In short the precision of science (to, some say, the 15th decimal place) is against the Wittgensteinian view that language is imprecise. — Agent Smith

That's math, though, a game of symbols, a generalization of chess, one might say. One can be ultra-precise in this limited domain.

In living, our bodies generate, imply, and enact language and culture; but with and after those, our bodies imply (project, experience, sense, practice, demand . . .) more. What they imply is inherently interactional and social, but it is more precise and implies what has never as yet formed and happened.” — Joshs

Plausible but vague and hard to do anything with. Something is gestured at. A Romantic poet might talk of the chains of rigid conceptuality scraping the incomputable flesh of a most elusive goddess.

Someone had to say it. Everyone on TPF knows it down deep inside. Now that it's in the open one can stand erect, proud to advance what we all know to be true! — jgill

I can't tell how ironic this statement is. I do think it's...metaphorically true....or not so crazy a theory...

Here's a taste of a 'non-religious' (?) example of 'the general theory of a the dominant illusion.'

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.

The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation. — Debord

A taste of Berger, too. Why not?

Publicity is effective precisely because it feeds upon the real. Clothes, food, cars, cosmetics, baths, sunshine are real things to be enjoyed in themselves. Publicity begins by working on a natural appetite for pleasure. But it cannot offer the real object of pleasure and there is no convincing substitute for a pleasure in that pleasure's own terms. The more convincingly publicity conveys the pleasure of bathing in a warm, distant sea, the more the spectator-buyer will become aware that he is hundreds of miles away from that sea and the more remote the chance of bathing in it will seem to him. This is why publicity can never really afford to be about the product or opportunity it is proposing to the buyer who is not yet enjoying it. Publicity is never a celebration of a pleasure-in-itself. Publicity is always about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. The image then makes him envious of himself as he might be. Yet what makes this self-which-he-might-be enviable? The envy of others. Publicity is about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness : happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour.

Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest - if you do, you will become less enviable. — Berger

This is in Kojève too. We desire to be desired. Someone needs to be blind, less than, looking up, outside in the cold... (?)

When did humans last have a culture that did not contain its share of unreality and alienation? One of the other great intoxicating stories is the notion of paradise lost or, in internet comments language; 'Everything today is worse that it used to be...' — Tom Storm

Exactly !

Guy Debord opens his The Society of the Spectacle with an old quote from Feuerbach.

But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm

Perhaps Debord would say that Feuerbach was already living in the beginning of the age of the spectacle (yet without photorealistic false-Heaven that Berger, a similar thinker, talks about.) Maybe he just liked the eloquence.

I think your point touches on a version of cave myth as the actual cave. I looked up some 'pure witness' mysticism, and a big theme there is that it's precisely the seeking of this nondual experience that obscures it. I suspect that alienation just comes with sophistication and differentiation. It's a toll one pays.

He talks to them as the others to his self-othering monologue, a compounding of otherness. Of course , he will only discover their otherness by their failure to respond to him in as anticipatable a way as his body responds to himself. — Joshs

I think we both need to be careful to distinguish between body and 'symbolic' ego. At times I've preferred an 'external' view, watching bodies learn to emit the token 'I' appropriately. A body is trained to emit tokens interpreted as a self-description internal realm. A body is trained that such a narrative features a single protagonist. This perspective, admittedly one among others, takes 'culture'-coordinated bodies navigating a shared world as primary.

But by the same token there is also no meaning of signs absolutely ‘external’ to the subject. — Joshs

Agreed! Call it an overcorrection. I have toyed with denying qualia, not because I don't have the usual intuitions, but because these intuitions are contingently blocking inquiry.

My ‘internal monologue’ is therefore not internal but an exposure to alterity , and this happens BEFORE my engagement with other people. — Joshs

So a little boy talks to himself before he talks to mommy and daddy?

There is no ‘interior monologue’. — Joshs

Well, sure, but this concept remains legible. I am criticizing a subjectivism that would construct the world from the idea of such a monologue. David Pearce treated the external world as an hypothesis which he mostly accepted, if memory serves, so that he presumably had to discuss within himself whether others existed. I think this is absurd, that such thinking is parasitic on a basic worldliness or with-others.

The body's interaction is always more intricate than language. It is after and with language, always again freshly ongoing and constellating this situation in the present.” — Joshs

This may be so, and one can also go in the direction of 'art mysticism' and insist that concept is wrong way to grasp 'Reality' in the first place. On the other hand, it's a move away from a critical and exoteric inquiry/articulation and back into the darkness of intuition and the ineffable. I'm not immune to the charms of the aesthetic or even the mystical. As Nietzsche might say, it may be only those who are secretly sustained by 'dark forces' who can indulge in reckless and thorough criticism.

