For the phenomenologists, perception is not representing a world, it is enacting one. This does not mean the mind invents the world, it means that perceiving is a form of doing, out of which the meaning of objects emerge in terms of use, of what we are doing with them and how we are doing it, and for what purposes.
It is that organisms are self-organising and self–maintaining in a way that non–organic matter is not . That is the ‘special metaphysical quality’. If there were a ‘force’ in the sense that science understands that term then it would be measurable. As to whether goal directedness is something which humans ascribe to organisms, the usual explanation is that these are ‘mechanisms’ which again ignores the self–originating nature of such behaviours, indeed of ‘behaviour’ in general.
Criticism is not mere complaint. The idea that the Universe is devoid of meaning has momentous consequences and entailments for philosophy and culture, even if it is the default view amongst the secular intelligentsia.
Notice that to even contest the idea that ‘the universe is meaningless’ is characterised as being a covert evangalist for Christianity, exactly as you did when you entered the conversation, saying that:
The reason it was not acknowledged, is that it is not implied. But the alternatives you and @tabemann see are either (1) acknowledge that the Universe is governed by blind physical forces or (2) that it is the divine creation. That’s why I said ‘the choice between the Blind Watchmaker and Creationism’: that is the choice you’re trying to force. The original post was composed to avoid either of those culturally-conditioned, pre-given outcomes.
The argument in the original post, is that the understanding that the objective universe is purposeless, is a consequence of the ‘grand abstraction’ that is made at the beginning of modern physics. You complain that this is irrelevant, yet are unwilling to consider how deep an influence it is on all of the debates about these questions. The sense that the Universe can be understood solely in terms of physical laws — physicalism, in other words— leaves out the very subject to whom such questions are meaningful, and then declares them meaningless.
You wouldn’t enroll in physics if you wanted to study biology and other life sciences, let alone anthropology or philosophy. Certainly, physics and scientific methods have wide applicability, but generalising from that to the idea that humans or animals are ‘arrangement of molecules’ says nothing meaningful.
A different sense of move then. An individual plant does not of its own volition change location.
I didn’t say what you quote me as saying here.
I can more or less agree with a formulation that says that the world is enacted as an interaction between bodymind and environment, although even that seems somewhat dualistic and it is after all just another way of formulating the situation. We are certainly not conscious of enacting a world.
Again you cherrypick what I’ve said which makes you look disingenuous. The rest of the sentence:
So your claim that I am accusing you of being a covert Christian evangelist is false.
Are you disagreeing with the understanding that the Universe is, on the global scale, purposeless? There can be no evidence that the cosmos has an overarching purpose, but you are free to believe it does, and I’m not saying there would be any shame in that. But you are being slippery because you won’t come out and say that is what you believe, that it is the idea that the cosmos is on the grandest scale purposeless (purposeless that is apart from the local purposes manifested in the behavior of living beings) that you are disagreeing with. I say “disagreeing with” not “arguing against” because you are not providing any argument other than a purported psycho-social explanation for why moderns by and large (allegedly) don’t believe in any overarching purpose. That said,you are not even explicitly stating disagreement. It’s like you want to disagree without owning up to it.
Physicalism does not leave out the subject. To claim that is absurd. Physicalism just has a different conception of the nature of the subject. Also physicalism doesn’t consider these questions meaningless at all, just definitively unanswerable. It’s astonishing how doggedly you keep repeating the same old mistaken assertions and tired non-arguments in your obsession with the bogeyman of physicalism.
And I say that as someone who is not arguing for physicalism…just against the idea that it is, on its own terms, self-refuting or that it is immoral or degenerate. Physicalism is just one of s suite of imaginable metaphysical views the truth statuses of which are indeterminable. I would rather say that since reality is non-dual, no “ism” or “ology” is going to be adequate to it.
As I explained in the original post
…the question of purpose, or its lack, doesn’t always require invoking some grandiose ‘cosmic meaning.’ Meaning and purpose are discovered first in the intelligibility of ordinary life — in the way we write, behave, build, and think. The moment we ask whether something is meaningful, we’re already inhabiting a world structured by purposes. And the belief that the Universe is purposeless is itself a judgement about meaning. Asking what this purpose might be, in the abstract, is almost a red herring — it doesn’t really exist in the abstract, but it is inherent in the purposeful activities of beings of all kinds, humans and other, which are driven by the imperative of survival. It is, as it were, woven into the fabric of existence.
