" Is the Lincoln Memorial a mind-independent object? How about the moon? What about what you or I ate for breakfast?"

The question is what it means to say that something is mind-independent. Or more generally, what an object is. The idea of object is an invention with a long pedigree in Western history. We can thank Aristotle, Galileo, and Descartes among others for our carving up experience into the abstractions we call objects. Granting that we invented this construct, we are still apt to defend it on the basis of its usefulness for us.The fiction of the object would seem to enable us to create many valuable technologies. But just because we have found the mind-independent object to be a useful construct for a long time doesn't mean that we cant replace it with an even more powerful construct, one that would seem to sacrifice precision and predictability at one level but in fact may provide an overall more useful explanatory framework over all. We've had to make such a choice many time before in the history of science. Pre-Darwinian biology made use of an elegant explanatory order for the origin of species. The Darwinian evolutionary paradigm sacrificed this elegance in favor of a relativism at the lower bound but a more effective paradigm at a meta level.

The issue of something like the Lincoln Memorial existing independent of us is what exactly can we point to in unison as what we are seeing in common. SOMETHING is there to contribute to our interpretations of it, but what that substrate is cannot be teased out from what we construe of it.

Mark C. Taylor(2001) characterizes this 'enactivist' ethos thusly; “Contrary to popular opinion and many philosophical epistemologies, knowledge does not involve the union or synthesis of an already existing subject and an independent object” Subjectivity and objectivity emerge through an ongoing adaptive process.

The Memorial is an item of language which has to be read off. What something is is a function of what we need it for, what we do with it, how we interact with it. And that changes not only from person to person but from instance to instance when we look at something, If we place a man from 30,000 years ago in front of a bus, how will that person's eyes track the vehicle? It depends on many things. Will they see it as a single thing or a collection of parts? And what is the significance of these parts for them?
Are they seeing the same bus as we are? What about it is the same? We could say their ability to avoid bumping into it maybe, but that will depend on their assessment of what it is made of and whether it is a mirage. Is a series of lines and curves scrawled in the sand a group of letters that form words or is it random patterns? It depends on many things, including what languages we are familiar with and our vocabulary. What is the 'object' or 'same object' that we all can agree on here? And what would it even mean to ask such a question apart from the intentions , background knowledge an context of each person encountering such a situation?

So yes, every meaning is interpretation all the way down, but a better word than interpretation is interactive transformation . An object is the result of a particular active engagement between person and world based on a interrelational framework of intentional directionality, personal history and knowledge, context, culture, for the sake of ongoing purposes. Object means nothing outside of how it relates to our goals.



" When you or I watch the news, for instance, do we not almost automatically sort the facts from the spin? "

This a good example of the disadvantages of thinking of facts as mind-independent. If you believe that, you will be forced, as many are today, to disparage and attack those who are , in a thoroughgoing way, interpreting those supposed facts in profoundly contradictory ways relative to your understanding. Thus the endless accusations of fake news, brainwashed or lying, ethically compromised politicians and duped citizens.

An understanding of facts that sees them as interpretive from top to bottom will , instead of questioning the integrity of others, seek to unfold their interpretive framework from their perspective.

IF we want to just keep doing science in the same way we have been, we can retain the old thinking about the mind-indepdendence of reality. But in order to build psychological theories and machines that think more like we do, and can do more complex cognitive and perceptual tasks, it will be necessary to think beyond mind-independence. Newell and Simon's neural network model of 60 years ago modeled itself on mind-independent objects, but it was profoundly limited in what it could do.

Interpretation all the way down doesn't destroy the notion of objectivity, it simply exposes it as an abstraction masking within itself more interesting possibilities. In a way,enactivist thinking leaves the old thinking intact, but works within it to make explicit its hidden context-dependency.

I hear you, and I have been down that rabbit-hole. I've also read and enjoyed many of your posts. Lately I've just been pulling back from what I now see as a certain stylistic excess in some of our mutual influences.

The question is what it means to say that something is mind-independent. Or more generally, what an object is. — Joshs

As an abbreviation for my feeling about that rabbit role (and not as an authority), I mention the later Wittgenstein. I can't 'prove' the futility of that rabbit hole in the language of that rabbit hole in the same way that I can't prove the God doesn't exist. I can suggest that the what-X-means game seems to have a built-in futility the further away it is from practice. Roughly, I suggest that ordinary language use is something like the base of the pyramid. We understand one another quite well without knowing exactly how we manage it. After-the-fact philosophical analyses strike me as tending to be artificial. What Joe means by 'object' when he uses it successfully may have little to do with Kant or Heidegger.

We can thank Aristotle, Galileo, and Descartes among others for our carving up experience into the abstractions we call objects. — Joshs

The concept of the object within philosophy no doubt has its history, but surely humans have been experiencing and talking about objects since long before the philosophers made things complicated without many of them doing much to actually help in managing those objects. I may sound a little bit anti-philosophy here, but I learned my suspicions of philosophy from philosophy in the first place, so I do value the genre.

What something is is a function of what we need it for, what we do with it, how we interact with it. And that changes not only from person to person but from instance to instance when we look at something, If we place a man from 30,000 years ago in front of a bus, how will that person's eyes track the vehicle? It depends on many things. Will they see it as a single thing or a collection of parts? And what is the significance of these parts for them?
Are they seeing the same bus as we are? — Joshs

These are good points. I see no easy answer for that last question, especially given your first sentence. What something is is a function of what we need it for, what we do with it, how we interact with it. I'm not saying I accept that sentence as a fact, but I agree with its emphasis on context and purpose. I'll also grant that many useful distinctions can still break down or have fuzzy boundaries. A tool doesn't have to always work to be worth passing on as a way we do things around here.

This a good example of the disadvantages of thinking of facts as mind-independent. If you believe that, you will be forced, as many are today, to disparage and attack those who are , in a thoroughgoing way, interpreting those supposed facts in profoundly contradictory ways relative to your understanding. Thus the endless accusations of fake news, brainwashed or lying, ethically compromised politicians and duped citizens.

An understanding of facts that sees them as interpretive from top ti bottom will , instead of questioning the integrity of others, seek to unfold their interpretive framework for their perspective. — Joshs

I understand the kind of rigid-mindedness you are cautioning against. I can relate to that. But note that the denial of fact altogether dissolves the boundary between news and fake news. There is only news that I don't like and new that I do without fact, as far as I can tell. And the word 'news' loses its force altogether.

Do you have any comment on whether it is a fact that 'there are no facts'? For context, I've defended ideas like that before. Philosophy can embrace itself as a paradoxical sophistry that is nevertheless good. I like the Tristan Tzara and other dada theorists.

The issue is largely a matter of taste. Hyper-clever philosophy, as it wanders away from application, sometimes strikes me as a kind of critical mysticism. Something 'profound' is achieved, but it still often enough just looks like words that make a small group feel good about itself, a romantic'reaction to philosophy losing prestige to science and technology for instance.

I like to think that I've read enough of these writers to criticize 'my' group from the inside. On the other hand, the whole thing is so disconnected from practice and being tested that there's no clear way to establish who really understands Heidegger (for instance) profoundly enough to be worthy of criticizing him. To me this further supports the 'not even wrong' judgment or attitude. If there are no facts, but only interpretations, then I seem to only risk a 'boo' or a 'you're don't get it, dude' in reply to these concerns. I say that I mostly do get it but that it's nice to be able to turn it off and speak with the vulgar when appropriate.

My goal in choosing relativistic, interpretation based thinking over mind-Independence is the opposite of obfuscation or continental philosophical self-abuse, which is of course widespread. The appeal of enactivist, hermeneutic, and post-structuralist discourse for me is supremely practical. What is most important to me is how one can understand one another more effectively not only in an ethical context but also psychotherapeutically. What I see in Heidfeger and Derrida I also see in psychologists like George Kelly and pragmatists like Dewey. What we gain by jettisoning a certain mind-independent objectivity is not a muddle of chaos and indeterminacy, but the opposite. a more effective way to follow each other's thinking.

The thing about objective realism is that when it is applied to the understanding of individual cognition , affectivity and motivation it reifies psychological phenomena into arbitrariness. There are exciting writers working in philosophy of mind and cognitive science today, such as Shaun Gallagher, Evan Thompson and Alva Noe. these are scientists who also happen to endorse relativist, interpretive enactivism as a way of understanding human empathy, schizophrenia, autism, perception affect, etc.

If youre tired of the lazy sycophantic regurgitations of Heidegger and Derrida in much of today's continentel writings you should give these writers a try. They are well-versed in Husserlian and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, as well as Heidegger, Gadamer and many other continentals.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I still think you might be projecting some theory of 'mind-independence' on me, but it's a small issue. Nevertheless, I'd just emphasize that a counter theory that accepts the divorce of 'mind,' 'fact', 'object', ... from their typical use misses the point. I guess I'm doing something like defending (the good part of) common sense against the excesses of intellectual hipsters, for my own hipster reasons. I'm endlessly looking for the perfect intellectual selfie. The lighting is never quite right.

Thanks for the suggestions. At the moment I'm mostly focused on learning technical skills. After spending years in the rabbit hole, the experience has been as important as any book. It enriches the books that preceded it and helps me test them. Philosophy is great and necessary as a zoomed-out view of our situation, but I'd say that it just can't substitute for a struggle with the details. Some know-how is learned in the trenches and can't be squeezed into concepts. Call it vanity, but I want to do a non-academic philosophy here, synthesizing 'official' philosophy with other valuable influences.

I would ou like to ask you a simple question. You previously mentioned “fact as interpretation” and I was wondering if this is your personal position or merely a comment on what Nietzsche wrote. I can see how you can draw such thoughts from Nietzsche but I’d be hesitant to say that was his singular intent.

A passage dealing with ideas of “will” and “self”.

Philosophers are accustomed to speak of the will as though it were the best-known thing in the world; indeed, Schopenhauer has given us to understand that the will alone is really known to us, absolutely and completely known, without deduction or addition. But it again and again seems to me that in this case Schopenhauer also only did what philosophers are in the habit of doing he seems to have adopted a POPULAR PREJUDICE and exaggerated it. Willing-seems to me to be above all something COMPLICATED, something that is a unity only in name—and it is precisely in a name that popular prejudice lurks, which has got the mastery over the inadequate precautions of philoso- phers in all ages. So let us for once be more cautious, let us be ‘unphilosophical”: let us say that in all willing there is firstly a plurality of sensations, namely, the sensation of the condition ‘AWAY FROM WHICH we go,’ the sensation of the condition ‘TOWARDS WHICH we go,’ the sensation of this ‘FROM’ and ‘TOWARDS’ itself, and then besides, an accompanying muscular sensation, which, even without our putting in motion ‘arms and legs,’ commences its ac- tion by force of habit, directly we ‘will’ anything. Therefore, just as sensations (and indeed many kinds of sensations) are to be recognized as ingredients of the will, so, in the sec- ond place, thinking is also to be recognized; in every act of the will there is a ruling thought;—and let us not imagine it possible to sever this thought from the ‘willing,’ as if the will would then remain over! In the third place, the will is not only a complex of sensation and thinking, but it is above all an EMOTION, and in fact the emotion of the command. That which is termed ‘freedom of the will’ is es- sentially the emotion of supremacy in respect to him who must obey: ‘I am free, ‘he’ must obey’—this consciousness is inherent in every will; and equally so the straining of the attention, the straight look which fixes itself exclusively on one thing, the unconditional judgment that ‘this and nothing else is necessary now,’ the inward certainty that obedience will be rendered—and whatever else pertains to the position of the commander. A man who WILLS com- mands something within himself which renders obedience, or which he believes renders obedience. But now let us no- tice what is the strangest thing about the will,—this affair so extremely complex, for which the people have only one name. Inasmuch as in the given circumstances we are at the same time the commanding AND the obeying parties, and as the obeying party we know the sensations of con- straint, impulsion, pressure, resistance, and motion, which usually commence immediately after the act of will; inasmuch as, on the other hand, we are accustomed to disregard this duality, and to deceive ourselves about it by means of the synthetic term ‘I”: a whole series of erroneous conclusions, and consequently of false judgments about the will itself, has become attached to the act of willing—to such a degree that he who wills believes firmly that willing SUFFICES for action. Since in the majority of cases there has only been exercise of will when the effect of the command— consequently obedience, and therefore action—was to be EXPECTED, the APPEARANCE has translated itself into the sentiment, as if there were a NECESSITY OF EFFECT; in a word, he who wills believes with a fair amount of cer- tainty that will and action are somehow one; he ascribes the success, the carrying out of the willing, to the will itself, and thereby enjoys an increase of the sensation of power which accompanies all success. ‘Freedom of Will’—that is the expression for the complex state of delight of the person exercising volition, who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the executor of the order— who, as such, enjoys also the triumph over obstacles, but thinks within himself that it was really his own will that overcame them. In this way the person exercising volition adds the feelings of delight of his successful executive instruments, the useful ‘underwills’ or under-souls—indeed, our body is but a social structure composed of many souls—to his feelings of delight as commander. L’EFFET C’EST MOI. what happens here is what happens in every well-constructed and happy commonwealth, namely, that the governing class identifies itself with the successes of the commonwealth. In all willing it is absolutely a question of commanding and obeying, on the basis, as already said, of a social structure composed of many ‘souls’, on which account a philosopher should claim the right to include willing-as-such within the sphere of morals—regarded as the doctrine of the relations of supremacy under which the phenomenon of ‘life’ manifests itself.

- Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche

All thoughts and comments welcome. Enjoy! :) — I like sushi

Merged from previous thread.

I was in half a mind as to whether to add here. It does pretty much run nicely into the current direction of the discussion.

Note: I am planning to post other extracts in separates threads, but I’ll make sure to select then carefully regarding the content and pose a subject of discussion more explicitly, okay? If not then I’ll not post any more extracts from this work.

This observation regarding "many souls" that make up an individual is something that stands in stark contrast with Nietzsche's use of egoistical expressions that would make him a self proclaimed prophet.

It is odd how one fills in the gap changes with what is understood to what is being claimed.