I just wanted to mention that there is a body of scientific and philosophical opinion that attention and consciousness overlap, but are clearly dissociated. — mcdoodle

I would say this "dissociation" is a function of how we choose to approach the task of explanation. Talking about consciousness is really coming at things in terms of phenomenology - what seems reportable as the contents of experience. And then talking about attention (and habit) is talking at a mechanistic level about the brain mechanisms that might produce those "contents".

So what I would object to in Montemayor/Haladjian's approach (and Koch/Tsuchiya) is that they are trying to turn the quest for consciousness into another part of the brain mechanism story. They are collapsing the phenomenal level to the functional level. They are buying into the dumb representationalist idea that consciousness is indeed "an output", a display of data once all the information processing is done.

Now I've been defending the science that approaches the brain as an information processing device. It wants to pull the machine apart and identify the mechanisms that serve the functions.

So attention is the selective filter that enhances or amplifies or focuses states of information. Habit is the short-circuiting of this extended processing that instead sees fixed routines being emitted when triggered by simple cues. It is all very clunky, but it is also a way to attempt to tie the functional and the phenomenal levels of explanation together. We can point to some very concrete lab data we have constructed by jabbing electrodes in a kitten's head, and then say this was what was going on as the kitten seemed to be making a conscious discrimination in some behavioural task.

So this is the way mind science proceeds. It is forced into a dissociation where it tackles the brain with the baldest mechanical metaphors - the information processing paradigm - and then hopes to connect that back to a phenomenal account, the "first person" point of view.

Naive neuroscientists and philosophers of mind then start protesting that the science is revealing all this information processing machinery and yet not giving us the further thing of the display of the information processed. Therefore more machinery remains to be discovered. We need to have seperate neural mechanisms to do the processing and the displaying.

I am trying to speak instead to an organismic paradigm - one that is founded now in semiotics or a theory of meaning. Life and mind are understood in terms of a modelling relation. Consciousness is embodied or enactive in being in dynamical interaction with a world. Instead of being dualistically split in the usual way - treating the mind as both a phenomenal substance and a bunch of brain circuits at the same time - it is a holistic approach that treats everything as "sign processing". :)

So I do defend the scientific understanding that has resulted from 100 years of treating consciousness as elaborate information processing. Reductionism employing mechanical metaphors has produced a ton of concrete results that tell us "what is going on in the brain".

But then you have to understand the conceptual limitations built into those same results. And seeking to reduce consciousness to brain representations - claiming you have discovered a dissociation that needs to be corrected by further mechanistic reduction - is the opposite of what you want to be doing.

So I am instead with the semiotic camp who seek to shift from an information processing paradigm to a sign processing paradigm.

I had a quick look at Montemayor/Haladjian's stuff and it felt like something out of the 1970s. I saw Haladjian is indeed a recent student of Zenon Pylyshyn and that made me smile, Pylyshyn being a famous information processing hardliner during the mental imagery war of the late 1970s.

If I see the apple as a rigid, defined object and not as a swirling whirlwind of indistinguishable matter, I am better suited for the world. My point being: (1) I agree with you that reality as we observe it is reducible to what we can agree upon, and (2) there is no reason to believe that the data we have in our heads offers an accurate depiction of the world. — Hanover

This is the way to look at it. It is the rational argument as to why our experience of reality would be functionally limited, not the thing in itself.

And also that very way of looking at it says there has to be a reality for us to be having our pragmatically simplified view. So it is an argument for indirect realism and not solipsistic idealism.

Another way to phrase it is that we are attempting to look through the flux - the blooming, buzzing, confusion - to see the Platonic forms. The tree, the apple, the whatever substantial entity we claim to apprehend, is ourselves viewing our ideas having managed to filter away all the clutter and detail that seems to stand in the way of a sharp act of object recognition.

So we can apprehend the buzzing confusion. But always we are striving to go beyond the unexamined reality of a sensory flux to arrive in a modelled realm of just us and our Platonically sharp objects of perception.

So you are meaning by semi conscious to be asleep and not meaning an automatic or habitual level of responding? What gives?

In case you didn't notice, I'm talking about the general thing, intention, not particular intentions. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes but I was talking about intentions. And it was my usage you were attacking. If you want to talk about intentionality, then that is a different subject. Making the point that life and mind are characterised by intentionality is just making the point that they are telic being. And that is explained by a systems understanding.

In regards to habit or attention, they are both intentional or goal directed in a general sense. One is just intentions learnt and fixed while the other is the forming and particularisation of intentions.

Of course I cannot really name the general intention from which the particulars are derived, or else it would no longer be general, it would be something specific, named. But I can describe them in general ways, like the feelings of anxiety, anticipation, discomfort, etc., which all seem to exist in forms which attract my attention. — Metaphysician Undercover

So something vague like a discomfort leads to the intention to look closer. And yet something vague like a discomfort attracts your attention so that you might develop a suitable intention.

Hmm. See your problem?

Obviously my point is that brains do have the general intent of focusing on what needs attention. That is why some very complicated machinery exists to make that switch if your thoughts need interrupting.

And then shifting the spotlight - to use the popular metaphor - allows the nagging discomfort to develop into some fully consider intention. An act or action plan that would be the right response. You find your arse itches and so you scratch.

So the facts you think significant are ones that are already accommodated.

