• Banno
    28k
    It was a scattershot.
  • Wayfarer
    24.7k
    No, but I said "determinant actuality prior to the senses." And this is a denial of that, right?…. Whereas , if the process isn't wholly self moving (i.e. randomly generating) then something is prior and determining the process, and so there is some "prior actuality."Count Timothy von Icarus

    There is something prior to or outside of any cognition of it, but it is not really ‘something’ until it is (re)cognised by a subject. (This is what I take the in-itself to mean - something is, but as it has no determinate form or features, then it can’t be understood as any kind of existent or ‘thing’).

    In Charles Pinter’s terms, cognition lights upon the features and form of objects and synthesises them as gestalts, meaningful wholes, in accordance with the sensory and cognitive faculties that the subject has (and not only human subjects, he demonstrates a similar faculty in the fairy fly, an insect so small as to be imperceptible to the naked eye.)

    So there is ‘prior’ but it has not been ‘actualised’. It is ‘actualised by cognition’, so to speak.

    So the Earth becomes what it is because we experience it, not because form is itself intellectual. Yet if nothing is prior to man (or life), if we rule out any distinctions in being that are actual prior to finite consciousness, why would consciousness be one way and not any other? Why would we be men and not centaurs? The sky blue and not purple?Count Timothy von Icarus

    The word ‘world’ is derived from the old Dutch ‘werold’ meaning ‘time of man’. It implies that man is already intrinsic to the nature of world.

    Planet Earth has a different meaning, that is as an object of study for the earth sciences, etc. And one is perfectly free to pursue that avenue of understanding, nothing said here contradicts that.

    What ‘the world’ means, however, is not exactly the same as planet Earth. 'The world' means 'the totality of existence including the subject:

    The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist. — Erwin Schrodinger

    As for why we perceive colours the same way, all of us belong to a common species, and also share a common language and culture. If we were a different species with a completely different cognitive system everything might appear completely differently to what it does to h.sapiens . The evolutionary pathway gave rise to h,sapiens, not centaurs, and as a species, we share a common world (to an extent).

    I should add, the passages I referred to are part of the book I mentioned, The Blind Spot of Science, by Adam Frank, Marcello Gleiser and Evan Thompson. The chapter those passages come from is on the topic of Consciousness, largely from Thompson’s perspective of phenomenology and embodied cognition. It introduces ‘the strange loop’ in the preceeding discussion, which is the sense in which our consciousness of the world provides the horizon of experience within which everything occurs, and yet we also know that the world which appears in experience, precedes any experience.

    There is no way to step outside consciousness and measure it against something else. Everything we investigate, including consciousness and its relation to the brain, resides within the horizon of consciousness. — The Blind Spot

    It is not practical to try and summarise all of the preceeding argument but there's a blog post which elaborates a similar point in Schopenhauer's words:

    ...the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent upon the first conscious being (due to its being Idea), however undeveloped it may be; on the other hand, this conscious being just as necessarily entirely dependent upon a long chain of causes and effects which have preceded it, and in which it itself appears as a small link. These two contradictory points of view, to each of which we are led with the same necessity, we might again call an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge… The necessary contradiction which at last presents itself to us here, finds its solution in the fact that, to use Kant’s phraseology, time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but only to its phenomena, of which they are the form; which in my language means this: The objective world, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different side—the side of its inmost nature—its kernel—the thing-in-itself… But the world as idea… only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time. Thus time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time.

    Reading that against your quotations from Robert Wallace, I don't see any inherent conflict.
  • jgill
    4k
    Logical form or syntactic structure does not have to issue from inborn powers in our brains, nor does it have to come from a priori structures of the mind. It arises through an enhancement of perception, a lifting of perception into thought, by a new way of making things present to us
    (Robert Sokolowski - The Phenomenology of the Human Person)

    Nicely said. We watch and learn.
  • T Clark
    15.1k
    Logical form or syntactic structure does not have to issue from inborn powers in our brains, nor does it have to come from a priori structures of the mind.

    It doesn’t have to, but it does.
  • Punshhh
    3k
    logic is computation and logical structures are software, by analogy. This is developed in living bodies that have a central nervous system. Living bodies that don’t have a central nervous system, have an encoded system of responses to stimuli.

