First of all, it is important to remember that the ‘social’ here refers to the exposure to absolute alterity that temporal repetition implies. Such alterity can be the voice of another or one’s own outer or inner voice, the written words of another or my exposure to the perceptual features of my room. This is all discursive (textual) for Derrida.My sense of my own identity is relentlessly, but subtly, formed and reformed through direct and indirect social engagement,
— Joshs
Here, you consider a social engagement as an immanent cause of ‘my sense of my own identity’. How is that compatible with Derrida’s placing ‘what absolutely is not’ at the center of our temporality and the constitution of our being? — Number2018
Shouldn’t we substitute Derrida’s interval of an absolute absence, for example, with Simondon’s notion of the transindividual? “The transindividual is the unity of two relations, a relation interior to the individual (defining its psyche) and a relation exterior to the individual (defining the collective), a relation of relations” (Combes, ‘Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual’, p 26). The interval, an abyss of what absolutely is not could be transformed into the relation between the two heterogenetic orders. It could become possible to avoid the epistemological aporia while saving Derrida’s exposure to the unendurable loss of meaning. — Number2018
I don't follow how you're making the jump from the particulars constituting concepts to 'experiences'. Why must the particulars be experiences?
Say there's concept a dog has which makes it more likely to, say, fetch its lead when it hears the word "walk", and say this concept is constituted of several linked concepts, I don't see why any of those linked concepts need be an experience. — Isaac
What I'm suggesting is that all experience is post hoc. Everything we'd call an experience is made up after the mental events which that experience is attempting to explain. — Isaac
So the fundamental issue here is not really the use of words. It is for humans, but maybe less so for dogs. It's about what kind of cognitive activity constitutes an 'experience' as opposed to simply some neurons firing.
I think the evidence is pretty strong now that there's no one-to-one relationship between neural events and our 'experience', so we must explain that epistemic cut somehow. — Isaac
What I'm suggesting is that all experience is post hoc. Everything we'd call an experience is made up after the mental events which that experience is attempting to explain.
So your dog's constituent neural activity is not an experience. — Isaac
It is indeed the system doing the narration, but not of experiences so much as of mental events. Does that make sense? — Isaac
Perfect sense. Brain system does its narratives of mental events, none of which is the mental event of “experience”, yet one of its mental events is the “conscious subject”, and that mental event is that which makes sense of mental event “experience”. — Mww
where is there word usage in the constitutional activities of brain systems? — javra
My bad — javra
For me, the fact that all I have to do is experience something in order to talk about it means that it's only ineffable at a certain time (in the sense that I couldn't speak the experience into myself, I'd have to get off my butt and go do something), rather than in principle. I guess I'm thinking, no matter what conditions you might put out there it will always be something that cannot be spoken of, whereas experience doesn't meet that criteria -- all you need do is experience something, then you can talk about it. — Moliere
Both are right and always will be. — Isaac
I don't know a blind person to ask. In fact this suggests they do indeed have visual experiences. — hypericin
But my point is, how would you determine what they experience by asking them? — hypericin
A dog can develop the concept of treat and associate it to the word "treat" only by a kind of inductive inference from a limited set of particulars of which it is aware of - this to the generalized notion as concept - by holding first-person awareness (to not further confound the issue by using the term “conscious awareness”) of things such as biscuits and bones. — javra
the appraisal that experiences need to be contingent on narration in order to manifest. — javra
And why are concepts like “mental event” and “constituent neural activity ” not themselves post hoc narratives? — Joshs
if a neurological account of psychological functioning constructs the world that it models in niche-like fashion, then the distinction between post-hoc experience and original event collapses. — Joshs
Anything so farging weird as mental events that apparently don’t do certain things, creating for itself events that apparently can do the things the system apparently doesn’t do, just has to be entirely ineffable, right? — Mww
There are innumerable ways to "model" any "functionally limited data set" - taking "model" here as setting out some sort of narrative or rule. If instead we consider "model" as letting a neural network predict the next element in the sequence, will it always choose the same sequence? — Banno
It's not that there is something left unsaid, but that there is always more that can be said... — Banno
It goes...
1. {some collection of neural firing events} ->
2. "I threw a red ball" experience ->
3. (if necessary) - abstraction of 'red', 'ball' and 'threw' from that experience (2) according to the social rules around identifying those components — Isaac
And if a textbook explanation suggests the blind have visual experiences... what does that suggest for your belief that the blind can't talk of red? — Moliere
I think what you're asking is how does dialogue communicate experience? -- which I'd agree is a good question I don't quite know the answer to. — Moliere
Cool. If it's not a logical procedure, then I believe can get along with it well enough -- though by no means am I an expert on Husserl, just an interested bystander who likes to think about these things. — Moliere
Sentence 2 would have us go down the rabbit hole of phenomenology that I'd want to bracket, for the moment, in order to be able to differentiate phenomenology from not-phenomenology. Phenomenology, I'd say, is one way of talking about why it is we can differentiate language from not-language. But surely it's not the only way? (even if it happens to be, say, the one true way) — Moliere
differentiate phenomenology from not-phenomenology — Moliere
Because that might be an interesting focus for the debate on ineffability -- if we hold that we can differentiate between language and not-language, and we hold that we can "access" not-language without the use of language, AND we hold that we cannot access such and such with language THEN, and only then, could we say what is ineffable while not falling into the trap of saying what can't be said (and its attendant performative contradiction).
