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.

You find meaning in your life through psychology texts? — Hanover

It’s kind of hard not to when those psychologists are Gene Gendlin and George Kelly. Gendlin’s major work was ‘Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning’, and Kelly wrote papers with themes like ‘A Psychology of the Optimal Man’, Psychotherapy and the Nature of Man’, ‘Sin and psychotherapy’ and The Psychology of the Unknown’. I can’t think of any better aids to finding meaning in one’s life.

Habituation occurs when we learn not to respond to a stimulus that is presented repeatedly without change, punishment, or reward.
Sensitization occurs when a reaction to a stimulus causes an increased reaction to a second stimulus. It is essentially an exaggerated startle response and is often seen in trauma survivors.”
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-psychology/chapter/biological-basis-of-learning/ — Michael McMahon

This sounds like a stimulus-response model of perception A bit outdated, considering the wide range of Gibsonian-influenced models of perception ( O’Regan and Noe, for instance) that have emerged over the past few decades. Expectation plays a fundamental role in perception , which is why the concept of qualia is incoherent when applied to perception.

art can depict reality, but that doesn't make it science or an academic study. And nobody should have any problem with this. — ssu

Tell me what you think the relation is between science and the progress of knowledge , and then compare it with your sense of whether philosophy progresses and if so , how is this progress different from the progress of science. Once i get a sense of your views on this matter, I can expand the terrain to include the arts and literature.

I’m curious as to why you thought this would not be a popular view. I agree wholeheartedly with this description, and I think you’re being quite cautious in how you express it. The way I see it, to describe something as ‘evil’ is to admit ignorance, isolation or exclusion of some aspect to our experience. It identifies a limitation in our understanding. — Possibility

That’s very refreshing to hear. Let me be sure I understand you, though. Tell me what distinctions you might make, if any , between evil and blame in general.
I include within the boundaries of blame the following: all feelings and expressions of blame aimed at another (or oneself in self-anger). These include: irritation, annoyance, disapproval, condemnation, feeling insulted, taking umbrage, resentment, exasperation, impatience, hatred, ire, outrage, contempt, righteous indignation, ‘adaptive' anger, perceiving the other as deliberately thoughtless, lazy, culpable, perverse, inconsiderate, disrespectful, disgraceful, greedy, evil, sinful, criminal.
My argument is that the concept of evil. particularly in its theological guises, is a more foundationalisr version of blame ,but all of the varieties I mentioned above share central structure features with evil. I’m aware of only one writer who seems to support my view of blame as a failure of understanding. Every other philosophy I know of is essentially a philosophy of blame i. that it relies on a notion of capricious and arbitrariness at the core of human intent. This takes a wide variety of forms, ranging from concepts of social influence on the individual ( Marx, Foucault, etc) to internal sources of bias and influence such as drives and emotions.

Faith based reasoning is properly limited to how one ought live one's life in terms of meaning and value, questions science does not address. — Hanover

Certainly the natural sciences don’t address these questions , but I wouldn’t say the same for certain approaches within psychology, such as clinical psychology.


“Suppose we regard clinical psychology as if it were the purest of sciences." George Kelly

Still Sokal was a leftist, similar to actually others that are politically on the left and worried about postmodernism.) — ssu

It should be mentioned that Sokal’s brand of leftism identifies itself with classical Marxism, which is a central object of critique by French postmodernists. So we are talking about two distinctly different ideologies of leftism, as different as classical liberalism ( now dubbed economic conservatism ) and social democratic liberalism.

Nature causes nature itself (e.g. creatures, exploding stars, slipping tectonic plates, lightening strikes, mass extinctions, etc) to suffer? :roll: — 180 Proof

Hmm. I like that idea. I was watching a blackbird attacking a crow today, and it made me think of the cognitive assessment the blackbird was making about the ‘evil’ the crow represented. Higher animals are fully capable of differentiating between playful
fighting , an attack to show annoyance and a desire to kill
the opponent. That is, they can to some extent understand the context of the other’s behavior as being benign or malevolent. Note , however, that what they share with humans who see evil all around them is a failure to see past the immediate harm to their interests.

can you drill down without getting too theoretical — Tom Storm

Not sure I could. But arent there all sorts of
fundamental discoveries about human nature bound up with the changes in religious doctrine over the centuries? What about the shift from Platonic (Augustine, Philo) to Aristotelian rationalist approaches (Aquinas, Maimonides) to faith? What about the abandonment of fundamentalist readings of scripture in favor of interpretive ones? And more recently the abandonment of the trinity? Or Spinoza’s pantheism? Or Tillch’s existentialism? I wouldn’t know where to begin to mark the dividing line between theology and philosophy , or for that matter, between philosophy and empiricism.

. I could read Einstein through Kant and Kant as the proponent of a certain form of liberal theology. Or I could connect Newton and Galileo with certain theological assumptions.

I know that’s something Dennett and his band of atheists would say but I disagree. I think this misses the central role of faith and values in science. I could read Einstein through Kant and Kant as the proponent of a certain form of liberal theology.

Faith is not a reliable method of justification because it is content free. — Tom Storm

I don’t think faith is content-free. It is the expression of a value system. A particular faith can only generate the assumptions you listed above because it generates predictions and anticipations based on the content of the faith. Religious culture in the west evinces a parallel evolution of understanding in relation to the history of science. This isn’t primary because those religions availed themselves of the latest empirical
evidence, but because on its own tems , within its own language and methods of inquiry it is capable of invalidating older views and replacing them.

Nobody ever asks about my middle and last names... :sad: — Amity

Ville Horror?

I didnt see that. He edited that last part out .

My definition of evil won’t be a popular one, but here goes. First of all, even though it may seem that the concept of evil isn’t necessarily associated with any particular affectivity, it is inextricably bound with the emotions of hostility, anger and guilt. We see others as evil when they violate our expectations or standards within the social realm. Feithemore, we believe that the perpetrator is ‘guilty’. That doesn’t mean they feel guilty, it means we believe they should feel guilty. That is, we believe
the other knew bette than to do what they did to hurt us or other members of society. We believe
they knew their actions would cause others pain but disregarded this and went ahead callously, thoughtlessly, maliciously , malevolently. Notice that these terms don’t explain anything, they just point to a strange arbitrariness and capriciousness in intent, what is typically referred to as freedom of will. The connection between evil and emotions of guilt, anger and hostility is that they all are based in the same structure of thinking. To put it simply, they are all concepts of blame. When we blame someone or ourselves , we believe there was an arbitrary succumbing to temptation , a being led astray from
doing the ‘right’ thing.

Here is where I’m going to be very unpopular. I believe that the thinking of blame and evil always represent our failure to understand the other’s motives
from thei pint of view, and never represent an accurate depiction of the other’s thinking. Blame and evil aren’t explanations , they are nothing but question marks nWby on earth did the other want to do something so terrible? Why didn’t they feel strong enough guilt at the prospect of performing those actions so as to prevent them from going through with it? I know that I have been tempted by such things but I was able to resist. This question mark of blame flies by many different labels and accusations. For inatancw, when we call the other lazy, inconsiderate , selfish, recalcitrant , immoral, criminal.

In sum, we blame the other for our failure to understand them. Perhaps this failure on our part is the true basis of ‘evil’ and all of the violence that emanates from it

Just you just say that Jack used low battery as a relative
example of evil?

I do think that it is likely that good and evil go beyond our own psychologies. — Jack Cummins

It sounds like you’re pointing to a theological dimension.