But hopefully an elaboration rather than a contradiction. — Wayfarer

. This 'for-the-sake-of' structure is already a teleological — and in that sense, proto-intentional — orientation. — Wayfarer

Sorry my chickens do this too. It’s intrinsic in the pecking order relationship. — Punshhh

What prompted my to respond was my misreading of “consciousness”. — Punshhh

Self awareness is not required for step one, or step two. I observe my chickens doing this every day* — Punshhh

So it is not a matter of 'abusing language' - the terms are being used in a broader way, and in a new context. — Wayfarer

As a corrollary to this, I think the theorists in these schools would question whether organisms at any level of development act solely in accordance with the principles of physics and chemistry. — Wayfarer

The term for the sense of 'being a subject' is 'ipseity' which is being extended somewhat through these new disciplines to encompass the awareness of organisms less developed than the higher animals. — Wayfarer

As I understand it, a better understanding of epigenetics undermines the idea that genetic variation is purely deterministic. Variation can be systemic, responsive, and developmentally mediated, not just molecular noise filtered by selection. Organisms are not just passive recipients of selective pressures — they are active participants in shaping their own evolutionary and developmental environments. — Wayfarer

Well, what isn't conserved is usable energy, not total energy. — boundless

If it can be detected, it is usable — Metaphysician Undercover

"Selected" implies choice. Do you think that processes governed by deterministic laws are capable of making choices? — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, its original purpose will be reflected in its form. That is not the same as the object, itself, having an intention = being a source of intentionality. — Dfpolis

I think you\ll need to explain this proposed difference to me Df — Metaphysician Undercover

But intentionality is hereditary. — Metaphysician Undercover

Don't you think that it is correct to say that the intentionality is intrinsic to the system? — Metaphysician Undercover

That's pure sophistry. If the states are not known, then clearly you cannot assert with any justification that it is "not physical indeterminacy". — Metaphysician Undercover

But it emphasises that the behaviour of organisms is not wholly explainable by mechanism - which is a metaphor - but as a self-organizing, value-directed engagement with the world. — Wayfarer

That’s the point phenomenology and enactivism insist on: that organisms are subjects, not just systems. — Wayfarer

They have to negotiate their environment in order to survive and to maintain homeostasis. — Wayfarer

A heart isn’t just a pump; it's something that beats for the sake of circulating blood within an organism — Wayfarer

If organisms were nothing but deterministic physical systems, how would anything ever have evolved? Evolution doesn’t work on pre-programmed machines — it works on organisms that can vary, explore, adapt, respond in ways that are not reducible to mere stimulus-response mechanics. — Wayfarer

Well, the question would be whether a purely physical system, in any absolute sense, is actually possible. — Metaphysician Undercover

As scientists, human beings can design what they like to think of, as purely physical systems. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is what I talked about earlier in the thread, we can have as our purpose, the intent to remove purpose, and this provides us with the closest thing we can get to objective truth. But the purpose of removing purpose can't quite remove purpose in an absolute way. — Metaphysician Undercover

That aspect of the activity of a physical system, which escapes determinability is known as "entropy". — Metaphysician Undercover

This view understands interpretation not as conscious self-awareness, but as a more basic responsiveness to environmental signals — a kind of primitive subject-hood inherent in the way organisms engage with their surroundings, qualitatively distinct from the behavior of non-living matter — Wayfarer

All organic life 'interprets' in a way that the inorganic domain does not, so as to preserve itself. The point is not to attribute conscious awareness to single-celled organisms or plants, but to acknowledge that the rudiments of agency — selecting among possibilities in response to internal states and external cues — emerge much earlier in the history of life than previously assumed. — Wayfarer

"Markoš concludes that all living creatures are interpreting subjects, and that all novelties of the history of life were brought into existence by acts of interpretation."

