Ah, known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. Interesting stuff. — Posty McPostface

Yes. IMV both WIttgenstein and Heidegger are pointing at an unknown known, the actual ground of our doings and believings which is inconspicuous for the atomizing theoretical gaze obsessed with clear and distinct ideas and objects with rock-like constant presence. This ground is not clear and distinct, and yet it makes the quest for a clear and distinct description of experience possible. I don't know that I have hands. 'Know' is the wrong word here.

Yeah, as I said. Heavy stuff to talk about. I don't have much to comment otherwise. — Posty McPostface

It's of more interest to someone with training in math, but it's of general interest as a critique of the one uncontroversial metaphysics we have: math. Especially in this highly normalized discourse the problem of meaning or being emerges. This teaches us something about the metaphysical dream. We can line up our concepts very nicely and build spiderwebs of eternal truth. At the same time, we don't know what we are talking about, and we mostly don't know that we don't know what we are talking about. Epistemology dominates ontology. The mystery of meaning sleeps.

Yes, I'm not arguing over that. What I an arguing is that I'm not the same person as my alter-ego known as Posty McPostface... — Posty McPostface

I believe you. I think we switch into a certain mode when we publicly talk about heavy ideas. Even just being polite is a transformation of the interior monologue.

Yes, I'd say so. And I'd say that WIttgenstein is an anti-Platonist in some sense. He's hard to pin down. He just writes lots of remarks.

The problem, as Wittgenstein sees it, is that mathematicians, especially foundationalists (e.g., set theorists), have sought to accommodate physical continuity by a theory that ‘describes’ the mathematical continuum (PR §171). When, for example, we think of continuous motion and the (mere) density of the rationals, we reason that if an object moves continuously from A to B, and it travels only the distances marked by “rational points”, then it must skip some distances (intervals, or points) not marked by rational numbers. But if an object in continuous motion travels distances that cannot be commensurately measured by rationals alone, there must be ‘gaps’ between the rationals (PG 460), and so we must fill them, first, with recursive irrationals, and then, because “the set of all recursive irrationals” still leaves gaps, with “lawless irrationals”. — SEP

All actual calculation uses a finite alphabet (is discrete.) Even the proofs about infinities are just strings of symbols that satisfy certain rules epistemologically. So the question is 'what are these proofs about'? Some thinkers just say that math is the science of such systems of rules. On the other end, we have intuitive access to some kind of timeless realm that the rules are like the shadow of. In my opinion, there is indeed some kind of shared meaning space, but we can't make it explicit except through 'mechanical' rules if we want reliable consensus about progress. To say that this meaning space is 'here' or 'there' (just human or some Heavenly stuff) is beside the point. What matters is how these things exist for us --and that seems to be largely a personal matter, since math is economically grounded in applications.

This is maybe a good taste:

What arithmetic is concerned with is the schema ||||.—But does arithmetic talk about the lines I draw with pencil on paper?—Arithmetic doesn’t talk about the lines, it operates with them. — W

Lots of debate about math involves infinity. How does infinity exists? It is certainly a symbol in the calculus. Can we apply the LEM to infinite sets? Is math eternal? Or does it actually get constructed a bit at a time. Are mathematical statements true or false? Or is there a third state not of unknown but rather not-yet-created-either-way. Does the system of real numbers capture our intuition of the continuum? Is logic really the heart of math? Or does logic follow behind a separate mathematical intuition? Can real numbers be truly real if 'most' of them contain an infinite amount of information (cannot be compressed into a algorithm that generates them to arbitrary precision)?

The machine of math can get along fine without answers to such questions. It is more or less grounded in the consensus about what constitutes a proof. As a rough approximation, I'd say that Wittgenstein would approve of any calculus as a calculus, but he is skeptical about the addition of mental entities and would ground math more in practice and applications. Have you seen the diagonal proof of uncountable infinity? It's fairly short for such an exciting result. And the idea can be repeated an infinite number of times, giving rise to a sequence of richer and richer infinities. I like to obsess over the set of all infinite sequences of bits (closely related to the real numbers and also thinkable as the set of all infinitely long files.) For instance, 10101010101... would be (correspond to a ) rational. But most possible sequences have no compressible pattern. We could of course never write them out or even find a finite description of them. In what way do such sequences exists? We can grasp them to some degree. Such sequences (an ungraspable background that takes up most of the space on the line) are my metaphor for what the later Wittgenstein is trying to point at. Whatever can be said can be said clearly is clearly wrong, IMV.

I don't think I have some more overarching/abstract "feeling that accompanies 'the doing of life'" (what's different about saying "The doing of life" so that we couldn't just say "living," for example?) — Terrapin Station

Well there is the idea that God is love. I would mention a creative play also that dissolves the ego. I could also speak of 'eternity' existing only within time. The incarnation myth symbolizes that God exists only as mortal human being, who is moreover a criminal with respect to state and church. This criminality is the surplus of being a particular human being. No human being quite fits into the system.

We can just say 'living.' Why not? But why do you dwell argumentatively on triviality like that and ignore the better part of my post?

Re "serious" art, I hate any sort of distinction like that. Art is art. I hate hierarchies that people try to impose. — Terrapin Station

I am skeptical. I highly doubt you approach all art the same way. Or is a jingle about hot dogs as good as a rock band's most transcendent and authentic work?

You might be interested in The Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto. He discusses the kind of feelings I think you have in mind. — Dfpolis

Thanks for the recommendation.

