Comments

  • Introducing Karen Barad’s New Materialism
    For those interested in the history of these kinds of political projects - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
  • Relative vs absolute
    You've got to be kidding. Reciprocal?jgill

    OK. Inverse if you prefer. And from there, the multiplicative inverse.

    In a very rough sense of the word. Not mathematically. No coastline is patterned the same upon closer and closer examination.jgill

    Again you are talking about the absolutism built into the maths model and not the world of physical process that it then only roughly models.

    Reality ain't a computation or a simulation. Coastlines aren't actually generated by an iterative algorithm.

    No reason to assert that "dynamical balance" is not mathematical.jgill

    There you go again. Maths in its casual absolutism can provide pragmatic models of reality. But here you would need to start to think about how reality itself might be more deeply described.
  • Relative vs absolute
    The continuous is the limit of the discrete. The limit definition of the common integral does the job.jgill

    And how are you defining the discrete? What grounds claims of there being a difference? Why is differentiation reciprocal to integration?

    I agree maths likes to sweep its metaphysics under the carpet. And here you are on a philosophy site, doing just that. :roll:

    Don't need fractals. There is no intermediate case.jgill

    You are missing the point. The real world of natural processes is pretty fractal, ain't it? Mountains, coastlines, rivers, earthquakes. Anything described in the language of dissipative structure.

    So mathematically, we have an interest in modelling the fact that nature is indeed organised by emergent dynamical balance. It is not one thing or the other, but some equilibrium fluctuation around its opposed tendencies.

    The earth's crust is a balance between cooling crust formation and weathering erosion. A coastline is irregular over every scale of observation because it is a dynamical balance between smoothness and roughness. Or "integration and differentiation".

    Fractal maths showed up in that link as the kind of bug that the patch of "absolute continuity" is designed to fix.

    But maybe the Cosmos just ain't a computation as maths would like to demand, and instead dynamical balance – self-organised emergence from symmetry-breaking – is the logical core of its being?
  • Relative vs absolute
    So I'm asking, what is the point in describing anything as relative if that 'relative' aspect can be defined completely synonymously in a way that most people here seem to describe as an example of absolute?Matt Thomas

    But to be absolute is a relative thing. The absolute only exists in terms of reciprocal bounds that mark the limits on being. Thus no thing itself can be absolute. All things are relative to those bounding limits.
  • Relative vs absolute
    I know, not quite what you mean. :cool:jgill

    But note how fractals neatly express the intermediate case between the continuous and the discrete.
  • Relative vs absolute
    Dialectical reasoning covers this by making two opposing limits relative to each other. So you have pairs of absolute limits that are related by their reciprocality. Each is defined in terms of being as little like its other as possible, in dichotomous fashion.

    A bunch of familiar metaphysical dichotomies have been organising Western thought since Ancient Greece.

    Take for example the oppositions of stasis and flux, chance and necessity, matter and form, the one and the many, the discrete and the continuous, meaning and nonsense, atom and void, local and global, etc, etc.

    Change can be measured in terms of a lack of stability. And stability as a lack of change. That is, applying the law of the excluded middle - the dichotomy defined as that which it is both mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive - stability = 1/change, and change = 1/stability. There is an inverse relation that defines its own absolute measurable limits. The measureable lack of one is the measurable degree of presence of its “other”.

    So problem solved. We seek opposites that have metaphysical strength generality. And use them as our yardsticks to measure reality.

    To be discrete is to be absolutely broken apart in some fashion. To be continuous is to absolutely lack that characteristic. We then can relate these two absolute ideals by the inverse operation which can tell us that how far or near we are from those bounding ideals in any particular case in question.

    In reality, nothing could be absolutely continuous as it would indeed just break the yardstick. It would claim that the absolute simply existed in a way that made its opposite pole of being - the discrete - not even a remote possibility.

    But we can still stay within the measurable bounds of possibility if the amount of discreteness being claimed as part of our continuous “whatever” is infinitesimal. That is, we are infinitely distant from a state which we would label as discrete.

    So you get both the relative and the absolute out of a dichotomy for all practical purposes. Two poles are related in a mutually self-measuring fashion. And that relation is absolute to the degree it conforms to the constraints of the LEM.

    Continuity and discreteness can have an absolute limit state description even if it is one based on the asymptotic approach to those limits via acts of relativistic discrimination.
  • Object Recognition
    For instance, phenomenologically informed enactivist and autopoietic approaches in cognitive psychology are based on such a conceptual shift, and new materialism ( which is different than pomo) interprets the results of quantum field theory through a different metaphysics than older materialisms.Joshs

    Interesting. Do you have a handy link to this?
  • Object Recognition
    You mean you arent familiar with the philosophical history of structuralismJoshs

    I meant that I don't do gibberish. And I certainly don't regard the PoMo version of "structuralism" as a solid foundation for a proper structuralist metaphysics.

    I'm a systems scientist/holist/Aristotelean when it comes to a structuralist causality. Kant and Hegel, along with Schelling and whoever, were the heirs to that tradition.

    And where I depart is in recognising that organisms have their root in the physics of dissipative structure, but their intentionality in the mechanics of semiosis.

    So nature wants to self-organise entropically. And life and mind can arise as further informational structure that lives off that dynamics.

