Memories are present creations, recreated time and again and exist only so long as they exist in our synapses. The future is a similar story. Consciousness created "the Thing that Persists in Time" so that it could compare different impressions and draw conclusions. But my belief is that past and future only live in one's consciousness.

So if this is what Heidegger means to say by time- then yes I agree. — Jonah Tobias

Hmm. While there is a case to be made for your view, I think that is basically a sophisticated version of (meta-)physics time that prioritizes the present. Heidegger is trying to show us that our notion of the present is mostly inherited baggage that doesn't do our first-person experience of meaning justice.

You say 'memories are present.' What's really being pointed at by Heidegger is the 'impossibility' of this pure present, one might say. It is understood as a point of instantaneous meaning. It's a fiction that covers over the same care-structured meaning-flow that it exists within. Something along those lines. It is 'common sense' that there is an exact now. But what if common sense is missing something? What if this exact now is a useful fiction? A radicalization of the anyone's clock, created to manage our teamwork, extended to understand nature as a system of dead objects for staring at as opposed to grabbing and using.

Crazy, right?T he book I love is indeed called The Concept of Time, not anything with ethical charge, let's say. You might say that he was trying to describe the connectedness of mental life in a more accurate way via his phenomenological training with Husserl. But this 'lack of the present' idea also extends more generally over generations.

Hmmm. So there's two contexts of not accepting our thrownness. Thinking that we are an original causa sui- or believing a metaphysical story. These days it seems this is less common. Now people just don't believe in anything lol. Distraction has replaced faith. — Jonah Tobias

Well I think there is a complex of meanings that are hard to sort out. Even in The Concept of Time that chapter is considered the sketchiest. Of course I am still very much figuring this Heidegger fellow out. Having grasped some of it, I am convinced there is more worth decoding.

This reminds me of Sartre's take on love- the impossibility of trying to dominate the subject, etc etc. Its not that relevant to what we're talking about except to say- how foolish is it that we try to elevate our own experience to the universal? A lot of times our philosophies describe us better than they do the world. — Jonah Tobias

How true. And yet on the other side there really is something we call love that is good, and this seems to motivate the great philosophers--even in their honesty about the dark side of love or of obsessive lust. And this love involves a shared meaning space. Heidegger wrote somewhere that man 'was' metaphysics. Even though we 'know' that we can't 'know,' we are constantly striving to say what is true-for-us.

I'm not sure that I understand this importance of time as you and Heidegger are using it. — Jonah Tobias

If it was easy to grasp, Heidegger might be forgotten by now. It is really a phenomenological point. In short, the time of common sense is more or less physics time these days. I think most people would just say: yeah, that's just plain old time. So the future passes through the present into the past, right? Ah, but that is what Heidegger challenges as a theoretical construction that covers over a more original time (that we must be experiencing right not by definition and the foundational or primordial time of the lifeworld --or the world as it is known when we aren't being philosophers and pretending that meaning is pasted on to atoms-and-void.) Does this help?

The way I 'got' it was to consider the flow of meaning as I read sentences. How does time work there? Is the past in the past, or is it in the future? And the reverse? Is meaning instantaneous? Or as you read every word do you both expect and remember?

Would clock time as we understand it be accessible to us without this primary 'meaning time'?

Heidegger saw something that Nietzsche did not see --or that was maybe only vaguely implicit in Nietzsche. For Nietzsche perhaps becoming was still a theoretical becoming and not the immediate grasp of a phenomenon.

I'm hearing Sartre's decision here in a way. Maybe Sartre presented his decision more as a radical break than this- there seemed to be a kind of unnatural randommness required for him- you don't decide for reasons but simply because to decide is to be free... I'm less impressed with Sartre in general lol. But it was fundamental that one choose one's decision- and here I see a choosing- a choosing of one's thrownness. Would you say the two are similar or different? Am I putting it correctly. — Jonah Tobias

Sartre is an absolute genius at times, but in some ways he missed one point of Heidegger entirely, which is an escape from the dominance of the theoretical mind. With Sartre you get existence as a thrown project caught up in time. You get authenticity versus bad faith as an explicit (theoretical) ethic. (You get some fascinating things that I don't think are in Heidegger too, some of my favorite passages of philosophy-literature.) But I grok the 'unnatural randomness,' It's kind of like free will in an atheistic context. And then Sartre though man was a futile passion to be God. Which maybe does capture some essential structure. But Sartre also liked to hang out in cafes, while Heidegger liked his rural hut and disliked the empty business of cities. Both seem to have been womanizers.

What does this really mean- this choosing of our thrownness? Do you think that we often live our lives with imaginary cards? — Jonah Tobias

I guess that depends if one believes in an afterlife or counts fantasies of starting from zero. My old man didn't like me reading philosophy. He told me that he had his own philosophy. Well, when he did talk about it, it was just a mishmash of pop-culture. It had emotional depth, but it wasn't his anymore than what I was piecing together from more serious sources was really mine. But I knew that mine wasn't mine. He didn't know or bother to know that his wasn't his. You see the consciousness of time as inheritance here? Maybe the better contrast, however, is between 'our' cards (the tribes cards) and 'my' cards. Because authentic means 'own,' just as one's death is one's 'own' more than just about anything else can be. It is literally the end of the world, a personal apocalypse. It exists now in the form of possibility. What does it mean to look at it and take it into account, as a constant possibility and not as distant event that one buys insurance for?

*Authenticity is one of the more elusive concepts. So I can't be sure I am getting it just right.

To face death and our own mortality seems like it throws us more into the now- the present moment- and here is how I understand your talk of musicality and poetry. There's no point to it per se- its not to get somewhere. As a guru once said to me. "So you seek enlightenment. Where will you find it... over there?" Our life can not be justified by some imagined goal- it must be its self justification at each moment- like music or poetry. — Jonah Tobias

Yes, I think we have the same general grasp. Life is justified by feeling, ultimately. And even if we think it is justified by something in the future, that project gives us a good feeling now, maybe a kind of sober joy. I would maybe stress that actually living does indeed require us to work at things patiently. In other words, having a project (as simple as doing the laundry) is pretty fundamental to life. Lots and lots of little projects organized into a larger project --which may be just becoming all that we can become in the face of mortality --including learning to love the little things and the mortal music of life.

Tell me if I'm on the right track with any of this. What I'm missing and not understanding. I've always felt like an outsider looking on Heidegger's thought.

