I'm adding some stuff from James that goes with the stream metaphor. Note his emphasis on the radical separation of streams. This separation is what makes the idea of ESP or mindmelding so interesting, for that'd be the dissolution of individuality in a stronger sense than is typical in the assimilation of culture.

I can only define 'continuous' as that which is without breach, crack, or division. I have already said that the breach from one mind to another is perhaps the greatest breach in nature. The only breaches that can well be conceived to occur within the limits of a single mind would either be interruptions, time-gaps during which the consciousness went out altogether to come into existence again at a later moment; or they would be breaks in the quality, or content, of the thought, so abrupt that the segment that followed had no connection whatever with the one that went before. The proposition that within each personal consciousness thought feels continuous, means two things:

1. That even where there is a time-gap the consciousness after it feels as if it belonged together with the consciousness before it, as another part of the same self;

2. That the changes from one moment to another in the quality of the consciousness are never absolutely abrupt.
...
Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.
...
The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it,—or rather that is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it is true, an image of the same thing it was before, but making it an image of that thing newly taken and freshly understood. — James

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/57628/57628-h/57628-h.htm#Page_6

Now I'll touch on the perspectivism which can't be left out, though my influences usually neglect this aspect. Ontology assumes a shared world/ language and adopts an ethic. Disconnected [ solitary ] streamings therefore make no sense. I'm a discursive subject, an entity in our world, trying to tell a coherent story about it, that gets the old mind-matter thing right or less wrong finally. Or really to simply understand what looks like an old solution, which is easily forgotten and hard to remember in any case.

In short, we all stream the same world from/as different 'places' in it. We 'are' ( as 'witnesses' or 'metaphysical' subjects) the same world, but streamed perspectively. As embodied discursive selves, we live together, discussing the objects that surround us. I see my neighbor take the trash out. I believe that my neighbor is not just flesh but the site of another streaming of the world. The 'witness' (so far as common experience would indicate) is always associated with a sentient organism. To be clear, the witness is 'really' just a perspectival worldstreaming. So the stream includes objects seen from this side of the room or that side, as a function of the associated body. The metaphor 'witness' loses all value beyond this correlation in the stream between the body at the origin of a moving coordinate system and that which surrounds it.

I think part of what we mean by 'sentient' is exactly the existence of such a worldstreaming associated with an organism, 'tied' to it as described above. We 'know' that our friends are 'conscious' (have the world) without being able to be their stream.

Note that there are no 'deep' subjects at all here. There is only one world and various empirical subjects that are somehow 'sites' for the streaming that gives this world all of its being.

Leibniz rubs up against this idea in his work on monads :

And as the same town, looked at from various sides, appears quite different and becomes as it were numerous in aspects [perspectivement]; even so, as a result of the infinite number of simple substances, it is as if there were so many different universes, which, nevertheless are nothing but aspects [perspectives] of a single universe, according to the special point of view of each Monad.

Taking off from Leibniz toward a full-strength perspectivism, we can say that town exists only 'in' or 'for' (or as) such perspectives. There is no town-in-itself, for this would be a story written in no language at all. Yet it's always the same town (our one shared world) which is as if given by a shattered mirror. Is Indra's net helpful here ?

Indra's net (also called Indra's jewels or Indra's pearls, Sanskrit Indrajāla, Chinese: 因陀羅網) is a metaphor used to illustrate the concepts of Śūnyatā (emptiness),[1] pratītyasamutpāda (dependent origination),[2] and interpenetration[3] in Buddhist philosophy.
In East Asian Buddhism, Indra's net is considered as having a multifaceted jewel at each vertex, with each jewel being reflected in all of the other jewels.[4] In the Huayan school of Chinese Buddhism, which follows the Buddhāvataṃsaka Sūtra, the image of "Indra's net" is used to describe the interconnectedness or "perfect interfusion" (yuánróng, 圓融) of all phenomena in the universe.
....
The metaphor of Indra's net of jewels plays an essential role in the metaphysics of the Chinese Buddhist Huayan school,[10] where it is used to describe the interpenetration or "perfect interfusion" (Chinese: yuánróng, 圓融) of microcosmos and macrocosmos, as well as the interfusion of all dharmas (phenomena) in the entire universe.[5] According to Bryan Van Norden, in the Huayan tradition, Indra's net is "adopted as a metaphor for the manner in which each thing that exists is dependent for both its existence and its identity upon every other thing that exists."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indra%27s_net
...
The other is most radically another stream, not [only] 'in' the world but [more of ] the very being of the world. Flesh is the avatar not of soul but somehow the moving center of a world-becoming.

