I didn't find anything particularly amusing about this paper — MetaphysicsNow

This is a really interesting paper btw. Rosen actually drew a parallel between C-T and Godel as well, some time back: "What we today call Church’s Thesis began as an attempt to internalize, or formalize, the notion of effectiveness. It proceeded by equating effectiveness with what could be done by iterating rote processes that were already inside—i.e., with algorithms based entirely on syntax. That is exactly what computability means. But it entails commensurability. Therefore it too is false. This is, in fact, one way to interpret the Godel Incompleteness Theorem. It shows the inadequacy of repetitions of rote processes in general. In particular, it shows the inadequacy of the rote metaprocess of adding more rote processes to what is already inside." (Rosen, "The Church-Pythagoras Thesis", in Essays on Life Itself).

It's also worth checking out the work of Robert Rosen, who showed quite definitely [PDF] that the C-T thesis can hold for physical systems only under very specific constraints, and that, if those constraints do not hold, that the thesis doesn't really say much about anything at all regarding those systems. In any case, that the C-T thesis is applicable to everything is an article of faith, and hardly some undeniable principle.

Dinosaurs were imminently successful by all counts for 100 million years and, as far as we know, they didn't have free will. We haven't been successful for very long at all -- Homo sapiens is — Bitter Crank

It's not entirely fair to compare dinosaurs - an entire taxonomic order - with humans, a mere species. One fun fact that often goes unrecognized is that we live closer on the timelime to the T-Rex than the T-Rex did to the Stegosaurus. So yeah, not cool to compare us to dinosaurs as a whole.

Yes, I think this is certainly the right approach, and the proviso is only that a word that does not belong, that has no use in a language-game, is a word that has not yet been given a role, a use in the language-game.

What I think Wittgenstein is interested in blocking, as a sort of catastrophic misunderstanding, is taking a word as it used in one language-game, and bringing it into a another language-game where it is expected to play that same role, to have the same usage. — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah, this all seems right to me. One way in which I would extend this though, is to attend to Witty's focus on grammar as a constraint with respect to the transposition of words/phrases/etc between langauge-games. I think Witty would agree that you that one can indeed plonk words from one language game into another and expect them to have the 'same role' on the condition that the grammar stays invariant. In some sense that's really, I think, the only stipulation on flexibility: don't let the (seeming similarities in) grammar misled you. Attend to that, and everything else is fair game (this is easier than it sounds, insofar as grammar is a function of our 'forms of life', our lived linguistic and extra-linguistic activities).

Eh, I read Witty very differently to you.

The philosophers of science, Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour, have long been writing about the insufficiency of the Milgram 'experiments' - which themselves made me suspicious of the Prison experiment - for quite some time. Here's a wonderful tidbit from Latour:

"Only in the name of science is Stanley Milgram’s experiment possible ... In any other situation, the students would have punched Milgram in the face… thus displaying a very sturdy and widely understood disobedience to authority. That students obeyed Milgram’s torture does not prove they harbored some built-in tendency to violence, but demonstrates only the capacity of scientists to produce artefacts no other authority can manage to obtain, because they are undetectable. The proof of this is that Milgram died not realizing that his experiment had proven nothing about average American inner tendency to obey —except that they could give the appearance of obeying to white coats! Yes, artefacts can be obtained in the name of science, but this is not itself a scientific result, it is a consequence of the way science is handled" (Latour, Body Talk).

I'm not necessarily criticizing your post, but only pointing out that use is not always a good indicator of the correct use of a word. Some people who read Wittgenstein necessarily equate meaning with use when it's not always the case. This same problem arises when we say that meaning has to be seen in context; and while it's true that both of these play an important role, we don't want to be absolutist about it.

The word correct has it's own problems, but generally we know if someone is using the word pain correctly or incorrectly. If for e.g., I'm learning English words and I confuse the use of the word pain with being happy, then it's clearly incorrect. This of course doesn't always mean that it's clear that a word is used correctly, sometimes people are just confused about the use of a word. Moreover, if I make a claim that a word is not used correctly, it's incumbent on me to demonstrate how it's incorrect. I've been making the claim that Christians generally use the word soul incorrectly, because much of the time it's exactly like Wittgenstein's beetle-in-the-box. — Sam26

Ah, I understand 'use' differently from you I think; all the cases of 'pain' I briefly profiled count as 'uses', and none of them are either 'correct' or 'incorrect': they are simply uses simpliciter. One can speak of the 'correct use' of a word of course, but this is not how I understand Wittgenstein's own deployment of the term (in the context of 'meaning is use in a langauge-game'). The contrast-space of 'use' here would simply be something like 'not-a-use in a langauge-game, rather than 'incorrect use'. Like Luke, I don't really understand why the Christian use of the term 'soul' would not count as a use. One can argue that there are particular incorrect uses of the term from the point of view of a particular, historically-established langauge-game, but this would be largely trivial.

