Gadamer talks about the fusion of horizons. — Fooloso4

Since the OP concerns the postmodern, I thought I’d mention Shaun Gallagher’s interesting paper, Conversations in Postmodern Hermeneutics , in which he tries to steer a course between Gadamer’s approach and Lyotard’s paralogy.

“A postmodern hermeneutics would be one that is free from the Romantic conceptions of humanity
and trust.
Lyotard's distrust of metalepsis indicates that in postmodern hermeneutics the fusion of horizons which would efface the differences between the self and the other must be displaced by a conception of linking that includes the impossibility of complete fusion, along with
the possibility of an agonistic refusal to be fused, as well as the possibility of progressive dialogue.

Metalepsis is the transformation of an observer left outside the conversation into a participant through his judgment about the conversation. When Socrates speaks to Thrasymachus, Plato intends for the reader to enter into the same conversation. We enter into the conversation, Gadamer would contend, through this metalepsis in which we judge whether Socrates or
Thrasymachus is right. For Gadamer, every time one reads Plato one enters into a conversation that is fused with the Socratic dialogue. Lyotard, in contrast, equates metalepsis with an absorption of the difference that exists between agonistics (debate) and dialogue, two
incommensurable genres. For Lyotard, it is "never certain nor even probable that partners in a debate, even those taken as witness to a dialogue, convert themselves into partners in dialogue".

Rather, what is certain here is that we end up with more than one conversation, each structured in its own genre, with different participants, and different senses. Despite Gadamer's addiction to metalepsis, this paralogical result is not inconsistent with Gadamer's own principle that we always understand differently. In doing so, however, we do not enter into the original conversation, but create a new one for ourselves.”

I do not think that interpreting a text is like modeling the origins of the universe. The former addresses the audience the latter does not. I do not regard interpretation of a text as either representing or constructing truth, but rather as opening up what is there to be found — Fooloso4

Could you elaborate on the difference between addressing an audience in textual interpretation and not addressing an audience in modeling the origin of the universe? Doesn’t one participate within a set of scientific practices and address a particular community of fellow scientists when constructing theory? Do we not find what we put there in doing science? That is , we discover from within a web of practices and devices that produce not just the means but the substrate of what is to be found.

So too, current concerns and goals can get in the way of understanding the concerns and goals of the author. In my opinion an author who is at a distance from us in time and place may have something to teach us that our contemporaries cannot. The fact that they saw things differently can be of value — Fooloso4

In modernist thinking one’s current goals and concerns act as a distortion of the text’s author’s ‘original’ aims, and one should try one’s best to separate these, so as to appreciate the different way an older author saw things with as little contamination from our overlaid experiences as possible. But aren’t the author’s original aims also interpreted via one’s current goals and aims? This is called the hermeneutic circle, which Heidegger discusses in Being and Time.

“Scientific proof must not already pre­suppose what its task is to found. But if interpretation always already has
to operate within what is understood and nurture itself from this, how should it then produce scientific results without going in a circle, espe­cially when the presupposed understanding still operates in the common knowledge of human being and world? But according to the most ele­mentary rules of logic, the circle is a circulus vitios'lis. But the business of historical interpretation is thus banned a priori from the realm of exact knowledge. If the fact of the circle in understanding is not removed, his­toriography must be content with less strict possibilities of knowledge. … It would be more ideal, of course, moreover according to the opinion of the historiographers themselves, if the circle could be avoided and if there were the hope for once of creating a his­toriography which is· as independent of the standpoint of the observer as the knowledge of nature is supposed to be.
But to see a vitiosum in this circle and to look for ways to avoid it, even to"feel" that is an inevitable imperfection, is to misunderstand understanding from the ground up….

What is decisive is not to get out of
the circle, but to get in it in the right way.“

My preference, and it comes down to a matter of preference, is for the interpretation that helps us understand the text, attending to the details and connecting them, illuminating the whole of the text or texts of the author.

An appropriately "radical" one would be one that gets to the roots, not one that pushes it to the edge. — Fooloso4

When we interpret a text, or model the origins of the universe, are we attempting to represent or to construct truth? If both , how does the fact-value entanglement situate the knower and the known?

I follow McDowell, Brandom and Sellars beyond realism and anti-realism. And I also follow Joseph Rouse in viewing the investigation of the meaning of a text or the origin of a universe not as the recovery of what was but as. a moving further and further away from
what was in order to understand it better and better.

In other words, getting closer and closer to the ‘roots’ involves ensconcing the past within more and more intricate schemes of relation that express what is relevant to current concerns and goals.

So, if I say "This ice cream tastes good" most people know I mean "This ice cream tastes good to me." But someone might mistake "The floor is hard" as a statement about objective reality. See my next comment.

“If I say "the floor is hard, . . ."
— Joshs
"The floor is hard" is a statement about objective reality. Compared to a diamond, the floor is soft. Compared to neutron stars the floor isn't much more than a wisp of smoke. — Art48

Let me see if I understand this. You’re making a distinction between the legitimate use of the word ‘is’ to make a statement about objective reality vs the use of the word ‘is’ to state a subjective preference, and your only concern here is with confusions between the two contexts that result in a subjective use of ‘is’ appearing to be an objective use?

