Comments

  • Work should be based on quantity of boredom involved
    In fact, the whole economy should be based on quantity of boredom involved. — schopenhauer1

    An interesting way to arrive at the same conclusion as empathy.

    Never going to happen. Silly. Not even really necessary. What is needed is a way for every able-bodied person to have a job which is safe and which pays them enough for them, and their families, to live a decent life with decent housing in a reasonably safe neighborhood, good healthy food, health care, good education for their children, etc. etc. Let's do that. Then we can worry about boredom. — T Clark

    :up: At least, that's how I feel about it.
  • Is Revenge Hopeless?
    Revenge is usually a fantasy. A war with yourself in your own head. A invitation to re-civilise yourself.
  • The emotional meaning of ritual and icon
    None of us mortals are in a position to piss on grand immortal symbols. We're dust to them. — frank

    Which is a shame, as they're all made of piss.
  • The emotional meaning of ritual and icon
    Flags are made of flux? — frank

    Well yes, in one respect they are. They're a stable object of an alliance of atoms that blows in the wind from atop buildings as a signal. Then they're a stable coagulation of cultural norms and social history with expressive power. A flag is a drawing with the right history.
  • Language is not moving information from one head to another.
    In the relevant sense, the world is our games. — Banno

    As I've said to @Wayfarer and @Joshs in other contexts, the dinosaurs called, they want their world back. The world back then is not a nothing, nor something about which nothing can be said, it does not fit the schema of a limit on language; demonstrably, we can understand it fine. More to the point, its structure still influences us in intelligible (and unintelligible) ways; oil!
  • The emotional meaning of ritual and icon
    The symbol is in stasis like an eternal shore that ever-changing, mortal experience breaks onto over and over. — frank

    I like the metaphor, but the flag isn't a given either. The flux has a habit of making islands to flow around - which push back upon it and give it shape.
  • The emotional meaning of ritual and icon
    Hume is the man. But left and right are distinct enough, but not independent. Does one say that the architect is the slave of the builder? It is the other way round according to our social conventions - the builder does what the architect says - yet the architect without builders is a mere fantasist the master is dependent on his slaves for everything, but especially for his mastery. — unenlightened

    The Essence lights up in itself or is mere reflection: and therefore is only self-relation, not as immediate but as reflected. And that reflex relation is self-identity. — Hegel, The Doctrine of Essence

    The hierarchical asymmetry of power there only makes sense upon a reciprocal inter-dependence; you can't need to give an order without needing their actions. System internal feed forwards between two components always require (or really just are) their supporting feed backs . Even though the presence of both is an exploitable resource for another causal pattern, like a hierarchy, to emerge or be imposed.

    I think Master-Slave in Hegel follows that reflex logic I quoted above, but my Hegel foo is not particularly good. One becomes definable only in opposition to another, like left and right.

    But we have more freedom to intervene here, one can choose to cultivate integration or to cultivate detachment from oneself. One can cultivate a reciprocal interdependence between the two, perhaps so one can feel their thoughts and think their feelings (but this is an exaggeration).

    Just like an asymmetry may emerge from a reciprocal interdependence; parts and wholes dynamically reciprocate rather than passively abide. So the form content schema I used was clumsy, but I think it suggested the right thing.

    Maybe like left and right if we could choose the orientation of the cardinal directions.

    Edit: I don't really know what this does to ritual and icon. I suppose my perspective on it is similar, you can't really 'reason' your way from the wine to the blood of Christ without partaking in the tradition of interpretation that provides the links, or the road to follow. I would however defend that noble ritual of ritual choice, reason, and the feelings which inspire the choice.
  • Philosophers are humourless gits
    ↪Amity


    Beer is please in the language of beer.
  • Philosophers are humourless gits
    ↪Amity


    I was reacting to your claim that philosophers are humourless gits, by providing an example of a pretty good extended joke in a philosophy paper. While it isn't about the philosophy of humour, it's definitely humorous philosophy.

    And no, I won't write the post as a joke. :razz:
  • Philosophers are humourless gits
    In Steven Soderbergh’s science fiction film Solaris the replicant Snow, a replacement of one of the original surviving crew members of the space station orbiting the planet Sola-ris, has a rather interesting philosophical in-sight regarding the nature of women:

    «Cos I’m thinking … women, right? Right now we got woman and woman, right? If we get
    women, you know, together on the same team and all that shit, what happens? You know what happens. All kinds of shit you can’t explain happens. Like the … But good shit, you know? Mysterious, but good. Usu-ally very good. Things get solved, you know?»

