And then first person points of view become something more like what we really mean - private information, personal action - once nature threw up biological structure with internal codes and memories as its latest trick — apokrisis

Ah, but if the codes of the cognitive system are just tricks, that is, adaptive accidents , then first person points of view in the experiential sense are really just eliminative rmaterialist products of the wider causal cosmic model.
But if you start with a truly fresh model
of causal motivation at the experiential level, you might have an entirely different notion of first person on your hands, one that might require a rethinking of world as objective Cosmos.

f we say that a system is attuned to the world by way of information and information is always acting on a system. A biological system differs from a rock in that it can register fine changes, whilst say a rock can only register coarse changes. So this would be a way of rationalizing what an object is conscious of, by way of what can cause it to change — Pop

What if we say that being an organic system means that the creature has a patterned way of interacting with its environment each moment , that essentially what a living thing is is this patterned interacting which, unlike a stone, maintains its overall integrity and consistency of functioning even as it is incessantly altering its behavior in response to novelties imposed by the outside(the ‘outside’ includes the consequences of the creature’s own functioning, the reciprocal impact on the life form of the changes it makes to its world in the process of functioning).
Information in this sense would be the normative goal-oriented directionality of a living system’s functional organization. It would reside neither strictly within the living thing nor in its environment but would be instantiated in the organism-environment coupling.

Your comments are an exellent example of 'Showboating' and I especially liked this paragraph. Do you have a room with technical terms tacked to the wall and a ball of yarn or do you use more modern methods? I'd like to know — Mark Nyquist

If you re-read all his posts carefully you may find as I do that he is pointing to a consistent and coherent set of ideas. It seems to me that showboating is an unnecessary use of technical terms to illustrate a point that could be made more clearly without them. But I’m seeing more than that in apo’s argument. It’s legitimate and interesting to integrate Peirce’s metaphysics, quantum theory and neuroscientific models of consciousness. It may also be threatening or confusing to those who prefer a more classically reductionist approach to these matters.

Yes, our humanity gets in the way of reality.

Have you considered what information is? Daniel has bought in Change into the mix of considerations. Does information entail change? I think it does. I'm sure you would have some views on this? — Pop

Merleau-Ponty founds consciousness in gestalt ensembles organized as figure against background. “The perceptual ‘something' is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a ‘field'.”(Phenomenology of Perception, p.4) .
The background is the formal (we can call it informational, the irreducible relation of the parts to the whole and the whole to its parts ) aspect of perceptual experience in its most primordial sense. Change is presupposed here rather than being added onto awareness , in that each moment introduces a new figure as it re-forms the background.

The Peircean approach is not to rid our view of reality of any subjectivism, it is instead to match such a science of the third person view from nowhere with its “other” of a general science of first person points of view. So a science of semiotics and habits of interpretance, in other words. — apokrisis

Does Peirce aim to derive the third person from the first person as a secondary modality or achieve a mutual affecting between them , a matching of already existing entities or aspects?

This is a view of information that leaves out any receiver of the information. It is moot whether an event or degree of freedom is considered to be random noise or orderly signal as there is no higher meaning or symbolism being attached to the mark. The first step is just to discover the foundational thing of a counterfactual - the starting point of it being even meaningful to ask of anything: "are you a 1 or a 0? A presence or an absence? A something or a nothing?" — apokrisis

We can recover the other sense of information as not just about countable physical differences, but differences that make a difference to someone as they are symbols being read as part of an exchange of messages. — apokrisis

This concatenation of information as meaningless mark and as subjectively meaningful signal system sounds compatible with Dan Zahavi’s depoction of metaphysical realism:

“If we want to know true reality, we should aim at describing the way the world is, not just independently of its being believed to be that way, but independently of all the ways in which it happens to present itself to us human beings. An absolute conception would be a dehumanized conception, a conception from which all traces of ourselves had been removed. Nothing would remain that would indicate whose conception it is, how those who form or possess that conception experience the world, and when or where they find themselves in it. It would be as impersonal, impartial, and objective a picture of the world as we could possibly achieve. How are we supposed to reach this conception? Metaphysical realism assumes that everyday experience combines subjective and objective features and that we can reach an objective picture of what the world is really like by stripping away the subjective. It consequently argues that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between the properties things have “in themselves” and the properties which are “projected by us”. Whereas the world of appearance, the world as it is for us in daily life, combines subjective and objective features, science captures the objective world, the world as it is in itself.”