The fundamental problem with “is” seems to be the person using that word seemingly speaks with a god-like authority
— Art48

Not to any competent language user. — SophistiCat

I like psychologist George Kelly’s approach:

“If I say "the floor is hard," I employ a language system in which the subject-predicate relationship inheres in the subject itself. It is the floor which is hard, and that is its nature, regardless of who says so. The statement stands, not because the speaker said it, but because the floor
happened to be what it is. The sentence's validity stems from the floor and not from the speaker.

Suppose our verbs could be cast in the invitational mood. This is to say that instead of being used in the popular indicative mood of objective speech, or in one of the other moods recognized by our language – conditional, subjunctive, or imperative – a verb could be cast in a form which would suggest to the listener that a certain novel interpretation of an object might be entertained. For example, I might say, "Suppose we regard the floor as if it were hard."
If I make such a statement I immediately find myself in an interesting position. The statement leaves both the speaker and the listener, not with a conclusion on their hands, but in a posture of expectancy suppose we do regard the floor as if it were hard, what then? A verb employed in the invitational mood, assuming our language had such a mood, would have the effect of orienting one to the future, not merely to the present or to the past.”

Kierkegaard's point was that Christianity is a dead religion. I think you've gone way too long not understanding Kierkegaard and how he was saying the same thing Nietzsche was vis-a-vis amor fati — Tate

I read Kierkegaard through people like Caputo , Sheehan and Critchley, who may have abandoned Christianity but certainly not God and faith in the coherence of the concept of moral good(which amount to the same thing). Is this your view of Kierkegaard?

A "scholarly rigorous reading" and "the most daring and interesting reading of Nietzsche , the one that pushes him to his radical edge" are two different things. Being historically situated is not a choice, but what you take to be the most interesting reading is a deliberate choice. — Fooloso4

They are not necessarily two different things. In this context, a reading is daring and interesting not because it entertains as fiction , but on the contrary , because it resists the easiest, most conventional interpretation in favor of one that pushes and dares the interpreter. When referred to pushing Nietzsche to his radical edge , I meant, of the many Nietzsches one could choose to adopt as the ‘true’ Nietzsche, all of which can be linked to solid evidence from his work, one should choose the most radical. We see this happen all the time in interpretive scholarship. Dreyfus’ reading of Heidegger and Husserl has been dumped in favor of more radical approaches, Hacker’s Wittgenstein has been replaced for many by Cavell’s and Conant’s, etc.

If the most daring and (to your mind) interesting readings of Nietzsche do not have to be consistent with Nietzsche's text, then are they still readings of Nietzsche and not misreadings? If the assertions are to be understood on their own terms, and these assertions are not consistent with Nietzsche's text, then is what sense, if any, are they still assertions about Nietzsche's text? — Fooloso4

I didn’t mean to suggest that a reading of an author shouldn’t strive to be as consistent as humanly possible with their text. My point was that even the most scholarly rigorous reading of an author , one which seeks nothing other than to capture without distortion the author’s original intent, will be oriented by implicit cultural presuppositions , much like the attempt to capture the original way that Bach sounded. There are numerous intellectual cultures operating simultaneously today, which is why there are such diametrically opposed readings of Nietzsche.

Schopenhauer wasn't his contemporary. He was about two generations back, and people who are familiar with both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche note how similar they are in spite of apparently being unaware of one another. — Tate

I meant that the ideas were contemporary , not that the writers were born in the same era. I consider Heidegger’s ideas contemporary even though he was born in 1889.
It is vital to postmodern readings of Nietzsche to recognize the critical distance between his thinking and Kierkegaard’s. Existentialist readings of Nietzsche, on the other hand, see the two as compatible. I would be very disappointed if I became conscience that Nietzsche wasn’t saying anything remarkably different than Kierkegaard. My favorite thing about Nietzsche is how he slams a hammer into the religiosity that Kierkegaard struggles to keep alive.

I'd just say that if you knowingly get creative with Nietzsche, you're not in a position to dismiss other interpretations. You'll just have to respect everyone else's view. Do you agree? — Tate

My point was everybody gets creative with philosophers they are charged with interpreting, but only some admit it. Others may buy into some form of realism that tries to lock in a ‘true for all’ reading of a set of philosophical ideas, and dont even have framework within which it makes sense to point out the cultural relativism implicit in understanding ideas.
So knowingly or not, we must respect others readings.( I would say the same about divergent theoretical viewpoints within the social sciences) But that doesnt mean we dont have a preference for one reading over another, and that there aren’t important ethical and psychological implications of one preference vs another.

