The claim that consciousness is a curse is not really a philosophy of biology claim. It's definitely more poetic although this does not necessarily take away its force, and it's fundamentally sourced from a reflection on the human condition than a reflection on a specific biological feature. — darthbarracuda

Again, my point is that you start from the histrionic and personal position that suffering, in any degree, is an unbearable fact. But most people just don't think that do they? Life has it ups and downs but that doesn't make life not worth living.

So yes. It may be poetic - in being histrionic. But if we want to talk realistically about the place of suffering in human conscious existence, then we need some solid backdrop against which to make some judgement.

You are failing to convince me either on phenomenological or material grounds that there is a general issue as opposed to a personal issue.

I never said it had to be bliss in this case, although I might question why we ought to settle for less (the mediocre). The point is that I think generally life is far worse than mediocre and we're not willing to face this immediately accessible fact. As Ligotti said, life is malignantly useless. — darthbarracuda

So what is your argument against settling for average outcomes? Why would that be mediocre rather contented?

Again, an exaggerated notion of what you deem acceptable distorts every part of your exposition.

Our "telos", or end-point (not the functional point) is death. A tool's function may be to drill holes or hammer nails, but ultimately its final destination is with it breaking and being tossed out. — darthbarracuda

This is silly. Things with a telos in this fashion can't get worn out unless they are used to achieve things. So you could say living and dying without properly living is certainly a waste of a life. Thus the end point of a drill's existence or a person's existence would have to be judged in terms of the negentropy created as well as the entropy spent.

Claiming we grow and flourish during life does not change this fact, and claiming that death is not psychologically problematic is laughably absurd - on the contrary, death is exactly why we have culture, religion, political parties and the family unit as well as a host of other reassuring fictions, such as entertainment or pop-science. — darthbarracuda

Your position relies on constant exaggeration. Mostly we have all those things to deal with the realities of life. To claim they are "exactly" fictions to hide death is more argument by histrionics.

Pessimism is generally less concerned with the lack of meaning than existentialism is. It's more of the combination of the lack of meaning + the inevitable and structurally inherent pain in life that makes life problematic. The abstract notion of the lack of meaning is actually relatively unimportant here, — darthbarracuda

I accept that. But that also makes pessimism less interesting here in being less a metaphysical issue and more a practical one - unless it is actually then related to the philosophy of biology.

what if you're actually right and I never agree with you and live my life in a less-than-positive state - wouldn't that be a tragedy? — darthbarracuda

But my position is not that life is bliss. Things being less than positive is not uncommon. We all know that. However what is histrionic is to then call it all a tragedy.

As soon as a person is born, they are in a state of decay, or being-towards-death. When we live, we are in a state of defense even if we don't realize it. Defending against threats. And ultimately forgetting that we lose in the end. — darthbarracuda

But that is hardly true. We spend a long time growing before we start decaying. So again your position - to the degree it has to depend on these kinds of histrionic claims - is unconvincing.

Therefore a key aspect of pessimistic literature is the disillusionment with the world, the idea that there is nothing here for us, that we have been deceived this whole time. — darthbarracuda

But it was bad metaphysics that did the deceiving - the idea that individual lives must have cosmic or divine significance.

And it is still bad metaphysics to jump to the other extreme of complaining of existence as a complete state of generalised contingency, brute fact, and cosmic insignificance.

Modern understanding confirms life and mind as special in being - in the cosmological sense - very highly developed in terms of complexity, or negentropic organisation. We are at the centre of creation in that way.

And a proper analysis of the human condition ought to respect that objective truth. Which is why the almost instinctive reply to the Pessimist is start paying more attention to the biological and social context that is actually psychologically forming you.

Stop thinking simply, start thinking in terms of reality's complexity if you want to talk accurately about what is true or right.

Instead of "vague" I would use the term "uncertain" — darthbarracuda

That's fine. Just give me the technical definition that would make this an important distinction here in your view.

Is it that your claim is the crisp possibility (like your fear of torture) can't be in anyway unthought or defused once experienced? I'm dubious of that as a psychological fact. I see it as the development of a psychological habit, and habits can be forgotten or at least be unlearned in ways which eventually render them vaguer.

To say that pessimists should suck it up is then, from the perspective of a pessimist, akin to telling a domestic abuse victim to love their spouse. — darthbarracuda

I guess that the other point of view is that when you see a pessimist wallowing in learned helplessness, refusing sensible life advice because of some cosmological world view, then it is natural to lose patience.

If you want to construct a philosophy that naturalises a state which is down to your neurobiology or/and your circumstances - things you could take action on - then really the case is that the door stands open and you are refusing to leave the clutches of the very monster you have constructed

As I say, true existentialism would instead lead towards vagueness or a state of mindless neutrality - the kind of mind state that Eastern mysticism often advertises as its major benefit.

I think this analysis of the horse is the other side of the question, which I've neglected. We need x and y before we can postulate necessity. And perhaps we can view x and y as unstable systems of constraints. Change one entity in the same and you change them all. — Hoo

Remember also that deduction is simply a calculus of constraints. Take one premise, combine it with another, logic tells you what is necessarily the new more specified state of constraint. So deduction is the crisp addition and subtraction of identified or separable constraints. It's a maths of constraint.

And my point is that instability is the necessary flip side of this presumption of stable necessities in life. Instability stands for raw possibility. The world could be anything - if it were not regulated.

So it is not constraint that is unstable. It is fundamental instability (ie: vagueness or Apeiron) that creates some kind of "stuff" for constraints to act upon.

In nature, constraints are in reality more holistic and non-separable. Quantum physics confirms the radical metaphysical truth of this. But still we can mechanically imagine reality in terms of a composition or accumulation of separable constraints. And it is that epistemic vision of existence that standard logic - as a formal calculus of constraints - underwrites. We can imagine reality as a hierarchy of constraints that traps possibility into a particular state of substantial being.

