The content of correlation is sometimes easier to ascertain than others. — creativesoul

Ok. That makes sense.

That Feuerbach grasped this so directly still impresses me.

But if friendship and love, which themselves are only subjective realizations of the species, make out of singly imperfect beings an at least relatively perfect whole, how much more do the sins and failings of individuals vanish in the species itself, which has its adequate existence only in the sum total of mankind, and is therefore only an object of reason! Hence the lamentation over sin is found only where the human individual regards himself in his individuality as a perfect, complete being not needing others for the realization of the species, of the perfect man; where instead of the consciousness of the species has been substituted the exclusive self-consciousness of the individual; where the individual does not recognize himself as a part of mankind, but identifies himself with the species, and for this reason makes his own sins, limits and weaknesses, the sins, limits, and weaknesses of mankind in general. Nevertheless man cannot lose the consciousness of the species, for his self-consciousness is essentially united to his consciousness of another than himself. Where therefore the species is not an object to him as. a species, it will be an object to him as God. He supplies the absence of the idea of the species by the idea of God, as the being, who is free from the limits and wants which oppress the individual, and, in his opinion (since he identifies the species with the individual), the species itself. But this perfect being, free from the limits of the individual, is nothing else than the species, which reveals the infinitude of its nature in this, that it is realized in infinitely numerous and various individuals. — Feuerbach

I love Nietzsche, but it's hard to imagine Nietzsche writing this. Feuerbach writes from a very open and synthetic point of view. He doesn't see masters types and slaves types, even if such exist, because he's not interested in seeing himself as a master in this attunement. He had two brothers who were very successful in their fields, as impressive in his eyes as he was. Nietzsche was the lone boy genius in a family of women with a dead father. Who's the better writer? Who is more acute? Nietzsche, I think. But the passage above is wiser and more balanced than much of what Nietzsche writers.

In Nietzsche we see the 'wicked' potential of the mangod symbol, 'beyond good and evil,' a transgressive ecstasy. This is 'God' in a man, not 'God' in men. Given his genius, he had a lively enough inner monologue to sustain himself this way. He had a community in his chest and between his ears. One reads him with mixed feelings, though at times with a transgressive ecstasy that understands him.

Feuerbach, on the other hand, despite some blindspots and sentimentality here and there, has a fundamental grasp on the human as essentially social. He is a man with a wife and friends who understand him. He knows the space because he lives in the space, and not just in books and his own vast soul.

Feuerbach, unlike Strauss, never accepted Hegel’s characterization of Christianity as the consummate religion is clear from the contents of a letter he sent to Hegel along with his dissertation in 1828.[7] In this letter he identified the historical task remaining in the wake of Hegel’s philosophical achievement to be the establishment of the “sole sovereignty of reason” in a “kingdom of the Idea” that would inaugurate a new spiritual dispensation. Foreshadowing arguments put forward in his first book, Feuerbach went on in this letter to emphasize the need for

the I, the self in general, which especially since the beginning of the Christian era, has ruled the world and has thought of itself as the only spirit that exists at all [to be] cast down from its royal throne. (GW v. 17, Briefwechsel I (1817–1839), 103–08)

This, he proposed, would require prevailing ways of thinking about time, death, this world and the beyond, individuality, personhood and God to be radically transformed within and beyond the walls of academia. — SEP

All predication is existentially dependent upon a plurality of creatures drawing the same(or similar enough) correlations between different things. — creativesoul

If I read you correctly, this underlined part takes into account the vagueness I'm interested in. We just ignore a certain vagueness as unimportant. I mean we really ignore it. If we search out some final exact meaning, we can't give it. Images are at work on the level of ordinary objects. Named images. Philosophers, however, sometimes obsess over winning arguments to the neglect of such seeing the object under consideration in its vagueness. Instead of looking around in the space, they want a particular relation between real or abstract objects (relationships) to be the center of attention --a natural part of the desire to communicate that can backfire.

Do you not see the unveiling? — creativesoul

You tell me. Do you recognize your view in my words? I see the positing of objects and thier relationships in a shared space. Is it like that? I think I see what you mean.

I tried to slip into your worldview a little, and I realized something important (to me anyway.)

Semantic holism becomes important only as sentences get either complex or appeal to abstractions. If we make simple assertions ('your coat is hanging up in the closet'), the context is so automatic that a particular coat in a particular closet appears. If we believe the speaker, we 'see' that coat just hanging there. We act on it as we would when going downstairs to get an apple from the counter where we last saw it. Thinking of this kind of communication would make the holist issue secondary at best. At this level of familiar purposes and familiar objects we are most clear.

