Yes, because claiming that we are sensate bodies means to "invalidate humanity's roots in the cultural". Seriously, when you're done making shit up, get back to me.

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

I didn't make your shit up about the primacy of aesthetics. So again, what justifies this "we" that exists pre-linguistically. When was the last time Homo sap was pre-linguistic, if ever?

And what do you think language is if not a (particular kind of) aesthetic phenomenon? To use language is to know-how to employ concepts and words in the same manner in which we begin to know-how to walk, see, climb. We feel our way around the world no less than we feel our way around the thickets of language. In the words of Emanuele Coccia, "language is a superior form of sensibility." There's much to say about language - if not culture itself - as a fundamentally digital (and hence self-reflexive, hierarchically structured) form of behavior, but again, there's no fundamental break from sensibility that digitality effects; not to mention that language, contrary to popular understanding, is primarily phatic - concerning intersubjective relations between speakers - rather than non-phatic - concerned with the relaying information between speakers (although the relations between the two are complicated). Language is edification, command, promise, hurt and exploration first, and 'communication' later.

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'. — StreetlightX

I think something like 'the great chain of being' - bearing in mind that particular terminology, and the Western model of it, are particular instances of a more general idea - is absolutely essential. Otherwise, there is no room for levels of meaning, levels of reality, or kinds of being.

I recall you got similarly hostile when I had a sig which said 'beings are not objects' which occassioned another scolding. I failed to see then, and still do now, why that is a shocking or inflammatory statement. But I don't want to engage in a flame war, I am trying to refrain from being sarcastic or dismissive. If there are real differences then they ought to be debated with civility.

In any case, I say there is an ontological distinction between beings and objects, and the nature of that is not something which is, generally, visible to the natural sciences (although I think it is something that semiotics recognises). But that 'vertical dimension', which is an heirarchy, is essential to philosophy, and I won't resile from that.

Depictions of hierarchical ontologies:

Traditional:


The Great Chain of Being

Contemporary:



Buddhist:

If by apt you mean the most irreparably destructive and philosophically regressive force of the last 2000 years, then sure. Hiding a noxious resentment of reality - generally coupled with a healthy hatred for the body, manual labour, temporality, and women (whatever doesn't reek with the stench of socio-economic privilege really) - behind a slogan doesn't make it any less venomous. — StreetlightX

Blimey!

I think something like 'the great chain of being' ... is absolutely essential. ... Otherwise, there is no room for levels of meaning, levels of reality, or kinds of being. — Wayfarer

I guess my most immediate reaction would be: why should there be 'levels of being' at all? To what conceptual exigency does the idea of 'levels of being' respond to? The traditional answer is of course something like, 'because God', but then, this is a philosophically useless answer as far as I'm concerned.

Moreover, it simply doesn't follow that without a 'GCB' we can't speak of 'levels of meaning' or what have you. There are plenty of hierarchies in nature that aren't divinely mandated, and they formed through perfectly 'natural' means. Contrary to what Apo - who in his incessant, nasty desire to read what I write in the most uncharitable manner - thinks, I fully accept that there are little chains of nature strewn through and across the universe, chains which come and go, each with their own immanent dynamics.

What bothers me is the the 'Great' and the 'Being'; every time a gay person is told that their sexuality is 'unnatural', what conception of 'nature' do you think is at work here? When a woman is told that it's only 'natural' that she be submissive to her partner, which nature is being appealed to? One where 'everything has it's place in the divinely ordained order' of course. I'm only barely being polemical when I say I think these ideas are venomous.

I hear you. Hadn't thought about it from that perspective.

To put into the context of Beings, the problem is that objectification is located in The Chain of Order, not in Beings that are objects.

If something says: "You're an object" it doesn't constrain my meaning. I could still mean basically anything-- I could be Prime Minster, a great artist, an equal among others, more than what anyone else says I mean etc.,etc.

To be an "object," a state of the world, means exactly nothing. Existence preceeds (or is regardless of) essence to quote the insight Sartre doesn't fully realise the implication of.

There is no order I am reducable to, no assertion of meaning which can capture or constrain who I am. Any imposition of Order others assert of me, I defy in my expression of infinite meaning.

