To think and perceive is to communicate with oneself by way of the world.
— Joshs

What are we communicating to ourselves? — Lionino

When we speak to another we have certain expectations concerning the response, which will never be precisely fulfilled. Likewise when we think to ourselves we are communicating with an other, since the self returns to itself slightly differently moment to moment. We always end up meaning something slightly other than what we intended to mean.

Its about the idea that language is not identical to thought. We don't need language to think about things. When — Apustimelogist

It depends on how narrow your view of language is. Wittgenstein’s analyses of language were focused on contexts of interaction between persons. His was a ‘phenomenology’ of the intersubjective. If we want an analysis of perception, and thus of thinking,
we have to turn to the phenomenology of perception. In the work of Merleau-Ponty we find an account of perception that I think dovetails nicely with Witt’s intersubjective focus. For Merleau-Ponty, perception is ‘languaged’, but this cannot be understood in terms of a split between thinking and communicating. To think and perceive is to communicate with oneself by way of the world. Language isn’t simply a tool that we use to access concepts , in its very instantiation it uses us to transform the sense of our concepts and percepts by enacting them in the world. We dont think language, language thinks us.

But I was referring specifically to the apophatic nature of the reduction. Michel Henry argues how this negative "method" takes philosophy to the purity of engagement and he means it takes one to an undeniable simplicity. — Constance

The simplicity Henry is after seems to depend on belief in a pure self-affecting ipseity. Zahavi is sympathetic to this stance, as he also argues that there can be no meaning without subjectivity and there can be no ground for subjectivity without an ‘I’ which comes back to itself as identically the same in its self-affection. As he says:

“Unless phenomenology were able to show that there is in fact a decisive and radical difference between the phenomenality of constituted objects and the phenomenality of constituting subjectivity, i.e., a radical difference between object-manifestation and self-manifestation, its entire project would be threatened.”

“Henry conceives of this self-affection as a purely interior and self-sufficient occurrence involving no difference, distance or mediation between that which affects and that which is affected. It is immediate, both in the sense that the self-affection takes place without being mediated by the world, but also in the sense that it is neither temporally delayed nor retentionally mediated. It is in short an event which is strictly non-horizontal and non- ecstatic.”

This is where Henry departs from Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, who all insist on the ecstatic nature of self-awareness.

I personally think Wittgenstein never fully got away from Russell and Hume's influence re causation. That is, the influence that made him write:

5.1361 The events of the future cannot be inferred from those of the present. Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus.

Part of what helps cement rules though is causal consequence. Bad applied math results in bad consequences regardless of what the majority thinks for instance — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think Wittgenstein is closer to the phenomenologists and poststructuralists in his critique of efficient causation that he is to Hume or Russell. The contextually sensitive, unreflective kind of skilled behavior he is pointing to in actual rule following behavior involves reciprocal causality, a back and forth adjustment of meaning sense between the unfolding matter and one’s conceptually informed response to it. Efficient cause ignores the shifts in sense that contextually unfolding situations produce. The shift from one language game to another is merely a more exaggerated kind of reciprocally developing change in sense than what occurs in any interchange.

Metaphysics attempts to escape one’s worldview or form of life in order to latch onto something that transcends all perspectives, something that can rule on and rule over all individual views; but the entities posited as
transcending all systems, such as Truth or Reality in-itself or God are, like Hegel’s thing-in-itself-for-us, posited by and only function within systems. These systems or games can be incommensurable, with no possibility of common measurement or neutral judge, a Great Umpire in the Sky. “Some­body may reply like a rational person and yet not be playing our game.”
We should say no more than that their behavior is just not what makes sense to us: “there’s only one thing that can be wrong with the meaning of a word, and that is that it is unnatural . . . unnatural for us. . . . We just don’t go on in that way.”182 While we cannot take up a wholly external point of view, we can inhabit ours critically, without the illusions of metaphysical grounding.

This incommensurability also means that we cannot get the players of strange language-games to start acting normally (that is, as we do) simply by reasoning with them, since the very thing we’re trying to teach them is
our way of reasoning. Just as a child isn’t rationalized through arguments— were she susceptible to arguments, she would already be rational—but through training, so bringing others to think as we do happens through
nonrational means. Supposing we met people who did not regard [the propositions of physics] as a tell­ing reason. Now, how do we imagine this? Instead of the physicist, they consult an oracle. (And for that we consider them primitive.) Is it wrong for them to consult an oracle and be guided by it?—If we call this “wrong” aren’t we using our language­ game as a base from which to combat theirs? (Lee Braver)

How does any individual ever know that they are properly chastising someone for following a rule wrong? Per Wittgenstein, they can't be sure that they ever understand a rule — Count Timothy von Icarus

It is not that we forget what we have learned concerning how to follow a rule, it’s that the initial information is always inadequate to continually follow it. Wedon’t apply a rule like a picture, we USE it in contextually changing circulate that require us to go beyond the original instructions. Lee Braver explains:

