But that's the point! It exists qua its own phenomena. There is no counterfactual as there is just feeling-like-something, the territory that you keep missing for the map. — schopenhauer1

It's like you have zero comprehension skills. Don't just claim counterfactuals are irrelevant to facticity. Demonstrate how that is an epistemically credible stance to be taking.

It's like you have zero comprehension skills. Don't just claim counterfactuals are irrelevant to facticity. Demonstrate how that is an epistemically credible stance to be taking. — apokrisis

The fact that there is a feels-like-something along with the modelling. The feels like something is the flipside/inner quality whatever you want to call it. It is not the map of the model, but the actual modelling itself processing from the inside. But "what" is this inside? That is the dualistic nature of the problem.

The fact that there is a feels-like-something along with the modelling. — schopenhauer1

Have a go at supporting the counter-factual - that there is the kind of modelling relation the human brain has with its environment and that that feels like ... nothing?

When is that the case?

If you are dead or in a coma, for example, there is no modelling relation. But when you are in a lived and active engagement with the world, what supports your claimed counter-factual here?

Not seeing it. (Hey, another counter-factual!)

If you are dead or in a coma, for example, there is no modelling relation. But when you are in a lived and active engagement with the world, what supports your claimed counter-factual here?

Not seeing it. (Hey, another counter-factual!) — apokrisis

But this goes beyond counterfactual to what is. Experience is a phenomena. What is the phenomena of experience? Your insistence on counterfactuals here makes no sense because you are constantly looking for a map in a question of metaphysics. What is existence? It is the feeling of experience- BEING the model, NOT OBSERVING the model. Being the model has this experiential quality that is somehow NOT primary to the constituents but EMERGES into its own thing. How is that not a dualism? You cannot get out of it be referring back to the constituents and ignoring that its emerged (into something different.. which you never explain other than referring back to the map).

How is that not a dualism? You cannot get out of it be referring back to the constituents and ignoring that its emerged ( — schopenhauer1

We could be here forever and you won't get the first bit of it. In my metaphysics, the constituents emerge too. The global constraints shape the local degrees of freedom.

This is holism here. There is no point you trying to understand that reductionistically.

The global constraints shape the local degrees of freedom — apokrisis

In context of the experiential self, how does that translate? Sounds all map.. Local degrees of freedom? Is that the experience? Why does green "feel" like something and is not simply non-feeling communication.. well it emerges.. Well what is that emerging that is no other except in this modelling relation. Experience is never really excavated.

In crude but familiar psychological terms, general concepts shape our particular impressions while those particular impressions in turn build up our habits of conception.

Sorry that this still doesn't answer your Hard Problem for you. But you haven't even decided if green is a concept, an impression, or even the interaction of the two. You are not even taking baby steps away from a rigid substance ontology.

In crude but familiar psychological terms, general concepts shape our particular impressions while those particular impressions in turn build up habits of conception. — apokrisis

Concepts/impressions don't live in a vacuum. They have the quality of being experienced by an experiencer. Thus cart before horse. Or perhaps simply more map no territory.

They have the quality of being experienced by an experiencer. — schopenhauer1

Ah, up pops your "experiencer". Because of course if you have experiences, then an experiencer is there already just waiting for his Cartesian theatre to roll. It's "logical" says the simple-minded "cause an effect" reductionist.

Talk about horse and cart.

When it comes to getting semiotics, its like you are trying to play Blind Man's Buff and everyone has left the room. Vainly your outstretched fingers grope for something to clutch hold of.

Ah, up pops your "experiencer". Because of course if you have experiences, then an experiencer is there already just waiting for his Cartesian theatre to roll. It's "logical" says the simple-minded "cause an effect" reductionist. — apokrisis

So far I've seen plenty of experiencers in your model, but they are hidden. There is emerging. There is interpretant. There is degrees of freedom. There is triadic relation modelling. All of these are kind of like place holders for "and experience happens", which is essentially saying a dualism exists. The dual aspect of the inner experience accompanied by its observable phenomena of constituents by the very thing that is experiencing. You don't have to give up your modelling to be a dualist, it is simply saying there is a dual aspect- one of the observable (the modelling) and other of the process happening (experience). The process happening is qualitatively different, though it may be composed of the same constituents and can be mapped like other physical constituents. However, the dual aspect remains.