On the other hand, I've been thinking about interpreting Nietzsche and Hegel, which is language at its most self-referential. The meanings and tones shift constantly and radically. In this case a line taken out of context is the limb of the dead cat that you didn't find convincing. Basically the holism I was talking about has been operating in this conversation. We are both trying to say strange things about saying things. We find something that sounds promising in what the other says. 'Wait a minute! I see that in the space.' And yet other words don't compute yet, don't feel right. So we prod one another with questions, elucidations, and subtle gestures of goodwill as a kind of lubricant against the natural friction of being challenged to interpret and not just see the coat in the closet--and maybe just the willingness to share the space so that we keep our eyes peeled and don't hide from the sharing. Slowly the other's total point or mini-language becomes intelligible as a whole. (And I hope this paragraph did exactly what it described in our case, filled in my view a little more.)

Shared meaning.

A plurality of creatures drawing the same(or similar enough) correlations between (the same or similar enough)different things.

That is the only line, and it's razor sharp. — creativesoul

In this context I see why you want it sharp. I think that's justified by your interest here in brightly-lit linguistic belief specifically. We might call sitting in a chair without thinking about it belief in the chair. A wink is not a belief or an assertion of a thesis. So I withdraw that as relevant to a different issue.

If I am getting you, we were just focusing on different issues and yet with some kind of similar intent.

All utterance of "thought" and "belief" is predication. All statements of thought/belief is predication. All predication is existentially dependent upon a plurality of creatures drawing the same(or similar enough) correlations between different things. All use of "thought" and "belief" is existentially dependent upon a creature capable of drawing correlations between different things. — creativesoul

Oh, well I can relate to this. This predication is something like being. Existence of things is presupposed. And thinking is something like their meaningful presence or making them present, pointing at them in the space. Don't know if that's what you mean, but I can relate it to my theory. Objects in the shared space are referred to, connected in relationships. Relationships themselves are therefore pointed at as a kind of ideal public object (a shared meaning).

That method begins by virtue of looking at all the different uses of the terms "thought" and "belief" in an attempt at discerning whether or not they share some set of common denominators that make them what they are. — creativesoul

For me all the different uses would be (potentially) infinite. Context dominates. Maybe you can just make your case and I'll just really open my mind.

Consisting of language or shared meaning is not acceptable, for pre-lingual thought/belief if there is such a thing, cannot consist of either.

Propositions?

Not on my view. Propositions are existentially dependent upon language — creativesoul

I'm not convinced there's a sharp line between language and non-language. For instances: a peace sign, a wink, a salute. Are these that different from 'hi' or 'uh' or 'hmmm'?

I wonder if you are pointing at thought independent of language/words?

I say the meaning-space I have in mind includes words and gestures, really everything that is interpret-able in terms of either other thoughts or other gestures or actions. The world, I guess, but the world as phenomenon or lifeworld.

1. Does it dissolve the hard problem of consciousness by providing a scientific explanation for colors, sounds, smells, etc? — Marchesk

What is explanation? I'd say he adds meaning to the situation, but I still don't feel satisfied. What would an answer to the hard question even look like. Can being itself or the space in which all questioning and explanation takes place be explained? If explanation is just a tool, just an implicit rule for pressing buttons, then that's something else. If it is supposed to obliterate wonder, I'm guessing that 1000 years from now (if we are still around) that the same issue will be in play.

2. Does this entail that direct perception is false, being that secondary qualities (color, taste, etc.) are not properties of things themselves, but rather coding schemes that relate to the chemical makeup of sugar or reflective surfaces of leaves (using the two examples above)? — Marchesk

Even if they are also coding schemes in one framework, they are 'directly' exactly what they already are. Can Dennet give an account of meaning itself? That 'inner' dimension in which his theory is intelligible for us? Is such an account thinkable? It would of course presuppose meaning.

3. We know that color experience is produced after the visual cortex is stimulated. This can the result of perception, memory, imagination, dream, magnetic cranial stimulation, etc. If a person's visual cortex is damaged enough, they lose all ability to have color experiences, including being able to remember colors. It's hard to avoid concluding that color experiences are generated by the brain. But that sounds like the makings of a cartesian theater, which Dennett has spent his career tearing down. — Marchesk

Good point. It makes sense to me that we could lose color through brain injury, and that colors are somehow generated by the brain. I even understand that of course a scientist would want to explain these things. On the other hand, one gets the sense sometimes that there is such a fear of ghosts and so on that basic facts are avoided as much as possible.

Recently I've been wondering if consciousness is the primary substance that the material world gloms onto or adheres to.

What are your thoughts on this and what are the implications for free will? — Noah Te Stroete

Is substance the right word? I've wrestled with a similar idea. Consciousness is (or has seemed) to be being itself --at least from a first person perspective. It is not a thing but a space in which things can be things. It is the 'there' itself. There is a there there.

But how can we become conscious of our consciousness? Why aren't we (as consciousness) exactly what we see? Lost in pure perception, a viewing of the object that forgets itself? When I see the tree (gotta use the tree), I also know that I see the tree. I 'see' myself seeing the tree. This seems to be made possible to some degree by thought. Thought moves through time. Or is that right? Is thought itself time? Is thought itself the time that is there?

