I am of two minds about this. — Fooloso4

We do have that metaphor, and doubt doubles, so it seems the metaphor suggests an exception to complacent single-mindedness.

If we substitute the ‘I’ or ‘self’ for mind , then I think the issue of a unity comes down to whether perspective, interpretation and ‘ for-me-ness’ are fundamental features of any experiencing of a world. — Joshs

To me it seems contingent. It's convenient that there's one 'soul' or 'self' per body, because bodies have to be trained to wipe their asses and stop at red lights. Which of the fourteen souls that share a skull gets prosecuted for date rape? Which one is a captain and which one is a private?

To me it seems contingent. It's convenient that there's one 'soul' or 'self' per body, because bodies have to be trained to wipe their asses and stop at red lights. Which of the fourteen souls that share a skull gets prosecuted for date rape? Which one is a captain and which one is a private? — j0e

I agree it is contingent. But as a temporal flow its contingency unfolds as a synthetic unity from moment to moment. Not a soul or self as something unchanging throughout the contextual transformations of sense but a self remade each moment as new variation of itself. Self as a pragmatic ‘in order to ‘ , an always implying, anticipating beyond itself. The world always matters to me, is significant to me , is relevant to me in a new and particular way, but is always recognizable in its mattering. There is an experiential intricacy built on change but much more intimate than the arbitrariness of socially conditioned languaged sociality.

But as a temporal flow its contingency unfolds as a synthetic unity from moment to moment. Not a soul or self as something unchanging throughout the contextual transformations of sense but a self remade each moment as new variation of itself. Self as a pragmatic ‘in order to ‘ , an always implying, anticipating beyond itself. The world always matters to me, is significant to me , is relevant to me in a new and particular way, but is always recognizable in its mattering. — Joshs

I like much of this, but I still find the unity at least possibly contingent. I very much agree with the Heideggerian last sentence, except that 'me' becomes complex here. I like what Dreyfus writes about the 'who of everyday dasein,' which is something like a 'one' who is 'we.' But even calling it the 'one' might be inheriting too much, taking too much granted. It's our form of life to be trained to talk about ourselves as single personalities animating bodies. With conjoined twins, we recognize two individuals who are entangled bodily, presumably because they have their own heads. The 'mind' and its 'divine spark' are in the head. The idea of a brain transplant confuses us. Why couldn't the world always matter to a plurality of minds in a single body, matter to 'us in here'?

I'm not saying that I can't be convinced that the unity is necessary. I just don't yet know a knockdown argument.

The idea of a brain transplant confuses us. Why couldn't the world always matter to a plurality of minds in a single body, matter to 'us in here'? — j0e

Galen Strawson argues that the self is always different from one moment to the next, and there is nothing outside of the larger social norms to unify this subjectivity as an identity over time. In this view he is not far from this those say that self is nothing but a social construct, and that intersubjectivity is more fundamental than subjectivity , which is only a temporary position within a socially constituted field.
This may be what you mean by plurality of minds in a body. Marvin Minsky talked about a society of mind , and Francisco Varela described a groundlessness of being with no solid self. But then there are the discourses on the embodiment of mind, taking their cue from Merleau-Ponty. Mind is embodied in organism, organism is embedded in world , and all three interact reciprocally such that a dynamic autonomy of self-organization is evinced. This autonomy provides the organism with holistically organized aims that give it a normative character. This argues for a notion of self as reflection of the ongoing normative consistency of organismic directedness.

Galen Strawson argues that the self is always different from one moment to the next, and there is nothing outside of the larger social norms to unify this subjectivity as an identity over time. — Joshs

:up:

This is basically what I'm saying (and find also in other words in Witt's 'Blue Book.')

In this view he is not far from this those say that self is nothing but a social construct, and that intersubjectivity is more fundamental than subjectivity , which is only a temporary position within a socially constituted field.
This may be what you mean by plurality of minds in a body. — Joshs

This is what I was hinting at with Dreyfus on Heidegger's 'one' or 'who of everyday dasein.' Really it's two different but related points. Meaning is public or between 'individuals.' This endangers a traditional view of a single mind that gazes as privately possessed meaning-stuff. To be able to talk is (roughly) to be primarily an 'us' rather than a 'me.'

