I do not understand why some do not see or feel the emptiness of this description. The tone reminds me of negative theology, let us get to “Reality” by saying what it is not. But we never can get there, and they come up with equally empty slogans like if only we can get a “view from no where” or if we only can get “outside ourselves”. — Richard B

:up:

This thoughtvirus had an innocent birth. The world is complex and it's easy for an individual to say something stupid and wrong. So we learn to be more careful about the claims we make. We hold them more tentatively. This is smart. We self-consciously let our hypotheses die so that we may live.

But then a wacky blend of primitive psychology caught on which turned life into a videogame out of which we could never climb poor souls, down from which however our noses were ever pointy at those who childishly dreamed that they were not dreaming.

we cannot get outside our experience of it to see what whatever is causing it is in itself. — Janus

But how did you get outside your mind to see others' situations ? How can you make all these claims about what we can and can't know ? You won't even say where we are. Where are our bodies ?

I will of course politely drop it if you think further discussion is useless.

That said, even my dogs understand what "do you want to go to the beach" means.

I don't imagine "something in some occult sphere" that gives meaning or "life" to sentences; it's just a matter of habitually instilled association as I understand it. — Janus

That doesn't make sense, unless you want to reduce rational norms to 'habitually instilled associations.'

What is being associated with what ? It can't be hidden mind stuff, so ?

I'm not seeing any point here to respond to, which you should understand, even if only on the basis that you seem to think language so indeterminate. — Janus

Sure. But I also think people are different. I can't pretend to think all interpretations are equally good or that communication is impossible or offer some other easy target. Semantic finitude is not semantic nihilism. I can't get it all but I'll always want more. Will to power, will to clarity, will to beauty.

A command of language is simply the ability to communicate adequately. — Janus

You leap from stone to stone, as we all must when we clarify. Pile signs on signs. But not all piling is equal. What is it to communicate adequately ? We both already know 'well enough' in the fog of average intelligibility. In this context the point is to notice the leaping from stone to stone. Meaning is being is seeing is meaning is being. Forms and information and sensations. We dance around in a ring and suppose.

In case you missed it, I wasn't endorsing James but saying that a certain way of thinking (reducing all the subject, etc.) points toward the dissolution of a subject that no longer has an other to talk about or others to talk to.

The minimal rational situation is us in a language in a world together, with ourselves subject to norms for the making and acceptance of claims. This is almost tautological, but it's surprisingly nonobvious in various circles.

So I will boldly admit that I believe that I live in a world with other people. I don't think it makes sense to present this as 'very likely all things considered.' I think it's confusion to violate this unity.

But not as anti-metaphysical. — Wayfarer

I wholeheartedly embrace a certain style of metaphysics.

I even like the way Emerson uses 'God.'

I call myself an 'atheist' as a shorthand for not 'that' kind of theist. My God is a devouring fire. He eats atheists himself for breakfast.

But it need not be. Consciousness is direct experience. What you are reading right now, what you see when you look at the window, what you listen to when you put on music, all of that is consciousness.

It needs organs to get information inside, but without it, nothing would happen, senses would merely pass through such an organism. — Manuel

Of course I understand what you mean. But consciousness is very close to just being being here. 'Consciousness' gets its meaning socially. We have no way of knowing, according to a certain type of idealist, whether other people's consciousness is at all like ours -- or whether it is there in the first place. But this would mean the sign could have no meaning. And yet it does. ChapGPT can use it well enough to philosophers, at least in short conversations.

Those who believe in the purely mental (as opposed to some purely physical) are in a bind that they do not see. The purely mental is understood to be known directly by exactly one soul. But 'consciousness' is tossed around as if it's obvious that we all have the same 'internal ' 'experience.' Ryle draws out this absurdity in The Concept of Mind. In short, the mental/physical distinction is fine for everyday use but absurd when absolutized.

Thanks. But you haven't addressed my criticism of this kind of quasikantian dualism.

For instance, can you clarify what a self is this theory ?

How could it ever have become plausible that there were two 'planes' in the first place ? How was such a theory engendered ?

Are fundamental fields mind or matter ? If matter, then wouldn't our image of them be maps ? Not territory ? If territory, then how can we know them ? Is the math on this side or that side ?

How do we, seemingly threatened with solipsism, manage to communicate and coestablish reliable maps ? Are words on this side or that side ? Is it pure information on one side and sounds and marks on the other ? But sensation is mental, right ? So how are marks physically instantiated ? But this is unknowable, right ? We can only map the nature of maps ?

