Neutral Monism / Perspectivism / Phenomenalism
Did the Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Mach's The Analysis of Sensation already [mostly] untie that famous knot ? The one about mind and world and their relationship ?
[b]wittgenstein's 'philosophical' I / eye
[quote=TLP ~5.6, edited to flow as a paragraph]
The world and life are one. I am my world, the microcosm. The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing. If I wrote a book The World As I Found It, I should also have therein to report on my body and say which members obey my will and which do not, etc. This then would be a method of isolating the subject or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject: that is to say, of it alone in this book mention could not be made. The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world.
[/quote]
This philosophical I is the perspectival form of the world. Philosophers have called this minimal I a 'pure witness' or a 'transcendental ego,' but it's important to insist that consciousness is exactly the being of the world.
husserl's transcendental ego
I do understand why Husserl speaks of a transcendental ego rather than something neutral, something prior to such articulation. He grasped the goal-driven on-the-way ego-like structure of a being which is always a 'world-streaming.' Being (the world) streams. Being is 'time.' Being is becoming, rushing forth in its stinking, shrieking, and shining, organized teleologically as a 'self' --- with somewhere and someone to be.
neutral phenomenalism
But reducing the world to thought-structured sensations dissolves (if consistent) the sensing and thinking subject. As Mach saw, 'sensations' is a useful ladder that must be thrown away. Esse est percipi is basically right, but we need J. S. Mill's 'permanent possibilities of sensation. 'Equivalently, we need Husserl's horizonal lifeworld or verificationism charitably understood.
[b]wittgenstein's 'philosophical' I / eye
[quote=TLP ~5.6, edited to flow as a paragraph]
The world and life are one. I am my world, the microcosm. The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing. If I wrote a book The World As I Found It, I should also have therein to report on my body and say which members obey my will and which do not, etc. This then would be a method of isolating the subject or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject: that is to say, of it alone in this book mention could not be made. The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world.
[/quote]
This philosophical I is the perspectival form of the world. Philosophers have called this minimal I a 'pure witness' or a 'transcendental ego,' but it's important to insist that consciousness is exactly the being of the world.
husserl's transcendental ego
I do understand why Husserl speaks of a transcendental ego rather than something neutral, something prior to such articulation. He grasped the goal-driven on-the-way ego-like structure of a being which is always a 'world-streaming.' Being (the world) streams. Being is 'time.' Being is becoming, rushing forth in its stinking, shrieking, and shining, organized teleologically as a 'self' --- with somewhere and someone to be.
neutral phenomenalism
But reducing the world to thought-structured sensations dissolves (if consistent) the sensing and thinking subject. As Mach saw, 'sensations' is a useful ladder that must be thrown away. Esse est percipi is basically right, but we need J. S. Mill's 'permanent possibilities of sensation. 'Equivalently, we need Husserl's horizonal lifeworld or verificationism charitably understood.
Comments (244)
Quoting plaque flag
Which philosophers in particular? Any particular examples in mind?
Quoting plaque flag
Your presentation of the matter is somewhat idiosyncratic. According to various textbooks, the 'transcendental ego' refers to 'subjective consciousness devoid of empirical content', namely anything that pertains to the external world or to the ego's psychological states (e.g. feelings or moods). It is the "observing self" that remains when we bracket out or set aside all our beliefs about the world, including our own existence in it. This bracketing process, which Husserl termed "phenomenological reduction," allows for the focus on consciousness as such and its structures without becoming entangled in empirical or naturalistic assumptions. For Husserl, the transcendental ego is the source and condition for the constitution of all meaning and objectivity. Objects appear as meaningful and objective only within the intentional acts of the transcendental ego. This means that the world's objectivity and our knowledge of it are not simply "given," but are actively constituted by conscious acts. (It is in this last where one can trace the influence of Kant although of course Husserl also departs from Kant in many important ways.)
This doesn't so much 'dissolve the sensing and thinking subject', as dissolving acts of sensing and thinking so as to lay bare the transcendental subject.
But, do carry on. All grist for the mill, and a splendid mill it is.
To name a few: Kant, Husserl, Wilbur. But the idea, under various names, is at the center of modern philosophy. Wittgenstein is admirably focused on exactly the right issue.
Quoting Wayfarer
In my view, es gibt. The world worlds and being 'streams.' We might say also that time times. As Mach saw, there are lots of causal relationships we can postulate / trace between clumps of neutral elements we call selves and clumps of neutral elements we call cups or X-rays. But I think it's best to interpret 'actively constituted by conscious acts' as the egoic structure of the being stream.
Objects exist in a meaningful context structured by care.
We cant give a successful or reliable meaning to talk of a non-perspectival 'unexperienceable reality.'
My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff pure experience, the knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter.
[/quote]
Pure experience is good, but itll tempt some to think of an experiencer as primary (or primary in the wrong way, as more than a structural tendency of the stream). Pure experience drags the history of its development behind it. Such experience is 'pure' because it is no longer representation. It is not something between a subject and a hidden real world. It is just that which is.
It is a beingstream that includes embedded entities that are for practical reasons often sorted into thoughts and objects, and so on. But these embedded entities are connected like the threads of a blanket. They are semantically interdependent.
A worldstreaming is the world given dynamically and perspectively to a subject, which is no longer really a subject but just the being of the world as grasped by a living human being (given perspectively, in the context of motive and memory, etc.)
ontological cubism
Anyone else ever play GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64 ? It was the supreme first-person shooter of its day.
4 players could each get a 4th of the screen as their POV on the world they shared with the other 3 players. Now this world only existed for those evolving ('moving') points of view.
In the same way, I think our world only exists for or through our own 'split screen' perspectival 'experience.' At least, it's all that we seem to be able to talk about with sense and confidence.
Also this:
[quote= link, section 56]
This connexion or adaptation of all created things to each and of each to all, means that each simple substance has relations which express all the others, and, consequently, that it is a perpetual living mirror of the universe.
And as the same town, looked at from various sides, appears quite different and becomes as it were numerous in aspects [perspectivement]; even so, as a result of the infinite number of simple substances, it is as if there were so many different universes, which, nevertheless are nothing but aspects [perspectives] of a single universe, according to the special point of view of each Monad.
And by this means there is obtained as great variety as possible, along with the greatest possible order; that is to say, it is the way to get as much perfection as possible.
[/quote]
https://plato-philosophy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/The-Monadology-1714-by-Gottfried-Wilhelm-LEIBNIZ-1646-1716.pdf
The town only exists through and for the monads.
The phrase 'natural phenomenalism' is intriguing. I'm struggling to figure out what it might mean. Does it refer to particular theory or approach?
.
:up:
Quoting FrancisRay
I think my view is pretty close to Sartre's. I'm a fan of his work.
Quoting FrancisRay
My influences are blurring together in the phrase, but I'd say that 'neutral monism' and 'phenomenalism' are raw ingredients. I think 'my' view is even part of the tradition, going back at least to Leibniz. It could also be called perspectivism.
'I don't see the world differently. Or this is still not strong and clear enough. I am the world from a different perspective. The world [so far as we can know or even make sense of ] only exists perspectively. '
[quote=Husserl : Basic Problems Lecture (available free online )]
Each I finds itself as a middle point, so to speak a zero-point of a system of coordinates, in reference to which the I considers, arranges, and cognizes all things of the world, the already known or the unknown. But each I apprehends this middle point as something relative. For example, the I changes bodily its place in space, and while it continues to say here it knows that here in each case is spatially different....
The same holds for things. Each person has around himself the same world and perhaps several see the same thing, the same segment of the world. But each has his thing-appearance: The same thing appears for each in a different way in accordance with the different place in space. The thing has its front and back, above and below. And what is my front of the thing is for the other perhaps its back, and so on. But it is the same thing with the same properties.
[/quote]
Who has ever experience the world differently ? And can I even make sense of one who claims to not see perspectively, not find themselves at the center of space ? This is the world as we know it, where to be is to be perceived or at least perceivable. That's the being we can make sense of. So the issue is largely semantic. We move on to the ego.
This can be framed in terms of a worldstreaming centered on ('in') a 'lived body' which is embedded in a conceptual culture. But of course I manage my persona, my mask. I am caught up as an 'I' in something like Brandom's normative inferential semantics. My 'I' exists in various layers in the world. But (I claim) the deepest 'I' (Wittgenstein's, etc.) is no longer an 'I' except in the most minimal sense --as the being of a world which is given with a reliably perspectival form. Granted that the stream of experience changes, are their general structures which are relatively constant ? I think Husserl and Heidegger and others have tried to sketch that relatively constant structure. If being is a river, it has a shape. (?)
[quote=Husserl]
The psychological I belongs to objective time, the same time to which the spatial world belongs, to the
time that is measured by clocks and other chronometers. And this I is connected to, in a spatial-temporal way, the lived body, upon whose functioning the psychical states and acts (which, once again, are ordered within objective time) are dependent, dependent in their objective, i.e., their spatialtemporal existence and condition. Everything psychical is spatialtemporal. Even if one holds it to be an absurdity, and perhaps justifiably so, that the psychical I itself (along with its experiences) has extension and place, it does have an existence in space, namely as the I of the respective lived body, which has its objective place in space. And therefore each person says naturally and rightly : I am now here and later there.
[/quote]
I'll end by referring back to GoldenEye (video games given only via first-person perspectives) and ontological cubism.
For the world of time and space this is the case. But what Sartre is saying, and also Kant,and the Perennial philosophy, is that by reduction all perspectives can be reduced and for a fundamental analysis would not really exist. All Kantian phenomenon would be empty of substance and illusory, and this would include the ego and the individual 'I'. .
I misread your word 'neutral' as 'natural; - sorry about that.
In what sense do you call it neutral? . .
:up:
Quoting FrancisRay
It is neutral as being neither mind or nor matter, prior to both.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/james1.htm
I'd say that people are conscious of (aware of) the world. The world only exists in this way, or so I suggest, but we have to include the whole horizonal lifeworld and J . S . Mill's permanent possibilities of perception. We have to accept that daydreams and prime numbers exist just like lobsters and contracts, differently yes but in the same logical-inferential nexus.
I speculate that the problem has been so difficult for philosophy because methodological solipsism gets the perspectival form of the world right but typically fails to integrate the equally important insight into the profound and even foundational sociality of reason. I credit Feuerbach for his clarity on their relationship.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/
Culture is softwhere running on the crowd. No particular individual is needed, but the absense of all flesh (all hardware) would be the end of the game. We might also think of a flame jumping from melting candle to melting candle, or of data moving from storage device to storage device.
The reduction doesnt dissolve acts of sensing, that is, acts of constituting and objectivating, and certainly not acts of feeling. It dissolves the products of these acts ( real spatial objects and empirical facts) in order to lay bare the irreducible structure of synthetic constitution itself.
The transcendental ego is not an observer, it is a synthesizer and product of synthesis, continually generating new senses of meaning. The transcendent ego is not a subject as opposed to an object. It is a synthetic structure composed of a subjective (noetic) and objective (noematic) pole. It is only abstractively that we can think of these poles separately from each other. This subject-object structure is only what it as through its acts, as the flowing repetition of temporal syntheses (retention-presencing-protention).
The fundamental form of this universal synthesis, the form that makes all other syntheses of consciousness possible, is the all embracing consciousness of internal time.
Husserl says the following is the incorrect ,Cartesian way of interpreting the Transcendental Ego:
The transcendental reduction does not remove empirical
contents, it leaves them as they are but does not attend to them in their specific relativity and contingency. Rather, it uses them as examples in order to extract from them what is universal to any and all particular data of consciousness, the fact that what an object is is a function of its mode of givenness within intentional constitution.
Quoting plaque flag
What youre quoting is an analysis of how we perceive our relation to things within the natural attitude. You realize of course that Husserl goes on to deconstruct the idealizations of the natural attitude and its objective time as derivative of subjective time. When Husserl says that through empirical knowledge we come to see our perception of a thing as only our subjective perspective on the same thing that others see, he means that it is the peculiar function of empirical objectivity to give the impression , through apperceptive idealization, of a unity where there is only similarity. Through the reduction we can come to see that it is not the same empirical thing we all see from our own vantage, any more than the aspectual features unfolding in our apprehension of a spatial object belong to the same object.
Sounds like an important point. I can guess at the answer, but for you, as a long time student of phenomenology, what is the significance of this point for how humans live with each other? Can it be applied in a practical way?
A misinterpretation of the significance of scientific results can result in the marginalizing and excluding of those who deviate from the norms out of which the scientific facts are generated. I was watching a youtube presentation by the popular physicist Shaun Carroll He was charming his college audience with his confident and humor-laden assertions about the superiority of the scientific method over claims from religious traditions. The ignorance he displayed concerning the basis of his own field in unprovable presuppositions turned my stomach. Phenomenology gives us a way to identity and protect the unique perspectives of all participants in a community even when their views deviate from the dominant scientific conventions.
Quoting Joshs
Maybe not for this thread, but what would a culture look like which did this well - I am assuming the notion of a mainstream or dominant culture would dissolve or go. I can't imagine how humans would organize themselves according to this and I wonder what protection of unique perspectives would look like. Do you think we will get there?
It seems we basically agree on this issue. The more radically we take subjectivity, the less it remains subject as opposed to object. We move to the undifferentiated unity of both, toward a streaming flux of becoming.
The issue is whether it should still be called 'consciousness.' There's an original eruption of flowing presence, the 'stream' of consciousness or experience or sentience. But what is this experience made of ? If not the world ? So the world is 'given' (is there) so that (for instance) its visual aspect largely determined by the turning of a creatures neck. The lived body's centrality suggests calling it consciousness, but this lived body is itself in the world.
I claim that we see the same object differently. Even I, by myself, see the same object differently as I walk around it or shine my flashlight on it. The object transcends and unifies its adumbrations.
Our perspectively given 'worlds' are glued together with our language and our profoundly empathetic/social intentions. I (usually) intend precisely the practical-shared-worldly object. I can't even begin to do philosophy without talking about, intending, our world. So we don't have a plurality of worlds but a plurality of perspectives on the same world. Different people can step in the same river, though it's never given (experienced) in the same way twice.
Speaking quite universally, the surrounding world is not a world "in itself" but is rather a world "for me," precisely the surrounding world of its Ego-subject, a world experienced by the subject or grasped consciously in some other way and posited by the subject in his intentional lived experiences with the sense-content of the moment. As such, the surrounding world is in a certain way always in the process of becoming, constantly producing itself by means of transformations of sense and ever new formations of sense along with the concomitant positings and annullings.
...
To begin with, the world is, in its core, a world appearing to the senses and characterized as "on hand," a world given in straightforward empirical intuitions and perhaps grasped actively. The Ego then finds itself related to this empirical world in new acts, e.g., in acts of valuing or in acts of pleasure and displeasure. In these acts, the object is brought to consciousness as valuable, pleasant, beautiful, etc., and indeed this happens in various ways, e.g., in original givenness. In that case, there is
built, upon the substratum of mere intuitive representing, an evaluating which, if we presuppose it, plays, in the immediacy of its lively motivation, the role of a value-"perception" (in our terms, a value-reception) in which the value character itself is given in original intuition.
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Note this part: the value character itself is given in original intuition. This is the stream before it's been analyzed or divided into its subjective and objective components. This value dimension in the worldstream is probably, more than anything, what gives it an teleologically egoic structure. I am the there itself, and yet the there tends to flow so that my belly stays full.
Quoting plaque flag
For Husserl the object transcends its adumbrations because it is not an actual substance but only an idealization, the noetic striving toward the fulfillment of the idea of a unified, singular object, which can never be completely attained. The unified object is the subjective (noetic) interest in or attitude toward the adumbrated elements we constitute. This intentional effect forces us to think the similar in terms of the same. Nothing in our experience of the world ever gives us the justification to claim that what we see is the same object, except in a relative way.
It is a neutral metaphysical theory for which consciousness is fundamental and there are no philosophical problems.
The trouble with phenomenology is that it is effectively naive realism and can never produce a fundamental theory. . . .
These textbooks are not explaining transcendental idealism. The phrase 'transcendental ego' is an oxymoron since the ego would be an illusion, and the ultimate state of consciousness would not be subjective. If we reify the ego as a subjective phenomenon then we are not going to be able to solve any problems since the idea doesn't make metaphysical sense. It would be subjective idealism, which has to be abandoned for transcendental idealism.
. . .
I don't think so. The "hard problem," is the problem of explaining how consciousness arises and how it produces its subjective qualities through a scientific theory that has the same rigor, comprehensiveness, and depth as any other of the major scientific theories we are familiar with (e.g., explanations of cellular reproduction.) If that's sort of answer you're looking for, this sort of framing isn't going to help you.
Phenomenology might help us find an answer to the hard problem, or it might tell us that the answer we want is unattainable, but it can't answer the problem because the problem is about explaining the subjective elements of consciousness in the same sort of language/model that we use for explaining how a car works.
This seems more akin to the answer of eliminitivism, an attempt to dismiss the grounds for the question. Now, maybe the question is unanswerable, or maybe it is asked in the wrong way, but it seems to me to be a fairly reasonable question, so I don't think the difficulties we experience with it can be reduced to "pseudo-problems."
Other types of answers might be valid, but they aren't the type of answer the hard problem is about. We want answer that would tell us something like "do x and y and then z is exactly the thing you'll experience." I'll allow that this is quite possibly a bad question because it is impossible to answer, but it does seem to be a coherent and fair question. "Explain my mind to me like my mechanic explains how my breaks work," is meaningful at least.
