Varela, Thompson, Gallagher, Petitot and others claim phenomenology can be naturalized once we transform and update our thinking about scientific naturalism so as to accommodate it. — Joshs

What an astounding assertion. Do they have any predictions about which century this update will be downloaded?

If sickness is the will of God then medicine, which Descartes took a keen interest in, is against the will of God. . — Fooloso4

Which part of the Meditations inspires you to suggest this?

What about embodied enactivist accounts that, following Merleau-Ponty, make intersubjectivity primary? — Joshs

There's a problem with trying to go from Merleau-Ponty to any of the hard sciences. There's just no bridge from his observations about what we can and can't separate, and biology, or its scientific mother, physics. Science starts with a methodological naturalism where analysis is built-in. There's no room for synthesis. Or if you think there is, you'd have to explain how.

There are non-human animals who adapt in terms of behavior, but not physically. An example close to home is mice and hamsters who escape from pethood. Unlike tame birds, who can't adapt to being wild once they're adults, some mammals can easily transition from dependent pets to independent, wild animals.

Could we argue that the neuroplasticity that allows mice and cats to become wild is also responsible for human so-called psychological adaptation? Perhaps it's just that humans ended up with such big brains that a more primitive adaptability present in all mammals is more pronounced in humans?

Whether or not we decide that it's reasonable to explain complex cooking techniques by an extension of something more primitive, what I'll note is that we've moved to the realm of speculation, not observation of what's actually happening.

Some proponents of embodied cognition would argue that the environment provides the body with all the stimulus necessary for navigation to food and shelter. So there's no need to assign inference to this navigation.

If that were true, then why do humans have a superior ability to adapt to diverse environments without any significant physical adaptation? And whatever the answer to this is, why do humans have this capability and few other animals do?

If I take the position of the embodied cognitionist, I'll have to explain why the traditional answer to this question, that is, that humans adapt psychologically, is wrong.

At the heart of my challenge is a form of multiple realizability recognized by Descartes in regard to wax. Why do we call a melted blob "wax" and a solid cube "wax"? Or as it relates to this topic:

The staple diet of the Guilford Indians was made from the acorns of white oaks, which were abundant where they lived. They would pound the acorns into blobs and then wrap them in the leaves of poison ivy, then bury these items in the sand under a running creek. A day or so later, they would take the items out and put them in a fire until the acorn dough turned black and had the consistency of charcoal. According to English observers, the result was sweet.

On the other hand, the Maasai of Africa eat milk, meat, fat, blood, honey, and tree bark.

So we have two very diverse adaptations. How do I explain how each of these takes place without any inferences? Without any concepts? With nothing but bodily engagement to the environment?

I think in order to adhere to this particular brand of embodied cognition, I'd have to posit some sort of bodily process that has not been discovered yet, but that would explain why there's no psychological adaptation going on.

Or, if I say that I don't have to explain anything because the Guildford Indians and the Maasai were both adapting physically, then I think I'll have to explain why humans have covered the globe in a way other animals haven't. What's special about us that our bodies adapt to diverse environments, but other animals have limited ranges?

The body does adapt, in that the strength of connections in your brain changes every time you learn something. It's simply a matter of us not being able to see and note the microscopic changes in brains hidden behind skulls. The changes to our bodies are there, and can be measured under the right circumstances, but it is easy to overlook such changes because they are hardly obvious. — wonderer1

So you would agree that if "embodied consciousness" refers to the belief that consciousness arises from the whole body, then it must be wrong, since the human body doesn't adapt to diverse earthly environments, but we adapt psychologically. You're saying all that's left is to assert that consciousness is associated with brain states. I agree with that. I don't think any serious philosopher would object to that. :up:

Consciousness is the blackboard (emptiness/space) upon which contents are written. — TheMadMan

I think this is the view of British Empiricists, but I don't know how to line it up with the idea of embodied consciousness.

:up:

Clarification: By consciousness I don't only mean awakening consciousness but whole levels of consciousness, known and unknown.