Of course you are right. Physicalism is a big bag of nothing (other than an unending stream of meaningless sentences) other than "It happens". After 28 pages of really no point, I believe the answer to the OP is no one had the foggiest idea, because it doesn't. The whole physicalism story (and it is truly worthy of being classified as great mythology), is simply a placeholder for an industry. It has no other value. When you are making a ton of money promising an end to all diseases, it is necessary to pretend you know what you are talking about.

So far I've seen plenty of experiencers in your model, but they are hidden. — schopenhauer1

Of course you have. That is how conception works, remember? It shapes your impressions. You always feel like you find what you are looking for if you look hard enough.

All of these are kind of like place holders for "and experience happens"... — schopenhauer1

Or maybe they're not. Maybe they are how we might label aspects of experiencing. Maybe that's how we talk structurally about a process.

For you its all reified nouns. I'm trying to get you to think in verbs. But I can see that ain't happening.

. I'm trying to get you to think in verbs — apokrisis

Verbs like Cosmic Goals, thermodynamic purpose, and constraints. Whitehead called all this God in his process metaphysics.

"Whitehead saw God as necessary for his metaphysical system.[114] His system required that an order exist among possibilities, an order that allowed for novelty in the world and provided an aim to all entities. Whitehead posited that these ordered potentials exist in what he called the primordial nature of God."

How DNA came about, what caused it to exist, is what is at issue. — Wayfarer

I've been reading up a bit on the formation of carbon chemistry at the year dot, and have to say that while we might be able to get to nucleic acids and amino acids at a stretch, we're not even close to explaining DNA - and once we get inside, holy crap. I'm working toward a post just on that alone.

I'm taking leave for the time being, travelling.

For you its all reified nouns. I'm trying to get you to think in verbs. But I can see that ain't happening. — apokrisis

Not really. I accept its process philosophy basically. It is you who accuse I propose otherwise. However, I do also claim the "shocking" idea that the process has an inner aspect. According to you, accepting that there is inner experiential qualities of (at least certain) processes is somehow antithetical to your theory. Also, reified verbs aren't much better than reified nouns. Process occurs but the process is not the experience any more than the regions lighting up in an fMRI is the experience of green. It may be the physical processes but not the experience itself. The experience itself is "something". That something has to be analyzed for what it is in itself, not how it can be mapped mathematically or logically. Your assumptions just don't allow you to excavate the experiential aspect.

One can create the process of experiencing if one wishes.

But this is beside the point. Everyone experiences with a mind. Either one moves ahead and explores it or in simply shunts it aside as some illusion for the sake of expediency. As for me, my experience in this world is as someone experiencing and creating. This is what I am exploring because I am interested in the nature of life.

Yep. Anaximander confused the heck out of folk as the only recorded scrap of his actual words talked about cosmic justice vs injustice. Heraclitus likewise talked about this unity of opposites - flux and logos. — apokrisis

Personally glad you added Heraclitus into the mix here. If you’ve ever read his fragments, his notion of “Zeus” is to my notion of what I’ve so far termed the telos of “unbounded awareness” as Anaximander’s notion of Apeiron is to your notion of vagueness. This being another, although maybe trite, way of illustrating the differences (rather than agreements) in our current structures of metaphysics.

The main difference here then is you want to add some further twist - another metaphysical dimension to your analysis. And that is based on the opposition of good and bad, or some such deontic distinction.

So my position would be deontically neutral. Neither competition nor co-operation would be inherently either good or bad. — apokrisis

You’ll notice I made no judgement call as to whether conflict or harmony is good, or as to which would be bad. Think in terms of Nietzsche’s meme of “beyond good and evil”. Slay Nietzsche’s dragon as Nietzsche’s lion by slaying each of its scales of “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not”. When you’re done, you’ll understand that this is about meta-ethical values, and not about any authoritative other telling you the “truth” to what is “Good” and what is “evil” – or alternatively, to what is right and what is wrong. We’re currently conflicting—I do hope you’ll laugh at the specious conclusion that, therefore, we are both evil. Gee, what would a debate forum be without all the evil-folk so defined as evil due to conflicts of opinion? Rather, in my system, primary focus is always placed upon end-states to being-as-awareness that is always in a state-of-becoming.

