The weird logical properties of language might somehow be biologically encoded, and many linguists seem to think they are. I'm just saying that much of language is just a bizarre cluster of formal restrictions that seem to be pretty robust across the world's languages and that you'd never guess just by seeing language as an embodied tool, or something like that. In that way it's a narrow view of the subject. Language has lots of properties that do not seem to care much for the cultural or bodily milieu they inhabit, lots of it is foreign even to its users, but still there and mathematically describable.

As such, the human experience of language - or rather human language tout court - is shaped by the fact that we are motile, kinesthetic, haptically sensitive and habit-engendered beings. — StreetlightX

You have been either missing or avoiding my original point.

Yes, I have always agreed with the embodied or enactive view of mental experience. I was already arguing that in the 1980s against the cogsci functionalism of that era.

But what I objected to was your invoking of aesthetics or sensibility as a naked foundation for anything. My argument is that this is a retreat towards solipsistic idealism and panpsychism in that it tries to make the phenomenology of feeling primary in philosophical positions. And that is a monism which is much too reduced. The right kind of most general philosophic grounding - the place from which to answer all deep human questions - is instead the irreducible triadism of hierarchical semiotic structure.

So the argument against aesthetics in particular is that that is already a socially constructed state of conception - a cultural rationalisation about biologically embodied processes of sensibility or evaluation. To talk about "aesthetics" is already to frame the thing in itself in an abstracting structure of words that embed a collection of cultural prejudices.

And this is just what you demonstrate by launching into rants about what is natural, what is wrong. It seems because you feel a certain way about manual labour vs intellectual activity, feminism vs patriachy, or whatever political agenda motivates you in some moment, then it is your conscious feelings that legitimate the stance. You talk as if any right-minded person would have to experience the same aesthetic response, and so phenomenology wins the argument.

But human emotions are socially constructed. There is the same animal machinery, but words are already getting in there and structuring experience from infancy. So if aesthetics is in the "mind" of anything, it is in the mind of a particular culture. That is its proper level of embodiment - if we must reduce towards a canonical level where the idea formative information, the constraints, are embodied as a state of remembering.

Again, you have agreed in the past about the socially constructed, language dependent, nature of human introspective awareness. To "look inside at ourselves and our qualia" is a skill that has to be learnt - one taught us by our social context, and so a set of ideas that evolved beyond us individually for its own (always philosophically questionable) reasons.

Thus to then turn around and say, no, look inside and there really just is this affective quality which is basic to experience and so the ground of philosophic epistemology, doesn't stack up. One can't look inwards to discover the "aesthetic". One has to look outwards to the cultural history, the rational intelligibility, of its (still evolving) social development as an idea.

And yes, again, there has to be some neurobiology that social contructionism can hook into. If you tell me that there is a Romantic response which is feeling the sublime, then I can check and say yes I get what you mean when I stand alone atop of a mountain, or whatever.

But hey, that is still a really bad foundation for philosophy. I shouldn't ignore the fact you are speaking for a social attitude which has evolved for its own reasons - reasons I ought to take into account against some larger scheme of nature which actually talks about the formation of such discursive structures.

And this is where Peircean semiotics gets it right. It makes that foundational connection between mind and matter - or now symbol and matter, constraint and freedom. Semiotics gets at the common mechanism that directly connects discursive structure and dissipative structure - rate independent information and rate dependent dynamics, to use Pattee's term. Or infodynamics as Salthe sums it up in his semiotic take on hierarchy theory.

Phenomenology is always going to be a misleading exercise if it is set up as a search inside for what is nakedly really there. We end up only creating the very thing we claim to be finding when we check and see that subliminity is an affective response we feel when we set up our state of thought according to the appropriate cultural prescription. Instead, what phenomenological training should set us up to look for - if semiosis is the correct model of course - is semiosis at work inside our own heads, creating its characteristic kind of organisation.

I'm just saying that much of language is just a bizarre cluster of formal restrictions that seem to be pretty robust across the world's languages and that you'd never guess just by seeing language as an embodied tool, or something like that. — The Great Whatever

Fine, And I'm going a step further in claiming that the emergent constraints aren't bizarre but natural in their developmental inevitability. Human grammar and the laws of thought are Platonic in that sense. They wound up having the only form they could have in taking semiosis to its rationalising extreme.

