Right! Precisely! I've been trying to make this point. Very good sources and quotes, I will spend some time on that last one in particular. Thanks. — Wayfarer

Awesome! I'm glad to understand you and to have provided helpful links.

OK, but if you are not going to support any claim that there are two radically different substances or realms or dimensions, or whatever term you want to use, to reality, then you are pretty much left with some kind of monism, no? — Janus

I understand why someone might see it that way, but I don't. My dodge is to not insist on treating various useful distinctions as absolute. No need to officially be a dualist or a monist. Instead we operate in concrete contexts, employing our linguistic knowhow in particular situations. I'm impressed by Saussure's notion of relational identity. Derrida took it and ran with it, but much of what I love in Derrida is also in Saussure.

Saussure argued that signs only make sense as part of a formal, generalized and abstract system. His conception of meaning was purely structural and relational rather than referential: primacy is given to relationships rather than to things (the meaning of signs was seen as lying in their systematic relation to each other rather than deriving from any inherent features of signifiers or any reference to material things). Saussure did not define signs in terms of some essential or intrinsic nature. For Saussure, signs refer primarily to each other. Within the language system, ‘everything depends on relations’ (Saussure 1983, 121). No sign makes sense on its own but only in relation to other signs. Both signifier and signified are purely relational entities (ibid., 118). This notion can be hard to understand since we may feel that an individual word such as ‘tree’ does have some meaning for us, but Saussure’s argument is that its meaning depends on its relation to other words within the system (such as ‘bush’).
...
Saussure emphasized in particular negative, oppositional differences between signs. He argued that ‘concepts . . . are defined not positively, in terms of their content, but negatively by contrast with other items in the same system. What characterizes each most exactly is being whatever the others are not’ (Saussure 1983, 115; my emphasis). — link

https://slavicgf.sitehost.iu.edu/assignments/Chandler_ch1_pt1.pdf

The notion of value . . . shows us that it is a great mistake to consider a sign as nothing more than the combination of a certain sound and a certain concept. To think of a sign as nothing more would be to isolate it from the system to which it belongs. It would be to suppose that a start could be made with individual signs, and a system constructed by putting them together. On the contrary, the system as a united whole is the starting point, from which it becomes possible, by a process of analysis, to identify its constituent elements. — Saussure

For Saussure, there are no objects (words/texts/others) that carry inherent, autonomous, "positive" meaning: there are only points of view whose meanings depend on their interrelatedness: Saussure states that "in language there are only differences without positive terms" (LT 88). Signifiers (sound images) and signifieds (concepts/meanings) are not fixed and universal and do not simply reflect or represent prior categories (the world/ideas/forms): language articulates or makes such categories and concepts possible. Because there is no necessary or inherent relation between words and objects, the relation between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary (e.g., similar meanings correspond in practice rather than in some natural or essential way to different words across languages or across time as words change). Yet because the sign's structure is arbitrary, it is subject both to history and to a synchronic study of its relational function within a signifying system (la langue) that is not arbitrary but conventional and socially constructed. To explain a signifying action (individual utterance, speech act, parole) is therefore to relate it to the underlying system of norms (conventions/practices) that makes it possible: hence, a structural rather than a strictly causal explanation (synchronic rather than diachronic/historical). — Flores

https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~sflores/saussure.html

I suppose I'm guilty of a kind of structural holism, but I'm not at all against ten thousand less metaphysical and scientific attempts to explain consciousness, etc. From an instrumentalist point of view, we want prediction, control, and of course the criticism, construction, and destruction of stragetic frameworks within which such is possible. And of course we want the technology of morale (orienting myths, etc.)

This requires a radical re-orientation in order to grasp it, something like a gestalt shift (and I'm sure the inventors of gestalt had just this kind of perspective in mind. — Wayfarer

Personally I don't find it that hard to grasp, but, like you, I've been reading crazy philosophers for a long time.

In some ways, you yourself as saying consciousness doesn't exist (as an object), which echoes William James.

I like his approach:

“As ‘subjective’ we say that the experience represents; as ‘objective’ it is represented. What represents and what is represented is here numerically the same; but we must remember that no dualism of being represented and representing resides in the experience per se. In its pure state, or when isolated, there is not self-splintering of it into consciousness and what the consciousness if ‘of.’ Its subjectivity and objectivity are functional attributes solely, realized only when the experience is ‘taken.’ i.e., talked of twice, considered along with its two differing contexts respectively but anew retrospective experience, of which that whole past complication now forms the fresh content.”

— W James

More generally, I like how Richard Bernstein interprets him:

[James believes that philosophers] misunderstood their own conceptual distinctions. They have mistaken distinctions, which are useful and important for particular purposes, for the concrete reality of experience itself. They have been guilty of what Whitehead calls “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” and James calls “vicious intellectualism.” It is a fallacy that occurs when we mistake some abstraction or conceptual distinction (which is important for specific intellectual purposes) for the concrete reality of experience itself. It is a fallacy that according to Whitehead, James, and Bergson has had disastrous consequences for a philosophic understanding of the world. Abstractions are important; we cannot think without them. But abstractions are abstractions from a concrete reality. — Bernstein

The mental/physical distinction is useful and sensible in many contexts. And in these useful contexts there is no chasm. The surgery didn't hurt because I was giving general anesthesia. We constantly invoke a causal nexus that includes both the mental and the physical. Meta-physicians who insist on making these distinctions absolute and foundational rather than instrumental and subject to revision create new, unnecessary problems.

Both quotes from:
http://faculty.fiu.edu/~hauptli/James'DoesConsciousnessExistandTheContinuityofExperience.htm

Because, as Husserl explains in Crisis of European Sciences, Descartes' depiction of 'res cogitans' leads to it being characterised as a literal substance, something that objectively exists (or doesn't exist). Whereas I say that because you can never get outside consciousness, then it is never amongst the things that exist. It doesn't exist anywhere at all, certainly not 'in' brains or 'in' minds. — Wayfarer

Consciousness understood in this way is like being itself. As someone once muttered, being is not itself an entity. Human existence is its there.

Knotty, inert, nameless, it fascinated me, filled my eyes, brought me back unceasingly to its own existence. In vain I repeated, "This is a root" — it didn't take hold any more. I saw clearly that you could not pass from its function as a root, as a suction pump, to that, to that hard and thick skin of a sea lion, to this oily, callous; stubborn look. The function explained nothing: it allowed you to understand in general what a root was, but not at all that one there. That root with its color, shape, its congealed movement, was beneath all explanation. — Sartre

Or (this is more what you are saying, I think) Wittgenstein:

https://ia801901.us.archive.org/4/items/jstor-2011942/2011942.pdf


In fact what solipsism means, is quite correct, only it cannot be said, but it shows itself. That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of the language (the language which only I understand) mean the limits of my world.

The world and life are one.

I am my world. (The microcosm.)

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

The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world.

Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be noted? You say that this case is altogether like that of the eye and the field of sight. But you do not really see the eye. And from nothing in the field of sight can it be concluded that it is seen from an eye.

…

This is connected with the fact that no part of our experience is also a priori. Everything we see could also be otherwise. Everything we can describe at all could also be otherwise. There is no order of things a priori.

Here we see that solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism. The I in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.

There is therefore really a sense in which in philosophy we can talk of a non-psychological I. The I occurs in philosophy through the fact that the “world is my world”. The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit—not a part of the world.
— Wittgenstein TLP 5.62 on

'I am my world.' 'Limit' is harder to parse. Consciousness is just being. Except we have reasons to use it in more practical ways. My headache is not your headache, etc. Where I am, death is not. Where death is, I am not. In other words, we have good reasons to treat consciousness as a kind of object in a brain, which can be soothed with aspirin or kind words. We have reasons to bring consciousness into the causal nexus, even if a more metaphysical approach would shrink it to a dimensionless point or go all the way and see that it's completely transparent and in fact just being, the 'there' itself.

Thanks for the link. It encouraged me to find a pdf of Consciousness Explained --easily foundvia googling.

Here are some clarifying quotes:

There is the lurking suspicion that the most attractive feature of mind stuff is its promise of being so mysterious that it keeps science at bay forever.

This fundamentally antiscientific stance of dualism is, to my mind, its most disqualifying features and is the reason why in this book I adopt the apparently dogmatic rule that dualism is to be avoided at all costs. It is not that I think I can give a knock-down proof that dualism, in all its forms, is false or incoherent, but that, given the way dualism wallows in mystery, accepting dualism is giving up (as in Figure 2.4, page 38). — Dennett

On this point I side more with Dennet, While I think there is a certain necessary contingency with respect to the world as a whole, in all other cases we can and do look for useful relationships. Inasmuch as dualism 'smells' like a god-of-the-gaps strategy, it is offputting to those who want more insight and power, which is to say knowledge. Dualism also connects perhaps to preserving philosophy as an armchair science of the spiritual, just as Kant 'had to deny knowledge to make room for faith.

This quote makes it clear that Dennett does after all believe in consciousness.

So let's take a brief tour of the phenomenological garden, just to satisfy ourselves that we know what we are talking about (even if we don't yet know the ultimate nature of these things). It will be a deliberately superficial introductory tour, a matter of pointing and saying a few informative words, and raising a few questions, before we get down to serious theorizing in the rest of the book. Since I will soon be mounting radical challenges to everyday thinking, I wouldn't want anyone to think I was simply ignorant of all the wonderful things that inhabit other people's minds. Our phenom is divided into three parts: (1) experiences of the "external" world, such as sights, sounds, smells, slippery and scratchy feelings, feelings of heat and cold, and of the positions of our limbs; (2) experiences of the purely "internal' world, such as fantasy images, the inner sights and sounds of daydreaming and talking to yourself, recollections, bright ideas, and sudden hunches; and (3) experiences of emotion or "affect" (to use the awkward term favored by psychologists), ranging from bodily pains, tickles, and "sensations" of hunger and thirst, through intermediate emotional storms of anger, joy, hatred, embarrassment, lust, astonishment, to the least corporeal visitations of pride, anxiety, regret, ironic detachment, rue, awe, icy calm. — Dennett

But Dennett asks for trouble.

The prevailing wisdom, variously expressed and argued for, is materialism: there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter — the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology — and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon. In short, the mind is the brain. According to the materialists, we can (in principle!) account for every mental phenomenon using the same physical principles, laws, and raw materials that suffice to explain radioactivity, continental drift, photosynthesis, reproduction, nutrition, and growth. It is one of the main burdens of this book to explain consciousness without ever giving in to the siren song of dualism. — Dennett

This is a monistic materialism, it seems to me. I find it just as metaphysical as dualism. The 'physical' is just as slippery and caught up in a system of signs as the 'mental.' The physical/mental distinction and an everyday loose dualism are both quite useful. They prove their value as instruments. But I agree with Dennett that science and philosophy should generally seek knowledge and pierce that which seems mysterious and sacred.

