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.

In general, the more you explain phenomenological approaches to me, the more impressed I am by the way they presaged active inference approaches. Which, although not your objective, I'm very grateful for — Isaac

That’s good. According to my definition of understanding as subsumption I’d have to say that you do understand phenomenology in some form in that you’re seeing it as a legitimate and substantive precursor or foundation for pp models. The question now is whether the more radical interpretations of phenomenology represented by Merleau-Ponty, Varela, JJ. Gibson and Heidegger can enrich pp accounts.
I singled out the above authors because Clark specifically mentions them as anti-representationalist , anti-computationalist approaches that share many features with pp.

I’m going to quote a long passage from Clark’s ‘Putting, Brain, Body and Mind back together again’ because I think you might find his take on these figures interesting:

“ Heidegger (1927) wrote of the importance of Dasein (being there) - a mode of being-in-the-world in which we are not detached, passive observers but active participants - and stressed the way our practical dealings with the world (hammering nails, opening doors, and so on) do not involve detached representings (e.g. of the hammer as a rigid object of a certain weight and shape) so much as functional couplings. We use the hammer to drive in the nail, and it is this kind of skilled practical engagement with the world that is, for Heidegger, at the heart of all thought and intentionality .A key notion in this analysis is the idea of equipment- the stuff that surrounds us and figures in the multiple skilled activities underlying our everyday abilities to cope and succeed.
Thus, Heidegger's work prefigures skepticism concerning what might be termed " action-neutral" kinds of internal representation, and it echoes our emphasis on tool use and on action-oriented couplings between organism and world . Some of Heidegger's concerns, however, are radically different from those of the present treatment. In particular, Heidegger was opposed to the idea that knowledge involves a relation between minds and an independent world (Dreyfus 1991, pp. 48- 51) - a somewhat metaphysical question on which I take no stand. In addition, Heidegger's notion of the milieu of embodied action is thoroughly social. My version of being there is significantly broader and includes all cases in which body and local environment appear as elements in extended problem- solving activity.

Closer in spirit and execution to the present project is the work of the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who was concerned to depict everyday intelligent activity as the playing out of whole organism- body- world synergies. In particular, Merleau-Ponty stressed the importance of what I have called "continuous reciprocal causation "- viz., the idea that we must go beyond the passive image of the organism perceiving the world and recognize the way our actions may be continuously responsive to worldly events which are at the same time being continuously responsive to our actions. Consider a lovely example, which I think of as "the hamster and tongs"
:
When my hand follows each effort of a struggling animal while holding an instrument for capturing it, it is clear that each of my movements responds to an external stimulation; but it is also clear that these stimulations could not be received without the movements by which I expose my receptors to their influence. . . . The properties of the object and the intentions of the subject are not only intermingled; they also constitute anew whole. (Merleau-Ponty 1942, p. 13)

In this example the motions of my hands are continuously responsive to those of the struggling hamster, but the hamster's struggles are continuously molded and shaped by the motions of my hand. Here action and perception, as David Hilditch (1995) has put it, coalesce as a kind of " free form interactive dance between perceiver and perceived.

" It is this iterated interactive dance that, we saw, is now recognized in recent work concerning the computational foundations of animate vision. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty also stresses the way perception is geared to the control of real-time, real-world behavior. In this respect, he discovers something very like the Gibsonian notion of an affordance- a notion which, in turn, is the direct inspiration of the idea of action-oriented internal representations discussed above in chapter 2 and in section 8.3.

An affordance is an opportunity for use or interaction which some object or state of affairs presents to a certain kind of agent. For example, to a human a chair affords sitting, but to a woodpecker it may afford something quite different. Gibson's special concern was with the way visual perception might be tuned to invariant features presented in the incoming light signal in ways that directly selected classes of possible actions- for example, the way patterns of light might specify a flat plain affording human walking. To the extent that the human perceptual system might become tuned to such affordances, Gibson claimed that there was no need to invoke internal representations as additional entities mediating between perception and action. In section 8.3 I argued that such outright rejection often flows from an unnecessary conflation of two properly distinct notions. One is the fully general idea of internal representations as inner states, structures, or processes whose adaptive role is to carry specific types of information for use by other neural and action-guiding systems. The other is the more
specific idea of internal representations as rich, action-neutral encodings of external states of affairs. Only in the latter, more restricted sense is there any conflict between Gibsonian ideas and the theoretical construct of internal representation.

Finally, the recent discussion of "the embodied mind" offered by Varela et al. (1991) displays three central concerns that likewise occupy center stage in the present treatment.First, Varela et al. are concerned to do justice to the active nature of perception and the way our cognitive organization reflects our physical involvement in the world . Second, they offer some powerful example of emergent behavior in simple systems.Third , there is sustained attention to the notion of reciprocal (or "circular") causation and its negative implications for certain kinds of component- based reductive projects. These themes come together in the development of the idea of cognition as enaction. Enactive cognitive science, as Varela et al. define it, is a study of mind which does not depict cognition as the internal mirroring of an objective external world . Instead, it isolates the repeated sensorimotor interactions between agent and world as the basic locus of scientific and explanatory interest.Varela et al. are thus pursuing a closely related project to our own.

There are, however, some important differences of emphasis and interest. First, Varela et al. use their reflections as evidence against realist and objectivist views of the world . I deliberately avoid this extension, which runs the risk of obscuring the scientific value of an embodied, embedded approach by linking it to the problematic idea than objects are not independent
of mind.My claim, in contrast, is simply that the aspects of real-world structure which biological brains represent will often be tightly geared to specific needs and sensorimotor capacities. The target of much of the present critique is thus not the idea that brains represent aspects of a real independent world, but rather the idea of those representations as action-neutral and hence as requiring extensive additional computational effort to drive intelligent responses. Second, Varela et al. (ibid., p. 9) oppose the idea that “cognition is fundamentally representation." Our approach is much more sympathetic to representationalist and information- processing analyses. It aims to partially reconceptualize ideas about the contents and formats of various inner states and processes, but not to reject the very ideas of internal representation and information- processing themselves.

Finally, our treatment emphasizes a somewhat different body of cognitive scientific research (viz., the investigations of real-world robotics and autonomous- agent theory) and tries to show how the ideas and analyses emerging from this very recent research fit into the larger nexus of psychological, psychophysical, and developmental research which is the common ground of both discussion geared to specific needs and sensorimotor capacities. The target of much of the present critique is thus not the idea that brains represent aspects of a real independent world, but rather the idea of those representations as action-neutral and hence as requiring extensive additional computational effort to drive intelligent responses. Second, Varela et al.
(ibid., p. 9) oppose the idea that cognition is fundamentally representation." Our approach is much more sympathetic to representationalist and
information- processing analyses. It aims to partially reconceptualize ideas about the contents and formats of various inner states and processes, but not to reject the very ideas of internal representation and information-
processing themselves. Finally, our treatment emphasizes a somewhat different
body of cognitive scientific research (viz.,
the investigations of real-world robotics and autonomous-
agent theory) and tries to show how the ideas and analyses emerging from this very recent research fit into the larger nexus of psychological, psychophysical, and developmental research which is the common ground of both discussions.

I wouldn't 'know' what was missing would I? Knowledge is not gained by gestalt shifts, only perspective. — Isaac

Not sure I’m following you here. Can we just say that a gestalt shift not only opens one up to a new approach but changes their interpretation of their currently held model?
Now suddenly , in the light of this changed perspective, that current model appears ‘lacking’. I realize there are implications here of a direct comparison between the older and newer model that would have to be justified.

