The point is that that there is no way to definitively establish whether or not what we experience as 'raw state' is socially constructed or not. In dialectical terms any argument whatsoever entails the possibility of its contrary. So then as to which seems the more plausible, that again depends on which set of presuppositions one favors.

If animals also experience a raw state of immediacy of perception, the that pretty much shows, to my mind, that it is not something socially constructed. Life underpins discourse, not the other way around.

One will never convince the other if founding presuppositions are opposed; it is not a matter of rational argument in such cases.
There's not much point in continuing an argument that effectively amounts to one saying "it is" and the other "it's not" over and over again.

apokrisis - check out this blog article - I'm sure you'll appreciate it if you don't know it already. — Wayfarer

Yep. Thompson was on to what has become the evo-devo point of view. Nature has self organising dissipative structure. So biosemiosis has pansemiosis to latch on to. Simple informational constraints can harness complex structure forming processes. Growth or development are not amorphous or featureless processes. They can easily be steered in ways that result in regulated pattern.

This is what flips the mechanical view of nature on its head. The anti-science view argues that nature is too richly organised for it to be the product of mere mechanical regulation. The chance of life arising seems to involve astronomical odds.

But now we can understand just how little mechanism is actually needed. Most of the requisite organisation already comes for free. The growth of entropy itself throws up negentropic self-order. Nature can’t escape a considerable degree of pattern even when “trying to be random”.

That would be the pansemiotic thesis. Material acts mostly respond to a context. They read off a direction in which things are meant to be happening.

Reductionism presumes the natural state of material events is to be atomistic and independent - exactly as modelled by the particles composing an idea gas.

But a holistic view sees correlations between events as irreducible. The parts of a system are always semiotically entangled. Events don’t happen in some context-independent fashion. The history of the system is always impacting on its present state as a generalised constraint.

I am talking about reporting how experience seems to us in its 'first person' immediacy, not its objective contents but its subjective quality. I believe this is something we all know; we know what it is, subjectively speaking, to experience ourselves in relation to a world of others, not as some objectivist description about it, but as subjective immediacy. — Janus

I'm with you on this project. In my view, the subject-object paradigm does become destabilized as we look closely at what is going on. For the most part, the subject is unthematized. It 'is' what it concerns itself with. In its dealing with others (participating in conversations), it 'is' the shared revelation of the shared world through language. This is an older and deeper concept of world. But this older, deeper concept ('phenomenon') is covered over by physics taken as metaphysics. This is not in the least to say that physics isn't true as physics. It only looks toward the ground of physics, which a basic sense of being in a shared world with others and an ability to navigate that world.

The how tends to be concealed by the what. In other words, the background from which theories emerge operates or exists for the most part invisibly. This gives metaphysics a certain shallowness. It neglects its own ground in our facticity. It gives rise to misleading preconceptions of language that generate 'pseudo-problems.' It involves a tossing around of concepts that are treated as crystals rather than blurs ripped out of a continuum. One could speculate that there's the desire to escape the always-becoming self-world we are into some kind of eternal completion of having-become.

Lots of these debates are 'really about' feelings. They are cultural criticism masked as metaphysics. The idea is to ground cultural criticism in the super-science of metaphysics. Epistemology therefore becomes the obsession. Things are 'proven' in a pseudo-mathematics of words understood as time and context independent essences. What those apparently opposed agree on is the unthematized how of their establishing their views as authoritative. They turn the crank of the same machine and somehow get different results. But the machine itself is not questioned. Only the other's operation of the machine is questioned. For me, this machine/method/approach/medium is itself a more fascinating target of questioning than the 'what' or the output of the machine. In my view, there is often a gut-level doubt about this machine-like approach that nevertheless wants to use the machine to subvert the machine. But this implicitly recognizes the machine as truly authoritative, so we have only reform rather than revolution. It is insufficiently radical, one might say. That we can't have 'pure' revolution but only more radical reform is how I understand our finitude. We can't get completely behind our past, where this past is the inherited 'how' of our approach in the present. [Forgive the long post. I'm feeling particularly inspired and longwinded.]

