You only see the relative as the unconnected because you oppose it to self-presence, as if nihilist meaninglessness were the only alternative to the thinking of presence-in-itself.

No, I don't think so. I thought you were saying they were unconnected because your response to "people can learn to communicate ideas across cultures and transcend current boundaries" seemed to be negative - that the ideas changing would imply there was no real communication.

But if we're in agreement that there is meaningful communication there, then I don't see how different cultures are a barrier that reason can't transcend, or an area where reason fails to apply — Count Timothy von Icarus

I’m all in favor of reason. But if by reason you mean the consulting of criteria and rules of reasonableness that exist prior to and outside of the actual, contextually unfolding situation in which they are being used, without that context modifying the sense of those criteria and rules, then this is a non-starter for me. As the later Wittgenstein argues, there is nothing in a rule that tells us whether we are following it correctly. In every situation where reason is involved, agreeing on what is the case is always accompanied by a redetermination of what is at stake and at issue in the interchange. That is to say, a paradoxical element of unreason belongs to the very heart of reason.

The truly groundless is not defined by anything else. To hate something else is to stand in a relation to it where you are defined by what you hate. To be merely indifferent to something is still to be defined by something, for its boundaries are the limit of your being and interest. Only an attitude of love, the identification of the self in the other, avoids this limitation, allowing for what is truly unconditioned. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Since when does love have priority over any other affectivity? One can only identify the self in the other if the other is already recognizable in some fashion. What matters to us, what we care about, whose suffering we empathize with, is dependent in the first place on what is intelligible to us from our vantage as nodes within a larger relational matrix (first order morality). We can only intend to recognize and welcome the Other who saves us from chaos; we intend to reject the Other who offers the oppression of incommensurability. Freedom from incoherence implies a sense of liberation, freedom from the order of intelligibility and intimacy a sense of subjection. We always have intended to welcome, sacrifice ourselves for the intelligible Other, and always disliked, `chose against' the incommensurate Other. What is repressive to us is what we cannot establish harmonious relation with. We cannot get beyond this link between the lovable and the recognizable without losing the basis of any ethics, which is the ability to distinguish between, even if without yet defining, what is preferred and what is not.

It is not likely you take any of this seriously. Philosopher generally don't. But blood and guts Nietzsche? I don't think so — Astrophel

Actually, I prefer what Foucault and Deleuze have done with
Nietzsche. They show what can be done with an ethics of contingent, relative becoming.

Yes, there is no outside. The idea is patently absurd, as if, as Rorty put it, the perceptual apparatus were a mirror of nature. But then, it is clear as a bell that the world is there, and it is not a representation at all, but is stand alone there, and by this I simply mean its existence as thereness possesses something that is, as Kierkegaard put it, its own presupposition. When we observe an object, the object becomes what it is in the observation, making it both a transcendental object, as the distance is never bridged, as well as an object of finitude, and this latter is what Heidegger holds — Astrophel

For Heidegger, there is nothing but the outside, in the sense of the always already ahead of itself of temporalizing understanding.

In directing itself toward ... and in grasping something, Da-sein does not first go outside of the inner sphere in which it is initially encap­sulated, but, rather, in its primary kind of being, it is always already "outside" together with some being encountered in the world already discovered. Nor is any inner sphere abandoned when Da-sein dwells
together with a being to be known and determines its character. Rather, even in this "being outside" together with its object, Da-sein is "inside, " correctly understood; that is, it itself exists as the being-in-the-world which knows. Again, the perception of what is known does not take place as a return with one's booty to the "cabinet" of consciousness after one has gone out and grasped it. Rather, in perceiving, preserving, and retaining, the Da-sein that knows remains outside as Da-sein.

Neither is the world ‘stand-alone’ there. The world is the unified totality of relevance relations, possibly ways for Dasein to be. Heidegger also calls world ‘beings as a whole’.

“…in all comportment we become aware of comporting ourselves in each case from out of the 'as a whole', however everyday and restricted this comportment may be…However concerned we are to comport ourselves with respect to various issues and to speak in terms of individual things, we nevertheless already move directly and in advance within a tacit appeal to this 'as a whole‘...We are always called upon by something as a whole. This 'as a whole' is the world.

The world temporalizes itself, which is to say, it continually projects itself anew as a whole. Dasein is continually thrown into a new world. The world worlds.

The projection is...a casting ahead that is the forming of an 'as a whole' into whose realm there is spread out a quite specific dimension of possible actualization. Every projection raises us away into the possible, and in so doing brings us back into the expanded breadth of whatever has been made possible by it. The projection and projecting in themselves raise us away to possibilities of binding, and are binding and expansive in the sense of holding a whole before us within which this or that actual thing can actualize itself as what is actual in something possible that has been projected.

So there is a concept that resolves the problem how to establish a world without concepts?

A good paradox tempts us to find a resolution, but ensures that no solution can be found. This is a good paradox. The paradox is formulated in language. So it is itself included in the problem. So "language in itself" transcends our concept of language, the "world in itself" transcends our concept of the world and the relationship or link between the two will always transcend anything we can articulate in language — Ludwig V

We dont use a concept to establish a world without concepts, we find ourselves thrown into a world ( we ‘are’ a self by continually transcending toward the world) and speak from amidst the beings ( things, concepts, uses) that are actualized from out of that world which projects itself. We can speak that world inauthentically in terms of extant things , symbols and concepts, or we can speak it authentically as a self-transcending happening (which concepts imply but conceal) , an occurrence. Then language is itself the transcending rather than a concept of itself.

Assuming naive realism, then you do in fact see the lamp, not something else in your own seeing. Seeing it, and the fact that it is there and visible, makes it possible to know that you're seeing it. — jkop

Interesting. Phenomenology and poststructuraliam arrive at conclusions quite similar to this, except that they do it without assuming realism at all.

It is phenomenologically absurd to speak of the phenomenon as if it were something behind which there would be something else of which it would be a phenomenon in the sense of the appearance which represents and expresses this something else. A phenomenon is nothing behind which there would be something else. More accurately stated, one cannot ask for something behind the phenomenon at all, since what the phenomenon gives is precisely that something in itself. (Heidegger)

The world does not much care what you believe, and will continue to inflict novelty and surprise on your beliefs. — Banno

That’s right, but because novelty is not a neutral in-itself, the world will inflict novelty within the boundaries of specifically organized discursive structures of intelligibility.

“…absent meaning-objects, reality cannot be called on to substanti­ate our claims independently of our practices of gathering and evaluating evidence. “Correspondence to reality” is merely a way of saying that some­thing is true, a compliment we pay to our best beliefs, as Rorty liked to say, but one that never gets outside our practices.