I’m going to take a page from Kelly and say that when I achieve a gestalt shift in my thinking it allows me to ‘subsume’ the older model within the newer one. Kelly used the notion of subsumption in the therapist-client relationship. In order to be helpful, the therapist must subsume the client’s construct system as a variation within the therapist’s system. This doesn’t mean that the therapist must begin thinking like the client, only that they be able , from within their own perspective , to effectively anticipate the client’s ways of construing situations.
That’s how I’m using the word ‘understanding’ with regard to adjudicating between conceptual systems.

As a good postmodernist( or maybe I should say a good Kellyan) , I could claim to ‘understand’ phenomenology (or any other set of philosophical presuppositions) by either subsuming it within a more superordinate model of mine or using it to subsume other perspectives. In either case I would be treating it as a valid and useful body of knowledge that functioned as either a foundation for my preferred perspective or as the cutting edge of thinking for me. If instead I simply argued that it was ‘wrong’, incoherent, nonsensical, irrational or falsified , I would run the risk of being called a modernist or realist. Don’t know if that was helpful.

Let me introduce Husserl’s analysis of the perception of a ball.
— Joshs

It sounds entirely consistent with active inference accounts of perception. I'm not seeing the difference. You might need to provide me with a little exegesis. — Isaac

Here’s my attempt at exegesis. I’m going to use Clark as representative of the pp position. Let me know if that’s not a good idea. Clark declares that he does not believe in a correspondence theory of mind:

“ This perspective leads to a rather profound shift in how we think about mind and cognition- a shift I characterize as the transition from models of representation as mirroring or encoding to models of representation as control (Clark 1995) . The idea here is that the brain should not be seen as primarily a locus of inner descriptions of external states of affairs; rather,
it should be seen as a locus of inner structures that act as operators upon the world via their role in determining actions.”

So Clark maintains the idea of perception as a meeting of the inner with the outer, but replaces passive mirroring with the organism’s active navigation of the world. But I don’t get the impression that for Clark the organism co-constructs and co-defines the very environment that it navigates by virtue of its interactions with that world, except in certain circumstances, and then it is an emergent function. Usually, the organism selects what is salient to it from an environment that exists independently of it. Clark seems to consider cultural creations not so much as manifestations of human-environmental reciprocal determination but as only additional tools (external props) for navigating a world definable independently of the subject’s activities.

“ our behavior is often sculpted and sequenced by a special class of complex external structures: the linguistic and cultural artifacts that structure modern life, including maps, texts, and written plans. Understaading the complex interplay between our on-board and on-line neural resources and these external props and pivots is a major task confronting the sciences of embodied thought.”

How might this differ from Husserl?

Husserl writes:

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

Is Husserl just agreeing with Clark here that the world has meaning for me by virtue of my goal-directed actions in it ? I think the difference is more significant that this.

One way to look at what Husserl is after with his notion of the intentional act is that what the organism encounters in the form of an external ‘stimulus’ belongs to a gestalt that includes the oeganism’s activity.
Let me bring in this quote from Merleau-ponty:

“When Gestalt theory informs us that a figure on a background is the simplest sense-given available to us, we reply that this is not a contingent characteristic of factual perception, which leaves us free, in an ideal analysis, to bring in the notion of impressions. It is the very definition of the phenomenon of perception, that without which a phenomenon cannot be said to be perception at all. The perceptual ‘something' is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a ‘field'.” (Phenomenology of Perception, p.4)

That field includes my embodied mind. Any change in my perception , any introduction of a new stimulus is a deformation of the entire embodied perceptual field , a gestalt shift.

In sum , when I perceive , the ‘stimulus’ I perceive doesn’t stand outside of me , over against me , it isn’t ‘matched’ against internally generated
action -oriented representations. Rather, it appears directly as a figure standing out against but defined in its very meaning by its role with respect to that background field. Husserl’s intentional act is not a ‘ ‘combining’ of external and internal . It is the creation of a new dimension of sense composed equally of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects. . Each intentional perceptive act is at the same time an anticipating forward from previous experience ( what Clark would call an internally generated prediction) and an occurring into that anticipation of the perceptual object. The anticipation co-shapes the objective sense of the perception at the same time that the objective ‘external’ aspect of it addresses the anticipation.

What is crucial to note here is that there is no object in itself and no anticipational ‘prediction by itself, no guess that takes place PRIOR TO encounter with an outside (and thus no moment of matching outer with inner) These are not separate moments, structures or processes:the internally generated prediction and the stimulus that enters from the outside. the subjective ‘prediction’ and the objective ‘outside’ are not separate entities or processes. They are the inseparable poles of a single intentional act. I anticipate into what intrudes upon me. That bifurcated act IS the intended object. An intentional act may have as its meaning a perceptual object that is recognizably familiar and identifiable, or one that appears foreign , unlike what came before , unidentifiable in some fashion. This is what Clark would call an error , but doesnt error imply a correct template to compare the erroneous to? For Husserl ,a surprising perception isnt an error in the sense of a failure to correctly match owns predictions to a supposedly independently existing external pattern. It is a positive and substantive new sense, which may or may not lead to a new form of harmoniously anticipated perception.

Husserl agrees with Clark that the organism strives toward harmonious anticipation of events , but this striving isnt oriented around a conformity of internal inferences with external ‘information’. Rather , it is a moving forward on the basis of the substantive meaning of the ‘failed’ perceptual act. If such ‘error ‘ is followed by a new harmony it will not be because néwly generated internal pattens formed a better match with pre-existing external information, but because a new mutually co-detemined subjective-objective gestalt shift produced such a harmoniously anticipatory situation.

Clark offers that there are situations in which the organism and environment exhibit emergent properties of a single non-decoupleable system, but he makes such circumstances secondary to those in which he still
feels that an internalist representationist model is appropriate.

“ Where the inner and the outer exhibit this kind of continuous, mutually modulatory, non- decouplable coevolution, the tools of information - processing decomposition are, I believe, at their weakest. What matters in such cases are the real, temporally rich properties of the ongoing exchange between organism and environment. Such cases are conceptually
very interesting, but they do not constitute a serious challenge to the general role of representation-based understanding in cognitive science. Indeed, they cannot constitute such a challenge, since they lie, by definition, outside the class of cases for which a representational approach is most strongly indicated.”

why would widespread agreement carry weight in any particular interpretation of phenomenology? — Isaac

Because the particular widespread agreement I’m talking about is informing the Chemero link I sent you as well as the ‘smallism-localism’ link. The latter paper mentions a thriving, productive extended mind research community oriented around shared conceptual assumptions, and this general interpretation of phenomenology is a core one
of theirs. You’ll notice Gallagher, Chemero and Slaby in the references, all of whom have written extensively on phenomenological authors. These same authors and others I’ve mentioned (Ratcliffe, Thompson, Zahavi) recur frequently in research papers of this community. Meanwhile, few to no citations of Clark or Barrett will appear. So this general interpretation carries weight in the sense that you will have a hard time understanding what this community is about , what conceptual difference they’re referring to with respect to the computationalist representationalist community, without knowing a bit about their shared phenomenological commitment.

