If in my mind I have already sweetly struck the tennis return, the only thing worth noting is that there was this "I" that imposed its will on nature. It is only when I then turn out to have fucked up the shot that instead the world exists in contrast to this "me", this locus of all will and meaning.

That is when "I" point to the divot that caused the bad bounce, or curse the small distracting noise in the crowd, or whatever else can take the blame, and so "other" the fuck-up as something external to my ego. — apokrisis

Seems to me the distinction you’re pointing to here is between volitional and non-volitional self -awareness , not between an event lacking a component of ‘self’ and one that includes it ( or creates it). If ‘self’ is merely the thread of minimal continuity in ongoing experience that allows the world to be recognizable moment to moment as familiar in some fashion with respect to previous expereince, then deliberate vs accidental , willful vs passive , agential vs non-agential are just different modes of this ‘self’- continuity. Even the most narrow focus on an event , seemingly to the complete exclusion of all reference to a self , presupposes a hierarchy of interlinked background meanings supplying the event with a sense of relevance and intelligibility.

Some quotes from Vygotksi, Popper, Lock, and Piaget (from the link) that seem relevant:

The central characteristic of elementary functions is that they are totally and directly determined by stimulation from the environment. For higher functions, the central feature is self-generated stimulation, that is, the creation and use of artificial stimuli which become the immediate causes of behavior
...
The inclusion of a sign in one or other behavioral process ... reforms the whole structure of the psychological operation as the inclusion of a tool reforms the whole structure of a labor operation
...
The origin of all, specifically human, higher psychological processes, therefore, cannot be found in the mind or brain of an individual person but rather should be sought in the social 'extracerebral' sign systems a culture provides.
...
the two results which seem the most interesting to me are, first, the time that Darwin needed to become aware of ideas which were already implicit in his thought, and, second, the mysterious passage from the implicit to the explicit in the creation of new ideas ... One might have believed that this passage concerned only the relationship between thought and action, and that, on the level of thought itself, the passage from 'implicit' schemas ... to their reflective explication would be much more rapid. [But] ... even in a creator of the greatness of Darwin the passage is far from immediate. This delay establishes ... that making things explicit leads to the construction of a structure which is partially new, even though contained virtually in those structures which preceded it
...
It is not planned - it is an unintended consequence of the need for easy or swift movement. This is how a path is originally made - perhaps even by men - and how language and any other institutions which are useful may arise .... In this way, a whole new universe of possibilities or potentialities may arise...
...
...social structure is the ground against which meaningful communication is established. In simple societies, that structure does not itself become a topic of the discourse practices it affords. In a manner of speaking, cognition remains embedded in discourse. But in more complex societies, cognition is lifted out of discourse, allowing the perception of the social structure within which it was constituted. Cognition is disembedded from discourse and reconstituted symbolically, then becoming re-embedded within the constraints of the symbol system by which it functions. Thus, elaborated code is seen as emerging out of restricted code as social structure becomes more complex and lowers the shared level of presuppositionality amongst speakers. This transformation occurs in tandem with societal complexification.

https://www.massey.ac.nz/~alock/

No worries man. I remember we did touch on this before; although I don't recall the unpleasantness so much.

Anyway aplologies for any misunderstanding.

I appreciate the friendly words.

It'd be great to hear your thoughts on Popper's swamp, which has hardly been touched. Observation statements are tricky! 'Experience' is pre-logical, one might say, since logic is about relationships between statements. Which statements count as basic (not needing justification by still other statements) is maybe unformalizable. Reminds me of On Certainty.

This quote below reminds me of Hegel.

In a manner of speaking, cognition remains embedded in discourse. But in more complex societies, cognition is lifted out of discourse, allowing the perception of the social structure within which it was constituted. Cognition is disembedded from discourse and reconstituted symbolically, then becoming re-embedded within the constraints of the symbol system by which it functions. Thus, elaborated code is seen as emerging out of restricted code as social structure becomes more complex and lowers the shared level of presuppositionality amongst speakers. This transformation occurs in tandem with societal complexification.

Compare with this.

Hegel posits (since concepts and judgments are kinds of “doings”) that language originally acquires meaning and content-fulness in social practices. Only later do we make the judgments implicit in antecedent actions something explicit in language...

