Love is basically mutual assurance. People giving each other hope and consolation. Its not a thing in itself. Without fear and insecurity, how could we give each other hope and comfort? — Yohan

I see us as tribal, social animals, evolved to work as a group. I view the relatively isolated self as a kind of invention or development in the story.

Love and fear are both about attachment: desire for stability, safety and comfort, all ways of coping with fear. — Yohan

Can we not just as easily make love primary ? I fear that harm will come to what I love. No love, no fear.

Yes. And that something can be the existence of other minds, or an external material world, or God, or the soul, or mind-independent mathematical entities. — Michael

If 'external material world' means something very specific like atoms-and-the-void that bang on our sense organs, then I consider it reasonable or sensible to doubt that. We can doubt that the world-we-share is like that.

But if 'external world' means 'that which we can be wrong or right about,' (the world-we-share) it's incoherent to deny or doubt it.

The solipsist says : It's wrong to think there's something we can be wrong about.

If he's a rational solipsist, his logic is binding for you and me too.

Yes. — Michael

It seems to me that everything is up for debate except that there is something we can be wrong about. Or am I wrong about that ?

Which logic? Classical? Free? Paraconsistent? — Michael

Excellent question ! But you have not yet caught me off guard. Philosophy is, among other things, figuring out WTF rationality is in the light of our best guess so far.

It's about what does or doesn't exist, and the nature of what exists. — Michael

OK, but debating what 'exists' means is fair game, no?

What is the claim about ? An otherwise radically unspecified world. 'The world is atoms and void.' 'The world is overlapping dreams.' 'John did that out of greed.'

What is the difference between reckless assertion and an argument ? Conforming to a logic that binds or ought to bind all rational participants to assent the conclusion, if the argument is sound.

What is implicit in a philosopher's arguing a claim ?

Yes, well this seems to be where the fun is found — Tom Storm

It's good clean neurotic fun.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. Are you saying that solipsism assumes other minds, that idealism assumes an external world, that eliminative materialism assumes mental states, etc.? — Michael

We need to go back to the absolutely minimal notion of whatever there is to make correct or incorrect statements about. We might annoyingly write this as world, with the under-erasure gimmick functioning as a reminder that it's not atoms-and-void or medium-sized-dry-goods or synchornized monads that's intended, but the X that plays the role of target for our claims. Philosophers make various claims about the nature of this inherently/implicitly public/shared X.

For instance, if I claim that "idealism assumes an external world," I'm arguing for the truth or at least the warrantability of a belief about this space that we share.

I think this point has also been made by others here in passing. — Tom Storm

:up:

I think my points go back at least to 'commonsense' philosophy, which reacted to Hume.

The philosophy of common sense developed as a reaction against the skepticism of David Hume and the subjective idealism of George Berkeley, both of which seemed to issue from an excessive stress on ideas. This provided what seemed to the common sense philosophers to be a false start leading from fundamental premises to absurdities. This false start stemmed from René Descartes and John Locke inasmuch as they gave to ideas an importance that inevitably made everything else succumb to them.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosophy-of-common-sense

I've generally held to the presuppositions that I live in a reality that appears to be physical and there are others who share this reality with me who have similar experiences - capacities and vulnerabilities - and ... it make little sense - and there are no advantages - to doubt these presuppositions. — Tom Storm

:up:

I basically agree, though I like philosophy enough to want to find the best way to make sense of 'appear' and 'physical.' But that's just fine-tuning the details.

Just to clear I'm not referring to "raw feels", The mind that matters, the mind that experiences life as an endless succession of rich and unique imagery is radically private. — Janus

I understand what you are trying to defend, and I'm not trying to deny the soul. I'm saying there's a way of talking about it that's nonobviously confused.

We can't rationally discuss concepts that aren't public. I think you and Micheal are trying to use both sides of the coin at once, the 'pure' ghost and the more ordinary mind that is indeed part of the usual causal/explanatory nexus. It's almost tautological that there's nothing to be said about the radically private mind (even saying that there is one such mind or kind of mind is arguably nonsense, except metaphysicians have created a mystified X that rides on the back of ordinary mind.) (I'm just leaning on Ryle here, and you might want to refer above to the quote to see where I'm coming from.)