I think you'll find the POP alot less difficult than it's reputation might suggest. It's certainly far easier reading than Heidegger, and while a light knowledge of Husserl and Kant are useful, it can be read on its own terms quite nicely. My biggest suggestion would be to make sure you read the (recent) Donald Landes translation (if you're going to read it in English), and not the previous one by I-forgot-who. Also that, if one isn't interested in phenomenological 'method', the preface can be skipped entirely (but I suspect you would be interested!). I won't join in on a reading group I'm afraid - I've got reading up to my ears to do and it's a bit too much of a time investment unfortunately.

If you want to read Merleau-Ponty on art, I suggest his essay "Eye and Mind", which I think you should be able to find online. It's an absolutely breathtaking piece of writing, dealing mostly with painting and Cezanne in particular, and is probably a more accessible starting point than the POP (which is itself an extraordinary book).

I'm not sure what 'correctly' means in this context. All the uses of 'pain' I sketched could be said to be 'correct' if generalizable ('publicizable').

One thing that might be useful to add to this discussion is the importance of inference-making. I mean one way - perhaps the only way - to 'coordinate' between meanings is to check if we make the same inferences, or if the same implications follow from one's use of that word. If I say 'I am in pain', and start athletically jumping over fences and smiling and saying 'no it doesn't hurt', one can reasonably suspect that I am using 'pain' in a way at odds which how one usually uses the word pain. However, if I start doubling over, grimacing, looking uncomfortable, etc, one can reasonably suspect that I'm using the word 'pain' how it is usually done.

Importantly, it's not a given that the 'athletic response' is entirely nonsensical. Maybe someone thought me that 'pain' means something other ('happy'?), or I misread the word 'pain' in a book and mistook it for something else. Or else one might intentionally be trying to subvert the meaning of pain, perhaps for some kind of in-joke or some other reason ("look I'm in pain haha" - maybe someone's bullying someone in pain?). In any case, the expression 'pain' is just one 'unit' in an entire ensemble of words and action, which, taken together, 'realize' the meaning of the word pain (the elements of this ensemble is, in principle, inexhaustible).

My only worry about this kind of approach is that it defines the relation between science and philosophy negatively: the one is not the other. I think this is fair, as far as it goes, but I think the more properly philosophical approach would be to offer a positive account of their relation. If philosophy does not depend on proof, what then, is the place for 'proof' in philosophy? Basically I think simply saying 'philosophy is not science' is only a half-position. It calls for more.

Have you ever read any Whitehead? — schopenhauer1

I'm somewhat familiar with Whitehead, more through secondary readings than any actual engagement with his own work. His vocabulary is forebording though, and I've put off properly studying him until I can devote the time to properly trying to digest it. Alot of what he says seems very congenial to me though, from the small bits I've gleaned here and there.

I had a discussion about exactly this with Mariner in another thread recently.

I find it interesting that reference to knowledge is mostly absent (although it's probably implied?) from your post and "seeing" is used instead. It makes me think if a distinction between surveying and knowing would be applicable here. In a way, "to see everything just as it is", to see everything in its singularity isn't precisely to do away with theory (and thus knowledge) altogether? — Πετροκότσυφας

That's a good point actually, and now that I'm thinking about it, it's not by accident that I'm avoiding 'knowledge' here. As far as it goes, I'm a bit of a hybrid Wittgenstinian/Heideggarian/Sellarsian on the topic. From Wittgenstein I draw on the idea that knowledge is a not much more than a kind of regional language-game in which the ability to answer 'how do you know...?' is just the ability to respond in a certain way (where this 'response' might require, depending on the circumstances, certain standards of proof (and what counts as proof? - look to the language-game)). There's a certain sense in which, if this philosophical understanding of knowledge is accepted, then the entire field of epistemology becomes a question for anthropologists, and not for philosophers ('ditch the ladder...').

