"Being in itself" is the philosopher's "little man who wasn't there". — Banno

Could you give me an example of ‘being in itself’ for Heidegger or Husserl? What do you suppose they had in
in mind?

I guess I'm considering a view of idealism and realism at the same time. For example, I say that physical nature exists independantly of human cognition, which is a realist statement, but then I realise that such a statement, that nature exists independantly of human cognition, is borne of human cognition, and wouldn't be possible without it. Then I get stuck in a double bind. — Aidan buk

Welcome to phenomenology.

Husserl writes:

“Certainly the world that is in being for me, the world about which I have always had ideas and spoken about meaningfully, has meaning and is accepted as valid by me because of my own apperceptive performances because of these experiences that run their course and are combined precisely in those performances—as well as other functions of consciousness, such as thinking.
But is it not a piece of foolishness to suppose that world has being because of some performance of mine? Clearly, I must make my formulation more precise. In my Ego there is formed, from out of the proper sources of transcendental passivity and activity, my “representation of the world, ” my “picture of the world, ” whereas outside of me, naturally enough, there is the world itself. But is this really a good way of putting it? Does this talk about outer and inner, if it makes any sense at all, receive its meaning from anywhere else than from my formation and my preservation of meaning? Should I forget that the totality of everything that I can ever think of as in being resides within what is for me real or possible.”?

Dan Zahavi:

“ For Husserl, physical nature makes itself known in what appears perceptually. The very idea of defining the really real reality as the unknown cause of our experience, and to suggest that the investigated object is a mere sign of a distinct hidden object whose real nature must remain unknown and which can never be apprehended according to its own determinations, is for Husserl nothing but a piece of mythologizing (Husserl 1982: 122). Rather than defining objective reality as what is there in itself, rather than distinguishing how things are for us from how they are simpliciter in order then to insist that the investigation of the latter is the truly important one, Husserl urges us to face up to the fact that our access to as well as the very nature of objectivity necessarily involves both subjectivity and
intersubjectivity.”

Living in the moment, as I understand it, means not dwelling on the past or being preoccupied about what's next and/or what might happen and it is all about appreciating 'now' and being able to experience or enjoy what's happening as it's happening. It isn't literally trying to do the impossible with time. — Tom Storm

Notice that when you talk about experiencing the past or the future , you emphasize a certain style of approach , a certain mood or attitude. I am ‘pre-occupied’ rather than just being occupied with my future. I am ‘dwelling on’ rather than flowing though the past. I suggest what characterizes these experiences as negative dwelling on and pre-occupation isn’t their temporal position as past or future but the way we move through recollection or anticipation. Since I hold to the view that recollection is a constructive activity, I don’t give it lesser status in relation to the supposed freshness of the now. Recollection is essential to imagination and thus creative thought. As far as anticipating into the future , this also depends in part both on recollection and experience of the present. If we stare into a night sky and let our mind drift off into vast futures , it can give us a sense of profundity peace view of breadth of perspective. It can make the problems of the now fade into insignificance.
How can it do this if it is not keeping us within the now?

Because the ‘now’ is the flow of nows, and this flow is always characterized by a style, an attitude, a mood. It doesn’t matter whether this mood is generated from a reflection on a long ago event , an event far off in the future or one occurring right this moment. What matters is how we are understanding the flow of events to unfold one out of the previous. Are they harmoniously intercorrelated one with the next so as to make some kind of referential sense to us, or are they a puzzle to us , a chaos of unpredictability and alienation? This is what determines ether our experience of the ‘now’ is enjoyable or miserable and isolating.

There are times when we feel stuck in our thinking and our feeling, for instance when we are depressed, and typically this stuckneas is inescapable regardless of whether we dwell in memories , focus on the present or imagine into the future. What is often needed to snap us out of this depression is to create a fresh meaningful way forward. Being in the moment isn’t enough. It’s HOW we are being in the moment. This can be accomplished from out of any of the three temporal modes , but will ultimately involve all three. I rethink my past in relation to a changed present(sometimes just rethinking the past will
change one’s present) , which anticipates freshly into the future.

Or one could say keeping one’s present from becoming a stale, stuck recycling of habits of thought involves dipping into the future in order to reinvent one’s past.

That sounds like an attack on the secular Enlightenment and progressive philosophy which was trying to usher in a more Enlightened culture free from the Catholic misogynistic culture of the old older in Europe. — Ross Campbell

You’re confusing side issues with the main issue, which I see as the following: what are Nietzsche’s supporters claiming as his main thesis, and how is it original with respect to 19th (and much of 20th and 21at century) philosophy. If you decide that his central ideas are
not original and/or unproductive, then it will
appear to you that his comments on women are derivations of this unproductive philosophy. If however you embrace his ideas as ahead of their time and in some
ways still so , then you will be able to forgive his less than clear, quirky or irritating aspects , because we can dig up dirt on all great philosophers.
I think the focus here should be on those ideas that a consensus has developed around. These are concepts that one can find in the postmodern writings of French philosophers like Deleuze and Foucault , in social constructionism and even in phenomenology.
They deal with the relative bias of value systems, the shaping of individual views by participation in larger normative communities , and the impossibility of nailing down the meaning of goodness and badness outside of those normative communities.

If we remove Nietzsche from the discussion for a moment, what is your response to current day critiques of enlightenment liberalism and progressivism?
Everything you’ve written suggests strongly to me that you are wedded to enlightenment rationalism. If that’s the case, the. it’s not just Nietzsche that you likely object to but an entire era of of post-enlightenment thinking.
If you’re not a fan of current activism on campuses then you’re not going to be a fan of Nietzsche

The next line is “though frankly I would be the antipode of the Indian Buddha,” — praxis

That’s right, and much more like it.

“…anyone who has ever really looked with an Asiatic and supra-Asiatic eye into and down at the most world-negating of all possible ways of thinking – beyond good and evil, and no longer, like Schopenhauer and the Buddha, under the spell and delusion of morality –(Beyond Good and Evil)

“: think, too, of the whole metaphysics of the clergy, which is antagonistic towards the senses, making men lazy and refined, think, too, of their Fakir-like and
Brahmin-like self-hypnotizing – Brahminism as crystal ball and fixed idea – and the final, all-too-comprehensible general disenchantment with its radical cure, nothingness (or God: – the yearning for a union mystica with God is the Buddhist yearning for nothingness, Nirvâna – and no more…”

(Genealogy of Morality)

In Buddhism, one should not harm other sentient beings. ... Happily the peaceful live giving up victory and defeat." These elements are used to indicate Buddhism is PACIFISTIC. — Ross Campbell

This is insipid. Aside from physical harm ( tribal warfare, punishment killings) , there have been throughout the history of buddhist culture , myriad forms of oppression, prejudice, caste stratification, forced ritual that arise from the need to live in this world until one’s soul is taken to Nirvana. In this world there needs to be a guide for making sense out of those who don’t share your ethnic background , language and religion, and buddhist teaching has done no better job of relativizing cultural differences in value systems than Christianity has.

I wonder will Nietszche stand the same test of time. I know he's admired by 10s of millions of people today as one of the most popular thinkers , but Freud and Marx in the early to mid 20th century were also lionized , but who have gone out of vogue today. l wonder how fashionable Nietszche will be in 50 years time. — Ross Campbell

The only way any philosophy stands the test of time is if it is constantly transformed and reinterpreted anew in each era, which is what we see with everyone from Shakespeare to Aristotle and Plato. The Buddhism that has been embraced by Westeners over the past century has more to do with our own Western philosophical heritage than it does with Eastern thought of two thousand years ago. Freud and Marx have ‘gone out of vogue’ not in the sense that their ideas have simply been rejected , but in the sense that their thinking has been a absorbed into and transformed by current neo and post-Marxist and neo and post-Freudian models.

