Seeing the truth is not conductive to survival

[DandelionSoul]

The question is, does such a phenomenon arise and/or become necessary for beings without any self-reflective capacity or beings who have evolved to much higher 'representational interfaces' which are 'aperspectival'?

"Aperspectival beings" is an oxymoron in my view. To be is to be in relation, and to be in relation is to be from a perspective, which I don't know of a way to conceptualize meaningfully without time (how would we even conceptualize the origin of atemporal beings without temporal-process words like "evolve"?).

I say no, the non-self-reflective being does not experience any phenomenon of linear temporality and has no memory.

This is very close to the heart of our disagreement, but I feel like there's no way to justify this statement in light of what we actually know. We know that babies start forming (at least) implicit memories far earlier than there's any kind of apparent self-reflection, and we know that they will begin to anticipate routines and a disjointed, unpredictable routine in infancy can disrupt the child's development. This all seems to me far more comfortably accommodated by a view where self-reflection emerges after memory and a sense of time and space. The other option is just that we're born self-reflective, but I don't think either of us is quite willing to bite that bullet.

A being without memory as such cannot be said to act with "purpose", because the latter concept presupposes knowledge of how an effect will be brought about by a cause.

I don't think this is true. We never know how an effect will be brought about by a cause, only that it will, because how is a question with an answer that's practically infinite, and our horizon of knowledge about the cause and the effect always stops short of a complete understanding. You could spend the rest of your life learning how a hammer drives a nail and you'll never fully understand it, but you know that when you hit the nail just so, it goes through the wood.

If you want to redefine "purpose" to exclude the requirement of any knowledge whatsoever,

I know this isn't in response to me directly, but I hope this isn't your interpretation of my view. If so, then I've done a shoddy job explaining it. Briefly, though, I think that desire is knowledge, and instinct is knowledge, so our dispute seems to be over whether 1) those things are actually knowledge and 2) whether they are sufficient to generate purpose and meaning in the mind of the organism.

then there is no reason to use the word "purpose" anymore, because every living being is programmed (naturally or otherwise) to react to stimulus (lack of something), even in very highly complex ways.

A couple of brief points:

"Programming" is a misnomer that ultimately only serves to mask the disanalogy between organic life and machines. The instinctive dispositions of an animal are not "programmed" by Nature in a way analogous to how a machine is "programmed" by a coder. The activity of brains is not computable.

Likewise, the complexity of living behavior is different in kind from the complexity of programmed behavior.

Both of these assertions require an argument in themselves, which is why I'm not dwelling, but I would point back to the "in itself" versus "for itself" distinction as a place to start.

[SanteriSatama]

"Aperspectival beings" is an oxymoron in my view. To be is to be in relation, and to be in relation is to be from a perspective, which I don't know of a way to conceptualize meaningfully without time (how would we even conceptualize the origin of atemporal beings without temporal-process words like "evolve"?).

Absense of point-like perspective (e.g. "light cone") does not exclude distributed and decentralized perspectivity (e.g. "cloud" or "field"), unless perspectivity is defined as point-like. IMHO such definition would only increase our semantic confusion and not be helpful for the discussion.

There's a simple test. 1) Looking with focused gaze with two eyes open 2) looking alternatively with one eye open 3) watching with unfocused gaze with two eyes open and 4) eyes closed.

It is possible to come to different conclusion and classify the experiments differently, but at least I don't have a problem of considering all four experiments as various types and qualities of perspectives, even though they don't necessarily share a common fixed point.

[DandelionSoul]

Absense of point-like perspective (e.g. "light cone") does not exclude distributed and decentralized perspectivity (e.g. "cloud" or "field"), unless perspectivity is defined as point-like. IMHO such definition would only increase our semantic confusion and not be helpful for the discussion.

There's a simple test. 1) Looking with focused gaze with two eyes open 2) looking alternatively with one eye open 3) watching with unfocused gaze with two eyes open and 4) eyes closed.

