Dasein is time. What can you make of that ? Is that metaphor or what ?

I don't see how a deliberate misreading can make anything clear. Does he use temporal terms metaphorically? — Fooloso4

Haven't you read the guy ? Of course. But successful metaphors become literalized. I'd say it's more like a continuum that runs from hard wax to hot wax. I've already quoted some passages for you about interpretedness.

comment
Lots of people quote Heidegger without risking a paraphrase. Calling my interpretation a creative misreading is to some degree just humility. On the other hand, I'm not a disciple of Heidegger but a rival poet 'forced' to consume an influence too weighty to be circumvented. While I do try to project a cohesive interpretation on the texts, it's not my life's project to get Heidegger right but rather to crank out some good philosophy myself, transforming what's been thrown to me into something that is mine, appropriate to the singularity of my mortal moment. Yet as poetry / philosophy this thing I create is for the tribe. I'm a faithful Hegelbot, working on my little piece of the graveleaping selfreferential blockchain.

Much like the case of the schizophrenic who hears voices. You don't have to accept the existence of some private, immaterial mind to at least accept this much. — Michael

I think it's better to talk about people being able to be wrong. The point is they are trying to talk about the world. 'Sorry, I thought I paid that bill.' (I thought it was the case that I paid that bill [in our/real world])

Ignore the question of the nature of experience if it doesn't interest you. — frank

Oh it does interest me. Didn't mean to offend or be rude or evasive somehow. The question of the meaning of being is great. We can dig into that if you want. My feeling is that not much can be said. So Heidegger ends up being more interesting to me in terms of what can be talked about, the historicity of beingthere in language.

I think this happens to some degree but what was need not determine what we will be. If our past governs our self-interpretation then what is to be gained by trying to educate and improve ourselves? — Fooloso4

We can successfully criticize the past 'as' that same past. We can indeed bring one metaphor to bear on another. We are also 'generative.' We somehow create new metaphors.

Clearly we do become more complex, more articulate. To me this is the genius of Hegel. He saw the towering accumulation of knowing's or freedom's self-consciousness. We are the process which decides and articulates its own nature, with greater and greater power and complexity. Theology itself is a god on the way to its birth. Or is it on the way to its mirror ? A cat trying to catch its tail ?

Unthrown on the throne, but the one must be thrown, cannot escape a residue of passivity.


Hegel denies the intelligibility of the idea of a set of determinate concepts (that is, the ground-level concepts we apply in empirical and practical judgment) that is ultimately adequate in the sense that by correctly applying those concepts one will never be led to commitments that are incompatible according to the contents of those concepts. This claim about the inprinciple instability of determinate concepts, the way in which they must collectively incorporate the forces that demand their alteration and further development, is the radically new form Hegel gives to the idea of the conceptual inexhaustibility of sensuous immediacy. Not only is there no fore-ordained “end of history” as far as ordinary concept-application in our cognitive and practical deliberations is concerned, the very idea that such a thing makes sense is for Hegel a relic of thinking according to metacategories of Verstand rather than of Vernunft.

All that he thinks the system of logical concepts he has uncovered and expounded does for us is let us continue to do out in the open, in the full light of self-conscious explicitness that lets us say what we are doing, what we have been doing all along without being able to say what was implicit in those doings.

If this was my past then I would not have this tool. My ability to develop language would not have developed. And yet, without being able to critique my past I would still have a past. — Fooloso4

Just to be clear, Heidegger and my creative misreading are both using temporal terms with different intensities of metaphoricity. Let me try another approach. Look at the shape of a hawk. Think of how much 'experience' (struggle for survival) in encoded in its DNA. In the same way, the latest best bots encoded the entire internet, a history of reading and learning, in a few billion floating point numbers. To be encultured is to 'download' compressed tribal 'experience' which is used to meet the future and also functions as an 'organ of perception.' One absorbs norms by interaction and example. Bots internalize them from examples alone.

How did language evolve to such complexity ? I don't pretend to know the details.

In what sense is what I have been the language and conceptuality I am? If I was dropped on my head as a baby is what happened language and conceptuality? If was neglected and malnourished and ate lead paint how is that language and conceptuality? — Fooloso4

The issue is what you want to identify with. Are you that body ? A merely occurrent thing ? Are you the legs and not the dance ?

