Yes, it’s a crude metaphor, perhaps a society of cells is more appropriate.

When observing ourselves, we are observing a puppet moving as though it is alive. Its aliveness is sustained by a complex process of actualisation which is hidden from us, unconscious. So we are only viewing an apparently conscious puppet. But because the puppet is a highly real projection, we think it is real, alive and inexplicable, it seems to have a life of its own. We are not aware of what makes it alive, which is behind the scenes, a complex biological machine. — Punshhh

:up: :up:

Do you know the power of a machine made of a trillion moving parts? ... We're not just robots. We're robots, made of robots, made of robots. ~Daniel Dennett — 180 Proof

Organisms are self organizing in a way no machine can be. — Wayfarer

Really? :chin:

Consider these articles:

https://wyss.harvard.edu/news/a-self-organizing-thousand-robot-swarm/

https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/4241/Evolutionary-RoboticsThe-Biology-Intelligence-and

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.adh4130

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_machine

The biological machine (society of cells) behind the scenes, is alive and imbues the puppet with sentience.

I noticed that there were no living cells in the AI/robots in the links. So no consciousness, or sentience.
Where are the cyborgs and cybernetics?

You're presuming that "real world" human reasoning is somehow beyond duplicating. I don't see any problems at all, because any specific issue you might bring up could be dealt in the design- either in software or hardware. — Relativist

Ha! I don't do a lot of "presuming" about such technical questions, because that is peripheral to my amateur philosophy hobby. But I'm currently reading a book by Federico Faggin*1, who is a credentialed expert in computer-related technology. And he details a variety of "problems" and "specific issues" that could limit software & hardware design from reaching the goal of duplicating human reasoning.

Faggin seems to be an Idealist, who believes that Consciousness is fundamental, and the human Mind is irreducible to physical processes. Personally, I have a slightly different view of the foundations of human thought. But hey! What do I know? I'm just an untrained amateur philosopher, and he is an experienced computer guru. :smile:


*1. Irreducible : Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature is a 2024 book by Federico Faggin, the inventor of the microprocessor, that argues consciousness is a fundamental quantum phenomenon, not an emergent property of complex computation, challenging the idea that humans are just biological machines.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=irreducible+book

Not an impasse but a misunderstanding. — Wayfarer

Perhaps.

The point is categorical, not psychological. There is a difference between reflexive awareness and object-awareness. By way of analogy: just as the eye is present in every act of seeing without ever appearing as a seen thing, subjective consciousness is present in every experience without itself appearing as an object of experience. — Wayfarer

Fair enough. I acknowledge that there is a difference between reflexive awareness and object awareness. You are right that the subject is not an object in the sense of being something standing “over-against” the subject.

But I don’t think that this is enough to establish your conclusion that realism is incoherent. After all, you don’t deny that the subject can be experienced, understood or known. Your claim that there is a categorical distinction between the subject qua object and the subject qua subject doesn’t strictly follow from the fact that the subject is not an empirical object. All that follows is that the subject can epistemically appropriate itself in different ways - as experienced, as understood, as known.

You could argue that understanding and judgement cannot fully appropriate the subject. There’s always “something more” that hasn’t yet been appropriated. This has already been granted in the transcendental distinction between the in-itself and the for-consciousness as outlined in previous posts. This only implies the unknown, not the unknowable.

So the realist deals with the “noumenal ground” of subjectivity by understanding it as unknown, not unknowable; indeterminate, not indeterminable; intelligible in potentia, not unintelligible in actu. Inquiry is the process of excavating this intelligibility, not manufacturing it.

I have argued that this attitude is a normative precondition of inquiry itself. Inquiry would be incoherent if consciousness presupposed that Being was unknowable, indeterminable and unintelligible. To deny this, I would argue, is not mystical profundity, but a retreat from the task and responsibilities of honest inquiry.

