Hi, Daniel. You should check out Heidegger. History meets ontology hasn't been neglected.

In other words, you, I and all of us, we are our history. The role of history should thus not be restricted to cultural philosophy, but should be given an ontological position in its role of making up the picture of the nature of human being!
This view has, of course, also implications for philosophical anthropology where man is viewed in a collective sense, but I will leave that for another day. — Daniel C

I agree with all of this, but it's also already been said and said well. As I see it, it's hard enough to catch up with the conversation, let alone add to it. It's always later than you think, even taking this principle itself into account. Check out Heidegger. Or, if you want a less well-known dish, try Kojeve.

You ought to jump in. But thanks!

[EDIT]
Might as well add this before I go to bed. Another old thought. As soon as we think of truth as a tool (an army of metaphors) that isn't really true but only 'successful' (in terms of replication of genes or memes), then the theory of truth as tool becomes one more tool, one more delusion. Maybe a thoroughly radical pragmatist could just enjoy the replication of the truth-as-lying-tool meme as a success. But he meant to speak the truth. And this idea of truth seems pre-theoretical, like some ordinary language tacit know-how with the word and some vague intuition that things are really like that, without really-exactly knowing what it really means for something to really be like something.

Anti-realism is a might tradition. Philosophy would be a bore or nothing at all without it, perhaps. And yet it seems to depend on gut-level realism that perhaps can't be theoretically justified clarified. One reads enough philosophy, is half-seduced by enough positions, so that one's own aphorisms or paragraphs never get it right, never say the inexhaustible. Sometimes we reread ourselves (our fusion of stolen ideas) and smile.Other times it's freaky experience. Not even disagreement but a sense of non-self-recognition. But the letter I write to you functions beyond both of our deaths. Or it wouldn't be a letter.

I think this fits the thread (180 Proof led me to google Metzinger).

Being No One helps to explain why the traditional reliance on philosophical intuition has illuminated this subject so little. Human intuitions about consciousness and the self are shaped by consciousness and the self-model, as they are experienced by normal human adults. Both consciousness and the self-model are products of evolution, a natural process which favours gene reproduction. Evolution has no fundamental bias towards the truth. Although it is often adaptive for organisms to form accurate models of reality, it is by no means always so. Robert Trivers has shown that self-deception can be adaptive (because it helps us to deceive others) (Trivers, 2000); and so can ego-boosting misperceptions such as superiority bias. Another highly adaptive evolutionary product is what Metzinger calls the Phenomenal Self-Model (PSM). It has conferred such great advantages on our species, that Metzinger describes it as not only a tool, but (acknowledging Andy Clark for the metaphor):

…a weapon, developed in a cognitive arms race. Conscious selves are like instruments or abstract organs, invented and constantly optimized by biological systems. (Metzinger, 2004, p. 273)

To describe the model as effective is not to say that it is accurate. In fact, it is inaccurate in important respects. We are not the sort of beings that, influenced by our own self-models, we intuitively think we are. Discipline is required to overcome our biases, to arrive at truths about ourselves that are scientifically justified. — link

First, I agree that the self is a fiction. I think this is an old idea, but it's a good one. I wanted to quote this because of its connection to 'war is god' and the idea of the mask as weapon. I'm not afraid of the idea of this fictional self being the weapon of otherwise blind goo for passing on genes. It's fine. It's beautiful.

And there is talk of 'accurate' models of reality. What is this accuracy? Why not just say that some genes get themselves replicated, and their fictions (sacred truths) were part of that? But 'discipline is required for us to overcome our biases.' Why not imagine science as meme/weapon in the hands of the communities that embrace it? 'It's the right approach because with it we can outfeed, outbreed, and outright annihilate the 'superstitious.' I think @Wayfarer sees the same problem with this ground for truth (Truth?), though he has different motivations perhaps.

I mention this problem in order to half-justify or explain a kind of ironism (not Rorty's but Schlegel's) or skepticism with respect to the cause of emancipation...or even the respectability of science as more than a weapon, a tool. At the same time I think we want 'substance,' connection to something beyond our illusory private selves. The mask is carved with all the words that point beyond the petty ego. Science, religion, politics, philosophy. What I see (among many other things) is a game of masks (selves, positions, weapons, communities), projecting themselves as desirable possibilities for emulation, including this one of course.

Robert Trivers has shown that self-deception can be adaptive (because it helps us to deceive others) (Trivers, 2000); and so can ego-boosting misperceptions such as superiority bias. — link

Relative to what is the ego-boosted self deceived? His community's shared self-deceptions? And I like various master thinkers (Lacan), but they too are masks, weapons, fellow mortals who dream of gazing on community-independent truth. Cult leaders all. And I dream that dream like maybe all of us do.

i say get used to the dirt because its everywhere in life. you cant always stay clean. master everything at every level.

improvise, adapt, overcome — OmniscientNihilist

Well said.

Hello everyone,

This discussion is about the time in between moments. It is impossible for every two moment to have time between it because It would result in infinite time between any two moments. — elucid

Maybe it's helpful to point out that you are assuming the time is like space. It's the usual metaphor, but philosophers have questioned it.

