Oooo almost. Following Austin, I have to say not that "we experience representations of plants and animals", but that our experiencing is a representing of... plants and animals. It's still the plants and animals that are being experienced, not their representations.

And this should be understood not as a piece of neuroscience, but a clarification of how to use words like "experience" and "representation". — Banno

I would say that both ways of framing it are consistent with common usages. How do we establish which is correct? Whatever way we choose, I think it remains unarguable that we know plants and animals only as they are represented. The primordial process of presentation (which includes, but is not limited to, neural nets) cannot be made conscious.

All of this is very hard, perhaps impossible, to talk about consistently and coherently. Our senses are affected, and we perceive things which we refer to as plants or animals, for example. (I think the vase is not the best example in one way in that it is made by humans for a certain use, so I am using natural examples). Animals move around and plants don't move around, although they may be moved by wind, while remaining in the same places.

So, these things, animals and plants stand out for us. They stand out for us by being different than their surroundings (and because they are pragmatically important to us in other ways). Their appearances and characteristics are as they are and cannot be altered by us. Animals have to deal with this inability to alter what is perceived just as we do. We, and the other animals can alter things to varying degrees by acting upon them.

Although we can access the existences of things only via the senses, we naturally infer that they exist independently of our senses in that they, in the case of plants, are always found where we last left them, or in the case of animals, their movements are consistent with what we observe of them. For example, they may leave tracks or other signs of their movements. So, the whole is a coherent realist story. Science is just an amplification of this kind of everyday experience and observation, and it has become a vast and mostly consistent story.

What we experience, though, are our representations that have resulted from the process, of which we cannot be conscious, of being sensorially affected. This does not contradict the idea that we experience animals and plants, because the animals and plants are, in one sense, the representations of which we are conscious, and in another sense are part of the process of what affected us sensorially to produce those representations, a process of which we cannot become conscious pre-representationally.

So, in one sense we can rightly say that we experience plants and animals, and in another sense, we can rightly say that we experience representations of plants and animals. These are just two different ways of parsing what we experience. It's too easy for us to become confused by language because of the inherent ambiguity of terms.

So this

So there is a view, more often implied that expressed, that what we perceive are such neural models. But that is mistaken; indeed, it is an iteration of the homunculus, this time with the little man looking at it's own neural pathways. Rather, those neural models constitute our perceiving. — Banno

I would say is right, or consistent, with one perspective, but wrong, or inconsistent with another. We can say that we see our representations, or we can say that our representations are our seeing. There is an ambiguity of language use in this connection that allows for the apparent contradiction. I don't think homunculi (they are tiny strawmen or red herrings) have anything to do with this basic problem of gaining a clear conceptual grasp of our experience.

That is, the folk looking at the vase see the vase, not each their own neural net. — Banno

I see this as obviously true, but I would not say that our neural nets are our representations, since we can be conscious of the latter, but not of the former.

:up:

Hence use, not discourse. — Banno

This is something we agree about. Discourse, or narrative, rules only in the arcane world of philosophy. Use, or doing, is the source of all narrative and discourse; much of the latter being post hoc.

Perhaps you are one of those who thinks the world is his oyster. We experience parts of what we think of as the world and parts of what we think of as oysters, but there is a vast difference of scale there.

As if we never actually taste the oyster; instead what we taste is a synthetic inference from the impressions, sounds, feels and images that we experience.

No. That "synthetic inference from the impressions, sounds, feels and images that we experience" is the taste of oysters.

The problem is set up by an excessive emphasis on "internal" and "external", and appears to be inherent in the phenomenological approach itself, from it's emphasis on direct experience. — Banno

You are attacking a strawman: I said we don't actually experience a world; I didn't say we don't actually experience oysters.

It seems we agree, apart from perhaps this:

I understand why one would say this, but I'd counter that impressions and sounds and so on only make sense within a tacitly accepted framework on an animal in an environment. — plaque flag

Yes, but I'd argue that such frameworks are inferentially synthesized by animals, including humans, from out of an initial "buzzing, blooming confusion", in their infancy. The framework just is the Unwelt or empirical world in the case of humans.