What is that? I'm interested in your input on the matter. — Posty McPostface

It's hard to sum up. It fits in with the later Wittgenstein as I remember it. One example was his idea that the 'paradise' of Cantor's set theory wasn't really that exciting (demystifying tendency.) He had intuitionist , finitist, and formalist leanings at different times.

I must say that math is a rich territory for philosophy. It is the ideal language in some ways and yet no one is quite sure what it is talking about. Given the form of the TLP, you can imagine why Witt would have thought about it. (Turing was one of his students, btw.)

No, just haven't made it through the book. It's a difficult book by my standards. I mean, nobody discusses the philosophy of mathematics by Wittgenstein either due to the gravity of the material. — Posty McPostface

I like his philosophy of mathematics. It's weird and piecemeal, but illuminating. Braver considers some of it among his best work.

There have been interesting attempts to claim incarnation from a materialist perspective - Zizek and Virno come to mind - but I generally find the whole theological matrix to be compromised beyond repair. — StreetlightX

I can understand that reaction, but your mention of 'matrix' alludes to what I had in mind. The mother is the mater is the matrix. While this kind of approach is suspiciously murky, I suspect that some 'Christian' thinkers were already articulating contemporary insights within the concepts and pictures available to them. I'm not sure how you feel about Heidegger, but he called himself 'really' a Christian theologian once in a letter. And then Hegel thought Luther was a leap forward in human consciousness. I'm thinking of the interior that is opened up by putting the Book in the hands of the individual for interpretation. Finally there is Nietzsche's eerie portrait of Christ that sounds quite a bit like Nietzsche himself. I'm coming from a perspective that thoughts are largely organized by emotionally charged pictures. The image of a particular human being (Christ or Socrates) suggests a unity of theory and embodied practice, ultimately grounded in and lit up by passion.

e. If the thesis of irreducible mediality is right, any such attempt at 'separation' would be detrimental, and not conducive to, well, anything whatsoever. As Derrida might have put it, the desire for pure presence is the desire for death. — StreetlightX

I take your point, but I suppose Nietzsche comes to mind along with Hegel. If we proceed by erring, it may be the impossible quest for death (an unrecognized goal) that pushes into a brighter kind of living in the long run. All of this is quite vague, of course.

Therefore we clearly believe that we can have influence over what happens in the future. — Metaphysician Undercover

Of course. When did I imply otherwise? The point is that nature doesn't care. We have to submit to her blind regularity in order to master 'her.'

There is no such object as "the table" anymore, there is just this or that description of what is going on, and we choose the one we want. Therefore we view nature as being whatever we want it to be. — Metaphysician Undercover

As I see it, science is science exactly because it is constrained by reliable prediction and control. All the grandiose and complicated theories boil down to satisfaction in the life-world. Arbitrary description is what science filters out. Virtual entities are justified as part of a process that emerges from the life-world and returns to the life-world. Electrons are 'real' to the degree that they are part of a system that gets us what we want. Public utility is the implicit epistemology here, it seems to me.

Clearly, there are two distinct directions, from two distinct starting points. Each one gets enveloped in problems sending one frustrated toward the other way. But the real problem is in those starting points themselves, the subject and the object, they do not produce sound premises, so they must be dismissed altogether for something different. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree. Traditional metaphysical approaches result in aporia. Some ignore them and soldier on, stubbornly attached to this or that terminology. My approach is to examine whether it is even possible to make our know-how explicit for ourselves. IMV the faith in atomic meaning is at the root of endless confusion. We impose a false notion on language in pursuit of the fantasy that we can and should do math with words. We don't look at the object with fresh eyes. We take a flawed approach for granted. But this is an old critique now, and hardly 'my' idea. I'm just catching up with the conversation. And this catching up with the conversation is not some discrete process. I'd say that meaning is 'continuous' or 'one,' and that it exists distributed over its own kind of historical time (with memory and project.)

What hazy thing do you have in mind? (I realize the answer will have to be hazy, by the way.) — Terrapin Station

In a word, something like a feeling that accompanies the doing of life. If 'God is a spirit and must be worshiped in spirit and in truth, ' the maybe what is referred to is beyond all mere pictures and concepts. The wind shakes the leaves on the trees. While the wind is partially manifest by the movement of these leaves, the leaves themselves are never the wind. An 'atheist' can agree that God does not exist (as a dead leaf), and a 'theist' might agree. To be sure, there are plenty of crudely dogmatic atheists and theists who both think of religion as a kind of alternative natural science.

You mentioned being an artist, and I think that's connected. Art has a kind of inherent grasp on the sacred to the degree that I'd call it 'serious' art. There's nothing wrong IMV with clever or self-referential art, but I don't think such clever art (with clever 'explanations' affixed nearby on the all) really speaks to us with the same ambition to share what is deeply beautiful and terrible about life.

To insist on the mediality of all things is to insist that all immidiacy must nonetheless be subject to a minimal medicacy: there is always the traction of time and space, the recalcitrance of matter to have to deal with (the Heraclitian maxim on nature's elusiveness must be read as a materialist maxim par excellence: 'Nature loves to hide'). — StreetlightX

In a word then, the materialist insists that the world is medial through and through: everything that is, has a density recalcitrant to all ideal(ized) first principles (arche) and immedial fantasies (God being among them). — StreetlightX

Illuminating OP. I just quoted some passages that especially spoke to me. I associate the 'traction of time' with the non-instanteity of meaning, the way a sentence/meaning needs time. Meaning itself is not immediate. There is also meaning's entanglement with its 'medium' (the written or spoken word.) We push out the air or scratch with a pencil or gently hammer on the keyboard. A perfect separation of meaning from its medium and its compression into an instant functions as a kind of goal, an impossibility that tempts us, perhaps to our benefit at times.

