The "I" is a construct, I am re-reading Descartes soon, but I believe he was aware of this. — Manuel

I would say that the 'I' is indeed a construct in the sense of a social norm. Of course we have individual bodies, so the issue is how these bodies are trained to take responsibility for what they do and become relatively autonomous. You might say that the self is a tradition we perform. Part of this tradition is conforming to logical norms. To be a scientist, for instance, is not to guess randomly and get mad at those who disagree. It's a conformity to more or less explicit rules about presenting and accepting claims. To speak as a philosopher or scientist, is ( I claim) to accept the selftranscending bindingness and legitimacy of these norms. It is to make a move in an always already ideally public space, as if in the light of expectations of telling a coherent story. The coherence of the story that the mouth of the body tells is the coherence of the associated self as a locus of responsibility for just this coherence. So the self is allowed to disagree with others but not itself. To contradict yourself is to fail a social duty, go out of focus. But we aren't perfect, so the self is more like an avatar in social space for a process that strives endlessly toward coherence (and expansion, but that's another issue.)

Hence the incompatibility between transcendental idealism and naturalism. — Wayfarer

Personally I don't want all of Kant's baggage, but I love what Brandom takes from him in that passage.

Naturalism seems like a blurry concept, so I looked it up to confirm: The term “naturalism” has no very precise meaning in contemporary philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/

We can just say that norms are 'primordial' or foundational. Any philosophy that doesn't account for them, despite of course depending on them and existing within and even as them, is incomplete, flawed, confused.

But one need not insist that norms are outside of nature, anymore than beavers' dams are, now is there any obvious reason that Darwinian evolution can't help explain them. To be sure, our linguistic norms are staggeringly more complex than any other creature's that we're aware of. It makes sense that Darwin and Dennett turned their consideration to how memes might use as hosts. Our is it better to say that we are the bundles of memes that use human bodies as hosts ? Layers! We might more reasonably identify with what binds time here (wacky Korzybski, quoted below) [or as bound time] , as the historical noosphere that Hegel and Heidegger seemed to prioritize. Geist. Memeplasm.

And now what shall we say of human beings? What is to be our definition of Man? Like the animals, human beings do indeed possess the space-binding capacity but, over and above that, human beings possess a most remarkable capacity which is entirely peculiar to them-I mean the capacity to summarise, digest and appropriate the labors and experiences of the past; I mean the capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present; I mean the capacity to employ as instruments of increasing power the accumulated achievements of the all-precious lives of the past generations spent in trial and error, trial and success; I mean the capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom; I mean the capacity in virtue of which man is at once the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity.

I thought you weren't a skeptic because this appears to be skepticism.

Do you know what I mean when I refer to a "dog"? I certainly do. I see dogs every day. — Andrew4Handel

Ah I see. So let me be clearer then. We obviously have some kind of average blurry understanding of what words mean. So we can go to the grocery store, chat with the neighbor, etc.

But with metaphysical beliefs this ordinary language takes on new roles. You said: The unity of perception is an immediacy Now it's hard to imagine this is anything like: pass me that screwdriver. So it's fair to ask what exactly or at least more exactly that's supposed to mean. Maybe I tell you : everything is God's will. And for some people that's comforting, as if an itch has been scratched. But what does it mean ?

To me philosophy becomes sensitive to how 'deaf' we mostly are when we toss words around so causally. We have only a hazy idea of what we meme as we pass on the metaphysical gossip.

I see little similarity with Heidegger’s conception of being-in-the-world. — Mikie

Fair enough ! W is so elusive that I can only argue for one assimilation among others equally reasonable. Have you looked at Braver's Groundless Grounds ? He fishes out similarities.

You do seem to be supporting a position of extreme skepticism not warranted by anything we know.

