Can we record human experience?
Do you think it's possible to record the individual human experience?
By that I mean, what each of us go through every second of our lives? The inputs to our senses, the thoughts that pass by, the emotions we feel? Our body to a certain extent is able to store these for a period of time. If it can do it, it can be argued that we might be able to parameterize the human experience. If we remove the bias that our genetics create, and assume all brains to be identical at the time they are created, let's assume that point is the moment we are born. Brain kind of acts like a computer, takes inputs from senses, gives output. Whatever principles, values, behavioral patterns we have today, have emerged from our experiences. Deep down all of us have a reasoning for the smallest of actions or decisions we take.
Now, if we actually are able to parameterize the experience, we might just be able to recreate and capture the human experience. Essentially, you will be able to step-in your past, re-experience those moments. We might just be able to time travel in the past, only to observe though.
Do you think this is possible?
By that I mean, what each of us go through every second of our lives? The inputs to our senses, the thoughts that pass by, the emotions we feel? Our body to a certain extent is able to store these for a period of time. If it can do it, it can be argued that we might be able to parameterize the human experience. If we remove the bias that our genetics create, and assume all brains to be identical at the time they are created, let's assume that point is the moment we are born. Brain kind of acts like a computer, takes inputs from senses, gives output. Whatever principles, values, behavioral patterns we have today, have emerged from our experiences. Deep down all of us have a reasoning for the smallest of actions or decisions we take.
Now, if we actually are able to parameterize the experience, we might just be able to recreate and capture the human experience. Essentially, you will be able to step-in your past, re-experience those moments. We might just be able to time travel in the past, only to observe though.
Do you think this is possible?
Comments (126)
If you had stopped at "inputs to our senses" you'd have something somewhat technologically feasible (if not very practical). However, with thoughts and emotions you would be talking about highly invasive measurement of a huge amount of activity occurring in people's brains. It's not at all technologically feasible to measure and record the data that would be needed.
Not sure I understand your ideas here. Memory doesn't represent what happened to us or how we felt. The self is like mercury. What we think we experienced changes which each recollection and evolves, often imperceptibly. The idea of a correct recollection of an event seems wrong. There is how you felt in the moment, which is specific to everything that came immediately before and after. It continually evolves: seconds, minutes, days, weeks, years later. I can't see how your idea would be useful. Rather than nailing down a single meaning and reproducing it over time in an attempt at a kind of synthesis, it might be better to celebrate the multiple interpretations of any event and realize that all we can do is try to make sense of our environment.
But how did that individual's version of whatever "meaning" arise? He didn't create it ex nihilo. It was constructed out of framing elements which evolved through social practices - words with already practically evolved meanings. Individuation and community are the poles of a spectrum, neither of which makes sense without the other, like materiality and ideality.
No, because experience is inextricably linked with a subject or a being, and recordings are always third-person.
There was a fabulous early 1980s sci fi movie on this theme, Natalie Woods' last film before her premature and tragic death, which occurred during the final stages of filming.
Where, in 3B neuroconnections/mm3 in the human brain, would the recording equipment probe be inserted, for recording the experience of reeling in a trophy fish, or, the memory of already having done such a thing?
At what measure of mass density, does the recording device effect that which the device is suppose to record, synonymous with the quantum “observer problem”?
The average human canÂ’t explain his own experiences, so how would he be able to design equipment, to record what he doesnÂ’t know how to find?
Nahhhhh…..a gigantic, cast iron, capital letter “not possible” from me.
Nice!
Hypnosis needs to be a lot more precise and controllable. External recording not possible, unless (?until) compatible hardware is perfected and individuals are fitted with a recording device wired into their brain.
But the recording is not the recorded.
:up:
At what point in 'sensoring up' a human, have you created something that is no longer a human.
Exactly like one of ZenoÂ’s Paradoxes.Â….cover half the distance with each step. Sooner or later, youÂ’re gonna get to a point where the distance is measured in terms of outer shell electrons of different things, both of which have, of course, disappeared.
Quoting Ayush Jain
Consider:
[quote=Emily Dickenson]
X.
IN A LIBRARY.
A precious, mouldering pleasure 't is
To meet an antique book,
In just the dress his century wore;
A privilege, I think,
His venerable hand to take,
And warming in our own,
A passage back, or two, to make
To times when he was young.
His quaint opinions to inspect,
His knowledge to unfold
On what concerns our mutual mind,
The literature of old;
What interested scholars most,
What competitions ran
When Plato was a certainty.
And Sophocles a man;
When Sappho was a living girl,
And Beatrice wore
The gown that Dante deified.
Facts, centuries before,
He traverses familiar,
As one should come to town
And tell you all your dreams were true;
He lived where dreams were sown.
His presence is enchantment,
You beg him not to go;
Old volumes shake their vellum heads
And tantalize, just so.
[/quote]
Which demonstrates that the record of human experience is deeper than re-experiencing my own experiences -- with the old volumes we can even conjure up the experiences of those before us.
Beautiful. I was so taken by the Dickenson poem below I printed it nicely and framed it for my study. This one really speaks to me.
What a beautiful thing to say.
This is the original Spanish version:
She's great.
Nice. :)
Would you agree that this poetic expression records human experience?
Yes, I would. 100%.
Would you also agree with Quoting jorndoe
?
That's what I'm thinking, anyways. I write poems as a record of feeling, and when I go back to them I can re-experience those moments -- but surely I recognize the difference between the real event and my re-experience for all that.
And if that's so then it seems we can record human experience, even if it wasn't in the way the people who want our brains to be programmable like a computer would like.
I think that I lack the knowledge to answer that question, honestly. I don't know anything about "map-territory relations", that sounds so abstract to me. I would have to study it for years just to be able to give a somewhat coherent opinion.
The basic idea is that when you look at a paper map of an area you ought be able to distinguish between the map you're holding in your hand from the land you're trying to figure out.
I don't know if there even are map-territory relations. I think it's mostly just a basic idea that there's a difference between our representations and what they represent, however we end up parsing that.
So, to bring it back to the OP, there's certainly a difference between poems and human experience, and even poems which record human experience. "Record" being a vinyl scratching from sound, poems are an ink scratching from pressure to represent sound to represent experience.
Yes, I agree. One should not confuse the semantics of a term with what that term represents. That was Alfred Korzybski's point, if I understood correctly. When one confuses them, one is "mistaking the map for the territory". And it is a logical fallacy. Indeed, I agree with all of that (I think?).
Quoting Moliere
Deleuzians and post-Deleuzians have some strange things to say about that. Not sure about Manuel DeLanda, though. He probably does.
Quoting Moliere
Yes, I agree (I think?).
Quoting Moliere
Yes, there is.
Quoting Moliere
Here is where I got completely lost. Can you explain this last part if you have the time, please?
Sure!
I mean like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph_record
When growing up the vinyl discs were literally called "Records" and the disc-spinner a "Record player", which was distinguished between cassette tapes, and CD's.
I'm trying to point out that there's more than an analogy between the literal grooves in a vinyl record and the ink marks a writer makes with a pen on paper.
I see what you're saying there, and I've heard that idea somewhere before, I've heard people suggest it and argue for it. But it's kind of... well, weird, isn't it? For example, I don't know what to make of it myself. I don't know if it's true or not. I don't know if sounds entirely reasonable or not. It's a strange thing to point out, that idea, it seems. That there could be more than an analogy here.
The best I can come up with is that a person listening to a vinyl record and a person reading a poem are both experiencing the record of human experience.
So while I understand the OP to be asking after something like a sci-fi version where I could plug a USB into my neck and re-experience the world at some point before exactly as I did then -- I want to suggest we already have the means of accomplishing exactly that, only not in the fantastical way which might tempt us.
Rather, we only need read and think about books, and they transport us to other worlds.
And the scientistic idea of a record is the only reason we'd dismiss the whole of human literature as evidence of a record.
I mean, there is a set or a series of possibilities here, however you wish to construe such a thing from a purely formal (i.e. mathematical) point of view. But that doesn't mean anything to me, math and logic (symbolic logic in general) have no meaning, they have no semantics whatsoever. They are purely syntactical languages. The problem is, human speech does not work like that. Ordinary speech does not work like that. The "map" (the semantics of a word) is connected to the "territory" (the thing that the word refers to), even though the map itself not connected to the territory itself. So, in some sense, there is a map-territory relation, since I can express that in first-order predicate logic like so:
?x?y(Rxy)
It should be parsed like so: there is an x, and there is a y, such that x is related to y by the relation R.
However, that tells us nothing about R itself, the relation here. Is it a symmetrical relation, yes or no? Is it a transitive relation, yes or no? Is it a reflexive relation, yes or no? Etc.
So, unless we can talk about the notion that there is more than an analogy here, using a language that has semantics (such as ordinary language), there is nothing meaningful we can say about it, because meaning occurs in the semantics of a language, not in its syntax (and, like I said, purely formal languages like logic and math are entirely syntactical, they have no semantics, though this last point is controversial, surprisingly, and many logicians argue against it).
Quoting Moliere
Yes, that would be the case, if it is true that there is more than an analogy here.
Quoting Moliere
Yes, I think you're right. 100%. Poetry is a recording in that sense, it is a recording of an individual human experience. And, just as you can listen to a person "sing" when you are listening to a song on an MP3 file or whatever, you can also listen to a person "talk" when you are reading a poem that they wrote. Fully agree with you on that point.
What I'm not so sure about is if this can be generalized to include every type of written communication. To read Emily Dickinson is to look at the beauty of her own soul, and I say that as an atheist. By contrast, I don't know if I would compare her to someone that has a "drier" tone, such as Willard van Orman Quine. I mean, Quine writes like a tax lawyer writes. There's nothing poetic about it. And I say that as a fan of Quine's work. So, I suppose that Emily Dickinson is on the "Spirit of the Law" team, while Willard van Orman Quine is on the "Letter of the Law" team. He did coin a strange term, though: "Pegasizing". And he famously said that Pegasus does not exist because "nothing Pegasizes", there is no object or creature in the world that "Pegasizes" as an act. Now the question here is: if nothing Pegasizes, can we say that something "Trumanizes" when we talk about President Truman? This is what people told Quine like way back in the 50's.
