Solipsism in this empirical form (as opposed to the Ayer/Wittgenstein transcendental form), if you like, just the admission that not all things are amenable to or discoverable by oneself: to complain that the gaps then can't be closed once you understand this is only to complain that there are other people. Nothing guarantees that everything is on level ground, and everything is discoverable to everything else on a single immanent playing field. The materialist might want to believe this, but their want is just that.

The appeal to magical souls and zero-dimensional beings is of course just rhetorical bluster. I think the real underlying impetus is the refusal to accept any idea of permanent closure or mystery, which must be equivalent to some deity or dualism so long as you're a materialist. But if you're not, this need not bother you, and you can indeed see the world as more complex than the materialist can ever allow, by recognizing that not even its notion as a common 'world' holds together in the first place. The insistence that we must know others in the same way as we know ourselves then just amounts to an insistence that there are not more things than are contained in our philosophy. — The Great Whatever

An apologia for woo if there ever was one.

As for the question of why it should be that experiences amount to self-consciousness: again all feeling is a feeling of oneself. — The Great Whatever

Dancing-on-a-rooftop-with-bells-on...

Not a great deal. At least, Derrida is quite clear in his exposition.

If you want to have the best of both words, do Austin's How To Do Things With Words, then Derrida's essay "Signature, Event, Context", which is a reading of that essay.

Only, the opposite of that. Lingis's phrase remains the best: we are an involution of the sensuous.

I don't think this can be right. The proprioceptive sense of the body comes on account of the actual sensations which belong to it, and are felt prior to any "if/then" kinds of inference. Proprioceptive and other 'inner sense": feelings as well as skin sensations would be immediately known not to belong to "shapes over there", I would say.

Short of subscribing to some myth of free-floating qualia, I simply don't see how this could be true. Proprioceptive sensing has precisely to do with our bodily asymmteries; we are weighty, fleshy bodies who have a centre of gravity which shift with our mass; moreover, in Lingis's terms, we are "polarized by vectors of forces, axes of stance and motility." We are postural beings, sensitive beings whose touch and movement is characterized by pressure, intensity, sharpness and texture, pleasure and heat: this is what it means to experience 'qualities'. This is how Stern puts it with respect to the child sucking her thumb (via Manning):

"When you suck your finger," Stern observes, "your finger gets sucked and not just generally sucked" There is no "the" finger-sucking that isn't inflected by the "how" of "a" sucking. "Which"? "This" one or "that. ... Depending on exactly how each event transpires and what else is present that may inflect it (a glance at a care­giver's face, the soft brush of a blanket on the cheek), each sucking in the series will take on its own unique vitality affect." In other words, the developmental trajectory of the infant individualizes it as 'an' infant, one who feels herself as such, a uniqueness that isn't simply brute and bound in some magical soul.

We are fleshly, weighty, differentially orientated, sensitive bodies of space and time, not free-floating, 0-dimentional 'feeling beings'.

--

Aghh, I think I accidentally hit 'edit' on your original post rather than reply and might have accidentally deleted some bits of it. I'm not sure :/

his cannot make sense unless you assume the self is a social construction and that having a self = coming to the realization of the self-other distinction as the result of being socialized. But this is exactly what is at issue. — The Great Whatever

But I'm not saying that the self is a 'social' construction (any more than I'm saying the self is a 'biological' construction); I'd rather say that it is something like a 'substrate-neutral' production. It would undermine the entire point - to give a differential account of the self - if I were to simply shift the grounds from a primordial 'self-other' distinction to an equally duplicitous 'social-biological' distinction (so much for Apo's diarrhetic blather about reductionism). So I absolutely do not 'assume' that the self is a 'social-construction' - the only assumption I make is that it is absurd to make assumptions about the brute reality of a primordial self as though it were written in the stars.

As for the distinction between 'realization' and 'sentience', of course it's the issue. We're literally talking about self-awareness: the word isn't hyphenated for fun, it is literally awareness of self that we're talking about. How is it not a dancing-on-a-rooftop-with-bells-on petitio principii to say "young children have experiences of themselves, therefore, they experience themselves first"? I mean honestly, really?