Language works. Someone says "The building is on fire" I leave the building and save my life. Only in philosophy does such an extreme level of meaning skepticism exist that nobody applies to real life. And then we have to clarify which sense of meaning we mean pointless. Semantic meaning is the ability of language to carry accurate information. Language is not a game it works. — Andrew4Handel

I'm arguing from the success of language. I am looking under certain rocks [foundational concepts], not pretending they don't exist or don't do their job. The issue is how. Can we get clearer on what it is we are ? What is it to be a self ?

Consciousness allows for unified perceptions. This logically requires one perceiver which is my self. — Andrew4Handel

How ? Why ? Says who ? I'm not just messing with you. I think there are decent tentative answers to these questions.

The unity of perception is an immediacy. — Andrew4Handel

Says who ? I dare you to say that ten times in a row until its nullity is audible.

As I have suggested if you don't believe in the validity of conscious states and language meaning you can't have a meaningful conversation. — Andrew4Handel

Ah Lou ! [ Fight Club reference ]. I don't doubt the self or language. I'm the opposite of a skeptic in some ways.

The reality of a perception is not a theory. Consciousness and self and language are not theories they are immediacies. Pain is an immediacy. We don't believe we are in pain we just have a state of pain. — Andrew4Handel

No they not. That just they grammar. In other words, that's a kneejerk metaphorical frame which one usually doesn't question, until some 'insane' person loans you a crowbar to pry it off. Maybe maybe maybe there is pain below the concept of pain, but the concept is social --just like the negative concept of immediacy.

I wouldn’t pay attention to it. Regarding in-der-Welt-sein, there’s some evidence of similarities with Daoism. That’s about it. — Mikie

I'm wondering if it's about a kind of monism of prepsychic impressions that get sorted tentatively into self and world ?

Personally I've never seen anything so decisive and explicit on this topic as Heidegger was at his best. I do think the later Wittgenstein is compatible, but (for better or worse) he doesn't methodically lay out theses.

I don't think Hume is a dualist (or Cartesian), do you? — 180 Proof

It's been awhile, honestly. But am I wrong to remember him building everything from impressions of various distinctness ? (So maybe he's a monist like Mach ?)

I feel like skeptics of the self put in almost no effort to characterise it sensibly before dismissing it and as with most of mental content they do not feel under the same obligation as a biologist for example to present something that is solid, testable and can be manipulated. — Andrew4Handel

I think Brandom's theory of the self is pretty good. He bothers to do what Descartes couldn't even grasp as necessary, which was to explicate the philosophical situation itself.

A good reason a for a self is the unity of perception. — Andrew4Handel

I think this is an angle. But what is the unity of perception ? Is this linguistic ? Is it part of our convention or habit of thinking about ourselves as a single ghost trapped in a single skull ? Why can't two fit in there ? Or four and twenty ?

Why can you not believe in the self before someone gives a causal/material explanation for it? — Andrew4Handel

Come away my friend from this Cartesian obsession with certainty.

It's not about whether P is true.
It's about whether we know what the flunk we are talking about when we say P.

We emit these platitudes without hearing ourselves. Proximally and for the most part, we are bots, as I've said before and botlike must say again.

If you can tell me what a self is supposed to be, then I will consider not believing in it. <smile>

This is a strange line of questioning. — Andrew4Handel

I hope so.

I totally agree that it's not so new (being-in-the-world), but I gotta stick up for Heidegger's early stuff before he took up that tiresome style. I'm talking The Concept of Time, Ontology : Hermeneutics of Facticity, stuff like that, made available much later, though written before B&T. Though some of Being and Time, in my view, is actually well written --- I mean the English is enjoyable, words aren't wasted. I'm a bit surprised to see Hume on the list. I totally agree about Witt.

A little more from an inferentialist perspective:

If philosophers fail to define their terms, they get nowhere.

To evaluate this statement is to decide whether we (the royal we of universal rationality) ought to accept the inference as legitimate. To make a case for such a policy, we will have to use still other inferences involving still other concepts that are tentatively accepted as sufficiently legitimate to do so. To me this suggests a huge web of concepts related inferentially with more or less confidence and familiarity.