I'll only add from my perspective- music or poetry also reach that dialectical ideal of becoming- where we are not trying to exploit or control but are equally putting ourselves in the mixture. The embodied cognition, as you called it, also means that our bodies and ourselves are at stake in our thought and actions. And isn't this what is truly Authentic? — Jonah Tobias

I've tried to add what you might overlooking above. I think your definition of authentic is closer to Heidegger's than you think. Existence is fundamentally care which is fundamentally caught up in time with a project and a past. When does the clock time become my time? When do I face my past as the only thing I have to work with? When do I decide that I can only play the cards that were dealt with me? When do I choose a project in terms of what is possible given those cards and not imaginary cards that let me do anything? What is it to get serious with a kind of sober joy that embraces the world I was thrown into? Arguably this adds more to the text than the text gives. It is presented not as an ethics but as a 'cold' description of the structure of existence made possible by such authenticity.

What allows the way we are caught up in time to become visible? In stronger terms, what allows us to see that existence 'is' time?

These heidegger ideas- as well as the one you mention with how our time is lived historically- I just can't get inside these ideas to feel them. So I know I don't really understand them. — Jonah Tobias

Well they are strange indeed. In my view, Heidegger himself made it more difficult than it had to be as time went on. His early lectures are clear, but he didn't publish a book until he had years of radical content to present under economic pressure. What was popularized was a kind of 'ethical' philosophy, where 'authenticity' was understood as a virtue to strive for. On top of that, the capitalization of 'Being' suggests something mystical or quasi-religious. This too, just like authenticity, was perhaps a misleading device of translators. We are so used to philosophers telling us what to do....but Heidegger prefers questions to answers. Yeah, he shares some phenomenological insights, but these are intended to light up the question of what it means for something to exist, a question he never pretends to answer.

A philosopher always has an ego and the grandiose abstract nature of philosophy can certainly play to this ego. So we don't know how to dance or dress fashionable or make social conversation but all this is "petty" and we are above and beyond these "petty things".... I can't help but see philosopher's like Heidegger in this manner. — Jonah Tobias

I think you are right about that. On the other hand, he is perhaps as good as a critic of that (done the 'wrong' way) as Nietzsche. And of course Nietzsche understood himself to be a world-historical personality too. Both were probably right.

Beauty and materialism in their right place are fundamental parts of a good life- even though some are more sensuous when it comes to these things and some are more enamored with thought and other aspects of life. The Carpenter values working with your hands, the philosopher values work of the mind, and the concierge or fashion designer values the art of comfort and appearance. All are valuable and have their place. — Jonah Tobias

One thing you might be missing is the massive 'valorization' of practical life in Heidegger. One of his basic ideas is that our ordinary know-how (working with tools) is itself unrecognized by the compulsively theorizing mind that can't see around its own way of distorting the object. Heidegger was a supreme holist when it came to describing existence. Our primary way of addressing the world is messing with it, beating it into shape. This primary knowhow is the inconspicuous ground of theorizing that has fundamentally mis-grasped existence in pursuit of a certainty that forgets what it is certain about --ignoring the question of how things are for us in the obsession over whether they are. Existence also grasps itself as a present-to-hand object like a thing that we are staring at and thinking about. This misses the way that existence (and therefore meaning) is fundamentally and not accidentally caught up in time. (This means that all 'truth' is caught up in time.)

My suspicion is that when Heidegger appeals to these fringe extreme concepts like the fact we all will die one day- its an attempt to render these parts of life worthless. Nietzsche criticized this a good deal when he was talking about those who raise a god only to cast a shadow upon life. Who are the lovers and who are the haters of life- Nietzshce who often asked. This is too simplistic because Nietzsche was of course full of hate and he admitted it himself- but the question has some validity. And where do we put Heidegger in terms of this question? — Jonah Tobias

While I grasp your point, I don't think it accurately gets at Heidegger's interest in death. He is largely interested in death as something that makes the historical-temporal nature of existence visible to those who endure it as possibility. He grasps the Hegelian point that a discourse about what is must account for its own possibility. Our immersion in the usual business and clock time 'covers over' a more primordial experience of time. Nietzsche himself wrote that he was born posthumously. This is what Heidegger was talking about. We can think ahead to the time that we are no more and understand ourselves in terms of a legacy. We can also reach back to Nietzsche for instance and interpret him in a way that helps us construct our own future. And we can only go back to Nietzsche from within our own thrownness -- we have to interpret him from our lives in 2018. And now I'm trying to do that with Heidegger, who wrote the work I especially like just about 100 years ago. I'm not saying that there aren't Nietzschean critiques to be made, and my intial complaints about Heidegger were from similar Nietzschean perspectives. Beyond all of this, I'd say just read The Concept of Time. You may or may not love it, but I think going back to Heidegger with fresh eyes and looking at a translation like that one where being is not capitalized will give you a fresh perspective. I can't speak for later Heidegger, but I vouch for the mid 1920s.

"Is something truly good if it is only temporary.... don't we want that which is Good Always?" — Jonah Tobias

I'd say that, as much as Nietzsche if not more (with Nietzsche as a master), Heidegger is a supreme destroyer of such static conceptions--at their root, extending the 'becoming' theme. Being is 'essentially' caught up in time or only appears against the background of time or within time. And the denial of death is related to a quest for timeless. On the other hand, and this is where Nietzsche and Heidegger might both ignore something, we do indeed believe in some kind of elusive virtue which is quasi-static. Our biology is more or less fixed. If our theory is radically entangled with time, still there are vague animal-emotional value-constants. Certainly great philosophers like Nietzsche and Heidegger felt tuned in to the 'eternal' at times. I personally think that the heights of human experience are fairly universal in emotional terms. So an anti-Platonic discourse might have to take this into account. The problem may be and have always been the tendency for talk about these high states to become too theoretical and dogmatic. The words lose their force. This, however, is a central theme for Heidegger. The way that words die into banality and systems--the chatter of Everyone who no longer understands their depths or sources. And this is where we start, born in the 'sin' of not having chosen that chatter that we start with in order to think (and feel?) ourselves out of it. (And really we have to sink back into all of the time in ordinary life.)