The wokism trends sweeping universities around the world would be impossible without the influence of Freud and Marx.

If we truly lives in the moment, we would experience absolutely nothing. A single experienced moment of time has three parts. It consists of the immediate past that forms a piece of the now, and the present event which occurs into that just past. A single ‘now’ also includes an anticipation into the next moment. If the immediate past were not a part of the now we wouldn’t be able to enjoy something like music, because the current note would have nothing to connect it to the just past note. We could t perceive anything in our world because most of what we see, hear, touch and smell in an instant comes from memory. We would have joys and hopes and pleasure because these are about how the present fulfills the past and points desiringly to the next present. I’m the story about the tiger and the area wberry we are supposed to learn a lesson that we will recall when we find ourselves in a similar situation.

Most people when hearing the story live in the future, they see one of two possible future outcomes, either the man falls or the tiger gets him. But the fact of the matter is, you don't know that. The mice could stop gnawing, the tiger could go away, so you don't know what will happen. — HardWorker

The person following the lesson of the story is also living in the future. He is anticipating that any outcome is possible. He is also making use of the past by recalling the lesson in the situation.

I don’t think inner peace is a matter of living in the moment , since th very idea of the moment is incoherent without its being part of a triadic structure of past-present-future which all occur simultaneously in what we call an instant of time. I think the key to satisfaction is in how harmoniously we anticipate beyond the moment.

The psychologist George Kelly made anticipation the very cornerstone of his psychology. In the following passage , he answers to the claim that the goal should be to live in the moment.

“For example, what about those rare and delectable hours when we can lie in the grass and look up at the fleecy summer clouds? Do we not then take life, savoring each moment as it comes without rudely trying to outguess it? Does one not feel very much alive on such occasions? Certainly! But this, too, is an anticipatory posture. To be sure, it is not the frantic apprehension of popping little events. It is rather a composed anticipation of a slowly drifting universe of great and benign proportions.”

Notice that when many talk about being in the moment , they equate this with being in the ‘flow’, but a flow isn’t about isolated, disconnected moments, it’s about experiencing them as linked to each other in a smooth, harmonious , meaningful way.

I have seen far more elegant and powerful writing of his in other passages. — Ross Campbell

Before you judge its power and elegance , I’d be interested to see if you have the slightest idea of what he’s talking about here. Of course , my reading could be wrong , but I’d like to see if you can make sense of such a reading.

how does Nietzsche know what people thought like in prehistoric times — Ross Campbell

I think his anthropological accuracy is beside the point. I think he would be the first to tell you that he is not attempting an empirical description but rather constructing examples to illustrate a more universal grounding of the basis of moral thinking. By the way, we do know that many of the oldest civilizations we have records of did indeed determine moral guilt on the basis of the action rather than the intent. Whether the act was done on purpose or by accident was irrelevant to the punishment.
Nietzsche’s point about Buddhism is that it upholds what he calls the ascetic ideal in its elevation of a nirvana beyond desire. Nietzsche said that a desire for nothingness is still desire, and there is no way around or beyond will and desire.

I agree with you. I think it’s possible to keep Nietzsche’s central ideas without having to articulate the movement of history in terms of weaker and sicker vs stronger and healthier will to power.
Foucault has done just this, keeping Nietzsche’s genealogical analysis of history and his depiction of subjectivity as a differential play of forces, but avoiding creating the impression that any previous eras were pathological.

Ok Here's a Friedrich Nietzsche Quote:
“Is it not better to fall into the hands of a murderer, than into the dreams of a lustful woman?”

Now explain what kind of validity is in the above statement. It sounds like something you could hear from some street corner guru. — Ross Campbell

I’d rather explain the validity in the statement below, which I, along with many philosophers, find to be brilliant.

“During the longest epoch of human history (which is called the prehistoric age) an action's value or lack of value was derived from its consequences; the action itself was taken as little into account as its origin. Instead, the situation was something like that of present-day China, where the honor or dishonor of a child reflects back on the parents. In the same way, it was the retroactive force of success or failure that showed people whether to think of an action as good or bad. We can call this period the pre-moral period of humanity. At that point, the imperative “know thyself !” was still unknown. By contrast, over the course of the last ten millennia, people across a large part of the earth have gradually come far enough to see the origin, not the consequence, as decisive for the value of an action. By and large, this was a great event, a considerable refinement of outlook and criterion, an unconscious after-effect of the dominance of aristocratic values and the belief in “origin,” and the sign of a period that we can signify as moral in a narrow sense. This marks the first attempt at self-knowledge.

Origin rather than consequence: what a reversal of perspective! And, certainly, this reversal was only accomplished after long struggles and fluctuations! Granted: this meant that a disastrous new superstition, a distinctive narrowness of interpretation gained dominance. The origin of the action was interpreted in the most determinate sense possible, as origin out of an intention. People were united in the belief that the value of an action was exhausted by the value of its intention. Intention as the entire origin and prehistory of an action: under this prejudice people have issued moral praise, censure, judgment, and philosophy almost to this day. – But today, thanks to a renewed self-contemplation and deepening of humanity, shouldn't we be facing a renewed necessity to effect a reversal and fundamental displacement of values? Shouldn't we be standing on the threshold of a period that would be designated, negatively at first, as extra-moral?

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.”

My point was that I think you would find their work interesting and I’m betting you would relate to it. They reject just about all of the traditional trappings of religion: the trinity, a personal God, ritual, etc.

I think that there might be some moral facts, and that maybe good can exist, but I have no faith in the matter. That would be the most important difference between my view and a theologian's. — ToothyMaw

What you just wrote is quite similar to the postmodern perspective of ‘religion after religion’ philosophers like John Caputo and Simon Critchley.

I know what you are getting at - if I associate evil with a particular set of beliefs then I must think that evil is mostly perpetrated as a function of beliefs, and not just evil people doing evil things. — ToothyMaw

No, I was focusing on your claim that there are just evil
people doing evil things. That is a quintessentially theological notion. Even if you don’t think of yourself believing in God, you clearly believe in Good( which is what defines as evil as what it is) , and for many theologians and philosophers this amounts to the same thing as God.

philosophy should be ONLY based on REAL LIFE EXPERIENCE and in line with NATURE — Ross Campbell

The ‘real’ doesn’t come and slap us on the face. It must be interpreted. There are thousands of ways of interpreting any event depending on our aims and purposes.

“… How about grasping the perfect incontrovertible truth, the frozen ultimate, the knowledge of the way things really really are; would not that end the confusion of having something happen unexectedly, end it once and for all? With such knowledge in our possession nothing could possibly occur unexpectedly and our lives would be lived out perfectly in peaceful contemplation of what was coming next.

This, it seems to me, is like a man teetering on what he thinks is the edge of the universe and daring anyone to push him off. He feels perfectly safe because he thinks he knows what is what and there is obviously no such thing as ever going beyond the limits of reality. Still, occasionally he makes a pretence of looking over the edge, just for laughs, and he says, ‘See, there really isn't anything there - just a lot of nonsense'. Then, out of the corner of his eye he does catch a glimpse of something moving out there in the nothing; at first, perhaps, no more than the shadows of his own imagination. All night long he wonders what is the perfect truth about them, how much further out their limits lie. So he secretly tests these shadows, tries to see if he can make them move. Soon he is working with his hands.

In time, there arise out there in the nowhere whole new cities, built outside the walls against which he once leaned so confidently. Now his world is different. Now his once ‘perfect' truths tell him what he can see is not so, and, faithful as he may try to be, he can offer no more than lip service to them. Now, each time he looks up from his work and peers beyond his latest achievement, he wonders who he is to have imagined such things, and what he is doing, and he shudders to think how much of his life was spent behind the city barriers, or what unseen walls may imprison him now. And then he wonders more; to what destinies has he been false - and why has the evening grown so late?