“Well, if everything speaks for an hypothesis and nothing against it—is it then certainly true? One may designate it as such.—But does it certainly agree with reality, with the facts?—With this question you are already going round in a circle.” (PI)

Nor can mental contents do the trick since practices of knowing trump any internal feelings or ideas.John McDowell captures this idea beautifully:

“now if we are simply and normally immersed in our practices, we do not wonder how their relation to the world would look from outside them, and feel the need for a solid foundation discernible from an external point of view. So we would be protected against the vertigo if we could stop supposing that the relation to reality of some area of our thought and language needs to be contemplated from a standpoint independent of that anchoring in our human life that makes the thoughts what they are for us. . . . This realism chafes at the fallibility and inconclusiveness of all our ways of finding out how things are, and purports to confer a sense on “But is it really so?” in which the question does not call for a maximally careful assessment by our lights, but is asked from a perspective transcending the limitations of our cognitive powers.”

We can appeal to nothing beyond these practices because any such appeal thereby incorporates the evidence into our language-games, thus compromising its desired independence from our practices. For the pos­sibility of making mistakes to operate, we need a way of comparing our beliefs to a reality that is, at least in principle, accessible to comparisons.

“‘But I can still imagine someone making all these connexions, and none of them corresponding with reality. Why shouldn’t I be in a similar case?’ If I imagine such a person I also imagine a reality, a world that surrounds
him; and I imagine him as thinking (and speaking) in contradiction to this world.”(PI)

The sense of wonder created by philosophy is merely the giddy dizziness one gets from being spun around to the point of disorientation; thankfully, it fades as we regain our bearings. (Lee Braver)

But knowledge certainly is not what is sought in all this. It is value. All of these endless ruminations in philosophy end here, in the pursuit of what can be generally called value. Any utterance made by a human dasein (or a fish, cat or cow dasein) has its telos in value, and value is the ONLY, I claim, no reducible phenomenological dimension of the world's presence. The only absolute — Astrophel

Nietzsche certainly thought that the buck stops with value. To be more precise, with a value-positing will to power. So in truth , the irreducible is the endless self-overcoming of value. But I don’t think that’s the kind of value-thinking you have in mind.

It may well be that language and its non- language counterpart, the "existence" of an actuality that "appears," cannot be separated, for they are a unity.

This is a major point of Heidegger, that language and the world are "of a piece." But there is always a "distance" between language and such actualities that cannot eliminated. To understand this is to see something really quite profound. I "know" that my cat's existence is "other" than the language I deploy to think what it — Astrophel

Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the -world determines that language and world are precisely not at a distance from each other. On the contrary, language discloses self and world together, as our always already being thrown into worldly possibilities. Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein make related points. The distance is not between language and the world, it is between our self and our self, due to the fact that, through language, we always come to ourselves from the world.

My cat’s existence is an existence for me, as a function of the relevance of the cat for my ongoing social practices. The discovery of this relevance through language both discloses the meaning of the cat anew and alters my previous sense of meaning of the cat for me. What would it even mean to refer to the cats existence apart from what I want to do with the cat in thinking about its existence?

It isn’t that we are presented with a pre-sorted world where catego­ries kneel for us to affix words to them like Adam naming the animals, but that we are always already in a linguistic world. We cannot sift out pristine reality from our reality, making the distinction empty. (Lee Braver)

Michel Henry's sense of the pure, or the "raw" and fleshy" encounter must stand as its own presupposition, not reducible to anything else. — Astrophel

How would you differentiate his notion of the pure encounter with that of Merleau-Ponty or Husserl? Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh as corporeal intersubjectivity has been incorporated into the reciprocally causal models of embodied, enactivist approaches. Husserl, however, considers causality to be a product of the natural attitude. We have to bracket empirical causality to arrive at its primordial basis in intentional motivation.

. My absolute criterion is not killing kids, if the rest of the world fails to be properly guided by that, is my condemnation and rejection unjustly moralistic, or just? — Lionino

The devil is in the details, no? One can unproblematically posit an absolute of process, an injunction against my acting to insure the loss of something I care about. But as soon as I fill in the content of what it is I can’t abide losing, absolutism gives way to the relativism of interpretation. Is a fetus a kid? Is a murdering bad seed a kid? And what constitutes murder, and bad intent?

If you are utilitarian, there is no such thing as a (correct) absolute, there is only whatever will bring the greatest welfare. Maybe killing a kid to save thousands is good — some primitive societies believed so.
Your post seems to assume utilitarianism — Lionino

The problem with utilitarianism is its need to universalize the concept of pleasure. As Hilary Putnam writes of Dewey’s critique of utilitarianism:

The assumption that people act only on self-interested motives was sometimes defended on the basis of the hedonist psychology of Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, which held that everyone ultimately "really" desires only a subjective psychological quantity (called "pleasure" by Bentham) and that this "quantity" was a purely subjective matter. As John Dewey put it long ago,

"When happiness is conceived of as an aggregate of states of feeling, these are regarded as homogenous in quality, different from one another only in intensity and duration. Their qualitative differences are not intrinsic, but are due to the different objects with which they are associated (as pleasures of hearing, or vision). Hence they disappear when the pleasure is taken by itself as an end."

This disappearance of the qualitative differences is (as far as importance to the agent's "happiness" is concerned), of course, just what makes it possible for the utilitarian to speak of "summing pleasures, "maximizing" them, and so on. But if Dewey's alternative view is right (as I believe), and if

“agreeableness is precisely the agreeableness or congruence of some objective condition with some impulse, habit, or tendency of the agent,"

then

"of course, pure pleasure is a myth. Any pleasure is qualitatively unique, being precisely the harmony of one set of conditions with its appropriate activity. The pleasure of eating is one thing; the pleasure of hearing music, another; the pleasure of an amiable act, another; the pleasure of drunkenness or of anger is still another."

Dewey continues,

"Hence the possibility of absolutely different moral values attaching to pleasures, according to the type or aspect of character which they express. But if the good is only a sum of pleasures, any pleasure, so far as it goes, is as good as any other-the pleasure of malignity as good as the pleasure of kindness, simply as pleasure.”

Just ask how a causal relation produces a knowledge claim. Can't be done, simply because there is nothing in the apodictic principle that an event in the world requires a cause that can deliver an "aboutness" in the mind TO an object — Astrophel

Otoh, a reciprocal , recursive, self-organizing model of causality can do the job that linear causality cannot. Reciprocal causality produces normative, goal-oriented sense-making consisting of anricipatory acting on and modifying a world that in turn feeds back to modify the cognizer, forming a loop of ‘aboutness’.

