Yes, exactly that last part. There is some security in identifying totally with your wound, while having control over how the wounding happens (Deleuze will say this is the core of masochism) John Ashbery's long prose-poem-in-parts three poems gets at this well (and draws together a lot of the things we've been talking about): — csalisbury

I love Ashbery, by the way, which somehow I'd never looked into until you mentioned him. I still have only seen what you've shared. Masochism is deep stuff. I've been listening to 'Venus in Furs' (Velvet Underground) and also think of 'In Every Dreamhome a Heartache' (Roxy Music.) I'm dropping those as (to me) great songs that might be fodder for more convo on this.

But I think, having accepted that, that a space is opened to understand what AI really is. Which is not just the programs themselves, but our relation with them, and how we change them and are changed by them... and how that rhythm of change keeps morphing, if that makes sense? That's why I think another technological suite - agriculture - is really useful here, particularly how it begins as one thing among others, then slowly changes us in ways we don't recognize, until we're symbiotic with it. — csalisbury

I think this is a great issue in itself. For me it has been mostly about 'idle talk' or 'botspeak' as the 'incarnation' of the 'One' as discussed in a non-moralizing way in Dreyfus.

The moral version would be not whatever Heidegger's authenticity is (I can't figure it out) but Bloom's anxiety of influence. I'm worried about being a bad poet, of merely repeating and not creating. Fight for recognition? But it's also just grasping how automatic most of life is. How taken-for-grantedly it flows, the way these words pour out. Yet that's also what I've called enlightenment, when it feels good.

Very cool that you've been in the trenches with the nets. I feel (I'm responding to your posts, as I read them) like I'm getting a better sense of "Path's Polonius" (who does, I admit, bear a strong resemblance to the character himself) He seems to think he understands everything well enough, without looking beneath the smooth workings of everyday life. — csalisbury

Polonius is my shadow. I read lots of Jung once, I confess. I connect him [Polo] to idle talk, chatter, or bot-speak. We always leave (or I always leave) a slime trail of the already-been-said. That's part of it. Polonius just barfs up what everybody knows.

But he's also a father figure. There's basically a performance of the smart guy that is implicitly patriarchal. So I can deliver a sermon on humility and the form of the communication is arrogant. Who gets to give the sermon? That's the 'real' issue on the level of form, thinly veiled by content. So runs my sermon on humility.

You also hint at a kind of shallowness of knowledge. I relate to that too. I play fast and loose and basically bluff, and part of that bluff is that everyone is bluffing. That's part of my AI point, too, that we just use these words and they work and we don't look to closely at how.

And talk of us all walking in darkness is one more false light, which is more talk of walking in darkness. But part of me wants to be called out, as an opportunity to catch the spaghetti again. If I am called out gently and perceptively, then the game is actually happening. This is a narcissistic detour, but I want to catch the spaghetti again.

Yeah, I think enlightenment, if it exists, is something reached subtractively. One way to get at that is to decry 'enlightenment' altogether which I think is a legit approach. — csalisbury

Right. I like that approach while knowing it's not the only approach. In some ways my vision of what enlightenment is is just so mundane that it hardly deserves the name. If I get caught up in loving my cat, forgetting mortality and identity and all of that, then that's it. Or I'll settle for just being in a state of easygoing play, even if that play is hard work. 'The seriousness of a child at play.' Maybe there's more, but I'm pretty happy with that. It's an animal kind of spirituality. The more mystical-manic states I've had via philosophy might deserve their own name. But it's like a drug state, not really for mortals, or not for long.

The debris part also speaks to me. My strategy, right or wrong, has been to lean in to the idea of dying in sin, dying in my mess. The only sure escape from those debris is just getting caught up in play, which I can't force. I can get the coin out of the washing machine, but it's like Bukowski said: he could always suddenly not be a poet. Probably boring things to talk about like diet and exercise are huge, which I'm OK with. But I lean on my coffee and nicotine gum.
I know that disaster is up ahead somewhere, and it's not the rest but the awkward transition I resent. In the meantime I'm trying to work out how to make money without selling my soul.
(I think it's cool that you work remotely now. That's what I'm doing too for now. So much of my life happens on this one screen.)

a handy image for showing how all these very different modes of living can root themselves in something mystical and profound, while producing very different flowers. And the variance in final flowering is probably pushed along through all the brawls and tussles. — csalisbury

Exactly! And that's us here too.