This is the portion missing from your system which brings about that extra layer which we sometimes term “ethics” but which I gather is nowadays better addressed as the philosophy of value-theory. Not an unimportant aspect of metaphysics, considering. And, to my mind, you cannot coherently obtain it if you insist on the only ontically real end-state being that of a Heat Death. This in the metaphysics I endorse is one variant of what I’ve so far termed “the nonbeing endstate of awareness (which is not identical to the identity of self)”, and I do look upon it as an ontically illusory endstate. Of course, you are far more interested in explaining the nuts and bolts of the physical – while I’m far more interested in explaining what the different types of reality that can be are, including that of physical objectivity and of metaphysical objectivity – and your system of metaphysics works best in terms of the physical aspects which you seek to explain.

To my mind, it would be nice to try to converge the two systems, but the current problem is, we justify our two systems in drastically different ways … although we both start with a kind of epistemological vagueness, to use your terms.

To me – and no doubt the arguments will persist on this – you seem to reify epistemological vagueness into a sub-stantial Apeirion and then proceed to make conclusions with use of this Apeiron as a premise. The way I go about things is by building up from foundations of optimal firmness (crispness) and then using these resultant conclusions of optimal firmness as foundations for further enquiry. Your system explains awareness thermodynamically; my system starts off with awareness as ontic, brute, fact. To illustrate, I can find no justifiable (via awareness, reasoning, or both) counterfactual to the proposition “the first-person point of view holds presence when in any way aware”. This lack of currently known counterfactuals does not then make this experience-based proposition an “unmitigated certainty”, for one cannot prove that at no future point in time will there ever be discovered such counterfactuals – and, thereby, demonstrate the proposition to be perfectly devoid of all possible error. But, because no counterfactuals can currently be found for it, it does make it a second-best type of certainty, an “unfalsified certainty” I’ve termed it (an inductive/abductive epistemological process of reasoning that nicely conforms to the scientific method’s principle of falsifiability, apropos). I’ve mentioned this not because I seek argument on the matter but so as to not appear so obtuse in what I’ve previous expressed.

At the end of the day we both for the most part agree with C S Pierce’s ontology. For my part, I wouldn’t mind debating these differences between us once I’m finished with reediting the entirety of my notes, this so that we may better exchange notes. But, due to the constraints of life, it’s bound to be some years before I finish doing so.

So, if it’s OK with you, maybe we can defer our basic metaphysical disagreements to some other future time. Plenty of other things to debate/talk about as far as I’m concerned. If not, I’m all ears.

According to you, accepting that there is inner experiential qualities of (at least certain) processes is somehow antithetical to your theory. — schopenhauer1

Hardly. My question to you is how is that not explained (in at least some tentative fashion) by agreement that a modelling relation with the world seems the kind of process that simply ought to "feel like something".

Even just a crude "picture in the head" representationalism, says there is something inner. There is the outer world and the inner picture of it. The problem is that representationalism is homuncular. It sets up the expectation that there is still "an experiencer" required to look at the pictures.

The modelling relations view aims to get past that in the fashion of ecological, enactive or embodied theories of cognition. Or Peircean habits of interpretance.

First, human consciousness needs to be deflated. We have to see that self-consciousness - the further habit of self-regulatory introspection - is a socio-linguistic skill. The ego, the self, is a verbal concept which we learn to apply. The "experiencer" is now a social-level selfhood, a view of our biological self taken from an externally anchored vantage point. We learn to view our actions, our behaviour, our "animal" urges, our accomplishments and acheivements, as if from a third person point of view - the generalised judgement of our family, peers, betters, and indeed entire cultural milieu.

So that social self is still a result of semiosis. Our cultures have some idea of the right way to be a human. And that becomes a constraint "we" learn to apply to our behaviour. In the Western romantic/individualist tradition especially, this social self becomes reified as an actual being living inside our heads.

Anthropology finds that simpler tribal cultures know right from wrong as simply being about how they would be judged if their actions were visible to their peers. But the Western way has been to make right and wrong a property of "the self". Sin and saintliness are properties of an inner soul. The third person social point of view gets internalised as part of the general modelling relation with the world.

That is why the psychology of modern man is so complex and existentially fraught. We live life through society's eyes. Our heads are crowded places with complex decisions. We find ourselves being pushed about by a confliction of selves. That is, "we" wind up in the middle between the social super-ego and the biological id, as Freud put it.

