But, you agreed earlier that your thinking is reductionist in this, but not in the 'mechanistic', sense. — Janus

Sure. Reductionist in the sense that modelling, and cognition, are about forming the umwelts that successfully distance "us" from the "thing-in-itself".

So reductionist in the way that forms the autonomy of being a self in a world. Hence reductionist in a way that speaks to "being human" as an example of that relation.

And I have never heard you say you found anything of interest or value in, for example, Deleuze, Heidegger, or Whitehead, or in fact any 'unscientifc' thinker, for that matter. You always seem to be dismissive of such philosophers. — Janus

Yeah. To the degree they are meant to be saying something interesting about the metaphysics of nature, I find them not wildly exciting. They are peripheral figures, rather late in the day, at best. And Whitehead not even that.

But I can't remember you saying much about Deleuze or Heidegger either. So I'm not sure what missed insight you mean to draw my attention to. What would repay that investment of my time?

The value in what you say does not exclude the value in very different kinds of discourses, though. It's not a matter of it being a contest between competing attempts to produce a theory of everything. — Janus

What do you want? If you think I ignore different discourses, that's bad. If I make posts giving my reasons for dismissing them, that becomes insufferable.

And if I go about my project of tracking the history of metaphysical theories of everything, you get on my case with your own theory of everything which is a rival theory of everything in wanting to reject every totality by fragmentation, implode every constraining unity by asserting creatively unbound pluralism.

Do I just impose all these dichotomies on you, or instead reveal the dialectics tacitly in play?

You really are sounding so bloody hard done by.

I don't agree with Peirce's formulation of truth as being what the community of enquirers would at the end come to agree on; for me, this seems to be a very scientistic notion of truth. — Janus

OK. You don't agree. Next step, you justify that if you think I should care. Why is it wrong?

And it is more than just "very scientistic". Peirce was trying to define science as an inquiry into truth - forever rooted in phenomenology and pragmatism.

So it sounds like you are accusing him of being "overly" correct. What you see as the bug was the feature.

Anyway I would apologize if you felt insulted, but I know there is no need, because you, like me, do not take anything said on here personally, or at least so you have avowed on several occasions if my memory serves. — Janus

I don't take it personal. But I will respond in kind. And finding people to disagree with is what it should be about. Who wants to be surrounded by the like-minded all the time? That is why I ask you to actually set out some concrete arguments when we have the luck to stumble into an area of basic disagreement.

If you could show me Whitehead said something I simply couldn't afford not to understand, that would be terrific. So ball in your court.

I honestly think your thinking is mired in reductionism in the sense that you think everything can be explained by science, and that any thinking which is not scientific is therefore pretty much worthless. — Janus

So you "honestly" think that. Thus you call me a liar when I explain otherwise.

Last time I checked, I seemed a functional member of society. I past the cultural tests even on a "poetical" level of expression. I have a life that seems worth the living.

I'd agree that I also live a highly abstracted life as well - the one that exists in that mathematico-scientific space. But again, more than most who do that, last time I checked, I actually manage to bridge the two umwelts in a way that many appreciate. I get well rewarded for the insights that result from being able to do that.

So, I don't believe that you have demonstrated that your ideas are cogent when it comes to the 'humanities' aspects of human life. — Janus

If you want to dispute their cogency, that is what I'm here for. If you just want to attack me as a person, then maybe take a closer look at your insecurities.

It's true that the human cannot find a home in your "mathematical strength umwelt" which means that it is not really an "umwelt" at all, but an ivory tower construction. — Janus

Such pedestrian ad homs. Not worth a response.

In all the time I have participated on this forum and the old one, I have never seen you show any interest in any philosopher other than Peirce (with the exception of perhaps Kant, Hegel, Aristotle and Anaximander insofar as you believe they agreed with or anticipated Peirce) or any approach other than semiotics. — Janus

So what? I've always said my interest is in systems thinking. That is the particular philosophical issue which I want to track through its historical development. It is the one relevant to naturalism as a metaphysical project.

It seems you think Peirce was the greatest philosopher who ever lived and that no thinker who comes after him said anything worthwhile unless it was something that had already been said, or implied, by Peirce. — Janus

Such hostility.

I agree it is a little surprising that Peirce sums up so much in pivotal fashion. But read it as a fluke of historical circumstance - a case of being in the right place at the right time.

If you listen closely, you would also see how much I say Peirce left rather muddled. If you want hero figures, I would point to Howard Pattee and Stan Salthe as two contemporaries who have added a hell of a lot of polish to anything Peirce was in a position to say.

But this is a philosophy forum. So talking about the philosophical legacy makes more sense in the context provided.

I don't read philosophy in order to discover the One True System. I read it to diversify my ideas and familiarize myself with creative new approaches. — Janus

Fine. You have your projects too.

It seems to me that you suffer from an anxiety, a horror even, that you might entertain any idea which does not correspond to Reality as it is portrayed by science, Good luck with that; I don't share such anxiety or proscription. — Janus

Don't you feel embarrassed by this level of insult? It is pretty clear which one of us is being thrust into a state of high anxiety by being confronted by their "other".

Again, do you think I should be apologetic for pursuing naturalism as a metaphysical project, going wherever it seems to lead? Am I being such a bad boy? Why are you shaking such a worried and angry finger now?

(Although I can appreciate that you view me as an alarming intrusion on your own chosen familiar umwelt. Your taste for intellectual diversity has its limits, after all.)

