The complexity of integrated circuits in modern computers approaches rapidly the complexity of the human brain. Traditional computer-programs give the program a limited range and programmers can quite easily foresee the possible outcomes. AI is different though. Not even the designer can predict what will happen as these programs in a certain way program themselves and are able to learn depending on the scope of available data. — Pez

Computers are our appendages. They are like organ systems within our bodies. Just like the functioning of a liver or heart cannot be understood apart from its inextricable entanglement in the overall aims of the organism, the same is true of our machines with respect to our purposes. They are not autonomous embodied-environmental systems but elements of our living system. As long as we are the ones who are creating and programming our machines by basing their functional organization on our understanding of concepts like memory storage , patten matching and sensory input, their goals cannot be self-generated. They can only generate secondary goals derived as subsets of the programmed concepts , which we then respond to by correcting and improving the programming. This is how our appendages and organ systems function.

Saying our machine are smarter or dumber than us is like saying the spider web or birds nest is smarter or dumber than the spider or bird. Should not these extensions of the animal be considered a part of our living system? When an animal constructs a niche it isnt inventing a life-form, it is enacting and articulating its own life form. Machines, as parts of niches , belong intimately and inextricably to the living self-organizing systems that ‘we' are.

Why is the complex behavior of current AI not itself creative, apart from the user's interpretation? Because the potential range of unpredictable behaviors on the part of the machines are anticipated in a general sense, that is, are encompassed by the designer's framework of understanding. Designing a chaotic fractal system, a random number generator, mathematically describing the random behavior of molecules, these schemes anticipate that the particulars of the behavior of the actual system they describe will evade precise deterministic capture. Industrial age machines represented a linear, sequential notion of temporality and objective physicalism, complementing representational approaches to art and literature, today's AI is an expression of the concept of non-linear recursivity, and will eventually embrace a subject-object semantic relativism. Current AI thus ‘partners' with newer forms of artistic expression that recognize the reciprocal relation between subject and object and embed that recognition into the idea the artwork conveys.

And just like these forms of artistic expression, non-linear, recursive AI functions as an archive, snapshot, recorded product, an idea of self-transforming change frozen in time. In dealing with entities that contribute to our cultural evolution, as long as we retain the concept of invention and machine we will continue to be interacting with an archive, a snapshot of our thinking at a point in time, rather than a living self-organizing system. In the final analysis the most seemingly ‘autonomous' AI is nothing but a moving piece of artwork with a time-stamp of who created it and when. In sum, I am defining true intelligence as a continually self-transforming ecological system that creates cultural (or biological) worldviews (norms, schemes, frames), constantly alters the meaning of that frame as variations on an ongoing theme (continues to be the same differently), and overthrows old frames in favor of new ones. The concept of an invented machine, by contrast, is not a true intelligence, since it not a self-modifying frame but only a frozen archive of the frame at a given moment in time.

Can we ever ‘create' a system that is truly autonomous? No, but we can tweak living organic material such as dna strands enclosed in cellular-like membranes so that they interact with us in ways that are useful to us. Imagine tiny creatures that we can ‘talk to'. These would be more like our relationship with domesticated animals than with programmed machines. Think of humanity as ecosystem 1, the encompassing ecosystem whose intelligence evolves over time. Computers belong to ecosystem 2, the sub-ecosystem operating within, and a dependent part of, ecosystem 1. As a dependent part, it cannot evolve beyond ecosystem 1. It evolves with it.

let's just assume for the sake of argument that D. C. Schindler is a giant hypocrite, and you were able to decide this by scrambling after short YouTube videos. Who cares? What does it have to do with the arguments of the OP? Is this not more ad hominem? — Leontiskos

The argument of the OP rests on an analysis of the weaknesses of pragmatism and discourses of power relations. The claim is made that truth is relative on those occasions when it suits the purposes of those in charge, and is absolute on other occasions. That’s a familiar critique. For instance, Todd May writes:

Despite themselves, Deleuze, Foucault, and Lyotard predicate much of their political work on several intertwined and not very controversial ethical principles. The mistake, made by Deleuze and Foucault in avoiding ethical principles altogether and by Lyotard in trying to avoid universalizing them, is that their avoidance is itself an ethically motivated one. In the conversation cited above, where Deleuze praises Foucault for being the one “to teach us something absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others,” he is laying out a principle of behavior that it would be unimaginable to assume he does not think ought to bind the behavior of others. In resisting an essentialism about human nature, there may have been a resistance to telling people not only what they want but also what they ought to want.

Where they must form an ethical commitment, and this is a commitment in keeping with poststructuralist political theory, is at the level of practice. Some practices are acceptable, some unacceptable.

I dont agree with this assessment. i think that cultural history develops, such that a parallel progress can be traced in all domains of creativity, from philosophy and science to the arts and ethics. But this is a progress of construction, of invention rather than revelation. Human ethical knowledge , like knowledge in other fields, is the building and transformation of a niche. Through a pragmatic process of reciprocal interaction ( power relations are in fact shared patterns of valuation) we come to learn how to perceive the world through the eyes of the other more and more effectively.

I believe that when someone writes a serious and thoughtful OP the initial posts have a particular responsibility to respond in kind if the thread is to succeed. Ad hominem quips intended to provoke are particularly pernicious at the very early stage of a thread. At best they derail. — Leontiskos

I don’t necessarily disagree. I should have posted the youtube link right away , since I think it is relevant to the OP that Schindler’s arguments are supposed to represent a bulwark against dogmatism, and yet he presumes as fact the appearance of god in the world, and presumes the manner of his appearance. I don’t understand how that isn’t dogmatic.

even Nietzsche would agree with it (namely that we cannot pretend to go back to a pre-Christian era). The second prong is that liberalism as Schindler defines it requires a denial of the ontological impact of the Incarnation, and that this is objectively evil (as privation) regardless of any good intentions involved. The second prong requires Christian premises, namely that the Incarnation had an ontological effect, and Schindler is not unclear about this fact — Leontiskos

All post-Hegelian philosophy recognizes the dependence of contemporary thinking on all that came before. But one can show how modern thought arose out of Christianity and the Greeks without assuming a cumulative progress that subsumingly retains the meanings of that history.