Would it be fair to characterize your thesis as a kind of techno-dialectics? There seems to be a fair amount of Marx in it , with technology moved to front and center. Have you read Richard Lewonti ?

If we can crack fusion in the next decade, it could be game on again. But if it is a civilisational future to be built on wind and solar, then that is a very different growth regime. — apokrisis

Isnt there a distinction to be made between growth defined in classical economic terms ( GDP, etc) and growth of knowledge( scientific, technological, philosophical , literary)? If there were a catastrophic disruption of access to sources of energy for technological use, do you really think this would prevent individuals from continuing to transform their ways of understanding the world?

The longer you live, the more experiences you have learnt to deal with, and so the less you need to learn. You've long had it all figured out down to the level of automaticism. — apokrisis

I wouldn’t say it’s the number of experiences you cope with that produces growth but the manner in which you organize those experiences. And each useful reorganization propels you into a new world , accelerating the possibilities of further growth rather than impeding them. Personal growth is akin to technological advances in cultural history. They evince an overall accelerative character.

It is completely coherent Josh you just need a higher level of understanding to appreciate it. — Julian Malek

I want what you’re on so I can get as high as you are

Random word generator? Are you related to Alan Sokal?

I am tempted to argue that what you have here is akin to an attempt to use a hardware description to explain software patterns. It’s not that your model is necessary wrong , just that your account ends just where the real scene of consciousness begins. To use the computer metaphor , you leave us with the
power on and the monitor active. But what actually takes place in awareness requires an entirely different causal language that that of physics.

Do you think Lalatos’ approach to the logical proof is consistent with the later Wittgenstein? I wonder i particularly about the notion of truth , as opposed to usefulness , with regard to logical
proof.

The GR assumes that people choose to treat each other with disrespect. Because it focuses on intent, it also assumes that disrespect drives differences in interpretation of the GR. But I think intent is not the crux of the issue when it comes to moral behavior. Rather, the issue is precisely interpretation. That is to say, sincere differences in interpreting or making sense of other cultural values is at the root of violence and what we call immorality, not bad intent or desire to disrespect.Limits in our understanding of each other, not a bad attitude, drives what we call iimmorality.This makes the GM a truism.

Big claim, Joshs. I admire the chutzpah of it. Can you expand on this perhaps with an example of it in action — Tom Storm

First I’d clarify the sense of the golden rule. Do unto ‘others’ only applies to others who are like you in certain key respects that pertain to their humanity. We don’t generally apply the golden rule to livestock, insects or plants, or to any other being that appears to us to be somehow less than fully human in the moral
sense. Thus we see how , at various times in human history, those who were regarded as only 2/3 human, evil, barbarian, heathen, pathological or demented were treated differently than we would want to be treated, without the golden rule being violated.

I believe that every major act of violence in history was committed by an individual or group who thought themselves to be following the golden rule, just as today we incarcerate and punish people based on the golden rule.

The Golden Rule is a recipe for immorality, because it can be used to justify whatever prejudice one harbors. For instance, ‘if I were a homosexual, I would want you to treat me as abnormal’. That prejudice justifies discriminating against others, without violating the Golden Rule.

We all know why the old, the isolated, and the uneducated hold to the views of the past, but there's good reason those views have been swept to the dustbin. I'm willing to hear from the sociologists who discuss our social evolution, but less so to hear directly from the mouths of our dinosaurs who don't realize time passed them by. — Hanover

You’d better be careful. Before you know it, you may find yourself being treated as the next dinosaur whom time has passed by. Foucault would have a field day providing a genealogical analysis both of the ‘reasons’ behind the change in values at the Olympics and your moralistic outrage ar those who dont follow the new orthodoxy . It sounds like you’ve latched onto the emancipatory version of critical theory but haven’t yet made your way into thoroughgoing postmodern territory

I think there are some interesting points that are being ignored here, regardless of Leghorn’s motives. For instance, the concept of competition has changed relative to 50 years ago. Leghorn is correct that athletic courage used to be thought of in terms of ignoring pain and suffering , both mental and physical , for the sake of athletic achievement for oneself and one’s team. Today there is an appreciation that one’s mental and physical well-being is more important than winning at any cost. This reduces the focus on competition and redirects it toward a more balanced concept of excellence. Included in this new thinking is the role of culture in either promoting or hindering personal excellence, which is where the discussion of racial bias comes into play. I think these are all positive and necessary developments but it is quite possible that they may detract from the entertainment value of the Olympics by creating an identity crisis.

