Nor me. I feel this is his biggest mistake. It leads him to the view we can know nothing about ultimate reality, which is NOt a logical result. But the voidness of phenomena is a matter of analysis. — FrancisRay

How so ? This voidness ?

But what are you when the subject disappears? This is the question that the perennial philosophy answers. This would be our 'end before our beginning' as spoken of by Jesus. . . — FrancisRay

In my view, 'pure' subjectivity is so radically transparent that it's really just the being of the world. I claim that the world has no other being. Or, at least, that we can't know of make sense of some other kind of being than our own (the world's ) perspectival kind.

But I'd be glad to hear more about this 'end before our beginning' as spoken of by Jesus.

Q is enumerable and so is the set of finite sequences of members of Q. The set of infinite sequences of members of Q and R are not enumerable. Okay, some things are enumerable and others aren't. — TonesInDeepFreeze

I know all that, already said it, spent years writing proofs for professors. Not asking random internet guy about the basics of analysis. Tried to ask you about 'subjective' (maybe philosophical) responses to all the symbols that swim like fish in those textbooks you mentioned. You gave a disappointing response, like you are deaf and mute to anything that isn't mere chatbot correctness. I have loved math as a meaningful 'science' of form(s) with some intuitive validity. I care about various formalisms only because they strive to mean something, capture something beyond them. The continuum is a endlessly fascinating beast that great thinkers have wrestled with for centuries. I don't know if you know or care much about mathematical history, but I love the drama. But I'll save that for others who aren't satisfied with the relatively trivial (however difficult at times ) syntactical part.

I don't see it as mystic or foggy. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Not you, of course, because you care about and have studied the details.

I'm talking about how math and physics can be (and often is ) taken from the outside in various metaphysical mystical ways.

But, as Schrodinger points out, as well as the myriad dependent phenomena there is the 'background on which they are painted'. This is what would be truly real. You could think of it as the information space necessary for an information theory, or the blank sheet of paper required for a Venn diagram and set theory, — FrancisRay

This (as you may already know) is pretty close to Heidegger. The background is a kind of elusive 'nothing' that enables all the little things to make sense. It's the enabling framework, mostly transparent, mostly hiding. I can agree with you that this background is more substantial in some sense.

But it should maybe be mentioned that identifying true being with the unchanging is not obviously the way to go, however traditional. Why are we drawn toward the eternal , the durable? Is it a triumph over death? Is it a greater personal achievement ? Akin to a great mathematical or scientific theory ? Note that there too the goal is eternal knowledge. And Milton's (and others poets') goal is to write something that no one wants to forget ---writerly immortality. What is this lust for that which lasts ?

To be truly real a phenomenon would have to be independent, irreducible, non-contingent and unchanging. — FrancisRay

I agree pretty much with the first two requirements, but I don't see why reality can't be in flux --- or why it can't be a brute fact.

I do agree that grandest kind of knowledge is the articulation of eternal necessity, preferably of an independent, irreducible being. This is the knowledge of self-knowing God -- perhaps the knowledge of the seer in a certain state. But, for me, that seer would only be in a beautiful semi-discursive frame of mind. I've had some intense experiences, and I'd explain them in terms of deeply understanding certain myths --as feeling the 'truth' of the symbols / stories. I mean the experience of very high/sublime emotion that allows one to 'get' certain myths. Of course people can't live for long on such heights, but perhaps a residue of the insight sticks. And maybe it's a little easier to get back up there when the conditions are right again.

It ought to be a science of logic, but the views you mention show that few people approach it as such. The voidness of phenomena is a logical result, as Kant shows, but most of these other views fail under analysis and so are profoundly unscientific. — FrancisRay

We may have to disagree here. I don't accept Kant's idea (or what is often taken to be his idea) that we are cut off from reality. I think we are always already 'in' reality, seeing reality. Indeed the vanishing subject, in my view, is reality-from-a-point-of-view. 'I' am not only being-in-the-world but the world's very being, along with you and him and her and them.

But I do very much think that some perspectives (some conceptual articulations of reality) are richer and more adequate than others. I think we do agree on the value of some kind of scientific rational approach.

Agreed in respect of discursive philosophers. For practitioners their authority is direct experience and not speculation. — FrancisRay

:up:

This is interesting. Do you know where it says this in Ecclesiastes? It shows how easy it would be to interpret the Bible as endorsing the perennial philosophy. — FrancisRay

It's very near the beginning. The word 'vanity' in the KJV is a translation of hebel, which could have been translated as 'vapor' or 'breath.' Turns out the hebel is already a rich metaphor in the original Hebrew. All is fog, mist, vapor, even the meaning of hebel, the meaning of saying so.

“Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher;
“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”

3 What profit has a man from all his labor
In which he toils under the sun?
4 One generation passes away, and another generation comes;
But the earth abides forever.
5 The sun also rises, and the sun goes down,
And hastens to the place where it arose.
6 The wind goes toward the south,
And turns around to the north;
The wind whirls about continually,
And comes again on its circuit.
7 All the rivers run into the sea,
Yet the sea is not full;
To the place from which the rivers come,
There they return again.
8 All things are full of labor;
Man cannot express it.
The eye is not satisfied with seeing,
Nor the ear filled with hearing.