But I suspect what you mean by ‘carrying weight’ is:
is it true ( not in some ultimate metaphysical sense)? My answer won’t be very satisfying to you. You simply have to do your best to read Husserl, Merleau-Ponty or Heidegger and decide for yourself. Either it will make sense and produce a gestalt shift in your thinking or it won’t. If it produces that shift , you won’t need an iota of empirical evidence in order to know what is missing from pp models.

Do you doubt that, should I trawl the papers, I could dig up an interpretation contrary to that general agreement and cite it, just as you did Thompson? — Isaac

Yes, but that won’t help you understand what shared conceptual commitment is guiding the non-representationalist, post-computational
extended mind community.

Philosophers are not super-human, they don't get to see things without those pre-suppositions. So how is it helping at all? We replace one set of pre-supposition infused ideas for another. Where does that get us? — Isaac

It is quite helpful when there are two competing research paradigms in psychology and one of them is claiming that the disagreement is a conceptual one rather than a dispute over evidence.

In order to talk about 'a ball' we have to, at the same time as labelling it, know what it's boundaries are. To know it's boundaries is to know that it is 'a ball' because the boundary is the point where 'ball' stops and 'air' begins. T — Isaac

Let me introduce Husserl’s analysis of the perception of a ball. I suggest at first you just treat it as a story and then we can see how it offers a different account of inside and outside and how this relates to Husserl’s notion of intentionality.

I can then point out what aspects of this ‘story’’ have had a profound influence of perceptual researchers like Varela, Thompson , Noe and O’Reagan.

Husserl attempted to chart a course between realism and idealism by grounding all experience in perception and grounding perception in structures of intentionality in which the subjective and objective aspects(what he called the noetic and noematic poles) are inextricably dependent on each other and inseparable. He was very much influenced in his project by the work of Franz Brentano, but went beyond Brentano's notion of inentionality by abandoning Brrentano's naturalism.

One of the key aspects of Husserl's approach was his explanation of the origin of spatial objects. Rather than defining an object in terms of its self-subsistence over time with its properties and attributes, he believed such entities to be , not fictions, but idealities. That is to say, what we , in a naive naturalist attitude, point to as this 'real' table in front of us, is the constantly changing product of a process of progressive constitution in consciousness. The real object is in fact an idealization.This process begins at the most primordial level with what he called primal impressions, which we can imagine as the simplest whiffs of sensation(these he calls actual, rather than real. Actual impressions only appear once in time as what they are. When we see something like a table, all that we actually perceive in front of us is an impoverished, contingent partial sense experience.

We fill in the rest of experience in two ways. Al experience implies a temporal structure of retention, primal impression and protention. Each moment presents us with a new sensation,the retained memory of the just preceding sensation and anticipation of what is to come. We retain the memory of previous experiences with the 'same' object and those memories become fused with the current aspect of it. A the same time, we protend forward, anticipating aspects of the object that are not yet there for us, based on prior experience with it. For example, we only see the front of the table, but anticipate as an empty horizon, its sides, and this empty anticipation joins with the current view and the memory of previous views to form a complex fused totality. Perception constantly is motivated , that is tends toward toward the fulfillment of the experience of the object as integrated singularity, as this same' table'.

Thus , through a process of progressive adumbration of partial views, we constitute what we call an object. It must be added that not just the sense of sight, but all other sense modalities can come into play in constituting the object. And most importantly, there is no experience of an object without kineshthetic sensation of our voluntary movement in relation to the thing seen. Intrinsic to what the object means as object is our knowing how its appearance will change when we move our head in a certain way, or our eyes , or when we touch it. The object is what it is for us in relation to the way we know we can change its appearance relative to our interactions with it.

In sum, what the naive realist calls an external object of perception, Husserl treats as a relative product of constantly changing correlated modes of givenness and adumbrations composed of retentions and protentions. The 'thing' is a tentative , evolving achievement of memory , anticipation and voluntary movement. We never completely achieve the objectivity of the object. But we can’t yet say at this level of constitution that what we have is something objective in an empirical sense. That requires a coordinating of our own experiences of the object and that of other people who have vantages on it that we do not. We then say that our own experience of the object is just an ‘aspect’ of the actual empirical
thing. Through this process of intersubjective
coordination we arrive at by idea of the empirical object , which is something that no one actually sees but instead is an idealization.

From this vantage, attempting to explain this constituting process in psychophysiological terms by reducing it to the language of naive realism is an attempt to explain the constituting on the basis of the constituted. The synthetic structure of temporal constitution is irreducible to 'physical' terms. On the contrary, it is the 'physicai' that rests on a complex constitutive subjective , and intersubjective, process that is ignored in the naive attitude. — Joshs

Yes, that sounds right. Body-brain-world as single, reciprocally causal gestalt , with no piece alterable without affecting the configuration as a whole.

Wittgenstein’s work is brilliant. He is among the first modern thinkers to see past the paired facades of idealism and realism to the intimate contextualism of life.
But don’t we need to direct that thinking back toward it’s own history , that is to say , to see it operating within history? Are Witt’s ideas a special and unique enlightenment , to be pitted against the dark history of philosophy, which in its entirety represented nothing but ‘a desire to solve skepticism with knowledge’ motivated by the ‘fear of the human’ ? Why does the endless productivity of language games no longer apply when it comes to the prejudices of earlier eras and cultures? Why do concepts like ‘desire’, ‘skepticism’ and ‘ human’ become reified so that they can be wielded as a weapon against all of cultural history prior to Wittgenstein?
Do these terms really mean the same thing as we move from one philosophical era to the next?

In Heidegger’s’What is a Thing’ he recognized that a never-ending rethinking of the nature of a thing has taken and continues to take place in philosophy and science. Isn’t the same true of the motivations for failing to embrace his outlook that Wittgenstein is assuming as somehow transcending cultural eras?

quote="Antony Nickles;d10273"]Worse, some people grab at words and their first impression of what they take as theoretical propositions, and jump to conclusions or dismiss him altogether based on their assumptions or, worse, the preconceived objectives they have no intention of changing. Are these people just innocently misunderstanding? Could the reason they jump to that end be harmful or dangerous as well?[/quote]

Perhaps what is dangerous is forcing an unjustly universalized rationale on those who fail to get Wittgenstein , instead of using of a historical genealogical approach which would allow one to see such failures as innocent misunderstandings belonging to the endless becoming of philosophical history.

This weakness in Wittgenstein’s approach might, however, explain his intense impatience with other people.

quote="baker;501308"]Appealing to people's compassion generally doesn't go well.[/quote]

Better to appeal to people’s ego. People like to feel important and respected. Its surprising how much they’re willing to do for you if you tap into that.

Everyone justifies their behavior in their own way , and the best fuel for this is when some one appears hostile to or critical of them. You best bet would have been to establish friendly relations with them
even though your were inclined to despise them. Still not too late . Make it about your vulnerabilities not about how irresponsible they are. If you’re too proud to do this, you’re screwed.

How could you test my understanding of phenomenology in the way I could test your understanding of cognitive psychology? The people you cite as 'misunderstanding' phenomenology have read the relevant books, to no less a degree than you've read Barrett and Seth.

That their conclusions about aim and methods differ from your can't be held as a measure of understanding surely? Otherwise I could use the same measure to claim you don't understand Barrett ans Seth.

That their conclusions differ from mainstream interpretations cannot be used either, otherwise, again, I could use the same measure to claim you don't understand Barrett and Seth?