I take this synthetic apriori as the generation of hypotheses from experience. But I'd say such knowledge is fallible. We may act on it without checking (and surely we do), but it could turn out to be wrong. Math might be an exception, but that gets us into the weeds of the philosophy of mathematics. — plaque flag

Do you think that Kant's synthetic a priori derivation of the "pure forms of intuition" and categories of judgement could be mistaken (bearing in mind that they are only presented as being relevant to the context of human experience and judgement)?

I agree we can't image the different senses, but can't we imagine that they might have an entirely different dimensionality to inhabit? In a sense as 'off limits' to us as noumena. — Tom Storm

Yes, I don't see why not.

Indeed. One gets the feeling that at some point we just have to use inadequate terms to give an impression of what is meant because there simply isn't the vocabulary or conceptual framework to explore it. We are stuck with 'us' to speak of 'them'... — Tom Storm

Yes, exactly...limited beings that we are... :fire:

I don't think it's a silly question at all. Since Kant posited things in themselves, I don't see why he could not equally posit space and time in themselves. So, rather than saying that things in themselves do not exist in space and time, he could have said that they do not exist in cognitive space and time, which actually "goes without saying", as the saying goes. The very idea of things in themselves suggests difference and duration, which seems to depend on the ideas of space and time.

I don't know whether an alternative physics would be possible for an intelligent alien, presuming that they shared the same (or some of the same) senses as us. We can imagine augmentation of the senses we are familiar with, but I don't think we can imagine entirely different senses.

Yes, I think Kant does say that knowledge begins with experience, but that not all knowledge is dependent on experience. As with the example I gave concerning knowing that all experience must be spatially and/ or temporally given, it is not a matter of that being confirmed by experience, because like any conjecture, experience cannot confirm its universal applicability.

It just seems impossible to us that possible experience could fail to be either spatial or temporal or both. I suppose we could deny that this is synthetic a priori and say instead that it is analytic, in the sense that only spatial or temporally given phenomena count as experiences. That said, it does seem impossible to imagine what a non-temporal, non spatial experience could be.

But I'm pretty sure that Kant said you CAN'T know truth through pure reason alone. — Darkneos

As I understand it Kant believed that we can know some things via pure reason. He called this kind of knowledge "synthetic a priori". But this knowledge is dependent first and foremost on the prior experience that our memory allows us to reflect upon and to discover its general characteristics. Once those are discovered and synthesized, then we can say, without any longer needing to check our experience, what the nature of any possible experience must be; the primary attributes being spatiality and temporality.

So, Kant attempted to harmonize rationalism with empiricism, while defining the limits of each.

I think the shared world is the more discursively fundamental, because once you have the language to discourse you have already been inducted into the shared world. It might be objected that the most primordial thing for the individual is being somato-sensorially affected, but prior to developing the sense of self that co-arises with the sense of the other and of world, there really is no individuality.

I agree with you that logic and language are both self and world transcending and yet worldly, because without prior sensory experience no logic or language would be possible. This is captured nicely in Kant's idea of the synthetic a priori; it is synthetic in that it is synthesized from experience and yet is transcendentally prior in that, once synthesized, it needs no longer to be checked against the world.

There is a sense in which I would agree that a meaningful language is a world: as I often say I think the world is a collective representation. We don't actually experience a world; it is a synthetic inference from the impressions, sounds, feels and images that we experience. I think animals also synthesize their Umwelts in the same kind of way, and in that sense, they have their own circumscribed worlds, so I don't see it as being wholly dependent on language, except in the reflexive phase. Without that ability to synthesize an Umwelt, language would not be possible in the first [place.

This sounds reasonable, about Kant. But I would only add that the nature of what is noumenal cannot be grasped in our finitude. "Reflection on our own experience" can still give one no more than a representation. It sounds reasonable to make this move, but all of this presupposes the very thing that needs to be shown.

