Very pretty. My favourites were the Modulars.

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/aliens/images/4/48/Modular_People_All_Tomorrows.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20171023061528[/img]

And the Mantelopes.

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/aliens/images/d/db/Mantelope.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20230311102713

All Tomorrows - C M Kosemen

A short illustrated novel, an excellent mix of cosmic horror and speculative biology. The prose isn't particularly artful - it evokes plaques on museum walls in zoology exhibits - but that in itself is very evocative.

Yes. Blood Meridian is my favourite novel. As of recently. I've never been so affected by fiction.

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

So far this is light hearted and hilarious, I really don't trust it. But it's great.

What else? The man's a seducer of prelates and a suborner of the judiciary. He's a habitual mailcandler and a practicing gelignitionary, a mathematical platonist and a molester of domestic yardfowl. Principally of the dominecker persuasion. A chickenfucker, not to put too fine a point on it.

Please don't take this wrong.

What're you getting out of asking these questions to us as well as stackexchange?

And this is presented with great skill and human understanding. Duchamp's route to a social statement was more vulgar and direct, but it worked. He helped move art forward and legitimize alternative means of expression. All this filters down and changes us. And we need to change. This is why we need artists and this is why art is "special". — Baden

I think this would make Susan Boyle performance art, on the basis of her disrupting and throwing into relief the equation of pop with beauty. She sings beautifully and just looks like an old lady. That was on Britain's Got Talent, which is the same thing but Bri-ish innit.

There wasn't a further development of the symbolic related to the conceptual content of her performances, but there was a development of the symbolic enacted through the social context of them. Susan Boyle as a phenomenon was very much both.

Maybe where that throws a spanner in the works is that interventions in the symbolic need to modify the symbolic - which Boyle did - but modify them in a way related to the modifying the understanding of the the expression of content in the symbolic simpliciter - which Boyle did not, she highlighted and undermined a stereotype in a manner that created a fandom.

Go look up Prior's approach to the liar and see what you think.

1. Whatever kinds of analogies may be used to argue for the similarity of pregnancy and diseases, there is a problem. There are other biological states that could be similarly equated - puberty, old age and sorrow, for example, all cause many different symptoms and suffering, which, albeit usually less sevear than those caused by pregnancy, do not differ from pregnancy symptoms in qualitative way. Therefore such analogy as a base for this argument can only be used if at the same time one accepts classifying old age as a disease as well. — Jussi Tennilä

I think this is the crux of the issue.

There's considerable ambiguity in the concept of functional impairment. 40 weeks of tiredness, nausea, coordination issues, disrupted appetite, interrupted sleep, rapid changes in temperature could count as one. I had those symptoms with COVID. If you end up defining a disease just by the presence of functional impairment relative to a person's baseline, you can probably conclude pregnancy is a disease on that basis.

It can join happiness, which perhaps should be a psychiatric disorder.

You can construe the (sometimes reported) presence of functional impairment as necessary but not sufficient for being diagnosed as diseased. If you universalise that you end up not being able to diagnose many mental health conditions or migraines (and some people will bite that bullet).

If you insist that functional impairment is necessary but not sufficient for counting as a disease, there needs to be something which stops pregnancy from being diagnosable as a disease. Presumably that's where, at base, "it just does, it's life, nerd" comes in.

I could imagine a society where an unplanned pregnancy of an unwanted (future) child is treated as a disease, whereas a planned pregnancy of a wanted (future) child is not treated as a disease. The former suggestion seems to cut through the idea that someone's well reasoned desire to be in a state of functional impairment stops any warrant for calling it a disease.

Perhaps also functional impairment itself is full of expectations of normality - maybe something which is sufficiently expected and "seen as commonplace and necessary for the average person" cannot be seen as a functional impairment. In that case, only above average severity period symptoms, despite how debilitating even relatively below average ones can be, could count as functional impairment. Even if you're weak and in constant pain for a week.

I do think that's the juicy bit. The norms inherent in diagnosing a disease, the norms inherent in counting as a disease, and the constitutive norms of functional impairment which facilitate both definition and diagnosis.

Self contradictory expressions - assuming that is an expression which entails a contradiction or are otherwise equivalent to A&~A - are truth bearers. They have the capacity to be true or false - as in, it would mean something for the statement to be true, and mean something for the statement to be false. They just happen to be false.

