Computationalism works as very rough metaphor. But it is another foundation of sand. — apokrisis
↪Joshs Tell me something I didn't know and haven't said — apokrisis
I mean you don't seem impressed with Bayesian mechanics as the vision of where enactivism is all headed. I haven't heard enthusiasm from you for the semiotic turn in the life sciences. PoMo may have turned towards metaphysics in its search for fresh discursive meat, but not serious engagement with Peircean semiotics. The carcasses of Saussure and Marx are still stinking up the place. — apokrisis
You want to be able to quantify the "genius personality" in terms of some individualistic paradigm of the human mind and spirit? — apokrisis
Once again a code is putting itself in charge of the physics needed to give itself existence as a structure that can grow and evolve. — apokrisis
Shakespeare stands accused of the literary sin of plagiarism – turning the prose of others into poetry. But no one minds that as he just told the stories better. — apokrisis
If you are a mathematician, for instance, there are almost no standards of social grace that obtain. — apokrisis
'Software' is just a metaphor for the time-binding sociality of reason. — plaque flag
individual living brains are necessary for this social game. — plaque flag
It's the depth and complexity of his characters that's especially celebrated — plaque flag
My key commitment is basically that we have actual bodies in an actual world. — plaque flag
I’m OK with that. Time binding is actually a semiotic concept in my book. — apokrisis
Is human evolution a story of individual hominid genius or collective hominid habit. Paleoanthropology points firmly to the later. — apokrisis
Basic skills like fishing or stitching clothing can just disappear. You need a critical mass to allow the specialisation that keeps innovation alive and developing.
The genius is standing on the shoulders of countless others. Some genius once said that. — apokrisis
And I speak to the homuncular incoherence of leaving out the social construction of the “we” that has an “actual body”. — apokrisis
According to Apel, in light of these innovative traditions, the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant must be fundamentally reconceived. In particular, the conditions for intersubjectively valid knowledge cannot be explicated in terms of the structure of consciousness or the cognitive capacities of the individual knowing subject but only through a systematic investigation of language as the medium of symbolically mediated knowledge. The pragmatic turn, initiated by Peirce and Charles W. Morris (1901–1979) and continued in the early twenty-first century in speech act theory, further implies that an adequate explanation of how meaningful communication is possible cannot be achieved by a semantic theory alone. Rather, it must be supplemented by a pragmatic study of the relation between linguistic signs and the conditions of their use by speakers.
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Apel argues that the most important contribution of philosophical hermeneutics, Gadamer's in particular, has been to show that interpretation is not another method of investigation in addition to the methods used within the hard sciences, but an unavoidable dimension of all understanding. Every empirical investigation of a domain of objects implies at the same time a relation to other subjects, to a community of interpreters.
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The so-called Münchhausen trilemma—that is, that all attempts to discover ultimate foundations result in either logical circularity, infinite regress, or an arbitrary end to the process of justification—can be overcome by moving from the level of semantic analysis to the level of pragmatics and recognizing that some presuppositions are necessary for the very possibility of intersubjectively valid criticism and argumentation.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/Feuerbach made his first attempt to challenge prevailing ways of thinking about individuality in his inaugural dissertation, where he presented himself as a defender of speculative philosophy against those critics who claim that human reason is restricted to certain limits beyond which all inquiry is futile, and who accuse speculative philosophers of having transgressed these. This criticism, he argued, presupposes a conception of reason is a cognitive faculty of the individual thinking subject that is employed as an instrument for apprehending truths. He aimed to show that this view of the nature of reason is mistaken, that reason is one and the same in all thinking subjects, that it is universal and infinite, and thatthinking (Denken) is not an activity performed by the individual, but rather by “the species” acting through the individual. “In thinking”, Feuerbach wrote, “I am bound together with, or rather, I am one with—indeed, I myself am—all human beings” (GW I:18).
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This loss Feuerbach finds reflected in three general tendencies of the modern age: 1) the tendency to regard human history solely as the history of the opinions and actions of individual human subjects, and not as the history of humanity conceived as a single collective agent, 2) the tendency to regard nature as a mere aggregate of “countless single stars, stones, plants, animals, elements and things” (GTU 195/14) whose relations to one another are entirely external and mechanical, rather than as an organic whole the internal dynamics of which are animated by a single all-encompassing vital principle, and 3) the tendency to conceive of God as a personal agent whose inscrutable will, through which the world came into being from nothing and is continually directed, is unconstrained by rational necessity.
Feuerbach’s basic objection to the theistic conception of God and his relation to creation is that, on it, both are conceived as equally spiritless. Rather than consisting of lifeless matter to which motion is first imparted by the purposeful action of an external agent, Feuerbach argues that nature contains within itself the principle of its own development. It exercises “unlimited creative power” by ceaselessly dividing and distinguishing its individual parts from one another. But the immeasurable multiplicity of systems within systems that results from this activity constitutes a single organic totality.
Nature is ground and principle of itself, or—what is the same thing, it exists out of necessity, out of the soul, the essence of God, in which he is one with nature. (GTU 291/86)
God, on this view, is not a skilled mechanic who acts upon the world, but a prolific artist who lives in and through it.
