No results found for “cognitive psychology of philosophy”.
by rsbakker
That is, until today.
The one thing I try to continuously remind people is that philosophy is itself a data point, a telling demonstration of what has to be one of the most remarkable facts of our species. We don’t know ourselves for shit. We have been stumped since the beginning. We’ve unlocked the mechanism for aging for Christ’s sake: there’s a chance we might become immortal without having the faintest clue as to what ‘we’ amounts to.
There has to be some natural explanation for that, some story explaining why it belongs to our nature to be theoretically mystified by our nature, to find ourselves unable to even agree on formulations of the explananda. So what is it? Why all the apparent paradoxes?
Why, for instance, the fascination with koans?
Take the famous, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Apparently, the point of pondering this lies in realizing the koan is at once the questioning and the questioned, and coming to see oneself as the sound. For many, the pedagogical function of koans lies in revealing one’s Buddha nature, breaking down the folk reasoning habits barring the apprehension of the identity of subject and object.
Strangely enough, the statement I gave you in the previous post could be called a koan, of sorts:
It is true there is no such thing as truth.
But the idea wasn’t so much to break folk reasoning habits as to alert readers to an imperceptible complication belonging to discursive cognition: a complication that breaks the reliability of our folk-reasoning habits. The way deliberative cognition unconsciously toggles between applications and ontologizations of truth talk can generate compelling cognitive illusions—illusions so compelling, in fact, as to hold the whole of humanity in their grip for millennia.
Wittgenstein, and the pragmatists glimpsed the fractionate specialization of cognition, how it operated relative various practical contexts. They understood the problem in terms of concrete application, which for them was pragmatic application, a domain generally navigated via normative cognition. Impressed by the inability of mechanical cognition to double as normative cognition, they decided that only normative cognition could explain cognition, and so tripped into a different version of the ancient trap: that of using intentional cognition to theoretically solve intentional cognition.
Understanding cognition in terms of heuristic neglect lets us frame the problem subpersonally, to look at what’s going on in statements like the above in terms of possible neurobiological systems recruited. The fact that human cognition is heuristic, fractionate, and combinatory means that we should expect koans, puzzles, paradoxes, apories, and the like. We should expect that different systems possessing overlapping domains will come into conflict. We should expect them in the same way and for the same reason we should expect to encounter visual, auditory, and other kinds of systematic illusions. Because the brain picks out only the correlations it needs to predict its environments, cues predicting the systems requiring solution the way they need to be predicted to be solved. Given this, we should begin looking at traditional philosophy as a rich, discursive reservoir of pathologies, breakdowns providing information regarding the systems and misapplications involved. Like all corpses, meaning will provide a feast for worms.
In a sense, then, a koan demonstrates what a great many seem to think it’s meant to demonstrate: a genuine limit to some cognitive modality, a point where our automatic applications fail us, alerting us both to their automaticity and their specialized nature. And this, the idea would be, draws more of the automaticity (and default universal application) of the subject/object (aboutness) heuristic into deliberative purview, leading to… Enlightenment?
Does Heuristic Neglect Theory suggest a path to the Absolute?
I suppose… so long as we keep in mind that ‘Absolute’ means ‘abject stupidity.’ I think we’re better served looking at these kinds of things as boundaries rather than destinations.
Three Pound Brain 
Bakker citing work coauthored by my PhD mentor?
The end times have indeed come.
But seriously- “We’ve unlocked the mechanism for aging ”
Naw. The last line in the paper reads ” the reason NAD+ declines with age is unclear” We’re getting closer though. I’m eagerly awaiting mouse lifespan data from the Sinclair lab- they’ve been working on the NAD+ story for a while. My PhD mentor has projects in the lab that I think will shed light on those hidden reasons soon as well… some of the unpublished data I’ve seen is seriously astounding.
Also impressive, if you missed it, was Baar et al in Cell (March 23rd 2017). The figured out a protein-based pharmaceutical that reverses aging in a progeroid mouse model, and they even have some data that it reverses aging in a non-progeroid mouse, which made my jaw drop. The main strategy there is called “senolytics” which is just a fancy way of saying “we kill all the old crappy cells so your body can rebuild using only good ones”.
None of these approaches have identified the ultimate driver of the aging process, but the catastrophic loss of DNA repair is certainly not helpful along the way- promoting more mutations and more cells to become senescent.
” there’s a chance we might become immortal without having the faintest clue as to what ‘we’ amounts to”
Ageless is not immortal, but it’s a start. True immortality will necessitate a coherent theory of consciousness. We will need to know what we are before we get there. I am increasingly exceedingly pessimistic about our chances.
My guess is that we’re going to begin discovering subtle field effects, and then things will start in earnest. The crazy thing about inexplicability is that it itself often has explanations–which I think is the case for the hard problems. Missapplications set aside, we can get to work on the natural phenomena.
That is jaw-dropping! For the longest time every piece of longevity science I encountered left me thinking they had no clue as what was basically going on. Now, they really seem to have a grip, giving me the feeling that this stuff is going to start making stem-cellesque progress, only involving a much smaller set of empirical challenges. For me, the issue has been one of granularity, of getting the mechano-explanatory grain down to the right level. I’ve long thought, given the importance of generational turnover to evolution, that the control for aging would ultimately prove to be a relatively simple mechanism.
“It is true there is no such thing as truth”,
if rephrased:
“It is true that truth is not a thing” –
goes from koan to trivial.
It’s just a reminder to avoid the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”
Similarly with your whole “what is meaning” bit on your “about” page.
People *mean* when they speak. Sentences *mean*. *Meaning* is not a thing. So what?
This is basically the Bart Simpson solution.
Might have been better to say:
“People *mean* something when they speak. Sentences *mean* something.
Hopefully you knew what I meant. 😉
Sounds suspiciously like a philosophical solution. But still, it misses the point by assuming a literal notion of thing:
How about, ‘It is true that there is no such abstract relation/pragmatic function/physical entity as truth.’
Ahh… (*3 hours later*)
>”‘It is true that there is no such abstract relation/pragmatic function/physical entity as truth.”
That gives me something to think about. Thank you.
I think the Buddha’s first thought after enlightenment was that the truth would be impossible to teach, being beyond human comprehension.
Fair enough.
You wrote:
“I think we’re better served looking at these kinds of things as boundaries rather than destinations.”
This reminds me of the final sentence of Paul Ricoeur’s “Existence and Hermeneutics”:
“In this way, ontology is indeed the promised land for a philosophy of reflection; but, like Moses, the speaking and reflecting subject can only glimpse this land before dying”
Click to access Ricoeur.Existence_and_Hermeneutics.pdf
And this:
“a rich, discursive reservoir of pathologies, breakdowns providing information regarding the systems and misapplications involved. ”
reminds me (somewhat laterally) of Ricoeur on how metaphors work by (roughly) exploding when you try to take them literally..
Have you read Ricoeur, and if so, do you have an opinion on him?
Back in the 90s I spent months working through Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative… I was smitten at the time, but I ultimately moved on. I remember his account of Braudel and the Annalistes set me on the hunt for scholarly material on anthropomorphism, and the remarkable discovery that next to no one was working on it.
What would a skin spy make of ‘It is true there is no such thing as truth’, since they can’t perceive paradox?
And if philosophy is pathological*, what does that say of the human mind compared to the skin spy mind?
* Philosophy + certitude = pathology, perhaps. Might be a stretch, but kinda reminds me of the idea of RPG brain damage, which is a hypothesis about people losing the ability to create and tell stories.
I’m reading John Wathey’s book “The Illusion of God’s Presence: The Biological Origins of Spiritual Longing.” The preface begins with a quote from Daniel Boorstin’s “The Discoverers: A History of Mans’ Search to Know His World and Himself:”
“The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.”
To me, philosophical pathology is more a symptom of illusory knowledge than ignorance. At least ignorance is honest enough to leave the door open for investigating a problem to find a solution. Illusory knowledge allows philosophers to merely pretend to be solving problems when they’re generating unsolvable paradoxes.
Bohm differentiated between the words ‘problem’ and ‘paradox’. He said we often treat something as a problem and want a solution. But some things, or even many things, especially those that have to do with the human psyche, are not a problem but a paradox. Which means they have no solution.
He wrote that, “Even when we do see that we are not in order inwardly, our habit is to suppose that we can point fairly definitely to what is wrong or lacking in ourselves, as if this were something different from or independent of the activity of thinking in which we formulate the ‘problem’ of correcting what is in error.”
So, as one blogger put it, the process of thought, with which we think about our personal and social problems is controlled by the very content which it seems to be thinking about. Thus, our thoughts influence our problems and our problems (paradoxically) in return influence our thoughts.
Lazerowitz argued that “. …in the case of a vast number of…views in philosophy, the paradoxical fact emerges that the arguments adduced for a proposition imply the invalidity of a distinction which the proposition requires.”
I think part of the illusion is to talk as if there’s a limit to human knowledge which one can strive to reach. The paradox is that once such a limit is posited, it suggests there’s something on the other side yet to be known. Philosophy treats knowledge as if it’s the ability to have a final say or last word. However, as Korzybski pointed out, “We can never say everything about anything.”
On point
http://www.cbcmusic.ca/first-plays/241/sarah-slean-metaphysics
“The spirit of a good woman cannot be coded by nucleic acids arranged in a double helix, and only an overeducated fool could think so. I could prove that mathematically save that mathematics can never prove anything. No mathematics has any content. All any mathematics can do is — sometimes — turn out to be useful in describing some aspects of our so-called “physical universe.” That is a bonus; most forms of mathematics are as meaning-free as chess.”
What is a spirit?
It’s a mystery…
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/david-chalmers-thinks-the-hard-problem-is-really-hard/
A better question might be “What is a Dakini?”
https://www.lionsroar.com/alexander-weinstein/
Some interesting sources to look up–thanks, Clay. Paradox actually decomposes quite neatly given HNT. Medial neglect assures both blindness to heuristic specificity and the inability to report endogenous sources. On the one hand, when the domains of two tool sets overlap, you end up with incompatible affirmations that both cue communication as true, or as universally applicable, because we (necessarily) lack any sensitivity to the ecological dimensions of cognition. On the other hand, metacognitive insensitivity assures that the recursive dimensions of conscious deliberation will remain invisible to conscious deliberation, manifesting in a wide variety of apparently paradoxical phenomena, most notoriously, the ‘now.’
http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-05-07
http://m.nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/is-matter-conscious
Yeah I caught this when it first came out: this is the ‘hard problem of matter’ one, isn’t it? Fascinating beginning, which ends in taking a mystical dive.
Also is ‘A meme is itself a meme’ a koan?
Kind of like rapping a knuckle on the inside of a metal drum. If incapacity was metal…may as well be.
I liked this post. It raises what for me is the most important, interesting and vital-to-ask question in all of philosophy, which is: Why is it so damn difficult?
The reason is explained in the koan. It takes two hands to clap. Our world is constructed of conceptual opposites. These are the dimension of thought. Examine any metaphysical question and it will ask us to choose between two extreme views. Yet as Kant notes and we all discover every one of these views is logically absurd. Clearly they are all wrong.
To transcend dualism we must embrace nondualism, the grounding principle for the Perennial philosophy and for the creators of koans such as this one. The universe is a unity and this is why philosophy.is difficult. This is the correct answer to the question and nobody will ever be able to show otherwise, but our intellect struggles for we are venturing beyond the categories of thought. We are now investigating mysticism.
Of course there there is Truth, for This IS the truth. Without two hands there would be no clapping. Without dualism there would be no Time and Space, no Something and Nothing, no Freewill and Determinism, no LIfe and Death, no Self and Other.
There would be ‘Being ,Consciousness, Bliss’. Or this is what those who have been there always report.
Philosophy has been solved and it is not difficult to solve it. It is fabulously difficult to understand the solution and even quite difficult to see that it is one, but it is not rocket-science. It is just off the beaten academic path in our part of the world. One has to realise that today’s university philosophers are more than two millennia behind the writer of the cited koan, and almost two behind the Buddhist sage Nagarjuna, who explains all this, and even a few centuries behind Kant, who showed that a fundamental theory must go beyond two of anything and beyond all instances of number and form, all divisions and distinctions.
The trouble is that people will insist on believing that they cant do better than Descartes, Hume, Wittgenstein, Russell and so forth, just as if the internet hadn’t been invented. , .
“Of course there there is Truth, for This IS the truth. Without two hands there would be no clapping. Without dualism there would be no Time and Space, no Something and Nothing, no Freewill and Determinism, no LIfe and Death, no Self and Other.”
Naw. I don’t think the originators of Buddhism were onto anything any more spectacular than the ancient skeptics (whom I think came closer). I’m also reluctant to think problematic philosophical dualisms amount to anything more than a cognitive illusion, as opposed to leveraging ‘illusions’ of space and time and being and freedom and life. For me, intuitions like this are precisely the kinds of traps we need to start avoiding, the notion that our low-dimensional intuitions can tell us the fundamental nature of things–or worse, beyond things! Buddhists are stuck with the same ramshackle tinker tool set as anyone other human being, and bound to fall into the traps belonging to their misapplication the same as any other human being. Only science gives us any credible foothold on these issues. The Dalai Lama reportedly told Cris Koch (see Koch’s recent interview in Nautilus) that where science contradicts Buddhism, then Buddhism must change–a sentiment I find heartening, but also, naïve, I think. No matter what your traditional dogma, if you leash it to the science, I fear it will not survive.
To understand that subject/object is a device is to break free a crash space that has afflicted intellectual history since the dawn of literacy. The further claim that ‘Being’ or ‘Consciousness’ or ‘Bliss’ lies ‘beyond’ applications of these heuristics is to actually commit the very error these misapplications reveal, viz., the notion that we possess the capacity to solve the insoluble. This is optimistic, but the track record suggests–strongly, I think–that we should assume otherwise. On my account, any genuine answer to these kinds of questions should horrify. We quite simply are not built to grasp what we are. Any nonempirical claim to have done so should be greeted with extreme skepticism.
“Naw. I don’t think the originators of Buddhism were onto anything any more spectacular than the ancient skeptics (whom I think came closer).”
What you think is clearly uninformed by any effort to understand Buddhism. I feel there’s no excuse for it in this day and age. Why not just say “Buddhists are idiots” and have done with it? “.
Sticks and stones. You need to get to know your enemy if you want to fight him effectively. I’m not impressed with this kind of lazy dismissal of the Perennial philosophy and disappointed not to be able to have an interesting discussion in response to your interesting post. .
I think all humans are ‘idiots’ – myself especially! – so accusing Buddhists of being such would bear no information. I certainly don’t regard them (or you) as an ‘enemy’ of any kind. I think traditional accounts inevitably express the cognitive shortcomings belonging to humanity as a whole–how could they not? They all think they’ve somehow overcome those shortcomings, of course–it turns out this is one of the biggest shortcomings of all: the ease with which humans can adopt drastic conclusions on the basis of inconclusive evidence.
I get accused of ‘laziness’ by many of the advocates of the different traditional positions troubled by my views (of course, not one of them ever bothers to actually understand my view, or comment on the lifetime of labour that has gone into constructing it). So my response to accusations of laziness is to shrug, and ask the person, ‘How do you naturalize meaning?’ I ask this because not one of the people accusing me of laziness has been able to give me an answer, despite advancing views that turn on intentional cognition in obvious and profound ways. I would genuinely welcome an answer… but traditional discourses seem to be universally committed to silencing it via more guesswork regarding ‘what’s wrong’ with the question, guesswork that turns on more questionable applications of intentional cognition.
Fact is, Peter, since you’re the one making extra empirical claims, the onus is on you to explain why anyone should take your preferred family of interpretations (out of the thousands out there) as the true family. Don’t blame me for your speculative predicament!
Bakker bait
http://www.newdirectionsproject.com/events/2017/03/21/intentionality/
[…] “The fact that human cognition is heuristic, fractionate, and combinatory means that we should expect koans, puzzles, paradoxes, apories, and the like. We should expect that different systems possessing overlapping domains will come into conflict. We should expect them in the same way and for the same reason we should expect to encounter visual, auditory, and other kinds of systematic illusions. Because the brain picks out only the correlations it needs to predict its environments, cues predicting the systems requiring solution the way they need to be predicted to be solved. Given this, we should begin looking at traditional philosophy as a rich, discursive reservoir of pathologies, breakdowns providing information regarding the systems and misapplications involved. Like all corpses, meaning will provide a feast for worms.” – R.S. Bakker […]
Reblogged this on synthetic zerø and commented:
Bakker reminding us that in the debris we might find meanings that can provide a feast for worms, philosophers, and post-nihilists alike. It’s not “enlightenment” we are looking for, but better options for adapting. Re-cognizing neglect, cognitive blindness, and semantic boundaries does not mean we “solve” them, only that we work with them in a different way. The game has never been about truth or absolute knowledge, but about how to live and live well.
How can you possibly know how to live well while not knowing how the world works or your place in it? The idea doesn’t seem to make sense.
My apologies for the long post earlier. I became engrossed in the issues. .
Umm, huh? My place in it is what I carve out for myself and what I’m afforded. We are throw into this world and whatever place-making and sense-making we do thereafter is fairly open.
