It could be demonstrated with reference to the texts - that’s what I tried to do with those two quotes from Gerson and Feser. I’ve read some books on the idea, but it’s hard to explain. — Wayfarer

Not to be difficult, but anything less than direct experience would seem to be a talking about what is finally not understood, a difference as difference without further specification.

But in any case, the really key point, the crucial fact, is the nature of the reality of ideas. They’re not real because they’re generated by some piece of meat that grew in the Petri dish of evolution; they’re real whether anyone knows them or not. — Wayfarer

This is a bold thesis, a theological thesis even, assuming these ideas are of central significance. For me this is hard to make sense of in the same way as mathematical platonism is hard to make sense of. We have access to 'intersubjectivity' (a non-neutral word), which provides the phenomenon that might be interpreted in terms of a faculty that 'sees' an otherwise invisible realm. For me, though, the phenomenon in its being is the 'reality' of the situation. Attaching additional concepts to this direct experience of the intuitions (they exists 'outside' us) would just be contexualizing the experience among other experiences. This is not to say that experience must be interpreted in terms of a subject having experience. The word 'experience' points at what is given, that which we try to describe and understand.
Or which it itself (experience) tries to understand as an embodied, self-clarifying field of meaning.

Husserl’s critique of Descartes in Crisis of the European Sciences anticipated that. In any case, it is true - it is the consequence of treating ‘res cogitans’ as a ‘that’ (whereas in reality it is always unknown.) — Wayfarer

I take your point about 'unknown,' but maybe 'elusive' is better? Something always unknown is arguably not worth troubling ourselves about. The 'pure witness' gets some of what's important. Existence is its there. But the pure witness (subject as bare possibility of experience) is outside of time, and this implicitly freezes being out of time, since such a subject must be being itself. Or being in the sense of that which lights up or discloses or gives beings. I'd say an immanently historical stream of meaningful experience that experiences itself as experience is not too far from the situation. We might also talk of a 'thrown open space' that 'worlds.' Hegel seemed to be pointing at this in a lingo that was either insufficiently dynamic (crystalline as in shard of conceptual glass) or just too hard to understand (is the concrete concept continuous?).

Have you heard about the purported relationship between Pyrrho of Elis and Buddhism? — Wayfarer

No, but that is what I had in mind. I suspect that some dialectical/argumentative/epistemological thinkers had breakthroughs and got 'behind' language, 'behind' an objectifying grasp of existence. To speak of an elusive becoming at the ground of beings is not enough, since those in the objectifying mode must take this becoming and this ground as one more being and not as the thrown open space for beings. IMV, Wittgenstein's ability to be shocked that the world exists is a becoming-aware of this thrown-open-space. Any purported ground of this space must be yet another object within this space and not its ground. That's why I suggested that intelligibility itself (the space of meaning) was the great mystery. All other explorations, questionings, and explanations presuppose this space. Man is the biological foundation of this space and simultaneously this space itself in which he roams for a ground apart from himself., his own mortal abyss-for-ground. Cue the organ music.

Indeed, it may be a misreading or a shift of emphasis. After a slow start, however, the book takes off. Even if Sheehan is wrong, his misreading is a great work of philosophy. If Heidegger really did think one basic thought, then something like Sheehan's book should be possible that really gets at this basic thought. I've been re-reaing texts in the light of this idea, and I'm inclined to read time as future as the open hermeneutical space. The present as making present (action that brings forth) is directed (I think you'll agree) by the future. Things are taken-as in terms of future as possibility, hence the dominance of the actual/actionable by the possible. (Not expecting this to be new to you, just framing my understanding.) The abyss between man and the animals would seem to depend on meaning, being as meaningful presence in the light of the future as possibility. So one has the mystery that anything is intelligible at all, and one has the mystery of the thrown open hermeneutical space that allows us to experience this as a mystery. We aren't immersed in particular meanings but can rise up somehow to ask after the possibility of meaning itself. We can even cognize the thrown open space. Sheehan calls this kind of thing transcendentalism to the second power (or maybe H himself did.)


Kiesel makes a big deal out lecture KNS 1919 as Heidegger's breakthrough. He sketches it in The Genesis of Being and Time. Kiesel also suggests that the 'turn' was maybe just going back to KNS 1919 insights and trying to say the same general thing in a better way. In this lecture (as you may know) Heidegger is trying to figure out how a 'pre-science' is possible. How does one grasp life in its utter facticity without choking it with theory?

Since the grasp of concepts intercept life and 'still the stream,' phenomenology must find less intrusive, more natural ways to get a grip on its subject matter, which remain in accord with 'the immanent historicity of life in itself.'
...
It involves a phenomenological modification of traditional formalization in order to efface its proclivity toward diremption. All formally indicative concepts aim, strictly speaking, to express only the pure 'out toward' without any further content or ontic fulfillment.
...
The conceptual pair motive-tendency (later the pair thrownness-project understood as equiprimordial) is not a duality, but rather the 'motivated tendency' or the 'tending motivation' in which the 'outworlding' of life expresses itself. Expression, articulation, differentiation arises out of a core of indifferentiation which is no longer to be understood in terms of subject-object, form-matter, or any other duality.
...
Experienced experience, this streaming return of life back upon itself, is precisely the immanent historicity of life, a certain familiarity or 'understanding' that life already has with itself and that phenomenological intuition must simply 'repeat.' And what is this understanding, whether implicit or methodologically explicit, given to understand? The articulations of life itself, which accrue to the self-experience that occurs in the 'dialectical' return of experiencing life to already experienced life...Once again, life is not mute but meaningful, it 'expresses' itself precisely in and through its self-experience and spontaneous self-understanding.
...
The full historical I finds itself caught up in meaningful contexts so that it oscillates according to the rhythmics of worlding, it properizes itself to the articulations of an experience which is governed by the immanent historicity of life in itself. For the primal It of the life stream is more than the primal I. It is the self experiencing itself experiencing the worldly. The ultimate source of the deep hermeneutics of life is properly an irreducible 'It' that precedes and enables the I. It is the unity and whole of the 'sphere of experience' understood as a self-sufficient domain of meaning that phenomenology seeks to approach, 'understandingly experience,' and bring to appropriate language. — Kiesel paraphrasing Heidegger

In my view, the above supports Sheehan's vision, though I do think Sheehan decided to emphasize meaning. He obtains a great coherence of his own project via this emphasis. He very much presents one Heidegger and not two.

Here are a few quotes that may help.

Every significant word or symbol must essentially belong to a 'system,' and...the meaning of a word is its place in this 'system.'


I now prefer to say that a system of propositions is laid against reality like a rule.

If I had to say what is the main mistake made by philosophers of the present generation...,I would say that when language is looked at, what is looked at is the form of words and not the use made of the form of words.


