t standards of rationality change. Slavery was an accepted institution in ancient Greece. The slave Epictetus was a Stoic, which makes sense. But then so was Marcus Aurelius. So rejection of an argument at a social level could be the institution of a new rational standard. — Pantagruel

Use of the word ‘standard’ could imply the difference between more and a less rational forms of thinking. Is that how you meant it? Or did you just mean to indicate different kinds of rationality?

No way out of this. Put simply, the physicalist model has to be discarded, or amended. How can this be done? — Constance

Take your pick. We could follow Quine, Davidson , Wittgenstein , Putnam, Rorty or Nietzsche out of the trap of physicalism. We could embrace a Gadamerian hermeneutics , a phenomenological approach, poststructuralism. We could follow the work of neuroscientists influenced by Peirce, or those adopting enactivism. Lots of options here.

Do you have a view on the practice of meditation, Joshs? — Tom Storm

I can start by saying what I think meditation does not do.
1)It does not bring us to a state prior to desire or will
2)It does not precede intention or reflection
3)it does not achieve a state of neutrality devoid of affective coloration.

As far as what it accomplishes, I think that depends on what one believes it will do for one. One’s
beliefs about it will have a lot to do with how it seems to provide benefit( sort of like chiropractics). In general meditation is a concentrated form of attention on a goal.

Saying the past-present-future is really "of-a-piece" actually reduces the problem for the Buddhist who faces the singular event of realization which is ideally out of time because
the production of experience is terminated? This means that there is nothing to deliver the perceptual event to in order to bring something "to mind" and for the meditator, this task is singular. Once the occurrent experience is reduced, there is a broadening of the purely perceptual horizon, and a new interpretative occasion, something "wholly other" presents itself.

…this being ahead of myself is a useful heuristic from meditators trying to understand what lies before them, as they face the dynamic of thought intrusion. It is the intrusion of the future and the past; but this, I think, annihilates time altogether, for one is left, ideally, with no interpretative stand at all, which is the point. — Constance

I have written a critique of Varela and Thompson’s
understanding of mindfulness and their misreading of phenomenology. Your depiction of a subject awaiting the objects of experience seems to overlap theirs, as if the act of attention is distinct from what one is attending to , and as if there could be such a thing as a pure, pre-reflective , pre-intending, non-judging and non-willing mode of awareness, a bare feeling of being.

Here’s the abstract:

“Evan Thompson and Francisco Varela ground the affectively, valuatively felt contingency of intentional acts of other-relatedness in what they presume to be a primordial neutral point of pre-reflective conscious auto-affective awareness. Through meditative practice, we can access this pre-reflective state , and avail ourselves of ‘unconditionally intrinsic goodness', 'spontaneous compassion', 'luminosity', 'blissfulness', and ' a calm and peaceful life guided by the fundamental value of nonviolence'. But how do such feelings emerge as ultimate outcomes of a philosophy of groundlessness? Aren't they motivated by a sort of 'will to goodness', a preferencing of one affective dimension over others? It would seem that groundlessness for Varela and Thompson doesn't apply to the thinking of affect and desire. Despite their claim that nihilism cannot be overcome by assimilating groundlessness to a notion of the will, they appear not to recognize that the positive affectivities they associate with meditative practice are, as dispositions of feeling opposed to other dispositions, themselves forms of willing. Phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty show that attention, as a species of intention, is sense-making, which means it is sense-changing. Attention is affectively, valuatively and meaningfully implicated in what it attends to as co-participant in the synthesis, creation, constitution of objects of regard. As auto-affection turns reflexively back toward itself, what it finds is not the normative sameness and constancy of a neutral positivity( blissful, self-less compassion and benevolence toward all phenomena) but a newly sensing being. Thus, the basis of our awareness of a world isn't simply compassionate, empathic relational co-determinacy, but the motivated experience of disturbing CHANGE in relational co-determinacy.“

Just as when the hammer's head flies off and the hammering gives way to a pause, a wonder, here, taken to the level of basic questions where there are no alternatives that readily fill the space of momentary indeterminacy, and here, there are no possibilities that can retake the occasion with something familiar, and there is nothing to step in and affirm an existence, and one faces nothing: past is suspended — Constance

This is not how phenomenologists understand ‘past’. You are thinking in terms of traditional notions of the past as a separate entity from the present, occupying a separate position in a sequence.


For instance, for Heidegger, the past, present and future don't operate as sequential modes which mark distinct states of objects. They interpenetrate each other so completely that they together form a single unitary event of occurrence.