Inasmuch as attention has an intentional (voluntary, noticeable, controllable, conscious) aspect, and an unintentional (involuntary, unnoticeable, uncontrollable, semi-conscious) aspect, it is unsuitable even as a metaphor for consciousness. It could just as easily serve as a metaphor for semi-consciousness. — Galuchat

Good thing that's just your misrepresentation then. I have stressed the complementary way that habit level and attentional level processing support each other.

Habit is there to do everything that needs to done without demanding thought. If you have already learnt the right responses (learning being what attention is for) then you can just act quickly with minimal need for analysis.

Attention is then where things get escalated because more thought and focus is needed.

So the fact that there has to be switching machinery that either gates or promotes events to the higher level is what you would expect. Your brain would not be much use if it couldn't flip between the need to keep focused on its own internal plans in the face of distractions, yet also then stop to focus on distractions when they might actually matter.

It's funny to hear you bringing up semi consciousness again as if it is a term with any relevance here. But maybe you can explain what you mean in neuro terms rather than as some handwaving metaphor, like a volume button being turned down low or something.

For the record, you are just misrepresenting my position.

Talk about attention is talk about a general faculty. Talk about intentions is talk about particular states.

Now I am trying to get away from such a mundanely mechanical framing of the debate myself. But if we have to talk in those terms, then you can see how you are confusing apples and oranges. Or the general and the particular.

Intentions have to form via attentional mechanism. And then having formed as particular states of attention, they can act as constraints on further attentional acts.

But also, this attentional machinery is design to allow those intended acts of attention to be interrupted. You might be intending to open the door and noticing odd noises coming from behind, be rapidly caused to halt and form some new state of intention.

So you've got yourself into some pointless spiral in trying to prove attentional machinery is under voluntary control and never subject to involuntary trigger. But that machinery obviously has to switch efficiently between two modes of attending - either pursuing a plan or getting a new plan started.

You can "rule" whatever you want, in any way you want, so what? Or why should anyone pay any attention? Ruling doesn't make something so. — tim wood

Are you that hard of understanding? It is the way I've ruled reality in that I'm defending. So yes, you could rule it in "any old way" and so what. But I am talking about a particular way. And you need to focus your response on that.

What have you got against the something, that I'm calling reality? — tim wood

That you are calling it reality is the point. Others (idealists) would call it experience. I am arguing the third epistemic position of pragmatism which steps back to speak explicitly of a modelling relation.

One of the critical points that emerges from pragmatism is the realisation that it is a useful thing - not a problem - that the reality of our experience is never the thing in itself. That is why a model works - by not being the thing itself.

But so far you have shown a tin ear to these epistemology 101 points.

The point between us is simply, and irreducibly, that I say there's something that corresponds to the tree, and you say there is not. If this isn't your position. maybe best to clarify here.

That is, reality, yes or no. — tim wood

Why would I go in for your idiotic simplicities? You don't even seem to realise that you just talked about a correspondence relationship between an abstraction - this Platonic tree that is the "real exemplar" - and some discriminative act, the forming of a sensory impression guided by such a remembered notion.

So you are telling me you have a general idea of a tree, a particular image of a tree, and that there is also a "real tree". But you are failing to tell me how you know about this "real tree" apart from there being your experience of some idea-conforming state of impression.

As I quite reasonably point out, this ain't a problem when such a belief is understood to rely on particular characteristics of the said experience - such as its recalcitrant nature. But still, your beliefs about a tree are not the same as some imagined unemboddied God's eye view of existence. To the degree that you assert naive realism, you will always be wrong.

You are making a category error in trying to make attention the efficient cause of a final cause.

I agree, it is hard to avoid talking like this. But I am trying to argue the more subtle systems view where what I mean by attention is precisely the development of some fleeting brain-wide state of constraint.

A clear intention comes to be in focus because all the background chatter of the brain is being suppressed or restrained. The intent thus pops into view as the efficient cause (supposedly) of the voluntary or controlled behaviour that ensues. And the effort being talked about is the effort of repressing all the possibilities that might have been to allow some particular "best fit" state of mind become fully actualised.

It makes no sense in the systems view to wear yourself out trying to isolate a first cause in such a model of neural action. If we say attention causes a state of intention, we don't mean that in a mechanical sense of there being an agent that has to pick a choice.

Instead, arriving at a state of attentional focus is a process of evolving development. It begins with the vague potential of the many different attentional outcomes that could be the case, and then arrives eventually - half a second later - at the outcome, the state of intentionality, which appears to have the best fit for whatever are the challenges or opportunities of the moment.

So as I say, you are analysing this mechanically - A leads to B leads to C. I am talking about an organic logic where a heap of potential self-organises through competition to arrive at a best adapted outcome. And in information processing terms, much of that effort goes into inhibiting or constraining all the possible neural activity that would otherwise muddy the water.

One striking finding was that if you measure the electrophysiological activity in the limbs of expert athletes, there is very little noise. Actions are being controlled with the least effort, the most efficient set of commands to the muscles. While a novice by contrast is sending a confused blast of often contrary messages to those same muscles - a reason why their motion is choppy and inaccurate.

So to control interactions with the world, we do have to learn what to do. But mostly that becomes learning to suppress the randomness of all the things we shouldn't do.