As far as I can tell, purveyors of p0m0 reduce N to his "there are no facts, only interpretations" (which, ontologically generalized out-of-context, entails(?) some sort of pan-aestheticism after N's so-called "the death of metaphysics" and "psychologistic reduction of morality"). For p0m0, it seems only caricatures –subjective interpretations – of N (or any text) are deemed "significant" :eyes: — 180 Proof

Not caricatures, characterizations, which is all any interpreter can come up with. The key questions, as far as I’m concerned , do not have to do with capturing the ‘real’ Nietzsche, any more than we can capture the real Plato. Of course we can do our best , but readings will always vary by era and social context.
To me that two key questions are: 1)What is the most daring and interesting reading of Nietzsche , the one that pushes him to his radical edge? 2) Whether or not we think this most radical reading is consistent with the author’s text, can we at least understand it’s assertions on its own terms?

I dont get the impresssion that you succeed at #2, which does t put you in an ideal position to judge whether postmodern readings of Nietzsche , like those of Foucault, Deleuze, Rouse, Derrida and Heidegger, are simply reductive caricatures or in fact reveal what makes him so different from contemporaries like Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer.

What does that tell us about truth, then? And how are we even able to compare these theories? Is it that there is no truth at all, or an undefined truth? Or is there simply a toy logic we invent in the moment which allows us to temporarily compare these theories among one another, but which ultimately results in no insight -- a formalism of truth? — Moliere

:up:

Let me add to that Nietzsche’s linking of traditional morality with intentionality , the willing what one chooses to will, and his critique of this morality. Self-overcoming involves deconstructing the presumed internal unity of willing, intending and valuing.

“Today, when we immoralists, at least, suspect that the decisive value is conferred by what is specifically unintentional about an action, and that all its intentionality, everything about it that can be seen, known, or raised to “conscious awareness,” only belongs to its surface and skin – which, like every skin, reveals something but conceals even more? In short, we believe that the intention is only a sign and symptom that first needs to be interpreted, and that, moreover, it is a sign that means too many things and consequently means almost nothing by itself. We believe that morality in the sense it has had up to now (the morality of intentions) was a prejudice, a precipitousness, perhaps a preliminary, a thing on about the same level as astrology and alchemy, but in any case something that must be overcome. The overcoming of morality – even the self-overcoming of morality, in a certain sense: let this be the name for that long and secret labor which is reserved for the most subtle, genuinely honest, and also the most malicious consciences of the day, who are living touchstones of the soul.”(BGE)

I am asking the question of what it means to find the "true" self. It is a fairly complex question because it involves the social and existential sense of selfhood? How important is the idea of a 'true' self? To what extent is the self bound up with relationships with others, or as being, alone, in relation to the wider cosmos, and making sense of this? — Jack Cummins

The self IS its relationships. The concept only makes sense as a comparison that simultaneously defines the ‘I’ and the not-I. I dont think the masks we wear and the roles we play are necessarily an impediment to a true self. On the contrary , the self is nothing but its
creative possibilities. The more audaciously and aggressively we try on new masks the closer we get to our ‘true’ self. The only sorts of masks that hinder the development of self are those that we adopt mechanically and superficially. An inauthentic self is a fragmented self , one that reacts rather understands, that copies without embracing. The self isnt any particular content or identity. It is a way of moving forward that is integrated.

I think my neighbors were simply driven by something like the will to power: a blind will live. In the same way a tree turns dirt and water into wood, we spray chemicals to eliminate annoying bugs: to transform the environment unto our own needs.

Is this not correctly called the will to power? — Tate

I think this is one aspect of the will to power, the drive to assimilate , dominate and achieve mastery over oneself and one’s surroundings. But will to power also implies a constant re-directing of the drive to dominate.

Nietzsche says the essence of life , as will to power , is its “spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, re-interpreting, re-directing and formative forces”.


What does he mean by re-interpeting and re-directing?
“That overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former ‘meaning' [Sinn] and ‘purpose' must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated.”

“No matter how perfectly you have understood the usefulness of any physiological organ (or legal institution, social custom, political usage, art form or religious rite), you have not yet thereby grasped how it emerged…the whole history of a ‘thing', an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the causes of which need not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes just follow and replace one another at random.

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, added to this the resistances encountered every time, the attempted transformations for the purpose of defence and reaction, and the results, too, of successful countermeasures. The form is fluid, the ‘meaning' [Sinn] even more so . . . It is no different inside any individual organism: every time the whole grows appreciably, the ‘meaning' [Sinn] of the individual organs shifts…”

So will to power is a dominating impetus that exhausts itself in assimilating the world to a valuative meaning, thus jumping from one meaning to another without there being a logical connection between the two. It is not about mere preservation or survival but expansion. And the dominant valuative interpretation will to power imposes becomes obscured or obliterated as it expands its dominance.

So if will to power is transforming the world in accord with our needs , it is at the same time having the valuative basis of our needs constantly be obliterated , re-directed, and redefined in ways that don’t allow us to claim some sort of thematic continuity in what we want. This is self-actualization as continual self-obliteration and re-invention.