This is weird stuff, ripe for parody. But I'm not joking, just confessing that it's funny language. My question (not really my own) is whether meaning 'is' time. This only makes sense if meaning has a movement, if meaning is not frozen at an instant. One way to support this is to just ask you to reflect on your memory of reading this post. (Another question is whether this is same kind of time that the clock measures.)

Again, I ony agree with "to imagine a language means (implies rather) imagining a form of life" as I described above. I wouldn't agree with that otherwise — Terrapin Station

At a certain age we are so trained in a language that our minds are privately differentiated when it comes to various brightly conscious beliefs. We can experience distance. We can not be understood and realize that there is reason the notion of subject meaning was born. But all of this seems to made possible by a deep immersion in the form of life. And we still obey the traffic lights. We are just so good at moving in the form of life that we only notice the gaps, our prized ideas that are hard to communicate. I'd say these brightly lit and lonely prized ideas are the tip of an iceberg.

If one tries to understand 'slab!' in only in terms of sentences and thoughts - rather than actions and practices - one will miss how it is that 'slab!' means anything at all. — StreetlightX

Well said. Action grounds meaning which is distributed throughout an entire form of life(oversimplifying which may be impossible to avoid, which may be the point). That certain words like 'cat' bring an image to our mind is misleading. What does 'misleading' bring to our mind out of context? Or 'context'? And yet we use these words transparently.

The critics point applies here when we consider what method of approach could lead us to such knowledge. We have to start at the conventional notions, all the ways we use the terms "thought" and "belief". We have to discover, determine, and/or otherwise clearly establish that they share the same set of basic elemental constituents. Then we have to consider this set of basic elemental constituents in a different light. — creativesoul

Can you put this in another way?

one sec

I'm thinking of basic structures of consciousness. The inarticulate sense of a shared world with others, the animal faith we live by when we say what is-for-us. So 'truth is correspondence' has to 'correspond' somehow to 'truth' in this shared space, for example. But the point is that the person touting truth-as-correspondence does so from a deeper, vaguer sense of truth that makes the assertion meaningful as an assertion--the sense that inspires explicit truth-as-correspondence.. They are trying to do something like point at pure presence. 'Look, here, in our shared space. It's the idea of truth, visible as correspondence.' What's the problem, then? Am I not talking about correspondence in the space? True, but is this the space of their explicit theory?

What is this space in which this shared idea of truth can be pointed at? This space makes truth possible. It's not the physical world in some simple way. Because people debate about whether this is a world, or whether it idea or stuff, etc. But again they point at the world as idea or the world as atoms 'within' this world where truth happens. It's as if our sociality and sense of being linked outstrips our most radical metaphysical theses, all of which suppose others for whom these theses can be true.

Maybe I thought (and still think?) explicitness must fail do to the elusiveness of this world. I think this is close to Heidegger's being-in-the-world-with-others, a basic structure that we can't get behind, the wheels and axle of intelligibility.

I also think I am not grokking one of your main points.

So, we agree that we can get some knowledge of pre-lingual thought/belief. That's good. Is there any good reason to hold that we cannot acquire knowledge of what all thought/belief consist in/of?

That certainly does not require omniscience. — creativesoul

What comes to my mind is 'nothing is hidden.' We already live and experience these phenomena. Beyond that we can articulate them better with superior formal indications. IMV, we are always already in the water we usually see right through. But I am working from a first-person perspective (brain stuff is another issue entirely).

Strong agreement here as well... — creativesoul

I'm glad you agree about the relations between words just becoming a second issue after defining the 'atoms.' I don't know if you'd agree to this: an entire form of life as the 'unit' of meaning. Of course we can stare at individual words, but I think this is like the parts of a dead cat --no longer really the cat we want.

Yeah, I kinda got the feeling that you had such a position... — creativesoul

Indeed. Though I'm still trying to find the words for it. I'd say think of a conversation with a lover or a friend. Think of those two faces communicating and the complex play of meaning, the flexibility. There's no real line between thought and action, but only between paradigmatic 'bright' thoughts and paradigmatic unsubtle actions. Is voice tone separable? Yes, we can do without faces even, but that is a learned skill. Even as I type to you I have the sense of a person who shares a world with me who listens as I type-speak in my mind.

Or I like to think of my cat in her living complexity. I can analyze this or that sub-system, but her living complexity is something else. I am not saying to stop looking for better accounts. I don't think we can help it. We just naturally synthesize accounts. And even we are part of this with our meta-accounts.

Witt would never agree that all meaning has the same basic elemental constituency, would he??? — creativesoul

I don't know, but it sure seems like he is doing a version of my knowledge (or really his) in his OC. At some points if not in others.

What does being pre-lingual have to do with our knowledge of it, or rather the capability and/or possibility of us to acquire knowledge of that which is pre-lingual? — creativesoul

I think we can get some knowledge of it, but we are talking about the most complicated object in the known universe. Or rather it is talking about itself.