So of course young children have experiences, but that those experiences are 'of themselves' is precisely what's in question: It is precisely the self 'in' those experiences which are differentially engendered though development. Moreover, your phenomenology is inside-out: children aren't 'solipsists' because "their own experience encompasses everything for them"; they don't yet know what counts as their 'own' experience: if they've no notion that anything could be 'outside' of them it's because the very limits of what counts as 'inside' have not sedimented in any strict way.

Moreover, one you 'start' with solipsism, there's no getting 'out': you can't work from the 'inside-out' in the outside's already 'in'.

Interestingly, we can actually scientifically test the above. The rubber hand illusion is famous and should be self-explanatory in the above regard, and there are other tests as well, as when Thomas Metzinger managed to make test subjects 'feel' that they were the 'fake bodies' standing out a few feet in front of them by coordinating their movement together with sensory cues.

As usual, part of the problem here is in conceiving 'inside' and 'outside' as absolutes, rather than differentially produced boundaries. The OP is admittedly ambiguous because it conflates - or rather doesn't properly differentiate between - phylogenesis (evolution of the human being) with development (the growth of a single organism), and I think some of the flak here comes out of that confusion. So to be clear, I don't think that developmentally we are 'other-conscious before we are self-conscious'; as far as phylogenesis goes however, I find the thesis quite convincing.

On the other hand, this doesn't mean that I hold the opposite thesis at the level of development either - rejecting the notion that we are 'other-conscious before we are self-conscious' doesn't entail that we are 'self-conscious before we are other conscious'. I'd rather say instead that both self and other are derivative notions which become (roughly) sedimented into place based on a variety of developmental factors, both biological and social.

For example, the child developmental psychologist Daniel Stern notes the basic 'awareness' in infants probably takes the form of what he refers to as 'vitality affects', which are kinds of 'life-feelings', or life-qualities': "These elusive qualities are better captured by dynamic, kinetic terms, such as ‘surging’, ‘fading away’, ‘fleeting’, ‘explosive’, crescendo’, ‘decrescendo’, ‘bursting’, ‘drawn out’, and so on. These qualities of experience are most certainly sensible to infants and of great daily, even momentary, importance."

Importantly, these vitality effects do not find their locus in a 'self' but are simply experienced 'as such': "infants experience these qualities both “from within” and “in the behavior of other persons” ... "In short, originary temporal structures of experience are cardinal in nature; vitality affects — surgings, fadings, and all such qualitative features of experience — are primary with respect to our experiences of ourselves and our experiences of others." In other words at this most basic level, there simply is no self-other distinction - there 'are' simply vitality affects. It's also important that these vitality affects are largely related to the infant's sense of proprioception and kinesthetic feeling, as per the OP.

That aside, the crucial thing is that vitality affects become differentiated into self and other by processes of symmetry breaking, as it were. The infant learns to be a 'self' - or rather learns to 'locate' these (trans-personal) affects within a self - by means of coming to grips with the regularities of bodily coordination which break the symmetry between self and other. These coordination processes are those of if/then relationships: if 'I' move this shape like so, then such and such follows. Nothing happens if I try and move the shape over there, however. Ipso: this shape is 'mine'.

Commenting on Stern's work, Erin Manning writes: "Stern's core sense of self is based on how these experiences veer the becoming-self toward new forms of relation. These new forms of relation in turn feed the process through which the infant becomes differentiated. Difference does not occur through the stratification of self and other or inside and outside. Difference emboldens processual shiftings between strata that foreground and background modes of experience, each of them affected by incipient reachings-toward, a reaching-toward not of the subject, but of experience itself. Senses of coherence emerge that unfold as feelings of warmth, intensity, texture, anguish."

Hope this clarifies things a little.

Oh fuck off Apo.

Oh look, I mentioned the words 'mirror neurons' so I'm an arch-reductionist who must disagree with everything you just said.

It's not 'subjectivity' that's the issue - it's the matter of it's being accounted for. And yeah, any philosophy that posits subjectivity as brute immediacy or whathaveyou is immediate grounds for its dismissal.