This tail-spin of thinking starts as all tail-spins do, from the stall that occurs when one tries to stand still in mid-flight. From the moment we assume that truth is a stationary achievement, rather than a stage in a lively quest, it is only a matter of time until things start spinning round and round. Truth is neither reality nor phantasy. It needs to be understood, instead, as a continually emerging relationship between reality and ingenuity, and thus never something that can be skewered by a phrase, a moment, or a place.”

George Kelly

Do you identity your notion of evil with any particular religious or spiritual faith?

The point is not that he was full of shit, the point is he thought he had a plan for improving the world and millions of people agreed with this plan. — Tom Storm

One might even venture a developmental model of a cultural history of morality. connecting empathy with a gradual evolution from one-dimensional foundationalism to increasingly multi-dimensional , differentiated social understanding. What we judge in hindsight as genocidal evil becomes a necessary phase in that development. (I’m trying not to sound too Hegelian, or modernist).

Do you really think people capable of genocide are worried about what's morally permissible? — Isaac

Not only are they worried about what’s morally permissible, their actions are bound by a strict moral justification. See Mein Kampf or the old and new testament But I get what you’re saying. In committing genocide they are rejecting one set of moral precepts
in favor of another.

Or at least that is the modern cultural version of the self we intend to construct via philosophical positions like phenomenology. — apokrisis

I think all of the critical observations you have made concerning the limitations of phenomenology are absolutely valid. That is, they are valid for what ever position you are taking to be what you are calling phenomenology. That is , your model is defined in opposition to ways of looking at the world which it represents an improvement over. If you
closely identify your thinking with Friston’s predictive processing, then we can note that his theory was created for a reason. It corrects for what it perceives to be lacking in previous models of cognition and affectivity, and by implication, in the underlying philosophical foundations. So what preceded predictive processing? Stimulus -response approaches dominated neuroscience for quite a while , and then first generation cognitive science came onto the scene. The main alternative to these empirical perspectives was psychoanalysis. It seems what you are calling phenomenology is entangled in the philosophical presuppositions grounding one or more of these earlier approaches in psychology.

But this leads me to some questions. First, are you are a thoroughgoing advocate of predictive processing models, and if so , which of the researchers contributing to it do you find most compatible with the outlook you have articulated to me? You already critiqued Friston’s embrace of Freud , which I find significant. Are you more or less fully supportive of Lisa Barrett’s work? My reading of her, Friston and even Clark shows them all to support variants of a computational, representational model of brain functioning , and yet you seem to be adamantly opposed to representationalism. Can you send me a link to a predictive processing writer who also rejects representationalism? The only psychologists I am aware of who reject computational representationalism embrace aspects of phenomenology. These include Shaun Gallagher , Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Anthony Chemero.

Here’s Chemero pitting his phenomenologicallly influenced enactivism against his reading of predictive processing:


“…any claim that the sensory-effector system is (must be) any organism's Markov boundary depends on having already defined the knowing self, or agent, as whatever is Markov-bounded by the sensory-effector system. This both makes the argument circular, and introduces a highly problematic notion of the knowing self. It is at least a step in the direction of supposing a homuncular self in the Cartesian theater (Dennett & Kinsbourne 1992), and is weirdly reductive insofar as it supposes the agent to have fewer parts than the organism.
Even so, it may be true that to know the state of a brain it is sufficient to know its initial state, internal dynamics, and the states of its sensory and motor systems (although we note that we are, scientifically, extremely far from this possibility, so assuming its truth is a very
generous stipulation). But assuming the brain to be the appropriate target worth knowing already places the enquiry within the traditional neo-Kantian cognitivist frame. In contrast, from the EEE perspective—at least one strain of which is influenced by the phenomenological critique of Kant (Kaufer & Chemero 2015)—it might be equally worth knowing about the state of one’s hand, the Markov boundary for which almost certainly includes items outside of the body. It also might be worth knowing the state of the tool one is wielding, which is physically external, but in at least some cases epistemically internal (i.e. phenomenally transparent) to the agent.

If one believes that it is the structure of the body and the readiness to deploy skills that condition the possibility of experience (perhaps along with or perhaps instead of mental structures like concepts and schema) then it is far from clear that the brain is the right focus for understanding cognition. And if this is true, the notion that perception is skull-bound and inferential, and knowledge stops at the sensory veil, can’t get any traction at all, even accepting the Markov-boundedness of all cognitively relevant elements.”

“We absolutely accept that Markov models and Bayesian inference are hugely important and successful tools in the study of mind, brain and behavior. But we find the philosophical inferences about the nature of the systems to which these models have been applied to be deeply problematic. Admittedly, it can be hard to resist mapping entities in one’s model of a system to elements in the system itself, but prudence dictates special care when doing so, and we believe that insufficient caution has been exercised by many proponents of predictive processing.
By way of closing, we also wish to urge something further on the field in general, and on Clark in particular. Hohwy (2017) wonders aloud if the EEE tactic to avoid skepticism may also cost us the very conceptions of belief, knowledge, and justification that lie at the center of a good deal of philosophy of mind. We hereby confess that it probably does. This is a development we embrace. For us, agency is about disposition and action, and not about belief.In this we follow the traditions of American Pragmatism and Continental Phenomenology in their critiques of a belief-oriented, representation-centric, model-building mind, in favor of an action-oriented, affordance-centric, world-navigating mind. The first step on this path is the recognition that organisms have access to ecological information. Take that step, and a whole world opens to you.”
(The world well gained: On the epistemic implications of ecological information ,Michael Anderson and Anthony Chemero)

You read Thompson’s enthusiastic embrace of Husserl. Given your critique of what you are understanding to be phenomenology, you must have a similar critic to level against Thomson’s and Chemero’s enactivism . Could you give me specific examples of how their models fall short of the predictive processing models you endorse?

Representationalism makes us passive observers of a world that …. we have internally constructed … for some weird reason no one can explain. — apokrisis

Representationalism starts with a dark screen and demands it be painted with some particular image. — apokrisis

Semiosis starts with the unbound possibility of Firstness and thus sets the opposite problem of how to be able to constrain that overwhelming variety - the blooming, buzzing, confusion - to some focused and rational plan of immediate action. — apokrisis

Let me give you what I think is an example of representationalism and you let me know if it is consistent with your understanding. Beck's cognitive therapy and Ellis' rational emotive therapy exemplify the oppositional relationship between a rationalist interpretive template and an assumed independently existing reality that commandeers that schematics. The image produced is one of the person standing back and placing interpretations on events in the world rather as they may sort objects, by mechanistically applying a pre-existing program.

This scheme is oppositional; the outside world is at a remove from the cognizing subject, whose internal representations are not in immediate and direct contact with that outside. When am internal representation is invalidated, it is by an ‘external’ reality that has nothing in it that is contributed or constrained by the subjective model.

Gene Gendlin critiques the representational
view of perception from a phenomenological vantage:

“ The currently underlying conceptual system leads us to assume that what exists is always something that can be presented before us. So there are always two, what exists and also us, the before whom. Contact with anything real is assumed to be by perception. Perception (or even more narrowly, sensation) is supposed to be the beginning. Perception involves a split between a here and a there. We sense here what is over there. Perception involves an inside and an outside; we sense in here in the body what is out there, outside, ‘external’ to us. I call this the ‘perceptual
split’. The here-there generates a gap, the space between the here and the there. This space is supposed to contain everything that exists. To ‘exist’ means to fill some part of that ‘external’ space. Only the ‘out there’ is supposed to exist. What exists is considered cut off from any other living process because perceiving is the basic starting process. But being perceived is not supposed to affect real things. They are conceptualized as inherently cut-off from living process. To be real
they need only to fill the perceptual gap space.”