— Wittgenstein

Holistic semantics explains why removing words from their customary language-games creates insoluble pseudo-problems, what most of us call philosophy.

Wittgenstein's holism applies to our selves as well as to our language: society comes first and individuals are born of, and continuously borne by, this context. Even our 'insides,' so to speak, come from the outside because we only have a sense of these internal contents --how to look for them, their taxonomy, what it makes sense to say about them --via the grammar learned from language games.

Atomism in some form or another has been the default ontology for most of the history of philosophy; objects are what they are because of their own intrinsic nature, gaining only superficial features from whatever relationships they happen to enter into. This metaphysical structure can then secure semantic determanicy. They simply mean what they mean regards of when, where, and by whom they are employed.
...
This idea is what authorizes drastic shifts in use that create philosophical confusion...Similarly, for present-at-hand ontology, 'the real entitiy is what is suited for thus remaining constant.' a prejudice that distorts metaphysics and compromises authenticity.

Heidegger and the late Witttgenstein embrace holism, according to which an object or word derives its nature and meaning from its place within a network, all other members of which likewise draw their sense from their interrelationships. This framework eliminates atomistic determinacy. — Lee Braver

I think this holism is anticipated in Hegel (and surely others as well.)

How would you know this? (Note that I'm not suggesting an answer either way--that either they do or do not see the world "the same." I'm simply asking how we know such things. Our answer to whether they see the world the same and whether and how we know this has a bearing on whether the method via which we're claiming to know it is even workable) — Terrapin Station

At some point there is always some grounding in the obvious --and this itself is obvious upon even a brief consideration. We are already in a shared language before we can even start to question one another about these things. Our lives indicate sufficient certainty in quite a few beliefs. If somehow a bat manifested a human-like consciousness, it would rattle our entire sense of things. The barest logical possibility is impotent, just as the notion of absolute certainty is a theological artificiality.

I'd say our true situation involves a groundless ground, an operating system we can't get behind and can only imperfectly grasp with that same operating system. When I step out of bed in the morning, I don't know that the floor is there -- I know it. Our high level thinking depends on a massive foundation of inconspicuous, automatic 'backgrounding.' One 'proves' this via a 'formal indication,' a phenomenological pointing-out. Such phenomena are covered-up by a pre-interpretation of the situation that needs it to be a certain way more than it just wants to see what's there. Something like an honest memory comes into play. We reflect in a theoretical mindset on what occurred outside that theoretical mindset. For instance, we look at ordinary conversation about easy, worldly matters and realize that we shared a meaning space. We inconspicuously and automatically lived in the same room, knowing that the same objects were visible to both of us and interpreted as a chair for sitting, a painting for looking at. The words of others weren't sounds to be translated into meanings. They were (shared) meaning itself (a direct realism, you might say.) We can of course call all of this an 'illusion' or 'projection of the subject.' That's a stereoscopic perspective. But we still do this in that same 'illusion.'

Don't take the following sketch of a caricature personally, please. I'm trying to contextualize why I think a certain approach to philosophy is obsolete (for me anyway.)

William James talked about tough and tender minded philosophers. I get the sense that anti-idealism identifies with toughness of mind. It opposes itself to silliness, wishful thinking, exotic language. In the name of truth, right? It is maybe even an implicitly macho facing-of-the-truth that wipes the icing off the cake as sugary stuff for weakling who can't handle reality without the sweetener.

The problem with this position is that truth as Truth is pure icing. These anti-idealists still just want to talk about ideal truth, unworldly truth. The genuine tough-minded epistemology is power as knowledge. Those who simply ignore AP philosophy do so from the basic tough mindedness of practical life. As Hume pointed out long ago, induction in all its deductive groundlessness is our dominant epistemology. Whatever reliably gives us what we want is true. The talk of philosophers is less convincing than a working hair-dryer.

But 'tough minded' philosophers who obsess over idealized words yanked from the living language ignore their situation. They contrast themselves with 'idealists' who...obsess over language. Their 'discoveries' follow from their stipulated, artificial definitions of words used with staggering complexity and facility in that unknown (forgotten, neglect, ignored) frontier of ordinary life. They take this particular mindset as a paradigmatic of human existence itself. The subject is a disengaged starer-at (not user-of) objects. The subject is a lonely chap who needs proof that he exists, despite such a request being the affirmation of a shared reality in the first place. He consciousness is burdened also perhaps by the lack of a proof that there is such a thing as consciousness. He's not sure that it's just wrong to run down children in one's car. Most of us feel that it is wrong, but this isn't theologically certified proof. He's just not sure that anything that doesn't just sit their for his vision like a mountain actually exists. He's scientific, of course, but can't quite say how science exists. It can't be shared meaning, since that's a tender-minded superstition.

The above is a bit of a caricature, obviously, but I'm trying to deflate the notion that mere talk about objective truth is significantly (or even at all) less tender-minded than its perceived opposite. Compared the pragmatic sophists who long ago grasped power as truth and war as epistemology, Truth-seeking philosophers are all sentimentalists, talking, talking, talking as others run the world ---mostly by persuasion within the murk of living, ordinary language. For the sophist, 'proof' is just another name for persuasion, for manipulating social and physical reality with language as a hammer. Philosophy a priori sets itself against this vulgarity sentimentally, 'gripped by an attunement.' The big-boy talk of realism is once more theological spiderweb, trampled over or ignored by a vulgar but more genuine realism that scoffs at words that don't do anything. Hence theology of neckbeards, with unworldly Truth as its god and a hobbled notion of rationality as its Holy Ghost.

You try to give them directions to the store to buy milk, but they can't do that, because all they can do is count how many miles it was to the store, how many light posts they passed, how many other cars were on the road, how many cartons of milk there were, etc.--all they can do is count things, all they can do is engage an obsession. — Terrapin Station

To me this is a good description of the atomic approach to meaning. It ignores the fluidity and complexity of actual life and gets caught up in differences that make no difference. It wants proofs of the same truths it lives by when not on a part-time quest for an life-divorced notion of certainty and clarity. It models its interactions with others (even the others most trusted and familiar) in terms of meanings trapped in skulls --never mind the palpable , pre-theoretical sense of sharing meaning with others.

It offers theses that are immediate consequences of the way the terms are initially interpreted as discoveries about our shared reality (idealism, realism, etc.). It concerns itself with an implicit ought (what we should mean by X) and neglects the is (what he, she, or we mostly mean by X).

they're going to see the Lincoln statue and the hydrogen atom similarly in that regard — Terrapin Station

The irony in Herg's anti-idealism is that s/he takes a model (the idea of hydrogen) for the thing itself. Science has evolved over the centuries. No doubt other unwitting idealists thought Newton's vision was the thing itself and not just another imperfect model at some point. In a certain sense all philosophy has been (shades of) idealism. It questions common sense and superstition by considering the subject's distortion of the object. The 'pure object' is itself an idea/ideal--along with the pure subject our fervid epistemologists just assume. A naive theory of reference ('it's not about the language') forgets that it can't give its elusive 'pure object' content that isn't 'stolen' from the impure object.