But my argument is that the very fact we can start to deconstruct the social construction is telling. We find ourselves having to step outside ourselves to see ourselves. The raw feels only seem to come into view because we have stepped back far enough as a distanced “self” - some idealised notion of a disinterested viewer.

We have to manufacture this divide between a knower and the known, a perceiver and the perceptions, an experiencer and the experiences.

So your argument was that raw feels are primal. I reply that I hear what you are saying.

Where we differ is that you believe nothing at all is to be known without the dualistic rational "stepping back" or "stepping out" of the living process. I disagree and say that we can know everything we need to know (existentially and not scientifically speaking, of course) from within lived experience, and that if we want to talk about that lived experience we must resort to metaphor and allusion; it is lost if we try to reduce it to rationalistic, scientific terms.

I say that this metaphor and allusion (the arts) is an alternative discourse to the so-called scientific understanding, and of at least equal importance. In fact I would say it is primary and that scientific understanding is secondary and derivative.

Most of the requisite organisation already comes for free. — apokrisis

According to Plato, that's because the Universe is fashioned on the basis of an eternal model. There's nothing in what you say that contradicts that.

The raw feels only seem to come into view because we have stepped back far enough as a distanced “self” - some idealised notion of a disinterested viewer. — apokrisis

I'd suggest (and I think you'll agree) that the usual conception of 'raw feels' is already too theoretical. That's because 'raw' experience is already meaningful. We start from an immersion in a shared world with shared language. The self is for the most part deeply entangled in what it is doing and the others it is doing things with. It meets the object in its network of social meanings, in its possibility for use (as tool or resource). The others are there with us as we make our decisions in terms of what they will think and do in response.

The cold, staring ego is a late development, created in the pursuit of ideal certainty. But really this ideal certainty was itself pursued as an act of imposing an understanding of existence on the culture. Methodological skepticism is a rhetorical ploy.

But let's be fair. There is something like a raw feel. Redness just 'is,' in a certain sense, even if it's only revealed by a sophisticated way of looking at things, by peeling it off of the apple. So there does seem to be a stubborn or dogmatic stupidity in any position that ignores 'consciousness' and 'meaning.' This is not to say that we can't or shouldn't point out the theory-laden-ness of these raw feels --but such theory-ladeness supports the idea that significance is 'primordial.' The idea that the subject 'pastes' meaning/concept on raw sensation is fascinating but misleading. It might justify itself in terms of prediction/control (haven't looked in to this)l, but it's not phenomenologically accurate.

You make some nice points here from unusual perspectives, and I find nothing to disagree with in what you say.

'The immediacy of mystical experience' really has nothing to do with the topic of this OP.

I say that this metaphor and allusion (the arts) is an alternative discourse to the so-called scientific understanding, and of at least equal importance. In fact I would say it is primary and that scientific understanding is secondary and derivative. — Janus

Absolutely. Science (for all its glory) is parasitic upon a basic ability to be in the ordinary world among others as a 'who.' Much of what we 'know' is gut-level or background or un-thematized. We don't see it. We are it. The how of our taking the world is obscured by the what that is taken. The interpretative framework functions like our liver or pancreas. We don't even here it whirring away. Yet we completely rely on it. The big revolutions in thought are, arguably, related to changes in this receding framework. An apparently necessary assumption (a pre-conceptional 'assumption' as unthought 'how') can constrain the human conversation for centuries. Then someone 'sees' this constraint, thematizes it, and can thereby think around or behind it. The conversation's field of possibility is thereby opened. --but this doesn't mean it can't be closed back down and the revealing words lose their force in our tendency to lose ourselves in the what.

You make some nice points here form an unusual perspective, and I find nothing to disagree with in what you say. — Janus

Thanks!

