Ah, true. Should have used something like x+3=y. I just wanted an example to break the one-to-one correspondence, as a first step.

It's a nice way to understand what a proposition is, though. Sometimes it seems that propositions are taken to be platonic objects, if not explicitly then in just the approach to them. Yes, of course John said that P, but we're going to lift P out of that context and deal with it. — frank

I've been thinking about this comment a bit actually, and one of the thoughts I keep circling back to is that if the Aristotelian model of problems is a crappy way to understand problems, and if that model is indeed a nice way to understand what a proposition is - and I think it is - then thinking about language (and anything else) propositionally is just as equally crappy. This is possibly one of the reasons analytic philosophy is such a graveyard of ideas: the entire structure of 'the proposition' hinges upon an incredibly banal sense of truth which is directly parasitic upon the Aristotelian model: is the proposition true, or not? All the ridiculous analytic 'paradoxes' - paradoxes of self-reference, Moore's paradox, etc - are just false-problems created by a shitty understanding of how problems ought to operate.

No wonder Deleuze was so scathing about treating philosophy as a matter of propositions: "This confusion reigns in logic and explains its infantile idea of philosophy. [Philosophical] concepts are measured against a grammar that replaces them with propositions extracted from the sentences in which they appear". Propositions - yuck.

Eh, your problem, not mine.

I didn't say I don't care about how it's received - the opposite. I want it to be received in a specific way, a way that deals with the issue at hand. Part of it btw is that I'm trying to work with the medium here. The OP is already 6 paragraphs long - about 2 longer than I'd like - so I try to cut away as much fat as possible. And the first thing to go is framing. So yeah, you got me, I care about editorial etiquette.

It doesn't feel like you're talking about a connection you've made, or stuff you're working through. — csalisbury

Good. That's the point - a well posed problem/issue shouldn't need some sort of journalistic fluff around it like [personal anecdote-serious stuff-cute story-feel good moral]. I don't care about that stuff and more importantly I don't want to have to waste time talking about that stuff. The issue should stand on it's own, be objected to/engaged with on its own terms, and the more I can make it seem like it does, the better. If it doesn't catch because I don't appeal to some human storytelling imperative then so be it, sucks for me, but man, I've put something into words that I think is coherent and helps me think things through and that's cool for me.

By 'it' btw I meant the fact that I struggle to set out a clear narrative dealing with a philosophical problem. Like, I think you think I just bang this stuff out like it's second nature - except I don't (sorry to disappoint?). I mean, yeah, 'course you can be 'forgiven' for missing that, but people generally don't give AF enough to care - which I like.

Also, university discourse I can deal with. I'm on an internet forum, talking smack. Hardly under any illusions of Grand Revolutionary Transference of The Real.

Eh, I think your own issue is that you think of me as kind of subject-supposed-to-know but I'm still working through this stuff on my own terms. That, and - I think an explicitly formulated approach to the world in terms of problematics is virtually absent anywhere outside of the Deleuzian milieu. I was honestly trying to think about where else I've encountered it, and while it's impicit in math, biology and engineering - the three examples I used in the OP - there really is a almost complete absence of philosophical resources I can draw upon. I actually really struggle to put this stuff in as clear terms as I can, without simply jargoning it up. I only encountered the Aristotelian line in the Topics a few days ago and it was like a mini-lightbulb moment for me.

Again, it's nice that you don't 'see' it - I'm obviously doing something right - but then you think you have to do your meta thing and it just misreads everything so badly. So yeah, I can play this game too, I just find it so unnecessary and bleh.

The Selfish Gene is unfortunately super outdated and rather badly misleading now, so I'd strongly advise against it. Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence For Evolution is still great though, and a really fun read.

My go-to is Jablonka and Lamb's Evolution in Four Dimensions, which can be nicely coupled with Sean Carroll's Endless Forms Most Beautiful for an easy introduction to 'evo-devo'.

Carroll can be a bit 'pop-sci' at times, and a more philosophically weighty book covering similar topics would be Susan Oyama's The Ontogeny of Information, which is one of my favorite books ever.

One of my favourite books I've read so far this year has been Richard Prum's The Evolution of Beauty, which aims to restore sexual selection back to it's rightful place as a fully fledged mechanism of selection in its own right, which I think is both vitally important and massively overlooked, and might even obliquely fit in with your readings on Levinas, if you squint a bit.

