experiences are post hoc constructions, they're narratives we use to make what just happened in our brain more predictable (understandable in more colloquial terms). We weave together disparate, and often completely contradictory processes into one coherent narrative after the mental events themselves have already taken place and then 'prune' our connections to those process via the hippocampus to create a false memory of how things went down - one which eliminates all the contradictory and inexplicable stuff. — Isaac

I would argue that what we weave together is not disparate and completely contradictory bits but inferentially compatible ( but never identical) experience united on the basis of commonalities as well as differences. That’s what makes the narratives cohere. It is only when we shift our interest and focus in order to spin out an empirical third person narrative consisting of neuro-chemical bits and physical wavelengths that what we wove together now appears as disparate and completely contradictory. The contradiction is between two forms of language, two kinds of narratives, the phenomenological and the naturalistic, not between our perception of the ways things are and the way things REALLY are, as if our folk psychology ‘fools’ us into ‘false’ knowledge.

It’s interesting that you can apply this relativism to perception but not to the underlying empirical realist assumptions you ground it in , implied by terms like such as “false memory” , “what actually happens in the brain” and “wavelengths of light”. Why not be consistent and jettison the assumption that neurons and brains and wavelengths refer to something any more context and person-independent that the experience of color?

The salient point with regard to the topic, what cannot be said, remains the fact that we do talk about red. Hence red is not ineffable. The retort is something like, that we can talk about the colour red but not the sensation of red. This sits oddly in the mouths of those who also claim that the colour red is the name of a sensation. And it is wrong, since we do talk about the sensation of red. — Banno

I agree that there is no ineffable sensation of red in the guise of something like a qualia. I also agree that red only has meaning as something we talk about. But I argue that in order to understand perception as simultaneously private and public, rather than as one or the other, we have to recognize that in perceiving color or anything else, we must ‘talk’ to ourselves, and this is the essence of perception. Whatever we have learned about the meaning of words, objects and colors through prior interchange with others contributes to the background informing our self-speech, just as what we have learned about the perceptual world though solitary exploration of it does. When we are alone and deciding what colors to use in a painting we are creating, we draw from that previous merged public and private history with color, but then transform that history in applying it to the present task.

Perception doesn’t just draw from an archive of previous experience with words and perceptions, it always uses that knowledge in new ways. Just as the use of words between people is a language game, the use of prior knowledge about perception in new perceiving is a ‘perception’ game, a kind of language game that takes place in solitary situations. We ask ourselves ‘which’ sensations, and answer them to ourselves through such games which are neither strictly private nor public. They are private only in the sense that we renew the meaning of perceptual experience in every new context of engaging with the perceptual world, without the need to have another person there to respond to us.

They are public in that new perception forces us outside of the archive of previous perceptual meaning, interrogating and modifying our expectations. We are not just in our heads when we construct an experience of red, we are thrown into new situations with red which alters the meaning of past experience. If it is the discursive exposure to another in a use situation which is the requirement for answering the question “WHICH private sensation?” , then this requirement is already met in solitary perception, since to recognize any aspect of our environment is to use our previous experience with it via the transformation ( use) of expectation through my discursive exposure of my past with the fresh novelty of immediate context This is how perception functions by talking to itself. My self-speech is more than just a proxy, an already archived record of my history of discourse with other persons. Asking ourselves what we mean by red , in the context of the solitary perceptual ‘language’ game, is asking ourselves in a fresh way what is at stake and at issue in using a perceptual sense, and the answer comes from both the world of speaking communities we participate with and the solitary world of light and sound and touch.

What is the relationship between "the product of a complex constructive activity of perception" (redness), and the embodiment of language here? When I say 'red', my utterance
is virtually accompanied by a complex perpetual activity. Yet, at a more profound level, both saying and seeing are ultimately affected by my socio-cultural situation. — Number2018

We are affected by our sociopath-cultural situation as filtered and interpreted through our situated bodily organization of perception. The word red has as many senses as there are shared purposes and uses, but those purposes are always only partially shared, due to the fact that we are all situated differently within the ‘same’ culture. The meanings of words are negotiated , not introjected from culture to individual.

