I confess that I find that difficult to parse ! But I don’t blame you. I was reading other sources lately too and thinking what ? In my experience, I usually “get” something when I can catch the tail of the founding metaphor.
Stephen Wolfram would like that. I’ve written lots of code for cellular automata. This tension between the discrete and continuous looks fundamental. “It from bit” because signs are discrete. But discrete as iterable bounded unities. The “hard digital core.” This arguably Plato’s “one” as essence of intelligibility. Yet we intuit a flow, or try to say that we do with finite chains of discrete signs. If I recall correctly, Heisenberg’s QM was more frankly discrete than Schrodinger’s.
Actually this really speaks to me. Hegel wrote that “Reason is purposive activity.” We might think of this as a “naked streaming of reality” that is also furiously making sense of itself. Peirce presented the past as a revisable construct for addressing the future. All empirical concepts are future directed. So this selection and prioritization is “toward” something. Toward what ? Nietzsche wrote that an organism wants to “vent its power.” This connects to what I mentioned earlier as the depth in the word “express.” To press out. To press outward. To expand. I want to avoid a reductive biological reading here, though that’s suggested and included. A cynic might say “it’s all sex-display to propagate your genes.” But I think we agree that there is a kind of mimetic will, the imposition of new forms. The eros toward math is partially explained this way. What I build in stone can fall nevertheless. What I build in pure form is indestructible.
This is precisely what I am trying to move away from. Thinking does not disclose itself only through signs. Take dance, for example. It is also a form of thinking, but dance discloses only itself, in the moment.
Here I would recall the Hindu image of the creation of the world: the world is created in the dance of the god Shiva. This differs sharply from the Western image of the world as logos.
Animals also have a gaze, but animals do not think in signs. They exist bodily. For them, the gaze is a practical prediction of the future.
Language can also be understood as a map of the possible: it shows what future is possible within language.
Well I generally agree with your anti-logocentrism, but recall that I insist that objects themselves in the world are signs.
But I grant that there is a continuous component in reality, like the chora. And the dance is primarily “significant” in terms of its “quality.” Keep in mind that I reject the idea of “pure conceptuality” without equivocation. Hence lots of my recent threads. Signs are “material” and they “radiate” in the world.
One can — and I am even inclined — to include dancing as part of thinking. But you can understand my thinking that thinking was the usual so-called conceptual thinking.
I think that existence is largely “visceral.” But I also think that intense historicity is difficult without signs.
I’m with you. To me the point of digging into the sign is really to grasp just this. Pure logos is an anemic mythology. As Feuerbach puts it, the creator who creates nature with a word is implicitly man’s assertion of his distance from nature. That “is” (or was at the time ) the essence of religion for humanity. “We are not animals.” Why not ? Through participation in divine essence, an eternal universal conceptuality.
A certain Plato, not mine, is the avatar of this, and it goes with asceticism, denial of the flesh as interrupting contact with divine essence.
“My” Plato is the thinker of the \chi that gives essences their fragile unstable being.
But I read Plato in terms of the incarnation symbol. The divine only lives as mortal flesh. “Meaning” only lives in the “materiality” or “sensuousness” of mortal signs.
Last point, I have a dog at my home here and she catches scraps of ham in her mouth. She seems to grasp that ham as a unity which is meaningful and desirable for her. She enacts its meaning for her. To me that is visceral appropriation of a generalized sign.
Yes I think so. Heisenberg was trying to account for the discrete jumps in electron energy levels that give rise to the emission and absorption lines in atomic spectra, so his account was intrinsically discrete from the outset.
Schrodinger presented a wave equation describing the continuous time evolution of the probability of expected future measurements. This leads to the measurement problem if we unthinkingly adopt metaphysical realism, and this is what Bohr argued against.
As you are aware, QBism re-interprets the evolution of the wave equation as the evolution of the agent’s state of belief about future outcomes – the issue becomes epistemic not ontological. As I understand it, Fuchs made the name change from Quantum Bayesianism to QBism to emphasize his conviction that the results of applying Bayesian probability theory to the situation were not objective but subjective – i.e. he moved the basis of the theory away from the world and into the agent in accordance with the work of Bruno De Finetti.
Right. And weirdly the epistemic becomes ontological again as the consciousness of the agent is understood as the very being of the situation for the agent. Hence Heidegger’s use of “truth” or “unconcealment” as another name for being itself, for time itself.
I like to understand belief, in these terms, as the articulation of world face. I don’t have beliefs. My beliefs have me. They are the “truth” of the situation now for me. If I am uncertain, the world itself is ambiguous. Indeed, uncertainty is “lived” as the threatening ambiguity of world.
