AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Jun 25, 2021 3:31 pm
The key point is that, as you also agreed before, there is a time when the infant is not self-reflective. By definition, that means it has no subject-object distinction which allows it to remember that there are "objects" which exist when its ego-self does not perceive them. The infant's psychic processes are completely interwoven with the world around them, as in the state of "original participation" that Barfield describes of archaic man. How can a being have a "purpose" without any clear sense of their ego-self apart from the objects that they are acting upon so that their ego-self can go from point A to point B?
Oh, I think we're getting close to the core tension here. All the fundamental felt distinctions that you would ground in a pre-existing ego-self created by self-reflection are the felt distinctions that, in my mind, provide the "self" that's reflected upon in the first place and thus are those things in which ego-self is
grounded. Hence, self-reflection emerges out of the felt subject-object distinction, the past/present distinction (in memory), etc. While it facilitates a deeper experience of those distinctions, it is itself grounded in them, such that they form the preconditions for an emerging sense of self in the infant.
It sounds to me like you are saying, people, from infants to adults and everyone in between, can have all sorts of "purposes" they are completely unaware of, so there is always purpose.
Sort of. Let me see if I can explain it a little better. I think that infants know what their purpose is, inasmuch as, say,
to be curious is already to know curiosity and
to be hungry is already to know food as the object of desire. This kind of knowledge is pre-built into the experience of the desire. But they don't
comprehend in that they don't understand well enough how the world works to know that they shouldn't swallow those brightly colored pills or grab the electric fence (... I was
that child, bless my mother's heart). They don't yet understand consequences because that knowledge emerges from experience, which they haven't yet had. This is why when a child finds a parent's loaded gun and shoots someone with it, we put the responsibility on the parent -- who should have known better -- and not the child.
This "purpose" without any knowledge whatsoever obviates the need to distinguish "purposes" from any mechanized behavior that is motivated by stimulus.
I don't think it does, because animals have, in addition to instincts, just such mechanized behaviors: reflexive actions. In fact, these sorts of involuntary actions themselves become objects of curiosity as the child explores their body: how long can they go without breathing or blinking? Just where do they have to tap their knee to make it jerk on its own? The reflexive action is not the fulfillment of a felt desire (though the voluntary act of triggering it might be); it's just something the body does on its own. Rub an infant's cheek and their mouth will open, regardless of whether the infant is actually hungry. Reflexes have different neurological correlates, too -- you jerk your hand away from something hot before you've become consciously aware of the heat, and this is reflected in the fact that the nerve signals for the reflexive action simply don't have to travel as far to be processed. A person in a vegetative state still has physiological reflexes, and it was thought that all plant behavior worked like this, but recent work on plant cognition is problematizing that notion (plants seem to demonstrate a capacity for learning and memory).
When I reflect upon my instincts, I notice that they are felt emotionally as desire: the desire to fight or flee when I'm threatened, the desire to have sex when I'm aroused, the desire to eat when I'm hungry, etc. Even our capacity to be social is to some extent instinctive. And all of these instincts are the basis for myriad ways of expressing and fulfilling the desires to which they're connected.
I also see the legal-ethical meaning of these terms as being grounded in the natural and intuitive understanding of them - the law does not recognize "purposive" or "intentional" action in infants, in the amount sufficient to justify punishment for that action, because we intuitively know some level of "comprehension" is a prerequisite for purpose-intention.
We know intuitively that comprehension is a prerequisite for
responsibility. You aren't fully responsible for what happened if you had no way to know what would happen. That doesn't mean you didn't have an intention going in. A child playing with their parents' gun has an intention: to play or to satisfy curiosity or something like that. The intention has nothing to do with harming anyone, because the child doesn't comprehend that that's a possible outcome. And that's part of what self-reflection does for us: it enables us to connect purposes (which is to say, the fulfillment of desire) with actual outcomes far more accurately. It enables us, in other words, to better discern meaning and generate new meaning.
