What is mind-boggling is that people actually take this Thermodynamics Purpose seriously. Humans just love their myths. This never changes, pre-historic or modern, always weaving myths. — Rich
Indeed, for Lyotard, the de-realization of the world means the disintegration of narrative elements into “clouds” of linguistic combinations and collisions among innumerable, heterogeneous language games. Furthermore, within each game the subject moves from position to position, now as sender, now as addressee, now as referent, and so on. The loss of a continuous meta-narrative therefore breaks the subject into heterogeneous moments of subjectivity that do not cohere into an identity. But as Lyotard points out, while the combinations we experience are not necessarily stable or communicable, we learn to move with a certain nimbleness among them.
Postmodern sensibility does not lament the loss of narrative coherence any more than the loss of being. However, the dissolution of narrative leaves the field of legitimation to a new unifying criterion: the performativity of the knowledge-producing system whose form of capital is information. Performative legitimation means maximizing the flow of information and minimizing static (non-functional moves) in the system, so whatever cannot be communicated as information must be eliminated. The performativity criterion threatens anything not meeting its requirements, such as speculative narratives, with de-legitimation and exclusion. Nevertheless, capital also demands the continual re-invention of the “new” in the form of new language games and new denotative statements, and so, paradoxically, a certain paralogy is required by the system itself. In this regard, the modern paradigm of progress as new moves under established rules gives way to the postmodern paradigm of inventing new rules and changing the game. — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/
If experience is there all the way down, experience is accounted for as a foundation. — schopenhauer1
What I fear about your brand of semiotics philosophy is that it has a hidden dualisim (because it is not accounting for the nature of the difference between quality and material interactions) in that there is a spooky-like quality that results from the semiotic process. — schopenhauer1
However, this hard ground at the bottom of the well, it really doesn't say much- thus the very speculative and imaginative answers to this question. — schopenhauer1
Now, perhaps ideas like sign processing, the epistemic cut, hierarchical complexity, systems causality, etc. may be the light which leads out of this cave, but it has to be done with at least keeping in mind what I stated earlier about how the experientialness of certain processes should not be taken for granted as just "there" as the result of a series of processes without account for what "there" is. — schopenhauer1
Yes, this is attractive because it sounds like it is saying something. But unless this being the case makes some reasonable causal difference, then it is just empty words.
So in what way does the presence or absence of experience make a difference at the microscale? What would we expect to observe as a reasonable or causally-motivated counterfactual. — apokrisis
Except that my approach does travel a long way before a lack of counterfactuals kicks in. There is a huge amount of textbook science to traverse before one begins to feel any sense of the air growing thin. — apokrisis
What is this spooky-like quality? Well, if we hit a wall of the hard problem because there is no "counterfactuals" that can be tested, that indeed is the very problem that we are getting at. Otherwise, yay for semiotics and systems approaches to neuroscientific/biological problems. However, this hard ground at the bottom of the well, it really doesn't say much- thus the very speculative and imaginative answers to this question. — schopenhauer1
Most folk love the hard problem because it means they can prattle on about the mind without having to actually study much mind science. Because no can know the answer - according to the hard problem - then no one need feel guilty about not even making a start on the vast amount of understanding that does exist. — apokrisis
I've given you the simple answer many times. If you understand how the brain models the world in a really detailed fashion, then it is hard to imagine all that being the case and it not feeling like something. — apokrisis
That being said, we must define what the debate is. The debate is the nature of mental events. — schopenhauer1
Kind of sounds like a postmodern stance- everything is just narrative. Here was something I found on Stanford Encyclopedia under postmodernism that sounds similar to what you are getting at: — schopenhauer1
I see it as a particular kind of process - a modellling relation - and so awareness is simply about how such a relationship is going to feel. — apokrisis