Quoting Moliere
I'm not sure if I understand the idea here. What's the underlying concept in this case? I'm struggling just to understand it.
(Edited for clarity)
Thanks to you for asking -- I don't know what the underlying concept is! I have some ideas upon you asking, but I didn't mean to invoke a whole ass concept as much as make a quip.
Though that's my fault since I said "idea of a record" -- I ought to have said "scientific record", in the physical sense, to distinguish between the actual records we have of science from literature. Scientism, in this case, would prefer the literature of the people we call scientists over the literature of the people we call writers, novelists, philosophers, playwrights, poets, historians, or journalists. (EDIT: or activists, preachers, clerks, janitors, teachers, fast-food workers....)
That's fair.
Quoting Moliere
I would say that they have that preference during their routinely, day to day work as scientists. They have to. They can't be reading poetry when they have to read the latest paper on whatever they're working on, like, if a new species of beetle was discovered in the Amazon rainforest or whatever. During their leisure time, after work (or even before it), I don't see why they can't enjoy poetry, or novels, or the latest political news, etc. Or even "university stuff" from some other career. Perhaps Mary the physicist is interested in what professional historians have to say about commerce during the Middle Ages in France. Why would she be interested in that? Who knows, go ask her. Maybe John the economist likes to read what's currently being discussed in the world of chemistry. Why would he be interested in that? Who knows, go ask him. Or maybe Mary and John just like to play video games after work or whatever. Like, why is there this stereotype that scientists wear a lab coat 24/7?
Hah! Movies, probably. I agree that scientists are human beings, and I don't mean to target scientists in saying "scientism"
"Scientism" is a pejorative -- no one actually calls themselves that way unless they want to challenge some notion that people who use it as a pejorative have.
Everyone can, in their off hours, investigate something else.
I think "scientism" has more to do with a particular appeal or argument -- that because a scientist wrote it in their scientific capacity it ought be treated as superior to other forms or expressions of writing.
Crudely: there's an academic hierarchy of two slots, and the sciences are on top.
Well Mario Bunge uses that term in a positive sense, in many different texts, for example in his article titled In Defense of Realism and Scientism.
I use the word "scientism" myself in a positive way. It's a word that started out with a negative connotation, but then some people (like Bunge) started to use it in a positive way.
Think of it like an ethic slur or a racial slur that has been appropriated in an positive way by the community that it initially targeted.
Good!
Access to the paper you linked will be restored upon going back to work ;)
I use it in the pejorative way with respect to what I said: Quoting Moliere
Sure, but that's just like, a state of affairs. It doesn't really tell me how we should "go about it" in any meaningful way. Should there be an academic democracy in the sense that the two slots are next to each other, horizontally, instead of hierarchically? Or should literature dethrone science, so to speak, so as to preserve the hierarchy, but inverting the terms occupying those slots? Should there be slots to begin with? Is there an academic continuum, so to speak, between literature and science, or is there an exact cut-off that marks the difference between science and non-science, or between poetry and non-poetry?
That's basically what I think about all social structures, but I'll admit I'm an odd-ball here. (EDIT: I mean, we should be horizontal, always)
I don't think so.
Sometimes science, sometimes poems -- unfortunately we have to decide ourselves when is what.
No.
Presently in the United States, at least, I believe there is -- my own mentor has been fighting for his tenure after being "let go" due to forces which basically prefer STEM, because they believe it relates more to industry, over humanities, because they believe it makes poor people dissatisfied with work and would prefer people to just learn how to do their jobs.{
But intellectually? No, no way. It's political, not conceptual.
Hmmm... Ok, I'll bite. We shouldn't be hierarchical, ever? A hierarchy is just an arrangement, objectively speaking. It's just an organizational instrument or tool. By itself, as a concept, it doesn't really mean anything to me. If humans are arranged hierarchically, will the top group always oppress the bottom group? Is there no such thing as horizontal oppression in that sense? Would peer pressure count as oppression in a horizontal sense? I think it would. I'm curious to know your thoughts on such conceptual topics.
Yup. Not intentionally, of course.
But human nature is to seek out what you want, and even if not everyone does it some people will take advantage of people who have less power in order to further their own ends such that it effects our social arrangements -- i.e. class is a real thing, and I do not think it ought be a real thing.
But this is much more political than metaphysical on my part. If you're talking about hierarchy in a mathematical sense, for instance, I'm not really talking about concepts here -- concepts can be organized hierarchically just fine because concepts aren't human beings.
Ok, let me see if the following analogy holds up, then. When looking at a bee colony, we usually point to a very large individual bee, which is clearly different from the rest just in purely morphological terms, and we say "that's the Queen". But that's an inaccurate thing to say. There is a hierarchy in a bee colony, but the Queen isn't the one running the show. The Queen bee is something like the "reproducer" of the colony, that is her function. She exists only to create the next generation of bees. She does not tell the other bees what to do, the other bees do their tasks without the Queen telling them to do those tasks (i.e., find nectar, bring it back, make honey, construct more wax cells for the colony, etc.). There is no hierarchical oppression in this scenario, even though there is a hierarchy. Or would you like to challenge the idea that there is a hierarchy in a bee colony?
You can also say "bees are not human beings". Ok. In that case, let me mention, as an example, the sport of Bazilian Jiu Jitsu. In BJJ, there is a hierarchy of belts. That doesn't mean that the black belts are oppressing the white, blue, purple and brown bets. Or would you like to challenge the idea that BJJ black belts are not oppressing the lower ranked belts?
Quoting Moliere
But it's not the only real thing. Biological sex is a real thing, sexual orientation is a real thing, racial discrimination is a real thing, etc.
Quoting Moliere
But that's my point. In a classical Marxist analysis of society, for example, or a classical Webberian analysis of society (or just pick whichever sociological theory you happen to agree with), where do you place King Charles? Where do you place Lady Di? Where do you place the Pope? Where would one place the Rolling Stones, or Lionel Messi? Are they oppressing the poor in any meaningful way, if any?
I'm not sure that I'm even challenging these ideas as much as using "hierarchy" differently. That's kind of what I was getting at with the notion that this is a more political than metaphysical statement -- I'm not talking about bees or the mastery of a craft, but power relations between human beings (which are largely defined by decision-making-power, in my mind)
I agree that calling the Queen Bee the Queen is a misnomer since bees are much more collectivist than human beings are. At least, from the outside -- it's not like I know how to read bee poetry.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
I agree here. I'm not a reductionist marxist type person -- just a marxist in the sense that I read him and respect his ideas and utilize his ideas in understanding the world around me because it's mostly worked so far.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
I'd say that a Marxist analysis of society doesn't look to place individuals within the hierarchy in a general sense -- it depends upon the "concrete conditions", and so the truth of placing people in a hierarchy isn't something decided in a conversation of contemplation at all. It's more "scientific", but less scientific in terms of norms -- in a marxist analysis it's class oppression, and not individual oppression, that matters. The concrete conditions could be likened to when we have to actually do something in the now -- who has the decision-making power? who has the money? what do we do to accomplish.....? -- rather than some criteria which will always hold such that we can say "King Charles does 78 oppressions per day", or anything so specific or general as that.
Right, but, look at the point I'm making here, for a sec. It seems to me (and I could be wrong here) that you're mixing up the topic of politics with the topic of power. Political power is not the only kind of power. There is such a thing as physical power. That is what we study and apply in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as a martial art, not a sport (thought it's both, really). The notion here is, if you choke me, for example, and I can't escape the choke, and you don't let go, then I go unconscious. And if you don't release the choke after I become unconscious, I will die. That, is some sort of power, and yet it is not a political power. And, to learn those powers, in the context of a BJJ academy, a clear hierarchy is needed, which is why belts exist in the first place. A belt is just a symbol, you could use some other criteria, such as how many medals have you won at tournaments, or how many trophies, which is what happens in the world of sports.
Quoting Moliere
I think that bees are fascist in that sense. They seem awful to me. The workers are running the show in a bee colony, all of them are females, there is only one reproductive female (the so-called "Queen"), and there is a caste of lazy, non-working males whose only function is to reproduce with the Queen. If anyone steps out of line, the female worker bees kill that individual. They've been known to kill Queens, males, and other female worker bees. And there are records of this. In short, bee society sucks. Fuck them. I'd rather be a human. And I have the "ontological-political right" to say that because I'm just as much of a living being as them.
Quoting Moliere
Yeah but I do that with a lot of philosophers and you seem to do the same thing, that's what I'm saying. Everyone seems to do that. No one sticks to "just one philosopher". I mean, everyone has their favorite, or their favorites, but it's not like we're ignorant of the fact that other philosophers exist.
Quoting Moliere
I don't know what to say here, my friend, so I'll just blurt out an intellectually reckless claim that I'm willing to argue for, even if I'm just shooting from the hip here: Marxism, by the epistemological standards of the 21st Century, is less scientific than contemporary physics. That's just a fact.
I agree!
It's something that bugs me, actually -- but building the science is a lot harder than being bugged by it.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
True.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Oh yes I have no desire to live in bee-society. For human beings, at least, bees are too collectivist -- we'd suffocate in that society.
I'm a collectivist, but it's not like I want to emulate the ants or bees. That's insane.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Please tell me if I'm missing something in this response because I feel like I'm repeating myself -- so I must be missing something. But I'll write more in an effort to see if something else snags.
I could be mixing up topics -- I do it all the time, and would be appreciative if I can see how I'm doing it now (not your job, of course, but mine -- just would be appreciative)
"Power" is a funny word -- Bertrand Russell tried to write a science of power by listing the various categories of power and suggesting it could be measured somehow. I think this is a common misconception of power -- that it's something like Kinetic or Potential Energy, and the greater force wins.