Why can't we focus on one thing at a time instead of flitting about from topic to topic like a squirrel with ADD? (And where the different topics are like nuts that we're desperately trying to build a huge store of prior to winter.) — Terrapin Station

Since the central theme is language/meaning in which all of these topics appear, we have really been talking about one thing, something like the being of meaning. If certain common-sense assumptions about the way that language/meaning is 'supposed' to work are 'seen around' by returning to the phenomenon itself (just look at the living process in your own mind), then a kind of background know-how is foregrounded along with an essentially historical 'connectedness of mental life.' I can say this with confidence if not with proof because the shared meaning space includes this sense of shared-ness.

I think you misunderstand me because you are trying to fit the terms I use into your fixed metaphysical meat-grinder. You want them to have sharp atomic meanings to correspond to the very fantasy that they deny, which is that words have ever had sharp atomic meanings independent of context. Context sharpens meaning (but never to perfect resolution) and such context is necessarily historical, caught up in a time that is not the simple time of the clock. This is made clear not only by phenomenological investigation ('first-person' is an imperfect pointer here) aided by 'formal indications' (the pointers to these inconspicuous or 'covered-over' phenomena contributed by others) but also by a sincere wrestling with the problem of interpretation. One has to care about understanding the other (grasping new ideas that don't coddle your lingo) more than one cares about playing a kind of argumentative sport. I am quite capable of playing that sport, but it's an inferior way to spend time IMO. Let's leave uncharitable misreading (misreading itself may be the only kind in absolute terms) to the politicians.

A cat would be nice. :) — Posty McPostface

If you have the space and funds for one, I think it's a great thing to try. My cat is playing the fool right now. I just love that evil little thing.

What's self-esteem? I have a notoriously low self-esteem. — Posty McPostface

Do you though? The audacity to say such a thing indicates some kind of self-affirmation. I'm just spittballing, but I think a rejection of the ways of the world (adult disenchantment) indicates a stubborn faith in one's own sense of how things ought to be. How might this connect to self-esteem? Do some of us present vulnerability with a cunning we don't fully understand?

When I was about 20, I tended to play the clown around everyone but my closest friend. I didn't take it as a conscious strategy. In a way it was a better mask than silence for a much more essential and serious core of my personality. Silence would have been all too loud, you see --and of course to some degree I did like to goof around more then.

My theory is: we adults dont play that much due to our abilities of thinking about the purposes or our exercices.
What are your thoughts on this? — musicpianoaccordion

If adults are not playing much, then IMV they are missing out bigtime. I think that many couples engage in verbal play. It's highly complex, so that I can't just lump it into joking around, though laughter is part of it.

And then sometimes, if we are lucky, we can experience our work as play. My career fluctuates. But even the boring parts increase my ability to play when the parts I like return.

Finally, even serious philosophical discussions can feel like a kind of play.

Mostly paranoia and anxiety. I don't like how THC affects my mood. I always been that doom feeling like I'm doing something wrong. — Posty McPostface

Well you don't need more bad feels. When I use it these days it's just the tiniest amount to cross a threshold where the surroundings are freshened up. But to each their own. Maybe I should have recommended a kitten.

And those intuitions are realist at their core. I am convinced that, whatever ideology we outwardly proclaim, whatever stuff we say the world is made of and however it is parceled out, inwardly we all believe that much of the world is indifferent to our thoughts and desires. We have some leeway in how we choose to conceptualize it, but there are strong constraints on those conceptualizations that are not up to us to choose. And that is the only ontology that matters. We can quibble about whether chairs or wave-functions "really exist," but that's just semantics. What matters is that there is this recalcitrant something that we all have to acknowledge, on pain of undermining all our empirical knowledge. — SophistiCat

We might also look at the gap between conceptualizations and a more ordinary sense of speeding trucks that might crush us, holes we might fall into, ice that we might slip on...I suspect that (to some degree) this is the dominant 'model'(?) by which other models are judged ultimately.

Are you careful about nutrition? Do you get enough exercise? Enough sleep? I find that a good long bikeride almost always fixes me up. Tire out the body, take a hot bath, and then lie down for a nap. If you aren't working out your heart and lungs, then your bad feels could be asking you for something like that.

Also, how does THC affect you? I find that it always makes things interesting. In low doses there is not much anxiety, if that is a concern. I don't use it often, but it's great as a way to break out of a rut and see the world with a cat's curious eyes again.

I've been through some dark moods that had no obvious reasonable cause. Eventually they lifted. I'd say the key thing is to hang on and experiment.

It has been fun! These kinds of subjects always offer a good bit of a mind workout. They can be somewhat frustrating though, due to the "ordinary language on holiday" syndrome they often embody! Certainly no hard feelings on my part, despite the fact that my tone can seem strident at times. — Janus

Well said, and I feel the same. I try to be forceful in pursuit of clarity, but sometimes in retrospect I'm afraid I verged on rudeness or being too strident. Frankly philosophy excites me so much at times that I can't stop thinking about it. And I only 'want' to stop because the real world demands other things from me --intellectual things, fortunately, but not as wild and free as philosophy.

The word 'truth' is itself polysemous, so none of this is exactly apt when it comes to thinking about so-called poetic or religious truths. — Janus

I think we agree quite a bit here. Part of me even wants to radicalize this. Even thinking of a finite set of meanings seems to betray the phenomenon of meaning to some degree. I am tempted to say that meaning is better modeled by R than N, and that individual word meanings or sets of meanings are still just useful abstractions, potentially misleading us in other contexts. Wittgenstein's 'language on holiday' is a great insight, but perhaps one retort would be that it sometimes accomplishes something to experience a word present-to-hand.

But to return to the OP; when a question like "Is idealism irrefutable" is asked, then we are dealing with the kind of logic that strictly propositional notions of truth operate within, because there is really no sensible question at all of "refuting" poetic or religious truths. I believe this is a source of great confusion in philosophy; which is amply demonstrated on these forums by the proliferation of superficial religious topics and posts. — Janus

I agree that that is what the OP presupposes, that questions about idealism are sufficiently sharp for an equally sharp notion of truth to be applied. But in my view we can only get this in mathematics. Even in mathematics we get this by ignoring meaning altogether epistemologically. Perhaps my fundamental point is that a typical ambition to do math with words ignores in its lust for certainty that language is far too slippery and flexible for that. I advocate a holism that I see as our usual mode of understanding/using language, which lies inconspicuous in its closeness to us.

Life must be seen as an art — Jonah Tobias

Great line. The art of existence, the art of life. A clumsy beginner learns to dance. The young mind that starts by repeating common sense can end by revolutionizing common sense.

