The "constraints" of the system, but then order takes shape, but then this creates the ultimate disorder of NO JUSTIFICATION. — schopenhauer1

I'd say that humans evolve to feel constrained only be themselves. We fucking decide now, --at least until the contemptuous and lecherous Neptunians make us their pets.

We justify ourselves only before one another, not before gods or the void.

There is no justification for why we must do anything, yet we act as if we do! — schopenhauer1

Can you justify this need for a justification ?

Justification is part of the way humans cooperate and compete, it seems to me.

When meaning itself can not be justified, yet we "fear" the consequences of this or that, something went askew. — schopenhauer1

We are liquid temporal finite softwhere, always on the way toward more clarity, more power. Reason is purposive activity. Felix culpa ! Something happened. Something went askew. Pumpkin is cotton in then mark.

It all goes back to the Zapffe's break in nature. Talk about a break in symmetry! Humans have created a huge asymmetry. — schopenhauer1

But we are nature. We were implicit in Nature, which had to give birth to its wickedest and most beautiful child.

That's right. But in the current lexicon, 'existence' is a univocal term - something either exists or it doesn't. — Wayfarer

But you are among philosophers here, no? That 'existence' is not univocal is stressed in the intro of Being and Time. If memory serves, Austin had a party with showing how complex our use of 'real' was. Then there's Wittgenstein, Derrida, Foucault, etc. Or consider Braver's synoptic narrative in A Thing of This World.

But don't you think the requirement for there to be an argument for the indispensability mathematics says something? What makes it necessary to defend mathematical insight? Don't you think this is an ideological argument? — Wayfarer

All claims, and all tacit assumptions, one we've dug 'em out, stand before the divinized tribunal of reason. Socrates is and always will be an annoying asshole who refuses to take things for granted, who delights in finding out the confusion in every pontification.

Some Kant quotes that seem relevant:

The difference between truth and dream… is not decided through the quality of the representations that are referred to objects, for they are the same in both, but through their connection according to rules that determine the combination of representations in the concept of an object, and how far they can or cannot stand together in one experience.

Reason must subject itself to critique in all its undertakings, and cannot restrict the freedom of critique through any prohibition without damaging itself and drawing upon itself a disadvantageous suspicion. For there is nothing so important because of its utility, nothing so holy, that it may be exempted from this searching review and inspection, which knows no respect for persons [i.e. no person bears more authority than any other—GW]. On this freedom rests the very existence of reason, which has no dictatorial authority, but whose claim is never anything more than the agreement of free citizens, each of whom must be able to express his reservations, indeed even his veto, without holding back. (A738f/B766f, translation modified)

We are, as philosophers, Reason's 'infinite' self-critique.

But surely if you are into Hegel, you can’t have got anywhere without understanding how his triadic system describes logic as the holist would see it? — apokrisis

It's hard to say. In my experience, there are lots of ways to interpret and focus on Hegel, and I've checked out a decent number of them. I'd be glad to hear your take.

I offered a Brandom quote above that focused on unstable impersonal conceptual schemes that increase in complexity and comprehensiveness. For Kojeve's Hegel, this 'is' time (as the movement of the embodied 'software' coming to understand itself and what knowledge is.)

This is standard social psychology. Not at all peculiar. How else could it have been? — apokrisis

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It's like pulling teeth though to make that point around here.

Folks love their methodological solipsism !

Another point is that mathematical objects do indeed exist. They are deeply involved in our inferences, so it's basically confused to deny them. The issue becomes clarifying how they exist. Personally I expect such clarification to go one forever, as for all of our concepts. We perform them together, in a self-referential and self-critical way that allows for an increase of that performance's complexity.

Why would it be that one of the purportedly major 20th c philosophers wants to 'avoid any appeal to rational insight?' — Wayfarer

The problem with such appeals is that they don't explain much, if anything. In-sight is a mere metaphor. An organ is simply postulated (as an 'eye') along with a realm or dimension that only that 'eye' can see. This metaphor gets something right. We tend to agree more of arithmetical issues than on other issues, but it's a bit of a ghost story. While some philosophers might dislike ghost stories because they dislike religion, others merely object to shirking the conceptual labor required. What's needed is an explanation that connects to the rest of our knowledge. I claim that, more or less explicitly, we strive for systematic / compact / cohesive knowledge.

