A little more Husserl, from the same section: §52. Supplementations. The Physical Thing as Determined by Physics and the “ Unknown Cause of Appearances
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We need only understand it correctly. By no means ought we to fall into either the picture-theory or the sign- theory, the fundamentally wrong theories which we considered ear­ lier without particular regard to the physical thing as determined in physics and which we likewise refuted in a radically universal manner.66A picture or a sign refers to something lying outside it which would “itself5be seized upon were we to go over into a different mode of objectivation, into that of presentive intuition. In themselves, a sign or a picture do not “make known” the designated (or depictured) affair itself.67 The physical thing as determined by physics, however, is nothing foreign to what appears sensuously “in person;” rather it is something which makes itself known originaliter in it and, more particularly, apriori (for indefeasible eidetic reasons) only in it. Accordingly, even the sensuous determination-content of the X which functions as bearer of the determinations ascribed in physics is no clothing foreign to these determinations and hiding them: rather, only because the X is the subject of the sensuous deter­minations is it the subject also of the determinations ascribed in physics which, for their part, make themselves known in68 the sensuous determinations. According to what has been set forth in detail, it is necessary that a physical thing, and precisely the physical thing of which the physicist speaks, can be given only sensuously in sensuous “modes of appearance;” and the identical appearing in the changing continuity of these modes of appearance is what the physicist subjects to a causal analysis69 in its relationship to all experienceable (thus perceived or perceivable) concatenations which can be considered as “circumstances,” an exploration with respect to its necessary real connections with them. The physical thing which he observes, with which he experiments, which he continually sees, takes in his hand, puts on the scale or in the melting furnace: that physical thing, and no other, becomes the subject of the predicates ascribed in physics, such as weight, temperature, electrical resistance, and so forth. Likewise, it is the perceived processes and concatenations themselves which become determined by means of concepts such as force, acceleration, energy, atom, ion, etc. The sensuously appearing thing, which has the sensuous shapes, colors, odor- and taste-properties, is thus anything but a sign for some other thing; rather it is, so to speak, a sign for itself.

Only this much can be said: The physical thing appearing with such and such sensuous determinations under the given phenomenal circumstances is, for the physicist, who has already carried out in a universal manner for all such physical things, in phenomenal concatenations of the sort in question, their determination by means of concepts peculiar to physics, an indicative sign of a wealth of causal properties belonging to this same physical thing which, as causal properties, make them­ selves known in phenomenal dependencies of familiar sorts. What makes itself known here — by being made known in intentional unities pertaining to mental processes of consciousness — is obviously something essentially transcendent.

According to all this it is clear that even the higher transcendency characterizing the physical thing as determined by physics does not signify reaching out beyond the world which is for consciousness, or for every Ego functioning as a cognizing subject (singly or in an empathic context).

Indicated in a universal way, the situation is this, that the thinking pertaining to physics establishes itself on the foundation laid by natural experiencing (or by natural positings which it effects). Fol­lowing the rational motives presented to it by the concatenations of experience, it is compelled to effect certain modes of conception, certain intentional constructions required by reason, and to effect them for the theoretical determination of sensuously experienced things. Precisely because of this there arises the contrast between the physical thing as object of the sensuous imaginatio simpliciter and the phys­ical thing as object of the physicist’s intellectio; and, for the latter side, all the ideally inherent ontological formations produced by thinking accrue which become expressed in the concepts peculiar to physics and which draw, and should draw, their sense exclusively from the method of natural science.
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Note that Husserl uses transcendent in his own way. The object transcends all of its adumbrations as something like their intentional unity. I walk around the same tree but what is given to my eyes is constantly different as I keep looking at it in its singularity.

I take Husserl to understand the scientific image as a mere enrichment of the manifest image. It should not be understood as a mathematical analogy for something that lurks under or behind the manifest image. The table is the one I got from my uncle, and it's also made of atoms. The table is a 'transcendent' object that is never given to my eyes all at once. Nor do I grasp its essence all at once. Reality has depth and horizon, not given immediately in all of its fullness, but we are not cut off from it. Sense organs are real and not absurdly their own product.

There can be no asserted being without a subject, and there can be no actual being without an object. — Bob Ross

I think you are aiming at something like what I call the entanglement of the object and subject. They cannot be isolated without absurdity.

