It's interesting you say that, and it may be different for different people, but I think it is easier to be honest with others, an honesty of expression which may or may not consist with being honest with oneself. — Janus

What I was hinting at is that people don't want the truth from me -- or from you. Or they only want a little bit of it, the piece they need to get the bills paid or feel pretty. White lies, mere omission of a truth that would embarrass, euphemism, pretending to have not noticed the embarrassing misstep.

I wouldn't want potential employers to have access to my philosophical writing. They'd probably be afraid I wouldn't respect them enough or be offended by my atheism. I don't talk much politics, but as a critic of nonsense on both sides of the culture war, I'd piss off everyone but a statistically unlikely weirdo contrarian like myself. ( Well there are lots of us, but why cast pearls before swine who won't listen, reject calm discussion.)

I work in academia sometimes, and I can feel the fear and caution. Maybe I'm just older and more aware and cautious, but it seems to me sometimes that life has changed since I was younger, that we are more on the stage than ever before, faker and more fearful than ever before --in my lifetime I mean. In my teens and 20s, my circle of acquaintances had all kinds of views and we dealt with it in our Gen-X live-and-let-let individualism. But I worked menial jobs then, so maybe I just didn't need to care about certain norms. Still, the internet so quickly communicates scandal. The eye of Big Mother (of the digital mob) is always watching in our cell-phone panopticon. One alternative is to become a polarized bigmouth like Peterson or some lefty counterpart. But something gross happens to personality when it becomes a product. And personality at that level of fame is almost always a smoothed-over self-marketing product --- no longer able to be vulnerable, given the increased cost of such honesty on the battlefield.

I also want to say that although that position is what seems reasonable to me. I don't think there is any imperative that it must seem reasonable to you, because in matters that cannot be determined either empirically or logically, I think what is acceptable or rejectable comes down to personal assessments of what seems plausible or coherent. — Janus

:up:

Yes. I totally embrace our freedom. Counterfactual hypothetical conversational community. To me it's crucial that we have our personal creativity, and not just for the tribe but for ourselves.

Ontology is like creative nonfiction. You know how Popper regards creativity as central. I think he's right. But weirdly it's aimed at truth --creatively guessing what might be true and making a case for it.

In principle we can know exhaustively whatever is accessible to our senses, both what is available naturally and what is available to our senses however augmented technologically. — Janus

FWIW, I think Husserl makes a good case that even familiar objects have a kind of transcendent infinity. I can't see this lamp on my desk from every possible angle in every possible lighting and so on.

I am familiar with the idea of the phenomenon as appearance or representation (indirect realism) which is given completely and certainly. This is the idea that I can't be wrong about how things seem to me. It's a classic and respectable thesis, though I've pointed out my objections.

More positively, I think we can put seemings and toothaches with doves and quasars on the same plane of rational discourse. Instead of dualism, we have a radical pluralism, you might say. A melody exists differently than the memory of ice cream exists differently than the integer. But it's also a monism, because all of these entities are caught up in the same rational discussion, getting their significance from relationships with one another.

I see that as no reason to claim that there is nothing more than what can be known, in principle via the senses. — Janus

FWIW, I don't think like a classical empiricist. I think concepts are directly given in experience. We see apples and not blobs of red. Numbers have a reality that transcends me as individual human being (but maybe not the species, and I wouldn't try to talk beyond the species.)

For me the point in this context is semantic. I suspect that experience informs what we can mean by words. So I, anyway, don't know what I'm saying if I talk beyond my experience. I have experience being surprised, so I understand epistemic humility. I also don't think others are compelled to be so 'ascetic' as someone who happened to adopt the project of critical-rational ontology. I sincerely respect that a mystic or even the bookfleeing athlete may live a better and wiser life than me. I flatter myself that I am 'existentially' humble. I don't buttonhole people and preach my way of life. I even confess its foolishness in worldly terms. But on the 'chessboard' or at the 'poker table' of ontology, where we're all on the path together, I go at it passionately, which might misleadingly suggest that I take it as the only game in town.

To understand is “to be sympathetically or knowledgeably aware.” Understanding through rationality and logic alone do not allow for sympathetic awareness or love, let alone any relation to the illogical or unknown. What is excluded from mattering must form part of our understanding, if we are to be fully accountable. — Possibility

Well, sure, but, respectfully, this is obvious and tangential. Consider also that you'd have to argue for this claim if it wasn't so obviously true.

