And a state of everythingness is effectively a state of nothingness anyway. — apokrisis

Isn't this a contradiction?

I agree that we need a concept of stasis (as well as concept of unity and identity) in order to think about change; I haven't been arguing against that. I have been arguing against reifying such concepts, and imagining that there are real entities which correspond to them. — Janus

Your original claim was that Being is identical to becoming. I am trying to undermine that claim by showing that becoming (change) presupposes something more fundamental and, as such, cannot be identical with Being.

However, I am not arguing here that Being is some eternal, immutable, first cause. It seems to me that the reification of Being is incoherent. Unfortunately, we can't seem to help but reify it in the course of attempting to think about it. At the same time, we can't help but think about it.

This seems to suggest that metaphysics (in the classical sense) is both inevitable and impossible at the same time.

My point is that to take "experience" as "primordial" is already to frame it as the noumenal thing-in-itself. It is already going beyond expererience to make a claim about the ontology of experience. So your claim that experience is primordially affective is a modelling claim about the structure of experience - even if a claim about some kind of lack of structure in just being this vague thing of "primordially affective".

The problem for your position is that it is incoherent if you try to eliminate the affective experiential dimension since you cannot coherently explain how there can be interpretation without some prior, or at least present, experience. — Janus

So your claim here is that there can't be conscious experience without affective experience. But note how this unpacks.

What matters is some distinction between an interpreting selfhood and then the signs of being that self. You are claiming that experience has this essential structure of a witnessing ego living in some internal world of recalcitrant affect - all these affective events that come and go of their own accord and speak to the third thing of whatever reality they in turn reflect. Some generalised realm of spirit or idea or mind, I guess.

So you speak of the "me" who stands witness, doing the interpretation. You speak of the affects, which are the percepts of stuff happening - look, there a flash of pain, there a flicker of anxiety, there a jolt of surprise. And to the degree that the witnessing self and the perception of the passing, uncontrolled or "primordial", affects are distinct from each other as interpreter and sign, together they must speak to the deeper reality that could be the intelligible cause of a play of affects. Your framing certainly points attention towards this further thing-in-itself - some noumenal world of generalised mind - even if you prefer to remain diplomatically vague about that implication.

Now if you can explain your position differently, go for it. But it seems clear that you are adopting the basic structure of a triadic semiosis, as all good psychological models will wind up doing. And so your (implied) claims about the noumenal - a realm of mind that is the cause of the affects - have to be judged on the usual pragmatic grounds. They are justified to the degree that the signs are measurements which reliably support a habit of interpretance.

So sure, if I have a pain, or hesitation, or a startle, these are all signs of something happening "out there" which have a habitual meaning for "me in here". Affect is a form of perception that feels very intimately connected to the self as a thing. It is the level of sensation that builds the sharp distinction between self and world. It is the construction of a boundary to the ego.

But that is the sensible psychological model of what an organism does to be a body with intentionality in a physical environment. And you are instead cutting away that actual world by saying "we" only have our experience. And that experience is primordially composed of affect. The physical world has now vanished from sight (well, it was always phenomenal). But in its place - because you still speak in terms of an interpretant and its signs - there still has to be a ghostly beyond of some (now "experiential") kind. The mind or spirit as a general noumenal thing-in-itself that is the ultimate ground of being.

Where does all this confusion start? Note how asserting anything about "experience" at all is already to assert a structure, as now there is also everything that experience isn't. So as soon as you talk about being "inside" the phenomenal, the noumenal "exterior" comes into play.

This is the bind that led Peirce to the logic of Firstness or Vagueness (although I agree, he didn't always quite stick to it himself). If you are going to have some foundational notion - a starting point for a developmental tale - then it can't come pre-loaded with distinctions like inside vs outside. It has to be conceived of as a "state" to which the principle of non-contradiction fails to apply.

So when it comes to the question of how "we" could have developed, we find ourselves already in that developed state - the one where there must have been a first accidental or fortuitious division followed by its hierarchical stabilisation as now a habit of interpretance.

