Given that the thinking of our best engineers doesn’t even represent the leading edge of thinking of our era, it’s kind of hard to imagine how their slightly moldy concepts instantiated in a self-learning a.i., will lead to the singularity.
— Joshs

I don't understand this sentiment. It's not a refutation of the possibilities of what can be created, neither is it a realistic sentiment about how the world works. Things change, ideas advance, ideas bleed over between different fields. Doubt anyone in 1950 at the time could tangibly envision technologoy that does what A.I. are doing now.

The fact that the architectures of our most self-organizing machines depend on locking in certain grounding concepts to define the parameters and properties of self-organization ( properties which will change along with the concepts in a few years as the engineers come up with better machines) means that these concepts are in fact forms of hardcoding.
— Joshs

And this would apply to all living organisms: jellyfish, plants, the many kinds of brains, neural webs, etc, etc. — Apustimelogist

I’m realizing after my last post to NoAxioms that what I’m arguing is not that our technological capabilities dont evolve along with our knowledge, nor am I claiming that the fruits of such technological progress don’t include systems that think in ways that deeply overlap thinking in living organisms. What I am arguing is that the implications of such progress, which the leading edge of thinking in philosophy and psychological sciences points to, necessitates a change in our vocabulary, a shift away from certain concepts that now dominate thinking about the possibilities of a.i.

Im thinking of notions like the evolution of our devices away from our control and beyond our own cognitive capabilities, the idea that a thinking system is ‘invented’ from components, that the materials used in instantiating a thinking machine don’t matter, and that it is fundamentally computational in nature. I recognize that those who say today’s a.i. already mirrors how humans think. are absolutely correct in one sense: their models of human behavior mirror their models of a.i. behavior. So when I protest that today’s a.i. in no way captures how we think, I’m making two points. First, I am saying that they are failing to capture how humans think. I am comparing their model of human behavior to an alternative which I believe is much richer. And second, that richer model demands a change in the way we talk about what it means to be a machine.

In a way, this debate doesn’t even need to bring in our understanding of what specific current a.i. approaches can do or speculation about what future ones will do. Everything I want to argue for and against concerning what a.i. is and can become is already contained with my dfferences with you concerning what humans and other animals are doing when they think. This gets into the most difficult philosophical and psychological perspectives of the past 150 years, and discussions about a.i. technology derive their sense from this more fundamental ground.

My position is simply that nobody has ever demonstrated the simpler model wrong. Plenty (yourself included) reject that simplicity, which is your choice. But the physical view hasn't been falsified, and there is no current alternative theory of physics that allows what you're proposing. You'd think somebody would have come up with one if such a view was actually being taken seriously by the scientific community. — noAxioms

The simpler model is proven wrong all the time. Put more accurately, scientific paradigms are replaced by different ones all the time. Since I am a Kuhnian rather than a Popperian, I dont want to say that the older view is falsified by the newer one. Rather, the frame of intelligiblity is turned on it head from time to time, leading to changes in basic concepts, what counts an evidence and even scientific method itself. From a short distance , it may seem as if there is one scientific method that has been in use for three hundreds of years, and that new discoveries about the brain are simply added to the older ones with minor adjustments. But from a vantage of greater historical depth, it can be seen that all concepts are in play, not just those concerned with how to create the best third person theory, but whether a ‘simple’ empirical model implies a physicalistic account, what a third person theory is, what a first person account is, and how to conceive the relationship between them. For instance, certain embodied enactivist approaches to the brain , such as Francisco Varela’s neurophenomneology, sweepingly rethink this relation.

So, on its own terms, what you call the ‘simple’ empirical model can’t be defined in some static, ahistorical way as third person physicalism as opposed to subjective feeling.

Certainly a brain would not be operational. It needs a being to be in, and that being needs an environment, hence my suggestion of a simulation of <a person in a small room> — noAxioms

Yes, if your aim is to get your brain to do what living brains do, you have to start by keeping in mind that a life form isn’t a thing placed in an environment. It IS an environment, indissociably brain, body and world in inextricable interaction. That has to be the starting point. As soon as we start thinking that we have to ‘invent’ a body and an environment for a device we separately invent , and ignore the fact that we ourselves were not first invented and then placed in a body and a room, we have guaranteed that our device will not ‘think’ the way that living systems think. If, on the other hand, we take as our task the modification of an already existing ecology (biological computing in a test tube), we are on the road to systems that think the way creatures ( including plants) think.

You’re missing the point. Even taking into account all of the biological lineages which become extinct, what it means to be a living system is to be self-organizing, and this self-organization is dynamic.
— Joshs
Yea, which is why mechanical devices are not yet living things. It can happen. Whether it will or not is an open question at this point. A device being living is not a requirement for it to think or to have a point of view — noAxioms

The reason it’s a question of the material is more a matter of the capacities of the material to be intrinsically self-transforming and self-organizing than whether we use silicon or dna strands as our building blocks. What I mean is that we can’t start with inorganic parts that we understand in terms of already fixed properties ( which would appear to be intrinsic to how we define the inorganic) and then design self-organizing capacities around these parts. Such a system can never be fundamentally , ecologically self-organizing in the way a living environment of organic molecules is, and thus cannot think in the way living creatures think.

This means that to continue existing as that creature from moment to moment is to make changes in itself that maintain the normative self-consistency of its functioning in its environment while at the same time adapting and accommodating itself to the always new features of its environment.
You mean like putting on a coat when winter comes? What does this have to do with the topic again? The definition of 'life' comes up only because you're asserting that life seems to have access to a kind of physics that the same matter not currently part of a lifeform does not. — noAxioms

Yes, a popular conception of both living and non-living things is that they start from building blocks, and thinking is computation, which can be performed with any material that can be used to symbolize one’s and zeros. Add in non-linear recursive functions and. presto, you have a self-organizing system. This will certainly work if what we want are machines which perform endless variations on themes set by the fixed properties of their building blocks as we conceptualization them , and the constraints of digital algorithms.

My point is really that we need to listen to those theorists (Physicist Karen Barad, Joseph Rouse, James Bridle) who suggest that material entities don’t pre-exist their interactions ( or ‘intra-actions’), and the limitations of our current models of both the living and the non-living have to do with their reliance on the concept of a building block. Just as any material will do if we think of thinking ( and materials) in terms of computational patterns of ones and zeros, no material will do, not even organic molecules, if we want to have such entities think the way life thinks.

Pre-programmed, in contrast to self-organization. Its not some technical concept. For instance, you could say pain or hunger is in some sense hard-coded into us — Apustimelogist

Whether technical or non-technical, it is a concept, and all concepts belong to cultural understandings, which are contingent and historically changing And the machines we invent are stuck with whatever grounding concept we use to build their remarkable powers to innovate. Given that the thinking of our best engineers doesn’t even represent the leading edge of thinking of our era, it’s kind of hard to imagine how their slightly moldy concepts instantiated in a self-learning a.i., will lead to the singularity.