One theory is that humans take the world as a stage for heroism. I'd frame the existential angst of my youth, in retrospect, for the fear that there was no genuinely heroic role to enact. We were all going to die and most people were sentimentally refusing to face it. Unless I could pile up something permanent, it was all futile. Now I see that the hopelessness and futility and risk and creativity is part of what makes living heroic. It might be comfortable in videogame created by God (maybe I'd still choose a good version of this), but it's not heroic. Only the damned are grand.

is inevitably discursively framed to be so due to the inherently dualistic nature of language. — Janus

This is a whiff of the structuralism I was arguing for elsewhere. Concepts are contrastive, a system of differences.

"Being-in-the-world-as-time-spirit" is dualistic: Being as X: substance and mode. I don't understand what you mean by saying equiprimordiality may be the key thought. — Janus

The world, the self, the others, language...are all equally foundational or primordial..are in fact a unitary phenomenon.

the separation of subject and object only obtains discursively; it is not the primordial nature of human experience. — Janus

Yes. This is about what I mean. So 'experience' is even misleading here, as you will perhaps admit. If the subject is a function of language, then so is the mind/matter distinction, etc.

You can see how the dismissive use of the term 'occult' is used in a futile attempt to combat that anxiety - by depicting it in terms usually reserved for side-show charlatans and fortune tellers. Speaks volumes. — Wayfarer

From my perspective, you are interpreting the situation in terms of antireligious scientism, addicted to certainty, and the courageous quest for genuine spirituality, willing to risk being wrong. But it's absurd to frame Wittgenstein as antispiritual (need I explain ?),and it's also absurd to seemingly implicitly frame my own semantic finitism, self-consciously striving to make darkness visible, as another form of certaintyworship. "Philosophy cuts the crust of convention and the cheese of complacency."

I've been discussing ideas that emphasize the basic difficultly of even knowing what we are talking about. We know something. Communication is possible. But what is its nature ? What is the being of meaning ?

it's the subject of experience, not the object of knowledge. — Wayfarer

This is not such a difficult idea. It's one of several flavors. In this version, the self comes of as the being or presence of sensations, that they are and not what they are. The self doesn't look at a screen. The self is a screen. But now the screen metaphor is pointless, for there is no one to look at it.

What do thinkers make of thoughts ? They are in a bind here. Some want to unify the thoughtstream and decide (without justification) that it's a monologue. In this version, we have a selfoverhearing voice that needs neither mouth nor ears to do so and understands itself perfectly. In this version, we have a screen that watches itself, it seems.

If the thoughts are part of The Given, you might as well go the whole hog :

‘Thoughts’ and ‘things’ are names for two sorts of object, which common sense will always find contrasted and will always practically oppose to each other. ... But one day Kant undermined the soul and brought in the transcendental ego... ... the spiritual principle attenuates itself to a thoroughly ghostly condition, being only a name for the fact that the ‘content’ of experience is known. It loses personal form and activity – these passing over to the content – and becomes a bare Bewusstheit or Bewusstsein überhaupt of which in its own right absolutely nothing can be said.

I believe that ‘consciousness,’ when once it has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles. Those who still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumor left behind by the disappearing ‘soul’ upon the air of philosophy. ...

To deny plumply that ‘consciousness’ exists seems so absurd on the face of it – for undeniably ‘thoughts’ do exist – that I fear some readers will follow me no farther. Let me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function. There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made; but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this quality of being is invoked. That function is knowing. ‘Consciousness’ is supposed necessary to explain the fact that things not only are, but get reported, are known. Whoever blots out the notion of consciousness from his list of first principles must still provide in some way for that function’s being carried on. — James

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/james1.htm

Can you make that connection for me - simply, for a non-philosopher? — Tom Storm

Platonic theories need ideas to have always been here (I neglected to account for this.) Or to have been suddenly created all at once. Postchristian Plato ?

To me the issue is whether we cogenerate a larger and larger set of meanings together as animals trading marks and noises as we cooperate to make babies who make babies...or whether we 'remember' the divine logos which we swim in between rebirths. I think words are the supertool, the metatool.

It can't be this simple, but maybe Platonism is the mystification of equivalence classes in the perennial quest to deny death.

Do we create, as historical animals, the meanings we live and die in ? Are the meanings there in the world, incarnate and never utterly bodiless ? Or are we born with spiritual receivers that tune in to some otherwise hidden dimension, getting the juice ineffably directly ?

Maybe I'm reading you wrong but is it your contention that evolution can't explain language and metacognition? — Tom Storm

No. I'm saying that any explanation must make sense in the context of evolution. I'm suggesting that language is fundamentally a tribal kind of software, which evolves as tribes struggle together in their environment. Our late, leisured civilization, economically rewarding the right kind of creativity, has pushed individuality to (often literally) insane heights of course. 'Moloch demands a tower.' But we are monkeys trading hieroglyphics. We know what we mean just well enough to lay the next brick.