How would you describe the difference?
— frank

Consciousness is not caused, contents are.
Consciousness is not dependent on time and space, contents are.
Contents are epiphenomena, they can be created and/or ended, Consciousness is not subject to this kind of change (although it could be subject to a subtler evolution).

There are many other differences that are implied by these. — TheMadMan

Could you be more specific? I'm not following. Can you have consciousness without any content? Can you have content without consciousness? If there's a relationship, what is it?

You haven’t mentioned affect, emotion, feeling and mood. These are considered bodily by embodied approaches to cognition, and there is no consciousness that is devoid of affect. “Cognition is constrained, enabled and structured by a background of emotion-perception correlations, that manifest themselves as a changing background of implicit representations of body states.”(Ratcliffe 2002) — Joshs

Mood is definitely influenced by bodily function. I work in healthcare, so I routinely use emotion, feeling, and mood to assess things like CO2 level in the blood. Of course I have to confirm my suspicions by testing because the same combative mood that might reflect hypercarbia, might also be a result of frustration or pain. So we have a multiple realizability issue here. There's no way to map a particular mood to any particular part of the body.

There is an important distinction that needs to be made between consciousness and contents of consciousness. — TheMadMan

How would you describe the difference?

What Trump lacks his supporters simply dream to exist as his abilities. Total bumbling is 4D Chess, remember? And as every negative news article is part of the global conspiracy against him, he is then absolutely fabulous. — ssu

Trump supporters aren't in the majority, though. Trump has never been able to control what information Americans have access to the way Putin controls Russian information. I agree that they both use the firehose technique, but Putin has more power to create that sense of disconnection from facts. I'm not saying Americans are particularly well-informed.

I think you're talking about the firehose propaganda technique.

The aim is to devalue truth by continuously changing the official story. Trump doesn't have the discipline or power over the media necessary to match Putin at that.

This is a new sort of McCarthyism and I’m glad I’m not on your side. — NOS4A2

I know it's terrible. I think he's going to crash land in jail this time. :starstruck:

I would be adequately gratified merely by his exit from my in-box. To be replaced by something more boringly acceptable and mediocre. Where he festers is of no consequence to me as long at is no longer in my consciousness. A luxury retirement home would be a very small price to pay as long as it had no outgoing internet. — unenlightened

I hear you.

I think historians present the wrong picture when they set Descartes' rationalism against experimentation — Fooloso4

I don't think there's a conflict. Descartes was the quintessential rationalist. This doesn't mean he thought all knowledge is a priori. :up:

It would be so gratifying to see him go to jail, probably for the rest of his life since he's 77.

How we get to a new system, is the previous system breaking and being forced to adapt to new circumstances. Necessity is the mother of invention.

This is also why people are having difficulty envisioning the future now (and why I think all current political ideologies are totally off base), we can't predict and see past a phase shift. — ChatteringMonkey

True, but when we pick up the pieces, maybe we'll remember the things we dreamed of before it all fell apart.

Once upon a time there was a god
And he was alone
And this was a wound.

Out of the wound came a child
who was born separated from her creator
And this was a wound.

To heal it, she built a stairway into the heavens
She built and climbed, and built and climbed
And one day, standing on the top step
She looked around to see that there had never been a staircase.

So she set about playing in the creek
Making friends with the crawdads
In the evening she would watch the sunset,
her heart filled with its beauty.

And one day she became tired and laid down to sleep
And as she drifted, she remembered a voice
But she couldn't remember if it was her own voice saying
"I want to live."
Or was it God's voice, saying
"I want you to live."

And now, she looked again into the darkness and said
"God. I hope this is what you wanted. I did the best I could."
And then, up from a deep, deep wound, came a voice.

"I know you did your best." said God.
"But be at peace now child and know:
"That you never cried, because you never smiled.
"You never lost your way, because you never left home.
"Look around you child: see that your world is gone.
"But it was just a world of dreams
"And there's more where that came from."