For context : I take from Hegel the idea that 'subject and substance' (symbol and the symbolized?) are entangled and not truly separable. The lifeworld is symbolically articulated. The reductionist scientistic image is just that, a map that ignores our symbolic historicity, the sediment of purposive meaning. The real world (for phenomenology) is all encompassing context. Even a massproduced blouse in a certain style speaks of the industrial revolution and the beheading of kings by a rising bourgeoisie (and the fancy designer version that inspired the knockoff.) We have a teeming creaking jungle of references here.

We like to think that purpose is completely and only in us. We all tend to think that signtrading is necessarily conscious. The second idea has been demolished in philosophy. Tacit norms are now understood to dominate. But the first (all purpose is animal purpose) seems still very strong.

You see molecules, neurons, laws of the universe, thermodynamics, information. But none of it get at it. They are great for explaining p-zombies though. — schopenhauer1

That's the problem, differentiating ourselves from p-zombies, so sure there is Something ---but this Something is Magically Private.

I use capitals to emphasize a kind of mysticism that resents being questioned. I can speak with the vulgar of sensations and feelings, but here I'm trying to think with those who question to the end.

Was it merely empirical for Darwin to recognise that evolution is the inevitable shaping hand of nature? — apokrisis

I don't know. It's an organizing framework (?), making new observations possible, so probably not only. Just to be clear, I have no objection to seeing what's going on and articulating it. At one point, gravity was just there, and Newton had the model. Now it's part of GR, yes ? But I'm open to the 2nd law being fundamental. Why not ?

I am truly willing to take off reductionist goggles (which is not to say it's easy.)

The world is (or seems to be) through a particular pair of eyes, though we grasp it always as transcending and encompassing those eyes.

How do you make sense of this peculiar situation ?

Do you see us participating in [ coconstructing ? ] a shared symbolic realm ? I like to think of us as tribal [ timebinding ] software running on local biohardware.

But he's one hell of an entertainer and one hell of a psychologist. — Baden

:up:

I like reading Nietzsche better than I like Nietzsche I think. — Baden

He explodes and gives us the fragments. Some of them are lovely, others hideous. He reminds me of Hamlet, poisoned and poisonous and yet transcendent.

I get the impression, having read a biography, he was overcompensating for his own social inadequacies and taking out his frustration on some easy targets at times. — Baden

I've also read bios, and I'm sure his weird life was the soil for just his kind of flowering...all those ladies pampering him. Then a too-passionate Wagner obsession, a rebellion. But his best 200 pages probably stack up against anyone's.

Yeah, I like a few of them too. — 180 Proof

:up:

I believe it was Quine who called the whole notion into question, saying that there is no clear boundary between what we can know a priori and what we can know based on experience. Rather, all of our knowledge is interconnected, and any belief can potentially be revised in light of new evidence. — Wayfarer

:up:

My problem with that is, well, pure maths, for starters. — Wayfarer

Pure maths has been revised. I suggest looking into the great ideological civil war of mathematics.

I don't deny that basic arithmetic is going be to extremely stable from now on, but there was a time before zero, a time before negative numbers. Math tends to be built so that useful ideas are preserved with any extension. Platonism sometimes seem to merely assume its own conclusion.

In set theoretical terms there are an infinite number of ways to construct the natural numbers. Which one is Real ? How would we know ? All that matters is structure. See Benacerraf’s What Numbers Could Not Be. Along these lines, there are many constructions of the real numbers, but real analysis is independent of such constructions, appealing only to a structure which they all share (in order to be considered as such a 'construction'), to a system of interdependent roles (not unlike Saussure's linguistic system of differences without positive elements.)

In physical Reality, everything is Particular, except that rational minds somehow "see" General (holistic) patterns, known as "Universals" & "Principles". — Gnomon

I suggest that we drop the ocular metaphor and talk about dancing. In other words, we perform 'universals' in the way we trade marks and noises. This 'seeing' of 'form' (this metaphorical interpretation of our situation) has its pros and cons. It's helped us trick ourselves into believing in ghosts.

But where did those rules-for-Reason come from? — Gnomon

I suggest they evolved and continue to evolve among / between social animals. We can only look at our own intellectual history. We've invented new ways of thinking, left old ways behind. The complexity of our culture has increased. We have more concepts than before.