Mt. Everest is pre-lingual. — creativesoul

Agree. But we don't know everything about that. Knowledge about Everest involves knowledge about everything else, including dark matter and our own perception and cognition.

But how do we experience time? I mean I understand the neuroscience of it. But I'm not getting how you think we experience it in any pre-theoretical sense. How do you think an animal "experiences time"? — apokrisis

I don't know about (other) animals. But we can also call it reading time. It doesn't have to be so linguistic, but that was how I began to think about it. It's the way, right now, just look, that (with memory) meaning like an electric current through a sentence flows, bidirectionally. We can measure our reading with a clock, but why is the meaning time inside clock time and not the other way around? What is it to look at the clock and say Now? 'The sun is up. Now is time to drive the cattle out.' Clock time is everyone's time. Clock time separates the me-self and the we-self. Clocks allow for a public event to weld narratives and actions together.

This is not to deny 'objective time,' of course, but to point out a phenomenon. Dasein is the 'there' is the space-time through which this meaning drags and rushes. Interpretation happens in this space, hence hermeneutical ontology/phenomenology.

I would strongly argue that all mind/language requires thought/belief, but not all thought/belief requires mind/language(unless one equates mind with thought/belief, and I wouldn't object). — creativesoul

I think we agree on this point. What surprises me is that you think we can capture this animal pre-thinking in an explicit account. I think it's too pre-lingual to drag into the light. I have the sense that the operating system we use to do so is just staggeringly complex and yet incredibly smooth and elusive. We look through it like clean glass or as a fish through water. An explicit account is like an old floppy disk trying to store a download of the internet. To be fair, our minds are great at getting basic, crucial patterns. So our major accounts presumably all get a basic thing right. I'm still working this idea out, to be sure.

I want to say that the quest is like trying to put walking into words. I believe we discussed the phenomenon of 'true for us.' People debate theories of truth in the light of this 'blind' assumption that something like true-for-us is already there. Keeping with my convention, I'll call this truth.

Statistics always expresses patterns. And really, there are only two statistical patterns ruling nature. Either Gaussian - the single-scale bell curve kind - or fractal, the log/log scalefree kind that is in fact more primal because it has one fewer linear constraints.

A random walk expresses fractal intermittency. It resembles nature - a nature understood in dissipative process terms - far more accurately. — apokrisis

That accords with what I non-expertly know. Those are indeed mighty patterns.

Physics would have its own version in the holographic and lightcone structure of the Universe. It takes time to arrive at a state of coherence across a spatial interval. If the sun dematerialised right now, it would take about eight minutes to discover that its light and gravity had gone.

So there is a baked in causal issue that defines cogency. If something happens way over there, it takes a time for it to have any effect over here. It takes time to observe a change or read that difference. — apokrisis

Right. But I'm suggesting a strange thing, that physics time is (at least for human cognition) derivative from a more basic experience of time. Heidegger used 'time' as a metaphor for what he meant at one point, but I think what is aimed at is something like existence itself, understood not as a static being but as the space in which beings appear. For human cognition, this space is structured by care, so that we act now in terms of a projected future.

We have to discover, determine, and/or otherwise clearly establish that they share the same set of basic elemental constituents. Then we have to consider this set of basic elemental constituents in a different light. — creativesoul

For me these would be part of that knowledge touched on in On Certainty.

I really want to say that a language-game is only possible if one trusts something (I did not say 'can trust something').

It is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there---like our life. — Wittgenstein

There are events that fix the past as a memory. A pattern of accidents can accumulate to shape what can happen as a further concrete step of the story. — apokrisis

I like this. It's to some degree a random walk and in other ways dialectical necessity.

I would say that no such entanglement is inevitable. It's not fait accompli. I would also point out that it quite simply does not follow from the fact that different schools in philosophy proper hold quite different - seemingly incommensurate - explicit accounts of meaning that there is no such account possible... — creativesoul

I think our main point of misunderstanding is that maybe I'm more on the semantic holist side. I think explicit accounts need to use the same word in a different context, hence the problem. Each account builds up its own mini-language.

I find that when one knows what they're talking about they can speak clearly about it. Speaking clearly requires consistent language use. One dominant trend in philosophy proper was to clearly define one's terms. That trend is indispensable. It is absolutely necessary for reading comprehension. — creativesoul

This is of course a good idea, but one must already be in a language to begin with. Similarly I think one has to feel one's way into another personality. While there's no truly private language. I also think the perfectly public language is an abstraction. A second concern is that even if we could define our terms perfectly, such a concern overlooks the way words join together. Can I define every relation between every word? The assumption might be that definition takes care of this, but I'm not so sure. If I can use words differently in the first place, why can I not understand their combination differently?

