I haven't looked that deeply into Hoffman's claims. I will admit that. I saw some of his interview with Lex and recognized something akin to a self-subverting psychologism.

if one doesn't trust in our ability to use logic, or that the world is rational and that this rationality is comprehensible to us... Down that road lies true, radical skepticism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, though I'd call it inarticulate madness. As long as still makes earnest claims as a philosopher, one must assume, explicitly or not, a share language in a shared world that one can be wrong about. Norms of rationality are also presupposed in the notion of philosopher as opposed to an emitted of random words or careless conjectures which are not modified in response to criticism. Something like Sellars' space of reasons makes worldly objects intelligible in the first place.

How do I know a person is depressed? If he tells me, and is honest about it, then I can assume he is depressed. He could be lying. I cannot enter his head. — Manuel

The conception of depression as a hidden mental state is itself the incorrect presupposition here. Wittgenstein's beetlebox thoughtexperiment shows this. Words cannot get/have their meaning from secret/private experience.

We all knows what 'causal' means in the ordinary sense. Same with 'mechanical'. The meaning of both just consists in one thing acting on another to bring about effect, change, event or process. — Janus

Of course we know well enough for practical purposes how to sling these tokens. That's never been in question. What I'm trying to point out is this structural hopscotch from 'cause' to 'thing' to 'effect' to 'event' and so on. The being of meaning seems to be distributed over the whole system rather than concentrated in a particular bark or squeak. I don't deny that saying 'dog' can trigger a certain image. But 'cause' and 'event' are terribly blurry.

If we think that if we don't know what words mean or refer to, then we cannot understand ourselves to be asking the questions about meaning or reference in the first place. — Janus

I've already said myself (in other words) that semantic finitude can only finitely or imperfectly specify itself. As convenient as it might be for those uncomfortable with the issue, this is not a simple case of "communication is impossible," which is of course self-cancelling. It's obviously, given the quotes, well within the philosophical tradition.

***
The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.... As a part of the system of language, one may say “the sentence has life”. But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. But whatever would accompany it would for us just be another sign.
***
What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar”. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these secure points, and in consequence goes on merely along the surface.
***

This is not about some kind of authority of those quotes but to show that the tradition has tended to give a damn about whether and how it knew what it was talking about. What are we who think ? What is thinking ? What is meaning ? It'd be folly to expect some simple answer here. In fact, I expect this project to go on forever, but not without progress, with the sign 'progress' also being used in unpredictable ways (taking on new 'meanings') in the process.

One can never be mistaken about what one sees. — RussellA

If this is true, it's not a discovery about seeing but only about the grammar of 'see.'

But I don't think it's even simply true, though I understand that philosophers want some word or another for the given about which one cannot be wrong.

This buys certainty at the cost of all significance ?

He is not arguing that no one knows antoehr;s private sensations, so much as that if there are any private sensations then by that very fact they cannot be discussed. — Banno

:up:

"The world" is nothing more than the idea of what our individual images and ideas of a world seem to have in common; it is a collective representation. — Janus

You are presupposing in what you say that we all already exist in some (the same) actual world. Where are we supposed to be alive and looking at these screens (our individual images) ? In the intersection of the images on those screens ? That makes no sense.

It's as if you imagine a framework of dreamers who each live in their own secret dimension and yet somehow communicate and negotiate an official shared world, as if we are writing a novel together remotely. But the concept of world, the one that matters, is most basically something like our shared situation. We can be wrong about living on a planet. But we can't be wrong about the possibility of being wrong about something.

The minimal rational assumption is a (shared ) languageworld. Else there is no way to argue and no something to be wrong or right about.

"Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as much as possible; let us chase our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appeared in that narrow compass." — Manuel

This Hume quote includes the veil-of-ideas (intuitions, perceptions) presupposition I was talking about. As I see it, it's just a metaphor gone wild, which results in quasitautologies mistaken for discoveries. One defines perceptions as the ownmost given and everything else is conjecture...but what of the context that makes 'perception' intelligible ? The sight of others' eyes seeing ? Is not this sight the root for a theory of perception ? But then it depends on the reality of the world it pretends to break into mere perceptions.