That which has been is what will be,
That which is done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there anything of which it may be said,
“See, this is new”?
It has already been in ancient times before us.
11 There is no remembrance of former things,
Nor will there be any remembrance of things that are to come
By those who will come after.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ecclesiastes+1&version=NKJV

I don;t know. I wish a mathematician would tell me but they don't seem to know either/ . — FrancisRay

I'd wager that most of 'em would say not so much. Why aren't people interested in the difference between R and Q ? That is so much more relevant, in some sense. We created a root for 2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Completeness_of_the_real_numbers

The reals are constructed in set theory usually in one of two ways: As equivalence classes of Cauchy sequences or as Dedekind cuts. — TonesInDeepFreeze

:up:

Yes, I've studied both. I've even developed twists on both.

What did you have in mind about the reals? — TonesInDeepFreeze

I have no doubt about the formal correctness of the various popular constructions. I guess I'm interested in the relatively subjective and philosophical issue of meaning. What do we mean with our formalism ? I feel comfortable with the rational numbers. The reals weird and (historically) controversial. The set of computable and therefore countable reals has measure 0. But these are the ones we can know relatively directly. So R is mostly a black and seamless sea in the darkness.

Let's consider the construction from Cauchy sequences of rationals. We try to imagine a subset of all possible infinite 'streams' of rational numbers. We know we can't enumerate them, right ? But we can enumerate Q and all finite sequences in Q.

Note that this is more about feeling than anything technical. It's about motives for adopting this or that formal system. Does the system scratch the itch ? Capture an intuition of magnitude or continuous flow, for instance ?

But I feel mathematicians are somewhat to blame for not being able to explain why the issue is important beyond mathematics, which is where most people live. — FrancisRay

But is it important beyond mathematics ? Do people care much whether a Turing machine halts ? ( I find it interesting, but I find constructions of the real numbers interesting. ) It's a bit like quantum mechanics. There's a kind of mystic fog that hangs around it.

To be clear. it's not just my approach, it's the Perennial philosophy. — FrancisRay

Understood. But, for me anyway, there's no authority beyond something like our own earnestly critical investigation of the matters themselves.

This states that space-time phenomena - , which in Buddhism are dhamma or 'thing-events' ,- are conventionally real but ultimately unreal. — FrancisRay

I'm not against that. Indeed, I agree with Hegel that the finite is 'unreal,' 'fictional,' [merely] conventional. Reality is one and continuous. I also like Ecclesiastes: all is hebel. Everything is 'empty.' See there how the great void shines.

Metaphysics has to reduce the many to the one, and if we assume the many is truly real this cannot be done. — FrancisRay

I'd say metaphysics is a kind of grand science, and that it projects illuminating metaphors on the whole of reality. For instance: 'all is vanity [empty].' Or: 'all is one [connected, interdependent].' Of course people like to say that 'all is mind' or 'all is matter' too. Or that all is God creating and recognizing itself. Or that all is 'a tale of sound and fury signifying nothing.'

You mention 'truly real,' which is like 'really real.' I'm not against it, but the question for me is almost always one of meaning. What does is mean to call something 'real' ? Of course I know well enough in dozens of ordinary contexts, but what does this or that metaphysician mean? 'Of course all things are really empty.' I can relate to that one, which means: it's our investment in a game that gives it life. Beauty is (largely) 'in' the eye of the beholder. We [spontaneously, unconsciously] 'project' a grand meaning on this or that, but this or that is straw dogs, cast away after the ceremony. The cat chases a red light on the wall. That light is 'nothing.'

Here's Locke's version of what's maybe the classic dualism of modern (subject-centered) philosophy. Note that Kant (in one dimension) merely radicalized his influences, making even matter in motion part of appearance (depending, as it does, on time and space).

To discover the nature of our IDEAS the better, and to discourse of them intelligibly, it will be convenient to distinguish them AS THEY ARE IDEAS OR PERCEPTIONS IN OUR MINDS; and AS THEY ARE MODIFICATIONS OF MATTER IN THE BODIES THAT CAUSE SUCH PERCEPTIONS IN US: that so we may not think (as perhaps usually is done) that they are exactly the images and resemblances of something inherent in the subject; most of those of sensation being in the mind no more the likeness of something existing without us, than the names that stand for them are the likeness of our ideas, which yet upon hearing they are apt to excite in us.

11. How Bodies produce Ideas in us.

The next thing to be considered is, how bodies operate one upon another; and that is manifestly by impulse, and nothing else. It being impossible to conceive that body should operate on WHAT IT DOES NOT TOUCH (which is all one as to imagine it can operate where it is not), or when it does touch, operate any other way than by motion.

12. By motions, external, and in our organism.

If then external objects be not united to our minds when they produce ideas therein; and yet we perceive these ORIGINAL qualities in such of them as singly fall under our senses, it is evident that some motion must be thence continued by our nerves, or animal spirits, by some parts of our bodies, to the brains or the seat of sensation, there to produce in our minds the particular ideas we have of them. And since the extension, figure, number, and motion of bodies of an observable bigness, may be perceived at a distance by the sight, it is evident some singly imperceptible bodies must come from them; to the eyes, and thereby convey to the brain some motion; which produces these ideas which we have of them in us.
...
15. Ideas of primary Qualities are Resemblances; of secondary, not.