You asked me what an explanation is, in philosophy. One answer would be: an explanation of why we’re tied in knots. That’s close to Wittgenstein’s attitude, isn’t it? The ladder and the discarding of it. But first we have to climb it, and it’s more than just a verbal matter. — Wayfarer

Perhaps you mean that a philosophical explanation unties knots. Or helps the fly out of the bottle. I like that. And a related idea is that philosophy offers and criticizes general frameworks (like what counts as science and philosophy in the first place.) The ladder metaphor is great, too. Flies in bottles, disposable ladders...these metaphors are 20th century theology ur-science.

On the issue of the subject, it seems that isolating some strictly metaphysical or non-empirical subject is equivalent to saving philosophy as metaphysics. To me the 'I' has its meaning within an entire system of signs and conventions for their use. That's why Husserl/Derrida on repetition are so important. Plato's realm of forms can be naturalized. Sharing in language is sharing in norms of intelligibility. To me this embodied sign-system is an operating system that we can't get behind, an abyssal ground. 'It is there, like the world.' The intuition is that pure literal meaning is grasped by the subject as a sense-organ meaning-eye. This meaning-eye is the same in all of us, and it allows us all to grasp the same set of pure, literal meaning. If we talk to ourselves, the phonemes don't matter. Such words might be ambiguous to those who overhear us or read our diary, but in the moment of speaking we know exactly what we mean. Of course such pure literal meaning must be translatable in principle. Eternal, universal knowledge cannot be trapped in English or French, etc. Is this not the non-empirical object of philosophy? This immaterial meaning-organ and its immaterial meanings? (Or are there just immaterial meanings among which the meaning-organ is an explanatory posit, a convenient noun to tie a bundle of thoughts to a body and the word 'I' which must correspond to a spiritual object?)

The experimental practice presupposes a certain pre-scientific practice of description, which establishes the norm for experimental measurement apparatus, and consequently what counts as scientific experience. — Bohr

The investigator of nature, however, does not make it clear to himself that the constant foundation of his admittedly subjective thinking activity is the environing world of life. This latter is constantly presupposed as the basic working area, in which alone his questions and his methodology make sense.
...
In so far as the intuitive environing world, purely subjective as it is, is forgotten in the scientific thematic, the working subject is also forgotten, and the scientist is not studied.
...
It is true, of course, that since Kant we have a special theory of knowledge, and on the other hand there is psychology, which with its claims to scientific exactitude wants to be the universal fundamental science of the spirit. Still, our hope for real rationality, i.e., for real insight, is disappointed here as elsewhere. — Husserl

What counts as real insight? If certain knots are untied, if prediction and control is increased, then progress is made. But there is an itch for something ultimate, it seems. To plug directly into the mystical Logos. And yet I agree with Derrida that we don't know exactly what we are talking about, or at least that the perfect presence (here before me and now) of clear literal meaning is a or the central myth of philosophy, which isn't to deny it a certain truth or worth.

Yeah what about it? I studied undergrad psych and it was abundantly obvious that the whole field was philosophically fractured. — Wayfarer

You said that the mind was not objective. I'm saying that psychology is a objective-unbiased science of behavior and mind, including 'conscious and unconscious phenomena.' Perhaps you mean that the mind is not an object like a rock or a cloud. Of course I agree. But it is a noun that's tangled up in our sayings and doings. We know things about it and apply that knowledge. It's included in a (probabilistic) causal nexus.

Husserl's epoche was not aimed exactly at objectivity, but at detachment. They're close, but not the same. Actually comparisons have been made between Husserl's epoche and the Buddhist sunyata, in that both philosophies are concerned with cultivating close awareness of the texture and nature of experience without a sense of attachment. (There’s an essay out there somewhere called Epoche and Śūnyatā). — Wayfarer

I don't claim that bracketing == objectivity. I read Husserl as trying to do a supremely scientific kind of philosophy, an ur-science that grounds the others. Objectivity is baked in to this approach. Detachment is of course related to objectivity. Bias is interest. Unbiasedness (objectivity) is disinterestedness. Or we might that the the objective approach is interested in what's 'really' there apart from biased or subjectivity-tainted distortions. Of course we need a subject to experience in the object in the first place. So the scientist is ideally an objective subject, an unbiased subject, who reports things as they are, who sacrifices hypotheses that don't survive testing or criticism. We seem to agree that the phenomenologist cultivates 'close awareness of the texture and nature of experience without a sense of attachment,' and therefore without a bias that distorts the objective.

The greatness of the natural sciences consists in their refusal to be content with an observational empiricism, since for them all descriptions of nature are but methodical procedures for arriving at exact explanations, ultimately physico-chemical explanations. They are of the opinion that 'merely descriptive' sciences tie us to the finitudes of our earthly environing world.4 Mathematically exact natural science, however, embraces with its method the infinites contained in its actualities and real possibilities. It sees in the intuitively given a merely subjective appearance, and it teaches how to investigate intersubjective ('objective') nature itself with systematic approximation on the basis of elements and laws that are unconditionally universal. At the same time, such exact science teaches how to explain all intuitively pre-given concretions, whether men, or animals, or heavenly bodies, by an appeal to what is ultimate, i.e., how to induce from the appearances, which are the data in any factual case, future possibilities and probabilities, and to do this with a universality and exactitude that surpasses any empiricism limited to intuition. The consistent development of exact sciences in modern times has been a true revolution in the technical mastery of nature.

In the humanistic sciences the methodological situation (in the sense already quite intelligible to us) is unfortunately quite different, and this for internal reasons. Human spirituality is, it is true, based on the human physis, each individually human soul-life is founded on corporeality, and thus too each community on the bodies of the individual human beings who are its members. If, then, as is done in the sphere of nature, a really exact explanation and consequently a similarly extensive scientific practical application is to become possible for the phenomena belonging to the humanistic sciences, then must the practitioners of the humanistic sciences consider not only the spirit as spirit but must also go back to its bodily foundations, and by employing the exact sciences of physics and chemistry, carry through their explanations. The attempt to do this, however, has been unsuccessful (and in the foreseeable future there is no remedy to be had) due to the complexity of the exact psycho-physical research needed in the case of individual human beings, to say nothing of the great historical communities.

If the world were constructed of two, so to speak, equal spheres of reality - nature and spirit - neither with a preferential position methodologically and factually, the situation would be different. But only nature can be handled as a self-contained world; only natural science can with complete consistency abstract from all that is spirit and consider nature purely as nature. On the other side such a consistent abstraction from nature does not, for the practitioner of humanistic science who is interested purely in the spiritual, lead to a self-contained 'world', a world whose interrelationships are purely spiritual, that could be the theme of a pure and universal humanistic science, parallel to pure natural science. Animal spirituality, that of the human and animal 'souls', to which all other spirituality is referred, is in each individual instance causally based on corporeality. It is thus understandable that the practitioner of humanistic science, interested solely in the spiritual as such, gets no further than the descriptive, than a historical record of spirit, and thus remains tied to intuitive finitudes. Every example manifests this. A historian, for example, cannot, after all, treat the history of ancient Greece without taking into consideration the physical geography of ancient Greece; he cannot treat its architecture without considering the materiality of its buildings, etc., etc. That seems clear enough. — Husserl

While we can and have abstract a mechanical nature from the total human situation (the early materialists were especially impressive in this regard), we can't abstract pure spirit from the total situation and leave behind the brain and the environment. 'Spirit' or culture is at the top and depends on everything below it. Whatever your misgivings about psychology, the mind and consciousness are already understood practically-technologically in a nexus that includes nature. Certain molecules change consciousness. We give the dying as much morphine as they want, for their comfort, which we gauge indirectly via expression and conversation. Violence, accident, and disease apparent end consciousness altogether, at least in the usual sense. We bury and cremate corpses.

To switch themes, we have

This rough sketch will gain in completeness and intelligibility as we examine more closely the historical origin of philosophical and scientific man and thereby clarify the sense of Europe and, consequently, the new type of historicity that through this sort of development distinguishes itself from history in general.23

First, let us elucidate the remarkable character of philosophy as it unfolds in ever-new special sciences. Let us contrast it with other forms of culture already present in prescientific man, in his artefacts, his agriculture, his architecture, etc. All manifest classes of cultural products along with the proper methods for insuring their successful production. Still, they have a transitory existence in their environing world. Scientific achievements, on the other hand, once the method of insuring their successful creation has been attained, have an entirely different mode of being, an entirely different temporality. They do not wear out, they are imperishable. Repeated creation does not produce something similar, at best something similarly useful. Rather, no matter how many times the same person or any number of persons repeat these achievements, they remain exactly identical, identical in sense and in value. Persons united together in actual mutual understanding can only experience what their respective fellows have produced in the same manner as identical with what they have produced themselves. In a word, what scientific activity achieves is not real but ideal. — Husserl

We see that the ideal realm depends upon the possibility of perfect iteration. This is its atemporality. Generations come and go like leaves, but certain cognitions are imperishable because each new generation can enjoy them. The flame leaps from melting candle to melting candle. This is the realm of the forms, the book of the forms that can even be extended by works of genius/revelation. This is a 'god' that mortals can incarnate or participate in through science/philosophy.

This last quote echos what you said earlier, I think.

In the focus on the environing world, a constantly objective attitude, everything spiritual appeared to be based on physical corporeality. Thus an application of the mode of thought proper to natural science was obvious. For this reason we already find in the early stages Democritean materialism and determinism.47 However, the greatest minds recoiled from this and also from any newer style of psychophysics (Psychophysik). Since Socrates, man is made thematic precisely as human, man with his spiritual life in society. Man retains an orientation to the objective world, but with the advent of Plato and Aristotle this world becomes the great theme of investigations. At this point a remarkable cleavage makes itself felt: the human belongs to the universe of objective facts, but as persons, as egos, men have goals, aims. They have norms for tradition, truth norms - eternal norms. Though the development proceeded haltingly in ancient times, still it was not lost. Let us make the leap to so-called 'modern' times. With glowing enthusiasm the infinite task of a mathematical knowledge of nature and in general of a world knowledge is undertaken. The extraordinary successes of natural knowledge are now to be extended to knowledge of the spirit. Reason had proved its power in nature. 'As the sun is one all-illuminating and warming sun, so too is reason one' (Descartes). The method of natural science must also embrace the mysteries of spirit. The spirit is real and objectively in the world, founded as such in corporeality. With this the interpretation of the world immediately takes on a predominantly dualistic, i.e., psychophysical, form. The same causality -only split in two- embraces the one world; the sense of rational explanation is everywhere the same, but in such a way that all explanation of spirit, in the only way in which it can be universal, involves the physical. There can be no pure, self-contained search for an explanation of the spiritual, no purely inneroriented psychology or theory of spirit beginning with the ego in psychical self-experience and extending to the other psyche. The way that must be traveled is the external one, the path of physics and chemistry. All the fond talk of common spirit, of the common will of a people, of nations' ideal political goals, and the like, are romanticism and mythology, derived from an analogous application of concepts that have a proper sense only in the individual personal sphere. Spiritual being is fragmentary. To the question regarding the source of all these difficulties the following answer is to be given: this objectivism or this psychophysical interpretation of the world, despite its seeming self-evidence, is a naïve one-sidedness that never was understood to be such. To speak of the spirit as reality (Realitat), presumably a real (realen) annex to bodies and having its supposedly spatiotemporal being within nature, is an absurdity. — Husserl

All quotes from here: http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/husserl_philcris.html

This also sounds like Heidegger. The 'subject' should not be treated like a present-at-hand piece of nature. While this may be a good approach for curing cancer, it's inferior approach for figuring out who-not-what we are and who-not-what we should be.

