First job was to wind you back from confusing cognition as epistemic method with cognition as some kind of ontological mind stuff that grounds mind-independent reality. — apokrisis
If you looked at the Mind Created World piece, I explicitly state that I am not arguing for any such thing. — Wayfarer

Way off-topic :
As usual, 's discussion is over my head. But it may not be over yours. I had to Google A> "cognition as epistemic method"*1 to learn how it differs from B> "ontological mind stuff"*2. The "A" definition sounds like Ontology-as-usual, while the "B" version sounds like an Idealist interpretation of the traditional question of "what is Being?", but using a matter-based metaphor : "stuff". Which can be confusing for those who take metaphors literally.

Cognition is defined as 'mental activity", but that leaves open the question of how the human brain is able to metaphorically reach out beyond the skull into the material world, and bring back meaningful Percepts that can be transformed into useful Concepts. How do incoming photons (light energy) convey knowledge about the properties (redness) of the object that reflected the light? How does Cognition decode mathematical wavelengths into personal meanings? After several thousand years of argument and experimentation, a final answer to such questions seems as elusive as ever.

The notion of a "Mind Created World" seems to be another perennial conundrum that is not amenable to objective empirical finality. If so, is arbitrary Faith the only answer? I just read an article, in Beshara magazine, entitled Mind Over Matter*3. It's an interview with Bernardo Kastrup about his Analytical Idealism beliefs. One of his responses refers to Matter as an "extended transpersonal form of mind". Again, that sounds like Cosmic Mind-stuff (res cogitans) is a non-local ideal substance that can be molded into various forms of extended substance (res extensa).

Obviously, that universal mind-matter is not generated by my personal brain, so does it assume that the world is created by God-mind (panpsychism or cosmopsychism)*4? On one hand, Kastrup seems to deny most traditional Theology, but he is somewhat cagey about the nature of the god-mind-stuff that constitutes the world we personified-blobs-of-matter observe with our senses. If god-mind is not self-reflective, can it be intentional in its creative acts or just accidental? Sorry to unload on you, but such cosmic questions are pertinent to my own non-theological information-based philosophical theory of Evolution from cosmic Bang to local Cognition. :nerd:


*1. Epistemic cognition is knowledge about knowledge, especially knowledge about fundamental issues of justification and associated matters of objectivity, subjectivity, rationality, and truth.
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-1-4419-1695-2_17
Specifically, individuals engage in epistemic cognition when they activate personal beliefs about the nature of knowledge and knowing
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/education/articles/10.3389/feduc.2021.669908/full

*2. Ontological mind stuff :
To ask about the ontology of mind, from the Greek word 'ontos', or 'being', is to inquire into the most fundamental metaphysical categories to which the mind may belong. Is the mind a physical thing, in principle like other material entities, but with more complex properties, or is it somehow immaterial?
https://media.bloomsbury.com/rep/files/Jacquette_Introduction.pdf

*3. Mind Over Matter :
I ended up as a metaphysical idealist –somebody who thinks that the whole of reality is mental in essence. It is not in your mind alone, not in my mind alone, but in an extended transpersonal form of mind which appears to us in the form that we call matter.
https://besharamagazine.org/science-technology/mind-over-matter/

*4. Cosmopsychism :
Bernardo Kastrup also tells Michael Egnor that he does not think God is self-reflective. That, he thinks, is a unique job for humans.
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/a-cosmopsychist-talks-about-the-universe-god-and-free-will/

I just read an article, in Beshara magazine, entitled Mind Over Matter*3. It's an interview with Bernardo Kastrup about his Analytical Idealism beliefs. One of his responses refers to Matter as an "extended transpersonal form of mind". Again, that sounds like Cosmic Mind-stuff (res cogitans) is a non-local ideal substance that can be molded into various forms of extended substance (res extensa). — Gnomon

I know that interview. I’ve been reading and listening to Kastrup the last couple of years. He’s an articulate defender of philosophical idealism. (A lot of people think ‘idealism’ is the belief in ideals, It’s not. It goes back to the ‘ideas’ of Plato, which are arguably the starting-point of Western philosophy,)

It is true that neither idealism or materialism are falsifiable in Popper’s sense, but the point of falsifiability is not to establish what is true, but what is a testable claim. Classic examples Popper gave of non-testable hypotheses were Marxism and psycho-analysis, because they could accomodate any counter-factuals on an ad hoc basis - no claim could prove them wrong. Whereas a proper scientific theory is always open to refutation by new facts.

