I agree that we need a concept of stasis (as well as concept of unity and identity) in order to think about change; I haven't been arguing against that. I have been arguing against reifying such concepts, and imagining that there are real entities which correspond to them. — Janus
The problem for your position is that it is incoherent if you try to eliminate the affective experiential dimension since you cannot coherently explain how there can be interpretation without some prior, or at least present, experience. — Janus
Isn't this a contradiction? — Aaron R
My point is that to take "experience" as "primordial" is already to frame it as the noumenal thing-in-itself. It is already going beyond expererience to make a claim about the ontology of experience. So your claim that experience is primordially affective is a modelling claim about the structure of experience - even if a claim about some kind of lack of structure in just being this vague thing of "primordially affective". — apokrisis
Your original claim was that Being is identical to becoming. I am trying to undermine that claim by showing that becoming (change) presupposes something more fundamental and, as such, cannot be identical with Being. — Aaron R
However, I am not arguing here that Being is some eternal, immutable, first cause. It seems to me that the reification of Being is incoherent. Unfortunately, we can't seem to help but reify it in the course of attempting to think about it. At the same time, we can't help but think about it.
This seems to suggest that metaphysics (in the classical sense) is both inevitable and impossible at the same time. — Aaron R
And this consists in what we know directly from experience, that actual experience begins with the body, and the precognitive ways in which it is affected. — Janus
Of course, when any attempt to articulate this kind of thing, to make it "crisp", is made it might be thought to make it look like it is all cognitive all the way down, but that is an illusion created by language. — Janus
It would probably help you to broaden your perspective and get this point if you were to read some Merleau Ponty or Whitehead, but you have probably already decided that you know better than they do. — Janus
All I'm saying is that we are affected pre-cognitively by bodily processes that are experienced as feelings that cannot be precisely discursively articulated, and that we are directly aware of this. Do you want to deny that this is so, and claim that the totality of what we are is exhaustively down to what is produced processes of cognitive construction? — Janus
Earlier, we briefly discussed how we both "felt" as though we may have existed in some form before we existed here on Earth. It sounds fantastic and the skeptical alarm bells are ringing loud and clear that this is magical woo, but a similar feeling arises in me when I contemplate Being as opposed to being. If the Scholastics are correct, and God is the eternal, infinite ground for Being, then the entire world could end and God would remain. God is, He always was and always will be.
That there is something more to the world than the world, that the foundation of the world permeates every facet while simultaneously extending beyond the finite, is an idea that I think is at the heart of religious sentiments. — darthbarracuda
Even when I'm talking about the super abstract - like semiosis as a triadic structure - it has cognitive meaning because the talk comes with some matching "felt state". There is some kinesthetic representation I have in mind of things all intertwined and connecting in a now familiar way. Thought is not a bloodless exercise of computation. We live our thoughts fully if we are doing it properly. — apokrisis
Though I doubt that you see this as a dismissal of "qualia". You are still going to complain that no amount of scientific theory is managing to deliver your missing explanation of why anything should feel like anything. As if that is what theories are meant to do. Theories only feel like something when you can live them in action. That is use them to constrain experience to have some particular quality that you had in mind as a suitable metric. So semiotics explains that because it explains how we construct constraints on experience so as to be able to feel, see - and even count - a world composed of suitably individuated particulars.) — apokrisis
As a meta-theory of theories, ain't that kind of vague?My theory about theories... — csalisbury
There is some "we" who knows directly from our "own experience" of ... something or other concerning the primordial condition of "our" bodies.
Much better to just start with interpretance as an embodied state of being. To be embodied is to have already begun down the path of being in a triadic modelling relation. — apokrisis
It would probably help you [Apokrisis] to broaden your perspective and get this point if you were to read some Merleau Ponty or Whitehead — Janus
A good human example is the affective aesthetic response. No rule can be derived from it. It is impossible to explain what is so good about the greatest works of literature, poetry, painting, music and so on. — Janus
Whiteheadian actual occasions are also subjects which arise from the synthesis of
material and formal conditions. The basic premise of Whitehead’s philosophy is that all
primary entities in the universe are processes. Everything which persists in space-time is
understood as the result of sequential manifestations of interrelated processes. According
to Whitehead there are four different kinds of actual occasions:
3 Vernunft is Verstand guided by principles. Vernunft also has a moral component. 4 Critique of Pure
“In the actual world we discern four grades of actual occasions, grades which are not to be
sharply distinguished from each other. First, and lowest, there are the actual occasions in socalled
‘empty space’; secondly, there are the actual occasions which are moments in the lifehistories
of enduring non-living objects, such as electrons or other primitive organisms;
thirdly, there are the actual occasions which are moments in the life-histories of enduring
living objects; fourthly, there are the actual occasions which are moments in the life-histories
of enduring objects with conscious knowledge” (1979, 177; italics added).
Actual occasions of the third and fourth grade correspond with Uexküllian subjects
because they have the complexity of biological processes.
