The shifts in context ushered in by my temporally unfolding self-talk already move me through a multitude of language games , prior to my engagement with others. — Joshs
Each word that is ‘shared’ between us is a different sense of the word for you than it is for me. It must be in order for there to be an ‘us’. — Joshs
I am already an other to myself when I talk or think to myself. The words I ‘use’ to think to myself come back to me in the instant I use them as if they came from another. I am changed in using my own words. You are a further other to my other that is myself. — Joshs
Wittgenstein begins culture between you and me , but culture begins most primordially between me and myself, as I find myself always changed from moment to moment via temporality. — Joshs
For how can I go so far as to try to use language to get between pain and its expression (PI 245)."
I would be interested in what others think of this passage. What would be in between pain and the expression of pain? Is there something there that could be referenced? I would think not. I'm not sure what Wittgenstein is getting at. What is it that he's trying to get us to think about? — Sam26
Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Wittgenstein, and I think this moralism is implied in his work. — Joshs
It also seems to me that language games are vulnerable to Heidegger’s depiction of Das Man — Joshs
this would be discourse as a flattened sharing rather than Heidegger’s account of authentic discourse as oriented toward one’s ownmost possibilities. — Joshs
as this is not about being told things as much as coming to see something for yourself. — Antony Nickles
For them self is not an entity, it is a constantly transforming interaction with world. They abandon the idea of outer and inner. The self is always outside of itself , coming back to itself from the world. — Joshs
Why the talk about 'justification' when this fact of being in pain can be discerned from behavior? — Shawn
I think nowadays ‘nature’ has become a stand-in for ‘the unconditioned’ in traditional philosophy. It’s the unpolluted, the pristine, the sacred ancestors - the nearest secular culture can come to ‘the sacred’. But that looses sight of the fact that in traditional cultures, although nature was esteemed, she was not idolized. — Wayfarer
Would you change places with a blithe Panda bear, contentedly chewing on bamboo, unbothered by the immanent extinction of its species? — Gnomon
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. — Whitman
What other choice do we have, besides depression and suicide, when faced with our lack of omniscience or omnipotence? — Gnomon
One thing one has to do is drop common tongue of interpretation, the endless talk about everything in our everyday lives as the basis for understanding the world. That is isolating, for the more one does this in earnest, the less the world's common interests have a hold, and then, instead of alienation being on the outside of these affairs, these affairs becomes the alienating cause. Eventually culture will come to this, after it is done with pragmatic technology infatuations. — Constance
As to the isolated interior: Isolated from what? — Constance
[L]anguage is structurally not capable of foundational truth.But then: we live deep in meaning and caring and all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. What can this be, to live on these terms of engagement, yet to acknowledge the emptiness of understanding. I think a Buddhist might have a clue or two...but she couldn't tell you; or could she? Another issue. — Constance
I never appreciated that, encouraging positivism and its insistence on clarity at the sacrifice of meaning. — Constance
Despite my personal doubts regarding transhumanism, that consider historical experience from the failed ,,homo soveticus’’ project, hence the effectiveness and optimality of the problem-solution path, I do find the movement rather refreshing in terms of daring life-approvement absolutism. — Voidrunner
That's why I find Existentialism to be a pragmatic solution -- to make the best of a bad situation, by adapting your attitude to reality, rather than expecting reality to change to suit your preferences. — Gnomon
Animals have no such knowledge - they simply dwell in the present, eating and being eaten, fleeing from terror and seeking sustenance. The predicament of self-awareness has not yet befallen them. — Wayfarer
But knowing that the future can be better than the past is enough incentive for positivity to avoid sinking into existentialist despair. So, I'm just following the advice of Sartre : to accept the personal responsibility for giving my life meaning and value, by constructing an idiosyncratic positive worldview from the latest available evidence, instead of taking some ancient Utopian myth on faith.
Signed, Just Another Veggie in the Stone Soup :cool: — Gnomon
But the knowledge that our world is not merely an astronomical accident -- randomly going nowhere -- does provide some incentive for global optimism -- realizing that the world is not just going to hell in a handbasket, but actually progressing toward some higher state. — Gnomon
:up: Not transcending it; rather steering it. — TheMadFool
As to cyborgs through and through, this biological reduction and being cyborgs I don't understand. — Constance
Behind all the fuss to be certain about what is right, is a desire to predict outcomes, which will avoid our being responsible after our act. That I can say, “Well, I followed the rule correctly!” — Antony Nickles
I suppose we ought to have a word for the opposite of reification, something like "nebulation", Banno's foe in this thread: the blurring of edges and misting over of shape to reduce definiteness so there aren't any facts anymore to worry about. — Srap Tasmaner
(I confess to being enough of an analytic that I never met a distinction I wanted to elide.) — Srap Tasmaner
We are trying to sort out how to live together. Impersonal reasons, insofar as they are impersonal, therefore lack all traction in what actually matters, ethically. — Welkin Rogue
But Cavell thinks the personal is essential. Our personal commitments - arising from our way of being in the world, our form of life - are the foundation of our ethics, if anything is — Welkin Rogue
On this standard view, it is not because I care about and am committed to my religious group that we ought to be allowed to practice our faith. It is because that's what duty requires (or some such thing). That is, I must give you an impersonal reason or criterion. — Welkin Rogue
I like "Reality bites back." (No doubt because it doesn't care about your feelings...) — Srap Tasmaner
From my witness of death of my father in the hospice, it was very painful process going into death. It was not some sort of momentary event. It was slow and gradual, sometimes up and down condition of the physical health, and deterioration of the mind into the demise.