It is possible to come to different conclusion and classify the experiments differently, but at least I don't have a problem of considering all four experiments as various types and qualities of perspectives, even though they don't necessarily share a common fixed point.

I'm chewing on that, but I don't think it contradicts my point: that to be a self just is to have a perspective (of whatever sort). It's a super interesting thought, though, and I'll have to reflect on it some more. ^_^

[AshvinP]

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.

That is a problematic formulation for me, because it presupposes subject-object and past-present distinctions are ones that exist independently of an ego-self making those distinctions. Rather, under that formulation, there is a subject-object dichotomy and then the ego-self comes along and discovers it. So, if my assessment is correct, you are saying the distinctions themselves are fundamental and the ego-self is epiphenomenal, which I definitely do not agree with. Our limited ego-self we currently identify with is a more recent development, but there is also eternal Ego-Self. The distinctions are not at all fundamental and are only a result of the Ego-Self 'forgetting' its true nature and becoming experientially-cognitively limited.

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.

I think our definitions are "knowledge" are simply different - I don't see how any true knowledge can exist without ability to reflect on experience. If we are dealing with mere non-reflective experience of desire and instinctual response, then I say there is no knowledge and also no purpose-intent. (side note: the law actually has a category for the sort of intent that is directed towards doing A but ends up doing B). I definitely agree that instinctive-reflexive behavior naturally unfolds into self-reflective behavior and therefore purposeful-intentional behavior during the course of cognitive development. But prior to that, we cannot say the infant was acting with purpose-intent.

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.

Don't get me wrong - I am not trying to diminish the utility of instinct in our experience and it's reflection of living spiritual activity within us. I do actually hold the instincts within us to be living beings in essence. However, to the extent they determine any of our behaviors without our knowledge of them doing so, I say we are not acting freely or, likewise, with purpose-intent. Related to that, I should clarify that I am not claiming we act as robots for awhile and then later everything we do is with purpose-intent - rather I think that full-grown adults can still lack purpose-intent in their behaviors which are not at all reflected upon before occurring.

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 selfhood. 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.

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?

[/quote]

So here again I think you are detaching reflective thinking from an 'entity' of "Self" and saying the latter exists, and then eventually a being observes itself and thereby produces the former. I am saying the very essence of Selfhood is reflective thinking, and there are stages in development of individual and collective humanity where that essence is shrouded in darkness. When that essence is illuminated within us, then we make distinctions in the world which eventually allow for increasing levels of spiritual freedom, which can only exist with true knowledge of one's desires and motivations as they influence one's behavior.

re: Cleric's illustration - yes I think are understanding it well. It is a pragmatic argument that meaning of content always present to us as if it pre-existed our knowledge of it. The import of that is recognizing that meaning, for "all intents and purposes" (I couldn't say that phrase without first understanding Cleric's illustration ), is universally shared and does not simply arise for each person independently. I'm actually forgetting how that relates to what we have been discussing... but I will probably remember later today.

[AshvinP]

I don't know, but I think science has adequately demonstrated there is some infant mode of consciousness in humans (probably for a very short time) which is not self-reflective. They experience and react, but not with knowledge of their ego-self as distinct from that which is beyond the boundaries of their physical body. So if we agree on that, the question becomes whether infant in that mode can be said to act with "purpose". If so, then I think we are defining "purpose" in a way that means we may as well ditch the word "purpose" altogether.

So, ego-loop thinks of body as the boundary, and self-reflects its separation inside the boundary?

Do you identify self as ego-loop and its boundaries and nothing else?

Does bodily awareness have boundary?

Which is more coherent way to think: A) Body is bounded object. B) Body is bodily awareness?

I am not sure how the word "loop" is being used here, so not sure if I agree with ego-loop concept.

