I mean does your view of intentionality separate it out from the external stimuli that may have caused it? — Noah Te Stroete

No, an act of awareness is typically about the sensory contents that inform it.

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I take consciousness to be awareness of present, typically neurophysiologically encoded, intelligibility. — Dfpolis

How do you differentiate this view from materialism or ‘brain-mind’ identity theory?

We always have to have a pair of ontic abstractions that reduce reality to some kind of orthogonal pairing. — apokrisis

What do you make of the pairing of 'meaning' and its 'vehicle'? For instance, the intelligible aspect of the voice as opposed to its arbitrary sound. Another example would be a chair grasped as a chair and the sensation organized by that grasping. One way to understand 'matter' would be as the opposite of pure meaning. Not mind but just meaning or form. These would be the poles of a continuum.

It's not clear to me that we ever have pure meaning. I think in words that are arbitrarily entangled with their meaning. I say 'sign,' and another says 'Zeichen' and mean pretty much the same thing. One could suggest that we also think in images, but aren't even these images 'formed'? To grasp something as a thing is already to grasp it as a unity, to install a boundary between it and not-it.

Actually I don’t see how anything could be ‘neurologically encoded’. DNA is a code but I can’t see how neurons could encode anything.

A sign (sema) is only informative when it actually informs an intellect to reduce logical possibility -- for that is the definition of information. So, intellect has logical and ontological priority over information, and therefore over signs as carriers of information. — Dfpolis

This is a deep issue, but I think that one can (not at all must) argue that the 'intellect' is one more sign within a steam of signs that refers to relationships between those signs. This is being as signs, including signs like 'consciousness' and 'physical.' These signs can occur in such a way that 'I' have the experience of being an 'I' or an intellect. Reality would just be intelligible or informed sensation-emotion. Given our experience of language, a sequence of signs is a bad approximation of a meaningful 'beingstream' or 'becoming' where the signs themselves are smeared into a streaming intelligibility that can't be atomized. The 'flesh' of these signs would be the sensation and emotion shaped by the 'meaning' aspect of 'becoming.'

To be sure I can't just live ordinary life in these terms, and I am not particularly attached to it except as a thought experiment that resolves some problems as it brings others.

Information is only meaningfully encoded in two ways that I can discern - in written and spoken language and by DNA.

I mean that the identical information can be encoded in any number of physical forms, and so is not explained by the data describing its physical matrix. In any case of conventional signing (speaking, writing, Morse code, digital representations, etc.) the information depends not on its physical form, but on the shared convention agreed to, implicitly or explicitly, by the users. — Dfpolis

My question is whether we can ever have pure information? Clearly we have the concept of information that is able to be 'encoded in any number of physical forms' via a 'shared convention.' But is this a merely theoretical sundering of a primordial unity? We might also ask if we ever experience the present as an instant or whether this too attaches a mathematical concept to something that is not a point.

Forgetting this is a prime example of Whitehead's Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness (thinking what exists only in abstraction is the concrete reality in its fullness). — Dfpolis

This seems important to me. I get a similar idea from Hegel. Do you have an opinion on Hegel?

At the beginning of natural science, we abstract the object from the subject — Dfpolis

Would you not say that this happened even before natural science? The division of subject and object just seems so useful that it's hard to imagine it not being in play long before science as we know it. Along with it I'd expect there to be the 'ur-science' of unthematized induction.

Intentional realities are information based. What we know, will, desire, etc. is specified by actual, not potential, information. By definition, information is the reduction of (logical) possibility. If a message is transmitted, but not yet fully received, then it is not physical possibility that is reduced in the course of its reception, but logical possibility. As each bit is received, the logical possibility that it could be other than it is, is reduced. — Dfpolis

This is great. What is maybe not addressed is the metaphoricity of language. While some meaning can be represented as a stream of bits, it's not obvious to me that meaning in general can be.

Actually I don’t see how anything could be ‘neurologically encoded’. DNA is a code but I can’t see how neurons could encode anything. — Wayfarer

Actually, Denis Noble recently made a fairly convincing case that the genetic code isn't very much of a code for anything either. See the 'code' section in his paper Evolution beyond neo-Darwinism: a new conceptual framework.

For instance, the intelligible aspect of the voice as opposed to its arbitrary sound. — sign

That is why the semiotic approach would be that of a triadic relation. The marks serve to mediate between the meanings and the world.

So the word “chair” is merely a syntactic token. It is information in the sense that it is a mark that can be crisply distinguished from other marks, like “cheer” or “hair”. There are simple objective and physical differences in the sign. But what the sign then mediates is an understanding of a constraint on material possibility. It stands for a habit of interpretation with a physical reality in that only something that serves a chair-like purpose with its chair-like form can be accepted as a proper instance of a chair.

So the essence is that there are two worlds in interaction. The meanings or intentionality exist only because there is a material world that would give them a role to play. And what makes this possible is the sign, the mark, that can act rather unphysically as a logical switch. Information can be stored because marks can be unambiguously distinguished.

From a material point of view, this is a complete accident. As scratches on paper, it is meaningless whether the word is chair or cheer. And by that being maximally a material accident, it can conversely be the least accidental distinction underpinning a system of interpretance. It is the lack of meaning in one sense that opens the door to absolute meaningfulness in another.

This aspect of language use or semiotic codes is both obvious and yet not much appreciated. It shows why mind and world are in fact connected by a radical kind of disconnection. The accidents of the one can be the necessities of the other.

