Well I am also interested in this idea of constructing clear frameworks for the purpose of communication, but I resist the notion of a universal or common framework from which other types of thought spring -- I am critical of your R1/R2 notion in so far as I understand it to do precisely that by locating the common framework in the physical space of practical use and scientific theory. Hence my questions have been the following: is the physical space of practical use identical to that of scientific theory, must all modes of thought be "held accountable" for the truth of practice, can science make a totalizing claim on knowledge, can our immersion in language be taken to argue for the primacy of a social or projective space underlying our every day understanding of physical space, etc etc.

Regarding the last point check out this interesting comment on Claude Levi-Strauss in Zizek's Parallax View (Some stuff I've been reading in this book goes to the heart of the matter we've been discussing, so forgive me if I quote a bit extensively in this post):

Recall Claude Levi-Strauss's exemplary analysis, from his Structural Anthropology, of the spatial disposition of buildings in the Winnebago, one of the Great Lake tribes, might be of some help here. The tribe is divided into two sub-groups ("moieties"), "those who are from above" and "those who are from below"; when we ask an individual to draw on a piece of paper, or on sand, the ground-plan of his/her village (the spatial disposition of cottages), we obtain two quite different answers, depending on his/her belonging to one or the other sub-group. Both perceive the village as a circle; but for one sub-group, there is within this circle another circle of central houses, so that we have two concentric circles, while for the other sub-group, the circle is split into two by a clear dividing line. In other words, a member of the first sub-group (let us call it "conservative-corporatist") perceives the ground-plan of the village as a ring of houses more or less symmetrically disposed around the central temple, whereas a member of the second ("revolutionary-antagonistic") sub-group perceives his/her village as two distinct heaps of houses separated by an invisible frontier... 20 The point Levi-Strauss wants to make is that this example should in no way entice us into cultural relativism, according to which the perception of social space depends on the observer's group-belonging: the very splitting into the two "relative" perceptions implies a hidden reference to a constant - not the objective, "actual" disposition of buildings but a traumatic kernel, a fundamental antagonism the inhabitants of the village were unable to symbolize, to account for, to "internalize", to come to terms with, an imbalance in social relations that prevented the community from stabilizing itself into a harmonious whole. The two perceptions of the ground-plan are simply two mutually exclusive endeavors to cope with this traumatic antagonism, to heal its wound via the imposition of a balanced symbolic structure. It is here that one can see it what precise sense the Real intervenes through anamorphosis. We have first the "actual," "objective," arrangement of the houses, and then its two different symbolizations which both distort in an anamorphic way the actual arrangement. However, the "real" is here not the actual arrangement, but the traumatic core of some social antagonism which distorts the tribe members' view of the actual arrangement of the houses in their village.

This anthropological experiment seems to undercut the apparently "natural" and "universal" character of Cartesian space...here is a link to the rest of the chapter regarding Kantian antinomies and the concept of the thing-in-itself:
http://www.lacan.com/zizparallax.htm

I don't agree with everything in this book, but it gets one thing right in my opinion. It seems to me that communication requires preserving qualitative difference rather than reducing activities to sameness -- it's all basically "nut-gathering", or biological instinct, god's thought, matter in motion, relations and quanta of power, translation of possibility into signs, class struggle, ritual and convention, etc etc. All such views can perhaps be shown coherent and totalizing, yet each is subject to critique from within and without, and each necessarily neglects some aspect that is fundamental to an other type of thought.

Regarding isms and metaphysics, here's another quote from the same book that nicely sums up why I feel the picture of "metaphysics" that propagates on this board is a straw man:

The fundamental lesson of Hegel is that the key ontological problem is not that of reality but that of appearance: not "Are we condemned to the interminable play of appearances, or can we penetrate through their veil to the underlying true reality?", but: "How could - in the middle of the flat, stupid, reality which just IS THERE - something like APPEARANCE emerge?"

