Does the plant experience no water, or is it simply not having enough water? — schopenhauer1

Most Some of us tend to treat plants without much care, but my wife is sad when a plant dies though, and she sometimes feels guilt for not watering or sunning it properly.

Rather,it is cultural and habit to care for something that looks like it feels something. — schopenhauer1

Yes, I should have quoted this and worked from it, sorry.

The issue is, in my view, that we don't very well know what we mean by feels something --- except for that (public / external ) cultural habit of doing stuff, of treating stuff kindly. [ Beetles in boxes and all that jazz. ]

It's as if the thought of interior hurt is a mere byproduct of the bodily training, derived from it as a false cause of it.

Well yeah, there’s an irreducible subject-object dualism for sure. I am not the apple. — Jamal

Maybe (?) we could also add that this is not an empirical discovery. 'Dasein' (a person) is not an occurrent object like an apple. We treat 'em different.

me too. — Arne

Cool.

For context, I'm an atheist who still finds theology interesting (as implicit anthropology, or something like that.)

He is letting the future lead the show. The future isn’t the not-yet , but a kind of scaffolding into which the present emerges. The having-been is already shaped and defined by how this scaffolding produces the present, so that is why Heidegger says the past comes to us via the future. — Joshs

:up:

We are always on the way, bringing to fruition, living into or toward a possibility. This organizes our grasp of the world and our past.

One could work ones way up to his language via secondary sources, but there are risks, like taking Dreyfus as a solid authority on Heidegger. — Joshs

Heidegger is quite readable at times. Of course I'd vote for focusing on his own (translated) words first.

Dreyfus is one of many interpreters worth checking out. Rorty's approach in terms of Harold Bloom is also nice. Sheehan. Farin. Derrida. So many.

We are all faithful Hegelbots, doing our best.

Instead of attempting to make Heidegger's statement more understandable, you cover it over, shroud it under a "background". As if, "you can't get there from here". — Fooloso4

I thought you studied Heidegger ? Doesn't everyone know at least this part ? As with Wittgenstein, in the beginning is the deed. At the bottom of The Anyone we find an ungrounded way of doing things. Our spade is turned. This is how one does it. For no deeper reason. A chair is handled as something for sitting on, treated as a tool with that role in a vast system of equipment which we navigate with animal confidence.
*****
Heidegger argues that we ordinarily encounter entities as (what he calls) equipment, that is, as being for certain sorts of tasks (cooking, writing, hair-care, and so on). Indeed we achieve our most primordial (closest) relationship with equipment not by looking at the entity in question, or by some detached intellectual or theoretical study of it, but rather by skillfully manipulating it in a hitch-free manner.
...
...while engaged in trouble-free hammering, the skilled carpenter has no conscious recognition of the hammer, the nails, or the work-bench, in the way that one would if one simply stood back and thought about them. Tools-in-use become phenomenologically transparent.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/#ModEnc
*****

Probably he meant we can't impose our speculations on others as binding.

If they can only be articulated in Heideggerese it proves all those hermetic cult accusations quite true. — fdrake

:up:

And one could even embrace the exclusive cult approach, but to me it's not the way to go.

It also always remains doubtful whether the proposition, God is the most being-like of beings, speaks of God according to divinity. — Joshs

Nevertheless, God is not primordially linked to beyng; because beyng occurs essentially not as cause and never as ground. — Joshs

Negative theology. Which ain't necessarily a bad thing.

As for reading Catholicism into the text -- what can I say? Seems like that's projection. — Mikie

To me it's an influence among others. Why can't it make the work better ?

Heidegger would go out of his way to interpret the most fragmented and obscure text in such way as to support his ontology and in such a way as to suggest that the pre-Socratics agreed with him and he was just returning philosophy to its roots. Simply put, his intellectual honesty is suspect. — Arne

:up:

Fair enough. Personally I don't mind creative interpretations. But one should be upfront about it.

I have stated on many occasions that Heidegger is not a good person for many reasons with his Nazism being foremost among them. — Arne

No need, in my view, to discuss his character again. I dig what he did with his inheritance. I was raised Catholic myself.

And to repeat something I said earlier: consciousness, whatever it is, doesn't extend beyond the brain, and so it's physically impossible for an apple and its properties to be constituents of my conscious experience. It might be causally responsible for conscious experience, but that's all it can physically be. — Michael

I suggest that consciousness isn't doing much work here. Wouldn't awareness be better ? We are aware of distant stars, apples just out of reach.

The light from an apple reaches my nervous system, making it possible for me to talk about it. The apple is not in my nervous system. But the apple I intend (think about, talk about) is indeed the one just out of reach. I lean over to grab it. I don't reach through my ears to take a bite of an image.

