if you want to make a parameter 'work' (i.e. if you intervene in a system on that basis), you will cause changes - but that doesn't mean the system is 'in-itself' sensitive to such parameters: only that, through your intervention you've made it so. — StreetlightX

Glad you liked it. It's part of larger 'series' ( called 'uruk machines', organized in the archive section) that tries, ambitiously, to synthesize 4 thinkers in order to create a Big Metanarrative ala 'how the west got where it is now.' It's pretty fascinating, whatever you think of his conclusions. The author admits, in a footnote or comment somewhere, that he's trying to trojan-horse continental insights using a rational idiom - and I think he largely succeeds. Definitely worth a read.

This thread has long since reached the escape velocity necessary to go irretrievably over my head, but that's ok. Even if I'm left dick-in-my-hands fumbling with basic Hegelian concepts, it's comforting to know that fdrake is still killing it with the hard applied mathematics and that apokrisis is still 1/x crisping every villain who crosses his path like someone who tapes down the 'x' button to grind out xp while he sleeps. It means everything is still progressing according to some familiar order.

"Perhaps there remains/
some tree on a slope, that we can see/
again each day: there remains to us yesterday’s street/
and the thinned-out loyalty of a habit/
that liked us, and so stayed, and never departed."


So all that being said, acknowledging I can't keep up with the math, I'm still confident enough to engage the OP on its own terms which are, I believe, metaphorical. Which isn't to say I think you think that self isn't literally an ecosystem - I believe you do, and I probably agree - but that I think the significance of this way of looking at the self ultimately relies on - and is motivated by- what can be drawn from it conceptually. It's about drawing on empirically-sourced models to the extent that they facilitate conceptual considerations. It's metaphorical in the literal sense that we're transporting some way of thinking from one level to another.

And what we have conceptually is something like: the self is a hierarchically organized collection of processes that can either be too open to the outside at the risk of being overwhelmed or too entrenched against the outside at the risk of brittle collapse. Basically chaos vs order.

As apo said, this essentially cashes out in goldilocks terms. If this isn't about the nuts and bolts of any actual ecosystem, this is really just a metaphor for: not too open, not too closed cf ecosystems.

So why now? why here? What's being said, really?

To get political: isn't not too closed, not too open, self-regulating while allowing lines of flight - i mean isn't that, in a perfect nutshell, neoliberalism (multiculturalism, whatever)?

I want you to be a bloodless academic punching bag, conceptually defending the current order by means of weak intellectual metaphors that conceal your own place in the system. That would satisfy me to no end. It would mean it's ok I dropped out.

You're not doing the real-ecosystem math thing fdrake is doing, even if you're drawing from his insights when it helps your case. So what are you doing? Prove me wrong! Is there any sense in which your metaphors don't serve the default academic order? Zizek and Deleuze and whoever else reduced to a serving a niche in the web of citation bread-crumbs etc etc. (get attention by drawing on an unexpected source, make your mark by bringing him ultimately back into the fold.)

@fdrake

But then something happens when a variable in the system can relate to that cycle by, to paraphrase Csal, by 'reflexively taking it's own parameters as a variable that can be acted upon': so humans will cultivate food so that we don't have to deal with - or at least minimize the impact of - cycles of food scarcity and die out like wolves with too few deer to prey on. This is the shift from the 'in-itself' to the 'for-itself', where the implicit becomes explicit and is acted upon as such. And this almost invariably alters the behavior of the system, which is why, I think, the two descriptions of the 'X’wunda trade system' (quoted by Csal) are not equivalent: something will qualitatively change if the system itself 'approaches itself' in Friedman's way. — StreetlightX

So first: yeah, the system will be changed if it relates to itself a system.

Quick example, from here. (In this case the system becoming self-aware would have negative effects, but of course with different examples it could have positive effects. Either way though, a qualitative change.)

The author is taking about gri-gri, a subsaharan belief/magic system which purports to make individuals immune to gunfire.

Gri-gri comes in many forms – ointment, powder, necklaces – but all promise immunity to weaponry. It doesn’t work on individuals, of course, although it’s supposed to. Very little can go grain-for-grain with black powder and pyrodex. It does work on communities: it makes them bullet proof.
happy people.PNG



The economists Nathan Nunn and Raul Sanchez de la Sierra wrote a paper analyzing the social effects of gri-gri: Why Being Wrong Can Be Right: Magical Warfare Technologies and the Persistence of False Beliefs [...]

