So, I'm saying that the shared experience of a common world is fundamental, — Janus

You mean "world", or unwelt? And so the noumenal - analytically - falls outside that phenomenology? It is the division that is fundamental, even if the division ain't usually experienced?

And also, it can only be fundamental in the sense of being fundamental to a particular level of semiosis, a particular community united by a common system of sign?

On the basis of this I reject the idea that the self and the world are socially constructed fictions, — Janus

Well, the self certainly is. A linguistic community is fundamental to the production of a linguistic self. And some kind of semiotic community is the shaper of any kind of selfhood.

These are in fact the consequences of your own first move - the one where you say the shared is what is fundamental. The self must emerge from that, if you are correct.

I of course make it easier by saying that co-emergent is in fact what is fundamental. It all begins with a symmetry-breaking or division. However you are taking the substantialist view that existence begins with something being already definite. You are calling that "experience" at the moment.

There must also be something fundamental to human experience which is wordless and cannot be captured in terms of signs at all. — Janus

Sure. But your problem is that we become human through language and its narrative framing. That is how we can even get to a position to wonder what "wordless experience" would be like. By which time it is too late. And it is only going to be make worse once you start using poetical social constructs about oceanic feelings, or whatever else you have picked up in your cultural wanderings and drugged states.

Are you wanting to ask a kind of "chicken and egg" question? Do signs constitute experience in a kind of 'atomic' sense? Or does the holistic sign relation constitute experience? If anything I would have to say the latter, and that the evolution of the sign relation just is the evolution of experience. neither is prior to the other, in fact they are coterminous; the sign relation just is experience; although looked in the abstract as distinctly different things, they are each impossible without the other. — Janus

Now you are talking of co-arising like me. There are atomistic and holistic aspects to it. And they complement each other because one constructs and the other constrains.

But you are still trying to ontologise experience as a substance of some kind. It is the thing that evolves.

My position is semiotic. Experience is what it is like to be modelling the world in the fashion a brain does. It doesn't need further explanation. We can just ask how could it not feel like something to be in that kind of modelling relation?

So the focus of the explanation is the "how" of the modelling relation itself. And this is analysed as the development of systematic and purposeful habits of interpretance based on the construction of "worlds of sign", or lived umwelts. The habits and the signs co-arise as two parts of the model - exactly in the way that theory and measurement have become the epistemically formalised basis of scientific semiotic models of the world.

Brains are already developing theories and taking measurements to generate your "brute experience". It is the same semiotic process. Just coded in genes and neurons, rather than words and numbers.

Although as said above I don't think this entails that everything about our experience can be adequately captured by any form of language, the closest would be its evocation by the arts. — Janus

Of course. Your argument has to reach your favoured conclusion. There is little point me commenting on that. Art is just straightforwardly the social construction of selfhood. That is not even disguised.

Do you have an actual argument? Can you point to an error of fact or reason here? Or does your entire critique rest on the claim that my position is "so funny," You are entitled to your sense of humor, I to my facts and analysis. — Dfpolis

You don't have to try to answer the challenge I've set for your position. If you can't see the incoherence of talking about the data of self-awareness when claiming to have got beyond dualism, it's not my problem.

The point is that the very idea of there being operations of symbolic signs, which rely entirely upon convention, entails that there is a shared world of experience; "our world", in other words. Without that the advent of symbolic signs would be impossible. — Janus

Exactly right. But that is the analytic view of how to understand experience.

You were talking about where epistemology has to start. And I would agree that it is with "brute unanalysed experience" experience ... whatever that then means from some subsequent properly derived, fully analysed, internalist understanding.

So the fact of semiosis would be what ensures a commonality of umwelts. To the extent we seem to understand each other via a common system of sign, we will be of the same mind, share the same experiential being. We can safely impute that of other beings.

And thus I know my cat has a mind to the extent that we can communicate. Likewise other humans. And conversely, not trees or rocks so much.

But what do we then say about "experience" itself, now looking back from a more informed semiotic viewpoint.

Well Peirce for one did try to say something, and even develop that explicitly as a triadic logic.

I give up.

Is that tree over there part of your “we”? What about that rock?

If you are claiming experience as fundamental, you are already making a fundamental distinction. The conceptual claims have started.

Do I have to point out you are already assuming there is a “we” that experience. So without being able to experience that I experience, you seem ready to take that for granted as a known fact. You have already divided experience into experiencers (plural) and experienced worlds.

You have a theory about how things are. And also of course, the notion of the evidence that rightfully sustains that belief.

So how you are progressing is exactly as I have described.

My approach is internalist, not externalist. So I don't claim to get beneath, or outside, or otherwise achieve some actually transcendent perspective on experience ... or "experience".

That is what makes a semiotic approach so epistemically consistent with its ontological claims. I'm surprised you haven't figured that out yet.

There is only one reality. If you would reflect on it, you would find that your mind is not only aware of the elephant you are seeing, but the fact that you are seeing it. If you find this puzzling, simply accept it as a contingent fact of reality. — Dfpolis

It is just so funny how you repeat the standard comforting formula of words as if they could make sense.

There is "me" who sees "my mind", and even sees the "me" seeing its "mind". And what is this mind seeing. Why, its "the world". Or no. In fact its sees the one reality. Or is that "the one reality", given that reality is whatever any mind happens to make of it? I mean "it".

If it does not fit your theory, then your theory does not fit the facts. — Dfpolis

Ah, "the facts". The signs, the acts of measurement, the particulars, that attest to a theory not being false. Or at least not useless for the purpose that "I" had "in mind".

Pfft

I'm not sure that's relevant? — Posty McPostface

Oh for fuck's sakes. :yawn:

OK, I'm still lost. — Posty McPostface

Well how do you think social organisation develops? Give us your version.

I don't quite see how this applies to the topic though. Care to elaborate — Posty McPostface

I explained. Symmetry breaking breaks the symmetry of spinning on the spot to produce the local~global asymmetry of hierarchical organisation.

Instead of self-referential circularity, you have the mutual-referentiality of a hierarchically divided organisation. One scale represents the extreme long-term, the other the extreme short-term.

And so that maps to typical social structure. There is some general framework of expectations. There is some set of detailed actions that make sense within that context.

I don't see that I can make it any plainer.

What's an asymmetry of a dichotomy? — Posty McPostface

The division into the local and the global, the particular and the general, is a prime example.

Having two extremes of the one thing - scale - is to break a symmetry so as to create an asymmetry. A fundamental lop-sidedness.

It is the same when talking about constraints vs freedoms. They are both the same thing - causes. But having been divided into the global vs the local, they look completely different. They are the asymmetric opposite of each other. Or more carefully said, each other's reciprocal.

I wouldn't always trust Wikipedia... — Damir Ibrisimovic

I thought it would do you for a start. There are plenty of more detailed journal articles you could browse.

I would like to ask, when does a question become, indeed, systematically inchoate, and how do we come about knowing this? — Posty McPostface

I don't agree that the situation is so hopelessly circular. Instead - if you believe in the intelligibility of self-organised systems - the situation is the organic symmetry breaking one that I am always describing. You can escape spinning on a spot via the asymmetry of a dichotomy. You create intelligible structure by heading towards a self-consistent hierarchical organisation. A separation into the local and the global.

So take the question of how we ought to live. Of course this is actually about the most difficult of all as we are still inventing that answer as humans. We are changing our global story so fast - our general social, cultural, economic and ecological environment - that we can't expect to have settled down to some firm view on the fine detail of what that all means in terms of our schedule for the day.