That was why Greek mathematics and logic was the big deal that got philosophy going. It was the first glimpse that existence could actually be a rational structure in a true sense. And now semiosis is a theory of how rational structure emergently develops with historical inevitability - getting us past the earlier problems of Platonic idealism where it is murky how the perfect forms interact with the messy material world to do the job of imposing necessity on contingency.

Platonic transcendence - an ontology of existence - gets fixed by Peircean immanence, a process view where the rule of law is instead replaced an inevitability of emergent habit.

Check human grammatical structure or logical form and there is a least action principle expressing itself. Of the many possible ways of thinking, it fast boiled down to an optimal structure that was the shortest distance to intelligible and persistent states of organisation - truths so true to seem eternal, and even always there even before they appeared in actuality.

The point is there is no catergory error. Experiences are physical states. — TheWillowOfDarkness

How?

A proponent of the "hard problem" does not agree. They view the world to be of their experience rather than experience to be of the world. — TheWillowOfDarkness

That's not necessarily true. That is a false dichotomy. Hard Problemers just do not make the category error of explaining experience by simply referring to causes when we are looking for correlates (how it is that physical things are experiences).

The reason they struggle with Being is because their position is trying limit existence of anything to their description. Deep down they cannot understand the world is more than what we say about it, for they view our world to be limited to our experience. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Actually many probably think quite the opposite- that the world is more than our descriptions and hence why they say that the descriptions (the material causes) do not seem to answer the "hard question".

This is why they say "doesn't make sense" whenever that which is more than language-- identity, causality, meaning-- is spoken about-- they foolishly think the world only extends to their experience. For the world to be more, to be a person who is more than what is said or thought, is thought to be impossible. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Again, I don't see how you are getting this. Indeed, I think it is quite the opposite- that Hard Problemers are willing reach for answers beyond mere descriptions in models.

That only repeats the error of Plato. The forms of the world are considered an inevitable outcome of enteral logic. But this isn't true. No form of the world is inevitable. It always takes an action of the world to make it so. For a grammar to be used, someone has to exist using it. It's not inevitable by the logic rule of grammar.

All rules of grammar are true. Even those of language which is never spoken. They are eternal. But this doesn't define they are spoken. Only bodies can do that. The realm of infinite intellectual meaning has no power here.

And this why language ought to be thought of in aesthetic or "phenomlogical" terms. It turns us away from the fiction that the world is made from infinite meanings of intellect back towards the worldly states which constitute it.

The rational structure of inevitablity, world out of form, is the greatest metaphysical blunder of philosophy. It gets the relationship of logic to the world backwards. Form doesn't make the world. World expesses form-- there are rational patterns to the world, but they are an expression of what they world is doing, not a constraint which defines what the world must do.

They aren't willing to reach for answers though, for any answer is dismissed as inadequate. Whatever we say will be "just a model" and so a failure, even our description of our own extension beyond language. Instead of understanding what we are, beings who are more than language, they treat us like we are a mystery-- "We don't really know what we are.Wooooo."

When I say they do not understand Being, this is what I mean. They view our inability to give full description of ourselves as a failure of knowledge. Supposely, to resolve the "mystery," we would have to detail the nature of us, in language no less, as "more than language."

Fundamentally, they cannot accept we are more than language. When confronted with our extension beyond language, they say we don't make sense, that we are logically impossible, rather than realise that existing means to be more than language, so we actually make perfect sense.

Whatever we say will be "just a model" and so a failure, even our description of our own extension beyond language. Instead of understanding what we are, beings who are more than language, they treat us like we are a mystery-- "We don't really know what we are.Wooooo." — TheWillowOfDarkness

I don't know where you get that from. You are saying really contradictory things. First you said that hard problemers only look at descriptions (models?) and now you admit that they don't do that but instead quite the opposite, that it is beyond mere models. However, Hard Problemers do seem to posit plenty of ideas that are descriptions but realizing that descriptions can only approximate what is happening, using imperfect language.

When I say they do not understand Being, this is what I mean. They view our inability to give full description of ourselves as a failure of knowledge. Supposely, to resolve the "mystery," we would have to detail the nature of us, in language no less, as "more than language." — TheWillowOfDarkness

I don't know what you mean that we would have to detail the nature of us, in language, as more than language. Language is being used to convey things that are metaphysical- pretty heady stuff, so yeah, it's going to probably involve more than just a straightforward scientific description (if that's what you even mean by "more than language").