Plus, even for the type of answer it is, it leaves me wanting more. Why these sensations and not others? Why do they follow each other in such and such a way? How is it so easy for me to think through what my future sensations will be based on my past ones? If the subject is a limit on the world, why such limits? If the being stream has a beginning, why did it start streaming and why is the stream like it is? And these sorts of questions seem bound to lead us into the same sorts of questions where the traditional thorny problems of philosophy lie.
If the world is one and the thinking subject is illusory, then there doesn't seem like there should be any barrier to explaining the appearance of the thinking subject in the same terms we use for all sorts of things in the world (e.g. how a TV works). But then that is just the hard problem repackaged as an explanation of appearance.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
So by way of circular reasoning, if we define science as a conventionalized philosophical language, then the philosophical solution to the hard problem only becomes a scientific solution once we translate the former language into a more conventionalized form. Kind of like what enactivist psychology and neurophenomenology have done with phenomenology.
But if consciousness is the being of the world, we have what's maybe even a deeper problem.
Just to be clear, I'm not in the 'nothing to see here' camp. Basically Madonna was right that life is a mystery. You give some good examples of us always being able to ask why. As far as I can tell, there 'must' be brute fact, just given the structure of our cognition.
I've gone back and forth on the p-zombie issue. But at the moment I think Husserl is right. It's something like empathy that convinces us of the reality of others. It's automatic. A sufficiently sophisticated android could make us fall in love with it, give our lives to save it from danger. I don't know if/when we'll get there technologically. But there is a kind of privacy to pain and pleasure, despite their undeniable social aspect, which (as Wittgenstein and others point out) makes talking about them possible. Nevertheless, I 'am' a perspective on the world. And I trust that so are you.
Can scientific methods tell an ideal p-zombie from the real thing ? What does this mean exactly ? If consciousness is the being of the world from a strangely private perspective,...?
All I can imagine is finding causal relationships and so on between thinks that get taken as conscious. But a public criterion for consciousness 'has' to include androids of a certain quality. The hard problem either looks so hard that 'problem' feels like the wrong word or it melts into something tractable but no longer so exciting ---a mere branch of AI perhaps, at least implicitly.
:up:
Perhaps you don't see that I see that part very well. The object-for-me is not, in an important sense, the object-for-you. But it's the essence of conceptuality to make the unequal equal. We must tame the chaos, lump things together. I think Lakoff and Hofstadter and right that we are deeply metaphorical, analogical beings, reusing a pattern grasped here also over there. Philosophy is nonfiction poetry. We speak of the stream of consciousness or the streaming of time. We float an anemic mythology. We speak of radicality and basis, still dirtworshipppers pointing at roots and soil.
To me phenomenology is largely about making the transparent opaque. We look right through the glass of our subjectivity. If I turn my head, I 'know' its not the whole world twisting. If I close my eyes, I know the lights didn't just go off.
[quote = Russell. --- I changed the last word]
When a crowd of people all observe a rocket bursting, they will ignore whatever there is reason to think peculiar and personal in their experience, and will not realize without an effort that there is any private element in what they see. But they can, if necessary, become aware of these elements. One part of the crowd sees the rocket on the right, one on the left, and so on. Thus when each person's perception is studied in its fullness, and not in the abstract form which is most convenient for conveying information about the outside world, the perception becomes a datum for [s]psychology[/s] phenomenology.
[/quote]
You might not find this fancy or difficult enough (I'm joking with you), but I think Russell is doing a pretty good job of pointing out the natural attitude, for which subjectivity is conveniently transparent.
We must have radically different conceptions of phenomenology. I'd say it's largely the opposite of naive realism. Though I will grant that it sometimes comes back around to a highly sophisticated direct realism.
There's much to like about this quote, but the world and the subject are interdependent. The subject 'is' the care-structured streaming of the world. Entangled, correlated.
The world is never the same 'twice,' and yet I am describing the world, as predictably infinitely novel. Concepts have a relative stability that makes our conversation possible. I 'know' that people never perfectly understand one another. It's fog and blur forever. But we try to find the least worst words for it all.
Right, but it isn't just translation. We'd need some sort of very good predictive capability. Something like, "I'm going to run this program on the Neurostim 8000, but first I'm going to describe in very fine detail what it is you'll experience and think. Then I'll run it and you'll find that my description was highly accurate."
I think if we had something like the technology mentioned above, something such that someone could control what you see, the emotions you feel, and even the words of your internal monologue by "playing your nervous system like a piano," then most people would say we've sufficiently grounded the causal underpinnings of experience to be able to tell when something is conscious at a human level versus just appearing so, even if we can't fully explain exactly where that consciousness emerges on the level from zygote to new born.
Is such technology possible? That's another question. But if it ever exists, I think many of the questions around the hard problem will be effectively solved.
I still think you maybe aren't addressing the being issue ? Or, more likely, I'm being muddy in making my point.
First, there's the relatively boring consciousness, which is 'just' sufficiently sophisticated interactive behavior. It wouldn't actually be boring (we might fall in love), but it's a definite mundanization of the concept consciousness. It's more like intelligence or self-modelling. Turing test stuff, really. Can we imagine sapience without sentience ? I found a baby turtle in the woods today. Perhaps the best AI tech of 2085, which we'll call Charlie, will be much more sapient but not sentient at all. I may be able to learn from Charlie, but does Charlie 'have' the world ?
So the'exciting' kind of consciousness is of course the 'thereness' of the world 'for' sentience (a condition for the possibility of actually rather than merely seeming to give a damn). I think the world only exists perspectively. But I also can't make sense of sentience outside of a world. I'm a correlationist, I guess. But not an idealist, as if subjectivity could make sense except as the-world-for.
Predictive capacity is already implied in the philosophical approach. Translation proceeds from a philosophical mode of anticipation into a conventionalized mode of prediction, which in todays sciences means mathematisizing the objects of study i order to build apparatus for the purposes of calculation and measurement. This doesnt make the scientific version more precise than the philosophical , it merely swaps a deeper philosophical notion of precision for a shallow instrumental idea of precision.
Husserls genetic method begins with an ego-intentionality which we imagine as preceding the constitution of any regularities in experience. At this point there isnt much to determine that there is something like the world, if this is to indicate a realm of recognizable regularities, patterns and meaning. So what sort of process is required to turn a chaos of meaningless flux into the meaningful, stable patterns that would justify calling what we experience the world? The flux would certainly need to make itself amenable to the construction of simple predictable groupings of some sort or other, but this is still a far cry from a world of stable objects that the subject can interact with. One would have to imagine that the subject progressively synthesizes out of simpler correlations more and more complex ones. In Heideggers terms, the subject creates a worlding. If this is an entangling of subject and world , it is one in which what the world brings to the correlation is subordinated to the requirements of recognizability and similarity.
No, I understood the distinction, you did a fine job describing it. What I was saying is this: were we able to manipulate our own sentience/experiences well enough, we'd probably also believe that that we understood it well enough to decide rather some AI actually experienced things or not.
For example, if I was hooked up to a machine and someone said "I'm going to press a button and you're going to experience enacting x exact internal monologue, feel happy, see a green pony walk into the room, then lift your arms up and yell "I love Newt Gingrich," and mean it," and the person pressed the button and all that actually happened, I'd assume that whatever technology they were using implied enough mastery of the causes of sentience that they could tell me if a given AI experiences it or not. The reason P Zombies are a problem, IMO, is that we actually don't have a good idea what causes sentience, and so we don't know what to look for to determine what things have it.
Now, of course we could always remain skeptical and suppose that maybe even rocks are sentient deep down, but I think this would be enough evidence for most people.
Maybe sometimes. But it seems to be able to do without making distinct predictions quite a bit. E.g., Hegel's theory of history and institutional development obviously could be extended to make predictions, but he specifically doesn't do this, history being "thought comprehend in its own time," and all.
And I've never come across any phenomenology that tries to make the sort of predictions psychology does, although maybe that's selection bias.
Of course. Nor does it make it more accurate. "Garbage in, garbage out," as they say in the data biz.
But that's why I use the example of a technology that lets you interact with conciousness in a profoundly direct way. Perhaps "prediction," is a bit to amorphous here. Part of what makes the scientific view so convincing is that it allows for mastery of a phenomena. It lets you grab cause by the handle and shape things to your will. The proof is in the pudding.
It's the difference between gnosis and techne. You don't necessarily need gnosis, understanding, knowledge, to master something with the appropriate technology. But to be the one who makes the technology, that requires gnosis. The best proof of gnosis in most contexts? It's techne, mastery, the technique for manipulation. Techne is where the speculative element of gnosis is put to the test, "causal mastery talks and bullshit walks."
Which isn't to say you can't know things about phenomena and not be able to control them. Nor that people can't control phenomena to some degree while failing to understand them. But if you learn how to control them well enough, and you understand the techniques you employ, then it seems like good evidence that you understand the whole thing. It's the difference between advancing lift as a theory in physics on a chalk board and trying to convince people that way versus flying a plane over their head and yelling "ta-da!" Well, we might not think the Wright Brothers understand [I]everything[/I] about lift, but we know they understand [I]something[/I] important.
This is also why I think people expect saints and sages to behave in a particular way. It's something like: "you say you've reached a sort of special understanding of the world, achieved the gnosis. Ok, now show me how you've mastered yourself then." The ascetic practice plays an important role for the practitioner, to be sure, but it also seems to play a role as "proof" to the would-be student.
It seems to me that self and world would have to be elaborated at the same time. The body is especially entangled and undecidable, for it is revealed and revealing. The (psychological) self too is made of patterns and boundaries, right ? The 'pure witness' is, in my view, anonymous being, more like a clearing or the light that shines on the scene of development. Or really just its being there. Just its happening.
FWIW, I don't think babies are able to think of being in this world, but I think we practiced concept-mongers understand their awareness to be awareness of the world.
You make a good point. But there's still maybe a gap here between steering sentience and creating or understanding it. I readily admit that technical power is even dangerously persuasive.
FWIW, I think we do take our fellow humans and sufficiently complex animals as sentient. So we 'do' already know what to look for in that sense. But in some sense 'my' pain (and so on) is mine. I see the object from one side, you from another. Everyone is seemingly forced to see the object only from this or that place at this or that moment. 'Ontological cubism.' The world is an 'infinite' or hypersaturated object which is only given in such slices or adumbrations. The shiny world that hovers in Euclidean space is a useful 'fiction,' an important piece of culture which perfects the transparency of the subject.
So for me the larger issue is not consciousness detection but consciousness as the very being of a world entangled in our cognition, as it is itself enclosed in the world (a Klein bottle, a Möbius strip.)
The painter, when he has to draw a round cup, knows very well that the opening of the cup is a circle. When he draws an ellipse, therefore, he is not sincere, he is making a concession to the lies of optics and perspective, he is telling a deliberate lie.
https://smarthistory.org/cubism-and-multiple-perspectives/
Is the opening really a circle ? This really-a-circle is a bit like the thing-in-itself, but note that it still relies on an idea viewing angle (straight on). It's still for and through the eyes that the circle is given.
The point is that phenomenology is exclusively concerned with observable phenomena or appearances and has nothing to say about the origin and essential nature of phenomena. Thus it is defined as being free from any claims concerning existence. It doesn't stray onto metaphysics but is a non-reductive approach. Nothing wrong with this but it cannot produce a fundamental theory.
I'm not arguing with the idea that mind and matter arise from a source,that is neither, since this is my view, and can see why you might call this a neutral phenomenology, but for a fundamental theory we would have to go beyond phenomenology and endorse a neutral metaphysical theory. This has implications for all metaphysical dualities and not just mind -matter.
This comment seems to sum up the issue-
"In fact, part of the way one starts to do phenomen-
ology is to push aside any doctrines or theories including sci-
entific and metaphysical theories. This pushing aside is part of
the method of phenomenology. The phrase way of seeing could
be written method of seeing it is certainly a methodologically-
guided way of seeing. Accordingly, some authors suggest that
phenomenology is best defined as a method rather than a philo-
sophical theory. The whatever appears to be as such and the
manner of appearing or its manifestation these are all ways of
talking about the phenomena, which is a Greek word for appear-
ances. For Husserl, phenomenology (literally, the science of
appearances"
What Is Phenomenology? - Shaun Gallagher
Time is that within which events take place.
...
Time is initially encountered in those entities which are changeable; change is in time. How is time exhibited in this way of encountering it, namely, as that within which things change?
...
What is this now, the time now , as I look at my watch? Now, as I do this; now, as the light here goes out, for instance. What is the now? Is the now at my disposal? Am I the now? Is every other person the now? Then time would indeed be I myself, and every other person would be time. And in our being with one another we would be time everyone and no one. Am I the now, or only the one who is saying this?
...
What is involved in the fact that human existence has already procured a clock prior to all pocket-watches and sundials? Do I dispose over the Being of time, and do I also mean myself in the now? Am I myself the now and my existence time? Or is it ultimately time itself that procures for itself the clock in us? Augustine, in the Eleventh Book of his Confessions, pursued the question so far as to ask whether spirit itself is time.
...
"In you, I say repeatedly, I measure time; the transitory things encountered bring you into a disposition which remains, while those things disappear. The disposition I measure in present existence, not
the things that pass by in order that this disposition first arise. My very finding myself disposed, I repeat, is what I measure when I measure time. "
[/quote]
Or is it ultimately time itself that procures for itself the clock in us? I think it was Gadamer who summarized Being and Time with 'being is time.' Existence is time, which I understand in terms of a dynamic steaming of what might have been called experience if we weren't more wary now of taking the 'experienced' subject as more fundamental than the 'experience' (streaming being.)
Ah, I see. That's a reasonable way to understand bracketing. But phenomenology is a big tent. Husserl alone was amazingly prolific and always revising (his work is too large and complex for me to begin to pretend to have mastered it. But I see that mountain of it. And once Husserl embraced transcendental idealism (and lost some worthy followers), he was a full-fledged metaphysician doing first philosophy. Doing it pretty well often enough it seems to me.
Quoting plaque flag
Yes, indeed.
The personal ego is itself an idealism in that, rather than leading us back to the apodictic self-othering, subjective-objective becoming of temporal constitution, the psycho-physical ego is itself a product of constitution, via self-apperception. When we complete the epoche by abstracting away this self-apperception, we arrive at the primordial stratum where there is as yet no ego, but there remains the unitary flow of subjective temporal processes. At the beginning of its development, the subject is not an Object for itself and does not have the apperceptive unity, "Ego."(Ideas II, p.361)
Husserl argues that As pure Ego it does not harbor any hidden inner richness; it is absolutely simple and it lies there absolutely clear. All richness lies in the cogito and in the mode of the function which can be adequately grasped therein.(Ideas II). Husserl describes this pure ego pole as non-perceivable, non-graspable and anonymous. ...the ego which is the counterpart (gegenüber) to everything is anonymous. This suggests that for Husserl, the pure ego may function as nothing but an empty zero point or center of activity.
Quoting FrancisRay
This doesnt seem to be true for the founder of phenomenology:
Which is basically what Wittgenstein offers in the TLP, and which seems right to me. The subject is time (or [s]being[/s] becoming) . But this zero-point clearing, as time or being has a perspectival self-like care structure of motivated sentience.
I understand the motivation of calling it a transcendental ego, but I try to avoid the wrong kind of idealism, which errs in the same way as a naive adoption of the independent object.
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Here's Husserl in a text about first philosophy.
[i]Genuine rational life, and in particular genuine scientific research and achievement, must, by means of radically clarifying reflection, completely transcend the standpoint of naiveté. It mustideally speakingfurnish a fully sufficient justification for each step it takes, while at the highest level this justification must come from principles obtained with insight.
Through the high seriousness with which Plato, in this Socratic spirit, seeks to overcome anti-scientific skepticism, he becomes the father of all genuine science. He does so, first, by refusing to take lightly the Sophistic arguments against the possibility of valid knowledge and of a science that would be binding on every rational person, instead subjecting these arguments to a deeply penetrating, fundamental critique. Together with this, he undertakes the positive search for the possibility of such a knowledge and science, doing so (while being guided by the deepest understanding of Socratic maieutics) in the spirit of an intuitive clarification of essences and an evident exposition of the general essential norms of such a science. And finally, he strives with all his powers to set genuine science itself into motion on the basis of such fundamental insights.[/i]
Yes, a fair point. It's only a very small step from your neutral phenomenology to transcendental idealism, which is a neutral metaphysical theory. But it's a much bigger and braver idea that leads beyond phenomenology and perhaps this is why he lost followers.
I read those quotes carefully and they seem to support my point. Metaphysics extends beyond phenomenology. The boundary is rather messy, however, and I can see why they become confused. The study of appearances is physics and the natural sciences and the the study of their origin and true nature is metaphysics and mysticism, so I'm not sure how phenomenology could be defined as a distinct subject. The boundaries are always going to be messy. . . .
I wonder if we all agree on the definition of phenomenology, since all those I've seen are quite vague. .
. ., . .
Husserl shows that (the 'experience' of ) time is stretched. There is no pointlike now, except as a useful mathematical fiction (the glories of [math] \Bbb R [/math]). But the gap between the so-called experience of time and time itself is also a fiction. 'Time in itself' is silly talk, 'decadent' metaphysics without an intuitive foundation.
I claim the world exists only perspectively, and we humans live as much in possibility as we do in actuality. So possibility is real, existing as a blurry anxious uncertain situation. Our narrower concept of the External reality as pure actuality and pure pointlike now-presence is a handy fiction, which corresponds to a maximally generic subjectivity, a dead camera without a temporal dimension.