In the phenomenological approaches that I endorse, there is not a subject that reproduces anything from an outside. There has not first been an original external ‘production’ from a real world and then an image or copy or model of it generated by a subject. There is in fact no subject to speak of except as a pole or a zero
point for actions. This zero point implies a functionally integral past history that implies into what occurs, and what occurs protends beyond itself. Am I talking about a representational scheme when I refer to this integral history? No. First of all , this history ( we could call it body memory if you like) has no existence apart from or outside of what is occurring into it. Secondly, this implicit intricacy is changed as whole in its function, sense and meaning by the occurring which it implies into. There is no static memory, no reified schemes. To occur is to change a set of remembered relationships that are themselves the manifestation of precious changes is relationships. The concept of a static , self-inhering ‘object’ is a very high order abstraction. It is nowhere to be found in the fundamental workings of experience. What is to prevent such a system from seeing the world as nothing but a chaotic blooming buzzing confusion? Because the organism is radically implicative, anticipative. It is wholly oriented toward anticipating the replicative aspects of events( not duplicative; experience never doubles back on itself). It isn’t set this way by some internal gyroscope or other rationalist grounding.

To talk of the quality of experience rather than the quantity of information (Friston’s free energy) that can be dissipated, is to show which paradigm still truly has you in its grip. — apokrisis

Talking of the quantity of anything is to start from an entity that is presumed to have a countable aspect to it.

What does it imply to make a measurement, to state that it takes certain amount of time for some process to unfold? A time calculation counts identical instances of a meaning whose sense is kept fixed during the counting.
Where does this idea that there is anything fixed to base a counting on originate? As I said before , it comes from our idealizing of experience from which we produce the abstraction of what you called ‘real’ time , which Heidegger calls the vulgar or everyday concept of time, the model of time as an infinite series of now points. Events occur IN time according to this thinking because time is considered as an empty form just as the objects ( or aspects of objects) that it counts are assumed as ideally self-identical.

The concept of quantity is a qualitative idealization, a covering over of the relevant pragmatic meaning and significance of an experience by restricting ourselves to staring at it as an inert self-identical pattern, scheme, entity, object , ‘firstness’ that is measurable and calculable.

Quality by itself has no place in phenomenology. It is differences in and relations between qualities that are key. In fact, the hallmark of this thinking is that qualitative content in itself is of little importance for the understanding of the nature of experiencing and its various levels of constitution. Affect isnt some intention-free surge or energy. It is none other than the moment to moment fluctuations in organizational integrity and coherence of the organism-environment system. Im fact , my favorite writers abandon the tripartite distinction between affect, cognition and action. By rethinking what would be modeled as qualitative inherence ( Pierce’s firstness, Friston’s physiological quantitatively measurable qualities) as intricately relational movement and transformation , phenomenology offers what is at the same time amore immediately mobile and transformative , and more ordered and intricately relational depiction of experience.
I ask you what sits there relatively immobile in your system and you mention automatic subpersonal processes, measurable quantities , fixed habits. You ask me what sits there relatively unchanged in my model and my answer is a absolutely nothing. And let me make clear what I mean by ‘change’. I don’t simply mean the rearrangement of subordinate elements within a superordinate scheme that does not itself change along with its elements. Put differently, in my approach every moment of experienced time , for every person ( and animal ) not only is utterly new in the world , but occurs into a past which , by being paired with what it occurs into , is an utterly new past.

The challenge of understanding the phenomenologies I endorse is seeing how such a radically change and difference oriented thinking allows us to experience stably anticipatable themes in the world , and to do so progressively more effectively.

You might fear that throwing about such terms as quality, affect, change and temporality leads us into the dead-end of the ineffable and subjective, that it opposes the key strength of science, its ability to carve out order and predictability from the apparently inaccessible and inner. But the aim of science and philosophy was never a choice between the qualitative and the quantitative, especially since the quantitative is itself a species of the qualitative. The challenge is to uncover ( or better yet, produce ) the intimacy and order within the process of time and qualitative affective change.

]

a concern with tychic affect as “other” to synecectic habit, or the temporality of located events vs spaciality of concrete structure, are cultural oppositions that derive from discovering that analysis always results in a dialectical choice. — apokrisis

I don’t see tychic affect and synecectic habit as ends of a dialectic choice but as both presupposed in each moment of experience , as inseparable aspects of the same event. If I understand it correct, Tychism as Peirce understands is rejected by phenomenology
since what occurs happens into to an implying , a projecting forward. Thus no experience can ever be a complete surprise , but is anticipated and recognized at some level.

We want to understand consciousness and selfhood in terms of a collection of well-adapted action habits. — apokrisis

Via what sort of causation is one part of this collection of habits related to other parts? Is a habit experienced as relavant and mattering to me or is it devoid of meaningful
sense?

I agree wholeheartedly with your take on postmodernism. I’d just like to add something to your comments on Derrida.

Derrida teaches his own kind of pluralism, not of epistemologies but of viewpoints, to systematically find every possible interpretation of a text without preferring one over another, and every possible authorial bias that hides and us hidden by those readings. — Kenosha Kid

What I would describe Derrida doing when he deconstructs text text is attempting to situate it in the richest and therefore most ‘precise’ context possible. Let’s say he is taking on Plato. First, he will choose a specific text of his rather than make general
comments about the arc of his philosophy. He does this because he recognizes that an author’s ideas change not only from period to the next in their lives, but even within a single work. Derrida typically goes to great lengths to justify a claim that he frequently makes that a certain consistent thematics unites the various periods of an authors writing. He then attempts to convey this thematics as faithfully as possible before he sets out to deconstruct it. One would think that Derrida would argue that it is impossible to convey any work ‘faithfully’, according to the author’s intent , since deconstruction. seems to reject the idea that one can ever locate this intent. But what Derrida means by interpreting the work faithfully is , to take into account that the reading is taking place from the vantage of a 20th or 21at century context , and the personal vantage of Derrida ( or whoever else is attempting the deconstruction) , and what ever other contexts belong to the interpreter’s background. Unearthing as many of these intertwined contexts as one can make explicit go towards strengthening the rigor of the reading. Having thus made explicit all of these interwoven contexts, Derrida proceeds to deconstruct Plato, revealing the interdependencies underlying Plato’s univocal and unequivocal assertions. So rather than encouraging every possible interpretation without preference for any one , Derrida is encouraging an exhaustively researched method of situating a work within the most complexity and intricate contexts.

Here’s one of my favorite examples
from ‘Points’ , the collection of interviews. Derrida’s
response to the question concerning the meaning of drug addiction is a great demonstration of how he attempts to situate the context of the meaning of a concept in as rich and ‘precise’ a way as possible.


Q.: You are not a specialist in the study of drug addiction, yet we suppose that as a philosopher you may have something of particular interest to say on this subject, if only because of the concepts common both to philosophy and addictive studies, for example dependency, freedom, pleasure, jouissance.

