Rolling Philosophy

so the joking relationship, which is the attitude 'stylized, prescribed and sanctioned by taboos or privileges and expressed through a fixed ritual', is the more flexible relationship, the one that changes to reflect changes in people's circumstances, and the one that has more of a relevance to their everyday.

also, the wik munkan word for 'labia minora' translates to 'vagina ears'.

Thank c sharp -- the article is really excellent but like you noticed, even reading the article it's not so clear exactly how Levi-Strauss' point is functioning here. But your answer makes sense (even if it's still pretty vague -- I'd love to know exactly how these relationships work, and what exactly is the contradiction being sanctioned? that they have competing kinship relationships? why is that more of a terminological problem but not an attitude problem? couldn't terminology be something like, "the brother of my mother who is also my wife's uncle" or whatever?).

in our culture doesn't it often seem the other way around, that the terminal kinship smooths over the attitude kinship? for example, you have a difficult relationship with your mother, but "she's my mom." it could go both ways. am I misunderstanding?

c sharp was just giving an example -- it seems like there are very close relationships that are vulgar. Primarily the non-vulgar relationships are an older person who you need to show respect to. But a sibling is probably an opportunity for some good vulgarity.

we are against any current philosophy that is not based in principles from evolutionary or cognitive science.

― rage for the machine (banaka), Friday, 27 August 2010 02:00 (4 days ago)

levi-strauss makes me feel like any philosophy not based in principles of structural linguistics is worthless

relevant:

IAN BUCHANAN: [...] Do you still think myth criticism has a place or can be reinvented in a way that would be useful today?

FREDRIC JAMESON: This is a very tricky question. Benjamin asked himself this question in his Arcades Project and was attentive to the critiques of the Frankfurt School who were maybe more alert than he was at that point to the affinities of myth criticism with Jungianism and even a kind of fascist affirmation in it of the archaic impulses that fascism and nazism tried to resurrect. Clearly a myth criticism which takes that route is unacceptable. I would myself also want to say that sociobiology is a kind of positivist version of this same effort in that it attempts to link very complex modern societies back to the simplest of biological urges and thereby to simplify social reality in a way which is also mythic, although it certainly doesn't look much like Jungianism. The Marxist perspective on this is of course that these very archaic societies were also societies without power and without money: whether one would call all of them forms of primitive communism is much more complicated since of course some of them had caste systems and an aristocracy and all the rest of it. But it seems to me that the greatness of Levi-Strauss was to reopen a powerful path back to the social realities of those archaic societies and to all kinds of social relationships which we have lost in the modern industrial capitalist world. It is not so much a matter of recreating those things as it as a tapping of a properly utopian energy that's present in those older societies and that one can find in primitive myths. The point is not to re-mythologize our present, but to use this moment of the distant human past (as with other modes of production in the past) as a way of understanding what we've lost historically and as a charge of utopian energy on which we can draw.

(partic. the part about sociobiology, although I left the levi-strauss stuff in just 4 u mordy)

so would anyone be up for that casual Meillassoux reading group? Would be nice to keep my head in the game in as many directions as possible once I hand in my dissertation on Thursday. (I can quietly provide a PDF if desired.)

(bump)

yeah, I'd be down -- I ended up giving up after the first couple chapters, but I think I'm ready to take another shot at it.

http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=1583

I'm pretty sympathetic to the Wittgensteinian notion that "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language", but this guy takes it too far. He seems to think that just because

ACK

... he seems to think that if a problem is expressed in terms that don't chime with natural language usage, then the problem, and the whole research programme behind it, are *necessarily* meaningless.

Surely to wonder what the sonar sensory experience of a bat is like, and if it is anything like vision, or anything like hearing, or something completely different, is perfectly simple, and understandable, and legitimate - regardless even of whether or not one is committed to the idea of qualia.

I see Dennett is mentioned in that article but really the dude needs to engage with what Dennett says rather than just bollocksing on and ignoring it.

I've never seriously engaged with Dennett meself. I'm a big qualia fan so I really should find out how he thinks he can explain them away.

Just argues that everything can be explained by biological process iirc. Agree.

Aye well. That's the leap I struggle with. Biological processes, or anything material, to conscious experience. I know this potentially makes me sound like some kind of horrendous dualist or epiphenomenalist. But could you find out what a bat's sonar sensory experience is *like*, just by inspecting the biological process?

The desire to find out what an experience is like, and the experience of feeling that likeness, seem totally explainable via brain function to me. I think the argument against is the harder case at this point in history.

Like, why add on an extra layer of mystery above and beyond the observable?

my experience is an observable!

What is it that's doing the observing?

Just argues that everything can be explained by biological process iirc. Agree.

Explain to who, though? To language using creatures who ineliminably see a world in intentional terms, or to unimaginable creatures who *know* it's biological process all the way down?