Yet still, sociology tells us broadly that humans evolve a hierarchical organisation that gives direction to their particular actions. In every moment, there is some general sense of what you are all about as an expression of your system of civilised people. A functioning community.

Importantly, the general aspect of a system only constrains or shapes local actions. It doesn't prescribe in rule bound fashion.

As the actor, you in fact could do bloody anything at any time. You could have an epileptic fit and truly be in a spasm of trying to do everything at once, as randomly as possible. But if we are talking of ourselves as evolved social creatures with in fact fairly organised tendencies already, then we at least start on a balanced pro-social yet also self-interested footing. And then responding to the constraints of our social and ecological setting, we will creatively work out how best to express what we understand of the general goals of "a civilised person".

So the systems view already is based on constraints and freedoms. Co-operation and competition. Law and creativity/spontaneity. These are the complementary global and local bounds that together are meant to produce a story of generally functional behaviour. The social system exists because it is divided in a way that maintains a creative self-organising state of development and adaptation.

Of course, as a small cog in the machine, it often ain't easy to figure it out. As I say, we have created a world where the global constraints are changing at an accelerating pace.

But still, that doesn't mean we have to spin on the spot in circular self-referential fashion. In practice, we all try to form bubbles of social relations within which our actions can make sense. Whether that is as a gamer, a Samaritan, a parent, or whatever. We are seeking the rules of those small worlds - their general codes of behaviour, their general reasons for being - so as to play a creative part in maintaining those worlds as a self-organised thing.

So the same dynamic is always the case. It starts with a separation into the particular and the general. One is the creative freedom of some local act. The other is the constraint of the larger purpose or social form that it can serve.

When the two dovetail nicely, we feel our lives are in a state of flow. It all works harmoniously.

When our lives are not like that, then that is when we have to figure something out. Understanding that it is all about natural hierarchical organisation becomes a help at that stage.

Even physicists accept that wavicles (WAVe/partICLEs) are unique with infinite sets of differences. — Damir Ibrisimovic

Wavicles are one of those happy classical concepts - a convenient way to gloss over the issues.

Quantum theory in fact relies on the indistinguishability, or identicality, of particles to explain their "weird" statistics - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_particles

So until an observational point of view is actually imposed, a pair of entangled particles are in the identical state described by their wavefunction.

When it comes to Leibniz's principle of the identity of indiscernibles, reality turns out to be more interesting. :)

However, the finite set of similarities cannot disguise the fact that there is an infinity of differences. — Damir Ibrisimovic

It all then comes back to the point of view that might make it matter.

Two apples are the same if they both meet our purpose of having a bit of fruit to eat.

At the supermarket, those two apples might be different if one is bruised and small. We would have good reason to be more particular. But if we have been starved for days, then one apple becomes as good as the other.

So judgements are contextual. They embody a purpose, a point of view, that makes sense of the world ... to us.

Now we can then imagine the more objective view of the world. That is what we routinely do in philosophy or science. We start talking about the disinterested observer, the view from nowhere, that reduces reality to some mindless set of "facts".

From that point of view, it is common to say that every difference matters as every difference is a potential fact - a bit of information, a difference that makes a difference. So there is no good reason to ignore any potential difference and accept any two things as the same. There will always be some possible view of reality in which the difference might happen to matter.

The good scientist or metaphysician wants to leave that question open. Differences become differences in themselves, not differences that exist, or don't exist, from some particular point of view.

As you know, that view of reality works great until it doesn't. And once we strike quantum physics, it really doesn't. It breaks down fundamentally. The world is no longer infinitely divisible. It has a finite definite information content. Only so much difference can be actual. And also every difference is contextual. It takes an "observer" to produce a difference in a definite counterfactual fashion.

But oh well. It takes more that actual facts about nature to shake people out of a formal classical conception of reality.

Anyway, there is your answer. There are differences that matter and then differences that don't ... given some point of view.

And then even from our most objective description of nature - the quantum one - there turns out to be a physical limit on difference. Infinite variety is not possible in actuality. Nor is escaping the essential contextuality of any notion of physically objective differentiation.

It is a good question because it reveals the shortcomings of the standard classical viewpoint in metaphysics, or even mathematics.

You have shown me no connection between my understanding that we know the world from a unique perspective, and the possibility of performing counting and/or measuring operations on all that we know. — Dfpolis

Hah. Your replies depend on such diligent misrepresentation of my arguments that it is pointless pushing them further.

But note that I was very careful to distinguish between a biological level of semiosis (the animal mind), a social level of semiosis (ordinary language), and a metaphysical or scientific level of semiosis (involving formal logical models)

So of course the nature of a sign or act of measurement is quite different at each of these levels. But the general mechanism is the same.

If we talk about an elephant, we are cutting across all these levels. There is of course the elephant as it would be perceptually for any speechless animal - like a fly, a lion, your cat, another elephant.

Humans, as primates with three cone colour vision, would be privileged in seeing the elephant was grey and not red. So we could talk about the specificities of our biological umwelt in that regard. There are some measurements of reality that our evolved neurology is equipped to make, and yet not others.

Then of course, we have also our linguistic and logical levels of discourse about "elephants" as objects of the world. Now you might understand me to be talking about elephants when I point to some statue or mention "Dumbo".

Or in a more formal and scientific setting, you might suddenly see a world of difference between Loxodonta cyclotis and Elephas maximus. Some fool ordinary person might call both "just an elephant" - being generically that. But you would be alert to the particular signs that mark a distinction between two very separate breeding populations. As a scientist, you will know how a logical structuring of your perception results in you literally seeing a different world than before. You see things "properly" when it comes to natural phenomena, in contrast to the ill-educated layman you were just before.

So you can't escape the fact that all mind is modelling. It is a business of reading off a self-centred understanding of the world. And all we need to know is what immediate signs tally with our long-run habits of interpretance. We are organised to comprehend reality as a set of measurements.

Is there an elephant in the room? I can't see one, but I can smell one. There is enough of a sign that I perhaps ought to keep looking.

But it seems - your presentation is confusing - that you are happy to collapse this triadic psychological process to a dualistic mysticism. That pretends to be a monistic direct perception. We look and we see the data that is there. Even when we look at our own "minds". It ain't qualia - perceptual signs conceived meta-cognitively as just that. The mind has just regressed in familiar homuncular fashion, curled deeper into its snail shell, and it is surprised to find there is an internal world along with an external world.

But what world is this "mind" now in that it can see both inwards and outwards? And so the nonsense continues.

Kevin robs a bank, consciously he is doing it for the money but unbeknownst to him he is institutionalised and subconsciously he wants to return to prison. — JupiterJess

Or Kevin robs a bank because that is his usual way to support himself - it is a habit that makes sense to him at some level - and also because if it results in returning to prison, he wouldn't mind. He is such a screw-up that having all his choices made for him in an institution seems better in some ways.

So even if I buy your scenario, we are talking about a spectacularly bad example of life choices. Not a typical person. And even then, it just reflects a conflict that isn't sufficiently conflicting for the person. Steal money to live or live in prison. Both probably have there upsides and downsides. This dude simply isn't figuring out a better path in life. He is just lapsing back into his habitual alternatives and isn't using his attention and planning to work himself towards some better choice of habits.

A person needs to know their own intent to be morally responsible in a legal sense after all. — JupiterJess

Sure. It takes critical thinking skills to construct an acceptable self-narrative. But of course people can also "fool themselves". If you are trained from an early age to have to give an account of your actions, then you also learn the game of saying the right things and covering up the bits that might be shameful or unacceptable.

