I am well aware of the various narratives held by individuals, sub-cultures and society. — Tom Storm

Yes, but do you view a scientific theory as essentially a value narrative? And do you then see empirical facts as sub components of those value narratives , such that the ‘fact ‘ would be incoherent apart from the narrative that gives it meaning? If you do, then isn’t the shift from one narrative to another a ‘dissolving’ rather than a ‘solving’ of the problem as it is defined via the
old narrative?

I apologize for this in advance but I can’t resist. This is basically my view of Chomsky. Welcome to my alternative universe:

“Chomsky is a very unattractive personality. (I don’t mean that he’s a bad person; this is about his public presentation only.) He is bullying, hectoring, and tends to berate those who disagree with him. He is intellectually ungenerous – he appears not to have heard of the principle of charity.[1] In her 2003 New Yorker profile of Chomsky, Larissa MacFarquhar described his prose this way:

To read Chomsky’s recent political writing at any length is to feel almost physically damaged. The effect is difficult to convey in a quotation because it is cumulative. The writing is a catalogue of crimes committed by America, terrible crimes, and many of them, but it is not they that produce the sensation of blows: it is Chomsky’s rage as he describes them. His sentences slice and gash, envenomed by a vicious sarcasm. His rhythm is repetitive and monotonous, like the hacking of a machine. The writing is as ferocious as the actions it describes, but coldly so. It is not Chomsky’s style to make death live, to prick his readers with lurid images. He uses certain words over and over, atrocity, murder, genocide, massacre, murder, massacre, genocide, atrocity, atrocity, massacre, murder, genocide, until, through repetition, the words lose their meaning and become technical. The sentences are accusations of guilt, but not from a position of innocence or hope for something better: Chomsky’s sarcasm is the scowl of a fallen world, the sneer of Hell’s veteran to its appalled naïfs.[2]

Why does this appeal to Chomsky’s followers?

For one thing, entering into Chomsky’s world provides some of the benefits of conspiracy theory. Not that Chomsky is a conspiracy theorist. But his model of politics offers an oversimplified, easy-to-understand framework that enables those who adopt it to make superficial sense of the political world, without having to study it closely.[3] It also – again like conspiracy theory – allows them to imagine that they possess a kind of inside knowledge of politics. While the rest of us are beguiled by patriotic clichés and nationalist myths, they see through the ideological illusions and understand power as it is really exercised, namely cynically and brutally.

Chomsky delivers these goods by adopting an archetypal American persona, that of the populist village explainer.[4] [5] The activity of the village explainer consists essentially in debunking, exposing the lies of conventional political wisdom and offering an apparently simpler, clearer, and better-informed appraisal. Chomsky achieves this by reducing political actors and events to caricatures, abstractions, and avatars of crude causal mechanisms. Chomsky’s tone, like that of the village explainer, is basically melodramatic: the virtuous poor versus the parasitic rich, predatory banks and corporations amassing profits on the backs of honest workers, government officials and their lackeys in the media dedicated to hiding the truth and deceiving worthy citizens. With his heavily footnoted essays, allusions to “respected” sources, and references to “official” documents, Chomsky creates an appearance of expertise that lends a spurious authority to his explanations. He offers a dumbed-down picture of politics as if it were the result of keen analysis and laborious scholarship.

To those who haven't bought into the cult, Chomsky comes off as a tedious windbag flogging a crackpot theory. To the initiated, he is a fount of wisdom and insight.

Like many very clever people, Chomsky is prone to acting like a know-it-all. An occupational hazard of intellectuals is the tendency to believe that if you read something, understand it, and find it plausible, then it must be true. Such people memorize an enormous amount of superficial information pertaining to a vast range of topics. They forget that not all forms of knowledge and judgment can be acquired by book-learning alone, and they tend to mistake the map for the territory.”

Frederick Dolan, U.C. Berkeley

If you re-label a serial killer as a person who is chasing their own bliss and working to reach their full potential does that mean the crimes go away? — Tom Storm

Yes, but only if you can put yourself in their shoes and see their intent as justified from their perspective , a perspective that you can build a bridge to. “Chasing ones own bliss” implies not giving a damn about other person’s feelings. That’s a no no because it implies a knowing intent to harm On the other hand , if they follow their delusional voices which tell them the victims were evils dna danger to society we would relabel the crime as an illness.

What is an internal relationality inherent within nature itself? On the whole re-labeling always makes me nervous — Tom Storm

As an atheist ( I assume you are one?), how would you describe the paradigm shift in thinking that takes us from a divine plan to a world which operates via its own mechanisms?

Maybe you don’t think in terms of worldviews , gestalts, paradigms and their transformations when you think about knowledge and the way it changes over the course of cultural history. If that’s the case , then relabeling as dissolving problems won’t make much sense to you because it implies the change in a gestalt.