It can be "easily conceptualized" because we naturally do not associate mechanized behavior, i.e. mere stimulus-response mechanisms without any knowledge of them, as being "purposeful".
Yes! Now the question is, are instincts mere stimulus-response mechanisms, or are they something more than that? I would argue that they're something more: they're ways of knowing that can spiral into complex and even creative ways of being. The instinctive desire for food can make a cat hunt. It can also make a cat beg their person for food. Cats can hunt creatively and adaptively. Instincts can also overlap. A cat's instinctive desire to eat and their instinctive to play come together pretty frequently (to the horror of the poor mouse who is their target). But my cat experiences them separately, because the things she plays with are not the things she eats.
I believe animals have feeling because they are ensouled. But my reasons for thinking they are ensouled have little to do with how I observe their instinctual behavior apart from myself. Rather it is because I can observe my own interaction with many animals at a deep emotional level that makes me conclude they are ensouled despite their highly mechanized (instinctual) behavior. For certain beings like insects, though, I am not sure whether or to what extent they are ensouled, because I have no such interactions with them.
Can you elaborate on this notion of ensoulment and how your own interactions with animals leads you to believe that they're ensouled?
Incidentally, I know I've talked a little about Hofstadter with Santeri, but you might enjoy the discussion on the sizes of souls in the beginning of I Am a Strange Loop.
I can accept that distinction, but what I find odd is defining "for itself" as self-organized and self-motivated but also claiming that those qualities have little to do with self-reflection. Maybe you can tease out that apparent discrepancy for me?
Oh, they have tons to do with self-reflection -- they're the ground upon which self-reflection is built. Without self-realization (that is, self-organization and self-motivation) there simply is no self upon which to reflect. Self-reflection emerges from self
hood. In the same way a mirror reflects my body to me -- and, hence, a body is a precondition to body-reflection -- my self-reflecting mind reflects my self back to me. This is why I never had the experience of
coming into being: when we become capable of self-reflection, there is
already a self-presence upon which to reflect.
I am not asking anyone to accept a full and final conclusion to the disclosure of meaning. But, even without that, I do not think it is reasonable to say meaning is "created" at any sort of personal level. I am going to refer to an illustration provided by Cleric awhile ago, as I found it extremely helpful. I will try to circle back on the rest of your comments later, but it has become sort of unwieldly so maybe it will help to limit the points discussed for now.
Cleric wrote:To give a simplified example, if I think about 1 and 2, then 4 and 5, does this mean that 3 doesn't exist until it is experienced? From experiential perspective every idea exists for me only when I experience it. But still, the relation between 2 and 4 is such that they can only be what they are if there's 3 in between. That's why I've always said (when you bring the Platonism argument) that it's irrelevant to me to fantasize some abstract container for ideas, which I can never experience in its purity. The important thing is that when I discover 3, nothing really changes for 1,2,4,5 - they are only complemented, the ideal picture becomes more complete. Even if 3 was never discovered, the relation between the above numbers would be as if 3 exists. This would be different if after the discovery of 3 all other numbers change relations. Then we would really have justification to speak of ideas being created. The act of creation of the idea has measurable effect and displaces all other ideas in some way. But as long as I discover ideas and beings, which only complement my own experiential ideal landscape, all talks about if these ideas and beings exist in 'pure form' before I experience them, is pointless.
I read the entire thread that the above paragraph came from, and I'm having a little trouble making conceptual headway with it. Let me see if I'm understanding the point Cleric is making (and if Cleric would like to chime in personally to clarify, that would also be lovely). It seems to me that the thesis here is that there is no argument to be made that meaning is
created, nor that meaning is
uncreated -- that, prior to its instantiation in experience, we can say nothing about it whatsoever. In either case, whenever we
experience meaning as new, that meaning seems as though it has always been there waiting to be discovered. Am I following the argument, and if so, what's the upshot for the conversation we're having now?