Philosophical ideas are not necessarily hypotheses in the scientific sense. They’re more like frameworks. The subject is generally discussed under ‘philosophy of mind’ so it might be useful to seek out primers on that topic. Banno points out that idealism is very much a minority position in the academic mainstream, but there are some.

I should add, that idealism itself as a philosophical term really only came into vogue after Descartes and his division of res cogitans and res extensia (customarily described as mind and matter in this context.) The Aristotelian matter-form duality was not divisible in that sense, as form and matter always co-exist in a particular. There’s an article by a Buddhist studies scholar that has a useful summary under heading 2a http://www.acmuller.net/yogacara/articles/intro.html

Thanks — Wayfarer

Cheers.

I am versed in anglo philosophy, with its emphasis on critique. It's not sufficient to learn about Buddhism or scientism, they must also be subject to analysis, which is roughly to see how consistent and complete they might be. But having said that it remains possible that any inconsistency I see is not apparent to those who are better versed. The trick then is to explain such inconsistency.

You are probably aware already of my disregard for the Kantian notion of the thing in itself. I can't see how to make sense of it in a way that enables it to be useful. If there is a way that things are that is outside of our comprehension, then it is irrelevant to that comprehension. The only practical consequence can be a nod to the mysterious, and silence. We cannot access "the world as it is in itself", not because it represents some profound fact about the world and our relation to it, but because the thing-in-itself is a useless metaphysical construct.

It is apparent that there is a distinction between what we believe and how things are. This distinction explains both how it is possible that we are sometimes wrong about how things are, and how we sometimes find novelties. In both cases there must be a difference between what we believe is the case, and what is the case. We modify what we believe so as to remove error and account for novelty; which is again to seek a consistent and complete account.

The "we" here is intentional. What is so loosely labeled "experience" only takes place in a mind and brain embedded in a community. There simply is no way to remove our communality, and any account that does not take this into consideration starts broken. It's not you looking out the window, but us. Something to be acknowledged if we would take into account the "experience of looking".

So there is a manifest difference between the way things are and the way we believe that they are. Yet we are, as you point out, "participants, moral agents, in our own lives", so to this we must add a difference between the way things are and the way we want them to be. It's this difference that is relevant to 's question. "Fair and just" is not found in the way things are so much as the way we want them to be.

I asked ChatGPT... — Wayfarer

Et tu? I can't accept GPT as authoritative. In any case, if your idealism claims that the world is inherently mental, it must respond to the three puzzles - other people, that we are sometimes wrong, and novelty. If your idealism claims only that our beliefs are mental, it misses the relation between the world and what we believe.

I can't help but contrast your response to me and your response to @Gnomon, here: . Analytical Idealism is not, so far as I can make out, a form of Epistemological idealism. So again, you seem to me to want your cake and to eat it, by answering issues I raise from the point of view of Epistemological idealism while answering issues others raise from the point of view of ontological idealism.

You are probably aware already of my disregard for the Kantian notion of the thing in itself. — Banno

It is apparent that there is a distinction between what we believe and how things are. This distinction explains both how it is possible that we are sometimes wrong about how things are, and how we sometimes find novelties. In both cases there must be a difference between what we believe is the case, and what is the case. We modify what we believe so as to remove error and account for novelty; which is again to seek a consistent and complete account. — Banno

This would make more sense if we paid attention to the dichotomistic manoeuvre involved.

How do we know we are wrong? That is measured by the degree to which we are not-right.

And how do we know then what is right? Well that is reciprocally measured in terms of the degree to which we are not-wrong.

That is how the mind works. It course-corrects from both directions as its seeks to zoom in on reality's true nature. It increases its resolution by minimising its errors of prediction. And what is believed to be true always harbours some doubt, what is doubted always can hold some germ of truth.

Pragmatism then says inquiry only has to reach the threshold of belief being predictive enough for the purpose in mind. We become right enough not to care about the wrong, and yet also still wrong in never quite reaching what would be some absolute and ideal state of truthiness.