From whence I think it easy to draw this observation,—that the ideas of primary qualities of bodies are resemblances of them, and their patterns do really exist in the bodies themselves, but the ideas produced in us by these secondary qualities have no resemblance of them at all. There is nothing like our ideas, existing in the bodies themselves. They are, in the bodies we denominate from them, only a power to produce those sensations in us: and what is sweet, blue, or warm in idea, is but the certain bulk, figure, and motion of the insensible parts, in the bodies themselves, which we call so. — Locke

This is how the physical study of primary qualities escapes being a mere study of appearance. Reality in its fullness is filtered for purity. The gray result is stripped of color and value. What's left Newtonian machinery abandoned by Deism's demiurge -- blobs of stuff that bump into one another in the void.

So, facts come into being with us. Not 'the universe', but there is no meaningful sense of existence in the universe prior to this act of formulation (as naturalism never tires of telling us). — Wayfarer

I sometimes think our views are pretty close, but your insistence on the pure subject seems to require a pure object (the ever-hidden-from-us world-in-itself.) @Leontiskos joked that he couldn't tell our positions apart (including J.S. Mill), but there is a difference. I think I'm defendning a nondual monist perspectivism, while you are defending some kind of still-dualist twist on Kant. But I may not understand you (and our views are naturally evolving as we talk and think.)

Here's a key point:
Permanent possibilities of perception turn out, in my view, to be pretty much all most people can and do mean by some [ mind- ] independent world.

What we mean when we say the mountain was here before us as a species is something like : if we could somehow visit with a time machine, we'd see the same old mountain. Kant discusses the possibility of beings on the moon in CPR, and notes that asserting their existence involves implicitly asserting the possibility of perceiving those beings. So experience is the foundation of sense. FWIW, this seems very close to Husserl's view. And phenomenology can be viewed as primarily negative and critical, as Wittgensteinian 'critique of language,' pointing out (like Kant) our tendency to talk in round squares and light without darkness.

Of course! That's the point! — Wayfarer

But you seem (to me) to be flitting from position to position. Either it makes sense to talk about some object apart from all subjectivity or it doesn't. Kant seemed to feel the need to glue on an empty concept, to get distance from Berkeley. But I think he should have just embraced the perspectivism implicit in most of his thinking.

Plenty of materialists (like Hobbes) are indirect realists. If you are (now) only saying that appearance is not reality, then how is that different from the usual dualistic scientism ? 'The table is really [latest physics theory stuff]. ' Or 'love is really just [brain chemistry].'
But physics stuff (I think we agree) is only meaningful within a lifeworld like ours. It makes no sense to say the world is really [some mere aspect or fragment of that world. ]

.

The consequence of rejecting truth is that anything goes, which of course means that the nature of the world is determined by those with power. — Banno

I choose this is a mere sample. Maybe 2/3 of your post was just (I'm sorry ) sentimental sophistry. I agree with some of your criticism of pragmatism, but they are irrelevant here. My 'rejection of truth' was a clarifying explanation of the concept truth in terms of what I suggest is a more basic concept: belief. I take belief to be something like the conceptual dimension of a perspective on the world. The [my] world is [when reduced to such a dimension] 'all that is case.' Something 'being the case' is fundamental. You might have this in mind when you try to derive belief from truth. Perspectively, they are the same thing. I call my own beliefs true, but I say perhaps that you are deluded.

A corollary of this is that to say that you believe p is to say that you believe that p is the case; that p is true. Hence belief presupposes truth. — Banno

Maybe we aren't that far apart after all. My belief is (I claim) just the 'meaningstructure' of the world from my point of view. I live 'in' that structure. It may change, but it is real now. It is 'my truth.'

I am my world...The world is all that is case.

I'd make assertion or conceptual structure itself fundamental. The world is 'always already' meaningfully ( logically, linguistically ) structured, at least for sentience which is also sapience. This world is 'for' that sapience, and its meaningstructure is the belief of that sapience. It's a minor detail we could debate, but I'd include silent realizations. I can update my beliefs without telling anyone right away.

I think Wittgenstein was something like a perspectivist in this way:

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Logic fills the world: the limits of the world are also its limits... In fact what solipsism means, is quite correct, only it cannot be said, but it shows itself. ...That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of the language (the language which I understand) mean the limits of my world. — TLP

You might suppose (and at times seem to propose) that you can get by this by working with what is most useful, regardless of it's truth. — Banno

I've explicitly rejected this pragmatic criterion in many posts. Note that I don't need to get around anything in the first place. Purveyors of mystic truth syrup are in the position of having to make a case. To call P true is basically [only] to communicate (and, secondarily, reason about) [ one's belief that ] P.

