The point is this: if we look around the world of human activity, even actions which seem far-removed from enculturation can ultimately be traced back to beliefs and values instilled in one over time, even if long forgotten or completely unconscious. — Mikie

It is popular these days in psychological ( Haidt) and anthropological circles to posit that cultural values and ethical norms originate in inherited evolutionarily adaptive affective preferences , such as disgust.
— Joshs

Indeed that is popular. The point being? — Mikie

The point is this: if we look around the world of human activity, even apparently belief-based actions which seem far removed from our biology can ultimately be traced back to values instilled in one as a result of evolutionarily adaptive affective feelings, even if completely unconscious.

I like this much better than the "popular view". Can you suggest anything I could read to learn more about it? — Ludwig V

Anything by Matthew Ratcliffe or Evan Thompson, especially the latter’s ‘Mind in Life, Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind’.

The way you phrased this ('It is popular these days...') suggests you take issue with the view. I have no dog in this fight but is there a better account? — Tom Storm

Phenomenologically-informed enactivist psychology preserves the emphasis on affectively-based values in organizing and situating cognitive appraisals and beliefs.But it avoids the biological essentialism of inherited affect modules and programs.

“… emotions are said to be enabled by genetically endowed, hard-wired neural modules, the existence of which can, at least in principle, be associated with selection pressures flowing from the survival or reproductive advantages produced by the action potentials and states of preparedness these capacities bestowed: to fight off predators (anger), manage changes in social status (sadness), prepare for something unexpected (surprise), cement a social bond (happiness),
avoid something toxic (disgust) or retreat from something dangerous (fear).”

In contrast to this account of affect and cognition , enactivism believes that :

“Sense-making comprises emotion as much as cognition. The enactive approach does not view cognition and emotion as separate systems, but treats them as thoroughly integrated at biological, psychological, and phenomenological levels. The spatial containment language of internal/external or inside/outside (which frames the internalist/externalist debate) is inappropriate and misleading for understanding the peculiar sort of relationality belonging to intentionality, the lived body, or being-in-the-world. As Heidegger says, a living being is ‘in’ its world in a completely different sense from that of water being in a glass (Heidegger 1995, pp. 165–166)

“...appraisal and emotion processes are thoroughly interdependent at both psychological and neural levels (see also Colombetti and Thompson 2005). At the psychological level, one is not a mere means to the other (as in the idea that an appraisal is a means to the having of an emotion, and vice-versa); rather, they form an integrated and self-organizing emotion-appraisal state, an ‘emotional interpretation’.”

This extends down to bodily reactions to stimuli. One looks at a corpse and instantaneously reacts with fear. If examined from one point of view, this reaction is conditioned by the environment -- namely, the milieu -- and at bottom is nothing more than an embedded belief that corpses are to be feared, or that they are aversive objects, because death is considered bad. It is not truly instantaneous at all -- there are judgments and interpretations being made despite appearing as natural reflexes. — Mikie

It is popular these days in psychological ( Haidt) and anthropological circles to posit that cultural values and ethical norms originate in inherited evolutionarily adaptive affective preferences , such as disgust.. The corpse is deemed aversive fundamentally not due to a belief but an inherited affective response, and the socially constructed beliefs are overlayed onto this biological ground. According to this approach, values
are subjective and relative because they don’t originate from propositional beliefs, which can be judged as correct or incorrect.

No. Facts do not change. Our perception of them may grow clearer, our understanding of how they fit together may render them less cold, but our concerns and practices shape nothing but our immediate environment, and our expectations are as often dashed as are fulfilled — Vera Mont

“ Knowledge is taken to consist in a faithful mirroring of a mind-independent reality. It is taken to be of a reality which exists independently of that knowledge, and indeed independently of any thought and experience (Williams 2005, 48). If we want to know true reality, we should aim at describing the way the world is, not just independently of its being believed to be that way, but independently of all the ways in which it happens to present itself to us human beings. An absolute conception would be a dehumanized conception, a conception from which all traces of ourselves had been removed. Nothing would remain that would indicate whose conception it is, how those who form or possess that conception experience the world, and when or where they find themselves in it. It would be as impersonal, impartial, and objective a picture of the world as we could possibly achieve (Stroud 2000, 30).

