Vervaeke-Henriques 'Transcendent Naturalism'

Reply to Quixodian I've watched a few of his talks and lectures. Interesting material. I'm curious about transjectivity (transcending categories of subjective and objective through co-creation/relatedness). There seems to be a bit of a wave of this material about - an attempt at rebuilding a discourse on meaning from the wreckage of humanism/scientism/materialism towards transcendental matters. Is Vervaeke a Platonist? I forget. I'm not sufficiently immersed in any of the important literature to get all that much from these on line sages but Vervaeke is an improvement on fellow Canadian Jordan B Peterson, who (and I may be wrong here) often seems to attempt a similar project, a type of restorative transcendentalism.

Quoting Tom Storm

Is Vervaeke a Platonist? I forget. I'm not sufficiently immersed in any of the important literature to get all that much from these on line sages but Vervaeke is an improvement on fellow Canadian Jordan B Peterson, who (and I may be wrong here) often seems to attempt a similar project, a type of restorative transcendentalism.

He does a lot of sessions on resurrecting neoplatonism, so I guess he must be. (He has mentioned Peterson once or twice, although I think Peterson has gone a bit off the rails with his political obsessions.) Anyway, Vervaeke's main concern is 'awakening from the meaning crisis' - that Western culture is undergoing a crisis of meaning, which manifests in a huge number of ways, rooted in the 'scientistic' view that the Universe is basically devoid of meaning. But in that introduction that I've linked to, they're proposing an alternative which is compatible with, but goes beyond, current naturalist models. Basically it's a synopsis of what they intend to cover in the forthcoming talks (which I mainly listen to while exercising.)

Quoting Quixodian

Anyway, Vervaeke's main concern is 'awakening from the meaning crisis' - that Western culture is undergoing a crisis of meaning, which manifests in a huge number of ways, rooted in the 'scientistic' view that the Universe is basically devoid of meaning.

Indeed and this has been a preoccupation of 'public intellectuals' for decades, from Aleister Crowley to Alan Watts. Carl Jung ran a similar project.

Australian academic John Carroll wrote a vicious tirade against humanism back in 1993 - Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture. His message was similar. It started me thinking about those themes.

I suspect there has been some kind of meaning crisis throughout human history. But since the project of modernism has been to foster independent thinking and living as a reaction against the inflexible strictures of religious orthodoxy and the bigotries this has generally entailed, it's no wonder that people today are spoiled for choice and many feel adrift. Certainty has gone and society seems atomized - I find this exciting, but many fear it.

Quoting Tom Storm

I suspect there has been some kind of meaning crisis throughout human history. But since the project of modernism has been to foster independent thinking and living as a reaction against the inflexible strictures of religious orthodoxy and the bigotries this has generally entailed, it's no wonder that people today are spoiled for choice and many feel adrift. Certainty has gone and society seems atomized - I find this exciting, but many fear it.

:up: I'm like you in that I find the current situation not at all "a crisis of meaning" in the sense that we have lost anything worth having, but an exciting "melting pot" in which new possibilities might emerge. Uncertainty seems to me to be the most fruitful condition.

I think the most important challenge we collectively face is dealing with the practical economic and ecological consequences of the 'continuous growth' paradigm, and the enormous problem of plutocracy and corrupted politics.

Quoting Quixodian

crisis of meaning

From the geek side of the things there's David Chapman.

Quoting Tom Storm

Australian academic John Carroll wrote a vicious tirade against humanism back in 1993 - Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture.

I used to pick up that book at the venerable Bookocino bookstore in Avalon when I lived up that way. I hadn't been aware of such critiques until then but have found a few more since. Some of the French Catholic social philosophers, like Remi Braque and Jacques Maritain, make similar criticisms. I must say, I'm sympathetic to them (even though I'm not in the least drawn to the Catholic religion).

Incidentally I've just been listening again to a (long!) online debate between Vervaeke and Kastrup. It's reasonably congenial, although Vervaeke throws up many objections to Kastrup's idealism.

Quoting Janus

I think the most important challenge we collectively face is dealing with the practical economic and ecological consequences of the 'continuous growth' paradigm

I think so, I tried to make a similar point in another thread about consumer economy and addiction. That's why I think it's so important to find a basis of real values other than continued growth and economic improvement. But there's nothing necessarily within liberal democracy or naturalism which provides a basis for that, other than better technology and engineering. Like, there's no rationale corresponding to the role that mok?a plays in Hinduism.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner Yes, I've also run into him in my many years of web surfing. I think he used to be associated with a quirky site called 'speculative non-buddhism'.

Reply to Tom Storm

Quoting Does Reason Know what it is Missing? Stanley Fish, NY Times

What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments. “Postmetaphysical thinking,” (Jürgen) Habermas contends, “cannot cope on its own with the defeatism concerning reason which we encounter today both in the postmodern radicalization of the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ and in the naturalism founded on a naïve faith in science.”

Postmodernism announces (loudly and often) that a supposedly neutral, objective rationality is always a construct informed by interests it neither acknowledges nor knows nor can know. Meanwhile science goes its merry way endlessly inventing and proliferating technological marvels without having the slightest idea of why. The “naive faith” Habermas criticizes is not a faith in what science can do — it can do anything — but a faith in science’s ability to provide reasons, aside from the reason of its own keeping on going, for doing it and for declining to do it in a particular direction because to do so would be wrong.

The counterpart of science in the political world is the modern Liberal state, which, Habermas reminds us, maintains “a neutrality . . . towards world views,” that is, toward comprehensive visions (like religious visions) of what life means, where it is going and what we should be doing to help it get there. The problem is that a political structure that welcomes all worldviews into the marketplace of ideas, but holds itself aloof from any and all of them, will have no basis for judging the outcomes its procedures yield. Worldviews bring with them substantive long-term goals that serve as a check against local desires. Worldviews furnish those who live within them with reasons that are more than merely prudential or strategic for acting in one way rather than another.

The Liberal state, resting on a base of procedural rationality, delivers no such goals or reasons and thus suffers, Habermas says, from a “motivational weakness”; it cannot inspire its citizens to virtuous (as opposed to self-interested) acts because it has lost “its grip on the images, preserved by religion, of the moral whole” and is unable to formulate “collectively binding ideals.”

Quoting Tom Storm

Certainty has gone and society seems atomized - I find this exciting, but many fear it.

:up:

Quoting Janus

I think the most important challenge we collectively face is dealing with the practical economic and ecological consequences of the 'continuous growth' paradigm, and the enormous problem of plutocracy and corrupted politics.

:100:

Quoting Quixodian

Western culture is undergoing a crisis of meaning

:yawn: i.e. adolescence of the species ...

Reply to Quixodian Quoting Quixodian

Incidentally I've just been listening again to a (long!) online debate between Vervaeke and Kastrup. It's reasonably congenial, although Vervaeke throws up many objections to Kastrup's idealism.

I'll check it out.

Quoting Quixodian

— Does Reason Know what it is Missing? Stanley Fish, NY Times

I've often enjoyed Stanley Fish - he's provocative and witty.

Quoting 180 Proof

i.e. adolescence of the species ...

I think that is a good analogy. Obsession with personal spiritual growth, in some of its forms and in relation to some of its attendant beliefs, seems to be, ironically, egoically or fear driven.

Quoting Quixodian

That's why I think it's so important to find a basis of real values other than continued growth and economic improvement. But there's nothing necessarily within liberal democracy or naturalism which provides a basis for that, other than better technology and engineering. Like, there's no rationale corresponding to the role that mok?a plays in Hinduism.

These days I tend to think that religion is the last thing we need to motivate interest in ecology and economic fairness. The idea of karma justifies people being in poor circumstances, the idea of a God playing favorites does the same and any notion of being rewarded in an afterlife devalues this life and demotivates interest with the problems of this life.

Catholicism, notably, is guilty of working against the provision of contraceptives where they are most sorely needed, and many religions condemn abortion, which contributes to over-population and social problems. Christianity in general has promoted the idea of human exceptionalism, and that this world was created by God just for us to use as we see fit provided, we have faith in the Lord, which I think has been, and probably still is, a major part of the problem.

Some religious orders fight against the very sensible idea of teaching ethics in schools, probably for fear that they will become redundant if people realize that ethics can stand on its own. I don't go as far as to say that religion ought to be banned, or that enlightened thinkers should actively work against religion: I think that would be counterproductive given the perversity of human nature, but I think that solutions, if they can be found, will have nothing at all to do with religion.

These social, economic and ecological problems are, after all, secular political issues which require social, economic and ecological solutions. I also think one of the most important positive influences would be ensuring that as many people as possible receive a good grounding in science, because it is only from the sciences, including psychology and sociology that we can expect the much-needed solutions.

So, in general I have much more sympathy for individuals finding their own set of spiritual values and much less time for organized religion, which always seems to become corrupted by power, just as it happens in politics and finance. I don't care what people believe provided it doesn't interfere with their giving first priority to this life, which includes all life.

Reply to Janus I do understand that by ‘religion’ you mean ‘religious organisations’. I’m more interested in the philosophical aspect of the question.

There are a great many important elements in the Western philosophical canon which have become associated with, or absorbed by, or even appropriated by, religion over the millennia. Because of these associations they become ‘tarred with the same brush’, as the saying has it. But what remains after all of those elements are redacted out barely worthy of the designation of ‘philosophy’.

Reply to Quixodian Unlike you, I don't believe that enlightenment or ego loss are philosophical matters. As Hadot tells us the old philosophical schools had different sets of ideas, which were unquestioned; their purpose being to provide a framework and inspiration for the practice of spiritual exercises. I don't believe such a thing is possible these days, and I also don't think such frameworks are necessary for personal transformation.

Reply to Janus :up:

Quoting Janus

I don't believe such a thing is possible these days, and I also don't think such frameworks are necessary for personal transformation.

Which would comprise what, exactly? Transformed how? Into what?

In any case, I don't want to convey the impression that the dialogue in the OP concerns religion, because it doesn't. Vervaeke says here and elsewhere that he's committed to naturalism, but that he doesn't accept materialist reductionism. They talk about 'extended naturalism' - the general gist being a move away from the reductionist idea that wants to account for everything in terms of the bottom layer - 'suggesting that our understanding of reality isn't limited to what's derivable from hard sciences but also includes what these sciences presuppose'. They discuss the energy-information nexus and its connection to Shannon's theory in a way that actually helped me to see that it isn't only applicable to electronic information transfer but that something like it exists in molecular biology. Also the idea that the order of the intellect conforms to the order that science sees in the world, drawing on neoplatonism - 'Conformity theory: how the principles governing the mind and the world mutually participate in the same governing principles.' And much more. This episode is basically a synopsis of what will be covered. Also provides a references list.

Reply to Quixodian Quoting Quixodian

They're trying to thread the needle between scientific reductionism on the one side, and religious dogmatism ( including what is described as 'degenerate romanticism' in this talk) on the other, by situating natural science within a broader context which includes the (re)introduction of levels of reality taking into account the qualitative dimensions of human existence

I think Vervaeke does a good job of encapsulating the main themes of 4EA cognitive science, which he then inflates into a kind of spiritual worldview. I have a few quibbles which mostly pertain to the scientific framework rather than Vervaeke. Unlike new materialism, which I discuss in another OP, the empiricism Vervaeke endorses. feistiness a split between supposedly pre-existing external reality and the cognizer who interacts with it. What is needed is not just a subject-object interaction model, but an INTRA-actionist approach which rejects the idea of a pre-existing world. For instance, Vervaeke claims that video games produce a flow experience that doesn’t allow adequate reality-testing, but I question the coherence of this distinction.

I should add a note of caution. If you’re going to listen to his Awakening from the Meaning Crisis youtube series, you might want to take his reading of Heidegger with a grain of sand. He incorporates Speculative Realist Graham Harmon’s interpretation of Heidegger, one of the worst I’ve come across.

Reply to Joshs Thanks. I'm not all in on Vervaeke but I think he's worth the listen. I'm sure learning things from him. I'll bear that caution in mind.

Quoting Quixodian

Which would comprise what, exactly? Transformed how? Into what?

Into whatever the nature of the human organism makes possible. Into a less self-obsessed, egocentric state of mind. Into a less anxious, more open state. Into a less conventionally constrained, more creative state. Into a less angry, more loving state. Into a less competitive, more cooperative state. Into a less acquisitive, more inquisitive state. Into a less dogmatic, more uncertain and open state.

Quoting Quixodian

Vervaeke says here and elsewhere that he's committed to naturalism, but that he doesn't accept materialist reductionism.

I don't see materialism as a bogeyman as you apparently do. For me the reductive face of materialism shows itself in the claim that everything can be adequately explained in terms of physics, an obviously absurd claim which I don't think anyone with any understanding would make. In the sciences we see emergent hierarchies, and the lower do provide the foundations for the higher, but it certainly doesn't follow that the higher can be exhaustively explained or adequately described in terms of the lower.

When it comes to personal transformation, what is possible is determined by the nature of the brain/body. So, one can alter their state of mind in the ways I listed above regardless of one's ontological opinions or commitments and regardless of whether one even bothers to worry about whether this ism or that ism is the truer to some imagined "ultimate" reality.

That said, some people may find certain ideas more congenial and thus more enabling than others, but that is a matter for the individual; there are no general rules. Diversity is the only rule.

Reply to Quixodian
Quoting Does Reason Know what it is Missing? Stanley Fish, NY Times

The counterpart of science in the political world is the modern Liberal state, which, Habermas reminds us, maintains “a neutrality . . . towards world views,” that is, toward comprehensive visions (like religious visions) of what life means, where it is going and what we should be doing to help it get there. The problem is that a political structure that welcomes all worldviews into the marketplace of ideas, but holds itself aloof from any and all of them, will have no basis for judging the outcomes its procedures yield. Worldviews bring with them substantive long-term goals that serve as a check against local desires. Worldviews furnish those who live within them with reasons that are more than merely prudential or strategic for acting in one way rather than another.

Hence the continuing allure of, for instance, fascism and communism, something bloody and radical, either nostalgic or utopian. The modern liberal state is neutral in the sense of taking the relatively free-autonomous-responsible atomized ego as its sacred object. For people like Kojeve, this is the end of history, its goal. If it didn't come with humanity's dangerous technical power, we'd probably celebrate it more.

Instead we see the Jenga towers of Moloch go up all around us, and our dear ol' gametheoretical Locomotive Breath has no way to slow down. If this or that agent reasonably stops to think, is cautious in this way or that, others will swoop in and take over. We won't (we can't) be careful with the environment or A. I. The incentive structure forbids it. Politicians will continue offering the comforting lie to those who don't want to see the ruthless way of the world --which is not the ruthlessness so much of guilty individuals but of the prisoner's-dilemma ('Molochian') structure of the game. Hegel came too early, dwelled on the good, didn't contemplate the threat of tech, but he saw the bloody grinding gears of a Machine that transcended the intentions of ephemeral individuals, and he mocked the impotent sentimental objections to this Process (the creepy side of humanism, but man is, among other things, an apex predator, though we mostly treat animals like meatplants, too lazy to hunt or bored with such easy prey).

In retrospect, we were always on the way to this situation, as a kind of breakaway piece of nature that had a big enough brain to become capable of bringing the whole system down. As far as I can tell, no evolutionary pressures were available during our forging to prepare us for our own therefore doomed triumph -- though we may sneak through the bottleneck and take over for nature, programming ourselves genetically and integrating our flesh with our best technology --posthuman cyborgs. This is the 'good' option, unless you not-so-unreasonably long for the end of our species. It's beautifully disgusting or disgustingly beautiful. I can't remember.

Quoting Janus

In the sciences we see emergent hierarchies, and the lower do provide the foundations for the higher, but it certainly doesn't follow that the higher can be exhaustively explained or adequately described in terms of the lower.