To be clear, I'm not denying that we have bodies. I think language is a movement of the body, not some magic immaterial substance 'contained' in sentences but those 'material' sentences themselves. To wag a tongue, to wave a flag.

We need the hardware to run the software. We need legs to dance.

As I see it, at least some of Heidegger's work is as good as philosophy gets. I won't burn Pound's Cantos for his political stupidity, and I won't burn Heidegger's The Concept of Time. I can and do think antisemitism is stupid. Perhaps I ought to understand how otherwise smart people found it alluring.

I suspect that antisemites project repressed parts of themselves on a scapegoat. They are rootless mandarins who are therefore afflicted by an impossible nostalgia. 'If only if only that alien corrosive modern egoistic 'worldless' moneygrabbing subject would go away, all could be Pure again, and I could truly appropriate the soil again like a tree with roots as deep as a grave.

I wonder if indirect realism and phenomenalism has served to obfuscate the biology of hallucination rather than helped to explain it. — NOS4A2

I think the word seems has messed with folks. I talk about the world. I may indicate uncertainty by saying It seems to me that that's a tree. This is not equivalent to I see a tree on a private internal screen, so perhaps there is really a tree analogously place.

Exposing a brain to a particular wavelength of light to see how the brain or particles/waves of a brain reacts to the light does not necessitate the need to posit “sense data” to understand the science behind the phenomenon. — Richard B

:up:

Oldschool metaphysics is folk psychology.

OK. But clearly the normativity is partly a priori (as per the Transcendental Aesthetic). — frank

Perhaps it's apriori like riding a bike is apriori for those who can. It's easy for us to talk everyday talk now. It's easy to not pee the bed. I find it plausible that rational norms are patterns or memes that evolved in human doings over thousands of years. They aren't more 'in here' than 'out there' between us. We have the brains / hardware to learn the norms / language / software. Logic need not be eternal. We can't see around it. We 'are' it. Here's how Dreyfus approaches it:

For both Heidegger and Wittgenstein, then, the source of the intelligibility of the world is the average public practices through which alone there can be any understanding at all. What is shared is not a conceptual scheme, i.e., not a belief system that can be made explicit and justified. Not that we share a belief system that is always implicit and arbitrary. That is just the Sartrean version of the same mistake. What we share is simply our average comportment. Once a practice has been explained by appealing to what one does, no more basic explanation is possible. As Wittgenstein puts it in On Certainty: "Giving grounds [must] come to an end sometime. But the end is not an ungrounded presupposition: it is an ungrounded way of acting.
...
This view is entirely antithetical to the philosophical ideal of total clarity and ultimate intelligibility. Philosophers seek an ultimate ground. When they discover there is none, even modern philosophers ... seem to think that they have fallen into an abyss -- that the lack of an ultimate ground has catastrophic consequences for human activity.
...
There is, however, something that average everyday intelligibility obscures, viz., that it is merely average everyday intelligibility. It takes for granted that the everyday for-the-sake-of-whichs and the equipment that serves them are based upon God's goodness, human nature, or at least solid good sense. This is what Heidegger called "the perhaps necessary appearance of foundation." One cannot help thinking that the right (healthy, civilized, rational, natural, etc.) way to sit, for example, is on chairs, at tables, etc., not on the floor. Our way seems to make intrinsic sense -- a sense not captured in saying, "This is what we in the West happen to do." What gets covered up in everyday understanding is not some deep intelligibility as the tradition has always held; it is that the ultimate "ground" of intelligibility is simply shared practices. There is no right interpretation. Average intelligibility is not inferior intelligibility; it simply obscures its own groundlessness. This is the last stage of the hermeneutics of suspicion. The only deep interpretation left is that there is no deep interpretation.

.

And I will comment, that just about everybody contributing to this thread has done that at one time or another. — frank

:up:

Sure. But I think we should ignore the internals altogether. Forget pineal gremlins and immaterial private showings. Let's look at how in fact we treat claims for which selves are responsible. Let's look directly at what philosophy itself is doing and what that doing requires or implies.

I really don’t understand you at all. — Michael

:up:

Whether or not I’m blind has everything to do with whether or not I can see and nothing to do with whether or not I can talk. — Michael

Yes, of course.