A challenge from language fails from the get-go, because the topic isn't language.Language is simply the means via which we're communicating, but it's not the topic, and if you think it's the topic, you're supremely confused. — Terrapin Station

And I think this is a questionable assumption. Language is something like the primary human phenomenon. Humans are radically social, palpably sharing a kind of 'meaning field.' If we build things up from the isolated subject (an 'I' which has 'meaning'), we rip this ego like an organ out of the larger organ-ism of the community. An isolated human being is not fully human in some sense. I do not mean an adult who lives on the moon for a year. I mean a child who is raised by wolves. For me this is the blind-spot of an analytic or atomic approach. It needs a atomic meanings, atomic subjects in skulls. It needs categories that are artificial and discrete. In short, it tries to model existence after mechanism as opposed to organism. I think the driving image is that of certainty and clarity, which are worth goals. But 'truncating' the object of investigation for these goals violates the primary goal of describing what is --in the name of what ought to be (oh, but existence should just fit my method of grasping it.). This means facing and tolerating that which will not come into perfect focus.

What you call confusion, I call neglect on your part of the very phenomenon that makes this accusation of confusion possible and meaningful.

That's a claim. What's the support for it? — Terrapin Station

I don't drive without my contact lenses in. I'd be breaking the law. Or are the blurry signs not the same as the less blurry signs?

The supreme kind of mediation is happening right now as you interpret these marks on your screen.

The differences are trivial to whom? We need to ask individual people whether they matter to them, don't we? Importance, mattering, etc. are to individuals, and different individuals feel different ways. — Terrapin Station

Indeed. And that is where the personal, 'existential' position shows its face. And I suggest this is all vaguely structured by an image of the ideal human being.

In asking 'what is the meaning of life?', we seem to be asking about unmeaning. It is always ambiguous what the individual person asking is actually getting at, e.g., existence, being, something rather than nothing, life on earth, human life, their life. In almost all cases it seems that an impossible question is asked: What is the meaning or meaninglessness of something that is excluded from meaning/meaninglessness, that is, unmeaning, aka life? — bloodninja

Have you happened to look at Sheehan's Making Sense of Heidegger:A Paradigm Shift? It's one of the best reads I've had in a while. He insists the Heidegger's central thought was indeed existence as the world as the thrown-open-clearing for meaning.

For Heidegger, discursivity, unlike the 'closure upon itself' of Aristotle's self-thinking God, requires openness. Human reason must traverse an open 'space' (constituted by existence as thrown open) within which alone reason can synthesize disparate things. This prior openness is 'the realm that a person traverses every time he or she, as a subject, relates to an object.
...
But we are able to do such 'traversing of an open space' in existentiel knowledge and action only because we already are such an open space in our existential essence (a priori and structurally of course, and not of our own volition). Our essence is to be the existential wiggle-room required for existentiel acts of taking-as.
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Over the course of Heidegger's career this open domain would ride under various titles: the clearing, the thrown open realm for being, and so on. This open region --along with the opening of it by our being thrown open or 'brought into our own' (appropriated) --is the core fact, die Sache selbst, of all Heidegger's philosophizing.
— Sheehan

He interprets being as meaningful presence, and framed the being question in terms of the source of intelligibility.

Intelligibility is the name of the world I inhabit as I live into and out of an array of possibilities that I am thematically aware of or not, that I welcome or am indifferent to, that excite or bore me, possibilities that in a sense I myself am in the inevitable process of always having to become myself.
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It is the ineluctable but hidden fact that determines my life and I can never get back behind. That my ontological fate is the be the clearing is evidenced time and time again as I talk with others, manage the things of my life, imagine the future, or remember the past. I cannot not make sense of everything I meet because I cannot not be a priori opened up. By our very nature we are both the demand for and the reason for intelligibility, for a meaningfulness that determines us and yet has know reality apart from us. And there is no way out but death. In fact, the whole process of making sense is mortal. — Sheehan

Lots more great passages like this in the book. Being-here is being the mortal, thrown open space for meaning-making.

So I agree in some sense asking for a meaning of life is asking for the outside of life. On the other hand it is just the same old expression of meaning making trying to grasp the whole. What's it all about? Not this or that meaning. But what are all of these little meanings about? If Sheehan is right, then Heidegger offers the self-consciousness of mortal, groundless meaning-making. To me this is beautiful as a kind of negative theology. The groundlessness is the 'miracle' of being thrown-open 'absurdly' to being-in-the-world-with-others or world-being, being-a-world, or being-the-space-within-the-space. As Kojeve wrote, Heidegger accepts or integrates death.

This for me is symbolically assenting to the incarnation, a Christian negative theology. It lets go of any kind of god/ground/fixed-point beyond the meaning-making of mortals who both make the meaning and also are the very space in which this is possible--which space is also temporality -- Being and Time means intelligible presence and the thrown open clearing (Dasein-World) that makes it possible and sustains it. Those who still ask for a meaning of life tremble before an intuition of their groundlessness, to being condemned to mortal freedom. Is this a flight from life? And yet it's also a flight from death and groundlessness. So, yeah, maybe a flight from life.

The fact that the meaning has shifted, actually means that we no longer have the same sense of what 'intelligible' means. And I don't think that the reality of universals is at all accepted in modern philosophy generally - about the place you'll find it, is in neo-Thomism, as they have kept it alive (which I have learned from reading a smattering of neo-thomist philosophy from the likes of Gilson, Maritain and Feser.) — Wayfarer

I agree that the theory of universals is not accepted. I'm saying that it has been replaced by the problem of meaning. And I find it plausible that we don't have the same notion of intelligibility. But how would we know? If you, for instance, have access to this notion, then it's not really lost. Personally I think semantic holism is far more plausible.

Cartesian anxiety refers to the notion that, since René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other".

This is one the big themes in Heidegger. Descartes encouraged us to read our own existence as a present-to-hand object, a kind of rock with consciousness stapled to it somehow. Deconstruction AFAK started with Heidegger's dismantling of this encrusted taken-for-granted ontology that obscures the phenomenon of being-in-the-world-with-others. We are always already in the world with others in a pre-theoretical way. This being-in-the-world-with-others is why solipsists immediately want to tell folks about their discovery. This is why people can argue about which theory of truth is true without having settled on a theory of truth. The obsession with epistemology obscures the paucity of meaning in the very terms we argue about. Whether something exists obscures what we even mean by 'exist.' IMV, hermeneutical phenomenology was exactly the kind of opening philosophy was right to take. Whether one likes Heidegger, his general approach seems to be neither science nor literature and aim at something like wisdom.