↪Joshs Also, as the ultimate or absolute "mystery", g/G is neither an explanation nor a justification because attempting to answer such questions as "Why do we exist?" and "What is right or good?" with (a/the) "mystery" only begs those questions. — 180 Proof

:up:

So... if a philosopher arrives at a hypothesis of the Absolute Being of all beings; and derived therefrom, a corresponding morality; a strict deontology, she is no less offensivel than an adherent to a religion who subscribes to an Absolute God and a corresponding morality? It's not strictly the idea of God that is abhorrent, but adherence to any Absolute because of the threat such adherence brings to morality? — ENOAH

There are degrees of abhorrentness, corresponding to the nature of absoluteness being claimed. The absolutism of religious fundamentalism (Evangelical Christian , Haredi Judaism, Muslim, etc) is more intolerant than the absolutism of Hegelian dialectic, or the hidden absolutism of scientistic atheists like Dennett and Dawkins, for whom the validity of empirical truth is grounded in unquestioned presuppositions.

Is it truly the idea of God that is abhorrent, Platonic or otherwise? Or, is it what we have done to that via the corruptible vehicle of so called religion? I.e., the former, an absolute criterion for the true and real; the latter conformist, restrictive and violent in its sanction of blameful moralisms — ENOAH

If you believe in an absolute criterion of the true and the real, and the rest of the world fails to be properly guided by your absolute, you won’t consider your blameful condemnation and rejection of that world to be unjustly moralistic, conformist and restrictive. If, on the other hand, you don’t believe in absolutes, you are in a much better position to avoid moralistic condemnation and rejection of others to begin with.

For me, the best argument against god isn't that there isn't enough evidence, but that regardless of whether or not there is evidence, the very idea of god is abhorrent. This is why I consider self-declared agnostics to be closet theists.
— Joshs

One of the more intriguing responses I've read here in a while.

But is this an argument or more of reaction? Which very idea of god is abhorrent? — Tom Storm

Good question. I have in mind the platonic idea of god as an absolute substance, content, form, quality. A sun around which all objects revolve. An unfalsifiable, unchangeable criterion for the true, the real and the good. This idea is abhorrent to me because it is conformist, restrictive and violent in its sanction of blameful
moralisms.

For me we cannot know about God or prove it. That doesn't mean there is no Possibility of god. So i choose to be an agnostic and i believe that is the most convenient position a philosopher could hold — Abhiram

For me, the best argument against god isn't that there isn't enough evidence, but that regardless of whether or not there is evidence, the very idea of god is abhorrent. This is why I consider self-declared agnostics to be closet theists.

There is no idea of Aristotle’s , or anyone else, that is simply carried through from one historical period to the next in its protected, pristine identity. Ideas are always repurposed and redefined via their transmission through history.

Sure, but they're still the same core ideas being transmitted. If each formulation is sui generis and unconnected to the last, then philosophy is impossible. Perspectivism need not entail relativism — Count Timothy von Icarus

You only see the relative as the unconnected because you oppose it to self-presence, as if nihilist meaninglessness were the only alternative to the thinking of presence-in-itself. What grounds meaning is neither the identical nor the unconnected, neither causality nor chaos, but the motivated, the relevant, the consistent. History, change, negation, difference; none of these can be understood if they are subordinated to a platonism of the absolute, the total, the identical.

. The Doctrine of Transcendentals itself could pass from its embryonic form in the mind of pagan, Greek Aristotle through Islamic thought, to medieval Latin Christianity precisely because it could transcend Greek, Islamic, or Latin terms of discourse. This is reasons transcendence at work. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would argue that the Doctrine of Transcendentals was transmitted up to the current philosophical milieu , as were Plato’s forms , Descartes’ Cogito and Kant’s transcendental subjectivity, along the way having their sense transformed continually. I think if Aristotle were re-animated and brought to the present time, he would disappoint many of his modern followers by siding with the most traditionalistic ethical elements of our culture. His thinking was a bit ahead of his time, and well behind our time. His thinking is separated from ours by all of the philosophies that followed one another in the intervening historical development, each critiquing the previous era’s limitations and pointing to new possibilities. There is no idea of Aristotle’s , or anyone else, that is simply carried through from one historical period to the next in its protected, pristine identity. Ideas are always repurposed and redefined via their transmission through history. Development of ideas is a contingent movement, not a logical one.

Further, people have "their reasons" for their views as they understand them, but there are also metaphysical reasons for these reasons if they are not to be simply "uncaused. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Reasons are caused within an interplay of reciprocal causality and reciprocal interaffecting, in the way the structure and function of an organism is caused by the selective pressures of a reciprocally causal ecological system. The function and aim of reason ( and metaphysics), just as the function of a hand or an eye, is not settled in advance, but arises alongside the emerging phenomenon. This is a non-linear rather than linear notion of causality. The rules are changed by the feedback from their consequences. One cannot attain an alien culture’s reasons without first understanding the worldview within which these reasons are intelligible. In order to understand their worldview, we cannot simply draw from some already established metaphysics, since a metaphysics amounts to a worldview There is no way to align multiple, incommensurable worldviews on the basis of a universal notion of reason grounded in a universal metaphysics. One has to be willing to alter one’s own worldview and metaphysical basis of reason in order to achieve dialogue with another perspective.

… the origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate; that anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it; that everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn, overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former ‘meaning' [Sinn] and ‘purpose' must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated. No matter how perfectly you have understood the usefulness of any physiological organ (or legal institution, social custom, political usage, art form or religious rite), you have not yet thereby grasped how it emerged: uncomfortable and unpleasant as this may sound to more elderly ears,– for people down the ages have believed that the obvious purpose of a thing, its utility, form and shape, are its reason for existence, the eye is made to see, the hand to grasp.

… the whole history of a ‘thing', an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the causes of which need not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes just follow and replace one another at random. The ‘development' of a thing, a tradition, an organ is therefore certainly not its progressus towards a goal, still less is it a logical progressus.(Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals)

I don't think everything that might be labeled "relativism," would fall prey to the problems of misology. Schindler is talking about a particular sort of relativism that denies the ability of reason to make judgements vis-á-vis what is declared relative. It is in this that it becomes absolutizing. Relational explanations, those where perspective is essential, notions of concepts as unfolding historically (e.g. Hegel) might be called "relativistic" in some sense, but they are not blocking off their subject matter from the purview of reason — Count Timothy von Icarus

How would universal reason, or even Rorty’s conversation of mankind, adjudicate the following ‘differends’ (to use Lyotard’s term for the inability of the established terms of discourse to recognize a claim made by the victim)?

… a conception of conversation that retains an aspect of universality is sometimes put forward in postmodern discussions -- namely, the notion of the "conversation of mankind." Of course it does seem odd that Richard Rorty, the pragmatic liberal, whether or not we would assign him the title of postmodern, retrieves this conception of conversation from the politically conservative Michael Oakeshott.