Why we do we need some dogma, or definitive frame or certainty, about ourselves with/in the wilderness of being to function? Isn’t it sufficient to be alive and willing to explore, and find ways of relating that generate nonzero sums (for what it is intrinsically worth in terms of security and stability) and joy? Can we live openly (with cognitive ambiguity) and still enact positive outcomes? Surely.
We know a lot about how the world works already. Knowing small-t truths for wayfinding is great, projecting meta-T Truths as explanatory closure for cognitive ease can be an obstacle for flexible being and becoming. The elegance and importance of our discourses and belief systems (BS) can only ever be evaluated in terms of the outcomes of their application.
Way cool, Michael. I wish I could follow down the ‘live well’ road! I mean, I’ve made peace with post-intentionality, of course, but it remains a violent break from our ancestrality, a break down. I get excited about the prospect of exploring this space in its own terms for the first time–very much so. But I need only pause to hear the clamour, the jar and shriek of clashing cognitive machinery. For me, it’s got to the point where I don’t trust any intuition that doesn’t hurt in some way. No matter what you dredge up, it all drags along the same vicious implicature. We are a blind biological operating system, duped by our hardware into spontaneously generating endless quantities of useless code.
This has to be a tragic view insofar as its anything at all.
I appreciate that as far as it goes Scott, but I’m always left with a desire to ask ‘so what?’ Why should I care if intentionality can complete the circle and decide definitely on what we are or how our machinery works form the inside out? Why ask intentionality to do something we know now it simply cannot do? Knowledge of our heuristic neglect, of our kludged prism of consciousness, of the fundamental incompleteness of subjectivity – knowledge of the ‘that’ of our condition without knowledge of the ‘how’ – is enough to warp our mode of operation such that we become motivated to take up and design new projects for living; new “games”.
Intentionality is not useless. It allows higher order recursion, and fills out our capacity for phantasmic imaging and code-generating (imagination) such that we extend reality out in sometimes creative, sometime pathology ways. Contra the nostalgic Baudrillard hyperreality in a positive advance in niche construction. Our cognitive simulacrums are nature exploring its own subtleties. But just because cognition can’t do what we thought it could do (or always hoped it would do and give) doesn’t mean we ‘should’ just shut it all down and fade into the black machinic blur of technos or some dark green slither of biological in-differentiation.
We can still hyperstitionally create ourselves and worlds. We can influence our own combinatoric sorting processes – in spite of everything we once were told we should or could be.
When you say, “I’ve made peace with post-intentionality, of course, but it remains a violent break from our ancestrality”, I wonder what your discursive game is then? How do you propose we ‘post-intentionally’ investigate the crash space in a way that hooks to all-to-human concerns for survival and joy? Or do you want to abandon those human interest?
All of this questioning and pondering and clamouring is still just projected code and synthetic imagery. To orient ourselves to the “live well”, or more contemporarily “just survive”, is to engage in a new way the funk of life rather than be distracted by the noise.
“Intentionality is not useless. It allows higher order recursion, and fills out our capacity for phantasmic imaging and code-generating (imagination) such that we extend reality out in sometimes creative, sometime pathology ways. Contra the nostalgic Baudrillard hyperreality in a positive advance in niche construction. Our cognitive simulacrums are nature exploring its own subtleties. But just because cognition can’t do what we thought it could do (or always hoped it would do and give) doesn’t mean we ‘should’ just shut it all down and fade into the black machinic blur of technos or some dark green slither of biological in-differentiation.”
To be clear though, there’s no such thing as intentionality. Intentional cognition, on the other hand, has something to do with our best ways of presently exploiting/troubleshooting recursion. Beyond that, I think the guesswork becomes abject. There’s also no such thing as ‘subjectivity,’ partial or otherwise. These things are metacognitive artifacts, little more, aside from raising castles of philosophical fancy. I can go on, but the point is that holding onto this and other forms of philosophical detritus, despite having the advantage of spanning the philosophical ingroups you’re interested in impacting, leaves you at sea when it comes to figuring out what’s going on in ways that survive scientific scrutiny. Tomorrow is all that matters at this point. All post-structuralist/post-Deleuzean ontologism is doomed to be a wry footnote in the face of what’s happening is material, though and through.
“We can still hyperstitionally create ourselves and worlds. We can influence our own combinatoric sorting processes – in spite of everything we once were told we should or could be.”
But this is precisely where the plank in reason breaks. It seems pretty clear that ‘we can’ talk has no real application when it comes to explaining the possibilities of behaviour in theoretical contexts (ecologies). We can talk presumes behaviour follows upon ‘reasons,’ when in point of material fact, it follows upon precursors–reasons are simply our way of getting around our neglect of them. We are not ‘meaning makers.’ We are blind and amnesiac waystations.
In defense of being stupid…
Stupidity is our natural condition but there are ways to work with it. First accept it. Know that incompleteness is an ontological condition. Next work to supplement it. Science, A.I,. etc. Then work against it.
From the link Dirk provided:
“Science involves confronting our `absolute stupidity’. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown… Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time… The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.” – Martin A. Schwartz
Interesting semantic twists and turns here.
By intentionality i meant ‘intentional cognition’: the capacity for neurocognitive recursive tokening (signification). Not only are we trouble-shooting our own cognitive limits we are also navigating real environments and coordinating actions against a thin-sliced horizon of actual entities. Hence my constant emphasis on coping/adapting. Intentional cognition allows for a manifesting of neuro-supplementary images/codes/referents which in turn surpluses symbolic information into cognitive simulacra (“culture”). The very fact that we generate things like novels evinces our ability to ‘externalize’/extend/throw up imaginal-symbolic contents.
Such symbolic algorithms and their material-infomatic products are not “useless”. They factor into the mix of coping-mechanisms. And the relative autonomy of our capacity for recombinatorial processing in individuating brains (or central nervous systems) is nothing other than the sheer materiality of agency.
As soon as we take yourself as a subject within cognitive apprehension subjectivity happens. Is it a concrete object? Certain not. But the “I am” hooked to a phenomenological sense is the basis of self-reference behavior and can be considered as one cognitive routine among many others that generates sapience. Are there better ways to talk about all that? Surely. But explaining away self-referencing cognitions, and the role they play on our evaluative procedures, seems like a parlour trick of reductionist inclination.
To be sure, I’m not overly interested in impacting philosophical ingroups. I work in a regional network of public school systems, and my job is to (re)design policy and practices that facilitate human (and non-human) flourishing. That work is primary. After I just tinker with local cultural engineering and influence work (via radio and other means). All my para-academic interactions are in the service of evolving, mutating, and enacting my new cognitive orientations that would allow me to work differently (professional) and live differently (personal). SZ is a collaborative and dialogical gathering, exploration, and design space for coping with the contemporary, although admittedly attracted to particular “philosophical detritus” and media resources in the doing. My game is not about finding Truth inasmuch as it is about designing useful fictions and mythologies for surviving what’s coming and enhancing what is possible within us humans, in the MOST material and ecological sense.
Soothsaying even in its “rational” norm-worshiping strains is just funeral poetry. I want to explore what can be done.
Again, I’m left wondering what your own discursive game is given what you say about our banal waystation thrashing in the dark? How are you aware of our heuristic neglect if heuristic neglect prevents us from knowing anything useful (for living well) about being human?
You write,
“It seems pretty clear that ‘we can’ talk has no real application when it comes to explaining the possibilities of behaviour in theoretical contexts (ecologies). We can talk presumes behaviour follows upon ‘reasons,’ when in point of material fact, it follows upon precursors–reasons are simply our way of getting around our neglect of them. We are not ‘meaning makers.’ We are blind and amnesiac waystations.”
‘We can’ talk is simply a discursive game set to influencing, motivating, and coordinating humans into projects. Such talk is just so much barking, but it’s barking in ways that gets shit done. Outside of getting things done in social contexts, and with varying degrees of relation to all the psychodramas of existential regard therein, ALL talk is cheap.
The notion that we are only waystations does not resonate with what I have found out in the world. I have come across neurologically bundled beings that have a relative autonomy from the informational (environmental) networks within they subsist. Their evolved kludged capacities for discernment, memorization/recall, recursion and recombinatorial sorting, however ad hoc it may be, allows a certain degree of randomization which can looks a lot like agency. These entities can even resist and augment a myriad in neurologically instantiated self-preservational routines in an effort to enact those algorithms embodied in the semiotic products i mentioned at the start. We may not “make” meaning as such, but we definitely assemble it from the resources in the process of perceiving the world and our movement in it. What we “make” is our way in the world and meaning/culture is in the mix.
Are you ready to declare that agency itself is an illusion? That we have no ability to influence our precursive contexts via relative biological recombinatorial autonomy? If so, how did the Bakker entity ever come to know this, and be then able to articulate it its truthiness?
“Are you ready to declare that agency itself is an illusion? That we have no ability to influence our precursive contexts via relative biological recombinatorial autonomy? If so, how did the Bakker entity ever come to know this, and be then able to articulate it its truthiness?”
Agency is THE noocentric illusion, which I’ve been consistently declaring since the beginning. We are mediation: countless ulterior functions are discharged through us. Cognitive science is in the process laying this fact bare.
As for how did it ever come to know this? How does anyone come to know anything? It gradually migrated to this position responding to countless environmental factors caught up in looping bouts of metacognitive deliberation systematically interdependent on some highly selective sliver of those factors. The same as any coming to any ‘position.’ As for the evidence you’ve encountered otherwise, what other evidence could you possibly encounter, short getting into the meat of the thing? There’s no autonomy from nature, I fear, which is precisely why brain surgery saves sanities as well as lives. ‘Relative autonomy’ (whatever that means!) either consists of noise and epistemic incapacity (which is to say nothing) or it actually comprises some natural phenomena in its own right. The important thing, however, is that we don’t need any of it to make theoretical sense of our predicament, and in fact get quite a bit further without it.
What a post-nihilistic approach to wayfinding suggests is guerrilla cognition – as means of survival and strategic resistance to doxic modes within and empires of alien enslavement by technos (including capital) without.
Scott when you write,
“We are mediation: countless ulterior functions are discharged through us… gradually migrated to this position responding to countless environmental factors caught up in looping bouts of metacognitive deliberation systematically interdependent on some highly selective sliver of those factors.”
This is precisely what I mean by the relative autonomy that is human agency.
Our “agency” is nothing other than the energetic-material generative recombinatorial powers (potency) for metacognitive slicing (selection) of attention into motivating sub-routines and disposition, as located and activated in the neuro-bundle we call a body.
The network of causal influence is inflected in the nodal powers (“noise”) of individuating bodies. That is relative agency. That we are tinkering meat-boxes of awkward idiosyncratic disposition is quite enough. As it is this that we adapting cognitive meat-boxes (coping-beings) influence the world.
Agency and choice as individual dispositions for attention selection is not illusions. They aren’t what many laypeople or philosophers want them to be either. They are emergent (aberrant?) features of nature, which extend what matter can do without escaping its ‘laws’.
So you just mean noise/incapacity. Why speak of ‘autonomy’ at all then, especially when you know that doing so immediately cues intentional cognition, and so perennially runs aground in crash space? Why not ponder (as I do) the significance of noise/incapacity in human social behaviour? The glorious opportunity lies in moving past the homuncularisms, and the first step toward doing that is to move past the terminology. I just don’t see what ‘relative autonomy’ provides.
“Agency and choice as individual dispositions for attention selection is not illusions. They aren’t what many laypeople or philosophers want them to be either. They are emergent (aberrant?) features of nature, which extend what matter can do without escaping its ‘laws’.”
I set my response to this aside because by coincidence my next post is on the unworkability of dispositional metasemantics. You can map ‘agency’ and ‘choice’ across these things if you want, but why? What do you gain in understanding (as opposed to palatability). The empirical fact, I’m arguing, is that agency talk and choice talk belong to intentional cognition, a system filtered to troubleshoot social/communicative problems absent any information regarding subpersonal dispositions. Either you accept something like this is the case, or you have a different theory of intentional cognition, which I would be interested in hearing. If you accept that intentional cognition is heuristic in this manner, then you accept that localization of intentional phenomena is simply a non-starter. We can play Dennett’s game of redefining intentional posits in light of the most recent science, but what Dennett always conveniently overlooks is the fact that all such redefinitions are doomed to be mere idiolects, socially sterile, simply because no one can agree on what is being redefined.
Get rid of them. Embrace the horror of the new. If your ingroup balks just pose the questions I’ve posed here.
Again, as I said in an earlier post above, “sheer materiality agency” is not something we can explain away with appeals to how cognition works. Individuals are doing the cognizing, however heuristic and clunky it clearly is, and so embody a relative (in degree) break from the smooth operations of causal influence to enact vectorial instances of idio-syncratic metacognitive sorting. We may not be fully autonomous (closed) selves, but we are also not strictly confined (completely open) tools of subpersonal processes.
“Individuals are doing the cognizing, however heuristic and clunky it clearly is, and so embody a relative (in degree) break from the smooth operations of causal influence to enact vectorial instances of idio-syncratic metacognitive sorting. We may not be fully autonomous (closed) selves, but we are also not strictly confined (completely open) tools of subpersonal processes.”
A ‘relative break in causal influence’? Would you like some syrup with your waffle? 😉 It doesn’t matter how small you make it, the magic tethers you to the misapplication of intentional cognition. Are you saying the industrial research program presently reverse-engineering cognition is going to find something more than matter obeying the laws of physics?
Just be done with it. It may be vertiginous, but the view is breathtaking, I assure you.
If you find you can’t bring yourself to think beyond agency, then hitch your horse to the case David makes in Posthuman Life. It’s the only credible argument for the kind of ‘intentional minimalism’ you’re arguing that I’ve encountered. This is why I think (IMHO 😉 ) that the future of philosophy lies somewhere between the two of us. Maybe I am too radical. But I’ll be damned if it doesn’t explain all the things a true theory of meaning should.
I certainly do mean noise. We are nothing other than the noise in machine. The aberrant attractor in matrices. That eddy in the river of immanence where driftwood gets caught up and gets spit out in some novel way. A being thrown out into the wild with nothing but our genetic repertoire forced to make-sense of our taskscapes through unique epigenetic variation.
Why focus on “incapacity” though? Seem nostalgic. Our limits circumscribe infinity and give us our distinct character. A bundled meat-machine of finitude complex enough to awkwardly tinker on its own code. We are have the highest degree of autonomy of all the biological différance engines we have yet encountered (outside of dolphins maybe?).
What I’m proposing is no homuncularism. It’s about recognizing bodies, and giving all due respect for physical individuality and the role that plays in complex recombinatorics (sorting) in our onto-stories.
Take, for example, a simple mechanical toy rabbit. When we wind-up the gears and set that rabbit on the floor it does its trick and hops away according to its mechanical make-up. In what I’m proposing that rabbit’s ‘agency’ is nothing but its material-organizational (mechanical) capacity for hopping. There’s no second rabbit homunculus inside controlling the legs and guiding it. It is operating according to its embodied functional organization within what is afforded by its environment. This mechanical rabbit has a low degree of relative (relational) autonomy. Its agency is almost nil.
Yet notice that each and every time we set some mechanical rabbit to work on the floor – to exercise its limited capacity and functional potency – it takes a different path. Never will it take the same path. Chaos is a ubiquitous feature of causality, as Ian Malcolm would remind us.
Asymmetry, and ontological incompleteness is build into reality from the big-bang onward. And every ecological situation and sub-event is composed of assemblages which embody different degrees and kinds of asymmetry, based on their onto-specific organizational complexity, with varying degrees and kinds of control and influence (“relative autonomy”). This inherent distribution of difference is the basis for individuality. Individuation as material-energetic process. And, again, each individual embodies particular degrees of complexity and agency (redefined here), therefore is capable and disposed to influencing the outcome of its subsequent relations.
So, regardless of how little agency (relative autonomy of function) that rabbit has in determining that path, its sheer individuality (its bundled capacities and material disposition toward hopping) always plays some causal role in the ever novel trajectory of its hopping, as do the ecological conditions under which it is set to hop.
Each iteration of hopping can only be explained with reference to each causally complex factor. In this case Rabbit + Floor = Hopping (R + F = H).
In the case of humans: embodied cognition + affordances (material as well as information/symbolic) = behavior (EC + A = B). With EC being vastly and exponentially more complex that R in the mechanical rabbit case. Both EC and R are modes of existence and forms of agency, just with differences in relative autonomy (capacities for control, information processing, sorting) and thus influence of trajectories. It is the relative degree of influence that matters here – the kind of noise we are in the matrices.
If you want to explain this kind of non-homuncular agency/noise away as mere illusion then you are not really being scientific (who is it that is doing the science?) you are just doing aesthetics in relation to scientific data, as I fear we all are in different ways.
Again, the “noise” of individuality disrupts the otherwise smooth causal flow of simple materiality. So ‘humanism’ is a code for self-organizing that particular kind noise/song, whereas ‘posthumanism’ is just a different code attempting to synthesize existing noises into a different kind of noise/song. Your agental recombinatoric system (body) sings the song of crash space and I sing the song of creative adaptation. That is, I prefer hashbrowns to waffles. I wonder which noise will play out and end up proliferating in the mix?