The social and pragmatic nature of semantic content is related to Wittgenstein’s argument about the impossibility of a “private language”, as well as the pragmatist notion of “meaning as use” rather than “meaning as reference,” as in the case of a semantic sign/signifer relation, or the idea that “dog” has some correspondence with the external world, eg. “dogness”. Reference theories of meaning tend to lead, due to their implicit Cartesianism, to skepticism about meaning (eg. semiotic deconstruction) or bullet biting about ideas having external reality (eg. Platonism). In the pragmatist interpretation, in contrast, if I say “It is raining outside” that entitles you to say “I shall get my umbrella” in our language game. Those explicit / discursive articulations are only meaningful because there are a set of “doings” behind them with pragmatic force and inferential implications.

https://hamandcheese.medium.com/what-makes-me-hegelian-99d329dbd136

Seems to me the distinction you’re pointing to here is between volitional and non-volitional self -awareness , not between an event lacking a component of ‘self’ and one that includes it ( or creates it). — Joshs

But I was saying that both levels of response are levels of self-world modelling.

What is volitional in your neuroscientific understanding? In mine, the line you are talking about is between attentional and habitual levels of response. And both are implementations of the same self-world dynamic, just with different spatiotemporal scales.

My habit self is the one that has to do the real work in tennis. Years of habit formation means a set of skills that can be “thoughtlessly” emitted in a tenth to a fifth of a second. And then any attentional response must lag as that takes at least half a second to kick in. It is also the experimental mode where “I” must experiment and try out in a “volitional” way that - as any beginning tennis player knows - is as awkward and glitchy as heck.

So there are two levels of selfhood to go with the two levels of world-making. And the brain has two general levels of neurology - the midbrain striatum and the cortex - to split the chores.

The brain dichotomises, as all effective structure must. And then it integrates the two work flows so seamlessly that “you” get used to not even noticing. Until a divot less than a fifth of second from your ball strike makes it bounce in unpredicted fashion, and you find “yourself” half a second later already involved in making plausible excuses.

If ‘self’ is merely the thread of minimal continuity in ongoing experience that allows the world to be recognizable moment to moment as familiar in some fashion with respect to previous expereince, then deliberate vs accidental , willful vs passive , agential vs non-agential are just different modes of this ‘self’- continuity. — Joshs

Yep. And even when we are acting on automatic pilot, I am saying that is still acting from a self-centred point of view.

So “being conscious” is not even the point of having a conscious brain. The brain is trying to optimise you for efficient unconscious habit.

If we are to break with Cartesian representationalism and enter the happy kingdom of enactive cognition, this is one of the central paradigm shifts. I wasn’t sure that PoMo has understood that. And I’m certain Peircean semiosis was founded on the idea that the fixity of habit is the goal of cognition, not the endless free play of sign, or the plurality of viewpoints.

And I’m certain Peircean semiosis was founded on the idea that the fixity of habit is the goal of cognition, not the endless free play of sign, or the plurality of viewpoints. — apokrisis

Catherine Legg is good on this very point…. https://core.ac.uk/download/29202694.pdf

What makes Peirce’s theory of perception an idealism operationalized, what makes this a distinctive contribution from pragmatism to idealism, is the role played by habit.

It is habit (continually refined and corrected) which laces the perceptual judgment to the percept over time, enabling the former to index the latter. Habit is the ur-ingredient of mental life for the pragmatist, as idea is for the British Empiricists..

It is a little like solipsism yet completely NOT that :D You just put things like that aside and notice objects of experience whilst not looking at them as necessarily there or not but investigating the experience. — I like sushi

What does it mean to investigate the experience if not to attribute some cause to the experience, or ponder why it is the way it is if there is no external world?

He refers to ‘parts’ and ‘moments’. For example removing a leg from a table still leaves it as a ‘table,’ but to remove the mass of the table is simply not something comprehend. Or to think of a sound with no timbre … we cannot. Other views are to notice that things are what Husserl likes to call ‘pregnant’. Meaning when you see the table you understand it as having only a partial view of it yet you experience it as a whole object with inside bits and bits at the back. — I like sushi

This all implies that there are tables that have sides and insides that are not part of our visual experience because we have to imagine that we are experiencing them when we aren't. There is a different in experiencing the visual of one side of a table and imagining the other side.

It exists as the experience of something in a certain. mode of givenness, as recollection, fantasy , perception, etc. These are distinctions between what is directly and what is indirectly experienced. But even what is directly experienced in perception doesn’t tell you very much about the ‘real’ world, because it only exists as what it is for the instant of its appearance. We don’t see chairs and tables and quarks , we see a constantly changing flow of senses of the world. We construct out of this changing flow what we call real objects. But Husserl says this ‘real’ world of spatial things is relative and contingent. It could always turn out to be other than what we construct it to be. So the external world thought of as the empirically natural world of real objects does not exist for Husserl as an irreducible fact, only as a conjecture. — Joshs

Right, so going back to what I said to you before, if you can't trust your senses then how do you know that you read Husserl correctly because words on a page are part of the 'real' world. You are making a special pleading for ink marks on a page that you are not making for everything else that you experience. How can we communicate if we can't trust our senses?