I honestly have no clue who he is outside of having had the book recommended to me. The book doesn't seem particularly conservative so far; — Count Timothy von Icarus

To be honest, I had no idea who he was either till you mentioned him, and then I scrambled to find some of his youtube lectures and an article called Perfect Difference: Gender and the Analogy of Being. But he does say that liberalism is the political form of evil, and defends this by arguing that god has already revealed himself in history , so for liberals to deny god is to deny this real history as the foundation of the Good , regardless of their intentions.

Another top-rate contribution from Joshs. :roll:
At least this time your ad hominem doesn't have such elaborate wrapping paper. — Leontiskos

I have an antipathy toward religious philosophy, and others (perhaps yourself?) have an antipathy toward atheistic postmodernism. But, as my posting history will reveal, I’m perfectly happy to get into detailed and respectful discussion on such issues. Otoh, a perusal of your comment history shows a tendency to scurry away from contentious debate while heaping insults on the other party. You haven’t been on this forum for very long. I’ve been here for 6 years, and if you wish to read all of my contributions over that period, you will find nothing that compares to the harshness and direct hostility you have demonstrated toward certain posters. What you will mostly find are over-long posts filled with too much information.

Given my debate history with Count Timothy, he is probably familiar enough with my idiosyncrasies to see my short comment as a provocation, to which he might choose to respond with something like “What do you mean, decidedly non-conservative writers like Ian McGilchrist and John Vervaeke idolize Schindler”. And we could take it from there. I’m not sure why you’re so threatened by me. Many of us here make blunt comments from time to time, but my goal here isnt to alienate, but to clarify my own stance through back and forth argument with others.

However, in his "Plato's Critique of Impure Reason," D.C Schindler makes a solid argument that these are two sides of the same misological coin. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Really? D.C. Schindler? I didn’t realize you were that conservative.

Numbers are not assigned to things, but they are all that things are, and our scientific theories seem to support this to a certain extent. Fundamental particles are in fact a collection of numbers, among which mass, electric charge, isospin, weak hypercharge, spin, lepton number. You may say these are the qualitative core(s), but that is a simple rebuttal that suffers from the same gaps as just stopping at the fact that they are quantitative. — Lionino

Numbers wouldn’t be assigned to things, but since number implies a process of identical repetition, it would commit things to a certain structure, that a thing repeat some attribute or property identically. Why does quality suffer the same gap as stopping at the fact of quantity?Doesnt quantity require quality but not the reverse? Can there be a quantity without a quality, category, whole, entity, species to be counted? Put differently, when Tegmark says mass, electric charge, isospin, weak hypercharge, spin, lepton are numbers, don’t we have to ask what it is that continues to be the same again and again ( number) in these entities, qualities , categories, properties?

Ball would be a human label (baggage) emerging from a collection of things (atoms and such). It is always changing as everytime it bounces it loses atoms off its surface, but then we end up not in metaphysics but in a discussion of semantics — Lionino

This isn’t just semantics but the fundamental basis of number as the repetition of ‘same thing, different time’. As soon as we say something ‘is’ a number, we have committed ourselves to a certain way of defining that something, as persisting self-identity. If Ball is a human label, what is a collection of things in themselves? The ball may change every time it bounces, but, what do we say about the atoms it loses off its surface? Are these not treated like the ball , as self-identical objects in motion? Or as fields of forces with assigned properties which are enumerated as identical repetitions of the same entity?

a lot of philosophy relies on the validity of the idea of repetition and of identity. We can throw those out at a very fundamental level, but at some point we will have to grant them if we want to progress.
There is no such thing as tissues, just a collection of cells that are made of molecules. Yes, but we can't derive biological laws from chemical laws due to the sheer complexity and also to possible emergent features. We must grant that there is such a thing as tissues if we want to come up with medicine. — Lionino

you could say sociology comes from psychology, which comes from neurology, which... from physics. But you can't say the converse, that physics comes from biology or that chemistry from neurology. The more derivative a field is, the more baggage it has, specifically because it goes away from the foundations of the universe. Another issue is that sociology and psychology are very unreliable (papers have very low reproducibility) while physics is almost always reliable — Lionino

A main reason why we cannot reduce the higher order sciences to the lower ones is that typically, the lower ones , such as physics, use a more traditional scheme of understanding than the higher ones. Physics today for the most part stays within a model of realist causation , although there are strands of newer thinking within the field, such as Karen Barad, which are allowing physics to catch up with the thinking that has been available within philosophy and psychology for a while now. For a long time, physicists, including Hawking, denied the relevance of time for the understanding of physical phenomena. But Lee Smolen and others, thanks to their embrace of ideas from biology and philosophy, are showing the absolutely central importance of time for understanding physics. So while it should in theory be the case that we can reduce philosophy to cognitive psychology , cogsci to neuroscience , neuroscience to biology, biological to chemistry and chemistry to physics , it turn out to be a circle , where the most complex human sciences come up with new ways of thinking that eventually make their way down to the natural sciences, which are reliable precisely because they are so abstractive. But the broad, simplifiying abstractions of physics have their downside, such as pushing into the convenient category of randomness whatever their simplifications cannot model.

We can progress in different ways. One form of progress relies on repetition of identity. Another form of progress relies on showing how the repetition of identity is derivative from differences upon differences. The first form of progress leads to normative ethics based on an empirical realism that assumes we are all living in the same natural world, thanks to the grounding of empirical certainty in the identical repetition of properties within natural objects. Since it assumes a verifiably same world for everyone, there are correct and incorrect, true and false understandings of this same world for all. As a consequence, political polarization, holocaust, atrocity and other forms of social violence must often be explained on the basis of wayward intentions and motivations of individuals and groups ( greed, dishonesty, evil, immorality, hunger for power, sadism) or ignorance (‘drinking the Koolaid’), rather than the result of an ethically legitimate worldview askance from one’s own.