So what you tell the world also tends to be what you come to believe yourself. Especially if you are being cornered on the truth of your story. In reality, our decision making is more impulsive and haphazard much of the time. Life itself is not a clear-cut thing. But the nature of the moral game is that we are expected to be able to tell a tale of self-justification. It doesn't have to be actually true, just believed. And it is at its most convincing if we come to believe it ourselves.

This is probably why there are tons of Libet threads here and other philosophy forums because the experiment has the implication that the subconscious mind is making the decisions and the conscious mind is being fed lies/illusions. — JupiterJess

Sure. His work seems to slot neatly into that myth. But it just simply takes time to assemble a clear attentional state of thought. So the early stages are going to be unconscious. All the bits are still falling into place. Every time you launch into your next sentence, you have a general sense of intent, a point to make, and then the fully formed words start to spill out of your mouth.

So attention and habits go together in integrated fashion. What is attentional is the novel bit of your next speech act - some briefly glued together point of view or orientation. Some angle on life or an argument has just caught your mind. You want to comment on that. And from there, your habits of speech take over and flesh the vague impulse out, turning it into an articulate flow of words.

The first time what you actually are going to say becomes consciously reportable - themselves a possible focus of your attentional processes - is as your brain broadcasts the actual motor image involved.

If you are going to say "Libet" next, your whole brain has to know to expect that to be a vocal action. The feeling that your lips will purse in a particular way, a certain noise will be heard, all has to be communicated across the brain so that you won't be weirded out to find this stuff happening. It won't feel like an alien has taken over your body. You will know that it was "you" who made a decision to speak. It's called reafference or forward modelling. You can tell what's "you" and what's "world" because you are expecting every sensation that is the result of something you are in the process of ordering.

So all this talk of conscious vs subconsious is just a very crude way to describe the hierarchical complexity of a working brain. Once you get under the covers, every action we take has to brew up over time and also involves both attentional and habitual processing. And because we are so good at forward modelling - operating on an anticipatory basis - we don't really notice any temporal gaps.

We think we experience things exactly as they happen. Which is impossible. It takes a tenth of a second just for a nerve message to travel from the eye or ear to the brain. It takes half a second to integrate a state of attentional focus across the whole brain.

But hypnagogia is the process from wakefulness to sleep. — JupiterJess

Right. But look closely at your dreams. They are exactly those kinds of images. They seem to be full of movement, and yet in fact they are just frozen snapshots. We have a sense of panning and swirling - a sense of normal flow. But the image isn't actually in motion.

When we fall asleep, and the brainstem gates all sensation, we have hypnagogic imagery because an anticipation-based brain tries to fill in for the missing world. Standard sensory deprivation. But because we are falling asleep, these first images have no narrative. They are really random.

Later at night, as we are roused by REM state, now we try to do the habitual thing of understanding these images as a running story. And that chase after meaning does start to drive the narrative. One image does connect to the next in a rough associative fashion. We are jogging the story along in trying to create one.

But it is still just hypnagogic imagery. Look close and you will see it has that same character.

Freud's dream interpretation was more or less what was written in the Bible where dreams are symbols and have to be decoded by a conscious mind. — JupiterJess

Freud was such a con. Of course if the story is that every dream has a hidden meaning, then you can find a hidden meaning in every dream. Who could prove you wrong? If I dream of standing on the heaving deck of an aircraft carrier, or going down a maze of stairs, I must be fantasising about screwing my mother, or father, or whatever. The fact I am bloody certain that I am not is all the evidence Freud needs to prove that I am.

So looking for secret meaning in dreams is a mug's game. It is just scrambled brain activity being prodded along by a narrative self, hoping to make sense of a state of sensory deprivation.

Again, you have to ask why we have come to frame our mental activities in this particular fashion - as some fraught drama of a consciously responsible self living alongside a wayward or subversive unconscious self?

Clearly it is a mythology that serves a useful social purpose. If we can teach people anything - in the effort to make them "civilised members of society" - it is that they know what they should do, but at any moment, without constant vigilance, they could let themselves down by letting their subconscious get out of hand.

It is the means of control. It is a habit of framing we learn. But it ain't good neuroscience. Or even good psychology.

Yes, but it comes down to the nuclear family, and those conditions. The best social environment doesn't matter if the nuclear family is dysfunctional. — Posty McPostface

In what sense would a best social environment have nuclear families? Isn't that a big part of the problem?

Besides, nuclear families have evolved to be atomic individuals. Today's kids probably look back fondly to when everyone sat around the dinner table eating the exact same food, spent the evening watching one of the three TV channels, or went for long Sunday drives in the countryside in the one family car.

Or probably not. :)

The cultivation of good traits, though, is highly individualistic, and hard to persuade otherwise. — Posty McPostface

You are very pessimistic. Social science tells otherwise. Moving to another country likewise.

I agree, but, if you ask my generation, the Millennial, they'll tell you that behaving selfishly is *ucked, and has lead to their current predicament or the predicament we will face in the future. Also, consumer behaviour is changing dramatically. People, on the grassroots scale, are more aware of the problem that climate change entails than on the macro scale, which is lagging as much as it can due to special interest groups and others. Besides, *it's the economy stupid*, that is changing minds. Electric vehicles are simply superior to gas powered automobiles. Solar panels, are *cool* and people want them. So, I would say that some semblance of a higher-order volition for the world is at play. At worst it's the economy working its magic in unseen ways. — Posty McPostface

Now you are very optimistic. I agree that this is all possible. But how do you explain Trump, for instance. The smarter we need to be, the dumber we are prepared to vote.

As for the unseen magic of the markets, the world has run off the road into the muddy ditch and is spinning its wheels with the accelerator rammed to the floor. Vast debt, zero interest rates. In a year, everywhere you know could be Venezuela.

Well, yes, because then we would not be reducing the noumenal to the physical world. — Janus

Not getting it. Making the distinction of the noumenal is agreeing that we can't reduce reality to some claim of "direct perception". And then my semiotic point is that we wouldn't even want to. The goal is to be able to ignore reality in practice. That is what carves out the space for us to impose "our" desires on nature.

So my focus is pragmatic. It is not about exhaustive knowledge but effective control.

The problem with "knowledge" as a goal is that it lacks an obvious intentional point. So pragmatism starts by admitting the aim of a mind is to achieve things in the world. Control already builds in intentionality in a way that knowing doesn't.

But I don't see the world and the self as products of the imagination, but rather as products of nature. — Janus

Right. The self~world distinction - the epistemic cut of an unwelt - does arise directly out of nature. That is the definition of an organism - the evolution of life and mind.

But now we are humans engaged in metaphysical-level semiosis - modelling that employs the language of maths, logic and measurement. And it is how that very high level view, one that aims to be generically objective, which is talking metaphysically about "selves" and "worlds".

So humanity has evolved semiotically to the point where we are doing this. And it has some use. It is how we have been constructing a cultural and technological level of organism. The Noosphere even.

Ultimately we have to still live in a biological and physical reality. We are constrained by all that. But it is at least thinkable that we can pass through the technological Singularity and launch some further level of semiotic beasthood - the Matrix or some other god-awful cyber-reality.

So of course all this is the product of nature in an ultimate sense. Again, that is what pan-semiosis would claim. It is nature all the way down, and all the way up.

But we have actually constructed the era of the machine. And we can't be sure what kind of umwelt that is going to evolve as part of its nature.

Another reason for wanting a well-developed theory of these things.