    The material world has an inherent logical structure due to cascading effects of forces between atoms and groups of atoms and sub atomic particles. This is an inherent result of the extension of spacetime. The aforementioned encoding is an inherent result of the development of living bodies and the aforementioned computation is the inherent result of the development of the central nervous system.

    The question I have is what comes next in this progression from cascading effects(1), to encoded responses(2), to computation(3). What is, or would be, number (4) in this sequence?
  • Banno
    28k
    You are moving too quickly. You ask the question and then jump to the conclusion. A more careful approach might serve you better.

    What presumptions do you make, in asking "Where does logic come from"? And what is logic, in the first place? Is it better to think of it as a thing, or as an activity? Is it better to think of it as how the bits and pieces in the world are related to each other, or just how the bits and pieces of our language are related to each other?

    Folk here are too hasty.
  • Quk
    188
    To everyone who thinks logic and causality were the same. They are not.

    The trigger before the explosion is not a logical reason; it's a physical cause. This cause is not based upon a logical law nor is it linked with it. It's not logical that the trigger causes an explosion. This is just an empirical observation and it's not guaranteed that this effect will be the same at all times. If this were logical and the effect would change, it would be like saying: "2+2=4 has been correct until now, but in the future it may be 2+2=3." -- This is not logic. Logic is independent of space and time.
  • Count Timothy von Icarus
    4k


    There is something prior to or outside of any cognition of it, but it is not really ‘something’ until it is (re)cognised by a subject. (This is what I take the in-itself to mean - something is, but as it has no determinate form or features, then it can’t be understood as any kind of existent or ‘thing’).

    Hm, I don't think I'm misunderstanding then. This is very different from how Wallace understands Plato and Hegel, because there intelligibility always refers outside itself, ultimately to the Good/One/True Infinite/Absolute.

    But here, if nothing is anything/something before finite creatures are conscious of them (and how would this work for finite creatures being aware of each other?), then this question seems quite relevant:

    Now, the idea that there is only flux prior to our "constructions" mentioned earlier strikes me as different. Here, flux is prior. But this still seems to me to be heading towards the idea of man as the source of the world, if not in the role of God, then at least a demiurge. Are the principles of things contained in the flux (say, virtually), or is the flux a sort of prime matter on which man imposes form and makes everything what it is? And if the latter, from whence this form?

    For instance, here I'd like to ask "interpretations of what?" If things do not have any determinant identity before we "interpret" them then the interpretations would seem to be of "nothing in particular." But then I wouldn't even want to call them interpretations, since they aren't "of" anything. They would be more like "generations," in that we would be imposing extrinsic form on them (which begs the question, how does this informing faculty work and what determines it)?

    They're similar positions in that they deny the standard materialist position. I don't think that makes them that similar. I don't think for instance, think that Bernardo Kastrup's analytic idealism is consistent with the idea that things are nothing/nothing in particular prior to being perceived by us.

    As for why we perceive colours the same way, all of us belong to a common species, and also share a common language and culture. If we were a different species with a completely different cognitive system everything might appear completely differently to what it does to h.sapiens . The evolutionary pathway gave rise to h,sapiens, not centaurs, and as a species, we share a common world (to an extent).

    Right, but appealing to evolution from presumably non-conscious life (and prior to that, non-living dissipative processes) is appealing to something determinant that is prior to the perception of finite beings. You're making an appeal to determinant causes prior to the first finite mind. If the two (experiencer and experienced) are rather wholly co-constituting, as a self-moving cause, this doesn't work. There is no interaction prior to consciousness that shapes why consciousness is one way and not any other, because consciousness itself is the only thing that makes anything one way and not any other (i.e. actual). That's the whole idea of "nothing is actual until we constitute them," right?
  • Wayfarer
    24.7k
    This is very different from how Wallace understands Plato and Hegel, because there intelligibility always refers outside itself, ultimately to the Good/One/True Infinite/Absolute.Count Timothy von Icarus

    Thanks for these pressing questions, it's really making me think it through. I want to clarify: I’m not saying there is nothing at all prior to interpretation—certainly not “nothing” in a nihilistic sense. What I’m pointing to is something more like undifferentiated givenness—not sheer formless flux, but not determinately articulated being either. It’s not a thing or set of things waiting to be picked out, but a field of potential meaning that only becomes structured in relation to a subject (something like Peirce's 'firstness'). That's why I said 'neither existent nor non-existent', which is what I take the expression 'beyond being' to mean - beyond the flux of coming-to-be and passing away.