J.D.: Okay. Let us speak then from the point of view of the nonspecialist which indeed I am. But certainly you will agree that in this case we are dealing with something other than a delimitable domain. The criteria for competence, and especially for professional competence, are very problematic here. In the end, it is just these criteria that, whether directly or not, we will be led to discuss. Having identified me as a philosopher, a non-specialist in this thing called "drug addiction," you have just named a number of highly philosophical concepts, concepts that philosophy is obliged to consider as priorities: "freedom," "dependency," "pleasure" or "jouissance," and so forth. So be it. But I propose to begin quite simply with "concept," with the concept of concept. "Drugs" is both a word and a concept, even before one adds quotation marks to indicate that one is only mentioning them and not using them, that one is not buying, selling, or ingesting the "stuff itself" [!a chose meme ]. Such a remark is not neutral, innocently philosophical, logical or speculative. Nor is it for the same reasons, nor in the same manner that one might note, just as correctly, that such and such a plant, root, or substance is also for us a concept, a "thing" apprehended through the name of a concept and the device of an interpretation.

No, in the case of "drugs" the regime of the concept is different: there are no drugs "in nature." There may be "natural" poisons and indeed naturally lethal poisons, but they are not poisonous insofar as they are drugs. As with drug addiction, the concept of drugs supposes an instituted and an institutional definition: a history is required, and a culture, conventions, evaluations, norms, an entire network of intertwined discourses, a rhetoric, whether explicit or elliptical. We will surely come back to this rhetorical dimension. There is not, in the case of drugs, any objective, scientific, physical (physicalistic), or "naturalistic" definition (or rather there is: this definition may be "naturalistic," if by this we understand that it attempts to naturalize that which defies any natural definition or any definition of natural reality). One can claim to define the nature of a toxin; however, not all toxins are drugs, nor are they considered as such.

Already one must conclude that the concept of drugs is a non-scientific concept, that it is instituted on the basis of moral or political evaluations: it carries in itself norm or prohibition, and allows no possibility of description or certification-it is a decree, a buzzword [mot d' ordre]. Usually the decree is of a prohibitive nature; occasionally, on the other hand, it is glorified and revered: malediction and benediction always call to and imply one another. As soon as one utters the word "drugs," even before any "addiction," a prescriptive or normative "diction" is already at work, performatively, whether one likes it or not. This "concept" will never be a purely theoretical or theorizable concept. And if there is never a theorem for drugs, there can never be a scientific competence for it either, one attestable as such and which would not be essentially overdetermined by ethicopolitical norms. For this reason I have seen fit to begin with some reservations about the division "specialist/ non-specialist." No doubt the division may prove difficult for other reasons. From these premises one may draw diff erent, indeed contradictory ethico-political conclusions.

On the one hand, there would be a naturalist conclusion: "Since 'drugs' and 'drug addiction,' " one might say, "are nothing but normative concepts, institutional evaluations or prescriptions, this artifice must be reduced. Let us return to true natural freedom. Natural law dictates that each of us be left the freedom to do as we will with our desire, our soul, and our body, as well as with that stuff known as 'drugs.' Let us finally do away with this law which the history of conventions and of ethical norms has so deeply inscribed in the concept of'drugs'; let's get rid of this suppression or repression; let's return to nature." To this naturalistic, liberal, and indeed la.xist decree [mot d' ordre] one may, on the basis of the same premises, oppose an artificialist policy and a deliberately repressive position.

Occasionally, this may, just like its liberal counterpart, take on a therapeutic guise, preventativist, if I can put it like that, inclined to be persuasionist and pedagogical: "we recognize," one might say, "that this concept of drugs is an instituted norm. Its origin and its history are obscure. Such a norm does not follow analytically from any scientific concept of natural toxicity, nor, despite all our best efforts to establish it in this sense, will it ever do so. Nonetheless, by entirely assuming the logic of this prescriptive and repressive convention, we believe that our society, our culture, our conventions require this interdiction. Let us deploy it consistently. At stake here are the health, security, productivity, and the orderly functioning of these very institutions.

By means of this law, at once supplementary and fundamental, these institutions protect the very possibility of the law in general, for by prohibiting drugs we assure the integrity and responsibility of the legal subject, of the citizens, and so forth. There can be no law without the conscious, vigilant, and normal subject, master of his or her intentions and desires. This interdiction and this law are thus not just artifacts like any other: they are the very condition of possibility of a respect for the law in general in our society. An interdiction is not necessarily bad, nor must it necessarily assume brutal forms; the paths it follows may be rwisted and symbolically overdetermined, but no one can deny that the survival of our culture originarily comprises this interdiction. It belongs to the very concept of our culture, and so forth.

From the moment we recognize the institutional character of a certain concept of drugs, drug addiction, narcotics, and poisons, two ethico-political axiomatics seem to oppose each other. Briefly put, I am not sure that this contradiction is more than superficial; nor am I convinced that either of these logics can follow through to their conclusions; and finally I am not sure that the two so radically exclude each other. Let us not forget that both start from the same premises-that is, the opposition of nature and institution. And not simply of nature and the law, but indeed already of two laws, of two decrees. Naturalism is no more natural than conventionalism.”

The simple idea of cause and effect is that some existing condition determines subsequent conditions. — Harry Hindu

Tell me more about what you mean by a condition. What are the absolute rock bottom requirements for a condition that can act as a cause? (Or , if you like. what are the minimal requirements for something to exist.). For instance , does a condition have properties and attributes? Is it located as a position in time and space? Does a condition have duration , extension and magnitude? Is there some substantive element, content or feature that is carried through identically from
one cause-effect sequence to the next in a chain of causes and effects?

But paying attention to fluctuations is a linguistically-scaffolded and socially-constructed human practice. Animals have the same brains but lack the language code to construct a habit of self regulatory introspection. — apokrisis

It isn’t a question of paying attention to the changing flow via introspection When we move our head , our entire visual field changes, a d the object in front of us now appears via a changed perspective. It is not the same visual experience of the object but we consider it to be the same object because we construct a subjective abstraction according which spatial objects are self-identical entities with fixed properties and
attributes. Logic and math would be impossible without this abstraction. The exactness of math derived from the assumption of the persistent self-
identicality over time of objects. From this assumption we derive extension, duration and magnitude.

Animals also must construct abstractive idealizations so as to locate and track moving objects, but these abstractions are local and contextual. Animals dont need formal language to construe situations perceptually and cognitively. They use is a non-formal semiotics.

I hit him because I was angry/sad/mistaken/playing a game. Affect is just the currency of this cultural discourse. See Rom Harre’s The Social Construction of thr Emotions or Vygotskian psychology in general — apokrisis

Ive critiqued a similar view from Ken Gergen and John Shotter. Before I am shaped by social interaction in linguistic contexts , I am already shaped in a more immediate and intimate manner by time itself. That is , every aspect of my previous history is exposed to an outside and transformed in a subtle way moment to moment , prior to interchange with others. I am already other than myself moment to moment , but in such a way that a thread of
pragmatic continuity characterizes my changing self.
It may appear that I am simply my socially constructed habits, but every ‘habit’ that structure me is subtly transforms i it’s sense, role and meaning
every new moment of experience.

In other words , the social begins not with exposure to other persons , but in temporal experience moment to moment. When I am engaged in contact with other persons , the way that I interpret that interaction and the linguistic senses of words and phrases and gestures and norms is unique to me. The same is true of every participant i. the ‘same’ interchange. It is the same differently for each of them, but such a difference is subtle enough as to go unnoticed.

l

t I can drive through town without registering or feeling anything particular for long periods in regards to the world. — apokrisis

If you are awake during your drive you are always , every moment , experiencing new and differentiated perceptions and cognitions of one sort or another. If I rode next to you and ask you every ten minutes or five
minutes or two minutes what you were just experiencing you would report something new. And every new experience is a change in how you are being affected by your world in some qualitative fashion( affective tonality, attitude, motivation).