It's at this point that I realise we've had this conversation before about 8 years ago with @Streetlight.

For what we do, sure, but I keep thinking the brain is so much messier. The individuated steps there are each neurotransmitter binding to a site or not, an individual ion passing through a pump or not, all subject to randomness, with overall effects that are more naturally described in analog rather than digital terms. (Slightly more or less this or that.) — Srap Tasmaner

I'm going to continue talking in metaphors because I don't have better structured thoughts. And also because that seems fit for task.

I think the body is very much messier yeah. I was speaking in terms of any model you can write down, it has typed states. Like "this number means air pressure", or "this subset of the model's nodes correspond to proposed actions".

Maybe even for those models, their generated representations don't have states in the pre-typed manner above. We pre-allocated air pressure at a space/time and a value in a model. Our neurones conversely can somehow create an ensemble which tracks such changes, with appropriate "holes" in it for variables and concepts and worlds. Neural networks of sufficient size can synthesise predictive features. We tend to individuate those features ourselves, keep track of them, record them, create sensors for them...

The body somehow solves a problem of individuation. Somehow out of all the passage in and out the permeable membrane of our body-environment, we end up with sensory-conceptual-comportmental organelles sensitised to the body-environment's self differentiating trajectories. I can somehow attune to the undulations in air underneath my desk to feel it rattish, as a rat, but outside it's a suitcase on gravel. I can somehow read an opinion and get a sense of whether it would offend a group. I can know if I'm hangry or whether my partner has been inconsiderate.

you can calculate the odds to a fare-thee-well and make your model as complicated as you like, — Srap Tasmaner

We talk digital even if we mostly live analog. — Srap Tasmaner

Indeed. Whatever model you have needs individuated states in it though. Like if you're simulating the weather, you need states corresponding to air pressure, space, time etc. In that regard air pressure, space, time need to be conceived as distinct but related.

As you were saying with object permanence, or rather as I read it, there is a sense in which we learn to perceptually differentiate our environment into meaningful chunks relevant to a task. Environmental objects can help in this by having stable properties with respect to a (class of) environmental interventions or exploratory activity. Like reflectance spectra, topography, friction, wetness, what chemicals they emit...

I think we tend to talk about talk as if we talk digital. But I remain unconvinced that language is principally made of chunks, or properties/predicates/relations which induce chunks. You can think of it like that, but it seems to be the same thing as above to me. Whatever you lose in words which music expresses is also part of language.

I like thinking of our capacity to individuate along extant joints in the world+nature as building sensory organs out of enacted patterns. Which is obviously pseudoprofound bullshit made out of weasel words, but I believe it all the same. Like you can learn to smell a linear relationship on a graph.

By contrast , autonomy for the enactivist isnt the property of a brain box hidden behind a markov blanket, distinguishable not only from the world but from its own body, but the autonomy of a brain-body system, whose elements cannot be separated out and for whom interaction with a world is direct rather than. indirect. — Joshs

I could be wrong, but I don't see how one could call a cognitive system's attempt to match external input with internally generated representations fully normative. — Joshs

The different states have different markov blankets. Eg the ones corresponding to touch have objects' topographies as direct relations. As far as I'm aware it's a common misconception that "the" markov blanket of an embodied perceptual system is exactly the same thing as the distinction between representation and represented, or the "transparent veil" the transcendental structure of judgement synthesises over and within the empirical.

Moreover, one might be committed to the idea that some states are principally representational, and some are principally action promoting, so that the entire ensemble of states is simultaneously both and neither.

The ensemble of states, even when construed in a representational manner, are not representations in the Cartesian sense. eg Friston's on record being a huge fan of the extended mind and ecological theory of perception. Hierarchcal signal passing in their model lets you represent nonperceptual, nonsensory and even nonconceptual data through how data is passed through our states as a simultaneous modelling and control structure. You could read that in terms of a state level plurality in representational type (what does each state represent? lots of different things in principle!), an indifference to type (throw everything in lol, it isn't even a thing or type yet)... And also on a broader functional level of embodied agent level patterns representing+(in)en/acting the world.