I don't think philosophy is reducible to edification or wise homilies. To call out popular forms of self-contradicting irrationalism is not to imply that life is just about critical thinking. It's to play the game of philosophy on a philosophy forum.

We inhabit our cognitions, and we know they cannot be explained in in terms of themselves: thus, we cannot but assume that something more that we cannot be aware of is going on. — Janus

I think we both agree very much that there's always more to find out and clarify.

The alternative is phenomenalism, which seems to be incapable of explaining anything. — Janus

I have to disagree there. I think maybe this is an indirect realist's misunderstanding of what I call direct realism in terms of indirect realist assumptions.

My thinking is that the ego that philosophy ought to prioritize is the participant in the ontological discussion --the ontologist among other ontologists. You and I right now are discursive subjects, responsible for the coherence of our claims. We make our case in terms of worldly objects and public concepts. Given that we are rational and not giving up on critical thinking, the conditions of the possibility for this critical thinking are [onto- ] logically necessary. [ We can't deny a shared world and language, etc. ]

So the stuff our language intends --- the stuff of experience we can talk about meaningfully, -- ought to be embraced as real rather than as mere appearance. But this does not mean we pretend that we do or can ever know it exhaustively. The lifeworld has depth, horizon, a kind of infinity.

Small difference in practice and epistemological humility. I admit. So I'm making a case for a thesis I think is a bit more solid in terms of impractical criteria. I am being unworldly and foolish, trying to offer what I find, by my grasp of ideally universal criteria, the most coherent and complete articulation of the structure of our shared situation.

I have the power to legislate my own norms in a technical sense only, if I abandoned any sense of pragmatism, any desire for compromise, or any concern for consequence, then I can legislate my own norms. So long as I have some sense, there's a significant limit to it. — Judaka

Of course you don't rule the world. A tyrant can hang you for calling him a silly bald motherfucker. Actual life, as the foil of the ideal, is always compromised and tainted. The topic is the quest for or toward greater autonomy. What ideal does critical rationality depend on or aim at ?

The perfect circle has probably never been and never could be instantiated, but imperfect circles are only circles in terms of this ideal circle. No actual human or group is perfectly rational or just. But these concepts play a huge role in our lives as goals.

I'm having trouble tracking some of these tangential topics. Is this about what we "ought" to believe? — Judaka

Only in the sense that all critical rationality is. My OP is a fairly ambitious ontological thesis that explains the relationship of what's called 'mind' and 'matter'. My direct realism is easier to understand once one grasps our shared situation as discursive rational/normative subjects. This is the condition of possibility for science and philosophy. To deny this condition is to engage in performative contradiction.

Understand the limitations of rationality and logic, that most philosophers seem blind to. — Judaka

I suggest that you've wandered into performative contradiction. You tell me to understand the 'limitations of rationality and logic.' Wouldn't this understanding be through rationality and logic ?
Or is the 'understanding' you have in mind mystical ? Does it wait in the arms of Jesus ? Or in a dose of DMT ? Am I to understand you as some guy at the bar pontificating after a couple of beers ?

There is no "whole truth", we are forced to select truths and logic, one must. If you understand this, you can put to rest any notion of "whole truth". — Judaka

Are you are preaching the finitude of human knowledge ? That we are not omniscient ? Who claimed otherwise ? You seem to just not understand me, and to be charging at a personal windmill.

It's possible that you are saying something existential here, along of the lines of my dramaturgical ontological. When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools. As individuals, we have to stand naked on our own in some sense, and live courageously with certain decisions that we can't know are the best ahead of time or even afterward.

If you are saying something like that, then of course I agree. Note that this is also a grand thesis about the structure of life, a knowledge claim.

I've looked into Harman. Can't say that I was won over, though I like his style. I embrace anthropocentrism as inescapable myself. I'm a correlationalist too, it seems. So I'm one of his bad guys. But I think you are correct about the relationship. Husserl => Heidegger => Harman.

The well-documented cases of multiple personality disorder show that one person may experience being multiple personalities. From the common perspective it is one person, and the multiple personalities are a disordering of what is the 'normal' order. — Janus

:up:
'One is one around here' or one is mentally ill.