So this thread makes the usual fuss about an explanatory gap. But it is how nature arrives at a strong disconnect between the accidental and the necessary that explains the fact that life and mind are even possible. The degree of the disconnection is how minds, as models of reality, can stand apart so as to regulate the accidents of that reality, applying their own intentionality to that world.

Again, dualities only speak to the easily appreciated fact of a strong disconnect. The next step is to understand how the disconnect is the basis of the resulting more complex modelling connection. It is the triadic modelling relation which returns us to a physical naturalism.

Naturalism is a vaguely defined and, in my considered and elaborated view, irrational movement motivated by an a priori prejudice against what its proponents call "spooky" realities. — Dfpolis

A theist would say that. But scientific naturalism accepts the empirical evidence that life and mind evolved and so there are good grounds to expect nothing spooky or transcendent going on. That then leads to an appreciation of a systems approach anchored in the immanence of Aristotelian four cause thinking.

Call that vague and irrational if you like. Sounds more like classical metaphysical thought ... before the church got hold of it ... to me.

I think the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness plays a pivotal role in the confusion surrounding quantum theory, but explaining this would take us far afield. An outline of my position is at https://www.researchgate.net/project/A-Manifest-Varaibles-Approach-to-Quanum-Theory, and I have explained a lot of points in comments to my YouTube videos on quantum topics. (Dfpolis channel) — Dfpolis

The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness loses its power when "physical" things are simply described as things that have causal power, and both "matter" and "ideas" have causal power. The Fallacy is in thinking that ideas and matter are different types of things.

I meant to write "you no longer have the same intent." I have edited the post to correct this. — Dfpolis

You simply changed the lowest common denominator from "intent" to "you". Okay, so now it's "you" that has an intent that changes, just as an apple has a color that changes.

No, it would not be the same intention. In a physical change, the material in the initial state, which is an aspect of that state, is found, in different form, in the final state. In a change of intention, what is the same is not part of the original intention, but the intending subject. We simply stop believing in Santa, and start not believing in Santa. The Principle of Excluded Middle forbids a continuous transformation as in the physical case. Even though the weight of evidence may accumulate slowly, the change of intent is discontinuous. — Dfpolis

Yes, but WHY did you believe in Santa in the first place, and now why do you not? For no reason at all? For no cause at all?

If there were no parts outside of parts in reality, the mind would have no reason to separate them in thought. — Dfpolis

The mind is just another process of reality and functions at a certain frequency relative to the other processes in reality. Time speeds up and slows down based upon your mental state, just as lethargic lizards need to warm up in order to speed up their mental processing to become more aware of those fast-moving predators. Your relative location in space/time relative to the size and speed of everything will influence the minds perception of everything. Slow processes appear as stable solid objects, while fast processes appear as blurs, or popping in and out of existence.

I am not denying the role of cause and effect. I am saying that matter is logically orthogonal to intent.

Information surely has causes, many of which are material. In my message example, the transmission process is described by physics, but the apprehension of information is not. Nothing described by physics involves awareness per se. — Dfpolis

I think a good explanation of awareness will link QM and Classical Physics.

What is your take on evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind?

The problem with "to specify a desire", or "to specify an intention", is as Tim woods alludes to above. Intentions and desires are derived from, and based in, something general and very unspecified, just like angst. — Metaphysician Undercover

Here, we need to apply the definition of an intentional state as one whose nature points beyond itself -- Brentano's "aboutness" criterion. If, as I've been discussing with Tim Wood, we understand "angst" to mean a purely neurophysiological condition, fully defined by objective symptoms, then it it is a material and not an intentional state. If we we define "angst" to include the awareness of such a material state, then angst, like many human conditions, is an integral effect involving both materiality and intentionality -- with our awareness being intentional because it is about the material condition.

Consider "hunger" for example. It might start as a strange feeling inside. Then the person may specify it from this general feeling, so as to associate the feeling with the stomach. Then one might further specify it as a want for food. From here the individual might consider possible food sources, and specify a particular food desired. Then the person might develop the very specific intention of getting a particular thing which is thought of, to eat. So intention's "intrinsic nature", is for something very general, and unspecific, but when we derive a specific intention, we go "beyond its intrinsic nature" (as you say) because intention is based in a general feeling. — Metaphysician Undercover

I made a similar point in the previous thread ("Fallacies of Strawson's Argument vs. Free Will"). Physical desires begin with a natural deficit signaled, neurally and/or endocrinologically, to the brain. There the response can be purely physical (not involving awareness and so not rising to the level of intentionality), or we can be aware of the signaled state, in which case intentionality enters.

Being aware of the state does not mean that we immediately know how to correct it. As you point out, over time we may come to know more clearly what object or kind of object will allow us to meet the deficit. That, then, is the object of the engendered desire -- and obtaining it is the thing we "ought" to do. Thus, "ought" is not divorced from "is," but is based on our nature, its end (telos), and the resulting hierarchy of needs described by Maslow.

I think the causality can run in either direction. As the placebo effect shows, what we think can affect our physical health. As neurophysical processing affects the contents we are aware of, defective processing can lead to defective thinking. — Dfpolis

How does one make sense of this? A causes B and B causes A? — Noah Te Stroete

The causality is not circular because it is not in the same act. In perception, material states inform intentional states (not as agents, but as formal causes). In volition, intentional states actualize possible material states as efficient and formal causes.