In the previous post, I claimed that the neutral stream (a perspectival perpetual becoming) was structured like a subject. But (crucially) it is not the inside of the subject. It is not even the world for a subject, those this is a rung on the ladder. The only subject to be found it there in the world with everything else. Heidegger is helpful here.

As Dasein, I ineluctably find myself in a world that matters to me in some way or another. This is what Heidegger calls thrownness (Geworfenheit), a having-been-thrown into the world. ‘Disposedness’ is Kisiel's (2002) translation of Befindlichkeit, a term rendered somewhat infelicitously by Macquarrie and Robinson as ‘state-of-mind’. Disposedness is the receptiveness (the just finding things mattering to one) of Dasein, which explains why Richardson (1963) renders Befindlichkeit as ‘already-having-found-oneself-there-ness’.
...
As one might expect, Heidegger argues that moods are not inner subjective colourings laid over an objectively given world (which at root is why ‘state-of-mind’ is a potentially misleading translation of Befindlichkeit, given that this term names the underlying a priori condition for moods). For Heidegger, moods (and disposedness) are aspects of what it means to be in a world at all, not subjective additions to that in-ness. Here it is worth noting that some aspects of our ordinary linguistic usage reflect this anti-subjectivist reading. Thus we talk of being in a mood rather than a mood being in us, and we have no problem making sense of the idea of public moods (e.g., the mood of a crowd). In noting these features of moods we must be careful, however. It would be a mistake to conclude from them that moods are external, rather than internal, states. A mood “comes neither from ‘outside’ nor from ‘inside’, but arises out of Being-in-the-world, as a way of such being” (Being and Time 29: 176).

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/#Car
I think it's worth placing Sartre in this context:

Sartre devotes a great deal of effort to establishing the impersonal (or “pre-personal”) character of consciousness, which stems from its non-egological structure and results directly from the absence of the I in the transcendental field. According to him, intentional (positional) consciousness typically involves an anonymous and “impersonal” relation to a transcendent object:

When I run after a streetcar, when I look at the time, when I am absorbed in contemplating a portrait, there is no I. […] In fact I am plunged in the world of objects; it is they which constitute the unity of my consciousness; […] but me, I have disappeared; I have annihilated myself. There is no place for me on this level. (Sartre 1936a [1957: 49; 2004: 8])

The tram appears to me in a specific way (as “having-to-be-overtaken”, in this case) that is experienced as its own mode of phenomenalization, and not as a mere relational aspect of its appearing to me. The object presents itself as carrying a set of objective properties that are strictly independent from one’s personal relation to it. The streetcar is experienced as a transcendent object, in a way that obliterates and overrides, so to speak, the subjective features of conscious experience; its “having-to-be-overtaken-ness” does not belong to my subjective experience of the world but to the objective description of the way the world is (see also Sartre 1936a [1957: 56; 2004: 10–11]). When I run after the streetcar, my consciousness is absorbed in the relation to its intentional object, “the streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken”, and there is no trace of the “I” in such lived-experience. I do not need to be aware of my intention to take the streetcar, since the object itself appears as having-to-be-overtaken, and the subjective properties of my experience disappear in the intentional relation to the object. They are lived-through without any reference to the experiencing subject (or to the fact that this experience has to be experienced by someone).

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

When I run after the streetcar, my consciousness is absorbed in the relation to its intentional object, “the streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken”, and there is no trace of the “I” in such lived-experience.

I think Sartre has no choice here but to talk in the usual way to make an unusual point. 'Pure' consciousness is just exactly (for instance) the streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken. As Heidegger puts it in an early lecture, 'it values.' The value 'shines' in the object. In that which is genuinely given, the pretheoretical lifeworld, there is that-beautiful-face-again or the-creepy-guy-from-class.

I go on sketching a position for others who might be able to follow. While this is my current position, I may of course change my mind, but I'll present it bluntly.

The subject/object distinction should not be taken as ontologically fundamental. Sartre and Heidegger both say something that is at least similar. Existence is [ fundamentally ] being-there becoming-here, not a subject 'processing' an environment, and not the inside of this subject ( e.g. the processed environment). Functional relationships between sensations and sandpaper are not being denied here. The tricky part is differentiating between the empirical ego and what thinkers tend to call the transcendental ego or witness.

The Transcendental Ego (or its equivalent under various other formulations) refers to the self that must underlie all human thought and perception, even though nothing more can be said about it than the fact that it must be there.
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Transcendental_ego

I'm claiming that 'nothing more can be said about it' because it's a [often confused ] synonym for being itself which is not an entity, though the concept of being is.