The interpretative framework functions like our liver or pancreas. — 0rff

You kant be serious ;-)

Yes indeed, Kant is involved here. Of course I am playfully serious. It's what we leave unquestioned and take for granted that leaves us trapped. That's the danger in calculative-mechanical reasoning. It treats the material and the method as given. It doesn't ask after the calculative-mechanical approach itself and how such an approach might determine what can show up as 'material.'

With respect to the OP, I suggest that information in the sense of meaning is prior to the physical/non-physical distinction.

What is the relevance of this comment? To what is it addressed?

Is Information physical.
An amazingly long thread of 45 pages for such a simple question.
All information relies on its physical existence, be that a tape, a CD ROM, a flash drive or a book.
Information held in the memory of a person is no different. If you don't believe me I can demonstrate the destruction of information with a Stanley blade, a bone saw and a spoon. Care to take the challenge?

This thread isn't about the immediacy of experience as such. What I'm trying to get at in this thread is the reality of the idea - I'm arguing for objective idealism, and trying to relate it to Platonist philosophy, which is a very different point to your argument about how 'immediate experience can only be communicated by allegory', valid point though that might be.

Earlier in this thread, there was a brief allusion to the sense in which logic, number, and so on, are attributes of 'meaning-world' which humans inhabit. That expression, 'umwelt' or 'lebenwelt' is attributable to Husserl, but in that respect, he was indebted to Kant and to the Western idealist tradition generally...which originated with (drum roll) Plato. But I also plead guilty to equivocating 'meaning' and 'information', which, even though there's an overlap, have many different connotations.

Care to take the challenge? — charleton

You have destroyed only a representation, not information. If for instance one man alone knew 'the Pythagorean Theorem' and had recorded it in all kinds of media - you could destroy each copy, but the idea would still be in the possession of that man, even if it wasn't represented anywhere. Kill him, and the idea is no longer possessed by anyone - although it still might be rediscovered by another person. You couldn't destroy the idea.

Nope not even the relationship between right angled triangles exist in nature.
Without humans to conceive information there is no information. Information is ideal.
Pythagoras' theorem is an invention, based on a fantasy 2D world.

There's always DNA.

It's a human interested construction too.
Information implies an informer and the informed.

You argument is non sequitur. Just because a person may know a language without knowing a particular concept, does not imply that a person can know a concept without knowing a language. — Metaphysician Undercover

In other words, although knowing the concept is not a necessary effect of knowing the language, knowing the language can still be a necessary cause. I accept the correction.

There is no such thing as redness unless there is such a thing as what the word "red" refers to. And, there is no such thing as what the word "red" refers to unless there is language. Therefore there is no such thing as redness without language. — Metaphysician Undercover

My turn to call non-sequitur. Just because the word "red" refers to the thing which causes the concept redness in the mind, it does not follow that the word "red" is necessary for the existence of the thing, and by extension, the existence of the concept. (Note that I have used the term "concept" to refer to both the thing outside the mind and the idea inside the mind, and as Wayfarer points out, this could be inconsistent with Aquinas who differentiates between form and concept).

You said "exact same properties", so if I am not picky I have not carried out my obligation of due diligence to determine whether the conditions of "exact same" have been fulfilled. — Metaphysician Undercover

But according to google, a plane is a flat surface, and so we are really saying the same thing, and in which case our concepts of triangle-ness does coincide.

That's the problem. "Exact same" implies that accidentals have been included. "Universal" implies that accidentals have been excluded. The two are incompatible by way of contradiction. Yet you insist upon using the two together, to say that I have the exact same concept as you. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree that 'universal' implies that accidentals have been excluded, by definition of 'universal'. But why would 'exact same' implies that accidentals have been included? As a side note, I thought your position from an earlier post was that universal forms (2) existed, in addition to particular forms (3).