'll have to take your word for it. But as Isaac pointed out, there's more to red than "a complex constructive activity of perception". It's a social construct, and not private. — Banno

It is neither strictly private not strictly public. Language is embodied, which means perspectival. That is why language must allow for failures of shared intelligibility.

Isaac, here we have the illusion, encouraged by phenomenology, that there is a clear distinction to be had between red and the-sensation-of-red or the-experience-of-red. — Banno

It is not encouraged by the founder of modern phenomenology. Husserl, or his disciple, Merleau-Ponty. Husserl contributed in-depth analyses
concerning how redness is the product of a complex constructive activity of perception, rather than some irreducible primitive sensation.

I am sympathetic to this. What are your thoughts regarding the variations within a shared understanding? While it seems accurate to say that people have different understandings of red, do you consider those differences are sufficient to warrant being seen as incompatible. — Tom Storm

It really depends on the task. If I ask you to hand me the red towel, your responding correctly will give me no reason to wonder if you’re picturing the red color exactly the way I am. If I tell a painter to paint my kitchen red, it may not be a good idea to rely on their determination of what red looks like. It would be wiser for me to select a sample of the color I want first. Otherwise I may very well find their idea of red incompatible with mine.

I don't agree that there exists a 'sensation of red'. — Isaac

And neither does there exist a socially constructed notion of red that is completely shared within a language
community. It would at best be only partially shared, continually contested and redetermined , slightly differently for each participant, in each instantiation, relative to purposes, context and capacities.

What you're calling your 'experience of red' is a socially mediated construction. Therefore it is bound up with the language your culture uses and so can be reiterated in that language. — Isaac

Aren’t you forgetting the perspectival role of the body here? Our use of langauge is not divorced from our embodiment but presupposes it. Thus there needs to be room for unintelligibility in language, which shows up as situations where, for instance a blind person is marginalized from a sighted language community due to a gap in intelligibility.

the firm footing for science in transcendental subjectivity,
— Joshs

Transcendental consciousness is an absolute subjectivity that cannot be an object and. cannot be given reflectively. Because it can never be an object, one cannot say. anything about it or characterize it.

Ineffable :cool:

How many scientists have even heard or read of this? — jgill

You might want to check out Berkeley philosopher Alva Noe for a link between Husserlian phenomenology and contemporary perceptual science. A.I. and perceptual psychology are two domains where there is an increasing interest in phenomenology. Husserl and Merleau-Ponty both contributed intricate and original analyses of the mechanisms of perception.

“Alva Noë is a modern-day empiricist. His book Action in Perception is chockablock with contemporary cognitive science; its preface and notes (not to mention general erudition) point to on-going collaboration with Evan Thompson, Kevin O’Regan, and Susan Hurley. Their research investigates the sensorimotor bases of consciousness, and Action in Perception is offered as its philosophical backdrop.”

States function through laws. Laws function through the threat and application of violence. — Tzeentch

The threat and application of violence is an inherent component of all human social interaction, simply because any action I choose will do unintended violence to someone else , and anything I believe to be right will be perceived as a violation of someone else’s standard of ethics. We have no choice but to shun those who behave in ways that violate our modes of thinking and acting. Whether we incarcerate them or physically separate
them from us, the principle is the same, even though there are vast differences in the degree of ‘humaneness’ with which we split ourselves or our group off from
others whose behavior we cannot abide.

Self declaredradical anarchists like David Graeber perpetuate a certain violence in demanding a wholesale denunciation and distancing from what they deem as structures of violence. The problem isn’t the existence of statist structures , but the rigidity of their formation and interpretation.
There are always ways of adding multiple forms
of discursive mediation , negotiation and collective
reinterpretation into legal and governmental structures , and this will happen as a consequence of evolving social
understanding.

Furthermore, in one of my references on philosophy, they indicated that Husserl, toward the end of his career, wrote that the dream of putting the sciences on firm foundations was over. Rather tragic end to one who began phenomenology to put all the sciences on secure footing. Talking about a dead end — Richard B

Could you send me that reference?You may be confusing Husserl’s critique of modern sciences as failing to ground themselves on the basis of traditional presuppositions of empiricism with his own transcendental grounding.