I agree with you that when we study the brain, just as when we study anything else, we are studying the brain as it appears to us. We have no idea what it, or anything else, is in itself apart form how it appears to us. — Janus

My issue is: why do we insist that the familiar world is appearance behind which lurks some Reality ? As far as I can tell, it's only by taking brains and eyes in the familiar world seriously that we can find indirect realism plausible, but indirect realism says those same brains and eyes are mere appearance.

I sincerely don't think this objection has been addressed sufficiently by indirect realists.

But "the mind" does not appear tous, it appears as us. — Quixodian

It's a rich concept. As consciousness, we can say it's a view on the world. As a discursive subject, it has views and responsibilities. We keep score on it. But 'matter' is pretty rich too.

existence itself implies and requires a perspective. Things don't exist from no point of view, they exist within a context, and the mind provides that context. But we don't notice that, because we're looking from it, not at it. — Quixodian

:up:

To me this is a big piece of Husserl, the seeing of our seeing. The subject is usually 'transparent' unless it's practical to drag him or her (or it ?) out of the background. We mostly don't care about how the object is given but only what is given. We can learn to focus on the way that objects are given, including objects like melodies and memories. I think this is the real point of the bracketing, just to get us to stop obsessing over the what and its status and focus on the how.

Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. — Quixodian

:up:
Along these lines, he would also only accept the potentially experienceable as meaningful. Reality is 'horizonal.' We haven't seen all of it. What we see suggests the possibility of seeing more. There's always a fuzzy background. The house has a back if we want to walk around and see it. The moment itself is not punctual but anticipatory and reminiscent, which is why music makes sense to us and we can read sentences over the course of seconds. We never see even familiar objects exhaustively.

True, but what this nexus is, is very much the question at issue. — Quixodian

I suggest that it's just the world. The world itself is not an entity. There's a radical pluralism in this view in that we don't force being to be univocal. So deciding that the world itself is X [ mind, matter, etc. ] is probably inappropriate. Isn't reduction is the wrong way to go when describing Reality as a whole ? It just is what it is, including things of every category you like, too 'big' to fit in any of them.

One brain per body, no? — Janus

Is it impossible for a brain to be trained to run two personalities? It'd probably be difficult, but maybe possible, if folks were mean enough to experiment on children that way. Two discursive selves would be held responsible for the coherence of two different sets of beliefs/claims. Maybe there's Weekend Willy and Weekday Walt.

Autonomy allows me to control myself, and it makes sense for me to adapt to my environment. That doesn't mean I think highly of it. — Judaka

How about you let me do your thinking for you ?

This joke is to wake you up maybe to what autonomy really means in this context. A philosopher who thinks for his fucking self and doesn't believe whatever he's told is exactly what I'm talking about. Autonomy means you must be convinced. You sit on judgment on the claims of strangers.

On the flip side, one of Sartre's famous line is that we are condemned to be free. It's a pain in the ass to have to be responsible all the time. Part of us wants a safe, comfortable slavery. Bread, television, and nap time. Or we want a book with all the answers and a leader who can't be wrong. King Trump, or that guy with the funny mustache, or that chap from the Bible.

I really don't like the labels either way and think they are not very useful, or were part of a historical context that perhaps doesn't pertain to every argument about philosophy of mind. — schopenhauer1

:up:
I don't like labels much either. The real stuff is in the back and forth. Meaning is intensely cumulative and contextual.

You're not progressing your argument by obfuscating and trivialising. I don't think you're clear about what is actually being called into question, and why it matters. What is called into question in 'facing up to the problem of consciousness' is the applicability of the natural sciences to the nature of experience. — Quixodian

I'm trying to actually resolve some confusion here, on both sides. You seem to ignore what it means to grant toothaches and rumors the same ontological dignity as electrons and peaches.

Husserl has a kind of direct realism in some of his work that's brilliant.
Consider:
1. Subjectivity is the being of the world from/for a certain perspective.
2. The world is only given perspectively.
3. All entities exist interdependently in the same semantic-inferential-causal nexus.

#1 nondual consciousness-world
#2 rejects scientific realism
#3 help from Hegel and Brandom

We are sensing an actual object that is interacting with the organism, yes. So in the sense that I think we are actually perceiving an object and not some intermediary, call me a direct realist then.. However, do brains process the inputs in a way that was shaped by the environment? Yes, so perhaps that is indirect realist. — schopenhauer1

Yes, that's the issue.