But with no light at the end of the tunnel. — Wayfarer

Indeed, that is how nihilism experiences itself and what makes it a dark night of the soul. The self is thrown back on its own existence. It is beyond the usual platitudes. It no longer takes 'spiritual' truths on authority. Only now can it work out its own salvation with fear and trembling. Only now is it facing the problem first-person and not just nodding along with the experts who keep it from the depths of its personal situation. The other cannot die for me, and the other cannot find 'God' for me.

Think of the person who says something mean- and everyone feels bad- and then another person who finds this ridiculous- and laughs at it- and then everyone laughs. The mean person's perspective is now discarded in exchange for the perspective of the one who laughs. — Jonah Tobias

Nice example. We impose on the shared space of meaning not only with words but through smiles, frowns, body language, rude tones, welcoming tones. I think contributes to the continuity of the meaning space. Other thinkers might stress 'embodied cognition.' While it is useful to break experience into pieces for some purposes, it is also useful to try to grasp consciousness as a living unity of concept, emotion, and sensation. I use these three words to point at a unity which is not a simple sum.

What is common and already widely understood is easily communicated through a sentence or two. What is different and doesn't want to be understood through old perspectives requires explanation. — Jonah Tobias

Exactly, which is a classic Hegelian point. One cannot compress a philosophical result into a proposition in the usual language. The meanings of the terms [itself a misleading expression, since terms don't have significant individual meanings] evolves dialectically. In short, the potent philosopher extends the language not primarily through a few neologisms but far more radically so that all of the terms of encrusted common sense are enriched. The desire for bite-sized philosophy that already fits on paradigm is the desire for no philosophy at all --or, more generously, the desire to stick with the relatively trivial part of philosophy, the machine-like inference from ideas already grasped to other ideas already grasped. It is the construction of these ideas that demands so much, and grasping a philosopher is repeating that construction by repeating not their result as a meaning-poor mantra but rather by taking approximately the same path that they did within one's mind. Hence the necessity of long posts where there is not already a mutual grasping of the issues. Such length does not ensure success, obviously. But de-contextualized aphorisms are even worse, since they offer the illusion that one has understood.

Mental phenomena are such as thoughts, ideas, concepts, etc. They're only first-person observable. — Terrapin Station

Of course I know what you mean in the everyday sense. Who doesn't? We start from this what-everybody-already-knows. IMV, you are repeating this as if it's an insight or a kind of progress in the discussion. I, on the other hand, am problematizing a distinction. If you uncharitably read philosophy as insanity, this would only support my point (not really mine) that paradigm-shifts are unintelligible nonsense at first. In this case, the paradigm-shift is mostly old news, since I am really just working through insights that are more than 100 years old.

So I'm crazy, Hegel is crazy, Heidegger is crazy. Everyone not immediately intelligible is crazy, because they try to extend and enrich 'common sense' by rooting out its blinding presuppositions. As we see the limitations of our current way of talking, we can only express these limitations to others in this same limited language. Argument is secondary to the disclosure of new concepts/entities that can only be argued about once they are grasped (become sufficiently public.) The space of shared meaning (which you haven't really accounted for as far as I can tell) is enlarged by metaphors and distinctions. We do not compute on some fixed, finite set of atomic meanings. Such a grasp of the object assumes that philosophy can work like that most normalized of discourses, mathematics. What is ignored in this pursuit of an ideal epistemology (math's) is that it comes at the cost of completely ignoring what is being talked about. A theorem is certainly true, but what it means 'floats free.' The epistemology is perfect at the cost of ignoring meaning altogether. The object is fit to the criterion, which 'truncates' what is living in it.

If we really take our own difficultly to grasp new ways of thinking and talking as the insanity of that new way of thinking, then our poor quantum physicists are crazy (or were crazy.). And every schoolchild's calculus teacher is a lunatic. Surely most would be ashamed to call these disciplines crazy. Why? Primarily because science and math are directly associated with worldly power. Even if no one 'really' understands QM (per Feynman), it gives us the internet. The complacency of well-fed common sense may well scoff at the funny way their apparently useless philosophers talk about talking. And, indeed, there are crazies enough out there. And one is free to sleep through what is awkwardly mysterious or problematic in one's default method. This is even the rule. We might even say that philosophy is the ecstatic self-mutilation of encrusted common sense. It hurts to think in new ways and yet it brings joy.

Given that the question cannot by definition be answered the way you are wanting to ask it; is the question really of any use? — Janus

That itself is a good question. And it brings me back to the ultimate authority of science being grounded in utility, public utility, the things that everyone wants, including me. An earlier issue I brought up was the tension between the pragmatic/instrumentalist monkeys-using-tools vision supported in some sense by science with a more passionate concern with what is 'really' there that is almost always at work in philosophy. Does utility = truth? I have defended such a position before, but I no longer think it makes sense. Truth cannot be pinned down like that. Our sense of 'true-for-us' eludes exact conceptualization, it seems. Meaning is not atomic or explicit. Proof? No proof, if meaning as it exists for us is not recognized as 'real' in the first place. Otherwise I'd say just examine your consciousness as you read.

I have been trying to light up the mysterious in what is easily taken for granted. It is 'obvious' that meaning isn't public, such is one of many public meanings. It is 'obvious' that science doesn't address meaning, and yet it is obvious that science exists as meaning. If all the scientistic philospher is saying is that science reveals some part of public existence extremely well, then who could disagree with that, except maybe to obsess over the words and miss the spirit of the remark?

Not only do I not deny the elusiveness of the word 'meaning,' I suggest that this elusiveness is there for the taking generally in language --which only exists distributed across a time that seems different than physics time (which itself exists within this kind of meaning-time.)

It's been fun talking tonight. I finally have to go to bed. Hope there are no hard feelings despite our slightly combative discussion.

If we can identify and agree about the features of public entities (which we certainly seem able to do), what more is required for shared meaning? — Janus

I think you are ignoring the complexity involved. And really identification-in-common is already mysterious, already a form of shared meaning. We don't see different patches of sensation. We see the same chair and know that we see the same chair. And this is the small stuff.

Science itself is an intelligible discourse. Did Einstein's consciousness exist? How could his ideas be shared? I'd say something like 'brains are networked,' and the individual human brain is to some degree an abstraction, at least if we are concerned with the brain in its 'natural' (social) condition. But this is to speak a lingo or organs, when I am really pointing at something that we are doing right now --imposing on some imperfectly public meaning-space.