Husserl’s last published work was The Crisis of the European Sciences( 1936), completed two years before his death. It attacks Cartesian and Kantian-based explanations of the basis of scientific truth( which brought us logical positivism) as leading to a crisis of justification within the sciences , and reiterates and further elaborates the firm footing for science in transcendental subjectivity, the central idea of his life’s work. In sum, scientific truth is grounded on objective concepts formed within intersubjective communities, which are themselves the reciprocal interactions among subjective perspectives.

↪Joshs If what you are saying is something like that we find ourselves embedded int he world, then I agree. — Banno

Yes, and thought is embedded within an affectively organizing bodily system in an even more immediate way that it is in the discursive world of other people. A cognitive system only continues to exist by making changes in itself.

I figured you'd go with: speech happens (somewhere in the motor cortex?) and when we reflect on this, we frame it as a conversation with a speaker and a listener. Posing and opposing things gives things meaning, right? — frank

The posing is itself is already meaning in that it produces a differentiation, a way in which a fresh sense of meaning is alike and differs from what preceded it in memory. The posing is inherently an opposing, a contrast and comparison with the substrate it grows out of. A thought addresses and modifies the context it emerges out of, and so this is already a kind of speaking to oneself.

No idea what that adds. But taking others as granted is much the same as dismissing idealism anyway, so ok. — Banno

The social constructionism of Ken Gergen and others has been critiqued as a form of discursive idealism because it tries to derive all forms of experience from cultural systems of language interchange. They believe that ‘cognitive mechanisms should not to be searched for ‘within the head' of a person, but rather within the discursive or conversational interactions between persons.’ As Gergen puts it: ‘The locus of knowledge is no longer taken to be the individual mind but rather to inhere in patterns of social relatedness'.

Enactive, embodied accounts, by contrast, see the self-organization of the individual in its interactions with its environment as having an autonomy that allows it to distinguish between its own normatively organized unfolding experience and its awareness of others. We normally can distinguish between our own thoughts (internal dialogue) and thoughts from others, due to the agential nature of our own thoughts.

Thus, ‘dialogue requires the autonomous contribution of different dialogical partners, and furthermore, a mutual acknowledgment of ‘otherness'. There is a fundamental difference between others that are part of our self narratives and others to whom we tell our stories.’

I can imagine a private language argument. Self-talk as a back construct from public talk. — Banno

Something like that, yes. And to prevent it from turning into a discursive idealism, one could integrate the feedback from the body into this interplay.

Are we forever trapped behind the cartesian demon, talking to ourselves, or do we -- as the seeming suggests -- actually feel something that others feel sometimes? — Moliere

Why not start from the idea that talking to ourselves is already talking to an other, that the self does not coincide with itself? This will avoid the Cartesian trap of solipsism.

No wonder anglo American philosophy is such a dead end, so busy trying to squeeze meaning our of ordinary language. Well, the world is not ordinary at all.
— Constance

This may be limited characterization of Anglo American philosophy. W. V. Quine, one who belongs is such a tradition, said the following in Word and Object, "There are, however, philosophers who overdo this line of thought, treating ordinary language as sacrosanct. They exalt ordinary language to the exclusion of one of its own traits: its disposition to keep on evolving." — Richard B

On the other hand, Putnam, one of Quine’s heirs, wrote:
“Thus we have a paradox: at the very moment when analytic philosophy is recognized as the "dominant movement" in world philosophy, it has come to the end of its own project-the dead end, not the completion.”

It was the same epistemic divide that pushed Rorty to hold that truth was made, not discovered, that is in place for transcendental idealism. I — Constance

He went so far as to suggest that we could do
away with the notion of truth because it was a confused and therefore not very useful idea.

:up:

To speak is never to know, though if you know something then you might have something interesting to say.

