Even from the first-person point of view we come into direct contact with the outer world. I think the burden of proof lies with those who claim otherwise. — NOS4A2

My favorite quote from Hume:

“ For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception…. If any one, upon serious and unprejudic'd reflection thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu'd, which he calls himself; tho' I am certain there is no such principle in me.”

Whatever a dog represents as a ball or food, isn't learned, it's represented, learning doesn't arise.

In either case representations aren't learned. They grow in the mind. — Manuel

I’m not sure I understand the distinction you’re making between the act of representing a feature of the world , and learning. Isn’t all representation a creative act? Or are you arguing for innate hard-wired categories as an explanation of instinctive behavior?

When scientists apply an interpretation to their findings, they are applying a philosophical judgement, and until their case is proven, there will always be alternate explanations from across the range of possibility. Yet 'Facts' remain unchanged, for ever, and therefore every philosophical interpretation must accommodate every relevant fact if it is to be held as potentially valid. — Gary Enfield

Could you elaborate a bit more on your philosophy of science stance with regard to your assertion that facts remain unchanged forever?

Are you saying that scientific progress is cumulative, with every new set of facts added onto the previous body of scientific knowledge?

Idealism should be the default starting position.
— RogueAI

Irrelevant. Physicalism is the default starting position. — Isaac

There are many forms of physicalism.
For instance , what allows Barrett to reject naive realism is her indebtedness to Kantian idealism. That’s why she can talk about a veil of appearances separating us from a world we have no direct access to and must use interpretive faculties to understand. She would agree we can never access the thing in itself. That notion of the physical only emerged with Kant. So I would say the default position in most of the sciences is a physicalism
derived from , or at least consistent with, Kant’s idealism.

Animals don't have language in any sense of the word. They can communicate, sure. But that's not language. The have cries that signify things like this is edible, this is dangerous, come here and so on. I'm obviously anthropomorphizing the cries. They probably have categories of some kind that allows them to interpret something as a sound for something specific like food or predator, etc. As for dogs when they respond to a command, they are repeating a behavior which they have associated with that command. One command is for them to sit down, for example. They do an action which the human has shown leads to a reward, or a desired outcome. — Manuel

It sounds like you are using a combination of Stimulus Response theory and a notion of prewired innate categories to explain animal communication. But there is much new research showing that animals conceptualize in ways similar to humans.

Can Dogs Learn Concepts the Same Way We Do? Concept Formation in a German Shepherd

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4pb6w96g


“Do animals have concepts?

The considerations above lead most cognitive scientists to assume that the meanings of words and sentences are to be cashed out in non-linguistic mental representations: ‘concepts’ hereafter. However, the cognitive revolution remains incomplete: while few today deny the existence of internal mental representations (concepts) in humans, many remain suspicious when attributing them to animals. Animal cognition researchers are typically required to reject all possible associative explanations, regardless of their complexity, before attributing mental representations to animals [23] and the discipline spends considerable energy and ingenuity refuting so-called killjoy associative explanations [10,24]. Fortunately, the field has matured to the point where, for many phenomena, there can be little doubt that mental representations exist in animals, and can be recalled, manipulated and themselves represented.”

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2019.0046

“ We suggest that several of the major varieties of conceptual classes claimed to be uniquely human are also exhibited by nonhuman animals. We present evidence for the formation of several sorts of conceptual stimulus classes by nonhuman animals: perceptual classes involving classification according to the shared attributes of objects, associative classes or functional equivalences in which stimuli form a class based on common associations, relational classes, in which the conceptual relationship between or among stimuli defines the class, and relations between relations, in which the conceptual (analogical) relationship is defined by the relation between classes of stimuli. We conclude that not only are nonhuman animals capable of acquiring a wide variety of concepts, but that the underlying processes that determine concept learning are also likely to be quite similar. ”

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2008-13159-002

Objects" in the world incite and elicit responses from us, but the world can't teach us what a tree is or what danger is nor what a book is. We have the concept book, tree and we apply it to certain objects in the world. A dog does not have the concept tree, nor does a wolf or an owl. In fact, most of the exotic animals we know of, we don't even encounter ever. We might get the idea from another person describing it, or from a book. Yet we've never experienced it. — Manuel

One could say that the world is a constantly changing flow of events that never repeats itself identically or doubles back on itself. Our challenge to construe stabilities and patterns in that constantly changing flow. Our constructs attempt to find order in events via the ways in which aspects of the world replicate themselves.
In this way a chaos of visual, auditory and tactile sensations which constantly bombard us becomes sorted into stable objects. Other animals must also construe perceptual order out of constantly changing sensory stimulation. So we invent constructs but the world teaches us whether those constructs are useful or not are by either validating or invalidating our constructed patterns that we attempt to impose on the world in order to make sense of it’s changes.
When we use a concept like ‘tree’ we have certain expectations of how that concept will allow us to interact with an aspect of the world. If in a particular context of its use the concept of tree no longer applies to some piece of the world we will have to adjust it.
Many concepts that we use ( book, chair, democracy) are created via our interaction with the human world and so describe social objects. They still need to be validated by the flow of events, just as does a concept like ‘tree’ but in this case they will be validated or invalidated by the interpersonal world rather than events in the world of ‘nature’. Other animals also have concepts for nature as well as social interchanges in their communities. They don’t have the complex verbal language that we do but they do have simpler gestural and auditory language. When your dog responds to a command , or anticipates your next behavior( taking him for a walk) based on your currents actions (bringing him his leash)he has formed a concept. Animals, like us, don’t have to ever have encountered a particular object in order to recognize it as familiar based on its resemblance to something they know. This is due to use of concepts.

as soon as someone can find a way to acquire reliable knowledge outside of what we call methodological naturalism, let's hear it. — Tom Storm

Sounds reasonable , but are you taking into account the problematics of the scheme-content distinction that motivated Kuhn, Rouse , Fine and others to level
the playing field between science and other modalities
of cultural creativity? Is ‘reliable knowledge’ a pragmatic construction that is simply useful in relation to human goals or an attempt to make knowledge
correspond to an independently existing external
world? Is science simply a relation between propositions or the relation between a proposition and ‘the way the world really is’?