How are we supposed to reach this conception? Metaphysical realism assumes that everyday experience combines subjective and objective features and that we can reach an objective picture of what the world is really like by stripping away the subjective. It consequently argues that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between the properties things have “in themselves” and the properties which are “projected by us”. Whereas the world of appearance, the world as it is for us in daily life, combines subjective and objective features, sciencecaptures the objective world, the world as it is in itself. But to think that science can provide us with an absolute description of reality, that is, a description from a view from nowhere; to think that science is the only road to metaphysical truth, and that sciencesimply mirrors the way in which Nature classifies itself, is – according to Putnam – illusory. It is an illusion to think that the notions of “object” or “reality” or “world” have any sense outside of and independently of our conceptual schemes” ( Zahavi)

“…the success of science cannot be anything but a puz­zle as long as we view concepts and objects as radically independent; that is, as long as we think of "the world" as an entity that has a fixed nature, determined once and for all, independently of our framework of concepts."
“So much about the identity relations between different categories of mathemati-cal objects is conventional, that the picture of ourselves a describing a bunch of objects that are there "anyway" is in trouble from the start.”
“…what leads to "Platonizing" is yielding to the temptation to find mysterious entities which somehow guarantee or stand behind correct judgments of the reasonable and the unreasonable.”

My favorite argument for atheism isn’t that the evidence isnt there, but that even if it were there, the concept of a god is a terrible idea and presents a really unappealing picture of the nature of the world and the basis of ethics.
— Joshs

I agree with much of this. But the general response will likely be 'no one says that the truth has to be appealing.' — Tom Storm

Ah, but appeal IS a central element of what we call truth, especially in the sciences. An important value in choosing one theory over another is aesthetic appeal. The facts have no coherence outside of their relation to our pragmatic goals and purposes. We convince ourselves that we conform our empirical models to the cold, hard facts of the world, but those cold , hard facts are constantly shaped and reshaped by our evolving concerns, expectations and practices. The same goes
for our gods.

the very idea of a god repugnant on its own terms
— Joshs

Indeed. Care to say more about why? — Tom Storm

At some point , we will no longer have need of a hypothesis that locks us into an arbitrary view of the world ( I’m speaking both of religion and the view of science as ‘truths that dont care about our feelings’. God and objective realism are tied together, not opposites ).

I would say I am an agnostic atheist. Similarly, I don't know if Bigfoot exists, but I am not convinced it does. The time to believe it is when there is good evidence. — Tom Storm

My favorite argument for atheism isn’t that the evidence isnt there, but that even if it were there, the concept of a god is a terrible idea and presents a really unappealing picture of the nature of traits and the basis of ethics. Everyone here ( that includes Dennett, Dawkins et al. They wish they could believe ) whose atheism or agnosticism is tied to ‘evidence’ is a closet -believer until they can get to the point where they find the very idea of a god repugnant on its own terms, when they no longer wish they could believe.

In the end, Outlander learned that technology was not something to be feared or dismissed. It was a powerful and transformative force that could bring people together and help them to understand each other in new and meaningful ways. And thanks to his friendship with Mandy, he was able to see the world in a whole new light. — ChatGPT

Someone should option the movie rights. Ryan Reynolds could play Outlander.

You’re still stuck in the Kantian-Popperian tradition of science as objective falsification., knowledge opposing itself to power and facts opposing values.
— Joshs

Not even close. — Vera Mont

Second guess: You’re still stuck in in the Marxist-structuralist tradition of scientific realism. Better?
Give me a hint.

The claims are a stratagem of power structures - all power structures, whether they are labelled as a religion, a political party or a corporation.
Objective reality isn't lost; none of them are looking for it; on the contrary, they're hiding it under layers and layers of "claim".(That's why faith healers are not like medical healers. — Vera Mont

‘Objective’ vs ‘subjective’, ‘faith’ vs ‘reason’, ‘power’ vs ‘knowledge’. Have you read no Kuhn, Feyerabend, Latour, Foucault, Rorty, Rouse, Nietzsche, Varela? It’s like the past 60 years of philosophizing about science doesn’t exist for you. You’re still stuck in the Kantian-Popperian tradition of science as objective falsification., knowledge opposing itself to power and facts opposing values.

↪Joshs It's always concerning when we appear to be in agreement. — Banno

I must be slipping.

I take it you are a believer in New Theology?

The ability to distinguish colours is not dependent on what we do, some of what what we do is dependent on the ability to distinguish colours. The cart and horse are not the same; the horse pulls the cart, the cart does not pull the horse — Janus

Sensorimotor theories of perception indicate that action is essential to perception in general. Seeing or hearing is the interacting with an object, a form of active, anticipatory doing rather than merely a passive taking in. As far as perception of color is concerned, preliminary studies show that saccadic eye movements may be involved in color discrimination.