One might have an intuitive feel for identifying true wisdom without possessing it oneself, just as one might intuitively recognize great music, art or literature without being able to produce it oneself. — Janus

The music metaphor is complicated.

Did you hear that old joke about 12-tone music ? 'It's better than it sounds.'

We probably mostly agree. I'd just reject the binary concept of X in the first place and say that we are drawn to those who get enough right that we live in hope for more such quality and tolerate with self-doubt or at least permissive gratitude their seeming failures. This puts us back down on earth, within a continuum. We know roughly what we are looking for because we already have some. And the stuff we are looking for is strangely self-clarifying. Perhaps the journey is toward a greater sense of the meaning and nature of that journey.

Something I think about is that even though language on the whole has a possibly infinite number of meanings, any one token of meaning can't have any more than some finite number of meanings. "token" as in token/type. — Moliere

You can think of an infinite number of tokens in a certain sense by adding context to each traditionally conceived token. You might never use 'token' twice in the same context. We can also imagine sentences as tokens for a countable infinity. And so on. But you make a good point about the reuse of words. There's a paper out there about the use and efficiency of ambiguity. Our short words tend to be ambiguous. We've learned to lean on the practical context to cheapen the cost of babble.

But regardless of all that, surely we must be able to use language? — Moliere

Sure. We are practically successful. There are billions of us. I imagine philosophy as wanting a tighter and tighter grip and yet a larger and more articulated view of the world. To solidify and sharpen what we mean manifests something like a will to power and beauty. Why does a cat groom itself ?

is troubled by a necessarily doomed search for a causal or mechanical explanation... — Janus

What exactly do you mean by 'causal' or 'mechanical' though ?

The problem of meaning haunts everything, which is not to say that it itself is not haunted in return. But that gets us back to the structuralism half of my point.

Referential meaning is the aspect of meaning that is determined by the relationship between language and the world, while expressive meaning is the aspect of meaning that is determined by the speaker's intentions and emotions. — Wayfarer

This implicitly casts intentions and emotions as otherworldly or outerwordly, evading our embodiment. Language is marks and noises in the world, not a layer smeared on top of it. (Please add an 'in my view' in front of all my claims. It'll save us both time.)

According to Katz, meaning is not simply a matter of convention or social agreement, but is rather grounded in the structure of reality itself. He contends that the meaning of a linguistic expression is not determined solely by its social context or by the intentions of the speaker (contra the 'natural language' philosophers) but rather by real facts about the world to which it refers. — Wayfarer

I'd go so far to say that it is the structure of reality in some sense. And I'd say that of course it's determined by real facts of the world -- and that social context and intentions are themselves such facts.

The idea that there is some meaningless stuff beneath appearances is, as I see, a confusion suggested by 'mental experiences,' as if humans are looking at the screen and not the world. It's the fear of error here which is the cause of that error. The metaphor of the control room in the skull is the most successful conspiracy theory in history. It's The Cave writ small. Atoms and intentions and toothaches exist on the same plane, or they could not signify (objects are obviously not just clumps of sensation but exist in a space of reasons -- but we need not take reasons as immaterial in any simple sense.)

A great deal of what has gone on in 20th c philosophy has been concerned with overthrowing such tropes. — Wayfarer

Yes, and 'tropes' is a good word. They were just taking seriously the directive to know thyself. The 'rational animal' is the symbolical linguistic animal, the metaphysical metaphorical animal. What is the nature of meaning ? How are meaning and being entangled ? Can we still believe in a static notion of meaning, in the midst of our towers and rockets and chatbots ?

There is an entire domain of conventional meanings, one would hope. — Wayfarer

Yes, there is something going on. But maybe Aristotle got it backwards. It's the 'external' synchronization that leads to the 'logical illusion' of 'internal' forms.' The language and its 'equivalence classes' (forms, concepts) are more feasibly cogenerated by our constant practical interaction which includes, among other more energy-intensive modifications of our shared world, the imposing of marks and noises called signs or words. We are so profoundly social and linguistic that the 'ghost' in the each of our machines is mostly the same ghost, which is how we mostly cooperate and understand one another.