All our concepts (tree, large, planet, rock, danger, river, person, pleasure, interesting, book, left, right, animal, books, grass, etc., etc.) , our ability to experience anything, language, the capacity for all our senses - all of these are innate. The world helps activate them, but the world doesn't "teach" us to see or to conceptualize. — Manuel

I was talking about perceptual and conceptual contents, not the innate biological capacities for experience( but even these biological structures are shaped and realized in relation to an environment). All of the concepts you mentioned (tree, large, planet, rock, danger, river, person, pleasure, interesting, book, left, right, animal, books, grass, etc., etc.) are constructed via interaction with a world. There are no innate concepts or perceptions, and that includes the concepts of number, space and time.

I think there's independent existence absent human beings. But I don't think we can access this independent existence. — Manuel

Do we access existence or do we construct it? Does our knowledge mirror an independent world or do we construct that world , contribute to its development? Is knowing copying an outside or is it an interaction that transforms what we see?

this is an empirical question, whether or not all desires are associated with positive or alleviation/avoidance of negative hedonic states. — HamiltonB

It’s a conceptual question before it is an empirical question, meaning that you would probably have to change your definitions of what a psychological system
is and how it operates before the empirical relevance of the idea of sense making as self-motivating can come into view as coherent.

I follow the psychologist George Kelly in substituting validation for reinforcement, and in the process doing away with the distinctions between motivation—affect-hedonic, and cognition-intentionality.
Validation is the relationship one senses between anticipation and realization, so we are ‘motivated’ to validate our anticipations of the world. This encompasses desire and hedonism. Perceived i coherence and confusion is intrinsically ‘unpleasant’.

There's this thing we call the world, there are subjects, and the a priori should be what we bring to the world prior to experience. — Manuel

How can we bring anything to the world
prior to experience? I know that is Kant’s argument but the phenomenological argument is that only IN experience, and not before or outside of it, is there anything that we bring to the world, and what we bring to it is not fixed but co-constructed along with what we experience in the world, and the tow are constantly changing each other. Put differently, we interpret what we experience in the world according to our previous history of experiences in the world. So how we organize the world is constantly being transformed by the world itself. But the world itself has no meaning apart from how we organize it. This is structural coupling , or reciprocal causality. so no ‘thing in itself, since ‘things’ are themselves the products of subject-object reciprocal causality.

Does it cause you displeasure?

This kind of discourse on desire and hedonism treats these terms as substantive entities which mechanistically push and pull a passive psychological system in one direction or another.I am attracted or repelled by an object because of the reinforcement properties of that object, as processed by my system. I think it makes the mistake of treating hedonic entities like pleasure and pain as physiological contents rather than organizational processes directly reflecting the struggles of cognitive sense-making. We are goal-directed, anticipatory creaturesWe don’t need arbitrary mechanisms like hedonic modules to motivate us, Sense making is intrinsically self-motivating.

The world is empirically real and transcendentally ideal. No objects without subject, but more interestingly, no subject without object. — Manuel

It sounds like you’re retaining Kant’s reification of subject and object here.

if we had enough information, we would know everything we could know about how the world is given to us. But we don't, so we investigate it. But what we investigate must have a "correlative" in our nature, because otherwise we couldn't make any sense of experience. — Manuel

What do terms like ‘information’ and ‘given to us’ imply here? It sounds like the world as an independent reality that the idealist subject organizes according to internal categories. But aren’t the subjective and the objective
merely poles of an indissociable interaction , before any a priori subjective formalisms or empirical realities can be claimed? Isn’t THIS the primordial a priori , that of radical interaction of the subjective and the objective? Don’t we need to jettison both the ‘empirically real’ and the categorical apriori?

That’s not saying very much. Most 20th and 21st century movements in philosophy are inconceivable without Kant ( Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Whitehead, Bergson, Dewey, Nietzsche, Heidegger , Wittgenstein, etc.)

I think they're complimentary. Kant and Schopenhauer, same with Husserl. — Dharmi

Husserl’s work represented an explicit critique of Kant. Kant invested the transcendental subject with formal (categorical) contents and the world with independent reality. Husser rejected both categorical subjective content and independent external reality.

You have to start by comparing thought to material in order to conceive of either. They're a package deal conceptually. — frank

Which is why phenomenologisits argue that idealism and empiricism are two sides of the same coin, and both depend on dualist assumptions.

Empiricism subjects everything to the tribunal of 'what can be sense and quantified'. What cannot be quantified is discounted a priori.
— Wayfarer

Yes. As I just explained, this is not mindless dogma. There's a fundamental and very compelling reason why that's the case. It's because we're talking to one another, two humans. The thing we share is the material world. Anything else is not shared, so there's no fact of the matter about it to be discussed. You might feel there's a purpose to life. I might not. It's irrelevant to any discussion because there's no shared content. If you feel the cup is on the table and I don't, we can both reach for it and find out. — Isaac

We don’t ‘share’ the material world because the notion of a same world for everyone is incoherent. We each interpret a world relative to our unique vantage. This can result in communities of normative agreement because of relative interpersonal similarities in outlook. Quantitative methods in empirical research only work by masking interpersonal differences in interpretation, to provide the illusion that everyone is on the same page.
The reason there can appear to be more agreement within a scientific community than within a philosophical community is because the former uses less precise, more abstractive concepts than the latter.

As John Shotter wrote:

“ So, although two scientists might not differ at all in doing calculations, making predictions, and in pro-explanations when working with scientific formulae, differences could still occur between them in the connections and relations they sense as existing within the phenomena of their inquiries. But these would only show up, notes Hanson (1958) in the different directions their new inquiries would take, “in ‘frontier' thinking – where the direction of new inquiry has regularly to be redetermined” (p.118).”