“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 [my experience of something ‘as' something], and on closer analysis it turns out to be time. And this being-ahead-of-myself as a returning is a peculiar kind of movement that time itself constantly makes, if I may put it this way.”(Heidegger 2010b)

The returning from a totality of relevance in the act of understanding something constitutes temporality not as a present object happening IN time but as temporalization.

“Temporalizing does not mean a "succession" of the ecstasies. The future is not later than than the having-been, and the having-been is not earlier than the present. “Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general." Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. We call the unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having been temporality.”(Heidegger 2010)

Gendlin(1997b) echoes Heidegger's unification of the components of time.

“The future that is present now is not a time-position, not what will be past later. The future that is here now is the implying that is here now. The past is not an earlier position but the now implicitly functioning past.”“......the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in”(p.37 )

the understanding that is engaged is bound in a temporal dynamic of past/present/future, and it is not as if there really "is" such a thing" as the past or the future. Really, is it even possible to affirm the past AS the past? Past is neither an empirical nor apriori concept. In fact, it is a genuine fiction, as is the future. — Constance

Husserl believed inquiry can isolate this horizon if intuitions, and there discover absolute "presence". He — Constance

For Husserl , the past, in the form of the retentional , and the future, in the form of the protentional phase, belong to the present. The immediate ‘now’ is inseparably all three phases. This a priori tripartite structure of the now is no fiction.

But then meta ethical judgments like pain is bad: these do not change. This is important: Conditions in whcih the judgment takes place can change, and this does make our ethical issues so ambiguous; but in cases where the entanglements are minimal, and the value as such is clear, even pure, as when you stick your hand in a fire, value is an absolute. — Constance

Dewey had a good argument against utilitarian ethics based on pain-pleasure, as explained by Hilary Putnam.

“The assumption that people act only on self-interested motives was sometimes defended on the basis of the hedonist psychology of Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, which held that everyone ultimately "really" desires only a subjective psychological quantity (called "pleasure" by Bentham) and that this "quantity" was a purely subjective matter. As John Dewey put it long ago,

"When happiness is conceived of as an aggregate of states of feeling, these are regarded as homogenous in quality, different from one another only in intensity and duration. Their qualitative differences are not intrinsic, but are due to the different objects with which they are associated (as pleasures of hearing, or vision). Hence they disappear when the pleasure is taken by itself as an end."

This disappearance of the qualitative differences is (as far as importance to the agent's "happiness" is concerned), of course, just what makes it possible for the utilitarian to speak of "summing pleasures, "maximizing" them, and so on. But if Dewey's alternative view is right (as I believe), and if

“agreeableness is precisely the agreeableness or congruence of some objective condition with some impulse, habit, or tendency of the agent,"

then

"of course, pure pleasure is a myth. Any pleasure is qualitatively unique, being precisely the harmony of one set of conditions with its appropriate activity. The pleasure of eating is one thing; the pleasure of hearing music, another; the pleasure of an amiable act, another; the pleasure of drunkenness or of anger is still another."

Dewey continues,

"Hence the possibility of absolutely different moral values attaching to pleasures, according to the type or aspect of character which they express. But if the good is only a sum of pleasures, any pleasure, so far as it goes, is as good as any other-the pleasure of malignity as good as the pleasure of kindness, simply as pleasure.”

Is it ethical for technological automation to be stunted, in order to preserve jobs?
— Bret Bernhoft

It's ethical, but probably impossible or at least infeasible. Science will be science. Technology will be technology. The solution may be something like universal basic income.

On the other hand, the unemployment rate is low and demographers say there won't be enough workers in the future as birthrates decline. — T Clark

I generally agree that it is infeasible to significantly throttle down the pace of automation. Universal basic income may be one temporary solution, but ultimately a shrinking of the population will ensue because we simply won’t need as many people as we have now. That shrinkage is supposed to produce all kinds of dire economic effects but I think ma y of these analyses are flawed.

Great quotes. Thanks.

Meaningful correlations that are drawn between different physical things by a creature capable of doing so are not themselves physical things. They are existentially dependent upon physical things. They consist of some physical things. — creativesoul

What would a physical thing subsist in , outside of all ‘meaningful correlations’? Isn’t a physical thing a co-relationship between experiencer and object of experience? What features , properties and attributes do you imagine a physical thing to possess outside of our interaction with it? Aren’t features, properties and attributes correlational functions?