We might perceive it as instinct to survive and thrive.
Does this accord with postmodern interpretations? — Tate

It’s more like a tension or difference between drives than any single drive. Not what puts us on a specific trajectory but an impetus which alway derails and resituates
our direction. Drives aim to exhaust themselves. “Physiologists should think twice before positioning the drive for self preservation as the cardinal drive of an organic being. Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength – life itself is will to power.”(BGE)

The way you’re putting it turns it into a form of self-consistency or self-continuity. For Nietzsche it is about self-transformation , not survival. If it is a thriving , it is not cumulative addition to a valuative theme, but a continual change of direction of value and meaning.

Oh god, Deleuze. That idiot.:razz: — Tate

It’s not just Deleuze who reads will to power this way. Most postmodern interpretations of it emphasize that power is not under the control of the will , because the will does not have any control over itself. It is splintered into competing drives.
The self-actualization of the will , which is tied to Hegelian dialectics, is a form of moralism that Nietzsche critiques.Creativity for Nietzsche is more about celebrating what thwarts our will than about willing what we want.

Is morality opposed to self actualization? Or does it temper the will to power, which I interpret as the will to dominate one's environment? — Tate

If you’re referring to Nietzsche’s notion of Will to Power, it is not a will to dominate one’s environment.

Will to power is the self-differentiating creative impetus of willing. Deleuze says:

Will to power does not mean that the will wants power. Will to power must be interpreted in a completely different way: power is the one that wills in the will. Power is the genetic and differential element in the will; it does not aspire, it does not seek, it does not desire, above all it does not desire power.”

I don’t think this clarification detracts from the distinction the OP is making between morality and Will to Power, except that for Nietzsche morality is itself a debauched form of will to power.

What I find odd here is the suggestion that relationships ought to be mediated by, in essence, science.

You count anything not theorized as "arbitrary" but is that more than a nasty way to say "individual" ? — Srap Tasmaner

It’s not science I’m arguing for , but the integrated, patterned basis of frame of reference. This is true not only when it comes to gender but all other aspects of our individual comportment toward the world. What I am labeling as arbitrary is the attempt to understand behavior as divorced from larger, internally integrated schemes of perception, affect and motivation that make human intentional acts of all kinds possible. Gender is just a very broad subcategory within this larger system of sense-making. It doesn’t really matter whether we assume gender is a specific genetically or hormonally determined disposition , or instead a more general personality disposition. The point is that we come into life with already formed schematic dispositions(m (perceptual styles), the broadest of which are very robust and consistent over the course of our lives, and his is how gender should be conceived.

If through interaction with a person one recognizes patterns, I don't see what that has to do with identity labels and generalizations. Surely it wouldn't be right to assume those patterns exist before one has met the person? Again, it seems to me the true nature of someone can only be explored through real interaction, and not through the generalized images which make up identities. — Tzeentch

I’m not sure what you have in mind when you speak of recognizing patterns in someone. What I have in mind is something like Chomsky’s transformational grammar, in this case an inborn ‘logic’ of gender instead of language . Also, unlike Chomsky’s patterns, gender would not be a single universal grammar but a spectrum or family of grammars along an axis of masculinity-femininity. No two individuals occupy the same point on the spectrum. To complicate things further, the masculine-feminine gender spectrum interacts with culture such that no set list of definitions can lock in for all time what masculinity vs femininity ( aggressiveness vs passivity, etc) entails. What gender means will vary from culture to culture and from historical era to historical era. Given this vast variability, it might seem that gender is not a very useful concept.

But I think it can be quite useful. First of all, within any particular era and region of culture, the masculine-feminine binary can be consistently recognized. In general, girlsnand boys will continue to have relatively consistent and predictable differences in preference for many activities and interests.

I agree that exactly how inborn gender patterns manifest themselves in particular individuals can only be determined by getting to know that individual, but it isnt a question of finding out WHETHER such a ‘grammar’ exists as part of a person’s behavior, but HOWit expresses itself.

You wrote:
“Surely it wouldn't be right to assume those patterns exist before one has met the person” , but to me that’s like saying that it wouldnt be right to assume a universal linguistic grammar exists in a person before one has met them.
If gender patterning is not a given for everyone what kind of pattern would it be that only exists in some
people but not others? What exactly would hold a set of behaviors together as a gender ‘pattern’? It sounds to me like what you have in mind is more like a disconnected set of behaviors than an internally coherent pattern.

Even though we can’t determine how exactly gender operates in individuals without getting to know them , if we don’t at least treat inborn gender pattering as a given, we are not likely to recognize it when we see it.

This is certainly the case with many conservatives for whom the very concept of an inborn gender other than heterosexual male or female is incomprehensible. Trying to treat everyone as unique individuals isnt enough to understand how gender helps to organize our experience of the world. The conservative doesn’t know to look for gender patterns in themselves or others and so doesnt find them, only anatomical sexual structures, sexual preferences, and a seemingly random list of other preferences regarding fashion ,etc.

This can be a non-issue when gender differences are very slight, but a disaster when more extreme departures from the norm are encountered. The high suicide rate within the lgbt community is the result of a failure on the part of the dominant culture to recognize that there is such a thing as an inborn gender pattern that pertains to all
of us. What about you? Aren’t you made aware of this pattern in yourself at certain times. Not likely when you are with others of a similar gender. But , assuming you identify as male , what about when you find yourself with your wife, girlfriend or a group of women who characterize something you do or say as being a typical ‘guy’ thing? Doesn’t that bring to the fore gender dispositions that you otherwise would. not notice in yourself?

