The colored in world we see around us isn't how the world is, it's how it looks for conscious creatures with visual systems like ours. — Marchesk

Correct. So what better example of a psychological truth could be imagined?

Awareness is not judgement. Being aware of both "this" and "horse" is not judging <this is a horse>, but we do so judge, because we confuse the joint awareness of the two different contents with that of a single object that is both this and a horse. For <this is a horse> means that the identical thing that evokes <this> is evoking <horse>. — Dfpolis

If we think we see a horse and not a dog, that is what we see. So while acts of perception do involve a general categorising conception and some particular sensory image, the two are normally experienced as a single act of interpretation. A point of view is what clicks into place.

So yes, we can dissociate the ideas from the impressions as a further effort of analysis. But the “immediacy of intelligibility” is a result of the perception being a fusion of the bottom-up sensory possibilities and the top-down conceptual constraints. Awareness is the emergent synthesis where the particular impression now stands as an acceptable instance of a general idea.

Psychology is about relational models. And that requires taking points of view. The sense of self is thus what emerges along with a sense of the world. The intelligibility being imposed on the world is the one that has “me” seeing “it” from some particular perspective.

This is easy to see with illusions like the Necker cube. The front can become the back, depending on “where” we are placing ourselves in our sense of visual space. Are we a bit above looking down, or a bit below looking up?

The stimulus remains exactly the same. But we can flip between two general conceptions as our intelligible interpretation of what it is in relation to where we are.

So knowledge - as some kind of direct experience of the available sense data - is always a mediated judgement. The self that is perceiving and taking some viewpoint is part of what is getting constructed, along with the world understood as a realm of intelligible objects.

What makes "The snow is white" true is the snow being white. That's not a justification. — Banno

As usual, the missing words are being white “to us”. Truths are always ultimately psychological facts, not ontic ones, as they require that reality has the further thing of a point of view.

You're making all the world a falsifiable chess game. — csalisbury

So pronouncing the truth becomes something like just asserting identity? — Baden

My approach is semiotic. So as Baden notes, I wouldn't be defending naive realism. The self would be "revealed", as much as its world, by the process of inquiry.

Of course you could then see the self at the centre of my own inquiry as some kind of ideally rational self ... that you don't like ... for reasons of your own. Or of your "own". Ie: whatever ideal self you have in mind as articulating the proper worldview from "your" point of view.

Be that as it may, my response was simply that the right way to go about things is to "pronounce truth" - as that is then inviting falsification head on. It is saying, come have a go.

Problems only arise if claims are made in ways that are vague or otherwise unfalsifiable. So I am saying the philosophical inquiry has to take the form of a falsifiable chess game. Pronouncing truth is not in itself some kind of psychological flaw.

But Baden is right that people have to be wary about the degree to which they are also forming "a self" in coming to some clearly articulated world view.

(But isn't that a good thing - to actually also become some sort of definite self in life?)

So what's going on here? What is happening? Why can't we stop? — csalisbury

Could it be - done right - that it is following the principle that ideas must be stated definitely enough so that they could be found wrong?

The worst thing of all is a mumbling, opaque, vagueness - an assertion which couldn't even be wrong as it does not put forward a clear enough claim. But if a claim is bold, then it makes itself open to the most direct counter-attack. Which is what you want if the aim of the game is intelligible discourse.

What I am thinking is that science might be just a very diverse range of practises with no underlying metaphysical claim to be found or to unite it. — Andrew4Handel

Why not begin by listing all the things science doesn't do then - like reading goat entrails, or accepting personal proclamations of faith, or wasting too much time on untestable speculation?

Do you think that a story about metaphysical naturalism and epistemological empiricism won't emerge, exactly as @aporiap says?

And maybe the concrete uniting feature is that science is generally pragmatic - not so fussed about prescriptive methods as you seem to think it ought to be. There are recognised good habits - well explored in philosophy of science - but also plenty of room for science as a creative art. It is not paradoxical that a method so powerful can also afford to be quite relaxed in many respects. It works so well that it can be sloppy in some regards.

That is why philosophy of science talks of paradigms and the difficulty shifting them. Science often tends to assimilate evidence to existing wisdom rather than being built up of discoveries, paper by paper.

So it is clear to anyone that science is generally committed to metaphysical naturalism, and then has a particular affection for atomism within that. It is also generally united by a method of reasoning that involves the cycle of abductive hypothesis, deductive theorising, and inductive confirmation. To deny this, as you do, is just unreasonable.

I think it is too restrictive to try and reduce it all to physics or the physical or empiricism and neglect the role of the imagination, cognition,chance, invention, intuition, desire, bias, political forces, commercialism and so on. — Andrew4Handel

But science is also pragmatic and so doesn't believe that it needs to stick to some rigid approach. It is pretty flexible within the general limits that define it. There is room enough inside for quite a variety of ways of attempting to achieve progress.

I take it from this that you have not read De Anima iii. — Dfpolis

As if there were one reading of it. :grin:

You know that there are many contrasting readings on what was meant by the intellect and how it was embodied.

Descartes published his Meditations on First Philosophy in 1641 and died in 1650. He was part of the background out of which the Enlightenment developed. — Dfpolis

Oh please. As if Galileo or Francis Bacon did not yet exist.

And I take it from this that you have not read what i wrote in my last post. — Dfpolis

Is this going to be your standard response? Anyone who dares to disagree with you must be merely failed scholars.

You do realize that thoughts are not the same kind of signs as natural and artificial languages? — Dfpolis

But are thoughts things or processes? Are they the syntactical symbols, the mere marks, or the semantic acts of interpretation?

So yes, semiotics is about recognising there is a difference between the signs - as marks - and their interpretance. If you want to call the semantic part of the story "thoughts", that would be reasonable.

Or maybe you also want to say that thoughts can take mental images as their signs. And that would also be reasonable to me in the light of my position being that all sense data are signs in a syntactic sense. At some level, we find neurons firing in a fashion that physically marks out the state of a logically organised circuit. Some yes/no question is being answered about the "state of the world".

Having read De Anima a number of times, i fail to see any evidence of this. Would you care to back this up with specific texts that support your point? — Dfpolis

I made my argument. There is a quite adequate naturalistic explanation of "human intellect". And it is no surprise that Aristotle is remembered as the empirical antidote to Plato's rationalism - a proto-pragmatist - even if that is of course a rough caricature of the story. You can choose to ignore it if you can't muster any telling counterargument.

So, I have chosen to define "knowing" to refer to the process Aristotle described in De Anima iii -- a usage with a long tradition of philosophical usage. To wit, to know is to actualize present intelligibility. It is thus an activity of intellect -- of our capacity for awareness of information. — Dfpolis

If that is how you conceive of knowledge, it does not exist. Our actual system of episteme and doxa is always limited -- always open to shocking surprise. Our ability to predict, while real, is limited and uncertain. Failing to see this is a very dangerous form of hubris. — Dfpolis

So is the real debate about the accuracy of Aristotle's epistemology or the unreasonableness of Descartes's?