Audiences used to expect Olympians to act as John Wayne-type superheroes. Now they like their superheroes (like Batman and Spider-man) to be depicted as angst and doubt ridden vulnerable
mortals. It makes for a different kind of drama. If its working for cinema , maybe it will work for the Olympics.

Forest for the trees.

I was created by something a trillion times greater then your minds doubts.

Therefore not only do I have no self doubts, but the very things you doubt are my greatest strengths — hope

I am much happier thinking of my self as something self-creating and re-creating rather than being created by a being outside myself whose knowledge I can never have complete access to. I also have no desire for access to ‘greatness’ , only for intimate, intricate, gentle and peaceful relational understanding of others.

How can there be anxiety if we trust every blade of grass is exactly positioned for its purpose? I credit Hope for bringing this up. — Hanover

Prior to Darwin, biologists believed that God created each species to be exactly suited to its purpose. It was a simple, ordered scheme. They didn’t try to explain the relations between species because it didn’t occur to them to look for such relations. So we have two entirely different kinds of ordered schemes in the pre-Darwinian and the Darwinian model. Similarly, a fundamentalist religious view could post that God put evil in this world to give humans the opportunity to exercise free will. In this approach, the ordered scheme of the world is one of good vs evil. Like the pre-Darwinian model, it doesn’t try to probe the relation between those who do ‘evil’ and those who do ‘good’ because it doesn't occur to it that good and evil are value judgements arising g out of relatively shifting cultural contexts.
My point is that it is not enough to believe in a perfect schematic order of the world. The question is how that order is accessible to us, and what the nature of the order is. One could say that God made every person to be positioned for their purpose just as every blade of grass is positioned for its purpose. But that could mean that one sees each person as either good or evil , of a good character or bad character. In that case, one may believe that anxiety is unnecessary because all is explained. But all one has done is trade anxiety for a resigned, accepting suffering. Why? Because one has settled for a rigid explanatory scheme that fails to make sense of people’s behavior in anything but the most superficial terms.

God knows all the answers. You don’t. That means, unless you abdicate your self responsibility to live your own life. you’re going to have to get up tomorrow morning like all the rest of us and deal with the normal day to day conflicts, frustrations and confusions. You will not call these anxieties because that would make you an unbeliever. If you did call these anxieties you might be prompted by these feelings to try and achieve a deeper understanding of others that would alleviate some of the conflicts, frustrations and confusions. Since you won’t call these
expereinces anxieties , how will you respond to them? Will you assume it is all part of the greater plan and simply accept the conflicts? Will you pray for guidance and try to change your world or your thinking about the world?

BTW, would it be possible to know where you've read all this stuff — Apollodorus

Apparently somewhere in Leviticus

Or maybe it's about realizing your creator is a billion times vaster than you are so you have no right to doubt or hate yourself. — hope

That’s just going to make you feel worse when you do inevitably doubt or hate yourself.

They try to use self-esteem to fix lack of self acceptance. And conditional self-esteem is always a shaky construction therefore prone to causing worry. — hope

You can’t have self-acceptance without self-understanding. And you can’t have self-understanding without an understanding of your world, particularly your social world and you place in it. And you can’t come to a realization of what needs to be understood about your relationships with other people , how and why they care or don’t care about you, without feeling social anxiety. Social anxiety lets us know what we are puzzled about , what we need to work on. It can be an extraordinarily creative emotion because it shakes us out of our complacency and pushes us to change and grow. I don’t know anyone who achieved healthy self-acceptance without allowing themselves to be open to anxiety and to use it to learn about themselves.
Self acceptance isnt easy. It is an endless process of development.

Seriously though. Aren’t you ever kept up at night tossing and turning over concerns about the future? Do you worry about getting older, about illness,? What about work related anxiety, like an upcoming performance review, or conflicts with other employees? Do you have anxiety about speaking in public? Do you get nervous before a sports competition? Do you worry you won’t have enough money to pay the bills , to pay off debt or for retirement?

Or maybe I just think longer and deeper. — hope

work it

Also maybe mine is better, and all the others are coming form the very ignorance mine attempts to expose and remove — hope

That’s cause you Da Man

You seem to be be forcing these labels into the two categories you want to see them as. You want to describe worry over everything bad that may happen to one’s loved ones as fear, and worry over one’s own self as anxiety. And you want to call the former healthy and the latter unhealthy. But this isnt generally how most psychologists define these terms. They see
Anxiety as pervasive in modern society. It reflects our struggle to cope with a fast paced, constantly changing world that we are desperately trying to predict and stay one step ahead of. The quality of this feeling, they argue , is different than the intensity and immediacy of fear. That is why it is is suited to modern times , where immediate dangers to survival are uncommon, but an endless series of smaller threats abound.