I'm throwing a rope down a well and trying to pull you out of this metaphor of internality. Forget everything else for a moment and consider this.

A philosopher, as such, makes claims about semantic norms with the authority of such norms. We can frame this as talk about electrons, for instance, but it's (equivalently?) talk about the talk about electrons, about how the concept is legitimately used. A philosopher is a semantic policeman. We all have a badge and no one is chief. We create a constitution in terms of what is already tentatively written there (Neurath's boat.). Sementic norms (the ones already largely tacitly shared ) are used to justify the enlargement and modification of semantic norms (criticizing those which have lost their value and introducing new concepts / metaphors).

The key here is that the individual philosopher comments on the norms, the way we (the royal we of universal rationality) ought to talk. If you disagree, you only prove my point, for you imply that I break the rules.

'We ought to think about talk about things this way rather than that way. '
'That does not follow.'
'You are assuming the conclusion.'
'That's not how the concept is used.'
'But you can't share my private experience.'

By and large phil-of-math people have recognized that we can't do without abstract objects due to some basic logic. Now if you want to dispense with logic, that's another matter. — frank

In principle, informal proofs can be translated into extremely pedantic formal proofs and checked by computers. So it's possible to think of all as a generalization of chess. I'm a big fan of Chaitin's Metamath. A FAS (formal axiomatic system) is an idealized program (one could create concrete examples in many ways) that cranks out all theorems implied by a set of axioms but enumerating all finite strings of symbols and seeing if they are proofs. It's all 'dead' symbol crunching.

Start with what you can't do without, then ponder the ontology. Otherwise the tail is wagging the dog. — frank

All we need is structure. Check out group theory to see this vividly. This I can talk about with a fair amount of confidence. No one in grad school every asked me for metaphysics but only to write proofs according to certain largely tacit norms.

All true. There are two egos. One appears in reflection only. As far as it has responsibility, this means it's being identified as a causal agent. It can also be helpless, so it's not just a matter of having power. — frank

We can maybe call this the empirical-normative ego.

quality of being. The here and now. The view out the windows of your eyeballs. — frank

In its radical purity, I think it's best called just being and not consciousness. We realize upon reflection, dragging in the heavy machinery of public concepts, that it's a 'view' through eyeholes. But deeper than that is just its thereness, if such a thing can be really communicated. Here's Witt:

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

The experience that we need in order to understand logic is not that something or other is the state of things, but that something is: that, however, is not experience.

To say 'I wonder at such and such being the case' has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case. In this sense one can wonder at the existence of, say, a house when one sees it and has not visited it for a long time and has imagined that it had been pulled down in the meantime. But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing. I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it's clouded. But that's not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is. One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. But then it's just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.

There is something ! I swear !

“Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general." Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. — Joshs

We are always carefully on the way to something. We are always bringing something to fruition, making it present. We come toward our possibilities, what we want to be. What we have been is interpreted in this context, in terms of realizing and further articulating our possibilities. Critique of the past is 'really' critique of the present in the realization of a possible future.

What we have been is also the very language and conceptuality which we 'are' by default and which we must use (there are no other tools) in order to critique this past itself, this past that leaps ahead, governing our self-interpretation today and what is possible for us tomorrow.

I am the history from which I'm trying to awake, the history that twists to free itself of itself, like a snake shaking off dead skin. I am that which would be its own father, having never been thrown. The deepest having-been-thrown is perhaps linguistic. My 'spiritual substance' is sediment I did not choose, and 'I' myself (a normative function of language) am part of this sediment. How does the mound of memes in our beehive change with or rather as the times ?


the who of every say dasein

Yep, and it’s not just the problem of other heads. — Jamal

:up:

Exactly ! The idea that I'm inside (my skull or wall of intuitions and concepts) to begin with only makes sense by a secret taking of common sense for granted, that I have a body in nature with other bodies, that I have sense organs on which I depend to see what's going on.

Then this has nothing to do with direct and indirect realism, which concerns the nature of perception, not the nature of conversation. — Michael

To what are you appealing to say so ? How could you possibly establish truths about the nature of perception without relying on inferential and semantic norms ? How could any theory avoid absurdity if it neglected to address or even acknowledge the condition of its possibility ? To do philosophy is to take up a duty to conform to certain norms and speak about a world beyond the self. Or is logic a private matter ? But that would be a self-cancelling statement.

