Sounds like a sales add... — creativesoul

I think you are missing the tone. I'm saying that our belief in the divine spark is alive and well, under a different name. As I grasp the situation, you yourself were just defending it.

My post was intended, with some of the others, as a polite attack on the superstition of the 'soul' and 'I' which is now 'sold' in the 'secular' form of whatever A.I. is supposed to be incapable of. 'I' can't be simply against this 'superstition,' just to be clear.

I would not worry too much about AI being like human thought, belief, and/or intelligence until an electronic device is capable of drawing meaningful correlations between itself and other things. That always begins - in part anyway - by recognizing/attributing causality. Until an artificial creation can do that, it cannot be an integral part of the process that results in thought and belief. — creativesoul

I hear you, but how would judge, for instance, that I am capable of drawing meaningful correlations between itself and other things? This connects to the beetle-in-the-box thing. Why do we take one another as real? Are we passing some implicit Turing test? Don't we just describe certain kinds of appropriate behavior in terms of drawing correlations, etc.? Some go players were freaked out by the apparent depth of AlphaGo's moves. That's already a little like profundity from a synthetic philosopher.

I haven't kept up with the state or the art, but I'm not aware of any amazing conversational A.I. that's already here. It's just that I know something about the field and can imagine what scale and theoretical advances could make possible. What's strange is that it's fundamentally just statistics, or that's how I read it. There is a pattern in our doings that can be 'absorbed' from data into the parameters of immense models. To me intelligence is not the issue but whatever we tend to call 'qualia.' Machines can definitely act appropriately in response to stimuli. This issue is whether they in some sense know what they are doing, which leads me to ask if we really know what we are doing ourselves...

This is something like the ideas in Strange Loop.

A synthetic religion, if it were one that kept the "others" content, might be worthwhile. — Banno

Indeed. As far as the 'others' go, Creed said in the US version of The Office that he'd been a cult leader and a cult member and that being a cult member was more fun. Philosophers are ascetics in some ways, denying themselves the simple pleasure of a false god.

A synthetic philosopher would be... disturbing. And yet also intriguing. If what counts is what is done rather than what is said, if acts are what is to be valued, then the content of the myth is irrelevant, and what is of value is what the myth shows: — Banno

We're not yet phased by getting our asses handed to us in games like Chess and Go. The perceived unity or continuity of the voice is still just ours. The divine spark is alive and well. The movies Her and Ex Machina are good on this issue. Just as we enact a faith in the reality of 'other minds,' we could also enact a faith in the 'soul' of a synthetic partner. It's not as if we have a formal proof of others' 'minds.' It's just insane to live any doubt on the matter. It's our form of life, which could gradually drift to take non-human 'consciousness' for granted.

But in exhorting its audience to care to use one of those teased-apart concepts for some practical purpose, instead of endlessly seeking answers to the uselessly confused and so perpetually unanswerable question that they may be irrationally attached to as some kind of important cosmic enigma, philosophy must instead use the tools of the rhetorical arts. — Pfhorrest

I agree with you in some ways. The more time I've spent with philosophy, the more I find some of the less experienced forum philosophers (and my own earlier incarnations as a self-crown philosopher) to be chasing their own tails, prisoners of a vocabulary that they take for granted, even as they flail about ever so critically within that vocabulary. IMV, this philosophy is sub-normal, inferior to a common sense that sniffs something bogus without being able to articulate just where things go wrong.

In some ways your approach continues to wave them away. The 'important cosmic enigmas' are also known as or at least entangled with issues of prime concern. Of course philosophy can retreat from these difficult issues into a kind of bland technicity, but that's a long way from Socrates, for better or worse.

I agree that the art of rhetoric is important, and I suggest that it's always been central. The quasi-technical arguments that a certain kind of philosopher relishes occur within 'irrational' paradigms or dominant images that set the terms for more detailed debate. The philosopher/sophist dichotomy is hardly itself technical and indeed shamelessly rhetorical or a piece of 'sophistry. '

I think it is frequently not by solving but by dissolving an apparently intractable problem, showing it to actually be a conflation of several different problems. — Pfhorrest

I like the dissolving approach too, though I think of it in terms of shining light on the contingency of a 'vocabulary' or paradigm that is enacted unwittingly as necessary. For this reason and others, I suggest that 'anything goes' is a less wrong approach. As philosophers we are always trying to constrain or dominate the future within our current, fragile vocabulary. We can't see the 'assumptions' that currently blind or constrain us, because they aren't explicit and because they have not yet been articulated. Such articulation is how future philosophers will liberate themselves from our prejudices in order to enjoy their own.

