I only know of other subjects and a ‘world’ to the extent that I can construe these entities on some dimension of similarity with respect to my ongoing system of interpretation. Whatever is wholly outside of this system is invisible to me. Thus, a ‘world’ is built up and continually transformed as variations on an ongoing theme. — Joshs

I don't find the underlined sentence to be obvious. Instead you seem to be starting from an implicitly postulated 'ego thing,' for which the world is and must be mediated. I'd call this a constructive approach that tries to patch together a world from snippets of private dreams. IMO, you have not yet made it clear that this isn't just sophisticated solipsism. Is there a world outside of what we know of it? Even if taking about this world is problematic and even if we assume that we only ever get some mediating version of it through the human nervous system? Are you an indirect realist? Or what?

Wittgenstein agreed with Kuhn, against Popper, that scientific change is like change in the arts , a matter of aesthetic shifts rather than an asymptomatic approach of truth through falsification. — Joshs

I don't know about this. I don't doubt that you can find fragments and build a case in this direction, but the older W wasn't exactly systematic, and probably an opposite case could be built.

If one assumes that an ego is 'given' or 'primary,' then perhaps one can cast everything else as an appearance for that ego. But I don't think this story is plausible. To me it makes more sense to take the ego and the world as 'equiprimordial' or conceptually independent. — jas0n

Ego for Husserl doesn’t mean personality. It is not Freud’s notion of ego. In fact , for Husserl, the pure ego functions as nothing but an empty zero point or center of activity. What is given or primary isn’t a content, substance , subject , phenomenon or entity , but the differentiating activity of temporalization. What is fundamental is the tripartite structure of time consciousness.

Modern phenomenology got its start with Husserl's assertion that stripping away the layers of historically acquired philosophical and scientific dogma via the reduction, in order to get to ‘the things themselves', reveals to us an irreducible primitive of immediate present experience. But rather than this primitive subsisting in an objectively present ‘now' point appearing once before being replaced by another in an infinite series of past and future punctual ‘nows', Husserl proposed the ‘now' as a tripartite structure composed of a retentional, primal impression and protentional phase. In doing so, he replaced a temporality justifying objective causation with the temporality of the intentional act. Events don't appear anonymously as what they are in themselves , they appear to someone, are about something, and reach out (protend) beyond their immediate sense.

But this ‘someone’, understood most reductively , is just this empty zero point. So what is essential here is the idea that every experience is an intending beyond itself , and an exposure to an alien outside that remakes the nature of the ‘ego’ . Both the subjective and objective poles of an intention are remade by the act.

Ego for Husserl doesn’t mean personality. It is not Freud’s notion of ego. In fact , for Husserl, the pure ego functions as nothing but an empty zero point or center of activity. What is given or primary isn’t a content, substance , subject , phenomenon or entity , but the differentiating activity of temporalization. What is fundamental is the tripartite structure of time consciousness. — Joshs

I get that, really. Call it the transcendental ego or the 'pure witness.' It seems to be a collapse of consciousness into being. All that is is consciousness. The empirical ego (my handsome mug in the mirror) is just a thing for that which things primordially. Nothing else ever. Substrates ? Matter? A mere product or manifestation of consciousness.

The following quote is not my kind of reading material. I discovered it when searching 'pure witness.' But perhaps you'll see a sort of parody of Husserl that's too close for comfort here.

The Realization of the Nondual traditions is uncompromising: there is only Spirit, there is only God, there is only Emptiness in all its radiant wonder. All the good and all the evil, the very best and the very worst, the upright and the degenerate-each and all are radically perfect manifestations of Spirit precisely as they are. There is nothing but God, nothing but the Goddess, nothing but Spirit in all directions, and not a grain of sand, not a speck of dust, is more or less Spirit than any other.

This realization undoes the Great Search that is the heart of the separate-self sense. The separate-self is, at bottom, simply a sensation of seeking. When you feel yourself right now, you will basically feel a tiny interior tension or contraction—a sensation of grasping, desiring, wishing, wanting, avoiding, resisting-it is a sensation of effort, a sensation of seeking.
...
One hundred percent of Spirit is in your perception right now. Not 20 percent, not 50 percent, not 99 percent, but literally 100 percent of Spirit is in your awareness right now—and the trick, as it were, is to recognize this ever-present state of affairs, and not to engineer a future state in which Spirit will announce itself.

And this simple recognition of an already present Spirit is the task, as it were, of the great Nondual traditions.

https://integrallife.com/always-already-the-brilliant-clarity-of-ever-present-awareness/

Events don't appear anonymously as what they are in themselves , they appear to someone, are about something, and reach out (protend) beyond their immediate sense. — Joshs

I find this quite plausible. But what's the status of the world shared with others ? Do they exist 'outside' this consciousness?

d you seem to be starting from an implicitly postulated 'ego thing,' for which the world is and must be mediated. I'd call this a constructive approach that tries to patch together a world from snippets of private dreams. IMO, you have not yet made it clear that this isn't just sophisticated solipsism. Is there a world outside of what we know of it? Even if taking about this world is problematic and even if we assume that we only ever get some mediating version of it through the human nervous system? Are you an indirect realist? Or what? — jas0n

What would be private here if every moment of experience subtly remakes this ‘private’ realm? Where is the inside , the dream, the subject , the solipsism if the inside is always redefined by its outside? In order to have a solipsism there must be something , some intrinsic , immanent content lurking at the origin that protects itself from transformation as it encounters a world There is absolutely nothing of this in what I’m suggesting. On the contrary , I am suggesting a radically temporal and radically mobile and transformative notion of subject-object relationality. For me the origin is the difference, the in-between, the differential , neither subject nor object nor just a cobbling together of the two.

