For the purposes of the point being made, the deconstruction of the distinction - while perfectly valid - is simply not relevant. — StreetlightX

Was thinking about this. What was your original point? "Facts are given against a background of meaning and significance by which they count as facts of a certain sort." Confronted with a certain challenge to this background, "we would have to revise not only our facts (what we say), but also how we say. "

So the point is to point out the normative conventionality of facts. What would make a deconstruction of the distinction relevant? It could be relevant if a specifically Heideggerian destruction or Derridean deconstruction questioned the justification of the distinction, in the dialectically oppositional way it is presented by Cavell, in the first place. There are certainly regions, modalities, groupings to be pointed to, with associated normative features, but when it comes to the 'between regions' , I don't Heidegger or Derrida as wanting to accord any special relevance to this in-between such as to imply a centeredness to normative conventions. This is what fascinates me most about their work. Perhaps it isn't specifically relevant to your point in that it doesn't contradict what has been uncovered about normativity and factuality, it just turns Cavell and Lacan against themselves to extend the economy of the between' to the 'within'. .

For my part, I believe our dialog has concluded. — Bryon Ehlmann

For a former prof, you give up way too easy. I'd like to think our dialog has just gotten started.

you fail to adequately answer the basic question I asked: "Assuming someone dies without ever awakening after having let's say a dream or NDE, precisely what will they perceive to make them aware that those last "features, contours, ...," present in their last conscious dream or NDE moment, are no more? Your seemingly off-the-cuff, hyper speculation that the final conscious moment would actually morph into three events in the "process" of being "frozen" is ridiculous. It again fails to accept the empirical evidence that a discrete conscious moment is a static (timeless) state that once produced will not change and requires no change. — Bryon Ehlmann

IF we were to agree for the sake of argument that 'a discrete conscious moment is a static (timeless) state that once produced will not change and requires no change", then my argument is , first of all, we do not know what percentage of people who are dying have near-death experiences, and of those who do, we cannot guarantee that this will be an experience where you will, as you put it " be overcome by marvelous feelings of wonder, love, and contentment. You truly believe that you have arrived and are experiencing heaven, and you’re excitedly anticipating the next moment and an eternity of joyful experiences." IF someone's last experience before dying is one of terror, dread and sadness , will this then haunt them for all eternity? You have been careful to keep your argument empirically oriented, but is there any spiritual thinking (Buddhism, perhaps) leading you to assume that last state would always be blissful?

My other point is that even among those who have a blissful end-of-life experience, I see no reason to assume that would necessarily be their last experience. If I am looking at a beautiful painting on the wall and all the lights are suddenly turned off, and then for some reason I am knocked unconscious, when I wake up my last memory before being knocked out may very well be the lights having been turned off rather than the image of the beautiful painting. Why should we assume that a dying person's last state would be bliss rather than bliss turning into pain, fear, confusion or disorientation as their cognitive faculties degenerate further? Just because we have reports from people who recovered from near death states? Need i remind you that this is a select group? The very fact that they did not die tells us that their neural integrity never degenerated beyond a certain point. It would be instructive to study a range of people who were revived after their neurological condition had degenerated along a spectrum from mild to severe and see if we could correlate points along this spectrum with the quality-pleasantness of reported near death experiences (or whether they appeared at all). We only hear about the blissful reports, I'm guessing , becasue they are more in demand by readers and everyone is desperate to believe in a happy ending.

I haven't even mentioned the enormous conceptual difficulties with your claim that a 'timeless' state
"goes on forever “living in the moment."”. Since no one has ever experienced a 'timeless' state that 'goes on' , all you have to draw from in imagining what this would be like are real experiences we all go through IN TIME , of an enjoyment that endures a while. You want to remove words like persist and endure, yet you don't express any doubts or raise any questions about whethher an actual state 'out of time' can be justifiably compared to our familiar experiences of enduring, persisting enjoyments.

A little empirical skepticism on your part may alleviate the impression of dogmatism.

So he length of now might be some finite number, which would mean time is discrete? — Devans99

The meaning of time as finite is that it is internally structured as retention, presencing and protention. There is no 'now' without these three features, the having been in process of becoming as the now. Time is 'stretched' as a horizon, not an infinite counting of identical 'nows'. For the 'now' of time to be finite and internally structured , the model on which ctime is based cannot be an attribute (motion, force) or object that self-persists identically.

I can't think of any reason why we need to be having experiences. Can you? — Unseen

Because the very reason you're posing the question about consciousness comes from an illusion born of the fact that we forget that a few hundred years ago we decided to arbitrarily carve up the world into inanimate and animate, sentient and non-sentient, for the purposes of doing science, . We made a problem out of consciousness by dividing the world in such a way as to make both sides inchoherent.

"Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the
objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience.
The hard problem is the conceptual and metaphysical problem of how to bridge
this apparent gap. There are many critical things that can be said about the hard problem
(see Thompson&Varela, forthcoming), but what I wish to point out here is that it
depends for its very formulation on the premise that the embodied mind as a natural
entity exists ‘out there’ independently of how we configure or constitute it as an
object of knowledge through our reciprocal empathic understanding of one other as
experiencing subjects. One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a
complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all
the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically
entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these
facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.

One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes
we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description
of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate
approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way
presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem
seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as
transcendental or metaphysical realism. From the phenomenological perspective
explored here, however — but also from the perspective of pragmatism à la Charles
Saunders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, as well as its contemporary inheritors
such as Hilary Putnam (1999) — this transcendental or metaphysical realist
position is the paradigm of a nonsensical or incoherent metaphysical viewpoint, for
(among other problems) it fails to acknowledge its own reflexive dependence on the
intersubjectivity and reciprocal empathy of the human life-world."

Evan Thompson

I'm not sure what self-awareness is. If it is self-identicality, tthe ability to turn back towards the 'self' that I was a second ago without my exposure to the world intervening and changing the sense of what it is I turn back to, then there is no such thing as self-awareness.

the distinction is more a matter of degree than kind; after all, even stipulation is a kind of way of life — StreetlightX

Yes, and by the same token, just as Heidegger's broken hammer makes visible but does not violate the overaching pragmatic sense of the situation it interrupts, an anomalous phrase within a specific logical context can be comfortably construed as nonsense within the frame of relevance of that context.
If , on the other hand, 'houses do not turn into flowers' is successfully transformed from nonsense to meaningfulness, it i s because an ongoing superordinate intelligibility guides the search for new interpretive contexts. As you say, the character of anomaly is a matter of degree.

one might make a distinction (which Cavell kinda does) between words which are 'only' their meanings (stipulations, metaphor), and words which take their significance from the world in which they are embedded - 'lived' meanings, as it were. Cavell speaks of words which 'have nothing but their meanings' (which are 'merely'/only conventional), and contrasts this with words that have a relation to the world, which take their intelligibility from how things are in the world (like the fact that houses are not the kind of thing which turn into flowers!). Both 'kinds' of words are of course meaningful - one cannot deny that metaphor and so on are meaningful; but the danger is in confusing the two, in treating the one like the other. — StreetlightX

It seems to me that Heidegger and Derrida would argue that metaphoricity and world-embeddedness are inseparably implied in all meanings, In your example:
(1) Unwatered seeds do not turn into flowers.
(2) Acorns do not turn into flowers.
(3) Houses do not turn into flowers

The first 2 require a metaphoric displacement just as much as the 3rd, even when they appear to be non-problematically intelligible. Simply determining something AS something is a transforming-performing. It understands, interprets, and articulates, and thereby "takes apart" and transnforms what it affirms.

Is the state captured by a photograph or by the frame of a motion picture not timeless? Is a discrete conscious moment itself, which is rendered by the brain based on "continual" unconscious processing within the brain, not timeless? — Bryon Ehlmann

We call such states 'timeless' or instantaneous or simultaneous, but that's just an abstract theoretical contrivance that we use for logical convenience. The constructs we've invented for empirical purposes (state, object, content, identity) have fooled us into confusing them with real entities in the world, which don't ever have 'states' in the sense of an internal identity outside of change and time. In terms of the subjective MEANING of a state for us, our experience of the multiple features of a photo unfolds richly over the temporal span of milliseconds.
There is no such thing as a simultaneously apprehended spatial multiplicity. Meaning is change, change is time and each feature is its own time, unless we want to pretend that an empty theoretical abstraction like 'instantaneous state' comes anywhere close to explaining how we meaningfully experience entities.

