it is largely this narrative that determines the value of the piece. — Banno

:up:

Bones of saints.

The analysis of existence that followed from the work of Frege and Russell is to my eye far better than that given by the Germans. I would not be happy to have it befuddled in this way. — Banno

You might like Feuerbach on this issue.

We check understanding of a concept by checking that it is used as expected. — Banno

:up:

How about semantic norms? Used properly. Is he holding that fork right ? I don't just expect Americans to drive on the right side of the road. One demands it. One also does not assume a conclusion. One does sometimes discuss edge cases, address gaps in the mostly unwritten law.

imported into English with a vast baggage. — Banno

Isn't English crammed with imports though ? Personally I wouldn't mind if we used 'existence' for 'Dasein,' or something like that. The French used something like 'human reality' (which might not have been ideal, but they ran with it.)

Are there any terms from Frege I can pick on? [Just kidding!]

It says "we ought use the term this way and here's why". That can be disputed. — Isaac

Yes. You'll perhaps agree that everything can be disputed throughout. De Man writes some good stuff on irony pervading an entire text, without being concentrated in one spot. I can imagine an inspired dialogue wandering all over the place. It just needs to stay interesting in a nontoxic way to all participants. A definition is a prelude, an invitation to cocreative halfadversarial exploration.

if someone wants to explore the meaning of Dasein and a hostile party butts in with, say, Adorno's excoriating analysis of Heidegger's abuse of language and celebration of irrationality? Would that be philosophical? — Jamal

Heidegger himself might contrast gossip with attending to the matter itself. It's primate-all-too-primate of us to love and hate and (anti-)identity with the faces painted on bags of memes and forget to dig for the memes beneath soap opera, to yank them out for 'endless recontextualization for the hell of it.'

To answer your question, it could be philosophical as an icebreaking joke. Shouldn't we have wings on our shoes when we do this stuff ? I don't pretend that my wings never fall off.

So the 'biosemiotic story' goes ... — 180 Proof

What do you think ? And do you have a view on Dennett's later work ( From Bacteria to Bach... )

Like tautologies, 'p-zombiies' are devoid of content. They are merely there (à la Chinese Rooms). — 180 Proof

Correct me if I'm wrong. Folks can't say what p-zombies are supposed to lack. The consciousness we can talk about is 'material' in the sense that we have public criteria for its application.

Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese.

Searle / Sarl
...if the man in the room does not understand Chinese on the basis of implementing the appropriate program for understanding Chinese then neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis because no computer, qua computer, has anything the man does not have...

Clearly the human in this case is the relatively stupid meatbot while instruction book hosts / performs most of the intelligence. It's weird that Sarl thought this proved that computers don't 'really' think. This is maybe the problem of the meaning(lessness) of being again in the more typical first-person register (which dilutes it by taking too much for granted.) 'Thrusting against the limits of language. '

You might like this:

folly -
folly for to -
for to -
what is the word -
folly from this -
all this -
folly from all this -
given -
folly given all this -
seeing -
folly seeing all this -
this -
what is the word -
this this -
this this here -
all this this here -
folly given all this -
seeing -
folly seeing all this this here -
for to -
what is the word -
see -
glimpse -
seem to glimpse -
need to seem to glimpse -
folly for to need to seem to glimpse -
what -
what is the word -
and where -
folly for to need to seem to glimpse what where -
where -
what is the word -
there -
over there -
away over there -
afar -
afar away over there -
afaint -
afaint afar away over there what -
what -
what is the word -
seeing all this -
all this this -
all this this here -
folly for to see what -
glimpse -
seem to glimpse -
need to seem to glimpse -
afaint afar away over there what -
folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what -
what -
what is the word -
what is the word

http://www.samuel-beckett.net/whatistheword.html

I like the marker hypothesis. It seems to model a 'deep' subrational self. Great quote from apo too. The brain as hardware, with the help of cultural software, models the relationship of an avatar and its world. Memes on top of genes that were built to host them ?

p-zombies are tautologies and subjective beings are contradictions ... — 180 Proof

Could you elaborate on the bold part ? I think I grasp the underlined part.

This criticism of the Left is very much in line with Zizek’s.