No question is dumb if it aids understanding.

For an explanation to be satisfactory, it has to be sound, — Dfpolis

Then what explanations are isn't determined by logic, because logic doesn't tell us (except stipulatively) which premises are true.

I take consciousness to be awareness of present, typically neurophysiologically encoded, intelligibility. — Dfpolis

How do you differentiate this view from materialism or ‘brain-mind’ identity theory? — Wayfarer

It is different because those theories do not see the need for an intentional subsystem in their theory of mind. The brain clearly encodes and processes information. But, as discussed by Aristotle in De Anima iii, encoded information, while intelligible is not actually known. For actual knowing to occur we need more than the presence of intelligibility, we need the simultaneous actualization of two potencies: the object's intelligibility (as neurally encoded) needs to become actually known, and the subject's capacity to be informed (Aristotle calls it nous pathetikos = "passive intellect," because it is receptive) needs to be actually informed.

Until this dual actualization happens, we have a mere physical state -- something fully describable in terms of its intrinsic material properties. After the actualization, we have an intentional state -- one about the encoded contents.

This operation, the conversion of materially encoded intelligibility to a specific act of awareness, is not a physical operation, for such operations can only change the intrinsic form of states, they cannot make them directed to something else, as intentional states are. So, we need a subsystem of mind that is not describable by physics.

This view is fully compatible with all that we know from neuroscience. For example, it tells us why defective processing leads to defective thinking. (Awareness is presented with defectively encoded contents.) So, it represents no rejection of scientific understanding. It just says that to be aware we need not only contents to be aware of, but a subjective component aware of those contents.

What do you make of the pairing of 'meaning' and its 'vehicle'? For instance, the intelligible aspect of the voice as opposed to its arbitrary sound. Another example would be a chair grasped as a chair and the sensation organized by that grasping. One way to understand 'matter' would be as the opposite of pure meaning. Not mind but just meaning or form. These would be the poles of a continuum. — sign

The hylomorphic theory (the analysis of bodies into matter and form) has a long and venerable history. In my book, and in my article "A New Reading of Aristotle's Hyle," I distinguish three incompatible versions (those of Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas) and I am sure there are more. You seem to be hinting at another.

Your question opens the whole of semiotics for discussion, so there is not time for a complete answer. Clearly, there are natural signs like smoke and conventional signs like the spoken word. The meaning of natural signs is generally grounded in a causal relation and consequent mental association, a la Hume. Conventional signs also signify by association, but the association is grounded and acquired culturally.

My question to you is how would you understand meaning, without some implicit or explicit dependence on mind? It seems to me that the meaning of a sign is information it evokes in the mind of the recipient.

It's not clear to me that we ever have pure meaning. — sign

I am unsure what you have in mind when you speak of "pure meaning." For some, the term might invoke the idea of God as Pure Intelligibility. If you mean that we have difficulty in communicating exactly what is in our mind to the mind of another, I could hardly agree more. Because of our varying life experiences, even the most precise words can have different associations in you than in me.

To grasp something as a thing is already to grasp it as a unity, to install a boundary between it and not-it. — sign

Yes, that is Aristotle's understanding of a substance -- an ostensible unity -- a "one" we can point out.

I think that one can (not at all must) argue that the 'intellect' is one more sign within a steam of signs that refers to relationships between those signs. This is being as signs, including signs like 'consciousness' and 'physical.' These signs can occur in such a way that 'I' have the experience of being an 'I' or an intellect. — sign

Clearly, when we quote words, we mean to consider them as signs. Still, since words express thoughts, thoughts are logically and temporally prior to the words that express them. Thoughts again are signs, but as John of St. Thomas points out in his Ars Logica, a very different kind of sign. Physical signs have a physical form that needs to be recognized before we can grasp their meaning. If I can't read your writing, or if I mistake smoke for dust, they fail to signify. These are Instrumental Signs.

Ideas are very different. We do not need to recognize an idea as an idea for it to signify. It signifies transparently, as it were -- without the need to be "seen" first. It is only in retrospect, if at all, that we realize that to think of an apple, we employed an <apple> idea. Ideas are Formal Signs. While instrumental signs can do physical things (scatter light, vibrate membranes), all formal signs can do is signify.

So, while consciousness involves signs, they are not the instrumental signs we typically think of. The signs of consciousness are formal signs -- signs that do not involve what you are calling a vehicle.

Going deeper, since the formal signs that are our thoughts can do only one thing -- point beyond themselves to their potential referents -- no ultimate analysis can end at the sign. To get a fundamental understanding we need to consider the relation of sign and referent, and so the nature of the referent.

Thus, if there were no subject of experience, 'I' and the <I> idea it expresses would be empty. They might have meaning, but that meaning would lack an existential referent. Clearly, each of us is a continuing subject of experience. So, while 'I' is a sign, its referent is not.

My question is whether we can ever have pure information? Clearly we have the concept of information that is able to be 'encoded in any number of physical forms' via a 'shared convention.' But is this a merely theoretical sundering of a primordial unity? We might also ask if we ever experience the present as an instant or whether this too attaches a mathematical concept to something that is not a point. — sign

I think this is a very good question, and one that is difficult to articulate. If we take Claude Shannon's definition of information as the reduction of possibility, then information is essentially limiting and complete limitation results in non-being -- nothingness. But, we have a contrary notion of information, one about intelligibility, about being aware of reality. As opposed to Shannon's notion, this kind of information grows as our awareness increases, and reaches its ultimate realization in the awareness of Pure Being -- God.