Forms are real in Aristotle’s sense, but their reality is not the reality of an object of perception. Their mode of being is inseparable from intelligibility itself. And if that is the case, how could they 'exist in the world in a mind-independent way'? — Wayfarer

For Aristotle forms exist in substances. Their existence is, in some sense, constitutive of substance. This is what I meant when I said he considered form to be immanent to material substances. For him form is literally inseparable from matter. When form enters the mind it is still bound to the matter of the organism, but in a different mode of existence. In that case the form exists in a way that determines “what” the organism is thinking about or perceiving, rather than in a way that determines “what” the organism is.

a proper understanding of the empirical depends on a proper understanding of the transcendental — Esse Quam Videri

…proper understanding of the origin and use of the transcendental. Transcendental is a condition representing the possible determination of the particular iff the general is given.

That space is a general intuition, is a transcendental proposition; that things have their own spaces, is an empirical one.

How else do we know "what is true"? — Gnomon
Notice that in the context of science, this is usually limited to a specific question or subject matter, but can also then be expanded to include general theories and hypotheses. Philosophical questions are much more open-ended and often not nearly so specific. That is the subject of another thread, The Predicament of Modernity. — Wayfarer

Apparently, disagrees with your definition of Philosophical questioning. He seems to picture himself as a Socratic gadfly, arguing against the Sophists, whose fallacious logic and situational rhetoric was goal-oriented instead of truth-seeking. In my early reading about Philosophy, Socrates was portrayed (by Catholic theologians?) as the good-guy, separating True from False, and the Sophists*1 were bad-guys, preaching relativity & subjectivity. Yet, unlike 180's sneering & disparaging & humiliating trolling-technique, Socrates' philosophical method*3 was dialectical & didactic & persuasive.

Now, I'm beginning to see that the Sophists' "practical wisdom" may have been anticipating the subjective relativity*2 of Einstein. Today, the notion of absolute Truth is relegated to revealed religions, while pragmatic Science makes-do with Bayesian truths. My own "open-ended" BothAnd philosophy is holistic & complementary & inclusive, instead of a dogmatic Either/Or belief system, which is reductive, binary, & exclusive.

I guess the Predicament of Modernity is highlighted by the Classical (deterministic) vs Quantum (probabilistic) revolution in worldviews. Transcendent truths are inherently subjective conjectures, not objective observations. So, how does 180 know what is objective capital-T-truth*4, while I have to get by with my little subjective perspective? :cool:


*1. The Sophists were ancient Greek thinkers who emphasized relativism, believing truth, knowledge, and morality are subjective and depend on human perspective, famously stated by Protagoras' maxim, "Man is the measure of all things". They taught rhetoric as a vital skill for success in politics, focusing on practical wisdom and the power of persuasive speech (logos) to shape reality, often contrasting with Socrates' search for universal, objective truths. Key beliefs included skepticism, conventionalism (laws are human-made), and humanism, seeing humans and their needs at the center of philosophy, not divine mandates.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=sophists

*2. Einstein's Relativity fundamentally changed philosophy by showing space and time aren't absolute but relative to an observer (Special Relativity) and that gravity is the curvature of spacetime (General Relativity), challenging concepts of universal "now" and introducing a geometric view of the cosmos, influencing epistemology, metaphysics (reality of space/time), and even religion through his idea of a "cosmic religion" based on nature's order.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=einstein+relativity+philosophy

*3. The Socratic Method is a teaching and discussion technique named after Socrates, using persistent, probing questions to guide individuals toward deeper understanding, uncovering assumptions, identifying contradictions, and fostering critical thinking rather than simply giving answers. It's a dialectical process of dialogue, discovery, and self-examination, moving from what a person knows to complex truths by systematically challenging ideas through carefully planned questions, aiming for clearer, more consistent thought
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=socratic+method

*4. "Capital T Truth" (or Big T Truth) refers to universal, absolute, objective reality or fundamental principles beyond personal belief, contrasting with "little t truths," which are subjective, contextual, or individual perspectives/facts (e.g., "my truth"). Think of it as the ultimate, overarching reality versus specific, smaller truths or experiences, often used in philosophy and religion to discuss transcendent concepts like Beauty, Good, or Truth itself, as opposed to mere factual statements
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=capital+t+truth

I see consciousness as inherently reflexive. — Esse Quam Videri

That’s you talking, not the system in which consciousness is a consequence.

It can (and manifestly does) use experience, understanding and reason to appropriate itself as experiencer, understander and reasoner. — Esse Quam Videri

If I am the experiencer, understander and reasoner, what am “I” doing while consciousness is, for all intents and purposes, making of itself a copy of me?