Now they might force all sorts of horrible things on me, they might make my life a misery or even destroy me, but they can never take my logical identity. I will always be a state of the world which expresses a meaning more than the Order they try to reduce me to.

Treating people as objects is not defined by saying they are objects. It's formed in reducing them to an Order which supposedly grants the wisdom of who they are and what they mean.

The Chain of Being is abhorrent because it treats people and the wider world as a means to achieve an imagined utopia. Order steamrolls the Being of everyone and thinks them mere 'objects' to be used.

And what do you think language is if not a (particular kind of) aesthetic phenomenon? — StreetlightX

It would be nice if you defined what you mean by aesthetic in this (apparently) ontic context.

Sure, I agree that neurobiological evolution results in embodied valuation. There is an emotional reaction to all that is the focus of attentional processes. So there is no doubting there is a phenomenology.

But to call it "aesthetic" is an appeal to something much more Platonic and ideal in normal usage - the holy trinity of truth, beauty and the good. And really, none of those has much to do with neurobiological level responses. Rather they too are discursive formations that have developed culturally.

So it would be quite wrong to mix up the two levels of valuation - the biological and the cultural. Especially when you mean to use the cultural sense to describe the embodied neurobiology.

In the words of Emanuele Coccia, "language is a superior form of sensibility." There's much to say about language - if not culture itself - as a fundamentally digital (and hence self-reflexive, hierarchically structured) form of behavior, but again, there's no fundamental break from sensibility that digitality effects; not to mention that language, contrary to popular understanding, is primarily phatic - concerning intersubjective relations between speakers - rather than non-phatic - concerned with the relaying information between speakers — StreetlightX

So clearly I argue that language is not a particular kind of aesthetic phenomenon, but instead a general kind of semiotic mechanism. And so philosophy would need to consider the way language does mark a new level of break.

Again, there is continuity of semiosis in nature - at least from a Peircean pansemiotic perspective. So biological organisation and systems of meaning (your aesthetics/sensate body) are also explained by semiotic mechanism (messages, switches, paths, codes). But then there is a radical stepping up of things because of language and cultural evolution.

Now a point about semiotics as a theory of meaning - why it is not a hollow term like "aesthetics" - is that it can be explained in material terms. Or rather, as formally dichotomous to materiality.

Symbols create a further informational dimension to reality - one hidden within the material world with its dissipative flows. This is what Pattee's epistemic cut, or Rosen's categoric distinction between metabolism and replication, is about.

Just as a computer's circuits can symbolically represent any idea for the same physical cost, so DNA can represent any protein (and hence the organisation of any metabolic process), and words can represent any thought (and hence the organisation of any social process).

Thus we have a physicalist account with semiosis. Symbols can regulate material flows because they exist in a dimension of information orthogonal to those flows. They stand apart to create a source of action that the physical world simply can't prevent .

So unlike this vague notion of aesthetics or phenomenological value, semiotics speaks to an actual fundamental physical break that is matter~symbol. And then - in foregrounding the issue of the machinery - it also says why there is a radical difference between animals (with just genes and neurons) and then humans (with genes, neurons and words - and numbers now too).

So to talk about language as a superior form of sensibility is crap. Sensibility is the product of genes and neurons (even animals are aware and anticipating). But words and numbers play out at a new cultural and abstract level of semiosis.

Yes, the two are intertwined intimately in neurodevelopment. Language structures sensibility - and needs in return to be grounded in sensibility. But they evolve in separate worlds. The senses evolve biologically, discursive structures evolve culturally. And it is the right kind of thing for words to be doing to regulate that sensibility in pursuit of social goals. That is nature in action. Selfhood - and the aesthetic attitudes that might seem bound up in that - is a social construction.

So this is about orientation. You wave the banner of embodied cognition as if you are anti- the notion of symbolic abstraction being still part of nature. Whereas I see it as part of the continuity of nature - nature's other hidden dimension. You say language is just more sensate bodilyness - a means to co-ordinate intersubjectivity. And sure, that is the everyday part of it - getting the social group to feel the same way. But then language does also develop an intellectual life of its own that clearly goes beyond immediate human needs and wanders off into metaphysics and mathematics and cosmology.