Maybe it’s because postmodernism is his philosophical milieu that he comes across as postmodernist. — Jamal

:up:

The word 'postmodern' is a bit of a hot potato, too.

.

Fossil fuel forced us to move up to a world valued in dollars. Most folk want to move it back to a world valued in dignity, respect. Or even just likes. Even just attention. — apokrisis

:up:

Any thoughts on how AI might affect our existential or technological or thermodynamic situation ? I think a storm is coming, beautiful and terrible.

We became animals that uniquely consumed wood – all this unwanted savannah trees just poking out of the ground – and gained in terms of fat and protein. — apokrisis

:up:

I never thought of it that way.

Intelligence in the form of semiotic innovation as well as simple neurosemiotic capacity both needs feeding, and is justified by being able to consume more. The Second Law says if it is possible for organisms to degrade locked up negentropy – do better than the unorganised world was doing – then such organisms must evolve. — apokrisis

I understand the bold part. Could you say more about the underlined part ? I think you are saying we should expect evolution where it increases throughput, maximizes burn ?

Ginsberg wails about Moloch. But the Beats celebrated the image of cool Neal Cassidy – driving the endless American highway in a big-ass car. Entropification personified. The flow experience of mindlessly riding a surging wave of gasoline and asphalt.

Once you learn to love a V8, what hope is there that you will lobby for hair-shirt Green energy policies? Burning gas has become a defining identity issue. — apokrisis

Yes. Ginsberg's poem is maybe about lust and tenderness, the desire for individual erotic expansion, so basically an alternative version of Cassidy's colorblind hot-rodding cocksmanship.

The gametheory Moloch idea is simple. Who can afford to slow the burn ? No one. Who can afford to not build bigger and badder and even bloodier AI ? No one. Saints are roadkill. Moloch demands a biblically tall Jenga tower.

Every skull wears an acquired face and calls it "self". I suspect that language – word-fetishizing – is why "the myth of self endures". — 180 Proof

Granted that it's an invention, does it persist because it accomplishes something ? What is it to be a discursive self, the kind Descartes took for granted? Why did Descartes take it as obvious that his voice was unified ? Why not we think therefore we are ? Brandom is good on this.
***
Kant’s most basic idea, the axis around which all his thought turns, is that what distinguishes exercises of judgment and intentional agency from the performances of merely natural creatures is that judgments and actions are subject to distinctive kinds of normative assessment. Judgments and actions are things we are in a distinctive sense responsible for. They are a kind of commitment we undertake. Kant understands judging and acting as applying rules, concepts, that determine what the subject becomes committed to and responsible for by applying them.
...
The responsibility one undertakes by applying a concept is a task responsibility: a commitment to do something. On the theoretical side, what one is committed to doing, what one becomes liable to assessment as to one’s success at doing, is integrating one’s judgments into a whole that exhibits a distinctive kind of unity: the synthetic unity of apperception. It is a systematic, rational unity, dynamically created and sustained by drawing inferential consequences from and finding reasons for one’s judgments, and rejecting commitments incompatible with those one has undertaken. Apperceiving, the characteristically sapient sort of awareness, is discursive (that is, conceptual) awareness. For it consists in integrating judgments into a unity structured by relations of what judgments provide reasons for and against what others. And those rational relations among judgments are determined by the rules, that is the concepts, one binds oneself by in making the judgments. Each new episode of experience, paradigmatically the making of a perceptual judgment, requires integration into, and hence transformation of the antecedent constellation of commitments. New incompatibilities can arise, which must be dealt with critically by rejecting or modifying prior commitments. New joint consequences can ensue, which must be acknowledged or rejected. The process by which the whole evolves and develops systematically is a paradigmatically rational one, structured by the rhythm of inhalation or amplification by acknowledging new commitments and extracting new consequences, and exhalation or criticism by rejecting or adjusting old commitments in the light of their rational relations to the new ones.
***

Philosophers, more than most, are 'bewitched by language', no? — 180 Proof

Oh that's a tough one.

Yes, if we focus on how useless these philosophers are, how much fun they have splashing around in their confusion. Regular folks (almost by definition) just use the usual word tools in the usual ways.
No, if we acknowledge how much better a strong philosopher is at 'hearing' the hollowness of ordinary usage.