Well, all I can say is I feel the same way. There is absolutely nothing radical or new in what you are talking about. It is old hat in the oldest sense of hat. It was in Aristotle, it was in Ryle. Ask yourself this: if what you think is so radical, why does everyone agree with you? Why is everyone tripping over themselves to say things like the title of your OP, and why is any mention of Henry in a serious context made in order to dismiss him as vociferously as possible? — The Great Whatever

Hey, I'm not making any claim to 'radicality' here, but I don't think it's exactly a stretch to say that the idea that recognizing other-selves came 'first' phylogenetically is counter-intuitive. Perhaps it's even true that certain strands of philosophy and science have often questioned the self-evidence of self-consciousness of whathaveyou, but outside of a few small, academic circles, it's simply laughable to think that these ideas are as pedestrian as you'd think. The 'myth of the given', to use Sellars's term, still haunts all our discourse on consciousness.

And besides, not even 'advocates' can seem to discuss this properly; pretty much no one in this thread is actually discussing the OP, and as usual, things have taken a turn into qualia and other such mundane issues. No discussion of kinesthetics, of evolution, of mirror neurons, etc. Not complaining, as such (not that I've attempted to curate the thread in any particular direction either) - just saying, details are bothersome. As for Henry, I'm hardly someone to 'vociferously dismiss' him. I think he's a stunningly brilliant philosopher who took two steps forwards in his critique of phenomenology and then one step back in his positive conception of 'auto-affective Life'; a failed escape, but one no less impressive for the effort.

The idea that we are only now coming to think past it makes no sense to me: rather, what you're saying here, about the outside being prior to the inside, has always been the direction of Western philosophy, so I don't see in it anything new at all, only a culmination of previous, very old, prejudices. — The Great Whatever

I suppose we simply have different approaches to the history of philosophy then. The whole idea of self-affection is pretty much as old as God himself, who is the auto-affecting being par excellence. Is it any surprise that Henry is as much a theologian as he is a philosopher? Anyway, you find the same structure at work in conceptions of the soul, spirit, liberal individualism, DNA, computer code - any reductionist program where something is meant to be sovereign over itself without remainder. It's only recently that we're coming round to the understanding that such conceptions are entirely inadequate to the complexity of the world. And even then we have a long way to go. That such a prodigious philosopher as Henry could simply transpose such an ancient mythologeme into phenomenology and declare it 'radical' attests to that, I think.

Russell's A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz remains one of the great studies, imo.

Not much of a trick.

Not if I distinguish between cake and not-cake. This allows me to create a digital model of the cake which I can work on in all it's discrete glory.

No - we 'create' zero by digitizing the cake and the not-cake. And not-cake is - as the name implies - a reflexive operation: it is a meta-statement about cake.

I might put it to my fellow mods that all discussion take place in terms of cake now btw.

This is part of the legacy of Western philosophy known as ontological monism, which takes the transcendent and distance as fundamental, which Michel Henry criticizes. I think it's backwards: you can get to exteriority from auto-affection, but not vice-versa. If you begin with the outside, you only get a sad facsimile of the self, as 'another inside of me.' That is what is fashionable in philosophy now, but it'd be a nice to see a return to the other direction, which was championed by the Cyrenaics and Descartes. The picture we have of the competing view is a sort of 'mutual emptiness' that Schopenhauer criticizes when he asks: 'this is all very well and good, but what the devil has any of it got to do with me?' — The Great Whatever

Eh, I'm of course exactly of the opposite mind, both historically and philosophically: the notion of auto-affection has been the theological thread that philosophy has had to untangle for thousands of years, and it's only recently we've managed to really think past it in a way most welcome. I think you'd very much enjoy something like Voice and Phenomena, by the way (re: the reading group), if only because it makes this point exactly with respect to Husserl - even if you would perhaps vehemently disagree with it.

As for the thesis about consciousness of others here, it doesn't even do what it wants of course, because it also sees other people as things. And so just like we have a facsimile of the self, we have a facsimile of other people. Lingis' description, what we see of it here anyway, is bloodless and facile, and does not at all capture what experiencing another person is like. — The Great Whatever

To be fair to Lingis, although the quoted phrases don't indicate it, he has been one of the most persistent critics of intentionality in the phenomenological sphere. Indeed, he ends the chapter on 'The Perception of Others' with a series of what he calls the limitations of the views above, which have to do exactly with intentionality. A sample: "The type of account we have elaborated seems to us limited in two ways. First, it would seem that the mind in the sublime sense - the other's thought, judgements, decisions, evaluations, processes that have no kinesthetic manifestation - escapes any perceptual experience. ... But secondly, it seems to us that a whole class of perceivable behaviours escapes the kind of analysis we have offered in this chapter.. There are behaviours of the other which are of their nature not associated with mine, behaviours by which the other polarizes himself over me ... To call upon me, to address me, is not to associate with me, to elicit my sympathy; it is to invoke me, to judge me, command me, contest me ..."