I am not an indirect realist , I am a phenomenologist. There is a world outside of what we know of it , every moment, in the very act of intending beyond what we intend. That is the only ‘world beyond’ there is.

A little more on 'pure witness':

We begin with the realization that the pure Self or transpersonal Witness is an ever-present consciousness, even when we doubt its existence. You are right now aware of, say, this book, the room, a window, the sky, the clouds…. You can sit back and simply notice that you are aware of all those objects floating by. Clouds float through the sky, thoughts float through the mind, and when you notice them, you are effortlessly aware of them. There is a simple, effortless, spontaneous witnessing of whatever happens to be present.

In that simple witnessing awareness, you might notice: I am aware of my body, and therefore I am not just my body. I am aware of my mind, and therefore I am not just my mind. I am aware of my self, and therefore I am not just that self. Rather, I seem somehow to be the Witness of my body, my mind, my self.

This is truly fascinating. I can see my thoughts, so I am not those thoughts. I am aware of bodily sensations, so I am not those sensations. I am aware of my emotions, so I am not merely those emotions. I am somehow the Witness of all of that!

But what is this Witness itself? Who or What is it that witnesses all of these objects, that watches the clouds float by, and thoughts float by, and objects float by? Who or What is this true Seer, this pure Witness, which is at the very core of what I am?

That simple witnessing awareness, the traditions maintain, is Spirit itself, is the enlightened mind itself, is Buddha-nature itself, is God itself, in its entirety.

https://integrallife.com/always-already-the-brilliant-clarity-of-ever-present-awareness/



This 'God itself' in entirety neglects other subjects it seems to me. We are all God, and yet we still have to figure out who to trust !

I am not an indirect realist , I am a phenomenologist. There is a world outside of what we know of it , every moment, in the very act of intending beyond what we intend. That is the only ‘world beyond’ there is. — Joshs

Cool. I was just looking for clarification. I acknowledge the complexity and sophistication of your position. It's a highly developed 'left wing' vision, while I've moved from the left toward the center over time. I reluctantly grant the claims of an exterior.

I find this quite plausible. But what's the status of the world shared with others ? Do they exist 'outside' this consciousness? — jas0n

Husserl actually assumed both that others exist outside my consciousness but that I can never have access to them except as variations of my own experience. An intersubjective world thus emerges for each of us , in which the empirically ‘same world for all of us’ is seen from each’s own point of view.

Husserl actually assumed both that others exist outside my consciousness but that I can never have access to them except as variations of my own experience. An intersubjective world thus emerges for each of us , in which the empirically ‘same world for all of us’ is seen from each’s own point of view. — Joshs

This vision seems to require either some kind of 'divine' synchronization of our video games or a substrate of some kind (what some thinkers have probably meant by 'matter'). Let's say a man runs off to live alone in a cave and writes a philosophical masterpiece. A century later the manuscript is discovered and assimilated in the living speech of a community (alive in the dreams from which it was long absent). What makes possible such a detour? What is this substrate with memory?

This vision seems to require either some kind of 'divine' synchronization of our video games or a substrate of some kind (what some thinkers have probably meant by 'matter'). — jas0n

Let’s look at how Husserl grounds the empirical
object.

One of the key aspects of Husserl's approach was his explanation of the origin of spatial objects. Rather than defining an object in terms of its self-subsistence over time with its properties and attributes, he believed such entities to be , not fictions, but idealities. That is to say, what we , in a naive naturalist attitude, point to as this 'real' table in front of us, is the constantly changing product of a process of progressive constitution in consciousness. The real object is in fact an idealization.This process begins at the most primordial level with what he called primal impressions, which we can imagine as the simplest whiffs of sensation(these he calls actual, rather than real. Actual impressions only appear once in time as what they are. When we see something like a table, all that we actually perceive in front of us is an impoverished, contingent partial sense experience.

We fill in the rest of experience in two ways. Al experience implies a temporal structure of retention, primal impression and protention. Each moment presents us with a new sensation, th4 retained memory of the just preceding sensation and anticipation of what is to come. We retain the memory of previous experiences with the 'same' object and those memories become fused with the current aspect of it. A the same time, we protend forward, anticipating aspects of the object that are not yet there for us, based on prior experience with it. For example, we only see the front of the table, but anticipate as an empty horizon, its sides, and this empty anticipation joins with the current view and the memory of previous views to form a complex fused totality. Perception constantly is motivated , that is tends toward toward the fulfillment of the experience of the object as integrated singularity, as this same' table'.

Thus , through a process of progress adumbration of partial views, we constitute what we call and object. It must be added that not just the sens of sight, but all other sense modalities can come into play in constituting the object. And most importantly, there is no experience of an object without kineshthetic sensation of our voluntary movement in relation to the thing seen. Intrinsic to what the object means as object is our knowing how its appearance will change when we move our head in a certain way, or our eyes , or when we touch it. The object is what it is for us in relation to the way we know we can change its appearance relative to our interactions with it.