    I do not know whether or not Lieu-tenant Snow obtained the idea from C. D.Broad’s seminal
    Mind and Its Place in Nature, but the basic idea seems to be about the same:

    <<Put in abstract terms the emergent theory asserts that there are certain wholes, com-posed (say) of constituents A, B and C in re-lation R to each other; that all wholes com-posed of constituents of the same kind as A,B and C in relations of the same kind as R have certain characteristic properties; that A, B and C are capable of occurring in other kinds of complex where the relation is not of the same kind as R; and that the characteristic properties of the whole R(A, B, C) cannot even in theory, be deduced from the most complete knowledge of the properties of A, B and C in isolation or in other wholes which are not of the form R(A, B, C).>>

    It may perhaps be wrong to believe that Broad thought that the ‘mysterious powers’of women are in fact emergent properties, but Lieutenant Snow nicely expresses the guiding intuition behind emergentism – in some contexts, the structural relationships between parts in a whole in conjunction with the properties of the parts give rise to novel, perhaps surprising or even mysterious, features of wholes.     — Ronny Selbæk Myhre, Naturalism and the Metaphysics of Emergence
  • Language is not moving information from one head to another.
    ↪Harry Hindu


    What it was meant to highlight was that "I do" there is not just communicative, it registers consent. Functionally, it marries rather than transmits. Of course, it also communicates, but it does more.

    Edit: unless you have a much more general account of information transfer, typically it's a rather passive process of transcriptive encoding and decoding.
  • The emotional meaning of ritual and icon
    But I'm pointing towards a loss of meaning that results from the philosophical project of rationality. The objectivity addict produces a world of meaningless facts - because facts are only meaningful if someone gives a damn; that's what it means to be meaningful. — unenlightened

    Something I've been entertaining recently is the integration of reason with passions. Hume was right that reason serves the passions, but to believe it wholly distinct might be an error. I believe it's possible to superimpose reason with other states, so that the two blend into a unified product. Something like what Phil Ochs portrays in "I Ain't Marching Any More":

    Now the labor leader's screamin'
    When they close the missile plants
    United Fruit screams at the Cuban shore
    Call it, Peace, or call it, Treason
    Call it, Love, or call it, Reason
    But I ain't marching anymore
    No, I ain't marching anymore     — Phil Ochs

    or Brecht portrays in "The Critical Attitude":

    Canalising a river
    Grafting a fruit tree
    Educating a person
    Transforming a state
    These are instances of fruitful criticism
    And at the same time instances of art.

    It is tempting to portray reason as an inertia of the subject that calls or returns us to our essence, as in Spinoza or Epictetus, or as the central mediator of virtue as in Aristotle. What I wonder is if reason already does supply the form of expression the passions provide the content for, neither isolable from the other, and whether one can develop skill in this regard. Like relearning how to see.

    Inference, or patterned structural linkage of interpretation and sensation seems rooted in our perception/sensation as much as in our deliberation; when one reasons about what play to make, they find they already understand how the pieces may move. Such heuristics are inescapable, but perhaps they can be trained to become better at exercising the passions; perhaps giving them a robust or more relatable structure. In that way, perhaps developing this integration is a key source of expanding one's autonomy, through reciprocity, in the fleeting moments of our life; in further cultivating ourselves.
  • Language is not moving information from one head to another.
    ↪Harry Hindu


    Priest: Alice, do you take Bob to be your lawful wedded husband?
    Alice: I do.
    The priest nods: Bob, do you take Alice to be your lawful wedded wife?
    Bob: I do.
    Priest: Let's table that discussion for later, I will take your input into consideration.
  • Language is not moving information from one head to another.
    So we've already been through that language isn't just information transfer, we can stipulate that that is one of its many uses; one thing we can do with words is communicate facts to each other.

    Let's take the bit of language that we might be tempted to characterise as information transfer. Specifically:

    (A) "Can you tell me the capital of Mongolia?" asked Bob sincerely. "Ulaan Baator", answered Sally.