What Wittgenstein's thought experiment shows is that if there were such a beetle, then we wouldn't be able to talk about it. Now we can talk about pain, colors and meaning - they have a place in the language game. Whereas the beetle - a hypothetical entity that can't be referenced or talked about - drops out as irrelevant. — Andrew M

I mostly agree with you. Note however that we are talking about the beetle. To me qualia serve that kind of goal. Maybe what I call 'red' is what you call 'green.' No way to check! And yet I think our language game includes this phenomenal redness. I do see that the sign 'red' has to function independently of this beetle, this pure redness. And I agree that we need an entire sign system and form of life in order to gesture toward it. And we have that system! Which allows us to say that it drops out as irrelevant, which it is for the functioning of the sign.

It seems to me that there should be explanations for these things. I'm not sure how not having satisfactory answers given our present state of knowledge should ever imply that there are no explanations to be had. — Andrew M

The point I was trying to make is perhaps a little strange. I understand explanation to be relational. The world as the entire system of entities and their relationships cannot be put into relation to something outside of it, for there is nothing outside of it by definition.

Sartre wrote on this in Nausea. He's very dramatic about what can also be contemplated coolly.

I was like the others, like the ones walking along the seashore, wearing their spring clothes. I said, like them, "The sea is green; that white speck up there is a seagull," but I didn't feel that it existed or that the seagull was an "existing seagull"; usually existence conceals itself. It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you can't say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it. When I believed I was thinking about it, I was thinking nothing, my head was empty, or there was just one word in my head, the word "being." Or else I was thinking — how can I put it? I was thinking of properties. I was telling myself that the sea belonged to the class of green objects, or that green was one of the qualities of the sea. Even when I looked at things, I was miles from dreaming that they existed: they looked like scenery to me. I picked them up in my hands, they served me as tools, I foresaw their resistance. But that all happened on the surface. If anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered in good faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form added to things from the outside, without changing any thing in their nature.
...
The word Absurdity is emerging under my pen; a little while ago, in the garden, I couldn't find it, but neither was I looking for it, I didn't need it: I thought without words, on things, with things. Absurdity was not an idea in my head, or the breath of a voice, only this long serpent dead at my feet, this serpent of wood. Serpent or claw or root or vulture's talon, what difference does it make? And without formulating anything clearly, I understood that I had found the clue to existence, the clue to my nauseas, to my own life. In fact, all I could grasp beyond that comes down to this fundamental absurdity. Absurdity: another word. I struggle against words; beneath me there I touched the thing. But I wanted to fix the absolute character of this absurdity. A movement, an event in the tiny colored world of men is only relatively absurd — in relation to the accompanying circumstances. A madman's ravings, for example, are absurd in relation to the situation in which he is, but not in relation to his own delirium. But a little while ago I made an experiment with the absolute or the absurd. This root — there was nothing in relation to which it was absurd. How can I pin it down with words? Absurd: in relation to the stones, the tufts of yellow grass, the dry mud, the tree, the sky, the green benches. Absurd, irreducible; nothing — not even a profound, secret delirium of nature could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of the segment of a straight line around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, in contrast, existed in such a way that I could not explain it. Knotty, inert, nameless, it fascinated me, filled my eyes, brought me back unceasingly to its own existence. In vain I repeated, "This is a root" — it didn't take hold any more. I saw clearly that you could not pass from its function as a root, as a suction pump, to that, to that hard and thick skin of a sea lion, to this oily, callous; stubborn look. The function explained nothing: it allowed you to understand in general what a root was, but not at all that one there. That root with its color, shape, its congealed movement, was beneath all explanation.
...
This moment was extraordinary. I was there, motionless, paralyzed, plunged in a horrible ecstasy. But at the heart of this ecstasy, something new had just appeared; I understood the nausea, I possessed it. To tell the truth, I did not formulate my discoveries to myself. But I think it would be easy for me to put them in words now. The essential point is contingency. I mean that by definition existence is not [logical] necessity. To exist is simply ... to be there; existences appear, let themselves be encountered, but you can never deduce them. Some people, I think, have understood this. Only they tried to overcome this contingency by inventing a being that was necessary and self-caused. But no necessary being [i.e., God] can explain existence: contingency is not a delusion, an appearance which can be dissipated; it is the absolute, and, therefore, perfectly gratuitous. Everything is gratuitous, this park, this city, and myself. When you realize this, your heart turns over and everything begins to float.... — Sartre

http://twren.sites.luc.edu/phil120/ch10/nausea.htm

The reason I'm saying that mind is not objective, is to undercut the presumption that it is a subject for the objective sciences at all. — Wayfarer

But what about psychology? And even Husserl's phenomenology aimed at objectivity and freedom from bias. If we emphasize that aspect of mind that is most distant from any kind of peer review or experiment, then indeed we take the mind out of serious conversation altogether. Even metaphysicians have no choice but to employ metaphors. I can't say the phenomenal redness of the rose. I can never know that others see red as I see red (or hear the same middle C.) I can say that grass is not red and that stop signs are. I have to enter the public sign system. And yet we all understand something like qualia if we can't compare them. Which is why Dennett will probably sound like a half-troll or clever moist robot himself to most of us.
I'm sure you've seen this, but for others....

To put it as clearly as I can: in his book, Consciousness Explained, Dennett denies the existence of consciousness. He continues to use the word, but he means something different by it. For him, it refers only to third-person phenomena, not to the first-person conscious feelings and experiences we all have. For Dennett there is no difference between us humans and complex zombies who lack any inner feelings, because we are all just complex zombies. ...I regard his view as self-refuting because it denies the existence of the data which a theory of consciousness is supposed to explain...Here is the paradox of this exchange: I am a conscious reviewer consciously answering the objections of an author who gives every indication of being consciously and puzzlingly angry. I do this for a readership that I assume is conscious. How then can I take seriously his claim that consciousness does not really exist? — Searle

But what eliminative materialism wants to eliminate or deny or describe as 'folk psychology' is in fact the fundamental nature of being itself. TO which the materialist reply is invariably: TOSH. There is no such 'fundamental nature'. If there were, you would be able to demonstrate it empirically'.

Do you see my point? — Wayfarer

Yes, I see your point. And I agree with you against the position that denies consciousness. I wonder if Dennett is half-trolling. No bad publicity, etc.

My approach is 'mind is that which grasps meaning'. And the reason we can say what it is, is because of the reflexive problem of consciousness, i.e. 'the eye cannot see itself, the hand cannot grasp itself.' That's why I say mind is not an objective reality - it is that which 'objective reality' depends on. — Wayfarer

But isn't your description precisely the eye seeing itself? The hand grasping itself? The mind is the meaning-grasper, the meaning-hand. Or the mind is sense organ for the otherwise invisible conceptual realm. The mind is a special kind of hand or a special kind of eye. Both metaphors are great.

For me objective just means 'expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations.' It's not about objects, though everyday objects are usually admitted without controversy or bias and therefore naturally come to mind.

I do understand that sans consciousness there would be no there there. Consciousness and being have an intimate if complicated relationship. Yet some kind of substratum that survives the coming and going of individual consciousnesses is just as intuitive as consciousness grounding being. We read the traces of dead philosophers and repeat (we hope) their cognitive leaps. They etched something in/on the realm of forms.

The problem with Cartesianism is that it posits 'res cogitans;' as a literal substance in an objective sense - something which objectively exists. And that leads to the intractable problem of how this 'ghost in the machine' can pull levers or do anything (which is Ryle's criticism). — Wayfarer

Perhaps you can expand on your distance from this Cartesianism.

Whereas materialism inverts this, and says that the mind is dependent on its own objects. (This is the realisation that prompted Schopenhauer's remark about the 'olympian laughter':

[Materialism] seeks the primary and most simple state of matter, and then tries to develop all the others from it; ascending from mere mechanism, to chemistry, to polarity, to the vegetable and to the animal kingdom. And if we suppose this to have been done, the last link in the chain would be animal sensibility - that is knowledge - which would consequently now appear as a mere modification or state of matter produced by causality. Now if we had followed materialism thus far with clear ideas, when we reached its highest point we would suddenly be seized with a fit of the inextinguishable laughter of the Olympians. As if waking from a dream, we would all at once become aware that its final result - knowledge, which it reached so laboriously - was presupposed as the indispensable condition of its very starting-point, mere matter; and when we imagined that we thought "matter", we really thought only "the subject that perceives matter; the eye that sees it, the hand that feels it, the understanding that knows it". Thus the tremendous petitio principii reveals itself unexpectedly.” — Wayfarer

I agree with you and Schopenhauer that a certain kind of materialism is the just target of Olympian laughter. I don't gel with Dennett, for instance. But if we leave metaphysics and just think of technology, then it makes good sense to see how we can construct the complex from the simple. In my view, 'matter' is just as problematic as 'mind.' The mind-matter distinction is useful in many contexts but doesn't work as a crisp and final metaphysics. 'Matter' is something like an old stand-in for the 'thing in itself' or the substratum. My own position is something like a generalized instrumentalism, but that's largely an attitude. To me most of the 'great' philosophers got something right, were illuminating.