In sum, what the naive realist calls an external object of perception, Husserl treats as a relative product of constant but regilated changing correlated modes of givenness and adumbrations composed of retentions and protentions. The 'thing' is a tentative , evolving achievement of memory , anticipation and voluntary movement.

But this ‘object’ is not yet the empirical object. In order to attain that notion of objectivity we must be able to recognize other egos as being like us. We do this not simply by constructing some sort of internal model of how we think others think. Rather , we directly perceive them as ‘alter-egos’ as beings like us but also different from us. Again, this is not our imaging of the other from
behind a wall of solipsism. It is a direct perception of them as other. As such, we can accept their own perspectives on objects which differ from our own, and take on a new attitude such that now our own experience of objects becomes a mere ‘appearance’ of the consensually perceived ‘empirical’ object that is the same for all of us. But meanwhile , this ‘empirical’ object is one which none of us actually directly sees.

So o hope you can see that this complex and intricate subjective and intersubjective system of reciprocal coordinations is anything but a ‘ divine synchronization’.
It is instead the actual way that we jointly build up a shared world.

The real object is in fact an idealization. — Joshs

Yes, I get that. Call it part of the mediation.

Perception constantly is motivated , that is tends toward toward the fulfillment of the experience of the object as integrated singularity, as this same' table'. — Joshs

This too I understand.

As a tentative indirect realist, I'd include all this in mediation. The stuff-in-itself from which the idealized table is constructed by our nervous systems and cultural conventions/habits is something like a point at infinity.

In order to attain that notion of objectivity we must be able to recognize other egos as being like us. We do this not simply by constructing some sort of internal model of how we think others think. Rather , we directly perceive them as ‘alter-egos’ as beings like us but also different from us. — Joshs

The order of theoretical construction might not be the order in fact. Perhaps the self is peeled off from the tribe as the baby is peeled off from the mother. If one stresses consciousness as 'pure witness,' then one is perhaps tempted to construct others from perceptions. But if one grants language priority, then the subject is co-created with the others, an effect of language and other physical habits, despite having his/her/their/its own body. Consider what I take to be Heidegger's view, that one is primarily 'one' or the generic/default layer of habit/interpretation of a generation (and class and gender, etc.)

So o hope you can see that this complex and intricate subjective and intersubjective system of reciprocal coordinations is anything but a ‘ divine synchronization’.
It is instead the actual way that we jointly build up a shared world. — Joshs

Note, my friend, that you still don't deal with the problem of the substrate. I think you grant a plurality of subjects? Is there a world that precedes or contains them in any sense? If not, how do we communicate without the synchronization? (I dream that I wave at you and you dream that I wave at you at the same time, etc.)

Yes

I accidentally hit 'flag' instead of 'reply,' which I mention both to apologize and to indicate to moderators that it was a mistake. (I hoped one could unflag, but it seems not.)

Anyway, what are you agreeing with ? @Joshs made quite a few points.

It was reply to his reply to me. Press @… to go to post.

I like what I know of Pierce, and I'm fairly familiar w/ pragmatism (James, Rorty) — jas0n

Step 1: bin James and Rorty. Dewey is OK though. :wink:

Even though Popper only came across Peirce late in his own career, he shared so much with Peirce down to a shared view that probability ought to be understood as propensity.

I'd add that Popper is also including the social element of technique and communication. — jas0n

Yep. But this is a rather secondary issue. Scientific method is well aware of these kind of commonsense problems and so pays a lot of attention to instilling a suitable level of experimental discipline and replicability.

But it should at least look bad when it fails at prediction. It has to be specific enough to fail. — jas0n

This is the more subtle issue. The idea that one exception could break the rule itself assumes a particular metaphysics. It says a theory can describe "how the world works" in some kind of totally constrained and exceptionless fashion - reality as a mechanism.

But the Peircean view follows the organicist tradition where the material ground of being is instead probabilistic - a sea of fluctuations or uncertain impulse. What Peirce dubbed a Vagueness, or Tychism.

And then a structure of constraints evolves to give firm shape to all the fluctuation. The possibilities are reigned in, narrowed in scope. In the limit - as Bateson put it - you still have plenty of fluctuation, but they are differences that no longer make a difference. Like an ideal gas at equilibrium, all the busy microphysics no longer makes a difference to the global macrostate.

And this is the world that science in fact describes. One that is probabilistic at base and thus always capable of exceptions that break the rule. And yet the rule is only in fact a constraint that limits exceptions to some long-run statistical profile.

So you have this conflict. There is the popular belief that the scientific method ought to be tuned to producing exceptionless law. Yet reality itself only has long-run habits.

Science is starting to realise this truth. Thermodynamics is starting to assert itself as the most fundamental model of the Cosmos.

So as far as framing laws goes, being so constraining as to be exceptionless would be to accept the idea that the Cosmos is an actual machine.

Peirce's pragmatism already understood this point. Which is why he stressed that universal laws were only really highly developed Cosmic habits. A propensity based view of probability itself follows.

Thanks ! I found it.

Steo 1: bin James and Rorty. — apokrisis

Well, I could definitely scrounge up some gripes about them. But they are readable. A bit squishy tho for my current taste.

The idea that one exception could break the rule itself assumes a particular metaphysics. It says a theory can describe "how the world works" in some kind of totally constrained and exceptionless fashion - reality as a mechanism. — apokrisis

My current view is mechanism with randomness. So a model will include random noise, for instance. Or the model will just be an empirically established distribution.