So what relative autonomy provides, or rather embodies, is a particular degree of operational closure for 1) sentience – the capacity for a self-awareness, and 2) sapience – the ability for externalized synthetic semantic regard (symbolic reference) and thus self-referencing evaluative consideration (reflection). Our relative functional autonomy embodied by our complex individuating meat-machinery (with its limited heuristic cognition) is the very basis of what have been, what we are, and what can be, and the source of much of our stupidity, cruelty and achievements.
What talking about it does, on the other hand (and to address your question), is primes intentional cognition for even greater reflection and metacognitive regard, and thus intensifies the degree to which our kind of noise (agency) influences the trajectory of our behavioral and social “hopping”. If we are mostly a “system filtered to troubleshoot social/communicative problems absent any information regarding subpersonal dispositions”, which I agree we are, then agency talk is exactly the kind of cognitive code we should be writing.
Let’s increase, or at least reorient our forever limited awareness of our own biases and subpersonal routines and begin designing technology and social systems that enhances our ability to cope, adapt, relate, deliberate, and create. My post-nihilist dog is in the fight to preserve and enhance sapience-noise in creative directions, out of the ruins of previous pre-nihilist attempts, rather than capitulate to some slick alien enslavement by non-human agents (technos), or dark posthuman mutation. I seek continuity with the enfleshed ancestors by preserving our strange attractions rather than complete fusion with the machinic blur.
Why shouldn’t we work with non-humans (various assemblages, flows, forces) to co-compose ecologies of flourishing where joy and exploration are in abundance, rather roll over in reactive nostalgic horror and embrace extinction?
I accept your theory of cognition Scott, I just don’t share your interpretation of the consequences.
I’m also still wondering what your discursive game really is? What is you story of the human meant to enact in the world? BUt doing what you do what do you hope to generate? Please answer.
And I look forward to your post on the unworkability of dispositional metasemantics, because obviously that is where the juice is for me 🙂
We need to focus on incapacity because it’s the only way to see past the manifest image, to understand why it not only falls short necessity (Sellars/Brandom), it also falls short indispensability (Turner/Dennett). It’s the cornerstone of my theory of cognition! A theory which doesn’t require Deleuzean/Simondonian/etc. ontologisms to do the work it does–basically all the stuff that immunizes theory circles from the mainstream debate.
For me, everything is triage at this point. There’s no solution, only mitigation.
Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus:
“For there simultaneously occurs upon the earth a very important, inevitable phenomenon that is beneficial in many respects and unfortunate in many others: stratification. Strata are Layers, Belts. They consist of giving form to matters, of imprisoning intensities or locking singularities into systems of resonance and redundancy, of producing upon the body of the earth molecules large and small and organizing them into molar aggregates. Strata are acts of capture, they are like “black holes” or occlusions striving to seize whatever comes within their reach. They operate by coding and territorialization upon the earth; they proceed simultaneously by code and by territoriality.”
Our limits and blindness makes us what we are. We are the loose noisy strata of capture. The glitch in systems. The fold in an unraveling khaos fabric. Attempts to dampen, deprogram, or unwrinkle will be met with maximum resistance.
There’s few thinkers I’ve put more labour into than Deleuze (in both his individual and collective guises), and I just can’t see how he isn’t simply a contemporary dogmatist. I loved Difference and Repetition and the Logic of Sense even moreso (and I personally believe that very few people citing these books genuinely understand them), but it all belongs to the Cult of the Ontological Ur-assumption, something which I came to see as a fundamental part of the real problem. Now I see Thousand Plateaus, which stole my breath for sheer conceptual creativity (but didn’t impress me as much philosophically), as another blight on Continental philosophy, another roadblock preventing its return to cultural relevance. Taking this jargon to the problem of meaning drastically reduces your audience. But even worse, it out-and-out prevents the kind conceptual innovation we really do require, which is to say, the creation of a novel post-intentional way to model our experience, behaviour, and sociality. What we want is an understanding that will not become irrelevant when we do.
I love michael’s story but when I really distill it to a formula it seems to lapse back into the old refrain to Expect the Unexpected, or if you like, to Reduce Your Need for Cognitive Closure, and reduce your traumatic responses to incursions against your beliefs. OK, but nobody really knows how to do this! And in some cases the need for cognitive closure seems to actually defend against the latter…
Ugh. Any part I should fast forward to?
nope
Such a burn! 🙂
was just nothing new there, even Graham was puzzled.
I knew I should have time stamped it to the ironic part where they both agree that you “know an object by its failures”
That sounds so funny I’m almost inclined to give it a listen!
So the headlong charge back into anthropomorphic fantasy is led by hollering philosophers…
http://jcs.biologists.org/content/121/11/1771
Very cool. Stuart Firestein has a book (a little to breezy for my tastes) and a TED talk (quite good, if I remember aright) on this very topic.
that was an ok bit of public outreach which largely failed as far as I can tell.
http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-april-10-2017-1.4061220/why-we-think-we-know-everything-a-cognitive-scientist-explains-1.4061245
From the archive! Fascinating dude.
not quite that grizzled yet in person but that’s how i feel in most of these blogosphere forums, maybe a need some kind of cigarette smoking gif made from this video to use as an emoji.
Can we all just take a minute and acknowledge that Dirk is the internet’s best resource for information. Damn dude.
Hands down. Some day, in some superpowerful version of Google, when search algorithms go rogue and evolve into their own specialized species, they will approximate his competence.
Maybe.
I found Pitt’s and McCulloch’s finding that neural nets even under very minimal assumptions can’t retrodict prior states from current states interesting re the interminable debates on freewill and determinism. My friend and I used to have this game of trying to trace the steps of our conversation back, and it was always shocking to us how quickly it teeters into oblivion. Dat beforeless.
I feel like this is something I encounter writing all the time: some filter malfunction will deliver multiple inklings, and I regularly find myself ripping one out, then attempting to read the ‘thought tape’ backward, trying to find my way back the idea I had just backburnered. Oblivion, indeed! though I am often able to reconstruct the second idea.
It makes me wonder if anyone has ever attempted to write a phenonmenology of these things…
…as it appears you Should know. But the argument you make some how shows you do, but then fall back into a sorr of ‘cognative’ truth: like a koan itself.
But it seems that you keep the meaning of the koan at a distance so you dont have to really grasp the meaning, like you are purposefully missing it — but why? Why do you talk about what you are missing as if you got it. ?
That’s kind of the point, isn’t it? ‘Getting it’ is simply something convinced people report, and they report all sorts of incompatible things. Nothing sorts interpretation on these issues, so why pretend otherwise? At the very least, I have an empirical theory that can show you up to the mystical doors.
It is apparent to me that we are so similar, so close in our reckonings. I have to wonder why you can’t see it in mine also. I don’t even have to read a few sentences of your posts to know; it takes very little time really.
Such an oddity. This is why not only is the varied topics of our similarity evident of a certain direction, but the more significant issue must be why it is the some people cannot see the trees and forest for the national conservation.
The effort must include every issue, not just some fashionable argumentative points. No?
Landzek – I’m with you on this. It’s no good just saying ‘I know what the koan means” as rsb does while openly misinterpreting it. It is shooting oneself in the foot while avoiding the issues. I would ask the same. Why do you talk about what you are missing as if you got it? .
Rsb – You say earlier “‘How do you naturalize meaning?’ I ask this because not one of the people accusing me of laziness has been able to give me an answer.”
I’m not surprised. I have no idea what you mean. I’ll attempt an answer if you explain. Anyway, questions or not it is clear that you are a lazy philosopher.and know only a small part of the field and have not solved anything yet.
The thing is, you are making it clear here to everyone that you have not thought through the issues. This is your choice but it is an odd thing to do. Your idea that people who ‘get it’ are simply guilty of self-deception is plainly daft when they all agree with each other, and very insulting to me personally. You might as well call me a fool. It is a common view among unreflective people who do not take the time to look into these things but a blogger should check his facts. .
Your view of mysticism seems to be stuck in the 18th century. if you say you’re not interested then fair enough. Bur please don’t make statements about things you know nothing about and have no intention of studying. It’s infuriating for your readers. .
Such a shame, You’ve raised a good discussion but have placed impossible limits on it. You must believe that the entire literature of the Wisdom traditions is nonsense and that all its readers and writers are blithering idiots. And all without any study. Is this intuition? Guesswork? A habit of thinking? Indocrination?
It sure ain’t scholarship.
What is the scientific explanation of meaning? I’m giving you an empirical theory which I think will find scientific vindication. I’m not sure how I could make it any clearer, which suggests to me I’m missing something in your complaint.
“The thing is, you are making it clear here to everyone that you have not thought through the issues. This is your choice but it is an odd thing to do. Your idea that people who ‘get it’ are simply guilty of self-deception is plainly daft when they all agree with each other, and very insulting to me personally. You might as well call me a fool. It is a common view among unreflective people who do not take the time to look into these things but a blogger should check his facts. . ”
I’m sorry you find it insulting. If it’s any consolation I consider myself to be a fool as well! You should know that it’s a little unfair to accuse me of remaining ignorant of the very facts I asked you provide, namely your theory of meaning.
But you do realize that everyone can’t be right. I assumed that you, like everybody (including me!), took your own personal interpretation of some Buddhist doctrine of truth to be true, which means all other accounts, such as mine, are false/misguided somehow, even though they are every bit as convinced as you that you’re the one mistaken. The fact of intelligent dissent should be cause to doubt one’s theoretical commitments, not take offence. It causes me to doubt my commitments, which is why I’m so keen on remaining in contact with the sciences.
Are you saying skeptics demonstrate more epistemic humility than Buddhists? I’m perfectly willing to admit I’m wrong. Are you?
Through reading these replies i am reminded that it is a mistake to write off or deem ‘philosophy’ as somehow ‘incorrect’ as a sort of essentially wrong process. It is just as functional and effective as ever.
What we are talking about should be not in the effort of ‘essentializing’ a ‘bad philosophy’, but in accepting that its mode is just different; it is not incorrect, but merely reflects a different modality; like computer programming and fire fighting deal with two different events.
To speak of some general essentialized category of ‘philosophy’ that is wrong is just as incorrect as the philosophical effort we are accusing.
Why shouldn’t I just scratch my head at these replies? Say of course it’s all cartoons. What you’re suggesting sounds suspiciously like, “all cartoons are equal,” but I assure, the world is filled with graves that suggest otherwise. I’m offering a naturalized way of sorting between them, explaining the endless heaps of underdetermined speculation. If you have a better empirical account of intentional cognition, then lay it on me. But please, landzek, don’t tell me that all discourses are equal in their own special ways. We’re in this pickle precise because they are not equal!
It’s just false as a reading as philosophy. Yeah Heidegger thought he was excavating the transcendental but he still thought his claims had cognitive warrant. He was still invistating our relationship to the world however much he transmutates those terms in the process of his own discourse.
…and before you jump the gun: this is not a ‘spiritual’ knowledge, for, if we can understand Hiedegger, the spirit, as a real determination, is destitute. This is why now Spirituality is another real situation of relative negotiated value.
I saying that there is a containment of discourses wherein thier value is determined, where they gain their relative value for reality, but that this determination concerns a particular kind of being that is concerned with its basis for Being. And due to this concern, cannot be ‘proven’ that its value is indeed determined (necessary), and thus but one kind of ‘knowledge’, ine that approriates discourse is a particular manner that emphasizes Being and justifcation over truth in description, so to speak.
rsb….”But you do realize that everyone can’t be right. I assumed that you, like everybody (including me!), took your own personal interpretation of some Buddhist doctrine of truth to be true, which means all other accounts, such as mine, are false/misguided somehow, even though they are every bit as convinced as you that you’re the one mistaken.”
No. no. There is no need to take some personal interpretation. There is only one that is works and one just has to find it. Nonduality is the orthodox and ubiquitous position for Buddhists and their like and it is well-defined, well-studied and highly developed. Of course, one can always argue about some of the details, but the philosophy of the Upanishads is what it is and it is the same for everyone. .
The irony would be that nondualism rejects agency. Human beings would normally be robots, slaves to their conditioning and beliefs. Many good arguments against agency are found in this tradition. Just as logic and science tend to conclude, agency does not work. Freewill would be a misunderstanding.
. .
“The fact of intelligent dissent should be cause to doubt one’s theoretical commitments, not take offence. It causes me to doubt my commitments, which is why I’m so keen on remaining in contact with the sciences.”
I don’t doubt my main theoretical commitments. No other theory works. This is demonstrable and not as matter of opinion. .
“Are you saying skeptics demonstrate more epistemic humility than Buddhists? I’m perfectly willing to admit I’m wrong. Are you?”
Buddhists are usually free of opinions, or should be if they;re serious. They are trying to find out.what is true not make it up. As for me, I am not prepared to admit I’m wrong because I’m not. I don’t make claims I cannot justify.or prove. Metaphysics is mathematical, one does the calculations and arrives where calculations always arrive if they’re done right. I’ve written at length on these issues and am always ready to put my money where my mouth is. I completely understand and concur that ‘appeals to mysticism’ are invalid in these discussions and that claims must be backed up with facts and logic. If only the same was true for ‘appeals to the philosophical speculations of scientists’. . .
My previous post probably seemed ruder than I meant to be so thanks for not being annoyed. But really, you are speaking about issues that are well-discussed and researched but ignoring past work for the sake of reinventing the wheel. There is no need to give up science to endorse nondualism and it can be studied by scientists. They work wonderfully well together since both are focused entirely on verifiable facts and logical analysis, not idle speculation and muddled thinking, and certainly not faith. I know you don’t believe this but you’d have to admit that you do not know this view and cannot be sure it is not the case.
Anyroad, rsb, I’ve made my objections.and will move on unless you wish to delve further into Zen koans and Taoist writings on agency, etc. Au revoir for now and thanks for the interesting disagreement. . .
“Buddhists are usually free of opinions, or should be if they;re serious. They are trying to find out what is true not make it up. As for me, I am not prepared to admit I’m wrong because I’m not. I don’t make claims I cannot justify.or prove. Metaphysics is mathematical, one does the calculations and arrives where calculations always arrive if they’re done right. I’ve written at length on these issues and am always ready to put my money where my mouth is.”
But then you have to realize, Peter, that this makes you every bit as difficult to debate rationally as a Christian fundamentalist. Epistemic humility is the cornerstone of rational argumentation, the conviction that, all things being equal, odds are that you are wrong. The reason for this has to do with the human genius for rationalizing faux-certitude: the phrase ‘I am not prepared to admit I’m wrong because I’m not’ is a tragically common one among us humans (think of ISIS), and we’re beginning to learn a great deal about why this is so. Consider:
“Metaphysics is mathematical, one does the calculations and arrives where calculations always arrive if they’re done right.”
This strikes me as naïve. I’ve spent decades immersed in metaphysics, and it consists of endless disputation, everybody convinced only their metaphysical theses are ‘done right.’ For me, personally, this is why Buddhism, despite being fascinating for a great number of reasons, ultimately reveals it’s religious, doctrinal nature, and so manages close down on the possibility of learning truly radical facts about our human nature. The irony, of course, is that this is pretty damn close as to how you’ve been characterizing me! The difference is that I recognize that my guess is just that, while you think your guesses amount to metaphysical revelation. So if it turns out that I am wrong, as you say, I have some hope of amending my view and moving on. Whereas if you turn out to be the one in error, you have no way of knowing as much, and so remain trapped in the illusion of absolute certitude.
I don’t think I get it. So the racial theories of the Nazi’s were appropriate to the particular kind of being they were interested in?
The issue is not whether there is ethical value. Of course there is.
The issue is involved in the arena where I am not disagreeing with you. don’t get me wrong; I live for disagreement and argument; I work to be shown where I am incorrect; to me, that is the point of discussion. But the point of contention is how it is that I can agree with what you are saying, yet, somehow, you defend against me having that understanding of you, as if how I am agreeing with you is based on an incorrect appraisal of you.
I am playing with the idea around how Foucault says it in the intro to “The Order of Things”. Basically he says in one of the last point there, the he rejects the idea of some transcendence, some sort of spiritual or consciousness that resides apart somewhere. He thus is one of the first (I think) to actually say that he looks at things as upon a horizontal plane.
I agree with his sentiment, so far a existentialism in the larger sense goes (not necessarily as the academic category goes). Discourse is all we are dealing with; there is nothing outside of discourse that we are able to deal with. OOO and SR and such are good religious apologies, but I get into that elsewhere.
So, if this is the case, if there is no getting outside of discourse, then there is the problem of agreement. We get into the PMs then.
See, I notice that you are and have noticed the same things and issue that I have. and even much of the conclusions you come to are so close, but then I find that you fall into, what I might call, a kind of dogmatism that excludes me from understanding you, that it appears you place as a condition upon your rhetoric so to keep me from you, or to uphold a kind of exclusionism.
I think PeterJ could be onto something with his latest comment.
But I think it is more that meaning itself, discourse itself, does not unfold or present itself upon a inclusive plane. Discourse itself may set upon such a horizon, but then we get into (as you have noted here and there) heuristic problems. But I think it is in this moment, at this juncture that you may be pulling the ‘non-transcedntal’ clause down to blanket and protect your ‘personal heuristic’, so to speak, As if, to use a non-phil idea, in the last instance you deny all that has come to you to bring a certain ‘open-ended’ conclusion, and ‘close’ the meaning.