A good philosopher might be defined in terms of an extreme sensitivity to semantic and inferential norms. But we got to make room for Nietzsche: strong philosophers are possessed. They think because they feel the world differently. I love John Coltrane. I can think of a chain of words from a beloved philosopher as another kind of music that moves through time. (Hobbes' chapter 'Of Man' is like this for me.)

I suspect you agree with Freddy ...

But there is no such substratum; there is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming; "the doer" is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything.
— On the Genealogy of Morals — 180 Proof

Yes. The doer is a fiction, so even 'deed' is no longer the right word. But taking phrases as tools, as flags being waved, screwdrivers being twisted, I answer yes.

Doers are fictional / conventional (essentially social) foci of responsibility.

More context plesse. — 180 Proof

Sure. A bouquet of W quotes:

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.
...
The experience that we need in order to understand logic is not that something or other is the state of things, but that something is: that, however, is not experience.

To say 'I wonder at such and such being the case' has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case. In this sense one can wonder at the existence of, say, a house when one sees it and has not visited it for a long time and has imagined that it had been pulled down in the meantime. But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing. I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it's clouded. But that's not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is. One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. But then it's just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.

The dominant memes (tropes) of a generation (of a form of life) are the tentacles it uses to explore and grasp any novel object. We are cyborgs to the core, enacting an impersonal conceptual scheme which we do not notice and did not choose. See the child learn to bark and scratch English and its contingent singifiers for a contingently articulated web of intercontrastive signifieds. This is how we roll, what we do, what we are, interpretive processes, bound time on the backs of primates.

Maybe how thrown we are is underestimated. It's not just being born lefthanded to a lavatory attendant and an epileptic with long fingers. It's the deepest part of me, my boldest thoughts, the language I am forced to think them in and with. It's my most basic bodily tendencies to react (Dreyfus likes this part, such as how close people stand in different cultures, how assertive they are physically.) Does Bergson fit in here ? We are continuous beings, gliding and accumulating, skating understandingly on a pre-conceptually significant and soporifically familiar roundabout. We do 70 on the highway, thinking about the book we are going to write, remembering an interaction that went beautifully, wincing at one that hurt.

Thank you for the kind words ! Especially from you they are valued.

As I discern things, there is no "hard problem" for scientists, just another hard confusion that semantically bewitches philosophers. — 180 Proof

I agree. But what do you make of 'wondering at a tautology' ? Do you see/feel why this confusion is tempting ? I love music. Feeling is first in some sense, but feeling is also senseless or aconceptual, but that too is nonsense. See what I mean ? Have you wrestled with this eel ?

I like the addition of [ just ] to 'drifting spacerock.' Well played.

Because the substance of the past is radically different from the substance of the future, substance dualism is justified, and it is the best option for understanding the nature of reality. — Metaphysician Undercover

Cats are different than roaches too. As I see it, anything we can make any sense of is for just that reason 'part' of the same inferential nexus. So I'm down with idealism understood as holism (as Hegel seems to have understood it.) But this kind of idealism does not think that mind is fundamental or prior to matter. The lifeworld and the self and others and language are all given in a primordial unity. Heidegger and the later Husserl talk about this. We can abstract (yank out) entities from their context. We can talk as if thought was weightless and disembodied. We can ignore its energetic cost, its dependence on a representative for its equivalence class. Such methodical ignorance may even be practically appropriate if metaphysically absurd.

This also gets at the heart of Heidegger :
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/#DiaPhr
To put the point more generally, and in more basic ontological terms, if we are to understand anything at all, we must already find ourselves ‘in’ the world ‘along with’ that which is to be understood. All understanding that is directed at the grasp of some particular subject matter is thus based in a prior ‘ontological’ understanding—a prior hermeneutical situatedness. On this basis, hermeneutics can be understood as the attempt to ‘make explicit’ the structure of such situatedness. Yet since that situatedness is indeed prior to any specific event of understanding, so it must always be presupposed even in the attempt at its own explication. Consequently, the explication of this situatedness—of this basic ontological mode of understanding—is essentially a matter of exhibiting or ‘laying-bare’ a structure with which we are already familiar (as well as a structure that is present in every event of understanding) and in which we are already embedded. In this respect, hermeneutics becomes one with phenomenology, itself understood, in Heidegger’s thinking, as just such a ‘laying bare’ (it also takes the form, given the focus on situation and situatedness, of what Heidegger later calls a ‘topology’ (Topologie) or a ‘saying of place’—see Malpas 2014).