Maybe you could quiz me on what was actually said? But I could pass that no less than you could with a Google search - again we're no closer to understanding here — Isaac

That’s a tough one.First, I should say that the disagreement I have with writers like Varela
and Thompson over their reading of phenomenology is what I’d call a family disagreement. Husserl was the one who introduced modern phenomenology around 1900, but each writer who came after him and who called their work phenomenological diverged from his approach in one way or another . For instance , many in the community might say Sartre’s version falls short of Husserl whereas Merelau-Ponty and Heidegger go beyond him. Many of those attempting to integrate phenomenology with cognitive science make use of a mixture of different phenomenologists. So I think that even though there are all sorts of internal disagreement about interpretation within that community, they would be in the same page concerning Chemero’s critique of Clark, because I think it’s general enough to capture what is common to all these versions.

I should also mention that it isn’t just phenomenology that would claim to find core philosophical pre-suppositions of Clark and Barrett problematic. A whole range of broadly postmodern schools of philosophy would do the same : hermeneutics , radical constructivism , post structuralism and deconstruction. From the vantage of this larger philosophical community, Barrett and Clark’s philosophical framework places them among the leading Neo-Kantian thinkers of the mid 19th century like Dilthey, Brentano , Helmholtz and Peirce. Not that this should mean anything to you. I’m just pointing out that the stakes are higher here than just a debate between phenomenology and pp.

I get the impression that it seems to you that phenomenology wants to avoid the ‘inner workings’ of the sub-personal domain, the ‘guts’ of the
system where I think you like to begin from, and just focus on apparent surface behavior.

I like doing that too. My B.A. was in cognitive neuroscience. What makes it tricky to see what phenomenology is about is that it begins from a claim that when we begin from even the smallest , most irreducible starting point for our model, for instance the neuron and its interconnections ( we could go further in the direction of ‘smallism’ : yes, smallism is a thing, and begin from the molecular or sub-atomic level, but then we’ve switched to an account which will hide everything useful from a psychological perspective) , we run smack to philosophical pre-suppositions that it is not the job of an empirical science to examine.

For instance, we owe the notion of empirical objectivity to a certain geometrization of the world into mathematical objects that took place between the time of Aristotle and Galileo. Implied in this formation of modern empirical science are assumptions such as the definition of the real world in terms of the calculable behavior of objects in motion. Phenomenology attempts to burrow beneath these assumptions in order to make explicit what is implicit in models like Barrett’s. An important point to make is that phenomenological analysis leaves intact all of the results of pp. It’s job isnt to refute or falsify , but to enrich.

what we talk about and the reality thereby created ("The glass feels cold") need not be reflected one-to-one in a model of how such talk comes about in the machinery we assume constructs it. — Isaac

Except that Ratcliffe’s point depends on understanding the machinery that constructs it in a difference way than does pp.

Pp’s machinery isnt all that mysterious and opaque. Even just from listening to a few of Barrett’s youtube lectures I already had a pretty good idea about what the machinery must be like in order to support her claims concerning behavior and why it runs counter to older views about pre-wired emotion modules in the brain.


I mentioned ‘smallism’ above. I think smallism and localism may apply to pp’s meta--theoretical assumptions:

“ It is our contention that even where smallism and localism are not openly endorsed, it is not the evidence but rather conceptual divergence that is responsible for the continuation of the extended cognition debate.
This is because, given the explicit or merely implicit commitment to smallism and localism (which are not empirical claims), no quantity or quality of evidence could possibly settle the debate. Rather than riding on empirical results and interpretations of those results, the extended cognition debate is therefore a debate about how to define the word “cognition”. For internalists in the debate (Rupert, Adams, Aizawa), cognition is defined in terms of computational manipulations of representations.But computational manipulation of representations is not part of the explanatory toolkit of those who gather evidence on extended cognition. These cognitive scientists work outside the paradigms of smallism and localism. When the debate is framed, as it usually is, as essentially an empirical one, then
critics react as if those working in extended cognitive science are dealing with defective evidence and/or incorrectly interpreting the evidence. But if the extended cognition debate is, as we claim, not empirical but one of definition, then critics might wonder: are advocates of extended cognition simply changing the subject? If the debate really is a disagreement about how to understand the word “cognition”, then the critic might think that, by adopting a different definition to begin with, those who go against mainstream smallist/localist cognitive science are not offering a competing account but are simply doing something else. This is a mistaken view: not only is extended cognitive science not changing the subject, but mainstream smallist/localist cognitive science itself might instead more justly be charged with changing the subject. We will elaborate on this point in the final section.”

https://content.sciendo.com/downloadpdf/journals/slgr/41/1/article-p9.pdf

You asked me how I could test your understanding of phenomenology. Why don’t we start instead with testing your understanding of the philosophical pre-suppositions grounding your own psychological
models . For instance, tell me more about how we can talk about what lies outside of a psychological system in its environment. I can see the influence of Kant on pp, but what is it about the difference between an outside and an inside that makes i it necessary for you to insist that they not be already co-implied in each other. Try to explain this without recourse to markov blankets but unsung a more fundamental language.

Here ya go:

Edmund Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenological philosophy, attempted to chart a course between realism and idealism by grounding all experience in perception and grounding perception in structures of intentionality in which the subjective and objective aspects(what he called the noetic and noematic poles) are inextricably dependent on each other and inseparable. He was very much influenced in his project by the work of Franz Brentano, but went beyond Brentano's notion of inentionality by abandoning Brrentano's naturalism.

One of the key aspects of Husserl's approach was his explanation of the origin of spatial objects. Rather than defining an object in terms of its self-subsistence over time with its properties and attributes, he believed such entities to be , not fictions, but idealities. That is to say, what we , in a naive naturalist attitude, point to as this 'real' table in front of us, is the constantly changing product of a process of progressive constitution in consciousness. The real object is in fact an idealization.This process begins at the most primordial level with what he called primal impressions, which we can imagine as the simplest whiffs of sensation(these he calls actual, rather than real. Actual impressions only appear once in time as what they are. When we see something like a table, all that we actually perceive in front of us is an impoverished, contingent partial sense experience.

We fill in the rest of experience in two ways. Al experience implies a temporal structure of retention, primal impression and protention. Each moment presents us with a new sensation, th4 retained memory of the just preceding sensation and anticipation of what is to come. We retain the memory of previous experiences with the 'same' object and those memories become fused with the current aspect of it. A the same time, we protend forward, anticipating aspects of the object that are not yet there for us, based on prior experience with it. For example, we only see the front of the table, but anticipate as an empty horizon, its sides, and this empty anticipation joins with the current view and the memory of previous views to form a complex fused totality. Perception constantly is motivated , that is tends toward toward the fulfillment of the experience of the object as integrated singularity, as this same' table'.

Thus , through a process of progress adumbration of partial views, we constitute what we call and object. It must be added that not just the sens of sight, but all other sense modalities can come into play in constituting the object. And most importantly, there is no experience of an object without kineshthetic sensation of our voluntary movement in relation to the thing seen. Intrinsic to what the object means as object is our knowing how its appearance will change when we move our head in a certain way, or our eyes , or when we touch it. The object is what it is for us in relation to the way we know we can change its appearance relative to our interactions with it.

In sum, what the naive realist calls an external object of perception, Husserl treats as a relative product of constant but regilated changing correlated modes of givenness and adumbrations composed of retentions and protentions. The 'thing' is a tentative , evolving achievement of memory , anticipation and voluntary movement.

