AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Jun 25, 2021 1:23 am
Yes definitely! We are non-reflective in our early infancy and our thinking metamorphoses to self-reflective later (perhaps after "object permanence" develops - which is also when faculty of memory develops).
I would suggest that memory emerges before object permanence and grounds object permanence. It's like this: a baby acts as though an object that's no longer directly in view no longer
exists, so the object is impermanent. But the interesting thing is, it's also not
forgotten. In fact, the disappearance of the object can be extremely distressing to the infant precisely because the infant knows what they've lost. It's only by remembering the pattern of things disappearing and then returning that the infant begins to understand that things don't stop existing when they disappear from sight.
So, does the early infant act with purpose or intention? I don't think so, and another one of those affirmative defenses to otherwise criminal behavior is "infancy", although many jurisdictions in U.S. actually extend that up to about 7 years of age, which is obviously past the point of basic self-reflective thinking.
An infant absolutely does act with intention and purpose, just not with
comprehension. Infants are curious little things, and given the opportunity, they will act to satisfy their own curiosity -- how does this taste or how does that feel? Experimenting with their environment is a behavior we even see in utero. They scream or cry when they need to be fed or changed, and they can even be taught sign language to express clearly what they need from much earlier on than they can express it verbally. Very young children are constantly testing out the limitations of their bodies -- an infant will start crawling quite on their own as soon as they can coordinate their limbs well enough to do so. But it's that lack of comprehension, I think, that makes it useful to differentiate meaning and purpose
broadly from specifically
ethical (or legal) meaning.
re: non-human animals - I agree that many of them have advanced cognition, but I am just saying it's easier to stay within the perspective we have immediate experience of. And now we can compare infants to adults in addition to archaic man and modern man!
Unfortunately, I have no memory of being an infant, and I'll never been an archaic human, so other than the fact that both of those creatures share a similar body composition, I seem rather stuck in the same place that I am with animals: I have to look at their behaviors and see what I can glean from them.
There are many metaphysical issues tangled up in this point, but I would offer first that I do not hold anything in Reality to be "non-living". That conclusion can be rooted in empirical observation, but also I think setting up dualism of "living" vs. "non-living" is very problematic philosophically. Of course, that does not mean everything we see with physical boundaries and which appears as an "object" to our senses is alive, it just means the living beings responsible for those appearances are non-physical and go well beyond what most people can observe now.
I don't think we disagree here. We can regard the fundamental reality as alive without regarding everything we see as having its own subjective center. I think we agree (based on the next snippet) that robots don't have their own subjective center in the same way that a human or even a cat does. Whether a robot with that internal sense of selfhood is even, in principle, possible is a conversation for another night, but I feel safe in saying that a robot programmed to make omelets can easily be conceptualized as not having anything of the sort. To draw on Sartre's language, the robot is "in itself," not "for itself." When I distinguish between the living and the nonliving, that "in itself/for itself" dichotomy is what I'm driving at, and that language might work better.
The other issue is this nexus between inner desire and instinct. I agree machines do not have any inner desire or living instinct, but it seems to me your view would leave that as a likely possibility, since you infer inner desire and "purpose" of animals from their instinctual behavior. So I think the assertion that machines "has no desires at all", even as far as we know, is problematic under your view. How can we say the programmed machine has no purpose-intention and the crocodile does, when both behave very predictably and out of "instinct" (programmed by another person or by Nature-God)?
I will answer that, but before I do, I'd like to turn the difficulty around: do you believe that animals feel anything at all, that they
feel hunger or thirst or fear? It seems if you agree that machines have no inner desire, and if you believe that instincts are indistinguishable from a machine's programming, then you'd have to say "no" to that question. If you're inclined to say that yes, they do, then... why? Where do
you ground the distinction between an animal and a machine? You have not committed to holding that
any nonhuman animal can feel
anything, at least that I recall, so simply saying "No, no animal feels anything" is a bullet your view seems to allow you to bite, but if you don't, then you yourself must make that distinction in some way or another.
Now for my answer. Fundamentally, it comes back to "in itself" versus "for itself." Something built with a preconception of what it's to be and what it's to do, something whose essence precedes its existence, is "in itself." Something that emerges spontaneously, a self-organized locus of conatus, is "for itself." The latter will necessarily exist, from its own perspective, as where the world appears, and the world will be made of relevance to its own self-motivated conative purposes. That self-organized, self-motivated conatus is the essence of desire, and with it comes the capacity to suffer. The Omeletron does not actually desire to make omelets -- it doesn't suffer when it's not making omelets. Making omelets has no relevance to it. It's an expression of someone
else's desire for omelets. It isn't self-organized or self-motivated.