Hobbes is just the kind of target Kant had in mind when he criticized empiricism. I won't try and re-state all the details, but suffice to say everything Hobbes writes about the mind, is subject to the criticism 'percepts without concepts are blind'. — Wayfarer

I know. Of course Kant made important advances on Hobbes. I'm hardly suggesting that Hobbes is up-to-date and hot off the press. But, as others have noted, Kant's theory is only intelligible against the background of Hobbes and Locke.
https://sites.google.com/site/diogenesphil/lk

These correspondences between Kant’s and Locke’s frameworks point up some character differences between their corresponding elements. One such difference is that between ‘things themselves’ and ‘things in themselves’. As already mentioned, Locke’s ‘things themselves’ are single corpuscles or aggregates of corpuscles that possess only primary qualities (and powers based on them). They affect our sense organs qua aggregates of corpuscles, and accordingly a sort of motion is communicated to the brain. As a result, sensible ideas are produced in the mind. By contrast, in Kant’s case, ‘things in themselves’ are not known to us, and since space is a form of our sensibility, the idea that things in themselves are in space does not make sense.
...
Now it will be seen that behind Kant’s positing unknowable ‘things in themselves’ and reinterpreting the ordinary external things in space as internal representations, the naturalistic logic of the seventeenth century theories of ideas is tacitly operating. If this were not the case, he would have no reason for regarding the objects of our experience as internal from the start and for grasping them as appearances in contrast to things in themselves. Further, the view that things in themselves ‘affect’ our senses would not make sense without our ordinary experience concerning the causal process of sense perception (or some physical view framed by sophisticating it). That is, it seems that the very framework of Kant’s transcendental idealism could not be established if it were not based on our ordinary experience or more sophisticated physical view. — link

One great thing about Kant is that he opens up the possibility of thinking the-world-as-it-really is without the assumption of 3 spatial dimensions. All kinds of new models become acceptable. Maybe we are 'really' in Flatland or Lineland or $\infty$-land. To me such theories are 'just' instruments, but still he drops the assumption that space is really there. Was he the first? If so, that's impressive indeed. I agree that intutions without concepts are blind, and that's why I make so much of language/community and speak of a socialized neo-Kantianism. While mind depends in one sense on the individual brain, it depends in another sense (just as important for human beings) on learning to speak among others.

The temptation is to emphasize the isolation of our minds as an echo of the physical distance between our brains. But this is to ignore the point of brains, which is to be networked. It's like only understanding the internet from the perspective of individual chromebooks. The chomebooks are for the internet, and the internet depends on chromebooks. A sane human being is plugged in to a language and various social norms. His internal monologue occurs in linguistic conventions he received like the law. And metaphysical versions of mind and matter seem parasitical upon pre-understandings of either in ordinary language.

. I'm saying that 'the mind' is a publicly tradable concept.
— jjAmEs — Wayfarer

Sure. — Wayfarer

I'm thinking you still don't see what I mean by that. There's a certain overlap in our positions, which is something like: Concepts are important. They exist. Perceptions are concept rich, but just stupid sensations. We need language/thinking even to absurdly deny the existence of language and thinking. We need linguistic conventions for denying the centrality of such conventions.

In dualism, ‘mind’ is contrasted with ‘body’, but at different times, different aspects of the mind have been the centre of attention. In the classical and mediaeval periods, it was the intellect that was thought to be most obviously resistant to a materialistic account: from Descartes on, the main stumbling block to materialist monism was supposed to be ‘consciousness’, of which phenomenal consciousness or sensation came to be considered as the paradigm instance.

The classical emphasis originates in Plato's Phaedo. Plato believed that the true substances are not physical bodies, which are ephemeral, but the eternal Forms of which bodies are imperfect copies. These Forms not only make the world possible, they also make it intelligible, because they perform the role of universals, or what Frege called ‘concepts'. It is their connection with intelligibility that is relevant to the philosophy of mind. Because Forms are the grounds of intelligibility, they are what the intellect must grasp in the process of understanding. In Phaedo Plato presents a variety of arguments for the immortality of the soul, but the one that is relevant for our purposes is that the intellect is immaterial because Forms are immaterial and intellect must have an affinity with the Forms it apprehends (78b4–84b8). This affinity is so strong that the soul strives to leave the body in which it is imprisoned and to dwell in the realm of Forms. — link

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/#MinBodHisDua

What Freud, Saussure and Durkheim seem to have recognized is that social sciences could make little progress until society was considered a reality in itself: a set of institutions or systems which are more than the contingent manifestations of the spirit or the sum of individual activities. It is as though they had asked: “what makes individual experience possible? what enables men to perceive not just physical objects but objects with a meaning? what enables them to communicate and act meaningfully?” And the answer which they postulated was social institutions which, though formed by human activities, are the conditions of experience. To understand individual experience one must study the social norms which make it possible. — Culler

The notion of value... shows us that it is a great mistake to consider a sign as nothing more than the combination of a certain sound and a certain concept. To think of a sign as nothing more would be to isolate it from the system to which it belongs. It would be to suppose that a start could be made with individual signs, and a system constructed by putting them together. On the contrary, the system as a united whole is the starting point, from which it becomes possible, by a process of analysis, to identify its constituent elements. — Saussure

The arbitrariness principle can be applied not only to the sign, but to the whole sign-system. The fundamental arbitrariness of language is apparent from the observation that each language involves different distinctions between one signifier and another (e.g. 'tree' and 'free') and between one signified and another (e.g. 'tree' and 'bush'). The signified is clearly arbitrary if reality is perceived as a seamless continuum (which is how Saussure sees the initially undifferentiated realms of both thought and sound): where, for example, does a 'corner' end? Commonsense suggests that the existence of things in the world preceded our apparently simple application of 'labels' to them (a 'nomenclaturist' notion which Saussure rejected and to which we will return in due course). Saussure noted that 'if words had the job of representing concepts fixed in advance, one would be able to find exact equivalents for them as between one language and another. But this is not the case' (Saussure 1983, 114-115; Saussure 1974, 116). Reality is divided up into arbitrary categories by every language and the conceptual world with which each of us is familiar could have been divided up very differently. Indeed, no two languages categorize reality in the same way. As John Passmore puts it, 'Languages differ by differentiating differently' (cited in Sturrock 1986, 17). Linguistic categories are not simply a consequence of some predefined structure in the world. There are no 'natural' concepts or categories which are simply 'reflected' in language. Language plays a crucial role in 'constructing reality'. — Chandler on Saussure

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/courses/BIB/semio2.htm


What I make of this is that we are trained as children to employ a system of signs in the context of a social life which is largely non-linguistic. This system of signs is also a taken-for-granted lens on the world. It makes philosophy and science possible. It is their 'ground.' And yet philosophy and science seek out the ground of this ground (metaphysical or physical substratum). The Mobius strip comes to mind.

Derrida's concept of iterability is attempt to make sense of the realm of the ideal, the realm of Forms. What is this human passion to dwell in the realm of the forms? To escape time, decay, vulnerability, confusion... I share this passion. We want to add to the Book, live in the Book.

There's nothing dualist about it - concepts are the simple residuum of the effects of sensations. — Wayfarer

I guess it depends on what one means by dualism. I had something in mind like indirect realism. The quoted article explores how indirect realism clashes with elimination materialism.

Sense data are seen as inner objects, objects that among other things are colored. Such entities, however, are incompatible with a materialist view of the mind. When I look at the coffee cup there is not a material candidate for the yellow object at which I am looking. Crudely: there is nothing in the brain that is yellow. Sense data, then, do not seem to be acceptable on a materialist account of the mind, and thus, the yellow object that I am now perceiving must be located not in the material world but in the immaterial mind. Indirect realism is committed to a dualist picture within which there is an ontology of non-physical objects alongside that of the physical. — link

https://www.iep.utm.edu/perc-obj/#H2

Hobbes definitely sounds like an indirect realist at the beginning of Leviathan.

And this Seeming, or Fancy, is that which men call sense; and consisteth, as to the Eye, in a Light, or Colour Figured; To the Eare, in a Sound; To the Nostrill, in an Odour; To the Tongue and Palat, in a Savour; and to the rest of the body, in Heat, Cold, Hardnesse, Softnesse, and such other qualities, as we discern by Feeling. All which qualities called Sensible, are in the object that causeth them, but so many several motions of the matter, by which it presseth our organs diversly. Neither in us that are pressed, are they anything els, but divers motions; (for motion, produceth nothing but motion.) But their apparence to us is Fancy, the same waking, that dreaming. And as pressing, rubbing, or striking the Eye, makes us fancy a light; and pressing the Eare, produceth a dinne; so do the bodies also we see, or hear, produce the same by their strong, though unobserved action, For if those Colours, and Sounds, were in the Bodies, or Objects that cause them, they could not bee severed from them, as by glasses, and in Ecchoes by reflection, wee see they are; where we know the thing we see, is in one place; the apparence, in another. And though at some certain distance, the reall, and very object seem invested with the fancy it begets in us; Yet still the object is one thing, the image or fancy is another. So that Sense in all cases, is nothing els but originall fancy, caused (as I have said) by the pressure, that is, by the motion, of externall things upon our Eyes, Eares, and other organs thereunto ordained. — Hobbes

The object is one thing and the image of the object is another. This is the object-in-itself and the object-for-us, matter and mind.


Below is a great slice of Hobbes that shows to what degree he was an armchair scientist of the soul, a folk psychologist knee deep in the 'transcendental pretense' mentioned earlier. To know others we must know ourselves, for others have reasons to conceal from us what we don't necessarily conceal from ourselves. His book appeals to the soul-searching of its readers.

Concerning the first, there is a saying much usurped of late, That Wisedome is acquired, not by reading of Books, but of Men. Consequently whereunto, those persons, that for the most part can give no other proof of being wise, take great delight to shew what they think they have read in men, by uncharitable censures of one another behind their backs. But there is another saying not of late understood, by which they might learn truly to read one another, if they would take the pains; and that is, Nosce Teipsum, Read Thy Self: which was not meant, as it is now used, to countenance, either the barbarous state of men in power, towards their inferiors; or to encourage men of low degree, to a sawcie behaviour towards their betters; But to teach us, that for the similitude of the thoughts, and Passions of one man, to the thoughts, and Passions of another, whosoever looketh into himselfe, and considereth what he doth, when he does Think, Opine, Reason, Hope, Feare, &c, and upon what grounds; he shall thereby read and know, what are the thoughts, and Passions of all other men, upon the like occasions. I say the similitude of Passions, which are the same in all men, Desire, Feare, Hope, &c; not the similitude or The Objects of the Passions, which are the things Desired, Feared, Hoped, &c: for these the constitution individuall, and particular education do so vary, and they are so easie to be kept from our knowledge, that the characters of mans heart, blotted and confounded as they are, with dissembling, lying, counterfeiting, and erroneous doctrines, are legible onely to him that searcheth hearts. And though by mens actions wee do discover their designee sometimes; yet to do it without comparing them with our own, and distinguishing all circumstances, by which the case may come to be altered, is to decypher without a key, and be for the most part deceived, by too much trust, or by too much diffidence; as he that reads, is himselfe a good or evill man.

But let one man read another by his actions never so perfectly, it serves him onely with his acquaintance, which are but few. He that is to govern a whole Nation, must read in himselfe, not this, or that particular man; but Man-kind; which though it be hard to do, harder than to learn any Language, or Science; yet, when I shall have set down my own reading orderly, and perspicuously, the pains left another, will be onely to consider, if he also find not the same in himselfe. For this kind of Doctrine, admitteth no other Demonstration. — Hobbes

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

he 'magical woo' involved is simply that of interpreting signs and signals, without which no discoveries of the kind you mention would ever have been made. Such discoveries depend on reason, but the ability to reason doesn't depend on such discoveries. — Wayfarer

I agree that we have to already share a lifeworld and a language before we can do science. As Bohr put it:

1. The interpretation of a physical theory has to rely on an experimental practice.

2. The experimental practice presupposes a certain pre-scientific practice of description, which establishes the norm for experimental measurement apparatus, and consequently what counts as scientific experience.