We were already the vessel for social ideas playing out way above our heads. And now even abstracta has taken off as almost a lifeform of its own.

Again, I have no problem with debates over whether this is a good or bad thing, a natural or artificial thing. There are arguments both ways. But the point is that semiosis gives you an ontic framework that its precise here. Whereas your use of "aesthetics" as a theory of meaning seems vague, ill-founded, and unilluminating so far. It seems merely to exist as a way to force through whatever popular PC politics is the predominant meme within your own social peer group. As you have employed it to date, it is a tool of rhetoric, not philosophy.

So this is about orientation. You wave the banner of embodied cognition as if you are anti-the notion of symbolic abstraction being still part of nature. — apokrisis

No, this is you projecting again; as is consonant with your Hegelian drive to turn all distinction into opposition and all difference into dichotomy. My whole point is that 'symbolic abstraction' is very much a part of nature, and one can only stare blankly at your so-called commitment to the "continuity of nature" while consistently pitting nature and culture, sensibility and intelligibility against one another. Where you see division I simply see mutual function - no wonder then that every time I lay the emphasis on something you reflexively think I must somehow be 'against' it's opposite. But your psychological quirks have little to do with anything I write.

In any case, I have no issue with symbols regulating matter and so on, but what you seem to miss is that they can only ever do so on the condition of them being sensible. Symbols would be nothing - empty formalism - without their capacity to affect make an affective difference. I would suggest that your blinkeredness to this matter is simply a lack of education; your conflation of sensation and phenomenology (when, in actual fact, it is well known that phenomenology has often been pitted against the notion of sensation), as well as your conflation of aesthetics with the notion of the Platonic Idea of Beauty (when in fact, aesthetics has a far wider and far richer history than it's Platonic one, as designating the sphere of the sensuous as such) seem to bear this out. I would offer you suggestions for further reading, but you wouldn't follow them up anyway.

Symbols would be nothing - empty formalism - without their capacity to affect make an affective difference. — StreetlightX

So when cells respond to genetic messages, you would call this "affective" in a regular phenomenological sense?

The point is the affect is embodied. It not symbolism which sends and responds to the message. Bodies do that. Without bodies all you have is a meaning which is not expressed by anything in the world. So it is for every instance of knowledge, symbolism and culture. Those differences are worldly, are stuff bodies do. There is no chain of being. The intellectual and cultural are not seperate from biology.

Indeed, with respect to differences in the world, they are only there because of it. If human biology suddenly lost its lingistical response tomorrow, the organisation of human society and interaction would alter overnight. The culture you consider so transcendent of biology would be gone. Biological states cause its presence or absence. Our world is not present by symbols. Its differences are bodily, a range of objects expressing the symbolic.

but what you seem to miss is that they can only ever do so on the condition of them being sensible — StreetlightX

Those who believe the hard question to be legitimate would then ask how it is that sense exists without committing a category error of replacing the phenomena itself with simply a model of physical cause(s) (i.e. the reason for sensation are these sound waves are hitting these neuroreceptors which cause x, y, and z, and so on..use any physical model to the zillionth degree of detailed explanation and it is all the same category error). No one doubts the cause which can be adequately predicted and verified by physical models, refined with further research and so on. It is the equivalency of the models with the phenomena that is at question.

My whole point is that 'symbolic abstraction' is very much a part of nature, and one can only stare blankly at your so-called commitment to the "continuity of nature" while consistently pitting nature and culture, sensibility and intelligibility against one another. Where you see division I simply see mutual function — StreetlightX

That's great if you understand that a dichotomy spells mutuality - and thus is an anti-reductionist notion. Or in fact, a holistic notion as the mutuality spells a mixing and so an irreducible triadic complexity of process - a hierarchical organisation.

Such was the shrillness of your earlier posts that this kind of holism wasn't coming through. But I'll take your word for it that this is what you meant all along. ;)

Well, that's actually the problem. Models are considered to have nothing to do with the world, so no casual description will ever make sense.