The 'density recalcitrant to all first principles' recalls something I was exploring in other thread, from a related if not identical angle. An analogy I like is theory trying to capture a set of positive measure in a set of zero measure (a conveniently countable set, say.) Our linguistic know-how is too rich, too flexible, too mostly-automatic to give a finite account of itself. Trapping meaning in an instant or imagining its complete independence from its medium seems like part of that impossible quest.

As for 'God,' I am open to sophisticated uses of this term. Is there an anti-metaphysical vision of God? An anti-theological vision of God? I don't know. Hegel felt the need to criticize vague notions (anti-notions?) of the absolute in his preface. Do you find it possible that one can use this term and be a materialist in your sense? I can imagine someone contemplating what it is that thrusts against traction and recalcitrance, which would seem to depend on some kind of movement against them. The incarnation myth comes to mind. Can incarnation symbolize materialism even? (I like following the mutation of the Christ image through certain German philosophers. A 'total' incarnation would leave nothing out-of-the-mess behind.)

Not a fan?

Hah, I actually never got round to reading GG, even though I thoroughly enjoyed Braver's A Thing of This World. Heard plenty of good things about it though. — StreetlightX

It's pretty great. In some ways I don't get the full value, because I sought out the book already convinced of some version of what Braver calls 'original finitude.' I will be looking into some of Braver's other stuff when I get the chance. He's got me wanting to read On Certainty in a new light, which he ranks as equal to PI.

The ambiguity of what he writes about has scared me from treating him seriously. I value preciseness in meaning and clarity in thought above all else. — Posty McPostface

I relate to the quest for clarity and precision --as much as can be had without betraying the object being investigated. If, however, the object itself does not exist as a crystalline structure, the demand for clarity no longer makes sense. Or rather we can ask that the thinker/writer make it easy to follow their investigation but not that her results be simple to digest --especially if those results themselves offend our taste for the crystalline and unambiguous. I think this is the case with PI. It's a hard pill to swallow.

I think Witt hammers us with examples, so that we generalize some theses. Heidegger (among other things) really does try to present his results abstractly, with few examples. Yet (to some degree) they seem to be pointing out the same kind of sub-theoretical background that makes the theoretical foreground possible. Maybe it's like a foundation of 'animal thinking' which is mostly automatic. Then our bright-light theory can't see its own legs and gets into trouble trying to invent artificial legs, walking all the time on its living legs to do so without wanting to see it.

I just ordered On Certainty. When I first read that book (many years ago, and lost my used yellow copy who knows when), I thought it somewhat boring. Now I think I know what he was after, so I'm looking forward to reading it in a new light. I think the idea is (sorta-kinda) that our practice is far more complex and inexplicit than we can grasp with an explicit theory. Language is a primary example. The fantasy is that we can capture what is 'infinite' in listening and speaking in a finite set of propositions. This dark infinity of the space from which we listen is a mundane infinity, though. It's too close and not too far away to see well.

Interesting recommendation. I might have to pick up that book myself, heh. — Posty McPostface

I don't know if you've checked out Heidegger, but it's probably a great way in for a Wittgenstein fan.

Awesome to have you on board. — Posty McPostface

Thanks!

I think that is what Augustine was expressing in defining theology as "faith seeking understanding" (fide quaerens intellectum). — Dfpolis

Nice! I haven't got to Augustine yet, though he comes up in some of thinkers I value.

Agreed. I think what a lot of atheists reject is not what I understand by "God." When they tell me what they reject, I often agree with them. — Dfpolis

Indeed. To me it's almost a matter of context which word I pick, if any. Once thinking becomes sophisticated, it's exactly crude categorization that's no longer appropriate. This isn't the thread for it, but I think the idea that meaning significantly lives in individual words is still fairly dominant --which contributes to lots of uncharitable interpretation.

Do you have any recommendations for a companion to use alongside the PI? — Posty McPostface

If I can pop in, I am reading Groundless Grounds right now. It concentrates on what Wittgenstein and Heidegger have in common. It's written by Lee Braver, whose two favorite philosophers are...Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Beyond that it's just very good so far.

So I'd say it's worth considering. (And I am interested in looking at PI again and joining the thread..)

The point is that you live acting in such a way as to prevent yourself from breaking your arm on the ice, and to prevent yourself from falling off the roof. Why did you want to go skating, or go on the roof in the first place? And how did you get onto that roof? Don't you know that you intentionally put yourself at risk by doing such things? — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't see how this matters. We take risks in pursuit of our goals. I think the point is whether we think nature is looking out for us our not. Perhaps the existential aspect of the scientific worldview is our faith in the inefficacy of prayer. If we decide to put on a new roof to keep the rain out, we take certain precautions (safety straps) because we don't expect the ground to suddenly become mud and break our fall.

I'd say that it's this concrete worldly context that mostly informs notions of objectivity. If we imagine the table made of particles/waves, we still vaguely imagine a table-shape. If we 'know better' or think about it more, we can abstract away not only this shape but even our mathematics and waves and particles as indeed just another layer of human significance 'projected' on 'something' --albeit problematically as we abstract away everything intelligible.

It occurs to me that the thing-in-itself is a kind of direction. Remove the 'subject' as much as possible, etc., starting with the sensual and proceeding to the intellectual. Trying to go all the way leads to absurdities. Does isolating a pure subject in the same way lead to absurdity?