:up:

This is part of my point in Dramaturgical Ontology. Personality is a very 'high' or complex thing, yet its function is absolutely fundamental. It is the window through which the world shines, but it's stained glass. The world depends on my personality, as does my personality on the world. And this is true for all of us. And it's an old insight. Attitude changes the object. The stoic works at transcending resentment and greed, changing the world he lives in by changing the lens through which is shines. So the high and the low are terribly entangled.

The reductionist is an escapist, enjoying the temporary relief that comes when complexity is simply ignored rather than clarified. To be fair, it's nice to get lost in maps that don't include the terrible self-referential complexity of ontology. I love a game of chess.

Reply to plaque flag Hence the requirement for the vertical dimension, the qualitative domain.

Quoting Janus

I don't see materialism as a bogeyman as you apparently do

The issue is that materialism only considers objects and their quantitative attributes to be real, not to put too fine a point on it. It says that intelligent agents such as ourselves can be explained and understood solely in those terms, and that the qualitative domain - the felt quality of existence - has no intrinsic reality apart from that. That is the source of what John Vervaeke and Gregg Henriques are describing as ‘the meaning crisis’ of modern societies.

Quoting Quixodian

Hence the requirement for the vertical dimension, the qualitative domain.

Ah but you speak as if we don't all of us already live in such a domain. In our historically late liberal pluralistic societies, we are lost in a maze of differing conceptions of that vertical dimensions. Socrates is probably only possible within such 'decadence.'

People crave community. They also crave recognition as individuals.

[quote = William James]
The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
...
Mankind’s common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life’s supreme mystery is hidden.
[/quote]

These days, when I hope to win another human being's attention and respect for my precious individual snowflake value, I have to compete not with other individuals but with the entire internet, a veritable dream machine, all others individuals at once, expertly curated by bespoke filters. So we largely bore and annoy one another, at least when sex is not an option and there's no money or fame to be obtained via cooperation. Of course parents and children often have strong bonds, at least when the children are young.
***
The most plausible situation I might have bothered hoping for once is a generalized Denmark. It's not that I don't feel your sense of something missing in our style of civilization. But then I think 'Solomon' is right about some kind of fundamental emptiness to human things. A show entirelessly without substance. But one can only say so with a complicated irony. Life is richly meaningful in one sense and yet lacking 'substance' in another sense.

Nihilism and transcendence sleep in the same bed.

Quoting Quixodian

It says that intelligent agents such as ourselves can be explained and understood solely in those terms, and that the qualitative domain - the felt quality of existence - has no intrinsic reality apart from that.

If the point is just that mind is embodied, that the subject needs a world, then I agree. But of course I insist that we live in quality and meaning, and that primarily quantitive 'maps' are something like useful fictions or mere aspects of the larger lifeworld.

Reply to plaque flag I feel as thought what I’m attempting to say is considerably simpler than what you’re taking it for. Never mind, it’s good to thrash these things out.

Reply to Quixodian
Even scientistic secular humanists, a tiny subset of the population, are lit up with the holy fire of the righteous truth, and they count themselves as members of the one of the countless versions of spiritual-cultural Elite.

The Q-Anon lady is heroically doing Research and saving children from demons who merely look like humans. And so on.

William James nailed it. We are fundamentally dramatic-heroic beings, understanding the world as a stage for good guys and bad guys -- vertically.

Reading about Vervaeke here : https://www.whatisemerging.com/profiles/john-vervaeke-edba633a-50b3-4dec-920b-967d8f0f2b01

A worldview is two things simultaneously: (1) a model of the world and (2) a model for acting in that world. It turns the individual into an agent who acts, and it turns the world into an arena in which those actions make sense.” The congruence between “agent” and “arena” leads to meaning in life. They “mutually make sense of one another, and ratify each other’s existence and intelligibility.”
:up:

A hero myth is a world view. A world view is a hero myth.

An ego-ideal implies a stage on which it makes senes, as well as a dragon/windmill/shadow.

Any expression of worldview is the expression of a total personality, of an 'unreliable' narrator who can be 'read off' of this worldview. Probably we mostly [s]praise[/s] reveal ourselves by talking about the world (our stage), because our vanity is slightly less obnoxious in the vanity of others that way.

In modernity, politics is basically ideological competition. While it claims to be addressing the human pursuit of happiness, whatever that's supposed to mean, it has degenerated into ideological competition,

Freedom is idealogical competition, within the constraints of a 'meta-ideology' of this freedom itself. You/I pursue happiness as you/I see fit, within the limits of not denying that privilege to others. This is just Enlightenment autonomy. Did freedom save the world ? From what, the horror of -- the horror that's necessarily part of --- life itself ?

We tend to overemphasize propositional knowledge: We have sentences that give us certain beliefs, and then we classify them into theories, etc.” explains Vervaeke. “I am a scientist, so I think propositional knowledge is great. I am not trying to condemn that.” The problem is not with propositional knowledge per se. The problem is that we have lost other forms of knowledge that allow us to experience our connection with ourselves, each other, and the worlds we are embedded in.

Vervaeke sounds somewhat Heideggarian to me so far. His 'worldview' is something like the dramaturgical structure of a lifeworld. If I bring a woman a rose, it's not just a plant. If I slip a ring on her finger, when she's wearing a white dress, it's bigger than the metal and cloth involved. Heidegger famously criticized the idea that the subject 'painted' values and meaning on the world that was given in terms of meaningless objects. This fiction has been extremely useful for certain purposes, and the rhetorical triumph of the technology it enabled dazzled philosophers who should have known better. The subject itself, in its meaningful lifeworld found and enabling science in the first place, became transparent to itself, as it 'collapsed' into its model of an amoral machine.

As I see it, such insights are extremely liberating for the weird kind of person who could find a reductive description of the world plausible in the first place. A younger me was like that. I loved science in school, and I let myself believe I was studying a secret reality as opposed to the structure of this one. So tables were Really just atoms and love was Really just chemicals. Nevermind that scientific norms are vaporized along with the now-mystical-seeming meaning of scientific claims. To me this just goes to show how much we all long for the esoteric (for membership in a elite exclusive circle.) I couldn't just know progressively more about tables and love. I had to gaze at the Real table and the Dark Truth of what sentimental fools called 'love.' Eventually the game becomes gazing on what sentimental fools call 'Dark Truth.' And that too is swallowed and so on.

Reading about Vervaeke here : https://www.whatisemerging.com/profiles/john-vervaeke-edba633a-50b3-4dec-920b-967d8f0f2b01

“Situational awareness depends on what we call perspectival knowing. Perspectival knowing is what it's like to be here now: what's foregrounded, what's backgrounded, what's salient, what's relevant? Perspectival knowing is your salient landscaping in a particular context from a particular state of mind. That's your situational awareness. Now that, in turn, is ultimately dependent on how biology, culture, and your fluid intelligence are shaping you in the environment, so they fit each other so that it creates affordances. For example, a cup is graspable to me as a cup that I can use to solve the problem of drinking.”
No mention of Heidegger or Dreyfus in this. Are the fields that far apart ? 'We' have known/discussed this for awhile now.

“Can we find bottom-up emergence—new forms of practices, new ecologies of practices, new communities of practitioners—that are trying to train people in the transformation of perspectival and participatory knowing so as to reduce their self-deception and enhance their sense of connectedness to themselves, to each other in the world?”

Would this not be enabled rather than hindered by a free society ?

“With mindfulness,” he says, “I can break out of egocentric bias and that will actually afford me overcoming a lot of self-deception and it also enhances my connectedness to the world.”

I totally agree with that project. To me philosophy and science are already a big part of that. The branding of 'mindfulness' is fine, but some of us find it necessary. Because it can be sold as one product.
The wisdom traditions of the great religions play an outsider’s role in modern Western culture. They do not determine our culture. Science, psychology and even the multitude of modern and postmodern therapies and social practices, have not been able to fill the vacuum.

This 'vacuum' is the treasure of our long, bloody, and mostly stupid human history. It's the idea of trying all kinds of ways of being and letting our bad ideas die without taking us and our neighbors down with them.

This doesn't mean that we aren't fucked as a species. We might be. But this looks more game-theoretical than a mere matter of ideology. Moloch demands a tower. If I mindfully avoid developing the next super-weapon, my rival is even more motivated to do so, for that rival can achieve a greater advantage at the same cost. If my company thinks A.I. is unethical in this or that context and does the right thing at a loss of profit, rival companies sweep in, make more money, and eventually by my own or put it out of business by underselling it. We'd need a global spiritual/ideological movement to spread across all classes and nations at high speed. How about a single nation ? Would the issue then be endless class war ? The threat of a schism of that supernation's ruling class ?

What I like about God on the cross (as a symbol, and as a way of life, me being bloody Christ of course) is its insistence that good is only found entangled with and even imprisoned by evil. [s]Satan[/s] Moloch is lord of this world. The proposed mindfulness movement is essentially optimistic and political rather than pessimistic and transcendent. Optimistic movements tend to reject the world as it is now, or forgive it only in terms of a implausible future. Pessimistic-transcendent ideologies (perhaps the skeptic in Kojeve) refuse to take mere worldly power as authoritative, finding an invisible 'kingdom of God' within. Stirner made much of the link between a unworldly Christianity (not today's Trumpthumping) and skepticism. Freedom is internal, a matter of ideas and feelings and ....

Quoting plaque flag

No mention of Heidegger or Dreyfus in this.

The Meaning Crisis episode on Heidegger is here. Dreyfus comes up in this episode and in a subsequent episode on Paul Tillich. (He specifically mentions a book by Dreyfus and Charles Taylor, Recovering Realism, which as it happens I own a copy of.)

Quoting plaque flag

Would this not be enabled rather than hindered by a free society ?

Surely, but there’s nothing native to modern liberal democracies which foster it. We have the freedom to pursue any ‘ecologies of practice’ we want to but absent the connective tissue provided by culture they can be very difficult to develop and enact. I was part of an informal Buddhist practice group for about ten years which was invaluable but it dispersed and it’s been impossible to replace.

That, by the way, is a very good overview, I hadn’t found it previously.

Watch this trailer. The full movie has been released on YouTube but the trailer is a mini-documentary in its own right. Dreyfus is in it.

Quoting Quixodian

Watch this trailer. The full movie has been released on YouTube but the trailer is a mini-documentary in its own right. Dreyfus is in it.

:up:

I've seen it. Good stuff.

Quoting Quixodian

We have the freedom to pursue any ‘ecologies of practice’ we want to but absent the connective tissue provided by culture they can be very difficult to develop and enact. I was part of an informal Buddhist practice group for about ten years which was invaluable but it dispersed and it’s been impossible to replace.

:up:

This is why I mentioned earlier how we all compete now with the entire internet. I was very social in my 20s and 30s, but lots of things I took for granted fizzled out as people took different life paths. Some of it must be aging, but some of it is probably our hyperstimulated culture. So I feel a nostalgia sometimes for that lost sociality, but I find comfort in the realm of ghosts -- as I find myself more and more a ghost myself, in many ways happier than ever. I reflect on Plato from a psychoanalytic perspective, thinking about how the projection is drawn back in and the object in its recognized virtuality is possessed internally. I think of blindgoing Joyce at work on his musical monomythic sinwheel, watching from the balcony with the gods, trying to paint the view. Jung's essay on Ulysses is profound. Pdf not hard to find if you are interested.

Quoting Quixodian

The Meaning Crisis episode on Heidegger is here.

:up:
Checking it out. Thanks !

***
So far, he uses the later Heidegger more. I am surprised the equipmental nexus from the earlier work wasn't touched on along with circumspection and 'understanding.' This part of the work helps the reader notice the structure of their mundane existence which is otherwise mostly transparent.

I think @Joshs mentioned the Harman interpretation.. As Vervaeke has it, speculative realism introduced or properly emphasized the horizon. Now the horizon is a beautiful idea, and it ultimately doesn't matter how one gets it, but it's incorrect to present Husserl as missing this. Indeed, his notion of the perspective-transcendent spatial object, which Sartre even uses to open Being in Time, is a perfect sample of the 'horizonal' elusiveness of the lifeworld, which Husserl emphasizes directly elsewhere. I gotta chime in, because I think Husserl and phenomenology in general is thought of very much in terms of subjectivity, which is not exactly wrong, but subjectivity turns to be...just the way the world is given, not some screen.

Another installment from the never-ending Vervaeke content stream. Listened to this one at my gym workout this morning, has a few egregious clangers (Australia drifting towards authoritarianism because of the lack of values of secular culture? :yikes: ) but still, some great ideas and themes.

Great current dialogos on The Philosopical Silk Road

@ENOAH, @javra

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

Quoting Tom Storm

There seems to be a bit of a wave of this material about - an attempt at rebuilding a discourse on meaning from the wreckage of humanism/scientism/materialism towards transcendental matters. Is Vervaeke a Platonist?

There was already some discussion on this previously, but I don't think anybody said this explicitly:

Regarding the mind, and the things the mind does, and why and how it does them, he's 100% a "it's all in the brain" type of guy. He's said as much explicitly at least once or twice in a podcast I listened to.

I think there's a lot of misconceptions about matierliasm - it's not the boogyman many of you seem to think it is, as Janus points out.

Quoting flannel jesus

I think there's a lot of misconceptions about matierliasm - it's not the boogyman many of you seem to think it is, as Janus points out.

Some here seem to think of materialism, (better known now as physicalism or naturalism) as superficial and untenable nonsense. I don't hold a particular view of this since I am not a theoretical physicist, or a philosopher. I just live in the world I experience and get on with things. :wink:

Reply to tim wood I don't know where you sourced that quote. As explained in the OP: John Vernaeke is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He currently teaches courses on thinking and reasoning with an emphasis on cognitive development, intelligence, rationality, mindfulness, and the psychology of wisdom.

Vervaeke is the director of University of Toronto’s Consciousness and Wisdom Studies Laboratory and its Cognitive Science program, where he teaches Introduction to Cognitive Science and The Cognitive Science of Consciousness, emphasizing the 4E model, which contends that cognition and consciousness are embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended beyond the brain.

Vervaeke has taught courses on Buddhism and Cognitive Science in the Buddhism, Psychology, and Mental Health program for 15 years.

Quoting Tom Storm

some here seem to think of materialism, (better known now as physicalism or naturalism) as superficial and untenable nonsense

I see physicalism as the implicit consensus, the common-sense understanding of life and mind, that is one of the consequences of Enlightenment rationalism. Vervaeke addresses it indirectly - the initial lecture series that became popular on Youtube was called 'Awakening from the Meaning Crisis', described as follows:

We are in the midst of a mental health crisis. There are increases in anxiety disorders, depression, despair, and suicide rates are going up in North America, parts of Europe, and other parts of the world. This mental health crisis is itself due to, and engaged with, crises in the environment and the political system, those in turn are enmeshed within a deeper cultural historical crisis that John Vervaeke calls “The Meaning Crisis”. It’s more and more pervasive throughout our lives. And there’s a sense of drowning in this old ocean of bullshit. And we have to understand, why is this the case? And what can we do about it?

Today, there is an increase of people feeling very disconnected from themselves, from each other, from the world, and from a viable and foreseeable future. Let’s discuss this, let’s work on it together, let’s rationally reflect on it. Getting out of this problem is going to be tremendously difficult. It’s going to require significant transformations in our cognition, our culture, our communities. And in order to move forward in such a difficult manner, we have to reach more deeply into our past to salvage the resources we can for such an amazing challenge.

That links to a series of 51 lectures which can be found here:

This series provides a historical genealogy – beginning 40,000 years ago – that explores the rise and fall of meaning in the West, and the philosophy, religion and science that nurtured it. Vervaeke examines how human beings evolved to be meaning-making creatures, and why this is so essential to our culture and cognition. The series explores how the decline of meaningful worldviews has paved the way for various modern ailments, such as our political, environmental and mental health crises, and the rising suicide rates in North America and around the world.

