So what does that mean for your notion of the atomism of concepts. Are they informationally closed or open?

Uttering "dog" is an atomistic act. As a noise we might hear, we know its not someone saying log or bog or dig or dob. But as a concept, dog seems informationally open. We could either generalise or particularise its semantics by adding or subtracting information (or constraints).

Are we talking about a dog or the dog? The Platonically ideal canine, or that little mutt snapping at our ankles?

Atomism kind of works because we can leave the contexual information implied and unsaid. But that doesn't make word interpretations foundationally atomistic. It is of the essence of words that their boundaries of reference are porous or vague. Atomism is relative as semantics is essentially open even if syntax does try to create a closed compositional structure that is meant to keep all the meanings trapped securely inside the spoken sentence.

Brains are salient to individual identities in such a world, so it's not entirely off base to be looking at brains -- that would be one part of the physical-world, after all -- it's just not the whole picture, in accordance with this line of reasoning. — Moliere

But this is just being inconsistent - choosing dualism or some ill defined brain functionalism depending on which front you are currently mounting a defence.

The logic remains - if dualism is true and qualia are not brain dependent, then the blind should have at least imaginative access to those qualia, despite eyes that have never functioned in a way that would produce the right neural circuits. And you shouldn't be able to zap the V4 colour centre of the brain and produce then a loss of colour qualia as a consequence.

I can see how such language could be confusing. — Moliere

It'd be less confusing to say we prejudge on the whole. And still less confusing to say we positively predict. Conceptions are schemata, to make use of the good old fashioned cogsci borrowing from Kant. We have mental templates to which the world is already generally assimilated. Post hoc judgement is reserved then for where the schema prove to need tailoring.

My question is -- what does the brain do to reality to make the appearance? But the answer is "it makes the appearance appear like the appearance appears, different from reality" -- which just masks the mechanism I'm asking after. — Moliere

The way you phrase this again says you find it natural to think about the mind as representational - the cogsci paradigm which is being replaced by the enactive or ecological turn in psychology (or return, if we are talking gestalt dynamics and even the founding psychophysicists).

And that is my point about the paradigm shift represented by semiotics. Representationalism presumes that a stable reality can be stability pictured and so stabily experienced - begging a whole lot of questions about what could ever be the point of there being the observer essentially doing nothing but sitting and staring at a flickering parade of qualia painted like shadows on the cave wall.

But give that observer a job I say. Observation - defined in the general fashion of semiosis - is all about stabilising the critically unstable. So minds exist to give determination to the inherent uncertainty of the material world. If matter is a lump of clay, minds are there to shape it for some purpose.

And uncomfortable though it may seem, the science of quantum theory says observers are needed to "collapse" the inherent uncertainty of material nature all the way down. Existence is pan-semiotic.

Somehow we now have to honour that empirical fact in a way that makes Metaphysical sense. Most folk agree we can't claim that "consciousness" solved the quantum observer problem. But quantum foundationalism does think that some notion of information, contextualism and counterfactuality will do so - which is another way of talking about semiotics.

So I'm talking about a sweeping paradigm shift. The systems view is about how existence has to founded on the primal dynamism of material uncertainty becoming regulated by the sedimentation of informational constraints.

Heraclitus summed up the understanding already present in Greek metaphysics - existence is flux and logos in interaction.

And the mathematical exploration of what that could mean is still being cashed out, as with the return of bootstrap metaphysics in fundamental theory - https://www.quantamagazine.org/20170223-bootstrap-geometry-theory-space/

To try to make things clearer, the computational view does the regular atomistic thing of imagining existence to be based on some level of fundamental stabilty. So that is where computational models of mind go wrong - they expect the neural code to be some kind of simple compositional deal.

But semiotics - to boil it down - takes the opposite metaphysical position of basing everything on a presumption of fundamental instability (what folk used to call the edge of chaos, or criticality).

So top down regulative constraints work because the underlying material reality is exactly on the point between breaking down and reforming. It is poised in a condition of maximum instability. Which is how a little nudge, an infinitesimal push, can tip the physics one way or the other.

That explains how mental states - as systems of signs, habits of interpretance - can interact in ways that pragmatically connect with the goings on of the material world. The world is poised at its tipping point, not stuck in some undynamic rut from which it would be impossible to budge.

So that regulation of material instability is what semiotic theory can explain. That is its metaphysical paradigm in a nutshell.

In neuroscience, computationalism still dominates. Folk know neuron spikes are some kind of code. But generally, they don't then have a clear way of relating that to a coherent model as they are still thinking that the activity must be computational and so based on some ground of "hardware" stability.

Even in biology, the full force of a semiotic shift in thought is only just beginning. It is only in the last decade that biophysics has had the tools to actually view cellular processes at the level of the nanoscale molecular machinery.

Life is matter poised on the point of falling apart and yet nudged to keep going, continually reforming, by a (genetic) system of signs. Thus the organic can be defined in contrast to the mechanical in terms of this foundational thought - semiosis is the regulation of fundamental instability.

The structure and apparent motion of stars doesn't match what we're expecting given our gravitational model. Hence the need to invent black holes. — Terrapin Station

Ha. A paid up member of the flat earthers. It's only a rumour things disappear over the horizon because the world is curved.

That doesn't indicate that there is anything inherent within GR which would make you expect to find a black hole, it indicates that certain types of stars when understood under GR make you expect to find a black hole. — Metaphysician Undercover

Another flat earther. In 1915, Schwarzchild had already extracted the basic cosmological implication of general relativity being true. A dense enough lump of matter would have to produce the local curvature that would become a complete gravitational collapse. That comes directly out of the equations.

And it is one of the ironies of intellectual history that Roy Kerr announced his simplification of Einstein's equations that could account for a realistic solution for a spinning black hole at the very same conference called to discuss the discovery of quasars. Unlucky for Kerr, it took quite a few more years for it to be realised that quasars were the product of black holes. So at the conference many wandered off or catnapped as he gave what seemed like an obscure mathematical technical paper at the time.