There's a difficulty in having to use the very words you're trying to redefine. — Jonah Tobias

Indeed. We can only expand the circle of meaning using what is already in there in strange ways.

I'm not sure its worth chopping up more on this particular subject. The differences- the stubbornness of the disagreement will probably reflect in some other area of conversation as well. Maybe it'll be clearer then- what is at stake? — Jonah Tobias

Probably not that much is at stake. It won't rock your world ethically if you suddenly see where I am coming from. It'll only change your mind that Heidegger was indeed saying something fresh. Existentialism as an ethic or worldview is as old as Stirner and even predates Hegel as 'The Irony' of certain artsy German intellectuals. So this isn't what is fresh about Heidegger. Indeed, we don't have to keep dwelling on it, but I will dwell on it a little longer just to reply to your post.

For me, my sense, my feeling when I talk about our different concepts of time- is that I feel like I am reaching for a demystifying of this time process- and you believe you are speaking of a time concept that has greater depth than what I am speaking of. — Jonah Tobias

Basically 'my' view (or I hope Heidegger's) is itself a demystification of clock time. But let us consider the demystification of demystification itself. It, demystification, is one more unmasking that always seeks the Real behind the Unreal. So our pursuit of depth and our pursuit of demystification aren't so separate in my view. Just as atheism can be profound (in that it opens up the mystery of a world that exists as brute fact), so does a demystification of the instantaneous open up metaphysics to a wider space. Instead of 'primordial' time being the construction of a spider web, it is the destruction of spider webs via an attack on an inconspicuous presupposition of such spiderwebs.

And surely I don't understaand what's down there since I haven't really plummeted its depths just tried sometime years ago and felt like I was entering into such a foggy morass it couldn't have been erected in good faith with the attempt at clarity. — Jonah Tobias

I relate to this. I'm just saying that sometimes (esp. in work prior to Being and Time) the dude did indeed just really come out and say it as clearly as it could be said. The situation is similar with Hegel. Scholars who have put in the time with Hegel can find 'most' of Hegel in the Phenomenology. But readers who start there are pretty quickly like WTF? They think this 'is' Hegel, though really it was Hegel still clarifying his own thoughts and writing under economic pressure. When the man had a secure economic position, he gave very clearly lectures that were extremely popular.

Similarly Heidegger's lectures became extremely popular. They were published long after B&T, so they aren't at the foreground of intros to Heidegger. Instead one gets the sense that one should leap into a dense book that crushes years of thought into a somewhat thick and heavy prose, translated in a way that suggests mysticism or bad faith on his part. Of course he also abandoned an exoteric style after the war, maybe because of some kind of guilt or human failing. Nevertheless, I'd say that his mid 20s stuff is intelligble. The only hard part is the phenomenology. Phenomena must be grasped intuitively. While this opens up the question of mysticism, it's really more like learning math. It's hard to put what learning math really 'is' down on paper in the symbols. The way the symbols work 'express' these intuitions indirectly. So being-in-the-world-with-others is aiming at a pre-theoretical 'worlding' in which explicit theories are born. Rather than being esoteric, it is too familiar , like the water we swim in. It's 'esoteric' in that one has to be reminded to 'just look ' --and don't project theory.

But where that mistifying mist rises up in philosophy... only look what ugly thoughts can hide behind these abstractions in the case of Heidegger! I think its important to speak plainly when we can.... this goes for philosophical writings in general. We say that if we speak plainly (like Nietzsche) we'll be misunderstood (like Nietzsche). But if we speak only in this tortured complex language we'll be even more misunderstood. Didn't delueze have a dichotomy of these two language- common language and more philosophical? I see them as common language is easy to relate to the rest of life and judge- but difficult to know the author's true intention because its so easy to substitute it with our own. Why philosophical language is more precise and distinct as to the author's intention- but so difficult to bring it to bear upon every day life and connect and really understand it- and this itself forms a kind of mask by separating it out from the world it must refer to. — Jonah Tobias

These are all good points. But you might be neglecting that the circle of meaning is expanded only by abusing words. Intellectual progress is the self-mutilation of common sense. More dramatically, philosophy making itself intelligible is suicide. At first this sounds like the most pretentious thing that could possibly be said. But it is only a dramatic way of defining philosophy as that which extends the realm of the intelligible. It may well be that 999 out of 1000 humans speaking in new ways are really wasting our time with their own confusion. But occasionally 1 of them really has grasped something new. Demanding that philosophy always be publicly and immediately intelligible is demanding that it not be philosophy, that it stay within the very ring of meaning it ought to stretch. If we think about paradigm shifts in physics, this becomes obvious. People like Einstein redefine time and space. They shake the entire network of meaning by shaking its fundamental meanings. With science, its predictive power overcomes any metaphysical skepticism. We can believe where we don't understand. With philospohy it's different, since meaning has an elusive, imperfectly public sharedness. Words don't always work.


*I do generally get where you are coming from and agree. I am just stubbornly presenting some thoughts that seem connected and (maybe) neglected.

Excellent sketch of your general position (which I happen to find congenial). Thanks.

I think the notion of 'absolute' meaning is incoherent; — Janus

I agree, but I think the fantasy of that kind of meaning is at heart of some approaches to metaphysics.

but I also think that meanings in everyday discourse including the empirical sciences are sharp enough that we get what is going on. — Janus

I agree here, too. We get what is going on well enough indeed. This well-enough is the 'field' of meaning. We can roughly atomized a word, but we do this of course by linking it to other words. This spiderweb is a very rough approximation, IMV, of the fluidity and mastery we have in our a-theoretical use of language. We have more mastery than we can justify or make explicit with this same mastery.