But if it can be identified and measured, it is still materialism. — Tom Storm

Wiki says :

“Materialism is a form of philosophical monism that holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions. According to philosophical materialism, mind and consciousness are by-products or epiphenomena of material processes (such as the biochemistry of the human brain and nervous system), without which they cannot exist.”

Is this consonant with your view of materialism?
If so, I can give you plenty of examples of psychologists who considers themselves to be doing science but yet reject materialism. They deal with entities that can be identified and measured, but these are not ‘matter’ in a physicalistic sense but intersubjectively constructed patterns. And they do not believe these are reducible to physicalistic matter.

'The problem of evil' is something that I have often pondered since it was first brought to my attention by Franz Liszt. — scientia de summis

For me , the problem of evil is that people believe there is such a thing. There are those who call themselves atheists and still have use for this concept. But the notion of evil presumes a metaphysical stance. This may not include belief in a personal god but I do think it belongs within the camp of heretical, progressive approaches to religious faith, and probably motivates even those who would deny having any such faith.

I don’t see consciousness as ‘an additional property in the world’, and I don’t think that’s how Chalmers depicts it. Chalmers' issue is the how to provide an explanation of 'what it is like to be' something. — Wayfarer

Zahavi argues that Chalmers sees intentionality and phenomenology as separable properties in the world. It seems to me the paper you linked to also does this.

“Chalmers's discussion of the hard problem has identified and labeled an aspect of consciousness that cannot be ignored. However, his way of defining and distinguishing the hard problem from the easy problems seems in many ways indebted to the very reductionism that he is out to oppose. If one thinks that cognition and intentionality is basically a matter of information processing and causal co-variation that could in principle just as well go on in a mindless computer–or to use Chalmers' own favored example, in an experienceless zombie–then one is left with the impression that all that is really distinctive about consciousness is its qualitative or phenomenal aspect. But this seems to suggest that with the exception of some evanescent qualia everything about consciousness including intentionality can be explained in reductive (computational or neural) terms; and in this case, epiphenomenalism threatens.

To put it differently, Chalmers's distinction between the hard and the easy problems of consciousness shares a common feature with many other recent analytical attempts to defend consciousness against the onslaught of reductionism: They all grant far too much to the other side. Reductionism has typically proceeded with a classical divide and rule strategy. There are basically two sides to consciousness: Intentionality and phenomenality. We don't currently know how to reduce the latter aspect, so let us separate the two sides, and concentrate on the first. If we then succeed in explaining intentionality reductively, the aspect of phenomenality cannot be all that significant. Many non-reductive materialists have uncritically adopted the very same strategy. They have marginalized subjectivity by identifying it with epiphenomenal qualia and have then claimed that it is this aspect which eludes reductionism. But is this partition really acceptable, are we really dealing with two separate problems, or is experience and intentionality on the contrary intimately connected“

https://www.academia.edu/9561065/Intentionality_and_phenomenality_A_phenomenological_take_on_the_hard_problem

Through subjects including cognitive science and psychology, although there will always be a controversy about the degree to which psychology is real science. And what these approaches 'leaves out' is precisely the subject of Chalmer's paper, 'Facing up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness'. — Wayfarer

Their criticism applies equally to this general picture, it is true. But it is that general picture that Chalmers' criticism is addressing. — Wayfarer

So are you saying that Chalmers is arguing the following?:

“One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.”

Or that he is agreeing with this?:

“One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism.”

My impression was that Chalmers is sympathetic to the first position,not the second , that he is arguing from a realist perspective that consciousness is an additional property in the world.

I was using "ideology" in a fairly negative way in my post. Ideology as an inflexible, dogmatic viewpoint. — T Clark

Of course, It doesn’t have to be used this way. Ideology can be synonymous with worldview, paradigm or philosophy, which is how I am using it to apply to science.

concept to what I have in mind. All life seems to exhibit intent, living organisms seem to want to do something as opposed to following the normal course of events either chemically or in a physics sense. What I'm getting at is in some sense encapsulated in the expression "a life of its own." — TheMadFool

It is possible the reason physics and the life sciences do not seem to converge on each other is not that there is something intrinsically different about the nature of life , but that the cocos tula foundation of physics has lagged behind that of evolutionary biology. That was Piaget’s argument. He suggested that physics would eventually catch up with where biology has led, in the same way that biology has recently converged with cognitive science via enactive self -organizing systems models. He mentions that complexity theory and dynamical
systems approaches show how physics can be re-thought as a science of creative self -transformation rather than static equilibrium states, and in this way reveal it to be dealing with ‘intentionality’.

“...physics is far from complete, having so far been unable to integrate biology and a fortiori the behavioural sciences within itsel. Hence, at present, we reason in dififerent and artificially simplified domains, physics being up to now only the science of non-living, non-conscious things. When physics becomes more 'general’, to use C.-E. Guye's striking expression-and discovers what goes on in the matter of a living body or even in one using reason, the epistemological enrichment of the object by the subject which we assume here as a hypothesis, will appear perhaps as a simple relativistic law ot perspective or of co- ordination of referentials, showing that for the subject the object could not be other than it appears to him, but also that from the object's point of view the subject could not be different.”

“ between two structures of different levels there can be no one-way reduction, but rather there is reciprocal assimilation such that the higher can be derived from the lower by means of transformations, while the higher enriches the lower by integrating it. In this way clectro-magnetism has enriched classical mechanics, giving rise to a new mechanics; and gravitation has been reduced to a kind of geometry in which curvature is determined by mass. Similarly we may hope that the reduction of vital processes to physico-chemistry will add new enriching properties to the latter.”

Prigogine's recent work on "dissipative-structures seems to show that the series "organism behavior- sensorimotor -conceptual psvchogenesis could be completed toward the lower end by relating the biological and hence cognitive structures to certain-forms ot dynamic equilibrium in physics (where the study of these structures -was motivated precisely by the need to relate the two disciplines to each other).