I have a wariness of anti-system thought, of staking your ground there. I think Anti-System still has one foot in System. — csalisbury

Always. That's what I try to load in the 'ironic' of the ironic aphorist. I can't mean what I say or say what I mean. It's always wrong. It's always thrown. To be thrown is to be in a system, perhaps especially an anti-systematic system. Now I'm in the system of us always being thrown. I relate to Derrida so much perhaps because he suffered and thrilled at/as the system trying to climb out of itself.

I can't say I've read Hitler, but I'm sure it's thuggish. — Xtrix

Yes, and fortunately it's online so no one has to pay for it. That's part of Heidegger's guilt. I know he got out early, but he read that book and praised it. He put his fame behind that movement and helped to legitimatize it.

His stubborn silence afterward fascinates me.

Eh, I wouldn't say that myself. He never killed anyone or advocated for the holocaust. If simply being a member of a dangerous political party makes you evil, then we currently have a lot of equally evil people in the US alone- called Republicans. — Xtrix

For me it's tricky, because I don't want to either just virtue signal self-righteously or act like his being a Nazi wasn't important. That letter I quoted is painful. I've read some of Mein Kampf. It's an ugly book, and Heid was recommending it, complaining only about the boring autobiographical parts. I won't quote Hitler here, but browse for yourself. It's a thuggish document. It troubles me that anyone could recommend it in the spirit of Christ...

But yeah fucking Mitch & the gang are evil. I will hold my nose and vote for Biden, I guess, though it won't matter in my red state...

Oh that's a shame! I think this is exactly where Heidegger is most "useful" in a scholarly sense; the man certainly knew his Greek. I think he is still underestimated as a "philologist," or perhaps linguist. — Xtrix

I do what I can to follow certain scholars on the etymological issues...but I am haunted by a sense of being outside all of the languages I don't know. I feel forced to recreate some analogue that's necessarily a misreading. On the linguistics front, I have only looked in Saussure, but it was illuminating.

with the Introduction to Metaphysics. Have you tackled that one yet? — Xtrix

I haven't seriously studied it. I was impressed by certain passages, definitely. So far I've mostly been drawn to the early stuff, before B&T, though obviously that book has its killer lines. I guess I don't like when Heidegger gets too systematic. To me, Witt and Heid were sometimes saying the same thing in different styles. Witt could be 'too' anti-systematic while Heid was too systematic. It's a tradeoff, and I'm glad both went in different directions. And what I have in mind is the deconstruction of various linguistic/metaphysical confusions based on assuming an isolated subject, etc.

To be clear, I could always read more of either or of other thinkers. I def. feel my finitude. I see so many...paths...and I can't take or be them all.

My favourite philosophers have always been ones who encourage an exploration beyond themselves... — StreetlightX

Yes, I too like philosophers who gesture beyond themselves.

Deleuze - who is my fav - offered his philosophy as a 'set of weapons' to be picked up as needed as discarded when not. — StreetlightX

I still need to really look into Deleuze. The set of weapons metaphor in nice, and goes well with Nietzsche's army of metaphors metaphor. I like this distance that thinkers can take from what they say. The pragmatists were on to something with the 'tool' metaphor, but (like anything maybe) it's easily made banal, conformist, sleepy. The philosopher forges tools or weapons with uses that cannot be anticipated, and being open to this is connected to that gesture beyond themselves. I like that they know they will be recontextualized, that they can't dominate the future.

Zizek writes somewhere that the only way to stay true to the spirit of a philosopher is to betray them in a direction they would not have considered. I think there's alot to that. — StreetlightX

Totally agree. Betray them even with the tools they've given us, which is both loving and hateful. Escapes age into new traps, or something like that.

But in general, he’s a thinker that’s more fun to forage around in and plunder than to take wholesale. — StreetlightX

Seconded. And this can probably be generalized. Who can we take wholesale?

As far as I know, there is no other advocate of what I'm advocating. My world-view has been influenced by far more people than I can possibly know, and there are similarities and shared positions on specific points with many. — creativesoul

I can relate to that. I also have lots of influences, and I couldn't point to just one.

Also, I don't agree with everything Rorty or everything anybody, but that Rorty quote was good for what I had in mind.

I wouldn't say that a name represents it's referent. It refers to it. It picks it out of this world to the exclusion of all else. — creativesoul

OK, that's why I mentioned intentionality earlier. If we tell a kid to go get a screwdriver and he brings the screwdriver back, does that work? We can't see inside his soul. He just does what we want him to do upon certain cues.