One of the take-aways from this is that the very idea of the (continuous) number-line is a kind of fiction, an attempt to glue together geometry and arithmetic in a way that isn't actually possible — StreetlightX

Zeno's paradoxes are paradoxes of intuition. This is because it's quite easy to circumvent Zeno's paradoxes with sufficiently precise definitions of what limits and continuity are; the celebrated epsilon-delta and epsilon-N constructions of Weirstrass. You can go on as if the paradoxes are resolved because pure mathematical inquiry is largely a conditional enterprise; given these assumptions (which characterise a structure), what can be shown and what does it do? You can posit yourself past the paradoxes if you so wish, and as is usually done. — fdrake

Nice discussion. The core problem is that this is a tension that always exists because it speaks to an underlying metaphysical-strength dichotomy, and thus it raises the issue of what it would mean to resolve the tension without dissolving also the useful division.

So the mathematical debate seems to hinge on whether "the real" is discrete or continuous. The intuition being applied gets hung up on that. And clearly - Rosen's point - maths depends on the trick of atomistic constructability. Arithmetic or algebra are seen as fundamental as a continuity of form can be built up step by step from a succession of parts or acts.

But then continuity - the grounding wholeness that geometry seems to speak just as directly to - also seems to exist just as much, according to intuition. The geometer can see how the operation of division is a cuckoo in arithmetic's nest. Zeno's paradox shows that. There is more to the story than just the algebraic acts of construction - addition, subtraction and multiplication.

Then continuity shows its face in other ways. Non-linear systems contain the possibility of divergences at every point in their space. As Rosen argues, systems that are safely enough linear are in fact rare in nature. Linearity is non-generic. Perfect constructablity must fail.

So the problem is that the tension is real. Construction seems to work. Used with care, maths can formally model the world in ways that are powerfully useful. The world can come to seem exactly like a machine. And yet also, as any biologist or quantum physicist will know, the perfectly mechanistic is so non-generic that ultimately a machine model describes nothing in the real world at all.

It is the pragmatics of modelling that really bring this tension into the limelight. Maths can simply ignore the issue. It can keep deferring the problems of constructability by pushing them ever further away as the limit, just as @fdrake describes. It is a respectable working practice. Maths has benefited by taking this metaphysical licence. But scientists modelling the world with maths have to deal with the ill-fit of a purely mechanistic description. Continuity always lurks and waits to bite. It needs to be included in the modelling game somehow - even if it is just like Rosen's essays, the planting of a bunch of "here be dragons" signs at the edge of the intellectual map.

But the way out for me is the usual one of Peircean semiotics. Where you have a dichotomy, you actually have a pair of complementary limits. The discrete and the continuous would both be a matter of "taking the limit". And this is in turn founded on a logic of vagueness. You can have the discrete and the continuous as both merely the emergent limits on the real if they have some common ground of indistinction that they are together - measurably - serving to divide.

So now you don't have to worry if reality is fundamentally discrete or fundamentally continuous. It is neither - always being vaguer - but also it is forever moving towards those crisp limits in terms of its actions. If it is developing, it is the discrete vs the continuous dichotomy that is becoming ever more strongly manifest. It is approaching both limits at once.

At this point, we might need to more from the overly spatial dichotomy of the discrete~continuous - the idea of a 0D location and its 1D line. The simplest possible space that would be formed via a translational symmetry and the definite possibility of it being broken. The real world needs to incorporate space, time and energy as its triad of irreducibly fundamental components. A maths suited to actually modelling nature would need to align itself with that somehow.

Or indeed, being biologists, concerned with the study of organisms, we might leap all the way to a focus on agency and autonomy - the modelling relation, or semiosis pure.

Now we can reply to the issue of atomistic constructability in terms of the dichotomy it forms with the notion of holistic constraints. The real world - sans modelling - just is a product of constraints on freedoms. But modelling itself has a pragmatic goal regulating it. The goal of being a modeller - the reason organismic agency and autonomy would evolve within an agent-less cosmos - would be to gain machine-like control over nature. A model is a way to construct constraints so as to achieve purposes. And hence mathematics reflects that modelling imperative.

Maths gets it "wrong" by pushing constructability to an unreasonable seeming metaphysical limit. It makes the "mistake" of treating reality as if it were a pure machine. And yet that is also what is right and correct. Maths is useful to the degree it can construct a world constrained enough by our machinery that it achieves our goals reliably enough.

Biology itself is already a mechanisation of physics. It is the imposition of a system of molecular motors on nanoscale material chaos. So scientific modelling is simply an intellectual continuation of that organismic trick.

Rosen is a bit conflicted in that he complains about the flaws in the tools we use, and yet those flaws are only apparent in the grandest totalising metaphysical perspective. The largest model.

So what he gets right is that the mathematical approach, based on mechanical constructability, can only constrain uncertainty, never arrive at certainty. That is all maths ever does - move towards the limits of being, imagined particularly in the form of the dichotomy of the continuous and the discrete, the geometric and the algebraic, the structures and their morphic acts.

Maths can point to the limits where uncertainty of either kind - either pole of the dichotomised - would finally be eliminated. But the uncertainty must always remain. Which is why maths also keeps advancing as every step towards those limits must spring a leak that is then worth our while trying to fix, so setting up the need for the further step to repair the still smaller leak that will be now be exposed.

So it is an interesting game. Nature is the product of the symmetry-breaking tango between global constraints and local spontaneity. Uncertainty is basic. Yet also it becomes highly regulated or lawful.

Then organisms arise by being able to seize control of the regulatory possibilities of a modelling relation. If you can construct constraints - impose mechanistic structure on that natural world - then you can become a world within the world. You can use your ideas to make the world behave locally in ways that suit your interests.

Eventually humans gained such mathematical mastery over their realities that they could afford to get upset about the way even the best-constructed models were still full of leaks.

But apophatically, flip that around, and you have now your best metaphysical model of reality as a system of constraints. Uncertainty - as vagueness - becomes the new anti-foundationalist foundation. Atomistic construction comes into focus as the emergently individuated - the machinery being imposed on nature so as to limit that vagueness, corral that spontaneity or fluctuation, that spoils the way it is "meant to look".