Is a discrete conscious moment itself, which is rendered by the brain based on "continual" unconscious processing within the brain, not timeless? Once rendered, the content of such moment never changes but is only replaced some milliseconds later by another such moment. — Bryon Ehlmann

I think people have this notion that emotional significance comes as a discrete content, whose power is experienced as 'this' instantaneous state. If the emotional experience lasts for a while, we assume that all that has happened is that equally powerful instantaneous states have been strung together, and that the only purpose served by the temporal extension was to provide duration to the already powerful experience. But anything meaningful to us unfolds as a narrative, whether it is the way the spatial scene in a photo unfolds in milliseconds or a song or emotionally significant event develops its meaning for us over time. Meaning arises IN THE MIDST OF continuous change, not as something encoded in each individual frame. There has to be SOME meaning in each instant, but the effect of significant relevance comes from from the totality of unfolding moments, not in any individual one. Meaning is EMERGENT and CUMULATIVE, not immediate. The more richly and densely an experience unfolds in time, the more meaningful it will appear to us. Intensity is not instantaneous, it is temporal.

When we listen to music, let's say the NEC freezes a single instant of our favorite song. That instant by itself is meaningless. If I extract a random note from a song, it obviously doesn't give me the song. That single moment doesn't even give me the relation between the note and the previous note, since that requires a comparison and recourse to memory, which implies change and time. It's true that in NEC there was a prior unfolding context that leads up to the last frame . But as soon as that last frame is frozen, it destroys flow and ongoingness.

Now that I think about it, even if we are talking about freezing the most elemental and singular sort of presence, there would be necessarily not one but two frames involved. First would be your assumed 'last' state, which you are proposing as frozen for eternity outside of time. That last state, you agreed, would present itself as a change, a contrast over the preceding state ,and that would provide its meaning. But note that I'm arguing that the TOTALITY of the meaning of the allegedly last state is in the particular way that it emerges out of, stands apart from, what it unfolds out of. That last state is not a state yet. It is movement itself. We don't really know what a frozen state is, because no one has ever experienced it. Photos and video pauses don't count, since they don't present us with frozen experience, simply frozen mechanics, which is very different. Everything we experience or imagine is ongoing, in process of becoming while having been. Even our imagining of frozen states takes place as an ongoing becoming.

But in your example, what instantiates and defines its very essence as a movement and a change(the last state, chock full of wonderful features and feelings) is frozen. That is an interruption of what it is. Because it is not a state until it is interrupted. We only artificially and abstractively talk about states as if they exist as discrete frames outside of the continuity of change and time, but you would be trying for the first time to have it be more than just an empty abstraction. In doing so, I would argue, your would have to add something onto that last 'state'.

IF that last state in its meaningfulness(however little that stands for in itself) is first a change, then to become a static state it will have to change from ongoing to frozen. To become the last 'state', it will have to do something that experience has never done before, it will have to transition from mobile to static, and that is a (second) meaningful change. So it is two meaningful events, not one. The question then is, why would one not notice this second event? And what kind of event would it appear as? No living person has ever experienced your hypothesized frozen state, but all of us have experienced what it is like when our mobile involvement in the world changes from dynamic transformation to 'holding steady'.
Changing from rapid acceleration to constant speed is a noticeable shift. Color perception involves rapidly oscillating changes in frequencies. If those frequencies become steady, the color will no longer be seen. A developing reality that stops developing will stop being interesting. But first it will appear noticeable, surprising , jarring , confusing, like someone suddenly turning out the lights(hey, who froze the world!). So I guess there would be three events. 1)the final 'state' of bliss, the last scene of game of thrones or whatever
2)the surprising, jarring , noticeable freezing of this meaningful presencing into pure self-identicality.
3)the transition from freeze to frozen, where surprise turns to boredom which turns into nothingness. That may actually be a pretty good description of the experience of dying
for some people.

So I think the issue is that you believe that meaningfulness in all its power is encoded in individual instants, as content that can be thought about separately from change, and therefore , one can imagine manipulating separately content from change, which is what your thought experiment is based on. The very fact that you don't think you're doing something ADDITIONAL
and MEANINGFULLY NEW to an already meaningful experience by freezing it into a state shows your dualistic thinking about content and time.
I , on the other hand, side with those philosophers and psychologists who believe that meaning is not static , instantaneous content, but transformation. We believe there is no such thing as content distinguishable from change. An experiencing is a change. Freezing that experience is a further change. The transit from freezing to frozen is yet a further change. The more temporally rich and developing the transformative unfolding, the more meaning we will perceive. Photos are great examples of dynamically changing developments. Stare at a great photo and it will dazzle you with the way its meaning changes for you from one moment to the next, and the ways that it spins out a narrative for you. Do something to interrupt that dynamism and you will kill meaning.

Care (Sorge) could be a reflective dimension "over" the more practical concern (Besorgen). The practical Besorgen is doing concretely this and that in order to attain concretely this and that. Care "thinks" this "in order to" in terms of more far-reaching meaning. — waarala

Yes, I think Heidegger's distinguishing between an authentic and an inauthentic mode of Dasein made it necessary for him to identify an inauthentic modification of Care, which led him to Besorgen.

The authentic and the authentic have a peculiar relationship. On the one hand, one might be tempted to see the former as 'better', more true, than the latter given the way Heidegger talks about the inauthentic in terms of average everydayness and the normativity of das man. But he reminds us throughout the book that this is not his intention: "The inauthenticity of Dasein does not signify a "lesser" being or a "lower" degree of being. Rather, inauthenticity can determine Da-sein even in its fullest concretion, when it is busy, excited, interested, and capable of pleasure." "Not-being-its-self functions as a positive possibility of beings which are absorbed in a world, essentially taking care of that world. Thus neither must the entanglement of Da-sein be interpreted as a "fall" from a purer and higher "primordial condition." Heidegger also cautions that the authentic is not more 'general' that the inauthentic in the sense of an overview. "Da-sein can fall prey only because it is concerned with understanding, attuned being-in-the-world. On the other hand, authentic existence is nothing which hovers over entangled everydayness, but is existentially only a modified grasp of everydayness."

I understand the distinction in two ways. First, in falling prey to and losing oneself in everyday inauthentic existence, one forgets the 'mineness' of what it is that Dasein is caught up with in its particular factical engagements with its world. In inauthentic existence one thinks of oneself in general, normative terms. We convince ourselves that we all understand language the same way, that we are experiencing the same world. In this way, Dasein cuts itself off from itself(Itself not being a thing or subjectivity, but a certain ongoing integrity and intimacy of relational self-transformation). That is, what individualizes meaning for each of us is suppressed and distorted in favor of the average. The 'mineness' of Dasein means not only that we belong to ourselves moment to moment, in a radically integral way, but that experience belongs to us and to itself moment to moment in this radically integral way. By contrast, the movement of unauthentic experience is fragmented, trivial, ambiguous since the 'mineness' that ties one experience to the next is forgotten and suppressed.

But that ongoing 'sameness' of authentic mineness is not to be understood as a subject persisting outside of its experiences.
"The sameness of the authentically existing self is separated ontologically by a gap from the identity of the I maintaining itself in the multiplicity of its "experiences ."

Maybe one can think of the distinction this way. In being-in-the world, one can focus on one of two poles. The inauthentic pole would be focusing on the pull of the matters of engagement that grab our attention. We fall prey to them and are held hostage to them.The authentic pole is the way in which whatever we encounter in the world is fore-closed and projected by Dasein. What appears to us never comes at us from nowhere but is framed and has its relevance within the context of our ongoing engagements.
Second, and this goes to your point about the authentic as a more far-reaching meaning, in inauthenticity we orient our motivation around the particular ways in which the world affects us. We frantically chase after new experience. Novelty becomes an addiction. In authenticity, at the same time that we recognize the integrity of unfolding of meaning for Dasein in its being-in-the-world, the individual experiences become insignificant as we become directed toward Dasein's ownmost possibilities of being. One could look at this transition from inauthentically being caught up in beings to authentically being directed toward beings as a whole as a move toward generality or , as you say a more 'far-reaching' horizon.