“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 (Putnam 1992, 120). Putnam is not denying that there are “external facts”; he even thinks that we can say what they are; but as he writes, “what we cannot say – because it makes no sense – is what the facts are independent of all conceptual choices” (Putnam 1987, 33). We cannot hold all our current beliefs about the world up against the world and somehow measure the degree of correspondence between the two. It is, in other words, nonsensical to suggest that we should try to peel our perceptions and beliefs off the world, as it were, in order to compare them in some direct way with what they are about (Stroud 2000, 27). This is not to say that our conceptual schemes create the world, but as Putnam writes, they don't just mirror it either”(Putnam 1978).

Which answer is closest to what you think is right? — god must be atheist

You’re missing a key option here, which is that Physicalism already presupposes the inseparable contribution of subjectivity in its formulation of the mind-independent ‘physical world’ without being aware of this.

“Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned.”(Dan Zahavi)

“The unquestioned givenness of the objective world that is constitutive of scientific descriptions cannot capture the way in which the given is disclosed by a meaning-giving background. Thus, if anything, it is the transcendental, meaning-giving account that has ontological priority over an objective/causal description.”(Matthew Ratcliffe)

the Will to Power framework that runs throughout "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" is similar to one's True Will, as found mentioned in Thelema. In this case, the uniting factor between Will to Power and True Will seems to be "working towards an individual's highest good, or grandest destiny". — Bret Bernhoft

Wiki says according to Thelema, true will adapts itself to the outside world. It is “a moment-to-moment path of action that operates in perfect harmony with nature.” “The Thelemite acts in alignment with nature, just as a stream flows downhill, with neither resistance nor "lust of result".

In contrast, for Nietzsche the adapting of the organism to the world is only secondary to what the Will to Power aims at. “The ‘development' of a thing, a tradition, an organ is therefore certainly not its progressus towards a goal, still less is it a logical progressus, taking the shortest route with least expenditure of energy and cost, – instead it is a succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subjugation exacted on the thing…””…the pressure of this idiosyncrasy forces ‘adaptation' into the foreground, which is a second rate activity, just a reactivity, indeed life itself has been defined as an increasingly efficient inner adaptation to external circumstances (Herbert Spencer). But this is to misunderstand the essence of life, its will to power, we overlook the prime importance that the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, re-interpreting, re-directing and formative forces have, which ‘adaptation' follows only when they have had their effect.” “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.”

Also according to Wiki, “Thelemites in touch with their True Will are said to have eliminated or bypassed their false desires, conflicts, and habits, and accessed their connection with the divine.” For Nietzsche there can be no ‘true’ will: all desires are false desires in that “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”.
“The will to truth needs a critique – let us define our own task with this –, the value of truth is tentatively to be called into question…”

↪Joshs That'll be why idealism, not realism, is so appealing to those with a spiritual bent. — Banno

The great idealist and theist Kant was the founder of modern realism.

“The “Critique of pure Reason” is the founding document of realism and to the present-day Kant’s discussion of realism has shaped the theoretical landscape of the debates over realism. Kant not only invents the now common philosophical term ‘realism’. He also lays out the theoretical topography of the forms of realism that still frames our understanding of philosophical questions concerning reality.” (Kant and the forms of realism, Dietmar Heidemann)

Is 'delights' something FN would recognize? What would moving though endless value systems be like? Sounds exhausting. — Tom Storm

Nietzsche thought the greatest joy and delight was to be found in the cultivation of error and falsification, not as an opposite to truth, but as its condition of possibility. Value systems and sciences are falsifications and fictions that give us something to organize our activities around.

“What a strange simplification and falsification people live in! The wonders never cease, for those who devote their eyes to such wondering. How we have made everything around us so bright and easy and free and simple! How we have given our senses a carte blanche for everything superficial, given our thoughts a divine craving for high-spirited leaps and false inferences! – How we have known from the start to hold on to our ignorance in order to enjoy a barely comprehensible freedom, thoughtlessness, recklessness, bravery, and joy in life; to delight in life itself! And, until now, science could arise only on this solidified, granite foundation of ignorance, the will to know rising up on the foundation of a much more powerful will, the will to not know, to uncertainty, to untruth! Not as its opposite, but rather – as its refinement!”(Beyond Good and Evil)

. But, at least at the individual level, books like "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" are useful for personal transmutation, personal evolution — Bret Bernhoft

I think using words like ‘evolution’, ‘progress’ , ‘self-actualization’ and ‘growth’ to describe Nietzsche’s view of the trajectory of Will to Power and the aims of the Overman forces us into a rather mundane and traditionalistic reading of him. These terms presuppose some particular self-created value system that one grows within and perfects. But the aim
of Will to Power is a self-overcoming that delights in moving through endless value systems. The only growth here is a kind of self-diversification.