It almost sounds to me like you are saying if you label things differently the hard problem goes away. Which is not quite the same thing as solving it. Or is it? — Tom Storm

What if I say there is a hard problem of the relation between God and nature? If as an atheist you re-label the relation between the divine plan and the actual world as an internal relationality inherent within nature itself would you say you solved the problem or dissolved it?

Give me one example of what you consider passive-aggressive. He's had thousands of interviews, so it shouldn't be hard to point to one. — Xtrix

I readily admit that I may be projecting here. When I began a sincere attempt to investigate the foundations of Chomsky’s political philosophy, I had a heck of a time figuring how to integrate his ideas with other political thinkers I had some familiarity with. Was he a fan of Marx? No. he stated explicitly that he was not a Marxist. Well, what about the neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt school? No luck there. Postmodernists like Foucault? His discussion with Foucault , available on youtube , clearly puts that out of play. I finally came to the conclusion that Chomsky goes back to the very early era of socialist theorization, when Marx was just one among a variety of responses to capitalism, which was at that time still relatively young.

How did Chomsky end up picking what to me was a peculiarly idiosyncratic niche in political thought? This is where my potential projecting comes into play.
I began to liken Chomsky to others I have known who pride themselves on the imperviousness of their ideas to subsumption by umbrella philosophies, as if they have an instinctive abhorrence of categorization, of being mainstreamed.

This suspicion was strengthens considerably by a long video I watched of a debate between Chomsky and Dershowitz on Israeli politics. I began the video fully prepared to be on Chomsky’s side. After all , he is on the left and Dershowitz is a conservative. I really wanted him to nail Dershowitz to the wall. But to my surprise I became more and more exasperated with Chomsky’s performance. Dershowitz, as you would expect , presented straightforward lawyerly arguments that I expected to see Chomsky directly refute. Instead what I witnessed was a caginess and focus on not being pinned down at the expense of direct debate. I stated to wonder if Chomsky’s entire political career was therapy for some
neurotic relationship with his father. I know, you could probably say the same thing about a majority of philosophers. All I can tell you is the dominant impression I get from Chomsky is a need to be seen as the ultimate outsider.

she has a perfect working model of the brain - how it learns, how memories form, how associations are made, what emotions are where they come from etc and awareness/ consciousness in general — Benj96

Would her brain hack itself using this knowledge? Become smarter and more efficient and take more control over emotions and it’s only psychological evolution now that it has a guideline to make changes to its own core functioning? — Benj96

You’ll notice that this enlightenment tells the researcher nothing specific about the development of ideas over the course of human history. Why not? Because what the scientist has constructed is only an abstract
formalistic model. One could say that her model itself belongs to and furthers this endless historical development of cultural knowledge.But since self knowledge is an endless historical process, she still has all the ‘final truths’ of human psychology still ahead of
her. She will be able to benefit from her insights to the exact extent that all previous advances in understanding benefited from what they contributed. It will push her into a new era and provide new questions and problems. And thus will the cycle continue

I take the view that consciousness , affect, empathy, language , sociality, take care of themselves and can be measured and understood. The hard problem of consciousness... I suspect science will resolve this one day and may already have come close, but people seem to absolutely hate and revile physicalist understandings of subjects they prefer to remain mysterious and connected to, shall we call it, God? — Tom Storm

Let me turn this thinking on its head a bit. Instead of the choices being those indicated by the so-called ‘hard problem’ , either a mysterious inner subjectivity or the clear light of objective empiricism, or a muddled synthesis of the two ( Chalmers) , let me suggest that both sides of that binary are caught up in an inadequate construction of reality. Dennett’s solution to the ‘mystery’ of consciousness is to pick physicalism, but in doing this he stays within the subject vs object, inner vs outer binary.

Phenomenology doesn t force us to choose between these two but instead puts them together in a much more radical way than the mere cobbling of ‘inner feeling’ and ‘outer things’.

There is only a ‘hard problem’ if one begins from a science which ignores the subject’s perspective ( relativity and qm only take the subject into account as another physical object , which is not what I’m talking about )
and a subject whose ‘values’ are irrelevant to the understanding of ‘external’ reality.

I also think with Peterson many people are terribly jealous and resentful that someone like him has come along and become huge when they think they are so much smarter and better informed than Peterson. — Tom Storm

That may be. i’m not jealous of Peterson, I’m jealous of philosophers who produce remarkable ideas I wish I thought of. There are untold interpretations of every major philosopher, and that is as it should be. I don’t think there are such things as ‘correct’ vs ‘incorrect’ readings , only those that to me are more or less interesting or expand the boundaries of my own thinking. Peterson’s reading of writers like Nietzsche isnt wildly outside the mainstream , it’s simply on the conservative end of that spectrum, which I think explains a lot of the hostility he gets from the left. To readers like me, Nietzsche is offering an exciting and profound worldview that is still ahead of its time 140 years later, so its a bit depressing to say the least when he is reduced to a mouthpiece for 19th century liberalism. But if I cringe at Peterson’s treatment of certain philosophers, I react similarly to the efforts of numerous respected academic writers. But to me any mention of Nietzsche or other philosophers in popular culture is welcome , even if it’s by Dwayne Johnson in ‘Fast and Furious ‘. In fact, I’d probably prefer Johnson’s take on Nietzsche to Peterson’s.