I see it as Dasein's wresting itself free of setting its future-oriented expectations based on the meaning relevance of the particular something it is caught up in. In wresting itself free, it hasn't abandoned the world, but can now see more clearly each moment of investment of dasein in meaningful relationality is at the same time an investment IN and an investment BEYOND each particular. Authenticity sees this complete 'in' and 'beyond' that each encounter with the world implies. So one could argue that authentic understanding is more practical than inauthentic in a fundamental sense. Heidegger shows how in all sorts of situations, including experiences of fear as well as conversation, authentic understanding doesn't take us away from the task in front of us by generalizing or abstracting from it. On the contrary, it allows us to penetrate beneath the distortions, illusions, fragmentation and closed-offness that falling prey to particulars of the world implies, in order to act more purposefully and understandingly with regard to whatever we are involved in. We see our engagement as stretched along via our temporality. "Only because Da-sein in general IS as I AM-having-been, can it come futurally toward itself in such a way that it comes-back." Thus, "Having been arises from the future".

The idea is fascinating and appealing. All I can do is share my sense of what the minimal requirement is for the having of any experience, presence, state.
You argue for the idea of an instant of time constituting a state that can persist as itself, that is to say, to have a duration. In the case of NEC, the duration would be eternal. Maybe you wouldn't want to use words like duration or persistence, because they imply passage of time. Your idea that

contrast in "content, texture, contour, outline, features" was observed by the dying person within the state at t1 — Bryon Ehlmann

supposes that one can experience these features simultaneously, at once, as one single state. But anything that constitutes a feature, a color, a shape, form, line, dot, registers itself as a change over something else. IF your dying state is a plurality of forms, features, shapes, sizes, colors then it is not just t1, but also t2, t3... Every dot, line, contour in that dying 'state' must have its own time becasue it is its own change. When we look at a painting we don't take it all in at once, there is a temporal sequence of changes as we make our way over the space.

Let me be more clear. If you look at the / (slash mark) I just typed, you only see it in the first place becasue it emerges out of the white background as a change. But if you continue to stare at it , it doesn't simply persist self-identically from that point onward without change. There must be continual change in order for it to appear constant and unchanging for you. This is how perception works. Our pupils oscillate rapidly from side to side almost imperceptibly ,, in order for stable objects in our visual field to continue to appear the same . Every feature, not only in order to be recognized in the first place, but in order to continue to be itself identically, must continue to change in order to be perceived.
So your timeless state , if it is to be a state of features, contours, shapes, colors, must be in continual process of transformation in order to be what it is, and this is the very definition of time.
On the other hand, a state with no time is the very definition of nothingness.Time doesn't begin with stasis and then add change onto this. Change is the precondition for stasis, state. Meaning is change. As soon as change disappears, the world disappears, even if that world is just a mental picture.

I think you are intermingling too much the (practical) concern (Besorgen) with the more "general", that is, more original care (Sorge). There can be concern only because there is care but it is not necessary that care will "realize" itself primarily as concern (Besorgen). Dasein's being is Sorge, not Besorgen. Also, I think there can be Care ("basic interest") which cares that something is not done or used! There can be Care that is concerned to keep something not to be encountered as a tool or device (Zeug) (Could this be possible??). — waarala

If there is already some thing for Dasein, then there is besorgen. A 'thing' is that which is disclosed for Dasein as a definite possibility, which always takes the form of the handiness of 'taking care' or 'concern'.

I should mention I use the Stambaugh translation of Being and Time: "The trio of words Sorge, Besorgen, and Filrsorge is rendered as "care," "taking care," and "concern," respectively."

It's important to understand first of all that primordial Care for Heidegger, as well as taking care and concern, have nothing to do with ontical sentiments like having a good feeling about someone. One could despise someone and that would still represent for Heidegger a relation of Care and concern for. These terms for Heidegger, like primordial attunement, understanding and temporality, tel us that, as Dasein , each of us are always already in the world of involvement with others. There is no isolated subjectivity for Heidegger that then encounters others. It also seems that you are understanding handiness and 'taking care' in terms of a narrow thinking about praxis, tools , accomplishment and work. It's true Heidegger uses many examples of tool-use and the work environment to illustrate the concept of handiness, but heedfully circumspective concernful involvement for Heidegger is a much broader and more profound dynamic that of workplace mechanics

where everything has a very specific significance as they are constituting some Work (Werk) to be accomplished. This actually resembles something thoroughly rational and calculated! Everything has its pre-determined place in the teleological system — waarala

.

This is very far from what Heidegger has in mind with handiness. There need be no specific work that has to be accomplished, no specific tools being used at all , for handiness and taking care to apply. Handiness is not about the rational, the calculable, the teleological. All of these belong to the theoretical modality of the present to hand, which is a derivative mode of taking care of. Reality, the rational, the calculative, the theoretical lose sight of their origin and basis in heedful circumspective involvement in the world.Heidegger explains rationality and object are based in propositional subject-predicate statements "Like interpretation in general, the statement necessarily has its existential foundations in fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception. But how does the statement become a derivative mode of interpretation? What has been modified in it?" Heidegger says predication points something out in a way that we sheerly look at it. By transforming the circumspective 'something "as" something' into 'this subject "as" this object', the 'as' is forced back to the uniform level of what is merely objectively present. It "dwindles to the structure of just letting what is objectively present be seen by way of determination."When we just stare at something, our just-having-it-before-us lies before us as a failure to understand it any more." Heidegger recognizes the theoretical as an impoverished, 'cut-off' modification of understanding. Ontologically, it originates from and never departs from heedful circumspective relationality.

The distinction between primordial Sorgen and inauthentic Besorgen for Heidegger is a subtle one, but I think the essence of Care and taking care is not 'doing' as manipulating objects, but meaning, intentionality, experiencing as self-transformative(thinking is also doing), the way the world makes sense to us in new ways from moment to moment. A 'thing' is a way in which I am transformed by the world. For Heidegger there is a 'glue' that binds my present to my having been(my past) and my future as a single, unitary stretching along. It makes all my experience anticipatory and future oriented. It make me ahead of myself in just being myself. In experiencing moment to moment I carry forward and articulate forward my past. But in articulating myself I also transform myself. That is why for Heidegger care is fundamentally uncanniness. You are right that Care is more general than taking care of. Taking care is Care that has been directed toward definite factical possibilities, whereas Care can also imply indefinite possibilities as well. But this doens't make taking care more 'practical', just a more definite mode of relevant being-in-order-to. That which has no relevance for Dasein does not exist for it.

"Since being-in-the-world is essentially care, being-together-with things at hand could be taken in our previous analyses as taking care of them, being with the Mitda-sein of others encountered within the world as concern. Being-together-with is taking care of things, because as a mode of being-in it is determined by its fundamental structure, care. As a primordial structural totality, care lies "before" every factical "attitude" and "position" of Da-sein, that is, it is always already in them as an existential a priori. Thus this phenomenon by no means expresses a priority of "practical" over theoretical behavior. When we determine something objectively present by merely looking at it, this has the character of care just as much as a "political action," or resting and having a good time. "Theory" and "praxis" are possibilities of being for a being whose being must be defined as care."

Care is Being-in-the-World."The multiplicity of these kinds of being-in can be indicated by the following examples: to have to do with something, to produce, order and take care of something, to use something, to give something up and let it get lost, to undertake, to accomplish, to find out, to ask about, to observe, to speak about, to determine . . . . These ways of being-in have the kind of being of taking care of which we shall characterize in greater detail. The deficient modes of omitting, neglecting, renouncing, resting, are also ways of taking care of something, in which the possibilities of taking care are kept to a "bare minimum." We do not choose the term "taking care" because Da-sein is initially economical and "practical" to a large extent, but because the being of Da-sein itself is to be made visible as care.

Again, this expression is to be understood as an ontological structure concept . The expression has nothing to do with "distress," "melancholy," or "the cares of life" which can be found ontically in every Da-sein. These-like their opposites, " carefreeness " and " gaiety"-are ontically possible only because Dasein, ontologically understood, is care. Because being-in-the-world belongs essentially to Da-sein, its being toward the world is essentially taking care. According to what we have said, being-in is not a "quality" which Da-sein sometimes has and sometimes does not have, without which it could be just as well as it could with it. It is not the case that human being "is," and then on top of that has a relation of being to the "world" which it sometimes takes upon itself. Da-sein is never "initially" a sort of a being which is free from being-in, but which at times is in the mood to take up a "relation" to the world. This taking up of relations to the world is possible only because, as being-in-the-world, Da-sein is as it is."