Indeed, I think the being-in-a-world-with-others-in-language is a single phenomena with different aspects. People try to snap off pieces and end up in performative contradiction and nonsense. As a philosopher, I cannot reject this minimal foundation, because it's basically already implicit in the concept/project of philosophy.

I totally respect going at Heidegger's themes without the baggage. I love Heidegger, especially the earlier stuff, but it's still nice to try to find a different vocabulary and different vector of approach. At the moment I'm kneedeep in Husserl, also great.

This is from Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible. I find it moving and helpful on these issues and thought I'd share.

We see the things themselves, the world is what we see: formulae of this kind express a faith common to the natural man and the philosopher— the moment he opens his eyes; they refer to a deep-seated set of mute “opinions” impli­cated in our lives. But what is strange about this faith is that if we seek to articulate it into theses or statements, if we ask ourselves what is this we, what seeing is, and what thing or world is, we enter into a labyrinth of difficulties and contradic­tions.

What Saint Augustine said of time— that it is perfectly famil­iar to each, but that none of us can explain it to the others— must be said of the world. [Ceaselessly the philosopher finds himself] obliged to reinspect and redefine the most well-grounded notions, to create new ones, with new words to desig­nate them, to undertake a true reform of the understanding— at whose term the evidence of the world, which seemed indeed to be the clearest of truths, is supported by the seemingly most sophis­ticated thoughts, before which the natural man now no longer recognizes where he stood. Whence the age-old ill-humor against philosophy is reanimated, the grievance always brought against it that it reverses the roles of the clear and the obscure. The fact that the philosopher claims to speak in the very name of the naïve evidence of the world, that he refrains from adding any­ thing to it, that he limits himself to drawing out all its conse­quences, does not excuse him; on the contrary he dispossesses [humanity] only the more completely, inviting it to think of itself as an enigma.

This is the way things are and nobody can do anything about it. It is at the same time true that the world is what we see and that, nonetheless, we must learn to see it— first in the sense that we must match this vision with knowledge, take possession of it, say what we and what seeing are, act therefore as if we knew nothing about it, as if here we still had everything to learn. But philosophy is not a lexicon, it is not concerned with “word-meanings,” it does not seek a verbal substitute for the world we see, it does not transform it into something said, it does not install itself in the order of the said or of the written as does the logician in the proposition, the poet in the word, or the musician in the
music. It is the things themselves, from the depths of their silence, that it wishes to bring to expression.

Philosophy is a strange business. I'm about to complain that an ordinary expression that I understand as well as anyone else is incomprehensible. — Ludwig V

FWIW, Merleau-Ponty describes the philosopher as exactly the kind of person who finds the ordinary mysterious and full of complexities. The most basic concepts are perhaps the most elusive and difficult. The philosopher returns again and again to the beginning.

Can we not reject the split, except as a methodological tool for understanding one aspect of a single world? — unenlightened

Exactly. The heart of all of this is holism. Fundamental ontology is a holism that doesn't cut corners or rip out a mere aspect or piece of reality and try to put it under the rest.

Yeah, I'm more trying to encapsulate the difficulties of physicalism than present the creed for adoption. It's dead, but it continues as a zombie to consume life. — unenlightened

It may be a parasite on the glory of technology. Granted that we worship power, any philosophy that seems to ride that particular coattail is a good bet. A rising politician needs a sophist to write speeches, not some angsty phenomenologist or a suspiciously detached Socrates content with no more than the conditions for the possibility of free-critical truth-seeking conversation. I might start another thread about the unworldly foolishness of the philosopher as opposed to the pragmatic sophist.

In a world with actual physics and cosmology, psychology and neuroscience, sociology and anthropology and linguistics, what philosophy has to offer on the nature of reality or thought or human social life is, shall we say, quaint. — Srap Tasmaner

I understand why one might make such a claim, but my concern is that a personality uses just that kind of statement, which I'd call philosophical, to navigate the world. What I'm trying to point out is the idea of a grand narrative for an individual or a culture in which central concepts like science and philosophy are placed in a kind of order.