At the very least, it's worth scrolling through the lecture titles. My view is, that it is extraordinarily relevant to what we are always discussing on thephilosophyforum, in fact for the next few months I'm going to spend more time listening and less posting.

Quoting tim wood

I can make no sense of "Transcendent Naturalism." Does anyone here have the ambition to try make some sense of the term in a sentence or two, or three?

:wink: FWIW, here's a sentence:

Plebian philosophical naturalist that I am, the only sense I can make of the term "transcendent naturalism" (pace @Wayfarer) is as a conception of beings-in-nature (e.g. embodied subjects) that is both (A) "beyond" subjective – neither anthropocentric nor egocentric (i.e. impersonal) – and (B) "beyond" super-natural – encompassed by unbounded immanence insofar as nature transcends whatever happens in nature because nature (and its constituents (e.g. embodied subjects)) cannot transcend nature (à la (e.g.) Epicureanism, Spinozism, Zapffe-Camus' absurdism & other anti-cartesianisms / anti-platonisms) – which is (C) epistemically consistent with (corroborated by?) human facticity, everyday ordinary experience, historicity-historiography and modern natural sciences ("Thus, we have art [make believe, magical thinking, woo-woo] in order not to perish from the truth" ~Nietzsche). :fire:

Reply to Wayfarer I've watched a number vids by Vervaeke and been aware of his work for a long time. I find him dull as dishwater. Whether he is adding anything useful to philosophy is up to others to determine.

Personally, I don't think we can demonstrate that meaning eludes us now more than in the past. This nostalgia movement or 'paradise lost' frame seems somewhat wonky to me. I think what confuses people is that we have moved away from dominant homogeneous cultural expressions into a world of energetic pluralism and multiculturalism and this is read as a lack of certainty and meaning. Diversity has certainly undermined the old metanarratives and I am not convinced that this is a bad thing.

I suspect Vervaeke sits with all those theorists and self-help folk who seek to offer a remedy for common anxiety. He's certainly no snake oil salesman, he seems likable and sincere, but I doubt he has all that much I can use.

Reply to Wayfarer

Today, there is an increase of people feeling very disconnected from themselves, from each other, from the world, and from a viable and foreseeable future. Let’s discuss this, let’s work on it together, let’s rationally reflect on it. Getting out of this problem is going to be tremendously difficult. It’s going to require significant transformations in our cognition, our culture, our communities. And in order to move forward in such a difficult manner, we have to reach more deeply into our past to salvage the resources we can for such an amazing challenge.

Not a fan of this. Just comes across as suggesting this stuff produces some kind of secret sauce to salvation which is independent to other structural factors going on in society. How many times in the past have things like this been offered as solutions. What happened to the hippies of '67? Transcendental meditation.

Quoting Apustimelogist

What happened to the hippies of '67?

One of them started Apple Computer..


Quoting Tom Storm

I suspect Vervaeke sits with all those theorists and self-help folk who seek to offer a remedy for common anxiety.

And I think that's a very small-minded way of looking at it. Vervaeke’s opus is nearer my interests than most of what is written about here, and he's a legitimate academic, he's not fringe or crank. He dialogues with a lot of interesting people and they cover a lot of topics in depth. The reason he's developed a following is because he's saying something that needs to be said, and that a lot of people needed to hear, shame folks here don't appreciate that, but nothing I can say is likely to change it.

Anyway, I'm logging out for a while, posting here has become too much of a habit, and it profiteth nothing. I need to develop some other interests.

Quoting Wayfarer

and he's a legitimate academic, he's not fringe or crank.

Never said he wasn't. My point is that times have changed, along with the stories we tell each other, and this causes many anxiety. I do not subscribe to this all being a product of rationalism, a disenchanted world and a post-enlightenment fugue state wherein we have lost touch with a purer philosophy.

You seem to like V because you are already a fan of countercultural metaphysics, from your early days of Alan Watts. That's fine. My aesthetic and emotional biases don't necessarily click with this stuff.

Quoting Wayfarer

the reason he's developed a following is because he's saying something that needs to be said, and that a lot of people needed to hear, shame folks here don't appreciate that, but nothing I can say is likely to change it.

Isn't it ok not to be on board with him? Developing a following means little; Trump has a following. Not comparing the output of the two. Actually Trump is probably a symptom of the same thing Veraeke is. The old stories have lost their power, pluralism and diversity is confusing people and many long to go back to making something great again, whether it be philosophy or the nation itself.

Quoting Wayfarer

One of them started Apple Computer..

And according to some, that has only exacerbated the culturo-emotional malaise talked about in your other post.

Quoting Wayfarer

Anyway, I'm logging out for a while, posting here has become too much of a habit, and it profiteth nothing. I need to develop some other interests.

Only do what you can manage, but I for one really value your contributions. You do a stellar job as an advocate for, and synthesizer of, the more interesting accounts of idealism and higher awareness.

Reply to Wayfarer Reply to Tom Storm

I second Tom.

I still read you, though often can't respond.

I know we disagree on much, but that, to me, is the point of being here: to hear others.

Reply to Wayfarer

I find some of his discussions, especially his most recent one with Curt Jaimungal (a FANTASTIC podcast btw, Theories of Everything) to be very very good.

On other occasions, a bit less so, I'm not do drawn to the "meaning" crisis, as he uses the term and he is prone to use a lot of jargon in his papers.

But yeah, he has interesting things to say. :up:

Reply to Tom Storm :up:

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Quoting tim wood

TN is the natural and common state of most [hep]cats.

:smirk: :up:

Quoting tim wood

That's some sentence

180 in the usual form...absolutely incomprehensible.

Reply to Wayfarer Quoting Wayfarer

Anyway, I'm logging out for a while, posting here has become too much of a habit, and it profiteth nothing. I need to develop some other interests

Hope you dont log out too soon. Im fascinated by Vervaeke’s quest to marry spirituality and cognitive science. As you know, Varela and Thomson have also gone down this road. I’m working on a paper comparing enactivism and poststructuralism, particularly when it comes to ethics.
Just last month, Shaun Gallagher gave a talk (posted on youtube) answering the question as to whether enactivsm has anything to say about ethics. His answer was that if we embrace forms of enactivism that follow Dreyfus’s notion of unreflective skilled coping, then we end up with a form of phronesis as ‘cleverness’, but with no orientation toward the Good.

Gallagher offers that Varela’s incorporation of buddhist themes of mindfulness gives enactivism a way to make skilled coping about more than cleverness. We can see it instead as directed by an ethical knowhow that achieves a benevolent posture through the giving up of egoistic habits of grasping. The awareness of the no self within the self leads to a compassionate stance toward others. This seems to be where spirituality comes into play for Varela and Thompson, and it illustrates how the progress of a science can come around to affirming what the spiritual disciplines knew. The science of enactivism can support a spirituality not only on the basis of its alignment with buddhism but also with certain strands of phenomenology. God is a core element of the phenomenologies of Scheler, Stein, Vattimo, Marion and Henry, and something like God lurks within Levinas’s thinking.

I know that Thompson has struggled to locate himself with respect to various spiritual communities since his upbringing in the midst of the Lindesfarne commune. As you may know , he wrote a book called ‘Why I Am Not a Buddhist’. He seems to be wanting to find a path of spirituality that doesn’t end up as a doctrine or a foundationalism . I can’t help but feel that, while he and Vervaeke share so much in common in terms of philosophical and psychological theory, he would find Varveake’s form of spiritual anchoring to be too essentializing. Part of the difference between them at be that Vervaeke seems to be more of a realist when it comes to cognitive science than Thompson is, and scientific realism may be a better fit for the kind of religiosity that Verveake is pursuing than enactivist relativism.

Quoting Wayfarer

And I think that's a very small-minded way of looking at it. Vervaeke’s opus is nearer my interests than most of what is written about here, and he's a legitimate academic, he's not fringe or crank. He dialogues with a lot of interesting people and they cover a lot of topics in depth. The reason he's developed a following is because he's saying something that needs to be said, and that a lot of people needed to hear, shame folks here don't appreciate that, but nothing I can say is likely to change it.

I think Vervaeke's work is worthwhile and important, and represents a much-needed juncture between praxis and theoria. As with Peterson, I often feel that he is forging a new path through the jungle when a well-worn trail is only a few feet to his right, but perhaps that's as it should be. I admire his fidelity to Plato, both in content and in form. He definitely has a therapeutic angle on the traditions he explores, but this too is not in itself a bad thing. I think he is laudably good at moving philosophy out of its superficial ruts, and more than anything I enjoy his receptive demeanor. He is clearly a contemplative with a deep spiritual life, and not someone who merely thinks or talks. For me this is the crucial difference in a Plato, Aristotle, or Aquinas (and many others too, of course). I'd say it is no coincidence that Hume did not access the higher parts of the divided line.

I also find it pretty interesting the way that Vervaeke comes from a Christian upbringing that was somewhere in the vicinity of fundamentalism, and that because of this he is a bit averse and suspicious of the Christian and later Western traditions. It is very common to see someone shift towards Eastern religions--usually Buddhism--and eventually begin to reassess a broader and deeper Western heritage. That's also what happened with me.

Reply to Wayfarer - Yes, ditto - haha.

Reply to Leontiskos Thanks for the affirmation! on both counts.

Quoting Joshs

Hope you dont log out too soon.

I keep saying I will, but then, as Michael Corleone put it....

And that project you're working on sound fascinating.

Meanwhile I'm going to work through Vervaeke's original series - it's the kind of material you can listen to on walks or driving, and I'm doing a fair amount of both. I'm not 'fixating' on him or anything, it's just that he's got a real 'integral' approach, and he's very learned. He's kind of doing what Ken Wilber tried to do, but Wilber was always an outsider to the academy.

Quoting Joshs

Gallagher offers that Varela’s incorporation of buddhist themes of mindfulness gives enactivism a way to make skilled coping about more than cleverness. We can see it instead as directed by an ethical knowhow that achieves a benevolent posture through the giving up of egoistic habits of grasping. The awareness of the no self within the self leads to a compassionate stance toward others. This seems to be where spirituality comes into play for Varela and Thompson, and it illustrates how the progress of a science can come around to affirming what the spiritual disciplines knew.

Beautifully said thank you.

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Reply to tim wood Quoting tim wood

I understand "no self" - perhaps more accurately no-self - as the self "under bare poles." That is, not any sort of negation of self, but instead the self itself. This implies elemental, fundamental, primordial, original, even maybe primitive

Let’s take the no-self as Varela and Thompson understand it within the framework of enactive cognitive science:

…the word self is a convenient way of referring to a series of mental and bodily events and formations, that have a degree of causal coherence and integrity through time. And the capitalized Self does exemplify our sense that hidden in these transitory formations is a real, unchanging essence that is the source of our identity and that we must protect. But this latter conviction may be unfounded and can actually be harmful. If there were a solid, really existing self hidden in or behind the aggregates, its unchangeableness would prevent any experience from occurring; its static nature would make the constant arising and subsiding of experience come to a screeching halt.

…cognition and experience do not appear to have a truly existing self, and the habitual belief in such an ego-self, the continual grasping to such a self, is the basis of the origin and continuation of human suffering and habitual patterns. In our culture, science has contributed to the awakening of this sense of the lack of a fixed self but has only described it from afar. Science has shown us that a fixed self is not necessary for mind but has not provided any way of dealing with the basic fact that this no-longer-needed self is precisely the ego-self that everyone clings to and holds most dear. By remaining at the level of description, has yet to awaken to the idea that the experience of mind, not merely without some impersonal, hypothetical, and theoretically constructed self but without ego-self, can be profoundly transformative.(Embodied Mind)

…the word self is a convenient way of referring to a series of mental and bodily events and formations, that have a degree of causal coherence and integrity through time. And the capitalized Self does exemplify our sense that hidden in these transitory formations is a real, unchanging essence that is the source of our identity and that we must protect. But this latter conviction may be unfounded and can actually be harmful. If there were a solid, really existing self hidden in or behind the aggregates, its unchangeableness would prevent any experience from occurring; its static nature would make the constant arising and subsiding of experience come to a screeching halt.

Sounds almost Dennett-like here.

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Reply to tim wood Anatta (no-self) is major theme in Buddhism. The passage that @Joshs provides is a good example. [sup]1 [/sup] As it happens, this was also the subject of my MA thesis in Buddhist Studies, so here I'll share some of my thesis work on that issue.

Despite the frequent association of the term with Buddhism, I think the principle of no-self is very easily misconstrued. Consider this verse from the early Buddhist texts. [sup]2[/sup]

Then the wanderer Vacchagotta went to the Blessed One and, on arrival, exchanged courteous greetings with him. After an exchange of friendly greetings & courtesies, he sat to one side. As he was sitting there he asked the Blessed One: "Now then, Venerable Gotama, is there a self?"

When this was said, the Blessed One was silent.

"Then is there no self?"

A second time, the Blessed One was silent.

Then Vacchagotta the wanderer got up from his seat and left.

The 'wanderer Vachagotta' is a figure in these texts associated with the posing of philosophical questions. The Buddha's non-response in such circumstances is generally designated a 'noble silence' wherein he declines to answer questions positively or negatively. [sup]3[/sup]

The verse continues:

Then, not long after Vacchagotta the wanderer had left, Ven. Ananda said to the Blessed One, "Why, lord, did the Blessed One not answer when asked a question by Vacchagotta the wanderer?"

"Ananda, if I — being asked by Vacchagotta the wanderer if there is a self — were to answer that there is a self, that would be conforming with those brahmans & contemplatives who are exponents of eternalism [the view that there is an eternal, unchanging soul]. If I — being asked by Vacchagotta the wanderer if there is no self — were to answer that there is no self, that would be conforming with those brahmans & contemplatives who are exponents of annihilationism [the view that death is the annihilation of consciousness]. If I — being asked by Vacchagotta the wanderer if there is a self — were to answer that there is a self, would that be in keeping with the arising of knowledge that all phenomena are not-self?"

"No, lord."

"And if I — being asked by Vacchagotta the wanderer if there is no self — were to answer that there is no self, the bewildered Vacchagotta would become even more bewildered: 'Does the self I used to have now not exist?'"

By not affirming or denying the existence of a self, the Buddha avoids reinforcing a dualistic view that could lead to further attachment or confusion which leads to the formation of dogmatic views (ditthi) in either a positive (religious) or negative (nihilist) sense.[sup]3[/sup] In Theravada Buddhism, this insight is foundational, directing the mind towards the non-conceptual understanding that the self is a dynamic process comprising the conjugation of aggregates (form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness).

But it's important to understand what, exactly, is being denied, and I think there is a good deal of confusion over this, even amongst the highly educated. (It was a constant source of argument on DharmaWheel where I was mod for a time.) In the thesis, I present several passages of the kind of 'eternal unchanging self' that the Buddha rejects.

The self and the world are eternal, barren, steadfast as a mountain peak, set firmly as a post. And though these beings rush around, circulate, pass away and re-arise, but this remains eternally. (DN1.1.32) [sup]4[/sup]

Here, the ‘this’ which 'remains eternally' is believed to be something enduring, within which ‘beings rush around, circulate and re-arise’. This arises from the Vedic principle of sat as being ‘what really exists’, distinguished from asat, illusory or unreal. Hence in this formulation, sat is what is ‘eternal, unchangeable, set firmly as a post’, and thus distinguishable from sa?s?ra or maya.

In another verse, the Alagadd?pama Sutta criticizes those who think:

This is the self, this is the world; after death I shall be permanent, everlasting, not subject to change; I shall endure as long as eternity’ - this too he regards thus: ‘This is mine, this I am, this is my self’.