How is deciding the meaning of a concept like define related to deciding such legitimacy ?

Examples are looked down upon by several philosophers, but they’re often what allow me to first get ahold of a concept, — Jamal

:up:

We see too that artificial intelligence learns from examples, which is probably mostly how we learn.

[ erased an angry post ]

God was used back then by almost everybody, Descartes had no special claim in relation to others in using God as an explanation. — Manuel

But, respectfully, that's beside the point. Whence the rational norms ? Whence this language in or even as which beingthere finds itself ? Whence the unity of the voice that thoughtlessly and credulously takes itself for an 'I' that ought to make a case for its claims ? What's missing here is an awareness of a massive tacit assumption of the philosophical situation itself.

maybe word things differently in other areas, such as the self. — Manuel

Here's a Brandom quote from my Becoming Whole discussion.

Kant’s most basic idea, the axis around which all his thought turns, is that what distinguishes exercises of judgment and intentional agency from the performances of merely natural creatures is that judgments and actions are subject to distinctive kinds of normative assessment. Judgments and actions are things we are in a distinctive sense responsible for. They are a kind of commitment we undertake. Kant understands judging and acting as applying rules, concepts, that determine what the subject becomes committed to and responsible for by applying them.
...
The responsibility one undertakes by applying a concept is a task responsibility: a commitment to do something. On the theoretical side, what one is committed to doing, what one becomes liable to assessment as to one’s success at doing, is integrating one’s judgments into a whole that exhibits a distinctive kind of unity: the synthetic unity of apperception. It is a systematic, rational unity, dynamically created and sustained by drawing inferential consequences from and finding reasons for one’s judgments, and rejecting commitments incompatible with those one has undertaken. Apperceiving, the characteristically sapient sort of awareness, is discursive (that is, conceptual) awareness. For it consists in integrating judgments into a unity structured by relations of what judgments provide reasons for and against what others. And those rational relations among judgments are determined by the rules, that is the concepts, one binds oneself by in making the judgments. Each new episode of experience, paradigmatically the making of a perceptual judgment, requires integration into, and hence transformation of the antecedent constellation of commitments. New incompatibilities can arise, which must be dealt with critically by rejecting or modifying prior commitments. New joint consequences can ensue, which must be acknowledged or rejected. The process by which the whole evolves and develops systematically is a paradigmatically rational one, structured by the rhythm of inhalation or amplification by acknowledging new commitments and extracting new consequences, and exhalation or criticism by rejecting or adjusting old commitments in the light of their rational relations to the new ones.

In other words, you and I are doing being selves right now by trying to live up to this kind of responsibility. I am the kind of the thing, that as an I, must be coherent, or at least minimize incoherence. A self is the kind of thing that can disagree with others but not with itself. It's an avatar on which score is kept in a social space of reasons (inferentially related claims.)

What Newton got rid of was the machine. The ghost remained, and is still here. — Manuel

To me that's like keeping left but not right, up but not down.

That's a great phrase which highlights why I didn't feel comfortable with the original distinction between Semantic/Phenomenological direct realism. — Moliere

Not sure exactly what you mean. In case it helps, for me the lifeworld has birds and blunders that we can talk about. Such articulated entities are just there for us. A (mistaken or less advisable) deworlding approach plucks all the leaves away to find the real artichoke. We acted as though we had tried to find the real artichoke by stripping it of its leaves.

It's a phase for some and a psychological affliction for others. I had a stage when I was around 10-11 of thinking everything was a simulation - although I lacked the wording for this back in the 1970's. I thought of it as a movie being run in my brain by parties unknown. — Tom Storm

Wild ! I'm glad you came out of it. It really does permeate our culture. As we've discussed before, Plato's cave is one possible major source. A certain kind of philosophy is sanctified madness, conspiracy theory made venerable by the distance of centuries, perhaps becomes it gets enough right at times that we ignore its excesses. Or because we need the sci fi.

