Auto-SummaryThe post discusses the concept of materialism and its role in explaining the origins of thought and mental experience. The author argues that materialism, which posits that everything is contained in conceptualized terms of a theoretical field, is necessary for debating positions. However, the author also highlights the challenge of explaining subjective experiences, such as the redness of red or the feeling of pain, which cannot be quantified or explained through objective terms. The post suggests that consciousness, while being part of the physical world, remains ontologically subjective and cannot be fully reduced to quantifiable terms. The author concludes that discursive thought is tied to our objectification of the world, but acknowledging subjective experiences does not contradict the establishment of physical cosmology. Instead, it adds an anomalous layer to our understanding of the natural world.
I don't really think I know what Laughingdog meant and was joking. People are hedged up in expressing positions, and counter positions but they are not saying what they mean, it seems to me. Maybe he was commenting on this, when he said that things seem to be spouted off, but then we are all in this same boat then, however many leaky spouts we are.
I still don't think a position can be debated too well if materialism (or what isn't even yet given a name or form as opposed to it) is not stated at some point along the line. Redgreenvines implied earlier an idea of materialism has something to do with explaining the origin of thought/mind, where we might take one of two ontological positions; one which is right and the other wrong.
It seems like an understandable response to the OP; and kind of a capitulation or championing of terms, more than an explanation of the origins of a physical world. A position on this kind of dualism (the kind where some kind of reasoning assumes some idea of the primacy or importance of mental experience, and from that requires us to clarify what sort of entity it is) could be materialism in the sense that everything is contained in some conceptualized terms of a theoretical field.
On Ontological Subjectivity (Added response)
I think that the concept of "thought" is mostly conventional and artificially conceived at face value. It relates to a discursive or epistemic practice. For instance, someone might say "I think..." and what projects and stands out initially, is not an entity of one kind or another, but a shared discourse. If I stand next to a tree and say "I think..." that it has certain properties, and someone else from a different position says something else, we do not say it is just a matter of difference in perceptions, or points of view, or that we don't see the same thing and chalk things up to subjective aspect, from different experiences. We can understand we perceive the same object in front of each of us, proceeding somewhat methodically. We conjecture and interrogate the sorts of properties we think exist in an object in terms of a common reality in sum. But the point is that in this sense "thought" occurs entirely externally, in a convention of discourse.
Of course if an approximate locus of these perceptions and mental processes in thought or thinking things relates to the field of objects, we are part of this field or general discursive space as well. We can turn the subject to object relation on itself to where "I think..." or the subject of conscious experience in general is broached as an object too. So thinking discursively as a convention generally allows for a concrete empirical investigation in the new terms, where minds are considered objects of investigation as much as anything else. So much could be said for the capitulation of materialism, in these terms. If conscious experience is included in the terms of the world there is nothing left to explain outside of this, or seemingly as being of mysterious or metaphysical origins.
But to say that in some ways consciousness in the field also is beyond possible quantification, (even if it is capitulated to a physical field) also generally makes sense. Essentially qualitative experiences, like the redness of the color red, or any other similar, partly qualitative experience; like of pain or pleasure, or hot or cold, are not explainable by objective quantification. Those quantifications of neurology and wavelengths in a field, come to an end at a point, before explaining anything about the redness of the color red. But many of us see and experience something we name and point our finger at as red. How do we know we have similar or the same experiences? This is not obscure. There is a spectrum of wavelengths and colors that are found in the objecticely physically structured relations. These experiences themselves though would be ontologically (in their basic existence and reality) subjective to experience, at the same time.
A conjecture moves back and forth between a consciousness/subject's circumspection of objects in the field to what we find in the field in a particular way as mind, and what can be understood. As a whole what was identified in the first place was discursive and this is really what we look to as thought. We do not only look to cognitive function and behavior in a reduction. Looking for a reduction of conscious subjects to quantifiable terms in the field as cognition, works where it does. Memory, association, would closely surround and relate to perception as the main place and drive of the mental function, but aside from function there is a consideration of what it is "like" to be conscious in general, what it is to experience which is the existing subjective basis of phenomenal experience.
From what I can see, cognitive behaviorists that look for a physicalist reduction offer no account for the ontological subjectivity. Quantification does not imply giving an origin and explanation of any possible domain of conscious experience even if terms may be capitulated. So respectively, Subjectivity in this sense is not necessarily otherworldly, and it is not presenting some essential challenge to meeting in perceptions and understanding a natural world, but it is anomalous and part of mental experience. It is what is brought forth in poetic experience.
Discursive thought is tied to and conditioning what we tend to objectify. That there are some subjective experiences that stand as anomolous, doesn't contradict the establishing of physical cosmology, but it does contradict the unspoken sentiment behind what capitulation of terms might seem to mean. It is not consistent to say everything we know as thought has a material reality and basis, even though that material basis is what we will be able to talk about intelligibly in all particular cases.
On ontological subjectivity:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Searle#Ontological_subjectivity
Edited by Kurt (09/11/17 06:18 AM)
|
Threaded
Previous
Index
Next
Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order 
Golden Teacher Liquid Culture For Sale 
Cultivation Supplies
falcon 
Kurt 
[Re: 
Edit 
Reply 
1 2 3 all )
Adamist
Dogomush
SpecialEd
dmtrypr
Swami
recalcitrant
ekomstop
Deviate