Furthermore, we might say that purpose does not only belong to the realm of human intentionality, but is implicit in life itself. Even the most rudimentary organisms behave as if directed toward ends: seeking nutrients, avoiding harm, maintaining internal equilibrium. Nothing in the inorganic realm displays these (or any!) behaviours. This kind of directedness — what might be called biological intentionality — is not yet consciously purposeful, but it is not simply mechanical either.
And nor is it ‘elan vital’ or some secret metaphysical sauce.
I’ve made the case, it is thoroughly grounded in those same inconvenient facts that you declare ‘irrelevant’ rather than attempting to discredit. Look at the passage Joshs presents in the post above, which makes the same point.
The whole point of objectivity is to arrive at a perspective the same for any or all observers. It is precisely to ‘eliminate the subjective’ in that narrow sense, and it does that across an enormous range. But to then make that a metaphysical principle, which we do when we ascribe it to ‘the universe’ is where a methodologically prudent step morphs into a metaphysical postulate.
There are many ways of formulating the situation, but aren’t some ways more satisfying in terms of making sense of things than others? How would you prefer to formulate the situation? As far as not being conscious of enacting a world, writers in the enactivist tradition trace the origin of consciousness to the self-organizing norm-generating capabilities of the simplest single-celled organisms. Enactivists push back against both strict physicalist reductionism and dualism. Instead of asking “how does matter produce mind?”, they reframe the issue: life and mind are continuous phenomena, and consciousness is a natural outgrowth of living organization, emerging gradually with the evolution of more complex and integrated forms of life.
Yes, physicalism explains the subject on the basis of ready-made theoretical abstractions without recognizing the genesis of these abstractions in subjective experience . It tries to explain the origin on the basis of the derived product. As Merleau-Ponty puts it:
… the psychologists who practice the description of phenomena are not normally aware of the philosophical implications of their method. They do not see that the return to perceptual experience, in so far as it is a consequential and radical reform, puts out of court all forms of realism, that is to say, all philosophies which leave consciousness and take as given one of its results—that the real sin of intellectualism lies precisely in having taken as given the determinate universe of science, that this reproach applies a fortiori to psychological thinking, since it places perceptual consciousness in the midst of a ready-made world…
Have a read of this post which was made yesterday. Author asks if life is a meaningless accident, DNA came together as a fluke and now produces animals who’s only purpose is to suffer and die. Should we commit suicide by nuking the entire planet and putting everything out of its misery, including ourselves? Honestly posed question and pretty much what Nietszche foresaw as the inevitable nihilism which faces the post-modern condition (not that I concur in the least with his proposed amelioration in the ‘ubermensch’).
It’s parts move. I I stand in the same place, and wave my arms, that qualifies as moving doesn’t it?
Yeah, sorry about that, I don’t know how that came up under your name, i must have done something wrong.
I have no argument with any of that given that purpose within life is unarguably obvious. The questionable part is the extension of that fact to purportedly support the conclusion that purpose “is built into the very fabric of existence”. What could be meant by “the very fabric of existence” seems like an obscure rhetorical phrase.
If you do believe that the obvious reality of purpose within living organisms, in some sense of the use of the word, leads to such a metaphysical conclusion then you are arguing for thinking that there is transcendent purpose and/or immanent purpose “all the way down” so to speak.
The problem is that you can avow that as an article of faith, but it cannot be cogently argued for in terms that should and would convince any non-biased judge.
As to your point about biology not being merely mechanical, of course I agree and think it obvious.
As I’ve said, I think we can only “arrive at a perspective which is the same (most generally) for any and all observers” in the empirical and logico-mathematical domains. Any and all “metaphysical principles” are outside of that possibility.
Satisfying to who though? There seems to be great divergence regarding what explanations people find satisfying. I lean towards relational realism―that the world we know is real as a function of the relation between ourselves and what is around us. To me this seems more or less the same as enactivism. But again it is a dualistic formulation which cannot adequately capture a non-dual actuality, so it’s good only as far as it goes.