I think you had best start a thread on Ryle. — Banno

Instead of asking people to read, I'm trying a more direct approach. Let them try and refute my proposed minimal foundation without performative contradiction. If they must have Descartes, I'll see if I can fix him up some.

Its not death you crave. You are dead already. You crave to truly live. — Yohan

Harsh but true in some way, I think.

.

The Other can be manufactured. Happens all the time. — Tate

To me the point is roughly that the self and the other are comanufactured, like the North and South. Why didn't Descartes problematize the first person pronoun ? Why doesn't the solipsist?
In other words, WTF is a self anyway ? I suggest that following this lead, going into detail about what a self is, will lead one to others and a shared world and language.

Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it. — W

Hear, hear!!! — creativesoul

<salutes>

Be great to get you in my new thread....

There is nothing public that can be pointed to, but from that it does not follow that there is no private mind. We all have our mental privacy, so we all naturally recognize that there is a private dimension to the mind. — Janus

Just to be clear, and as mentioned before, I see no need to deny raw feels. I can speak with the vulgar, insist that I too have a soul. I'm just making the by-now traditional and even tautological point that they play no role in inferences, that the X which, when added to a p-zombie, makes him a real boy,...is suspiciously elusive conceptually. Any concept that defies all public criteria for its application starts to sound more like a grunt.

It'd be great to get your reaction on the Ryle quotes above. Because that's where I'm coming from here. The mind that matters, the mind that figures in reasoning and explanation, is not and cannot be radically private.

' Is there an external world? ' The challenge is making the absurdity of this question conspicuous.

' Is there something that we can be wrong or right about ? ' If not, the question is unintelligible. If so, the question answer itself, presumes its own answer, confusing with its strangeness, with its apparently valid grammar and what seems like a daring willingness to question everything....

For more on this, I quote again:
http://www.henryflynt.org/philosophy/flawbelief.html

We begin with the question of whether there is a realm beyond my "immediate experience." Does the Empire State Building continue to exist even when I am not looking at it? If either of these questions can be asked, then there must indeed be a realm beyond my experience. If I can ask whether there is a realm beyond my experience, then the answer must be yes. The reason is that there has to be a realm beyond my experience in order for the phrase 'a realm beyond my experience' to have any meaning. Russell's theory of descriptions will not work here; it cannot jump the gap between my experience and the realm beyond my experience. The assertion 'There is realm beyond my experience' is true if it is meaningful, and that is precisely what is wrong with it. There are rules implicit in the natural language as to what is semantically legitimate. Without a rule that a statement and its negation cannot simultaneously be true, for example, the natural language would be in such chaos that nothing could be done with it. Aristotle's Organon was the first attempt to explicate this structure formally, and Supplement D of Carnap's Meaning and Necessity shows that hypotheses about the implicit rules of natural language are well-defined and testable. An example of implicit semantics is the aphorism that "saying a thing is so doesn't make it so." This aphorism has been carried over into the semantics of the physical sciences: its import is that there is no such thing as a substantive assertion which is true merely because it is meaningful. If a statement is true merely because it is meaningful, then it is too true. It must be some kind of definitional trick which doesn't say anything. And this is our conclusion about the assertion that there is a realm beyond my experience. Since it would be true if it were meaningful, it cannot be a substantive assertion.

Personally, I have found an extremely bright silver lining in the darkest of clouds. — DA671

I can relate. One can even start laughing in the swamp of misery, with the gods at the one's own folly and the folly of humans in general. Gallows humor. And then there is the true platitude that suffering sometimes burns off a mask or a delusion. I don't claim that all suffering can be partially forgiven this way. The world offers pure stupid hurt too.

I often feel that the so-called small moments of fulfilment can also be of great value. — DA671

:up:

I love a good cup of coffee, a lonely bikeride on a cool night, snuggling my torty, laughing at a piece of a bit in an old book that only the aging cool kids remember...

Kant has a lot to answer for.

The hypothesis is that what we see might be totally different to a conjectured, inaccessible world about which we can say nothing.

...

One can't have it both ways, supposing that the hypothesised unseen world both causes what we see and yet remains outside of our considerations.