Take the example of telling someone to follow a rule, say, repeatedly adding two. It isn’t that when we teach this procedure to her we don’t know what we want her to do, but that this knowledge shouldn’t be mod­eled on the picture of a mind encompassing the range of the function “Add two” in its gaze, even though our reflexive correction of a wrong answer makes it appear as if we were comparing the series coming out of her mouth
with a written list.
“When I teach someone the formation of the series . . . I surely mean him to write . . . at the hundredth place.”—Quite right; you mean it. And evidently without neces­sarily even thinking of it. This shews you how different the grammar of the verb “to mean” is from that of “to think.” And nothing is more wrong-headed than calling
meaning a mental activity! The interlocutor here argues that since we know that 1,002 should follow 1,000 when we issue the order “Add two,” a sequence not explicitly consid­ered at the time the order was issued, something queer must be plugging us into the entire series. Wittgenstein reverses the polarity of the argument.
We know what should follow 1,000 and the humble cogitative actions we find do not consciously anticipate every step—so understanding the rule must enable us to correct immediately without explicit thoughts. The mirage of the meaning-object’s containment of all future applica­tions shimmers into existence here to supplement the woefully underpow­ered act of comprehension.

In most situations, we simply follow a rule without reflection. It is only when an unexpected consequence ensues that we shift from unreflectively following a rule (or unreflectively observing someone else following it) to analytically dissecting it.

Lee Braver discusses the unreflective following of rules:

The standard view has the PLA resting on verificationism: the objection is that the private linguist cannot reliably verify the recurrence of the same sensation, since all he has to go on is his feeling that the present instance is of the same type as the previous one. Without an external check on my reidentification of the Gorignak, I cannot satisfactorily determine whether I have applied the term correctly or not, that is, whether this entity here now is a token of the same type as the one previously so baptized. My attempts to evaluate the consistency of my own applications cannot suffice because, being at the same level as the acts of identification themselves, they provide
no justification of these acts; on my own, I’m just buying multiple copies of a given newspaper to check the headlines of the first. Without such an external check, then, the difference between merely believing I am following a rule correctly and actually doing so collapses, taking the very notion of a rule, and that of language in general, with it.

Some commentators have denied that this argument appears in Witt­genstein’s discussion of PLA at all, but I find it expressed too clearly in too many texts to dismiss it entirely. However, as has been pointed out, this kind of verificationism clashes with many of his other ideas, in particular his frequent claims that we neither have nor need justification to carry out many rule-governed activities perfectly well, a claim that, in fact, often appears within his discussions of private language. For example: “‘but when I in my own case distinguish between, say, pretending that I have pain and really having pain, surely I must make this distinction on some grounds!’
Oddly enough—no!—I do distinguish but not on any grounds.” Wittgenstein believes that every interpretation must bottom out in some unjustifiable immediate reaction in order to escape the infinite regress of interpretive rule-following, so demanding an overt justification for the correct recognition of sensations even to be conceiv­able seems odd. I believe that Wittgenstein uses verification to indicate the purposelessness rather than the intrinsic incoherence of private language­ games, as clearly stated here: “you have to remind yourself of the use to get
out of the rut in which all these expressions tend to keep you. The whole point of investigating the ‘verification,’ e.g., is to stress the importance of the use as opposed to that of the picture.”

I guess I can get this gist of the joke from the general context. I don't remember much about the movie. Was that an actual scene, or something that you imagined? — Ludwig V

Given this, it would make sense to pick popular religions and try them out, learning as much as you can, and giving each a chance to display their truth to you. When you find a religion you think contains truth, you practice it but remain skeptical, still searching other religions for more/more relevant truths.
— Igitur
I'm puzzled about what you mean by trying religions out — Ludwig V

I’m picturing Woody Allen trying out Christianity by eating Wonder bread with mayo in Hannah and her Sisters.

However, I do agree that the "bedrock" metaphor doesn't challenge foundationalism itself, and that's always puzzled me. The radical issue is whether foundations are always necessary. After all, it turned out that there are no foundations of the planet. — Ludwig V

I think it does challenge foundationalism, which is why Lee Braver named his book on Wittgenstein and Heidegger ‘Groundless Grounds’. Take this quote from On Certainty:

96. It might be imagined that some propositions, of the form of empirical propositions, were hardened and functioned as channels for such empirical propositions as were not hardened but fluid; and that this relation altered with time, in that fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones became fluid.
97. The mythology may change back into a state of flux, the river-bed of thoughts may shift. But I distinguish between the movement of the waters on the river-bed and the shift of the bed itself; though there is not a sharp division of the one from the other.

I interpret this to mean that bedrock assumptions are like the river bank. They change along with the river itself, but more slowly.

there is also the idea that Crusoe cannot make new rules so long as he is alone, and any continued rule following can only be judged by an absent community. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There seem to be a number of issues involved here. First, what takes place when we use words to communicate with each other? Second, how does this compare with what happens when we use words by ourselves? We could go down the rabbit hole of the private language argument of private pains and beetles in boxes, but I would rather argue that both private language and public language involve
the use of words to enact new senses of meaning. In social
communication this takes place as a result of the mutual
affecting among the participants. In the case of my talking to my self, my present and past selves affect each other to produce new senses of meaning of the words and the criteria of rules I invoke.

