Sometimes what is needed is the ability to change a flat tire on the highway. From this ordinary life perspective, Heidegger's grandiosity, for instance, is a rubber bullet. 'Speculative' thought is the world turned upside down. — macrosoft

Just to be clear, I'm not really trying to set up a distinction between philosophy and ordinary life ('changing a tire'). I'm interested rather in a distinction between two approaches to philosophy itself. When I speak of the need to attend to the asymmetry of the our relationship to the world, by this I mean a properly philosophical attention, and not some naive 'immersed in a life world', pre-theoretical kind of deal. I mean to attend to this precisely at the level of the theoretical. One way to think about this, with respect to Heidegger, is to challenge his account of the role of death in the analytic of Dasein, which you nicely outlined here:

The death theme is important. There's no time to figure it all out the right way. The future roars with too many possibilities. They can't all be claimed or explored. And then some fundamental assumptions just have to be grasped, as risk understood to be risk. That's one way to understand resoluteness. A person groundlessly chooses and makes the best of it, with no Universal Time-safe Entity to insure that leap. — macrosoft

The question is this: can death play the existentially orienting role which Heidegger wants it to? It has often been suggested - and I agree with this suggestion - that it cannot. The problem is that the possibility of death is far more diffuse and evanescent than Heidegger makes it out to be: death is not merely some future possibility that awaits at some always differed point 'down the track' (death qua 'possibility of impossibility'); rather, the possibility of the death is, as it were, contemporaneous with Dasein at every point:

"Death is imminent at every moment. it is not a moment that lies ahead of the succession of moments before me, it is an event immanent in every event. The last moment may be the next moment. The contingency of the being that is promised in the moment is its possible impossibility. Death is everywhere in the environment; every step I take may plunge me into the abyss, every objective that offers itself to my reach may be the ambush from which there will be no advance and no return. The location and the approach of death cannot be surveyed across the line and distance of the future ... Death which has no front lines cannot be confronted. lt cannot fix a direction" (Alphonso Lingis, Sensation, my bolding).

I quote Lingis but this point has long been made by others, including and especially by Blanchot, who has often riffed on the impersonality of death, and its disoreinting and de-temporalizing power: death as what interrupts, and not (only) what orients. The upshot of this, to link it back to my hesitation about holism, is to 'fragment' death so it is not longer just some single, distant point toward which Dasein is oriented, but something pluralized and dispersed in a way which enables multiple and even clashing orientations and possibly disorientations. To de-idealize and de-singularize death such that we occupy not a single, coherent and unified current of 'timing' (a verb, as you put it), but multiple, overlapping, confusing, timings (and untimings, even). Death in Heidegger plays far too much of a role in 'smoothing over' the tumult that more properly characterizes the trajectory or trajectories which characterize Dasein.

Another way to put this is that it's necessary to shatter the rigidity of the so-called 'fundamental structure of Dasein' whose explication is one of the main drivers of B&T. 'Structure' is one of those terms that saturates B&T, and which has not been given enough attention because people are generally too interested in the more inventive neologisms that Heidi peppers the work with. But 'structure' in B&T is just as important a term as 'being-toward-death' or 'care' or any other well-known Heideggerianisms. For me at least, the importance of this term lies in how its frequency demonstrates just how formalist and ossified the whole analytic of Dasein is in B&T.

This is one of the reasons why I much prefer - following Arendt - to emphasize not death but natality - beginnings and births, not ends - as a far more interesting philosophical theme. The broodiness of Heidegger is not accidental but in fact very much in keeping with his philosophy. So, to bring this all back to the OP, I'm not drawing a distinction between the 'intoxicating', 'exhausting' efforts of capital-P Philosophy qua dark, introspective discipline and 'everyday life', but rather, looking at ways to inject the (sometimes) aerialities and lightness of the latter into the former. It's a question of philosophy all the way through. Speculative thought doesn't have to be the world turned upside down. It can instead be - to quote Elizabeth Grosz - an effort to "enlarge the universe by enabling its potential to be otherwise, to be framed through concepts and affects. [To be] among the most forceful ways in which culture generates a small space of chaos within chaos where chaos can be elaborated, felt, thought".