    Imagine describing (A) as a channel between Bob and Sally. Along this channel, Bob submitted a question, Sally submitted "Ulaan Baator" in answer. This seems to be the kind of imaginative exercise required in classifying the speech act this way. Then let's imagine that we have to explain (A) to someone; how would you do it? What presumptions do you have to put in place for your explanation?

    I think if you wanted to form an account there, you'd need to know about questions and answers, what it means to ask a question, how that connects to the desire for an answer, what it means for those speech acts to be sincere...

    So I think to characterise any instance of language as "information transfer", this is a higher-order characterisation based off of agglomerating different speech acts together that involve "information transfer". I imagine the converse would be like trying to teach a student what it means to transmit information along a channel, what bits mean and so on, without having any analogies in place for framing.

    Whether you lose anything from the agglomeration probably depends upon the analytic context. Someone interested in modelling the semantics of questions based upon the semantics of propositions probably will not give too much of a crap, a student of pragmatics might give all the crap in the world.

    Edit: though, it might be interesting to consider textual speech acts here. You literally transmit encoded information on sites like this, and it's decoded. I'm still 'explaining' and 'providing an exegesis' and 'giving examples', which are the kinds of thing one might do when making a post on a philosophy forum.

    For added complication, writing does not share all relevant features with speech. Writing might piggyback its elements on some in speech ects, but share some essential characteristics differ from conversation. Text is asynchronous, gestural elements are encoded differently: emoji are a thing, emotes are gestural - rhythmic elements are gestural in some way in text; salient units for interpretation have different demarcation strategies available for them - purely visual ones are most common @StreetlightX.
  • A Proof for the Existence of God
    I tend to follow David Hilbert's view on (real-world) constructivism, for similar reasons, and I am therefore also very negative about it. I think that the constructivist mentality is unproductive. Therefore, I consider it to be a heresy. — alcontali

    Not being able to establish an existence claim through a proof by contradiction really sucks.
  • Betsy Ross: Racist swine
    Does it really take that much effort not to pick a symbol like that? One imagines the use of the symbol by political groups shows up in basic research. I mean it's a bad idea to use it because of backlash.

    Even though, y'know, drawing a line between this and a swastika is hard based on principles. It's a difference of degree really. The most sensible option is not to use any symbol which is affiliated with any scandalous groups unless it is an intentional show of support. Why?

    As much as I dislike Rawls, he provides a good rule of thumb here. If you want to minimise the maximum harm done by your branding, you don't use the dodgy symbol.

    But using it for free grassroots marketing is a smart play.
  • Understanding suicide.
    What's the whole deal with suicidal idealization? I mean, psychologically what is driving the mind to generate these thoughts? Does this happen on a subconscious level? Freud called it the death desire or instinct; but, is that view held to this day? — Wallows

    Doubt there's one cause. You can probably group the causes into environmental factors like workplace or relationship stress, mental health issues with limited physiological or neural aetiology, mental health issues which have pronounced physiological or neural aetiology, and as a symptom of comorbidities of other disorders like chronic pain or (persistent) psychosis.

    Or you might just be a gloomy sod with nothing wrong with you otherwise.

    Edit: though I want to highlight that everyone can wanna die from time to time, even when there's no medical issue. Sometimes life inescapably fucking sucks.
  • Understanding suicide.
    In terms of mental health suicide risk factors, suicidal ideation is pretty key. But suicidal ideation alone doesn't let you distinguish between people who have it that are likely to kill themselves, and people who have it that are unlikely to kill themselves.

    These conditional risk factors for people with suicidal ideation are real instances of self harm, emotional volatility and impulsive action. Impulsive self harm rather than ritualised self harm is a big thing for it. So is lack of insight into its social effects; if someone is really convinced the world will be a better place without them, and doesn't feel 'weighed down' by the love of their family and friends, they're more likely to do it.

    Substance abusers for drugs that have a fine boundary between OD levels and not-OD levels also fit here.

    Edit: the story this tells for suicide attempts is that they're usually done in a fit of despairing passion, which makes use of previous plans (say, buying a gun).
  • Claim: There is valid information supplied by the images in the cave wall in the Republic
    ↪Joshs


    Why do I have to explain myself in terms of Kuhn and Feyerabend and Rouse and Foucault and Rorty and Latour and Heidegger?