Since this is a fundamental part of being human, it's hard to imagine not addressing this space (from within this same space.) And discourse about experience as a whole must take it into account since such a discourse lives in this space. We can ignore this space and look outside at more reliably shared public objects, but we still move in this space even as we reason about these objects and illuminate their nature. It's mysterious and yet utterly familiar.

I think it is acknowledged by science that any entity that cannot be directly observed is a mathematical model. Of course it is assumed that there is something energetically real there which is being modeled, but that we cannot visualize it adequately (and thus must rely on our mathematical models for understanding) simply because our abilities to visualize have been conditioned and limited by the perception of observable entities. — Janus

And of course all of this is fine, but (from a philosophical angle) how does this unseen something exist? What is the gap between our models and what they model? Do scientists even need to take a position on whether electrons or quarks are anything more than useful fictions? Perhaps you see where I am coming from. We have prediction, control, and a certain language game. The details of the language game are mostly unimportant to most, who mostly want tangible, intelligible results in the 'lifeworld.'

What I think is questionable is adopting virtual entities as the 'real' world simply because these virtual entities are part of the creation of technology. I do see a certain aporia, but I would leave it undecided and just endure it. The lifeworld is 'in' the deadworld is 'in' the lifeworld is 'in' the 'deadworld' is....

What motivated my initial interest in philosophy was the possibility of spiritual illumination or enlightenment — Wayfarer

I relate to this too. I didn't know what exactly I was looking for, but it was always a thrill to see the world from a wider perspective, having synthesized painful contradictions both in thought and action. Hegel speaks to me in this regard. Existence is describable as the process of its own self-clarification. Since language/meaning is so deeply a part of this (and so mysteriously public/social), it's hard to imagine stopping with prediction and control that cannot give an account of its own possibility.

And I think that most would agree that the point of prediction and control is to create the leisure, abundance, and safety to pursue the heights of feeling and thought that are possible in such conditions. Philosophy in that sense is the blossom, while natural science is the leaves and stem --mentioning here only the conceptual heights which are by no means all that we care for. Then of course philosophy is a passionate, potentially ecstatic 'how' of being human. For me it opens more doors than it closes.

But that has culminated in a somewhat religious kind of philosophy, although possibly ‘religious’ is not actually the correct word, in that it’s not oriented around mainstream religion. Anyway, I have never wavered in my pursuit of that understanding. — Wayfarer

I suppose for me philosophy is just one of the deeper aspects of being human. IMV, it (among other things) dissolves or problematizes the everyday understanding of terms (which is why you put 'religious' in quotes.) In some ways it is precisely this thrust against educated common sense (or all that a community takes for granted) --ideally because it has a larger view on existence that no longer fits in that everyday taken-for-granted obviousness.

natural science reveals what is really going on? — Janus

Hi, Janus. I was responding to your 'really' above. This is the metaphysics. I get it. I trust science so that this 'really' is natural and defensible in many ways. But it implies that non-scientific experience is unreal. Since I think science depends on 'ordinary consciousness,' the world of tables and chairs, I can't embrace the notion that the chairs and tables are not real while electrons, etc., are.

Mach resisted the atomic theory as being descriptive of what was 'truly' there. They were handy virtual entities (fictions) for getting good predictions. Evidence became stronger so that he looked silly, but I always liked his skepticism. I'm not adopting his philosophy as my own, but I think I saw where he was coming from. He thought of science (if memory serves) as the economic description of patterns in sensation. But there are problems with this. We don't work with 'sensation.' We already see the tables and the chairs. We understand measuring instruments. This basic intelligibility of the world deserves contemplation, I think. The meaningless world is an abstraction useful for certain purposes within the meaningful world. In some very important sense this meaningful world is also in the meaningless world.) Aporia. But this doesn't mean the meaningful, ordinary world in which ideas are somehow shared is an illusion.

A second theory might understand science as the modelling of relationships between measurements. Where does the 'hidden but truly real' have a place in this perspective? Is the ordinary world real or an illusion? Or is all of this a function of the language game we are playing in a particular context while engaged in a particular purpose? Is meaning 'fixed' enough to begin with so that metaphysics is possible is a certain 'perfect' way? I am primarily trying to light up the question, not answer it.

Not publicly, as I've already said. I can't see anything puzzling about the distinction between private and public actuality. — Janus

You may be missing something then. How does meaning exist? How can science be shared if meaning is not somehow public? How is the spider egg interpreted as a spider egg? How is the number of spider eggs written down in a book for others to read?

It's been awhile, but I remember the Vienna Circle struggling with questions like this. What is an observation? Is it really so trivial? Or are we employing a know-how that we take utterly for granted and don't even think to investigate because it is too close? And you mention phenomenology, so I am surprised you have no idea where I am coming from.

Who said that philosophy should not investigate supposed "subjective meaning"? It's trivially obvious that science cannot investigate that! But what do you think phenomenology consists in? — Janus

Is 'subjective meaning' really real, in your view? And if it is trivially obvious that science exists as 'subjective meaning' (at least part of it) and trivially obvious that science cannot investigate 'subjective meaning,' then science cannot reveal its own actuality? Or not in its fullness? Does science even exist (in its living essence as meaningful discourse) for itself?

Do we really disagree? Or what?

I think we share a sense that philosophy should not collapse into something 'small,' dazzled so much by the undeniable public power of science that it is afraid to investigate that which makes science possible and yet may be resistant to the scientific method, supposedly 'subjective' 'meaning.' Is meaning subjective? What is meaning? Whatever it is, science lives 'in' and 'as' such meaning. To be clear, I think it is 110% fine that science just takes such meaning for granted and builds its models. Most of life is like that. It works with a pre-loaded intelligibility which it need not question. On the other hand, philosophy seems like exactly the human pursuit that digs deep, 'uselessly' or for 'existential reasons' or out of curiosity. It does question 'educated common sense,' or is all such questioning ridiculous? Philosophy makes the sensible, worldly people giggle. Is philosophy essentially worldly and respectable? Or is it a little foolish, like a child? Or maybe it is especially serious. Or both.

I am really only opposing a philosophy that adds to this modelling without perhaps confessing that it is wrapping a metaphysics around it --and 'my' critique is far from new. I'm just exploring this critique, bringing old thinkers to life in my own mind.

Do you deny that the kind of observation, employing unbiased analysis and synthesis, that is characteristic of natural science reveals what is really going on? — Janus

I deny the absoluteness of this 'really.' Making this narrative (science) the 'real' one is where metaphysics comes in.