In terms of the conversation of mankind, incommensurability is defined only within the conversation, in the vocabulary of the metadiscourse, and if a group refuses to take up, or is incapable of taking up that vocabulary they are not agreeing to disagree. One can find numerous examples of such groups. The Sinn Fein (the political wing of the IRA) in Northern Ireland had at one time refused to take their seats in the British parliament when elected. They attempted to remain within their own conversation and did not accept the vocabulary of the other official one; an overarching conversation was refused. A group of aborigine coal miners in New Zealand refused to take up the terms of collective bargaining because in their view the vocabulary and legal processes of the industrialists -- which in the West would represent civility (agreeing not to disagree) and participation in conversation -- was immoral. This group, to join in the conversation, would have to adopt a vocabulary and procedure to which they object and find abhorrent. So also, native American tribes who did not have within their vocabulary the conceptions of property, legal ownership, purchase or sale, were not genuine participants in the negotiations which resulted in the white man's ownership of the forests and rivers.

For persons of African-American or Native-American descent who feel that their needs for freedom and dignity do not find adequate expression in the dominant language of formal rights, for women and gays who feel that their needs for self-identity do not find adequate expression in traditional gender roles, and for workers who feel that their needs for justice do not find adequate expression in the contractual language of a wage agreement, refusal to enter into the established discourse may well represent a principled moral stance against oppression and injustice.

The conversation of mankind would be a universal conversation based on a presupposed (meta)consensus -- a contract, expressible in prescriptive terms, an agreement to disagree. In contrast, the universality claimed for the hermeneutical model of conversation involves neither a metaconsensus nor a method of adjudication. This model does not entail a metanarrative. Although it lays claim to universality, it does not claim adjudicative power. It is not prescribed as a solution to problems; it is not that we ought to converse. The claim is rather that we cannot avoid conversing. It is not a matter of agreeing to participate in a particular conversation, but rather a matter of finding ourselves already cast (sometimes as unwilling participants) in one or many conversations which are organized (or disorganized) in paralogical fashion. This means that wherever we find ourselves we are always in a hermeneutical situation, in a conversation, and more precisely, in one conversation among others. This universality has nothing to do with a universal conversation. As Gadamer indicates, the universality of hermeneutics is in no way inconsistent with the fact that a particular conversation contains its own limits within itself, but "fits perfectly well with the factual limitedness of all human experience and with the limits governing our linguistic communication and possibility for expression" (DD 95).

The postmodern idea is not that there is one overarching conversation, but that there is a plurality of conversations, some constituting relative differends in relation to others. It is still possible that fusions can happen between conversations, not in the sense of unifying or reducing different conversations, but in the sense of creating new and different conversations by linking one to another; or again, not in the sense of a fusion of horizons, but in the sense of a creation of new horizons.
(Shaun Gallagher)

At 52:00 he reads a footnote that addresses ↪Joshs objection. — Leontiskos

I am reminded of Richard Rorty’s remark about relativism:

Relativism certainly is self-refuting, but there is a difference between saying that every community is as good as every other and saying that we have to work out from the networks that we are, from the communities with which we presently identify. Postmodernism is no more relativistic than Hilary Putnam’s suggestion that we drop trying for a ‘God’s-eye view’ and realize that ‘We can only hope to produce a more rational conception of rationality or a better conception of morality if we operate from within our tradition.’ The view that every tradition is as rational or as moral as every other could be held only by a god, someone who had no need to inquire or deliberate. Such a being would have escaped from history and conversation into contemplation and metanarrative. To accuse postmodernism of relativism is to try to put a metanarrative in the postmodernist’s mouth. One will do this if one identifies ‘holding a philosophical position’ with having a metanarrative available. If we insist on such a definition of ‘philosophy’, then postmodernism is postphilosophical. But it would be better to change the definition.

I think of Newton, developing calculus to describe physical phenomena. And perhaps some math is created in this fashion today. But by and large it's not an empirical process. Although math is called the Queen of the Sciences, it is not really a science — jgill

You’re saying math is not empirical for roughly the same reason that a novel or poem is not empirical, right?

The main problem with sensorimotor theory would be the fact that with the same input to the sense organs or sensibilities of different individuals, the behavioural and mental eventual output of the each individuals can be vastly different. And also the same behavioural output can be achieved by different sensorimotor inputs. — Corvus

It can’t be vastly different, because individuals are not solipsisms. Embodied and phenomenological interpretations consider the embeddedness of the embodied subject in a world of linguistic cultural practices to be of fundamental importance to the understanding of behavior.

“…intersubjective (social and cultural) factors already have an effect on our perception and understanding of the world, even in the immediacy of our embodied and instrumental copings with the environment.”(Shaun Gallagher)

Sense always co-implies body, and subjectivity belongs to intersubjectivity. Being in the world for Merleau-Ponty is occupying a position within a shared gestalt (the same world for everyone). I am primordially situated in an intersubjective world.

” My friend Paul and I point out to each other certain details of the landscape; and Paul's finger, which is pointing out the church tower, is not a finger-for-me that I think of as orientated towards a church-tower-for-me, it is Paul's finger which itself shows me the tower that Paul sees, just as, conversely, when I make a movement towards some point in the landscape that I can see, I do not imagine that I am producing in Paul, in virtue of some pre-established harmony, inner visions merely analogous to mine: I believe, on the contrary, that my gestures invade Paul's world and guide his gaze. When I think of Paul, I do not think of a flow of private sensations indirectly related to mine through the medium of interposed signs, but of someone who has a living experience of the same world as mine, as well as the same history, and with whom I am in communication through that world and that history.

“ In the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground; my thought and his are inter-woven into a single fabric, my words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by the state of the discussion, and they are inserted into a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator. We have here a dual being, where the other is for me no longer a mere bit of behavior in my transcendental field, nor I in his; we are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity. Our perspectives merge into each other, and we co-exist through a common world. In the present dialogue, I am freed from myself, for the other person's thoughts are certainly his; they are not of my making, though I do grasp them the moment they come into being, or even anticipate them. And indeed, the objection which my interlocutor raises to what I say draws from me thoughts which I had no idea I possessed, so that at the same time that I lend him thoughts, he reciprocates by making me think too. It is only retrospectively, when I have withdrawn from the dialogue and am recalling it that I am able to reintegrate it into my life and make of it an episode in my private history”.
(Phenomenology of Perception, p.471).

Another difficulty of the sensorimotor theory of mind would be, that there are many different factors which affects the state of mind. And it cannot explain most subconscious or unconscious mental events. — Corvus

It explains them differently than a psychoanalytic model of the unconscious.