And this is the world that science in fact describes. One that is probabilistic at base and thus always capable of exceptions that break the rule. And yet the rule is only in fact a constraint that limits exceptions to some long-run statistical profile. — apokrisis

This makes sense to me. Zoom in and find a casino. The house tends to win, and chairs tend not to jump from one side of the room to the other. Broken plates tend not to reassemble spontaneously. But I only climbed a rung or two beyond Newton in school. Learning more physics is on the list with so many other worthy pursuits.

There is the popular belief that the scientific method ought to be tuned to producing exceptionless law. — apokrisis

My understanding is that, back in Newton's day, folks were tempted/terrified to think of the world as a deterministic video game. As a child, I thought of laws that way and didn't think about the complexities of measurement and curvefitting and wasn't told about the randomness of modern physics.

So as far as framing laws goes, being so constraining as to be exceptionless would be to accept the idea that the Cosmos is an actual machine.

Peirce's pragmatism already understood this point. Which is why he stressed that universal laws were only really highly developed Cosmic habits. A propensity based view of probability itself follows. — apokrisis

Definitely a fascinating idea, which seems to replace the machine metaphor with one from biology. I've looked into biosemiotics a little bit (thanks to your intriguing posts) and it's good stuff.

Bigger picture: do you think in terms of lots of organisms each making a model of their world? Are you (roughly) an indirect realist? I understand the limits of the mind/matter distinction, hence 'roughly.' In this thread, I think the problem have other 'subjects'/persons hasn't been touched on enough. Folks either want to stuff the world into consciousness or flatten consciousness into the brain. I understand the motives for both moves, but each seems to simply ignore this or that issue. Are we different humans with different minds in the same world? And does this same world need some kind of an elusive substrate that we can carve into in order to communicate?

Consider what I take to be Heidegger's view, that one is primarily 'one' or the generic/default layer of habit/interpretation of a generation (and class and gender, etc.) — jas0n

There are many conflicting interpretations of what Heidegger means by language and how he sees the relation between self and culture. This is from a recent paper of mine:

If Dasein's being-in-the -world is always structured as an intimate, pragmatic self-belongingness, how does Heidegger explain the basis of apparently normatively driven intersubjective ‘we' contexts? Heidegger's most systematic treatment of Dasein's role in a linguistic community appears in his discussion of average everydayness and das man in Being and Time.

Zahavi is among those thinkers who interpret Heidegger's ‘we-self' of every day das man as taking precedence over his authentic self of ‘ownmost' possibilities. As das man , Zahavi claims

“group belongingness, rather than being founded upon an other-experience, preceded any such experience.”

“...an everyday being-with-one-another characterized by anonymity and substitutability, where others are those from whom “one mostly does not distinguish oneself” (Heidegger 1996: 11)

He surmises that Heidegger would approve of Schmid's(2005) assertion that “...the we, the “sense of us” or “plural self-awareness,” precedes the distinction between yours and mine, is prior to any form of intersubjectivity or mutual recognition, and is itself the irreducible basis for joint action and communication.”

Zahavi is far from alone in interpreting Heidegger's discussions of the discursive practices of Das man as assuming an introjection of norms by a socially created self or a socially conditioned self-affecting subjectivity. Heidegger's critique of Husserl's model of empathy was taken by many interpreters as evidence that the primacy of being-with for Dasein functions as the conditioning of a self by an outside.

For instance, Rousse(2014) says

“...the particular way I ‘carry out' my being and relate to myself is unavoidably susceptible to the pressures of the others' normative expectations.””... inauthenticity is a matter of a person having his practical orientation dominated by ‘outside forces',...the tacitly operative normative expectations about how one ought properly and normally to behave.” “ Dasein, as essentially ‘being-with', initially ‘gets' its existential answerability by being socialized into the shared behavioral norms of the One. In turn, this enables, even encourages, Dasein to act in accordance with them and to avoid taking its own (‘existentiell') answerability for how it comports and understands itself. To be responsible, then, is to be the kind of agent who has the possibility to take responsibility for the socially normative determinants of identity.”

By taking for granted the notion of normativity as a shared understanding, Rousse exemplifies the kind of thinking that Heidegger says disguises, covers over, conceals and obscures a genuine understanding. Das man isn't a matter of simply acting in accordance with norms that are communally understood but a way of thinking that pre-supposes and takes for granted that the self can internalize and introject meanings from others. Public interpretedness is not about behaving in accordance with culturally assimilated norms but believing that norms exist as the sharing of unambiguously intelligible meanings in the first place.

Rousse misreads authenticity as a self-reflexive self's becoming aware of what it has introjected, ‘taken in' from culture and its attempt to take responsibility for, or embrace its own alternative to, those norms. But for Heidegger what the self discloses to itself in average everydayness is not introjected meanings from a community. The self never simply introjects from an outside to an inside. The radically temporal structuration of Dasein makes such introjection impossible.

Heidegger's(2010) task is to explain how a Dasein which always understands others in relation to its very own pragmatic totality of relevance ends up believing in a cultural world of linguistic practices that appear to be the same for all. “...what purports to be an opening up of the world is in fact its concealment: by appealing to public opinion and tradition, idle talk creates in Dasein the belief that it possesses universally acknowledged and thus genuine truths.”