    I get the sense its more that Heiddger's Dasein you're objecting to here. It seems to me you are opposing your realist stance to a large community of anti-realist philosophies of science( who apparently are not grasping what is 'utterly banal' to you). Would I be correct in surmising that? — Joshs

    Look, Heidegger made a big deal about distinguishing his project from merely anthropological reasoning. Still, you're claiming that there's never been an uninterpreted world, maybe that such an idea is senseless, and when I have the temerity to say "Dinosaurs existed before us", and that we can understand that, you with-hold understanding of the issue artificially as if I'm making something other than a completely boring observation. One that primary school kids are fine with, but apparently philosophy graduates are not! This is anthropologism of the highest order, centring our accounts on the human beings which make them. AFAIK this is something @Wayfarer acknowledges explicitly (even though I don't have much interest going through the 'observer effect' conversation with Wayfarer again).

    The significance of the boring observation is that it reveals not only can we establish stuff about a nature indifferent to us, we have to be able to do ontology in a way which allows us to make sense of this fact. The a-priori structure of experience passes from non-being into being, and this is an observation which can be understood within the a-priori structure of experience, rather than some grand violence against experiential temporality, we already know this shit. We understand it, it has been demonstrated already. It is not a conceptual issue, it's a fact. Take off the Heidigoggles and go visit Jurassic Park.
  • Law Of Identity And Mathematics Of Change
    What does a clock show? What does it mean to say that this iteration is prior to that? If we reject mathematical models as inadequate for exhaustively answering empirical questions, I am afraid that an answer can only be provided by gesturing, tautologically, towards some sort of unfolding. Tautologically because, of course, our notion of unfolding is already informed by the notion of periodic processes. — SophistiCat

    I don't want to reject mathematical models, far from being a mere philosophical point; if I thought that I would have to change job! Specifically, I think mathematical models really do allow us to find things out about nature. What I was trying to highlight was that the use of time in mathematical models doesn't really tell us much about it, as any smooth bijective function of time could be used to parametrise them.

    All that really says is that the time parameter in mathematical models is often rather arbitrary, and when thinking about what ontological commitments to form based on mathematical models, we should be very careful with attributing existence to something which may be chosen so freely.

    In terms of the Lotka Volterra example earlier, the relevant dynamic the equations seek is the reciprocal dependence of predator numbers on prey numbers. Predator numbers and prey numbers are something it makes sense to have a commitment about, and the rate of change of one with respect to the other is the target of the model. It's what the equations try to capture.

    Time in the model, in that regard, is a useful independent parameter that you can evaluate both populations at. I'm not saying we should do away with it.

    So when you ask yourself, "What is time?" you can point to periodic processes or to theoretical models, but then if you ask, "What validates those explanations?" you still have to go back to the phenomenology (including, of course, the phenomenology of clocks), because what else would we go back to? That doesn't mean, of course, that we have to hang on to every prejudice and intuition, but our explanations have to be true to something, or else they just hang free, like abstract mathematical entities. — SophistiCat

    What I have in mind is a few procedures for giving an account of the unified concept of time.

    (A) One takes the plurality of rates, synthesises that through some phenomenological considerations, and outputs a concept of time which is necessary in our understanding.
    (B) One takes the time variable, synthesises that through some phenomenological considerations, and outputs a concept of time which is necessary in our understanding.

    (C) One takes the plurality of rates, synthesises that through our capacities of understanding more generally, and outputs a time concept which is tied speculatively to time in nature.
    (D) One takes a time variable, synthesises that through our capacities of understanding more generally, and outputs a concept of time which is tied speculatively to time in nature.

    You can see that (A,B) and (C,D) are grouped structurally, I don't really care which approach is taken within (A,B) or (C,D), they denote the development of a phenomenological understanding of time indexed to humans and a use of whatever that time concept is to understand time in nature.

    What I'm trying to point out here is that we should not take answers from the (A,B) group of questions as answers to the (C,D) group of questions. Even if one has, like in Kant, linked the unity of the time concept to the sensory manifold and the transcendental unity of apperception, one still has the independent branch of questions about time in nature; like what Riemann and Einstein and even Bergson aimed at; that cannot be given answers in this way. (C,D) questions are possible to address, and are of philosophical merit. They just require a different workflow to address than the 'link to a priori structure of experience' machine, as there is time in nature irrelevant of experiential temporality.

