I’m not suggesting this is your belief, but according to a long-standing Western tradition, which continues today in cognitive neuroscience, science, affective feeling is supposedly instantaneous, non-mediated experience. It has been said that ‘raw' or primitive feeling is bodily-physiological, pre-reflective and non-conceptual, contentless hedonic valuation, innate, qualitative, passive, a surge, glow, twinge, energy, spark, something we are overcome by. Opposed to such ‘bodily’, dynamical events are seemingly flat, static entities referred to by such terms as mentation , rationality, theorization, propositionality, objectivity,
calculation, cognition, conceptualization and perception.

I believe in collapsing the distinction between feeling,intention, perception and action. Thus, to feel is to construe, which expresses.

I know that what I call experience, wordless awareness, is different from knowing or understanding using language. It feels different in a profound way. It uses different parts of me. I — T Clark

Is it anything like this?:


“Our usual way of thinking divides experience into discrete entities: thoughts, feelings, memories, desires, body sensations, and so on....These experiences are cut apart from each other. If you were now to say to yourself, "How do I physically sense this situation as a whole?", even the question is confusing. It involves an unusual way of sensing. We are used to letting "physical" and "body" refer to just sensations. Can we physically feel a situation? We usually think of "situation" as outside, and we split that off from our inside.”
“ A characteristic of this felt sense is that it is experienced as an intricate whole. One can sense that it includes many intricacies and strands. It is not uniform like a piece of iron or butter. Rather it is a whole complexity, a multiplicity implicit in a single sense.”
“Thus intellectual meanings are in their very nature aspects of subjective feelings. Any moment's subjective feeling implicitly contains many possible meanings which could be differentiated and symbolized. Everything we learn, think or read enriches the implicit meanings contained in subjective felt referent. For example, after reading a theoretical paper, my "feeling" about it will implicitly contain many intellectual perceptions and meanings which I have, because I have spent years of reading and thinking. When I write a commentary on the paper I symbolize explicitly the meanings which were implicit in my "feelings" after I read the paper.
Clearly, such "feelings" contain not only emotions, but attitudes, past experiences, and complex intellectual differentiations. Thus the "feeling" which guides the adjusted person implicitly contains all the intellectual meanings of all his experience. As his "feeling" functions, it is a modified interaction of these implicit meanings. When an individual is said to "act on his feelings," this complex total functions as the basis of action. It includes implicit intellectual meanings; it is not mere emotion.”(Gendlin, E.T. (1959).

You're changing the meaning of the word "talking." Talking uses words. This from the web:

Talk - speak in order to give information or express ideas or feelings; converse or communicate by spoken words. — T Clark

I can also talk to myself , as if I were speaking to someone else, neo sued in fact I am
speaking to someone else. I can also think ‘pre-verbally’, using the felt as a of a situation. But to me words are merely more richly articulated versions of a felt sense.
The felt sense is a vague , impressionistic sketch of what the word crystalizes. What the verbal and the pre-verbal , the merely ‘felt’ and the conceptualization have in common is that they are both ways of construing new events.

The other is understood entirely by a body of knowledge possessed by a self, so no separation is possible. No mind independent other can exist, so a self cannot be separated from other.


This conception of self has a central density of information then extends outward, similar to a hurricane, to wherever and whatever it has information of.

How would you conceive a self, and thus a boundary of "subject"? — Pop

The subject-object boundary is none other than the finite, discreet nature of time. Time is nothing outside of the experience of time , and the experience of time is that of my immediate past ( and by implication all of my prior history linked to it ) being changed by implying into a new event which occurs into that implying. The now is always a differential. It is what occurs to me by changing me.

The answer to the second question then becomes....to know a thing it is necessary to conceive it, and to conceive a thing it is necessary to represent it, but the mere representation of a thing makes the naming of it only possible and not necessary. — Mww

I don't understand the distinction you are making between the representation and the naming. How is it represented if not in words?

By the same token, taking into consideration the second question really meant to ask.....how can I know you know something that can’t be put into words (or some kind of expression)....then it is the case I cannot. — Mww

No. That's not what I "really meant to ask." I think my question is clear. Also, what did you have in mind when you wrote "some kind of expression."