For example that the heart is a pump, that heat causes many materials to expand, some to combust, others to melt, that animals and plants both consist of cells (with plants cell, unlike animals cells, having cell walls consisting of cellulose) and so on? I mean, the examples are countless. Are these not revealing actuality? — Janus

I indeed agree that science is a central revelation of what is actual. But its power largely comes from ignoring the realm in which it has its foundation, a realm open to philosophy. I'm not religious in any typical way, so it's best to think of me as coming from a philosophical angle. To centralize science without further ado is like pretending we have eyes but no ears. Note that no one has really addressed my specific concerns about science-as-metaphysics (Note that my formal education is in science, so it's wrong to think that I am anti-science just because I ask more from philosophy than that it be the cheerleader or bodyguard of educated common sense. EDIT: not implying anything about your position in that last line --not sure where you are coming from yet)

I don't see how metaphysics comes into it at all. Can you explain why you think so? — Janus

One example: If we model reality with math and say that the model is good and reveals reality, we leave unquestioned how such models exist for us. How do we grasp real numbers? Are they real? Certainly the marks on paper are real. But this is not math. Science is caught up in a living intelligible discourse. While it can model this discourse in some ways (predict the next word I might type via machine learning), it is not clear that is even equipped to touch 'meaning.' Those who deny meaning would seem to have to do so in the very space of meaning. I don't know what meaning is, but I see the question.

Another example is the notion of a public entity. I think this notion is left hazy, precisely because we can get away with it and still have our technology. Are public entities fixed? Or did/can other communities recognize entities that we do not as public? This might sound like a silly question. But what is it that allows us to recognize a spider egg as a distinct public object? That one seems easy, and may be universal enough. But what is it to grasp a mathematical theorem as a public entity? None of this has any obvious bearing on the uncontroversial predictive power of science. It's about whether science can or is even interested in giving an exhaustive account of existence. If it does not even attempt to tackle issues for which its method is inappropriate, then making it the arbiter of the 'really' real is suspect, IMV. This fits the real to the method, not the method to the real.

After Studying philosophy I decided to go try and live it and basically- start revolution lol These days I'm primarily a musician and community organizer. — Jonah Tobias

Cool. I am (or really was) a musician too. Never been very political though. Always an outsider trying to understand (while some might say I should be doing and not just describing/clarifying.)

But the more pieces you throw into the air- the better chance you have that they may coalesce and form a new orbit. — Jonah Tobias

That makes sense to me. Paradigms are sometimes maybe shattered. We can go back and take a different fork in the road. It's maybe not always assimilation and transcendence but starting from 1/2 if not from 0.

This is my view of revolution in both thought and society. You work on one aspect- and then another- and then another- and its only after enough aspects have been altered that the big picture begins to emerge. — Jonah Tobias

There's a great quote to that effect in Hegel. The baby gestates 'continuously' but then there is a true break and the child is born.

I notice that you don't speak of two circles- you speak of brightening the one. Which is beautiful. And I think this metaphor works too. And here instead of two separate circles- you add enough to its rings that suddenly the whole circle starts to rotate around a different center. For me this circle we're born into is often very isolationist and solitary- from the individual to the nuclear family. And the new center I seek- is also the old center. Tribe. — Jonah Tobias

Right. The world-as-significance-with-offers gets larger and bright (if all goes well and ignoring dark nights of the soul that may be necessary for this intermittently.) I like your addition to the metaphor. It becomes re-centered. A spinning, expanding wheel whose center is not fixed.

I think I know what you mean by isolated / solitary. There are two ideas that unexpectedly blend. Lemme see what you think. Facing mortality can give you distance from what is petty in one's community. In that sense it is isolating, especially if most don't want to face embarrassingly deep issues while there are gadgets to collect and while there is respectable worldly position to enjoy. On the other hand, the terror of death forces us to flee from what is petty or less important in ourselves. Flee where? To universal virtue which is more like poetry or music than a fixed idea. Mozart and Hegel and Einstein live on by being reborn in those who approach them with care. And then in a less grandiose framework there is just a increased ability to see virtue in those in your ordinary life. Instead of obsessing over the right words or details, one grasps them as a whole, 'musically,' and learns their language in a spirit of generosity and they learn yours. You understand that the children to come will be again what you found most important in yourself. They will find the same treasures of the interior, if you are lucky with your help, because you passed on music or existence-clarifying concepts or a kinder and wiser political structure.

Ah I was trying to place where the talk of time but not the time of the clock and "care" came from... Heidegger! Heidegger's interesting for me because when I was really reading this stuff I was an atheist and very Nietzschean and I followed Heidegger in all his thrownness, Neitzschean resonating talk- But then when he got to the sort of disclosure more Eastern sounding aspects I was "thrown" off lol. — Jonah Tobias

I've been thrown off Heidegger a few times, but some itch always brought me back. I still can only really enjoy his work from the mid 1920s (I have some of the lectures and the tiny first draft of B&T which I've read more than B&T itself. Of course some secondary literature too.) It has slowly opened up for me.

But then after my philosophical journey came my spiritual journey- and I began to believe after arguing for only beliefs- that there was capital T Truth... Only we don't possess or create it. We can only listen to it. — Jonah Tobias

Fascinating. I'm probably more in tune with essentially Christian themes, but I find that these are not so innocent. Nietzsche's sketch of Christ in The Antichrist sounds quite a bit like Nietzsche! A few passages in that book, even though they are intended to be critical or distanced, are nevertheless some of the best spiritual writing I am aware of. It's basically the incarnation myth --a sense of complete at-home-ness and non-alienation by either fixed concepts or some distant authority. Luciferian, really. But of course Blake explored the marriage of Heaven and Hell long ago, and Jesus was viewed as The Adversary of the religion of his day.

To put it clear. I believe from my own experiences, that among the other experiences of spirituality- there is a kind of knowing that one can listen to. It is very quiet, especially at first. But the more one listens, the louder it gets. To me it is an obeying, but I'm also Jewish and I've noted different peoples seem to have a different relation/concept of spirituality (Christians go to India and they still talk all about love and christ consciousness lol). — Jonah Tobias

Thanks for sharing this. I think you make a good point about our hardware or OS following with us wherever we go. The religion of our childhood probably sticks with us. We can come back and make it more sophisticated. But maybe it stains us in an important way.