It belongs to the essence of perception not only that it has in view a punctual now and not only that it releases from its view something that has just been, while ‘still intending’ it in the original mode of ‘just-having-been’, but also that it passes over from now to now and, in anticipation, goes to meet the new now. The waking consciousness, the waking life, is a living-towards, a living that goes from the now towards the new now. — Husserl

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-temporal/#BerHusRusBro

Consider as you read this sentence that each new word shapes your interpretation of the previous words and your expectation of the words that will follow. The interpretation of this sentence too is a function of the one you just read and your general sense of what I'm getting at.

If what your OP is getting at is the continuity of time (not breakable into discrete nows), then perhaps my response will support your OP.

I am arguing that at the point of the development of language and reason, h. sapiens is no longer understandable solely through the evolutionary perspective, but is capable of insights into the nature of being which are beyond anything available through a purely biological perspective. — Wayfarer

I think this is true. We are symbolic, historical, metaphorical beings. We are profoundly social, able to talk across oceans with our sharing in English.

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god. — A

However we position platonic ideas or concepts, we are beasts without them --not fully human. So we are not fully human without our fundamental tool, which we might call meaning or intellect. And this tool is intrinsically social. Does the debate boil down to deciding what to call this stuff that a community swims in? The stuff that makes private theorizing and disagreement possible in the first place?

Can be boil down the question to this? Can the platonic ideas or concepts survive the death of the species?

One person understands something about the world and teaches - communicates with - others so that they understand; the knowledge then, because that is what it is, becoming a general community property (of those educated and able to understand). And where is this general community property kept? Nowhere else but in the minds of individuals, there being enough of them to obscure the nature of the keeping place(s). — tim wood

I agree with this framing of the situation. The issue seems to be about the interpretations of minds, communities, and languages, all of which are obviously intimately related. We can talk about 'understandings of being' or 'impersonal conceptual schemes' or 'non-material realms.' We call also imagine signifieds somehow disconnected from their signifiers, (pure) meaning apart from and above all the sounds and marks that we nevertheless need to store and transmit it.

Ideal, universal truth seems to assume a ideal, universal human nature. All rational minds can repeat the 'meaning act' and join in the single truth. Does some organ in us gaze into a realm that is not material? I think this is metaphorically true. What do we mean if we say more? But what is the material world that the tough minded offer for contrast? Another metaphorical separation of a lived unity?

It is precisely because the philosopher's questions can only be answered by careful reasoned reflection, whereas the therapist's questions require detailed empirical investigation, that we have separate disciplines dedicated to answering them. — Bartricks

I think I see what you are getting at here. For you the philosopher is not operating empirically. This sounds like what's called armchair science. I googled and found a defense of it as 'traditional philosophy.' I just skimmed the intro, but here's a quote.

The traditional philosopher views philosophy as an armchair discipline relying, for the most
part, on reason and reflection. — link

https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1525&context=etd

Thinkers like Rorty have made strong cases against 'armchair' science, but then Rorty thinks philosophy has died into cultural criticism (that the dream of reason is dead.)

On a different note, I can imagine the therapist as more of an engineer or person of tacit know-how who doesn't prioritize theory but rather results. A therapist might be understood as a kind of musician of the soul. All that matters is results, not the results-independent accumulation of explicit knowledge. But I don't have much experience with therapy. I'm doing armchair philosophy.

Yeah, them meeting with the monolith at the start of the film must have been quite an experience, eh? — Wallows

Indeed! The madness of the human unleashed...

What is more egoist and "evil"?

A) Developing a entire philosophical thought about the true nature of egoism, and trying to explain that you, indeed, is egoist, and that you have to accept the fact that all you do is only for your own benefit.

B) Developing a entire philosophical thought about how to, in supposedly "harmony and altruism", confiscate everything from everyone on behalf of "Communism". — Gus Lamarch

I prefer the honest of position A, and indeed I have largely been a kind of egoist in the past. I have even written my own The Ego and His Own type of philosophy, where I 'fixed' Stirner or at least tried to clarify his text in my own preferred direction. So I don't at all simply take Marx's side. I take a position with distance from both of them. And maybe Stirner himself did, the man from his text.

Truly I think I 'got' Stirner in a way that put him far above politics as a kind of ironic mystic. The mysticism involved was his feeling of transcendence and liberation. Nietzsche also nailed this in his stronger passages. And it's from within this sense of freedom that I can enjoy criticizing Stirner, in the same way that I like to think Stirner could laugh at himself through a Marx that he already contained.

I also love Feuerbach. Personally I think one ought to read Stirner in that context, as a response to Feuerbach, as a semi-prankish attempt to out-Feuerbach Feuerbach. For me Stirner is still right in his sense of play and transcendence against a background of 10,000 solemn humanisms. Maybe I'm challenging you because I think you are reading Stirner too politically. The union of egoists is, as I like to read it, the friendship between radically free but essentially noble individuals. A friendship between kings (or queens) who respect one another's domains. The handshake of the free and godless who live beyond all causes except for the friendship beyond all other causes. (I can't sing this as the final song.)