    The problems posed by (C,D) do influence how we should think of experiential temporality - perhaps it is not 'primary' in all senses, humans evolved in the presence of a time which is not our own, and in that regard the 'merely ontic' notion of time targeted in (C,D) is primary. But here what really matters is that they're different question groups with different methodologies to attack. (C,D) weaponise experiential temporality to 'carve nature at its joints'.

    My love of the chain rule example is that it suggests one way to exploit the arbitrarity of the time variable to 'internalise' it to other concepts; of differentials of unfolding. While time and unfolding are probably interdependent, time is often seen as unitary whereas unfolding is a plurality of links which we know have affective power in nature. It invites an immanent thought of time, whereas the times thought in (A,B) and the hypostatised 'indifferent substrate' of time are both marred by their transcendental character.

    Edit-imprecise summary: time is something empirically real, not just something transcendentally ideal. The empirically real component requires different methodology to attack than the usual Kantian/phenomenological interpretive machines, and is still of philosophical interest.
  • Claim: There is valid information supplied by the images in the cave wall in the Republic
    These are not structures that require human psyches or souls, rather they precede all thinking of humans as subjects or biological objects even as they make possible such conceptions. They are a starting point for the positing of any kind of existing entity. Their a priori status with respect to humans and all other objects and subjects might tempt one to think of them in terms of a pan-pychism, but this would confuse more that it clarifies, given the link between pan-pychism and subjectivism. — Joshs

    You make it sound like if there were no humans there still would be Dasein in the human sense. This is terribly wrong. Nature existed without humans. We know this. Furthermore, far from being senseless, the indifference of nature to our concerns which it reveals is something utterly banal. Update your ontology with its effects.
  • Claim: There is valid information supplied by the images in the cave wall in the Republic
    We dont want to and don't need to know how things 'really were' before we existed. That is a nonsensical notion. When we theorize about the past, whether cosmological, biological or cultural, what we want to know is what we can do with this understanding right now in relation to our current goals. — Joshs

    How empirically realist, it isn't how the universe existed before humans which poses a problem here, it's that it existed at all. It existed non-relationally to humans for longer than there are humans, and it still exists non-relationally to humans. We might not be indifferent to nature, our understandings have a-prior structures, but those a-priori structures are still events in a timeline. We know they are not always operative, we know they are not always relevant.

    Nature doesn't turn on human understanding, surely you can understand that. This fact alone, and our capacity to understand it, should perturb us away from any attempt to derive the ontology of this indifferent, inhuman nature, from the a prior structures of our experiences.
  • Spring Semester Seminar Style Reading Group
    So this died, mostly my fault for leading badly. Would anyone be interested in starting this up again?
  • Law Of Identity And Mathematics Of Change
    And yet... how can there be processes, what could unfolding possibly mean, what are we to make of rates - without referring to the concept of time? I still insist that, although all these physical concepts in the first part of the sentence - let's refer to them as clocks for brevity - serve to operationalize time, they do not define time away; they are not more primary in our understanding than time itself is. And while we cannot understand time without referring to clocks, neither can we understand clocks without referring to time. — SophistiCat

    There's a lot going on in the question.

    (1) There's an epistemological issue - which Kantian/phenomenological considerations fit into - how are clocks (operationalisations of time) interpretively pre-structured by the categories of the understanding or by experiential temporality.

    (2) There's a cultural issue - what are the origins of the unified concept of time, what kind of understandings do people have to learn to grok time?

    (3) Then there's an ontological (well, also ontic) issue about unfolding/becoming being dependent upon time for it to unfold.

    The interesting issue here is (3), but we need to talk about what not to do given (1) and (2).

    I would like to posit that insofar as (1) experiential temporality, or the transcendental structure of time are related to the issue, we shouldn't index ontical unfolding - natural time/temporality - as a development of experiential temporality. Only our understanding of ontic time is facilitated by experiential temporality. Experiential temporality allows the issue to be raised in the first place, but is otherwise irrelevant to providing a good exegesis of the interdependence of time and unfolding. The first eye opening was one event in the natural flows that subtend our existence.