zoon wrote:

think wrote:

think wrote:Now as for what one means by existent, what do you say to the following argument? (To be clear, this is intended as a thought experiment and should not be taken in strict conjunction with my previous arguments). One says "we consistently see x", but every instance of x differs. Furthermore, x is a unity in itself (a squirrel) yet we know x by a multiplicity of perceptions (grey, furry, etc etc) which show themselves to the senses. There must be a SOMETHING, ie some actual condition, to account for the togetherness of multiplicity in a unified object, a "this", and the togetherness of multiple instances of "x" into the class "x", for when I point to a "this" I mean one thing before me, not many, and when I say "squirrel" I mean a unity and not an infinite multiplicity of possible perceptions which, by being potentially infinite, could never be known as a class. Therefore, either "x" exists in itself as an idea, or some underlying self identical substratum (material substance) must exist, around which the multiplicity of perceptions are gathered as properties of a unified thing. Hence by "what is" we do not mean the infinitely multiple and constantly vanishing/fluctuating perceptions, but the material substratum or eidetic class by which this unintelligible flux is ordered into unities and differences and made intelligible, allowing us to say "this is x, there is not x; here is a squirrel, there is a bird which is not a squirrel".

This was my shoddy summary of the "first rung", or rather the look of the first rung, on the ladder of idealism beginning with the epistemological variation of the problem of the "one and the many". So you see, I'm not just laughing at res extensa! This was me trying to show my work!

SpeedOfSound wrote:Yes. I said before that I like that. I see nothing about this that would not be entirely compatible with physicalism and in particular with neuroscience.

Like SpeedOfSound, I would see think’s thought experiment as consistent with materialism/physicalism, because what is described is almost certainly correlated at every point with the activity of neurones in the brain. We’ve evolved, among other things, to track objects like squirrels in order to catch or evade them, and to do this our brains have to manage large quantities of noisy and partial information from different senses and from other sources such as memory and what others have told us. All this information is integrated into a model of the world with the squirrel in it, before we can decide what to do about the squirrel. “The material substratum ....... by which this unintelligible flux is ordered into unities and differences and made intelligible” is the collection of neurones in the brain, which is fantastically complex but which, as far as we know, follows the laws of physics and chemistry and evolved through natural selection.

I suspect I’ve twisted what think meant by “material substratum” out of recognition, but it seems to me important to bear in mind that thoughts follow neurones which follow physics first and reason only incidentally.

No, you are right except material substratum is completely general -- as the substratum of everything that is, it admits of no differentiation within itself...it must be both the underlying structure and first principle of all phenomenon. So it is the substratum of both the "neurons" and the squirrel so to speak. So this absolutely is consistent with the notion of materialism, but as I said it's the first rung on the ladder climbing out of epistemology.

think wrote:Well I am also interested in this idea of constructing clear frameworks for the purpose of communication, but I resist the notion of a universal or common framework from which other types of thought spring -- I am critical of your R1/R2 notion in so far as I understand it to do precisely that by locating the common framework in the physical space of practical use and scientific theory. Hence my questions have been the following: is the physical space of practical use identical to that of scientific theory, must all modes of thought be "held accountable" for the truth of practice, can science make a totalizing claim on knowledge, can our immersion in language be taken to argue for the primacy of a social or projective space underlying our every day understanding of physical space, etc etc.

If you are critical of R1/R2 then I suggest you don't understand it. It's like if I stand up to speak in court and the opposition objects.

R1/R2 is a description of the mass of human knowledge and it makes a fuzzy distinction along the lines of common biological knowledge and formalized signs and systems of science. That isn't even the important part. The important part is the fuzziness of the relationships between the atoms and fact that there are clusterings that are common to us all. They are not exact copies, these clusterings, but they are in some way isomorphs. There is a structure no matter how fuzzy it is there. It is as if you peer into the fog and see the shape of a tree. We all share this shape. It is how we communicate.

I am saying exactly nothing about what the shape is or how it might have got there or what it's bottom turtle may be. I am simply saying the shape is in the fog.

The only way to refute this is to prove to me that we have absolutely nothing in common in how we think and perceive.

I am really not saying much at all but I want to say it clearly and get some honest nods on it.

think wrote:...

Regarding the last point check out this interesting comment on Claude Levi-Strauss in Zizek's Parallax View (Some stuff I've been reading in this book goes to the heart of the matter we've been discussing, so forgive me if I quote a bit extensively in this post):

Recall Claude Levi-Strauss's exemplary analysis, ...of the houses in their village.

This anthropological experiment seems to undercut the apparently "natural" and "universal" character of Cartesian space...here is a link to the rest of the chapter regarding Kantian antinomies and the concept of the thing-in-itself:
http://www.lacan.com/zizparallax.htm

I don't agree with everything in this book, but it gets one thing right in my opinion. It seems to me that communication requires preserving qualitative difference rather than reducing activities to sameness -- it's all basically "nut-gathering", or biological instinct, god's thought, matter in motion, relations and quanta of power, translation of possibility into signs, class struggle, ritual and convention, etc etc. All such views can perhaps be shown coherent and totalizing, yet each is subject to critique from within and without, and each necessarily neglects some aspect that is fundamental to an other type of thought.