I think Aristotle's approach - shorn of scholastic/divine interpretations - boils down quite nicely to a pragmatic and semiotic story. And I certainly don't support Descartes's mentalistic dualism. I just see that he has a place in history as a particular reaction to the simplistic empiricism that characterised the dawning Enlightenment.

It is not me that would drive a wedge between sense data and rational argument, suggesting that knowledge rests on either the one or the other. My view is that theories and acts of measurement go together as an active and productive habit - an established system of sign. So the kind of doubt about sense data, and even habits of conception, that Descartes was saying were ultimately doubtable, well, in practice, we have no good reason to doubt them. At least until they start to make enough bad predictions.

A Peircean epistemology stresses that the very nature of habits of conception is that they are "well developed" - the best we can do so far. So Descartes in his chamber could "conceivably" be a Boltzmann brain, making all his practical knowledge some random illusion. But then pragmaticism is about accepting that absolute knowledge is never going to be the case, then moving on. The focus of pragmatism is about what constitutes "well developed" habits of belief or intellect. How closely can we approach some ideal of "absolute knowledge", or "objective totality", or whatever general epistemic goal we have a reasonable freedom to set ourselves.

So Aristotle offered a fairly systematic and complex view of epistemology. So does Peirce. And Descartes pops up as one of those epistemology 101 guys, along with Hume, Berkeley, etc, who questioned the empiricist tide of their times in some nicely simplistic fashion. They dramatised the "other" that looked to be subsumed in the contemporary discussion. But that kind of antithesis has to find its resolution in a triadic synthesis, not simply left as a disjointed dualism.

So sure. Take a pop at Descartes. Could he actually doubt "everything" in a reasonable fashion? Or was he simply illustrating the Peircean point. Knowledge develops by beginning from some "leap of faith" - a willingness to take one hypothesis as a plausible truth and then judge that based on its "real world" consequences. The metaphysical starting point then becomes believing there really is a world out there that impinges on us in such a way that we can be its pragmatic modellers.

I would suggest that underlying this crisis in faith about our knowledge is the cultural shift from a theological perspective to a humanistic worldview. The Scholastics were quite content to acknowledge that human beings are finite creatures, with limited intellects. They did not think that we should know anything exhaustively, as God knows it. Rather, we know only what sense reveals to us. Still, we know what sense reveals to us. — Dfpolis

I don't buy that at all. Pragmatism doesn't just acknowledge our finitude, it goes further in saying we - as "aware selves" - are constructed via that very process. What gets constructed are habits of belief that are models of selves in worlds. So there is no soul that pre-exists the modelling relation. That kind of personalised psychological point of view is what emerges in forming notions of "a world out there".

So we switch to not even expecting the phenomenal to have access to the noumenal. The phenomenal is the system of sign, the Umwelt, which is producing the "self" along with its "world".

In this light, knowledge is all about the development of those kinds of regulatory habits. It is not about subjective, nor objective, truth. It is about the production of a subjectivity in contrast to an objectivity - a modelling relation which embodies a separation of "self" and "world". And that separation is what a system of sign mediates. The outside physical world becomes symbolised in terms of internal goals and desires.

So, contra simplistic empiricism, all sense data is simply acts of measurement. A self-interested transformation of material energy into self-interestedly meaningful data has already happened as soon as sensations have "entered experience".

So what sense reveals to us isn't finite because it is somehow partial, or lacking in omniscience. It is finite in the sense of already reflecting some useful structure of selfhood. It is the world as it could make sense to the habits of interpretance that have developed to produce some focal "us".

Your scheme seems basically Cartesian in its dualism of mind and world. You accept that there is this stuff called "mind". And God has the all-sensing version. We have a limited embodied point of view. Animals lack something essential - the intellect or reasoning soul - and so have a very dull and extremely embodied perceptual experience.

But my position is quite different from that. I would take the naturalistic view that we are talking of different grades of semiosis - principally the evolutionary advances of genes, neurons, words and numbers.

So the Aristotelian intellect is the product of evolution reaching the level of semiotic modelling which we would recognise as discursive and rational. That is, it is semiosis mediated by words, then numbers.

And this socially constructed understanding of human evolution does map comfortably to Aristotle's notion of the rationalising intellect as something extra even to the sensing soul. It is just that rather than a cut-down Godhood, it is about the kind of "self" that a new level of "world making" will produce.

Humans - as discursive selves - are the product of sociocultural systems. It all started with symbolic language that could encode social ways of thinking. There could be an institutional memory, and hence the rise of social institutions and their socialised participants. There emerged a higher state of being or mind - the cultural-linguistic one. But it was a purely natural development, not any kind of divine shift.

And then - the Greek flowering - we had the further development of a logical discursive self. Mathematical-strength discourse paved the way for mathematical-strength social institutions and mathematical-strength selfhood.

In some sense, this was a depersonalisation or objectification of viewpoint. As animals selves, we are highly embodied in our own immediate biological concerns. As cultural selves, we start to become disembodied in our point of view to the degree that we take on some higher level institutional view of how we ought to behave, what we ought to think.

And then now we have the possibility of a logical or rational "self" in a logical or rational "world". Again, no mystery. Just the kicking of semiosis up another level of abstraction or objectivity. But - as philosophy makes clear enough - trying to live as a self of that world is a little dicey.

In human history, the turn to institutional rationalism was a powerful next step. We could both mechanise society and bring nature much more under our technological control. But the new "self" that this new "world" eventually creates stands in question.

Anyway, getting back to Aristotle's intellect, the naturalist view is that this isn't talking about another step towards omniscient godhood and true knowledge. It is instead the direct continuation of a natural trend - the evolution of semiosis. And the reason Aristotle would have seen the discursive intellect as somehow coming from somewhere beyond the embodied and sensing animal soul is that its form indeed does come from the "beyond" that is human cultural development, with the "self" and the "world" that emerges there.

What we are interested in as humans is to know being as it reveals itself to us. To the extent that we can "model" it with a system of comprehensible signs, we make it easier to respond to. Still, to the extent that we confuse our models with reality, to the extent that we think our "reduced" world is the real world, we are guilty of Whiteheads Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. The real world is not our model and it is always ready to hit us with a shocking surprise to prove it isn't. — Dfpolis

Yeah. But what I'm saying goes beyond that. I am stressing that the system of signs is Janus-like in that it encodes both "the real world" and "the real us". So experience is a reduction to a model that results in the twin emergence of some crystalised sense of "out there" vs "in here". And the fallacy of misplaced concreteness would be to think that this constructed selfhood is any more real than this constructed world.