Let's just grant this "gap", as you call it, between what we can say and what is known. — Moliere

What is it we are doing when we merely ‘think’ rather than ‘speak’ something? Can we distinguish , for instance , pure thought or meaning from speaking to oneself? According to traditional understandings of the role of language, the communicative nature of language implies the risk of losing or distorting some aspect of what is to be communicated. Something is lost when we speak what we are thinking , and even more so when we write down what we are speaking. The problem with language is supposedly the risk associated with attaching of a signifier to carry and express the meaning of a signified.

But doesn’t this assume there is such a thing as a pure, or purely present to itself signified, an immediately present meaning in thought and then direct experience of doing that only secondarily , through symbolic language, is then expressed and communicated? What is immediate thought and direct doing are already mediated , already a form of speaking to oneself that is in fact never purely present to itself but already a form of language? When we know something , doesnt the knowing have to be repeated to itself, to refer back to itself, in or order to continue to be a knowing? Isn’t this necessary repetition a speaking to onself, and in speaking to onself, isnt there a gap from one iteration of the repetition to the next , between what one intends to mean to say to oneself and what one actually says and means?

If I walked into a Tanzanian builder's yard and said "jiwe moja tafadhali", I know that uttering this particular sound will achieve my goal of being given a stone. The sound only has meaning in enacting a form of life. It has no meaning if not able to change the state of the world in some way. Yet the sound does refer to an object, because if it didn't refer to an object, a "jiwe", the merchant wouldn't know what I wanted. Words both enact a form of life and refer to objects. — RussellA

Word use doesn’t literally mean “changing the state of the world”, as if we first have an understanding of what a word refers to and then later decide to “change the world” in a separate step by using this word we already understand to change some other aspect
of our environment.

As human beings we always already find ourselves in motion( not physical but conceptual motion). We always already find ourselves thrown into new contexts of meaning. ‘Use’ of a word should be understood in the same way as ‘use’ of perceptual know-how. If instead of hearing the word ‘apple’, we find ourselves perceiving a picture of an apple or an actual apple in front of us, the image we are presented with is never identical with any image of apple we have seen previously. This is due not only to differences in its appearance , its lighting, color, shape , angle of view, but also to the context of its appearance. If it appears in a scene where we dont expect to see it we may not recognize it as an apple.
We may have something else on our mind and be looking right at it but not pay attention to it as an apple. Even when we do recognize it, this may imply that we are treating it as a a fruit , or as something to satisfy our hunger , or as an object to fling at someone, or as an element in a pie we want to bake.

In all of these cases of recognizing the object as an apple, our experience is of something slightly different. You want to say that hearing the word ‘apple’ refers us back to the memory of a concept( a specific object or category of objects). The word links back to, correlates with, a piece of information we have stored, and this allows us to recognize the word. The problem with this notion is the same problem with describing perception this way. When we recognize a visual image , we are indeed drawing knowledge from memory. We are ‘ using’ that memory to anticipate , to create expectations and predictions of what is in front of us. But because what we actually see in any perception is different in some respect with respect to our expectations, the way we end up ‘using’ our expectations is by modifying those expectations in light of the unique features of what we are actually seeing.

This is the same with words we have learned. When we hear the word apple, or when we summon the word in response to seeing an apple in front of us, we are ‘using’ our prior understanding of the word in the context of a new situation which always requires us to modify our prior sense of the word. Notice that this has nothing to do with wanting to deliberately “change the state of the world”. The state of the world is always already changed every time we are involved in new contexts of perceiving objects and using words, prior to any effort or desire on our part to ‘change the world’. What allows us to recognize words is the dance between expectation and the novel aspects of the actual situation. This gives words their intelligibility and familiarity. But this is never simply a matter of pure reference. Pure reference is impossible. It is reference (memory , expectation, anticipation) modified by context, which is another name for ‘use’ or ‘forms of life’ or ‘language games’ in Wittgenstein’s sense. Doing things with words is not a choice. Even if we don’t have the slightest interest in changing anything about our circumstances when we employ a word, the very intelligibility of the word involves the modification of its prior sense, which usually goes unnoticed by us , and allows you to believe in the idea of word as referring to objects.

context is independent of whatever meaning a word may have. If I walked into a Parisian cafe and said "jiwe" I may get strange looks. If I said "jiwe" in a language class I might get top marks. — RussellA

I disagree that the later Wittgenstein believes context is independent of whatever meaning a word has. Words don’t have meanings as context-independent categories. Word meanings only exist as particular senses of meaning produced in particular contexts. What the word “jiwe” means in a language class is not simply an already established definition within that class, but the product of the particular language game occasioning its immediate use. If that word is used in the class on three consecutive days, it will be understood not according to a single
identical definition applicable to all three days , but based on three unique senses related by family resemblance.