Science is an ideology, not a religion. — T Clark

Science is many ideologies , or. more precisely, a historical continuum of transforming ideologies, moving in parallel with transformations in all other areas of culture , including and interwoven with the continuum of transforming ideologies of religion.

If you are going to say science is a worldview, fine. So is everything, from medicine to sport. But some worldviews are more helpful than others. — Tom Storm

I would modify that statement to read: science is a word which points to a historically developing progression of worldviews rather than a single worldview, changing in tandem with other aspects of culture. Thus we can speak of Enlightenment , modernist and postmodernist eras of science, literature,art, philosophy, etc. It is the pragmatic usefulness of the larger cultural worldview informing and defining the science of a given era that determines its helpfulness. So I agree that’s some
worldviews are more helpful than others. For instance Popper’s Kantian-inspired modernist view of science as falsificationism is more helpful than Bacon’s Enlightenment hypothetical -indicative definition. And I think Kuhn and Feyerabend’s postmodern view of science is more helpful that Popper’s modernist worldview.
It has been said that modem physics is an instantiation .of a modernist worldview whereas Newtonian physics represented an Enlightenment worldview. The attempt to bring irreversible temporality into the center of physics by researchers like Lee Smolen may indicate the beginnings of a shift of physics into a postmodern science.
The shifts of worldview within the history of psychology can also be noted. Jerry Fodor, one of cognitivism's leading and most eloquent exponents, said that "In intellectual history, everything happens twice, first as philosophy and then as cognitive science.". He added that the only respect in which first generation cognitivism is a major advance over eighteenth- and nineteenth-century representationism is in its use of the computer. Enactivist approaches in cognitive
science represent a shift in worldview within the field
away from modernist realism and representationalism , and in the direction of postmodern intersubjectivity.

what benefits do you believe your worldview brings, which are not available to the person who thinks the scientific method is the only reliable pathway to truth available to us at the moment? — Tom Storm

Since when is the ‘scientific method’ not itself a worldview.? More accurately put, is there any such thing as THE scientific method? A quick glance at the history of philosophy of science shows that science’s understanding of its methods and practices has undergone many shifts over the past centuries. Your particular understanding of the methods of science and their significance and justification belongs to a particular
philosophy of science( a realist , Popperian one), as opposed to a post -realist philosophy of science along the lines of Kuhn, Feyerabend and science studies writers like Joseph Rouse. I suppose one way to define scientism is the mistaken belief that one particular interpretation of the role and methods of science is the one true interpretation.

I agree that there are important, completely non-scientific ways of understanding consciousness and experience and science that doesn't recognize that is scientism. But when people talk about "the hard problem of consciousness," they are generally talking about consciousness as a scientific issue. It is perfectly possible to study consciousness on a purely scientific basis. Something is lost, left out when you do that. — T Clark

That would be the realist position , which starts from the belief that the hard problem really is a problem rather
than a result of a dualist metaphysics. For the realist , all that is lost by studying consciousness is some ineffable subjective quality, like a spice that can be added or removed at will.

As Evan Thompson writes:

“ “Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. The hard problem is the conceptual and metaphysical problem of how to bridge this apparent gap. There are many critical things that can be said about the hard problem (see Thompson&Varela, forthcoming), but what I wish to point out here is that it depends for its very formulation on the premise that the embodied mind as a natural entity exists ‘out there' independently of how we configure or constitute it as an object of knowledge through our reciprocal empathic understanding of one other as experiencing subjects. One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.

One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism. From the phenomenological perspective explored here, however — but also from the perspective of pragmatism à la Charles Saunders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, as well as its contemporary inheritors such as Hilary Putnam (1999) — this transcendental or metaphysical realist position is the paradigm of a nonsensical or incoherent metaphysical viewpoint, for (among other problems) it fails to acknowledge its own reflexive dependence on the intersubjectivity and reciprocal empathy of the human life-world.“

You will have to provide a simple example. If you're simply talking theory then this is largely inconsequential. — Tom Storm

You mean psychoanalytic theory, S-R theory and cognitive behavioral theory are also inconsequential, or did you mean that it would be difficult for you to assess the practical usefulness of a theory you are unfamiliar with without some examples of how it is put into practice? Rogers’a client centered therapy, Gendlin’s focusing and George Kelly’s personal construct therapy are some examples of post-realist psychotherapeutic approaches. Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson have a applied post-realist framework to perceptual and consciousness research, and Matthew Ratcliffe uses this perspective in his model of affectivity and his studies of schizophrenia , depression, ptsd, grief, etc.
You can check out Jan Slaby’s
research group in Germany for a post-realist model of neuroscience. Or look at Shaun Gallagher’s post -realist accounts of thought-insertion and his critique of theory of mind accounts of autism.

From Wiki:

“Enactivism argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment.[1] It claims that the environment of an organism is brought about, or enacted, by the active exercise of that organism's sensorimotor processes."The key point, then, is that the species brings forth and specifies its own domain of problems ...this domain does not exist "out there" in an environment that acts as a landing pad for organisms that somehow drop or parachute into the world. Instead, living beings and their environments stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or codetermination." p 198[2] "Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world."[3] These authors suggest that the increasing emphasis upon enactive terminology presages a new era in thinking about cognitive science.”

I don't disagree with most of what you say but I don't think it makes an impact on the efficacy of methodological realism as the only useful tool we have for determining the nature of our experience. — Tom Storm

It depends on what aspect of our experience you have in mind. Our natural sciences don’t seem to suffer from their dependence on realism, but then that’s probably because these fields have yet to produce an alternative to compare it to ( but they will eventually).
As far as the social sciences are concerned it is a different story, especially in psychology. Here we do have post-realist alternatives in hermeneutic, enactivist , constructivist, social constructionist, and phenomenological approaches. These accounts recognize that one can maintain naturalism while jettisoning realism.