So, a 'cure' for that, involves coming to some understanding of how modernity is itself a kind of mindset or state of being, and understanding the cultural dynamics that drive it. That is the sense in which my orientation is basically counter-cultural. You actually have to jail-break yourself out of the Western mindset which is no easy task, if you're living in it, as we all are. — Wayfarer

I very much agree on this goal of a 'jailbreak.' I'd say that individuals vary widely in terms of how much they are caught up in it. Of course one starts in the common consciousness more or less. Then one spends a lifetime trying to get brighter and freer.

My 'meta-narrative' is about how the secular-scientific attitude became so entrenched in Western culture. So I don't see it in terms of 'replacing one theology with another' but trying to understand the underlying dynamics and how they have unfolded over history. (Actually had I had any kind of career in academia, it would likely have been more suited to history than philosophy per se.) — Wayfarer

Thank you. That is clarifying. I also find that fascinating. One theory is that Plato himself got that in motion. Scientism offers a debased leading-out-of-the-cave as its gimmick. The human world (maybe consciousness itself) is an illusion. The truth is dead stuff and randomness. While there are some who publicly tout these ideas, I don't think anyone can live by them. Dawkins is a neckbeard's theologian.
We might talk about the schism between artificial theories and life as it is lived.

There are some domains of discourse in which that is true - for example, Soto Zen, which is very much oriented around how the 'ordinary mind' is itself extraordinary ('Chop wood! Draw water! How marvellous! How mysterious!'. 'When hungry I eat, when tired I sleep, fools will laugh at me, but the wise will understand.') But the point is, that school of Zen was itself the culmination of more than a thousand years of dialectic, starting with the Buddha, and then unfolding through the subsequent centuries, millenia even, to find expression in the writings of Dogen (who some have compared to Heidegger.) And there's an awful lot of implicit depth in that tradition, if you actually encounter it; their 'ordinary' is far from the 'ordinary' of the 'ordinary wordling'.

But overall, my 'perennialist' leanings are such that I really do think there's an underlying 'topography of the sacred'. Of course the 'parable of the blind men and the elephant' always bedevils such an analysis, but this is the general drift (courtesy Ken Wilber): — Wayfarer

Thanks. I underlined the part that echoes the notion of learned ignorance. I speculate that Pyrrho and other skeptics have been caricatured. For me there is the notion of getting behind language. As I understand it, this comes from a mastery of concepts, not their neglect. It's the apotheosis of trying to trap the real in finite expressions. You mention the 'thousands of years of dialectic' this required, which is also an extremely Hegelian idea. Following this logic, the spiritual possibilities for individuals are caught up in time. On the other hand, I think existence is justified in terms of feeling. Presumably our affective structure is sufficiently constant for the same enjoyment of the 'absolute' through varying conceptual lenses over the centuries. Or we might say that the 'absolute' takes different forms, where feeling is grasped in better and better concepts to hold it fast. Or just to light up the concept system with passion. The 'absolute' or 'God' could just be a word that gets used again and again for related but somewhat different states of mind (peak experiences). I find this last one most plausible.

The topology of the sacred I find most plausible is in terms of primordial images. These images just keep on working, despite our time-bound conceptualizations. I do like Wilbur's hierarchy, and I was pretty impressed once by his Brief History of Everything. I should check it out again after all these years. I know that he mentioned Hegel (before I had read any Hegel), and I would probably like his holons more now that I'm more of a holist. (Some might say A-holist.)

All ideas exist within individual skulls, so this isn't saying anything. It's like saying, "patterns of paints exist on individual canvases." Yeah, obviously. — Terrapin Station

That obviousness is actually what deserves being challenged, and not from some notion of magical machinery but in terms of the phenomenon of being 'in' a language. Your approach seems to be (implicitly) building up the 'life-world' from a dead world of objects. This is indeed a natural approach. But its complementary approach is equally persuasive. We examine the life-world first and trace how the image of a dead world of whatever-stuff is built up within the meaningful discourse of this life-world. For me the stereoscopic view is more comprehensive. Especially since 'your' approach 'covers over' the phenomenon of 'world' explored by Heidegger and others. It simply ignores experience that doesn't fit its unconsidered present-to-hand approach. It applies an un-investigated contingent understanding of being as if this understanding were necessary. It understands clock time (ultimately spatial) as the only kind of time. Among other things this traps its theory of meaning in an instantaneous atomism.

And for what really? To understand itself as an armchair science, as far as I can tell, a 'neckbeard theology.' In its hard objectivity that ignores values as mere projections on dead stuff it fails to ask what its own investment in such a vision is. Pragmatism is far more worldly. Armchair science still understands Truth as something sacred or valuable in itself. Why does this vision stop half-way? What is this feeling it has for truth-apart-from-purpose? You mentioned a flight from anthropomorphism. To me this is almost the essence of the human, this desire to be trans-human. I think philosophy as the armchair science of words is 'religiously' charged. Else why not a post-Baconian epistemology of power-as-knowledge? The 'worldly' philosophy is just sophistry, speech as a hammer. As I see it, one grasps this and decides one wants to do 'existential' things with this hammer. Traditional epistemological concerns seem to be cashed out in politics and technology, relegating armchair science to the bleachers.

It's not just a matter of style to say that we're "seeing our seeing." That's a claim that would require some sort of support beyond simply making the claim. — Terrapin Station

I'd say just look at the well-worn pragmatist critique of differences that make no difference. I agree that 'just seeing the tree' and 'only seeing or seeing of the tree' do have different meaning-content in the heads of those debating, but these differences are trivial. They act pretty much the same in the real world that grounds all our talking.

These kinds of debates are one reason why a certain kind of philosophy is considered so dry and useless. (Feynmann's joke about rasiing the fork to his mouth. ) One reason why I embrace phenomenology (Heidegger's and Hegel's) is because it actually addresses the stuff people mostly care about. It isn't stuffed in a jar, talking endlessly about the right jargon for an epistemology no one asks for or lives by. If we want to be big worldly realists, I think we have the brute fact of technology that works. Painless dentistry obliterates the tiny persuasive force of a 50 page analysis of what truth 'really' is. And just as I forgot the details of your definition of truth, we all forget any individual's attempt to yank this token 'truth' out a living practice of action and conversation. We might say that a certain kind of philosophy is an endless game of 'if I could control how people talked, ....'

This obliteration is liberating though. Since philosophy as epistemology has no real persuasive force, we might as well stop pretending we are scientists of some kind and get back to existential and phenomenological issues, the 'literary' stuff that embarrasses those with a theological itch to find god-as-method in a dead set of propositions.