I see no reason why one could not provide a reasonable account of biological processes involved in color perception, in an affirmative manner — Olivier5

I guess what I’m saying is that we always have a certain account in mind when we think about what perception isor how we talk about the processes that precede something like perception historically , like the biological evolution of organisms, or something to which they can supposedly be reduced, like physical
processes. So for instance to say that the perceptual can reduce to the biological and the biological can reduce to the physical presents us with a problem because we are not simply shifting our focus from one level of perspective to another, we are moving between accounts which I think are incompatible with each other. Why are they incompatible? Let’s take physics and evolutionary biology. Darwinian theory ground biology on a fundamental principle of the unidirectionality of time. Physics, meanwhile is still mostly in thrall to the notion that time is a human invention that is irrelevant to the understanding of physical
processes. Only now are there some physicists , like Lee Smolen, who are insisting that physics needs to learn from biology and transform itself into a radically temporal account. I think there are similar problems in attempting to reduce perception to a biological account , unless that biological account has learned from constructivists like Piaget, Maturana and Varela.

is there any method of acquiring reliable knowledge better than methodological naturalism? — Tom Storm

Btw, please don’t tell me you prefer Jordan Peterson to Nietzsche. I will have to come to your house and hurt you. However one wants to define methodological naturalism, it is not description that can apply to the entirety of the past 400 as as a approach that science practitioners across that entire span of time would have considered as what they were doing. One can only apply it retroactively to the science of Galileo’s or Newton’s era.
The reason is that everything about how science
characterizes what it is doing changes in subtle ways in parallel with changes in philosophical worldviews. In today’s era, methodological naturalism may be incontrovertible among physicists , who are realists anyway, but not among all psychologists, some of who have ventured beyond realist and representational models of meaning.
I guess the short answer is that methodological naturalism is a help rather than a hindrance depending on how richly intricate and unified one wants one’s description of the world to be. Methodological naturalism gives the natural sciences it’s semi-arbitrary objectively causal models of things, but those are only useful up to a point. At some point physicists will realize that for the purposes of their own advancement of knowledge they will have to integrate their models with the psychology of perception.

What methodological naturalism is particularly unsuitable for , I would argue , is the understanding of myriad psychological phenomena ( consciousness , affect, empathy, language , sociality , etc). For these domains I prefer a radical constructivism.

It seems to me that only a theorist could potentially write off science as they cheerfully embrace all of its fruits and technologies in their congenial universities. In life theory doesn't much matter. No one worries about the problem of induction when they are parking their car in the supermarket lot. — Tom Storm

In life everything we do, no matter how trivial,
is guided and informed by overarching goals that themselves belong to to normative , valuative worldviews. That’s a fundamental aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy and why he critiques the idea of science as search for truth. He not only argued, as did Feyerabend and Kuhn, that science functions as worldview, but that there is no direction toward a ‘more correct’ worldview or theory. His lesson about the death of God and nihilism wasnt to avoid worldviews but to revel in them and their destruction. He hoped the death of God would herald the rise of his kind of man, who posits an endless series of worldviews and doesn’t become attached to any of them.

To say that cars work and planes fly is to say no more than that each era’s philosophical system ‘works’ in its one pragmatic way. Deriding science isnt deriding its results, its saying that when science ‘progresses’ it works differently , not simply better , as if we were approaching a better approximation to what sits out there independent of our own aims and worldviews.

That would be is antithetical to Nietzsche’s thinking.

t would be a mistake to think he was anti-science — Fooloso4

When I think of the expression ‘ anti-science’ , I of course think of Trump. But I also think of the attitude of conservatively minded writers toward philosophers at the opposite end of the political spectrum. The cultural
wars that reached their peak a few decades ago pitted Sokal and his supporters against representatives
of postmodern fields like cultural studies , and individuals like Deleuze and Derrida. The latter were accused of being ‘anti-science’ by the former, because they attacked the precious foundation of method, verification and objectivity upon which modern science is supposedly based. Of course, Sokal and company were
right about what the postmodernists were attacking, but this didn’t mean they thought planes shouldn’t be able to fly.

When you say that Nietzsche is not anti-science, do you have this group of postmodernists in mind as being truly anti-science ?
Do you know of any philosopher who is actually anti-science in the way you mean it?

It is equal parts subject and object. Unlike idealisms, the subject pole doesn’t dominate or determine in any transcendent sense( categories of perception) but neither does the object simply impose itself as a pure empirical given (external sense data) unaffected by the normative influence of the subject pole. There is nothing self-identical about the subject over time.