Fear is a natural response to prediction of external harm. Anxiety is something else. — hope

Yes, I think fear and anxiety can be usefully distinguished. Fear involves the anticipation of imminent, serious harm or loss. Anxiety involves the anticipation of an event that may produce a less severe harm or loss , and is not as imminent. Anxiety is worry, rumination, apprehension, restlessness. Anxiety over the upcoming medical test can turn to fear once the result is known. Both fear and anxiety can be described as neurotic or healthy, depending on the circumstances.

Anxiety is caused by your irrational self doubt and self hate related to those things, triggered by those things, etc... — hope

You just made that up. Do you have any sources for this peculiar definition of anxiety? It seems to me all you’re doing is trying to distinguish a neurotic from a healthy anxiety. You could do the same thing with all other emotions, including joy.

Basically stop doubting and hating yourself, and start accepting and loving yourself, and your anxiety will be gone. — hope

What if most of your anxieties concern the welfare of those around you that you care about?

Is there anything wrong in stating that neurotransmitters are scientifically assumed to play a role in the regulation and experience of affective behavior? — Shawn

I appreciate that you’re making this claim as general and open-ended as possible. In fact , I suspect that the claim is so flexible as to run the risk of saying very little. What is a neurotransmitter? Well, it’s the ‘fuel’ that allows neurons to communicate with each other. So affect implies a brain, a brain implies neurons, and neurons imply neurotransmitters. Not sure what else one can learn here.

what is wrong with assuming that moods are really just neurotransmitter levels working in the brain? — Shawn

As long as you realize that no mood ca be reliably induced by manipulating levels of single neurotransmitters. Neurohormones are involved in affect just as they are involved in all aspects of cognitive function. But moods are much more complex that anything that can be reduced to individual hormones. Serotonin reuptake inhibitors do not always alleviate depression for this reason. I would go so far as to say that the way neurotransmitters are involved in moods is inseparable from the way they are involved in cognition in general.

The implication is that there is something that is the same in each expression. This is an assumed, almost unconscious transcendental argument: You understood the meaning of my utterance, therefore there must be a thing that we call the meaning of that utterance that has been transfered from you to me. — Banno

My understanding of the meaning of your utterance is just a sense that is produced via my construal of your utterance. That sense may include my assuming that what you mean to say is exactly the same as what I am construing as the recipient of your utterance. Or I might make no such supposition. I may instead assume that I construe something that is likely similar enough to what you intended to convey that we can have a useful interaction , but whether that is in fact the case must be born out by my observation of your subsequent behavior. I may later decide that you intended to convey something very different from what I was assuming and I will either have to resign myself to concluding that your utterance is incomprehensible to me or begin exploring ways of making sense of your utterance that is useful to me.
So nothing has been transferred from you to me. You fell into an utterance , and I received an utterance that was somewhat different from what you experienced ( or so we can both demonstrate to each other by repeatedly surprising each other with mutually unpredictable behaviors ) but close enough for both of us to be able to benefit from the interchange.


“ For about three centuries now Anglo-Saxon man has labored under the somewhat mislead-ing assumption that knowledge is transmitted through the senses. This was John Locke's great notion in 1690' In expressing it, he provided the essential spade work for both modern experi-mental psychology and the courageous empiricism of Sigmund Freud. But great ideas, like great men, sometimes have a way of eventually blocking the very progress they once so coura-geously initiated. Thus it is, even after continued experience in psychotherapy, most of us still hold doggedly to the belief that one man's understanding of the universe can be somehow encoded within a signal system and then transmitted intact to another man via the senses. The signal system is often called "language." Indeed, Pavlov's psychological term for "language" was simply "the second signal system.” George Kelly

Because ongoing experience is a carrying forward of a past. That past enters into, participates in, what occurs into it, even as that past is changed by what occurs into it. That’s why there can be neither absolute novelty nor absolute identity.

This maintains the misleading reification that there is a something that is expressed, something reproduced. It isn't always so. Better to say something is done. Instead of looking for meaning, look at what we do when we use words. — Banno

There is, must always be something that is expressed, something that is repeated, but in so doing the repetition alters. But don’t make the mistake of treating what is repeated as a presence, an object or subject.