I've not heard this style of Platonic argument made before about this. — Tom Storm

I've tried to make it vivid and explicit. There is a 'mindscape' thread out there at the moment that invokes this idea in pretty much this way.

The fantasy that we ghosts in the machine seems to require it. People speak of the hard problem of consciousness [singular] -- which implies that there is one way to be conscious -- while also assuming the absolute privacy of the stuff. It makes no sense. Or it can only be saved with the assumption that we are all plugged directly into the divine mind, call it what they will.

Interesting. What's the nature of the gulf between these two? — Tom Storm

The proposition that the finite is ideal [ideell] constitutes idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognising that the finite has no veritable being. Every philosophy is essentially an idealism or at least has idealism for its principle, and the question then is only how far this principle is actually carried out. — Hegel

The finite, as I understand, is something that is independent and enclosed and detached from everything else. The finite entity is an abstraction (a useful fiction, no true being), the result of reason's 'violence' against the unified fabric of being-in-the-world. In other words, idealism means holism. Idealism means system. The truth is the whole.

The scientific image is a desiccated X-ray of the world where history and language are methodically omitted. This is why it's useful as map. Reduction is a good thing, I'm saying, because I'm not antiscience.

But it's shitty metaphysics to worship a map within the lifeworld which depends for its sense on that lifeworld as somehow the realest truth about that lifeworld -- as if marriages and mockingbirds don't 'really exist' but other 'fictions' like quarks do.

But of course many 'idealist' are caught in preHegelian veil-of-ideals implicit solipsism. They 'trust' that the 'external' world exists, but they don't see the absurdity of doubting it theoretically.

While some may want to deny consciousness, I think the reasonable approach is to emphasize how difficult it is to clarify what is meant by the word. Thinking should not stop with Ryle (for instance), but it should pass through the fire of Rylean critique.

It's nice even that the hard problem wants to reveal our ignorance, but it tends to miss the hard problem of the hard problem.

I don't claim 'naive realism.' I reject that baggage as more harm than good. The point is to get out of the metaphor that structures the pseudoproblem.

I also don't claim that language can't refer. I just admit that it's a difficult problem. I do think that yes indeed there's something like a limit on the determinateness of meaning ('semantic finitude'). I think we'll have reason to work at or as our tower of babble forever, but not without progress. Indeed, my criticism of your 'Kantianism' is mostly a paraphrase of 20th century philosophers.

As I see it, you yourself offered a theory of our shared situation in the world. I pointed out difficulties in it as I perceived them and presented a challenge.

How do my words get to your control room ? Please give me the entire journey from my control room to yours. Where are these control rooms, please ? — green flag

But if it has to with, say, marginalizing sensations and mental states, then I don’t even see what there’s to argue. — Manuel

But that's just it. It's the 'obviousness' of the veil of ideas or veil of sensations or veil of the given in general that functions as the invisible bottle in which the fly buzzes fruitlessly. We tend to get trapped in metaphors, taking painted scenery for the real enchilada.

It's an historical contingency misinterpreted as a logical necessity. It's a false beginning, a dead metaphor in the costume of an origin.

Even "being in the world" is dualistic; whereas simply "being" is not. — Janus

I think the point is that being is being-in-the-world-as-time-spirit-etc. Equiprimordiality may be the key thought ?

Of course we can just be naive realists and take the world to be just as it appears, and that is arguably the default. This is fair enough, since the in itself reality is unknowable, but consciously taking that stance is also showing a kind of willful blindness to our actual fundamental ignorance. — Janus

Or we can pretend that philosophy didn't die in 1777. 'Naive realism' is like the word a particular cult has for outsiders. 'If you doubt the genius of Kant, you are a silly monkey' ?

collective representation constructed upon inter-subjective communication — Janus

Can we tell me how the phones are wired ? How do my words get to your control room ? Please give me the entire journey from my control room to yours. Where are these control rooms, please ?

I don't think you are seeing the issue.

Do you think we are all trapped in individual control rooms ? Locked forever in or behind sensations and concepts ?

Where do other people exist for you ? Only on your screen ? Is the idea that other people are trapped behind thier screens something you see on your screen ? Or the truth about screens that transcends your screen ?

someone unpack that a bit. Why that word? Why 'occult' in this context. — Wayfarer

It just means hidden. This is just Ryle's classic target, the ghost in the machine. 'Your' experience of redness or love or the meaning of meaning is radically private. According to the theory of this ghost in the machine, no amount of technological progress could make a mindscope possible. There is something infinitely interior, infinitely self-present and self-transparent. This ghost, which is radically immaterial (hence the hard problem), either 'is' or is in immediate contact with 'the divine logos' or the 'pure information' or the 'meanings' of words, stripped of their mere clothing, marks and noises.