I mean how do they *know*?

Explain to human beings thinking about being human beings. Intentionality really has nothing to do with it, this feels like basic Occam's Razor stuff to me.

Dualism is such a busted flush.

Lucky you, so...

To say that *I think* my experience can be explained in terms of biological process - by which i take you to mean law- governed, predictable? - seems a performative contradiction to me. There can be no 'I' thinking this, if what the 'I' thinks is the case.

xp

I don't think there is an I in the sense you mean. A theoretically predictable law also leaves room for tremendous difficulty of prediction, maybe up to the point where prediction is only a theoretical possibility rather than a practical one.

There can be no 'I' thinking this, if what the 'I' thinks is the case.

Explain to human beings thinking about being human beings

Any human beings? Could you 'explain' vision, in terms of biological processess, to a blind person?

... yes?

I mean no obviously I couldn't give a blind person the experience of vision through any kind of explanation. I also couldn't give a paraplegic the experience of playing Dance Dance Revolution, but I could still tell him how the game works.

GCSE Biology iirc

I'm down with Davidson here - monism, but dual-aspect, or some such. Perhaps engaging in philosophical thought when I have to leave the house in one minute is not a good idea.

Why can't it be thinking this as part of a biological process?

May it can be, maybe it is in some ultimately real way, but it can't 'think' this, if 'thinking' means what it thinks it means.

'Maybe it can be'

I mean no obviously I couldn't give a blind person the experience of vision through any kind of explanation

well y'know to me that seems like a pretty big explanatory failure.

I begin to feel like this is almost a religious position - in the sense that those on one side just *feel*, intuitively and strongly, that there is something that the scientific picture leaves out, and those who seem to feel that there is nothing in need of explanation.

No there is plenty in need of explanation, it's more a case of believing that it's explicable vs believing in magic.

Obligatory douchey dichotomy there, soz.

well y'know to me that seems like a pretty big explanatory failure.

I'm very skeptical about the capacity of language to explain any phenomenology, let alone a phenomenology of vision

i'm kind of being facetious

Expressibility thru language feels like a red herring here tho, since nobody's claiming that language = the totality of brain function I don't think.

I think phenomenology is basically outwith the capacity of explanation, it is something that can only be understood through experience. This may or may not be controversial.

Actually i think bernard's DDR paraplegic was interesting. Is that a simple and mundane example of something non-phenomenological that cannot be 'explained'? Or is it phenomenological at its core?

I think it's telling that all of us who can see "understand" the experience of sight phenomenologically (even if we aren't conscious of it) and very few of us could explain scientifically the processes of light and the biological basis of seeing. Even a complete full case of the latter doesn't give the former (and, obv, vice-versa too).

Telling what? How do you go from the uniqueness of phenomena to separating them from an aspect of brain function?

I guess I also don't see what the basis is for putting such extreme burdens of explanation on a biological theory of consciousness that, as far as I know, would posit the inseparability of mental 'experience' and (for lack of a better word right now) behavior. Like, it is one thing to aggregate a number of empirical behaviors into one common phenomenon called 'sight'; it is another thing to posit that there is some 'experience' of sight which is shared by all people who have engaged in those behaviors; and it is still a third thing to insist that any explanation for the phenomenon of sight must also be able to make the 'experience' of sight accessible to people who have never engaged in any of the behaviors.

also I would maybe want to dispute this
all of us who can see "understand" the experience of sight phenomenologically (even if we aren't conscious of it)
on the basis of optical illusions, that internet video with the basketball-passing people, etc -- what we "understand" is how to utilize our eyes in many of the most common situations to achieve a desired end result, like reading a word or tracking an object.

I guess I'm not really sure what we're arguing about anymore (or are we arguing at all?). It seems to me like a mechanistic explanation of various phenomena will never fully account for the full phenomena. For instance, I'm not sure that science* (*I don't really know what this word means here either, but I imagine we're using some loose Enlightenment distinction) can explain why when I look at something sad its affect is transmitted and I experience sadness too. It can maybe point out the spike in a particular chemical in my brain, but it can't locate the genesis of that chemical outside my internal processes. When someone says something mean to me and my feelings get hurt, science can't trace that affectual spike through the air. To bernard snowy, tho, I'd definitely agree with his second option (that there is some 'experience' of sight which is shared by all people who have engaged in those behaviors) and I'm more skeptical about language's ability to transmit that experience whatsoever. I just worry tho that giving everything a mechanistic explanation is a way of ignoring parts of the phenomena that we know are real but that can't necessarily be measured.

never fully account for the full phenomenon*

"y sad things make u sad" seems like a unproblematic candidate for scientific explanation to me. mirror neurons, intention as representation, something evolution something, blah de blah. For me at least, I think it's purely the non-material, phenomenological quality of experience, which is not captured by current scientific thinking.