Now this opens up a chilling line of thought for me as a Jew discussing Heidegger. I always thought about this spiritual voice- that like Kierkegarrds discussion of Abraham and Isaac- the Big T Truth is anything but Humanist! It follows no rules at all that we can proscribe. The chilling prospect of giving up your will to it is that it could tell you to do something monstrous.

Can you imagine what a monstrous possibility that is?

What if God told Heidegger all the Jews should be sent to camps!!! — Jonah Tobias

Yes, you raise some great points. Humanism is very nice and rational, but there is an aspect of spirituality or call it what you will that wants to transcend the nice and rational. Feuerbach was so liberated/inspired by his insight that he perhaps expected to much from others. 'If only man overcomes religious alienation, then ...utopia.' But some of his critics saw that abstractions like humanism can be every bit as alienating or artificial.

It is hard to make sense of such a strong philosopher being sucked in by Nazi rhetoric. I have read some history from that period, and to me it's just obviously hypocrisy. A fever-dream. There is some crude quasi-pseudo-Nietzsche mixed in with it, and it's an example of how initially liberating ideas can be transformed into tyranny and stupidity if held fixed or without the care that develops them.

I read the Schiller wikipedia article you attached. and I remember reading some of the pragmatists... here's the thing for me- For some reason I do get excited about some of their ideas- but more often than not, they seem to quiet my thoughts. To replace thinking with common sense. it almost seems like a quieting of philosophy some how. — Jonah Tobias

I can relate to that. I think of (later) Wittgenstein as an extension or alternate version of linguistic pragmatism. The futility of a certain kind of nitpicking approach is...disclosed. But what is stirring about it for me came mostly through Rorty. He liquifies thought to such a degree that it reminded me of Taoism. It verges on a mysticism that is completely earthly and flexible.

Can you explain this to me? — Jonah Tobias

I get the sense that you already understand the essentially historical nature of existence. But to clarify the words I happened to pick: existence 'is' its past in the mode of no longer being it. And existence 'is' its future in the mode of not yet being able to be it. (That's Sartre's version.) Existence is fundamentally caught up in time. Who I am now is possibility that haunts facticity. The past 'leaps forward' into the future in the way or the how of my interpreting what is possible. At the same time, my care for what is possible or investment in a project reveals the so-called past in a new light. I write so-called because in this sense the past is not dead and fixed.

Moreover our thrownness is deeply social. I emerge from the way of looking at the world that Everyone shares. I am everyone and no one before I am able to become someone, to overstate it. So the past is everyone's past at first in one sense. He calls this 'interpretedness.' The conscious already-been-interpreted is not really the problem. A 14-year can have the nihilist insight. It's the water we swim in that we can't see that really traps us. This is the 'hidden' past that lives in the how of our initial grasp of things. This is the method we don't know that we have.

Philosophy (among other things) foregrounds this bad method so that better questions become possible. Are questions more essentially human than answers?

The clock comes in when Heidegger traces its birth and radicalization (the everyday clock is pushed to extremes by natural science.). Let's go back to the German peasant of 1905. We have certain projects that require daylight. Soon the sunrise has the significance of a 'now it is time to drive the cattle out.' All the individual projects are sewn together by this significance. We learn to talk in terms of a publicly present indicator of appropriate nows. The man who has the least time is the man who wears a clock accurate to milliseconds on his wrist. Our immersion in the business of life (in everyone's time) covers over our historical nature, including the flow of meaning. I have to go at the moment, but I hope that helps. If you want to read the 10 pages that cover this, you can find them in The Concept of Time (the 100 page first draft of Being and Time and not the lecture of the same name which is even shorter.) These pages were one of my ways in since they are very concrete.

Truth is a process that creates our experienced world. — Jonah Tobias

This is an exciting line. It reminds me of truth as disclosure. People can only argue about entities that are already mutually disclosed. But some speech acts bring the background to the foreground so that they can be argued about in the first place. This is what is great in Heidegger, IMV. What I get from him is not arguments but the revelation of things that were always there without me grasping them conceptually. He analyzes the evolution of human clocks in terms of care. By really looking into the concept of time he opens man's essentially historical existence--existence as a thrown project, or a project that finds itself with a past that it must use for this project, that makes this project possible. From the point of view of truth as disclosure, poetry (poesis, creation) takes a more central role. If I lay down a strong metaphor for my brothers, their world is changed. I have extended their circle without an argument. I have wired new neurons together. As Nietzsche said, truth is a mobile army of metaphors --which is one more marching metaphor itself.

Tediously I maintain that that vision of truth does not exhaust the use-meaning of 'truth' as a token within ten-million meaning-currents. But it is itself one more example of truth-as-disclosure about one aspect of truth -- creation/disclosure.

I laughed out loud at this one. — Jonah Tobias

Great to hear. I like some joy in humor in foolosophy.

I have read William James and so many others but nothing in about the last 10 years so bear with me if I don't know whose arguments I may be using. — Jonah Tobias

No prob. It's really about the ideas and not their source who usually turns out to have yet another source. I mention the names to get a sense of what you have seen and to make certain references (as abbreviations of viewpoints) possible. I've read quite a few philosophers, but there are some famous ones that I haven't got around to. I often find 'my' ideas afterward in some forgotten philosopher (I like to read some outsiders not mentioned much at times.) So no prob & it's about the ideas in our own language today really.

when I say that something is real. It is what I must react to. Where as if something is fake- or false- I can dismiss it- and hold onto instead a different understanding- that which it really is. "This is not an opportunity to get rich- (discard that) its a scam (react to that)!" — Jonah Tobias

Well said. The truth is what one must react to. And another approach is that the real is what resists (as an obstacle between us and our desire.) And the real would also be a tool that will actually work.

Its only when we sketch out each part- the epistemology, the psychology, even the politics or ethics- that as it were we construct a mutually reinforcing home for these thoughts to live. We create an operating system. — Jonah Tobias

Yes, that's also how I see it. As Hegel said, science or knowledge exists as a system. Not only 'ought' to be but always already is, really, in my opinion, because the personality is a unity. One thing I'd twist is that we edit an operating system that we already have in order to start this editing. As you mention, we are thrown. A culture loads us up with a self-reprogramming operating system, a language --along with all kinds of practical knowhow from tying our shoes to knowing how close to stand to others.