Suppose for example that I am going to meet a man, and all I know about them is that they are gay.

What good would it do to assume they have a particular sort of style, as you say, without ever having met the person? — Tzeentch

What good would it do you know that someone is on the Asperger’s spectrum? It depends on how you want to interact with them
If you are a woman or man married for years to someone on the spectrum , and have become increasingly confused , angry and frustrated dealing with their inexplicable social shortcomings , it can be a blessing to have a way to put the pieces together. , to learn how the Asperger’s interacts with their personality , how they ‘own’ the Asperger’s. The person on the spectrum can have the same feeling of liberation when they learn for the first time why they are different from many around them.

Gay men and women, myself included , can profoundly benefit from learning that certain ways of acting that alienated us from heterosexual peers when we were growing up , that made us feel different and freakish, were not unique to us, and that there was a community where we could feel normal.


Just knowing that the person you are about to meet is gay may not make any difference to you in getting to know them, but what if you have had encounters with men who acted in ways that were extremely flamboyant and effeminate? And let’s say that this made you angry and disgusted , because you assumed that they were putting on a deliberate act that was childish or silly? I know a number of people like this.

Of course, not all flamboyantly acting men identify as gay or gender-nonconforming, but I’ve known many gay men like this , who were likely that way from birth and didn’t choose in any way to be that way , who would have given anything to be ‘normal’ growing up.

To understand that there is an inborn perceptual-affective style that can account for hyper-femininity in men can make a huge difference in one’s attitude toward someone who one assumes is ‘putting on an act’. It also makes one really that pen’s own personality involves it’s own gender style. that pervades every aspect of one’s social dealings. Knowing this about oneself can allow one to build a bridge between one’s
own style and that of someone with a very different inborn gender. But denying that there is such a thing as inborn perceptual-affective gender style , or insisting that all forms of gender behavior are socially constructed as some do, makes it impossible for one to build that bridge. One misses the overarching pattern organizing the particulars of inborn gender behavior and treats every action as arbitrary and conditioned by peers

What can we really say we now know about this person in regards of who they are as a person?

Nothing! — Tzeentch

We know valuable aspects of their style of approaching the world that allow us to engage with them in more intimate ways than we could have otherwise. This is precisely why, as a gay man , I have always found myself gravitating to other gay men , not because of sexual attraction, but because of a common affective-perceptual ‘style’. This doesn’t deprive me of my ability to to relate to many other kinds of groups, and it is not a narrow pigeonholing of people. Rather, it makes use of faculties we put to use all the time in relating to different sorts of people. Adults relate differently to children than to others adults. This isn’t stereotyping , it is a relational dance that maximizes connection between people.

Do you have a pet? Male and female dogs exhibit recognizable gender-related behaviors. Do you treat your male dog slightly differently than your female dog, independent of other personality features unique to each animal?

What are the major arguments for and against the idea of a simulation? — Benj96

If we carefully thought through what we mean by simulation, I think we would conclude it wasn’t such a remarkable situation. We have to start by considering all the ways we are exposed to the cultural, artistic and technological creations of others. Sitting in a movie theater or participating in an immersive video game , we are exposed to forms of simulation. But what we are being exposed to isnt simply the ‘furniture of the world’, visual , auditory and tactile things that follow rote laws, but events that we actively participate in and influence. The most meaningful aspects of our word are the way we responsively change and are changed by communicating with other people. A simulation running canned algorithms would soon become irrelevant to us.

↪Hanover The crudest way of putting it, is that identity is one of the many masks of the ego, and illusory. Gender is just one of the many attributes we use to dress up this image of ourselves in our mind. Nationality, gender, ethnicity, religion, favorite football team, etc. All essentially made up, except for perhaps minor biological factors which are generally meaningless. — Tzeentch

Are there no robust , relatively stable and consistent. aspects of personality style that we carry with us our whole lives? Could we say that Asperger’s is a kind of personality style( as opposed to a disorder or pathology , a characterization many strongly oppose). Or Wilson’s syndrome, which has a cluster of personality traits associated with it, such as extroversion and musicality?

So why not look at gender , or at least the inborn brain-wired aspects of gender, as robust personality features that interact with culture in complex ways?

In short, that computers have an IQ comparable to a bumble bee says more about us than computers themselves. — Agent Smith

If only. I wouldnt even compare computer intelligence favorably to a virus.

I think the experts in the field can be trusted that they haven't achieved the dream — Pie

What exactly does this dream consist in? I would
think those most likely to break through to new dimensions of thinking concerning what machines can do would not be experts within the field as it currently defines itself, but instead be located OUTSIDE the field.