The paper argues that gri-gri encourages resistance on a mass scale. Beforehand, given a mix of brave and cowardly, only a small percentage of a village would fight back. If you want to have any hope of surviving, then you need everyone to fight back. Gri-gri lowers the perceived costs of said resistance, i.e. no reason to fear guns when the bullets can’t hurt you. Now everyone fights, hence, gri-gri‘s positive benefits. Moreover: since more people are fighting, each gri-gri participant also raises the marginal utility of the others (it’s better to fight together). And, since there are highly specific requirements for using the powder (if you break a certain moral code it doesn’t work), gri-gri also probably cuts down on non-war related crimes. Take group-level selection: the belief in and use of gri-gri will thus allow any given village to out-compete one without gri-gri. After a time, these will either be replaced by gri-gri adherents (hence spreading it geographically), or they’ll adopt gri-gri themselves (also spreading it).

So despite gri-gri appearing 'irrational', its adoption by a group is eminently rational. So why not keep the real rational benefits, but drop the irrational veneer?

"[imagine that] the state sends a researcher into the village. “We’re sorry,” he says. “We were so stupid to mock you. We totally understand why you do this thing. Let’s explain to you what’s actually going on, now that we have an economic translation.”

The researcher explains that, in fact, gri-gri doesn’t work for the individual, but it has the net-positive effect of saving the community. “Give up these childish illusions, yet maintain the overall function of the system,” he exhorts. A villager, clearly stupid, asks: “So it works?” The man smiles at these whimsical locals. “Oh, no,” he sighs. “You will surely die. But in the long run it’s a positive adaptation at the group level.”

No one would fight, of course. The effect only comes from the individual. If he doesn’t think he can survive a bullet, then it’s hard to see how you’re going to make him fight. “But people fight better in groups, don’t you see?” stammers the exasperated researcher. That’s true as far as it goes, but it’s also no revelation. I trust that at least a couple of those villagers have brawled before. “Fighting six guys alone vs. fighting six guys with your friends” is a fast lesson with obvious application. Still didn’t make them go to war before the introduction of gri-gri. If that didn’t work, why do you think “time for some #gametheory” will convince anyone?

So I agree, but the question of whether the two descriptions of the X'Wunda are equivalent is another thing entirely. I mean in one sense it's obvious they're not equivalent, otherwise they would be the same description. But do they both describe the same thing?

My mistake was to differentiate between the 'in-itself' and the 'for-itself', when the germane Hegelian distinction would be the one between the 'in-itself' and the 'for-us' ( that is, 'for us rational observers observing the system'.)

Importantly, for Hegel, the in-itself and the for-us are the same thing. It's not a matter of noumenal core and phenomenal presentation, but of acting and knowing. The noumenal/phenomenal distinction cast things in terms of a transcendental knower who reaches out toward (hidden noumenal) being. (You could also conceptualize it as a knower not reaching toward, but being affected by, the diffracted rays of a noumenon.)

Hegel, as you know, holds instead that knowing is itself a type of acting (and so also a type of being). Any given type of knowing will unfold, over time, as a series of actions. In doing so it will create a pattern observable to a different, meta-level, knower.

But it's not as though the description of the meta-knower is 'true' while the experience of the object-level knower is false. The patterns the meta-knower observes are themselves driven by the internal logic of the object level-knower. If the object-level knower spoke the meta-language, it would not act the same way, and the object-level (as it existed) would disappear.

So the idea would be: there is indeed a hidden order - a rational in-itself - to how things unfold. It's not a projection by us. It's already there, as long as there's someone to look. But for that order to be there (were someone to look), the order itself has to be 'looking' at something different.

In short: Both descriptions of the X'wunda example are correct, and both refer to the same thing. You can't reduce one to the other, because in reducing the object-level to the meta-level rational one, you lose the object-level altogether. If you don't have the object-level, the meta-level description doesn't refer to anything.( this is why hegel's so concerned with pointing out that the truth is the process as a whole, not simply the result)

And then my broader idea (I guess kind of Schellingian?) is that 'nature' itself 'knows' in some way, and that that knowledge drives it to act as it does. The way in which nature knows is itself (in part) those patterns and parameters we observe, but that it can't itself know those patterns (otherwise it'd be a human.) It knows something else, so to speak.

I suppose, then, we both agree that it's a matter of emergence, though I'm not sure we're thinking of how that happens in the same way (though maybe we are.)

wait @StreetlightX you've used 'see' a lot - maybe we're drawing on the same sources, here. Are you referencing Scott?