Time curls into tiny balls along with space so that the fluctuations are temporal wormholes. — apokrisis

For me there is a tension between what I call physics time and meaning time. Meaning time is the time of intelligibility, the time it takes to read this sentence. My question is whether spatialized time can really replace meaning time. This is theme in Heidegger, the idea that clock time (radicalized in physics) is derivative of a more fundamental time (ultimately being or existence itself, with the thrown-open space of interpretation or embedded signs as 'time.')

Clearly we have and use physics time. The relationship seems complicated.

Again, here I think that I agree wholeheartedly that the attribution of meaning is largely mischaracterized and misunderstood by many of not most philosophers. I think you said earlier that all of them have something to add(to our understanding?) but none of them got it right. — creativesoul

It's nice that someone else sees where I'm coming from on this issue. Yes, I think explicit accounts tend to emphasize some aspect in a useful way. But the explicit accounts get entangled, hence the endless arguments between those who assume an explicit account is possible.

I'm suggesting something like a pre-human 'bottom' of our mind/language. Some things are just so automatic that we live rather than see them. With difficultly we can get a vague sense of them, by looking at certain problems in attempts at explicit accounts.

Children do not learn that books exist, that armchairs exist, etc.,etc.---they learn to fetch books, sit in armchairs, etc.,etc.

Does a child believe that milk exists?

Are we to say that the knowledge that there are physical things comes very late or very early? — Wittgenstein

I appreciate the answer there--that helps give some insight into differences. I was sincerely asking you, not in a critical way, because I was getting the impression that you want philosophy to more or less serve as a tool for some other end, but I wasn't sure what end. — Terrapin Station

I appreciate your answer, too. I just like to say that it's a personal tool. I'm an apolitical being, more or less. I take this world as it comes. Just sayin' that I'm aware that these matters are personal. At this moment we've actually switched into my mode of philosophy (offered as an example of what is not 'artificial.' We are looking at motives. We are clarifying what it all means to us.

I love national parks, etc.--I would have enjoyed a career where I spent most of my time in national parks), — Terrapin Station

I can relate to that. I like those open spaces, the animals, the green. Nothing like hiking up a trial.

In philosophy, ontology and philosophy of science were two of my big focuses. I did a lot of logic, too. On the other hand, I also put extra time into aesthetics--because of my music/art background, but probably unsurprisingly, an overarching philosophical obsession for me is a critical approach to logical argumentation, though moreso informal logical argumentation than formal. — Terrapin Station

Maybe I'm not as much into argumentation because I write/read proofs at work. And I'll be coding most of the next few days. That informs my sense of just how informal arguments in English are. I like philosophy of science, or at least I got drawn in by Popper for awhile. I'm also interested in the explication of explanation. I'd say that it's deduction from postulated necessity. We just project this necessity, sometimes mistakenly, and with no (deductive) proof of the uniformity nature. Fascinating.

Philosophically, I'm not really driven by a notion of any "big mysteries." G.E. Moore once said that a significant part of the attraction to philosophy for him was the "curious things" that philosophers tended to say--where the idea was more or less that they were saying things that seemed fit for a loony bin, and it piqued his curiosity why they'd say such things. I feel very much the same way. The "big mysteries" for me tend to be "What in the world is so and so talking about and why (is he/she saying it that way)?" — Terrapin Station

That's probably why we've tended to clash. For me philosophy is conceptual rock'n'roll. Where we might agree is that philosophers say lots of ridiculous things. But for me (and to be clear this isn't my understanding of you) is a parody of strict logic. The terms are utterly vague. I think I have more tolerance of contextualized vagueness than you, given my theory of meaning. So what I have in mind is some of the weird posts that appear here from time to time. 5 line proofs of god or ultimate nihilism or whatever. It does strike me as word math that hasn't really bother to explore its mind for what it really means to say. The words are just grabbed like super-charged crystals.

As far as big mysteries go, I do have one I'm attached to. And that is the simple mystery that this world exists in the first place. But it's not exactly a mystery. I don't think it makes sense to seek a ground for the whole. Explanation relates objects (projected necessity). Any purported global explanation is itself one more part of the whole to be explained.

In some ways, though, although I'm not at all a misanthrope, I'm not that philosophically interested in humanity qua humanity. I'm someone who finds the phrase "the human condition" annoying. I don't want artworks to be primarily about "the human condition" either. When it comes to fiction, I like fantastical stuff, humorous stuff, surreal stuff, etc. The more "straight drama"/realist drama and soap-opera like something is, usually the less interested I am in it. Outside of that, I also hate our politics (in terms of day to day politics, the sorts of political systems we've created, etc.). I hate people moralizing (in the negative sense a la being highly judgmental/self-righteous/etc.)--though also partially because I don't agree with a lot of conventional moral views. I typically get annoyed watching the news, because of the way it reflects the things that people care about and just how they care about it, both of which I often disagree with. — Terrapin Station

I think I get my formal or non-human aesthetic kicks from math. I love a good TV show. So maybe I'm a humanities guy who works with all the formalism I need in my diet. You seem more into nature and perhaps abstract art. I've read my share of art theory (manifesos of movements), and I very much like abstract art, experimental music, etc. Though I think it does have much of its force in its ideology. Nevertheless, I put the human face at the center of everything. That's my god, the lit up human face and what it says. Biology is the science I would now be most interested in --which never fit well with the math path and was therefore neglected. Cellular automata are a fascinating middle-ground between the mechanical and biological in terms of visual form. Wolfram's Rule 30. In one of my fantasy lives that I'll never get around to, I'd be an abstract artist heavy on the beauty of visualized math.