The poststructuralist can claim all he wants ("every change in degree is simultaneously a difference in kind"), but until he proves Π, I can just ignore him on this topic because it has explanatory power for me to do so. Mathematical universe is a theory about the universe, it takes our perceptions as they are, without doubting our modes of cognition as they appear, without taking phenomenology into account. — Lionino

Again, I’m not denying that physics has explanatory power. Accepting poststructural thinking doesn’t take away any of that power. It leaves it completely intact, but enriches it. My mode of perception makes things appear for me exactly as I described it to you. Since we are accustomed to seeing our world in terms of self-identical objects , it take a bit of practice to make ourselves explicitly aware of what is already implicit within that perception. Husserl’s method of phenomenological reduction through bracketing our naive naturalistic attitude ( which physics remains stuck within) is one way of gaining entry into this implicit intricacy hidden within the abstraction of self-identical persistence that we place over what presents itself to us as a continually qualitatively changing flow of sense.

It stands that, unless we admit of computers being conscious or souls or the like, the only relationship between being alive and consciousness is that the former is a necessary condition for the latter — a counterfactual if you will — Lionino

Otoh, autopoietic systems theory and embodied, enactivist cognitivism understands a living system as functionally integral and normatively oriented around goals and purposes, which allows us to trace back the precursors of cognition and emotion to the simplest living organisms.

Evan Thompson writes:

“…the genuine interiority of life is a precursor to the interiority of consciousness, and hence the conception of nature presupposed in standard formulations of the hard problem or explanatory gap for consciousness-namely, that living nature has no genuine interiority-is misguided.

I think consciousness is what dictates the term “alive.” — Arbü1237

As in “This bacterium is alive”?

Art is distinguishable from philosophy because it is evocative, and can be supremely so through the ability of an artist. Philosophy tries to explain, sometimes in dull detail. These are different things. When philosophers try to be artists, they fail miserably because they don't have the talent. — Ciceronianus

Growing up, art was a talent that came naturally to me. After graduating high school , I briefly contemplated pursing art as a career. But in high school I had stumbled upon a set of insights that at the time I thought of as belonging to psychological theory. These insights had a profound impact on my life, and I have been elaborating these ideas ever since, at first within a psychological mode of discourse and later as philosophy. I chose against a career in art because I needed to be able to believe that I could express the insights I was developing as effectively within the language of art as I could within psychology or philosophy, and the answer I came up with was no.

This doesn’t mean that I believe philosophy or psychology are in general superior forms of knowing. Many intellectuals make the e silly mistake of elevating their own preferredmode of expression to the status of objective supremacy over all other modes. Poets think theirs is the purest way to truth, musicians consider music to be the most authentic expression of meaning, others give preference to the political, the scientific, the technological, or the philosophical. All these modes are all absolutely equal in their uniqueness and their non-superiority over other modes of creativity.

I’ll leave you with this from Deleuze:

[quote

Art and philosophy crosscut the chaos and confront it, but it is not the same sectional plane; it is not populated in the same way. In the one there is the constellation of a universe or affects and percepts; and in the other, constitutions of immanence or concepts. Art thinks no less than philosophy, but it thinks through affects and percepts.This does not mean that the two entities do not often pass into each other in a becoming that sweeps them both up in an intensity which co-determines them.


The plane of composition of art and the plane of immanence of philosophy can slip into each other to the degree that parts of one may be occupied by entities of the other. In fact, in each case the plane and that which occupies it are like two relatively distinct and heterogeneous parts. A thinker may therefore decisively modify what thinking means, draw up a new image of thought, and institute a new plane of immanence. But, instead of creating new concepts that occupy it, they populate it with other instances, with other poetic, novelistic, or even pictorial ormusical entities.

The opposite is also true. Igitur is just such a case of conceptual persona transported onto a plane of composition, an aesthetic figure carried onto a plane of immanence: his proper name is a conjunction. These thinkers are "half" philosophers but also much more than philosophers. But they are not sages. There is such force in those unhinged works of Hölderlin, Kleist, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Kafka, Michaux, Pessoa, Artaud, and many English and American novelists, from Melville to Lawrence or Miller, in which the reader discovers admiringly that they have written the novel of Spinozism.
[/quote]

the mathematics of the phenomenon is pretty much the phenomenon itself lato sensu — when a neutron decays into a proton and an electron, the only things happening are numbers changing — Lionino

Think about what is happening when a number changes. In the first place, what must be assumed about a phenomenon such that a number can be assigned to it? The phenomenon must be assumed to have a qualitative core that remains the same while we count increments of change within it. We usually think of numeric change in terms of the model of motion. When we measure the movement of a ball we count changes in degree of spatial displacement of something that is assumed to remain continually self-identical as the qualitative meaning ‘this ball’ throughout the countable changes in its location. But what if the quality we label as ‘this ball’ never persisted from one moment to the next as the same qualitative thing?

There would be nothing self-identical about which to count increments of change. Put differently, numeric quantification depends on our ability separate difference in degree from differences in kind, qualitative change from quantitative change. This is what ‘same thing, different time’ means. What poststructuralist authors argue is that it is only by abstracting away, that is, by not noticing, the continual qualitative changes in the substrates of our counting that we end up with a universe of objects which appear to behave mathematically. They argue that in fact every change in degree is simultaneously a difference in kind. And this applies not only to objects in the world, but our cognitive schemes. It is not simply that there are no perfect shapes in nature, but that even in our own imagination there are no perfect shapes.

As Heidegger writes:

“The most insidious manner of forgetting is the progressive "repetition" of the same. One says the same with a constantly new indifference; the mode of saying and interpreting changes.”

It is only as a result of our own conjuring trick that we produce a world that is remarkably amenable to numeration.