He's basically alluding - without naming it - to the whole Levinasian account of the Other which is always impositional, etc. In any case, my interest was how the account offered nicely links up to a testable, scientific thesis.

--

A sample, from elsewhere, to indicate Lingis's awareness of the problems of intentionality: " The sensibility for the sensuous is not a synoptic receptivity for a multiplicity of sense data; instead light, darkness, chromatic density, sonority, warmth and cold are surfaceless depths in which the sensuous body is immersed. Sensibility is not intentional; it is an involution in depths. ... We breathe for the sake of breathing the good air, we eat in savouring the goodness of terrestrial nourishments, we drink in enjoying the tang and bouquet of the wine."

It appears that when you asked how many elements belong to the empty set and came up with one, you were already thinking in discrete terms. — Mongrel

Yes, and? A more fun way to understand the whole deal with the empty set is that it's like distinguishing the cake from the not-cake, which means that you take the continuum as such as a discrete element. But of course, there is no not-cake 'in' cake. And then you work your way from there.

Doesn't strike me as intuitional to say that Zero is a higher-order, reflexive rule about the continuum on the basis of which we can divide it. In fact it makes close to Zero sense to me. — Mongrel

Take it up with math, not with me.

Um... what's the basis for this rule, then? — Mongrel

The basis is always methodological. What are you trying to achieve with your rule?

I'm too tired to reply to your mammoth post properly tonight, but I wanted to quickly post that it seems to me our differences come down to whether or not one accepts or rejects pansemiosis. I reject it. Semiosis only makes sense at the level of life - so I have no problem with biosemiotics - but I think your attempt to extend those principles beyond that 'border' are illegitimate and not well-founded. In lieu of a proper reply, you might be familiar with the hyperlinked conversation between Salthe and others over exactly this question. Needless to say, I don't take Salthe's side here.

I think this passage is explaining what I was trying to say... that if you have a cake for which the law of excluded middle fails, you can't just slice the cake. — Mongrel

No, but you can make the law of the excluded middle apply by imposing a rule which would, on that basis, arbitrarily split said cake. That’s the whole point of digitisation: you take something that cannot be ‘naturally’ split, then you arbitrarily define a rule by which to impose a distinction on said continuum, then you use that rule to split the continuum from the ‘outside'. Of course, this rule will always leave a remainder, in the form of self-referential paradoxes. In math, this rule is the empty set, and it’s corollary, zero.

This is how you do it: Take a set, S. Then, you find the compliment of S, which just so happens to be the empty set, ∅ (S-S = ∅). Now that you’ve done this, you’re in a great position because the empty set plays a double role. Not only is it the compliment of S, it is also a subset of S, to the extent that every set contains the empty set. Note that the empty set is thus is both ‘inside’ and ‘outside of S, occupying exactly the paradoxical place which we said a rule for distinction would occupy.

Having done this, you can generate the entirety of the number line by asking how many elements belong to the empty set (=1), and then recursively asking how many elements belong to that set and so on ad infinitum. Ta da. You’ve now digitised the continuum.

The problem, of course, as with any digitisation, is whether or not 0 belongs to it. The answer is strictly undecidable. Wilden: "zero is not simply a number as such, but a rule for a relation between integers… zero is implicitly defined as a meta-integer, and indeed its definition is what provides the RULE for the series of integers which follow it.” Zero, like negation, is a higher-order, reflexive rule about the continuum on the basis of which we can divide it, provided we cannot situate either negation nor zero properly in that continuum itself.

Which is exactly the point.

I think that's the fundamental problem here, with Deleuze, and with the aesthetic approach to epistemology in general. Insofar as it purports to be a sub-representational account of thought, it cannot be represented - it literally cannot be thought or talked about. — Aaron R

The issue is more subtle than this, although I admit that in my haste to distinguish intensive (analog) differences from the Kantian 'thing-in-itself' I moved too quickly. First, sub-representational intensities are meant to account for extensional magnitudes: in Deleuze's words, they are the sufficient reason of all phenomena, "the condition of that which appears". Second - and here is where I moved too fast, we don't know intensity 'directly', but rather "we know intensity only as already developed within extensity, and as covered over by qualities."