    Which leads to the question of the sense in which the purported Good/One/True Infinite exists. Existence is precisely what 'the transcendent' is transcendent in relation to. To make of 'the One' something that exists is a hypostatisation (perhaps akin to Heidegger's critique of onto-theology).

    I think, and you will know this subject better than I, that Eriugena's Periphysion articulates this far better than I could. From the SEP entry:

    Eriugena proceeds to list “five ways of interpreting” the manner in which things may be said to be or not to be (I would prefer 'exist or not to exist'). According to the first mode, things accessible to the senses and the intellect are said to be ('exist') , whereas anything which, “through the excellence of its nature” transcends our faculties are said not to be (i.e. 'exist'). According to this classification, God, because of his transcendence is said not to be (i.e. exist). He is “nothingness through excellence” (nihil per excellentiam).

    Quite literally beyond existence, sheer out of this world. Not in the heavenly firmament above but beyond (or is it before?) any spatial or conceptual projection (see God does not Exist by Bishop(!) Pierre Whalon.) Whereas when you speak of the One as 'something that exists' prior to or outside any act of intellect, I think perhaps this is also an hypostatisation. You have something in mind when you say it, perhaps as a kind of placeholder.

    As far as the forms are concerned - I don’t mean the Forms as existing objects pre-existing in metaphysical space. This touches on a deeper point I've been trying to work out—namely, the metaphysical necessity of forms. I agree with the concern that if cognition had no grounding at all—if it operated in a total void—it would be arbitrary, even solipsistic. But I don't think that's the case.

    Universals—or forms—exist, or rather, are real, not as actual entities, but as structured possibilities. As Kelley Ross puts it, they "exist where possibilities exist," and we encounter them not only in the future, but also in what he calls the "imperfect aspect"—that is, in things that are still unfolding, in process, not yet completed. This is key: the world we engage with is not made of finished essences, but of meaningful potentials that become actualised or manifested through living beings.

    So cognition isn’t either imposing form or simply making things up. It’s realising a potential that is already there in the world—not as a determinate object, but as an intelligible field of possibility. That, I think, is what makes form metaphysically necessary without requiring it to “exist” in the way physical objects do. It’s also why cognition can be both grounded and open-ended

    The concluding point I'd llike to make is that all this really does have some bearing on 'where logic comes from' but I think I'll leave that open for now.

    You're making an appeal to determinant causes prior to the first finite mind. If the two (experiencer and experienced) are rather wholly co-constituting, as a self-moving cause, this doesn't work.Count Timothy von Icarus

    Hence that passage I quoted:
    These two contradictory points of view, to each of which we are led with the same necessity, we might again call an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge… The necessary contradiction which at last presents itself to us here, finds its solution in the fact that, to use Kant’s phraseology, time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but only to its phenomena, of which they are the form; which in my language means this: The objective world, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different side—the side of its inmost nature—its kernel—the thing-in-itself… But the world as idea… only appears with the opening of the first eye. — Schopenhauer, WWI
  • Harry Hindu
    5.7k
    Where did logic come from? Natural selection.

    Yes, but this presupposes something prior that determined human logic.
    Count Timothy von Icarus
    Like that the universe is causal and deterministic? Yes. Could a mind evolve in any other type of world?