From this vantage, attempting to explain this constituting process in psychophysiological terms by reducing it to the language of naive realism is an attempt to explain the constituting on the basis of the constituted. The synthetic structure of temporal constitution is irreducible to 'physical' terms. On the contrary, it is the 'physicai' that rests on a complex constitutive subjective process that is ignored in the naive attitude.

...Monday (sucks), Tuesday (a bit better), Wednesday (hump day), Thursday (it's Friday tomorrow), Friday (TGIF), Saturday (Yeah!!), Sunday (oh no, tomorrow is Monday)... — synthesis

Yeah, but what about orgasm? Intense pleasure morphs into deep relaxation(depending on who you’re with, of course) and then maybe sleep. No necessary transition to sadness or letdown

Your idea that if you would not want to live this life over and over again is a sign that it needs changing is one which I had not considered in relation to the idea of eternal recurrence. — Jack Cummins

Here’s an an interpretation of the eternal return from Deleuze that kind of plays havoc with the above thought. According to Deleuze , what is returning isn’t the same life but the ‘same’ always new becoming. Nietzsche believed that becoming was more fundamental than being, and that becoming wasn’t an arrow pointed at some end goal but self-overcoming for its own sake. That’s what Will to Power is about , not power over others but a continual self-overpowering and self-transformation. Heidegger says that it is Will to Power that recurs as the same. So imagining the eternal return of the same is becoming comfortable with the idea that life always ‘repeats’ itself as something utterly different.

If happiness results in sadness, why be happy? — synthesis

YES, but does happiness always result directly in sadness? Does any particular emotion or mood state necessarily follow another? It seems to me that what could follow immediately in the wake of a happy period is complacency, boredom, sadness, contentment , or myriad other states. By the same token, contentment could be followed by sadness , happiness , boredom, etc.
Another argument in favor of going for happiness depends on whether you can buy into the idea that happiness is connected with personal growth. , that is , that pleasant experience is associated in some small way with more or less lasting positive changes in one’s self-understanding and approach to life. In fact Madison Ave has caught onto this way of marketing. They discovered that Millennials in particular are less interested in possessions than in meaningful experiences, so everything becomes an experience ( shopping experience, internet experience). If there’s truth to this way of looking at happiness , the. even if a particular bout of happiness is followed by sadness , it’s not a zero sum game and in the long run, going as aggressively as possible for the happiness of self-transformative growth will be a better strategy than settling for caution.

. And I don’t think there are many moral realists on the forum either — khaled

Then there are moral relativists who define what’s “right” or “wrong” relative to something or other (the individual, the society, etc). Something can be wrong now and right later. This seems to be what applies to the majority of posters here from what I’ve seen. — khaled

It seems to me most on this forum who call themselves moral relativists are only relativist up to a point. I’ve. found very few full fledged postmodern relativists. Most here dilute their Foucault or Deleuze with Cavell and Putnam, and sign on to the usefulness of moralistic terms like racism and homophobia.

Their moral relativism is no more radical than their epistemological relativism, wherein Scientific truth is subject to falsification but rival paradigms are not incommensurate all the way down: it is still
possible to talk of scientific truth as progressing.

Would you like to stand by a claim that your understanding of the neuroscience behind active inference models was better than my understanding of phenomenology? — Isaac

Yes, absolutely! But I realize I’d have to prove that to
you. I’ve been reading more Barrett and Clark, and listening to her youtube lectures. I’m getting a pretty good sense of where she stands. Keep in mind , my graduate degree was in experimental a cognitive science. Even though that was the 1990’s there is an awful lot that is familiar to me in her model. Connectionism and parallel distributed processing had already come into vogue , and I had been familiar with the James-Lange theory of emotion ( we interpret physiological effects to determine causes in the world) , and with Schacter and Singer’s studies on how we attempt to interpret arousal aa emotions of one sort or another( or as something other than emotion) based on situation.Eleanor Roesch’s work on conceptual category formation I think also bears similarities with Barrett’s modeling of on-the -fly conceptualization. I was also familiar with the work of Neisser, Gibson, Mclelland and Rumelhart.

I don't object to these views at all (I'm on a philosophy forum after all), but they are only frameworks, not models. They don't have predictive power and their utility is not universal, it's personal. — Isaac

My expertise in psychological theorizing is concentrated in clinical psychology, psychotherapy and personality theory. Since Barrett ventures into this territory from
time to time , we could use this as a source of comparison with cbt and other approaches to psychotherapy. Of course the sort of evidence that must be accepted in this area is different from that which neuroscientific models make use of, but it is nonetheless does have predictive power ( it must since it is results oriented rather than just abstract theory).

What I dislike, however, is the move (often made) from approach A, with all it's empirical evidence, cannot found it's own premises, cannot demonstrate the validity of it's own frame...therefore approach B. It doesn't follow. None can. Yet we still must choose, and I'll take the one yielding the results. — Isaac

And yet you said that you abandoned S-R theory for cognitivism not on the basis of the empirical evidence but on the basis of a conceptual shift. Would it be fair to say that results matter because they speak to the ability of an approach to define what it stands for clearly , comprehensively and in a coherent manner ? In other words, if a pretender to the throne of new psychological paradigm impressed you on these terms, then you could embrace it even if it hasn’t yet been translated into a thriving research community? My concern is that William James’ work was likely ignored by many who used the rationale that it hadn’t produced clear predictions or a body of empirical results backing it up. It is often difficult and frustrating to make sense of ground-breaking new ideas in psychology or philosophy, precisely because they have to introduce a mew vocabulary , and because the empirical research stage has to wait for a community to form around the ideas.

To be fair , I think that Thompson, Varela, Ratcliffe and Chemero aren’t as far removed from Clark and Barrett as they would like to think, and that maybe any differences in empirical findings from them will be subtle and their significance may only be appreciated by linking it back to the phenomenology( kind of like a work of modern art which is indecipherable without the text on the wall next to it ). ( I’ve written papers critiquing Thompson, Varela and Ratcliffe’s reading of phenomenological authors).

Nevertheless , I think Ratcliffe makes an interesting and somewhat significant distinction between accounts of emotion that make it an interpretive construction oriented to bodily states , and an interpretive construction that takes into account these bodily states but is primarily oriented toward the world. It is the glass which feels cold, not my bodily sensation of it.

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/228165528.pdf

...as is 'language' — Isaac

Why, because communicating with oneself is so profoundly different from communicating with others in terms of its goals? Only if you start from a separation of organism and world. Then talking to oneself
is idealist solipsism.

I’m curious. Are you a realist when it comes to scientific progress? Would you say that a science describes a real world independent of the theory, and that it is approximating that real world ? When one theory displaces another can we say it explains the empirical data better or just differently?Im asking because this relates to your ideas about morality.

If you assent to the idea that you know when you’ve learned something new,( regardless of whether it turns out later that you were mistaken) , that is , there is an ‘ah ha’ feeling, a sense of relief or excitement, the sense that you have connected
two things that previously seemed
unrelated. So it seems to me that when we ask a question, we already know about the domain the answer willlikely be in. But we don’t know the answer. Or at least we don’t feel we know the answer , based on the feeling that normally accompanies questioning , a certain anxiety, uneasiness, tentativeness. If we get an answer that produces that feeling of having learned something new , then the feeling of unease and unsettledness turns into satisfaction and pleasure , which indicates
that the asking of the question was the preparation for that new learning. If the question already knows the answer, then when the official answer comes out attitude will likely be boredom and complacency.