." For example, the claim that a man who washes ashore on desert Island loses his ability to make and follow rules, but then regains this capacity when a second person washes ashore later. Obviously, a great many Wittgensteinians (as well as people generally) find this to be somewhat absurd. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why would the man who washes ashore lose his ability to make and follow rules? He would bring with him from
whatever culture he was raised in a background intelligibility of linguistic practices. When he is alone , thinking to himself, he would draw from that background. He would bring those practices to bear on his engagements with a second person on the island. Rouse’s point isn’t that we dont draw from that background, it is that the rules it brings it with don’t bind us in the new situation.

Language and mathematics are rule governed. Games are also rule governed.

These rules are developed socially and change over time — Count Timothy von Icarus

As to this the following:

We cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, I have argued, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances (Wittgenstein 1953). Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances. (Joseph Rouse)

Do you think this idea is commonsensical?

↪Joshs I don't think either H or W are regurgitating, but that they've had an influence upon philosophical thinking to a point that anyone whose read philosophy knows these points, even if they are hard to articulate -- especially because they're enigmatic, rather than logically valid.

Not a bad thing, at all. I think the Witti Heidegger comparison holds pretty well, tho I prefer to say Derrida-Wittgenstein is the true duck-rabbit of western-philosophy — Moliere

The way I see the heritage , Heidegger comes after Witt, and Derrida after Heidegger. That is, Witt is the least radical of the three. I wish you were right about their ideas having by now been thorough assimilated within philosophy. If that were true it would make my work a lot easier. My experience has been that there is a small community of thinkers who grasp the most radical implications of Heidegger and Derrida, and a much larger group that misreads them as similar to writers like Kierkegaard, Sartre and Levinas.

Wittgenstein, much like Heidegger, ends up not being particularly radical or different from commonplace positions when you force yourself not to think using their specialised terms as a privileged vantage point upon philosophy, language and the world… His arguments are sufficiently enigmatic that none of them are logically valid as stated, they rely on unarticulated but perpetually unfolding and changing concepts. Honestly he's just like Heidegger. — fdrake

I’d love to hear what ‘commonplace positions’ you think these writers are regurgitating. What do you suppose their commonplace critiques of the ‘logical validity’ you obviously prize might look like? Do you think Ratcliffe would agree with you that they are not offering anything significantly new, given that his ideas are strongly indebted to both of them?

Signifiers and significance is also nothing more than use as knowledge is - we observe symbols and physical interactions from the outside world causally affect our internal neural systems. They then can spit out future behaviour that reflects the causal interaction with the symbol in the context of the outside world... a symbol is nothing more than the associations we observe it connected to. — Apustimelogist

In the spirit of Wittgenstein, we should keep in mind that we are not talking about an ‘internal’ cognitive system receiving inputs from, computationally representing and spitting out outputs to an ‘external’ world. The system includes brain, body and the intersubjective, linguistic environment in an inseparable reciprocal interaction. As Merleau-Ponty wrote:

“[t]he world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that it itself projects”

Forms of life are the intersubjective practices that we enact in actual contexts of social relation . The use of words are our doings , normatively constrained by the possibilities and limits of intelligibility produced by the enacting of particular language games. Regardless of whatever rules and criteria of meaning have previously been laid down, these are open to contestation in each actual
use of words, as each party to communication re-assesses what is at stake and at issue in the interchange.

Interestingly, even on a reductive physicalist account, the general notion here should be true. Sign relations involving human cognition are incredibly complex and dynamic, and will never repeat in exactly the same way. — Count Timothy von Icarus

One of the many differences between what Derrida is getting at with ‘iterability’ and a reductive physicalist account is that the latter presupposes subject and object, cause and effect. This grammar assumes that quantitative changes in a process are subservient to qualitatively determined identities constraining the sense of those quantitative changes. The qualitative nature of a cause is not allowed to be changed by the effect, it is transcendent to what is immanent to it.

I am offering a prize of $10,000
— Dan

Yeah, that is bait to get people to do free work on your theory. — Lionino

You think he’s counting on reaping the rewards in terms of career advancement? Or maybe he’s a trust fund baby with nothing better to do with his cash.

Husserl's reduction is an apophatic method of disclosure. Heidegger later (Discourse on Thinking) softens a bit, referring to gelassenheit, meditative thinking that is a kind of yielding to a world to discover it, but here one can still construe this to be no more than allowing the Totality of language and culture to play out without the imposition of presumed knowing. — Constance

Keep in mind that Husserl’s apophantic method discloses certainty in the structural features of intentional synthesis, grounded in the synthetic structure of consciousness. It is not designed to disclose certainty in the specific content of what appears to consciousness. On the contrary, every particular content given in consciousness ( such as a sensation of pain) is contingent and relative.

But yes, I am saying that value-in-Being is just as you say, but value as such is utterly transcendental, and the word is contextually bound — Constance

For Heidegger, the transcendence of Being refers to the fact that the subject is out beyond itself in being in the world. It understands itself by coming back to itself from its future. When we take something ‘as’ something, we are projectively understanding from out of this future.

“Because my being is such that I am out ahead of myself, I must, in order to understand something I encounter, come back from this being-out-ahead to the thing I encounter. Here we can already see an immanent structure of direct understanding qua as-structured comportment, and on closer analysis it turns out to be time.”