Even if it be allowed to consciousness that it uses, say, understanding, it cannot do so in the approximation of itself as an understander, for it is the understander which stands in consciousness of its thinking, from which follows consciousness, in approximating itself as a thinker, is conscious of itself being conscious of its thoughts, which is absurd.

If perchance then the same scenario holds for experiencing and reasoning, the whole proposal falls apart.

Consciousness is a consequence of faculties, having no pretensions of being one.

Or so it seems……

I think you’re rather over-dramatising my view. My argument isn’t against realism as such, nor against inquiry into it. It’s against the presumption that reality is exhausted by the objective domain. Scientific realism, insofar as it ‘brackets’ the subject as a methodological step, turns that bracketing into an ontological claim, that all that can be known, can be made subject to scientific analysis. That is precisely where methodological morphs into metaphysical naturalism. My point is that objectivity itself presupposes reflexive awareness, which itself cannot be captured within the scope of objective analysis (‘facing up to the problem of consciousness’). That marks a principled limit, not a failure of inquiry. And I do think an acute sense of the unknowable is not just mysticism, it’s also realism in a different register. Humans are not all-knowing as a matter of principle, not just because of the limitless subject matter of scientific enquiry. Discursive knowledge doesn’t just have limits, it also has limitations.

I will add, I’m in no way ‘anti-science’ in the sense that a lot of those on both the far left and far right are. I’m fully cognizant of the benefits of science, I’m not an anti-vaxxer or climate change denialist (and I know people who are.) What I’m protesting is viewing philosophical questions through scientific perspectives. An example we’ve been debating is D M Armstrong (‘Materialist Theory of Mind’) who believes that philosophy should be fully integrated with or even subordinated to scientific standards of enquiry. Again this is where Kant is invaluable as he was confronting just these kinds of questions.

When form enters the mind it is still bound to the matter of the organism, but in a different mode of existence — Esse Quam Videri

I’m not highly educated in Aristotle and Thomist philosophy, but the way hylomorphic dualism is understood in that philosophy impresses me. That ‘different mode of existence’ is insight into the intelligible domain:

…if the proper knowledge of the senses is of accidents, through forms that are individualized, the proper knowledge of intellect is of essences, through forms that are universalized. Intellectual knowledge is analogous to sense knowledge inasmuch as it demands the reception of the form of the thing which is known. But it differs from sense knowledge so far forth as it consists in the apprehension of things, not in their individuality, but in their universality. — Thomistic Psychology, A Philosophical Analysis of the Nature of Man, by Robert E. Brennan, O.P., Macmillan Co., 1941.

The point I want to make is that this was a ‘participatory ontology’. Man was not yet outside nature, the ‘accidental byproduct of the collocation of atoms’ in Russell’s phrase. But I’m not proposing a reactionary critique of modernism. It’s a matter of understanding the tectonic shifts in the meaning of Being that have occurred over this period of history.

I think you’re rather over-dramatising my view. My argument isn’t against realism as such, nor against inquiry into it. It’s against the presumption that reality is exhausted by the objective domain. — Wayfarer

I apologize if I've read too much into your critique. Hopefully the discussion has proved interesting nonetheless.

I apologize if I've read too much into your critique. Hopefully the discussion has proved interesting nonetheless. — Esse Quam Videri

Very much so. You're plainly an expert interlocutor, and I value your contributions.

Really? — 180 Proof

Yes, really, 180. All machines, all systems, computers, and devices are allopoeitic, their organising principles are imposed from the outside by those who manufacture and program them. Organisms are autopoeitic, self-organizing. Chalk and cheese. Systems can be made to self-organise in a way analogous to organisms, but, you know, these are not naturally occuring.

So you didn't read (or understand) the articles on self-organizing machines I provided in my previous post ...

I scanned them. But they're artifacts, they're built by human designers, to emulate aspects of biology. Surely even you can spot the difference between that, and naturally-occuring organisms? Or does it suit you to try and obfuscate it? Maybe something you don't want to know?

"This self-organizing swarm was created in the lab of Radhika Nagpal...."

If you want to press a point, helps first to understand what point that is.