The desire to find meaning in the universe is not a linguistic quest. Nietzsche denies that such meaning can be found in the universe. Hence my statement: "The universe has always been meaningless." Whatever meaning we find is a meaning we create.
3h — Fooloso4

ok. So you’re saying apprehension of a universe is not a matter of adequation or correspondence with an independent reality but of construction?

There are some noted physicists including John Wheeler who defend the notion of a participatory universe. — Fooloso4

Would you say that for Wheeler
the universe is participatory in a materially causal way or in a valuative way?I realize that ‘value’ would have to be fleshed out in relation to notions like intentionality and goal-oriented normativity.

I really don't see Chomsky as an egomaniac in anything, politics or otherwise. Especially not to "rival" Peterson and Zizek. Give me a break. — Xtrix

I guess if I agreed with his political
philosophy I would notice his passive-aggressive style of argumentation less. Normally I try to get away from focusing on personality style, but you kind of drew me in with your remarks on Peterson and Zizek. Perhaps , like me, you notice their personal idiosyncrasies because you dislike their ideas.

I’m assuming youre a fan of Chomsky’s political thinking?

"Jordan Peterson appears very profound and has convinced many people to take him seriously. Yet he has almost nothing of value to say. This should be obvious to anyone who has spent even a few moments critically examining his writings and speeches, which are comically befuddled, pompous, and ignorant. They are half nonsense, half banality. In a reasonable world, Peterson would be seen as the kind of tedious crackpot that one hopes not to get seated next to on a train. — Xtrix

:up: :up: :up:

For those who seek meaning in the universe it means, but is not limited to, questions of purpose, significance, and our place in it. — Fooloso4

Yes, the notio that the universe is a place that we exist ‘within’ is a realist notion, which I think Nietzsche is implicitly critiquing in the quote I sent you.

Some contemporary physicists do as well, although others treat the laws of nature as eternally unchanging and immutable. — Fooloso4

I agree that some physicists have moved beyond naive direct realism , but I can’t find any who have left realism of all stripes behind, Do you know of any? I can’t imagine any phycisst who would subscribe to Nietzsche’s claim below:

Assuming that our world of desires and passions is the only thing “given” as real, that we cannot get down or up to any “reality” except the reality of our drives (since thinking is only a relation between these drives) – aren't we allowed to make the attempt and pose the question as to whether something like this “given” isn't enough to render the so-called mechanistic (and thus material) world comprehensible as well? I do not mean comprehensible as a deception, a “mere appearance,” a “representation” (in the sense of Berkeley and Schopenhauer); I mean it might allow us to understand the mechanistic world as belonging to the same plane of reality as our affects themselves –, as a primitive form of the world of affect, where everything is contained in a powerful unity before branching off and organizing itself in the organic process (and, of course, being softened and weakened –). We would be able to understand the mechanistic world as a kind of life of the drives, where all the organic functions (self-regulation, assimilation, nutrition, excretion, and metabolism) are still synthetically bound together – as a pre-form of life? – In the end, we are not only allowed to make such an attempt: the conscience of method demands it. Multiple varieties of causation should not be postulated until the attempt to make do with a single one has been taken as far as it will go (– ad absurdum, if you will). This is a moral of method that cannot be escaped these days; – it follows “from the definition,” as a mathematician would say. The question is ultimately whether we recognize the will as, in effect, efficacious, whether we believe in the causality of the will. If we do (and this belief is really just our belief in causality itself –), then we must make the attempt to hypothetically posit the causality of the will as the only type of causality there is. “Will” can naturally have effects only on “will” – and not on “matter” (not on “nerves” for instance –). Enough: we must venture the hypothesis that everywhere “effects” are recognized, will is effecting will – and that every mechanistic event in which a force is active is really a force and effect of the will. – Assuming, finally, that we succeeded in explaining our entire life of drives as the organization and outgrowth of one basic form of will (namely, of the will to power, which is my claim); assuming we could trace all organic functions back to this will to power and find that it even solved the problem of procreation and nutrition (which is a single problem); then we will have earned the right to clearly designate all efficacious force as: will to power. The world seen from inside, the world determined and described with respect to its “intelligible character” – would be just this “will to power” and nothing else.”

Peterson and Zizek are both egomaniacs.

Give me 5 minutes of someone like Noam Chomsky over either of their oeuvres. — Xtrix

Peterson grossly misreads most of the postmodern authors he pontificates about. Zizek’s a windbag but at least he has a solid background in figures like Hegel, Marx, Freud and Kierkegaard. Chomsky is a brilliant psycho-linguist but as a political theorist is an egomaniac to rival the other two, and whose philosophical understanding seems to be arrested somewhere between Hume and Hegel.