In Hindu philosophy, Sakshi (Sanskrit: साक्षी), also Sākṣī, "witness," refers to the 'pure awareness' that witnesses the world but does not get affected or involved. Sakshi is beyond time, space and the triad of experiencer, experiencing and experienced; sakshi witnesses all thoughts, words and deeds without interfering with them or being affected by them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakshi_(witness)

Despite the 'witness' metaphor, we see that this witness is beyond time, space and the triad of experiencer, experiencing and experienced. I read this as being, pure and simple. Radically pure and simple. Indeed, empty. The vanishing witness does not witness the world. It is the world. There is no witness.

But the 'witness' metaphor is not crazy talk, for the 'neutral stream' is structured like a motivated subject. One has to climb the ladder of indirect realism until the experiencer is grasped as a mere piece of the experience. But then 'experience' is seen to be a term prejudiced on the side of the subject, one that clings to a hidden Ego, just as a certain kind of Kantian clings to some hidden Matter.

While I primarily approach this in a dry and conceptual way, I expect that people who believe in or at least hope for the immortality of the personal soul will not find this view congenial. Mach is useful here.

In this investigation we must not allow ourselves to be impeded by such abridgments and delimitations as body, ego, matter, spirit, etc., which have been formed for special, practical purposes and with wholly provisional and limited ends in view. On the contrary, the fittest forms of thought must be created in and by that research itself, just as is done in every special science. In place of the traditional, instinctive ways of thought, a freer, fresher view, conforming to developed experience, and reaching out beyond the requirements of practical life, must be substituted throughout.
...
The ego must be given up. It is partly the perception of this fact, partly the fear of it, that has given rise to the many extravagances of pessimism and optimism, and to numerous religious, ascetic, and philosophical absurdities. In the long run we shall not be able to close our eyes to this simple truth, which is the immediate outcome of psychological analysis. We shall then no longer place so high a value upon the ego, which even during the individual life greatly changes, and which, in sleep or during absorption in some idea, just in our very happiest moments, may be partially or wholly absent. We shall then be willing to renounce individual immortality,' and not place more value upon the subsidiary elements than upon the principal ones. In this way we shall arrive at a freer and more enlightened view of life, which will preclude the disregard of other egos and the overestimation of our own. The ethical ideal founded on this view of life will be equally far removed from the ideal of the ascetic, which is not biologically tenable for whoever practises it, and vanishes at once with his disappearance, and from the ideal of an overweening Nietzschean "superman," who cannot, and I hope will not be tolerated by his fellow-men.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/mach.htm

.

So solipsism basically? There is no world outside an experiencer? — schopenhauer1

I think the nondual view passes through indirect realism (like Kant's). Mach read Kant intensely when young. Wittgenstein studied Schopenhauer. James studied Kant and all kinds of things (highly recommend his famous psychology book if you haven't read it already.)

There is no world outside an experiencer? — schopenhauer1

There is no experiencer. Not fundamentally. The one Eiffel tower appears in many beingstreams (worldstreams, interpenetrating becomingstreams...) My own body appears in many beingstreams. But what some of us want to say with 'first person consciousness' (hard problem stuff) is simply the streaming world itself --- but 'gathered around' this or that sentient flesh. Look around the room you are in. That's the world. Not dream but stream. Your face in the mirror. Your thoughts. My thoughts. All worldly entities. Nothing but world. But many streams of this same world . Each stream 'happens to' gather around a body which is itself an entity in the streams of course.

So solipsism basically? — schopenhauer1

No solipsism. Even the opposite in some sense (pure/direct realism). But related to why Wittgenstein cared about solipsism, the problem of 'my' pain and so on.

It's more important to keep the world here than the subject. Does that help ? The 'deep' subject is pure world, but world-from-'perspective.' Note that empirical subjects are in this world, not its very being.

I see every reason to believe that no individual experience nor the totality of individual experiences exhausts the real. — Janus

Our human world is wrapped in darkness. Of course. The only impossibility is logical possibility. This (pseudo-)proposition, which I embrace, manifests a radical openmindedness. But 'aperspectival reality' or a 'story in no language' has no [ stable, achieved ] sense.
The issue is approximately what we [can ] mean by 'exists.' An aperspectival object is like a round square. It's a good analogy if you focus on the issue and don't fall back on the same undisputed platitude that we might find ourselves surprised.

I believe you have not achieved what I have asked. If anything, that is more obfuscatory. In one sentence, summarize, in laymen's terms, your idea. If I do it for you, I will get it wrong I am sure. — schopenhauer1

First person consciousness is the [only] being of the world given perspectively.

If you were to summarize your position in one sentence that was comprehensible to almost anyone, and was not being cheeky, poetic, or obtuse, what would you put forth? — schopenhauer1

It's hard to beat what Witt did in the TLP, but he is so terse that he didn't get himself understood.

