Seeing the truth is not conductive to survival

[DandelionSoul]

Whew, tons going on in this thread since I poked my head in last! Gonna take me a while to chew through all of it, but of all the complicated questions raised, this one I think I can answer pretty succinctly:

he (?)

She.

[SanteriSatama]

Which argument did I incorrectly interpret? It sounded like naive realism when DS said:

And I can't get my head around it because it would make liars of my eyes: to look at life in process is to look at intentional actions, goal-driven acts, a struggle against entropy -- in short, purpose carried out.

But I also left open possibility he (?) was using that as metaphor for what it looks like to his thought and not only his eyes.

For me it sounded like DS was describing animistic gnosis as a self evident given. I don't know if you have had or have a e.g. a dog or cat as family member... Like with human members, with the dog dude we constantly "read" each others emotions, intentions etc., and develop a common language to express also differences of opinions and ways to negotiate and resolve such differences.

Replacing experiencing with "thought" in the vocabulary can guide towards rationalizing interpretations and projections. No matter how far we want the expand the semantic scope of thought, the prototypical meaning of internal dialogue and rationalizing looping remains affective.

[AshvinP]

Which argument did I incorrectly interpret? It sounded like naive realism when DS said:

And I can't get my head around it because it would make liars of my eyes: to look at life in process is to look at intentional actions, goal-driven acts, a struggle against entropy -- in short, purpose carried out.

But I also left open possibility he (?) was using that as metaphor for what it looks like to his thought and not only his eyes.

For me it sounded like DS was describing animistic gnosis as a self evident given. I don't know if you have had or have a e.g. a dog or cat as family member... Like with human members, with the dog dude we constantly "read" each others emotions, intentions etc., and develop a common language to express also differences of opinions and ways to negotiate and resolve such differences.

Replacing experiencing with "thought" in the vocabulary can guide towards rationalizing interpretations and projections. No matter how far we want the expand the semantic scope of thought, the prototypical meaning of internal dialogue and rationalizing looping remains affective.

I disagree completely, and this is the basic contention Cleric and I are always debating here - "prototypical meaning" (or any meaning) is always brought through Thinking-thought in its highest possible sense (the sense implicitly understood by pre-Socratics through to medieval Scholastics, with perhaps a few gaps in between). The first thing to understand is that this claim is not being made through naïve sense of attachment to rational thinking or anything of that sort... it is based on a ton of consideration of various Western idealist philosophies and deep examination of our own experience (much more in Cleric's case than my own). Based on that, we conclude meaning is never discovered by way of willing or feeling or any non-thinking processes.

re: pets - I have been around enough to know the emotional connection you are speaking of and the "common language", but I also think the dog and myself are not experiencing that connection in the same way. It is natural for me to project my own inner perspective onto the dog when I lack actual experience of the dog's perspective but that does not make it correct. Again, this question comes back on how broadly we want to define "purpose" - if it includes all natural instinctive actions and reactions then yes those animals are acting with purpose. But I am challenging that definition.

[AshvinP]

Whew, tons going on in this thread since I poked my head in last! Gonna take me a while to chew through all of it, but of all the complicated questions raised, this one I think I can answer pretty succinctly:

he (?)

She.

That's what I thought at first, but then thought I was being too presumptuous and convinced myself to go with "he"

[DandelionSoul]

So while your formulation on reincarnation above may very well be true, it's just too low resolution to be useful. Everything must eventually be judged by both its coherency in light of Reason and also its practical utility for spiritual growth (the two should never be at odds). Because I do not have any such high resolution on this process of reincarnation, I really try not to even speak about it. I suspect its relevant for this issue of "implicit memories", but I can't say for sure. So I mention this just to keep in mind going forward

So you use the word "resolution" a lot, and my intuitive reading of that word is an analogy to, like, image resolution, but can you draw out that concept a little more? It seems to me that very low resolution imagery has its use -- the process of learning itself is a bit like loading a picture on dialup, after all. First there's nothing but big blocks of color, which progressively sharpen until, at some point, you can see what the image is, and then later, you can see it in all its sharpness. And it seems to me that "resolution" is always a relative quantity, but when you invoke it, it feels as though you’re using it as an absolute. Thirty years ago, 800x600 was a relatively high-resolution monitor, and _twenty_ years ago, one megapixel was a fairly high-resolution digital camera. In terms of ideas, let's take a look at, say, our knowledge of DNA: we've gone over the course of a couple hundred years from discovering the structure of the cell to the double-helix structure of DNA to the understanding of the function of DNA to mapping the human genome to... whatever comes next. And that's only to zoom in on one part of cell physiology, which is itself to zoom in on one part of our biological makeup. But in zooming in, we lose the context, the larger-scale structures that are necessary to make sense of what we saw at the higher resolution, structures that only fit fully within the scope of our attention at lower-resolution.