I guess what I’m saying is even simple creatures are subjects of experience - they’re beings. And so they can’t be fully understood by the same laws that govern inanimate matter. — Wayfarer

I know that Heidegger would phrase this differently , and I think so would Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. For Heidegger, Being isnt ‘a’ being, a subject, in the Kantian sense of a formal content. It is the in-between of subjectivity and objectivity, so neither the subjective nor the objective pole can be ‘measured’ except in relation to each other. That is why he rejected humanism, which wants to see subjectivity as a kind of standing reserve. For Husserl the self , in the form of the ego, has no substantive content in itself, other than being a kind of zero point of noetic-noematic correlations. It seems to me the religious impulse is to locate a transcendent content or vector or telos in subjectivity, which is associated in some grounding way with the good, while the phenomenologists see the good as a relative subject-object construction.

But we’re talking about something unmeasurable in principle. — Wayfarer

It is describable though. I’m more familiar with Zahavi’s phenomenologically- based pre-reflective awareness than Nagel’s notion of the feeling of what is is like to be aware. In Zahavi’s case , this subjective felt sense never stands alone but always as one side of a subject’s intentional relation to objects. And thus it is not an essence or category but an aspect or pole. He describes it as like a source of light that , along with illuminating everything that falls within its scope , renders itself visible as well.

I’m wondering , how would you articulate the difference between the religious and the atheistic account of pre-reflective self -awareness , the ‘feeling of what it is like’?

Suffering and stressors are essential factors of human life and I don't think we should get rid of them if they're nothing detrimental to us. — Nagel

There are some approaches to therapy that don’t pathologize the client , but instead see their difficulties as arising out of the inevitable stucknesses and confusions that our explorations of life lead us into from
time to time. They see their role as a partnership with the client in a kind of combined philosophical and scientific investigation into creative ways the client might reconstrue their circumstances rather than seeing themselves merely as victim of those circumstances.

Simply because a lot theories are based on evidence. — TaySan

By definition, scientific theories are based on evidence. And what counts as evidence is based on a pre-existing framework defining what counts as evidence. And this paradigmatic framework is of the order of a philosophical system.

The vast majority of mortalities from severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 are from people with comorbidities, and the elderly, so the numbers are almost entirely unknown. — Paul S

Don’t you think a pretty good indicator of how many died due to Covid , who would not otherwise have died , is by looking at the average overall number of deaths from all causes on a yearly basis ( say over the past 10 years) and comparing it to the number of deaths from all causes in the past 12 months? I recognize that the number of deaths from all causes fluctuates from year to year, but it does so within a range, and I’m betting that range is on the order of only 10’s of thousands. If in the U.S. there has been anywhere near 600,000 more deaths than would be expected in an average year , then it simply would not be true that “the numbers are almost entirely unknown.” In fact, the opposite would be the case. The numbers , give or take a certain percentage, are clearly demonstrable. The fact that these deaths are among a vulnerable population is irrelevant. Those people would not have died if not for Covid.

https://www.cbs19.tv/amp/article/news/health/coronavirus/verify-comparing-total-deaths-from-2020-to-2019-and-2018/501-355b857c-e7e9-40e4-b31d-11500cbcb103

Saved us from doom scenarios like the Spanish Flu and the Bubonic Plague. Compared to those, the amounts of death and suffering have been minimal. — TaySan

Within the next 4 weeks , 600,000 people will have died in the U.S. in the 12 month span since the pandemic began, which will tie the total estimated number of fatalities in the U.S from the Spanish Flu. It took two years to reach that milestone 110 years ago, but Covid accomplished that feat in half the time. To put that number in perspective, here are the leading causes of death in the U.S. in 2019:


Heart disease: 659,041
Cancer: 599,601
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 173,040
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 156,979
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 150,005
Alzheimer’s disease: 121,499
Diabetes: 87,647
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 51,565
Influenza and pneumonia: 49,783
Intentional self-harm (suicide): 47,511


Do you still think number of fatalities from Covid is 'minimal' compared to the Spanish Flu.?

science & technology have saved us. I'd love to hear how philosophy could contribute to that. — TaySan

As a previous poster noted, you just heard it from your own mouth(keyboard), since all scientific theories are elaborations of philosophical systems.

.

The work for Feldman Barrett, Seth and Friston is based on what they see happening inside the brain, It's not an overarching philosophical model, it's a theory posited to explain the neurological phenomena they have observed. I'm left, after multiple pages, still unclear as to what neurological phenomena the approaches you're describing are trying to model. — Isaac

Barrett, Friston and Seth’s work doesn’t amount to an explicitly conceived overarching philosophical model, because they are not philosophers. But it implicitly rests on such overarching philosophical assumptions, just as does every empirical enterprise.

What’s at stake here is not what neurological phenomena enactivist approaches are trying to model, but a more fundamental questioning: what is a natural object like a neuron, a brain or a body, what do we mean when we talk about observing such phenomena, what is an internal and an external environment and how do these all relate to each other? These are primarily philosophical and not empirical questions and they require a philosophical investigation. I’m not saying there’s no room at all for empirical clarification, but that must come after the conceptual work.

The work for Feldman-Barrett, Seth and Friston, is, prior to being about any phenomena like the ‘inside of a brain’, based on a certain set of philosophical pre-suppositions that make such notions as ‘inside brains’ and ‘computational representations’ meaningful in the way they are to them in the first place and justify their research project.

I have now read carefully a number of writings by Clark , Friston and Barrett, and I can say with confidence that their thinking is squarely within the realist tradition( not naive realism, as Barrett points out, but a more sophisticated neo-Kantian version which distinguishes between real sense data and constructed human realities.

So, far from being mere ‘observation’ (observation, I suppose, in Barrett’s sense of looking at ‘real’ natural phenomena. As she writes “...concepts exist in your human mind that is conjured in your human brain, which is part of nature. The biological processes of categorization, which are rooted in physical reality ...are observable in the brain and body”) , the natural phenomena to be observed come already-pre-interpreted.