Philosophy augments, extends, and edifies. It is not pale imitation and inadequate 'proximating'.

And I find holism pretty inescapable --which is to say a description more than an invitation. — macrosoft

In a way I do think holism is 'inescapable'; much though, in the same way that the fridge light is inescapable: its not on when you look, its on because you're looking. Which is to say, of course we're bound to find meaningfulness and intelligibility everywhere - we can't but not. But it's important to attend to the asymmetry of our relationship to the world which, for its own part, is largely indifferent to what one can even call our 'primordial comportment' to it, if you like.

Moreover - and this is something the French reception to Heidegger understood very well, perhaps because of their interest in Nietzsche - meaningfulness can be asphyxiating. Heidegger got something of this in his speaking of our 'throwness', but perhaps didn't draw the full consequences from it. To make one's way in a world loaded with inescapable meaning can be incredibly oppressive, and one of the things we happen to be very good at is ignoring much of it and, and it were, playing with reality. The almost fanatical thematics of 'appropriation' in Heidegger - speaking also to his conception of philosophy outlined in the OP - strikes me being insensitive to precisely the liberatory power of disappropriation, of the anonymous and of Das Man that Heidi consistently disparages.

This is why Sheehan's book is so appealing. He's worldly and funny, doing his best to cut through all the smoke and music. I'd love to hear what you think of it if you get a chance to check it out. — macrosoft

I've read some of Sheehan's work on Heidegger before and I found all very good. The emphasis on 'meaningfulness' was always - I'd like to think - how I understood Heidegger, although I picked that up from readings prior to Sheehan, even as the latter codified it in a full-throated way I'd not come across before. That said, my 'distance' from Heidi actually takes its cue from readings like Sheehan's: as productive as it is to think of the world as a meaningful whole, it's also a very simplified view of things. As I see it, the world is rather full of holes, perforated by ambivalence and opacity, instances of indifference and insignificance.

Psychoanalytic theory gets at this very nicely, showing how we employ a whole range of necessary psychic mechanisms to patch over these holes in ways that create a whole bunch of very interesting effects that also constitute our 'humanity'. Basically, I take issue with Heidegger's holism, which always struck me as far too ideational and seamless. One of the more devastating charges against Heidegger's whole project was Levinas's, for whom "Dasein in Heidegger is never hungry" - to which he coupled with a criticism of the sheer absence of sensuality in Heidegger. I think this is a nice synecdoche for why Heidegger's project seems so barren to me, at the end of the day. It's far too formal (despite all the excellent and insightful mileage Heidi got out of that formalism, which still deserves study).

Part of the problem of course is the adherence to phenomenology, and with it, intentionality. Unless the latter is put into radical questioning, any philosophical project which take its cue from it is destined to incapacity.

MV, he is outright rejecting deep/final truth, but clearly some kind of pure lifestream is functioning along those lines. The truth is just the open space that times, self-interpretively. If we are relentlessly pointed back to our own lifestream, however, I think 'truth' is the wrong word. — macrosoft

Yeah, I simply used 'Deep Truth' as a stand-in for that mystical core of Being or whatever that Heidegger consistently tried to 'proximate'. It was more a figure of speech than anything precise.

Philosophy in its 'poverty of thought' is ultimately reduced to maintaining its proximating orientation toward the pre-theoretical origin which is its subject matter. Philosophy is accordingly an orienting comportment, a praxis of striving, and a protreptic encouraging such a striving. Its expressions are only 'formal indications' which smooth the way toward intensifying the sense of the immediate in which we find ourselves. It is always precursory in its pronouncements,a forerunner of insights, a harbinger and hermeneutic herald of life's possibilities of understanding and articulation. — Heidegger/Kiesel