Language use begins when a plurality of creatures draw the same correlations between different things. Reference is only one use. We also get others to do stuff with language use. — creativesoul

What about when a dog pees where other dogs have peed? We can say that they are indicating their presence, maybe other things. But all we see is that the dog pees where other dogs have peed.

Or we can say that bee dancing points other bees to food, but all we see is the dance and that the bees go to where the first bee was.

Would you accept this as enacted correlation?

Language begins when one creature successfully refers to something by use of proxy of some sort, marks, sounds, gestures, etc. — creativesoul

Ah. For me the issue is maybe this referral. Do you mean that one thing represents another, or points to it in some sense?

I'm not a Rorty fan, by the way... He mistakenly holds that truth is dependent upon language, which is prima facie evidence that he has no coherent conception of non linguistic thought or belief. — creativesoul

Is there someone you can refer me to that's closer to your approach? Just to see it in another vocabulary? Or are you working on something fresh?

We clearly have thought and belief - of some rudimentary basic and/or simple variety prior to language; that is prior to any and all notions, definitions, and/or conceptions of "thought", "belief", "imagination", "mind"... prior to language creation/acquisition itself. — creativesoul

I guess I don't see a clean break where language begins. If animals coordinate their behavior with noises and scents, that's a kind of language. What if we humans are doing the same kind of thing at a higher level of complexity? Does that make sense?

That is the target. We clearly have thought and belief prior to language. What does it consist of? — creativesoul

I'm tempted to think of organisms reacting to stimuli.

One can be

the kind of antiessentialist who, like Dewey, sees no breaks in the hierarchy of increasingly complex adjustments to novel stimulation—the hierarchy which has amoeba adjusting themselves to changed water temperature at the bottom, bees dancing and chess players check-mating in the middle, and people fomenting scientific, artistic, and political revolutions at the top. — Rorty

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

So we have non-human animals doing as they do, before the bald talky apes arrive. Then we come along with our highly complicated meows (language proper) and talk about it. Thought and belief prior to human language are shown or enacted nonlinguistically in patters of reaction and interaction.

That's my first guess. Much more can be said, as always.

You have to be foolish to despise something that you have no choice but to do. I'm just asking for a cautious metaphysics. That is to say, not to pretend to function independently of the data that science provides and to move too far away from them.

So I'm not against philosophy. Just that it should be a philosophy that knows where to step, asphalt if it's asphalt and quicksand if it's quicksand. Those who hear the word "quantum mechanics" and start seeing the Holy Spirit make me nervous.

And, unfortunately, my experience with philosophers is that there are quite a few who see the holy spirit and have no idea what quantum mechanics is. — David Mo

Thank you for the excellent reply. We're not so far apart after all. I think you are referring to quantum woo, which I also dislike. I studied some QM in school but wasn't a physics major. Feynman is one of my many heroes, along with laughing Democritus. I currently work on AI, or glorified statistics.
I've been talking about AI in other threads to try to demystify consciousness. [Or to join in the old game of trying to demystify consciousness.]


My objection to holy ghost philosophers is that they won't confess that it's just poetry. They could add that 'poetry' is a metaphysical concept, but they don't think of that.

I love science for exposing itself to falsification. It takes guts to make an unambiguous prediction. It takes guts to climb in a machine and hope to end up on the moon.

I also agree that instrumentalism isn't completely satisfying. I want the truth, without knowing exactly what it means to say that I want the truth.

The lack of playful humor or a role for music in his 'thinking', as George Steiner points out, is quite telling of his decadent, constipated, "spirit of gravity" (Nietzsche). — 180 Proof

I think this nails it, and I agree. Heidegger is a constipated priest. No golden laughter there, instead a heavy mystic gloom, a sort of concentrated hysteria, somehow tangled in the being-toward-death stuff that I could never quite get --because maybe it wasn't there to get. It was just a storm cloud for a god.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, at his best, was well beyond metaphysics. Better a clown than a priest, and he meant it. I like thinkers who can laugh at themselves, who aren't quite convinced by themselves. I want them to laugh with the abyss as it laughs at them. Don't they hear the laughter of the gods?

[Derrida tries in some sense to assimilate Heidegger to Nietzsche, raid him for parts in a spirit of play, if there is such a thing as a Derrida.]