And this is the organic constraints-based model. A system is some collection of degrees of freedom which can be organised by limiting those degrees of freedom. The result is not complete suppression of error (as reflected in the OP's concern about Freudian slips), but instead its minimisation to an average that is tolerable - pragmatically good enough to serve a purpose.

The point of the OP was this suspicion that every action has a cause and so Freudian slips have to be secretly intentional. But an organic or Aristotelean view of causality says slips can be just slips. Accidents are also still part of the game. In a sense, you are always thinking about many other things at once, its just that you are also for the minute trying to suppress them so as to be left thinking about just the one thing.

Having a mind that rambles associatively comes for free. That is the brain's accumulated degrees of freedom expressing themselves. You can call it the unconscious if you like. But it is more about what we are putting an effort into suppressing just for an instant so as to be matchingly attentive to whatever wins out as that part of current experience we can least afford to restrict to an automatic response.

Well, on your account these are realities - which you have ruled out. In particular, you (apparently) think they persist across time, but what makes you think so? — tim wood

Again, I've ruled reality in by making it a testable belief. The recalcitrant nature of some of my experience is the evidence supporting that interpretation. And by the same token, the existence of "my self" as the perceiver/experiencer/interpreter arises as that part of experience which is other to this "real world".

So I am speaking as a pragmatist and not an idealist. The practical psychological and epistemic question I am answering is how we can rightfully put limits on doubt and so have grounds to believe.

My point here is simply that to insist there's no access to reality is to be entangled with a set of arcane presuppositions that predate Kant.

I'd like to sharpen this a bit: my position is that there is a reality that we perceive, that grounds our perception, such that we can know the reality and make true statements about it. — tim wood

The big question is how the mind - as a model of reality - can have access to reality. And the answer is indirectly.

Your position seems to be that somewhere along the line, there needs to be actual direct contact with something. So it can't be interpretation all the way down. Knowledge has to be founded on actual nakedly apprehended fact.

Hence you have adopted the position of insisting that look closely enough and we will find ourselves able to see those elements of reality upon which a whole edifice of subsequent interpretation then depends.

Yet psychological science has put awareness under the microscope like this and shown that it can't be the case. The modelling of reality only kicks in once an epistemic cut (cf: Howard Pattee) has formed to allow the translation (or interpretation) of physical energies into informational inputs.

There cannot be a model of the world until there is a definite epistemic separation from the world being modelled. So the indirectness is built in as the necessary starting point of perception and cognition. The mind arises where the world is no longer in control of activity by the directness of its physical energies. Instead, the mind - as a modelling relation - is able to start to choose how it reads those physical energies as the sign of something. The sign of a "reality" as usefully conceived.

Psychological science tells us this. Red and green are vivid signals - understood as the very opposite of each other - yet the wavelengths they represent are fractionally different in energy. Sounds are only air pressure variations, but we hear noise. Molecules are shapes that can chemically bind, yet we smell an odour.

Every time we look at sensory processes, there is a translation of physical energies into meaningful signals by a framework of interpretance. And what we experience is nothing like how - as now discovered through scientific models - we imagine the real world to physically be.

So sensation itself is as indirect as everything that follows. The foundation of awareness is in fact the trick of disconnection that allows a process of world-modelling mediated by its own system of signs.

Your position looks to depend on some "proper connection" between our signs of reality and reality as the thing in itself. Somehow, we must read reality directly down there at the foundational level. Our signs, our bits of information, must be "true" and not merely learnt and developed convention - habits of interpretance.

Again, my pragmatic modelling relations approach - which is simple psychological science - makes the point that modelling can't even start unless there is a cut off imposed on the real physical energy of the world. The only way mind can arise is by shutting out the world so it can form its own regulated system of sign which permits it to insert its own self-interested point of view into the energetic flows of that reality.

As usual, what you look to be making out to be a bug is the feature. We can only be in control of reality to the extent we have constrained it as a habit of interpretation. What is foundational is the epistemic cut that puts us on the informational side of a modelling relationship with a "real" flux of material dynamics or physical energies.

I don't see how the unconscious could be linguistically structured. — Metaphysician Undercover

I was talking about using the attention~habit distinction instead of the conscious~unconscious one. And then - as we mostly study the neuro-architecture of that by jabbing electrodes into the skulls of laboratory animals - I added the rider that humans would of course have the usual linguistically structured overlay over both of those levels of processing.

Emotions and feelings arise from the unconscious which we cannot put words to. — Metaphysician Undercover

Huh? People are always talking about feeling scared, happy, hungry, whatever.

But yes, "emotional" valuation does take place at a rapid and instinctual level of genetically-formed habit. It is automatic and so "arises".

Yet it is also true that the evolution of the higher brain sees all the lower level habitual responding getting mapped to places in the prefrontal and cingular cortex so that they can enter into attentional level responding, become part of working memory planning. Feelings of pain, for instance, are mapped down in the brainstem. But then re-mapped in the anterior cingulate where they can then be either amplified or over-ridden, depending on the broader choices a smart animal has to make.

The higher brain can remember the pain - make it a nagging anxiety. Or it can shut down the feelings of pain if the animal is in a fight or flight situation and has to focus on executing some more complex plan of action.

So feelings can be "conscious" or "unconscious". Sometimes we can be feeling things - like that dull pain in your back while sat in your chair - without really being aware of them. We have a habitual level response but it isn't deemed significant enough to be allowed to break through ... until someone mentions it and you go looking to see if it's there. Then vice versa, a bee stings your toe and that breaks through your concentration, suppressing whatever other thoughts of urgent business that you had at that moment.

