ok, let's assume determinism for now. At a certain moment, time blooms into an intricate linear flower, its end and its beginning contained already in its now. What determines the conditions at that initial now? Or is it a free imaginative act by consciousness, purely self-conditioned?

its end and its beginning contained already in its now. — csalisbury

Well no, its end and beginning aren't now, they're in the future and past respectively.

I'm not sure what you mean by what determines the conditions.

Agreed that they're not "now." As you said it gets tricky with tenses and you've gotta futz with terminology. "Contained in the now" is a gesture toward the determinist idea that the now leads in a strict causal chain toward a determinate end and back toward a determinate beginning. Like those amorphous paper-sculptures that, when, placed into water, become e.g. a swan. They're not swans now, but it's inexorable that swans they'll become.

As for the conditions. When consciousness blossomed, it didn't happen in a void. There was still both hunger and places where the food was. Why was the food in this place and not that? And why were these conscious beings hungry?

Also I can't help but note the irony in your initial insistence that ordinary language should suffer 'violence' and neologisms for the sake of philosopical exploration, only to say, mere posts later, that we ought observe actual usage and be wary of formal tricks. All I can take away from this is that formal tricks & violence are justified when in service of the right philosophical position. Not justified, on the other hand, when it's for the wrong cause.

"Contained in the now" is a gesture toward the determinist idea that the now leads in a strict causal chain toward a determinate end and back toward a determinate beginning. — csalisbury

I'm not sure the determinist position as I've outlined it here makes any commitment to causality. I think it's intelligible to say that right now 'will p' is true or false, but at the same time there's no determinate causal path leading to p in the future. I'm not saying that's not right, just that it's not clear to me it is. It's a very weak kind of determinism. It could be that 'will p' is true, but only because of your free choice.

but it's inexorable that swans they'll become. — csalisbury

I don't know if it's inexorable either. I think 'will p' is not the same thing as 'must p' or 'must will p.'

As for the conditions. When consciousness blossomed, it didn't happen in a void. There was still both hunger and places where the food was. Why was the food in this place and not that? And why were these conscious beings hungry? — csalisbury

Hunger is definitely older than linear time and older than objectivity. Where the food is is a kind of ethical projection: the food is where my hunger gets satiated. The existence of food as a discrete cognizable object is a projection of hunger.

Also I can't help but note the irony in your initial insistence that ordinary language should suffer 'violence' and neologisms for the sake of philosopical exploration, only to say, mere posts later, that we ought observe actual usage and be wary of formal tricks. All I can take away from this is that formal tricks & violence are justified when in service of the right philosophical position. Not justified, on the other hand, when it's for the wrong cause. — csalisbury

It depends on whether you're giving an explanation of ordinary language or not. I kind of buy into the 'two truths' thing, or Henry's two kinds of speech. I think it would be pointless to talk about this Schopenhauer stuff in an academic context, for example -- the academy is part of the world. I mean, I don't 'really' think time is deterministic, because in the end all of our temporal conventions are just that. The realist reifies them.

That's an explosive answer! There are so many angles from which to respond. I'll see if I can muster a response tonight. If not, I'll be back tomorrow

You don't have to answer all of it, not all of it is equally important to me and I imagine to you. Whatever you think is relevant for the topic.

I think it's all relevant tbh. That's what makes it so hard.

I have trouble limiting myself. It's probably my biggest problem. If there're six movies in my netflix queue, I have difficulty enjoying any one of them. The other ones might be better. But I also think fisking can fracture and enervate a conversation (tho I'll admit I fisk frequently). I'll have to focus on one avenue of argument here.

I'll choose this. You didn't answer my question about hunger and sources of food. You spoke abstractly about what hunger is and how it works. My question is, for this newly-minted conscious being, why is it that satiation lies in zone x and not y? It may be that the existence of food as a discrete cognizable object is a projection of hunger. Well and good. Why does this sudden beneficary (or torture-victim) of consciousness project food in zone x and not zone y?

What do you mean by newly conscious? Like, newly able to represent time as linear? Because if so it was already hungry before that (and there are animals right now that are hungry all the time without being 'conscious' in that sense).

Then you've got it backwards, it's not that you pop into being and get hungry and then the food pops up elsewhere. It's more that the entire schema for trying to navigate the world is built around hunger, and to help satiate it a method of objectifying and distinguishing so as to satisfy it consistently grows up. A dog doesn't really think 'that's food,' it just sort of feels hunger urges and makes instinctual movements with its mouth when it smells and feels certain things. That's like us, only our urges are more convoluted.

Yes, newly able to represent time as linear.
I agree that the being was hungry before that moment.
Do you agree that these beings are dependent for their satiation on the contingencies (where the food is) of a world that pre-exists them?

No, the world came after (and in a sense 'still' comes after). But the world, once there, presents itself as having come before. The naive position is a kind of idolatry and just takes it at its word. This has a kind of Gnostic flavor to it.

That humans have a world is just a way of saying we have more convoluted and sophisticated ways of navigating and manipulating our hungers of various kinds.

The world came after.
So the hungry being was hungry and projected a world in which the satisfaction of its hunger lies in zone x and not zone y. Let's imagine that zone y is right next to it and zone x is further off. Why did it project food in zone x and not zone y?

It doesn't get to choose whether it's hungry or not -- it just has to face the fact that it is, and sometimes that hunger gets satisfied, sometimes not. But it painstakingly starts to put together certain clues about how to satisfy that hunger. For a dog it's put your mouth around what smells a certain way, for a human it can be complex enough to involve restaurants. Even so with these heuristics there's just no guarantee you're actually going to get full, sometimes you just starve and there's nothing you can do about it.

So it's not up to you where the food goes -- where the food ends up is just a projection of the way your hunger works, which you're not in control of.

No I agree. It's hungry and has no choice. As you say, it has to follow 'clues' about where the food is. There is no such thing as a 'clue' if there's no mystery or puzzle to unravel. The mystery is where the food is - zone x or zone y - and the clues help tell us.

It's funny that this world, which comes after, is utterly indifferent to the needs of the hungry being. It depends on this being, but is in no way tailored to its needs. The food may even be out of reach!

It seems clear that this hungry being has no conscious control of the world it creates. It has to follow clues to understand its contours. Why does the world have these contours? Why is the food in zone x and not zone y? It may be the case that "world" exists only because the being is hungry. But why does this world exist. That's really the crux. The question is not why does a world exist? But why does this world exist?

No I agree. It's hungry and has no choice. As you say, it has to follow 'clues' about where the food is. There is no such thing as a 'clue' if there's no mystery or puzzle to unravel. The mystery is where the food is - zone x or zone y - and the clues help tell us. — csalisbury

Yeah, but it's not like there's some real thing outside of the creature that it then has to use a kind of sensory apparatus to go find. The mystery of where the food is just is the mystery of 'how do I stop the pain?' The world presents itself as having this kind of externality as a sort of crutch to facilitate eating.

It's funny that this world, which comes after, is utterly indifferent to the needs of the hungry being. It depends on this being, but is in no way tailored to its needs. The food may even be out of reach! — csalisbury

It depends on what you mean by indifferent. In one sense that is obviously false and in fact there is no world at all without these needs -- the world is literally just a projection of those needs, and so has a kind of illusory or dream-lke quality to it, and disappears to the extent that those needs cant be intelligibly managed, because the pain (or pleasure) is too intense. But it has no inclination to be kind or easy or pleasant, because the hunger isn't. A truly indifferent world -- one without pain or pleasure -- would be nothing at all.

So think of it not like, 'why did you make such a mean world?' No one made the world, it was forced to grow out of pain and strife, and is just a kind of embodiment of that pain and strife.

Why does the world have these contours? Why is the food in zone x and not zone y? It may be the case that "world" exists only because the being hungry. But why does this world exist. That's really the crux. The question is not why does a world exist? But why does this world exist? — csalisbury

Because the hunger works in a certain way. It's not that the hunger somehow causes the world to sprout out of it as something separate. The hunger never goes away and the world is never separated from it. The world having a certain shape is just hunger taking that very shape.

Why -and under what conditions - do pain and strife force a world to grow? Is it because the pain or pleasure becomes too intense? But intensity, apparently, forces the world to disappear. I'm confused

Why -and under what conditions - do pain and strife force a world to grow, to "take shape"? Is it because the pain or pleasure becomes too intense? But intensity, apparently, forces the world to disappear. I'm confused.

A world taking shape just is the desires and pleasures and pains becoming more convoluted in a certain way. They gain a kind of competence over themselves, a knowing how to proceed so as to be moved in one way or another, and to respond to certain cues to get what it wants, and so to gain a certain kind of power.

When you can do this, the concrete methods of changing the flux of suffering around get reified into distinct shapes -- a worldly object in a way just is a bundle of those possibilities (I'm a little uncomfortable with that way of putting it though -- I'd rather say, that in a sense it is nothing, hence the world's dreamlike quality, rather that a sort of concrete shape is posited or given credence as a way of helping or managing the suffering, as a kind of guidepost that is very often not reliable. But that is also confusing because it makes it seem as if there is some sort of constituting mind which has the power to 'make' these things, which is not the right way to put it).

The world then presents itself as external and prior to, and causing, the suffering because this is a kind of reflection of the fact that our sufferings are not generally under our control, and so the concrete shapes (the objects) seem to 'precede' them and be their source. What I am suggesting is that it is the other way around: it's not that we can't control the world because it's external, but rather than the world is external because we can't control it. And this in turn just means we can't control (except in very limited ways) our suffering.

And in one sense you could say that an external world gets 'made' in this way, but in another you could say it doesn't because there is no such thing, so of course it can't get made. The external world, like linear time, is a kind of convention that arose, but doesn't really hold up on its own terms (hence philosophy's frustration with the 'external' perspective being forever unable to capture the 'internal perspective).

The world then presents itself as external and prior to, and causing, the suffering because this is a kind of reflection of the fact that our sufferings are not generally under our control, and so the concrete shapes (the objects) seem to 'precede' them and be their source. What I am suggesting is that it is the other way around: it's not that we can't control the world because it's external, but rather than the world is external because we can't control it. And this in turn just means we can't control (except in very limited ways) our suffering. — The Great Whatever

Can you explain this in more detail? This seems to be the Schopenhauerian notion that Will is the thing-in-itself, and our representations are manifestations of this metaphysics. It seems like you are saying, similarly, that our suffering desires for more creates the representations. Can you explain the implications of this for what it would mean for a real external world.

Yeah, I think it's pretty close, though I don't know if he would have outright agreed with what I'm saying.

I don't really preserve the distinction between world as will and world as presentation as strongly as he does, though -- at best the world as presentation claims to be distinct from the world as will, i.e. something objective that is 'just there,' independently of how one feels about it. And so I could say that presentations are just a certain kind of willing. That might just be a terminological variant, though, since Schop. both says that presentation and will are entirely distinct sorts of things, and that the former is the objectification of the latter.

The desire doesn't always have to be for more, but that could be a part of it. It could also be a need to stop the pain, e.g. the pain of hunger, the pain of heat, or whatever.

Yeah, I think it's pretty close, though I don't know if he would have outright agreed with what I'm saying.

I don't really preserve the distinction between world as will and world as presentation as strongly as he does, though -- at best the world as presentation claims to be distinct from the world as will, i.e. something objective that is 'just there,' independently of how one feels about it. And so I could say that presentations are just a certain kind of willing. That might just be a terminological variant, though, since Schop. both says that presentation and will are entirely distinct sorts of things, and that the former is the objectification of the latter.

The desire doesn't always have to be for more, but that could be a part of it. It could also be a need to stop the pain, e.g. the pain of hunger, the pain of heat, or whatever. — The Great Whatever

I am guessing you are also considering the idea of evolution in all this as well? Organisms have survival strategies that are mainly about fulfilling desires for survival. Before the first consciousness, was the willing there? If one was to combine panpsychism with Schop, then you can say that if everything has a mental/Willing nature to it, whereby it is "there" due to its "willing" nature, then by definition, all things had willing aspect, thus dissolving the issue of what came before the first consciousness. However, this will definitely seem like a fanciful stretch to many.

I don't think I want to make any sweeping claims about the general nature of everything or how it ties into willing. Everything we project is tied to willing, since it is just the result of, or one shape of, that willing. But I don't think this somehow goes 'beyond' us or willing creatures generally to encompass a broader 'everything.' To say that the world is a projection of or shape of will isn't to give our nature as willing creatures undue or all-encompassing importance, but rather to show how fragile, limited, and unimportant the world is. I think this is ultimately compatible with Schop., who opens the possibility that what is 'nothing for us' might nevertheless be 'out there' beyond what we know to be 'everything' as willing creatures.

So in one sense all things have a willing aspect, sure -- but only insofar as 'all things' is just whatever things are projected as a result of will. I don't think there's any coherent 'everything' to talk about and say that it has a single nature, or a nature that's somehow shared with or rooted in us. What's outside the will is 'nothing,' sure, but only 'nothing to us,' because we literally couldn't comprehend such a thing. I think it still might be in some way efficacious on us, though, which is why we experience things as ultimately just happening to us for no reason -- there's no way to see 'behind' our suffering, and so there is a kind of blindness where our suffering seems to encompass everything, yet at the same time we have no account of its origin.

I always get a little concerned when people talk about the world's 'dreamlike quality" For 'dreamlike' to be in any way meaningful, it must be possible to distinguish between dreamlike and non-dreamlike. Dreams are dreamlike in opposition to what? Not the world, certainly, if the world itself is 'dreamlike.' V confusing.

But anyhow.

Being (1) is hungry, it satisfies that hunger, grows hungry again, satisfies that hunger. So forth, until it dies.

Being (2) is hungry. It satisfies that hunger. Grows hungry again, cannot satisfy that hunger - the 'clues' are scarce, no 'food' presents itself, it agonizes and dies.

The contingent distribution of food in a world external to these beings, it appears, cannot account for the difference in their respective fates. Is it that the pathe of being (1) happily enough manifest themselves as plentitude while the pathe of being (2) manifest as scarcity? Is this a fair way put it? Agony manifests as distant objects of satisfaction to...maintain itself as agony?

If not, what's a better account?

Second question. Or really a scenario I'm interested in your explanation of:

There's a human and there's a squirrel. Let's say the human is lonely and enjoys feeding squirrels. It throws bread (or w/e squirrels eat) into the yard from its second story porch

This human - through whatever endlessly intricate, labyrinthine twisting of its desires- has come to occupy a world where it can see a piece of bread, a squirrel, the porch etc. as things with their own independent identities. The squirrel, on the other hand, follows 'clues' to satisfy its hunger. It smells the bread and scampers toward it, propelled only by the movements of hunger.

All the while, though, the human watches on (either in aesthetic indifference or through some libidinal sublimation where the squirrel's satisfaction dimly satisfies the human. Who cares. In any case, the human can see the bread as a stand-alone object with nutritive qualities*.)

How does this work? The human can give an account of the squirrel's movements: the squirrel was triggered by the piece of bread they chose to throw into the yard (which could just have well remained in the kitchen.) Yet, according to your account, the object of satisfaction cannot be disentangled from the hunger. The squirrel's hunger must be what accounts for the bread. Yet the bread existed, already, in the human's kitchen and need not have been thrown. The human chose to throw it, to trigger the squirrel, to watch it move toward it.

A very simple scenario. How would you explain what's happening according to the position you're advocating?


*To get one potential red herring out of the way immediately, it is obviously true that without hungry beings, there can be no 'food.'

↪The Great Whatever I always get a little concerned when people talk about the world's 'dreamlike quality" For 'dreamlike' to be in any way meaningful, it must be possible to distinguish between dreamlike and non-dreamlike. Dreams are dreamlike in opposition to what? Not the world, certainly, if the world itself is 'dreamlike.' V confusing. — csalisbury

As opposed to the way people often present the waking world as being in philosophical reconstructions: in reflection people often put up a difference between waking life and dreaming that, on observation, is not there. There are very important practical differences between the two, but not metaphysical ones deducible from observation. In other words, if you ask people to explain what makes dreaming seem so 'unreal,' you'll find that every phenomenological character of dreaming they offer is found in waking life too.

Is it that the pathe of being (1) happily enough manifest themselves as plentitude while the pathe of being (2) manifest as scarcity? Is this a fair way put it? Agony manifests as distant objects of satisfaction to...maintain itself as agony? — csalisbury

Yeah, you have to reverse the way of thinking about it, from contingently distributed food leading to different pathe, to contingently distributed pathe leading to different food-projections.

There is a way in which we can try to explain our hunger, first in lay terms by saying we need to eat, and trying to remedy it through causal mechanisms by finding food, and then technically by exploring the biological mechanisms of hunger. But all these things are ways of trying to deal with hunger from within, by working out ways that it can be diminished and acquiring a taste for new signs along the way. These explanations are in the end attempts at controlling the hunger, which might be successful or not. There's in a deeper sense no real 'explanation' for it, since explanation presupposes hunger.

How does this work? The human can give an account of the squirrel's movements: the squirrel was triggered by the piece of bread they chose to throw into the yard (which could just have well remained in the kitchen.) Yet, according to your account, the object of satisfaction cannot be disentangled from the hunger. The squirrel's hunger must be what accounts for the bread. Yet the bread existed, already, in the human's kitchen and need not have been thrown. The human chose to throw it, to trigger the squirrel, to watch it move toward it. — csalisbury

To the extent that a human and squirrel can recognize in whatever dim way they they are in the presence of the same object, some bread, it is because they are similarly constituted in their suffering. We can only understand as existing alongside us those things that make us suffer or suffer with us, and squirrels do suffer with us, to a limited extent. The bread is intelligible as a piece of food for both of us because the squirrel is intelligible as hungry, not vice-versa. This is just Husserl's idea that the notion of an intersubjective or objective world is dependent on the alter ego -- but cast in pathetic rather than intellectual terms.

The throwing of the bread is itself a way that the human knows how, given his awareness of this co-sufferer, to ease its hunger. For the human that manifests as an object in his kitchen moving. For the squirrel, it may just seem like the solution to its problems are raining down like manna from heaven. And this is because the human is smarter, in the sense that it is more adept at manipulating its own suffering and that of others. The human can see the action as intricately interconnected with a web of other causal effects, the squirrel can't. And that's because the squirrel is inept at resolving its own suffering and that of others in a way a human isn't (a human can empathize with a squirrel: can a squirrel empathize with a human? It seems a dog can).

I'm coming into this a bit late, but the OP reminded me of something I thought I'd share about the topic referenced in the quote by Schopenhauer. Here is Schopenhauer scholar Robert Wicks, who summarizes:

Schopenhauer is not mentioned in Douglas R. Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize winning book, Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979), but as we have seen in our presentation of The World as Will and Representation, §7, §27, and §39, Schopenhauer should be recognized as among those philosophers who utilize the 'strange loop' structure at the very basis of their thought. In Schopenhauer, to recall, this involves the peculiarity of saying that although my mind is in my head, my head is in my mind, and although my head is in my mind, my mind is in my head. This mind-bending thought gives one extended pause.

He then expands (in a different book):

An even better model that displays a sharper reversal of 'inside' and 'outside,' while also preserving a transition between the two, is characteristic of the type of image represented by M.C. Escher's Drawing Hands (1948), where one hand draws another hand, which in turn draws the hand that drew it. Each hand is sequentially 'outside' of the other, while each hand depends upon and issues from the other. Such comparisons suggest that we have here, in Schopenhauer, a 'strange loop' phenomenon that has been described well, and at great length, by Douglas R. Hofstadter, who writes: 'the 'Strange Loop' phenomenon occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started.'

If we accept the comparison between Schopenhauer's remarks on the reciprocal containment of realism and idealism, and the 'strange loop' images such as Escher's Drawing Hands, we can make more sense out of Schopenhauer's remarks concerning the relationship between intellect and brain. When referring to how brains are the result of the principle of sufficient reason's constructive activity, he speaks from an idealistic view and explains the spatio-temporal world as an illusion created by our mental activity. Then, immersing himself within the contents of that mental construction, he then identifies his own body, and then, his brain as a part of that body. Upon noting how this experiential perspective issues from his body within that construction, he then locates his perception within his brain. Once again reflecting that his brain is a product of the principle of sufficient reason, and with this, shifting from an external to an internal standpoint upon his body, he finds himself once again at the beginning of the strange loop.

An upshot of this unusual looping structure is that Schopenhauer can refer either to the brain as a function of the intellect, or to the intellect as a function of the brain, depending upon his assumed philosophical location within the loop. Appreciating this more complicated structure of Schopenhauer's philosophy - what Hofstadter would refer to as a 'tangled hierarchy' - helps resolve what seemed earlier to be a devastating criticism. Standing outside of the strange loop, as did Escher when he drew Drawing Hands, would be Schopenhauer himself; i.e. the philosopher in general, reflecting upon human experience in an effort to understand it.

This reference to strange loops and reciprocal containment may explain why Schopenhauer believed that his chapter on 'Physical Astronomy' was among the most important in his philosophical writings. Although the chapter does not contain the key arguments that we find in WWR, it does describe the movement through the hierarchy of nature, from inorganic, to organic, to human levels, and then, at the human level, describe how this hierarchy itself depends upon the human being's own intellectual construction.

Wicks is surely wrong to say anyone can stand outside of the strange loop just described (except maybe in aesthetic experience or in the denial of the will), but I think he explains the idea quite well all the same. I might also add that this problem, or paradox, is resolved by the will. The materialist collapses the mind into brain or subject into object, while the idealist collapses the brain into mind or object into subject. Schopenhauer says that each of these views is true, but deficient, since they mutually presuppose one another. Whatever the true nature of reality, it is neither material nor mental. So Schopenhauer advocates for neutral monism, which then becomes voluntarism when he identifies the nature of reality as will, which is neither a material object nor a subjective idea.

Schopenhauer should be recognized as among those philosophers who utilize the 'strange loop' structure at the very basis of their thought. In Schopenhauer, to recall, this involves the peculiarity of saying that although my mind is in my head, my head is in my mind, and although my head is in my mind, my mind is in my head. This mind-bending thought gives one extended pause.

Thanks for this. I never knew there was literature surrounding this idea.

Let's tweak the example. Imagine a courtyard bisected by a large stone wall. In one half grows an oak. In the other there's a fountain. On the north side of the courtyard is a city street. There are tall apartment buildings on each of the other sides. Some awful kid, out of sheer sadistic pleasure, tosses a sack containing two squirrels over the wall and into the courtyard. One squirrel falls into one half, one into the other. A man watches all of this from an apartment window. One squirrel collects acorns. The other slowly dies.

This oak and these acorns have existed long before the squirrels arrived. (Let's say our apartment dweller is a sort of hikomori who spends hours each day observing the courtyard. If you need an observer to guarantee the existence of this courtyard, he's your man)

Let's take this

Yeah, you have to reverse the way of thinking about it, from contingently distributed food leading to different pathe, to contingently distributed pathe leading to different food-projections. — The Great Whatever

In this example it is clearly the case that, for the squirrel, a contingent distribution of food is what leads to their respective pathe, not vice versa.

