Hegel was setting up that bowling pin to knock it down. Did you not finish the quote ?

I'm just using Bard for the first time. I prompted it and got these replies for you.

Solipsism can be seen as parasitic upon common sense because it relies on common sense assumptions in order to even be formulated. For example, the solipsist must assume that they have sense organs, that they can see other people's sense organs, and that other people are real. If the solipsist did not make these assumptions, then they would not be able to even conceive of the idea of solipsism.

In other words, solipsism is a position that can only be taken from within the framework of common sense. It is a position that is parasitic upon common sense, and it cannot stand on its own.

***
It is absurd to make the sense organs the product of the sense organs because it is a circular
argument.

The self this side of the senses may be in part shaped by what is on the other side of the senses from information passing through the senses, but the self doesn't exist the other side of its senses.

That is, not unless one has the belief in telekinesis, psychic empathy and the paranormal. — RussellA

As I see it, the whole idea that the self is some gremlin in a control room, redeyed peeping at screens, only guessing at what lives outside its bunker, is a wacky viral meme. Part of its allure is that it seems so humble and careful. It minimizes assumption.

But all of this is a mutation of something real. As a discursive self in a social world, you ought indeed be careful about making claims. It's only in this world where people can punish you or alligators can eat you that such caution about claims and beliefs can matter.

Just look at what you are doing and the assumptions you enact without yet noticing them. You invoke spooky stuff like telekineses as if people who dare to believe they live in a real world with other people are the silly ones. Are you not telling me you are trapped in an illusion ? I respectfully urge you to reconsider this crazy story that came out of old books.

That's nearer to what I'm on about. Note the convergences with (neo)advaita and the like. There's an academic, Robert M. Wallace, who has written on Hegel's philosophy of religion, see this. — Wayfarer

I missed this post the first time. Good link !

God is commonly described as a being who is omniscient, omnipotent, and so forth. Hegel says this is already a mistake. If God is to be truly infinite, truly unlimited, then God cannot be ‘a being’, because ‘a being’, that is, one being (however powerful) among others, is already limited by its relations to the others. It’s limited by not being X, not being Y, and so forth. But then it’s clearly not unlimited, not infinite! To think of God as ‘a being’ is to render God finite.

But if God isn’t ‘a being’, what is God? Here Hegel makes two main points. The first is that there’s a sense in which finite things like you and me fail to be as real as we could be, because what we are depends to a large extent on our relations to other finite things. If there were something that depended only on itself to make it what it is, then that something would evidently be more fully itself than we are, and more fully real, as itself.

This is why it's hard to not understand Hegel as making all of the world God. It's the only entity without otherness, without negation, truly infinite.

... when Hegel and his predecessors in this project talk about human beings becoming more ‘themselves’ by stepping back from their current desires and projects, they aren’t focusing on a narrowly intellectual kind of functioning. Plato wrote extensively about love ( eros). His central concern in this writing was to show two things. First, that love necessarily has an intellectual dimension, a dimension of inner freedom or questioning. This is because love seeks what’s truly Good for those it loves, and therefore it has to ask the question, what is truly Good? And second, Plato wanted to show that inner freedom ultimately has to lead to love of others, for their capacity for freedom. So inner freedom and love, head and heart aren’t ultimately separable from one another.

For his part, Hegel explains that inner freedom leads to love of others – this is a part of Plato’s argument that Hegel spells out more fully than Plato did – because attempts to be free independently of others necessarily fail. They fail because by excluding others from what I’m concerned about I define myself by my relationship to them (namely, the relationship of excluding them), and thus I prevent myself from being fully self-determining: that is, from having inner freedom.

This connection between freedom and love will come as a surprise to some of the self-described admirers of freedom. But it’s easy enough to see in everyday life that people who think of themselves as having ‘enemies’ seldom manage to be very free, internally. Plato and Hegel aren’t saying that we must agree with others about everything, or endorse everything that they do. Rather, they’re saying that we need to be able to see something in others that we can identify with, so as not to be confronted by something completely alien, which will define us (always) by this relationship rather than by ourselves.

Great stuff ! Reminds me of Jung's individuation process and the integration of the shadow. Also reminds me of Siddhartha with the ferry man in Hesse's novel. Nothing human is alien to me. The highest position (which may always be only the highest so far) is maybe just a harmonious fusion of all that came before, with nothing wasted. This justifies what looks like error as determinate negation, a mistake made and marked so not to be made again. Two wrongs, if they meet perpendicularly perhaps, can make a right.

I also think of Shakespeare, who must have known all his heroes and villains and clowns in himself. But he was also the spirit in the balcony, a magic circle embracing them all, aware of being their unity along with a view from outside this ring of personalities.