It might be good to learn about Whitehead through Rorty. — schopenhauer1

A very nice talk, but I'm puzzled by what you would see as its take home message.

I would say it clarifies something important as far as I'm concerned. And that is some language games are better than others ... from a metaphysical point of view. Rorty says Whitehead's approach is poetical. And I would say that's the problem. Peirce's approach is at another level because it is mathematical.

So when it comes to language games, there is this rather vast step up from ordinary language (and its own highly refined forms in terms of poetry, music, art) to mathematical-strength language (as in logic and other universally abstract grammars).

Metaphysics has always depended on mathematical-strength language - principally the dialectical argument that speaks to symmetries and their breakings. So while I agree with Rorty's Wittgensteinian point - philosophy is a self-evidential language game designed to disclose "worlds", or metaphysical umwelts - we can also recognise why some metaphysics is at another level. The mathematical beats the poetical as the mathematical is designed to talk about universal abstractions while the poetical is very much about embodied sociocultural meaning - the umwelt that happens to be defining what it would mean to be human at some moment in the story of human development.

So it is not that the poetical is wrong, or inadequate. It is the right tool for the particular task being done - the invention or social construction of the world that humans "find themselves living in by learning to live within it". The poetical can sketch out the map of what is culturally meaningful, and we become structured by that to the degree we can use this map to navigate a life.

But then mathematical language is a different order of semiosis. It has a larger ambition in terms of being a way to construct maps that disclose a world. It wants to go beyond a merely human identity to "see reality as it actually is".

Now we can both recognise the Quixotic nature of that ambition, and appreciate how unexpectedly and surprisingly powerful that next level of semiosis actually is. We can achieve much more than might have been thought - even if it all remains a (mathematical) language game.

This is why Platonism, Logicism and Computationalism seem to have something to them. They are only mathematical umwelts - the worlds disclosed in a language game. Yet they are a clear step up from the sociocultural boundedness, the subjectivity, of a poetical umwelt.

Again, poetry is fine. But maths and poetry are tools with different goals. They aim to disclose umwelts of essentially different kinds. And metaphysics is about mathematical-strength umwelts. Peirce was playing that game. Whitehead did and then dropped out.

Whitehead's process theology is a comfortable fable that tells a lot of people the sociocultural message they want to hear. Hey buddy, you live in a world that is fundamentally experiential and divine. Therefore experience and divinity do make meaningful sense. Like all good theories, a formal closure is achieved by reading everything in nature to be essentially "human", from the smallest event to the super-human scale of being represented by the Cosmos itself.

From this point of view - an umwelt contructed by a poetical use of language - you can actually wall yourself off from all that nasty mathematical metaphysics. That becomes scientistic baggage to be left at the door of belief. Welcome to the cosy world of pan-experientialism. Take off your work boots. You are home again.

He doesn't "absorb" oppositions or contrasts and explicitly rejects any kind of Hegelian synthesis or sublation where they are resolved through absorption rather than upheld as contrasting relations And what do you say? — Janus

I didn't say he resolves them. I said they sink without trace in his ambiguity.

Hegel at least saw it as a hierarchical spiral where each level of synthesis makes the ground for a fresh bout of symmetry breaking. We can understand what is suppose to be happening in terms of a metaphysical mechanism.

Whitehead talks about stuff getting stuck together to form more complex arrangements. If you look for a mechanism, it is just the same old bottom-up composite story. Bits of experience replacing bits of matter. With - as you note - something vaguely Platonic about God as a possible source of the global something or other.

Tychism=creative advance indeterminism meaning a genuinely open future). — Janus

Peirce says initial free spontaneity becomes regulated by globally developed habits of constraint. That is a very general systems science statement.

Whitehead says the human mind seems creatively spontaneous in pursuit of their wishes, so why not fundamental particles too? That is mystic woo.

Firstness= universal and primordial feeling or "everythingness" (in your terms) — Janus

Yes, Peirce said such things and I say that is OK in a metaphorical way that gets at a basic unity of nature. If we accept phenomenology as our necessary epistemic starting point, then that is what Firstness looks like from that descriptive position. Then we move to what it looks like once we have developed a more general scientific and cosmological framework. Now it becomes what we would understand by spatiotemporal fluctuations. We would understand Firstness through the lens of quantum theory.

But at times Peirce also looks to have slipped into mystical woo. How much that was due to social circumstances - like his financial dependence on religious benefactors - is an interesting biographical question.

However my position is that the woo is completely dispensable. The epistemology and ontology doesn't depend on some undefined notion of "experience" as it does with Whitehead.

pan-semioticism (although I'm not sure Peirce himself advocated that) = pan-experientialism — Janus

Peirce's speculative cosmology is pretty well advertised. You wouldn't call it pan-semiotic?

And again the difference is between spelling out a structuring mechanism - semiosis - and simply saying everything has experience as an inherent property, even when there is no measurable support for that vague claim about nature.

It is not even controversial in science that life and mind have semiotic structure. Nor I guess that they all support grades of experience. Organism have the organisations that give them lived points of view of their world (via an Unwelt, a mediating system of signs).

So what would be speculative in science is saying the Universe also is semiotic structure all the way down. Except this is what quantum physics and a general information theoretic turn in physics suggests.

And it would be non-experiential semiosis to the degree it did not have "a point of view". Semiosis at the cosmic level becomes just a developing set of boundary conditions. A totally generalise or objective state, not one that is locally individuated and particular to some subject.

So I am happy that pan-semiosis can account for the similarities and differences of the levels of nature's complexity as they are actually measured and observed.

I don't see any of this in Whitehead except from the very superficial gestures towards a contextuality and holism in his direction of thought.

That is the usual vague reply on Whitehead. His system is a system that successfully absorbs all categorical differences ... which would be why I consider it a failure.