I also think Andreas Wagner's works on genome networks are indispensible for a full understanding of evolution, and his Arrival of the Fittest being his pop-sci intro, and The Origins of Evolutionary Innovations being his more technical - but quite readable - work on the topic.

Darwin himself is great so long as you go in knowing that he wrote before the discovery of any mechanisms of heredity (the ways in which changes got passed down - genes, etc), so his account is missing one of the major facets evolution. I'd suggest getting to him after some other, more modern reading.

:grin:

I also like this one, although together with the last, it's darker than you might think:

"Let us laugh together, on principle" - William Connolly

My favourite:

Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo

(If I cannot bend the heavens, I will stir the infernal powers)

- Virgil, Aeneid VII, 312.

Noah Moss Brender - The Meaning of Life: A Merleau-Pontian Investigation of How Living Bodies Make Sense [link]
Matija Jelača - The Problem of Representation in Gilles Deleuze and Wilfrid Sellars [link]

Read both of these recently, both unpublished PhD theses, both fantastic, and I'm insanely jealous of Brender's dissertation which is more or less the kind of thing I wish I'd written. Also just started:

Bob Clark - Wittgenstein, Mathematics, and World

He was banned because he was an incredibly polemic poster who did nothing to actually argue for the positions he held. He degraded the quality of conversation in alot of threads he posted in, and he was warned multiple times to change his behaviour before he was finally banned. I don't remember the exact thing that got him banned, but it was almost certainly another in a long line of bad posts. It was not because of his viewpoints.

"Perception is essentially differentiation, gradation, specification of distances, formation of tensions, reliefs, contrasts. To not perceive something is not for a positive content to cease to be there before the subject; it is for there to be disarticulation, undifferentiation, for there to no longer be contrast, divergency, relief. What we perceive is not a positive term existing in itself and supporting its own "properties"; what we perceive is a contrast, a tension - not an adequation with our substance, but a difference from us, marked out in the continuous fabric of being ... of which we too are a part. It is that divergency, that contrast, that is the perceptual meaning, the sense grasped in perception; meaning has not a positive but a differential being."

- Alphonso Lingis, Phenomenological Explanations

QM makes the idea of free will even more implausable, not less:

"[One must] reject the common sop that somehow the indeterminism of quantum physics helps us out here. First, there is no evidence that the neurons of the brain are subject to indeterminancy in the way, say, firing of elections is (and in fact there is much evidence against it); even if that were the case, however ... the indeterminancy of some outcomes in the brain would not help with establishing personal causal origination of actions. For randomness in fact would make us more rather than less subject to unexpected turns of fact. ...

Moreover, human free choice would not be made possible by neuronal randomness in any case (and all the evidence so far seems to be against it) because no conscious human choice could ever operate to refashion neural networks directly at the neuronal level. Neural networks change through experience, not through will. ... We do not have direct access to neurons and their patterns of firing any more than we have the capacity for direct intervention into the functioning of our liver, even if the liver sometimes were to function randomly". (Heidi Ravven, The Self Beyond Itself)

I doubt if Aristotle added the one-to-one qualification. If I had the text I wouldn't have to doubt. Can you easily reproduce it? — tim wood

The Topics can be found freely online - here is the first book which I reference explicitly in the OP: http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/topics.1.i.html

'Stotle doesn't quite phrase it the way I do, but I don't think it's a stretch: "The difference between a problem and a proposition is a difference in the turn of the phrase .... Naturally, then, problems and propositions are equal in number: for out of every proposition you will make a problem if you change the turn of the phrase". (Bk 1, 4).

The whole text is just easily one of the worst in the history of philosophy: "Reasoning, on the other hand, is 'dialectical', if it reasons from opinions that are generally accepted... those opinions are 'generally accepted' which are accepted by every one or by the majority or by the philosophers-i.e. by all, or by the majority, or by the most notable and illustrious of them. Again (c), reasoning is 'contentious' if it starts from opinions that seem to be generally accepted, but are not really such, or again if it merely seems to reason from opinions that are or seem to be generally accepted." :vomit:

So, a problem is dynamic if it has more than one solution? — Galuchat

Yes, but this aspect is tributary or parasitic of the more primary fact that a 'dynamic' problem is one which does not simply re-state it's solution in different terms (remember Aristotle's formulation: a problem is just a proposition phrased differently - this is the key thing to resist when thinking about problems). Only a problem which does not do this admits of multiple solutions precisely because you cannot just 'read off' the solution from the problem in different terms. Instead you have to invent, create something new. There's nothing about the need for energy generation (stated as a general problem) that dictates that a dam or a coal plant ought to be built in response. One has to bring something new to the table. That's the key. Multiple solutions are an 'effect', not a defining feature - although I was a little unclear about this, I think, in the OP.