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humans live in an unreal world, a false world, a sea of delusion. — Wayfarer

This is an intoxicating story, which probably tempts just about everyone interested in philosophy, be it on the religious or anti-religious wing. Enlightenment, waking from the dream, bearing the torch, leading others from the cave...this is the general form of the grand version the intellectual hero myth, or so it seems to me.

But one man's torch is precisely another man's delusion. For some, the myth of the cave is itself the cave. The narrative is aggressive, since it labels the majority (the generic other) as confused and lost (it doesn't matter that much what the content happens to be.) 'I'm OK, You're not OK.'

I don't deny the allure of this aggression. I also don't pretend that this description is exhaustive. I think the way we live now is alienating and unreal ('society of the spectacle,' etc.) One of the weird features of this world is the rank plurality of aggressively grand narratives.

As I mentioned earlier, even though I think Gallagher and Gadamer misread Heidegger , they at least recognized that he was not dissolving the self into an interpersonal ‘we’ . — Joshs

Just to be clear, I consider the impersonal we to be a kind of bottom layer. Of course we have personalities! But who are the great personalities? In general they are those who exploit that which came before. We are time-binding apes. The bottom-layer plugs us in to the network. So this isn't some war against individuality. It's just a critique of Cartesian fiction taken as a necessary starting point. The 'interior monologue' is something that can only come after being a little we-blob. 'The subject is an effect of language' and 'the soul is the prison of the body.' Even if these are overstatements, they at least balance an old philosophical prejudice...the lonely subject, imagined as that which is most primary, most given, most secure...

If I am misreading Heidegger and following Dreyfus, that's fine with me. These names are signs that organize texts, facilitate contextualization, etc. Fame implies no authority.

Good analogies. And that is why hierarchy theory seems central to me. It is the basic structure of recursion itself. It is about the self-organisation or emergence of "fit" in any holistic sense. — apokrisis

Perhaps you can help me with the point of view involved. For instance, is human philosophy conceived of as something like reality's self-knowledge? Are human concepts (or 'dementalized' signs) given 'full status' as entities and not just as representations of some substrate? Is reality made of signs that are neither mental nor physical ? For this distinction is itself a cut of the sign ? Have you looked into Derrida's différance?

What role do we play? Would other intelligent lifeforms play? Is reality best understood as an organism? And us as organs or cells or suborganisms?

Does this becoming conform to a scheme, like for instance a dialectic? — Joshs

I would say that yes. I am making a claim about human nature, postulating a permanent structure in human experience. Let me note that I agree with the tripartite structure of time. I suppose I'm just making the point that we are still within metaphysics. I love the early Derrida on Saussure. I'm especially interested in the meaning of meaning, in something like the limits of clarification, ineradicable ambiguity, the futile yet intoxicating chase of a luminous plenitude. If ambiguity is ineradicable and ubiquitous, I'm not exactly sure what it means to say so.

Dialectic reminds me that the meaning of signs is external to the subject and inexactly determined by the history of their endless recontextualization within an infinite dialectic, which is not to say we should not strive toward what might be a point at infinity, an impossible mastery of our own signs.

But Heidegger’s Dasein is involved in constructions of the world from a totality of relevance given beforehand. — Joshs

I like Heidegger, to be clear, so I'm not sure what you mean here. The self and the other are equiprimordial, as I think Hegel saw. The starting point of the Cartesian peephole doesn't make, although it is tempting when looking at the human body and its sense organs. Thinking/meaning is historical, more software than hardware, more 'we' than 'I.' We can think of the brain as hardware and as the tribal culture as a self-modifying, distributed OS with no official version. The game of rationality and inquiry happens only within language (is largely body independent, though some body is necessary.)

It cannot be ‘stuff-independent. — Joshs

Sutff-independent is not intended as disembodied. I am just speculating that maybe there's nothing special about brain tissue. Maybe what matters is relationship or structure.

we are remaining within the computationalist representationaliat model — Joshs

I'm thinking we might figure out how to build interactive/social 'minds.'