To me it's as if there's a temptation to do folk psychology with almost mystically reclusive entities.

They aren't mental objects because one can be wrong about them, but they aren't physical like golf balls. — frank

:up:

OK. I'm a math guy by training, so I can relate. As I grok it, certain norms are set up and then other norms fall out pretty naturally from them. Once one learns to start with 1 and also learns to add 1 more, one has a kind of 'potentially infinite' staircase. Then one can define prime numbers and prove you never run out of them, etc. I'm pretty much with this guy:

In "What Numbers Could Not Be" (1965), Benacerraf argues against a Platonist view of mathematics, and for structuralism, on the ground that what is important about numbers is the abstract structures they represent rather than the objects that number words ostensibly refer to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Benacerraf

This fits in nicely with Saussure on nonmath language. It's about roles rather than 'positive elements.' And that gets us back to equivalence classes of tools that pretty much do the same thing.

Lemons are sour and yellow, i.e., taste sour and look yellow. That you think this is (equivalent to) an hallucination plus an external trigger is just your headbound epistemology. — Jamal

:up:
Heads too are hallucinations in this mad but popular interpretation of our existence.

This is where we will never agree. There is more to life and the world than language. Things happen that aren’t talked about. I don’t need a language or a community of people to interact with to have experiences. — Michael

Sure, that's the grammar of 'experience.' Who can deny your beetle if they can't even signify it ?But to do philosophy is to push on tribal norms. As philosophy, it's not the random emission of words. It appeals to norms as it critiques them, like Neurath's boat.

It's not I see the tree directly but (much better!) I talk about the tree ( our tree) and not my image of the tree.

According to Genesis we are already gods, although that was not the intention and not a task we were ready to take on. A responsibility that god took from us when it became clear that nothing man set out to do would be impossible for them (Genesis 11). What was stolen from them was stolen back by the thinkers of Enlightenment Humanism and the goal of a universal language. — Fooloso4

:up:

Moloch demands a tower ! Drop us on fossil fuels and watch the explosion of selfreferential complexity.

Are we still fighting for the same tribe today and for the same reasons, in your opinion?
If you think we are, then is that wise? Is it not time to reinterpret your lion shield aesthetic?
What tribe do you belong to? — universeness

I think you misread me. In our 'impostume of peace' in which nailbiting adolescents find new diseases every day to wear for a camera that follows them endlessly, it's easy to forget that humans aren't necessarily alienated from their gods, wallowing beneath them in confusion and fear. Humanism itself has a lion on its shield. Christ the lion is the light bringer, Lucifer, child of thunder, the morning star. I speak metaphorically to dig out the emotional charge of Enlightenment's Oedipal autonomy project. 'I will not serve. I will not have been thrown. Nothing is sacred but my own freedom to question.' [Our God is a devouring fire.] Satan laughing spreads his wings. Our metaphysics is a gloriously anemic mythology.

Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding [= reason[33]] without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. Sapere aude! [Dare to be wise!] Have courage to make use of your own understanding [= reason]! is thus the motto of enlightenment.

Reason must subject itself to critique in all its undertakings, and cannot restrict the freedom of critique through any prohibition without damaging itself and drawing upon itself a disadvantageous suspicion. For there is nothing so important because of its utility, nothing so holy, that it may be exempted from this searching review and inspection, which knows no respect for persons [i.e. no person bears more authority than any other—GW]. On this freedom rests the very existence of reason, which has no dictatorial authority, but whose claim is never anything more than the agreement of free citizens, each of whom must be able to express his reservations, indeed even his veto, without holding back

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-reason/#ReasCommPrin

I belong to the tribe of philosophers. I'm a piece of the self-articulating Hegel bot.

I agree with your description of humanism's ultimate goal, but I think the goal will forever be an asymptotic approach — universeness

:up:

Yes, humans will continue to do the work, but your attached 'sacrificial' imagery, adds nothing of value that I can find commonality with. — universeness

This is a Hegelian point. History moves toward more freedom and justice. People suffer terrible things now in this world. That's why an antinatalist thinks its cruel to bring children into such a place. But an optimist considers that things will keep getting better, that it's good overall to keep making babies. That some are born to endless night is considered a price worth paying, a reasonable sacrifice for the general weal.