This applies to the vatted brain. Should one hypothesis that what one sees is an illusion, one thereby hypothesises a meta-world, a world in which the illusion may take place. For the vatted brain, this is the vat; for Neo, his pod. What one cannot conclude is that everything is an illusion.

If the phenomenalist supposes that we cannot deduce from our perceptions what the world is like, he has been shown to be mistaken. If the phenomenalist supposes that we cannot say anything about how the world actually is, his view is utterly irrelevant. — Banno

All well said.

I think there's a POV trick to be sussed out here. We see others from the outside and ourselves from the inside. So it's plausible that individuals depend on their sense organs and brain as mediators for them of their environment. But if we try to build only from the inside, we talk nonsense. We call everything sense-data while ( pretending to be ) no longer taking the sense organs and objects affecting them in the 'outside' or 'public' world for granted. The stereoscopic key may be remembering that the entities populating the 'inner' and 'outer' worlds are part of the same causal/explanatory nexus. It's problematic to make a wish more or less real than an electron. Kant rather madly jettisoned all the stuff he depended on, radicalizing Locke or Hobbes perhaps to the point of absurdity, respected only because he also wrote lots of non-insanity.

So, it seems material objects are actually theoretical constructs, i.e., ideas we experience based on our sensory input. — Art48

So it seems that sense organs (material objects among others, after all) are theoretical constructs, ideas we experience based on sensory input....wait a minute !

The "basic point" of relativity is that the laws of physics are the same for all observers. — Banno

:up:

It’s abstract, amorphous, mind-dependant, something like a “natural kind”—a “political kind”. — NOS4A2

Not unlike the ego...

I consider that a dodge to my stance on this and a symptom of society's collective fear around death, I mean we can't even talk about it without people thinking there is something "Wrong" with you. — Darkneos

I think it's just an intimate topic. Folks aren't that afraid. What's 'wrong' with someone might just be their timing or expectation of intimacy. Suffering and gloom are not in short supply. They are maybe even the rule and not the exception, at least as people age. So there's not much use talking about it ... unless you can light up the shitshow with a joke we haven't heard yet.

I'm pretty happy these days, but the older I get the less attached to life I feel. Does the fruit ripen on the tree? Is there less to prove ? I wrote to a friend yesterday that it's like learning that a video game can't be beat...so that losing your last player is no longer so scary...

Amplifying, I think Wittgenstein (and not just him) already proved well enough that meaning is public, outside of and between individuals, not glowing in their pineal glands. But Philosophical Investigations, for all its ghostbusting, doesn't sketch much of a positive theory. As I understand it, Sellars' brilliant move was to see the practical/social primacy of humans making, challenging, and defending claims. A 'hanging' concept doesn't mean much apart from a complete thought/claim. Inferences are how we justify and challenge claims, how we explain ourselves and others, ...how claims relate to one another. So it makes sense to look how concepts work within/between claims as part of seeing them work between claimants.

A 'self' (to put it playfully) is something like a set of claims that ought to cohere. An 'object' is a set of claims that 'must' cohere (as in we can't make sense of a round square, while being all too familiar with humans who contradict themselves.)

This essay might get a larger following if all this infinite stuff were in mathematically acceptable nomenclature. Just a thought. — jgill

Or be revealed as poetry that can't be combed into a formal system ?

Social or professional groups of insiders create meaning for themselves. — magritte

:up:

Of course. Time is just the most obvious variable.

Again, I think this is more hypothesis than conclusion of an argument, isn't it? — Tate

I take what you mean, but I'd say it's both in that it's an hypothesis that's been argued for. Philosophy isn't math of course, so conclusions aren't theorems.

Yup. — creativesoul

It's nice to not be alone in recognizing the language trap. Once seen, the whole thing is weird.

I like the simulations involving rain you linked to. It's a bit like the p-zombie thing, with the truth-making thing-in-itself revealed as a kind of X that plays no role.

FWIW, I reject bivalence. We can easily make statements that don't cohere. 'This statement is false.' And I think solipsism is incoherent, not really true or false.

It seems that both 'truth' and 'consciousness' are used (metaphysically) in elusively minimal ways.

And what public norm determines the meaning of "true" and "false" which distinguishes them from "warranted" and "unwarranted"? — Michael

The grammar or norm for truth is pretty weird and might deserve its own thread. The difference seems like that between a 'real' person and arbitrarily convincing p-zombie. It's as if all we can productively talk about is warrant.