Follow up from the previous BBC post I mentioned regarding the heart's role in how we relate to the world:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180423-how-a-s

The answer is obvious!:

I left my Sellars book at a work function :cry: Just started to reread Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind too :broken:

Until (if?) I get it back -

Daniela Voss - Conditions of Thought: Deleuze and Transcendental Ideas

Couldn't imagine a more horrible kind of life, one driven solely by necessity.

There's a reason that there's a long running theme in philosophy that links freedom with the ability to act immorally.

And I think this where is the pairs thing gets me. Because [pairs] is clearly up a level. It's base-level is already a relational, cognitive one.

I don't think it's clear that all universals operate like this, such that, ultimately, a particular relates to itself through relation to another thing.

So, the doggie route may have been a bad one. I think the Paul one is better. I recognize Paul. This definitely involves an as-structure: I see Paul as Paul. But I don't see Paul as Paul @tx related to Paul @ty related to [timeless] Paul. I just see Paul. — csalisbury

But if you acknowledge the as-structure, then a token-type relation 'falls out' of it: an as-structure is a sumsumptive structure where something belongs to a class of (a higher order) something else. I think the best way to bring this out is to turn again to - let's call it - the argument from misrecognition. Say you recognise Paul, and you call out 'Hi Paul!'. But, it turns out, it's not Paul. Just a bloke a who looks alot like him from a distance. A question: how is this misrecognition possible? How did you misrecognize George as Paul? Surely this misrecognition is only possible on the basis of an implicit two-level 'game': object-level (the thing so recognized: George, Paul), and meta-level (the 'concept' Paul). Otherwise you wouldn't have misrecognized George - you simply wouldn't have recognized him tout court.

This is probably a better way to put it than say that it's a case of recognizing 'hypotethical Pauls' (as I wrongly said about the apples). On the other hand, there is perhaps there's something to be said of the fact that this (two levels) only becomes explicit in the case of 'breakdown' or misrecognition, a lot like - perhaps exactly like - when Heidegger discusses his broken hammer and the ready-to-hand/present-to-hand distinction, where recognising Paul is, for the most part, a case of ready-to-handedness, whereas thinking about it in terms of tokens and types is a present-to-hand retrojection/abstraction that isn't 'there' in the ready-to-handedness of simply meeting a real life Paul.

But - this would be cold comfort to the realist insofar as with the ready-to-handedness approach, there is no questino of thinking in terms of tokens and types, and thus no question of universals and particulars.

Also, I never thought about making the connection to Marx's commodity or Lacan's master signifier, but yeah, that would be something very productive to explore.

In a perfect world all needs would be satisfied, thereby the motivation for both negative and positive behavior would be extinct. — TheMadFool

"thereby the motivation for ethics would be extinct".

A hypothetical perfectly moral world X would be one in which bad behavior (can't actually call it that) would be only those committed out of necessity. Such a world already exists - the animal world ( Y ). — TheMadFool

No. There is no ethics involved in any such behaviour, no more than there is ethics involved in the wind blowing a leaf away 'by necessity'. Such an act is neither good nor bad, and it is simply a category mistake - a misuse of grammar and failure of language - to say so. Again, the 'perfectly moral world' you speak of simply involves no morality. You're mistaking the absence of morality for it's so-called 'perfection'.

But ethics is just that space opened up between biological necessity and extra-biological contingency. A life driven by necessity is an a-ethical life, where there is not even the possibility of ethical or unethical action. Ethics moves in a space beyond 'need'. The vaulted 'harmony' you speak of forgets the fact that nature is red in tooth and claw; nature is not some happy place where things are 'in balance'; nature will murder you and your family indiscriminately, watch you bleed out with indifference. But ethics is just that which makes a difference - good or bad.