Now this seems to return us to an argument that only the noumenal is the real, the phenomenal is some kind of generalised illusion. There is the hard reality that is being modelled, and then this afterthought, the modeller, whose very actions of modelling are constructing "himself".

And this could be the reductionist understanding indeed. There is something true about it, as naturalism would lead you to argue.

But here is where I would personally embrace the more speculative metaphysical turn that is pan-semiosis. This is where we go beyond the naturalistic explanation of life and mind as modelling systems and begin to understand all physical reality as a self-organising evolution of an intelligible sign system.

Check out current physics - with its information theoretic turn in particular - and pan-semiosis seems the case. The "reality" of information has become a standard "material fact". So as speculative metaphysics, it ain't so whacky. Science has already gone there now.

But regardless, my main point here is that what Aristotle meant by the "intellect" maps very nicely to what we would understand about the social evolution of the human mind. And it has nothing to do with any approach towards a transcendent and absolute state of knowledge. It arises directly as a continuation of pragmatic semiosis. There was a jump to a new level of self-making and world-making with the invention of words and then numbers. Codes create memories and memories create institutions. Organismic behaviour could rise up another level of self-organisation - the ones we call social culture and then science and philosophy.

Thanks. :up:

In other words while he continued to know that he was in his chamber, he chose not to believe it. — Dfpolis

Surely it's the other way around. He believed he was in his chamber. And what he felt he knew - by rational doubt - was that was just in fact a belief and no more.

So simple empiricism - the evidence of the senses - has a problem when it comes to being "knowledge". It is quite plausible that any sensory evidence is some kind of dream or illusion. Psychology already reveals that. And logically, it is not impossible that an evil demon insures this is the general case.

He extended this to even his mathematical imaginings. It might be the case he believes a square to have four sides - as he can picture a square in his head and count them. But that might also be a continuation of a deception.

To follow this line of thought to its natural end, he had to further suppose the evil demon would never let up. The fact that life couldn't operate unless he allowed himself to fall back into old habits - like just accepting his chamber was actually there and getting on with daily life - was still just sensory evidence and so still doubtable for this reason.

Rather, it involved a willing suspension of belief, — Dfpolis

Explicitly the opposite. Descartes had to posit a relentless evil demon as the reason why it was logically possible he could be deceived, despite his wishes otherwise.

So, if knowing is not a species of belief in this view, what is it? It is what Aristotle described in De Anima iii -- the actualization of intelligibility -- or, in more phenomenological terms, the awareness of present being. — Dfpolis

Well "the awareness of present being" is a hopelessly ambiguous term here.

The correct answer in my view is the Pragmatic/Semiotic position taken by scientific reasoning. Descartes was essentially right. But that then means knowledge becomes founded on pragmatic belief. We have to take a chance, make a guess, form a hypothesis that is our belief. Then we see how operating in that light fares. We find out how false it is in practice. Truth becomes whatever stands the test of acting in the world as we feel we understand it to be.

This is good psychology. It is how brains function. Minds are pragmatic models of the world - a system of signs or an Unwelt, and not some kind of veridical direct representation as is usually naively presumed.

So Descartes problematised knowledge, highlighting that it couldn't in fact rise above belief.

Then eventually the modern scientific epistemology emerged. With semiosis, we can realise that knowing isn't even about having a true belief, but about having a pragmatic one. The whole question of whether we can "see things as they actually are" becomes the charade. What we are in fact interested in - as modellers - is to reduce "the world" to an easily understood system of signs.

The view we are constructing - biologically and socially - is not of the "world out there", but of "the world with us acting in it". And that is a big step on from the simplistic representationalism that Descartes helped problematise.

So knowledge becomes about certainty over our possible courses of action. We are judging our ability to act in "the world" in a way that conforms to our long-run expectations.

Definitions are simply guides, but use tells us much more. — Sam26

Hah. And how do metaphysicians, logicians, mathematicians and physicists use the word?

But anyway, I would highlight the metaphysics built into your ordinary language examples - the way they rely on a simple classically-imagined counterfactuality ... a world composed of things. Some thing either exists as a propositional fact, or it doesn't.

So nothing is just understood as "not one thing" - its etymological derivation.

Say not one thing.
I did not one thing.
There is not one thing there.
Your book said not one thing.
Not one thing is easy.
I have not one thing.
I admit not one thing.

This is a very restrictive understanding of "nothingness". And to the degree that one lacks the logical resources to challenge its dependence on simple predication - a calculus of particulars - one really can't hope to rise above an ordinary language confusion about what could be usefully said.

IOW "it" could be (is the possibility of being) anything — gurugeorge

but that still leaves a generalized possibility. — gurugeorge

I am agreeing that pure indeterminate potential - the possibility of anything - is a form of nothingness. But what I am arguing is that nothingness comes in two complementary forms. So confusion arises in trying to collapse the two into the one. There is a higher level of metaphysical insight in seeing how there is a dichotomy at work here.

And it is recognised in Peircean logic.

There would be nothingness understood as absolute generality - that to which the law of the excluded middle does not apply. And then nothingness understood as absolute vagueness - that to which the principle of non-contradiction fails to apply.

So somethingness is the middle ground state where the law of identity does apply. Somethingness is the particular, the definite, the individuated. And hence the PNC and the LEM do apply to somethingness.

But the LEM does not apply to the purely general. The general is empty of difference. It is the nothingness of a sameness. So that is one extreme way to arrive at a state of nothing.

Then the PNC defines the nothing that is the vagueness of the indeterminate. It is neither the case, nor not the case, that something exists - exists even in the sense of a definite possibility.

You have the further dichotomy of the possible and the actual that rather confuses this discussion. I would point out that all definite possibilities are so because there is some definite context that makes that the case. Some general state of constraint must be in place such that a possibility has an actual form. So while a possibility is not yet actual, it could become the case because the circumstances are already actual. It exists, or is an individuated particular, in that sense.

So there are further subtleties at work here. A classical notion of possibility relies on the definiteness of a context. And we know that a quantum approach to possibilities sees that kind of classical counterfactuality breaking down in a “spooky” fashion. QM is about real indeterminacy. Real vagueness.

So to talk about nothingness, we have to get way beyond a classical conceptual framework which talks simply about empty space - gaps that might be filled. That kind of talk is already imagining a world of crisply individuated particulars ... and the counterfactuality which then parasitically becomes their imagined absence.

That classical conception is fine as far as it goes. But to get at the more absolute version, logic itself points to the answer. If individuated definite somethingness is that to which the three laws of thought apply, then what is less than that, or beyond that, is that to which the laws don’t apply. Which is the absolutely vague or the absolutely general.

So yes. The usual opposite to the idea of a metaphysical void is talk of a metaphysical plenum. And this everythingness is both the “other” of nothingness and also as good as a great big nothing itself in lacking any proper differentiation. There is a reason why metaphysics began with the idea of an Apeiron or unbounded potential, a chaos of possibility. A lack of coheherent differentiation makes a good starting point for a creation story.