This is the sophisticated way brains are organised. They are designed to divide their effort two ways - either to deal with as much as possible with the least effort and analysis, or decide something is so significant that it needs full attentional analysis. And all day they do both things at the same time.

Saying some aspect of mentality is unconscious, semi-conscious, or whatever, explains nothing. It is saying well whatever consciousness is, there is this other stuff I rely on that isn't consciousness.

But attention and habit makes sense as two poles of a dichotomous brain organisation. We can talk about what exactly the brain is doing with each, and also why that seems the logical way for brains to navigate the dynamic complexity of the world.

Furthermore, when we think using words it is always a conscious effort. If we try to put words to the subconscious, in an effort to structure it, we must bring it into the conscious mind, so that it is no longer the subconscious which is being structured. — Metaphysician Undercover

Or rather it is like an iceberg. The whole brain is involved and the effort is divided between habit and attention. Attention forms a generalised intent (that being the novel part), habit puts that into words (that being routine skill), and then attention can sign off on the final utterance - or at least come up with hasty self-correction having spotted something wrong with the way the words just came out.

You are thinking of conscious and unconscious as two walled off kinds of mind. I am stressing their active interconnection as two complementary modes of processing - one doing the most work for the least effort, the other putting in the most effort only where it is really necessary.

...and have no access to anything but interpretation... — tim wood

My point is that you in fact have access to two things - your general theory and your particular acts of measurement. So this allows for a process of triangulation.

You have this general idea that there is a reality out there, of which a tree is one of its material objects. Such a theory of your experience then has natural consequences that can be deduced and tested. Real objects should endure in our experience even if we might wish their facts to be otherwise. And so I can test this theory about the reality of the tree by trying to walk through it, or whatever. The extent to which my beliefs are unchanged as the result of such actions rightfully goes to the certainty of my original interpretation. I have evidence of an internal model consistency even if I don't have direct experience of the world.

You can't know. But it is a hypothesis you can adopt and test.

I didn't say it was a textbook. But in fact it was being used as an
introductory text for neuroscience at my local medical school. And it did focus on the neural architecture of automatic and attentional processing.

Why be such a dick?

As is always the case in such philosophical quandaries, it is fruitless trying to achieve the grounding of an external perspective. The only epistemic route is internalism. That is, we are free to form our axioms, hypotheses, or other statements of certainty. Then we see how they fare in practice. We observe and measure to reduce our uncertainty about those grounding principles.

So normativity is fine as expressing what some community of thinkers has come to agree over time. The norm works to the degree that the community can measure or care. They find it possible to doubt in principle but not doubt in their hearts.

Truth is a measurable or quantified lack of uncertainty about some claim made in a spirit of complete certainty. You can't escape knowledge internality. But you sure as heck can get rigorous about the internal structure of belief systems.

PMed.

There you go. It was fact free waffle.

So speaking neurological, what actually is going on when you are conscious vs "semi-conscious"? What's your model in terms of actual brain processes?

That's the advantage of talking instead about attention and habit. We know how both work and how they functionally relate. It's not handwaving.

That is a tree." What does "that" refer to? Do you begin to see the difficulty? If it's another interpretation, then you never escape from an endless chain of interpretation. On the other hand, if there is something about the tree that is not merely interpreted by you, then you have a grasp of reality not interpreted. — timw

It is interpretation all the way down. But also, part of what we then experience is the recalcitrant nature of our experiences. So every time we open our eyes, the tree is still there. That is extra information we can interpret - especially if we happen to wake up and realise we were dreaming. Reality becomes defined by having the particular further property of seeming to be unquestionable.

Another commonsense point is that interpretation also bottoms out of its own accord. Eventually we lose interest as we feel that further inquiry doesn't matter. That tree could be a fake, a phantom, something other than what it presents. But if it is just part of the scenery, we weren't planning to turn it into a boat or throw it on the fire, then who cares?

So while we might never know the world in some direct and complete sense, it doesn't matter. Our habits of interpretation only need to be good enough for the purposes we have. Our lack of real concern about the nature of reality will take over long before we get that far down a chain of increasingly refined interpretance.

Wiki is useful on symbolic interactionism and its attempts to place itself - pragmatically - in the middle of the usual realist vs idealist debates.

This viewpoint sees people as active in shaping their world, rather than as entities who are acted upon by society (Herman and Reynolds, 1994). With symbolic interactionism, reality is seen as social, developed interaction with others.

Most symbolic interactionists believe a physical reality does indeed exist by an individual's social definitions, and that social definitions do develop in part or relation to something "real". People thus do not respond to this reality directly, but rather to the social understanding of reality; i.e., they respond to this reality indirectly through a kind of filter which consists of individuals' different perspectives.

This means that humans exist not in the physical space composed of realities, but in the "world" composed only of "objects". According to Blumer, the "objects" can be divided into three types: physical objects, social objects, and abstract objects.