Ethical sterility is not a 'perfectly moral world'.

This is obviously a bit far afield, but I wish the left was able to do this in terms of storytelling i.e (mythologizing, sermonizing, poeticizing etc etc) I think the theory stuff is great, but I also sometimes picture like, 50 columbia grads at zucotti park talking to one another about hyper-nuanced stuff, and like 10 of these splitting off to try to talk to the group (Ranciere said !). I think the Left is reallllly lacking invigorating narrative power these days. And everything you've said about theory, imo, applies to (mythologizing, sermonizing, poeticizing) as well. — csalisbury

Depressing but true. Ironically I think it's actually really hard - perhaps much harder than being 'hyper-nuanced' - to weave a good, punchy tale with an eye to political action. There are elements of the left that try to do this - Sanders and Corbyn being the two obvious ones, but I also really like the kind of writing that George Monbiot does, as well as Byung Chul-Han, who has been releasing what are essentially pamplets of critique (all his books are about 100 or so pages) which are easily digestible and appropriately sermony. Also Varoufakis, but he's got that Greek arrogance which makes him hard to relate to. But there really is no MLK of our time... (and MLK knew his Aristotle and Hegel!).

There's also something to be said about the fact that it's harder and harder to tell stories in general (and the the right always seems to appeal to stories about stories to get around this particular hurdle), which has to do with the fragmentation of our psychic lives under capitalism, but yes, a bit far afield.

I'm pretty sure, however, that the reason you find Laruelle's claims trivial is because Deleuze sees things very similarly, Zizek has similarities too, and you also like Brassier. Also that you already think 'non-philosophically' in the broad sense. Most do not; how hard it is to bend your mind that way in terms of wordview isn't just a function of the difficulty of Laruelle's writing. It's because it really is difficult to be a slave to the real. — fdrake

Hah, that's a very generous way to respond to my grumpiness about Laruelle. Funnily enough, my favorite formulation of the role that philosophy or 'theory' plays comes from a political theorist, Wendy Brown, who specifically affirms the way in which philosophy captures the world precisely to the extent that it frames it otherwise than it is:

"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 political and social theory describe reality abstractly. At their best, they 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." (Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty)

In other words, the autonomy of the real implies nothing less than a certain co-autonomy of the ideal. And the genesis of this kind of thinking goes back (at least) to Kant, who affirmed that the whole purpose of the faculty of Reason was to provide a focus imaginarius, a supersensible 'regulative point' which would allow us to relate to the world as if it made maximal sense, as if it abided by our concepts. The idea being that without this fictive positing, we would be unable to reason at all. This was part and parcel of Kant's discovery of the 'synthetic a priori', whose real import, as Levi Bryant points out, was that it uncovered a power of novelty specific to thought:

"But the synthetic a priori is real magic. From thought alone you’re getting more out of the hat than you put there in the first place. When Kant says that 7+5 = 12 is not an analytic a priori judgment, nor a synthetic a posteriori judgment, but a synthetic a priori judgment, he’s saying that when we go through these calculations we learn something we didn’t know at first, something that’s absolutely certain but that we didn’t know at the outset, and that this isn’t merely a matter of definitions nor is it a matter of experience. Through thought we get more than we started with. ... If synthetic a priori propositions are possible this means there’s a power of thought… A power to go beyond teaching or environment and a power to go beyond your nature. If synthetic a priori propositions are possible this means you have the power to introduce something new into both your own thought and the world through thought." (source).

Those who think that thought merely 'reflects' the real in a 'transcendental' sense (w/r/t Laruelle use of the term 'transcendental' - a use, btw, which bothers me to no end), miss precisely this power of thought, it's introduction of novelty into the world in which it thinks about.

The heart may not be able to think per se, but there's strong evidence that its role as a keeper of internal rhythm is vital to our ability to think and feel in certain ways. Check out this BBC article from a while back that discusses the case of a man with two 'hearts', his own, and a mechanical one that was fitted near his stomach:

"When Carlos tapped out his pulse, for instance, he followed the machine’s rhythms rather than his own heartbeat. The fact that this also changed other perceptions of his body – seeming to expand the size of his chest, for instance – is perhaps to be expected; in some ways, changing the position of the heart was creating a sensation not unlike the famous “rubber hand illusion”. But crucially, it also seemed to have markedly altered certain social and emotional skills. Carlos seemed to lack empathy when he viewed pictures of people having a painful accident, for instance. He also had more general problems with his ability to read other’s motives, and, crucially, intuitive decision making – all of which is in line with the idea that the body rules emotional cognition."