I've always had a profound distaste for this kind of 'mysterian' conception of philosophy - if I can call it that - which treats philosophy as though it were just some under-maintained half-way house to Deep Truth or what have you. At its best, philosophy does always indeed 'point elsewhere', always feels like a matter of 'fore-running', like you've never quite grasped the so-called 'sense of the immediate'. But I think it is a deep and terrible mistake to confuse this feeling with the positivity of philosophy itself which is a self-consciously and actively joyful practice of artifice, of constructing visions that deliberately and wilfully abstract from the real all the better for us to orient ourselves within it. Or to cite one of my favourite quotes on the topic,

"Theory depicts a world that does not quite exist, a world that is not quite the one we inhabit. ... An interval between the actual and the theoretical is crucial insofar as theory does not simply decipher the world, but recodes it in order to reveal something of the meanings and incoherencies with which we live. This is not simply to say that [we] describe reality abstractly. At [our] best, [we] conjure relations and meanings that illuminate the real or that help us recognize the real, but this occurs in grammars and formulations other than those of the real." (Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty).

I think Heidegger well realized the artefactual nature of philosophy - perhaps better than most - but mistook it for a mark of inadequacy rather than having acknowledged it for granting philosophy the power it would otherwise not have. It's one of the reasons why Heidegger is so utterly bereft of a sense of humour, and why the whole Heideggarian artifice feels like walking in a blackened, Gothic church, creaking with every step. As fantastic as he was a philosopher, it always feels he aimed to ultimately 'submit' philosophy to some kind of other (higher?) calling, and it comes off as though weighing down - like a weight attached to the ankle, as it were - the real and clearly discernable drive of philosophical creativity and vibrancy that courses through all of Heidegger. Heidegger makes philosophy feel like it ought to serve another master, than to buoy in its own autonomous beatitude. I find it a disquieting and ugly feeling.

It is always better to be precisely what the object of study demands and nothing less. Clarity is a pleasant bonus in the pursuit of that.

I'm sorry, why do you think that? If I observe the motions of the planets around Saturn, does that influence those motions? — alan1000

You misunderstand. Nothing about what is said implies that the observation influences the motions. The change can, and usually does, take place on the side of the apparatus itself: the delay in the travel time of light in an interferometer; the change in a magnetic field in a voltmeter. These are the kinds of changes I'm referring to.

Exactly. All names are entirely arbitrary, even those so-called understood as one's 'real name'. The line between reality and fiction does not run between anything so shallow and fickle as a name. Thinking otherwise is to be conned by grammar.

I suspect that some 'Christian' thinkers were already articulating contemporary insights within the concepts and pictures available to them. — macrosoft

I don't doubt this at all. I just question the necessity of routing philosophy through the swamp of theology to get at the same insights. Deleuze has a wonderful line somewhere about how every theology, no matter how staunch, always ends up 'secreting' an atheism insofar as it always needs to secure the relavence of the otherworldly to this world at the end of the day; of how the illusions of transcendence all ultimately "recharge the plane of immanence with immanence itself", citing Pascal and Kierkegaard in particular as two examplars of those who explicitly realized this within the bounds of theology itself. Again, I think this may be interesting as far as it goes, but then, I'd be happy to burn the entire theological corpus for a page of good, original a-theological philosophy.

As an aside, with respect to Heidegger, he's the kind of figure I feel took two steps forward and then one back (and is all the more important to study because of it). He remains, for me, too mired within a phenomenological horizon that screams at every point to be broken out of; I'd trade most of what isn't B&T for a couple of chapters of Merleau-Ponty or Levinas without much hesitation.

Its such a lazy argument.

Over a long enough time-span, any bullshit scenario I make up is more likely to be the case because time. Time, therefore, [insert bullshit scenario here] is very likely.

Heh, I guess it is a pretty elliptical piece of writing, one that does more to circle around its object(s) in various ways than approach them directly. It's not very scholarly. But probably all the better for it.

rigid designators alone have no meaning — Posty McPostface

I didn't say this either!

Are we talking now about modalities and necessity? — Posty McPostface

I don't know why you start dragging in words that were not even mentioned in my post. You do this often, and it's really quite annoying.