I don't see a significant difference between this and Whitehead's notion of prehension, and the pan-experientialism which has grown out of it. (But let's not become embroiled in that argument again; I only mention it in response to your referring to his purported "pan-psychism" again a few posts ago). — Janus

I'm happy to debate the difference any time.

Well, self-love is almost entirely self cultivated. — Posty McPostface

Most psychologists would say it is down to a loving childhood environment. It is only the lack of that means you would have to make an effort on your own.

I take it you live in some Scandinavian country? — Posty McPostface

The Scandinavia of the South Pacific. :)

Not actually paradise. But still a very good place for bringing up kids.

I don't quite know how malleable are passions and desires, through reasoning to them. — Posty McPostface

You don't argue with them. You construct suitable habits that give them useful employment. It is a process of domestication - if you want to view them as untamed animals. You want to get them accustomed to the harness that is going to give them direction, make use of their energy ... to continue with a bad psychological analogy.

Care to expand on that last part a little more? — Posty McPostface

I've argued the case to the point of most folk's boredom. To understand our modern condition, you have to look at how life exists to maximise entropy production. And so modern technological humans are nature's answer to the problem of vast reserves of energy-dense fossil carbon that requires burning.

We are that kind of society - one burning up a planet - for a very good reason. So it shouldn't be surprising that any sensible response to climate change keeps getting derailed by politics.

We need to be thinking really selfishly to continue the way we are behaving. And so that is the culture we have created. One that ensures we won't suddenly turn nutty and green.

But, a higher-order volition seems to be something else in some manner. Speaking of falling in love or being a good citizen or such, aren't reflexive attitudes towards reality; but, wholly self-cultivated. Thus, them being of a higher-order. Self-love is perhaps, as per Harry Frankfurt, the highest of volitions one can have. — Posty McPostface

Are they wholly self-cultivated? They are supposedly top of the national school curriculum where I live. They are a basis of a healthy education and a healthy society.

So sure, there are higher order thoughts about our desires. But it is constructing that conscious hierarchy that is point. It is a basic skill we need to learn. And schools are meant to institutionalise that.

Well, having read some of Frankfurt's works, he does talk about self love, being the highest-order volition that one can attain. — Posty McPostface

Loving your fellow humans and a shared environment also seem pretty important. Self-love would be part of the balanced mix.

Yes, the concept seems to have gotten exploited to some degree by society at large. — Posty McPostface

I think it is clear it has run out of control and taken on a life of its own. Society starts to exist for its own sake. Or worse yet, for the sake of a privileged elite.

But it is hard to push social democracy once a muddled philosophy of the human condition has become as pervasive in popular global culture as it has.

It would seem better then to say that the idea of the physical world is really a reduction of the noumenal to a habit of meaning. — Janus

Was there a difference?

I would further modify what you say and call self and world fictive rather than fictional, since they have their roots in reality, but are not real in the sense we might think when we hypostatize them — Janus

Again, is there a difference that matters? If fictional is specific to the literary, then fictive is perhaps more suitably general in being a product of the imagination. But it seems like hair splitting.

Should I be offended? — Janus

Sorry, I couldn't resist that little joke.

So, it would seem that, for you, intentionality in it's inorganic guise is entropy, and in its organic guise is negentropy, and the same may be said for formal/final causation? — Janus

Intentionality would be the negentropy - organic or inorganic. Even energy has stuff it is itching to do.

So what would match that in a double aspect or dichotomous fashion would be uncertainty - an indecision of some fundamental kind. And entropy is the uncertainty of a state of material disorder or unpredictability.

Meaningfulness is then a low entropy/high information condition. A negentropic or intentional state.

Confusingly of course, Shannon information is defined in exactly the opposite terms. It is defined in terms of entropy or fundamental degrees of freedom - a capacity for nature to surprise you and confuse any intentions you might have had.

So information now means its exact opposite - meaningless syntactical variety.

And yet that's fair because entropy is how you wind up justifying that you can completely specify the state of a complicated system, like a gas of a gazillion particles, just by knowing a couple of critical numbers, such as a temperature and a pressure reading.

So lift the covers of the scientific modelling and the two-facedness of it all can be seen. We have to construct an image of the ultimately meaningless so as to have a backdrop against which to measure the "other" of the ultimately meaningful.

Newton had a backdrop in space and time. That foregrounded the "other" of a located event.

Modern physics is now reinventing itself using just information/entropy as a generalised backcloth - one on which even space and time, along with energy, can emerge as the locally measureable.

So that is what I mean about folding mind into the physics. The unification of information and entropy, the atoms of form and the atoms of matter, means that this new metaphysical backcloth is ready and waiting to host all your neuroscience, as well as all your physics. It is a backdrop so mathematically general that it allows a common approach to measurement to be taken to absolutely "everything".

Which is exactly what is happening with the Bayesian brain approach to theories about mental function.

So the usual notion of how mind science is suppose to work is that one day it would all be collapsed to a story of physics.

But no. Now - in a pan-semiotic or information theoretic approach - both physics and neuroscience are being collapsed back to a still deeper metaphysics. One that is beyond the old Cartesian dualism.

And, for metaphysical thinkers, this then becomes the new umwelt. When you look at minds or worlds, you see them as essentially the same thing - the same semiotic process.

This is certainly the great breakthrough Peirce made a hundred plus years ago now.

So, what is happening when we pause and reflect on an action before it is undertaken? Is there indeed some higher order volition operating in the background as we go by doing things? As if some narrator who wants to see things done in a certain way for some ultimate purpose? — Posty McPostface

I am saying this is the socially constructed aspect of human voluntary behaviour. We are taught that we have to be in charge of our every action. That then cashes out as learning to pay attention where that seems necessary.

So just for neurobiological reasons, we might pause and reflect when a situation is uncertain. If unthinking habit can't carry us safely through to our general goals, then we have to let attention try to figure out some plan. And be there ready constantly to keep stepping in as necessary.

Then as modern humans, expected to moderate all our desires and impulses within a framework of social judgement, we are meant to be always in attentional control of our choices - as we are always going to be held responsible for them under prevailing laws and custom.

So a narrator is us standing in for society inside our heads, running everything through that cultural filter.

An exhausting business, eh? :grin:

I think there is some truth to there being a higher-order volition if everyone's mind that guides us through life. Would you agree with that assessment? — Posty McPostface

My view is that this higher-order of choosing is the social one. And that is still so even when modern culture is supposedly all about the celebration of the self-actualising individual.

You can regard it as society's cleverest manipulative trick. There are ways you should behave as that is what is functional at a social level of human evolution. And the best way to get you to behave like that is to get you to own the responsibility.

You know you have "freewill" and so could always act anti-socially. And in having such a sharp sense of what that would be like, you can then safely choose the pro-social path on the whole (that is, in a balanced fashion where your needs are also being served, as they should if society matters a damn).

So I definitely don't see any higher order volition in the sense of tapping into some hidden better self that lies beyond our ugly animal impulses. That is Romanticism.

But also, that Romantic model of the self is exactly the one which has evolved as the best way to sell pro-social modern behaviour. It maximises our individual competitive freedoms within a restraining framework of social co-operation.

So we are taught to believe this myth about the nature of human individuality. We are actually socially constructed creatures. But believing we are completely responsible for all our own successes and failures in life is the way to produce the modern citizen, completely at home in a striving, neo-liberal, self-reliant, upwardly mobile and consumerist world ...

... hey, wait a minute! ...

Yep. The idea certainly would be.