Semiotics adds on top of that the fact our modelling relation with reality is never actually charged with capturing its full ontic truth. As biological creatures, we only need to insert ourselves into our worlds in a semiotically constructed fashion. The task is to build ourselves as beings with the agency to be able to hang together in an organismic fashion.

Which is where we get back to the "idealism" of embodied or enactive models of cognition that have finally become vogue after so many years. Philosophy of mind catching up with the psychological science in its own sweet time.

I can't accept GPT as authoritative — Banno

There’s no requirement to. I used it to generate a useful summary rather than going to the trouble of drafting one de novo. Like a glossary entry.

I can't see how to make sense of (the in itself) in a way that enables it to be useful. If there is a way that things are that is outside of our comprehension, then it is irrelevant to that comprehension. The only practical consequence can be a nod to the mysterious, and silence. We cannot access "the world as it is in itself", not because it represents some profound fact about the world and our relation to it, but because the thing-in-itself is a useless metaphysical construct. — Banno

Knowledge of appearances *is* knowledge of phenomena. It can be and is consistent and effective without it needing to be all-knowing. The “thing in itself” is a boundary in Kant's system; it marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery.. Through that it serves to keep us humble. I see it as a modest claim, not as a sweeping declaration. ‘What we see is not nature herself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.’

As for as Kastrup’s idealism - I do question the ‘mind at large’ idea in this essay - Is there ‘mind at large’? - although it’s quite a long piece so don’t feel any obligation.

As biological creatures, we only need to insert ourselves into our worlds in a semiotically constructed fashion. — apokrisis

You’re selling us short ;-)

You are probably aware already of my disregard for the Kantian notion of the thing in itself. I can't see how to make sense of it in a way that enables it to be useful. — Banno

There is no reason to regard the Kantian ding an sich as anything other than a metaphysical construct a priori, the only usefulness of it being a representation of the limit of human experience.

Given the major premise, from a speculative metaphysical point of view, that human experience begins with the effect of things on sensibility, it does not follow that things that do not have an effect on sensibility therefore do not exist, for otherwise we must be sufficient causality for the existence of such things in Nature that are perceived, which is catastrophically absurd, but it does, on the other hand, follow without self-contradiction that things that do not have an effect on sensibility cannot be an experience.

So we cause nothing perceived, but experience only the perceived. Reason inserts…..er, manufactures….the thing-in-itself to reconcile the former with the latter, nothing more or less than that. Which does sorta make the concept, technically the transcendental idea, practically useless but nonetheless logically necessary, in order to invalidate any conclusion that affirms human perception is simultaneously causal.

IDK, the thing-in-itself seems to do some heavy lifting, e.g. securing human freedom at the end of the Prolegomena.

Personally, I think it's just bad metaphysics. I already shared the critique of "things-in-themselves" in the nominalism thread, from the Thomistic, Hegelian, Patristic, and process philosophy schools.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/919006 (at the bottom of the comment where the quotes start). I find these arguments very compelling.

The semiotic view one gets from the Scholastics (Poinsot being a core example) or refined in the 20th century by Charles Sanders Peirce and John Deeley seem much more compelling to me.

In general, I think the types of "idealism" (if that is a useful title for them) that have no problem with Banno's three questions, e.g. Hegel, Plato, some interpretations of Aristotle, etc. avoid dealing with this Kantian false dichotomy.

In any case, if your idealism claims that the world is inherently mental, it must respond to the three puzzles - other people, that we are sometimes wrong, and novelty. — Banno

Those three puzzles are more of a problem for solipsism than idealism. But I think you think that idealism readily collapses into solipsism. Is that right?

From my vague recollections of your views, sometimes you strike me as a kind of linguo-ist, such that the way the world is depends on our language use (as opposed to, say, Berkeley's perceptions). I may have misinterpreted you. But you are definitely a realist - that's your trademark if nothing else. You think there was a universe before language, no? Do you need some kind of (non Kantian) existence-without-categorisation for your own metaphysic?