From Heidegger (and maybe Bergson?) I take the idea that our primary relation to the 'world' (or whatever you want to call it) is not one of 'knowledge', but of a deeper, 'pre-ontological disclosure' or 'vital' (a la 'living') kind, with knowledge as a kind of (inessential) add-on or supplement to this. Finally from Sellars (and Heidegger) I take the idea that to 'know' something is always to know something as something, which means being able to place it into a conceptual web which has it's own, specific kind of dynamics (stratification into token and type, general and particular), which requires a very specific kind of learning-to-do in order to be counted as knowledge proper (again, knowledge as regional language-game).

The 'seeing' or 'understanding' that I'm leveraging Geuss/Nietzsche/Adorno to explicate - again, now that I think about it - probably belongs more to the order to sense: it's a question of how one makes sense of a phenomenon, of understanding the kind of thing it is and of the kinds of becomings it can enter into (it's ability to affect and be affected, qua Spinoza). This kind of understanding can, I think, be codified as knowledge, can be placed into conceptual web which would make it knowledge, but does not, 'in-itself', belong to the order of knowledge.

Deleuze in D&R speaks of a kind of 'infinite learning' that marks any encounter with a genuine problem to be thought through, which only subsequently becomes codified into 'knowledge', which by contrast "designates only the generality of concepts or the calm possession of a rule enabling solutions." Or to shift metaphors: knowledge is like a still image of movement, where the understanding I'm after can only take place in and with the movement in action. Sorry if this seems like an unholy amalgamation of uneasily fitting puzzle-pieces, but these issues lie almost exactly on the edge of what I've been conceptually struggling through lately.

However, once you start saying things like "seeing things precisely as they are" and couple this "without concepts"... — schopenhauer1

I don't think I would say 'without concepts' though; I think philosophy is inseparable from - and perhaps defined by - conceptual activity (hence Adono: 'Philosophy has no choice but to operate with concepts...'). What is at stake is how concepts are employed: what kind of use they are put to. What is being inveighed against (as per the Geuss quote) are prepared categories and pregiven positions, not 'categories' and 'positions' tout court.

It is a mistake, I think, to invoke a radical disjunction between some beatific intellectual intuition - as though one were to occupy the position of a all-seeing God in direct, unmediated contact with 'the things themselves' - and that of a rigid systematizing in which everything fits into pre-given boxes. The point is rather - to quote Adorno again - whom everyone seems to be ignoring! - to "assure ... the non-conceptual in the concept": to let our concepts respond to the singularities of 'each thing', to capture each thing in it's distinctiveness.

There's a biblical trope in which God counts all the stars and gives a name to each one: each treated as the singular luminescence it is. One wants to do the same with concepts.

but we cannot explain them in the same way that we can explain, say, the origin of species. — Moliere

Actually I think speciation is an excellent model of individuation that ought to be generalized - with the appropriate caveats - where possible. After all, the individuation of a species and their traits is precisely the kind of thing that cannot be said to be a given; any account given of it needs to take into account the contingencies by which any evolutionary trait came into being: it cannot presuppose the necessity of any one species or trait, and the story it tells is full of dead-ends, accidents, surprises, paths that could have gone otherwise, and of course, necessities and constraints (contingent necessities, even!).

I think it's true of course that it is agreement that makes what counts as an individual, an individual. But once we fix this frame - once we decide on the object of our investigation - we simply must do our best to follow the 'evolutionary' path of what makes it what it is. That's just what all good investigation and analysis does. Staplers are no exception to the play of necessity and contingency which make them what they are: form, function, aesthetics, history, market forces, material components, local contingencies - each and more playing a developmental role in the individuation of this stapler.

Must teleology be bound to pre-destination? — Moliere

Perhaps not necessarily, but in this particular context, it would be an inadequate account of individuation if the question of 'why this individual and not another (or even - not nothing at all)?' is not posed. There can be immanent, generative accounts of teleology, but that's somewhat outside the scope of the thread, I think.

As in Kierkegaard?

Yes, but then, the question is really: how best to conceive concepts? (Was it you who asked for clarification re: the appended quote from Adorno?; if so, that's it). If we want labels, perhaps something like: 'direct conception'.

Not really, because it's not perception that's at stake so much as conception. As others have pointed out, 'see' is just being used as a privileged metaphor. One might also say: 'To understand everything just as it is, and as nothing else". I was just following the quote. I had hoped the context of discussion - re: philosophical systematisation - would have rendered that clear.