Simple analogy: Multiplayer GoldenEye on the N64. Split-screen first-person shooter. The world (the basement level) exists only on those 'first-person screens' and those 'first-person screens' show only the world, including the empirical egos (the players' hands and guns). We concept mongering humans can 'recurse' and ponder symbols like this within our own little stream, so it gets very weird. But I primarily ask to be understood, not at all minding criticism that can steelman the position.


*****gravy if needed/wanted******

What is called the stream of 'experience' is better thought of as a neutral streaming, for the experiencer (the worldly ego, Brandom's discursive subject, etc.) is part of the 'experience' --- in the stream of the 'experience.' So 'experience' is a misleading word, for it implies that one is still inside somehow, that the world is 'out there' and mediated somehow. Sartre basically says the same thing [quoted below.]

Is this a 'solipsistic' streaming ? No. What is 'experienced' (what just is 'perspectively') is the usual world-in-common. I see the cat from this side of the room, and you from that. We both intend that worldly cat, and the sociality of rationality in general is what glues the cubist painting together.

*******

Sartre devotes a great deal of effort to establishing the impersonal (or “pre-personal”) character of consciousness, which stems from its non-egological structure and results directly from the absence of the I in the transcendental field. According to him, intentional (positional) consciousness typically involves an anonymous and “impersonal” relation to a transcendent object:

When I run after a streetcar, when I look at the time, when I am absorbed in contemplating a portrait, there is no I. […] In fact I am plunged in the world of objects; it is they which constitute the unity of my consciousness; […] but me, I have disappeared; I have annihilated myself. There is no place for me on this level. (Sartre 1936a [1957: 49; 2004: 8])

The tram appears to me in a specific way (as “having-to-be-overtaken”, in this case) that is experienced as its own mode of phenomenalization, and not as a mere relational aspect of its appearing to me. The object presents itself as carrying a set of objective properties that are strictly independent from one’s personal relation to it. The streetcar is experienced as a transcendent object, in a way that obliterates and overrides, so to speak, the subjective features of conscious experience; its “having-to-be-overtaken-ness” does not belong to my subjective experience of the world but to the objective description of the way the world is (see also Sartre 1936a [1957: 56; 2004: 10–11]). When I run after the streetcar, my consciousness is absorbed in the relation to its intentional object, “the streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken”, and there is no trace of the “I” in such lived-experience.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/#TranEgoDiscInte

The 'soft' indirect realism of Hobbes and Locke does indeed make senes when applied to the worldly ego. Mach discusses this kind of functional relationship between stones and eyes, ice cream cones and brains. So the stumblingblock to understanding neutral monism (nonduality) is seeing around this still-worldly ego to the 'pure witness' which is confusingly still typically presented as if subjective.

Contrary to the mystically inclined, I take a positivistic, verificationist approach to this issue. I find/offer no cure for life here but only the pleasure of untying an old conceptual knot --- untying it again, grasping an old solution to an old 'problem' which is merely a theoretical tangle, and not a practical problem.

I agree tho with Sartre that 'the spirit of seriousness' (see Existential Psychoanalysis ) will probably make untangling such a knot seem not only impractical but even offensive. Utopians and proselytes will always ignore/resent the metaphor (now we are 'spiritual') that all is הֶבֶל. Such a metaphor manifests an offensive, post-pessimistic 'transcendence.'

I got wind that Schlick was a neutral monist (I suspected that circle would be so to some degree, given W's proximity), and I found this.

Schlick ( [Wende] p.8 ) interprets Wittgenstein's position as follows: philosophy "is that activity by which the meaning of propositions is established or discovered"; it is a question of "what the propositions actually mean. The content, soul, and spirit of science naturally consist in what is ultimately meant by its sentences; the philosophical activity of rendering significant is thus the alpha and omega of all scientific knowledge"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moritz_Schlick

I feel you, Schlick.

we are also able to think that the world is, in itself, beyond all and any perspective. — Janus

So you claim, but one can also make the phrase 'round square.' I continue to claim that beyond all and any perspective is nonsense. Kant sometimes seemed to want to 'cure' people of such talk, but his cure was more of the poison, because he didn't have the nerve to go all the way. But Mach, who studied Kant closely, finally broke through.

In case it's helpful, here's another example of an innocent phrase that turns out to have no meaning (or only a kind of 'failed' or unstable meaning.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_paradox

The world from perspectives is not the fusion of subject and object, but the separation of them. — Janus

As far as I can make out, you still don't get it, though it I admit that it's hard to find the right words. And it's hard to let go of indirect realism. [ If you think I'm an indirect realist, then you just don't understand me. ]

You seem to think (?) of everyone getting their own representation of the world. As if everyone lived in their own bubble of 'appearance.' In other words, the world is X and every person's experience is only f(X), where f is that person's cognition, which never gives X in its purity. So there's Real World out there but we only get the mediated version.