For Aristotle forms exist in substances. Their existence is, in some sense, constitutive of substance. This is what I meant when I said he considered form to be immanent to material substances. For him form is literally inseparable from matter. When form enters the mind it is still bound to the matter of the organism, but in a different mode of existence. In that case the form exists in a way that determines “what” the organism is thinking about or perceiving, rather than in a way that determines “what” the organism is. — Esse Quam Videri

By this formulation, you reserve a separate "place" for "forms" that Aristotle resisted. In either yours or 's account, the meaning of the words "matter" and "form" are given through the activity of the soul. I have been chided for quoting too much Kant recently so I will go back to my previous habit of quoting too much Aristotle:

412a6. Now we speak of on particular kind of existent things as substance (οὐσία), and under this heading we so speak of one thing qua matter, which in itself is not a particular thing, another qua shape and form, in virtue of which it is then spoken of as a particular, and a third qua the product of these two. And matter is potentiality, while form is actuality---and that in two ways, first as knowledge is, and second as contemplation is. — Aristotle, De Anima, 412a6, translated by D.W. Hamlyn

This is different from the role of 'material' depicted in Plato or the expressions of 'mind-independence' in modern writings. So far, we are not too far away from Kant. For some unknown reason, we know stuff. This is different from asking why we know stuff. Making the first condition a mystery is not an advance.

The distance from Plato is a different job, some of it done on this site. I won't try that here. Back to the next paragraph in De Anima:

412a11, It is bodies especially which are thought to be substances, and of these, especially natural bodies; for these are sources of the rest. Of natural bodies, some have life and some do not; and it is self-nourishment, growth, and decay that we speak of as life. Hence, every natural body which partakes of life will be a substance, and substance of a composite kind. — ibid. 412a11

At this point, it is tempting to say that this composite is a jazz fusion of 'form' and 'matter.' But the equation of matter and potential in the first paragraph throws all of this into a different light. It is not an issue of inclusion or exclusion from the "intellect." The "ways we talk about it" are not the last words about what it is. We need all three ways because they are not replacements of the others.

The passage is no starting point for the distinction between immanence and transcendence in the theological sense because nothing is possible if it is not "natural." Aristotle questions the freedom of the "Craftsman" in the Timaeus. A topic that leads to the third paragraph:

412a16. Since it is indeed a body of such a kind (for it is one having life), the soul will not be body; for the body is not something predicated of a subject, but exists rather as subject and matter. The soul must then, be substance qua form of a natural body which has life potentially. Substance is actuality. The soul, therefore, will be the actuality of a body of this kind. — ibid. 412a16

I won't quote the fourth paragraph but will respond if any of you do.

Very good.

I often repeat this, but the translation of 'ousia' as 'substance' is misleading. In modern usage, substance suggests an objective existent, which is not what 'ousia' means. Ousia is closer to “being” or “what-it-is-to-be.” Once this is recognised, Aristotle no longer looks like a precursor to object-based realism, and the role of actuality — including the actuality of knowing — can’t be reduced to the cataloging of objects.

The IEP article on The Metaphysics has two sections on the translation of 'ousia', part of which is:

Boethius, in his commentaries on Aristotle ...always translated ousia as substantia, and his usage seems to have settled the matter. And so a word designed by the anti-Aristotelian Augustine to mean a low and empty sort of being turns up in our translations of the word whose meaning Aristotle took to be the highest and fullest sense of being. Descartes, in his Meditations, uses the word 'substance' only with his tongue in his cheek; Locke explicitly analyzes it as an empty notion of an I-don’t-know-what; and soon after the word is laughed out of the vocabulary of serious philosophic endeavor. It is no wonder that the Metaphysics ceased to have any influence on living thinking: its heart had been cut out of it by its friends. — IEP

Imagine if this passage, we said:

412a11, It is bodies especially which are thought to be substances subjects, and of these, especially natural bodies; for these are sources of the rest.

('The rest' incidentally being artifacts, parts and properties, relations, etc).

So, here, 'subject' is nearer in meaning to the original 'being', and it gives the whole phrase a subtly different meaning, with the caveat that 'subjects' is also not exactly right. But it is arguably nearer the mark that 'substance' (IEP explains where that translation originated.)