In biology, that first primordial division would be affectless. It would simply be some biosemiotic distinction that starts a division between an organism and its world. A spherical membrane separating an inside and outside is a definite start. Membrane pores to regulate a difference between the chemistry inside and outside would be a next step. A beating flagella to mark a "conscious" difference between the direction a cell wants to go in, vs those it doesn't, is yet another.

So a lot of semiotic distinctions would get built up before we start to reach your world of a "self separated from the affects that are signs of a more generalised realm of mind". For an organism to develop the semiotic sophistication of seeing itself as a self in a world because it can sense its own boundaries as a general thing is hardly a primordial state of being. It is hierarchically complex, or recursive, already. The modeller modelling itself now.

Thus again, note how you attempt to slap the label of "experience" across everything in sight as a way to flatten all the semiotic complexity. Sure, the Peircean approach agrees that we start stuck inside our own highly developed phenomenology. We can't escape our "experience". In that sense, it seems a primordial condition.

But we can pay attention to the logical structure of that experience. And we can see that the perception of affects requires a higher order of recursive modelling complexity than the perception of "the world outside". To see our affects as affects requires that we don't just hold a model of the world, we hold a model of us as selves in that world having an experience of ourselves as phenomenologically bounded beings. We are so aware of the modelling relation that we feel aware of having to make a choice about which of two worlds - the ideal or the real - that we actually exist "primordially" in.

Isn't this a contradiction? — Aaron R

No. The stress is on "effectively".

And a logic of vagueness is based on the suspension of the principle of non-contradiction. It is rather the point that what seems to stand in contradiction - everything and nothing - would be indistinguishably the same thing in primordial vagueness.

So I simply tried to show how that does make intelligible sense if we think of "everythingness" in terms of an everythingness of fluctuations.

How much do you actually wind up with if I give you an infinite amount of the infinitesimal? Is it everything or nothing? What does your maths say here?

My point is that to take "experience" as "primordial" is already to frame it as the noumenal thing-in-itself. It is already going beyond expererience to make a claim about the ontology of experience. So your claim that experience is primordially affective is a modelling claim about the structure of experience - even if a claim about some kind of lack of structure in just being this vague thing of "primordially affective". — apokrisis

It is to make a transcendental claim, to be sure. But it is not a transcendental claim about the conditions, in a synthetic a priori sense, for possible experience; it is a claim about the precognitive conditions for actual experience. And this consists in what we know directly from experience, that actual experience begins with the body, and the precognitive ways in which it is affected.

Of course, when any attempt to articulate this kind of thing, to make it "crisp", is made it might be thought to make it look like it is all cognitive all the way down, but that is an illusion created by language. And of course, also, once analytical thought gets going, skepticism about what I am claiming is known pre-cognitively becomes possible, but that is all part of the possible deceptiveness of analytical cognitivist thinking.

It would probably help you to broaden your perspective and get this point if you were to read some Merleau Ponty or Whitehead, but you have probably already decided that you know better than they do. :wink:

Your original claim was that Being is identical to becoming. I am trying to undermine that claim by showing that becoming (change) presupposes something more fundamental and, as such, cannot be identical with Being. — Aaron R

I still don't understand why you think becoming presupposes something more fundamental. Can you explain?

However, I am not arguing here that Being is some eternal, immutable, first cause. It seems to me that the reification of Being is incoherent. Unfortunately, we can't seem to help but reify it in the course of attempting to think about it. At the same time, we can't help but think about it.

This seems to suggest that metaphysics (in the classical sense) is both inevitable and impossible at the same time. — Aaron R

If being is not immutable, then I can't see how it is different than becoming. I think the notion of being as unchanging arises from the abstraction of becoming, change, process into the idea of sheer duration. This linguistic reification creates the illusion that there is "something" which endures changelessly.

So, we are never able to capture reality fully in discursive thought, because we think in fixed categories and generalities which have within them the inherent illusion that they are changeless, and we are thereby lead to believe that what we are thinking about must also, in some absolute sense, be changeless. The best we can do with metaphysics is to create novel networks of concepts that give us a sense of that change. Being a painter, I like to draw an analogy with the way the best paintings, although they are fixed images, evoke the living-ness of becoming.