Isn't this just "thing-in-itself"? — schopenhauer1

There've been few philosophers who have so vehemently rejected the idea of the 'thing-in-itself' as much Nietzsche, so no, it's definitely not. Nietzsche's point is that this kind of 'seeing' can, even if only fleetingly, take place. For Geuss, Nietzsche's entire philosophy is, if nothing else, an attempt - not always realised - to attain just that point of view upon things. The context in which the quote from the OP is taken is a discussion of critiques of Nietzsche which complain that Nietzsche is not systematic enough. Here is how it begins:

"One sometimes hears plaintive (disingenuous) criticisms of Nietzsche of two related kinds. One of them runs, ‘Nietzsche was a trenchant critic of certain misconceptions and also forms of moral self-deception and spiritual narrowness, but he never actually went beyond mere criticism to present his own positive, constructive theory of how we ought to live our lives. Schade.’ The other runs, ‘Nietzsche is a purveyor of highly interesting but detached, fragmentary, and undeveloped aperçus. What a shame that he never succeeded in being more systematic; he failed completely to write a “system”.’

I think that these criticisms, in the form in which they are given here, are completely misguided. They suggest that Nietzsche was trying desperately to be Hegel but unfortunately failing, when in part the point of his work was that he was trying desperately not to be Hegel (or any similar systematic philosopher) but to engage intellectually with each situation as it came, without reducing it to a prepared category or a pregiven position in a discursive network." (Geuss, Changing the Subject). The quote in the OP follows directly after this.

Note of course, that to say this does not necessarily entail any kind of regression into a romantic 'pure experiencing' (although importantly it doesn't preclude it either). That's why I included the Adorno quote - the point is to approach concepts themselves differently from the manner in which systematic thinking does. If there's something from Kant to be drawn upon here, it'd be more analogous to the difference between (what Kant calls) 'reflective judgement' (movement from the particular to the general, as detailed in the Third Critique) and 'determinative judgement' (subsumption of particular under the general, as with legislation of the faculties in the First Critique). I say 'analogous' because the general-particular pair is, I think, something to be avoided altogether, but it's rough and ready enough to capture the spirit of what's at stake here.

Nietzsche the Buddhist then :halo:

Yes, I think God is a helpful concept to have, even if you are not theistic. The classical God sees things in their entirety. Objects do not transcend the perspective of God as they do in finite creatures like humans. There is no mediation, no conceptual apparatus, no "filtering". God knows all because he sees all. — darthbarracuda

One interesting thing I find with the approach in the OP is that the viewpoint of the Nietzschean would-be God is subtractive, not additive: that is, it's not that such a God would see 'things in their entirety', over and above the 'finitude' of humans - I take this to be a rather classical theological trope - but that God would see things without the trappings of "a concept to catch it and reduce it to something else". There's a sense in which God here would see less than a human would, and not more. The 'finitude' of the human here consists of introducing more than what is warranted (in the form of a system).

There's a paper online by Eric Steinhart in which he discusses one of the implications of this view. For Nietzsche 'sameness' or 'identity' is only an appearance. It's a highly sophisticated appearance. Our human ability to postulate sameness / endurance enables us to conceptualize and count. But it is only an appearance, in a dialectic with 'difference'. — mcdoodle

That was a cool paper. I'm all aboard the 'difference precedes identity' train so it's good to see a close textual analysis of the varying instances of this in Nietzsche's works.

This discussion was merged into Donald Trump

Yep.

Process. Individuation is a process.

There's a name for this - it's called the Tao - and it's not seeing "each thing clearly," it's seeing everything, all at once, undivided. — T Clark

To speak a little abstractly, one of the problems I have with 'seeing everything' is that 'everything' strikes me as too subsumptive, as though 'everything else' were just so much detritus ready to be subsumbed under one big cosmic principle. Too systemic, in other words. That said, I quite like the Tao, even though I find it problematic at points.

Is the referenced work the right one for an introduction to Geuss's philosophy? — T Clark

Changing the Subject is comprised of little essays on philsophers in history. The little I've read is great, but Geuss's main work is in political philosophy. For a nice intro I'd recommend his Philosophy and Real Politics. I will also say that I think Geuss is the best philosophical writer in English that I know currently working. His essays are just marvels. Anything of his is worth reading.