I wouldn’t label it ‘superstition’, but an abstraction, like point, line, circle, the continuum, etc., all mental constructs for purposes of measurement. They are practical conveniences — sandman

OK, but then many mathematicians would agree with you. To me math is something like the formalization of intuitions. I like formalism, but it doesn't speak to the beauty many find in it. And when I and other math people I know are doing math, we need intuition to write proofs and make sense of proofs.

That said, at some points proofs become too long. No one can remember all of the steps. One has to trust the machinery of what one has proved but no longer keeps in mind. Or one uses machinery that one hasn't checked. We can switch into a playing-with-symbols mode, and sometimes we have to. In short, no philosophy of mathematics gets it quite right for me. They all focus on this or that aspect. I will say that I'm not a Platonist, since I don't think a community can see around its own eyes. Shared intuitions are plausible. More feels like reaching.

Yes, that's the gist. — Bartricks

I'm glad that we both see this. It's a great theme.

That was my point about how it is possible to be insane and a philosopher. — Bartricks

Excellent. I thought so but wanted to check. If we understand the philosopher as the pursuer of truth through reason against his own comfort and community if necessary, then indeed he can be seen as insane.

But Reason doesn't just talk about the truth, but also about how we ought to behave. — Bartricks

What do you make of the is/ought problem? Various 'great' philosophers have taken the position that reason just tells us what is, not what ought to be. As I see it, the 'ought' is where bias tends to manifest. I remember my early concept of the scientist/philosopher. He or she just coldly looked for patterns in reality. He or she could see what others couldn't or wouldn't because he or she resisted the all too human urge to tell reality what it should be.

Let's just focus on one of those bizarre assumptions that you insist I must make, namely that we "aren't essentially mythological as opposed to metaphysical beings". Now, what do you mean? Do you mean that I have to assume I exist? — Bartricks

No, it's nothing so silly as having to assume you exist. What I am talking about is the nature of language. In short, language is not like math. It's full of metaphor and ambiguity. To me the linguistic turn in philosophy was reason in its pursuit of truth looking into its method. Certain philosophers have hoped to purify language, to find a version of language where exact reasoning toward truth would remain possible. But I don't think they did or even can succeed.

Basically we can do it in math because we can formalize everything. Everything result can be checked with a computer, even if that result also has intuitive meaning for the mathematician. But metaphysics that wants to talk about human things like ethics and reason itself is stuck in language. We can come to some consensus in the fog and metaphor. But this fog, along with ethical/political bias, helps explain, it seems to me, why philosophy tends to be many, many philosophies that try to swallow and negate one another.

To use language is mostly like riding a bike. The words pour out of us. We are intelligible to one another because we live in the same 'form of life,' which can't be made completely explicit to build the kind of foundation metaphysics needs.

Heidegger constantly reminds us throughout Being and Time, the account of 'inauthentic' life of everyday anyone is not to be interpreted evaluatively or morally but rather ontologically. It is an a priori Existential of being human: "the anyone is the condition of possibility of all human action" (p. 2). Thonhauser writes: "To be socialized in the framework of established modes of intelligibility and regulated modes of comportment is the prerequisite for becoming an agent in one's own right" (ibid.).
First of all and most of the time (Heidegger's zunächst und zumeist, BT 370), humans live following the social rules that they apprehend in some kind of mindless, non-explicit, anonymous manner. — link

https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/from-conventionalism-to-social-authenticity-heideggers-anyone-and-contemporary-social-theory/

No one should take Heidegger on faith, but I think he makes a strong case on this issue. As does Wittgenstein.

While engaged in hitch-free skilled activity, Dasein has no conscious experience of the items of equipment in use as independent objects (i.e., as the bearers of determinate properties that exist independently of the Dasein-centred context of action in which the equipmental entity is involved). Thus, while engaged in trouble-free hammering, the skilled carpenter has no conscious recognition of the hammer, the nails, or the work-bench, in the way that one would if one simply stood back and thought about them. Tools-in-use become phenomenologically transparent. — link

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/

Here's Heidegger in his own (translated) words. When we are absorbed in using a tool, it becomes 'transparent ' in the sense that we don't focus on it but what we are trying to achieve.

The less we just stare at the hammer-thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is—as equipment. The hammering itself uncovers the specific ‘manipulability’ of the hammer. The kind of Being which equipment possesses—in which it manifests itself in its own right—we call ‘readiness-to-hand’. (Being and Time 15: 98) — H

I mentioned this because I think language is a like the hammer. The theoretical mode depends on the automatic ease we have with it most of the time. We can never define all of our terms. We can never get behind our tacit knowhow. We can of course do our best, but reason has a vanishing foundation, an abyss for a foundation. Language is received like the law. We can't question that 'law' without obeying it to do so, 'following the social rules that they apprehend in some kind of mindless, non-explicit, anonymous manner.'

This is why the philosopher as philosopher needs at least an ideal community, for which he is not insane, even if he is insane within his actual community. To speak a language is to be a 'we' on an automatic-unconscious level on only an 'I' at the high, conscious level.

Or what say you?