Likewise, our peripheral vision is not as sharp -- not as high-resolution -- as our central vision, but it serves a necessary purpose in contextualizing and framing what's at the center of our view, giving us a sense of what we're not yet paying attention to. The bits about reincarnation/panincarnation in the discussion are like this: we could zoom in and talk about this concept in more detail, but it's peripheral to our main discussion, so what I offered was a deliberately low-resolution statement meant to leave the idea on the periphery where, for now, it seems to belong: it has more utility being low-resolution in this conversation than it would’ve had for me to center it and write a monograph about it.

I think the last point I'd make about "resolution" as a concept here is that some images are such that there is no meaningful way to gauge resolution. Fractals are sometimes like that. Because as I "zoom out" a fractal to get a better sense of the larger structures in which the smaller structures are embedded, I see the same structures again and end up, as it were, right where I started. There seems, in some such cases, to be a range of resolutions that cycles: zoom in, and new structures appear, but zoom in further, and the old structures reappear, and so on forever.

So I think what you are calling "mystification" here is what I call the normal state of affairs in the modern age. We are self-aware, but mostly we do not truly reflect on our Selfhood and how it manifests in our spiritual activity of W-F-T. Instead, we seek our meaning and purpose in 'things' external to us, whether they are religious or secular, natural or cultural, etc. We act out of compulsion and blind obedience rather than genuine knowledge and desire to act the way we do. We definitely have the capacity for Self-determination, but very few people are Self-determined to a significant extent.

I would say you're right, and the Existentialists certainly thought that people were living in all manner of what they termed "bad faith," which is to say, in the denial of their own freedom. De Beauvoir outlines several different archetypal ways that people flee their own freedom and the responsibility therefrom. In mystification, however, she means something more specific, in that it is imposed deliberately by other people upon the mystified:

There are cases where the slave does not know his servitude and where it is necessary to bring the seed of his liberation to him from the outside: his submission is not enough to justify the tyranny which is imposed upon him. The slave is submissive when one has succeeded in mystifying him in such a way that his situation does not seem to him to be imposed by men, but to be immediately given by nature, by the gods, by the powers against whom revolt has no meaning; thus, he does not accept his condition through a resignation of his freedom since he can not even dream of any other; and in his relationships with his friends, for example, he can live as a free and moral man within this world where his ignorance has enclosed him.

Yet I also think this course of evolution - this "dark night of the soul" - was necessary to bring about the conditions from which we can truly overcome our enslavement to the physical world and external agents and gain our spiritual freedom from within. It should never be thought of as "stepping outside ourselves", though, because the whole point is to see how we ourselves are participating in the unfolding of our experience, in the co-creation of the phenomenal world.

I kinda wondered if you'd object to my phrasing of "stepping outside of ourselves." What I mean is just that in our capacity to see our actions reflected back at us in the world, we are able, to some extent, to see ourselves through a perspective that is not our own, as we might see our bodies through a perspective that is not our own when we look into a mirror or see ourselves on camera. We behold ourselves, to some extent, in the gaze of the other, and that makes us very self-conscious in terms of our behavior. This is, incidentally, not only a human trait: many animals know when they're being watched and will behave differently. My cat is sneaky like that -- if she wants to go somewhere she knows is off-limits, she'll wait until I've turned my back and then scurry as quickly as she can to the forbidden wonders. But I've seen this behavior even in much simpler and less innately social creatures, like wolf spiders, where they won't move as long as I'm looking at them, and then scurry off and find a place to hide when I turn away. I haven't actually dug into research on spider cognition, so I can only speak from my own interactions with them, but the whole thing always leaves me a bit awestruck -- how does the spider even know that I'm looking at it?