On the other hand, the best philosophers make up new words for perfectly good reasons. Best not to avoid philosophy just because of the bad apples. — Joshs

Tell that to Heidegger... — Tom Storm

He’s one of those who does it for good reasons.

Making up new words when there are already perfectly good ones is one of the reasons people don't take philosophy seriously — T Clark

On the other hand, the best philosophers make up new words for perfectly good reasons. Best not to avoid philosophy just because of the bad apples.

But theists would much rather give up on logic than god, so the replies will be - have been - shall we say unphilosophical? — Banno

Faith is indeed an amazing thing, with its capacity to reach beyond mere reason into gullibility. — Banno

The irony here is that realism is that remnant of Christian religious faith which motivates the scientistic accusation of religious faith as being ‘unreasonable’ and ‘illogical’.

Whatever the dialectic is, it is not logic in the modern sense — Banno

And, of course, neither is Husserl’s or Kant’s transcendental logic, Deleuze’s logic of sense or Derrida’s logic of the trace. Maybe we should distinguish the modern Analytic philosophical sense from the modern Continental sense.

Fichte introduced into German philosophy the three-step of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, using these three terms. Schelling took up this terminology. Hegel did not. He never once used these three terms together to designate three stages in an argument or account in any of his books. — Dermot Griffin

He may not have used those specific terms, but they can be interpreted in a variety of ways, just as the terms Hegel did use for his triadic dialectic structure can be understood in different ways.For instance, one can translate the triad as understanding, negation-opposition and unification. Do these present a different meaning than thesis-antithesis-synthesis? It seems to depend on one’s interpretation.

“Hegel provides the most extensive, general account of his dialectical method in Part I of his Encyclopaedia of
Philosophical Sciences, which is often called the Encyclopaedia Logic [EL]. The form or presentation of logic, he says, has three sides or moments (EL §79). These sides are not parts of logic, but, rather, moments of “every concept”, as well as “of everything true in general” (EL Remark to §79; we will see why Hegel thought dialectics is in everything in section 3). The first moment—the moment of the understanding—is the moment of fixity, in which concepts or forms have a seemingly stable definition or determination (EL §80).
The second moment—the “dialectical” (EL §§79, 81) or “negatively rational” (EL §79) moment—is the moment of instability. In this moment, a one-sidedness or restrictedness (EL Remark to §81) in the determination from the moment of understanding comes to the fore, and the determination that was fixed in the first moment passes into its opposite (EL §81). Hegel describes this process as a process of “self­sublation” (EL §81). The English verb “to sublate” translates Hegel’s technical use of the German verb aufheben, which is a crucial concept in his dialectical method. Hegel says that aufheben has a doubled meaning: it means both to cancel (or negate) and to preserve at the same time. The moment of understanding sublates itself because its own character or nature—its one-sidedness or restrictedness—destabilizes its definition and leads it to pass into its opposite.
The dialectical moment thus involves a process of self-sublation, or a process in which the determination from the moment of understanding sublates itself, or both cancels and preserves itself, as it pushes on to or passes into its opposite. The third moment—the “speculative” or “positively rational” (EL §§79, 82) moment—grasps the unity of the opposition between the first two determinations, or is the positive result of the dissolution or transition of those determinations (EL §82 and Remark to §82).
( Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

I disagree that "formal logic" and "Fortran" are similarly related to language in that both represent specific uses of the language.

I see formal logic as the semantical component of language, which does not represent a structure , but a meaning, whereas Fortran is a specific syntactical language form used to convey a semantical meaning. Under any language (Fortran, French, English), you will need to adhere to a logical based semantics for coherence, but the form can vary among types of languages. That is, logic is not a language, but a component of language, whereas Fortran is a type of language. — Hanover

How about this: Fortran is a specific language offering its own semantics based on a logical syntax whose form is in turned based on a certain semantics. Meanwhile , formal logic is an empty syntax whose formal features are based on a certain semantics.

I agree with you to the extent you suggest that there are all types of thought without language, but I believe your example of "how to" language points to the least controversial one that is generally conceded by the staunchest of deniers of meaningful thought without language. — Hanover

Most of those depictions of ‘how to’ language ( like Dreyfus , for instance) deny that skills are conceptual in nature. That’s what allows them to deny meaningful thought without language

Language and logic are synonyms. This boils down to saying you can’t practice cognition outside of language. — ucarr

Language and formal logic are no more synonyms than language and fortran. The latter is a specific use of language. Language is a human extension of perceptual interaction with the world, and is continuous with perception , which is already conceptual and cognitive prior to the learning of a language. Our embodied perceptual-motor interaction with the world plays a large role in the origin of the structure of linguistic grammar. Animal cognition already implies a spatial-temporal ‘grammar’.