To me, this is a methodological maxim, a procedural constant of what is ‘philosophy’. It, as Laruelle, ‘relies upon a prior decision’ in order to establish identity.
Perhaps this is why I wonder about your science. Science, as a pure kind of endeavor (never mind Latour right now), just ‘does’. The identities is deals with are not philosophical argued but are grounded in a different kind of ‘substantiating material’ that that of philosophical identity. This is why philosophy is not ‘wrong’, it is merely ‘doing what it does’ and is also why I call for a clearing up of philosophy, its domain, and what problems it is capable of addressing.
rsb – From your post I assume you’re happy to carry on, and so am I.
I wish you wouldn’t assume that I’m a fool. I don’t do this for you. I;m a serious scholar albeit an amateur and I know more about these issues than most professors. This is not arrogance, for it not hard to know more. Your understanding of religion and metaphysics is poor. I apologise if this seems an inflammatory remark but it is meant as a challenge, for now I have to show that mine is not.
I cannot do this if you waive away my comments and voice your opinions as equally valid. I can prove my view if required. It is consistent with that of Kant for the most part and you cannot believe that you know more about these things than Kant.
In metaphysics Buddhism is a neutral metaphysical position. It rejects all positive positions as false and they are demonstrably so. There is a myriad of proofs that all positive positions are logically absurd for this is just what all philosophers discover, albeit that not all would agree that being logically absurd entails that they are false. Most academic philosophers prefer to assume that philosophy is hopeless.
Kant states only what we all discover when he says “All selective conclusions about the world as a whole are undecidable”. We cannot choose between two absurd options, but must if we assume that one of them is is true. Buddhism doesn’t get into this muddle and offers us a way out of the cul-de-sac. .
If we follow logic and not our opinions then it is the metaphysics of the Perennial philosophy that emerges from analysis as the only workable theory of everything, the only one that survives analysis. This would be why it can be perennial. It passes all the tests for a rational theory. .
You dismiss it as religion as if religion is no more than what we learn in Sunday school as a child. You dismiss metaphysics as a method for establishing truth. Then you say there is no truth and feel free to speculate But metaphysics and religion are not speculative disciplines. The problem is our education system, which teaches a lot of nonsense about these things.
I would happily concede that a lot of religion is philosophically flawed and scientific nonsense. We all know this is true. But so is a lot of science and philosophy. It is our job to sort the wheat from the chaff.
I’m a little unsure of the precise issue or question you’re raising in the essay, but if you can state it briefly I’;ll have a go at giving the ‘perennial’, ‘mystical’ or ‘nondual’ view if I can, and you can asses whether it looks plausible. We don’t have to worry where the theory comes from.
Please don’t mistake bluntness for rudeness. For me these are clear-cut issues but treating them as such can seem naive and rude to others. .
How can they be ‘clear cut’ if no one can agree on them? Core issues are ‘clear cut’ to all discursive ingroups, and vary wildly between them. The fact that you and I find ourselves at this impasse is not unique. To me, ‘clear cut’ means uncontentious. What could be *more* contentious than metaphysics? What domain warrants more epistemic humility?
Do you consider questions like these insulting? If so we find ourselves in a real culture clash. For me, Buddhism holds no more claim to respect than does phenomenology or Christianity or pragmatism or my own position. You and I are just more people with more guesses. I generally do show respect (ie, refrain from asking difficult questions!) out of a distaste for the consequences. But this blog is all about asking hard questions.
No, of course your questions are not insulting. They need asking. But they are very basic. It appears that you have not read anything about Buddhism. In this case why do you think so poorly of it? I think you should ask some questions about it rather than give your opinions.
It is certainly rather weird to give the meaning of a Zen koan as if you know it while believing that Zen is nonsense. The koan you cite is the entire answer to metaphysics.if we really delve into it. .
. .
Metaphysics is not contentious. Almost everyone agrees on the results of metaphysics,. What they do not agree upon is their interpretation. The logic is clear-cut, the interpretation less so. Buddhism and logical positivism are in full agreement as to the results of metaphysics and also all modern philosophers of whom I’m aware. The logic is inexorably the same for everyone. It;s the response to those results that varies so wildly. . .
Metaphysics is mathematical, a science of logic, and its results are clear-cut to most thinkers. Positive metaphysical positions all give rise to fatal contradictions. This is not a matter of opinion. What is a matter of opinion is whether this proves the uselessness of philosophy or the truth of a neutral metaphysical. position. .For this position the Universe would be Unity, which is hardly a wild idea.
It is only in the Academy that metaphysics seems contentious, because here logic is ignored. Even where theories fail in logic they are endorsed, so chaos ensues. This is the price of refusing to consider the idea that Buddha and Lao Tsu might have known what they were talking about. . .
PeterJ wrote: “Positive metaphysical positions all give rise to fatal contradictions.”
Metaphysical propositions are only mysterious because they pretend to express the same logical structure as empirical propositions which use the indicative mood to enable valid inferences about matters of fact. It’s an illusion of grammar that can be set aside without meditation or dissolving contradictions into “The Unconditioned.”
Here’s an empirical proposition:
John owns a copy of the Dhammapada.
Here are two similar-looking metaphysical propositions:
The Universe is a Unity. Nirvana is freedom from the cycle of rebirth.
All three sentences above appear to have the same logical form stating facts expressed in the indicative mood. But there’s a hidden difference. In order for propositions to make sense, they must express what we understand to be the case for a proposition to be true and what we understand to be the case for a proposition to be false. We can understand this even if we don’t know whether it’s actually true or false, and even if we never find out. That means an empirical proposition like the one about John can be legitimately negated without losing its sense.
1. John owns a copy of the Dhammapada.
2. John does not own a copy of the Dhammapada.
Sentences (1) and (2) gain their sense from the truth-possibilities they appear to hold open. They are made true or they are made false by the same situation obtaining or not obtaining, respectively. In this case, that it has to do with John actually owning a copy of the Dhammapada. If you know under what conditions (1) is true, you automatically know under what conditions it’s negation is false/not true. In principle one could identify John, go to his house, interrogate him and verify that he owns a copy of the Dhammapada. Evidence is relevant to establishing truth-value. The two sentences about John are logically related.
Unlike empirical propositions, metaphysical propositions only pretend to derive their sense from the truth possibilities they hold open. This can be demonstrated by the metaphysical propositions below and what appear to be their negations:
3. The universe is a Unity.
4. The universe is not a Unity.
5. Nirvana is freedom from the cycle of rebirth.
6. Nirvana is not freedom from the cycle of rebirth.
Despite appearances, sentences (4) and (6) are not negations of (3) and (5). They simply changed the definitions of universe and Nirvana thereby effectively changing the subject. That means they don’t have the same empirical content. They are true or they are false under entirely different conditions. The same situation obtaining or not obtaining is not what makes them true or false. They don’t relate the same state of affairs and thus they have different content – if content is defined by what an indicative sentence purports to tell us about the world. Thus it turns, the sentences about the universe and Nirvana are logically unrelated.
The truth of (3) cannot be ruled out by means of the truth of (4) and vice versa. The same goes for (5) and (6). What one might imagine they’re trying to rule out by using 3&5 won’t in fact have been ruled out because 4&6 are about a different subject (a different universe & Nirvana) and hence different content. We would have no idea what we were ruling out and thus no idea what we were ruling in. To declare a sentence true is to declare it not false. The two go together. Metaphysics only pretends to care about truth and facts.
If the propositions “The universe is a Unity” and “Nirvana is freedom from the cycle of rebirth” stated facts about the world or states of affairs expressed by such sentences, we would be able to negate them legitimately (without changing their subjects) and also hypothesize that they don’t obtain. But that’s not possible. What one might think they’re ruling out is “The universe is not a Unity” or “Nirvana is not freedom from the cycle of rebirth,” but again those sentences have a different content from universe defined as Unity and Nirvana defined as freedom from rebirth. You can’t negate (3) and (5) in theory, not even in the mind’s eye. To pretend that “The universe is a Unity” is true, one must pretend that a theoretical state of affairs is being ruled out. No one who believes “The universe is a Unity” can actually say what that state of affairs depicts, not because it’s psychologically impossible but because it’s logically impossible. If it depicted something even in theory, we could legitimately negate it, not just change the subject.
Hence, metaphysical propositions can’t be true and they can’t be false. That means they lack a sense. They can’t rule anything in so they can’t rule anything out. They have no content. They express no state of affairs even in theory. Language actually prevents them from expressing a sense, let alone express truth possibilities.
To understand an empirical sentence like “John owns a copy of the Dhammapada” it isn’t necessary to know whether it’s true or false before understanding it. But with “The universe is a Unity,” as soon as it’s understood, it’s truth status is automatic, not because of observation or evidence, but because of the meaning of words and definitions. The semantic status of such propositions is no different from their comprehension.
Even if one rejects that the universe is a unity, the rejection wouldn’t be based on evidence or facts either. Conversely, no amount of pure thought would determine whether or not John owns a copy of Dhammapada. That’s because an empirical sentence must be understood first before it can be confronted with evidence to establish it’s truth or falsity. However, to understand a metaphysical proposition is the very same thing as knowing it’s truth or falsehood by purely thought dependent means. Metaphysical propositions can’t fail to be true (or fail to be false) because they hide fake logical form behind the indicative mood to magically produce metaphysical necessity from empirical-looking propositions that aren’t empirical. If it wasn’t a linguistic trick, then it would also make perfect sense to declare the proposition “John ‘must’ own a copy of Dhammapada” to be true or false without ever getting off the cushion to go fact check. All one would need to determine the truth of about John or its negation would be to think about meanings or definitions of John and Dhammapaa. So when others talk of paradox, fatal contradiction or getting behind appearances to the nature of reality by pure thought or meditation alone, I just try to figure out where I can pull back the curtain of grammar.
correction/addition: – It turns out the sentences about the universe and Nirvana are logically unrelated TO THEIR SO-CALLED NEGATIONS.
Clay – I’m sorry but I cannot see where you;’re coming from. Is this in response to my claim that positive metaphysical are logically absurd. If so, how does it change anything?
It is a simple empirical fact that these positions are absurd. Whether they are false or not is another matter. ,
Wonderful stuff, Clay. Grammar isn’t the way I would frame the problem, however (in fact, I think grammatical arguments against metaphysical discourse are actually low-D ways to get a handle on heuristic specificity). The big problem lies with underdetermination. The thing I’m trying get Peter to see is the parochialism of his ‘mathematical certainty’ regarding metaphysical issues, the fact that everybody sees some different version of ‘clear cut.’ And here, the argument is decidedly more simple: if your metaphysical claims possess mathematical rigour, then why do they exhibit none of the epistemic properties distinguishing mathematical inferences?
Blog-Pharau shrieks into the minds of his enemies “WHAT IS YOUR THEORY OF MEANING?!”
It’s a fair question. A purely naturalistic answer to a question such as “what is the relationship between the word ‘chicken’ and actual chickens?” along the lines of “sensory percept initiates cascades of neurological activity which, if those cascades include motor neurons, may also initiate observable behavior” commits one to renouncing semantics and I suspect a great many other intentional commitments, unless one insists that some non-neurological / non-physiological processes operate in parallel with the neurological / physiological processes. The question one must then ask ones self is “can I construct a non-neurological / non-physiological semantics which is non-supernatural or must I resort to supernatural processes in order to defend the existence of semantics?”
Some people will insist that a theory of meaning which does not solve the hard problem is not a theory of meaning. I say let’s figure out the neurological /physiological bit that we’re all fairly sure exists first. If we still think we have a hard problem after we’ve done that we can start looking for supernatural explanations. I don’t see the need to seek supernatural explanations until the process of natural explanation has been completed or has failed. I understand that chronologically the supernatural explanations came first, but if progress is being made on the natural front I’d let that process play out before resorting back to the supernatural.
To quote Kant: “All selective conclusions about the world as a whole are undecidable”.
To quote Bakker’s Global Neuronal Workspace post: “It’s not ‘whole versus parts’ its ‘personal wholes versus impersonal parts’ that’s at issue.”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it looks like Kant has run afoul (as BBT might put it) the distinction between consciousness as it is (selective conclusions) and consciousness as it appears to us (as a whole), i.e., the distinction between consciousness as impersonally and personally construed.
Kant isn’t doing Buddhism any metaphysical favors.
“the distinction between consciousness as it is (selective conclusions) and consciousness as it appears to us (as a whole)”
rsb highlighted such a distinction in the recent podcast. I’m still trying to grasp this: are rsb (and Clay) saying we need to distinguish the ‘noumena’ from the ‘phenomena’ of consciousness? Is that a fair way to put it?
This is one way of looking at my point, a la Kant. Have you checked out “The Metacritique of Reason,” Clay?
What interested me in “Metacritique” was the point about swinging from the third-person lateral to the first-person medial. IMO there isn’t enough written about that from a neurocognitive perspective. It’s mostly a literary or sociolinguistic topic.
I pulled Kant’s quote from PeterJ’s post for comment because terms like ‘as a whole’, ‘unity’ or ‘totality’ are used to justify metaphysics and it looks to me like a shell game of switching between modes, registers and idioms. It bugs me when metaphysicians get away with conflating ’cause’ and ‘because’ or as Wittgenstein might say, confusing objectual and conceptual investigations.
Since PeterJ brought up Buddhism, one of my problems with it is that it appears to do exactly what Wittgenstein warned against. It does this by treating so-called mental objects as simply another kind of object, i.e., the term dhamma can refer to both mental and physical objects. Dhammas demand an immaterial sense organ called the mind that comes into non-physical contact (whatever that might be) with immaterial sense objects (whatever those are) via a sixth sense. Buddha was aware of sensory input and responses from input but not of the “processing” of input by the brain to produce a response. Processing had to take place somewhere, so he called this somewhere “mind”. If thoughts contacting mind is a process no different from objects contacting a nervous system, then the requirement for source sensitive-causal-mechanical cognition can be bypassed. Simulus-response can be described in terms of good or bad “intentions” rather than in terms of physical environments. Any serious causal constraint on knowledge of what exits can simply be ignored. Thus, they can claim “action at a temporal distance” in order to support karma and rebirth. Buddhism has a discontinuity problem: Either you can have experience arising and passing away in the moment, or you can have actions connected to consequences, but not both.
I think you’re dead right about this issue, and I’ve been puzzling over my reluctance to prosecute my arguments in terms of the lateral/medial distinction of late. I guess I worry is that its one of the things that cues readers to identify me as a Continental thinker, and to cease reading on that account. But it is key to understanding how traditional philosophy of mind can be understood in neurobiological terms.
I would love to hear more about the sociolinguistic and literary guises you reference. What Kant basically does is mistake the medial (enabling) dimension in a manner similar to the way Aristotle mistakes the celestial: he confuses features pertaining to the low-dimensionality of his deductions with positive features pertaining to the ‘transcendental.’ Rather than seeing one ontology bisected by radically different conditions of cognitive access and capacity, he delivers us to yet another dualism.
I struggle to see why we need to make this complicated. Kant’s statement is simply true, as history shows and as all philosophers discover. Where’;s the need to complicate things? What’s consciousness got to do with it? .
Clay I appreciate that you’ve given this a lot of thought, but I don’t think anyone here is going to find a fault in Buddhist doctrine after so many centuries.
Some thoughts that might be relevant. For a Buddhist experiences are unreal. By reduction the experience-experiencer distinction goes that way of all the others. Experiences cannot arise and pass away ‘in the moment’. A moment is not enough time for anything to happen. All mental and corporeal phenomena would be reducible. Thus both Mind and Matter are reduced.
For this view nothing would really exist and nothing would ever really happen. Nobody said it was easy to understand. This would be part of the reason it not easy to make telling objections.
I feel the issues are being over-complicated here due to a confusion of the absurdity of positive theories with their falsity. They are demonstrably absurd, They are not demonstrably false. Their falsity is an optional (albeit sensible) interpretation of the logic.
But you’re missing the point, Peter, which is that Buddhist metaphysical claims, far from possessing mathematical rigour, flounder in the same soup of conceptual overdetermination and theoretical underdetermination as do all metaphysical claims. It quite literally doesn’t matter what you personally think regarding their ‘obviousness,’ the fact remains they are not obvious to others. Clay, as thorough as his grammatical breakdown on the logical problems posed by totalizing claims, has simply scratched the surface of the disputation. You may think you’ve surmounted a mountain, but that’s the only-game-in-town effect. For all those familiar with the wild variety of speculative alternatives, you are standing in a swamp. Simply asserting that things aren’t so complicated, amounts to no more than what philosophers call foot-stomping.
Buddhism is a faith. Why not acknowledge your metaphysical guesses as guesses, and your commitment to them religious, as opposed to rational (because it is irrational to treat guesswork as true). Or even better, why commit to any traditional Buddhist dogma at all–perhaps stop looking at Buddhism as a canon (product), and rather focus on the process (which strikes me as personally redeeming in countless ways)? The Dalai Lama seems willing to do this.
Would be interesting to see the Dalai Lama and Thinley Norbu debate this.