Heidegger’s Dasein is not the frame , it is the in-between frames: — Joshs

Good quotes! Perhaps I'm not choosing the right metaphor. The issue I'm getting at is that philosophy tends to search for and postulate deep structure. Physics gives us 'laws of nature,' and philosophy (often) gives us 'laws of reality' or 'laws of being a subject' or 'laws of meaning.' Clearly the world changes, people change. But we can find whirlpools in the chaos, shapes that are constant while their material or content changes. Braver paints Heidegger as setting us radically adrift. An era's 'understanding of being' or conceptual scheme just is reality. Or Foucault, similarly, can talk of one episteme being replaced by another. But the old criticism of relativism applies: what is the status of Heidegger's claim or Foucault's claims? Is it too a creature of its time? Will Heidegger remain true? Or is he just the barf of a moment, replaced by the next age's self-referential, self-defining barf?

Thanks for the detailed response!

If nothing else, the behaviorist motive seems laudable, if even some compromise turns out to be necessary.

Excellent post altogether. I'll just respond to some of it (dense and inspiring stuff, I have to choose.)

I've made it clear that for me, it ain't a mechanistic view of the substrate. That is reductionist and one-sided. It divides reality in a broken fashion that leaves the idealistic fantasies as its matchingly monistic "other".

The only view that sees through the muddle is the one that can both divide and unite. The good old logic of the dialectic, the dichotomy, the unity of opposites. This steps out of monism and leads us to the triadic systems view of reality - the holism that is an organic causality. — apokrisis

I can understand something like the limits or the bias of the projection of mechanism, as if a hammer insists on seeing only a nail. I have never been satisfied by a metaphysical system, though I feel the urge toward a totalizing vision. I'm intrigued by the triadic systems approach, but I can't quite bring it into focus. The problem might be point of view. I can see only through my human (biocultural) 'lens.'
Kojève's version of Hegel was spectacular, implicitly semiotic perhaps. Reality is presented as fundamentally historical and conceptual (so 'concept' loses its mentalistic associations and becomes something neutral or just the structure of the world.)

And the true final step is when the holism describes not just the substrate "out there" but captures the holism of the modelling relation, the semiosis, which is about an "us in here" as well. — apokrisis

This kind of thing, yes. Hard to do, but necessary for a comprehensive account that takes itself into that account.

The levels aren't even that well integrated. The techno-semiotic level in particular is still a half-baked view of reality ... as it needs to be seen in order for us to flourish in the world we are so busily trying to construct. — apokrisis

I relate to this, and I connect it with the difficulty of philosophy. Tie a knot over here and another knot comes undone over there. Or it's blanket too small for the bed.

There certainly is no content or feeling here that is eternally present. — Joshs

Does the 'subject' always experience in terms of a tripartite structure? If Dasein 'is' time, then frame if not the canvas is ever-present. This 'problem' haunts all ambitious philosophy...any discourse that would conquer the future by imposing a structure on 'possible experience' or its analogue.

You wouldn't be able to tell the difference between an ∞∞-sided polygon and an actual circle. — Agent Smith

IMO, there would be no difference at all. The phrase 'infinite-sided polygon' is typically interpreted as a circle. (Nonstandard interpretations are possible, of course.)

The metaphysics, the ontology, of infinity, may not be as important as how useful it is to us. Figuring out if there are actual infinities or if they're just potential infinities would be the icing on the cake, yes? — Agent Smith

Yes. And for me the issue of whether there are 'really' various infinities leads inexorably what we could mean if we say so. All roads seem to lead to the 'problem' of the meaning of 'meaning.'

Ed just wanted to be a better Kantian than Kant. Or a more complete Kantian, perhaps. But he was never the metaphysical paradigm shift as Kant, even while presenting stuff for his peers and successors to think about. — Mww

That makes sense. He came too late, I suppose. Back to back to Kant...

Reasoning is what the human intellect seems to do, by its very nature, pursuant to brain machinations. Language, or objective signage in general, merely stands as representation of the intellect expressing the reasoning it appears to do. — Mww

To me this is plausible and useful, but perhaps Derrida and others destabilize this position. In any case, it seems close to the physical/mental distinction. 'Meaning' is the essence of the mental, which, like a ghost, is only visible/objective when under the sheet of the spoken or written word.

