It's like locking yourself into a room and forgetting where the door is. — Wayfarer

Right. To recall the forgotten/inherited framing of the situation that we don't even think to question is perhaps more than anything else philosophy's task.

The secularity we presuppose must be "de-naturalized" in order to realize how unique and peculiar such a worldview is. — David Loy

Loy gets it, but I'm suggesting that philosophy also denaturalizes taken-for-granted concepts of consciousness, matter, reality.

This is what Carlyle called 'custom.'

*********************************************************************************************************************
Philosophy complains that Custom has hoodwinked us, from the first; that we do everything by Custom, even Believe by it; that our very Axioms, let us boast of Free-thinking as we may, are oftenest simply such Beliefs as we have never heard questioned. Nay, what is Philosophy throughout but a continual battle against Custom; an ever-renewed effort to transcend the sphere of blind Custom, and so become Transcendental?
*********************************************************************************************************************

Institutionalized revolution.

These personalities might be described as the dreams of the Sūkṣma Śarīra, as it travels the spheres. Brought to the west by the Theosophists. — Punshhh

Sure, though I'd consider these dreams more symbols (as perhaps you also do.)

Taking down statues means that you have something so traumatic in your history that you cannot face it otherwise and cannot accept it being a part of your history, but see it as something needed to be erased away. — ssu

Consider, though, that the US has statues of CSA rebels everywhere. These enemy leaders fought to maintain the institution of slavery.

Why should black citizens (and not only them) be expected to tolerate such statues?

this framework is not individual. We're each instances of it but it is basically collective, 'what everyone knows' to be the case. We're embedded in a matrix of meaning — Wayfarer

Right. Language is the easiest example, especially once it is grasped that meaning is public. Then one can recognize that language depends on the world.

But it's not 'objective' in that it's not discoverable by empiricism; it's transcendent, in the Kantian sense of 'shaping experience but not disclosed by experience'. — Wayfarer

I see why you say that, and I agree that it's not available to a sense-data empiricism that doesn't bother to account for its own possibility.

But, as we agree above, the framework is collective or social. If we abandon the 'myth of the given',
we can see why it makes sense to describe the world as all that is the case. That is to say that the world is fundamentally if not perfectly intelligible. We move in and as significance.

It's just that analytic philosophy tends to dismiss it BECAUSE it's not objective, and then demand you 'prove' that it's something real. — Wayfarer

Maybe that shoe fits some 'analytic' philosophers, but consider this from Sellars.

****
The essential point is that in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says.
****

Objectivity is not about (physical) objects. Instead statements about physical objects are prototypically objective, but then so are mathematical statements.

This might explain the 'ancient war.' What is more 'real'? Numbers or atoms? Since both physicists and mathematicians are celebrated for objectivity, the temptation is to find some non-linguistic object that explains this objectivity.

But such objects turn out to be epistemologically invisible, or at least more controversial (as interpretations) than the facts they are supposed to explain.

The Loy quote takes accurate aim at those who grow up secular and take it for granted. Philosophy is one kind of poisonous cure for our all too human tendency to sleepwalk.

That's what hermeneutics is for. — Wayfarer

I agree, and that too happens in an essentially public space of reasons.

But my intuition is that the ancients sought a kind of synthetic vision of unity - an awareness of the Whole - which is actually the meaning of 'cosmos'. — Wayfarer

That sounds like a description of philosophy to me. Sellars saw it that way too.

***
The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.
***

I like that Aristotle quote, too.

But what this doesn't see is that the mind itself provides the framework within which every judgement about 'what exists' is meaningful. In other words, there is a subjective pole or element in the absence of which nothing exists whatever; you can't take away the observing intelligence and leave the world. — Wayfarer

For me that framework is (to write it in a fancy way) Λόγος. Isn't it misleading to call it 'subjective'? If we are 'rational animals,' it's because we talk with one another and celebrate 'transpersonal' (objective) talk as disclosing the facts, be they facts about numbers, neutrons, or nothingness.

Private mental experiences get us nowhere, conceived as they are to make critical thinking about them impossible in principle. The critique of sense-data empiricism is also the critique of the 'Inner Light' (or the reverse if you like, as Locke discovers his sword is sharp on both sides.)

Other posters seem to imply that the 'space of reasons' is 'inter-subjective.' Personally, I think 'interpersonal' or 'social' is better.

If we care or at least pretend to care about justifying our assertions, then such justification is social (for others.)

Bearing in mind, 'substance' was 'ouisia' and 'mind' was 'nous' - much has been lost in translation, I think. — Wayfarer

Is this not itself significant? How could we check? We can't look into the private minds (long vanished) of those who first used the words philosophically.

Scholars can look at texts and write their own texts about those texts, responding to one another.

We can't look into those scholars' minds to see what they 'really think' behind the words. We have only their texts. Perhaps they have only their texts. They can't prove otherwise given certain assumptions about minds.

We ourselves live in a meaning-world - even the declaration that the world has no meaning is dependent on that. It is from within that meaning-world that all judgements are made. — Wayfarer

We basically agree, except that we might as well call it a language world. Yes, language is meaningful, but emphasizing 'language-independent meaning' just abandons the critical conversation for an epistemological apocalypse.

From my POV, we don't want to make the same mistake as ontological materialists and reify one aspect of the world with its words. (The world words. The word worlds.)

I find Sellars useful on this issue. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sellars/
***
Antecedent to epistemology, Sellars’s treatment of semantics essentially constitutes a denial of what can be called a semantic given—the idea that some of our terms or concepts, independently of their occurrence in formal and material inferences, derive their meaning directly from confrontation with a particular (kind of) object or experience. Sellars is anti-foundationalist in his theories of concepts, knowledge, and truth.