That's a simplification that works, but is basically false. There is no unit of "Power" in terms of political power.
By "craft" I meant the sort of thing you're talking about here -- one can become better at something, and a school can use a hierarchy to indicate to students the path they are meant to take. I can see the conflict with what I'm saying, and I'm not sure how to resolve it.
I think in the ideal ideal world I'd prefer it if somehow persons could meaningfully choose to participate in such hierarchies. It's not like learning is bad, and human beings can benefit from that.
It's that human nature is such that even those benevolent hierarchies are abused -- in various dark ways that we need not go into.
Right, but you wanna know why bees are like that and we're not? This is a curious biological fact that I learned when I was working on my doctoral thesis, which was about the history and philosophy of biology. Check out my explanation of it. Bees have eusociality, and the species Homo sapiens does not have eu-sociality, we only have socialty. Now, what is "eusociality", you might ask? It's a word that biologists use, and it means something like True sociality:
Quoting Wikipedia
It's a biological division of labor, or division of labor at the biological level. Bees are not collectivists. They are the worst form of social organization that can ever exist, it is extremely oppressive to the individual bee. We, human beings, would not want to live like that, if we experienced it in person. Or would you disagree with me (on something specific or on everything in general)?
Quoting Moliere
It seems to me (and I could be wrong here) that you are mixing them up (here, in this conversation) at the level of the concepts themselves, like, you're mixing them in an almost "mathematical", purely formal way. Metaphorically, it's like you're mixing up Geometry with Algebra in some sense.
Quoting Moliere
Ok, but could there be one? It's just math, at the end of the day, in that sense. For example, you can use Goolge Ngram to look for statistical trends on this and that. For example, right now it has the following three search terms: Albert Einstein,Sherlock Holmes,Frankenstein. Right now, the trend is 1) Frankenstein, 2) Sherlock Holmes, 3) Albert Einstein. So what would we say about that, from the POV of Theory? I would say something like the following: currently, people seem to pay more attention to fictional characters than to real people, though that was not always the case in the past.
Agree or disagree? And to what percentage? Don't just say "Agree, 100%"
: )
Quoting Moliere
Me either : (
Quoting Moliere
100%, Agree.
Nope! I agree with this.
I rarely use the word "insane", because it doesn't have any real referent. But if someone really and actually wanted to become bee or ant like I'd say they are out of their mind.
I'd feel like I'm being misunderstood if people began to wonder if they ought be like bees or ants.
Also, thanks for teaching me about eusociality.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Cool, thanks. I'll think about it, but obviously if I'm mixing them up now it's not the time to disentangle.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
There could be one, but I think it's so far out there that any suggestion will probably be false.
Someone could trip across the right answer, as we've done before. I don't like to cut off ideas in principle -- and really, if I'm a marxist, there ought be a way to do this scientifically.
I just doubt that there is at the moment, and through my experience with doing union politics, at least, I've sort of come around to thinking there is no scientific analysis of political power -- it's a historical, rather than scientific, phenomena.
But this actually does come up every now and then, in political conversations. Like, I've heard fascists make the argument that human society should be more like an ant society or a bee society precisely because eusocial insects are similar to fascists. As for myself, I can only describe such deluded beliefs (for that is what they are) as a metaphysical and political attempt to erase the very concept of individuality in a social sense. And I say that as objectively and as respectfully as possible.
But then again, I've also heard hippies make the argument that we should be like bees (not ants, mind you) because bees produce honey, and it is well known that Ambrosia (i.e., honey) is the "Food of the Gods", whatever that means.
Quoting Moliere
It's just a useful reference, nothing more.
Quoting Moliere
I can't make that decision for you. Nor would I want to.
Quoting Moliere
Well, in my honest opinion, this is because the social sciences in general are not as scientific as the natural sciences, at least not currently. If we wanna bring up the social sciences so that they are on a par with the natural sciences, then we kinda need to place our bets on scientism, right? Anti-scientism won't get that particular job done. See where I'm commin' from, partner?
Quoting Moliere
Exactly. It's actually really simple, at the end of the day. Right? I could be wrong about that though, I mean, it is technically a very, very complicated point to make. Just look at this conversation. It's too abstract, in some sense. Like, we need to be a bit more materialistic, here. And yeah, I just say it like that, I just blurt that sort of thing out. Doesn't mean that I don't believe in it.
Quoting Moliere
Well, then, what you're alluding to right there is the following question: "Is historiography a social science?" "Is it a science to begin with, or is it one of the "Humanities" or "Humanistic studies"? And I just don't think that it's a productive discussion at the end of the day, even though people love to discuss it. Like, let's just all come out of the scientism closet: we all believe in scientism at the end of the day, let's not fool ourselves about that. Right? Or do you disagree?
As always it depends upon how we understand the terms in the first place.
To my understanding I don't think we need to place bets either way. If neither literature nor social science nor physical science are in some sense superior to each other then there's no need to argue which one is going to win. We can engage in each at our whim.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
I certainly don't believe in scientism -- I don't see science as superior to other forms of knowledge. I see it as one of the ways we can go about our world. And sometimes it's a foolish way to go about our world.
With respect to history in particular I think this is true. This would be where I begin to part ways with Orthodox Marxism.
Generally speaking I don't think all phenomena fit the same methodological bill -- and which is better at a time has much to do with what we're talking about in the first place. I wouldn't want the historical record of a particular cannon ball in figuring out where it will land when given such and such an amount of energy. I also would not break out thermodynamical models to explain the causes of World War 1.
These are just different ways of knowing.
Oh, also, I tried to track down access to the particular paper you linked and failed. I found some papers by Bunge, but not that.
But then some things will be more difficult and/or they'll take more time, such as the construction (or discovery) of a way to meaningfully quantify oppression, or political power. To be sure, it's possible to quantify exploitation, but there is no comparable metric for oppression or political power (I mean, there are some proposals, but they're sort of flimsy and questionable from a methodological POV).
Quoting Moliere
Depends on what you want to know. If you want to know what the interior of the Earth is like, you'll probably arrive at a more sensible result reading what geologists have to say than reading Jules Verne. It's fun to entertain the idea that there might be living dinosaurs inside the Earth's core, but in all likenesses there's just a lot of inorganic stuff at a very high temperature there, even though no one has ever seen it. Why would we approach history any differently?
Quoting Moliere
Sure, if you're reading "Journey to the Center of the Earth" and you get mad at Jules Verne because he says that there are living dinosaurs inside the Earth's core, you kinda missed the point of the book.
Quoting Moliere
Is there a particularly important reason why non-Orthodox Marxism can't support scientism?
Quoting Moliere
Sure. But you wouldn't approach the invention of the cannon or World War 1 as academic topics just from the point of view of poetry. That history isn't physics doesn't necessarily entail that it's non-scientific tout court.
Quoting Moliere
Feel free to send me a PM and I'll see if I can do something about that.
Can't? No. But this is the very point that I begin to question Marx on -- whether history even can be treated scientifically, or more to the point, whether it should be done.
In some cases, sure -- I see a lot of advantage to being able to predict the flows of the economy, for instance, but I wonder if the economy is more a historical rather than a scientific entity. In which case the notion of models and empirical evidence and all that kind of goes out the window -- it's too close to home for us to make predictions about because we care too much about it. As soon as we have a model which works people will adapt to that model and the model will have to change in order to be true.
Whereas science emphasizes reproducibility and explanatory power history emphasizes the moment and the narrative.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
I think that treating history like science is overly broad on the part of science.
And also, historians do reference poems and novels from time periods they're interested in. This is because they are historical records unto themselves if they were produced at that time and capture something of the era.
With respect to human experience I think poetry is an important record.
Why not? There's a lot of quantitative content in history, already. We have numbers for the centuries, for the years, even days and the minutes and seconds of each day. Not that you'll take all of those into account when you write or read about, I don't know, the French Revolution, but it's like, there are some numbers here already, about a ton of stuff. What was the price of bread in the months leading up to the French Revolution? How many people lived in France at that time? How many in Paris, specifically? How many guards were at the Bastille? Etc. And then you can study larger phenomena, like, the first World War. How many countries were involved in that conflict? When did it start? When did it end? How many combatants, on each side? What was the death toll? Etc. All of this is quantifiable. Why wouldn't you then look for statistics, trends, correlations, etc.?
Quoting Moliere
Probably both. Why not? It's "a human thing" that has numbers, isn't it?
Quoting Moliere
But think of the physicists that study the Big Bang. It only happened once. And it's not reproducible. It's not like you're going reproduce the Big Bang in a lab. Plus, physicists can explain everything that happened immediately after the Big Bang, but as for the Big Bang itself, in the strict sense,there's only speculation.
Quoting Moliere
Or perhaps history already is a science, just not a very sophisticated one in comparison to physics.
Quoting Moliere
So do some physicists, when they quote Borges in one of their papers, for example.
Quoting Moliere
It is, but historians aren't doing poetry when they're working, just as mathematicians are not playing chess when they're working.
"Shouldn't" because the phenomena isn't a scientific one, but historical. So while we can draw up statistics and trends and correlations this won't be what decides how a history is told, or at least we'll be missing out on a huge part of the history of all we do is look at measurables and ignore stories.
There's even a whole theory of writing history dedicated to exactly that -- it's the multiplicity of stories and causes and perspectives on an event which fills out an understanding of the event, rather than a unifying theory or the necessity for agreement or universality, though. I think both disciplines look at time and causation in different ways such that you can do a history of science or a science of history, but when you try to do a science of history you don't really get any unifying theory whereas if you do a history of science you get a multi-faceted narrative that doesn't give you a Method or Theory of Science, but gives you some ideas about how to go about doing science some of the time.
Quantitation is acceptable, of course. Numbers of people, hectares of agriculture, year Franz Ferdinand is shot are part of history.