I don't think any fundamental boundaries exist between ego-self and qualitative totality of Cosmos. But yes humans in current state identify ego with corporeal boundaries to large degree. Although it's interesting to note law has concept of car being an extension of person who is driving it when hitting someone else, or when hitting someone else's car which is extension of person being hit. I think that speaks to intuitive understanding of ethereal and astral bodies which have much deeper interaction with other spiiritual beings, although the dynamics of that still remain at very low resolutiion for me.

[AshvinP]

The question is, does such a phenomenon arise and/or become necessary for beings without any self-reflective capacity or beings who have evolved to much higher 'representational interfaces' which are 'aperspectival'?

"Aperspectival beings" is an oxymoron in my view. To be is to be in relation, and to be in relation is to be from a perspective, which I don't know of a way to conceptualize meaningfully without time (how would we even conceptualize the origin of atemporal beings without temporal-process words like "evolve"?).

'Aperspectival' is term from Gebser and The Ever-Present Origin - it is not lack of any perspective, but rather mode of consciousness which concretizes space-time so there is freedom of perspective (SS response to you also pointed to that). What we are saying about 'aperspectival' is merely an intellectual concept and inherently inadequate, however, because we are trying to grasp an integral mode of consciousness from a not-yet-integral mode (for most people). Gebser cautions about that repeatedly. I hope to discuss this much further in another installment of Spiritual Aesthetics essay. In the meantime, here is a quote from Gebser:

“Aperspectival” is not to be thought of as merely the opposite or negation of “perspectival”; the antithesis of “perspectival” is “unperspectival.” The distinction in meaning suggested by the three terms unperspectival, perspectival, and aperspectival is analogous to that of the terms illogical, logical, and alogical or immoral, moral, and amoral.2 We have employed here the designation “aperspectival” to clearly emphasize the need of overcoming the mere antithesis of affirmation and perspectival negation. The so-called primal words (Urworte), for example, evidence two antithetic connotations: Latin altus meant “high” as well as “low”; sacer meant “sacred” as well as “cursed.” Such primal words as these formed an undifferentiated psychically-stressed unity whose bivalent nature was definitely familiar to the early Egyptians and Greeks.3 This is no longer the case with our present sense of language; consequently, we have required a term that transcends equally the ambivalence of the primal connotations and the dualism of antonyms or conceptual opposites.

Hence we have used the Greek prefix “a-” in conjunction with our Latin-derived word “perspectival” in the sense of an alpha privativum and not as an alpha negativum, since the prefix has a liberating character (privativum, derived from Latin privare, i.e., “to liberate”). The designation “aperspectival,” in consequence, expresses a process of liberation from the exclusive validity of perspectival and unperspectival, as well as pre-perspectival limitations. Our designation, then, does not attempt to unite the inherently coexistent unperspectival and perspectival structures, nor does it attempt to reconcile or synthesize structures which, in their deficient modes, have become irreconcilable. If “aperspectival” were to represent only a synthesis it would imply no more than “perspectival-rational” and would be limited and only momentarily valid, inasmuch as every union is threatened by further separation. Our concern is with integrality and ultimately with the whole; the word “aperspectival” conveys our attempt to deal with wholeness. It is a definition which differentiates a perception of reality that is neither perspectivally restricted to only one sector nor merely unperspectivally evocative of a vague sense of reality.

- Gebser, Jean. The Ever-Present Origin

I say no, the non-self-reflective being does not experience any phenomenon of linear temporality and has no memory.

This is very close to the heart of our disagreement, but I feel like there's no way to justify this statement in light of what we actually know. We know that babies start forming (at least) implicit memories far earlier than there's any kind of apparent self-reflection, and we know that they will begin to anticipate routines and a disjointed, unpredictable routine in infancy can disrupt the child's development. This all seems to me far more comfortably accommodated by a view where self-reflection emerges after memory and a sense of time and space. The other option is just that we're born self-reflective, but I don't think either of us is quite willing to bite that bullet.

A being without memory as such cannot be said to act with "purpose", because the latter concept presupposes knowledge of how an effect will be brought about by a cause.