Is it anything like this? — Joshs

I read it a couple of times and still don't really understand what he's getting at. There is this:

Thus intellectual meanings are in their very nature aspects of subjective feelings. Any moment's subjective feeling implicitly contains many possible meanings which could be differentiated and symbolized. — Joshs

Which I disagree with. It's like he's trying to define the problem away. What does it mean to say that a "feeling implicitly contains many possible meanings." I think he has it backwards.

I can also think ‘pre-verbally’, using the felt as a of a situation. But to me words are merely more richly articulated versions of a felt sense. — Joshs

I think it's the other way around. Words are chopped up and stacked representations of something much richer.

The felt sense is a vague , impressionistic sketch of what the word crystalizes. — Joshs

The crystallization you refer to is achieved by throwing away much of the information included in the original experience.

I don't understand the distinction you are making between the representation and the naming. — T Clark

The distinction resides in the point-of-use of a speculative human cognitive system on the one hand, and the talking about the conditions under which that point-of-use system operates, on the other.
—————

No. That's not what I "really meant to ask." — T Clark

Ok, fine. I’ve been wrong before.
—————

what did you have in mind when you wrote "some kind of expression." — T Clark

Intentional communication.

I know that Scientific realism is the common sensical position, and I have a lot of time for it.
I guess I'm considering a view of idealism and realism at the same time. For example, I say that physical nature exists independantly of human cognition, which is a realist statement, but then I realise that such a statement, that nature exists independantly of human cognition, is borne of human cognition, and wouldn't be possible without it. Then I get stuck in a double bind. — Aidan buk

Stop thinking of it in dualistic terms and think of it monistically, or else you're left with explaining how physical things interact with ideas.

What does it mean for something to exist independently of human cognition, or human congnition exist independently from physical nature? Are they not causally related? I think you are confusing the map with the territory.

Not sure what to make of that. It's not an argument, so far as it reads. Seems to be just conflating a series of distinct things for no reason.

The subject-object boundary is none other than the finite, discreet nature of time. Time is nothing outside of the experience of time , and the experience of time is that of my immediate past ( and by implication all of my prior history linked to it ) being changed by implying into a new event which occurs into that implying. The now is always a differential. It is what occurs to me by changing me. — Joshs

Yes. I agree. I would use different words. I would say in a moment of consciousness all the information in ones possession converges to a point. All of ones historical information ( biological and social ), bodily sensation, and environmental information is integrated to a point. And this point will be slightly different in successive moments of consciousness, and awareness of this difference creates the “change” that we experience as time.

The distinction resides in the point-of-use of a speculative human cognitive system on the one hand, and the talking about the conditions under which that point-of-use system operates, on the other. — Mww

I don't understand. Can you give me an example.

Intentional communication. — Mww

Again, an example would be helpful.

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish, I wish he'd go away... — Banno

That's a really accurate way of putting it, cheers!

*

You're welcome.

That’s being in itself in a nutshell. Irreducible subject-object reciprocal relationality. — Joshs

I don't see any progress in explaining this.

:up:

Again, the best analogue is Antigonish...

"Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish, I wish he'd go away..."

"Being in itself" is the philosopher's "little man who wasn't there".

Kant invented this nonsense. Husserl and friends elevated it to an academic career. — Banno

:clap: :lol: :100:

The felt sense is a vague , impressionistic sketch of what the word crystalizes.
— Joshs

The crystallization you refer to is achieved by throwing away much of the information included in the original experience. — T Clark

Isnt this what we are told words are supposed to do, give us only this generic dictionary meaning? But is this really how each of us experience the meaning of a word? Do two people ever experience the meaning of a word in the same way? Does one person ever experience the meaning of the same word in the same way twice? If you read any of of the same words I just wrote twice do they connote the same exact sense each time? So what exactly is it that a word locks in? I know we say that this is supposed to be what words do, but what does a word, used this instant, in this context, lock in that a feeling, felt in this instant in this context, doesn’t?
I say that a ‘feeling’ is a particular change being made in the way we relate to a situation, just as a word is. What give a feeling the richness a word doesn’t have? Is it some intrinsic , immediate mystery? Or is it a discrete relational difference , a change made in my comportment toward the world?