The problem is not with the meaning of the term. I suspect you know that. — Fooloso4

What is there outside of the meaning of the term? Put differently , unless you maintain a dualist perspective, positing an objective ‘real world’ existing in itself outside of subject-object interaction, is the idea of a ‘meaningless in itself’ universe even coherent? ( I’m arguing this from a phenomenological philosophical perspective).

He does not deny science. What he denies is the:

metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests — Fooloso4

Yes, and this means he denies that the aim of science should be the attainment of truth, which amounts to a direct critique of modern physics and most sciences outside of perhaps a few branches of psychology.

The universe has always been meaningless. — Wayfarer

Then how are we able to understand the meaning of the word ‘universe’?

This isn't a disparagement. Not even close. — Xtrix

Heidegger had nothing but respect for Kierkegaard, just as he had for Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Descartes, and others -- despite the fact they he considers them still within the realm of Greek ontology. — Xtrix

Indeed, as well he should respect them, because they represent the foundation on which his own philosophy is built. Let me clarify what I mean by disparage in the context of Heidegger’s relationship to Kierkegaard.
Of the philosophical predecessors to one’s own thinking, there are those whose work is distant enough intellectually ( this isn’t necessary correlated with chronology, since Heidegger felt a philosophical proximity to the pre-Socratics) to be of only tangential or historical use to them. By contrast, there is usually a much smaller circle of thinkers whose ideas are considered close enough to one’s own to be considered kindred spirits. For Heidegger, Nietzsche and Holderlin became those figures whereas Kierkegaard was one step removed from this circle. This is what I meant by his being ‘disparaged’ by Heidegger.

I can't find a single time he "disparages" Kierkegaard. — Xtrix

From Gerhard Thonhauser
“Thinker without Category:

“The first volume of the Black Notebooks is exemplary for Heidegger’s hostility against an anthropological and/or existential reading of Being and Time, which Heidegger associates with the name “Kierkegaard” (GA 94, 32–33 and 74–76).

Heidegger’s view of Kierkegaard’s relationship to Hegel is a major aspect of his understanding of Kierkegaard. Heidegger’s perspective remained the same throughout his intellectual development: From a philosophical point of view, Kierkegaard is a Hegelian. Kierkegaard himself, however, did not notice this de- pendency. For that reason, his criticism of Hegel is mistaken, as he failed to see or misunderstood the crucial metaphysical issue that manifests itself in Hegel’s philosophy. In short, Heidegger considered Kierkegaard a Hegelian that deeply misunderstood Hegel, which is why his criticism of Hegel, from a philosophical perspective, is hollow and pointless.

Heidegger:

The pertinacity of dialectic, which draws its motivation from a very definite source, is docu- mented most clearly in Kierkegaard. In the properly philosophical aspect of his thought, he did not break free from Hegel. His later turn to Trendelenburg is only added documentation for how little radical he was in philosophy. He did not realize that Trendelenburg saw Ar- istotle through the lens of Hegel. His reading the Paradox into the New Testament and things Christian was simply negative Hegelianism.

Regarding Heidegger’s relation to Kierkegaard, we can summarize with the observation that the first half of the 1930s is characterized by a tendency to embrace the Dane alongside Nietzsche. That changed around 1935 together with a transformation of Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, whose “The Will to Power” is henceforth considered the completion of metaphysics. As a consequence, Hei- degger includes Nietzsche in his history of being as the final step in the oblivion of being (Seinsvergessenheit), whereas Kierkegaard continues to be excluded from Heidegger’s idiosyncratic history of Western thought. In Contributions to Philosophy he states: “What lies between Hegel and Nietzsche has many shapes but is nowhere within the metaphysical in any originary sense—not even Kierkegaard.”

The first time Heidegger clearly explains his new point of view is in summer term 1936:

Nietzsche’s attitude toward system is fundamentally different from that of Kierkegaard who is usually mentioned here together with Nietzsche...All of this is said, by the way, in order to show by implication that the combination of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, which has now become customary, is justified in many ways, but is fundamentally untrue philosophically and is misleading.31
Through this shift, Nietzsche gains an importance for Heidegger that Kierkegaard never had.

As for Nietzsche, he didn't write two volumes, he taught several courses -- and later than Being and Time. — Xtrix

These were published as 2 two volume books of 200 pages each.

it is the structure the the past only existing as what it occurs into and is changed by.
— Joshs

This isn't very clear, I'm afraid. What does the second "it" refer to? Time or temporality? — Xtrix

Past , present and future are the same moment, what Heidegger calls the three ecstasies of the ‘ now’, The past isnt what is behind me, but that part of the past-present-future hinge which projects forward into the now. The present occurs into this projected past. So there is never a past other than this past which is always already changed by the present which it projects itself into.
This gives the relation between my past ,present and future an extra-ordinary intimacy, the intimacy of Care. It makes the now a becoming rather than a ‘state’.

time temporalizes itself," meaning it emerges and is constructed out of something else. That "something else" is human being, human experience, human needs and interests. — Xtrix

Keep in mind that Heidegger didn’t want to equate Dasein with anthropos , the ‘ human being ‘ as biological entity.
Yes, It emerges and is constructed out of Dasein, but more specifically , it is the structure the the past only existing as what it occurs into and is changed by.