This still seems like the postulation of necessity. Horsesmust be within specific constraints. Our postulates become more specific. But how does one avoid a "If x then y" as a premise from which y can be deduced in the context of x? — Hoo

It is the postulation of necessity. But it allows also for the role played by possibility or contingency. And also distinguishes between epistemic and ontic models of formal and final cause.

So horse becomes nothing but a state of constraint. It is constraints all the way down. But now we must realise how out of pure epistemic blinkeredness, we often class accidental constraints along with the actually naturally necessary. Or indeed, vice versa.

Is a horse still a horse if it is made out of pottery, and created in a factory rather than born of a mare?

Accidents and necessities may be considered quite differently when switching between a mechanical and organic notion of explanation. There may still be postulations and deductions, but within quite contrasting frameworks of thought.

What really matters is that you come to see what will change your life and take you away from holding worldviews — John

This is perhaps the true existential crisis - when there seems no hope of a worldview at all.

The Pessimist is taking comforting refuge in a concrete belief there is no such hope. A life can be built around that. But what if even the absence of such hope can't be known for certain? What if that is as radically unsure?

So there is another big step beyond the self-comfort of Pessimism where instead of confronting the void, we are in confrontation with the vague. ;)

I would suggest a more organic and less mechanical notion of explanation.

Things are explained by pointing to the constraints that bound possibility. This view has the advantage of starting with the idea that anything could be the case. But then limits arise for various reasons to specify what actually is. And yet in so bounding possibility, possibility still remains.

If nature makes a horse, it could be any colour, any size. If the horse is in fact white, or dwarf, then these are further constraints on possibility that explain why this colour and not that, why this size and not some other.

Then of course Aristotle came up with four kinds of "becauses". We can say a horse is what it is because of the specific constraints in terms of what it is made of, how it came to be made, for what reason it was made, and with what design it was made.

So specificity in the world arises from the extent to which there are constraints impinging on naked possibility. And explanation just has to account for those constraints to the degree it epistemically matters. Our own conception of a horse can be vague or more definite - depending on the demands of the situation, the degree to which we need to care.

A donkey is at least horse-like from some angles. Is this really a Lipizzaner stallion if it is not grey?

So what is necessary and what is accidental when it comes to explanations? Confusion arises because we tend to mix up epistemology and ontology.

There is the question of what it would take for us to create "a horse". Then the separate question of how a horse arises in nature - a question which has to include the one of is there "a mind" at work such as to care about sufficiently meeting some set of causal conditions. Is nature really specifying some constraints in terms of formal and final cause, or even material and efficient cause. When it comes to the existence of "a horse" - either as genus or individual - what is actually necessary and what is merely accident (ie: unconstrained possibility).

So an organic approach steps back far enough not to simply assume nature shares our highly epistemic and self-interested approach to forming explanations. We always end up thinking about explanation in terms of how could we replicate or control nature as if it were a machine or device that we wanted to craft. And from there a huge number of familiar philosophical confusions flow.

MU wants to cut the link between sexual hunger and sex. But without the physical manifestation of the sexual hunger, you cannot complete the sex act. — Baden

It mostly all boils down to bad phrasing most likely - we simply lack good language for describing these things in philosophically rigorous way.

But don't we routinely make the joke that men think with their cocks. When it throbs, it is showing it has a mind of its own. So who is feeling the sexual hunger here and acting on it? Your penis-self or your brain-self?

Anyway, I felt MU did pull out a critical point in showing that we can eat out of socialised habit rather than felt desire. And that looked to strike to the heart of whatever it is that TGW might be saying - whatever that really was.

When I said external physical effect (in males) I meant an erection, which is required to complete the act of sex. And sexual hunger is what causes the erection. — Baden

Isn't this just a projection of an overly mechanistic model of causality on to the reality of the situation?

Where is the hunger beyond the throbbing of your penis? Does it really make sense to say a mental event is the cause of the physical event rather than that the mental event is an awareness of that physical event?

Or better yet - given you likely have no causal theory to connect mental and physical events in the first place - we start again all over and build accounts of experience/reality on a more generic causal foundation (like semiosis).

The meat is to-be-acquired, the hunger is to-be-acted-upon. In that sense they are different qualities or kinds of experience, but I am not sure it would be right to say there is a "general thing that is qualia". — John

My argument is that the generality of qualia is the socially constructed idea here and so due to linguistic self-awareness (the speaking which can talk about selves and their states).

So the meat that is to-be-acquired and the hunger that is to-be-acted-upon nicely points out the directionality, the fundamental embodiness, that is primary awareness. The view points from the self to the world, leaving the self outside what it sees.

That is why we call hunger a drive. It is the source of the action rather than the satisfaction. And in culturally-constructed self-awareness, we are meant to now start paying critical attention to the sources of our actions. And here we start to distinguish "pangs" that stand for this concept of "the hunger drive, the cause of eating behaviour".

We check in with ourselves and see if the stomach rumbles. Then we note those autonomic sensations and say to ourselves, see, we are actually hungry. We can sense ourselves in ways that betoken that idea.

Or else we might just be sitting down to eat out of clock-watching habit. If we ask ourselves do we really feel hungry, we might remember feeling nothing much before heading to the kitchen, but then the scent and sight of the food triggers "pangs" - the stomach reflexively gets ready with its surge of gastic juices, the mouth runs with saliva ahead of what it knows is about to happen. If we check in, all the boxes of our sensory definition of "hunger" are getting ticked.

So even if the drive to action is some social habit - the very human thing of stopping to eat because that is what the clock tells us to do - we still psychologise the whole affair and say, we eat because we felt hungry.

Perhaps because the hunger is a kind of 'inner prompting' that exists in itself when the body is at rest and the meat as something to be acquired is elusive and uncertain and requires the effort of bodily exertion and stealth, even animals may feel the 'outer-directedness' of the desire to get the food as feeling distinct from the 'inner-promptingness' of the hunger itself. Perhaps it is these very kinds of animal feeling that form the basis of our conceptually elaborated distinctions. — John

It is not as if there are no internal sensations to speak of. Our bodies are suffused with receptors. But then as SX points out, our embodied sense of self is still very much a plastic construction. We can feel a rubber hand as an extension of ourselves. The "mirror neuron" research is wildly overplayed as the neuro-reductionist secret of human self-awareness, but it does also show how we can empathetically feel the actions or reactions of others as if they were literally part of our "selves".