The child looked around herself and thought of her home.
She thought of the creek.
She remembered the crawdads
And the sunset, her heart filled with its beauty.
And then she remembered a statue she had made. A statue out of the clay.
A statue of a child.

She laughed now and turned to her God.
"You're right, she said.
"I never left home.
"And you, my almighty friend, were never alone.
"Because it's not me who is the dream.
"We are."

And in the silence she never noticed that the pain was gone. Because so was she.

Once upon a time, there was a god.

I read that if Trump is elected, he could make it go away. We shouldn't allow the president to control the DOJ. It puts one person above the law, and if things went the other way, it could allow a president to attack opponents.

Seriously, capitalism functions on the principle "maximize profit." How much worse off can we be if we decide to operate on the principle "maximize ecological harmony"? — Pantagruel

Probably not worse. In the 1970s there was a lot of focus on reducing pollution and managing the environment intelligently. A lot of that is still in place, though eroded by conservative policies.

I was talking about a bigger transition to managing the environment on a global level; managing the transition out of a growth model, managing the transition to non-carbon based energy sources. But more, what would we have to become to carry those changes forward on a permanent basis? A global government? A new religion?

I think if you want something to become real, you have to imagine it. You can't bring about change by wagging an index finger. You know?

Capitalism isn't the defining feature of humanity, — Pantagruel

No, but it's profoundly shaped what we are as a species today:

However not every value can be effectively understood in economic terms. Attempting to put a price on human dignity, for example, can seem unreasonably expensive, from a capitalistic perspective. In fact, what is unreasonable is reducing human dignity to economic terms. Likewise for the planet. The planet may be morally neutral, but humans are not; and they rely on the planet as part of their ongoing well-being. — Pantagruel

If we pivot toward acting to secure the well-being of the global biosphere, what would that look like? What would we have to become in order to do that?

Right. That's pretty much the conclusion I came to, I think. So we need a definition, or theory, to guide what we are looking for. And then the stuff we find when looking constitutes evidence. Is that right? — bert1

One challenge for a theory about rock consciousness is that it would conflict with our present worldview. That means it would stretch the meanings of words. A theory of that type wouldn't be taken seriously until society in general has shifted ideologically.

Hey, where am I getting all this? From the Internet, social media, mass media, public television, etc. — BC

I think a lot of what you said was logical, though. The internet is a funhouse mirror. Thanks for the insights!

When profit is the sole motive, to hell with what's right, moral, just, best, true, or fair... — creativesoul

Exactly. The world is just full of marks waiting to be played.

This is true, and that sort of thing was increased and perpetuated by many trusted sources in media. Still is to this day. — creativesoul

I was also disappointed that even outlets like CBS would occasionally spin and report falsehoods with the aim of ridiculing Trump. And MSNBC and CNN? They lost whatever integrity they ever had. But that's capitalism for you. Money over integrity.

Are you aware of the damaging role that the glorification of ridicule in American society played as it helped cultivate the ground for the rise of Trump? — creativesoul

I'll butt in because this issue has been on my mind lately. I believe the reason ridicule of Trump and his supporters energized his base was because they already tend to feel inferior. There's angst among them toward the coastal intellectual crowd.

I don't know if there's really much of a glorification of ridicule. People who are over-flowing with ridicule just aren't particularly emotionally mature, you know? You jerk!

A medieval history scholar said we know more about ancient societies (2000 - 3000 years ago) than we do about medieval society. That was several decades ago and historians have made progress, but whenever I read medieval history I am usually very surprised by what all was going on. It most definitely was not 'the dark ages'. — BC

:up:

I plead guilty (but the statute of limitations has expired). Back in the late 60s, a poster of Che, maybe Mao or Lenin, seemed meaningful. Now I'd call it virtue signaling. For roughly a year (1969-70) I received leftist instruction from a roommate who had been involved in Trotskyist groups at the U of I in Champaign Urbana. I picked up some of the names, and some of the lingo.