That would require a private language which would be impossible to learn. We have words which refer to public effects of what we take to be 'emotions' which we use to convey our own propensity to those public effect. If there were no — Isaac

We do create private language all the time , for instance
when we create new theoretical ideas.
‘ Private’ here is a bit of a mis-nomer though. When I reflect in solitude , what is creatively generated is already social in the sense that it is still my being exposed to an outside, even when I am not in contact with other people.My talking to myself is social and an exposure to an outside.
I can create an entire vocabulary that others will not understand in the way that I will and that I use not to share with others but to share with myself. Did I create thewords de novo, with no background competence or familiarity with conventions of grammar? Well, no , of course not. They pre-suppose my already having been socialized into a publicly shared language , but their sense can then move on from and exceed that socialized meaning.

You know what they tell
young courtroom lawyers-barristers : Never
ask a question you don’t already know the answer
to.

My comment was really about the prevailing trend, not the complete absence of outliers (Thompson's article has 4 citations, Seth and Friston's latest article on the same topic has 86 - to give some idea of the take up of these ideas in the community) — Isaac

Yes, they are quite popular. During its long reign as the dominant paradigm, S-R psychology represented an overwhelming percentage of citations in experimental psychology. Meanwhile , during that era, the work of Dewey and James was all but ignored( I should
mention that Kelly, whose major work came out in 1955 was ignored too. His constructivist approach is now
belatedly recognized as anticipating cognitive science as well as cognitive therapy.). I think you’ll find writers like Clark and Barrett declaring much closer allegiance to the pragmatists than to Skinner and Watson. It only took the field 80 years to catch up .The problem wasnt empirical validation , it was making the conceptual shift. My anticipation is that it will take another 20 years or so before enactivism sheds the remnants of representational realism.

In that light, I have another link for you, from Anthony Chemero and Michael
Anderson. I prefer this paper to Thompson’s. Rather than trying to empirical ‘prove’ anything on Clark’s
turf , they are critiquing it from a meta-theoretical standpoint. They are making the points I was trying to make concerning the limitations of representational
realism , but using a vocabulary that is more familiar to you.

https://www.academia.edu/39326657/M_Anderson_and_A_Chemero_The_world_well_found_in_M_Colombo_L_Irvine_and_M_Stapleton_eds_Andy_Clark_and_his_Critics_Oxford_University_Press_161_173

I particularly like their point that the use of Markov blankets and Bayesian theory in a psychological model is mot in itself problematic , the issue is HOW they are used.

“ We absolutely accept that Markov models and Bayesian inference are hugely important and successful tools in the study of mind, brain and behavior. But we find the philosophical inferences about the nature of the systems to which these models have been applied to be deeply problematic. Admittedly, it can be hard to resist mapping entities in one’s model of a system to elements in the system itself, but prudence dictates special care when doing so, and we believe that insufficient caution has been exercised by many proponents of predictive processing.
By way of closing, we also wish to urge something further on the field in general, and on Clark in particular. Hohwy (2017) wonders aloud if the EEE tactic to avoid skepticism may also cost us the very conceptions of belief, knowledge, and justification that lie at the center of a good deal of philosophy of mind. We hereby confess that it probably does. This is a development we embrace. For us, agency is about disposition and action, and not about belief (Anderson 2014; Chemero 2009).10 In this we follow the traditions of American Pragmatism and Continental Phenomenology in their critiques of a belief-oriented, representation-centric, model-building mind, in favor of an action-oriented, affordance-centric, world-navigating mind. The first step on this path is the recognition that organisms have access to ecological information. Take that step, and a whole world opens to you.”

As I said before, this is the problem with phenomenological approaches. They confuse the effect, as it seems to us, with the mechanism that produces that effect. — Isaac

I’m not going to let you get away with this ( he said half in jest). As a good empiricist you should know better than to pronounce a verdict on a theory without first demonstrating that you know what it is saying.
One might even call that lazy thinking. For instance, are you familiar with how Husserl’s model of perception constitutes a real spatial object, like a ball? You know those 86 citations in Seth and Friston’s
article? I can show you 100’s upon 100’s of citations mentioning phenomenology in the psychological
literature that grotesquely misread its aims and methods.
We should probably leave it aside for now and focus on the points that Chemero is making, unless you want to attempt a cursory summary of what you think phenomenology is all about and how it relates to the construction of empirical theory. I notice you didn’t comment on my observations concerning the incommensurability of rival meta-theories concerning agreement on what constitutes empirical evidence. Maybe you could start there. Would you be able , for example, to justify the Kuhnian claim that one scientific theory ( for example, phenomenologically oriented enactivism) can replace a rival one without invalidating -disproving any of that rival theory’s empirical predictions?

the answer must be known before the question posited. — synthesis

Is this what you mean?

“Every questioning is a seeking. Every seeking takes its direction beforehand from what is sought. Questioning is a knowing search for beings in their thatness and whatness.... As questioning about, . . questioning has what it asks about. All asking about . . . is in some way an inquiring of... As a seeking, questioning needs prior guidance from what it seeks. The meaning of being must therefore already be available to us in a certain way.” (Heidegger, Being and Time)

:up:

There's neither the incentive nor the 'wiring' to change our response to empirical experiences such that things feel true. The feeling of truth is aimed at predictive success. There is both the incentive and the 'wiring' to feel 'good' about whatever hedonic experiences we're exposed to, rather than simply accept their first impression. — Isaac

I would say the feeling of truth and the feeling of hedonic satisfaction are inseparably co-implied. Truth isnt a match between inside and outside, it’s a teleological oriented goal of fulfillment of expectations that is never fully satisfied, but can be progressively approximated. Things that are true can always appear truer, because we have an inexhaustible ability to reconstrue our interpretations of the world of events to make them more and more intricately and multi-dimensionally consistent with our anticipations. Theprogressive satisfaction of anticipations is precisely what hedonic valence is oriented around. So if you want to know the path of true happiness, it is the identical path and vector of anticipatory sense-making. I know we’ve already hashed this out, but I have an impulsive need to be a pain in the ass. But this is my op, and if I can’t be a pain in the ass in my own op, where can I be one?

I don't read Thompson as advocating anything in opposition to people like Feldman Barrett and Seth. enavctivism is almost exactly what is being described in active inference approaches to perception, and the embodied mind concept is referenced frequently by Feldman Barrett. I've read Thompson, I'm just not seeing the differences you seem to be seeing. — Isaac

Thompson seemed to be pretty thrilled when he announced on his twitter feed a research paper which he co-authored purporting to show that predictive
processing can’t account for affective selection bias.

He wrote:
“ Exciting news: predictive processing theory can't explain affect-biased attention: “

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S001002772030189X?via%3Dihub

As you would expect, defenders of pp almost
immediately denied that the paper represented
any sort of refutation of the model as a whole. I’m just pointing g out that , while Andy Clark hopes that active inference models will unite representationalist and dynamical, non-representationalist factions within the cognitivist community, phenomenologically-oriented enactivists like Thompson believe that active inference suffers from the drawbacks they associate with predictive processing.