As far as logical status of intensity goes, intensity thus occupies an undecidable place within any system of representation: it can only be known through representation, but is is nonetheless not of the representational register. It's status is strictly correlative to that of the digital cut itself, which neither belongs to the system of representation nor is merely external to it. Hence the paradoxical status of intensity with respect to the question of knowledge: "[Intensity] has the paradoxical character of the limit ... [It] is both the imperceptible and that which can only be sensed."

Here is where things get complicated, but I'll try and do my best to explicate the ideas. If you recall that what's at stake is a 'critique of pure logic', then the idea is to introduce 'extra-formal’/‘real' constraints on the the exercise of what might otherwise be purely syntactic logical manipulations which might simply follow transitively from an established set of axioms. For Deleuze, intensive differences are precisely what force 'real life' (extra-formal) constraints of 'existence' on logic, making logic no longer a formal and arbitrary play of symbolic manipulation, but beholden to a specific existential situation, as it were.

Thought - which just is representational - must be ‘forced' to think under the aegis of what Deleuze refers to as an ‘encounter’ with sub-representational intensities which impose 'real constraints' on thought. These constraints shift the modality of thought from the order of the arbitrary to the necessary: "if necessity is only ever the necessity of an encounter, and of a relation that this encounter gives rise to within us, a relation whose nature cannot be known prior to the forced movement it induces, then we must reconsider the meaning of the arbitrary. The concern of critical philosophy cannot be bound up with evaluating truth from a position of relative or extrinsic indifference … When truths are separated from the necessity of an encounter they become abstract, which is to say, they are reduced to being merely possible or hypothetical.” (Kieran Aarons, The Involuntarist Image of Thought).

There’s a lot more to say here. I’ve not really given a full blown account of intensive differences, nor the manner in which they force us to think, so much as focused on attempting to answering the charge that buying into the notion plunges us into the myth of the given. At most, I’ve focused on the status of intensive differences with respect to thought, but I’ve already gone on too long. By all means ask any follow up questions though, cause these are bloody good thought-encounters for me. But I don’t want to prattle on too long. In the meantime, I'd direct you to this paper by Peter Kugler which takes up exactly how to make sense of the above using Ryle's notion of categories. Will probably elaborate in a next post if you want.

I may or may not chime in with Word and Object, How to Do Things With Words, or Speech and Phenomena, if we end up doing one of those. Got alot on my plate but I'm at least familiar with those. Varieties of Reference might be a bit too big a book for an online reading group, I think.

Think about the notion that the digital is a subset of the analog.... as if the analog is made up of discrete points and the digital is just some of them. — Mongrel

The latter doesn't follow the former at all. If I cut a cake into two and say that the two pieces now belong to the set 'Cake', it doesn't mean the cake was made up of pieces to begin with. I cut it. except here, negation cuts the analog.

Ugh, you can't even get the terms right. I said nothing about binary logic. Seriously, you are really bad to have discussions with. And that we can process digitally structured information has zip all to do with whether or not 'we' are digital - again a meaningless phrase. Consider this my last reply to you until you can actually discuss things properly.

Ugh, that we work with digital systems has nothing to do with whether or not 'we are digital systems'. The latter phrase is literally meaningless, it is actual word salad.

I'm asking you to elaborate.

In that case, the thesis would be that nature is fundamentally digital. — Mongrel

Go on...

This has been pointed out to you before: if there's some base level of granularity in your analog, then you're dealing with something that's fundamentally atomic. Therefore, at that fundamental level, there is negation. That lack of negation that was spoken is only true of a continuum. — Mongrel

? This is what I've been saying from the beginning. Not sure what's being pointed out anywhere.

The same information can be transmitted either analog-wise or digitally... so I don't know what you're talking about there. — Mongrel

I'm referring to the distinction between information and data which is a basic one in computer science.

In this thread, the terms are being used metaphorically. It's not clear if everybody realizes that, although it's been pointed out several times in the this thread that the metaphor is being stretched pretty far... maybe too far.