We are discursive subjects. Is the 'ego' trapped in the brain ? Or is the ego a character on the stage of the world ? Making a case ? A philosopher is always already on the normative stage, 'performing' critical rationality, making a case, responsible for the coherence of his claims. No rational argument could begin to deny this stage without performative contradiction. The mechanics of seeing depend on taking the eyes and brain as real. Or do we have the eyes-in-themselves and light-in-itself and brains-in-themselves .... insane ! We'd never dream up such stuff if not for a disavowed direct realism that taught us about causal relationships involved in seeing to begin with.

One reason I hate these debates of direct and indirect realism is this notion of "mental representation" and what that really means. It's very vague and becomes a weird sticking point. — schopenhauer1

Well I think it's hard work getting clear on the most basic concepts especially. Hence the foolishness of the ontologist who should be marketing dick pills on Instagram for big bucks. But I insist that we are striving to find the truth and clarify our situation.

Note that I'm saying that nostalgia and rumors and butter and integers are all equally real.

Integers aren't easy to place in space-time. Rumors are also hard to localize, but not in the same way or for the same reason.

Dualists seem to want to create an extra world for every sentient creature, but then they go on to reason about entities that exist in this extra world, proving that this extra world is just a little glovebox in our world. Whatever we can reason about as philosophers is in our world. Isn't the alternative confusion and nonsense ? You may have special access to your nostalgia, but you are in my world and so therefore is your nostalgia. I 'see' it from a different 'perspective.'

If there were no boundary, it is simply subject to whatever chemical and physical influences act on it - it would dissolve or break up. Whereas an organism has to maintain itself (which is homeostasis), seek nutrition, avoid threats, and replicate. That is the origin of the self-other divide. — Quixodian

Also why I insist that the ego is flesh. I think it's this basic bodily boundary that inspires us to further develop the tradition of the 'soul' -- of a responsible discursive subject existing with a new intensity in the dimension of time, capable of making and keeping promises. One soul per body too. Did it have to be that way ? Or was it just far more convenient to train a brain to be one person ?

I will happily grant you that toothaches exist in a different way than protons. But they too are in the one-layer world, seen from many perspectives, part of the one and only semantic-inferential network along with marriages and voltages.

But there's no way you could capture an experience in a description. — Quixodian

I'm afraid this is trivially true. As John Berger says at the beginning of Ways of Seeing, we see before we can talk. The world surrounds us. A painting is not a poem. A melody is not a painting. Conceptuality is its own dimension. If I describe a painting, I give you concepts and not a painting (not shapes and colors).

You'd have to flesh that out...Otherwise it's words coherently put together that don't mean much for me. — schopenhauer1

The main thing here is to grasp the radical and I think surprising centrality of the usually backgrounded philosophical situation itself. If you want to make a case to me about objects X and Y and their relationship, they have to be available to me in some sense. Your toothache is literally meaningless unless it's related inferentially to other concepts. It's in my world too. It's in the only world that philosophers can talk about. The world. Our world.

The physical sciences can describe organisms… as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – [their] structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. — Thomas Nagel

There's a dualism taken for granted here.

In my opinion, the issue is especially here:

but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view.

I think the better path is 'how the world appears.' For this is the rat looking at the cheese and not some internal image of the cheese. The problem with 'subjective experiences' is that it slides toward looking only at the image of the cheese. Then one is tempted to say the image of the cheese is made of a special 'nonphysical' stuff. As if there's no other option.

If the rat is looking at the worldly cheese, why can't we ( fallibly ) describe how the cheese appears to it ? Trivially, my talk about brown is not itself brown. Nor is my talk about a rat itself a rat. Describing what the rat sees is, as description, bound to be conceptual. It's trivially not what the rat saw but my fallible description of it. 'I don't think it saw that cheese, because it just sat in the corner.' It's like me trying to figure out what my mother saw when I forgot to lock the door that one time. Note that I can't put my actual seeing into my description of what my mom looks like in the shower.

So why can't I fallibly describe what the rat saw in the spatio-temporal order ? Must I be infallibly omniscient for it to count ? Must I mindmeld with the rat ? Be the rat to study the rat ?

Thanks I will have a look — PhilosophyRunner

:up:

How is this "dependence" upon a particular "embodied" scientist?

Perhaps I'm not interpreting what you say properly. — jgill

It's a weird point, so I'm not surprised if I didn't find the best words.