Kant knew this, and I'm sure you can easily find where he says this in the deduction and elsewhere. Transcendental means metaphysical, and what is "pure" reason is just this. Kant didn't do metaphysics (or did he? He certainly doesn't intend to, but his representational thinking sets up an epistemology and an ontology that is inherently metaphysical.) — Astrophel

I, and as far as I understand it, Kant agree that the nature of the noumenal cannot be grasped. I keep saying that. for me, even the nature of our actual experience cannot be grasped as it non-dually is but can only be parsed discursively in dualistic terms. That is the essence of our finitude that we can only think in finite terms.

So, I agree with you that reflection on our experience, otherwise known as phenomenology, cannot escape that dualistic finitude. So the TUA is a part of our collective model of self and world, and is presupposed in the very possibility of such a model. I think Kant did indeed know this, and that is why, after establishing the limits (finitude) of thought he wrote the CPJ, purporting to establish our practical justifications for having faith in God, Freedom and Immortality.

I don't think 'transcendental' means 'metaphysical', at least not in the traditional sense of 'metaphysical'. 'Transcendence' means 'metaphysical' in that sense, and I believe Kant was at pains to distinguish between the ideas transcendental and transcendence.

Transcendence purports to be saying what the absolute nature of reality is, and I don't believe Kant can reasonably be charged with doing that. Kant attempted to analyze and lay before us what the nature of human reality, the human situation, epistemologically speaking, is. I see Kant as being primarily a phenomenologist, not a metaphysician.

I agree with the sentiment but contend the particular point. Are humans "hard-wired" to have children or are we a more complex (albeit still animal) that have an existential nature to it? — schopenhauer1

Are you talking about philosophical types or just humans generally? I can see the point of not breeding, particularly now the way the world looks like going. I would not want to have children at this point in human history because I would then be condemned to worry about how they were going to cope with what inevitably seems to be coming. But I never had any desire for kids anyway; I'm too selfish, absorbed as I have always been in my own pursuits and obsessions.

I certainly don't regret being alive. On balance I would count my life as a definite positive. It is a well-worn cliche that thinking too much will bring misery, and that is probably the view of a majority of humans, who don't experience their lives overall as miserable, and like to cling to the illusions that too much thinking might dispell. Maybe it's down to brain chemistry; those low in seratonin have a negative, depressive view on life, and those with abundant seratonin feel life is good.

I know how miserable life has seemed for me at times a day or two after taking MDMA, and this is attributable to seratonin depletion. Selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors are given to people who suffer chronic depression. If you try to imagine how life would seem if you always felt good, you might be able to understand and acknowledge that your perspective of life as misery says much more about you than anything else.

For them, the private object is the given, the most undeniably real and present. Then the public world is a hypothetical construction from all of these streams of experience. 'The' vase with the red flower is a useful abstraction, perhaps a fiction, used to organize a plurality of red-flower-experiences. — plaque flag

I wouldn't say it is a hypothetical construction; it is rather a logical entailment; if we can all agree on the minutest details about objects, then it follows that the objects must have some kind of independent existence, either just brutely existent, or on account of our minds being conjoined in some way we have no awareness of. In either case the objects do not depend on any particular mind, and so are mind independent in at least that sense.

Thanks for your reply, Astrophel. Your thinking goes off on so many tangents that I am at a loss as to what to address in what you've said.

So, to keep it simple I'll just respond to what you've said about the TUA.

It is impossible because it is conceived by the very unities it presents to us. To talk about what the TUA is, we would need a third pov, one that is objective and removed from the conditions assume what needs to be shown. This, of course, comes from Wittgenstein (but I can't remember where, exactly). Logic cannot explain is own nature because this presupposes logic to do so. Like talking about the eye that "sees" the eye. A brain that conceives a brain.

The TUA is, after all, "transcendental" and noumenal. Kierkegaard I brought up because he was adamantly opposed to any kind of "rational realism". Wittgenstein's quasi-mystical position on the world and value can be found here. — Astrophel

My understanding of Kant's idea is just that we understand new ideas by relating them to a unified body of pre-existing ideas about ourselves and the world. The "I think" is the idea of a transcendental ego or unity. Kant did not follow Descartes in thinking this ego as a substantive entity; rather our selves are models that seem unified to us in terms of a coherent story of the self/ world relation. All of this is transcendental insofar as it is not empirically derivable from observations of the world, but rather constitutes the very condition that enables observation and understanding of the world.