And: "Along these lines, Furman has found that people with major depressive disorder (but without other complications like anxiety) struggle to feel their own heart beat; and the poorer their awareness, the less likely they were to report positive experiences in their daily life. And as Dunn’s work on decision making would have suggested, poor body perception also seemed to be linked to measures of indecision – a problem that blights many people with depression."

Super cool stuff.

The child isn't able yet to see this particular dog as a particular dog. It sees it as a dog. But it doesn't see it as a particular dog — csalisbury

Hmm, but I think the relevant qualification is the 'as' here; I mean, this is the structure of intentionality as such, the 'as-structure' that Heidegger talks about: to see X as Y, whether it be 'as a dog' or 'as a particular'. The language is confusing here because to see something as something is to see it... as a particular (in general!).(it's the difference between de dicto and de re uses of the word 'particular'). So I want to grant that there is a 'language game' (conceptual game?) where to recognize something as 'a particular' (de dicto) is indeed a specific kind of knowing (where 'particular' is treated as a 'kind of thing'), but to also say that all recognition of something as anything whatsoever implicates particularity de re).

I mean, consider a case of misrecognition. An adult says: 'look it's doggie!' while pointing to another dog than the child is used to, and the child pauses, screws up her face and says '...that's not doggie'. Perhaps this is the first time the child has ever been 'forced' to recognize that her doggie is indeed 'a' doggie, or maybe this would be a good time for the adult to teach the child that 'doggie' is a broader term than what she actually (probably) wants to say ('doggie's name is 'Snoopy', dear'). In either case, 'doggie' already has determinate (that is to say particular) 'content' qua particular content, even if not recognized in a 'higher-order' game as particular.

So I guess the point is that while it's true that the game of tokens and types is 'a' game among others (de dicto), and that this game is indeed a 'higher-order game predicated on some lower-order one', it is nonetheless implicated in all other games (de re). And to play those other games - to sort pairs of like pairs together - is to play that game, even if one doesn't know, in the full-blown intentionally directed sense of the term, that one is playing that game (and not some other). At the very least any kind of recognition of 'something as something' paves the way for a retroactive lightbulb moment of 'ah, so that's what I was doing' (at a higher order).

(In line with a Deleuzian take, one can say that there is always a prior 'problematic' that 'distributes' token and type, and that it is to this problematic that we respond to before utilizing the distinction in an explicit way: "Propositions, whether general or particular, find their sense only in the subjacent problem which inspires them ... A well known test in psychology involves a monkey who is supposed to find food in boxes of one particular colour amidst others of various colours: there comes a paradoxical period during which the number of 'errors' diminishes even though the monkey does not yet possess the 'knowledge' or 'truth' of a solution in each case: propitious moment in which the philosopher-monkey opens up to truth, himself producing the true, but only to the extent that he begins to penetrate the coloured thickness of a problem".)

A year ago I saw this sci-fi movie (forgot the name) where they capture s star-fish like Martian life form whose cells are multi-functional e.g. the skin cells think, see, taste, smell, feel and multiply all at the same time. The cells are even able to contract like muscles. — TheMadFool

"Life". Awesome movie.

To link this back to Sellars, seeing language as a closed, flat plane - the dizzying immanence, as csal described it iirc- is very much like characterising sense in preparation for the introduction of a philosophical interpretation of the real. This resonates very will with seeing the unfolding of language use as a series of natural causes - thought holding itself indifferent to its content. It seems for Sellars this will be furnished with a representational account of language use as somehow picturing and gesturing towards nature (here, a real). Will the account find the principles of unfolding of language use as a series of natural causes? Perhaps it will, but hopefully it will be seen as a description of our conduct rather than reifying the interpretation of the real of language into another 'hole filling' in an architectonic system. — fdrake