In that, deviation from a norm can very well be construed as a source of surprise. Paradigmatically so, norms act as a form of perceptual prior. Norms even thus have that antecedent flavour of temporality you would expect from the Husserl-Heidegger heritage in their work.

Moreover, Barrett's work explicitly construes normativity as a site of constraint and novelty in the landscape of emotion - like you would not expect to see a smile on a disgusted face, but you might see a smile as condescending depending on the context. They see their projects as compatible.

I didn't want to get into the specifics of it, just provide a note that the literature there wasn't as clear cut as you presented it. Though I'm sure you can get a lot of mileage criticising any model of human agency, insofar as it is mathematical, under the aspect that it is a mathematical representation of its intended object. And moreover you get similar mileage criticising the endeavour in principle, that such science always already thematises human agency representationally rather than in a situated/attuned/embodied-enactive/rhizomatic/tinkering/co-becoming etc manner.

This allows enactivism to embrace what Buddhist traditions already understood, that cognition is fundamentally the exercise of skillful know-how in situated and embodied action rather than the kind of abstract belief-based reasoning you have been talking about. — Joshs

You still can have predictive processing in situated and embodied cognition. Friston and Barrett's collaboration in active perception is all that.

Now, how does all of this predictive modeling the brain does show up in how we talk about things? I think it mostly doesn't: the two are largely unrelated, and that's why I don't think it's helpful to talk about metaphysical assumptions in our discussions, even if by that you mean beliefs acquired from the models our brains build, below the level of our awareness. — Srap Tasmaner

Thanks for the tag. I agree with this. Two anecdotal bits of evidence: it takes a lot of effort to parse everyday stuff in terms of brain and body stuff. And also when you do get some way toward doing that, it comes off as horrifying alien poetry or cosmic horror. Example of the latter, parsed in terms of the every day: you'll have different thoughts motivations and reasons, in an unpredictable fashion, if you sleep well on a night versus if you don't. You have no choice over this. There's all kinds of terror in the subpersonal.

not of "belief formation." which is a completely different thing. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. You're forming beliefs "between thoughts", so to speak, they (eg) parse your chaotic sea of retinal images and individuate objects in them. Propositions/statements - declarative language that ascribes statements and intentions to people - at best serves as a summary of the aggregate "output" of this continual filtering and chunking in terms of current task relevance and task reevaluation.

My impression is that when you do philosophy, you take this capacity for aggregation as a given. And form something like a folklore out of it. Which is fine, and as you're saying (I'm reading you say) you can reverse engineer out some of the True Music (tm) our agenthood dances to.

Edit: I wanted to edit to highlight that we do have the capacity to take the folklore and act upon it, without treating it as fundamental. And also without treating the body+brain as fundamental too. Statements like "oxytocin potentiates pair bonding and also jingoism" need to make sense.

I suppose I'm suggesting that thinking a concept like "object permanence" is actually instantiated in the infant brain might be a sort of category mistake. The whole system will behave in a way that we recognize or categorize as embodying such a conception, but that doesn't mean it's "in there" somewhere. — Srap Tasmaner

I agree with that too. Though I think there's also a critical (as in criticising) role for philosophy in that. I've in mind people like Matthew Ratcliffe (one of @Joshs 's reading recommendations), who do their best to survey the ground of how we live our lives, and use that greater survey to undermine and expand false preconceptions we may tend to have about it.

I don't mean to make that a "handmaiden of the sciences" comment, I also think meticulously categorising the nonsense of our everyday lives is valuable for its own sake.

Can you give a page reference please @Count Timothy von Icarus?

@Srap Tasmaner - I think the only application of ontology in everyday life I've had recently was a spirited mereological discussion over whether every man was gay if their butt counted as part of, and was thus in, their own butt.

Also mine for lack of clarity. You were being attentive and responded to garbled words.

I'm not sure why you would make such a statement. You've witnessed me in several of the threads on Wittgenstein. When have I been unwilling to generally engage? I may not engage with everyone, but I've engaged with people in my threads, including you. So, I don't know what to say. — Sam26

It was directed to schop. Not you. I edited the post to make that clearer afterwards.

I did some of that if you read the thread. — Sam26

Aye. I recall.