On politics I think we agree. Self-righteousness just turns me off. Only seeing one side, etc. I have my preferences, but I just see the terrible complexity of the human political situation. And then there's just something that bothers me about dissolving into chants.

So that might give some insight into the different frameworks we're coming from, the different interests we have, etc. — Terrapin Station

Thanks. I enjoyed it.

And again, just to preempt any further misunderstanding of what I have been saying; I am not claiming that science or math do not also involve the more indeterminate kind of poetic knowing). — Janus

The crux is perhaps that I regard metaphor/analogy to be the cutting edge of creation. The essence of math is that creation. The rest comes after, like ash from a flame. I have provided examples and suggested books that inform my view along with personal experience.

At this point, I think we should probably drop this particular issue. I'd rather talk about those Feuerbach quotes (for instance.)

Check out the proto-Heidegger in the first passage!

The philosophy of the modern era was in search of something immediately certain. Hence, it rejected the baseless thought of the Scholastics and grounded philosophy on self-consciousness. That is, it posited the thinking being, the ego, the self-conscious mind in place of the merely conceived being or in place of God, the highest and ultimate being of all Scholastic philosophy; for a being who thinks is infinitely closer to a thinking being, infinitely more actual and certain than a being who is only conceived. Doubtful is the existence of God, doubtful is in fact anything I could think of; but indubitable is that I am, I who think and doubt. Yet this self-consciousness in modern philosophy is again something that is only conceived, only mediated through abstraction, and hence something that can be doubted. Indubitable and immediately certain is only that which is the object of the senses, of perception and feeling.

The sensuous is not the immediate in the sense of speculative philosophy; i.e., in the sense in which it is the profane, the readily obvious, the thoughtless, the self-evident. According to speculative philosophy the immediate sensuous perception comes later than conception and fantasy. Man's first conception is itself only a conception based on imagination and fantasy. The task of philosophy and science consists, therefore, not in turning away from sensuous – i.e., real things – but in turning towards them – not in transforming objects into thoughts and ideas, but in making visible – i.e., objective – what is invisible to common eyes.

An object, i.e., a real object, is given to me only if a being is given to me in a way that it affects me, only if my own activity – when I proceed from the standpoint of thought – experiences the activity of another being as a limit or boundary to itself. The concept of the object is originally nothing else but the concept of another I – everything appears to man in childhood as a freely and arbitrarily acting being – which means that in principle the concept of the object is mediated through the, concept of You, the objective ego. To use the language of Fichte, an object or an alter ego is given not to the ego, but to the non-ego in me; for only where I am transformed from an ego into a You – that is, where I am passive – does the idea of an activity existing outside myself, the idea of objectivity, really originate. But it is only through the senses that the ego is also non-ego.

Only in feeling and love has the demonstrative this – this person, this thing, that is, the particular – absolute value; only then is the finite infinite. In this and this alone does the infinite depth, divinity, and truth of love consist. In love alone resides the truth and reality of the God who counts the hairs on your head. The Christian God himself is only an abstraction from human love and an image of it.

The old philosophy had its point of departure in the proposition: I am an abstract, a merely thinking being to which the body does not belong. The new philosophy proceeds from the principle: I am a real and sensuous being. Indeed, the whole of my body is my ego, my being itself. The old philosopher, therefore, thought in a constant contradiction to and conflict with the senses in order to avoid sensuous conceptions, or in order not to pollute abstract concepts. — Feuerbach

If "Truth is a pathless land" why would it necessarily be on a mountain-top? — Evil

That does sound like the voice of Evil.

Well played.

I think you make a good point. A complete absence of structure would be unintelligible. Some kind of minimal journey somewhere vaguely good is presupposed. Blake might mention the crooked roads without improvement.

To do math is to calculate, measure or follow a set of rules; — Janus

Well, I'll drop it if you want. But I'm a mathematician, and that's not what I do. Those who just use math might fit that description, but to do math is to create those rules along with the entities they rule. As I mentioned, I invented some crypto systems that were works of art to me. AFIK, no one had ever contemplated exactly those structures, which were machines designed with two constraints --that they work and that they be elegant. That they worked was more like the canvas. I chose to write a sonnet, let's say. Utility wasn't the goal, only a constraint of the genre, to focus creativity.