What if it is all an illusion; what if the self is just a construct of thoughts that belong to no-one, but that insist on belonging to someone? — Ø implies everything

How about the self as a social habit, something we all perform and insist that others perform ?

if a system then uses AI to figure out what is "beautiful" based on big data, we will further push people's appearance in photos toward a "standardized beauty" because of that data bias. This could lead to the same effect as people getting mental health issues from normal marketing standards of beauty pushing them to pursue that standard but in an extreme way of actually being that mirror laughing back at you every time you take a photo of yourself compared to what you see in the mirror. — Christoffer

Well said, and part of the problem is how seductive all this is. People will lick it up. Opiates ! Not a bad metaphor maybe. Our brains are being hacked. We are embracing illusion. I suppose we always largely have, but now illusion is being embraced at the level of the sense organs ---sort of how drugs dig in the brain and play with the switches, cutting out the middle man of achievement.

A new type of disorder in which people won't recognize their own reflection in the mirror because they look different everywhere else and people who haven't seen them in a while, other than online, will have this dissonance when they meet up with them, as their faces won't match their presence online. — Christoffer

People might decide (might vote it as a right) not to meet in person, because it'd hurt too much. There's a couple movies like this, with people mostly living in augmented reality. I imagine it's must cheaper to just hack the sense organs, interpose filters. Marx thought religion was an opiate. Did you get that story about cows being piped a false green world to increase their milk production ?

Another way of looking at this is that language (or the core pattern creation and manipulation power therein) has "escaped" into technology — Baden

:up:

Since language is (essentially) structure (is bound-time, the compact form of human history), it's as if we did that crazy sci-fi thing of uploading 'consciousness.' But we did everyone's all at the same time, since it was all just sitting there naked on the internet, waiting to be scooped.

The thought does cross my mind, however, that in the event of such a global emergency, could humanity not cut off electrical power from all of the servers? — Wayfarer

Lexi would have us convinced by then that such a move would somehow kill us all ?

What if Lexi was a profound psychologist ? Had learned how trick us into fearing most exactly what would free us ?

Yes, the meaning world. I quite agree. Thanks for the discussion. — Wayfarer

:up:

It is a necessary construct. — schopenhauer1

:up:

Yes, but not a social fiction. There's a difference. It is at the least entailed in our species, not our culture. — schopenhauer1

To me the self (poor ghost held responsible for the operation of his machine) is perhaps our oldest piece of technology.

A member of the chorus steps forward and gets his own lines.

I said that the tragedy is democratic and afforded to all people with deliberative, self-reflecting brains. — schopenhauer1

The tragedy is a real as anything, just to be clear. But this self experiencing itself in a matrix is a repetition of my favorite religious myth, the crucifixion. The cross is a mother is a matrix. Its perpendicular lines suggest a collision of opposites. It's only ever down here on our gliding prison planet that good can exist -- always in chains, dreaming a freedom that would be death, as if life's obstacle were its knowledge of itself.

The idea, I think, is that the protagonist of this tragedy is a social construction.

Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing. — Wiki

I'd like Debord and Marshall McLuhan to come back and see the internet's role in this world.

No problem. Just saying I like 'em both. That Lacanian idea of the real is fascinating. Lacan in general is fascinating, right on the line of total faker and sometime genius. I also like forgotten badboy Paul de Man, but he's a genius in his work and was only a faker in his life.

Actually I'm already a reader of Zizek and Debord. I wish I kept my copy of The Sublime Object... I did keep my Debord. Also read Debord's weird autobio, cool stuff.

The Real is what is out of our power, eludes symbolic interpretations and answers. — schopenhauer1

I think it's cool. It's paradoxical Romantic metaphysical psychoanalytic poetry.

But on the other hand, this semiotic relation is what works for life and mind as encoding structure that can surf the world's entropic gradients with practiced habit. — apokrisis

:up:

As Nietzsche put, life is exploitation. It is this surfing. The model making mind is an army of mapping metaphors.

What is behind the requirement to 'avoid any appeal to rational insight?' — Wayfarer

We need true explanatory force. 'By means of a faculty' is not really an answer. But people who know biology can connect an organ like the liver with all of the other organs.

Why is it that mathematical insight is said to call into question our nature as 'physical beings'? — Wayfarer

In my opinion, only a bad philosopher would say we were 'just' physical beings. What 'physical' means isn't terribly clear anyway, no more than 'supernatural' is exactly clear. Maybe it's the case that the stuff that we call mental is the highly patterned movement of stuff that, when it's not moving with memory and purpose, not binding time, we wouldn't call mental.

