As I mentioned before, I’d actually map matter to execution and form to code. I can go into the reasons for that if you’re interested, but for now I’ll just leave it at that.
This is where, I think, the mapping starts to break down a bit. For me, the universe itself is not a hylomorphic unity of matter/form (i.e. a “thing”), but an ordered unity of things and relations between them. Furthermore, hylomorphism typically includes a distinction between natural things which have an internal principle of change, and artificial things whose form is imposed externally. The mapping essentially breaks that distinction by making everything artificial.
It’s not missing, it’s out of scope. Hylomorphism is primarily a thesis about intrinsic principles of unity. Most traditional hylomorphic metaphysical systems were accompanied by a theory of causality. In these systems, efficient and final causation are generally considered extrinsic to the thing, and the so-called “first” efficient cause is generally identified as “God”. But in my opinion, hylomorphism does not, in itself, entail such a committment.
Again, historically most hylomorphists, starting with Aristotle, posited some kind of agentic consciousness as a “ground” of one sort or another. Probably the majority of theorists were theistic rather than pantheistic or panentheistic. Again, hylomorphism itself does not necessitate any particular answer here, but neither is ii incompatible with such answers.
Jaworski is worth taking a look at, though I should mention that Jaworski hasn’t really engaged with thinkers like Juarrero or Deacon (or vice versa). Jaworski is bit more of a traditional metaphysician and interacts more with thinkers like Kit Fine, Mark Johnston, Kathryn Koslicki, Bernard Williams, Jaegwon Kim, etc. Not saying that’s a bad thing, just didn’t want to give the impression that he’s in the same milieu as the other thinkers I’ve mentioned.
That’s an interesting connection. I’m not as familiar with Nagel’s work as I am with (say) Chalmers’s. I’d like to rectify that at some point.
Personally, I find Lonergan compelling on these kinds of questions. He once wrote that objectivity is the fruit of authentic subjectivity, which could be read as a response to Kierkegaard’s “truth is subjectivity”. It keeps Kierkegaard’s insistence on the existing subject but refuses the opposition between subjective and objective. For Lonergan, “I am a knower,” and “I am Thomas Nagel,” are not aporetic. They are judgments and, once authentically affirmed, are facts within being.
But Lonergan still has a place for something like the Kierkegaardian leap, only it shows up at the level of decision and religious conversion, where what’s important is not more knowledge but committment and self-transcending love. So for Lonergan, the leap belongs to becoming oneself, rather than to knowing that oneself exists.
I actually agree that nothing should try to “rejoin” them. Personally, I tend to see the problem of how to bridge the subject “in here” to an object “out there” as a pseudo-problem that arises from a broken picture of what knowing is. On that point, at least, I have affinity with Davidson’s rejection of scheme/content dualism. Where we differ, I think, is that I don’t see hylomorphism (matter/form, with substance as the composite) as a bridge at all, but as part of an account of the structure of whatever is known (e.g. material objects).
Agreed. I see hylomorphism as “heuristic”: “form” ultimately names whatever is to be understood, like the ‘x’ in an equation, and the sciences supply the content. So I think we probably agree about explanation, and disagree only about whether hylomorphism claims to be such an explanation.
To me, whether two accounts are about the same thing is a question of identity that grammar alone can’t settle. The hylomorphic notion of a “thing” or “substance” is an answer to exactly that question.
The money example is a good one, and I largely agree with you. Finance and metallurgy as irreducibly different explanatory categories, with money partly constituted by meaning. One small quibble: I wouldn’t say that money has come loose from matter entirely, since even ledgers require some physical realization.
I agree with you if this means rejecting one “privileged” vocabulary. I’m less inclined to agree that there’s no “way things really are”.
Agreed. Statistical laws and non-systematic conditions sit much more comfortably with Anscombe than with Davidson’s nomological principle.
Is this to say, I addressed one version of hylomorphism and you are defending another?
Is you version therefore one which has sought to use The Razor on those older versions?
Simulation Theory of course doesn’t avoid the implications that we exist within a created thing, which then implies a “creator” or “creators” - which may be why some “opinions” emerge about certain philosophies such as Hylomorphism.
Be that as it may, I think trying to solve The Hard Problem without accepting the possibility will have those trying to solve it, continue chasing their tails…
This problem of “God” of course, is understandable, but ST doesn’t go so far as to make claims as to the name or nature of such, as does religion, and I don’t see it as a problem which requires avoidance or reinterpreting any philosophy to suit that approach. If indeed hylomorphism does not, in itself, entail such a commitment, one is probably talking about something else rather than.