    The philosophical history of structuralism continues to be written. By science now.
  • Object Recognition
    We could argue the toss about who was informed by the mechanistic holism of Kant, who by the idealistic holism of Hegel. But it is still the same thing of taking the developmental perspective seriously. Perception as an embodied habit rather than a disembodied display.

    As Derrida writes:Joshs

    I don’t speak gibberish. Perhaps you could translate into plain language?
  • Object Recognition
    One example is the eventual embrace of the ideas of American Pragmatists and Phenomenology within psychology.Joshs

    But wasn’t the pragmatism a reflection of early psychological research - the work of Helmholtz, Wundt, Donders, Fechner and the rest? Psychology started off enactive and embodied with its emphasis on habits, psychophysics, anticipation, etc - the practical how of modelling a world - and then got lost in the wilderness of Freudianism, Behaviourism, Cognitivism, Personality testing, etc, for a long time.

    In my reading of the history, you have Cartesian representationalism and British empiricism creating the familiar disembodied notion of mind as a clutter of sense impressions and ideas. The justification of phenomenology as the method of inquiry.

    You then have pragmatism arising out of the new scientific spirit of inquiry where the mind is all about modelling, habits and judgements - constrained by the fact of being in the world rather than being remarkable for standing apart from that world.

    After that, psychology swings back to a confusion of approaches that speak to the old Dualistic concerns with representation and sense data. The “problem” for psychology becomes again the contents of the private individual head rather than the more general one of how organisms relate to worlds in meaning constructing fashion.

    See this quick intro to Peirce’s theory of object recognition as a shift from the representationalism of sense data to the enaction of perceptual judgements.

    https://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10289/9037/NZAP%28Dec2014%29.pdf?sequence=6&isAllowed=y

    So enactivism was alive and well in 19th C experimental psychology. And Pragmatism arose in that context. Both were informed by the holism of German naturphilosophie.

    But then the reductionist Anglo world came crashing in and claimed psychology as its science of the mind. The story of a container with its private content. The whole field got metaphysically screwed for another century.
  • Nice little roundup of the state of consciousness studies
    Perhaps it could be argued that consciousness is 'the capacity for experience' in an allegorical manner to energy as 'the capacity for work'// and that physical matter, in the absence of consciousness, lacks the capacity for experience. So that the emergence of organisms is also the emergence of the capacity for experience, which is absent in the non-organic domain.Wayfarer

    So what is it about organisms that is so special? What characterises them beyond what the bare physics of matter can tell us?

    The scientific view is that organisms display intelligence and behavioural autonomy because they use semiotic codes to construct a “selfish” or enactive modelling relation with their worlds. That is what can be seen plainly written into the structure of their nervous systems. It is not a mystery.

    So what is the alternative you are trying to float here? That a by-product of starting down that path is that living bodies somehow … tune into a karmic plane of being, or something?

    They are like fleshy receivers of cosmic signal? Having a metabolism not only allows organisms to do work but also download, glimpse, incorporate, something or other, a kind of “experiential energy” that radiates from some source beyond the physical realm?

    Be specific as you like in answering. What ontology do you wish to commit to here?
  • Nice little roundup of the state of consciousness studies
    I dismiss Chalmers by reducing his claimed concern to the general epistemic issue that science can only proceed by way of testable counterfactuals.

    That applies to anything science might investigate. It is not special to “consciousness”. It is why science has special contempt for “theories that are not even wrong”.

    Which is the class of theory popular with crackpots who like the idea that the Hard Problem gives them licence for their furious speculations.
  • Nice little roundup of the state of consciousness studies


    The refrain of “no one knows” is being heard often. And yet the neuroscience exists.

    The unification and stabilisation of perception is what falls out of the Bayesian Brain and its predictive modelling. Learning to ignore the world as much as possible by learning to anticipate the world as much as possible is what both solves this “binding problem” and also produces the sense of the still self at the centre of its coherently unfolding world.

    Before you turn your head, you have already sent out the “reafference” pattern as the motor command to be subtracted from the resulting perceptual experience. You will know it is you that turns and not the world that suddenly lurches as that is the uncertainty which you just cancelled out in advance.

    A lot of BS is being cited here about what “neuroscience doesn’t know”. Chalmers and Koch are perpetuating a giant public con. You are falling for it.
  • Nice little roundup of the state of consciousness studies
    And as I’ve also said, that is not something which can be framed in scientific terms, because there’s no ‘epistemic cut’ here. We’re never outside of it or apart from it.Wayfarer

    You don't yet understand the epistemic cut. Perhaps I should rename it the epistemic bridge for your benefit.

    The cut is the mechanics of a sign, a switch, a ratchet, that gets inserted so as to make the modelling a reality. Brains do that at their level. Societies do that at the next level up.

    You are being too psychology-centric. You think only of the minds of "individuals". But organisms can become entrained to social levels of reality modelling. Ants and humans are the "ultrasocial" extremes of this development, as they could insert the further systems of sign in the form of pheromone signals and verbal signals.
  • Nice little roundup of the state of consciousness studies
    There is the presumption that their findings are observer-independent i.e. replicable by anyone, They’re ‘third person’ in that sense. It’s an implicit assumption.Wayfarer

    It seems the explicit part of science as epistemic method that this "independence" is what is being socially-constructed. It is the realist position on indirect realism. :grin:

    All the defenders of the Hard Problem and "what it is like to be a first person point of view" make the mistake of not understanding that selves arise within neurobiology as "other" to their perceptual/cognitive realities. The Bayesian Brain and psychology's "enactive turn" summarises the "how" of this. This is the concrete advance since Chalmers and Koch had their little self-aggrandising bet.