“ What goes on strictly inside the head never as such
counts as a cognitive process. It counts only as a participant in a cognitive process that exists as a relation between the system and its environment. Cognition is not an event happening inside the system; it is the relational process of sense-making that takes place between the system and its environment. In Maturana and Varela’s language (1980, 1987), cognition belongs to the ‘relational domain’ in which the system as a unity relates to the wider context of its milieu, not to the ‘operational domain’ of the system’s internal states (e.g., its brain states). Of course, what goes on inside the system is crucial for enabling the system’s cognitive or sense-making relation to its environment, but to call internal processes as such cognitive is to confuse levels of discourse or to make a category mistake (neurons do not think and feel; people and animals do).

Intentionality is always a relation to that which transcends the present state of the system (where what
transcends the system does not have to exist in the sense of being a real entity). In saying that the mind is intentional, phenomenologists imply that the mind is relational. ‘Being- in-the-world’ (Heidegger) and the ‘lived body-environment’ (Merleau-Ponty) are different ways of articulating this kind of relation. The spatial containment language of internal/external or inside/outside (which frames the internalist/externalist debate) is inappropriate and misleading for understanding the peculiar sort of relationality
belonging to intentionality, the lived body, or being-in-the- world. As Heidegger says, a living being is ‘in’ its world in a completely different sense from that of water being in a glass (Heidegger 1995, pp. 165–166).“

This is a central issue I have with phenomenological approaches. they take, quite unreasonably, the starting point that they way one thinks one's mental processes function, is in some way informative of the way they actually do function. I just don't see any good reason for that assumption — Isaac

Let’s change the wording of this statement to make it about science: the way one’s theory makes sense of empirical phenomena is in some way informative of the way phenomena actually function. You might be inclined to add, yes, as long as the theory undergoes proper experimental validation. The key concept here, then, is ‘actually function’. So hypothesis and assumption is being contrasted here with the actuality of empirical reality. This doesn’t sound particularly Kuhnian to me. I think he would argue that the ‘actuality’ of empirical fact is not something that we can separate from a value system within which such facts emerge as what they are. He would add that within a particular meta-theoretical framework it is useful to make use of empirical results to adjudicate between competing hypotheses, but between meta-theories , deferring to the ‘actual’ facts is not helpful since the competing meta-theories will not agree on what constitutes the relevant data, not to mention method.

Phenomenology doesn’t ignore the empirical facts, it investigates the conditions of possibility making something like empirical objectivity possibility. It does this neither in the guise of an idealism nor a realism but as a radical interactionism. The idea of the true world being hidden behind the veil of apparent experience is a very Cartesian notion , but in postmodern thought , it turns out the only true world is the apparent world , that is, the constructed one.

Asking for a cup in consequence of wanting a cup is not the same as caring about getting the cup. If I program a computer to make the noise "battery" every time it's low on power, it will have the effect of ensuring the computer remains powered (assuming a compliant human listening). The computer may or may not care whether it gets power, depending on how it's been programmed. — Isaac

I’m not sure what your point is here. Are you saying that we don’t know whether someone is a machine rather than a human merely on the basis of their asking for a cup? I’d agree with that. The point is that the difference between a living system and a computer is that a living system is a self-organized anticipatory whole. The human asking for a cup is making a request against a background of concerns and goals. I can’t assume I know beforehand in what sense they ‘care’ about the cup, but it has some relevance to their ongoing concerns or else they wouldnt have mentioned it.
Motivated behaviors don’t exist in humans as disconnected modules of activity , but as reciprocally interrconnected aspects of an integrated holistically functioning system.

It is an external source of surprise, but it is never fully independent of that anticipation.
— Joshs

Then it is not an external source of surprise. Variables outside the Markov blanket are defined by that property. Anything which is not independent of that variables in question in the direction we're concerned about is inside the Markov blanket. You cannot have surprise if nothing is outside of that blanket (it's a fully knowable system), so you need hidden states. It doesn't matter how far you push them back, the boundary (the edge of the Markov blanket) is the edge of the system. — Isaac

Let me put that differently . Can a variable outside a markov blanket be defined by a property in an objective sense, the way we would define a physical stimulus in terms of its own properties, independent of its interaction with a specific organismic system?

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the concept of structural coupling , but it specifies that the environment with which an organism interacts , including all of the outside variables that it can surprise an organism with, cannot be defined independently of the functioning of that organism.

Evan Thompson explains:

“ Whereas physical structures, such as a soap bubble, obtain equilibrium in relation to actual physical condi-
tions of force and pressure, living systems seek equilibrium, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, “with respect to conditions which are only virtual and which the system itself brings into existence; when the [system] . . . executes a work beyond its proper limits and constitutes a proper milieu for itself.”

“ Thus, Merleau-Ponty says, whereas physical structures can be expressed by a law, living structures have to be comprehended in relation to norms: “each organism, in the presence of a given milieu, has its optimal conditions of activity and its proper manner of realizing equilibrium,”and every living being “modifies
its milieu according to the internal norms of its activity.”

“...autopoiesis (in a broad sense that includes adapativity) is the “self-production of an inside that also specifies an outside to which it is normatively related,” and thus that autopoiesis is best seen as the “dynamic co-emergence of interiority and exteriority.” “the (self) generation of an inside is ontologically prior to the dichotomy in- out. It is the inside that generates the asymmetry and it is in relation to this inside that an outside can be established.”

Do you agree with the above?

the central question is, exactly what from a phenomenological experiential vantage is the endocrine activity contributing to the meaning for us of something like an emotion?
— Joshs

The fact that you haven't read the research on this is not that same thing as the central question remaining. It may remain to you. To most neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists it doesn't remain because they've read the vast acres of research which has gone into resolving that exact question — Isaac

Keep in mind that cognitive psychology is a broad tent, and there are many disagreements within different segments of the community. For instance , you may disagree with the concept of structural coupling as an alternative to a markov blanket, and with the idea that internal representations and a computational approach to models of affectivity and cognition are relics of a reductionist positivism that needs to be jettisoned. But if you do disagree, do you think most cognitive psychologists also disagree, based on ‘empirical evidence’? If so, you should also keep in mind where the embodied approach to cognition that researchers like Barrett embrace got its start. One of its key inspirations was the 1991 book, The Embodied Mind , co-written by Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson, who happen to be leading the segment within the cognitivist community advocating for the changes in psychological modelling I’ve described.

The point he was making is that many different empirical accounts of a phenomenon can all ‘work’ , that is, satisfy predictive hypotheses.
— Joshs

What predictive hypothesis has Kelly's model made and had empirically supported. If you can supply the papers I'd be interested to read them. — Isaac

I can direct you to papers by enactivist researchers
like Francisco Varela , Matthew Ratcliffe and Shaun Gallagher on the role of disruption of existential feeling in depression and ptsd, pathologies of agency in schizophrenia, interaction models of autism that critique theory theory , and visual perception, among other topics.

Although no study to date has knocked out all emotional states, all the evidence from lesion studies seems to indicate that it is theoretically possible although it would require hundreds, if not thousands of lesions.

given me an example of what it would be like to have a conversation with someone in this situation.
— Joshs

Tourette's, echolalia, Wernicke's aphasia induced logorrhea, Progressive Jargon Aphasia... — Isaac

These are not examples of selective disruption of affectivity, rather they involve an inseparable entanglement of affect and cognition. A better example would be one where feedback from the body was curtailed, leading to the absence of autonomic cues associated with emotion.