Just in case our cognition was shaped so that we perceive what is relevant to our survival and reproduction, then a Kantian view is implied because ? — Terrapin Station

That would be a quasi-Kantian view. Our cognition mediates or distorts the object. We never get the object prior to this mediation. I'm not saying that this view is without problems or even my own. I'd say that its hard not to be influenced by it.

Does a bat see the world as a human does? Does a 5 year old boy see the world as 50 year old man does? Of course not. And I can only ask this question because we have an initial sense that the same world is involved in all cases. On the other hand, we never get this world unmediated. Within our distorted conceptually-laced interpretations of the world there is also the sense or notion of this world apart from our distortions. I think this derives mostly from everyday life where we find that we were wrong about the situation. As this is puffed up into a metaphysical issue, certain problems arise.

It's like Kant's dove. It found that it flew faster in thinner air and assumed it could fly faster yet in a vacuum. Metaphysical theories are parasitic on the blurriness of ordinary language and embodied, ordinary life.

I do enjoy debating with you and trying to do math with words. My goal is to illuminate the complexity of the issue, point at an aporia. To do that I have to oppose your view, indicate why it doesn't seem to be exhaustive. But I don't think a quasi-Kantian view is exhaustive either. The wheel goes around and around. Centuries of this stuff. I suspect that thinkers like Pyrrho also wrestled in this kind of controversy and that this led to a detachment from it -grokking that it has no natural end. Explicit formulations fail. Consensus is not attained. The blind guy with the elephant's ear in his hand doesn't know what the blind guy with its tail in his hand is talking about. The words won't stay fixed. For me on the big issues is how one addresses this situation itself.

You haven't addressed what kind of thing you are fundamentally up to (which I did not ask directly.) What is philosophy for? Is it a kind of science that can be done with words alone? Is it part of a wider existential project of making sense of one's life?

And macrosoft's statement ("There is a big statue of Lincoln in DC") and mine ("The hydrogen atom has one proton and one electron") are not on a par. The statue, Lincoln, and DC are all external mind-independent objects, but describing them as a statue, Lincoln and DC requires knowledge of a particular culture and is therefore mind-dependent. My sentence about the hydrogen atom requires no knowledge of a particular culture, only knowledge of the structure of matter, which is not culture-dependent, and therefore not mind-dependent (unless one is an idealist, which macrosoft claims not to be). — Herg

This is where I think you are missing my point. You assume that the lingo of hydrogen is fundamentally different from the lingo of Lincoln and DC. And you make your argument in terms of aliens to dodge the problem. But here you assume that surely they must understand hydrogen the same way, despite it having a different position in their own wider context of interpreting the world. You also assume that they wouldn't understand a statue as a statue.

I'm not afraid of being labeled an idealist. But I don't embrace those kinds of categorizations. That you seek to place me under categories like that does humorlessly show some idealism on your part. All but the most extreme so-called idealisms (as far as can tell) boil down to emphasizing mediation --what the subject adds to the object and, finally, the entanglement of the subject and object.

The point about 'intelligible truths' was that they were immediate and apodictic in a way that facts about the world could never be. — Wayfarer

For me though the issue isn't about certainty but about intelligibility itself, the very existence of meaning or concept. For me epistemology is secondary to this mystery, since epistemology presupposes its own intelligibility. So does the solipsist, the radical skeptic. They mean something. In 'I think therefore I am' we have the link between concept and existence, but Descartes was too interested in a quasi-theological epistemological grounding of truth to be examine what makes truth possible --concept, meaning, intelligibility.

But, the idea of intelligibility is intimately linked to the theory of ideas. Again, the idea or form of something was grasped directly in a way that facts-about-the-world could never be. — Wayfarer

As I grasp the matter, the world is grasped by means of the forms or concepts. Facts are made of concepts.

I think this is why universals are fundamental to the notion of 'intelligibility'. Get rid of universals, as nominalism did in the late medieval period, and intelligibility goes with it, with considerable consequences. — Wayfarer

I think what we already have (more or less explicitly) is a holism with respect to universals. Meaning is not assembled from a set of distinct universals. Instead distinct universals are plucked imperfectly from a living meaning which is continuous.

As far as consequences go, I agree. The denial of meaning is surprisingly common. But I'd say let's avoid this implicit shift into politics. Or by all means contextualize your thought in those terms. But for me (to contextualize my position) the shift into politics ultimately reduces philosophy to culture-war.

The problem, again, is that the cultural matrix in which our dialogue is conducted has no convention within which such a question can even be meaningfully discussed. That's why it must always be depicted in terms of 'poetry and religion' - vague, nebulous, ennobling perhaps, but in no way real. We have a collective construct of what is real, built around science, but science itself is also a construct, at least when it comes to being considered a world-view. — Wayfarer

Much of philosophy is indeed concerned with meaning (universals) though. Some philosophers are indeed 'scientistic.' Others (like the 2 seemingly most famous philosophers of the 20th century) were distinctly anti-scientistic, with Heidegger being the variable boogey-man, and not at all only because of his political stupidities. Wittgenstein has an ambiguous status, given his later tendency to avoid exact theses.

Beyond philosophy, I agree there are prominent intellectuals who consign the merely 'subjective' to the real of illusion. IMV they really don't speak to or for most people. They are the intellectual heroes of neckbeard theology -- a naive collapse of one handy way of talking among others into the one way of talking that gets it right. I won't attribute this view to you, but I did read some of the links in your profile. And I sometimes get the impression that what some culture warriors desire is to simply replace one positive theology (of dead junk) with another. In short, what is desire is the replacement with one authoritative science of the truly real with another. Again, I'm not saying this is your view.

Let's give this position its due. Science has prestige as far as I can tell because it appeals to the vulgar or universal desires. Our animal selves are dazzled by the utility of prediction and control. But there is also a desire in humans to transcend the merely human. IMV, this is how a base instrumentalism gets super-charged with metaphysical significance. The real is identified with public power. Bacon said knowledge was power. But this is best read as 'power is knowledge.' The question of power, however, seems inseparable from the question of value. That which is powerful is that which gives us what we want. As long as we want animal comforts and fun gadgets more than 'inner' illumination, there will be a temptation to read scientific discourse as metaphysical truth. So the position that opposes science-as-metaphysics can be understood to oppose a certain shallowness in the contemporary lifestyle.