You have then seemed to base the rest of the post on latching onto this use of the word "hardcoded" even though I initially brought that word up in the post to say that "hardcode" is exactly not what characterizes self-organization or what A.I. — Apustimelogist

The fact that the architectures of our most self-organizing machines depend on locking in certain grounding concepts to define the parameters and properties of self-organization ( properties which will change along with the concepts in a few years as the engineers come up with better machines) means that these concepts are in fact forms of hardcoding.

What is being hardcoded, effectively, is the ability for a system to learn to do things by itself without explicit supervision, which is self-organization. — Apustimelogist

What does hardcoded mean? What are the technological concepts involved? It is not difficult to answer this question for any given a.i.architectural blueprint. One can put together a list of such grounding concepts. At the top of this list should be concepts like ‘hard’, ‘code’ and what these do together in the form ‘hardcode’, but it also includes our current understanding of concepts like memory, speed, symbol, computation, and many others. If I were to suggest that today’s computer architectures and their grounding concepts are based on older philosophical ideas that have been surpassed, would you respond that this simply proves your point that just because today’s technological know-how is inadequate to model human thinking, this doesn’t mean that tomorrow’s technological understanding can’t do the job?

If I am claiming that there is a more adequate way of understanding how humans think, what stands in the way of our applying this more adequate approach to the development of products which think like us? My answer is that nothing stands in the way of it. I would just add that such an approach would recognize that the very concept of a device humans design and build from the ground up belongs to the old way of thinking about what thinking is.

So if I’m not talking about a machine that we invent, what am I talking about? What alternatives are there? Writers like Kurzweil treat human and machine intelligence in an ahistorical manner, as if the current notions of knowledge , cognition, intelligence and memory were cast in stone rather than socially constructed concepts that will make way for new ways of thinking about what intelligence means. In other words, they treat the archival snapshot of technological cultural knowledge that current AI represents as if it were the creative evolution of intelligence that only human ecological semio-linguistic development is capable of. Only when we engineer already living systems will we be dealing with intelligent, that is, non-archival entities, beings that dynamically create and move through frames of cognition.

When we create dna-based computers in a test tube and embed them within an organic ecological system, or when we breed, domesticate and genetically engineer animals, we are adding human invention on top of what is already an autonomous, intelligent life-based ecological system , or ecological subsystem. The modifications we make to such systems will allow us to communicate with them and shape their behavior, but what will constitute true thinking in those living systems is not what we attempt to ‘lock in’ through ‘hardcoding’ but what feeds back into, surpasses and transforms that hardcoding through no planned action of our own. The difference here with devices that we design from the ground up is that the latter can never truly surprise us. Their seeming creativity will always express variations on a theme that we ‘hardcode’ into it, even when we try to hardcode creative surprise and innovation.

When we achieve that transition from inventing machines to modifying living systems, that organic wetware will never surpass us for the same reason that the animals we interact with will never surpass us in spite of the fact that they are subtly changing their ‘hardcoded’ nature all the time. As our own intelligence evolves, we understand other animals in more and more complex ways. In a similar way, the intelligence of our engineered wetware will evolve in parallel with ours.

↪Joshs

I really don't understand what you are going on about. A brain is a physical object. In principal, you can build a brain that does all the things brains do from scratch if you had the technological capabilities — Apustimelogist

And can we also create life from scratch if we had all the technological capabilities? What I am going on about are the important differences between the cognizing of a living organism and the thinking of a human-designed machine.

No matter how apparently flexible its behavior , that flexibility will always be framed and and limited to the model of thinking that dates to the time that the product is released to the market.
— Joshs
No so for devices that find their own models of thinking.

As soon as it is released, it already is on the way to obsolescence
So similar to almost every creature. Name a multicelled creature they have a fossil of that exists today. I can't think of one. They're all obsolete. A rare fossil might have some living descendants today (I can think of no examples), but the descendant is a newer model, not the same species. — noAxioms

You’re missing the point. Even taking into account all of the biological lineages which become extinct, what it means to be a living system is to be self-organizing, and this self-organization is dynamic. This means that to continue existing as that creature from moment to moment is to make changes in itself that maintain the normative self-consistency of its functioning in its environment while at the same time adapting and accommodating itself to the always new features of its environment. This is as true of dinosaurs and do-do birds as it is of us.

While organisms without linguistic culture rely on inherited ‘design’ to frame their possibilities of adaptation to the world, this isnt just a one-way street. The organism’s own novel capabilities shape and modify the underlying genetic design, so behavior affects and modifies future genetic design just as genetic design frames behavior. This is what makes all living systems self-designing in a way that our machines can never be. A designer can’t ‘teach’ its product to be self-designing because all the tools the machine will have at its disposal will have been preset in advance by the designer. There is no reciprocal back and forth between machine and designer when the designer chooses a a plan for the machine.

In that the the engineers have the opportunity to observe how their machine operates out in the world, there is then a reciprocity between machine behavior and desiger. But this is true of our artistic and philosophical creations well. We create them , they ‘talk back to us’ and then we modify our thinking as a result.

I will say bluntly that no machine we invent will do what we do, which is to think.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
— Joshs
Noted. How very well justified. Your quote is about LLMs which are mildly pimped out search engines. Compare that do devices which actually appear to think and to innovate. What do you call it if you refuse to apply the term 'think' to what it's doing?

The quote goes on to label the devices as tools. True now, but not true for long. I am arguably a tool since I spent years as a tool to make money for my employer. Am I just a model then? — noAxioms

When we build a machine it has a time stamp on it. No matter how apparently flexible its behavior , that flexibility will always be framed and limited to the model of thinking that dates to the time that the product is released to the market. As soon as it is released, it already is on the way to obsolescence, because the humans who designed it are changing the overarching frame of their thinking in subtle ways every moment of life. 20 years from now this same device which was originally praised for its remarkable ability to learn and change “just like us” will be considered just as much a relic as a typewriter or vcr. But the engineers who invented it will have continued to modify their ways of thinking such as to produce a continuous series of new generations of machines, each of which will be praised for their remarkable ability to ‘think and innovate’, just like us. This is the difference between a human appendage ( our machines) and a human cognizer.

You might argue that biological evolution designs us, so that we also have a time stamp on us framing and limiting our ability to innovate. But I disagree. Human thought isn’t bound by a frame. It emerged through evolutionary processes but has no limits to the directions in which thinking can reinvent itself. This is because it isn’t just a product of those processes, but carries forward those processes.Evolution isn’t designed, it is self-designing. And as the carrying forward of evolution, human culture is also self-designing. Machines don’t carry forward the basis of their design. They are nothing but their design, and have to wait for their engineers to upgrade them. Can we teach them to upgrade and modify themselves? Sure, based on contingent, human-generated concepts of upgrading and modification that have a time stamp on them.