There are no problems before consciousness. — schopenhauer1

Before life perhaps. Problems are in the way, a way. Life is directed toward food and reproduction. [ Don't plants hurt ? I don't know. We don't hesitate to cut and burn them. ]

Well, clearly consciousness. Some sort of first person perspective that the person possessing the arm has. Some sort of feeling of what it's like to be that person (ouch!!!). — schopenhauer1

This is plausible but not obvious.

I suggest that the training is much deeper than that. If pushed, then (if we are philosophers) we rationalize this training.

I hope and trust that adult humans would find it difficult to damage an extremely realistic babydoll. I suspect that, even if they rationally knew it wasn't alive, there would be resistance.

In reverse, a computer that passed the Turing test (etc) would be easier to 'kill' because it lacked a lovable relatable mammalian body.

All this makes sense in the light of evolution. Our fancy concepts came last ?

I could not help reading Catholic, even biblical, concepts in between the lines of the text and connotated by H's use of (undefined, cryptic) terms like "being" "authenticity" "ownmost" "resoluteness" "the they" "dasein" "being-towards-death" "forgetting of being" "temporality" etc. — 180 Proof

I agree. He is twisting his inheritance. Falling immersion is a state of [ original, necessary ] sin.

Felix culpa !

I find strange tendrils running between Joyce and Heidegger. (But then Vico and Heidegger are comparable.)

was markedly influenced – though of course not exclusively determined – by his (early) Jesuit education, studying neo-Thomist theology before switching to neo-Kantian philosophy and writing a habilitation thesis (i.e. PhD dissertation) on the Scholastic theologian-philosopher Dun Scotus. Not long after, H would make a considerable study of 'biblical hermeneutics' (e.g. Dilthey & theologian Schleiermacher) which, reformulated, plays a centrol role in SuZ. — 180 Proof

:up:

It follows that we don’t use standards to make that judgement, because there is no judgement--unless the question comes up. And now that the question has come up, we find it difficult to judge. — Jamal

:up:

It's true, Hegel's mind was gigantic. Nobody knows how he got it all crammed into that little skull. — frank

Also should note in passing that Kojeve's Hegel is weird and great (scifi ?) (mixed with Heidegger and Marx.) Brandom's is profound in its relentless reasonableness. Nothing iffy or mysticalsounding is left over but the tower stands glorious anyway.

To repeat again what I said earlier, this is the “illusion” of experience (and in particular sight), and is I believe the driving force behind direct realism. — Michael

Respectfully, you seem to just not yet understand what I'm getting at. It's possible that some direct realist fit that picture, but it should be obvious by now that I do not. No one thinks that the stars we talk about are in our skulls. We know that light travelled vast distances to be interpreted so that scientific judgments are made about entities known as stars. We talk about those distant stars, not about their effects on our nervous system --- even though we depend on our nervous system to do so.

You say: the “illusion” of experience...is the driving force behind direct realism.

Are you not talking about our world, here ? The actual, public concept of direct realism ? Driving forces in others' souls ? External to your own ? Philosophy is normative imposition. It says we ought to think of thinks this way [ if we a rational ]. You appeal to norms to persuade me that your approach is better, more rational.

'Outward'/'externally' directed language.

What does "directly" mean? — Michael

It adds nothing, methodically. It's like 'unmediated.' It denies the middle man. Scraps postulated metaphysical phlogiston.

It's like atheism. Doesn't need or believe in god. It negates god. Let's look at the dead metaphor that's hidden in the word.

direct (adj.)

c. 1400, "straight, undeviating, not crooked," from Old French direct (13c.) and directly from Latin directus "straight," adjectival use of past participle of dirigere "to set straight," from dis- "apart" (see dis-) + regere "to direct, to guide, keep straight" (from PIE root *reg- "move in a straight line"). Meaning "plain, expressive, not ambiguous" is from 1580s.

So why keep introducing references to language, linguistics and language games.

Why say that what really matters are linguistic norms, when linguistic norms are not part of what distinguishes Indirect from Direct Realism, according to your resource. — RussellA

Yes, I accept that provided definition of direct realism as good enough for now.

My defense of this direct realism (of the claim that we have and talk about the world directly) is in terms of semantic norms, what our talk is aimed at, the 'public' tree or chair in our world, the world.

So the linguistic defense is something that I am bringing to the table, in order to defend direct realism, which was already there when I arrived to defend it.

Why say that what really matters are linguistic norms, when linguistic norms are not part of what distinguishes Indirect from Direct Realism, according to your resource. — RussellA

See how you are holding me to linguistic norms, asking me to justify/defend my moves in social space ?

Really? It's true, Hegel's mind was gigantic. Nobody knows how he got it all crammed into that little skull. — frank

Some of it might be projection (finding what you look for), but that cake is crazy rich.

