It's worth pointing out the influence of this link has greatly diminished in the secular West. Over the last century, in stated philosophy at least, we've been slowly undoing this immaterialism within social tradition.

It would not be amiss to say most of cannot see just how intertwined they are. Since our culture shifted to understand the world (particularly people) in term of themselves rather than otherworldly order, we now laugh at the latter. The underlying immaterialist influence had been mitigated by culture that says it's bullshit-- we can almost treat it like it's "innocuous" whim precisely because it suppressed in culture.

If it were accepted as profound, as a couple of commentators here wish, it would again become a (more) dominate justification for social oppression. To pose The Order (e.g. men naturally better than women, white people naturally better than black people, etc., etc.) would be supposed as coherent description of the world.

How so? What do you think "physically" entails? And how do bodies have it but not conciousness?

The words 'physical' and 'material', mean, respectively something like 'able to be quantified and modeled mathematically' and 'able to be sensed'. The body and the other objects in the world qualify under these definitions; consciousness does not. So, it is an empty assertion when you claim that consciousness is a physical state unless you can describe in what way it is such.

So you don't sense pain? Happiness? You don't intuitively feel others have thoughts and feelings? You don't know the child who touches the hot stove will suffer?

Experiences are sensed all the time. Much of philosophy is just irrationally prejudiced against the idea because it doesn't involve a particular sensory experience. The result is we ignore and dismiss the existence of consciousness. Conciousness becomes this thing which "doesn't makes sense" because we told ourselves it's impossible to sense, that it can't be part of the world we know.

This is the reductionism of idealism-- if I can't see, hear, smell, taste or touch it, then it can't be part of the world. Everything is reduced to a set of particular sensations rather than being recognised itself.

We are sensate bodies long before we are inference-mongering, reflexive intellects. — StreetlightX

I think you've hit on something here. If the most important part of our knowledge is a natural result of our embodiment, which in the process of 'human relating' becomes occluded by multitudes of confusing cultural and discursive accretions, then philosophical reflection which is necessarily another discursive accretion, necessarily the work of "inference-mongering, reflexive intellects", is not the way, but merely the way that may clear away the accretions and consequently our confusions, and makes way for the way. It is like Wittgenstein's ladder, or the "raft' of the Buddha; useful only for our preliminary orientation.

The spirit is not to be known by discursive reasoning, but by the natural activity of embodied intuition. So, I would say that the nature of order is the order of nature, but it is not limited to the order of nature discovered by science. There is a whole other order of nature to be revealed by the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious and the spiritual.

No, apart from bodily sensations of pain, those things are not "sensed" as entities at all. Those kinds of things are intuited.

This is the reductionism of idealism-- if I can't see, hear, smell, taste or touch it, then it can't be part of the world. Everything is reduced to a set of particular sensations rather than being recognised itself. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I haven't said that at all. I have said that if it can't be sensed then it can't be part of the material or physical world. You can speculate that things which cannot be sensed might be part of the physical world; but such a speculation is empty unless you can describe how such things are part of the physical world. So, you are playing the reductionist here by saying that the world is reducible to the physical world.

Do you remember our earlier discussion on knowledge in this thread? All sensory knowledge inuited. If I'm to recognise the bookshelf in front of me, I need more than just the object in front of me. If I did not intuit the distinction between the bookshelf and the wall, I would not know either. To sense something is to invited it. The distinction between sensing and intitung you are trying to draw is incoherent.

But you have said it. According to your argument conciousness cannot be part of the world because it's not sensed/intuited/experienced in the same way as other things.

Your appeal to speculation is a contradiction. If something cannot be part of the physical world, then there's no way it "might be true." The "cannot be apart" excludes any such possibility. If something might be part of the (physical) world, then "cannot be a part" is false.

I'm not playing the reductionist. My point is that the world cannot be reduced to the objects that we say are "sensed" in opposition to "intuited." The material extends beyond them. There are things which are not empirical sensations of a point in space.

The spirit is not to be known by discursive reasoning, but by the natural activity of embodied intuition. So, I would say that the nature of order is the order of nature, but it is not limited to the order of nature discovered by science. There is a whole other order of nature to be revealed by the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious and the spiritual. — John

The problem with this thesis is that animals might be all about embodied cognition but Homo sapiens is a linguistic species. Our brains are shaped also by discursive reason from the earliest stage. We need culture to complete our development - our brains are designed for that because of their greatly delayed maturity. Even the teenage years are a phase of neural development that seems to have been absent in Homo erectus.