Also, I don't see why you needed to qualify with 'in a friendly spirit"; why would there be, or need to be, any unfriendliness at work in such discussions? Disagreement and critical questioning does not equal unfriendliness in my view: I have nothing to defend in any of this, it's of no crucial import to me one way or the other; I'm just presenting my thoughts on what you seems to be proposing. — Janus

Why so touchy about a courtesy? I'm not really trying to hold you to an answer there.

This is arguably an out of the blue tangent, but I like to read the Germans as a progress, or at least as a family. I have a sense that Feuerbach is not read much, so I'm sharing some good passages which fit in various ways with some of the shards of the conversation so far.

In love, man declares himself unsatisfied in his individuality taken by itself, he postulates the existence of another as a need of the heart; he reckons another as part of his own being; he declares the life which he has through love to be the truly human life, corresponding to the idea of man, i.e., of the species. The individual is defective, imperfect, weak, needy; but love is strong, perfect, contented, free from wants, self-sufficing, infinite; because in it the self-consciousness of the individuality is the mysterious self-consciousness of the perfection of the race. But this result of love is produced by friendship also, at least where it is intense, where it is a religion as it was with the ancients. Friends compensate for each other; friendship is a mean,. of virtue, and more: it is itself virtue, dependent however on participation. Friendship can only exist between the virtuous, as the ancients said. But it cannot be based on perfect similarity; on the contrary, it requires diversity, for friendship rests on a desire for self-completion. One friend obtains through the other what he does not himself possess. The virtues of the one atone for the failings of the other.

Friend justifies friend before God. However faulty a man may be, it is a proof that there is a germ of good in him if he has worthy men for his friends. If I cannot be myself perfect, I yet at least love virtue, perfection in others. If therefore I am called to account for any sins, weaknesses, and faults, I interpose as advocates, as mediators, the virtues of my friend. How barbarous, how unreasonable would it be to condemn me for sins which I doubtless have committed, but which I have myself condemned in loving my friends. who are free from these sins!

But if friendship and love, which themselves are only subjective realizations of the species, make out of singly imperfect beings an at least relatively perfect whole, how much more do the sins and failings of individuals vanish in the species itself, which has its adequate existence only in the sum total of mankind, and is therefore only an object of reason! Hence the lamentation over sin is found only where the human individual regards himself in his individuality as a perfect, complete being not needing others for the realization of the species, of the perfect man; where instead of the consciousness of the species has been substituted the exclusive self-consciousness of the individual; where the individual does not recognize himself as a part of mankind, but identifies himself with the species, and for this reason makes his own sins, limits and weaknesses, the sins, limits, and weaknesses of mankind in general. Nevertheless man cannot lose the consciousness of the species, for his self-consciousness is essentially united to his consciousness of another than himself. Where therefore the species is not an object to him as. a species, it will be an object to him as God. He supplies the absence of the idea of the species by the idea of God, as the being, who is free from the limits and wants which oppress the individual, and, in his opinion (since he identifies the species with the individual), the species itself. But this perfect being, free from the limits of the individual, is nothing else than the species, which reveals the infinitude of its nature in this, that it is realized in infinitely numerous and various individuals. — Feuerbach

To me this is a great interpretation of God. It's a prosier version of Blake's notion. F saw that language networked us all intensely, that we are really only what we are as individuals in a wider context. The individual is an abstraction, we might say, even if he has to die his own death.

On the other side of Heideggarian angst (which is real) is the sense that what dies is not the essence. This essence is distributed. A node in the neural network of selves goes dark. Others light up. Each node is a snowflake, which keeps things fresh. But the snowflake particularity is also replaced --with an also never-before-seen and never-to-be-seen-again particularity. I love Feuerbach's sense of the earth, of the planet we were made for --apparently by chance, but that is beside the point. He is also quite a generous critic of religion. He sees what is pre-theoretically or pre-critically true in it.

So we do want to search for crisp atomism as the basis of our ontology. But we find it not in atomistic matter - the usual answer. The passively existent answer. We find it being conjured into being as the emergent product of a context of constraints reacting with a ground of naked possibility. A physical event is the answer to a question that was asked. The quantum physicist interrogates with their measuring apparatus - has "it" happened yet? At some point, the sign is given. History branches in definite fashion. There is an updated context that requires the posing of some different question. — apokrisis

I follow you here. I agree (without pretending to have gone beyond my first QM class --but I did get that A!--which is not to say that I remember the stuff that well. )

The naked ground is probabilistic and contributes its capacity for the accidental. — apokrisis

Fascinating. Does time get into the picture here?

Again, Peirce is the rare metaphysician who got it because he made chance or tychism as fundamental as law or synechism. His view of probability was propensity-based. He was way out on a limb in accepting spontaneity as real and creative, not merely a convenient modelling fiction.