I've been bringing up consciousness and mentalistic language in order to avoid it and take some distance from it. But it's hard to strip it entirely from our meta-language. We are just trained in to talking this way. We can only talk against this training by simultaneously employing it.

Yes, I hear you. [Responding to the post before your last. ]This touches on intentionality. What interest me is that this is one more beetle in the box. People might say that AI can't have it, but how do we know that we have it? If we just use the word according to certain complex conventions, we 'have' it. It's supposed to refer to something that's not just language. It's the same with 'consciousness.'

You and I both understand, I trust, that we know what it is to take snowballs as a snowman. What this knowing is...is not so clear. It's at least participating in complicated social conventions.

What is the term "consciousness" doing here? I mean what is it accomplishing? What's it adding aside from an unnecessary multiplication of entities? There's no need to invoke it. — creativesoul

Wow, we are misunderstanding each other. I've been contorting myself to get away from 'consciousness' and 'the unnecessary multiplication of entities.'

Can opener sound. Tuna smell. Cat comes closer, meows, looks up.

This pattern is something that we can work into the complicated pattern of our meows and can-openings. All talk of 'expectation' and 'belief' and 'consciousness' is just part of that human meowing. As is what I'm meowing now.

Perhaps we could say "embedded time" or "experiential time" as someone put it, and which Heidegger calls "temporality." — Xtrix

Right. And we can think of physics time as deworlded time. I think we can also drag in Sellars. The 'manifest image' is like the holistic network of equipment. The 'scientific image' is the system of prsent-at-hand entities for a deworlded dehistorized 'I' or 'pure' abstract subject.

Could manifest objects reduce to systems of imperceptible scientific objects? Are manifest objects ultimately real, scientific objects merely abstract constructions valuable for the prediction and control of manifest objects? Or are manifest objects appearances to human minds of a reality constituted by systems of imperceptible particles? Sellars opts for the third alternative. The manifest image is, in his view, a phenomenal realm à la Kant, but science, at its Peircean ideal conclusion, reveals things as they are in themselves. Despite what Sellars calls “the primacy of the scientific image”(PSIM, in SPR: 32; in ISR: 400), he ultimately argues for a “synoptic vision” in which the descriptive and explanatory resources of the scientific image are united with the “language of community and individual intentions,” which “provides the ambience of principles and standards (above all, those which make meaningful discourse and rationality itself possible) within which we live our own individual lives” (PSIM, in SPR: 40; in ISR: 408). — link

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

'Synoptic vision' is nice, and I understand the desire to do justice to both images. Personally I lean toward interpreting the scientific image as 'valuable for prediction and control.' If we say that the world is really particles or waves, then I don't think we know what we are talking about. 'The finite has no genuine being.' Or things depend on context for their determination. 'Atoms & void' are a picture. Waves are a picture, and so on. Only mathematical Platonism can try to dodge this.

Then that Peircean ideal conclusion is Hegelian af, shoving metaphysical difficulties into the future. Things are revealed in themselves? Because our models get better? I can't make sense of it. Maybe Kant had the substratum the least wrong by saying the least about it, if one was not going to just attack the notion as problematic.

I've a ton of sympathy and appreciation for Heiddy... regarding his focus on language. — creativesoul

I think the bot-stuff is connected to bedrock beliefs. We enact our expectations of being intelligible as we engage in various linguistic conventions. (I know I didn't avoid the mentalistic talk when I used intelligible, but I guess I thought I needed it to be intelligible.)

I think our views are pretty close. If I'm being eccentric, it's in good faith.

My guess is that that is not true, and you know it!

Earlier... not so long ago actually... I stated the following...

Expectation is belief about what will take place. — creativesoul

I really was just trying to get clear on what you meant.

I think I may have it.

You agree that beliefs require no consciousness or language. They can simply be enacted.

Expectation is simply an enacted belief about the future.

So expectation also requires no consciousness.

I enact my expectation that the floor will hold me as I walk across it.

Funny, I just started in on Hegel this year. I've heard for years that he's the "hardest" philosopher to read. But so far I don't find him hard at all. — Xtrix

To me it's just like it is with Heidegger. I can find passages or lectures that speak to me. But then there are long passages that remain obscure, or rather suggestive. Maybe he means this. Even if I didn't have to work non-philosophically for a living and knew 5 languages, I think I'd still end up thinking that life is just too short.