More generally, how do sensorimotor analyses of perceptual ‘doing’ relate to public linguistic interaction? Certainly, the empirical concepts employed in the description of perceiving are shaped via a public doing. But can one also tease out a performativity associated with immediate perception that is not completely subsumed under the rubric of public language practices? Is sensorimotor perceptual ‘doing’ a kind of proto-linguistic activity, a kind of normatively oriented discourse subject to its own rules of error and correction, outside of public language?

A point related to Davidson's derangement of epitaphs, and Wittgenstein's argument for what we might call the inscrutability of rules; given any such definition one can purposefully undermine it. — Banno

And its undermining is the further spinning of new fibers of a thread, correct?

Can you give an example of two things that should be thought of as belonging to the same family, but which have nothing in common with each other? — Janus

Wittgenstein talked about this in P.I.

67.” I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.— And I shall say: 'games' form a family. And for instance the kinds of number form a family in the same way. Why do we call something a "number"? Well, perhaps because it has a—direct—relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres. But if someone wished to say: "There is something common to all these constructions—namely the disjunction of all their common properties"—I should reply: Now you are only playing with words. One might as well say: "Something runs through the whole thread— namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres.”

The problem here is the truncated "nothing but" pretends that our sensations are prior to our "being in the world". It assumes the perspective of an homunculus. That's pretty much the assumption of Joshs and @Constance, too. More or less the same criticism by the homunculus applies to phenomenology. — Banno

Three phenomenologists offer three readings of sensation. You mentioned Heidegger’s subordination of sense to being-in-the -world:
(“Ini­tially" we never hear noises and complexes of sound, but the creaking wagon, the motorcycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the crackling fire. It requires a very artificial and complicated attitude in order to "hear" a "pure noise." The fact that we initialy hear motorcycles and wagons is, however, the phenomenal proof that Da-sein, as being-in-the­-world, always already maintains itself together with innerworldly things at hand and initially not at all with "sensations" whose chaos would first have to be formed to provide the springboard from which the subject jumps off finally to land in a "world."(Being and Time).

Then there’s Merleau-Ponty, who was critical
of what he interpreted as Husserl’s reliance on a ‘hyle’ of sensation, a primitive content.

It appeared to Merleau-Ponty that Husserl treated
the elements of a flowing multiplicity of hyletic data as positive essences, as objects separable from what conditions them via subjective history. Instead, he argued, “ There is no hylé, no sensation which is not in communication with other sensations or the sensations of other people. “(P. Of Perception, p.471). Perceptual essence “is not a positive element, not a quiddity; it is rather a divergence within the corporeal field of things. The unity of the thing is of a piece with the unity of the entire field; and this field is grasped not as a unity of parts but as a living ensemble. The living ensemble cannot be recomposed of essences in the sense of eide, since these are positives – significatory atoms or constants. Hence, [Husserl’s] eidetic method is in reality an idealistic variant of the constancy hypothesis [a point-by-point correspondence between a stimulus and the perception of it].”(Phenomenological Method in Merleau-Ponty's Critique of Gurwitsch, Ted Toadvine, p.200).

That leaves Husserl, the intended target of your critique of phenomenology. I happen not to believe that Husserl
started from qualia-like primitives of sensation. For him , as for Isaac, sensations are constructed out of contextual elements.

The alternative is thinking that I might suddenly choose an option which I don't think is best, that is what seems impossible to parse. The very act of 'deciding' is one of judging some option to be the best relative to my values, and my values must already be in place prior to that judgement, so the option which most aligns with them is already determined. — Isaac

The feeling of guilt reminds us that we frequently choose options that conflict with the way we see our values. In guilt, our falling away from another we care for could be spoken of as an alienation of oneself from oneself. When we feel we have failed another, we mourn our mysterious dislocation from a competence or value which we associated ourselves with. One feels as if having fallen below the standards one has erected for themself. It follows from this that any thinking of guilt as a `should have, could have' blamefulness deals in a notion of dislocation and distance, of a mysterious discrepancy within intended meaning, separating who we were from who we are in its teasing gnawing abyss.

what constitutes a move in the direction of greater valuation as opposed to the lesser (more true, more harmonious, more intelligible...) from where one started. If one starts with "this is how things seem to me" and then conducts any kind of 'investigation', one is implicitly affirming that the way things seem to one is lesser, by whatever measure, than the potential result of that investigation. Less true, less harmonious, less intelligible - whatever. — Isaac

Yes indeed. It would be impossible to have a world at all if we could not distinguish grouping and categories, if we could not talk about events that were more or less consistent with one group rather than another, that belonged or failed to belong to a category, system, pattern, scheme.

