PaulSmid wrote: ↑Sun Aug 22, 2021 11:04 pm
In most places, BK gives the impression that "meta-cognitive" is an absolute state, as we see clearly reflected in the understanding of people who follow him, and that we can think of MAL, which would be the totality of all relations, meta-cognitive or not, as purely instinctive like an animal. I have no idea how he arrives there from the relational perspective. The 1:1 "alter" correspondence is an even worse concept IMO because associating the image of a being (i.e. all of its outer, normally observable structures and processes) with the totality of its inner life (qualities of experiential meaning) is naïve realism and incorrect from any sound philosophical or scientific perspective. It actually only remains a coherent position under materialism, but of course materialism has a million other fatal flaws, including its irreconcilability with all the conclusions of modern science over the last 100 years or so, and its inability to explain the existence of inner life to begin with.
Could you tell me why this 1:1 relationship is not sound from a scientific and philosophic perspective? I'd be very curious to hear.
And to me it is also a strange idea that mind at large would be instinctive like an animal. Animals have become instinctive due to evolution, where would the instincts of mind at large come from? It never had to evolve to survive etc.
Yes, I would say the most significant scientific evidence comes across a wide variety of fields which have concluded, all in their own unique way by different methods, that there are no static 'things' in the world, only a continuously interpenetrating array of
processes. We should be able to sense the implication of that conclusion right away - there is no possible way to demarcate where one process ends and another begins, either in space or in time, without doing it in a completely arbitrary manner. A fantastic book was written about this called "
Everything Flows: Towards a Processual view of Biology" (not written by idealists, by the way, but scientists of all sorts). I am quoting some of the foreword below (which also refers to Bohm, Bergson, and Whitehead, only a few of a much larger group of 20th century process philosophers who also reached these conclusions):
"There is really no ‘thing’ in the world." —David Bohm (1999: 12)
There is a notable lack of substance, not in the writing you will find in this book, I assure you, but out there in the domain of the living. Let’s face it: there is no thing in biology (or, as Bohm would have it, in the world). Things are abstractions from an ever-changing reality. Reality consists of a hierarchy of intertwined processes. If life is change, then the activities driving this change are what we must explain. Yet we lack concepts and experimental approaches for the study of the dynamic aspects of living systems. This severely limits the range of questions we ask, most of the time even without our realizing. The problem is so obvious it is rarely ever talked about. There are very few explicitly processual theories in biology today. As a practising biologist, I’ve always found this utterly baffling and disappointing. We remain strangely fixated on explanation in terms of static unchanging entities.
The prime example of this substance fixation in biology is our love affair with genes, those particulate agents of heredity and development. It is all too easy for biologists to slip into deterministic and preformationist language, where genes represent some sort of enduring essence of an ephemeral living body. As a result, the mysterious source of gene agency remains unexamined and unexplained. Another example is our insistence that proper ‘mechanistic’ explanations of living organisms must be formulated at the level of component molecules, which we take to be unchanging at the timescales relevant to the processes we study. James Ladyman and Don Ross (2007), in their book Every Thing Must Go, call this the metaphysics of ‘microbangings’, small entities causing their effects by bumping into each other. Ladyman and Ross point out that this view is outdated and inconsistent with the dynamic view of the world given to us by modern physics.
Our fixation on static things leads to fallacious patterns of reasoning, within biology and elsewhere. The French process philosopher Henri Bergson alluded to this in the quote above, while Alfred North Whitehead (1925: 52) put it more explicitly by calling it ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’. This consists in the unwarranted reification of objects, which become fundamental and replace the underlying dynamic reality in our thinking. This fallacy is deeply engrained in our cognitive habits. From a very early stage of development, we learn to distinguish objects, to isolate them from their context. Cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980: 30–2) have suggested that this reflects a tacit commitment to a doctrine of ‘containment’: we treat the world as a container of objects that change properties or location and interact with one another.
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To identify an object as a container, we must establish its boundaries as precisely as possible. Where and when does it begin? Where and when does it end? We instinctively crave for clear and rigorous answers to such questions.
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However, modern science suggests that reality is simply not like that. The world is full of fuzzy boundaries. Seemingly unchanging entities keep on emerging and decaying if we consider them over a long enough time span. Moreover, it is impossible to say precisely when they truly become what they are and when they cease to be themselves. Or where they begin and where they end. This problem of identification and individuation is beautifully illustrated by the ancient Greek thought experiment about the ship of Theseus. According to the legend, the ship was preserved by the Athenians for centuries upon Theseus’ return from his journeys. In the process, each plank of the hull was replaced when it started to rot, until none of the original planks was left. Just as in our own bodies, the substance that makes up the ship is constantly replaced. Does this mean that the ship changes over time, or does it remain the same? As this conundrum illustrates, we need criteria for recognizing, individuating, and classifying processes. We need more accurate and adequate thinking tools that let go of the abstraction of the object. In short, we need to transcend the limitations of substance-based thinking. This is what the book you have in your hands sets out to do.