So yes, primary awareness has structure. It is divided into promptings versus their satisfactions. There is a self that is a collection of promptings and the world that is its satisfactions (and frustrations).

But human self-awareness is a whole new level of experience-structuring. We now represent to ourselves our promptings as a class of things in themselves. We say "I" ate the meat because I was "hungry". We no longer just eat the meat without further thought. We can provide a socially acceptable justification in ways that imply we have the further thing of willed controlled over our own desires.

No, the point is that such axioms result from a description of what is, reality, not from dichotomous reasoning. — Metaphysician Undercover

Empirical claims about "what is" - the kinds of things people say as a result of common experience of the world - were the departure point for Ancient Greek metaphysical inquiry.

So in the world, we see all kinds of objects and non-objects. Is a cloud an object? Is the wind an object? Is a river an object?

Reason is then applied to the question - the unexamined assumption. So the starting point is only self-evident in the sense no one has really thought to question it systematically. It is only axiomatic in being acted upon without being philosophically considered.

Therefore "boundary" is to be read as a property of objects, not as dichotomous to objects. — Metaphysician Undercover

And I accounted for the conditions under which it can be considered a property of an object - if the object has the semiotic power to define its own boundaries. Otherwise the boundary is probably an idea that we ourselves impose on an unbounded nature. It is only us who might be concerned about identifying the true source of the nile or deciding whether some bump on a landscape is a hill or a mountain.

So the question is where do we get this idea of a continuous boundary. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well what bounded objects did you have in mind as an example? Let's see how necessary continuity might be to that idea of it being an object.

The ideal of boundless must be described in a self-evident way to become an axiom. — Metaphysician Undercover

Like the axiom of vagueness you mean? Surely you can see how it arises automatically via a dichotomy with the ideal of the crisp. To be absolutely crisp would be to absolutely lacking in vagueness. And thus, transitively, the same must apply in the other direction.

So if you can tell me about boundedness in any absolute fashion, you will be also telling me about absolute unboundedness as its logical corollary.

And if you can't give that kind of crisp definition of a boundary, then - again logically - your idea of a boundary is rather vague and lacking in metaphysical-strength axiomisation.

I think it comes down to whether you think the primary awareness of the inner milieu counts as self-awareness, as distinct from the reflexive self-awareness brought about by cultural/ symbolic mediation. — John

That's right. There is a self in primary awareness, but it is "off-stage" as the animal's awareness is of the world (as that which is not "self"). So the awareness is purely extrospective in being the view from a self.

The question then is where internal sensations like pangs or hunger or lust may play into this. Are they parts of the "field of sensation" - part of the animal's umwelt - and so in that sense, the animal is seeing "into its self"?

The animal sees the lump of meat. And the animal sees its hunger. And then in unseen fashion, the animal decides the connection that links the two (which could be meat first, then hunger, or hunger first, then the meat).

We can see that talking this way, it is all starting to break down. There is something essentially wrong in treating inner and outer sensation in this fashion - as if they were all just different varieties of the general thing that is qualia.

You are contradicting your proposed axiom though. The axiom was that boundaries are continuous. I objected, saying that this is not self-evident. How does proposing two types of boundaries, continuous and non-continuous, help to solve the issue? — Metaphysician Undercover

Sorry, I thought it was the axiom you had proposed. But instead your self-evident axiom is that objects are bounded.

So still my answer would be the same. Metaphysical-strength axioms seem self-evident when they result from dichotomous reasoning. If a pair of possibilities are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive, then in being the mutual limits on such possibility, and in exhausting all other possibilities, they would have the status of necessity.

And that has long been accepted of the continuous~discrete. Together they are as far as you could go in making a contrast between the connected and the disconnected, the integrated and the differentiated, the related and the isolated, etc.

But then as I say, my own take is that dichotomies only do produce ideal limits. And limits are boundaries in marking where reality ceases to be some thing. Which in the metaphysical case, is where reality ceases itself to exist. And so while reality might approach the ideal of either the discrete or continuous with asymptotic closeness, it can never actually arrive exactly there because the boundaries are not part of existence. They mark (in our minds) the limit, so the exact point where the business of existing has halted.

So now we could talk the same way about your own proposed dichotomy here - objects and boundaries. You can see how it is actually parasitic on the continuous~discrete as a metaphysical axiom. We can imagine the discrete, individuated, differentiated, isolated thing which is an object because we can imagine the complementary thing of it having a continuous, unbroken, integrated, related boundary - a boundary which is a global limit on the object in marking the point where all its discrete being suddenly stops.

So yes. The idea of a bounded object seems pretty convincing. But boundaries in reality are often pretty vague. Or if crisp, designed in fact to be leaky.

Any river or coastline is a pretty vague boundary. Tides and floods shift the margin between water and land continually. Tracing a river to its source in some clutter of springs and tributaries is always a contentious affair.

On the other hand, country borders, cell membranes, and other semiotic lines drawn across the world, are not just leaky, they are designed to be porous - porous in a way that is regulated. A border or membrane is a boundary which has to have holes so as to allow the object - the nation or organism - to make the right kind of material transactions to continue to persist as the kind of objects that they are.

So the idea of a bounded object is a crisp metaphysical ideal that in reality only really exists in this fashion.

Even a rock has vague bounds as an object. It is always subject to erosion. And at what point exactly - with metaphysical-strength or Platonic perfection - is some silicon or iron atom crossing the boundary from being part of the solid rock to part of its history of eroded material? Or is the mud on the rock, part of the rock as "an object"? If not, why not?