Marvin Minsky talked about a society of mind , and Francisco Varela described a groundlessness of being with no solid self. — Joshs

:up:

That's the 'softwhere' I'm talking about, a groundless society of mind, groundless in the sense that its quasi-foundational quasi-elements are more deeply habitual than others. IOW, the non-foundation or fragile foundation we have is contingent social practices, especially dominant conventions, such as the rule of one-legal-person-per-skull.

Mind is embodied in organism, organism is embedded in world , and all three interact reciprocally such that a dynamic autonomy of self-organization is evinced. — Joshs

I like embodied mind and embedded organisms, but I don't find autonomy clear in this context. I tend to associate it with people who can be more or less autonomous. How does the world fit in except perhaps as a background or extended body?

BTW, my Witt thread hasn't taken off yet. The stuff we are talking about fits in well there, so I invite you to join.

I like embodied mind and embedded organisms, but I don't find autonomy clear in this context. I tend to associate it with people who can be more or less autonomous. How does the world fit in except perhaps as a background or extended body? — j0e

If there is no dynamic aurnonomy , what makes an organism a dynamically functioning unity? Is it just a loose conglomeration of modules, or is there a functional unity to it , as Piaget argued?

Let’s say an organism is organized hierarchically, and even the most trivial aspects of its functioning are authorized or guided by more superordinate structures. Let’s then say that as the organism interacts with its world it assimilates a new aspect of the world to itself but at the same time accommodates and adapts its structures to the novel aspects of what it assimilates from the world. In sum, the structural organization of the creature as a whole is changed in every interaction with its world , but as a variation on a gradually changing theme. If this were not the case, then every interaction would produce an entirely new organism. it then would no longer be a living system but a rock.

One could look at mind the same way , in terms of a hierarchical organization that functioning as a unity , and that doesn’t ‘exist ‘apart from its being changed by the world that it is exposed to every moment. So it really has no internality to it. It is just a pole of self-world interaction. What I am pointing to here is not a solipsism but the exact opposite , a different and more radical notion of the social than that which believes in the coherence of the idea of the social as interpersonal. I’m my view interpsonal means something differ to every participant in it , and this isn t because a mind resists the social by being a box of inner stuff. On the contrary the so-called linguistic interpersonal notion of the social is a fiction. More precisely , it is a derived abstraxtion because it begins too late. One has to begin with radical temporality rather than language as Witt conceives it. Radical temporality reveals a more intimate and intricate beginning of the social, as both Heidegger and Derrida argued .

OK, now I think I see what you mean. Autonomy draws the boundary. I was stuck in the more honorific sense of the word, as the sort of conscious goal of an individual.

This also flows into my point about the convenience of the single self. The body is a natural 'first boundary' (or second, if the skull comes before) for us to draw.

In the following remarkable passage in response to a question from Thomas Baldwin concerning
the relation between the alterity produced by temporality and the alterity of linguistic sociality, Derrida appears to argue that the way in which time makes me other than myself from moment to moment is a more fundamental kind of sociality than that of linguistic intersubjectivity. I see this as a crucial point , and is certainly to my paprika concerning the unity over time of the self. It is a unity of transformations, but what unites it isn’t some dominating idealist center but the opposite, an utter lack of the arbitrary and polarizing force that is implicit in Witt’s and social constructionist models of socially.

Baldwin:

Anyone who reads Derrida having already familiarised themselves with the debates in English-language philosophy that we associate with Wittgenstein 's 'Private Language Argument' is bound to be struck by the similarities between, on the one hand, Wittgenstein' s critique of the possibility of private ostensive definition, and, on the other, by Derrida 's critique of the 'myth of
presence’. But then one difference must equally strike a reader; namely, that whereas Wittgenstein's argument focuses on a contrast between the private and the public, Derrida's focuses on a contrast between the present and the absent. So my second question is this: is
differance, this 'originally repetitive structure' of language, essentially public? Is some involvement with others essentially implicated in the use of language that counts as 'differance' ? There are suggestions in Derrida to this effect. For example he writes: Intersubjectivity is
inseparable from temporalization taken as the openness of the present upon an outside of itself, upon another absolute present' (Derrida 1973, p.a 84n). But, as this passage indicates, for him it is the 'temporalization' of meaning that carries the burden of his argument: it is the ecstatic potentially repetitive structure of differance that bursts the confines of anything merely present
through its essential reference to that which is not present. But is there here a distinction - between other times and other minds - without a difference?
...is the involvement of others in differance something essentially derivative - dependent upon the ecstatic structure of temporalization? Or is it absolutely fundamental in a way that might connect with that Hegelian conception of self-consciousness that is utterly dependent upon involvement with others?