But that doesn't make it a science. (Shop keeping requires mathematics, but running a shop is not doing science)
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Because it's a political entity and so all statements about it will themselves be political statements rather than statements of fact that can be assessed from some intersubjective objectivity.
Unlike biology economics will have a class-character. Quoting Arcane Sandwich
That's different, though -- the physicist can't quote Emily Dickenson as a record of physics, whereas the historian can.
That's because they're doing different things entirely. I think of them as orthogonal to one another, and it's only because history is more permissive -- rather than superior to science -- that there can be a history of science but no science of history.
They have different goals in mind, though, so this isn't a problem.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Well, they aren't doing poetry as the poets do poetry, though in the sense of the difference I'd keep between science and history -- they are in a sense doing two different kinds of poetry with different rules and thereby different outcomes. The poetry is more rigid than what we usually associate with "poetry", but the narrative character of both history and science is what I mean by the "poetics".
Consider the difference between the Big Bang and World War 1, to use your example. (other historical sciences, like geology and biology etc. will likewise count here as a point of comparison):
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
What's reproducible with the Big Bang are the results of the experiments which the scientists generated using such-and-such methods, rather than the Big Bang itself. Likewise I don't need to witness the entire evolution from RNA to homo sapiens re-occur to still have reproducible results.
However, such reproducibility is not the point of delving into the causes of World War 1. Everyone will acknowledge that there are many causes, and there will often be a handful of causes that all historians agree upon. What will differ is which causes get more emphasis and "what it all means" -- the marxist historian will emphasize material conditions and internal conflicts, the progressive historian will situate world war 1 as a terrible lesson we can grow from, etc.
And even within a particular theory individual historians will disagree on the exact narrative.
Do yo usee the difference?
Of course. I've debated this topic before, though not with you : )
Your position on this topic, I believe (and I could be wrong) confuses history with storytelling. It's a sort of "history from a storytelling POV". Allow me to illustrate what I mean by that, by answering some specific points that you discuss, starting with the following:
Quoting Moliere
This, is the root of our disagreement, IMHO. Having identified that, let's proceed:
Quoting Moliere
History is not storytelling, I would say, if I had to say such a thing as a slogan.
Quoting Moliere
Again, I'll just blurt out the slogan: history is not storytelling.
Quoting Moliere
Sure. But there are other theories of writing history. How are we to settle which one is preferable? I don't think that's a purely political matter. It's a scientific matter as well. There is such a thing (I believe) as writing history in a more scientific way.
Quoting Moliere
I don't think that history is like shop keeping. It's more like physics. The difference between a shop keeper and a physicist (and by extension, a historian) is that the former is running a business while the later is doing basic and applied research. Historians are scientists because they do research, like the physicist does, not because he is running a business, like the shopkeeper is.
Quoting Moliere
It's an ontological entity before being a political entity. And ontology is more scientific than politics, is what I would say. Consequently, not all statements about it will be political statements. Some will, but others will be non-political (i.e., they will be aesthetic statements, meta-scientific statements, ethical statements, etc.)
Quoting Moliere
Not necessarily, because class is not the only concept that is used in economics and in the social sciences more generally. Or, in Ontologese: class exists as much as sex, gender, and ethnicity does, among other sociological variables.
Quoting Moliere
Can the historian quote Jorge Luis Borges in the same sense that he can quote Emily Dickinson? If so, then he has something in common with the physicists.
Quoting Moliere
How do you know it's not the other way around? Maybe physics is more permissive than history. That's another way to look at it.
Quoting Moliere
The Marxist would be leaving out a lot of important sociological variables in that case, and the progressive historian would be arriving at a somewhat simplistic conclusion when he tries to formulate "the moral of the story".
Quoting Moliere
Do I need to just say my slogan in here as well? : )
Cool. Insofar that you have some intuitive sense of what I'm on about that's enough for me.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
This might be the in-a-nutshell version of our differences as I see it, at least: Not only are there other theories of writing history, it is not the historians job to settle which theory of writing history is preferable. The best the historian can do is choose a consistent perspective and tell a history, and it's the multiplicity of historical theories that gives a more well-rounded character to an event, whereas a scientist would prefer a singular theory which gives an account of many of the same kinds of events.
Usually the reason a historian chooses a perspective to write from is because it resonates with the way they see history, but not always -- one can purposefully use the concepts of another theory to write a history. What moores this storytelling is that it must be based upon evidence.
...
Actually, this is a better example for the difference between history and science, using the Big Bang.
In science the big bang happened billions of years ago
In history the big bang happened in the 20'th century -- there are no documents to reference in writing a history of the time before human beings. If one's ontology were defined by this historical reality, rather than by science, then we'd say that right now it appears that the Big Bang happened billions of years ago, but by the documentation it didn't exist until much more recently.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
I agree these are closer -- shopkeeper example is meant to point out that numeration is common to many human endeavors, even outside of the academy, and so can't serve as a basis for separating out what makes science, science.
(Also, for what it's worth, I don't think there is a solution to the problem of the criterion)
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Not something relevant, though. The relevant difference is that for the historian the poem can reasonably be considered evidence in some circumstances, whereas with the physicist it can't: there is no circumstance in which a poem will count as evidence for a scientific belief.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Study. ;)
Also, "more permissive" can be challenged -- ultimately they're just different, and those differences are what account for why we can have a history of science and not a science of history rather than some sort of fight for the top or a superior discipline with respect to reality.
I take 20th century philosophy of science has having demonstrated the failure of a science of science: without an answer to the problem of the criterion there can be no way to ascertain if what we're talking about is scientific proper, and thereby we can never classify a knowledge which is the knowledge of knowledge: science is more a thematic unity than a methodological unity which leads one closer to truth.
It forces agreement, but it smothers out difference in the process -- and this is a good thing for what it's doing.
History allows more differences than science to count as significant in the construction of a history.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Exactly! And yet, in order to bring any sort of coherence to an odd collection of records, one must have some idea of the structure of history before writing a particular monograph.
So the historiographical move is to allow this multiplicity since to rely upon only one would necessarily ignore very important things.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Yes lol.
If it's not story-telling, then what is it? What else is research than the telling of stories?
Seems to me that they're just different forms of literature that go towards different purposes. I know history isn't story-telling in the sense that Tolkien is a storyteller, and I know that the storytelling parameters of history are different from the storytelling parameters of science, but even in science, when you communicate your findings, the important part -- and the part that often gets fought over -- is how the story gets told.
So even this storytelling isn't what excludes science from history. I think it's really just that they aren't doing the same thing.
I notice that you give quite a lot of importance to events. Why? Events are arguably just the crest of the wave, as Fernand Braudel used to say. Histoire événementielle, as he liked to call it, "history of events". But events are not the wave itself. Historical phenomena that occur more slowly, which have a longue durée, are far more "structural" than mere, ephemeral events. From a scientific standpoint, I don't care about the poem that some French intellectual wrote months prior to the French Revolution. I want to know what the price of bread was, among other sociological variables. That doesn't mean that I don't care about the poem in question at all, it might be an awe-inspiring work of poetic brilliance, but history is not storytelling. We're not at the literary café or the art museum when we're doing history. We're at the "history lab", if you will. I'm aware that sounds dry, and cold. Well, what can I say? Welcome to the world of scientism. Warmth is for the Art Room. When we're in the Science Room, we're cold, heartless, down-to-earth tax lawyers.
True, there's been a lot of Theory done after Braudel, by historians such as Jacques Le Goff, or Roger Chartier. And I'm aware of the theoretical contributions of the British Marxist historians, such as Eric Hobsbawm and Edward Palmer Thompson. And I'm aware of the post-structuralist critique of structuralist historians like Braudel. Still, it makes no sense to me, in 2025, to say that Montaillou and The Cheese and the Worms are somehow historiographically preferable to what Braudel did in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.
Quoting Moliere
We're not in the 20th century anymore, are we? A lot has happened ever since Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, and the like. The refreshing originality of such approaches to philosophy of science and history of science has worn off by now, and their epistemological relativism has, pun intended, gotten really old by the epistemic (and even political) standards of 2025.
Quoting Moliere
It's science. It's no different in kind than physics. That's why there's no conceptual hierarchy to begin win. The only hierarchy between physics and history currently, is that the former is more scientific than the latter. It's not as if physics and history had different essences. They are indeed branches of the same tree, not fruits from different species of plants.
Quoting Moliere
The telling of information. To tell a story is not the same thing as to tell information. They are different "speech acts", if you will.
Quoting Moliere
That beetles are arthropods is a fact even if there were no human beings to communicate stories. If humanity went extinct tomorrow, it would still be true that the French Revolution happened in the 18th century. How a story gets told, how any story gets told, has nothing to do with history. It has to do with politics. But history is not politics, and politics are not history.
Controversial thing to say at the end, I know.
(Slightly edited)
There was a syfy movie 20 or 30 years ago where criminals would commit crimes and record everything going on in their head (their feelings and visions and sounds etc) while committing them and then sell the tapes to rich people to sit in their living rooms and relive it.
Not possible yet, but if you record continuous brain scans and use AI to segment out the signals from each your five senses, it may be possible to record, but accurate playback would be impossible except for in the brain that originally recorded it. Thoughts would remain unrecorded and emotions would have to be strong enough to produce a brain sensed physiological effect to get recorded.
No reason that I can think of.
When you say...
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
I don't know how I'd differentiate between the two. Similarly so with the histories you list -- I've read none of them, but on their face I don't see why I'd prefer the history of the mediterranean over the microhistories -- arguably the microhistories are more accurate than the grand narratives. But, really, I think they complement one another. (similar move to what I've been saying with respect to science and history -- there isn't a better or worse, they're just different)
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
We're not, but I haven't seen an adequate response to Feyerabend as much as a shrug.
People don't like the conclusions so they go on to try something new. All well and good.