But talk of possibility - to the degree it is still talk of some actual state of counterfactuality - is still dealing with nothingness at a classically particular level. It encompasses neither the vague nor the general in its attempted conceptualisation.

'Nothing' is defined. — unic0rnio

Well, weren't you trying to define it as even the absence of a definition? That inclusion of an epistemic criteria already gets you into the problem that "nothingness" thus becomes a point of view. The view from "somethingness".

And I simply say that one ought to go with that. It becomes an issue of what we can say about points of view themselves. You have to work within that framework, not pretend to stand outside it. This means to define nothing, you must define it in opposition to its proper "other". You have to work with the internalist perspective you are given ... as you can't escape it.

First time I'm hearing of it and from what you've explained I agree with it fully. — unic0rnio

So, as I was saying...

...The Kyoto School might even be thought of as recovering a suggestion from one of the first Presocratic philosophers, Anaximander: namely, to think finite beings as determinations, or delimitations, of “the indefinite” or “the unlimited” (to apeiron)...

Nothing is the absence of anything, even a definition. Therefore, for a true nothing to exist, every possibility must exist at every time but never any one at any particular time. These circumstances would prevent the nothingness from being defined and it would remain nothing. — unic0rnio

I would suggest you are mixing up two alternatives that together give the more complete ontic view.

So nothingness can be defined as the definite and actual lack of anything. A true state of nothingness lacks possibility as all possibilities are what have been removed. It is an emptiness. And it ought to be somehow beyond any particular kind of spatiotemporal container. An empty box still leaves the problem of their being a box.

Now if that is our best image of true nothingness - the absence even of possibility - then what is the opposite of that. It would be a state of everythingness. If every possibility is being freely expressed, all at once, no matter if the possibilities might seem to contradict, then that is also a kind of perfect nullity as nothing in particular has any clear existence. Even spacetime might be regarded as having an infinity of directions rather than just three spatial dimensions bound to a thermal direction of action. So it would be just a mass of fluctuations going off in orthogonal, disconnected, directions with no coherence. A white noise of possibility with no concrete actuality. A vagueness or Apeiron.

So a definition of nothingness doesn't really make sense by itself. We are only really standing in our state of definite somethingness and noting that we can create the kinds of emptiness that are definite existence drained of all further possibility. A container without contents.

Then we can flip that over to imagine an opposite bound to a state of definite somethingness. That now becomes an absolute everythingness that is like a contents without a container. There is every unstable possibility, and yet no stable actuality.

Believe it or not, this is progress. Metaphysical furniture understood in terms of a mutual definition means we at least can be sure that where we are at lies somewhere inbetween the two extremes we have just identified. Metaphysical work can begin.

So on the one hand, our condition of observed somethingness is bounded by a state of "pure empty container". At the other extreme, it is bounded by the opposite condition of a state of "pure unbounded content". We exist measurably between two limit states. And that ought to map to the real world in some fundamental way.

One way it does is to standard Big Bang~Heat Death cosmology. The Big Bang, on many accounts, started in a state of quantum flux - a pre space and time roil of "quantum foam". So pure unbound content.

Then the universe is heading for the opposite of a Heat Death. It will expand and cool to become as empty of energy density as possible. So it will be a container without contents. In some sense, it will be a generalise spatiotemporal container. But now it will have only the minimal quantum sizzle of zero degree radiation. A virtual stuff in fact. Time and space will lose any meaning as expansion will have ended, energetic interactions cease to happen, in any real sense.

So the question is not "what is nothingness?". It is what does our attempt to conceive of nothingness then direct our attention towards. What is its "other" that we might have been missing. Having found the two possible extremes that bound what we understand as the actual somethingness of physical existence, then a larger evolutionary story can slot into place where the Cosmos is the transformation of the one into the other in some useful and measurable sense.

I am merely saying that phenomenologically speaking, from the perspective of the ordinary unreflective individual who would never automatically, and without considerable education, begin to interpret experience in terms of signs, affect is basic. — Janus

Then all you are saying is that people brought up in contemporary western culture would learn to say these kinds of things as that reflects folk epistemology. It is hardly fundamental.

On a different analytic perspectives we could say that semiosis is fundamental, or we could say that semiosis and experience are co-arising, — Janus

Well I am arguing that ontologising experience as a semiotic process is the fundamental epistemic move. And this stands in contrast to ontologising it as a substance. So I am taking a hylomorphic and semiotic position on the question.

If you too are rejecting a substantive sum in regard to experience, you would need to communicate that in your choice of words, the direction of your arguments.

As it stands, I haven’t seen that. You still want to make experience - affective experience - basic. And then say at worst it is a chicken and egg situation.

(The noumenal would be more properly what is real but not revealed to us, and hence kind of irrelevant to this discussion). — Janus

Huh. Internalism makes no epistemic sense without the assumption that there could be the external as its other. So given this is about the foundations of epistemology now....

But the point is that they are united by a common form of experience which gives rise to the possibility of a common system of signs. — Janus

I was saying it is the other way round. Otherwise this ontologises experience as substantial being.

t is the affective aspect of experience that is really determinative; — Janus

And what is that founded on except some process of neural semiosis? We have our evolutionary biology in common. We grow up in the same physical world. So sure, it may ban aspect of neurocognition. But once we are talking about affect as a rational semiotic process, it is the mechanism of the sign relation we are making ontically basic.

You can’t have your cake and eat it. If you want to make experienced affect basic, then you are talking a very different story. The usual one of substantial being and not semiotic process. So you have to decide which horse you back.

What you say is true of 'a linguistic self", but there is a deeper pre-linguistic sense of self and other, upon which the linguistic self and other is parasitic, and without which it would be impossible, and that is what I am referring to. — Janus

Sure. I’ve said that a thousand times. The vertebrate brain is based on the forward modelling that makes a self-world distinction basic. We have know it is our head that turns and not the world that spins. But the animal sense of self is not an introspective one. It lacks that social structure.

It's not my favored conclusion, but my favored inclusion. You, unfortunately, have your diametrically opposed favored exclusion; which leaves the fullness of your account severely wanting. Art is (or at least can be) much more than what you say, but for you to see that you would need to experience that 'much more'. Hopefully one day you will. — Janus

If you can’t deal with reasonable arguments then best you don’t reply.

So, I'm saying that the shared experience of a common world is fundamental, — Janus

You mean "world", or unwelt? And so the noumenal - analytically - falls outside that phenomenology? It is the division that is fundamental, even if the division ain't usually experienced?

And also, it can only be fundamental in the sense of being fundamental to a particular level of semiosis, a particular community united by a common system of sign?

On the basis of this I reject the idea that the self and the world are socially constructed fictions, — Janus

Well, the self certainly is. A linguistic community is fundamental to the production of a linguistic self. And some kind of semiotic community is the shaper of any kind of selfhood.