“From the point of view of a phenomenology of the lived body, the unconscious is not an intrapsychic reality residing in the depths "below consciousness". Rather, it surrounds and permeates conscious life, just as in picture puzzles the figure hidden in the background surrounds the foreground, and just as the lived body conceals itself while functioning. Unconscious fixations are like certain restrictions in a person's space of potentialities produced by an implicit but ever-present past which declines to take part in the continuing progress of life. (Thomas Fuchs)

In the end, I fear that all of us, no matter how well educated in this subject, still need to piss and eat and still need to treat the world as though realism were true, which means avoiding the worst of the cold, trying to dodge cancer and scrounging enough money to live comfortably into old age. — Tom Storm

On the other hand, psychologist George Kelly makes some good points about the dangers of a realistic attitude being taken too far:

…the notion finally struck me that, no matter how close I came to the man or woman who sought my help, I always saw him through my own peculiar spectacles, and
never did he perceive what I was frantically signaling to him, except through his. From this moment I ceased, as I am now convinced every psychotherapist does whether he wants to admit it or not, being a realist. More important, I could now stop representing psychology to clients as packaged reality, warranted genuine and untouched by human minds. Perhaps"realism" is not a good term for what I am talking about. It is obvious, of course, that I am not talking about Platonic realism. Nobody talks about that any more. The realism from which my clients and I are always trying to wriggle loose might possibly be called "materialistic realism." At least it is the hardheaded unimaginative variety nowadays so popular among scientists, businessmen, and neurotics.

What actually jarred me loose was the observation that clients who felt themselves confronted with down-to-earth realities during the course of psychotherapy became much like those who were confronted with downright dogmatic interpretations of either the religious or psychological variety. On the heels of this observation came the notion that dogmatism -the belief that one has the word of truth right from the horse's mouth-and modern realism -the belief that one has the word of truth right from nature's mouth-add up to the same thing. To go even further, I now suspect that neither of these assumptions about the revealed nature of truth is any more useful to scientists than it is to clients.

If one is to avoid dogmatism entirely he needs to alert himself against realism also, for realism, as I have already implied, is a special form of dogmatism and one which is quite as likely to stifle the client's creative efforts. A client who is confronted with what are conceded to be stark realities can be as badly immobilized as one confronted with a thickheaded therapist. Even the presumed realism of his own raw feelings can convince a client that he has reached a dead end. I am not a realist-not any more and I do not believe either the client or the therapist has to lie down and let facts crawl over him. Right here is where the
theoretical viewpoint I call the psychology of personal constructs stakes out its basic philosophical claim.
There is nothing so obvious that its appearance is not altered when it is seen in a different light. This is the faith that sustains the troubled person when he undertakes psychotherapy seriously.

To state this faith as a philosophical premise: Whatever exists can be reconstrued. This is to say that none of today's constructions-which are, of course, our only means of portraying reality is perfect and, as the history as the faith expressed of human thought repeatedly suggests, none is final. Moreover, this is the premise upon which most psychotherapy has to be built, if not in the mind of the therapist, at least in the mind of the client. To be sure, one may go to a therapist with his facts clutched in his hand and asking only what he ought to do with them. But this is merely seeking technical advice, not therapy. Indeed, what else would one seek unless he suspected that the obstacles now shaping up in front of him are not yet cast in the ultimate form of reality? As a matter of fact, I have yet to see a realistic client who sought the help of a therapist in changing his outlook. To the realist, outlook and reality are made of the same inert stuff. On the other hand, a client who has found his therapeutic experience helpful often says, “In many ways things are the same as they were before, but how differently I see them!"

This abandonment of realism may alarm some readers. It may seem like opening the door to wishful thinking, and to most psychologists wishful thinking is a way of coming unhinged. Perhaps this is why so many of them will never admit to having any imagination, at least until after they suppose they have realistically demonstrated that what they secretly imagined was there all the time, waiting to be discovered. But for me to say that whatever exists can be reconstrued is by no manner or means to say that it makes no difference how it is construed. Quite the contrary. It often makes a world of difference. Some reconstructions may open fresh channels for a rich and productive life, Others may offer one no alternative save suicide.

Funny about the crows. Europeans never came up with 0 on their own. :rofl: — Patterner

I’m not planning on swapping my calculator for a chiclid. I dont even know what a chicklid is.

If the dog had the capacity to understand mathematics, and it was our inability to teach it that was the problem, it would not need teaching any more than we did. It would have developed mathematics as we did — Patterner

I agree animals dont learn formal mathematics, but that’s not to say they don’t have mathematical capabilities.

We often think of mathematical ability as being uniquely human, but in fact, scientists have found that many animal species—including lions, chimpanzees, birds, bees, ants, and fish—seem to possess at least a rudimentary counting ability or number sense. Crows can understand the concept of zero. And a study published in April found that both stingrays and cichlids can take this rudimentary "numerosity" to the next level, performing simple addition and subtraction for a small number of objects (in the range of 1 to 5).

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/06/what-the-simple-mathematical-abilities-of-animals-can-tell-us-about-ourselves/

https://www.mathnasium.com/blog/math-isnt-just-for-humans-animals-can-count-too#:~:text=Some%20animals%20are%20better%20at%20counting%20than%20others.&text=In%20the%20late%201980s%2C%20chimpanzees,objects%20on%20a%20computer%20screen.

If the dog had the capacity to understand mathematics, and it was our inability to teach it that was the problem, it would not need teaching any more than we did. It would have developed mathematics as we did — Patterner

I agree animals dont learn formal mathematics, but that’s. it say they don’t have mathematical capabilities.

https://www.mathnasium.com/blog/math-isnt-just-for-humans-animals-can-count-too#:~:text=Some%20animals%20are%20better%20at%20counting%20than%20others.&text=In%20the%20late%201980s%2C%20chimpanzees,objects%20on%20a%20computer%20screen.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/06/what-the-simple-mathematical-abilities-of-animals-can-tell-us-about-ourselves/

In any case, the principle of transcending egoic consciousness is fundamental to many faith traditions — Wayfarer

Varela and Thompson, in their book The Embdied Mind, made their way from empirically demonstrating a groundless self to emphasizing the beneficial ethical implications of the decentering of the Cartesian subject. They assert that a thoroughgoing understanding of the groundlessness of personhood reveals the mutual co-determination of subject and world. This realization can in turn lead, through the use of contemplative practice of mindfulness, to the awareness of universal empathy, compassion and benevolence.