Now of course astronomers are drumming up public money so they can take a "photograph" of Sagittarius A*, the super massive black hole at the centre of our own galaxy.

In the case of our brains the disharmony is fundamental. Inconsistencies arising in the lower brain directly threaten the very essence of our higher brains - rationality. — TheMadFool

The neuroscientists have looked. The answer is in. Everything works together fine on the whole. It is not unnatural to jerk your hand off a hot surface even if your spine seems a rather lowly level of thinking matter to grant such an important decision to. And I would rather be driven by a driver competent enough to be mindlessly negotiating the traffic with their mid brain habits rather than the nervous learner where the prefrontal is having to navigate a blizzard of unfamiliar sensations with uncertain results.

The biggest threat to rationality is in fact just badly trained habits of thought. Folk can latch on to an untested idea and feel a passionate conviction for it. They are indeed stuffed if they mistake that lower brain evaluation of their own competence at rationalisation as the truth of things.

'Snoopy' and 'dog' are independent atomic concept respectively. — quine

In what sense are either not composed of multiple instances of experience?

You might mean that words, to behave in "the right way" - act like a conjunctive arithmetic - would have to be treated as atomistic particulars ... even when they are actually general umbrella terms. But it is clear that being atomistic is not what word meanings actually are.

It's funny how he specifically targets pragmatism's affirmative approach, which is akin to apokrisis's theories on this thread. So as applied to apokrisis' view, his assumption of survival has already made his theory dead in the water, due to not questioning the very assumption of the argument to begin with. — schopenhauer1

Except you forget that my naturalism has been checked out all the way down. So I am happy to ask the question whether nature is natural. Why does life even exist if physical existence is mechanical and meaningless - as its entropic story appear to suggest? And that naturalism explains why negentropic structure is needed to allow entropification to occur. The basic unifying dynamic of existence has been exposed. And it turns out that the mechanical view was wrong. The cosmos itself is organic in being a semiotic dissapative structure.

Of course you can dispute that new metaphysics, argue with it as a theory. That is when we turn to the empirical evidence to see whose theory best explains what we observe.

And you know that I've made that argument often enough in terms of modern romantically striving western consumerist culture and the entropic desires of a bazillion barrels of buried, energy dense, fossil fuels.

So I am hardly guilty of affirmative bias - in either the guise of pollyannism or pessimism. Instead I'm quite happy being the scientist putting competing theories to the test. It just so happens that nature itself affirms its own immanent organicism - existence as the universal growth of "reasonableness".

What does it mean, exactly, when you say you start with a head full of every kind of possibility? — darthbarracuda

I hesitate to give the usual answer, but since you insist, I mean vague possibility. So a state of informational symmetry that could be broken a countable vast number of ways.

Possibility doesn't have to be an ensemble of distinct states like marked balls in a bag. Instead it can be a state or relatively unformed indistinctness out of which distinct possibilities are forced into counterfactual definiteness as the hand reaches in to grasp for some thing.

ou said "less is more", but in my opinion it should be "more is more" so long as efficiency and adaptability are maintained within some set threshold. — darthbarracuda

But I'm not the one trying to impose a monotonic dynamic on the discussion. I am simply trying to correct for that tendency to privilege bottom up construction in telling the story of nature. So I have no problem that there is both construction and constraint, each being fully expressed. That is in fact what full blooded holism demands.

And note how you make consciousness synonymous with in the moment attention. My definition of being mindful extends to include habitual level awareness. So that is the diachronic view of the holist. Memory, or the whole weight of a life of experience, is "doing" the "being conscious". We grow a close modelling fit for the world and so in the moment, only tiny tweaks need to be made to tat running state of mind. Again this is in complete contrast to computational thinking where every moment is a new state of information to be data processed so that it generates some mental representation.

So when I say less is more, I mean the fewer tweaks needed, the better the running model. The less attention needs to fix, the more powerful it becomes as it is being now very narrowly devoted to whatever turns out to be the remaining focus of uncertainty.

This actually shows up physically in comparative neurology. Chimps are smart, but we are smarter. So who do you think devotes more primary visual cortex to the tiny central focus of vision? It is because we are better at predicting the contents of our peripheral vision that we can justify devoting more neural resource to whatever needs to be the centre of our attention. Tunnel vision becomes wired in because we are more successful at ignoring the world in general.

Well in neuroscience it has led to this almost crazy obsession with the possibility that cells are talking to each other in codes of electrochemical pulses. I mean what are these guys smoking? ;)

This explains the seeming regularity of experience better than reference to an embodied organ which differs from person to person. — Moliere

So by your dualistic reasoning, every congenitally blind person ought to report imagining colours, every congenitally deaf person would still imagine noises, every teetotaller would still know the feeling of drunkenness, etc. After alll, something may be missing in terms of inputs to drive brain activity but we all partake in the one mind substance, right?

It could have been a bi-color, for all we can tell, and the tri-color vision just came along for the ride, or was sexually selected for, or was a random mutation and a seismic event wiped out those with bi-color vision. — Moliere

Well the usual speculative evolutionary story goes that mammals generallly did go bicolour or dichromatic and red-green colour blind because they were night creatures during the dinosaur era. Then primates added a pigment to allow for sharp red-green discrimination. And a reasonable reason for that was so they could spot ripe fruit in dense foliage. Which would happen to be a good example of evolving a sign detector to read the signs being made by other parts of nature.

Judgment is useful in non-social environments too, to be sure. Learning how to judge, and further how to make adjustments to said judgment, can reap many rewards. But I'd say that the structure of experience, as much as judgment plays a part in our behavior and functions, differs from this. — Moliere

So what does your "judgement" entail as a neurological concept? It does seem to imply a hard dualism of observer and observables. It does give primacy to acts of attentive deliberation where I am pointing out how much is being done automatically and habitually, leaving attention and puzzlement as little to do as is possible. So talk of judgement puts the emphasis in all the wrong places from my anticipatory modelling point of view. Just the fact that judgements follow the acts strikes another bum note if the impressions of present have already been generally conceived in the moment just prior.