The point about metaphysics being both impossible and inevitable is a Kantian one about the transcendental realist illusion of rational thought.

And this consists in what we know directly from experience, that actual experience begins with the body, and the precognitive ways in which it is affected. — Janus

Again, any claim of direct knowledge admits that there is a distinction to be made with indirect knowledge. So you are talking about a noumenal knowledge of the thing-in-itself. And if that is primordial, then it makes no sense. As why would indirect knowledge become a thing if knowledge could already be direct?

Just examine the structure of words you are forced to use to express you own claims.

There is some "we" who knows directly from our "own experience" of ... something or other concerning the primordial condition of "our" bodies.

Much better to just start with interpretance as an embodied state of being. To be embodied is to have already begun down the path of being in a triadic modelling relation.

There is no "self" as some kind of focal entity that stands apart from its embodied condition. There is just that habit of interpretance that is reliably making the embodied distinction of being a self in a world. And this habit can even point to the signs that prove the distinction to be a hard one - hard to the point of a mind~world dualism. It can proclaim, look at all these little affects running about inside my head. Here are the veritable signs that "I" exist ... embodied within my own embodiment in semiotically recursive fashion. The existence of "precognitive" bodily affects is my measurable proof of that claim.

Of course, when any attempt to articulate this kind of thing, to make it "crisp", is made it might be thought to make it look like it is all cognitive all the way down, but that is an illusion created by language. — Janus

No. It is using science to explain the neurobiology of affect as a form of perception - an organism learning to measure its own boundaries so as to be able to behave as a bounded organism.

You might want to treat affect as mystical primal qualia. But you know that a baby doesn't even know that its own hands belong to it until it learns to bring them under a suitably modelled sense of control.

A learner driver on an icy road feels like everything that happens is an out of control imposition from the world outside. An expert driver on the same road will feel the wheels as part of their own embodied state of being.

You can't just ignore all the actual evidence from the developmental histories of habits of experiencing or interpretance. It is not an illusion of language. The illusion of language is presuming that because we have words for speaking about "selves" and "qualia", that these things might be real in the sense of being primal, simple and noumenal.

It would probably help you to broaden your perspective and get this point if you were to read some Merleau Ponty or Whitehead, but you have probably already decided that you know better than they do. — Janus

Thanks for the reading tips. But of course I have read them. And Peirce as well.

So what I "know better" is that Peirce resolved all the metaphysical issues in the neatest way to be found.

Have you read him yourself? If you had, it wouldn't in fact take long to come across many more such hostages to fortune as "matter is effete mind". What is more "pre-cognitive" than the way he often talks about Firstness as pure spontaneity of feeling?

You could quote-mine Peirce for days to support your own preferred position here. I would be left lamely having to reply, well that was exaggeration for effect, look to his logic for a real understanding of what he should have always said to avoid misunderstandings of the transcendental or noumenal kind. :)

I don't have time for detailed reply right now, but I want to make it clear that I'm not talking about things-in-themselves, or noumena or the self, or qualia, or anything like that. All I'm saying is that we are affected pre-cognitively by bodily processes that are experienced as feelings that cannot be precisely discursively articulated, and that we are directly aware of this. Do you want to deny that this is so, and claim that the totality of what we are is exhaustively down to what is produced processes of cognitive construction?

All I'm saying is that we are affected pre-cognitively by bodily processes that are experienced as feelings that cannot be precisely discursively articulated, and that we are directly aware of this. Do you want to deny that this is so, and claim that the totality of what we are is exhaustively down to what is produced processes of cognitive construction? — Janus

Sure. There is plenty of perceptual stuff that we don't notice until we learn how to pay attention to it.