    This is what Konrad Lorenz had to say:

    This is the basis of our conviction that whatever our cognitive faculty communicates to us corresponds to something real. The 'spectacles' of our modes of thought and perception, such as causality, substance, quality, time and place, are functions of a neurosensory organization that has evolved in the service of survival. When we look through these 'spectacles', therefore, we do not see, as transcendental idealists assume, some unpredictable distortion of reality which does not correspond in the least with things as they really are, and therefore cannot be regarded as an image of the outer world. What we experience is indeed a real image of reality - albeit an extremely simple one, only just sufficing for our own practical purposes; we have developed 'organs' only for those aspects of reality of which, in the interest of survival, it was imperative for our species to take account, so that selection pressure produced this particular cognitive apparatus...what little our sense organs and nervous system have permitted us to learn has proved its value over endless years of experience, and we may trust it. as far as it goes. For we must assume that reality also has many other aspects which are not vital for us.... to know, and for which we have no 'organ', because we have not been compelled in the course of our evolution to develop means of adapting to them.
    — Konrad Lorenz - Behind the Mirror
    T Clark
    My response is that survival is the best incentive for getting your perceptions right about the world, and to be open to new information that might be useful because you never know what part of reality might be useful to promote one's survival. That is the direction evolution seems to be headed from instinctive, hard-coded behavioral responses to general stimuli to conscious minds capable of making finer distinctions and therefore finer behavioral responses as well being able to change one's behavior based on new sensory information effectively overriding those instinctive behaviors when they are not the best response in a given situation. We can change our behavior in almost real-time compared to instinctive behaviors which can take generations to change.
  • ChatteringMonkey
    1.5k
    To everyone who thinks logic and causality were the same. They are not.

    The trigger before the explosion is not a logical reason; it's a physical cause. This cause is not based upon a logical law nor is it linked with it. It's not logical that the trigger causes an explosion. This is just an empirical observation and it's not guaranteed that this effect will be the same at all times. If this were logical and the effect would change, it would be like saying: "2+2=4 has been correct until now, but in the future it may be 2+2=3." -- This is not logic. Logic is independent of space and time.
    Quk

    Bingo! Logic is about language, not about the world itself.
  • Count Timothy von Icarus
    4k


    . I want to clarify: I’m not saying there is nothing at all prior to interpretation—certainly not “nothing” in a nihilistic sense. What I’m pointing to is something more like undifferentiated givenness—not sheer formless flux, but not determinately articulated being either. It’s not a thing or set of things waiting to be picked out, but a field of potential meaning that only becomes structured in relation to a subject (something like Peirce's 'firstness'). That's why I said 'neither existent nor non-existent', which is what I take the expression 'beyond being' to mean - beyond the flux of coming-to-be and passing away.

    Right, so is this "undifferentiated giveness" first in the order of being or in the order of our experience? It seems obvious that it comes first in our particular experience, yet the ontological priority of something wholly undifferentiated would seem to cause problems in terms of what follows from what is truly undifferentiated as a cause (which would seem to be, nothing, or nothing in particular). There is also Hegel's point about sheer, indeterminate being collapsing into nothing to consider as well.

    One way to look at this would be to distinguish between "all finite experience" and "our particular experience." If all the finite experiences of all organisms is what "makes things the concrete way they are," (maybe something somewhat akin to "consciousness causes collapse") then, for those born in a world already teeming with life, in the midst of civilizations, the world would be in a sense "already divided." The collective experiences of all that have comes before us have already accomplished this.

    This at least makes more sense to me, although I still see problems. Yet I often get the impression that the opposite is meant, and that this move is made because the order of our experience is conflated with the order of being (perhaps because bracketing has made phenomenology "first philosophy" by default). This would be the idea that there is no squirrel or owl prior to our knowing it as such, that our knowing makes it what it is. But this would be a sort of denial of other beings as prior, relatively self-governing, self-determining, organic wholes that are relatively intelligible in themselves. Plus, if this applies to animals at the level of individual human experiencers, I don't know why it wouldn't apply to other people. And so we would all live in our own self constituted worlds.

    I think the difficulty here is finding a ground for per se predication versus per accidens, so that "what things are" is not determined by seemingly accidental relations vis-á-vis what we think or say of them.

    I think, and you will know this subject better than I, that Eriugena's Periphysion articulates this far better than I could. From the SEP entry:

    Right, but Eriugena is proceeding by affirmation and negation (like Plotinus and Dionysius), using analogous predication. He is not simply denying that God is, full stop. God cannot be the First Principle, First Cause, and ground of being if God is not prior to creatures (and we could say the same of any true infinite re the finite). And if creatures do not have a prior cause or ground, we have the question of why they are one way and not any other, but also have to affirm that they are truly subsistent being. Yet their essence would not appear to indicate their existence, so how are they subsistent except as a "brute fact," a spontaneous, self-constitututing move from potential to actuality.