    So the first person POV is "subjective" in relation to its neurobiological Umwelt. It objectifies the world as the "other" of its ability to forward model it environment. The self is that part of the brain activity which stands as a goal-organised predictive model of the world. The world then becomes for the organism that part of its wider reality which is the recalcitrant or unpredicted. By further processing that updates the running Bayesian model, the world gets assimilated to this "selfish" first person point of view and so woven in as a stable "consciousness" of "how everything is" in terms of a self~world relation.

    Science comes along as humans eventually realise the modelling game being played and say we can do better. Through language, but better yet maths, we can implement a model of the modelling relation in such a way it would be like experiencing the world from a God-like view from nowhere. A transcendent third person point of view.

    This is made concrete by a process of theory and measurement.

    We can state publicly in formal terms a structure of thought that encodes predictions about states of the world. We can share a model with every other mind within our cultural orbit such that we can be sure we are thinking the same – because the rules of this thinking are captured in a rigid mechanical fashion.

    And then the predictions are cashed out by reading numbers off dials. We become third person observers by making measurements – measurements that codify degrees of surprise or prediction error.

    So whether we talk about "consciousness" as neurobiological awareness or socially-constructed knowing, it is the same epistemic process in action. Cognition as predictive modelling aimed at creating a self in control of its world.

    The first person self becomes contrasted with the third person self only as the feature, rather than the bug, of the advances of human epistemology. We took nature's modelling relation to its next semiotic level. We found that we were embodied in our "private" worlds and so found the ladder that could get us out into a public space of theories and measurements.

    At the deep metaphysical level – the one that speaks to the ontology of fundamental structure – the structure is the same. A self constructing itself as the prediction maker within what becomes its predictable world – its semiotic Umwelt.

    So sure, one can bang on about ineffable feels and homuncular mind's eyes. That reflects an older technical point of view. It reflects the social technology required to impose stable order on the "world model" of cultures based on agrarian empire building. It produced the level of self-regulation that organised the world as a hierarchy of peasants, bureaucrats, priests and kings.

    But now we live in industrialised societies where science is the new social technology. We can aim to regulate our lives in ways that have an impersonal rationality. We become ruled not by some transcending sense of God or generalised notion of the divine, but by something even more Platonic and impersonal than that. Laws of nature. And what a clock and ruler can tell us about that in terms of mechanical acts of measurement.

    And sure, one may think this impersonalised form of mindfulness is a bit much. It's not real in the sense you might think your neurobiology of the "self and its world" is. The first person view stands clearly opposed to the third person view as the first person view is "the place which you actually inhabit".

    But facts are facts. The first person view is just as much a modelling relation as the third person one. It is only that we find ourselves developmentally rooted in the first and making a conscious choice about the second.

    And if we are going to be debating things "philosophically", we need to remember that between the neurobiology of the the organismic self and the social construction of the scientific self comes that middle period of being the peasants within an agrarian era with its organised religion and useful ways of having its folk think. There are good historical reasons for why the Hard Problem resonates with a theistic point of view – why Cartesianism still reigns with its crisp dualism of mind and body.
  • Nice little roundup of the state of consciousness studies
    The objective point of view doesn't take the subject into consideration - it is only concerned with what is amenable to quantitative analysis from a third person point of view.Wayfarer

    That would be a grave misunderstanding of Peircean semiotics. Or indeed, post-Kantian epistemology in general.

    Nolan goes on to explain that “the color scenes are subjective” and “the black-and-white scenes are objective.Wayfarer

    The difference between being there “for real” and being there as if watching the displaced historical newsreel record of events.

    A simple but effective narrative trick by the sound of it. Not sure it supports your idealism very well though.
  • Nice little roundup of the state of consciousness studies
    The grammatical differences among first, second and third person sentences present some interesting quirks,Srap Tasmaner

    Yep, a useful trick of grammar inflated to become an epistemic no go theorem and from there, the greatest mystery of all metaphysics. :up:
  • Nice little roundup of the state of consciousness studies
    Oh, yea. There was also this.javra

    My celebration was premature. My name keeps being brought up. And suddenly you all seem to be reading papers on biosemiosis. I am curious about the gyrations that will be performed to sustain this Hard Problem charade for the next 26 years too.
  • Nice little roundup of the state of consciousness studies
    But I am quite tiered of this interplay. Enjoy.javra

    You waved goodbye. But I keep getting tagged.

    Now that you are talking of this mystical thing of “the mind’s eye”, is that something a philosophical zombie also has? Or are you simply pulling the rhetorical stunt of claiming something “exists”, but you define it so as to be beyond any possible empirical reach … because epistemic devilry of whatever needed form.

    Does “the mind’s eye” come with a definition? We never got one for “consciousness” out of your mouth.

    It’s all part of the game of course. Demand explanations for any term you decide to toss into the discussion, but refuse to give definitions for those terms in ways that would commit to an empirical test.