Since causality is understood as symbolic but not worldly, no description will ever make sense to them. No matter how much we describe, the cry will always be: "but you've only describe a model. The world being like that doesn't make sense." According to them, we can never know the world. Knowledge doesn't make sense to them.

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. — StreetlightX

I think there is more than one systematic tendency in philosophy, yes. :-|

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. — StreetlightX

In other words, a monumental abstraction that is, likely by design, well suited to damning nearly everything one doesn't like without much need for close analysis or argument.

Well, that's actually the problem. Models are considered to have nothing to do with the world, so no casual description will ever make sense.

Since causality is understood as symbolic but not worldly, no description will ever make sense to them. No matter how much we describe, the cry will always be: "but you've only describe a model. The world being like that doesn't make sense." According to them, we can never know the world. Knowledge doesn't make sense to them. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Who is them in this case? I can't tell if we agree or disagree.

Those who consider there is a "hard problem." Or those who consider descriptions of the world to be talking about something seperate to the world.

Most likely disagree. I'm saying this who think there is a "hard problem" are fools concerned with worshiping ignorance-- when we know something about the world, they say it's impossible.

Most likely disagree. I'm saying this who think there is a "hard problem" are fools concerned with worshiping ignorance-- when we know something about the world, they say it's impossible. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I think you are building a strawman against the "hard problemers". They are not saying knowledge of models are useless. They clearly predict things that can lead to other conclusions that follow predictable patterns, etc. No one ever stated that the models are not a (very good) approximation of the causes of events. It may even be the full and complete picture- it would not matter. The point is the models themselves are not the reality. The models are the descriptions of reality. So, no one is nasaying the efficacy of the models, but simply claiming the models are not reality itself. My experience is not x,y,z physical descriptions as propounded in a number of academic journals (or all the ones related to the phenomena I seek to understand). That may be the causes behind the experience, but the experience itself is not the descriptions.

But that's the problem. The issue isn't a failure to recognise models work, it's the inability to understand the world is acting. In other words, they do not understand how descriptions work. Supposely, to describe anything that occurs in the world, we have to be that state ourselves-- supposedly description of me experience fails because it's not the being of my experience.

Knowledge doesn't work that way. To describe doesn't require being. It just needs an awareness. Descriptions don't need to be what they are describing. Indeed, that's exactly what characterises a description: a state of representation of something else.

"Your experience (you are really referring to the being who experiences)" being more than any description of it cause (e.g. brain) or even description of your experiences (e.g. sadness, knowledge of this forum, happiness, etc., etc.) is to be expected. This doesn't mean descriptions fail. Or that what is described isn't part of the world. It merely means any person is more than any description or them.

The difference between being (existing) and describing (representing) always means there is more to the world than any description, no matter how accurate. Even if I were to spend hours stating what you'd done in life, it would still only be a description. The world contains more than just my description: you. Not a failure of description, but the truth that more than my description exists.

So when cells respond to genetic messages, you would call this "affective" in a regular phenomenological sense? — apokrisis

Put it this way: the quality of affect (and affect is nothing but a quality) is determined by (among other things) bodily differentiation, developmental history and spatio-temporal differentiation in an environment (primarily enacted through movement). 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. As the work of those like George Lakoff and Jerome Feldman show, our ability to language is constitutively premised upon our bodily experiences; the body is not just a 'vehicle' of a speaking, rational being, but contitutively determines, depending on the kind of body it is, the way in which language is used and understood (this lies at the basis of Wittgenstein's intuition that even if a lion could speak, we wouldn't understand it; the affective, sensorial worlds of lions and humans are simply too different). Here is Feldman:

"There is now very strong evidence that essentially all of our cultural, abstract, and theoretical concepts derive their meanings by mapping, through metaphor, to the embodied experiential concepts we explored in earlier chapters ... By linking abstract language to embodied knowledge, we are able to tap into all of our rich experience of the world and social systems as the basis for inference." To the degree that bodily - that is, affective - knowledge is our 'first' source of knowledge, language itself is built off of this primary fund of corporeal meaning: " Each primary metaphor is directly grounded in everyday experience linking our (often sensory-motor) experience to our subjective judgements. For example, the primary conceptual metaphor Affection is warmth arises because our earliest experiences with affection correlate with the physical experience of the warmth of being held closely." (Feldman, From Molecule to Metaphor).