Doesn't make sense. You must mean concepts can be combined but not decomposed. If concepts can be composed, then they would be composites. So you might be wanting to say that concepts are the atomistic, non-decomposable, units that can then be used to compose.

But atomism is disproven in physics now. And even in language use, it is clear that instead organisation and particularisation are created by contexts of constraint.

The word "dog" limits reference to a class of phenomenon fairly tightly. Talking of the brown dog restricts things even more.

So constraints can be combined reducing the freedom of the possible with any arbitrary degree of precision a situation might require. And there is an atomism of a kind in that composability. But concepts don't have to rigidly possess particular fixed properties as atomism implies. Instead they only need to restrict interpretations, and they don't even have to do that more than loosely much of the time.

The strawberry appears different to the viewer under different conditions. The scientist measures the same length of light coming from the strawberry under these various conditions. — dukkha

The disconnect is the other way around. We still think we see red even though there is now no actual "red" wavelength light being emitted.

So the brain corrects for the missing light by being able to imagine perceptually what the same scene would look like under ordinary light.

But the upshot is the same. The point is that the world has no colour anymore than a chemical has a taste or an air vibration has a noise. So if we are understanding the world in terms of neurally constructed qualia, then what kind of thing are they really?

My answer is we have to think of them as signs or symbols. Colours, noises, tastes and other qualia are encodings of physical energies.

Now most people don't take that as much of an answer. But it is not as if the physical energies are much less mysterious once we start to delve scientifically into the reality of material being. We soon discover that we haven't really shaken off our qualitative impressions of the world when we try to imagine light as little wriggly lines of something.

So the same applies to the mental side of the equation. Scientifically, a generalised theory of signs - that is, semiotics - is going to have to be the best way of making sense of phenomenal experience.

Yet I find it hard to believe that you were actually subconsciously predicting all these insane possibilities as you mentioned. — darthbarracuda

My point was the opposite. These were all things I could be consciously conjuring up, but then in fact I am effortless ignoring. Just being aware at a general background level of "being in my familiar room" is enough to suppress a vast amount of craziness.

In dreams, of course, we aren't plugged into a real setting and so the imagination does run riot in just that way. The lack of an ecological or situated state of mind means there is no organised state of constraint to suppress the perceptual invention.

Again, this goes back to the top down logic of systems, where the way things work is by the creating of states of constraint that narrow and shape degrees of freedom. So at any moment, it is possible I could be imagining anything. But the more I'm plugged into some actual place with its affordances and the kinds of things natural to the situation, the more constrained my state of mind will be.

So the contrast is with the input/output model of a computer where a vision of the world is thought to be constructed in jigsaw like fashion by the elaborate gluing together of a multitude of sensory data points. The view gets constructed by figuring out the details from the bottom up.

Instead now I start with a head full of every kind of possibility and start to limit that in a top down fashion so it is reasonably predictive of what is likely to happen next in terms of some flow of sensory elements. I generate the idea of the room from memory and so pretty instantly will notice anything that sharply deviates from my forward model of it.

I sort of suspected that Kant might come up, given the Kant-esque nature of cog-sci. — Moliere

Kant is a familiar reference point. But my argument is more properly Peircean or biosemiotic.

Colors would just be accidents, and I'd infer that they actually do look different for each of us, in the same way that we have different behaviors which result from various brain functions (behaviors which are products of judgment, at least -- not heart beats and such). — Moliere

Of course we can't compare our experiences to know that your red is my red. in that final analysis, there is a brute lack of counterfactuality that thus winds up in an explanatory gap. But quite a lot of telling comparisons can be made on the way to that ultimate impasse. So for instance everyone sees yellow as the brightest hue, and also doesn't see brown as the blackish yellow it really is. And that phenomenological commonality is explained in complete fashion by the known (rather jury-built) neurological detail of the visual pathways.

So in the end, our yellows might indeed be different as experiences. Yet we can track the story right down towards this final question mark and find that similar neuroscience is creating similar mental outcomes. Thus we are not getting a strong reason for the kind of doubt - the talk of the purely accidental - that you might want to introduce to motivate a philosophy of mind argument.

And that said beliefs about mental processes and a presumed sort of faith in emergence are what give these sorts of inferences from this image their persuasive "umph". — Moliere

I'm trying to be quite clear that talk of emergence is very much reductionist handwaving most of the time. It is taking the idea of physical phase transitions - the idea of properties like liquidity emerging as a collective behaviour at some critical energy scale - and treating consciousness as just another material change of that kind.

But I am arguing the exact opposite. I am saying there is a genuine "duality" in play. The brain is a semiotic organ and so it is all about a modelling relation based on the play of "unphysical" signs. So material physics isn't even seeing what is going on. No amount of such physics could ever produce anything like what the brain actually does by just adding more of the same and relying on some kind of collective magic.

Of course physics does self organise and that kind of emergence is a really important correction to physicalist ontology. But semiosis is yet another story on top of that again.

"stripping away the backdrop truth" -- because I'm rather uncertain that the backdrop truth is, well, actually true given its Kantian backdrop. — Moliere

Ah well. Forget any mention of Kant then. This is Peirce so "truth" is pragmatic. We have already shifted from requiring that the world be represented in some veridical fashion. We are now viewing cognition in the way modern neuroscience would recognise - modelling that is ecologically situated, coding which is sparse, perception that is only interested in the degree to which uncertainty can be pragmatically minimised.

Why does the eye only have three "colour" pigments when evolution could have given us as many as we liked? Less is more if you already have in mind the few critical things you need to be watching out for.

One such problem would be the over-emphasis on the power of judgment with respect to experience, as is revealed by such language as 'the brain talks to the ganglion' — Moliere

Neuroscience has a ton of more technical jargon. But it is a basic fact of neural design that every neuron has hundreds of times more connections feeding down from on high than it has inputs coming up from "the real world". So just looking at that anatomy tells you that your prevailing state of intention, expectation and memory has the upper hand in determining what you wind up thinking you are seeing.