We might also ask if we ever experience the present as an instant or whether this too attaches a mathematical concept to something that is not a point. — sign

I think mystical awareness might be what you are thinking of. If you're religious you might read St. John of the Cross. If you want a more philosophical account, W. T. Stace and D.T. Suzuki are good starting points. Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness is an atheist perspective.

Forgetting this is a prime example of Whitehead's Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness (thinking what exists only in abstraction is the concrete reality in its fullness). — Dfpolis

This seems important to me. I get a similar idea from Hegel. Do you have an opinion on Hegel? — sign

I'm not well-read in 19th century German philosophy, so any opinion I have would be ill-informed.

At the beginning of natural science, we abstract the object from the subject — Dfpolis

Would you not say that this happened even before natural science? The division of subject and object just seems so useful that it's hard to imagine it not being in play long before science as we know it. Along with it I'd expect there to be the 'ur-science' of unthematized induction. — sign

I am not talking about when the distinction came to be. It has a long history. You can find it in early Vedic works. I am talking about a conscious decision to focus on one to the exclusion of the other. This exclusion is not present in Aristotle, for example. In thinking about the mind, he includes both objective and subjective data. His analysis of intentional operations is paralleled with physical hypotheses about the mechanisms of sensation and first-hand anatomical work. The fact that he thought that the blood vessels were data conduits and the heart the central processing organ is incidental to the fact that he saw the need to understand physical and intentional data equally important.

This is great. What is maybe not addressed is the metaphoricity of language. While some meaning can be represented as a stream of bits, it's not obvious to me that meaning in general can be. — sign

Of course. We can only look at so much at any one time. In chapter 4 of my book, I deal with the rules of evidence and have a long discussion of analogical reasoning, of which metaphoric reasoning is a type.

The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness loses its power when "physical" things are simply described as things that have causal power, and both "matter" and "ideas" have causal power. The Fallacy is in thinking that ideas and matter are different types of things. — Harry Hindu

I disagree. The fallacy is forgetting that, when we abstract, we leave contextual data on the table.

Things all share being, but they differ in how they share being. As matter and ideas have non-overlapping definitions, they are different.

Okay, so now it's "you" that has an intent that changes, just as an apple has a color that changes. — Harry Hindu

Yes. I am what has changed. One intent ended. Another came to be. I remained. The point in contention was whether there was continuity in the intent rather than in the intending subject.

In a change of intention, what is the same is not part of the original intention, but the intending subject. We simply stop believing in Santa, and start not believing in Santa. The Principle of Excluded Middle forbids a continuous transformation as in the physical case. Even though the weight of evidence may accumulate slowly, the change of intent is discontinuous. — Dfpolis

Yes, but WHY did you believe in Santa in the first place, and now why do you not? For no reason at all? For no cause at all? — Harry Hindu

As I said, "Even though the weight of evidence may accumulate slowly, the change of intent is discontinuous." So, not without cause.

If there were no parts outside of parts in reality, the mind would have no reason to separate them in thought. — Dfpolis

The mind is just another process of reality and functions at a certain frequency relative to the other processes in reality. Time speeds up and slows down based upon your mental state, just as lethargic lizards need to warm up in order to speed up their mental processing to become more aware of those fast-moving predators. Your relative location in space/time relative to the size and speed of everything will influence the minds perception of everything. Slow processes appear as stable solid objects, while fast processes appear as blurs, or popping in and out of existence. — Harry Hindu

How is any of this an argument against my claim that matter has parts outside of parts?

What is your take on evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind? — Harry Hindu

I think that our psychology is largely based on our physical nature, and that nature is largely the result of evolution. So, I have no problem with looking at evolution to find reasons for various psychological dispositions. I am, however, generally opposed to any approach that is confined to a single projection of reality.

As for the computational theory of mind, I agree that the brain is a data processing organ and control system, but the computational theory of mind goes beyond this well-founded conclusion. I see some major problems: (1) Confusing instrumental signs, such as computer states, with formal signs such as ideas. (See my response to @Sign above.) (2) Dealing only with the contents of awareness, and not with the act of awareness. (3) Physical states have no intrinsic meaning. What, for example, does an abbababa state mean? It depends on the conventions we use, such as assigning 1 or 0 to a or b and the order in which the bits are read (left to right, the reverse, or something else). As a result, to determine the meaning of a state we have to look beyond the machine to the mind(s) assigning the conventions.

It seems to me that the meaning of a sign is information it evokes in the mind of the recipient. — Dfpolis

This is a passive/substantive notion of "mind". And it might fit a dyadic Saussurian notion of semiotics. But I prefer a triadic Peircean approach that fits the modern neurocognitive understanding of "mind" as an active process - an embodied modelling relation.

So the emphasis shifts to how intentionality actually engages with materiality. There is nothing much going on unless an idea is acting causally with material effect. There has to be that connection - that aspect of reality covered by finality or downward causation where purposes constrain the free play of material events.