And all of this applies to 'my' own attempt to dominate the future which is already dated, already canonical 20th century philosophy.

Check out Generative_adversarial_network — Banno

I think the time is coming (if the species can manage it) when not only synthetic faces but also synthetic conversation partners will be hard to isolate from the real. Our neural networks are tiny compared to what is possible. What if we built an 'electronic brain' the size of NYC? What if it developed its own humanoid holographic avatar? We wouldn't necessarily have to think it was 'more' than 'just a computer.' We might just see ourselves in a new way. If the thing was charismatic enough, it might found a religion.

...probably the time is at hand when it will be once and again understood WHAT has actually sufficed for the basis of such imposing and absolute philosophical edifices as the dogmatists have hitherto reared: perhaps some popular superstition of immemorial time (such as the soul-superstition, which, in the form of subject- and ego-superstition, has not yet ceased doing mischief): perhaps some play upon words, a deception on the part of grammar... — Nietzsche

*If anyone is curious, that face beside path is the face of a ghost who was never born.

Right, but the "sedimentation" is, I think biological at base. So, I suspect some (perhaps most?) animals have a sense of self, but, lacking symbolic language, they have no generalized, absract idea of self. We have both, and our having both is on account of us being language users. — Janus

Right. I agree with all of that.

With sedimentation I was thinking of culture. For instance, this English language is a kind of historical sediment. And then there are the 'assumptions' (enacted interpretative approaches) that philosophers don't know they have and so haven't been able to challenge. Perhaps you've seen how Wittgenstein's 'beetle in the box' tends to offend and mystify, precisely because it's so well aimed.

This brings us back to the idea of the "social construction of reality". And this idea is not problematic as long as you remember that construction is not creation in any ex nihilo sense. — Janus

Right. It's not ex nihilo. And the actual text is shrewder than its eye-catching title. One could even accuse it of being too assuredly realist in its approach.

OK. But do you not think that it's difficult to draw a line? Is 'how are you?' really a question?

This is related to an anti-skepticism post I made recently. The Cartesian skeptic who doubts the outer world already assumes the unity of a 'mind' or 'inner' voice as an 'I' that is knee deep in 'meaning.' Of course this is all intuitive enough within our form of life, but perhaps it's mostly a habit, a kind of background sedimentation.

Music to mine ears. — Banno

I thought maybe you'd agree. I also like the notion of embodied cognition, which you mentioned above.

Yes, it's true that linguistic expressions are also actions. — Janus

Right, but I guess I'm trying to point out that we might take 'consciousness' too much for granted. There's a common background assumption that verbal behavior has some kind of intense proximity to meaning, but what we witness is just the further use of the our linguistic skill if asked what we 'mean.'

Roughly, I don't think we know or even can know exactly what we mean by 'meaning' -- or by 'exactly.' In Wittgenstein and others it's as if philosophy discovers it limits, its enacted and somewhat ineffable and un-masterable foundation.

Beliefs which have not been "expressed linguistically" can be expressed linguistically... — Banno

That does seem to be the case. We can often articulate an enacted 'belief,' and it's tempting to think of the enacted belief as made of something like unconscious mental stuff. Instead I'd suggest that the conscious, verbal version of the belief is a fresh creation.

This leads to the conclusion that there are two kinds of beliefs; those which are expressed linguistically and those which are not, but are instead manifested in action. — Janus

Or perhaps we could think in terms of a continuum. If I say 'hello' to an answering machine (if anyone remembers those), I'm making a noise. It's not unlike a kitten running to the sound of a can opener, even when tuna is not being opened but only kidney beans.

A text to be treated with great caution.

Reality tends to delineate what we can and cannot construct, despite our best efforts. — Banno

I think I understand your concern and agree. We do not 'construct reality' as a painter works with a blank canvas. We work within constraints, and 'the real is that which resists.' (Though that description of the real is hardly exhaustive of our somewhat vague notion of what constrains us.)

Reading it, I was often stuck by its philosophical naivety. It used 'subjective' and 'objective' with a certain innocence, etc. At the same time, I think the sociological approach is basically right.

Descartes' very bad idea. — Banno

Right. It's fascinating how something inherited like this old bad idea can become the 'ground zero' of a game of doubt. I remember being stuck in this framework myself once. It's the glasses we don't know we are wearing that get us.

I guess the only inference that can be made from thinking is a thinker and while you're of the opinion that no more is possible, I'm looking at the glass half-full and say no less too. — TheMadFool

I don't think you grasp what I'm gesturing at, which is admittedly a strange thing. What is thinking? Does this involve 'mental' stuff? Why believe in mental stuff is something as equally obvious as the external world is doubt-worthy? Don't all these 'concepts' live together?