    One can always keep claiming that no empirical evidence has been presented when one has refused to even agree as to what the nature of that empirical evidence might be.

    All we have here is you playing the game of “look at me. I can say that I doubt”. But those words ring hollow. You never set out a position that you were prepared to believe.
  • Nice little roundup of the state of consciousness studies
    For instance, were philosophical zombies to be realjavra

    So you in fact believe they are not real? And therefore irrelevant in the reality in which scientific accounts unfold?

    If Descartes’ demon was also real, then we would be epistemically screwed in every way. But you don’t think that is the case? Or even that if it could be the case, you would act any different in the world?

    To claim zombies are conceivable is to assert that one can always doubt. And Descartes’ demon does a much more sweeping job of that for you.

    But science is applied pragmatism. It begins with the epistemic willingness to hazard a belief. It advances a hypothesis and checks it out.

    So your epistemology is as bad as your ontology on this score. It is meaningless carping as the science rolls on.
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    Traditional conceptions of dynamics as a matter of how the values of an object’s properties change over time as the result of the action of external forces won’t do

    All fine up until the conclusion. Why won’t our theoretical frames do if they can do work in terms of our enactive interests?

    Barad to me is saying nothing further than we indeed form Umwelts as “models of our world with our selves also to found in them”. This self-world modelling might just be Bayesian technology. But it’s what we’ve got and so the question is how do we proceed from there having realised there is this technology … and it can always be improved.

    Is that what you mean by constructive alternativism? The difference of course may be that I would see that as a Darwinian competition for best model - according to some optimising metric that would be the debatable bit - and alternativism is philosophical cover for anything goes pluralism?
  • Nice little roundup of the state of consciousness studies
    (I think Apokrisis would probably disagree but I'll leave that to him)Wayfarer

    It is much more prosaic than that. Barbieri wanted to be the big cheese with his ribosome theory. Pattee was over-shadowing him and the rest by arriving late, and endorsing Peirce over Saussure.

    So he left in a dramatic huff to re-establish his own code biology brand. As it happens, he backed the right horse in the ribosome. That has indeed moved centre stage of abiogenesis in my view. And the ribosome is a very “Peircean” structure, a very convincing tale of how the epistemic cut could have first arisen in practice.

    Arran Gare did a social history of the Barbieri affair - https://philarchive.org/rec/GARBAC-4
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    ...should hold more weight than faith in the god-like mechanics of entropy.Joshs

    In the same spirit of making ontic commitments explicit so they can be debated rather than derided, I would point out that I follow the biosemiotic hierarchy on the material cause half of the hylomorphic systems science dichotomy.

    So the material half of the equation would run from the most general to the least specified subsumptive order of....

    "quantum indeterminacy" > dissipative structure > thermodynamics > mechanics > matter

    That is, quantum indeterminacy is the placeholder for whatever potency we can imagine lying beyond the Planck scale of our Cosmos. Our Cosmos is then fundamentally a dissipative structure – a self-organising entropy flow with emergent spacetime order.

    You can then restrict this larger view to that of regular "gone to equilibrium" thermodynamics – where the flows can encounter their final heat death. And then restrict the ontology even further to extract the regular classical view of dead matter following Platonic trajectories. And still further to arrive at simple matter imagined as a substance we could rub between our fingers or fling across the room.

    So you can appreciate that to say physics really starts with the openness and self-organisation of dissipative structure theory is still a bold metaphysical move even today. But particle physics is there with topological order, QFT, condensed matter physics, etc.

    And biosemiosis also now argues this is the "right kind" of material cause to use in its models as it is matter at its most dynamic and lifelike already. That leaves the semiosis so much less to have to do to then play its own causal part in whipping up organisms that exhibit the structure we call life and mind.

    This covers with how the material half of the Aristotelean equation is dealt with. But what about the form in hylomorphic form, I hear you ask? :wink:

    Well dissipative structure is a triadic ontology. It is the hierarchical story of global constraints shaping local degrees of freedom. What exists is then the dynamical balance that results. So it already includes global form and purpose to quite a large degree.

    Again that is the feature not the bug. It leaves feeble life and mind less to have to organise as dissipative structure is "order out of chaos". It provides so much order just for free. But it is confusing as every move towards a suitably complex view of reality always winds up in trichotomies. It can seem – as Peirce was accused – that one just suffers from some trichotomania.

    Anyway, form. From the biosemiotic point of view, there is a hierarchy of increasingly more general sign or code that runs... genes < neurons < words < numbers

    Now there is clearly something different here. Genes are pretty arbitrary seeming. The whole of biology seems rather accidental more than metaphysically fundamental.

    Well in fact there are new arguments for how the Comos couldn't have used anything else but carbon backbones, proton pumps or redox reactions. The space of possibility was far more restricted than might be thought. Yet also, the Cosmos wasn't too fussed seeming about their being any biology. And genes look to have a large dose of contingency about them until we get a proper autopsy on those aliens they found.

    Neurons are likewise a perhaps contingent bit of semiotic kit. Words - as puffs of air – again could have been something else. But puffs of air are very low cost, and a vocal tract forces the symbols into serial order. There is the general thing of being cheap to produce and also dimensionally constrained in ways that build in the necessity of articulate choice. Word order is inevitable and so grammar is also inevitable.