Heidegger chooses words like average, vague, flattened , confused, uprooted state of suspension, and ambiguous to describe Dasein's being as Das Man, to indicate that the heedfulness of Care is still primordially and implicitly operative even when it is explicitly concealed and suppressed . Average everyday discourse has to be vague, approximate, superficial and ambiguous enough to conceal, disguise, cover over, miss, obscure, suppress the fact that the meaning of what is shared is never interpreted identically for each dasein.

“What is talked about is understood only approximately and superficially. One means the same thing because it is in the same averageness that we have a common understanding of what is said.” “Publicness ” does not get to "the heart of the matter," because it is insensitive to every difference of level and genuineness.”

“Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without any previous appropriation of the matter. Idle talk, which everyone can snatch up, not only divests us of the task of genuine understanding, but develops an indifferent intelligibility for which nothing is closed off any longer. Discourse, which belongs to the essential constitution of being of Dasein, and also constitutes its disclosedness, has the possibility of becoming idle talk, and as such of not really keeping being-in-the-world open in an articulated understanding, but of closing it off and covering over inner worldly beings. “ “ Ontologically, this means that when Da-sein maintains itself in idle talk, it is-as being-in-the-world-cut off from the primary and primordially genuine relations of being toward the world, toward Mitda-sein, toward being-in itself.”

“Idle talk conceals simply because of its characteristic failure to address things in an originary way [urspriinglichen Ansprechens]. It obscures the true appearance of the world and the events in it by instituting a dominant view [herrschende Ansicht].”“Usually and for the most part the ontic mode of being-in (discoverture) is concealment [Verdeckung]. Interpretedness, which is speech encrusted by idle talk, draws any given Dasein into 'one's' way of being. But existence in the 'one' now entails the concealment and marginalization of the genuine self [eigentlichen Selbst]. Not only has each particular given itself over to 'one', 'one' blocks Dasein's access to the state it finds itself in [Befindlichkeit].”(Heidegger 2011)

What is this genuine self, this genuine understanding, this originary and primordial way of appropriating the matter, this “getting to the heart of the matter”, these primordially genuine relations of being toward the world, toward Mitda-sein, toward being-in itself, that idle talk conceals?

To say that in the mode of average everydayness Dasein disguises, covers over, conceals, obscures its genuine self, a genuine understanding, an originary and primordial way of appropriating the matter, “getting to the heart of the matter,” primordially genuine relations of being toward the world, toward Mit-dasein, toward being-in itself, is to say that Dasein explicitly experiences itself as a constituted self, introjecting norms from other selves , but this awareness pre-supposes and is grounded in an implicit mineness.

Average everydayness of Das man and idle talk shares with what Heidegger calls the ‘present to hand‘ the features of being derivative modes of the ‘as' structure of heedful circumspective significance, functioning as a contextually rich totality of relevance. They also share the feature of being a ‘dwindling down' of that wider experience.

Even as Zahavi mistakenly critiques Heidegger for giving precedence to “plural self-awareness,” over the distinction between yours and mine, Zahavi's I-Thou model of sociality falls under the scope of Heidegger's formulation of Das Man.

Zahavi(2012) says “The I and the you are prior to the we”. The I-you relation “is a reciprocal exchange of address and response that affects and transforms the self experience of the participating individuals... we take over from others (and make our own) a language, roles, attitudes and norms”.

This makes individual behavior in social situations the product of narrative norms, reciprocities, shared practices and social constraints. The presupposition here is that my own subjectivity always functions as a harbor in the reception of social signs . Intersubjectivity is characterized by a reciprocal cobbling and co-ordination between personal history and cultural signs in which the ‘joints' of such interactive bodily-mental and social practices are simultaneously within my own subjectivity and common to other participants in my community. Zahavi assumes these culturally normed practices that we internalize represent forms of meaning no less robust in significance and relevance to our lives than those which we generate.

In contrast, for Heidegger the social norms and practices that Dasein takes in are specific modifications of meaning on the order of a diminution of significance. The publicness of Das Man and the present to handness of things are modes of Dasein representing a deprivation and trivialization of intelligibility, significance and relevance, and thus a reduction of meaningfulness. Dasein becomes alienated from itself not by being taken over by, introjecting and internalizing an outside but by encountering itself (its ownmost world of possibilities) as almost devoid of sense. This is self-alienation as senselessness rather than internalization of an other.

“However, alienation cannot mean that Da-sein is factically torn away from itself....this alienation, which closes off to Da-sein its authenticity and possibility, even if only that of genuinely getting stranded, still does not surrender it to beings which it itself is not, but forces it into its inauthenticity, into a possible kind of being of itself.”(Heidegger 2010)

Zahavi's belief that socialization is a direct introjection and internalization from an outside marks it from Heidegger's vantage as an inauthentic and confused self-understanding, even if we assume with Zahavi that the subject is an active participant in what it takes in from others( I-Thou).

World-understanding as Dasein-understanding is self-understanding. Self and world belong together in the single entity, the Dasein. Self and world are not two beings, like subject and object, or like I and thou, but self and world are the basic determination of the Dasein itself in the unity of the structure of being-in-the-world. (Heidegger 1982)

We saw earlier how for Husserl the alterity and foreignness of other egos is constituted as a variation of my own thematics, via aperceptive transfer. Heidegger understands thematic mineness through the Care structure. Heidegger says average everydayness alienates Dasein from itself, but without Dasein's therefore being merely conditioned by others.