So, it is not a case of knowing the noumenal, but via reflection on our experience, of thinking the necessary conditions for the possibility of that experience. We know that if we did not have a coherent, unified sense of ourselves in relation to a world that we experience, we would not be able to experience and understand the world the way that we know we do. I might not be understanding Kant rightly, since I am not a Kant scholar, but that is my take on it...

Do I have that right @Mww ?

When considering much of what is scientifically investigated, I don't think there is any need to actively bracket out the observer. One is just considering relatively simple systems where observers aren't playing any significant causal role.

Things get messier at the quantum level, and at the classical level when what is being studied (say an animal) might well have its behavior influenced as a result of sensing the observer. — wonderer1

My point was simply that the observer is bracketed out because it is methodologically impossible to incorporate the observer into the models which are employed for understanding what is being studied in fields like chemistry, geology, biology, cosmology and astronomy.

In phenomenology the question of the existence of the external world is bracketed out because it is the nature of perception itself, which is the object of study, and the question of the independent existence of the objects of perception is not relevant to that study.

It is only in QM where the "observer" becomes an issue, as observation and measurement appear to affect the outcome of experiments. But even there just what constitutes "the observer" is not clear, and the popular philosophical idea that it is human consciousness which actually creates the outcomes is completely useless to, and is not incorporated, or in way incorporable, into quantum theory.

When studying animal behavior, ethologists can only try their best to remain undetected by their subjects, or try to minimize whatever influence their presences might have on animals being studied in laboratory conditions.

I agree, but mostly for technical feasibility reasons. Even now, with consciousness itself not being an issue, knowing what is going on in a trained neural network is highly problematic. See The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI. — wonderer1

That's a good point. We really don't know what anything is in any absolute sense.

Thanks for your thoughtful response, Moliere; while you haven't convinced me to read further into Derrida, I can relate to where you seem to be coming from in your understanding of his work.

OK, I'll take a look.

It is inevitable that money will be spent on such investigations. Sometimes there are beneficial spinoffs from scientific investigations. Personally, I think we should spend on health, the environment, subsidizing sustainable energy sources, and so on before lashing out on such things as the JWST or the LHC, but it ain't going to happen.

It is just plain wrong , and it is not what Derrida is saying. First of all, differerance doesnt just refer to words, it refers to all forms of experience. Second , Derrida isnt arguing that the chain of referential meanings of words leads to an infinite regress. — Joshs

If that is so, then provide a textual reference which unlike the one you did provide is not a mere apologetic, lacking any argument for why we should not think that his work is as I said it is. Also explain how differance could refer to experience, and cite where Derrida says this.

It's easy enough for a relativist to simply claim, without actually backing it up with an argument, that they are not a relativist, even though their works as interpreted certainly seem to fit the bill.

Maybe there is more of focus now than thirty years ago...I don't really know. Maybe it's a category mistake to expect neuroscience to explain consciousness as we intuitively understand it. Maybe that understanding itself is due to reifications of linguistically generated ideas. I don't think it's a problem which really matters much to how we live our lives—there are far more pressing problems facing us right now.

:lol: :up:

I don't think the so-called "hard problem" is the main, or even a significant, focus of neuroscience. It's mostly the philosophers who worry about it.

The other option is confusions all the way down. That seems fairly popular too. On a separate note, I did hear a philosopher (I forget who ) in a guided discussion on truth saying, 'What's wrong with endless recursion, anyway?' Not a notion we hear very often. I guess Rorty argues similarly by saying (my paraphrase) that all of our values are contingent on other values and so on forever, without the possibility of a final resting place or source. — Tom Storm

Confusion all the way down...I like that!

I'm not so keen on Rorty's relativism, or at least I think it only applies to the relatively minor moral values, like the age of sexual consent, general social etiquette, the ethics of taking mind-altering substances and so on. When it comes to the really significant moral values—condemnation of murder, rape, torture, theft and so on—I think they do find their source in social pragmatics. On that connection though, we have to also acknowledge that we are not yet a global village, and maybe never will be.