I will say that Brandom puts conceptual norms between us rather than in us. As I take him, there's no supermatterstuff or supermindstuff. There's us in our shared world in our shared language making claims, and the self is the kind of thing that is held responsible by itself (autonomy) and a community. A dualist might think that meaning is being made into supermatterstuff but that whole framework is irrelevant in a lifeworld which is not mediated by Sensations in the first place. We are always already, as discursive creatures, thrown into one and the same world, the one we talk about, even when we paradoxically try to say that we can never talk about it.

No offense taken, just to be clear. I'm pretty much an antiskeptic. I reject mental images as a bad invention, a bogus middle man, that encourages a mistaken skepticism that hilariously takes for granted the very machinery it hopes to use to hide from reality. I agree with Kojeve's Hegel that skepticism is a 'slavish' ideology -- that it glorifies interiority as a substitute for fighting for status in the real world, possibly at the risk of its life, but certainly at the risk of being made to look foolish.

So my idea now in this thread is like that of Descartes, that our selves and experiences are immune from doubt but external reality is not immune from doubt. — Andrew4Handel

This is consider to have been shown absurd by philosophers who followed Descartes. It assumes all kinds of machinery for which it can give no account. It mistakes itself as exceedingly careful when it's accidentally recklessly credulous. To see where I'm coming from (and it's not your duty to give a damn, of course), you might look into how Heidegger had to fix Husserl, with Husserl being something like Cartersianism done better but not well enough, given the faults in its basic orientation or founding metaphor of its magic bubble.

A lot of things can go wrong in the introspection phase it seem to me... — Tom Storm

Certain metaphors became dominant until young men in 2023, having inherited those hardened and venerated metaphors, think it makes sense that maybe there's really no world and no other people 'out there' beyond their Sensations. And this they say in the name of logic and caution and epistemological responsibility. But they don't see that they take these norms for granted. That amuses and frustrates me, yet I was guilty of that harmless insanity myself once.

Is it held in the notion that I am my world? — Tom Storm

:up:
Yes. Of course any cute summary is liable to objections, but that's part of it. I am not locked behind some screen in a control room. Beingthere is not an object for a subject. I am not hidden away from others in my own immaterial infinitely private bubble. I am in fact mostly the others in terms of 'software,' in terms of tribal norms of what makes sense.

It seems to me to be an act of constructionism, not merely raw experience. — Tom Storm

I'd even claim that the concept of raw experience is itself a philosophical construction, a meme that caught on, perhaps because it was a good crowbar to use against theological tyranny. It mixes well with individualism.

As far as I can tell, you are what I'd call a dualist. I prefer a phenomenological direct realism. The world and language and us and linguistic norms (semantic-inferential) are all 'given' at the same time. I claim they can't be separated, that to do so results in nonsense (which doesn't mean it's obviovusly nonsense given our human frailties and tendency toward motivated reasoning.)The scientific image is within and a nice part of our encompassing lifeworld, which is not mediated for us by internal images or a veil of sensations. The self is not 'in' the brain but something more like a social convention, a dazzingly selfreferential and selfmodifying 'dance' that primates like us have evolved to be able to engage in. Along these lines, ideas are not immaterial but more like equivalence classes of moves in a symbolic game with and in which we cooperate and compete and even largely are, given what might be called the virtuality of the self as a bearer of responsibility for claims and deeds.

I claim that theses presented by a being that takes itself to be doing philosophy, which is to say conforming to a selftranscending and even universally binding logic, implicit assumes while possibly explicity denying a massive framework all too often left ignored and unappropriated. For instance, did Descartes bother to explain rational norms ? Why would an isolated ghost bother to justify its claims ? How could such a ghost question all of the semantic norms that make such questioning possible ? Small wonder that God is quickly smuggled in.

he seems to invoke a structural version of Platonism as a foundational grounding to avoid relativism. — Tom Storm

You aren't the first to point this out, and I think you are correct to do so, and that it's significant. As you probably know, his linguistics is more like physics than what came before ---nice fancy symbolic grammars.