I also believe that things have a real existence apart from humanity, not in independent isolation but in the infinite interdependent webs of relations everything has with everything else. But then that too is just a metaphorical proposition of which we have no way of knowing how it relates to whatever actually is.
I can see what MP is getting at in the quoted passage, but I think the fact remains that phenomenologically speaking the world "presents itself to us and in that sense can be said to be given to us. We are precognitively affected by the “great whatever” such that we find ourselves in a shared world, that much we know. How it all comes about “behind the scenes” we can only speculate.
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Yes, as I said it qualifies as a different kind of movement. I think the point about the relationship between sentience and purpose is that simple animal organisms (note the relation between “animal” and “animate”) sense and actively move towards food sources or away form irrtants and danger. I’m not denying that some plants may be thought to do something like this.
No stress about the misquoting.
I think that all plants do this. It’s especially evident when you consider their roots.
Agreed. It seems I’ve misunderstood @Meta_U.
Even biology or other life sciences isn’t adequate, because biology is at the moment physics and chemistry. Still, biology can be said to put physics and chemistry in their place. We’ve built Voyagers and Pioneers that are now leaving the solar system, we’ve synthesized chemicals that set off the green revolution, but we haven’t built even 1 synthetic living cell in the lab, let alone a complete human being or an animal. There’s this gap between (physics, chemistry) and (biology) and between (biology) and (life) which people seem to be ignoring and its probably because science works, which is to say that, inter alia, we have a fairly good pharmacological/therapeutic industry despite.
What do you mean by dualism here? That there are subjects and objects and then relations between them? That there is a being with inner awareness confronting external matter? Did you know that enactivism rejects the dualistic notions of inner awareness and outer reality in favor of an inseparable subject-object dynamic?
I think that overstates the case. Even though I accept the idea that self and world are ‘co-arising’, I still think there’s a recognisable meaning attached to subjectivity and to agency, and that it describes a mode of being which is absent from inanimate objects.
An interesting point from Buddhist psychology (abhidharma) is that the ‘dharmas’ in this context are said to be momentary in nature. They’ re not proposed as self–existent material constituents in the sense that atom was in Greek atomism. But they are precisely ‘moments of experience’ - which is why abhidharma psychology has been recognised as phenomenological from the outset. The sense of separateness of self–and–object which pervades Western culture is deprecated.
This is evidence of how science is easily misled. Since these fields of study are themselves purposefully directed, they are not necessarily directed toward determining truth. In fact, they are more pragmatic in nature, being guided by prevailing social conditions.
The second world war for example brought about the Manhattan Project, directing nuclear physics. The same is the case with biology, COVID-19 led to rapid approval of mRNA vaccines. These are examples of how extraordinary conditions have an amplified effect on the direction of science, but scientific investment is always directed by the purposes prioritized by the current social conditions.
Western society is in general, materialistic in nature. This is to use “materialistic” to indicate that material goods are prioritized over spiritual goods. I suggest that it is this materialist trend in our social conditions which allows physics and chemistry to be the guiding sciences over biology.
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Right, organisms create a normative inside and inanimate matter doesn’t. What I meant to highlight was that cognition is world-involving. Perception, thought, and emotion are not sealed-off brain processes; they are patterns of coordinated activity spanning brain, body, and environment. The organism doesn’t first build a complete inner model and then act, it enacts a meaningful world through ongoing sensorimotor engagement.
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Agreed completely. You said better what I would have said than how I attempted to express essentially the same ideas.
@Meta_U that’s correct, there’s the social factor. Think Mowgli, brought up by wolves, taken care of by a bear and a panther, and who can forget King Louis, our gigantopethicus cousin, and his troop. One’s nurture or lack of it, can hugely impact the direction science turns. We’re at a momentous period in history ,- science is flourishing and so is religion.
That post has been deleted as AI generated. Which is a shame, because it would have been the most substantive reply in the thread to date. So I can’t comment on it, because it’s been removed, but I can still read it as a mod. However I will note that the closing remark was ‘It marks a level of organization where new kinds of explanations become necessary.’ It is exactly these ‘new kinds of explanations’ that this OP is directed towards.