One of the questions you didn't address is whether such shallowness can be said to be 'cured' in terms of conceptually mediated feeling. Another question might be whether the individual can/should seek salvation in non-political terms, accepting the shallowness of the world as a sort of cocoon from which individuals emerge if they are sufficiently passionate about higher things, 'gripped' by an attunement.
For me the 'spiritual' issue is indeed higher than any kind of culture war or the speaking of what ought to be. 'God' exists within 'sinful' morality. From this perspective, positive theologies are a denial of the incarnation. That's where the cleansing flame of nihilism comes in as a dark night of the soul. We might say (symbolically) that this dark night of the soul is a suffering of the crucifixion, a realization that all our hopes and intuitions of the divine are nailed to a dying body in an unjust world that cannot be rationally grounded. This world in which we feel the divine in the context of mortality and injustice is a brute fact.

(I don't think we agree on all of this. I would like it if you would engage with some of the other points in my original post --if you feel like it, of course.)

Yes, though in way I think this notion of 'identity pure and simple' is the very exemplar of the reduction of dynamis to stasis. All very essential to intellectual grasping; something whole and complete to hold (yet it keeps slipping from the grasp, nonetheless!) — Janus

Indeed. That is part of what is so fascinating about pre-rigorous calculus. The 'infinitesimal' was a philosophically problematic grasp at pure becoming. And as you hint at, much of our discourse seems to be trying to grasp becoming in terms of being.

Music (as performed) is an essentially dynamic form, whereas as painting, for example, is not. — Janus

I agree that painting isn't dynamic in the same way. I suppose one could think of the eye scanning this and then that. But for me the strong analogy would be between music and the movement of concepts.

(Maybe Kant presented an argument for it in CPR or wherever, but I don't recall that if so. It's been a long time since I read much Kant . . I don't even recall what the heck the conditioned/unconditioned distinction is supposed to be) — Terrapin Station

As I understand it, conditioned is mind-dependent and unconditioned is 'pure' or mind-independent reality in this context.

Some kind of Kantian view is almost the natural outcome of adopting a science-dominated metaphysics. If we evolved as mainstream science has it (and I don't doubt that we did), then our cognition would be one more tool, shaped so that we perceive what is relevant to our survival and reproduction. Darwinism suggests (and largely inspired) a pragmatist epistemology. The kind of truth independent of human purposes looks theological and old-fashioned in this light, even counter to the insights of science.

I like the style of naive realism. I prefer to say that appearance is just the mediation of the real. We don't see our seeing of the tree. We just see the tree. Ultimately it's a matter of style. Each side is trying to emphasize something valuable.

I started using 'air gapped' in response to your insistence that meaning is trapped in the individual skull. I think this is initially plausible because we see the separation of brains. Then the marks and noises of language are objectively meaningless. Somehow actual meaning is encoded in dead material for decoding into meaning again at another site. From a third-person perspective, this makes sense. But it thrusts us right back into reality being mediated by private cognition. We don't see the tree. I see the tree. This Cartesian framework opens up the usual talk of solipsism. Does not this imply that we all see a different reality? Then we have to infer somehow that we are actually in the same reality. The other problem is of course individual bias. Why should anyone be seeing reality correctly? We'd each have a privately held idea of what things are really like 'next' to our current idea of what things are like, as the possibility of the revision of our beliefs.

IMV, this is all about looking at what we really intend by certain phrases. What is their conceptual content?

The patterns of paints on a canvas are a pattern of paints. That doesn't mean that the patterns of paints are only OF a pattern of paints. — Terrapin Station

I agree. I think the problem here is that I see your point but you don't see mine.

For some background that similar to where I am coming from:

The absolutely “unconditioned,” regardless of the fact that it presents to reason as objective, is not an object or state of affairs that could be captured in any possible human experience. In emphasizing this last point, Kant identifies metaphysics with an effort to acquire knowledge of “objects” conceived, but in no wise given (or giveable) to us in experience. In its efforts to bring knowledge to completion, that is, reason posits certain ideas, the “soul,” the “world” and “God.” Each of these ideas represents reason’s efforts to think the unconditioned in relation to various sets of objects that are experienced by us as conditioned.

It is this general theory of reason, as a capacity to think (by means of “ideas”) beyond all standards of sense, and as carrying with it a unique and unavoidable demand for the unconditioned, that frames the Kantian rejection of metaphysics. At the heart of that rejection is the view that although reason is unavoidably motivated to seek the unconditioned, its theoretical efforts to achieve it are inevitably sterile. The ideas which might secure such unconditioned knowledge lack objective reality (refer to no object), and our misguided efforts to acquire ultimate metaphysical knowledge are led astray by the illusion which, according to Kant, “unceasingly mocks and torments us”. — SEP

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-metaphysics/#TheReaTraIll

No, it isn't. And that's such a simple mistake that it's ridiculous. The IDEA of the real world is an idea. The real world isn't itself an idea. — Terrapin Station

Is the real world there in your using of the phrase? What can you be referring to ? I'd say public reality, the intersection of air-gapped meanings. Of course there is a real world. The question is how this real world can exist in air-gapped skulls. Presumably you think that the brain synthesizes sensation into an indirect image of the world. Part of this image would be our philosophic examination of what is going on. The real world (which of course I believe in) is mediated by human cognition.
All we can meaningfully talk about is this mediated image of the world (from this perspective, anyway.)

If meaning lives only in the skull, then the intelligible structure of the world (meaning) is 'in' the skull --and yet this skull models its own environment. In short, we can indeed vaguely point outside of our modelling. But I think you are ignoring the tangles that occur when we try to specify exactly what we mean.

You're off the tracks here already. What in the world is this sentence even saying? What in the world does it have to do with anything we were just talking about? — Terrapin Station

The idea of the real world exists within an individual skull. And yet the idea of the real world is meant to include this skull and the meaning it contains. The 'real world' is an idea. Yet ideas are inside 'skulls' that are inside the 'real world.' What is really going on? I don't pick a side. It's like a mobius strip, a glitch in our human cognition. Kant examined similar glitches in CPR. We weren't necessarily evolved to revolve such issues. There are similar paradoxes in naive set theory.

So when we say something about the mind-independent world, we're not saying that we're not thinking about it, that we don't have concepts about it, that we're not using language, etc. But that's not what the claim is about. The claim is about the mind-independent world. Not about our concepts.

This is like another mental defect--an inability to understand the notion of aboutness, so that you conflate tools with what the tools are working on. — Terrapin Station

I agree with you on this point more than you might expect. As I've said, the real value of this is to reveal a certain aporia from taking either perspective as absolute. The issue is clarification in the pursuit of a less naive metaphysics. 'Aboutness' functions just fine when we don't try to make it explicit.

It's actually the pursuit of transpersonal reality that motivates the separation of what humans add on (their biases, historically limited pre-conceptions) the 'thing-in-itself' from this 'thing-in-itself.' Our discussion is itself part of this pursuit. I think it is closer to the experience to think in terms of finding the public in the private.