Might interest you to know that Popper co-authored a book with neuroscientist Sir John Eccles on dualist philosophy of mind. — Wayfarer

Dualism gets something right. In practice, we seem to live and talk as dualists. We all agree pre-theoretically that there are dreams and chairs. I'll look into Eccles.

Substitute any empirical unity. All trees are the unity of trees, but the unity of trees doesn’t explain why some are hardwoods and some are soft, some broadleaf, some needle leaf. There’s something more needed than just being trees, to facilitate trees being hardwoods. — Mww

Ah, yes, that's clear. So we have something like subsets. I like the idea that concepts exist in a system or a web. To make sense of one is to rely on others close by in the network.

I won’t fight over that. Intersubjective still leaves concepts as purely subjective constructs with possibly real objects which conform to them, which we call experience. — Mww

Right, and I agree with that. All that I personally add is that this subject is not quite absolute, in the sense that subject is one more concept/object in the (ideally or largely) impersonal and interpersonal concept scheme. In short, I think there's some truth in 'language speaks the subject.' To be sure, common sense almost demands that we focus on consciousnesses in individual brain being linked by language and action.

Right. Not saying it was about altered states. I'm saying the notion of exploration is involved in both space travel and in altered states of mind.

After reading Osmond's paper, Huxley sent him a letter on Thursday, 10 April 1952, expressing interest in the research and putting himself forward as an experimental subject. His letter explained his motivations as being rooted in an idea that the brain is a reducing valve that restricts consciousness and hoping mescaline might help access a greater degree of awareness (an idea he later included in the book).[19] Reflecting on his stated motivations, Woodcock wrote that Huxley had realised that the ways to enlightenment were many, including prayer and meditation. He hoped drugs might also break down the barriers of the ego, and both draw him closer to spiritual enlightenment and satisfy his quest as a seeker of knowledge.[20] — Wiki

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doors_of_Perception

Explorers run risks, often with the hope of bringing something home to the tribe.

That's a misunderstanding of the film. Sure it was released in the 60's, and you had the audience at the time either high or inebriated in some sense. But, according to what I've seen in regards to commentary about the film by Spielberg, that wasn't the intended message. — Wallows

It's Kubrick's film. But my point wasn't about any message of the film but simply to connect space exploration with the exploration of rare mental states. Outer space and inner space. I don't use drugs much these days, but I did when I was younger. (Added for context.)

the last man is the goal that modern society and Western civilization have apparently set for themselves, with lives of pacifism and comfortableness, with no more distinction between ruler and ruled, strong over weak or supreme over the mediocre. Social conflict and challenges are minimized and every individual lives equally and in "superficial" harmony. — Gus Lamarch

Equality?
https://equitablegrowth.org/the-distribution-of-wealth-in-the-united-states-and-implications-for-a-net-worth-tax/

Are the little people running things? Are the laws set up by and for the sheep?

Harmony? Minimized social conflict? We are living in intense polarization.

I can only say, with regret, that we are going straightfoward towards the latter. — Gus Lamarch

I thought that maybe we were cooking the planet, not creating an end-of-history utopia where everything is safe and cozy for the non-egoist.

To be a little fairer to you, I think there is some fascinating content in Stirner and egoism. By becoming conscious of the 'the sacred' as a generalized X to which causes appeal, Stirner achieved or re-achieved the position of irony or skepticism. Hegel already sketched the position, but Stirner wrote a book about the position from that position, while Hegel went on to criticize its blindspot, which is a desire for recognition in the real world. Moreover the liberated ego is only substantial in terms of quasi-universal values that exceed that ego. Kant already identified enlightenment with autonomy.

I suggest checking out Marx's criticism of Stirner.

Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away. Let us revolt against the rule of thoughts. Let us teach men, says one, to exchange these imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the essence of man; says the second, to take up a critical attitude to them; says the third, to knock them out of their heads; and -- existing reality will collapse.

These innocent and childlike fancies are the kernel of the modern Young-Hegelian philosophy, which not only is received by the German public with horror and awe, but is announced by our philosophic heroes with the solemn consciousness of its cataclysmic dangerousness and criminal ruthlessness. The first volume of the present publication has the aim of uncloaking these sheep, who take themselves and are taken for wolves; of showing how their bleating merely imitates in a philosophic form the conceptions of the German middle class; how the boasting of these philosophic commentators only mirrors the wretchedness of the real conditions in Germany. It is its aim to debunk and discredit the philosophic struggle with the shadows of reality, which appeals to the dreamy and muddled German nation.

Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence. This valiant fellow was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany. — Marx

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/preface.htm

I don't think Marx says the final word, but integrating Marx's criticism leads IMO to a richer, more defensible position. While the mystical egoist can in theory shrug all of this off, his mere appearance on a forum betrays a desire for recognition as a measure of substance.

It's really paradoxical that for open-minded people who want to explore space, to be so militant against a harmless mind-expanding compound. I suppose the people at NASA and engineers still think it's the 50's or something?? — Wallows

That's a good point. How many people have been high when watching 2001? And consider the term psychonauts. Obviously one should be careful, but at the same time Neil Armstrong (as a recent movie makes vivid) was not careful. And philosophy is dangerous in the same way drugs and space exploration are. Anyone who wanders away from Everyone runs a risk. We call them heroes or fools depending on their success or failure as we interpret it.