If you know pretty much exactly what should happen in the next instant, you can pretty much ignore everything as it does happen a split second later. And thus you also become exquisitely attuned to any failures of the said state of prediction. You know what requires attentive effort in the next split second - the hasty reorientation of your conceptions that then, with luck, allow you to ignore completely what does happen after that as you have managed now to predict it was going to be the case.

So yes. This doesn't tally with the usual notions of how the mind should work. But that is because the phenomenology as we focus on it is naturally about all our constant failures to get predictions right. It seems that the homuncular "I" is always chasing the elusive truth of an ever surprising reality. However that introspective view by definition is only seeing things that way because there is such a bulk of events successfully discounted in every passing instant.

For example, in the second that just passed, I was effectively, subconsciously, predicting that Donald Trump was not about to barge into my room, an asteroid was not about to plough into the park outside my window, my foot wasn't about to explode in a shower of fireworks. So that is what brains do - allow us to discount a near infinite ensemble of possibilities as that which is almost infinitely unlikely.

In your terminology, that seems a hell of a lot of judgement in relation to a tiny fraction of experience. It is just that we don't really give much weight to how much we both routinely predict successfully, and also discount unthinkingly as too crazy to even consider (although we can pull them out conceptually at any time as I just did).

So again, that is why I stress this extra constraint of ecological validity. Philosophy of mind does have a habit of stripping it away as it searches atomistically for a foundation of qualia. Yet it is the pragmatic relation that a mind has with the world that is central to accounting for the mind causally.

It seems to me that if the strawberry images are not red, then there must be some means of determining this in reality, no? What means are those? — Moliere

Your argument exposes that this can't be about simple emergence via compositional interactions. But in talking about a digital pixel display - designed to fool the brain in that precise fashion - then it does start to seem that composition is somehow the right register of thought.

To simplify the story, we should think of the world simply having some wavelength peak of reflectance at some point of the environment. Let's call that X. And then from the get-go, the brain - speaking down at the very front line in the ganglion cells in the retina - are already making a more complex computation. They never see this X. They are already seeking a comparison with other (remembered) values. So X is being compared to Y. Or more generically (that is dichotomously, as in opponent channel processing) X is being compared to not-X.

So the situation is Kantian or semiotic from the neural get-go. We don't see X, the thing in itself. We are already into a response that is the sign representing the psychological "fact" of a contrast. We don't see some pixel scale strength dollop of some particular physical wavelength. We have already crossed the "epistemic cut" and are representing purely some difference that makes a difference - the experience of seeing X in terms of that meaning we are not seeing not-X. That is, we are seeing what we see in terms of an actual contrast with a remembered context or conception. Raw input has already been transformed into pure sign or signal at the first neurological step.

So now we have a story where ordinary visual judgements are made ecologically - we apply everything we know to interpret the scene. And this state of "best fit" conception acts all the way top down to frame our neural responses.

An isolated ganglion cell gets a ton of outside help to make up its mind. The wider brain can see that this is a plate of strawberries in a weird light. It shouts at the ganglion cells, that (using the chat about grey and teal pixels being used here) the grey or low level white actually should be understood as a relative absence of the dominating teal hue and so - by logical implication - a suppressed presence of redness.

The point again is that the brain never sees anything real directly. The world just doesn't have that kind of contextuality in which wavelength peak X is meaningfully an absence of every other wavelength possibility. That comparison - the one that turns a meaningless variation into a difference that makes a difference - depends entirely on the existence of the further thing of a memory-based comparison, a response by an observer who says that the facts have to be either a "this" or a "that". Either the world is X or not-X in terms of our private modelled realm of signs.

So what I am arguing against is any kind of colour realism. And talk of higher level emergence from the collective interactions of composite parts is still going to create the question of what colour are the pixels really.

Instead it is comparisons (counterfactual constraint or forced symmetry breakings) all the way down. Even grey is about the comparative absence and presence of "black" and "white".

This extends to talk about qualia. When we talk about the redness of red, we are repeating what is happening down at ground level on a grand scale. We are stripping away the levels and levels of conception or context that give the "computations" of the brain/mind their ecological validity. We are just saying pay attention to what it feels like to be "seeing red". And that strips away from qualia talk the backdrop truth that what is really going on is that we are (just as much) seeing a mental state of not-green (which more complexly is itself either a dominating presence of red wavelength light, or - another way to see not-green - a relative absence of blue-yellow channel activity).

Same old one note lament. You make the choice to view everything as pointless and whine on and on about it.

Yet life as normal people experience it is a mix of ups and downs. As I said, once you get into the lived complexity of our feelings about events and meanings, then you can start to see that what has most value is efforts in the name of purposes. It's a sad fact for you (as it destroys your excuse to whinge) but constructed meanings are fine. Why climb a mountain? Well it hurts in a way that is fun. Who cares if a pessimistic neuroscientist says that is an endorphic delusion.

But I'm wasting my breath. The way you have constructed the meaning for your own life is that it utterly lacks purpose. So every effort or action is a harm and a pain. Congratulations for adopting such a dull one note socially constructed idea. You may have biological level depression. So your personal umwelt may chime with this one-noteness you want to claim as existentially universal. But I am happy to get on with a more complex level of ethical analysis when talking philosophically about the human condition.

Are we sure that this is the work of our lower brains? — TheMadFool

I'm giving the simplified version, but it is like a short circuiting as you said. The lower emotional areas are involved in normal speech acts, giving the felt tone and emphasis. But a sudden startled response is a reflexive response - a quick physiological reorientation to get prepared while the more complex analysis by the higher brain starts trying to catch up.

So normally everything would work together in smoother fashion. But when things are surprising, we get a quick flush of emotional "getting ready" in a fifth of a second, followed by the full attentional analysis after half a second. And in that time we have yelped or sworn, as well as jumped or tensed and started to focus our attention.

The way to think about it is that we need to react to the world as fast as possible. So the brain is set up to start with a quick and dirty emergency response - shit, something's happening. Then a split second later, the more considered analysis can kick in.