    Universals—or forms—exist, or rather, are real, not as actual entities, but as structured possibilities. As Kelley Ross puts it, they "exist where possibilities exist," and we encounter them not only in the future, but also in what he calls the "imperfect aspect"—that is, in things that are still unfolding, in process, not yet completed. This is key: the world we engage with is not made of finished essences, but of meaningful potentials that become actualised or manifested through living beings.

    Isn't this to identify form with potency instead of actuality? Except, it's a "structured potency," and so already limited and determinant. But that's the same as saying they are a prior actuality, but that they also exist with potency (which must be true for all changing beings). However, it seems to me that the "structure" here just is the form, the actuality, and that we might want to avoid lumping it in with the potency. The actuality determines the potency.

    So, I am not sure if there is anything objectionable there except that it seems like a confusing way to formulate the idea that beings are act and potency and that prior actuality does not fully determine them, that they have the potential to change (else they would be pure act, right?).

    But that prior structure does set limits. Does a cat have the potential to become a frog? I would say no. An act of sorcery that accomplished this would simply be replacing one thing with a other. So there is an essential limit on what things are, else everything is potentially everything else. And I think those limits on what a thing can be are just what is meant by "substantial form." No doubt, we could break a cat down into its matter and make it into a frog. That's different though. That isn't a potential of the cat because the cat ceases to be. Another way to put this is that generation and corruption really occur because there really are beings as organic wholes.

    Yet I don't know what it means for an essence to be "unfinished." To be sure, we have the "staying-at-work-being-itself" of physical beings, their struggle to maintain their form and achieve the good/perfections related to that form. Since forms exist only where they are instantiated, this means there is no such thing as a completed form, except perhaps as a principle in the absolute unity of the transcendent One as a sort of "idea." And yet there has to be something determinant there for final causation to have any purchase.

    But the idea that essences are a sort of project is tricky. I think there is a sense that this is true, from an evolutionary perspective and the unfolding of history. Yet I don't think this is true if it is an attempt to deny final causality and any telos (which seems to deny the goal directedness of life and the role of aims in giving beings, wholes, unity). I think resistance to essences is often based on a misunderstanding of them as "Platonic forms" or calcified logical entities, but also a psychological aversion to telos due to a misguided understanding of freedom primarily in terms of potency/power, the capacity to "choose anything."

    Actually, I think Chat-GPT is a good demonstration of this because it has been fed so many papers. Ask it about contemporary philosophy that denies essence, and you get a straightforward narrative of why essences are problematic, as is final causality, and often something that seems to potentially deny the possibility of per se predication. But ask it then how essences were understood by the figures being critiqued, and it suddenly switches gears to give a very different narrative. I would imagine, this is due to pulling from different sources.
  • Count Timothy von Icarus
    4k


    Bingo! Logic is about language, not about the world itself.

    Human logic is clearly not physical causality. However, logic isn't "about" anything but language? So:

    Socrates is a man.
    All men are mortal.
    Therefore Socrates is a mortal.

    Is about the words "man" and "Socrates" and not ever about men and Socrates? Wouldn't this lead to a thoroughgoing anti-realism and an inability of language to signify anything but language, such that books on botany are about words and interpretations and never about plants (only "plants")?
  • ChatteringMonkey
    1.5k
    Wel words do usually signify something in the world, though not allways. Those words are abstractions from the world, and it's to some extend arbitrary where lines are drawn.

    Logic then applies to statements we make with those abstractions, not directly to the world itself. Insofar those statements are about the world, maybe you could say it's also about the world indirectly. But only if those statements are about the world, which they don't have to be. Logic isn't concerned with epistemics per se.

    Only 'about language' was maybe a bit loose and fast.
  • Count Timothy von Icarus
    4k


    There was a very long running debate over whether terms signify concepts in the mind (Aristotle) or whether they signify things (through a triadic semiotic relationship, Augustine). I've always been partial to Augustine here, but I can see the impetus in the other direction as well, and language plays a crucial role in either case.

    So:

    Logic then applies to statements we make with those abstractions, not directly to the world itself. Insofar those statements are about the world, maybe you could say it's also about the world indirectly.