You can choose to exemplify either the differences or the sameness as you like but the position that both things do not exist is untenable. The idealist position gives no reason for the sameness. It has to invent one such as Berkeley's god. The physicalist position accounts for and predicts both. The physicalist position as I define it is that there are patterns. The straw man that irritates me is that this must mean that there is some kind of physical substance. It has nothing to do with substance; only do do with the fact of the patterns.

The Ojibwa, some of whom I grew up with, reportedly had no concept of a noun. For them the word for bay was something like water flowing and shaped in a circle. Many linguists now take this to be a myth but regardless they have a different more verb-al way of looking at reality. I as a neuroscientist would be the last one to argue that our cortex is not capable of massively strange realities. Put a human in a vat and feed in patterns for an entirely strange reality and the cortex will construct that phenomenal reality.

The fact of STOM is proof enough to me of a realism. The fact of our biological nature is proof enough to me that that is not some noumenal truth. The combination of all that we are and all that we are embedded in constructs our phenomenal reality. An idealism and a realism are perfectly compatible.

I mentioned spirit. Or spiritual. That is about US. We made god. We are god. Yet I cannot deny a greater stranger god that is not about US. It's about the rest of the patterns.

Now if you take this you can construct a mythos that encompasses all things in a richly vivid way without any of this silliness about what IS absolutely. There is plenty of room for archetypes and ghostly spirit depending upon which pespectival slice you choose.

When I say you collapse the quantum wave function I mean that you create a duality by fighting for a side of it.

think wrote:
Regarding isms and metaphysics, here's another quote from the same book that nicely sums up why I feel the picture of "metaphysics" that propagates on this board is a straw man:

The fundamental lesson of Hegel is that the key ontological problem is not that of reality but that of appearance: not "Are we condemned to the interminable play of appearances, or can we penetrate through their veil to the underlying true reality?", but: "How could - in the middle of the flat, stupid, reality which just IS THERE - something like APPEARANCE emerge?"

The first part of this I am just plain happy to here. This particularly "the key ontological problem is not that of reality but that of appearance". I agree and if that is what you mean by metaphysics then I am truly with you.

But this:

"How could - in the middle of the flat, stupid, reality which just IS THERE - something like APPEARANCE emerge?"

Why the fuck does it have to be flat and stupid? That's what I mean by criminal reduction. The physical is not flat and stupid. It is myriad pattern in pattern and more like a fractal prismatic wonderland. The the concept of flat and stupid is an aspect of the appearance not what's actually going on. It's naive materialism and it's dual aspect is naive idealism.

Both miss the mark by a Fucking Astronomical Measure. 40 FAMS,s at least!

SpeedOfSound wrote:R1/R2 is a description of the mass of human knowledge and it makes a fuzzy distinction along the lines of common biological knowledge and formalized signs and systems of science. That isn't even the important part. The important part is the fuzziness of the relationships between the atoms and fact that there are clusterings that are common to us all. They are not exact copies, these clusterings, but they are in some way isomorphs. There is a structure no matter how fuzzy it is there. It is as if you peer into the fog and see the shape of a tree. We all share this shape. It is how we communicate.

After having read Husserl's lectures The Idea of Phenomenology I think I finally begin to understand your R1/R2 concept. To check whether we are on the same page, do you agree that qualia are essential elements of invariance in phenomena? I don't mind logical exactness, do you agree that the proposition characterizes R1 right?

Rilx wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:R1/R2 is a description of the mass of human knowledge and it makes a fuzzy distinction along the lines of common biological knowledge and formalized signs and systems of science. That isn't even the important part. The important part is the fuzziness of the relationships between the atoms and fact that there are clusterings that are common to us all. They are not exact copies, these clusterings, but they are in some way isomorphs. There is a structure no matter how fuzzy it is there. It is as if you peer into the fog and see the shape of a tree. We all share this shape. It is how we communicate.

After having read Husserl's lectures The Idea of Phenomenology I think I finally begin to understand your R1/R2 concept. To check whether we are on the same page, do you agree that qualia are essential elements of invariance in phenomena? I don't mind logical exactness, do you agree that the proposition characterizes R1 right?