Heh. That's the question! I don't believe in forms, and yet I believe words mean. It sounds like platonism of some kind, but I don't think that's really believable either. — Moliere

I believe language means also, I just don't know exactly what it means to say so. So I'm a semantic finitist rather than a semantic nihilist, right ?

Here's Lakoff:
It is a system of metaphor that structures our everyday conceptual system, including most abstract concepts, and that lies behind much of everyday language. The discovery of this enormous metaphor system has destroyed the traditional literal-figurative distinction, since the term literal, as used in defining the traditional distinction, carries with it all those false assumptions.
***

As Derrida noted, metaphor is itself a metaphor. What the hell does it mean to call something a metaphor ? If metaphysics is metaphorical, then metaphor is playing a metaphysical role in the structure as center or basis. I call this the blurry go round. It's a merry hurrying through the fog.

Writing can be taken as primary to speech, where speech is phono-centric writing. — Moliere

Right. And if metaphors are central and mostly visual, then our talk aimed at the ear is nevertheless hieroglyphic and aimed at the inner or spiritual eye. Now I'm an atheist, so this spiritual eye is an organ for geist or culture or symbol interpretation. Given that the etymological fallacy is indeed a fallacy, what is the strange process of metaphors being 'lifted up' or transfigured so that they bear metaphysical import thereafter ? How does breath become spirit ? How does dirt become primordiality or the apriori ? How does image become trans-ocular form ?

Writing is a chasing after — Moliere

Yes! I agree. Philosophy is that chase. The chase for clarity ? Power ? Beauty ? Novelty ?

We leap from stone to stone, from sign to sign, trying to say it.

Trying to say what saying is ?

how do we know what the sign is? Isn't it that which is always-already meaningful? — Moliere

That sounds right, but how do we define 'meaningful' ? That which signifies ? Is the sign "that ill-named thing, the only one, that escapes the instituting question of philosophy...what is it?" ?

To me something like being-in-the-world-together-with-language is an unbreakable unity. If you try to break it, you end up talking nonsense.

Is "grounded" the right relationship to seek? And if so, what even is grounding? — Moliere

Beautiful question. Because 'ground' is a metaphor. We want our feet on the ground.

But perhaps we could talk of them hanging from the ceiling ?

I usually just take meaning as basic. Being a competent speaker of a language means knowing meanings, and we seem able to use English. — Moliere

But we are back to grounds and foundations this way :

'Basic' => 'base '= > "bottom of anything considered as its support, foundation, pedestal"
https://www.etymonline.com/word/BASIC

Is taking meaning as basic a kind of platonism ? Are meanings 'basically' forms ?

I don't dispute our practical skill with the language and the way we glide glide glide.

The transistors are at a deeper layer, but I wouldn't say that the transistors are "more real" than the tree. — Manuel

:up:

I like to insist that promises and marriages are no less real and no more real than quarks and crossbows. They are all caught up in a single system that gives them sense (or in a system that is their sense.)

For me the essence of Heidegger is thinking of historicity and what it entails. It's as if he purified and amplified and liberated a Hegelian insight about our 'software.' Lately I'm reading Emerson this passage seems Heideggarian in its historicity.

A man's genius, the quality that differences him from every other, the susceptibility to one class of influences, the selection of what is fit for him, the rejection of what is unfit, determines for him the character of the universe. A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him, wherever he goes.
He takes only his own out of the multiplicity that sweeps and circles round him. He is like one of those booms which are set out from the shore on rivers to catch drift-wood, or like the loadstone amongst splinters of steel. Those facts, words, persons, which dwell in his memory without his being able to say why, remain, because they have a relation to him not less real for being as yet unapprehended. They are symbols of value to him, as they can interpret parts of his consciousness which he would vainly seek words for in the conventional images of books and other minds. What attracts my attention shall have it, as I will go to the man who knocks at my door, whilst a thousand persons, as worthy, go by it, to
whom I give no regard.
...
No man can learn what he has not preparation for learning, however near to his eyes is the object. A chemist may tell his most precious secrets to a carpenter, and he shall be never the wiser, — the secrets he would not utter to a chemist for an estate. God screens us evermore from premature ideas. Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream. — Emerson

https://emersoncentral.com/ebook/Spiritual-Laws.pdf

To squeeze the Heidegger out of this, we need to imagine the man as the personification of his generation. A generation's genius hardens into anyone's idle-talk with the arrival of the next. A man is a method. If there is no object apart from this subject (if this division is confusion), the being itself is significant ('conceptual','linguistic') and historical (sedimented with interpretedness.)