And then where an object in fact has the power to self-define its own boundaries (when it is an organism), or when it is an artifact (like a nation or a plastic cup) where it is us who imposes some idea of a definition, then really any boundary is a constraint imposed on material vagueness. It is regulation of erosive or dissipative processes designed to reconstruct what the world would generally aim to deconstruct over time.

So on the one hand, we can easily imagine a world of bounded objects. We can axiomatise a metaphysical dichotomy in that fashion - one that is built up from ancient debates about the continuous and the discrete, the one and the many, to arrive at an atomistic conception of bounded objects.

But then when that axiomatised conception is put to the emprical test, we find that reality is different. It has a further developmental dimension to it. Reality is founded more on flux than stasis. The Universe is one vast sea of erosion. And now - metaphysically - its ultimate other must be the counter-move of regulative habit. Boundaries are really constraints on dissipative freedom - or vagueness. Boundaries are the semiotic information that form up stable object-ness in a fundamentally unstable world.

I'd rather say instead that both self and other are derivative notions which become (roughly) sedimented into place based on a variety of developmental factors, both biological and social. — StreetlightX

Yep. A dichotomisation that arises to structure the "bloomiing, buzzing, confusion".

The truth is that Experience is trained by both association and dissociation, and that psychology must be writ both in synthetic and in analytic terms. Our original sensible totals are, on the one hand, subdivided by discriminative attention, and, on the other, united with other totals, - either through the agency of our own movements, carrying our senses from one part of space to another, or because new objects come successively and replace those by which we were at first impressed. The 'simple impression' of Hume, the 'simple idea' of Locke are both abstractions, never realized in experience.
...
The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space.

William James - Principles of Psychology (1890)

For example, the child developmental psychologist Daniel Stern notes the basic 'awareness' in infants probably takes the form of what he refers to as 'vitality affects', which are kinds of 'life-feelings', or life-qualities': "These elusive qualities are better captured by dynamic, kinetic terms, such as ‘surging’, ‘fading away’, ‘fleeting’, ‘explosive’, crescendo’, ‘decrescendo’, ‘bursting’, ‘drawn out’, and so on. These qualities of experience are most certainly sensible to infants and of great daily, even momentary, importance." — StreetlightX

This is a good way to put it because it shows how early on there would just be a disembodied response. Raw sensory change would wash through the circuits like noise. The newborn would not be distinguishing between the changes caused by its actions vs the changes caused by a changing world. Either way, the same energy would be washing through with the direction not yet telling of a difference,

That aside, the crucial thing is that vitality affects become differentiated into self and other by processes of symmetry breaking, as it were. The infant learns to be a 'self' - or rather learns to 'locate' these (trans-personal) affects within a self - by means of coming to grips with the regularities of bodily coordination which break the symmetry between self and other. — StreetlightX

Agreed. But that is an animal embodied level of self. And Stern is of course alert to the later Vygotskian development of the linguistically-distanced self.

So this is where I think your account so far halts too soon.

A dotted line makes a non-continuous boundary. — Metaphysician Undercover

Wouldn't it be leaky or .... vague?

We simply assume that boundaries are continuous, as a mathematical type of axiom, an ideal which has not been justified. Then the boundaries which are shown to us do not fulfill the qualifications of the ideal, so we deny that they are boundaries. Now the ideal boundary must be justified as a true example, or it should be dismissed as not properly representing the boundaries which we know of. — Metaphysician Undercover

That just puts us back dealing with dichotomies as I routinely argue. We can have the ideal or axiomatic notion of a continuous boundary because we also have the ideal/axiomatic notion of what would be the most leaky possible boundary - one that is discrete instead of continuous, all holes and no bounds like a sieve.

So we have two true notions - the unbroken and the broken. And we can then measure anything in the real world by how close or far it is from those bounding ideal limits.

Dotted lines of course usually mean "tear here" so they are suggestions left for you to complete. The would be exactly halfway between unbroken and broken in that sense.

Oh look, I mentioned the words 'mirror neurons' so I'm an arch-reductionist who must disagree with everything you just said. — StreetlightX

How do you live in the real world with such thin skin? But yes, you are being neuro-reductionist in your OP by going along with the idea that the evolution of the critical differences concerning the human mind are all biological mechanism rather than sociocultural, language-enabled, habits.

You might of course in fact agree with me on that further point. But it would be up to you say. Put your man pants on and give it a go.

No discussion of .... mirror neurons, etc. — StreetlightX

Speaking of shit sandwiches, that's a doozy from neuro-reductionism.

Sure, "mirror neurons" tell us something about embodied consciousness - the active construction of a self/world distinction. But introspective or self-conscious level awareness is a learnt cultural habit based on having the language skills to direct attention in a third person fashion.

Instead of simply being plugged in the world like an animal, we can distance ourselves from ourselves by forming an intervening habit of self-representation. "This is me in here having my thoughts, feelings and perceptions."

Putting a cherry on MU's shit sandwich isn't going to make it any more edible. — Baden

But I would have thought you would agree that TGW has been peddling the shit sandwich here.

The Vygotskian view is that it is indeed correct that introspective awareness is not a natural biological feature of brains/minds, but instead a socially and language scaffolded reflexive habit.

So we don't simply observe our pangs of hunger, we have to construct such an attentional state by way of learnt cultural concepts.

Of course there is something "in there" to be found. I've just checked in with my stomach and it tells me that although another part of me knows its lunchtime, it could take it or leave it another few hours. Yet I know from experience that as soon as I find something tasty leftover in the fridge, the gastric juices will start to flow and hunger pangs - being exactly that preparatory autonomic response - will appear.

So in a real sense, introspective awareness or self-consciousness does take the long way round to get there. It is a culturally evolved habit of thought that I need to master, a set of exterior concepts that I need to learn to apply in the right socially-approved way.

And in Philosophy of Mind, we all have to learn to introspect in a way that makes "qualia" seem a true thing. It's part of the induction process to be part of the club. People will laugh at you if you claim not to get the ineffability of the colour red, the smell of a rose, a pang of hunger, or the taste of a shit sandwich dressed with a cherry.