Why would you say that approach doesn't seem to be working? Are you just referring to neuroscience, or the whole of science? Neuroscience may not have explained first person experience, but it has discovered plenty about the workings of the brain.

I don't think that this works. The reason why different systems are needed is because incompatibilities arise between one and another. Incompatibility makes it impossible to have immutable axioms which would be applicable to all systems. — Metaphysician Undercover

:up:

Nice little article!

I don't see any alternative for science than the Galilean approach. Bracketing out the conscious observer is analogous to, and the reverse of, the Epoché in phenomenology. It is a methodological necessity.

It is hard to see how a seamless causal model from something third person observable (neural activity) to something that is not (conscious experience) could be achieved.

From the first-person perspective it is neural activity which is not observable. Science and phenomenology remain separate "magisteria" (Gould) , the first dealing with what can be observed in things via the senses and the second with how the experience of things seems, and what, on reflection can be said to be the common characteristics of all experience.

:up: I love the idea, but heights are too daunting for me.

I think he is saying in essence that reality is co-created and that we can't take any particular account for granted. — Tom Storm

Right, I think it is obvious that reality, if we mean what is experienceable (which we should, since we cannot talk about what is not experienceable, except to make groundless speculations about what we imagine might be the case), is "co-created". Although we do know from experience that we cannot make the process by which we are affected such as to experience the world of phenomena, from which we infer a shared empirical world, so there is a sense in which we have no say in the creation of the phenomena we experience.

The co-creation part comes in with the socially., culturally and linguistically mediated interpretations that produce the model we call "the external world". But let us not forget the more primordial biologically and semiotically mediated dimensions, which we have in common with other organisms. Shall we say that other organisms also co-create their Umwelts?

It seems there is a lot of co-creation going on—perhaps it is co-creation all the way down. :wink:

Cheers, good points.

I'm not convinced (it does not seem to me to follow), however, 'that if physical events-regularities are computable (which they are), then physical reality must be a "computer" executing a nonphysical program (and, in your case, Gnomon, that's written by a "nonphysical programmer")' – at best, this hasty generalization is too unparsimonious and the pseudo-speculative equivalent of (neo-Aristotlean / neo-Thomistic / neo-Hegelian) "intelligent design". :eyes: — 180 Proof

:100: I totally agree with you here.

Derrida is saying, at a minimum, that "tone, language, posture, gesture," are philosophically important -- else he wouldn't have written what he wrote, since Heidegger already wrote it. — Moliere

OK, I got the idea, but I want to know why and how they are philosophically important. If all he did was paraphrase Heidegger in even more obscure language, why would I bother to read him instead of Heidegger, since the latter would afford the same insights with less effort on my part?

But also that provides a clue into reading his philosophy: start with Heidegger, and then try and read what's different. — Moliere

If you've made the effort to penetrate Derrida's philosophy, and Heidegger's, to the point where you can understand both sufficiently to be able to see the difference between the two, then I can only take my hat off to you.

On the surface, at least, they both seem to share a certain suspicion of categorization. The present-at-hand and presence perform similar roles in that they have a non-visual complement -- the ready-to-hand and absence, which are meant to show how our phenomenology and language rely upon not just the metaphysics of presence, but this other unexamined side as well. — Moliere

I understand the difference between vorhandenheit und zuhandenheit, and I think that is a valuable phenomenological insight, but it is also an example of categorization.

Although I should point out that my understanding is that the former is a reflective presence, while the latter is not so much an absence as it is a transparence. The hammer becomes "invisible" when I use it, but it is there nonetheless. This is also foreshadowed by the ideas of the conscious and the unconscious, or the explicit and the implicit. I am not consciously or explicitly aware of the hammer as I use it, but its presence in my hand is unconscious and implicit.

Now, I can talk about these ideas in plain language, but I cannot think of any of Derrida's ideas that I could do the same with, unless they come to seem trivial. Differance, the idea that words only have their meaning in terms of other words which leads to the indefinite deference of meaning is, I think, either trivially true or just plain wrong. Logocentrism was foreshadowed by Klages, and the irony is that there is no philosopher more logocentric (or logorrheic) than Derrida. Are there any other of Derrida's ideas that can be explained in plain language, while remaining insighful and not becoming trivial? This is a genuine question since I have never penetrated far into the Derrida landscape, and so cannot claim to know that there could not be anything there that I've missed.