Derrida’s response:

“In the structure of the trace you have something that perhaps Wittgenstein would call 'public’: , but what I would simply call 'beyond my absolute re-appropriation’ : It is left outside, it is heterogeneous and it is outside. In short, then, perhaps there is here a possible link with
Wittgenstein, but it will have to be reconstructed around the history of these notions of 'private ' and 'public', and I am too concerned with and interested in politics and history to use them so easily.

Now the next question, again a very difficult one, has to do with the distinction between the other and time, between alterity, intersubjectivity and time. Again, you make recourse to Wittgenstein in a way which I cannot address here. I quote you: “If one thinks back to the
Wittgensteinian debates again, it is clear that there are substantive issues concerning the alleged normativity of meaning and the role of a community in sustaining the practice of a language-game which involves other minds rather more than other times. “ I would immediately
agree on the level of the normativity of meaning. No doubt, for a meaning to be understood and for discussion to start, for literature to be read, we need a community that has, even if there are conflicts, a certain desire for normativity, and so for the stabilization of meaning, of grammar, rhetoric, logic, semantics and so on. (But, by the way, if these imply a community, I wouldn’t call it a community of 'minds' for a number of reasons - not least those touched on In response to your last question regarding the 'inner' .) This is obvious. And, again, I would say that it is true even for animals, for animal societies. They form a community of interpretation. They need
that. And some normativity. There is here some 'symbolic culture‘.
But this is not really the context in which I connect the question about the other who is 'radically other' (that is, is another 'origin of the world' , another 'ego' if you want, or another 'zero point of perception') with that of 'another moment' in time (between this now and the other
now, the past now and the now to come, there is an absolute alterity, each now is absolutely
other ). So how do I connect the question of the constitution of time (and the alterity within the
living present) and the question of the other (of the 'alter ego' as Husserl would say) ? Well my quick answer would be that the two alterities are indissociable. A living being - whether a human being or an animal being - could not have any relation to another being as such without this alterity in time, without, that is, memory, anticipation, this strange sense (I hesitate to call it
knowledge) that every now, every instant is radically other and nevertheless in the same form of the now. Equally, there is no ‘I’ without the sense as well that everyone other than me is radically other yet also able to say 'I’, that there is nothing more heterogeneous than every 'I’ and nevertheless there is nothing more universal than the 'I’.”(Arguing with Derrida)

Well my quick answer would be that the two alterities are indissociable. — Derrida

Nice quote. I read 'indissociable' as not giving priority to one or the other. I like the critique of presence and punctiform 'now.' In some ways, philosophy has to keep beating back a mathematizing-idealizing-reifying tendency of the 'wax' to cool and solidify. Successful metaphors harden into cages. New metaphors depend on a dead context for traction.

This is wrong btw, — frank

Well, there's no point in me pursuing it if it's wrong. What's the latest thinking on the relationship between the ventral stream and language?

Well, there's no point in me pursuing it — Isaac

:up:

What? So you're just going to leave me hanging with regards to the right process? Come on man, don't be such a tease. Cite me a paper at least...

What? So you're just going to leave me hanging with regards to the right process? Come on man, don't be such a tease. Cite me a paper at least... — Isaac

The grey strawberries illusion shows that ”red” doesn't line up with some portion of the em spectrum.

The grey strawberries illusion shows that ”red” doesn't line up with some portion of the em spectrum. — frank

How does it do that? I mean, I can see how it shows that ”red” doesn't always line up with some portion of the em spectrum, but that's a different claim altogether.

Yep. Sometimes grey strawberries look red.

You have this and that. I have this, and that. You are one step closer. I am one step further away. You decide if I should continue when all my interest is on show. Good show!

The only fear you should have is that I release you before you finished wanting some much less interesting moment with whoever you wanted- like now- if you said yes. If something can replace you so that when you left you begun in such a way it still was you existing in our, the stayers, eyes, you can go I will send you. I plan to send you and whoever when you work this out, but, in a position as such there is more knowledge to gain.

You want the full details Facebook/wiyte.blog and my latest post.

Yep. Sometimes grey strawberries look red. — frank

Right.