Aside from the difference between a feeling and a word, what’s the difference between a feeling and an intention or a perception?

I left something important out. I know that what I call experience, wordless awareness, is different from knowing or understanding using language. It feels different in a profound way. It uses different parts of me. If you don't feel that same difference, then there's probably not much further we can go with this discussion. — T Clark

In Yogic logic, one of the practices is to turn thought off completely. Such a mental state is surprisingly innately pleasant, for me at least. Walking along a beach, or through a forest, just absorbing it thoughtlessly and nonjudgmentally has this affect of connecting me with the surroundings that is lost once thought returns.

The epistemic cut approach works better as it doesn’t try to reduce the world to the model anymore than it reduces the model to the world. — apokrisis

Ha, ha. But a subject object assumption has huge consequences for understanding.
Mostly I like your thinking, but I sense you share with Pattee, a dualistic bias. Of course this is your prerogative, but the epistemic cut has Cartesian origins, so does not make much sense to me.

Would Pattee say a Ribosome makes an epistemic cut in regard to an RNA? Would he, like Descartes, make an epistemic cut when the object is his body? What about in a state of introspection?

My introduction to systems thinking is fairly recent. I have found info dynamics to be far more instructive then thermodynamics. Information is the co-element of any substance. If a substance beyond energy ( electromagnetism ) is ever discovered, we will know of it from the information we have of it.
As Pattee says himself:

"As a matter of practice, symbolic expressions do not appear to take place by physical necessity,
nor do physical laws appear to restrict symbol sequences (e.g. Hoffmeyer and Emmeche, 1991).
Because of this, some mathematicians and physicists believe in the reality of true Platonic
symbol systems independent of physical laws. Nevertheless, it is the case that no symbol vehicle
or symbolic operation can evade physical laws. This means that in spite of the apparent
autonomy of biological information, physical laws impose several conditions on the material
embodiment of the different forms of information."
Published in Biological Theory, Summer 2006, Vol. 1, No. 3: 224–226.
The Physics of Autonomous Biological Information

And this Zeilinger paper: Quantum Information and Randomness Johannes Kofler and Anton Zeilinger

Instead, there is an interaction between a self and the world, an organism and an environment, where each has a specific reciprocal effect. The order in one is increased to the degree the order in the other is dissipated. — apokrisis

I would agree that there is an interrelational evolution. The entropy in the past was well dissipated, but this is changing now as we head toward hot house earth. Possibly we are already seeing the effects. The increase in entropy will require a corresponding increase in order, If we are to survive. The dissipation bottleneck will effect everything, without exception. I wonder what obscure insights you might have, apart from the obvious?

Then I could carefully protect my favourite coffee cup - treating it as an extension of my self - or carelessly dispose of a beer bottle by smashing it against the nearest wall because I generally regard it and my environment as non-self - a realm of waste, an entropic heat sink. — apokrisis

I think future generations are going to be paying for this sort of thinking. They will look back and blame this sort of thinking for the trashing of the earth. This sort of thinking arises from dualism, of course I am as guilty as anybody else, but I would dearly like to promote a different way of thinking. One where mother earth is respected, as a consequence of the way people think about themselves as being at one
with the earth and each other ( monism ) ( panpsychism ).

It's like the boundary between a mountain and a valley. We think of a mountain as an independent thing, not noticing how the concept is bound to it's negation. If there were no valleys, there would be no mountains and vice versa. We're bound to divide things up like that for the sake of explanations and narratives. — frank

:up: I like that explanation.

I think it is the consciousness and thought which is able to tell the subject and object, the internal and external, known, unknown, the objects and limitation of reason, and the objects of intuition and faith. — Corvus

I think I understand what you mean - in a sense you are saying there is no mind independent object, and all this thinking about it never leaves mind. I agree, and believe idealism would agree with you.

I don't understand the distinction you are making between the representation and the naming. How is it represented if not in words? — T Clark

Sorry if I'm butting in, but I'd like to give it a shot, as I understand it.

Representations are what we have of the world, the way whatever sense-data/information interacts with our senses and cognitive faculties that leads us to postulate objects in the world.