As biological creatures zombies, we only need to insert ourselves into our worlds in a semiotically constructed fashion. The task is to build ourselves as beings zombies with the agency to be able to hang together in an organismic fashion. — apokrisis

I can't help but contrast your response to me and your response to Gnomon, here: ↪Wayfarer
. Analytical Idealism is not, so far as I can make out, a form of Epistemological idealism. So again, you seem to me to want your cake and to eat it, by answering issues I raise from the point of view of Epistemological idealism while answering issues others raise from the point of view of ontological idealism. — Banno

Your use of the Cake metaphor sounds like you think it's a bad (magical?) idea to try to have it both ways ; perhaps like Jesus multiplying five loaves of bread into enough nutriment to feed five thousand people. But I view 's broadminded worldview as a useful philosophical attitude ; that I call BothAnd*1. It's a flexible binocular perspective that combines two conceptual frames into one philosophical worldview ; where you're not forced to choose one side to stand on.

Rather than viewing the Cake as either Material/Real or Immaterial/Ideal, he can see both sides of the equation. It's based on the traditional distinction between a physical Object (Terrain) and a metaphysical Metaphor (Map) : the idea/concept/synopsis/model of the terrain. Epistemology is about our sensory knowledge of real Objects. But Ontology is about our rational inference of ideal Essences. For example, Aristotle's HyloMorph combines a real material Cake (yummy!) and an ideal mental Cake (the abstract tasteless notion of cakeness).

Empirical Science specializes in practical sensable Epistemology, while Theoretical Philosophy focuses on impractical visionary Ontology. But, on this forum, in our search for perfect all-encompassing Truth, we often cross the line between the Cake you can eat, and the Cake you can only imagine. :smile:


*1. BothAnd :
Conceptually, the BothAnd principle is similar to Einstein's theory of Relativity, in that what you see ─ what’s true for you ─ depends on your perspective, and your frame of reference; for example, subjective or objective, religious or scientific, reductive or holistic, pragmatic or romantic, conservative or liberal, earthbound or cosmic. Ultimate or absolute reality (ideality) doesn't change, but your conception of reality does. Opposing views are not right or wrong, but more or less accurate for a particular purpose.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html

As for as Kastrup’s idealism - I do question the ‘mind at large’ idea in this essay - Is there ‘mind at large’? - — Wayfarer

In my last two posts on this thread, I responded to 's and 's challenges for you to state a firm either/or (cake or eat) position on the multi-faceted concept of Idealism. And one facet that you seem to waver on is the "mind at large" notion, which seems to imply some kind of God-mind ; although even Kastrup seems to be "of two minds" regarding the nature of that hypothetical entity.

In your Mind At Large article, you distinguished Scientific Materialism from Scientifically-Informed Idealism. And the latter phrase is close to my intention when I wrote the original Enformationism thesis. Yet invariably, posters on this forum insist that I take a stand for Scientific Materialism or for Philosophical Idealism. However, what I had in mind was more like your notion of "Scientifically-Informed Idealism" (SII).

Although your interpretation of SII may not be exactly the same as mine, I suspect that we both envision a middle-ground or transition between the poles of Mind and Matter. If so, then you and I are standing firmly on the bridge in between. For me, that Mind/Matter connection is Generic Information, as exemplified in physical causal Energy Fields, which Einstein linked to Matter in his E=MC^2 equation. Mathematical Mass is not the same thing as sensable Matter, but it's how our physical senses perceive Material objects in a gravitational field : resistance ; inertia.

If my guess is correct, then you and I are not vacillating between two poles, but stably standing in the middle ground, which some philosophers believe does not, cannot, exist. But we may still be unsure of the nature of the "mind at large" which serves as a Bridge Over Troubled Waters. For me, it's definitely not the God of Theology, but more like the Way-Path (organizing principle) of Taoism, or the Logos (rational principle) of Western Philosophy. Is my reckoning even close to your standpoint? :smile:

I suspect that we both envision a middle-ground or transition between the poles of Mind and Matter. — Gnomon

Matter and form make the better metaphysical ground zero. Aristotle's hylomorphism. Or what might be called ontic structural realism in modern metaphysics.

A world of enmattered form or substantial being must exist as a starting point. And then life and mind evolve out of that as something further.

So now a new higher level dichotomy becomes required. We must make a distinction between the inanimate and the animate. We have to have something that separates the tornado – which can seem pretty lively in being a self-organising dissipative structure – from an actual organism. Even if the organism is also still a self-organising dissipative structure, just now self-organising in a self-interested fashion by virtue of being able to encode information.

So an organism is just as substantial as inanimate matter. All matter being in fact dissipative structure with its potential for topological order (the ontic structural realism thesis).