Sooo, my rant aside, this is where I begrudgingly acknowledge that OK, there may be some extra-psychological payoff to Laruelle's notions, and it's in this direction where one might find it. But on the other hand, did we really need Laruelle and his extravagant theoretical motions to get there? Or was it always just a matter of paying attention to the specificity of thought itself? So maybe I can say: Laruelle makes explicit something implicit everywhere in thought, and it's nice to use that explicitness as a jumping-off point but there's no reason to then try and erect some giant edifice over and against some boogyman called 'philosophy' which apparently simply cannot accommodate that explicitness. This being Brassier's own criticism of Laruelle:

"It is only Laruelle’s own insistence on equating philosophy with decision which shores up this alleged incommensurability [between philosophical and non-philosophical thinking]. [But] Once the dichotomy between philosophy and non-philosophy has been recast as a contrast between correlationalist and non-correlationalist thinking, the rationale for disowning any potentially intra-philosophical consequences of the real’s positive negativity simply evaporates. In fact, Laruelle’s disavowal of the latter amounts to an attempt to neuter his work’s latent philosophical potency on the grounds that this would compromise non-philosophy’s supposed indifference towards philosophical decision. But it is necessary to insist, against Laruelle himself, that it is precisely the positive negativity of the ‘non-’ which expresses the real’s non-dialectical negativity (read: 'non-conceptual negativity' - SX)." (Nihil Unbound, "Being Nothing")

And the turn to Sellars is, among other things, an attempt to capture this 'positive negativity' within philosophy itself, without reducing it to what is philosophically posited. Laruelle would probably insist it cannot be done. And if he did I would say he'd be wrong.

This isn't to say that philosophy is bad in principle, but it is to say that philosophies of the real begin in philosophy and project the ideas through the delimiting and negational concepts conditioning sense as such to the real. Laruelle sees non-philosophy as beginning in this real, and following one's nose on what it suggests — fdrake

I really get Laruelle's project, I really think I do, but my gosh do I also think the point is overstated. I mean, yeah, OK, there's a difference between seeing the negative as the negative of philosophy (what you refer to as caesura) and the negative as, as it were, 'in itself' (''in-itself' for philosophy!' the annoying Laruellian will reply), but, when it comes right down to it, I don't see this as amounting to anything other than a change in attitude on behalf of the philosopher. Like, I think the ultimate payoff of 'non-philosophy' is psychological, a little bit of humble pie, or an acknowledgement that things in a mirror are closer than they seem.

But then I'm always tempted to ask: who actually thinks that philosophy functions in the way Laruelle does? Who - apart from maybe Hegel - will say 'My system covers everything, even the (its?) negative!'. I mean yeah, there are some nameless idiots here who walk around with blinders so strong that they don't even realize they're wearing them, but generally if you press people they'll acknowledge that at best they're working with a series of intuition pumps or attempts at framing things so as to bring out relevant features of the world (or of specific situations), and so on. I mean, this is just what thinking is: you make a distinction, and then you attempt to reason on the basis of that distinction. The alternative is that you get interminably bogged down arguing about 'the system', and I can't imagine anything more philosophically anemic.

I mean, there's a question here over a 'realism' of that distinction: is that distinction a 'real' one (in the Platonic sense) or not? But I think even granting that Laruelle is right (and I think he is), my immediate impulse is: who cares? Not very 'philosophical' of me I know, but all the interesting stuff happens once we've made a distinction (of token and type, among other things!); all the juicy philosophy happens in its wake, and while there's perhaps some question over the status of all that juice, it strikes me as thoroughly boring to keep coming back to it over and over again. And to think Laruelle has made a career out of this! No wonder he's had to resort to a vocabulary so exotic that even continental philosophers - whose trade and ply is exoticism - are generally like 'wtf man'.

Not directing this at you btw, just more venting in your general direction since you mentioned it. I mean, take the Zizekian real. Surely the Zizekian can reply - of course you're right, the real is 'immanent' to thought: but that's just what it would be on account of it being thought as such. By Laruelleian lights themselves, this is exactly as it should be. Surely the problem would be if the real is posited as really, actually being beyond discourse, precisely because it is being 'posited-by-thought-to-be-beyond-thought'. But that is just what isn't happening.

Very cool. I wonder how it 'works'.

But there are some organisms that don't age, and our reproductive cell line is immortal and doesn't age. So aging is not necessary, at least for some types of cells, and there is ongoing research showing some promise into slowing or even stopping the aging process in various animals, including humans. — Marchesk

I remain sceptical. After all, germ cells are not organisms, and the reason that they don't age is that they - exactly like cancer, actually - remain undifferentiated, retaining their pluripotential so they may turn into other cells. And organisms just are differentiated beings (among other things).