More anecdotally, I formally studied math, and at my institution this study was utterly devoid of any 'philosophy' that interpreted what it all meant. I took some physics as well, and it was the same deal. People trust bridges and pollsters without knowing the first thing about real analysis. Right ? I think there's maybe a default tech-worshipping pragmatism where a philosophy 'should' be but never actually was. The philosophy is a bit of a fool at the feet not of the scientist but of the engineer, and the scientist is largely beside him -- or at least I'm not sure that sociology, for instance, isn't just as 'idealistic' and pitiful in a certain sense before this tower we build for 'Moloch.'

Blueness and pain are qualia. They are unnecessary subjective experience. and unexplained. — Patterner

In my view, blueness and pain are actually just as caught up in the causal nexus and 'logical space' as everything else. Pain is used to explain behavior. Aspirin is used to explain the cessations of pain. As I see it, there's only one network of concepts whose meanings are radically interdependent.

It is certainly odd that people so often forget that the scientific version of colour is also the product of experience - that's what "empirical" means. — Ludwig V

Yes. There's a default indirect realism that crumbles upon close investigation. I saw things like that myself once. It's probably because I was a science nerd and liked to think that tables were 'really' X. I probably absorbed it from nerdy teachers.

Anyway, Kant seemed to see that the others didn't go far enough. He put everything on the side of appearance but an unspeakable void. The really real shrunk to something infinitely distant, an absurd conclusion that suggests problems with the premises. Or that's how I grasp the situation at the moment.

I think I agree with you, only I'm not sure what you mean by "this image" (which image exactly?). — Ludwig V

Ah, excellent question.

PSIM describes what Sellars sees as the major problem confronting philosophy today. This is the “clash” between “the ‘manifest’ image of man-in-the-world” and “the scientific image.” These two ‘images’ are idealizations of distinct conceptual frameworks in terms of which humans conceive of the world and their place in it. Sellars characterizes the manifest image as “the framework in terms of which man came to be aware of himself as man-in-the-world” (PSIM, in SPR: 6; in ISR: 374), but it is, more broadly, the framework in terms of which we ordinarily observe and explain our world. The fundamental objects of the manifest image are persons and things, with emphasis on persons, which puts normativity and reason at center stage. According to the manifest image, people think and they do things for reasons, and both of these “can occur only within a framework of conceptual thinking in terms of which [they] can be criticized, supported, refuted, in short, evaluated” (PSIM, in SPR: 6; in ISR: 374). In the manifest image persons are very different from mere things; things do not act rationally, in accordance with normative rules, but only in accord with laws or perhaps habits. How and why normative concepts and assessments apply to things is an important and contentious question within the framework.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sellars/#PhilEnteImagHumaWorl

Physicalism has a bit of a blurry meaning, so I'll try to more carefully specify that what I'm challenging is the intelligibility of the species-independent 'pure' object. I freely grant that mountains and mothers are independent of any particular individual human being, at least in a powerful sense that rules out crude egocentric. But I don't think we can talk more than nonsense and round squares about a world apart from human cognition. It's almost tautological, and yet the simplest things are sometimes slipperiest.

Scare quotes for "the mind" because it seems to imply a universal generalised 'realm of ideas' in which your mind and my mind float ethereally in a universe of ideas, supping on the nourishing philosophies that abide there and remaining essentially disembodied. — unenlightened

I suggest that ideas do indeed exist at something like the 'more subjective' or 'less material' end of the spectrum. How they exist is something we can clarify endlessly. Where we seem to agree is that the individual subject is very much embodied. So is the 'cultural subject,' but more strangely.

You mention penetration anxiety, and I think that is related to a more general flight from vulnerability. It's a bit of a tangent, but I suggest that the spirituality of science involves living more in more in something like Popper's 'world 3' and identifying more and more with culture that depends on human bodies in general but no human body in particular.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popper%27s_three_worlds

The flame of knowledge leaps from melting candle to melting candle. We lose (even get bored with) the idiosyncratic mortal self except as 'hardware' for the infinite game of rationality's endless selfclarification. I imagine old Socrates, no longer troubled by the usual lust or greed, more interested in world-revealing critical conversation than anything else. Objectivity is implicitly social.

Another way of phrasing it:
The only world that we live in and care about and can talk about meaningfully (the 'lifeworld' in its fullness and depth) seems to depend, mostly tacitly, on the life of our flesh. When humans talk about reality, they implicitly talk about something that involves the perception thoughtful flesh, which we drag along everywhere, like it or not.