But doesn't our naming behavior result from the behavior of what is perceived? President Trump's behavior is different from Santa Claus', and for that reason we consider there to be an actual referent to the word "Trump," thus causing us to behave in a way that one has an actual referent and the other not. Since we behave differently when we consider the word "Santa Claus" then we do when we consider the word "Trump," it seems reasonable that we offer different words for them, namely "imaginary" and "actual." To say there's no distinction between imaginary and actual is itself a metaphysical statement. — Hanover

A few things. First, I didn't say that there is no distinction between imaginary and actual. All I would say is that language is indifferent to any such distinction. Second, our 'naming behaviour' results from our learning how to use names. That's it. If we find out tomorrow that Santa Claus is real, or if tomorrow, Trump turns a new leaf and becomes the Nicest, Bestest, most Lovely person in the universe, we would still use those names to refer to each respective person. That's why proper names are so-called 'rigid designators' - they reflect a fact about language and its use (our practices of using language), and not about 'the thing itself'.

Just because all names can be explained through behavior doesn't mean that there might not actually be a reason our behavior varies when speaking about one sort of thing versus the next. — Hanover

I did not say there is no reason why our behaviour varies when speaking about one sort of thing versus the next. I would emphatically agree there is such a reason. But that reason is to be found in our use of language, and not in the 'thing'.

Some names have a direct reference. Nonsensical, sensical, and senseless propositions derive their meaning from what reference they have. Think, the present King of France is bald. — Posty McPostface

I'm not denying that some names have a 'direct' reference. Of course some names do. The question is over the nature of this directness. And the point is that such 'direct reference' does not differ in kind from 'non-direct' reference. The idea that reference determines sense is balderdash. 'The present king of France is bald' is a perfectly sensical proposition, to which one can sensibly reply: 'there is no present king of France', and not just sit there looking quizzically.

The trick is to recognize that all names - even the most seemingly concrete, 'real' instances of them, like Abe Lincoln or Amelia Earhart - 'refer' in the exact same manner as do names like Santa Claus or Pegasus. All names are 'empty names'. There is no difference in kind between the two apparent 'types' of referring. This is because language is entirely indifferent to questions of 'reality' or 'existence': in language, both Pegasus and Lincoln belong to the same existential plane, as it were.

The difference, inasmuch as there is one, lies in our behaviour, and not 'in language'. One can treat names like a set of condensed instructions - the name 'Santa Claus' dictates, to some extent, a set of behaviours - both linguistic and extra-linguistic - which we enact when uttered in this or that context. Similarly with the name Earhart. That one refers to an actually existing person and another to a fictional feel-good figure makes not one bit of difference. So-called 'empty names' are paradigmatic of the function of naming in general, and not an exception to the rule.

The incarnation myth comes to mind. Can incarnation symbolize materialism even? — macrosoft

There have been interesting attempts to claim incarnation from a materialist perspective - Zizek and Virno come to mind - but I generally find the whole theological matrix to be compromised beyond repair. Short of constituting some clever thought-exercises for a bit of intellectual athleticism, I don't really see any reason to do so outside of that. We've had literally millenia of theological wrangling, and it would be nice to proceed with a bit of independence from that whole meilieu. Ray Brassier once put it nicely, if only just a little too strongly:

"I view this continuing philosophical fascination with monotheism as deeply pernicious and think a moratorium ought to be declared to prevent any further ‘God talk’ by philosophers. I do not think it mere coincidence that the critique of scientific rationality in much 20th century philosophy goes hand in hand with a revival of theological themes. Religion obviously satisfies deep-seated human needs, but it has been a cognitive catastrophe that has continually impeded epistemic progress — contrary to the pernicious revisionism that claims monotheism was always on the side of science and truth. Human knowledge has progressed in spite of religion, never because of it. Philosophers should simply have no truck with it." (source)

(Too strongly because I think the study of theology and its concepts can be very useful for triangulating one's position; one ought to know the enemy least one becomes them).

A perfect separation of meaning from its medium and its compression into an instant functions as a kind of goal, an impossibility that tempts us, perhaps to our benefit at times. — macrosoft

I largely agree with the rest, but I would be careful in characterizing the 'kind' of goal this would be. If the thesis of irreducible mediality is right, any such attempt at 'separation' would be detrimental, and not conducive to, well, anything whatsoever. As Derrida might have put it, the desire for pure presence is the desire for death.