The exact kind of realism that you seem to argue for requires that there is more to meaning and reference than just what is publicly given to us in experience. The world isn't just what we see or hear or believe. — Michael

I'm maybe more anti-metaphysics than arguing for realism. I don't, for instance, think 'atoms and the void' are truth-makers. The grammar of truth is even leaner than that, because we can always debate physical and metaphysical theories (debate the existence of any particular truth-maker candidate.)

I will say that our social situation is logically primary, simply because saying otherwise is incoherent. If we aren't in some underspecified sense in the same word with the same concepts, then rational conversation is impossible.

We debate claims about our world. Any beginning 'less' than that seems to be nonsense, though we can and do endlessly explicate what we mean by these keywords. Someone might, for instance, try to understand the world simply as the set of true claims.

a proof is supposed to bind everyone, not just oneself. — Banno

:up:

Not knowing how something can happen doesn't entail that it doesn't happen. — Michael

But not knowing what we mean or how we could establish what we mean seems problematic. I claim that the concept is elusive by definition. Given any possible public criterion, we can imagine a sufficiently clever but soulless android that satisfies it. That's a problem. It's like ether or phlogiston.

A creature could (according to the official theory) write excellent novels but lack a soul, while an inarticulate amoeba could have one.

But this is like the concept of truth. A statement can be warranted but false or unwarranted but true.
So truth plays a kind of absolute role, about which nothing more can be said, and this X seems to be the same kind of nothingness.

And, again, in the context of this discussion "public" and "private" have a particular meaning that isn't analogous to your example of a private phone call. — Michael

I agree that a metaphysical grammar has indeed been invented, adjacent to but different from the ordinary grammar. I claim that that grammar leads to absurdity or its own uselessness. Though I 'get' the temptation to use it.

we have actual examples of words and phrases referring to private sensations, the self, one's will, thinking, dreaming, the soul, God, counterfactuals, etc.And they have a meaning despite the words not referring to something which is publicly accessible. — Michael

The criteria for applying those concepts are public, else we could not learn them, and it would be pointless to engage in philosophy.

To be sure, a theist will probably tell us that his concept refers to some entity, but you can't locate the meaning of 'God' in his ghost without assuming precisely what I'm questioning.

All it takes for words to have a meaning is certain norms that govern their application, to play a certain relatively stable role in our form of life.

Broadly, I'm trying to show that the metaphysical version of the private mind is broken (or at least useless), despite its initial plausibility.

I don't see how we can institute a meaning for the mysterious X that the p-zombie is supposed to lack. Working within this assumption that there is such an X, we could never prove either that we weren't p-zombies or that we were talking about the same 'thing' being substituted for X.

That's a problem for the framework. I'm trying to argue from within it to show how it breaks down. ( I view selves as fundamentally worldly, social, and linguistic. )

A few more quotes:

It will be helpful to keep in mind that Ryle’s target is the Official Doctrine with its attendant ontological, epistemological, and semantic commitments. His arguments serve to remind us that we have in a large number of cases ways of telling or settling disputes, for example, about someone’s character or intellect. If you dispute my characterisation of someone as believing or wanting something, I will point to what he says and does in defending my particular attribution (as well as to features of the circumstances). But our practice of giving reasons of this kind to defend or to challenge ascriptions of mental predicates would be put under substantial pressure if the Official Doctrine were correct.

For Ryle to remind us that we do, as a matter of fact, have a way of settling disputes about whether someone is vain or whether she is in pain is much weaker than saying that a concept is meaningless unless it is verifiable; or even that the successful application of mental predicates requires that we have a way of settling disputes in all cases. Showing that a concept is one for which, in a large number of cases, we have agreement-reaching procedures (even if these do not always guarantee success) captures an important point, however: it counts against any theory, say, of vanity or pain that would render it unknowable in principle or in practice whether or not the concept is correctly applied in every case. And this was precisely the problem with the Official Doctrine (and is still a problem, as I suggested earlier, with some of its contemporary progeny).

...