I think this gets it pretty much right:

The truth predicate is not used to say something about sentences or propositions. It is used to say something about the world. As Grover (1992, p. 221) puts it, prosentences function “at the level of the object language.” Even when someone makes an utterance such as “John’s last claim is true”—which uses a referring expression that explicitly mentions an antecedent utterance token—the prosentential theory still denies that it is the utterance that is being talked about. The person uttering this sentence “expresses an opinion about whatever (extralinguistic thing) it was that John expressed an opinion about” (Grover, 1992, p. 19). W. V. Quine (1970, pp. 10-11) makes a similar claim, stating that the truth predicate serves “to point through the sentence to reality; it serves as a reminder that though sentences are mentioned, reality is still the whole point.”

https://iep.utm.edu/truthpro/

I suggest understanding belief as the intelligible structure [conceptual aspect ] of the world as given to or grasped by a person. To be troubled by doubt is to have a blurry or flickering world. Did I forget to set my alarm ? Does she like me ? Will I get caught if I only take a little bite ?

That we seek 'better' beliefs is not so problematic, for many of us have beliefs about what makes beliefs better. A closer walk with God, whatever.

It seems to me, that no one sees around their own perspective to some 'naked' reality, because that 'reality' would not be meaningfully/linguistically structured. So reality-from-no-perspective is mystic nonsense, at least for creatures like us. Our beliefs (the current linguistic-conceptual structure of the world from our perspective) might always change, some more plausibly than others, of course.

Your reply is that all we have is better and better beliefs. — Banno

I say only that we tend to settle beliefs, when troubled by cognitive dissonance, and that we often tend to understand ourselves as making progress, that we 'know better' now --- we write Whiggish autobiographies. The 'race realist' finally 'sees the light.' Someone is 'red pilled' or 'black pilled' or whatever) and understands themselves to see the world more correctly or completely now. An observer might see decline and ruin. But 'ground truth' presupposes someone infallibly in touch with the mystic Real, someone who isn't just another believer.

Yes, we are self-reflexive (i.e. strange looping phenomenal-self-modeling) objects in which this self-reflexivity is completely transparent making each of us the "subject" of a narrative delusion (i.e. ideality, or supernatura) that s/he is not – is ontologically separate from – objects (i.e. reality, or natura). — 180 Proof

:up:

Perhaps you can share any thought you might have on Spinoza's perspectivism, and connections to Wittgenstein's 'I am my world.' https://iep.utm.edu/spino-ep/#SH2b

He retains his substance monism by affirming the existence of the great variety of ways humans, and moreover all beings, can have knowledge as being so many ways God expresses himself. If all ways of knowing are ways God is known, then God himself, insofar as he is absolutely self-causal and self-expressive, would have to thereby know himself through and as all the different ways he is known. Therefore, from the perspective of God, God knows himself in an infinity of ways, while we, in our everyday existence and from our finite perspective, are just so many of these infinite ways God can both inadequately and adequately know all of reality as himself. — link

https://iep.utm.edu/spino-ep/#SH2b

I tend to understand this in terms of the 'subjects' being 'views' on a single Nature --- being Nature-from-an-embodied-in-Nature-perspective. Nature is 'painted' ( lit up, revealed ) by 'subjectivity' as if God was a cubist.

Subjectivity is light as the being or possibility of color, or something like that.

Idealism is just a rejection of the independence of impenetrability, space, time and emergent phenomena, yet often proposed by people who thinks they have asserted anything what so ever of their own, by imagining that the "mind" could be a substance when the very essence which depicts it hinges on being dual to something different from itself, something different from mind. — Julian August

:up:

I think your 'rejection approach' is good. The word 'idealism' will be difficult or impossible to rescue, but I like Hegel's understanding thereof:

The proposition that the finite is ideal [ideell] constitutes idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognizing 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.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hlbeing.htm

Another way to put this is that the lifeworld (the whole of experience) is a kind of unbreakable unity, a continuous flow. We can analyze it, but plucking out an object and a subject, for instance, is engaging in something like useful fiction. The subject (as you seem to point out) is part of a dyad, and part of 'experience.' But if the subject is not absolute or fundamental, it's not even 'experience' anymore but just what is.

Objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds. Nor do they have features, because features correspond to categories of animal sensation. This is the way the early universe was before the emergence of life—and the way the present universe is outside the view of any observer.

But Pinter's featureless stuff here is empty of content. This is close to Hobbes' view, who took only matter in motion to be real (independent).

The cause of Sense, is the Externall Body, or Object, which presseth the organ proper to each Sense, either immediatly, as in the Tast and Touch; or mediately, as in Seeing, Hearing, and Smelling: which pressure, by the mediation of Nerves, and other strings, and membranes of the body, continued inwards to the Brain, and Heart, causeth there a resistance, or counter-pressure, or endeavour of the heart, to deliver it self: which endeavour because Outward, seemeth to be some matter without. And this Seeming, or Fancy, is that which men call sense; and consisteth, as to the Eye, in a Light, or Colour Figured; To the Eare, in a Sound; To the Nostrill, in an Odour; To the Tongue and Palat, in a Savour; and to the rest of the body, in Heat, Cold, Hardnesse, Softnesse, and such other qualities, as we discern by Feeling. All which qualities called Sensible, are in the object that causeth them, but so many several motions of the matter, by which it presseth our organs diversly. Neither in us that are pressed, are they anything els, but divers motions; (for motion, produceth nothing but motion.) But their apparence to us is Fancy, the same waking, that dreaming. And as pressing, rubbing, or striking the Eye, makes us fancy a light; and pressing the Eare, produceth a dinne; so do the bodies also we see, or hear, produce the same by their strong, though unobserved action, For if those Colours, and Sounds, were in the Bodies, or Objects that cause them, they could not bee severed from them, as by glasses, and in Ecchoes by reflection, wee see they are; where we know the thing we see, is in one place; the apparence, in another. And though at some certain distance, the reall, and very object seem invested with the fancy it begets in us; Yet still the object is one thing, the image or fancy is another. So that Sense in all cases, is nothing els but originall fancy, caused (as I have said) by the pressure, that is, by the motion, of externall things upon our Eyes, Eares, and other organs thereunto ordained. — Leviathan, close to the beginning