Are we talking about processes or actual entities, transcendence or immanence, material things or mental things, creativity or constraints? Whitehead. He say yes!

...but whether you like his system or not, I don't think it can be denied that Whitehead's ideas go well beyond Perice's in the scope of development. — Janus

And why can't that be denied? Only because you won't spell out how exactly Whitehead goes beyond Peirce in your estimation.

I think every supporter of Whitehead I've ever come across only is so because he said "experience is basic". He rejected the logicist project and turned to God and universal mind. He mixed in quantum physics too. So he sounds like the sort of guy one should proclaim as a metaphysical genius.

But I've yet to meet anyone who believe they understand Whitehead well enough to stop and explain him in ways that makes sense - especially in relation to Peirce and other structuralist thinkers. Funny that.

Are you denying that Whitehead has produced a complex, comprehensive and systematic metaphysics that owes something, but by no means everything, to Peirce? — Janus

I just don't see any important similarities. So I would welcome you explaining what they might be.

Every time I try to delve into Whitehead, it just seems maddening rubbish. Every time I take another dip into Peirce, it feels the opposite. So please tell me what I'm missing.

In the meantime, here is how others have summarised the connections between the two....

Lowe writes "Whitehead knew Peirce's logic of relatives when he wrote Universal Algebra, but there is no evidence of substantial knowledge at any time of anything else that Peirce published."

Although it has been common for readers of Peirce's metaphysical writings to notice a considerable similarity to some features of Whitehead's philosophy, a study in depth of each one shows wide differences between them.

According to Lowe, "the more likely picture is of paths which, though touching at certain important points, were for the most part so separate that whoever thinks to make further explorations must choose the one and reject the other, and as he looks back at Peirce and Whitehead, he must then be ready to reconsider the significance of those similarities"

http://www.unav.es/users/PeirceWhitehead.html

I am claiming a heightened state of experience, not a "truer one". An ecstatic experience is not necessarily "truer" than a banal one. So, the contradiction is, again, a projection of your own. — Janus

So what follows from it merely being "heightened"? Where does that leave us?

The contradiction still has to be answered. Or are you conceding that it is resolved by accepting the neuroscientific view would say the affective state is an over-excited one?

A well functioning brain with affective states that make cognitive sense - that would actually ground a mental response pragmatically in tune with the world as it is - would only be excited to an appropriate degree. Thus you can have the non-functional affective responses that are either under-excited or over-excited - too flat or too aroused.

Or did you have some other story on how there is no contradiction between how the feeling feels and what it would be for a feeling to be a suitably functional ground to neurocognition?

Well, Whitehead developed a whole complex metaphysical system which is certainly not Peircean through and through, although there are commonalities. It takes a long time to make sense of Whitehead, which I am beginning to do. I suppose the same can be said for Peirce. I've made less progress on that front. — Janus

Right. So you have made your judgement. But you can't give the grounds for it.

I guess it's just a gut feeling. So at least you are being self-consistent then.

There certainly seems to be a lot of Peirce in Whitehead (judging from what I have read of Peirce, which has not been a real lot, but just slowly, over the past fifteen or so years, working through two volumes of his selected papers), but he also goes well beyond Peirce in important ways, I think. — Janus

Oh please. If you can make any sense of Whitehead and how he goes "well beyond", here is your perfect chance to lay that wisdom out.

Local to where, though? — Janus

Well, Australasia. I've had good mates from both Ashburton and Warrnambool. You wouldn't know the difference.

That like anything else drugs open up different possibilities for experience. — Janus

Does that seem enough of an answer to you?

You are claiming a heightened and truer state of experience from what the neuroscience would say must be a faulty misfiring of the brain. Not sure how you resolve that contradiction, until you tell me.

OK. And what do you conclude from knowing that it was only the drugs causing that state of mind?

Unreadable bunk.

A bogan. It’s a local speciality.

A sensible paper that. :up:

But it should be clear I am not actually agreeing with your definition of cognition. Whatever you think it might be. Or of affect.

I simply say it is semiosis all the way down and all the way up. Different levels of the same embodied relation.

Sure, we have percepts that are understood as being signs of how we feel, and percepts that are signs of the way the world is. But surely your own drug experiences will have told you how uncertain and constructed those kinds of boundaries actually are.

Cognition likewise is a confused term. Discursively, it means something about working things out in some intellectualised fashion. And yet animals are also said to think things through in dispassionate fashion without the benefit of words. Even a jumping spider has the brains to stop and work out a roundabout path to its target. So cognition doesn’t claim anything particularly specific in mind science. Originally it was just a branding for a generally functionalist/symbol processing turn in 1960s psychology.

A good human example is the affective aesthetic response. No rule can be derived from it. It is impossible to explain what is so good about the greatest works of literature, poetry, painting, music and so on. — Janus

Yeah. But where do I take that mechanistic view of organisms in the first place? That is what semiosis is opposed to - even if the mechanical gets incorporated into semiotics as being systems of rigidly fixed constraint.

But again, refer to your own drug experiences. Didn’t you think this or that was the most sublime thing ever, simply because you were high?

Feelings by themselves are not trustworthy. They only become reliable signs of anything when framed within a well adapted “cognitive” context.

Temporal epilepsy and schizophrenia can leave you feeling you are bathed in the divine. Your pet psychological theory needs to be able to account with little facts like that.

My theory about theories... — csalisbury

As a meta-theory of theories, ain't that kind of vague?

Or is even a unifying meta-theory a dangerous thing to have? There should be as many meta-theories as there are individuals to have them?

I mean if there is no largest model, then also, no model could be too small, could it?

(Whoops. I didn't mean to be so bold as to advance a single meta-model of models there. So like ... just whatevs ... its all good, eh brah?)