Fundamentally, they cannot accept we are more than language. When confronted with our extension beyond language, they say we don't make sense, that we are logically impossible, rather than realise that existing means to be more than language, so we actually make perfect sense. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Are you perhaps discussing New Mysterians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_mysterianism ? This particular set of adherents may fit the description you say, but they seem to only be a subset of hard problemers. Not all hard problmers are New Mysterians. It is only one subgroup's response to the hard problem.

Phenomenology is always going to be a misleading exercise if it is set up as a search inside for what is nakedly really there. — apokrisis

I should add that my approach also then may lead back to aesthetics in that having recognised its inherently socially-constructed nature, that gives philosophy the useful job of figuring out what that social contruction ought to be. So to the degree we have to invent/discover the right aesthetic evaluative responses to be learnt, then that is the bit which is the work in progress.

So yes, we want a successful individual-level embodiment of cognition. Yet we can't find that in either biology or culture alone. Instead it is how the two levels of semiotic adaptation can arrive at their most fruitful balance in personal experience that is the question.

Now that is the issue with materialism or scientism that simply seems to deny that such a balance might be an end game. But also - where the romantics take offence - it does suggest that the human psycho-social balance is a game playing out within a still larger game of thermodynamics. In the end, philosophy in this vein has to make proper contact with material semiosis - materiality in some generally determining form.

So yes, personally we would want an aesthetic which is a felt guide to how to flourish. We would want to be so embodied in that way of being it is a sensible habit. But to get there, we would have to construct a scaffolding culture.

That is another reason why SX's posts have been quite objectionable in this thread. For instance, Wayfarer speaks for religious traditions that may have proved quite functional in terms of achieving such an aesthetic of flourishing. Likewise the chain of being.

So the level of philosophical analysis might be weak, and yet the historically-developed cultural prescription could pragmatically work.

Likewise, we all almost instinctively support feminism or oppose consumerism, or whatever. But from a philosophical point of view, actual positions must be argued for rather than simply ticked off as standard issue ideological at a certain point in modern cultural history.

How?

That's not necessarily true. That is a false dichotomy. Hard Problemers just do not make the category error of explaining experience by simply referring to causes when we are looking for correlates (how it is that physical things are experiences). — schopenhauer1

Experiences are states of the world. That's what it means to be "physical." Not a reduction of one state to another, but to be a state of the world. Your accusations of strawman are missing what the criticism of the "hard problem" is. No-one is trying to explain experience by reducing it to a correlate. They are saying experiences, themselves, exist. The sort of explanation the Hard Problem wants is incoherent. Description of experience is given by "experience," not by "caused by X." If we have the correlates in question, existing experience and an existing brain together, we have a full account of the cause of consciousness. There no extra link to explain. Our existence beyond of descriptions is a different subject entirely and has no relevance to describing the causality of experience.

Actually many probably think quite the opposite- that the world is more than our descriptions and hence why they say that the descriptions (the material causes) do not seem to answer the "hard question". — schopenhauer1

The "hard question" is incoherent. If the world is more than our descriptions, how there be a description which gives that? The issue with the "hard problem" is not that the world is thought to be more than descriptions, it is that fact is somehow meant to have description. For the Hard Problemer, even the world outside language is meant to be given in language.

I don't know where you get that from. You are saying really contradictory things. First you said that hard problemers only look at descriptions (models?) and now you admit that they don't do that but instead quite the opposite, that it is beyond mere models. However, Hard Problemers do seem to posit plenty of ideas that are descriptions but realizing that descriptions can only approximate what is happening, using imperfect language.

I don't know what you mean that we would have to detail the nature of us, in language, as more than language. Language is being used to convey things that are metaphysical- pretty heady stuff, so yeah, it's going to probably involve more than just a straightforward scientific description (if that's what you even mean by "more than language"). — schopenhauer1

You have to remember they view models as only approximate. Using models, for them, means to only approximate what's happening, rather than describing the world. They think we can't give descriptions of the world at all-- that knowledge is only about our ideas rather than stuff that's occurring outside our language.