The tone, though! What a difference! Heidegger the joyless and serious spiritual questor for a Truth long forgotten, vs. the joyful and playful linguist. — Moliere

If you find Derrida joyful to read, then that's great: it's always good to find something joyful to read. I've tried to read him and don't find it joyful at all.

Is there a fact of the matter about anything? I can explain Derrida in clear language but that doesn’t mean you’ll understand it. — Joshs

I see no reason to think that if you could explain Derrida in clear language that I would be unable to understand it. Give it a go and we'll see.

It has nothing to do with language except insofar as we use language to report. And I'm not talking about "relevant meanings" either. Find any complex object with many distinct features and invite a friend to tell you just what she sees at the precise locations you point to on the object. You will find that she sees just the same features that you do.
— Janus

Why aren’t you talking about relevant meanings? Is there such a thing as a neutral meaning, divorced from relevance? This is crucial to understanding how we construct sense and language. Heidegger’s thesis in Being and Time centers around the fact that how things matter to us is not separable from what they are in themselves. Extracting a neutral fact of the matter is “an artificially worked up act.” — Joshs

I was arguing that people seeing the same vase, when they paint it, and in support of that I made the point that people will agree on small and precise features of objects if questioned. You have not addressed that argument but have instead changed the subject.

the categorical thought takes up the experience AS a propositional abstraction. It is an abstraction from an unquantifiable source, which is the experience itself, — Astrophel

Yes, I've said as much myself, but that doesn't change the fact that the truth or falsity of the abstractive thought exemplified in propositional assertions is not the same as the idea of truth that Alethia represents; so I'm not sure whether you are agreeing or disagreeing with what I've said, or of what point you want to make.

Kant's Transcendental Unity of Apperception is itself an impossible concept constructed out of the very concepts it is alleged to bring forth. Part of Wittgenstein's complaint in the Tractatus is about this kind of thing, which is why he was such a fan of Kierkegaard. — Astrophel

You haven't explained why you think Kant's Unity of Apperception is an impossible concept, what exactly Wittgenstein's complaint is and how it relates to Kant's idea, or what relevance Kierkegaard's philosophy has in this connection. You give me nothing to respond to unless you offer more than this kind of vague gesturing.

But to treat a proposition as a utility, as I am now writing this, philosophically, is a reduction of the world to a utility. And this is Heidegger's big complaint in his Question Concerning Technology. — Astrophel

Propositions are not necessarily "utilities", although they of course can be. The idea that the world is a "standing reserve", there to be exploited in whatever way we see fit, has no necessary connection with the fact that humans practice propositional thinking. In fact, the mutually contradictory ideas that it either does, or does not, have such a necessary connection are themselves examples of propositional thinking. Philosophy is impossible without propositional thinking, and that is why I say that it cannot capture the non-dual, non-discursive, affective nature of experience. Poetry is better suited for that task.

OK, suit yourself.

I'm not getting this. Edit: A predator's perceived prey that stands out perceptually isn't separate from the prey's environment? — javra

I meant not separate in any ontological sense. The prey and the predator are parts of the environment that only stand out in the sense of being noticed.

As to Bateson's latest quote, interesting as it is to read, it only speculates without evidencing what is speculated. — javra

Speculation or conjecture, more or less informed, is all we have; what more do you expect?

But wait, what if all this is not counting but "pattern or rhythm recognition"? I'll skip on this debate. — javra

As Bateson says pattern recognition is possible with small numbers of things; beyond that we would need to count them to know how many there are.

Conceptually, quantities consist of numbers - whether or not the latter are specified. To go back to Bateson's initial quote, what would a numberless measurement of length, for example, be? — javra

Apart from counting, quamtities do not strictly consist in numbers, or at least not in number alone. A certain quanity of tomatoes will weigh a certain number of milligrams, a different number of grams, kilograms, ounces pounds, stones and so on. Same with volumes. So it is numbers plus units of measurement.