Actually I'm saying that the meaningfulness of the measurement is independent of any particular physicist. It doesn't have to be Larry or Susan. But it has to be somebody.

I make my case by saying that we have no experience whatsoever of a world apart from the one entangled with our networked timebinding human nervous systems.

We are tempted to forget this because the embodied subject is left out for practical reasons. It doesn't matter if Larry or Susan was watching the machine. We trust them both. The subject becomes 'transparent' to a physicist long accustomed to a godlike view of an artificial videogame Euclidean space. Because his body is not before his eyes that stare at symbols that help him think of that imaginary space, he forgets that such a space was never available without his body's help.

As a squirrel, a fish, a bat, a rat, and a bee all have their own view, and yet, do they have direct access to the world too? If it is different, then certainly there is something that mediates between directly observing the object, and processing it (i.e. indirect realism). Surely something is causing differences upon the objects perceived between species. — schopenhauer1

If you and your mom are on opposite sides of the room, and she is nearsighted as fuck and can't find her glasses and you have an eagle's eyesight but are colorblind, are you looking at the same furniture or not ?

Or let's say there's a clone of you across the room. Are you looking at the same furniture, seeing it from different perspectives?

I do not at all contest that there are all kinds of causal relationships that can be examined between eyes and objects and brains. No one is denying the biological complexity of seeing. But when I talk about the Eiffel tower, I'm talking about the fucking Eiffel tower and not my idea of it. Language is deeply ego-transcending and social. We intend the worldly object. Even my toothache is a worldly object, despite my special access to it. I can use it to explain being rude. Its cessation might be explained by Novocain.

What you ignored in my first post was the absolute centrality of giving and asking for reasons -- the philosophical situation itself. This is prior to any ontological thesis. We reason about and intend worldly objects. I talk about the rose, our worldly rose. It's not completely insane or absurd to invent a private rose for everyone, but it is insane or absurd to get rid of the worldly rose.

We can just as well talk about brains. Presumably you like indirect realism because the brain is conceived as a mediation machine. But then the brain is an illusion. The brain-in-itself (the one that does the work) is now a wild hypothesis.

It's much easier to believe that we see the familiar brain directly, if never completely and perfectly and exhaustively. Objects have depth and complexity. They are seen from different perspectives, understood with more or less sophistication.

We can be wrong about them. But this does not force indirect dualism on us. A daydream, for instance, doesn't need its own level or plane of reality. We can understand consciousness as the being of the world for this or that subject, instead of its own kind of being.

Direct realism assumes the human animal has a god-like view of the universe. — schopenhauer1

I disagree. A good description of what I'm talking about is Zahavi's interpretation of Husserl in his intro book. But I'll sketch the basics.

I see the rose and not an image of the rose. I see it from a certain perspective, with my eyes.--because I'm a primate, not a god. I can be mistaken. Maybe it's dark or I'm sleepy. But my being mistaken need not be explained in terms of some ghostly stuff about which I cannot be mistaken. [Indirect realists tend to misunderstand direct realism, loaded as they are with certain assumptions, used to as they are to incorrigible images.]

One of the stronger arguments for [ sophisticated ] direct realism is that indirect realism secretly depends on assuming it in order to insist on the necessity of some mediating layer. If the brain is a mere representation (an 'image on a screen'), it's absurd to use it to claim that all the subject ever has is representation (an 'image on a screen.')

But we are back at square one. Some processes are not mental. Why? Or if they are, how do you get past the incredulity of saying that rocks and air molecules, or even a tree has "subjectivity" or "consciousness", or "experience"? — schopenhauer1

Consider this possibility: Consciousness is just the being of the world for various embodied subjects. We don't live in private dreams. Your toothache is part of my reality. It doesn't matter that I access it differently. I can reason about it with you. It lives as concept in the logical space we share.

:up:

I take there to be no higher meaning than that, do you? — Judaka

Don't worry. I'm an atheist. I don't even believe in ghosts.