3. Our pre-scientific practice of understanding our environment is an adaptation to the sense experience of separation, orientation, identification and reidentification over time of physical objects.

4. This pre-scientific experience is grasped in terms of common categories like thing’s position and change of position, duration and change of duration, and the relation of cause and effect, terms and principles that are now parts of our common language.

5. These common categories yield the preconditions for objective knowledge, and any description of nature has to use these concepts to be objective.

6. The concepts of classical physics are merely exact specifications of the above categories.
The classical concepts—and not classical physics itself—are therefore necessary in any description of physical experience in order to understand what we are doing and to be able to communicate our results to others, in particular in the description of quantum phenomena as they present themselves in experiments.
— summary by link of Bohr

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-copenhagen/

We also find something like this in Husserl's Crisis. I understand as a kind of socialized less rigid Kantianism.

[In] my naive self-consciousness as a human being knowing himself to be living in the world, for whom the world is the totality of what for him is valid and existing, I am blind to the immense transcendental dimension of problems … I am completely … bound by interests and tasks … [and] a certain habitual one-sidedness of self interest … I can, however, carry out the transcendental re-orientation in which … I now have, as a new horizon of interest … a new, infinite scientific realm—if I engage in the appropriate systematic work …

[One] kind of thinking … tries to bring ‘original intuition’ to the fore—that is, the pre- and extrascientific lifeworld … The proper return to the naïveté of life—but in a reflection that rises above this naiveté—is the only way to overcome [this] … naiveté …

In science we measure the lifeworld … for a well-fitting garb of ideas … It is … a method which is designed for progressively improving … through ‘scientific’ predictions, those rough predictions which are the only ones that are possible within the sphere of what is actually experienced and experienceable in the lifeworld …

Considering ourselves … as scientists … the manner of scientific thinking puts questions and answers them theoretically in relation to the world … Cofunctioning here are the other scientists who, united with us in a community of theory, acquire and have the same truths or … are united with us in a critical transaction aimed at critical agreement …

For the human being in his surrounding world there are many types of praxis, and among them is this peculiar … one, theoretical praxis. It has its own professional methods; it is the art of … discovering and securing truths with a certain new ideal sense which is foreign to [extra]scientific life, the sense of a certain ‘final validity’ … — Husserl

https://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-7/husserl-on-the-task-of-science-in-and-of-the-lifeworld


For me the problem is ignoring that concept is social rather than private.

The reason I keep referring to Dennett is that he is a textbook materialist; if you want to understand what that theory means, then he's the go-to. So he's not a straw man, he's the genuine article. If you want to criticize materialist philosophy of mind, then look no further. — Wayfarer

Perhaps someone will speak up for Dennett. If not, then he's a strawman in this context.

The 'hard problem of consciousness' is that, no matter how complete a functionalist theory of mind is, there is always going to be an explanatory gap. It wouldn't be a problem, were it not for those who say 'what "gap"?' 'What is left out?' Because when you can't answer the question in their terms - that is, objectively - they say: "aha! It's nothing, see!" That's because, as I say, it's not an objective reality; rather it is that which the whole concept of objectivity is founded on. But 'the subject forgets himself' - as Schopenhauer puts it. — Wayfarer

The kind that that is the subject of philosophy as distinct from science. — Wayfarer

I ask again what kind of explanation is sought? I accept the necessary contingency of the world as a whole. So I'm not anti-mystery. If the explanatory gap is just that again, then OK. But what is philosophical explanation? If not prediction and control, then perhaps it's conceptual coherence or an emotionally satisfying narrative about how things hang together.

I mentioned anesthesia because we do indeed have practical theories about consciousness that allow for prediction and control.

If others object to the 'explanatory gap,' I'm guessing that they do so because they expect this 'gap' to be filled nevertheless with a metaphysical or religious explanation. Some might just be anti-mystery. Others are just OK with the mystery but more interested in useful & illuminating theories (conquering ignorance and impotence ).

Mind is not an object - this is an empirical statement. There are billions of things that are objects - but 'mind' is not among them. The fact that 'it functions socially' is only a statement of something everyone supposes to be true. In fact, the mind is a mystery in the midst of being - that is why materialists feel such a sense of urgency in denying it! If you admit the reality of mind, then materialism is unsustainable. — Wayfarer

I think you are missing my point. I'm not saying that minds are objects like balloons or clouds. I'm saying that 'the mind' is a publicly tradable concept. Their are more and less intelligible ways to employ this word. I don't legislate the language. It is given like the law. To deny this is to implicitly confirm it.
Any denial is only intelligible in the first place in terms of social conventions.

Also lots of classic materialists were something like dualists.

Concerning the Thoughts of man, I will consider them first Singly, and afterwards in Trayne, or dependance upon one another. Singly, they are every one a Representation or Apparence, of some quality, or other Accident of a body without us; which is commonly called an Object. Which Object worketh on the Eyes, Eares, and other parts of mans body; and by diversity of working, produceth diversity of Apparences.

The Originall of them all, is that which we call Sense; (For there is no conception in a mans mind, which hath not at first, totally, or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of Sense.) The rest are derived from that originall.
...
The cause of Sense, is the Externall Body, or Object, which presseth the organ proper to each Sense... — Hobbes

Then, more generally,

According to philosophical materialism, mind and consciousness are by-products or epiphenomena of material processes (such as the biochemistry of the human brain and nervous system), without which they cannot exist. — Wiki

To me the essence of materialism is something like a taking of the physical substratum seriously. It's not a denial of sensation or thought but a belief in some kind of substratum or matrix/matter with a controlling influence on 'mind.' Democritus theorized atoms that were too small for human eyes to see. The substratum (in this case atoms and void) had to be approached indirectly. Another crucial aspect of materialism (according to Lange) is that this 'matter' is subject to simple human-indifferent laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Materialism_and_Critique_of_Its_Present_Importance

In short, I don't associate philosophical materialism with the denial of what we aim at with 'mind.' I'm a materialist, yet I feel no need to deny mind. Nor am I afraid to admit the necessity of contingency (that the world as a whole is inexplicable and hence mysterious). I'm also more of an instrumentalist than a realist when it comes to theories about the substratum, yet:

More recently, Stein (1989) has argued that the dispute between realism and instrumentalism is not well joined: once realism has been sophisticated (as he suggests it must be) to give up its pretensions to metaphysically transcendent theorizing, to eschew aspirations to noumenal truth and reference, and to abandon the idea that a property of a theory might somehow explain its success in a way that does not simply point out the use that has been made of the theory, and once instrumentalism has been sophisticated (as he suggests it must be) to recognize the scope of a theory’s role as an instrument to include not just calculating experimental outcomes, but also adequately representing phenomena in detail across the entire domain of nature and providing resources for further inquiry, there remains no appreciable difference (or no difference that makes a difference) between the two positions. — link

https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/pkylestanford/files/2016/10/InstrumentalismRoutledge.pdf

That's why, for instance, Daniel Dennett has to claim that humans are merely and purely objects ('moist robots' he says, semi-humorously); because if the human subject is real, then his project (which is based on positivism and behaviourism) is stymied. And why? Because the mind is real but not objective. — Wayfarer

I'm not defending Dennett, since I don't think consciousness is an illusion.

But I don't think that one can say that the mind is not objective. This is the general idea of a 'publicly traded' concept. It functions socially. It's supposed to refer to lots of individual minds. Yet some would have these minds be so private that they are utterly incomparable.

I don't know the quale that you call 'red.' I only trust that we both know that the prototypical rose is red. Indeed, the moist robot metaphor is made possible in the first place by the notion of the radically private mind. While only a sociopath doubts that others have feelings 'behind' their behavior, the notion of the private mind creates an infinite chasm one mind and another. A sophisticated enough moist robot would presumably fool us into caring about it, perhaps electing it to lead us. On the other hand, how do we know that a coffee cup isn't conscious? If a lion coffee cup could speak, we wouldn't understand it. Language depends on social practice.

I know more or less what you mean by the mind is real but not objective. But I also gave the example of anesthesia for surgery. The technician definitely wants to keep the patient from feeling the surgery. But the technician can't directly mind-melt with the patient to guarantee unconsciousness. Clearly there are signs of consciousness, and these signs are part of the public concept of consciousness. In terms of prediction and control, we are already chipping away at the hard problem. If we abandon prediction and control, then what kind of explanation do we want? A poem that satisfies intuition? The story of God breathing life into Adam?

The world as a whole can't be explained. So I'm not bothered by the radical version of the hard problem. But that radical version is framed to be insoluble.

The really hard problems are the problems the scientists are dealing with. [...] The philosophical problem, like all philosophical problems, is a confusion in the conceptual scheme." — Peter Hacker - Hard problem of consciousness (other views) - Wikipedia

Is Hacker right? I'm sympathetic to where he's coming from, but perhaps the perspective matters. Metaphysically the hard problem is just a sub-problem of 'why is there is anything at all'? Certain philosophers gesture at the limitations of explanatory discourse. That there is a world in the first place cannot be explained as a matter of principle. Does this make the question 'why is there something?' grand or pointless? The philosopher offers a profound freakout for those who will follow his argument. The scientist is concerned with questions that can be answered (partially) increased conceptual organization, prediction, and control. (Or that's my read of the situation.)

If you mean "Is breaking your toe painful?" then, yes, it is. If you mean "Do we have radically private, immaterial experiences?" then, no, we don't. — Andrew M

While I think we mostly agree, I can't quite fit this outright denial of 'private, immaterial experiences' into my perspective. I think the phrase does serve a purpose. I believe in a redness that I can't compare with the rednesses of others. I experience something that I am tempted to call 'meaning' as I read a book.

At the same time this 'private' experience can't ground social practice, and it's social practice that makes it possible for us to talk even with ourselves about an infinitely private experience of redness. In short, the folk metaphysics of dualism seems to be not absurd but only blissfully unaware of how the beetle in the box cannot ground the talk about the beetle. Perhaps denying the beetle is also saying too much?

Nicely said. — Andrew M

Thanks. I think we are aiming at saying roughly the same thing.

Here's a nice quote.

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does. — Chalmers

Does it seem objectively unreasonable? What does that even mean? Is he just saying that it's strange that the right arrangements of otherwise inert stuff become sure that they have feelings? I agree: it is strange. But strange compared to what? And what of the contingency of the world itself?