.

The brain has the necessary unity for a self identity and receives input from one individuals sensory organs and perceptual mechanisms. — Andrew4Handel

I think the unity is software rather than hardware. We learn to take responsibility for our bodies. We learn to talk about what we see and what we think. Before long we think that nothing is more real than this convention. This isn't crazy, though, for it's the normative self that makes a case. So Descartes was right but not complete or careful. Perhaps thoughts have extension. 'Of course' thoughts have extension, are material in some sense.

To distinguish between what is to be sought, and what is to be avoided, is to make a distinction of kind, which is to categorize, and this is a qualia based judgement. — Metaphysician Undercover

I say : so you assume. So you happen to interpret, projecting expired metaphysics on our fellow mammals. <smile>

Even thermostats respond differentially, categorize. Check Sellars maybe on what it might mean to really apply a concept and not just react to the presence of X.

Next stop: metacognition. — Tom Storm

:up:

We've all caught the Hamlet virus by now.

a definition can be read as an argument that we ought to agree. — Isaac

Yes. Semantic norms. Appropriate and inappropriate use of a flag or siren.

We may even be described as always working on our self and self perception. Running from our self, finding our self, losing our self and so on

But one thing I believe is we should be true to our self not led by others. Not to feel pushed and pulled but with some kind of self contained integrity. — Andrew4Handel

:up:

We need stability. We cling to terror management strategies, orienting myths. To me we get this 'software' from the culture, picking and choosing what fits our life, sometimes even inventing stuff that others can copy and use.

So the Bayesian mechanics approach of Karl Friston says all organisms are prediction machines - embodiments of Robert Rosen’s modelling relation - that work to reduce their levels of surprisal. In less jargon, we learn to predict reality in such routine fashion that we can control its flow without ever being surprised. — apokrisis

How might you account for technological progress ? Or the enlightenment goal of increasing autonomy ? In other words, how does timebinding fit in here ?

Political dissent once dealt with real world issues, like the disequilibrium between labour and capital. But again citing Fukuyama, the political focus has shifted to the distractions of identity politics. — apokrisis

:up:

I don't think it's pure distraction. It matters whether abortion is legal. But it looks like a consolation prize.

Thank you !

Have you looked into Moloch as a game theory metaphor ? A generalized prisoner's dilemma ? Moloch demands a tower ! We must play this game of Jenga. Those who won't are eliminated, assimilated by those who will. We are machine elves dropped like a match on fossil fuels, maximizing throughput ? I'd like to know more about dissipative structures. If you have any comments on that, I'm all ears.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

while the romantic mode is based on intuition and direct experience. — ChatGPT

In careful, technical conversation, it's hard to make sense of qualia. It's hard to even point out the logical difficultly to people, because our ordinary way of talking obscures the issue. This is the Motte and Bailey confusion as explored by Ryle. So people don't 'get' Wittgenstein's point. There is 'obviously' something like 'direct experience.' One says so and one agrees. Of course. But not of course. The problem of the meaning of such signs is overlooked. One has bills to pay, places to be, more visceral myths to elaborate, something juicier to chew on.

how the question is framed often is the issue. Folk are prone to uncritical acceptance of a naive or pre-philosophical position. — Banno

:up:

Does by this account Shakespeare's play become Hamlet? — Tom Storm

As you may know, Bloom quotes Hegel noticing that Shakespeare's characters overhear themselves and for that reason change. We are dialectical protagonists, with Hamlet for our dark prince.

Is the metaphor the thing itself? — Tom Storm

:up:

We might think of the icing or top layer of 'Spirit' in terms of a self-referential complex of concepts-metaphors. Theology is that part of the lifeworld which describes its own conceptual essence. As Schopenhauer might put, its computation is like a parasite, mostly impractical. But the self-image of a community matters. Existence is what it takes itself to be, within the usual limits of embodiment.