But that's not what I'm saying at all. There is no [hidden] X. X just is only perspectively. Not mediated. The structure of X itself (in each of its streamings) is ego-like, but consciousness does not exist. No witness is needed. There is only world.

****
To be a little more careful, there are fundamentally only 'neutral' (nondual, no-category-needed-really) 'beingstreams' or 'becomings.' The 'same' 'worldly objects' and characters appear in different streams. All of the items of the world appear only in such streams. The being involved is the deepest meaning of 'first person consciousness,' but being in its purity can't be operationalized. Is existence in the deepest sense a predicate ? I don't think so. The merely practical appearance / reality distinction is a red herring, for that's about sorting daydreams from dandruff. There is only reality, though different entities exist differently, and empirical egos very much care about whether it's 'real' money or the [still real] idea of money.

****

X in its aperspectival 'purity' is a maybe the official Round Square of metaphysics. It's like a story told in no language at all. But indirect realism of the softer Hobbes/Locke variety does make sense when applied only to the worldly or psychological ego. These are just the typical functional relationships discussed here.

In a nutshell: because correlation doesn’t explain consciousness. — Art48

Any operational-scientific definition of consciousness will work just fine. We can agree to attribute 'consciousness' to this human body or that moon-sized computer, given this or that set of observations. But (here's where I go nondualist and weird and controversial) what people are trying to say (if they could wriggle out of the net?) is that consciousness is being itself. But, for just that reason, there is no consciousness. Rashomon. Or As I Lay Dying. The unreliable narrator is inextricably tangled with the narrated. Ontological cubism. 'But tell us what really happened, apart from all telling...' There's just the world-from-perspectives, an utter fusion of the subject and object. Though these categories remain practically relevant. The empirical-normative subject is not going anywhere. It's a basic technology like language (and both are part of the same system, really?)

I mentioned a famous very-early lecture by Heidegger above, and I hunted down some passages that some of you might like.

What is immediately given! Every word here is significant. What does 'immediate' mean? The lectern is given to me immediately in the lived experience of it. I see it as such, I do not see sensations and sense data. I am not conscious of sensations at all. Yet I still see brown, the brown colour. But I do not see it as a sensation of brown, as a moment of my psychic processes. I see something brown, but in a unified context of signification in connection with the lectern. But I can still disregard everything that belongs to the lectern, I can brush away everything until I arrive at the simple sensation of brown, and I can make this itself into an object. It then shows itself as something primarily given. It is indisputable that I can do this.

Only I ask myself: what does 'given' mean here? Do I experience this datum 'brown' as a moment of sensation in the same way as I do the lectern? Does it 'world' in the brown as such, apprehended as a datum? Does my historical 'I' resonate in this apprehension? Evidently not. And what does immediately given mean? To be sure, I do not need to derive it subsequently like an extraworldly cause; the sensation is itself there, but only in so far as I destroy what environmentally surrounds it, in so far as I remove, bracket and disregard my historical 'I' and simply practice theory, in so far as I remain primarily in the theoretical attitude. This primary character is only what it is when I practice theory, when the theoretical attitude is in effect, which itself is possible only as a destruction of the environmental experience. This datum is conceived as a psychic datum which is caused, as an object, albeit one which does not belong to the external world but is within me. Where within? In my consciousness? Is this something spatial? But the external world is spatial, the realist will answer, and it is my scientific task to investigate the way in which something psychical can know the space of the external world, the way in which the sensations of various sense organs work together, from external causes, to bring about a perception of space.

But presupposing that realism could solve all these (to some degree paradoxically posed) problems, would that in any way amount to an explanation and justification of environmental experience, even if only a moment out of it were 'explained'? Let us illustrate this from the moment of spatial perception, an environmental perception. In the course of a hike through the woods I come for the first time to Freiburg and ask, upon entering the city, 'Which is the shortest way to the cathedral?' This spatial orientation has nothing to do with geometrical orientation as such. The distance to the cathedral is not a quantitative interval; proximity and distance are not a 'how much' ; the most convenient and shortest way is also not something quantitative, not merely extension as such. Analogue to the time-phenomenon. In other words: these meaningful phenomena of environmental experience cannot be explained by destroying their essential character, by denying their real meaning in order to advance a theory. Explanation through dismemberment, i.e. destruction: one wants to explain something which one no longer has as such, which one cannot and will not recognize as such in its validity.

https://ia903000.us.archive.org/33/items/ApolloHumanRightsBooks/36102337-17775771-Heidegger-Towards-the-Definition-of-Philosophy.pdf
You'll note at the end there a preview of what might be called existential or genuine or experiential space and time, which was also studied by Mach and James.