Solving the "hard problem" would be to state in language that which is outside language. If I could give an account of "experience," that was "experience" rather than a mere description of it, then the supposed issue would be resolved.

Are you perhaps discussing New Mysterians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_mysterianism ? This particular set of adherents may fit the description you say, but they seem to only be a subset of hard problemers. Not all hard problmers are New Mysterians. — schopenhauer1

Nope. They are just a bit more honest than the other Hard Problemers. They realise the argument of the "hard problem" requires consciousness to beyond understanding and so make that argument. This understanding is just as true for any other Hard Problemer, it's just they haven't realised it.

If we have the correlates in question, existing experience and an existing brain together, we have a full account of the cause of consciousness. — TheWillowOfDarkness

We have a full account? We have two things without the actual thing trying to be explained- the correlate itself between the two.

For the Hard Problemer, even the world outside language is meant to be given in language. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I just do not think this is what Hard Problemers believe. Language may be an imperfect vehicle, but things can be explained in language. Look at Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy. He has tons of neologisms, not presumably because he likes being obscurantist but because to explain metaphysics that is beyond simply reiterating the object-side (scientific-mathematical mode) of expression is inherently hard to produce. Therefore, language is always in the equation- just perhaps, very hard to understand language.

You have to remember they view models as only approximate. Using models, for them, means to only approximate what's happening, rather than describing the world. They think we can't give descriptions of the world at all-- that knowledge is only about our ideas rather than stuff that's occurring outside our language. — TheWillowOfDarkness

But often metaphysics are explained using the models and thus are a step removed the matter at hand. They are in the realm of causes assumed to be explanations of the events themselves. In other words, they confuse what we epistemically test/predict as the ontological event.

Solving the "hard problem" would be to state in language that which is outside language. If I could give an account of "experience," that was "experience" rather than a mere description of it, then the supposed issue would be resolved. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Well, yes it would wouldn't it. Of course, all we have is language so we have to make do.

Nope. They are just a bit more honest than the other Hard Problemers. They realise the argument of the "hard problem" requires consciousness to beyond understanding and so make that argument. This understanding is just as true for any other Hard Problemer, it's just they haven't realised it. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I think you are confusing "beyond understanding" and "beyond language". Yes, metaphysics may be beyond language, but not beyond (at least a good approximation) of our ability to (at least mostly) understand the matter at hand.

I agree with you about the idea that sensation cannot be simply stated and have it understood without the context of being a fully embodied being who already has sensations that could understand its context. However, to me that is simply a given. It is almost a tautology, though I guess it could be differentiated with some philosophies that may say that this is not the case. Anyways, I think this is simply begging-the-question because your answer to my response of how is it that we can explain sensation otherwise "it exists as a brute fact" is that we need to be a (proto or actual) organism to know what sensation is. That really only answers "what" can explain this, but not "what" sensation is. — schopenhauer1

We can try this on for size: sensation is the qualitiy of/for a certain kind of existence. Part of what motivates many of the criteria I stipulate is the fact that (spatio-temporal/bodily) differentiation (neither the environment we live in is purely symmetrical, and neither are the bodies we are) and interaction are all inherently qualitative, or rather, they 'processually qualitative'. Key here is movement; to move is not only to feel changes in oneself and in one's environment, it is to define what counts as self and environment in the first place. To move is to be individuated. Moreover, movement is inherently qualitative; Consider what Maxine Sheets-Johnstone writes about the inherent link between the qualities of movement which are the grounds for - what else - 'qualia':

"Any movement has a certain felt tensional quality, linear quality, amplitudinal quality, and projectional quality. In a very general sense, the felt tensional quality has to do with our sense of effort; the linear quality with both the felt linear contour of our moving body and the linear paths we sense ourselves describing in the process of moving; the amplitudinal quality with both the felt expansiveness or contractiveness of our moving body and the spatial extensiveness or constrictedness of our move- ment; the felt projectional quality with the way in which we release force or energy. Linear and amplitudinal qualities obviously describe spatial aspects of movement; tensional and projectional qualities obviously describe temporal aspects of movement, what we recognize as the felt intensity of our moving bodily energies and the felt manner in which we project those bodily energies — in a sustained manner, for example, in an explosive manner, in a punctuated manner, in a ballistic manner, and so on. Temporal aspects of movement are the result of the way in which tensional and projectional qualities combine; that is, the temporal quality of any movement derives from the manner in which any particular intensity (or combined intensities) is kinetically expressed.