Both individuals and society cannot be separated far from each other for two reasons. One, being that they are both created through social interaction, and two, one cannot be understood without the other. Behavior is not defined by forces from the environment or inner forces such as drives, or instincts, but rather by a reflective, socially understood meaning of both the internal and external incentives that are currently presented.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_interactionism

So you've got the best of both worlds. Humans are neither materialistic automatons programmed by social memes, nor is social information some sort of non-existent abstracta. Instead you have the fruitful co-operativity of individual psychologies being shaped by useful cultural habits developed over the long-run. Human intellect is liberated ... but in ways that are imbuded with the pursuit of general social goals.

This is why modern life is strange. Hey, we all could be anything we like - astronaut, president, bum living under a bridge. But then also we have to be that one thing pretty much. We get both huge choice and the necessity of binding ourselves to that choice.

Freedom and constraint go hand in hand. The modern socially constructed mind takes that claimed paradox to the extreme.

I was asking if society is constructed or discovered.

I think your position is that everything is constructed, except some things are mathematically inevitable.. so not constructed. Is your view contradictory? — Mongrel

Dude. So many ways to misconstrue anything I say. You keep demonstrating the grip that a socially constructed worldview has on folk's thinking.

You are talking standard reductionist metaphysics and so it has to either/or, and to suggest both implies contradiction and paradox. Instant logical fail. Go to jail and don't pass go.

But you know that the essence of holism or systems causality is about the complementary duality of two kinds of causes in interaction - upward construction vs downward constraint. So anything real is a product of both efficient and final cause. Or to put it another way, material and formal cause.

So in my view - which is pretty much ordinary social science - society is an organismic system. It is a form of holistic order that can learn and adapt. It is rightfully a higher kind of "mind" - mind being put in quotes to signal we are talking of semiotics or a generalised theory of mindfulness, and not wanting to get tied up in the usual old hat Cartesian notion of mind as a soul-stuff or sentient substance.

Social constructionism (or symbolic interactionism) is then getting into the tricky semiotic detail of how this works - again in a way that can be generalised from the social to the biological and even perhaps the physical.

I posted on the triadic nature of sign relations. And I made the point that when it comes to the "constructing", what is involved is the construction of habits of conceptual constraint within a community of minds. Through language, bit by bit, ideas can be built inside everyone's heads. Each new generation can become soaked in the schemas that best make sense of their worlds - or best make sense in a way that works to suit the purposes of the larger social organism.

It is all perfectly obvious. It is just that most people also object to this analysis of the process. An irony of the modern condition is that it is basic to the shared conceptual ideology that we should all be free and individual. So social construction is a really bad thing in that light - a threat to the supposed primacy of the self.

And that enlightenment/romantic model of humanity has of course taken hold because of its very effectiveness in achieving social goals. Fooling folk about the reality of their socially constructed state has had immense payback for the modern western techno power culture that has adopted it as its umwelt or unquestioned world model.

Now you are trying to force what I say into your traditional socially constructed reference frame. (Not necessarily a wrong thing, but definitely an example of social construction at work.)

So in my systems science/holistic/pansemiotic ontology (definitely socially constructed), I see abstracta as being concretely real ... in some useful sense. Just as I see concretely material stuff - like atoms or forces - as really convenient fictions, ideas we have about a reality formed of constituent objects.

So when a physicist goes looking for the fundamental material stuff of which everything is made, it has a way of evaporating. It turns out to be an over-concrete idea of what reality really is.

And likewise, finality really turns out to be critical to accounting for reality. Thermodynamics is not just some random idea. There really are mathematically-inevitable constraints that must emerge for anything to actually be.

So yes, it is conventional to see a sharp distinction between the real material world and the realm of human constructed notions - ideas about universities, hedgehog houses or whatever. This is what social construction has come to mean in PoMo especially. It is the basis of postmodernist relativity.

But that is why I prefer semiotic approaches that see reality as a co-construction of information and energy. That replaces the dichotomy of mind and matter with something more ontically general.

So Un says construction is about things that are actively built as opposed to things that just sort of passively appeared due to erosion or continental collision. — Mongrel

A point about that. A metaphysical strength distinction does rest on a fundamental opposition. Or to be more precise, not merely an act of negation but an actual inverse or reciprocality.

So yes, the distinction could be between active and passive. But more strongly, the dichotomy would be construction vs constraint. That is bottom-up efficient causality vs top-down finality. That is then the systems frame of meaning that brings value and intentionality naturally into the picture.

Even an eroding mountain is a semiotic relation. The laws of thermodynamics act as a constraint on material constructions. They are a universal desire that is the cause of a generalised tendency towards an equilibrium state. Mountains get worn down and valleys filled up over time just by "accident". Or rather, by the fact of a global balancing drive which limits the scope of acts of construction.

Social constructionism - first best explained by the symbolic interactionism that arose out of Peirce's semiotics - is then about how language can socially construct the perceptual constraints by which we experience reality. Habits of words can organise our thoughts at a very deep level. They regulate what we see or distinguish.

So this is where the confusion starts. There is both construction and constraint in play (as natural partners, being the necessary pairing in any systems understanding of causality). It is not that individuals ever had a choice that they were modelling reality in pragmatic fashion and so their experience was constrained by some natural or evolved intent. But with the development of a new level of semiotic mechanism - articulate and grammatical speech - a new social way of constructing constraints could get going.

Biological minds could be social minds - still in a pragmatic modelling relation with the world, but now from an expanded social point of view which could incorporate social level final causes, or intents and values.

The elements of a triadic semiotic modelling relation are there. You have an intent. It exists to organise the world. And it is mediated by signs.

