questing for intelligibility of evolving situations continues

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What keeps me from writing more online this past week:

An acquaintance who recently finished his PhD wants to do research on “intelligibility,” and can I help out? Sure, if he’ll be specific about what he wants to do. I wrote back briefly about my sense of intelligibility—which might have thrown him, since he’s wanting to understand something “transcendental” within a horizon of linguistic relativity. But intelligibility isn’t basically linguistic, e.g., regarding the mathematical plight of theoretical physics trying to grasp quantum foam (then translated into narrative about that).

winter 2015

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March 20:

My March 8 web page “a trace of spirited time” resulted from notes that related to several home page postings, Feb. 8 through Feb. 23, that were made into one blog posting: “being a spirited democrat. But the web page was a very different kind of thing, even before I did major revision March 12.

The days following that were occupied with organization of notes from my entire winter, which gained tens of headers and sub-headers, looking “worse” than the table of contents of a Heidegger lecture course—not that I’m being Heideggerian; but there’s nothing like a Heideggerian course outline.

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theorizing research in the humanities

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How can conceptual inquiry most fruitfully constellate or cohere qualitative research?—that is: to importantly bridge evidentiary research with cultivation of humanity? I asked this relative to Habermas, but the question belongs generally to philosophy—indeed, belongs to Habermas’s own sense of philosophy in higher education.

The future of philosophy is at least service to cohering interdisciplinary studies, at best in a leading way—to my mind.

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2-fold, 3-fold, 4-fold—onefold?

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2-fold: enacting the act: Acting is done and witnessable, by others and by oneself. But immanence of self-witnessing as one goes along in activity is essentially different from another’s continuing to witness the activity. Enactivity has a potential recursiveness (responsiveness, adaptability) that belongs solely to intentionality, not observation. Yet, interaction embodies both for each actor. So, a dyad of interaction is immediately a 3-fold of what “we” both share along with our psychally-separate engagements: two selves in a shared event that is also observable by a non-participant, which is less than being a participant in the mirrorplay of interacting time.

So, a heuristic 3-fold is easily associable with the presence of two 2-fold actors. This “lateral” or horizontal 3-fold has no ontic overtones. A “vertical” one might credibly be: “a 3-fold ambiguity of ‘cognitivity’.”

a 3-fold ambiguity of ‘cognitivity’

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Throughout academia, ‘cognitive’ is used ambiguously, if not ambivalently, to pertain to (1) mental phenomena or issues of inquiry, (2) conceptuality or domain of comprehension, or/and (3) epistemic issues or range of representational relevance.

This 3-fold is homologous with philosophical discourse on concepts alone: Concepts are standardly regarded as (1) capabilities, as (2) so-called Fregean senses, or as (3) representations.

This is homlogous with Habermas’ 3-fold model of lifeworld pragmatics (though I don’t expect that to seem evident; a keynote is that what really holds us together is conceptual).

And the homologies continue, really. So, what’s the nature of such 3-folding of a person(1) relating(2) to the world(3)?

I have the answer! But a simple (unexplicated) rendering(3) of foldness(2) itself wouldn’t seem obvious(1).

Anyway, logocentrism conceals the ontogenesis of such abstracted differentiability.

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Two relevant discussions are: “‘I understand’” and “emergingness in relation to ordinary conceptuality.”

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autumn 2014

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December 22:

My Dec. 21, Habermasian posting, “drawing thought beyond transcendentalism,” explains itself well enough. Today, I’ve sketched a context for moving beyond that into how Habermas’s work could be progressively applied to working for the good of our times, going forward (rather than being overly attached to the past). But I’ll return to that next year. Presently, I’m having fun with my purely philosophical venture.

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vistas in conceptual design: a preface on anthropic singularity

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baby, baby...

“Oh, how cute!”

“Well, it’s still a toddler. You should have been here just a few years back. Just wait a few more years.”

What is a “mind”? As it goes now, a recent Science article titled “A Mind of Its Own” is subheaded: “Novel neuromorphic chips and software should provide robots with unriveled perceptual skills.”

Forget computational neuroscience (trying to model wetware perception, which is the result of eonic biogenic self-sorting, then intelligent self-selectivity which outstripped natural selection, yet is replicably encoded in the [regulatory] genome). The Game is neurocomputational beings (with quantum computational capacity allegorized in human terms). And the meta-Game is conceptual design of computational complexity—if not conceiving autogenic algorithmicity (which must remain always susceptible to human halting).