So first there is the socially constructed sense of self that worms its way into our heads to structure our experience. This illustrates how "points of view" are semiotically constructed. When we talk about "the experiencer", we are really talking about a system of constraints that kick into organise the flow of action.

We may personalise that machinery - call it "a self". But really it is just a machinery of constraints that reliably kicks in to focus action. It is a habit of interpretance. And that then contrasts with the individual novel acts of interpretance which may be how we form a point of view from one monent to the next. So every state of impression is some particular point of view in which an experiencer vs experience dyad is formed. It is another fleeting state of orientation in which we imagine an external or detached angle that makes "personal sense" of some particular state of the world.

Now I'm getting on to the biological level of semiosis or selfhood.

It just is the case with neural modelling that a discrimination between "self" and "world" is core to the process. If I am chewing, I have to have a constant sense of what is food, what is tongue, in my mouth. Confuse the two and it is painful. So right at the foundation of perceptual processing, there is a self/other discrimination that starts the show.

A "self" is implicit in working out constantly where the boundaries of our bodies and their intentions, their capabilities, lie. And then, from the same computation, the world - as everything "other" to that - is also implied. The world exist for us not because it is there, but because we understand it to be there as that which brutely resists our wishes and interests.

This is what an embodied approach to cognition is about. What comes first is neither self, nor world, but the unbounded and so vague experience of the infant. It is only as habits of interpretation are built up that we become practiced and secure at making an automatic, subconscious level, running discrimination in which there are the two things of a self and a world. We divide things into the experiences of what is "out there" and the experiencer which is "in here". Self and world co-arise as the definite categories of experiencing.

So the "experiencer" is revealed as a processing habit. There is no "I" at the fundamental level. But I-ness is what arises in conjunction with other-ness. We get a reified notion of there being a homuncular experiencer, an inner witnesser and willer, along with an equally reified notion of "the world" as a place of brute physical facticity.

So a good theory of mind is one that can track the semiotic reality of how both self and world co-emerge via a modelling relations process. They are both "inner" - as Kant argued. Which leaves the third thing of actual world outside, the thing in itself.

And Peirce then turned that into a more concrete formalism - a triadic description which correctly sees that what is going on is a habit of interpretance that forms for itself the signs by which it responds.

The fact that we can talk about "the self" and "the world", and find that meaningful in terms of knowing what to usefully do next, shows we have indeed reified these things as the signs that are needed to anchor acts of interpretation.

If my elbow knocks over the crystal display in crowded shop, I can immediately determine who is to blame. Well, at least I will know the grounds of the complicated debate that must ensue in my head. Was it me being clumsy? Was it my troublesome id acting out deliberately? Is it is the shop's fault for crowding its wares and almost ensuing an accident like this would happen? Maybe the shop is even being sly and deliberately setting customers up for costly breakages?

A whole host of third person points of view. Pick one as the correct first person experience of the situation.

To me – and no doubt the arguments will persist on this – you seem to reify epistemological vagueness into a sub-stantial Apeirion and then proceed to make conclusions with use of this Apeiron as a premise. — javra

In fact I am trying to avoid the usual substantial take on the Apeiron, just as I am of Mind.

But also, I am a physicalist in that I accept the scientific evidence that consciousness is emergent from complexity. It is not a simple. We know that because there is such a clear explanatory connection between brains and behaviour for a start. Drink and you feel drunk. It becomes foolish after that to deny mental states are not supervenient on material ones.

So to talk about what could be "the fundamental" - the foundational vague potential - we have to reason via whatever we know to have popped out of it emergently. And that boils down to the duality of matter and form (according to our founding metaphysics). So there must be some kind of materiality, as well as some kind of organisational structure, present in the Apeiron - at least as its unexpressed potential.

That is the argument that leads back to the notion of the Apeiron as a sea of chaotic fluctuations. Actions with a direction.

Of course, that is already "too much" in terms of an actual vagueness. But also, it seems the least possible form of definiteness. A bare action with a direction unrelated to any other is a nothing really.

It is like standing on top of a fog-bound mountain and stabbing a finger as if towards a path. It seems a meaningful event, yet it just ain't without a larger context that can make it so in relational fashion. Pointing in any other direction, in any other way, would have been just as good at that first moment.