This is a related passage. The 'environmental' is developed throughout many lectures after this one before B&T arrives. Just noticing the environmental is hard for some of us brought up in a theoretical tradition that reality is 'really' [just/only] [the latest theoretical posit.]

Thingliness marks out a quite original sphere distilled out of the environmental; in this sphere, the 'it worlds' has already been extinguished. The thing is merely there as such, i.e. it is real, it exists. Reality is therefore not an environmental characteristic, but lies in the essence of thingliness. It is a specifically theoretical characteristic. The meaningful is de-interpreted into this residue of being real. Experience of the environment is de-vivified into the residue of recognizing something as real. The historical 'I' is de-historicized into the residue of a specific 'I-ness' as the correlate of thingliness; and only in following through the theoretical does it have its 'who', i.e. merely 'deducible'?! Phenomenologically disclosed!! Thing experience is certainly a lived experience, but understood vis-a-vis its origin from the environmental experience it is already de-vivification.

This beautiful passage is also worth quoting:

But philosophy can progress only through an absolute sinking into life as such, for phenomenology is never concluded, only preliminary, it always sinks itself into the preliminary. The science of absolute honesty has no pretensions. It contains no chatter but only evident steps; theories do not struggle with one another here, but only genuine with ungenuine insights. The genuine insights, however, can only be arrived at through honest and uncompromising sinking into the genuineness of life as such, in the final event only through the genuineness of personal life as such.

Given our fast-paced conversation, I would submit that an object is something like an existent thing (a wholeness or unity). Unperceived or even imperceptible objects are therefore possible.

For example, maybe someone believes in an imperceptible ghost or spirit that nevertheless possesses causal powers to influence the world which we are able to perceive. On my view this putative ghost is an object. For Mill it cannot be, having no possibility of sensation. (The notion at play here is object-as-causal-agent.) — Leontiskos

I think Mill was primarily just trying to make sense of matter, not limit all existence to sensation, but I'm not sure. This is an excellent issue in any case. Husserl tackles a related issue in his investigation of the meaning of the invisible entities of physics. For him, there's no problem though, because he acknowledges the reality of ideas. But it's crucial that such ideas are just part of the lifeworld. A table is not 'really' atoms or quarks. It is also atoms or quarks. The real table is not some gray shiny source code hidden 'behind' the one we sit at. We just 'look' at the table not only with our eyes but also with our entire mind and culture. Heidegger's historical-I is valuable here.

Note that your ghost, as entity in the conversation, already has some experiential content, and most ghosts will end up having a further role in the inferential nexus. 'The rain god is angry. So the rain will not come. But we will offer up a sacrifice.'

I think I addressed your object-as-causal-agent already [ Brandom's discursive/normative subject ] , tho I'd say object-as-responsible-agent. Such an agent is essentially temporal, a 'creature capable of making promises,' and held responsible for a coherent narrative, etc.

Thus it is quite different to talk about objects as things perceived rather than as possibilities of perception. Talk of "[permanent] possibilities of sensation" elicits the question as to why these possibilities are permanent (or semi-permanent). — Leontiskos

I still think possibilities of experience works in say Husserl or Sartre, but what catches my eye here is that elicited question. Now it is of course a good question, but, with my phenomenological cap on, I prioritize [merely ] clarifying the given, making it explicit. As Husserl put it, phenomenology is the genuine positivism (the point being its honesty about direct experience including prime numbers and 'transcendent' trombones --- and the horizonal lifeworld in general.-- as opposed to blind adherence to a sensedata tradition, etc.)

For context, I personally think there 'must' always be brute fact. At the end of any ascending chain of explanations there is 'just because.' If God did it, then why is God such as to want to do that ? If some physics formula is hyped as the final word, then why is the final word like that and not otherwise ? I agree with Wittgenstein that only impossibility is logical possibility, but that's a pseudo-proposition, a tautology if one understands it, perhaps an implicit definition of logical.

Your <quote from Hobbes> is a propos. It is precisely the object that impresses itself upon the sense organ. To talk about sensation apart from an object sensed is a very different approach to the senses and perception. — Leontiskos

As Mach put it, we find functional relationships all the time between 'inner' and 'outer' things. This is the point of my Flat Ontology thread. It's all in a single causal-inferential nexus. I think this is Hegel's point, when he said no finite [ disconnected ! ] thing has genuine being. Things 'are' (to overstate it) their relationships with other things.
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What Hobbes doesn't address is that those sense organs exist for other sense organs. So the being of matter in motion apart from all such organs is left indeterminate, hence Mill's attempted clarification, etc.