The move from thinking to a thinker is substantial. But we can consider a more basic move: the move from a sequence of words into a cohesive voice that is mine. The skeptic starts not from zero but from a complicated assumption of selfhood and some 'mental' realm that acts as kind of screen between this self and an 'outer' world that may or may not 'really' be there.

Do you see this massive framework that is utterly taken for granted? Just taking the 'I' for granted as some unity of a voice that is assumed to be 'interior'? The (pseudo-) skeptic starts with an inherited situating paradigm as if it were necessary. He walks across the floor to check whether the wall is real, not noticing his trust in the floor.

I'm trying to point out a massive enactment of faith or trust that makes any particular doubt intelligible. Our skeptic doubts the 'outside' but not that the inside-outside thing might itself be a radical misunderstanding, etc. He takes the 'I' utterly for granted.

Whether we are talking about Christian love or Eastern mysticism, there is the experience and the explanations. The woo lives in the explanations.

Can we just dump the explanations? Most of the time, probably not. We're human so explanations are probably going to happen, especially if one has a philosophical nature. But we don't have to take the explanations too seriously, especially given that doing so is usually an act of taking ourselves too seriously. — Nuke

Well said !

I agree, with the exception of the solipsism --if we even want to count that as skepticism. And even solipsism was/is a great goad for thinking about language.

By the way, I like the spirit of skepticism. I like instrumentalism as a philosophy of science. I somewhat object to saying that a table, for instance, is 'really' atoms, etc. Or that the table is 'really' sensations. This is like trying to pin down a network of interdependent meanings by making some of them fundamental. The world and language function as a glob.

There's something like a 'constructivist' paradigm that can be taken for granted where philosophers are tempted to build up the world as experienced from 'matter' or 'sensation' or whatever. I don't think that it's wrong. It squares with certain other intellectual achievements. It's just limited, and I like becoming aware of strategies that we never consciously chose but just absorbed from the conversation around us. The apparently necessary thereby becomes contingent and the conversation is enlarged.

It could be an inter-subjective kind of skepticism where we agree on human experience, but getting from there to claims about the external world are seen as problematic. — Marchesk

That kind makes sense. I think much of it boils down to how we use the word 'real' in various ways. I doubt that our skill at using this word can be converted to some explicit, exhaustive theory.

You have to convince yourself before you can even try to convince an other. — TheMadFool

But if there are no others, what does convincing oneself mean? If I'm alone and there is no world outside me, it doesn't matter what I believe. It's all equally real or unreal. Even reaching for a proof enacts a concern with getting it right. The standards driving the process are social.

Descartes? — TheMadFool

Yeah. Good example. So the skeptic starts with this framework of being a voice and an eye trapped behind a screen, a fairly detailed and wild assumption, and takes it utterly for granted. 'I don't believe anything, except that there's a screen between me and everything.'

The skeptic doesn't know he has a hand but is sure he has a voice, that he ought not believe without proof, that he understands correctly what the voice (which must be his is saying). This proximity of the 'inner' voice is a massive assumption. It's 'me.' Those words in my head are 'me.' Why is the skeptic sure that he is a singular consciousness? That words imply some kind of consciousness or 'mind stuff' opposed to 'non-mind stuff.'?

The general point is that to be intelligible at all is to presuppose all kinds of things, which function as background to our foregrounded concerns.

Where exactly is the boundary between internal reality and external reality? Presumably there is an internal reality since we're talking about external reality. Also, it seems to me that hands and other sensory organs are the interface between the internal and the external - a place, so to speak, where the external and the internal greet and converse with each other. Given this is so, I'd expect something other than bodily parts for a proof of the external world. :chin: — TheMadFool

If proof means something like 'argument or sufficient evidence for the truth of a proposition,' then it seems to me that the very concept of proof is social. Who is the argument for? What is reason? If reason is radically private, how does it avoid being absurdly arbitrary?

The idea that was start in some kind of private mental space and have to somehow construct or justify the world from there is massive and misleading assumption. Why does our skeptic take this framework for granted? Why does the skeptic not doubt the existence of the mental, of the inner? Perhaps because the skeptic assumes without proof that language/thought is 'inside.'