Elon was/is also getting a piece of Grimes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9SGYBHY0qs

He is doing something right.

What reason could we have for submitting ourselves, as slaves, to truths that would merely destroy our well-being (if there are such truths)? — Janus

Indeed. Why truth? Why not untruth? It seems natural enough to try and make sense of the pride we take in possessing the truth not just for ourselves but for others as well. It seems plausible that truth-for-all is related to adapting as a group to our environment. While I don't accept pragmatism's reduction of truth to what is useful to believe, I also can't accept some transcendent Truth as a vague god.

As insanity involves some kind of systematic failure to listen to Reason in some or other regard, it is possible to be a true philosopher and insane. — Bartricks

This is an interesting theme. It reminds me of a play.

Therefore, An Enemy of the People tells the story of a man who dares to speak an unpalatable truth, and is punished for it. However, Ibsen took a somewhat skeptical view of his protagonist, suggesting that he may have gone too far in his zeal to tell the truth. Ibsen wrote to his publisher: "I am still uncertain as to whether I should call [An Enemy of the People] a comedy or a straight drama. It may [have] many traits of comedy, but it also is based on a serious idea." — wiki

We are familiar with the notion of the thinker ahead of his time or beyond his local community. From our loftly point of view, we see that the truth-teller was right and yet unrecognized. So, from our POV, sanity was misrecognized as madness. When you capitalize 'reason,' that suggest to me that you are trying make this principle 'infinite' and think from the absolute end of inquiry, from a God's point of view. Your 'Reason' looks to me like the deity of a monotheistic humanism. The philosopher ought to die if necessary in pursuit of the POV of this deity. Take up your cross (the capital T) and follow, says Reason. I am the way, the light, the truth. None come to the Father Truth except by me.

But there are problems with this. One has to assume that philosophy can be resolved without ambiguity. That human language isn't haunted by metaphoricity and ambiguity, that we aren't essentially mythological as opposed to metaphysical beings, that a metaphysics transcending myth and metaphoricity is possible. Cases have been made against these assumptions.

One problem I see with scientism is that its defense within philosophy to some degree violates its own principles. Scientism within philosophy is a kind of rhetoric that wants to understand itself as logical. Writing 'Reason' instead of 'reason' is a naked rhetorical and mythological device, and yet this device is used against feel-good framings of existence as bunk.

I hesitate in granting that any concept is objective simply because it is grasped by many subjectivities. — Mww

If we understand 'objective' to mean unbiased or ideally intersubjective, then the problem disappears. I think you are suggesting that we can't see around our own eyes, with which I agree. Placing shared concepts in some realm beyond doesn't make sense to me. I understand, though, why philosophers want to talk about such a realm.

Popper's World 3 contains the products of thought. This includes abstract objects such as scientific theories, stories, myths, tools, social institutions, and works of art.[2] World 3 is not to be conceived as a Platonic realm, because it is created by humans.[3] — link

As I see it, we have repeatable insights. Anyone who repeats the thought process can come to something like the same conclusion (ideally, anyway). This 'anyone' is relatively immortal. It doesn't die with the individual. But it quite plausibly dies with the species. The temptation is to place this cultural realm in a beyond that is 'really' there, even when we aren't. Hence my interest in this 'subject' or 'Anyone' as a them running through philosophy.

Subject (pov)/gauge-invariant scientific models either defeasibly explain some transformation - physical or formal - or they don't. That's all they are used for. "The 'rational subject'" which uses scientific models cannot also be the object of scientific modeling anymore than eyes can also be within their field of vision. Territories necessarily exceed maps, or abstractions (i.e. informational compressions - simplifications) of territories; the map-maker - map-making - is always the enabling lacuna of every map and any lacuna-free map - corresponding 1:1 to a territory - would be useless as a map. — 180 Proof

I like this. 'Enabling lacuna' is great. Complexity lurks in 'explain.' While I'm not eager to collapse explanation into prediction and control, it does seem science's prestige is largely founded on the power it gives us. We can employ and develop models that don't agree with our intuition.

If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics. — Feynman

So are explanations can indeed only partially intelligible if they empower us. The problem for philosophy is or can be that the philosopher claims a profound understanding of reality that may not be recognized by others and also fails to manifest an uncontroversial/'worldly' power. We are 'forced' to listen to those who can destroy us, outperform us. The alternative is some form of antithetical, world-rejecting metaphysics. The first are not really first but perhaps last.

A question that occurs to me is whether mathematical proofs are objectively true? I mean, they are in a sense, but on the other hand, strictly speaking they don't appeal to objects as such; they're perceivable by reason alone. — Wayfarer

I find it helpful to recall that objective is just unbiased. That we tend to conflate it with objects speaks perhaps to how uncontroversial talk about couches and cars tends to be. The objective view is one that is purified of subjective distortion and/or the intersection of a personal perspectives.