    I think in either case you're right, it's about the world in at least some way. It's mediated, so "indirect." I'm not sure if anything is ever truly unmediated; that's another question. Logic and language only ceases to be "about the world," if the terms/concepts cease to be determinantly related to the world in any way. So, even on the view that signification is of concepts (usually universals), this isn't overly problematic because universals come to us from things via the senses. It becomes a difficulty only when that linkage is somehow severed.

    Here, I don't really mind the Kantian interjection that what we say about things is always "things as we know them." That's fair. Surely we are not speaking about things as we don't know them. Where it gets dicey is in the idea that there is no determinant linkage between things and what is known, in which case, it doesn't even seem like the knowledge can be "of" the things.
  • T Clark
    15.1k
    That is the direction evolution seems to be headed from instinctive, hard-coded behavioral responses to general stimuli to conscious minds capable of making finer distinctions and therefore finer behavioral responses as well being able to change one's behavior based on new sensory information effectively overriding those instinctive behaviors when they are not the best response in a given situation. We can change our behavior in almost real-time compared to instinctive behaviors which can take generations to change.Harry Hindu

    I think this is an over simplistic understanding. This is from William James’ book “What is an Instinct?”

    “Nothing is commoner than the remark that Man differs from lower creatures by the almost total absence of instincts, and the assumption of their work in him by “reason.”...[But] the facts of the case are really tolerably plain! Man has a far greater variety of impulses than any lower animal; and any one of these impulses, taken in itself, is as “blind” as the lowest instinct can be; but, owing to man’s memory, power of reflection, and power of inference, they come each one to be felt by him, after he has once yielded to them and experienced their results, in connection with a foresight of those results…

    …It is plain then that, no matter how well endowed an animal may originally be in the way of instincts, his resultant actions will be much modified if the instincts combine with experience, if in addition to impulses he have memories, associations, inferences, and expectations, on any considerable scale…

    …there is no material antagonism between instinct and reason…”

    This was written more than 100 years ago, but it is consistent with other things I have read that are more recent.
  • Count Timothy von Icarus
    4k


    That's a fantastic quote. I'll probably reuse it. It gets at a common mistake which is that if something is always filtered through something else (e.g. human nature, "instinct," is always filtered through habit and culture) then it cannot be prior to what it is always filtered through. Perhaps this is a side effect of the tendency towards thinking of causes exclusively in terms of temporal ordering. At any rate, it misses that, in order for human culture to exist, humans have to exist. This doesn't entail that any humans ever exist without culture. It merely entails that, because humans are one thing, and not any other, this will always shape human culture.

    Likewise, the realities faced by all living things, the demand to maintain homeostasis and form in the face of entropy, etc. are more general principles that will effect all cultures, human, or any other intelligent species.

    More general principles explain more things, but less determinantly. So human nature explains all human cultures, but it is less definite then how cultures shape us. And thus, it can easily seem like "culture all the way down," because culture drives the particular specific details we take notice of, yet these are always against a particular background of biology, physics, etc.
  • ChatteringMonkey
    1.5k
    There was a very long running debate over whether terms signify concepts in the mind (Aristotle) or whether they signify things (through a triadic semiotic relationship, Augustine). I've always been partial to Augustine here, but I can see the impetus in the other direction as well, and language plays a crucial role in either case.Count Timothy von Icarus

    Augustine views seems close to Peirces theory on semiotics. I could get on board with that I think.

    I think in either case you're right, it's about the world in at least some way. It's mediated, so "indirect." I'm not sure if anything is ever truly unmediated; that's another question. Logic and language only ceases to be "about the world," if the terms/concepts cease to be determinantly related to the world in any way. So, even on the view that signification is of concepts (usually universals), this isn't overly problematic because universals come to us from things via the senses. It becomes a difficulty only when that linkage is somehow severed.

    Here, I don't really mind the Kantian interjection that what we say about things is always "things as we know them." That's fair. Surely we are not speaking about things as we don't know them. Where it gets dicey is in the idea that there is no determinant linkage between things and what is known, in which case, it doesn't even seem like the knowledge can be "of" the things.
    Count Timothy von Icarus

    They are related to the world, but in an abstracted way.