Heidegger is highly influenced by Kierkegaard. It's worth the effort in reading it. — Xtrix

I think he was much more influenced by Nietzsche, who he wrote two volumes about , than kierkegaard, who he only mentioned disparagingly. Unfortunately a whole generation of West Coast Heideggerians ( Dreyfus, Haugeland, Rousse) were mostly influenced by Kierkegaard in their reading ( in my view misreading) of Heidegger. The writers I find most useful in understanding Heidegger are Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche and Derrida , but Kierkegaard very little.

I think science is our best bet at a future. — counterpunch

I didnt realize comparing the value of different cultural modalities came down to a processof elimination.

The advent of computers marks the threshold of epistemic and technological maturity - the bahmitzvah of binary, if not yet the quinceanera of qbits, a coming of age that isn't reflected philosophically, sociologically or politically. — counterpunch

In what way is it not reflected philosophically?You mean you can’t name a single philosopher whose ideas have the ‘maturity’ of the fields you mention?

Galileo had a stultifying effect on the subsequent development of philosophy — counterpunch

What specifically do you object to in post-Galilean developments in philosophy? How do you envision the lineage of Descartes-Spinoza-Leibnitz-Hume-Kant-Hegel-Marx-Nietzsche, etc might have differed without this ‘stultifying effect’?

Most people don't realize 'Starry Night' is Van Gogh trying to paint what he actually saw. — ernest meyer

If you look at the painting Starry Night you’ll notice that Van Gogh didnt just paint rings around lights, he painting a veritable network of streaming movement that includes not only points of light but integrated the lights with the blank sky and clouds. This complex river of movement was intended as a subjective spiritual and emotive statement, not simply a copy of external reality.

the processing is innate, but it is not completely hard-wired. — ernest meyer

Only the capacity to process perceptual relations is innate, the actual constructive process is entirely a process of perceptual learning , which is why sensory deprivation at a crucial juncture in development can cause permanent deficits in sight or other sense modality.

Suppose we are waiting in a dark room as a baby, and our mother comes in and turns the light on, then feeds us. Then when she leaves she turns the light off. This makes an association in our minds that bright light is good, and shadows are bad.

I believe such associations at a very early age explain much of what we personally 'feel' about color. As we grow older, we form more associations, which are more direct, such as red being 'danger' because of traffic lights and blood — ernest meyer

I think there are more interesting and more explanatory models of perception than those which make use of basic stimulus response reinforcement.

Newer approaches think of perception as a form of normative and goal oriented interaction with the world. not simply the processing of data but embodied sensory-motor interaction with environment. The model of blind arbitrary associative reinforcement has been replaced by the idea that perception is anticipative and oriented toward fulfillment of expectations. It doesn’t like surprise or loss of what was anticipated. Thus, what is reinforced isnt simply what is causally associated with a surge of pleasure , but fulfillment of anticipation , completion of pattern, consistency of appearance, a relative match between what we see and what we expect to see. In short , perception is patterned sense making , not causal association shaped by simple reinforcement It prefers coherence over incoherence and chaos.

In this regard, the change from light to darkness that ensues when we turn off a light represents a loss that is intrinsically negative. Of course, we can say we love the dark , but that involves secondary positive features that emerge for us after the immediate change from light to dark. Similarly , I think colors have intrinsic hedonic ‘feel’ to them prior to secondary meanings that are shaped though more complex social interactions, and this feel , like light vs dark , is linked to what I described as their ‘popping out toward us vs receding away from us’. Linking the expression ‘Having the blues’ with the color doesn’t require complex social associations of the color blue but can be directly related to the recessionary character of the basic perception. One can compare these recognized felt qualities of color to the way temporal arrangements of musical
notes provideds us with a feeling vocabulary of music independent of our varying reactions to particular musical pieces. We all recognize that when an octave scale is played it constitutes a subject and predicate. The first 4 notes constitute a completed ‘subject’ phrase and the second 4 are the predicate.Put together as a song , patterns of notes connote beginnings, endings, sadness adm joys, and all variants of moods. How does it manage to do this in such a way that we all recognize the basic feeling elements of music even when we disagree on how good or bad a particular song is ? Through consonances and dissonances that remind us of the rhythms of fulfillment’s and lack of fulfillment’s that perception and cognition in general present us with.
Don’t make the mistake of assuming that this capacity to recognize feeling in music is either ‘innate’ or just a concatenation of reinforcement contingencies.

Look. My sense of what a color is changes in subtle ways in relation to my own previous perception of it all the time , in response to changing contexts of experience , both social-linguistic and private. If I am an artist, the meaning for me of red may be extraordinarily differentiated , and change in all kinds of ways as a result of different projects I engage in. I am constant evaluating and attempting to validate
my previous understanding and use of the sense of all of my perceptions, so my own use of words for color and sound and touch that I use for my own purposes shifts subtly all the time.