The battle-lines, if you want to call them that, between realists and relativists, modernists and postmodernists, is not over whether what I described above is possible, but what is the irreducible basis of the singular elements that particulate in gatherings and dispersions, integrations and differentiations? How do we understand the nature of causation and motivation most primordially?

So the very nature of an investigation has, at it's core, an acceptance that the way things currently seem to one is flawed in some way - in whatever measure you're using to judge the model you have.

Once one has accepted that the ways things seem to one is potentially flawed, one cannot rationally, at the same time, use "but that's the way it seems to me" as a counter to any alternative model put forward. — Isaac

To the extent that one can say there is an ethical direction to postmodern thinking, it involves a preference for the coherent over the incoherent, the integrated over the fragmented, the intelligible
over the unintelligible. But this preference isn't over and above experiences of relative organization or disorganization. The two concepts , preference and integration, are synonymous. So saying that we investigate or aim toward or intend or desire is using a volunteeristic language to describe the fact that we find ourselves already thrown into situations, and our awareness of our ‘preferring’ is an after the fact observation. We find ourselves sense-making, and we talk about ourselves in terms of having a preference and an aim with respect to the way the contexts we are thrown into seem to us, and the way we would like them to seem to us.

. So in your case why not accept the reality of a god? Is your position beyond reason and more about an inability to believe? I am fascinated by forms of atheism which doesn’t rely on conventional arguments — Tom Storm

I begin with the philosophical and psychological
model that makes sense of my world, without at first worrying about how this thinking relates to the question of God. Then I examine the different ways in which ‘god’ can be used. For instance, there is God as a personality , a ‘self’ modeled on human selves. The. there is God as energy, or God as pantheistic totality of all existing things.
Concerning God as a self, if in my psychological
model, the self is a social construct, a continually changing phenomenon with no persisting identity , you can see how this fragments the idea of God as a self.
What about God as energy or pantheistic totality? Here what is at stake is the idea of an ethical grounding for the world. Not a personal self but a grounding of goodness. God is synonymous with the Good. But what if my psychological model puts into question the persisting identity of the meaning of the concept of goodness? If the meaning of goodness when it comes to human relations is relative to content and culture, then God as Goodness becomes just one concept that is relative to its use , which is constantly changing.
In sum , my atheism is not a matter of saying there is no god, but of saying there are as many meanings of that concept as there are selves within my body, or values within and between culture. So God can’t be used as a fundamental explanation or first cause. It is more of an effect of a process that philosophy can describe in other terms, such as Heidegger’s Beyng.

“As the most being-like, God is the first cause and the last goal of all beings. God is represented as the most being-like of beings, and so God essentially occurs out of beyng. Nevertheless, God is not primordially linked to beyng; because beyng occurs essentially not as cause and never as ground.”

how do you suggest, Joshs, such "sacred" claims – usually extensions of the purported predicates of some so-called "god" – be evaluated, especially when they contradict publicly accessible facts and practices? — 180 Proof

Of course , the same ‘sacred scriptures’ , once they were canonically frozen into their eventual form as the 5 books of Moses and the New Testament, immediately became interpreted and reinterpreted over the course of the past 2 millennia in ways that prepared tor way for , and then paralleled, the progress of scientific thought. In the era of Philo and Augustine, Platonic readings were in vogue. By the time of Aquinas and Maimonides, Aristotelian interpretations predominated, which emphasized for the first time human rationality, setting the stage for the Renaissance. In Kierkegaard’s era , a Kantianized , Hegelianized Judeo-Christianity of subjective existentialist faith emerged alongside dialectical materialist science.

The point is, it is not the same sacred scriptures and the same God that each era comes to know , but instead a transformed, reinterpreted text and deity. So how does this evolution of faith square with the ‘publicly accessible facts and practices’. One has to appreciate that facts only exist with a systematic order of practices . One could call this organizing frame an empirical episteme. Furthermore , the reigning episteme of an era undergoes a historical evolution that not only parallels that of Judeo-Christianity, but encompasses religious belief, the sciences, the arts and political thought within a single encompassing frame. This is why there were no atheists among Enlightenment scientists. The publicly accessible facts and practices of the day were subsumed under the order of a divine rationalism.