Some people say colors aren't real, because our nervous system paints them on some Reality that's never seen naked. But I say that instead the rose is red. It's only a fictional confused rose that has no color or shape and is the gray or vanishing fantasy of a metaphysician. Instead of a layer of appearance between us and reality, we can think in terms of depth. We always have the real, but we can also always have it more adequately and clearly.

My judgement of what caused these phenomena may be mistaken, in that I may think the postbox is red, but this would be an illusion, in that the postbox is actually emitting a wavelength of 700nm. — RussellA

In my view, the conception/meaning of wavelengths is entangled with everyday experience. If I ask you what you mean by wavelengths, you'll have to tell me about 'mere appearance.' In short, indirect realism that takes the scientific image as the hidden real seems to miss that this image is very much on the side of appearance and only his its meaning in context.

So my argument is not that the universe doesn’t exist sans perspective, but that any meaningful sense of existence entails a perspective, so it’s a mistake to take it as an invariant truth, as a truly ‘observer-independent reality’. — Quixodian

In my opinion, the tricky part here is the relationship between the individual human and the time-binding cultural community that (in some sense) thinks through or with the brain of the individual. Culture is software that runs on the crowd, and knowledge is a social product. The scientific image (and arguably the philosophical image) is intentionally independent of any contingent human being. That's it's job. To be the truth, not just your truth or mine.

But it's all too easy to let this image float away from subjectivity altogether. I mean we can lose ourselves in our models and forget their dependence on a living brain and the thousands of years of transmitted research and development that went into training it. [Husserl's later work wrestles with cultural sediment and how it matters in the subject's coconstitution of reality, or so I'd put it at this moment. I am made of ghosts and mud.]

I think this is a good OP. I'm going out soon, (it's 5PM Saturday evening here and I'm off to a "vinyl revival" two turntable DJ-ed reggae dance party) so no time for further conversation right now. I look forward to seeing some responses from others tomorrow. — Janus

Cool. I look forward to continuing the conversation. This topic is my jam lately.

You did mention in another thread you’ve been reading Husserl, right? Your penultimate paragraph is phenomenological through and through, in its guise as embodied cognition. — Quixodian

Yes, I consider myself very much in the phenomenological camp. Merleau-Ponty, inspired by Husserl, famously stressed the flesh as a metaphysical concept (so I am processing influences here).

I think that Hegel is maybe the grandfather, if Husserl is the father of phenomenology.

Consider this shocking understanding of idealism.

The proposition that the finite is ideal 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. ... A philosophy which ascribed veritable, ultimate, absolute being to finite existence as such, would not deserve the name of philosophy; the principles of ancient or modern philosophies, water, or matter, or atoms are thoughts, universals, ideal entities, not things as they immediately present themselves to us, ... in fact what is, is only the one concrete whole from which the moments are inseparable. — Hegel

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/help/mean08.htm

Idealism is named after its awareness that all finite objects are ideal (useful or pleasing fictions.) A finite object is a disconnected object, an object that makes sense on its own. Hegel's idealist sees the semantic interdependence of entities. Subject and substance are entangled.

Scientific realism (the ontological thesis of the pure or independent object) thinks it can see around all human subjects because it can see around (in a certain sense, itself to be further clarified) any particular subject.

But [and this for me anyway was the breakthrough, however simple it looks in retrospect], the concept of the subject only has meaning from our typical experience as social creatures with sense organs in a shared world. The subject is just as dependent on the object as the object is on the subject. Similarly, there's no left without right.

That’s getting close to what I’ve been trying to say. It’s the tendency to forget that ‘scientific realism’ still relies on an implicitly human perspective. — Quixodian

Yes, I think we agree that some philosophers don't give subjectivity its due. [ On the other hand, many go too far, till the subject is no longer intelligible as such. ]

(Which is very much something Husserl was saying, isn’t it?) — Quixodian

Let me offer a quote from §52 in Ideas. (I add emphasis to sense as meaning near the end and break up a long paragraph for clarity.)