You have said things over the course of our discussion that led me to think that perhaps your view of the basis of science is a full-going post-realist one. But I have to assume your philosophical assumptions underlying your thinking about psychological phenomena jibes with the authors you follow.

If the following quotes from Barrett don’t raise red flags for you, or strike you as in any way problematic , then no amount of empirical evidence from enactivist quarters will make any difference.

“If you talk to a chemist, “real” is a molecule, an atom, a proton. To a physicist, “real” is a quark, a Higgs boson, or maybe a collection of little strings vibrating in eleven dimensions. They are supposed to exist in the natural
world whether or not humans are present—that is, they are thought to be perceiver-independent categories. If all human life left this planet tomorrow, subatomic particles would still be here.”

“ Plants exist objectively in nature, but flowers and weeds require a perceiver in order to exist. Common sense leads us to believe that emotions are real in nature and exist independent of any observer, in the same manner as Higgs bosons and plants.”

I know that your field is neuroscience, not philosophy, but if the only thing that would make the enactivist perspective( or any of a whole slew of post-realist arguments ) convincing to you is empirical evidence or a model written in the language of neuroscience, then you’re missing the point. This is a philosophy forum, not a neuroscience blog. As Jerry Fodor pointed out, "In intellectual history, everything happens twice, first as philosophy and then as cognitive science.”.

If I were to start this discussion over from scratch , I would collect quotes like the above from Barrett, Friston and Seth and simply ask you which philosophical perspectives you think would find them troublesome and why. If your answer is you’d prefer to remain within the confines of contemporary neuroscientific discourse, we could end the conversation there because, while there may be a bevy of such activity, I’m not familiar with its details. More importantly , as I mentioned, whatever neuroscientific work is being done within post-realist approaches will not be decipherable without an understanding of the philosophical pre-suppositions undergirding it. That means it should not be necessary for this discussion to delve into the world
of neuroscience. To help make my point, Barrett’s writing, and Clark’s also , is loaded with references to philosophical frameworks that their thinking breaks free of ( for instance, Barrett’s mention of naive realism, and Clark’s references to Cartesian dualism and essentialism). So it seems to me they are quite awareness of the philosophical underpinnings of approaches they are rejecting. As impressed as I am sure they have been with empirical findings that surprised them or seemed initially counterintuitive, I believe they would acknowledge that
the neuroscientific evidence alone could not have formed the backbone of pp models. If you asked Barrett or Clark what a neuroscientific model looks like that is grounded in naive realism, essentialism or Cartesian dualism, I think they could tell you.

The point I'm making is that we can't (as the phenomenologists would have us do) reverse-engineer this effect, because the 'task' that's relevant to the priors is not necessarily one we're even aware of, and certainly one on many going on at the same time. — Isaac

We're never doing one thing at once, there's never 'a task' for our brain to be holistically oriented toward. — Isaac

This needs to be clarified. First, there is a distinction to be made between the views of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, and the current crop of writers( Varela, Thompson, Gallagher , Ratcliffe ) who incorporate elements of their work in their own models. I don’t think any of these current writers would disagree with the idea that partially independent subprocesses functioning in parallel underlie, and are hidden from conscious awareness.

Varela writes:

“...the overall picture of mind not as a unified, homogenous entity, nor even as a collection of entities, but rather as a disunified, heterogenous collection of networks of processes seems not only attractive but also strongly resonant with the experience accumulated in all the fields of cognitive science.”


On the other hand, you would be right to claim that Heidegger, Husserl and MP would argue that the idea of partially independent subsystems functioning in parallel violates the organizational grounding of phenomenology in temporality. But I don’t think this is relevant to the critiques being leveled against pp models from enactivist writers.

In approaches like that of Matthew Ratcliffe and Varela, the emphasis is not on WHAT is taking place when one has the sort of experience Barrettdescribes, but on HOW one has it, in the sense of how one is finding oneself in the world, one’s comportment toward events.
— Joshs

I'm not sure I follow. 'How' in what sense? (I'm afraid 'finding oneself in the world' hasn't made it any clearer — Isaac

Afterall, the world is not altered for us in any one unique way when we're anxious, any more than our physiological states are in any one unique set up. What Barrett is trying to say is that the way the world appears to change is one of the factors involved in the model. — Isaac

But how is the way the world appears to change related to the aims of the system, and what lends coherence to these aims? Is there in fact a system at all
for Barrett in the sense of an integrated normative directionality? I get the sense that for Barrett all these sources of input into the system are a jumbled accumulation of semi-independent and semi-arbitrary bits of information , and that human goal-directedness is not much more than a more sophisticated, action-oriented pattern-matching version of S-R( judges in a cited study rule more negatively before lunch than after, thanks to the brain’s interpreting of the arbitrary negative interoceptive reinforcement from the ‘body budget’). I imagine Barrett as a psychotherapist treating the client’s aims, goals, desires and feelings as being at the mercy of internal and external circumstance, and in fact signifying nothing more than an arbitrary transition from dominating circumstance to circumstance. Better yet, to the extent that her model is in line with that of Friston, the reductionistic plumbing metaphors of Freud’s id-ego-superego paychodynamics seem to be a good fit for her approach.

(The default-mode, ego-functions and free-energy: a neurobiological account of Freudian ideas.
R. L. Carhart-Harris, K. J. Friston. Brain, Volume 133, Issue 4, April 2010)


The ‘how’ of finding oneself in the world that enactivists talk about depends on their viewing a cognitive-environmental system as normative in character, that is, as functioning as an autonomous whole in a certain reciprocal causal exchange with its world. This normativity creates the criteria for what perturbs it , not discrete packets of environmental information that it has to match itself to. And this normativity allows us to talk of emotions as just special versions of an affective attunement toward the world which is always present in cognitive functioning, indicating how interactions with the world either facilitate or degrade the system’s autonomy.
I could be wrong, but I don’t see how one could call a cognitive system’s attempt to match external input with internally generated representations fully normative.