I don’t know anything about Buddhism, so like any modern person confronted with his ignorance I flipped to Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism
Does reincarnation really happen? If so, what is the thing conserved from rebirth to rebirth such that the purported continuity exists? What observational evidence do Buddhists have for the existence of this thing? Do the six realms really exist? What observational evidence do Buddhists have for the existence of these realms? Have Buddhists made any attempt to reconcile these realms with the cosmology that astronomers and astrophysicists are developing?
Are there fundamentalist Buddhists who believe in the literal existence of these things? Are there non-fundamentalist Buddhists who think of these things as educational tales or metaphors?
If Buddhism, like Christianity and Islam, makes testable claims about the nature of the physical universe it seems reasonable to subject those claims to the same examination as other claims about the nature of the physical universe. If Buddhism’s claims about the nature of the physical universe seem implausible or unsubstantiated and Buddhism’s claims about human nature and the human soul are tied to its claims about the nature of the physical universe then Buddhism’s claims about human nature and the human soul will also come to seem implausible.
I don’t think Buddhists have a soul.
Like Christianity
PeterJ wrote: “Clay – I’m sorry but I cannot see where you;’re coming from. Is this in response to my claim that positive metaphysical are logically absurd. If so, how does it change anything?
It is a simple empirical fact that these positions are absurd. Whether they are false or not is another matter.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Clay’s Reply: Positive metaphysical propositions aren’t just wildly unreasonable. I’m not talking about a lack of ‘sense’ to mean absurdity. I use the term ‘sense’ following Wittgenstein when he writes: If one wants to call there being facts a matter of experience, then one can say logic is empirical. But when we say something is empirical we mean that it can be imagined otherwise; in this sense every proposition with sense is a contingent proposition.” “If the logic (grammar) of a word requires an antithesis and there is no antithesis, then the word is without meaning.
I had hoped to demonstrate that there is no sense in which metaphysical propositions can be true and there is no sense in which they can be false. My further suggestion is that alternatives such as negative metaphysical propositions do not express any more sense than do positive metaphysical propositions. Negative propositions can’t be true or false any more than positive ones. To have a sense is to be able to imagine things being otherwise. When imagining otherwise, the subject must remain the same. Otherwise, you are imagining something completely different. In the sentence about John and his Dhammapada, the subject remains the same in both the positive proposition and in its negation. However, it was not possible to negate the sentences about the universe and Nirvana. A universe which is a unity and a universe which is not a unity are different universes by definition. The subject changed along with the word “not’. None of the four examples using the terms universe and Nirvana are about a subject which can be imagined otherwise. It is my contention that once one understands the meaning of Buddhist terms such as ‘The Unconditioned’, then The Unconditioned cannot be imagined, thought or conceived otherwise. It has no opposite, so there’s a lack of sense to any assertion being made, , positive or negative. One who makes the assertion that everything is Buddha Nature cannot show the difference between a state where everything is Buddha nature and one where not everything is. Thus the statement at issue makes no sense. It makes no difference. Differences that don’t make a difference don’t matter. To loosely paraphrase Wittgenstein, ” In the case of The Unconditioned or Buddha Nature, you cannot say, “What difference could be greater?” as you could say with pain: that no difference could be greater than the difference between pain and its absence. Whatever it is that perennial philosophy asserts, it’s opposite or absence is supposed to be unthinkable by definition. Hence the lack of Buddhist or perennial philosophical sense.
For a similar reason, I don’t accept that mathematics supports perennial philosophy. ‘The sum of 7 and 5 is 12’ may be a mathematical truth but saying ‘that the sum is 11’ is not a mathematical truth; it is an untruth and mathematics does not contain untruths as well as truths. If mathematics can’t say what’s ‘untrue’, then it doesn’t allow metaphysics to be ‘thought otherwise’. The opposite is still unthinkable. It’s nothing more mystical than an apriori grammatical rule for the use of mystical sounding vocabulary words like Sunyata, Rigpa, Alayavijnana, Dharmakaya, Thusness. Therefore, math is no more philosophically grounding than the previously demonstrated non-sense masquerading as empirical sentences in the indicative mood calling itself necessary truth.
Proverbial fingers pointing to the moon don’t help either in my opinion. Beliefs may be positive or negative but pictures are not. An act of pointing assumes that which may be pictured upon looking. Pictures cannot be negated and therefore don’t stand in logical relations. There is no sense in which a picture can be true and there is no sense in a pictures can be untrue. Therefore pointing at a philosophical moon using sutras, koans or clear light mind may produce beliefs about an ‘ineffable’ transcendental realm, but will not yield a positive or negative picture of that realm any better than metaphysical propositions, whether they be positive or negatively formed.
Perhaps I was wrong, but when you commented on positive metaphysical positions giving rise to fatal contradictions, I got the impression you were attempting to contrast such linguistic failures with some other means of pointing to a metaphysical reality. If so, it doesn’t look to me like you succeeded. Nothing you wrote suggests the existence of anything beyond the mechanics of your grammar, i.e., suggests neither a verbal nor a non-verbal source of valid metaphysical knowledge. I view your aforementioned quote as making a grammatical statement rather than an empirical or factual one. I see it as the expression of a preferred use of linguistic terms such as ‘positive propositions’ and ‘fatal contradictions’, i.e, a commitment to a form of thought – a rule of language.
Also, I must point out an issue with your statement that, “It is a simple empirical fact that these positions are absurd.” It appears you are failing to distinguish between a grammatical rule and an empirical statement of fact.
Allow me to demonstrate the difference once again.
Here is statements expressing empirical fact:
1. Clay owns a grammar book.
2. Clay does not own a grammar book.
The above statement and its negation make sense. They share the same content. They can both be imagined otherwise without changing the subject. The subject is still Clay. The truth or falsity of the sentence and its negation depends on evidence, not the meanings of words or definitions. Therefore it is empirical.
Now, here’s a non-empirical statement about language:
“It is a simple empirical fact that these positions are absurd.”
The subject of your sentence boils down to what can be said about propositions. So I’ll examine what can be said about a proposition according to your statement:
1. The metaphysical proposition is absurd.
2. The metaphysical proposition is not absurd.
A absurd proposition and a proposition which is not absurd are two completely different propositions by definition. Sentences (1) and (2) don’t refer to the same subject. They don’t share the same content. Therefore, they cannot be negations of each other and their opposites are thus unthinkable. That’s how you know they’re not empirical facts. No evidence is necessary or even possible. Their truth or falsity depends on meanings and definitions. These sentences express grammatical rules for the use of the words ‘proposition’ and ‘absurd’. Rules are not true or false. Only empirical facts can be said to be true or false. And I’ll admit that what I just wrote is a grammatical rule, not an empirical fact.
To paraphrase Kenny: Logic depends on there being something in existence and there being facts. Logic is independent of what the facts are. Therefore, the logical conclusion that there are facts is not something which can be expressed in a proposition.
Therefore, I must conclude that your statement, “It is a simple empirical fact that these positions are absurd” is itself the expression of a grammatical rule, and not a statement of empirical fact. Again, rules are not true or false. If you don’t recognize the difference between empirical facts on one hand and grammatical rules about word usage on the other, we’ll keep talking past each other.
To me, you seem to have been hinting at ‘why’ language fails. I wonder if perhaps your emphasis is on “why” language functions the way it does, while my concern is with “how” language functions. I try hard to remember that ‘why’ questions and ‘how’ questions are distinct in the same way that intentional cognition and causal cognition are distinct. Metaphysical thought tends to ignore such distinctions. That’s what I’m trying to get you to notice that difference by examining our language.
One last comment and I’ll bow out of the discussion. PeterJ, you wrote that for a Buddhist experiences are unreal. If Buddhists cannot demonstrate the difference between a state where experience is real and one where experience is unreal, then any statements they make about experience must not be using the words ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ as they are used in ordinary human language. Therefore, I’m unable to discuss stated issues further until I know what language Buddhists are speaking.
However many good qualities have been expressed by all those skilled in languages, they can hardly find room to vie with even a fraction of bodhicitta.
Just to cover my carelessness, I probably should have analyzed the “propositions are absurd” sentence a little differently. I admit being too lazy to explain things like how a physical man can be short today and tall tomorrow, but an absolutely absurd proposition isn’t going turn into an absolutely non-absurd proposition tomorrow. If PeterJ had used the term “all positive metaphysical propositions” as in his previous post, I might have thought to do a better job.
rsb – “But you’re missing the point, Peter, which is that Buddhist metaphysical claims, far from possessing mathematical rigour, flounder in the same soup of conceptual overdetermination and theoretical underdetermination as do all metaphysical claims.”
It can be and has been proved many times that all positive metaphysical positions are absurd. It is a famous fact. You can verify it for yourself if you wish. If you keep going at metaphysics it is impossible not to verify it.
Something-Nothing, Freewill-Determinism, Internalism-Externalism and so forth, these are the well known dilemmas of metaphysics. The two horns are always logically indefensible. This is not Buddhism but basic Metaphysics.
Forget all about Buddhism, and the Perennial philosophy. Pretend it doesn’t exist. It remains the case that all extreme metaphysical positions fail in logic. This is, after all, the reason why why philosophy is difficult. I cannot think of philosopher who has argued otherwise. These dilemmas are world-famous and famously undecidable. This is because the two extreme options are absurd. All this is well known.
If you believe that metaphysics is not a rigorous logical discipline then it is because this not how you do it. If you do it as a logician would do it, as Hegel or Russell would do it, say, then you arrive where everybody else arrives, at the the absurdity of all extreme metaphysical positions.
What philosophers make of this result is up to them but there are only three options. We can assume that there is no knowledge to be gained in metaphysics such that philosophy is useless, we can assume that all we learn from it is that the Universe is paradoxical, we can assume that the Universe is a Unity transcending the distinctions on which these dilemmas are predicated, as the Perennial philosophy proposes.
The first choice leaves us free to have almost any opinion we like, as we can easily see from the state of philosophy where ever this interpretation is endorsed. The second option is Dialethism, associated with Melhuish and Priest. The third is the doctrine of the Upanishads. which allows us to explain why these problems are undecidable and solve the problems of philosophy. That this third interpretation of metaphysics is Buddhist doctrine makes no difference to the logical issues, The logic is not a matter of opinion. The interpretation is a choice.
It is worth nothing, all the same, that the falsity of positive metaphysical positions is axiomatic to Middle Way Buddhism. Nagarjuna’s famous proof 2nd century of their absurdity is considered the foundation stone for Buddhist philosophy, and if we can show that his result is wrong then we will have falsified the teachings of the Buddha. If we want to attack Buddhism in philosophy then this is the battle-ground. ,
I mean, honestly, is our success really very likely? Is it not more plausible that all positive metaphysical positions are found to be logically absurd simply because they are false, just as ‘nondualism’ proposes and predicts? Then we would be able to explain why nobody can falsify the metaphysical scheme of the Perennial philosophy or find another one that works. Everything falls into place.
Contrary to popular opinion metaphysics is quite simple, but only if we approach as an exercise in logic, a game of chess, and stick closely to the rules. If we do this we end up where everyone must end up, and almost immediately. We are then faced with just three options, which is hardly a complex situation. It’s just that it;s mind-boggling. . .
.
Oops. That should have read ‘;It is worth noting…’. An unfortunate typo.
“Contrary to popular opinion metaphysics is quite simple, but only if we approach as an exercise in logic, a game of chess, and stick closely to the rules. If we do this we end up where everyone must end up, and almost immediately. We are then faced with just three options, which is hardly a complex situation. It’s just that it;s mind-boggling. . . ”
You seem to be confusing the fact of your belief in ‘proper metaphysics’ with metaphysical fact. We all know that you think it’s simple, Peter, which proves that you have run afoul the duality of simple/complex, and so remain hopelessly entangled in the very duality you claim to have overcome. The manifest absurdity of this duality is revealed with the question, ‘Can the simple apprehend the simple?’ Since simplicity apprehends nothing, we realize complexity is the condition of possibility of simplicity. But of course, simplicity entails the absence of complexity–leading to the absurd conclusion that complexity is both the condition of possibility of simplicity and the condition of impossibility of simplicity.
I came up with that hokey little bit between sips of tea. I know little of Buddhist theology, but the history of philosophy is filled with various ways to spin incompatible theses out of our ‘metaphysical intuitions.’ I appreciate that you will rationalize it some way–as an unwarranted hostility to metaphysics, as ignorance to the ‘proper’ traditions, as personal intolerance–you’ve suggested each of these in the course of making your case, but you still find yourself in the very same position I’ve been describing all along: unable to adduce anything even remotely capable of compelling me to think your particular interpretations are anything but your particular interpretations.
There is no metaphysical consensus on this planet. This is a fact. There’s lots of people who think they have discovered some indisputable metaphysical proof, but for some strange reason, they, like yourself, find themselves bogged down in disputation. Isn’t this a fact?
If it is a fact, then the skeptic carries the rational day, doesn’t it? How could she not?
“What philosophers make of this result is up to them but there are only three options. We can assume that there is no knowledge to be gained in metaphysics such that philosophy is useless, we can assume that all we learn from it is that the Universe is paradoxical, we can assume that the Universe is a Unity transcending the distinctions on which these dilemmas are predicated, as the Perennial philosophy proposes.”
There’s way more options! This is a perfect example of how the ‘only-game-in-town-effect’ generates illusions of simplicity. We can assume that metaphysics isn’t what we thought it was, that its usefulness turns entirely on the specific job at hand. We can assume that humans possess cognitive shortcomings conjuring the illusion of paradoxes. We can assume the Universe is a different multiplicity transcending the distinctions underwriting our dilemmas, one that only appears unitary…
Need I go on?
There’s nothing remotely ‘mathematical’ about your inferences, Peter. In fact, it resembles literary criticism more than anything, where the underdetermination of claims assures perpetual interpretative dispute–of the kind we are all witnessing here.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/audio/2017/apr/13/the-evolution-of-reason-a-new-theory-of-human-understanding-science-weekly-podcast
Great interviews. The Stigler effect is beginning to feel more and more inevitable…
PeterJ: “…we can assume that all we learn from it is that the Universe is paradoxical,…”
Clay: No, we can’t assume that without first confusing words with things, concepts with objects and rules of grammatical word usage with statements of empirical fact.
PeterJ: “…transcending the distinctions on which these dilemmas are predicated,…”
Clay: I’ve just spent lots of pixels trying to demonstrate there haven’t been any real distinctions made which require transcending.
PeterJ “…positive metaphysical positions are found to be logically absurd simply because they are false,…”
Clay: I’ve apparently also wasted many paragraphs explaining why they cannot be said to be false any more than true.
PeterJ: “…assume that the Universe is a Unity…”
Clay: Unless one can demonstrate what they mean by the difference between a universe which is a Unity and a universe which is not a Unity, the statement at issue doesn’t mean anything. Making assumptions doesn’t replace making distinctions.
PeterJ: “…the falsity of positive metaphysical positions is axiomatic to Middle Way Buddhism.”
Clay: “experiences are unreal” and “the universe is a Unity” look just like positive metaphysical positions to me.
Clay – My first reply was poor. I’ll just say that none of these are telling objections. You are underestimating your opponent. They are objections and deserve an answer, but this is not my blog and it would be a long one. It would be inappropriate to answer here. I’ll just reply to the last one. Your objection will be defused if you examine meaning of the words ‘unreal’ and ‘Unity’. This is not some cobbled together theory that cannot withstand analysis.
Clay – Have you not learned that experiences are undemonstrable? It’s basic stuff.
It’s like nobody wants to make any progress. Is nobody here interested in metaphysics? .
“Is nobody here interested in metaphysics?”
I think your question is central to the disagreements between you and Scott and between you and Clay. My sense of this blog from my three or four years reading and commenting here is that most of us are by and large not much interested in metaphysics. Metaphysical issues do arise from time to time, but my sense of the blog community that Scott has created around Blind Brain Theory is that it’s pretty empirically-minded and more interested in physical than in metaphysical entities. To put it another way, what does “the universe is a unity” mean to an astrophysicist or a cosmologist?
we get all the meta we need from actual physics.
http://imperfectcognitions.blogspot.com/2017/04/surfing-uncertainty.html
Reminds me of my high school years, reading mystical guys like Paul Davies and John Barrow and tripping hard on shrooms.
If there is …
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/jun/26/spaceexploration.comment
Hi Michael.- It appears that you’re correct. But it’s rather strange. Why the strong opinions then? Why the confident ‘explanations’ of Zen koans? Why no questions about the meaning of ‘unity’. I don’t get it.
Yes, I do despise metaphysics. But even being anti-metaphysical is a form of being interest in metaphysics. Would I bother to write this post if I wasn’t interested? Below are some altered quotes which sum up the findings of my metaphysical studies. A few changes/additions have been made to better reflect my own conclusions.