I don't think this is true. We never know how an effect will be brought about by a cause, only that it will, because how is a question with an answer that's practically infinite, and our horizon of knowledge about the cause and the effect always stops short of a complete understanding. You could spend the rest of your life learning how a hammer drives a nail and you'll never fully understand it, but you know that when you hit the nail just so, it goes through the wood.

Can you point me towards the evidence you are speaking of in bolded statement? I am not exactly sure if that challenges the point I am making. I think the very existence of a process from non-self-reflective to self-reflective, highly correlated with "implicit" to "explicit" memories, or whatever we may call them, works in favor of my point that there is, at least in theory if not also in practical experience, a distinction between behavior that is purposeful-intentional and behavior that is not purposeful-intentional in human beings. I would say we can also find this in practical experience but it's not even necessary to recognize that experience in order to see this distinction clearly exists. On that note, I am wondering whether you think there is any behavior which is not purposeful-intentional (I think you may have already answered "no", but just to confirm)?

If you want to redefine "purpose" to exclude the requirement of any knowledge whatsoever,

I know this isn't in response to me directly, but I hope this isn't your interpretation of my view. If so, then I've done a shoddy job explaining it. Briefly, though, I think that desire is knowledge, and instinct is knowledge, so our dispute seems to be over whether 1) those things are actually knowledge and 2) whether they are sufficient to generate purpose and meaning in the mind of the organism.

then there is no reason to use the word "purpose" anymore, because every living being is programmed (naturally or otherwise) to react to stimulus (lack of something), even in very highly complex ways.

A couple of brief points:

"Programming" is a misnomer that ultimately only serves to mask the disanalogy between organic life and machines. The instinctive dispositions of an animal are not "programmed" by Nature in a way analogous to how a machine is "programmed" by a coder. The activity of brains is not computable.

Likewise, the complexity of living behavior is different in kind from the complexity of programmed behavior.

Both of these assertions require an argument in themselves, which is why I'm not dwelling, but I would point back to the "in itself" versus "for itself" distinction as a place to start.

Right, so you are not saying "purpose" excludes "knowledge", but rather you are expanding "knowledge" to encompass all instinctual behavior, or basically all behavior of living beings in general. I don't see how that can reasonably be done. It's ironic because I am usually debating people here to expand the definitions of "knowing" and "thinking" from the artificially limited definitions people impose on them, but now I am arguing with you to constrain those definitions. I do hold that all human experience includes a knowing-thinking aspect, but that aspect is exactly what lifts our behavior beyond mere instinctual behavior.

I also want to clarify we should not conflate "purpose" and "meaning" - the latter exists in every experience, whether we know it or not. The former, according to me, only exists when we know that we can bring about effects from causes (even if don't know exactly the mechanisms of how that happens). And "knowing" for me does not include merely instinctual behavior since it already rules out reflection on cause-and-effect chains. I am fine ditching the "programming" label, because I only want to get to the living essence of the activities we are discussing here.

[SanteriSatama]

Our limited ego-self we currently identify with is a more recent development, but there is also eternal Ego-Self.

Ego-self is already a compound of Greek "Ego" and Self. At least Greek "Ego" is an emergent historical process.

What is the justification for the claim, that "eternal Ego-Self" is anything more or anything else than a projection of the historical "Ego-Self"? Other than post-modern arbitrary use of the quantifier "there is...".

[SanteriSatama]

“Aperspectival” is not to be thought of as merely the opposite or negation of “perspectival”; the antithesis of “perspectival” is “unperspectival.” The distinction in meaning suggested by the three terms unperspectival, perspectival, and aperspectival is analogous to that of the terms illogical, logical, and alogical or immoral, moral, and amoral.2 We have employed here the designation “aperspectival” to clearly emphasize the need of overcoming the mere antithesis of affirmation and perspectival negation. The so-called primal words (Urworte), for example, evidence two antithetic connotations: Latin altus meant “high” as well as “low”; sacer meant “sacred” as well as “cursed.” Such primal words as these formed an undifferentiated psychically-stressed unity whose bivalent nature was definitely familiar to the early Egyptians and Greeks.3 This is no longer the case with our present sense of language; consequently, we have required a term that transcends equally the ambivalence of the primal connotations and the dualism of antonyms or conceptual opposites.