I am curious as to your take on Andy Clark. He has made an effort to distance himself from the computational representationalism that characterizes writers like Barrett and Friston. So you support his efforts? I’d also love your response to Dan Zahavi’s phenomenological critique of what he calls the neo-Kantian tendencies of at least some predictive processing models.

https://www.academia.edu/34265366/Brain_Mind_World_Predictive_coding_neo_Kantianism_and_transcendental_idealism


It’s interesting to me that you consider philosophies which treat affectivity and temporal transformation as primary to be exemplars of a romantic idealism. Since
that group includes not only the phenomenologists but also social constructionists like Shotter and Gergen, Heidegger and poststructuralist authors such as Foucault , Deleuze and Derrida, I assume you consider all of these as romantics?

My initial thought is that it’s a focus on individualism and/or essentialism that seems to support these philosophies of blame. The ambiguity in language regarding the identity of a disembodied perspective (‘view from nowhere’) conceals a highly variable, qualitative aspect of ‘self/not-self’ which seems to effortlessly shift perspective between interacting systems at the level of intentionality. Does that make any sense?
11h — Possibility

For me the key to the concept of blame is a belief in the
arbitrariness , capriciousness and fickleness of the qualitative variations in shifts of perspective.

The one writer I’ve found who seems to share my view of blame is George Kelly.

Here’s my summary of Kelly’s position on blame:

https://philpapers.org/rec/MRGKO

So your intestines have anticipitive directionality toward shitting. So that's what intestineses are about? Sort of, yes. — frank

Yep, kind of. Intestines function in relation to other digestive organs as part of a larger system of digestion, and that larger system coordinates with every other aspect of the body’s functioning such that a holistic directionality obtains.

. I subscribe to approaches to understanding living systems that impute a kind of aboutness even to creatures with no cognitive capacities to speak of.
— Joshs

Buy then intention wouldn't be involved, right? — frank

Strictly speaking , without consciousness there could not be intentionality, although an ‘aboutness’ and self-organizing anticipative directionality would still characterize the organism’s behavior.

affect, or the fleeting minor updates of disorientation and reorientation that indeed highlight a momentary disconnect between self and world, is thus something fairly epiphenomenal rather than central. The rational structure is the ground. The affect arises to the degree we just fell out of our pragmatic state of automaticism - the feeling of being mindlessly in the flow. — apokrisis

Except that the changes in the flow afe precisely what affect is. That is to say , the flow or stream of consciousness consists of continuous qualitative novelty moment to moment. I am affected moment to moment differently by what I experience. There is no self on one side and the world on the other. The self is nothing other than this organism-environment interaction in which experience always matters to me, is significant to me in one way or another, and this has a ‘feel’ to it. Affective tonality is never absent from experience , regardless of whether I am having difficulty making sense of the world or not. Feeling is never mindless , it is precisely what orients and informs our sense making and logical schemes. What grounds any logic is the valuing that generates it , and values are in turn grounded affectively as qualitative feeling. There is no such thing as affect-free thought , or feeling-free reason.

By contrast, Friston's free energy model posits minimization of surprise(disorder) in pursuit of homeostasis as the normative aim of a living system in a non-equilibrium steady state, and defines autonomy on the basis of a markov blanket distinguishing between internal and external states, but these are weak notions of autonomy and normativity, in contrast to many enactivist versions. It's not surprising, then, that Friston chooses Freud's realist model ( Friston's characterization of schizophrenic disturbance as ‘false belief' indicates his realist bent) as a good realization of his neuroscientific project, given that Freud, like Friston, turns autonomy and normativity into a conglomeration of external pushes and internal pulls on a weakly integrated system. This is posited as an ‘internal' environment indirectly exposed to an outside, in classic Cartesian fashion, as Barrett express here: “ Like those ancient, mummified Egyptian pharaohs, the brain spends eternity entombed in a dark, silent box. It cannot get out and enjoy the world's marvels directly; it learns what is going on in the world only indirectly via scraps of information from the light, vibrations, and chemicals that become sights, sounds, smells, and so on.”” From your brain's point of view, locked inside the skull, your body is just another part of the world that it must explain.”

By contrast , autonomy for the enactivist isnt the property of a brain box hidden behind a markov blanket, distinguishable not only from the world but from its own body, but the autonomy of a brain-body system, whose elements cannot be separated out and for whom interaction with a world is direct rather than. indirect.

“One of the basic propositions of the enactive approach is that being autonomous is a necessary condition for a system to embody original intentionality and normativity. Sense-making is the interactional and relational side of autonomy. An autonomous system produces and sustains its own identity in precarious conditions and thereby establishes a perspective from which interactions with the world acquire a normative status. Certain interactions facilitate autonomy and other interactions degrade it. Information-processing models of the mind leave unexplained the autonomous organization proper to cognitive beings because they treat cognitive systems as heteronomous systems. These models characterize cognitive systems in terms of informational inputs and outputs instead of the operational closure of their constituent processes. As a result, they do not explain how certain processes actively generate and sustain an identity that also constitutes an intrinsically normative way of being in the world.”(Thompson)

Let me ask you this. Do you think affectivity , which has become a major topic in psychology these days, plays an important role in the understanding of logic and rationality, and doe Perice accord an important place for it in his model?

Philosophy professor and president of the CS Peirce Society vs some random angry dude on the internet. Gee, it’s tough to decide who to give greater credence to. — apokrisis

I don’t mean to come across as angry. I’m not angry, I’m enthralled with ideas and use every opportunity to discuss them. I chose to debate with you because I admire your knowledge of physics and logic. Your author may be a Pierce scholar but he is not a Husserl
scholar. I have published articles on phenomenology in journals like the Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology, so yes, I think I’m more of an authority on Husserl than he is. I also collaborated with Gene Gendlin, one of the central figures in American phenomenology. But I don’t think credentials are the issue here. We should stick with the arguments.

https://independent.academia.edu/JoshSoffer?from_navbar=true

You may find the following from enactivist Evan Thompson from his latest book, Mind in Life, useful:

READERS FAMILIAR WITH MY EARLIER BOOK, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991), might be surprised by the importance I give to Husserlian phe-nomenology here, given the cridcal attitude toward Husserl that book expressed. What accounts for this change of atdtude? The purpose of this Appendix is to clarify this matter.

In The Embodied Mind, we asserted (i) that Husserl was a method-ological solipsist (p. 16); (ii) that his theory ignored "both the consen-sual aspect and the direct embodied aspect of experience" (p. 17); (iii) that his theory of intentionality was a representational theory (p. 68); (iv) that his theory' of the life-world was reductionistic and representa-tionalist (that he tried to analyze the life-world "into a more funda-mental set of constituents" (p. 117) consisting of beliefs understood as mental representations (p. 18)); and (v) that his phenomenology was a purely abstract, theoretical project lacking a pragmatic dimension (pp. 19,117). We concluded that the Husserlian project was a "failure" (p. 19) and even wrote about the "breakdown of phenomenology" more generally (p. 19). This assessment then motivated our turn to the tradition of Buddhist philosophy and mindfulness-awareness medita-tion as a more promising phenomenological partner for cognitive sci-ence.

As Chapter 2 indicates, however, I no longer subscribe to this assess-ment of Husserlian phenomenology. Our earlier interpretation of Husserl was mistaken. Husserlian phenomenology has far more resources than we realized for productive cross-fertilization with both the sciences of mind (Petitot et al. 1999; Varela 1996) and Buddhist thought (Thompson 2005; Varela 2000b; Varela and Depraz 2003). In particular, I now believe (i) that Husserl was not a methodological solipsist; (ii) that he was greatly concerned with the intersubjective and embodied aspects of experience; (iii) diat his theory of intentionality was not a representational theory; and (iv) that his theory of the life-world was not reductionistic and representationalist. Furthermore, al-though I think phenomenology has tended to overemphasize theoret-ical discussion in the form of textual interpretation (to the neglect of phenomenological pragmatics as well as original phenomenological analyses and philosophical argumentation), I think it is too facile to say simply that phenomenology is a purely abstract, theoretical project lacking a pragmatic dimension. It follows that I would now not charac-terize Husserlian phenomenology as a "failure." Nor would I assert that phenomenology suffered a "breakdown" owing to its neglect of phenomenological pragmatics.