This does not at all mean that our physics is incorrect, that we have to go back and change all our calculations. It just means that there is a more intricate kind of behavior taking place in what the physicists observe and model , a behavior the requires a non-numeric language in order to understand it. The need for this language, and its advantages over mathematical forms of description become more clear in the social sciences than in the natural sciences. This is not because we understand these phenomena less well than we do the physical realm. On the contrary, newer approaches within psychology reveal an understanding, still lacking among most physicists, of the qualitatively shifting dynamics underlying mathematical objectification.

You likely will not agree with any of this, but at least it may give you a better sense of why postmodernists have a bug up their ass about the mathematical grounding of science, truth as correctness and propositional logic.

The universe is not math unless the regularity of the laws of physics is true? I have not read "Our Mathematical Universe" but I am convinced Tegmark addresses that — Lionino

The truth of the regularity of the laws of physics is not relevant to the question I raised. Truth as correctness comes from comparing a model of the phenomenon to the phenomenon. If they correspond then the model is ‘true’ to the observed phenomenon. What is at issue in my question is whether an abstraction may be involved in treating the model and the phenomenon as self-identical during the comparing process. There is no question we have produced a large collection of true mathematical statements in physics, and that these true statements of mathematical physics make many technologies possible. The question is whether we can come to a more fundamental understanding of modeler and phenomenon, subject and object than that which begins from the assumption that both hold still during the comparing process. Such an understanding does not invalidate mathematical truths , it shows them to be derivative and opens up new possibilities for understanding the world and ourselves

This summary of Tegmark's mathematical universe is interesting — Lionino

The universe isn’t math unless the ‘same thing different time’ applies to natural phenomena rather than our pretending to hold it still so as to calculate it.

It takes a bit of mental contortion to construe the kind of object people are talking about in a direct vs indirect realism debate as transparently an intentional one…At least on the forum, productive discussions of direct vs indirect realism tend to require pinning down where the disagreement is between disputants. — fdrake

I have a confession to make. I deviated from the topic of the OP in responding to you and Jamal concerning the meaning of an object’s presenting itself in Husserlian phenomenology. I take Husserl to be neither a direct nor an indirect realist , and his use of the term ‘intentional’ is entirely different in its sense from the various ways it is used in analytic philosophy, or in debates between direct and indirect realists.

Nice summary. I was—or Banno was—hung up on the connoted attribution of agency to an object that “presents itself.” It wasn’t clear to me how we go from the object as “constituted by the subject through intentional acts” to the object as that which is doing the presenting. I’m not saying this doesn’t work, just that the locution is not clear to me — Jamal

The object of an intentional act is neither discovered nor invented, neither simply “forced to present more of itself than it wants to” nor accommodated by the subject as an arbitrary in-itself. The object is “a unity which “appears” continually in the change of the modes of its givenness and which belongs to the essential structure of a specific act of the ego.” “The "object" of consciousness, the object as having identity "with itself" during the flowing subjective process, does not come into the process from outside; on the contrary, it is included as a sense in the subjective process itself and thus as an "intentional effect" produced by the synthesis of consciousness.”(Husserl). So on the side of the subject there is an intentional effect of synthesis (what you call forcing it to present more of itself than it wants to) , and on the side of the object there is presentation or appearance, the aspect of objectification that always resists subsumption within pre-given laws or categories.

The work of the applied scientist is often popularly described as if it were a series of hostile acts: ‘So-and-so wrested from the soil a new source of food’, ‘Whosits forced the atom to give up its secret’. These are grossly misleading descriptions of scientific behavior.(George Kelly)

Why do you and I want to say, and why do some phenomenologists say, that the things we perceive present themselves to us? I feel I’m missing something obvious. — Jamal

I dont know why you want to say that , but I can tell you that in Husserl’s phenomenology objects don’t just appear to a subject as what they are in themselves in all their assumed completeness, but are constituted by the subject through intentional acts. This means they present themselves to the subject within some mode of givenness. For instance, an object can be given in the mode of recollection, imagination or perception. Within spatial perception, we never see the whole object in front of us; the object gives, or presents, itself to us in only one perspectival aspect at a time. So what we understand as the object as a unitary whole is never given to us in its entirety. This abstract unity is transcendent to what we actually experience.

The posit that they're the same question, or indeed have any kind of dyadic relation, is precisely the kind of structural presupposition which should be held in suspension IMO. I think if you come at that distinction from phenomenology you end up pissing reciprocal co-constitution everywhere and thus take the co-constitution as an unexaminable given. Rather than as an a contingent observation made of human bodies…Becoming-meatbag is something I appreciate in Ratcliffe ("Experiences of Depression") and Scarry ("The Body In Pain"), they really get into how the soul is a story told by idiot meat — fdrake

I wouldn’t say it s a structural presupposition for Piaget, auto-poietic systems theory or embodied, enactivist cognitive science. For them it is something that can be demonstrated empirically. Merleau-Ponty shows elegantly how we can conceive it either as a philosophical a priori or as an empirical result , depending on which hat we wear.
Ratcliffe address the question of

whether one form of inquiry ultimately has some kind of priority over the other. It could be maintained that the two address different but complementary questions. Alternatively, one might adopt a stance of agnoticism, a ‘wait-and-see' policy. Another position, currently very popular in the philosophy of mind and other areas, is the sort of ‘scientific naturalism' or ‘scientism' that gives empirical science metaphysical and epistemological priority over all other forms of human inquiry. But contrary to scientific naturalism is a position that appears, in slightly different guises, in the work of numerous phenomenologists, including Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. They maintain that phenomenology has priority over science. In brief, scientific conceptions of things are abstractions, which depend for their intelligibility on the everyday experiential reality studied by phenomenology, in much the same way that a road map depends upon a road system. Here is how Merleau-Ponty puts it:

The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we want to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression. . . . To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign-language, as is geography in relation to the countryside in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie, or a river is. (1962, viii–ix)

This kind of position is not ‘anti-science'; it is an account of the nature and role of science. And it allows that science can still inform phenomenol-ogy, in various important ways. However, it does give phenomenology a kind of primacy over science, insofar as the subject matter of the former is presupposed by the intelligibility of the latter. It is therefore opposed to metaphysical and epistemological scientism, but compatible with weaker conceptions of naturalism that require only commerce and consistency between phenomenology and science. I suggest that this last conception of the phenomenology–science relationship applies to at least some uses of phenomenology in psychiatry: to adequately explore alternative ways of being in the world, one must first recognize the contingency of a way of being in the world that the intelligibility of empirical science depends on. Given this first step, it is incompatible with strong forms of naturalism. It follows that any attempt to characterize phenomenology solely in terms of how it can assist empirical scientific inquiry will fail to acknowledge an important and distinctive role that it has to play in psychiatry.