What is an explanation? How can that which is not observable or comparable by definition by integrated within an objective causal nexus? What can be dealt with is sentences and other signs of consciousness. Does anesthesia work? We think so, and we can give reasons without ever having been put under. From an instrumentalist point of view, we have already made progress on the hard problem. Though this requires working with the trusted signs of private experience. 'How can we explain why a person talks about a pain that is otherwise undetectable?" This kind of talk (a public phenomenon) can be worked into a system for prediction and control.

I think this is because the quale (the beetle in the box) is more or less defined as what we cannot be objective about. I can't know what redness is for others as a kind of direct sensation, but I do trust that we all have the same set of red things. We know how to use 'red.' But this applies not only to redness but to the meaning of 'meaning' and of 'quale' itself.

I look forward to your response.

I add this quote to the conversation for anyone who might find it useful. It's more difficult prose than that inSignature, Event, Context, but it touches on the relationship of the ideal and that which can be repeated.

For instance, 2 is an ideal object because it's always the same when I bring it back to mind. I can repeat the cognition or experience of this ideal object again and again. Its ideal reality is 'in' this possibility of reliable repetition. 2 doesn't exist as a physical object but either as innate form of human cognition (Kantianism of some kind) or as an object in some nonphysical realm for which humans have a 'sense' organ (mathematical Platonism).

The unique and permanent motif of all the mistakes and distortions which Husserl exposes in "degenerated" metaphysics, across a multiplicity of domains, themes, and arguments, is always a blindness to the authentic mode of ideality, to that which is, to what may be indefinitely repeated in the identity of its presence, because of the very fact that it does not exist, is not real or is irreal—not in the sense of being a fiction, but in another sense which may have several names, whose possibility will permit us to speak of nonreality and essential necessity, the noema, the intelligible object, and in general the nonworldly. This nonworldliness is not another worldliness, this ideality is not an existent that has fallen from the sky; its origin will always be the possible repetition of a productive act. In order that the possibility of this repetition may be open, ideally to infinity, one ideal form must assure this unity of the indefinite and the ideal: this is the present, or rather the presence of the living present. The ultimate form of ideality, the ideality of ideality, that in which in the last instance one may anticipate or recall all repetition, is the living present, the self-presence of transcendental life. Presence has always been and will always, forever, be the form in which, we can say apodictically, the infinite diversity of contents is produced. The opposition between form and matter—which inaugurates metaphysics—finds in the concrete ideality of the living present its ultimate and radical justification.
…
Husserl will awaken it, recall it, and bring it back to itself in the form of a telos— that is, an Idea in the Kantian sense. There is no ideality without there being an Idea in the Kantian sense at work, opening up the possibility of something indefinite, the infinity of a stipulated progression or the infinity of permissible repetitions. This ideality is the very form in which the presence of an object in general may be indefinitely repeated as the same. The nonreality of the Bedeutung, the nonreality of the ideal object, the nonreality of the inclusion of sense or noema in consciousness (Husserl will say that the noema does not really—reell—belong to consciousness) will thus give the assurance that presence to consciousness can be indefinitely repeated—ideal presence to an ideal or transcendental consciousness. Ideality is the preservation or mastery of presence in repetition. In its pure form, this presence is the presence of nothing existing in the world; it is a correlation with the acts of repetition, themselves ideal. — Derrida

from Voice and Phenomenon.

The only pain we feel is our own. — David Mo

We have this one word 'pain' for something that we are all supposed to experience privately. How do I know that what I call my pain is what you call your pain?

We observe some linguistic and bodily behaviours. — David Mo

Exactly. So even though we have a certain intuition that the word 'pain' is attached to private experiences which cannot be compared, the concept only works because of various social conventions. In my view, Wittgenstein's point about the beetle in the box is a radical insight. It applies not only to pain or sensation but also to the issue of meaning. If the concept of pain depends on social convention, then so does the meaning of 'subject' and 'object.' The basic philosophical prejudice is arguably the notion that words are attached somehow directly to mental entities. And then this prejudice understands social practice to be secondary and derivative, ignoring that the functioning of a concept is radically dependent on social practice.

We have this idea of private experience that by definition cannot provide evidence. I can never know whether we 'mean' the same thing according to the private conception of meaning. All we can do is trade more signs, witness one another's behavior.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x86hLtOkou8

If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word "pain" means - must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly?

Now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case! --Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle". No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. --Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. --But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language? --If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. --No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.

That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant. — Wittgenstein

I think Derrida is making a related point in Signature, Event, Context. The point is not to simply deny the privacy of pain or meaning but to root out unquestioned assumptions or dominant metaphors.
One such metaphor is the mind as an eye that gazes on atemporal meaning.

I think you failed to address the point.

I wrote:

Note that in an argument against writing, the metaphor of writing is employed. — jjAmEs

You wrote:

I would interpret this as a statement of Plato's attitude towards written texts generally. — Wayfarer

Indeed, and it's precisely this demotion of writing in the name of speech that is strangely presented with a metaphor that involves writing. Socrates contrasts to writing that cannot defend itself 'an intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner.'

That this metaphor is not accidental is suggested by the relationship of ideality and iterability (explored in Voice and Phenomenon). The relative permanence of writing is presumably being borrowed.

His Hindu contemporaries philosophical teachings were likewise called 'upanisads' - meaning 'sitting close to', i.e. indicating a spoken or silent teaching between guru and chela. — Wayfarer

I'm open to the value of spoken and silent teaching. I also like Hadot. But is there not always the risk of performative contradiction? What does it mean to make written gestures away from writing? Is writing merely a recruitment tool, a half-truth that lures the student in for a personal initiation? The implication seems to be that what is learned is non-verbal --perhaps like learning to ride a bike. I find that kind of knowledge not only plausible but ubiquitous.

But how is one to distinguish one variety of mute know-how from another? As the outward sign is demoted or denied, so is rationality. This is fine, but why should access to the super-rational present itself rationally ? 'He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does not know.' And yet he who 'knows' feels compelled to say so. To me it's this need that makes me skeptical of the needy person's Enlightenment or mystic access. They are compelled to write just like me, even if they also remember peak experiences in which they temporarily felt beyond the need to explain or justify or even describe. How can such experiences even be talked about, though, without retrospective or anticipatory metaphors?

Language depends on public criteria. See Wittgenstein's private language argument and specifically regarding pain, see his beetle-in-a-box thought experiment. — Andrew M

I agree. Wittgenstein's point is radical and yet often ignored (just as similar Derridean insights are ignored.)

For me it's not as some in is thread might see it. It's not that private experience like pain is being denied. We know what people mean by such talk (we know how to get along in less philosophical conversation.) Nor is something like the presence of meaning being denied. But this general notion of immediate contact with sensation or meaning is revealed as a largely unquestioned assumption, to those willing to suffer the damage such an insight does to their current attachments.

I'm sure you can find some writers out there who deserve that kind of lampooning. At the same time, the 'pomo' caricature also serves as wishful thinking for those who just find certain philosophers too difficult (or more likely want to be spared the effort of even trying to read them.) Personally I'd be embarrassed to find the quotes below too difficult.

In order for my "written communication" to retain it function as writing, i.e., its readability, it must remain readable despite the absolute disappearance of any receiver, determined in general. My communication must be repeatable-iterable-in the absolute absence of the receiver or of any empirically determinable collectivity of receivers. Such iterability...structures the mark of writing itself, no matter what particular type of writing is involved (whether pictographical, hieroglyphic, ideographic, phonetic, alphabetic, to cite the old categories). A writing that is not structurally readable--iterable -- beyond the death of the addressee would not be writing.
...

What holds for the receiver holds also, for the same reasons, for the sender or the producer. To write is to produce a mark that will constitute a sort of machine which is productive in turn, and which my future disappearance will not, in principle, hinder in its functioning, offering things and itself to be read and to be rewritten. When I say "my future disappearance" [disparition: also, demise, trans.], it is in order to render this proposition more immediately acceptable. I ought to be able to say my disappearance, pure and simple, my nonpresence in general, for instance the nonpresence of my intention of saying something meaningful [mon vouloir-dire, mon intention-de-signification], of my wish to communicate, from the emission or production of the mark. For a writing to be a writing it must continue to "act" and to be readable even when what is called the author of the writing no longer answers for what he has written, for what he seems to have signed, be it because of a temporary absence, because he is dead or, more generally, because he has not employed his absolutely actual and present intention or attention, the plenitude of his desire to say what he means, in order to sustain what seems to be written "in his name. " One could repeat at this point the analysis outlined above this time with regard to the addressee. The situation of the writer and of the underwriter [du souscripteur: the signatory, trans. ] is, concerning the written text, basically the same as that of the reader. This essential drift [derive] bearing on writing as an iterative structure, cut off from all absolute responsibility, from consciousness as the ultimate authority, orphaned and separated at birth from the assistance of its father, is precisely what Plato condemns in the Phaedrus. If Plato's gesture is, as I believe, the philosophical movement par excellence, one can measure what is at stake here.
— Derrida

Soc. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
...

Soc. I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.
...

Soc. Is there not another kind of word or speech far better than this, and having far greater power-a son of the same family, but lawfully begotten?

Phaedr. Whom do you mean, and what is his origin?

Soc. I mean an intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner, which can defend itself, and knows when to speak and when to be silent.
— Plato

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html

Note that in an argument against writing, the metaphor of writing is employed. 'Graven in the soul' implies that the soul is itself a tablet, a text. That's the beginning of a deconstruction. The higher (speech) ends up depending on the lower (writing), ends up being a mere form of the lower. And speech is subject to the same principle of iterability as writing, though a present speaker can always pile on more words in explication of those already spoken, which are themselves subject to the same law of iterablity and (generalized) writing. Wittgenstein's arguments against private language aim at making a related point. This is not to deny but to complicate the presence of meaning in the individual mind as kind of governing metaphor that can lead us into confusion or simply block other aspects of meaning (its sociality, for instance.)

The author allows a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a world where one is thrifty not only with one’s sources and riches, but also with one’s discourses and their significations. The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning. As a result we must entirely reverse the traditional idea of the author..the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition and recomposition of fiction. — Foucault

Here is a different spin on the same idea. The author is authority that helps us hide from the ravages of time in the form of the drift and ambiguity of meaning. I prefer Derrida's more neutrally toned presentation, but Foucault is obviously not some unreadable phrase generator.

Here's something from the New Age generator:

Consciousness consists of transmissions of quantum energy. “Quantum” means a flowering of the high-frequency. We dream, we believe, we are reborn. We exist as supercharged waveforms.
Nothing is impossible. The goal of vibrations is to plant the seeds of life-force rather than suffering. Inseparability is the knowledge of fulfillment, and of us. Today, science tells us that the essence of nature is being.

Have you found your path? If you have never experienced this quantum shift through non-local interactions, it can be difficult to self-actualize. It can be difficult to know where to begin. Humankind has nothing to lose. Throughout history, humans have been interacting with the solar system via vibrations. We are at a crossroads of potential and dogma. Dogma is the antithesis of being.
How should you navigate this magical totality? Indigo Child, look within and enlighten yourself.

