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Non-physical "Stuff" and Physical Stuff

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Non-physical "Stuff" and Physical Stuff

Banno
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Posted 01/11/09 - 12:00 AM:	#281
Timw, In #225 Dunamis said "any object we are conscious of arises out of a contrast it makes with the ground from which it emerges". There was some discussion of this, which reminded me of Searle's use of the "background" which he leaves purposely poorly defined, and the web of belief in Quine. If there is no coherence at all, how is it we are having this conversation? Dialogue requirers some sort of coherence. When we come across absurdity, we presumably recognize it by our inability to fit it into the dialogue (that is, the absurd is not part of the dialogue - another point worth considering). I'm not going to spend time defining the where and how of the coherent background. I'm just going to wave my hands around and say that without it, we would be stuffed. Perhaps there is a background of absurdity, against which we recognize coherence. It makes no difference. We still could not recognize absurdity without contrasting it with coherence. Perhaps this makes little sense. One should not really write philosophy after two glasses of red, even if they were quite small.
Davidson: We make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimizes agreement. Russel Morris: There's a meaning there, but the meaning there doesn't really mean a thing... Ned: Such is life

Simple Occam
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Posted 01/11/09 - 12:01 AM:	#282
Banno wrote: Let me be clear that I do think that brains somehow produce mind. I proposed a theory that would explain how it does this. You have not shown how it is not "logically acceptable", whatever that means. You rejected it out of hand. But you don't have a theory that in any way supports your belief... that we both accept. I offered a reson for believing that but I don't think you have. 'I do not think that adding qualia to the soup improves it. Certainly without any evidence, equating qualia with parts of the brain just isn't worth the effort. How do you decide these things? Without any arguments youdon't "think" adding qualia to the soup improves it. But qualia is what we are trying to explain. You also seem to consider it too much effort to equate them with parts of the brain... but again without any reasons to support your proclamations. Saying Ophelia occupies a space in my brain is silly, since she must also occupy a space in your brain, and so on. In that case, in what sens eis the ophelia I talk about the same as yours? This is at least an attempt at an argument. If we agree all thought happens in the brain and we both have a thought about the fictional Ophelia, then that thought is in both of our brains. A better approach is just to let the neuroscientists do their work. You are jumping the gun, and I think that is unproductive. Again, you just assume you know better about these thing than I do. Are you a neuroscientist? Yelling what you think or don't think is not critiquing my arguments.

Banno
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Posted 01/11/09 - 12:13 AM:	#283
Hey, I did explain my rejection of your idea, simply, but let me do it again, so as to be clear: it makes use of qualia, which I reject for reasons given earlier in the thread; and it has no basis in physiology. I don't have a complete replacement theory. My opinion is that we should just let the neuroscientists have their head. I suspect that we ought buy shares in neuroscience companies. As for equating qualia with parts of the brain, you proposed it, you ought justify it. You haven't. The thought of Ophelia is in both our brains? What? Get out of my head! Come on, you are misusing language here. Hey, if you want to tell the neuroscientists what to do, go ahead. I'm wondering how you will get them to listen.
Davidson: We make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimizes agreement. Russel Morris: There's a meaning there, but the meaning there doesn't really mean a thing... Ned: Such is life

Vumba
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Posted 01/11/09 - 08:51 AM:	#284
CypressMoon wrote: The point being, aesthetically, that language is a three-dimensional sculpture, where both the abstract metaphors are percieved in three-dimensions, sometimes making a three-dimensional "motion picture" that has been anthropomorphized by the psyche. At the same time, one can also see the language as a two dimensional logical picture, or map. It is both. And both are necessary. How is one to read Camus with "analytical boots on"? It must stretch, pull, extend, reverberate, and resound in the three-dimensional experience of looking at words, to not be understood, but felt by the body. I believe Nietzsche eluded to this, by saying something (roughly), language is flesh and blood with taste, sound, images, scents and the whole experience. If percieved, language can be reflected in three dimensions and expressive in three dimensions too, in an inextricable relationship between experience and the world. If one reads language, and doesn't "look at it" (experience it), it becomes a mute set of two-dimensional pictures, sometimes making a film, without regaurd for the projector. Interesting post, Cypress. Sure, artists have always appreciated and utilised relations between the body, language, experience and the world. There's also a strong scientific / philosophical tradition, from Darwin and William James to people like Edelman, Sacks, Lakoff, Damasio, Varela and Noë exploring the role of the body. Far more fruitful, I find, than people like Dennet and Dawkins.
Where does the hole go when you eat the doughnut?