For the past while I've been interested in how schemes are generated rather than thinking about how changes shake already formed ones up — fdrake

I would think they were the same question. Cognitive schemes , as manifestations of living systems, only function by making changes in themselves. Genesis and structure are not separate features, although we can artificially separate them for convenience sake.

To my ears, then, construing the world as "presenting itself" is supposed to efficiently connote that the world's nature is autonomous, but what its nature is revealed as is dependent upon us. I think it's a means of saying that objects have a capacity to affect us regardless of our ability to apply concepts to them or those means of affecting — fdrake

You remind me of Lee Braver here, whose Transgressive Realism uses Kierkegaard as a means to reconcile Levinas and Heidegger.

Lately, I've become interested in these moments of revolutionary experience, when our whole sense of what the world is like gets turned inside out and we are forced to form entirely new concepts to process what is happening. According to what I am calling Transgressive Realism these are the paradigmatic points of contact with a reality unformed by human concepts, when a true beyond touches us, sending shivers through our conceptual schemes, shaking us out of any complacent feeling-at-home

Whether you can coherently think of the object as autonomous in its capacities to affect us while placing the means by which its nature is revealed as an interaction involving an agent is an issue which clouds all that. Which is a question of whether objects transcendentally condition interaction with them based on their properties. — fdrake

Do you gravitate toward the alternative way of thinking according to which objects transcendentally condition interaction with an agent in a manner neither entirely separable from the nature of the schemes they condition, nor logically derivable from them?

It's quite possible for philosophy to address how people live and what they care about without having recourse to the kind of obscurity, and sometimes even esotericism, analytic philosophy and OLP were and are intended to expose and avoid. — Ciceronianus

God forbid philosophy should be ‘obscurantist’ or ‘esoteric’ (code words for ‘I have no idea what they’re talking about’). I’m not denying it is possible to locate writers here and there who choose to be deliberately obscurantist or esoteric, but mostly these accusations are leveled against philosophers whose work I am very familiar with and understand well, and I see the difficulty not in the choice of writing style of the philosopher but in the unpreparedness of the accuser to grasp the radically new and difficult concepts embedded in the text. I associate analytic philosophy less with a clear and accessible style of writing than with an attachment to a certain set of metaphysical presuppositions (for a long time, they were just bookends to Hume and Kant) that they have lately been in the process of abandoning , leading to the fading of the boundary between analytic and continental in terms of style of language and approach. Joseph Rouse and Lee Braver are examples of contemporary philosophers who have no trouble moving back and forth between the two cultures.

Is philosophy just idle talk? Philosophy in the general sense can be. Philosophy as a discussion of rigorous proofs, logic, and proposals is not — Philosophim

Otoh, positivist and analytic approaches to philosophy almost killed it by cutting off its revelance to how people live and what they care about. Fortunately, in recent years the wall between analytic and continental has been eroding.

It has more to do with the dynamics of conformity. Metaphysics is what One does. — Arne

ok, but I recommend adult supervision. You could poke an eye out.

Contemporary metaphysics represents the systematizing of philosophy. — Arne

That makes it sound like a deliberate effort is required. Is metaphysics for skilled specialists, something you should never try at home, or is it a way in which we are thrown into the world?

Heidegger’s thinking may be a bit weirder than you’re prepared to accept. I noticed you make traditional philosophical distinctions like that between mind and world, fiction and reality, subjective and objective. Heidegger eliminates those distinctions. Dasein is neither mind nor world , inside nor outside, subject nor object. Heidegger’s Being is not an entity, an object, a subject. Being is a happening, a transit, an in-between.

And if you do not want to talk ontology, then that is fine too. But only a metaphysician would attempt to persuade that metaphysics is some sort of umbrella term that includes ontology and epistemology. It is not. — Arne

To add my two-cents worth, Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, what he calls also the ontic-ontological difference, is not at all the same thing as the traditional philosophical meaning of ontology as the meaning of extant beingness. Heidegger considers this classical understanding of being to belong to metaphysics, whereas his fundamental ontology overcomes metaphysics.

This is an intriguing position and I am sympathetic to embodied cognition. I'm not sure what it means to 'exceed' culture. Does he mean that bodily experince is primary and the others later and derivative? Or is there more of a reciprocal relationship? — Tom Storm

He means that each of us interprets the culture we live in in ways that are unique to us as individuals, and that these unique ways open themselves to creative transformation. It’s not just an inner process, since tapping into the body’s experiential intricacy is being in touch directly with the world of nature and culture.

It will incorporate the insights of postmodernism and move past the dead end where postmodernism seems to stop.

Do you agree with Gendlin's account here? Does postmodernism lead to a dead end? — Tom Storm

It’s not exactly a dead end, but I do agree with Gendlin that writers like Foucault who emphasize the socially constructed nature of experience leave us with a somewhat arbitrary account of meaning formation. Gendlin’s account
keeps pomo’s relativism while enriching it with an intricacy that they miss. I think Heidegger and Derrida also accomplish this.

Lots of noxious examples of woke authoritarianism here, but would you agree with me that Laurie Rubel’s comment about math and data being non-objective was likely not referring to the logic of calculating in itself but the contested subject matter it is attached to? That many facts in the social sphere are contestable doesn’t in itself seem to be an unreasonable assumption. What many do find unreasonable are the sweeping guilt by association tactics (white privilege, implicit bias, etc) used by some on the left.