It's as if some variant of deism is popular, where what's left of the creator is just its glorious machine, which can run in the dark forever , somehow meaningful but ineffable if one is honest, for all perception must be stripped away if it is to run divinely in perfect darkness and silence. Its divinity is its radical independence.
Yes, which is why I think Heideggers critique of internal time consciousness as a metaphysics of presence is a bit unfair to Husserl.
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To me it's still feels pretty bold to doubt the 'independent object.' It reads almost like impiety, even if one is an atheist.
I tend to interpret Husserl as sharing my concern with semantic legitimacy. What does (what can) it mean for something to exist radically apart from the subject ? Or, to be fair, to feature a subject without a world ? If I say the world will go on without the human species, what kind of world am I thinking of but that which was given in correlation with the human spectator ?
If I say that aliens exist on a far away planet, I [ must ] mean that they are potentially perceivable, at least in theory. Our spaceships may not be fast enough yet, etc.
It's something else entirely to speak of the paradoxical or self-contradictory. And phenomenology is often, in my view, just the calling out of such paradox and bluff.
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Yeah, reading Husserl directly has been eye-opening for me. Ideas II was clearly an inspiration for Heidegger, along with so much else. Heidegger had that existential sexy factor going, then the scandal. I still think Heidegger is great, but perhaps Husserl's star will shine at least as bright in the long run.
You might like the read Herman Weyl's famous book on the continuum. He correctly states that we do not experience time. It is a fiction created from memories and anticipations. This is what Husserl means by saying time is stretched. It has to be stretched in order to creatr the illusion that we are experiencing it. The 'eternal now' is what Weyl calls the 'intuitive continuum, which is unextended, and the fictional time we seem to experience he explains as a theoretical construction. His book is mostly mathematics, but his philosophical ideas are well described by commentators and in his other writings. .
As you say, the idea of time as a metaphysically real phenomenon is inherently paradoxical. But the eternal now is transcendent to time. . . .
I would say physics is the study of appearances as filtered though a particular set of metaphysical suppositions, what Husserl calls objectivist metalhysics. All science is doing metaphysics, but implicitly rather than explicitly. Heidegger would say that the notion of appearance of a world before a subject is itself grounded in a particular metaphysical presupposition. A perhaps you can see, Im defining metaphysics as a set of grounding presuppositions guiding any domain of culture.
I do love that kind of stuff.
Quoting FrancisRay
To me the situation is tricky. I think there is an 'eternal now' in the sense that there is a form of the present, but this present is not punctiform. Husserl famous analysis of hearing a melody is sufficient, in my opinion, to prove this (to allow us to notice it, to see around the encrusted punctiform tradition.
https://iep.utm.edu/phe-time/
I also read James' Principles of Psychology lately, and he is great on this issue in that book. It's not just melody but the flow of meaning itself (in a spoken sentence perhaps) that is 'stretched' and non-punctiform. Consider the experience of reading these words. There is a stream of presence, retention and anticipation. An entangled trinity.
Quoting FrancisRay
I would say it is the pure present we only experience as a fiction , and that, most primordially, the only thing we do experience is the tripartite structure of time.
I'd rather say physics doesn't need to make metaphysical suppositions. It has banished metaphysics to a different department. Physicists often stray into metaphysics and sometimes hold strong views, but when they do they're no longer doing physics. Materialism is the typical methodological assumption, but this is not a scientific theory.and it is not even necessary to physics. . . .
I'd agree. But the idea that appearances can appear in the absence of a subject to whom they appear makes no sense to me. They seem to be mutually dependent phenomena.
Sorry but I don;t quite understand your post. What do you mean by 'independent object'? . .
Im not talking about sitting down to write a treatise with the word metaphysics in the title. Im talking about the presuppositions , usually unexamined, that make it possible to do any kind of science. Thomas Kuhn understood this. Think of a scientific paradigm as a kind of metaphysical frame. Physicists may think they have banished metaphysics, when all they have done is banish a certain strand of metaphysical thinking and substituted for it another, even more insidious one , which they are so far from recognizing that they have convinced themselves they have somehow escaped from history.
I mean the idea of something existing which cannot even in principle be perceived, something like 'things in themselves,' when it's also assumed they are only ever mediated by appearances -- by phenomena in the crude prephenomenological sense.
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Even Hobbes was on to this. I'll just offer a sample, but the chapter 'Of Man' is surprisingly temporally aware.
And because in Deliberation the Appetites and Aversions are raised by foresight of the good and evill consequences, and sequels of the action whereof we Deliberate; the good or evill effect thereof dependeth on the foresight of a long chain of consequences, of which very seldome any man is able to see to the end.
...
Continual Successe in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth, that is to say, continual prospering, is that men call FELICITY; I mean the Felicity of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual Tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because Life itself is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Feare, no more than without Sense. What kind of Felicity God hath ordained to them that devoutly honour him, a man shall no sooner know, than enjoy; being joys, that now are as incomprehensible, as the word of School-men, Beatifical Vision, is unintelligible.
...
[i]If the Discourse be meerly Mentall, it consisteth of thoughts that the thing will be, and will not be; or that it has been, and has not been, alternately. So that wheresoever you break off the chayn of a mans Discourse, you leave him in a Praesumption of It Will Be, or, It Will Not Be; or it Has Been, or, Has Not Been. All which is Opinion. And that which is alternate Appetite, in Deliberating concerning Good and Evil, the same is alternate Opinion in the Enquiry of the truth of Past, and Future. And as the last Appetite in Deliberation is called the Will, so the last Opinion in search of the truth of Past, and Future, is called the JUDGEMENT, or Resolute and Final Sentence of him that Discourseth. And as the whole chain of Appetites alternate, in the question of Good or Bad is called Deliberation; so the whole chain of Opinions alternate, in the question of True, or False is called DOUBT.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm#link2H_4_0038
These problems arise for space and time and for the numbers and the number line and Weyl dismisses all of them as a fiction. The idea that any of then are made out of points is paradoxical/. He concludes that the idea of extension is paradoxical when we reify it, and endorses the 'Perennial' explanation of extension as a fabrication of mind. .
.
So are you saying that space is an illusion ? Along with time ?
FWIW, I think a certain kind of knowledge strives to transcend both time and space --to be valid or worthy at all times and places. But this is the only kind of negation of space and time I can make sense of. It's a negation of the relevance of where 'o clock for the divine thinking that is everywhen and all ways.
Yes. The idea of the eternal now requires the idea that we can transcend the experience-experiencer duality. As you seem to say, if we cannot do this the idea makes no sense.
We never experience the pure present. There isn't time to experience it. But we can be in it. This explains how yogis can sit for weeks without moving. They are not experiencing the passing of time.
The nonduality teacher Sadhguru began to become famous after sitting on a rock for two weeks. When he came back to everyday li0fe found himself surrounded by admirers. He thought he'd been sitting for half an hour and was taken by surprise. . , . .
Ah. So you disagree with Kant? He concludes that it is a necessary definition of the ultimate phenomenon that it cannot be perceived or conceived since it lies beyond thee categories of thought. . But clearly it does not exist in the usual sense of ;standing out'. It has nothing from which it can stand out.
This is the classical Christian idea of God, that God exists but not in the way you and I exist. I don't like the word 'God' but the argument holds for the ultimate phenomenon whatever we call it.
.
[i]Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
...
The practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time. The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were -- a rearward -- and a forward-looking end.[5] It is only as parts of this duration-block that the relation of succession of one end to the other is perceived. We do not first feel one end and then feel the other after it, and from the perception of the succession infer an interval of time between, but we seem to feel the interval of time as a whole, with its two ends embedded in it. The experience is from the outset a synthetic datum, not a simple one; and to sensible perception its elements are inseparable, although attention looking back may easily decompose the experience, and distinguish its beginning from its end.
...
In the experience of watching empty time flow -- 'empty' to be taken hereafter in the relative sense just set forth -- we tell it off in pulses. We say 'now! now! now!' or we count 'more! more! more!' as we feel it bud. This composition out of units of duration is called the law of time's discrete flow. The discreteness is, however, merely due to the fact that our successive acts of recognition or apperception of what it is are discrete. The sensation is as continuous as any sensation can be.
...
Let me sum up, now, by saying that we are constantly conscious of a certain duration -- the specious present -- varying in length from a few seconds to probably not more than a minute, and that this duration (with its content perceived as having one part earlier and the other part later) is the original intuition of time. Longer times are conceived by adding, shorter ones by dividing, portions of this vaguely bounded unit, and are habitually thought by us symbolically.[/i]
https://genius.com/William-james-chapter-xv-1-the-perception-of-time-annotated
Yes. It has to be both or neither. This is Weyl's view also. As an illusion extension it is just as real as it seems to be, but as a metaphysical phenomenon it would be reducible.
Leibnitz makes the point thus:
"In Leibnitzs view, the ultimately real, something that depends on nothing else for its existence, cannot have parts. If it had parts, its existence would depend on them. But whatever has spatial extension has parts. It follows that what is ultimately real cannot have spatial extension,
Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy
Ed. Thomas Mautner (2000)
,
[i]In all our voluntary thinking there is some topic or subject about which all the members of the thought
revolve. Half the time this topic is a problem, a gap we cannot yet fill with a definite picture, word, or phrase, but which, in the manner described some time back, influences us in an intensely active and determinate psychic way. Whatever may be the images and phrases that pass before us, we feel their relation to this aching gap. To fill it up is our thought's destiny. Some bring us nearer to that consummation. Some the gap negates as quite irrelevant. Each swims in a felt fringe of relations of which the aforesaid gap is the term. Or instead of a definite gap we may merely carry a mood of interest about with us. Then, however vague the mood, it will still act in the same way, throwing a mantle of felt affinity over such representations, entering the mind, as suit it, and tingeing with the feeling of tediousness or discord all those with which it has no concern.
Relation, then, to our topic or interest is constantly felt in the fringe, and particularly the relation of harmony and discord, of furtherance or hindrance of the topic. When the sense of furtherance is there, we are 'all right;' with the sense of hindrance we are dissatisfied and perplexed, and cast about us for other thoughts. Now any thought the quality of whose fringe lets us feel ourselves 'all right,' is an acceptable member of our thinking, whatever kind of thought it may otherwise be. Provided we only feel it to have a place in the scheme of relations in which the interesting topic also lies, that is quite sufficient to make of it a relevant and appropriate portion of our train of ideas.
For the important thing about a train of thought is its conclusion. That is the meaning, or, as we say, the topic of the thought. That is what abides when all its other members have faded from memory. Usually this conclusion is a word or phrase or particular image, or practical attitude or resolve, whether rising to answer a problem or fill a pre?existing gap that worried us, or whether accidentally stumbled on in revery. In either case it stands out from the other segments of the stream by reason of the peculiar interest attaching to it. This interest arrests it, makes a sort of crisis of it when it comes, induces attention upon it and makes us treat it in a substantive way.
...
The ordinary associationist?psychology supposes, in contrast with this, that whenever an object of thought contains many elements, the thought itself must be made up of just as many ideas, one idea for each element, and all fused together in appearance, but really separate.[35] The enemies of this psychology find (as we have already seen) little trouble in showing that such a bundle of separate ideas would never form one thought at all, and they contend that an Ego must be added to the bundle to give it unity, and bring the various ideas into relation with each other. We will not discuss the ego just yet, but it is obvious that if things are to be thought in relation, they must be thought together, and in one something, be that something ego, psychosis, state of consciousness, or whatever you please. If not thought with each other, things are not thought in relation at all. Now most believers in the ego make the same mistake as the associationists and sensationists whom they oppose. Both agree that the elements of the subjective stream are discrete and separate and constitute what Kant calls a 'manifold.' But while the associationists think that a 'manifold' can form a single knowledge, the egoists deny this, and say that the knowledge comes only when the manifold is subjected to the synthetizing activity of an ego. Both make an identical initial hypothesis; but the egoist, finding it won't express the facts, adds another hypothesis to correct it. Now I do not wish just yet to 'commit myself' about the existence or non?existence of the ego, but I do contend that we need not invoke it for this particular reason ? namely, because the manifold of ideas has to be reduced to unity. There is no manifold of coexisting ideas; the notion of such a thing is a chimera. Whatever things are thought in relation are thought from the outset in a unity, in a single pulse of subjectivity, a single psychosis, feeling, or state of mind.[/i]
http://www.public-library.uk/ebooks/50/61.pdf
Okay. But this is not a metaphysical idea. In metaphysics the idea that time and space are truly real doesn't survive analysis. It is a difficult idea for sure, but not incomprehensible. Ive been quoting Kant, Leibnitz and Weyl, who all endorse the unreality of space-time. So did Erwin Schrodinger, and as far as I can make out modern physics seems to be arriving at the same conclusion. .
I see the charm of the idea. Reminds me of (as you say) Kant. And of course Schopenhauer. The Will is the Real 'behind' the Veil. That sort of thing.
To me this is using 'real' honorifically. It's another version of what I'd call filtering. Some of experience or being is declared 'unreal,' while a precious kernel, possibly only available to an elite, is honored with the label 'Real.' In many contexts, this makes sense. Real gold as opposed to fool's gold. Real quality, real insight. Ironically, this real insight is 'ideal.' The ideal marriage, etc. The perfect circle, which can never be instantiated in its perfection but makes the instantiation of circles possible (meaningful) in the first place.
So I'm not again your approach, but I favor an inclusive approach. It's all real. Confused daydreams are real, and they exist in the style of confused daydreams. All entities are semantically-inferentially linked in a single nexus. Language is directed at the one common world.
Philosophy, in my view, is largely about drawing our attention to neglected aspects of the real. This often involves seeing around old metaphors that hide structure. We see only what we were told to expect to see. It's hard to look with our own eyes, that sort of thing.
Then, finally, there's still a filter, but it's more about articulating general aprior forms of 'experience' (world-streaming), such as the tripartite structure of the rubber moment.
Quoting plaque flag
Youd like Deleuzes approach. He distinguishes between the virtual and the actual. Both are real; the virtual is the problematic field within which actual events arise and disappear.
I like some of what I've seen from Delueze. He's on my list, etc. If you feel like curating some gems, I'd be glad to see them.
By the way, Ong's Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982) is great. I bumped into it at a used book store. Good stuff.
To be clear. it's not just my approach, it's the Perennial philosophy.
You might like to look at Buddhism's doctrine of two truths. This states that space-time phenomena - , which in Buddhism are dhamma or 'thing-events' ,- are conventionally real but ultimately unreal. This is why they are said to 'not really exist'. One could say that by reduction they are unreal, and what is truly real would be irreducible, Nobody claims that nothing exists, although some western scholars confuse Buddhism with nihilism. ,
Metaphysics has to reduce the many to the one, and if we assume the many is truly real this cannot be done. I think you'd have to admit that the incomprehension of philosophers suggests that they're missing a trick. .
Understood. But, for me anyway, there's no authority beyond something like our own earnestly critical investigation of the matters themselves.
Quoting FrancisRay
I'm not against that. Indeed, I agree with Hegel that the finite is 'unreal,' 'fictional,' [merely] conventional. Reality is one and continuous. I also like Ecclesiastes: all is hebel. Everything is 'empty.' See there how the great void shines.
Quoting FrancisRay
I'd say metaphysics is a kind of grand science, and that it projects illuminating metaphors on the whole of reality. For instance: 'all is vanity [empty].' Or: 'all is one [connected, interdependent].' Of course people like to say that 'all is mind' or 'all is matter' too. Or that all is God creating and recognizing itself. Or that all is 'a tale of sound and fury signifying nothing.'
You mention 'truly real,' which is like 'really real.' I'm not against it, but the question for me is almost always one of meaning. What does is mean to call something 'real' ? Of course I know well enough in dozens of ordinary contexts, but what does this or that metaphysician mean? 'Of course all things are really empty.' I can relate to that one, which means: it's our investment in a game that gives it life. Beauty is (largely) 'in' the eye of the beholder. We [spontaneously, unconsciously] 'project' a grand meaning on this or that, but this or that is straw dogs, cast away after the ceremony. The cat chases a red light on the wall. That light is 'nothing.'
Agreed in respect of discursive philosophers. For practitioners their authority is direct experience and not speculation. .
This is interesting. Do you know where it says this in Ecclesiastes? It shows how easy it would be to interpret the Bible as endorsing the perennial philosophy.
It ought to be a science of logic, but the views you mention show that few people approach it as such. The voidness of phenomena is a logical result, as Kant shows, but most of these other views fail under analysis and so are profoundly unscientific. . . .
To be truly real a phenomenon would have to be independent, irreducible, non-contingent and unchanging. What we usually call 'existence' is dependent or relative existence. It requires that the phenomenon 'stands out' from a background. But, as Schrodinger points out, as well as the myriad dependent phenomena there is the 'background on which they are painted'. This is what would be truly real. You could think of it as the information space necessary for an information theory, or the blank sheet of paper required for a Venn diagram and set theory,
The idea is not that the conventional world does not exist, but that it exist only in a weak and non-metaphysical sense. Thus Heraclitus states 'We are and are-not', and in this way takes account of both aspects of the world, or both levels of analysis, the conventional and the ultimate. This is an example of the 'two truths'. Hence the seemingly contradictory language of mysticism. . . . . , . . ,
. . . . .