Do you not believe in real possibility, real choice? If you believe that the universe unfolds in a determinate way, then you deny the possibility of real choice. — Metaphysician Undercover

I have no problem with a religious point of view where God is the final cause giving the universe, the world, reality, or whatever you want to call it, meaning and purpose. That's not my way of seeing things, but it's something I understand. My problem is with all this talk about teleology without God. — T Clark

Galileo showed that bodies do not fall because of their purpose, but due to forces and motions that could be described mathematically, without reference to final causes. — Wayfarer

Dfpolis in his Aristotelian representation, places the basic intent to create, as internal to matter itself. It must be local, rather than global. But I think that the proper interpretation of Aristotle puts the basic intent of final cause as transcendent to the matter, but in a local sense. This allows final cause to give matter its basic form, transcending it internally, with the form coming from beyond the boundaries of matter to the inside, while Df thinks its immanent to the matter. — Metaphysician Undercover

1. There is a real consciousness humans have, like all animals, at least, albeit in varying "complexities." It is organic attunement to organic feelings drives movements sensations presently and with no movement in time, possibly not space, as in monistic ("aware-ing"). But Ive said too much because we cannot know aware-ing; aware-ing is "pre" knowing. Our only access to aware-ing is being the aware-ing. — ENOAH

2. The aware-ing can organically attune, when feelings of pleasure arise, aware-ing pleasure; pain, aware-ing pain. Apple comes into view, aware-ing apple. Not "I" subject of the sentence see apple object. Aware-ing x-ing is one present event; no duality because Mind hasn't constructed difference yet. — ENOAH

3. Once mind emerged (through (to oversimplify) the evolution of Language) aware-ing x-ing was displaced by "I" am looking at an apple, or I am enjoying this Icecream. — ENOAH

5. So now "aware" of an object acting on my senses just means that the natural aware-ing, where there is no hard problem, is displaced by mediating processes of constuctions and projects. Such that there is the "illusion" of a hard problem; the illusion that we are "aware" of an "object" when really we have constructed it then projected it as object. — ENOAH

Thus the con­nection between mind and meaning, on the one hand, and subjectivity and consciousness, on the other, was completely severed.

Cognitivism, far from closing this gap, perpetuated it in a materialist form by opening a new gap between subpersonal, computational cognition and subjective mental phenomena.

Enactivism asserts that via sensory-motor coupling with an environment, an organism enacts a world. — Joshs

Subjective consciousness arises out of this normatively driven activity. — Joshs

The first idea is that living be­ings are autonomous agents that actively generate and maintain them­selves, and thereby also enact or bring forth their own cognitive do­mains.

The second idea is that the nervous system is an autonomous dynamic system: It actively generates and maintains its own coherent and meaningful patterns of activity, according to its operation as a cir­cular and reentrant network of interacting neurons.

The nervous system does not process information in the computationalist sense, but creates meaning.

Sensorimotor coupling between organism and environment modulates, but does not determine, the formation of en­dogenous, dynamic patterns of neural activity, which in turn inform sensorimotor coupling.

The fifth idea is that experience is not an epiphenomenal side issue, but central to any understanding of the mind, and needs to be investigated in a careful phenomenological manner

If there is some fundamental aspect to reality then wouldn't it follow that there is an aspect of reality that does not need a reason for happening. I mean, what does fundamental mean if not that there is some aspect that "just is". If not, then there would be an infinite regress of reasons, or reality is an infinite causal chain with no beginning and no end, or another possibility could be a loop of causality. — Harry Hindu

he Munchausen trilemma is proof enough that there is some truth which has no explanation. Some truth(s) which form the basis for all other truths. — flannel jesus

And how does something physical generate these experiences? You rightly asked. It doesn't generate anything real at all. These are "codes" hijacking feelings to create this illusion of meaning and that meaning matters. It doesn't. Matter matters. — ENOAH

My intuition tells me that there's one really important boundary - the boundary between the fundamental, and everything else. The fundamental is causally closed, but all other layers can be argued to interact to each other and also to still be sensitive to fundamental-level events. — flannel jesus

Can you give an example of consciousness causing something in a way that doesn't tread on the toes of any physics? — bert1

Sensation, let’s be clear, has a different function from perception. Both are forms of mental representation: ideas generated by the brain. But they represent – they are about – very different kinds of things. Perception – which is still partly intact in blindsight – is about ‘what’s happening out there in the external world’: the apple is red; the rock is hard; the bird is singing. By contrast, sensation is more personal, it’s about ‘what’s happening to me and how I as a subject evaluate it’: the pain is in my toe and horrible; the sweet taste is on my tongue and sickly; the red light is before my eyes and stirs me up. — Nicholas Humphrey