Does Barad claim a scientific justification for the claim? — wonderer1

I would say yes. She cites studies of the neurobiology of the brittlestar as an example of the use of her approach in predicting the behavior of phenomena.

↪Art48

Agreed. Besides, when we are asleep we still dream. Not only do we dream — Lionino

Here’s an interesting paper by Evan Thompson on the subject:

https://anandvaidya.weebly.com/uploads/4/6/2/3/46231965/dreamless_sleep-_the_embodied_mind-_and_consciousness-2.pdf

One of the major debates in classical Indian philosophy concerned whether con-sciousness is present or absent in dreamless sleep. The philosophical schools of Advaita Vedānta and Yoga maintained that consciousness is present in dreamless sleep, whereas the Nyāya school maintained that it is absent. Consideration of this debate, especially the reasoning used by Advaita Vedānta to rebut the Nyāya view, calls into question the standard neuroscientific way of operationally defining consciousness as “that which disappears in dreamless sleep and reappears when we wake up or dream.” The Indian debate also offers new resources for contem-porary philosophy of mind. At the same time, findings from cognitive neuroscience have important implications for Indian debates about cognition during sleep, as well as for Indian and Western philosophical discussions of the self and its rela-tionship to the body. Finally, considerations about sleep drawn from the Indian materials suggest that we need a more refined taxonomy of sleep states than that which sleep science currently employs, and that contemplative methods of mind training are relevant for advancing the neurophenomenology of sleep and consciousness.

Perhaps what is required is some kind of neutral, formal, metalanguage so that natural languages can be deconstructed more precisely. Instead of postmodernising mathematics, we should mathematise postmodernism. :smile: — GrahamJ

Don’t know about that. We don’t want a repeat of the Principia Mathematica fiasco. As for an Esperanto for postmodernists, that kind of flies in the face of the point they’re trying to make about the relation between language and the world.

I'm not saying that, the prevailing modern/postmodern state of wisdom, is the only wisdom there is. I am also not saying that postmodernism has no wisdom in it, because it does. But I think at the same time, there is a prevailing wisdom today, and it is stuck. It hasn't gotten past existentialism — Fire Ologist

In 1997, the philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin held a conference at the University of Chicago titled ‘After Postmodernism’. His aim was not to deny the insights of pomo but to move beyond them. You might be interested in his work.

An enormous gap called postmodernism has recently been created between experiencing and concepts. I want not only to examine the nature of this gap, but also to attempt to move beyond it. Of course there are many strands of postmodernism. It is best known for denying that there is any truth, or that one can claim to ground any statement in experience. Postmodernism is right in that one can not claim to represent or copy experiencing. But this does not mean that what we say has no relationship to what we experience—that there is no truth, that everything we say is arbitrary. In contrast to postmodernism, I show that we can have direct access to experiencing through our bodies (Gendlin 1992). I maintain that bodily experience can not he reduced to language and culture. Our bodily sense of situations is a concretely sensed interaction process that always exceeds culture, history, and language.

The purpose of this paper is to establish a new empiricism, one that is not naive. It will incorporate the insights of postmodernism and move past the dead end where postmodernism seems to stop. It will be an empiricism that does not assume an order that could be represented, and yet this will not lead to arbitrariness.
The rejection of representational truth must lead us to a more intricate understanding, rather than arbitrariness. We assume neither objectivism nor constructivism. The results of empirical testing are not representations of reality, nor are they arbitrary. Our empiricism is not a counterrevolution against Kuhn and Feyerabend, but it moves beyond them.

↪HardWorker To be fair, if the philosophy has been around for more than a few decades and isn't integrated into science in some way by now, its likely a failed or highly controversial philosophy — Philosophim

Wouldn’t a ‘successful’ philosophy also be integrated into art, literature, politics , education and business? Is science the supreme arbiter of the truth of philosophy?

Is it correct to characterize your statement thus: abstract rules of organization have conceptual influence (the conferring of sense and intelligibility) upon concrete things? — ucarr

I would prefer to say that concrete things are articulations and modifications of an internally interconnected web or Gestalt of referential meanings. This structure is not a logically causal whole, but a a reciprocally interaffecting totality in which changes to any subordinate aspect modifies the whole in some fashion.

Is it possible QM exemplifies a networked reality: wave functions and particle functions are interwoven within a universe that supports superposition regulated by probability measurements? — ucarr

Quantum physicist Karen Barad has produced a model
of interaffecting matter that was inspired by the double
slit experiments.

Phenomena are ontologically primitive relations—relations without pre-existing relata. On the basis of the notion of intra-action, which represents a profound conceptual shift in our traditional understanding of causality, I argue that it is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the ‘‘components'' of phenomena become determinate and that particular material articulations of the world become meaningful. A specific intra-action (involving a specific material configuration of the ‘‘apparatus'') enacts an agential cut (in contrast to the Cartesian cut—an inherent
distinction—between subject and object), erecting a separation between ‘‘subject'' and ‘‘object.'' That is, the agential cut enacts a resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological (and semantic) indeterminacy. In
other words, relata do not preexist relations; rather, relata-within-phenomena emerge through specific intra-actions. (Meeting the Universe Halfway)

Physics isn`t mathematics, the theories within physics have additional assumptions and just make use of the theorems of mathematics. — Johnnie

Physics doesn’t just make use of mathematics. Even if all of the equations were removed from physics, its starting point in objective relations makes its goal calculative exactitude, the essence of the mathematical, even if it can only vaguely approximate this goal.

The problem with many answers here is metaphysics ends up very inflated, encompasing physics and epistemology and not distinguishing metaphysics and ontology — Johnnie

You are right that we can pick and choose from mutually exclusive definitions of metaphysics. What I’m about is
your view toward a holistic model of scientific understanding. There are many examples of such holistic models, but I dont think you’ll find them in Aristotle. They emerge after Kant , and particularly in the wake of Hegel’s historical dialectics. Hegel paved the way for Heidegger’s ontic/ontological difference, which directs us to become attuned to the conditions of possibility (metaphysics) of the ontological manner of being of ontical beings. For Heidegger, a list of natural kinds pertains to ontical beings. But any category of existing entities derives its sense and intelligibility from a wider context of relevance. This wider context of relevance comes first, and the meaning of the list of beings is derived from it.

