On 2/16/23 11:26 AM, glen wrote:
I don't grok the context well enough to equivocate on concepts like
"have" and "category of being". But in response to Nick's question:
"What is there that animals do that demands us to invent categories to
explain their behavior?", my answer is "animals discretize the ambient
muck". So if categorization is somehow fundamentally related to
discretization, then animals clearly categorize in that sense.
.. or more elaborately? "life *transduces* gradients and spectra
(light, sound, chemistry) and then *thresholds* the results into what we
would nominally call "discrete categories". The actual definition of
those categories, the stimulus-response patterns are actually built upon
(created under the shaping of) some kind of utility function (variations
on survival in some sense). One step removed from this is to begin to
"name" these categories and modulate and relate (adjectives and verbs)
them to one another and from that build elaborate models of cause/effect
that can be used to leverage our sensory inputs in pursuit of optimizing
said utility functions? Semiotic theory probably already has a suite
of terminology for this?
But Nick does follow that question with this "experience" nonsense. So
my guess is there *is* some sophistry behind the question, similar to
EricC's incredulous response to DaveW's question about
phenomenological composition of experience(s). What I find missing in
Nick's (and EricC's) distillation of experience monism is an account
of the seemingly analogous position of panpsychism.
I don't know if I am fully untangling this construction: I personally
am drawn (intuitively) to panpsychism but more in abstract theory than
in practice. I rarely treat a brick or stone as if it has any level of
sentience, yet I do grant (impute) *something* like sentience onto more
complex units. That would be especially life itself, and especially
life at my personal scale such as a tree or a horse, while it might be
easier to ignore whatever complex adaptivity a protozoa or an entire
forest or coral reef or the biosphere as a whole might have (because it
is out of my physical/time scale). But many artifacts in my world
which I have an intimate relationship with, I tend to impute *some*
sentience (or at least agency/identity) onto? House, Vehicles, Garden,
some toolsets?
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