Indeed, I don't have sex out of sexual hunger, I do it out of habit. My sexual hunger only kicks in when that mechanism that compels me to have sex fails. Of course, the only problem with this is that my lack of sexual hunger means I can never perform, so I never actually end up having sex. Weird. — Baden

Maybe what's weird is these kinds of mechanical accounts of mentality - hunger or whatever as bare qualia.

If you are forever constructing local observables in this fashion, you will forever be failing to deal with the phantasmal thing that is the "self" - the supposed observer.

That is why if you are going to talk about a construct like "hunger", it would have to break with the notion of it being just "the pangs I experience right here and now". What is hunger when it is stretched out over the kind of temporal span of a habit? Is it a concept rather than a percept now? Is it some very dilute version of the much more occasionally intense thing?

What TGW actually wants to argue is as usual quite opaque. He evades close questioning. But the problems with any kind of qualia-based account of mentality are pretty self-evident. It simply shows how strong a grip a mechanical notion of causality has on the popular imagination.

So, as a philosophical axiom, we cannot just pick any axiom, it must be self-evident. We have evidence that objects are bounded, and "object" may be defined in such a way that an object is necessarily bounded, so we could pick an axiom such as "objects are bounded".

With respect to continuity though, as I stated earlier in the thread, that some aspect of reality is continuous, is implied through observations of reality, and inductive reason. Since it is implied, that some aspect of reality is continuous, this is not self-evident, we cannot pick continuity as an axiom. The assumption of continuity must be justified. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well self-evident is always going to be a suspect claim.

But anyway, are bounds not self-evidently continuous? So if there are (discrete) objects, then continuity is also an aspect of your axiom of object boundedness?

This is insane. — The Great Whatever

In fact MU points to problems for the position you want to promote.

Do we eat because we are hungry, because it is a habit, or because eating is pleasurable? Clearly if you want to promote some simplistic position here, you need to be able to show how you deal with this complexity of the issue.

I don't think material things are 'made of thought' whatever that might mean, they are by definition materially constituted. There is no-thing there, though, that is not in conceptual form; but that does not mean there is nothing, or even that there is a 'great unrepresented' there. — John

This is an issue which doesn't get enough attention.

Science has searched pretty hard for the material basis of being and what has it found? Matter is really energy. Energy is really a field. If you believe in inflation, that field is scalar and doesn't even start with direction or difference.

Form or structure we can get our head around. Materiality dissolves into bare action and then even ceases to have particular action according to science.

But "thinking like a crank" is just a subjective characterization. What does thinking like a crank consist in when it comes to psi researchers? You're not saying that thinking like a crank here means being open to the idea that psi might be a genuine phenomenon are you? — John

No. That's why I said sceptics could also be insincere about their apparent objectivity. So what I am talking about is the difficult thing of what it would mean to be open-minded yet common-sensical.

It is like Bayesian reasoning (or it is Bayesian reasoning). Given the laboratory results (or the general lack of them), how do you then quantify your state of belief. Can you live as though it is 99.9% unlikely there is such a thing as psi, yet not then jump to 100% certainty in your heart, if the literature supports a psi effect of 0.1%?

A sensible person is always seeking falsification of his strong beliefs in some sense. A crank does everything to avoid a confrontation with falsification.

There are other standard good habits of thought like Occam's razor - valuing the theories with the fewest moving parts. Not data-mining for significant results. And so on.

It is not that hard to say something objective about the difference in mental habits of cranks and sensible investigators as it turns out. Philosophy of science is rather focused on the issue.

And as I say, that is why I found parapsychology a good living example of rational inquiry in practice. It both showed what scientific rigour looks like (psi research being far tighter in its protocols than practically anything else - like for instance, pharmaceutical research) and also the social limits of that rigour (how far can you go in supporting a hypothesis that a positive result is the product of experimental fraud?).

the point that hunger doesn't tell us anything about any objects at all, not even our own bodies, — The Great Whatever

What if I feel hungry for something - like something sweet rather than savoury? We can be satiated on steak and yet still discover an appetite for chocolate mousse.

Your apparent suggestion that appetites lack objects doesn't square with experience. it seems classic reification in support of some dualistic or panpsychic conception of qualia.

The AC is often stated as the existence of a choice function. Are you sure you don't have another axiom in mind? I think the logical use of equality keeps things distinct in math generally, not just in set theory. — Hoo

What I have in mind is the assumption that you can just pick out individuals and throw them into different contexts freely. But what if that identity was contextual? It's like imagining being able to scoop a whorl of turbulence out a river with your bucket. So the AC shows that kind of assumption at work. But then all of maths pretty much assumes that.

How would it be established? Our most predictive/manipulative theory based on the real numbers? Or on geometric intuition of flow? — Hoo

Geometry always beats algebra for me. But note Michael Atiyah's view that the two are dichotomous and reciprocal. Geometry is manipulation in space and algebra in time. And anything describable in the one reference frame can usually be flipped over into the other, as with symmetry groups or Cartesian curves. So dialectics or duality applies right at the heart of mathematical development.

See:

https://web.math.rochester.edu/people/faculty/cmlr/Advice-Files/Atiyah-Mathematics.pdf

Still, I don't mean to be rude, just in case that's not clear. — Hoo

No worries on that score. I didn't take it that way because you are a very positive guy. Also, rudeness is part of the fun. It's all a game in the end. With ideas the winner hopefully.

I like the idea of the subject and object being disentangled (starting with neither in its purity), but who is this "we" that must talk about observers being themselves individuated? It's as if we always already "believe" in the "we" and the "I." — Hoo

Obviously the Pragmatic "we" - the community of minds that is the limit to rational inquiry (see Peirce).

So yes, I already believe in that "we" and also say that is the thought it should have here. In doing so, I am urging an opinion on you which I am claiming would the inevitable destination of clear thinking. And that method of thinking is also defined in the same fashion.

In the end, everything is recursive - the view we establish from inside the problem we want to describe as if we stood outside it. But that entails no paradox if it is measurably true we are achieving the purpose we had in mind.