R1/R2 is more a characterization of knowledge but I agree that qualia are for the most invariant. Not sure if it's for the same reasons as you think. I believe we all see pink the same way because pink qualia is a buzzing nest of knowing and we all end up being exposed to, not the same exact inputs, but the same statistical significance.

Is that what you meant?

That book is on my x-mas list.

SpeedOfSound wrote:R1/R2 is more a characterization of knowledge but I agree that qualia are for the most invariant. Not sure if it's for the same reasons as you think. I believe we all see pink the same way because pink qualia is a buzzing nest of knowing and we all end up being exposed to, not the same exact inputs, but the same statistical significance.

Is that what you meant?

IMO qualia are final internal representations of all information (from senses, proprioception, memory, ...), of which we build our phenomenal reality. ”Final” refers to the last phase of the intentional process in which the experienced phenomenal reality becomes conscious. I.e., objects are formed and feelings are associated to them.

I'm not sure if you see qualia this way. I don't think that colours and sounds are translations of light and air waves. They correlate in some cases, but basically the processes which produce them have been evolved to discriminate objects and forms. Besides, as biological structures they are genotypical: different species experience different phenomenal worlds.

As a result of unconscious biological processes, qualia can naturally be only statistically equal. Instead, R2 knowledge which consists of conscious forms built on conscious base, can be logically equal.

Seems that Husserl uses 'intention' nearly in the same sense as Dennett. But honestly I hardly understood more than a half of his text.

I see qualia pretty much as you do. I think the pink thing is a complex of all that has gone before around a pink set of V1 neurons. I am going to try and refine the R1/R2 idea this weekend.

SpeedOfSound wrote:

think wrote:...

Regarding the last point check out this interesting comment on Claude Levi-Strauss in Zizek's Parallax View (Some stuff I've been reading in this book goes to the heart of the matter we've been discussing, so forgive me if I quote a bit extensively in this post):

Recall Claude Levi-Strauss's exemplary analysis, ...of the houses in their village.

This anthropological experiment seems to undercut the apparently "natural" and "universal" character of Cartesian space...here is a link to the rest of the chapter regarding Kantian antinomies and the concept of the thing-in-itself:
http://www.lacan.com/zizparallax.htm

I don't agree with everything in this book, but it gets one thing right in my opinion. It seems to me that communication requires preserving qualitative difference rather than reducing activities to sameness -- it's all basically "nut-gathering", or biological instinct, god's thought, matter in motion, relations and quanta of power, translation of possibility into signs, class struggle, ritual and convention, etc etc. All such views can perhaps be shown coherent and totalizing, yet each is subject to critique from within and without, and each necessarily neglects some aspect that is fundamental to an other type of thought.

You can choose to exemplify either the differences or the sameness as you like but the position that both things do not exist is untenable. The idealist position gives no reason for the sameness. It has to invent one such as Berkeley's god.

Don't see your argument here, maybe you referring to an idea that is important specifically to berkley.

The physicalist position accounts for and predicts both. The physicalist position as I define it is that there are patterns. The straw man that irritates me is that this must mean that there is some kind of physical substance. It has nothing to do with substance; only do do with the fact of the patterns.

This sounds like upholding form (pattern) -- or what is for us--- without what is for itself (substance)...which is a kind of naive idealism.

The Ojibwa, some of whom I grew up with, reportedly had no concept of a noun. For them the word for bay was something like water flowing and shaped in a circle. Many linguists now take this to be a myth but regardless they have a different more verb-al way of looking at reality. I as a neuroscientist would be the last one to argue that our cortex is not capable of massively strange realities. Put a human in a vat and feed in patterns for an entirely strange reality and the cortex will construct that phenomenal reality.

Ok...that's very interesting, but quite a different point than is brought up in the Levi-Strauss study.

The fact of STOM is proof enough to me of a realism. The fact of our biological nature is proof enough to me that that is not some noumenal truth. The combination of all that we are and all that we are embedded in constructs our phenomenal reality. An idealism and a realism are perfectly compatible.

I mentioned spirit. Or spiritual. That is about US. We made god. We are god. Yet I cannot deny a greater stranger god that is not about US. It's about the rest of the patterns.

Now if you take this you can construct a mythos that encompasses all things in a richly vivid way without any of this silliness about what IS absolutely. There is plenty of room for archetypes and ghostly spirit depending upon which pespectival slice you choose.