Do you have a different theory about theories? You are welcome to explain.

Do you see it as a defect that I should in fact start from the phenomenological stance that would have to ground any grand intellectual assault on a ToE?

Which sin do you want to hang me for? Being too subjective, or too objective, for your tastes? :razz:

Or finally you understood something that was always being said?

(Though I doubt that you see this as a dismissal of "qualia". You are still going to complain that no amount of scientific theory is managing to deliver your missing explanation of why anything should feel like anything. As if that is what theories are meant to do. Theories only feel like something when you can live them in action. That is use them to constrain experience to have some particular quality that you had in mind as a suitable metric. So semiotics explains that because it explains how we construct constraints on experience so as to be able to feel, see - and even count - a world composed of suitably individuated particulars.)

All I'm saying is that we are affected pre-cognitively by bodily processes that are experienced as feelings that cannot be precisely discursively articulated, and that we are directly aware of this. Do you want to deny that this is so, and claim that the totality of what we are is exhaustively down to what is produced processes of cognitive construction? — Janus

Sure. There is plenty of perceptual stuff that we don't notice until we learn how to pay attention to it.

And it is my psychological claim that learning to be this self-conscious kind of conscious self is discursive. It is not biologically natural to frame any kind of percept - affective or otherwise - in this kind of self-conscious fashion that would single it out as "a percept", or qualia. To pay attention to these kinds of "precognitive" goings-on is a learnt, language-scaffolded, socially-constructed, culturally-evolved, discursive skill.

An animal doesn't "feel its pains". It just reacts due to being in pain. And so do we until we learn to take a discursive view of pain as being a sign that speaks to the presence of a mind. We have a higher level of semiotic modelling that now sees the "self" that is the experiencer of the experience, the observer of the observable. Our response to being in pain is no longer a direct embodied state of perceptual cognition. It has been elevated to a disembodied state where we see ourself as a mental being suffering a mental assault.

So you say that affect is primordial. But perception of any kind is primordial in this sense. It is still cognitive, but pre-discursive level cognition - the cognition which goes further to model the self as something essentially disembodied, unphysical and mind-like.

So yes. I am happy to say it is cognition, or semiosis, all the way down to the ground. That is exactly what neuroscience and social psychology tells us.

The division between reason and emotion, cognition and affect, is a Romantic/Theistic notion that doesn't really hold water.

It is sort of true in the sense that the nervous system and brain represent many layers of cognition. So right down at the reflexive level, responses are hardwired and instinctive rather than elaborately reasoned.

But even something so primal as pain - an emergency signal that just says back off quickly right now without hesitating to think or discuss - if filtered through a whole series of processing levels in a large mammalian brain.

The spinal cord can think for itself - whip our hand off a hot stove before we have even possibly felt anything. A short loop creates a reaction before the nerve signals could even reach the brain. That is precognitive in the most literal sense because it takes at least a fifth of a second for the brain to become involved enough to integrate anything in a felt fashion - and half a second if it is a unexpected surprise.

Then there is a big pain area in the brain stem and yet also further pain areas in the "emotional" cortex - the cingulate lobe. There, complex interactions take place.

One bit of cingulate can really amplify the pain, the other can suppress our awareness of it. It all depends on the general context of whether we need to fight through because bigger things are happening - we are fighting for our lives - or instead, we are doing bugger all and so that slight unnoticed pain in your back that I just mentioned is now turning into a burning agony demanding some response.

And all that before we get anywhere near a human socially-constructed sense of pain - accepting of course that, hypnosis or self-distraction techniques apart, pain is canonically about the least controllable feeling we have. As a biological emergency signal, it is designed to grab our attention so that the totality of our cognitive resources become devoted to a suitable response to it as a signal of something wrong.

So yes. The brain has this layered architecture. Affect seems foundational as that which is least ameniable to social construction. Cognition is at the other end of the spectrum. When it comes to the most highly discursive aspects of what the brain is doing - like reasoning - it is pretty easy to just shift attention by changing the subject.

But from a theory point of view, it is semiosis - a modelling relation - all the way down. And if you call that the same as saying it is cognition all the way down to the ground, I can live with that. Just as I would also accept it being affect all the way to the top.

Even when I'm talking about the super abstract - like semiosis as a triadic structure - it has cognitive meaning because the talk comes with some matching "felt state". There is some kinesthetic representation I have in mind of things all intertwined and connecting in a now familiar way. Thought is not a bloodless exercise of computation. We live our thoughts fully if we are doing it properly.

And this consists in what we know directly from experience, that actual experience begins with the body, and the precognitive ways in which it is affected. — Janus

Again, any claim of direct knowledge admits that there is a distinction to be made with indirect knowledge. So you are talking about a noumenal knowledge of the thing-in-itself. And if that is primordial, then it makes no sense. As why would indirect knowledge become a thing if knowledge could already be direct?

Just examine the structure of words you are forced to use to express you own claims.

There is some "we" who knows directly from our "own experience" of ... something or other concerning the primordial condition of "our" bodies.

Much better to just start with interpretance as an embodied state of being. To be embodied is to have already begun down the path of being in a triadic modelling relation.

There is no "self" as some kind of focal entity that stands apart from its embodied condition. There is just that habit of interpretance that is reliably making the embodied distinction of being a self in a world. And this habit can even point to the signs that prove the distinction to be a hard one - hard to the point of a mind~world dualism. It can proclaim, look at all these little affects running about inside my head. Here are the veritable signs that "I" exist ... embodied within my own embodiment in semiotically recursive fashion. The existence of "precognitive" bodily affects is my measurable proof of that claim.

Of course, when any attempt to articulate this kind of thing, to make it "crisp", is made it might be thought to make it look like it is all cognitive all the way down, but that is an illusion created by language. — Janus

No. It is using science to explain the neurobiology of affect as a form of perception - an organism learning to measure its own boundaries so as to be able to behave as a bounded organism.