↪JoshsI think we’re converging on a similar point. I would agree that “truth” does not wear a single face. Its criteria shift depending on the language-game: in a courtroom truth is tied to testimony and records, in science it is tied to predictive success but also to the testimony and documentation that communicate, test, and replicate those predictions, and in mathematics it is tied to logical necessity. To borrow Wittgenstein’s term, these are family resemblances rather than a unitary essence.

Where I’d want to add a note of caution is that the factivity of truth still matters across those contexts. However we construe it, “p” being true always implies that things are as “p” says they are. Otherwise we lose the very grammar that distinguishes knowledge from conviction. — Sam26

If we’re sticking with the later Wittgenstein we want to be careful here ( otherwise feel free to ignore this :grin: ).
The grammar of truth isn’t defined across instances connected by family resemblances. It is defined by the particular instantiations within the larger family. We dont consult an already given conceptual grammar (“p” being true always implies that things are as “p” says they are) and then apply it to a family of instances. There is always something particular we are doing with ‘“p” being true always implies that things are as “p” says they are’, and this grammar doesnt just give us unique criteria but a unique sense of meaning of the phrase ‘ “p” being true always implies that things are as “p” says they are’.

Your wording suggests “truth” is a concept with multiple “faces” or modes of operation. For Wittgenstein, this risks hypostatizing truth as a thing. He would prefer to dissolve that urge: “truth” isn’t an object with different guises, but simply a word whose uses vary across practices. And every particular use, even within a single “practice,” can shift the sense. If meaning is use, then it’s not just different practices (“law,” “science,” “math”) that set the sense of “truth,” but also the fine-grained contexts within those practices.

Sam26

You’re right that to say “truth is a maintenance project of cognition” is itself an epistemic claim. But that doesn’t undermine my point... it reinforces it. The fact that I can’t step outside the framework of justification to make my claim is precisely what I mean when I call truth a “maintenance project.” To describe truth is always to participate in it, never to stand above — DifferentiatingEgg

I’m with you all the way here. I would just add that truth is not a unitary concept but changes its sense according to the context of its use. Human beings are in the business of construing recognizable patterns in the swirl of experience and then drawing from our memory of those patterns to anticipate new events. This is a richer and more fundamental process than what is contained within the thin and derivative notions of propositional truth and justification. We don’t primarily make truth-epistemic claims, we project expectations and wait to see if the way events unfold do it in a way that is more or less inferentially consistent with our anticipations. Events will never duplicate those expectations, so even when our hunches are verified, we must adjust these patterns to accommodate the novel features of the events we recognize. This is not epistemology, it is context and situation-based sense-making.

↪Joshs
I mean, none of this has any relevance to any points I am making. Obviously, to artificially recreate a human brain to acceptable approximation, you need to construct this computational system with the kinds of inputs, kinds of architectures, capabilities, whatever, that a human does. I am not making any arguments based on specific assumptions about specific computing systems, just on what is in principle possible. — Apustimelogist

I will say bluntly that no machine we invent will do what we do, which is to think. As Evan Thompson wrote:

LLMs do not perform any tasks of their own, they perform our tasks. It would be better to say that they do not really do anything at all. Thus, we should not treat LLMs as agents. And since LLMs are not agents, let alone epistemic ones, they are in no position to do or know anything.

The map does not know the way home, and the abacus is not clever at arithmetic. It takes knowledge to devise and use such models, but the models themselves have no knowledge. Not because they are ignorant, but because they are models: that is to say, tools. They do not navi-gate or calculate, and neither do they have destinations to reach or debts to pay. Humans use them for these epistemic pur-poses. LLMs have more in common with the map or abacus than with the people who design and use them as instruments. It is the tool creator and user, not the tool, who has knowledge.

I think what he wrote about LLM’s applies to all of the devices we build. They are not separate thinking systems from us, they are and always will be our appendages, like the nest to the bird or the web to the spider.

There is no indication that in principle we cannot someday model all our own behaviors and reports through computer models. I think even just looking at AI now indicates that there isn't really a conceivable limit on what they can do given enough power and the right inputs, which is what you might expect from something which is Turing complete: i.e. they can compute anything in principle. — Apustimelogist

The results of modeling the brain on today’s computers, using today’s forms of computer logic, are precisely as you describe. And they will colossally miss what philosophers and psychologists are coming to appreciate is the central feature of brains; that they are embodied and enactive. So,no, it won’t be today’s generation of A.I. that can express this understanding, and it has nothing to do with power and inputs. In about 10 to 20 years, we will likely see the emergence of a different kind of A.I. operating according to a different logic, that of complex dynamical systems ( cds).

Ultimately, CDS-based AI chips may blur the line between computation and physical processes, resembling intelligent materials more than traditional silicon. As Stephen Wolfram notes: “The most powerful AI might not be programmed; it might be cultivated, like a garden of interacting dynamical systems.”

When AI chips fully integrate complex dynamical systems (CDS) models, they will likely diverge radically from today’s parallel architectures (e.g., GPUs, TPUs) by embodying principles like self-organization, adaptive topology, and physics-inspired computation. Here’s a speculative breakdown of their potential design and function:

Architectural Shifts: From Fixed to Fluid.

Current A.I. Chips:

Fixed parallel cores (e.g., NVIDIA GPU clusters)
Deterministic von Neumann logic
Digital (binary) operations
Centralized memory (RAM)

Future CDS AI Chips:

Reconfigurable networks of nano-scale nodes that dynamically form/break connections (like neural synapses).
Nonlinear, chaotic circuit exploiting emergent stability (e.g., strange attractors).
Analog/quantum-hybrid systems leveraging continuous dynamics (e.g., oscillatory phases).
Distributed memory where computation and storage merge (like biological systems).

From an external point of view, cognition is private and indirect. From an internal point of view, cognition is public and direct. So Husserl and Descartes can be both semantically correct, provided that we don't mix their postulates and apply them in different contexts. — sime

Husserl’s point is that the external , third person point of view is a derived abstraction constituted within first person subjectivity.

The second is fiction, while the first is an act of mind remembering (while I am sleeping) people I know and whom I interacted with. — javi2541997

I’m confused. Above you say that an act of remembering makes something non-fiction but below you write that remembering the past makes it fiction.

I can assume that a past version of myself is fictional — javi2541997

Even if I agree that strict remembrance of my experienced past is non-fiction, I dont recall ever having a dream that simply recalled a past event. They always tell a new, never before experienced story or adventure. I don’t think we are even capable of strict remembrance in a dream. Their style of thinking is not linear.

They are subjective constructions, abstractions, idealizations which result from our taking our own perspectivally changing experience, comparing it with that of others
— Joshs
How can you compare your experience to that of others if their experience is not available to you? — noAxioms

Their experience is available to me as their experience as seen from my perspective of them, through my interpretation of them. Thus, I don’t have direct access to their thoughts as they think them, only mediate access.

First person questions are not about what is the case, what the objective facts are.