If the meaning of a word changed with context, language would have no foundation, and there would be the problem of circularity. I wouldn't know what a word meant if I didn't know the context, and I wouldn't know the context unless I knew the meaning of the word. — RussellA

You’re thinking of words in the old way as referring to objects. For Wittgenstein words don’t refer to objects, they enact forms of life. The issue of circularity isn’t resolved by referring the meaning of words back
to dictionary definitions or pre-established
rules of use. There is still the problem of interpretation.

Your statements, considered as evidence, suggest deep internal conflict within your mind. You know cerebration is indissociable from experience, and yet, when push comes to shove, according to your heart's desire, you must assert that metaphysics is both temporally and logically antecedent to physics. — ucarr

Why not look at physics as a particular invention of modern science dating back to the 17th century? Aristotle introduced a physics but it was very different from modern physics. Prior to the Greeks, many cultures had their own versions of what we call ‘physics’. So the development I described as leading up to modern physics is a historical sequence of changing theories concerning the nature of objects. When I say that metaphysics is prior to modern physics I just mean that theorization is ‘prior’ to any particular historical content of a theory. Put differently, what all kinds of theories of objects have in common is that they are all theories, even though only one of them represents modern physics. In another few hundred years we may be using a theory of the real world that no long calls itself physics and no longer deals with what we today think of as material objects. So ‘physics’ and ‘material object’ may be historically transient concepts , but theory and metaphysics, like self-world interaction, are common to all eras of scientific inquiry. Metaphysics is not prior to the self-world interaction, but it is prior to ( the condition of possibility for) modern physics.

If every different use of a stone gave us a different meaning of stone, then there would be an uncountable number of definitions of "stone"

I'm with Banno who wrote "Nowadays a property is considered essential if and only if it belongs to the individual in question in every possible world." — RussellA

And I’m with the later Wittgenstein , who argues that there is no such thing as a word outside of some particular use; for a word to be is for a word to be used, and word use is always situational, contextual and personal. Language does not exist external to its use by us in the world; there is nothing common to all language games or particular applications of a rule or definition of a word. Wittgenstein's metaphor of “spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre” shows the difference between language use as applications of pre-existing categorical , normative and rule-governed frames and language use as a subtle or not-so-subtle re-invention of the sense of norms, rules and categories. The family resemblance among senses of meaning of a word like stone is the continuous overlapping of fibers altering previous patterns of language use via fresh contexts of use, rather than the churning out of a new instance of a superordinate theme, rule, property or attribute.

*Let's say some infantile suppositions do evolve within. I argue the source of such suppositions is still external i.e. the intra-mural particulars of the deprivation chamber communicated to the infants senses. — ucarr

I didn’t mean to leave the impression that I thought a metaphysical framework is generated ‘in the head’ before and outside of exposure to an outside world. On the contrary, every moment of experience is an interaction with an outside. The self , and all its contents of belief, are modified in some small fashion in their identity each moment through this exposure. So inside and outside, subject and object, are not two separate realms, they are only poles of an indissociable interaction. Through this interactive experiencing we construct and evolve schemes of understanding and predicting ( metaphysics) the behavior of aspects of our world. In sum, metaphysics isnt in the head, it is in patterns of schemes of interaction with the world.

My point is that in making this argument, we are a long way away from the empirical objects that are talked about in physics and chemistry. Using the physical object as the starting point for our understanding of the self-world interaction is getting it backwards, because we are starting with a sophisticated metaphysical scheme without recognizing that modern concepts of the physical object are the products of a long constitutive development , the evolution from one metaphysical scheme to the next( scientific paradigms) that involves the communication among many subjective perspectives within an intersubjective scientific community.