This is designated as 'eternalism', one of the two 'extreme views' associated with death and re-birth. The other 'extreme view' is nihilism, that the body is a purely material phenomenon and that there are no consequences for actions after death [sup]5[/sup]

But - this is the crucial point, not generally acknowledged in my view - in none of this is agency denied. How could it be, in a doctrine to which karma is central? There is a verse in which the Buddha explicitly denies the claim that there is no agent (self-doer or other-doer, i.e. self and other, see Attak?r? Sutta.)

What is denied is the eternally-existing, unchangeable self posited by the Brahmins. And also that there is, anywhere, an unchanging element, thing or being - hence the designation of 'all dharmas' ('dharmas' here meaning 'experienced realities') as anatta, devoid of self (and also anicca, impermanent, and dukkha, unsatisfying.) In the Buddha's context, what I think he was rejecting was the religious view that through the right sacrificial practices, one could secure favourable re-births indefinitely or dwell in an eternal heaven. But he also rejects the view that physical death terminates the process that gives rise to individual existence in the first place. Getting insight into that process unties the Gordian knot of existence. And yes, that is hard to fathom!

-----

Notes:

1. The text cited is from The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch. It was a hugely influential book originally published in 1991, revised edition 2015, which combined insights from cognitive science, phenomenology and Buddhist abhidharma (philosophical psychology). Worth noting that more recently Evan Thompson has published Why I am Not a Buddhist, in which he explains why he doesn't designate himself Buddhist, although he maintains a 'friendly' attitude to Buddhism and continues to draw on its insights. Thompson is now Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University.

2. The 'early Buddhist texts' refer to the Pali canon, which are the texts of the Theravada Buddhism. The Pali language is an extinct dialect which is only preserved in these texts, although it is closely related to Sanskrit, in which the later Mah?y?na corpus was preserved. Translations of the Pali texts are preserved in the Mah?y?na corpus as the 'nikayas' or 'agamas' along with the Mah?y?na Sutras which are not recognised in Theravada Buddhism.

3. In this there is a correspondence to the 'aporia' of the Platonic dialogues, which are in effect invitations for the questioner/listener to consider a matter more deeply. There are a list of questions categorised as 'undeclared' which occupy this category, with Vachagotta representing the usual protagonist in such dialogues. These have been compared to Kant's 'antinomies of reason'.

4. Note here the phrase 'self-and-world' which are often written as a pair, which suggests the 'co-arising of subject and object', also a theme in phenomenology. I've never quite got to the bottom of the Pali term which is translated as 'self-and-world'.

5. @Tom Storm - Dennett's materialism would be categorised as a form of nihilism, according to the Brahmajala Sutta, 'the Net of Views', which meticulously documents the 64 (magic number!) varieties of eternalist and nihilist views. It is the first and longest text of the Pali suttas. Materialists such as Dennett were well-known in the Buddha's day and were represented in the texts by various figures, including one Prince Payasi, who had condemned prisoners put to death inside a clay jar, weighed before and after their deaths, to try and ascertain whether the release of their soul could be detected by the scales.

See also

Anatta-lakkhana Sutta

Reply to Wayfarer Quoting Wayfarer

Dennett's materialism would be categorised as a form of nihilism, according to the Brahmajala Sutta, 'the Net of Views', which meticulously documents the 64 (magic number!) varieties of eternalist and nihilist views. It is the first and longest text of the Pali suttas.

I recently listened to a series of youtube videos by Verveake. He references Dennett in some of them, always positively. Honestly, comparing Vervaeke’s and Dennett’s understanding of cognitive science, I can’t find a lot of daylight between them. One might wonder, if Vervaeke derives his spiritual views from his understanding of the science, and his and Dennett’s empirical perspectives overlap substantially, how did they come to such sharply different conclusions concerning religion and spirituality? My answer is that I don’t think they did. What Dennett always attacked was a traditional form of religious belief, and Vervaeke is also critical of a personified deity. If we look closely at what exactly his faith consists of, it depends heavily on what he calls relevance realization, which is his answer to what he believes is a meaning crisis in today’s culture. I happen to think the meaning crisis pertains more to his personal journey than to a culture-wide phenomenon, and that his proselytizing on this topic has certain cult-like tendencies about it, but that’s a bit off-topic.

To back up a few steps, Vervaeke considers what is unique about humans to be our ability to determine what is relevant, what matters in an incoming flow of information relative to our situational context. What’s important to understanding the basis of his notion of meaning , and spirituality, is that meaning relevance is not determined solely on the basis of our needs and goals, but must also be grounded in the real. He is not a direct realist, but believes that reality is relational, and not disclosable in some final fashion. There will always be more layers to unearth, and yet he believes firmly in fundamental empirical truths, as inaccessible as they may be. We can see the importance for him of truth in his scientific work, which is centered around research attempting to show that we allow video games and advertisements to deceive us concerning what is real. Self-deception plays an important role in his thinking.

His spiritual perspective relies on two aspects of his scientific work, meaning as relevant relationality and as grounded in underlying truths. He is no relativist , because he is convinced that the sense of belongingness we all need so much is worthless unless it is anchored in a firm ground which provides us with a guiding empirical and moral compass. I think Dennett believed the same thing about the dual importance of relational interdependency in cognitive processes and grounding in the real , but being the pragmatic Yankee that he was, he shied away from a language that had the taint of religion.

If you haven’t seen Vervaeke’s interview of Evan Thompson, I recommend it. I think it shows how a difference in interpretation of enactivism and 4EA cognition leads to different approaches to the spiritual. Even though Vervaeke claimed that his own work was strongly influenced by Varela, I dont think either Varela and Thompson buy into Vervaeke’s realism, and Thompson’s subtle distancing from Vervaeke in the interview reflects this. Thompson derives from his empirical work a reverence for the mystical, a sense of wonder an awe towards the world. This wonder doesn’t require a belief in a real grounding for what exists, if the real is understood in Vervaeke’s sense of that which is beyond deception. Thompson’s focus is on what creatively emerges rather than on what is connected to a pre-existing foundation.

Reply to Joshs That's a very interesting reply.

Quoting Joshs

If we look closely at what exactly his faith consists of, it depends heavily on what he calls relevance realization, which is his answer to what he believes is a meaning crisis in today’s culture. I happen to think the meaning crisis pertains more to his personal journey than to a culture-wide phenomenon, and that his proselytizing on this topic has certain cult-like tendencies about it, but that’s a bit off-topic.

I wondered about that.

Quoting Joshs

I dont think either Varela and Thompson buy into Vervaeke’s realism, and Thompson’s subtle distancing from Vervaeke in the interview reflects this. Thompson derives from his empirical work a reverence for the mystical, a sense of wonder an awe towards the world. This wonder doesn’t require a belief in a real grounding for what exists, if the real is understood in Vervaeke’s sense of that which is beyond deception. Thompson’s focus is on what creatively emerges rather than on what is connected to a pre-existing foundation.

Would you say Thompson's view is compatible with a post-modern understanding of 'reality'. Do you think Thompson's views are in any way limited or 'skewed' by his Lindisfarne Association upbringing?

Reply to Joshs I take Dennett as a textbook example of scientific materialism, which I think is impossible to reconcile with any 'sense of the sacred' (and which is perfectly consistent with his role as 'evangelical atheist'.) According to his neo-Darwinian philosophy, that sense, like anything, can only be explained in terms of its value for group or social cohesion, as there is no grounding to its existence save that provided on the molecular level. Whatever can’t be reduced to that has no real existence. Let there be no ambiguity about this:

Quoting From Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, quoted by Steve Talbott on 'The Illusion of Randomness'

…through the microscope of molecular biology, we get to witness the birth of agency, in the first macromolecules that have enough complexity to ‘do things.’ … There is something alien and vaguely repellent about the quasi-agency we discover at this level — all that purposive hustle and bustle, and yet there’s nobody home.” Then, after describing a marvelous bit of highly organized and seemingly meaningful biological activity, Dennett concludes:

Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe.

As to the ‘meaning crisis’, I take Vervaeke at face value (even though I haven’t listened to the whole series). He locates the crisis the loss of the sense that the Cosmos is meaningful. He's not a religious polemicist but an academic scholar with a broad range of interests. He frequently refers to a kind of neo-neo-platonist cosmology, summarized here and in the associated lecture. He is critical of physicalist reductionism, and I think there's plenty of daylight between he and Dennett on that score. Everything in that lecture says that top-down is an equal and important factor, which Dennett contemptuously dismisses as 'sky-hooks'.

I notice this talk references the theological philosopher Catherine Pickstock, who's come up on my radar:



'The grammar of knowing and the grammar of being must be very similar (even if the content is different)' he says at around 49:22 in reference to Pickstock, who's most recent book is Aspects of Truth : A New Religious Metaphysics.

Quoting Joshs

If you haven’t seen Vervaeke’s interview of Evan Thompson, I recommend it.

I'll watch it. I've listened to the interview between Vervaeke and Kastrup on Kurt Jaimungal's podcast a couple of times. Overall, my philosophy is much nearer Kastrup than Vervaeke, but then, I also think there's much less daylight between them, than between either of them and Dennett. I value Vervaeke even where I diverge from him, for the breadth of scope and the seriousness of his approach. (I went back to find the Kastrup-Vervaeke interview, but found there's an entire playlist. I can't recall which one I listened to but I think it was the first in the series.)

I will add that the entire picture of molecules which 'do things', and create the only 'sense of agency' that meaningfully exists in the Universe, is painfully and self-evidently rooted in the (false) Cartesian dichotomy of 'matter and spirit'. So 'the real Universe', in that view, comprises solely the fundamental units of the physical sciences (and to hell with 'quantum wierdness' :rage: ), which (somehow) gives rise to what appears as mind or experience, even if nobody can quite figure out how that happened (it's a hard problem!) or what purpose the nature of first-person experience might serve.

Just ordered the Pickstock book, hardcover, dammit :fear:

And I’ll correct something I said above - Descartes himself, of course, would never accept that ‘the real universe’ comprised only the physical. But the way he conceived the model lead to the ‘ghost in the machine‘ critique because of the inherent implausibility of a ‘spiritual substance’.

Quoting Wayfarer

I take Dennett as a textbook example of scientific materialism, which I think is impossible to reconcile with any 'sense of the sacred'

I may have mentioned to you before that I am personally taken with Jane Bennett's notion of 'vibrant matter'. This doesn't contradict scientific materialism, exactly, but it claims a vitality in all things, a 'thing power', which we generally overlook as it requires us to be highly attentive to the ecology of any situation. (I think the idea descends from Latour) Her view decenters us from the human, but also from the merely atomic, as she explores the issues for instance of 'mood' and 'atmosphere'. According to her John Hopkins website 'She is currently working on notions of a creative cosmos, in ancient Greek thought and in classical Daoist philosophies'.

Reply to mcdoodle She sounds interesting. Seems a flavor of panpsychism. One of the emerging alternatives. We live in interesting times!

I will add, ‘cosmos’ means ‘ordered whole’. According to Alexander Koyré, philosopher of science, the advent of modern science put an end to that sense of cosmos. The cosmos is no longer seen as an ordered whole but rather as an infinite, homogenous space characterised by mathematical laws and devoid of inherent meaning. So we still talk of a ‘scientific cosmology’ but in some ways it is an oxymoron.

Reply to Wayfarer
I like reading about these ideas, something both very poetic and powerful about them.

What is the Buddhist view about creating life? If they see life as just suffering and the ultimate goal is ending the cycle of suffering, death, birth - "extinction" - (as far as I understand), then wouldn't they be anti-natalist?

Reply to Wayfarer

Quoting Wayfarer

I take Dennett as a textbook example of scientific materialism, which I think is impossible to reconcile with any 'sense of the sacred' (and which is perfectly consistent with his role as 'evangelical atheist'.)
…through the microscope of molecular biology, we get to witness the birth of agency, in the first macromolecules that have enough complexity to ‘do things.’ … There is something alien and vaguely repellent about the quasi-agency we discover at this level — all that purposive hustle and bustle, and yet there’s nobody home.” Then, after describing a marvelous bit of highly organized and seemingly meaningful biological activity, Dennett concludes:

Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe.
— From Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, quoted by Steve Talbott on 'The Illusion of Randomness'

How does the above quote differ from this by Varela?

"...lots of simple agents having simple properties may be brought together, even in a haphazard way, to give rise to what appears to an observer as a purposeful and integrated whole"

And how does Varela goal of naturalizing Husserlian phenomenology differ from a materialism?

It is our general contention indeed... that phenomenological descriptions of any kind can only be naturalized, in the sense of being integrated into the general framework of natural sciences, if they can be mathematized.”

Let me share how I think it differs from Dennett. Varela and Thompson have no interest in abandoning naturalism and the Darwinian framework that explains the genesis of organisms and human cognition. But they realized that the implications of insights coming from Eastern meditative traditions, phenomenology and cognitive science required a re-definition of the meaning of the natural, the material and even the dynamics of evolution. This is not such a radical move, given that the concept of materialism has undergone many transformations over the centuries. The crucial way in which Varela and other enactivists have rethought materialism is by making the relations between elements more reflexive and reciprocal. Rather than thinking materiality in terms of the relations among pre-assigned causal properties of elements of a system, the properties of the elements depend on the dynamics of the system as a whole as they feed back to affect and change the nature of the elements. The irreducible unit of a dynamical system is the assembly as an agential , ‘subjective’ whole. This makes possible the understanding of the organization of living systems and consciousness as more functionally integral and normatively motivated, and integrates organism and environment more fully, than via the reductive, atomized materialism of Dennett.

This new materialism, as it has been called in some quarters, doesn’t restrict its notion of agency and subjectivity to living things with cognitive systems , but applies equally to the physical world independent of any interaction with sentient creatures. Materiality is fundamentally agential in that it produces elements from within assemblages that are inherently perpsectival , from within which matter ‘matters’ in a particular way.

The kind of spirituality that Varela and Thompson derive from this model rests on what is immanent to dependent co-arising. Is this so terribly far removed from Dennett’s delighting in our developing ability to care about a world whose meaning is produced by, as Varela put it,

“..lots of simple agents having simple properties that are brought together, even in a haphazard way, to give rise to what appears to an observer as a purposeful and integrated whole"?

And don’t Vervaeke’s machinic technologies of relevance realization inhabit an intermediary position between Varela and Dennett?

“…manipulating Relevance Realization affords self-transcendence and wisdom and insight precisely because
Relevance Realization is the ability to make the connections that are at the core of meaning, those connections that are quintessentially being threatened by the Meaning crisis. That would mean if we get an understanding of the machinery of this (Synoptic Integration Construct of RR), we would have a way of generating new psycho-technologies, re-designing, reappropriating older psycho-technologies and coordinating them systematically in order to regenerate, [be] regenerative of these fraying connections. Relegitimate and afford the cultivation of wisdom, self-transcendence, connectedness to ourselves and to each other and to the world.

Reply to Tom Storm Quoting Tom Storm

Would you say Thompson's view is compatible with a post-modern understanding of 'reality'. Do you think Thompson's views are in any way limited or 'skewed' by his Lindisfarne Association upbringing

Thompson has worked closely with another enactivist, Shaun Gallagher, who has published pieces such as Conversations in Postmodern Hermeneutics, so I think he would be comfortable with the label. When Thompson discusses his childhood, he has as many critical as positive things to say about the varieties of spirituality he was exposed to. I think he came away with the idea that there was something of value which was worth pursing further , but he did so with a healthy dose of caution and skepticism. I think even to this day he doesn’t have anything like a fully thought-out stance on spirituality.

Reply to Joshs Thanks, well said. I will consider that in my ongoing readings. But I still see Dennett and Dawkins as representing the cause of the meaning crisis, not the solution to it. There's nothing like the blatant hostility towards every and anything deemed 'religious' in those other writers, that is evident throughout their polemics.

Quoting Apustimelogist

What is the Buddhist view about creating life? If they see life as just suffering and the ultimate goal is ending the cycle of suffering, death, birth - "extinction" - (as far as I understand), then wouldn't they be anti-natalist?