Lots of “indirect realist” talk is probably generated out of politeness. I use “seems” to indicate my open-ness to more input, to recognize the freedom of the other to see things differently.
This can unfortunately get crystallized into a blind faith in some gap between us and reality. Reality’s very presence is treated as a mere ambassador (whose own presence is lived but ignored theoretically). Less awkwardly put, people live in the “perceptual faith” and suppress this when they theorize. The gap is between life and theory, which in this case is bad for the dominant theory.
I propose that we should think of dance not as something that is almost thinking, but as thinking in the same sense — or perhaps even in a more primary sense.
Conceptual thinking is the product of a more developed, and perhaps very specific, civilization. But for archaic peoples, dance is a way of communicating with spirits — with something analogous to the world of Ideas.
Choreographers and ballet masters often regard dance precisely as a natural way of thinking through the body. Here one can also note that dance cannot be fully fixed or recorded. Even modern video recording cannot capture it completely. And it is even less possible to transmit it fully as a system of signs.
Dance is transmitted only through the body and through time.
Actually I agree with you, basically, that dancing is a more primary “thinking.”
George Lakoff argues for the metaphoricity of cognition, and he traces these metaphors back to the body. The body itself is the “foundation” of metaphor. “Forward” is not essentially a metaphor but the way that animals tend to move into their field of vision or smell.
Right. So we might say that spirits ( gods ) are especially visceral forms of “group cognition.” I would suggest that the repeatability of a dance makes it minimally a kind of “sign.” I could just use the word “being.” In the context of this thread, the dance would be a dance through being possibily repeatable. Or, if we consider a unique historical event, it still has being in terms of the “faces” it showed to different subjects who “refer” to it, even if not in explicitly conceptual ways.
“Analogous to the world of ideas” suggests a relatively static gallery of spirits, which we find in Greek mythology and elsewhere. I think a visceral “knowledge” is encoded in such myths. Which may and most plausibly have their most vivid life not for theory but for the dancer.
The repeatability of a dance, or its rhythm, is perhaps not so much a sign as an unfolding of time. Time is probably possible precisely because it has structure.
I use dance as an example of fundamental thinking not because it is universal, but because it may be closer to the disclosure of being in Heidegger’s sense.
Dance is perhaps better understood through phenomenology.
So we are basically maybe agreeing in our individual lingos. Perhaps I should drop the word “sign” as misleading.
Is there structure without “identity” ? This “identity” or “synthesis” is what I’m aiming at. The river is not this water or that water that passes through it. But it comprises them. Or rather it is their unity or synthesis.
Yes, I agree with you. Sort of what I mean by “quality.” There is no pure conceptuality but rather the sensory-visceral world has a certain structure through the “discreteness” of its objects. They are not discrete in the sense of having determinate boundaries. Not at all. It’s rather that even very fuzzy boundaries are boundaries in the first place through the unity of the object.
I am not sure that I am proving anything here. At this point, I am rather proposing an idea.
You led me to the thought that rhythm provides reproducibility, while the sign is the way thinking expresses this reproducibility. This may be one of the ways in which time, being, and thinking are connected.
The more familiar form of thinking for our civilization is the isolation of objects. An object can be isolated because it is not unique, because it repeats.
But what if we try to think not from the repeatability of objects, but from the repeatability of action? What if this is no less broad a way of thinking?
I have noticed that the creative process often works better during the mechanical repetition of some action: walking, tapping a pen on the table, even touching one’s own body. Rhythm structures, and it has power. We can recall the rowers of a galley or the military drum. Music is extremely abstract and does not point to anything concrete, yet it gives thought something to work through by means of rhythm.
Plato’s constructions are captivating, but we can imagine that objects are not necessarily connected through an Idea gathered in the chora. Perhaps repetition itself already creates a being and a way of interacting with the world.
I think the important difference is that, in many traditional cults, spirits do not live in a separate world. Rather, they are encountered here, near the human being; one only has to find contact with them.
And this contact happens through ritual, as the repetition of action; through sacrifice, as something irreversible; or through dance, as a way of entering a flow and tuning the psyche.
A separate world of Ideas is still different from a world of spirits. The former seems to belong more to certain strands of Western metaphysics, where the higher or truer world is separated from the visible one — as in Platonism, and later in some forms of Christianity, Judaism, and Gnosticism.
What did they do in those caves ? I can’t recall the source or sources, but my vague understanding is that one “becomes the god.” Probably (?) there was sacrifice and blood ritual.