I'm tempted to say this supports my notion that science and philosophy are distinct.

But I'm uncertain. If I missed something I'd appreciate a clue. — Moliere

For Heidegger the way that science and philosophy are distinct is that science ‘doesn’t think’. What he means by that is that a given science works within the bounds of a regional ontology produced by philosophy, but can’t escape those bounds without the help of philosophy. Philosophy contributes

a productive logic, in the sense that it leaps ahead, so to speak, into a particular region of being, discloses it for the first time in the constitution of its being, and makes the
structures it arrives at available to the positive sciences as guidelines for their inquiry.

To put it in Kuhnian terms, normal science is the way the vast majority of scientists think, whereas revolutionary science requires philosophy. He believes today’s sciences (in the very way they define themselves as objective) are still stuck within the metaphysics laid out by Descartes and modified by Kant Hegel and Nietzsche.

We become the source of contradiction in this universe, as if enabling matter to reflect upon it's "self" instead of the matter - the first instance where what was becoming, simply is being. We provide a limit at which, by turning back, a reflection, a notion, a contradiction, is made. The word contradiction includes "diction" which places words in our essence, the self-contradictory animal who can speak about nonsense with clarity and poise. — Fire Ologist

Writers following Nietzsche into postmodern territory, like Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida and Heidegger, reject the idea that reflection simply turns back to gaze at itself. Whenever we attempt to do this we are presented with an Other. Reflecting on ourselves IS reflecting on the matter. That is, the world , including our own consciousness, changes with respect to its prior state every moment. For instance, Delleuze argues that all matter in the universe interacts with other matter such that we can never point to any object that simply continues to be what it was the moment before. This is not the reality of human beings perceiving matter , but how matter ‘is’ in itself. Matter contradicts itself from moment to moment , whether there are people around to reflect on it or not. He was strongly influenced by Nietzsche in forming his perspective, especially where Nietzsche suggests that all ‘matter’ in itself is differential relations among drives.

Assuming that our world of desires and passions is the only thing “given” as real, that we cannot get down or up to any “reality” except the reality of our drives (since thinking is only a relation between these drives) – aren't we allowed to make the attempt and pose the question as to whether something like this “given” isn't enough to render the so-called mechanistic (and thus material) world comprehensible as well? I do not mean comprehensible as a deception, a “mere appearance,” a “representation” (in the sense of Berkeley and Schopenhauer); I mean it might allow us to understand the mechanistic world as belonging to the same plane of reality as our affects themselves –, as a primitive form of the world of affect, where everything is contained in a powerful unity before branching off and organizing itself in the organic process (and, of course, being softened and weakened –). We would be able to understand the mechanistic world as a kind of life of the drives, where all the organic functions (self-regulation, assimilation, nutrition, excretion, and metabolism) are still synthetically bound together – as a pre-form of life?

My point was that no matter what the starting point is, and there are more than I mentioned, enough holes have been poked in things, that hole-poking deconstruction seems to be the last man standing… Now I should proceed to deconstruct every last word I just said, remake the very impulse that led me to say it in first place. Or maybe not, because then I might just be contradicting myself, demonstrating my point by refuting it. — Fire Ologist

You seem to be focusing on only one aspect of seeing the world in terms of a self-transformative, self-contradictory movement of becoming, and missing the other, more important one. Your focus is on incommensurability, loss, disconnection, arbitrariness. It is true that for all these writers difference is more primary than identity. And in deconstructing the traditional metaphysics, they lose the faith in the certainty a God creator provided, and the certainty absolute truth provided. But I would argue they gained something more important. In thinkers like Nietzsche, Derrida. Heidegger, Deleuze, Foucault and Wittgenstein, the differential relations that swallow up matter are alway already organized as systems, networks, totalities of relational relevance and a certain internal consistency.

We are never without recourse to such backgrounds making our world intelligible and familiar to us at some level. If one compares the organization of these systems of internal differences with the objective realist models of idealists like Kant, or Enlightenment thinkers like Leibnitz, Hume, Spinoza and Descartes, one finds that they give us a way to understand our connection to the world, and to other human beings , that is more intimate and less arbitrary, allowing us to anticipate the behavior of others more effectively. We gave up the certainty of arbitrary truths in favor of the relativity and becoming of relevant , intricate and intimate relations of meaning. One can even find in postmodern models a certain notion of progress embedded within the becoming of these differential systems.

We haven't been able to really advance the discussion since existentialism (and it's bleed into post-modernism), and Nietzsche already burned most (not all), most of it down. — Fire Ologist

The discussion is always advancing , albeit slowly, although I admit this seems to be a somewhat stagnant period for great ideas. But if you grant that there has been a progress in the sciences and technology since the existentialists, then you would have to grant a progress in philosophy as well, since the former are outgrowths of the latter and parallel their development.

The whole point of the "9/11 didn't happen," meme popular on places like 4chan isn't that people actually think that the government falsified the construction of the Twin Towers in some objective sense, and then faked an attack on non-existent buildings. That would be too ridiculous even for those circles. The point is that history is whatever people in power say it is (and that Alt-Right activists possess this same power to change history). Objective history is inaccessible, a myth. The history we live with is malleable. It's a joke, but a joke aimed at an in-crowd who has come to see the past as socially constructed.. The subtext behind declaring every mass shooting a "hoax" is that "you can never be sure what is happening in current events." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Can you give me some quotes that demonstrate the belief you’re attributing to the alt right that objective history is a myth? My understanding is that the far right is so astonished and incredulous in the face of what they see as completely unfounded liberal interpretations of the facts that they have completely lost faith in the accuracy of anything a liberal says. That's not being anti-realist, that’s abandoning the expectation that the other side will be faithful to what is real, true and objective. You seem to be randomly mixing pomo and conservative memes together while providing no evidence to justify this.