:up:
Quoting FrancisRay
It's very near the beginning. The word 'vanity' in the KJV is a translation of hebel, which could have been translated as 'vapor' or 'breath.' Turns out the hebel is already a rich metaphor in the original Hebrew. All is fog, mist, vapor, even the meaning of hebel, the meaning of saying so.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ecclesiastes+1&version=NKJV
We may have to disagree here. I don't accept Kant's idea (or what is often taken to be his idea) that we are cut off from reality. I think we are always already 'in' reality, seeing reality. Indeed the vanishing subject, in my view, is reality-from-a-point-of-view. 'I' am not only being-in-the-world but the world's very being, along with you and him and her and them.
But I do very much think that some perspectives (some conceptual articulations of reality) are richer and more adequate than others. I think we do agree on the value of some kind of scientific rational approach.
I agree pretty much with the first two requirements, but I don't see why reality can't be in flux --- or why it can't be a brute fact.
I do agree that grandest kind of knowledge is the articulation of eternal necessity, preferably of an independent, irreducible being. This is the knowledge of self-knowing God -- perhaps the knowledge of the seer in a certain state. But, for me, that seer would only be in a beautiful semi-discursive frame of mind. I've had some intense experiences, and I'd explain them in terms of deeply understanding certain myths --as feeling the 'truth' of the symbols / stories. I mean the experience of very high/sublime emotion that allows one to 'get' certain myths. Of course people can't live for long on such heights, but perhaps a residue of the insight sticks. And maybe it's a little easier to get back up there when the conditions are right again.
This (as you may already know) is pretty close to Heidegger. The background is a kind of elusive 'nothing' that enables all the little things to make sense. It's the enabling framework, mostly transparent, mostly hiding. I can agree with you that this background is more substantial in some sense.
But it should maybe be mentioned that identifying true being with the unchanging is not obviously the way to go, however traditional. Why are we drawn toward the eternal , the durable? Is it a triumph over death? Is it a greater personal achievement ? Akin to a great mathematical or scientific theory ? Note that there too the goal is eternal knowledge. And Milton's (and others poets') goal is to write something that no one wants to forget ---writerly immortality. What is this lust for that which lasts ?
Nor me. I feel this is his biggest mistake. It leads him to the view we can know nothing about ultimate reality, which is NOt a logical result. But the voidness of phenomena is a matter of analysis.
This makes sense. But what are you when the subject disappears? This is the question that the perennial philosophy answers. This would be our 'end before our beginning' as spoken of by Jesus. . .
Absolutely we agree on this. This is why I endorse the perennial philosophy, for which reality is not a perspective but a phenomenon, Reality would be our identity, not a perspective on something else. Kant shows that the ultimate is inconceivable and unsayable, as the OT story of the golden calf suggests. It would be knowable, however, as it is who we are. ,
Hmm. I'd say it is the only way to go. No other idea allows us to create a fundamental theory.
The crucial idea here is the principle of nonduality and the unity of all. .
Okay. But in this case how do you explain the odd fact that the mystics have the only metaphysical theory that works? All others are rejected by analysis. Also, meditation is said to be shallow if it does not go beyond mind.
I think perhaps you underestimate just how deep it is possible to go.
How so ? This voidness ?Quoting FrancisRay
In my view, 'pure' subjectivity is so radically transparent that it's really just the being of the world. I claim that the world has no other being. Or, at least, that we can't know of make sense of some other kind of being than our own (the world's ) perspectival kind.
But I'd be glad to hear more about this 'end before our beginning' as spoken of by Jesus.
Well maybe our views are pretty close. It's always interesting to navigate others' idiolects. We all have our own way of saying things. But I think we should differentiate between perspectivism and indirect realism. Because I view perspectivism as the subjectivity finally done right, finally grasped properly, in a way that doesn't hide reality from the subject, put us all in a solipsistic box of mere appearance.
I'm not sure what metaphysical theory you have in mind. To me, perennial philosophy is not so exact or definite.
The perennial philosophy (Latin: philosophia perennis),[note 1] also referred to as perennialism and perennial wisdom, is a perspective in philosophy and spirituality that views religious traditions as sharing a single, metaphysical truth or origin from which all esoteric and exoteric knowledge and doctrine has grown.
Now I lean more toward than away from this idea. I've studied thinkers for different eras and cultures and I do think that there's a blurry consensus that's worth something. I find my own favored perspectivism appearing in different flavors in Western philosophy. But, FWIW, I am fascinating by Buddhism, Taoism, etc.
Quoting FrancisRay
I do think 'rejection by analysis' is, roughly, the correct method. I also think it's analytically shallow to take the subject as something final and absolute. The subject is a kind of fiction. And in heightened states it's maybe an acceptance of death that allows for an ecstatic breakthrough. (Happened to me once.) And just conceptually, I'm sharing my own ideas in this thread because I feel like there's genuine progress in understanding consciousness as the being of the world. Like a knot has been untied, even if it's hard to communicate to others (I'm not saying you don't get what I'm trying to say, just that it's tricky to talk about with most people.)
It could be. And I could end up revising my beliefs. All I can do is sincerely think and be open and be critical, and so on.
Under analysis the phenomena of this world are found to be empty of substance or essence. This is not a metaphysical speculation bur a verifiable fact.
In metaphysics the results of analysis are surprisingly easy to summarise. All extreme or positive metaphysical positions are found to be logically indefensible. This is the reason why metaphysical questions are undecidable, If you reject all these failed positions you are left with a neutral theory, as required for the perennial philosophy. Hence those who reject mysticism are unable to make sense of metaphysics. ,
For the mystics reality and consciousness are the same phenomenon, and perhaps this is the idea you need to overcome the idea of pure subjectivity. They say the subject-object distinction is functional or conventional, and not ontological.
This is not an idea endorsed by the church, so be warned. . .
"Blessed is he whose beginning is before he came into being!"
Jesus - Gospel of Thomas - V 20
"The disciples said to Jesus, "Tell us how our end will be." Jesus said, "Have you discovered, then, the beginning, that you look for the end? For where the beginning is, there will the end be. Blessed is he who will take his place in the beginning; he will know the end and will not experience death."
Gospel of Thomas - V18
This refers to what in Taoism is 'our face before we were born'. If we can dive this deep we can overcome life and death, and this would be the Grail experience of total 'holiness'. In its proper meaning yoga is the 'art of union with reality',and this definition reveals what meditation is all about. It's about going back to the beginning, before we began to identify as a subject with a perspective.
. . . .
It's wonderful to talk to someone so thoughtful and open minded.
BTW, I'm reading this right now:
It has a similar set of ideas at its core, although it goes a lot further, trying to show how the "enlightened," view of reality ties into conceptions of human freedom, the pursuit of the sciences, art, ethics, and ultimately, conceptions of God.
It isn't perfect, but a very neat book. It draws on Whitehead, Wittgenstein, and Murdoch the most in terms of modern philosophers, along with Aristotle, Saint Augustine and Kant. Although the big sources of inspiration are in the title.
It's sort of neat to see the tie ins between Wittgenstein and Hegel, given how Russell was such a reaction against Hegel, and influenced
Wittgenstein.
Of course, how is simply recognizing the nature of being "mystical?" It's a loaded term for sure. But I'd say it fits in that we obviously have such a strong tendency NOT to see the world this way, making the turn a sort of "revaluation."
A good question. Maybe 'mystical' isn't the ideal word. Is philosophical wonder better ? The world loses it familiarity, but as a whole. Husserl writes of the sense of a whole world being opened up by his bracketing, as if an entire dimension of reality/experience is usually ignored.
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I'd be glad to hear more about your take on the perennial philosophy.
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Nice ! That's what I'm basically try to say in this thread. Of course we need account for the fact that there are many of us, each of us the being of the 'same' world from a different 'point of view.'
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Nice. Sort of like 'the face of a baby at a parade before it has learned to smile.'
Quoting FrancisRay
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I like to think that there's also a discursive path to some discursive analogue of that. I do think that analysis gets us far. But of course I value ineffable experiences that I also won't try to talk much about.
. . ,
In this case we're on the same page.
Waves on the ocean or sparks of the divine are common metaphors for our situation as individuals.
Dost thou reckon thyself only a puny form
When within thee the universe is folded?
Bahaullah quoting Imam Ali,
the first Shia Imam
.
I also believe in the value of analysis, since although it cannot take us all the way to an understanding it clearly signposts what it is we need to understand and disposes of philosophical problems. For a sceptic analysis is the only way forward, since they will not be inclined to do the practice.
. ..
Quoting FrancisRay
Is such a sitting yogi having an experience of anything while they claim to not experience the passing of time? There is a tendency to confuse the conventional measurement of time
via clocks and time itself. For instance, the concept of time dilation in physics is typically described as a slowing down or speeding up of time because clocks slow down when accelerated. But a more slowly ticking clock is not the same thing as a time moving more slowly. Most fundamentally time is not like motion, to be sped up or slowed down. Time is the nature of the changes in what we are involved in. If we are immersed in a flow experience, the consistency and coherence of that kind of creative unfolding will be experienced as a speeding up or stoppage of time, because we normally pay attention to a clock and its meaningless movements when our task is interrupted, or when we are distracted and bored.
In short , where there is no time there is no experience. The mystical and religious notions of pure unchanging reflexivity, of awareness without intention, fail to recognize that such notions of pure identity rely on fundamental difference. The only pure ground is already a repetition. It is the repetition of difference in itself.
[quote=Mach]
Colours, sounds, and the odours of bodies are evanescent. But their tangibility, as a sort of constant nucleus, not readily susceptible of annihilation, remains behind; appearing as the vehicle of the more fugitive properties attached to it. Habit, thus, keeps our thought firmly attached to this central nucleus, even when we have begun to recognise that seeing hearing, smelling, and touching are intimately akin in character. A further consideration is, that owing to the singularly extensive development of mechanical physics a kind of higher reality is ascribed to the spatial and to the temporal than to colours, sounds, and odours; agreeably to which, the temporal and spatial links of colours, sounds, and odours appear to be more real than the colours, sounds and odours themselves. The physiology of the senses, however, demonstrates, that spaces and times may just as appropriately be called sensations as colours and sounds.
[/quote]
This is part of Mach's showing how relatively permanent enties (including the ego) can be decomposed into elements which will turn out to be neither mind nor matter, prior to both, the raw ingredients of both. By dissolving primary qualities (as Kant also did), he goes beyond Hobbes and Locke. But unlike Kant he feels no need to hang these neutral elements on something obscure. This is probably because he wasn't religious in the same way. He also didn't need an afterlife. Digression, but Mach's minimal, understated 'spirituality' (if we still want to call it that) also speaks to me.
Here's a sample:
[quote=Mach]
Further, that complex of memories, moods, and feelings, joined to a particular body (the human body), which is called the "I" or "Ego," manifests itself as relatively permanent. I may be engaged upon this or that subject, I may be quiet and cheerful, excited and ill-humoured. Yet, pathological cases apart, enough durable features remain to identify the ego. Of course, the ego also is only of relative permanency.
...
The ego is as little absolutely permanent as are bodies. That which we so much dread in death, the annihilation of our permanency, actually occurs in life in abundant measure. That which is most valued by us, remains preserved in countless copies, or, in cases of exceptional excellence, is even preserved of itself. In the best human being, however, there are individual traits, the loss of which neither he himself nor others need regret. Indeed, at times, death, viewed as a liberation from individuality, may even become a pleasant thought. Such reflections of course do not make physiological death any the easier to bear.
[/quote]
I suspect that many people come to this same realization. The same virtues that die with the old return with the young. The flame leaps from candle to candle. In Feuerbach, we find also that
[ the true belief in immortality is ] a belief in the infinity of Spirit and in the everlasting youth of humanity, in the inexhaustible love and creative power of Spirit, in its eternally unfolding itself into new individuals out of the womb of its plenitude and granting new beings for the glorification, enjoyment, and contemplation of itself.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/
This will not please the antinatalist, and there is maybe an optimism in Mach and Feuerbach that's more difficult for us in age that's come to dread technology, to feel ourselves enslaved perhaps to screens, or to others who are so enslaved.
[quote=Mach]
Not only the relation of bodies to the ego, but the ego itself also, gives rise to similar pseudo - problems, the character of which may be briefly indicated as follows:
Let us denote the above-mentioned elements by the letters A B C . . ., X L M . . ., a, b, c . . . Let those complexes of colours, sounds, and so forth, commonly called bodies, be denoted, for the sake of clearness, by A B C . .; the complex, known as our own body, which is a part of the former complexes distinguished by certain peculiarities, may be called K L M . . .; the complex composed of volitions, memory-images, and the rest, we shall represent by a b c . . . Usually, now, the complex a , c . . . K L M. . ., as making up the ego, is opposed to the complex A B C . . ., as making up the world of physical objects; sometimes also, a b c . . . is viewed as ego, and K L M . . . A B C . . . as world of physical objects. Now, at first blush, A B C . . . appears independent of the ego, and opposed to it as a separate existence. But this independence is only relative, and gives way upon closer inspection. Much, it is true, may change in the complex a b c . . . without much perceptible change being induced in A B C . . .; and vice versa. But many changes in a b c . . . do pass, by way of changes in K L M . . ., to A B C . . .; and vice versa. (As, for example, when powerful ideas burst forth into acts, or when our environment induces noticeable changes in our body.) At the same time the group K L M . . . appears to be more intimately connected with a b c . . . and with A B C . . ., than the latter with one another; and their relations find their expression in common thought and speech.
Precisely viewed, however, it appears that the group A B C . . . is always codetermined by K L M. A cube when seen close at hand, looks large; when seen at a distance, small; its appearance to the right eye differs from its appearance to the left; sometimes it appears double; with closed eyes it is invisible. The properties of one and the same body, therefore, appear modified by our own body; they appear conditioned by it. But where, now, is that same body, which appears so different? All that can be said is, that with different K L M different A B C . . . are associated.
A common and popular way of thinking and speaking is to contrast " appearance " with " reality." A pencil held in front of us in the air is seen by us as straight; dip it into the water, and we see it crooked. In the latter case we say that the pencil appears crooked, but is in reality straight. But what justifies us in declaring one fact rather than another to be the reality, and degrading the other to the level of appearance ? In both cases we have to do with facts which present us with different combinations of the elements, combinations which in the two cases are differently conditioned. Precisely because of its environment the pencil dipped in water is optically crooked; but it is tactually and metrically straight. An image in a concave or flat mirror is only visible, whereas under other and ordinary circumstances a tangible body as well corresponds to the visible image. A bright surface is brighter beside a dark surface than beside one brighter than itself. To be sure, our expectation is deceived when, not paying sufficient attention to the conditions, and substituting for one another different cases of the combination, we fall into the natural error of expecting what we are accustomed to, although the case may be an unusual one. The facts are not to blame for that. In these cases, to speak of " appearance " may have a practical meaning, but cannot have a scientific meaning. Similarly, the question which is often asked, whether the world is real or whether we merely dream it, is devoid of all scientific meaning. Even the wildest dream is a fact as much as any other. If our dreams were more regular, more connected, more stable, they would also have more practical importance for us. In our waking hours the relations of the elements to one another are immensely amplified in comparison with what they were in our dreams. We recognise the dream for what it is. When the process is reversed, the field of psychic vision is narrowed; the contrast is almost entirely lacking. Where there is no contrast, the distinction between dream and waking, between appearance and reality, is quite otiose and worthless.
[/quote]
Here's a key part:
Let those complexes of colours, sounds, and so forth, commonly called bodies, be denoted, for the sake of clearness, by A B C . .; the complex, known as our own body, which is a part of the former complexes distinguished by certain peculiarities, may be called K L M . . .; the complex composed of volitions, memory-images, and the rest, we shall represent by a b c.
Note that capital letters are used for everything that's typically understood to be physical.
ABC = elements that make up chairs for instance
KLM = elements that make up my arm, for instance
abc = elements that make up my daydream, for instance
The breakthrough move is to simply consider functional relationships between all of these elements, forgetting or ignoring our usual prejudices about mental and physical and appearance and reality.
[i]Precisely viewed, however, it appears that the group A B C . . . is always codetermined by K L M.
A cube when seen close at hand, looks large; when seen at a distance, small; its appearance to the right eye differs from its appearance to the left; sometimes it appears double; with closed eyes it is invisible. The properties of one and the same body, therefore, appear modified by our own body; they appear conditioned by it. But where, now, is that same body, which appears so different? All that can be said is, that with different K L M different A B C . . . are associated.[/i]
I think Mach's point is that the cube is one and the same body throughout those changes as a matter of convention. We blow open the hermeneutic space by thinking of ABC as a function of KLM, or the reverse.
The other issue is the conventional nature of our taking this or that assembly of elements for 'real' or 'physical.' Mach doesn't stress the fact here, but he seems to echo Wittgenstein's 'I am my world.' The ego, along with everything else, is composed of such elements. Its boundaries (its assembly) is in some sense arbitrary, though I doubt Mach would deny the force of habit and enculturation.
The underlined part is more of Mach's spirituality, and I suspect that of many scientific and artistic types. I'm sure many of us here would love to contribute something worthy --- somehow push the conversation forward. Even if such a drive also includes petty-selfish elements, so be it. We are mud that breathes.
This is the 'worldstreaming' mentioned previously. 'Sensation' is a ladder that must be thrown away, for the subject with sense organs emerges from these neutral elements along with its other, the sensed environment. Given the intense connection of our flesh with this worldstreaming, it's natural enough to want to make subjectivity absolute, but this ignores the interpenetration of our worldstreamings and the crucial sociality and worldliness of language. Note that Mach is content to dissolve the ego because he feels himself in a society where what's worthy in any ego is safely leaping from mortal vessel to mortal vessel. Mach is not alone in a sensation bubble. The world is not reduced to consciousness. Consciousness is 'reduced' or properly understood as exactly the [only] being of the world. [The only being that we know anything about and talk sensibly about ---a world of possible and actual experience. ]
Husserl
Experience is flowing and 'horizonal.' I see the front of a house and have a sense of the unseen back of the house. I read the first few pages and have a vague sense of the many that follow. I 'get to know' someone, who I find interesting. Of course the 'now' itself is 'stretched' with anticatipation and memory, allowing me to appreciate music and understand a long sentence. Note that I constant expect expect expect, and that attention is drawn to violations of expectoration.
