'Every Thing Must Go': James Ladyman in conversation with Raymond Tallis

Adam's Opticks blog: www.adamsopticks.wordpress.com
Bristol Centre for Science and Philosophy: www.bristol.ac.uk/philosophy/csp/
Raymond Tallis: www.raymondtallis.com/

[@CesarClouds]

Thanks for sharing!

[@MontyCantsin5]

Excellent discussion. It would be great to hear Don Ross being posed similar questions about Every Thing Must Go and OSR more generally as I've only heard him speak about political and economic theory.

[@joeboswellphilosophy]

Other people have said this. Duly noted!

[@Frohicky1]

Dangerously clear and informative for philosophy. Stop it.

[@JCResDoc94]

this was gr8. we req more of this level of media

[@JCResDoc94]

we come so far to realise we havent moved at all - always just variants of looking at lookingness

[@DigitalGnosis]

Have you firgured it out since?

[@benmijuskovic8427]

Plato alludes to a perennial battle between the Giants and the Gods, between materialists and idealists (Sophist, 245e-246e). It pits Democritus against Plato; Epicurus against Plotinus; Skeptics and Atheists against Augustine and Aquinas; Valla against Ficino; Hobbes against Descartes; Locke against Leibniz; Hume against Kant; Marx against Hegel; Russell against Husserl; D. M. Armstrong, Paul and Patricia Churchland, John Cacioppo against Raymond Tallis. etc. It seems to me that the materialists and empiricists are mistaken because Locke's concept of Aristotle's tabula as "reflection" fails to account for Kant's transcendental unity of apperception (how do I know my sensations or thoughts are mine and not yours?); Hume's skepticism about personal identity when he admits to a SUCCESSION of impressions as he holds that the "self" is a bundle of successive impressions following each other with inconceivable rapidity. Impossible to be aware of "succession" unless there is some sort of a substantial self to synthesize the moments with other continuously. Similarly, the materialist conception that objective, scientific time rests on the motion and measurement of objects through space (Aristotle, Newton) as opposed to Kant's discussion of immanent time consciousness (1st ed. Critique, A 99ff.), Peirce's analysis of immediacy and mediacy I "How To Make Our Ideas Clear, Bergson's Time and Free Will, " and Husserl's The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, the last 3 analogizing consciousness to listening to a song (the stream of consciousness") with the sensations representing the sensations and the thoughts to the melody.

[@himathsiriniwasa7646]

Your argument against Hume's skepticism about personal identity has some weight to it. However, you're mistaken when in assuming it suggests the existence of a 'substantial self' to synthesise the moments. As Kant notes, what the implication of the notion of succession is the 'pure and empty form of time' which is equivalent to the notion of basic notion of the self, i.e, that which endures over time. Thus, what this succession entails is the existence of a FORMAL, insubstantial self --- the 'I' that accompanies all my representations.

[@benmijuskovic8427]

Sorry to barge in on your current interesting discussion but I was trying to join in on your earlier discussion, "James Ladyman versus Raymond Tallis Debate 2015" but sadly I was unable to get my Comments accepted so I was hoping unless you have solved the issue between neuroscience versus philosophy, you'll be able to direct me where I can participate--or indeed if I am allowed to do so.

[@modvs1]

@27 Ladyman- "the stone falling down the hill doesn't have an internal representation of the external world". We'll if your an eco-psych-Gibsonian-enactivist, neither do we!

[@jkdarrow]

+modvs1 . Although Gibson's work has been used in support of Dynamic SystemsTheory, and anti-representationalism in general, that is a misreading, or, at least an over-extension of ecological theory. The point is more that cognition does not entertain pictures or one-to-one mappings of the external world. Neural processes are more active than that.

[@JCResDoc94]

I just reacted to that exact phrase.

[@FrankiePanaia]

Ladyman comes across severely confused. He unsuccessfully attempts to mask his frequents bouts of confusion by resorting to esoteric jargon. I suspect his entire model for structural realism can be summarized in a simple sentence - everything is structure. It is also evident he baked the cake he wants to eat, when he suggests there is quasi relata beneath the relations of all unobservable entities. Which one is it? Is everything vacuous structure / relations or does the structure ultimately emanate from entities i.e relata. It has been stated before, you cant have relations without the relata to juxtapose against.

[@benmustermann2045]

it is more complex, then you make it out to be :)

[@MrJustSomeGuy87]

Have you ever heard of Justus Buchler. American philosopher. Argues against “simples” and proposes a systematic metaphysics based on the notion of a “natural complex”. Complexes all the way down.

[@hypnosifl]

The relata simply are the positions in the structure, they have absolutely no inner essence or intrinsic properties beyond their structural relations to other positions in the relational structure. I don't see anything incoherent about this, and to me it's interesting that this view, which is probably mainly inspired by the increasingly abstract and formal nature of both physics and mathematics, ends up converging in many ways with some Buddhist views that saw each part of the world (and consciousness) existing only in an "interdependent" way with other parts, see in particular the Huayan or Hua-yen tradition discussed at dharma-rain.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Hua_Yen_Buddhism_Emptiness_Identity_Inte.pdf (p. 66 includes a Buddhist discussion of mathematics from the 7th century that seems to bear a lot of resemblance to mathematical structuralism)

[@trashygit]

What is Tallis doing with this guy is beyond me. He even mentioned this highly confused man's work in his book "Of Time and Lamentation". Anyway, these two are from different planets.

[@MontyCantsin5]

Instead of offering thinly veiled hatred towards someone whose work you've probably not even read, can you at least present a coherent argument as to why Ladyman and Ross's book is 'highly confused'?