Another main route for anti-realism to enter the far-right has been through esoterica, particularly Julius Evola and Rene Guenon. On places like 4chan it is not rare to have people talking about tulpas, creating realities through concentrated thought — thinking something is true makes it so — although this generally partially ironic (like everything in the Alt-Right). Hence, their God who was created from memetic energy or whatever. Everything is ironic and unreal, a sort of trolling of the "real" to show its total groundlessness — Count Timothy von Icarus

Evola and Fuenon are considered traditionalists. This has nothing to do with anti-realism as I understand its meaning in philosophy. As Joseph Rouse describes them:

Anti-realists endorse the possibility of understanding what scientific claims purport to say about the world, while denying the kind of access to what the world is "really" like needed to determine whether those claims are "literally" true. We can supposedly only discern whether claims are empirically adequate, instrumentally reliable, paradigmatically fruitful, rationally warranted, theoretically coherent, or the like.

Again, your depiction of anti-realism inappropriately mixes mysticism, irrationalism, supernaturalism and other traditional metaphysics with pomo post-realism, which is not related to any of those perspectives.

Daniel Friberg doesn't urge "rebutting" or "debunking" leftist "lies" but "deconstructing their narratives" in "metapolitical warfare." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Friberg couldn’t accurate define what Derrida’s notion of deconstruction means if his life depended on it. Pomo memes like these have entered the public vocabulary and have now become ubiquitous, but it will be decades before the general public has a clue about their original philosophical meaning. As proof of this, he certainly seems to have you fooled.

Both exist and one is derived from the other. — Lionino

Indeed.

Critical race theory can be thought of as a paradigm that goes all the way back to the Frankfurt school of critical theory. What the theorists were arguing is that, in order to understand modern society, you have to pay attention to the power relationships among members and groups.

https://news.temple.edu/news/2021-08-05/untangling-controversy-around-critical-race-theory

At least if I'm right that science and philosophy are different, and math is science. — Moliere

Heidegger argued that modern philosophy from Descartes to Nietzsche is grounded in a particular notion of the mathematical which founds the modern conception of science. With Descartes is born the contemporary philosophical metaphysics of the subject-object binary. The subject posits the object via an axiomatic method that defines in advance what it means to be an object, and in this way the modern notion of the mathematical becomes the basis of what subject and object are.

Mathematical method is not one piece of equipment of science among others but the primary component out of which is first de­termined what can become object and how it becomes an object…

Descartes does not doubt because he is a skeptic; rather, he must become a doubter because he posits the mathe­matical as the absolute ground and seeks for all knowledge a foundation that will be in accord with it. It is a question not only of finding a fundamental law for the realm of nature, but finding the very first and highest basic principle for the being of what is, in general. This absolutely mathematical principle cannot have anything in front of it and cannot allow what might be given to it beforehand.

This objectifying of whatever is, is accomplished in a setting-before, a representing, that aims at bringing
each particular being before it in such a way that man who calculates can be sure, and that means be certain, of
that being. We first arrive at science as research when and only when truth has been transformed into the
certainty of representation. What it is to be is for the first time defined as the objectiveness of representing, and
truth is first defined as the certainty of representing, in the metaphysics of Descartes. The whole of modern metaphysics taken together, Nietzsche included, maintains itself within the interpretation of what it is to be and of truth that was prepared by Descartes.

Eugene Gendlin’s analysis helps to clarify Heidegger’s comments:

There is a serial procedure employed in counting. In this procedure we obtain various numbers because we always keep in mind the units al­ready counted. Our counting “synthesizes” (puts to­gether) fourteen and another, another, and another. We keep what we have with us as we add another same unit. Our own continuity as we count gets us to the higher number. As Kant phrased it, without the unity of the “I think,” there would be only the one unit counted now, and no composition of numbers. We get from fourteen to seventeen by taking fourteen with us as we go on to add another, another, and another.

Thus, our activity of thinking provides both the series of uniform steps and the uniting of them into quantities. These units and numbers are our own notches, our own “another,” our own unity, and our own steps. Why do two plus two equal four? The steps are always the same; hence, the second two involves steps of the same sort as the first two, and both are the same uniform steps as counting to four. Thus, the basic mathematical composing gives science its uniform unitlike “things” and derivable com­positions. Therefore, everything so viewed
becomes amenable to mathematics.

But Heidegger terms the modern model of things
“mathematical” for a second reason. He argues that “mathematical” means “‘axiomatic”’: the basic nature
of things has been posited as identical to the steps of
our own proceeding, our own pure reasoning. The laws
of things are the logical necessity of reason’s own steps
posited as laws of nature. It is this that makes the model “mathematical” and explains why mathematics
acquired such an important role. The everywhere-equal
units of the space of uniform motion of basically uni­form bodies are really only posited axioms. They are the
uniform steps of pure, rational thought, put up as axioms
of nature. Descartes had said it at its “coldest” and most extreme: Only a method of reducing everything
to the clear and distinct steps of rational thinking grasps
nature.

Is not such an approach simply unfounded? Every­thing may follow from the starting assumptions, but what
are they based upon? How can that be a valid method?
Heidegger says that the axiomatic method lays its own
ground . He thus gives the term “axiomatic” a
meaning it does not always have: he makes it reflexive
(as Descartes’ method was ). “Axiomatic” means not only
to postulate axioms and then deduce from them; it does
not refer to just any unfounded assumptions one might
posit and deduce from. Rather, Heidegger emphasizes that the axioms that rational thought posits assert the nature of rational thought itself. Axiomatic thought posits itself as the world’s outline. It is based on itself. It creates the model of the world, not only by but as its own steps of thought. As we have seen, it is rational thought that has uniform unit steps and their composits, logical neces­sity and so forth. The axiomatic ground-plan of nature is
simply the plan of the nature of rational thought as­serted of nature. This, then, is the basic “mathematical”
character of modern science. It is founded on the “‘axio­matic” method of “pure reason,” which, as we shall see,
Kant retains but limits.