Heidegger comes down favorably on Hegel, however, and so I thought it worth while to actually read the man and see what all the fuss is about. So far I see why he was so influential. — Xtrix

I got into Hegel first, which is maybe why I prioritized historicity when reading Heidegger. Roughly I think that Heidegger added a kind of subconceptuality to Hegel. The zeitgeist is enacted. This is where Dreyfus comes in. The who of everyday dasein (the 'one') is not primarily conceptual. The stance we take on our existence is so deep that we don't have to think about it. Interpretative phenomenology is hard work! The familiar is too close.

I think Hegel in the quote below is trying to be a proto-Heidegger, but he's still caught in the language of thought, thought, thought. That last line sounds like 'destruction.' We are so thoughtlessly theoretical that the problem is getting under all this machinery, to grasp it as machinery, not building it up in the first place.

The manner of study in ancient times is distinct from that of the modern world, in that the former consisted in the cultivation and perfecting of the natural mind. Testing life carefully at all points, philosophizing about everything it came across, the former created an experience permeated through and through by universals. In modern times, however, an individual finds the abstract form ready made. In straining to grasp it and make it his own, he rather strives to bring forward the inner meaning alone, without any process of mediation; the production of the universal is abridged, instead of the universal arising out of the manifold detail of concrete existence. Hence nowadays the task before us consists not so much in getting the individual clear of the stage of sensuous immediacy, and making him a substance that thinks and is grasped in terms of thought, but rather the very opposite: it consists in actualising the universal, and giving it spiritual vitality, by the process of breaking down and superseding fixed and determinate thoughts. — Hegel

Heidegger's notion of 'restoring force' to elementary words seems related. We usually just chug along in our inherited bot-speak. We don't even hear ourselves. This is our 'inorganic nature.' And we thought cyborgs had to set off metal detectors...(I say we are cyborgs because we are thrown into this bone-machine that we speak and think with that's invisible to us most of the time.)

OK, he was a creep. But do I also have to pretend that all of Woody Allen's movies suck? That Louise CK was never funny? Where does it end? Why not also blast Aristotle? Frege? Or the slave-owning founding fathers? At some point we'll need our hand held as we walk through the dangerous library. Blast them at people, but maybe let me explore their work for myself.

We start with a world -- so it's not a scandal that no one can "prove" the existence of the external world; it's a scandal that anyone is trying to. — Xtrix

Indeed, and we just echo the 'problem' of the 'scandal' like bots. Or (as I am doing now) the scandal of the scandal. But Hegel saw that we had to be bots to catch up with the conversation. I need to work through this now classic philosophy. I mean Heidegger is old news, Hegel is older news. But I, stupid mortal that I am, have to work through the wreckage for myself.

This bygone mode of existence has already become an acquired possession of the general mind, which constitutes the substance of the individual, and, by thus appearing externally to him, furnishes his inorganic nature. — Hegel

We start with a world -- so it's not a scandal that no one can "prove" the existence of the external world; it's a scandal that anyone is trying to. — Xtrix

Indeed. There are different ways that philosophers can try to show us the way out of this bottle. Like trace its development (Rorty in PMN, inspired by Heidegger, Dewey, Sellars, Quine, others). Or Wittgenstein can try to wake us up with homely comments. I think you've followed Heidegger's etymologies more. That's a harder path for me.

Or perhaps scientism and "mysticism," but I take your meaning of "theology" in this sense as well. Excellent point -- I think that's what we're left with, yes. Along with one very important third position (usually embodied in science or in a reaction to the "death of God"): nihilism. — Xtrix

I like the phrase 'technical interpretation of thinking.' Theology is (to me) mechanical when it isn't mystical. Even anti-scientism tends to be scientistic in its methods. It demonstrates a taking-for-granted of this technical interpretation of thinking. One proves God. Or one generates a philosopher's god out direct access to concepts that just ignores Witt's critique of such beetles. Even 'intentionality' is theological in this sense. All these systems need their beetles. I wish that some of them would admit it, which is to admit that they are poets without anchors, but then I'd have no targets. I'd be a bot without a purpose.

On the other hand the 'honest' nihilist just drops the metaphysical pretense and chases power and money. This is 'true' sophistry. Who cares what X really is? It's standing reserve, canned whatever-we-need-it-to-be. Pretty soon we are canned whatever-we-need-us-to-be.

Thanks! Yeah, that's what I was going for. Being a bot about being a bot...