So SX is quite wrong in treating "sensate bodies" as if they were the primal natural condition of humans. We have already evolved past that stage because language created something much larger.

Sure, it is important that we are embodied in a world - the basic point of a modelling relations or semiotic approach to epistemology. But we are embodied in a cultural world too. So it is a Romantic fallacy to talk about "going back to nature" to recover the special goodness that is ... ecstatic dance or whatever.

Humans can't un-invent being linguistic and hence rational in the way grammatical habits structure all thought.

Language is a feature of sensate bodies. Culture is something human bodies do. So is logical reasoning. Language is an expression of sensate bodies not an opposition to them.

There no going back to nature because our embodiment has been here all along.

I am not denying that the experience of embodiment is greatly elaborated by our linguistical natures. The two are inseparable, and language (including bodily, visual, musical, rhythmical and so on) is as intrinsic a part of spirituality as it is of the arts and of course the sciences and all other discourses.

But there are many confusions caused by the 'either/or' dualistic nature of discursive reasoning, that, for some people at least, cannot simply be dropped, but need to be worked out by the very discursive reasoning that is causing the problem. "Words got me the wound, and will get me well, if you believe it" (Jim Morrison from Death of My Cock). That is what philosophy, when it is not merely mental masturbation, is all about, in my view. Philosophy is a clearing house.

Well, at least we agree about something!
:)

Until we start talking about it terms of consciousness. Then you'll insist experiences aren't of the same realm as bodies, speaking as if experiences/sensation/language were not part of that world we know.

Yes, I know objects are intuited as well as sensed. But that is not the point, or rather it goes to the point in another way than you think. The intuited nature of objects, their identities, is not physical or material at all. An object has an identity as a physical object, but its identity, per se is formal, not physical, which just goes to show that even objects cannot be reduced to the merely physical. Of course they cannot be reduced to the merely ideal either. That is what I was getting at in an earlier response to SX, where is said ( more or less) that idealism/ materialism are not "two sides of a rotten coin" as SX contended, but two (when considered in isolation), rotten sides of a true coin.

I would never say that. Experiences are certainly part of the world we know; but it makes no sense to say that an experience is a physical entity. To say that would be a category error; experiences are (or may be) of the physical.

I'm not talking about the identity of an object though-- the presence or absence of an object isn't its form. My point is the object is material (all existing thing are of the same realm), not that its meaning is exhausted in existing or not existing.

If that is so, how come you still insist on the 'hard problem?' What is missing in the account which says states of bodies cause states of consciousness?

As I see it the physical aspects of an object are sensed; the identity of an object is intuited. Why must all things "be of the same realm". Do you have an argument to support that statement?

I don't insist on a "hard problem" at all. I think the relationship between the physical and the spiritual is something than can be intuited; but it is not a "problem", "hard" or otherwise, that can be solved by discursive reason.

So more like a philosophical appropriation or expression of politics, rather than a political appropriation of philosophy. — jamalrob

I don't know if 'appropriation' is the right word - all philosophies lend themselves to certain political emphases over others, and appropriation suggests a kind of exteriorly of politics from philosophy, which I think can't be maintained.

If you think all of your examples cannot be met with counter-examples, then you are hopelessly naive. — Thorongil

Oh please, you may as well start your own hashtag: #notallphilosophy. If you think the systemic tendencies of philosophical history are simply refuted by a few counter-examples, then your accusation of naivety is itself hopelessly misplaced. And like I said, I'm not just talking about idealism in the sense of 'it's all in my head', but any kind of philosophy which would seek to idealize some aspect of reality over others as being the Really True Thing That Does All Of The Stuff Unilaterally, including atoms, spirit, Prime Movers, or, when it comes to the human, DNA and brain.

For instance, you seem to be appealing to nature and yet railing against hierarchical organisation. — apokrisis

Funny, I don't believe I've used the word hierarchy once in this conversation, but feel free to conjure up disagreements as you are consistently wont to do.