I take the 'soul as the form of the body' to mean the soul (psuche) is the principle of the body.

Ousia is closer to “being” or “what-it-is-to-be.” — Wayfarer

As you know, Kant was the chair of metaphysics and logic, and had great respect for Aristotle, using logical syllogism as ground for his critical program. Do you see any similarity to, or perhaps a continuation of, the earlier, in the later?

“…..The schema of substance is the persistence of the real in time, i.e., the representation of the real as a substratum of empirical time-determination in general, which therefore endures while everything else changes….” (A144/B183)

Streetlight, when he was around, alerted me to a book, a very advanced Kant studies book, Konstantin Polok - Kant's Theory of Normativity: Exploring the Space of Reason. I did acquire it, and read from it, but can't claim to have mastered it. But it shows how Kant adapted Aristotle's matter-form principle into 'transcendental hylomorphism'. 'Pollok argues that for Kant, human cognition is structured by a "matter-form" dichotomy where sensible data (matter) is ordered by a priori mental structures (form), such as the categories of understanding and forms of intuition. (ref).

I also learned that Kant adopted Aristotle's 'categories' with only minor changes.

So, yes, I think there's a great deal of continuity from Plato>Aristotle>Kant, while also considerable modifications.

I acknowledge that there is no definitive interpretation on these matters and that commentators have disagreed substantially over the last two millennia over the meanings of terms such as substance (ousia), substratum/subject (hypokeimenon), matter (hyle) and form (morphe/eidos).

In the Categories, Aristotle distinguished between "primary" and "secondary" substance, the former denoting concrete individuals such as Socrates, the latter denoting abstractions such as "man". In the Metaphysics and De Anima the account of substance is not as straightforward, but I think a reasonable case can be made for interpreting substance as denoting the concrete individual. Aristotle seems consistent in defining substance as a composite of matter and form (as in your quotation from De Anima 412.a6). As you suggest, the word "matter" is not to be understood as denoting any particular physical "stuff", but rather a principal of potentiality operative within every substance. While this principal is always realized in some concrete substratum, it's not equivalent to any given substratum. Substratum refers to that which persists under change, whereas matter seems to refer to something more like a constraint on what forms can or can't be "received" by any given substratum as determined by the nature of the substratum itself.

Form seems to variably refer to the principles of unity, actuality and "what-ness" of a substance. Basically, it accounts for everything that makes something what it is, aside from the substratum.

One way of interpreting these terms "form", "matter" and "substratum" is to understand them as "roles" that things can play with respect to each other. The bronze plays the role of both substratum and matter with respect to the bronze statue, whereas the shape of the statue plays the role of form with respect to the bronze.

On this interpretation a form (such as a shape) is constitutive of the substance (bronze statue). It is immanent to the substance in the sense that it is not something over-and-above the substance, yet it's not equivalent to the substance which also includes some additional constituent(s) playing the roles of matter and/or substratum. This approach potentially enables a "hierarchical" ontology. For example, atoms have form with respect to subatomic particles and are matter with respect to basic chemical compounds. Basic chemical compounds have form with respect to atoms and are matter with respect to complex chemical compounds, etc., etc.

Now whether this is the correct interpretation of Aristotle, I can't claim to know for sure as I'm not an expert in the interpretation of ancient Greek manuscripts. That said, scholars like Anscombe, Gill, Jaworski and Kosman seem to lean in this direction, as did (arguably) Thomas Aquinas and some of his followers.

So, yes, I think there's a great deal of continuity from Plato>Aristotle>Kant….. — Wayfarer

Yeah, it’s kinda hard to make certain just how much Aristotle is in Kant, beyond the general conditions. He does credit the categories to Aristotle, but doesn’t for the intrinsic duality of human intelligence. I’m wondering if Aristotle didn’t go that far himself, which would explain why he didn’t get the credit, at least for the idea on which the theory as subsequently built.

Anyway….thanks.

Even if it be allowed to consciousness that it uses, say, understanding, it cannot do so in the approximation of itself as an understander, for it is the understander which stands in consciousness of its thinking, from which follows consciousness, in approximating itself as a thinker, is conscious of itself being conscious of its thoughts, which is absurd. — Mww

Experiencing, understanding and reasoning are acts of subjectivity. They are not something over and above the subject but constitutive of the subject itself. So when I engage in these activities I am intrinsically conscious of them as constitutive of me. Or so I would argue...