Thus the lower brain is about quick simple habits. The higher brain is about creative and considered plan making. And they work in combination, but with slightly different inherent speeds.

I shall focus on verbal responses as indicators of our state of mind while experiencing shocking events. — TheMadFool

There is a prosaic answer. A "lower brain" area - the cingulate cortex - is responsible for expressive vocalisation in social animals. So chimps hoot and howl in an "emotional" fashion using this bit of brain. Then human speech built levels of more abstract motor planning - capable of supporting syntactical speech acts - above this.

So when we get a jolt of adrenaline, the cingulate kicks in with the rote expletives. Instead of just howling, we exclaim god damn or holy shit. But the reasons are the same.

In the same way reading words like fuck create a cingulate level shock. Bad language leaps out and catches us at that more basic emotional valuing level.

The religious, sexual or scatalogical connotations of the words is a learnt association. The cingulate just wants to make a noise, and what comes out most naturally is any language that has that association to its job of evaluating shocking things even before the higher brain can turn around and focus its full attention.

The point is that you want to found your position on the transcendental subject. Good luck with the pure solipsism that ensues.

Yeah. But only if they live in some other reality rather than this actual world of ours. So natural values are not abstract in the way that your affirmative values are. Again you are peddling the anti-naturalistic fallacy.

I mean, I am a consequentialist. I'm not exactly going to endorse paradoxical agent-centered restrictions — darthbarracuda

That's terrific. But the said moral agent has to be actually rational, not neurotic, psychopathic, autistic, etc. Which in turn means the agent must have values that are "natural" under my definition of them.

It's just as I've been saying from the beginning - affirmative morality is inherently aggressive and hypocritical, especially in regards to the edges of its domain. — darthbarracuda

LOL. Says the guy who fantasises about pessimism having the responsibility, because there is the capability, of wiping humanity out with nukes.

So why don't we stop beating around the bush and admit and agree on this: life was never meant to be enjoyable and it's childishly absurd to believe the universe was meant to make us happy or comfortable. — darthbarracuda

You keep making claims I don't make. Everything winds up back with your personal neuroses.

Wait, what argument? — darthbarracuda

http://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/59160

I responded to your phenomenology point by reminding you I posted a detailed argument on that which you have continued to ignore.

As to the rest of your post, it was your usual lament that I'm not taking your personal feelings seriously. But then this is a philosophy forum, not a mental health support forum.

You keep trying to nudge these phenomenal experiences out of the picture as if they're not important or relevant to the discussion. — darthbarracuda

But in fact I said that the phenomenology as I experience it is that pain and pleasure go together. They appear inextricably intertwined in everything I find meaningful. Sport, love, kids, work, study - its got to hurt or feel like an effort as part of it being rewarding and worthwhile.

So the phenomenology is irreducibly complex. And that is indeed the important and relevant fact in this discussion so far as I'm concerned.

Blah, blah. Etc, etc. — darthbarracuda

Sorry, I looked hard but couldn't discover any actual counter-arguments in the rest, just a lot of laughably lame ad homs.

I mean "scienced-up taoism"? In what world is that going to hurt?

To assume what we tend to do as a culture is what is right because it is what the culture expects us to do, is a circularity. — schopenhauer1

The logical presumption is that what a culture does must be pragmatically reasonable in some sense. It has to work in self perpetuating fashion. And therefore if as you claim, individuals are free to dissent. to be non-compliant, on the whole, individuals must be agreeing with the world they are collectively creating.

So if you actually apply logic to the situation, then cultures have to be doing something right. They are the expression of the collective behaviour of a lot of individuals who could instead dissent.

And this natural reasonableness is why you have to resort to extraordinary claims - like regular folk are all operating under some kind of illusion. If only they would open their eyes (like you) they would see its all a heaping pile of shit.

Of course I criticise the developed world's current cultural settings. I say they are focused on short-term gain at the expense of long-term costs. We have become entrained to the imperatives of fossil fuels in indeed quite a blind fashion. Oh if only the normies would open their eyes. :)

But that criticism accepts that the way things are must in some sense work for people - who after all, have some degree of choice. My worldview doesn't just say existence itself is meaninglessly shit. There is the very real possibility of living a life in positive fashion. We can all aim higher than consolation, catharsis, and other justifications for assuming attitudes of helplessness.

Unfortunately, since you can't really think outside the little box you made for yourself, you don't realize "rebelling" is not simply doing the "opposite" but rather the idea of not even considering it as the assumed position in the first place. — schopenhauer1

Sadly, your whole position is based on dichotomies of opposition, which is why your arguments turn dualistic. I am advocating dichotomies of the complementary - so yes, Taoism is one of the philosophies that gets that.

You want to divide the world up into opposing absolutes. The world being completely "the bad" is how you can - tragically/heroically - imagine yourself as the entrapped "good". The basic Romantic trope. Liberate me from this constraining world.

But I make the other case. There is no good and bad. There are instead only the complementary limits on being that seek their equilibrium. So at the level of human social being, those complementary limits on free action are the instincts towards competition and co-operation. Living well is doing both in the right way. Hit the balance and life feels great.

And the psycho-social sciences show that is the correct evolutionary view of course.

You're Brady (the bald guy) here.. Instead of the Bible, it is Systems theory.. — schopenhauer1

A quite fascinating glimpse inside your power fantasies. But isn't it odd that you are pleased by the triumph of evolutionary reasonableness in that clip?

This is kind of full of shit.. You are not above the fray.. You betray your own Romanticism- it's just of a different kind, "the reasonableness of the system". It's as if you drank the Kool-Aid Bateson et al was passing out and you went off the deep end.. turning the circularity in on itself.. Romanticizing Peirce.. You don't even know what you mean anymore except you don't like the sound of pessimism because its dark and scary to you. — schopenhauer1

So I'm suppose to mistake this for an argument? Blah, blah, blah, you're the real romantic, take that and no returns. ;)

I don't see how the scrip of the "uncompliant" who does not further the position would be of much benefit.. If anything, it gunks up the works. — schopenhauer1

It's not a problem if its just a phase. Toddlers can be very uncompliant. But we expect them to grow up. Same with teenagers. And on the whole, noncompliance is superficial - a hairstyle, a dress code, a collection of slogans.