Invented as an explanatory device in accordance with a theory from which its possibility arises, yes. No empirical theory is in principle provable with apodeitic certainty, but theories with purely logical predication at least obtain their own kind of “if this, then that necessarily” certainty, so sharing a purely logical conception presents its own difficulties. You get a whole boatload of blank looks when you say a guy’s entire rationality is determined by his transcendental ego. Hence, Berkeley’s “vulgar caste”, Hume’s “vulgar understanding”, Kant’s “most commonplace reason”. — Mww

I willing to think that 'pure logic' along with 'pure meaning' (stuff behind words) are something like points at infinity, elements within a transparent/white mythology. So-called necessity can often be interpreted instead as a shared habit or a social convention. The boundary is tricky. Philosophers sometimes argue from the purported fact that they can't imagine X or can't help but imagine Y. Building/founding a theory on such introspection strikes me as problematic. All of that said, I think the transcendental ego is alive and well in the thought of its critics in a modified form as 'tribal software' (habits of reaction and interpretation, especially linguistic-logical habits.) The 'subject' is a sign/concept of great importance in such a system but does not mark the origin or source. Something like a 'we-self' is understood as prior to the 'I' which can be understood as an additional module. Schopenhauer's notion of genius as a parasite on an otherwise generic man is analogous.

How would you translate the ruling metaphor into a definition? Or is the metaphor sufficient for a definition? — Mww

I think the transcendental ego is mostly a failure, or let's say it succeeds until it's looked at sufficiently closely. I emphasize the metaphor as a kind of seductive picture. To deduce the seer from the seen might be just chugging along in grammar. If you start with a given understood as seen (or as appearance), then 'of course' there's an intellectual eye and something 'behind' appearance. I think Witt is right on this one, that philosophy is largely a battle against language, and yet of and within it.

A designed entity that can rival humans at translation will likely be along the lines of a ‘wet-wear’ creature that we interact with rather than ‘program’. — Joshs

I agree that interaction will probably be primary. 'Wet' may not matter. Why should moisture matter? My money is on stuff-independent structure.

To me that response misses the issue entirely. It's too emotional for such a dry topic.

He surmises that Heidegger would approve of Schmid's(2005) assertion that “...the we, the “sense of us” or “plural self-awareness,” precedes the distinction between yours and mine, is prior to any form of intersubjectivity or mutual recognition, and is itself the irreducible basis for joint action and communication.” — Joshs

Yes, I suggested something like this earlier, that the self and other are created simultaneously from we-stuff, from 'one.'

Being-with is instead the very site of sociality as a referential differential inside-outside. — Joshs

Yes, that's how I see it, and that's maybe my fundamental gripe about the transcendental ego, at least inasmuch as it's involved in constructions of the world from images given through peepholes.

There is a world , but not a static one that sits there waiting for us to represent it faithfully with our science. — Joshs

Ah, but who would dream it was static? We project/discover 'motionless' patterns in the motion (project being on becoming.)

“The future that is present now is not a time-position, not what will be past later. The future that is here now is the implying that is here now. The past is not an earlier position but the now implicitly functioning past.”“......the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in”(p.37) — Joshs

Good stuff.

This is the absolute antithesis of phenomenology. To be self-present is to be altered in the very act of turning back to oneself. So there is no eternal present , no pure self-reflecting subject. The present , the ‘now’ does not exist outside of the tripartite structure of retention and protention. — Joshs

I don't know if it's truly an antipode. You still seem to present an eternally present tripartite structure or primordial form of experience.

I'd be happy to, but I'm not very clear on what you're asking. Perhaps you could clarify, if it's still relevant? — Isaac

What do you make of the convention of treating belief as 'that upon which a man is prepared to act' ? Or, in other words, of understanding 'belief' as a tendency to act in this or that uncontroversially observable way? I suggested that this wasn't a lexicographer's definition but the specification of a term of art, a convention that sharpens/operationalizes an otherwise too-foggy concept.

Just seems like ol’ Rene got left out for some reason. — Mww

Good point!

Absolutely, and should go far in making analytic language philosophy only that which is mere leftovers from the real philosophy already done. — Mww

So...would you say that reasoning is ultimately independent of language? Philosophy tends to be understood as that which should be especially translatable, while poetry, depending on the sounds of contingent signifiers, is on the other end. Is 'thought' a kind of content which is clothed in words? Or is an equivalence class of intersubstitutable strings a better approach?

While science as a doctrine, without regard to its objects, is complete in itself, — Mww

I was thinking in terms of a body of theories and conjectures that continues to grow. We had Newton. Then we also had Einstein. And so on.

that purely logical science could ground a metaphysical theory, there would still not be a transcendental ego given from it necessarily, but there may arise a purely speculative system by which it is represented, and that can be given to members of the public as an opportunity to look at themselves. — Mww

Care to elaborate? Do you mean the transcendental ego could be invented as a concept and shared?