And it is my psychological claim that learning to be this self-conscious kind of conscious self is discursive. It is not biologically natural to frame any kind of percept - affective or otherwise - in this kind of self-conscious fashion that would single it out as "a percept", or qualia. To pay attention to these kinds of "precognitive" goings-on is a learnt, language-scaffolded, socially-constructed, culturally-evolved, discursive skill.

An animal doesn't "feel its pains". It just reacts due to being in pain. And so do we until we learn to take a discursive view of pain as being a sign that speaks to the presence of a mind. We have a higher level of semiotic modelling that now sees the "self" that is the experiencer of the experience, the observer of the observable. Our response to being in pain is no longer a direct embodied state of perceptual cognition. It has been elevated to a disembodied state where we see ourself as a mental being suffering a mental assault.

So you say that affect is primordial. But perception of any kind is primordial in this sense. It is still cognitive, but pre-discursive level cognition - the cognition which goes further to model the self as something essentially disembodied, unphysical and mind-like.

So yes. I am happy to say it is cognition, or semiosis, all the way down to the ground. That is exactly what neuroscience and social psychology tells us.

The division between reason and emotion, cognition and affect, is a Romantic/Theistic notion that doesn't really hold water.

It is sort of true in the sense that the nervous system and brain represent many layers of cognition. So right down at the reflexive level, responses are hardwired and instinctive rather than elaborately reasoned.

But even something so primal as pain - an emergency signal that just says back off quickly right now without hesitating to think or discuss - if filtered through a whole series of processing levels in a large mammalian brain.

The spinal cord can think for itself - whip our hand off a hot stove before we have even possibly felt anything. A short loop creates a reaction before the nerve signals could even reach the brain. That is precognitive in the most literal sense because it takes at least a fifth of a second for the brain to become involved enough to integrate anything in a felt fashion - and half a second if it is a unexpected surprise.

Then there is a big pain area in the brain stem and yet also further pain areas in the "emotional" cortex - the cingulate lobe. There, complex interactions take place.

One bit of cingulate can really amplify the pain, the other can suppress our awareness of it. It all depends on the general context of whether we need to fight through because bigger things are happening - we are fighting for our lives - or instead, we are doing bugger all and so that slight unnoticed pain in your back that I just mentioned is now turning into a burning agony demanding some response.

And all that before we get anywhere near a human socially-constructed sense of pain - accepting of course that, hypnosis or self-distraction techniques apart, pain is canonically about the least controllable feeling we have. As a biological emergency signal, it is designed to grab our attention so that the totality of our cognitive resources become devoted to a suitable response to it as a signal of something wrong.

So yes. The brain has this layered architecture. Affect seems foundational as that which is least ameniable to social construction. Cognition is at the other end of the spectrum. When it comes to the most highly discursive aspects of what the brain is doing - like reasoning - it is pretty easy to just shift attention by changing the subject.

But from a theory point of view, it is semiosis - a modelling relation - all the way down. And if you call that the same as saying it is cognition all the way down to the ground, I can live with that. Just as I would also accept it being affect all the way to the top.

Even when I'm talking about the super abstract - like semiosis as a triadic structure - it has cognitive meaning because the talk comes with some matching "felt state". There is some kinesthetic representation I have in mind of things all intertwined and connecting in a now familiar way. Thought is not a bloodless exercise of computation. We live our thoughts fully if we are doing it properly.

Earlier, we briefly discussed how we both "felt" as though we may have existed in some form before we existed here on Earth. It sounds fantastic and the skeptical alarm bells are ringing loud and clear that this is magical woo, but a similar feeling arises in me when I contemplate Being as opposed to being. If the Scholastics are correct, and God is the eternal, infinite ground for Being, then the entire world could end and God would remain. God is, He always was and always will be.

That there is something more to the world than the world, that the foundation of the world permeates every facet while simultaneously extending beyond the finite, is an idea that I think is at the heart of religious sentiments. — darthbarracuda

Sorry to respond so late. Rocky past few days.

I'm convinced of this, though, to my core, especially the last paragraph.