But it's not their freshness or originality which draws me to their philosophies. Rather, I just read them and they appeal to me and my experience of science; they have good lessons for reflecting on the beast science, and really I think their relativisms are overhyped.
Feyerabend and Kuhn, in particular, are often overhyped as some kind of arche-relativists, but if you just take them at their word they are nothing of the sort.
They poke holes in some pet theories of science, but that's more the philosophy of science than the science itself.
And of course we've absorbed some of those lessons over the course of time. But Feyerabend still strikes me as particularly relevant since people will reject Popper, but then still try to define science by its methods -- that is, find a different criterion or structural description of science that Feyerabend isn't addressing, but totally missing the point that a whole cadre of philosophers and scientists have already tried to build a science of science and failed at it.
For me to take the idea seriously I'd have to know what it is about this science of science that is superior to Popper's theory, which is pretty well articulated.
Is it Popperian, in the sense of Karl Popper? Of course not. It's Bungean, in the sense of Mario Bunge. So what does Bunge have to say about that? The following, among other things:
Quoting Wikipedia
With that in mind, I would say that physics stands today as Tetartoscience (Stage 5). History, I would say, stands today as a Protoscience (Stage 2). It has already surpased Stage 1, it is no longer a Prescience.
In other words, the "science of science" which you speak about already exists. It's called Metascience. And I quote:
That being said, I believe that I've made quite a case for:
-History as one of the Sciences
-Some differences between the Art Room and the Science Room
-Marxism and Post-Marxism
-Positivism and Scientism
-A Stage-Theoretical Philosophy of Science, and
-An explanation of what Metascience is.
So, what other questions might you have about these topics?
EDIT: And another thing, what you're trying to do, when you connect History with Poetry (with Emily Dickinson, for example) is a semi-conscious (perhaps even "unconscious", if one were to believe in such things) attempt to turn History into a Stage 3 Science: a Deuteroscience, a True Science.
You think you're doing storytelling, but you don't realize that the very attempt to optimize your storytelling indicates that what you are doing has something in common with science, for the sciences also seek to optimize. However, here you go astray when you compare physics or history to shopkeeping, just because all of them use math. Yes, they all do, but to do science is to do basic and applied research. The shopkeeper is just running a business. And science is not a business.
Controversial statement at the end, I know. I kinda have that style. I think it suits me. What do you think?
With respect to scientism, though, I want to be clear: I have no problem with scientists trying it all over again. It's only that it's failed before and I don't have high hopes for a real unifying theory of science. Furthermore, I tend to think we don't even need one -- there's too much out there to want to investigate to build some kind of theory of making theories. Just make shit up and see what works; it is no grander than that.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Do any of these record human experience?
That was my initial reason for using poetry as a record -- because we have nothing better than poetry to capture human experience. Novels, poems, bank-statements, government records, attendance sheets, newspaper articles, reports, letters, oral interview are the records of human experience, and this is what history deals in.
It's because history is perspectival that there isn't one way to tell it. You only get the full sense of history by hearing all the sides, some of which contradict.
Human experience is contradictory.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Like numeration, optimization is not a criteria for the sciences -- actors optimize their acting to fit a scene, and aren't doing science for all that.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
The point of the shopkeeper example was to demonstrate that your criteria of numeration could not differentiate science from not-science. Similarly so with the above on optimization. I don't think that shopkeeping is either science or history -- but numeration is used by all three and so this can't be a criterion which differentiates science from not-science.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
I love it! :D
Gives me something to think on and through.
Ok, then I'll just copy and paste what I just posted in another thread, so that we may take a look at it here, from the point of view of your storytelling theory. I submit that the following text, which I just wrote a few minutes ago, can be classified as a poem as well as a short piece of philosophical text:
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Will you accept this as an example of a poem, yes, no, or sort of?
As long as its intended as such, sure. But sometimes poem-looking writing can be intended otherwise, and vice-versa -- the proem.
That is, there's not a textual criteria for counting as a poem that I can think of that's universal universal.
Poems, and art generally, are created between a creator and an audience -- it requires an expression and an interpretation.
Though I ought note that just because a poem is the best way (EDIT: at present) to record human experience that does not then mean that all poems record human experience -- some are structured for different purposes, or on strictly formal phonetic and syntactical terms.
I am a person. One is a person.
No reason. We come from nothing and here we are -- there is no why.
Because we like to think of ourselves as unitary.
Yes, to both.
I don't know what I am, at bottom. I have so many certainties, but these aren't necessarily knowledge-based certainties.
I think these questions are asking after the difference between self and other -- and that's the sort of thing I often think about. What I don't think is that there's some criteria for the seperation -- there's a "why", but not a list of reasons.
Though with each question we could articulate more about this relationship my thought is that I still think about this relationship a lot. Almost like I like Levinas ;).
Neither do I, that's the problem. I don't think anyone does, actually. I mean there's like, some guesses, but that's basically it: just guesses.
At the end of the day, this is what I call "political ontology". The term already exists, of course, I didn't invent it. But this is the only way that I can make any sense of such a notion.
Quoting Moliere
I'm not so sure that being a person is the end of the story here. One is an animal, I would argue. One is a subject. One is a creature. One is an organism.
But even more generally: One is something composed of subatomic particles. One is not reducible to those particles, but One is something that emerges, in a purely physical sense, from them. This is the part of One that is not social (I am not just a person), it is not biological (I am not just an animal), it is not chemical (I am not just a bunch of elements of the Periodic Table). I am all of that, but in a more fundamental sense, in a physical sense, I am something composed of subatomic particles. And so are you. And so are they, whatever they may be, even if they are just ordinary stones.
What's your feeling on Heidegger? The notion of Dasein seems to fit here as a place for thinking about this.
EDIT: So I guess my point is, I don't agree with Heidegger in characterizing One as "impersonal exsistence" as opposed to "authentic existence". If anything, I'd say it's the other way around: One is better characterized as "authentic existence", while Dasein is just "impersonal existence". I'll say it even more recklessly: To be One is to be a stone, to be a Dasein is to be a Nazi. I'd rather be a stone, thank you very much.
Hmm. "Philosopher" is an identity that identifies itself as central. But then that goes for any old narcissist too. But that's ok with me, because I am happy to say that I am the real Donald Trump, or a 17thC French playwright, or a harvest mouse. I am any centre anywhere.
Not really. When you move to one of the corners in a room, you're not a the center of the room. So, you're not the center of the room. But you could be. The problem in this case, is that the notion of center, in this context, is a relative notion: your centrality is relative to the room's centrality in that sense. They need not co-incide, they need not be co-located. One's centrality is therefore relative to one's surroundings or circumstances. But if there is a relative centrality, there can be an absolute centrality. And I would say, if only for the sake of argument, that one is not absolutely central, in any way, shape, or form.
My biggest doubt with respect to the existentialists is the emphasis on authenticity, and with respect to Heidegger especially, his use of "authentic" with respect to a metaphysical existence.
I definitely see the fascism in Heidegger -- it's really only because of Levinas that I take him seriously. I've said it before on this forum but I consider Levinas to be like the baptizer of Heidegger.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Would you accept that this is the entire point of a metaphysics?
I see metaphysics as subordinate to ethics; one chooses a metaphysic that fits with an ethical stance, at least historically speaking. i.e. Plato wrote a metaphysics that got along with his philosophy, as did Aristotle and Epicurus etc.
Quoting unenlightened
What would a non-narcissistic philosophy look like, in your opinion?
Lao Tzu.
We can't record it really, and the defense of poetics falls to the same narcissism as the defense of science.
Yeah? Or naw?
Yeah.
"The record that can be recorded is not the continuing record."
"Work is done and then forgotten; therefore it lasts forever."
ETC.
Yeah but Laozi's entire point is that you shouldn't follow the Dao. Instead you should follow what the Dao follows: "what is natural".
Quoting Laozi
It's "Nazism for Philosophers", at the end of the day.
Quoting Moliere
Because Levinas is a Husserlian before being a Heideggerian. And Heidegger himself is, at the end of the day, just one among many of Husserl's students. The most famous one, sure, not necessarily the best one.
Quoting Moliere
Maybe, maybe not. Could there even be another metaphysics? If you mean that in the sense of "Well, Nietzsche had a metaphysics, Aristotle had a different metaphysics, Plato had his own metaphysics, etc.", then sure. Metaphysics are a dime a dozen.
But if you mean metaphysics in the Bungean sense, as general science, then I would say no: just as there is one biology, one chemistry, and one physics, there is also one metaphysics. And there is no reason to believe that the same is not true of the social sciences and the humanities, because if they become Deuterosciences, then there will be one history, one geography, one economics, one sociology, and so forth.
Quoting Moliere
I see it the other way around: ethics is subordinate to metaphysics. This is exactly the topic that I had hoped to discuss elsewhere in this Forum, but there was no interest : P
Quoting Moliere
I choose the Ethical stance that fits with my metaphysics.
Quoting Moliere
Good for them. Doesn't mean that one has to do the same thing.
I am something, and I am someone. To be one is to be something. But it does not follow from there that to be something is to be someone. For a stone is something, yet it is not someone.
And I am not everyone. I am only someone. Am I no one? I am someone. I cannot be everyone, and I cannot be no one. I will always be someone, not less, not more. But in being someone, I am something. I am something in the following sense:
?x(x=a) - There exists an x, such that x is identical to Arcane Sandwich.
?x(x=x) - There exists an x, such that x is identical to itself.
There is an "itselfness" to what I am, in addition to there being a selfness to who I am.
I think therefore I am whatever I think. I am the thought of myself. I am the result of the distinction I make between myself and the world. But this is obviously wrong. I am, therefore, whatever I mistake myself for.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Will you say, "There exists an x, such that x is identical to a named hurricane."? We talk about them as objects for convenience, but we do not draw the boundaries or wonder where they go when they dissipate. The problem with formal logic is that it cannot deal with time.