    Then we get to number. Would any kind of alien have to count? Arguably yes if they get around in flying saucers and generally do engineering. And as the Ancient Greeks felt they discovered, maths speaks with Platonic necessity. You can't just pick and choose the structures that follow rules. Form at that level is more discovered than invented. So we seem to arrive at some kind of matching metaphysical limit, even if it remains a highly debated one.

    As you can see, I defend a fairly elaborate but systematic metaphysics. Laugh if you like. Or engage.
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    A principle of constructive alternativismJoshs

    Sounds grand. What does it actually mean in practice - metaphysical or scientific practice?
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    It's the depth and complexity of his characters that's especially celebratedplaque flag

    Yep. The shift to real people rather than social tokens. Less moralising and more nuance. All part of the social construction of the modern citizen upon which the next chapter of social and economic development was based.

    My key commitment is basically that we have actual bodies in an actual world.plaque flag

    And I speak to the homuncular incoherence of leaving out the social construction of the “we” that has an “actual body”.

    Probably you want to leave that way framing things behind. I believe I have provided as many pointers as I can to what I view as the right path.
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    'Software' is just a metaphor for the time-binding sociality of reason.plaque flag

    I’m OK with that. Time binding is actually a semiotic concept in my book.

    individual living brains are necessary for this social game.plaque flag

    But which comes first? A biologist could reasonably argue that “ultrasociality” first arose in ants and termites speaking the language of pheromones to act like a distributed brain.

    The individual ant is more like an individual neuron than an individual brain in this story of chemical messages jumping synapses.

    So if we are to generalise successfully to the wider biological frame, of course there must be the suitable parts. But it is the collective whole which defines what could be meant as suitable.

    Is human evolution a story of individual hominid genius or collective hominid habit. Paleoanthropology points firmly to the later.

    That Og invented the wheel is a modern joke - the first entrepreneur. The history of isolated small human populations - like the Tasmanian aboriginal people - show how the quickly forget much that they once knew. Basic skills like fishing or stitching clothing can just disappear. You need a critical mass to allow the specialisation that keeps innovation alive and developing.

    The genius is standing on the shoulders of countless others. Some genius once said that.
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    Tell me something I didn't know and haven't said. We discussed Kelly at length, remember? And I think why Mead, Cooley and Dewey showed something was also stirring at the turn of the century in the wake of pragmatism, but failed to flower for reasons of wisespread Anglo-world disinterest.

    Vygotsky and Luria are more interesting to me. They combined the psychology and the neurobiology. They experimented. They seemed to have a receptive audience as social constructionism ought to be "on brand" following a Marxist revolution. But then shit happened. Along came Stalin. The suppression of the books. The academic seizing on Jewishness and Vygotsky's failure to actually adhere literally to Marxist theology. And tuberculosis.

    As a stirring that again failed, it was bigger and thus more tragic.

    There is a social history here that goes back to Aristotle at least. And it doesn't feel as if there has been a true paradigm shift yet.

    I mean you don't seem impressed with Bayesian mechanics as the vision of where enactivism is all headed. I haven't heard enthusiasm from you for the semiotic turn in the life sciences. PoMo may have turned towards metaphysics in its search for fresh discursive meat, but not serious engagement with Peircean semiotics. The carcasses of Saussure and Marx are still stinking up the place.
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    Meaning is 'dormant' (a 'spore' or 'virus') in/as a script without a reader.plaque flag

    That is how a computationist would look at it. Biology and neuroscience show that computationalism is simply wrong. Life and mind start from the first meaningful action. The first shifting of an atom for a reason.

    Scripts don't write themselves. And they need to be being read from the start of their writing.

    I think that maybe you don't sufficiently address the importance of the subject.plaque flag

    Or you are not following what I've been saying.

    So let's get focused on what you say your are here to discuss despite it being a wandering of the thread. You want to be able to quantify the "genius personality" in terms of some individualistic paradigm of the human mind and spirit?

    I am saying this would simply be a bad question arising from a bad metaphysics. And I've made that reply accordingly.

    I've tried to argue using concrete examples which you brush away in your haste to just keep moving on in aimless-feeling fashion.

    So again, focus. If we have Shakespeare and Newton as our candidate for intellectual hero of the English millennial, how do we decide who wins, who is runner up?

    A metric I might toss into the mix is what we are willing to ignore about their personalities – if personalities is indeed key to your putative model.

    So Newton was a historical genius in turning physics into maths. He was brave or reckless enough to use dramatically lossy data compression. He even was willing to chuck out the very materialistic metaphysics he just had substantiated with his Laws of Motion to take the opposite tack "action at a distance" in his Law of Gravitation.

    We all applaud that kind of relentless genius that can use and abuse metaphysics as he willed. The maths is what mattered. The metaphysics got backfilled to fit. A project going on for both his mathematical triumphs. And even the maths was of foundational importance and is keeping folk busy trying to back fill its metaphysics too. The ghost of departed quantities, and all that.

    No wonder Newton is a turning point just in terms of social attitude. He personified something that really did change intellectual history. Where would Kant and the rest be without Newton as that central challenge? The guy had strut.

    But what does polite intellectual society then say about his religiosity? Well, it seems excusable for a person of his time if not his genius.

    What about his difficult personality? Again, excusable to be impatient with dullards and jealous of those claiming any part of his personal glory. That's just people being people. Maybe he was neurodiverse and so really can't be blamed.

