"It is simulacra all the way down—except, of course, for the scientific knowledge we have of the validity of this particular formal model."
Exactly.
I've been working on a post about the fairly common notion that we can have knowledge of the objective world as 'mind-independent', which is sometimes taken to be unknowable Kantian noumena and at other times to be knowable.
Curious to hear if you've heard/read any recent discussions about primary/secondary properties and access to the objective world? I get the sense people still buy into the idea that primary qualities tell us about the world "in itself", but there seems to be very little direct discussion of this topic (or I'm just missing out.)
Zahavi (in Husserl’s Legacy: Phenomenology, Metaphysics, and Transcendental Philosophy) provides an excellent argument against neuro-representationalism (i.e. Predictive Processing, Active Inference etc.). The following is my own summary of that argument (from https://tmfow.substack.com/p/world-model-and-mind):
"Neuro-representationalism starts out as a materialist realism: there is an independent material brain which generates experience and the world we see, based on sensory data from an inaccessible external reality. But this representation of things must also be embedded in this model, because the model of a brain generating experience enclosed in a world is a representation that on this view results from just such a model. But how can we then ever go beyond our model? How can we even posit that a brain is responsible for experience, if we are led to the brain also being just a representation in our model? If we are enclosed to a model, what justification is there for positing an external world? We have gone in a strange circle and arrived at some form of idealism, not materialist realism where we started. We also see here an example of how the hermeneutic circle is unavoidable: we are immersed in reality, and once we try to explain this immersion a leap must be made, some background must be assumed, for otherwise we have no ground to stand on at all."
Thanks as always for this presentation. The precision of terminology needed to sail on this sea is huge, and I’m afraid it’s going to get even more Byzantine 🤷🏼♀️. I get the sense of many true minds striving to extrapolate from abstractions. A drop of “direct spiritual experience” subjected to sensetive evaluation makes the terminology much more descriptive in nature. As I’m sure you know. Thanks again.
Great post!
"It is simulacra all the way down—except, of course, for the scientific knowledge we have of the validity of this particular formal model."
Exactly.
I've been working on a post about the fairly common notion that we can have knowledge of the objective world as 'mind-independent', which is sometimes taken to be unknowable Kantian noumena and at other times to be knowable.
Curious to hear if you've heard/read any recent discussions about primary/secondary properties and access to the objective world? I get the sense people still buy into the idea that primary qualities tell us about the world "in itself", but there seems to be very little direct discussion of this topic (or I'm just missing out.)
Zahavi (in Husserl’s Legacy: Phenomenology, Metaphysics, and Transcendental Philosophy) provides an excellent argument against neuro-representationalism (i.e. Predictive Processing, Active Inference etc.). The following is my own summary of that argument (from https://tmfow.substack.com/p/world-model-and-mind):
"Neuro-representationalism starts out as a materialist realism: there is an independent material brain which generates experience and the world we see, based on sensory data from an inaccessible external reality. But this representation of things must also be embedded in this model, because the model of a brain generating experience enclosed in a world is a representation that on this view results from just such a model. But how can we then ever go beyond our model? How can we even posit that a brain is responsible for experience, if we are led to the brain also being just a representation in our model? If we are enclosed to a model, what justification is there for positing an external world? We have gone in a strange circle and arrived at some form of idealism, not materialist realism where we started. We also see here an example of how the hermeneutic circle is unavoidable: we are immersed in reality, and once we try to explain this immersion a leap must be made, some background must be assumed, for otherwise we have no ground to stand on at all."
Thanks as always for this presentation. The precision of terminology needed to sail on this sea is huge, and I’m afraid it’s going to get even more Byzantine 🤷🏼♀️. I get the sense of many true minds striving to extrapolate from abstractions. A drop of “direct spiritual experience” subjected to sensetive evaluation makes the terminology much more descriptive in nature. As I’m sure you know. Thanks again.
Bryn