That is why I would accept a restriction on knowing the noumenal. But indeed I go further. I am saying the umwelt is a kind of double fiction. It contains both the self and the world as its double aspect.

When I see that yellow flower, the yellow is the sign that there is a physical world ... for the mental "me".

And now that we can conceive of the physical world in terms of quantities of information, we are extrapolating that semiosis of signs to make it foundational to our ontology. The world itself is understood in this Janus two-faced fashion. The self~world distinction - where self stands for some individuated point of view - is reduced to make it the way we understand the world in general.

Of course, it is still all just ideas - our usefully organised impressions, the tale we tell to form an umwelt. But it offers a neat resolution - one that is dual aspect without slipping into the pan-psychic.

Reality itself can be regarded pan-semiotically as a system of signs. It is formed by its own reductive development of intelligible habits - it's laws or other regularities that frame every event as confirmation of some generalised intent.

So as I say, both "mind" and "world" can only be constructs. The "physical world" is our useful fiction - the one that makes most sense in opposition to that other useful fiction of "the conscious mind".

But then, it becomes something when physics itself starts to embrace that semiotic twist and begin to measure the world in terms of atoms of form rather than atoms of matter. Information or entropy? These are now just two sides of the same coin - the one basic Planckian unit of reality measurement.

So that little move secures the scientific self in a completely objective description. A neat new trick.

Well actually, the job ain't done yet. The major chunks of theory - quantum mechanics in particular - can't formalise the definition of "the observer" in the way they have formalised "the observables".

And yet even here, huge progress is being made. You now have a decoherence version of QM - one with thermal statistical mechanics bolted on - which allows the "environment" to replace the "experimenter" in the effective collapse of a wavefunction.

Again, there is still the huge problem that decoherence just spreads out the uncertainty so it becomes completely diffused - without actually being collapsed. However it is still scientific progress. And recent turns in quantum interpretation keep becoming more overtly semiotic.

So the brain forms a rather particular view of the physical world - an umwelt that is useful for decoding reality in terms of a universe of "medium sized dry goods". We know from psychology that it is all an interpretation, a system of sign, and not the thing-in-itself. Qualia like yellowness mediate a relation between a "mental me" and a "material object" - both aspects of this being useful fictions of thought.

Having grasped the semiotic nature of experience, we can then push that back towards the reality we seek to experience in more true and naked fashion. And surprisingly perhaps, that is not some crazy random move. It turns out to work amazingly well. It fixes physicalism by giving back some of the essential stuff that went missing - like intentionality or formal/final cause.

I think the discussion has always been whether or not the subconscious mind/ habitual/ the autonomic has intentional mental content in competition or subduing with the conscious/attentional mind. — JupiterJess

You mean Freud played on Romanticism to turn it into a "scientific" theory?

The Romantic movement did dramatise a conflict between self and society - how the needs of the one suppresses the desires of the other.

And then late 18th century psychology began to reveal the difference between habitual and attentional processes. The mind more generally was shown to be the result of twitching nerve fibres.

Freud then packaged these various influences in his tripartite model of superego, ego and id. The idea that we live a life of deeply repressed animal urges - which coincidentally happens to be also the source of our wild creative inspirations, the spiritual best of us - was an easy one to sell.

But it was always bad science. The brain didn't evolve to be basically split. It is divided into attentional and habitual level processing so as to benefit from that clear division of labour. And the benefit comes from the two then working together in an accord that "flows".

The best example I have of a sort of competition is that in dreams the subconscious mind (whatever you want to call it) subjects the attentional mind to weird experiences it isn't requesting. — JupiterJess

The problem with sleep is you can't actually turn the brain off. If neurons stop firing, they would be dead. And so they fire all night, even though there is nothing to do except rest and repair, consolidate memories and newly acquired habits.

So the attentional aspect of the brain is still on. But it can't function normally as there is a general desynchronisation of activity. It is turned off as much as is possible.

In dreaming sleep, the brain is aroused to waking levels, but still has no external stimulation. Both sensory input and motor output is gated at the brainstem. So the brain is awake in a state of complete sensory deprivation. And that causes it to generate anticipatory imagery - randomly associative hypnagogic images. Conscious scenes that replace each other every half second of so like a series of disconnected movie frames.

Our narrative self - our habit of trying to pursue the events of life in terms of a coherent thread - is then left trying to catch up with this random phantasmagoria.

So yes. There is then a disconnection. The perceptual brain is awake enough to be doing its thing - striving to anticipate what the world ought to look like in the next instant. But that perceptual habit is not connected to the actual world, so just throws up a meaningless succession of wild guesses.

And then our narrative self is also awake enough to be doing its thing of trying to tell a coherent story about what it is experiencing. Which is difficult when no two images have anything more than a tenuous associative connection.

So it is not hard to explain the phenomenology of dreams in terms of how the brain would normally hang together during normal waking. You get exactly what you would expect when the brain as a whole is unplugged from the world, yet still continues to try to fill in for a world that has gone missing.

And, you can offer no a posteriori reason because your methodological dogmatism prevents you form considering, let alone judging, the data of self-awareness. — Dfpolis

The reason would be that I have studied the relevant neuroscience and psychology. Self-awareness is a cultural meta-skill, a gift of language. And so all its "data" is socially constructed. That is the place I would start on that subject.

Our intentions occur in, and are part of, the natural world. — Dfpolis

Sure. I'm all for an embodied, ecological, enactive, etc, approach to neurocognition. But that is what underwrites a semiotic understanding of the issues. The natural world for us is an umwelt - a system of meaningful sign.

So on the one hand, our perceptions are always embedded in an active modelling relation with the world - the noumenal thing-in-itself. There is always that necessary aboutness or intentionality. But still, the mind is the product of forming that model of the world. The phenomenal is the other side of the relation. We experience our own umwelt - our experience of a world with "us" in it.

There is an irreducible complexity here. A triadic Peircean story.

And that is why I stress the necessity of being able to cash out any concept in acts of measurement. There always has to be a percept that answers the case in terms of a "fact". The aboutness is really about the umwelt we form as our sign of the world. It reflects all that we could afford to ignore by way of information - the entirety of the entropic physicality of the world - so as to construct an interpretation in terms of personalised meanings.

Look, I see an elephant. It is grey. It is angry.

A chaos of physical possibility has just been reduced to a collection of signs that have meaning for me. Indeed, I am "me" because there is that point of view which forms exactly that set of signs in response to some chaos of physical possibility.

So what I was after was some proper definition of intentionality from you to support your case. Talk of the "data of self-awareness" suggests you are way off the mark.

But I guess in mentioning data you accept that all generalities must be cashable in terms of their particulars. If we have an idea of a quality, then we must be able to quantify that in the sense of point to some sign, citing some particular act of perception or measurement.

I say the elephant is grey. You say look closer. You see more colour, more shades. I shrug and say "gray enough" from where I stand.

The satisfaction of theories are always negotiable. But the way that claims are satisfied is a standard epistemic process.

I have said intentionality is not a quantity and therefore not measurable. — Dfpolis

And what I said was that intentionality is a quality. A general conception. And qualities are only intelligible to the degree they can be particularised or quantified.

You can't actually have a clear conception of something - like intentionality - unless you can point to its specific located examples. That is how intelligibility works. Induction from the particular to the general and then deduction from the general back to the particular again.

If "intentionality" is an intelligible construct, you will be able to present the specific instances which support the general case - the acts of measurement which make sense of the claims of the theory.