    Did did you know he was made Master of the Royal Mint? And he was twice an MP? Oh yeah. A man of the world, a man of action too. That adds to his genius personality index. But wait. That was about social influence and good money. Erm, it seems he was trading up to be a big cog in the Imperial British enterprise. He lost a good chunk of change plunging into a slave-trading venture. Um, move on.

    Now let's socially evaluate his career as an alchemist, his occult studies. Oh no. Let's not. Erase that from the collective memory and fix on the bit of the scientist that was the mathematical genius. We don't have to judge the genius personality in terms of his personality after all perhaps.

    Now run the same ruler over Shakespeare. Could his peccadilloes even detract from his reputation? Wouldn't he be judged more leniently on that social score because the social realm was itself the one he was addressing where Newton was addressing something intellectually more demanding than that?

    Shakespeare stands accused of the literary sin of plagiarism – turning the prose of others into poetry. But no one minds that as he just told the stories better.

    I'm just illustrating here the reality that it is audiences that rate genius. And they do so in regard to their institutionalised interests. It might then take certain personality traits to succeed in this competitive game. But it is still the audience that takes the view on what it might treat as the proper measure, even just on the "type of person" the genius was.

    If you are a mathematician, for instance, there are almost no standards of social grace that obtain. :naughty:

    I'm a holist focused on the (human) lifeworld that can't really be broken up except in terms of useful lies.plaque flag

    The problem with the subjective stance is that even the self as a first person viewpoint is socially constructed.

    Well it is first neurobiologically constructed. Pragmatic modelling means I can chomp my food with out chewing off my tongue.

    But the kind of self that exists the social world where individuals can be acclaimed as "genius personalities" is a social construction. And needs to understood as such. Otherwise you are building your philosophical cities on foundations of sand.

    Language is tribal software.plaque flag

    Computationalism works as very rough metaphor. But it is another foundation of sand.

    Life and mind science need to be built on the foundation of dissipative physics. As I argued, even the modern industrial world with its particular economic and political structures are comprehensible as "metabolism".

    Once again a code is putting itself in charge of the physics needed to give itself existence as a structure that can grow and evolve.

    And you can't say that about a computer. Well, not until they start telling ChatGTP to go find its own wall socket to plug itself into after the power company cancels over the mounting unpaid bills. Hey computer, go figure it out for yourself. If you are so smart, provide your own metabolic foundation.
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    let's imagined a shipwrecked composer with a harpsichord and plenty of coconuts. He soars to new musical heights on that island,plaque flag

    Better yet, let’s imagine the infinity of randomly typing monkeys banging away until the end of time.

    We agree that they “must” produce every possible work of genius of any kind? And hence this proves something about genius?

    Meaning has to be smuggled in somewhere to give life to the syntax. You want to claim it starts with the individual and so artfully arrange your thought experiment to achieve that illusion. I say go back and start again. Deal with Borges’ Library of Babel.
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    What I'm getting at is (roughy) personality is the yardstick.plaque flag

    A certain kind of inquiring intelligence?
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    I was talking about the human tendency to dogmatize theories like Darwin's and the BB, according them the status of facts, of orthodoxy, and how that can make it difficult for competing theories to get heard.Janus

    But you were claiming that inside the institutions as well as outside. And I replied that the institutions institutionalise the competitive space in which the different theories are heard. It would be a problem if they were bad at serving this function. We would know they were bad as nothing was ever allowed to change. They would be museums and not places of quite frantic intellectual competition.

    What in fact makes it difficult to be heard is everyone is shouting at once these days. Anyone can shove a pet Theory of Everything on Arxiv. Then belly-ache if everyone else doesn’t immediately drop their own pet theory.

    Academia used to be so much smaller. You could immediately ignore anything said by a polytech, or which came out of the colonies.

    I’m not recognising the intellectual world you are quoiting Hands as describing.
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    Exceptions to this include the later Wittgenstein, enactivism and social constructionist approaches in psychology.Joshs

    Sure. Belatedly the Anglo world started to show up. So I don’t see these as exceptions but stragglers. Folk like Vygotsky and Luria already had the party well started in the 1920s. Social constructionist approaches to psychology arose out of that as the Russian texts finally got translated.

    Yet right when Vygotsky/social constructionism was finally filling two shelves at UCL’s Waterstones, along comes the genecentric/cognitive module bandwagon of evolutionary psychology and rolls right over it. Back to the future we go.

    Enactivism really took its time showing up too. I had long given up waiting. The Cartesian grip on the Anglo imagination is strong. The enactivists came in swinging as if they were offering the world something unthunk and brand new.

    Does language serve a role in fusing habit and what is attended to in such a way as to transform the habit in the very act of engaging it?Joshs

    Not sure that this question coheres well enough for me to give a matchingly snappy answer.

    But I’m inclined to “sure”. It is all a pliable and fused kind of story once social construction and neurodevelopment have been co-habiting a brain for 20 or 30 years.
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    Sure, and I think there are deconstruction-adjacent forms of literary criticism that dissolve the creative personality into a mere thermostat of their time -- ignoring that their own criticism becomes equally 'irrational' --a mere blinking light on the history machine -- thereby.plaque flag

    Still not sure what goal you are reaching for here. You seem to be arguing that these things are mutually exclusive rather than necessarily complementary. That one most win and thus the other lose - the zero sum game - instead of there being the win-win that comes with a useful division of labour.