'Early' Buddhism certainly saw existence as a malaise, a woeful condition to be escaped by the renunciation of the world. However the 'new' Buddhism - not that it's new today, as it developed around the first century CE - introduced a different perspective, that of the Mah?y?na, or 'Greater Vehicle', which recognised that Bodhisattvas (wisdom-beings) might be born voluntarily for the benefit of sentient beings:

Quoting HH The Dalai Lama, 'Reincarnation'

How rebirth takes place

There are two ways in which someone can take rebirth after death: rebirth under the sway of karma and destructive emotions and rebirth through the power of compassion and prayer. Regarding the first, due to ignorance negative and positive karma are created and their imprints remain on the consciousness. These are reactivated through craving and grasping, propelling us into the next life. We then take rebirth involuntarily in higher or lower realms. This is the way ordinary beings circle incessantly through existence like the turning of a wheel. Even under such circumstances ordinary beings can engage diligently with a positive aspiration in virtuous practices in their day-to-day lives. They familiarise themselves with virtue that at the time of death can be reactivated providing the means for them to take rebirth in a higher realm of existence. On the other hand, superior Bodhisattvas, who have attained the path of seeing, are not reborn through the force of their karma and destructive emotions, but due to the power of their compassion for sentient beings and based on their prayers to benefit others. They are able to choose their place and time of birth as well as their future parents. Such a rebirth, which is solely for the benefit of others, is rebirth through the force of compassion and prayer.

Reply to Joshs There's a deep conversation here between Vervaeke and an Elizabeth Oldfield about Vervaeke's thoughts on God, religion and everything.

https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2023/11/08/john-vervaeke-on-fundamentalism-trauma-and-embodying-wisdom

He was brought up in a fundamentalist family, but later in life discovered he was actually the progeny of an illegitimate relationship, which was highly traumatic. He then turned 'east' but also deeply into science.

Some snippets:

God is where we find a relationship between sacredness and ultimacy. And like you said, I think that’s inherently relational. But I’m using that as a stand–in for whatever. My partner is sacred to me, because I have that connection. But I do not think – although there’s mysterious depths to her that I can never fully grasp – I do not think of her as Ultimate Reality. And so, I think we have notions, and they could be Tao, or Brahman, or ??nyat? (vacuity), of ultimacy. And then, if we have sacred experiences of the ultimacy, that’s sort of the epitome of what I think you’re putting your finger on.

The cognitive revolution was based on the idea that humans are not stimulus–response machines, they’re meaning–making entities.

I cultivated a professional persona that compensates for that [shyness]. And I’m in this persona right now. So, as long as I’m in this persona, I’m well, but if you put me in a context where that persona is not appropriate, like a traditional party at somebody’s house, I become sort of indistinguishable from a potted plant.

If people come to my work and find a way to “rehome” – and I’m going to use that as a strong verb, rehome – in one of the legacy religions, great! I am not anti–religious.

--

Quoting Joshs

Varela and Thompson have no interest in abandoning naturalism and the Darwinian framework that explains the genesis of organisms and human cognition.

I don't challenge naturalism on empirical grounds, but a distinction can be made between biology and biological reductionism. The empirical facts of evolution and the development of species are a field of study, but a lot is read into it, and inferred from it, due to the overvaluing of science, the kind of 'evolution as a religion' attitude that Mary Midgely and others have criticized. Again, Dennett is a poster-boy for that kind of scientism, Varela and Thompson have a different attitude altogether. (You know that Varela collaborated with the Dalai Lama and other Buddhist scholars and practitioners to explore the intersections between cognitive science and Buddhist philosophy. This collaboration was part of the Mind and Life Institute, which he co-founded in 1987 to foster dialogue between science and Buddhism. In the later years of his life, Varela took formal Buddhist vows.)

Quoting Joshs

The irreducible unit of a dynamical system is the assembly as an agential , ‘subjective’ whole.

Why the scare quotes around subjective? It is either subjective or it's not. That attempt to generalise or fudge subjectivity into, well, everything, seems another version of pan-psychism to me.

Here's another thing Vervaeke says in that interview:

I do a lot of work on kinds of knowing other than propositional knowing. And maybe at some point we can talk about that procedural, perspectival, participatory, and that cognition is embodied, embedded, enacted, extended. So the theory is actually pointing away from an over–intellectualised, over–individualised understanding of meaning, cognition, intelligence, rationale. The evidence is growing, the theoretical argument, the evidence is growing.

I think that the kind of cosmic consciousness that I'm drawn to - the unitive vision, the mystical experience - is something in this register. It's not propositional knowledge, and if it's put into bald propositional form, it comes across as nonsense. It's a re-orientation, a different way of being and seeing. Isn't Heidegger also about that? The video posted above, The Philosophical Silk Road, is also replete with references to it.

Quoting Joshs

If you haven’t seen Vervaeke’s interview of Evan Thompson, I recommend it

I’ve found one, at least, which starts with a discussion of Thompson’s latest book, The Blind Spot. I started a thread on the precursor article to the book five years ago and it was thoroughly bollocked at the time for being ‘click bait’ and a sad error of judgement by an otherwise profound philosopher (although I think that reaction was primarily because it was me who posted it. I’ll have to listen later, I’ve already had enough Vervaeke for one day.)

Quoting Joshs

How does the above quote differ from this by Varela?

Because Dennett’s quote references organic molecules, and Varela’s references ‘simple agents’. If ‘simple agents’ are e.g. cellular, then they’re already at a different ontological level to organic molecules. Dennett’s model is strictly reductionist with solely bottom-up causality. As soon as you take emergence into account, and the top-down causality associated with strong emergence (in Vervaeke’s terms), then it’s already radically different to the ‘flat ontology’ of reductionism (the thrust of the first 20 minutes of the Vervaeke keynote I listed to today.) I’m starting to get Vervaeke’s idea of ‘levelling up’ in which each level, such as the sub-atomic, molecular, and organic, reveals different facts or truths about reality. These levels are not isolated but mutually influence each other, forming an interconnected web of existence. And they’re emphatically not reducible to lower levels, such as the atomic or molecular. This perspective helps in understanding the complex, multi-layered nature of reality and how various levels of being are interdependent, shaping and being shaped by one another. This perspective mirrors Plotinus’ view that all levels of reality are part of a continuous, dynamic process of emanation and return to the One, emphasizing the unity and interrelation of all aspects of existence. There’s nothing like that in Dennett’s model. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Dennett argues that the complexity of biological and cognitive phenomena can be explained solely through natural, evolutionary processes that build up from simple to complex structures (“cranes”) without invoking any mysterious, top-down causation (“skyhooks”).

In short: chalk and cheese.

Reply to Wayfarer

Quoting Wayfarer

Because Dennett’s quote references organic molecules, and Varela’s references ‘simple agents’. If ‘simple agents’ are e.g. cellular, then they’re already at a different ontological level to organic molecules. Dennett’s model is strictly reductionist with solely bottom-up causality. As soon as you take emergence into account, and the top-down causality associated with strong emergence (in Vervaeke’s terms), then it’s already radically different to the ‘flat ontology’ of reductionism (the thrust of the first 20 minutes of the Vervaeke keynote I listed to today.)

I think you’re on the right track in thinking Dennett’s approach too reductive. But it’s important to appreciate that his model of cognition stands as a critique of symbol-manipulating logical models of which use the serial computer as a metaphor. In its time, parallel distributed connectionism, which Dennett embraced, was considered an important step beyond Cartesian descriptions of mental processes. Connectionism doesn’t claim to reduce directly to the molecule-physical level.

Chemistry has been shown to reduce, in some sense, to physics, and this is clearly a Good Thing, the sort of thing we should try for more of.

Such progress invites the prospect of a parallel development in psychology. First we will answer the question "What do all believers-that-p have in common?" the first way, the "conceptual" way, and then see if we can go on to "reduce" the theory that emerges in our first answer to something else—neurophysiology most likely. Many theorists seem to take it for granted that some such reduction is both possible and desirable, and perhaps even inevitable, even while recent critics of reductionism, such as Putnam and Fodor, have warned us of the excesses of "classical" reductionist creeds. No one today hopes to conduct the psychology of the future in the vocabulary of the neurophysiologist, let alone that of the physicist, and principled ways of relaxing the classical "rules" of reduction have been pro-posed. The issue, then, is what kind of theoretical bonds can we expect—or ought we to hope—to find uniting psychological claims about beliefs, desires, and so forth with the claims of neurophysiologists, biologists, and other physical scientists?

We are going to have to talk about the ephemeral, swift, curious, metaphorical features of consciousness.

Many people say: "Some day, but not yet. This enterprise is all just premature." And others say: "Leave it to the philosophers (and look what a mess they make of it)." I want to suggest that it is not premature, that in fact there is no alternative but to start looking as hard as we can at consciousness first. If we don't look at consciousness and get clear about what the destination is, and instead try to work our way up by just thinking about how the brain is put together, we won't know where we are trying to get to from where we are and we will be hopelessly lost. This is commonly referred to as the defense of the top-down strategy, and in looking at Jaynes's book again this morning I find that in his introduction he has one of the clearest and most perspicuous defenses of the top-down approach that I have ever come across:

We can only know in the nervous system what we have known in behavior first. Even if we had a complete wiring diagram of the nervous system, we still would not be able to answer our basic question. Though we knew the connections of every tickling thread of every single axon and dendrite in every species that ever existed, together with all its neurotransmitters and how they varied in its billions of synapses of every brain that ever existed, we could still never—not ever—from a knowledge of the brain alone know if that brain contained a consciousness like our own. We first have to start from the stop, from some conception of what consciousness is, from what our own introspection is. (Jaynes, 1976, p. 18)

Reply to Joshs Thanks,pleased to have some elements of agreement. I've been reading Deacon's Incomplete Nature which I think also has relevance to this subject.

Quoting Wayfarer

'Early' Buddhism certainly saw existence as a malaise, a woeful condition to be escaped by the renunciation of the world. However the 'new' Buddhism -

Sounds like a turn for convenience. If you can’t beat them (the masses) have them join you by justifying the status quo.

Also the idea of karma is a convenient way to kick the responsibility down the road no? A self fulfilling prophecy. You want a family because you aren’t born enlightened enough yet. Don’t worry, in the next life you might be a celibate monk eating a handful of rice. You’ll get ‘em next time :lol:.

Quoting Tom Storm

I suspect Vervaeke sits with all those theorists and self-help folk who seek to offer a remedy for common anxiety.

I think you summed up religion in a nutshell, sir. Hats off to you. Daoism tries to find the flow in the ordinary and Buddhism to escape the suffering of the angst..Epicureanism and Stoicism roughly the same. Some don’t need bigger meaning, they want microdose flow states from a good game of chess or zoning out to a video game. The remedy ends up being just variations of acceptance and escapism of the daily grind.

Reply to schopenhauer1 Thank you. No doubt others will think my take is wrong headed. :wink:

Quoting Leontiskos

I think it is clear that Vervaeke is a Platonist, but his relationship with naturalism seems a bit complicated. Maybe it would be better to say that he wishes to redirect naturalism away from its anti-Platonist history. It may all come down to the question of how Plato and Vervaeke understand God and transcendence. At the very least I would say that Vervaeke is opposed to the standard, reductionist tropes of naturalism, such as materialism. What do you think?

Question from here.

The key idea is his 'levelling up' - rather a peculiar turn of phrase, but what it means is that there are different levels of description, and also reality, but that these all influence each other, upwards and downwards. He says that reductionism, which produces a 'flat ontology', wishes to account for everything in terms of its atomic or sub-atomic basis. Whereas in reality, top-down constraints are equally important in the actual processes of living beings. (This is the subject of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis>Episode 6>Aristotle Kant and Evolution.) He often mentions this book, Context Changes Everything, Alice Juarrero which also got a bit of attention here on the forum in years past.

(I also recently listened to a keynote lecture he gave on neoplatonism and levels of being. The problem with Vervaeke is there's so much of him! Awakening from the Meaning Crisis is, what, 52 hour-long lectures, and then there's numerous other interviews, guest appearances, panel discussions....life's too short....)

Reply to Wayfarer - Okay thanks, that is helpful. :up:

Reply to Leontiskos More and more, I'm understanding how the 'Western mindset' has lost a vital perspective, and that the resulting worldview is like a two-dimensional depiction of a three-dimensional reality. (It is like the scenario that McIntyre describes at the beginning of After Virtue, with scattered fragments from a library lying about, that we no longer know how to connect.) That lost perspective *is* the qualitative dimension. But that claim is nearly always challenged on the basis that qualitative judgements are personal and subjective and that there is no scientific basis to them. I think this is what Awakening from the Meaning Crisis is addressing. But Vervaeke is - I would say first and foremost - a cognitive scientist, so he doesn't endorse any kind of sentimentality or romanticism. It's a factual issue, but it's also qualitative (in one of the last talks I listened to he rejects the 'fact-value' dichotomy).

Related to this - I have the sense that the One of Plotinus *is not* a concept. I think arriving at an understanding of it requires a kind of cognitive transformation although that too is very difficult to fathom. I recall from the IEP entry on Pierre Hadot: 'Hadot argues in Plotinus, or the Simplicity of Vision, that the famous Neoplatonic metaphysics of the One, the Ideas, and the world-psyche is not the abstract, purely theoretical, otherworldly construction it is often presented as being. Rather, Hadot claims, in Plotinus’ Enneads the language of metaphysics “is used to express an inner experience. All these levels of reality become levels of inner life, levels of the self” (PSV 27). For Hadot, Plotinus’ metaphysical discourse is animated by a “fundamental but inexpressible experience.” ' Later in the same article, Hadot distances himself from Plotinus' ascetic mysticism but nevertheless this is a recurring theme in his later studies of philosophy as a way of life. That also chimes with Vervaeke's continual stress on philosophy as a transformative understanding, albeit remaining fully conversant with and aware of natural science.

Quoting Wayfarer

Related to this - I have the sense that the One of Plotinus *is not* a concept. I think arriving at an understanding of it requires a kind of cognitive transformation although that too is very difficult to fathom.

The inner experience is important in the thinking. What a 'concept is' is also considered. The work also makes a claim upon how the universe works just as other such claims do. Every component is located through the pattern drawn.

I tender Plotinus' objections to the Gnostics as evidence for this view. The conflict between views of a natural good and a flawed creation concern the expectations of the future, for all who live.

Reply to Paine:up:

There's a passage from David Bentley Hart which I've quoted a number of times recently:

[quote=David Bentley Hart, The Illusionist]In the pre-modern vision of things, the cosmos had been seen as an inherently purposive structure of diverse but integrally inseparable rational relations — for instance, the Aristotelian aitia, which are conventionally translated as “causes,” but which are nothing like the uniform material “causes” of the mechanistic philosophy. And so the natural order was seen as a reality already akin to intellect. Hence the mind, rather than an anomalous tenant of an alien universe, was instead the most concentrated and luminous expression of nature’s deepest essence. This is why it could pass with such wanton liberty through the “veil of Isis” and ever deeper into nature’s inner mysteries.[/quote]

I'm exploring the idea that the reason the natural order was seen as 'akin to the intellect', is because the ancients and pre-moderns did not have the sense of separateness or 'otherness' to the Cosmos that we ourselves do. That in turn is because of a different conception of the nature of self. It's very hard to identify or articulate, because it's a foundational or intuitive sense of the natural order, our innnate intuitive sense of 'the way things are'. (I'm not claiming their sense is superior to ours in any scientific sense, as the ancients were not scientifically informed as we are, but that it is highly significant as an existential stance or way-of-being.)