This is extra-philosophical, but the best model I've found for this is Proust talking about involuntary memory. You can have everything arranged just so in your thought. You can voluntarily try to remember the past, and it'll fit into your just-so arrangement. But sometimes you'll get a hint of something (a scent, an image, a feeling) that will activate a much-deeper much-realer connection with reality. That'll make all your philosophical thought seem like lego-models, in the face of what actually is.

And then that connection and understanding will fade. But it's so much more....something - it feels realer than anything else, in a way that is absolutely authoritative, from within itself.

They have a term for this in Kabblah too - the 'reshimu'

This is from some chintzy kabblah site, but so be it:

"The reshimu is compared to the fragrance of the wine which remains in the glass after having been poured out of it.

The reshimu is the consciousness of knowing that one has “forgotten.” It is the consciousness which arouses one to search for that which he has lost, the awareness that God is “playing” with His creation, as it were, a Divine game of “hide and seek.” A forgotten melody lingers in the back of one’s mind, and although he is unable to remember it he continuously searches for it, and whenever he hears a new melody (that might be it) it is the reshimu which tells him that it is not."

-----

This quote too, Gravity's Rainbow:

"Moving now toward the kind of light where at last the apple is apple-colored. The knife cuts through the apple like a knife cutting through an apple. Everything is where it is, no clearer than usual, but certainly more present. So much has to be left behind now, so quickly"

Even when I'm talking about the super abstract - like semiosis as a triadic structure - it has cognitive meaning because the talk comes with some matching "felt state". There is some kinesthetic representation I have in mind of things all intertwined and connecting in a now familiar way. Thought is not a bloodless exercise of computation. We live our thoughts fully if we are doing it properly. — apokrisis

Finally, that's all I was trying to get at.

Or finally you understood something that was always being said?

(Though I doubt that you see this as a dismissal of "qualia". You are still going to complain that no amount of scientific theory is managing to deliver your missing explanation of why anything should feel like anything. As if that is what theories are meant to do. Theories only feel like something when you can live them in action. That is use them to constrain experience to have some particular quality that you had in mind as a suitable metric. So semiotics explains that because it explains how we construct constraints on experience so as to be able to feel, see - and even count - a world composed of suitably individuated particulars.)

Though I doubt that you see this as a dismissal of "qualia". You are still going to complain that no amount of scientific theory is managing to deliver your missing explanation of why anything should feel like anything. As if that is what theories are meant to do. Theories only feel like something when you can live them in action. That is use them to constrain experience to have some particular quality that you had in mind as a suitable metric. So semiotics explains that because it explains how we construct constraints on experience so as to be able to feel, see - and even count - a world composed of suitably individuated particulars.) — apokrisis

I mean, I guess that hinges on what you think 'theories' are supposed to do. So, specific theories - theories explaining this or that phenomena according to this or that model - yeah, they shouldn't bow to any personal feelings. Theories of Everything - well...

Do you have a different theory about theories? You are welcome to explain.

Do you see it as a defect that I should in fact start from the phenomenological stance that would have to ground any grand intellectual assault on a ToE?

Which sin do you want to hang me for? Being too subjective, or too objective, for your tastes? :razz:

I'd never hang you.

My theory about theories is that theories are useful for some finite thing, idk what, depends on the theory, the subject matter.

my theory about theories that aren't that kind of theory is that they're not good.

My theory about theories... — csalisbury

As a meta-theory of theories, ain't that kind of vague?

Or is even a unifying meta-theory a dangerous thing to have? There should be as many meta-theories as there are individuals to have them?

I mean if there is no largest model, then also, no model could be too small, could it?

(Whoops. I didn't mean to be so bold as to advance a single meta-model of models there. So like ... just whatevs ... its all good, eh brah?)

My guess is that qualia does not stem from the brain but the metabolism, hence its elusiveness in searching the brain. The brain may in fact just control, regulate and guide qualia rather than generate it.

The brain's capacity to switch consciousness on or off may be mistaken for the actual generation of the qualia, like an intelligent home system being mistaken as the generator of the electricity it regulates.