This 'soul superstition' is not entirely wrong. Philosophers like Brandom have build understandings of what it is to be a self from what Kant and Hegel got right. Social language is at the center of the lifeworld. What idealists 'want to say' (but don't manage to say) is roughly correct. That's my claim.

To what is the (purely mental) 'idea' of reference supposed to refer ? To a Donnie Darko cleargoo snakebridge from the (shared) Platonisphere to desolate beach in Alaska where the thinker baits a hook ?

To what does a Donnie Darko cleargoo snakebridge refer ? Has that idea always existed in the divine logos ?

Do you mean the possibility of transcendence built into the process? — Tom Storm

I think Wittgenstein is saying that we tend to imagine signifieds or pure meanings as existing in some 'purely mental' realm. This seems to be what Aristotle claims when he says there are 'mental experiences' which are the same for all humans.

But Plato's forms are images etymologically, mere pictures. So even Plato is on the edge of seeing us as savages trading hieroglyphs, except his are not historically generated, mutable, blurry, entangled with 'matter' (embodied), and subject to decay and erasure.

Cute joke! How could music be better than it sounds? I guess it could be intellectually, harmonically sophisticated even though being unlistenable. — Janus

Yes, it was 'intellectually' beautiful. Which is correct in some sense. But there's an explicit expansion of the concept of music to include the theory about it. Which is maybe always in fact there but we methodically ignore it. This guy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu) is great on this kind of issue in Distinction. I may start a thread on it, because I think it applies to philosophy. I take it to be about the relationship of status and seeing others from above. It's more specifically about art knowledge and aesthetic training and class in France.

For example, having the best selling (or banned) book--even though one hasn't read it and probably won't--somehow allows one to claim knowledge of the book. — BC

:up:

We did, of course, make public health information readily available--but the main thing was the condoms themselves. They were the message. — BC

:up:

Both great examples of the admittedly vague phenomenon I had in mind. It's how of communication opposed to the what and yet serving as the essence of the what. My boss tells me something trivial in terms of content but his or her tone or the way they walk into my office tells me what's most important...which is who's the boss.

No wonder some religious folk consider God foundationally necessary for intelligibility. — Tom Storm

Something like the mind of God seems to be necessary for the 'prestructuralist' theory of meaning. The assumption (not usually made explicit) is that there is a universal set of signifieds just waiting for this or that tribe to agree on handles or labels for them. This eternal set of signifieds is 'the divine logos.' Somehow (no one can tell) we are all plugged directly into this logos, for these 'mental experiences...are the same for all.' And yet 'we' pretend to be (?) scientific and think we evolved from amoebas....? How do animals which evolved from germs co-generate language ? Many animals have bodies that cooperate. That's a natural starting point. How do metaphors get 'lifted up' into new, literal meanings ? Platonistic theories of meaning are married to some version of creationism, it seems to me, without realizing it. They want structure without genesis and, accordingly, without death.

language is infinitely iterable -- but it's used within a finite amount of time, so there will only be so many finite sentences produced, for instance, — Moliere

If humans go extinct, then I guess you are right. There are finitely many expressions, even including context as part of the expression. Chalk up another win for semantic finitism. (Just kidding. But good point.)

All you're saying is that one must have some minimal command of language in order to understand what words refer to and what sentences mean. — Janus

As Hegel noted, we can always try to summarize a philosophical point with a banal platitude. This is why the point is clarifying what the hell we are even talking about. What is a 'command of language' ? Another metaphor, this 'command.'

(1) No one denies that you can go on with your life and chug along in the usual idletalk and its average intelligibility. You might end with more money in your bank account and more friends.

(2) I claim that most of the real work in philosophy is semantic. You can prove God is dead or blue or made of numbers. Fine. But I want to know what you've proved exactly, as exactly as a finite human can manage in a finite time. Of course even here we have to choose what is worth clarifying in the first place.

(3) If the clarification of meaning is the essence of philosophy, then it makes sense to clarify clarification (seeing its own metaphorically, for instance) -- and to get a better sense of what sense is. This is fairly obviously Heideggarian, but that just means he found a good path to explore and not authoritative answers.

For me, I pretty much find pleasure in the activity itself. — Moliere

:up:

A profound pleasure ! But it also makes me feel powerful, and I think that's part of the pleasure.