We're still no closer to the way in which my description of a route from retinal ganglia to speech production was "wrong", which is, obviously, the bit I'm most interested in.

Right.

We're still no closer to the way in which my description of a route from retinal ganglia to speech production was "wrong", which is, obviously, the bit I'm most interested in. — Isaac

What do you mean when you agree that the strawberries look red? What does it mean for a thing to have an appearance?

Sorry, didn't see that.

unless that biological account has learned from constructivists like Piaget, Maturana and Varela. — Joshs

Exactly. A non reductionist account, an account that would start from the innate, pre-theoretical assumption, axiom, presupposition or a priori -- however you want to call it -- that our capacities for observation, perception and logic help us notice patterns, and thus give us a modicum of understanding and control over things and events. The non reductionist account would then use these capacities to explore and explore further the world, until such a point when one could propose a well-evidenced, logical theory for animal perception, how it emerged in evolution, how it works, what's its bag of tricks, and why it is indeed so useful to us.

(IOW, the exact opposite of what most materialists have been busy doing)

Such an exploration and validation of perception by itself may look circular, but I rather see it as an outward spiral, that starts from a kernel of intuition and explores the surroundings by going around in a spiral.

What do you mean when you agree that the strawberries look red? — frank

What it means is only that I've conceded that 'Red' is the correct word to use for the strawberries. Why I conceded that might be different in different contexts. some times it might be traceable back to the fact that some 700mn photons hit my retina, other times it might be traceable back to a memory of the colour of the objects matching that shape. There needn't be one cause. We have thousands of neural streams happening concurrently and the system is designed to only fire (move on to the next node) when there's sufficient triggers, so invariably there'll be more than one reason why it did so.

What does it mean for a thing to have an appearance? — frank

Same issue. A thing's having an appearance means only that I can recall to mind an image of it to describe the details of. I could mange that recall in any one of a hundred different ways, it could be triggered by any combination of hundreds of preceding neural events.

other times it might be traceable back to a memory of the colour of the objects matching that shape. — Isaac

That's not the explanation for the grey strawberries illusion (if it was meant to be.) Your brain is actually generating the experience of redness without any red light. It's pretty cool.

A thing's having an appearance means only that I can recall to mind an image of it to describe the details of. — Isaac

Yes, so our conflict is about wording. :up:

That's not the explanation for the grey strawberries illusion (if it was meant to be.) Your brain is actually generating the experience of redness without any red light. — frank

How are you supporting that assertion?

- To clarify. All you've got by way of self report is that they appeared red in retrospect. By third party all we have is that the person selected the word 'red'. If we look at fMRI we'll see activity in v4...

...none of which amounts to 'the experience of red'.

How are you supporting that assertion? — Isaac

here

- To clarify. All you've got by way of self report is that they appeared red in retrospect. By third party all we have is that the person selected the word 'red'. If we look at fMRI we'll see activity in v4... — Isaac

Remembering how things looked is a kind of experience.

...none of which amounts to 'the experience of red'. — Isaac

That's correct.

Sublimely, the expression of the color red is something to me, intollerable. Google Chrome red.

Some people believe there are infinite colors, not so, just ones discovered.

Right down to the rubillionth ant, the color black always annoyed me!

When we're talking mass amounts like the atom, some combination is in order to prevent infinite color regress, here here.

How are you supporting that assertion? — Isaac


here — frank

That doesn't support your assertion. All such illusions have the same properties I described above. What I'm trying to get across is that there are numerous pathways which may lead to behaviours indicating we think images (or parts of them) are red. An actual strawberry may take one route, a greyscale picture of a strawberry may take another, and a greyscale abstract image a third.

Remembering how things looked is a kind of experience. — frank

I didn't say 'remembering how things looked' I said 'appeared red in retrospect', they're not the same thing. One implies that some mental event happened 'the strawberries looked red' which we then recall. There's no evidence for that. The other describes the construction of a narrative, post hoc, to explain the circumstances we find ourselves in.

I'm not enthusiastic about continuing this discussion. Thanks for your responses.

Please, do not give up so easily...