I'm not sure there is any meaning at all in mathematics, beyond our ordinary, empircally derived notions of number and the ways in which we can elaborate those. The rest would seem to consist in conventionally established formulaic operations, and the discovery of new formulaic operations that are implicit in the ones we are already familiar with. — Janus

I'd say that when we do mathematics that we indeed employ some kind of intuition that is hard if not impossible to make explicit in a non-controversial way. Indeed, much of this is connected to its empirical application, but there is IMV some genuine intuitive meaning in some of the more outlandish mathematics --an infinite tower of infinities each more infinite than those lower on the stack. Or infinite dimensional vector spaces. Seems to me that metaphor/analogy is central to mathematics along with quasi-Kantian 'intuitive' space and the grasp of 'pure unity.'

Maybe one of my themes here is that we tend to deny or avoid issues of meaning where that meaning cannot be made sufficiently explicit. But at the same time our basic existence in meaning is an existence in something that is more fluid than crystalline. If we insist that only the crystalline is 'real,' then we do so within the same 'fluid' that is therefore unaddressed or even unreal. And I also cannot make this point in a crystalline way, since I am ultimately pointing phenomenologically toward a blurry truth derived from introspection.

Why would you believe that it exists in some public, not private way? — Terrapin Station

I'd say consider our experience right now. Are we not in some sense sharing a meaning space accessible in some sense also to everyone following our conversation right now? I am trying to do justice to that in-some-sense that doesn't impose a visually-inspired 'air-gapped' metaphysics on it -- a metaphysics that ignores the very thing that makes it possible, the in-some-sense-public-ness of meaning.

I think it might be more accurate to think of public and private in terms of a continuum. Some language is more or less universally intelligible to speakers of that language. Other language is trickier. And sometimes a 'global' sense is public while individual terms are understood differently. For instance, a neural network on the same hardware (fixed set of neurons) can learn approximately the same model with wildly differing 'weights' from neuron to neuron -- as function of its initial random state. The 'model' (meaning) doesn't live in the individual neurons or any particular connection between the neurons but is distributed across them all. The model is emergent and cannot be atomized.

The discourse of public/private is caught up in this same indeterminacy of any particular atom considered in isolation.

macrosoft this is part of the response I'd give to you on the 'thread' you suggested, but tracing the reinvigoration of metaphysics by emphasising the autonomy of the real (viz; becoming) and our ability to track it with good concepts takes a lot more effort than this exegesis. — fdrake

Hey, just to get a sense of where you are coming from more generally, have you read Groundless Grounds? Do you find that kind of grasp of our situation correlationalist? At the moment that book presents roughly my own perspective and focus, which I mention to contextualize some of the themes I'm exploring.

A hint at what I'm trying to say: I think we listen from and speak from a background that philosophy tries to grasp or compress into a foreground. This background is too rich ( a set of positive measure) for this to be accomplished. Attempts to make the 'dark place' from which we listen and speak explicit interfere with other such attempts. It's as if a set of positive measure is trying to fit itself into a set of zero measure --the attempt to capture R with Q and somehow say finally what it means to mean.

Meaning is the mental phenomenon of making what are basically conditional, implicational associations--in other words, both connotational and denotational assocations that mentally function in the manner of "if this <input>, then that <association>." It's important to keep in mind that meaning is not the associations themselves. Non-mentally, there isn't even any way to make an association. Simple correlations can't do it. Instead, meaning is the dynamic, inherently mental phenomenon that is the act of associating. The things associated can be any other mental content--perceptions with respect to any sense (sight, sound, etc.--or in other words re perceptions, we're assigning meanings to external objects and events etc. in the world ), concepts, words a la sounds or symbol/text strings, concepts, etc.

Meanings, as something inherently mental, the inherently mental act of associating, can't literally be made public. They're not identical to sounds we make, gestures we make, strings of letters or symbols, etc. And they can not literally be shared, either in the sense of display, or in the sense of two or more people possessing the same one. — Terrapin Station

OK, we are back on track and really talking again.

I largely agree with what you say above, though maybe it doesn't exhaust 'meaning' for me. I don't think we really can 'exhaust' a word. Btw, how do you categorize the associations themselves? I like meaning-as-dynamic. I see the value of meaning-as-act. But wouldn't most of us (and maybe) you want to point at something 'immaterial' associated with your definition above? Is what you are communicating pure act? Or various associations?

I agree that meaning is not 'in' the marks or the noises in some simple way. Nor is meaning 'literally' shared from an important perspective. But my sense of the inexactness of meaning inspires me to question the very way we talk about meaning. Maybe you think I am trying to say something 'supernatural' about shared meaning. No. I am trying to say something about the phenomenon of meaning, the way it exists for us in a kind of public way.