What is 'original fancy' ? How has Hobbes and has ilk got around human cognition ? Matter in motion seems very much based on visual and tactile perception. Kant was 'right' in some sense to put everything on the side of the subject, right up to the Hegelian edge.

I've followed your math posts for a long time, and I appreciate the care you take to get things right. I'm not a logician, but I have studied math, and I can see you know what you are about. It'd be a digression here, but if you feel like discussing the real numbers (including perhaps constructions or the intuitive foundations thereof ), that might be fun.

You’d like Deleuze’s approach. He distinguishes between the virtual and the actual. Both are real; the virtual is the problematic field within which actual events arise and disappear — Joshs

I like some of what I've seen from Delueze. He's on my list, etc. If you feel like curating some gems, I'd be glad to see them.

By the way, Ong's Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982) is great. I bumped into it at a used book store. Good stuff.

I agree with Aquinas. I count myself a direct (perspectival, phenomenological) realist. We see things themselves, not our images of them. But, following Husserl, we can see them with more or less clarity. And we see them from a perspective. Language generally intends the social-common object. This alone is a strong argument for direct realism. The stuff we argue about it is in our world. Don't know if this'll interest you, but I argue for a kind of minimal foundationalism here. We share a world and a language and various norms for discussion and inquiry to even adopt the role of philosopher in the first place.

I also consider thought to be plenty real. I'd even say that possibility exists in a fairly strong sense. A certain kind of scientistic materialism basically filters out about 90% of that which is and calls a remainder Real. This is practically and sometimes maybe even ethically justified. (A pluralistic, free-ish culture has reason to put various entities safely 'all in one's mind' and leisure and personal space.)

Okay. Can you give a quick overview of what you mean by perspectivism and correlationism? I have seen these words used in different ways. Generally speaking, I am inclined to lump you, Wayfarer, and Mill together. :razz: It seems like you are all saying that reality cannot be known as it is in itself. Or in Wayfarer's words, "Reality has an inextricably mental aspect." — Leontiskos

This quote nails it for me.
Correlationism consists in disqualifying the claim that it is possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another. Not only does it become necessary to insist that we never grasp an object ‘in itself’, in isolation from its relation to the subject, but it also becomes necessary to maintain that we can never grasp a subject that would not always-already be related to an object.

To me it's important to lean toward neutrality rather than subjectivity. Consciousness is the [only] being of the world itself. The world is world-for, and the subject is world-from-a-point-of-view. Wittgenstein whittles it down nicely in the TLP. See <5.6>.

I am my world. (The microcosm.) The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing. If I wrote a book "The world as I found it", I should also have therein to report on my body and say which members obey my will and which do not, etc. This then would be a method of isolating the subject or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject: that is to say, of it alone in this book mention could not be made. The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world.

I would myself tweak that last line. The subject is the [from-a-perspective] being of the world. Ontological cubism.

In my view, this is not so much a positive theory as a challenging of the intelligibility of a certain kind of talk. Permanent possibilities of perception turn out, in my view, to be pretty much all most people can mean by some independent world. Or what else do/can they have in mind ? A round square ? A mystified X ? Kant writes about the possibility of beings on the moon, and he correctly interprets claims of their existence in terms of the possibility at least of experiencing them. In the same way, the mountains that might outlast our species are, seems to me, understood as the mountains-for-our-species, as what they are , in theory, 'not.'

Okay. But this is not a metaphysical idea. In metaphysics the idea that time and space are truly real doesn't survive analysis. It is a difficult idea for sure, but not incomprehensible. Ive been quoting Kant, Leibnitz and Weyl, who all endorse the unreality of space-time. So did Erwin Schrodinger, and as far as I can make out modern physics seems to be arriving at the same conclusion. . — FrancisRay

I see the charm of the idea. Reminds me of (as you say) Kant. And of course Schopenhauer. The Will is the Real 'behind' the Veil. That sort of thing.

To me this is using 'real' honorifically. It's another version of what I'd call filtering. Some of experience or being is declared 'unreal,' while a precious kernel, possibly only available to an elite, is honored with the label 'Real.' In many contexts, this makes sense. Real gold as opposed to fool's gold. Real quality, real insight. Ironically, this real insight is 'ideal.' The ideal marriage, etc. The perfect circle, which can never be instantiated in its perfection but makes the instantiation of circles possible (meaningful) in the first place.

So I'm not again your approach, but I favor an inclusive approach. It's all real. Confused daydreams are real, and they exist in the style of confused daydreams. All entities are semantically-inferentially linked in a single nexus. Language is directed at the one common world.