See for example the beginning of the chapter on Plotinus in Eric Perl's 'Thinking Being':

[quote=Eric D Perl, Thinking Being, p 119]Plotinus follows Plato, and, indeed, Aristotle, in identifying being, ?? ??, that which is, as form. As in Plato, sensible things exist just insofar as they have and display intelligible forms. The forms themselves, therefore, as that which is intelligible and in virtue of which sensible things are at all, are reality (?????, ouisia). Sensible things thus are not reality itself and are not beings in the full and proper sense, but, in that they have some share of intelligibility, are images of true, intelligible reality. But Plotinus goes further than Plato and Aristotle in developing both Plato’s ????????, synousia, the togetherness of intellectual apprehension and intelligible reality, and Aristotle’s doctrines of pure form as one with the act of thinking and of intellect as one with the intelligible, into a far more thorough and explicit account of the coinciding, the unity-in-duality, of being-as-form and intellectual apprehension.[/quote]

That sense is also preserved in Aquinas, in the 'union of the knower with the known', which characterises the apprehension of the forms of particulars:

[quote="Aquinas Online, Cognition in General;https://aquinasonline.com/cognition-in-general/#:~:text=Knowledge%20presupposes%20some%20kind%20of%20union" ]Knowledge presupposes some kind of union, because in order to become the thing which is known we must possess it, we must be identical with the object we know. But this possession of the object is not a physical possession of it. It is a possession of the form of the object, of that principle which makes the object to be what it is. This is what Aristotle means when he says that the soul in a way becomes all things. Entitatively the knower and object known remain what they are. But intentionally (cognitively) the knower becomes the object of his knowledge as he possesses the form of the object.[/quote]

This theme of 'union' in some ways echoes the idea of union in many different schools of the perennial philosophy. This is what is lost in the transition to modernity, particularly with the advent of Cartesian dualism and the separateness of mind and matter.

Updates for this thread: I've belatedly started working through the lecture series for Awakening from the Meaning Crisis which was the origin of Vervaeke's online material.

The playlist can be found here. There's also a companion website here which contains, among other things, transcriptions of the series.

The lectures all contain bibliographies of the books mentioned. I stress again Vervaeke is first and foremost a cognitive scientist, and many of the books he references are from cognitive science and psychology. When he discusses mysticism, which he does, he has a way of framing it so that it makes sense from a cognitive science perspective. But he's also pretty well-versed in philosophy and the history of ideas. New Age dross, it ain't.

There's a lot of material - I've generally been listening while working out or driving, both of which I'm doing a fair amount of at the moment. But it does form a comprehensive curriculum.

Eric D Perl, Thinking Being, p 119:Plotinus follows Plato, and, indeed, Aristotle, in identifying being, ?? ??, that which is, as form.

I am not aware of any text from those three that supports this statement.

Reply to PaineYou can find that book online - which is just as well, as it's out of print and very expensive in hard copy. It was one of the books mentioned in the video series this thread is about, which is how I found it.

Quoting Paine

I tender Plotinus' objections to the Gnostics as evidence for this view. The conflict between views of a natural good and a flawed creation concern the expectations of the future, for all who live.

This is a very interesting comment. I've recently been reading Cormac McCarthy's works and a book, A Bloody and Barbarous God the Metaphysics of Cormac McCarthy by Petra Mundik, which aligns McCarthy's philosophy with the Gnostics, with the idea that this world was created by a flawed deity. It does seem that the natural human demand for Justice and search for the Good cannot be realized, or at least not comprehensively, on a societal scale.

Although this inability to realize the Good seems apparent I'm reluctant to admit it, because it seems defeatist, and I think this might be what you allude to when you say

Quoting Paine

concern the expectations of the future, for all who live.

Do you have a ready reference for Plotinus' objection to the Gnostic vision? If so, I would be interested to look at it.

Reply to Janus
I will provide tomorrow. I approach the end of today's period of being fully conscious.

The observations about McCarthy does address what I am thinking about. I will sit with them for a while.

Reply to Paine Cheers, whenever you find both the time and inclination...

Reply to Janus If you google Plotinus on the Gnostics there’s a ton of material out there. As I understand it, the basic drift is that he wouldn’t countenance their claim that matter was evil. (The top hit is from a Wiki article which seems quite comprehensive and as always has links for further reading.)

Reply to Wayfarer Quoting Wayfarer

As I understand it, the basic drift is that he wouldn’t countenance their claim that matter was evil.

But that is what Plotinus said:

We conclude that Matter's participation in Idea is not by way of modification within itself: the process is very different; it is a bare seeming. Perhaps we have here the solution of the difficulty as to how Matter, essentially evil, can be reaching towards The Good: there would be no such participation as would destroy its essential nature. Given this mode of pseudo-participation- in which Matter would, as we say, retain its nature, unchanged, always being what it has essentially been- there is no longer any reason to wonder as to how while essentially evil, it yet participates in Idea: for, by this mode, it does not abandon its own character: participation is the law, but it participates only just so far as its essence allows. Under a mode of participation which allows it to remain on its own footing, its essential nature stands none the less, whatsoever the Idea, within that limit, may communicate to it: it is by no means the less evil for remaining immutably in its own order. If it had authentic participation in The Good and were veritably changed, it would not be essentially evil. — ibid. III. 6. 11

Reply to Wayfarer Thanks, I'll have a look. I hadn't thought of the Gnostics considering matter as such to be evil, but rather the forms it takes and their activities in this world.

From the Wiki article:

Plotinus, at least in his texts against the Gnostics, portrayed God as a separate entity that human souls needed to go towards, whereas Gnostics believed that in every human soul there was a divine spark of God already. However, Gnostics did not disagree with the neoplatonist notion of getting closer to the source.

This it seems. if true, would place the Gnostics closer to Plato than Plotinus would be. As far as I understand the Gnostics did not believe that God is the source of this world, and nor, on the other hand, did they believe that the Demiurge was the source of matter, but was rather a "craftsmen god" (as Plato's Timaeus tells it) who shaped the world out of pre-existent chaotic matter. The difference being that the Gnostics did not think the Demiurge, or the resultant world, is in accordance with the Good, as Plato apparently did.

Reply to Paine Reply to Janus An arcane argument. The SEP entry on Plotinus, by Gerson, has it as follows:

With regard to Plotinus’ contemporaries, he was sufficiently exercised by the self-proclaimed Gnostics to write a separate treatise, II 9 (‘Against the Gnostics’) attacking their views. These Gnostics, mostly heretic Christians…were sufficiently close to Platonism, but, in Plotinus’ view, so profoundly perverse in their interpretation of it, that they merited special attention. The central mistake of Gnosticism, according to Plotinus, is in thinking that Soul is ‘fallen’ and is the source of cosmic evil. As we have seen, Plotinus, although he believes that matter is evil, vociferously denies that the physical world is evil. It is only the matter that underlies the images of the eternal world that is isolated from all intelligible reality. The Gnostics ignore the structure of Platonic metaphysics and, as a result, wrongly despise this world. For Plotinus, a hallmark of ignorance of metaphysics is arrogance, the arrogance of believing that the elite or chosen possess special knowledge of the world and of human destiny. The idea of a secret elect, alone destined for salvation – which was what the Gnostics declared themselves to be – was deeply at odds with Plotinus’ rational universalism.

I stand corrected.

Reply to Janus

This website has all of the Six Enneads translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page. The translation is a little clunky at times, but it beats typing out the passages.

The text concerning the Gnostics comprises all of the Second Ennead, Ninth Tractate.

The title given there speaks to your comments about McCarthy:

AGAINST THOSE THAT AFFIRM THE CREATOR OF THE KOSMOS AND THE KOSMOS ITSELF TO BE EVIL:
[GENERALLY QUOTED AS "AGAINST THE GNOSTICS"].

Reply to Wayfarer

Quoting Wayfarer

Knowledge presupposes some kind of union, because in order to become the thing which is known we must possess it, we must be identical with the object we know. But this possession of the object is not a physical possession of it. It is a possession of the form of the object, of that principle which makes the object to be what it is. This is what Aristotle means when he says that the soul in a way becomes all things. Entitatively the knower and object known remain what they are. But intentionally (cognitively) the knower becomes the object of his knowledge as he possesses the form of the object.
— Aquinas Online, Cognition in General

This theme of 'union' in some ways echoes the idea of union in many different schools of the perennial philosophy. This is what is lost in the transition to modernity, particularly with the advent of Cartesian dualism and the separateness of mind and matter.

I think Modernity began a deconstruction of the idea of unity determined as identity, but it didn’t take this deconstruction far enough. Only when identity is understood as a derived modification of difference can the concept of union free itself from Platonic dogmatism and metaphysical presuppsitons.

Reply to Wayfarer
Gerson's account is a fair description.

I wonder how he distinguishes "These Gnostics, mostly heretic Christians" from the other varieties. Many of Plotinus' objections could apply equally well to a certain 'Saul of Tarsus', who called for the end of tis kosmos.

Augustine placed Plotinus above Plato in The City of God. But I don't recall any reference to this part of the oeuvre.

Quoting Janus

Although this inability to realize the Good seems apparent, I'm reluctant to admit it, because it seems defeatist, and I think this might be what you allude to when you say: "concern the expectations of the future, for all who live.

I think Kafka gave this some thought. In his Reflections, [a collection of aphorisms]. this one is an affirmation through negation of a sort:

Kafka, Reflections, 54:There are questions which we could never get over if we were not delivered from them by the operation of nature.

But perhaps the true antipode to the gnostics is Walt Whitman:

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 17:These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands.
they are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or
next to nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they
are nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.
This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the
water is,
This is the common air that bathes the globe.

Quoting Joshs

Only when identity is understood as a derived modification of difference can the concept of union free itself from Platonic dogmatism and metaphysical presuppsitons.

Where does that critique come from? What's the theory behind it?

Quoting Paine

I wonder how he distinguishes "These Gnostics, mostly heretic Christians" from the other varieties

I'm wary of trying to delve into the minutiae of doctrinal distinctions between Christians, neoplatonists and gnostics, although I'm sure there are many to be made. I'm attempting to stick to the broad contours of the issue. But for what it's worth, some of the entries I perused yesterday said that Plotinus had specific gnostic sects in mind and that while 'Plotinus raises objections to several core tenets of Gnosticism, although some of them might have come from misunderstandings' (Wiki entry on Neoplatonism and Gnosticism.) An interpretation of neoplatonism is central to Vervaeke's project, so far as this project is concerned, I'm being guided by that.

Reply to Paine Thanks.

Quoting Paine

I think Kafka gave this some thought. In his Reflections, [a collection of aphorisms]. this one is an affirmation through negation of a sort:

There are questions which we could never get over if we were not delivered from them by the operation of nature.
— Kafka, Reflections, 54

Right, it is not productive, healthy or even tenable to focus too exclusively on the obvious plethora of evils that seem to be an integral (or dis-integral) part of human life.

Quoting Paine

But perhaps the true antipode to the gnostics is Walt Whitman:

These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands.
they are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or
next to nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they
are nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.
This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the
water is,
This is the common air that bathes the globe.
— Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 17

Nice! Whitman is one of my favorite poets and is also a fitting "antipode" to postmodern relativism. Some see modernism as the elimination of all but subjective values and postmodernism as the radical relativization of all value.

Reply to Wayfarer
Perhaps I should not have made my remark. I did not mean to hold Gerson to account as a matter of the 'minutiae' of citing specific schools of thought. Plotinus leaves the burden upon the one who would disagree with his argument. It is brilliant in that regard.

Reply to Wayfarer Quoting Wayfarer

Only when identity is understood as a derived modification of difference can the concept of union free itself from Platonic dogmatism and metaphysical presuppsitons.
— Joshs

Where does that critique come from? What's the theory behind it?

I dont know, but it’s got a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Just kidding. Actually, that’s a kind of thinking common to Foucault, Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida. They all trace it back to Nietzsche’s Eternal Return. They read it as eternal return of the always different. Deleuze wrote

In accordance with Heidegger's ontological intuition, difference must be articulation and connection in itself; it must relate different to different without any mediation whatsoever by the identical, the similar, the analogous or the opposed. There must be a differenciation of difference, an in-itself which is like a differenciator, by virtue of which the different is gathered all at once rather than represented on condition of a prior resemblance, identity, analogy or opposition.

On Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, Deleuze says:

When the identity of things dissolves, being be­gins to revolve around the different. That which is or returns has no prior constituted identity: things are reduced to the difference which fragments them, and to all the differences which are implicated in it and through which they pass.

Reply to Joshs The analogy that comes to mind is Buddhism's apoha logic: 'Apoha theory was proposed to provide an explanation for how, in the absence of objectively existent universals, we are able to form concepts and effectively use them to communicate and achieve practical ends. Dign?ga defined apoha as a theory of classification based on exclusion. He said that a category such as 'cow' is arrived at not by the inclusion of all objects we would, based on some criteria, identify as cows, but by the exclusion of all objects we would identify as 'non-cows.' Concepts thus involve a double negation - the category of 'cow' is, in fact, the category of all 'not non-cows.' Since a negation or an absence cannot, according to the Buddhists, be objectively real (since absences are not caused and have no causal efficacy), this shows that concepts, though referring to a class of particulars, have no basis in reality.'

But then, this is the aspect of Buddhist philosophy that I have trouble accepting. There's a well-known analogy in the early Buddhist texts, the analogy of the chariot. It comprises a dialogue between one Ven Nagasena, a monk, and King Milinda (who has subsequently been identified as Meander, an actual Greco-Bactrian king). In short, Nagasena 'deconstructs' the chariot, showing it cannot be found in its various parts - the axle is not the chariot, the wheels, etc. Likewise, says Nagasena, I am nothing more than an aggregation of parts, if these parts are dispersed, then I would be no more (ref).

What this doesn't come to terms with, in my view, is the idea of the chariot. In that historical epoch, the possession of chariots was a major factor in military conquest. Empires rose and fell on the basis of such technologies. So while it's true to say that this or that particular chariot is nothing more than an assemblage of parts, it is also the instantiation of an idea, which is real over and above any particular. There are those who possess the idea, and those who don't.

In fact what I think undermines Buddhist nominalism (although this is a digression) is that the Buddha himself is a universal kind. That is why Buddhism uniquely believes that Buddhas are a class of being, even if at the same time each one is a particular individual. (I've tried that out on Buddhist forums and it didn't go down well.)

Quoting Wayfarer

In fact what I think undermines Buddhist nominalism (although this is a digression) is that the Buddha himself is a universal kind. That is why Buddhism uniquely believes that Buddhas are a class of being, even if at the same time each one is a particular individual. (I've tried that out on Buddhist forums and it didn't go down well.)

That is very interesting.

Reply to Tom Storm It was a major factor in making me realise my own Platonist (i.e. western) heritage.

In exploring John Vervaeke's conception of 'extended naturalism,' I am developing a theory that aligns with Platonism, proposing that what Platonism describes as universals are, in fact, universal cognitive structures. However, it is crucial to clarify that these universals are not merely constructs of the mind. Instead, they are the inevitable parameters of conscious experience and knowledge.

To avoid falling into the trap of conceptualism, which posits that universals exist only within the mind as concepts, I propose that universals such as the principles of logic and natural numbers have an ontological status that transcends individual cognitive processes. They are not mind-dependent in the sense that they do not rely on being conceived by any particular mind to exist. Instead, these universals are fundamental aspects of the fabric of reality that reason can discern and understand. As Bertrand Russell put it, 'universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts.'

This perspective suggests that universals have a kind of reality that is both independent of individual human minds and intimately connected to the rational structure of the universe. The principles of logic and natural numbers, for example, are not contingent upon human thought but are discoverable through the exercise of reason. In this way, they serve as the bedrock of our capacity for knowledge and conscious experience, guiding and constraining our understanding of the world.

In summary, by situating universals as universal cognitive structures that are inherent to the rational structure of reality, we can maintain a stance that acknowledges their actuality while recognizing that they can only be grasped through the exercise of reason. And I think that's consistent with where Vervaeke is going in this course I'm listening to.

Reply to Wayfarer Thanks. Jungian archetypes would seem to belong to these universal cognitive structures too.