Funny, but 'cogito ergo sum' is pitched as a first person analysis concluding an objective fact. I personally don't buy that conclusion at all, but that's me not being a realist. — noAxioms

In his book Cartesian Meditations, the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl praises Descartes’ method but critiques him for treating the cogito as a private object among other objects in the world, whose property is that it thinks. Husserl argues instead that the cogito is not a private object with the property of thought but exists by always being about something. It is not an objective fact but the subjective condition for the appearance of any world. Descartes asks "What can I know with certainty?" while Husserl asks "How does anything come to be given to consciousness at all?"​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Exactly by following my feelings, I came to the conclusion that you exist. :smile: I know that an image (like a mirror) can prove me wrong or cheat me. — javi2541997

What’s the difference between dreaming about me and being a novelist who writes a story with me as one of the characters? Novelists often say the characters come to life and tell them what they want to do. Do you think a novelist distinguishes between the reality of their dreams and that of their writerly imagination? Does my appearance in your fiction prove my existence?

I assert that your mechanics will fall flat on its face if it amounts to nothing but a ‘third-person’ mechanics.
— Joshs

But everything in your previous post was "third-person mechanics — Apustimelogist

I was trying to point to methods ( hermeneutical, phenomenological, enactivist) which go back and forth between first and third person , between the found and the made, without giving precedence to one over the other, but instead showing their radical inter-dependence.

Even if I was in a dream, my ability to have these thoughts, including interacting with you, proved your existence — javi2541997

Doesnt the strange world of dreams teach us that just as important as the question of whether something exists is how it exists? Have you ever noticed that when you try to make sense of a dream strictly on the basis of remembered perceptual data (the identification of people, things and the actions that are being performed, like flying) the narrative of the dream appears bizarre and incoherent? And yet if asked to make sense of that narrative from the vantage of the emotions and feelings accompanying the perceived images and actions a much more intelligible picture emerges? For instance, one may perform an act, likely floating or flying, which in waking life would trigger feelings of joy, astonishment or terror.

But the emotions accompanying such feats in the dream may tell a very different story. One may feel bored , nonchalant or blasé, suggesting f that the meaning of the act should be sought in the kinds of waking activity that typically evoke such feelings. I suggest that if one wants to know what is really going on in the dream one needs to consult this affective narrative rather than the narrative of concrete perceptions and actions. This includes the identification of people in the dream. Dont be too sure you’re dreaming about so and so just because the dream image looks like them. The feeling accompanying the image may lead you to someone else. And often, what starts out as one person morphs into someone else. Follow the feelings , not the images.

I don't really find this that interesting in the context of the problem of consciousness. It’s almost a triviality of science that different problems, different descriptions utilize different models or explanations. Given that any plurality of explanations need to be mutually self-consistent, at least in principle, this isn't interesting. — Apustimelogist

My point isn’t simply that different accounts of nature can co-exist, it’s that when you say “My impression is that there is nothing really in biology that suggests we couldn't explain our behavior entirely in terms of the mechanics of brains, at least in principle”, I assert that your mechanics will fall flat on its face if it amounts to nothing but a ‘third-person’ mechanics. As to differing accounts being ‘compatible’ , I’m not sure what this means if they are drawing from different frames of interpretation. According to Kuhn, when paradigms change, the accounts they express inhabit slightly different worlds.

And here we have the problem. All what we know via science can be known by any subject, not a particular one. However, 'experience(s)' have a degree of 'privateness' that has no analogy in whatever physical property we can think of.
— boundless

I'm not grasping what you see as a problem for physicalism here.

My neurons are not interconnected with your neurons, so what experience the activity of your neurons results in for you is not something neurally accessible within my brain. Thus privacy. What am I missing? — wonderer1

You’re missing the sleight of hand trick we perform called ‘objectivation’. The starting point of subjective experience is flowingly changing, never identically repeating events, out of which we can notice patterns of similarity, consonances and correlations. The trick of physicalism arises from comparing one person’s contingent and subjective patterns of similarity with many other persons, and then forcing these similarities into conceptual abstractions, like ‘same identical object for all’.

Not does this flatten and ignore the differences of sense of meaning between individual experiences of the ‘same’ object (private experience), but more importantly, it ignores the subtle but continuous changes in sense within the same individual. It is not only that I can never see the identical object you see, but I can never see the identical object from one moment to the next on my own, becuase the concept of identical object is our own invention, not an independent fact of the world. The mathematical underpinnings of physical science depend on the sleight of hand of turning self-similar experience into self-identical objects.

It’s not a bad trick, and allows us to do many useful things, but buried within objective third person concepts like quarks and neutrons and laws of nature are more fundamental, richer processes of experience which are crushed when we pretend that the first person is just a perspectivally private version of the third person vantage. We can keep our third person science, but we must recognize that it is empty of meaning without a grounding in the creative generating process of first person awareness.

I recommend Evan Thompson’s book ‘The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience’

“Science, by design, objectifies the world and excludes the subjectivity of lived experience, but this exclusion means science cannot fully explain consciousness or account for its own foundations.Science depends on conscious subjects (scientists observing, measuring, reasoning), yet its methods treat subjectivity as something to be explained away.

Consciousness is not just another object in the world; it is the background condition that makes any objective inquiry possible.To overcome this blind spot, science needs to integrate first-person experience with third-person methods, rather than reduce or ignore it.”

https://aeon.co/essays/the-blind-spot-of-science-is-the-neglect-of-lived-experience

It seems that people are talking about many different issues.
Q1: What is the subjective experience of red? More to the point, what is something else's subjective experience of red? What is that like?
Q2 How does the experience of red (or any qualia) work? This seems to be a third person question, open to science — noAxioms

Third person questions imply objective answers . Objectivity implies flattening subjective experience so as to produce concepts which are self-identical over time and across individual perspectives. Such temporally and spatially self-identical objects do not have an independent existence out there in the world. They are subjective constructions, abstractions, idealizations which result from our taking our own perspectivally changing experience, comparing it with that of others, and ignoring everything about what each of us experiences form our own unique temporal and spatial vantage that we can’t force into the model of the ‘identical for all’ third person thing or fact. The abstracting activity we call third person objectivity is quite useful, but it is far from our primordial access to the world and how it is given to us.

There can be first person as well as third person science. The first person science doesnt abstract away what is genuine, idiosyncratic and unique to the perceiver in the moment of perceiving, and doesn’t pretend to be a fundamental route of access to what is real.

First person questions are not about what is the case, what the objective facts are. They are about how things show up for one, their modes of givenness. They explain what third person science takes for granted, that the objectivity of objects is constructed as much as discovered.

↪Patterner
To me, they would if they had exactly the same brains as us but just devoid of any "lights on" inside. My impression is that there is nothing really in biology that suggests we couldn't explain our behavior entirely in terms of the mechanics of brains, at least in principle. — Apustimelogist

There is another, perhaps more important, issue at play here. It’s not just a matter of providing an explanation. It’s recognizing that there are a multiplicity of explanations to choose from, differing accounts each with their own strengths and weaknesses. In dealing with the non-living world, we make use of accounts which are quite useful to us in building workable technologies. But these same accounts, when applied to living organisms and parts of organisms, like brains, show their limits.