AI makes clear that intelligent activity is possible for nonliving entities, and by the same token qualia may be possible in living entities without them having intelligence.

There is some "we" who knows directly from our "own experience" of ... something or other concerning the primordial condition of "our" bodies.

Much better to just start with interpretance as an embodied state of being. To be embodied is to have already begun down the path of being in a triadic modelling relation. — apokrisis

I think you are being pedantric. I already warned about the difficulty of language. I should have written:

"And this consists in what is known directly from experience, that actual experience begins with the body, and the precognitive ways in which it is affected."

And I think you know this is what I meant. Why go for the low-hanging fruit in these discussions?

You say you are happy with "cognition all the way down", as long as it entails affection all the way up. But I still don't agree that is helpful to understanding the situation. The fact that the idea of precognitive affect makes sense, whereas the idea of pre-affective cognition does not, is telling I think. It's easy to see in nature that affect is prior to cognition and I don't see why humans should be any different.

A good human example is the affective aesthetic response. No rule can be derived from it. It is impossible to explain what is so good about the greatest works of literature, poetry, painting, music and so on.

It would probably help you [Apokrisis] to broaden your perspective and get this point if you were to read some Merleau Ponty or Whitehead — Janus

I’m sure he has. But this comment inspired me to google Peirce + Whitehead, which brought up an interesting essay called Uexküll, Whitehead, Peirce. Rethinking the Concept of ‘Umwelt’ from a Process Philosophical Perspective. Regarding Uexküll, his Wikipedia entry says that he 'established biosemiotics as a field of research' so he’s a heavy hitter. The section on transcendental apperception particularly interested me, although I didn’ understand the section about Whitehead. [Consider this a footnote.]

But it should be clear I am not actually agreeing with your definition of cognition. Whatever you think it might be. Or of affect.

I simply say it is semiosis all the way down and all the way up. Different levels of the same embodied relation.

Sure, we have percepts that are understood as being signs of how we feel, and percepts that are signs of the way the world is. But surely your own drug experiences will have told you how uncertain and constructed those kinds of boundaries actually are.

Cognition likewise is a confused term. Discursively, it means something about working things out in some intellectualised fashion. And yet animals are also said to think things through in dispassionate fashion without the benefit of words. Even a jumping spider has the brains to stop and work out a roundabout path to its target. So cognition doesn’t claim anything particularly specific in mind science. Originally it was just a branding for a generally functionalist/symbol processing turn in 1960s psychology.

A good human example is the affective aesthetic response. No rule can be derived from it. It is impossible to explain what is so good about the greatest works of literature, poetry, painting, music and so on. — Janus

Yeah. But where do I take that mechanistic view of organisms in the first place? That is what semiosis is opposed to - even if the mechanical gets incorporated into semiotics as being systems of rigidly fixed constraint.

But again, refer to your own drug experiences. Didn’t you think this or that was the most sublime thing ever, simply because you were high?

Feelings by themselves are not trustworthy. They only become reliable signs of anything when framed within a well adapted “cognitive” context.

Temporal epilepsy and schizophrenia can leave you feeling you are bathed in the divine. Your pet psychological theory needs to be able to account with little facts like that.

A sensible paper that. :up:

I'm interested in your understanding of this as compared to Peirce, especially his aversion to substance ontology:

Whiteheadian actual occasions are also subjects which arise from the synthesis of
material and formal conditions. The basic premise of Whitehead’s philosophy is that all
primary entities in the universe are processes. Everything which persists in space-time is
understood as the result of sequential manifestations of interrelated processes. According
to Whitehead there are four different kinds of actual occasions:
3 Vernunft is Verstand guided by principles. Vernunft also has a moral component. 4 Critique of Pure
“In the actual world we discern four grades of actual occasions, grades which are not to be
sharply distinguished from each other. First, and lowest, there are the actual occasions in socalled
‘empty space’; secondly, there are the actual occasions which are moments in the lifehistories
of enduring non-living objects, such as electrons or other primitive organisms;
thirdly, there are the actual occasions which are moments in the life-histories of enduring
living objects; fourthly, there are the actual occasions which are moments in the life-histories
of enduring objects with conscious knowledge” (1979, 177; italics added).
Actual occasions of the third and fourth grade correspond with Uexküllian subjects
because they have the complexity of biological processes.
For different reasons Whitehead departs from the old metaphysics of substance
(Koutroufinis 2014b). He especially rejects the Cartesian idea of substance as something
that is conceived of as being self-sufficient, since it “exists in such a way that it doesn’t
depend on anything else for its existence.”5 As such it requires no relation to anything
else in order to exist. Whitehead explicitly distances himself from this conception of
substance (1979, 59). The actual entities are subjects, but not in the sense of the classical
metaphysical idea of subjectivity as a feature of a substance. As a processual subject is
not a substance, it cannot relate to its own experiences as a timeless carrier, the essence of
which is independent of its experiences. Therefore, in Whitehead’s metaphysics the
essence of the processual subject cannot be separated from its experiences. He conceives
of the actual occasion––that is, the processual subject––as a totality of experiences that
grows together to form a unity. Thus, each actual occasion is a process in which the
experiences it has with other processual subjects merge together to form an integrated
experience:
“The final facts are, all alike, actual entities; and these actual entities are drops of experience,
complex and interdependent” (1979, 18).
Every process has experience-relations to other already existing processes that occupy
concrete positions in space-time. It is these relations which make up the essence of the
process. These kinds of relations, which are indispensable to the essence of the related
entities, are usually called ‘internal relations.’ Whitehead calls them prehensions.
The material conditions out of which an actual occasion arises are ‘physically
prehended’ data of the immediate past. They constitute the part of the spatial
surroundings of the subject which is prehended by it and thus is relevant to its selfformation.
Only things allowed into a process through its prehensions––meaning,
5 Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, Part I, §51.
10
ultimately, by the process itself––have causal relevance to this process. In other words:
nothing external to an actual entity determines it––not even God, who Whitehead
conceives of as being the most comprehensive process that coordinates all other
processes. The factor which determines what can become a material condition, i.e. an
efficient cause, for a given process is the subjectivity of the process itself. The process is
a “teleological self-creation” (Whitehead 1967, 195), an act that creates its own aim and
purpose. It is teleological, not in the sense of substance of the old metaphysics (which
strives towards the aim determined by its fixed essence), but rather in the sense of a
processual teleology: each actual occasion strives to determine its own essence. Finding
its aim means determining the physical form which the completed process will have as a
spatio-temporal fact. This striving towards finding its own aim is experienced by the
process. The experience develops out of the evaluation of the relevance of prehended
content for the process itself. Therefore, it is the teleology (or final causality) of the
processual subject which decides what part of its physical surroundings can become an
efficient cause, what can be integrated as a causal factor into the process and how this
integration will occur. Each process of concrescence necessarily implies a distinction
between the facts of its physical surroundings which are allowed to be integrated into the
process and those which have been negatively selected. Thus each process of
conscrescence, even the most primitive one, exhibits an essential similarity to living
beings: it is a subject and at the same time, necessarily, defines its Umwelt.
The formal conditions out of which an actual occasion arises are the ‘conceptually
prehended’ universal abstract entities or ‘eternal objects,’ which the emerging process
obtains from the past and also from the eternal or ever lasting process which Whitehead
calls ‘God.’ More complex actual occasions, however, do not only prehend ideal forms.
They synthesize the prehended eternal objects to a new more complex eternal object,
which becomes the so-called subjective aim of the arising process. The mental pole
strives to generate the subjective aim of the new process and thus to determine what the
emerging subject will be.
As the complexity of a Whiteheadian subject (actual occasion) increases, it becomes
less determined by the inherited material and by formal conditions. The generation of
subjective aim is the development of an entity, which Whitehead calls a proposition.
Whiteheadian propositions should not be confused with linguistic propositions. They are
not connections of linguistic subjects with predicates or, in Kant’s language, connections
of individual sensual intuitions with abstract concepts. Whiteheadian ‘propositions’ are
much more basic than linguistic propositions. Therefore subjects or creative agents that
perform Whiteheadian ‘propositions’ do not need to be conscious beings endowed with
the faculty to operate with symbols:

“The interest in logic, dominating overintellectualized philosophers, has obscured the main
function of propositions in the nature of things. They are not primarily for belief, but for
feeling at the physical level of unconsciousness. They constitute a source for the origination
of feeling which is not tied down to mere datum” (Whitehead 1979, 186).
Whiteheadian propositions are connections of something particular with something
universal. Particular localized facts which are physically prehended become combined
with universal abstract entities (‘eternal objects’). This is Whitehead’s interpretation of
Kant’s dictum “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are
blind.”

Talk of "qualia" is unnecessary.

From the point of view of the physical story, as described by the Materialist, consciousness is the property of being a purposefully-responsive device. Experience is that device's surroundings and circumstances with respect to and in the context of its reaction to them in keeping with its purposes.

No need to speak of "qualia", "supervienience", or something "emergent".

Physicalists get themselves into a confused snarl that isn't necessary, even within their metaphysical belief.

But I don't believe in the metaphysics that makes the physical world primary.

Whatever you know about the physical world is from your experience, and there's no reason to believe that your experience isn't central and primary.

I've already discussed how there uncontroversially are infinitely many systems of inter-referring abstract implication-facts, including an infinite subset consisting of experience-stories, one of which inevitably has the events and relations of your experience, and is your experience-story. ...and that there's no reason to believe that this physical world is other than the hypothetical setting of that hypothetical story.

...a story about your experience, in which of course your experience is primary and central.

Objections to that account have consisted of complaints that it disregards the necessary distinction between logical and "substantive" facts or truth. But people making that objection never answered about what they mean by "substantive".

Michael Ossipoff


.

As a meta-theory of theories, ain't that kind of vague? — apokrisis

no, its 1/crisp :lol: :lol: :100:

(Whoops. I didn't mean to be so bold as to advance a single meta-model of models there. So like ... just whatevs ... its all good, eh brah?)

'just whatevs, it's all good, eh brah? '

What voice are you trying to caricature? Is this supposed to be a stoner? A teenager? A jock?

A bogan. It’s a local speciality.

Unreadable bunk.

But again, refer to your own drug experiences. Didn’t you think this or that was the most sublime thing ever, simply because you were high? — apokrisis

It wasn't "this or that" it was everything. It wasn't "thinking it was sublime" it was seeing and feeling it's incalculable depth and subtlety, its alien yet familiar beauty in an indescribable ecstasy. Impossible to describe adequately.

Feelings by themselves are not trustworthy. They only become reliable signs of anything when framed within a well adapted “cognitive” context.

Temporal epilepsy and schizophrenia can leave you feeling you are bathed in the divine. Your pet psychological theory needs to be able to account with little facts like that. — apokrisis

To say that feelings are not trustworthy is a category error. Feelings do not tell you about anything except what and how you feel. I am not arguing for or against the reliability or otherwise of 'cognitive contexts", That's why I keep arguing over and over with @Wayfarer about his belief in "ancient knowledge" and his idea that mystical or religious experience can tell us anything at all about metaphysics. For me metaphysics is a game that is played for the sake of conceptual and affective enrichment.

I am pointing out that the context of feeling is itself a (potentially) vast realm of direct experience that requires no particular interpretation, but which may be associated with diverse sets of symbols and practices to enrich human life. There is no need for "the theory", the TOE, our lives are in need of enrichment, not dogmas as to the final nature of reality.

So, again, you are projecting your own anxieties when you impute a "pet psychological theory" to me. I am not proposing anything like that at all. If anything, essentially I am a skeptic.

OK. And what do you conclude from knowing that it was only the drugs causing that state of mind?

A bogan. It’s a local speciality. — apokrisis

Local to where, though? Most likely Australia, I would say. :razz:

That like anything else drugs open up different possibilities for experience.