I have pointed out that the act of seeing an apple, for example, not only gives us data about the apple (as objective object), but also about ourselves (subjective object) -- for example that we can see, be aware, direct our attention, etc. None of this involves "feels." So please spare me the typical physicalist pap. — Dfpolis

As I say, I fully endorse that enactive, embodied, etc, approach to cognition. I've studied it for many years. I agree that our subjective self is what emerges along with the objective world as the result of there being that modelling relation in place at an organismic level of semiosis.

But when you talk of the data of self-awareness, this is the meta-cognitive stuff that folk often refer to as an abstracted notion of selfhood. This is where the dualism normally starts - the mind becoming something actually separate from the view it is taking.

Again, there is the bit in the middle. The umwelt. And it anchors a state of interpretation. The dualistic error is to see the umwelt as the actual noumenal world being presented to a self, making that self now also its own mentalistic thing.

Our percepts are already only a self-interested system of signs. They are a reduction of the physical world to habits of meaning. And a selfhood is imputed because the habits establish a persisting regularity to a point of view. We can always find "ourselves" in the self-interested logic of that perceptual umwelt.

So I was asking how your concept of intentionality can navigate that enactive understanding of psychology. If you actually do take an ecological and embodied view as you say, then you ought to find it natural that intentionality can be quantified. You would be happy to point to the particular signs that it exists as a general fact of some kind.

As I pointed out above, you have made no case reducing "meaningfulness" to measurability. — Dfpolis

Perhaps now I have. :)

Conflicting desires absolutely, but that doesn't necessarily imply a natural hierarchy or a seperate desire to resolve conflicts. — ChatteringMonkey

Why wouldn't a hierarchy be the natural form here?

If we take brains to be about making smart decisions (on the whole), then desires will generally be adaptive states with known benefits. Over the long run, we would learn to like what is best for us. And I mean this over both evolutionary and developmental timescales.

So we would start from the point of view that our desires are usually correct or functional at some level.

Of course drug-taking stands out as something which cuts across an evolved and generally well-adapted neurobiology. It hits the reward button for no good reason. Or - more functionally - it offers a way to escape what we desire to escape and find difficult to escape.

But anyway. To get back to more normal life choices, the brain would naturally be organised hierarchically so as to weigh desires in best balanced ways. And a key dimension to this would be to be able to balance short term gain against long term gain. Even a cat stalking a bird has to be able to regulate its impulses. It must sneak up carefully rather than rush headlong from the start.

Intelligent behaviour is about being able to manage a hierarchy of action. The further off the goal, the more steps it has to take to get there. A bigger brain allows that kind of organised thinking.

The orbitofrontal cortex in particular is an area that allows us to construct a hierarchy of desire, focusing on the eventual outcome of following a path of actions. It can damp the urgent signals coming from the amydala and other emotional structures, balancing an immediate desire to react (like get out of this burning building) with a counter-desire created at a more general level (well I'm a firefighter here to do my job).

So the brain itself is hierarchically organised. It is designed so that mostly it works in harmony. Our immediate instincts and our general life goals are in accord enough that we can just go with the flow. We don't have to wrestle with any dilemmas.

But also, life quite naturally needs to be broken down into the immediate steps to reach some eventual goal. The larger the brain, the greater the distance there can be between the two. And there is plenty of scope for conflicts that need to be balanced. If you are crossing a river, the desire to get to the other side needs to be balanced against a rising feeling that it is rather faster and deeper than you first thought. Sometimes, if not often, the immediate does have to win out. That has to be part of the neurology too.

And all that is just the neuroscience. Humans are also linguistic creatures. We are socialised to have habits of self-regulation. We learn the habit of talking out our goals and needs in a social light. This adds a whole other layer of complexity to volition. We find it quite easy to take on a cultural agenda and so frame our decisions in a social light where our actions will be judged.

The fire fighter doesn't run from the blaze because s/he IS a fire fighter. S/he has the training. And it is fire fighting school which has thought through the balance of when to stay, when to go. There is a clear intellectual overlay that shapes the neurobiology.

So human volition is structurally complex. It has both a neurobiology and a cultural overlay. But hierarchical organisation is very natural. Our choices need to be adaptive - the first order of business. But then that soon breaks down into what seems most adaptive right now, and what seems most adaptive in terms of long term goals. Volition gets polarised to have these two opposing focuses, so allowing them to be best balanced - that balancing being the higher order of desiring or choosing.

And again, mostly in life, our short and long term desires are in an adaptive balance. We have learnt that higher order state and can just go with its habitual flow. Conflict then reveals that the easy balance is absent. Volition breaks down into a starker choice between what is best right now, what is best long term.

So the hierarchical story would be that mostly we are desiring at a holistic meta level - the state which reflects a thoughtlessly habitual adaptation to live in terms of the immediate and the distant. The alarm goes. We just get out of bed, get to work on time. It is only when we stop to think "why?" that a conflict may be revealed, a habitual state of desire start to break down into competing impulses.

A hierarchy is a state of integrated differentiation. And so a desire gets broken down into the short term and the long term on its way to being integrated as some generalised and unthinking balance. But that higher level balance can always be decomposed into a conflict or dilemma again.

That is the great advantage of hierarchical design. You get both the integration and the differentiation, the harmony and the conflict, as the possibilities of the one processing structure.

It goes without saying that most of our mental processing, assemblage and filtering of sense data is done below the level of conscious awareness. — prothero

Yet also, every habit was once being learnt at a conscious - that is attentional - level.

So to use a bad computer analogy - computer analogies always being bad - the writing of the subconscious routines involve the full consciousness that allows their writing. But once written, they can be freely executed without that level of development and supervision.

So it is not that the conscious and subconscious are mysteriously divided - raising the question of how our automatic behaviour is so smart and aware. The neurocognitive story is about how consciousness (or attentional processing) is simply the front-end learning and development phase. The whole goal of the mind as a "processing system" is to turn the novel into the routine.

Again, this turns things on its head for most people where it is presumed that consciousness is the highest authority and ought to be in charge of all things.

No. It is the blundering baby level of cognition. The novice car driver. The newborn still discovering it has hands. :)

OK. A bit of an exaggeration. But the goal of the brain is streamlined action. The aim is to turn every action or decision into a thoughtless habit as far as possible. Clearing consciousness of all its responsibilities is the architectural task.

So understood in terms of brain function, it is not at all surprising that consciousness barely seems involved in running the show. But of course, understood in more usual folk psychology terms - especially because humans have the social demand for being consciously responsible for their behaviour - it does come as a neuroscientific surprise that reportable awareness is the blundering about, still searching for an answer, level of mental operation.

I think that why science is currently embroiled in what Jim Baggott calls 'fairytale physics' is precisely the complete and total absence of an 'immanent unity'. — Wayfarer

Well first, very little of science is currently embroiled in string theory or multiverse speculation. It's a small, if prestigious, field.

And second, you are now talking about physics having reached the edge of physical existence so far as it could possibly matter. If it ain't measurable, that means it ultimately can't make a difference what we say we believe. So you are simply accepting that physics has pretty much done its whole job of arriving at a single unifying theory of nature - so far as that was pragmatically possible.

You are complaining that physics has been so successful, the only place left to go is on into frank metaphysical speculation.

So the Baggotts of this world are complaining about an excessive exhuberance - at the tax-payers expense - for investing brains and money in "beyond the standard model" physics. Real scientists ought to get on with improving their models in other more immediately fruitful areas - like biology, psychology, or the humanities in general.

The complaint isn't that physics didn't in the end work or that it was running down the wrong track in its wedding of the rational and the empirical.