“Some organisms also respond to some features of their environment in ways that support a distinction between merely taking them up, and taking them as relevant “under an aspect,” “as meant,” or “under a description,” such that they can mistake them.”
— Joshs
seems to make use of Davidson and Anscombe's notion of intent being "under a description" rather than countering it or offering an alternative. — Banno

Davidson’s distinction between ways the mind grabs onto the world in terms of non-propositional vs propositional, pre-conceptual vs conceptual meaning , is rejected by McDowell , Rouse and others who argue that perceptual experience in humans and animals is already conceptually articulated. As Rouse explains, “Davidson understood perception as a merely causal prompting of discursive judgment in thought and talk. If David­son were right, McDowell picturesquely proclaimed, conceptual thought could only be a “frictionless spinning in a void”.

For Rouse et al, being ‘under a description’ doesn't require linguistic representation. A situated perceptual mapping will do just fine. More specifically, what is required for conceptual intentionality is “a robust capacity to discriminate and respond flexibly and mostly appropriately to subtle, often disguised aspects of ac­tual circumstances that matter to a species-characteristic way of life, including novel behaviors by other organisms. Moreover, these percep­tual discriminations and motor-behavioral responses are not distinct but correlated subsystems of the organism’s overall way of life. They instead constitute an integral entanglement of the organism’s physical and behavioral repertoire with its selective environment.”

Just to be clear, I mention anomalous monism as an example of an approach that separates physical and intentional descriptions. Similar ideas are found in Anscombe, Midgley and others, variously articulated. The question is whether the separation is one of degree or of kind. — Banno

I’m thinking that a biologically rooted account of intentionality such as that of Rouse is neither physical nor mental in the sense that anomalous monism distinguishes these, but rather something mid-way between them. Or maybe it simply abandons the assumption of ontological physicalism that Davidson’s non-reductive physicalism retains. Not sure.

Again the intentional behaviour and language sits on and yet remains distinct from the physically causal description of events. As you say,
I don't think such a physical necessity matches they way we normally use 'intent'. It might show that there's no physical basis behind our word at all, but that's fine, I don't see there needs to be.
— Isaac

This view is in apparrent contrast to
..this represents a primitive form of intending...
— Joshs — Banno

The biological notion of intending that I had in mind is not
at the level of physical causal description. It is similar to Joseph Rouse’s assertion that non-linguistic animals display an authentic rather than merely ersatz form of intentionality. His argument hinges on the assumption that animal intentionality is conceptually-based , even though it is non-linguistic.

He explains that while some animals respond to
stimuli in rigidly inflexible ways, “many organisms can change their behavioral patterns in flexible, instrumentally rational responses to novel or conflicting patterns of multiple cues and can make further adjustments shaped by the outcomes of their own earlier efforts. Call this difference between rigid and flexible responsiveness to envi­ronmental cues (which may be a difference in degree rather than kind) the “sphex/flex” distinction; to describe it initially in terms of causality, rationality, or intentionality may beg key questions.”

Rouse’s biological notion of intentional conceptuality applies to the following: “Some organisms also respond to some features of their environment in ways that support a distinction between merely taking them up, and taking them as relevant “under an aspect,” “as meant,” or “under a description,” such that they can mistake them.”

In the following quote, Rouse presents John Haugeland’s argument against Rouse’s claims for animal
intentionality. In reading this, I now realize that dishbrain’s generalizing and discriminating capabilities certainly don’t exceed Haigeland’s depiction of ersatz intentionality.

“Haugeland’s (1998) arguments against the possibility
of a biologi­cally based understanding of human intentionality make this mismatch especially clear, for his line of argument also provides a decisive con­sideration against treating expert chess play, and other forms of skilled perceptual-practical responsiveness, as nonconceptual. Haugeland ar­gued that biological functioning can only differentiate the patterns in the world to which it normally responds, even if those patterns are gerrymandered from the perspective of conceptually articulated under­standing. For example, a bird whose evolved perceptual responses are to avoid eating most yellow butterflies, except for one oddly mottled pattern of yellow, would not thereby be mistaken about the color of the mottled yellow ones. We identify the bird’s responses as almost in ac­cord with a conceptual category we endorse (“yellow”), but the bird’s behavior itself provides no basis for concluding that it was striving but failing to accord with that classification.