Perhaps our own species will in the future. — Pie

Why ‘perhaps’? What sort of mysterious barrier are you erecting in your imagination to technological innovation in this area? Maybe the dream is caught up within its own algorithmic prison . Rorty once described progress in thinking as more a matter of changing the subject than of elaborations of a theme, more a matter of dissolving problems rather than solving them, making the old ways ‘not even wrong’. The problem with both realism and its counterpart, anti-realism, is it believes ‘the way things really are’ is a metaphysical rather than a contingently , historically relative constraint. This is true of Popperian falsificationism , and even Hegel’s relativism was trapped within an algorithmic dialectical cage.

The problem is that we are smarter than are machines still. They can crush us at narrowly specified tasks, yes, but we haven't been able to breath life into them. One might naturally ask how life (our general intelligence) was breathed into us. Evolution (which some describe as an algorithm) created us from something simpler, step by painful step by step — Pie

How do we know that we’re smarter than machines? Machines are texts translated into material processes. If we are smarter than machines than we are smarter than the texts we create. But wait a minute. Who is this ‘we’ that I am referring to? We only know about this ‘we’ who is smarter than the text describing our machines by virtue of another text that represents our understanding of what ‘we’ can do that machines can’t.

So it looks like a competition between two kinds of texts, one of which uses a symbolic computational language and the other a language we haven’t clearly articulated yet. That is to say, this second text hasnt been clearly enough articulated in order to render it as a new kind of machine text that functions comparably to the ‘we’ text.

The problem with generating a satisfying new machine text (and material machine) isn’t due to our current machine models not being ‘alive’. They are very much alive in the sense that they express an objectively causal metaphysics that we have traditionally relied upon to articulate both our understanding of the living and the non-living.
The problem lies in our dualistic causal model of the living that makes it necessary to split it off from the non-living via some kind of gap or gulf, the ‘breath’ or spirit of life, and encourages us to talk of natural history in terms of algorithmic processes. An algorithmically generated history is not a genuine history , it is what post-structuralists call a ‘historicism’ , which is no history at all , and no temporalization at all. It is the attempt to arrest time and change by enclosing it within a scheme.

The problem is not that we don’t know how to create life out of the inanimate , our machine texts are already animate in that they are interactive texts. The problem is that we don’t have an adequate enough understanding of what it means to be animate. Our machines will ‘come to life’ as we continue to progress in our understanding of the life we and our machine appendages already are. Our technological advances will provide this insight by transforming our living engagements with our machines, not by recapitulating earlier steps in our own evolution, but by inventing new steps. That is precisely what our machines are and do. They contribute to the creation of new steps in natural evolution, just as birds nests, rabbit holes , spiders webs and other niche innovations do. Saying our machine are smarter or dumber than us is like saying the spider web or birds nest is smarter or dumber than the spider or bird. Should not these extensions of the animal be considered a part of the living system? When an animal constructs a niche it isnt inventing a life-form, it is enacting and articulating its own life form. Machines, as parts of niches , belong intimately and inextricably to the living self-organizing systems that ‘we’ are.

The book I mentioned shows an awareness of the problem, but this does not mean we will soon have the solution. Can we circumvent or simulate millions of years of evolution? — Pie

This sounds like an example of treating history ( in this case natural history) as the ‘weight’ of the past. Technology , as human cultural evolution in general, was never about simulating a past, but rather constructing a future that moves further and further away from its past. The evolution of our thinking machines doesnt simulate a past natural evolutionary process.

Our self-knowledge seems more 'semantic' or linguistic that algorithmic and mathematical, even if we can of course model ourselves that way too. — Pie

Our machines dont have to be algorithmic and mathematical. They are that way because we used to assume human cognition was that way.

I don't see why the past wouldn't still be constraining. Indeed, I see both thinkers as acutely aware of such constraints. — Pie

The past is only constraining to the extent that new experience is always already familiar, recognizable, intelligible to us at some level. Pure novelty is non-existence But it is familiar not because a piece of the past has simply been carried over as a sedimented , recycled bit, glomming itself onto new events. There can be no pure duplication or repetition of a past as identical to itself.

I agree that something like a finishing touch or final spin is added at each moment, but it strikes me as unrealistic to ignore the weight of the past here. To have skill at speaking even basic English is the work of many days. — Pie

Like Heidegger, Derrida , Merleau-Ponty , Wittgenstein and others, I am a holist when it comes to how new context changes the past. Everything one has ever experienced , learned and committed to memory interacts with every other bit of one’s past, and the totality of one’s past is changed in drawing on any aspect of it. This change is extremely subtle so we ignore it and talk instead about the weight of the past, as if past were a present thing that holds us down. For Heidegger and Derrida , the past can’t hold us down if the past only ever exists as already affected by the present that it crosses with. When we say someone is stuck in the past they are not literally frozen in an archive, they are continuing to move forward every moment into fresh experience, but so ploddingly that it appears they are only regurgitating a ‘what was’.