On the way to spelling out the nature of these qualities more precisely, I should call specific attention to the fact that movement creates the qualities that it embodies and that we experience; thus it is erroneous to think that movement simply takes place in space, for example. On the contrary, we formally create space in the process of moving; we qualitatively create a certain spatial character by the very nature of our movement — a large, open space, or a tight, resistant space, for example. In effect, particular spatial designs and patterns come into play with self-movement, designs and patterns that have both a linear and amplitudinal quality. The predominant shifting linear designs of our moving bodies may be now curved (as when we bend over), now twisted (as when we turn our heads), now diagonal (as when we lean forward), now vertical (as when we walk), and so on; the predominant linear patterns we create in moving may be now zig-zag (as in a game of tag), now straight (as in marching), now circular (as when we walk around an object or literally ‘go in circles’), and so on". (Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement)

This is why I keep emphasizing the kinds of bodies that we are as key; to be a certain kind of body is to be a qualified body; it is not enough to speak about 'matter' on the one hand and 'sensation' on the other, rather, we are already the kind of bodies that are sensate bodies thanks to evolution and our ability to feel the world that is not only necessarily 'around us', but that we in some ways are. So I refuse to see 'sensation' as 'brute' or 'tautological'; this, to me, is spiritualist empty air, the same kind of which says things like 'God did it'; it explains nothing and leaves us with mysticism and posturing. To leave you with another quotation, consider Brian Massumi's words on the subject:

"When I think of my body and ask what it does to earn that name, two things stand out. It moves. It feels. In fact, it does both at the same time, It moves as it feels, and it feels itself moving. Can we think a body without this: an intrinsic connection between movement and sensation whereby each immediately summons the other? If you start from an intrinsic connection between movement and sensation, the slightest, most literal displacement convokes a qualitative dif­ference, because as directly as it conducts itself it beckons a feeling, and feelings have a way of folding into each other, resonating together, interfering with each other, mutually intensifying, all in unquantifiable ways apt to unfold again in action, often unpredictably. Qualitative difference: immediately the issue is change." (Massumi, Parables for the Virtual)

But what I objected to was your invoking of aesthetics or sensibility as a naked foundation for anything... So the argument against aesthetics in particular is that that is already a socially constructed state of conception — apokrisis

Again, you keep charging me with 'opposing' this, that or the other; 'naked aeshtetics' vs, 'social construction', 'inwardness' and 'outwordness'; there are all silly dichotomies constructed solely by you, and then projected, with no foundation, onto me. I fully accept - and I have no idea what you think I don't other than to put it down once again to your lack comprehension - that we can speak of 'socially constructed aesthetics' or that even that all our 'inward feelings' or what have you are a product of public habit-formation, etc, etc - in fact I would insist upon it. But because you're working with an incredibly narrow notion of the sensorial, you keep projecting that limited understanding upon me and think that I hold to it. I really don't. If you're talking about a socially constructed aesthetics, you're still talking about aesthetics. But that's exactly what I've insisted upon this entire time. Aesthetics is not some 'base level' of existence upon which everything is founded upon - whatever that would even mean; it is, nonetheless, paradigmatic, in the proper sense of the word - it 'stands beside' (para in the Greek) everything, it co-accompanies even the most abstract rationalisms and formal systemics, without which they would be/do 'nothing', would have no efficacy, etc.

Linear and amplitudinal qualities obviously describe spatial aspects of movement; tensional and projectional qualities obviously describe temporal aspects of movement, what we recognize as the felt intensity of our moving bodily energies and the felt manner in which we project those bodily energies — in a sustained manner, for example, in an explosive manner, in a punctuated manner, in a ballistic manner, and so on. — StreetlightX

we are already the kind of bodies that are sensate bodies thanks to evolution and our ability to feel the world that is not only necessarily 'around us', but that we in some ways are. To leave you with another quotation, consider Brian Massumi's words on the subject: — StreetlightX

"When I think of my body and ask what it does to earn that name, two things stand out. It moves. It feels. In fact, it docs both at the same time, It moves as it feels, and il feels itself moving. Can we think a body without this: an intrinsic connection between movement and sensation whereby each immediately summons the other? If you start from an intrinsic connection between movement and sensation, the slightest, most literal displacement convokes a qualitative dif­ference, because as directly as it conducts itself it beckons a feeling, and feelings have a way of folding into each other, resonating together, interfering with each other, mutually intensifying, all in unquantifiable ways apt to unfold again in action, often unpredictably. Qualitative difference: immediately the issue is change." — StreetlightX

So what makes movement in humans or animals different than movement elsewhere?