All good! I move on pretty quickly from one subject to another, and will take whatever good input I can get :)

Perhaps the way in which I recognize him is a flood of affection - It's paul! I can imagine this same sort of thing happening with a little kid seeing a dog. "Doggie!" the kid says, but the kid doesn't recognize the dog as a particular dog among many. It's more like a welling-up of excitement. Perhaps, for the kid, 'doggie' is just the way one expresses the welling-up of excitement at seeing a dog. And, importantly, in this conception - it's not just that welling-up of excitement is one instance of welling-up in general. It's the same thing, from the same source. the welling-up doesn't relate to itself - it just is that welling up. Perhaps one says doggie, the same way one does a certain dance move to express a certain feeling. — csalisbury

Yeah, but this is a different issue, no? At stake is not a question of tokens and types: by your own description, 'doggie' isn't a particular. I mean, this is one of the reasons Sellars draws a hard line between sensation and intelligibility, where a flood of affection would lie on the former side of the equation and tokens/types on the latter. I don't think the account of tokens and types given above needs to deny that such wellings of affections - where one might utter 'Paul!' or 'doggie!' as a consequence - can happen. It needs only to ask that we be careful to distinguish between the different 'logics' at work in each.

The dizziness that sets in when we realize that any type can be treated as a token and any token as a type (or when we realize that any level can be either object-level or meta-language) - the dizziness of a kind of fractal infinity that stretches inward and outward, with no firm ground - is linked directly to a procedure of thought that is indifferent to the things its thinking about. The weird dialectical combustion that's happening is taking place at a level of abstraction so abstract that it creates a kind of cognitive ouroborous. It's the place of thought par excellence that treats all things as things-in-general. — csalisbury

Yeah but I wanna say that this is exactly the desired outcome! I think what this dizzyiess assests to, when all is said and done, is nothing other than the insufficiency of thought unto itself. Thought cannot be anchored in itself, it must get its bearings from an 'outside' which indexes - provisionally and haphazardly, according to the vagaries of human interests and motivations - tokens and types as tokens and types. Were there to be some kind of solid point of departure, some 'ground-level' where we can say - ah, this really is a token, or this really is a type - that's where the materialist in me would get worried.

The ouroboric effect you refer to, an effect of 'thought being indifferent to the things it is thinking about' is I think precisely the desideratum of a materialist conception of thought. It means that the very form of thought is not sanctioned by some kind of 'pre-established harmony' between that form - always indifferent to the real - and the real itself. At best, it is just a kind of machinery that gets put to work in this way and that way, such that the real is always 'autonomous' (read: indifferent) with respect to thought. This kind of approach is what - I think - Laruelle and his cabal of 'non-philosophers' are always going on about, but I can't be sure.

A more solid reference - for me anyway - is Zizek's reading of Hegel, where he sees in Hegel's idealism a, or rather the kernel of materialism; to all the brouhaha about 'correlationism' a while back and how to break out of the 'correlationist circle' between thought and being, Zizek's response was basically: of course we can't break out of the circle, of course thought always reflects what it 'puts there' to begin with, and for exactly this reason is reality independent of thought. So yeah, no one can say what they mean - on account of the fact that one is saying at all.

(And this is the whole issue of the 'logic of sense'; Deleuze (who is more Hegelian than he ever lets on): "I never state the sense of what I am saying. But on the other hand, I can always take the sense of what I say as the object of another proposition whose sense, in turn, I cannot state. I thus enter into the infinite regress of that which is presupposed. This regress testifies both to the great impotence of the speaker and to the highest power of language: my impotence to state the sense of what I say, to say at the same time something and its meaning; but also the infinite power of language to speak about words"; But: "There is indeed a way of avoiding this infinite regress. It is to fix the proposition, to immobilize it, just long enough to extract from it its sense - the thin film at the limit of things and words").

You mean death is a part of life itself? — TheMadFool

I'm not sure talk of 'parts' and 'wholes' is very appropriate here; I'd perhaps like to think about it in terms of Kant's dove - Kant imagined a dove which, feeling the resistance of air on its wings, figured that it would be much better off without the air getting in its way. But you'd know how that story ends.