Semantics?
EST regards “The Universe” as being one thing which had a beginning and consisting of many things, all of which together are “The Universe”.
Perhaps the problem with philosophy is that there are so many and some are even in opposition to others, which would mean either one finds a way to bring them all together in coherency or dump philosophy as a means of dissolving the Hard Problem or dump any which show they are unable to do so?
Interesting. The aporetic element I had in mind is indeed the one that, for Kierkegaard and perhaps for Lonergan, prompts an individual to leap out of thought and into faith, from “knowledge” to “commitment,” from “knowing” to “becoming.” This may be placing too much weight on Nagel’s simple question, I acknowledge. Still, what you’re calling an “authentic affirmation” of self-awareness seems to result in something different than a new fact, though it’s quite difficult to articulate precisely where the problem lies in simply calling it a fact.
It’s always helpful to have that reminder. Us philosophers and our analogies . . . !!
So back to the pie: We don’t have any trouble understanding how the ingredients of the pie come together in the cooking process. If asked, a culinary scientist (is there such a thing?) could give us a highly detailed account. We also understand why we need a new term, “pie,” to describe the result: Not only is “pie” a functional description which it would be incredibly cumbersome to avoid, but the ingredients have been subjected to a process, mixing + heating, which has changed their constitution from what it was at the beginning.
Nothing like this clarity applies to consciousness, I contend (except maybe the obvious need for the term itself). We sense, dimly, that something like this must be happening, as we “mix and heat” the physical and the mental, but to say more would be premature. So to those who want to argue that “something like this” is enough to solve or dissolve the Hard Problem (similar to a fallback to “emergence”), I can only say that for me it’s not enough.
It’s been a million years since I read Consciousness Explained. I know I disagreed strongly with Dennett’s views on nearly everything, including qualia, but I’ll keep mum since I can no longer recall his specific arguments nor my objections. But yes, I’d say you’re right that, for Dennett, consciousness is basically a user illusion.
I’ve been waiting for someone to bring this up! It’s absolutely the vulnerable point in my contention that we can apply different language to the same concept, and know that it is the same concept.
Yes, I’m painting a picture in which conceptual apprehension can be pre-linguistic, or linguistic-adjacent. (I’d call it para-linguistic but that term is taken, and means something different.) See this exchange between @Banno and @EQV :
Just so, according to me as well. I’m suggesting there can be an inquiry into the “way things really are” that remains aloof from any privileged vocabulary. Indeed, the assumption that there must be a privileged vocabulary is responsible for a lot of wasted philosophical energy. But rejecting this picture doesn’t have to involve rejecting a privileged conceptual structure, perhaps even what Sider is happy to call a privileged ontology.
How do we apprehend concepts without starting with words, with language? Not only is this a very interesting discussion, as you say, it’s also probably way outside the confines of this thread. Maybe one of us conversing now will start a new thread? I’d be happy to see it either defended or contested. But just in a sentence or two: I think we can conceive of grounding relations pictorially, or else in terms of logical form. We see the building blocks, imaginatively, and bracket the labels. When we do put it in language, we might start with, “There’s this building block here that’s called by many ‘physical’ and this other building block there that’s called by many ‘mental’; what grounds what?”
And the vulnerable point in all of this is: Is this really “pre-linguistic”? Don’t you need language to go on to do the conceptual analysis? Also, I’m in the process of taking on board some of what McDowell has to say about this, so the whole idea may be a work in progress for me.
Sorry for the delay in responding. Your question made me aware of my relative ignorance of the physiology of hearing, and researching the subject lead me down a bit of a rabbit hole.
In the process of reading up on the topic, it occurred to me that a couple of idiosyncratic things about me that I had never considered connected might well be connected. (Poor sense of rhythm and poor ability to follow a conversation in a noisy environment.) It turns out that relevant research has been done and those characteristics are correlated.
Anyway, I understand what you are asking better, and yes, for something to sound musical there needs to be periods where the frequency of sound is sustained. A yell has frequency content, but not necessarily a sustained constant frequency. For example, a yell might have a continuously rising frequency (like if a trombone slide was being pulled in while playing a ‘note’).