If you, for instance, are locked into an identification with scientificity or investment in objectivity as the measure of a man, then, sure, this won't have much appeal. But this investment is optional. Imagine Beethoven at his piano. Was that objectivity? — Hoo

I get the need to caricature me as the dry-as-dust reductionist scientist to legitimate the otherness that would be your heroic and liberated, yet still dreadfully suffering, poet of nature. It is the quickest way for you to win the argument here. But it doesn't accord with the facts of how I live and think.

If I were to offer you a theory of the measure of a man, it would be all about a balanced life - so a fruitful mix of science and poetry, the objective and the subjective, if those are indeed the dichotomy to be balanced here.

Spiritual practices, drugs, music, fasting, etc., are usually aimed at value insights. — Hoo

Well I think those things might be fun but also bogus when it comes to insight about values.

If you want real insight like that, go help out at a homeless shelter or do some eco-system restoration. Seriously. Actually being involved with the world is the way to discover its values. The other stuff you mention is largely self-indulgence.

I'n not going to reply to this, because I don't think it matters — The Great Whatever

Is that you don't think, or you don't feel? Or that you don't think you should feel? :)

Sensible psychonauts, mystics, religious thinkers, and perhaps even sensible crackpots (although "sensible crackpots" sounds a bit odd) and sensible drunks in the gutter (are there any such?), don't make such kinds of claims; and that is precisely the point I have been trying to make. — John

I know what you mean. But the rub is in how you now define "sensible" in a fashion that is not how I'm defining it.

If there is no empirical way of telling the difference between the sensible mystics and the cranky mystics - as in listening to the way they talk as an example of "sensible" - then it becomes a distinction that makes no difference.

I used to spend a lot of time with psi researchers - because of the way the field is a living example of the edges of the scientific method. And really, in a formal setting with even its written accord between believers and sceptics, everyone could talk the sensible talk ... for a while. But eventually you learnt by their behaviour who was more honestly sensible, who was secretly still thinking like a crank.

And the sceptics could be the secret cranks at times too.

OK, then I guess I'm asking whether you think there is any biochemical system you could mess with in order to remove the capacity to have that "actual choice". I don't know, perhaps I'm missing some crucial point here? — John

It's up to TGW to make sense of that claim. My point is that in talking about "chemistry", he is misdirecting us from the formal cause to the material cause when dealing with the issue of "mind".

But why is it only so-called 'outer' observations, which may be collectively observed and confirmed, that are taken into account when it comes to inter-subjectively motivated, conducted and judged discussions about the nature of things, and not the 'inner' observations of meditators, or the intuitions of imagination? I think the answer is obvious; because the latter are not subject to easy corroboration, or even any of the kind of more or less universal corroboration, which is possible and demanded when it comes to empirical observations. — John

It is one thing to get involved in a social practice in a way that produces an experiential state of social value. It is another to then analyse that as phenomenology. At that point you must be able to justify a further epistemic method of inquiry. It is no longer good enough to "just experience it" because that experiencing itself involves the conceptualistion which is the social practice's culturally constructed frame.

Naked phenomenology is a pipe dream. Introspective states come already culturally legitimated. People think all kinds of wrong things about the way that they dream because that is the way they are told dreams are in stories about dreams, or movie recreations of dream states. You have to strip away such expectations and - scaffolded by other theories now - see those phenomenal states "for real" ... as much as they will ever be seen so nakedly.

But the very fact that we can have those kinds of experiences (and who that has not enjoyed many, and/ or temporally sustained, such experiences can know just how comprehensive and utterly convincing they may be?) might lead some to believe that, since they are not satisfactorily explainable in physicalistic causal terms, they 'come from somewhere else'. — John

People think they know the deep secrets of the universe when they are on drugs, in church, psychotic, crackpot, drunk in the gutter. Indeed, the psychotic and the crackpot are the most strongly convinced.

So you are being very defensive about meditation. But I'm not attacking it as something that is not good to do - anymore than I would say art has no value in life. And it is plainly better than drugs or psychosis as an altered state - for reasons that I would give based on a neuropsychological justification.

And you would probably too? Just as you would point to the pragmatic utility of LSD as a creative aid if push came to shove in a social setting - where the meaning of such trips is having to be culturally framed.

Now OK. You might in fact say that meditation connects you transcendentally with a spiritual plane beyond our material one. And now we are off the charts when it comes to empirically defensible mechanism.

Yet still, I would be left with the neuropsychological story about why meditation feels like it does and might do you good. And you would be left unable to demonstrate that it was in fact anything more.

It is like psi. If it exists, then produce it in the lab. Otherwise we can put coincidence down to coincidence. And you can continue to lose money at the casino while listening to your dreams or using your lucky numbers.

Are you saying that the "system of interpretance" is not underpinned by any biochemical system that you could mess with in order to disrupt it? — John

If an organism has the actual choice to overeat or starve itself, then the materiality, the chemistry, is not really the issue, is it?

As I see it, math is machine-like. "Here are formal definitions. Here are rules of inference. See how these definitions are related in terms of those rules of inference." The formal definitions tend to have intuitive appeal of course, but we're aren't allowed to use intuition directly. The ghost of intuition must be incarnated in the symbolism. — Hoo

That's right. Once you have axioms, you are good to go with the deductions. It all unfolds mechanically in a predestined fashion.

But what is the meta-theory about forming axioms - the semantic residue animating the unfolding syntax?

I would argue that it is dialectic or dichotomistic metaphysics. That is what presents us with our "binary" choices. We can posit the axiom of continuity - having identified it as one of two choices. Reality could be fundamentally discrete or continuous. Well, let's pick continuous for the sake of argument and run with that, see where it leads.