    I think particulars come to us via our senses, which I would consider unmediated (stricly speaking maybe not as sense-organs, nerves etc are involved, still I think we have a sense of the world).

    As in Heraclitean 'metaphysics' only particulars/only becoming exists in space and time, that is the world of our senses anyway... panta rhei.

    When we name a particular thing and abstract it into a universal concept we are equating and lumping together things that are similar but not identical, and take them out of their spacio-temporal context (the spirit/the eternal).

    That is fine and can be usefull as long as we don't forget that universals are not really real like Plato (contra Cratylus).
  • Joshs
    6.2k


    So... living organisms, including humans, affect the environment and organisms and environments evolve together. Agreed. That's not "missing from Lorenz's account." It's just not particularly relevant to the specific point he, and I, are trying to make which is - human minds, including our intellectual capacities, evolved in the same manner that our physical bodies did. Logic is something we brought to the world.T Clark

    I get that that is your point, but the point of Lorenz’s comment is that we evolved sense organs for adaptive purposes , organs which allow us to see only those aspects of reality we need to see in order to achieve our evolutionarily shaped goals. Unlike recent biological thinking, he does not claim that the very reality of the organism’s environment is co-constructed by the organism’s patterns of functioning in it. Instead, he assumes the reality of that environment is external to, and independent of, the organism’s limited, adaptive perception of it.
  • Wayfarer
    24.7k
    This would be the idea that there is no squirrel or owl prior to our knowing it as such, that our knowing makes it what it isCount Timothy von Icarus

    What about the natural numbers and the law of the excluded middle. Do they exist before our knowing them as such?
  • T Clark
    15.1k
    he does not claim that the very reality of the organism’s environment is co-constructed by the organism’s patterns of functioning in it. Instead, he assumes the reality of that environment is external to, and independent of, the organism’s limited, adaptive perception of it.Joshs

    Sorry. I don't get it. In the context of the question at hand, why does it matter whether human cognitive systems evolved in response to the environment or coevolved in concert with the environment?
  • T Clark
    15.1k
    That's a fantastic quote. I'll probably reuse it.Count Timothy von Icarus

    It's a very short book and you should be able to get it free online. It has other good stuff too.

    At any rate, it misses that, in order for human culture to exist, humans have to exist. This doesn't entail that any humans ever exist without culture. It merely entails that, because humans are one thing, and not any other, this will always shape human culture.

    Likewise, the realities faced by all living things, the demand to maintain homeostasis and form in the face of entropy, etc. are more general principles that will effect all cultures, human, or any other intelligent species.

    More general principles explain more things, but less determinantly. So human nature explains all human cultures, but it is less definite then how cultures shape us. And thus, it can easily seem like "culture all the way down," because culture drives the particular specific details we take notice of, yet these are always against a particular background of biology, physics, etc.
    Count Timothy von Icarus

    The seems like a description of emergence at the levels of human neurology, psychology, and sociology. Psychology must operate consistent with human mental processes from below, but it is also heavily influenced by social and cultural systems from above. For some reason, I thought you are a skeptic about emergence.
  • Banno
    28k
    Socrates is a man.
    All men are mortal.
    Therefore Socrates is a mortal.

    Is about the words "man" and "Socrates" and not ever about men and Socrates? Wouldn't this lead to a thoroughgoing anti-realism and an inability of language to signify anything but language, such that books on botany are about words and interpretations and never about plants (only "plants")?
    Count Timothy von Icarus

    What makes the syllogism valid is that whatever you substitute for "Socrates" "Man" and "Mortal", the syllogism holds. That's why we can write it as ((f(a) & U(x)f(x)⊃g(x)) ⊃g(a).

    It is not about Socrates and Man, it is about the structure of the three sentences. It is about the language used.

    Logical validity is a property of forms, not of names or referents. This formal property does not imply that logic is only about language, nor that language is only about itself. In fact, the ability to generalize over arbitrary constants (like “Socrates”) is what allows logic to apply to the world. Far from anti-realist, this is precisely what gives logic its extensional power.
  • Count Timothy von Icarus
    4k


    For some reason, I thought you are a skeptic about emergence.