But an organism then adds the new thing of a modelling relation. It can encode informational states that mechanically regulate entropy flows.

A river just throws its snaking bends across the plains to optimise its long-run entropy production. A farmer can throw a whole system of drainage ditches and sluice gates across that landscape so as to harness the water flow for a useful purpose.

So the mistake in terms of idealism is to treat "mind" as something as foundational as substantial being. Substantial being has to evolve first – as enmattered form – to then become a material potential that itself can be harnessed by the mind of an organism.

In your Mind At Large article, you distinguished Scientific Materialism from Scientifically-Informed Idealism. — Gnomon

Yes, well put. That's exactly what I have in mind. A convergence between cognitivism and philosophical idealism.

For me, it's definitely not the God of Theology, but more like the Way-Path (organizing principle) of Taoism, or the Logos (rational principle) of Western Philosophy. Is my reckoning even close to your standpoint? :smile: — Gnomon

:100:

So the mistake in terms of idealism is to treat "mind" as something as foundational as substantial being. — apokrisis

I can see why you would say that, but your perspective is predicated on the physicalist notion that mind is 'the product of' the brain. I really don't know if your philosophical mentor, C S Peirce, would have endorsed that. I find his metaphysics hard to fathom, but he does say that 'matter is effete mind'. 'Effete' means 'degenerate' or 'depleted' or sapped of its original vitality. What 'mind' is in Peirce is nothing at all like the Cartesian 'res cogitans' which he views as completely mistaken. He proposes a continuum between mind and matter, where they are not entirely distinct but different manifestations of the same underlying reality (and which I don't think can be described in terms of physics). He suggests that mind and matter are fundamentally connected, with mind being a more dynamic and vital principle, while matter represents a more static and inert state. By saying "matter is effete mind," Peirce implies that matter is a kind of mind that has lost its vitality and dynamism. In other words, what we perceive as physical matter is, in essence, mind that has become fixed and less active. Kind of like your hair- or finger-nail clippings in relation to your whole body, or your whole body after death. I sometimes muse that matter consists entirely of fossils.

I note that in philosophy encyclopedias, Peirce is categorised as an objective idealist, positing that the physical world is not independent of the mind but is intertwined with it. In his view, reality consists of both mental and material elements that are deeply interconnected. He proposed that the universe has a mental or spiritual dimension that cannot be fully explained by physical processes alone. That is central to his idea of agapē-ism, that love, understood as a creative and unifying force, plays a crucial role in the development and evolution of the universe and is a fundamental principle that guides the growth of complexity and order in the cosmos. He believed that the creative and purposive aspects of evolution could not be fully explained by natural selection alone. In that he was a lot more like Henri Bergson than Richard Dawkins.

Even if the organism is also still a self-organising dissipative structure, just now self-organising in a self-interested fashion by virtue of being able to encode information. — apokrisis

From an idealist standpoint, it is equally plausible to see the emergence of organic life as the first stirrings of intentionality in physical form. Of course primitive and simple organic forms have practically zero self-awareness or consciousness in any complex sense, but already there the self-other distinction is operative, as it must be, for the organism's first task is to remain separate. The dissolution of the self-other boundary is death. So then through the evolutionary process, what we're seeing is ever-expanding horizons of being. The appearance of life is the appearance of perspective - of 'what it is like to be' a bat or whatever else. Alan Watts' cosmic hide-and-seek, in which the Universe appears to itself in any number of guises. And in Nagel's 'Mind and Cosmos', he entertains the notion that in life, the universe is becoming self-aware, 'waking up', as he puts it. I find that more congruent with Peirce's philosophy than any form of physicalism.

As for as Kastrup’s idealism - I do question the ‘mind at large’ idea in this essay - Is there ‘mind at large’? - although it’s quite a long piece so don’t feel any obligation. — Wayfarer

That's a very nicely written essay which sits well as a companion piece to your first essay. Excellent work.

Without the organising capability which consciousness brings to the universe, what exists is by definition unintelligible and unknowable. The mind brings an order to experience in light of which data is interpreted and integrated into meaningful information — this is an intrinsic aspect of the meaning of ‘being’. But the sense in which the universe exists apart from or outside that activity is by definition unknown, so there is no need to posit a ‘mind-at-large’ to account for it. We need to learn the humility to accept that the unknown is indeed the unknown, and not to try and fill in the blank with a mysterious ‘super-mind’.