Philosophy, in my view, is largely about drawing our attention to neglected aspects of the real. This often involves seeing around old metaphors that hide structure. We see only what we were told to expect to see. It's hard to look with our own eyes, that sort of thing.

Then, finally, there's still a filter, but it's more about articulating general aprior forms of 'experience' (world-streaming), such as the tripartite structure of the rubber moment.

This is from a different section focused on thought, but time is central:

In all our voluntary thinking there is some topic or subject about which all the members of the thought
revolve. Half the time this topic is a problem, a gap we cannot yet fill with a definite picture, word, or phrase, but which, in the manner described some time back, influences us in an intensely active and determinate psychic way. Whatever may be the images and phrases that pass before us, we feel their relation to this aching gap. To fill it up is our thought's destiny. Some bring us nearer to that consummation. Some the gap negates as quite irrelevant. Each swims in a felt fringe of relations of which the aforesaid gap is the term. Or instead of a definite gap we may merely carry a mood of interest about with us. Then, however vague the mood, it will still act in the same way, throwing a mantle of felt affinity over such representations, entering the mind, as suit it, and tingeing with the feeling of tediousness or discord all those with which it has no concern.

Relation, then, to our topic or interest is constantly felt in the fringe, and particularly the relation of harmony and discord, of furtherance or hindrance of the topic. When the sense of furtherance is there, we are 'all right;' with the sense of hindrance we are dissatisfied and perplexed, and cast about us for other thoughts. Now any thought the quality of whose fringe lets us feel ourselves 'all right,' is an acceptable member of our thinking, whatever kind of thought it may otherwise be. Provided we only feel it to have a place in the scheme of relations in which the interesting topic also lies, that is quite sufficient to make of it a relevant and appropriate portion of our train of ideas.

For the important thing about a train of thought is its conclusion. That is the meaning, or, as we say, the topic of the thought. That is what abides when all its other members have faded from memory. Usually this conclusion is a word or phrase or particular image, or practical attitude or resolve, whether rising to answer a problem or fill a pre−existing gap that worried us, or whether accidentally stumbled on in revery. In either case it stands out from the other segments of the stream by reason of the peculiar interest attaching to it. This interest arrests it, makes a sort of crisis of it when it comes, induces attention upon it and makes us treat it in a substantive way.

...
The ordinary associationist−psychology supposes, in contrast with this, that whenever an object of thought contains many elements, the thought itself must be made up of just as many ideas, one idea for each element, and all fused together in appearance, but really separate.[35] The enemies of this psychology find (as we have already seen) little trouble in showing that such a bundle of separate ideas would never form one thought at all, and they contend that an Ego must be added to the bundle to give it unity, and bring the various ideas into relation with each other. We will not discuss the ego just yet, but it is obvious that if things are to be thought in relation, they must be thought together, and in one something, be that something ego, psychosis, state of consciousness, or whatever you please. If not thought with each other, things are not thought in relation at all. Now most believers in the ego make the same mistake as the associationists and sensationists whom they oppose. Both agree that the elements of the subjective stream are discrete and separate and constitute what Kant calls a 'manifold.' But while the associationists think that a 'manifold' can form a single knowledge, the egoists deny this, and say that the knowledge comes only when the manifold is subjected to the synthetizing activity of an ego. Both make an identical initial hypothesis; but the egoist, finding it won't express the facts, adds another hypothesis to correct it. Now I do not wish just yet to 'commit myself' about the existence or non−existence of the ego, but I do contend that we need not invoke it for this particular reason − namely, because the manifold of ideas has to be reduced to unity. There is no manifold of coexisting ideas; the notion of such a thing is a chimera. Whatever things are thought in relation are thought from the outset in a unity, in a single pulse of subjectivity, a single psychosis, feeling, or state of mind.
http://www.public-library.uk/ebooks/50/61.pdf

Here's some more wood for the fire. Not offered as authority, but perhaps as an influence on Husserl. Both he and Heidegger mention James by name within their work.

Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
...
The practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time. The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were -- a rearward -- and a forward-looking end.[5] It is only as parts of this duration-block that the relation of succession of one end to the other is perceived. We do not first feel one end and then feel the other after it, and from the perception of the succession infer an interval of time between, but we seem to feel the interval of time as a whole, with its two ends embedded in it. The experience is from the outset a synthetic datum, not a simple one; and to sensible perception its elements are inseparable, although attention looking back may easily decompose the experience, and distinguish its beginning from its end.
...
In the experience of watching empty time flow -- 'empty' to be taken hereafter in the relative sense just set forth -- we tell it off in pulses. We say 'now! now! now!' or we count 'more! more! more!' as we feel it bud. This composition out of units of duration is called the law of time's discrete flow. The discreteness is, however, merely due to the fact that our successive acts of recognition or apperception of what it is are discrete. The sensation is as continuous as any sensation can be.
...
Let me sum up, now, by saying that we are constantly conscious of a certain duration -- the specious present -- varying in length from a few seconds to probably not more than a minute, and that this duration (with its content perceived as having one part earlier and the other part later) is the original intuition of time. Longer times are conceived by adding, shorter ones by dividing, portions of this vaguely bounded unit, and are habitually thought by us symbolically.
https://genius.com/William-james-chapter-xv-1-the-perception-of-time-annotated

FWIW, I think a certain kind of knowledge strives to transcend both time and space --to be valid or worthy at all times and places. But this is the only kind of negation of space and time I can make sense of. It's a negation of the relevance of where 'o clock for the divine thinking that is everywhen and all ways.