In similar fashion, the words we share with others for color undergo all kinds of changes in sense, both those that members of a group agree on and those they don’t. Straws on babbles on about evolutionary and genetic determinants of color perception, but what matters for
the social consensus concerning the meaning of a color word is what sense of color is being meant and how we go about validating whether others are meaning a similar sense not. So for instance ,the word red can be used to pick out an object against a background.
For this task it is irrelevant whether my perceived red is the same as yours. All that matters is that we both consistently pick out the same object. Then there can be an aesthetic use of the word red. If my red is fiery hot, aggressive, angry and yours is the opposite, then the word red in this context isn’t very useful in capturing a shared understanding.

Strawson’s reminder that we may be meaning different things with the use of the same color word is sort of beside the point. First of all, how would we even know this unless we established some situation
to validate it? If we normally don’t force our shared use of words like red to undergo validation its because our pragmatic involvement with it doesn’t present difficulties. The word is doing what we need it to do.

If it came to be that an important shared understanding of a word sense began to unravel, that is, if it became apparent that each user of the word could no longer depend on other users to behave in previously anticipated ways in response to the use of the word, the. it would likely cease to be practical in its present form.

Everything I said about the social validation of color concepts applies to the interpersonal establishment of objective science. This is the point of a phenomenological analysis. Strawson is doing a kind of rudimentary phenomenology when he shows how shared concepts are built from intercorrelations across individual perceptual systems that transcend subordinate differences

as if you and I did not overwhelmingly agree as to what is black and what is white.

Phenomenology starts in the wrong place and proceeds in the wrong direction. — Banno

Then so does Wittgenstein.

Look. My sense of what a color is changes in subtle ways in relation to my own previous perception of it all the time , in response to changing contexts of experience , both social-linguistic and private. If I am an artist, the meaning for me of red may be extraordinarily differentiated , and change in all kinds of ways as a result of different projects I engage in. I am constant evaluating and attempting to validate
my precious understanding of the sense of all of my perceptions, so my own use of words for color and sound and touch that I use for my own purposes shifts subtly all the time.

In similar fashion, the words we share with others for color undergo all kinds of changes in sense, both those that members of a group agree on and those they don’t. Straws on babbles on about evolutionary and genetic determinants of color perception, but what matters for
the social consensus concerning the meaning of a color word is what sense of color is being meant and how we go about validating whether others are meaning a similar sense not. So for instance ,the word red can be used to pick out an object against a background.
For this task it is irrelevant whether my perceived red is the same as yours. All that matters is that we both consistently pick out the same object. Then there can be an aesthetic use of the word red. If my red is fiery hot, aggressive, angry and yours is the opposite, then the word red in this context isn’t very useful in capturing a shared understanding.

Strawson’s reminder that we may be meaning different things with the use of the same color word is sort of beside the point. First of all, how would we even know this unless we established some situation
to validate it? If we normally don’t force our shared use of words like red to undergo validation its because our pragmatic involvement with it doesn’t present difficulties. The word is doing what we need it to do.

If it came to be that an important shared understanding of a word sense began to unravel, that is, if it became apparent that each user of the word could no longer depend on other users to behave in previously anticipated ways in response to the use of the word, the. it would likely cease to be practical in its present form.

Strawson believes in the usefulness of notions like veridicality and mind-independence of experience. Phenomenology sees them as derivative abstractions.

Treating these as if they were mutually exclusive will get you nowhere. — Banno

I did not mean to suggest that they are mutually exclusive. What I meant was, following Husserl and Merleau-Pontus, the ‘physical’ is a higher order derived product of constitution, and can’t be used to ‘explain’ the fundamental basis of color in perception. .

We are influenced by color, both by deep evolutionary forces, and by abstract cultural associations; yet the colors themselves possess no intrinsic properties to cause such influence. The colors themselves are no more than labels we apply to a physical phenomena (parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, in this case). — ernest meyer

Colors are not physical phenomena, they are perceptual phenomena, and as such are the achievement of a constructive process. They are intentional acts , and like all acts, they produce a change of sense. Colors may not present ‘intrinsic’ properties on the order of qualia, but they do present us with the experience of a transformative construction. For instance, the perceptual act of color constitution is created primoridally as a black shape either emerging out of or receding into a dark background. You can demonstrate this yourself. Cut out a white cardboard circle, paint one half black , and then draw a series of black lines following the curvature of the circle on either side of the disk emerging from the black half. Then attach it to a fan and watch the appearance of red and blue.