I like etymology:

mid-14c., "escape inclusion in; lie beyond the scope of," from Old French transcendre "transcend, surpass," and directly from Latin transcendere "climb over or beyond, surmount, overstep," from trans "across, beyond" (see trans-) + scandere "to climb" (see scan (v.)). Meanings "be surpassing, outdo, excel; surmount, move beyond" are from early 15c
https://www.etymonline.com/word/transcend

We follow them because they're useful, and partially because we're compelled. — Judaka

I think it's true that they are useful. It's also true that we are [ sometimes ] compelled. But the central Enlightenment idea of autonomy means that we 'legislate' our own norms. We are bound to no norms we do not willingly embrace -- to nothing 'alien' to us (like an inscrutable god who just gives commands, or a tyrant with more guns than reasons.)

Critical rationality further determines or explicates its own essence or concept. When we drop an eternal god, we set out to sea on Neurath's boat.

We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurath%27s_boat

In other words, I argue in terms of current logical-semantic norms for the elaboration, modification, or extension of these same norms.

This is not a trust in a preexisting we, but a trust in the promise of a we, a not yet we which will always remain not yet, defined by our differences. I have stated elsewhere, "the true we is never we, never stabilized in a name for we, always undone before being constituted, only identified in the non-identity between you ... and me ..."A conversation "could do no more than put the we back into question"

The above is just the horizonal-ideal 'we' already discussed, the we-to-come, the city of god.

I'm happy to grant that we are all in some sense misfits with idiolects. I'll grant that we have differing conceptions of rationality, but clearly there's enough agreement to debate about how much agreement there is.

It makes so sense to argue against the conditions of possibility for an argument. That means others in a world and a working language and rational norms. A true skeptic doesn't show up, actually feels and enacts his loss of hope in the possibility of communication.

It's just not Husserl. Other thinkers engage in the same sci-fi, sometimes quite brilliantly. I'm not even saying it's worthless or completely wrong. As a holist, I'm suspicious, and I'm telling you why.

In general (not just in response to Husserl) my gripe is that subjectivity gets its meaning from the typical experience of a community of cooperative and adversarial bodies in a shared environment. The subject is held responsible for what its body does and says. One soul per body. Now what's the logical necessity of one soul per body ? Sci-fi gives us lots of souls in a single body. But there's a practical 'necessity.' Easier to track, reward, punish.

The subject only makes sense against other subjects and a world. No left without right, that sort of thing. Why would a varying stream of being be a subject ? How is the 'interiority' generated? I think it's smuggled in from actual experience. Just like the alien hotties in the first Star Trek are all really just pneumatically advantaged human females painted green.

If you're going to highlight my choice, let me ask, how much of a choice do I even have? How would it serve me to ignore the established norms? — Judaka

Purple cheese leaps from the nostrils of hello.

That violates semantic norms, right ? Or does it mean whatever I want to it mean, because I meant (in more familiar lingo) 'have a wonderful evening in Toledo.' Point is I don't pick the meanings of words. Or how one claim implies another, etc.

Are you not implicitly asking me to argue in terms of rational norms that transcend me to justify my claim ? Or do I get my own logic ? Critical thinking is essentially normative. If you don't think so, then why I should I care ? unless you have the leverage on me of my (our) commitment to facing criticism and making a case for our claims ?

Science is a heroic [ normative ] endeavor, not some search algorithm.

Why do we need to add a temporal dimension? — Judaka

I'm sorry. Who are you ? Why are you asking me this ?

The temporal dimension is us keeping score on who's said what and who owes who an explanation or elaboration, etc. So you ask me a question about a claim I made a few minutes ago, holding me responsible.

Recall that, in 1984, Winston is destroyed psychologically. Rorty goes into great detail about this in CIS. The Inner Party makes it impossible for Winston to place himself in an acceptable narrative. The 'hero myth' -- if fundamental to personality -- is fundamental to human reality. Hence James saying with Shakespeare that the world is a basically a stage.

One could say that the world for us is a stage, but to me that's just the world --which is not to say we ever know it exhaustively or infallibly.

If we take a page from self-consistency theory in psychology, we can say that the self is a continual achievement of the construing of events, and among the most important event is one’s own self-reflections. — Joshs

I think we need to see the self from the inside and outside at once.

Thus the self is no more internally integral than the events the person is able to construe intelligibly. Examples of a disordered self include emotional distress. Emotions such as guilt, threat and anxiety can represents situations which put into question the coherence of our core sense of self. — Joshs

:up:

I agree. Dramaturgical ontology. Who am I ? I 'shit my pants' when I 'lose my head.' I lose my map. I lose the script. I lose the plot. Hysteria, chaos in the meatsuit.