Yet I also think this course of evolution - this "dark night of the soul" - was necessary to bring about the conditions from which we can truly overcome our enslavement to the physical world and external agents and gain our spiritual freedom from within.

Why do you think so? In what does our enslavement to the physical world consist? Who's the referent of the "we"? What does "spiritual freedom" mean to you?

If a person claims that they have observed a spiritual realm (by lifting off veil on "physical" realm) in which certain beings are directly responsible for my physiological processes, for ex., then I cannot automatically rule out the claim because it is entirely possible such observations could occur. If that person claims there is a God who is responsible for all natural processes, but he exists entirely separate from the realm of knowing human mind, then I rule out that claim because the God, by definition, cannot possibly be observed or known. Does that make sense?

I think so! Essentially, the question you're asking yourself is whether the claim to have witnessed something contradicts itself, and if it doesn't, then you can't rule out the claim a priori?

So instead of "knowing" or "thinking" element in every experience, let me say there is a "meaningful element" in every experience.

So... what is meaning, in your view?

This also speaks to my point that meaning is fundamentally shared between all perspectives of the unified Consciousness, rather than being personal to each perspective.

I just don't see how this is true at all, though. So, for instance, suppose someone robs me. That robbery carries one set of meanings for me -- maybe it'll make it difficult for me to make rent this month, or maybe I've lost an heirloom that held a lot of sentimental value for me, or maybe it just means I've had a really bad night. For the thief, though, maybe robbing me means they're able to feed their addiction, or maybe it means they can pay _their_ rent, or maybe it means they can buy medicine for their sick child, or whatever. In any case, this is a shared experience -- robbing this house -- that seems to me to very obviously have different meanings for everyone involved. And, what's more, it's not static. Maybe it means I'm struggling this month, but it also leads me to get renter's insurance, and then later on some natural disaster strikes and I'm prepared because I'm insured: now the robbery, due to downstream effects, has ultimately meant that I didn't lose everything in a natural disaster. And likewise for the robber, maybe they can buy their thing they need tonight, but later on they get arrested for the robbery. Now the robbery has gone from meaning some level of financial boon to meaning that they've lost much of their autonomy. Maybe I visit the robber in jail and through my visits, we become friends, and after they get out, we remain friends, and now the robbery has meant yet another thing for both of us. Maybe after many years it's something we laugh about over drinks.

So meaning seems to me not to be universal, but to be living and evolving, to be negotiated intersubjectively, to be subject to renegotiation, never fixed or final or fully given. It's no different in that way from any other living process.

The purely instinctive creature experiences meaning in everything it encounters. It is fundamentally the same meaning we encounter in reading these posts, for example, but the ability to write the posts comes from our ability to reflect on meaningful experience. That ability to reflect is what I say is required for "true knowledge".

Just what is “experiencing meaning” in your view? And when you say it's the same meaning we experience in reading these posts, do you mean that there is only One Great Meaning that's instantiated in every encounter, or do you mean that meaning is meaning regardless of the creature experiencing it, but there is still a different particular meaning for each experience?

The purely instinctive creature is immersed in a world of meaning (much more so than modern man who experiences only dull meaning in most perceptions), but it does not make clear distinctions between meanings or ask itself questions about those meanings

The more I think about it, the less I think I know of any creatures of pure instinct. Even single-celled organisms demonstrate the capacity to learn. But I'm going to take "creature of pure instinct" as "creature without the ability to conceptually reflect upon itself," and then proceed to ask you, what does making distinctions between meanings entail? Or, in other words, how is it a failure to distinguish between meanings if a lion knows that this experience calls for fighting and that experience calls for sex, and this experience calls for care and caution, and that experience calls for rage? My sense is that an organism's consciousness is most basically discernment, the capacity to tell this from that, and that discernment is always already grounded in a contrast of meaning (which is grounded in purpose, which is grounded in desire, which is grounded in what it is to be alive, just to keep the structure of concepts in my thesis clear).