‘In Buddhism, we have a case study showing that when groundlessness is embraced and followed through to its ultimate conclusions, the outcome is an unconditional sense of intrinsic goodness that manifests itself in the world as spontaneous compassion.”(Thompson)

But I never understood how assuming a groundless ego leads to spontaneous compassion and benevolence. The basis of our awareness of a world isn't simply relational co-determinacy, but the experience of motivated, desiring CHANGE in relational co-determinacy. For Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, every moment of return to the thinking of totality conjures a different affect and a slightly different motivated meaning of the whole. Feelings of compassion and benevolence belong to an infinite spectrum of always changing affectivities of positive and negative valence. Phenomenal awareness as transition from one kind of relational unity to another can just as well be malevolent as benevolent. Within the range of kinds of relationality, a particular phenomenal awareness may be a lessening of compassion or a strengthening of it. We can not say it is always benevolent, only that it is always a new sense of the correlational, that it is never without co-determinacy. Becoming is the restless anxiety of desire, striving, motivation, and the ground of all affect and valuation.

We don't educate children the way we train horses, and this is for more or less the reasons you gave. When a 4th grader is taught math, or is taught the golden rule, or is taught to think before they act, or is taught to recognize when they are angry and count to 10, they are being educated in the form you indicated. But in fact it is the parents who are primarily responsible for education in this deeper sense of civilizing the child and teaching them how to be human. — Leontiskos

We shouldn’t train horses the way we train horses either. Now that we understand that other animals are cognitive, emotive creatures that construct their worlds on the basis of goal-oriented norms, we can jettison mechanistic behaviorist ways of thinking about non-human animals, and perhaps also move beyond Aristotle’s animal rationale distinction between homo sapiens and other species. We are beginning to learn that moral thinking does not start with humans. For instance, the sense of justice has been studied in the wild.

In discussing the most basic interactions of non-human animals, Mark Bekoff and Jessica Peirce consider data from the study of animals in the wild and suggest that a basic sense of justice is interwoven with cooperative behavior (including a cluster of behaviors that reflect altruism, reciprocity, honesty, and trust) and empathy (including neighboring phenomena of sympathy, compassion, grief, and consolation). Although it still may be controversial to think that non-human animals engage in practices that can be considered moral or just, clearly some of these aspects of cooperation and empathy are to be found in the earliest intersubjective interactions among humans.

Play involves action and interaction and the ability or possibility of the participants to continue in play. It's defined by a set of interactive affordances. When one animal starts to dominate in playful interaction, closing off the other's affordance space (or eliminating the autonomy of the other), the interaction and the play stops. Self-handicapping (e.g., not biting as hard as the dog can) is a response to the other's vulnerability as the action develops, based on an immediate sense of, or an attunement to what would or would not cause pain rather than on a rule. Role-reversal (where the dominant animal makes itself more vulnerable) creates an immediate affordance for the continuance of play. If in a friendly playful interaction one player gets hurt, becomes uncomfortable, or is pushed beyond her affective limits, this can generate an immediate feeling of distrust for the other. That would constitute a disruption of the friendship, a break in this very basic sense that is prior to measures of fairness, exchange, or retribution. Robert Solomon captures this idea at the right scale: “Justice presumes a personal concern for others. It is first of all a sense, not a rational or social construction, and I want to argue that this sense is, in an important sense, natural.”

What separates civilizing, rationalizing education from indoctrination? Are we not teaching children as we teach horses, with one distinction being that in the case of the horse we assume there is no rational cognition mediating between the stimulus and the reinforcement?
In fact, if conceptions of the good and virtuous life are assumed to be non-relative, we bypass environmental contingencies and reinforcers in favor of innate, a priori givens. We teach the golden rule and how to count to ten when one is angry, not recognizing the contradiction between indoctrinating students with a recipe for blameful anger against violators of such a rule, and teaching techniques for moderating tempers which we train to be fired up in the face of transgressions against the golden rule.

Here is another short video for his talk on "Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality." — Corvus

Here is an argument for why your brain does not ‘hallucinate’ your conscious reality.

…to perceive the world isn’t to hallucinate and get things right. To perceive is to explore the world with your sensing and moving body. Perception creates meaning through sensorimotor exploration. You don’t get a being with a sense of self by taking a hallucinating brain and tacking on some sensory inputs and motor outputs. You get a being with a sense of self by taking a brain with a capacity for imagination—for imaging its past and future—and embedding it within a sensing and moving body. Perception, therefore, isn’t online hallucination; it’s sensorimotor engagement with the world. Dreaming isn’t offline hallucination; it’s spontaneous imagination during sleep. We aren’t dreaming machines but imaginative beings. We don’t hallucinate at the world; we imaginatively perceive it.

Merleau-Ponty maintains that the relation between self and world is not primarily that of subject to object, but rather what he calls, following Heidegger, being-in-the-world. For a bodily subject it is not possible to specify what the subject is in abstraction from the world, nor is it possible to specify what the world is in abstraction from the subject: “The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects”. To belong to the world in this way means that our primary way of relating to things is neither purely sensory and reflexive, nor cognitive or intellectual, but rather bodily and skillful. Merleau-Ponty calls this kind of bodily intentionality “motor intentionality”. His example is grasping or intentionally taking hold of an object. In grasping something we direct ourselves toward it, and thus our action is intentional. But the action does not refer to the thing by representing its objective and determinate features; it refers to it pragmatically in the light of a contextual motor goal effected by one's body.

I highly recommend Thompson’s paper for a more detailed
introduction to this thinking.

https://evanthompsondotme.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/sensorimotor-subjectivity.pdf

Liberalism as we now understand it is the idea that no conception of the good life is to be imposed, and everyone is to be allowed to pursue their own notion of the good life — Leontiskos

Might we say that, particularly for post-Marxist positions, there is a teleologically oriented notion of the good life that is process (dialectical materialism) rather than content-based?

They are similar because how we learn is similar, and because the proximate goals of "reinforcing x behavior," are similar.

I'd argue that they can't be the same thing. When we train animals, a behavior, or lack of it, is the end itself. The Aristotlean distinction between continence and virtue makes no sense with animals. But with people, we want them to want what is good — Frankfurt's second order volitions — and we want to convince them that it is good to act in this way.

The difference is that the person and their excellence, excellence in our eyes and theirs, is an end in itself. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I’m reminded of the reason that positivism, in the form of stimulus-response theory, came to dominate psychology. It was meant to counter the idealist atomisms of armchair psychologists. Only what was observable and measurable counted for the behaviorists. Eventually, after finally circling back to William James, it became clear that behaviorism’s understanding of objectivity relied on hidden metaphysical assumptions. Cognitivism sought to remedy behaviorism’s blind spot for the irreducibly interpretive elements of meaning, but came under fire themselves for being disembodied, and ignoring the body , the social, and the intrinsically normative, goal-oriented nature of human and animal behavior.