Semiotics only makes physicalist sense if the ultimate goal - of information being used to regulate physical flows - is kept firmly in the foreground of the metaphysics. So there is no passive "recipient" - the Cartesian ghost in the machine. Semiotics is just about habits of interpretance. A sign is informational in that it acts like a logic switch to release a developed pattern of regulative behavior. Meaning is not evoked. It is meaningful action which is evoked.

To talk about meaning in and of itself in this kind of passive/substantive way would be an example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Meaning is just a willingness to act in response to a sign. And the fact that some habit of interpretance is meaningful remains forever open to emprical correction. The consequences of acting in a habitual way either reinforce or weaken the habit in question.

So again, a triadic or enactive semiotics closes the supposed explanatory gap. It divides the world cleanly into the two parts of the information and the matter, the constraints and the degrees of freedom, the downward acting formal/final causes and the upwards constructing material/efficient causes. Then it also does the other thing of showing how what gets separated then becomes connected by an actual relation, a functional process.

It is the hylomorphic story. But updated by a clearer modern understanding of the science of semiosis. We now get the trick of how codes - like genes, neurons, words and numbers - can anchor the self-organising complexity of semiotic systems like life and mind.

My question to you is how would you understand meaning, without some implicit or explicit dependence on mind? It seems to me that the meaning of a sign is information it evokes in the mind of the recipient. — Dfpolis

I'm happy to answer this, since this is the very heart of the issue. I mention again that the theory I'm presenting is to speculative or strange to actually live by. I enjoy it nevertheless.

Signs are beings here. What we usually divide into concepts and objects are both understood as signs (intelligible unities of sensation and emotion). Now 'sensation' and 'emotion' are still misleading subjective here. The 'subject' and the 'object' are both just signs that appear among others. Even 'God' is one more sign, though this sign can be understood as the name of the sign-stream in which it appears. The sign is the unity of signifier and signified. Note that collapsing the subject to one more sign radically changes the meaning of 'sign.' We could also use 'object' or 'being' instead of 'sign.' The 'mental' and the 'non-mental' are 'gone' here. Experience can then be understood as a sequence of signs/beings. As a final move, however, we have to consider the radical continuity of meaning. Meaning 'streams,' as I believe your very reading of this sentence shows. And note that the end of this sentence determines the meaning of its beginning. The past comes after its own future. So even 'stream' is too unidirectional of a metaphor. Becoming is not 'one-way.' One might call this is a theology of 'Becoming.' We can also call it a thought-experiment. I like that it gets us out of all kinds of problems (perhaps creating its own beyond its impracticality.)

Still, since words express thoughts, thoughts are logically and temporally prior to the words that express them. — Dfpolis

I understand this view, but I have the sense of thinking in words. Certainly one can discover something in a silent monologue and then speak out. But does this monologue require words? Or does it at least mostly require words ('signifier' along with 'signified' in an indissoluble unity?

Thus, if there were no subject of experience, 'I' and the <I> idea it expresses would be empty. They might have meaning, but that meaning would lack an existential referent. Clearly, each of us is a continuing subject of experience. So, while 'I' is a sign, its referent is not. — Dfpolis

Of course this is an important point. The theory I'm presenting as a though-experiment needs the signs to refer to one another in order to generate a sense of the subject. The sign-stream or being-stream is profoundly organized into an experience of being an 'I' who perceives itself, others, and objects in a world. Putting this theory aside, I think even in ordinary experience that the 'I' is not perfectly present to itself. The meaning of 'I' is elusive, although we use it successfully in everyday life. I've been influenced by the later Wittgenstein and Heidegger. I postulate a 'streaming' or 'smear' of meaning (including the meaning of 'I'), which is revealed by really 'looking' at the movement of meaning in sentences.

I think mystical awareness might be what you are thinking of — Dfpolis

Yes I think that figures in. 'Reality is one.' The 'streaming' I mentioned is indissoluble. What is the relationship between phenomenology and mysticism? Are mystics non-conceptual or just precisely aware of the movement of concepts?

I'm not well-read in 19th century German philosophy, so any opinion I have would be ill-informed. — Dfpolis

Ah, well Hegel used 'abstraction' in a similar way as a kind of deficient thinking of the 'understanding' which only rips things out of their context. He is a supreme holist, one might say.

By the way, great response. And thanks for taking the time.

I made a similar point in the previous thread ("Fallacies of Strawson's Argument vs. Free Will"). Physical desires begin with a natural deficit signaled, neurally and/or endocrinologically, to the brain. There the response can be purely physical (not involving awareness and so not rising to the level of intentionality), or we can be aware of the signaled state, in which case intentionality enters. — Dfpolis

Why would you not call this prior state an intentional state as well? Under your preferred definition, "aboutness", the "natural deficit" which develops into hunger is intentional, as it surely points to something beyond itself, the well-being of the animal. Intentionality is central to the "feeling" from the very beginning, prior to being grasped by consciousness. So intentionality is prior to consciousness.

Naturalism is a vaguely defined and, in my considered and elaborated view, irrational movement motivated by an a priori prejudice against what its proponents call "spooky" realities. — Dfpolis

A theist would say that. But scientific naturalism accepts the empirical evidence that life and mind evolved and so there are good grounds to expect nothing spooky or transcendent going on. That then leads to an appreciation of a systems approach anchored in the immanence of Aristotelian four cause thinking. — apokrisis

Denigrating what I say because I am a theist is an instance of the genetic fallacy, verging on ad hominem. I have sound reasons for my judgement, elaborated in hundreds of pages of well-documented text.