So say you peek out your window and you see something (assume it's a tree) . This thing you see is usually called a "tree", but your experience of the object is nowhere near exhausted by merely naming it. There's the different colours, the smells, the type of wood, the shade it offers, etc. ; you can see the front side now, but not the opposite side, you imagine it has one.

In short, naming something is a very brief and concise way of expressing something which is much richer in experience than a single word could convey. It's the difference between all the ways you could think about trees and how you interact with them as opposed to merely naming them.

But I'm confident @Mww will give you a better example. :)

Mostly I like your thinking, but I sense you share with Pattee, a dualistic bias. — Pop

Hah. I used to question Pattee about this dualistic framing. I was was with others like Salthe who stressed a triadic systems approach. But then Pattee became a born again Peircean like the rest of us.

So Pattee was never a substance dualist, and always in the modelling relations camp (given his close connection to Rosen). That ain’t dualism as usually understood. Which is why Pattee had no trouble becoming the leading biosemiotician.

Would Pattee say a Ribosome makes an epistemic cut in regard to an RNA? — Pop

This is exactly the issue I’ve been working on. The cut seems pretty sharp when you are talking about the coded information vs the material product, but in fact we do then have the further issue of precisely how the two sides interact. In some sense, the informational side of life and mind becomes a machinery - a set of switches. While the material side has to become matchingly “switchable”. And it is only over the past decade that biology has been able to see life operating at the nanoscale and understand what all that means in practice.

So yes, too much talk about a cut may draw attention away from the fact that what gets separated also then must interact. Yet the fact of that interaction was always understood, and now it can be observed in the structural biology of the nanoscale.

Nevertheless, it is the case that no symbol vehicle
or symbolic operation can evade physical laws. This means that in spite of the apparent
autonomy of biological information, physical laws impose several conditions on the material
embodiment of the different forms of information. — Pattee

This is true. But codes also evolve towards idealised abstractness. After genes have come the three further levels of semiosis in neurons, words and numbers. Each operates at a further remove from the constraining hand of physics, and so each digs even more deeply into the possibilities of a coded control over physical dissipation.

Simple life became complex life, then human society, and now human techno-existence. The semiosis and its ability to entropify keep stepping up levels.

The dissipation bottleneck will effect everything, without exception. I wonder what obscure insights you might have, apart from the obvious? — Pop

Chiefly that there is no hope of halting the runaway train. The thermodynamic imperative to entropify fossil fuel is so strong that it has formed its own “mind” now. Human society embodies the urge to keep accelerating the energy burning and waste production.

So in terms of semiotics and dissipative structure theory, a political resistance to change is no surprise. If there is an entropy gradient and the intelligence to dissipate it, then the system will keep adapting its order to do just that.

I think future generations are going to be paying for this sort of thinking. They will look back and blame this sort of thinking for the trashing of the earth. This sort of thinking arises from dualism, of course I am as guilty as anybody else, but I would dearly like to promote a different way of thinking. One where mother earth is respected, as a consequence of the way people think about themselves as being at one with the earth and each other ( monism ). — Pop

Earth has seen these catastrophes before. When Cyanobacteria invented the free lunch of photosynthesis, they poisoned the world with oxygen. Near total extinction followed. But then life managed to add oxygen-based respiration to its redox toolkit and a clever balance was restored. One half of life produced O2 as waste, the other produced CO2. And so life got a Gaian grip on the planet’s climate by building in a cybernetic balance of the two critical gases.

So we know that success looks like. As Hans Morowitz pointed out, life as dissipative structure must be open for entropy and closed for materiality. It has to be based on a complete recycling of its own waste, just in the way a rainforest makes its own soil and even rain.

The human system is all about the entropy and does near zero recycling. Why would we expect it to last much longer in any form? Why would it deserve to with such a disregard of basic design principles?

Will big tech save us? I give you as prime examples the marvels of unrepairable Apple phones, the entropic idiocy of bitcoins, and the big oil sponsored ruse of “green hydrogen. :grin:

The human system is all about the entropy and does near zero recycling. Why would we expect it to last much longer in any form? Why would it deserve to with such a disregard of basic design principles?