To exist in meaning is to exist in a language that is not completely or even mostly private. In some sense the 'subject' that thinks is not simply an isolated subject. IMV, the fact that we can look at brains separated in space (air-gapped brains) inspires us to neglect the living sense of connectedness we have as language users. We have a 'wireless' connection to an elusive meaning space. If we insist on interpreting this from an atoms-and-void perspective, the meaning is trapped 'in' a subject. I make a mark or a noise and then someone else can bring this mark or noise alive 'in' their own consciousness. This is a reasonable and even natural approach, but I think it's limited to work only from within this perspective. Why? Because it begins with a notion of the objectively real that doesn't consider how the phenomenon of meaning complicates this notion. I'd say that any explicit theory of the objectively real depends on a softer, out-of-focus notion of 'true-for-us.' Explicit theories of the objectively real seem, in my view, parasitic upon the shared meaning space that they tend to interpret in a way that makes this less visible. My theory is not an explicit theory of the real but rather a pointing at a fundamentally in-explicit ground of all such theories. This sense of language and meaning also questions basic notions of the subject and the object as useful for one purpose but perhaps inappropriate as a description of our ordinary, pre-theoretical mode of existing in the world.

Look at your examples, they are all things which "might" happen. So we look at the world with a view to how we can prevent, or cause, identified future events. This does not jive with Sophisticat's "we all believe that much of the world is indifferent to our thoughts and desires". — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't see the problem. The ice isn't going to politely melt before I unthinkingly skate on it and break my arm. If I am fixing a roof and tumble off, the ground will not soften as I descend. Or at least I do not live with such expectations, however merely logically possible such things may be. At other times, it's my understanding that people did try to bribe or flatter something like nature. Nature was a personality, mysterious by ultimately 'like us' or a 'subject with feelings' in some way. The de-personalization of nature into a machine is the the ur-model upon which we project more sophisticated scientific models. And these models largely apply in terms of us deciding which goals are possible and how to obtain them --in the 'lifeworld' or the 'basic' 'model' that grounds other modelling in terms of care. Or so I reason.

the feeling is mutual. i want to brush up against the borders of what i don’t understand because that’s where the growth is. thank you for all the explication. i think i need to revisit Heidegger. — Jonah Tobias

my pleasure. it has been fun. and thanks for being openminded and tolerant of my enthusiasm

There'd be no past. Nones' thinking about it. It just doesn't arise. This rock is going through changes. That rock is going through changes. They're not even in the same "world" because what's a world but a perspective? — Jonah Tobias

This point about the rock is great. Humans create time because they care. They have a perspective informed by memory and a project. They have to wait for the morning light to do certain things together. This is the original public clock. The sunrise means 'now it is time to hunt [or pick berries].' Time becomes part of our language, our shared reality. But time was already there privately in terms of private projects. So a public mechanical time comes to dominate a private sense of time. Before long we think that our private sense of meaning time is the illusion, while the clocks we invented tell the truth.

The way we interact with the past and future to me is just the way we interact with our imagination. It doesn't strike me with awe. A "future" is always imagined- A "past" is always imagined. The present is always real. So the three are not equal- Past and future all exist in the present- and the present is just flux. Reality. — Jonah Tobias

What is this present other than the future and the past and our care for them? How precise is this present? And where does this notion of a perfectly precise present come from if not from clocks? The way we take the clock as the last word on our experience despite it being our invention for practical purposes? Our ideas are close, but the 'flux' is maybe not so 'present.'

OK, now I will really go to bed. I just saw that paragraph and realized I neglected the rock issue, which is important. We don't exist as a rock exists, and yet we insist on grasping ourselves as that kind of instantaneously present object, like a rock that happens to think instantaneously present thoughts. This 'common sense' traps the metaphysical enterprise in fixed ideas experienced as necessity rather than invention.

Till next time....

I hope I haven't been too annoying. I just get excited about these ideas and want others to enjoy them with me. It is indeed late, so I will probably turn in. Have a good night.

The world does not need everything that ever was preserved and laid out in sequential order of time. We're the ones who need this. — Jonah Tobias

Hmm. Heidegger is trying to shatter the sequential order of time as a fiction. --or as a discourse appropriate for natural science but not for existence and meaning. As far as us needing something, that is on track. What is the time-structure of care or need? What is the time structure of the care that needs time? Does it try to bring its fantasy of time into its present? Care and time and meaning are one, let's say.

But is this anything more than an impressive trick? Does it change us? — Jonah Tobias

That's tricky. Does Nietzsche change us? IMV, Heidegger is the same kind of 'raw' philosopher who is not just concept tricks. He is a master of being against shallow concept tricks. At least at his best. But pointing out those deeply ingrained fixed ideas is hard work. Exactly because he tries to go back or go deep, he seems to be saying nothing or saying something absurd. IMV, as long as you think he's boring you probably haven't got what I like about him at least. Just an opinion. I love Nietzsche
and Hegel the same way. Heidegger is just the newest thinker that I'm really starting to get --and he fits right in with those other two.

I still retain the impression that what Heidegger is concerned with more than anything else- is just turning everything into philosophy! lol These sophisticated descriptions... is this really embodied and lived philosophy? — Jonah Tobias

Well philosophy is ultimately philosophy. I'd say that clarifying our own existence is a big but not the only part of life. I love riding my bike down by the river and playing with my cat, too. But there is something very deep about language/meaning that might be the highest for me. At least as 'me' ( a self and not just an animal.)

When you talk about how the the living past is how we do the now- are you saying for example- like the way foucault reinterprets the past how that changes our present? Are you saying-

"He who controls the present now- controls the past.
He who controls the past now- controls the future!"
-Rage against the machine :)

If this is the case- maybe I'm not effected by this thought because I could say- right- reality is a narrative. Why describe it in such a complicated manner. — Jonah Tobias

No, I'm not saying that. It's like my 14 year old nihilist example. Anything explicitly conscious is still on the level of theory. It's the stuff that dominates in the background that matters. It's the water we swim in that we can't see. This water-we-can't-see is the 'living' past (one aspect of it.) It is the way you reach for your instrument, your way and not someone else's, informed by years of experience. It's the way you read these words right now, the way you unconsciously interpret them, the way that you (like all of us) are trapped in certain habits of interpretation, ultimately learned not only from your personal past but that which you inherited as a child and even further back in the creation of the English language. It's all of this stuff functioning invisibly as you dream up a future and act toward it in the 'present;. [The thrown-ness that you know about consciously is the least important kind, let's say.]