We self-move; as biological creatures, we self-relate; we not only sustain ourselves metabolically, we seek ways to sustain that metabolism; movement being an evolutionary strategy to help organisms do exactly that (one imagines - my evolutionary history is fuzzy - that it begins in the sea, with the development of fin-like structures to regulate movement in water currents, before taking off from there).

If you're talking about a socially constructed aesthetics, you're still talking about aesthetics. But that's exactly what I've insisted upon this entire time. — StreetlightX

Great. Except...

As someone who believes in the primacy of the aesthetic as a grounds for knowledge, modelling relations constitute a highly constrained - that is, particular - form of knowledge, whereas my own interests lie in the direction of a more general understanding of what it is to know. We are sensate bodies long before we are inference-mongering, reflexive intellects. — StreetlightX

...which appears to stress the differentiation over the integration.

First in your philosophy comes the primacy of biological embodiment - laudable in its greater generality than semiotic mechanism. Then second - in "mongering" fashion - comes the parasitic socially constructed aspect of intellect (which doesn't here seem to be naturally related to the sensate body and the phenomenology of aesthetics).

So maybe I am as dim as you keep trying to claim. Or maybe you really are quite confused in your position. And now I've helped you embrace a clearer understanding for at least a moment.

(one imagines - my evolutionary history is fuzzy - that it begins in the sea, with the development of fin-like structures to regulate movement in water currents, before taking off from there). — StreetlightX

The origins of motility are worth mentioning as a charming example of the dichotomous logic of symmetry-breaking.

The simplest movement is created by the spiraling tail, the flagella, of a bacterium. Rotate the bundle of threads in one direction and they tangle up to propel the cell in a straight line. Switch the rotation in the other direction and the threads untangle, causing the cell to now tumble randomly.

So the cell can swim down a chemical gradient - receptors telling it to get going straight if it is heading towards food, or away from toxins. Then if the cell is getting no such clear signal, it reverses the motor and tumbles about until something comes up as a signal to get going again.

So it is a neat example of a structural asymmetry - directed action vs random search. And the same semiotic logic persists into the left/right dichotomous division of the human brain. Left for focused directed action, right for exploratory thought and open vigilance. Then in cosmological modelling, determinism vs randomness, constraints vs freedoms, synechism vs tychism, repeat the distinction at a logical intellectual level.

The way we swim through the world is the way we swim through ideas.

The way we swim through the world is the way we swim through ideas. — apokrisis

Poetic, but where's the sense in it? Get the pun :D.

So maybe I am as dim as you keep trying to claim. Or maybe you really are quite confused in your position. And now I've helped you embrace a clearer understanding for at least a moment. — apokrisis

Bahaha, douchebag. But you're wrong to boot: I still take the inferential constraints required by modelling to be particularizations of a more general aesthetic without having to place them into opposition, as you are wont to do (or project onto me). The way I'd put it is this: the kind of rationalization you're after is - to use a clunky phrase - a linearization of a multidimentional aesthetic. The notion here is essentially anthropological: the emergence of linear writing, and the kind of abstractions it allows for, is an event in time, in human history. Here is Leroi-Gourhan, who traces the anthropology of writing through it's begging in pictograms, through to ideograms and then symbolization proper:

"The invention of writing, through the device of linearity, completely subordinated graphic to phonetic expression, but even today the relationship between language and graphic expression is one of coordination rather than subordination. An image possesses a dimensional freedom which writing must always lack. It can trigger the verbal process that culminates in the recital of a myth, but it is not attached to that process; its context disappears with the narrator. ... It still prevails in the sciences, where the linearization of writing is actually an impediment, and provides algebraic equations or formulas in organic chemistry with the means of escaping from the constraint of one-dimensionality through figures in which phonetization is employed only as a commentary and the symbolic assemblage "speaks" for itself."