Do you understand what is meant when we say that the schizophrenic hears voices, and that these voices are “in his head”?

The indirect realist argues that this exact same thing happens in the case of veridical experience. The only relevant difference is that in the case of veridical experience the voices-in-my-head are triggered by external world voices rather than by spontaneous brain activity. — Michael

Speaking as a direct realist, I truly get this point, but I think you are missing the point that the self is not 'in there' to begin with but more like an avatar within a conversation. As I see it, indirect realism gets sidetracked by practicing a kind of folk psychology, not realizing that the very case it makes is always already within a public space of reasons and inferential norms. Rational thought enacts and discusses tribal semantic norms. This is usually implicit.

**********************

People forget that philosophy always projects itself outward, imposing on what the universal rational person ought to think. 'One ought not just assume an external world.' 'One ought to realize that one has only images not the real world directly.' But this 'one' is essentially external and public, just as language is.

For AP, a sentence is an abstract object. — frank

To me Brandom is the beautiful collision of AP clarity and continental insight. FWIW, an equivalence class is still abstract in some sense, what exactly do we mean by 'abstract' ?

What do you do about the fact that you can't really exit this "house of being" in order to photograph it and talk about it? — frank

I think this is where Hegel and Heidegger pour into Brandom who puts their ideas in a more AP and less freaky vocabulary. A person is like something like a dance rather than a pair of legs. A person is, among other things, a locus of responsibility which is stretched between the past and the future. 'I' am held accountable for what I've said and done. An 'I' is the kind of the thing that ought not disagree with itself. This also applies to claims. I can't (I should not) say I love animals as I kick dogs for pissing in my yard.

I don’t think experience resembles the external world at all. — Michael

How you could possibly know though ? If 'external' impossibly gestures toward whatever we don't 'experience' ?

Traditional approaches posited a unitary a priori subject with self-identically persisting faculties of mind surveying external objects across a divide. — Joshs

:up:
We all had the same fixed faculties too.

Things are beings-in-themselves that appear before a subject. — Joshs

To ‘be’ is to be a crossing or intersection between past and present. — Joshs

:up:
Perhaps comment on the future too here ?

Suffering is real. People are not just fictive driftwood when they suffer. There is a Subject behind it. The “story” is covering this up and dressing it up. Now we are in fantasy and not what is the case. — schopenhauer1

I agree that there is suffering in the world. I'm of course not trying to silence you. Does the story 'cover up' subconceptual pain ? I'd say that the story is just not that pain itself, and that other stories miss the pleasure in life. To reiterate, I respect the edge and the nerve of antinatalism. It 'questions to the very end.' But, with Nietzsche, I don't stop but perhaps even truly start there.

We created gods, yes, but only because we have yet to consider ourselves as worthy of our own existence. ...Why do some feel like 'gods trapped in crucified dogs?' I think it's because such people are not in communication with their own core HUMANISM (or Samaritan, to project Tom as a kid!). — universeness

Consider the sigil of a lion on a shield on the morning of a battle. The glory and immortality of its god is the glory and immortality of the tribe.

Why would one feel trapped ? Shakespeare gave us Hamlet, perhaps still the most aware character ever written, trapped in a petty revenge plot. But I think also of Hobbes' kings who wage war to expand their holdings just to secure those they had already. The project known as humanism is that of us becoming gods. Antinatalism resents us not being there yet, us still being embarrassingly vulnerable. Humanism is willing to put in the work, put bodies on the altar, in the hope of a relative utopia to come ,though I will include ironism as a last late rancid version of humanism.

Exactly. We can thank Dreyfus , and to a certain extent Gadamer, for a god-awful misreading of Heidegger that turns him into a Kierkegaardian existentialist. — Joshs

It's unfortunate that the deepest stuff gets overshadowed by the lurid stuff. We are the (historical) house of being, not so much timebinding as bound time itself -- or bound time further binding itself. Do you see the modified minimal Hegelianism in this ?

The epiphany comes from looking at the tree the way an artist would. Just see the shapes and shades. When you realize that "tree" is an idea that organizes the data in the visual field in certain way, you begin to see that it's all ideas out there, this contrasted with that, foreground against background. — frank

I think there's value in that approach. We can talk about the tree as a unity of shapes, as atoms, as a piece of the ecosystem. The key though is that we are still talking about the tree, 'our' tree, the tree we can be wrong or right about.