When Derrida says there is nothing outside the text, he means nothing outside context. Context for him is not a frame that encloses a meaning within it, but a displacing , transcending futurity that is imminent to the structure of understanding something as something, a break within the heart of what would otherwise be constituted as intrinsically ‘pure’ value , sense, meaning, ipseity.

It can be said, in a certain sense, that nominalism becomes absurd if it is carried to its ultimate consequences. For it would deny the very possibility of identity as repetition and permanence. We need time and permanence in order to distinguish and identify. Identity and difference imply each other — JuanZu

Derrida's chain of deconstructive tropes (difference, gramme, trace) directs us to the futural difference within presence, the way that a would-be identity comes back to itself differently as the same . Derrida's notion of iterability is informed by a radical view of temporality he shares with Heidegger. The repetition of the same meaning intention one moment to the next is the fundamental origin of the contextual break, and our exposure to otherness. Iterability, as differance, would be an

"imperceptible difference. This exit from the identical into the same remains very slight, weighs nothing itself..it is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition... Pure repetition, were it to change neither thing nor sign, carries with it an unlimited power of perversion and subversion.”

Derrida's thinking here bears a remarkable resemblance to Heidegger's insistence that identity is never simply present to itself, but differs from itself as the same.

“The same never coincides with the equal, not even in the empty indifferent oneness of what is merely identical...The same…is the belonging together of what differs, through a gathering by way of the difference. We can only say "the same" if we think difference.”

Nietzsche arrived at a similar conclusion:

“Just as mathematics and mechanics were long considered sciences with absolute validity, and only now does the suspicion dare show its face that they are nothing more and nothing less than applied logic on the strength of the particular, indemonstrable assumption that 'identical cases' exist ­and logic itself is a consistent notation based on that assumption (that identical cases exist) being carried out…

Deleuze explains the meaning of Nietzsche Eternal Return in the following way:

“When we say that the eternal return is not the return of the Same, or of the Similar or the Equal, we mean that it does not presuppose any identity. On the contrary, it is said of a world without identity, without resemblance or equality. It is said of a world the very ground of which
is difference, in which everything rests upon disparities, upon differences of differences which reverberate to infinity (the world of intensity). The eternal return is itself the Identical, the similar and the equal, but it presupposes nothing of itself in that of which it is said. It is said of
that which has no identity, no resemblance and no equality. It is the identical which is said of the
different, the resemblance which is said of the pure disparate, the equal which is said only of the
unequal and the proximity which is said of all distances. Things must be dispersed within difference, and their identity must be dissolved before they become subject to eternal return and to identity in the eternal return.”(Difference and Repetition)

the assumption that "seeing" is somehow magically contained in the development of the eye is actually conditioned by elements external to the eye (e.g. the light that the eye needs for vision, and this is evidently external to the eye, it cannot be said that light belongs to the teleological identity of the eye); but mainly it is never demonstrated a priori, only a posteriori — JuanZu

Reminds me of Nietzsche’s analysis of ‘purpose’:

“… the origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate; that anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it; that everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn, overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former ‘meaning' and ‘purpose' must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated.

No matter how perfectly you have understood the usefulness of any physiological organ (or legal institution, social custom, political usage, art form or religious rite), you have not yet thereby grasped how it emerged: uncomfortable and unpleasant as this may sound to more elderly ears,– for people down the ages have believed that the obvious purpose of a thing, its utility, form and shape, are its reason for existence, the eye is made to see, the hand to grasp…the whole history of a ‘thing', an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the causes of which need not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes just follow and replace one another at random.”

I'd trace the problem here back to Kierkegaard booting theoretical reason from a determinant role in freedom (Nietzsche too). No longer is determinism seen as in a way conducive (or even essential) to freedom, in that it allows theoretical reason to give us a sort of "causal mastery" of the world through techne (e.g. Leibniz's invocation of PSR in defense of free will). Instead we have to keep retreating posterior to the findings of theoretical reason (the sciences) to defend freedom (a freedom which is increasingly contentless). — Count Timothy von Icarus

You probably have in mind thoughts like these from Nietzsche:

The 'external world' affects us: the effect is telegraphed into our brain, there arranged, given shape and traced back to its cause: then the cause is projected, and only then does the fact enter our consciousness. That is, the world of appearances appears to us as a cause only once 'it' has exerted its effect and the effect has been processed. That is, we are constantly reversing the order of what happens. - While 'I' see, it is already seeing something different.

What one also learns from Nietzsche is that the external world is not a deterministic mechanism, but continually changes its nature. If we supplement Nietzsche with the phenomenological insight that the intentional act perceives the givenness of what appears to it along dimensions of similarity in relation to what has been seen before, we can give human freedom a teleological, anticipative aspect. But this teleological vector is free in the same way as the ‘external world’ that appears to it. That is, not as theoretical reason but as contextually engaged sense-making.

n a similar way we can see ourselves: "I am I and my circumstances" (Ortega y Gasset), "Existence precedes essence" (Sartre). The end of our existence is never prefigured and is always about to happen, and it is to the extent that we develop in our circumstances that we become what we are. Nietzsche entitled one of his books as follows: "Ecce Homo: How one becomes what one is". We can say of ourselves that to a large extent we become what we are. We become. Which means that the end is not at the beginning (as teleological thinking presupposes) — JuanZu

Excellent point.