There is nothing as restrictive on your freedom as being a punk, emo, hacktivist, gender fluid, or whatever. Genres are particularly intolerance of true difference. Again a familiar irony of modern life.

One of the nice things about being a pessimist is that you have nothing to lose if you're wrong. — darthbarracuda

Yeah. You have already embraced failure. So one less thing to worry about I guess.

These naturalistic philosophies irk me for partly the same reason Stoicism irks me. It's the idea that the stance we take must be one of bear and grin it. — schopenhauer1

Well I don't say that except to ridicule the idea that we have the choice implied.

Naturalism would be about accepting our natural condition as the necessary starting point for any personal meaning. It doesn't say we then have to accept the starting point as the place we stay. But it does encourage us to inquire into the reasons why nature is the way it is - which then tells us something about the reasonableness of our own further acceptances or departures as a matter of personal choice.

Rather, the rebellious stance is not rejecting the intertwined nature of society and the individual, but sees the situation for the raw deal it can be....It is a difference on perspective of the system, not a difference of metaphysical position. — schopenhauer1

It is a difference at the basic level. It relies on the claim that there is this mythical "we" who "exist" in ontically separate fashion. Whereas I am saying that "we" is a social and biological construction. Romanticism literally was an idea whose history can be traced through modern culture. You can see people constructing the image and then trying to live the part.

And it wasn't a wrong response in itself. It was quite natural in that it was the social construction of individuals stripped down to devote themselves creatively to abstractions - like being heroes on a battlefield or economic self-starters. This notion of the outsider, the rebel, the uncompliant, the one who resists out of personal dignity - its all a bunch of social imagery dedicated to the furtherance of the cause that is modern society. Everything you so "celebrate" is the script being handed out to today's maintenance crew. That's the irony.

We do not have to be willing vessels of the system even though we must be a part of it while alive. — schopenhauer1

And there you go. The transcendent bit that completes your dualistic metaphysics. They can do everything to you ... but break your will. You can have the ultimate revenge ... of not believing the bastards. The self is ultimately not part of the world. It can stand outside and pass its (admittedly impotent) judgement. And for the Romantic, that is what counts. The inalienability of the subjective. The helpless martyrdom becomes the very proof of the metaphysics. They could do everything to control your being ... but they couldn't force you not to suffer! :)

As Thorongil and I pointed out, the will-denying hero in this conception will probably never accomplish his goal, but his stance here is what matters. — schopenhauer1

Yep. I've read the book, seen the picture, heard the song. Impotence in the face of social conformism is not a sign of failure. Instead, it is the resulting degree of suffering that proves this metaphysics of the transcendent self right.

But it is bad metaphysics even if cathartic as light entertainment. Whereas naturalism supports a culture of self actualisation and positive psychology - the cultivation of the habits of potency, the ability to engage with the world in socially fruitful fashion.

To remind you, this is the (false) dichotomy on which you got the OP started...

At this point of birth into a particular society, are the individuals truly their own person, or are the simply perpetuators of the social relations?

So your claim was either/or. Either we are truly our own person, or we are simply helpless perpetuators. No middle ground. No interaction. Just a dualism cashed out in the familiar way - a mechanical and mindless world vs the Romantic "other" of the transcendent self.

My reply - expressing the holistic systems point of view where nature is an immanent whole - was...

So you already dismiss the alternative that the social relations are the source of the personal individuation? The capable individual is what society in fact has in mind?

I've been perfectly happy to argue my end. Selfhood is inextricably intertwined with social being. Social being is inextricably intertwined with biological and then physical being. So yes, nature is divided, but still a whole. There is a unity of opposites that underpins everything in immanent fashion.

My organicism - in being semiotic - even recognises the distinct grades of autonomy of purpose or interests that then arise within this overall connectedness. So it does count that there are "accidents of mechanism", such as a hierarchy of codes - DNA, followed by neurons, followed by words, followed by numbers. Each is generally constrained by nature in terms of the laws of thermodynamics - the globalised imperative to entropify. Yet each is a level of mechanism for achieving negentropic autonomy - localised purpose, localised interests.

So within this naturalistic framework, it is possible to see how words made a difference to Homo sapiens - we did become self-representational individuals working within a sphere of social relations. And with numbers, we became scientific creatures, living within machine-like economic worlds.

Thus there is plenty about how we have become that can be questioned and criticised.

But my point is that I have a framework that makes sense of such an inquiry. It reflects the actual structure of reality. Whereas you are recycling the machine vs spirit dichotomy that divides the natural world towards two unreal conceptions of existence - the material world as being brutely mechanical and the mental world as being transcendentally "other". And no good ethics can come from a faulty model of reality.

I never stated that we can transcend reality- simply cope with our situation and prevent future suffering. — schopenhauer1

If that was all you said - making that pragmatic point - then of course I agree. But I don't see where you have argued that society is a natural phenomenon, or that nature - and so the cosmos - might have a proper non-contingent purpose.

Your framework sets up existence as mechanistic and contingent. I argue instead that it is organic and telic - with the proviso that this does then explain how existence also does have accidental and machine-like aspects as part of the deal.

So what I have objected to is the reductionist simplicity of your ethical conclusions and I have opposed them with the irreducible complexity of a holistic or systems view of existence.

Also, the only positive claim you made "to live hard" has NO justification. — schopenhauer1

But I justified that in detail. You are simply asserting that I'm wrong without countering my actual argument.

And here we can see your bias poking through.. Life is a gift.. there we go. — schopenhauer1

My little joke. You exaggerate by calling life a burden. I say hey no, its a gift. But clearly - in saying that I am opposed to any transcendental framing of the human condition - I think the whole notion of life being "given" as either a burden or a gift is nonsensical in its invocation of some external telos.