So yes, hylomorphic substantiality is what emerges. And that is then how vagueness must be modelled or understood. We can roll our imaginations back to the very first breaking of its symmetry by the most meaningless possible fluctuation, the most relationless relation between a material action and a formal direction or organisation.

Talk about the Apeiron will thus always have to carry an air of substantiality. But the Apeiron is then formally the vague limit to substantiality. It is the boundary to reality, not itself a further state of reality. That is the subtle further bit of the story.

Your system explains awareness thermodynamically; my system starts off with awareness as ontic, brute, fact. — javra

My system starts off with symmetry-breaking and hence there must be some duality from the first moment. If there is awareness, then there must be equally also its "other" - however that is then correctly conceived.

As argued, mind and matter just don't pan out as that dichotomy. This is obvious from all the problems that bedevil ontic dualism. There is just no way to see each as the cause of the other in interactive fashion.

But another dichotomy - constraints and degrees of freedom, or information and matter - does have that intrinsic complementary machinery. We can translate from one to the other in a way that shows they are causally related. Each crisply exists to the degree its "other" is absent. The metaphysical relationship is not one of opposition or negation but instead of the inverse or reciprocal. The symmetry-breaking is not one that just brutely exists, but one that has to develop with the fullness with time.

I’ll only address this part:

If there is awareness, then there must be equally also its "other" - however that is then correctly conceived. — apokrisis

Here, you confuse awareness with awareness-of. In most, if not all, aspects of life—heck, even in all aspects of out of body experiences, where one to entertain the possibility of such occurrence—our awareness always consists of some awareness-of. It is awareness-of that in-forms us as selves, gives us as conscious agents form. We as selves are different due to the differences in awareness-of which, in part, includes: our perceived contexts of physical environment (our own bodies are, in part, perceived as self via physiological senses such as that of proprioception), our memories experienced at any given time, our moods, our thoughts, our percepts of that which is internal to our own minds (like in the imagined taste of freshly cut lemon), and so on. And yes, from here on out, of course, there’s self and other/world as a requisite dichotomy. Nevertheless, what you seem to be missing from the terminology of Ein Sof (and related terms from other cultures) is the very plausible (at the very least, quite fitting to all works in which it is mentioned) metaphysical interpretation of the intended referent being that of awareness sans awareness-of. This awareness sans awareness-of, however, is stated to be obtainable by many in many cultures via things such as meditation; though not maintainable, other than a maintained awareness of this being the foundation of all that can and does stand. Naturally, there can conversely be no awareness-of sans awareness.

But, I figure, we’re getting too spiritualizational-like (my sense of humor) in using terms such as Ein Sof, this being the Kabalistic term for the ground of all being, out of which the Kabalistic tree of life emanates.

Still, wanted to clarify this different metaphysical perspective—relative to that which you hold—which is likewise rather ancient, and very wide spread to different cultures. Of course this metaphysical slant cannot be evidenced via physics, awareness of which already entails there being some awareness-of; only via metaphysical means. And yes, I already know, we disagree on whether awareness could hold presence in the absence of awareness-of.

Your system explains awareness thermodynamically; — javra

I must have missed something big! All I remember was the phrase Thermodynamic Purpose being invented out of thin air. Granted there were about 1000 words surrounding this little sleight of hand, but no amount of words is going to hide that obvious trick. I believe it came right before the other offering of "Cosmic Goal". It's easy to explain things if all you need is words. How about, a "Romantic Cell" or a "Hungry Gene" or better yet, the "Yankee Fan molecule"?

As for Peirce, he had no ontology that I could find other than "tychism", which for the uninitiated is another manufactured word to take the place of "I don't have the foggiest idea, it just happened!" After that it is easy for Pierce. Mind just happened and Matter happened from Mind. But no need to go any further than that. I guess "It just happened", can be considered an ontology, but hardly an interesting one. What is interesting is the number of big and manufactured words it took for him to say it.

Nevertheless, what you seem to be missing from the terminology of Ein Sof (and related terms from other cultures) is the very plausible (at the very least, quite fitting to all works in which it is mentioned) metaphysical interpretation of the intended referent being that of awareness sans awareness-of. — javra

Not missing, but explicitly rejecting.