As I see it, the formal definition of "set" tries to capture the intuition of "gathering up into a unity." All things as things are unities. The tail and the nose and the fur and so on have been gathered up as the dog, for instance. It's as there is always already a logical circle drawn around any particular thing, perhaps giving it its thing-hood, cutting it out from the background automatically. But then sets are also (intuitively) the extension of properties, which surely inspired the axiom of extensionality. — Hoo

Well the relevant axiom is the axiom of choice. It starts by presuming individuated (crisp and not vague) things, events, properties, whatever. And given that is the case, forming collections becomes trivial in being trivially additive and subtractive. One can construct any unity (or deconstruct it to leave behind "nothing").

I think we get this from writing R as (-inf, inf). — Hoo

Or I would prefer to think of it in terms of the reciprocal limits defined by the notions of the infinite vs the infinitesimal. This is the strictest way of defining each limit on possibility in terms of its other.

Positive and negative infinity are hardly marking bounds in claiming to point in either direction in terms of the unlimited.

I'd stress feeling and imagination when it comes to Romanticism. — Hoo

Yep. Ghostly spirits. The essences that Newtonian mechanicalism so clearly leaves out.

Now of course Romanticism was also a retreat into vagueness about what exactly it might mean in this regard.

Theology had a perfectly substantial notion of souls and Gods. The Enlightenment undermined that concreteness in radical fashion. And so Romanticism was the retreat to talk about the ineffable, the sublime, the aesthetic, the personal, the existential, the ideal.

It all became fuzzy in a way that made it un-attackable by the reductionists. There was no longer any definite thesis to come under examination. A firm position on the realm of spirit was turned into a metaphysical waffle that evaded its pursuers.

Then there's irony and pluralism. Hegel griped about "The Irony" in his day, presumably in the name of the rigor of the concept. — Hoo

I think that is different - and more like Peirce's abduction. We can indeed retreat into vaguer states of conception with the self-conscious purpose of then making some new creative jump that might land in a better place.

So Romanticism I see as a refuge - a cloak of obscurity, an asking just to be left alone with a "mystery" that is more fun, more real, more whatever it takes to get serious questioning off its back.

But scientific reasoners use vagueness as a productive tool. An ironic stance to your own professed beliefs is a pre-condition for being able to start all over again in another direction. You have to be able to step back from your own current certainty to make another leap towards possibly more convincing certainty.

You can't be right unless you are prepared to be wrong. So the question for Romanticism is in what sense is it putting itself in a position that it could be shown wrong? In claiming the transcendent authenticity of personal feelings and imaginings, it just puts itself in a place where that becomes a social impossibility.

Although I'm not completely unromantic. As John argues, one can learn this social practice called meditation and find what that feels like. One can go to art galleries or watch the sun set. Culturally and psychologically, there is stuff that is important which is very human and a long distance from any cosmological-level discussion. So Romanticism as a movement makes great cultural experience. It speaks to that part of our lives.

But does it make great philosophy? I say no. It just isn't designed for that task. Although of course being a professional mystifyer in the form of a Continental academic is probably a quite gratifying kind of career if one is not really serious about cosmological issues. :)

I don't know if you're using math metaphorically here, but the compliment of S is going to be relative to some set X. If X = S, then, yeah, the empty set is its complement. To say that the empty set is both inside and outside of S is a bit of cheat. It's a subset of S but not an element of S (in general). I don't doubt that your getting at something interesting about rules for distinction, though. — Hoo

Set theory probably has the problem that it builds in the distinction SX hopes to derive. It's weakness is that its brackets that bound possibility are themselves so definite and unexplained as features of the world.

But there would be two ways of looking at this.

Either the brackets - {....} - exist in deus ex machina fashion as if someone outside constructed boundaries large enough to contain anything, and thus both everything and nothing (as the crisp complementary limits on vague anythingness!).

Or instead the brackets in fact just represent the simpler thing of being the emergent complementary limits on such a naked state of possibility. The brackets stand for the fact that possibility has its own inherent limits. In saying something is possible, everything and nothing, infinity and zero, already also exist in negative recursive fashion as now the places where everythingness and nothingness put a stop to somethingness.

So - and here is the difficult bit - the limits on being are precisely that which doesn't itself exist. A boundary is where reality stops. And so the boundary itself is unreal or non-existent - even if it seems to have brute causal presence in being "a limit".

This is why I objected to SX's idea of boundaries as something like a 1D line drawn across nature - a single dimensionless feature that somehow bisects reality to make it binary.

Instead - organically - the metaphysical-level logic is that of the dichotomy. The self-organisation that results in a system arising within its own opposing boundaries or limits. The crisp brackets of the set are formed as a result of the action arising within them. The contents are producing their own container - so as to be now definitely "the contents" rather than just vaguely that.

This would be why folk feel that category theory is a better foundation for maths than set theory. It has that embedded dichotomistic view in the mutually exclusive/jointly exhaustive formulation of "structure and morphism". Instead of the container and contents metaphor, we have a organic distinction of constraints and freedoms, organisation and change.

So set theory could be naturalised by recognising the opposed brackets as standing for complementary poles of being - the opposed limits you need to arrive at to have the third thing of the individuated something that can now stand between.

It is then a further thing to give a name to these limits - to call them out as it were, even though they are by definition precisely what does not exist (even as possibility!). So we can speak about infinity, we can speak about zero, as concrete real things. Just as we can talk about all the metaphysical-strength limit states like the discrete~continuous, vague~crisp, stasis~flux, matter~symbol, chance~necessity, part~whole, atom~void, etc, as being real in their limit state unreality.

And that is very powerful from a modelling or reality-mapping point of view. Just look at 2500 years of Western intellectual history. But it also makes us prone to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness that the process view warns us of.

One last point on SX's idea of boundaries as just lines, he would do better to consider Spencer-Brown's diagramatic use of circles as the simplest shapes to form an inside vs an outside - a canonical act of digital symmetry-breaking. Or even better still, go further back to the source of those laws of form in Peirce's own diagramatic re-formulation of logic.

http://mentalmodels.princeton.edu/papers/2002peirce.pdf

http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/Peirce.pdf

The problem is of course that we don't just see external things at all to begin with: they are formed only as a coagulation of feelings, and we only come to individuate them insofar as we understand how that affect us, and so other people arise from a common pathetic source, and not as things that we must first see as rocks and then imbue with life force as we notice that they move like another kind of rock (our body, which we look at from the outside out, rather than the inside out). — The Great Whatever

The problem here would be that you simply set up an alternative dualism - the one of self and qualia instead of that of self and world. And so the problem is not dissolved. You are still talking about the observers of observables in a way that makes the observation as a process mysterious.