We carried out the last series of our deliberations chiefly with respect to the physical thing pertaining to the sensuous imaginatio and did not take due notice of the physical thing as determined by physics, for which the sensuously appearing (the perceptually given) physical thing is said to function as a “mere appearance,” perhaps even as something “merely sub­jective.”

Nevertheless it is already implicit in the sense of our earlier statements that this mere subjectivity ought not to be confused (as it is so frequently) with a subjectivity such as characterizes mental processes, as though the perceived physical things, with respect to their perceptual qualities, and as though these qualities themselves were mental processes.

Not can it be the true opinion of scientific investigators of Nature (particularly if we keep, not to their pro­nouncements, but to the sense of their method) that the appearing physical thing is an illusion or a faulty picture of the “true” physical thing as determined by physics. Likewise the statement that the determinations of the appearance are signs of the true determinations is misleading.

Are we then allowed to say, in accordance with the “realism” which is very widely accepted: The actually perceived (and, in the primary sense, appearing) should, for its part, be regarded as an appearance of, or an instinctive basis for, inferring something else, intrinsically foreign to it and separated from it? May we say that, theoretically considered, this something else should be accepted as a reality, completely unknown by acquaintance, which must be assumed hypothetically in order to explain the course of mental appearance- processes, <accepted> as a hidden cause of these appearances characterizable only indirectly and analogically by mathematical concepts?

Already, on the basis of our general presentations (which will be greatly deepened and undergo continual confirmation by our further analyses), it becomes evident that such theories are possible only as long as one avoids seriously fixing one’s eyes on, and scientifically exploring, the sense of a physical thing-datum and, therefore, of “any physical thing whatever,” a sense implicit in experience’s own essence — the sense which functions as the absolute norm for all rational discourse about physical things. If anything runs counter to that sense it is countersensical in the strictest signification of the word; and that, without doubt, is true of all epistemological theories of the type indicated.
...
The perceived physical thing itself is always and necessarily precisely the thing which the physicist explores and scientifically determines following the method of physics. — Husserl

To me this is something like a sophisticated direct realism. The scientific image is not 'under' everyday objects. For Husserl (roughly, from my reading so far), reality makes no sense except in relation to human experience. We don't know what we are talking about otherwise.

Well, the fossil record tells us they did, and if the Universe is older than the human race then it follows that it existed prior to us and our points of view. — Janus

It seems to me that we living human beings now, when we think of the time before human cognition, can only project the-world-for-us in a way that doesn't exactly make sense. Part of the messy issue seems to be that world-for-us is (must be) just the world. It's as if we tend to talk around what seems like an inescapable anthropocentrism. The world that we know and talk about is the one that's given through sense organs and brains that are strangely part of that same world.

I guess I reject scientific realism if understood in terms of a truly independent object. I challenge it as semantically troubled.

This is why I have always found Aristotle's definition of truth to be the most compelling: "Well, falsity is the assertion that that which is is not or that that which is not is and truth is the assertion that that which is is and that that which is not is not" (Metaphysics, Gamma 7, p. 107). Truth seems, by my lights, to be an act of uncovering and lies to be the act of covering up what was already uncovered; and this depends on there being both a subject and object.

What do you all think? — Bob Ross

This last part especially appeals to me. I associate it with Heidegger, who was strongly influenced by Aristotle. Truth-telling is often a pointing-out or a directing-attention-to. We are all in the same world together, talking about that single shared world, disclosing it for one another in greater depth and clarity, disabusing one another of various confusions and superstitions.

I also think that there is a scientific attitude, a characteristic way of approaching problems. — Quixodian

I agree. I suspect that it's (ideally) a sublime style of sociality, a way of seeing others and of seeing one's own claims from the outside. One tries to see around limiting idiosyncrasies or (equivalently) see as an ideally universal subject. It's as if the object in its truth exists for just this perfected subject. I don't pretend that this is typically explicit.

Plenty have philosophers seem to have become quite invested in the idea that materialism is what allows them to look the void in the eye and scream their power into it. How can we be Nietzschean overcomers without a void to overcome? How else can we congratulate ourselves over being good when there is no Good? What is the point of the Marxist struggle if we get a greater reward in the afterlife? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think it's reasonable to consider motives like this, but doesn't this folk-psychology cut both ways? The religious person is 'just terrified to die' and the atheist is 'just doing a gloomysexy elitist pose.' If I simply argue that the other's reasoning is motivated rather than making a direct case for my point, why should I not suspect myself of the same motivated reasoning ? In short, there's something self-subverting about too much psychologism.