This structure of being of the essential "being concerned about" we formulate as the being-ahead-of-itself of Da-sein. Being ahead-of-itself means being-ahead-of-itself-in-already-being-in-a-world. As soon as this essentially unitary structure is seen phenomenally, what we worked out earlier in the analysis of worldliness also becomes clearer. There we found that the referential totality of significance (which is constitutive for worldliness) is "anchored" in a for-the-sake-ot-which. The fact that this referential totality, of the manifold relations of the in-order-to, is bound up with that which Da-sein is concerned about, does not signify that an objectively present "world" of objects is welded together with a subject. Rather, it is the phenomenal expression of the fact that the constitution of Da-sein, whose
wholeness is now delineated explicitly as being-ahead-of-itself-in-already-being- in . . . is primordially a whole. Expressed differently: existing is always factical. In being-ahead-of-oneself-already-being-in-the-world, entangled being-together-with innerworldly things at hand taken care of lies essentially included."

What about the meaning of a word used in a Wittgensteinian language game?
is that subjective, objective or intersubjective?

he is not reasoning against the possibility of the innerworldly being as such, before there is made a distinction between the tool-being and object-being. — waarala

Before there is made a distinction between the tool-being and object-being, there is the absolutely fundamental and primary structure of Care, which is equiprimordial with temporality, Understanding and Befindlichkeit. One never experiences one of these structures without the other . They all imply each other. Heedfully circumspect Handiness, deriving from Care , is the condition of possibility of having a world, and thus of the experience of innerworldly beings. The reason Heidegger puts nature and reality in scare quotes is because such notions are present to hand concepts derived from handiness.

You seem to be thinking of what you refer to as 'innerworldly being as such', that which you say is not yet 'object-thing', as present-to-hand. Yet you don't seem to realize that's what you are doing. What do you understand the 'present to hand' to mean for Heidegger? In my understanding the present to hand is precisely that which you describe as an innerworldy experience that is , as you say, "not led by practical-relevance-being", "inherited "cultural "objects which simply are there" . You say "their presence is simply or primarily "felt" (in Befindlichkeit) as part of "my world"". As I pointed out, Befindlichkeit is equiprimordial with Care. Thus , any thing which is 'primarily felt' is also at the same time primarily experienced through the Care structure of heedfully circumspective handiness, and relational significance, Your understanding of innerworldly experience supposedly outside of 'practical handiness' jibes perfectly with Heidegger's definition of the present to hand as an experience which exists in and of itself outside of my relating to it in circumspective relevance.

The same can be said of the natural landscape: mountains etc. i.e "Nature" has here its worldliness not in the practical or theoretical world. — waarala

On the contrary, Heideger says 'Nature' is a present to hand concept derived from our heedful relating to the world in handiness.

""Nature" is also discovered in the use of useful things, "nature" in the light of
products of nature. But nature must not be understood here as what is merely objectively present, nor as the power of nature. The forest is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock, the river is water power, the wind is wind "in the sails." As the "surrounding world" is discovered, "nature" thus discovered is encountered along with it. We can abstract from nature's kind of being as handiness; we can discover and define it in its pure objective presence. But in this kind of discovery of nature, nature
as what "stirs and strives," what overcomes us, entrances us as landscape, remains hidden. The botanist's plants are not the flowers of the hedgerow, the river's "source" ascertained by the geographer is not the "source in the ground." Along with the public world, the surrounding world of nature is discovered and accessible to everyone. In taking care of things, nature is discovered as having some definite direction on paths, streets, bridges, and buildings."

Our absorption in taking care of things in the work world nearest to us has the function of discovering; depending upon the way we are absorbed, innerworldly beings that are brought along together with their constitutive references are discoverable in varying degrees of explicitness and with a varying attentive penetration. The kind of being of these beings is "handiness" (Zuhandenheit) .
But it must not be understood as a mere characteristic of interpretation, as if such "aspects" were discursively forced upon "beings" which we initially encounter, as if an initially objectively present world-stuff were "subjectively colored" in this way. Such an interpretation overlooks the fact that in that case beings would have to be understood beforehand and discovered as purely objectively present, and would thus have priority and take the lead in the order of discovering and appropriating association with the "world." But this already goes against the ontological meaning of the cognition which we showed to be a founded mode of being-in-the-world. To expose what is merely objectively present, cognition must first penetrate beyond things at hand being taken care of. Handiness is the ontological categorial definition of beings as they are "in themselves. "

historically or traditionally inherited "cultural "objects simply are there and are part of some cultural-historical landscape. — waarala

.

Heidegger discusses cultural artifacts in the context of an an authentically temporal understanding of historiography. Objects in a museum aren't simply 'there' as representatives of a past history. This would not only be taking these objects as present to hand, but understanding them via a vulgar concept of time as itself present to hand. Present to hand thinking of time fails to understand that when we experience something from an earlier point in history, we carry that history forward and transform it by redetermining its meaning via our future-directed interests and involvements. So the cultural object from the past is never simply there for us outside of the care structure of heedful significance.This is the only landscape that gives it meaning and through which it emerges for us as a being.

Something can be practically relevant in a negative sense: "I can't do anything with that". I encounter something here as not to be assimilated to this practical nexus. A being shows itself there as useless *. It is there as something not to be mastered in the practical world. It stands there as an innerworldly being without practical-technical significance. It persists (at least for the time being) "open" as "something" (without any determinations or involvements). In practical understanding it can remain or can be sustained as something yet to be mastered and used (in some other situation in the future). — waarala

That which is not to be asimllated to a practical nexus belongs to that nexus via its unusabilty, Its very meaning as unusable is made possible and framed via that nexus of relevance. The object's uselessness is always in connection to the context of our current dealings. We never measure a thing with respect to "THE practical world" in general(the idea of a world in general is a present to hand concept. The only world that exists primordially for Dasein is a world of relational relevance)). It is always THIS specific context of heedfully relevant dealings. My discovery of the uselessness of something is always in relation to THIS specific context, which specifically defines the meaning of its lack of usefulness for me.

It stands there as an innerworldly being without practical-technical significance. — waarala

No, it stands there conspicuously in its significance for me in relation to my context of activity as something not useful. Handiness isn't the same thing as 'practical' if by practical you mean the narrow sense of the tools I am using right now. Handiness, relevance, Care, heedful circumspection are about a relational totality of meaningfulness in a situation in which I am involved in my world. Things that break, that I cant use in a specific practical context, things that are missing , these are all part of the totality or meaningful relevance of that context, and thus all belong to handiness.

There has been encountered something that can't be handled practically inside the current relevance-relations — waarala

That which can't be handled practically inside the current relevance-relations derives its very meaning and significance via that current totality of relevance. It belongs through and through to the handiness structure of that situation.

Heidegger talks about objects that are 'practically relevant in a negative sense' in the guise of conspicuousness, obtrusiveness and obstinacy.

"Modes of taking care belong to the everydayness of being-in-the-world, modes which let the beings taken care of be encountered in such a way that the worldly quality of innerworldly beings appears. Beings nearest at hand can be met up with in taking care of things as unusable, as improperly adapted for their specific use. Tools tum out to be damaged, their material unsuitable. In any case, a useful thing of some sort is at hand here. But we discover the unusability not by looking and ascertaining properties, but rather by paying attention to the associations in which we use it. When we discover its unusability, the thing becomes conspicuous. This objective presence of what is unusable still does not lack all handiness whatsoever; the useful thing the objectively present is still not a thing which just occurs somewhere. The modes of conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy have the function of bringing to the fore the character of objective presence in what is at hand. What is at hand is not thereby observed and stared at simply as something objectively present. The character of objective presence making itself known is still bound to the handiness of useful things Privative expressions such as inconspicuousness, unobtrusiveness, and obstinacy tell of a positive phenomenal character of the being of what is initially at hand. These negative prefixes express the character of keeping to itself of what is at hand."

where did he, or Kant, have a lot to say about WHERE THE SENSATIONS CAME FROM BEFORE THEY WERE PROCESSED BY THE BRAIN INTO EMPIRICAL OBJECTS. — charles ferraro

Merleau-Ponty may be more help here than Kant or Schopenhauer.
Sensations, stimuli don't 'come from' an outside, nor do they originate in an inside. THey only exist as an interplay between the two, as an interactive coupling in which what constitutes body and world are mutaally determined.