There can be no numberless measurement, but a length is a length, regardless of whether it is measured.

Instead, you could reply to what I initially asked.

Either via the idealism of Platonic Realism or the materialism of today's mainstream views, how can one have numbers in the complete absence of discrete amounts of givens - i.e., of quantities? (if nothing else, there would yet be a quantity of numbers by the shear presence of the number(s) addressed) — javra

I'm not sure what you are saying or asking there. I'll attempt an answer if you care to clarify.

I of course accept this, but so far fail to see its significance. — javra

The significance, as I see it, is that thinking in terms of number is, along with identity, an artificially exact mode of thought. Also, I think it is good practice to draw conceptual distinctions wherever we find that we can; it helps to understand how we think.

I'd instead focus on the discreetness of physical givens as discerned by awareness. Something which, as an indefinite amount of something, we commonly term quantity in the English language. Which we then use numbers to more precisely quantify in definite manners. — javra

That something stands out perceptually is not that it is actually separate from its environment; it is just that we can distinguish it. That said observations of animals show that they often distinguish the same things as we do; notably items of food.

Our distinguishing things depends on our nature, and on the nature of what is distinguished. When we distinguish a single tomato, there is not an "indefinite quantity of something" in the sense that you were using the term 'quantity', that is as number: on the contrary there is an exact number of tomatoes; in this case one. We might even say that there is an exact mass and volume of tomato there, although we cannot say precisely what that is.

I don't know the background of the guy you've quoted. Is the guy trying to conceive of what reality is like, or would be like, in the complete absence of all awareness in the cosmos? — javra

No, Bateson was one of the seminal "information" thinkers; well worth a read.

The exactitude of numbers has everything to do with awareness's aptitudes - especially here addressing that of humans - — javra

Apropos of this, another quote from the same book:

"Some birds can somehow distinguish number up to seven. But whether this is done by counting or by
pattern recognition is not known. The experiment that came closest to testing this difference between the
two methods was performed by Otto Koehler with a jackdaw. The bird was trained to the following
routine: A number of small cups with lids are set out. In these cups, small pieces of meat are placed.
Some cups have one piece of meat, some have two or three, and some cups have none. Separate from the cups, there is a plate on which there is a number of pieces of meat greater that the total number of pieces in the cups. The jackdaw learns to open each cup. Taking off the lid, and then eats any pieces of meat that are in the cup. Finally, when he has eaten all the meat in the cups, he may go to the plate and there eat the same number of pieces of meat that he got form the cups. The bird is punished if he eats more meat from the plate than was in the cups. This routine he is able to learn.

Now, the question is: is the jackdaw counting the pieces of meat, or is he using some alternative method
of identifying the number of pieces? The experiment has been carefully designed to push the bird toward
counting. His actions are interrupted by his having to lift the lids, and the sequence has been further
confused by having some cups contain more than one piece of meat and some contain none. By these
devices, the experimenter has tried to make it impossible for the jackdaw to create some sort of pattern or rhythm by which to recognize the number of pieces of meat. The bird is thus forced, so far as the
experimenter could force the matter, to count the pieces of meat.

It is still conceivable, of course, that the taking of the meat from the cups becomes some sort of rhythmic
dance and that this rhythm is in some way repeated when the bird takes the meat from the plate. The
matter is still conceivably in doubt, but on the whole, the experiment is rather convincing in favor of the
hypothesis that the jackdaw is counting the pieces of meat rather than recognizing a pattern either of
pieces or of his own actions.

It is interesting to look at the biological world in terms of this question: Should the various instances in
which number is exhibited by regarded as instances of gestalt, of counted number, or of mere quantity?
There is a rather conspicuous difference between, for example, the statement "This single rose has five
petals, and it has five sepals, and indeed its symmetry is of a pentad pattern" and the statement "This rose has one hundred and twelve stamens, and that other has ninety-seven, and this has only sixty-four." The process which controls the number of stamens is surely different from the process that controls the number of petals or sepals. And, interestingly, in the double rose, what seems to have happened is that some of the stamens have been converted into petals, so that the process for determining how many petals to make has now become, not the normal process delimiting petals to a pattern of five, but more like the process determining the quantity of stamens. We may say that petals are normally "five" in the single rose but that stamens are "many" where "many" is a quantity that will vary from one rose to another.