Let's recall that you yourself insist that meaning lives only in individual skulls. This approach especially suggests to me that all we can ever have is overlapping inter-subjectivity. The publicly real what be nothing, it seems, but the synchronized intersection of skull-trapped interpretations of the world. Personally I think there is a lot to recommend that approach, which is not to say that it is the last word. But it makes truth very human, bound to human purpose and human cognition. The quest then is (as I have said already) what is true-for-us and not just true-for-me. Making this true-for-us explicit tends to run into problems.

"The hydrogen atom has one proton and one electron." — Herg

There is a big statue of Lincoln in DC.

Both statements are the same kind of uncontroversial statement about our shared 'mind-dependent' world, one might say. Both have conceptual content. If we zoom on on what is 'meant' by hydrogen, we have to zoom back out to place 'hydrogen' in a wider context to give it sense. The world is a nexus of meaning, one might say. To ignore that physics is grounded in a wider context that makes it intelligible is tempting but misleading, I think.

IMV, I think a better take on 'mind-independent reality' is trans-individual reality, public or shared reality.

Even if you don't agree, try to grasp what is being said. Our language game as humans exists as a whole. These statements have no sense apart from a wider, embodied context. The talk about atoms is one more useful kind of talk. It helps us map measurements to measurements. It helps us make stuff. The leap from this to a metaphysics of atoms is not justified, IMV.

Sure. Okay, here's something about it. "There are lots of rocks on the Appalachian Trail near the Pennsylvania-New Jersey border." — Terrapin Station

All of this is loaded with the mental. We have the idea of a rock. We have proper names that exist within an historical context. I'd call this public or non-controversial reality. In short, this is talk about the human world, intelligible to humans. Does New Jersey exist independently as New Jersey independently from us ?

We are probably bickering over terminology.

I'm not a Platonist either. And 'external to us' is perfectly comprehensible: I don't see your difficulty.

Are you trying to sell us idealism? Because idealism is hopeless. It's a philosophical dead end. — Herg

Nope. Not idealism. I agree it's a dead end. And so is its opposite. That kind of categorical thinking is naive, IMV. I have to disagree that 'external to us' is 'perfectly comprehensible.' If that were the case, we would not have centuries of argument about it. It's not like we just here and now wandered in to a new issue. This is old stuff.

I think you're completely avoiding the need to support the notion that thereis some fundamental difficulty to it. — Terrapin Station

I am willing to do so. I think the best way is to ask you to say something about mind-independent reality. Then I will try to point out the contradictions.

?? I didn't say anyone says that. I said it's what's going on in those situations. It's like a kind of developmental retardation, and I don't at all mind if anyone reads that as insulting. — Terrapin Station

It's very much your choice if you want to toss around 'development retardation.' But then some of the famous philosophers are developmentally retarded. I don't think that you are a crank, but this kind of attitude is common in cranks. We usually see it in anti-science cranks, but this isn't the only kind of crankiness. The general structure of the crank is seeing fools in high places --high places where the crank rightfully belongs.

Mind independent reality isn't beyond human conceptualization in the slightest. Why would anyone believe that it is? — Terrapin Station

I think you are missing the fundamental difficultly in cashing out 'mind-independent.' Nobody doubts that there is mind-independent reality of 'some' kind. The problem is giving this phrase content.

For instance, tell me about mind-independent reality.

Mathematics is not mental in the sense you mean. It is grasped by the mental, but it is not constituted by the mental, because it is external to us. — Herg

That is an arguable position, but I'm not a default Platonist. The problem is just repeated here. What is this 'external' to us? IMV, we have unclarifed language here.

The stuff we're talking about doesn't "have concepts." Concepts are mental phenomena. That doesn't mean that we can't say anything about the stuff that's not us. — Terrapin Station

To say things about this stuff is just to 'project' concepts on it. Even if you don't agree, it would be good if you could grasp the idea that projecting a 'table' on some piece of mind-independent reality is arguably no different than projecting an arrangement of atoms. It's the same kind of shared meaning or conceptual interpretation. The 'atoms' story has an additional glamour that seems to derive from the worldly power of science.

Of course we can say things about it. Why on Earth would we believe that we are not able to? — Terrapin Station

If you are trying to talk about something beyond human conceptualization (mind-independent reality), then you would seem to have to strip all conceptual addition from experience. To think that talk about fields or electrons is talk about the mind-independent reality is IMV to make a mistake. Just as breaking the visual field into ordinary objects is a useful kind of modeling, so is finding patterns in measurements with the aid of intellectual objects like electrons. It's just more modelling 'within' the life-world. We know in a rough sense that our life-world has a foundation that precedes us. But whatever try and say about it already stuffs it with mind-dependence. We would believe we were not able to because we would see the problems or contradictions in our way of speaking.

Suppose, however, someone were to object: "It is not true
that you must already be master of a language in order to understand
an ostensive definition: all you need—of course!—is to know or
guess what the person giving the explanation is pointing to. That is,
whether for example to the shape of the object, or to its colour, or to its
number, and so on."——And what does 'pointing to the shape',
'pointing to the colour' consist in? Point to a piece of paper.—And now
point to its shape—now to its colour—now to its number (that sounds
queer).—How did you do it?—You will say that you 'meant' a different
thing each time you pointed. And if I ask how that is done, you will
say you concentrated your attention on the colour, the shape, etc.
But I ask again: how is that done?

...

And we do here what we do in a host of similar cases: because
we cannot specify any one bodily action which we call pointing to the
shape (as opposed, for example, to the colour), we say that a spiritual
[mental, intellectual] activity corresponds to these words.
Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there,
we should like to say, is a spirit.
37. What is the relation between name and thing named?—Well,
what is it? Look at language-game (2) or at another one: there you
can see the sort of thing this relation consists in. This relation may
also consist, among many other things, in the fact that hearing the
name calls before our mind the picture of what is named; and it also
consists, among other things, in the name's being written on the thing
named or being pronounced when that thing is pointed at.
38. But what, for example, is the word "this" the name of in
language-game (8) or the word "that" in the ostensive definition
"that is called . . . ."?—If you do not want to produce confusion you
will do best not to call these words names at all.—Yet, strange to say,
the word "this" has been called the only genuine name; so that anything
else we call a name was one only in an inexact, approximate sense.
This queer conception springs from a tendency to sublime the logic
of our language—as one might put it. The proper answer to it is: we
call very different things "names"; the word "name" is used to
characterize many different kinds of use of a word, related to one
another in many different ways;—but the kind of use that "this" has
is not among them.
....
What lies behind the idea that names really signify simples?—
Socrates says in the Theaetetus: "If I make no mistake, I have heard
some people say this: there is no definition of the primary elements—
so to speak—out of which we and everything else are composed; for
everything that exists1
in its own right can only be named, no other
determination is possible, neither that it is nor that it is not . . . . . But
what exists1
in its own right has to be .... . named without any other
determination. In consequence it is impossible to give an account of
any primary element; for it, nothing is possible but the bare name;
its name is all it has. But just as what consists of these primary elements
is itself complex, so the names of the elements become descriptive
language by being compounded together. For the essence of speech
is the composition of names."
Both Russell's 'individuals' and my 'objects' (Tractates LogicoPhilosophicus] were such primary elements.
47. But what are the simple constituent parts of which reality is
composed?—What are the simple constituent parts of a chair?—The
bits of wood of which it is made? Or the molecules, or the atoms?—
"Simple" means: not composite. And here the point is: in what sense
'composite'? It makes no sense at all to speak absolutely of the 'simple
parts of a chair'.