The thread's textual exegesis of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. That includes debate about what passages mean. Debating the broader significance is tangential. If you feel unable or unwilling to have a textual discussion in a textual thread, @schopenhauer1, I don't know what to say!

Desiring-machines run amok? — Srap Tasmaner

Aye. The body without organs concept is pretty natural there. Ironically it is not talking much about chemicals and demographic risk factors for addiction.

Ontology, as we here think of it, is a game that only philosophers play. — Srap Tasmaner

I think that's broadly true. Though I do think how people relate the concepts and things in their world counts as an examinable ontology. In that respect, "out in the wild" it isn't sharply distinguished from how people think of institutions, nature, their own bodies, culture and themselves. But it's definitely never thought about as its own thing, I agree with you there.

of aesthetics — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, and this is even avoided in my book group. Who enjoy analysing literature.

discussions of right & wrong, of politics, — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, broadly speaking these are also avoided in the activist circle I'm part of. Since most of the theory is irrelevant to tangible goals, and the tangible goals are clearly worth fighting for (eg taking a landlord to court for allowing raw sewage to pour into an immunocompromised person's kitchen for months on end).

But I can still play at philosophy, and it's an old habit. Even though the content of philosophy mostly leaves me cold now, I still enjoy the practice of philosophy, the challenge of understanding and evaluating arguments, all that. — Srap Tasmaner

It might be off the track, but do you enjoy its applications in other disciplines? I'm reading a Deleuze inspired social science book on addiction at the minute.

To speak for oneself is already to speak in relation to a cultural perspective, — Joshs

Did you just reciprocal co-constitution Wittgenstein scholarship?

Not sure what you've read into this comment. — Hanover

I read it in a Sadean way. Appetites are in principle limitless, and only confined by what people agree to indulge in.

Oh my.

What came first, the chicken or the egg?

Fucking. Fucking came first.

More seriously though, you'd be as well asking whether blue or brown eyes are more natural. It's population level variation, some people have strong preferences both ways. Some people don't. It also changes within lifetime and over history.

How can it be that an approach which claims to privilege the common use of language does not use language in a common way? — Leontiskos

Yes. Especially with regard to feeling and concept talk.

You can use Wittgenstein inspired ideas as elaborate ways to tell people to shut up about a problem ("dissolving" or "undermining" a dispute), while using highly contestable concepts implicitly. Upon highlighting those highly contestable concepts or challenging them, you can receive another violently reframing invitation to shut up.

In my book it's less about Wittgenstein and more about totalising. You see the same from devout Heideggerians, Derrideans etc. Pretty much anyone aligned with vaguely poststructuralist (yes, including Wittgenstein) philosophers can exhibit that specific form of totalising discourse. Which is obviously not totalising because how can it be totalising if you're undermining the concept of totalities and reifications and ancient metaphysical superstitions which exist everywhere except in your own thoughts blah blah blah...

There's another form with less pomo-ish peeps. You just get drawn into their system and every issue is treated as explicitly subordinate to that system's articulated terms. In the pomoish form of totalising, the chat in thread superficially resembles the OP's topic but is in fact a contest of merely implicit worldviews. In the architectonic form, the thread is entirely derailed into the poster's fairly rigid system.

If you're reading academic philosophy, there are forms of this. When reading postructuralist inspired literature I play a game I call "reciprocal co-constitution bingo". In which the author adopts phrases like "affect and be affected by", "in and through", "unable to imagine without", "always already". I get a point for every phrase like that. They're used in order to stifle thought that anything could exist before everything analysed became inextricably subsumed in everything else and impossible to analyse on its own terms. If the author explicitly endorses the co-constitution of discourse and being, I win.

In all cases, these worldviews monopolise the connections between ideas and the conditions under which ideas are generated. They're ways of thinking about thinking, and about how thoughts arise. The pomoish form monopolises those connections by picking a specific way of undermining one flavour of connection (binarised, dual, antipodal) while asserting another (pluralised or continuous, multiply connected, mutually presupposing), the architectonic form instead severs connections of all types which are irrelevant or contrary to the articulated system, or otherwise interprets them as terms of it.

Ultimately both tendencies are refusals to stay on topic. In both the academic and Philosophy Forum forms, they produce a lot of redundant and derivative content. Everything becomes an application of the infinitely rehashed.