My being-with-others originates primordially as ‘my ownmost' being-with , relative to my significant aims and goals, to what matters to me. As the inauthentic mode of average everydayness communication become flattened, leveled down into the vagueness of a ‘we' understanding, but this average everydayness does not eliminate but only covers over the originary ‘mineness' of the Care structure of primordial temporality.

The ‘solitude' of the mineness of the self of Dasein is disclosed most fundamentally for Heidegger in the authentic mood of angst. Angst individualizes and thus discloses Da-sein as "solus ipse." This existential "solipsism," however, is so far from transposing an isolated subject-thing into the harmless vacuum of a worldless occurrence that it brings Da-sein in an extreme sense precisely before its world as world, and thus itself before itself as being-in-the-world.“ "Together with the sober Angst that brings us before our individualized potentiality-of-being, goes the unshakable joy in this possibility.”

As much as it is the case that Heidegger's being-with-others is not the precedence of anonymous plural self-awareness over Dasein's ownness, it is equally true that Dasein's self-belonging is not a retreat from the immediate contingency of world-exposure, not the choosing of an idealist self-actualization at the expense of robust being with others. Gallagher and Gadamer's readings of Heidegger appear to fall prey to such a solipsist interpretation.

Gallagher(2010) says: “In Heidegger, and in thinkers who follow his line of thought, we find the idea that a relatively complete account of our embodied, expert, enactive, pragmatic engagements with the world can be given prior to or without reference to intersubjectivity.”

Gadamer(2006) writes:

“Mit-sein, for Heidegger, was a concession that he had to make, but one that he never really got behind. Indeed, even as he was developing the idea, he wasn't really talking about the other at all. Mit-sein is, as it were, an assertion about Dasein, which must naturally take Mit-sein for granted..."Care" [die Sorge] is always a concernfulness [ein Besorgtsein] about one's own being, and Mit-sein is, in truth, a very weak idea of the other, more a "letting the other be" than an authentic "being-interested-in-him."”

Zahavi, Gallagher and Gadamer are right and wrong in their readings of Heidegger. Gallagher and Gadamer are right that Heidegger makes their notion of primary intersubjectivity a derivative modification of the primary self-understanding of Dasein. But they are wrong to interpret Dasein's self-understanding as prior to sociality. Being-with is instead the very site of sociality as a referential differential inside-outside. Zahavi is right that Heidegger places being-with as prior to Zahavi's model of pre-reflective self-awareness, but Zahavi is wrong in treating Das Man as an anonymous plural self. As a referential differential it is a more intimate notion of self- relation than Zahavi's present-to-hand oppositional subject-object structure.

Note, my friend, that you still don't deal with the problem of the substrate. I think you grant a plurality of subjects? Is there a world that precedes or contains them in any sense? If not, how do we communicate without the synchronization? (I dream that I wave at you and you dream that I wave at you at the same time, etc.) — jas0n

There is a world , but not a static one that sits there waiting for us to represent it faithfully with our science. The world is a continual development , and we participate in this development via our behavior. To know is to change the object of one’s knowledge. Through intersubjective discourse and culture each of us contributes to the evolution of the world. Our sciences produce new worlds in the form of knowing.

There is a world , but not a static one that sits there waiting for us to represent it faithfully with our science. — Joshs

Ah, but who would dream it was static? We project/discover 'motionless' patterns in the motion (project being on becoming.)

He surmises that Heidegger would approve of Schmid's(2005) assertion that “...the we, the “sense of us” or “plural self-awareness,” precedes the distinction between yours and mine, is prior to any form of intersubjectivity or mutual recognition, and is itself the irreducible basis for joint action and communication.” — Joshs

Yes, I suggested something like this earlier, that the self and other are created simultaneously from we-stuff, from 'one.'

Being-with is instead the very site of sociality as a referential differential inside-outside. — Joshs

Yes, that's how I see it, and that's maybe my fundamental gripe about the transcendental ego, at least inasmuch as it's involved in constructions of the world from images given through peepholes.

Ah, but who would dream it was static? We project/discover 'motionless' patterns in the motion (project being on becoming.) — jas0n

Does this becoming conform to a scheme, like for instance a dialectic?

Yes, that's how I see it, and that's maybe my fundamental gripe about the transcendental ego, at least inasmuch as it's involved in constructions of the world from images given through peepholes. — jas0n

But Heidegger’s Dasein is involved in constructions of the world from a totality of relevance given beforehand.

To know is to change the object of one’s knowledge. Through intersubjective discourse and culture each of us contributes to the evolution of the world. — Joshs

This doesn't adequately deal with the holism of nature and thus our position as modellers of nature.

The world as a whole is entrained to the dynamics of the laws of thermodynamics. Life and mind arise in turn as mechanism to further that univocal cosmic project. We feel the hot breath of the thermodynamic imperative at every turn. It is what our modelling relation with the world is fundamentally about. We exist both by and for our evolved ability to break down barriers to entropy production.

The imperative was the same - univocally - for the major transitions in out socio-cultural ways of life: the shifts from hunter-gatherers, to agriculturalists and pastoralists, to eventually the miners of the buried bonanza of fossil fuels.

So to understand the human situation, we must be able to place ourselves correctly in nature. We must start with the core or fundamental imperative that drives us, and thus shapes our sociocultural mindset, our generalised and collective view of the world.

Thus yes, humans only see the model of the world that they construct for themselves. But this model isn't fundamentally diverse, or plural, or something each of us contributes to except in the form of reinforcing the general direction being taken in the furtherance of the universalising goal.