So there is a play. Events have to manifest. And there is a flow. The answers weave a collective memory. There are even the atoms - definite events. But metaphysically, they have the quality of signs - in the full Peircean sense. — apokrisis

I think I am actually following what you say here.

Time is implicit in all of this. Ol' Heidegger made the point that the concept of time is central in a metaphysics. Was he right? I don't know. But having dwelt on that lately, I'd like to see how you might more explicitly weave it in. I am down with chance being fundamental. Is there chance without time?

My point is that metaphor is not the core of propositionally determinate modeling, and nor is the discipline and the practice of mathematics (which a computer utterly blind to metaphor can do). — Janus

In a friendly spirit, I must say that computers don't really do math. Saying so is close to saying that an abacus does math or that a magazine writes shorts stories. Indeed, real numbers don't exist! They aren't even (physically) 'real.' It's worse than that: the integers don't even exist. Nor do Turing machines exist (since they have infinite tapes.) We have finite state machines that can process symbols. They can indeed check a string of symbols representing a proof for correctness, but only a human could understand what was going on there, having built the machine, the axioms, the definition, and the encoding. Only humans care about proofs. Proof is not the essence but only the hygiene of a supremely creative enterprise, which I'd say is founded on basic human intuitions of form.

Science, in the broader sense as 'knowing' (of a certain kind) is not poetic or aesthetic knowing, the latter is more like direct experience. — Janus

I am generally open to the point you are making, but I think you underestimate metaphor. Speaking from experience with math, the whole enterprise is a system of analogies. The epistemology is formalist and machine like, but actually doing it and understanding it is surprisingly metaphorical.

Also we have thoughts like 'analogy is the core of cognition'. And yet another thinker influenced me on this, Lakoff:

Metaphor has been seen within the Western scientific tradition as a purely linguistic construction. The essential thrust of Lakoff's work has been the argument that metaphors are a primarily conceptual construction and are in fact central to the development of thought.

In his words:

"Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature."

According to Lakoff, non-metaphorical thought is possible only when we talk about purely physical reality; the greater the level of abstraction, the more layers of metaphor are required to express it. People do not notice these metaphors for various reasons, including that some metaphors become 'dead' in the sense that we no longer recognize their origin. Another reason is that we just don't "see" what is "going on". — wiki

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff#Reappraisal_of_metaphor

The 'I' and the 'world' are just further signs in a grand linguistic play of signs. But pan-semiosis would be an actual model of ontology and not merely an acknowledgement of epistemic limitedness. — apokrisis

So the sign is just pure meaningful being, the primary 'atom.' My speculative mind is there. The only question is not the 'consciousness' for which the sign exist (because we don't need that along this line of thought), but something like time for the play or alteration of the signs. The sign-stream rushes forward with memory.

We have gone beyond just words to numbers. We speak the language of pure Platonic forms. — apokrisis

Kojeve liked to call it 'the silence of algorithm.' I think you'd like him if you haven't checked him out.

we, as highly particular biological creatures, have come to grasp something absolutely general and necessarily true about the physical world. Reality turns out to have this hard and mechanistic formal face to it. Only these permutation symmetries are logically possible. And that is a constraint so objective that it always lay in wait as the future of any Cosmos. Chaos thought it could do what it liked. Randomness was its destiny. But permutation symmetry already spelt finitude. The ultimate shape of the future was an inevitability. The Heat Death of the Universe was foretold. — apokrisis

Who said heat death couldn't be poetic? That's like Greek tragedy. I'm not denying its nonfictional aspect, but I can't help admiring the narrative in other terms as well.

And then there is the story of dasein as an ontology of semiosis. The world itself arises as some kind of interaction between information and entropy ... as the most primal constructs we can apply to its description. (Of course, we never escape our epistemological situatedness to talk about the thing in itself in some naive realistic fashion. Ontology is only about the commitments we are prepared to risk our necks by. That too is already taken as read by the post-Kantian Pragmatist.) — apokrisis

I like this 'commitments we risk our necks by.' Indeed, lived 'pre-theoretical' ontology keeps us waking up alive in the morning.

We think of signs as marks - indelible scratches that can then become the material subject of a mindful interpretation. But really, a sign in the biologically primitive sense is a switch - a logic gate - that can be thrown. It is a bit of machinery or syntax that can be inserted into the material flow of the world so as to start to control that world with stored information.

At the level of biology, the fact that "mindfulness" is purely pragmatic is nakedly visible. An enzyme is a message from the genes to the cell. It says turn on this, switch off that. That is dasein as mechanistic action. It is all about the imposition of constraints, not some exploration of intellectual freedoms.

And when humans invented language, it too was ultimately a means of sociocultural regulation. It was the mechanistic framework which could be dropped over the top of the psychological animal to establish an appropriately detached notion of self as a social actor, keeping a close eye on the wants and impulses of the beast within. — apokrisis

Yes, I can see this, even without knowing all the details. And indeed there lurks a beast within, chained up by words and gestures, internalized words and gestures largely.