In short, we don't start from zero. We start within some kind of 'circle' of the meaning of existence. It's a circle because it is the meaning for us of the world in which we live. I'd say that we extend and brighten that circle. Instead of the circle being a chain of atomic meanings, it's more like a wire through which current flows. Meaning is dynamic and caught up a time that does not belong to the clock (the clock's time emerges from this more fundamental time --not without dialectic trouble or feedback.)

For truth you could appeal to common usage- science- religion- shame or ethics or taboo- predictability/repeatability- pragmatism- passion- lack of passion- etc...and all of these bases of truth might shape your worldview at different moments. So I think its not just that we can't see this operating system because its so big or because we're always in it- but because it is shifting with many pockets and networks and webs of related and mutually determining ideas with varying relations to others. Its multiple. — Jonah Tobias

I agree. It's multiple. We use the same words differently in different contexts. And indeed all the meanings connect in a sort of web. Even this might be misleading. IMV, the fact that words are spatially separated when written encourages us to think of language as a sort of crystalline thing. While there are something like 'clumps' of initial meaning in words out of context, the way they work together is more even continuous more continuous than that. While 'truth' as a string of symbols is a discrete entity, its meaning lives only dynamically with other meanings which also exist only dynamically. (We are back to your becoming which is organized for convenience into discrete beings.)

Pragmatism seems to suggest a more exploitative concept of truth- truth is what benefits us. Whereas my animalistic concept of truth suggests that truth is what creates us (hopefully in a manner that benefits us). — Jonah Tobias

This is similar to Richard Rorty's so-called neo-pragmatism. For him there is no clear line between science, philosophy, poetry, and politics. Truth is created. He tries to think beyond the idea of correspondence. He tries to replace objectivity with solidarity. While I don't embrace every little thing about him, he really tuned me in to radical thoroughgoing holistic pragmatism. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is maybe his best book. He synthesizes his vision as a whole. I mention this because you two seem close in spirit, and (if you haven't already checked him out) I think you'd dig his work.

It adds a dynamism to our thought- it is the type of thinking that befits the "over-man", the Hegelian-Nietzschean constantly evolving dialectical becoming type of person. And this certainly goes a long way towards warding off shallow pragmatisms and the Last Man. — Jonah Tobias

You touch on what was so controversial about pragmatism when it first emerged. It seems gross, shallow. It liquefies the crystalline representations of the Higher Things. But often this was a projection from the outside that couldn't see the kind of 'spirituality' involved, a sort of Feuerbachian humanism (which is extended and problematized in Nietzsche). This guy more or less identitfied humanism and pragmatism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._C._S._Schiller

The objects of the physical sciences form the lower orders in the hierarchy of existence, more extensive but less significant. Thus the atoms of the physicist may indeed be found in the organisation of conscious beings, but they are subordinate: a living organism exhibits actions which cannot be formulated by the laws of physics alone; man is material, but he is also a great deal more.[8] — Schiller

That quote will be controversial here, I think. If man is not just defined in terms of a talking monkey, there is a whiff somehow of impending theocracy. But I'd say that insisting that 'monkey' is an essentially correct metaphor is problematic (not accusing you of doing that, to be clear), even if it gets something important right. Any 'hardened' understanding will, I expect, have its blindspots. If man is a monkey, then he is surprisingly sentimental about a truth that exceeds prediction, control, and comfort. Man is an animal who can commit suicide in cold blood and sacrifice his life for an abstraction or an ideal community which does not exist yet and perhaps never will. I'd say that any ambition to describe and clarify what is has to take not only that into account but also its own possibility (a rich space of shared meaning presumably inaccessible at such a resolution by any other animal.).

Interesting points, nihilism reflects a dark night of the soul in many respects. — eodnhoj7

Exactly.

I think a possible difference between preference and morality is that you could change someones moral ideas by argument but you are unlikely to change someones dislike of pork or their sexuality through argument. — Andrew4Handel

IMV you might be making morality too theoretical. A good example of this taken to extremes is Randian objectivism. Hume's is probably a better approach. Roughly we praise what is good for the community, and this seems to be based largely on an intuitive sense of what is good. Can one justify trying to survive in the first place with pure reason?

I venture to say (especially as a cat lover) that no argument will persuade me that torturing cats is good or OK. The badness of such cruelty is perhaps no less obvious to me than the sight of my shoes on the floor. No matter how perfect the argument, I would doubt argument itself first before being persuaded. Moral intuitions even make civil discourse and argument possible in the first place, IMO. Does one have to reason carefully before deciding not to punch someone in the nose upon first meeting them? IMV you are thinking of reason in an insufficiently complex way, as a sort of calculator. Reasoning is something we do in a living social context made possible by things that reason cannot even grasp with exact concepts perhaps.

On the hearing/seeing issue, I think we might have a more sophisticated sense of time if we listened more to human discourse and looked at clocks less.

Above you see as a whole a sentence. So it is instantaneously present. But if you read it you have to move through time. What you have already read hangs above the word 'presently' being read with an expectation of what is to follow. What you have read already constrains your interpretation of what you read next. What you continue to read, however, inspires a reinterpretation of what you have already read. The past leaps ahead and the future leaps behind. The present might be said to be this leaping behind and ahead.

Does this time of reading/hearing have wider application? Is this more generally existential time? If the beings of the world are meaningful in terms of language, it would seem that being itself is caught up in this 'existential' time which is not clock time. (Heidegger-influenced thought, of course.)

I don't know honestly. Do androids dream of electric sheep? What is it like to be a butterfly? What exactly is a 'qualia'? Does the computer in the Chinese room understand what it is processing? — Posty McPostface

All beautiful questions.

I like computer science, and my initial position was that computers could never experience qualia. But then I reflect that all of us start as the fusion of tiny sperm and egg cells. Are these conscious? At what point and how does this biological stuff become able to think of itself as biological stuff? And if it can be done with burning bags of water who walk on sticks made of milk, then maybe it can be done in other kinds of material. My avatar is an artificial neural network, a research focus. These are very fascinating. What they 'know' is not easily localized. Could we build one with the right materials in 10,000 years so that it wakes up? I don't know. Maybe.

I'd say that reality is mysterious. And yet we have a tendency (myself very much included) to pose as knowing-it-all and finding-it-all-boring or finding-it-all-obvious. That's why I like your string of difficult questions as a response.

Here's a question for you. How would it affect philosophy if our primary access to the world was through the ear? [It's my understanding that we are dominantly visual creatures.]

Ah, shucks. Push around some objects! <smiles>