This explains why red is often a metaphor for anger and aggression, and blue can represent calm and coldness.
Red is literally the sense of a shape popping out at us and blue is an appearance receding from us( and the other colors of the rainbow fit between these two
poles), even as these are just features of a motionless surface.
So our language, through its metaphors , is in fact indicating organizational characteristics ( aggressive approach vs passive receding) of the supposedly ‘private’ feel of color.
Color, like all other perceptions, is never just immediate ‘sense data’ taken from the world , but correlations , figures emerging out of and co-created by their relationship to a background bodily field. And one can see how perceptual correlations are intertwined at a higher level with the social field of interpersonal relations.

I argue that philosophy is a certain strangeness that comes with experience — ghostlycutter

Even better, philosophy discloses the strangeness that is an intrinsic feature of experience but is covered up by everyday living and thinking.

one can't philosophize endlessly, before convening on a decision. — Aryamoy Mitra

That a decision or appraisal emerges, after some length of time, is what accords all meaning to the exercise (to commence with). — Aryamoy Mitra

you're likely embarking on an inexhaustible venture. — Aryamoy Mitra

is it at all worth rationalizing one's being? — Aryamoy Mitra

You make it sound like profound life meanings are some finite set of propositions that we either grasp or fail to grasp.

Let me offer two suppositions to counter your argument. First, if ‘rationalizing one’s existence’ is going to have any significance to one’s actually lived life, it will have to centrally involve insights concerning improving one’s understanding of and empathy with other people.

Second, such insights are not a matter of adequation with reality, but with production of reality , which is a developmental process, meaning every step, however small , along the way can benefit one enormously in getting along with others ( and oneself), and thereby enriching one’s capacity for joy. So you better get started. Think how much time you’ve wasted thinking you needed to hand in a completed report! If it makes you feel any better , all of us , whether philosopher or not, is in a sense ‘rationalizing our life’ every day we live.

Our day to day behavior is the posing of questions that our subsequent experience either validates or invalidates, causing us to re-evaluate our sense of the world as we progress through it. This rationalizing need not be in propositional form, but it may make you happier to articulate it this way if you have a predilection for analytic philosophy.

"positing the spirit" is to pull away from normal discourse, not just in thought, but existentially, and indeed from all that creates separation from God: — Constance

For K, to "posit spirit" is to posit sin, for in this positing one realizes that what we call time is possessed by the eternal present, which is God, the soul. — Constance

Why is the eternal present God, rather than God-sin as the inseparable poles of every present?

Something I wrote on Caputo;
“to maintain a faith in experience as a fluctuation between moments of agential intending is to believe that one is `justified' in locating discrete moments nameable abstractively as God, faith, justice, transcendence opposing themselves to discrete moments identifiable as injustice, evil, nihilism. Caputo wants to argue that the `trace' does not knock out the name of God, but Derrida's trace does knock it out, or rather, splits it in two by preventing there simply being such a thing as a temporary (even if just for an instant) semantic unity nameable as God, love, transcendence, justice, liberation.”

that doesn’t mean they can’t inform or be informed by phenomenological idealism. — Possibility

Contrary to many misinterpretations, Husserlian phenomenology is not an idealism but a radical subject-object interactionism.

Husserl says the following is the incorrect ,Cartesian way of interpreting the Transcendental Ego:

“ But is it not a piece of foolishness to suppose that world has being because of some performance
of mine? Clearly, I must make my formulation more precise. In my Ego there is formed, from out
of mthe proper sources of transcendental passivity and activity, my “representation of the world, ” my “picture of the world, ” whereas outside of me, naturally enough, there is the world itself. But is this really a good way of putting it? Does this talk about outer and inner, if it makes any sense at all, receive its meaning from anywhere else than from my formation and my preservation of meaning?”(Phenomenology and Anthropology)

So what’s happening in your brain when you categorise? You are not finding similarities in the world but creating them. — Lisa Feldman Barrett, ‘How Emotions Are Made’

What this quote from Barrett illustrates is the fact that idealism and realism are two sides of the same coin. Barrett’s cognitive system is a relation. between a ‘real’ independent external world and ideal internal
representations.

Merleau -Ponty echoes Husserl on idealism and empiricism:

“We must now show that its intellectualist [idealist] antithesis is on the same level as empiricism itself. Both take the objective world as the object of their analysis, when this comes first neither in time nor in virtue of its meaning; and both are incapable of expressing the peculiar way in which perceptual consciousness constitutes its object. Both keep their distance in relation to perception, instead of sticking closely to it. This may be shown by studying the history of the concept of attention.”

“...in a consciousness which constitutes everything, or rather which eternally possesses the intelligible structure of all its objects, just as in empiricist consciousness which constitutes nothing at all, attention remains an abstract and ineffective power, because it has no work to perform. Consciousness is no less intimately linked with objects of which it is unheeding than with those which interest it, and the additional clearness brought by the act of attention does not herald any new relationship. It therefore becomes once more a light which does not change its character with the various objects which it shines upon, and once more empty acts of attention are brought in, in place of ‘the modes and specific directions of intention'.(Cassirir)