timw
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Posted 01/11/09 - 05:01 PM:	#285
Banno wrote: I'm not going to spend time defining the where and how of the coherent background. I'm just going to wave my hands around and say that without it, we would be stuffed. Perhaps there is a background of absurdity, against which we recognize coherence. It makes no difference. We still could not recognize absurdity without contrasting it with coherence. Perhaps this makes little sense. One should not really write philosophy after two glasses of red, even if they were quite small. I wasn't thinking either-or so much as neither-nor. I wasn't inviting you to contention, but rather investigation. The OP seems to have made an evaluative judgment, here and elsewhere, in difficult and sometimes spectacular language that hasn’t collapsed yet, either of its own weight or from others leaning on it. You seem to hear it, here and elsewhere, as a categorical statement about the world. Two different things; even two different worlds. If I understand your critiques and ultimate dismissal, it is that absurdity fails to come to grips with a world that is itself “gripable”—in the sense that the world as background has coherence; and that at best absurdity functions as a tool, as a kind of doubt, that has limited and restricted but not any final application. Background coherence, as part of a world of categorical givens, seems problematic to me; but more than that, in terms of the OP I think it’s irrelevant, simply a mistake or a misunderstanding. I wonder if you will take on the OP in its own terms, and I invite you, if you do, to reply briefly, in particular with your own thoughts and your own arguments. I’ve noticed that folks sometimes cite other thinkers. I do that, mainly because I don’t have too many original thoughts of my own, but I try to make the ideas and arguments my own. In particular, to those people who in an open forum cite books or other thinkers without their own explication, I would say that throwing a book at someone is not a form of education, but is rather a kind of assault and battery. I cannot speak for the OP, but my understanding of it is as a radical critique of language as having become a viciously transformative means for rendering experience. The writer of the OP would seem to want to recover that original experience, and in particular in recovering it to leave it as found, as if in situ. In as much as it is ideas (I think) that are referred to, this is a pretty interesting notion. I think the OP generalizes over language and ideas to experience, a more than interesting notion. As it happens, there is an excellent example of the process that I think she is describing immediately before us: this forum. I invite you to think about just what it is that hovers over the keyboard and transcribes itself into these texts, what its usual rules for expression are, and the forms they are transformed into here. Often enough it is the transformation from the passion of the desire to enter into a discussion, which process has its own structures and proper subjects, to the coolness of demonstration, whose objects are of a different kind.

Banno
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Posted 01/11/09 - 06:00 PM:	#286
A sort of gut reaction to the OP? I like explanations that make sense of things. The OP claims (I think...) that it is OK for explanations not to make sense. To me, explanations that do not make sense are not explanations.
Davidson: We make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimizes agreement. Russel Morris: There's a meaning there, but the meaning there doesn't really mean a thing... Ned: Such is life

CypressMoon
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Posted 01/11/09 - 06:07 PM:	#287
Sense making operates on a different scale than the scale of the eye and ear. The analytical mind is calibrated to a different scale than what is around ones eyes and ears.
"IN THE spring, Tipasa is inhabited by gods and the gods speak in the sun and the scent of absinthe leaves, in the silver armor of the sea, in the raw blue sky, the flowercovered ruins, and the great bubbles of light among the heaps of stone." - Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays A good determinant of success is when people start buying your shit.

Dunamis
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Posted 01/11/09 - 06:15 PM:	#288
Banno wrote: A sort of gut reaction to the OP? I like explanations that make sense of things. The OP claims (I think...) that it is OK for explanations not to make sense. To me, explanations that do not make sense are not explanations. Nicholas de Cusa would tell you, in his De Docta Ignorantia, that rational knowledge is limited and that what is required is a visio sine comprehensione, a vision without comprehension, which brings about a mystical "union of opposites". This is what CM probably has in mind, the teaching of ignorance. At times Wittgenstein puts forth something like this, the way in which the spade is turned when looking for an explanation of an explanation, and how symbolic and transformational gestures can be "without error" (see Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough). One can of course say that an explanation that does not make sense is not an explanation, but is a vision without comprehension not a vision? And are the analogies of Wittgenstein explanations that fully make sense (can be supported by non-aphoristic, logical argument), or more like pictures, visions? Just some open thoughts.
Tractatus theologico-politicus [is a] work forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil and issued with the knowledge of Mynheer Jan de Witt. - Church Council of Amsterdam If no man ever thinks alone, then we might say that to know really is to think ever less by oneself - Balibar

CypressMoon
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Posted 01/11/09 - 06:25 PM:	#289
Dunamis wrote: Nicholas de Cusa would tell you, in his De Docta Ignorantia, that rational knowledge is limited and that what is required is a visio sine comprehensione, a vision without comprehension, which brings about a mystical "union of opposites". This is what CM probably has in mind, the teaching of ignorance. At times Wittgenstein puts forth something like this, the way in which the spade is turned when looking for an explanation of an explanation, and how symbolic and transformational gestures can be "without error" (see Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough). One can of course say that an explanation that does not make sense is not an explanation, but is a vision without comprehension not a vision? And are the analogies of Wittgenstein explanations that fully make sense (can be supported by non-aphoristic, logical argument), or more like pictures, visions? There we have it people. A well respected, well read member has re-worded (using a referrence) what Smithson calls the "enantiomorphic chambers" [of the "inner eye"]. Read it. Ahhh. Read it again. inhale. Breathe the coherency of this aesthetics I'm talking about. It's quite releaving to have Dunamis reference someone from the metaphysical tradition (I think) that expressed an idea that has been bashed, ridiculed, tormented, and tortured almost to a death, by you (very) slightly open minded people. You almost killed a valid aesthetic paradigm shift of mine, because you couldn't understand my words. I must thank you Dunamis.
"IN THE spring, Tipasa is inhabited by gods and the gods speak in the sun and the scent of absinthe leaves, in the silver armor of the sea, in the raw blue sky, the flowercovered ruins, and the great bubbles of light among the heaps of stone." - Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays A good determinant of success is when people start buying your shit.

Banno
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Posted 01/11/09 - 06:27 PM:	#290
CypressMoon wrote: Sense making operates on a different scale than the scale of the eye and ear. The analytical mind is calibrated to a different scale than what is around ones eyes and ears. I don't agree. Sense making is not all or nothing. If you see something, yet can make no sense at all of it, what have you seen?
Davidson: We make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimizes agreement. Russel Morris: There's a meaning there, but the meaning there doesn't really mean a thing... Ned: Such is life

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