To be 'punctiform' is to be a point with no extension. Thus the 'eternal now' is outside of time.and should not be thought of as a brief amount of time. In this sense time is not punctiform.

These problems arise for space and time and for the numbers and the number line and Weyl dismisses all of them as a fiction. The idea that any of then are made out of points is paradoxical/. He concludes that the idea of extension is paradoxical when we reify it, and endorses the 'Perennial' explanation of extension as a fabrication of mind. . — FrancisRay

So are you saying that space is an illusion ? Along with time ?

I would say it is the pure present we only experience as a fiction , and that, most primordially, the only thing we do experience is the tripartite structure of time. — Joshs

:up:
Even Hobbes was on to this. I'll just offer a sample, but the chapter 'Of Man' is surprisingly temporally aware.


And because in Deliberation the Appetites and Aversions are raised by foresight of the good and evill consequences, and sequels of the action whereof we Deliberate; the good or evill effect thereof dependeth on the foresight of a long chain of consequences, of which very seldome any man is able to see to the end.
...

Continual Successe in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth, that is to say, continual prospering, is that men call FELICITY; I mean the Felicity of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual Tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because Life itself is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Feare, no more than without Sense. What kind of Felicity God hath ordained to them that devoutly honour him, a man shall no sooner know, than enjoy; being joys, that now are as incomprehensible, as the word of School-men, Beatifical Vision, is unintelligible.
...
If the Discourse be meerly Mentall, it consisteth of thoughts that the thing will be, and will not be; or that it has been, and has not been, alternately. So that wheresoever you break off the chayn of a mans Discourse, you leave him in a Praesumption of It Will Be, or, It Will Not Be; or it Has Been, or, Has Not Been. All which is Opinion. And that which is alternate Appetite, in Deliberating concerning Good and Evil, the same is alternate Opinion in the Enquiry of the truth of Past, and Future. And as the last Appetite in Deliberation is called the Will, so the last Opinion in search of the truth of Past, and Future, is called the JUDGEMENT, or Resolute and Final Sentence of him that Discourseth. And as the whole chain of Appetites alternate, in the question of Good or Bad is called Deliberation; so the whole chain of Opinions alternate, in the question of True, or False is called DOUBT.




https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm#link2H_4_0038

Sorry but I don;t quite understand your post. What do you mean by 'independent object'? . . — FrancisRay

I mean the idea of something existing which cannot even in principle be perceived, something like 'things in themselves,' when it's also assumed they are only ever mediated by appearances -- by phenomena in the crude prephenomenological sense.

You might like the read Herman Weyl's famous book on the continuum. — FrancisRay

I do love that kind of stuff.

He correctly states that we do not experience time. It is a fiction created from memories and anticipations. This is what Husserl means by saying time is stretched. It has to be stretched in order to creatr the illusion that we are experiencing it. The 'eternal now' is what Weyl calls the 'intuitive continuum, which is unextended, and the fictional time we seem to experience he explains as a theoretical construction. — FrancisRay

To me the situation is tricky. I think there is an 'eternal now' in the sense that there is a form of the present, but this present is not punctiform. Husserl famous analysis of hearing a melody is sufficient, in my opinion, to prove this (to allow us to notice it, to see around the encrusted punctiform tradition.

Since temporal objects, like a melody or a sentence, are characterized by and experienced as a unity across a succession, an account of the perception of a temporal object must explain how we synthesize a flowing object in such a way that we (i) preserve the position of each tone without (ii) eliminating the unity of the melody or (iii) relating each tone by collapsing the difference in the order between the tones.

Bergson, James and Husserl realized that if our consciousness were structured in such a way that each moment occurred in strict separation from every other (like planks of a picket fence), then we never could apprehend or perceive the unity of our experiences or enduring objects in time otherwise than as a convoluted patchwork.

https://iep.utm.edu/phe-time/

I also read James' Principles of Psychology lately, and he is great on this issue in that book. It's not just melody but the flow of meaning itself (in a spoken sentence perhaps) that is 'stretched' and non-punctiform. Consider the experience of reading these words. There is a stream of presence, retention and anticipation. An entangled trinity.

Yes, which is why I think Heidegger’s critique of internal time consciousness as a metaphysics of presence is a bit unfair to Husserl. — Joshs

:up:

Yeah, reading Husserl directly has been eye-opening for me. Ideas II was clearly an inspiration for Heidegger, along with so much else. Heidegger had that existential sexy factor going, then the scandal. I still think Heidegger is great, but perhaps Husserl's star will shine at least as bright in the long run.

But it's a much bigger and braver idea that leads beyond phenomenology and perhaps this is why he lost followers. — FrancisRay

:up:

To me it's still feels pretty bold to doubt the 'independent object.' It reads almost like impiety, even if one is an atheist.