In case it's helpful for understanding my POV, I endorse this:

The Ego is the specific object that intentional consciousness is directed upon when performing reflection—an object that consciousness “posits and grasps […] in the same act” (Sartre 1936a [1957: 41; 2004: 5]), and that is constituted in and by the act of reflection (Sartre 1936a [1957: 80–1; 2004: 20]). Instead of a transcendental subject, the Ego must consequently be understood as a transcendent object similar to any other object, with the only difference that it is given to us through a particular kind of experience, i.e., reflection. The Ego, Sartre argues, “is outside, in the world. It is a being of the world, like the Ego of another” (Sartre 1936a [1957: 31; 2004: 1]).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/#TranEgoDiscInte

The discursive subject described by Brandom is a locus of responsibility. Our bodies are trained into becoming this kind of entity, a responsible who rather than a mere what. But I place this discursive subject in the world as our most fundamental tradition --- a crucial piece of technology, for we are cyborgs, vampires even, in the way we bind time. One is one around here. There is exactly one responsible agent-soul in your/my flesh. The rest is madness or sci-fi.

But to me this is still a worldly entity, an unreliable narrator completely enmeshed in a concept-structured lifeworld-from-perspective. The story is not separable from the narrator, as if somehow written in another language which is no language at all. 'Deeper' than this discursive subject is the 'pure witness' which is no longer a witness really but just the fact that the world happens to gather around the flesh that therefore seems to host it. And this world includes feelings and fantasies as well as fountains and fawns.

Usually when we talk about the possibility of perceiving, we are talking about the possibility of perceiving some object. — Leontiskos

:up:
I think you've found a weak part in Mill's account. At the very least, he did not go into detail about the experienced unity of the object, what Husserl calls its transcendence. Mill is still too much caught in sense-data empiricism of his time.

the very idea of anything out of ourselves is derived solely from the knowledge experience gives us of the Permanent Possibilities. Our sensations we carry with us wherever we go, and they never exist where we are not; but when we change our place we do not carry away with us the Permanent Possibilities of Sensation: they remain until we return, or arise and cease under conditions with which our presence has in general nothing to do. And more than all—they are, and will be after we have ceased to feel, Permanent Possibilities of sensation to other beings than ourselves. — Mill

But he dissolves the sensing self in a way that foreshadows Mach. The only way to have a world in common and no selves and no [ 'deep' ] matter is (as far as I can tell) perspectival worldstreaming --- first person 'consciousness' as [nondual, perspectival ] being itself. With the experiencer goes experience, with only being left behind, the simple it-is-there-ness of a radical plurality of entities.

We have no conception of Mind itself, as distinguished from its conscious manifestations. We neither know nor can imagine it, except as represented by the succession of manifold feelings which metaphysicians call by the name of States or Modifications of Mind. It is nevertheless true that our notion of Mind, as well as of Matter, is the notion of a permanent something, contrasted with the perpetual flux of the sensations and other feelings or mental states which we refer to it; a something which we figure as remaining the same, while the particular feelings through which it reveals its existence, change. — Mill

Respectfully, what I'm hearing is platitudinal. To me it's such a truism that people think differently that I wouldn't think to mention it. This is a forum, right ? Where voices collide ? As mere cautionary platitude, it is not relativism, I agree. But it's also not relevant to the thread, which was potentially actually about something. I like your posts by the way, so I don't mean to come off rude. I'm just surprised with the detour here.

I am of course wary of defining objects in terms of perception. — Leontiskos

As you should be. The theory is interesting because it challenges some vague but strong sense of there being more to physical being than our actual and possible experience. It just 'sounds wrong.' But what then does one mean beyond such possible perceptions ? And ultimately beyond experience itself ?

To be sure, indirect realism needs some kind of Stuff Out There, because they have a Subject In Here. But Mach and James don't. It's all one stream (or, strangely, many perspectival streams of the 'same' world.)

I think my single sentence about the common opinion has ended up being a distraction. — Leontiskos

Let's forget it then.

But it's not what objects are. Objects are not defined in terms of perception. — Leontiskos

I don't think objects are very well defined. I think all people end up meaning...being able to find words for...is possibilities of perception. I haven't heard any good alternative yet.

From the book you cited in your other thread: — Leontiskos

I can't recall the context, but I reject the speculative realists. I sometimes quote their presentations of correlationism, though, for it's one of 'em that gave me the handy term in the first place. But there's a huge gap between Kantian indirect realism and my own Mach/James inspired nondualism. So the speculative realists haven't clarified their opponent.