Why do you keep insisting on the naturalistic fallacy. — schopenhauer1

So do you understand the fallacy? It applies just as much to taking the undesirable in terms of feelings to be "the bad".

I certainly take the naturalistic view. But that is something different.

So you think I have trapped myself in a self-refuting argument.. — schopenhauer1

You sound upset at being accused of vicious circularity. And yet only a few posts back....

The pessimist argument, if you want to cast it as an institution (which is contestable in itself), has the goal of broadening people to the idea that they are forced by other institutions for the sake of nothing. — schopenhauer1

...right. So now we are on the same page in agreeing that hierarchies escape circularity. There is the more general view.

Yet now you need to deal with the naturalness of hierarchies - the way they must emerge in nature as chaos or contingency already speaks to order or regulation. Only the notion of the meaningful can produce counterfactually the notion of the meaningless. And this is the bind for your position.

Nihilism is reductionist about physical existence. God is dead. Humans are meat machines. The Cosmos is without a point. The second law seems to confirm it all. Ahead lies only the nullity of a Heat Death, the curtain brought down on a meaningless fluttering of complex existence.

So as you climb to your higher level view of reality, it all counts for nothing. That is reality's big secret. And only a select few are brave enough to confront it face on. (Wait, is that the institutional figure of the solipsistic romantic already sneaking into the room?)

But again, half the story is only half the story. Reductionism says nothing on its lonely ownsome. And dividing the story into two - mechanical physics and romantic spirit - is only dualism. A doubling down on the reductionism. So you need a story that binds everything into an organic whole - one that can show how material/efficient cause and formal/final cause are systematically ... that is, hierarchically ... related.

Now the meaningful and the meaningless can be related in formal, even measureable, terms.

You frame the argument as if "pragmatic goods" are already the default goal! — schopenhauer1

Or rather, the inevitable outcome. Existence is whatever works. I mean you haven't even tried to argue against the evolutionary points I've made. You already accept the basic logic of pragmatism. Your claim is instead that you can transcend reality in romantic fashion to scoff at its illusions of doing anything worthwhile.

But that in itself is contradictory as I have pointed out - the anti-naturalistic fallacy.

It is as bad to judge reality wrong as right just for simply being what it is. I don't think you have got the force of that yet.

Not just for me but for anyone who is caught in the harms of this or that situation of life. — schopenhauer1

Ah, now back to harms again. We speak of the negative values that themselves demand the counterfactuality that which would have been the good. We are doubling down on the self-contradiction so that first existence is meaningless, now it is structurally black. Yet if we are weighing harms in the balance, we have already admitted the issue is about balance. And for normies or zombies, the phenomenological truth is that pain and pleasure are intwinned in the way I describe as the desire to "live hard".

Your failure to argue back I took as acceptance you had no useful counter. And now we are back to just repeating assertions about existence being obviously meaningless and obviously bad.

Now, by talking about once you SEE what is going, by living your day out with this in mind, you can CONSOLE with others and have more understanding about the harms that befall us all.. — schopenhauer1

Well you understand why I object to this pragmatic interest in consolation - lets all get in a dark room and have a wee cry together. It smacks too much of wanting a socially acceptable excuse for not engaging in the gift of life that has been given to you.

I'm not heartless. I agree that the modern world is fairly shit in some key aspects of its organisation. It can be a struggle to find a place in a consumer society that demands a higher level of individualisation and self-actualisation than is naturally comfortable for many people. Yes, we can certainly see how a fancier wristwatch or faster car is in the end quite a pointless measure of anything so far as human nature is concerned.

But you can't diagnose or correct imbalance unless you have a workable theory about a life in balance.

So while pessimism likes to frame matters in terms of absolutes, pragmatism says the way things are must work in some sense - otherwise it couldn't exist. And yet also - taking the hierarchical view that gets us out of vicious circularity - we can see that what works in the short run might count as failure in the long run. And in seeing the precise nature of the imbalance, we already can see how it might be corrected.

It's not rocket science.

But again, talk of consolation is talk of learnt helplessness. It is getting comfortable with failure. And I can't see the point of that as a supposed ethical system. It is not the intelligent response.

However, I see you as in fact the callous one. Here you are.. prophet of the SYSTEM.. professing to know what it wants.. it wants perpetuation by strengthening through challenges presented to the individual and individual's collectively coming together to strengthen society to create more individuals etc.. Whether the individual experiences harm in all this challenge strengthening does not matter to you.. Who is the cult leader here? — schopenhauer1

I thought I said I in fact value pain as part of the deal. But I also made a careful distinction between accidental pain and pain that is indeed part of some valued deal.

These are the kind of subtleties of my position that you hurry past so as not to be disturbed from your dogmatic slumbers.

I really don't have to give a shit about whether people see it or not. — schopenhauer1

But your angry language shows you do in fact care. As does your endless reposting of the one argument. Your actions give the game away. In your own words, you are a paid up member of another of those social institiutions performing some meaningless sub-contract.

There...is...no...escape. Heh, heh. It is all quite natural.

A belief or cultural institution that doesn't get out and sell itself is going to shrivel up and die. The church of nihilism is stuck in the same old game of claiming its essential truth.

The only question then is what pragmatic goods does it deliver to its cult followers? It has to be beneficial to their lives in some practical sense.

It is a catharsis more than anything. It is staring it face down. — schopenhauer1

Oh I see. Sounds rather manly and romantic. So the benefit is to one's self-esteem?

Why shouldn't people see this for what it is? Are you advocating for Plato's Noble Lie? — schopenhauer1

Nope. I'm asking what is consistent about claiming existence is essentially meaningless and then getting so het up about people who don't appear to believe your truth. How could it matter if you are being true to your own professed belief here?

Yes but it's the questioning that is important. — schopenhauer1

Why is the questioning important if your answer is that nothing matters?

As usual, pessimism makes no sense. You complain about the pain and futility of existence and then complain about people not appreciating that "fact" as if it could then matter.