For different reasons Whitehead departs from the old metaphysics of substance
(Koutroufinis 2014b). He especially rejects the Cartesian idea of substance as something
that is conceived of as being self-sufficient, since it “exists in such a way that it doesn’t
depend on anything else for its existence.”5 As such it requires no relation to anything
else in order to exist. Whitehead explicitly distances himself from this conception of
substance (1979, 59). The actual entities are subjects, but not in the sense of the classical
metaphysical idea of subjectivity as a feature of a substance. As a processual subject is
not a substance, it cannot relate to its own experiences as a timeless carrier, the essence of
which is independent of its experiences. Therefore, in Whitehead’s metaphysics the
essence of the processual subject cannot be separated from its experiences. He conceives
of the actual occasion––that is, the processual subject––as a totality of experiences that
grows together to form a unity. Thus, each actual occasion is a process in which the
experiences it has with other processual subjects merge together to form an integrated
experience:
“The final facts are, all alike, actual entities; and these actual entities are drops of experience,
complex and interdependent” (1979, 18).
Every process has experience-relations to other already existing processes that occupy
concrete positions in space-time. It is these relations which make up the essence of the
process. These kinds of relations, which are indispensable to the essence of the related
entities, are usually called ‘internal relations.’ Whitehead calls them prehensions.
The material conditions out of which an actual occasion arises are ‘physically
prehended’ data of the immediate past. They constitute the part of the spatial
surroundings of the subject which is prehended by it and thus is relevant to its selfformation.
Only things allowed into a process through its prehensions––meaning,
5 Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, Part I, §51.
10
ultimately, by the process itself––have causal relevance to this process. In other words:
nothing external to an actual entity determines it––not even God, who Whitehead
conceives of as being the most comprehensive process that coordinates all other
processes. The factor which determines what can become a material condition, i.e. an
efficient cause, for a given process is the subjectivity of the process itself. The process is
a “teleological self-creation” (Whitehead 1967, 195), an act that creates its own aim and
purpose. It is teleological, not in the sense of substance of the old metaphysics (which
strives towards the aim determined by its fixed essence), but rather in the sense of a
processual teleology: each actual occasion strives to determine its own essence. Finding
its aim means determining the physical form which the completed process will have as a
spatio-temporal fact. This striving towards finding its own aim is experienced by the
process. The experience develops out of the evaluation of the relevance of prehended
content for the process itself. Therefore, it is the teleology (or final causality) of the
processual subject which decides what part of its physical surroundings can become an
efficient cause, what can be integrated as a causal factor into the process and how this
integration will occur. Each process of concrescence necessarily implies a distinction
between the facts of its physical surroundings which are allowed to be integrated into the
process and those which have been negatively selected. Thus each process of
conscrescence, even the most primitive one, exhibits an essential similarity to living
beings: it is a subject and at the same time, necessarily, defines its Umwelt.
The formal conditions out of which an actual occasion arises are the ‘conceptually
prehended’ universal abstract entities or ‘eternal objects,’ which the emerging process
obtains from the past and also from the eternal or ever lasting process which Whitehead
calls ‘God.’ More complex actual occasions, however, do not only prehend ideal forms.
They synthesize the prehended eternal objects to a new more complex eternal object,
which becomes the so-called subjective aim of the arising process. The mental pole
strives to generate the subjective aim of the new process and thus to determine what the
emerging subject will be.
As the complexity of a Whiteheadian subject (actual occasion) increases, it becomes
less determined by the inherited material and by formal conditions. The generation of
subjective aim is the development of an entity, which Whitehead calls a proposition.
Whiteheadian propositions should not be confused with linguistic propositions. They are
not connections of linguistic subjects with predicates or, in Kant’s language, connections
of individual sensual intuitions with abstract concepts. Whiteheadian ‘propositions’ are
much more basic than linguistic propositions. Therefore subjects or creative agents that
perform Whiteheadian ‘propositions’ do not need to be conscious beings endowed with
the faculty to operate with symbols:
“The interest in logic, dominating overintellectualized philosophers, has obscured the main
function of propositions in the nature of things. They are not primarily for belief, but for
feeling at the physical level of unconsciousness. They constitute a source for the origination
of feeling which is not tied down to mere datum” (Whitehead 1979, 186).
Whiteheadian propositions are connections of something particular with something
universal. Particular localized facts which are physically prehended become combined
with universal abstract entities (‘eternal objects’). This is Whitehead’s interpretation of
Kant’s dictum “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are
blind.”
As a meta-theory of theories, ain't that kind of vague? — apokrisis
(Whoops. I didn't mean to be so bold as to advance a single meta-model of models there. So like ... just whatevs ... its all good, eh brah?)
But again, refer to your own drug experiences. Didn’t you think this or that was the most sublime thing ever, simply because you were high? — apokrisis
Feelings by themselves are not trustworthy. They only become reliable signs of anything when framed within a well adapted “cognitive” context.
Temporal epilepsy and schizophrenia can leave you feeling you are bathed in the divine. Your pet psychological theory needs to be able to account with little facts like that. — apokrisis
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