If one insists that X installed such concepts in us, without being able to provide details, where X is more mysterious than we are ourselves, then this allusion to X is a sentimental antiexplanation, a hiding-from rather than an addressing-of our lack of clarity about of our nature. Or so I claim.

See: http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/189/284 — apokrisis

This one won't work for me.

Maybe: https://complexsystems.org/publications/into-the-cool/ — apokrisis

This one did. This quote helps.

“Nature abhors a gradient,” they claim, and life arose in order to reduce energy gradients – in much the same way that tornadoes serve to dissipate the pent up energy in the gradient between high and low pressure air masses. The emergence of life is “causally connected to the second law,” they say. Indeed, the second law is variously characterized by Schneider and Sagan as a force that “governs,” “organizes,” “selects,” “generates,” “determines,” “mandates,” “pushes” and “leads to” biological structure and organization. The second law is the “source” for the overall directionality observed in evolution, they say.

The Second Law is simply a globally inevitable tendency or propensity. But recognising this as telos at its simplest possible level is still recognising that it is a universal drive that causes order in the Cosmos. — apokrisis

So it's something that is just found empirically. One looks and sees and articulates this tendency. It doesn't reduce to this or that aspect (thinkers you mentioned.). (?)

The point here is for the scientist to accept all four of Aristotle's causes and not pretend nature is reducible to just bottom-up construction by localised material and efficient causes. — apokrisis

:up:

That seems reasonable, and I grasp that it challenges a more encrusted view.

We will need to rely on natural expressions and reactions to particular situations that humans typically harmonize to develop this concept of pain. — Richard B

:up:

Right ! So words are just one kind of deeds in an inferential predictive explanatory nexus with others.

'Her back hurt when she woke up, so I served her breakfast in bed.'

The self is this side of our senses, and society is the other side of our senses. — RussellA

But it's not. I claim that you've simply adopted bad assumptions from a more primitive era of philosophy.

Also consider the fact that any explicitly defined linguistic convention can only be finitely specified, implying that there is always uncertainty as to the intended meaning of a convention. — sime

:up:

This idea is central in Hegel, as I understand it. Our concepts are never complete or perfectly articulate and never completely internally consistent. The system is always falling 'forward' and gathering determinate negations, increasing in complexity, evolving. This includes the forging of metacognitive and logically expressive terms. Brandom talks about what he himself is an example of, our ability to make our rational nature explicit to itself by the introduction of metacognitive concepts.

If meaning is considered to be use, as Humpty is suggesting, then how can meaning-as-use be grounded in linguistic convention? — sime

I suggest checking out that paper by Brandom. The big picture is pragmatic rationalism. Ethics is first philosophy. A person is an essentially temporal social-conventional entity, a focus of responsibility for claims and other actions --a normative avatar in the space of reasons.

You challenge me (within the norms of politeness too, another ethical frame) in the name of inferential norms, calling upon me to defend my claim. Indeed, in making that came, I have indeed committed myself to its defense. If I can't defend a strong challenge, it's my duty to withdraw or modify the claim. I am also not allowed to contradict myself, for the self is the kind of thing (almost by definition) that ought not disagree with itself --- must strive toward coherence, to perform or be a unity.

One supports this approach phenomenologically, which is to say by simply bringing us to awareness of what we have been doing all along. Scan this forum. See us hold one another responsible for keeping our stories straight. See which inferences are tolerated, which rejected. Bots can learn this stuff from examples, just as children do.

but working together to see the breadth of our world in openly, seriously "producing" the terms the other is using, by creating examples and imagining a context where they are valid (as pointed out by plaque flag); to, as Socrates says, stand in the other's place, their shoes. I take this "unfolding", as you say, of our unexamined (shared) lives as the purpose and skill of the philosopher — Antony Nickles

:up:

That's also what I would call hermeneutical ontology or phenomenology. Philosophers scrape away some of the crust or sediment of traditional and mostly 'unconscious' pre-interpretation (Heidegger's interpretedness.) So it's not like physics. We walk in the city talking, challenging, responding, more sensitive than to inferential/semantic norms, giving more of a damn than most for the best word, the fiery sign that liberates, only to become a trap for those who must make it all new tomorrow. Sufficient unto the day is the stupidity thereof.