If I had a problem with it I couldn’t let go of, it would be including Hume. That guy was an card-carrying, dyed-in-the-wool, unrepentant empiricist, with all the negative implications with respect to pure subjectivity that philosophy entails. — Mww

Husserl is eccentric perhaps ?

The distinction/boundary is heuristic. — Possibility

For us as viewers, the organism, or both? I suppose both. Is your background in biology, btw? You seem to know some stuff!

Your view reminds me to some degree of that presented in I am a Strange Loop, which is probably why it made sense to me so quickly (though fairly complex.)

This system does 'kind of,' emulate how humans access their previous experience to make decisions when faced with new unpredicted/unexpected conditions never encountered before. — universeness

Thanks. I've studied pieces of the field but others are blanks for me. I expect algorithims to get better, and this may turn out to be more important than more compute and more data.

I wonder how long it would be before the physical joy of an eternal orgasm would turn into a horrific scream. — universeness

Even orgasms of normal length, if sufficiently intense, aren't always simply pleasure. 'Ride the lightning.'

Of course, theists get around this easily by claiming 'you are trying to conceive 'heaven' with a human mind and you cant do that,' my answer is normally 'but that's all I have! and it's all you have too!' They will normally just respond with a head shake and a comment like 'have faith in god!' — universeness

One way to view philosophy is as a thinking that doesn't run off into the darkness. Of course some will tell you that the 'Truth' is 'foolishness to the Greeks,' that the 'Inner Light' hides in what the arrogant and faithless philosopher can only misunderstand as darkness. It's a battle of the labor of concept (against and yet through metaphors) and what seems more like paradoxical mystical poetry.

In practice, the brain is inseparable from the lifeform as an integrated event, and has evolved with a high degree of variability within its protective casing. It is this integrated variability that enables a relational structure of ‘mind’ to develop through the ongoing interoception of affect. It’s effectively a DNA-style structure in 4D, a variable biochemical prediction of this lifeform’s ongoing interaction with the world. — Possibility

Nice ! That makes sense. I like the emphasis on 4D and time. I acknowledge that the brain/non-brain distinction is an abstraction. I think it was appropriate in the context you quoted, but I don't take it seriously. Even the organism/world boundary is an abstraction/approximation. If light from distance stars is tickling my retina...

Surely the distance between us will blur more and more as time passes and transhuman technologies propagate. — universeness

Highly plausible ! We might form little subcommunities to (wisely) prevent homogenization.

I remember watching the much underrated (in my opinion) film AI by Steven Spielberg.
The futuristic creatures portrayed near the end of that movie were 'individual' but also had the ability to merge or act collectively by 'tapping into' the experience of any one of their fellows.
All this stuff is part of why I don't understand the theist position. I would be so so disappointed if any of the religions turn out to be true. The future possibilities for the human species are far more exciting in my opinion than anything heaven posits have to offer. — universeness

I love that film! Those are my favorite aliens from any film, though the fellows in Arrival are great too.

I agree that visions of heaven don't tend to make sense. We might not like to admit it, but we need our problems and our projects. We need to be tired to enjoy the bed, hungry to enjoy food, afraid to enjoy safety, etc. There's a Twilight Zone episode where a creep goes to 'Heaven' (where he wins every game without effort, etc.) and slowly figures out it's the bad place.

This is bit dense, but it seems especially relevant .

For Husserl, as we have seen, the voice -- not empirical speech but the phenomenological structure of the voice -- is the most immediate evidence of self-presence. In that silent interior monologue, where no alien material signifier need be introduced, pure self-communication (autoaffection ) is possible.

This is what I take to be the default view, that we can 'talk to ourselves' and know exactly what we mean. The signified shines for an 'intellectual organ' that grasps meaning directly, instead of simply emitting sentences in response, just a machine can do (if not as well.) In this view, sentences are vehicles for meaningstuff, delivered to consciousness. And this is what we don't want to grant machines.

Perhaps you could expand on that?

That's the second time you've used this rather tired metaphor/straw man. How about explaining what you mean in plain language. — Daemon

If you zoom in on the brain and look at neurons firing, where do you find thought? Is there something irreplaceable about human brain tissue? Or does 'consciousness' only require a host of the proper structure? Maybe (I don't know) silicon or something else can work just as well as brain tissue. IMO, we humans are a bit too confident in our consciousness talk. I don't know how well we actually know what we have in...mind ? I suspect that our ignorance is manifest in our haste to accept it as obvious.

The 'pure witness' thread is about consciousness, being, etc., and its fraught relation with language.