I am not sure what happens after one's death, but it was evident that the process of death was very slow and painful prolonged suffering of months for the dying.
Of course, each and every death is different. But some can be long lasting painful process before the actual death. — Corvus
I wouldn't say that. No more TPF. No more heroes. No more thoughts about quantum physics. No more carrot cake. No more walking the dog. No more painting. No more watching children play. -No more Coldplay, Rammstein, Killing Joke, Doors, Satie, Nat King Cole or System of a down. Not to forget Allanis Morrisette. Or Nina Hagen. No more loving. No more realizations... — MikeBlender
Self-deception imho is an integral part of human being. The topic of death does very well to illustrate this.
Either it's as you say and there is no downside to death - in which case our survival instinct would be a form of self-deception.
Or there is a downside to death, in which case your proclamation that there is none is an individual self-deception on your part.
So if we are to deceive ourselves either way, I might as well choose my delusions based on merit. — Hermeticus
Sin (but put aside the Christian thinking here) is essentially being possessed by culture, but the manner of conceiving of sin is important: It is an existential break from something primordial. Heidegger will later dismiss K's religiousness, but move forward with this "break" saying K is right, we in our normal assimilated ways of living according to "the they" which is the thoughts that circulate so freely and dominate throughout society in the form of given institutions and ideas, are out of touch with something deeply important. He thinks there is some nonalienated original condition. — Constance
Language makes us forget, reduces the world to familar terms. We don't think this is so because we are IN this zeitgeist, and it takes philosophy to see it. — Constance
And let what we do be based on the facts; then it will be worth doing.
That's my pompous hobbyhorse. — Banno
In science decision making, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' — T Clark
Isn't the point that the election was fair, vaccines do save lives, climate change is man-made?
If you start from the premise that truth doesn't matter, you've already lost. — Banno
And then there's yanking Everest out of its background, etc.If we didn't have the concept of height, there'd be no way for us to say anything about the height of Everest -- what that height is, that it has one, or doesn't, nothing. That is a tiny, tiny sliver of what the other side in this wants. — Srap Tasmaner
But we can also say this: given our concept of height, it makes no sense to talk about Everest not having one. Everest having a height -- as you say, Banno, a single specific height -- is built into our concept of height. — Srap Tasmaner
The definiteness bit also implies that there can be a fact about the height of Everest -- and must be! -- but there can't be a fact about whether something is funny. (For other quite different cultures there might be facts about humor, but it will be obvious that their concept of funny works differently from ours.) And that's not only a matter of our concepts -- not just, we might say, a "fact about us" -- because not just anything gets a height, only Everest sorts of things. So there's that too. — Srap Tasmaner
Ha, ha, I happen to be an idealist also, though now an enactivist. Information is fundamental. To know anything at all, you have to have information about it. That is the bottom line. This is how we are enacted / interacted in the world. — Pop
Radical enactivists often adopt a thoroughly non-representational, enactive account of basic cognition. Basic cognitive capacities mentioned by Hutto and Myin include perceiving, imagining and remembering.[16][17] They argue that those forms of basic cognition can be explained without positing mental representations. With regard to complex forms of cognition such as language, they think mental representations are needed, because there needs explanations of content. In human being's public practices, they claim that "such intersubjective practices and sensitivity to the relevant norms comes with the mastery of the use of public symbol systems" (2017, p. 120), and so "as it happens, this appears only to have occurred in full form with construction of sociocultural cognitive niches in the human lineage" (2017, p. 134).[16] They conclude that basic cognition as well as cognition in simple organisms such as bacteria are best characterized as non-representational.[18][16][17]
Enactivism also addresses the hard problem of consciousness, referred to by Thompson as part of the explanatory gap in explaining how consciousness and subjective experience are related to brain and body.[19] "The problem with the dualistic concepts of consciousness and life in standard formulations of the hard problem is that they exclude each other by construction".[20] Instead, according to Thompson's view of enactivism, the study of consciousness or phenomenology as exemplified by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty is to complement science and its objectification of the world. "The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we want to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression" (Merleau-Ponty, The phenomenology of perception as quoted by Thompson, p. 165). In this interpretation, enactivism asserts that science is formed or enacted as part of humankind's interactivity with its world, and by embracing phenomenology "science itself is properly situated in relation to the rest of human life and is thereby secured on a sounder footing."[21][22] — Wiki
But physics is discovered via math. And I literally don't know something less "realistic" (mind-independent) than mathematics. — Manuel
Patterns which by necessity have to leave stuff out. Usually "noise" in the data, though not always. — Manuel
Deconstruction can be loosely talked about, but it should never be considered an affirmation, a positing, regardless of how contradictory this is, and it is of course, contradictory in the extreme.....or is it? I mean, It is not to say one may not affirm this or that, but that such affirmations are never definitive, and all meanings issue from a diffusion of associated ideas. Language is always "under erasure" the moment it is spoken or written.
So deconstruction puts one, Caputo says, in the ultimate skepticism as it annihilates all affirmations. This is where philosophy must go in order to be liberated from the tyrant of language. I affirm that to do so is a revelation, even, as the Buddha said, an apprehension of ultimate reality, though this really does push it, always keeping in mind that the very language that is used here is infinitely deconstructable. Ultimate??? Reality???
What can these mean? — Constance
Regardless of how you personally might relate to the idea that matter and energy and information are equivalent, there is a growing trend toward this understanding. I see it as a monism, where everything is made of matter, energy, and information. — Pop
That everything is information is easily falsifiable ( Popper ) by providing something that is not information? — Pop