Let me emphasise: sensations are ideas. They are the way our brains represent what’s happening at our sense organs and how we feel about it. Their properties are to be explained, therefore, not literally as the properties of brain-states, but rather as the properties of mind-states dreamed up by the brain. — Nicholas Humphrey

I believe the upshot – in the line of animals that led to humans and others that experience things as we do – has been the creation of a very special kind of attractor, which the subject reads as a sensation with the unaccountable feel of phenomenal qualia. — Humphrey

Per se causes bring out the effect through themselves. Per accidens causes are merely conjoined with the per se cause. So the the wisdom of Aristotle does not directly cause him to be hungry. It can only be an accidental cause of his hunger insofar as it for example makes him use his brain more. — Johnnie

First of all, it's a title of a chapter in Physics VII: "It is necessary that whatever is moved, be moved by another." Another is not identical. Unless you say that Aristotle says that beside the immediate mover there is yer another cause of an effect which is identical with the effect. — Johnnie

Are you to suggest that the prime mover is identical to every movement? — Johnnie

The definition you quoted concerns Scotus, not all scholastics definitely. Aquinas and Suarez wouldn't agree. And they're taken to be the orthodox Aristotellians, Scotus' doctrines are controversially Aristotellian. — Johnnie

(consider a transformation of an element, an efficient cause ceases to be once the effect is in actuality). — Johnnie

I found this summary of Ways of Knowing — Gnomon

Well then, why don't you accept what I've been telling you, that "being built" is a predication which implies the thing being built, "the house" as its subject. And, the house exists only as a goal or intention (final cause) at this time of being built. The house is not an existing thing affected by the activity of being built, it is created intentionally by being built.. — Metaphysician Undercover

You, Dfpolis, are unable, or simply unwilling to engage with teleology, the foundational aspect of Aristotle's ontology. — Metaphysician Undercover

Aristotle’s concept of prime matter (hylē) refers to the underlying substratum that has no form or qualities of its own but can receive various forms. — Wayfarer

Aristotle ruled out "prime matter" as an incoherent concept with his cosmological argument. — Metaphysician Undercover

Some thomists nowadays portray essential causality as necessarily simultanoues but this is clearly not the case. — Johnnie

The effect of the builder building is a house, and the house is posterior in time to the builder building. The effect of the builder building is not a house being built, as these are one and the same thing. The effect is the house. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are stipulating a separation between the "builder building" and the "house being built" — Metaphysician Undercover

Your argument amounts to employing two distinct descriptive styles to describe the very same activity, and then claim that one description is of the cause, and the other is of the effect, when both descriptions are really descriptions of the very same thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

Do you agree, that when each part comes into existence, it does so as an effect, from the prior activity of the builder which is a cause of it, and the activity of the builder is always prior in time to the existence of the part? — Metaphysician Undercover

Right, but "being done" implies finished, complete, the end. — Metaphysician Undercover

this object is supposed to be the house. But the house does not exist — Metaphysician Undercover

That's unabashed bullshit. — Metaphysician Undercover

Aristotle did not distinguish accidental efficient causation from essential efficient causation in the way you describe. Nor did the scholastics. — Metaphysician Undercover

As I explained, "the builder building", and "the house being built" are just two different ways of describing the exact same thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, "building" is "being built". Why can't you comprehend this? The two are the very same, identical activity, described in two different ways. — Metaphysician Undercover

There is no separation of cause and effect because there is only one activity being described. — Metaphysician Undercover

Further, since "the house", as subject does not yet have any existence, it cannot suffer any passion, or have any properties at all. — Metaphysician Undercover

If the cause is inseparable from the effect, then how do you know that "being built" is not the cause, and "building" is not the effect? — Metaphysician Undercover

Yet you also claim that the two are concurrent and the cause is inseparable from the effect. Therefore whenever you describe the scenario, there is no way to know whether the description is of the builder building, or the house being built. — Metaphysician Undercover

you've devised this elaborate way to say that it is two distinct activities, one cause and the other effect. — Metaphysician Undercover

you admit that the cause cannot be distinguished from the effect, "they are inseparable". — Metaphysician Undercover

So you try to hide it behind a strange use of "passion". — Metaphysician Undercover

Do you agree that to talk about causation here, we need to include "final cause"? — Metaphysician Undercover

The house does not exist — Metaphysician Undercover