:up:
I suspect that such clarification is interminable. I'm on a Husserl kick at the moment, and he and the other phenomenologists seem to understand that phenomenology's most burning issue is the clarification of its own founding intention -- which is deeply if controversially scientific in as radical and pure a sense as possible --but one wrestles endlessly with the meaning of radically and purity.

I think you are right that the emphasis on sight misleads us. Strangely enough, Husserl's careful analysis of sight is also curative. The spatial object is always given to us from this or that perspective. The 'total object' is 'transcendent' in the sense that it's never given to the eyes all at once.

For practical purposes, we seem to ignore how the object is given. The report and the reporter are 'transparent' except to the degree that they are relevant.

Scientific practice ideally consists in unbiased and (as much as is humanly possible) presuppositionless inquiry. The abandonment of belief in what is merely imagined and what seems merely intuitively "right" with no other supporting evidence seems to be the essential element of scientific method, and what distinguishes it from speculative practices that existed prior to the advent of this new kind of scientific practice and which of course still exist today. — Janus

That seems like a good (necessarily blurry) picture of it.

Does anyone still believe a “method” of science really exists, and that it essentially defines and differentiates science as a sui generis human endeavor?

Shouldn’t we abandon this idea? Is it not both old and obsolete? — Mikie

In my view, it'd be hard to sincerely act as if anything goes. Maybe Popper (for instance) isn't the final word, but he can be taken as one of many thinkers using critical rationality to further clarify that very same critical rationality.

I think what you present captures something crucial about critical thinking but underestimates the radical sociality of reason and fails to account for its own status. Karl Popper's work seems related. You seem to be (more or less) contrasting science and metaphysics, but your embrace of science is itself metaphysical. This isn't bad or good, but it should be accounted for.

Another approach: 'ground' a metaphor that signals our intention to set up camp on solid ground. It seems to me that much of philosophy has been a debate about where this ground is or whether it exists at all. Popper wrote about the swampy foundations of science.


Science does not rest upon solid bedrock. The bold structure of its theories rises, as it were, above a swamp. It is like a building erected on piles. The piles are driven down from above into the swamp, but not down to any natural or ‘given’ base; and if we stop driving the piles deeper, it is not because we have reached firm ground. We simply stop when we are satisfied that the piles are firm enough to carry the structure, at least for the time being.

There's an old thread about this here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/12759/poppers-swamp-observation-statements-factsinterpretations/p1

To make this more concrete, let's say that I think I saw a ghost or a flying saucer. Do I completely trust my memory ? Or do I take others into account ? 'Pure' experience is a tricky concept.

On this I am simply unable to tell what fits. I find both 'I think' and 'I am' problematic. Even Merleau-Ponty's account seems to require a kind of faith. — Tom Storm

I grant that one can't prove such (relatively internal) things. It's like proving that a love poem gets it right. I can say that such words sound about right to me and listen for input from others.

We can choose to describe our reality any which way we want and hold these accounts as foundational axioms - dualism, monistic idealism - or your equiprimordial, phenomenological construct above. — Tom Storm

I agree that we have a big space to play around in. For most of us here, this talk is (whatever else it is) a kind of conceptual music. Or puppies wrestling. Discussion of the best Chess openings. The folding of paper swans. Behind the scenes/screens, we have to chew food, be nice, pay bills.


FWIW, I'd say that there is only a tiny core that can't be denied without performative contradiction : 'we are in a world and a language together'. The details are intentionally left unspecified, for that's what we debate, the nature of the world, never (without absurdity) its existence. The other phenomenological stuff is relatively tentative, but the ideal is not theory construction so much as a pointing-out what's already there and not being noticed (famously including my blind knowhow as I hammer or drive and the strange being-kind of tools-in-use.)

Quick question: I can see merit in this and have a modest interest in phenomenology, but could it not be argued that this account is just words used as a kind of magic spell? — Tom Storm

Yes, it could be argued, but I claim there would be a performative contradiction in such an argument.