This is what it means to speak of language as a 'superior form of sensibility', and what I mean when I say that symbols regulate matter to the degree that they are of the sensuous. It's simply not enough to speak of symbol and matter without taking into account the absolutely crucial role that sensibility plays in language. Sensibility is the very condition by which symbols affect changes - that is, communicate, regulate. So to bring it back around, I imagine that cells, to the degree that they both are and exist in less differentially structured environments, and possess a smaller range of interactive possibilities, would similarly inhabit an affective world of far lower intensity than, say, a human, without simply being a material vehicle for semiotic manipulation (a hylomorphic formulation, which, like all hylomorphisms, ought to strike one as immediatly suspect).

Knowledge doesn't work that way. To describe doesn't require being. It just needs an awareness. Descriptions don't need to be what they are describing. Indeed, that's exactly what characterises a description: a state of representation of something else. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I don't disagree with you here. Again, no reason to get upset or overreact.

"Your experience (you are really referring to the being who experiences)" being more than any description of it cause (e.g. brain) or even description of your experiences (e.g. sadness, knowledge of this forum, happiness, etc., etc.) is to be expected. This doesn't mean descriptions fail. Or that what is described isn't part of the world. It merely means any person is more than any description or them. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Again, I do not disagree, and again your implications with the word "fail" is moving back to strawmaning the position to saying that descriptions "fail". But I know the "sense" in which you mean fail so I will not hold you to it too much.

The difference between being (existing) and describing (representing) always means there is more to the world than any description, no matter how accurate. Even if I were to spend hours stating what you'd done in life, it would still only be a description. The world contains more than just my description: you. Not a failure of description, but the truth that more than my description exists. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Again, we do not disagree. The question is, how does one get to being without committing a category error of always referring back to the physical causes?

"There is now very strong evidence that essentially all of our cultural, abstract, and theoretical concepts derive their meanings by mapping, through metaphor, to the embodied experiential concepts we explored in earlier chapters ... By linking abstract language to embodied knowledge, we are able to tap into all of our rich experience of the world and social systems as the basis for inference." To the degree that bodily - that is, affective - knowledge is our 'first' source of knowledge, language itself is built off of this primary fund of corporeal meaning: " Each primary metaphor is directly grounded in everyday experience linking our (often sensory-motor) experience to our subjective judgements. For example, the primary conceptual metaphor Affection is warmth arises because our earliest experiences with affection correlate with the physical experience of the warmth of being held closely." (Feldman, From Molecule to Metaphor).

This is what it means to speak of language as a 'superior form of sensibility', and what I mean when I say that symbols regulate matter to the degree that they are of the sensuous. It's simply not enough to speak of symbol and matter without taking into account the absolutely crucial role that sensibility plays in language. Sensibility is the very condition by which symbols affect changes - that is, communicate, regulate. So to bring it back around, I imagine that cells, to the degree that they both are and exist in less differentially structured environments, and possess a smaller range of interactive possibilities, would similarly inhabit an affective world of far lower intensity than, say, a human, without simply being a material vehicle for semiotic manipulation (a hylomorphic formulation, which, like all hylomorphisms, ought to strike one as immediatly suspect). — StreetlightX

This is getting close to panpsychic ideas. Although, sensation itself is not explained without being self-referential or just saying as a brute matter-of-fact "sense exists, now let's build from there".

This is getting close to panpsychic ideas. — schopenhauer1

Not at all; I listed some quite specific conditions that need to be met for anything of the kind to occur: spatio-temporal and bodily differentiation, as well as self-other (environmental) interaction, primarily in the mode of movement; bodily differentiation itself is generally the result of phylogenetic developmental trajectories (i.e. evolution), with motility also being an evolutionary development in the service of sustaining a metabolism. The panpsychic thesis anything and everything has some mysterious measure of mind can... do nasty things to itself in the butt.