So you come to want the long term thing of a hedgehog house. A particular pile of leaves has come to stand for that. You have an informational model in that you have both a theory of a hedgehog house and a measurement, a perceptual sign, of its existence. Where I see wind blown leaves, you experience a hedgehog house. And if I happen to kick through the leaves, you will tell me off then push the leaves back into their proper place. So it is more than just an idea. It is a semiotic relation that is physically constraining the world in a particular way now.

As I say, all life and mind can be explained in these terms - what theoretical biologist Howard Pattee called the epistemic cut. Rate independent information exerting constraint on rate dependent physical dynamics. Like the way DNA manages cellular metabolism in a "knowing" fashion.

So social constructionism is just a rather uncontroversial example of a semiotic relation - a high-level linguistically-anchored version of a basic natural mechanism.

One thing this looks to miss is that what you are socially constructing is a constraint. And so any distinction remains irreducibly vague in practice. It does carve the world up into differences that make a difference. It does impose informational boundaries around the world and its physical dynamics. But a constraint only narrows the scope of a meaning or intent to the degree it is considered (socially or organismically) useful.

So talking about stuff is vague. It has vast scope in language when it comes to bounding the world with a meaningful distinction. But a combination of words, said in this particular context, then should narrow the scope of an intent with great precision.

Your kids should understand that the intent they are meant to mirror - the constraint they should place on their own physical or dissipative degrees of freedom - don't involve tidying up dead spiders or doing something about the chairs.

The very fact you can imagine labelled boxes - physical constraints of the most literal kind! - for all this loosely referenced "stuff", shows how socially constructed this real world landscape really is.

By the by, all this is precisely what Peircean semiotics and modelling relations approaches make clear.

Spencer-Brown is only half getting it in talking about the triadic nature of the informational side of a model's epistemic cut. He talks about the symmetry breaking that creates the three things of the two domains distinguished and then the third thing which is the boundary or act of division imposed.

The full semiotic view emphasises that the modelling relation is between an informational model and an energetic physical world. There is an ontological duality, a self/world, that is being constructed. But this is triadic in that the self forms signs of the world. It is the whole point of modelling not to represent reality in some veridical way - leaving no gap or epistemic cut between self and world - but to instead form a habitual relation of signs that comes to be our understanding of the thing in itself.

So biologically, the physical energies of the world are experienced by us in a perceptually constructed fashion. We see red and not green as a striking difference when the physical wavelengths may be only fractionally different in reality (and in reality, not at all coloured in any sense).

This is of course where SX goes particularly astray. If you conflate self and world, ignore the epistemic cut, then you start to talk about hues as "the real" and you don't assign them the proper ontic status of being our mediating signs of physical energies - a translation of the material world into the information that habitually constructs a state of mental constraint on our intentionality. Seeing red or green can mean something ... because they are in fact never real. We can then impose whatever intepretation or habit of meaning we like as they are just symbols.

Anyway, this semiotic game is then repeated at the social or linguistically mediated level of experience. We carve the physical world with useful concepts like boxes, kinds of toy, tidiness, parent-child dominance relations, etc.

So going to the OP, semiotics would take it as obvious that our relations with the world are constructed. That is the definition of life and mind - to be a modelling relation where information forms a self in fruitful control of a physical world.

And the typical reaction to this realisation - that conscious awareness is indirect or constructed - is negative. It seems an epistemic problem rather than the necessary basis of an epistemic relation. Most folk are naive realists and want philosophy to get them back to that happy position somehow. But the whole point of awareness is to simplify the complexity of any physical environment and to take advantage of its entropic gradients - tap the flows for useful purposes. So the world has to be replaced by a system of signs. Constructing "our world", our umwelt, is the same as constructing our selves, our own individuated being and meaning.

Humans depend on social construction to be human. It is not a bug but the feature.

The only issue then is whether there is a natural story of progression. Is this a pluralistic free for all where anyone can make up their own valid worldview, or is there a real world out there and so the world construction must converge on some optimal mental model?

Again the answer seems obvious. The scientific view of reality has arisen as a modelling discipline which is most effective at constructing the constraints which can harness material flows. Science is the most life giving way of construing the world.

Of course then you can look around and protest at the state of a scientific society. But any biologist will tell you how out of kilter with nature we have allowed things to get. Modern society is not being rational on the long term view.

But again, the bottom lines are that any relation with the world is a process of triadic mediation. We have to form the signs that become our world and so form our strongly individuated selves along with that. That is the essential epistemic relation.

And then there can be many ways of setting up that self-world point of view. The social constructionist arguement becomes about which socially encouraged stance is evolutionarily optimal. And that question can't be answered without recognising that the relation is between the information that constructs constraints and a world of physical potential that is being thus usefully constrained.

So any epistemology has to be grounded in a natural ontology. And people know that. It is why social construction is treated as such a danger - this idea that folk can construct their own realities rather too freely.

But in fact, against naive realism, it also had to be understood that what constitutes our psychic reality is the third thing of the modelling relation. We shouldn't mourn the impossibility of knowing the thing in itself. The whole point philosophically should be attending instead to forming the healthiest system of signs - the correct mediated view. What would it be to optimise the modelling relation (in some given environmental context)?

That's backwards. Memory as a technical term can mean all sorts of things just applied to humans. There is long term memory, short term memory, iconic memory, autobiographical recollection, recognition or perceptual memory, etc.