Someone's been reading too much Heidegger :rofl: — StreetlightX

I think you are missing the joke.

I think Heidegger probably was thinking he would be the Third Reich's go-to philosopher, and so that was tempting. He was also apparently pretty naive politically. — Xtrix

Yeah. The way I read it is that he was an applied philosopher. We just don't like the way he did it. His world-historical fantasy of himself is pathetic...and Van Gogh cut his ear off, etc.

It would appear that Germany is finally awakening, understanding and seizing its destiny.

I hope that you will read Hitler’s book; its first few autobiographical chapters are weak. This man has a remarkable and sure political instinct, and he had it even while all of us were still in a haze, there is no way of denying that. The National Socialist movement will soon gain a wholly different force. It is not about mere party politics—it’s about the redemption or fall of Europe and western civilization. Anyone who does not get it deserves to be crushed by the chaos. Thinking about these things is no hindrance to the spirit of Christmas, but marks our return to the character and task of the Germans, which is to say to the place where this beautiful celebration originates. — Heidegger letter to brother

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/10/18/in-his-own-words/

But Pound is not a bad poet for liking Mussolini, and Heidegger's stupidity on Hitler doesn't cancel what is good in his work. [Jesus this is a bot-like thing to say. We also need an anti-anti-Heidegger bot.]

If only there were such bots, ready to pounce at every reverent mention of his name. — Ciceronianus the White

I just suggested installing one...

And I know that you're not really a bot, so no offense intended.

I think the bot metaphor genuinely fits in here. Chatter is the swamp of hazy everyday intelligibility from which we emerge. Everybody knows that Hiedegger was a Nazi, that Nazis are bad. Or that a certain kind of philosopher is mumbo-jumbo fraud. It's so easy that repeating it is just being a bot.

Proximally and for the most part, we are bots. Even our philosophical selves are ripe for replacement by bots. Let's go ahead and install an anti-Heidegger bot on the site.

This spiel too is easily automated. I want a bot that says 'proximally and for the most part, we are bots.' It switches on whenever either Heidegger or AI is mentioned.

But that's what an anti-Heidegger bot would say....

Instead, we should appeal to everyone's direct sensations or observations, free from any interpretation into perceptions or beliefs yet, and compare and contrast the empirical experiences of different people in different circumstances to come to a common ground on what experiences there are that need satisfying in order for a belief to be true. — Pfhorrest

How might you address the attack on the myth of the given? Here's what it 'is' and a link to more detail.

Antecedent to epistemology, Sellars’s treatment of semantics essentially constitutes a denial of what can be called a semantic given—the idea that some of our terms or concepts, independently of their occurrence in formal and material inferences, derive their meaning directly from confrontation with a particular (kind of) object or experience. Sellars is anti-foundationalist in his theories of concepts, knowledge, and truth. — link

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

More generally, attempts to create a method almost invariably lean on 'myths' that are taken for granted, uncritically inherited from the tradition. The critical thinking that would like to define critical thinking turns out again and again to be insufficiently critical.

I don't blame you if you just get tired of answering me. That's what we all do. We 'irrationally' or 'uncritically' ignore the fault-finding of our peers. (To be clear, I rate many of us here as far above average in that regard. So it's just that we mortals have limits.)

I was just trying to figure out how you were using 'expectation,' I guess. If we are ignoring the cat's consciousness, then what is given is just a reaction to food. Of course we can call that reaction 'expectation,' but to me this is just arguably talking about the observed behavior without adding anything.

Not very widespread among the popes of philosophy.
Philosophers don't convince others. At most they convince themselves. — David Mo

Well arguably philosophy is just too complex for perfect transmission. It's as complex as life itself. Philosophers partially convince one another all of the time. And your anti-philosophy view is familiar to me. Everyone's version is a little different, but it's a recognizable inheritance. You have your influences just as I do. We were persuaded. We are recognizable types, reenacting an old battle.

On the other hand, you'll have to recognize that science is more than just machinery. Apted's pre-coordinated spins, time dimensionality, wave collapse, not to mention string theory, are more than beaters and gameboys. If you force me, even gravity theory seems like a metaphysical thing. The problem is that most scientists don't even realize what they're doing and think Einstein is a washing machine. — David Mo

Of course my more sincere view is that science is more than technology. But to simply say that it studies reality is not very illuminating. Why doesn't literature study or reveal reality? Deciding what's so special about science, if anything, is philosophical and contentious. A person can of course get sick of wrestling with 'useless' issues and lean on Kant (a metaphysician, ultimately) as an escape from metaphysics. We can all fall back asleep. We all do fall back asleep. IMV we are never totally awake, always taken something for granted...and fending off those who try to wake us (impose their dreams on us.) We can and do pretend to have conquered existence with a neat little system. And even anti-systematic talk partakes in this, foisting openness as a closure.