These are in fact the consequences of your own first move - the one where you say the shared is what is fundamental. The self must emerge from that, if you are correct.

I of course make it easier by saying that co-emergent is in fact what is fundamental. It all begins with a symmetry-breaking or division. However you are taking the substantialist view that existence begins with something being already definite. You are calling that "experience" at the moment.

There must also be something fundamental to human experience which is wordless and cannot be captured in terms of signs at all. — Janus

Sure. But your problem is that we become human through language and its narrative framing. That is how we can even get to a position to wonder what "wordless experience" would be like. By which time it is too late. And it is only going to be make worse once you start using poetical social constructs about oceanic feelings, or whatever else you have picked up in your cultural wanderings and drugged states.

Are you wanting to ask a kind of "chicken and egg" question? Do signs constitute experience in a kind of 'atomic' sense? Or does the holistic sign relation constitute experience? If anything I would have to say the latter, and that the evolution of the sign relation just is the evolution of experience. neither is prior to the other, in fact they are coterminous; the sign relation just is experience; although looked in the abstract as distinctly different things, they are each impossible without the other. — Janus

Now you are talking of co-arising like me. There are atomistic and holistic aspects to it. And they complement each other because one constructs and the other constrains.

But you are still trying to ontologise experience as a substance of some kind. It is the thing that evolves.

My position is semiotic. Experience is what it is like to be modelling the world in the fashion a brain does. It doesn't need further explanation. We can just ask how could it not feel like something to be in that kind of modelling relation?

So the focus of the explanation is the "how" of the modelling relation itself. And this is analysed as the development of systematic and purposeful habits of interpretance based on the construction of "worlds of sign", or lived umwelts. The habits and the signs co-arise as two parts of the model - exactly in the way that theory and measurement have become the epistemically formalised basis of scientific semiotic models of the world.

Brains are already developing theories and taking measurements to generate your "brute experience". It is the same semiotic process. Just coded in genes and neurons, rather than words and numbers.

Although as said above I don't think this entails that everything about our experience can be adequately captured by any form of language, the closest would be its evocation by the arts. — Janus

Of course. Your argument has to reach your favoured conclusion. There is little point me commenting on that. Art is just straightforwardly the social construction of selfhood. That is not even disguised.

Do you have an actual argument? Can you point to an error of fact or reason here? Or does your entire critique rest on the claim that my position is "so funny," You are entitled to your sense of humor, I to my facts and analysis. — Dfpolis

You don't have to try to answer the challenge I've set for your position. If you can't see the incoherence of talking about the data of self-awareness when claiming to have got beyond dualism, it's not my problem.

The point is that the very idea of there being operations of symbolic signs, which rely entirely upon convention, entails that there is a shared world of experience; "our world", in other words. Without that the advent of symbolic signs would be impossible. — Janus

Exactly right. But that is the analytic view of how to understand experience.

You were talking about where epistemology has to start. And I would agree that it is with "brute unanalysed experience" experience ... whatever that then means from some subsequent properly derived, fully analysed, internalist understanding.

So the fact of semiosis would be what ensures a commonality of umwelts. To the extent we seem to understand each other via a common system of sign, we will be of the same mind, share the same experiential being. We can safely impute that of other beings.

And thus I know my cat has a mind to the extent that we can communicate. Likewise other humans. And conversely, not trees or rocks so much.

But what do we then say about "experience" itself, now looking back from a more informed semiotic viewpoint.

Well Peirce for one did try to say something, and even develop that explicitly as a triadic logic.

I give up.

Is that tree over there part of your “we”? What about that rock?

If you are claiming experience as fundamental, you are already making a fundamental distinction. The conceptual claims have started.

Do I have to point out you are already assuming there is a “we” that experience. So without being able to experience that I experience, you seem ready to take that for granted as a known fact. You have already divided experience into experiencers (plural) and experienced worlds.

You have a theory about how things are. And also of course, the notion of the evidence that rightfully sustains that belief.

So how you are progressing is exactly as I have described.

My approach is internalist, not externalist. So I don't claim to get beneath, or outside, or otherwise achieve some actually transcendent perspective on experience ... or "experience".

That is what makes a semiotic approach so epistemically consistent with its ontological claims. I'm surprised you haven't figured that out yet.

There is only one reality. If you would reflect on it, you would find that your mind is not only aware of the elephant you are seeing, but the fact that you are seeing it. If you find this puzzling, simply accept it as a contingent fact of reality. — Dfpolis

It is just so funny how you repeat the standard comforting formula of words as if they could make sense.

There is "me" who sees "my mind", and even sees the "me" seeing its "mind". And what is this mind seeing. Why, its "the world". Or no. In fact its sees the one reality. Or is that "the one reality", given that reality is whatever any mind happens to make of it? I mean "it".

If it does not fit your theory, then your theory does not fit the facts. — Dfpolis

Ah, "the facts". The signs, the acts of measurement, the particulars, that attest to a theory not being false. Or at least not useless for the purpose that "I" had "in mind".

Pfft

I'm not sure that's relevant? — Posty McPostface

Oh for fuck's sakes. :yawn:

OK, I'm still lost. — Posty McPostface

Well how do you think social organisation develops? Give us your version.

I don't quite see how this applies to the topic though. Care to elaborate — Posty McPostface

I explained. Symmetry breaking breaks the symmetry of spinning on the spot to produce the local~global asymmetry of hierarchical organisation.

Instead of self-referential circularity, you have the mutual-referentiality of a hierarchically divided organisation. One scale represents the extreme long-term, the other the extreme short-term.

And so that maps to typical social structure. There is some general framework of expectations. There is some set of detailed actions that make sense within that context.

I don't see that I can make it any plainer.

What's an asymmetry of a dichotomy? — Posty McPostface

The division into the local and the global, the particular and the general, is a prime example.

Having two extremes of the one thing - scale - is to break a symmetry so as to create an asymmetry. A fundamental lop-sidedness.

It is the same when talking about constraints vs freedoms. They are both the same thing - causes. But having been divided into the global vs the local, they look completely different. They are the asymmetric opposite of each other. Or more carefully said, each other's reciprocal.

I wouldn't always trust Wikipedia... — Damir Ibrisimovic

I thought it would do you for a start. There are plenty of more detailed journal articles you could browse.

I would like to ask, when does a question become, indeed, systematically inchoate, and how do we come about knowing this? — Posty McPostface

I don't agree that the situation is so hopelessly circular. Instead - if you believe in the intelligibility of self-organised systems - the situation is the organic symmetry breaking one that I am always describing. You can escape spinning on a spot via the asymmetry of a dichotomy. You create intelligible structure by heading towards a self-consistent hierarchical organisation. A separation into the local and the global.

