Great find. Thanks. I will read that.
It was pretty damned dense for me, no more probably than OOO itself, and
being something of a critique the complexity is compounded for me a
little. I definitely was drawn in by the poetic title: "Extruding
Intentionality from the Metaphysical Flux"... which may explain some of
the topic of my other tangent to the Nick's Categories thread.
I'm a bit worried how you went from "trampled dirt" to a "pile of
trampled dirt". This is the target of DaveW's first question of
composition and structure. "Dirt" is a mass noun, whereas a "pile of
dirt" is not. Mass nouns like "data" are interesting, I think, for the
very reason you're targeting. They seem to me to be qualities, not
objects. When EricC mentioned "dirt at your feet", I implicitly
*registered* a locality to the quality "dirt". There's some intuitive,
natural to those of us with feet, boundary around "beneath your feet"
versus "way the hell over there". So, you might hedge on "pile" with
"local". But as fuzzy as the boundary of a pile is, the boundary
around "local" is even fuzzier.
"Body Stuff" amongst unequivocal *life stuff* also follows this
formulation which is why I don't disagree with your (Glen's) ideation
(probably mischaracterized as I often do) that "mental stuff" is "the
stuff of body stuff". Whether a pile (or a "patch"?) of dirt "does
mental stuff" is one question and (your) Glen's interesting alternative
which suggests that "a patch of soil" would be a
different/more-interesting question begs the question of "life
itself?". My proverbial sand-pile cum dog+earth-hump began "life as a
sandpile" when I shoveled a "sandpile" from the back of my flatbed
trailer onto the spot of earth/soil. Said sand was (by some measure)
much more sand than soil (surely there was microbial life on the
surfaces of the sandgrain, if not quite a flourishing ecosystem of
microbiota?) Once it fell upon the adobe-earth of my side-yard it
began to become more-soil-like the very type of particles (silt, clay,
organic-bits) that had been screened/washed from it at the sand-gravel
yard were re-introduced (in kind, not in particular) by the wind and by
my dog (and other creatures) who liked to perch atop this tiny
"mountain" where she liked to play "king" (or whatever the heck she
thought she was doing). Within a year or so a nice patch of grass was
growing up through the "patch of sand" (formerly known as "pile of
sand") due mostly perhaps to the water-holding or aeration "mulching" of
the sand? Today there sits a nice 3-6' diameter patch of rough grass
to mark where the "pile" once was and amongst it's roots is
unequivocally "soil" which at the beginning of it's formation (first
shovel of sand dropped there) it was hardly or even
patently-not-quite-really soil? A bit of the vitality of the dog who
once perched there continues on even though *her body* lies under
another pile of earth/rocks nearby becoming *soil itself*... with the
amount of "mental stuff" that went on when she threw herself down on top
of the pile-o-sand and looked around attentively seems to have
diminished (or become obscured to the sensibilities of *this*
warm-blooded-vertebrate-whose-primary-sense-is-focused-attention-in-the-optical-spectrum?
I hate the word "affordances". But it's as good as any, I guess, as a
sign for that boundary-installing transition from quality to object.
If I were born without legs and spent my life in a wheelchair, I
suspect that boundary-installing registration of "dirt" to "dirt
beneath your feet" would be VERY different than it is now, to me with
my legs.
I'm glad you noted that you hate the word... I hate it too and perhaps
that is why I threw it in here (and in a few previous
thread-fragments)... I'm trying to process "boundary-installing
transition from quality to object" here... I do in fact trust that this
means something very specific to you and possibly to a whole community
of folks I don't know (of). I also hate "boundary" in it's several
uses, but following your style I acknowledge it might be "as good as
any". What I was trying to tease out when I introduced "affordance"
is that we use the the term as if it is a quality of the Subject when in
fact it seems to be a projection of some (perceived?) utility to the
Object observing the Subject. We say that the class of objects (or a
particular instance of that class) we call "chair" has a suite of
affordances as if they are properties of the chair when in fact they are
aspirational utilities for the object-considered-as-Subject
(chair/chairs-in-general) which we consider on it's behalf. We might
situpon or standupon or placeobjectsupon or blockdoorwayswith or
throwthroughwindows this thing(ish thing) we call "chair" but it seems
specious/duplicitous to suggest that the chair itself has those
qualities/properties?
All this to emphasize, even more, that things like registration are
*body* stuff, not whatever is meant by "mental stuff", much the same
way as, say, self-organized criticality is body stuff, directly
dependent on the shapes and sizes of the particles. I'd expect that
what it is like to be a tiny chunk of quartz is different from what it
is like to be a tiny chunk of hematite. And compositionally, I'd
expect a carbon molecule sitting inside a diamond to *be* different
from one sitting inside a lump of coal.
More good "food for thought". H and O atoms, when bound into H2O
molecules and even more interesting when variously arranged in Ice
Crystals or Water Vapor or Liquid Water or at the interface-boundary
between liquid water, either as part of the miniscus-boundary or
en-exchange between solid/liquid-phase are all the same yet different in
fascinating ways. And this doesn't even begin to address heavy-water,
titrated water, snow-flakes, IceN <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_X>
(e.g. Vonnegut's Ice9), water dimers, or more far-afield water-memory
(ala homeopathy) and hexagonal water, polywater (another
pseudo-pseudoscience?).
While "life itself" seems like a likely "floor" for projecting
mental-stuff onto body-stuff, we get confused (perhaps) somewhere down
the complexity numeration around virus particles (or at least the
simplest virii? or a fragment of mRNA?)... or maybe a nematode with
302 neurons or a jellyfish with many more but much more distributed?
What is the boundary between complex organism, adaptive organization,
metabolism, and thought?
mumble,
- Steve
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