Every poet and artist contributes to the current exponential rise in fossil fuel consumption just as much as anyone else. And do as little to change the situation, even if they might feel they want to. Same goes for the informed scientist. Neither cultural influence, nor technical influence, have had any influence, if you are tracking the human curve of entropy production - as Vaclav Smil has done.

So yes, we humans model the world - but in the univocal fashion that is appropriate to gaining control over nature and its resources so as to sustain our existence as dissipative structures, or organised beings who flourish by becoming ever smarter at being entropy degraders.

It is only when you get down to this level of science-informed modelling that you can clearly diagnose where things have gone wrong for us.

Organisms need to combine their entropy production with the ability to recycle their structural materials. They need to be an open path for the transaction of entropy - the flow from some source to some sink - while being closed for the matter that constructs that open path.

This is what nature does over all its organismic scales. Nature is indeed Gaian as when bacteria first evolved CO2 consuming photosynthesis, they just about poisoned the planet with the waste product - oxygen. But then the ability to consume oxygen in respiration - and make the waste product of CO2 - closed the cycle at a planetary level. A new self-balancing and autopoietic level of material recycling/solar flux harvesting was created that was capable of regulating the atmosphere and climate itself.

Everything worked smoothly until we came along as disruptors. We lived within the old system - the one entrained to the solar flux and its coupled photosynthesis~respiration balance. But then we stumbled upon a form of semiosis that went beyond social language - the techno-semiosis of mathematically structured thinking. And at the same time, we stumbled across a vast buried resource of unconsumed energy - the buried carbon quietly accumulated in sedimentary rocks over half a billion years of rotting vegetation and rotting plankton.

The scientific and industrial revolution were the result, a new stage of the human adventure that was predicated on the exponential rise of fossil fuel burning, coupled to a flagrant unconcern for the normal need to ensure a system of dissipation that was also closed for materiality. We built the entropy generating path - the one piping the stores in the ground to the heat sink of outer space. But didn't include recycling in the economic budget. We just filled our environment with material waste as if that too was a normal, natural, thing to do.

Then of course we found that getting rid of all the heat of the burning was also a problem. The atmosphere - the Gaian blanket of gas so lovingly gardened by nature for the past billion years with its marvellous photosynthetic~respiratory balance - acts as a barrier to the disposal of heat into the black unconcern of outer space. The heat exchange capacity of the atmosphere, and the planetary climate stability which was so carefully and biosemiotically constructed, has become a frustration to our entropic desires. Houston, we have a snafu.

So it is quite possible to step back from the human condition and see the whole story laid out.

Nature is dissipative structure based on biosemiotic modelling. To persist as biosemiotic dissipative structure requires being an organism - closed for materiality, open for entropy. It says that in the label. To be a structure is to recycle your matter in a way that achieves a dynamical stability. And to dissipate is to degrade some energy source, importing the good stuff at one end, exporting the waste heat to some bottomless sink outside yourself.

Life and mind arose doing just this. It evolved through four major grades of semiotic world modelling to get to us modern humans - the coding steps of genes, neurons, words and numbers. The three earlier levels of world modelling managed to make themselves closed for material, open for energy transaction. But the fourth level of modelling - the one based on numbers that wants to treat nature as a machine - isn't doing so well. Or it has over-performed on the entropy production, under-performed on the material recycling.

So for the scientist who understands the reality of organismic being, the inadequacies of the machine model, all this as plain as the nose on your face.

But the current paradigm - the economic juggernaut that has entrained both the typical scientist and the typical poet to its world model - has grown so mindlessly powerful that nothing is even slowing it in meaningful fashion. Only crashing off the road could bring it to a halt.

Philosophy used to be a discourse that seemed very important to pointing the way ahead. But that was when the dominant world model was linguistic and aimed at fine-tuning a way of life still lived within the constraints of the daily solar flux.

We now live by a world model that is techno-semiotic. And if philosophy was up to date, it would be presenting fine arguments about what it really means to be an organism - at the noosphere scale.

Instead, we have this stale nonsense - this warmed over Romanticism - about the human individual and the pluralistic struggle against totalising discourse. Or alternatively, the "commonsense realism" of Enlightenment thought that addressed the pragmatic concerns of the human way of life of yesteryear, then failed spectacularly to address the new world that its logical atomism, and other mechanistic tropes, were engendering.

So much time being wasted pissing about on antique concerns. :up:

Folks either want to stuff the world into consciousness or flatten consciousness into the brain. — jas0n

Good way of putting it.

Are we different humans with different minds in the same world? And does this same world need some kind of an elusive substrate that we can carve into in order to communicate? — jas0n

As I've just outlined, the biosemiotic view would be that humans embody four quite distinct levels of world-making. But everyday folk philosophy carries on oblivious to this complexity in being "a subject" in "the objective world".

So the biological basis to being a conscious creature - a combo of genetic evolution and neurobiological development - is a well-integrated affair. A billion years of life with a multicellular complexity would tend to produce something suitably polished.

But we humans only tacked on symbolic and grammatically structured thought - the modern linguistic self - about 40,000 years ago. That is plain to see in the abrupt rise of symbolic art. That produced a new level or organismic existence where we became subjects not only to the world as seen by our inherited genes, or the world as it needs to be understood neuro-developmental as a body navigating confusing spaces, but as a subject within a linguistic community. Suddenly we were living in tribal spaces, freighted with symbols, taboos, customs - a new shared state of mind that our biological being had to become fully immersed in so as to survive.