In proofs without words, the background assumption seems to be that we all perceive/intuit space in the same way, which implies a kind of ideal, shared subject. 'Anyone' can see that area is preserved by the mere translation and rotation of shapes and therefore grant various formulas for the area of a triangle as necessarily true. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5x-NFKZrnMM

We expect such theorems to remain true, which suggests that this Anyone is fixed or outside of time. This allows us to imagine aliens who are partially human in the sense of participating in this Anyone.

Just trying to learn something, is what it boils down to. — Mww

Me too, and I appreciate the feedback.

On the one hand, no human is possible without the antecedent humanity, but on the other, a general condition of some empirical unity is in itself insufficient to explain the multiplicity of disparate conditions of its particulars. — Mww

Could you elaborate on the second part of this?

In other words, why I’m this, or why I think this, doesn’t explain why you’re that, or why you think that, merely because we’re both human. — Mww

This makes sense to me.

And if what we want to know is why, which is almost always the case, then we see it just won’t answer anything if we ground our investigation on some fundamental ontological condition. — Mww

I read this in terms of a wariness about pseudo-explanations. For instance, 'God' is often (not saying always) just rug under which we hide our ignorance. 'God' can also be used symbolically, not in an act of science/philosophy. And there's also the issue of whether literal and metaphorical meanings can be cleanly separated.

When the lights go out at the end of the day, there’s nobody there but ourselves. “Know thy-self”, and all those other colloquial admonishments, doncha know. Which, ironically enough, leave off “as best you can”, or, “but you’re probably wrong”. — Mww

I agree. So a sense of humor & play is helpful.

A nontrivial case - in the sense that a foundational belief - the ascendency of matter over the imagination - is thrown into question. To the zealous, the imagination-centered scheme ("blood") is a deeper reflection of reality than the matter-centered scheme ("wine"). So things are topsy-turvy. But there is still a background of common beliefs - for example a belief in the existence of the red liquid. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Well said.

If "pure" is meant to denote something in it's most unadulterated uncorrupted and/or basic state, then it doesn't get any purer that what I've set out here. — creativesoul

By pure meaning I just mean the imagined context that can be moved from French to English. That somehow an English translation is the 'same' book suggest the notion of a language-independent meaning, though many translators will stress that they have only done their best and actually created a new, only similar work.


What do you make of this?

Language, Saussure insists, has an oral tradition that is independent of writing, and it is this independence that makes a pure science of speech possible. Derrida vehemently disagrees with this hierarchy and instead argues that all that can be claimed of writing - eg. that it is derivative and merely refers to other signs - is equally true of speech. But as well as criticising such a position for certain unjustifiable presuppositions, including the idea that we are self-identical with ourselves in 'hearing' ourselves think, Derrida also makes explicit the manner in which such a hierarchy is rendered untenable from within Saussure's own text. Most famously, Saussure is the proponent of the thesis that is commonly referred to as "the arbitrariness of the sign", and this asserts, to simplify matters considerably, that the signifier bears no necessary relationship to that which is signified. Saussure derives numerous consequences from this position, but as Derrida points out, this notion of arbitrariness and of "unmotivated institutions" of signs, would seem to deny the possibility of any natural attachment (OG 44). After all, if the sign is arbitrary and eschews any foundational reference to reality, it would seem that a certain type of sign (ie. the spoken) could not be more natural than another (ie. the written). However, it is precisely this idea of a natural attachment that Saussure relies upon to argue for our "natural bond" with sound (25), and his suggestion that sounds are more intimately related to our thoughts than the written word hence runs counter to his fundamental principle regarding the arbitrariness of the sign. — SEP

To me one of the interesting themes is a destabilizing of the so-called mental realm, the idea of which is tied up with pure meaning. Of course we have intuitions of being minds, and we take this granted, the talk of minds filled with thoughts. But there's no private language, and we use 'I' fairly automatically.

To put Derrida in context, there's Braver's A Thing of This World.

On Braver’s narrative, Kant’s Copernican revolution inaugurates anti-realism by allowing him to conceive of phenomena as dependent upon the structuring activity of the mind; this provides the basis, as well, for Kant’s rejection of correspondence truth. On the other hand, Kant still retains a realist view of the “transcendental” subject responsible for this structuring work, as well as the notorious “realist” commitment to the reality of noumena or things-in-themselves. It is Hegel’s critique of the latter commitment in particular, according to Braver, that produces the more thoroughgoing anti-realism of the Phenomenology of Spirit and substantially leads to the decisive Hegelian claim (essential to all varieties of continental anti-realism that follow) for the necessarily historical character of all philosophical inquiry. The rejection of realism about noumena also leads Hegel, according to Braver, to see reality as “mind-dependent” in another, and more radical, way than Kant had. In particular, relying rather heavily on contemporary “social pragmatist” interpretations, Braver suggests that Hegel ultimately sees Spirit as a kind of “communal intelligence” coming about through the intersubjectivity of a speech community and that the culmination of the system of the Phenomenology in “Absolute Knowledge” expresses the deeply anti-realist claim that “there is no higher court of appeal for our beliefs than our community”

https://www.unm.edu/~pmliving/Braver%20review.pdf

Braver talks about 'impersonal conceptual schemes,' which is basically what I mean by being 'in' a language community and / or form of life.