↪Joshs Is not failing to move beyond a modernist understanding of postmodernism in education an assimilation? — introbert

Yes, in education and other disciplines where the postmodern refers to widely shared practices that are not necessarily correlated with the any particular metaphysical framework. But postmodern philosophical ideas can’t be assimilated into modernism since within philosophy these refer to incompatible metaphysical
positions.

The tragedy of postmodernism is that it is far from being a point of departure from modernity, but has become a fascination, and has been assimilated into modernity. Ironically, postmodernism that aims for critical thought on objectivity, rationality and truth has become the object of study in which students are evaluated on their ability to understand it objectively, reach conclusions with its rationality and answer questions regarding its truth. — introbert

That’s not an assimilation of postmodernism ( or at least philosophical, as opposed to cultural or political postmodernism). Understanding Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida ‘objectively’ and ‘rationally’ is failing to move beyond a modernist understanding.

You can't cogitate the metaphysics of a material object prior to its existence because material objects cannot be cogitated - which to say, cannot be rationalized - into being — ucarr

What if we were to think of metaphysics as a necessary, always present network of presuppositions and expectations that allows objects in our world to appear as what they seem to be to us? For instance, perceptual psychologists know that when we recognize physical objects through vision, sound or touch, the stimuli we are actually exposed to is very minimal. We fill in the rest from memory in the form of expectations. What we bring to a material object like an apple to a complex perceptual-motor schema based on a numerous previous encounters with it and other objects in our world. This schema includes expectations concerning how the visual image of the apple will change when we move our head or eyes or body in a certain way, it includes our expectation that the object has dimensions and if we walk around it wee will see the side or back of it. It includes expectations of how it will feel when we lift it up , or how it will sound. None of these attributes are immediately present to us in the object. In fact, what is immediately present is only a flowingly changing series of perspectival data, not a unified material object. The material object is a construction that we impose on the experience, an ongoing hypothesis that the series of perspectival bits amounts to a unified thing, as well as how this assumed object will respond when we interact with it in various ways. This perceptual schema is a kind of mini-metaphysics, linked to more encompassing schemes of understanding concerning the nature of the world within which the apple appears to us and its relation to our minds and bodies.

I don't see that there is a necessary link between what something "is" and any use that something may have, in that something may exist and yet have no use.

A stone is defined as a "hard solid non-metallic mineral matter". Stone may be used as a building material, but even if it isn't, it still remains a stone. — RussellA

No, a stone is picked up, it is thrown, it is inspected, it is ignored, or perhaps it is ‘defined’. Every use of the word stone provides us with a different sense of meaning of ‘stone’. Asking for the definition of the word ‘stone’ is an uncommon and narrow use of the word, rather than being some overarching grounding for the word ‘stone’, as if every conceivable sense of meaning of the word in actual, unique contexts is somehow subordinate to a context-independent , generic dictionary definition of ‘stone’

↪Joshs there are many things involved with your left hand - the weather affects it, you touch other people, your eyes cause you to hold it up if the sunnis too bright. The problem with your analogy is you’re saying those outside factors ARE your hand — GLEN willows

We were talking about consciousness, which is not an anatomical location within the body ( like a hand) but a function or process. There is never a neat relation between anatomically defined parts of the brain(amygdala, frontal lobe, hippocampus), and functions such as language and memory. This is because anatomy is defined mostly by visual appearance. These parts of the brain appear to us as distinctly identifiable blobs so we name them and try to squeeze unique functions into them. Then we remove those parts or observe the results of damage to them and see if the resulting deficits allows us to cleanly assign them a function. This doesn’t work out very well. We now know that memory isn’t located in one anatomical part of the brain but is distributed throughout the entire brain. The hand is also defined anatomically . We can loosely agree
that the hand is that part of our anatomy above the wrist. But does this describe a functionally unified entity, or does it encompass a variety of interconnected functional systems that we arbitrarily group together as ‘hand’?