I am not rejecting methodological naturalism in natural science. I simply do not see the abstract and limited consideration of data on which natural science is (rightly) based as rational grounds for the a priori exclusion of logical possibilities -- which is what metaphysical naturalists do. Their blindness with respect to their to the fundamental assumptions, their preference for the a priori over the a posteriori, and their unwillingness to consider fully what is logically possible run counter to the entire scientific mindset.

Aristotelian thinking, rigorously applied, leads us to such "spooky" realities as an agent intellect operative in an immaterial theater of operation and the logical completion of science by an ultimate cause rightley called "Self-thinking Thought."

It seems to me that the meaning of a sign is information it evokes in the mind of the recipient. — Dfpolis

This is a passive/substantive notion of "mind". And it might fit a dyadic Saussurian notion of semiotics. But I prefer a triadic Peircean approach that fits the modern neurocognitive understanding of "mind" as an active process - an embodied modelling relation. — apokrisis

You are reading a lot more into my short description, "evokes," than I intended. I do not think of the mind as a purely passive recipient of information. My seconding of Aristotle's treatment of ideogenesis as involving a twofold actualization (in response to Wayfarer above in this thread) makes this clear. The twofold actualization requires the mind to have a aspect operative in the intentional theater of operations prior to the actualization. This is Aristotle's nous poiêtikos (= agent or active intellect), which, for phenomenological reasons, I identify with our power of directed awareness.

So, I have no problem with Peirce's analysis of sign, object, and interpretant. You will find my take on (instrumental) signs as triadic relations in my video "#40 Knowledge as a Sign" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3APhv_I3p8), which is part 4 of my series on knowledge.

Still, I do not want to divert the thread into a full-blown discussion of semiotic issues.

I prefer a triadic Peircean approach that fits the modern neurocognitive understanding of "mind" as an active process - an embodied modelling relation. — apokrisis

While I have thought a great deal about presentation, re-presentation and modelling in the structure of formal and informal theories, that would also take us off on a major tangent. While I agree that the mind does a great deal of modelling, I think it is an error to think of mind primarily as a modelling process.

So there is no passive "recipient" - the Cartesian ghost in the machine. — apokrisis

Of course there is no ghost in the machine, passive or active. There are integral human beings which have material and intentional operations -- operations describable by physics and operations that are not. I have given my reasons for holding that there are human operations not describable by physics. You have chosen not to rebut any of them. Instead, you are making dogmatic and unsupported claims as though I had not made my case.

Meaning is not evoked. It is meaningful action which is evoked. — apokrisis

No, meaning need not result in action. Meaning is found in theoretical reflection as well as in practical reasoning. What action results from being able to distinguish essence and existence, or knowing that we cannot prove the consistency of arithmetic?

Actually I don’t see how anything could be ‘neurologically encoded’. DNA is a code but I can’t see how neurons could encode anything. — Wayfarer

Neurons encode data in their firing rates. Neural nets are systems of connections that develop to favor or inhibit successful responses, allowing them to be "learned."

The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness loses its power when "physical" things are simply described as things that have causal power, and both "matter" and "ideas" have causal power. — Harry Hindu

I did not notice this. There is no reason to think that everything with causal power is material in any commonly accepted sense. The laws of nature are unextended and appear to be unchanging, so they have none of the characteristics thought to define material objects. Still they cause physical phenomena to operate as they do.

The common word for anything that can act is "being."

My question to you is how would you understand meaning, without some implicit or explicit dependence on mind? It seems to me that the meaning of a sign is information it evokes in the mind of the recipient. — Dfpolis

...

Signs are beings here. What we usually divide into concepts and objects are both understood as signs (intelligible unities of sensation and emotion). — sign

Signs exist, and so are beings, but the problem is that merely potential realities, such as intelligibility, have no actual existence. So, it can't be known directly. Intelligibility can only be known by experiencing cases where it's actually understood -- implying the existence of a mind that understands it.

The sign is the unity of signifier and signified. — sign

Conventional signs have no intrinsic unity. They are linked by some external convention, such as agreeing to think of actual apples when we read "apples," and that agreement represents acts of will by those consenting to the convention.

The 'mental' and the 'non-mental' are 'gone' here. — sign

No, they're merely implicit instead of explicit.

And note that the end of this sentence determines the meaning of its beginning. — sign

There are different kinds of meaning. Simplistically, individual words mean concepts of objects, actions, aspects and relations. Sentences generally mean judgements, which assert relations between concepts. Still, context helps specify meaning. So, as we come to know the context, the meaning of the individual words becomes less ambiguous.

Still, since words express thoughts, thoughts are logically and temporally prior to the words that express them. — Dfpolis

I understand this view, but I have the sense of thinking in words. — sign

I agree. We often think in words. Still, I see myself often searching for the right word(s) to express what I think, and occasionally fail. Thus, my thoughts have priority over even my internal monologue.

The theory I'm presenting as a though-experiment needs the signs to refer to one another in order to generate a sense of the subject. — sign

But, doesn't that, like the consistency theory of truth, leave us out of touch with reality? We check the truth of what we believe, the adequacy of our semiotic structures, by comparing them to experience. And, to have experience, we need experiencing subjects.