And then the Second Law was shown to be a special case of the more general thing of dissipative structure - at least in my view. — apokrisis

I need to track down those references, of course, but while you are here:

Should we think of the 'second claw of thermodemonics' as something like an urge ? Such as will in Schopenhauer or deathdrive in Freud ? Do things 'want' to dissipate ? Or do we just project this telos because things tend to dissipate ? Random motion will tend toward dissipation, right ? Though occasionally it can move toward what we call order ?

Do you know of any resources that give a great overall intro ? I love bigpicture first then zoom in.

Consciousness is loaded jargon. It speaks to a Cartesian substance. — apokrisis

:up:

This makes sense to me. I guess the deeper issue, 'behind' Cartesian confusion, is the thereness of the there. The world is not 'only' concept. It's hard to get at it this issue.

Are there really 3 dimensions ? Is color 'more' than differential response ?

Yorck understands religious life in terms of its “freedom from the world” or Weltfreiheit (ST, p. 81 & 112). Psychologically, freedom from the world is the precondition for the consciousness of a world-transcendent God, or the consciousness of transcendence (ST, p. 105). — plaque flag

Freedom from the world is a genuine lack of interest in more typical status indicators like wealth and fame, as well as (perhaps) a lack of attachment to longevity. One values differently. One has a rich interiority, a secret source of status. Consider the supreme myth of a transcendent god who only appears for the public eye (for One's eye) as a church-and-state crucified blasphemer. How could such a myth be intensified ? It screams its message, even to an atheist like me.

I find a gnostic (?) meaning in it as well. All good and beautiful and lovely things that exist...do so down here in 'hell,' on our mad prison planet, subject at all times to humiliation and accident, enacting the 'will' of that old gametheoretical demonking Moloch. Matrix, mother : tender and yet devouring.

That life is historical means that each person is always already outside his or her own individual “nature” and placed within the historical connection to predecessor- and successor-generations. For Yorck, living self-consciousness is, to use Hegel's fortuitous phrase, “the I that is we and the we that is I” (Hegel 1807, p. 140). — plaque flag

We see this Hegelian insight (which he surely got elsewhere) appear in Feuerbach, Yorck, Dilthey, and Heidegger. Predecessor generations have been discussed already (our having been thrown.) The mention of successor generations emphasizes our future directedness (our projection, our livingtoward, strivingtoward, bringing-to-fruition, expectant concern. Summer porn posthumously. The strong poet intends to pry its way into the past of the future. This poet hopes to be experienced as fate by those who come later. Indeed, those who come later will be (to some degree) a repetition of this poet, a reenactment of its memes. What is it in us that wants to come home with silver and gold?

compostmoderns — 180 Proof

Nice burn ! Even if I like some of 'em.

I also find much resonance in the project to integrate ethics into the understanding of language, something I have been incoherently banging on about for some time. — unenlightened

He puts responsibility, entitlement, and authority--which is to say our sociality--at the very heart of rationality and meaning. We live and move and have our being in normativity.

The idea of the language game - the use of it, must be to communicate the truth and not to deceive, in the sense that though the business of a stick insect is to project "I am a stick", the business of the predator is not at all to understand, but to see through the visual claim. — unenlightened

Right. So, shifting to an analogous conceptual context, the (nonironic) declarative sentence becomes the basis. To abuse the messaging system is to only pretend to be in or with the community (or to be in it linguistically but not affectively.) Languagelinked communities have something like a shared mind.

"Naturalism" to my understanding is a position that denies the meaning of its name, in the sense that the claim his that everything is natural and there is nothing unnatural or supernatural. This reflects the sad fact that one needs ones' enemies to maintain one's identity. — unenlightened

The enemy as boundary of the self also fascinates me. The concept of the supernatural (excepting obvious cases) strikes me as blurry. I think we all model the world according to personal experience. If something extraordinary happens, we update that model. This makes 'supernatural' seem like a synonym of 'very surprising.' Of course we have Voltaire and Luther in our rearview, there are definition associations with this or that style of reported or expect surprise.