We may want a reductive explanation of brain activity for certain purposes, like studying individual neurons or clusters of neurons. But if we want a model to describe perceptual-motor processes and their relation to cognitive-affective behaviors, and the relation between individual cognitive-affective processes and intersubjective and ecological interactions, and we need to show the inseparability of these phenomena, including the inseparability of brain, body and environment, and emotion and cognition, we will want an account which does not isolate something we call ‘brain’ from this larger ecology, and then reduce its functioning to a causal ‘mechanics’.

We will need a model which understands consciousness as a kind of functional unification and integration of these inseparable processes. Applying a non- linear complex systems approach can be a good start, but even here we have to be careful not to make this too reductive.

I read more than that into it, since I agree with Chalmers the impossibility of reducing it to the third, and yet I see no problem that's hard. — noAxioms

You see no problem that’s hard because you don’t believe the methods and modes of description (the various models of material causality mentioned so far in this discussion) handed down from the empirical sciences are lacking or insufficient with regard to the explanation of any natural phenomenon, including first person awareness. And I imagine that from your perspective it doesn’t help that Chalmers only claims to tell us what third person accounts can’t do, without offering a satisfying alternative model of causality or motivation we can apply to those natural phenomena ( first person experience) the third-person account cannot account for adequately.

But while Chalmers falls short in this regard, a range of philosophical accounts dating back 150 years to Dilthey’s hermeneutics, do offer concrete alternatives to material causality. Some, like Dilthey and embodied cognitive science, allow methods strictly applicable to the human and psychological sciences to sit alongside methods designed for the physical sciences. Others , such as Gadamer with his more radical hermeneutics, the intentional phenomenologies of Merleau-Ponty , Husserl and Heidegger, the later Wittgenstein and post-structuralism, see the methods of third person science as secondary to and derivative of the more primary accounts they offer.

Consciousness studies is a burgeoning field in philosophy of mind and psychology , and I believe the most promising approaches show that , while one can apply the methods you recommend to the understanding of first person awareness, their predictive and explanatory usefulness is profoundly thin and impoverished in comparison with accounts which believe that third-person accounts are valuable, but they abstract from experience. Third person accounts describe patterns, correlations, or generalities that can be applied across people. However, they cannot capture the full richness or specificity of any individual’s lived experiencing. They must remain accountable to and enrich first-person experiencing, not replace it.

Here's a thing - what does "abduction" mean? Even the SEP article can't say. So now you claim it's just making up an hypothesis. So why not just call it "hypothesising"? Why the new name — Banno

My preferred approaches to philosophy of science find the concept of abduction problematic for a number of reasons. First, abduction is too rationalistic; real science is more anarchic. Second, abduction misses the paradigm-dependence of hypothesis generation. And third, abduction isn’t a universal logic but a practice-specific activity embedded in forms of life. Maybe this is at least somewhat consistent with your objections.

I read Chalmers to be questioning whether what is referenced through the first person can be reduced to the third. The issue concerns what is reduction as much and maybe more than any particular model of consciousness.

Neither side of the divide is presented as a given. The frames of reference are incongruent — Paine

Good point. Chalmers is suspicious of reductionism because he sees the form of description on the basis of which consciousness would be reduced ( empirical causality, eliminative materialism) to be incompatible with the form of causality or motivation applicable to
consciousness. His proposed solution (panpsychism) lets us use empirically causal methods while at the same time honoring the peculiar status of consciousness by embedding consciousness within material things.

The phenomenological approach follows Chalmers in not wanting to reduce consciousness to material causality in eliminative fashion. But it departs from Chalmers in not wanting to maintain a dualism between third person causality and first person awareness. Its solution is to reduce material causality to subjective motivational processes. That is, it sees material causality as a secondary , derived abstraction, not as a method which deserves equal billing with consciousness.

. Maybe someone knows other approaches? — Astorre

There’s repentance. I don’t mean this in a religious sense, but as re-construal. The best way to appreciate anything in our life is to refresh its meaning for us. Simple attention won’t do this. Stare at anything long enough and it disappears. We must always re-construe in order to retain relevance. The world is amenable to an indefinite variety of ways we can make sense of it. When one is feeling bored, stuck in a rut, despondent or riddled with guilt for not appreciating others, the best route to gratitude is to take up audacity , re-invention and experimentation. Treat the self as a work of art in continual state of re-creation. Appreciate what you have through re-enchantment, and re-enchant through transformation.

Here’s a counter to apokrisis‘s treatment of causality from an enactivist perspective. I’m curious as to how it resonates with your reading of Collingwood.

Causality can’t be formalized into a clean dichotomy of constraints vs. degrees of freedom or top-down vs. bottom-up. It isn’t a fixed logical schema but a dynamic interplay that unfolds over time. Organisms live causality as an ongoing, enactive process, not as a formal reciprocal equation. In the enactive framework, context isn’t an add-on or backdrop but constitutive of meaning and action. The salt marsh doesn’t just exist within constraints and freedoms, it enacts its world through sensorimotor coupling, structural coupling, and ecological embeddedness. Context isnt external constraint; it’s part of the organism–environment system.

Rather than positing a timeless schema of causes, we need to see how causality arises within living, embodied processes. These causal relations are open-ended, historical, and enacted, not closed or total. Co-emergence is a better way to think about this rather than via a constraint/freedom dichotomy. It’s not that the atom has freedom and the void constrains it; rather, the atom–void system is a co-defined relation, a process without independent parts.

Basic point being that analysis is a process of critical scrutiny, so the people interested in it generally want to really get to the bottom of things — boethius

Not only that, but when we compare difficult philosophical texts like Heidegger’s Being and Time with work aimed at a more popular audience, the latter will be of necessity be written in a more direct and less ambiguous style. There is pressure from the readership for the author to be polemical and hammer home some clear and likely controversial points. Writers like Dennett, Pinker and Dawkins are anything if not polemical and controversial. I’ve participated in many philosophy discussion groups, and the rule of thumb is that the more the material is aimed at a popular audience, the more likely it is to encourage polarized, oppositional forms of debate.

If you want humility and open-mindedness , you’re more likely to find it in a discussion of Heidegger, where no one is quite sure what he is getting at .

Don’t all of the people you mention share competence, and perhaps even innovation, in common?

How many people known as philosophers today would actually produce original work, do you think?

How would you go about defining what it means to be a philosopher? — Tom Storm

To be a philosopher means thinking philosophically, whether one does that in an exceptional or mediocre way. So what does it take to think philosophically? Ask the average person a profound question about the nature of existence (the nature of time and space, the origin of value and feeling) and they are likely to mention quantum physics and the block universe, quote Einstein or rehash the latest models in evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience. Why do they do this? Probably because the spread of the sciences into territory of questioning previously restricted to philosophical speculation has convinced many that philosophical reflection was used in the past as a poor substitute for ascertaining the hard empirical facts. According to this thinking , now that our sciences are advanced enough to tackle such questions, philosophy should be relegated to a secondary role as ‘’clarifying’ the logical implications of the latest brilliant scientific discoveries.