    In regards to (2), just like we can't say that a mathematical entity must have a corresponding entity in a nature for a theory of nature which has that mathematical entity in it for that theory to be correct (example: infinite plane waves, sum over 'all histories' approach in quantum mechanics), we should not be so sure that cultural artefacts and norms of interpretation vouchsafe the necessary existence of a referent of words. Nature informs our vocabulary through our understanding, but light's frequencies are nevertheless not arranged in a colour wheel.

    I'm quite suspicious, therefore, that something like time would have a unique ontic correlate - for there to be a pattern of nature which is time - just because the unfolding of processes requires a time concept to think. To me, it appears that something like the type-token distinction is at work here; the word time is a sortal we learn that synthesises the operationalisations that we are first exposed to, the mathematical abstractions of periodic processes, numbers inscribed on clockfaces, the rhythm of our hearts and so on. Our understanding is densely populated with things and strategies of thought that are not in concordance with the unfolding of nature, and do not help us to reveal its structure.

    From this I think we should resist saying that the progression of the physical entity of a clock depends upon a concept we have derived from the clock; as if the clock would not tick without the operationalisation of time that it embodies in our understanding. Or if it would not tick without experiential temporality stretching along with it.

    This speaks to learning what time is by learning the role it plays in (our interpretations of) life, rather than the role it plays in nature itself. I think it suggests we should reject the ontic relevance of time as a unified concept, just like we can reject the idea of mathematical entities necessarily having an existence in nature (if someone kicks over a rock and discovers I would be incredibly surprised). As the chain rule thing shows, it doesn't matter whether we have or (smooth, bijective) in our physical theories, as it just requires scaling the laws (imagine if seconds were instead 2 seconds, divide the time term in a law by a half or multiply by 2 depending on the context, sorted).

    I think it's important to think ontic time immanently, and processes being 'clocks' for each other might provide a vantage point from which to do this.
  • On Intelligence and Philosophy
    Legendary violinist Isaac Stern was once confronted by a middle-aged woman after a concert. She gushed, “Oh, I'd’ give my life to play like you!” “Lady,” Stern said acidly, “that I did!”
  • Internet: a hindrance to one's identity?
    Is this forum included as social media? I find this a very social place. I've made friends. I share personal information. We are a community. The opportunity for this type of interaction with people doesn't replace my relationships with my face to face friends and family, but it's a nice addition. — T Clark

    I think it's a special interest social space. It's definitely social, and definitely media, but it doesn't behave in the aggregate like Twitter and the likes do. Especially since we value long form responses, and our associations are based more on being interested in each others' ideas, research and other products than our larger lives.

    Of course, it's difficult not to feel fond of those you want to read. :)
  • Law Of Identity And Mathematics Of Change
    I think you have it a little backwards. We should think of time in relation to physical "clocks," such as heartbeats, diurnal cycles, pendulums or electromagnetic oscillations - because how else can we think of it? That this can be expressed in the form of the chain rule when modeling processes using differentiable functions is just a consequence. The backwards reasoning from a mathematical model to reality is inherently perilous, because mathematics can model all sorts of unphysical and counterfactual things. — SophistiCat

    You know, the bolded bit amused me, because avoiding the reification of a time beyond or above the unfolding of processes was precisely what I wanted to do. The idea that a clock is simultaneously a measurement of and a definer of time is a bit weird (@Banno @Luke @Fooloso4 @StreetlightX for Wittgenstein thread stuff :) ). I think it's better to think of periodic phenomena as operationalisations of a time concept which is larger than them; ways to index events to regularly repeating patterns.

    Another thing the chain rule there reveals, though obviously in some poetic sense, is that there are multiple 'times' and their rates of unfolding differ. Everest slowly increasing in height is effectively a zero rate from the buzz of city life, but from the perspective of stellar accretion Everest's process of increasing height is like driving past the speed limit.