Sartre
The thing is not behind its appearances but something like their ideal unity, which is 'infinite' in that the object can continue to be examined by me or others who might arrive. The worldly object is experienced as experienceable-by-others-too. It's a relatively permanent possibility of perception, projected into the future and into considerations of alternate versions of the past.
:up:
I suspect that this :
Indra's net (also called Indra's jewels or Indra's pearls, Sanskrit Indraj?la, Chinese: ????) is a metaphor used to illustrate the concepts of ??nyat? (emptiness),[1] prat?tyasamutp?da (dependent origination),[2] and interpenetration[3] in Buddhist philosophy.
is another way to say the same thing that I mean by ontological cubism.
Note that interpenetration is stressed. I 'am' my world in some sense, but of course I am our world, and you are in our world with me. But the world is arranged around sentient bodies, so that each of us is at the center of our own coordinate system. Our feet don't move. The street rolls beneath them. Einstein and Mach come to mind here, and not just Husserl.
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Beautiful. Yeah I think we are on the same page in the most important way. The feeling tone, the sense of philosophy's radical potential, the sense of the 'illusory' nature of the ego. I'll even give you the 'illusory' nature of time in a certain sense. Though I think the form of flow itself is static. The river runs on smoothly forever. The reels of the projector turn. Hebel. Breath. Vapor. All procession is.
I guess I find the discursive and 'the rest' to be pretty entangled. But I've been known to talk about the feeling of being 'behind language.' Or maybe 'over language. ' This is still a figure of speech, but it points at a 'feeling' or heightened state that triumphs over the useful neurotic discursivity, plays with it.
My own favored sense of mysticism is close to Nietzsche's interpretation of Jesus in The Antichrist.
[i]... if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, tradition should positively be discouraged. ...Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.
Some one said: The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did. Precisely, and they are that which we know.
Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.
What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science.[/i]
That's T.S. Eliot
I think there's a 'good' discursive part of philosophy, some of it basically so creative as to be visionary. This or that person somehow cuts through the general confusion with just the right metaphor, just the right revelation of false necessity as mere contingency, opening up the space.
But we probably agree that philosophy can be a dreary excuse for conformity --a soporific even...
The word 'reflexivity' implies some sort of dualism so I'm not sure it's relevant here. I may be misunderstanding what you mean but it. .
Aha. I can show you how to untangle it. It requires knowing only two or three vital facts. If you know that all metaphysical questions are undecidable then you're half way there.
I am not a fan of Nietzsche. He's brilliant but seems to be floundering around in the dark.
That was an Interesting Eliot quote.
I don't share your view of philosophy and have a much higher regard, but I'm not talking about mainstream western philosophy. . . . . ,
I see it more as reducing duality to non-duality; non-duality being neither one nor many. Duality is simply based on the notion of separation, a conception which is essential to thought and perception, but has no being or provenance beyond that.
Come on. Spit it out. :smile:
Quoting plaque flag :up:
The problem, as I see it, is that then a revolutionary idea is drowned in a sea of words. Being a math guy and not a philosopher, to be concise is paramount (though some in my former profession violate that principle).
I'm glad someone caught my little joke.
Quoting jgill
I feel you. Did you ever look into the famous TLP ? It's got a tree structure, where you can open up any claim for more detail. But even with all the leaves out, it's still a brief, beautiful book. Definitely one of my favorites in the entire tradition, and a big influence on this thread.
Personally I'd like to squeeze the gist of anything I've learned into such a tight presentation, but I think it takes lots of experimentation (longwinded at times, and likely interactive ) to whittle it down.
Not to be difficult, but claiming that all metaphysical questions are undecidable seems to decide an important metaphysical question. Though I can actually feel my way toward what you might mean. And I've maybe made similar claims, most recently in terms of an ineradicable ambiguity which I was calling semantic finitude.
To my ears, you are little too down on mainstream philosophy, forgetting maybe that it's not just the domain of respectable professors. And some of those professors are great anyway. Hegel was a professor, as was Heidegger and Husserl.
I know that there are aspects of Nietzsche that hard to enjoy, but I definitely personally defend his overall philosophical greatness. To be clear, it's of course not a matter of endorsing all of his claims. It's more about the value of wrestling with an original and daring mind.
FWIW, I adore Emerson.
A question that might be asked is whether this is true by definition --- whether we tend to understand 'Being' [the truly real ] precisely in terms of constant presence. If so, is this a bias ?
I'm of course not the first person to speculate in this way. I bring up a famous issue. Much of the radicality of Being and Time is perhaps in its claim or suggestion (according to some) that being is time. This is maybe like Heraclitus making the Flux itself most real.
My own view is that discursive philosophers really can't help looking for atemporal structure. That's the quasi-scientific conception of the enterprise at least. But perhaps we can articulate the perduring matrix or structure of the flow of otherwise continuous novelty. We can sketch the form or 'skeleton' of all possible experience. For instance, the rainbow shows us the palette with which reality must eternally be painted. The human ear experiences a certain range of tones. Wittgenstein tried to express the logical form of [the conceptual aspect of] the world. Mathematicians arguably disclose necessities in quantitative and spatial aspects of reality.
6.5 If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.
Incompleteness in mathematics puts a kink in this. Is "this and that" provable? Will "yes" or "no" always suffice?
You raise a good point. I can't endorse all of his claims, but some of them are great. I recommend checking out 5.6 and its leaves, which largely inspired this thread.
Here's a little comment he makes in passing in response to Kant's [ failed ] argument that space is not real.
A right-hand glove could be put on a left hand if it could be turned round in four-dimensional space.
That's a stretch. :cool:
But I like his conciseness.
Quoting FrancisRay
Im aware that the classical understanding of the ultimately real is the eternally unchanging. My argument is that the idea of seeing beyond time to some sort of awareness or reality is incoherent. To be aware is to change. Pure anything , including pure timelessness, is not Being but the definition of death itself.
:up:
I think the most charitable way to read it is as gazing on The Unchanging with adoration. Or feeling oneself in a sort of divine stasis, having temporarily become The Illuminated One. There's only One of 'em to, because it's the Central and Ideal State of Being. The capital letters aren't meant as a parody but only to capture the feeling I think is involved.
You know Sartre's talk about our desire to be like stones --to flee from our twisting and ragger nothingness and yet somehow keep our freedom in that stonelike plenitude.
Quoting plaque flag
Heidegger analyzes how Nietzsches Eternal return makes use of this notion of Being as constant presence to turn it against itself via time as a continual passing away. Eternal return of the same is the same by being Willed as always different from itself.
I've looked into that book recently. Of course Heidegger is famously eccentric in his grasp of Nietzsche, but there is something to be said for even a semi-fictional Heidegger's Nietzsche as the prophet of eternal return. It's a truly glorious & disturbing myth. Close to Vico, and dear it seems to Joyce. The wheel is an ancient and profound symbol, and I think Nietzsche taps into that. He also forged something that's like a stone and a river at the same time.
Quoting plaque flag
I think feeling is central to many of the modernizations of meditative practice. Non-judgemental , non-intending bare awareness of being is supposed to be connected with the feeling of unconditional, intrinsic, spontaneous compassion and benevolence, peace and fundamental warmth toward the phenomenal world, concern for the welfare of others beyond mere naive compassion, joy and of the mind, etc, and this is a kind of auto-affection or self-luminosity. It all rests on the supposition of a purely neutral attention that can be separated off from any intentional objects being attended to.
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That sounds right. I like Rahula's What The Buddha Taught, and I imagine the state you describe as the goal. This is a kind of auto-affection or self-luminosity. Feuerbach also, in his own words, sees and says this.
But this thinking all rests on the supposition of a purely neutral attention that can be separated off from any intentional objects being attended to. But there is no such thing as neutral attention. To attend to something is already to intend it, to desire, to will. Attending is a biasing.
The idea of the mind reposing, awake and alert, in the sheer luminosity' of consciousness (its quality of non-reflective and open awareness), without attending exclusively to any particular object or content, is a form of desire and intentionality in that in simple self-reflexive awareness, it is at every moment relating to a new object (its own changing sense of non-objectifying awareness of the arising and passing away of temporary forms), and being affected, disturbed, by it. Disturbance, desire and dislocating becoming is prior to, that is, implicit but not noticed in neutral' compassionate awareness. Becoming is the restless anxiety of desire, striving, motivation, and the ground of all attention, affect and valuation. Primordial awareness is from moment to moment a new way of being -affected-by the world, and thus, what ever else it is affectively in its particular and contingent experience of now', a kind of uncanniness.
I don't go out of my way to meditate, but I can report of my happy and at-ease states, which are fortunately pretty regular, that there's a leaping from stone to stone. So it's maybe that lack of stickiness or viscosity that matters. Or what a beatnik would call a hang-up. Again I roll in Hobbes.
Continual Successe in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth, that is to say, continual prospering, is that men call FELICITY; I mean the Felicity of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual Tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because Life itself is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Feare, no more than without Sense.
It's almost like a melody, with a new note born to make up for the last note dying. Sartre writes about this in Nausea, with his redheaded hero listening to jazz, learning to let the notes die, so that that music can go on, seemingly a metaphor for life itself, which one must live by continually dying.
That sounds right to me, tho I don't claim to be an expert on such matters. I do think life is noisy, muddy, and wobbly, even if we can smooth it over.
It is simply a fact. All selective conclusions about the world as a whole are undecidable. This is demonstrable and old news. Figuring out what it implies for the world is the entire secret of metaphysics. . . .
Good point. But it;s not a definition. It;s a result of analysis. A fundamental theory must reduce space-time, motion and change.
Heraclitus points out that in the world of time there is constant change but does not suggest this is the fundamental nature of reality. Heraclitus and Parmenides are easy to reconcile. .
I have a boo here with the subtitle 'Buddhist Explorations in Consciousness and Time. Here the word 'and' is highly significant. I wouldn't agree that Heraclitus reified the flux.
I feel the phrase 'atemporal structure is an oxymoron. How can one have a structure without time?
I can never grasp why anyone reads Wittgenstein. ThePhilosophical Investigations reveal no grasp of the issues. Even his mentor Russell suspected he was a fool.
For the logical form of the conceptual aspect of the world you can't do better than George Spencer Brown in his Laws of Form. To investigate this issue means examining naive set theory and solving Russell's Paradox. This allows us to dive deeper than the conceptual aspect. .
. .
You'll find that your view does not allow you to make sense of metaphysics or consciousness. You call this unchanging reality the 'classical understanding', but in fact it's the understanding of anyone who dives deeply into consciousness even today. You're speaking of ordinary awareness, which as you say requires change and time.
But in a way you're right, it is a definition of death. Thus the prophet Mohammed advises, ;Die before your death', which all the realised masters advise. For a deeper view of consciousness and time one would have to explore beyond life and death. Those who succeed in this,endeavour, the Dalai Lama tells us, do not experience death.
. . .
We only have fragments to go on, and of course we don't take (at least I don't take) any jaw-flapping human for an authority, but there's this:
This world-order [kosmos], the same of all, no god nor man did create, but it ever was and is and will be: everliving fire, kindling in measures and being quenched in measures.
Quoting FrancisRay
Not trying to be difficult, but the expectation in a context like ours is that one justify grand claims of that nature. I readily grant that adopting the role of the critical-discursive philosopher in the first place is optional. Most of us here live in free societies where the problem is people being too bored with the spiritual babble of strangers to be offended by anything more than the buttonholing itself, with the incommodious proselytizing form rather than the content. Those who know It are looking for peers rather than students: they want to enjoy the wealth of the situation with others. The desire for students is still too grasping. For me knowing 'It' doesn't involve some definite content but a general sense of freedom and a kind of playful ground state. I can 'basically understand life' without even being done improving myself and learning.
Not disagreeing, but Why ? Note that 'fundamental' is a metaphor that gestures to the ground, the soil, that upon which everything stands, typically unmoving, which is how we experience the earth beneath us, tho we know it hurtles through space.
I'm saying that the metaphor betrays the assumption of or instinct toward that which is unchanging, that which is static in the flux. Presumably this is connect with our flesh and its needs. We want fruit that doesn't go rotten. We don't want to rely on things which are subject to moths and rust. We flee death via an identification with the relatively immortal: the eternal truth, the eternal insight, the perennial philosophy. Note that I to seek durable (relatively atemporal) knowledge, but I take this to be one more thing worth explaining. Granted that I find myself seeking such knowledge, why do I (why do we) do so ?
I'm not the one who denies time. Indeed, I'm insisted that being is time in some sense. I write of 'interpenetrating worldstreamings.' In this context, structure is something constant in the flux. For instance, physicists once talked of the conservation of energy. Or there's the tripartite 'care structure' of the stretch moment mentioned above, inspired by Husserl and Heidegger. So one can, in my view, have nothing at all without time.
But philosophers often sketch what stays the same through various changes, such as the shape of a river whose water is never the same (though of course this shape is only relatively stable.) The supreme and classic examples of timeless structure are of course mathematical.
Sorry to be dense, but I don't know what this means.
I don't nee to work hard to justify what I said. I was agreeing with just about every philosopher who ever lived. It is simply a fact that metaphysical questions are undecidable. This is the reason such questions are called antinomies. There's nothing mysterious about it and it's common knowledge. . . . . .
Because it's a matter of logic and experience. Kant famously makes the case. Even in modern astrophysics this is recognised, hence Victor Stenger's idea of creation from nothing.
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Exactly! And no-thing is precisely what we need as the ultimate for a systematic fundamental theory. Again, Kant proves this. At any rate, mysticism will make no sense to anyone who reifies time or space.
"Verily, if the reader can break down the power which the notion of extension has over his own mind, he will have gone a long way in preparing himself for the Awakening.
Franklin Merrell-Wolff Pathways Through to Space
In the same vein, Meister Eckhart dismisses space-time phenomena as 'literally nothing'.
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This is not a philosophical way of doing business. I think for now we should take a break in the conversation. But no hard feelings. I just think it'll be counterproductive to proceed, given our apparently very different conceptions of what kind of conversation this forum is for.
I'd say it's the only way to do business.
I stated that metaphysical questions are undecidable. What else can this forum be for than exploring the facts? Are you suggesting this isn't a fact? It's been known for thousands of years.
I thought you were trying to untangle philosophy, in which case the facts are the place to start. . .
This is a result of thinking of the present moment as separate. Now is not fugitive, it is perennial. Future and past also are always now, else they have no existence at all.
I don't see it as a metaphysical question, but a phenomenological one. It is a phenomenological fact that metaphysical questions are undecidable. The alternative would be to collapse metaphysics into phenomenology; in some respects, both Kant and Heidegger do this, but then metaphysics is no longer metaphysics, as traditionally conceived, and we have lost a valid distinction between avenues of investigation.
I don't say the undecidability of metaphysics disqualifies it, just as I would not say the ambiguity of poetry renders it pointless. metaphysics as traditionally conceived is a poetic and logical exercise of the imagination; it shows us what we can coherently imagination, but it cannot tell us anything about the world or the ultimate nature of reality, as it once purported to be able to.
I hear you, but for me there's no sharp boundary. My own phenomenology-inspired view rejects the idea that reality is hidden somehow 'outside' of a so-called subjectivity that is thought of as 'inside.'
Some think of phenomenology in terms of a study of this inside without a concern for the outside (and they have reasons for doing so), but this misses what I take to be its deepest insight --- that that inside/outside distinction is a kind of prejudice or habit which has only practical justification, if that --- arguably a misinterpretation of physical science, thinking the image is the core of reality rather than icing on top. Mach makes a similar point, without calling it phenomenology.
That is nothing like what I've been saying. Do you claim nothing exists outside of cognition? For me reality is vast. much vaster than human cogntion, so I see your position as a return to anthropcentrism and anthropomorphism, and as such it has little appeal for me. Different strokes, I guess.
Could you just quote the words that caused your reaction? I was stunned by it and would genuinely like to know what I said that caused the problem.
I was being a little abrupt. Sorry about that.
Your tone has sometimes been, from my POV, too much on preachy / condescending side. I view us as doing something like science here. When you bash Wittgenstein (a primary influence on this thread), you sound a bit crankish (a bit envious-bitter maybe of the fame of the charismatic man .) And you speak of Russell thinking Wittgenstein was a fool, but that's contrary to the well known details of their story. I've read biographies of both. And this is not a matter of my sentimental attachment. If you recklessly speak contrary to the facts or tear down the 'mighty dead,' then that's a stumblingblock to your credibility. You ought to explain how all the other shrewd readers could be so silly as to get things so wrong.
I'd say that the concepts of time and space are one thing, but that moving my arm around of seeing an object in experiential space is another thing. In the same way, there's the concept of red which a blind person can master, and there's seeing red. Existence has (even primarily) a 'transconceptual' or 'preconceptual' aspect. Feuerbach correctly made a big deal about this sensualism. The world is not just thought. Thought is merely something like its intelligible structure.
But I'd say it's metaphorically nothing, unless that 'nothing' is supposed to point at the framework character of space and time.
From my POV, the nothingness of things is tied up in their value being conditional. dependent on our investment in them. Straw dogs. I like the phrase psychoanalytic Platonist.'