Have you never felt that someone purpoted to be doing philosophy puts forth a position not because he thinks it is truthful but because it appeals to his political prejudices? — Lionino

I’m a philosopher, and that makes me a bit biased. I tend to think that whatever area of thought one purports to be involved in, one is appealing to one’s philosophical prejudices. But I dont see that as a bad thing, given that for me truth comes down to nothing but a philosophical prejudice. What matters to me isnt whether an assertion accords with the way things ‘really, really are’, but what use we can make of it.

These theories are also often in conflict to some extent.
— Count Timothy von Icarus

I would hope they would be in conflict, just as is the case with contemporary philosophical positions. It’s nice to have so many alternatives to choose from. But that diversity seems to bother you, as though you need a consensus of significant size in order to take a theory seriously.

In a mature fields, people don't announce a new paradigm shift every year or so—evolutionary biology for example has one major power struggle that has slowly built around the same lines for decades now. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Evolutionary theory has undergone a number of significant transformations since Darwin presented it, no less so than cognitive science, which has evolved from its origins in the 1950’s. Enactivism is one of its most recent incarnations. But all ‘ mature sciences’ must start somewhere. Are you suggesting that we ignore scientific approaches that aren’t ‘mature’? Do you think their maturity protects them from eventual replacement? Since you’re borrowing Kuhn’s term, you might take a page from his philosophy, which holds that the maturity of a science says nothing about its truth in relation to the way things really are, only that it generates productive research for a period of time.

TBH, I think the isomorphisms are more due to everyone working off the same suggestive research findings than all of these sharing some sort of deep connection. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is not true of the leading figures of enactivism. Writers like Shaun Gallagher, Matthew Ratcliffe, Hanna De Jaegher, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, Thomas Fuchs, Dan Zahavi, Jan Slaby and Anthony Chemero all agree on the importance of phenomenology, hermeneutics and pragmatism in structuring the concepts of enactivism. One can find such shared philosophical commitments as well among the leading lights of active inference.

while I find this area interesting, I'm not sure it's a particularly profitable way to analyze freedom. I think it's enough to point out that an explanation of consciousness where our experiences and volitions have no causal role in our behavior faces a host of issues and shouldn't be assumed. Attempts to describe awareness in terms of neurology themselves seem prone to slipping into the mistake of positing that "brains = minds," which in turn abstracts the enviornment out of the analysis. But brains won't produce any conciousness if placed into the vast majority of environments that exist in the universe (e.g. the bottom of the sea or the surface of a star). — Count Timothy von Icarus

I suggest it would be a more profitable way to analyze freedom if you could take the lead from the enactivist writers I mentioned above and see how they integrate scientific naturalism with the phenomenology of perception that Merleau-Ponty , Heidegger and Husserl introduced. Slipping into the mistake of positing that "brains = minds”is precisely what enactivism does not do. As Thompson writes:

Mental life is also bodily life and is situated in the world. The roots of mental life lie not simply in the brain, but ramify through the body and environment. Our mental lives involve our body and the world beyond the surface membrane of our organism, and therefore cannot be reduced simply to brain processes inside the head.

I didn't say it doesn't. Within the article you find philosophy that is evidently politically motivated. Replace it with any other valid example that comes to mind — Lionino

What’s the difference between philosophically informed politics and politically informed philosophy? Can’t we trace all political frameworks to underlying philosophical presuppositions?

, I would just hope that the "philosophy" being done does not turn out to be politics dressing up as philosophy. — Lionino

Not sure how what you linked to doesn’t count as philosophy. I’m familiar with two of the authors mentioned, Karen Barad and Donna Haraway. Their work is rigorously philosophical.

I was hoping you’d say a bit more about what the mental
means to you , taken as a cause. I agree there’s a lot of disagreement within psychology about the nature of the mental ( the subjective , consciousness, the feeling of what it’s like, etc). Yet I dont agree with your claim that “this is an area of inquiry where there is a great amount of disagreement—an area that seems to be getting less, not more unified each decade. On the contrary, I suggest there is emerging a general consensus among active inference and 4EA researchers in cognitive neuroscience concerning the embodied , embedded and non-representational nature of consciousness and affectivity. I wonder how your thinking about the mental as cause relates to or differs from this consensus, which also integrates important facets of phenomenonological philosophy.

If the mental NEVER has causal efficacy then it can never affect behavior and so natural selection can never select on the contents of phenomenal awareness. At the same time, "mental phenomena," would apparently be the lone, totally sui generis thing in our universe that exists but is causally insignificant. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What is it you are envisioning as the structure of the mental? Does it have parts, elements, sub-components?
Are you defining it in terms of a neuro-cognitive organization? If so, then question comes down to whether the global neural organization can have top down effects on its components, and the answer is yes. Not because of any special status allotted to the mental, but because of the non-linear properties of living systems.