Hence we have used the Greek prefix “a-” in conjunction with our Latin-derived word “perspectival” in the sense of an alpha privativum and not as an alpha negativum, since the prefix has a liberating character (privativum, derived from Latin privare, i.e., “to liberate”). The designation “aperspectival,” in consequence, expresses a process of liberation from the exclusive validity of perspectival and unperspectival, as well as pre-perspectival limitations. Our designation, then, does not attempt to unite the inherently coexistent unperspectival and perspectival structures, nor does it attempt to reconcile or synthesize structures which, in their deficient modes, have become irreconcilable. If “aperspectival” were to represent only a synthesis it would imply no more than “perspectival-rational” and would be limited and only momentarily valid, inasmuch as every union is threatened by further separation. Our concern is with integrality and ultimately with the whole; the word “aperspectival” conveys our attempt to deal with wholeness. It is a definition which differentiates a perception of reality that is neither perspectivally restricted to only one sector nor merely unperspectivally evocative of a vague sense of reality.

- Gebser, Jean. The Ever-Present Origin

Yes, as with 'asubjective', the alpha privative aX denotes a state in absence of the question between affirmation or negation of X. I don't know what meaning or definition Gebser gives to 'perspectival', so can't comment on that.

Etymological meaning 'looking forward' inherently contains also the purpose and temporal relations of procreation. If we call this purpose Mother, also in its archetypal, spiritual and theological connotations. Absence of affirmation or negation of Mother, the perspective and purpose of procreation, does not sound familiar or plausible, but of course I can't apriori exclude such possibility. As death is a negation of life, the perspective and purpose of life is present in death as polarity.

Maybe aperspectival state beyond life and death is possible in principle. But is such worth discussing?

[DandelionSoul]

This is becoming overwhelming to try to respond to everything, but I'll try to hit the highlights and refocus the conversation.

Our limited ego-self we currently identify with is a more recent development, but there is also eternal Ego-Self. The distinctions are not at all fundamental and are only a result of the Ego-Self 'forgetting' its true nature and becoming experientially-cognitively limited.

So I don't accept the idea of an eternal Ego-Self, at least on the face of it, but fundamentally the idea seems incoherent to me and I'm not sure how to parse the meaning of those words together. Can you elaborate?

I think our definitions are "knowledge" are simply different - I don't see how any true knowledge can exist without ability to reflect on experience. If we are dealing with mere non-reflective experience of desire and instinctual response, then I say there is no knowledge and also no purpose-intent.

This may be one of those things where each of our theses seems obvious to us and obviously nonsensical to the other. Later I'll try to offer my understanding of what knowledge is and how it can operate prior to self-reflection.

However, to the extent they determine any of our behaviors without our knowledge of them doing so, I say we are not acting freely or, likewise, with purpose-intent.

Ah, see, this is somewhere that we differ. "Freedom" in my perspective is nothing but the capacity to act upon a self-motivated intention, and an intention can be instinctively supplied. Freedom increases with self-reflection in two ways: we now have the capacity to engage with our intentions themselves from a critical or ethical perspective (that is, to develop abstract values and allow them to inform our intentions and to recognize the impact of our actions on the world at large), and we also have the capacity to develop better strategies for acting upon them. And ethically, self-reflection enables the recognition of metaphysical freedom, both ours and others, and thus enables us to will the practical freedom of metaphysically free beings (that is, to oppose oppression both of humans and animals). But freedom, in my view, is one of the aspects of a self that's reflected upon in self-reflection, and that's probably the single most fundamental disagreement between us: whether self-reflection generates selfhood, or whether selfhood is already present prior to being reflected upon. And that disagreement seems to function at a level that's deeply intuitive to both of us, so we'll have to tease out those underlying intuitions if we hope to be understood (and I suspect we do, or we wouldn't bother with all these words ).