Don't you see the confusion of your position on this yet? You say Platonism is what its about, and then exhibit A for your claims of Scientism are all those physicists who say they are quite happy being Platonists if that is all that is left.

Baggott is the argument that empiricists use against that "too metaphysical" attitude. String theorists and multiverse speculators are being caned for abandoning empiricism for pure mathematical argument. So as something that is happening, it directly contradicts what you claim about the mindset of the scientist. It is your worst possible example. Yet you keep trotting it out.

Pierce, semiosis and signs also seems to be a rejection of nominalism. — prothero

It definitely rejects nominalism. But also Platonism.

The key psychological shift for me is to see that the general can be just as real as the particular ... because the particular ain't actually as real as nominalism pretends.

So it is the shift to a contextual view of existence where there are no ontic individuals - atoms of existence - just various relative states of individuation. Persisting regularities produced in the course of a larger process.

In the end, nothing just exists. It all emerges - form and matter. And so it is our notion of the real itself which gets deflated. Nothing qualifies for being real in a hard nominalist sense. Although nature can approach that kind of strong realisation with arbitrary closeness.

Admittedly, approaching it through Aristotle is actually an extremely cumbersome way of going about it, wrapped as it is in layers of often-confusing verbiage (hence my appreciation of Zen which cuts to the quick.) — Wayfarer

One of the mistakes would be to expect Aristotle to be giving a single dumbed down answer. He rather systematically explored the two key alternatives - reductionist atomism and holistic hylomorphism. So he remains relevant in that he attempted a complete working through of the metaphysical possibilities.

It was thought in action in his day. And the surprise is how little has changed in terms of how to frame the business of doing metaphysics.

But at the same time, I have come to realise that the fundamental conceptions of Platonist philosophy - form and substance, matter and causation, and many other basic ideas - were absolutely indispensable for the foundation of modern science, and, arguably, why science developed as it did in Europe, and not in India or China (which were aeons ahead of Europe two millennia ago). — Wayfarer

This is bollocks. Aristotle set the tone (as did Anaximander before him) by talking an immanent and self-organising view of nature. Both were strong on the observational basis of belief, even as they also stressed the ontological status of rational order in the cosmos. So the scientific worldview grew out of a rationality about actual nature.

Now mathematics was also significant in that it showed rationality itself could be understood as a science too - a science of patterns. So once metaphysics generalised nature in terms of parts in relations, it could make a clear distinction between material parts and formal relations. That was the right way to break nature apart so its essential workings could be modelled.

But you are conflating the usefulness of a science of patterns with a nascent dualism of mind and world. This was the distinctive religious turn taken by the Christian church as it adopted Platonism for its theistic metaphysics. The line was blurry when theism was not metaphysical. Folk just believed in a generalised undifferentiated animism. And then Platonism became the conceptual wedge to separate a rational soul from a corrupted world. It was a huge social con trick.

So science flows on from philosophical naturalism - the recognition that nature is divided into matter and form ... in some useful sense ... but is also still an immanent unity. Ancient Greek philosophy laid the rules of this game with Aristotle the pivotal figure in his ability to play off atomism against holism, as well as providing the "deep maths" of logic. He went beyond mere arithmetic and geometry.

Then Plato is who you gravitate towards if you are instead going in the other direction of seeking supernatural accounts of the human condition.

Nature isn't large enough to explain our wondrousness. We need a more transcendental justification for our Being! How else would we see things as they really are, just using our minds?

Of course, Plato himself was also more subtle, more willing to canvas the variety of metaphysical alternatives. But since we are dealing in caricatures here....

I simply wonder how much of his thinking is immediately relevant to any modern science. — tim wood

Do you then simply believe that it is distantly relevant? Could that be a thing?

But as a practicing attorney in a court case does not open - or close - his argument with a reading of Magna Carta, so I imagine that scientists do not consult their Aristotle to do their work. — tim wood

Again, who do you think would claim this is the case? Surely you realise that science - at its bleeding edge - is a matter of current peer review.

A lawyer would be able to appeal to precedent in fact. If some judge made a ruling, that would have to be followed or over-turned. It wouldn't matter how far back the precedent was established. But of course, society moves on, and so there are plenty of ancient rulings and laws on the books that would get knocked down pretty easily if brought to the attention of a contemporary peer review.

But for science, as it is actually in the process of being done, the very logic of a process of creative invention and discovery is to be able to place that work in its currently most meaningful context. You paint a very strange picture of doing science where practitioners would be consulting existing wisdom rather than trying to flag how they are rewriting the books by making a significant departure from that.

In practice, you have to demonstrate your relevance within some highly localised scientific conversation. There is some small community of peers. You are advancing that body of knowledge by asking its next natural question. So much more than a lawyer, you are directly addressing a contemporary audience who will all have a view. It is more equivalent to standing before the jury than poring over ancient law rulings.

I think for present purpose yeses or nos will do. — tim wood

Yeah, but I've shown you were merely asking a loaded question. And - given your apparent love of lawyering - you will know that trying to slip in a yes/no query along the lines of "Have you stopped beating your wife?" is going to be ruled inadmissable by any competent judge.

We can only measure quantities and intentionality is not a quantity. — Dfpolis

Then there ain't anything to meaningful to talk about.

Concepts have to be cashed out in their appropriate percepts. And it is clear that you are doing the usual dualistic thing of wanting to claim that intentionality needs to be measured in terms of it being a qualia - a feel, an affect, something mental, something ineffably subjective and hence beyond simple objective measurement.

But taking the discussion in that direction is not much use if we want to deal with intentionality in some useful scientific modelling sense. For a start, it changes the subject at a basic level. You are stressing the abstracted "aboutness" of consciousness rather than the more prosaic thing of that aboutness being a modelling relation embodying some actual goal.

So yes, modelling the world involves the general thing of being able to take particular - personal and individual - points of view. We could say that there is that general quality of first person perspective which makes awareness intrinsically a matter of "aboutness". But that now leaves out the goal-centric nature of an embodied mind. The aboutness is also always about something that matters. Intentionality might speak to the existence of a subject, but it also speaks to an object in the same breath.

So intentionality ought to be measurable in terms of its objective satisfactions. It is not a free-floating subjectivity. It is a goal-directedness. And that is the bit science can measure. It can ask the question of what the Cosmos appears to be trying to achieve in general. Finality can be approached from that end, rather than having to start with ineffable "feelings" of aboutness.

Merely intelligible information is not intentional. It's defining characteristic is not being about some intended target, but being an aspect of physical reality. Bits encoded in my computer's memory are electronic states with no intrinsic meaning. — Dfpolis

Sure. But the information theoretic turn in physics is based on the realisation that the material world has a fundamental capacity in terms of intelligible bits. The bits might be signal, or noise. But there is a foundational limit on semantic possibility in this basic fact about syntactical quantity.

So what the formal dichotomy of information and entropy does is create a baseline ontology. It says that material energy and formal variety are not only both conserved quantities in nature, they are essentially exchangable. They are two views of the same stuff.

And having united the material and formal aspects of nature like that, right at its root, we can then start to make sense of the semantic aspect of being. Nature - considered as a memory, a record of syntactical markings - is now understood as being composed of atoms of form. And that gives us the ground to make the further distinction of the marks that are being interpreted in terms of being meaningful, or meaningless, to "someone".

We thus can move on from information as uninformed syntactical possibility to information as actually informed semantics - the reduced kind where the variety is collapsed in sharp fashion to a state of signal vs noise. We arrive at a condition of aboutness or intentionality where we know what marks or signs matter, what other marks and signs we can now treat as completely ignorable and meaningless background chatter.