One idea I've been interested in for a while is that of higher-dimensional langauges: most languages are essentially two-dimensional linear scripts, and don't utilize the 'third' dimension of spatial position (as with chemical forumulas, where spatial relations between 'morphemes' matter). One possible way a higher intelligence could organize their grammar is by utelizing such dimensions so that, say, dependant clauses are located below independant clauses, or that future tenses are written in bold, past tenses in italic and so on. At the limit, an entire sentence, paragraph, book, or database of information could be condensed in a single high-dimentional figure: a differentially colored sphere, say (perhaps hue, value, and saturation might encode syntactic or semantic info!).

We would be literally too stupid to 'read' such a script (without help from a computer, at any rate) but it jibes with the notion that a higher intelligence might use 'less' language.

It sounds boring but I think one of the defining marks of a more intelligent species would be a far more complex and interesting grammar (The movie Arrival I think was right on the money in it's focus on language!). I mean, one of the distinguishing marks of our human intelligence over animals is our abilty to 'talk about talk' instead of just talking about 'things': that is, human language exhibits a self-reflexive structure that is almost impossible for even the smartest chimp.

One result of this is that we have a much richer grammatical structure than any possible animal language: our ability to talk about how we talk allows us to used tensed words (past, present, future), qualify other words (adverbs, adjectives), and basically use all sorts of different kinds of words. Essentially, grammar allows us to categorize the world and how we talk about it in different and interesting ways. Now, if one compares grammar between different languages, one also gets a feel for how different grammars limit (and also enable) the way in which we can talk - and hence think - about things.

Further, grammar is a bit of a balancing act. A rich grammar helps us to talk about things in different ways, but we can't have too many grammatical categories because, well, we're cognitively limited. So one imagines - and this is the point, finally - that a far more intelligent being would be able to handle an ever richer set of grammatical categories than we can. It would be able to talk and think about the world in more interesting and more complex ways than we currently can.

I'm not sure how comfortably the idea can be transferred from biology to philosophy, maybe it's too specific to biology? — gurugeorge

One of the cool things about the idea of adjacent possible is precisely that it actually has been already taken up in contexts outside the biological: the author of the article I cited in the OP, Steven Johnson, employed the idea in the context of technological innovation, to great effect (it's also why I used the microchip and the locomotive as examples). I think the idea of the adjacent possible is made particularly clear in the context of biology because it's so concerned with tracing out the evolutionary paths that species take in the movement of historical time, which allows for a particularly clear-eyed approach to questions of modality - but I don't think that really grants it any particular conceptual privilege; just a pedagogic one.

With Hegel, I'd be hesitant to assimilate his thought to this because of there's alot of weird shit going on with the aufhebung ('sublation') which I suspect would take alot of conceptual fiddling about to align just-so, but I'm not quite prepared to do that right now. As for Aristotle - while I think he made a step in the right direction in aligning the potential with matter and thus with the sensible rather than the supra-sensible (as in Plato), he still subordinated potentiality to form (morphe) in a way which I don't think is congruent with the understanding of 'the adjacent possible'. I think there's more resonance in both Leibniz and Kant on this score, although both in their different ways. All of which is to say that I think there's definitely room to think about the idea independently from it's biological roots.

Nope.

Identification <> Individuation.

*yawn*

Mercury, Pegasus, Daedalus, witches... to name but a few. And it's not equivocation; nature is blind to everything but the immediate, but human history simply is the realisation of fantasy under the guise of 'planning'. — unenlightened

Fantasy <> possibility. If you want to modalize fantasy, go ahead, but don't pretend it's philosophy.

Flying was dreamed of while it was impossible — unenlightened

Clearly it wasn't.

In any case the "dreams of possibilities" have nothing to do with possibility as a modality. One can dream all one likes. To confuse the two is grammatical equivocation.

If you think we make 'choices' in that manner, sure, but that's extrinsic to the theory of evolution.

I didn't say we can't make choices. I said it's irrelevant.

Being able to shoot lazer beams from my eyes to melt my enemies would probably be a survival advantage, but it doesn't mean that it 'will most definitely evolve into existence in the future'.

That said, evolutionary theory already accommodates for the fact of niche construction, which is the when organisms alter their environment so as to be better accommodated to it. That niche construction occurs says nothing about 'free will' though, so we can keep the science while dropping the bad metaphysics.