To borrow from Kevin Hector with a few additions/changes: “…metaphysics does violence to objects by forcing them into predetermined categories…in metaphysics, human persons give beings their measure in that they [metaphysically] determine from and by themselves what should be allowed to circulate as reality, in consequence of which the metaphysically stamped manner of human representation finds everywhere only the metaphysically constructed world. Metaphysics ends up doing violence to the objects to which it directs its gaze, accordingly, insofar as such objects are allowed to show up – indeed, to be – only as they fit within a prior framework established by one’s ideas, words, categories, dharmas and so on. This violence is compounded by the fact that metaphysics can render one insensitive to actual experience, since the essence to which one’s ideas supposedly correspond is defined as that fundamental reality which stands at a remove from experience. Metaphysics limits an object’s particularity to that which fits within one’s pre-established ideas about it, which explains why it is commonly criticized as “totalizing”, calculating, instrumentalizing, and above all, I would add “alienating.”
To borrow from John Caputo with a few additions/changes: “…[Metaphysical] language is violent inasmuch as it seeks to fit objects within its horizon, to pin them down, and to hold them within its grasp. …one forgets the inescapability of conceptual violence and instead sees [metaphysical] concepts as in perfect harmony with reality. This system of exclusions is put in place when a [metaphysical] language claims to be the language of reality itself, when a [metaphysical] language is taken to be what being, reality or nature itself would say if it were given a tongue. That is to say, if one forgets that one’s [metaphysical] concepts fit objects into a certain framework, one will be tempted to see that framework as itself natural, in consequence of which objects and persons who disagree with one come to be seen as unnatural, as opponents of the Truth…”
To borrow from Vattimo with a few changes: While metaphysics provided stability, it is in its essence violent not only because it is appropriating (aiming to order the world), but also because it reduces reality back to first principles, silencing questioning. Therefore, ‘All the categories of metaphysics are violent categories’.
To borrow from R. Lichtenstein with some additions/changes: [Metaphysics] is the ‘re-interpretation’ of everything to fit an a priori picture. The truth-values of ordinary empirical propositions are determined by an interface with physical reality. With metaphysical theses, on the other hand, the opposite is the case: the underlying state of the world is determined by what they say. They do not reflect the world — the world is forced reflect them: reality is a reflection of what they declare to be the case. The way the world has to be is determined by their supposed content; they stand out as philosophical pictures, delineating the conceptual boundaries of reality, as foundational principles, which trace out the logical or essential form of any possible world. That is why no evidence is needed, and none is ever really sought. No world is conceivable in which they do not apply.
To borrow from “Humanizing Evil”with a few additions/changes: “[Metaphysical] language places a proverbial demand on the other whether solicited or not through aggressive encroachments and superimposed universals of meaning. Therefore, systematic violence can be instantiated through our economic and political institutions operating as concretely inscribed [metaphysical] mechanisms within our cultural infrastructure and social ideologies.
Clay – It did not need saying that you despise metaphysics. I imagine rsb is the same. Why do you pretend to more about it than people who who study it? Why write about something you clearly do not understand? Have you re-read your post above? Doers this look like the words of someone who understands metaphysics. or someone who doesn’t know anything about it.?
Whatever happened to scholarship? .
My apologies for causing trouble. I thought you guys were serious,. .
Would appreciate some help over here at Eric Kaplan’s blog. I’m not sure I wont just go on a tangent and fail to deliver the model of concern I would like to deliver (or even one close to it)
PeterJ
Consider this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoousion
For an atheist these theological details don’t really mean anything. For believers they are matters not merely of life and death, but of salvation and damnation. Similarly, for those who do not believe in the existence of the entities which metaphysics discusses, the metaphysical details don’t really mean anything. One might in fairness say that metaphysics discusses the universe, but one also might in fairness ask if the metaphysical universe is the same as the physical universe that astronomers, cosmologists and physicists discuss.
Regarding seriousness, as Scott wrote at the beginning of the post, “philosophy is itself a data point.” I think that In the same way that a psychiatrist takes a patient’s hallucinations seriously, not as possible descriptions of reality but as symptoms of a disease, Scott purports to take traditional philosophy seriously, not as possible descriptions of anything that might actually exist, but in the same way that scientists who study vision take optical illusions seriously, as a tool for understanding how brains work. I can’t speak for anybody else, but I enjoyed your posts and hope you will continue to visit.
Certain tools are taboo, even in science.
Michael – You talk great sense. What you say here seems spot-on.
But in what way does all this temperamental; stuff change anything? It appears to be simply a way of avoiding the issues.
The OP raises various metaphysical issues and makes statements about Zen koans. It is one thing to believe that metaphysics is a waste of time, quite another to believe this while making statements about it in blind disregard for twenty centuries of work by greater minds than any here.
If a person thinks that metaphysics is a waste of time then they do not understand it. This is inevitable. The difficulty is proving that it is a waste of time, and thus that nobody understands it. This would be impossible. Many people understand it.
The idea that metaphysics sis not important cannot survive ten seconds of analysis. The idea that is useless, on the other hand, is quite difficult to refute. University administrations seem to have concluded it the case.
The reason would be that if a person believes that metaphysics is useless they are not going to listen to someone who claims to understand it, and will believe they are an arrogant and deluded person.
For this reason these kinds discussions are usually impossible, They always end in tears. The problem, which I have studied for a long time, seems to be while that the western academic tradition of philosophy is obviously a failure it has succeeded in persuading most people that it is impossible to understand philosophy. It has achieved this by refusing to study or teach the philosophy of the Upanishads. ,
It has been so successful in misunderstood Mysticism that it has not noticed that it has a perfectly sound philosophy.which a great many people claim to understand and which has a vast explanatory literature. It is not easy, but it is accessible with work.
I’d be happy to discuss this stuff all day if I thought it was helpful. When I first realised how philosophy works I was gobsmacked. It’s all so simple. I’m unable to appeal to academic qualifications but as an amateur I completed a supervised academic dissertation as a reality-check on my reasoning. My dissertation condensed the whole of metaphysics into four brief propositions and was approved without a single objection.
For Lao Tsu’s view metaphysics can be condensed further into just four word. Just about anybody would be able to learn why metaphysical problems arise and how to solve them. But the professors know better. They know that metaphysics is useless. This leaves us free to believe any old thing, even that the Buddha and Lao Tsu did not understand how the world works and perhaps even that nobody ever could. It is an academic scandal in this day and age.
…a feast for worms. ⚠ .
She’s not mine…
https://lovindanger.wordpress.com/2012/01/30/stephen-kings-basement/
Scott, just a general thanks for being here and doing the stuff you do. I’ve been reading your fiction since ’04, but only found this blog very recently. My academic background is only peripheral to the nitty-gritty of cogsci (call it about at best rather than anent), but I’ve quite happily been surfing the crests here and looking up fancy words as they appear. My personal reading list has gotten a lot longer since I started lurking here, a happy fact for which I blame you entirely. 🙂 Thanks again.
Thank you, Adam. Welcome to the board. I don’t think reading lists shrink, ever, period.
As I was reading through the comments here a couple essays came to mind.
“Can a Mādhyamika Be a Skeptic? The Case of Patsab Nyimadrak” by George Dreyfus pdf version can be found here: http://www.littlebang.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/dreyfus-skep.pdf
“Madhyamaka and Classical Greek Skepticism” by Jay L. Garfield and George Dreyfus (I was unable to locate a version of the essay to which I could link)
I came across both of these essays when reading Moonshadows: Conventional Truth in Buddhist Philosophy (a collection I’ve previously mentioned around here).
These look like some cool sources, dharm. What’s your take, though?
Sorry for the delay, I’ve been thinking about how to respond to this for a few days now.
First, and contrary to PeterJ’s comments, I don’t think Buddhism has solved philosophy. Even within Buddhism, there are multiple and sometimes contradicting views on various subjects. Some schools acknowledge
I thought it worth mentioning that I discovered Buddhist philosophy around the same time I discovered your works. It was during some time I spent unemployed while living in Milwaukee and I was making use of the Milwaukee library system. I started reading about Madhyamaka philosophy a few months before I started reading The Darkness That Comes Before. There were things in your book that seemed to me, a naïve college dropout, to reinforce what I was reading in the Buddhist philosophy. Both your novel and the Buddhist philosophy I was reading could have had the same tag line: Ever are men deceived. And they suffer because of it.
Suffering is what Buddhism is trying to deal with. The whole point of the Buddhist practice is to eliminate suffering. One of the reasons that Madhyamaka philosophy emphasizes the middle way approach (middle way between essentialism and nihilism) is because either view can lead to more suffering. Take the skeptical approach and practice compassion, you will be better off in the long run.
While I think Buddhism currently has a role to play in helping people, I don’t know what the future holds. I know the Dalai Lama has stressed that Buddhism must let go of things that science discredits (for example, Mt. Meru is not the center of the universe). I know that he’s spent the past 30 years (aprox) meeting with scientists trying to advance his own knowledge of science and has been a driving force behind introducing science education into Buddhist scholastic monasteries (keep in mind. In the short term, and perhaps near long term, I think Buddhism can survive and be strengthened by encounters with science. But what happens when the world of “Crash Space” becomes reality? Why would I need Buddhism when I can adjust my emotional states and eliminate my experience of suffering by thinking about it? Over the past few days, I have kept thinking about “Crash Space” and replacing the Humanist character with a future incarnation of the Dalai Lama.
In closing: from a purely selfish perspective (not sure if anyone else around Three Pound Brain has much interest in Buddhsit philosophy), I wouldn’t mind a guest post from someone (Jan Westerhoff comes to mind) that could represent Buddhism, preferably Madhyamaka philosophy and then see your response. I would especially be interested in how someone more learned in Madhymaka philosophy responds to your question “what’s your theory of meaning?”
This is a wonderful retrospect, and conforms with my cartoon understanding (that dissension reigned within the Perennial philosophy as well). Ever since reading Metzinger’s piece on the reality of suffering I’ve wondered if their wasn’t some way to assemble something quasi-ethical out of heuristic neglect, but everything I come up with feel tendentious. The idea of the Dalai Lama at the release party hit me like an electric bolt: what will become of the world’s major ethoi? How will they adapt to survive? Do you know of anyone who approaches Buddhism from a transhumanist standpoint: I just had a memory of bathing in Zelazny as an adolescent–someone has to attempted something similar to his Lord of Light.
(I have no idea how this ended up in spam–I blame the NSA, then the Russians!)
Hi Scott, I wrote a response but doesn’t look like it posted. Did it get flagged as spam or something?
Lemme check…
Scott wrote: I would love to hear more about the sociolinguistic and literary guises you reference.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Clay’s Reply: I’ve only found a couple of sociological/literary references which seem to describe the kind of problems to be expected when swinging between and/or conflating the first and third persons.
A sociological example is found in Steve Fuller’s review of “The New Production of Knowledge – The dynamics of Science and Research In Contemporary Societies by M. Gibbons, et al. If I understand correctly, Fuller criticizes a view of sociological methodology which conflates theorizing and sense-making by inscribing the etic in the emic. In this case the roles of 1st and 3rd persons are apparently represented by social agents and sociologists. He writes: “One is reminded of priests who need to impute souls to people in order to have something to minister. Here a cynic might wonder whether the sociologist is engaging in anything more than a form of methodological ventriloquism by claiming that social agents are ‘already’ theorising by the time the sociologist arrives on the scene.
Fuller then asks the million dollar question: “Is the ‘etic’ is already inscribed in the ’emic’, the ‘third-person’ in the ‘first-person’ perspective?”
One problem he finds with this way of relating the sociologist to fellow social agents is the problem of creeping reflexivity. He writes: “Even granting some sort of analogy between the sense-making of social agents and the theorising of sociologists, the two activities clearly perform quite different, if not opposed, social functions.”
A literary example is found in a dissertation which uses Hamlet to point out first person reports of thoughts/feelings being conflated with third person comments on those thoughts/feelings – “The Undiscovered country:” Theater and the Mind in Early Modern England” by J. Magsam. There is a reference to the work of Paul Cefalu, who: “has argued that any tendency to understand Hamlet as having complex “inwardness” is based on the persistence of Hamlet’s family and peers to attempt to “pluck out” his mystery, thereby conflating first-person reports of thoughts and feelings with third-person comments upon those thoughts and feelings.
Cefalu further reads Hamlet’s insistence that “I know not ‘seems’” as drawing an unclear distinction between propositional and existential attitudes. “I am” necessarily differs from “I act” (the first suggests an ontological truth, the second argues that an action has occurred or will occur), but Hamlet does not claim “how he acts and how he is are not identical states. In Cefalu’s reading, Hamlet’s inability to distinguish significantly between these states suggests that there is in fact no gap between “is” and “seems,” and that Hamlet is simply grieving; there is no “particular” expression of grief, calculated or otherwise, because there is no difference in the interior and exterior experience of his grief.
The Hamlet example thus leads me to question the issue of “theorizing” mental states. It looks to me like swinging between first and third perspectives may be connected with so-called “Theory of Mind.” The following example discusses ToM in relation to confusion of social psychology with cognitive psychology.
Fuller’s above criticism of the idea that “social agents are ‘already’ theorising by the time the sociologist arrives on the scene” seems to agree with general criticisms of ToM as found in the book, “Against Theory of Mind” edited by Leudar and Costall. According to the book, “before the advent of ToMism, cognitive psychology treated the problems of how psychologists study people, and how lay people make sense of other people as being quite separate. They claim that “…treatment of children and adults as theoreticians – or as if theoreticians – is not actually an empirical discovery at all, but a background assumption inherited from Chomsky’s theory of language…” Furthermore, the assumption that social action entails such ‘mindreading’ – and hence theorizing – individualized the problem of social understanding, thus making the study of intentional social activities seem no longer the preserve of social psychology, but of cognitive psychology instead. One of the main critical issues raised is the ToMists’ exclusion, in their research and theory, of other ways that people – adults as well as children – might actually deal with one another without the help of ‘Theory of Mind’.
In their insistence that making sense of another person must involve a two stage process, the observation of ‘mere behavior’ and the inference from such observable data to hidden mental states is the cause of a different kind of dualism. For they keep talking themselves into epistemic and methodological dualisms, based on the opposition of appearance and reality, surface and depth, and behavior and mind.”
To me, this mention of ‘making sense’ of another person in relation to ‘theorizing about minds’ sounds possibly connected to Fuller’s criticism of conflating ‘theorizing and sense making.’ Also, the dualistic two-stage process of observing mere behavior and the inference from such observable data to hidden mental states sounds suspiciously connected to the distinction mentioned in the Hamlet example – “I am” necessarily differs from “I act” (the first suggests an ontological truth, the second argues that an action has occurred or will occur)…”
The book also says, “ToMism continues to treat ‘Theory of Mind’ as the one true form of social understanding, and all other kinds of relating to other people as the mere appearance of the real thing. This is why the ToMists distrust or else simply disregard research based upon real-life social interaction: from their perspective real-life studies can (somewhat paradoxically) only provide evidence about the appearance of sociality, they could never confirm its reality….It is on the basis of this opposition of appearance and reality, that ToMism assimilates the problem of how psychologists make sense of ‘ordinary people’ to how, for example, physical scientists come to theorize about atoms.
Critics of cognitivism and dualism may have, therefore, identified the wrong target and the Cartesian mind-body dualism may not, after all, be the most fundamental problem. The Cartesian appearance-reality dualism may indeed be more fundamental in generating the many dilemmas of modern psychology.
(so, in my opinion, if BBT can explain the ‘appearance’ of consciousness by explaining it away, then mischief managed!)
If I understand the above correctly, swinging between 1st & 3rd persons leads to conflating such things as social agents & sociologists, social psychology & cognitive psychology, sense making & theorizing. All this seems to be fueled by a Theory-of-Mind-ism that tries to use intentionality and metacognition to provide theoretical solutions, and uses causal idioms to do the work of intentional terms.
Lastly, the mention of “methodological ventriloquism” and “priests imputing souls in order to minister” in the Fuller article hints at an idea I’ve had regarding the conflation of first and third person perspectives. It seems to produce a form of ventriloquism, which might be what Wittgenstein calls ‘autoventriloquism’. He links it to a conflation of logical and psychological.
In the book“Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness” by G. Hagberg, he writes: “…the fairly uniform clothing of language can make very diverse language-games appear alike, and in response to the philosophical voice insisting ‘While you can have complete certainty about someone else’s state of mind, still it is always merely subjective, not objective certainty,’ Wittgenstein flatly replies: “These two words betoken a difference between language games.” Again, a logical difference is misconstrued as a psychological one; the very word ‘subjective’ shows its danger in calling us back to the philosophical voice, and the influence our language holds over us (in making us want to say what fits the metaphysical picture) is approximating a condition of autoventriloquism.
My conclusion is that all the above seems to agree with your comment in October that, “There’s no such thing as ‘mind,’ so what we need is a theory of ‘mind talk,’…”
Dharmakirti – Hi. Your post above i much too long for me to deal with, but I’d like to discuss you first paragraph. In my view it is dangerously misleading.
“First, and contrary to PeterJ’s comments, I don’t think Buddhism has solved philosophy. Even within Buddhism, there are multiple and sometimes contradicting views on various subjects. Some schools acknowledge .”
Of course there are many opinions on the finer points of the nature of Reality. Many Buddhists have almost no understanding of philosophy. There are different schools among even the experts but this philosophy allows for different schools because it is a method, not a list of axioms.
All Buddhists agree with the teaching of the Buddha. These are interpreted into formal philosophy by Nagarjuna. We do not have to guess whether his philosophy solves philosophical problems or accords with science or contradicts reason we can go and look and prove it one way or the other.