For me a key point here is that discursive normativity is irreducible. The scientific image is a mere part of an encompassing lifeworld of people living into scientific norms for instance. That we evolved from simpler organisms to be able to perform our discursive selves doesn't diminish the dignity or rationality of those selves.

Suppose there is someone who has lived their life alone on a desert island. — RussellA

Human babies don't survive without help. If a human doesn't learn a language, I don't know how much we can say about them in this context (they would be almost like wild animals?).

My question is, where exactly is this public concept of pain, if neither of the individuals has the private concept of pain ? — RussellA

There was a tribe of mute jellybears once, and when one jellybear pinched its own nose while looking at another, that second jellybear would give the first a long hug. Eventually some teenaged jellybears started pinching their noses (seemingly ironically, because they fled attempted hugs) at frustrating peers.

The idea that more than any other animal we live in a symbolic realm is something a supporter of Indirect Realism would say, something that I would say. — RussellA

My view will make more sense if you grasp the claim-making self as a social convention, as part of that enacted symbolic realm. So the person that sees (which is the person that talks about what is seen) is not stuffed in a brain, not trapped behind or as sensations.

philosophies we dislike have much to teach us, about ourselves, — Pantagruel

:up:

I can't help but hold the view that reality is an act of constructionism - we can't identify absolute truth (which is likely a remnant of Greek philosophy and Christianity) and philosophical positions we might hold appear to be culturally located. This does not feel especially wise or clever to me. — Tom Storm

:up:

This does indeed seem to be much of what folks find offensive, a simple recognition of our 'historicity.'

But in the end, we can only converge on a pragmatically “good enough” agreement in our collective behaviour. There is always a “residue” that is left vague and unspecified. — apokrisis

If you are interested, Brandom is great on Hegel (and it address what's above.)
***************
Hegel denies the intelligibility of the idea of a set of determinate concepts (that is, the ground-level concepts we apply in empirical and practical judgment) that is ultimately adequate in the sense that by correctly applying those concepts one will never be led to commitments that are incompatible according to the contents of those concepts. This claim about the inprinciple instability of determinate concepts, the way in which they must collectively incorporate the forces that demand their alteration and further development, is the radically new form Hegel gives to the idea of the conceptual inexhaustibility of sensuous immediacy. Not only is there no fore-ordained “end of history” as far as ordinary concept-application in our cognitive and practical deliberations is concerned, the very idea that such a thing makes sense is for Hegel a relic of thinking according to metacategories of Verstand rather than of Vernunft.

All that he thinks the system of logical concepts he has uncovered and expounded does for us is let us continue to do out in the open, in the full light of self-conscious explicitness that lets us say what we are doing, what we have been doing all along without being able to say what was implicit in those doings.
...

There is no thought that any particular development is necessary in the alethic sense of being inevitable or unavoidable, or even predictable. It is rather that once it has occurred, we can retrospectively exhibit it as proper, as a development that ought to have occurred, because it is the correct application and determination of a conceptual norm that we can now see, from our present vantage-point, as having been all along part of what we were implicitly committed to by prior decisions. This normative sort of necessity is not only compatible with freedom, it is constitutive of it. That is what distinguishes the normative notion of ‘freedom’ Kant introduces from the elusive alethic notion Hume worried about. Commitment to the sort of retrospective rational reconstruction that finds norms governing contingent applications of concepts (the process of reason) turns out to be implicit in engaging in discursive practices at all because it is only in the context of discerning such expressively progressive traditions that concepts are intelligible as having determinate contents at all. Coming to realize this, and so explicitly to acknowledge the commitment to being an agent of reason’s march through history, is achieving the distinctive sort of selfconsciousness Hegel calls “Absolute knowing.”

What is “fundamental” is the whole triadic shebang of the Peircean system. Holism says self organisation supplies it own ground of being. — apokrisis

If it fits in at all, where does consciousness fit in ? Does it play a crucial role ? Perhaps you've already said it and I didn't understand.

Any thoughts on Stuart Kauffman ? He seemed legit in a couple of video lectures.

What do you think Hegel was trying to argue? — apokrisis

At the moment, I think he saw us as historically constrained (timebinding) but otherwise freefloating creators of our own mutating normative essence. [Semantics is normative. We decide/perform what we mean, create our signs. ] We are beings with a history rather than a nature, existing mostly as what we take ourselves to be.