Moreover, even if the bird’s re­sponse patterns were de facto coextensive with conceptually significant features of the world, as in always and only avoiding eating yellow butterflies, those patterns would not then display an intentional direct­edness toward the butterflies’ color, for that coincidence would merely be a de facto contingency. For Haugeland, intentionality or conceptual understanding must introduce a possible gap between what some com­portment is directed toward and the manner or content of that directed­ness such that a mismatch between the two accounts for the possibility
of error. The birds’ pattern of behavior is only a complex pattern of response to actual circumstances. The single pattern of what the birds do in varying circumstances cannot then generate a dual pattern that could differentiate what they are responding to from how they take it to be. Individual birds can malfunction with respect to species-normal patterns of discrimination and response, but there is no further basis for concluding that the overall response pattern within the population aims for but falls short of something different than what its members actually, typically do.”

Mind science was tracking down this road since Helmholtz until the computer revolution derailed it in the 1950s. A new mechanistic paradigm was forced on to it. And now it has returned to that more naturalistic paradigm. — apokrisis

I don’t know that mind science had much of a chance between Helmholz and the rise of embodied approaches in the 1990’s. After turning its back on James, it quickly embraced positivist behaviorism. It took the computer revolution, along with Chomsky , Shannon and Bruner , to make talk of internal intervening variables acceptable again. Mind science had to wait another 40 years to free itself from its rationalist bias of first-generation cognitivism.

novelty has not generally been a criterion of value. — Tom Storm

I would say that novelty is the only criterion of value, if one understands novelty in a certain way. The value of something, how meaningful and relevant it is to us , how richly it affects us, is a dance between familiarity and alterity. If a thing is too alien, it will be invisible to us. If it is just alien enough to be seen but not effectively assimilated, we will react to it with confusion. Paradoxically, boring experience falls within this category of the confused and chaotic. Needless to say , this is not the kind of experience we embrace as meaningful and valuable, but instead as a waste of our time or something actively aversive to us. That leaves the delicate dance between familiarity and difference that is involved in experiencing something just different enough to escape boredom or confusion. This is the zone where creativity and rich sources of valuable experience reside.
In sum, just the right balance of novelty is vital
to the perception of value. Whether we are engaging with chronologically ‘new’ music or enjoying an art form fromcenturies ago, it will be valuable to us to the extent that we interpret it freshly , but not too freshly.

I do still seek out new music being released whereas many people don't..
— Jack Cummins

Me too, but only if it was written between the 17th and early 20th century. :razz: — Tom Storm

I confine myself to discovering ‘new’ pop music written between 1964 and 1973. Pop music has been trying to recapture that breathtaking speed of innovative change ever since, with increasingly less success. But then, we shouldn’t expect creative revolution from our music if it is nowhere to be found in the larger culture. Good luck finding an original , underground counterculture these days.

I wouldn't use the metaphor that innovation dries up, but rather innovation sparks the imagination of others who then imitate the innovation (new derivations of innovation are still possible, but the returns appear to diminish), and eventually the artistic movement dies a natural death once the imitations and derivations reach critical mass (at which point the audience stops paying attention). — Noble Dust

Have you seen Mark Fisher’s ( his alias as a music writer was k-punk, before he became an academic) video on the ‘slow cancellation of the future’ as evidenced by recent trends in pop music? I’m wondering if you agree with his diagnosis of the current situation of pop music ( apart from his explanation of their causes).

But if, on my next day off, I wandered over to the Life Sciences building at the local state university, and asked everyone I met there about biosemiosis and Friston and Salthe and all the rest, they would all assure me that it is universally accepted — except perhaps for a handful of dinosaurs on the verge of retirement — and as well-supported as, say, evolution. — Srap Tasmaner

Metatheories don’t have to invalidate each other. Biosemiotics ties together the physical, biological and psychological on the basis of a unified overarching scheme that doesn’t so much contradict rival approaches as attempt a grand synthesis that it hasnt occurred to others to try before ( that is, not before Peirce, Piaget and a handful of others). I think what the profs at your local state university will say about Friston and biosemiotics is that in every era of science there emerges a certain network of powerful organizing ideas that inspire, in different ways , a young generation of researchers in a variety of fields, regardless of whether they embrace every aspect of these frameworks. This is the role that free energy and biosemiotics is playing today in interdisciplinary work across the spectrum of biological and neuropsychological theorizing. (I could add enactivism to this list). It’s not a question of such ideas simply being proved or discarded. They are more formidable than that. In some form or another they will remain with us, and even when they give way to a new set of motivating assumptions, their role in making the next steps in thinking possible will be evident.

insofar as you or Joshs answer the sorts of questions philosophers talk about with "Shiny new theory says X" without assuring us that shiny new theory has much claim to truth, why should we listen to you? You guys have preferences among theories, good for you; let us know when you have overwhelming evidence — Srap Tasmaner