Space is one of the concepts which we use to understand relations between things. — Metaphysician Undercover

Although I find this topic interesting, I will drop out of it because it drifts away from the main topic of forms.

I'm sorry, but humans didn't construct DNA. In any case, it's beside the point. Your initial statement is incorrect, i.e. information does not depend on being represented. It may be represented, or it may not be.

Humans constructed the idea of DNA, named DNA and built the idea that DNA was information.
All ideas are dependant on representation.

Where we differ is that you believe nothing at all is to be known without the dualistic rational "stepping back" or "stepping out" of the living process. — Janus

It's dichotomisic rather than dualistic. Yes. My point is that what is primal is the process of "separating out" (that being "apokrisis" :) )

We are born into the world already complex in our experience. We then construct a simplicity through an act of separation. We develop a notion of selfhood that is detached from its experiences.

To the degree that you are trying to reunite the two in a return to some hazy notion of the "raw feel of being a self", you are talking about the primality of the process of achieving a crisp division.

But note how you attempt to recover the "raw condition" by way of the opposed concepts of a self and its experiences. You construct your primal state as being the least amount of self which still leaves a self, and the least amount of sensory definiteness that still leaves some general idea of sensation.

So I say pay attention to how you go about constructing some third person point of view about the very thing of "forming points of view". In an indirect way, you are proving my argument. My argument just tries to speak directly about the vagueness which is the true primal condition here. It doesn't conceal that the primal state can only be recovered by stepping back even further.

Beyond the first person point of view which you seem to wanting to make basic, I say there is a zero person point of view which is just a vague firstness.

I say that this metaphor and allusion (the arts) is an alternative discourse to the so-called scientific understanding, and of at least equal importance. In fact I would say it is primary and that scientific understanding is secondary and derivative. — Janus

OK. These are the social goods you want to support with a founding metaphysics. So first you claim that all discourse is equal - science is no better than art. Then you claim that all discourse is rooted in the primacy of "raw feeling" - the place where the self dwells. And so art is better than science because it is part of the foundational "in here", the subjective realm, and not part of the derivative "out there", the discourse that can only pretend to objectivity as a limit.

The self-serving structure of this argument is nakedly plain. And it hinges on idealism or dualism being true. I've said enough to show that subjectivity is also a limit rather than a foundation to discourse. The dyad of the self and its sensations are the product of certain socially-constructed point of view. Subjectivity is what we term this selfhood being developed to its highest limit. And an artist expressing his/her raw feelings would be the epitome of that. It is iconic.

According to Plato, that's because the Universe is fashioned on the basis of an eternal model. There's nothing in what you say that contradicts that. — Wayfarer

Well, if its immanent, it ain't transcendent. So we still have a contradiction I hope.

In philosophy, Immanent and transcendent are mutually-defined, i.e. like ‘high’ and ‘low’ or ‘left’ and ‘right’. Been meaning to write an OP about that.

But I also plead guilty to equivocating 'meaning' and 'information', which, even though there's an overlap, have many different connotations. — Wayfarer

I think that's the heart of this issue. Isn't what you really have in mind the idea of the non-physical? the idea of the idea? Does the OP ask (essentially) whether anything non-physical exists?

I'd suggest (and I think you'll agree) that the usual conception of 'raw feels' is already too theoretical. — 0rff

That's what I'm saying.

We start from an immersion in a shared world with shared language. — 0rff

Exactly.

But let's be fair. There is something like a raw feel. Redness just 'is,' in a certain sense, even if it's only revealed by a sophisticated way of looking at things, by peeling it off of the apple — 0rff

I always agree that there is this kind of Hard Problem issue. But then my position is that this boils down to an issue over the lack of counterfactuals. Red just "is" because we haven't got something we can compare it to as what might be "other", given the same observable "psychological machinery".