Reply to Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer

I propose that universals such as the principles of logic and natural numbers have an ontological status that transcends individual cognitive processes. They are not mind-dependent in the sense that they do not rely on being conceived by any particular mind to exist. Instead, these universals are fundamental aspects of the fabric of reality that reason can discern and understand.

But how can number and logic be aspects of the fabric of reality when what we think of today as number and logic were invented bit by bit over the course of cultural history? I will go so far as to predict that at some point in the future we will replace numeric calculation and propositional logic with alternative technological languages.

Quoting Joshs

But how can number and logic be aspects of the fabric of reality when what we think of today as number and logic were invented bit by bit over the course of cultural history?

I guess that debate would focus on whether number and logic were invented or 'discovered'.

Quoting Joshs

But how can number and logic be aspects of the fabric of reality when what we think of today as number and logic were invented bit by bit over the course of cultural history?

‘God created the integers’ ~ some philosopher.

It is sometimes said that the natural numbers are objectively real, but I don’t agree. I think they’re ‘transjectively’ real - the same for all who can count, but only perceptible to one capable of counting.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/transjective

I haven’t heard of this author, but there has been a Platonist element circulating contemporary philosophical writings for some time, even as far back as the pre-Brexit, pre-Trump era. It may have helped to cultivate ideas amongst the masses which led to those circumstances. Maybe Trump tapped into the collective conscious when those raiders stormed the capital building!

Reply to Tom Storm

Quoting Tom Storm

I guess that debate would focus on whether number and logic were invented or 'discovered'.

Like other empirical knowledge, we invent these schemes and then discover their usefulness in our dealings with the world. The fact that we find them useful does not make them part of the fabric of reality, any more than our other invented technologies are a part of the fabric of reality.

Reply to Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer

It is sometimes said that the natural numbers are objectively real, but I don’t agree. I think they’re ‘transjectively’ real - the same for all who can count, but only perceptible to one capable of counting.

They are the same for all who can count because that is the meaning of numeric unit, ‘same thing different time’. There is no experience in nature that conforms to ‘same thing different time’. In order to understand the empty, generic concept of ‘same thing different time’, one must start by noticing multiplicities, and then separating out particulars within such multiplicities. There is no concept of number yet to be found at this point in the process of going from multiplicity to the deliberate noticing and separating out of particulars. In order to arrive at the concept of the number unit, one must turn away from the meaningful world of continually changing senses by inventing a new notion, that of the empty, context and content-free particularity, a particularity which can be returned to again and again as ‘same thing different time’ because it has no content, stands for nothing other than a placemark. It is not just that the apples we count are never identical to each other in their attributes, but that the very meaning of the category of ‘apple’ changes as we move from one ‘apple’ to the next in our enumeration. In order to count, we mist ignore this slippage of sense, not only of attributes of the particulars , but of the meaning of the category as a persisting identity. Nothing about the world we perceive gives us the notion of identity of content, which is why we can only count by ignoring the actual
content.

Whatever we look at in the world, or imagine in our minds, changes in such a way that every difference in degree is simultaneously a difference in kind. It is necessary for the invention of the concept of enumeration that we ignore this about actual experience. Such a strange notion of ignoring and flattening the real world had to be invented, and invented in order to accomplish specific purposes. To say that numbers are the same for all who can count is merely to say that all who can count have already invented the concept of identical sameness, since counting depends on that concept. We have become so accustomed to the idea that the notion of repeated identicality is built into the universe that we forget how peculiar an invention it was, the imposition of a subjective idealization onto our experience ofnthe world that precisely ignores , prescinds from , the fabric of reality in order to create the illusion of pure difference in degree that is not at the same time a difference in kind.

…without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the wholly invented world of the unconditioned and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world through numbers, people could not live.” (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)

Quoting Joshs

In order to arrive at the concept of the number unit, one must turn away from the meaningful world of continually changing senses by inventing a new notion, that of the empty, context and content-free particularity, a particularity which can be returned to again and again as ‘same thing different time’ because it has no content, stands for nothing other than a placemark.

I wonder if there is a confusion here between counting and conceptualising counting. In many cultures counting begins with the human body, and the names for certain numbers correspond to different parts of the body - hence, digits. Some of the names for numbers have magical or (un)lucky qualities, or associations with non-numbers.

Then it would be in algebra, the generalisation of counting, that one arrives at 'same thing different time'. But perhaps this is what you meant.

Reply to mcdoodle Quoting mcdoodle

I wonder if there is a confusion here between counting and conceptualising counting. In many cultures counting begins with the human body, and the names for certain numbers correspond to different parts of the body - hence, digits. Some of the names for numbers have magical or (un)lucky qualities, or associations with non-numbers.

Then it would be in algebra, the generalisation of counting, that one arrives at 'same thing different time'. But perhaps this is what you meant.

I was doing a rather static analysis of a contemporary thinking of number, but a historical account would support my argument that them concept of number is invented, and thus there were many concepts of number that appeared over the past centuries. As I said in an earlier post , the modern notion was invented in bits and pieces over time , in different ways in different cultures.

Quoting Joshs

Like other empirical knowledge, we invent these schemes and then discover their usefulness in our dealings with the world. The fact that we find them useful does not make them part of the fabric of reality, any more than our other invented technologies are a part of the fabric of reality.

This has always been my assumption - but not being a philosopher, I assumed it was common sense - that most dubious of systems.

Quoting Joshs

To say that numbers are the same for all who can count is merely to say that all who can count have already invented the concept of identical sameness, since counting depends on that concept. We have become so accustomed to the idea that the notion of repeated identicality is built into the universe that we forget how peculiar an invention it was, the imposition of a subjective idealization onto our experience ofnthe world that precisely ignores , prescinds from , the fabric of reality in order to create the illusion of pure difference in degree that is not at the same time a difference in kind.

Nice. Thanks.

Quoting Joshs

They are the same for all who can count because that is the meaning of numeric unit, ‘same thing different time’. There is no experience in nature that conforms to ‘same thing different time’. In order to understand the empty, generic concept of ‘same thing different time’, one must start by noticing multiplicities, and then separating out particulars within such multiplicities.

Which is a human ability, and one that is basic to the exercise of reason. As for being ‘no experience in nature that conforms to “the same thing at a different time”, surely these are occurring every instant. Breathing, tides, days - many basic constituents of existence happen in patterns which can be counted and measured. Humans have been counting seasons and moon-phases since the Stone Age. As soon as humans began to produce and gather then the requirement becomes imperative - no coincidence that the advent of writing, counting and calculation was mainly concerned with tallying harvests.

As for ‘ignoring and flattening the real world’ I interpret it differently. With the advent of science there is a tendency to believe that only what can be measured is real, as measurement is fundamental to science. That tendency indeed ignores and flattens the reality of lived experience. That lives on in the absurd arguments about 'qualia', a jargon term that designates 'qualities of experience', which are ignored under quantitative sciences. But there’s nothing inherent to mathematics that entails this. //It's the mistake of believing that only what can be quantified is real. It perhaps grew out of the Pythagorean-Platonic foundations of Western science, but it also depended on many other social and historical factors.//

As regards the contention that number is invented, this doesn’t account for the consilience between mathematics and nature, the subject of Eugene Wigner’s well-known essay The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. By abstracting from the observable and measurable properties of objects and their relations, many things have been discovered that would be otherwise unknowable. Wigner can't explain it, but he also doesn't attempt to explain it away.

"Subjective idealisation" is the wrong term, that's why I referred to the newly-coined 'transjective', meaning 'transcending the distinction between subjective and objective, or referring to a property not of the subject or the environment but a relatedness co-created between them.'

Given that mathematical ability exists, then all kinds of imaginary systems can be invented. But the core elements are discovered not invented. This is what has impressed me about mathematical Platonism.

Reply to Wayfarer

Quoting Wayfarer

As regards the contention that number is invented, this doesn’t account for the consilience between mathematics and nature, the subject of Eugene Wigner’s well-known essay The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. By abstracting from the observable and measurable properties of objects and their relations, many things have been discovered that would be otherwise unknowable. Wigner can't explain it, but he also doesn't attempt to explain it away.

Mathematics only seems unreasonably effective because we don’t notice the sleight of hand we perform by forcing aspects of the world into idealized objects that persist identically and then apply mathematical calculations to these constructed idealities. Our invented axioms don’t represent a world, any more than our scientific theories represent a world. They enact a world by our inhabiting it , moving within it in a particular way, like an animal constructs a niche. We don’t say that the spider’s web or the bird’s nest is an unreasonably accurate representation of their world. We say that it produces a lived world unique to the animal , that it navigates in a specific normative way. Mathematics, science and technology are how we navigate our constructed world in ways that express how we build that world . We create these patterns of interaction in a back and forth with the environment within our bubble, and then exclaim in wonder how unreasonably precise the response of our niche is to the very patterns that constrain it to respond in that way.

Von Uexkill illustrated how creatures like us build a ‘bubble’ around us that we consider world. In the following, he takes us on a

stroll into unfamiliar worlds; worlds strange to us but known to other creatures, manifold and varied as the animals them­selves. The best time to set out on such an adventure is on a sunny day. The place, a flower-strewn meadow, humming with insects, fluttering with but­terflies. Here we may glimpse the worlds of the lowly dwellers of the meadow. To do so, we must first blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around each
creature to represent its own world, filled with the perceptions which it alone knows. When we ourselves then step into one of these bubbles, the familiar meadow is transformed. Many of its colourful features disappear,
others no longer belong together but appear in new relationships. A new world comes into being. Through the bubble we see the world of the bur­rowing worm, of the butterfly, or of the field mouse: the world as it appears
to the animals themselves, not as it appears to us. This we may call the phe­nomenal world or the self-world of the animal.

The only difference between us and other animals is that we continually produce new bubbles , new niches, via new technologies. It’s not a question of the human subject positing a world as an epistemological knowing, but the active engagement of the human organism with its surrounding according to stable patterns of interaction which define the person as a living system and at the same time define its world. To be alive means to produce a normative pattern which maintains its dynamic stability in changing conditions. Our sciences enact ,through the feed forward and feedback reciprocity between our actions on and response from the world , a way of navigating through it in a consistently anticipatory manner.

A scientific, mathematical or technological niche( paradigm) have a certain contingent stability, what Kuhn called normal science. During this period of stability we can predict the response of the world to our observations of it in precisely logical ways through our mathematical schemes. But when we replace one niche, paradigm, worldview for another, the old logical relations either become irrelevant or we change the sense of the concepts they refer to (Newtonian vs Relativistic).

Quoting Joshs

Mathematics only seems unreasonably effective because we don’t notice the sleight of hand we perform by forcing aspects of the world into idealized objects that persist identically and then apply mathematical calculations to these constructed idealities.

I don't accept that, it's reductionist. I'm just as opposed to "scientism" as you are, but I don't buy this idea that mathematics and science is simply a projection or solely an invention. They're also discoveries, something uncovered or revealed about nature, which we are able to discern because of reason and mathematics.

John Vervaeke is completely on-board with the 4E approach - embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended by way of extra-cranial processes and structures. I am reading up on that and trying to understand it better. But he also advocates for a kind of modernised neoplatonism, and remains committed to natural science. He's not a post-modern theorist (although I'll look out for anything he might say about that.)

This we may call the phe­nomenal world or the self-world of the animal.

Totally get that. Umswelt and lebenswelt. I have learned about those concepts here on this forum. But none of that detracts from or undermines the reality of mathematics and the objects of reason. Those are also very much part of the lebenswelt of h. sapiens. But they're neither 'in the world' nor 'in the mind' but are characteristic of our experience-of-the-world, which is quite different to the experience-of-the-world of spiders, birds and bats (god bless 'em.)

Quoting Joshs

when we replace one niche, paradigm, worldview for another, the old logical relations either become irrelevant or we change the sense of the concepts they refer to (Newtonian vs Relativistic).

Totally on board with that, also. Still doesn't mean 'number is invented'.

Quoting Wayfarer

This perspective suggests that universals have a kind of reality that is both independent of individual human minds and intimately connected to the rational structure of the universe.

I'd say universals are inherent to cognition because cognitively enabled organisms could not survive without re-cognition, which involves pattern discernment and of course memory. If any sentient being's umwelt was a play of unrelated and unrelatable particulars (James' "buzzing, blooming confusion") no orientation would be possible; the animal would not be able to recognize food, water, prey, predator, shelter, and so on.

So, recognition is the seed of generality, of universals; an essential aspect of cognitive apprehension of anything. Symbolic language of course enables this implicit recognition to be explicitly elaborated into the conception of universals.

Reply to Wayfarer Quoting Wayfarer

John Vervaeke is completely on-board with the 4E approach - embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended by way of extra-cranial processes and structures. I am reading up on that and trying to understand it better. But he also advocates for a kind of modernised neoplatonism, and remains committed to natural science. He's not a post-modern theorist (although I'll look out for anything he might say about

I would say that Vervaeke subscribes to what I would consider a more conservative variant of enactivism than do Gallagher, De Jaegher and Thompson. I agree that he is not a postmodernist, and that his approach is quite likely consonant with yours.

Reply to Joshs :up: I don't know yet if I'm on board with everything Vervaeke says, but I'm learning a lot listening to him, especially how to map philosophical concepts against systems science.

Quoting Janus

recognition is the seed of generality, of universals; an essential aspect of cognitive apprehension of anything. Symbolic language of course enables this implicit recognition to be explicitly elaborated into the conception of universals.

Right. And it's a difference that makes a difference!

Quoting Wayfarer

Right. And it's a difference that makes a difference!

Yes, I agree it most certainly is. There is no rational requirement to deny that what is real for humans in general is "really real" on the basis that we don't think it is real in itself. I'd go even further and say that what is experienced by any individual is what is most real for that individual and that what is experienced by all individuals is what is most real for humanity.

Quoting Wayfarer

Still doesn't mean 'number is invented'.

I agree—recognition and thus the workability of cognition itself entails difference and similarity, which in turn entails diversity and kind and thus generalities and number.

Reply to Janus Philosophically, though, the point of difference I want to establish against evolutionary naturalism, is that such abstractions are not necessarily the product of evolution. While evolutionary naturalism provides a pretty comprehensive account of the development of cognitive capacities, it does not necessarily account for the nature of the abstract entities these capacities enable us to apprehend. The ability to cognize abstractions, such as mathematical truths, may be an evolved trait; however, the abstractions themselves are not products of evolution. Instead, they represent cases of exaptation, where a cognitive capacity evolved for one function is repurposed to engage with another: in this case, the realm of objective (or 'transjective') truths that transcend biological adaptation. (This is what I mean by 'transcending biology'.) It challenges the reductionist view that everything about us can be fully explained through the lens of biological adaptation. The argument relies on the inherent capacity of the human mind to grasp transjective truths uch as mathematical proofs and logical principles, which exist independently of our evolutionary history, but which are able to be discerned by h. sapiens. This approach does not appeal to religious revelation but instead emphasizes the autonomy of reason, so is in line with the approach of Greek rationalism. And there's nothing in it which relies on falsifying the empirical records of evolutionary history, but I think it corrects the reductionist tendencies which often result from 'popular Darwinism'.

Reply to Wayfarer I don't see the question you are asking— that is, simply put, "how is abstraction possible" as being capable of an answer. I tend to think that questions that cannot be answered are, discursively speaking, non-questions. however interesting or inspiring they may otherwise be.

So, I agree with you that science cannot answer such a question, however I don't think there is any other way to answer it either (which is not to say there are not various ways to think about it).