So take the question of how we ought to live. Of course this is actually about the most difficult of all as we are still inventing that answer as humans. We are changing our global story so fast - our general social, cultural, economic and ecological environment - that we can't expect to have settled down to some firm view on the fine detail of what that all means in terms of our schedule for the day.

Yet still, sociology tells us broadly that humans evolve a hierarchical organisation that gives direction to their particular actions. In every moment, there is some general sense of what you are all about as an expression of your system of civilised people. A functioning community.

Importantly, the general aspect of a system only constrains or shapes local actions. It doesn't prescribe in rule bound fashion.

As the actor, you in fact could do bloody anything at any time. You could have an epileptic fit and truly be in a spasm of trying to do everything at once, as randomly as possible. But if we are talking of ourselves as evolved social creatures with in fact fairly organised tendencies already, then we at least start on a balanced pro-social yet also self-interested footing. And then responding to the constraints of our social and ecological setting, we will creatively work out how best to express what we understand of the general goals of "a civilised person".

So the systems view already is based on constraints and freedoms. Co-operation and competition. Law and creativity/spontaneity. These are the complementary global and local bounds that together are meant to produce a story of generally functional behaviour. The social system exists because it is divided in a way that maintains a creative self-organising state of development and adaptation.

Of course, as a small cog in the machine, it often ain't easy to figure it out. As I say, we have created a world where the global constraints are changing at an accelerating pace.

But still, that doesn't mean we have to spin on the spot in circular self-referential fashion. In practice, we all try to form bubbles of social relations within which our actions can make sense. Whether that is as a gamer, a Samaritan, a parent, or whatever. We are seeking the rules of those small worlds - their general codes of behaviour, their general reasons for being - so as to play a creative part in maintaining those worlds as a self-organised thing.

So the same dynamic is always the case. It starts with a separation into the particular and the general. One is the creative freedom of some local act. The other is the constraint of the larger purpose or social form that it can serve.

When the two dovetail nicely, we feel our lives are in a state of flow. It all works harmoniously.

When our lives are not like that, then that is when we have to figure something out. Understanding that it is all about natural hierarchical organisation becomes a help at that stage.

Even physicists accept that wavicles (WAVe/partICLEs) are unique with infinite sets of differences. — Damir Ibrisimovic

Wavicles are one of those happy classical concepts - a convenient way to gloss over the issues.

Quantum theory in fact relies on the indistinguishability, or identicality, of particles to explain their "weird" statistics - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_particles

So until an observational point of view is actually imposed, a pair of entangled particles are in the identical state described by their wavefunction.

When it comes to Leibniz's principle of the identity of indiscernibles, reality turns out to be more interesting. :)

However, the finite set of similarities cannot disguise the fact that there is an infinity of differences. — Damir Ibrisimovic

It all then comes back to the point of view that might make it matter.

Two apples are the same if they both meet our purpose of having a bit of fruit to eat.

At the supermarket, those two apples might be different if one is bruised and small. We would have good reason to be more particular. But if we have been starved for days, then one apple becomes as good as the other.

So judgements are contextual. They embody a purpose, a point of view, that makes sense of the world ... to us.

Now we can then imagine the more objective view of the world. That is what we routinely do in philosophy or science. We start talking about the disinterested observer, the view from nowhere, that reduces reality to some mindless set of "facts".

From that point of view, it is common to say that every difference matters as every difference is a potential fact - a bit of information, a difference that makes a difference. So there is no good reason to ignore any potential difference and accept any two things as the same. There will always be some possible view of reality in which the difference might happen to matter.

The good scientist or metaphysician wants to leave that question open. Differences become differences in themselves, not differences that exist, or don't exist, from some particular point of view.

As you know, that view of reality works great until it doesn't. And once we strike quantum physics, it really doesn't. It breaks down fundamentally. The world is no longer infinitely divisible. It has a finite definite information content. Only so much difference can be actual. And also every difference is contextual. It takes an "observer" to produce a difference in a definite counterfactual fashion.

But oh well. It takes more that actual facts about nature to shake people out of a formal classical conception of reality.

Anyway, there is your answer. There are differences that matter and then differences that don't ... given some point of view.

And then even from our most objective description of nature - the quantum one - there turns out to be a physical limit on difference. Infinite variety is not possible in actuality. Nor is escaping the essential contextuality of any notion of physically objective differentiation.

It is a good question because it reveals the shortcomings of the standard classical viewpoint in metaphysics, or even mathematics.

You have shown me no connection between my understanding that we know the world from a unique perspective, and the possibility of performing counting and/or measuring operations on all that we know. — Dfpolis

Hah. Your replies depend on such diligent misrepresentation of my arguments that it is pointless pushing them further.

But note that I was very careful to distinguish between a biological level of semiosis (the animal mind), a social level of semiosis (ordinary language), and a metaphysical or scientific level of semiosis (involving formal logical models)

So of course the nature of a sign or act of measurement is quite different at each of these levels. But the general mechanism is the same.

If we talk about an elephant, we are cutting across all these levels. There is of course the elephant as it would be perceptually for any speechless animal - like a fly, a lion, your cat, another elephant.

Humans, as primates with three cone colour vision, would be privileged in seeing the elephant was grey and not red. So we could talk about the specificities of our biological umwelt in that regard. There are some measurements of reality that our evolved neurology is equipped to make, and yet not others.

Then of course, we have also our linguistic and logical levels of discourse about "elephants" as objects of the world. Now you might understand me to be talking about elephants when I point to some statue or mention "Dumbo".

Or in a more formal and scientific setting, you might suddenly see a world of difference between Loxodonta cyclotis and Elephas maximus. Some fool ordinary person might call both "just an elephant" - being generically that. But you would be alert to the particular signs that mark a distinction between two very separate breeding populations. As a scientist, you will know how a logical structuring of your perception results in you literally seeing a different world than before. You see things "properly" when it comes to natural phenomena, in contrast to the ill-educated layman you were just before.

So you can't escape the fact that all mind is modelling. It is a business of reading off a self-centred understanding of the world. And all we need to know is what immediate signs tally with our long-run habits of interpretance. We are organised to comprehend reality as a set of measurements.

Is there an elephant in the room? I can't see one, but I can smell one. There is enough of a sign that I perhaps ought to keep looking.

But it seems - your presentation is confusing - that you are happy to collapse this triadic psychological process to a dualistic mysticism. That pretends to be a monistic direct perception. We look and we see the data that is there. Even when we look at our own "minds". It ain't qualia - perceptual signs conceived meta-cognitively as just that. The mind has just regressed in familiar homuncular fashion, curled deeper into its snail shell, and it is surprised to find there is an internal world along with an external world.

But what world is this "mind" now in that it can see both inwards and outwards? And so the nonsense continues.