The second passage seemingly describes grasping or uncovering a phenomenon. The difficulty of interpretation is emphasized. I can pour the correct words in your ear, and you in mine, with no result. For we are not just our generation but also, of course, individuals. We run local snowflake-unique modifications of the tribal software.

I don't think we have any serious disagreements then. The mentalistic talk is great for practical purposes. I do think Sellars' and Popper's criticisms of the given are convincing though. To me the idea is that there is no 'bottom' or 'elemental' kind of 'pure experience.'

we see appearance not the reality of transistors — Art48

But why stop with transistors ? They are also abstractions or icons in a particular framing of the situation.

Consider also that certain structures are curiously independent of their 'medium' or 'host.' A proof of the infinity of the primes is not reducible to the paper it happens to be printed on. Equivalence classes matter. It's hard to figure out their status.

:up:

Nietzsche wrote of the necessity of a hard heart, and I think he was right. This doesn't mean I don't like being kind. But life is indeed pointless is if it's a sin to enjoy it just because others can't.

I also agree that the value of life is undecidable in terms of strict logic. I can't prove that birth is an evil fate or a wonderful blessing. I express myself in such a judgment. I even commit myself perhaps. The envelope is the letter. Some 'prophecies' (expectations) are largely self-fulfilling.

Perhaps consciousness is something that networked cooperative/competitive brains do. I think was already implicit, but perhaps emphasizing sociality is helpful. Is the metaphor of the thin client helpful here ? What about cloud computing ? If we approach consciousness as language or software, something not in but between bodies, does that help ? I believe this is implicit in the theme of enaction.

Maybe the opening poster will benefit from a step away from the usual egocentric veil-of-ideas Cartesianism (I don't mean 'egocentric' ethically but just in terms of a focus on [oxymoronic?] individual consciousness.)

This adds some context.

The same reality pervades all teaching. The man may teach by doing, and not otherwise. If he can communicate himself, he can teach, but not by words. He teaches who gives, and he learns who receives. There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you, and you are he... — Emerson

If the teacher is successful, he clones himself. (I mean he clones the relevant part of himself.) If there is a binary predicate like Is-enlightened, then one torch lights another. The fire is the fire and never the torch, though it depends on their being some torch or another as its host or hardware.

Predicates are more feasibly continuous than discrete and binary. In this case, perhaps the novice is drawn by a conceptual music he can understand well enough to strive for further clarification. Maybe this is why we can quote great names without it being idolatry. If a person makes one brilliant point, we are on the lookout for a second victory, and we linger longer over ambiguous gifts.

Now at this point it would feel like I’m lying to myself to say and or pretend other people exist. I can’t live a life like that, pretending I’m feeling something or caring about someone that doesn’t truly feel the same to me. I just can’t imagine living like that. — Darkneos

It sounds like a bad situation. I think you should consider getting some professional help. I've wrestled with negative compulsive thoughts before, and it's something a person can get over. At least I did, and it's been a long long time since I've wrestled with that kind of problem. I remember it was terrible.

It's also the most awesome and wonderous adventure ever, imo. — universeness

It can be beautiful and amazing indeed. I know that those current tormented will only be further nauseated by that kind of talk, just as I have been when I was low. Terror and wonder and beauty and diamonds and diarrhea.

if it as was done by Locke and Hume, I don't see it as a trap, but then it is also misleading to call it a "veil". — Manuel

How would you fix the issue ? As far as I can tell, it's by looking at sense organs like the eyes and talking to people in the world that we develop the idea of a perspective on the world. This idea seems to evolve until the self is understood to have only indirect access to the world, throwing the very existence of that world into doubt. Incorrigible ideas or intuitions are taken as The Given -- as basically 'mental' even though the framework of a body with sense organs in the world is put in question.

To me the 'self' and the 'mental' only make sense in a lifeworld that includes their opposites. They are pieces of a social semantic system that don't work on their own.