Many competing theories can justifiably claim empirical validity and truth. Each can have evidence supporting it. It is thus not simply a question of whether one metatheory is more ‘true’ than another but whether one is true in a more useful way relative to certain aims and problems. You would have have a hard time finding a theoretical biologist or neuroscientist denying that biosemotics or free energy are devoid of evidence. Your preference must be made on the basis of whether the conceptual shift required to make the evidence supporting these ideas attractive is one you are willing or able to make.

once the functional aspect of an artistic expression is evolved to it's logical conclusion, the focus of that expression shifts from what it is to how it's done — Noble Dust

Is this another way of saying that ground-breaking art introduces a new thematic, and as the innovation dries up we get more and more derivative variations on the old theme? And why would this be the case? Perhaps a consolidation period is part of the creative cycle?

One of the reasons I came up with the criteria for reality I did was that in several discussions posters claimed that quantum behavior at atomic and subatomic scale called into question the reality of phenomena at human scale. I reject that idea — T Clark

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Husserlian phenomenology makes a distinction between the real, the sensate and the imaginary. For him , the real refers to something like a spatial object in empirical nature. The real object is actually a concatenation of memory, anticipation and sensate data. We never actually
experience the object as a fulfilled unity so the ‘real’ is an idealization, and is contingent and relative. The real is based in part on immediate data of sensation , but what we actually experience in sensation changes from
one moment to the next as a Heraclitean flux, unlike the real , which we assume to have extension, duration and persistence. Imagination is memory of actual
sense sat ( and the real, which is constituted at a higher level from this primordial experience of the world).

But what purpose does this coupling serve? Is it a striving to avoid the white noise as an aversive stimulus or negative reinforcer?

Where did such a preference come from? It can only be a relic from the genetic bauplan of what makes a neuron useful in an actual embodied relation with its world — apokrisis

When you ask where the dish-brain’s preferring to avoid white noise comes from, might we not distinguish between a specific and general source of motivation? In the most specific sense, motivation is tied to pre-determined sensitivities to environmental features , as well as a pre-determined capacities to act on those features. As a result the world looks and matters very differently to a bacterium or an ant or a human. The particularities of preference ‘come from’ these unique capacities to sense and respond, but in a more general sense preference is always for the sake of the continuation of whatever coupled system of organism-world interactions is repeating itself as a normed process.
So specific preference is dictated by direction of sensory-motor ‘use’, and use , beyond specific goals , is in the service of the preservation of self-consistency of change in the face of potential interruptions and perturbations. I don’t think the striving for self-consistency needs “a genetic bauplan of what makes a neuron useful in an actual embodied relation with its world”. Rather, self-consistency is what Piaget called the most general organizing principle of life.

to my eye the question is, if we choose to say that the dishbrain intends to move the paddle to stop the ball, have we extended the use of "intend" too far? So far that we have lost some worthwhile distinctions. For instance, we commonly only attribute culpability in cases of acting intentional - is the dishbrain now culpable for any negative consequences of its intent?

Isn't the language around intent distinct to that around use, including, as Josh says, normative features — Banno

I would be comfortable in saying that if what the dish-brain is doing is generalizing from particular events, and thus using memory to anticipate for the sake of maintaining normative directions ( the norm being whatever consistency of coordinated neural activity is repeating itself ), then this represents a primitive form of intending. I am defining organismic intention here as a responsiveness to its environment involving capacity to discriminate and respond flexibly and appropriately to aspects of its circumstances that matter to its self-maintenance.

So is it legitimate to describe dishbrain as having intended to move the paddle to deflect the ball?
— Banno

What's missing is the intent to make some actual change in the world.

A biosemiotic view of Dishbrain, and predictive coding in general, is that it is meaningless unless it is driving some pragamatically useful result for the organism. — apokrisis

I'm not convinced that a thermostat intends to keep the temperature stable. Nor that a virus intends to reproduce. My suspicion is that for some act to count as intentional, the organism might in some sense have done otherwise — Banno

I’m sympathetic to the idea that a brain in a dish is too close to the idea of a brain in a vat for it to qualify as having intentionality in the same sense as a natural organism. But can we rule out the idea there is in some sense a structural coupling taking place between the dish brain and the environmental stimuli that the experimenters have drummed up? More importantly, could these cells be creating a primitive form of normative pattern of functioning , a kind of anticipation,
via this coupling? If so, then the pragmatic usefulness of the dishbrain’s behaviors is driven by its ‘striving ‘ to maintain a patterned self-consistency.