(I think, at least.... a first guess at some conditions for being able to state ineffability) — Moliere
I agree that the taste of a pear is not a language event. And notice how often we indoctrinated in western philosophy reach for non-visual senses to get at the non-linguistic nature of experience? So there's something intentionally fuzzy about this notion, like it's defined as what cannot be said.
One experience I have to complicate this, though, is how I listen to classical music before, and after, reading about classical music. The more I'd read about classical music, the more my actual experience would change, even though it was an identical recording (like, literally, the same YouTube link :D Classical music is much easier to study than it used to be...)
I attribute this to the analytical and conceptual things I learned from reading. That is, the more I knew about the basic experience, the more the basic experience changed -- but in a way that was enhanced rather than dulled. Aesthetically, then, my thought is the exact opposite of reducing value to the raw experience. The raw experience, for the case of aesthetics at least (and not just individual enjoyment), is just an un-tutored mind. It's fun to think back on, but really, the more we come to know things about the art, and especially the more we listen to how others encounter the work of art, the more we get out of it.
So language, in my estimation, must go some way to constructing experience. Even at the level of acquiring it in my individual skull. But, from the phenomenological side of things, it seems impossible to be able to state to what extent it does or doesn't, hence my feelings of skepticism of such things. (not a hard skepticism, just an uncertainty). — Moliere
If we take the assertion that language-world is fused, Heidegger's phenomenology of Ancient Greek to modern German should have worked -- and he wouldn't have posited something entirely different from what Plato said (or, maybe, he knew what Plato really said if we're true devotees :D ). His procedure would have seen the original meaning right there, rather than creating a very interesting treatise that is interesting specifically because it is a creative work and a fusion of ideas.
(It doesn't help Heidegger's case that he got lost in his own hermeneutic circle and couldn't even finish the 6 books that were planned, and then was seduced by fascism)
Where I think you and I, from the rest of what you write, will get along well is with Levinas -- I agree with you and him that ethics is the starting point for philosophy.
And if ethics is the starting point of philosophy, then there's no point in discussing proposition from non-propositional knowledge, or whether an ontology of naturalism is better from an ontology of phenomenology without, at first, understanding the ethical dimensions of these things. — Moliere
Hrmm, for me it's the foundationalism that's an issue (same issue I have with Descartes, for that matter). Also, I have a feeling we have very different notions of what science is :D -- but that's going to take us very far astray. Maybe put a bookmark on this line of thought for another thread? — Moliere
I hope my prodding isn't seen as disapproval. Because your posts have been a treat to think through some thoughts. So, at least from me, I have nothing but approval, though I am naturally inclined towards skeptical thinking, and skeptically inclined towards naturalism. Usually I doubt people who claim to have special knowledge. But, then, there's the curious fact of our individuality, our interiority, and so on that doesn't seem to be physical.
I just wonder if we really lose out on naturalism, for all that, when we think of naturalism as a philosophy rather than as "What physics books say is the whole truth and nothing but the truth"-style naturalism. Or, even further, I doubt metaphysics ever produces knowledge, ala old Kant's line of thinking. So, if phenomenology be an object of knowledge, then it's not metaphysical and thereby amenable to the methods of science. And if it's an object of knowledge, it would be effable, shareable, study-able.
But if it's an ethical basis, then it wouldn't. In which case, what is Husserl doing when he asks us to reject naturalism? What is the ethical dimension to Husserl's thought? Isn't that the important part? — Moliere
I'm still not following how you've jumped to 'awareness'. Why does the dog need to be 'aware' of bones and biscuits in order for the category {stuff that's nice to eat} to form a semantic memory. — Isaac
It seems to me all that's required would be some connections between the word-sound 'treat' and the neural networks associated with nice food. — Isaac
I'm saying that without language we do not have experiences of 'red', not that we don't have experience tout court. — Isaac
it is important to remember that the ‘social’ here refers to the exposure to absolute alterity that temporal repetition implies. Such alterity can be the voice of another or one’s own outer or inner voice, the written words of another or my exposure to the perceptual features of my room — Joshs
What would allow two orders to be heterogeneous to each other, other than some structural unity or center within each , opposing one to the other? Doesn’t this invoke the problem of the condition of possibility of formal structures? We would have to recognize the heterogeneity that already inhabits an ‘order’ and keeps
it from being closed within itself and simply opposed to another order. — Joshs
What is it that you suppose is named here? — Banno
For a start, my insults are funnier. — Banno
I can agree that without language we would likely hold no awareness (…) which redness can imply. — javra
it seems to me that all lesser-animal predators will be aware of red…. — javra
lesser animals do not make use of language (…) to have experiences of red. — javra
I dunno….just seemed to smack of anthropomorphism. — Mww
Lesser predators are not aware of red or blood, for those are conceptions that belong to language using intellects. Lesser predators are aware of that which triggers their instincts, — Mww
But alas…..we’re freakin’ married to our own words, and don’t employ a sufficient work-around when trying to show them impossible to use. — Mww
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