It is interesting to ponder that metaphor. It obviously runs straight into philosophy of math because we're talking about continuity vs discontinuity. Looking at it that way, the notion that the digital is parasitic on the analog is just wrong. If we persist in maintaining that the digital is "loose" on the analog, we're stipulating some specialized meaning for the terms. It wouldn't be appropriate to complain that people don't understand the jargon. You're going to have to explain it since you've made up something unusual. — Mongrel

I've stipulated what I've meant by the terms multiple times, precisely defining them in terms of negation and reflexivity, meanings which are certainly not idiosyncratic to me, but freely employed in philosophical discourse. Moreover, defining the difference in this way is far more precise than the appeal to the discrete and the continuous, which are more like heuristics, to the extent that the one can simply scale into the other at a level of granularity fine enough. But this is exactly what I'm trying to avoid. In any case, the terms are certainly not meant as metaphors. Of course you if you think Terrapin's question makes any sense whatsoever even in the data sense, you're welcome to engage him (and even then, the original sense of the terms have less to do with data than they do information).

Honestly, I really don't want to play twenty questions. Thanks for engaging though.

I have no idea what you mean by 'we function digitally'. Sorry Terra, I don't think you have a grasp of the vocabulary here, which is why I'm being curt.

No.

Sure.

Logic is a symbolic representational system. I have no idea what it means to say that 'we' are a symbolic representation system.

Weird. The definition of vagueness is that it is the "not yet digitised". Vagueness is that state of affairs to which the principle of non-contradiction fails to apply. And thus it stands orthogonal to crispness, the state where A/not-A are busy doing their logically definite thing. — apokrisis

So which is it - do vague and crisp map on to analog and digital or do they not? If they do, in what sense can you claim that the analog/digital distinction is derivative from vagueness (circularity). If they don't, you're back to mythology.

Depends on how you mean. Your original question quoted a statement about symbolic representational systems then asked if 'we' are digital or analog. In that context your question makes no sense.

The question doesn't make sense. Analog and digital characterize systems or processes in nature, not things or entities.

It is important that the analog or iconic representation already exists on the other side of the epistemic cut - on the side of the symbolic or "rate independent information". It is a distinction made at the level of the mapping, even if it means to be talking about a distinction in the (computational!!) world. — apokrisis

Sure, every setting of a boundary is always (at least) double: the explicit one between the two (digitized) elements in question (A, not-A), and implicit one between the 'boundary-setter' and the very system under consideration, taken as a whole. But this is just the methodological constraint set on any attempt at analysis; Wilden himself is perfectly aware of this:

"Even if we think we have successfully divided the whole of reality and unreality into only two sets by drawing a line between A and non-A (and by including within non-A, non-B, etc.), the act of drawing that line defines at least one system or set as belonging to neither A nor non-A: the line itself. And since that line is the locus of our intervention into a universe, it necessarily defines the goalseeking system that drew the line as itself distinct from both A and non-A: it is their 'frame'".

The 'goalseeking system' in question being nothing other than living things, of course. But just as the 'location' of the first boundary setting operation is consecutively undecidable - it belongs neither to A nor not-A (W: "it corresponds to nothing in the real world whatsoever") so too is this second-order boundary setting: the line is methodological, and cannot be imputed to the 'world': doing so is nothing but metaphysical dogmatism, in the Kantian sense of the term.

In other words, you can't have your cake and eat it too: if you insist that the analog/digital distinction is made at the level of digital mapping to begin with, the projection of a more primordial ground of vagueness is simply that: a mythological projection that doesn't abide by the very epistemological constraints you ought to be beholden too. This is why rather than take the path you do, Wilden correctly recognizes that this higher order 'cut' is just that - a higher order cut:

"[The second-order distinction] is of a different logical type from the line between A and B. The metalinguistic function of 'not' is in fact what generates the higher-order paradox, for 'not' is the boundary of the empty set, which like 'the class of classes not members of themselves' is both a member of itself and not a member of itself. And [second-order distinction] turns out to be another, higher order, substitute for 'not' : it defines an Imaginary line which belongs to the process of making distinctions, rather than to the distinctions themselves."

"A nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past, a hatred of their present neighbors, and dangerous illusions about their future."

-Slavoj Zizek

Thank you for your series of assertions.