Before the grass-dogs [?? chu gou] are set forth (at the sacrifice), they are deposited in a box or basket, and wrapt up with elegantly embroidered cloths, while the representative of the dead and the officer of prayer prepare themselves by fasting to present them. After they have been set forth, however, passers-by trample on their heads and backs, and the grass-cutters take and burn them in cooking. That is all they are good for.
Consider also (?) Buddha's last words: Transient are conditioned things. Try to accomplish your aim with diligence.
Or consider The Fire Sermon.
Note that I'm not claiming to be a Buddhist. Instead I'm getting a more universal (perennial?) idea of transcendence in terms of detachment. The world becomes a spectacle. We get 'distance' on it. We find ourselves less 'immersed in the object.' Heidegger calls this 'falling immersion,' the way that everyday life sucks us into its flow.
Personally, I don't pretend to have some cure for life. Nothing beyond the usual possible quotations of wisdom literature, the same old worthy proverbs. And this is mere amelioration. Life has its terrible face and its beautiful face. As far as I can tell, there's not much more to be sought or had than the continual re-attainment of an always fragile state of grace or play. We always fall off the horse again, find ourselves petty and resentful, or just tormented by a health issue, or forced to deal with a dangerous situation where stress (tho never panic) is appropriate.
Do we agree on this ? Or do you find something that radically 'cures' life in what you call mysticism ?
It's nice that he dissolves the magic subject too.
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Mach and James understand neutral monism as an especially radical form of achieving perceptual contact with the world. It might be understood as a limiting case of naïve realisma case in which the relation between the subject and its perceptual object becomes the identity relation. In perception subject and object merge (James 1905: 57). A single realitya red patch, say, when we see a tomatois a constituent of two groups of neutral entities: the group that is the perceiver, and the group that is the tomato. The mind and its object become one. In Jamess words:
A given undivided portion of experience, taken in one context of associates, plays the part of the knower, or a state of mind, or consciousness; while in a different context the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known, of an objective content. In a word, in one group it figures as a thought, in another group as a thing.
....
The most frequent type of objection to the traditional versions of neutral monism is that they are forms of mentalistic monism: Berkleyan idealism, panpsychism, or phenomenalism. The core argument is simple: sensations (Mach), pure experience (James) and sensations/percepts (Russell) are paradigms of non-neutral, mental entities. Hence there is nothing neutral about these neutral monisms. This type of objectionthe mentalism suspicionhas been articulated by a diverse group of philosophers...
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https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neutral-monism/#MindBodyProb
The objection is initially understandable. There's a tendency of neutral monists to cling to a still-subjective terminology. But I hope I've explained this tendency. What is given (just check yourself) is a care-structured 'streaming' of being with a sentient body as its roving center. Small wonder then the tendency to conflate the no-longer-subjective transcendental [s]ego[/s] with the psychological ego. Both are associated with the same body, and we reason about others in terms of their awareness and what they have a right to claim.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_the_Law
'Experience' a slightly confusing synonym for [perspectival, care-structured ] being, in other words.
All this is very fair. I should have been more careful.
Russell did express uncertainty as to whether Wittgenstein was a genius or a fool, and it's true that I think he is not worth reading. As you say, however, I can't just waive my arms around but must make the case.
I should have made it clear that I think most of western philosophy is also a waste of time. Nobody claims to understand philosophy and it just just goes round and round in circles. In the perennial tradition people who don't understand the topic don't write about it. . . .
I once spoke on the phone with George Spencer Brown, a colleague of Russell's, and asked him why Russell had been unable to see the meaning of Brown's book Laws of Form,, which is of vast importance in metaphysics.,despite praising it as presenting a valuable new calculus. He replied in a friendly and wistful tone, 'Ah, Bertie was a fool'. This does appear to be the explanation and it is my view also.
I'm afraid that from the perspective on anyone who has understood the perennial philosophy people like Russell and Wittgenstein look foolish for not studying it and for not understanding philosophy as a consequence.
This attitude looks arrogant and deluded to others, since most people think they know that philosophy cannot be understood and is like quantum mechanics,such that anyone who claims to understand it must be unable to understand it. Meanwhile, in the perennial tradition many people claim to understand it and it is an expectation of students that one day they will. .
Of course, both were very clever people. Russell was brilliant as a communicator and deserves respect for his his activism on social issues, nuclear arms for instance. But like his protege he failed to solve any problems, refused to study mysticism and made surprisingly basic mistakes. . .
I completely understand the point you make here. and normally you'd be completely right to make it. The point for me though is that we cannot understand philosophy unless we can see the mistakes made by Russell and Wittgenstein that prevented then from doing so, and once we have done so they do appear rather foolish. If I make any bold remarks that look naive or deluded then you can always ask me to put my money where my mouth is and justify them.
But okay, I see your point and should have been more circumspect. My impatience with the western academic approach to philosophy got the better of me. The 'mighty dead' you speak of were in some ways mighty, but if they did not understand philosophy then their mightiness was of limited scope. .
I see this as an opinion since you cannot prove it. I would suggest it's an unnecessary assumption,and that it's best not to make it. Cartesian doubt and all that. I feel it's best to start with verifiable facts and build on this foundation.
Just to clarify, I mean simply that there is sound, color, hunger, pain. I mean that there are trumpets and not just the thought of trumpets. I mean that real babies get themselves born, that their bodies develop in the real wombs of their mothers. I believe in gingivitis and diarrhea.
You speak of 'verifiable facts,' but it's hard to make sense of such a phrase in the light of the assumption that only thought exists. We can roughly identity thought here with signitive intention (empty or unfulfilled or unchecked hypothesis or picture of the world). Then a fulfilled intention is us going and looking at the situation. I see that there are two eggs in the fridge. Color, shape, the cool feeling of them in my hand, the crack sound as I smack them against a cast iron edge.
Eckhart is very clear. He states they are 'literally nothing'. They are something as appearances, of course, but for an ultimate analysis they are nothing, This is the Buddha;s teaching and more generally that of the perennial philosophy. It is logically proved by the Buddhist master Nagarjuna in his 'Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way. . . . .
The Buddha's words you quote are consistent with Eckhart's statement. .
We get distance by detachment, although oddly we also get closeness. But this detachment indicates an underlying truth, which is that there is nothing from which to become detached. It is all illusion, and when we see this we are finally and fully detached. The practice of detachment helps us to achieve it, but to fully achieve it requires enlightenment and an understanding of phenomena. . .
I would strongly disagree, both on logical and experiential grounds. The teachings of the Buddha are said to be a medicine and this would be the cure. It has to be self-administered since nobody can become enlightened on our behalf, but the teachings are the label on the bottle. The last of the Four Noble Truths is the cessation of suffering. At a certain point in the progress of our knowledge It is revealed as an illusion, as is the person who suffers. Nothing extended in time and space would really exist, and this would include the suffering and the sufferer. .
Those who are not fully enlightened may to some extent know this and be able to transcend suffering to some degree, but as you say they will sometimes fall off the wagon. It seems Jesus fell off for a moment,while on the cross and feared his non-suffering state had forsaken him. If you check out the story of the brutal execution of the Sufi master Al-Hallaj by the Islamic church you'll see an example of how utterly detached from life, death and suffering one can become and how stable this state is once fully attained. .
This achievement is within the power of all of us, since it is no more than a recognition of who we are. Thus the cure for suffering is to 'Know Thyself'. This is the entire method of mysticism in two words. All the rest is about helping us to succeed. .
As the mystics often say for the sake of humility,, 'Thus I have heard'.
Unless one is a meditative practitioner It would impossible to sort these issues out without a close study of metaphysics, and this would mean starting with the undecidability of metaphysical questions. This is verifiable regardless of what is and is not a thought. It is a solid foundation on which to start building an extended theory. If we cannot explain this philosophical fact then metaphysics will be incomprehensible.to us. It cannot be explained by Western thinkers, so they believe metaphysics is incomprehensible. It is explained in the perennial philosophy and in a very simple way, but most philosophers don't think this solution is worth studying .It;s an area of philosophy left blank and marked 'Here be dragons', and this is considered a rational approach to philosophy. . . ..
. . .
To me it seems you are underestimating Western philosophy. The greats have not feared to charge the edges of the map. Lately I've been looking into Husserl, who is bold radical ambitious etc. To me this narrative is (I must be honest ) suspiciously vague. The bad guy is vague and so is the good guy, with the skeptical-discursive Western philosopher as the bad guy of course, and the mystical perennial philosopher as the hero.
You suggest that the skeptical-discursive approach is irrational, but it seems to me you have it backwards. This is just my perspective, but here goes: I take you to be presenting some kind of theory of Direct Insight or Mystical Intuition, associated with a Gnosis that is basically Ineffable. You haven't put it that way, I conceded, but that to me is the gist, the background structure. I could of course be mistaken, but I'll respond to this type of approach in any case.
My issue with that is that the ineffable is either ineffable or it's not. If the true knowledge is trans-conceptual or trans-discursive, then there's a performative contradiction in arguing for it. And showing up to argue something in the first place is the pursuit for recognition discussed by Hegel and Kojeve, manifesting the sociality of reason and the centrality of conversation (dialectic, rationality, discursivity) after all.
I imagine the 'ineffable' sage to be beyond the need for recognition, consistent enough to not bother arguing for what argument can never reveal. Are such people out there ? Probably a few. But they don't show up. Maybe some of them once showed up, but then they realized the futility of talking. I myself embrace the partial futility of talking. Most seeds land where the plant cannot grow.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/positivism
It is a more honest or shrewd positivism in that it doesn't simply assume a crude sense-data picture of experience, which indeed is merely a traditional metaphysical prejudice, or a gap between experience and the real world in the first place that goes along with such a picture.
Others take their phenomenology differently, but I like to take in in the spirit of philosophers like Ernst Mach or William James --- in a scientific as opposed to a mystical spirit. Given that positivism is metaphysical in some sense, it must be anti-metaphysical with respect to a certain kind of constructive or 'floating' metaphysical system. Nothing is hidden. Or, more accurately, we concern ourselves with what is 'given,' with what can be checked by all participants in a basically scientific inquiry, but one that includes a 'radical' or 'first-philosophy' investigation of the very meaning of such scientificity.
There are a few exceptions, of course, but for most philosophers it has only become practically possible to study this area of knowledge in recent times. I believe Schopenhauer was the first to dive into this rabbit hole. After hon there are others but they;re few and far between. The average professor know next to nothing on this topic. .
As you say. even those who do tend to speak vaguely and not helpfully. But please don't think the sceptical rational approach is at fault in any way. It;s t he approach I take. I;m suggesting that this approach demands a study of mysticism, and that it this is avoided it is not a sceptical rational approach. .In other words, I would accuse most philosophers in the tradition of Kant and Russell of doing t heir job badly, not of using the wrong methods. My complaint against the academic community is poor scholarship, not poor methods.
It's not my approach that is backwards, it's the approach you think I'm taking. I'm just doing philosophy the usual way. A plausible theory must be proved in logic, not just wafted around as an idea.
I;m certainly not suggesting we must settle for the 'ineffable sage'. For a not-practitioner the only way to make sense to hat such people say is a cold-hearted sceptical study of metaphysics. This is what I was suggesting earlier. It would be pointless expecting anyone to conduct a study of metaphysics and mysticism it it has to depend on ineffable ideas and unprovable conjectures.and only a great sage could understand it. I;m suggesting that most people could understand it.once they know the trick.
Of course,this approach doesn't lead to a sages understanding of the world, but understanding how to make sense of metaphysics is a much easier task.
This is exactly the sort of approach that I would warn everybody to avoid. If we do philosophy like this we will become lost forever in a muddle of ideas and details. Clearly the positivists have no understanding of metaphysics and what it does and does not prove. this passage is typical of the hopelessness of western academic philosophy. It depends on the idea that metaphysics is incomprehensible,and we might as well just speculate wildly and in all sorts of complex ways and make life hell for students of the subject. .
These are not empty words. But I can't back them up without presenting an argument and this means going back to the undecidability of metaphysical questions. . .
I'd say that those ideas and details are philosophy. Tho I will grant you that the point is to grasp some 'theorems' of value. In math, for instance, a theorem might be 'obviously' true after a certain amount of experience. But proofs are a kind of hygiene: we make sure we aren't deluded, and we find a ladder to aid the intuition that really matters.
:up:
I might agree with you here. 'Mysticism' is not easy to define exactly. But I will agree that plenty of 'skepticism' can be close-minded, which is to say that it makes 'unconscious' assumptions.
I ask you not to make that kind of error here tho with my talk of positivism. The basic affirmations of positivism are (1) that all knowledge regarding matters of fact is based on the positive data of experience and (2) that beyond the realm of fact is that of pure logic and pure mathematics. What is so offensive in this ? To me it's pretty much the requirement that we know what we are talking about -- that we speak from experience. This is almost a tautology.
It's only a narrow, prejudiced version of positivism that's problematic, in my view. For instance, some people simply assumed that only 'sense data' were given. But this is a complete fiction, a superstition. What we find when we just look is a rich and meaningful lifeworld. Breaking things up into elements (sensations) is a late, sophisticated theoretical act. Now this act has value (Mach used it powerfully), but it is obviously not 'the given' or the 'raw' 'data' of experience. Husserl (inIdeas II, for instance) and Heidegger (in many lectures leading up to and within Being and Time) convincingly sketch the structure of this lifeworld --- of pre-theoretical experience. That's genuine positivism: describing how it is. Not my fancy theory of what it must be.
Quoting FrancisRay
You yourself say that metaphysical questions are undecidable. That's a fairly positivist claim, it seems to me. The positivists are saying 'we might as well talk nonsense' but just the reverse. There's a serious scientific intention positivism and phenomenology. I do understand that there's a personality type associated with the term. One might fairly expect that a positivist is also a physicalist who hates spiritual traditions. But I say not so fast. Wittgenstein is a famous exception, but we can also think about John Stuart Mill. There's a streak in empiricism that leads directly into the nondual tradition. A strict or serious positivist wants to know, with Berkeley, what 'matter' can even mean if it's not merely patterns in experience. But of course experience is only 'mental' against the contrast of some kind of elusive non-mental stuff. So we get the breakthrough to monist neutral phenomenalist perspectivism --- ontological cubism -- or whatever one wants to call it.
:up:
I very much appreciate the clarification and the politeness with which you addressed my concern. To quote an excellent show (The Bear) : heard, chef.
I'll meet you half way. There's a certain type of philosopher who is a fundamentally and even methodically boring. Maybe this is connected to the ways of academia and more generally to the usual conformism of respectable types. All roads lead to a certain sanitized vaguely pro-science political correctness. To saying almost nothing but I'm Clean.
Quoting FrancisRay
I can relate to this in terms of my point above. We might call it idolatry or fame-worship. It's like people believing in genius or insight only at a distance. No one 'here with me in Nazareth' actually gets it.
But I invoke [genuine ] positivism again. What have I experience ? What have I personally verified ? Can I paraphrase the thinkers I pretend to understand ? Can I personally generate proofs or at least make a strong case for my major theses ?
This is part of my rejection of 'Kantianism' (and yet my acceptance of a certain interpretation of Kant). It's pointless to gesture beyond experience, beyond what I understand, except as a mere horizon of possible experience and understanding. The great thinker is only realized (for me) within my own cognition. I have to 'become' that great thinker in order to understand them. So the false humility thing is indeed a confusion, though a true humility with respect to fallible and endless interpretation is fitting.
I think 'illusion' has to be a kind of metaphor here. As I see it, all 'experience' is 'real.' But of course we make practical distinctions, and the word 'real' mostly functions that way.
In this context, the so-called illusion becomes so with the detachment. I transform the world into an 'empty' spectacle by a change in attitude or investment.
How would you define 'enlightenment'? I've tended to be wary of binary understandings of this word. In my experience, our spiritual focus or transcendence is highly variable. We fall off the ludic hobbyhorse, forget to laugh, forget that all is 'empty' procession (hebel).
I've look into that book, but I didn't find it gripping enough to keep going. I may give it another chance. I'm trained as a mathematician, so I recall it being technically daunting. My mere suspicion is that it'll be similar to Wittgenstein somehow, who also worked at the intersection of mysticism and logic. If you care to paraphrase the gist of the work, I'm all ears. What does it mean to you ?
Was 'Bertie' a fool ? Anecdotally, my opinion on him has jumped around. His crude attack on Nietzsche in his history of philosophy is embarrassing, but politics and its intense tribalism brings out the stupid in people. I found him quoted in Szasz lately, and I was impressed by the quotes. The whole I-hate-Hegel thing associated with people like him is annoying, but maybe it's good that some people started from scratch, if only to re-achieve Hegelian insights in a lingo in which they were more at home.
Still, this is all just gossip basically. I think it's good to fess up to biases, but it's not the real work of course. I've 'hated' thinkers who ended up being important to me. So I've learned not to trust initial reactions. It's as if we always first try to save ourselves the trouble of assimilation with an uncharitable reading.
I think you should justify your dismissal of Wittgenstein. In my view, you are underrating him. I'm not his agent, and I don't take him for an authority. It's just think he deserves the fame. Same with Heidegger -- though I'd drag into Husserl more and stress some undernoticed early Heidegger (lectures 1919 on.)
[quote=Witt : Notebooks ]
Aesthetically, the miracle is that the world exists. That what exists does exist.
....
This is the way I have travelled: Idealism singles men out from the world as unique, solipsism singles me alone out, and at last I see that I too belong with the rest of the world, and so on the one side nothing is left over, and on the other side, as unique, the world. In this way idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out.