Although you may not realize it, you are Vedic. — link

https://sebpearce.com/bullshit/

It's as crude as the one you linked to, a nice substitute for actually trying to understand a particular 'New Age' text.

Here's another one that generates one-liners.

Nature is a reflection of an abundance of timelessness. — link

http://wisdomofchopra.com/

Scientific objectivity is something else. It rests on a series of reasonable assumptions: intersubjectivity and prediction specially. — David Mo

I like science. But why do we call those assumptions 'reasonable'? Reasonable for you and me, but not for others. Without its technical results to back it up, it would be one more set of norms for conversation. To be clear, I'm for science and against superstition. So the issue is what grounds science, what lifts it above other ideologies. For me it's an instrument that works, prediction and control. And it works even for people who don't believe in it, which sets it apart from myth. I'm not worried about dark matter. Nor am I the least bit attracted to some God of the gaps.

I think we trust tools that get us what we want. Science through technology is the most reliable wonder-worker that most of us have seen. (Others claim to have been given golden tablets by angels and son on, which is more impressive, but I don't believe them.) For me pseudo-science is what imitates the style of science without actually working. Tech is the test.

"Ruby lips". It is a classical (hackneyed) metaphor. Metaphors are metaphors. New or old. It is a matter of form. — David Mo

Do rivers have mouths? Do needles have eyes? Do you see what I mean? (Is meaning literally visible?)

Metaphor itself is a dead metaphor.

The English metaphor derived from the 16th-century Old French word métaphore, which comes from the Latin metaphora, "carrying over", in turn from the Greek μεταφορά (metaphorá), "transfer",[8] from μεταφέρω (metapherō), "to carry over", "to transfer"[9] and that from μετά (meta), "after, with, across"[10] + φέρω (pherō), "to bear", "to carry".[11] — link

A metaphor is a carry-over or carry-across of structure. It makes sense to me that we would point out one pattern or structure in terms of familiar patterns or structures.

Then idea is a central metaphor, a visual metaphor.

The word "Idea" originates from the Greek, and it is the feminine form of, the word εἶδος (Greek eidos: something seen; form, shape; related to idein "to see," eidenai "to know" [2]). "Idea" meant at first a form, shape, or appearance and implied the "visual aspect" of things in classical Greek.[3] — link

This concern with metaphor isn't just one internet rando's pet.

While the basic features of phenomenological consciousness – intentionality, self-awareness, embodiment, and so forth—have been the focus of analysis, Continental philosophers such as Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida go further in adding a linguistically creative dimension. They argue that metaphor and symbol act as the primary interpreters of reality, generating richer layers of perception, expression, and meaning in speculative thought. The interplay of metaphor and phenomenology introduces serious challenges and ambiguities within long-standing assumptions in the history of Western philosophy, largely with respect to the strict divide between the literal and figurative modes of reality based in the correspondence theory of truth.
...
Derrida, from the outset, will call into question the assumption that the formation of concepts (logos) somehow escapes the primordiality of language and the fundamentally metaphorical-mythical nature of philosophical discourse. In a move which goes much further than Ricoeur, Derrida argues for what Guiseseppe Stellardi so aptly calls the “reverse metaphorization of concepts.” The reversal is such that there can be no final separation between the linguistic-metaphorical and the philosophical realms. These domains are co-constitutive of one another, in the sense that either one cannot be fully theorized or made to fully or transparently explain the meaning of the other. The result is that language acquires a certain obscurity, ascendancy, and autonomy. It will permanently elude our attempts to fix its meaning-making activity in foundational terms which necessitate a transcendent or externalized (to language) unified being.
...
For Arduini, figurative activity does not depict the given world, but allows for the ability to construct world images employed in reality. To be figuratively competent is to use the imagination as a tool which puts patterns together in inventive mental processes. Arduini then seems to recall Nieztsche; anthropologically speaking, humans are always engaging in some form of figuration or form of language, which allows for “cognitive competence” in that it chooses among particular forms which serve to define the surrounding contexts or environments. Again, metaphor is foundational to the apprehension of reality; it is part of the pre-reflective or primordial apparatus of experience, perception, and first- through second-order thought, comprising an entire theoretical approach as well as disciplines such as evolutionary anthropology (see Tooby and Cosmides).
...
The Continental theories of metaphor that have extrapolated and developed variations on the theme expressed in Nietzsche’s apocryphal pronouncement that truth is “a mobile army of metaphors.” The notion that metaphorical language is somehow ontologically and epistemologically prior to ordinary propositional language has since been voiced by Heidegger, Ricoeur, and Derrida. For these thinkers metaphor serves as a foundational heuristic structure, one which is primarily designed to subvert ordinary reference and in some way dismantle the truth-bearing claims of first-order propositional language. Martin Heidegger’s existential phenomenology does away with the assumption that true or meaningful intentional statements reflect epistemic judgments about the world; that is, they do not derive referential efficacy through the assumed correspondence between an internal idea and an external object. While there may be a kind of agreement between our notions of things and the world in which we find those things, it is still a derivative agreement emerging from a deeper ontologically determined set of relations between things-in-the-world, given or presented to us as inherently linked together in particular historical, linguistic, or cultural contexts.

The role of metaphor in perception and cognition also dominates the work of contemporary cognitive scientists, linguists, and those working in the related fields of evolutionary anthropology and computational theory. While the latter may not be directly associated with Continental phenomenology, aspects of their work support an “anti-metaphysical” position and draw upon common phenomenological themes which stress the embodied, linguistic, contextual, and symbolic nature of knowledge. — link

https://www.iep.utm.edu/met-phen/#SH1b

This is the Wiki version. For the Greeks, Prometheus meant punishment for the excessive pride of those who think they are smarter than the gods. Well-deserved.

This is how a myth can represent one thing and its opposite. It depends on what you want. This is not objective knowledge. — David Mo

Of course myths are far more flexible than E =mc^2. As for objective knowledge, what is the measure of that? In my view we respect science primarily because of its technical miracles. Not everyone understands or endorses mainstream science, so we can't rely on a unanimous vote. Can we objectively say that J S Bach is a good composer? Many would be tempted to say no. But I'm not so sure about a radical boundary between physics and aesthetics. In both cases we depend on community consensus, even if (of course) we imagined something stronger.

May be it is a matter of language, but I wouldn't say that the Lysenko case was about myths or superstition. It was ideology mixed with pseudoscience and totalitarianism. — David Mo

I like this definition.

Ideologies are patterned clusters of normatively imbued ideas and concepts, including particular representations of power relations. These conceptual maps help people navigate the complexity of their political universe and carry claims to social truth. — link

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

To me religion fits in with that nicely, including the 'religion' of the enlightenment (which is my 'religion' or ideology.) Where we perhaps differ is that I understand my position to be an invested or founded position. I adopted the ideology of those who want to transcend ideology as much as possible. Why truth? Why objectivity? Why rationality? Why skepticism? What image is pursued here? Prometheus, etc.

Many critics of religion (like Dawkins) understand religion as pseudo-science (which is a correct diagnosis in many cases, though the definition of ideology above is perhaps better.)

Chapter one, "A deeply religious non-believer", seeks to clarify the difference between what Dawkins terms "Einsteinian religion" and "supernatural religion". He notes that the former includes quasi-mystical and pantheistic references to God in the work of physicists like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, and describes such pantheism as "sexed up atheism". Dawkins instead takes issue with the theism present in religions like Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism.[13] The proposed existence of this interventionist God, which Dawkins calls the "God Hypothesis", becomes an important theme in the book.[14] He maintains that the existence or non-existence of God is a scientific fact about the universe, which is discoverable in principle if not in practice.[15] — link

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

Your manners could use some work, but nevertheless I'll answer you. I like Dewey's general approach (other names might work as well.)

Dewey’s pragmatism—or, “cultural naturalism”, which he favored over “pragmatism” and “instrumentalism”—may be understood as a critique and reconstruction of philosophy within the larger ambit of a Darwinian worldview (Lamont 1961; MW4: 3). Following James’ lead, Dewey argued that philosophy had become an overly technical and intellectualistic discipline, divorced from assessing the social conditions and values dominating everyday life (FAE, LW5: 157–58). He sought to reconnect philosophy with the mission of education-for-living (philosophy as “the general theory of education”), a form of social criticism at the most general level, or “criticism of criticisms” (EN, LW1: 298; see also DE, MW9: 338).

Set within the larger picture of Darwinian evolutionary theory, philosophy should be seen as an activity undertaken by interdependent organisms-in-environments. This standpoint, of active adaptation, led Dewey to criticize the tendency of traditional philosophies to abstract and reify concepts derived from living contexts. As did other classical pragmatists, Dewey focused criticism upon traditional dualisms of metaphysics and epistemology (e.g., mind/body, nature/culture, self/society, and reason/emotion) and then reconstructed their elements as parts of larger continuities. For example, human thinking is not a phenomenon which is radically outside of (or external to) the world it seeks to know; knowing is not a purely rational attempt to escape illusion in order to discover what is ultimately “real” or “true”. Rather, human knowing is among the ways organisms with evolved capacities for thought and language cope with problems. Minds, then, are not passively observing the world; rather, they are actively adapting, experimenting, and innovating; ideas and theories are not rational fulcrums to get us beyond culture, but rather function experimentally within culture and are evaluated on situated, pragmatic bases. Knowing is not the mortal’s exercise of a “divine spark”, either; for while knowing (or inquiry, to use Dewey’s term) includes calculative or rational elements, it is ultimately informed by the body and emotions of the animal using it to cope. — link

Note that your mind/body dualism is included here.

Another questionable philosophical habit is talk about the isolated consciousness, the forlorn ghost in the machine.

Dewey rejected both traditional accounts of mind-as-substance (or container) and more contemporary schemes reducing mind to brain states (EN, LW1: 224–225). Rather, mind is activity, a range of dynamic processes of interaction between organism and world. Consider the range connoted by mind: as memory (I am reminded of X); attention (I keep her in mind, I mind my manners); purpose (I have an aim in mind); care or solicitude (I mind the child); paying heed (I mind the traffic stop). “Mind”, then, ranges over many activities: intellectual, affectional, volitional, or purposeful. It is

primarily a verb…[that] denotes every mode and variety of interest in, and concern for, things: practical, intellectual, and emotional. It never denotes anything self-contained, isolated from the world of persons and things, but is always used with respect to situations, events, objects, persons and groups. (AE, LW10: 267–68)

As Wittgenstein (entry on Wittgenstein, section on rule-following and private language) pointed out 30 years later, no private language (see entry on private language) is possible given this account of meaning. While meanings might be privately entertained, they are not privately invented; meanings are social and emerge from symbol systems arising through collective communication and action (EN, LW1: 147). — link

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey/

In case it's still not clear how this bears on the thread, subject-object talk is not necessarily fundamental. We don't have to take it that way. Or, if we want to, it's better perhaps to think of social organisms in an environment. Inquiry for such organisms is not usually a pure knowing but rather adjustment and transformation that is as much deed as word. And even the word is used not just for representation but primarily as part of the creation and transformation of physical and social environments.