But how would the defeat of physical cause and effect by a mind so detached from the world it knew nothing in itself, set one free in the physical world? — Fire Ologist

You don’t need a mind detached from reality to defeat physical cause and effect. You can get to the same goal by looking at the non-linear dynamics of self-organization in living systems. Efficient cause doesn’t apply here.

Sure events are rewritten in partisan histories, time travel stories and human memories. I've never seen it in a chemical reaction; thus remain unswayed. — Vera Mont

Looking at the level of detail of a chemical reaction will only reveal a chain of linear causality. Looking at the level of global self-organizing processes of a living system will reveal a non-linear reciprocal causality that moves between the global and the elemental.

As Alicia Juarrero explains:

The bottom-up causality of nonlinear far from equilibrium dynamics is thus truly creative; it produces qualitatively different wholes that are not reducible to sums, com­pounds, or aggregates. Once self-organized, furthermore, these emergent global structures of process actively and dynamically influence the go of their compo­nents, but not qua other. In contradiction to the received views on causality, that is, the whole also actively exerts causal power on itself top down. Self-organization, in short, strongly counsels for a wider denotation for the
term cause, one reconceptualized in terms of “context-sensitive constraints” to include those causal powers that incorporate circular causality, context-sensitive
embeddedness, and temporality. On this interpretation deterministic, mechanistic efficient causes become the limit of context-sensitive constraints.

Given this, we can conclude we could have acted differently for the simple reason we are not limited to only one act.
— NOS4A2

In any given situation, you are, quite literally limited to only one act. — Vera Mont

What distinguishes reductive determinisms from those that allow for the evolution of freedom is whether an effect is determined by a cause in a unidirectional manner, or whether the nature of the cause reshaped by the effect. This is how complex dynamical systems operate. Put differently, in complex systems the past is changed by the present that it functions in.

But what happens when you realize that everything we construct today will utterly change and be wiped away? What happens to the “objectivity” that is derived from the shifting sands?

It never was more than an illusion. Intersubjectivity only becomes objectivity by convention — Fire Ologist

Changing is not the same thing as being ‘wiped away’. I’ll give you an example. In the shift from Newton physics to relativistic and quantum physics, was the Newtonian description of macro phenomena ‘wiped away’? No, it continues to be useful. Non pomo-oriented philosophers of science will say that we continue to understand the Newtonian concepts in an unchanged form, and merely correct or supplement them when dealing with sub-atomic phenomena. Postmodern thinkers argue that when in using the Newtonian concepts today, we alter the sense of meaning of this system of terms ( terms like mass and energy), but in ways that are subtle enough that it appears for practical purposes as though we are accessing their original meaning. I think this is a good example of how our concepts evolve and change in ways that are subtle enough that we can move back and forth between the older and the newer senses of meaning in ways that are useful to us. Progress may change our older concepts , but it also depends on them, references them, builds on them. It just doesn’t do so in a cumulative, linear, logical manner. We can agree with Kihn that a new paradigm is better than an older one, that it makes progress over the older one, by solving more puzzles But we can also agree with him that assuming a linear , cumulative progress in thinking is really no progress at all, because it just recycles the older concepts and adds to them. Real progress requires real change in ideas, and real change in ideas demands qualitative , gestalt shifts in the axes of meaning within which empirical concepts get their sense.

The fact that our schemes must be turned on their heads from time to time doesn’t mean that they aren’t in touch with a real world , as though only the schemes changed but the world remained the same. We can say the same thing about the world around us, the real, material world that we interact with , that matters to us, as w can about our schemes. That real world is constantly turning itself on its head as well. We as human knowers are qualitatively changing our understanding in conjunction with and in relation to a world which is changing its relation to itself, and to us, over time.

It’s subjective any way you go.
— Tom Storm

Then why speak? It’s all babble. No one will ever truly know anyone or anything if it’s all subjective any way you go. Nothing is left to share among people in discussion. Anything shared would be objective. — Fire Ologist

It’s actually intersubjective , at least with regard to empirical truth, and the intersubjective intertwines itself so inextricably with the subjective that it is only in a move of abstraction that we can claim to separate them.
And given that the objective is a product of intersubjective coordinations and material practices, the objective does not come before the other two but is derivative. What comes first is a world which is always intelligible and understandable in some form, due to the social and linguistic practices that we share. You don’t need a god or a notion of absolute truth to explain why we understand each other. The question is not why we understand each other, but how are systems of values and knowledge formed through interaction , and how do they change over the course of history, such that communities of divergent intelligiblity arise? Once we have embarked on this line of inquiry, the search for the ‘really real truth’ may come to be seen more and more as a way to freeze the progress of inquiry in its tracks, rather than as the best way to enhance our ability to get along with each other.

If Nietzsche's "atheistic revaluation" really worked, why doesn't the suicide prevention hotline use it to give hope to their clinically depressed users? — Tarskian

Nietzsche often considered suicide due to his physical suffering. It was his philosophy which rescued him. But as you said, any approach only works if one believes in it. Or more precisely, one can only absorb a philosophy to the extent that it is relevant to and consistent with their way of life. Any therapeutic approach can help someone in distress if it resonates with their outlook, which is why a suicide helpline can encourage one person’s atheism and another’s religious faith without compromising its mission of saving lives. . Of course an idea can change the way we look at things, but even here, we must be ready to integrate what it has to teach us in order for it to benefit us.