"We cannot apply the classical distinction of form and matter to perception, nor can we conceive the perceiving subject as a consciousness which "interprets," "deciphers," or "orders" a sensible matter according to an ideal law which it possesses. Matter is "preg-nant" with its form, which is to say that in the final analysis every perception takes place within a certain horizon and ultimately in the "world." We experience a perception and its horizon "in action" rather than by "posing" them or explicitly "knowing" them. Finally the quasi-organic relation of the perceiving subject and the world involves, in principle, the contradiction of immanence and tran-scendence.'

Francisco Varela, a student of Merleau-Ponty's approach , developed his enactive approach out of it.

"The central concern of the enactivist position in a perceiver-depdendent world stands in contradistinction to the received view that perception is fundamentally the truthful reconstruction of a portion of the physical world through a registering of existing environmental information. in the enactive approach reality is not a given:it is perceiver-dependent, not becasue the perceiver "constructs" it as he or she pleases, but becasue what counts as a relevant world is inseparable from the structure of the perceiver."

Thompson makes some use of Merleau-Ponty, but I think relies more on Husserl, who believes that there is such a thing as a pre-reflective consciousness. Meleau-Ponty's view is more novel. He argues that there is no such thing as pre-reflective consciousness. That is, awareness, the self, the 'I' , the ego, in order to be itself, reaches out to the world, and what comes back to the self IS the self. In other words, consciousness is radically inter-subjective, composed within its very core as interaffection between inside and outside. He compares this to one hand touching the other.


"If my left hand is touching my right hand, and if I should suddenly wish to apprehend with my right hand the work of my left hand as it touches, this reflection of the body upon itself always miscarries
at the last moment: the moment I feel my left hand with my right hand, I correspondingly cease touching my right hand with my left hand. But this last-minute failure does not drain all truth
from that presentiment I had of being able to touch myself touching: my body does not perceive, but it is as if it were built around the perception that dawns through it; through its whole internal arrangement, its sensory-motor circuits, the return ways that control and release movements, it is, as it were, prepared for a self-perception, even though it is never itself that is perceived nor itself that perceives."(Merleau-Ponty, the Visible and the Invisible)

"Consciousness is removed from being, and from its own being, and at the same time
united with them, by the thickness of the world. The true cogito is not the intimate communing of thought with the thought of that thought: they meet only on passing through the world. The consciousness of the world is not based on self-consciousness: they are strictly contemporary.
There is a world for me because I am not unaware of myself; and I am not concealed from myself because I have a world. This pre-conscious possession of the world remains to be analysed in the pre-reflective cogito."(Phenomenology of Consciousness)

"..the identity of the thing with itself, that sort of established position of its own, of rest in itself, that plenitude and that positivity that we have recognized in it already exceed the experience, are already a second interpretation of the experience...we arrive at the thing-object, at the In Itself, at the thing identical with itself, only by imposing upon experience an abstract dilemma which experience ignores(p.162)." Merleau-Ponty

Or it can simply remain a innerwordly being? Something not used or observed. — waarala

Innerworldly being exists for an individual Dasein out of a totality of relevance.
I don't think there can be any innerworldly being that is not part of a totality of relevance of useful things, or itself a present to hand being(which is also a derived mode of relevant taking care of something). Without a relation of heedful circumspective care, no being can disclose itself as a being to Dasein.

"Strictly speaking, there "is" no such thing as a useful thing. There always belongs to the being of a useful thing a totality of useful things in which this useful thing can be what it is. In accordance with their character of being usable material, useful things always are in terms of their belonging to other useful things: writing materials, pen, ink, paper, desk blotter, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room. These "things" never show themselves initially by themselves, in order then to fill out a room as a sum of real things. A totality of useful things is always already discovered BEFORE the individual useful thing." Being and Time

Which is most 'true' requires substantiation through one or other epistemic truth theory. — Isaac

. And even then, what was more true in the past does not always continue to be most true contemperaneously.

Anger is a nasty emotion. It can cause, among other things, yelling, breaking things, and hurt generally. Anger is a destructive emotion and brings distress. Nearly all of us have it, though. It was naturally selected for, so it must have been useful for survival. — Purple Pond

In aggressive anger we throw things, shout , destroy , etc. But the basis of anger isn't evolutionary mechanisms, and it isnt eliminated simply by not acting out.
Let's get to the origin of anger. Anger is the manifestation of a cognitive appraisal. This appraisal is two-pronged. It begins with a disappointment pain, loss. That experience is followed up by the assessment that the entity which was responsible for one's loss , pain or disappointment knew better than to do what they did. They violated our expectation of them, or of what we assumed someone in their situation would have done. Anger is the belief that someone knew what they did would cause us pan and disregarded our feelings. Our anger seeks the other's apology, contrition, repentance, punishment. In anger we want to teach the thoughtless other a lesson.


To answer your question. the only way to avoid anger is to rethink the other's behavior as either unintentional or as a sincere judgement on their part that we deserved to be hurt. We can avoid shouting or throwing chairs, but we will still feel anger as long as we assess situations with other people as I outlined above. The real danger of anger is that it prompts us to want to reject, punish, censure the perpetrator. This is the basis of most cultural violence. A great majority of situations in which we judge the other to be culpable is the result of our failure to see the world from their perspective and understated why they believed they were justified in doing what they did, They may have been in error, but that is different from saying that they thoughtlessly disregarded our feelings.

How do you know there is a presence if if it isn't internally differentiated? Presence implies absence. The idea of a presence with no content , texture, contour, outline, features, is incoherent.

There is still the presence of the state occurring at t1. — Bryon Ehlmann

How do you know there is a t1, if t1 itself isn't differentiated from what it isn't, from the others that it isn't? If t1 has no beginning and no end , then it isn't an existent at all. and if it begins, then it constitutes a difference.

I feel confident in saying that nobody understands consciousness. That includes scientists, materialist philosophers, idealist philosophers, dualists, spiritualists, Buddhists, Hindus, Protestants, New Agers, neuroscientists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, AI researchers, Daniel Dennett, Deepak Chopra, and all the rest! Nobody has a friggin clue. — petrichor

I would modify this statement by saying that if nobody understands consciousness then they don't understand materialism, physicalism and empiricism either. Because each is completely dependent and co-implied by the other. And I would assert that philsophers like Heicegger, Derrida and Merleau-Ponty have a better understanding of consciousness that realists, objectivists and physicalists do of empiricism.

As Evan Thompson puts it:

"Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the
objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience.
The hard problem is the conceptual and metaphysical problem of how to bridge
this apparent gap. There are many critical things that can be said about the hard problem
(see Thompson&Varela, forthcoming), but what I wish to point out here is that it
depends for its very formulation on the premise that the embodied mind as a natural
entity exists ‘out there’ independently of how we configure or constitute it as an
object of knowledge through our reciprocal empathic understanding of one other as
experiencing subjects. One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a
complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all
the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically
entail the subjective facts of consciousness?

If this account would not entail these
facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.
One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes
we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description
of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate
approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way
presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem
seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as
transcendental or metaphysical realism. From the phenomenological perspective
explored here, however — but also from the perspective of pragmatism à la Charles
Saunders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, as well as its contemporary inheritors
such as Hilary Putnam (1999) — this transcendental or metaphysical realist
position is the paradigm of a nonsensical or incoherent metaphysical viewpoint, for
(among other problems) it fails to acknowledge its own reflexive dependence on the
intersubjectivity and reciprocal empathy of the human life-world.

Another way to make this point, one which is phenomenological, but also resonates
with William James’s thought (see Taylor, 1996), is to assert the primacy of the
personalistic perspective over the naturalistic perspective. By this I mean that our
relating to the world, including when we do science, always takes place within a
matrix whose fundamental structure is I-You-It (this is reflected in linguistic communication:
I am speaking to You about It) (Patocka, 1998, pp. 9–10). The hard problem
gives epistemological and ontological precedence to the impersonal, seeing it as the
foundation, but this puts an excessive emphasis on the third-person in the primordial
structure of I–You–It in human understanding. What this extreme emphasis fails to
take into account is that the mind as a scientific object has to be constituted as such
from the personalistic perspective in the empathic co-determination of self and other.
The upshot of this line of thought with respect to the hard problem is that this problem
should not be made the foundational problem for consciousness studies. The
problem cannot be ‘How do we go from mind-independent nature to subjectivity and
consciousness?’ because, to use the language of yet another philosophical tradition,
that of Madhyamika Buddhism (Wallace, this volume), natural objects and properties
are not intrinsically identifiable (svalaksana); they are identifiable only in relation to
the ‘conceptual imputations’ of intersubjective experience."