Conceptual relativism on stilts. — Srap Tasmaner

That's fair.

Same with you.

'mon, do you need to insult people like that.

Yeah, I like it, it's a bit divergent, but on topic. "Any particular man is mortal" introduces a quantifier almost obliquely. In first order logic it would be parsed "For all x, if x is a man then x is mortal", but now I am wondering if there might be an alternate parsing in some alternate logic. — Banno

Never seen one. I vaguely recall learning about it as a way to think of what happens when you "undo" universal instantiation to get the universal quantifier back in a natural deduction proof. But it crops up much more, without caring about the order of the underlying logic, in maths proofs. You end up saying "let x be a (blah blah)", at the start of a proof, then "every x is a (blah blah)" at the end, of many. But you do so in natural language. So you don't care about the underlying formal logic.

EG you'll write it the same in the Cauchy sequence proof here and in the proof that at least one solution of (x+1)(x-1)=0 is less than 0... Even if the first result needs an underlying second order logic and the second just needs first order. You write it all the same.

I think the formalisations are thus red herrings in the discussion regarding quantifier variance. Since if even mathematical reasoning has both ambiguity and commonality regarding the underlying logic and its quantifier introduction rules, why would we expect logic to behave as more than a prop, crutch or model of quantification in natural language? Never mind ontology!

But I'm not sure how this relates to — Banno

It was an example of people disagreeing about quantifier introduction rules. That one is tricky!

It is a fact that not everyone in every context means the same thing by "all" or by "some". But this is nowhere near the sort of variance our heroes are promoting, in my limited understanding. — Srap Tasmaner

Just to be clear, what do you believe our heroes are promoting? I'm not sure any more.

Second edit; that is, "...for arbitrary a..." just is "for any a you might pick", or "for any a" - it's introducing a quantifier. — Banno

It's just this.

It might but I don't see that it does - those unbound variables make it hard to see what is going on here. But (Pa→Qa) does not allow (∀x (Px → Qx))... You've lost me. — Banno

You can introduce the quantifier onto (Pa->Qa) to get (for all x P(x)->Q(x) ) if you made no assumptions about a anywhere in your reasoning. If someone just comes up to you and hands you some constant with some properties, you cannae, but you can show that if (P( a ) for arbitrary a) then (P( x ) for all x).

In order to recognise a failure of translation, you must understand what success would look like. — Banno

How does translation play into it here? What I would get from successful translation is a set of equivalent uses, you've not provided a guarantee that such an equivalence between utterances involving quantifiers would preserve quantifier rules.

I am willing to go down the individuation and intension route. But I'm not particularly prepared for that kind of discussion.

(1) This shouldn't be the usual one side saying "There are more things in heaven and earth..." and the other saying "No there aren't." — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. I'm of the opinion that there is something substantive here to talk about. Lots of substantive things in fact. One thing we've done so far is treating terms as individuated entities. I think you problematised that in a post here a while back regarding the neuroscience. That whole issue gets occluded once you can already apply a name to a thing. But the metaphysics in that kind of discussion gets dicey real fast and the science gets incomprehensible even quicker.

I like the idea of each side being baffled by what the other could possibly be thinking. — Srap Tasmaner

Is that bafflement gesturing toward incommensurability? I could see people having irresolvable disagreements about how they (their bodies?) individuate entities, even if they agree on everything under heaven and earth. Maybe related to intension again.

But I am far less incline to agree that these are instances of a variation in the quantification rules themselves. — Banno

How would you account for people's differences in use? As in, plenty of people don't know that (A implies B) implies (Everything which counts as A also counts as B). That slide from propositional to first order logic you get from the diagrams. Their quantifier introduction rule would vary over people, as you wouldn't have universal generalisation working the usual way for at least one person. (P(x)=>Q(x) where x is arbitrary lets you derive (for all x P( x ) => Q( x ) ), and they can't do that).

The challenge I see that presenting is that people can believe statements that block applications of inference rules, or otherwise not believe in appropriate inference rules. Even when two people share the theorems of the underlying logic... You just have to hope that every person innately believes every theorem. If they don't use the quantifiers in the same way, they don't have the same intensions over people.