On Certainty is fantastic. Every time I came back to it, I'm blown away. The sensitivity with which Witty approaches language is just unmatched in it.

I would be surprised if Street couldn't give you some nice input on the book! — fdrake

Hah, I actually never got round to reading GG, even though I thoroughly enjoyed Braver's A Thing of This World. Heard plenty of good things about it though.

That was a really good read, but like alot of articles on identity politics, it doesn't seem to get to the heart of the matter, which is that identity politics is basically the logical outcome of neoliberal managerialism. Having depoliticized almost everything about society by making 'economic efficiency' the only recognizeably applicable policy metric, politics itself has more or less been forced into the straight-jacket of identity-politics, which has the advantage of basically leaving economic questions entirely untouched.

In other words, it's not just that the left abandoned economic problems in favor of identity-based ones, it's that neoliberalism has systematically defanged and deprived the people of the ability to intervene - and thus conduct politics - at the level of the economic. Having subject governments around the world to regulatory capture, while increasingly shifting decision making power away from the demos and into the hands of the already-powerful, identity politics is the only 'kind' of politics left that anyone can scrap over.

While it's easy to blame the left - and the right - for the turn to identity politics, this should also be coupled with the necessary question: what other options for political action are available, and more importantly, how viable are they? Fukuyama's proposed solution - building national identities - does nothing to address the engineered lack of political agency which is everywhere ascendant. Its no good just to attempt to 'change the discourse', as it were: the discourse will follow the institutional arrangements, and not the other way around. And precisely what is lacking are the institutional arrangements which would allow people to excercize political power in a way that isn't just the last-resort efforts of identity politics.

tl;dr: identity politics responds to a crisis of political action in general, a crisis engineered by neoliberal approaches to governance and policy.

What I would call reductive physicalism envisions a unique (but so far only hypothetical) Theory of Everything, usually identified with fundamental physics, that fixes everything in existence. All other theories and explanations, from chemistry to psychology, at best supervene on and approximate this TOE. The TOE thus has a unique status. Its ontology is the only true ontology, and its causality is the only true causality - everything else being illusory and epiphenomenal. With some variations, this is a pretty popular view among physical scientists (especially physicists, natch) and scientifically-minded laymen. — SophistiCat

Yeah, part of what I'd like to argue is that this kind of approach to things simply is idealism par excellence, and an insidious one at that, insofar as it couches itself in the language of the ‘physical’, despite being a metaphysical (in the pejorative sense) chimera through and through. It always amazes me that those who hew to this kind of view don’t recognise just how shot-through with theology it is. And I don’t mean this as a cheap-shot (like ‘oh science is just the new religion'), but in a properly philosophical key: it shares with theology its ‘emanative’ logic wherein, to botch Plotinus, everything flows from the One and returns to the One - and where the ‘flow’ is just so much detritus and debris. What you call reductive physicalism mirrors, exactly, ancient theological tropes and, from my perspective, is more or less indistinguishable from them.

You seem to be rejecting the primacy of some fundamental physical ontology and instead insisting on a multiplicity of coequal ontologies.

I am sympathetic to this view, but I might be coming to it from a somewhat different direction, one that deemphasizes ontology in favor of epistemology. To my mind, ontology is theory-dependent. Theory comes first, and whatever entities it operates with, that is its ontology.

I perhaps wouldn’t say ‘co-equal ontologies’: my basic intuition is that ontology ought to be dictated by both the things and what we want to know about them, as it were, and that both are subject to change. A dynamic, pluralist ontology, maybe, one attentive to historical currents and issues of scope, scale, and interest, but one still with synthetic ambition. The philosopher Reza Negarestani probably put it best:

"We can generally investigate the space of the universal through particular instances or local contexts. But once we carry out this investigation through the synthetic environment that the interweaving of continuity and contingency create, we can arrive at very interesting results. Looking at the space of the universal, through particular instances or local contexts is in this sense no longer a purely analytical procedure. It is like looking into an expansive space through a lens that does not produce zooming-in and zooming-out effects by simply scaling up and down the same image but instead it produces synthetic and wholly different images across different scales of magnification. It then becomes almost impossible to intuitively guess what kind of conceptual and topological transformations the local context—a window into the universal— undergoes as it expands its scope and becomes more true to the universal”. (Negarestanti, Where Is the Concept? [pdf])

But these are very general methodological remarks that are perhaps not quite to the point. I aver to it because I’ve long had a suspicion that the distinction between ontology and epistemology is not a particularly fruitful one, and that both are abstractions from a more general question about how we go about conceptualizing phenomena, with concepts being reducible to neither side of the epistemology/ontology divide. To bring this back to the OP, one of the reasons I think this, is because this approach is itself dictated (I like to think) by the necessity of avoiding what I see as idealist approaches in which the world is made to ‘pre-fit’ certain a priori conceptions of it, or else follow from some eternal, God-given rules from which everything else is just epiphenomena, as with what you referred to ‘reductive physicalism’.

Once the rules, say, of syntax are arbitrarily decided, then whether we use such rules correctly or not can be seen objectively. — Sam26

But what would be the point of that? I mean, in the case of chess, sure, you set up a bunch of more or less arbitrary rules with the goal to make a fun, competitive past-time. And from there, you can see if someone has or has not followed those rules correctly. But philosophy is not - or rather, ought not to be - a merely a fun, competitive past-time. Philosophy ought to shed light on the nature of things (in a broad sense). That's the productive constraint on its discourse, in the same way that 'developing a fun game' is roughly the productive constraint on the rules on chess.

Mere 'agreement' however, would be useless and trivial in both cases. We don't just settle on some arbitrarily agreed upon rules for no particular reason. Communication is not the point of philosophy. It ought to be a minimal condition of philosophy, sure, but that is nothing but a necessary but not yet sufficient condition of its practice. You seem to be mistaking the means for the ends: I'm not just trying to have a conversation with you when doing philosophy - I'm trying to hopefully say something meaningful about the world around us, with my use of language reflecting that. The man who yells 'slab!' isn't doing it just because he wants to communicate (although that's part of it) - he does it in order to, presumably, build something at the end of the day.

The focus on 'objectivity' is, in this sense, totally banal. I couldn't care less if people can or can't agree upon some arbitrarily decided rules and then look to see if those rules are being objectively followed. Communication is nothing but a bare minimum; all meaningful talk takes place in a language-game, yes, but a language game also includes practices which define the context by which that 'game' becomes meaningful and significant. We don't just play 'language-games' for 'language-games' sake, and then look to police those rules to see if one is playing rightly or wrongly. If you don't have some kind of motivation - having a fun game, building a structure - then even the most pristine and elegant rules ever devised are worthless.

Oh look. Another instance of The Worst Argument in the World.

Besides, what is medium at one level is the nuts and bolts at another, more fine-grained level. You acknowledge this yourself when you pick examples from different sciences that look at the world at different levels of detail. So where exactly is that medium that you are talking about? What is it? — SophistiCat

I think there's a misunderstanding here: I'm not against 'big picture claims' (Gould is wonderful, as is Darwin!), and I invoked Weinberg and Dawkins not as avatars of 'big picture thinking' but because the specific ways in which they theorize the 'big picture' are severely misguided. Each, in their own way, attempts to assign full explanatory power (in physics and biology respectively) to a privileged ontological stratum so that certain parts of reality are simply reduced to epiphenomena that have no material agency.

That's the point: I'm not at all trying to furnish a 'non-reductionism physicalism' - whatever that might mean - but rather, give full 'ontological rights', if we can speak that way, to all of what is often simply dismissed as medial. The equation of the material with the medial isn't meant to reduce the medial to the material. Quite the opposite: it is meant to expand our understanding of what counts as material. So to these kinds of questions:

How could there be evolutionary biology if we could not (mostly) ignore the medium of chemistry and physics? How could we have so much success with the Big Bang theory if we could not ignore the medium of stars and pretty much everything else and idealize it as a perfect fluid?