So nature has to first provide the variety. And then develop the mechanism that sorts it into figure and ground, meaningful and meaningless.

Having built in a mathematics of measurement at the root of this ontology - one that understands reality to be composed of individuated marks or material degrees of freedom - we can hope to quantify our notions about semantics or intentionality. We can set up a definition of mind in terms of its ability to reduce the chaotic variety of the world to the simplest binary model of signal and noise.

For instance - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_approaches_to_brain_function

So you can see why I am being insistent on demonstrating that you are talking in concepts or qualities that are capable of being quantified. Physicalism has moved beyond hand-waving on the issue of semantics, intentionality, finality, etc.

Material variety and formal possibility have been united within scientific physicalism. Time to move on to the empirical modelling of semantics that this allows.

So there cannot be dialectical opposition between matter and form because that would put matter into the category of form. — Metaphysician Undercover

Your logic is a little out of whack. If you are framing matter as the indefinite - in opposition to the definite - then that is just putting matter in the category of the metaphysically dichotomous.

Dichotomies might be regarded as an intelligible form, but the whole point is that they are the intelligible form that subsumes differentiated categories, such as form and matter, into a higher level method of logical categorisation. Dichotomies talk about form and matter as being the limits of a common process of division.

So you are making the reductionist mistake of trying to reduce dynamical processes of opposition to mere standalone categories. And yet you know the logical definition of a dichotomy to be "mutually exclusive/jointly exhaustive". The coherent relationship - the asymmetry, or broken symmetry - is what it is all about.

My agenda is simply to learn whether anyone who cites Aristotle as a final authority in modern science should, may, must, or should not be taken seriously. — tim wood

Huh? Science doesn't operate by citing ultimate authorities. You must be thinking of the doctrinal approach taken by the Church in medieval times.

Is this the basis of your problem with Aristotle - that the scholastics did treat him as a final authority on matters of science, hence a basic animus against Aristotle ought to remain within contemporary science?

If you keep rewriting your question, you will surely arrive at the answer you seek. :)

Aristotle: dogma, science, or description? Relevant or mere interesting history? — tim wood

If scientists were asked to vote on the most scientific philosopher of ancient times, do you think Aristotle would get top place?

But if you did a citation search on current journal articles, would you expect a work of Aristotle to be touted as a key reference?

C'mon. Ask yourself what it is that actually concerns you here? Do you think that Arisototelian metaphysics is so obsolete as to have no contemporary relevance?

If that is your actual charge, we can then consider the metaphysics that underpins current scientific speculation. As I have said, broadly that divides into atomism and holism. If you are a holist, then absolutely you will be pushing Aristotle ahead of Democritus. And an atomist, the reverse.

Enlightenment science was successful because it went with atomism as it metaphysical model, and the results of this simplification of causal modelling were remarkable. Being anti-Aristotelian - in the sense of rejecting the holism of four cause thinking, or the supposed impossibility of an empty and a-causal void - was a rewarding move.

So in a general way, Aristotle became the scholastic bogeyman, the dominant scientist of the previous generations, that the enlightenment scientists had to leave clearly behind.

But I was deeply involved with theoretical biology, complexity and hierarchy theorists in the 90s. And everyone knew all about Aristotelian metaphysics. So it was mainstream commonsense to those having to work on the metaphysics of life science. It would be embarrassing not to be able to articulate the parallels.

So for system thinkers in contemporary science, Aristotle is important as a contrast to the standard issue causal reduction of atomism. But for a lot of science, Aristotle still would serve as a useful cultural boundary marker between the crazy scholastics and the sensible Enlightenment dudes.

But prime matter, according to the concept cannot have any form, and that's why it's impossible in reality. — Metaphysician Undercover

Matter and form are just the useful conceptions that divide reality for us. Being is a whole. So we are speaking of taking a dialectical opposition to its limits so as to have a causal tale that makes a generalised sense. It sustains a mode of metaphysical analysis that works better than any other general scheme.

So you are confused to say the fundamental source of materiality would somehow exist by itself in concrete fashion - even as the hypothesis here. That is not hylomorphism. And that is why I in turn invoke the further foundational concept of the vague and the crisp to allow for conception of the development of the dialectically divided themselves. You can start with a hylomorphic state of matter~form without either of these aspects of causality being clearly in effect.

It all makes logical sense. If there is a beginning in a symmetry, then a symmetry breaking can follow. A lack of distinction is the perfect ground for the birth of distinction.

Your constraint is your refusal to recognize that matter is purely conceptual, in the mind only. You want it to be an active thing within the reality which you model, when in reality it is just a symbol in the model. — Metaphysician Undercover

Of course it is conceptual. Metaphysics is about developing the most useful constructs for making sense of existence. It is all modelling.

But also, some modelling actually works. The hylomorphic division into material and formal cause works. As does the attempt to understand reality as being divided with degrees of sharpness into the dichotomy of stasis vs flux. Or chance vs necessity. Or atom vs void. Or now, information vs entropy.

For me, matter and form both have to be active in the sense that both have to themselves develop. And both have to be causes - a reason for concrete change. Yet still, those other contrasts, like active vs passive, will start to apply somewhere along the line. We wouldn’t hold on to these other dichotomies of existence if they didn’t have strong explanatory value.

But a characterisation like active vs passive doesn’t seem to make much sense until reality has developed enough to become crisply divided against itself in this categorical fashion. Everything is relative. And so action can only be treated as something general and actualised once hylomorphic being is developed enough for action to be measured against some kind of countering passivity in its world. To be a thing, somewhere, it also has to not be a thing elsewhere.

So you are wrong to say all this metaphysical talk is purely conceptual. It is an attempt to dissect reality in terms of its actual logical oppositions. But also, it is definitely an exercise in modeling. So it is conceptual. But what seems missing in your replies is an understanding that what is central to the conception is the dialectical logic - the logic of symmetry breaking - that is at the heart of a hylomorphic analysis of nature.

You keep thinking vagueness should be a thing in my arguments, then getting angry because monistic existence of that kind is impossible. Vagueness could only ever be relative to crispness, you say.

And I agree. That is the very point I make. Metaphysics only makes sense once all the conceiving is understood in terms of how the logic of symmetry breaking or dichotomisation would work. It is the mechanism by which primal divisions arise that is the key take home here. Categories are limits - the complementary limits of some deeper process of dichotomisation.

I already answered that question. It is completely contradictory to dfpolis' position in which laws are inherent within matter. And, both of you claim to represent the principles of modern physics. So, modern physics allows both, that "something could accidentally change", and that accidental change is impossible because the laws of nature are inherent within matter. That's what's wrong with it, it is a representation of deep inconsistencies within the discipline of physics. — Metaphysician Undercover

That’s a really weird mash up, not an answer. It is just you lumping everyone else into a general category of those who seem to be in disagreement with MU. You right, thus everyone else is definitionally wrong. :razz:

The fact that it has been identified as a difference indicates that it has made a difference. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. It says the criteria has been changed. A different point of view has been adopted.

My approach starts by granting the reality of finality in nature. And goals are constraints. Once a purpose has been adequately served, anything more doesn’t make an intelligible difference.

So I simply apply that commonsense view of finality or intentionality to nature as a general principle.

Every river is different. But not in a way that makes a difference to nature, in terms of its general purpose of maximising entropy.

So regardless of what you say, this way of conceiving of existence is already basic to the metaphysics of science. It just makes obvious sense.