Care to set out these basic ideas? I'm unsure what you're talking about. — creativesoul

I recently read The Social Construction of Reality, which is summarized:

Their central concept is that people and groups interacting in a social system create, over time, concepts or mental representations of each other's actions, and that these concepts eventually become habituated into reciprocal roles played by the actors in relation to each other. When these roles are made available to other members of society to enter into and play out, the reciprocal interactions are said to be institutionalized. In the process, meaning is embedded in society. Knowledge and people's conceptions (and beliefs) of what reality is become embedded in the institutional fabric of society. Reality is therefore said to be socially constructed. — Wiki

It doesn't matter if we call it 'culture' or 'spirit' or 'form of life' or an 'understanding of being.' It's the patterns in our doings that make us intelligible to ourselves and to one another, simultaneously.

For both Heidegger and Wittgenstein, then, the source of the intelligibility of the world is the average daily practices through which alone there can be any understanding at all. — Dreyfus

As I read this, we co-enact the world. The tribe and its conventions (including language) is the condition of possibility for the individual thinker.

There are various passages in Hegel on this theme. Here's one.

The very essence of spirit is action. It makes itself what it essentially is; it is its own product, its own work. Thus it becomes object of itself, thus it is presented to itself as an external existence. Likewise the spirit of a people: it is a definite spirit which builds itself up to an objective world. This world, then, stands and continues in its religion, its cult, its customs, its constitution and political laws, the whole scope of its institutions, its events and deeds. This is its work: this one people! Peoples are what their deeds are. Every Englishman will say, we are the ones who navigate the ocean and dominate world commerce, who own East India and its wealth, who have a parliament, juries, and so on. The function of the individual is to appropriate to himself this substantial being, make it part of his character and capacity, and thus to become something in the world. For he finds the existence of the people as a ready-made, stable world, into which he must fit himself. The spirit of the people, then, enjoys and satisfies itself in its work, in its world. — Hegel

To me this 'substantial being' is whatever strange kind of being we want to attribute to 'the social.' I think we agree that 'mental' is misleading, given how embodied and externalized culture has to be, as a social phenomenon. The temptation is to obsess over the brain and the sense organs and ignore that this obsession takes place in a code that is not biologically local. The 'space of reasons' has a certain 'virtuality' which tempts us to speak of ghosts in the machine.

Feuerbach wrote in his dissertation that thinking is not an activity performed by the individual, but rather by “the species” acting through the individual. “In thinking”, Feuerbach wrote, “I am bound together with, or rather, I am one with—indeed, I myself am—all human beings.”

That's somewhat optimistic, in that it assumes a singular form of life, but the point that even thinking itself is not (in an important and neglected sense) an individual achievement seems crucial here. Not I, but Christ my inherited culture's patterns through me. Noteworthy individuality is difficult, rare, and allows for the slow drift of a form of life.

Yes. I'm reminded of Heidegger. — creativesoul

Right. I like what Dreyfus does with Heidegger. Of course I want to avoid getting swallowed by the jargon of any particular thinker, especially because I find the same basic idea in quite a few philosophers, for instance Hegel. I think Rorty is pretty great in his PMN book.

Indeed. Especially when we're reporting upon that which consists of and/or is existentially dependent upon both. Thought, belief, truth, and meaning are such things. — creativesoul

Right. And for me one of the trickier things is these philosophical master concepts are all caught up in that clump of automatic enactment before we can make them terms of art. I can relate to the Wittgenstein who mostly exists to swat down bad philosophy as it tries to get in the way of the otherwise smooth functioning of this automatic enactment.

Bad philosophy that gets tangled up in taken-for-granted but unnecessary and futile paradigms is something like a harmless vice. The Wittgenstein approach to me is almost aesthetically motivated. Lots of people just tune out a certain kind of philosophy as a trivial game. Others stick around and try to articulate in just what way it is confused or irrelevant.

A handful of privileged intellectuals in each generation take on the task to oppose evil with words so that the havenots can make opposition with actions, rather than simply maintaining and enjoying their privilege; for a revolution of language and argument precedes every revolution of political relations, and this is the only relevance of philosophy beyond entertaining parlor talk games; I rather try to take on that task than live in fear of the lightening strikes from high society and be deafened into silence from the thundering ruffling of feathers. — boethius

I like the connection of philosophy to politics, but I think you are leaving out a big chunk of relevance. In the quote above you are using philosophy to define a version of philosophy that gives you a role in the world, a way to perform the your philosophy-of-philosophy's version of the hero. I'm not saying that's 'bad.' I'm just pointing out the personal relevance of philosophy which is obviously connected to the political relevance. 'I am a revolutionary because...' Telling truth to power is a kind of role that can be performed. So is telling truth to telling truth to power, and so on.