Surely, as his earlier critics pointed out (and as those who see him as a behaviourist ignore) some of the phenomena he allows will reintroduce a realm of private occurrences (dreams and imaginings will be the paradigm case). But as Ayer suspects, this sort of “ghost” is an honest ghost. Not simply (as Ayer suggests) because the phenomena do not command the stage of a private theatre: in the sense that no one else can tell us about them they are in that respect private.[12] As Ryle himself admits, “the technical trick of conducting our thinking in auditory word-images, instead of spoken words, does indeed secure secrecy for our thinking …” (1949a, 35).

It is an “honest ghost” since privacy or secrecy of certain episodes will not lead to privacy for them all; and thus the epistemological concomitant to the Official Doctrine that would lead to the problem of other minds is not a threat. Nor does this sort of privacy usher in the semantic consequences of the Official Doctrine. The privacy attending our dreams and imaginings does not impugn our right to draw on observable (in the robust sense of the term) phenomena to defend our right to employ mental predicates for a large number of cases, for “this secrecy is not the secrecy ascribed to the postulated episodes of the ghostly shadow-world” (1949a, 35).

There will indeed be cases in which only the agent can say whether she is pondering, imagining, dreaming, letting her mind wander, calculating, solving, planning, or rehearsing. But the sort of privacy in which only she can say whether she was doing any of these or other particular things is not the sort of privacy that gives rise to philosophical conundrums like the problem of other minds and the problem of necessarily private languages. On the contrary, the ability to describe one’s dreams (as well as one’s sensations) presupposes a language whose terms have established and public criteria for their correct use.

....

When the thinking does result in propositions or sayings, however, the temptation is on the one hand toward excessive inflation, and on the other toward excessive deflation. For the result is not merely a string of words linked together in a grammatically well-formed sentence. In recognising this truth, however, we are tempted toward the view that bits of language are only necessary as the interpersonal vehicles of objective Meanings that are thinkable, in principle, to any hearers or readers of any nationalities.

These Meanings are for the Duplicationist those significance-cargoes that are carried indifferently by your French and my English internal locutions—though the challenge to exhibit to his Reductionist critic even one such cargo, prised off its French or English vehicle, is as usual unwelcome to him. (1979b, 87)

Ryle’s solution is to reject the vehicle-cargo model. In owning a penny, the duplicationist is right in saying I own more than a mere metallic disc; but the reductionist is also right in rejecting the idea that I own two things: a mere disc and a non-metallic, unpocketable yet marketable cargo. The word I employ is not a noise and something else as well; nor is just a noise. In learning a word’s meaning, I become enabled to conduct with it a host of inter alia informative, calculative, recording, anagram-solving, and versifying transactions of quite specific kinds. Just as a penny is not just a disc and nor is it a disc and something else as well, so a word is not just noise, but nor is it a noise and something else as well. The penny is an institutionally-qualified enabling instrument that I can use for specific sorts of transactions. The word is a complexly qualified noise, endowed with a quite specific saying-power, endowed by institutional regulations, accumulating public custom, pedagogic disciplines, and so on.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ryle/#EpiSemCom

This Ryle quote probably makes the point I'm trying to make better than I can.

There is thus a polar opposition between mind and matter, an oppos- ition which is often brought out as follows. Material objects are situated in a common field, known as ‘space’, and what happens to one body in one part of space is mechanically connected with what happens to other bodies in other parts of space. But mental happenings occur in insulated fields, known as ‘minds’, and there is, apart maybe from telepathy, no direct causal connection between what happens in one mind and what happens in another. Only through the medium of the public physical world can the mind of one person make a difference to the mind of another. The mind is its own place and in his inner life each of us lives the life of a ghostly Robinson Crusoe. People can see, hear and jolt one another’s bodies, but they are irremediably blind and deaf to the workings of one another’s minds and inoperative upon them.