And then likewise, there is memory in the most general technical sense as a systems theorist or semiotician most especially would use it. And there memory describes any form of information capture that serves to constrain future system dynamics.

Metal for instance can be fabricated to have a,memory - a form it wants to snap back into.

So you are making a loose use of language - one not really scientific or philosophical. I am talking about memory in a generic yet fully technical sense.

Are you serious? What's the problem with a genetic memory that can capture useful random changes? There is no logical or metaphysical hole in this as a basic story.

Its a joke. A rock just wouldn't get it would it?

No. The universe is a dumb as a rock. Which is what requires life to evolve and entropifiy what the universe itself cannot.

So it is not a positive relation in that the physical realm has the intellligence to decide to make life. Instead the physical realm is limited by its dumbness in a fashion that makes a drive towards intelligence inevitable, if such intelligence is possible.

So a case of creative dumbness?

Thanks. My background is in neuroscience and theoretical biology. But that thread is many pages long.

A brief answer is that biologists now understand life as a manifestation of the laws of thermodynamics. So evolution (and progress) would now be placed securely on that particular branch of physics. Life exists to accelerate the entropification of the universe.

This naturalises life, giving it a purpose. The universe wants something. Life arises not as some wild accident but because it is the kind of complex, energy dissipating, heat producing, process that is meant to be.

This is a big change from the old Darwinian mechanical picture. And the same ontological shift is happening in physics too. The universe itself is a Big Bang, etc. Existence is the evolution of maximalised simplicity - the search for a physical heat death.

Then life and mind arise as the fleetingly complex structure which help with this generalised cause. Where there are undissipated energy stores, we insert ourselves as structure that finds clever ways to dissipate it to waste heat.

So one general physical imperative to rule them all.

Yes, I do see appeals to the supernatural as ontologically vacuous. Transcendence can't work as causal explanation. So I am happy starting with a rational position. Holism has to be about immanence - system style causality.

I don't think I've ever been roundabout on the point. :)

I myself and Bergson consider the unconscious just a form of memory. — Rich

Memory is a better way to look at it. But also everything about the brain is memory.

A snappy way of putting it is that the unconscious or habitual part of brain activity could be called a memory of what can be forgotten, while the conscious or attentional part is our memory of the future.

What I mean is that we form a machinery of adaptive habits by learning what to ignore about the world. We learn what we can afford to forget to make things happen in a way that demands least conscious attention.

And then attention is about noticing what predicts the near future. It is forming the mental picture of what counts and needs to guide our coming behaviour. So it is a (working) memory of the expectable future.

So the unconscious is everything that at the moment we can afford to forget about. The conscious is everything we need to be remembering as context for the moment we are going through so as to smoothly integrate ourselves in the world just about to happen.

The two faces of what we call the faculty of memory. And what people typically think of as memory - recall of past events - is the linguistically structured art of talking ourselves back in time, imagining or recreating an anticipatory image of what it would be like to be back in some moment, doing the Janus thing of ignoring as much as possible via habit, forming a working memory as context for some next moment.

But you've changed the subject by bringing in Jung. At least Freud was trying to be materialistic and scientific. Now you are appealing to the supernatural. And that is just peddling the romantic myth of the wrongfully constrained human individual from a flakier ontological basis. Instead of Freud's naturalist story of a secret driver of conscious action, you have shifted to a secret supernatural driver of natural action in general.

So you are again recognising a division, but then jumping to a transcendent ontology which puts the second source of action outside the level of action to be explained. It is not the integrated view I am taking. Holism is about immanence. It is about the two way interaction that can result because there is a symmetry breaking or dichotomy that forms, allowing the third thing of dynamical integration.

Even if a subject has a neuronal abnormality, such as a developing tumour, which might cause behavioural changes, then that is an unconscious determinant of behaviours. — Wayfarer

But it is also pretty materialist to be seeking the hidden subconscious determinants of behaviour. Freud's own model is straight out of the industrial era with its hydraulic steam engine metaphors. Watch out, that thar id is a pressure about to blow! Got to protect the ego system by finding harmless release in Freudian slips!

So that is why I would stress flipping the story. The unconscious is just that dynamical vague mass of everything we might ever think or do. Then the moment to moment consciousness is what becomes our usefully adapted state having constrained all the meaningless variety to form some fleetingly useful mental picture.

The determination of the indeterminate is a top down thing. We are actually in control in the sense that the evolution of a state of mind is holistically organised via a competivite process, a generalised filtering.

So to escape materialism - the standard bottom up story - it is important not to try to pin the blame on our instinctual animal id. That itself is a romantic myth by which society - as a higher scale of mind - is seeking to regulate or constrain individual humans in a holistic and top down fashion.

At least Freud got he super ego story right. But he was essentially speaking to materialist science and romantic ideology.

A better neuroscientific division than conscious vs unconscious is attentional vs habitual. And in humans, both would have then have the extra feature of being linguistically structured.

So an important point is that habit and attention operate on different timescales - a fifth of a second vs half a second. And connected to that, all clear thoughts have to start out vague and tentative, becoming focused and strongly conscious by neural competition and selective attention - unless they are, by exact contrast, highly routinised thoughts that can be emitted "without thought" as rapid habits.