Kevin robs a bank, consciously he is doing it for the money but unbeknownst to him he is institutionalised and subconsciously he wants to return to prison. — JupiterJess

Or Kevin robs a bank because that is his usual way to support himself - it is a habit that makes sense to him at some level - and also because if it results in returning to prison, he wouldn't mind. He is such a screw-up that having all his choices made for him in an institution seems better in some ways.

So even if I buy your scenario, we are talking about a spectacularly bad example of life choices. Not a typical person. And even then, it just reflects a conflict that isn't sufficiently conflicting for the person. Steal money to live or live in prison. Both probably have there upsides and downsides. This dude simply isn't figuring out a better path in life. He is just lapsing back into his habitual alternatives and isn't using his attention and planning to work himself towards some better choice of habits.

A person needs to know their own intent to be morally responsible in a legal sense after all. — JupiterJess

Sure. It takes critical thinking skills to construct an acceptable self-narrative. But of course people can also "fool themselves". If you are trained from an early age to have to give an account of your actions, then you also learn the game of saying the right things and covering up the bits that might be shameful or unacceptable.

So what you tell the world also tends to be what you come to believe yourself. Especially if you are being cornered on the truth of your story. In reality, our decision making is more impulsive and haphazard much of the time. Life itself is not a clear-cut thing. But the nature of the moral game is that we are expected to be able to tell a tale of self-justification. It doesn't have to be actually true, just believed. And it is at its most convincing if we come to believe it ourselves.

This is probably why there are tons of Libet threads here and other philosophy forums because the experiment has the implication that the subconscious mind is making the decisions and the conscious mind is being fed lies/illusions. — JupiterJess

Sure. His work seems to slot neatly into that myth. But it just simply takes time to assemble a clear attentional state of thought. So the early stages are going to be unconscious. All the bits are still falling into place. Every time you launch into your next sentence, you have a general sense of intent, a point to make, and then the fully formed words start to spill out of your mouth.

So attention and habits go together in integrated fashion. What is attentional is the novel bit of your next speech act - some briefly glued together point of view or orientation. Some angle on life or an argument has just caught your mind. You want to comment on that. And from there, your habits of speech take over and flesh the vague impulse out, turning it into an articulate flow of words.

The first time what you actually are going to say becomes consciously reportable - themselves a possible focus of your attentional processes - is as your brain broadcasts the actual motor image involved.

If you are going to say "Libet" next, your whole brain has to know to expect that to be a vocal action. The feeling that your lips will purse in a particular way, a certain noise will be heard, all has to be communicated across the brain so that you won't be weirded out to find this stuff happening. It won't feel like an alien has taken over your body. You will know that it was "you" who made a decision to speak. It's called reafference or forward modelling. You can tell what's "you" and what's "world" because you are expecting every sensation that is the result of something you are in the process of ordering.

So all this talk of conscious vs subconsious is just a very crude way to describe the hierarchical complexity of a working brain. Once you get under the covers, every action we take has to brew up over time and also involves both attentional and habitual processing. And because we are so good at forward modelling - operating on an anticipatory basis - we don't really notice any temporal gaps.

We think we experience things exactly as they happen. Which is impossible. It takes a tenth of a second just for a nerve message to travel from the eye or ear to the brain. It takes half a second to integrate a state of attentional focus across the whole brain.

But hypnagogia is the process from wakefulness to sleep. — JupiterJess

Right. But look closely at your dreams. They are exactly those kinds of images. They seem to be full of movement, and yet in fact they are just frozen snapshots. We have a sense of panning and swirling - a sense of normal flow. But the image isn't actually in motion.

When we fall asleep, and the brainstem gates all sensation, we have hypnagogic imagery because an anticipation-based brain tries to fill in for the missing world. Standard sensory deprivation. But because we are falling asleep, these first images have no narrative. They are really random.

Later at night, as we are roused by REM state, now we try to do the habitual thing of understanding these images as a running story. And that chase after meaning does start to drive the narrative. One image does connect to the next in a rough associative fashion. We are jogging the story along in trying to create one.

But it is still just hypnagogic imagery. Look close and you will see it has that same character.

Freud's dream interpretation was more or less what was written in the Bible where dreams are symbols and have to be decoded by a conscious mind. — JupiterJess

Freud was such a con. Of course if the story is that every dream has a hidden meaning, then you can find a hidden meaning in every dream. Who could prove you wrong? If I dream of standing on the heaving deck of an aircraft carrier, or going down a maze of stairs, I must be fantasising about screwing my mother, or father, or whatever. The fact I am bloody certain that I am not is all the evidence Freud needs to prove that I am.

So looking for secret meaning in dreams is a mug's game. It is just scrambled brain activity being prodded along by a narrative self, hoping to make sense of a state of sensory deprivation.

Again, you have to ask why we have come to frame our mental activities in this particular fashion - as some fraught drama of a consciously responsible self living alongside a wayward or subversive unconscious self?

Clearly it is a mythology that serves a useful social purpose. If we can teach people anything - in the effort to make them "civilised members of society" - it is that they know what they should do, but at any moment, without constant vigilance, they could let themselves down by letting their subconscious get out of hand.

It is the means of control. It is a habit of framing we learn. But it ain't good neuroscience. Or even good psychology.

Yes, but it comes down to the nuclear family, and those conditions. The best social environment doesn't matter if the nuclear family is dysfunctional. — Posty McPostface

In what sense would a best social environment have nuclear families? Isn't that a big part of the problem?

Besides, nuclear families have evolved to be atomic individuals. Today's kids probably look back fondly to when everyone sat around the dinner table eating the exact same food, spent the evening watching one of the three TV channels, or went for long Sunday drives in the countryside in the one family car.

Or probably not. :)

The cultivation of good traits, though, is highly individualistic, and hard to persuade otherwise. — Posty McPostface

You are very pessimistic. Social science tells otherwise. Moving to another country likewise.

I agree, but, if you ask my generation, the Millennial, they'll tell you that behaving selfishly is *ucked, and has lead to their current predicament or the predicament we will face in the future. Also, consumer behaviour is changing dramatically. People, on the grassroots scale, are more aware of the problem that climate change entails than on the macro scale, which is lagging as much as it can due to special interest groups and others. Besides, *it's the economy stupid*, that is changing minds. Electric vehicles are simply superior to gas powered automobiles. Solar panels, are *cool* and people want them. So, I would say that some semblance of a higher-order volition for the world is at play. At worst it's the economy working its magic in unseen ways. — Posty McPostface

Now you are very optimistic. I agree that this is all possible. But how do you explain Trump, for instance. The smarter we need to be, the dumber we are prepared to vote.

As for the unseen magic of the markets, the world has run off the road into the muddy ditch and is spinning its wheels with the accelerator rammed to the floor. Vast debt, zero interest rates. In a year, everywhere you know could be Venezuela.

Well, yes, because then we would not be reducing the noumenal to the physical world. — Janus

Not getting it. Making the distinction of the noumenal is agreeing that we can't reduce reality to some claim of "direct perception". And then my semiotic point is that we wouldn't even want to. The goal is to be able to ignore reality in practice. That is what carves out the space for us to impose "our" desires on nature.