Science does seem to have to take the position that reality makes sense, is coherent, has laws and responds to human reason. — Andrew4Handel

Yes, this is a good way to characterize the dawn of modern science in the era of Galileo and Newton. But there has to be more to it than this , doesn't there? Because Enlightenment scientists believed in God. I would argue that they had to. Their understanding of the metaphysical underpinnings of scientific rationality implied a divine source. Only when reason and ‘laws of nature’ became relativized after Darwin, Marx and Freud could atheism begin to make sense. In other words , sciences of pure reason( like 18th and 19th century physics) require a God. Sciences ( evolution, ethnology, quantum physics, psychoanalysis) which put reason’s command of itself into question unravel the coherence of God.

↪Joshs Do you believe in god/s? and if so (or not) can you sketch out your thinking? — Tom Storm

I grew up in a religious home but decided I was an atheist in my late teens. It was important for me not to embrace atheism simply as a lack of faith or in any way a rejection of the positive values that are associated with belief in God. My atheism had to be justified as incorporating all that was advantageous about religion while improving on its ability to make for a good society.

No thanks. I have no time for bad fate debaters of any stripe — Vera Mont

I call bullshit. Dont blame others for your inability to grasp their arguments. That’s not bad faith, but it is anti-intellectual as well as insulting to me and I don’t appreciate it.

Atheists beware. Bad-faith debater on the loose! Take cover! — Vera Mont

From atheist Marxist Terry Eagleton:

“Dawkins falsely considers that Christianity offers a rival view of the universe to science. Like the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett in Breaking the Spell, he thinks it is a kind of bogus theory or pseudo-explanation of the world. In this sense, he is rather like someone who thinks that a novel is a botched piece of sociology, and who therefore can’t see the point of it at all. Why bother with Robert Musil when you can read Max Weber? . . .

Dawkins makes an error of genre, or category mistake, about the kind of thing Christian belief is. He imagines that it is either some kind of pseudo-science, or that, if it is not that, then it conveniently dispenses itself from the need for evidence altogether. He also has an old-fashioned scientistic notion of what constitutes evidence.”

Would you like to hear from some more “bad-faith” atheist debaters with similar comments on Dawkins and Dennett? I can give you plenty.

Bivalent logic is a type of two-valued logic, which means that it only allows for two possible truth values: true or false. In other words, something is either true or it is false, and there is no in-between or middle ground. In this sense, bivalent logic does not necessarily require that the world be independent of our concepts. Instead, it simply requires that there be a clear distinction between true and false statements, regardless of how those statements relate to the world or our understanding of it. — Banno

.

Let me compare bivalent logic to what I will call a bipolar sense. A bipolar sense differentiates itself from its contextual background ( the contrast pole) via a unique dimension of similarity and difference. A bipolar sense isn’t just something that happens to be the case. It is something that happens to be the case in a particular way. No bipolar sense ever duplicates its exact content. To apply bivalent logic to a bipolar sense is to always come up short. That is, whenever we ask whether a particular bipolar sense is the case , the answer will be no, simply because the exact sense doesn’t repeat itself.
Bivalent truth and falsity are irrelevant to bipolar senses because the former presupposes the persistent identity of that meaning one is inquiring about.

In other words, bivalent logic must have context-independence. It must apply to truth-apt concepts that are independent of our actual situational sense of what is the case.

So I think one can justifiably argue that a belief in a world that is independent of our concepts or ethical values is a necessary pre-condition for supporting the usefulness of bivalent logic.
— Joshs
Well, then present the argument. What is it? — Banno

Here’s the argument from Putnam’s perspective:

“Without the cognitive values of coherence, simplicity, and instrumental efficacy we have no world and no facts, not even facts about what is so relative to what. And these cognitive values, I claim, are simply a part of our holistic conception of human flourishing. Bereft of the old realist idea of truth as "correspondence" and of the positivist idea of justification as fixed by public "criteria," we are left with the necessity of seeing our search for better conceptions of rationality as an intentional activity which, like every activity that rises above the mere following of inclination or obsession, is guided by our idea of the good.

If coherence and simplicity are values, and if we cannot deny without falling into total self-refuting subjectivism that they are objective (notwithstanding their "softness," the lack of well-defined "criteria," and so forth), then the classic argument against the objectivity of ethical values is totally undercut.”

If your claim is that phenomenology correctly shows us how things are, then there must be some way things actually are, some true propositions opposing false ones. — Isaac

There are so many wonderful ways in which humans beings can talk about what matters to us , what is relevant and how it is relevant. For instance , harmonious, integral, intimate, consistent, similar, compatible, intelligible. Of all of these, ‘true and false’ are
particularly narrow and impoverished.