The forum has value because the harshest possible criticism people here can craft is both allowed and encouraged. Now, why not even harsher such as insults? Because insults are not harsh criticism, but the flailing about of a weak mind that no one with an ounce of wisdom needs strain their own faculties to meet. — boethius

I hear what you are saying, but I don't think there's a clean break between criticism of ideas and well-designed insults. "Maybe you don't have enough RAM to understand this, Michael, but there's such a thing as brotherly love." To me philosophy is not so much about careful argumentation as it is about the clash of paradigms or dominant metaphors.

When insults are forbidden, it's perhaps because they are associated with a warlike attitude that is no longer interested in learning from an enemy who must be cast as totally wrong.

Harsh critique does not persuade those that aren't interested, or are mildly interested; the objective of harsh critique is to try to actually get to the truth; it is of interest only to those actually willing to do what it takes to get more truth than they currently have.

When PhD's submit their dissertation, the ideas is not only that it is critiqued harshly, so that there is some basis to assume it has merit (if it withstands harsh critique) but that the PhD student, so motivated by the truth, is able to accept and process harsh criticism (for instance, to then address that harsh criticism before the final submission). The critical method is a harsh process, not a soft process. — boethius

To me there's something complicated about getting to the truth as a goal. We do like others to think as we do, seeing reality the same way, take our truth, as we do, for the truth. But even this might be secondary to just pushing people's buttons with words that will make them do as we want.

I like instrumentalism as a philosophy of science. 'Truth' is part of practice that reliably gives us want we want. But what do we want? That's where philosophy comes in as rhetoric for making this or that goal feasible, popular, etc.

The dissertation issue is good, but is it simply about truth? The institution and those identified with it have an interest in its reputation and self-conception. Harsh criticism is a kind of policing in maintenance of the institution's prestige and brand. Of course the high ideal of scientificity is part of that, and there's some itch for untainted truth that is not scratched by instrumentalism.

This quote seems relevant:

…one consequence of antirepresentationalism is the recognition that no description of how things are from a God's-eye point of view, no skyhook provided by some contemporary or yet-to-be-developed science, is going to free us from the contingency of having been acculturated as we were. Our acculturation is what makes certain options live, or momentous, or forced, while leaving others dead, or trivial, or optional. — Rorty

This is why I think we can't have some perfect timeless rationality that can lift itself up by its own bootstraps. We are blinded by our eyes. The condition for the possibility of conversation is the condition of the impossibility of a conversation that presupposes nothing. The philosopher 'irrationally' decides what is worth addressing in the first place. Critical language as it is spoken is employed uncritically, with the 'assumption' that it intelligibly signifies and has value for others. Metaphors like 'falling' or 'immersion' point to what I mean.

A certain kind of philosophy wants to deny that we are along for the ride, tied to something that drags us along. We want to be autonomous, self-determined. There's an image of noble stasis at the center, I think. If the stoic has to die, he at least doesn't want to die like a lil' bitch. 'It's no use whimpering.' Transcendence is a fragile equilibrium that includes the sense of mastery of a situation. So 'existential philosophy' is a kind of half-rational poetry that functions quasi-religiously this way. Something like that.

It seems the counter argument is that concepts can only be lnquistic, and language is an external, public thing. But there has to be something in human brains that forms language. And why would that be entirely novel in the animal kingdom? Also, why must concepts be only expressible in words? Do images not count? — Marchesk

I agree with what I think is meant by 'language is an external, public thing.' But it also makes sense that the social sphere leaves its mark on the individual brain. Our computers can talk right now by using more or less the same software on different hardware. So 'form of life' is like the software that runs on the hardware of individual brains. Since we think with this 'form-of-life software,' the world-with-the-others is 'presupposed' in some sense and the hardware enacts the social, as it evolved to do.

As to concepts, I think images count. Though for me it's another term of art issue. The meanings of 'concept' and 'image' function mostly automatically. We philosophers can establish conventions and definitions in a local context pretty however we want. I try not to be attached to terminology, and it's nice to find whatever terminology facilitates mutual understanding.

That said, maybe we can meet here: Saying 'hello' is not a proposition, not 'conceptual.' It's like a cat's meow. There are examples like waving or flipping someone off. Humans move their hands when they talk, make facial expressions. What I'm getting at is that there is no clean break between the 'mental' and the 'physical' (or the concept and the gesture.) The 'mental-physical' distinction functions mostly automatically and practically. Philosophers are tempted to make this and other distinctions, like scheme/content, fundamental and absolute.