— W

Just some passages I think are ripe for discussion.

Consider this further case: I am explaining chess to someone; and I
begin by pointing to a chessman and saying: "This is the king; it
can move like this, ... . and so on."—In this case we shall say: the
words "This is the king" (or "This is called the 'king' ") are a definition
only if the learner already 'knows what a piece in a game is'. That is,
if he has already played other games, or has watched other people
playing 'and understood'—and similar things. Further, only under these
conditions will he be able to ask relevantly in the course of learning the
game: "What do you call this?"—that is, this piece in a game.
We may say: only someone who already knows how to do something
with it can significantly ask a name. — W

This already-having-to-know seems important to me. We can't start from zero and build everything up explicitly. We 'fade in' to having language. We always already have an initial understanding of what is going on that we can't get behind. If we try to get behind it, we have to use this understanding to try and do so. All the radical questions of the skeptic presuppose all kinds of tacit knowledge of what is going on.

Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a
saw, a screw-driver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws.—The
functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.
(And in both cases there are similarities.)
Of course, what confuses us is the uniform appearance of words when
we hear them spoken or meet them in script and print. For their
application is not presented to us so clearly. Especially when we are
doing philosophy. — W

Words side-by-side on the page (out of the context of their use) look to be all the same kind of thing. But we aren't looking at them in their dynamic application. We are just staring at them, not watching them work.

I found a pdf of the PI, btw.

Well, I don't know what to make of your discussion on the PI. I'm somewhat confused about what both of you mean by "meaning" here. Do you want to lead the reading group? How about you, Terrapin Station? Or maybe someone else? I don't know. — Posty McPostface

That confusion about what 'meaning' means is completely appropriate. It is confusing! If philosophy is an activity, the process of clarifying our thinking, then bombs away.

That philosophical concept of meaning has its place in a
primitive idea of the way language functions. But one can also say
that it is the idea of a language more primitive than ours. — W

I read this as: we have a naive pre-interpretation of what language is really doing. Wittgenstein gives examples that fit this naive idea. That's from PI.

To me, stuff like this seems like philosophers obsessing over people qua people, so that they can't allow themselves to address anything other than people, people's perspectives, etc. I see it as a case of not being able to move past seeing oneself as the "center of the world," or thinking that the "world revolves around them." — Terrapin Station

I understand why one might say that. But a person might ask what the motive away from the human is really about. It is itself a typical human motive, the quest for a god's eye view. As I see it, there are two grounds of the prestige of science. The first is practical power in the 'manifest image' or everyday world. If science didn't give technology and accurate predictions, it would collapse into sci-fi or pure math. The second is the quasi-religious urge to grasp Reality. IMV the metaphysical addition to the pragmatic value of science is 'religious' in its motivations. The idea of getting beyond the human is like the idea of getting beyond experience.

Another issue for me is that science doesn't need philosophy. Science is not grounded by the quasi-theological musings of the philosophers. It is, IMV, palpably grounded in worldly power. And the man on the street might express this as science being 'real' and philosophy being 'just a bunch of opinions in fancy words.' How do scientists feel about philosophy? Here is one opinion.

This is not to deny all value to philosophy, much of which has nothing to
do with science. I do not even mean to deny all value to the philosophy of science, which at its best
seems to me a pleasing gloss on the history and discoveries of science. But we should not expect it
to provide today's scientists with any useful guidance about how to go about their work or about
what they are likely to find. — Weinberg

http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Steven-Weinberg-%E2%80%9CAgainst-Philosophy%E2%80%9D.pdf

I don't at all agree that if we strip away everything mental we are left with nothing. I think it's rather absurd to suggest that somehow the world didn't exist at all prior to us, and then we just popped into existence as whatever it might be that you think we are, exactly, and created the world wholesale simply because we popped into existence. — Terrapin Station

Of course such an idea is absurd, and it is not at all what I am saying. That you would think that indicates to me that maybe you really haven't grasped the 'aporia.' It's the old critique of Kant. I understand your view to be vaguely Kantian. Assuming that there is some kind of physics-stuff that precedes the emergence of human consciousness (which I indeed believe), we can't say anything about it. It has no conceptual content. Any concept it could have would be the addition of consciousness. So the vague sense that the non-mentally physically real is 'energy' or 'fields' is contradictory, ignoring as it does that our interpretation of the world in terms of physics is not essentially different than seeing it in terms of furniture and people. In short, you are ignoring the problem that Kant ran into of giving sense to 'things-in-themselves.'

I don't think stuff like that is anything even remotely like a philosophical insight. I think it's more akin to being developmentally stuck at a stage that most people grow out of by the time they pass toddlerhood,or at best, it's rather sophomoric and/or off-the-charts self-centered. — Terrapin Station

Not to be insulting, but your readiness to think that that is what people are getting at is itself self-centered. I can't think of anyone who claims that, period. Things that sound that absurd are almost always being misinterpreted. Our readiness to take such misinterpretations as what is intended is self-flattering. 'Oh these fools,' we say, 'these children,' as we naively stop with lazy interpretation that ensures we never have to painfully absorb criticism. I'm no saint on these matters, btw.

But, we do need some narrative, don't we? — Posty McPostface

This may sound strange to you, but I think that my conversation with TS is already wrestling with the PI. What we could do is work more Wittgenstein quotes into this situation. How does meaning work? Is not this the theme of PI ? Or a central theme?

Is there anything you believe would be difficult to account for under my view? — Terrapin Station

You define meaning in terms of undefined words. I think it would be good to address how the language is learned as a whole and seemingly can't be anchored in any one word. How is the subject's working 'set' of meanings constructed? And does my response to your long post make my approach more intelligble?

We could do without a leader; but, someone needs to organize how we proceed, I think. — Posty McPostface

Personally I'm a bit of an anarchist on such matters. I'd suggest that people just bring up passages and interpretations and let the conversation rip --let it go where it goes. Even Wittgenstein was never settled about the order of the remarks.