So solutions to this problem have to understand the self and its objects - ideal or real - in terms of a semiotic relation. The observer side of the equation must also be generalised (so that it no longer seems so mysteriously and ineffably particular). We must be able to talk about observers as something themselves individuated, rather than starting with them as some brute fact individuation.

You can starve or overfeed-to-death an organism by messing with the biochemical processes that make it feel appropriate hunger and satiation. — The Great Whatever

You mean biosemiotic, not biochemical. You have to mess with the signalling, the system of interpretance, not the material state that is the subject of some interpretation.

it seems to me our differences come down to whether or not one accepts or rejects pansemiosis. — StreetlightX

If you could demonstrate that you understood it, your rejection would be a lot more convincing.

Don't forget that I've always said biosemiosis is definitely something new in nature - the development of full-blown digital-strength symbolism to allow for autonomous systems within the Universe.

Physiosemiosis would be vaguer in just being analogic or iconic. And it would be even these in a vaguer sense as the interpreter is "the Universe" as a system - a material system without yet any symbol systems operating within it in their autonomous (not-A) fashion.

So pansemiosis - as Salthe works to define it - is simply the assertion that the Universe is self-organising and comes into existence as a global regulative habit. It is a view rooted in dissipative structure theory and far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics. Natural law is like the self-closure that is the eruption of constraining convection currents in a Benard Cell. Semiosis speaks to the formation of the negentropy or memory by which a Universe becomes its own vehicle for a generalised production of entropy.

Thus it seems in all these ways precisely a thesis that you would agree with. You would have to explain to me how it says something different in your view.

Remember also that the new thing is that the biophysics of the nanoscale has now empirically identified the physical point where a transition from physiosemiosis to biosemiosis can happen - or indeed, is inevitable. I wrote that up in this thread - http://forums.philosophyforums.com/threads/the-biophysics-of-substance-70736.html

So now we have identified a convergence point where material being has a critical instability - an edge of chaos cusp of order~disorder - that allows "digitality" in a physically real sense.

A problem with your highly abstracted exposition is that you make a huge mystery of how the digital cut can be imposed on the analog world - the slice that cuts the cake. Somehow the cake breaks apart as intended without your knife physically doing anything - waving it wishfully or threateningly suffices.

Your use of Wilden's computer analogy encourages this. A computer has just this kind of symbolic disconnection from the world. The software is granted the security of utterly stable hardware and so doesn't have to think anything about its operation. Whereas with life, and semiosis generally, the situation is the precise opposite. It is all about the regulation of a fundamental instability, a fundamental vagueness. And the more on the cusp of the edge of chaos things are, the greater also the semiotic range of regulative possibilities. (Have you ever read Scott Kelso for example? - https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/dynamic-patterns)

So despite the fact you normally claim to be an enactivist, in this thread you have argued from the basis of representationalism - analog and digital computation both being ways to represent the world. And so any digital cut remains virtual rather than actual. The computer can click and whir away doing its digital or analog thing and it makes no bloody difference to the world unless somebody - usually a human - takes notice of its syntactical mapping and treats it as a sign of something about the world.

Semiosis - like enactivism - says that is ridiculous. The digital cut has to be a real cut out in the world. The cake must be sliced - or at least nudged just enough for it to reorganise itself into two parts because it was on the cusp of just such an entropic bifurcation.

So this is the mystery that semiosis solves.

The regular mechanical way of looking at the world presumes that the ground of any hierarchical complexity must be rock solid stable. You have to have something crisp and definite - like atoms - to begin any construction work. The cake is there and is never going to cut itself because cakes have had any such dynamism or self-organisation baked out of them. And all that makes it a real material mystery how any amount of symbolic activity - analog or digital computation - is going to make a difference. The cutting can be imagined, yet where is the power to execute?

But the self-organising semiotic view of the world says instead that you get these major transition zones due to criticality. Now reality is as unstable as it can be - suspended between two states. And the slightest nudge can tip it in either direction. So there is a digitality inherent in the material state (it can distinctly go in either direction just due to spontaneous fluctuations). And then that digitality can be made extrinisic by a symbol system which retains only the slightest physical presence in that world. A system of signs can compute where and when cake self-cutting should happen. Then deliver the almost infinitesimal physical nudge that tips the balance.

So first the physical world does its bit by presenting the potential - some point of absolutely poised instability. And then a minimal bit of physical machinery - a nudging mechanism controlled by as much background symbolic computation as you like - can exploit that eminently controllable situation.

Thus the digital cut imposed in recursive fashion via a negative mark (a pointing towards whatever state a biifurcation happens not to be in) is no longer the kind of virtual phantom act it must be in your framing of things, it now has an actual physicality. It has a size. Indeed it has the particular universal scale now discovered by biophysics.

So I know you think you reject pansemiosis, Salthe, vagueness, and indeed anything that I might mention that you are not already familiar with. But really you are just in the process of getting there.

And one of the presumptions you might not realise you have been making is that existence must be founded in the stable, when the whole point of any view founded on process thinking - such as enactivism - is that it is instability which makes the very idea of regulation possible in the world.

I think that is just what people have been doing for centuries; I'm just not convinced that subsequent scientific advances bestow any improved ability to do it, in fact they may well get in the way. — John

We weren't exactly expecting quantum indeterminism, but science found that. Just like science found Newtonian determinism and Boylean atoms 500 years ago and metaphysics spent a very long time being shook up by what that seemed to imply for everything.

Is there any fundamental conceptual advance that science hasn't delivered - even if it is in the guise of an antithetical reaction provoked by that very conceptual advance?