What sort of knowledge can be secured of the workings of a mind? On the one side, according to the official theory, a person has direct knowledge of the best imaginable kind of the workings of his own mind. Mental states and processes are (or are normally) conscious states and processes, and the consciousness which irradiates them can engender no illusions and leaves the door open for no doubts. A person’s present thinkings, feelings and willings, his perceivings, rememberings and imaginings are intrinsically ‘phosphorescent’; their existence and their nature are inevitably betrayed to their owner. The inner life is a stream of consciousness of such a sort that it would be absurd to suggest that the mind whose life is that stream might be unaware of what is passing down it. ... Besides being currently supplied with these alleged immediate data of consciousness, a person is also generally supposed to be able to exercise from time to time a special kind of perception, namely inner perception, or introspection. He can take a (non optical) ‘look’ at what is passing in his mind. Not only can he view and scrutinize a flower through his sense of sight and listen to and discriminate the notes of a bell through his sense of hearing; he can also reflectively or introspectively watch, without any bodily organ of sense, the current episodes of his inner life. This self-observation is also commonly supposed to be immune from illusion, confusion or doubt. A mind’s reports of its own affairs have a certainty superior to the best that is possessed by its reports of matters in the physical world. Sense-perceptions can, but consciousness and introspection cannot, be mistaken or confused.

On the other side, one person has no direct access of any sort to the events of the inner life of another. He cannot do better than make problematic inferences from the observed behaviour of the other person’s body to the states of mind which, by analogy from his own conduct, he supposes to be signalised by that behaviour. Direct access to the workings of a mind is the privilege of that mind itself; in default of such privileged access, the workings of one mind are inevitably occult to everyone else.

For the supposed arguments from bodily movements similar to their own to mental workings similar to their own would lack any possibility of observational corroboration. Not unnaturally, therefore, an adherent of the official theory finds it difficult to resist this consequence of his premisses, that he has no good reason to believe that there do exist minds other than his own. Even if he prefers to believe that to other human bodies there are harnessed minds not unlike his own, he cannot claim to be able to discover their individual characteristics, or the particular things that they undergo and do. Absolute solitude is on this showing the ineluctable destiny of the soul. Only our bodies can meet.

As a necessary corollary of this general scheme there is implicitly prescribed a special way of construing our ordinary concepts of mental powers and operations. The verbs, nouns and adjectives, with which in ordinary life we describe the wits, characters and higher-grade performances of the people with whom we have do, are required to be construed as signifying special episodes in their secret histories, or else as signifying tendencies for such episodes to occur. When someone is described as knowing, believing or guessing something, as hoping, dreading, intending or shirking something, as designing this or being amused at that, these verbs are supposed to denote the occurrence of specific modifications in his (to us) occult stream of consciousness. Only his own privileged access to this stream in direct awareness and introspection could provide authentic testimony that these mental-conduct verbs were correctly or incorrectly applied. The onlooker, be he teacher, critic, biographer or friend, can never assure himself that his comments have any vestige of truth. Yet it was just because we do in fact all know how to make such comments, make them with general correctness and correct them when they turn out to be confused or mistaken, that philosophers found it necessary to construct their theories of the nature and place of minds. Finding mental-conduct
concepts being regularly and effectively used, they properly sought to fix their logical geography. But the logical geography officially recommended would entail that there could be no regular or effective use of these mental-conduct concepts in our descriptions of, and prescriptions for, other people's minds.
...
It is an historical curiosity that it was not noticed that the entire argument was broken-backed. Theorists correctly assumed that any sane man could already recognise the differences between, say, rational and nonrational utterances or between purposive and automatic behaviour. Else there would have been nothing requiring to be salved from mechanism. Yet the explanation given presupposed that one person could in principle never recognise the difference between the rational and the irrational utterances issuing from other human bodies, since he could never get access to the postulated immaterial causes of some of their utterances. Save for the doubtful exception of himself, he could never tell the difference between a man and a Robot. It would have to be conceded, for example, that, for all that we can tell, the inner lives of persons who are classed as idiots or lunatics are as rational as those of anyone else. Perhaps only their overt behaviour is disappointing; that is to say, perhaps ‘idiots’ are not really idiotic, or ‘lunatics’ lunatic. Perhaps, too, some of those who are classed as sane are really idiots. According to the theory, external observers could never know how the overt behaviour of others is correlated with their mental powers and processes and so they could never know or even plausibly conjecture whether their applications of mental-conduct concepts to these other people were correct or incorrect. It would then be hazardous or impossible for a man to claim sanity or logical consistency even for himself, since he would be debarred from comparing his own performances with those of others. — Ryle

https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/concept-of-mind.pdf