Putting this theory aside, I think even in ordinary experience that the 'I' is not perfectly present to itself. The meaning of 'I' is elusive, although we use it successfully in everyday life. — sign

We agree. We do not know even ourselves a priori, but only in the experience of living. We are an integrated set of powers, and, as I said above about potencies, we know them only when they are actualized. So, I think we can always do more than we know.

What is the relationship between phenomenology and mysticism? Are mystics non-conceptual or just precisely aware of the movement of concepts? — sign

This is a deep subject. Being trained as a scientist, I used to dismiss mysticism as unworthy of investigation. Reading W.T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy, changed that. Since then I have educated myself by actually reading the literature. Stace provides a starting point, but he only scratches the surface.

I see the ontology of mysticism from a Thomist, not a Platonic or Kantian, perspective -- not that Aquinas had much to say about mystical experience. So, I do not see phenomena as opposed to noumena, but as revealing them "though a mirror darkly."

This is how I think of mystical awareness:
God maintaining our existence is identically our existence being maintained by God. Because of this identity, we are inseparable from God, and the divine intelligibility, which is unlimited, and so uninformative (unconceptualizable), is always present. Recall that information, which delimits and defines concepts, is the reduction of possibility, while God is unlimited being.
Normally, we turn our our attention, our awareness, to the world of limited being. If, for some reason, we break the fixation on limited being, our intellect, always in search of intelligibility, can turn to the divine intelligibility that is always dynamically present because of the above identity. So it is that we have direct experiences of God, who being unlimited, is not reducible to concepts.
I also think that, even while our awareness is thoroughly engaged in the world of limited being, we are vaguely aware of the presence of Unlimited Being. As I mentioned above, in connection with the inner monologue and the search for articulation, this awareness can be, with difficulty, articulated. The best articulations are sound proofs of the existence of God -- structures that articulate our awareness of the sustaining presence of God.
Again, the same awareness, a vague awareness of the intentionality behind our being, is what the Scholastics called synteresis -- the inner spark driving conscience.

By the way, great response. And thanks for taking the time. — sign

Thank you as well. You are welcome.

Why would you not call this prior state an intentional state as well? — Metaphysician Undercover

Because it is fully exhausted by its physical description. It is not "about" something else in the sense of Brentano. Our awareness of the state, on the other hand, is both and act in itself and points to the state it is aware of. So, it is intentional, while the original state is not.

Under your preferred definition, "aboutness", the "natural deficit" which develops into hunger is intentional, as it surely points to something beyond itself, the well-being of the animal. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, natural processes have ends, and as a result an intrinsic intentionality. That is the basis for Aquinas' Fifth Way to prove the existence of God and the reason I hold that the laws of nature are intentional realities. So, physicality is partly intentional. I am not denying that.

What I an asserting is that the concept of matter is orthogonal to the concept of intentionality and so intentional operations cannot be reduced to material operations. Just to be clear, in physics, we distinguish material states from the laws under which they evolve.

Intelligibility can only be known by experiencing cases where it's actually understood -- implying the existence of a mind that understands it. — Dfpolis

Speaking from the perspective of common sense, I of course agree.

Still, I see myself often searching for the right word(s) to express what I think, and occasionally fail. Thus, my thoughts have priority over even my internal monologue. — Dfpolis

I relate to an experience like that, but I tend to interpret it in terms of condensation. I'm reluctant to classify this 'cloud' as an actual thought.

We check the truth of what we believe, the adequacy of our semiotic structures, by comparing them to experience. And, to have experience, we need experiencing subjects. — Dfpolis

It looks like I'm basically describing a position like James'. Note that 'experience' must change its meaning radically once the idea is grasped. It is a ladder to be thrown away. James has no choice but to use subject-object language in order to be intelligible as he tries to lead subject-object thinking somewhere rich and strange.

My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff pure experience, then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one of its terms becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other becomes the object known. — James

http://fair-use.org/william-james/essays-in-radical-empiricism/does-consciousness-exist

Now I think that this wild theory can still account for what you say above. The only difference is that the subject and its experience are not 'absolute' entities but important repeating 'signs' in the stream.
I completely understand if others find this theory unacceptable, but it strikes me as an advanced metaphysical position worth considering, if only for the intellectual adventure.

This is how I think of mystical awareness:
God maintaining our existence is identically our existence being maintained by God. Because of this identity, we are inseparable from God, and the divine intelligibility, which is unlimited, and so uninformative (unconceptualizable), is always present. Recall that information, which delimits and defines concepts, is the reduction of possibility, while God is unlimited being.
Normally, we turn our our attention, our awareness, to the world of limited being. If, for some reason, we break the fixation on limited being, our intellect, always in search of intelligibility, can turn to the divine intelligibility that is always dynamically present because of the above identity. So it is that we have direct experiences of God, who being unlimited, is not reducible to concepts.
I also think that, even while our awareness is thoroughly engaged in the world of limited being, we are vaguely aware of the presence of Unlimited Being. As I mentioned above, in connection with the inner monologue and the search for articulation, this awareness can be, with difficulty, articulated. The best articulations are sound proofs of the existence of God -- structures that articulate our awareness of the sustaining presence of God.
Again, the same awareness, a vague awareness of the intentionality behind our being, is what the Scholastics called synteresis -- the inner spark driving conscience. — Dfpolis

Thanks for sharing that. For what it's worth, my own understanding of mystical awareness is not so different, though some might not grant me the word 'mysticism.' What I have in mind varies in its intensity. Nevertheless a sense of the infinite is usually at least somewhere in background. At stronger intensities I reach for phrases like 'behind language.' My influences are Christian, but this Christianity has passed through the 'fiery brook' of the Left Hegelians. For me the incarnation is central, and I suppose my mysticism inasmuch as I can keep and enjoy it is much like Blake's. The senses and feeling are not in any way put aside, and the forgiveness of sin or transcendence of accusation opens up an ability to praise this existence and feel like a son of God. For me the language doesn't matter much. In a desire to connect with others I use the words that will build a bridge. Of course I'm no saint! It's often myself I have to forgive.
Finally, for me religion is higher than politics. 'He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.' 'And He saw that it was good.'