So we can distinguish two distinct levels of personhood there. Nature and nurture. We are subjects in the world that our bodies must construct, and also subjects in the world our social organisation must construct. The two worlds have to be functionally aligned to feel like they are the one integrated "state of mind". But it's only been 40,000 years.

For the first 30,000 years, we were hunter-gatherers and so living as close as we could get to the entraining rhythms of nature. Then came one of those climate fluctuations - the ending of a cycle of ice ages, the loss of the big easy game harvested by excitable bands armed with spears, the start of agricultural and pastoralism. The domestication of the natural world by the imposition of a new communal understanding of nature as something to be socially parented rather than rudely hunted and gathered.

Even the socio-linguistic self can evolve its world model in radical ways. Or that socio-linguistic self starts to take over the neurobiological self as the centre of gravity when it comes to the business end of entropy production and the maintenance of a way of life, or the structure of the dissipation.

And it has been barely 500 years since we shifted into our new state of mind - the technocratic view of the world.

So the world - as it is understood to physical science - is the world as we are now constructing it. It emphasises technology - the desire for the mechanisation of all things that thus rewards a mindset which see its world in terms of mechanistic possibility. If we can look at the world as just an arrangement of efficient causality, then that looks like the world that we technological creatures could absolutely flourish in.

Only a few centuries earlier, we would have been looking at the same world through the eyes of the gardener or herder. We would see nature as a wilderness in need of domestication.

Wind back to the last set of ice ages and the world we saw was one with mysterious natural rhythms - the changing seasons, the wandering beasts, the dangerous boundaries demarcating different language communities, different tribal bodies. Nature was a flux. People clung together, bonded by a state of mind that was a narrative of ancestry and hard-earnt survival craft.

So it is true that there is some kind of substrate reality that grounds our idealistic fantasies. But where is the final point of view that sees this in a totalising way?

I've made it clear that for me, it ain't a mechanistic view of the substrate. That is reductionist and one-sided. It divides reality in a broken fashion that leaves the idealistic fantasies as its matchingly monistic "other".

The only view that sees through the muddle is the one that can both divide and unite. The good old logic of the dialectic, the dichotomy, the unity of opposites. This steps out of monism and leads us to the triadic systems view of reality - the holism that is an organic causality.

And the true final step is when the holism describes not just the substrate "out there" but captures the holism of the modelling relation, the semiosis, which is about an "us in here" as well.

Biosemiotics reveals all nature's clever tricks. It shows us how we - as human subjects - have this complex psychology that results from stacking up four levels of an ever enlarging "consciousness", or Umwelt.

The levels aren't even that well integrated. The techno-semiotic level in particular is still a half-baked view of reality ... as it needs to be seen in order for us to flourish in the world we are so busily trying to construct.

And yet, we can also see enough to that one grounding imperative shines through as the evolutionary trend. Learn how to be a dissipative structure - an autopoietic material being sustained by a bountiful entropic flow. Learn how to see a reality that looks just like that, as the reality that a subject prehends is the reality they intend, by their own existence, to bring into being.

Excellent post altogether. I'll just respond to some of it (dense and inspiring stuff, I have to choose.)

I've made it clear that for me, it ain't a mechanistic view of the substrate. That is reductionist and one-sided. It divides reality in a broken fashion that leaves the idealistic fantasies as its matchingly monistic "other".

The only view that sees through the muddle is the one that can both divide and unite. The good old logic of the dialectic, the dichotomy, the unity of opposites. This steps out of monism and leads us to the triadic systems view of reality - the holism that is an organic causality. — apokrisis

I can understand something like the limits or the bias of the projection of mechanism, as if a hammer insists on seeing only a nail. I have never been satisfied by a metaphysical system, though I feel the urge toward a totalizing vision. I'm intrigued by the triadic systems approach, but I can't quite bring it into focus. The problem might be point of view. I can see only through my human (biocultural) 'lens.'
Kojève's version of Hegel was spectacular, implicitly semiotic perhaps. Reality is presented as fundamentally historical and conceptual (so 'concept' loses its mentalistic associations and becomes something neutral or just the structure of the world.)

And the true final step is when the holism describes not just the substrate "out there" but captures the holism of the modelling relation, the semiosis, which is about an "us in here" as well. — apokrisis

This kind of thing, yes. Hard to do, but necessary for a comprehensive account that takes itself into that account.

The levels aren't even that well integrated. The techno-semiotic level in particular is still a half-baked view of reality ... as it needs to be seen in order for us to flourish in the world we are so busily trying to construct. — apokrisis

I relate to this, and I connect it with the difficulty of philosophy. Tie a knot over here and another knot comes undone over there. Or it's blanket too small for the bed.

But Heidegger’s Dasein is involved in constructions of the world from a totality of relevance given beforehand. — Joshs

I like Heidegger, to be clear, so I'm not sure what you mean here. The self and the other are equiprimordial, as I think Hegel saw. The starting point of the Cartesian peephole doesn't make, although it is tempting when looking at the human body and its sense organs. Thinking/meaning is historical, more software than hardware, more 'we' than 'I.' We can think of the brain as hardware and as the tribal culture as a self-modifying, distributed OS with no official version. The game of rationality and inquiry happens only within language (is largely body independent, though some body is necessary.)