'This account is just words' attempts to say something about this account in our world --- it reaches out beyond the ego of the speaker. It is offered as intelligible assertion in our language. It suggests that another claim, my lifeworld thesis, might go too far, be wrong, be a magic spell or illusion. In other words, it implies something like a ground truth. It also implies that the other claim is sufficiently meaningful to be recognized as a claim and challenged according to logical/epistemological norms.

I grant that I can't talk someone out of madness or solipsism. My point only has relevance for those wearing the philosopher hat --- who showed up for a conversation to assert themselves. I hold up a mirror and show them, in outline, what they always already assume when they try to tell me about the world.

The truth is that the mind actually 'brings the world into being' in some fundamental sense - not that things literally go into and pass out of existence depending on the observer. — Wayfarer

As I see it, you are trying to do justice to the entanglement of subject and substance. I think it's better to talk of equiprimordiality. Self, language, community, and world are all co-given -- aspects of a single 'fused' lifeworld. The 'proof' of this is almost analytic : denials of it are performative contradictions.

I suggest that the embodiment of mind should be stressed to do justice to the world.

So (in summary) the human nervous system living human body is one 'object' in the world among other objects, but it's an extremely special object, one that is always with us, a condition for the possibility and experience. You might say that it's neither 'mind' nor 'matter.' Probably flesh is a great word here for the subject, because it stresses entanglement with world and the visceral-sensual aspect of being an individual.

You might like:

The properties of things that we take to be “real” and “objective” also tacitly assume a reference to the body’s norms and its adoption of levels. An object’s “true” qualities depend on the body’s privileging of orientations that yield maximum clarity and richness. This is possible because the body serves as a template for the style or logic of the world, the concordant system of relations that links the qualities of an object, the configuration of the perceptual field, and background levels such as lighting or movement. In this symbiosis or call-and-response between the body and the world, things have sense as the correlates of my body, and reality therefore always involves a reference to perception. Yet, to be real, things cannot be reducible to correlates of the body or perception; they retain a depth and resistance that provides their existential index. While each thing has its individual style, the world is the ultimate horizon or background style against which any particular thing can appear.
...
The perspectival limitations of perception, both spatially and temporally, are the obverse of this world’s depth and inexhaustibility. Through an examination of hallucination and illusions, Merleau-Ponty argues that skepticism about the existence of the world makes a category mistake. While we can doubt any particular perception, illusions can appear only against the background of the world and our primordial faith in it. While we never coincide with the world or grasp it with absolute certainty, we are also never entirely cut off from it; perception essentially aims toward truth, but any truth that it reveals is contingent and revisable.

Rejecting analogical explanations for the experience of other people, Merleau-Ponty proposes that the rediscovery of the body as a “third genre of being between the pure subject and the object” makes possible encounters with embodied others (PP: 407/366). We perceive others directly as pre-personal and embodied living beings engaged with a world that we share in common. This encounter at the level of anonymous and pre-personal lives does not, however, present us with another person in the full sense, since our situations are never entirely congruent. The perception of others involves an alterity, a resistance, and a plenitude that are never reducible to what is presented, which is the truth of solipsism. Our common corporeality nevertheless opens us onto a shared social world, a permanent dimension of our being in the mode of the anonymous and general “someone”. The perception of others is therefore a privileged example of the paradox of transcendence running through our encounter with the world as perceived:

Whether it is a question of my body, the natural world, the past, birth or death, the question is always to know how I can be open to phenomena that transcend me and that, nevertheless, only exist to the extent that I take them up and live them. (PP: 422/381)

This “fundamental contradiction” defines our encounters with every form of transcendence and requires new conceptions of consciousness, time, and freedom.
...
Merleau-Ponty argues that we cannot separate the certainty of our thoughts from that of our perceptions, since to truly perceive is to have confidence in the veracity of one’s perceptions. Furthermore, we are not transparent to ourselves, since our “inner states” are available to us only in a situated and ambiguous way. The genuine cogito, Merleau-Ponty argues, is a cogito “in action”: we do not deduce “I am” from “I think”, but rather the certainty of “I think” rests on the “I am” of existential engagement. More basic than explicit self-consciousness and presupposed by it is an ambiguous mode of self-experience that Merleau-Ponty terms the silent or “tacit” cogito—our pre-reflective and inarticulate grasp on the world and ourselves that becomes explicit and determinate only when it finds expression for itself. The illusions of pure self-possession and transparency—like all apparently “eternal” truths—are the results of acquired or sedimented language and concepts.