Perhaps you can see how this connects to the idea of being reasonable and ultimately with the very identify and self-consciousness of philosophy.

It's mutual(shared) when a plurality of individuals draw the same correlations between the use and other things. — creativesoul

I agree that we have an intuition of sharing meaning. I trust (irrationality?) that you understand these words roughly as I intended them. That, by the way, is the 'anyone' or 'shared subject' I'm talking about, or part of it. Nothing mystical, just our basic sense of being mutually intelligble and understanding chairs as chairs and not random shapes with no obvious purpose. Co-enworlded with language.

Leaving intution out of it, there's also this beetle in the box video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x86hLtOkou8

Which you've probably seen/read. But it's well done if you haven't, and short.

All attribution of meaning requires something to become sign/symbol, something to become significant/symbolized and a creature capable of drawing correlations between different things. — creativesoul

I agree that what you say corresponds with the typical use of 'meaning.'

All attribution of meaning by language less creatures requires only the creature capable of drawing correlations between different things... none of which are linguistic devices and/or marks(signs/symbols), and all of which are directly perceptible things. That situates the kinds of correlations that are drawn at a level some call 'beneath' common language. — creativesoul

This seems reasonable. Cats and dogs understand the world in some way. Maybe they have their own kind of a childlike thinking. I haven't studied it closely.

So let's grant a pre-linguistic kind of meaning.

But I'm still most interested in the highest levels of human thinking, which, it seems to me, requires words. 'Life is the dream of a monster.' This is one of those suggestive phrases that has no clear meaning. It asks us to (creatively) interpret it. We meet it with our entire pasts.

As I said above: For instance, Derrida uses 'writing' in a special way, for a reason that only makes sense slowly. At the same time I'll never be done understanding Derrida. Furthermore I re-read older writers having read Derrida and find new meanings, new connections. So in that sense that future determines the past as much as the past determines the future.

That element of the future determining the past seems important to me. As you read this sentence you'll find its beginning organized by its end. The 'time of reading' is strange. As humans, we find new meaning in things we read long ago.

OK. Thanks. — Mww

Your welcome. I just saw this response. I'd be grateful for any feedback, even if it's disagreement. I enjoy your posts.

For some thing to have meaning, it has to be tied to a value for that person or people. Such as, a sense of status or independence.. An idea that encompasses a value or opposes them, would have meaning to it. It has to touch one of your higher values in a personal way. — halo

I agree. So that's why I like to call philosophy 'taking the impersonal personally.' It's difficult. Most people don't care about clarifying the talk about talk. So the philosopher as such finds a 'higher value' is carefully articulating what he and the world are.

Put it in some context everyone can at least agree on first.. — halo

Right, but that's very hard in philosophy. We humans are good at teaming up to deal with objects. But when we talk about talking things get wild. Meanings evolve historically. To understand what thinker X means by word Y requires backtracking and reading one's self into a long conversation. For instance, Derrida uses 'writing' in a special way, for a reason that only makes sense slowly. At the same time I'll never be done understanding Derrida. Furthermore I re-read older writers having read Derrida and find new meanings, new connections. So in that sense that future determines the past as much as the past determines the future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutic_circle

My view is that once h. sapiens evolves to the point of being a language-using and meaning-seeking being, then we have capabilities that are beyond the scope of biological theory per se. — Wayfarer

To me this is akin to the notion that biology is no substitute for philosophy, which with I agree. This theme is well explored, too, in I am Strange Loop.

I submit that anything belonging to a subject’s rationality, per McDowell, is private, and to suggest that the totality of subjects in possession of rationality is the same as rationality itself being “essentially public and social” does not follow. — Mww

This might help too.

Heidegger constantly reminds us throughout Being and Time, the account of 'inauthentic' life of everyday anyone is not to be interpreted evaluatively or morally but rather ontologically. It is an a priori Existential of being human: "the anyone is the condition of possibility of all human action" (p. 2). Thonhauser writes: "To be socialized in the framework of established modes of intelligibility and regulated modes of comportment is the prerequisite for becoming an agent in one's own right" (ibid.).

First of all and most of the time (Heidegger's zunächst und zumeist, BT 370), humans live following the social rules that they apprehend in some kind of mindless, non-explicit, anonymous manner. — link

What I have in mind is something like this 'Anyone.' In some sense the 'we' is prior to the 'I' as a kind of software that makes the hardware fully human. Kant could only write the CPR because he knew German, because he was 'in' German. He was anyone before he was someone. And we love Kant not as a fountain of opinion but because he is reasonable. He speaks to what is rational in us.

The world may have been created by God, but it was now in the hands – for better or worse – of humanity. The world was a human stage, with human values, emotions, hopes, and fears, and this humanity was defined, in turn, by a universal human nature. — Robert Solomon

The idea is that a theological notion was humanized. Reason is a transformation of the Holy Ghost, metaphorically speaking. (To me it's all thoughts and feelings and metaphors. While you know Kant better than me, I mostly feel like some kind of Kantian, exploring the limits of cognition from the inside.)