As for the notion of sensation being referential, this is not entirely surprising. If to partake of the sensuous is to meet (at least) the conditions above, then only a being of that kind would be able to make sense of the sensible. Evan Thompson, speaking in the context of the theory of autopoiesis, and employing Hans Jonas's dictum that "life can only be known by life", puts it nicely: "In observing other creatures struggling to continue their existence—starting with bacteria that actively swim away from a chemical repellent—we can, through the evidence of our own experience and the Darwinian evidence of the continuity of life, view inwardness and purposiveness as proper to living being. … The proposition that life can be known only by life is also a transcendental one in the phenomenological sense. It is about the conditions for the possibility of knowing life, given that we do actually have biological knowledge. One way to articulate this transcendental line of thought is as follows:

(1) To account for certain observable phenomena, we need the concepts of organism (in the Kantian sense of a self-organizing and immanently purposive whole) and autopoiesis. (2) The source for the meaning of these concepts is the lived body, our original experience of our own bodily existence. (3) These concepts and the biological accounts in which they figure are not derivable from some observer-independent, nonindexical, objective, physicochemical description … To make the link from matter to life and mind, from physics to biology and psychology, we needs concepts such as organism and autopoiesis, but these concepts are available only to a bodily subject with firsthand experience of its own bodily life.” (Thompson, Mind in Life).

Not at all; I listed some quite specific conditions that need to be met for anything of the kind to occur: spatio-temporal and bodily differentiation, as well as self-other (environmental) interaction, primarily in the mode of movement; bodily differentiation itself is generally the result of phylogenetic developmental trajectories (i.e. evolution), with motility also being an evolutionary development in the service of sustaining a metabolism. The panpsychic thesis can go... do bad things to itself in the butt. — StreetlightX

(1) To account for certain observable phenomena, we need the concepts of organism (in the Kantian sense of a self-organizing and immanently purposive whole) and autopoiesis. (2) The source for the meaning of these concepts is the lived body, our original experience of our own bodily existence. (3) These concepts and the biological accounts in which they figure are not derivable from some observer-independent, nonindexical, objective, physicochemical description … To make the link from matter to life and mind, from physics to biology and psychology, we needs concepts such as organism and autopoiesis, but these concepts are available only to a bodily subject with firsthand experience of its own bodily life.” (Thompson, Mind in Life). — StreetlightX

This last sentence seems to not say much. In order to know life, there needs to be another life form that understands what it means to have firsthand experience? Well, isn't that with every concept, even beyond biological concepts? In order to understand math, you probably need to be a being that can derive, invent (or discover if you wish), use, and understand math- basically a living being that has the capacity to do this. Or at least one that has the capacity to make a computer that can do this.

Edit: I guess perhaps I'm trying to say that how is it that saying "In order to know life, you have to be life" saying much? Maybe don't use the math example, but I'll keep it in there since I had it posted.

I think the point is more that on can imagine, at least in principle, explaining say, algebra to a disembodied being (assuming which we could get round the fact that a disembodied being couldn't 'know' anything at all*); "if you take one 'x' and you put a little multiplication sign between that and another 'x' you get 2x." i.e. you manipulate a few symbols and voila, you've learnt something. Whereas with affectivity, you're kind of left with a proliferation of synonyms; at the very least, if they ask 'what is a feeling?', and you reply by suddenly shouting in their face and asking 'did you feel that?' That's what it is." Sensation is what one might call 'indexical' in this sense. It's like trying to explain what the word 'here' designates; 'here' is a kind of performance in space and time, an ostensive act, a gesture towards a spot; sensation analogously is a kind of 'life-performance', you 'need to be there' to 'get it' as well - but to 'be there' is to be the kind of being that can in the first place.

*This math example is incredibly contrived, I should note: having a sense of spatiality - itself derived from being a moving body - is foundational when it come to being able to understand mathematical concepts.

Interesting discussion. On the one hand I think it's inevitable that language as used by people has to be grounded bodily somehow, but there's also no doubting that it has emergent formal and mathematical properties that aren't traceable in any straightforward way to them. Language as a formal system is something you can at least in part demonstrably 'teach to a machine,' and formal semantics is empirically successful in being largely algebraic (there is even a logic of indexicals that does not, strictly speaking, need to appeal to embodiment).