Replace "presupposes" with "is existentially dependent upon", and "presupposition" with "existential dependency" and we are in complete agreement on this aspect. — creativesoul

Nice. I'm not attached to 'presupposition.' We can say that language is existentially dependent upon the world, but the world-for-humans is existentially dependent on language too. It all comes in a single clump ('equiprimordial'). This 'holism' is maybe what various 'idealisms' have pointed at more or less awkwardly. We inherit world-and-language as a system, it seems to me.

Do you perchance know where it is from / the exact quote? — Pfhorrest

Maybe I first saw it in Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao Te Ching. Or maybe in a Krishnamurti interview. But I don't know the original source.

Here's a quote that adds to this thread, I think:

Philosophers are saddled with expectations which no one could possibly meet. They are supposed to respond helpfully to large questions posed by anguished laymen. (Am I more than a swarm of particles? What meaning does life have?) They are supposed to be paragons of argumentative rigour, strenuously criticising seemingly obvious premises, fearlessly pushing inferences to bitter ends. Finally, they are supposed to be learned and wise. They are expected to have read all that has been written in response to the layman’s large questions, and to rearrange it in novel and luminous dialectical patterns, sympathetically harmonising all the suggestions offered by all the great dead philosophers.

Since philosophy became self-consciously professional, the first task has usually been disdained as ‘mere’ edification. The analytic philosophers take on the second assignment, and congratulate themselves on their ‘scientific’ devotion to truth, hardness of nose, and sheer cleverness. The so-called ‘speculative’ and ‘Continental’ philosophers – those impressed by the examples of Hegel or Whitehead or Heidegger – take on the third. They weave webs of words which put their predecessors in their proper dialectico-historical places. The analysts despise the fuzziness of the speculators. The Continentals despise the illiteracy and gimmickry of the analysts. Both despise the cheerful, wealthy, unprofessional authors of best-selling paperbacks on how to live. A good time is had by all. — Rorty

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n09/richard-rorty/persuasive-philosophy


The review is worth reading in its entirety. Those best selling paperbacks are what I'd call 'deep' philosophy, even if we find this or that personality obnoxious. To practice one of the other kinds is to have already decided with respect to the 'existential' stuff.

To this we can imagine the existentially intense layman replying: ‘I thought you were promising an explanation of how knowledge is possible – how I, a poor little animal on an insignificant planet, a mere swirl of quarks, can nevertheless grasp the nature of the universe, the depths of heaven and earth. I thought you might at least tell me what methods I should use to be sure of getting knowledge. What happened? All I got was a way of defining “knowledge” which splits the difference between me and some crazy sceptic.’ ... What to say to somebody who suggests you are a brain in a vat is a nice testing-ground for dialectical acuity, a paradigm of the sort of thing about which one can be precise and argumentative, but it is just not the kind of issue which ever ‘moved anybody to take up the study of philosophy’. It is the sort of issue you get into after you’ve shrugged off the existential, after you’ve dismissed the question of how you might be precious and valuable as jejune, and have settled for competitive, coercive technicalities. (This is the loss of Eden which makes hard-nosed professional philosophers out of eager adolescents.) — Rorty

I think 'loss of Eden' is a great phrase there. Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is one of my favorite texts, and he makes better arguments against the traditional 'referee' conception of philosophy than I am liable to manage. I also recommend Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.

There some old aphorism I heard once in my first philosophy class along the lines of "Before walking the path to enlightenment, tables are tables and tea is tea. Along the path to enlightenment, tables are not tables and tea is not tea. Upon reaching enlightenment, tables are again tables, and tea is again tea." — Pfhorrest

I've always like that quote, but note that it also deflates enlightenment. Illusions are our special friends.

I see progress in philosophy as consisting of, basically, tallying up all the broad kinds of confusion that people could find themselves getting trapped in, elucidating why those approaches are wrong, and then once people are securely shielded from that kind of insanity, letting them just go about life in a way much like they would have if they had never been tempted into that kind of confusion. — Pfhorrest

The place where we meet is the stuff I've posted in Bedrock Beliefs. Call it 'logical pragmatism' or whatever you like, but something like that seems right to me. The 'insanity' that Wittgenstein and others ward off, however, is only the relatively innocent game of bad philosophy.

I don't see a clean answer to the question of whether it's better to live a safe and respectable life of many years or a risky, intense life that ends quickly. Is it better to write philosophy or put that time into learning the piano or making a fortune? I don't know. Is it a good thing to be born? I don't know. Sometimes I pity the dead. Sometimes I envy them. Sometimes I wish I hustled after money more in my youth, if only to buy some more space from others now. I think, rightly or wrong, that this kind of reflection is common.