We're not here to read your genius posts. We want you to read ours. — frank

<laughter>

[ See how I heroically deny myself the convenience of emojis. ]

I think maybe this is where it all breaks down. Maybe this is why no aliens will ever have to worry about humans coming along and invading. I worry for my children. — T Clark

:up:

We are rubbing a magic lamp !

Just riff on Hegel and it's usually right. — frank

Yes. And that method may have a wider application ! Rorty jokes about us always finding Hegel ahead of us on the path.

I am grinding coffee beans now because I hope to be drinking coffee soon. I never signed up to be born in a world with coffee in it. It was my fate, the hand I was dealt. Not that I'm complaining.

I speak Joshese. — frank

<smile>

It is good to have a Josh-whisperer. Sometimes I think I also speak that dialect, but maybe not always.

The past remains present insofar as our language and conceptual frameworks were here before us and we think within and strive to think beyond them. — Fooloso4

:up:

Yes. But (as you'll maybe grant) it's not just language, not just thought. Aconceptual competence. 'Mindless' comportment. The way of a man with a maid hammer, the way of a man with a bicycle.

All right my friends I gotta hit the hay. [ Sorry to leave just as you arrive, ]

For the record, I know that the normative approach is counterintuitive !

If you have to advise people not to use certain words, that's a bad sign. There's something you don't want to face. — frank

Please review the context. I think you'll see in this case that Russell is just being difficult. <smile>

I've accepted as much when I said that consciousness is reducible to brain activity. The "moving parts" of my inner monologue is the firing of certain neurons. — Michael

:up:
Cool. So we can agree on embodied cognition.

But perhaps we do not agree that selves are discursive normative entities performed in a social world ?
That language is directed at that shared world ? Toward objects and other selves in it ?

I talk about the tree in the / our world by conforming to various semantic norms.

The term "external" comes from the resource you recommended. — RussellA

Just pretend it's not there. Like I said, close enough.

Not at all. Consciousness might just be reducible to brain activity, and brain activity obviously doesn't extend the brain. — Michael

I claim that the concept of consciousness is something we perform. I personally think the term is more trouble than it's worth in this context.

If there's a "ghost story" at all it's with your theory that consciousness extends beyond the stars. — Michael

Astronomers, while conscious, make claims about far away stars. Their claims are about those star and not their photographs of those stars. They may use photographs of those stars in inferences whose conclusions are claims about the stars themselves.

I suggest that language and its concepts are something we do with our bodies, like an extremely complicated version of wiggling a finger or vibrating a larynx. The [ lonely , singular ] ghost in the machine is a good metaphor for a trained loci of responsibility up to a point, because conventionally bodies are 'given' (treated as containing, while alive ) one 'soul.'

But this normative/discursive entity is still a task or a process that happens materially (in the everyday sense of stuff in the world). It, the mind, does have extension. Mind is something a body does , a patterned way of moving. Even that minimal monologue is moving parts.

Isn’t intentionality a fundamental part of consciousness? Isn’t that pretty much what consciousness is for? — Jamal

:up:

Directedness of human activities, like what an arrow is flying toward ?

consciousness doesn't extend beyond the brain — Michael

To me this is a strange and very questionable statement. This really does sound like a ghost story from over here.

Yes, this relates back to the Kant passage, but it doesn't address the question as to whether we have indirect or direct knowledge of this world. — RussellA

Less is more. But direct.

If the concept pain doesn't get its meaning from private experience, I stub my toe and feel pain, where does it get its meaning from ? — RussellA

Tentative partial answer : community norms governing the inferential relationships between claims in which the concept appears. Meaning is what we do, what one does. Meaning is public. But individuals can shift meanings, be creative, etc. A new meme can take off. Before long we'll be calling bots 'conscious.' Maybe.

I don't think that "the self" is normally defined as part an individual and part the community in which they live. — RussellA

To do philosophy is to impose on (negotiate / update / criticize) conceptual norms. I'm suggesting one way to understand the self. Kant seemed to start this idea. Brandom made it more explicit.

Isn't an external world a mind-independent world ? — RussellA

I suggest dropping that terminology. External to what ? The ghost we have abandoned as a piece of confused theology ? And the world we talk about, for just that reason, is not mind independent. It's an articulated lifeworld, including people pineapples pensions parabolas and perfumes.

Some folks like to think there's some unspeakable mindindependent Really Real World named X. Then they call our world, the only real world we get to peel at, something like an f(X), a function of X. A mere illusion or appearance. Poor us. But all this talk of X is just that.

But all of this machinery looks like an weirdly complicated way to admit that we can be wrong as individuals and wrong as communities. That we can come to know more and more facts, etc.