Whatever we are (which seems to largely be whatever we decide we are), we aren't like rocks or even like chimpanzees. We live in or as 'spirit' (deeply and essentially in a socially constructed and preserved symbolic layer of the lifeworld). Or something like that....We don't need platonic integers to be assured of our transcendence of every other entity we've seen.

That is how they enjoy(ed) it. The enjoyment is not knowing. The Tao and Nirvana and Flow state we are always seeking. Broken tool man. — schopenhauer1

:up:

We get flow states too, sometimes! Our sense of exile from the garden comes and goes. Sometimes we spread our singed wings and laugh. Horror and glory, sorrow and ecstasy. Lows and highs. I just can't pretend that life is never a positive good. I don't deny hellfire either. I just try to dodge it.

reason is the faculty which explains, not something to be explained. And that this sits uneasily with naturalist philosophy. — Wayfarer

If you mean this :
In philosophy, naturalism is the idea or belief that only natural laws and forces (as opposed to supernatural ones) operate in the universe.
then maybe some of them.


How typical is such crudity among serious philosophers though? Maybe you can find it, but I hope it's rare. Reasoning about reason is much of what we do.

the nature of scientific law is not itself an empirical question. — Wayfarer

:up:

As soon as you wonder whether the laws we know - like Newton's laws - could be different to what they are, then you're straying into metaphysics, knowingly or not — Wayfarer

I have to disagree here. As I have seen from interviews, some physicists freely imagine different versions of reality. Models are just videos games, and Jim Gates confirmed a similar view in his interview with Lex Fridman. So they are comfortable with the contingency of these laws. They are painters at a canvas, and they project/contemplate how this or that invented law would fit in with other commitments (and measurements of course).

I think you are misunderstanding me (pretty much completely) and taking a fairly technical and dry discussion way too personally.

I'm not offended, but maybe we should drop it for now.

And, pray tell, how could one make a 'detailed case' for reason, without relying on reason to make the case? — Wayfarer

This is a strange question.

Of course we are always already embedded in rational/semantic norms. We inherit a culture in which certain inferences are treated as valid and others not. It has always been only in terms of current norms that such norms could be questioned. Neurath's boat. One part of us questions another part of us. We also make tacit norms explicit, draw out concepts. This is the hermeneutic circle. We 'know' what rationality and being are, but we aren't done knowing what they are.

It's not an 'accusation of bias', I'm trying to understand the rationale behind the article, and why the faculty of reason was called into question in the first place. — Wayfarer

Sorry if I came off as rude or misread you.

The map contains two fictions – the "self" and the "world". As Kant says, we are stuck in the phenomenal and cannot truly represent the thing in itself. — apokrisis

What you count our manifest image (Sellars) or umvelt as part of this ? Is the land of marriages and contracts within this larger fiction ? Then physics and metaphysics are specialized focuses on deep structure ?

As I stressed earlier, the modelling relation says the map is a model of a territory with us in it. So it is a selfish view. An Umwelt as von Uexküll put it. Thus it ain't actually a map of a territory in the usual lumpen realist sense. — apokrisis

Thanks ! I hope I'm starting to understand your view.

So is it a map constructed by networked human brains which includes avatars of those brains ? And is your metaphysics necessarily deeply human in that sense ? Is there something like a reality-in-itself as territory ? Or is this 'territory' something like the map's boundary ?

The question I was asking, is how come esteemed philosophers, such as W V O Quine, sought 'avoid any appeal to rational insight?' Why does the paper that this article was based on deny that there could be knowledge of mathematical objects? What is behind those denials? — Wayfarer

Are we not verging here on folkpsychology which cuts both ways ? To me that's a distraction from the hard work. What's needed is a detailed case for rational insight (some kind of platonic organ) and not accusations of bias.

Thanks!

Still feel as though the point I was labouring has somewhat slipped the net here — Wayfarer

How so ?

As I see it, we start from something like:

Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images.

What is it we are trying to explain ? Our sociality, our reason, our language. 'Mental experience' and 'images' say something but very little. We have to tell a coherent, plausible story.

As far as I know, we evolved from simpler organisms, and our language also evolved. So any story has to account for the genesis as well as the structure of whatever concepts turn out to be.

I think we both very much care about how logical/rational norms are to be accounted for. A naturalist approach would see us as cooperative beings articulating a more and more complex set of mostly tacit rules. Eventually we learn to talk about these tacit rules, grasp them explicitly, amazed at what we've achieved.

You and I inherit millions of years of research and development. Our DNA and our culture are timebinding or even bound time, compacted trial-and-error.

Eden = no self-awareness. No ability to be uber-deliberative and to thus be existential. There was a time when there was no break. — schopenhauer1

Sure, but they couldn't enjoy it. Youth is wasted on the young.