Rejecting classic approaches to time that treat it either as an objective property of things, as a psychological content, or as the product of transcendental consciousness, Merleau-Ponty returns to the “field of presence” as our foundational experience of time. This field is a network of intentional relations, of “protentions” and “retentions”, in a single movement of dehiscence or self-differentiation, such that “each present reaffirms the presence of the entire past that it drives away, and anticipates the presence of the entire future or the ‘to-come’” (PP: 483/444). Time in this sense is “ultimate subjectivity”, understood not as an eternal consciousness, but rather as the very act of temporalization. As with the tacit cogito, the auto-affection of time as ultimate subjectivity is not a static self-identity but involves a dynamic opening toward alterity. In this conception of time as field of presence, which “reveals the subject and the object as two abstract moments of a unique structure, namely, presence” (PP: 494/454–55), Merleau-Ponty sees the resolution to all problems of transcendence as well as the foundation for human freedom. Against the Sartrean position that freedom is either total or null, Merleau-Ponty holds that freedom emerges only against the background of our “universal engagement in a world”, which involves us in meanings and values that are not of our choosing. We must recognize, first, an “authochthonous sense of the world that is constituted in the exchange between the world and our embodied existence” (PP: 504/466), and, second, that the acquired habits and the sedimented choices of our lives have their own inertia. This situation does not eliminate freedom but is precisely the field in which it can be achieved.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/merleau-ponty/#NatuPercStruBeha

I bumped into a Gibran passage that spoke to me:

Say not, "I have found the truth," but rather, "I have found a truth."
Say not, "I have found the path of the soul." Say rather, "I have met the soul walking upon my path."
For the soul walks upon all paths.
The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.
The soul unfolds itself like a lotus of countless petals.
http://www.katsandogz.com/gibran/onknowledge.php

Over three days I became pretty out of touch with reality due to this shouting match going on in my head.

It took a year for me to get over the fear of being in that mental state and reach the point that I was willing to risk allowing myself to think about such things. — wonderer1

I can relate to some degree in my own way --- something along the lines of a shouting match..invasive compulsive thoughts -- but I was living a crazy life, folly of the young weed, basically asking for trouble...

About six months later (36 years ago), in a manic state that scared the shit out of me, I intuited an explanation for a lot of idiosnycratic things about myself (including social issues), in terms of hypothesized variations in low level neural interconnect structure. I only recently found out, that some years back evidence that fit my hypothesis well has been found. — wonderer1

What I love about Popper is his respect for creativity and intuition. The (mysterious) source of a hypothesis doesn't (shouldn't) count for or against it.

that intuition was sure as hell right, but that was the best three months of my life. — wonderer1

To guess as the adventure of those three months, I go back in time to something similar in my own life, that started long ago ---and which has somehow lasted, though not without storms that even the battered ghost of Bukowksi would respect. For me it was/is a musician, not really the scholastic type, which might help keep me grounded, remind me there's more than concepts. Watching The Bear together at the moment. Great show about chefs.

To me it's (metaphorically speaking) topologically weird, something like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein_bottle

That was what I thought you were taking issue with. — Wayfarer

Consider that we are in the world, so we don't construct the world ex nihilo. But the world is for or through our human sense organs, brain, and culture, so talking about a world without an embodied cultural subject is also a mere abstraction (a useful fiction.)

How thing have changed, eh? — wonderer1

Oh yeah. I've been an atheist so long that I can enjoy theological metaphors now. That god from the bible is about as real as Huckleberry Finn --and interesting to me on that literary level.

I wonder about trust. Barb and I had known each other for years. Meri, being a great observer of people, I'd guess she recognized Barb's trust in me while we were in the bar. I hadn't asked for her number or anything at that point though. On one hand, I think it was rather bold of her to assume I would step in. On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if she 'knew' I had her covered. — wonderer1

It's endlessly analyzable right ? I guess we've got millions of years of R & D hidden away from our 'conscious'/linguistic investigation and (in some situations) control. At the beginning of relationships, there's the moment of the first kiss, letting 'I love you' slip out, all kinds of stuff.