I see what you are saying. I don't know if this distinction is relevant at all, but I would just say we remain the same person in essence when dreaming and our mode of consciousness and our perspective changes, giving us access to experience we do not have access to during waking consciousness. There is definitely a sense in which our "I" has been dislodged from the person who is dreaming, though.
I think the one who makes the omelet and the one who went to sleep are the same
being but not the same
person, where "person" means something somewhat more specific: I'm using it here in the sense of an ego-self, a mask made of bundles of experience that are radically different in dreams. If our sleepwalker wakes up and finds that, while sleeping, she has apparently made an omelet, she will simultaneously have the thought, "Oh, I must've been sleepwalking and made an omelet" and also the sense that
she did not, in fact, make an omelet, as though her body were haunted at that time by the omelet maker. For legal purposes, we generally do not hold our sleepwalker responsible for the omelet-maker's actions (say, if she had sleepwalked to a neighbor's house, broken in, and made the omelet in
their kitchen).
Under idealism, especially of the Western variety, ideational activity and meaning are fundamental. The very essence of the Cosmos is meaning. Our perspective on that meaning is certainly different and becomes even more different when abstract intellect is involved without any higher cognition, but that is our shortcoming and not that of the Cosmos. There is no such thing as my meaning of any given phenomenon and your meaning of that same phenomenon in essence. If we consider how it is possible for us to communicate so well and empathize with what others may be experiencing, and we acknowledge it is truly possible, then I think we are pretty much forced to this conclusion of "shared meaning". It is also roots our ability to truly integrate our conscious perspectives with others in the spiritual evolutionary process.
Fundamentally, I don't accept the idea of a singular all-encompassing perspective from which the play of meaning-making is concluded and to which meaning is fully and finally disclosed, so if that's the sort of thing you're proposing, we may have stumbled upon a big disagreement. For me, meaning is always created, negotiated, and renegotiated subjectively and intersubjectively, and there is no Greatest Subject who gets the final say, and there never will be.
By "reverse the order", I assume you mean that purpose comes before meaning.
I'd affirm that purpose comes before meaning, sure, but what I actually meant to reverse was the relationship between self-reflection and memory. I think self-reflection emerges from memory, and not memory from self-reflection.
I think maybe I am starting to see where we are truly diverging here. It seems like you are holding to an "instinctive MAL" view (similar to BK) where humans are merely advanced instinctual animals and our self-reflective capacity does not raise us qualitatively beyond the level of animal.
I'm not sure that's quite accurate about me
or Kastrup. Kastrup's view suggests a kind of transcendental attractor guiding the "blind" impulses of Will, an eternal Telos realized in time that acts as the condition under which the unreflective Will moves at all. Humans are unique in our ability to grasp that Telos, to understand the workings of Will, to grasp the eternal Ideas, and that very ability was the thing Will was striving for the whole time:
Bernardo Kastrup in Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics wrote:
To put it more directly, the metaphysical meaning of human life is to achieve meta-conscious awareness of the dynamics of the will. Through introspection we can meta-cognize it as it manifests within ourselves, and through contemplation of the eternal Ideas we can meta-cognize it as it manifests in the world beyond ourselves, both organic and inorganic realms. The metaphysical meaning of all non-human life, in turn, is to enable the realization of the meaning of human life.
But I disagree. That's to posit a "why" for the whole thing, a Big Reason behind all this -- ultimately, it's to posit a final disclosure of meaning.
It does not add any meaning or purpose which was not already there in Nature before it became self-reflective through us (or other animals before us). If that is accurate summary of your position, then we have a pretty significant disagreement.
It isn't, but let's not let that stop us from disagreeing.
I think self-reflection generates
many meanings and purposes that were not already present, but no Meaning or Purpose.
Not only do I hold that "purpose" only becomes meaningful concept once there is self-reflective thinking, but also that such thinking adds an even deeper 'dimension' to meaning, which, for lack of time and better words, I will for now call, "the meaning of knowing meaning" (also referred to as "awakening" of the Divine in spiritual traditions).
Here I think we might have disagreed to such an extent that we've come around to an odd sort of agreement: we agree that self-reflection enables the
meaning of knowing meaning, just not on what it means to know meaning.