    Jaegwon Kim has a series of monographs that are widely considered devastating for the idea of strong emergence given certain presuppositions (roughly a supervenience substance metaphysics where things just are what they are made of, e.g. things as ensembles of particles). This doesn't make me skeptical of emergence though, quite the opposite, it makes me skeptical of the metaphysics that seems to imply that emergence is impossible.

    However, I think the whole idea of "emergence" is only required because of that general metaphysical approach. So I guess I am "skeptical" in that sense. In the broader sense of things operating on different scales and levels, I'm all on board.

    What I do object to is when people present an accounts of physicalist theory of mind that simply ignore the Hard Problem with an appeal to emergence that is thin. In those cases, it seems like an ad hoc way to avoid the largest objection.
  • SophistiCat
    2.3k
    P.S. Meh, I should read all responses before adding mine.

    But I'll add one thing: What question the OP is asking? It is never entirely clear. Is it about anthropology? Developmental psychology? Metaphysics (whatever that might mean for them)? Before we jump to formulating answers, we should get clarity about the question.

    Human logic is clearly not physical causality. However, logic isn't "about" anything but language? So:

    [1] Socrates is a man.
    All men are mortal.
    Therefore Socrates is a mortal.

    Is about the words "man" and "Socrates" and not ever about men and Socrates? Wouldn't this lead to a thoroughgoing anti-realism and an inability of language to signify anything but language, such that books on botany are about words and interpretations and never about plants (only "plants")
    Count Timothy von Icarus

    [2] Socrates is a fork.
    All forks vacillate.
    Therefore, Socrates vacillates.

    [3] X ⊂ Y
    ∀Y P(Y)
    ∴ P(X)

    [2] and [3] have the same logical structure as [1]. They are the same logical statements. But, clearly, they are not about the same thing, are they?

    Logic is only about something insofar as we make it to be. It can be something perfectly sensible, like [1], or frivolous, like [2], or even nothing in particular, like [3].
  • Leontiskos
    4.8k
    [2] and [3] have the same logical structure as [1]. They are the same logical statements.SophistiCat

    They don't and they aren't, but leaving that aside, are you gainsaying the thesis that logic is about something other than language?

    Logic is only about something insofar as we make it to be. It can be something perfectly sensible, like [1], or frivolous, like [2], or even nothing in particular, like [3].SophistiCat

    Which of them do you say is about nothing other than language?
  • SophistiCat
    2.3k
    I use "about" in its intended sense - the semantics of logical sentences.
  • Leontiskos
    4.8k


    This is the thesis that post was responding to:

    Logic is about language, not about the world itself.ChatteringMonkey

    Since you disagreed with the person who disagreed with this thesis, I am assuming that you affirm the thesis. Please correct me if you do not affirm the thesis.
  • Count Timothy von Icarus
    4k


    Whose the knower? An individual man, or mankind? It seems to me that the natural numbers must be prior to individuals, since they are already around and known by others before we are born.

    Now, if mankind is the only species with the capacity for intellectual knowledge, I think there might be a sense in which the natural numbers could be said to be posterior to man, but they also seem obviously prior in another sense.

    The sense in which the natural numbers are prior lies in the fact that there were discrete organisms, organic wholes with a principle of unity, long before man existed. There were many tyrannosaurs, trees, fish, etc. There were beings, plural. And so multitude exists there. But if man is the first "physical being" to be capable of abstracting the principle of multitude and notions of unity as measure (unit), then there is a sense in which natural numbers first exist in the mode of the (finite) intellect with this abstraction. So the existence of this abstraction is dependent on man and posterior to him. It has to exist in the intellect, and man has to first be and have an intellect for anything to exist in it.

    So I would say both, but with a distinction of modes.

    That's probably confusing so let me try an easier example. We have the idea of "humanity." We would not say "Socrates is a humanity." Humanity is the form of man abstracted from any determinate matter. Socrates can be a man, and he can possess humanity, but he cannot be a humanity.

    Likewise, we can think of tyrannosaurusity. Yet such an abstraction only exists in beings with intellects, and if only man has an intellect, obviously he will be the first to have accomplished this abstraction. That said, obviously there has to be a tyrannosaurus for this.

    Similarly, if one considers God or any sort of First Principle/Prime Mover, these principles are going to be prior there too.
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