And surely others feel that they are caught up in the current of a world that is bigger than them. The 'species essence' expresses itself only the plurality of personalities. I can't contain that essence (general human potential) all on my own. I can't manifest conflicting possibilities. Life is short. We are shaped by a particular childhood, etc. I can make extending myself a project, but even then belief in God is not a live option for me, and that would be a decisive inaccessible difference. Is it better to believe in God? I don't know. I just know I can't and work within that cage. I guess the point is that we don't start from zero, and that the goal of perfect rationality seems to require that we do, that everything pass the test of some atemporal reason.
I don't think we can escape our animality. Philosophy is more like the forging of tools or the composition of jokes or the continuation of religion by other means. Maybe all at the same time.

I'm as full of shit as the next person, but I still think you are misreading me. Of course everything hasn't been great. This is the world we are talking about, the old meat grinder. The irony of the ironist only makes sense if philosophy is not some magic cure-all. Lately I've thought about how most parents have children in their 20s and therefore don't even know what life is as they pass it on to others. I often think of Schopenhauer, especially given the insanity of our times. The whole dream of being a good scientist smells strange now.

The 'pure whatever' thing is great, but isn't that the structure of life? People fall in and out of love, be it sexual or Platonic/creative.

Yeah that's the move — csalisbury

Like I said, maybe I'm crazy, but I really do think that we are profoundly mythological animals and that our interactions occur within a shared gallery of types. We all play off on each other against an inherited background of types. TV imitates life imitates TV. It doesn't mean we don't love one another, but it does raise the question of what exactly it is we love. A beloved person is another vortex in the shared cultural stream, another critic of the movie of the world, perhaps a co-hero, and philosophy is perhaps the critic as hero.

I'm unclear what you take the aim of philosophy to be, that your account of its progress is as you've said. And if you see attempts to do different things as unrecognizable as philosophy. — Pfhorrest

One of the things I like to think I've learned from philosophy is a suspicion of definitions. The word 'philosophy' is alive and well as a token in our form of life. The life of this token (and of tokens like 'truth') exceeds any careful articulation. I'm not saying that such articulations are worthless. I simply can't approach them without some sense of the futility of the game. I don't write the English language. The English language writes me.

That said, I associate the most important philosophy with a basic stance taken on existence and a basic vision of existence. In that sense philosophy is like a map for maps. So I largely agree with this:

I, for instance, as outlined in the OP, see philosophy as something like meta-science: the aim of philosophy is to account of how best to go about answering our various questions, investigating things like what our questions even mean, what criteria we use to judge the merits of a proposed answer, what methods we use to apply those criteria, what faculties we need to enact those methods, who is to exercise those faculties, and why any of it matters at all. — Pfhorrest

I'm surprised you don't see the connection of the above with some kind of comforting narrative. If you think there are neutral answers to those questions above, then that to me is a highly comforting narrative. 'Reason is one and universal.' That's all we have left of the Pentecost.

The only thing "totalizing" about any of it is just a big picture of what abstract principles have what implications on all of those different kinds of meta-questions. — Pfhorrest

How entangled is all of this with the stance that the individual philosopher takes on existence ? To read Nietzsche or Schopenhauer is feel your way into their world and their role in it as they see it. As philosophy becomes safer and more dry, perhaps it also becomes the dry legitimization of an ordinary sanity that doesn't really need it.

Maybe I'm just crazy, but I think myth haunts everything. I was usually in bands with male friends, and we were all lit up by a fantasy of what the band could be, and each thought the others were great musicians, truly cool, etc. It was great.

I'm suggesting that everyone is lit up by myths. That the place beyond myth is itself a seductive myth. I don't think that there are real or core selves, though of course there is more and less spontaneous interaction. If you are gesturing at that pure state of play that lovers and friends can achieve, and this is the place beyond myth, then I do understand you and agree. I just read those states of play as still swimming in the myth, only playfully, less fastened to some image of the self.

another aphorism path

You can't kill a discarded self by proximity to a marquee truth. I mean, heck guy, what do you think the import of 'path' is? — csalisbury

I'm not exactly clear on what you mean. I do see that anti-totalizers like myself are mostly ringing variations on Nietzsche. I haven't had the sense of a discarded self for quite a while now. That's what I'm calling being old. In my 20s I went through lots of changes. In the 30s I was already just sharpening an equilibrium state.