I could just say 'fruit' instead of 'experience of fruit' if I wasn't reacting against what I'd call the metaphysical fantasy of aperspectival reality.

Yes, I realize that. A power is an easy example. An apple tree has the power to produce fruit. It possesses this power, we can know this through inference, and nevertheless the power is not perceptible. — Leontiskos

That power is possibility. I perceive an apple tree, and I understand the possibility of [ a future experience of ] fruit, given certain conditions. If I nurture the tree, if it's not cut down, then I can hope to enjoy fruit.

Note that most of the objects in the world are not currently perceived (by this or that single person). And I've never seen the Eiffel Tower, but I think I could see it, given certain conditions.

I think someone like Mill is saying, "Objects are this and not that. Your pre-theoretical view was mistaken." I don't think he is saying that "this" unfolds from "that", such that both are secure. — Leontiskos

The point is an explication of the pre-theoretical view.

I think what we understand in the first place is a thing, and secondarily that the thing has perceptible properties, and then later that the thing likely has non-perceptible properties. — Leontiskos

Sure, we start in the world of things, not as philosophers. Then we learn to analyze, account for the subjects and objects. But I object to 'non-perceptible properties.' What's that supposed to mean ? Science finds patterns in perceptions. Or so I claim.

.

Objects are things that we encounter through our senses, not possibilities of sensation. — Leontiskos

That's just a rephrasing, it seems to me.

Here's a classic passage that nails the spirit of phenomenology.

What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar”. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these secure points, and in consequence goes on merely along the surface. Apprehending and proving consist similarly in seeing whether every one finds what is said corresponding to his idea too, whether it is familiar and seems to him so and so or not.
...
Analysis of an idea, as it used to be carried out, did in fact consist in nothing else than doing away with its character of familiarity.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phprefac.htm

My own philosophical work is largely motivated by a sense that people don't know very well what they are talking about in the first place. And I don't think such ambiguity is ever completely reducible. Obviously inferences are important, but meaningless or insufficiently determinate conclusions are worthless.

An "unfolding" which contradicts the previous notion is redefinition. — Leontiskos

What previous definition ? People mostly use words like tools with pre-theoretical skill. We are concept-mongering practical primates. It's the worldly foolishness of philosophy and all that. Making it explicit is hard work. And most people just don't need such clarity.

Presumably what he is trying to do is convince the world that an object is not what they suppose it to be, but this is too seldom explicit. My favorite philosophers are very careful to avoid this sort of redefinition. — Leontiskos

Come on though, that's presumption, as you say. Uncharitable. And Mill is dead. So please just try to understand me, and then defeat my position.

Also, I have always thought this would be an interesting study in itself. What does it mean for a philosopher to redefine a commonly used term? For instance, what does it mean when Mill comes along and redefines objects as possibilities of sensation? Is this not equivocation? — Leontiskos

Explication (unfolding) is not redefinition.

The non-sequitur is that, just because we know objects through sensation, it does not follow that objects just are possibilities of sensation. — Leontiskos

As I've said, the issue is semantic. People sometimes worry about whether P is warranted. But they forget to check whether P is meaningful. Respectfully, you still haven't met my challenge, unless I haven't got to that part yet.

How do you understand the existence of physical objects ?

Mill is close to talking about a representation (sensation) rather than the object itself. He is defining the object in terms of sensation-representation. — Leontiskos

I'd say you'd have to look into his 'deconstruction' of the self too. To be clear, I don't take Mill or anyone really as an authority. But Mill gets something right. It's what I was getting at with what I quoted above.

The essential partiality of our view of things, he argued, their being given only in a certain perspective and at a certain moment in time, does not diminish their reality, but on the contrary establishes it, as there is no other way for things to be co-present with us and with other things than through such "Abschattungen" (profiles, adumbrations).

The thing transcends our view, but is manifest precisely by presenting itself to a range of possible views. The object of perception is immanently tied to its background—to the nexus of meaningful relations among objects within the world.

In case it helps, I intensely agree with early Heidegger (famous KNS1919 lecture) that we get a meaningful world directly. We get tables and wigs and cats, not planes of color, etc. And this lifeworld is also profoundly cultural and historical, so I see a picture of Shakespeare and grasp the cultural significance immediately (though of course I can always look more closely, and so on ---for all is horizonal).

So I utterly reject crude sense-data understandings of the given. The lifeworld is the given. So the point for me is not sensation (though sense organs are involved) but perspective. The object is always situated in a field of vision, and we understand it in the first place as something that could be looked at.

Further, no one actually thinks about objects in such a way. . — Leontiskos

:up:

Of course. But most people aren't philosophers.