    Yes, except that when you ask what "rate" is, time creeps back in. I don't think you can completely eliminate time from consideration, reduce it to something else. You can put it in relation to something else, such as a clock (heartbeats, etc.), but that relationship is not reductive: it goes both ways. Clocks are just as dependent on time as time is on clocks. — SophistiCat

    Thought experiment here - suppose that the universe is a process of unfolding itself, how can there be a time separate from the rates of its constitutive processes? What I'm trying to get at is that we should think of time as internal to the unfolding of related processes, rather than as an indifferent substrate unfolding occurs over. Think of time as equivalent to the plurality of linked rates, rather than a physical process operative over all of them. Just like 'the kidney' is not an organ of the body, but kidneys are.
  • Claim: There is valid information supplied by the images in the cave wall in the Republic
    ↪Joshs


    And the idea that the thingliness of things can only be given an adequate account in terms of the existential hermeneutics of a late arriving structure in the universe doesn't make you want to throw up from nauseating reductionism?
  • Language is not moving information from one head to another.
    'Information transfer' is one way we do things with words — StreetlightX

    Think there's information transfer without words though, smoke indicates fire. A spider detects flies in webs through vibrations. Indicators are older than language.

    There's probably a useful paradigm of thought somewhere that treats human language as a capacity which has evolved to symbolically attend or affect differences; transmission of information requires information to encode. Whether this is a continuous refinement of language abilities of human 'precursors' or whether human language is a discrete break from the tradition of language through the development of recursive grammars (or some other on-off property) matters less than the rootedness of 'information transfer' language capacities in the presence of information rich patterns in the world.

    There is probably also a recursive component to the evolution of information transfer here, the current linguistic community's expressive capacity (what they can do with language) is likely to be something that is adaptive (or a favourable trait) for an ecological constraint.
  • Law Of Identity And Mathematics Of Change
    ↪fishfry


    Since we've both referenced Lotka-Volterra in previous posts, I'm thinking of the following procedure:



    implies



    time cancels out without a loss of information.
  • Law Of Identity And Mathematics Of Change
    Ah but no. The continuity of the real numbers are the mathematical model of time. But we don't know for sure if time itself is continuous. That was my point. I don't necessarily take differential equations for reality. It's the map/territory thing. — fishfry

    Eh that's fair. The point I was trying to make was that calculus has the tools to 'internalise' indexical time to any process which (sufficiently smoothly and bijectively) scales with it. In that regard, the evolution of one system with respect to another always gives a derived sense of time.

    So, since it's arbitrary for the math, you can think of time relationally; as the pairing of systems creating an index; rather than as the index by which systems evolve.

    Edit: or if you want it put (overstated) metaphysically, instead of conceiving as becoming as being changing over time, you can consider time as being's rates of becoming.

    Edit2: in a broader mathematical context, time as an (ultimately redundant) output from the coupling of differential operators rather than the medium in which their coupling is expressed.
  • Arguments from Analogy
    Arguments from analogy never formally establish what they seek to, their purpose is to exploit a posited structural symmetry between the argument topic and the analogy content which is easier to discus in terms of the analogy content. They're a type of 'intuition pump' as Dennet calls them.

    If you actually want to use an argument from analogy to establish a claim, you need to give a sub argument that the moving parts of the analogy represent the issue you are discussing without over simplification or irrelevance. This usually is not done.

    Being able to think analogically about an idea is an excellent way of forming and experimenting with your understanding of it. So long as you can translate your ideas into a more rigorous presentation if required anyway - analogical thinking is fast, intuitive but prone to over simplification and irrelevance, rigorous exegesis is slow and dense but a better guarantor of correctness.
  • Forms-of-Life
    ↪thewonder


    There's lots of discussion of it from various posters in the Philosophical Investigations: Reading It Together recent thread. Though it is very long.
  • Do we need objective truth?
    There is no such thing as "objective truth". — thewonder

    And I take it you inferred this universal property of subjective experience, which will always and forever limit them, irrelevant of their content... from subjective experience.
  • Internet: a hindrance to one's identity?
    Now, introduce to this whole situation an empty, absorbent, and young mind, and the situation seems rather precarious. — Wallows

    Suspicions like this are incredibly prone to confirmation bias. You end up seeing evidence for them just because you read a convincing anecdote.