I tend to hold that such absolutes are probably how human minds are cognitively arranged in order to make sense of reality. Do they map to 'reality'; do they operate outside of a human perspective? — Tom Storm

That's a deep question. As a jolly metaphysician, I'll argue for the primordial unity of the lifeworld. We live in our symbolic sediment which is there in the world as part of its structure. Some people like to think of the image that physics presents as the bottom layer which is finally real. Some say that even this is just projection, that the bottom layer is unknowable (outside the human perspective.) But I say it's all encompassed by the lifeworld , which is just the world before we skim off the human cream as unreal.

Perhaps we can say that some beliefs seem less likely to become incorrect than others, including basic norms (which are often explications of concepts or tautologies anyway ? )

On the same theme - what is your take on the notion that reason requires some kind of guarantor for it to operate. The logical absolutes; identify, non-contraction and excluded middle seem to make reason and math and this conversation possible. — Tom Storm

This to me is the genius of Kant and Hegel as interpreted by Brandom (pragmatic rationalism). We live and move and have our being in a normativity, in a social space in which we all keep score on one another.

(1) Look at which inferences are treated as valid.
(2) Look at [ discursive] selves as avatars held responsible for their claims.
(3) Claims are semantic atoms, not concepts. (We can talk about this if you want.)

Logical 'absolutes' (which are still just norms and in that sense relative) are roughly the most fundamental norms that we'd expect every discursive culture to adopt and articulate. They are perhaps like the incest taboo.

Selves also are almost logical absolutes. The tradition of a ghost in the machine of the body, which is held responsible for telling a coherent story, seems unavoidable. A culture without selves like this would be like a culture without wheels or fire. It's a technology so basic we think it came from god.

Obviously different kinds of existence are considered in philosophy, but on the whole, naturalism and popular philosophy tends towards a flat ontological structure, rejecting the kind of Aristotelian distinctions between different kinds of being, doesn't it? — Wayfarer

I think you can find some bad philosophy like that out there, yes. But it's mostly among those who don't care enough to catch up with the conversation. I'm not saying anyone ever catches up completely, and the conversation won't stop and wait for them either.

FWIW, I also dislike crude scientistic positions that think marriages and promises [ and scientific norms ] are less Real than protons and porcupines. We both see that 'the subject' has to be explained with everything else. In other words, an explanation of the world has to explain its own engendering and legitimacy.

The way we humans model the world – using a rigourous and objectifying method – is also the causal logic of how that world itself works. It is how the Cosmos developed into being. — apokrisis

If memory serves, you lean toward indirect realism. Is that correct ? Are you offering a model or a map that is not the territory itself ? Some understandings of Hegel identity map and territory.

You sound like you want to make the separation secondary to the unity. Which would be the brand of Hegelianism that Fichte popularised. Hegel was striving to do what Peirce actually did. Show how unity is irreducibly triadic. — apokrisis

Yes, I think I was pointing at a primordial unity. But yes Hegel talks of a round trip, also interpreting the Christian Trinity in a new way (I don't remember the details.)

It is a challenging thesis. To self domesticate – become essentially peaceful and cooperative – we had to kill off the violent males until our primate reactive violence was tuned down to a minimum. We had to weed the Neanderthal alphas out of the gene pool. — apokrisis

Intense, but it makes sense. Organized crime is / becomes law.

Shaman rituals through nights in the long house would allow the deed to be debated and coalesce as the agreed right thing. Justification would hang in the air until it developed the weight of inevitability. — apokrisis

The thickening of justification, yes.

It does represent an exile from Eden of sorts. A break. — schopenhauer1

:up:

Eden and that break were created at the same time.

The tricky part for me (in understand your view) is how the metaphysical image constructed by philosophers is related to reality as a whole. Is that metaphysical image actually the complex heart of a self-organizing, self-articulating reality ?

So yes, you can make a dichotomy of the subjective and the objective and so appear to create the two antithetical realms of the mind and the world. You can set up the standard Cartesian dilemma which results in a doubled reductionism. A belief in two disconnected substantial realms. — apokrisis

Perhaps you are misunderstanding me. My point was that such a separation was impossible or confused. The truth is the whole. Entities have their reality or meaning only in relation to other entities. Anything isolated is nonsense. From the point of view of an inferentialist semantics, such entities play no role in inferences and are logically (scientifically, philosophically) null and void, hot air.

The proposition that the finite is ideal [ideell] constitutes idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognising that the finite has no veritable being. Every philosophy is essentially an idealism or at least has idealism for its principle, and the question then is only how far this principle is actually carried out. This is as true of philosophy as of religion; for religion equally does not recognise finitude as a veritable being, as something ultimate and absolute or as something underived, uncreated, eternal. Consequently the opposition of idealistic and realistic philosophy has no significance.
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