Reply to Janus

Quoting Janus

—recognition and thus the workability of cognition itself entails difference and similarity, which in turn entails diversity and kind and thus generalities and number

Recognition does involve difference and similarity, but number requires the concept of identity , the repetition of the exact same. We look at an aspect of the world and construe that aspect on the basis of ways in which it appears similar to previous events and differs from others. When we count 1,2,3 instances of a ‘this’, we assume that the categorical whole , the ‘this’ , of which we are counting instances ( apples, people, trees) , remains identical in its meaning for the duration of the counting. If the ‘this’ changes its meaning and became a new ‘this’ every increment of the counting we could only ever count one instance of it before having to start the count over. What allows us to enumerate is a convenient ignoring of the fact that similarity in the real world never means identity. So we invent the device of numeric identity, the exact same, which is very useful but at the same time covers over intricate changes in what is being counted.

As Heidegger expressed it:

“The same never coincides with the equal, not even in the empty indifferent oneness of what is merely identical...The same…is the belonging together of what differs, through a gathering by way of the difference. We can only say "the same" if we think difference.
“The most insidious manner of forgetting is the progressive "repetition" of the same. One says the same with a constantly new indifference; the mode of saying and interpreting changes.

Quoting Wayfarer

The ability to cognize abstractions, such as mathematical truths, may be an evolved trait; however, the abstractions themselves are not products of evolution. Instead, they represent cases of exaptation, where a cognitive capacity evolved for one function is repurposed to engage with another: in this case, the realm of objective (or 'transjective') truths that transcend biological adaptation. (This is what I mean by 'transcending biology'.) It challenges the reductionist view that everything about us can be fully explained through the lens of biological adaptation.

The most valuable idea buried within the biological concept of exaptation is that meanings , purposes and other living patterns of organization can be re-invented in ways that are not logically derivable from the previous schemes of organization. The limitation of the concept as it is usually employed is that it makes such inventiveness secondary to and derived from deterministic causal mechanisms. I think people slip into reductive determinism to ground process of change for the same reason that you want to ground human rationality in something that transcends or precedes exaptation. That is, if I were to propose a notion of exaltation not based on mechanisms of efficient causation, you would find it not grounded enough. Becoming, untethered from any conception of the right path, the true source, the objectively real, is just meaningless chaotic drift.

But not all relativistic philosophies of becoming see historical change as directionless from an ethical or empirical point of view. The direction is always toward the most intimate engagement with contextual circumstance that is possible via mindful skilled coping. The use of propositional, logical, mathematical axioms and conceptual abstractions flattens and conceals the intimacy of change in our perceived world , which reinvents itself just as continually as humans invent understandings to anticipate and cope with it. Our mathematical abstractions appear to ‘slow down’ the creative becoming of the world enough to make us convince ourselves that the world gives itself to us ‘naturally’ as transjective universals. The price we pay for such illusions is a world that is alternatively self-identical and arbitrary.

An inherent violence attaches to the becoming of the world in the extent to which change is construed as arbitrary. The perceived arbitrariness and externality of change is in turn a function of how we understand beings to BE in themselves as mathematically self-present.

Quoting Joshs

Recognition does involve difference and similarity, but number requires the concept of identity , the repetition of the exact same.

Kind and generality consist in identity. Each particular is unique, so there is no identicality of particulars. Things are counted as being of the same kind, so there is identicality of kind.

Reply to Janus Quoting Janus

Kind and generality consist in identity. Each particular is unique, so there is no identicality of particulars. Things are counted as being of the same kind, so there is identicality of kind

Exactly. We invented the concept of ‘same kind’ in order to count, but same kind doesn’t exist in nature.

Quoting Joshs

Exactly. We invented the concept of ‘same kind’ in order to count, but same kind doesn’t exist in nature.

I get the argument that the concept serves a purpose in how we talk. The claims about what exists in nature seems to contradict the limits presented regarding such description. But how does that let us say what exists in nature?

Quoting Joshs

Exactly. We invented the concept of ‘same kind’ in order to count, but same kind doesn’t exist in nature.

Something must exist in nature that would support the judgement of 'kind' otherwise how would we have arrived at the idea? Animals generally associate with their own kinds, and for that matter 'animal' is a different kind than 'plant', and 'human' is a kind of animal. Then we have the biological and non-biological kinds of substances and even the different kinds of microphysical "particles".

So, I am not convinced we are entitled to say that kind does not exist in nature, I think the evidence points rather to the conclusion that kind does exist in nature, on every level of being.

Quoting Joshs

We invented the concept of ‘same kind’ in order to count, but same kind doesn’t exist in nature.

Flocks of birds, schools of fish, all comprise collections of ‘the same kind’. There are repetitions and patterns and instances of ‘the same kind’ in nature. How is that not so?

Reply to Wayfarer Quoting Wayfarer

Flocks of birds, schools of fish, all comprise collections of ‘the same kind’. There are repetitions and patterns and instances of ‘the same kind’ in nature. How is that not so?

It comes back to the issue of identity. Same kind is not identical kind. The same only continues to be itself slightly differently from one moment to the next. Iterability produces

"an imperceptible difference. This exit from the identical into the same remains very slight, weighs nothing itself...". “It is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition.”“Pure repetition, were it to change neither thing nor sign, carries with it an unlimited power of perversion and subversion. (Derrida)

Reply to Paine Quoting Paine

I get the argument that the concept serves a purpose in how we talk. The claims about what exists in nature seems to contradict the limits presented regarding such description. But how does that let us say what exists in nature?

I should have said that it is the nature of a meaning intention that contextual change intervenes in the repetition of the same ‘identity’. For Husserl, number in itself is not tied to anything but itself. Enumeration, as an empty ' how much', abstracts away all considerations that pertain to the nature of the substrate of the counting, including whether that substrate offers itself up for measurement in qualitatively or quantitatively changing increments. Enumeration represents what Husserl calls a free ideality. Derrida characterizes this feature of number in the following way;

“I can manipulate symbols without animating them, in an active and actual manner, with the attention and intention of signification(crisis of mathematical symbolism, according to Husserl) .”

“Now, Numbers, as numbers, have no meaning; they can squarely be said to have no meaning, not even plural meaning. …Numbers have no present or signified content. And, afortiori, no absolute referent. This is why they don't show anything, don't tell anything, don't represent anything, aren't trying to say anything. Or more precisely, the moment of present meaning, of “content,” is only a surface effect.”

Numeric idealization is unbound (within the strict limits of its own repetition); no contextual effects intervene such as was the case in the attempt to repeat the same word meaningfully.

Quoting Joshs

It comes back to the issue of identity. Same kind is not identical kind.

Kind is an abstraction from natural regularities, and as such is a fixed or static identity. Abstractions, like number, are static, although obviously their instantiations are not.

Reply to Janus
Aristotle would thank you if he were not otherwise occupied.

Quoting Joshs

]"an imperceptible difference. This exit from the identical into the same remains very slight, weighs nothing itself...". “It is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition.”“Pure repetition, were it to change neither thing nor sign, carries with it an unlimited power of perversion and subversion. (Derrida)

I must respectfully disagree with the passage from Derrida, which I find to be 'nonsense on stilts.' Identity, or what things are, is a fundamental constituent of rational thought and cognition. Even the simplest animals must identify kinds and types to navigate their environments.

In focusing on the abstraction involved in identifying kinds and likenesses, it's an overstatement to claim there are no kinds, repetitions, or likenesses in nature. These elements are plainly evident and essential; without any similarity or repetition, there would be only chaos.

To try and focus the issue with respect to Greek philosophy, the reason arithmetical knowledge was held in high esteem by the Greeks was because of its exactitude and apodicity:

[quote=Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra.]Neoplatonic mathematics is governed by a fundamental distinction which is indeed inherent in Greek science in general, but is here most strongly formulated. According to this distinction, one branch of mathematics participates in the contemplation of that which is in no way subject to change, or to becoming and passing away. This branch contemplates that which is always such as it is and which alone is capable of being known: for that which is known in the act of knowing, being a communicable and teachable possession, must be something that is once and for all fixed.[/quote]

(Emphasis added.)

Arithmetical proofs are not contingent - they are, as it were, perfectly intelligible to reason. Whereas empirical truths, or sensory knowledge, was held to be of a lower order - because the senses may deceive, because things may not be as they appear. That is the sense in which arithmetical and logical knowledge is regarded as 'higher' or more trustworthy than sensory data. Ultimately, this was because arithmetical proofs and logical laws are nearer to 'the unconditioned' (hence the italicized phrase above). To put that in the context of traditional philosophy, generally, rational principles and universals are nearer to the One than are sensible particulars. That even survived until the 17th C:

Quoting 17th Century Theories of Substance, IEP

In contrast to contemporary philosophers, most 17th century philosophers held that reality comes in degrees—that some things that exist are more or less real than other things that exist. At least part of what dictates a being’s reality, according to these philosophers, is the extent to which its existence is dependent on other things: the less dependent a thing is on other things for its existence, the more real it is.

I think that is what has been lost to the mainstream of Western philosophy, due to the decline of Platonic realism and the ascendancy of nominalism and empiricism.

I think where abstraction and quantification becomes pernicious is precisely in draining the world of the fleeting qualities of immediacy, now-ness, presence- of being, in fact. That's what I think the sources you mention ultimately have in their sights, isn't it? But I think that, if only the respect for arithmetical and logical principles that traditional philosophy had are retained, but the aesthetic and ethical principles that animated it are abandoned, that's what leads to 'the reign of quantity'. Which is precisely the 'cultural impact of empiricism'. That's what culminates in eliminative materialism and the idea that mind is the product of physical principles. It is the hallmark of a secular age.

I think what has really gotten lost in modern philosophy of all schools, is any orientation towards the unconditioned. And how to talk about it without falling back into tired religious tropes or metaphysical dogma. There is nothing that maps against it in the current lexicon, and it's not generally discussed, and if it is, it's couched in the lumbering verbiage of a 'philosophical absolute' or something similar. This, I think, is one of the major underlying themes of Vervaeke's Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.

Quoting Janus

So, I am not convinced we are entitled to say that kind does not exist in nature, I think the evidence points rather to the conclusion that kind does exist in nature, on every level of being.

I'd say this abductive shift is key in these sorts of arguments. "Which is more rational or plausible? To say that kinds do exist, or to say that they do not exist?"

Reply to Paine :lol: :cool:

Reply to Leontiskos :up:

Quoting Wayfarer

I must respectfully disagree with the passage from Derrida, which I find to be 'nonsense on stilts.' Identity, or what things are, is a fundamental constituent of rational thought and cognition. Even the simplest animals must identify kinds and types to navigate their environments.

:up:

Quoting Joshs

It comes back to the issue of identity. Same kind is not identical kind. The same only continues to be itself slightly differently from one moment to the next. Iterability produces
"an imperceptible difference. This exit from the identical into the same remains very slight, weighs nothing itself...". “It is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition.”“Pure repetition, were it to change neither thing nor sign, carries with it an unlimited power of perversion and subversion. (Derrida)

Derrida wants to say here that the old ontological metaphysics, built around the notion of ‘presence’, is over. It means that the present that eludes our consciousness is the other, always unknown side of what sustains ‘pure repetition’. The significant part of whatever we are doing now, at this present time, is completely absent from what we can see or feel. Yet, it is not clear how the absolute break, ‘pure repetition’ is related to iterability. But what is the process of the production of the same? It should not be simply attributed to iterability, mark, or differance. The identical is not the ultimate gap designating one of these, but the structure of operative recursive connections, maintaining temporal stability of persistent self-reference.

Reply to Number2018

Quoting Number2018

Derrida wants to say here that the old ontological metaphysics, built around the notion of ‘presence’, is over. It means that the present that eludes our consciousness is the other, always unknown side of what sustains ‘pure repetition’. The primary part of whatever we are doing now, at this present time, is completely absent from what we can see or feel. Yet, it is not clear how the absolute break, ‘pure repetition’ is related to iterability. What is the process of production? The identical is not the ultimate gap, but the structure of operative recursive connections, maintaining temporal stability and persistent self-reference

Consciousness for Derrida and Heidegger implies self-affection, a selfless turning back to itself to reflect on itself.
To be conscious is always to be self-conscious. This is the origin of identity, A=A. To say that experience is not conscious to itself does not mean that ‘the primary part of whatever we are doing now, at this present time, is completely absent from what we can see or feel’. On the contrary, differance, as the in-between of transit, is precisely what we see and feel.

Derrida famously wrote:

“The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling
presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence..(Limited Inc)

His thinking about identity was strongly influenced by Heidegger’s notion of Being as event. Heidegger introduced us to a beginning for thinking that is ontologically prior to the overt distinction between the present and the absent, the same and the other, familiarity and subversion, schemes and their dislocation, something and nothing, the relevant and the strange, binding and separating, identity and difference, being and becoming, good and evil. What Heidegger elaborated in the guise of the ‘as' structure, temporality and the making of the work of art marries these gestures within the same paradoxical moment. Heidegger constantly struggled to come up with an adequate way of articulating a notion of transit, othering and difference that the grammatical structure of language mitigates against, an essencing which is neither simply present nor absent, neither something nor nothing, neither future, now nor past.

Reply to Janus

Quoting Janus

Kind is an abstraction from natural regularities, and as such is a fixed or static identity. Abstractions, like number, are static, although obviously their instantiations are not.

I agree.

Reply to Wayfarer

Quoting Wayfarer

I must respectfully disagree with the passage from Derrida, which I find to be 'nonsense on stilts.' Identity, or what things are, is a fundamental constituent of rational thought and cognition

I agree that identity is a fundamental constituent of rational thought. My argument, shared by Varela, Thompson and other enactivists that Vervaeke claims to be influenced by,
is that rationality is secondary and derivative of a more fundamental form of sense-making, mindful skilled coping, which places relation and difference as prior to identity.

Quoting Wayfarer

In focusing on the abstraction involved in identifying kinds and likenesses, it's an overstatement to claim there are no kinds, repetitions, or likenesses in nature. These elements are plainly evident and essential; without any similarity or repetition, there would be only chaos

If we abandon the abstraction, or more precisely, see the variation within the abstraction that we employ to turn similarities and likenesses into fixed kinds, we not only do not lose what we are aiming for , the intimate relationality, harmony , compatibility and meaningfulness between events, but we gain a richer and more robust sense of the radical interconnectedness of events than we do when we smother phenomena with the stifling templates of self-identical kinds.

Reply to Leontiskos

Quoting Leontiskos

I'd say this abductive shift is key in these sorts of arguments. "Which is more rational or plausible? To say that kinds do exist, or to say that they do not exist?

Not only is saying kinds exist more rational, I would say that the notion of categorical identity is essential to most definitions of rationality. But then, there are more rigorous, more fundamental ways of grounding truth and meaning than by means of identity and rationality.

Quoting Joshs

But then, there are more rigorous, more fundamental ways of grounding truth and meaning than by means of identity and rationality.

I don't think so, and I don't think it's a coincidence that your sentence reads like a necessary falsehood. Apart from very odd and idiosyncratic definitions of "rational," something less rational or less plausible is not more robust.

Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Book One has been published.

WE LIVE TODAY in the aftermath of what philosopher Charles Taylor described as the “great dis-embedding.” While we once commonly understood our relationship to nature as being a part of the greater whole, we now find ourselves separate and isolated from its perpetual flow, desperately trying to inhabit an impossible Frankensteinian “view from nowhere.”

Some claim we’re above nature and capable of bending it to our will. Others diagnose our state as beneath nature, not worthy of participating in its cycles. They say we’re a scourge, and the planet would be better off without us.

This paradoxical confusion about our species’ role in the Cosmos has a common denominator.

After unknown thousands of years of faith in the inherent meaning in and of life, since the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, a dark wave of nihilism has washed across our global village. We’ve mistaken part of life’s complex experience, the problems, and waved away the greater emergent whole of their meaning.

How did this meaning crisis happen?

Awakening from the Meaning Crisis: Origins traces the history of what led to our contemporary malaise, offering scientific, spiritual, and philosophical interweaving threads that ground us in the troubling truth of our extraordinary evolution.