This seems to take us back to Kant's noumenal world, right?

I guess most of our great debates here seem to find their origins in the speculative thinking about this 'unknown, unknown'. Your solution to this is (as you put it) a convergence between cognitivism and philosophical idealism. Do you consider phenomenology, in some of its guises (perhaps the neurophenomenological of Francisco Varela) to be a compromise between your position and one shaped by embodied cognition?

Do you consider phenomenology, in some of its guises (perhaps the neurophenomenological of Francisco Varela) to be a compromise between your position and one shaped by embodied cognition? — Tom Storm

Thanks! Not a compromise, but an inspiration, the subject I'm working to understand.

There's also the matter of Kastrup's 'dissociated alters' which explain individual (constrained) experiences of consciousness as tiny slithers of the great mind.

There's three paragraphs in your essay I need to consider more deeply and I'll get back to you.

There's three paragraphs in your essay I need to consider more deeply and I'll get back to you. — Tom Storm

I get it. I'm not entirely happy with it, that's one of the reasons I haven't written many more.

I'm kind of on board with Kastrup's terminology, but not unreservedly.

I can see why you would say that, but your perspective is predicated on the physicalist notion that mind is 'the product of' the brain. — Wayfarer

In what sense is that a notion? And don't forget that I treat mindfulness as a general term that would span the biosemiotic gamut from genes to numbers as levels of encoding. So it ain't all about the neurons says the true anti-reductionist here. :wink:

The brain doesn't generate consciousness. That is the kind of statement that betrays an idealist who wants to treat the mind as another kind of essential substance to stand alongside the substance that is matter.

What a biosemiotician would say that the nervous system is the mechanical interface between the organism's informational model of the world and the resulting self-interested metabolic and behavioural changes made to occur in that world.

It is the production of a living process rather than a material stuff or even informational state.

I find his metaphysics hard to fathom, but he does say that 'matter is effete mind'. — Wayfarer

Here we go. Just repeat the same old contextless quote. As I've said in the past, read Peirce and you can see he was absorbed by the way dissipative states of matter could look remarkably lively and self-organising. The line between the animate and inanimate looked rather small when you considered how matter could shape itself into orderly forms under the Second Law.

Peirce, who was Harvard's top chemistry student for his first degree, was up to date with materials science. But working quite a while before the genetic code was cracked. So he did not have the advantage of this epistemic cut to draw the proper line. His semiotics – as a general triadic logic of nature as well as of speech as a triadic sign system – simply anticipated what biology and neurology were shortly to discover within their own scientific domains.

That is central to his idea of agapē-ism, that love, understood as a creative and unifying force, plays a crucial role in the development and evolution of the universe and is a fundamental principle that guides the growth of complexity and order in the cosmos. — Wayfarer

Again we can forgive Peirce for being of his time and place. He was under great social pressure to sound and behave suitably christian – it was a requirement even of his Harvard position, and his only sponsor after being bounced out of academia for the scandal of living unmarried with a woman was also wanting publishable writings leaning in the same theological direction.

Replace love with cooperation or synergy and you can perhaps see why he might have focused on this as a missing aspect of the Darwinian evolutionary theory that was sweeping over his world at that time.

He believed that the creative and purposive aspects of evolution could not be fully explained by natural selection alone. In that he was a lot more like Henri Bergson than Richard Dawkins. — Wayfarer

Precisely. In the late 1800s, a good Episcopalian would frame a response to Darwinian competition that way. In the mid-1900s, the socially accepted frame became Marxian biology. And capitalists remain in favour of the original "red in tooth and claw".

Are your own views expressed here free from that kind of cultural entrapment? Isn't Eastern religious philosophy something that has swept through Western culture in a number of counter-culture waves over the past few hundred years.

From an idealist standpoint, it is equally plausible to see the emergence of organic life as the first stirrings of intentionality in physical form. — Wayfarer

But then you would have to explain how exactly. What changes? What creates this epistemic cut?

Otherwise just hand-waving – hand waving away the much better formed arguments that exist.