    The game is to differentiate AND integrate. Go in both directions with the vigour that can arrive at a high state of dynamical contrast.

    And isn’t that why you would celebrate a historical figure like Shakespeare. He was singular and different because of the generality or universality of what he had to say. We can focus on him to understand what we all ought to think.

    The tightness of listening to a single lonely voice, heard and agreed to by the largest imagined crowd, indeed echoing on down the ages, is the kind of high contrast state that eliminates the most ambiguity. We have even the artefact - the canonical work of a play - to cement the lonely utterance in the collective memory. We can refer back at any moment to a spoken truth and interpret it afresh - stage Macbeth in the setting of a modern corporate office or whatever.

    So your acts of solitary genius are meaningless until they are understood as having been matched by an equal amount of intelligent response.

    The question then is who moved more people down the ages. Is Newton greater than Shakespeare? At least in theory we could quantify this in terms of how much movement - cultural or physical - was created by a bunch of plays vs the Principia.

    You seem to want to ask how to measure genius, I say the yardstick is obvious. Action and reaction. The push and its effect. A simple reciprocal equation, or Newton’s third law of motion. And then less clearly, the kind of thing l’m sure Shakespeare also gestured at in all his words I never actually bothered to read. :smile:
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    Still, it seems to me like meaning is in some ways constructed too.Count Timothy von Icarus

    My systems science view expects upward acting construction as the “other” to downward acting constraint. So construction comes as part of the holistic equation in some form.

    t seems like different, quite independent systems get used for processing different aspects of language.Count Timothy von Icarus

    Yes. Your brain is an accumulation of processing habits that will simply emit the right response when constrained by some general act of attention.

    So if your focus is on interpreting an utterance, that suppresses activity across the brain so that all your many perceptual habits - visual, gustatory, object recognition, spatial orientation, whatever - are turned to the task of responding in their learnt habitual way. The words will be decoded in terms of their suitable associations and anticipatory imagery will form.

    Stick a person’s head in a scanner and the word “hammer” will light up the motor cortex areas which know what it feels like to initiate the physical act to banging down a nail. Say “wombat” and the visual recognition paths will light up with a suitable state of expectancy for what you might indeed turn your head and see within your visual field.

    So understanding is the brain being holistically constrained by attentional focusing to have some narrowed state of sensory and motor priming that “puts you in mind” of the right kind of anticipatory imagery and readiness to act accordingly.

    The call of “Kentucky Fried” or “pizza” might even get you drooling in preparation for what you expect is about to arrive on the diner table. Responses that would be more appropriate to “hammer” and “wombat” will also now be equally much suppressed.

    Those constructive habits of action are still part of the fabric of your brain, but they will be inhibited rather than excited. The meaning of words is understood in what you now don’t expect or prepare for as much in what you do.

    That is why we wouldn’t describe interpretation as simply representational or constructive. It needs a holistic act of focusing that fruitfully limits the brain by suppressing the vast number of inappropriate reactions as much as it appears to stimulate the few right ones.

    You can see this happening in real-time with EEG recordings. There is a characteristic P300 positive wave of inhibition that sweeps across the brain 300 milliseconds after some surprise stimulus to narrow focus to the task of interpreting just whatever it is. Then a N400 negative swing of excitation as the suitable pattern-match gets made and the right state of sensory and motor priming is evoked.

    So, it seems like the recipient "brings something to the table."Count Timothy von Icarus

    Yep. The brain isn’t a computer. It is very flexible and organic. It can cut short the time it spends letting a state of deep understanding emerge. Or it can linger until you really start to feel what it would be like to really have a wombat rummaging about at your feet, probably stinking like a wombat and grunting how you might imagine a wombat would, That level of vividness takes about 500ms to conjure up, and so occupies your brain that it “blinds” you to everything else for half a second too.

    Or you can do the quicker thing of just responding “subconsciously”. Almost as you hear the word, you have made enough of a connection - “OK, that Australian marsupial thing” - to just skip on and keep going with the sentence. You can get the gist and always come back to let the word expand in your consciousness if you need to double check that “wombat” could really make sense in the context of what was said after that.

    Think about thinking. That is our learnt habit of using speech on ourselves - the inner voice. But we often believe we think wordlessly because we can cut short the full act of uttering in our heads - waiting long enough for the full auditory image to arrive - as it is enough to begin shaping the motor intent to the point we could have actually said the words to ourselves, then skip on. We short-circuit to save time as the attention constraining effect of narrowing our state of thought has already been achieved by our getting ready to verbalise some point of view.

    The effect is compounded by the fact that we are mostly always going to say the kinds of things we usually would say to ourselves anyway. There is even less need to linger. We can even think on automatic pilot. Just let the routines run.

    Language is an evolved capacity that itself evolves. It is used to do many different types of thingsCount Timothy von Icarus

    And what is missed is that language is used as the trick that structures our own thoughts as much as it communicates our state of mind to another. To be able to speak its to have the ability to self-constrain in ways that are like being “spoken to” by your society, your culture, your peers, your tribe.