We might talk of the issue in terms of attributing this to hardware (biology) and that to software (culture). Note that biology is inherited in the singular body, so egoistic / personalistic / Cartesian leanings will try to put as much Geist in biology as they can. Or so I would expect.

Do what now ?
:chin:

You have misunderstood me completely. I don't blame you or take it personally. I just want it on record. I may able explain more later.

I have no insight about Life but I am satisfied that human lives are random events, with no capital 'm' meaning, only more modest meanings we inherit though culture and/or make for ourselves. — Tom Storm

It seems to me that any postulated origin will have to be taken as a brute fact, until it is replaced and explained by an earlier postulated origin. I don't see how there won't always be a 'just because' or 'it's our best guess' at the end of a series of answers to a battery of childish/profound why questions.

Everything we are familiar or acquainted with is through experience, this is an "idealist" claim. The metaphysical side is that everything is physical stuff. — Manuel

This sounds like dualism ? Do we only know 'physical' stuff through 'experience' stuff in your view ?

the kind of atheist polemics that are the speciality of Dawkins. — Wayfarer

As I see it, a scientist whose work is particularly threatened by religion's attempt to hamper it is even more justified than most in putting on the philosophers' or citizens' cap and speaking out. To be sure, science is also sometimes attacked or misappropriated by atheistic ideologies, so it's at all just religion, even if that is what Dawkins tends to focus on. Personally I'm more interested in Dawkins as a biologist, so I don't keep up with his polemics, because I can read Peter Gay on the philosophes, etc.

Here's Jefferson:
It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are 20 gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

As I see it, this is why Heidegger had to transform Husserl's phenomenology and make it interpretive. Language is the organ of perception. We can never just start from nothing and gaze at the original thing. Instead we can try to dig around the inherited interpretations that we mistake for the naked thing itself. It's as if layers of sediment obscure a more original phenomenon --- but presumably even here we have a lifeworld articulated metaphorically, so we never get under language but only under a few layers of it, going back in time to a place where a decision can be made differently, back to the fork on a path which is a new freedom for our future now.

I think that's a worthy pursuit. One might even go so far as to say that it's in the vein of knowing yourself. — Moliere

:up:
Exactly!

Spot on. It's easier to fool oneself into thinking something which is contingent is necessary than it should be! — Moliere

I'd even say that our enculturation is largely a being stuffed with contingencies as necessities. So it's as if most of the damage is unconscious. We were never fooled but rather are such foolishness. I think this is what Derrida took from Heidegger. That which deconstructs is precisely that which is deconstructed, our Neurathian raft of the very concepts we use to question that use.

People who get stuck on specific definitions are often irritating pedants and seem to miss the point. — Tom Storm

:up:

[ erased an angry post ]

keeps coming around due to it being part of the traditional readings. — Moliere

Yes. But that's part of my amusement / frustration. One inherits a methodical pretense of isolation behind a screen as the given. The self, its language, its logical norms...all of these are taken for granted. Those who seemingly pride themselves on epistemological humility are accidentally up to their shoulders in yesterday's debunked confusions. But I started in no better a place, and I don't pretend to be able to become unthrown, so (for me) it's a matter of more thoroughly appropriating the hermeneutical situation, getting clear on what I'm projecting unwittingly, on what metaphors might be controlling me without me seeing them. In general, it's a question of the contingent being mistaken for the necessary, like a painted wall we don't think to push against and check.

My philosophy, as I’ve explained at length elsewhere, is that in sentient rational beings, the Universe comes to know itself. — Wayfarer

Darwin is to biology as Hegel is to philosophy. In Darwin, biological evolution finds an eye with which to look at itself. I'm not saying that evolution sought this ability, but a supremely social and symbolic creature indeed emerged that could grasp the structure of its own genesis from primeval slime. (In Hegel we see philosophy (an immortal graveleaping Conversation ) that reaching the point where it could grasp its own nature --- or that's one interpretation that sets up the analogy I was making.)