What I’m arguing is that we dont fully understand the functions of any aspect of the body without recognizing that our pointing to a ‘body’ is arbitrarily separating one aspect of a system based on anatomical criteria( the body is a blob of attached parts that can be visually distinguished from its surroundings). The body and the environment which sustains and interacts with it are one system, not two. Bones don’t survive without gravity putting pressure on them. The nervous system doesn’t exist without external stimulation. A digestive system needs food particles to keep it working, muscles need resistance in order to continue to be muscles. Our perceptual systems don’t allow us to develop the ability see or hear properly without our physically interacting with an environment that actively participates in defining its functioning. The very structure of a body with all its internal components implies a very specific environment, just as a bird’s or fish’s or snakes body implies a specific body-environment system.
The animal isn’t simply a body placed in an environment. It is an inseparable body-environment system.
Consciousness in a sensory deprivation chamber functions very differently than on a crowed street, or when getting a massage, or when mediating , or when drunk. That doesn’t mean these different environmental factors define consciousness by themselves , any more than it means that consciousness can be defined in isolation from its surroundings. Rather, consciousness is an organized system of interactions between an environment and an organism. Biologists and psychologists are coming to the conclusion that all
consciousness requires , at the most primordial
level, is sensitivity to an outside, and this includes even single-called organisms.

“Not just animals are conscious, but every organic being, every autopoietic cell is conscious. In the simplest sense, consciousness is an awareness of the outside world. And this world need not be the world outside one's mammalian fur. It may also be the world outside one's cell membrane. Certainly some level of awareness, of responsiveness owing to that awareness, is implied in all autopoietic systems. (Margulis and Sagan 1995, p. 122)

" coffee is not defined by what it may cause to happen, coffee is defined by what it is, a dark brown powder with a strong flavour."Coffee" doesn't mean that a person will act, the desire to drink coffee means that a person will act. — RussellA

What something ‘is’ defines a use. ‘Dark brown powder’ represents the anticipation of ways of interacting perceptually with something, and these are guided by a background context of aims and purposes. What we notice about things is what matters to us. There is always a motivated reason why we find ourselves paying attention to something as being a dark brown powder. It is this particular instance of a powder, seen in these particular circumstances, and noticed for specific reasons in relation to our ongoing activities. All of these factors are part and parcel of the very meaning of coffee as ‘dark brown powder’.

If what we know is believed, justified and true, it is propositional, and hence statable. But can one put into words how one rides a bike or play guitar? Tacit knowledge is a candidate for the ineffable. — Banno

Can one put into words the way in which one knows something as believe, justified and true, that is, the tacit sense of its truth?

The one apparently advocated by Wittgenstein was to simply remain silent about the ineffable
— Banno

Was it? Or was he warning that language is sometimes misused?

Was there an argument that shows that speech never falls short of expressing what we know? — frank

Good point. The ineffable is not a patented product with a tag warning not to speak of it. If it were, the lawyers would have a field day arguing over whether the defendant was actually speaking of the ineffable. The meaning of the ineffable is nothing outside of how it is used in actual contexts, and since these contexts are never identical but only share a family resemblance (which does not mean that they are subsumed within an overarching definition of ineffability), there is no single generic sense of ineffability. What we can say is that to use to the word is to provide it with a sense, even when we are inclined to be bewitched by our ordinary use ( or misuse) of language into convincing ourselves that we can somehow understand a sense of a word like ‘ineffable’ and yet hold it to be outside all meaning. This apparent paradox , like the liar paradox, is only an illusion or confusion resulting from our misunderstanding of how language works.

↪Joshs I’m just really not sure why it’s so difficult to imagine consciousness is located entirely in the brain. Of course we are influenced by phenomena outside our brains, and it enters into, and influences, our consciousness. But outside phenomena aren’t “consciousness” per se — GLEN willows

The problem with locating any process entirely within some segment of the body is that it is a purely artificial move. We can designate some function or process as being associated exclusively with an anatomical part of the body, but that process is fully interconnected with the rest of the body, and the body is fully interconnected with its environment. Is respiration a function of the lungs? What about the role of the circulatory system that brings blood to be oxygenated or co2 to be eliminated? And isnt the air part of the lungs? Consciousness involves much more than just the brain. It is a synthesizing center that brings together information coming from all parts of the body as well as from the external environment. Thus, the coordinated communication among brain, body and environment constitute what consciousness is. I would agree that the higher the level of consciousness, the more complex and dominant role is played by cerebral neural activity relative to body and environment.