With this difference in mind, we can look at the biological world and ask what is the largest number that
the processes of growth can handle as a fixed pattern, beyond which the matter is handled as quantity. So far as I know, the "numbers" two, three, four, and five are the common ones in symmetry of plants and animals, particularly in radial symmetry."

Psychologists have tools for this , such as Rorschach tests. They reveal how striking different one person’s sense of the relevant meaning of a thing is from another person’s. Dont confuse conventional language, which is designed to hide these differences, from the differences themselves. — Joshs

It has nothing to do with language except insofar as we use language to report. And I'm not talking about "relevant meanings" either. Find any complex object with many distinct features and invite a friend to tell you just what she sees at the precise locations you point to on the object. You will find that she sees just the same features that you do.

Whether she sees them in just the same way you do, and if not, how does it differ is another question altogether: and one for which there can be no definitive answer, since comparison is obviously impossible. Since you and she are different organisms, we can safely assume that there will be differences, even if we cannot say what they are.

As usual I don't know what Derrida is trying to say there (if in fact he is trying to say anything).

It’s not sophistry, it’s highly rigorous philosophy. I’m sorry you dont understand him but don’t blame the messenger for your failure to understand the message. — Joshs

Right, I already know that is your opinion. It's not mine. Is there a fact of the matter as to whether Derrida's work is "highly rigorous philosophy"? If he is, then you should be able to explain in clear language just what he is saying in that passage you quoted.

I have no problem with ambiguity in poetry; in fact, I would say it is a hallmark of good or interesting poetry. I don't think the same way about philosophy. I have no trouble understanding (early) Heidegger, Kant or Hegel, Husserl, Foucault, Deleuze, Wittgenstein or Merleau Ponty, but Derrida is a different beast. Even Foucault said (in a conversation with Searle) that much of what Derrida writes is gobbledygook.

The it = It is the case that it is raining? :wink: — Tom Storm

Yes, that's another way of looking at it. But it remains true that when it is raining it is the sky or the cloud, if you like, that is raining.

Which may lead one to thinking this (Rorty this time): — Tom Storm

He is thinking only of truth or falsity as attributes of propositions or sentences. There is a more ancient understanding of truth as actuality or "alethia". Heidegger revives this idea. Also, there is the idea of truth as "hitting the mark" and in that sense our perceptions can be true or not.

Alright, so you're saying (via your quote) that tomatoes are not quantifiable? — javra

Sure, language is ambiguous, and we can say that there is a certain quantity of tomatoes or a certain number of tomatoes. But the quantity of tomatoes, although it can be given as a number, could also be given as a weight or a volume. Of course, these weights or volumes are also expressed in numbers, but Bateson's point is that number is discrete, whereas quantity, insofar as a distinction can be made between it and number, is not.

So, we can have exactly three tomatoes, but we cannot have exactly three kilograms or cubic centimeters of tomatoes.

:up:

You might say that artists came to understand how to convey the ‘real world’ more accurately over time, whereas I’d say that their pictorial constructions of the world changed not by better approximating it but by shifting their worldview to accord with changing purposes. — Joshs

I'd say that people came to understand the principles of perspective and to explore image-making in accordance with these newfound principles, and then later came to deliberately represent things in ways that contravene those principles. Photographs do not contravene the principles of perspective, though, and those principles do best formulate how we normally see things.

If we want to discover whether people see the same things and features of things all we have to do is ask. It is a commonplace fact that people do see the same things including relatively insignificant features of things, and this can easily be proven if they are asked to look closely and report what they see.

What is the 'it' that rains? Really there is no such object, there is simply 'raining' but the structure of our language is such that it has to be expressed in those terms. — Wayfarer

It's obvious; the sky rains.

The way I have come to understand it is that there are domains of discourse within which words derive their meaning. — Wayfarer

You're leaving out half of the picture: it's not just domains of discourse, but the domains of experience which give the domains of discourse sense. You cannot have a language game without the commonality of experience that provides something to talk about.