I want to answer: precisely because - and not in spite of - the fact that the material is not exhausted by chemistry and physics, nor by the stars. Recall again the etymology of media: the state of being-in-the-middle; the point is to rethink materialism not as origin (arche) or as fundament, but as being-in-the-middle of things. Or better yet, the idea is to rethink what it means to be fundamental, where what is fundamental is precisely all that is often thought of as 'accidental' (hence the inversion of Aristotle I briefly invoked at in the OP). Your questions seem to make it as though I disagree with you on the reality of 'larger scales', as it were. But this is just the opposite of what I'm attempting.

Walter Ong - Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
Giorgio Agamben - What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays
Fernando Zalamea - Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics
Fernando Zalamea - Peirce's Logic of Continuity: A Conceptual and Mathematical Approach

Hi,

The post wasn't deleted but got caught as a false positive in the spam filter. It's been restored!

If you're OP wasn't even about information — schopenhauer1

No, the OP was not about information, which it barely spoke about - very perceptive of you.

It's not my job to address connections that you're making and not explicating. 'In the realm of information'; 'hint at a kind of theory of information' - this is imprecise blather, and it's nothing but thick irony to accuse me of 'avoiding the central issue' when you're literally making things up and projecting connotations whose significance to the OP you can only hint at with half-baked allusions to vague semantic connotations. Don't mistake your own analytic inadequacy for that of the OP.

I spoke of neither emergence nor information - I haven't used the former word even once in this thread so far, and the latter only appeared once in the OP in a not very central way. So I have very little time for your projections, tautologies, and lack of basic comprehension ability.

I'm not the one who expects tautology to be taken seriously as a point of discussion.

We do everything we can to get away from the material of the material ... Matter is matter is matter. Matter doesn't matter to matter. — schopenhauer1

This is just warmed over mysterian trash. Not worth engaging.

Critique? It's barely more than a blunt assertion with no grounds provided to give it even the semblance of substance. As it stands it's basically one step above meaningless.

Rather, he was pointing to the fact that "true" materialism would have as little abstraction as possible, as it would merely be the "stuff" at the basis of the discussion. — schopenhauer1

We'll see. This would be very silly though.

I doubt Cat would make the naive and boorish mistake of identifying abstraction with idealism - especially since he seems to reject the latter term as being of significance - but I'll let him speak for himself.

Rather than these fleshier theories being a case of us getting wise to the materiality of the world, they are simply the result of more mature, more elaborate theorizing, which, while still being abstract (as all theories are, by definition), can afford to incorporate more detail. — SophistiCat

While I'd like to think that yes, materialism does entail more mature, more elaborate theorizing than the various idealisms which it arrays itself against, I think you're vastly understating the influence and pervasiveness of the latter. If one accepts materialism in the sense outlined here, people like Richard Dawkins and Steven Weinberg become nothing other than arch-Idealists; searches for reductive 'theories of everything', where all the universe follows from a small handful of first principles, turn out to be idealist desiderata par excellence. To say that these debates have no purchase in the sciences is just to leave implicit and untheorized attitudes which pervade them through and through, ones which determine the direction of research projects along with the very questions asked ay the outset.

From this perspective its no surprise that the completion of the Human Genome Project - for instance - left scientists incredibly underwhelemed regarding its results. And that the concerns there have hardly affected the billions of research dollars being poured into the current Human Brain Project, which will undoutably be of equal a massive disappointment to everyone, everywhere. To think these questions are irrelavent is naivety, and a willful and damaging one at that.

Reading your examples, I thought of another from the same stock: Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, where he points to material factors, such as climate and biogeography, in order to explain large-scale trends in the development of civilization in different parts of the world — SophistiCat

Yeah, this would definately be another instance of what I'm referring to.