What is this "feel" qua feeling? If you are going to say it is a metaphysical limit that cannot be answered, then does that qualify "feel" as a basic property of the universe like charge or spin? — schopenhauer1
I've explained that limit in terms of counterfactuality - the limits of intelligible explanation. I've also said that in practice, that epistemic limit is at the very far end of a lifetime's worth of biology, neuroscience and social psychology. Gorge yourself on the knowledge that is available. Stop obsessing with that knowledge running into some ultimate limit. The details we can't know turn out to be insignificant. — apokrisis
Why is red so red, and not instead ... well anything whatsoever? Why do we need to care? Have we already understood the story of colour processing so well that we have arrived at this issue as a scientific matter? — apokrisis
As I say, my view is that people who promote the Hard Problem are generally looking to put down that vast weight of scientific achievement. They want the last laugh - without having to get their hands dirty reading actual neurology textbooks. — apokrisis
So my response is that - knowing all that there is to know about how brains model worlds - why would we say it wouldn't just obviously feel like something to be doing all that? — apokrisis
Of course, if you haven't seriously studied the science, there is going to be no reason it would. That is the other side of the message I hope you can see by now. — apokrisis
So here we have limit- a very deep problem and you are saying simply back off from it. — schopenhauer1
It is a question of what it is in-itself- its ontology, not its causation. — schopenhauer1
You seem to only go back to causitive answers and then don't want to be bothered with the hard question of ontology. Sorry, but that's the question at hand here as it relates to physical processes that are not "what it feels like to be a process". — schopenhauer1
The modelling obviously feels like something to be doing that. — schopenhauer1
But what is "feels like that" aspect of the process in the first place! — schopenhauer1
What it is like to be doing that. No need to reify the feeling as something further that must be caused, or worse yet, have brute fact existence and yet you still demanding of me its causal, intelligible, reasonable explanation. — apokrisis
But more generally - when the issue is what is continuous across all the hierarchical scales - the idea that mind only exists at some one privileged brute fact scale of being is one that carries remarkably little weight. It just becomes an obvious habit of reification, a way folk have got used to talking about mindfullness, points of view, and selfhood. — apokrisis
I simply call that experience and more specifically "qualia". — schopenhauer1
I don't think there is a privileged brute fact scale. — schopenhauer1
You do not want to recognize this because it is not quantifiable and that doesn't compute for you. Instead of dealing with it, you will simply go back to what is quantifiable. This is a dodge. — schopenhauer1
Qualia is qualia is qualia. Electrons are electrons are electrons. — schopenhauer1
The physical correlates are important, but looking at the correlates won't ever answer the qualia. — schopenhauer1
I think you say it is because that is all kinds of "mind", whereas I say it is all kinds of "minding" - or actually more generally, all kinds of semiotic world modelling. — apokrisis
At the psychological level, it is self and world that emerge to organise experience, give it a useful phenomenological structure. — apokrisis
Right. Let's plunge back into the mysteries of how appearances can be felt. Let's not stop to think how this is itself a division of your reality into "self" and "world" - the feeling bit vs the appearing bit. — apokrisis
Have you found time to read up on Pattee's epistemic cut? Yes, there is something novel about life and mind according to biosemiosis. — apokrisis
How is it written, stored, and read. — schopenhauer1
You mean how should you understand semiosis as if it were Turing computation? Yeah, that'll work just fine. That'll will let you preserve the mystery of the writer, the storer, the reader.
Really, if you want answers, spend weeks or even years getting to learn a different way of thinking. And Pattee is a really good and clear start. — apokrisis
I don't know why you persist in thinking that I don't trust in the empirical sciences or that I don't get the general gist of how complex systems arise. — schopenhauer1
You actually have to give something up to be able to go forward here. And I agree it is not easy. — apokrisis
When you understand how they might be the wrong questions is when you will start to know that you might be getting the organic approach that is biosemiosis.
You actually have to give something up to be able to go forward here. And I agree it is not easy. — apokrisis
That is why Pattee, Salthe and other hierarchy theorists get semiotics. — apokrisis
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