The NEC is timeless. — Bryon Ehlmann

If there is no time, there is no change. If there is no change, there is no contrast. If there is no contrast, there is no presence. If there is no presence, there is no NEC.

So therefore this was a reality outside the human mind, which was very real to the pre-human lifeforms that inhabited it. — TheArchitectOfTheGods

It's not a question of whether there was reality outside of human understanding and activity, but of what in the earth this means? What is the practical significance of making a claim that rocks existed before there were humans to name them? The question is what we are doing when we name a rock, when we construct a theory about what a rock is. Names of things, and their associated attributes and functions, are only useful and meaningful to us to the extent that the allow us to do things with objects, to manipulate and build things with them, to predict their behavior. That's what a theory is. It exists for us to do things with our world.

To say there was something there in the world before human came along and constructed theories and categories about the things in the world is one thing, but to talk specifically about objects in terms of their attributes and practical features is to refer to how a scientific, technological and social culture of a particular time makes use of those things. The way we understand objects that we theorize about acts as a kind of blueprint, an instruction manual for interacting with that object, for using it in certain ways, Over time our scientific concepts for the objects in our universe change, and with them our blueprints and instruction manuals for manipulating and interacting with those objects.The reason that we can say that the universe is real is because it provides specific opportunities and constraints that allow us to construct more complex models and blueprints of interaction. We can't just invent any old account and have it work for us, and this is what makes the universe 'real', instead of an arbitrary human invention. But the universe is also a continual, unfolding development taking place on the dimension of time. Humans are participants in this unfolding and thus our constructions of the world are in themselves a further development of it, rather than just a 'copy' of a static set of facts.

If we place a man from 30,000 years ago in front of a bus, how will that person's eyes track the vehicle? It depends on many things. Will they see it as a single thing or a collection of parts? And what is the significance of these parts for them? Are they seeing the same bus as we are? What about it is the same? We could say their ability to avoid bumping into it maybe, but that will depend on their assessment of what it is made of and whether it is a mirage. Is a series of lines and curves scrawled in the sand a group of letters that form words or is it random patterns? It depends on many things, including what languages we are familiar with and our vocabulary. What is the 'object' or 'same object' that we all can agree on here? And what would it even mean to ask such a question apart from the intentions , background knowledge an context of each person encountering such a situation?
. An object is the result of a particular active engagement between person and world based on a interrelational framework of intentional directionality, personal history and knowledge, context, culture, for the sake of ongoing purposes. Object means nothing outside of how it relates to our goals.

The problem with associating the real with time-bound human concepts of it is illustrated in this
piece by Nelson Goodman:

"To be objective, one would have to have some set of mind-independent objects to be
designated by language or known by science. But can we find any such objects?
A point in space seems to be perfectly objective. But how are we to define the points of our everyday world? Points can be taken either as primitive elements, as intersecting lines, as certain triples of intersecting planes, or as certain classes of nesting volumes. These definitions are equally adequate, and yet they are incompatible: what a point is will vary with each form of description. For example, only in the first "version," to use Goodman's term, will a point be a primitive element. The objectivist, however, demands, "What are points really?" Goodman's response to this demand is worth quoting at length: If the composition of points out of lines or of lines out of points is conventional rather than factual, points and lines themselves are no less so. ... If we say that our sample space is a combination of points, or of lines, or of regions, or a combination of combinations of points, or lines, or regions, or
a combination of all these together, or is a single lump, then since none is identical with any of the rest, we are giving one among countless alternative conflicting descriptions of what the space is.
And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? Neither the space (a) as an undivided whole nor (b) as a combination of everything involved in the several accounts; for (a) and (b) are but two among the various ways of organizing it. But what is it that is so organized? When we strip off as layers of convention all differences among ways of describing it, what is left? The onion is peeled down to its empty core."

Stone is being too. It is being/entity within-the-world (innerweltliches Seiende). — waarala

the difficulty that arises from this is that if our only access to the being of the stone is through Dasein's being-in-the-world, then what would it even mean to talk about the being of the stone as world-less? It would seem to presuppose what would be incoherent beginning from the being-in-the-world of Dasein. This was Derida's issue with Heidegger's formulation of the being of a stone, as well as the being of the animal as 'poor in world'.

we can never be certain that the brain’s spontaneously constructed perceptual objects actually coincide with the “real” cause(s) of the subjective sensations, which cause(s) would necessarily have “predated” the brain’s act of spontaneous construction. — charles ferraro

.

I haven't read an awful lot of Kant, but wouldn't he consider subjective sensations to be intuitions?
Intuitions would be the things in themselves that we can never have direct access to. However, our scientific constructions(based on constructions of perceptual and conceptual objects) can assymptotically approach the truths of the real world as a limit.

The best way to deal with suffering and hostility is to overcome it. This requires strength of will and psychological resilience — S

"Consciousness doesn't cause itself, Will is neither free nor a Determinism:
What gives me the right to speak about an I, and, for that matter,
about an I as cause, and, finally, about an I as the cause of thoughts? As far as the superstitions of the logicians are concerned: I will not stop emphasizing a tiny little fact that these superstitious men are loath to admit: that a thought comes when “it” wants, and not when “I” want. It is, therefore, a falsification of the facts to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.” It thinks: but to say the “it” is just that famous old “I” – well that is just an assumption or opinion, to put it mildly, and by no means an “immediate certainty.” In fact, there is already too much packed into the “it thinks”: even the “it” contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself."

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

I think of the self as a metaphorical space where mental phenomena happen; so the metaphor of a container seems quite apt to me. — Louco

Note that metaphors are 'as' structures, understanding something as something else. i think that's an apt description of the signifiying nature of the moments of meaningful awareness. Each moment of self is a self-transcending metaphorizing of the previous moment. To 'be' this moment is to have transformed oneself from what one was the precious moment. The moment of self could be thought of as spatial in the sense of a synthetic coordinating of multiple neural imputs into the unifying 'con' of consciousness. But to be consistent with recent research into consciousness, it would be useful to recognize this synthentic whole of a moment of awareness as intersubjective rather than solipsistic.
Self is space of interactive body-world transformation rather than static 'isness'.

The sense of agency versus ownership have been studied in schizophrenics.
When a schizophrenic has an experience of thought control or hears voices, they know that these occur inside of their head. So in this sense their body owns the experience. But they do not experience a sense of agency, the sense that their self initiated and was responsible for the foreign experience. It occurs inside them but not of them. Some schizophrenics describe themselves as a dead body whose behavior is controlled like a marionette being pulled by strings. One could say their body exists for them but not their self.

in the instant when we focus on a sense, the self and the intention belong to the same being, the intention is inside the self. — Louco

Could we we instead say that the the intention IS the self? This way treats the self as a transitive process rather than a container.

i'm the one who wrote

the claim that absolute truth is impossible is itself a contestable claim rather than unchallengeable — curiousnewbie

.

Let's see if we can flesh out a little the thinking of those who are truth relativists. Let me throw out a hypothetical approach in this vein. Let's say that in my experience of the world and myself, I've discovered that anything I observe or imagine or think or see other people observe has a curious habit of constantly changing its meaning in subtle ways every moment . If i read or repeat the word 'cat' over and over, each time, each moment it has a slightly different semantic sense than the previous. And the same effect occurs when I perceive an object in my environment. I conclude form this that I have discovered something that others haven't noticed, but is there for them also. they just don't see it because it is a subtle effect.
So I then form an explanation of objective truth that goes like this:people believe that there is such a thing as an object that has a certain permanence to it, that can be pointed to or referred back to as the same over time. People believe that self-identity, self-persistence, self-permanence are features of our world. We can find such attributes in the physical world, in our language concepts, in our memory, etc.
But I believe that we only think that such attributes as self-persistence, self-identity over time and permanence are what we are experiencing. I surmise that what we are really experiencing is phenomena that , as I said before, are subtly shifting their semantic meaning every moment of time. So we just assume meaning permanence, self-identity,etc where there is instead very tiny shifts and transformations in the semantic sense of object, percepts, concepts. In practical terms this isn't a big deal. We can understand each other, point to what for the most part is the same reality, and agree on our empirical descriptions and physical laws.