Heidegger is a 'depth' meta-physician. He is trying to get 'under' things that can be argued about to see what makes them visible or invisible as things to argue about. For instance, to the degree that this is making sense to you I am 'opening' new things for us to talk about --hopefully pointing to things already in the background of your consciousness, covered over by louder explicit theory that gets in the way.

Speaking phenomenally- it seems we are always in a reality that can't be pinned down (flux) and we strategize and contemplate based on constructed memories and projected imaginations which are also part of this unpinnable reality.

Can you explain to me how it is otherwise? — Jonah Tobias

I think our views are very close. There is maybe only the specific issue of that flux. How is it pinned down? Is it pinned down? I want to say something like: meaning never existed in an instant to begin with, but we learned to think that it did. We thought the instantaneously present, which was a mathematical notion 'pasted' on to a more primordial or original flow of meaning which is never really present. Or never without past and future, in other words.

I'm not saying it's terribly important. But I connect it to some cool things. Do you ever experience a sense of being behind language? Like you could always choose other words? That the words aren't important, but only a more general message behind them that grabs which ones seem right at the moment for that person you are talking to?

When we consider our reality- our experience- in terms of something in the "past"... isn't this past constructed just like a movie by our minds? We try to be faithful to what we were recording but its still a movie. — Jonah Tobias

I very much understand what you are saying, and I do not deny any of that. But perhaps the most important part of the past is the way we interpret the 'present' and the 'future.' The 'living' past is how we do 'now'. Our fundamental approach evolves, so that what we experience informs what we project onto the future and how we interpret what is conventionally present. I'd say (just to grasp what I'm saying) let go of the physics notion of the world, the perspective from atoms-and-the-void, and focus on the 'life world,' the meaningful world shared with others doing ordinary things. It's not really about something strange or mystical or supernatural at all. (That stuff can be added on, of course.) It is about the structure of meaning as we experience it. It's not whether the past exists. It's about how the past exists, perhaps most importantly in an embodied or semi-conscious sense. You have of course various memories of the past. But you 'are' or 'live' a deeper kind of past, that past which shapes your seeing of the 'present' and grasping of meaning.

Think about driving a car. How does time work there? You anticipate, remember, and act in a kind of unity.

The past that we encounter is always a picture/ a memory/ a bit of our imagination. It is never real. Things change and they leave nothing behind. — Jonah Tobias

I do generally agree. So what is really at issue is perhaps in what way the past does live on. When you write messages to me or I to you we can understand one another in terms of a living language. So the past is 'still here' in that sense (in terms of what we know of one another, which gathers.). And the future is already here too as the words pour out toward the end of the sentence.

A "future" is always imagined- A "past" is always imagined. The present is always real. So the three are not equal- Past and future all exist in the present- and the present is just flux. Reality. — Jonah Tobias

Respectfully, and only to continue to try to share why I think Heidegger is so fascinating, I think you are still taking for granted the time of physics. The idea that there is a present instant and that what is real exists in this present might be THE bubble that early Hiedegger is trying to pop as an unquestioned and inaccurate inheritance which now seems so natural as to be common sense. I think he has a point, and this is why some people rank him with Hegel and Plato, etc. If he is right (and you will have to decide for yourself), then we've been locked in a 'presentist' illusion (useful fiction) for centuries, beguiled by one of our own inventions, asleep to its apparently necessary but actually merely contingent dominance.

IMV, the authenticity stuff is fascinating, but what is maybe more purely [anti-]'metaphysically' amazing in Heidegger's this phenomenological deconstruction of a fixed idea. In some ways this is the fixed idea. And critics of being in the name of becoming have still tended to be caught in this idea, maybe even Nietzsche.

I offer this politely as food for thought. I know it's weird. If he is right, then this has to be true-for-us in an important way, and that where phenomenology comes in. We need to look at the flow of meaning with fresh eyes, without taking the presentist notion for granted.

What you're describing here- isn't the feeling of it a kind of lessening of seriousness? A kind of- Shit since we're all gonna die anyway- I'm not as caught up in the gravity of it all?

In my life- when I was about 20- I decided the future that I was taught to hold sacred and fear missing out on- getting a good job- the american dream etc- was a crock of lies. So I felt a kind of lessening of the seriousness of these shared perspectives and was freed to embrace my own. Is this talk of death having a similar effect? — Jonah Tobias

Bingo! Because all of those A-holes were just mortals like you. And you were going to live your life and die your death your own way. 'Everyone' (AKA 'Anyone') has only limited authority over any mortal who lives this mortality by embracing what it offers --freely chosen project, etc. That space allows us to go back perhaps to a past our generation neglects and repeat it in today's or rather tomorrow's terms.

I mention that past because presumably you had influences, images of another way. I know I did. And I spent my 20s poor but adventurous. I 'repeated' the past of Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, and many many more. And before novels it was especially poetry in my teens. Auden, Eliot, Yeats. And through everything....rock'n'roll. These days lots of classical. when I do math at my desk --and write philosophy like now. And some mean Coltrane when I'm in the mood.