Is belief a kind of experience?
Is thought a kind of experience?
All experience is world and does not need the subject.
[/quote]
This is early Wittgenstein. A lean, direct presentation of nondualism. Thou art that. The 'false' (or relatively shallow) subject is of course the body and the psychological-normative subject. But (I think we agree) the 'deep' subject is no longer subject but the very being of the world itself -- its only kind of being (that we can know of, speak of sensibly.)
Distinctions begin with consciousness.
I not disagreeing with distinctions begin with consciousness, but I don't so why this isn't the answer to a metaphysical question. I suggest that even positivism is at least implicitly metaphysical.
[quote = Hume]
they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. ...The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. ... The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind...
[/quote]
Given the nature of language/logic, this is perspectival perception of the world [that world's beingthere, in fact] , and so we have world-streamings.
This is not to say that there could not be differences without consciousness, as there seems to be no way of making sense of the idea that distinction or consciousness without difference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta
To me this all reads exactly like what I'm calling nondual perspectivism.
"it" is not an object, but "the irreducible essence of being [as] subjectivity,
Being-as-subjectivity is body-centered perspectival worldstreaming. The stream of becoming is pure 'world' (really prior to world or self) but also structured as a person, even seated in a person. Heidegger's Dasein is not a bad description of the character of this being, a doing-of-dishes, a biting-of-nails, a writing-of-non-dual-philosophy.
I interpret that to mean that consciousness is not separate from being, not that consciousness is being or that being is consciousness through and through.
If you don't mind, what do you mean by consciousness is not separate from being ?
I agree that distinctions depend on consciousness, but I understand consciousness as [perspectival ] being itself. Of course this only makes sense, so far as I can tell, in that perspectivistic context. I expect the world to outlast me, [s]in[/s] as other worldstreamings.
Consciousness is world-from-perspective, and it's correlated or associated with sentient flesh. So I can talk about whether someone else is conscious or not. Their body (after a head injury perhaps) may or may not be an independent 'site of being' or 'spatial origin' for a 'worldstreaming' --- even as their heart pumps on.
But being can stand apart from all consciousness ?
Of course your view is the popular and dominant view, and ancestral objects deserve serious discussion, but I think it's ontology's job to interpret the claims of science.
For instance, what is an 11-dimensional physical theory supposed to mean ? A cautious approach might propose computable functions as ways to compress and predict measurements in the familiar world of three dimensions.
Not at all. There is no subject. There is no consciousness. Not 'really.' Just world-from-perspectives, and not world-from-no-perspective. That's the idea. Nondualism.
[s]Consciousness[/s] is being.
So we all have our own take, but you are suggesting that a movement that takes nondual as its name is really just dualist in the usual way. But that loses the quasi-mystical excitement in the position, its [s]contact with[/s] identity with the absolute. That radical intimacy and simplicity is the point, the appeal, the breakthrough. I think it'd be better to reject it than transform it into something reasonable but boring. This was my concern with @Wayfarer in the mind-creates-reality thread to the degree that he was just doing (or seemed to be) the interpretation of Kant that makes him a typical indirect realist, a dualist totally compatible with physicalism, with mental magic being ultimately dependent on its radically hidden basis. To insist on some deep trans-experiential Substance is, in my view, missing the point of nondualism. Though it's a respectable, default position for plenty of solid practical reasons (if not, in my view, logically stable).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/james1.htm
Quoting plaque flag
I can't make sense of what you say here. I am a non-dualist ontologically speaking, but I am not a non-distinctionist epistemologically speaking. In the non-dual context there are no distinctions but I don't think it follows that there are no differences, but rather just that there is no separation.
I agree that there is no world in the sense of 'perceived and conceived world' without consciousness but not that nothing exists absent consciousness.
For me the issue is semantic. I think of 'physical' objects as enduring possibilities of perception.
I lean toward verificationism when it comes to scientific claims about such objects. How does the ancestral object exist ? If I was there (with a time machine), I could see it. Or as a possible premise in a reasoning that takes such perceptual givenness for granted, without paying any metaphysical tax on that assumption.
This is difficult to parse. Perhaps you mean that consciousness is always consciousness-of ?
How does this sound to you ? I think Sartre intends the same idea.
The Ego is the specific object that intentional consciousness is directed upon when performing reflectionan object that consciousness posits and grasps [ ] in the same act (Sartre 1936a [1957: 41; 2004: 5]), and that is constituted in and by the act of reflection (Sartre 1936a [1957: 801; 2004: 20]). Instead of a transcendental subject, the Ego must consequently be understood as a transcendent object similar to any other object, with the only difference that it is given to us through a particular kind of experience, i.e., reflection. The Ego, Sartre argues, is outside, in the world. It is a being of the world, like the Ego of another (Sartre 1936a [1957: 31; 2004: 1]).
....
Sartre devotes a great deal of effort to establishing the impersonal (or pre-personal) character of consciousness, which stems from its non-egological structure and results directly from the absence of the I in the transcendental field. According to him, intentional (positional) consciousness typically involves an anonymous and impersonal relation to a transcendent object:
[i]When I run after a streetcar, when I look at the time, when I am absorbed in contemplating a portrait, there is no I. [ ] In fact I am plunged in the world of objects; it is they which constitute the unity of my consciousness; [ ] but me, I have disappeared; I have annihilated myself. There is no place for me on this level. (Sartre 1936a [1957: 49; 2004: 8])
The tram appears to me in a specific way (as having-to-be-overtaken, in this case) that is experienced as its own mode of phenomenalization, and not as a mere relational aspect of its appearing to me. The object presents itself as carrying a set of objective properties that are strictly independent from ones personal relation to it. The streetcar is experienced as a transcendent object, in a way that obliterates and overrides, so to speak, the subjective features of conscious experience; its having-to-be-overtaken-ness does not belong to my subjective experience of the world but to the objective description of the way the world is (see also Sartre 1936a [1957: 56; 2004: 1011]). When I run after the streetcar, my consciousness is absorbed in the relation to its intentional object, the streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken, and there is no trace of the I in such lived-experience. I do not need to be aware of my intention to take the streetcar, since the object itself appears as having-to-be-overtaken, and the subjective properties of my experience disappear in the intentional relation to the object. They are lived-through without any reference to the experiencing subject (or to the fact that this experience has to be experienced by someone). This particular feature derives from the diaphanousness of lived-experiences.[/i]
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/#TranEgoDiscInte
I would say each object exists (as long as it does) as a reliable possibility of a very specific and unique set of perceptions, and I don't think of that perceptible existence as depending on the existence of percipients.
Quoting plaque flag
Yes, if there were nothing to be conscious of, and of course if there were no conscious entity, then there would be no consciousness. So the way I think of it, prior to the advent of conscious entities all the rest of the cosmos existed as a vast array of perceptible existents, perceptible but obviously not perceived.
.
They are philosophy, yes, but look where it gets the people who take this approach.
Good point about mathematics. It is this 'hygene' that I'm advocating. .
I can agree with this. A positivism that dismisses metaphysics as meaningless is not so much extreme as simply wrong.
I suppose you could say it;s a positive claim, but it;s not a positive metaphysical statement. Whatever it is it's a verifiable and demonstrable fact. It's the precise reason why logical positivism exists.
Yes. Nobody can understand philosophy for us. But what I;m suggesting is that you don't need to be a great thinker to do this. One just has to take account of the facts.
Look how many great thinkers failed to understand philosophy. Clearly being a great thinker is not enough. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if being very clever is a drawback. .
Hmm. I see no reason to make this assumption.It;s something to work out or explore, not to preempt with assumptions.
Your realisation of its unreality will grows with practice, but the practice of detachment will not be enough to reveal it. It would be necessary to 'see' its unreality, and this would require realising what is not unreal. Only from the perspective of the real does the world of change seem unreal. But one can calculate its unreality for the sake of a metaphysical theory.
Maybe, but this would have nothing to do with whether or not it is unreal and some sort of illusion..
It is said that full enlightenment is union with reality, the death of the individual and the ego.and the transcendence of life and death. To be a little enlightened would be to have glimpsed beyond the veil and realised the possibility of being fully enlightened. Not many people can be authoritative on this topic but there is plenty of literature.
. .
I have no comprehension of the mathematics and for philosophy it's not necessary to know more than that it works. The point is his reduction of form to formlessness, and his explanation of how the world is created by the multiplication of categorical opposites. Also, his dismissal of the idea that there is a 'set of all sets'. . .
Only in certain respects. He failed to understand Bradley or Brown, and this was because he rejected mysticism without bothering to find out what it is. I'd say this is just plain stupid, although call him merely foolish because this was prior to the internet. He also believed that containers can contain themselves, and then wondered why he encountered a paradox in set theory, which to me looks like a careless beginner's mistake. . . , ,
Its all relevant and interesting, but it's a bit like chatting about complex mathematics before sorting out arithmetic,
I'd put Heidegger in a different class to Wittgenstein. I can't make head or tail of the Tractatus but the later Philosophical Investigations are naive and ill-informed. Heidegger was a great and perceptive thinker and I'm a fan, but he muddles the issues to the point of incomprehensibility and did not crack the case. (Sherlock Holmes is my model for a good philosopher, albeit he was concerned with other matters). . .
The view I endorse may be called Transcendental or Absolute Idealism. It would not be possible to confuse this with realism. I dislike calling this Idealism, however, since there are too many ways of interpreting this word.
A bit too lean for me to read it as nondualism. In any case he'd given up any hint of nondualism by the time of the Investigations.
Yes, although I'd prefer to say there is no 'deep' subject and that in the final analysis being is also non-being.
.
That metaphysical questions are undecidable is not a view any more than that F=MA is a view. .
Recall that I don't acknowledge authority in this context. I'll consider claims. But vanity and delusion are always with us. As humans we easily get drunk on talk of round squares. We get drunk on talk that must remain cloudy, so that it's relative emptiness is hidden for us. There's a joke about a woman being a Monet [the painter ]. From far away she's beautiful. Close up she's a mess.
Much of Spiritual talk is like that. It's dependent on a distance effect ('the envelope in the letter') which includes the-subject-who-is-supposed-to-know. Before long you;ve got people who are content merely believing that someone is Enlightened but not really concerned to get there themselves. The belief in the distant possibility suffices (hence the envelope being the letter, with mere promise enjoyed as performance.)
Note that I don't take binary talk of Enlightenment seriously, though I do think some human beings are superior to others in this or that way. Still, everything flows. The self is not like a stone. I can fall off my 'horse.' I can get back on.
As I see it, we all see the same world, but we do see from different positions. You see the world and understand metaphysical questions are undecidable so that the claim fits or articulates the world.
You give offer your testimony. But (as I've stressed elsewhere), saying that P is true is just saying that you believe P. Is just claiming P. Your testimony is your testimony. And that's it.
To quote Wittgenstein:
"p" is true, says nothing else but p.
https://archive.org/stream/notebooks191419100witt/notebooks191419100witt_djvu.txt
See 6.10.14
"P" is the structure of the world 'given to me,' the [slice of the ] world I am.
It tries to give meaning to a metaphor --- or to a tendency to treat some experience as somehow 'unreal.'
That's just it. I simply take experience as experience, as 'real.' It's you (in my view) who are simply deciding to ignore this or that aspect of experience.
Note that 'real' tends to have a merely practical or honorific use. It matters whether I 'actually' paid the rent or just dreamt it. But dreams exist, as do prime numbers.
I agree that we don't have to be a great thinker in the sense of obtaining a great breakthrough that'll get us in the canon. But we do have to understand some of the great thinkers, and this involves being them in a certain sense, seeing the world as they saw, with the help of their words. I agree that facts are important, but we also have to think (reason carefully from or on the facts.)
Note that they are only great thinkers in the first place because, having understood them, we feel empowered, that we see things more clearly. So it's always about the ideas, the 'theorems.'
:up:
All is ?????l .
NASB Translation :
breath (5), delusion (2), emptily (1), emptiness (2), fleeting (2), fraud (1), futile (1), futility (13), idols (7), mere breath (2), nothing (1), useless (1), vain (3), vainly (1), vanity (19), vanity of vanities (3), vapor (1), worthless (2)
This source [ Theodore Kiesel ] places Heidegger's primary breakthrough at the lecture KNS 1919: THE IDEA OF PHILOSOPHY AND THE PROBLEM OF WORLDVIEWS.
[i]In fact, it was in this semester which inaugurated his phenomenological decade that he first discovered his root metaphor of the 'way' to describe his very kinetic sense of philosophy. Philosophy is not theory, outstrips any theory or conceptual system it may develop, because it can only approximate and never really comprehend the immediate experience it wishes to articulate. That which is nearest to us in experience is farthest removed from our comprehension. Philosophy in its 'poverty of thought' is ultimately reduced to maintaining its proximating orientation toward the pre-theoretical origin which is its subject matter. Philosophy is accordingly an orienting comportment, a praxis of striving, and a protreptic encouraging such a striving. Its expressions are only 'formal indications' which smooth the way toward intensifying the sense of the immediate in which we find ourselves. It is always precursory in its pronouncements,a forerunner of insights, a harbinger and hermeneutic herald of life's possibilities of understanding and articulation. In short, philosophy is more a form of life on the edge of expression than a science. That phenomenology is more a preconceptual, provisory comportment than a conceptual science, that the formally indicating 'concepts' are first intended to serve life rather than science, becomes transparent only after the turn...
...
Philosophy is 'philosophizing', being 'on the way to language,' ways ---not works.[/i]
One way to understand phenomenology is in terms of digging in to an experience that tends to be taken for granted. It is (aspiring toward) a 'radical wakefulness for existence.'
I take myself to have understood nonduality through a scientific/logical approach. This understanding doesn't solve the problem of life. It's 'just' an improved arrangement of concepts, an ontological breakthrough. Does it make me a better person ? I think it's only me climbing one of many possible conceptual ladders. I merely understand what Mach and James and Wittgenstein were getting at. But life goes on.
As far as 'wisdom' goes, I can believe from experience is a relative detachment -- that all is ????? [hevel]. I could quote some dark humor from Freud, but suffice it to say that various 'infantile longings' are put aside. One learns how to enjoy this dirty nasty beautiful actuality. One gets cozy in the meatgrinder, no longer so attached to the dying host body, more and more a cultural being identified with relatively durable patterns that leap from host to host.
[quote=Mach]
The ego is as little absolutely permanent as are bodies. That which we so much dread in death, the annihilation of our permanency, actually occurs in life in abundant measure. That which is most valued by us, remains preserved in countless copies, or, in cases of exceptional excellence, is even preserved of itself. In the best human being, however, there are individual traits, the loss of which neither he himself nor others need regret. Indeed, at times, death, viewed as a liberation from individuality, may even become a pleasant thought.
...
Similarly, class-consciousness, class-prejudice, the feeling of nationality, and even the narrowest-minded local patriotism may have a high importance, for certain purposes. But such attitudes will not be shared by the broad-minded investigator, at least not in moments of research. All such egoistic views are adequate only for practical purposes. Of course, even the investigator may succumb to habit. Trifling pedantries and nonsensical discussions; the cunning appropriation of others' thoughts, with perfidious silence as to the sources; when the word of recognition must be given, the difficulty of swallowing one's defeat, and the too common eagerness at the same time to set the opponent's achievement in a false light: all this abundantly shows that the scientist and scholar have also the battle of existence to fight, that the ways even of science still lead to the mouth, and that the pure impulse towards knowledge is still an ideal in our present social conditions.
The primary fact is not the ego, but the elements (sensations). ... When I cease to have the sensation green, when I die, then the elements no longer occur in the ordinary, familiar association. That is all. Only an ideal mental-economical unity, not a real unity, has ceased to exist. The ego is not a definite, unalterable, sharply bounded unity. None of these attributes are important; for all vary even within the sphere of individual life; in fact their alteration is even sought after by the individual. Continuity alone is important.... But continuity is only a means of preparing and conserving what is contained in the ego. This content, and not the ego, is the principal thing. This content, however, is not confined to the individual. With the exception of some insignificant and valueless personal memories, it remains presented in others even after the death of the individual. The elements that make up the consciousness of a given individual are firmly connected with one another, but with those of another individual they are only feebly connected, and the connexion is only casually apparent. Contents of consciousness, however, that are of universal significance, break through these limits of the individual, and, attached of course to individuals again, can enjoy a continued existence of an impersonal, superpersonal kind, independently of the personality by means of which they were developed. To contribute to this is the greatest happiness of the artist, the scientist, the inventor, the social reformer, etc.
[/quote]
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/mach.htm
I understand 'learning how to die' in terms of a disidentification with the petty body-ego, which is simultaneously an identification with a kind of 'generic' gnosis.
[quote = Eliot]
Some one said: The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did. Precisely, and they are that which we know.
...
What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.
What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
[/quote]
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69400/tradition-and-the-individual-talent
This continual extinction of personality is also its enlargement.
[quote=Blake]
Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & governd their Passion or have No Passions, but because they have Cultivated their Understandings. The Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of Passion but Realities of Intellect, from which all the Passions Emanate Uncurbed in their Eternal Glory. The Fool shall not enter into heaven let him be ever so Holy. Holiness is not The Price of Enterance into Heaven.
[/quote]
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Vision_of_the_Last_Judgment_(1982)
As mystic as Blake is thought to be, he's also a 'scientist' here. Cultivate their understandings. Not purity or self-mortification. But 'realities of intellect' --- empowering-liberating realizations.