We can still say quite a lot about red to the degree we can point to counterfactuals. So I can point out that we can see yellowish red (ie: orange), but not greenish red. And this is just an East Problem because we have the opponent channel processing logic of the visual pathways to explain the fact. If the arrangement of the neural logic was otherwise, there would be no reason not to be able to experience a greenish red.

So yes. Ultimately our models of cognition run out of counterfactuals to sustain the explanatory assault on "experience". That is just a general fact about the scientific method. It applies for all scientific explanation and is not evidence that the mind is somehow "unphysical", or primal in not being part of nature.

So there does seem to be a stubborn or dogmatic stupidity in any position that ignores 'consciousness' and 'meaning.' — 0rff

Hope you not talking about me. I give very good reasons for deflating the inflated notions of "consciousness" and "meaning" that folk routinely trot out. :)

My view is, the physical exists - as I said in that quote on objective idealism, I don’t deny scientific or even common-sense realism - but the physical is not ‘self-existent’ i.e. it does’t exist ‘in its own right’ or ‘from its own side’. It has no ultimate essence or reality. That is actually the Buddhist principle of śūnyatā,. But it shifts the locus of what we consider to be real from the world ‘out there’ to the sense in which ‘mind creates the world’. It’s a gestalt shift, to understand the world that way, referred to in Buddhism as ‘realising emptiness’.

From a review of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos

Physics is the question of what matter is. Metaphysics is the question of what [is real]. People of a rational, scientific bent tend to think that the two are coextensive—that everything [that is real] is physical. Many who think differently are inspired by religion to posit the existence of God and souls; Nagel affirms that he’s an atheist, but he also asserts that there’s an entirely different realm of non-physical stuff that exists—namely, mental stuff. The vast flow of perceptions, ideas, and emotions that arise in each human mind is something that, in his view, actually exists [ I would rather say, ‘is real’] as something other than merely the electrical firings in the brain that gives rise to them—and exists [is real] as surely as a brain, a chair, an atom, or a gamma ray.

In other words, even if it were possible to map out the exact pattern of brain waves that give rise to a person’s momentary complex of awareness, that mapping would only explain the physical correlate of these experiences, but it wouldn’t be them.

As you can see, I think there’s a distinction between ‘what exists’ and ‘what is real’ (which is why I inserted ‘is real’ where the original said ‘exists) - a distinction which has been lost in modern philosophy, due to the ‘flattening’ of ontology since the victory of nominalism at the end of medieval times. So I think the Platonist tradition had an hierarchical ontology, i.e. ‘the great chain of being’, which has subsequently been forgotten. That’s my basic view.

All information relies on its physical existence, be that a tape, a CD ROM, a flash drive or a book. — charleton

Laughable. Sure, interpretation must be rooted in physical marks. Something must defy physics, defy the usual fundamental process of entropification and disorder, by rather unphysically standing firm as a 1 or 0 marked sequentially on a tape, disk or other "media". But that still also leaves the interpretation to account for.

And as I say, even the degree to which a mark or symbol is physical, it is singled out by its unnaturalness in terms of any known physics.

The odds against a mud tablet being marked in some particular cuneiform pattern are astronomical if we were relying on normal geological processes like weathering and erosion. The odds against a CD-ROM being formed by normal physics are beyond anything that could be sensibly imagined.

So to suggest that information is "just physics" is about as wrong as you can be. You need a triadic relationship to make sense of what is going on. You need a world of actual natural physics - the entropic one. Then the unnaturalness of the marks or signs which can stand as significantly unnatural against that natural backdrop. Then the habits of interpretation that can latch onto the codes that these marks support.

I like the Nagel quote quite a bit. I agree that there is a flattening, a pretty ghastly flattening. There is in my view a spiritual element here. Why should a doctrine of being be neutral? Can a doctrine of being be neutral? Is philosophy just cold impersonal super-science? Or is it a deep expression of the spiritual? For me it's the latter. And those who choose the former are still perhaps expressing their spirituality nevertheless in such a choice. We reveal what we revere in our choices.