“It is no more than a moral prejudice that the truth is worth more than appearance; in fact, it is the world's most poorly proven assumption. Let us admit this much: that life could not exist except on the basis of perspectival valuations and appearances; and if, with the virtuous enthusiasm and inanity of many philosophers, someone wanted to completely abolish the “world of appearances,” – well, assuming you could do that, – at least there would not be any of your “truth” left either! Actually, why do we even assume that “true” and “false” are intrinsically opposed? Isn't it enough to assume that there are levels of appearance and, as it were, lighter and darker shades and tones of appearance – different valeurs, to use the language of painters? Why shouldn't the world that is relevant to us – be a fiction? And if someone asks: “But doesn't fiction belong with an author?” – couldn't we shoot back: “Why? Doesn't this ‘belonging' belong, perhaps, to fiction as well? Aren't we allowed to be a bit ironic with the subject, as we are with the predicate and object? Shouldn't philosophers rise above the belief in grammar? With all due respect to governesses, isn't it about time philosophy renounced governess-beliefs?” – The world with which we are concerned is false, i.e., is not fact but fable and approximation on the basis of a meager sum of observations; it is "in flux," as something in a state of becoming, as a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for--there is no "truth" ('Nietzsche, Will to Power.)

All the sirens went off at once; red flags waving like mad. — Vera Mont

And what are those sirens and red flags telling you?

Realism is just supposing that statements are either true or false, that this is the correct grammar to adopt in taking about how things are, that the appropriate logic is bivalent. Talk of "the independent existence of a world outside of our interaction with it" is irrelevant, misleading philosophical twaddle. — Banno

Supposing that statements are either true or false , a logic of bivalence, leads us down the rabbit hole of the meaning or role of ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’, which has been investigated in recent threads here. Davidson and Putnam thought that truth was a concept worth keeping, despite Putnam’s conceptual relativism . Not coincidentallly, both of them rejected value-relativism. I don’t think you’ll find among those philosophers ( Rorty, Rouse, Heidegger, etc) who are both conceptual and ethical relativists, any enthusiasm for the usefulness of propositional truth.
So I think one can justifiably argue that a belief in a world that is independent of our concepts or ethical values is a a necessary pre-condition for supporting the usefulness of bivalent logic.

One cannot 'reveal' something one did not previously think without the concept of one's thoughts having previously been wrong on some matter. If it is possible to be wrong on some matter, there must exist some external state against which one is comparing one's thought to determine it's wrong.

It's not about 'external worlds', it's about external states - information, not matter. It's merely a description of a system. Any defined system must have internal states and states external to it (otherwise it's not defined as we can say nothing about it - it's just 'everything'). Any complex networked system must also have boundary states (otherwise it would either be a single node or linearly connected). This means that internal states have to infer the condition of external states from the condition of boundary states. We've just described a system. There's no need for any commitment to realism, all this could be taking place in a computer or a field of pure information. It's just derived necessarily from the description of a system.

Phenomenology appears to me to be saying that the internal states can infer the condition of other internal states. They could, but there'd be no reason to change any first inference. There's no 'revelation' no 'investigation'. You might one day feel one way, another day, feel another. There's no reason to prefer one over another. One is not 'investigating' anything, one is merely changing one's mind arbitrarily. — Isaac

Phenomenology begins by bracketing notions like ‘state’ and patterns of ‘information’, which are not as much of an improvement over the concept of matter as many think. The problem is that they put identity before difference and try to derive differences from the relations is among identities. The assumption of identity is the idea that there exist states whose identity persists over time (even if only temporarily).

“no need even for a material world to exist, it would be the case inside a computer too.” No need for a material world in order to have a real world. Realism depends not of physicalism or materialism, but on this assumption of at least temporarily persisting self -identity. The real is that which endures as itself. Thus there are all kinds of real objects, including patterns of informationn.

Phenomenology shows how the ‘illusion’ of self-identity is constituted out of the flow of appearances of changing sense, how systems, states, real pattens of ‘information’ and correlations are constituted, founding our mathematics, formal logics and sciences.

Why wee do you think Dennett’s and Dawkin’s doctrinaire atheism comes from?
— Joshs

Why would any of us presume to know where someone else's thinking comes from? M — Vera Mont

I presume to know when it comes to Dennett and Dawkins, and I’m far from the only one who has pointed this out about them, because it is patently obvious from their understanding of the role and nature of science that they view science ‘scientistically’. What does this mean? Any time you hear someone defend atheism on the basis an argument to the effect that there is no empirical evidence in support of God, or that religious believers can’t put their ideas to a scientific test, youre in the vicinity of a scientistic thinking, and a doctrinaire atheism which asserts with authority the ‘truth’ of their position.