You might want to treat affect as mystical primal qualia. But you know that a baby doesn't even know that its own hands belong to it until it learns to bring them under a suitably modelled sense of control.

A learner driver on an icy road feels like everything that happens is an out of control imposition from the world outside. An expert driver on the same road will feel the wheels as part of their own embodied state of being.

You can't just ignore all the actual evidence from the developmental histories of habits of experiencing or interpretance. It is not an illusion of language. The illusion of language is presuming that because we have words for speaking about "selves" and "qualia", that these things might be real in the sense of being primal, simple and noumenal.

It would probably help you to broaden your perspective and get this point if you were to read some Merleau Ponty or Whitehead, but you have probably already decided that you know better than they do. — Janus

Thanks for the reading tips. But of course I have read them. And Peirce as well.

So what I "know better" is that Peirce resolved all the metaphysical issues in the neatest way to be found.

Have you read him yourself? If you had, it wouldn't in fact take long to come across many more such hostages to fortune as "matter is effete mind". What is more "pre-cognitive" than the way he often talks about Firstness as pure spontaneity of feeling?

You could quote-mine Peirce for days to support your own preferred position here. I would be left lamely having to reply, well that was exaggeration for effect, look to his logic for a real understanding of what he should have always said to avoid misunderstandings of the transcendental or noumenal kind. :)

Isn't this a contradiction? — Aaron R

No. The stress is on "effectively".

And a logic of vagueness is based on the suspension of the principle of non-contradiction. It is rather the point that what seems to stand in contradiction - everything and nothing - would be indistinguishably the same thing in primordial vagueness.

So I simply tried to show how that does make intelligible sense if we think of "everythingness" in terms of an everythingness of fluctuations.

How much do you actually wind up with if I give you an infinite amount of the infinitesimal? Is it everything or nothing? What does your maths say here?

My point is that to take "experience" as "primordial" is already to frame it as the noumenal thing-in-itself. It is already going beyond expererience to make a claim about the ontology of experience. So your claim that experience is primordially affective is a modelling claim about the structure of experience - even if a claim about some kind of lack of structure in just being this vague thing of "primordially affective".

The problem for your position is that it is incoherent if you try to eliminate the affective experiential dimension since you cannot coherently explain how there can be interpretation without some prior, or at least present, experience. — Janus

So your claim here is that there can't be conscious experience without affective experience. But note how this unpacks.

What matters is some distinction between an interpreting selfhood and then the signs of being that self. You are claiming that experience has this essential structure of a witnessing ego living in some internal world of recalcitrant affect - all these affective events that come and go of their own accord and speak to the third thing of whatever reality they in turn reflect. Some generalised realm of spirit or idea or mind, I guess.

So you speak of the "me" who stands witness, doing the interpretation. You speak of the affects, which are the percepts of stuff happening - look, there a flash of pain, there a flicker of anxiety, there a jolt of surprise. And to the degree that the witnessing self and the perception of the passing, uncontrolled or "primordial", affects are distinct from each other as interpreter and sign, together they must speak to the deeper reality that could be the intelligible cause of a play of affects. Your framing certainly points attention towards this further thing-in-itself - some noumenal world of generalised mind - even if you prefer to remain diplomatically vague about that implication.

Now if you can explain your position differently, go for it. But it seems clear that you are adopting the basic structure of a triadic semiosis, as all good psychological models will wind up doing. And so your (implied) claims about the noumenal - a realm of mind that is the cause of the affects - have to be judged on the usual pragmatic grounds. They are justified to the degree that the signs are measurements which reliably support a habit of interpretance.

So sure, if I have a pain, or hesitation, or a startle, these are all signs of something happening "out there" which have a habitual meaning for "me in here". Affect is a form of perception that feels very intimately connected to the self as a thing. It is the level of sensation that builds the sharp distinction between self and world. It is the construction of a boundary to the ego.

But that is the sensible psychological model of what an organism does to be a body with intentionality in a physical environment. And you are instead cutting away that actual world by saying "we" only have our experience. And that experience is primordially composed of affect. The physical world has now vanished from sight (well, it was always phenomenal). But in its place - because you still speak in terms of an interpretant and its signs - there still has to be a ghostly beyond of some (now "experiential") kind. The mind or spirit as a general noumenal thing-in-itself that is the ultimate ground of being.

Where does all this confusion start? Note how asserting anything about "experience" at all is already to assert a structure, as now there is also everything that experience isn't. So as soon as you talk about being "inside" the phenomenal, the noumenal "exterior" comes into play.

This is the bind that led Peirce to the logic of Firstness or Vagueness (although I agree, he didn't always quite stick to it himself). If you are going to have some foundational notion - a starting point for a developmental tale - then it can't come pre-loaded with distinctions like inside vs outside. It has to be conceived of as a "state" to which the principle of non-contradiction fails to apply.

So when it comes to the question of how "we" could have developed, we find ourselves already in that developed state - the one where there must have been a first accidental or fortuitious division followed by its hierarchical stabilisation as now a habit of interpretance.

In biology, that first primordial division would be affectless. It would simply be some biosemiotic distinction that starts a division between an organism and its world. A spherical membrane separating an inside and outside is a definite start. Membrane pores to regulate a difference between the chemistry inside and outside would be a next step. A beating flagella to mark a "conscious" difference between the direction a cell wants to go in, vs those it doesn't, is yet another.

So a lot of semiotic distinctions would get built up before we start to reach your world of a "self separated from the affects that are signs of a more generalised realm of mind". For an organism to develop the semiotic sophistication of seeing itself as a self in a world because it can sense its own boundaries as a general thing is hardly a primordial state of being. It is hierarchically complex, or recursive, already. The modeller modelling itself now.