So would I then be able to say that objective truth does not exist? Well, first of all, I could agree with Heidegger and say that truth for me is just the way that each new moment of time unveils a slightly new semantic meaning for me. Truth is just the unveiling of new experience, not its matching up to a standard. So there is truth, but what about objectivity? So does objectivity exist? AlI I can say is that every moment I have to test myself, ask myself the question again. Do I this moment experience a thing that persists identically, be it a concept, a percept, a law of nature, a norm of any kind? IF each time I ask the question the answer is still no, then I can say that as far as I can tell, this moment, for me and apparently for everyone else that I've observed or thought about, reality doesn't sit still even for a moment, such as to allow persisting semantic self-identity or the self-persistence of any object.

I can say that when someone claim's that objective truth exist, they are absolutely right. Every moment there is a truth about the meaning of an object. And every moment that meaning changes very slightly, for everyone that I've observed. So I would want to rephrase that question to: 'does the objective truth about anything stay exactly the same for more than a single moment? What about my claim that objective truth never stays the same for more than a moment? Is this an objective claim? Well, it is me saying, at this moment and from my recollection, I do not now nor ever remember having an experience of self-identity or self-persistence of anything, physical , conceptual or otherwise. But others are welcome to keep asking me the question. I can tell them that I have a theory about why others believe they are seeing objective truth as stable, and that it is possible to miss the instability of reality without it in any way jeopardizing one's ability to do formal logic or science.

So , based on this argument, the relativist isn't really stating a negative claim(objecivity does NOT exist) so much as a positive one, that they are seeing something beyond, within, underneath, overflowing what those who believe in the semantic stability of objects(logical, perceptual, conceptual) arew seeing. Their claim should be: 'objectivty exists, but does a lot more interesting things than the objectivist is able to see). They are seeing dynamism where others are seeing only stasis. Is this dynamism 'objective'? Is it a theory, a principle? It is certainly a general claim. But , and here's the most important point, its not an objective claim as long as it doesn't turn 'radical dynamism ' into a stable object. It has to be modest in its claim. It has to say simply that each moment the question must be asked anew, because the very nature of radical dynamism is that there is no horizon beyond the current moment for any assertion. I can say that I anticipate that the next moment I will generally believe something very similar to what I am now asserting, because in my experience so far the world not only changes every moment but preserves a certain overall stability in its ongoing transformations. Each new moment is not a profound semantic break with the previous but only a very subtle one.
This is a post-objective claim, requiring a different method of test.

To test the claim of radical changeability in all objects of experience for everyone is to do two things:
1) it is to try to teach a believer in stable objectivity to see the underlying movement in supposedly static experience. How do you convince someone to see more than they see? Either they see it or they don't. Meanwhile, as relativist, you can leave them to their objectivism, knowing that it works for them, and isn't 'wrong' or 'untrue', just incomplete.
2)The believer in radical relativism must every moment of experience test their own perception(make it contestable) to see if this dynamism continues to appear very moment, everywhere for them.

"If my left hand is touching my right hand, and if I should suddenly wish to apprehend with my right hand the work of my left hand as it touches, this reflection of the body upon itself always miscarries
at the last moment: the moment I feel my left hand with my right hand, I correspondingly cease touching my right hand with my left hand. But this last-minute failure does not drain all truth
from that presentiment I had of being able to touch myself touching: my body does not perceive, but it is as if it were built around the perception that dawns through it; through its whole internal arrangement, its sensory-motor circuits, the return ways that control and release movements, it is, as it were, prepared for a self-perception, even though it is never itself that is perceived nor itself that perceives."(Merleau-Ponty, the Visible and the Invisible)

"Consciousness is removed from being, and from its own being, and at the same time
united with them, by the thickness of the world. The true cogito is not the intimate communing of thought with the thought of that thought: they meet only on passing through the world. The consciousness of the world is not based on self-consciousness: they are strictly contemporary.
There is a world for me because I am not unaware of myself; and I am not concealed from myself because I have a world. This pre-conscious possession of the world remains to be analysed in the pre-reflective cogito."(Phenomenology of Consciousness)

So I'd agree self is both an inside and an outside, but only at different points in time. — Louco

What does that mean? What does it mean to say the self is an inside at a single point of time? Is there such a thing as a single point of time as an immediate 'now"? Heidegger and Husserl split up the now into a tri-partite structure retention-presencing and protention. Time is not puctual opints but stretched along as a horizon. For Heidegger thee now is a beyond itself, and thus self is already ahead of itself in a single moment of its being.

"..the identity of the thing with itself, that sort of established position of its own, of rest in itself, that plenitude and that positivity that we have recognized in it already exceed the experience, are already a second interpretation of the experience...we arrive at the thing-object, at the In Itself, at the thing identical with itself, only by imposing upon experience an abstract dilemma which experience ignores(p.162)." Merleau-Ponty

Well, he wrote, and that was a literal quote, that the stone does not exist, it is just there (vorhanden). That is what he wrote. And that doesn't make much sense to me, and I hope also not to most others. — TheArchitectOfTheGods

What Heidegger meant was that it is meaningless to talk about the existence of objects outside of any account of an object.

'Matter' and 'energy' are not just neutral facts about what is out there. They are human constructs. Their modern empirical versions were invented somewhere between Galileo and Newton. Both matter and energy presuppose the idea of a self-identical force or thing. They also presuppose self-persistence over time and certain categorical notions of causality, space and time. These are pragmatic abstractions that are useful in modelling and interacting with the world , but as Kant argued, they require certain categories of thought in order to make sense. Heidegger was trying to reve3al the basis of those categories.
There is no such thing as a specific object like a stone outside of an account of a stone.

If we had a better understanding, we would be close to knowing what this that energy everything consists of is, we knew what the universe is. That is what keeps human philosophy going. Einstein said something indefinitely more meaningful with five symbols than Heidegger did with with all his jumbled grasping at linguistic straws. For scientific and philosophical purposes, it is unnecessary to distinguish between the existence of a stone and existence of a human mind. — TheArchitectOfTheGods

There's a lot I need to clarify in this. First of all, have you read Kant? Einstein certainly had, and admired and identified with his philosophy. This makes sense, given that relativity implies a subjectivism , the recognition that our accounts of nature are relative to the way we frame our theories.
This thinking , in both Einstein and Kant, is consistent with a philosophy of science that Popper delineated in terms of falsificationism, the idea that we can never exhaustively prove a theory, but we can asymptotically approach scientific truth through trial and error, and endless falsification of prior theories. Falisficationism, Kant and Einstein's approaches all imply a correspondence theory of truth, the idea that our theories are intended to mirror or represent an independent reality that we approximate more and more closely with our models.
It wasn't Heidegger, but Hegel and those in Hegel's wake (Kierkegaard, Marx, American pragmatism, analyst philosophers like Quine and Putnam, who first critiqued the correspondence theory of truth and falisficationism. Their patron saint in terms of philosophy of science was Thomas Kuhn, who rejected Popper's falsificationism in favor of the idea that science creates paradigms which are overturned. It is not a linear march of truth but a revolutionary shift from one worldview to another. Science doesn't represent an independent world, it enacts a world. Knowledge is not representation but transformative interaction,and this implies an indissociable interaction between subject and object.

I'm guessing in embracing einstein you're defending Kant against everything that's come after. Heidegger is just a straw man. It's the entire history of philosophy as well as science that critiques Kant from a post-Hegelian stance that you're attacking.

This reminds me of the difference between Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on the self. Husserl argued that self is an aspect of all intentional meaning, not as a specific content of self but as a certain 'mineness' that is pre-reflectively implied in any awareness of experience. Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, used the idea of my one hand touching the other as model for how self-awareness functions. He said that this demonstrated that self-reflection is a reflecting back on an other. That is to say, when we attempt to return to the self that we are, its as returning to an other, an outside. This explains how we are able to empathically understand and relate to other persons. The other is already in me as myself. Thus there is no self-same entity or experience or aspect of being that we can point to when we point to 'self' . Self is both an inside and an outside at the same time.

He was never concerned with the nature of reality outside of its reflection in the human mind. I wonder what he would write now 100 years later. — TheArchitectOfTheGods

Probably the same things that scores of postmodern, pragmatist, hermeneutical ,phenomenological , constructivist and enactivist writers in philosophy , cognitive science and the philosophy of science already write today. Which is that your account of reality is outdated and quaint, assuming an independent reality that our constructions attempt to mirror or represent .