Yesterday, there existed an x, such that was identical to unenlightened.
Today, there exists a y, such that y is now identical to unenlightened, but somewhat changed from x.
Tomorrow, who knows, there may exist a z such that z is then identical to the mortal remains of unenlightened, but is radically different from x and y in being lifeless. Or maybe z will be enlightened. :joke:
But it can be interpreted elsewise, yes?
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Which is the best, in your estimation?
Either way the reason I brought up Heidegger is his notion of disclosure, but with a twist that with a disclosure there is something passed over -- but by reworking what we think as possible a new disclosure appears, and passes over what we were thinking on before.
It's an ontological description of the epistemology of history that I've been arguing for.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Oh here I disagree entirely. I see science as much more fractured than this.
But here I'm still ignorant with respect to Bunge, so all I can say is I see more than one of each of these -- even in physics we have classical and quantum mechanics. Even if at some point later we find some way to reconcile these it will still have been the case that there was a period of time when there were 2 physics, and I see no reason to disparage that -- they both work in their respective contexts.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Well, you can attempt to do something else. And I think most people believe that metaphysics is prior to ethics -- but I can give an argument as to why I think it's the other way about.
If, in describing the world, we were purely descriptive then we'd never finish enumerating all the features of the world. However, we do finish, so there must be something which is not purely descriptive that we're doing.
In building knowledge we're eliminating irrelevant facts in favor of relevant facts that link up -- we make wild guesses and insecure inferences in peicing together the relevant facts. What guides this is what we want out of the science -- some people want a puzzle, some people want a medicine, some people want the truth (and they have some pre-theoretical notion of what "the truth" consists in). This "wanting" is all that ethics consists in; it's the guide which helps us navigate, and it's even pre-figured in our modes of knowledge-production. We are thrown into the norms which predate our existence, and it's only by following these social norms that knowledge gets produced at all.
Ahhh, the cogito rears its head once again!
All I can say there is what the cogito is in various capacities has been a recent uncertainty of mine. I see the cogito becoming relevant again and again even as philosophers attempt to overcome it.
This is part of why the phenomenological-existential tradition is interesting -- the outcomes may be weird, but I genuinely believe they've managed to at least advance the cogito philosophically: the cogito is composed of, part of, directed towards the world so there is no gap between self and world in the first place there.
Quoting unenlightened
That gets along with what I'm thinking... there's certainly the sense of self that is continual from day to day, and yet...
Quoting unenlightened
The self does seem to be a fuzzy bundle that even changes what is part of the bundle as time goes on...
Hmmm... are you sure this is correct? It doesn't seem to be. I can think that I am a fish. That doesn't mean that I am a fish.
Edit: Quoting unenlightened
Sure, why not? Humans and hurricanes have something in common: both of them are event-based objects, in Carmichael's (2015) sense of the term.
Edit 2:
Quoting unenlightened
Not really. Take a look:
?x(Cxm ? Bxt) - There exist an x, such that x was a caterpillar on Monday, and it is a butterfly on Tuesday. You just need to treat Monday and Tuesday as individual constants, and "being a caterpillar" and "being a butterfly" as two-place predicates that relate an individual to a moment in time.
Can it?
Quoting Moliere
Carlos Astrada.
Quoting Moliere
Yes, I can see that.
Quoting Moliere
Sure. It's the descriptive vs normative debate in philosophy of science.
Quoting Moliere
That doesn't mean that the knowledge that gets produced is somehow 100% relative to those social norms.
Quoting Moliere
Same here.
Well that is a question of identity politics. Some people like to lay down the law about what are legitimate identities, but the recognised identities do seem to change over time and between cultures to an extent at least. Who knows if gill reassignment will or won't become an option?
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Or to put it another way, they are both temporary, mutable, evolving objects. I'm all for a bit of common sense now and then. And depending on the time-scale, mountains continents and pretty much every object is temporary, mutable and evolving.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Of course, one can account for these things, but in general, logic is mainly conducted in the present eternal tense, as it has been in this thread, and that is the practice I am criticising
I am unenlightened, but tomorrow I will be enlightened. No problem, but will anyone want to say that unenlightened is enlightened, even if they are willing to say tomorrow that enlightened was unenlightened. It can be made to work, but it isn't without difficulties.
Is it?
Quoting unenlightened
But if one wishes to conclude that one actually is whatever it is that one happens to think that one is, what is the underlying ontology here? Is it something like "Dream big, you can be whatever it is that you want to be"? Or is it instead something like "Reality Itself bends to our mere will, so that with a mere though you can instantly become a different creature, such that you have gills simply because you think so, and you can actually breathe underwater because you think you can".
Quoting unenlightened
And some people like strawberry ice cream, yet I don't think that taste or aesthetic judgement is involved here in any meaningful way.
Quoting unenlightened
That's what I'm saying, at some point, we just need to look at everything from the point of view of common sense. Why is there this idea that just because common sense is not infallible, we should throw it in the epistemological trash bin? That makes no philosophical sense to me.
Quoting unenlightened
Why are you criticizing it, if I may ask? I'm curious.
Quoting unenlightened
Well, as far as logic goes, you can make anything work. There's para-consistent logics for example, there's formal systems for contradictions, or for the denial of the Principle of Excluded Middle, to mention another example. There's multi-valued logics (so that you don't have just "true" and "false", you have more options), there's fuzzy logic, etc. I personally stick to first-order predicate logic because I don't really need anything else in that sense, other than perhaps propositional logic here and there.
Sure!
Derrida, Sartre, and Levinas aren't fascists but Derrida, in particular, credits Heidegger for his philosophy.
And thus far what I'm liking more about Sartre is it fits in with my materialist prejudices than Husserl did. He still uses Heidegger, but he also does his own thing.
It's in this sense that I mean we can interpret it differently -- it's not necessary to attend to Heidegger's intent or belief in making use of his philosophy (though I think it's worthy to note his fascism in approaching the philosophy as a contextualized historical product which Heidegger is offering to us to think through)
But almost any philosophy can be modified by disagreeing with one inference or adding an auxiliary hypothesis or entirely cutting out whole sections of thought and decontextualizing the concepts within to try them in new ways.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Cool. I'll keep him in mind as someone to investigate.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
I agree. Similarly to Kant's notion "But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience." -- though all our knowledge is directed at facts by no means follows that knowledge arises out of the facts.
But then I also want to avoid things like things-in-themselves while preserving some of the insights which put a limit on metaphysics.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Sweeeet
Well my ontology is that identity is a thought process and nothing else. To be hard-nosed for a minute, no fish ever thinks it is a fish, it does not identify itself at all, and therefore has no identity. Humans identify stuff including themselves and each other. Reality doesn't bend, it flows. Dreams remain dreams unless they are realised, just as as an architect's plans are fantasies until and unless a builder makes them a reality. Now we can argue about whether an architect whose plans are never built is a "real" architect or not, but identities as fantasies certainly have potential.
I think that some knowledge arises out of the facts. And that sort of response allows you to solve the problem of Debunking Arguments about ordinary objects in a rather elegant way, from the point of view of Theory.
Quoting Moliere
I think that things-in-themselves exist, and they can be thought about (as Kant argues), and they can also be known (as Bunge argues).
Quoting unenlightened
We have an important disagreement here, at the level of ontology, then. I think that every object, creature, thing, artifact, etc., has an identity. And it has it in an ontological sense, whether we like it or not. It has nothing to do with identity politics, nor with politics in any sense.
Quoting unenlightened
No fish ever thinks its a fish, I agree with you there. And it does not identify itself at all, I also agree with that. But I don't agree that this somehow entails that it has no identity. For it can have an identity even if it can't think of it. A stone has an identity, in my view, even though it doesn't even have a mind to begin with.
Quoting unenlightened
Humans are the most recent creatures to have emerged on this planet, and they are the most recent ontological units to have emerged ever since the Big Bang. We're not exactly the protagonists here, in this vast and ancient Cosmos.
It is what it is. If that is all you mean, we have no disagreement. But to say it has something seems to hint at more... ?
I'd say that insofar that it does the fact has to count as significant in the first place. When we falsify something, for instance, we have an idea what the measurement will entail one way or the other -- so there is a fact to the matter which decides a belief, but the facts had to already be important to us: there had to have been some guiding passion that brought the seeker or producer of knowledge to consider these facts.
It's because reality is abundant that I'm thinking our values is what aids us in picking out facts -- they can be epistemic values, such as honesty or integrity or consistency. Or even a thirst for truth itself.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Bold! :D
I obviously disagree there.
Would you say that human experience is a thing-in-itself?
Suppose we had this plug in our necks we could slot something into which would cause our total experience to become like the record rather than being directed towards the world around us. And let's suppose we have some recording device where I can record a day in the life of me and put it into the machine for others to play back.
More or less treating the brain like a VCR-Recorder, or perhaps it could be streamed across UV rays to various brain-transponders which generate experience, somehow.
The ineluctability of the Self before the Other would remain because it would still only be myself experiencing these things. They may have originated from some kind of wild science fiction machine, but even as I change identities I'd remain in my ipseity, the cogito.
The exterior isn't experienced, but lies outside the self. Since there is no gap between world and self the difference cannot be accounted for by our world -- it comes from the impossibility of ever being the Other.
But what we can do is imagine and encounter -- the encounter is beyond proof, like having hands doesn't prove anything. I think of the face-to-face relation as more an encounter than a strict logical relationship -- it's a phenomenon when one is made certain of the existence of the Other and the impossibility of knowing them the way you know your own ipseity and world.
All we have is language and charity, and the semi-mystical experience of being-with-others.
Well, that's what I would call "The Hard Problem of Identity" in Metaphysics, and I mean that like "The Hard Problem of Consciousness" in the Philosophy of Mind.