I tend to interpret Husserl as sharing my concern with semantic legitimacy. What does (what can) it mean for something to exist radically apart from the subject ? Or, to be fair, to feature a subject without a world ? If I say the world will go on without the human species, what kind of world am I thinking of but that which was given in correlation with the human spectator ?

If I say that aliens exist on a far away planet, I [ must ] mean that they are potentially perceivable, at least in theory. Our spaceships may not be fast enough yet, etc.

It's something else entirely to speak of the paradoxical or self-contradictory. And phenomenology is often, in my view, just the calling out of such paradox and bluff.

Husserl shows that (the 'experience' of ) time is stretched. There is no pointlike now, except as a useful mathematical fiction (the glories of $\Bbb R$). But the gap between the so-called experience of time and time itself is also a fiction. 'Time in itself' is silly talk, 'decadent' metaphysics without an intuitive foundation.

I claim the world exists only perspectively, and we humans live as much in possibility as we do in actuality. So possibility is real, existing as a blurry anxious uncertain situation. Our narrower concept of the External reality as pure actuality and pure pointlike now-presence is a handy fiction, which corresponds to a maximally generic subjectivity, a dead camera without a temporal dimension.

It's as if some variant of deism is popular, where what's left of the creator is just its glorious machine, which can run in the dark forever , somehow meaningful but ineffable if one is honest, for all perception must be stripped away if it is to run divinely in perfect darkness and silence. Its divinity is its radical independence.

Phe­nomenology's purely intuitive, concrete, and also apodictic mode of demonstration excludes all "metaphysical adventure", all speculative excesses.

:up:

Here's Husserl in a text about first philosophy.

Genuine rational life, and in particular genuine scientific research and achievement, must, by means of radically clarifying reflection, completely transcend the standpoint of naiveté. It must—ideally speaking—furnish a fully sufficient justification for each step it takes, while at the highest level this justification must come from principles obtained with insight.

Through the high seriousness with which Plato, in this Socratic spirit, seeks to overcome anti-scientific skepticism, he becomes the father of all genuine science. He does so, first, by refusing to take lightly the Sophistic arguments against the possibility of valid knowledge and of a science that would be binding on every rational person, instead subjecting these arguments to a deeply penetrating, fundamental critique. Together with this, he undertakes the positive search for the possibility of such a knowledge and science, doing so (while being guided by the deepest understanding of Socratic maieutics) in the spirit of an intuitive clarification of essences and an evident exposition of the general essential norms of such a science. And finally, he strives with all his powers to set genuine science itself into motion on the basis of such fundamental insights.

Husserl describes this pure ego pole as non-perceivable, non-graspable and anonymous. “...the ego which is the counterpart (gegenüber) to everything is anonymous. “ This suggests that for Husserl, the pure ego may function as nothing but an empty zero point or center of activity. — Joshs

Which is basically what Wittgenstein offers in the TLP, and which seems right to me. The subject is time (or being becoming) . But this zero-point clearing, as time or being has a perspectival self-like care structure of motivated sentience.

I understand the motivation of calling it a transcendental ego, but I try to avoid the wrong kind of idealism, which errs in the same way as a naive adoption of the independent object.

The point is that phenomenology is exclusively concerned with observable phenomena or appearances and has nothing to say about the origin and essential nature of phenomena. Thus it is defined as being free from any claims concerning existence. It doesn't stray onto metaphysics but is a non-reductive approach. Nothing wrong with this but it cannot produce a fundamental theory. — FrancisRay

Ah, I see. That's a reasonable way to understand bracketing. But phenomenology is a big tent. Husserl alone was amazingly prolific and always revising (his work is too large and complex for me to begin to pretend to have mastered it. But I see that mountain of it. And once Husserl embraced transcendental idealism (and lost some worthy followers), he was a full-fledged metaphysician doing first philosophy. Doing it pretty well often enough it seems to me.

Time is that within which events take place.
...
Time is initially encountered in those entities which are changeable; change is in time. How is time exhibited in this way of encountering it, namely, as that within which things change?
...
What is this now, the time now , as I look at my watch? Now, as I do this; now, as the light here goes out, for instance. What is the now? Is the now at my disposal? Am I the now? Is every other person the now? Then time would indeed be I myself, and every other person would be time. And in our being with one another we would be time — everyone and no one. Am I the now, or only the one who is saying this?
...
What is involved in the fact that human existence has already procured a clock prior to all pocket-watches and sundials? Do I dispose over the Being of time, and do I also mean myself in the now? Am I myself the now and my existence time? Or is it ultimately time itself that procures for itself the clock in us? Augustine, in the Eleventh Book of his Confessions, pursued the question so far as to ask whether spirit itself is time.
...
"In you, I say repeatedly, I measure time; the transitory things encountered bring you into a disposition which remains, while those things disappear. The disposition I measure in present existence, not
the things that pass by in order that this disposition first arise. My very finding myself disposed, I repeat, is what I measure when I measure time. " — early lecture The Concept of Time ---the ur Being and Time

Or is it ultimately time itself that procures for itself the clock in us? I think it was Gadamer who summarized Being and Time with 'being is time.' Existence is time, which I understand in terms of a dynamic steaming of what might have been called experience if we weren't more wary now of taking the 'experienced' subject as more fundamental than the 'experience' (streaming being.)