A time domain description of a yell would certainly contain information that would be obscured in a frequency domain description. A frequency domain description of a trombone sliding would indicate that the pitch was changing during the slide, but it wouldn’t provide information about whether the pitch was rising or falling.
BTW, I downloaded a free spectrum analyzer app for my phone called Spectroid. It provides a frequency domain description in graphic form of whatever is picked up by your phone’s mic. So you can whistle, sing, yell, etc. and see a frequency domain representation of the sounds. Things like the second and third overtones of my whistle are clearly visible. You might have fun playing with it.
I’d like to hear more about that, if you have the inclination. My former wife suffered from bizarre forms of “amusia” so I’m kind of a connoisseur.
Interesting, thanks.
I do a lot of home-studio recording, so I use those gizmos a lot. You can’t really get the hang of how music sounds (as opposed to harmonic theory) until you take the overtones into account, and having them laid out by a freq analyzer is essential to avoid all kinds of horrible production.
It also highlights the freq/pitch distinction, because I might have to tinker with the frequencies of, say, a snare drum, which has no pitch at all. But the issue of overtones still applies.
It is my contention that experience emerges long before the capability to talk about it. I’m sympathetic to the allure of “pre-linguistic”. I spent better than half a decade trying to successfully employ “pre-linguistic” within my own position but found it incapable of picking out and/or accurately describing creatures that are amidst language creation/acquisition. That’s a very large swathe of candidates being left sorely neglected. Hence, I abandoned it. You’ve picked that vulnerability out in the quote below, albeit on a different complexity level…
Understood. Indeed, it is a work in progress for myself as well. I’ve watched McDowell and Davidson’s discussion as well as Strawson, Dummett, and Quine’s.
Stemming from my own ‘theory’ of meaning, which is unlike the two dominant methodological approaches, I have a notion/understanding of language with a much broader scope than just picking out words; it’s more of an outline, as it were. I’ve mentioned this general idea of an outline before, in an earlier exchange of ours regarding thought, belief, and meaning.
In line with the need to be able to describe language less animals’ experience, any notion of experience worth its salt must be amenable to evolutionary progression. That is to say that it needs to be capable of taking proper account of other creature’s experience as well as our own. Hence, and filling out the “pre-linguistic” aspect, Nagel’s (in)famous question “What is it like to be a bat?”, would have a much more practical answer, despite the very peculiar way the question itself is formed. That much is apparent - to me anyway - after considering the fact that each and every segment/duration dissected from any individual candidate’s experiential timeline is different from the rest of the segments within their own timeline, our own first person ‘qualities’ of experience notwithstanding.
As you say though, this is all well beyond the scope of this thread’s focus, which is Davidson’s notion(s) of dual descriptions.
Well. You did exactly what I warned against, even after commending the warning. I think the speech act folks may count that as performative contradiction.
The critique is certainly fair enough, as I’ve given very little ‘substance’ to go on.
The point of the pie analogy was to highlight the seemingly disparate sides of the consciousness debates as well as to hint towards and/or skirt around the inherent lack of explanatory power of either side, if taken by itself.
In addition to what I’ve said about the analogy previously…
On the one hand, I completely agree with the general thrust as I understand it. Particularly as it pertains to the different domains, and the tremendous attention to certain details that some frameworks lay out nicely. Others may focus upon completely different aspects/features of the very same thing.
However, if experience is the sort of thing that happens prior to language creation/use, then we can get it wrong on a very basic level. I don’t think I’d call it an “ontological” level, but I can’t help but to stand firm on the idea that we can be mistaken about what needs to be the case in order to facilitate experience. For example, I think most, if not all would agree that certain biological machinery is necessary.
When contemplating experience that happens long before our words ever hit the paper, we can most certainly be mistaken about everything that such experience consists of. I’m reminded of centuries past dogma regarding the neglect to admit that other creatures had experience, or emotions, or thought, or belief.
We’re well beyond that sort of false elevation of humans above other animals regarding those facets of being alive in the world. At least, we’ve begun to acknowledge the fact that while other animals may not be capable of metacognition, and all sorts of other ‘mental’ feats that humans are, many are indeed quite capable of thinking about what’s going on around them; they do so with simpler thought and belief… hence, simpler experience.
Circling back to the idea of not privileging one vocabulary or framework above another…
I would most certainly privilege an accounting practice that proved capable of effectively setting out how experience emerges.