Which means what exactly? That we invent concepts and that's enough to be getting on with? — Tom Storm

As I read the situation, some of the Germans of this era were transforming Christian pessimistic memes into humanist (Satanic?) optimistic memes. You don't want to forget the creepy organ music. Feeling is first. Religious tradition could be integrated as if by magic (with mouthfuls of air and handfuls of printer's ink) with optimizing factory output. Hegel was giving the bourgeoisie a critically purified (pseudo-)Christianity [ Christ the Lion rather than the Lamb? Blakean Romantic Satanism ? ]

God in his truth is therefore no bare ideal generated by imagination; on the contrary, he puts himself into the very heart of the finitude and external contingency of existence, and yet knows himself there as a divine subject who remains infinite in himself and makes this infinity explicit to himself.

Out of interest can you site a reference for Hegel actually employing the thesis-antithesis-synthesis model? — Tom Storm

You are correct ( I think ) that he got it from Fichte, but he did use it, at least implicitly. The key idea is determinate negation, which allows us to construct a differentiated system of concepts. One remembers, contains, and understands (from the inside) less sophisticated positions. Russian dolls. Concentric circles.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phprefac.htm
[ Starts around section 39. ]

[We] might ask to be taken straight to the truth at once: why meddle with what is false at all?

[This] may be answered here by considering the character of negativity in general regarded as something false. The usual ideas on this subject particularly obstruct the approach to the truth. ...

Truth and falsehood as commonly understood belong to those sharply defined ideas which claim a completely fixed nature of their own, one standing in solid isolation on this side, the other on that, without any community between them.

Against that view it must be pointed out, that truth is not like stamped coin that is issued ready from the mint and so can be taken up and used. Nor, again, is there something false, any more than there is something evil.
...
To know something falsely means that knowledge is not adequate to, is not on equal terms with, its substance. Yet this very dissimilarity is the process of distinction in general, the essential moment in knowing. It is, in fact, out of this active distinction that its harmonious unity arises, and this identity, when arrived at, is truth. But it is not truth in a sense which would involve the rejection of the discordance, the diversity, like dross from pure metal; nor, again, does truth remain detached from diversity, like a finished article from the instrument that shapes it. Difference itself continues to be an immediate element within truth as such, in the form of the principle of negation, in the form of the activity of Self.

I can't imagine being anyone else so we may all be fundamentally different. — Andrew4Handel

Yes, but we can still talk. We are still 'in' the same language.

It seems you have to address someone's self in order to get them to reassess the issue of self otherwise who is being addressed? — Andrew4Handel

Yes. This is the normative, discursive self. The one that is ashamed or gets a trophy. This self identifies with this or that virtue or hero myth. So one appeals to such a self in terms of its current investments. What is takes for sacred is also a handle on this self. So Stirner tries to have no identity, nothing for an opponent to grab onto (an outermost skepticism).

built into Hegel’s dialectic is the possibility of both being right and wrong in specific aspects...find a synthesis of both views. — ClayG

:up:

In other words, many theories get something right but go too far ( claim to much ) or leave something out ( completely ignore something vital ).

It's great you mention synthesis. Hegel noticed that the human world was increasing in complexity. He also saw that those alive now are truly the Ancients, for have more cultural memory (more synthesis) than any who came before. We are cumulative, timebinding beings.

With this in mind, talk of God gets more and more complex, more and more correct (or less and less shallow.) For Hegel, we 'are' God. Theology itself is God. [ God is 'just' incarnate theology, etc. ]But theology doesn't realize this immediately but only after a sufficiently intensive and creative self-critical synthesis. The world comes to understand itself and this very understanding in us, we timebinding selfexploring theological-metaphorical brickstacking primates.

It totally makes sense that life responds differentially and can (must ? ) be interpreted as seeking and avoiding.

But qualia are slippery eels.

I read somewhere that the idea of the illusory self was designed as a coping strategy for societies where the individual had little control. — Andrew4Handel

This is a deep issue. Kojeve talks about stoics and skeptics focusing on what they could control, digging little bunkers in themselves. The world could go to hell. They were fine. This maximizes interiority. It can also look escapist.

Then denying the self is removing the thing that can be harmed altogether. Personally I can very much relate to the self melting into 'spirit' or science or philosophy. I can forget myself in my work. I can put the best part of me in the symbolic realm. I can realize that 'my' best thoughts were just stuff I found in books --- and that they are the best thoughts of pretty much anyone.

So it's a messy issue, right ?