Buddhism is a science of mind, not a snake-pit of opinion. It is possible to prove that only one metaphysical theory is not logically-indefensible and Nagarjuna shows us how to do it. Nobody has ever proved otherwise. It hardly matters whether Nagarjuna was a Buddhist or a devout believer in materialism since what he says is what he says, and either it makes sense or it doesn’t.
Your comment suggests that the Buddha did not solve philosophy, which is an absurd idea, and that Nagarjuna’s formal writings will not lead us to be able to do the same, which is a claim that must be proved and not just stated. The founder of Zen cannot easily be knocked off his perch.
The claim that philosophy is solved by conceding the logical absurdity of extreme metaphysical positions is not some woolly religious nonsense. It is a well-defined and clearly-formulated claim that is decidable in logic and reason. We could forget Buddhism and study Lao Tsu instead, or the Upanishads, or various modern philosophers who write on these topics.
It is odd that Nagarjuna and Kant, who some would say are the greatest philosophers in their respective traditions, agree about metaphysics while so many others disagree with them both but cannot prove them wrong.
Just to be clear, PeterJ, do you specifically endorse Kant’s synthetic a priori knowledge/judgments?
I don’t get involved in his ideas about judgements since I feel they are confusing if not wrong in places. I would disagree with many of his ideas. It’s his metaphysical logic and results that I would endorse. I do not entirely endorse his ideas about how to interpret those results, some of his thoughts on the noumenon for instance. I’m not proposing that Kant was right about everything, just that his metaphysical analysis arrived at the correct place. I would suggest that he did not quite get it right with his ‘noumenenon’ solution but that he correctly saw the need for an idea of this sort. As it is a matter of logic nobody is going to gainsay him on that one.
We can all disagree happily on how to interpret the logic, but I can’t see much point in arguing about what can be proved.
Thank you for the reply, PeterJ.
And thanks for the discussion. I realise I’ve been proposing unpopular ideas.
Philosophy abounds with convergences like Nagarjuna and Kant–which is to say any convergence you fasten on evidences nothing except that convergences happen in philosophical thought. No one said anything about ‘woolly nonsense,’ only that your position is one out of countless positions, most of them filled with people possessing your degree of conviction. All I’m asking you to tell me is what distinguishes you from all those other believers, each of which have their own ‘incontrovertible arguments’ that only seem to generate skepticism and disputation outside some narrow ingroup. The easy thing to do is to blame others for not being convinced: this is what pretty much every credulous ingroup discourse does. Nagarjuna (like Kant) is controversial in the extreme. It’s not our fault the founder of Zen finds himself in this position! Nor do we have to engage any of his arguments to state that he’s in this position. Either you agree with this, or you think every rational soul on the planet agrees with Nagarjuna.
Credulity is the human disease, Peter, and you display the symptoms. That’s not our problem, it’s yours my friend. I know you feel like the exception, but from the outside you like frightfully familiar…
I like to rely on logic and experience. All philosophers agree with Kant and Nagarjuna as to the absurdity of partial metaphysical positions. If you can prove them false you will instantly become a world-famous philosopher. It is basic stuff. .
Examine what you say here. It is clearly not informed by a knowledge of Kant and Nagarjuna. It is a sort of meta-comment on the quantity of coincidences in philosophy. Of course two philosophers agreeing proves nothing. But two philosophers proving the same thing in logic and going to to explore their result is a completely different matter.
Take your favourite first-order metaphysical question. It will be reducible to a simple choice between two opposing views neither of which work. Anybody can try this. Do you not wonder why? Do you have no wish to solve such problems? Would you rather just invent cognitive and psychological theories that have no metaphysical foundation, like sandcastles with the tide coming in?
But this is exactly what I’m talking about: you always assume the ignorance of your interlocutor. I spent years studying Kant–two courses on the first critique, an entire course on his ethics, and a whole course on the third critique. I even took a grad course on everything other than the critiques and MFM. And I’m sorry, but no, it isn’t the case that Kant’s antinomies command any kind of consensus whatsoever.
“Would you rather just invent cognitive and psychological theories that have no metaphysical foundation, like sandcastles with the tide coming in?”
Whose metaphysical foundations? Everyone has their different stories, and yet somehow, we have smart phones and heart transplants–sans any consensus on (knowledge regarding) metaphysical foundations.
What’s your solution to the problem of the criterion? How do you immunize yourself from the inevitability of confirmation bias? I can go on and on with these questions, Peter. But how about we stick with the problem of the criterion… How do you solve it?
It’s all quite simple. Kant showed us why metaphysicians cannot decide even one metaphysical problem. It is because both of their extreme answers are logically absurd. Nobody ever discovers differently, whatever their theories about how they might do so one day. What is there to argue about?
The reason why some philosophers set out to formally prove that this is the case is to to provide a sound formal foundation for the rest of their world-theory or description. Kant could go no further than logic took him and he discovered nothing new. But he faced up to the implications of his resul and half0fugured out what it meant, and this is why he deserves to be mentioned alongside Nagarjuna. He seems to have made the mistake of thinking the there could be more than one noumenon, which is logically impossible according to its definition, and his defense of the Categorical Imperative, which could be Buddhist doctrine is ridiculous and renders it absurd, But he went where few scholastic philosophers are prepared to go, to the the conclusion that logic endorses some sort of idealism and a phenomenon that is ‘mind-in-general’ and an strange phenomenon prior even to this. He did know about Buddhist doctrine but if we follow the logic all roads lead to Rome.
I understand your scepticism. You have been to university. The idea that someone could understand philosophy will seem outrageous and quite obviously a sign of poor scholarship, delusion. arrogance and so forth. Yet on some internet forums most of the members would know all this stuff. It’s not a secret. It just isn’t taught in western universities because the professors know little about it. If we chat for little longer you’ll know more about Buddhist philosophy than many professor of philosophy.
Sounds like hand waving to me, Peter, sorry. The fact that everybody gets it on some forums actually evidences my case: these are ingroup commitments, beliefs that certain individuals use to indicate reliability and membership. If you get a chance, check out Haidt’s Righteous Mind: humans find it impossible to think rationally about group-identifying commitments.
It’s the science I trust, not Kant. If you trust the science, then you acknowledge the inability of humans to appraise identifying beliefs rationally. You realize that you are your own yardstick, and so prone to be amazed at how your beliefs always seem to measure up, no matter what the world throws at them. You fail to realize that the existence of well-formed, evidenced counterarguments warrants suspending commitment to your own argument, rendering it contingent on future discoveries. All you can do is wave your hands and insist, despite the fact of endless metaphysical disputation, that you have somehow won the magical belief lottery and come up with the one true metaphysics.
Your’s is a faith-based position. The fact you can’t see this speaks to the power of your faith, I suppose.
A faith-based position? You should have the basic decency to read my posts. I conclude that you skim through them as if they are not rigorous.
I find it difficult to believe that you’re interested in metaphysics. Saying you are is not the same thing, and just having an opinion is abandoning reason.
If an objective reader were to read my posts here then they would see that calling it ‘hand-waiving’ is equivalent to saying that you haven’t read them. .
Why would you? You know I’m hand-waiving. You know that metaphysics is complicated and impossible to solve and that nobody could ever understand it. Indeed. you know more than Kant and Nagarjuna and me combined. Of course, you know nothing of the sort, but it seems unlikely that you’ll ever discover this because you know you’re right so don’t need to study the issues. . .
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I don’t say this just to be rude. It is simply the case. The evidence is this conversation. Hand-waiving indeed. I’m appealing to logic and the facts and you;re suggesting we should ignore them.
I’m happy to carry on but you’;ll have to give me a reason. I can’t imagine why you would want to. .
This discussion is not unusual. It is article of faith in the academic world that metaphysics is incomprehensible and this meme is carefully transmitted across the generations. Today it is forgotten that is is an article of faith and assumed to be an established fact. Any suggestion that metaphysics can be understood is dismissed as ‘mysticism’, as if giving it a name will make it go away. I’d bet my house that you could understand metaphysics a lot better better than most of your philosophical heroes if you put your mind to it. .
How about you read my posts, tell me why I should take your metaphysical claims seriously. Your original ‘mathematics’ contention was false, I think you now realize. Your claim of convergence between Kant and Nagarjuna attests to the ‘truth’ of their metaphysical presumptions no more than any of the other countless convergences out there. Your every attempt to lay out the ‘compelling’ steps only seem such absent appreciation of all the other interpretations out there. You continually complain of my ignorance, my failure to read you properly… in the course of never managing to answer my basic questions regarding underdetermination and how you could ever think you’ve overcome the problem.
So, how do you solve the problem of the criterion? How do you put an end to the regress of interpretations?
If you have no decisive way of doing this, you’re playing a hunch, plain and simple. I appreciate you don’t think so, but to anyone with any appreciation of the difficulties involved in theoretical cognition (there’s a reason why science is more perspiration than inspiration), you won’t be taken seriously.
rsb – I think you are caught up in a certain way of thinking that is inimicable to what I’m saying. Please explain to me what is wrong with what I’ve said.or I’ll just go on saying it.
In answer to your opening question, you should take my claims seriously because you cannot falsify them , and if you studied metaphysics you’d know this. Whether you should take metaphysics seriously is not a question that needs asking, albeit not many people do. .
The problem of the regress of interpretation and of the criterion are irrelevant to anything here as far as i can tell. It’s just a question of doing the sums. We haven’t yet got past the basics of metaphysics, so no point in worrying about anything else until then.
Let’s get down to brass tacks. I have claimed that all positive metaphysical positions are logically indefensible, Either you can falsify this claim or not. I know that you cannot. You’d win a Nobel prize if you ever did. .
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I fear “The problem of the regress of interpretation and of the criterion are irrelevant to anything here as far as i can tell” answers the question in about the worst way possible! Faulting the question is tantamount to shooting a rescue flare in these parts, Peter. Why not admit that you don’t know? Why does the fact of our collective ignorance trouble you so?
Otherwise, what’s your interpretation of logic? You employ the term as if it were uncontroversial, when it is anything but. For me, logic is a kind of neurally implemented selection machine. What is it for you? What evidences your view?
rsb —“I fear “The problem of the regress of interpretation and of the criterion are irrelevant to anything here as far as i can tell” answers the question in about the worst way possible!”
I’m not interpreting anything. We haven’t got that far yet. I’m pointing out the logical result of metaphysics. We need to establish this before moving on to interpretation.
—“Faulting the question is tantamount to shooting a rescue flare in these parts, Peter. Why not admit that you don’t know? Why does the fact of our collective ignorance trouble you so?”
Basically all of it. You seem happy to know nothing of the a successful philosophy but lots about one that doesn’t work. Indeed, you don’t even seem to know that it is successful, or even what it is. This is just the way it is in academic philosophy at this time and it affects us all. What is it I’m supposed not to know?
—“Otherwise, what’s your interpretation of logic?”
I interpret it as proving that the Universe is a Unity, or, to be more cautious, as proving that this is what an Ideal Reasoner would conclude.
—“You employ the term (logic) as if it were uncontroversial, when it is anything but. For me, logic is a kind of neurally implemented selection machine. What is it for you? What evidences your view?”
I’m happy to go along with Aristotle on this one. I’ve never seen the need for anything else in metaphysics. Spencer Brown, a colleague of Russell’s who shares my view of metaphysics, proposes that we need to introduce imaginary values for metaphysical calculus and he introduced one that works in his ‘Laws of Form’, but I believe this is unnecessary if we properly understand Aristotle’;s dialectic method.
I therefore don’t see any need to complicate this issue. By ‘logic’ I mean ‘working it out in the usual way’. .
Do you believe that the universe is a pink cube? I thought not. This is because you are perfectly capable of doing metaphysics armed with the tools you already have. You have not yet seen how to do it, that’s all. You still think it’s complicated, never a sign of understanding, and if you reject it’s result then yes, it will become a rat’s-nest of impossible problems as you know and as history shows. I could tell you how to cut through all this complication.
I think you should make objections to the philosophy I’m explaining and stop trying to shoot the messenger. You’re close to going ad hominem here, the philosophical equivalent of ‘postal’. The logical issue is the absurdity of extreme metaphysical theories. If we can agree that they do at least appear to be absurd to nearly all philosophers who have ever lived then we can move on to interpretation. ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ philosophy is in full agreement about the results of analysis, they disagree only over interpretation. . .
“I have no idea how this ended up in spam–I blame the NSA, then the Russians!”
I blame my atrocious grammar. Sorry about that.
Anyway, regarding Buddhism and Transhumanism, some time ago I was on the IEET website and I came across the Cyborg Buddha Project. I have not followed the project, though. I did bookmark it with the intent of checking it out someday. Someday just hasn’t come around, yet. https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/cyborgbuddha
To change subjects to something truly important….
Go MN Wild!
What a heartbreaker after that electric 3rd!
My boys face elimination tonight, but the force is strong with us.
I kinda fell off after the Blackhawks crashed and burned.
PeterJ, sorry if I’m overlooking it, but I can’t discern whether or not you gave a specific answer to Scott’s question regarding the problem of the criterion. Appealing to logic and facts looks to me like justification of knowledge. If I understand correctly, the problem of the criterion is a separate and more fundamental issue than justification. Could you please clarify how you solve the problem of the criterion and what you take to be the starting point of knowledge?
Oops, just saw that Scott’s last post included a repeat question about the criterion problem. Just reply to his post instead of mine. Thanks.
Aristotle concluded that true knowledge is identical with its object and I agree. It’s a matter of logic. True knowledge would be the identity of knower and known.
Is this what you mean?
Perhaps you take knowledge to be ‘justified true belief’ or somesuch. I can never understand how this can be called knowledge. To be knowledge we’d have to know whether the belief is justified, and in my terminology if it is a belief then it cannot be called certain knowledge.
Analysis shows that certain knowledge, knowledge about which we cannot be mistaken, can only be ‘knowledge by identity’, knowledge that is immediate and not dependent on interpretation or a medium of communication. All else would be relative knowledge.
Theories of relative knowledge are useful and important, but not a major concern in the functioning of metaphysics. We all know that logical demonstrations are a guide to what a rational person should believe and not a proof of what is true, since Reality might not obey the rules. .
PeterJ,
If I’m not mistaken, it sounds like your criterion of knowing relies on what Aristotle described as self-thinking thought – a thinking that thinks itself – an identity of form and content, where the thinking and what is thought are the same. To me, this is like the Buddhist notion of self-cognizing, self-illuminating Dharmata, where awareness takes on the form of an object and reveals that form by assuming it. Thus in the process of revealing external things, cognition reveals itself. This all boils down to the reflexivity of consciousness, or more simply “reflexivity.” It was understood by Dharmakirti as a particular type of perception called self-cognition (svasamvedana). It might be compared to what Western philosophers call apperception. “The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness” notes that Dharmakirti’s ideas are not unlike Western philosophers like Aristotle, Descartes and Kant, who argued that consciousness implies self-consciousness. A Tibetan metaphor for this reflexivity is that of a lamp in a dark room which in the act of illuminating objects in the room also illuminates itself.
May I ask if the above adequately describes “how” you know, i.e., your criterion of knowing?
Clay – Your exposition sounds right to me. But I like to keep things simple and just say that true knowledge is identical with its object. Even this is slightly misleading but at least it’s simple. I find complexity to be the enemy of progress in metaphysics,.
rsb – I didn’t quite address the question you asked about logic. I have no idea where this post will appear but just so I do…
You call logic a ‘neurally implemented selection machine’. When you and I are thinking this seems about right as far as it goes. But logic stands independent of you and me. If you look around you’ll see that world obeys the rules. At any rate, all we need to do in metaphysics is to turn on our selection machines a let them go to work. They will naturally follow the laws described by Aristotle.
Regarding the problem of the criterion….
I understand that it is not the purpose of TPB to teach epistemology, so I am a little reluctant to post this, but, I’m going to anyway with the hope that I will learn something.
Below is a passage from Jan Westerhoff’s Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction and I’m wondering, can someone here can tell me whether or not this statement is related to the problem of the criterion? Thanks in advance. 🙂
I would say that statements using the term “means of knowledge” or “valid cognition,” both translated from the word “pramāṇa” are related to the problem of the criterion. To back me up on this, I refer to the Wikipedia article on the term “Pramana,” which says, “The focus of Pramana is how correct knowledge can be acquired, how one knows, how one doesn’t, and to what extent knowledge pertinent about someone or something can be acquired.”
Therefore, (correct me if I’m wrong), statements involving means of knowledge, i.e., how correct knowledge can be acquired, are indeed related to the “problem of the criterion.”
What puzzles me about Nagarjuna is that he is said not to subscribe to the idea of pramanas as an epistemological cornerstone. For example, Paul Williams states that Nagarjuna believes there are no pramanas. In fact, some Buddhists accused him of being a nihilist because they said his doctrine undermined the Buddha’s proper teaching. Yet, somehow, Nagarjuna manages to argue for the view of emptiness while paradoxically giving injunctions against holding any view whatsoever. If Nagarjuna admits that “means of knowledge” (pramāṇas) are empty, then I fail to see how he can give any good reason to believe all things are empty. I don’t know what he thinks functions as a criterion in bringing about such knowledge. It’s as if he or his disciples have smuggled some form of “valid cognition” in through the epistemological back door.