Thus again, note how you attempt to slap the label of "experience" across everything in sight as a way to flatten all the semiotic complexity. Sure, the Peircean approach agrees that we start stuck inside our own highly developed phenomenology. We can't escape our "experience". In that sense, it seems a primordial condition.

But we can pay attention to the logical structure of that experience. And we can see that the perception of affects requires a higher order of recursive modelling complexity than the perception of "the world outside". To see our affects as affects requires that we don't just hold a model of the world, we hold a model of us as selves in that world having an experience of ourselves as phenomenologically bounded beings. We are so aware of the modelling relation that we feel aware of having to make a choice about which of two worlds - the ideal or the real - that we actually exist "primordially" in.

Not my cup of tea. — Banno

Always a devastating answer. Shows you take the big questions seriously.

And I know you don't want to countenance anything you can't measure; but that says more about you than it does about the immeasurable. — Janus

Bollocks. It says more about the history of intellectual advance and the very nature of pragmatic inquiry.

The statement that the riverbank experienced the erosive force of the river is a perfectly intelligible one. — Janus

Let's not kid ourselves. We might well choose this more mind-like framing so as to highlight deficiencies in a more matter-like framing. But my argument is that both remain just framings. And you ache to make the mind part of the noumenal, just like you accuse materialists of thinking the material has noumenal status within our phenomenology. Neither such move is valid.

Hence all you can say is that reality is mind-like ... in this measurable fashion. And here - please note - you accept the physical erosion of the river bank as your supporting fact. If I said the dirt just dematerialised, or grew legs and ran away, you would say no. The river eroded it. The river washed that dirt away downstream. Look, here it is washing muddily into the sea. What more proof do you need?

in a relational sense, insofar as they are signified object and interpreted sign they are not the interpretant. — Janus

You did it again.

You framed semiosis in dyadic Sassurean fashion so as to leave the interpretant bit dangling free of the relation. It now has to stand noumenally outside as the mind doing the interpreting, experiencing the meaning, making sense of the inert sign and what it may have to say about the world lying beyond.

One day you'll stop seeing through the lens of your own presuppositions and understand what I am saying. It seems to me to be fairly close to what you are saying, but differs on a couple of fundamental points. — Janus

I have no trouble understanding your defence of a dualism that would allow you to claim noumenal status for "mind".

I'm not sure how to answer this. The answer that the question seems to beg for is "nothing", but that seems incoherent. — Aaron R

Starting with nothing is incoherent as nothing can come from nothing.

But starting with everything is coherent as at least then you only need to limit it to arrive at the something we know to be the case.

And a state of everythingness is effectively a state of nothingness anyway. We know that if we tried to do everything at once, nothing would get done. Any particular action would be at the same instant cancelled by us trying to do its opposite as well. No change would actually result until some possible actions were suppressed, allowing the others to now be released.

So retroductive argument leaves you little choice.

We exist. There is something.

We then notice that the somethingness of our Cosmo is always the result of symmetry-breaking - a constraint or limitation of a larger space of possibilities.

And as we go back as far as we can see - all the way to the quantum-scale Big Bang - that is all we see. A chaos, a quantum foam of spacetime fluctuations, that is a radically indeterminate everythingness, right at the point where symmetry-breaking begins to suppress some actions and so now concretely release some others.

We can then either choose to believe what we are seeing or continue to complain reality is not behaving the way we would expect - the way it should if it were instead some kind of miraculous something out of nothing.

The pan-experientialist view is based on the idea that everything that exists experiences, in the broadest sense of that term, just as the pan-semioticist view is that everything that exists interprets. — Janus

But "experiences" is an empty, question-begging, sort of term.

Sure, everything that is individuated can then react or relate. We can measure that in terms of a model of a spatiotemporal/energetic framework - some set of global symmetries that could be locally broken.

But this "experience". How do we measure it in any sense?

The usual way is to distinguish according to reactions and relations which have something extra by way of autonomy, intelligence and self-interest.

So there just ain't any good reason to claim that the whole of nature has experience when the only intelligible definition of experience is the one that points to the difference it makes in terms of reactions or relations to have something extra by way of autonomy, intelligence and self-interest.

A sign cannot be interpreted by an interpretrant unless it is experienced (not necessarily, or even mostly, consciously) by the interpretant. — Janus

A sign is itself the wholeness of the sign relation as a process.

So see what you did there. You slipped in the mediating sign as something dead, static, inert - a mere physical mark that symbolises and thus needs an interpreter with a mind to read it as being about something real out there in the world.

This is the weird thing you and schop both want to do. You want to oppose realism with idealism. You want to oppose an ontology of dead matter with an ontology of living mind.

But that is just doubling down on noumenalism. It is compounding the epistemic error identified by Kant and fixed by Peirce.

For me - accepting that phenomenology is all we got - I treat the idea of "matter" the same way I treat the idea of "mind". I don't buy noumenalism about either of them .... even if the matter vs mind dichotomy are a productive kind of phenomenological distinction to make in constructing our metaphysical models of existence.

So I don't believe in quarks and electrons as "bits of matter", just as much as I don't believe in them as "bits of experience". However, for the sake of scientific modelling, they are measurably more like how we conceive of bits of matter than how we conceive of bits of experience.

And if physics does get around to the semiotic common ground of understanding quarks and electrons as "bits of interpretance, the signs of a triadic relation" then I would be happy indeed.

It would still be all a pragmatic phenomenological tale, not the noumenal truth of the thing-in-itself. But a ground that is common to both the material and the experiential would give scientific explanation the unified view of nature it is always seeking.

It's kind of off-putting when you keep talking about propper names.

But as a Peircean, I do indeed find Fregeanism the over-simplified version.