My viewpoint has changed for two reasons. The first is that when Varela and I were writing The Embodied Mind (during 1986-1989; Eleanor Rosen joined the project near the end of 1989) our knowl-edge of Husserl was limited. We were familiar with the main published works in English translation (Logical Investigations, Ideas I, Cartesian Meditations, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenome-nology) but had not studied them carefully enough, and we did not know about Husserl's writings on passive synthesis (then untranslated) and intersubjectivity (still untranslated). We were both more familiar with Heidegger and were influenced by his (largely uncharitable) reading of Husserl. We also had little knowledge of other phenomeno-logical thinkers who were deeply influenced by Husserl (Merleau-Ponty excepted), and we had studied only a litde of the secondary lit-erature on Husserl.

The second reason is that we accepted Hubert Dreyfus's (1982) in-fluential interpretation of Husserl as a representationalist and pro-tocognitivist philosopher, as well as his Heideggerian critique of Husserl thus interpreted. Dreyfus has been a pioneer in bringing the phenomenological tradition into the heardand of the cognitive sci-ences through his important critique of artificial intelligence (Dreyfus 1972, 1992) and his groundbreaking studies on skillful knowledge and action (Dreyfus 2002; Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1986). Yet his work is also marked by a peculiar interpretation of Husserl. Dreyfus presents Husserl's phenomenology as a form of representationalism that antici-pates cognitivist and computational theories of mind. He then re-hearses Heidegger's criticisms of Husserl thus understood and deploys them against cognitivism and artificial intelligence. Dreyfus reads Husserl largely through a combination of Heidegger's interpretation and a particular analytic (Fregean) reconstruction of one aspect of Husserl's thought—Husserl's notion of the noema. Thus the Husserl Dreyfus presents to cognitive science and analytic philosophy of mind is a problematic interpretive construct and should not be taken at face value.”

Is a Phenomenologist? - https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/menu/library/aboutcsp/ransdell/PHENOM.HTM

Note the Cartesian roots of phenomenology and its steady retreat into the primacy of subjectivity. Peirce argued for the irreducible triadicity of a semiotic modelling relation and an expansion of that from a statement about epistemology to a story of ontic and cosmic generality. — apokrisis

Yes, let’s note that more closely:

“ it might be more misleading than helpful to do so [consider Peirce a phenomenologist] is encouraged by Husserl's intellectual affinity with the Cartesian philosophy, which is evident not only from his explicit self-identification with that tradition and his characterization of phenomenological method as starting from a Cartesian methodic doubt process, but also from his insistence on the necessity of finding or establishing absolutes of one sort and another: absolute starting points, absolute foundations, absolute clarity, absolute indubitability, absolute certainty, absolute givenness, absolute data, absolute immanence, absolute self-evidence, and so on.“

It sounds to me like this author is relying on superficial summaries from secondary sources. Only in the most general way did Husserl borrow from Descartes .In all specifics phenomenology isvastly different from the Cartesian project. Rather than focusing on the word ‘absolute’, the author should describe what this starting point is for Husserl, an irreducible interaction between subjective and objective poles of experience. This means there is reified self. But neither are there intrinsic qualia ( first ness) of experience. This is what the reduction shows us, but Pierce rejects
the reduction. According to your author:



what "phenomenology" primarily meant to him was the idea that the objects of phenomenological study as such are not studied with any implicit or explicit assumptions, presuppositions, or assertions as to their reality status, which made it possible to develop semiotic or logic (in the broad sense) in a way that presupposes no metaphysical framework, and therefore involves no a priori assumptions about, say, the mental or physical status of the phenomenal entities.

But by founding experience in intrinsic firstness Pwirce begins with a major presupposition , that objects of perception are self-present entities. He need to reduce
this naturalistic idea in order to see that it is an idealization deriving from
continually changing senses of experience that become constituted i to a single ‘this’.

“The power we have of "creating meanings" is not creational in that sense but only in the more modest sense in which we have the power of creating houses out of wood or pots out of clay: we take words--and, of course, other signs or representations--and put them together, i.e. arrange and rearrange them, just as we do other materials, and if we are good at this then of course we create unique artifacts, but there is no creation ex nihilo here. Given the frequent talk by phenomenologists about "constituting meanings" and the like, it seems important to stress here that one will find nothing like that in the Peircean philosophy. (This has important implications for the way in which intentionality is treated by Peirce, about which I will say only that it is not a topic of the first importance in his thought because he regards it as a conception to be explicated by more fundamental conceptions rather than as itself a fundamental explicating conception.)”

Peirce maintains a notion of objects of experience as independent of the subject who does the experiencing. His focus on the social might at first appear to be compatiblewith Wittgenstein’s notion of language, but Pierce doesn’t seem to see the intrinsic role of subjective and intersubjective context in the experience in perceiving and in language.

The three choices are the monisms of materialism and idealism, the Cartesian dualism of two varieties of substantial being,, and then the trichotomies of any holistic or systems causality. — apokrisis

No, there are four choices. The 4th is interactionism, which doesn’t begin, like Pierce , with a ‘firstness’ consisting of an intrinsic in-itself content. Such a concept, contrary to Pierce’s claim, is not an entity feee of suppositions but a construct depending on a very old notion of substance. This is a variant of empiricism , and suffers from the limitation of any empiricism, that which it has in common with idealisms of various stripes.

…….

Then it should be simple enough for you to provide an example of aboutness and intentionality that does not include a causal relationship. In talking about intentionality or aboutness you are basically talking about causes and their effects.

Intentions always precede the action that is intended.

To say that something is about aomething else is to say that something was caused by something else, or else how would it be about it? How would it contain information about something else? — Harry Hindu

Husserlian intentionality is very different from natural
causality. To intend an object is to anticipate forward into its occuring, so in this sense the intention brings ‘information’ with it that shapes what it is we experience as the object. That is to say , it borrows from the past to shape the future. So this protentional feature of intentionality is causative in it’s shaping function. But the object which is intended is also causative in that it shapes and corrects the expectation emanating from the subjective pole of the intentional act. In sum , the subjective and objective poles of an intentional act both cause and are affected by each other in the same moment.

“ First there is an empty expectation, and then there is the point of the primary perception, itself an intentional experience. But the primary presentation [or impression] comes to be in the flow only by occurring as the fulfillment of contents relative to the preceding empty intentions, thereby changing itself into primal presenting perception.” (Husserl 2001; translated in Gallagher & Zahavi 2014)

“The primal impression comes on the scene as the fulfilment of an empty protention; the now, as the present phase of consciousness, is constituted by way of a protentional fulfilment (Husserl 2001). “

Note that the intended object doesn’t merely fulfill the intentional expectation. If that were the case the world would be nothing but what we conjure. The object intersects with the forward expectation to produce something new which nonetheless is framed by the intentional anticipation.


This may not make much sense but maybe you can see how it deviates from the logic of natural cause-effect.

Intentionality has to do with the directedness or of-ness or aboutness of consciousness
— Joshs
This is just another way of saying consciousness is composed of information — Harry Hindu

There are as many definitions of information as there are of intentionality , so in order for each of us to know what the other is talking about we would need to clarify these terms. I would just offer that u less you are willing to reduce information to ‘sense’ , the only place for information I see in Husserl’s model of consciousness is as a derived, second order construction.