Mithras is depicted as being born from a rock. He is often shown as emerging from a rock, already in his youth, with a dagger in one hand and a torch in the other.
One of the most characteristic and poorly-understood features of the Mysteries is the naked lion-headed figure often found in Mithraic temples, named by the modern scholars with descriptive terms such as leontocephaline (lion-headed) or leontocephalus (lion-head).
In Nietzsche’s portrait of Christ, we get the suggestion of something beyond “fixed formulae.” But his Christ was gentle, serene. Nietzsche is ambivalent about this portrait, despite its profundity. So his own position at least includes it, if also something contrary or complementary.
Here we get near the edge of “universal rationality.” The intersection of the esoteric and the visceral. The movie Midsommar investigates this edge. Sometimes profound, it also plays into standard structures ( isn’t as profound as it could be perhaps.)
The initial scene of the suicide/murder via carbon monoxide is a piece of genius. The music is numinous. It is a subtle critique of the “emptiness” that can grab those who find themselves unplugged in our high-tech comfortable society.
You may be familiar with the positivist sense of history. First myth, then metaphysics, and then positivism. Ideas as other-worldly seem to fit with metaphysics. But this is a slippery issue. We have forms of “The Good.” Abstraction would also include “The One” or some possibly concrete sense of the unity of the world.
Still, the move from anthropomorphic and stereo-morphic gods suggests as moving into the “head.” “Idea” is a visual metaphor. Seeing is a “pure” contact with the object, safely at a distance. No perturbation of the object. No smell. No tactile resistance.
The world is a spectacle, a feast for the eyes. So it’s the “metaphysics” of distance and detachment, of watching from that other world.
I have seen Midsommar. In my view, it exploits the image of cult members as mad fanatics.
There is also the classical ballet The Rite of Spring, about ancient cults sacrificing young girls to spring. I checked this, and as far as I understand, it is an artistic construction by the author, not something directly supported by history.
Besides — and this is the key point — we can see the wide use of both ritual and sacrifice even today. I should note that I use “sacrifice” in a narrower sense. Sacrifice is first of all the refusal of a part of oneself, not a random killing. Parents sacrifice themselves for their children, soldiers for the state, employees for corporate loyalty.
Ritual is even more widespread. A banal example would be the many actions we repeat every day in order to confirm loyalty to some system of power — an idea, a state, or a social environment.
Dance does not necessarily serve as an appeal to gods. It is rather an affirmation of oneself through inclusion in a certain process. Even simply as an attractive social object in a nightclub.
Ritual dances in cults tune the psyche to a shared mystery, which in one way or another changes reality and includes certain forces in the process. Literally, this can be understood as a tuning of goals and psyche.
But perhaps I am going too much into details. Originally, I mentioned dance as a reference to a certain phenomenological experience.
I would also add that Heidegger himself was deeply critical of the Platonic division between the sensible world and the world of ideas. This does not mean that I reject Plato completely. Rather, I think these are different philosophical traditions. The question of being and time belongs to another register. Phenomenology has little to do with the idea of two separate worlds.
So do atemporal objects endure without changing ? Or are you thinking of more mathematical entities ? Qubits are abstractions, yes ?
Some philosophers consider the positive integers to be outside of time. 2 comes “after” 1 but not in a temporal sense. I might say that we learn to ignore time in this case. We learn to count in time, but we learn that “that doesn’t count” in some contexts.
Are bits atemporal in your jugdment ?
“Distances emerge from it.” So do these atemporal entities play a role in scientific explanation ?
I agree. Phenomenology “becomes” ontology by ditching any sense of a external world, and therefore ditching any sense of experience is internal.
So for me, we are talking about being and time in relation to this visceral sensuous world. In which we have entities that endure, that we share and can talk about.
I was just reading Gerson’s book. To the average Platonist, I am almost the opposite of a Platonist perhaps. Or I’m trying to read Plato through Heidegger and Bakhtin. The idea of the idea has a solid core under all the otherworldly mystification. I suggest that it’s “all over the place” in terms of the discrete component of the world. The unity of objects themselves and the recognition of them as belonging to categories. But this includes a dog snapping a piece of ham out of the air. Presumably acting on that piece of ham as a unified “target” with a rich “significance.”
You mention repeatable actions. Actions are objects in the properly general sense that I’m going for. Events are objects. Processes are objects. So “object” is almost a logical term. Anything with an identity is an object. But this formal component of the world is without substance. Not a higher substance, but a “character” of visceral experience, its articulation. Instead of a blur or good of feeling and sensation, we have a rich “structure.” This structure is not “hidden substance” but “only real” through what it structures.