Speaking for myself, I, at least,
have a clear idea of cause and effect. — Janus

I have a 'clear idea' of the will of God myself. Why do you think phenomenology became hermeneutic ? What is the essence of human historicity ?

Let's look at the etymology of these terms.

IDEA
idea => from idein "to see," from PIE *wid-es-ya-, suffixed form of root *weid- "to see."
https://www.etymonline.com/word/idea
Roughly an idea is an image, though (as mentioned early), metaphors lift terms into new usages, so that 'idea' is no longer interchangeable with 'image.' Do you see what I mean ?

CLEAR
c. 1300, "giving light, shining, luminous;" also "not turbid; transparent, allowing light to pass through; free from impurities; morally pure, guiltless, innocent;" of colors, "bright, pure;" of weather or the sky or sea, "not stormy; mild, fair, not overcast, fully light, free from darkness or clouds;" of the eyes or vision, "clear, keen;" of the voice or sound, "plainly audible, distinct, resonant;" of the mind, "keen-witted, perspicacious;" of words or speech, "readily understood, manifest to the mind, lucid" (an Old English word for this was sweotol "distinct, clear, evident"); of land, "cleared, leveled;" from Old French cler "clear" (of sight and hearing), "light, bright, shining; sparse" (12c., Modern French clair), from Latin clarus "clear, loud," of sounds; figuratively "manifest, plain, evident," in transferred use, of sights, "bright, distinct;" also "illustrious, famous, glorious" (source of Italian chiaro, Spanish claro), from PIE *kle-ro-, from root *kele- (2) "to shout."
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=clear

This one is messier, but it's amazing to find an auditory metaphor at the bottom. What is clear is like what shouts at you in the environment. It's obvious, grabs your attention.

I think the clarity metaphor is also related to a background idea of an object being seen through clear water. In this case the clear speech or writing is the conveniently clean and transparent water, while the meaning of that speech is the pebble on the bottom of the creek. To say something is clear is like pasting a hieroglyph of clean water on it, perhaps a few wavy lines.

So part of the difficulty in asking after the sign is even choosing what a token is. — Moliere

:up:

What's funny is that even the rhetorical failures or troubles of semantic finitism serve as examples thereof.

To me this thread is about making darkness visible. I carry my torch into the cave to look at the size of it. The tunnel widens as I push forward.

"The being of meaning?"

Discursive practice. — 180 Proof

:up:

That sounds right to me (as you imply, it's embodied.)

Your account leaves out how we have contact with one another in the first place. Do we have Kantian bodies in the thing-in-itself ? If so, we shouldn't be able to know that. If not, how do we 'meet' to create the intersection of our private representations of the one X that we seem to call the world in your account ?

If memory serves, Kant believe in a noumena self and hid our freedom there, but I haven't studied such madness closely.

We can talk about the schizophrenic hearing voices (that aren't there), or we can talk about the schizophrenic not "actually" hearing voices (because there aren't any). The idea that one or the other is in some sense the "correct" way of talking, or says something about the philosophy or science of perception, is mistaken. — Michael

I agree. I will concede that arguing for one usage or another might be worthwhile in certain contexts. But I think it's very much case that one should have a grip on whether making grammar explicit is being mistaken for an empirical discovery.

Whaever gives rise to the collective representation of a world does so reliably, else there could be no collective representation. That is all we know about the "in itself". — Janus

You claim that we "represent" an X that is otherwise completely unknowable. But somehow you believe there is a we in the first place, that we all represent this weird X. This, sir, is itself a claim about the world. Or is it just a claim about your private representation of the X ? Is our representation relationship to the X not part of the real world ? Not what is the case ?

This kind of Kantianism is arrogant in a cloak of humility. I don't mean this as a comment about you but about the strangeness of the claim. We can't know anything about reality, yet we are damned sure about the basic metaphysical structure of any possible human being. "I know nothing about true reality, but I know that any possible human being is locked in a representational relationship to some hidden kernel." Because somehow you are outside of the situation, seeing each of us in a box ? And I suppose you can't refute solipsism, right ? Because you are trapped behind a wall of intuitions and concepts? But isn't your trapped self one of those intuitions and concepts ?

Another way to express the idea is : Ontology is all Mind. — Gnomon

My objection to approaches that want to call everything 'mind' is that only make sense in a world where we see animals with nervous systems and speculate about what it's like to be them or about their umwelt. This applied to us encouraged philosophers to think of themselves as trapped behind a wall of sensory experience, within a mere image of the world on a screen and not the world itself.


As if the eyes create the very world in which eyes are seen in the first place.

Eyes are self-creating like that old god we used to sing about.