Science does not seek a view from nowhere, it seeks explanations that work anywhere.

The claim that science tries to stand outside of nature is no more than rhetoric. — Banno

A view from everywhere , or sideways on, is a relative of the view from nowhere. What justifies this stance is a view of nature grounded in a set of normative presuppositions concerning objectivity. There must be something universal within ‘nature in itself’ that makes it possible for science to ‘work anywhere’.

Care to cite an instance of "religious metaphysics" (1) that quantifies the error of predictions, (2) that experimentally tests its explanations, (3) that is institutionally error-correcting – fallibilistic – by a peer-review community, (4) that is free of "revealed" "X-of-the-gaps" dogmas, etc etc? :chin: — 180 Proof

Your depiction of the methods of science is dependent on normative concepts like error correction and falsification, pointing to the indirect relation between conceptualization and the things themselves of the world. In this move , both our subjectivity and the things in themselves of the world take on the character of the divine in presupposing that which exists in and for itself outside of and before its relation to an outside.

The 'bizarre claim' I was actually referring to was the one implied by an 'investigation' into they way things seem to us without (bracketing out) the question of reality (external states). I just don't believe one approaches the question of how some thing seems to one with a blank slate. I think given almost any question at all one will have preconceptions about it. — Isaac

Husserl’s epoche, otherwise known as the phenomenological reduction or ‘bracketing’ of presuppositions, gets a lot of flack. But the general
principe here is one that is widely applied both in philosophy and in the sciences. Notions of folk psychology, naive perception, the relation between the personal and the sub-personal or your distinction between experience and mental events all involve a ‘bracketing’ of appearance and pre-supposition i. favor of a more fundamental truth. As a realist, you believe in the independent existence of a world outside of our interaction with it. For you this is an indubitable , or founding presupposition, and it is what orients the bracketing by science of naive appearance and preconception.

For Husserl the existence of the world as an independent fact is not a founding presupposition but a preconception which can be bracketed. When one does this one has the opportunity to reveal a more fundamental grounding for science and philosophy in the irreducible interaction between subjective and objective poles of experience. Thus, no independent subject and no independent world.
Just the structural a priori that makes preconception possible.

Perhaps, if religion employed something similar to science’s epistemological method, real progress could be made. — Art48

Science and philosophy run on parallel rails. — Vera Mont

Science’s epistemological method is itself a remnant of religious metaphysics. Why wee do you think Dennett’s and Dawkin’s doctrinaire atheism comes from? What’s needed is an atheism that overcomes epistemological
method. I recommend Nietzsche, Foucault , Kuhn and Rouse.

Here’s Rouse:

“I also think a more basic trace of a theological conception remains in many philosophical accounts of science and nature. A theological conception of God as creator places God outside of nature. God's understanding of nature is also external to the world. Such a God could understand his language and his thoughts about the world, apart from any interaction with the world. Naturalists long ago removed God from scientific conceptions of the world. Yet many naturalists still implicitly understand science as aiming to take God's place. They interpret science as trying to represent nature from a standpoint outside of nature. The language in which science represents the world could then be understood apart from the causal interactions it articulates.”

↪introbert I would honestly like a clearer definition of this ‘political/social schizophrenia’ … I will read around a bit but in the OP there is not a definition I can see that has any real clarity. — I like sushi

I’ll give you a taste of the notions of schizophrenia and ’schizo-analysis’ that Deleuze and Guattari introduced, since it seems to be the main inspiration of introbert’s OP. He says he doesn’t want to link his ideas exclusively to D-G, but I think it would
help if he could lay out in some detail what they wrote and contrast his arguments with theirs.

In his first mentions of schizophrenia, Deleuze distinguishes between a clinical psychopathology and a metaphorical use of the word.

“…when Kant puts ratio­nal theology into question, in the same stroke he introduces a kind of disequilibrium, a fissure or crack in the pure Self of the 'I think', an alienation in principle, insurmountable in principle: the subject can henceforth represent its own spontaneity only as that of an Other, and in so doing in­voke a mysterious coherence in the last instance which excludes its own - namely, that of the world and God. A Cogito for a dissolved Self: the Self of 'I think' includes in its essence a receptivity of intuition in relation to which I is already an other. It matters little that synthetic identity - and, following that, the morality of practical reason - restore the integrity of the self, of the world and of God, thereby preparing the way for post-Kantian syntheses: for a brief moment we enter into that schizophrenia in principle which characterizes the highest power of thought, and opens Being directly onto difference, despite all the mediations, all the reconciliations, of the concept.”