One possible candidate for fully inclusive Identity (an Identity that applies to stones as well as humans) is spatiotemporal continuity of form under a sortal. What you get there is a sort of "essence" but in the tradition of Analytic Philosophy. Another possible candidate is the plurality of parts that compose the entity at any given time. The problem there is that not every entity is composite to begin with, some are just pluralities that compose no further object. That leads to the tripartite debate on van Inwagen's Special Composition Question. Etc. It's the Rabbit Hole of Ordinary Objects, a fascinating rabbit hole (to my mind, at least), in which I have some papers published (I mean that as a colorful datum about myself, not as an appeal to authority).
Why? I'm curious to know your thoughts.
Quoting Moliere
No, I would not. It's in-itself, sure, but it's not a thing in the technical sense. Human experience is not a res. Human experience is more like cogitans in that sense. I would say: there is a human (a res) that has human experiences (cogitans). In other words, we shouldn't think that the cogitans is purely "mental" or "rational", since it is also empirical.
Here is Bunge's take on that, and I happen to agree with him on this specific point: a brain transplant, by definition, is impossible. You can have someone else's kidney transplanted into your body. You cannot have someone's brain transplanted into your own body, even if the technology to do such a thing were to exist. Why not? Because if you receive someone else's brain, what has happened is that the other person's brain has received a body. You, on the other hand, exist wherever your brain exists. So, if you receive a brain transplant, what happens to you is that you have become disembodied. Someone else has occupied your body. You now only exist as a disembodied brain. If they put you into someone else's body, then you have received a new body. A brain transplant, therefore, is impossible by definition, even if the technology for it were to exist.
Quoting Moliere
As Bunge says: what is internal to my brain is external to yours, and what is internal to your brain is external to mine.
Quoting Moliere
Yes it does. It proves that solipsism is false, as Moore argued:
Quoting Wikipedia
Quoting Moliere
Logic is just the formal science that studies the validity of arguments, nothing more. It's not "a thing in the world" in the same sense that this stone on the floor is.
Quoting Moliere
Hmmm... I don't agree with this. We have a ton of things. We have science (episteme), we have opinion (doxa), we have reason (ratio), we have deductive reasoning, we have inductive reasoning, we have "abductive reasoning", as Peirce called it (it's really just inference-to-best-explanation), etc. We have a ton of things, in addition to language, charity, and the semi-mystical experiences of being-with-others.
Well, there's two thoughts I have on Kant. One, I think he has a deep insight in his philosophy which is that the rational mind is more limited than what it might desire to know -- there are some things which are beyond us.
But there's a lot that comes along with his project that I reject like transcendental idealism, even of the one-world variety, mainly because I don't think the world makes as much sense as Kant seemed to believe. One Big Mind would make sense of a nature which is rationally ordered, but I don't see rational order in nature or the signs of some kind of purposive mind (to be fair Kant predates the wide acceptance of Darwinian biology which can explain some of this stuff).
What I like to keep about the thing-in-itself is that it's a purely negative concept which indicates some beyond that we must assume in order to make sense of the world but which will forever be outside of our mind's grasp -- almost by definition, meaning if terra-incognita somehow became cognizable due to brain-implants or whatever then this new part of the mind previously unexperienced would no longer be a thing-in-itself.
By definition it's unknowable, and the funny part that's hard to accept is that because causation is part of the categories it cannot be the case that the thing-in-itself is the cause of our representations. So it really just floats outside of all thought to take the place of things like the philosophical Ideas or God and the Soul and the Good.
It's an incredibly beautiful philosophy that I just can't bring myself to really believe in. The world appears much more jagged, and even if it were constructed it appears to move much more than Kant's epistemology seems to indicate -- there's not some eternal structure behind it all that provides a mental foundation to explain our rational abilities, but a loose web of guesses which hold together many of our [s]bleiefs[/s]beliefs meaningfully, but changes with time.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Cool.
I'm not sure I'd put human experience as an in-itself at all -- I'm not sure we really are our brains, or that there is something so solid about identity that we can treat it like an in-itself.
It's right around there that it becomes wildly interesting but speculative at the same time.
I'm not sure there even is a cogitans -- the brain-body bundle doesn't think much without having grown up in a supportive environment.
I really think of "mental" and "rational" as socially performed and taught rather than bound up in the structures of our brains.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
He argued it, but does he know that "here is one hand"?
What if he were dreaming? Would there be a hand there?
But there'd be no way to differentiate between the dream-hand or real-hand in dream-land. So we must conclude that Moore does not know, in the apodeictic sense of proof, that "here is a hand"; we must grant that he is able to refer to the hand in the first place by interpreting him and responding in kind. Without that collective enacting of language in the first place the hand couldn't be referred to -- he's assuming a great deal in thinking that referencing his hand is what proves solipsism to be false.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
So close and so far at the same time! :D
I tend to think that we are more than our brains -- we are our bodies, what we own, our relationships, commitments, legal rights all barely bundled together in a collective fiction we call "the self", which I think forms a dyad with the Other. In our original innocence the world is a playground which we can do with as we please, but the adult is the one who sees there's more to the world than the self and the world, and that the self requires others to exist at all (consider what happens to prisoners in solitary confinement, and feral children)
Brains seem an important part for human beings to be able to do all the things we tend to think of as a self or a mind -- but all unto themselves they're just a pile of dead cells. We can put them into computer chips to treat them like physical neural nets and train them, but for all that I don't think that the chips with neurons are a self at all.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
For understanding the experience of others'?
My individual experience IS my body - this is the “cord” that there is to “re-cord” so to speak.
Talking about it is recording it. Thinking about thinking is an attempt to record thinking.
So yes, itÂ’s not only possible, itÂ’s what we do when we speak. Problem is, the recording quality sucks.
Kant also predates Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose Transcendentalism is far beyond anything that Kant could ever dream.
Quoting Moliere
The way I see it, a Kantian thing-in-itself is just an Aristotelian substance, at the end of the day. An unknown Arisotelian substance, that's all he adds to it, that it's unknown. Well, I disagree with that skepticism (because that's what it is). I'm a realist in metaphysics, and I'm a realist in epistemology.
Quoting Moliere
Why do I have to accept that definition in the first place? Why does anyone have to accept that definition in the first place? It doesn't mean anything substantive to me. The mere speech act of definition, by itself, does not get to dictate the ultimate words (the "last words", if you will) in matters of ontology.
Quoting Moliere
I feel the same way about that, oddly enough. I think everyone does, in some sense, in some other topics.
Quoting Moliere
Could you briefly make a case for that, so that I can "picture" it?
Quoting Moliere
Yes, he does. That was his whole point. He does indeed know that.
Quoting Moliere
He knows how to distinguish dream from reality, in the same sense that you and I do.
Quoting Moliere
Would there be? It could be a hand in a dream, instead of a washing machine in a dream. A hand that is dreamed is as much of a hand as the hand that is real. Simpler: both of them are hands, even though one is real and the other one is not.
Quoting Moliere
Who cares? You can differentiate them in reality, when you're awake. Everyone can do that.
Quoting Moliere
Yes, for that, and for other things as well. But here's the thing: is a person literally a thing, as in, a res? Descartes said "yes", we are thinking things (res cogitans)
I'm a realist of some kind or other, though I have no clear idea of what that entails.
I'm certainly also a skeptic of some kind or other, even if merely by disposition alone.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
When I think about the various examples of extreme neglect of children and the effects that has on them it's apparent to me that we at least need others in order to get to a place where we can confidently say I have a sense of self.
The fish experiences the world, but does not experience itself experiencing the world like a self does (which, really, seems to me a third step removed -- there's the experience of the body knowing the body and the world and there's the synthesis which somehow allows us to meaningfully and truthfully say "I am")
The cogito is so significant not because it's point-like, but explosive: Once we have a sense of self there's so much already in play that solipsism is a clear impossibility.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Right. It just takes more than me waving my hand in the air. Once I'm speaking to everyone in an audience there's no need for proof, and saying "here is a hand" proves nothing.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
I don't believe so, no. But I'm a materialist at the same time.
Hence the conundrum.
Sounds like a smart thing to say. I'm not sure that I agree with it, but OK.
Quoting Moliere
But the point of Moore's argument is that he has two hands. Solipsism says that there is only one thing. If that's the case, then Moore would have to have just one hand. But he has two instead. So, it follows from this that solipsism is false. It's a rather simple case to make, but most people resist it for some unknown reason.
Quoting Wikipedia
Quoting Moliere
I'm a materialist as well. Through and through.
EDIT: My "core beliefs", if that's what they're called, are the following five:
1) Realism
2) Materialism
3) Atheism
4) Scientism
5) Literalism
I'm not so sure about the last one, though. It's the newest addition to my system. I might have to modify it a bit, in some ways.
It's where my mind has been drifting in reading Sartre... slow going as always.
It's a transcendental argument so we can be suspicious about it immediately :D -- but I suspect Descartes' is too, in some fashion.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
I didn't until I read On Certainty.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Probably not through-and-through on my end, only it's what appears true to me.
But articulating it, and trying to do so without a notion of substance -- well, that's what I think about at night to go to sleep ;)
You can do what I do: just accept substances. It's like, you're not going to turn into a fascist just because you have a concept of substance in your personal philosophy.
Cool.
I don't know 5, but it seems we do have some pretty significant differences with respect to 4, even without my knowing exactly the meaning -- just basing that on our conversation here.
2 I'm somewhat ambivalent on -- it's what I think, but it's not really important to me as a truth.
3 I'm solid on in terms of some gods, and fine with modifying it with respect to more metaphorical gods or things like epicurean gods or deist gods. While I'm an atheist I'm increasingly ambivalent towards gods that don't interact with the world.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
I just don't think it makes sense, truly. So I want to drop it for that reason.
I can respect that. You disagree with substances on a conceptual level, because they have no methodological role to play in your ontology. In other words, you're a good ol' fashioned relationist. Not a co-relationist, just a relationist. Like Bruno Latour, for example.
Hrrrmm! Carlos Astrada and Bruno Latour -- I've heard the latter but never read.