So what we are dealing with here is a natural dichotomy of brain activity towards either dealing with life in a rapid, learnt, unthinking way, or a more deliberative, attentive, and learning way. And this is a dynamical balancing act. We have to be doing both at once all the time.

If you apply this neurological model to Freudian slips for example, you can see that speech acts have to bubble up from vague beginnings where there is some general intended thought to be expressed, but multiple choices about how to turn that into an articulated sentence. So the brain has to be in a state of competition where many things could be said - including stuff you don't want to say, or stuff vaguely associated - and all that possibility has to be suppressed just to let some actual formula of words win through to be said.

Nothing nefarious is going on when slips occur. It just reflects the fact that thought has to start with a net cast wide, then speech itself forces a dramatic narrowing of possible sayings to arrive at a string of particular words that then count as what you wanted to say.

And the timing comes into it because you can be conscious of your general intended speech act, but stringing the actual words together happens at subconscious speeds. So it is only after the final speaking you discover how this little process of competitive filtering played out.

So my complaint against Freudian style views is that they kind of paint a picture of two kinds of selves in competition - like the instinctual id and socially constrained super ego. It is a one dimensional tale of repression and betrayal.

But while competition definitely exists, the ability to smoothly integrate the various levels of processing is what is more relevant to an understanding of brain function. The neural architecture may be founded on dichotomies. But the dynamics are then about the fruitful integration of the useful division of labour.

The idea of being at secret war with your own self is a nice romantic myth. It speaks to the real fact of division. But what completes the story of the self is focusing on its actual goal of arriving at an integrated and adaptive state of understanding and action. The unconscious then becomes, in this light, all the dynamic and lively variety that has become constrained for just a moment to form the highly focal state of mind we happen to be in right now, at this time, for some good reason.

I'm speaking for the scientific research. If you want to believe something else, it won't change that.

The simplest answer is that being conscious of the world itself demands a constant process of anticipatory imagery. We have to forward model the sensations of what are about to happen so as to reduce the amount of things that are surprising. Even as you reach for a door knob, you are forming all kinds of expectancies about how the knob will feel as it turns in your hand and what will be the generality of what will be seen beyond.

In a state of sensory deprivation, these kinds of anticipatory images will develop into highly detailed - but fleeting and disconnected - states of perception themselves. At a rate of every half second, one image will replace another, with a loose associative knowledge.

That is why dreams seem a constant chase after meaning. You are still trying to make some kind of narrative sense of what is going on - fitting some tale to it. But as MU points out, Fred is never Fred as every passing image throws up a new scene.

On this view, vivid R.E.M. dreams serve no great psychic purpose. R.E.M. exists to stir up the brain to near waking state so you will be ready to go if something does wake you up. The images are just what the brain has to do - fill in the blanks - because it is designed to generate a constant flow of anticipations and those become vivid when actually answering sensation is absent.

You can catch that happen when you first fall asleep - hypnagogic imagery. The brain cuts off from the outside world and you immediately plunge into the bright light of some fantastical vision. But it lacks the narrative structure of a R.E.M. dream. That scrabble after explanation takes time to build its own confused history.

So your claim is that we can imagine a class of things, such that we cannot imagine any element of that class? — Banno

Well yes, as you just did. :)

The point is rather that the meanings of words aren't exhaustible. You could always contrive to find more. But then there also has to be some point to it. Meaning involves a triangulation between the world, the sign and a purpose.

Imagination couldn't function unless vagueness was its basic feature. That is how we can be impressed when by contrast it seems we are pretty definitely conceiving of various things in "exhaustive enough to be useful" fashion.

So in terms of your OP, the question would be whether this civilisation a million years hence is still using language in much the same way (as well as being neurologically much the same in the way in which they are biologically conscious of the world).

Already - because we can use the language of maths - we do conceive of the infinite and nothing in ways that constrain their meaning in more definite fashion.

So the question may be how much more could language evolve as a tool of precise thought in the next million years? Maybe not a lot if we just extrapolate from the speech and math we have - could their grammar or syntax become much more flexible or universal?

So in some ways, the answer to your OP is trivial. We already know - from basic epistemological argument - that we should expect there to be known unknowns and unknown unknowns. But my point is that then - for speech acts - speech has the further power of counterfactuality. We can speak even of the unknown unknowns and say something about them in a way that is humanly meaningful. We can talk in ways that constrain them in ways we regard as useful.

Yep, the complementary limits on the knowable. And as usual, limits are what knowledge may approach with asymptotic closeness, but - by definition, in being the absolute limit - never completely reach.

Banno needs to make up his mind whether he believes in epistemological absolutism or not. He hankers after some form of pragmatism or knowledge relativism but keeps getting in his own way with experience-transcending claims.

Rubbish. Even imaginable things are to some degree uncertain, vague or indeterminate in our mind. So we can talk about that which is by the same token the most radically vague, uncertain or indeterminate in regards to our imagining.

We can imagine a zero, a big fat nothing. Yes, that imagining may be rather fuzzy on closer examination, but so is our conception of everything, or even something.

It is simply the constraints-based logic of speech and thought that means all acts of imagining are in the same boat. What we take as enumerately imagined - some set of concrete objects conceived - is never in fact as concrete as we pretend. So whatever hasn't or couldn't be imagined is merely the same general thing, just at the other end of the spectrum in terms of it apparent (in)definiteness.