Deleuze argues that philosophy has been under the burden of a dogmatic image of thought that swallows differences within formal logic and propositional rationality.

“It is not a question of opposing to the dogmatic image of thought another image borrowed, for example, from schizophrenia, but rather of remembe­ring that schizophrenia is not only a human fact but also a possibility for thought - one, moreover, which can only be revealed as such through the abolition of that image. It is noteworthy that the dogmatic image, for its part, recognizes only error as a possible misadventure of thought, and reduces everything to the form of error.”

Deleuze is using his peculiar notion of schizophrenia in service of a radical concept of becoming influenced by Nietzsche.

Julie Van der Wielen writes:

“In Anti‐Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari describe what they call the schizophrenic process. Their aim is actually ethical‐philosophical and socio‐political; it transcends a merely clinical point of view on schizophrenia.1 Nevertheless, one can also distinguish here a description of schizophrenia as a mental condition, in a positive manner: according to them, if the schizophrenic individual seems confused and unable to operate within meaningful structures, this must not be explained negatively, as a failure to interiorize such structures. Instead, one must explore the way in which the schizophrenic functions and try to understand his “logic” without preconceptions.”

the "small print" of causal determinism makes it seem impossible, whereas the large print of personal experience makes freedom of the will seem certainly (if not always) so.

Which dictum you gonna believe? Is it even up to you? — Janus

One way out of this is to dump linear causal
determinism for a dynamical reciprocal determinism. This is the route Dennett and embodied psychology take. Natural systems are non-linear and self-referential, creatively redefining the role and meaning of their constituents via the temporal evolution of the whole.

'

There's no one-to-one relationship between the two, such that a small and variable number of 'chemical and physiological reactions of my brain in the presence of coffee' might be described by us as "I smell coffee".

We 'assign' narratives to the various neural happenings according to some rules-of-assignment, and those rules almost exclusively come from our culture. — Isaac

Is there a one-to-one relationship between a small and variable number of chemical and physiological reactions of my brain and cultural rules of assignment?

But such an argument seems lost here, among the phenomenologist's bizarre claims — Isaac

Does this sound like a bizarre claim to you?

From phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty:
” My friend Paul and I point out to each other certain details of the landscape; and Paul's finger, which is pointing out the church tower, is not a finger-for-me that I think of as orientated towards a church-tower-for-me, it is Paul's finger which itself shows me the tower that Paul sees, just as, conversely, when I make a movement towards some point in the landscape that I can see, I do not imagine that I am producing in Paul, in virtue of some pre-established harmony, inner visions merely analogous to mine: I believe, on the contrary, that my gestures invade Paul's world and guide his gaze. When I think of Paul, I do not think of a flow of private sensations indirectly related to mine through the medium of interposed signs, but of someone who has a living experience of the same world as mine, as well as the same history, and with whom I am in communication through that world and that history.”(Phenomenology of Perception, p.471)

“ In the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground; my thought and his are inter-woven into a single fabric, my words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by the state of the discussion, and they are inserted into a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator. We have here a dual being, where the other is for me no longer a mere bit of behavior in my transcendental field, nor I in his; we are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity.

Our perspectives merge into each other, and we co-exist through a common world. In the present dialogue, I am freed from myself, for the other person's thoughts are certainly his; they are not of my making, though I do grasp them the moment they come into being, or even anticipate them. And indeed, the objection which my interlocutor raises to what I say draws from me thoughts which I had no idea I possessed, so that at the same time that I lend him thoughts, he reciprocates by making me think too. It is only retrospectively, when I have withdrawn from the dialogue and am recalling it that I am able to reintegrate it into my life and make of it an episode in my private history”. (Phenomenology of Perception, p.413))

But Mcdowell would have us think there is a gap between these two.

Is that what you are suggesting, Josh? I'm not seeing it.

(Davidson would have us think that the physiology causes the belief. I'm not in complete agreement with that.) — Banno

When Davidson says the physiology is a cause, he seems to mean something other than a direct relation between it and a belief. McDowell is trying to get him to make sensory cause into something more ‘visible’ without quite turning it into a proposition.
Davidson and Mcdowell discuss this very issue here

Let me know how you interpret the discussion. Start at 22:20