It is not something that everyone has an easy time grasping and I’m only giving you a rather stunted version. I only read more about it via studies in the cognitive neurosciences. That is how I found Husserl.

The phenomenologist doesn’t care

, if you can't trust your senses then how do you know that you read Husserl correctly because words on a page are part of the 'real' world. You are making a special pleading for ink marks on a page that you are not making for everything else that you experience. How can we communicate if we can't trust our senses? — Harry Hindu

You can’t trust the contingent content of your senses, such as ink marks on a page, to the extent that they link to meanings that are relative to individual interpretation. But are all aspects of meaning contingent and relative , or are there certain universals that one can be ‘apodictically certain’ of, as Husserl puts it, like Descartes’ Cogito?

Husserl uses a method he calls eidetic variation to allow the contingent aspects of meanings to drop out and revel to us these unchanging primitives. So what are these grounding principles of phenomenology? They have to
do not with the specific content but with the formal
structural form in which all objects are given to a subject. Specifically, they deal with the universal
temporal structures of retention, presentation and protention which are presupposed by all sensory experience .

Every test of a theory, whether resulting in its collaboration or falsification, must stop at some basic statement or other which we decide to accept. If we do not come to any decision, and do not accept some basic statement or other, then the test will have led nowhere…
...
Basic statements are not justifiable by our immediate experiences, but are … accepted by an act, a free decision.
...
Science does not rest upon solid bedrock. The bold structure of its theories rises, as it were, above a swamp. It is like a building erected on piles. The piles are driven down from above into the swamp, but not down to any natural or ‘given’ base; and if we stop driving the piles deeper, it is not because we have reached firm ground. We simply stop when we are satisfied that the piles are firm enough to carry the structure, at least for the time being. — Popper


Is anyone else reminded of Wittgenstein's later work here? Popper does not take the route of treating sense-data at the absolute which can falsify theories. Instead he talks of decisions. In his Logic, he uses the metaphor of a jury. I think he's trying to jump over the quicksand between language and the world apart from language. This 'swampy' element is something like 'common sense.' I imagine, for instance, everything that goes into a making a legitimate measurement, including one that falsifies a theory. Wittgenstein's discussion of the standard meter comes to mind. Popper admits or tolerates a dimness at the base of critical rationalism. — jas0n

It'd be great to hear your thoughts on Popper's swamp, which has hardly been touched. Observation statements are tricky! 'Experience' is pre-logical, one might say, since logic is about relationships between statements. Which statements count as basic (not needing justification by still other statements) is maybe unformalizable. Reminds me of On Certainty. — jas0n

My initial thought is that statements which count as basic are statements which have come to be accepted because they reflect what is common, most universal, to all of human experience. Is this "ecosystem" of 'self-evident' experience rightly captured in the metaphor of "swamp"? A swamp has no firm bedrock (which was Wittgenstein's metaphor for the set of hinge propositions which form the terrain over which the river of human life flows) to be found. We can touch the stream bed as it is more or less firm.

So, the question seems to be as to what is the difference between the two metaphors. Wittgenstein (if memory serves) allows that hinge propositions might change (as the river of human experience and judgement erodes here and silts up there). A swamp is an ecosystem thriving on a bed of fathomless ooze. Unlike Kant's sharp distinction between phenomena and noumena. the observability of the life of the swamp fades into the mud.

It has been pointed out by Sellars, McDowell and Brandom (following Hegel?) that, if sense experience is to be counted as justification for any propositional claims, it must be "conceptually shaped" all the way down. But what could this mean?

We know, on account of our very ignorance, that we are affected by the world at a pre-cognitive level; this means that, despite our ability to analyze the function of the various sensory structures via which we gain access to experience of a world, we cannot become conscious of this very most basic affectivity. It is ineluctably vague and subject only to our most recondite speculations.

So it is not consciousness which is most basic to our experience of a world, but unconsciousness, a primordial unfathomable affectivity.

'Experience' is pre-logical, one might say, since logic is about relationships between statements. Which statements count as basic (not needing justification by still other statements) is maybe unformalizable. Reminds me of On Certainty. — jas0n

Statements are just scribbles on a page, or sounds in the air. It seems to me that logic pre-exists statements, as it requires logic to understand that things are being said with scribbles and sounds in the air in the first place. Logic is essentially the manipulation of sensory-data for the purpose of predicting and understanding future experiences. Babies logically (and naturally I might add) arrive at the notion of object permanence (abandoning solipsism in favor of realism) without the use of any statements.