My point is that explanations in terms of intent do not apply to dishbrain. Talk of intent is part of a different language game. — Banno

I don’t understand the function of ‘intent’ in living systems the way that eliminativists like Dennett do. In their language game intent is reduced to a glorified form of s-r, the combined behavior of numerous dumb bits. Placing living neurons in a dish is a whole new ball game in comparison with silicon chips. We can try to force what is taking place in the dishbrain into the strictures of computational patterns of 0’s and 1’s or some such thing, but I think this misses much of what is most interesting about self-organization in even the simplest living systems.

(There are often odd carriage returns in your posts; just mentioning it in case you were not aware. Presumably your device or browser?) — Banno

Nope, a combination of fat fingers on an iphone touch keyboard and the fact that I compose most of my comments while hiking in the woods.

DishBrain is able to identify habits or tendencies in the "ball" and to develop matching habits or tendencies or propensities. For what purpose? In an earlier age, we might have heard this described as a manifestation of the death drive, the will to become mechanical, but maybe Freud was on the right track in seeing life as paradoxically trying always to reduce irritation and excitation, or to predict it well enough that it ceases to be experienced as surprise. (See, Isaac, I do listen. Did you know you're a closet Freudian?) — Srap Tasmaner

Freud’s understanding of life drew inspiration in part from physical models ( hydraulics, etc) in which equilibrium is static , and change within a psychic system requires an extraneous source of motivation in the form of the push or pull of instinctive drive.
In contrast, contemporary dynamical systems and autopoietic approaches assume that equilibration is not driven toward static balance but a dynamical tension characterized by incessant activity and change. That is, equilibration tends in the direction of an increasingly active, increasingly organized organism, rather than a drive toward mechanical equilibrium ( the death drive).

the brain cells did not "learn to play pong", they just avoided "a chaotic stream of white noise". It was the experimenters who turned this into a game. That is, the dishbrain had no intent to play pong. — Banno

The question is whether it might be possible to say that the brain cells were forming intentions of any sort.
The brain cells ‘avoiding a stream of white noise’ is reminiscent of the description of Skinner’s
rats as avoiding aversive stimulation. While
one can employ a reductive s-r level of explanation in the the case of Skinner’s animals, it is now assumed that much more is going on in between stimulus and response in animal reinforcement. The same may be the case with the dishbrain.

I don't see what "perfection" has to do with universals anyway. What would it mean for a universal tree to be "perfect"? — litewave

For a triangle perfection may be linked to ideal self-identical repetition of the pattern. For a line or angle to be perfect, it would have to conform to an iteration of an exact self-identical procedure.

Pathologically, when discussing our past selves or future selves with another ("But you promised!"), should we treat those selves as separate moral actors/agents? Do we disavow ourselves? — Ennui Elucidator

Derrida makes a distinction between situational, or conditional, forgiveness and what he calls ‘pure’ forgiveness. He explains that in ‘ordinary’ , conditional forgiveness,

“I forgive on the condition that the guilty one repents, mends his ways, asks forgiveness, and thus would be changed by a new obligation, and that from then on he would no longer be exactly the same as the one who was found to be culpable.... As soon as the victim ‘understands’ the criminal, as soon as she exchanges, speaks, agrees with him, the scene of reconciliation has commenced, and with it this ordinary forgiveness which is anything but pure forgiveness.

By contrast, pure forgiveness for Derrida is not an acknowledgment of apology and reconciliation, and is not in the name of redeeming the wrongdoer by welcoming their return to a normative rational order. It is instead an acknowledgment of the structural condition of possibility of the ‘evil’ act itself. Rather than an acceptance of the contrite other , pure forgiveness would be an acceptance of the necessary role of absolute alterity in the constitution of justice, honesty and intentional meaning in general.

“I must ask forgiveness for (the fact of ) being just. Because it is unjust to be just. I always betray someone to be just.”
“...existence, or consciousness, or the ‘‘I,’’ before any determined fault is at fault and in the process, consequently, of asking at least implicitly for forgiveness for the simple fact, finally, of being there.”
“It is not simply a moral, ethical, or religious experience, but simply in order to go on and to produce the synthesis that you need to be yourself, and to identify yourself through time, you have to forgive yourself constantly. Forgiveness then is part of the temporal constitution of the ego, self-forgiveness.
So from that point of view, yes and no, I forgive myself, I never forgive myself; it depends. We are a scene of multiple egos, persons. There is in me someone who is always ready to forgive and another who is absolutely merciless, and we are constantly fighting. Sometimes I can sleep, sometimes I cannot.”