But without a conception of the human good, virtue, and freedom, education and training for human beings degenerates into the sort of thing we do for animals — Count Timothy von Icarus

It seems to me the development of psychological theory from logical atomism to behaviorist understanding of human and animal behavior to psychoanalysis and cognitivism , and finally embodied enactivism, has taken the field farther and farther away from non-naturalistic, non-evolution and ecology-based models of the good, the virtuous and the autonomous.

What would be your explanations or arguments on the gaps and the model and modeled? — Corvus

Sensory-motor embodied enactivist approaches to perception and consciousness are based on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception. Evan Thompson explains:

“ Whereas physical structures, such as a soap bubble, obtain equilibrium in relation to actual physical condi-
tions of force and pressure, living systems seek equilibrium, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, “with respect to conditions which are only virtual and which the system itself brings into existence; when the [system] . . . executes a work beyond its proper limits and constitutes a proper milieu for itself.”

“ Thus, Merleau-Ponty says, whereas physical structures can be expressed by a law, living structures have to be comprehended in relation to norms: “each organism, in the presence of a given milieu, has its optimal conditions of activity and its proper manner of realizing equilibrium,”and every living being “modifiesits milieu according to the internal norms of its activity.”

“...autopoiesis (in a broad sense that includes adapativity) is the “self-production of an inside that also specifies an outside to which it is normatively related,” and thus that autopoiesis is best seen as the “dynamic co-emergence of interiority and exteriority.” “the (self) generation of an inside is ontologically prior to the dichotomy in- out. It is the inside that generates the asymmetry and it is in relation to this inside that an outside can be established.”

↪Joshs Do you think Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Husserl are postmodernists???

You think Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is postmodern thought? I beg to differ. I think that what Wittgeinstein says about mathematics there is quite true philosophy of mathematics. — ssu

The Tractatus is not post-modern. But Wittgenstein’s later work, which turns its back on the logical grounding of mathematics put forth in the Tractatus, had a strong influence on many postmodern thinkers, including Rorty and Foucault. Lyotard, who popularized the term postmodern, devoted a chapter of one of his books to the later Wittgenstein. Heidegger was of central importance to postmodern poststructuralists like Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze. Husserl is not generallly considered to be postmodern, but I believe his work on the philosophy of arithmetic and logic contributes ideas that are taken up by postmodern thinkers.

Do you agree with these speakers' points? Why or why not. — Corvus

We have an empirical reductionist (Seth) arguing with two transcendentalists. I prefer the reductionist, but I think there are better ways of addressing the hard problem naturalistically than Seth’s representationalist-computational approach. It still leaves us with an inner vs outer gap of map vs territory, the model vs what is modeled. It is not interactional enough, too focused on correspondence and not enough on enaction, movement and embodiment.

I don't have enough maths knowledge to drill down into this, but no doubt axioms or presuppositions (and their justifications) lie the core of postmodern investigation.
— Tom Storm
I don't think so. I still think that their focus is on the societal aspects of mathematics, starting perhaps with the way it's taught. What they will (unfortunately) refer to is Gödel's incompleteness Theorems, but... basically I get the feeling that the just mention it to say that they are aware of incompleteness results existing. But that's basically it. If they say something more, it's quoted by Alan Sokal in "Fashionable nonsense".
Or if I'm wrong, please quote the text that shows your point. — ssu

Deleuze, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Husserl have a lot to say about the foundations and meaning of mathematical reasoning. For Heidegger mathematical thinking is inauthentic, for Husserl it doesn’t understand its basis in subjective processes of constitution, for Deleuze number is ordinal before it is cardinal, and for the later Wittgenstein it is socially constructed.

In the logic thread I proposed "logos" for the logic-like function of the world. I wonder what a good term would be for "the apparently mathematical in nature?" Quantos? Mathematicularity? Máthēma? Quanticularity — Count Timothy von Icarus

We could always dust off mathesis universalis.

We can bypass the whole reality vs illusion mentality by focusing on the inexhaustible variety of ways our constructions of the real can allow us to do things in the world, and find ways of making those constructions more inclusive and open-ended, rather than reifying one construction as more ‘truly real’ than others.

I don't really know how this works either. Didn't we just reinstate the Cartesian veil? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Our constructions are real. They are of the world. More specifically , they are world-organism interaction, but not in the guise of an interior peering out at an exterior. Constructions are of movements , doings, performances, not passive contemplations of an epistemological nature. To know is to change the world in some fashion and to be affected by the feedback from that change. The cycle of interchanges between our bodies and an environment define what ‘objects’ are on the basis of what we do with them , and how they respond to our doings. There is no veil here since neither pole of the body-world interaction has a meaning or existence part from the interaction, which remakes each pole in every interchange.

Such constructions might well be open ended, and inexhaustible, but they aren't unconstrained. Many — most really — ways of trying to do things run into immediate problems. If you want to patch a tire, there are myriad ways to do it right. Yet, just as certainly there are many more ways to do it wrong (e.g. pouring spaghetti on it, drinking potions, etc.) than ways that will make the tire hold air. These constraints I think, can usefully be thought of as reality, without losing the insights re intersubjectivity. We could take Husserl's conception of the "zig-zag" in perception as the phenomenologically basic case of this. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Let’s look at a how Husserl’s zig-zag works. When Husserl talks about a real spatial object, what he means is an idealization. In the case of fixing the tire, we first have to constitute the real object we call the tire. We do this through a progress of objectivating acts that adumbrate perspectival appearances and synthetically correlate these with input from our other senses modalities as well as kinetic information. The object is an idealization founded on the synthesis of these correlated objectivating intentionalacts. Since the object is constituted on the basis of similarities and correlations with respect to prior intentional syntheses, which themselves are build upon earlier commonalities and likenesses, the ‘real ‘ world
that we constitute, both in terms of what we recognize within it and what goes wrong, what surprises us, what goes missing or breaks down, what turns out to be ‘illusory’, are already prefigured and organized by us around the possibilities of our own bodily performance as zero point of activity. In the zig-zag, when we go back to reflect on the ‘beginning’ of a process of constitution of the real, this beginning is already framed on the basis of the highest level of constitution we have achieved. As Derrida explains,

“…consciousness discovers its path in an indefinite reduction, always already begun, and wherein every adventure is a change of direction and every return to the origin an audacious move toward the horizon.

In sum, the constraints that are placed on the ways in which we are able to constitute the real via objectivating intentional acts arise out of an outside whose alterity is never completely foreign to the nature of the subject’s bodily functioning.