I think, oddly enough, we may be reaching a point of convergence here with something you said several pages ago: "The very essence of the Cosmos is meaning." After all, if things only appear at all by means of distinction, if they are only constituted as what they are by contrast with what they are not (and this is the case, on my view), which is to say, if relation is the fundamental category, then that which distinguishes is what creates the world. Since all living things distinguish, all living things co-create the world. Much of the horror wrought by humanity in the last several centuries has been wrapped up in forgetting that and inventing a Great Chain of Being with us near the top of it. We were born into a world already created for us by our nonhuman elders, and in all that we do, we participate in what they were already doing.

We actually come closer to this sort of experience when we are dreaming. Various things manifest in our dreams and they all have immense meaning to us, but we do not ask why they are popping up or how we came to encounter them in the first place.

We take the dream world and its underlying logic as given, but we do -- or at least I do -- frequently find myself interrogating situations according to the dream logic itself, drawing on background knowledge that, as the dream-character, I apparently have, in order to make good decisions within the dream. It's the mind of the dream character that divides up the dream world and allows it to appear as a world at all.

How are we differentiating "non-life" from "life" here?

Life is self-generated, self-organized conatus, a localized, self-motivated struggle against entropy, an integrally complex homeostasis reflecting, modeling, and integrating the environment from which it’s inseparable -- these are ways of saying the same thing, which is ultimately just to describe the process of living.

How are we determining the timeline of when humans came into the scene? (clearly that is the mainstream physicalist view, but I think we agree that we do not need to accept physicalist conclusions for empirical data re: evolution of outer living forms).

This question tells me that you already know what I mean by "life"; you phrased it as "outer living forms." To answer the question itself, I don’t think we need to assume time has some independent existence for us to posit its dependent existence prior to us being here to experience it. Time depends, sure, but it doesn’t depend on humans. I think to make an argument that it does risks flying closer to solipsism than either of us wants to go.

What if we were to develop AI machines which looked exactly like "life in process" and therefore "purpose carried out" - would those machines be acting with purpose-intent?

I don't know, but as these would be machines engineered and programmed to behave in particular ways rather than actual life in process, it's very difficult for me to imagine that they would be. We can make computers do some pretty incredible things, but I don't think "live" is one of them. My sense is that life cannot be manufactured or engineered

It's interesting, though, that you felt the need to qualify "machines" with "AI," as opposed to some other sort of machine, some unintelligent kind. I would, too, if I were asking that question, because I see all life as intelligent. It can't be otherwise (within my view), because intelligence is inseparable from the idea that its actions are purposeful, because intelligence is most basically the capacity to discern meaning in the service of purpose; I don't see any fundamental difference between what I've called "living consciousness" and "intelligence."

If we are going to use the "who do I believe, you or my lying eyes?" argument, then I think we need to be clear we are implicitly assuming naïve realism - whatever it looks like to us is what it actually is in essence. Of course, that view simply cannot be reconciled with idealism or our own experience of the world.

I was being a touch poetical, though now you’ve gone and gotten that Eagles song stuck in my head. I agree with you here, though. I don’t know that a thoroughgoing naive realism is even coherent: to see at all is already to interpret. They are inseparable. Something about meaning as a fundamental component of all experience? In any case, replace “eyes” with “experience” if you like.

Now if you mean "looks like" as in, after reasoning through everything you know about living process, i.e. looks like to your informed thought, that is much less of a problem. But I want to be clear that I am not arguing animal instinctive behavior (or early human infant behavior) is actually a mechanical process like the copier in my office or something, so it should definitely look alive and dynamic to our perception-thought, but I don't see why looking alive and dynamic necessary entails it is purposeful-intentional.

Oh, I’m not arguing that it does: already we can manufacture shockingly verisimilar simulations of life. Nevertheless, granting that things that aren’t alive can still look alive, we still have to grapple with what is alive and what it means to be alive.

In that connection, I want to also be clear that I agree Nature and its instinctive behavior is the place from which all human reflection, representation, and agency was born, and that is very clearly reflected in mythology as you say. But, again, saying those things were born from instinctive Nature, for me, implies that they were not in existence before (keeping in mind I am using temporal language because I have to, but I do not hold to realism of linear temporality).

Well, no, I suppose human reflection, representation, and agency did not preempt the existence of humans, by definition.

And that is the key issue here - whether something was actually born in and through humans which sets us apart from the mere "implicit" potential of purpose-intent that was previously yearning in Nature to be freed.