Will big tech save us? I give you as prime examples the marvels of unrepairable Apple phones, the entropic idiocy of bitcoins, and the big oil sponsored ruse of “green hydrogen. :grin: — apokrisis

It's so disappointing isn't it? I cannot see any near term solutions. But theoretically, the entropy build up should create even greater molecular complexity, so for humanity this might lead to a higher consciousness - just a wild hopeful thought. :smile:

I say that a ‘feeling’ is a particular change being made in the way we relate to a situation, just as a word is. — Joshs

I disagree. That's not how I experience either feelings or words.

What give a feeling the richness a word doesn’t have? Is it some intrinsic , immediate mystery? — Joshs

Probably the word "feeling" is not the right one. I generally use the word "experience." The experience includes everything; sights, smells, sounds, touch, heat, cold, along with interoception, i.e. our internal sense of our bodies. It's all of those things at once. It is possible to experience the world directly in this way without words or concepts. I can do it...sometimes. Mostly not, but enough to know that it's possible.

Is it some intrinsic , immediate mystery? — Joshs

It's not a mystery. The experience comes first. The words are something added by processing and interpreting the experience. Maybe the words are the mystery. Cue eerie music.

In short, naming something is a very brief and concise way of expressing something which is much richer in experience than a single word could convey. It's the difference between all the ways you could think about trees and how you interact with them as opposed to merely naming them. — Manuel

I'm mostly ok with this. Naming can be brief and concise because something is lost. Something is also changed. The thing-in-itself is different from the thing.

I think one place where the thing-in-itself really differs from the Tao is that the Tao is everything all at once undifferentiated. Kant seems to think that apples are separate from the rest of everything before they become things. Before they are named. That doesn't make sense to me. Keeping in mind that my experience with Kant is limited, so I may be misrepresenting him.

In Yogic logic, one of the practices is to turn thought off completely. Such a mental state is surprisingly innately pleasant, for me at least. Walking along a beach, or through a forest, just absorbing it thoughtlessly and nonjudgmentally has this affect of connecting me with the surroundings that is lost once thought returns. — Pop

I don't know anything about "yogic logic," so I'm making some assumptions. I'm ok with what you've written, as long as we stipulate that "turning thought off completely" does not mean walking around in a haze. Many western philosophers have interpreted eastern meditative practice that way. In that kind of state, you are paying attention, fully awake and aware, and actively participating in the world.

This is exactly the issue I’ve been working on. The cut seems pretty sharp when you are talking about the coded information vs the material product, but in fact we do then have the further issue of precisely how the two sides interact. — apokrisis

In considering issues like this, I have come to the conclusion that information organizes on its own. That information is self organizing due to the anthropic principle. Initially this sounds weird, as we identify most deeply with that which organizes the information - we do the thinking. But this sorts itself out if we conceive of ourselves as a body of information ( which to my mind is the best definition consistent with constructivim ). Then it is the case that information organizes the information!

This is a sort of melding of constructivism and informational systems theory.

**The Ribosome and RNA are bodies of information, and they are constrained by this in how they can integrate.

The human system is all about the entropy and does near zero recycling. Why would we expect it to last much longer in any form? Why would it deserve to with such a disregard of basic design principles?

Will big tech save us? I give you as prime examples the marvels of unrepairable Apple phones, the entropic idiocy of bitcoins, and the big oil sponsored ruse of “green hydrogen. :grin: — apokrisis

:up: Yes, unfortunate, but seemingly inevitable.

I'm not an expert on Kant myself, but I know a bit. Nowhere near Mww. I'm more of a Schopenhauer guy.

I suspect the Tao and the thing-in-itself is not that different, the idea in transcendental idealism is that we contribute space and time to things. Without us attributing this to nature, everything would be undifferentiated. So in this respect, it's not that different. And yes, naming changes things in a sense, absolutely.

For Kant we cannot know anything about things-in-themselves, outside a few negative comments (what it cannot be, for instance).

For Schopenhauer, the nature of the thing-in-itself is will (an unconscious striving) which is akin, roughly, to energy. Everything in nature is an object for a subject (us).

We however are both: an object like other objects but also a subject of knowledge. We have knowledge from the inside of an object, our bodies. Our bodies are driven by will as is everything else in nature.

There are plenty of connection between Eastern and Western thought in some areas.

In that kind of state, you are paying attention, fully aware, and actively participating in the world. — T Clark

:up: