its end and its beginning contained already in its now. — csalisbury
"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
but it's inexorable that swans they'll become. — csalisbury
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
↪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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
Yeah? One of the things that make dreams surreal is that a single individual can shift shapes and faces from moment to moment.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
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 this is the right tack. I guess we just approach this same idea differently?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
Yeah? One of the things that make dreams surreal is that a single individual can shift shapes and faces from moment to moment. — csalisbury
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