It's like trying to explain what the word 'here' designates; 'here' is a kind of performance in space and time, an ostensive act, a gesture towards a spot; sensation analogously is a kind of 'life-performance', you 'need to be there' to 'get it' as well - but to 'be there' is to be the kind of being that can in the first place. — StreetlightX

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, What essentially this translates to is this scenario:

Person A: "Sensation is X, Y, Z physical phenomena."

Person B: "Well, that is just a description using a model. The actual sensation needs to account for the actual "feeling" of the sensation."

Person A: "Well, you need to be an organism to know this feeling, so when I say "heat", you as an organism that can feel heat, just "knows" what it is".

Person B: "But how is this an explanation? You simply stated the obvious that sensations are what people feel and can relate because they intuitively understand the concept from firsthand experiences. This does not explain how it is sensation exists from non-sensation. This internal feeling of the organism.. the external and internal, the evolutionary trajectory, these are all descriptions similar to your x, y, z, but does not provide the actual understanding of how it is that there is this completely new form of reality that is different from previously. To deny this is a "different form of reality" is to state 1) That the form of reality existed previously or 2) To have no explanation really- simply question-begging.

*This math example is incredibly contrived, I should note: having a sense of spatiality - itself derived from being a moving body - is foundational when it come to being able to understand mathematical concepts. — StreetlightX

Actually, I agree with you, hence why I realized using math was not a good idea because you would think that I was saying that math can be recognized by non-organisms, when, in fact, I am saying that math, like sensation needs to have organisms with moving-body, internal/environmental relations (in other words sensations). I was just trying to say that it seems quite obvious that just like explaining sensation, explaining math needs someone with similar embodied experiences (i.e. people who also have sensations).

The point is there is no catergory error. Experiences are physical states. They are of the same existence as everything else. Not in the reductive sense of "only being a brain", but in sense of experiences being of the world. To be an experiencing being is to be material, a distinction of the material world, which may be described.

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. 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.

When we have a model, they insist we only describe our experience and not the world. Understanding Being is closed to them because they limit knowledge only to properties and parts which are stated in language. They deny the world can be more than what they say.

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.

On the one hand I think it's inevitable that language as used by people has to be grounded bodily somehow, but there's also no doubting that it has emergent formal and mathematical properties that aren't traceable in any straightforward way to them. — The Great Whatever

This is one of the points I think is interesting here. It is a speculative way of putting it, but it is as if the Universe is talking about itself in having its Platonic organisation emerging as the end game in our philosophic/scientific modelling.

That was the step Peirce wanted to make. Our human instinct for "reasonableness" could be either just arbitrary - just a very limited kind of Procrustean view we impose on existence with no deep justification. Or it could be in fact the very organisational principle by which the Universe itself self-organises into being. The Universe actually is rational in that it is like the development of an "embodied" mental habit, and exercise in rendering vague possibility as crisp logical counterfactuality.

So the contrast is between this pansemiotic metaphysics and SX's apparently panpsychic/idealist approach where he stresses phenomenology/aesthetics/sensibility - the experiential feel of things rather than the rational structure of things.

I don't deny that experience is where it all must start for us epistemically. It is really important to counter the usual reductionist view which simply wants to bypass all the problems of defining what it is to be a mind - in contrast to being a body. So taking an embodied approach to consciousness is absolutely the right thing to do.

But I take that already for granted. And my argument then picks up at the point where we have to turn back to talking about the material world. Peircean semiotics says we must see the material world as generally "mindful" in its mechanisms, but we don't want to then just be idealistic in a dualistic sense of saying that that mindfulness is some kind of dilute substance - a grade of some elemental mentalistic property as panpsychism does.

So the human mind is biologically rooted, and language/culture appear parasitic on that embodied state of sensibility. But language opened the door to a logico-mathematical level of cosmology modelling. And that does arguably - in its potential for Platonic-strength abstraction - create a conversation in which the Universe is speaking of itself now. Its principles are being articulated in ways that are forced onto us by their reality now that we have a suitably universal form of semiotic mechanism in words and counting, grammar and logic.