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)

what makes the sensible default hypotheses non-task relativeness for edge recognition and contrast detection; or whatever broader category they lay in; when the rest of the procedure is task-relative? — fdrake

tasks (in the sense I think the phenomenologists meant it - 'doing the shopping', eating a sandwich'...) are modelled by areas of the brain several steps removed from the primary visual cortices. — Isaac

Let me suggest the way that Husserl and Merlea-Ponty would answer the question of whether there can be any such thing as a non task-relative sensation. But first, I’m wondering whether such a concept would fall under Sellars’s myth of the given.

Varela summarizes Goodman’s version of this:

“To be objective, the interpretationist points out, one would have to have some set of mind-independent objects to be designated by language or known by science. But can we find any such objects? Let us look at an extended example from the philosopher Nelson Goodman.

A point in space seems to be perfectly objective. But how are we to define the points of our everyday world? Points can be taken either as primitive elements, as intersecting lines, as certain triples of intersecting planes, or as certain classes of nesting volumes. These definitions are equally adequate, and yet they are incompatible: what a point is will vary with each form of description. For example, only in the first "version," to use Goodman's term, will a point be a primitive element. The objectivist, however, demands, "What are points really?" Goodman's response to this demand is worth quoting at length:

If the composition of points out of lines or of lines out of points is conventional rather than factual, points and lines themselves are no less so. ... If we say that our sample space is a combination of points, or of lines, or of regions, or a combination of combinations of points, or lines, or regions, or a combination of all these together, or is a single lump, then since none is identical with any of the rest, we are giving one among countless alternative conflicting descriptions of what the space is. And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? Neither the space (a) as an undivided whole nor (b) as a combination of everything involved in the several accounts; for (a) and (b) are but two among the various ways of organizing it. But what is it that is so organized? When we strip off as layers of convention all differences among ways of describing it, what is left? The onion is peeled down to its empty core.”

Now let me analyze a notion like ‘edge’ in the way that I think Husserl might. Imagine that we are a
creature recently emerged from the womb and just beginning to make perceptual sense of the environment via our various modalities of reception and action. Husserl begins with the assumption that we only experience a sensation as that sensation if it is meaningful to us, and its meaning is bound up with usefulness , that is, how perceiving something helps us to navigate our environment , to pick up and handle
objects, to recognize and pursue sources of food, shelter, danger, etc. It might seem obvious , even primitive, how the perception of edges are useful to us(there can be no object differentiated from a background without contrast). But is an edge
the same thing as a contrast? Let’s think about what is necessary in order to have an edge. First of all, an edge is not the same thing as a point in space. It implies a multiplicity of points or contrasts of some sort. Could we say the that it requires recognizing a surface? What is it that composes a surface? Our geometrical knowledge tells us that a surface has such and such characteristics, but isnt this a higher order abstraction? There can be no such thing as an abstract surface in nature any more than there can be a straight line. The point isn’t simply to question the primordiality in nature of perfect lines and surfaces but to question the very concept of a line or surface as a sensory given rather than a relative constructive hypothesis.


Surfaces are imperfect in shape, color , hue, brightness, texture, etc, notnbecause the are imperfect exemplars of the category ‘surface’ but because the very notion of surface as a unitary entity is an idealization subjectively constructed. And if this is true of a surface it is also true of its boundary. Often our visual sense cannot confirm a boundary that fades and disperses and gets lost and blended with changes in light, shadow, color , depth, etc. Sometimes only the recourse to movement and touch allow for a construction that leads to a notion of something like a boundary. And how many different meanings of boundary might there be, depending on how we are seeking to interact with it?
A ball has a boundary which appears as an edge visually but only when we attempt to interact with it do we discover the notion of sphericalness. There are boundaries between planes which pre-suppose
the notions of ‘in-front-of’ and behind. Recognition of such ‘edges’ protect us from falling off cliffs. Sometimes we don’t need to know what’s
behind or in front of. Instead we need to know what is above or below, to the left of or to the right of. Perhaps it is the boundary itself we are pursing in a directional fashion. And of course, the orientedness in space of a perceptual feature does not originarily take place in objective space but in the subjective space
of embodiment. My body is the zero point relative to which everything that I perceive is correlated and is orientated.

These orientation concepts are complex constructions , as we know from brain pathologies in which one loses the ability to process left from right. There are also brain injuries that cause neglect of one side of the field of vision or of the body. This is not due to damage to sensory reception but to a kind of apathy. (In Schizophrenia we often find a failure to demarcate where one’s body stops and the world begins. This bleeds over into the a failure to recognize boundaries of other objects. The issue here with edges isn’t one of sensory input but of significance, the relations between the object and my aims. If purposiveness becomes fragmented, the world and its contours fragments along with it. )

So are all these examples of goal-oriented tasks just different constructions based on a task-neutral sensory primitive called an ‘edge’? Husserl would say that none of them are, and that in fact there can be no such singular category like ‘edge’ that encompasses these varying contextual constructions. Each is telling the organism something original and invaluable to their present need to interact with an aspect of the world , about the way a new feature contrasts with the previous(aboveness, belowness, behind or in front of, sphericalness) in relation to one’s bodily position and in the context of how one is specifically intending to interact with an aspect of the world.

The question then becomes, from Husserl’s vantage, where do we get the idea that there are such subject-neutral things in nature called edges or points? His answer was that these are the product of an abstract idealization of the perceived world that was invented between the time of Aristotle and Galileo in the form of objective geometrical mathematization. This idealization was itself
designed to perform certain tasks, but has been taken as the foundation for the analysis of the perceived world, in the form of objective sensation primitives. The examples I gave above become imperfect variations derived from a gemotricized subject-independent space-time model of sensation.