In the 1980s I had a real encounter with union organizing by participating in the Hormel Strike support group. The Hormel strikers lost, despite the heroic efforts of the support group to be supportive (tongue in cheek). But that was my first close encounter, at age 40 with an actual strike by actual blue-collar workers. They were all replaced at lower wages and worse working conditions. By that time I had become "a leftist" (sic). — BC

During the 1980s, did you have a sense of a change in zeitgeist to moral ambiguity? How were the 80s different from the 60s and 70s?

Lots of leftists do not, in fact, have such consciousness -- not because we are fakes and hypocrites, but because our education and experience has taught us to think of ourselves as professionals and managers--even if we are still clock-punching workers doing white collar service labor. Workers who do not see the larger picture are at a major disadvantage. — BC

So it's not that you would identify with the European aristocracy. It's just that you encounter leftism in college. A blue collar worker doesn't have that experience, so there's a rift.

Just trying to figure the world out. Why all the angst toward "wokeness" and elitists?
— frank

It's insubstantial social media chatter seeping into real life. Were one so inclined, one could do a history of social media trends, fads, and obsessions: Who started it on what platform; how it spread through various channels; where did it begin to be referenced as important; and so on. I think one would find that the hot issue of the moment (or year) owes little to real life, though it may have an effect on real life. Memes such as "the 2020 election was stolen" are UNTRUE, but have turned out to be quite powerful and/or destructive. "Stop the Steal", "Lock Her Up", "Sleepy Joe" and so on. "Racist", "homophobic", or "Transphobic" become clubs to bludgeon opponents (even though racism, and so on, are real).

In a word, "It's epiphenomenal". (Maybe that's the right word...)

I avoid paying much attention to all that crap. — BC

I guess, but the guys who attacked the capital on Jan-6 organized on-line. I think the internet helped Trump get elected. Maybe some of it seeps into real life?

Sure, because in the early medieval period there weren't any capitalists. The local Lord had the income of land rent (from peasants, yeomen, etc.) so didn't need to invest. — BC

Proto-capitalists came into existence around the time of the crusades. They brought back goods from the middle east and sold them to nobles and clergymen. The re-established trade routes through Europe and eventually became the nuclei of European cities, which is a fascinating story. The point is that profit-making, as a European profession, did not pop into existence in the 1800s. You already knew that, though.

In what context are you writing, thinking? — BC

Just trying to figure the world out. Why all the angst toward "wokeness" and elitists? Why is the base of the Republican party made of blue-collar workers, while the Democrats have all the educated atheists?

I'm not saying every question has to have a profound answer, but it's interesting to notice how we emerged from the land of our ancestors.

Without the power of labor unions, American leftists just strayed off into nowhere. It's as you put it:

Academic leftists are perhaps somewhat analogous to a superannuated aristocracy. Most of them have just about zero connection with working class organizing or working class life. Struggling to explicate post-modern understanding within English Departments (et al) could just as well be taking place on Mars as at the local University. Some academics have risen from the ranks of the working class, but my guess is that most of them have been launched from the more favored middle class of professional families (or better). — BC

I was playing with the idea that to the extent that there is any leftism in America, it's a pose, like a poster of Che Guevara makes your meaningless life more worthwhile. They're just ghosts. But then, I'd like to see the world through their eyes. What do they see? How do you think they would explain their situation?

The Left (socialists, Marxists, communists, anarchists (IWW), et al did indeed help workers organize, unionize, and resist capitalists' exploitation. I don't see a parallel between aristocrats and leftists or workers. What are you reaching for in making that comparison? — BC

The Neutral Party:

I believe Frank misspoke here. Traditionally there was a functional relationship between the European nobility and their serfs. It was vaguely like the Moors, where the upper and lower classes form a happy duo. In the case of the Moors, the two were of different ethnicities, though.