While structuralism suggests one kind of ambiguity, metaphoricity suggests another. In short, we are savages trading hieroglyphics.

Lakoff and Hofstadter both write that cognition is metaphorical, but the idea is older. In the narrower context of metaphysics, Anatole France had a character make the case.

I was thinking how the Metaphysicians, when they make a language for themselves, are like … knife-grinders, who instead of knives and scissors, should put medals and coins to the grindstone to efface … the value… When they have worked away till nothing is visible in these crown pieces, neither King Edward, the Emperor William, nor the Republic, they say: ‘These pieces have nothing either English, German, or French about them; we have freed them from all limits of time and space; they are not worth five shillings any more ; they are of inestimable value, and their exchange value is extended indefinitely. — Garden of Epicurus by Anatole France

The idea is to examine metaphysical terms etymologically and find the original metaphors. Ideas turn out to be images. The soul turns out to be breath. And so on. The referee blows her whistle at this point, because we are on the verge of the etymological fallacy. Or are we ? Once 'image' is used enough in a new way, a new 'concept' is indeed created (perhaps as this new way of using an old word.) So the 'hieroglyphic' for image is now understood to refer to something like a FORM. In the same way, the word 'breath' can lose its association with lungs and air and become consciousness or the subject.

Metaphysical words aren't meaningless, but their status is strange. They float over an abyss, one might say. How is their meaning to be grounded ? If it all ?

The critique of phonocentrism also detaches (elusively pure) "meaning" from the voice. If what is poured in the ear is mostly signs evoking images, we like to drink our hieroglyphs with the mouths on the side of our face.

Not crazy about Blood Meridian but it is extraordinary. I prefer Cormac's Suttree... talk about the blues.... — Tom Storm

I've debated getting into Suttree. I am now more motivated.

Love Deadwood. Best TV I ever saw. — Tom Storm

Same here. I can't think of anything better. Is there anything as good ? There are many great moments in Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Succession. But none of these shows overflow with one great fusion of writing and acting after another. Deadwood is like Shakespeare and Dostoevsky and Bukowski (and ?) somehow got put on the screen in full vividness.

I think Arrested Development is as good as any comedy I've seen, but that deserves another category. Very different experience.

It's tough being human. I've been reading The Denial of Death lately. It really brings home what an accomplishment it is to operate with relative sanity. We are like gods stuffed in dying meat. It's a weird thing to learn to have fun with.

I think Raymond Tallis put it best when he said that if Hoffman really believes we didn't evolve for truth, but only for survival, then why should he trust his experiments which rely on evolutionary arguments being true as a necessary condition for how own view? — Manuel

Exactly. And this also works against any 'veil-of-ideas' metaphysics. The idea that we are trapped behind a screen is itself based on the content of that screen.

We are argue that that from which we argue is an illusion.

I think you need to infinitely nest your Cartesian theatre image. The mini-me needs his own control-room in the skull, with its own screen that shows the first screen. And then mini-mini-me needs...

Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as if there were only quantum wave functions?

Why could it not be that snakes and trains are just what quantum wave functions look like, viewed by an evolved organism?

What exactly makes snakes and trains not real? — Banno

:up:

:up:

Last point. You can also think of signs as imperfectly repeatable patterns in the 'tornado' of what we humans do on this planet. It's as if there were a mindscape. It's a good metaphor for certain purposes. It's as if there was a ghost in the machine. This metaphor made a certain kind of sense along with a certain kind of nonsense. The problems arise when yesterday's optional metaphors are misunderstood by today as necessity, as brutely given and 'obvious.' This to me is why a focus on what we even think we mean is so often appropriate.

Establishing the mind-independent existence of abstract objects (numbers) might be hard enough, — Jamal

To me there's also the problem of establishing what one even means or can mean by mind-independent abstract objects. It's a bit like the hunt for round squares.

I'm puzzled why there have been so many posts about the word "exist". — Art48

To me it's the opposite of puzzling. One of the things a philosopher does is help people see that they don't or only barely know what they are talking about. The obvious and the familiar are exactly the rocks under which our deepest and most hobbling prejudices hide. Or that's one theory.