'Aperspectival' is term from Gebser and The Ever-Present Origin

I haven't read this, but the quote clarifies what you mean. Thank you! My only encounter with the term "aperspectival" has been to mean what Gebser calls "unperspectival," particularly in Miri Albahari's work on aperspectival consciousness as the ground of being.

Can you point me towards the evidence you are speaking of in bolded statement?

What sort of evidence would you like? I can certainly provide research on early childhood development, if that would help. Briefly, though, very young children (but old enough to have acquired language) tend to have memories from infancy that are later purged, and infants can be traumatized in ways that are only possible if they're capable of remembering. Implicit memory tends to emerge as emotional responses with no clear reason behind them, so trauma triggers are a good example, but also, say, a feeling of warmth over a particular scent because your mother used to wear it while she was holding you as an infant. There's a memory there, but it's implicit in the present experience and unable to be explicitly accessed and reported upon. Implicit memory is a re-experiencing of some past state, whereas explicit memory is the capacity to integrate that re-experiencing into a narrative or report upon it. Most animals are capable of implicit memory -- this is how they learn anything at all.

a distinction between behavior that is purposeful-intentional and behavior that is not purposeful-intentional in human beings

I'd agree, but I wouldn't put the line where you would.

On that note, I am wondering whether you think there is any behavior which is not purposeful-intentional (I think you may have already answered "no", but just to confirm)?

Yes, and I'd offer two sorts right off the top of my head: reflexive actions and what de Beauvoir calls "mystification," by which she means (and I mean) a state where a person's self-reflective capacity is twisted to make them believe that they have no freedom, as in the case of enslavement, brainwashing, severe abuse, cult indoctrination, etc. In that case, the will of the mystified is subsumed into the will of the oppressor and their actions are not, from their own perspective, intentional because the faculty that should make them aware of their freedom is roped into the service of denying it.

Right, so you are not saying "purpose" excludes "knowledge", but rather you are expanding "knowledge" to encompass all instinctual behavior, or basically all behavior of living beings in general.

Yes, in my view there is a cognitive component intrinsic to desire itself, such that feeling is always already a sort of knowledge even before it's reflected upon.

I also want to clarify we should not conflate "purpose" and "meaning" - the latter exists in every experience, whether we know it or not. The former, according to me, only exists when we know that we can bring about effects from causes (even if don't know exactly the mechanisms of how that happens).

Right, whereas I see meaning as always already purpose-bound: an idea has meaning when it has meaning for a being, when it's relevant to their purposes.

In the interest of making the conversation more manageable, I think I want to make a move toward narrowing our focus to the core disagreement, which seems to me to be the order of things: does self-reflection emerge from selfhood, or does self-reflection produce selfhood?

[AshvinP]

Our limited ego-self we currently identify with is a more recent development, but there is also eternal Ego-Self.

Ego-self is already a compound of Greek "Ego" and Self. At least Greek "Ego" is an emergent historical process.

What is the justification for the claim, that "eternal Ego-Self" is anything more or anything else than a projection of the historical "Ego-Self"? Other than post-modern arbitrary use of the quantifier "there is...".

The "historical ego-self" is a microcosm, or a prefigurement, of the eternal Self. Of course, that is a conclusion based on my consideration of many different lines of evidence and a certain modicum of faith. Spiritual mythology and the metamorphic progression of its symbols is a big line of evidence for me. My experience of the world as it presents to my current ego-self also leads me to think my Selfhood is essential to that experience even if my limited ego is not. That also relates to metamorphic phenomenology of Thinking and my very rudimentary understanding of spiritual science. We can get into each of those as necessary if you want, but I think DS latest response will also take me in that direction anyway, so we may as well integrate both discussions.