. Of course primitive and simple organic forms have practically zero self-awareness or consciousness in any complex sense, but already there the self-other distinction is operative .... Alan Watts' cosmic hide-and-seek, in which the Universe appears to itself in any number of guises. — Wayfarer

How easily you slide from the germane to the ridiculous. This is the hallmark of your style as folk keep noting. One minute we seem to have some kind of foothold on a sensible story, the next we are whisked away into spiritualist noodlings. And you seem always baffled when this is pointed out to you as an illegitimate chain of argument.

This would make more sense if we paid attention to the dichotomistic manoeuvre involved. — apokrisis

While dialectic has a certain appeal, I'm not as enamoured by it as you. I see two major issues. First, and most obviously, in classical logic asserting something and its negation leads to contradiction, not to some third option. Priest and others have addressed this wonderfully by playing with the law of non-contradiction, developing some intriguing alternatives. But it remains that the sort of contradiction seen in dialectic is not the sort of contradiction found in formal logic. What a dialectic contradiction is remains, I think, ambiguous

And secondly, even if we supose that dialectic does not breach non-contradiction, the result is not clear. Given the Principle of Explosion, anything could follow from a contradiction, so given a thesis and an antithesis, the nature of the resulting synthesis is far from fixed.

So I would rather not glorify dialectic by calling it a "logic".

The task is to build ourselves as beings with the agency to be able to hang together in an organismic fashion. — apokrisis

Why?

That "ought" thing, again.

. First, and most obviously, in classical logic asserting something and its negation leads to contradiction, not to some third option. — Banno

If the PNC said it all, why does it lead on to the LEM as the third law of thought.

Peirce offered his answer. Vagueness is thus defined by that to which the PNC fails to apply, and generality is defined as that to which the LEM fails to apply.

Dichotomies arise out of monisms and cash out in trichotomous structure. The particular so beloved of logical atomism is thus always found betwixt the larger Peircean holism of the vague and the general. The logic of hierarchical order in its proper form. Not your levels of corporate management tale meant to conform to the brokenness of the is/ought divide.

And secondly, even if we supose that dialectic does not breach non-contradiction, the result is not clear. — Banno

The result is mathematically clear. Reciprocals and inverses are pretty easy to understand as approaches to mutually complementary limits of being. A dialectical “othering”.

The dialectic doesn’t have to worry about breaching the PNC. It is how the PNC is itself formed. It is the division of the vague on its way to becoming the holism that is the general - the synthesis following the symmetry-breaking.

The result is mathematically clear. Reciprocals and inverses are pretty easy to understand as approaches to mutually complementary limits of being. A dialectical “othering”.

The dialectic doesn’t have to worry about breaching the PNC. It is how the PNC is itself formed. It is the division of the vague on its way to becoming the holism that is the general - the synthesis following the symmetry-breaking. — apokrisis

The part here that I'd like to better understand -- and is part of why I find Hegel frustrating -- is the "leap" from prior-to-PNC to PNC, or some variation thereof.

Basically I agree that the dialectic doesn't have "to worry" about the PNC in the sense that it's philosophically legitimate. But I'd like that "doesn't have to worry" spelled out more such that I can say how it avoids the principle of explosion.

That's where I get stuck still.

From an idealist standpoint, it is equally plausible to see the emergence of organic life as the first stirrings of intentionality in physical form.
— Wayfarer

But then you would have to explain how exactly. What changes? What creates this epistemic cut? — apokrisis

Without doubting that the scientific modelling of the biochemistry involved, the question remains, to what end? For what purpose?

You said upthread:

We are modellers that exist by modelling. There are naturally progressive levels to this modelling. Words and then numbers have lifted humans to a certain rather vertiginous point. Numbers as the ultimate abstractions – variables in equations matched to squiggles on dials – take the basic epistemic duality of generalisation and particularisation to their most rarified extreme. I don't really see what comes next.... — apokrisis

Maybe it's because the only aims in your philosophy are instrumental and pragmatic. No 'beyond'.

How easily you slide from the germane to the ridiculous. — apokrisis

Don't mistake whimsicality for ridicule. There is a serious point about the reason for existence. I'm suggesting that life provides a means for the disclosure of horizons of being that otherwise cannot be realised. From a review of Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos:

Nagel’s starting point is not simply that he finds materialism partial or unconvincing, but that he himself has a metaphysical view or vision of reality that just cannot be accommodated within materialism. This vision is that the appearance of conscious beings in the universe is somehow what it is all for; that ‘Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself’.