I like path as a metaphor for the singularity of a journey. I want some transcendent god's eye view, but I know...from within some approximation of that view...that we are all stained by our histories. What I liked about the first post I responded to in this thread was the theme of vulnerability. It's painful to realize that we can't be our own parents, literally and metaphorically. We are enabled as individuals in the first place by a system we did not choose. That's what's fascinating about Dreydegger or Hegel or the sociology I'm reading lately. We can manage only a minor deviation here and there. We are late to a party that has seen everything, including its having seen everything. And another critique of a certain kind of start-from-zero totalizing is that it needs to forget its thrownness, that is has parents, that it is constrained in ways that it does not recognized, caged in the vocabulary it takes for granted. But what's outside the cage? Perhaps merely an enlargement of that vocabulary. 'I'm set free to find a new illusion.'

I was hoping to squeeze more out of you on the totalizer versus the alternative. As I read him, the non-totalizer or aphorist is just as in love with grand narratives. I would like there to be a nice fluffy god out there, something that sews the mess together. What's available (ignoring simple animal immersion is joyful little things that might do the heavy lifting) is a transcendence that's hard to divorce from the morbid.

'In anguish there are only distances.' The age demanded an image of its accelerated grimace. The ground opening was a flap. Is there progress, if there is such a thing, in philosophy, if there is such a thing? He splits up a peach of grass.

Generalizations avoid the nitty-gritty. — jgill

Yup, and so much of life depends on the skilled handling of the nitty-gritty. Skill is not a set of handy general propositions, though handling such general propositions is its own skill. Philosophy is the skill of playing with difficult and totalizing ideas.

Philosophy, at its best, rids you of the traps thought can keep you in, so you can move on safely to what matters. Its a painstaking self-inoculation. Totalizing systems are like guys who steroid themselves against past humiliations into near-immobility. — csalisbury

I like that. For me the traps might be personalities, where the danger is becoming fixed and predictable and essentially (?) a bad poet. Philosophy is strange in wanting to transcend personality while tending to demonstrate it. 'This is the way that I like to transcend the ego. This is what I understand as scientific. ' Philosophy is something like a 'big picture' relationship with the world. The deep stuff (along with politics and art) is a secular replacement for religion. The totalizer brings the good news, the squared circle. The aphorist has a tone like:

These fought in any case,
and some believing,
pro domo, in any case . . .

Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later . . .
some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some, pro patria,
non "dulce" non "et decor" . . .
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies. — Pound

https://poets.org/poem/hugh-selwyn-mauberly-excerpt

I don’t understand this seemingly pejorative use of the term “totalizing”. — Pfhorrest

In this context the issue is maybe a totalizing personal type, with which I associate an earnestness and a love of careful classification. The anti-type here is the ironic aphorist. In both cases there are totalizing theories, but the difference is how tightly versus ambivalently they are held.

As far as progress goes, I think philosophy takes a baseball bat to the usual comforting fantasies in pursuit of an unusual comforting fantasy, which is a vision of the world through our dead God's eyes.

I find that there's a connection between the loss of these fantasies and 'learning how to die.' So I'm an ambivalent aphorist, who's not quite sure that the wise are wise in their wisdom.

Ash on an old man's sleeve...is all the ash the burnt roses leave. But what else has he got, our old man, whilst this machine remains stubbornly to him? He doesn't have to be physically old. It's philosophy that paints you gray.

When we look at the structure of belief statements and expect prelinguistic belief to somehow have the same structure, we're thinking in the exact reverse fashion that evolutionary progression can possibly allow. — creativesoul

I like that you are stressing the biological continuum.

The idea that only humans have concepts because we're the only language users is a bit anthropomorphic. — Marchesk

Yes, to me it makes sense that certain animals have something like concepts. As others have mentioned, crows can count in some sense. Aliens might say that humans can count (only) in some sense for similar reasons.

It also brings out that knowledge-how is not JTB. — Luke

Right. That makes sense to me. We could use the word skill for this knowledge-how. Skill is primary. We develop the skill of co-hosting a form of life, which is at least as visceral as it is 'conceptual.' To say 'hi' is to make an animal sound. What does waving mean? I think I'm saying that there's no radical break but instead a continuum from grunts to dissertations. There's a background of 'stupid' skill or uncooked can-do at work in all cases.

For context, I recently read The Social Construction of Reality, apparently a sociology classic. It was something like 'Dreydegger' and Wittgenstein in a different jargon. We are 'possessed' by a 'form of life' or 'zeitgeist' and for the most part enact it as 'one' does. For the most part we co-enact the what one does and what everybody knows. The depths of the so-called self are as much outside as inside, since the speaking 'ghost in the machine' relies on a skill that exists in some sense as a community habit. Language is a borrowed 'bone machine' that makes 'self-consciousness' possible but also already always 'falling.'