I was one of those people who believed that philosophy as ‘cutting edge’ knowledge was obsolete due to the success of science and its superior method, until I read Heidegger in my mid 20’s. This led me to a host of other contemporary philosophers whose understanding of the world I believe exceeds the grasp of the most advanced scientific inquiry. My point isn’t that the sciences are not capable of catching up. It is that to think philosophically is to recognize that science is inherently conventional. That is, there are certain starting presuppositions that it takes for granted and therefore does not submit to questioning. It is the role of philosophical inquiry to make explicit this implicit starting point and submit it to questioning.

I wonder what the minimum standard would be for someone to be called a philosopher?
— Tom Storm

Minimum standard, by my lights in the world we live in, is being paid to do it.

But surely you see how inadequate that standard is. It's just the minimum standard in the world we happen to live in (and it's likely the person paid to do it has expertise, especially given how competitive those roles are) — Moliere

And it shows how the world we live in has changed. Up until recently, most notable philosophers wrote outside of academic environments and lived off of other jobs or inheritances. These include
Maimonides
Machiavelli
Montaigne
Descartes
Spinoza
Locke
Leibniz
Rousseau
Hume
Schopenhauer
Kierkegaard
Peirce
Nietzsche

very cool pic

Ok, but doesn't that mean the "other America" you spoke of is 80-85% of the population? Is that what you meant? — frank

I don’t mean that literally 80-85% of the country is hostile to the philosophical and political values that urban America stands for. My point is that the cities give us the closest
thing to a consensus on these values, allowing us to think of them as representing a ‘country within a country’

↪Joshs
80% of the US population is considered urban., but Trump got 49.1% of the popular vote..

I think the community you're referring to is educated urbanites, probably mostly white, so it's the 45% of whites who didn't vote for Trump. The group to watch is Latinos, who are now 20% of the US population, and voted for Trump in larger numbers in 2024 than previously. — frank

I’m focusing on the high population-dense cities themselves, not ‘urban areas’ inclusive of vast stretches of sprawling conservative suburbs. The former are the communities I have in mind. Around 15-20% of Americans live within the city limits of the 50 largest U.S. cities by population.

All of the those places are failing, sorry to say. You are making my point. I live in one of them. — Fire Ologist

I’m curious. Which of the cities I listed do you live in? Do you live within the city limits or in a suburb? If you live within one of those cities I listed, you must be bombarded with viewpoints that are abhorrent to you. No wonder you feel they’re ’failing’.

What are the values unique to those cities that the Dems are fostering and building up but the repubs are resisting? What values and will promoting those values help make those cities flourish? — Fire Ologist

I’ve discussed the philosophical underpinnings of the spectrum of ideas on the left that runs from Hegel through Critical theory and that defines and organizes a range of political and social perspectives of the big cities. These philosophical underpinnings are not your cup of tea, so your criterion for flourishing will likely not be consistent with them. If you dont already, you deserve to live in the America where your philosophical values are shared by the lion’s share of your community. That way, you may be less tempted to engage in shrill competitive rhetoric concerning who is winning and who is losing. Don’t worry about our flourishing. We’ll figure that out in our own way. If our ways are failing you, you need to tend to the flourishing of your own community in your own way.

↪Joshs Very interesting analysis. How do you see this playing out over the next 4-8 years? — Tom Storm

My best guess is a sharp economic downturn and likely recession will ensue, and a collapse of the crypto and A.I. bubbles will hurt many average citizens economically and cause a backlash against the political leadership.

North, south, east coast, west coast, city, farm, black, white, little Italy, china town, rich/poor - the American system survived a massive civil war. We survived the 1960s and the murder if so many politicians, and 2020 elections and a maga insurrection. Nothing really new about a free nation’s people at odds with their own unity — Fire Ologist

This time is different. During the Civil War one crucial issue profoundly divided the north and south, but on so many other cultural issues the electorate was mixed , not segregated by geography. Therenwas much more a rural or city resident of Massachusetts had in common with a resident of Georgia than what divided them. In the 1960’s the country was at war with itself, but a large percentage of the Democratic voters in urban America were socially conservative. Most of those voters have since left the liberal cites for the more conservative South and the far flung suburbs, and joined MAGA. As a result, what had been a mixed electorate for the Democratic party from the 1930’s though the 1960’s , reflecting a wide mix of social values within the big cities , has now become ideologically purified by geography ( population density) to an extent we have never seen before in this country. In the 1960’s the average blue collar resident of Chicago or San Francisco spoke the ‘same language’ as a worker living in Cheyenne Wyoming. That is no longer the case.

Trump’s success is because people in the cities, in the suburbs, on the farms, of every economic class, of all types of sexual preference, in every color, Hispanic, Native American, etc, etc, etc - so many agree. Basic street facts, like who is male, and who is the bully, and who needs help, and who is full of shit all of the time (Crockett) - they can’t be hidden forever. Media is losing and the Dems are losing with them. — Fire Ologist

There you go again with who is winning and who is losing. The media you’re referring to is urban American , the Dems are urban America and I am urban America. You say people in the cities agree? Let’s see what they agree about. This is how urban America feels about Trump; 70-80% in these major cities rejected him in 2024.

1)New York
2)Chicago
3)San Francisco
4)Los Angeles
5)Boston
6)Philadelphia
7)Seattle
8)Minneapolis
9)Milwaukee
10)Washington D.C.
11) Baltimore
12) Portland

That’s an overwhelming expression of solidarity and agreement about a way of life reflecting the values of a country within a country. As an actively participating member of one of these liberal urban communities, what am I losing beside taxpayer support from that other America? I know what I am gaining. I see it as I walk around the neighborhoods. My community has pulled together to affirm its commitments, and protect its values against encroachment from that other America, and to welcome refugees fleeing restrictive policies in red states. My own view of the larger picture is that what started out in the 1960’s as tiny enclaves of hippies and leftist intellectuals in cities has spread over the past 60 years to become the strong majority in urban America and more progressive elements which began with small groups of academics in the 1980’s has furthered the urban shift to the left. I don’t see shrinking numbers over this 60 year time span but the opposite, a steady growth and the emergence of a new kind of city way of life. Trump would not have won if the rest of the country wasn’t becoming aware of this growth in numbers , and becoming alarmed by it. No amount of legislation or political intimidation will slow its continued spread.

At some stage one might grow to recognise oneself as a member of a community, to acknowledge the need in others to also overcome themselves.

And then one might begin to consider ethics. One might become an adult. — Banno

Or one might recognize that the subject is not pre-given; it is produced historically, socially, and psychologically through morality, culture, and power networks. Ethics isnt discovered at adulthood but inscribed through practices of subjectivation from the start.