Just so you know, that's not an innovation on his part. It's standard axiomatic set theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_schema_of_specification
Because restricting comprehension avoided Russell's paradox, several mathematicians including Zermelo, Fraenkel, and Gödel considered it the most important axiom of set theory.
There's also the issue of the gap between a formal theory and our ontological interpretation of it. This is related to ontology's interpretations of the claims of physics. A statement may be warranted within a certain discourse (that may be uncontroversial), but what that statement means might be problematically indeterminate in the total context of life.
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Perspectivism
This resonates with me. Great thinkers are of course clever, but I would say a much great factor is their obsessiveness.
Quoting FrancisRay
I agree in the sense that it can clearly be seen that metaphysical questions are undecidable, and in that sense, it is a realization rather than a view. On the other hand, like any proposition, it is open to being negated, so someone can always hold the (erroneous or myopic) view that metaphysical questions are decidable.
Yes, this is an issue. But the work is not for everyone.
If you cannot conceded that metaphysical questions are undecidable and feel it;s just my opinion then there will be no purpose in our talking about metaphysics, We can shoot the breeze about this and that,but we won;t get anywhere.
What metaphor? That the space-time world is unreal (in a specific sense) is a result of analysis, not a metaphor.or anything to so with your attitude.
Okay. Your a realist. I seem unable to persuade you to examine the facts of philosophy so there's no way I;m going to be able to change your mind. . .
This is the issue on which I've been trying and failing to convince you. You seem to prefer to chat about opinions and conjectures. . .
You clearly don't believe this, given your views on experience. . .
I'm not sure what this post is for.
I think we should bring our discussion to a close,. but I'll reply to your other posts first.
Yes, but the approach is different. .
Clearly seen by you and me perhaps, and Kant and most philosophers, but apparently it's not obvious to everyone.
I suppose someone can believe that two plus two equals five if they want to do so, but they cannot expect to understand mathematics. .
Despite the occasional lip service, I don't think you understand the spirit of science, or that you are able or willing to get your story straight. Some people are more sensitive to rational norms, more bothered by contradictions or indeterminateness in the story they tell. Others think they have a thought to share, when it's only a Feeling associated with a cloud of unorganized references. Do you not tell me, without irony, that everything is literally nothing ? And yet you don't even bother to clarify for yourself or others what kind of trope must be involved to avoid the obvious absurdity involved. I quote Qoheleth for you, and we seem to gel on that, but then you insist on dogmatically pontificating, squandering the investment of a charitable listener -- implying if not saying that I'm missing the Insight --- which however cannot be articulated.
As I see it, it's fine to not justify or argue for Spiritual Things, but I suggest you and others who prefer that mode just drop the pretense of rationality altogether. Avoid attacking worthy philosophers you haven't read [ closely ? at all, really? ] for not being irrationalist metaphorical paradoxical mystics in just the way you are.
Again I quote Nietzsche's sketch of Jesus, because I think it gets 'mysticism' right. And it gets my mysticism right, if I bother to call it that. But one doesn't argue about such things.
[quote = Nietzsche ]
...he regarded only subjective realities as realities, as truths ... he saw everything else, everything natural, temporal, spatial and historical, merely as signs, as materials for parables...
...
The kingdom of heaven is a state of the heartnot something to come beyond the world or after death. .. The kingdom of God is not something that men wait for: it had no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it is not going to come at a millenniumit is an experience of the heart, it is everywhere and it is nowhere....
...
This faith does not formulate itselfit simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae. ...It is only on the theory that no word is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya, and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tseand in neither case would it have made any difference to him.With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a free spirithe cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth, whatever is established killeth. The idea of life as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma.
[quote]
Never mind. See you around.
Schlick ( [Wende] p.8 ) interprets Wittgenstein's position as follows: philosophy "is that activity by which the meaning of propositions is established or discovered"; it is a question of "what the propositions actually mean. The content, soul, and spirit of science naturally consist in what is ultimately meant by its sentences; the philosophical activity of rendering significant is thus the alpha and omega of all scientific knowledge"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moritz_Schlick
I feel you, Schlick.
Contrary to the mystically inclined, I take a positivistic, verificationist approach to this issue. I find/offer no cure for life here but only the pleasure of untying an old conceptual knot --- untying it again, grasping an old solution to an old 'problem' which is merely a theoretical tangle, and not a practical problem.
I agree tho with Sartre that 'the spirit of seriousness' (see Existential Psychoanalysis ) will probably make untangling such a knot seem not only impractical but even offensive. Utopians and proselytes will always ignore/resent the metaphor (now we are 'spiritual') that all is ?????. Such a metaphor manifests an offensive, post-pessimistic 'transcendence.'
If you were to summarize your position in one sentence that was comprehensible to almost anyone, and was not being cheeky, poetic, or obtuse, what would you put forth?
It's hard to beat what Witt did in the TLP, but he is so terse that he didn't get himself understood.
Simple analogy: Multiplayer GoldenEye on the N64. Split-screen first-person shooter. The world (the basement level) exists only on those 'first-person screens' and those 'first-person screens' show only the world, including the empirical egos (the players' hands and guns). We concept mongering humans can 'recurse' and ponder symbols like this within our own little stream, so it gets very weird. But I primarily ask to be understood, not at all minding criticism that can steelman the position.
*****gravy if needed/wanted******
What is called the stream of 'experience' is better thought of as a neutral streaming, for the experiencer (the worldly ego, Brandom's discursive subject, etc.) is part of the 'experience' --- in the stream of the 'experience.' So 'experience' is a misleading word, for it implies that one is still inside somehow, that the world is 'out there' and mediated somehow. Sartre basically says the same thing [quoted below.]
Is this a 'solipsistic' streaming ? No. What is 'experienced' (what just is 'perspectively') is the usual world-in-common. I see the cat from this side of the room, and you from that. We both intend that worldly cat, and the sociality of rationality in general is what glues the cubist painting together.
*******
[i]Sartre devotes a great deal of effort to establishing the impersonal (or pre-personal) character of consciousness, which stems from its non-egological structure and results directly from the absence of the I in the transcendental field. According to him, intentional (positional) consciousness typically involves an anonymous and impersonal relation to a transcendent object:
When I run after a streetcar, when I look at the time, when I am absorbed in contemplating a portrait, there is no I. [ ] In fact I am plunged in the world of objects; it is they which constitute the unity of my consciousness; [ ] but me, I have disappeared; I have annihilated myself. There is no place for me on this level. (Sartre 1936a [1957: 49; 2004: 8])
The tram appears to me in a specific way (as having-to-be-overtaken, in this case) that is experienced as its own mode of phenomenalization, and not as a mere relational aspect of its appearing to me. The object presents itself as carrying a set of objective properties that are strictly independent from ones personal relation to it. The streetcar is experienced as a transcendent object, in a way that obliterates and overrides, so to speak, the subjective features of conscious experience; its having-to-be-overtaken-ness does not belong to my subjective experience of the world but to the objective description of the way the world is (see also Sartre 1936a [1957: 56; 2004: 1011]). When I run after the streetcar, my consciousness is absorbed in the relation to its intentional object, the streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken, and there is no trace of the I in such lived-experience.[/i]
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/#TranEgoDiscInte
I believe you have not achieved what I have asked. If anything, that is more obfuscatory. In one sentence, summarize, in laymen's terms, your idea. If I do it for you, I will get it wrong I am sure.
[s]First person consciousness[/s] is the [only] being of the world given perspectively.
So solipsism basically? There is no world outside an experiencer?
Is this a response to my having said that distinctions begin with consciousness? You have expressed it here in reverse; that mind (not consciousness) begins with distinctions, and I think that works too since we can say they are co-arising. So, I take it that for you mind is intentional consciousness, and by 'consciousness" you mean satchitananda?
No solipsism. Even the opposite in some sense (pure/direct realism). But related to why Wittgenstein cared about solipsism, the problem of 'my' pain and so on.
It's more important to keep the world here than the subject. Does that help ? The 'deep' subject is pure world, but world-from-'perspective.' Note that empirical subjects are in this world, not its very being.
There is no experiencer. Not fundamentally. The one Eiffel tower appears in many beingstreams (worldstreams, interpenetrating becomingstreams...) My own body appears in many beingstreams. But what some of us want to say with 'first person consciousness' (hard problem stuff) is simply the streaming world itself --- but 'gathered around' this or that sentient flesh. Look around the room you are in. That's the world. Not dream but stream. Your face in the mirror. Your thoughts. My thoughts. All worldly entities. Nothing but world. But many streams of this same world . Each stream 'happens to' gather around a body which is itself an entity in the streams of course.
I think the nondual view passes through indirect realism (like Kant's). Mach read Kant intensely when young. Wittgenstein studied Schopenhauer. James studied Kant and all kinds of things (highly recommend his famous psychology book if you haven't read it already.)
I'd have to agree with this:
Quoting Janus
From what I can gather from it is you are advocating for some kind of process philosophy. But I believe you would deny that.
Well to be fair, I was echoing @Janus:wink:.
I like to build from simples (lazy and dunce-like) and go from there. But I enjoy your word salad. As I said, and Janus implied, it is poetic and sometimes poetry is the only way to get at something profound.
The subject/object distinction should not be taken as ontologically fundamental. Sartre and Heidegger both say something that is at least similar. Existence is [ fundamentally ] [s]being-there[/s] becoming-here, not a subject 'processing' an environment, and not the inside of this subject ( e.g. the processed environment). Functional relationships between sensations and sandpaper are not being denied here. The tricky part is differentiating between the empirical ego and what thinkers tend to call the transcendental ego or witness.
The Transcendental Ego (or its equivalent under various other formulations) refers to the self that must underlie all human thought and perception, even though nothing more can be said about it than the fact that it must be there.
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Transcendental_ego
I'm claiming that 'nothing more can be said about it' because it's a [often confused ] synonym for being itself which is not an entity, though the concept of being is.
In Hindu philosophy, Sakshi (Sanskrit: ??????), also S?k??, "witness," refers to the 'pure awareness' that witnesses the world but does not get affected or involved. Sakshi is beyond time, space and the triad of experiencer, experiencing and experienced; sakshi witnesses all thoughts, words and deeds without interfering with them or being affected by them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakshi_(witness)
Despite the 'witness' metaphor, we see that this witness is beyond time, space and the triad of experiencer, experiencing and experienced. I read this as being, pure and simple. Radically pure and simple. Indeed, empty. The vanishing witness does not witness the world. It is the world. There is no witness.
But the 'witness' metaphor is not crazy talk, for the 'neutral stream' is structured like a motivated subject. One has to climb the ladder of indirect realism until the experiencer is grasped as a mere piece of the experience. But then 'experience' is seen to be a term prejudiced on the side of the subject, one that clings to a hidden Ego, just as a certain kind of Kantian clings to some hidden Matter.
While I primarily approach this in a dry and conceptual way, I expect that people who believe in or at least hope for the immortality of the personal soul will not find this view congenial. Mach is useful here.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/mach.htm
So, what's the difference between saying that about the transcendental subject and saying that the transcendental object must also underlie all perception, even though nothing more can be said about it than the fact it must be there. It would help if you could explain your position clearly in plain words and leave the salad for dessert. So far, it's mud to me, and that is not on account of my laziness or stupidity.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/#Car
I think it's worth placing Sartre in this context:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/
When I run after the streetcar, my consciousness is absorbed in the relation to its intentional object, the streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken, and there is no trace of the I in such lived-experience.
I think Sartre has no choice here but to talk in the usual way to make an unusual point. 'Pure' consciousness is just exactly (for instance) the streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken. As Heidegger puts it in an early lecture, 'it values.' The value 'shines' in the object. In that which is genuinely given, the pretheoretical lifeworld, there is that-beautiful-face-again or the-creepy-guy-from-class.
From I get from it, especially this:
Quoting plaque flag
You very much echo Schopenhauer's notion of Will. And if so, I don't see how this is "direct realism", especially if you think there is a "transcendental ego". The minute you indicate that there is some sort of "pure" version of ego (witness), you are indicating that there is a reality that is (truer) beyond what is directly observed. A variation of the Cave, but rather than Forms, it is "true perspective" or something like this.
In short, we all stream the same world from/as different 'places' in it. We 'are' ( as 'witnesses' or 'metaphysical' subjects) the same world, but streamed perspectively. As embodied discursive selves, we live together, discussing the objects that surround us. I see my neighbor take the trash out. I believe that my neighbor is not just flesh but the site of another streaming of the world. The 'witness' (so far as common experience would indicate) is always associated with a sentient organism. To be clear, the witness is 'really' just a perspectival worldstreaming. So the stream includes objects seen from this side of the room or that side, as a function of the associated body. The metaphor 'witness' loses all value beyond this correlation in the stream between the body at the origin of a moving coordinate system and that which surrounds it.
I think part of what we mean by 'sentient' is exactly the existence of such a worldstreaming associated with an organism, 'tied' to it as described above. We 'know' that our friends are 'conscious' (have the world) without being able to be their stream.
Note that there are no 'deep' subjects at all here. There is only one world and various empirical subjects that are somehow 'sites' for the streaming that gives this world all of its being.
Leibniz rubs up against this idea in his work on monads :
And as the same town, looked at from various sides, appears quite different and becomes as it were numerous in aspects [perspectivement]; even so, as a result of the infinite number of simple substances, it is as if there were so many different universes, which, nevertheless are nothing but aspects [perspectives] of a single universe, according to the special point of view of each Monad.
Taking off from Leibniz toward a full-strength perspectivism, we can say that town exists only 'in' or 'for' (or as) such perspectives. There is no town-in-itself, for this would be a story written in no language at all. Yet it's always the same town (our one shared world) which is as if given by a shattered mirror. Is Indra's net helpful here ?
[i]Indra's net (also called Indra's jewels or Indra's pearls, Sanskrit Indraj?la, Chinese: ????) is a metaphor used to illustrate the concepts of ??nyat? (emptiness),[1] prat?tyasamutp?da (dependent origination),[2] and interpenetration[3] in Buddhist philosophy.
In East Asian Buddhism, Indra's net is considered as having a multifaceted jewel at each vertex, with each jewel being reflected in all of the other jewels.[4] In the Huayan school of Chinese Buddhism, which follows the Buddh?vata?saka S?tra, the image of "Indra's net" is used to describe the interconnectedness or "perfect interfusion" (yuánróng, ??) of all phenomena in the universe.
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The metaphor of Indra's net of jewels plays an essential role in the metaphysics of the Chinese Buddhist Huayan school,[10] where it is used to describe the interpenetration or "perfect interfusion" (Chinese: yuánróng, ??) of microcosmos and macrocosmos, as well as the interfusion of all dharmas (phenomena) in the entire universe.[5] According to Bryan Van Norden, in the Huayan tradition, Indra's net is "adopted as a metaphor for the manner in which each thing that exists is dependent for both its existence and its identity upon every other thing that exists.[/i]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indra%27s_net
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The other is most radically another stream, not [only] 'in' the world but [more of ] the very being of the world. Flesh is the avatar not of soul but somehow the moving center of a world-becoming.
[quote=James]
I can only define 'continuous' as that which is without breach, crack, or division. I have already said that the breach from one mind to another is perhaps the greatest breach in nature. The only breaches that can well be conceived to occur within the limits of a single mind would either be interruptions, time-gaps during which the consciousness went out altogether to come into existence again at a later moment; or they would be breaks in the quality, or content, of the thought, so abrupt that the segment that followed had no connection whatever with the one that went before. The proposition that within each personal consciousness thought feels continuous, means two things:
1. That even where there is a time-gap the consciousness after it feels as if it belonged together with the consciousness before it, as another part of the same self;
2. That the changes from one moment to another in the quality of the consciousness are never absolutely abrupt.
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Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.
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The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it,or rather that is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it is true, an image of the same thing it was before, but making it an image of that thing newly taken and freshly understood.
[/quote]
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/57628/57628-h/57628-h.htm#Page_6
Yes, this would be how I think of it. I don't speculate beyond a certain point since there would be little value in doing so, but for the sake of relating consciousness and mind this would be my interpretation of what is said.by those who know. Plotinus states that we should not think of 'The One' as God or mind, and so this seems to be the arrangement. Would you agree? Or is there another way of looking at it? . . . .
Speculation can be a fun exercise of the imagination, but I don't take any of these ideas very seriously because I think what-is in its non-dual nature cannot be captured in concepts. I'm not too sure about the idea of "those who know" if it is understood that they know something propositionally that is hidden from the "unenlightened". I think of it rather as an altered state of consciousness, wherein a whole different way of (wordless) seeing and understanding opens up. So, I would agree with Plotinus that we should not think of 'The One' as God or mind, in fact I would say that we should not think of the non-dual as "one" because it is both one and many, and neither one nor many. and even saying that could be misleading.
Of course, everyone takes it for granted that others, including animals, have their own inner experiences that are hidden from others. I cannot know your experience, even in principle, except insofar as you describe it, (assuming that telepathy is not a possible thing). Such descriptions are inevitably poor compared to the experience itself, and being dualistic in nature cannot ever adequately express the non-dual nature of experience. The conclusion is that all our propositional talk is really inadequate, except for practical tasks, and only poetry serves to possibly be able to present a more vivid picture by allusion and metaphor. But you can't coherently argue about the truth of poetry, as it is not truth apt in any propositional sense.
So, all these kinds of arguments, for example, about whether being or consciousness or matter is fundamental or whether things can exist independently of the human are fatally flawed and potentially misleading.
Note: when I wrote this, I hadn't read your above post where you mention ESP.
I'll be off now. Thanks for the chat. . . . . . , .