I don't really know how Heidegger would deal with objects showing themselves out of a background mechanically, certainly don't recall anything about it. — fdrake

Heidegger agrees with Husserl and Merleau-Ponty that there is no such thing as a task-neutral sensation. But his reasoning differs from these authors. MP and Husserl ground experiencing in perception and argue that even the most primitive perceptual features are the result of constructive processes in which expectations are crucial. Heidegger, however, believes all new experiences are bound up so directly in holistically organized pragmatic aims and significances that trying to ground Being in perception produces an artificial abstraction. Instead, he founds all experiencing on what he calls the ‘as’ structure. We see something ‘as’ something , that is, as the contextual, pragmatic way it matters to us in relation to our ongoing concerns.

“Da-sein hears because it understands. On the basis of this existentially primary potentiality for hearing, something like hearkening becomes possible. Hearkening is itself phenomenally more primordial than what the psychologist "initially" defines as hearing, the sensing of tones and the perception of sounds. Hearkening, too, has the mode of being of a hearing that understands. "Initially" we never hear noises and complexes of sound, but the creaking wagon, the motorcycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the crackling fire. It requires a very artificial and complicated attitude in order to "hear" a "pure noise." The fact that we initially hear motorcycles and wagons is, however, the phenomenal proof that Da-sein, as being-in-the world, always already maintains itself together with innerworldly things at hand and initially not at all with "sensations" whose chaos would first have to be formed to provide the springboard from which the subject jumps off finally to land in a "world." Essentially understanding, Dasein is initially together with what is understood. In the explicit hearing of the discourse of the other, too, we initially understand what is said: more precisely, we are already together with the other beforehand, with the being which the discourse is about. We do not, on the contrary, first hear what is expressed in the utterance. Even when speaking is unclear or the language is foreign, we initially hear unintelligible words, and not a multiplicity of tone data.”

“ But why is it that this as-structure is already present in a direct act of dealing with something? The most immediate state of affairs is, in fact, that we simply see and take things as they are: board, bench, house, policeman. Yes, of course. However, this taking is always a taking within the context of dealing-with something, and therefore is always a taking-as, but in such a way that the as-character does not become explicit in the act. The non-explicitness of this “as” is precisely what constitutes the act's so-called directness. Yes, the thing that is understood can be apprehended directly as it is in itself. But this directness regarding the thing apprehended does not inhibit the act from having a developed structure.

Acts of directly taking something, having something, dealing with it “as something,” are so original that trying to understand anything without employing the “as” requires (if it's possible at all) a peculiar inversion of the natural order. Understanding something without the “as”—in a pure sensation, for example—can be carried out only “reductively,” by “pulling back” from an as-structured experience. And we must say: far from being primordial, we have to designate it as an artificially worked-up act. Most important, such an experience is per se possible only as the privation of an as-structured experience. It occurs only within an as-structured experience and by prescinding from the “as”— which is the same as admitting that as-structured experience is primary, since it is what one must first of all prescind from."(Logic,The Question of Truth,p.122)”

The question now is whether the more radical interpretations.... — Joshs

As I was saying, the question now is whether the more radical interpretations of phenomenology represented by Merleau-Ponty, Varela, JJ. Gibson and Heidegger can enrich pp accounts. As you saw in my long quote , Clark thinks they unnecessarily close the door on internal
representations. If phenomenological and pp accounts have so much else in common, does this one difference
amount to anything significant? I suppose to some
extent it depends on the aims of the model. Clark likes to build machines , and I think it would be a lot more difficult to simulate psychological processes vi an A.I. system at present without invoking computations and representations. I think if Clark were a personality theorist, psychotherapist, researcher in psychopathology or social psychologist he might look at matters differently.

In this vein , there was something that struck me about Barrett’s youtube lectures on emotion. She decided to spotlight what I consider to be a relatively minor feature of emotion processing as a prime example of how pp differs from older, essentialist approaches to emotion. In her examples , the brain uses active inference to decide whether certain physiological sources of information amount to anxiety as opposed to indigestion , a heart attack or some other physical malady. I understand her aim is to show that deciding that one is experiencing an emotion is the end product of a complex process of prediction testing that takes into account as many sources of information as are available from the person’s interaction with the world as well as their interoceptive states. In enactivist approaches like that of Matthew Ratcliffe and Varela, the emphasis is not on WHAT is taking place when one has the sort of experience Barrett
describes, but on HOW one has it, in the sense of how one is finding oneself in the world, one’s comportment toward events. It is not that they are denying feedback from bodily states needs to be interpreted in order for one to have an emotion. I think it is that the various forms of input into affect , the hormonal , physiological-kinesthetic, behavior and social, are so tightly integrated through reciprocal causality that the question of WHAT one is feeling ( angina vs anxiety) is usually much less pertinent than the issue of how the world as a whole is altered for us when we are anxious or sad or elated. It isn’t that pp doesn’t have the tools necessary to account for mood as global attitude , but I wonder if beginning from computational representation turns integrated holistic comportment into a struggle rather than a given in most situations, something that has to
be wrung out from the data first as a what question and then as a how question. Representational models just seem to me to be clunky when it comes to handling full-fledged ongoing , real-time reciprocal causality.

When Barrett was describing the butterflies one feels when giving a public talk, instead of suggesting it could have been mere indigestion( which of course it could have) , she could have talked about how one’s heart races where one looks up at the crowd , and calms down when one quickly turns back toward the lecture notes , how it races again when looking back up and then calms when one remembers to imagine the audience naked, how one’s reflexes seem to be in overdrive at every noise from the crowd, how one’s legs seem primed to race one’s body out of the room. She could have talked about this constellation of thoughts , feelings, sensations as a coordinated dance, each component implying the next as a meaningful whole rather than a combination of arbitrary elements. Most importantly, she could have talked about the particular ways in which this anxious comportment shapes and orients one’s inclinations to relate o to other people. I recognize that the dance of emotion is composed of differences in equal measure to similarities , but representationalism seems perhaps to result in an emphasis on arbitrary difference at the expense of what makes the components of emotion belong together as a meaningful whole.