If existence is meaningless, then who cares if the majority are delusional? What beneficial meaning is being withheld from them?

And how does it add up that you would seek to make the delusionally comfortable discomforted? If pessimism is so bothered by life's discomforts, why would it have a goal of adding to them?

As usual, nothing has really been thought through.

Is that clear from your careful rebuttal or something? Must be something up with my iPad. That post doesn't seem to have appeared my end yet.

Yep. I've just explained at length why I wouldn't invest a cent in the sad dualistic combo of mechanicalism+romanticism. So what's your point exactly?

LOL. Appealing to subjectivity is metaphysics. You can't have "a position" that doesn't make a claim on some species of counterfactual definiteness.

The essence of our difference is that my immanent naturalism opposes your transcendent Romanticism in believing in the unity of opposites. So any dichotomy reflects nature's irreducible and necessary complexity. A holist is defined by accepting this principle as true. A reductionist is defined by an insistence that instead worlds can actually be broken apart and still make sense.

So - to use the dichotomy that seems most relevant to the pessimist's position - the complaint is that the world contains the bad. And yet the world ought to be good. Therefore the world is fundamentally imperfect and bad. Goodness now counts for nothing in the reductionist calculus that the pessimistic thinker constructs as his cocoon of thought.

But for me - just phenomenologically - that stance is ridiculous. I experience pleasure and pain as inextricably intwinned. I exercise hard because that produces the most exquisite mix of these two things. Likewise, I would live life hard for the same reason. Effort is intrinsically a pain and yet intrinsically a delight.

Reductionist thinking can make a paradox of this basic psychological fact. But holism instead demands its truth. It is natural that the coin of existence has its two complementary faces and the value of each is maximised when we are most truly alive.

So this is what you and DC signally fail to understand - the logic of nature.

You instead have become enslaved to the logic of machines. You think about existence in terms of monadic reduction. Life has to be either all the one or the other. So therefore any bad counts as a blemish on the perfect good, making the whole thing irredeemably bad as the only remaining option.

Yet this is simply to ignore the evidence of your own experience. It is to misunderstand your own nature by imposing on yourself the notion that you are a machine - a notion you then want to violently, romantically, transcendently, reject ... leaving you then with no rational position at all.

I instead understand my nature because I can see why pleasure and pain are psychically joined at the hip. Perfection in the real world lies not in one reigning absolute, the other banished from the kingdom. Instead to flourish is to live with that exquisite balance where you thrash yourself up mountains (both literal and metaphoric) as living hard is living best.

Of course pain can become overwhelming in life. Shit happens. Likewise you can "suffer" from an excess of ease and satisfaction. So imbalance is perfectly possible - indeed it is a given if balance is a goal that relies on the constraint of the accidental.

The standard ethics of the enlightenment should be coming into sight now - as the enlightenment was about humanity waking up to existence of nature (with the sharp understanding of the mechanical being the ironical handmaiden to this larger psychological awakening).

That is, humanistic ethics is focused on creating the opportunity to thrive. Society needs to be organised to remove the accidental sources of the good and the bad in the life of the individual. That way, the individual has the greatest opportunity to be the source of their own exquisite mix of joy and sorrow - to be actually fully alive and not one of DC's monotone zombies or your mechanical maintenance crew.

So pessimism is based on the completely faulty notion of ending the pain inherent in living. But you can see how naturalism only wants to remove the accidental pain - so as to maximise the scope for purposive pain. And likewise, naturalism would want to remove accidental pleasures, to make pleasure properly purposive.

It all makes sense once you have a proper theory of life and nature. You can see what is hollow and pointless about taking drugs - they are accidental sources of pleasure. Although people often take drugs as a crutch to aid socialisation. And so it gets complicated. Socialisation is a natural and purposeful thing - the context that our efforts at individuation require. Social interaction - done right, done hard - hits that exquisite balance of pain and pleasure.

Thus there is a crisp choice when it comes to the metaphysics underlying ethics and aesthetics.

You can go reductionist and view existence in brutely mechanical terms. Which itself must engender the dualistic reaction of the inarticulate howl of Romanticism's transcendental protest. Something has clearly been left out. But now there are no resources with which to think about it.

The alternative is the immanent holism of natural philosophy. Now we see that existence has irreducible complexity. It is meant to be dichotomous and thus about arriving at fruitful balances. And living hard sums that up as that means we are living the life that is the least accidental, the most individuated or personally meaningful. Life is meant to be a deliberate mix of pleasure and pain - the exquisite contrast which we ride so hard that any accidents that do occur are going to be ... spectacular.

Of course a further point in all this is that naturalism is also about nested hierarchies, so "living hard" becomes an imperative now to be balanced across all its many scales. This is where what is best for the individual may exceed what is best for a family, a village, a region, a nation, a planet.

Naturalism - as opposed to romantic/mechanical reductionism - grants mindfulness or semiotic meaning to all these levels of being too. So that larger balancing act, that larger definition of flourishing, has to be worked into the ethical and aethetic story too.

What did I say about irreducible complexity? Heh, heh.

You seem to be mixing two different familiar questions. One is about the nature of your existence - the riddle of consciousness. The other is about the nature of general persistence - the problem of induction.

So a good answer on induction is indeed the existence of memory or history. If those exist, then there is every reason to think the future constrained to some definite degree. It becomes reasonable to expect you will wake up every morning. That propensity exists. And also reasonable to expect there is some smaller chance you won't wake up, as death also exists as a propensity of life.

Then the riddle of consciousness is a longer story. But one brief point is that there may not seem an answer as all our explanations of the world are based on telling the mechanical tale of states of affairs or sets of observables. We have got very skilled in describing reality in a way that pushes the notion of an observer out of the picture being described. And that way of thinking - observerless metaphysics - results in the kind of dualistic mysteriousness that seems so paradoxical. So the remedy is then to develop instead a metaphysics that incorporates observers along with observables, that is, a metaphysics of modelling relations.

Anyway, whatever the answers, your OP seems to mix two foundational questions. So the first order of business is to separate them clearly.