What's interesting about Leroi-Gourhan's approach is that he does not simply and reductively oppose the aesthetic with the rational, but rather finds within the aesthetic a rationality of it's own, which is then progressively constrained for the sake of higher order abstraction; thus he condemns thinking of pictograms as 'mere pictures'; speaking, for example, of the arrangement of figures in Paleolithic cave art, he writes, "What we have here therefore is not the haphazard representation of animals hunted, nor "writing," nor "imagery." Behind the symbolic assemblage of figures there must have been an oral context with which the symbolic assemblage assemblage associated and whose values it reproduced in space."

The larger point is that rationality and aesthetics belong on a continuum, or rather, that there is a kind of aesthetic that just is rationality, which, from the perspective of the aesthetic, does not signify some sort of inexplicable and miraculous break: "Through an increasingly precise process of analysis, human thought is capable of abstracting symbols from reality ... Writing thus tends toward the constriction of images, toward a stricter linearization of symbols." (Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech). Modeling relations, which rely on very precise inferential rules, are enabled by this historical progress of aesthetic linearization, without, for all that, playing into silly distinctions like 'inside and outside', 'naked and rational' or whatever pseudo-dichotomies you see fit to foist onto me.

Weself-move; as biological creatures, we self-relate; we not only sustain ourselves metabolically, we seek ways to sustain that metabolism; movement being an evolutionary strategy to help organisms do exactly that (one imagines - my evolutionary history is fuzzy - that it begins in the sea, with the development of fin-like structures to regulate movement in water currents, before taking off from there). — StreetlightX

I understand what you are saying about movement being an evolutionary development that "helped" survival, however I am having trouble understanding how self-moving creatures (flagella one-celled organisms let's say) actually = sensation. Is there something in the "self-moving" and "evolution" concepts that I do not get that entails sensation?

Edit: I just picked up on the unintentional pun of "entails" :D. I also realize that movement may cause sensation or be the effect of sensation but how movement + concepts of evolution + concepts of survival = sensation eludes me.

Bahaha, douchebag. — StreetlightX

Your insults are so funny. Stylistically they are just all over the place. Maybe you should get a copy of a book of someone expert like Dorothy Parker so you could cut and paste?

I still take the inferential constraints required by modelling to be particularizations of a more general aesthetic without having to place them into opposition, as you are wont to do — StreetlightX

Maybe you don't yet get how dichotomies relate to hierarchies - despite my explaining it to you repeatedly?

The genetic level of semiosis and the verbal level of semiosis both play into the neurodevelopment of mental habits as levels of semiosis.

And the point was your earlier posts argued for a disconnect when it came to human-level cognitive development. You said sensate bodies came before inference-mongering intellectuality, and a lot of other things in the same vein.

You've now been forced to concede that this doesn't accurately describe the human situation at all - which would be a critical issue for any supposed philosophy founded on "aesthetics".

What's interesting about Leroi-Gourhan's approach is that he does not simply and reductively oppose the aesthetic with the rational, but rather finds within the aesthetic a rationality of it's own, which is then progressively constrained for the sake of higher order abstraction; — StreetlightX

This is obvious. And also the important point when it comes to a semiotic metaphysics. All semiosis is about the "linear" constraint on free variety - a limitation of freedoms, a reduction in dimensionality.

But again, your cite reveals that PoMo simply gets this back to front in treating the reduction in dimensionality as a bug rather than a feature. And this goes along with the anti-hierarchy/pro-flatness, anti-rationality/pro-romantic, anti-syntax/pro-semantics rhetoric that the dialectical-splitting habits of PoMo inspire.

My systems view is of course based on the differentiation that is the basis of integration, the competition that is the basis of co-operation. So while I always talk about the division that is a dichotomy, I also always talk about its synergistic resolution which is a hierarchy.

Thus when I repeatedly pull you up on your tendency to make "confrontational" divisions in ontology, this is not me applying my oppositional mentality on your holistic position, but instead me holistically highlighting the oppositional stance that is your go-to point of view. You show a quite incredible hostility to "otherness" - as you have demonstrated repeatedly to me and others in this thread.

Again, it is really quite funny. So keep it up!