For sure, something was -- not purpose, but the capacity to witness purpose, to make explicit the implicit through concepts and symbols (art, myth, music, dance, etc.), and through this, to feed back into the web of purpose, generate our own novel purposes as every new creature does, and let those purposes generate new meanings.

And here a clarification is in order: implicit is not potential. Implicit is actual-but-unspoken. Implicit things are not conceptually or symbolically represented, but they are still present. So, for example, suppose I call into work with a stomach bug. Implicit in, “I can’t come in; I have a stomach bug” are the details of the symptoms of the stomach bug, which it would be distasteful to name explicitly. So they’re left implicit, but very much present.

Much of how he view human nature and human spiritual activity turns on the answer to that question,

Yes, I fundamentally agree with this statement.

such as where the process of developing purposeful agency is now taking us after it is has been partially freed from Nature through us but is by no means totally free or complete.

I have no idea what you mean by “freed from Nature.” Would you elaborate?

Okay, I’m gonna end this post here since it’s already absurdly long and I’ll respond to the discussion between you and Santeri as I can.

[DandelionSoul]

Which argument did I incorrectly interpret? It sounded like naive realism when DS said:



But I also left open possibility he (?) was using that as metaphor for what it looks like to his thought and not only his eyes.

For me it sounded like DS was describing animistic gnosis as a self evident given. I don't know if you have had or have a e.g. a dog or cat as family member... Like with human members, with the dog dude we constantly "read" each others emotions, intentions etc., and develop a common language to express also differences of opinions and ways to negotiate and resolve such differences.

Replacing experiencing with "thought" in the vocabulary can guide towards rationalizing interpretations and projections. No matter how far we want the expand the semantic scope of thought, the prototypical meaning of internal dialogue and rationalizing looping remains affective.

I disagree completely, and this is the basic contention Cleric and I are always debating here - "prototypical meaning" (or any meaning) is always brought through Thinking-thought in its highest possible sense (the sense implicitly understood by pre-Socratics through to medieval Scholastics, with perhaps a few gaps in between). The first thing to understand is that this claim is not being made through naïve sense of attachment to rational thinking or anything of that sort... it is based on a ton of consideration of various Western idealist philosophies and deep examination of our own experience (much more in Cleric's case than my own). Based on that, we conclude meaning is never discovered by way of willing or feeling or any non-thinking processes.

re: pets - I have been around enough to know the emotional connection you are speaking of and the "common language", but I also think the dog and myself are not experiencing that connection in the same way. It is natural for me to project my own inner perspective onto the dog when I lack actual experience of the dog's perspective but that does not make it correct. Again, this question comes back on how broadly we want to define "purpose" - if it includes all natural instinctive actions and reactions then yes those animals are acting with purpose. But I am challenging that definition.

This seems like as good a place as any to jump in with this particular part of the conversation.

While I will personally bite the bullet on the purposefulness of instinctive actions (obviously -- over the course of this conversation, that bullet has acquired many toothmarks), I don't think that's what the question of the dog comes down to. The question of the dog is whether you can justify asserting that, because the dog isn't human, she has no sense of self-versus-other, no ability to conceptualize what she wants before seeking it out, no personality as such, just a cluster of instinctive behaviors so automatic in nature that the closest available analogy is to machines. That animals often do have just such personalities and capacities seems to me almost trivially true, but as you noted, the modern world makes it all too easy to deny what's trivially true.

[SanteriSatama]

I disagree completely, and this is the basic contention Cleric and I are always debating here - "prototypical meaning" (or any meaning) is always brought through Thinking-thought in its highest possible sense (the sense implicitly understood by pre-Socratics through to medieval Scholastics, with perhaps a few gaps in between). The first thing to understand is that this claim is not being made through naïve sense of attachment to rational thinking or anything of that sort... it is based on a ton of consideration of various Western idealist philosophies and deep examination of our own experience (much more in Cleric's case than my own). Based on that, we conclude meaning is never discovered by way of willing or feeling or any non-thinking processes.

"Prototypical meaning" was expression referring to Lakoff's semantics. Prototypical meaning can be considered a structuralist inverse of Platonic forms. We think of a concrete example - a prototype - and then metaphorically and analogically expand the semantics to various connotations through associative chains.