    I'm vulnerable to this too, of course, that quote about the commodification of emotions online while being insightful (though dated "island of the blessed" indeed!) is an oversimplification. It makes it sound as if if we had this conversation IRL it would mystically be better, despite all the advantages of text exchange, and would not have occurred unless we both frequented a special interest forum.
  • The Blind Spot of Science and the Neglect of Lived Experience
    ↪Pattern-chaser


    There is a certain pattern of people defending science in principle without actually knowing anything about it. For clarity, I'm not defending science-denial, woo, mysticism, I'm trying to defend scientific thinking from its own idealisation; scientism is just as bad for science as woo.
  • Internet: a hindrance to one's identity?
    ↪Wallows


    It is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some kind of _island of the blessed_ where people are free to indulge and express their Individuality...this is not true....i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until...i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories...by workers who were mostly exploited....i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to...and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment... [Cyberspace] is a black hole. It absorbs energy and personality and then re-presents it as an emotional spectacle. — Carmen Hermosillo
  • Internet: a hindrance to one's identity?
    How the internet influences childhood development is one thing, how it influences the maintenance, expansion or diminishment of (sufficiently) adult agency is another. I don't care to speculate on the first.

    Identity's something that receives reinforcement and can change over time. Your expressive capacities certainly do, you can learn how to touch just like you learn how to raise your voice. You can find your voice on an internet forum, even, and use it as fuel for academic discussion IRL. :)
  • Internet: a hindrance to one's identity?
    The internet is a series of biased sampling methods from the set of possible social relationships you may attain. It is constrained to vision, hearing, though certain environments and speech acts; like emotes (think waving in World of Warcraft), or responsive exchanges of personalised erotica in cybersex ape gestures and touch respectively. The medium is intrinsically asynchronous, messages may be delayed indefinitely (think of old email), though various features some platforms have are designed to induce synchronicity through manipulating positive feedback (likes, share notifications) or the social obligations of immediate response through bodily, tonal or 'I'm done speaking now' cues; like "X has read this" or "X is writing a message" notifications.

    You will not explore sensoria of touch or kinaesthetic/social spatiality on here. Luckily we can't smell each other after sweaty days festering in an office either. But you can capitalise on the social networks present here to elicit any social interaction (any meet and fuck or dating app for the mysteries of love condensed to the soppy love letters in condom tips).

    The unique opportunities for socialising and making friends in the medium exploit its biases. You can have long term exchanges in special interest groups, you can use search functions to find special interest groups and capitalise on those networks; BDSM need not transmit through word of mouth any more, nor non-gender binary or gay dating and meet/fuck. Social media even creates the potential for international spontaneous political organisation (like the Arab Spring or the Extinction Rebellion protests in London recently).

    In those regards, it depends a lot on how you use it. Ideally it is an augmentation instead of a replacement for life, realising the cybernetic ideal of the internet as much as possible, rather than the corporate centralisation such lawless irregularity actually promotes.
  • Claim: There is valid information supplied by the images in the cave wall in the Republic
    As the vaguest of hints where to look ... I’d suggest you take into account the ‘intersubjective’ as being what binds the ‘prescienctific’ with the ‘scientific’ - Husserl’s deeply ambiguous rant about ‘thematic’ is something I don’t confess to be completely satisfied with and I’d need to look MUCH more deeply into his earlier works to guess the true context of his meaning. — I like sushi

    For my general perspective on the issue:

    I think there's a shallow (but correct) way to take this, and an interesting (but harder to develop, but I suspect is right for the most part) way to take this. It's pretty clear that scientific methodology develops collaboratively, we check each-others' work. More fundamentally, we use each other's work. You can look at the capacity to use each-others' work as displaying an intimate relationship between concepts, interpreted non-psychologistically, and norms of language use. That the specific results of scientific studies interface with nature is trivially true in this line of thinking, being empirically realist, but the question of concept work (crystallised norms of language use which thematise nature) in science or scientifically influenced philosophy articulating our connection with nature gives us the radical prospect of a subtle transcendental realist project which underpins the 'mere' transcendental idealities of our conceptual schemes, or deep structure of our experiences.

    It's not just that we look out on nature through the prism of our concepts, the prism adapts to nature and responds to the texture of ecological affordances . Or for @Joshs, the circumscription of regional ontologies actually takes its cue from their ontic structure rather than inheriting their ground from the existentialia they allegedly derive from.

    Or for @Banno, just like the 'Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme' in Davidson is undermined by the adaptive/physically abiding properties ('anomalism') of radical interpretation's relationship with truth (this doesn't fit super well, considering conceptual regularities are of questionable status in Davidson's account of mental events, but I thought it might interest you to see him referenced outside of his milieux).
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