No, I've never thought of it. Tell me briefly how a "surface semi-symmetrical in its continuity" would do what needs to be done here. — Constance
that's not what you said I said. You said:
Your statement implies the belief commonplace subjective experiences should be easily accessible to the objectivist methodologies of science. It also implies the subjective/objective distinction is a trivial matter and should therefore be no problem for science.
— ucarr
I didn't say or imply either of those things. — T Clark
...As far as I can see, there's no reason to think that consciousness can't be understood in terms of principles we already are aware of. I don't see any hard problem. — T Clark
...it was an insult. — T Clark
The fact you don't recognize the difference tells me everything I need to know about whether or not to take you seriously. — T Clark
Wayfarer has already done this on our behalf. — ucarr
I often wonder just how much of what we believe is arrived at through such personal processes - some ideas seem to neatly complement our existing aesthetics and values. I find Husserl, such as I have read, engaging too. — Tom Storm
Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to and takes nothing away from the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there's anything lying behind them.
This mode is called emptiness because it's empty of the presuppositions we usually add to experience to make sense of it: the stories and world-views we fashion to explain who we are and the world we live in. Although these stories and views have their uses, the Buddha found that some of the more abstract questions they raise — of our true identity and the reality of the world outside — pull attention away from a direct experience of how events influence one another in the immediate present. Thus they get in the way when we try to understand and solve the problem of suffering. — Thanissaro Bhikkhu, What is Emptiness
. This ties in with the phenomenological idea of the 'lebenswelt' (life-world) and 'umwelt' (meaning-world), which is very different to the idea of the objective domain completely separate from the observer. It recognises the sense in which we 'construct', rather than simply observe, the world (which is also the understanding behind constructivism in philosophy.) — Wayfarer
Let me call it Scientific Logos.
Consider the following parallel,
As a crystal chandelier is a workup (constructive metabolism) from a handful of sand, so a conversation between two humans is a workup (constructive metabolism) from a moon orbiting its planet (earth_moon).
Under the implications of the above parallel, consciousness is an emergent property of two (or more) interacting gravitational fields. Thus a conversation, such as the one we're having, is the deluxe version
(replete with all of the bells and whistles) of the moon orbiting the earth and causing the tides and global air currents that shape earth's weather.
Language, being the collective of the systemic boundary permutations of a context or medium, cognitively parallels the phenomena animating the material universe.
That we humans have language suggests in our being we are integral to a complex surface of animate phenomena via intersection of gravitational fields. Action-at-a-distance elevates the self/other, subject/object bifurcation to a living history with unified, internally consistent and stable points-of-view better known as the selves of human (and animal) society.
Under constraint of brevity, a good thing, let me close with a short excerpt from my short essay on the great triumvirate of gravity-consciousness-language.
There is a direct connection between human consciousness and the gravitational field.
Gravitation is the medium of consciousness.
One can say that the gravitational attraction between two material bodies is physical evidence that those material bodies are aware of each other.
Under this construction, consciousness is an emergent phenomenon arising from the gravitational field.
This tells us that the study of consciousness (and especially the hard problem of consciousness) begins with the work of the physicist.
Gravity waves, the existence of which has been established, can also be called waves of consciousness.
Since matter is the substrate of consciousness, one can infer that the material universe is fundamentally configured to support and sustain consciousness.
Just as there can be geometrization of gravitation through relativity, there can be geometrization of consciousness through gravitation. This is a claim held by astrologers dating back to antiquity.
The (material) universe itself is a conscious being. — ucarr
This sounds quite old fashioned and perhaps seven quasi religious. I'm not sure I have ever thought the world could be understood. The more time I spend on this site, the more this seems reasonable — Tom Storm
There is something here. but the language has to change. First, remove the science-speak, for you have stepped beyond this, for keep in mind that when consciousness and its epistemic reach is achieved by identifying object relations as gravitational in nature, and then placing the epistemic agency in this, as you call it, logos, you are redefining gravity as a universal, not law of attraction, but connectivity and identity, and I do remember thinking something like this was a way to account for knowledge relationships: identity. The distance is closed because there is no distance between objects that are not separated. And I mentioned that Husserl did hold something like this, but the "logos" was not scientific, it was a phenomenological nexus of intentionality. And since gravity is at this level of inquiry a strictly naturalistic term (to talk like Husserl), the description of what this unity is about has to go to a more fundamental order of thought, phenomenology. Gravity is now a phenomenon, an appearing presence. Ask a phenomenologist what a force is, what the curviture of space is, and you will first have see that these are conceived in theory and they are terms of contingency. One doesn't witness space or forces, but only effects from which forces are inferred and the names only serve to ground such things in a scientific vocabulary.
Not gravity, with its connotative baggage, but phenomena, for this is all that is ever witnessed, ever can be witnessed. If it is going to be a universal connectivity of all things, I do think you are right to note that there is this term gravity that abides in everything and binds everything. I would remove the term and realize this connectivity does not belong to a scientific logos. It must be a term that is inclusive of the consciousness in which the whole affair is conceived and the epistemic properties are intended to explain. And this consciousness is inherently affective, ethical, aesthetic, and so on. For the nexus that connects me to my lamp and intimates knowing-in-identity is always already one that cares, in interested, fascinated, repulsed, and so on. A connection of epistemology not only cannot be conceived apart from these, it must have then as their principle feature, because these are the most salient things in all of existence. — Constance
Of course, gravity sounds a lot like God, then. For God is, sans the troublesome history and narratives, a metaethical, meta aesthetic metavalue grounding of the world.
You may not agree with the above, but for me, I think you are on to something. Gravity, I will repeat, never really was "gravity", for this is a term of contingency, See Rorty's Contingency, Irony and Solidarity for a nice account of this. When the matter goes to some grand foundation of connectivity, are we not in metaphysics? Or on its threshold? — Constance
What any DVD means depends on the content, whereas how it works has nothing to do with the content, to press the analogy. The hard problem is not about ’how the brain works’, it’s about the question of meaning. — Wayfarer
What turns living creatures into semiotic systems is their ability to interpret the world, and single cells, according to Markoš, have this ability because their behaviour is context-dependent. This is why even single cells are subjects, not objects, and this is why we recognize them as living creatures, not machines. — Marcello Barbieri, A Short History of Biosemiosis
My point is that collections of elementary particles are not just useful fictions but real things, — litewave
Isn't it just lumpen materialism? You still haven't allowed for intentionality other than as a byproduct or epiphenomenon of these essentially unintentional relations. — Wayfarer
Curious. Did you really think philosophy was just talking about itself? What is responsible for this is analytic philosophy, which has gotten lost, endlessly trying to squeeze new meanings out of familiar mundane thinking. — Constance
Yes - well, when you can demonstrate a self-creating machine that follows goals, then I will accept the answer. Because machines are human artefacts, produced intentionally to deliver a result. They embody the intention of the agent who builds them. — Wayfarer
You do see how the assertion that 'something just happened' does not actually amount to any kind of rationale? — Wayfarer
I studied Jung and Joseph Campbell for a year as an elective in the 1980's. — Tom Storm
between a science that recognizes that reality is inextricably tangled with human cognition and one that doesn't.
— T Clark
Any examples come to mind of sciences or scientists that do? — Wayfarer
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