I'm not enthusiastic about continuing this discussion. Thanks for your responses. — frank

Let me see if I can help out here. Undoubtedly one could link phenomenal appearances, memories, dreams, fantasies, etc to neural pathways stimulating clusters of neurons. But this reminds me a little of Skinner attempting to pair every word in the dictionary with a specific reinforced response. I don’t think Isaac is incorrect to reduce perceptipn to activation of arbitrary groupings of neurons. This will provide useful information depending on what one wants to know and how deeply one wants to understand it. But I think the reductive route offers a kind of explanation and prediction that misses something vital about both sensory perception and language, and that is that meaning of all kinds involve intentional acts that arise out of nested contexts of significance for the person. Events occur for people into personal contexts that imply forward and thus co-define and shape
what occurs into them. Neurons or clusters of neurons never function in isolation from ones bodily system as a whole. They belong to larger webs of implicating relations linking sense modalities to other sense modalities , embedding these within superordinate affective-intentional aims and purposes.


So let’s talk a look at what it might be like for a little girl to learn the color ‘red’ from this non-reductive vantage. You’ll notice that it doesn’t t contradict Isaac’s
account but rather enriches it.

So the mother is trying to teach her daughter the color red. What is the background context foe this from the girl’s perspective? If she hasn’t learned any of the other colors, then she would first have to learn the category ‘color’. Otherwise when she acknowledges seeing the color red when her mother points to it , she may simply be recognizing color in general. Of course ,an even more fundamental context here is that the girl is a participant in a a language community, that she is making a decision to respond to a request from her mother , etc. It was suggested that her motivation for correctly picking out the right color is she wants to please Mummy. Perhaps , but any number of motivations may also be in play , and these motivations are not extraneous to the meaning of the task and even the meaning of the word ‘red’ for her.

For instance , children have a voracious curiosity , as evidenced by the obsessive asking of the ‘why’ question.
This is an intrinsic motivation, to be able to anticipate events beyond the immediate present, to be a sense-maker. Even before the mother’s attempts to teach color
words , the child likely has pursued numerous explorations on their own of color, how different colors form a rainbow , how some colors make her feel bad and some good , She may already have come up with her own words to describe her experiences with color.

But beyond or before all these subjective variations in meaning of color , is there a specific set of neurons that fire when exposed to a specific wavelength?
I had described in an earlier post how the perception of color can be produced on a spinning half black half white wheel, where ‘red’ is a black line coming out from a black background and ‘blue’ is a black line receding into a black background. I suggested that color may be fundamentally this ‘popping out at me’ of warm
colors and ‘receding away from me’ of cool colors.
In other words , rather than just an arbitrary bunch of neurons firing , color would be a contextual
movement being perceived, just as binocular vision is a comparative relation between two sources of input .

And color as a whole must itself be a corrected rod it of more basic intentional correlations. Color implies the seeing of a surfaceIf one does t yet know what a surface is , then color will not emerge as a coherent sense. To construct a surface perceptually, one mist construct lit of the every changing stream
of sense impressions stable objects that remain as what they are when we move our eyes or head or body. I doubt if someone someone blind at birth and only attaining vision later in life would see color at all , at least not initially.

Even if one were to claim that somehow the behavior of this apparatus produced a color wavelength out of black and white, it wouldn’t explain the more significant feature that red vs blue corresponds to , is produced by , opposing intentional contexts. The colors are what they are to us because they are DOING SOMETHING meaningful to us, in relation to our bodily comportment, not just resting in themselves as arbitrary sensations. And this meaningfulness of color implies into the motivational and goal-oriented contexts that I described above.

So what may the girl have learned of the parent succeeds in ‘teaching’ her to link the word ‘red’ to some feature of surfaces that both of them see similarly enough to differentiate from other colors? It wouldn’t just be a simple association between a word and a perceptual experience. It would be a whole situation that the girl learned, and the elements of this situation can only be artificially separated out into discrete items. The situational meaning would include the girl’s sense that something was important to her mother , what it was, and why it was. The situation would include the girl making a decision to comply , not comply , comply happily and with curiosity , or with indifference. It might involve excitement on the girl’s part that there might be a new achievement she could share with friends and maybe even teach them. When the mother begins pointing to objects and attempting to show that there is something common to all of them that forms a category, even before the girl connects her perception of red with this category , she may already know what it is like to learn a new category because she has played such games before. There is also the possibility that she never thought of red as a category. Perhaps for her each experience of red is so uniquely connected with that particular object that it never occurred to her to see it as something common to different objects.

So in sum, linking words and sensations is as complex and multivaried a social and psychological act as the perception of a senation itself.