This is getting interesting, but I don’t think we can sort it out in a comments section.
Like Clay, many people conclude that Nagarjuna dismisses all possible views. But this is not the case, or only the case in a way. A crucial aspect of his teaching is his conceptual division of the world into the ‘conventional’ and ‘ultimate’. This allows us to disentangle two aspects of the world and speak about them more clearly. This is his Doctrine of Two Truths or Worlds.
Then we are able to say that pramanas are (to all intents and purposes) real and functional but also unreal and not functional. How so. Because in the aphorism of Lao Tsu, ‘True words seem paradoxical’. This is because what is true in one world is false in the other, and yet both have to be taken into account for metaphysical statements. . ,
Fir instance, when we say ‘it is raining’ this may be true in a conventional sense, but metaphysically it is false since by reduction nothing would really exist or ever happen. Therefore we must say it is raining and not-raining. This explains Heraclitus’ statement, ‘We are and are-not’.
Knowledge and understand are both reducible. So what we say about them may be true for the conventional world but false for an an ultimate analysis. It is this dual-aspect approach that causes Nagarjuna to be so poorly interpreted, and why so many people think he held no view of his own.
In fact he endorses a neutral metaphysical position. For this all positive metaphysical theories would be not just absurd (as he proves) but also false.
Knowledge requires a knower. Understanding requires an understander. These dualities are reduced in the Perennial philosophy. The Upanishads ask, ‘Who is there to understand the understander? Who is there to know the knower?
Nagarjuna’s logic is the same as Aristotle’s once it is is broken down and as Dharmkirti’s useful post shows he likewise proposes that true knowledge is identical with its object. Hence in mystocism the problem of knowledge is solved by identity or unity, for their would be no true knowledge besides knowledge of ourself, since we would be the universe. . ,
In my opinion this is not the way to get into Nagarjuna because it is too complicated and difficult. There are more basic issues to sort out first, such as his logical argument. To understand his view of knowledge and ontology we would have to understand his doctrine of two truths, and for this to seem plausible we would need to grasp the significance of his metaphysical proof.
People who are confused about Nagarjuna sometimes write books and articles, and this confuses the issues. I would recommend ‘The Sun of Wisdom’ by Khenpo Tsultrum Gyamptso. For a grasp of his logic it would be ‘Aristotle;s De Interpretatione’ by C.W.A Whittaker. Although they are excellent in their various ways I would not recommend those by Jay Garfield or Mark Siderits.
In short, Nagarjuna argues that the universe is a unity, and it would follow that is has two inimicable descriptions, one that works for the relative world, the world of opposites, and one that is ultimate. This dual-aspect language is the reason why it takes quite a while to get the hang of the Perennial view. It is a very slippery customer. . ,. .
The key idea here would be ‘nonduality’. This may be worth googling.
PeterJ wrote: Clay – Your exposition sounds right to me. But I like to keep things simple and just say that true knowledge is identical with its object. Even this is slightly misleading but at least it’s simple. I find complexity to be the enemy of progress in metaphysics,.
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Clay’s reply: Okay, since you did not disagree with Dharmakirti’s awareness of objects that contains an element of self-awareness, it sounds like you accept the Buddhist notion of apperception (samjna-skandha) which in a generic sense is equivalent to Aristotle’s senus communis that binds together sensory input into a representation of the object, as well as equivalent to Kant’s notion of the transcendental unity of apperception that makes experience possible.
To reduce complexity, allow me to reduce everything said thus far down to Dignaga ‘s fine term for reflexive self-cognition or “apperception” (svasamvitti) which counts as a pramana (means of knowledge or valid cognition).
And, to make it even more simple, your criterion of knowledge ends up being:
REFLEXIVITY
I have yet to investigate any philosophical, religious or metaphysical position that doesn’t ultimately depend upon a metacognitive foundation of reflexivity for it’s knowledge claims. Searching for a way to debunk the illusion of reflexivity is what led me to Scott’s blog in the first place.
You mentioned Lao Tsu’s aphorism ‘True words seem paradoxical’. But according to what I take to be the Blind Brain Theory, the reason for such seeming paradox is not “…because what is true in one world is false in another…” Rather, I refer to one of Scott’s comments from December 1, 2012 where he wrote, ” Saying, ‘language is inherently contradictory’ simply restates the mystery. Linguistic self-reference actually isn’t contradictory on the account I provide, we are simply stumped into thinking it is because of the illusion of reflexivity which turns on informatic neglect.”
Philosophy and metaphysics are no longer important to my sense of well-being. I don’t know how much you depend on metaphysics for your state of mind, PeterJ. Perhaps if you investigated Scott’s writings on “informatic neglect” it would only cause you distress. Giving up the self-validating goodies provided by reflexivity is not always a painless process. But if you are curious about what Blind Brain Theory has to say about reflexivity and informatic neglect, I’d suggest starting off with Scott’s posts titled, “Paradox as Cognitive Illusion” and “Reactionary Atheism: Hagglund, Derrida, and Nooconservatism*”
As for your explanation of Nagarjuna, I note a similarity statements such as: (1) “But this is not the case, or only the case in a way.” (2) “…pramanas are (to all intents and purposes) real and functional but also unreal and not functional.” (3) “…we must say it is raining and not-raining.”
And last but not least, we find one universe, yet two worlds, one conventional & one ultimate:
“…the universe is a unity, …what is true in one world is false in the other,…”
In my opinion, all the above statements are variations on a familiar theme. They express an “appearance-reality” dualism, plain and simple. It’s the old gap between “is” and “seems.” After noticing this pattern, I suspect Nagarjuna pulls off his tricks utilizing the same methodology I criticized in my post above on April 21 regarding Theory of Mind. Looks to me like he misconstrues a logical difference as a psychological one, and possibly conflates theorizing with sense making. A good indication he’s doing this would be an inability to tell whether he’s speaking strictly from the first or third person perspective. Is he treating observation as something mental/psychological/intentional or as something logical/causal/theoretical? I can’t tell where he makes any such distinction between the two. Can anyone else?
If not, then Nagarjuna is open to charges of “creeping reflexivity” and “autoventriloquism” similar to that mentioned in my aforementioned post. The same criticism would apply to Nagarjuna as to those sociologists and Theory-of-Mind-ists who talk their audiences into unnecessary epistemic and methodological dualisms of appearance and reality, surface and depth. Someone needs to explain to Nagarjuna that it’s no mystery metacognition doesn’t provide solutions to experience theoretically/causally, and that causal idioms were never intended to do the work of psychology/intentionality. Therefore, it’s not necessary to metacognitively theorize two worlds in one universe or to posit identity in difference or to philosophize over whether it’s really raining or just appears to be raining, in order to make sense of truth and falsity.
And by the way, I’ve read everything there is to read about non-duality on Greg Goode’s site a few years ago, and I personally don’t believe anyone could explain it any better than he can.
P.S. I think I may have narrowed down further where Nagarjuna confuses logical and psychological. Rather than calling it a case of theorizing conflated with sense making, a better description might be theoretical reasoning conflated with practical reasoning. Nagarjuna apparently tries to parallel the worlds of conventional and ultimate truths in the same way Aristotle tries to parallel practical syllogism with logical syllogism. In so doing it looks like Nagarjuna and Aristotle both end up blurring the distinction between practical and theoretical reasoning. Theoretical reasoning leads to a logical conclusion or demonstration by constraint of logic, while practical reasoning leads to an action by psychological constraint. Perhaps Nagarjuna’s two truth worlds function the same way as Aristotle’s major (universal) premise and minor (particular) premise. Calling it a unity doesn’t fix the problem, in my opinion. Even if my theory isn’t exactly right, I think others will agree that something similarly fishy is going on behind the metaphysical curtain.
Clay. my friend. I am going to go away, but before I do I must tell you that you have no understanding of these issues. Has someone refuted Nagarjuna’s logical proof or falsified his explanatory theories? Of course not. And it is idiotic to think that you’re going to do it.
You are obviously very clever, as are many around here, but the assumption that the Buddha was guessing and that Nagarjuna’s explanation his teachings presents a view that can be refuted is simply laughable. This is not doing philosophy and it is not clever.
I would suggest that you consider the idea that you do not in fact, have the slightest idea whether Nagarjuna is right or wrong about the nature of Reality and Consciousness, or even understand what he says about it, and if you really can show that his argument does not work then you would already be famous. Beware delusions of grandeur. Nagarjuna will remain famous, respected and useful long after you and i are gone..
If you think his philosophy is flawed then it must at least be possible that your understanding is flawed, and honestly, which one would you bet on?
Thanks for the discussion, If a directly relevant recent essay is published I’ll drop back with a link, but for now I’ll stop causing trouble and bow out with a thank you to our host. .
I refuse to believe that anyone can understand philosophy by making it this complicated. Nobody is this clever. I’m certainly not. Are you really sure you understand these issues? Could you clarify whether or not you are disagreeing with Aristotle?
Reflexivity depends on relativity, which is exactly the reason why true knowledge must be identical with its object. Otherwise it is relative knowledge. Epistemology in mysticism comes comes down to identity and unity. In a profound sense there would be no such thing as knowledge, but then, knowing this is knowledge, so things become a llttle confusing for language around here. To the extent that knowledge is true it would be knowledge by identity.
Is this really such a complicated issue? If philosophy needs to be as complicated as you make it here I’d never be able to understand it.
I’d be happy to leave it here if you wish. The idea that you can find a flaw in a doctrine than western philosophers have been trying to falsify for two thousand years seems a bit implausible to me, I can explain simply but on my terms, and I refuse to be drawn into the quagmire of chaos that drowns us when start trying to deal with details before the foundations are in place.
If it were me I’d find a metaphysical and thus global theory that works in logic and reason as a first priority, and then try to derive a theory of knowledge from it. Otherwise we are building sandcastles. Such a theory must be general, explaining time and space. matter and consciousness, ethics and, or course knowledge. But I certainly wouldn’t start with knowledge. .
For the final record, yes, I do disagree with Aristotle. I agree with Milo about Aristotle’s lack of clarity: “There is . . . good reason to suspect that Aristotle never clearly distinguished between logical and psychological necessity, between the logical and the psychological “must” . . . .” Aristotle’s universality premises are made so absurdly broad, a leap in logic takes place between the logical entailment of the syllogism and the psychological motivation required for an act. Aristotle, unfortunately, assumes rationality requires action. Even if an appropriate universal premise could be found that applied in every situation, it doesn’t follow that a person would be psychologically motivated to act in that way. I think Buddhism suffers similar problems with regard to karma as it seems to blur the distinction between impersonal principles that operate like logic and personal good or bad intentions that operate like psychology. In other words, I think Buddhism also has an Aristotelian is/ought problem.
And I didn’t even get started on my disagreements with Aristotle regarding “identity!” lol. But, if you want to know where I stand on that, you could read basically anything related to Korzybski’s General Semantics.
Thank you for clarifying your position on knowledge and allowing me to do the same. All the best to you, PeterJ.
[…] via No results found for “cognitive psychology of philosophy”. — Three Pound Brain […]
I’ve become partial to using Nihilism as a maul/leveling device in the pursuit of an actual truth. Let’s say one took the stance of Absolute Nihilism, and annihilated all meaning for themselves. What would they be left with? A meaningless environment that has been rendered meaningless by one single meaning. The only thing left standing would be the meaning of Nihilism which itself states nothing has meaning. Doesn’t that seem a little bit contradictory? Thus going through Nihilism, leads to true meaning. Meaning that is re-created according to the mores/values that one adopts. One’s entire Life becomes a project where nothing is taken for granted as meaningful.
It’s like sacrificing an inherited God (Parental/social Eternal Meaning/Value), for a Resurrection of God (Personal Meaning/Value). And if we’re possibly Immortal as alluded to (extrapolated) from first comment/post. What else are we to do except Live Life, and then Immolate for a Rebirth in some sense?
. ”
And last but not least, we see one creation, yet two worldly concerns, one schematic & one ultimate:
“…the creation is a oneness, …what is unfeigned in one worldly concern is false in the former(a),…”
In my legal opinion, all the above statements are variations on a familiar(p) melodic theme.
Clay and RSB – I came back here by accident and reread the OP. I still think it represents the correct way to approach philosophy and so I’ll explain why. It baffles me why you guys are so determined that Aristotle is a fool and the Buddha was a fraud. Metaphysics becomes a doddle if we assume otherwise. I don’t want to argue, just demonstrate the benefits of understanding metaphysics. The OP is in quote marks.
—“The one thing I try to continuously remind people is that philosophy is itself a data point, a telling demonstration of what has to be one of the most remarkable facts of our species.”
I wish more philosophers would grasp this point. It is blindingly obvious, almost unmissable, yet regularly overlooked. It is surely perfectly obvious that the problems of metaphysics tell us something vitally important about the world but philosophers in the West refuse to consider this idea. I presume it’s because to do so would mean taking the Perennial philosophy seriously.
—“We don’t know ourselves for shit. We have been stumped since the beginning. ”
Perhaps you and the people you read don’t know themselves. Many people heed the Oracles’ advice and become properly acquainted. There is a vast literature.
—“We’ve unlocked the mechanism for Christ’s sake: there’s a chance we might become immortal without having the faintest clue as to what ‘we’ amounts to.”
This is a category error. It would be impossible to extend a finite life to infinity. For immortality we would have to transcend time. Those who succeed say that there is no possibility of us doing this without knowing exactly and completely what ‘we’ amounts to.
—“There has to be some natural explanation for that, some story explaining why it belongs to our nature to be theoretically mystified by our nature, to find ourselves unable to even agree on formulations of the explananda. So what is it? Why all the apparent paradoxes?”
Again, I wish more philosophers would ask themselves this question. I wonder if even RSB asks it it with enough force. It is a question on which I’ve written many essays. Of course there is a natural explanation, and it’s not even difficult to find. The question is easy to answer. The paradoxes arise because the Universe is a Unity. If we understand what his means then they evaporate. It means that all positive metaphysical statements are false, thus logically absurd, and this renders all such statements undecidable. We are therefore faced with a choice. We can believe that metaphysics is incomprehensible or believe that the Universe is a Unity. This is what the paradoxes tell us if we listen.
—“Why, for instance, the fascination with koans?”
Koans have many purposes. They draw our attention to the need of the intellect for contradictory and complementary categories, without which it cannot function. Clapping requires two hands. They ask us to explore the idea that the intellect cannot achieve what the Oracle asks us to achieve because, as Kant surmised, consciousness outruns the intellect and even the space-time realm, reducing to the pure ‘I Am’ of awareness and knowing prior to the categories of thought. This would not be immortality but the ‘Holy Instant’ or ‘Perennial Now’, eternal rather than immortal.
I can understand the scepticism and suspicion. What but I cannot understand is the reluctance to concede that there can be no other plausible explanation for the paradoxes of metaphysics than that the Universe is a Unity and no other workable solution for them, This is a fact most people would be capable of verifying without traveling to Tibet. .
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Metaphysics is easy to explain. All selective theories of the world-as-a-whole are false and thus logically absurd. We cannot work out their falsity since this would not be a matter for logic, but most philosophers find it quite easy to calculate their absurdity. RSB asks us to take take notice of this for it must tell us something important, but we would have to be prepared to listen to the message, History shows that if we are not willing to learn about the Perennial philosophy then we will always be baffled by metaphysics. It is the only world-view for which they can be predicted and explained.
[…] What applies to human cognition applies to human metacognition—understood as the deliberative derivation of endogenous or exogenous behaviour via secondary (functionally distinct) access to one’s own endogenous or exogenous behaviour. As an ecological artifact, human metacognition is fractionate and heuristic, and radically so, given the complexity of the systems it solves. As such, it possesses its own neglect structure. Understanding this allows us to ‘reverse-engineer’ far more than Dennett suspects, insofar as it lets us hypothesize the kinds of blind spots we should expect to plague our attempts to theorize ourselves given the deliverances of philosophical reflection. It provides the theoretical basis, I think, for understanding philosophy as the cognitive psychological phenomenon that it is. […]
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[…] “The fact that human cognition is heuristic, fractionate, and combinatory means that we should expect koans, puzzles, paradoxes, apories, and the like. We should expect that different systems possessing overlapping domains will come into conflict. We should expect them in the same way and for the same reason we should expect to encounter visual, auditory, and other kinds of systematic illusions. Because the brain picks out only the correlations it needs to predict its environments, cues predicting the systems requiring solution the way they need to be predicted to be solved. Given this, we should begin looking at traditional philosophy as a rich, discursive reservoir of pathologies, breakdowns providing information regarding the systems and misapplications involved. Like all corpses, meaning will provide a feast for worms.” – R.S. Bakker […]
[…] But since he frames the problem in the traditional register of ‘thought,’ an entity he acknowledges he cannot definitively define, he has no way of explaining what precisely is going wrong, and so finds himself succumbing to analogue nostalgia, Kantian shades. What is thinking good for? The interruption of cognitive reflex, which is to say, freedom from ‘tutelary natures.’ Thinking, genuine thinking, is a koan. […]