For Heidegger and you it seems like there is something more profound supposedly there. Does this view of time impact your life in some kind of way? can you describe how? — Jonah Tobias

For me the point about time is a point about language. I'd say that it leads to a continuous view of meaning. Here's a quote from Nietzsche (about Christ) that gets at the behindness-of-language that I get my kicks from with respect to all this 'continuity.'

This faith does not formulate itself—it simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae. To be sure, the accident of environment, of educational background gives prominence to concepts of a certain sort: in primitive Christianity one finds only concepts of a Judaeo-Semitic character (—that of eating and drinking at the last supper belongs to this category—an idea which, like everything else Jewish, has been badly mauled by the church). But let us be careful not to see in all this anything more than symbolical language, semantics[6] an opportunity to speak in parables. It is only on the theory that no word is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya,[7] and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse[8]—and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.—With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a “free spirit”[9]—he cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth,[10] whatever is established killeth. The idea of “life” as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of inner things: “life” or “truth” or “light” is his word for the innermost—in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory.—Here it is of paramount importance to be led into no error by the temptations lying in Christian, or rather ecclesiastical prejudices: such a symbolism par excellence stands outside all religion, all notions of worship, all history, all natural science, all worldly experience, all knowledge, all politics, all psychology, all books, all art—his “wisdom” is precisely a pure ignorance[11] of all such things. — N

The idea of “life” as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. People who get caught up in 'essences' are trapped in words in some sense. And maybe we all are to some degree. But I think we can become significantly freer of the certain rigid and life-choking conceptions of meaning.

*In a letter Heidegger told a friend that he was 'really' a Christian theologian. IMO, in some ways, this is also true of Nietzsche. Is not that portrait above reminiscent of Nietzsche's own ability to 'see' becoming?

Of course words like 'Christian' and 'theologian' are caught up in the flux. The words can only hint at a freedom that surpasses them --that picks them up as the wind picks up the dead leaves. And puts them down again somewhere else.

There is constant change- let us give up on the idea of trying to seize everything all at once and then passing it through some medium called time. etc. — Jonah Tobias

I think your ethical point is beautiful. I agree. I'd just say that Heidegger's time (as I understand it) is a morally neutral pointing-out of something about language and meaning. It's connected to the later WIttgenstein's work. I have a book by Lee Braver called Groundless Grounds. We can say that WItgtenstein and Heidegger were similar anti-foundationalists in important ways. Our practices have no deeper ground than those very practices. 'This is just how we do things (mostly automatically.)' Philosophers try to build an 'official ground,' but they do so on this vanishing ground or abyss of semi-conscious, embodied knowhow. [This is why most people think philosophers are boring, because most of them are boringly trying to lay down a floor that no one is asking for or missing.]

Meaning-time is a slice of this with respect to language.

In a sense I don't believe in time at all. Just constant change. — Jonah Tobias

I think what maybe that statement neglects is the connectedness of mental life. It's not pure noise, for instance. The past is reinterpreted in terms of a future project. The future is projected in terms of what has already been. What is the dynamic here? Is it a simple forward flow?

This way of seeing the world- of one's own death as a possibility- I'm not sure I'm familiar with it. — Jonah Tobias

I think it just means that knowing one will die. His idea of death is this version of death as a possibility.

I can sit here right now and think about if everything just ended. If my own personal experience was gone. And what do I get from that thought? Personally I get a kind of peace. There's some famous christian who said to an atheist- "come here and see me upon my death bed. I want you to see with what peace a christian dies." I'm not christian but I'm spiritual. I see my life as a sort of mission in some ways. I'm doing my best. If I'm gone... well shit I sure tried. but since I don't feel like I have to control everything- the sense of me vanishing doesn't leave me with some great anxiety about what I leave behind. That was never up to me to begin with. I was just doing my best and proceding with trust. — Jonah Tobias

I think this is beautiful way to view things. I pretty much see things that way. I'm not ready yet, but I am not essentially afraid. I am however still immersed in projects. I want to bring those little babies to term.
As far as I can tell, the point of death in Heidegger is actually the opposite of 'morbid.' It really seems to be about an approach to the historical nature of existence.

This is what trying to feel the possiblity of my own death brings up in me. I'm not sure if this experience coincides with what you speak of. Neither does it make me feel necessarily more like this life is my own rather than shared with others. My spirituality still makes me feel like I am part of something shared....

Speak on this- what am I not understanding that makes Heidegger so hard for me to grasp :) — Jonah Tobias

On this subject, we might wander away from Heidegger a bit. IMV, the fact that we die pokes a hole in the respectable world. It lets it breath. Otherwise we would just be trapped in our tribe's way of thinking and talking absolutely. But since we are already mortal, we might decide to fight for our freedom, for example, since we'd only be dying earlier. Or maybe we try hard drugs or jumping out of airplanes. In any case, we are maybe already looking back on our life as a whole and summing it up. 'If I die from an overdoes, well I was an explorer. I can live with my death now in the present in terms of that way of seeing my existence as a whole.' Yes, I think this seeing one's otherwise unfinished existence as a whole is a big part of it. Death allows us to see our entire existence from the outside, from nothingness. Nothingness lets beings be against a background of their possible not-being. We can see the entire world (the meaningful world with others) from the outside, imaging ourselves gone.

*Meaning-time, as I call it, can definitely be grasped without all the death stuff. As far as I can tell. Wider forms of historical time seem more dependent on the mortality angle. And it may be as simple as looking back on one's life from the perspective of already being gone.