Our gift is not crunching through possibilities. Our gift is the initial abductive leap. We are also radically enworldled. It's very hard to give computers the near infinite background knowledge required for disambigulation. For instance, computers have struggled with 'the box is in the pen.' We humans can guess that 'pen' must refer to something one might keep pigs in rather than a writing utensil. — Pie

It makes sense that a machine we call a ‘computer’ will be expected to interact with us via symbolic computation. As long as a representational, symbolic calculative model continues to ground our understanding of our thinking machines, we have no reason to expect that faster speed and greater memory capacity will achieve embodiment and adductive leaps.

The fact that we now see our own cognitive functioning differently than we did when we relied on computational metaphors to explain human mentation means we that we ready to move beyond the era of computing machines. Our machines will always be able to approximate what we do , since they are but practical models influenced by our best explanations of how we think. As such they are our appendages , and what they can do , and how they do it , evolves along with our understanding of what we do and how we do it.

If we now believe we are embodied, situated sense-makers, you can be sure we will soon produce machines that echo this. They may be wetware rather than silicon, closer to living things than to inanimate parts.

I guess I side with Heidegger against Husserl here. The 'one' has priority. — Pie

What do you make of the critique leveled against Heidegger that Dasein’s own pragmatic concerns have priority over a robust intersubjectivity?

Critics get that impression based on quotes like these in which Heidegger denigrates the ‘one’ for being an ungenuine, obscuring, closed off mode of discourse.

“Publicness ” does not get to "the heart of the matter," because it is insensitive to every difference of level and genuineness.”

“Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without any previous appropriation of the matter. Idle talk, which everyone can snatch up, not only divests us of the task of genuine understanding, but develops an indifferent intelligibility for which nothing is closed off any longer. Discourse, which belongs to the essential constitution of being of Dasein, and also constitutes its disclosedness, has the possibility of becoming idle talk, and as such of not really keeping being-in-the-world open in an articulated understanding, but of closing it off and covering over inner worldly beings. “ “ Ontologically, this means that when Da-sein maintains itself in idle talk, it is-as being-in-the-world-cut off from the primary and primordially genuine relations of being toward the world, toward Mitda-sein, toward being-in itself.”

“Idle talk conceals simply because of its characteristic failure to address things in an originary way [urspriinglichen Ansprechens]. It obscures the true appearance of the world and the events in it by instituting a dominant view [herrschende Ansicht].”“Usually and for the most part the ontic mode of being-in (discoverture) is concealment [Verdeckung]. Interpretedness, which is speech encrusted by idle talk, draws any given Dasein into 'one's' way of being. But existence in the 'one' now entails the concealment and marginalization of the genuine self [eigentlichen Selbst]. Not only has each particular given itself over to 'one', 'one' blocks Dasein's access to the state it finds itself in [Befindlichkeit].”(Heidegger 2011)

Husserl seems to be gesturing at the same 'pregiven' shared situation or primordial we-world that I'm calling the minimally specified world. — Pie

The relation between subjectivity and intersubjectivity gets complicated for Husserl. He never seems to give up the insistence on the primacy for me of my subjective vantage on the intersubjective world The world for all of us is a world constituted through my own subjectivity, which cannot be bypassed. This ‘world for us', from one to the other to the other, is constituted within MY(the primal me) subjective process as MY privileged apperception of ‘from one to the other to the other'.

“...one of the main tasks of pure intentional psychology is to make understandable, by way of the progressive reduction of world-validity, the subjective and pure function through which the world as the "world for us all" is a world for all from my—the ego's—vantage point, with whatever particular content it may have. ...”(Crisis, p.256)

“ The epoche creates a unique sort of philosophical solitude which is the fundamental methodical requirement for a truly radical philosophy. In this solitude I am not a single individual who has somehow willfully cut himself off from the society of mankind, perhaps even for theoretical reasons, or who is cut off by accident, as in a shipwreck, but who nevertheless knows that he still belongs to that society. I am not an ego, who still has his you, his we, his total community of co-subjects in natural validity. All of mankind, and the whole distinction and ordering of the personal pronouns, has become a phenomenon within my epoche; and so has the privilege of I-the- man among other men. “(Crisis, p.184)

“...it was wrong, methodically, to jump immediately into transcendental inter-subjectivity and to leap over the primal "I,"the ego of my epoche, which can never lose its uniqueness and personal indeclinability. It is only an apparent contradiction to this that the ego—through a particular constitutive accomplishment of its own—makes itself declinable, for itself, transcendentally; that, starting from itself and in itself, it constitutes transcendental intersubjectivity, to which it then adds itself as a merely privileged member, namely, as "I" among the transcendental others. This is what philosophical self-exposition in the epoche actually teaches us. It can show how the always singular I, in the original constituting life proceeding within it, constitutes a first sphere of objects, the "primordial" sphere; how it then, starting from this, in a motivated fashion, performs a constitutive accomplishment through which an intentional modification of itself and its primordiality achieves ontic validity under the title of "alien-perception," perception of others, of another "I" who is for himself an I as I am. ”(Crisis, p.185)

So do you believe in a thing-in-itself (atoms and void) or just a relatively 'material' side of a continuum ? — Pie

I am attracted to naturalistic models that don’t cut corners , either by reifying materiality through reductive physicalism , or by making the manifest image of conceptualization unaccountable to the empirical world.
This is a naturalism in which normativity plays an essential role even outside of its connection to a human subject.