Eg: https://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/cognitiofilosofia/article/viewFile/13383/9918

Propper names do not have a sense. — Banno

So it could just as easily be you who is "Harry Hindu" here.

Sounds legit.

I think you're conflating experience with consciousness. — Janus

Think what you like. I'll wait until you define the difference.

From a neuroscience point of view, what most folk really mean by conscious experience involves attentional level processing by a brain capable of that. So more than just reflexive sentience. But less than human-level self-consciousness, which depends on linguistic competence and culturally evolved constraints.

What is this "me"? This "illusion"? If you go back to mere description, you have lost the trail. — schopenhauer1

That's just you still imposing your dualistic framing on any words that pass your eyes.

A modelled selfhood would be an illusion to you because you - unwittingly still - ache for a noumenal self that exists beyond the phenomenology of self.

To me, that self is simply a modelled construction - along with the world this self is living in. So the whole of this makes for an Umwelt - the world as experienced with a "you" in it.

So it is only once you move up to a triadic framing that the whole of what is going on can snap into place.

If you go back to mere dualistic yearning for the noumenal, you have lost the trail.[/quote]

And how far is that? — schopenhauer1

It is up to you to define the kind of experiencing that concerns you here.

Does a slug lack the kind of visuospatial sense of being a self in a world that higher animals find second nature? What do you think? Where would be the lingering mystery according to you?

But what is it that is fluctuating in the first place? — Aaron R

Wrong question. If nothing has yet been prevented from being the case, then what isn't the case?

A fluctuation is just a way to talk about the barest first imaginable kind of substantial state of being - an action with a direction.

So materialism sees an atom as its simplest possible starting point. But if you flip to a dynamical point of view, that becomes a fluctuation. A fluctuation is what we would call the first expression of any limitation on naked and unbounded possibility. The starting point for in-formed being would be an action in a direction. And being fleeting, both the action and the direction would disappear with it.

In other words, if the modeling feels like something, who is to say this feels like something doesn't go all the way down? — schopenhauer1

The answer is obvious. Complex brains do complex modelling. When I use my eyes, I create a model of a world from some pattern of illumination falling on my retina. And key to that model is also the "me" that is place in time and space as a "receiver" of that point of view.

So that is an example of how the modelling is a model which is of a self in a world. And that is then what we would expect the model to feel like.

But if a slug doesn't have the equipment to make sense of the scrambled EM radiation striking it, then there is no "world" in terms of some self-centred point of view. We can just as reasonably draw a conclusion about a slug having the kind of experience that would follow from not having that level of reality modelling.

None of this is rocket science. It is obvious from the type of modelling being done what we might expect that type of modelling to feel like.

We can't then experience what it is actually like to be a slug, or an echo-locating bat, just because of that scientific account. But we can still answer questions about how far down some kind of experiencing would go when it comes to organisms and their self~world modelling.

To ask which bit of the sign relation is the “conscious bit” is to miss the point.

Consciousness, as a biological phenomenon, is a result of a brain modelling a self in a world. The sign relation captures the irreducible complex nature of that relation.

Pansemiosis would be an extension of that triadic analysis to a non conscious, because non modelling, physical reality.

Organisms are sentient because they have internal models of themselves in the world. The Cosmos is then in some sense a globalised model of itself. The model is not internal but now the actual shape of the system itself.

This makes sense given the information theoretic and holographic turn of current physics. Science has had to give up on matter as substantial being. Instread reality is composed of contextual limitations on individuated events.

So semiotics began as a way to understand language as a causal structure. Then Peirce extended that to include the grammar of logic, and speculatively, a self-organising tale of cosmology and existence.

Semiosis was about the growth of intelligibility and reasonableness - both within human thinking and also in the actual world within which humans arose.

Modern biology showed that life and mind are properly semiotic - language-like in their code-based modelling of states of meaningfulness.

And now modern physics is showing how a world of quantum events is about the power of contexts, or states of interpretance, to determine or individuate particular occurrences - the signs that compose the unfolding history of a universe.

So pansemiosis has the same triadic logical structure as biosemiosis and even just ordinary language use. But there is a huge difference between an organism that is modelling its world and a world that is just in some sense its own model.

Consciousness doesn't cross that line. The Cosmos is not aware, except in the loosest metaphorical sense. Even trees, slugs and ant colonies are not aware in the kind of way we really mean.

So pansemiosis remains a million miles away from panpsychism, panexperientialism, pantheism, etc, etc.

At what point does modeling not feel like something? — schopenhauer1

So you accept modelling would reasonably feel like something. My job is done.

Doesn't change presuppose something that changes? Isn't this something more fundamental than the changes that it undergoes? — Aaron R

Alternatively, change could be fundamental and somethingness is what we get when unbounded fluctuation is stably bounded.

How does a star exist when it is both a violent fusion explosion and a gravitationally collapsing ball of gas? You have two extreme and uncontrollable types of change in the one place. But a star can exist for billions of years because these two opposed kinds of change must find a stable equilibrium balance.

So all somethingness could be the stable equilibrium balance emerging from violent underlying change.

Any precisely opposed directions of change will have this result. And if it seems unlikely that such dichotomous pairings would arise in nature, consider the fact that if this is how existence works, then for anything to exist, only neatly complementary actions capable of striking a stable balance would be around to be observed. Everything out of balance would not be the case.

So a reasonable position is that anything might have been the case. And that is a maximally unstable or dynamical starting point. But if stable balances were possible, then stability would have to emerge. The fact that the forms of such stability - such as realised in stars - might seem rare is beside the point. They would be the ones that actually prevail as only they could prevail. And we know they could prevail, as here we are here to note the fact.

But no need to exaggerate the mysteries.

How could a living, running, intentional model of the world - a model which includes a model of “ourself” - fail to feel like something?

Not seeing your slippery slope to panpsychism. Only seeing that you don’t get pansemiosis.