So my focus is pragmatic. It is not about exhaustive knowledge but effective control.

The problem with "knowledge" as a goal is that it lacks an obvious intentional point. So pragmatism starts by admitting the aim of a mind is to achieve things in the world. Control already builds in intentionality in a way that knowing doesn't.

But I don't see the world and the self as products of the imagination, but rather as products of nature. — Janus

Right. The self~world distinction - the epistemic cut of an unwelt - does arise directly out of nature. That is the definition of an organism - the evolution of life and mind.

But now we are humans engaged in metaphysical-level semiosis - modelling that employs the language of maths, logic and measurement. And it is how that very high level view, one that aims to be generically objective, which is talking metaphysically about "selves" and "worlds".

So humanity has evolved semiotically to the point where we are doing this. And it has some use. It is how we have been constructing a cultural and technological level of organism. The Noosphere even.

Ultimately we have to still live in a biological and physical reality. We are constrained by all that. But it is at least thinkable that we can pass through the technological Singularity and launch some further level of semiotic beasthood - the Matrix or some other god-awful cyber-reality.

So of course all this is the product of nature in an ultimate sense. Again, that is what pan-semiosis would claim. It is nature all the way down, and all the way up.

But we have actually constructed the era of the machine. And we can't be sure what kind of umwelt that is going to evolve as part of its nature.

Another reason for wanting a well-developed theory of these things.

I don't see a significant difference between this and Whitehead's notion of prehension, and the pan-experientialism which has grown out of it. (But let's not become embroiled in that argument again; I only mention it in response to your referring to his purported "pan-psychism" again a few posts ago). — Janus

I'm happy to debate the difference any time.

Well, self-love is almost entirely self cultivated. — Posty McPostface

Most psychologists would say it is down to a loving childhood environment. It is only the lack of that means you would have to make an effort on your own.

I take it you live in some Scandinavian country? — Posty McPostface

The Scandinavia of the South Pacific. :)

Not actually paradise. But still a very good place for bringing up kids.

I don't quite know how malleable are passions and desires, through reasoning to them. — Posty McPostface

You don't argue with them. You construct suitable habits that give them useful employment. It is a process of domestication - if you want to view them as untamed animals. You want to get them accustomed to the harness that is going to give them direction, make use of their energy ... to continue with a bad psychological analogy.

Care to expand on that last part a little more? — Posty McPostface

I've argued the case to the point of most folk's boredom. To understand our modern condition, you have to look at how life exists to maximise entropy production. And so modern technological humans are nature's answer to the problem of vast reserves of energy-dense fossil carbon that requires burning.

We are that kind of society - one burning up a planet - for a very good reason. So it shouldn't be surprising that any sensible response to climate change keeps getting derailed by politics.

We need to be thinking really selfishly to continue the way we are behaving. And so that is the culture we have created. One that ensures we won't suddenly turn nutty and green.

But, a higher-order volition seems to be something else in some manner. Speaking of falling in love or being a good citizen or such, aren't reflexive attitudes towards reality; but, wholly self-cultivated. Thus, them being of a higher-order. Self-love is perhaps, as per Harry Frankfurt, the highest of volitions one can have. — Posty McPostface

Are they wholly self-cultivated? They are supposedly top of the national school curriculum where I live. They are a basis of a healthy education and a healthy society.

So sure, there are higher order thoughts about our desires. But it is constructing that conscious hierarchy that is point. It is a basic skill we need to learn. And schools are meant to institutionalise that.

Well, having read some of Frankfurt's works, he does talk about self love, being the highest-order volition that one can attain. — Posty McPostface

Loving your fellow humans and a shared environment also seem pretty important. Self-love would be part of the balanced mix.

Yes, the concept seems to have gotten exploited to some degree by society at large. — Posty McPostface

I think it is clear it has run out of control and taken on a life of its own. Society starts to exist for its own sake. Or worse yet, for the sake of a privileged elite.

But it is hard to push social democracy once a muddled philosophy of the human condition has become as pervasive in popular global culture as it has.

It would seem better then to say that the idea of the physical world is really a reduction of the noumenal to a habit of meaning. — Janus

Was there a difference?

I would further modify what you say and call self and world fictive rather than fictional, since they have their roots in reality, but are not real in the sense we might think when we hypostatize them — Janus

Again, is there a difference that matters? If fictional is specific to the literary, then fictive is perhaps more suitably general in being a product of the imagination. But it seems like hair splitting.

Should I be offended? — Janus

Sorry, I couldn't resist that little joke.

So, it would seem that, for you, intentionality in it's inorganic guise is entropy, and in its organic guise is negentropy, and the same may be said for formal/final causation? — Janus

Intentionality would be the negentropy - organic or inorganic. Even energy has stuff it is itching to do.

So what would match that in a double aspect or dichotomous fashion would be uncertainty - an indecision of some fundamental kind. And entropy is the uncertainty of a state of material disorder or unpredictability.

Meaningfulness is then a low entropy/high information condition. A negentropic or intentional state.

Confusingly of course, Shannon information is defined in exactly the opposite terms. It is defined in terms of entropy or fundamental degrees of freedom - a capacity for nature to surprise you and confuse any intentions you might have had.

So information now means its exact opposite - meaningless syntactical variety.

And yet that's fair because entropy is how you wind up justifying that you can completely specify the state of a complicated system, like a gas of a gazillion particles, just by knowing a couple of critical numbers, such as a temperature and a pressure reading.

So lift the covers of the scientific modelling and the two-facedness of it all can be seen. We have to construct an image of the ultimately meaningless so as to have a backdrop against which to measure the "other" of the ultimately meaningful.

Newton had a backdrop in space and time. That foregrounded the "other" of a located event.

Modern physics is now reinventing itself using just information/entropy as a generalised backcloth - one on which even space and time, along with energy, can emerge as the locally measureable.

So that is what I mean about folding mind into the physics. The unification of information and entropy, the atoms of form and the atoms of matter, means that this new metaphysical backcloth is ready and waiting to host all your neuroscience, as well as all your physics. It is a backdrop so mathematically general that it allows a common approach to measurement to be taken to absolutely "everything".

Which is exactly what is happening with the Bayesian brain approach to theories about mental function.

So the usual notion of how mind science is suppose to work is that one day it would all be collapsed to a story of physics.

But no. Now - in a pan-semiotic or information theoretic approach - both physics and neuroscience are being collapsed back to a still deeper metaphysics. One that is beyond the old Cartesian dualism.

And, for metaphysical thinkers, this then becomes the new umwelt. When you look at minds or worlds, you see them as essentially the same thing - the same semiotic process.

This is certainly the great breakthrough Peirce made a hundred plus years ago now.