That is something lacking in your account. Your deprecation of Pierce's idealism likewise, that it only existed because 'science hadn't yet figured out the physical causes yet'. The reason you're critical of reductionism is not philosophical, but technical - semiotics provides a better metaphor for living processes than machines. And yet your descriptions are still illustrated with 'switches' and 'mechanisms' and energy dissipation - it is still resolutely physicalist in a way that I don't think C S Peirce himself ever was.

That "ought" thing, again. — Banno

Quite.

But it remains that the sort of contradiction seen in dialectic is not the sort of contradiction found in formal logic. What a dialectic contradiction is remains, I think, ambiguous.

And secondly, even if we supose that dialectic does not breach non-contradiction, the result is not clear. Given the Principle of Explosion, anything could follow from a contradiction, so given a thesis and an antithesis, the nature of the resulting synthesis is far from fixed.

So I would rather not glorify dialectic by calling it a "logic". — Banno

:up: :up:

Indeed, what we know is mental, but that does not imply that the world is mental...

The argument attempts to show that the world is partially mental, but only succeeded in showing that the what we say about the world is "mental".

That is, the argument presented here does not demonstrate it's conclusion. — Banno

:100:

Yes, it's the idealist (antirealist) conflation of epistemology ("what I/we know") and ontology ("all there is") – i.e. a fly-bottle out of which @Wayfarer @Gnomon et al can't seem to find the way.

aybe it's because the only aims in your philosophy are instrumental and pragmatic. No 'beyond'. — Wayfarer

Jeez, you’re right. Urging folk to wake up and smell the oil - understand what now drives our political and economic settings - is really pretty small beer compared to your uplifting moralising and and karmic acceptance.

You win the big prize for your heart being “in the right place”.

The reason you're critical of reductionism is not philosophical, but technical - semiotics provides a better metaphor for living processes than machines. And yet your descriptions are still illustrated with 'switches' and 'mechanisms' and energy dissipation — Wayfarer

Twist away but I’ve made it clear enough that biosemiosis is talking literally about the interaction between mechanical forces - the way an enzyme can close pincers around two molecules it wants welded together - and quantum forces like entanglement and tunneling, or how clamping two molecules allows them to quantum jump the chemical potential threshold and weld them “for free”. Or even for profit.

Sure, technology is now human ingenuity repeating the same biosemiotic trick. But without actual switches and ratchets and motors at the nanoscale level where biology meets chemistry, you wouldn’t even be here to dispute this as an essential fact about your being.

It’s a recent discovery of course. Barely 15 years old as science. Philosophers may catch up in their own sweet time. If they have nothing better to do.

Philosophers may catch up in their own sweet time. If they have nothing better to do. — apokrisis

What do you call a Greek skydiver?

Basically I agree that the dialectic doesn't have "to worry" about the PNC in the sense that it's philosophically legitimate. — Moliere

The result of contradiction in classical logic is not just vague - it's quite literally anything.

(p ^ ~p)⊃q. From a contradiction, anything goes. That is, if we allow contradiction then everything is both true and false, and we cannot explain anything. There are various systems of paraconsistent logic that accomodate or mitigate explosive results, so I won't rule out some form of dialectic, but I won't rule it in, either. (see what I did there...?)

The part here that I'd like to better understand -- and is part of why I find Hegel frustrating -- is the "leap" from prior-to-PNC to PNC, or some variation thereof. — Moliere

There is a retrojective argument. For things to be crisply divided then they would have had to have been previously just an undifferentiated potential. A vagueness being the useful term.

Our imaginations do find it hard to picture a vagueness. It is so abstract. It is beyond a nothingness and even beyond the pluripotential that we would call an everythingness. It is more ungraspable as a concept than infinity.

Even Pierce only started to sketch out his logic of vagueness. That is why it excited me as an unfinished project I guess. One very relevant to anyone with an evolutionary and holist perspective on existence and being as open metaphysical questions.

The result of contradiction in classical logic is not just vague - it's quite literally anything. — Banno

You mean, any thing. Anything would be the generalising leap from the differentiated particular. And let’s not make the modalist mistake of believing in infinite sets except as a pragmatic tool for taking limits.

There are various systems of paraconsistent logic that accomodate or mitigate explosive results, so I won't rule out some form of dialectic, but I won't rule it in, either. (see what I did there...?) — Banno

:smirk:
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