    We did not evolve as thinking selves that then needed to tack on speech to express a headful of clever private thoughts. We evolved as animals whose behaviour could be organised from an emergent higher level of socially constructed meaning. We evolved to be listener’s of what we were meant to be doing so as to function in a communal fashion. Once we got into that habit of constantly reminding ourselves through a “self-regulating” inner voice, then we started to find ourselves with a headful of clever private thinking.

    Any time there was some socially approved course of action, that would automatically bring to mind it’s “other” of what we thus shouldn’t be doing, or even thinking as a possibility. But of course, that then raises the very possibility of going against the group mind and doing something for selfish and private reasons.

    The “voice of conscience” will be ringing in your guilty head. Very loudly if you have a strict upbringing where you were always being told by parents, teachers and priests. Yet the very fact of being socialised as a general constraint on your thought and behaviour will shape up matching degrees of freedom in your thought and behaviour. In being strongly focused on what not to do, you become strongly focused on what you might indeed do. And so the private self emerges as other to the public self.

    Language leads to the co-construction of our private and public realms. Society needs language to shape us, and we need language to shape our societies.

    That two-way focusing effect of speech acts is what Anglo thought in particular tends to miss. It is absent from mainstream cognitive psychology, neurolinguistics and evolutionary psychology even.

    The sciences that think they study the human mind think they need to study the human individual. You have to get into sociology, anthropology and child development to hear about how the human mind is in fact linguistically constructed.
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    Would you say though that this is very different than what Shakespeare was doing ?plaque flag

    You could make a case that he spoke to the metabolism - the economic and political order - of his time. He may well have crystallised views of history and customs from an English perspective that informed the notion of what it was to be a member of that society. He was an influencer pushing the zeitgeist to its sharper focus. And that sense of identity was important as Europe was changing from feudalism to nation states. Larger identities were needed to bind the local fiefdoms into mobilised kingdoms.

    So at the level of words, he was helping the reorganisation of a nation as it made a major upgrade to its metabolic basis by becoming centralised in its politics and moving towards the trade that which would alllow it to grow its population with imported food by beginning to export manufactured goods.

    Did Shakespeare understand this or did he just pocket the proceeds from being nifty with a quill and rhyme? Was he brilliant at capturing the currents of his time, but didn’t actually claim to be standing right outside of the system to see it as indeed a system?

    We can tell Anaximander and Aristotle were doing that. Metaphysics is different. It isn’t holding up a mirror to a time and place in the way that is of everyday human interest. It is to step back as far as possible by having a method that systematically abstracts such historical contingencies until only the pure structure of “being” is being contemplated.
  • Nice little roundup of the state of consciousness studies
    But I am quite tiered of this interplay. Enjoy.javra

    So this is goodbye. :party:
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    I'm not sure the highest levels of personality (of symbolic life) can be adequately captured from the outside.plaque flag

    Well that is my current research interest. To model life and mind at all their levels in organismic language.

    Biology speaks of metabolism. I would show how political and economic structure is simply metabolism scaled up. There is a literal identity and not just a metaphorical one. As structure, they are the same.

    So maybe you could have the goal of exploring all the ways individuals could be different. I am accounting for the fact that all natural structures must be essentially the same.

    The bonus is that structuralism also explains why difference grows unboundedly as the constraints of “sameness” become increasingly general or abstracted.

    So structural holism contains thesis and antithesis. A world that is just constructed of the atomic individual fails even to account for the local degrees of freedom that compose it.
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    Right, but I think of neuroscience as (roughly) software running on human hardware.plaque flag

    Computional analogies are certainly the rough cut. But even so, why does that make a difference – except in being a lossy compression of what I said?
  • How Does Language Map onto the World?
    A forger could be a genius too, or not. If not, then I doubt there would be much trouble detecting forgery.Janus

    Finding refuge in the Gettier problem? Sly dog.
    I know what I see in works and how I judge their greatness, but that is not something I can explain;Janus

    I agree. I couldn't see the fuss about Picasso when I was just looking at the pix in the book. But then there was the big exhibition in Aussie and in real life the paintings really worked. So there is something that lifts an artist above the crowd.

    But you can also analyse what it is – like the way it works when seen from both near and afar. It's not a little flat image but something that seems to lift off the canvas because the details are not overworked. From a distance, it seems precise. From close up, it becomes the opposite.

    My daughter is an artist (as was my mother) so we are looking both at the paintings and why they succeed.

    If you don't recognize that people generally tend to become attached to their theories and defend them dogmatically, in science just as anywhere else, then all I can say is that I wonder what planet you've been living on.Janus

    But you were talking about the "dogmatic" institutions – you know, the places that can house so many contradictory dogmas.

    Have you spent any time in science departments or at science conferences? Or even had to work at the coalface of ideas?

    If you are talking sociology, there is this curious - but explicable - dynamic where the greatest hatred is reserved for those just beyond your circle. Your inner circle are your back-slapping chorus. Your outer ring becomes your treacherous rivals for the prize. Then beyond that, you are back into the general crowd of folk "doing science, but no threat to your career prospects" and hence its all friends again as you turn your collective hatred on the metaphysicians or the government funding agencies.

    The real world is more like Turing's reaction~diffusion systems if you want to get technical.

    https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reaction-Diffusion.gif#/media/File:Reaction-Diffusion.gif