The biggest cause of depression and despair is breakdown in interpersonal relations. Our self-worth, and the meaningfulness of our world, are dependent on our ability to form bonds with others and successfully navigate conflicts with people we care about . This requires insights into why people do things that surprise, disappoint or anger us, why trust and loyalty breaks down. If we leave the answers to these questions to our gods, we will not develop the skills to discover the perspective of the other from their vantage. Getting along with others is the most difficult challenge in life, and making progress at it is our responsibility, not the gods.

I consider everything else that Nietzsche wrote on the matter to be his personal rebellion against the absurd. He clearly knew that there was a problem. He thought that he had found a possible solution, but he hadn't. Rebellion against the absurd only brings false hope. Salvation will never arrive. Not in the form of alcohol, or drugs, or any otherwise meaningless atheistic revaluations — Tarskian

Is the only alternative to a dead determinism, a determinism of assigned causes and effects that we invented for the convenience of building stuff, a spirit of some kind? Is life meaningless simply because it doesn’t have some ULTIMATE meaning, purpose or truth? Is this what really causes feelings of despair, hopelessness and absurdity? Isn’t t a feeling of meaningless in a present situation that leads to such overblown philosophical conclusions about the pointlessness of it all? It is a hallmark of severe depression that the present hopelessness draws into itself the part and future, so that it becomes impossible to envision any change from one’s current state. One ceases to be able to remember or anticipate any hopeful state of mind.

We spend most of our lives ensconced within one value system or another which imparts a sense of meaning and purpose to life . It is this participation on the part of individuals in shared cultural practices of meaning and value that allows us to communicate with each other and make the world intelligible. Nietzsche doesn’t deny this. His point is that nihilism results from trying to freeze in place a particular cultural notion of truth or ethical goodness. Doing that eventually kills off the meaning of the values we co-create as a society, like repeating the seem word over and over until it loses all sense. To remain within meaning, we must continually renew and transform our understanding of ourselves and the world, not for the seek of some ultimate goal, but for the sake of going with the flow, being one with the process of transformation, enjoying the value systems which give us meaning and delighting in overthrowing them when they have outlived their usefulness.

In line with what Nietzsche predicted, western civilization is now in a constant rebellion against the absurd, frantically trying to avoid the inevitable final outcome, which is that it will spectacularly commit suicide. — Tarskian

This is not what Nietzsche predicted. Nihilism is not the inevitable result of atheism. In fact , Nietzsche argued in his later works that religion and spirituality are nihilistic, because they represent a negation of life, as does the metaphysical notion of free will. He believed that only an atheistic revaluation and overturning of all religious, ethical and scientific values, such as the value of truth and goodness, can stave off nihilism.

'Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts'
— Wayfarer

I haven't the foggiest what that is supposed to mean. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Not everything that matters is calculable.

It took many centuries for the idea to emerge that that Universe might be purposeless, it is one of the realisations (if it is a realisation) that is born out of the mechanical philosophy of Galileo and Newton. I suppose the idea that the Universe is animated by reason is a thread that is common to nearly all traditional philosophy. It’s only with the advent of modernity that this is called into question. — Wayfarer

Can the Universe be ordered without being animated by purpose? Do you see the difference? Purpose and reason seem to suggest A purpose and A reason. That is , a realism in which things works according to a certain scheme , a particular content of meaning. By contrast , it could be that the universe is ordered in the sense that it changes with respect to itself in a way that is profoundly intimate. What makes this unfolding ordered is not an assigned purpose, but the lack of arbitrary content violently polarizing its movement in one direction or another. For instance, psychologist George Kelly wrote:

The universe that we presume exists has another important characteristic: it is integral. By that we mean it functions as a single unit with all its imaginable parts having an exact relationship to each other. This may, at first, seem a little implausible, since ordinarily it would appear that there is a closer relationship between the motion of my fingers and the action of the typewriter keys than there is, say, between either of them and the price of yak milk in Tibet. But we believe that, in the long run, all of these events—the motion of my fingers, the action of the keys, and the price of yak milk—are interlocked. It is only within a limited section of the universe, that part we call earth and that span of time we recognize as our present eon, that two of these necessarily seem more closely related to each other than either of them is to the third. A simple way of saying this is to state that time provides the ultimate bond in all relationships.

Kelly says all events in the universe are interlocked via temporal succession. What does he mean by interlocked? He says “all its imaginable parts have an exact relationship to each other”, but by ‘exact' he doesn't appear to mean an objectively causal exactitude, even though he describes it as all working “together like clockwork”. The order of material causality is dictated by the empirical content, which is inherently arbitrary. A car engine's parts have an exact causal relationship with each other, but not an inferential one. If one part were removed, the others would retain their identity, even if the engine no longer worked. By contrast, in Kelly's form of interlocking, any two events are just as closely related to each other as either of them is to the third. In other words, all events are inferentially, relevantly, motivationally, replicatively related to each other like an optimally enlightened construct system, which is quite different than saying they are externally, causally connected via the representational relation between subjective knower and objective world.