The truth of the deep leftward bias of all legacy and main stream media (ABC, NBC, CBS, NYT, LA Times, Wash. Post, CNN, all things Hollywood) is the fulcrum behind Trump’s continued success and appeal - since 2016.

Libs refuse to see it. It’s a total blind spot. It’s why dems will continue losing outside of the areas where Al of their sheep flock — Fire Ologist

Why are liberal communities composed of sheep but your community isn’t? Should we judge these communities by who is ‘winning’ and who is ‘losing’ , as if either side is in a position to determine the objective correctness of the other’s social , political, ethical and spiritual views? Perhaps we need instead to respect the qualitatively different ways of life each chooses to organize themselves on the basis of.
We are not one country now, we are different cultures moving further and further apart. Urban America is a country within a country and all efforts now should be focused on creating as much separation between those communities as possible rather than urban America trying to appeal to conservative society. Trump’s success isn’t due to urban America getting anything ‘wrong’, any more than Erdogan’s or Orban’s or Le Pen’s or Nigel Farage’s success is due to urbanites in those countries making some mistake of political calculation.

We simply happen to be living though an era in which the cities around the world have rapidly transformed their way of life ( including Hollywood, the urban media hubs, and academic centers) while the more traditional cultures surrounding them have not had time to catch up. It’s not that they ‘have’ to catch up, or even that they have to see themselves as needing to change in any way. The point is that I thrive in my urban community and support its values , but would wither away in a conservative environment, and will do my upmost to contribute to widening the intellectual gulf between what my community stands for and what MAGA stands for. And I urge MAGA supporters and social conservatives in general to do everything they can to further the direction they believe they need to go in. Obviously this will go most smoothly if both sides eventually give up the idea that one side must be ‘ winning’ and the other ‘losing’.

I want to enjoy my community and also look forward to travelling to the hinterlands from time to time so I can be a tourist taking in their exotic ways, like visiting an Amish village.

I agree that when it comes to claims of knowledge, justification is required. On the other hand I know many things with certainty that require no justification simply because they are directly known―in these cases justification just doesn't enter the picture.
— Janus

And this resembles the "A or ~A" case, where it's difficult to see it in terms of justifications. Still, I think the conclusion we ought to draw from this is that we're not quite sure what a justification is. What sorts of reasons may play a part in justification? (We noted earlier that a "good justification" is very unclear, in many cases.) If you ask me for my justification in believing "I am having thought X right now" and I reply, "I am directly observing this occurrence as we speak," have I offered a justification? Perhaps so; that's one way of understanding what reasons count as justification, though I'd probably also need to say something about the previous reliability of my direct observations. Or we might conclude that "directly observing" and "having" are two ways of saying the same thing, so no actual reason has been offered. Then, if "I am having thought X" needs a justification, we'd have to look elsewhere. — J

In his final piece of writing, On Certainty, Wittgenstein describes how G.E. Moore asserts something quite close to what Janus claims, that we can know things with certainty that require no justification simply because they are directly known―in these cases justification just doesn't enter the picture. Moore uses as an example holding up one’s hand and stating ‘here is my hand’. He believes one can be certain of this without a need for justification. But Wittgenstein disagrees with Moore’s depiction of this form of certainty as a kind of empirical knowledge. He asserts instead that it is a matter of our enmeshment in a “form of life”, a hinge on the basis of which to organize facts rather than the ascertainment of those empirical facts by themselves.

If the idea is that self-refutation and contradiction are avoided because what is meant by terms like: truth, correctness, constraints, etc. is always changing, and so always equivocal, then it doesn't seem that it can be saying anything at all. Every point in the discourse would be guilty of the fallacy of equivocation — Count Timothy von Icarus

You’re trying to run all these concepts through a propositional logic wringer, which, as I said before, presupposes that the terms we are comparing do not alter their sense in the very act of comparison. Without its dependence on the fixity of its terms, logic can’t produce its laws, and you’re clinging to these laws as the ground for your attempt to refute certain philosophical approaches as self-contradictory. If you start from a ground of identiy and then explain difference as emerging from or dependent on identity, then you will always be able to use propositional logic to ‘refute’ philosophies which claim to ground identity in difference.

They acknowledge the necessity of periods of stable cultural norms, but take delight in their deconstruction. One could say that betterment for them is tied to the most accelerative cycling between stability and radical change we can manage.
— Joshs

In virtue of what is this "better?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

Forcing intricately and intimately flowing experience into the artificial straitjacket of reified conceptual schemes takes us out of our intimate engagement with others. This is because the fact that experience is constantly on the move doesn’t mean that we cannot approach it in terms of familiar, recognizable patterns and regularities. But the patterns must be permeable , open to variation without crumbling. The unethical is closely tied to treating morality in terms of laws, essences, facts or real foundations that flatten and thus do violence to the contextually unfolding way that situations present us with ethical issues. The more fluid, open and permeable to change our thinking is, the more we do justice to the real.

it seems there was a time during which life did not exist, just as there was a time during which we each individually did not exist. During that time period, it seems that the Earth did exist. Is it not possible for the Earth to have existed or to have a determinant shape, etc. prior to the advent of life and its schemas? No doubt, the empiricist-analytic view of a "view from nowhere" is flawed, but it doesn't seem to me to follow that, if that view is flawed, then truth and intelligibility are dependent upon man and his practices (or life and its practices).

It does not follow, for instance, that because the view from nowhere is flawed, and because one needs language to say "the Earth was round before life existed on it," and a mind to know this, that Earth could have no shape prior to the "schemas" etc. that allow for this to be known by — Count Timothy von Icarus

Here we can make use of the work of agential realists like Joseph Rouse and Karen Barad, as well as Deleuze. So far I have been talking about the way the world appears to us as a result of how we interact with it, and that the contingently changing nature of this interaction precludes notions of the way things really are independent of our participation in the world ( even the notion of subject -independence is itself dependent on perspective). They argue that , indepdenent of human involvement, things in the world don’t pre-exist their interactions. Just as human culture achieves a relative normative stability without needing to rely on notions of fixedly real things, so the world outside our involvement with it interacts with itself via configurative patterns which produce a relative stability for periods of time which gives it characteristics which we are tempered to interpret in abstractively fixed ways.

Intelligibility is arguably a prerequisite for understanding, not a product of understanding. But even if intelligibility is a product of understanding and will (pragmatic striving), I can think of no reason to think that it is a product of our act of understanding and willing (either individually or collectively) nor a product of the understanding and willing of life on Earth more generally.