Husserl has its virtues, but my non-Husserl-expert impression is that he's too Cartesian.

--God is real. He talked to me last night.
--No, he didn't. Take these pills, sir. — Pie

Is Heidegger also too Cartesian? He rejected truth as correctness in favor of truth as whatever discloses itself to Dasein.

Is it not safely taken for granted that individual humans have incompatible beliefs? So that not all of them can be right ? — Pie

Why do beliefs have to be right or wrong? Why can’t different ways of making sense of one’s world be valid and useful in different ways, as different sorts of niches?
Much of the progress of science consists not in correcting ‘wrong’ theories from the past , but in producing concepts in areas where they were no concept
at all . Perhaps one can find ones way through supposedly incompatible beliefs by further articulating one’s own approach such that it is capable of subsuming alternative beliefs?

It's all 'just' speech acts, suggestions, co-creation rather than co-discovery. The only deep problem with this that I can make out is its utter lack of authority. As soon as one wants to bind others in terms of what they ought to believe, one is in a normative space. From a structuralist perspective, something is going to play the role of [what's-better-to-believe] and something else is going to name [the-reason-why-it's-better.] — Pie

What one creates or co-creates in language implicates and is reciprocally dependent on material changes in one’s world. The feedback from those material
changes produces new discovery in language. Invention and discovery are two sides of the same coin, since we construct the world that talks back to us , and offers constrains and affordances in accord with how we construct it. We co-inhabit the partially shared construction we call a space of reasons, within which we invent, discover, agree and disagree.

Does it make sense to take as a fact that there are no independent facts of the world to fix our concepts to ? Seemingly not, right ? And this approach itself would have to be established and defended in terms of the very pragmatic relevance it would institute as a replacement for truth. — Pie

If we took such a thought as a fact , that is , as an identically reproducible idea, then it would merely be a shift from the realist to the idealist side of a metaphysical trope. If instead of a formal fact , we were to take ‘no independent facts of the world’ as a performative act arising from within the midst of contextual sense-making, obliged to re-validate itself the same differently in each new contextual instantiation of its use, then we would have a way of thinking and talking about what happens to notions like truth and belief when they are examined from a radically contextual vantage.

I doubt humans will stop needing 'seems', 'believe', 'supposed', and synonyms to make sense of one another. — Pie

Husserl argued that there is no veil between subject and world. What appears to us, in the mode that it appears to us, is not a proxy or representation of something independent of what directly appears, but is the thing in itself ( whether imagined, perceived, remembered). From this vantage, what ‘seems’ to be, what we ‘believe’ or ‘suppose’ , is just one way of talking about different sorts of direct experiences.

If we abandoned the assumptions of correspondence or coherence with a real outside in favor of notions of enaction and construction of a world , would we change our vocabulary? I think so. It is already happening in certain quarters of philosophy , where truth and belief are no longer considered particularly interesting or significant aspects of how humans interact.

For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case.

The facts in logical space are the world.


Beliefs articulate the world's possibilities.

True beliefs are the world's actuality.

Much of our language has developed so that we can talk about things like beliefs and logic and truth — Pie

What do you surmise the Wittgenstein of PI was trying to get away from with regard to concepts like belief, truth and logic as he is using them in the Tractatus? I suggest he was not merely showing how instances of the use of these concepts reveal unique senses of meaning within the categories of truth and belief. Rather, he was trying to get us to see that the general categories that would be called ‘truth’ and ‘belief’ are not themselves stably fixed by their relation to the facts of an empirical world. If there are no independent facts of the world to fix our concepts to, them concepts liken pragmatic relevance, consistency, anticipatory compatibility and coherence replace true and false belief as expressions of how we cope with our world. This is self-creation rather than a fitting of language with fact.

↪Joshs Animals don't have genders, just biological sexes. — Michael

A psychological gender is a set of behavioral dispositions that are linked together to form a recognizable style. Female dogs are, among other things, shyer and less aggressive than male dogs. This is gender.

I don’t know what any such characteristics would be. I can imagine waking up in a woman’s body, whether by magic or a brain transplant, and yet I’d continue to identify as a man, so it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with my body. And I can’t think of what psychological traits I have, except the obvious of identifying as a man, that would count as being such characteristics. — Michael

If you were a gay male , you may have experienced the following from childhood, as I did:

I had no reason not to label myself as a male , based on anatomy and how I was being classified by my culture. But ( and this is a gigantic but), I always felt different from most of my male peers, on the basis of a whole constellation of behavioral dispositions linked to gender. Among the least important of these was who I was sexually attracted to. I call these dispositions ‘perceptual-affective style’ because they are functionally integrated as a whole. We all have it from birth. It’s like a stable , life-long personality trait. It’s what allows us to distinguish masculine from feminine behaviors in other animals, but we deny it in ourselves , claiming that masculine and feminine behavior is purely a matter of social conditioning.