Words 'mean' what they do, so I would imagine if someone learned that the word 'cup' brought them a cup then that's what the word would 'mean' to them. A simple computer could do this. again, I don't see how even a brain would be required, let alone emotion. — Isaac

Why would they care if the word brought them a cup? Because they wanted a cup. The aim and purpose and relevance of the cup is built into the meaning of the word in that context. It is not merely ‘this cup’ in some generic sense , but ‘ this cup that I need in order to accomplish some aim.’ All of that is implied in the use of the word in that instance. Even the most seemingly arbitrary, trivial and unmotivated cognitive activities belong to larger contexts of significance for us.
You said you agreed a psychological system functions as an integrated gestalt , but that implies that we always find ourselves in the midst of activities that matter to us for the sake of some purpose. Is this larger aim that word meanings imply and serve not affective? That is , are goals and desires ever devoid of affectivity? I guess that depends on how narrowly you want to define feeling, affect and emotion. For instance Kelly has a peculiar definition of anger. He says that it is a response to someone who disappoints us by violating an expectation we had of them, for instance when a spouse cheats on us. The anger is an attempt to coax or force them back to behaving the way we initially expected them to behave. So anger involves a two step process of assessment of a situation. First there is disappointment , and then the hope that I can get the other to return to my original expectation of them( mend their ways) .

Where do bodily states come into play in this model?
They are implied by the intentive direction of the anger. The clenching of my fist and other physiological changes are summoned in support of the needs of the situation based on my assessment of what need to be done. That is to say, these bodily preparatory behaviors are in service of and get their meaning from my anger construal of the situation.

What if the connection between my intentive experience and the bodily accompaniments of anger are severed by an injury? Patients have reported that they lose the normal ‘feeling’ of anger , but are these supportive boldily behaviors the core of what we mean by the emotion of anger?
Many have argued that what is left in this instance is merely a neutral , sterile intellectualized cognition devoid of feeling. But I would argue that almost all of what is essential in what we call feeling is already in this assessment, and all that has been lost is a certain bodily supportive energetics that aids in accomplishing the goals that the anger is directing us toward. Without the organized purposive assessment of the anger , all
that is left is an arbitrary concatenation of reflexes with no inherent meaning. I would make the same point concerning fear or sadness. Fear is not primarily the adrenaline surge and quickened reflexes. Theses are merely the peripheral supports in service of an intentional assessment of a situation as threatening. The core of the feeling is the assessment , not the adrenaline rush.

If your model defines emotion exclusively by reference to the peripheral reflexes and endocrine changes that accompany and serve the needs of affective assessments , then it will appear to you that emotion can be selectively eliminated from an experience without affecting the intentional meaning of situations.

But I argue that thinking this way about affect leaves you with a hollow shell of arbitrary reductive causal mechanisms and misses the heart of the matter.

for Kelly as far as the construct system is concerned there is no external world ( no botto
up) that can be isolated from the construct system’s expectations.
— Joshs

Then what is it we're predicting? IF there are no states outside of our Markov blanket then we need not predict the causes of the internal states, we simply know them? In order for prediction to have any meaning we have to have hidden states. — Isaac

Kelly’s model isn’t dealing with causes but intentional motivations (construals). And he isn’t dealing with states but processes of transformation. And he isn’t dealing with anything simply ‘internal’ because there is never simply an internal state apart from its exposure to, interaction with and transformation by an outside. Just because it doesn’t make sense to talk about a external world independent of one’s expectation of it doesn’t mean that the outside which the system encounters as an event is nothing but that anticipation.It is an external source of surprise, but it is never fully independent of that anticipation. It is a surprise RELATIVE TO and partially formed and defined by my expectation, so it is always unique to my system.

This what the autopoietic and enactivist concept of structural coupling between organism and environment implies.

We don’t need ‘hidden states’ in order to have an anticipatory system. Our system which participates in the formation of construals is one pole( the subjective pole) of the subject-object dynamic but it can’t be said to ever exist apart from or independent of this indissociable interaction. Nothing takes place simply ‘inside’ such a brain-body-environment system but always between it and environment.

Clark discussed this difference between predictive processing and enactive models influenced by phenomenology.


“ There remains, however, at least one famously vexed issue upon which PP and the (at least if history is any guide) seem doomed to disagree. That is the issue of ‘internal representation’. Thus Varela et al are explicit that, on the enactivist conception “cognition is no longer seen as problem solving on the basis of representations” (op cit p.205). PP, however, deals extensively in internal
models – rich, frugal, and all points in-between - whose role is to control action by predicting complex plays of sensory data. This, the enactivist might fear, is where
our promising story about neural processing breaks bad. Why not simply ditch the talk of inner models and internal representations and stay on the true path of
enactivist virtue.”

http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/82337/1/SpindelRPP2march17%202.pdf


Clark proceeded to attempt to show how , even though pp relies on the notion of internal representation it somehow evades enactivism’s critique. It seems to me , though, that Clark isnt fully grasping the enactivist argument about what it means for a psychological system to be fully embedded in a world, and so falls back on a Cartesian computationalism of inner processes.

The kicker here is that validation or invalidation , the experience of coherence or chaos , fulfillment or disappointment, doesn’t have to be filtered and processed through some bodily mechanics in order to arrive at ‘feeling’, ‘affect’ and ‘ emotion’.
— Joshs

This you'd have to support with some neurological evidence because as it stands it flies in the face of everything we've seen so far which indicates that these 'emotions' are 100% associated with endocrine activity. — Isaac

I have no doubt these emotions are associated with endocrine activity. That doesn’t prove a specific pattern of causation though , merely association. And the central question is, exactly what from a phenomenological experiential vantage is the endocrine activity contributing to the meaning for us of something like an emotion?
This depends to a profound extent on how we tease out the aspect of emotion that includes involves cognitive appraisal from that which supposedly acts outside of appraisal.

I get the sense that for Barrett , one could hypothetically( or at least imagine doing so ) sever the communication between regions of the brain-body dealing with feeling and those which purportedly don’t , and still be able to talk coherently about a cognitive system.
— Joshs

Not just hypothetically, no. We can literally sever certain connections between brain and body and get pretty much the results we'd expect from our model of hidden state prediction. If you're interested I can drag out some papers on experiments of exactly that sort come Monday, but basically we've already thought that this would need to be done to prove the model, we've done it, and the model works as expected. — Isaac

I’m sure the model works magnificently , but then that’s what we expect of our models. Kelly once wrote that one should ‘t wait until a scientific model has been disproved in order to search for a better one. The point he was making is that many different empirical accounts of a phenomenon can all ‘work’ , that is, satisfy predictive hypotheses. But what it means for a model
to work predictively can vary widely in terms of how arbitrary the interrelationships which the model is designed to describe are assumed to be.

That is why lots of different accounts can describe the same anatomical and functional neural data.
Because we are structurally couples with our world, there is no ‘way in which things really are’ that constrains our accounts, only pragmatically more or less intricate and interrelational ways of describing the ‘same’ phenomenon.

But let me ask you this. If we sever certain connections between brain and body , can we eliminate certain kinds of emotion? Could we hypothetically eliminate all kinds of emotion ? If so, given me an example of what it would be like to have a conversation with someone in this situation.
Describe for me what someone would sound like, how they would be motivated , what their words would ‘mean’ to them without emotion, what you think meaning without emotion could possibly be like.

Otherwise I think we are done here. — SophistiCat

I suspect we were done the minute I challenged your ego.