A sort of Euthyphro dilemma seems to hold here. Is what is willed (pragmatically striven for) willed because it is good, or is it good because it is what is willed? If it's the former, then what is striven for must already be intelligible as desirable (good) prior to the act of willing. If it's the latter, we have a sort of inchoate voluntarism where the direction of the will (the pragmatic drive) is ultimately arbitrary in that it is grounded in no prior intelligibility, and is itself contingent. A pragmatism that is not oriented towards some end is not so much pragmatism, as a sort of sheer willing that generates its own end. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The ‘will’ doesn’t begin inside and then point outward toward a world; it is neither inside nor outside but in-between the two. We find ourselves willing in that we find ourselves moved, affected, motivated by the way things appear to us. This isn’t a stimulus-response model. We anticipate forward into new experience based on previous experience, and this anticipatory stance sets up constraints on how things emerge as what they are for us. But what emerges as the things we encounter always involves a dimension of surprise and novelty alongside recognizability.
The things we encounter strike us as funny, sad, boring, undesirable. Our own thoughts come to us in this same way. We don’t will to think what we think, we find ourselves already thrown into the thoughts. To want something is to sap we oneself wanting it. The desire arrives to one from an ourside, not from an inside.

So where do good and bad, better and worse come in here? We find ourselves desiring and striving, which simply means that we find ourselves ‘aiming. toward’ the fulfillment of what was anticipated. Emotional cries are crises of meaning and relevance. To anticipate into the next moment and be rewarded with an experience which is unfamiliar and incoherent is a kind of loss of self, and we call this loss of self , this being plunged into the emotional darkness of chaos and confusion, the ‘bad’. We don’t choose the good over the bad so much as find ourselves in situations of relative intelligiblity or incoherence and label the finding after the fact as what we ‘willed’.

Even if beliefs shift, practices that fail to work or coordinate with the world will disappear, while useful practices will persist.
— Tom Storm

What "fails to work" and what is "useful" is defined in terms of current beliefs, desires, and opinions, no? So, if "not anything goes" because only "useful" practices survive, but "useful practices" are just whatever practices just so happen to be affirmed as useful, I am not sure what sort of limit this is supposed to generate. What is (truly) "useful" is itself a function of current beliefs, right?

Not only does this undermine the ability for "usefulness" to function as a sort of constraint on truth, I think it clashes with our intuitions. It seems possible for everyone to be wrong about what is useful. But for it to be possible for everyone to be wrong about what is useful at some time, it cannot be the case that the truth about what is useful is posterior (dependent upon) whatever current practice and belief affirms as useful. There has to be a distinction between reality and appearances/beliefs. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Your point is relevant to certain readings of pragmatism, wherein ‘usefulness’ is measured in terms of conformity between a belief and ‘ how things are’. But this is not how ‘use’ functions for writers like Wittgenstein and Heidegger. They agree with you that we can only know whether a way of thinking is useful, does what we want it to, satisfies our goals, allows for clarity of understanding, corresponds to how things are, because we already bring to the situation a pre-understanding providing the criteria of usefulness. Their interest is in investigating where this pre-understanding comes from and how it changes.

That is, whether things turn out the way we plan, the world is always useful in that both our successes and failures, our validations and invalidations take place against the backdrop of a world which is fundamentally intelligible and familiar to us. They argue that this pre-understanding is not itself a belief that we measure against the way things are. Rather, it is already the way things are. That is to say, it is the overarching totality of relevance within which things can appear to us as correct or incorrect on the basis of particular criteria. It is not a question of a conformity between this overarching schema and some reality outside of it. The schema directly expresses a real world in a way that is as real as it gets, via patterns of pragmatic use.

A metaphysics IS a boundary, setting up criteria for correctness, and more importantly, for intelligiblity.
— Joshs

Yet this is itself a metaphysical position about the nature of intelligibility. If it is affirmed over competing understandings of intelligibility without argument, obviously that would be a sort of question begging. But to merely affirm it "alongside" other understandings without argument would still essentially do the same thing. Just because the position allows contrary positions to be "equally correct" doesn't mean it isn't contradicting them, for the opposing positions might themselves deny that both understandings are "equally correct" (because they deny this understanding of the grounding of intelligibility). Even the Protagorean relativist who asserts that "whatever anyone believes is true (for that person)" ends up making a claim that has implications for truth tout court.

Plus, it would seem to me that this particular metaphysical position should want to assert itself as "more correct" than others. Otherwise, wouldn't it fall victim to the criticism in the Theaetetus that, if it is impossible to be wrong, the sophist (as a profession, not a derogatory term) is the most useless sort of person, since teaching never improves our grasp of the truth — Count Timothy von Icarus

A human, a dog, a snake and a fish all inhabit their own behavioral niches. What if one thinks of these as akin to metaphysical positions? Leaving aside the evolutionary issues of long-term survival of lineages, does it make sense to say that the behavior niche the dog enacts , and the way its world is perceptually salient to it, is more correct than that of the fish? Each has their own functional norms of correctness (the behavioral criteria for the satisfaction of needs), so each species’ norms of correctness are equally adequate expressions of their mode of functioning. And what about the human? We set up cultural niches including sciences and technologies, and political and philosophical organizations. What would it mean to say that these knowledge niches are more correct than that of other species?

We know that our ability to represent stretches of time far into the past and future allows us to use language concepts in ways that other species can’t, but in what way is this better than what animals can do? In what way does this make us ‘higher’ animals? We could claim that we are capable of a complexity of social organization unavailable to other species, but what makes that better in a biological sense? Or we could argue that metaphysical positions can be ordered on the basis of complexity. We could add that a historical trajectory results in a kind of progress in social stability due to improvements in anticipatory understanding or some such. But making this claim would not require that we deem earlier stages of cultural evolution and their accompanying metaphysics as less ‘correct’, merely less advanced in the complexity of the niches they produce, but heading in the right direction. Key to claiming the superiority for one mode of thinking over others is that it include within itself the other modes of thinking in a kind of dialectical totalization ala Hegel

Such an assumption is problematic for writers like Deleuze, Foucault , Derrida and Heidegger. They argue that whatever criteria of progress we use, whether complexity, stability-survival, rationality, moral goodness or conformity to the way things are, such criteria are subject to continual changes in meaning. And yet one can discern an underlying criterion of progress for these writers that appears to maintain its stability of meaning throughout cultural shifts. They acknowledge the necessity of periods of stable cultural norms, but take delight in their deconstruction. One could say that betterment for them is tied to the most accelerative cycling between stability and radical change we can manage. Does this mean they consider their philosophies to be better than those of previous eras based on the criterion of accelerative self-transformation?

In a certain sense yes, but it is not as though they would then claim that the Medieval scholastic period was ‘better’ than the Greek era, the Enlightenment was better than the Scholastic period , the Modern period was even better than the Enlightenment, and postmodernism is better than all previous ways of thinking. Instead, they would argue that each metaphysical era exposes the limitations of what came before it, limitations that could only become apparent within a changed perspective. But the limitations attached to each era are unique to those periods. The ethical task of the postmodernists is defined by their relation to the limitations they expose in the thinking of their time. Every metaphysic holds within itself it’s own dangers, including postmodernism. Foucault wrote:

I would like to do the genealogy of problems, of problematiques. My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism. I think that the ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main danger.