I wouldn’t call that “falling back onto” emergence.
If memory serves, the chapter in CE called “Qualia Disqualified” was a reworking of “Quining Qualia” (or possibly the latter was a reworking of the chapter), making the same arguments.
Sorry, I’m lost. I may well have done what you say, but could you point me back to the context you’re referring to? What was the warning?
No worries, Jay. It was not an explicitly worded warning, and it’s not directly relevant to the discussion regarding dual descriptions. I do not want to detract from that.
OK! Though as I get older, I’m aware that I forget shit, including shit I wrote myself, so don’t hesitate to point it out.
Yes, this seems sensible. Can you say more about the significance it has for the “pre-linguistic” question? Do you mean that the difference, as experienced by a non-linguistic animal, would still be conceptualized by them?
This is tricky. I agree that we can be wrong, in two distinct senses: We can give a mistaken account of what causes or constitutes the experience, and we can be wrong about whether the experience is veridical – that is, whether it is of what it appears to be of. But I think there’s a third sense in which we can’t be wrong. My account of a experience of a mirage in the desert can be wrong on both the above scores, but I can’t be wrong in claiming that I appear to have had it. Oh, I suppose we could construct a case where even my memory is false, but then we would just say, “I had the experience of having a false memory of something.”
Absolutely.
Nor would I. But I’m sure you used the term “effectively setting out” with deliberation. If I’ve effectively set out how experience occurs (using language to do so, we assume), have I captured basic ontology? Does the fact that my account is the most effective one so far (let’s say) mean that there can’t be any daylight between the terms I’m using and “the way things are”? I’d say that what we’d have would be an excellent match, employing really useful language, but quite a long way from a privileged vocabulary. Any formal logical language would be a good example of this.
Moreover, in order for the account to be useful, the users must agree on how to use the terms – what they’re meant to refer to, how they match up with other terms, etc. Such agreement can’t be achieved by consulting some “other reality” that is different from the one under discussion – no Big Glossary, in other words, that can mediate disputes between philosophical traditions. So again, “correct” and “incorrect” use of an ontological vocabulary is going to be both contextual and consensual.
If your interest is in my idiosyncrasies I can’t say that I have any insight to speak of, on how my poor sense of rhythm plays a role in my difficulty with following conversations in a noisy environment. I’ll be somewhere with a crowd and band tonight. Perhaps I’ll gain some insight then, but I don’t have any confidence in that happening.
I paid attention last night to what my auditory experience was like when I was trying to listen to people across the table from me, while a band was playing and people all around me were carrying on conversations. It seemed to me as if I was failing to pick up on syllable boundaries, as if my brain were trying to combine the end of one syllable with the beginning of another syllable and interpreting such ‘misaligned pseudosyllables’ as gibberish.
The rhythm of the music seemed to especially dominate my auditory experience and impede my ability to get in sync with the speech of the person I was listening to. So I need to attend to my auditory experience in a noisy environment without music sometime, to see if music in the background makes it particularly difficult for me to parse speech or not.
Anyway, I’m glad you asked about it, because I did attend to my auditory experience under such conditions, in a way I never had before.
Appreciate your report on your night out! What you say about the rhythm factor suggests a couple of things. Maybe the experiment to try is: noise in the background that has some rhythmic regularity (a washing machine going round and round?) versus just plain noise. Or see what happens if the background music is loud but very “ambient,” not much rhythm. Vary all these factors (noise, rhythm, music), in other words.
The description of what happens to your perception of syllables is also suggestive. You probably know about “masking,” when two instruments are emphasizing the same frequency range, so they cancel each other out in the listener’s ear. I wonder if something like that can affect hearing where syllables break. Totally speculation here, but there’s a temporal reality you have to pick up on, in order to hear syllables and words; you have to be able to hear when they “stop and start.” If there was a different, very insistent tempo that was occurring at the same time, it’s like it’s competing for your attention, wanting you to break the words at the same points that the 4/4 (say) tempo breaks its beats. So the experiment to try there would be to have a friend speak to you in synch with the rhythm of the background music (sort of rudimentary rap) and see if the problem recurs.
OK, that’s my imaginative trip for the day, thanks! (Except now I’m trying to imagine getting a cadre of people together to “experiment” with you. You might have pay them, or bribe them . . . )
You did exactly what I warned against, even after commending the warning. I think the speech act folks 
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