I will defer to Derrida on the relation between reproduction, repetition, meaning , subjectivity and pragmatic ‘doing’ in your sense.

Repetition is altering, and this is what Derrida calls `iterability':

"The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence..(LI53)."

"Through the possibility of repeating every mark as the same, [iterability] makes way for an idealization that seems to deliver the full presence of ideal objects..., but this repeatability itself ensures that the full presence of a singularity thus repeated comports in itself the reference to something else, thus rending the full presence that it nevertheless announces"(LI29)). ...the possibility of its being repeated another time-breaches, divides, expropriates the "ideal" plenitude or self-presence of intention,...of all adequation between meaning and saying. Iterability alters...leaves us no room but to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say) (Limited, Inc,p.61)." "The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition.”

This situation is valid not only for linguistic signs, but, Derrida says, for all of what philosophy calls experience, "even the experience of being"(Limited,Inc.,p.9)

So what is left of idealizing notions like self, ipseity, internality , intrinsicality , subjectivity and objectivity is the element, the mark , which is only a differential, an in-between.

"convey" implies that something moved from here to there, so one might be tempted to ask what it is that was moved, and set that out in words. But nothing - no thing - was moved. — Banno

Yes, if we think of convey via the metaphor of displacement in physical space. But instead we can think of words like convey , express , transport ,articulate, trasmit, elucidate, repeat , not as the spatial displacement of an unchanged entity but as a reproduction which alters what it reproduces in the transmitting of it. To convey a meaning is to alter what is expressed.

what the painting conveys is different from what any interpretation provides. — T Clark

Isnt the painting itself an interpretation, and always a slightly different one every time we return to it , the same way that a novel or a poem means exactly how one interprets it at any given time , but is interpreted slightly differently every time we return to it? Or these words I’m writing now and you are reading now, don’t we , each in our own way, see their meaning as exactly what they are, at any given reading, which changes its sense from
reading to reading?

As long as we are conscious we are construing our world moment to moment on the basis of how the next event is similar and different with respect to the previous. This is the basis of all language. As we perform this construing moment to moment , we perceive each event both in terms of it’s unique content and its affective relation to what went before it , how it either carries forward or changes a previous mood , a feeling disposition, a motivational attitude , the way in which events matter to us.

Music is a language that particularly well suited to convey these shifts in feeling from moment to moment. That does not mean that it is content free. It can’t be , because the shifts i. feeling that we experience when we listen to music have to be about something. Music is ideational. It tells a story via affectivity but also via a vague, unspecified content that is undergoing these feeling and attitude fluctuations. One can think of notes as profoundly impressionistic words. Written and spoken words , on the other hand, ade best suited for conveying crystallized content , leaving out what is nonetheless intrinsic to their sense , their affectivity.

Every word you are reading right now presents its own music. It either carries forward a previous feeling or changes it. It has built in emojis, which we hear in spoken intonation and emphasis but have to fill in ourselves when we read a written text . But no word ever spoken or written or received with the intent to mean something is devoid of its own accompanying musical feeling tone. The feeling tone is always intrinsic to the context of the word ( what the person speaking or writing it intends to convey by it or how the recipient intends to interpret it ), not separate and added on.

So words can be impoverished in the encoding of affect, and music without lyrics is impoverished in fleshed-out meaning content , but words and music convey both affect and sense content. What is only conveyed implicitly in one language via the contextual intent of the speaker and recipient) is conveyed explicitly in the other.

Regarding your quote , of course when we hear the first notes of a song we notice the physical instruments -and other such surface details. But as we become absorbed i. what the music is saying , where it is taking us, we are transported , just as when reading text we at first notice physical details of the page , the font and size and color
of the letters. If it is an engaging novel , by the time we get caught up in it we may complete forget we are reading words on a page. Instead , we are in the drama.

I don't think the song is sitting in the muso's head, complete, just needing to be birthed. I think it develops as it is played. — Banno

Sure. What I said about the evolution of a philosopher’s new idea applies also the the musician. Within their own medium , in struggling to compose something new there is a move from the tentative and incipient to a crisp , clarified and focused musical product. I’m just saying that articulating their ideas in words is not a
necessary part of the process, unless the song includes lyrics. But just as forming a vague idea into words doesn’t lose the profundity of the ideas for the philosopher , turning a vague impressionistic inconsistent musical sketch into a finalized written score doesnt lose the profundity for the musician.