Joshs
If birds call out a warning sound related to the presence of a hawk, do we assume the aboutness if it shows that the birds are thinking? Or should we first establish that they can think, and then away there is aboutness? — frank

Good question. I subscribe to approaches to understanding living systems that impute a kind of aboutness even to creatures with no cognitive capacities to speak of.

This thread topic is about "aboutness" and not about intention (or "intentionality").
— 180 Proof

— Wheatley

“Intentionality has to do with the directedness or of-ness or aboutness of consciousness, i.e. with the fact that when one perceives or judges or feels or thinks, one's mental state is about or of something.” (The Phenomenological Mind)

Phenomenology compounds the Cartesian error by building up the barrier made between mind and world. — apokrisis

I’ve hear quite a lot of readings of phenomenology, but claiming that phenomenology builds up a barrier between mind and word is about as far removed from Husserl
as one can get. All I can figure is that you’re succumbing to a common tendency to misrepresent phenomenology as introspection, attending to the inner. No wonder you think it has nothing to offer the understanding of the application of reasoning.

Intentionality is the aspect of the mind that causes other mental states and body states. The will to remember something brings that memory into consciousness. — Harry Hindu

I imagine your description of intentionality is accurate for certain approaches in philosophy. In phenomenology, however, intentionality and aboutness are quite different from a cause-effect structure.

Nonsense. The history of physics shows a continual revision of the suppositions in exactly the way I describe. Newton comes along with one mathematical framework that embeds a set of particular symmetries. Then Einstein comes along and shows how that classical dynamics is just a special case of an even more general symmetries (needing even less in terms of those particular presuppositions). — apokrisis

I have no doubt. But even with all these revisions there are still core presuppositions going back to Galileo and Descartes that have not been challenged within physics itself , only outside of physics , in particular by Husserlian phenomenology and Heidegger.

Heidegger traces the origin of empirical science to the concept of enduring substance.
“Mathematical knowledge is regarded as the one way of apprehending beings which can always be certain of the secure possession of the being of the beings which it apprehends. Whatever has the kind of being adequate to the being accessible in mathematical knowledge is in the true sense.
This being is what always is what it is. Thus what can be shown to have the character of constantly remaining, as remanens capax mutationem, constitutes the true being of beings which can be experienced in the world. What enduringly remains truly is. This is the sort of thing that
mathematics knows. What mathematics makes accessible in beings constitutes their being. Thus
the being of the "world" is, so to speak, dictated to it in terms of a definite idea of being which is embedded in the concept of substantiality and in terms of an idea of knowledge which cognizes beings in this way. Descartes does not allow the kind of being of innerworldly beings to present itself, but rather prescribes to the world, so to speak, its "true" being on the basis of an idea of being (being = constant objective presence) the source of which has not been revealed and the justification of which has not been demonstrated. Thus it is not primarily his dependence
upon a science, mathematics, which just happens to be especially esteemed, that detennines his ontology of the world, rather his ontology is determined by a basic ontological orientation toward being as constant objective presence, which mathematical knowledge is exceptionally well suited to grasp.* In this way Descartes explicitly switches over philosophically from the development of traditional ontology to modem mathematical physics and its transcendental foundations.”(Being and Time)

We have provisionally taken into consideration
the question about "being-in-time." It is easy to see that we cannot deal with it as long as we have not clarified what "time" is and as long as we have not clarified what "being" means, as it relates to a thing, and as it relates to the human being, who exists.
The question is exciting specifically with regard to natural science, especially with the advent of Einstein's theory of relativity, which established the opinion that traditional philosophical doctrine concerning time has been shaken
to the core through the theory of physics. However, this widely held opinion is fundamentally wrong. The theory of relativity in physics does not deal with what time is but deals only with how time, in the sense of
a now-sequence, can be measured. [It asks] whether there is an absolute measurement of time, or whether all measurement is necessarily relative, that is, conditioned.* The question of the theory of relativity could not
be discussed at all unless the supposition of time as the succession of a sequence of nows were presupposed beforehand. If the doctrine of time, held since Aristotle, were to become untenable, then the very possibility of physics would be ruled out. [The fact that] physics, with
its horizon of measuring time, deals not only with irreversible events, but also with reversible ones and that the direction of time is reversible attests specifically to the fact that in physics time is nothing else than the
succession of a sequence of nows. This is maintained in such a decisive manner that even the sense of direction in the sequence can become a matter of indifference. “

The irony there is the Peircean view is quite the other way around. It goes from the psychology of cognition to a description of the material world as itself a semiotic system. So it is as anti-Newtonian as you can get. But it also turns out to predict the informational turn that physics had to take once it encountered the dialectical marvels of quantum theory. — apokrisis

Pierce’s model of firstnessn shows the same limitation as that of physics. It tries to model change and transformation by beginning with intrinsicality and immediate self-presence and processing from there to relation and change. Instead, difference and transit must be considered primary and the intrinsic and self-present drives from it.

“Let us begin with the body as we just re-conceived it, rather than the traditional order in philosophy which begins with perception first. Then relations or interactions are added, and then language and thought.
For example, Peirce called sensations "firstness." They are assumed to be opaque: What I mean by opaque is exemplified by bits of color, smell, or touch. These are just what they are. Examine them as deeply as you might, in color there is just color. (See Moen, 1992, for a reading of Peirce in which firstness is not opaque.)
When reality is assumed to have opaque things at the bottom, then any relations among them must
be external relations, brought to them. Nothing within a color or a smell inherently insists on its being related to some other color or smell. There is nothing within a color, but color. To relate these opaques, some force or movement must impact on them. Peirce called it "secondness."
Then, thirdly come the relations of language, thought, and universals, kinds, conceptual forms. This order stems from the seeming opaqueness and unrelatedness of the sense-data of perception.Anything more complex must be brought to them, imposed on them from the top down.
Empiricism depends on adding our procedures to nature, "torturing nature" as Bacon said. You must always bring something to the sensations because they have nothing within themselves.

Merleau-Ponty moves far beyond all this but his "first flesh" and "second flesh" still retain something of the old order of first and second. Let us upset that ancient order altogether. If one begins with the body of perception, too much of interaction and intricacy has to be added on later. Perception is not the bottom. There is an implicit interactional bodily intricacy that is first—and
still with us now. It is not the body of perception that is elaborated by language, rather it is the body of interactional living in its environment. Language elaborates how the body implies its situation and its next behavior. We sense our bodies not as elaborated perceptions but as the body-sense of our situations, the interactional whole-body by which we orient and know what we are doing.” Gene Gendlin

Physics works because it models the world as laws and measurements. Maths works because it enshrines that same division at a level so abstract it feels possible to talk about all possible worlds. — apokrisis

Physics works in a certain way and with certain limitations. The limitations are imposed by the fact that physics begins with certain presuppositions that make both it and maths possible, but those presuppositions remain unexamined by it. Even as physics moves beyond the notion of materiality and naive objectivty , it retains the idea of the object as persisting presence to itself. This makes possible duration and extension , which in turn make possible counting, measurement, calculation. But the enduring thing-form-pattern is an idealization. As an idealization, it is quite useful
within certain limits as a way to anticipate our world, but it’s presuppositions are profoundly leas useful in making sense of human behavior, particularly the relation between affectivity, cognition and action.

But as soon as they start down the path to a dialectical logic, they are embracing the same symmetry-breaking logic of physical existence itself. It is the only route to evolving complex order as we find either in our models of particular physical phenomenon, or in physics as a general metaphysical phenomenon. — apokrisis

Again, a Peircian dialectical logic is useful for physics in its present form, but at some point it will recognize the need to move beyond this, as many in philosophy and psychology already have.