This is a whole ‘nuther argument.

I might agree that understanding and all are acts of the intellect, and the subject to which they belong is conscious of his participation in some of them. But that’s not the same as saying consciousness is approximating itself when it “manifestly does” the same thing.

The word I used was "appropriating" not "approximating". In order to know myself I must first be aware of myself. This self-awareness is intrinsic to every conscious act. But awareness is not knowledge. In order to know, I must understand. In order to understand I must inquire.

Oh damn. Sorry. Not sure what I’d change, but thanks for correcting me.

Again, I’d agree self-awareness is intrinsic to every conscious act. I maintain, on the other hand, there are acts of the intellect of which the subject is none the wiser.

Some would argue that awareness of things is knowledge that there are things. Plato, Russell, that I am familiar with. In juxtaposition to knowledge of things.

In order to know I must do a lot more than understand.

In order to understand I must think.

What is it for you to inquire? How would you describe it?

Doesn’t Freud’s discovery of the unconscious (if indeed a discovery it was, as it had been anticipated previously) have some bearing on the question of self-knowledge? There is plenty of documentation of ‘Freud’s debt to Schopenhauer’ e.g. here. That aspect of the mind that is available to conscious introspection is according to Freud ‘the tip of an iceberg’, with the remainder of the body suspended beneath the surface.

:eyes: Incorrigibly wrong as always.

Ehhhh….I don’t do psychology. I’m happy just knowing stuff, and while I think of myself as a knowing subject, that is not to say I know myself. But I seriously doubt the full complement of my intellectual capacity is available to my conscious awareness, metaphysical theories aside, and I’m certain I know nothing at all about the manner in which my brain presents a subject from itself that doesn’t have itself recognizable in it. (Sigh)

In terms of moral disposition, which is where I think most like to say they know themselves, I would admit to only this, I do know what I should do, I do know I hope to do what I should, but to know I will do what I should is not given from any of that.

Goes to the point of the sense in which the subject can be reflexivly self-aware. Surely the subject can form an image of itself - that is what I think constitutes ego, the subject's idea of itself - but the processes which Kant term 'synthetic' function below the level of ego - it was in that sense that Kant and Schopenhauer anticipated Freud.

I take the 'soul as the form of the body' to mean the soul (psuche) is the principle of the body. — Wayfarer

The rest of that sentence is important: "the form of a body which has life potentially. The next statement touches on the sense you are referring to: "Substance is actuality" (ἡ δ᾿ οὐσία ἐντελέχειa).

The use of form (εἶδος) is within the larger context of agency. Consider this discussion of "contraries:

But, since only such things as possess contrariety or are themselves actual contraries—and not any chance things—are naturally adapted to be acted upon and to act, both “agent” and “patient” must be alike and identical in kind, but unlike and contrary in species. For body is by nature adapted so as to be affected by body, flavour by flavour, colour by colour, and in general that which is of the same kind by something else of the same kind; and the reason of this is that contraries are always within the same kind, and it is contraries which act and are acted upon reciprocally. Hence “agent” and “patient” are necessarily in one sense the same, and in another sense “other” and unlike one another; and since “agent” and “patient” are identical in kind and like, but unlike in species, and it is contraries which have these characteristics, it is clear that contraries and their “intermediates” are capable of being affected and of acting reciprocally—indeed it is entirely these processes which constitute passing-away and coming-to-be. — Aristotle, On Coming to Be and Passing Away, 323b, Forster and Furley

In the above passage, "species" is the translation of εἶδος and "kind" translates γένος.

Thank you once again.

Hence “agent” and “patient” are necessarily in one sense the same, and in another sense “other” and unlike one another; and since “agent” and “patient” are identical in kind and like, but unlike in species, and it is contraries which have these characteristics, it is clear that contraries and their “intermediates” are capable of being affected and of acting reciprocally — Aristotle, On Coming to Be and Passing Away, 323b, Forster and Furley

This is what snagged Descartes, with his 'complete otherness' of res extensa and res cogitans, and why Cartesian philosophy engendered problems that Aristotelian philosophy does not.