A big fan of Dewey, Richard Rorty, is also worth mentioned.

On Rorty's account, modern epistemology is not only an attempt to legitimate our claim to knowledge of what is real, but also an attempt to legitimate philosophical reflection itself—a pressing task, on many accounts, once the advent of the so-called new science of the sixteenth and seventeenth century gradually gave content to a notion of knowledge obtained by the methodological interrogation of nature herself. — link

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rorty/

In other words, philosophy has been trying to save its own reputation against a background of undeniable technical progress. How is it that all the technology works without the permission or endorsement of the epistemologists? Who cares these days what philosophers think? In my view philosophy is still valuable, but perhaps only philosophers still believe that philosophy is some kind of master discourse that polices all the rest.

Mary's virginity — David Mo

This myth isn't so easy to interpret. One of the safer interpretations is that Mary represents the unselfish love of a mother, with the virginity intended to exclude the greed in lust.



There are riskier interpretations that I won't go into here. I will gesture toward works like Love's Body, a book that fuses Freudian psychoanalysis and Christian theology. I understand this book as belonging to the quest for self-knowledge, though of course it's not empirical science. I don't think it has a genre, but I do think it's a first rate book of something like philosophy but more willing than most philosophies to leap into the depths.

Paul Robinson writes that Love's Body "makes quite clear that psychoanalysis was only a stage in Brown's development toward a rather curious (and radical) brand of religious mysticism. The very concrete body of Freudian psychology has been absorbed into the Mystical Body of traditional Christian theology. To be sure, Freud remains an important authority, and there is a racy (and confusing) display of sexual rhetoric. But the erotic language is largely metaphorical; as Brown himself says, 'Everything is symbolic...including the sexual act.' — link

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love%27s_Body

https://books.google.com/books?id=Va0wDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

I guess I like the 'mysticism' that isn't afraid of but even learns from the masters of suspicion.

The real deceivers are the literalists, who say, I cannot tell a lie.
...
We can begin, I think, to make sense of these paradoxes if we think of the Oedipal project as the causa sui (father-of-oneself) project, and therefore in essence a revolt against death generally, and specifically against the biological principle separating mother and child. — Brown

...

Therefore, living metaphors have a power of provocation while stale metaphors lead to conformity. — David Mo

A truly stale metaphor is no longer recognized as a metaphor. The idea of literality (itself a dead metaphor!) is contrasted with metaphoricity. We tend to think of metaphors as mere embellishments, not recognizing that dead metaphors that were once optional now function as a kind of pre-interpretation of the situation that steers us sometimes into dead ends. Deconstruction is to some degree about heating up these old metaphors so that they are fluid and alive again. We can experience the past in its contingency, as choices in foundational metaphors that could have been made otherwise.

If we want to discuss a myth, it would be better to choose a true myth: Prometheus, Mary's virginity or the creation of the world according to the Mayas. — David Mo

In Greek mythology, Prometheus (/prəˈmiːθiːəs/; Greek: Προμηθεύς, pronounced [promɛːtʰéu̯s], possibly meaning "forethought")[1] is a Titan, culture hero, and trickster figure who is credited with the creation of humanity from clay, and who defies the gods by stealing fire and giving it to humanity as civilization. Prometheus is known for his intelligence and as a champion of humankind[2] and also seen as the author of the human arts and sciences generally. — Wiki

He sounds like an enlightenment hero, doesn't he?

For the Romantic era, Prometheus was the rebel who resisted all forms of institutional tyranny epitomised by Zeus – church, monarch, and patriarch. The Romantics drew comparisons between Prometheus and the spirit of the French Revolution, Christ, the Satan of John Milton's Paradise Lost, and the divinely inspired poet or artist. Prometheus is the lyrical "I" who speaks in Goethe's Sturm und Drang poem "Prometheus" (written c. 1772–74, published 1789), addressing God (as Zeus) in misotheist accusation and defiance. In Prometheus Unbound (1820), a four-act lyrical drama, Percy Bysshe Shelley rewrites the lost play of Aeschylus so that Prometheus does not submit to Zeus (under the Latin name Jupiter), but instead supplants him in a triumph of the human heart and intellect over tyrannical religion. — Wiki

Is this not enlightenment humanism personified? And is this not our currently dominant hero myth? In a less spiritualized version, we have capitalism's entrepreneur. The enemy is religion, tradition, the mediocre masses, resistance to innovation, etc.

The punishment of this titan is the punishment of the bold individual who wanders from the safety of conformity and the punishment of the community that leaves behind the comforts of its gods and traditions. Today there is plenty of fear about where our technology is taking us. There is also the sense of spiritual loss of some kind.

Rorty is obsessed with updating the language. He reduces the philosophical value to novelty or antiquity. He thinks that what matters is to be fashionable. — David Mo

For me the way to put this is that groups of humans use marks and noise as part of surviving and prospering in the world. The marks and noises they use to do this change in the long run. Rorty is clear that he is not saying that language is just marks and noises understood at tools. Instead this perspective is presented as one metaphor among others, good for this or that. In this case, the metaphor is language is a tool. An opposed metaphor is language is a lens. If we think of our talk or thinking as a lens through which we see the world, then we can worry about distortion in the lens. You mentioned correctness in your post, which leans on the lens or eye metaphor. From a pragmatic language-as-tool metaphorical grounding, we worry more about success or failure relative to this or that purpose (including the purpose of obtaining consensus about our other purposes.)

I'm crazy about Bach. If the Holy Trinity exists, Bach is in the upper corner. I'm sure he is. But I don't think music is a good example for myths. — David Mo

I wasn't suggesting that music be understood as myth. My point was that great souls like Bach were Christians in some sense. Individuals can take myths literally or symbolically (to oversimplify).

My broader point is that superstition need not involve the supernatural. I expect that we'll agree on this point. But here's an example:

The pseudo-scientific ideas of Lysenkoism assumed the heritability of acquired characteristics (Lamarckism).[1] Lysenko's theory rejected Mendelian inheritance and the concept of the "gene"; it departed from Darwinian evolutionary theory by rejecting natural selection.[2] Proponents falsely claimed to have discovered, among many other things, that rye could transform into wheat and wheat into barley, that weeds could spontaneously transmute into food grains, and that "natural cooperation" was observed in nature as opposed to "natural selection".[2] Lysenkoism promised extraordinary advances in breeding and in agriculture that never came about.

Joseph Stalin supported the campaign. More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were fired or even sent to prison,[3] and numerous scientists were executed as part of a campaign instigated by Lysenko to suppress his scientific opponents.[4][5][6][7] The president of the Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, was sent to prison and died there, while Soviet genetics research was effectively destroyed until the death of Stalin in 1953.[2] Research and teaching in the fields of neurophysiology, cell biology, and many other biological disciplines was also negatively affected or banned.[8] — Wiki

Another example is nazi racist biologism.

'Magical thinking' is not eradicated with the 'supernatural,' though I do understand that desire for cognitive purity. At the same time the quest for cognitive purity (rigor, accuracy, etc.) looks like a repetition of a myth structure. I'm skeptical about the idea of some complete break from our mythological roots. Such a complete break is itself the repetition of creation from nothing.

Perhaps thinking is fundamentally technical. Heidegger can be read as analyzing a spiritual problem and finding that the only tool for the job is a new god, which is to say not yet in the toolbox. We just can't imagine what would save us. In that sense I agree with Heidegger.

But there's something abstract about this salvation. I have to switch into a world-historical mode to worry about it. Heidegger, like Nietzsche, just found it pretty natural to work in that mode. Heidegger was famous enough to make such self-importance plausible.

Heidegger's analysis is deeper than environmentalism perhaps, but from a PR angle he and his jargon are contaminated by right-wing politics. For me global humanism and environmentalism together are a natural fit, since individual nations don't seem likely to set aside technological competitiveness in the name of what's good for the species or the planet in the long run. I don't know if it will ever happen, but it seems obvious that at some point the species should have one government. What I expect in my lifetime is more of the same, though disaster on a scale that I've only read about in history books about does seem possible. (And for the individuals involved in 'little' disasters, those disasters are massive already. Which is just the gap between world-historical mode and living as an individual for whom a heart attack or a car accident might as well be the Gulf War.)

But dismissing his observations on those grounds is falling prey exactly to his criticism. This isn't about reaching eco-utopia, it's about avoiding techno-dystopia, which is a real danger right now. If you don't believe me, look at how China is presently governed. Ask yourself what happens when we're basically data-cattle for social media and government. — Pneumenon

I respect what you say, and I don't dismiss his observations. I even try to live more in the direction of such values. I agree with Wordsworth and Heidegger, and yet I am also a greedy monkey who is happy to be well-fed in a little box with a woman and lots of words and pictures to keep me amused. Part of us objects to the process. Another part of us is hypnotized. Something like that. And it's hard to say which part is realer or more effective.

The Wiki page on Eliade is fascinating.

From the perspective of religious thought, Eliade argues, hierophanies give structure and orientation to the world, establishing a sacred order. The "profane" space of nonreligious experience can only be divided up geometrically: it has no "qualitative differentiation and, hence, no orientation [is] given by virtue of its inherent structure".[88] Thus, profane space gives man no pattern for his behavior. In contrast to profane space, the site of a hierophany has a sacred structure to which religious man conforms himself.
...
From the standpoint of religious thought, the world has an objective purpose established by mythical events, to which man should conform himself: "Myth teaches [religious man] the primordial 'stories' that have constituted him existentially."[166] From the standpoint of secular thought, any purpose must be invented and imposed on the world by man. Because of this new "existential situation", Eliade argues, the Sacred becomes the primary obstacle to nonreligious man's "freedom". In viewing himself as the proper maker of history, nonreligious man resists all notions of an externally (for instance, divinely) imposed order or model he must obey: modern man "makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacralizes himself and the world. [...] He will not truly be free until he has killed the last god".

Eliade says that secular man cannot escape his bondage to religious thought. By its very nature, secularism depends on religion for its sense of identity: by resisting sacred models, by insisting that man make history on his own, secular man identifies himself only through opposition to religious thought: "He [secular man] recognizes himself in proportion as he 'frees' and 'purifies' himself from the 'superstitions' of his ancestors." — link

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

I agree with the last point. The secular identity depends on the traditional identity which it negates. This 'secular' identity has freedom or autonomy as its ideal --as that which must be incarnated, repeated, brought to completion in perfected deicide.

It seems hard indeed to avoid some kind of 'spiritual' role-play, which may obviously take the form of anti-superstitious flame-throwing in the name of the fire god.