...should hold more weight than faith in the god-like mechanics of entropy. — Joshs
A principle of constructive alternativism
— Joshs
Sounds grand. What does it actually mean in practice - metaphysical or scientific practice? — apokrisis
, quantum indeterminacy is the placeholder for whatever potency we can imagine lying beyond the Planck scale of our Cosmos. Our Cosmos is then fundamentally a dissipative structure – a self-organising entropy flow with emergent spacetime order — apokrisis
“In my agential realist account, scientific practices do not reveal what is already there; rather, what is ‘‘disclosed’’ is the effect of the intra-active engagements of our participation with/in and as part of the world’s differential becoming. Which is not to say that humans are the condition of possibility for the existence of phenomena. Phenomena do not require cognizing minds
for their existence; on the contrary, ‘‘minds’’ are themselves material phenomena that emerge through specific intra-actions.
This is, after all, a realist conception of scientific practices. But unlike in traditional conceptions of realism, ‘‘objectivity’’ is not preexistence (in the ontological sense) or the preexistent made manifest to the cognitive mind (in the epistemological sense). Objectivity is a matter of accountability for what materializes, for what comes to be. It matters which cuts are enacted: different cuts enact different materialized becomings….
Events and things do not occupy particular positions in space and time; rather, space, time, and matter are iteratively produced and performed. Traditional conceptions of dynamics as a matter of how the values of an object’s properties change over time as the result of the action of external forces won’t do.”
Traditional conceptions of dynamics as a matter of how the values of an object’s properties change over time as the result of the action of external forces won’t do
In my agential realist account, scientific practices do not reveal what is already there; rather, what is ‘‘disclosed’’ is the effect of the intra-active engagements of our participation with/in and as part of the world’s differential becoming. Which is not to say that humans are the condition of possibility for the existence of phenomena. Phenomena do not require cognizing minds for their existence; on the contrary, ‘‘minds’’ are themselves material phenomena that emerge through specific intra-actions.
That is, quantum indeterminacy is the placeholder for whatever potency we can imagine lying beyond the Planck scale of our Cosmos. Our Cosmos is then fundamentally a dissipative structure – a self-organising entropy flow with emergent spacetime order
But the problem is I couldn't make heads or tails of what an agent, the core of the theory, was supposed to be for Barand. Are interacting bits of space dust agents doing "cuts?" Are our dirty socks agents as they interact in our washing machines? — Count Timothy von Icarus
There are no singular causes. And there are no individual agents of change…it is less that there is an assemblage of agents than there is an entangled state of agencies.
…the primary ontological units are not “things" but phenomena -dynamic topological reconfigurings/entanglements/relationalities/ (re)articulations of the world. And the primary semantic units are not “words" but material-discursive practices through which (ontic and semantic) boundaries are constituted. This dynamism is agency. Agency is not an attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world. The universe is agential intra-activity in its becoming.”
But I also think relational theories in general have a problem in explaining how, if only interactions exist, only certain types of relations seem to show up a certain times and places. If things only exist to the degree they interact, then they essentially cease to exist when they stop interacting. — Count Timothy von Icarus
While we may wish to reject the materialist realism of science as a form of metaphysical prejudice, we cannot do so in favour of an alternative metaphysical framework that also claims to describe an ultimate reality be it a new form of idealism, panpsychism, or some Hollywood influenced Matrix version of 'we are living in a simulated reality' without having a theory of language that explains how any of these realist claims are possible.
I'd say language, being our primary medium of communication, is not capable of getting "behind itself" in order to derive "a realist theory of language". — Janus
Language makes communication of ideas about the world possible, as evidenced by ordinary life — Janus
to ask for a realist theory that could explain that would be to already presuppose that language is capable of communicating ideas about the world and be asking for some more fundamental guarantor of realism than our merely taking it to be so, and the obvious successful practical communicative applications of language we routinely experience. — Janus
Our differences are perhaps of greater interest than our agreements, and so tend to grab our attention. But the things on which we agree overwhelm those disagreements. — Banno
So I reject the suggestion that we live in different worlds. Rather it seems that we have different descriptions — Banno
What might be worth considering is if these two views are actually incompatible. After all, not just any sentence will do. If the cat is on the mat, yet someone insists that the cat is not on the mat, then there are a few possibilities. They may be using "cat" or "mat " in some alternate way; or they may just be wrong. What we can say about the world is in some way restricted by the world - that is, there is a difference between true statements and false ones. — Banno
But there is a difference between those statements that are true and those that are not. Hence, one way or anther, there is a shared world that underpins that difference. — Banno
Suppose we agree that the sentence “The cup has a handle” is true. Put the cup in a cupboard. Does it still have a handle? A realist might say that it either does or it doesn’t, and perhaps add that since we have no reason to suppose otherwise, the unobserved cup on the cupboard still has a handle and the sentence is true. An idealists might in contrast say that the cup only has a handle in relation to some language construct, and that somehow as a result we cannot or at least ought not commit to the sentence being either true or false; instead it has some alter value, perhaps “unknown” or “neutral” or whatever. — Banno
So if we have no fundamental guarantor of realism, what does this say about our ability to communicate successfully about metaphysics?
I feel like this is a Kantian matter - language is like our phenomenal world. — Tom Storm
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