Whereas mechanisms are assembled piece by piece from different parts, each with its own already fixed properties, that are all externally related to each other, living wholes are made up of internally related ‘participant parts'. That is, instead of being structured into wholes by being all joined together by third entities (such as glue, nails, etc.) into unified structures, the ‘parts' of a living whole do not already have a fixed character, nor are they fixed in place by ‘glue' or ‘nails’.

Unlike for Vervaeke, ‘getting the universe right’ doesn’t mean capturing some particular contentful purpose or reason or scheme that we can nail down as the ‘truth’. It means that through discursive and practical niche construction, organism and environment are formed and reformed together through an ongoing, mutually intra-active reconfiguration. Over time , this process of mutual reconfiguration can reveal itself to us as Kelly’s profoundly interconnected and intercorrelated movement of a universe. We dont need the universe to be purposeful in order to reveal a reality in which human behavior can be understood as ethically benign. In fact, purpose, by implying a right path and a wrong path, gets in the way of such an understanding.

“Johnny is doing his best,” is a statement about the effort that Johnny is applying to some activity, and humans can apply different levels of effort. Step 1 is assessing the level of effort, which is a matter of fact. This step is like using the radar gun to determine the car’s speed. Contrary to your moralizing worldview, the assessment of effort is not yet a normative or moral matter. Step 2, the normative step, only arises when we want to judge how much effort Johnny should be applying to the activity. — Leontiskos

What devices akin to a radar gun measure effort? I assume you want to focus your attention on the brain and what is taking place inside of it , rather than on other parts of the body. A decrement in bodily ‘effort’ can be due to many things, such as fatigue, injury, disease , aging. But we’re taking about mental effort, right? So do we use electrodes on the skull? An mri? The observations of a community? And don’t we want to distinguish physiological causes of performance decrements in the brain (physical fatigue, illness, lack of food or drink, excessive hate or cold) from those having to do with intent and motivation? Don’t we want to focus our attention where we believe a person uses physiological issues as an EXCUSE for not trying their hardest?

It seems to me that this ‘mental’ effort, the decision to try or not to try as hard as one can , regardless of one’s amount of sleep or nutritional status, is a matter of engaging in a game whose rules are familiar to one, and then choosing to dial down one’s effort. So arent there two normative dimensions involved here, the criterion of success at the game, and the criterion of optimal vs suboptimal effort? For instance, let’s say the game I opt into is driving my car to work as fast as I can, because I’m running late. My goal is to shave off at least 10 minutes relative to my usual pace. It will be very clear to me whether I have succeeded in this normative goal. But whether I succeed or fail does not in itself say anything about how much effort I put into the game. That’s a different game, with its own norms. Although you have said we don’t always know whether we were trying our best, at least some of the time we know it, and in those cases maybe the simplest way to measure our effort is to use a verbal scoring system: On a scale of one to ten, how hard were we trying?

Now , I have been claiming that we are always trying our best at something, so I reject the premise behind this scoring system. I would put it this way. We are always putting our effort into some game or other , but the criterion of success changes with changes in the game. When I am late for work, and I choose a game of speed, my criterion of success is different than when I am not playing the game of speed. There are times when I am in no rush, when I am in mood for a game of touring. The aim of this game is not to drive fast , or slow, but to drive in such a way that I am maximizing my engagement with the countryside around me. This can mean speeding up, slowing down, pulling over, changing route. I’ll know how successful I was at my game of touring by how satisfying the trip was for me, not by how fast I was going.

Notice that it doesn’t make sense to say that , while touring, I wasn't trying my best at making time. The concept of speed didn’t come up for me because I wasn’t thinking along those lines at all. My point is, as I mentioned in an earlier post, that in understanding the relation between effort and performance, it is necessary to identify not just what we are not doing, but what we are doing. There are a nearly infinite variety of games we can opt to play, and we switch among them all the time. When we naively assume another is continuing the play the game we believe they are playing, we may not notice this shift in games. So we only notice their failure to perform within the rules we assume they are abiding by, and we fail to notice that they are already involved with a different game. The are still doing their best, but their effort is applied in a completely different direction, with different criteria of success.

↪Joshs You're still not addressing how Aristotelianism fetishizes intent over sense-making. OK, then. — javra

What I mean by fetishizing intent is the assumption that intent can be ethically incorrect, that one can want what one shouldn’t, in addition to success or failure at intelligible sense-making.

Is any of this sense-making - both on the part of the consciousness involved and on the part of their own unconscious mind which stands in opposition to their conscious will - in any way independent of some form of intent ... and, thereby, non-intentional in quality?

If not, then I don't understand how Aristotelian-ism "fetishizes intent over sense-making" ... this since the later is then fully contingent on the occurrence of the former — javra

As I wrote to Philosophim in another thread, addiction is so powerful because the rewards are immediate and the detrimental effects are more gradual. The drug makes one sicker and sicker, pulls one of out of social world and into isolation more and more completely, but one also knows that the immediate effect of one more fix or hit or drink is to make one forget about all anxieties. One has to learn to see immediate repercussions of the long-term harm, immediate repercussions that are so powerful they override the immediately gratifying effects. They used to call this ‘hitting bottom’ in alcohol addiction , but many never hit bottom.