The problem with metaphysics is that it remains anchored in the scandal that Kant denounced: no progress, no agreement between metaphysicists. — David Mo

That's not unlike rejecting art because artists vary or all of religion because religions vary. It equates progress with consensus. Do scientists agree? Not a chance. The conflict is essential. Individual scientists contribute to things like Plandemic. Some are religious,etc.

Think also of rejecting all political theory because there is no consensus. Life is political, the clash of voices. Philosophy is tangled up in that. One might say that politics is applied philosophy, and that you are being a philosopher right now, disagreeing with me about the meaning/value of science and philosophy.

You still haven't clarified how scientific progress isn't more than increased prediction and control.

Especially when today it is impossible to talk about the roots of reality and infinity without knowing quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. — David Mo

Respectfully, that is a thoroughly metaphysical and contentious statement. Talk of the 'roots of reality' sounds good, but it's the same old metaphysics. What's reality made of? Our models? Our maps? We're right back in the anti-realist quagmire. I'm not 100% an instrumentalist, but I like it as a less naively metaphysical approach to science. It's at least aware of the issue.

My philosophical gripe is that people talk about 'reality' without really knowing what they mean. Actually I don't think we can ever be done figuring that out, but the first step (to me) is seeing how vaguely we are talking. Like maybe you'll answer 'the physical.' Then physicists study the physical and the physical is what physicists study.

I think they're intimately connected through "disclosure," through aletheia. Being is only vaguely understood in a pre-theoretical way and then interpreted in some fashion. Interpretation certainly involves meaning. So the human being is a "clearing," "unconcealing" beings while giving them meaning. — Xtrix

One way I can approach this (which is maybe Braver's way) is to think of being as reality. Philosophers obsess over what is real. What do they mean? Some people say the physical, which is one beetle in the box. And some say the mental, which is another. If we try to determine the physical, we end up mentioning all kinds of mentalistic stuff. If we try to determine the mental, we end up talking about the worldly stuff. The whole game of reducing the whole to some X....seems doomed and confused.

In practical terms, no one even cares about the philosophical game. We don't have to know what money 'really' is in order to chase it furiously. Scientistic types beat down challenges to their foggy philosophical foundations with (seems to me) implicit appeals to raw power or better paying jobs. Then the other side is often trying to beat down the secular-critical threat of newer philosophy in a nostalgia for lost religion or attachment to some method.

Basically we get scientism or theology, which is maybe better expressed as scientism-theology, given that the essence of each is a forgetfulness of the question of being-meaning (taken it as a dead question that has been answered well enough, so please stop wasting everyone's time.)

I guess I understand the clearing in terms of a holism. We social beings and our world are one. In our form of life we have a system of entities, things we take-as or take-for this or that, for these or those purposes within various typical roles (professor role, student role, restaurant server role.) This 'system' is given as a whole. We are the clearing for this system. Sheehan interprets the clearing as a kind of wiggle room for our interpretations. I am still trying to grok some of Heidegger's basic concepts, while others seem quite vividly 'there' for me. Like I seriously feel connected to 'idle talk' or 'interpretedness' or 'forehaving.' These things rings bells in my skull. Like yes, that's it!

Just in case you haven't seen this quote (you probably have), it seems relevant:

What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar”. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these secure points, and in consequence goes on merely along the surface. Apprehending and proving consist similarly in seeing whether every one finds what is said corresponding to his idea too, whether it is familiar and seems to him so and so or not. — Hegel

This is that whole 'we don't know what we are talking about' yet we go on arguing as if we do or just appealing (anti- or pre- philosophically) to what Everybody knows. 'One knows of course that blah blah blah.' Such idle talk or gossip or chatter lives in the buzzing we grow up in. It's that old familiar fuzz. It's those routines that are second nature, false necessity, the bottle in which the flies are trapped masters.

I repeat this kind of thing routinely, which makes me fear that I'm a bot. (Kidding! Sort of...)