Actually I don’t see how anything could be ‘neurologically encoded’. DNA is a code but I can’t see how neurons could encode anything.
— Wayfarer

Neurons encode data in their firing rates. Neural nets are systems of connections that develop to favor or inhibit successful responses, allowing them to be "learned." — Dfpolis

I'm sorry but I doubt that; or rather I believe that the idea of 'encoding' must be mistaken here.

I have an interesting book, 'Why Us?' by James Le Fanu. (It was the best book I read in 2010.) He's a UK medical journalist and author. It's a scientifically-informed rumination on the shortcomings of Darwinian biology and neuroscience with respect to human intellectual capacities.

The second half of the book is based on various findings from what was called 'the Decade of the Brain' which was an incredibly ambitious program to 'crack the neural code', encompassing thousands of researchers over a decade. I don't want to try and abstract the detail he presents, but one point is that all of the neural studies which attempted to understand the areas of the brain, or brain processes, involved in learning new words, via fMRI scans, were hopelessly inconclusive. They didn't look near to producing any kind of consistent or repeatable data in respect of how the brain goes about remembering a simple word.

In the case of the genetic code, the term 'encoding' is quite appropriate, because the correspondence between genes and attributes is reasonably well-established (with the caveat that epigenetics has shown that genes have to be activated in some sense). But I wouldn't dispute that DNA encodes information which is transmitted by the process of reproduction. That is the 'central dogma of molecular biology' (let alone 'he has his father's eyes').

But the correspondence between the brain and the elements of meaning is nothing like that at all. What about people who suffer brain damage, and whose brains re-configure themselves to compensate? That is one of the findings stemming from neuroplasticity. So they can re-learn language, say, using parts of the brain that are not usually associated with language at all. Of course I'm not proposing any kind of theory that explains these and many other uncanny aspects of neuroscience. But they do cast doubt on the idea of a kind of 1:1 relationship between brain function and content.

I think the idea of 'encoding' is what I call a 'rogue metaphor', that is, it is relying on the metaphor of how computers encode information - as they surely do - for the way the mind operates, when in fact it doesn't operate by codes or encoding, except for in the obvious sense that it can understand and create codes, because of language, which is the unique ability of h. sapiens.

When you consider what a 'code' really is, there aren't that many instances of them. I mean, science has been scanning the Universe for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) for decades, and found no evidence of anything like a code. (If they had, it would be big news.) You can say that the spectral footprints of atoms and stars are 'a code' but they are only so to a scientist who can interpret them; in themselves they don't convey information; nothing like a string of transmitted information has been found. I think the only examples of codes that science knows of, are human languages and symbolic systems (including maths and computer languages), and DNA, which transmits biological information.

I am not a dualist. I hold that human beings are fully natural unities, but that we can, via abstraction, separate various notes of intelligibility found in unified substances. — Dfpolis

What does 'fully natural' mean here? The whole point about theistic philosophies, which I had the impression you accept, is that there is an element in the human, namely, the soul, which transcends the (merely) natural.

Every progress in evolution is dearly paid for; miscarried attempts, merciless struggle everywhere. The more detailed our knowledge of nature becomes, the more we see, together with the element of generosity and progression which radiates from being, the law of degradation, the powers of destruction and death, the implacable voracity which are also inherent in the world of matter. And when it comes to man, surrounded and invaded as he is by a host of warping forces, psychology and anthropology are but an account of the fact that, while being essentially superior to all of them, he is the most unfortunate of animals. So it is that when its vision of the world is enlightened by science, the intellect which religious faith perfects realises still better that nature, however good in its own order, does not suffice, and that if the deepest hopes of mankind are not destined to turn to mockery, it is because a God-given energy better than nature is at work in us. — Jacques Maritain

Something with which any scholastic philosopher would concur, I would have thought.

When you consider what a 'code' really is, there aren't that many instances of them. I mean, science has been scanning the Universe for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) for decades, and found no evidence of anything like a code. (If they had, it would be big news.) You can say that the spectral footprints of atoms and stars are 'a code' but they are only so to a scientist who can interpret them; in themselves they don't convey information; nothing like a string of transmitted information has been found. I think the only examples of codes that science knows of, are human languages and symbolic systems (including maths and computer languages), and DNA, which transmits biological information. — Wayfarer

We agree that DNA is a code, but it doesn't transmit biological (or any other kind of) information during gene expression.

According to Hoffmeyer & Emmeche, it is inactive, and:
1) Determinate to the extent that it preserves identity through time.
2) Indeterminate with respect to material detail.

So, DNA isn't a code by your definition (either "a string of transmitted information", or something "which transmits biological information"). Do you still think DNA is a code? If so, what do you think a code really is?