Wilfrid Sellars - Science, Perception, and Reality — StreetlightX

I've finally come to the doorstep of the famous Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind essay in this book. I remember giving it a go a few years ago - in a reading group of the old PF if I recall! - and found it almost entirely incomprehensible. I'm actually a couple of pages in and it's actually readable this time around :gasp:

What about cancer cells? Dysfunctional though they are they seem to be immune to both genetic signals and environmental stress. Immortality is possible. We don't really have to die even within the context of, I quote, "thermal and chemical degradation". This seems to suggest that it's the environment that has the greater say in death and not our genes which are fully capable of immortality. — TheMadFool

Cancer is fascinating and terrifying because it is literally a kind of superabundence of life itself: life without the limits that normally constrains and, in the last analysis, sustains life. Cancer is pathological life that is indifferent to limits: it's only imperative is to propagate, irrespective of whether this propagation will kill off the very environment that sustains it. The sociologist Melinda Cooper has a great discussion of this, in which she cites the work of Aurel Kolani:

"The specific sickness of cancer lies in the metastasizing overproduction of life rather than its simple negation. If cancer kills, it is not so much through a direct decomposition of the organism, as an extortion of the vital life force of organic life (cellular division), which it deflects from all ends — other than its own accumulation. There is overproduction of life, writes Kolnai, when the generative processes of growth, reproduction, and regeneration escape the boundaries of organic space and time." (Cooper, Life as Surplus)

Cancer lifes you to death. But the point is that those boundaries are what, at the end of the day, allow life to continue. Cancer, precisely because it does not respect those boundaries, ends up putting an end to life. So the so-called immortality of the cancer cell is a double-edged sword: it buys its immortality at the price of... life (which should tell you something about how life and death cannot be as cleanly separated as I think you'd like).

There was a great article by Peter Hoffmann in Nautilus a little while ago, weighing up the different takes on why we die (or age, rather). He does a nice job of bringing alot of them together:

"The scientific literature is full of explanations for aging: Protein aggregation, DNA damage, inflammation, telomeres. But these are the biological responses to an underlying cause, which is accumulating damage through thermal and chemical degradation.... If this interpretation of the data is correct, then aging is a natural process that can be reduced to nanoscale thermal physics—and not a disease."

The whole article is worth a read, it's pretty breezy, and relates quite nicely to the OP. As to weather death 'evolved', well, no, death is a condition of evolution, so cannot have evolved; This is a logical/defintional point. Also, the question mixes up levels up analysis: death is what happens to individual organisms, evolution is what happens to species and their environments (the correlate of the latter is extinction, not death).

One thing that Clark focuses on is the role of language in allowing higher-order abstraction to take place. The monkeys had to use physical tokens to do things their other untrained brethren couldn't. But language gives one an essentially infinite reserve of (auditory and graphic) tokens by which to construct abstractions. He follows Oliver Sacks in discussing Joseph, a deaf 11 year old who was never thought sign language or any kind of 'structured linguistic experience':

"Joseph saw, distinguished, categorized, used; he had no problems with perceptual categorization or generalization, but he could not, it seemed, go much beyond this, hold abstract ideas in mind, reflect, play, plan... he seemed, like an animal or an infant, to be stuck in the present, to be confined to literal and immediate perception".

So while it's often said that language is one of the things that has allowed humans to set themselves apart from the rest of the animal world, we can speculate that the reason this is so is because it functions (among other things) as a repository of tokens that allow us to build ever more abstract cognitive scaffoldings which allows us to tackle harder and harder problems.

Clark even details the way in which math is structured in this way, allowing for the rudiments of a materialist/naturalist approach to math: " In an elegant series of investigations Stanislas Dehaene and colleagues have provided compelling evidence that precise numerical reasoning, involving numbers greater than three depends upon language-specific representations of numbers. There is, to be sure, a kind of low grade, approximate numerical sensibility that is probably innate and that we share with infants and other animals. Such a capacity allows us to judge that there are one, two, three, or many items present, and to judge that one array is greater than another. But the capacity to know that 25 + 376 is precisely 401 depends, Dehaene et al. argue, upon the operation of distinct, culturally inculcated, and language-specific abilities." (Clark, Natural Born Cyborgs).