As the forerunners of capitalists appeared, it was out of the serf class. It was people like Martin Luther, whose family struggled generation after generation to create a new class that stood apart from either the aristocracy or their slaves. It's here that the rift forms between aristocrats and the proto-capitalists. The aristocracy says it's counter to God's will for these insects to crawl up into the light of day. The new-born liberals say God gives them the right to stand up like human beings.

In the future I'm going to write all my thoughts in the form of a dialog so people won't try to pigeon hole me. It might take me a while to address all your excellent points.

If they both hated capitalism, their reasons for doing so were quite different. Laborers were toiling in the 'dark, satanic mills' [William Blake's term]; long hours, dangerous working conditions; low pay; hard work. Aristocrats may have disdained the capitalists rapidly accumulating wealth, but they probably also envied it. Land-rent based aristocrats weren't poor, of course. — BC

On whether we can draw a distinction between leftists and laborers:


American laborer says, *sung to the melody of an old spiritual*:

"Come on all you workin' people
Good new to you, I'll tell,
All about how the good ole' union
Is coming here to dwell.

"Which side are you on? *repeated three more times*

"Rich man say he's gotta put us down
And educate his child
His children live in luxury
And ours are almost wild.

"Which side are you on? *repeated three more times*

"Now we got the good fight
I know we're bound to win.
'Cause we got them gun thugs
Lookin' mighty thin."

"Which side are you on? *repeated three more times*

_________________________________________________________

The Leftist speaks:

"In the question under discussion now, Darimon got no further than the point that banks, which deal in credit, like merchants who deal in commodities or workers who deal in labour, sell at a higher price when demand rises in relation to supply, i.e. they make their services more difficult for the public to obtain at the very moment the public has the greatest need for them. We saw that the bank has to act in this way whether the notes it issues are convertible or inconvertible.

"The behaviour of the Bank of France in October 1855 gave rise to an ‘immense clamour’ (p. 4) and to a ‘great debate’ between it and the spokesmen of the public. Darimon summarizes, or pretends to summarize, this debate. We will follow him here only occasionally, since his synopsis displays the weak sides of both opponents, revealed in their constant desultory irrelevances. Groping about in extrinsic arguments. Each of the antagonists is at every moment dropping his weapon in order to search for another. Neither gets to the point of striking any actual blows, not only because they are constantly changing the weapons with which they are supposed to hit each other, but also because they hardly meet on one terrain before they take rapid flight to another."

I think there's a difference.

Assuming you will chant then that "His blood be upon us and on our children". Or something on that line. — ssu

I don't advocate execution, by the way.

Trump’s a folk devil. The scapegoating has become so bad that his opponents’ behavior has led to the state of the world we now see today. — NOS4A2

I know, people being prosecuted for breaking the law. It's terrible.

Can we crucify him?

There was, but they've been executed already. — Changeling

:grimace:

A yank's rose-tinted perspective... — Changeling

But he didn't incite a riot at Parliament, suggesting that the rioters should execute the vice-Prime-minister. Is there a vice-Prime-Minister?

He's still incredibly decent compared to Trump.

So what's going on here? How are my eyes 'windows upon the world', when my scientific understanding of how vision works seems to undermine this? — Inyenzi

Vison is partly data from your eyes, and partly the operation of your brain. It's possible to sort of separate the two. If you've ever done drawing, you know that when you go to draw something, ideas you have about it will interfere. When you draw a person, it might end up like this:



Notice that this is what things look like to the mind, not the eyes. You know how long your limbs are compared to the rest of your body, so you draw according to what you know, not what you see. If you tune in directly to data from your eyes, you'll draw this:



Notice that this conflicts with what your mind knows about a human. The bottom half of the body seems smaller, and this is called "foreshortening."

There are philosophers who focused on the on-going dance between ideas and visual data, if you're interested.

Just reasserting the obvious because there seems to be a few people cheering this kind of tyranny. — NOS4A2

A tyrant is a dictator, like the former president wanted to be, but utterly and completely failed to be.