When I say you collapse the quantum wave function I mean that you create a duality by fighting for a side of it.

What duality are you referring to?

"How could - in the middle of the flat, stupid, reality which just IS THERE - something like APPEARANCE emerge?"

Why the fuck does it have to be flat and stupid? That's what I mean by criminal reduction. The physical is not flat and stupid. It is myriad pattern in pattern and more like a fractal prismatic wonderland. The the concept of flat and stupid is an aspect of the appearance not what's actually going on. It's naive materialism and it's dual aspect is naive idealism.

Both miss the mark by a Fucking Astronomical Measure. 40 FAMS,s at least!

Um...think you missed the point on that one, but it's no biggie.

That's it?

SpeedOfSound wrote:That's it?

Referring to me?

I guess I just don't know what to say...

1) You say physicalism isn't about material substratum or "the real", then you take issue with the Zizek quote:

Zizek: "How could - in the middle of the flat, stupid, reality which just IS THERE - something like APPEARANCE emerge?"

SpeedOfSound wrote:
Why the fuck does it have to be flat and stupid? That's what I mean by criminal reduction. The physical is not flat and stupid.

So, unless you were speaking carelessly, you implicitly equate the "the physical" with "the real"...How can I respond to this?

2) The Levi-Strauss study isn't meant to demonstrate cultural/linguistic relativism -- the two representations come from within the same village. Your Ojibwa example, while very interesting, seems intended to demonstrate cultural/linguistic relativism and therefore isn't relevant.

3) Can't go along with this qualia business at all due to the same criticisms I directed against Destroyer (what do you mean by "internal" representation? Internal to what?).

So my question remains: Why is this whole R1/R2 schema necessary? How is it valuable? What is it -- a description?

think wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:That's it?

Referring to me?

I guess I just don't know what to say...

1) You say physicalism isn't about material substratum or "the real", then you take issue with the Zizek quote:

Zizek: "How could - in the middle of the flat, stupid, reality which just IS THERE - something like APPEARANCE emerge?"

SpeedOfSound wrote:
Why the fuck does it have to be flat and stupid? That's what I mean by criminal reduction. The physical is not flat and stupid.

So, unless you were speaking carelessly, you implicitly equate the "the physical" with "the real"...How can I respond to this?

The idea that the physical is flat and stupid is what I take issue with. To me world-views that are anthropic are flat and stupid. The universe is like a fractal wonderland.

This is just another example of how men mistake the finger for the moon. Criminal reduction is what I call it.

Yeah...there is nothing in the Zizek quote referencing the physical. That is why I am confused. You seem to be attacking something that isn't even there.

think wrote:
So my question remains: Why is this whole R1/R2 schema necessary? How is it valuable? What is it -- a description?

We have somewhat become awake or aware in the midst of a fuzzy set of knowledge. It has non-discrete elements and it is manifold. We can trust little particulars and we can even go a ways toward constructing a model, science or R2, that conforms to it rather well. So R1/R2 is a first go at noting that this is where we get all of our concepts and models. It is where we came up with reality, exist, truth, and the lot. It's what we know and it's all we know. Attempts to get outside of it any greater than noting it's presence are going to require quite a bit of effort. Was it Husserl that talked about casting out any 'natural bias'? I have no idea how to do that but I am certain that if you want to make some statement about a deeper underlying reality or existence you should at least check with R1/R2 to see if the terms do't refer to something a bit more provincial.

think wrote:Yeah...there is nothing in the Zizek quote referencing the physical. That is why I am confused. You seem to be attacking something that isn't even there.

Ahh. I see. It's the typical way to refer to materialism and matter is where I got that from. How could something as magnificent as consciousness come from mere stuff?

The last line didn't seem to adhere to the rest of the piece so I guess I must of misunderstood it.

I really like Mach. Thank you think!

Cool! Which texts are you reading? I'm about to dig into some myself, maybe you will be interested in doing a thread on him?

Consciousness necessarily contains unconsciousness (the relationship does not hold the other way). It is only consciousness that faces the problem of 'appears'. Unconsciousness is 'is'. That consciousness necessarily contains unconsciousness means 'appears' relies on 'is' for its (incomplete) formation.

In other words, all conscious sentient beings contain rocks, but all rocks do not contain consciousness. Our rock-selves deal with is, even if our conscious-selves only experience appears.