But that adds two names that I ought investigate to help me articulate myself better. I'm not sure that I'm a relationist, but if that's the category that comes to mind through the conversation I ought investigate it
Well, look at it from a methodological POV: if you have no substances in your ontology, what element is doing the work that the classical substances are supposed to do? The inference-to-best-explanation for that is "relations", though it could be "properties" instead (i.e., classical British Empiricism, like in Berkeley or Hume). It could instead be "events", it could instead be "processes" (like in Whitehead's process ontology). It could be "Being" and "Event", as in Badiou, etc. There's a lot to choose from, but "relations" seem like the most reasonable option here, if you discard classical substances.
Quoting Moliere
It's been a blast as well! :up:
I'd like to join in the mutual appreciations; I've got a deal of reading up to do, and things to think about, and thanks for that. I would have been a bit more forthcoming maybe, but I had a seizure on Boxing day and have been in hospital for tests and scans and then on anti fitting drugs and painkillers for a severe backache.
So I can say from immediate experience that I am not my brain, because my brain is going its own way and doing stuff that I definitely do not approve of, and my body likewise. But I am reading along more or less, and I'll just make a vague comment, somewhat related to this:
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
I find the term 'experience' too ambiguous for the job it has to do here, so I will substitute—
Would you say that human awareness is a thing-in-itself?
And my answer is an emphatic 'yes'. It is the thing in itself; the noumenon into which all phenomena fall. Awareness is like the black hole at the centre of the galaxy, it is the unexperienced source and destination of all experience. Thought cannot touch it, cannot grasp it cannot know it. The confusion of the mechanical process of thought with the silence that is aware of thought and everything else, Is I suspect, the heart of most philosophical difficulties.
So personal identity, then, is the confabulation thought creates in the attempt to stabilise itself as the narrative thread on which identity is built. In the superficial physical world, there are the facts of name, age, medical history, posting history, etc, etc, that is substantially true of a physical body and brain, but that is all merely phenomenal; of the thing in itself, of that which I am and you are, nothing whatsoever can be said.
So, does a stone have an identity? Mu!
Sorry to hear that, I hope you are doing better now!
Quoting unenlightened
No, I would not. I would say that it is indeed in-itself, but it is not a thing, it is not a res. Awareness is a process, just like any other mental process. It is noumenical (a process-in-itself), without being a noumenon (a thing-in-itself).
Does that make sense?
No worries, and I hope you get to feeling better soon.
Also, silver lining, your example provides a good basis to think on the topic ;)
"I assure you I am neither my brain nor my body" makes a good deal of sense to me.
Quoting unenlightened
So we cannot be aware of awareness.... at least insofar that awareness is thought?
Is there a non-thought awareness of awareness?
I'm thinking that if we answer "yes" to there being a non-thought awareness then that makes some sense of how we can say awareness is a thing-in-itself.
Quoting unenlightened
By golly I think we're beginning to converge. I found myself nodding along here.
Though the zen stuff is always outside of my comprehension -- I'm told that's the point, but that makes me even more confused. :D
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
I'm tempted to go into the thinghood of the thing. oof. :D
Definitionally at least I think it's not the "thing" that the thing-in-itself emphasizes -- it's the outside-of-cognition that it emphasizes.
But the self is inside of cognition, and so can be considered a "thing" in the super-general sense Kant is getting at -- which is basically anything that can be named.
He bases his logic around the copula such that "X is Y" is the form of an assertion, and every assertion can be appended with an "I think X is Y", and the X is the name and the Y is a category.
I think (awareness is always aware of being aware).
I have basically stolen the notion from J. Krishnamurti, that thought is nothing much to do with awareness. If awareness is considered as 'presence' to the world, it surely becomes clear that thought is secondary, subsequent, and thus always operating on the past as memory. The awareness that can be put into thought and thought about is not awareness but thought.
I want to, or you want me to, talk about life— but talk is dead; thought is mechanical. And this is the hardest lesson for western philosophy and western culture by which I mean to include both Christianity and science (the twins). The heart of things cannot be touched by thought, cannot be understood by thought, and all that AI does is to expose how dead and mechanical we have become, that we mistake our lives for that endless talk that clouds it.
[quote=Tao Te Ching: 5]The space between heaven and Earth is like a bellows.
The shape changes but not the form;
The more it moves, the more it yields.
More words count less.
Hold fast to the centre.[/quote]
How does one hold fast to that which always moves and yields? Hush. Do not say it, find out.
It wouldn't be possible in reality. Maybe it could be recorded in films, and virtual reality settings, and one could try to replicate a certain experience of someone or yours, but it would still not be the lived experience of actual reality. The hard fact in reality is that no one can go back to the past.
Yes!
or yes?
or yes.
I think I agree, though now I'm wondering if there's a difference between "I think I agree" and "I think (I agree)", but simultaneously seeing that as the wrong way to go about.
I'm going to jump to Sartre because thems the words I'm familiar with at the moment:
But it does sound a lot like Krishnamurti might agree with Sartre on consciousness: Sartre's unique contribution to the philosophy of consciousness is that it is always what it is not. Intentionality means that consciousness is never the thing it's directed to, but rather an awareness of the thing while not being the thing.
I would love to talk about life, but I've come to like talking about puzzles related to that love.
You'd have to give some details to be sure, but it sounds from that as if Sartre is confusing identity with consciousness, and identity is very much the thought that conflates itself with consciousness. I quite like Sartre, but the suggestion that he might be aligned with Krishnamurti seems almost ludicrous. Sartre's still playing goodies and baddies, even if he asserts that he is making it up like everyone else.
Thank you for saying so.
Sartre is definitely playing goodies and baddies. At least I'd say he's playing it like the other existentialists who have notions of authentic/inauthentic.
I'm coming back around to Sartre in so many ways that I thought would not be the case.
I'm probably confusing things with respect to Krishnamurti, too.
I'll attempt to give some details on his phil-o-consciousness after i re-read the section on temporality. today I'm just goofing off with the philosophy phriends ;) :)
lol
It fits tho right? I like the idea of phriends, at least in philosophy -- peeps you like to hear from even though you know there's something different in your respective beliefs.
I'd say we're friends in the normal sense, and phriends in the philosophy sense.
But every human being is in that club, matey :death:
There is no human being that does not philosophize
Or at least that's what the curricula says that we have to say in the first class of Philosophy 101
And I take exception at that
Why would everyone philosophize?
Is Philosophy a disease?
Is it a Sin?
Is it "a Good Thing"?
Is it "a Bad Thing"?
Philosophy has many ugly qualities, and I say that objectively, because it is a fact.
And yes, I like controversial penultimate lines in my verses.
Until every Meth-Lab Burns to Ashes.
What if you do it slowly? Suppose that 1% of my brain is replaced with someone else's and I'm awake for the whole thing. And then another percent...At what point do I stop being me?
That's a brutal question, and it's more or less the same question that arises in the paradox of material constitution (i.e., the case of a piece of clay and the clay statue that it constitutes). But it's even worse when you ask it about a brain, because there is arguably an ontological difference between inorganic objects (such as a statue) and an organism (such as a human being). I have no answer to your question, it's an extremely tough thing to even think about.
I don't know. There are two "things" involved in the paradox (I'm using "thing" very loosely), the piece of clay and the clay statue. Are there two "things" in the brain replacement scenario? If my brain is slowly replaced while I'm conscious the whole time, do I "become" some other person at some point? (the way the lump "becomes" the statue) Or is there only just "me": me at the beginning of the process and me at the end.
There is no brain/mind duality in that scenario, as if it were a duality between a res extensa (the brain) and a res cogitans (the mind), because the mind is not a thing (it's not a res), it's instead something that the brain does (the act of minding is a process that the brain undergoes, just as the act of digestion is a process that the gut undergoes, just as the act of walking is a process that the legs undergo).
But there are two brains in the hypothetical case of a brain transplant. In that sense, yes, there are two things. Does one of them turn into the other one, if we proceed with a small step-by-step replacement of cells, or even atoms? I have no idea what the answer to that question is, but I'm not sure that I would describe such an operation as a "brain transplant". When someone gets a kidney transplant, this doesn't occur partially, it occurs fully, one thing replaces another thing, one brain replaces another brain. It's not the step-by-step incremental replacement of one and the same brain by small incremental changes of its parts.
Quoting RogueAI
Here's the thing: this has actually happened already. Eventually, all of the cells of our bodies, even all of our atoms, get replaced by new ones. In that sense, we're like the Ship of Theseus. Your brain is not composed of the same atoms that it was composed when you were a child. It's an entirely different brain. So, are you still the same person? Or are you a different person? I think that you're still the same person, just as I am still the same person. If someone has Alzheimer, and they lose brain mass because of it, do they turn into a different person? I don't think so.
Quoting RogueAI
I don't know, you tell me. I think it's still you.
That was my first thought, and then it occurred to me that it also happens that the brain is slowly removed and not replaced, and that is called dementia, Creutzfeldt-Jakob, and the like. And far into the process, it seems as if one is still perfectly conscious, even though one has lost one's history, one's habits, one's personality, and one's relationships.
Almost as if every brain were either an Adam or an Eve computing machine and fundamentally identical except in the programming and memory, and consciousness is part of the sameness, not part of the individuality.
The data we can collect is the brain activity but not Qualia itself. I think it is feasible in the future to tell what sort of experience a person has from this data but we cannot possibly collect Qualia.
I agree. And how do you get around the inverted spectrum problem? Suppose brain activity xyz feels like qualia xyz to me. I can never know what that qualia will be like to you, so when I record brain activity xyz and someone uploads it into their brain, I can never be sure what kind of experience they're having.
Very correct. :up:
"consciousness is part of the sameness" makes a lot of sense of various phenomenological investigations -- how else could we verify if the descriptions of consciousness are true, applicable, good, whatever -- or not -- other than believing consciousness is sameness rather than difference?