Funny, I don't believe I've used the word hierarchy once in this conversation, but feel free to conjure up disagreements as you are consistently wont to do. — StreetlightX

In case you forgot....

The Great Chain of Being. Among the most important of the continuities with the Classical period was the concept of the Great Chain of Being. Its major premise was that every existing thing in the universe had its "place" in a divinely planned hierarchical order, which was pictured as a chain vertically extended.

http://faculty.up.edu/asarnow/greatchainofbeing.htm

Ah yes, because my acerbic off-hand comment about an ancient philosopheme is no different to my position on hierarchies tout court. Methinks you no inference-mong so good.

Ah yes, because my acerbic off-hand comment about an ancient philosopheme is no different to my position on hierarchies tout court. Methinks you no inference-mong so good. — StreetlightX

So are you making a point about the lower and higher rankings of things or not?

Your complaint was that women get ranked lower than men (if above animals), that sensation is ranked lower than cognition, that manual labour is ranked lower than intellectualising. And you seemed to be claiming this was a hierarchical positioning that is "against nature". So my reply is that this anti-hierarchical tendency - very familiar from Romanticism, Marxism and Post-Modernism - is a load of wishful piffle. It is something that you won't argue here because you cannot justify it.

But please keep pretending it was all some kind of careless slip of the tongue. Now that you can see where this is going, time for you to hop of the bus.

Who said it was careless? The idea of the Great Chain of Being is possibly among the most philosophically damaging ideas ever espoused. Don't think I can be more unequivocal than that. But I guess equivocation is kind of your thing, like how this automatically means all notion of heirarcy ought to be expunged. But then, your powers of projection and equivocation are surely higher up on the heirarcy of blunt thoughtlessness than mine.

More like you are confusing stated hierarchies with nature: a manifestly grotesque equivocation of the meaning of people and the world with principles of what the world is meant to be.

You are continuing to the Great Chain of Being which views the world as defined by something outside itself-- the principle of hierarchy that supposed to determine states of the world. Everyone and everything is supposedly "divinely planned" by semiotics rather than being themselves.

But I guess equivocation is kind of your thing, like how this automatically means all notion of heirarcy ought to be expunged. — StreetlightX

Why always so thin skinned and confrontational? If you can explain how your rejection of the chain of being is done within the context of a more general acceptance of the naturalness of hierarchies, then please just do so.

I've already made my point - that you seem simply intent on making the lower higher in good Christian fashion. In your own words, sensation, manual labour and political correctness are all of real value, while cognition, intellectualism and dead white males are somehow all dangerous to what matters.

But that is as trite an analysis as the position it attacks. For example, as I say, humans are naturally already more than mere sensate bodies. We are fundamentally discursive beings. So it is phony and romantic to claim that human embodiment is rooted in biology in a way that might invalidate its - ever increasing - roots in the cultural.

You probably can't deny the logic of that, which is why we are having all this ad hom diversionary posting now.

Ah yes, I must be like those pesky feminists, who, in fighting for the equality of women, must hate all men. The logic is undeniable, thanks Dave. #notallphilosophy

I mean honestly, if you've any ear at all for for the history of philosophy you'd know that the idea of the Great Chain of Being is just about the most 'unnatural' idea there is: it is literally a divinely ordained order which, like Wayfarer's dictum, posits the 'order of nature' as beyond - outside of - 'the nature of order'. If you think this jibes well with your naturalism, then either you're a terrible naturalist or a worse reader of philosophy.

That logic is precisely the problem.

Culture and discourse are embodied practices.
They formed out of biology interacting with the environment. And yes, this means there is no Great Chain of Being, just a whole lot of states of the world, various interactions of biology and environment. Culture is not a force that exists above and separate to our embodiment.

Ah yes, I must be like those pesky feminists, who, in fighting for the equality of women, must hate all men. — StreetlightX

Non sequitur. Drop the pose of the valiant hero and deal with the argument.

What argument? You have the reading comprehension of a fifth grader who continually extrapolates things I don't say from the tiny snippets of things I do and then has the gall to ask why I'm not defending myself in the face of your interpretive ineptitude.

What argument? — StreetlightX

Humans are naturally already more than mere sensate bodies. We are fundamentally discursive beings. So it is phony and romantic to claim that human embodiment is rooted in biology in a way that might invalidate its - ever increasing - roots in the cultural.