Although I'm certainly also sympathetic to the idea that all differences disappear as we work our way back to vagueness.

So we are both arguing from opposite sides of the fence. In the end I am speaking in a physicalist register, you (I assume) an idealist register. But I agree also that "in the end", experience is what is epistemically primary (for us). Dasein, Firstness, or whatever term one uses. To talk about grounding experience in the world is the beginning of an explanation. But we never transcend the limits of the fact of being grounded in .... not mind, or even awareness, but whatever is experience as vague being.

So there is something to meditation and other such ego-shedding spiritual practices even within my scheme. I am indeed talking of vagueness as physics. I have the explicit project of pan-semiosis where even "the world" is organised by a "mind-like" process - both world and mind being recognised as labels we apply to an experience thus divided. So pan-semiosis is ontically idealist to the extent it is not brute realism (and reciprocally, not brute idealism to the extent it its realist).

However, in terms of experience itself, as we can discover it to be, then shedding structuring thoughts and returning to some bare ground of "just being" is a legitimate project from the idealist side. I guess that was exactly what interested me a long time ago when I was getting started.

I did spend a lot of time investigating actual phenomenology - uncovering the fact that the organised mind is a busy place, and so how it could be relaxed back into a generalised nothingness, a vagueness, by zoning out, or a floatation tank, or that point where one falls asleep, or what it is actually like in the depths of deep non-dreaming sleep.

So I say Zen is bunk because of the notion that it is a self-mastering path to personal power. I realise that also there are varieties of Zen. The particular one I encountered at 10 was all about martial arts. It was about centering the mind so as to be able to muster strength and speed in action. And I thought sod that as the mosquitoes descended. Finding that kind of mental focus is not difficult in a sports situation. It's practical training. No need to dress it up with transcendent significance.

But then being able to still the mind - or rather empty its attentive foreground so as to allow a background natural restless manifest - is a useful trick when having to be creative in your thinking. You have to be able to strip away existing mental organisation, go back to a vaguer mental state, and catch the novel ideas or associations that flower.

So in a pragmatic way, understanding this about the mind is a useful thing. The ability to control our experiential vagueness has value, even if it is not of transcendent significance (no deontic dimension).

You do seem to want to defend the crisp existence of bare awareness - the generalised state that is about nothing in particular, and thus quietly, restlessly, about potentially everything.

And I would say something similar, but with different emphasises because of my own interests. It is the restless potential - the everythingness rather than the nothingness - which would lie at the end of my naturalist phenomenology.

So the Zen I criticise (which you may rightfully say is a caricature in speaking of the Westernised new age take) is wrong in making nothingness the goal. Somehow even the inkling of thoughts and urges must be stilled to the point of not existing. And this impossibility is why you might get a smack over the head from the Zen master, or spend a lifetime never achieving this idealised state.

My view - which fits with the neurology - is that the whole point of foundational mental being is to be a rustle of a billion possibilities. You need the mind as a sea of fluctuations - a Peircean Firstness of flashes of uncontexted thoughts and bare sensations - to then have some Tychism or creative spontaneity to shape up into an organised structure of awareness-of.

is that the whole point of foundational mental being is to be a rustle of a billion possibilities — apokrisis

Definitely saving this for the summation of this thread. Physicalism at its most poetic.

Talk about the Apeiron will thus always have to carry an air of substantiality. But the Apeiron is then formally the vague limit to substantiality. It is the boundary to reality, not itself a further state of reality. That is the subtle further bit of the story. — apokrisis

Still you ramble on...

And emergence, from the random symmetry-breaking of pure, infinitely vague potential, is not an intelligent answer. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm sorry to have to be so blunt, but sometimes when a person is so trapped by unreasonable self-conviction that the individual is doing or saying irrational things, it is necessary to grab that person's attention and say "Hey, you are acting irrationally!"

You know how it goes, MU. If one finds oneself going in the opposite direction to you, then one is definitely not getting it backwards. So thanks for that (backwards) vote of confidence. (Y)

Well, it's quite clear that I explained in very explicit terms how your backward approach is irrational, and you had no reply to that.

I remember you describing Bohm as a crackpot. Was not his poetry up to snuff?

Sounds legit.

Either the post is there or it is not. I think it's there, and you had no reply. And that's legit.