However, I think that the contrast you are drawing is rather between more and less abstract levels of explanation. Abstraction removes detail, and detail is where your "materiality" is. The more abstract an explanation, the more immaterial it seems, as it were, its ontology consisting of made-up concepts like "genes" and "networks," instead of familiar, immediately perceptible "stuff." — SophistiCat

This is not a bad way to put it, although I might quibble a bit with 'perceptibiltiy'. That aside, it leads very nicely into Whitehead's dictum that 'the abstract does not explain, but must itself be explained'. Yet another way to look at it is as an anti-hylomorphic stance. Contrary to hylomorphic schemas according to which intelligible form (morphe) descends from on high onto dumb, passive matter (hyle) in order to account for individuation, a materialism is one in which matter itself has powers of individuation, or powers of activity proper to itself. It's a denial of the need - or efficacy - of any abstract, God-descendent animating spirits to account for the richness of the world. Matter as self-in-form-ing, immanent only to itself.

Its a question of returning to matter its own autonomy and independence, while at the same time insisting upon its irreducibility.

And it is the case that some rules are determined by group consensus — Sam26

Some, sure. But it makes little sense to say philosophy belongs, or ought to belong to that subclass. The rules of chess are more or less utterly contingent and utterly arbitrary after all (constrained only by the - already contingent - choice of an 8x8 grid, our physionomy, and our intelligence and history). Insofar as philosophy asks after how things in reality hang together in the broad sense, the constraints which govern its discourse ought to be far more significant that than those which govern a frivolity like chess.

This is all well and good, but rules are immanent to use, and it's not a case of 'group consensus' which determimes them, as if from above and without.

However, my problem is that we shouldn't just arbitrarily pick meanings out of thin air, that there is a general consensus of correct use among concepts. — Sam26

Arbitrariness by consensus is still arbitrariness.

So much the worse for philosophy and philosophers if we have to entertain that shit out a shallow sense of intellectual 'openess'. Millions didn't die in gas chambers and pits to be made yet more discursive fodder because of need to get one's intellectual rocks off every now and then. 'Philosophically suspicious'? Not a single fuck given.

You seem to be articulating the principle of locality, which says that all interaction is mediated by local, i.e. immediate contact — SophistiCat

Hmm, this is not quite what I had in mind. A biological example maybe: genes were once thought to be something like blueprints from living organisms. DNA -> Organism. As if a recipe. But more and more, we've come to understand that there's a whole bunch of medial process that work between gene and organism (transcription, translation, protein folding structures and their regulation, feedback loops of all sorts, and lots more) all of which contribute non-trivially to the process of gene expression. In every case, the 'mediums' through which genes are expressed lend their wight of materiality to the process. Bodies are not just hereditary vessels and carriers for genes and their abstract, symbolic code: the fleshly, palpable, damp body plays a irrepressible role in its own unfolding. And not just incidentally, but essentially.

Or, moving one level up, evolution itself works not merely on a genotype, but on a the whole developmental system (roughly: organism + environment) which supports and non-trivially plays a role in the evolution of a species. With the advent of 'evo-devo' approaches to evolution, the entire developmental context of evolution must be taken into account, and the environment cannot be reduced to a mere holding-chamber in which evolution takes place unaltered by the constitution of that very environment. Again, it's the principle of the irreducibility of the medium that is exemplified here im both examples.

Or, moving yet another level up, the internet was once touted as a democratic, 'flattened' space where all would get to have their say, and everyone would be able to participate equally and freely. But this didn't pay attention to the specificities of the kind of medium the internet is, which lends itself better to quick, eye-baiting moments of interaction (Twitter, 'comment sections', and 3-10 minute videos are precisely geared to the kind of medium the internet is), which has led the internet to become the widely stratified, uneven network that it is. Elsewhere, there have been arguments made to the effect that it was the postal system that enabled literature to flourish as it did in the 17th century: the medium of transmission being central to it's development.

Or, in the realm of political theory, the last few years have seen a backlash against conceptions of politics that do not take into account uneven relations of powers across societies (I have in mind Rawls in particular), which do not take into account the medial nature of how politics works (with varying roles played by different institutions, different distributions of money and wealth, access to infrastructure and information, etc etc). One could speak of a difference between an idealist and materialist approach to political theory.

Anyway, those are just four (three?) examples that come to mind. The list could be expanded indefinitely.