…the denial of order in the Universe tends towards nihilism, in the sense that it denies the possibility of causal connections and any intrinsic meaning. That is what made me think of Nietszche and Heidegger, as it was among their central themes. — Wayfarer

Heidegger’s main target of critique was the subject-object binary that he traces back to Descartes and continues to exert its effect on philosophy through Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche. This binary makes possible the metaphysical basis of modern science and technology. According to the modern scientific notion of the subject-object relation, the subject is seen as a self-reflective consciousness that posits and represents the object before itself. Heidegger considers this self-presencing certainty of the subject to be the basis of modern mathematical thinking. That is, as the certainty of calculation. Only because being is understood via the persistent presence of subject and object can modern science and technology, as well as humanism, be thought. What is real is what is consistently present, and the object’s reality is made possible by its being represented by a self-present subject. A=A because, more fundamentally, the ‘I’ equals itself.

“Thinking becomes I-think; the I-think becomes: I unite originarily, I think unity (in advance). By virtue of the guiding-thread that already dominates, knowing as self-knowing is the utmost identity, i.e., what is an actual being; and as such a being it is at the same time in the possibility for conditioning every other objectness in its manner as knowing…”

Heidegger traces the modern conception of will, value and causality to the presumed self-identity of the subject as that which posits and represents objects to itself (subject-object relation as propositional assertion S is P). For Heidegger the modern notion of subjectivity is nihilistic because the order (mathematical, objective) it attributes to the Universe is based on a presupposition concerning the certainty of the self as persisting presence. To perceive the self , or objects, in terms of Self-identity, self-persistence, present-at-handness is to distort and flatten meaning, to fail to understand , to fall into nihilism. His notion of Being (or Beyng) as fundamental ontology overcomes the idea of being as persisting presence in favor of Being as occurrence, happening. Being is more primordial than concepts like subject, object, consciousness, willing and valuing. We fall into nihilism whoever we take these as fundamental.

In order to feel sandpaper:
The sandpaper must contact our skin.
The contact must register with sensory nerves.
The nervous signal must conduct to our brain.
Our brain must translate the nervous signal to sensation. — hypericin

This strictly one-way input -output model of sensation contrasts with recent approaches. Evan Thompson explains:

“…traditional neuroscience has tried to map brain organization onto a hierarchical, input-output processing model in which the sensory end is taken as the starting point. Perception is described as proceeding through a series of feedforward or bottom-up processing stages, and top-down influences are equated with back-projections or feedback from higher to lower areas. Freeman aptly describes this view as the "passivist-cognitivist view" of the brain.

From an enactive viewpoint, things look rather different. Brain processes are recursive, reentrant, and self-activating, and do not start or stop anywhere. Instead of treating perception as a later stage of sensation and taking the sensory receptors as the starting point for analysis, the enactive approach treats perception and emotion as dependent aspects of intentional action, and takes the brain's self-generated, endogenous activity as the starting point for neurobiological analysis. This activity arises far from the sensors—in the frontal lobes, limbic system, or temporal and associative cortices—and reflects the organism's overall protentional set—its states of expectancy, preparation, affective tone, attention, and so on. These states are necessarily active at the same time as the sensory inflow.

“Whereas a passivist-cognitivist view would describe such states as acting in a top-down manner on sensory processing, from an enactive perspective top down and bottom up are heuristic terms for what in reality is a large-scale network that integrates incoming and endogenous activities on the basis of its own internally established reference points. Hence, from an enactive viewpoint, we need to look to this large-scale dynamic network in order to understand how emotion and intentional action emerge through self-organizing neural activity

There are similar arguments against systems being complex versus simple. But once you start deciding that key ways we cognize the world are illusory, it seems hard to know where to stop — Count Timothy von Icarus

We dont have to assume our cognitions are illusory simply because we recognize the inextricable role of the subject and intersubjective community in the construction of our understanding of nature. This reinstates the Cartesian veil separating appearance from reality, and a correspondence approach to empiricism. We can bypass the whole reality vs illusion mentality by focusing on the inexhaustible variety of ways our constructions of the real can allow us to do things in the world, and find ways of making those constructions more inclusive and open-ended, rather than reifying one construction as more ‘truly real’ than others.

I think there is a deep, unsettled conflict between humanism and naturalism in modern philosophy, and it lies at the heart of the inability to move past the appearance/reality dichotomy.

Humanism wants man as the measure of all things, and proclaims our freedom when it proclaims that ethics, aesthetics, meaning, and even the objects of sense perception are our own invention. And yet naturalism would say these all have a causal history, having come into being through the same step-wise progression of physical state evolution (the logic of the world) that moves planets and dust particles. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Humanism presupposes objective empiricism and vice versa. Both originate in the Christian( which is indebted to the Platonic) notion of an absolutely certain ground for truth. In the wake of Descartes, God was replaced by the human subject , the consciousness of the ego, as the source of absolute certainty. According to then modern scientific , and humanist, notion of the subject-object relation, the subject is seen as a self-reflective consciousness that posits and represents the object before itself.

“Thinking becomes I-think; the I-think becomes: I unite originarily, I think unity (in advance). By virtue of the guiding-thread that already dominates, knowing as self-knowing is the utmost identity, i.e., what is an actual being; and as such a being it is at the same time in the possibility for conditioning every other objectness in its manner as knowing…”( Heidegger)

Heidegger considers this self-presencing certainty of the subject as the basis of modern mathematical thinking. That is, as the certainty of calculation. Only because being is understood via the mathematical self-identity of subject and object can modern science and technology, as well as humanism, be thought. What is real is what is consistently present, and the object’s reality is made possible by its being represented by a self-present subject. A=A because , more fundamentally, the ‘I’ equals itself. Once you deconstruct the self-identical unity of the human subject , you simultaneously pull the rug out from under direct and interdict realism.

I'd argue that the claims of liberals and collectivist identify movements can't be adjudicated because they each have the origin of the good lying not in reason, which can adjudicate, but in the individual or collective's desires. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What is the origin and nature of desire within the human being? It has been suggested, in different ways , that desire is a function of biological drives. Freud’s libidinal energy and Nietzsche’s Will to Power are two examples of biological adaptivist approaches to desire. Deleuze’s desiring machines is one of the most intriguing ways of navigating between the individual and the social, the reasonable and the affective, the human and the natural. To be more precise, his model of desire abandons the distinction between personal and social, reason and emotion, humanity and nature. Desiring machines are what we are made of, but they are pre-personal. Desiring elements are like nodes in a complex system; they never function alone , but always as an ensemble , out of which subjectivity , the self, the ego, is just a bi-product. Desiring machines are at work everywhere , as much in the world of physics as in the living world. Their functioning accounts for the paradoxical operation of reason, its temporary stabilities as well as its penchant for revolutionary transformation.