Lakoff's semantics seem empirically valid. What you appear to be trying to mean by "thinking" does not function as prototypical, concrete example. Speaking of pre-Socratics, a concrete example of "thinking" is told in the joke of Thales thinking so intently heavenly matters, that he didn't see a hole in the ground and fell.

Hence, a concrete and familiar prototypical meaning of "thinking" manifests in the phenomenon of 'mind-wandering', not staying sentiently present and attentive. Getting lost in thoughts can, and empirically speaking, does often to lead to loss of coherent meaning, inattentive behaviour and physical injury.

If meaning is never discovered by non-thinking process, do you agree that deep sleep can be a non-thinking process? If so, do you really caim that the you don't "discover meaning" if you are in a deep sleep, and I throw a bucket of ice cold water on you?

The narrowing down of meaning and semantics to abstract conceptualizing, that you build your case on, remains protypical rationalism.

re: pets - I have been around enough to know the emotional connection you are speaking of and the "common language", but I also think the dog and myself are not experiencing that connection in the same way. It is natural for me to project my own inner perspective onto the dog when I lack actual experience of the dog's perspective but that does not make it correct. Again, this question comes back on how broadly we want to define "purpose" - if it includes all natural instinctive actions and reactions then yes those animals are acting with purpose. But I am challenging that definition.

In animistic experience our relations are very much intuitive and based on the Ground of phenomenal empathy, whether we relate as human and dog or human and human. Again, the humanist argument that non-humans are categorically different and function only based on mechanized instincts and reaction, is based on rationalism, separating purely conceptual language from the poetry and dance of animistic languages and declaring superiority of purely conceptual language.

As the dog invites me to a walk, and gets thrilled in the dog language of scent, I recognize that for dogs, pee is poetry.

[DandelionSoul]

In animistic experience our relations are very much intuitive and based on the Ground of phenomenal empathy, whether we relate as human and dog or human and human. Again, the humanist argument that non-humans are categorically different and function only based on mechanized instincts and reaction, is based on rationalism, separating purely conceptual language from the poetry and dance of animistic languages and declaring superiority of purely conceptual language.

YES! This is almost exactly what I've been trying to say. How do I know that my cat isn't mechanical? Because she and I recognize each other recognizing each other. Abstracting from that moment of recognition a series of concrete behaviors and attempting to categorize them as "free" or "automatic" to assess whether she acts with purpose is only necessary in a world that's swallowed Descartes and hasn't managed to spit him out again.

[JustinG]

As the dog invites me to a walk, and gets thrilled in the dog language of scent, I recognize that for dogs, pee is poetry.

Whitehead's account of perception is relevant to the ontological implications of the poetics of pee .

For W, the most basic form of perception, which he called perception in the mode of casual efficacy, is emotional in character. Griffin conveys some of the flavour of this (from p. 145 of this book https://www.newdualism.org/papers/D.Gri ... -Knot.html):

"Sensory qualities such as red as we see it, it is agreed on virtually all sides, do not exist in external nature; for example, the molecules in a red ball are not red as we see it apart from someone's seeing it, and they certainly do not see red. But we do see red, and this sensory quality surely arises out of our bodily activities. It is impossible to understand how, apart from supernatural intervention, this could be so if these bodily activities were purely quantitative in nature, devoid of all qualia. A naturalistic perspective leads to the inference that our bodily cells must embody qualia of some sort, even if they do not experience them in the same way that we experience them in conscious sensory perception. That is, cells surely do not enjoy red as we see it . But perhaps red for them is an emotion. Perhaps red as it exists throughout most of nature is a subjective form of immediate feeling, whereas it is only in the conscious presentational immediacy of animals with sensory organs that that subjective form is turned into an objective datum projected onto outer things. "Red as seen," then, would be a transmutation effected by more or less high-level experiences out of "red as felt." This is a kind of transmutation that requires no supernatural assistance."

[Ben Iscatus]

Nice quote, Justin. It might be useful if we all saw things differently, and with complementary functions. Thus if a slug saw a lettuce as a beautiful but temporary object of contemplation, there would be no competition with me seeing it as food...(note to MAL for the next universe).