And the physical and the mental are separable aspects?
— Joshs
Of course! Don't you distinguish between those categories? Physical is real & tangible, while Mental is an imaginary intangible model of Reality. One is matter-based, and the other is meaning-based. One is here & now, while the other is anywhere & any-when.

Animals, who don't make such "trivial" irrelevant distinctions, live in a material world of the 5 senses, while humans live in a cultural world modified by the mind — Gnomon

.

It’s interesting that you identify the material
with the tangible. What is physically real is what we can touch. Touching is interacting If we further analyze the basis of information we receive through touch, we find the sensory and the motoric, in the modes of our ways of moving in relation to objects, and the kinesthetic feedback from our movements, are inseparably involved in what objects are to us. In other words , what allows us to interpret objects as objects is a body schematic integrating touch sensation, kinesthetic feedback from bodily movement , as well as the input from other sense modalities, especially vision.

This is also how other animals construct meanings concerning the world they interact with. Animals may move in a ‘material world’ , but that world appears very differently to different animals as a result of the different body schemas of various animals. In sum , a perceived object is a product of a scheme of interaction with an environment based on the needs and purposes of an organism. We call aspects of our environment ‘material’ and ‘physical’ as a result of the ways we have come to interact with our world. Thus, not only our experience of the imaginary, but also our experience of the actual is a synthetic construction of the real. The real is a production and not a passive
observation , something we enact as much as discover.

What paradigms have been broken, altered, or introduced by philosophers in that time period? No fair citing physicists or other scientists who have speculated about their subjects, just philosophers known for their contributions, those ideas familiar to the general public. — jgill

Logical positivism was put into question by the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy, structuralism was
critiqued by phenomenology and post-structuralism in continental philosophy and the social sciences, modernism was replaced by postmodernism in political theory, etc…

↪TiredThinker It seems to me that philosophers don't "answer" so much as they raise (unbegged) questions of 'our political, ethical and intellectual givens' (e.g. assumed answers, perennial questions, normative solutions or intractable / underdetermined problems). — 180 Proof

You can’t raise a question if you don’t already presuppose its answer in terms of a wider framework within which the question is intelligible.

“Every questioning is a seeking. Every seeking takes its direction beforehand from what is sought. Questioning is a knowing search for beings in their thatness and whatness.... As questioning about, . . questioning has what it asks about. All asking about . . . is in some way an inquiring of... As a seeking, questioning needs prior guidance from what it seeks. The meaning of being must therefore already be available to us in a certain way.”(Heidegger)

But I'm sure some here will say we are missing the real geniuses, Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, Lyotard, Althusser....

Hah — Manuel

Dont forget Foucault, Rorty, Kuhn, Ricouer, Gadamer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Husserl and Nancy.

Empirical Science studies the effable & phenomenal (physical) aspects of the world. So, it's left to Philosophy to dabble in the ineffable & mental (metaphysical) features of reality — Gnomon

And the physical and the mental are separable aspects? Empirical science isnt already dealing with the mental in studying the physical (the objective as the product of intersubjective organization of subjective experience)? Time is a more abstract concept than physical object?

In consciousness, we imagine that all we perceive is somewhere outside, whereas the purely neurophysiological operations do not provide any such clues. They are entirely closed off and internal. Insofar as it is coupled with self-reference, consciousness is also internal, and it knows that it is — Pantagruel

Not all approaches to neuroscience assume that neurophysiological operations are entirely closed off and internal. For instance, neurophenomenology, an enactive approach to neuroscience, makes the body and social environment an essential and inseparable aspect of neural functioning. There is only one system, and it is simultaneously neural, embodied , and embedded in an environment. This makes consciousness also irreducibly interactive, because it is the integration of all three aspects.