Let me immediately nip one potential response in the bud.

Obviously, if the squirrels were not hungry, they would not need the acorns. Clearly, hunger is the condition of possibility for both its suffering and its flourishing. It is also the condition of possibility for the acorn's being considered food. But whether the squirrel flourishes or suffer, in this example, depends entirely on where it happens to land in relation to the food. As our hikomori can attest, these trees and acorns have been here long before the squirrels arrived. The question, once more, is not why hunger exists at all, but why the agony of a hungry being exists in this case, not in that. In this example, the contingent distribution is quite clearly the cause ('occasion', if you prefer) of the agony. The agony does not cause the acorns to be distant.

Now, to the hikomori. He's the heir, I suppose, to a long line of pathe-masterers. He's so adequately satisfied food-wise, that his hunger can take the form of interest in courtyards and interest in squirrels.
If we wish to maintain that this or that world cannot come about before this or that hunger, and since these acorns quite clearly precede the squirrel's desiring-them, we must look to to the hikomori as the world-shaper. Is he somehow 'outwilling' the squirrels through his abstract - yet still hungry -contemplation which shapes the courtyard?

(Bonus question: If the hikomori were sick that week and couldn't make it to the window, which squirrel would suffer and why?)

In other words, if you ask people to explain what makes dreaming seem so 'unreal,' you'll find that every phenomenological character of dreaming they offer is found in waking life too. — The Great Whatever

Yeah? One of the things that make dreams surreal is that a single individual can shift shapes and faces from moment to moment.

I always get a little concerned when people talk about the world's 'dreamlike quality" For 'dreamlike' to be in any way meaningful, it must be possible to distinguish between dreamlike and non-dreamlike. Dreams are dreamlike in opposition to what? Not the world, certainly, if the world itself is 'dreamlike.' — csalisbury

I think dreamlike here means the phenomenological appearance of the analyzed world. We either live in a metaphorical dream in an unanalyzed world, or we confront the world and analyze it only to find that it reminds us of a dream.

What's outside the will is 'nothing,' sure, but only 'nothing to us,' because we literally couldn't comprehend such a thing.I think it still might be in some way efficacious on us, though, which is why we experience things as ultimately just happening to us for no reason -- there's no way to see 'behind' our suffering, and so there is a kind of blindness where our suffering seems to encompass everything, yet at the same time we have no account of its origin. — The Great Whatever

I think this is the right tack. I guess we just approach this same idea differently?

Think of it this way: there could not be an acorn in one part of the yard in the first place without there being the possibility of a squirrel satisfying its hunger in that half of the yard and not the other. This is in part what there being an acorn there in the first place. In the example, you're assuming we can take for granted that acorns just 'exist' independently, and that is how you set up the example, as if the squirrels just came along to something independently established and only then interacted causally with it. But that is not true; to be a squirrel consists in having certain urges and certain capacities for satisfying them, and in some situations often beyond the squirrel's control, it will be able to, or won't be able to. In the former situation, we call that -- and if we watch, see it as -- there being an acorn there. Or whatever else the squirrel might need or find.

The hikkimori doesn't need to be watching. His watching is irrelevant, unless of course he wants to help one of the squirrels out. If he does watch, what he is seeing is not a bunch of previously unrelated objects coming into relation: he is seeing the suffering of these creatures unfold and interact, in ways that spring from his own suffering and ability to empathize with them, i.e. to recognize them as living creatures.

A squirrel eating an acorn is what a squirrel satisfying its hunger looks like. To say that one squirrel can eat and the other can't because there is a tree on one side and not on the other is merely to report what the fact that we see a tree there told us in the first place -- that 'over there,' is where you can get something to eat. Seeing the acorn is seeing where the food is.

Yeah? One of the things that make dreams surreal is that a single individual can shift shapes and faces from moment to moment. — csalisbury

The same is true of waking life. Sometimes it takes a little longer (and sometimes it doesn't) -- but what does it matter?