The meaning of "meaning" consists of the correlations drawn between it's use and other things. — creativesoul

By correlations you mean 'a mutual relationship or connection between two or more things'? It does seem clear that language largely deals with relationships. But surely there is more to say, even if that's a start. And maybe there can be no end to the talk about talk. Perhaps what we mean by meaning is largely dark for us, because what we can make explicit is just the tip of the iceberg. That doesn't mean I'm against trying to clarify. I just speculate that the nature of meaning might prevent an exhaustive definition of meaning.

You're free to dream what society says you can. — Gus Lamarch

What kind of society are you living in? In the US we can dream whatever we want. That's what we do now. We get home from work (which might be staring a screens) and stare at more screens.

Liberty in this case doesn't exist, but then we are arriving on my philosophical thought, and that's not what this discussion is about. — Gus Lamarch

My comments seem on topic. Though I'll leave you alone if you resent criticism. If you push all criticism away, though, you are wasting the forum. And people will just tune you out as someone lost in a dream he refuses to clarify or modify.

Both/and - (but) must be we choose? :smirk: — 180 Proof

I'd enjoy any elaboration. I find some dark truth in 'war is god.' Yet the judge is also a madman, however articulate. He's a blood mystic, who can only understand the mind as a weapon. And that's sexy but also terrible.

I act in the real world like everyone with partial knowledge of consequences and a host of perspectives that can't be synthesized. I expect to die in sin and confusion, and I'm OK with that. The rose and the fire are one, or so speaks one mood.

All answers to the question of what one means by some word or other requires increasing signage... Some explanation increases signage. We agree here, I think. — creativesoul

Excellent. And I think we agree that language is a social phenomenon, only possible for a community in a shared world. It makes no sense without bodies and objects 'outside' of the 'mental.' I put these in quotes only because language has to be in place for us to think in terms of bodies and objects. Language is an invention and yet 'prior' to us being able to say so.

It probably evolves from talking about and orchestrating the handling of objects. At the same time, myth/religion seems so human that from the very beginning we were also trying to talk about important internal experiences, create solidarity, etc.

Derrida (1930-2004) famously argued that writing preceded speech. By this I believe he meant that the “iterability” of language logically preceded its spontaneous performance...that is, repeatable in any context whatsoever, just as this very introduction to Derrida I’m writing now must be able to signify as an introduction to Derrida after this semester is over [hey! like now!], after I’m dead, after you cease to read it, after the expiration of every element of the context in which I am composing it now. That, writes Derrida, is the very condition of writing itself, without which we simply do not recognize writing as such: if the writing is not “iterable,” it is not writing. — from above

Basically the mortality of the subject is tied up with the iterability of the sign. This is a dramatic way to express it, but the point is that language is 'exterior' in some sense. We know that something like 'pure meaning' is translatable. So I can read quasi-Derrida in English. I hope you see why I bring this up. A fundamental idea in philosophy is that it is translatable. Any knowledge that is universally rational shouldn't be caught in a particular language. So philosophy understands itself as a kind of anti-poetry, and therefore would like to exclude metaphor as vague and misleading. But if literal terms are dead metaphors..., and if the idea of the literal is itself a dead metaphor...

"Full" meaning is present?

I don't talk like that. Something else. — creativesoul

In other words, do we know exactly what we mean? Are we ever done knowing what we mean? We have words that feel right enough, but when asked what we mean...are we not also being creative and still figuring out what we 'originally' meant?

You mentioned suspicion about 'correlation' - which is my notion of thought and belief. All thought and belief consists of correlations drawn between different things. — creativesoul

Correlation is fine, but I guess I want more info. If we stretch correlation enough, maybe it'll work.

If one does not know the difference between you and I, well, there can be no distinction between who says what. — creativesoul

Of course. And of course I know how to use the signs 'I' and 'you.'

Is there a finite amount of signs that can get this right? What on earth is this? Is there a finite chain of signs that can be used to comprehend how we use the terms "I" and "you"???

Is that what you're asking me here? — creativesoul

Yes, that and the meaning of meaning. I think to know a language is like knowing how to ride a bike, primarily non-theoretical. The words just pour out of us most of the time. And we can read and understand as a fish moves through water.

Heidegger constantly reminds us throughout Being and Time, the account of 'inauthentic' life of everyday anyone is not to be interpreted evaluatively or morally but rather ontologically. It is an a priori Existential of being human: "the anyone is the condition of possibility of all human action" (p. 2). Thonhauser writes: "To be socialized in the framework of established modes of intelligibility and regulated modes of comportment is the prerequisite for becoming an agent in one's own right" (ibid.). — link

This 'framework' is like W's 'form of life.' So in some sense I'd argue that the 'I' and the 'you' depends on a 'we' that is prior. Or to put it another way, Kant had to know German in order to write the CPR. But knowing German or English, however mundane, is also a symbol for being human.

https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/from-conventionalism-to-social-authenticity-heideggers-anyone-and-contemporary-social-theory/

Undoubtedly, but that's true of asking anyone what they mean by any other term as well... — creativesoul

I agree, and I think that's significant. Is it really the case that a 'full' meaning is present that we are merely finding more words for? Or something else?