How would a universe without matter ‘look’ like? — TheArchitectOfTheGods

It's not a question of denying a n empirical account of matter and energy, but of showing what underlies the conditions of possibility of models based on objective causality. Heidegger didn't say that matter doesn't 'exist', he says it is the product of a derivative thinking.

Would you agree that the way that Varela and Thompson interpret Buddhism, so as to interrelate it with phenomenology and cognitive science, avoids thinking transcendence as world transcending? I believe they were following Japanese philosopher Nishitani Keiji in this respect, as well as Heidegger, and Nietzsche up to a point..

In comparing Heidegger with Nishitani, Thompson endorses a thinking of transcendence as historical rather than trans-historical:

"Dasein's freedom is grounded in perpetual surpassing to the world as being-in-the-world. On the "field of emptiness", Dasein is revealed as not-being-in-the-world; Dasein has attained the "other shore":
Yet this" other shore" is what Nishitani calls an "absolutely near side": Dasein's surpassing of the world
occurs simultaneously as the most thorough being-in-the-worId."

If we understand Being as being itself by always being ahead of, beyond itself in temoparlizing itself, doesn't a notion of world-transcendence become an inadequately thought-out and reifying derivative of being-in-the world?

Are you familiar with any of the enactivist writing? It's hardly engineering, especially where Varela and Thompson integrate neuroscience with Buddhist teachings and phenomenology. What specific models of cognition , emotion and consciousness are you advocating instead?

Don't know why I keep that angelfire site. i guess so I don't have to run down and change all the links to it I've spread out god knows where over the years.
My undergrad and grad training was in cognitive psychology. I worked as a counselor in halfway house settings for adult mentally ill populations for a few years, intending to become a psychotherapist while putting together my own version of what used to be called personality theory. But as my writing became more focused, it steered me toward the underpinnings of psychological theory, which led me to existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics and deconstruction.. So I immersed myself in continental philosophy, although I was enormously suspicious of its methods at first, having been indoctrinated as a good Anglo-american pragmatist.
Eventually, the continental approach won me over, and I began submitting articles to philosophy and interdisciplinary journals. Fortunately, philosophy is one field where you don't have to have an academic title in order to be published.
So I've been content to live the life of an independent scholar, while watching those in academia lose more and more job autonomy, security and benefits. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

we transcend the biological. We are able to conceive of purposes above and beyond those encompassed by biological theory. — Wayfarer

I can think of a better alternative than settling for a dualism between the biological and the cognitive.
Combining neuro and cognitive science with phenomenology, enactivist, dynamical systems approaches unite the biological and the cognitive. They view intentionality as originating in the inherently anticipatory self-organizing characteristics of living systems. Cognition is not the internal representation and manipulation of external stimuli, but an active interaction between organism and world based on sensorimotor coupling.

A couple of observations here. First, regardless of Kennedy's political affiliations, the fact that she is a public figure in today's extremely polarized social climate means that she is going to be exposed to some scary, violent and threatening comments. If it were you regularly receiving legitimately threatening messages from some unbalanced-sounding individuals, how would you react? I assume with caution, Even if you knew that most of them were not to be taken seriously, could you afford not to be on your guard? I also want to point out that copy pastas are used for lots of reasons, including as a weapon by people who in some cases don't have much of a sense of humor and don't have the ability to write their own original message. Most people use this particular copy pasta as an over the top joke, but not all do.Obviously Kennedy wasn't aware that this was a meme that had been around a long time. Does that justify her reaction? It depends. I don't necessarily assume she was taking literally the content of the copypasta. I think she was responding to the spirit of it, the fact that it expresses intense hatred. And as i said, even though it was intended by whoever originally wrote it as an over the top joke, that does not mean the person who posted it wasn't trying to send a more sinister message.

That brings me to you. I'm curious as to your own political orientation. Do you live in a liberal urban area? Did you go to a liberal university? You claim that politically correct over-serious culture is dominated by Baby Boomers. Well, given the fact that they are more likely to be in a position to have power and visibility than younger generations,it isn't surprising that you would hear more from them than younger leaders. But there is now a split within the politically correct leftist tradition. The older social justice warriors tend to be on the side of free speech on campus, whereas millennials are more likely to claim the Baby Boom political activists are too tolerant and out of touch . They believe that a harsher, more censorious approach is needed. Younger activists are ridiculed by older activists and journalists for being intolerant. Safe spaces, trigger warnings, movements to ban certain speakers from campus are all associated more with millennials than with Boomers.
Obama and Clinton were the Boomers' politicians. Humorless, in-your-face, shouting Bernie Sanders is the preferred type of leader for many millenails.

You raise interesting points. A therapeutic-emancipatory rhetoric certainly seems to dominate both religious and secular life. Derrida called that ‘metaphysics of presence’. Philosophy and the healing professions act as though negation, loss , decline , pain and suffering are accidental to what is true and primary, while they privilege betterment and certainty. Negation for them is just a means to an end, that end being fulfillment.

Even the atheists act as though somebody somewhere is keeping score and the result of all the purposeful figuring out is we get to keep what we’ve figured out and use it as a staircase to climb up to a better and better place. In fact, it isn’t life we want to continue and extol, it’s good experience. But life is every kind of experience, it will always, for everyone transition through every conceivable shade of good and bad feeling, and whether we feel like extolling it or not depends on what mood we are in.
That doesn’t mean that life is meaningless. If it were meaningless, we wouldn’t suffer. Being miserable is a very meaningful state. It implies a concept of pleasure. Pessimism is a comparison between an experienced or imagined state of well being or satisfaction and its loss or negation. A pessimist or depressive who claims never to have experienced pleasure could not then experience sadness or negativity. By the same token, pollyanna types experience as much suffeing as pessimists, but de-emphasize or repress those experiences. So pessimism, optimism and Utopianism have a lot more in common than they think.

To my mind, meaningfulness itself is a problem and a nuisance when taken as the aim of living. What people don't realize is that desiring substantial happiness and profundity out of meaning also dooms them to equally substantial misery and chaos.

The aim of knowledge is the minimization of meaning. I dont mean instrumental knowledge. I mean the kind of interpersonal knowledge that allows us to slip into the other’s perspective such as to give their actions a certain overall relataibility and intelligibility. Such relational anticipatory knowledge allows us to bypass significant anger, guilt, condemnation, astonishment when it comes to making sense of others. This is no instrumental staircase to bliss and idealized harmony. What it is is the dialing down of meaningfulness in relating to others. In achieving intimacy of relatednesss and unity,we at the same time reduce the power and substance of what we understand to affect us . This way of being with oneself and others is is directed toward a certain insignificance. It is still goal-directed, but the goals are more minor, not needing to be taken as seriously any more, just something to do. This is where Heidegger and Derrida lead me. It’s life beyond frantic joy and meaningful misery, and the replacement of such substantial affectivities by a knowing engagement of insubstantial mood textures, leading nowhere but in an endless circle of getting along barely distinguishable from non-existence.Heidegger calls it uncanny. Derrida says it is almost nothing. That’s the life for me.

Schopenhauer took misery too seriously. That's becasue he was stiil attached to the Proper. His pessimism, as is all lamenting of the misery of life, was a mourning of the loss of faith in proper foundationalism. Nietzsche shook himself free of vestigial attachment to the Proper , the serious, the mournful and the miserable.

Life for him was misery, but not proper misery, any more than it is proper joy or aggression or suffering or laughter. It is all these, sometimes all at once. He called this WIll to Power.
there is Will to instrumentality, Will to misery, Will to emancipation, Will to Utopia , Will to minutia mongering and Will to nothingness, and they are all forms of Will to Power.

I'm struck by how Schopenhauer1 avoids mention of personal relationships(friends, family, etc). Instead the emphasis is placed on job , task and performance in relation to emotional well-being. I don't know anyone who has been able to achieve happiness over time strictly through their vocation. It's personal bonds that are key to a sense of meaning and worth. Knowing that one is loved and respected is the only thing I know of that can make the arbitrariness and unfairness of life bearable(and perhaps even irrelevant). I also notice that while you seem to reach out empathetically to him in your posts, there doesnt appear to be a lot of empathy in his responses.
I'm not Sigmund Freud, and this isn't a therapy blog, but i suspect that intimacy issues are driving the existential concerns here.