I agree that 'it's all ideas out there' in the sense that 'language is the house of being,' that the lifeworld's structure is largely linguistic. I don't think it's something we can peel off, though we sometimes ignore a few layers of sediment for this or that purpose.

This isn't opposed to realism, it's just a particular way of understanding what it is that we call reality. It's a kind of projection, although that isn't right either. That's just a way of putting it phenomenologically. — frank

Our views may be close, and I adore phenomenology. I understand the temptation to call it projection. I think we tend to take the scientific image, itself a piece of this projection, as the screen receiving projection. We tend to say that wavelengths are 'real' but color isn't. But I take the entire lifeworld that we usually talk about as real, so color is real. But colortalk is part of our langnorms. (The deep qualia issue is on the edge, seems to me, right near the problem of being and the ineffable. It may be holy nonsense.)

BTW, I like talking to you because you're so poetic, it invites the same. Somethings come out better as poetry than as a recipe. See? More poetry. — frank

Thank you ! I love inspiring fresh metaphors.

I think we are finding common ground and learning to interpret one another.

if you're not then you're wrong in your characterisation of direct and indirect realism. — Michael

Or am I wrong about my 'image' of my characterisation of direct and indirect realism ?

Of course I'd be wrong about direct and indirect realism 'directly,' because language is how we refer to our world.

What we are doing is negotiating which inferences involving such concepts are legitimate.

The Direct Realist would say that the tree exists in a mind-independent worldexactly as we perceive the tree to be in our minds. The Indirect Realist would disagree. — RussellA

I'm sorry, but you've lost the thread. I claim that we see talk about the tree and not some image of it in our minds. This is not a claim about the internals of our immaterial angelic machinery. In fact we should stop saying see and start saying say to work against this confusion.

This is instead about how language works. We talk about the world, the tree.

Presumably an indirect realist is not just mumbling about their internal illusion but trying to share news about the 'real' world (or whatever an indirect realist wants to call the one we live in together).

The epistemological problem of perception concerns the extent to which perception informs us about what the world is like. That doesn't seem to have anything to do with language at all. — Michael

Have you looked into Sellars' 'space of reasons'? What is applying a concept ? Where do concepts come from ?

What really matters are linguistic norms. — plaque flag

That doesn't seem accurate. — Michael

Why should I be accurate, seriously ? (I'm not being rude or irrationalist here but trying to make explicit what we are doing at this very moment.)

But words and sentences are something else. The fact that the same sentence can be expressed by multiple utterances (a text engraved in stone vs a professor's quotation,) shows this. — frank

Have you considered equivalence classes ? You seem to be using the container metaphor. Different wrappers can contain the same candy. We can also think of different expressions having the roughly the same use. For this reason they have the same [enough] meaning / use.

More to say later but because it seems apt, GPT-4 just wrote this piece of micro fiction for me based on a piece of my own: — Baden

Pretty good and pretty eerie !

What else distinguishes the Direct Realist from the Indirect Realist ? — RussellA

The indirect realist (as I understand it) posits a internal image which simply is what it is, glowingly present, and may or may not represent accurately what's going on the external world.

The direct realist tries to do without this internal image, but not without sense organs. The direct realist is not so much focused on how the eyes see the tree and not the image of the tree, even if they will put the event this way. What really matters are linguistic norms. The 'I' that sees the tree exists within the space of reasons. The 'I' is like a character on a stage among others egos. Direct realists aren't worried about the internal structure of this 'I.' That's not the point. Language is fundamentally social, world-directed, and self-transcending. To see the tree is more usefully understand as to claim 'I see a tree.' We now think of this claim as a move in a social game. Think of a witness at a trial who had better keep his story straight. In social space, this witness 'is' his story or a kind of organizing avatar held responsible for it. Maybe this isn't all that a self is, but it's the way selves are 'used' in philosophy, so it's weird that it's mostly ignored. Why didn't Descartes ask about where logic itself came from ? As the proper (normative) way to think ? How did he know he was a self ? Why not random words attributed to no one rattling away in his skull? But instead we find something curious and reasonable already in place and knowing a language or two ....He 'was' that language (he was right in an important way), but language is anti-private, anti-isolated...it's bundled with a we.