Traditional epistemology assumed that knowledge is hierarchically structured. There must, it was believed, be some cognitive states in direct contact with reality that serve as a firm foundation on which the rest of our knowledge is built by various inferential methods.
***

Personally I think knowledge is hierarchically structured (if we like) in a different way, namely in the spectrum that runs from facts to interpretations.

'Potential' is 'real' in the sense that interpretations are 'fact candidates' that are neither true nor false but currently undecided. In other words, we live in a world not only of actualities but also of articulated ('meaningful') possibilities (which may oppose one another).

there was an hierarchy of the understanding, such that mathematical and scientific reason were said to be higher than (mere) sensory knowledge. — Wayfarer

We can thank more recent philosophy (improving on Kant?) for destroying sense-data empiricism as a serious option. Facts are primary (true sentences). Not 'sensations' of redness but statements. "The light is red."

For me it cuts both ways. I relate to the joyful nihilist and the anguished pessimist who longs for the end of the world. That's why I mentioned the early Christians, who I understand to have been an apocalypse cult, disgusted with the whore of Babylon, drunk as she is on the blood of martyrs.

When the religion of progress becomes less believable and synthetic threats become more plausible (like panvasive thoughtcrime scanners brought to you by A.I., to name just one), ...antinatalism asks after a gentle genocide.

Antinatalism, our aesthetic trickster will remind us, is caught up too in the usual role-play --on the great stage of fools, some pretending to laugh and others to cry.

If our joyful nihilist is forced to scrub toilets, then our pessimist also forgets to be anguished and enjoys his grim pessimism as an especially cruel joke played on us by the hole where the gods should be (which is perhaps one more fascinating image of a god, after all.)

I'm pretty sure I recall having sensations before 'sensations' entered my vocabulary. Don't you? — Kenosha Kid

I find the fact that you asked me that illuminating.

A speech act on my part is something we can reason about. It is there, it is public.

The problem is that sensations tend to be understood as private and therefore 'epistemologically invisible.'

A theist can assure me that we all experience God 'directly' through some kind of spiritual intuition.

I find Mach fascinating. He studied the relationship of sensations and 'external stimuli.' Or did he? Could he? (As a critically minded philosopher/scientist.)

We can't make objective (impersonal, transpersonal) statements about sensations, more or less by definition.

We can see whether certain wavelengths are called 'red.'

For me the unifying theme here is that facts (uncontroversial propositions) are primary.

The world is not sensations or noemata.

Or at least thinking in those ways leads to serious problems while ignoring how we actually reason.

.

But of course you could only know there was such a consensus via your own conscious experience...

Take care lest you find yourself permanently up the garden path of phenomenology. — Banno

Bingo.

Though I can imagine phenomenological facts.

Husserl writes something, we look at it and say yeah, things are like that.

All that seems to be needed is that we treat it as fact, call it fact.

Is fundamentally different than looking at a clock and agreeing about the time?

You see, I don't think modern philosophy, generally, has room for the notion of 'degrees of existence'. I think that we think that something is either real or it isn't - reality is a univocal term. So I think that's significant. — Wayfarer

I'm inclined to say that philosophers of all people should be especially sensitive to ambiguity and polysemy. Just how modern are the philosophers you are talking about here?

I think I do sometimes meet with the attitude that I think you have in mind, and I think of it as the collapse of objectivity into objects.

Note, though, that this collapse can involve psychical as well as physical objects.

What I'm trying to argue for, is the concept of degrees of reality. I'm trying to show that certain kinds of intellectual or intelligible objects are real but not material. — Wayfarer

I suggest that we already do accept degrees of reality in a loose way as suggested by various distinctions in language.

The difference is perhaps that you want to make such a distinction primary or foundational.

Socrates was mortal, but the words of Socrates are (relatively) immortal. Generations come and go, relearning the same old Pythagorean theorem, agreeing that it is a fact about space. Then of course the use-meaning of 'bread' outlasts any 'actual' bread that one would care to eat.

I think Augustine was reifying aspects of language.

Here's a quote from Aristotle that seems relevant (On The Soul).

****
The case of mind is different; it seems to be an independent substance implanted within the soul and to be incapable of being destroyed. If it could be destroyed at all, it would be under the blunting influence of old age. What really happens in respect of mind in old age is, however, exactly parallel to what happens in the case of the sense organs; if the old man could recover the proper kind of eye, he would see just as well as the young man. The incapacity of old age is due to an affection not of the soul but of its vehicle, as occurs in drunkenness or disease. Thus it is that in old age the activity of mind or intellectual apprehension declines only through the decay of some other inward part; mind itself is impassible. Thinking, loving, and hating are affections not of mind, but of that which has mind, so far as it has it. That is why, when this vehicle decays, memory and love cease; they were activities not of mind, but of the composite which has perished; mind is, no doubt, something more divine and impassible.
****
Socrates is mortal, but his best sentences are something 'more divine and impassible.' I like the idea that philosophy is objective (transpersonal) 'thinking' (language).

It happens 'in' or 'for' various mortal philosophers who thereby participate in and contribute to something relatively deathless and impervious.

Here I am, after all, quoting a translation of Aristotle.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1051/1051-h/1051-h.htm#link2HCH0020

Or put another way, language is not merely self-referential. It conveys information we might not have found by any other means. — Wayfarer

I agree that language is not merely self-referential. It's one thing to deny sensation and intuition and another thing to say that they can't function as foundations epistemologically.

To stay on topic, if one is arguing theism in a philosophical context, then one can only argue from facts (uncontroversial propositions) towards interpretations as candidates for facts (that God makes sense as part of an interpretation of the facts.)

I suggest that facts are primary, and that the language they are 'made of' can't be reduced to either mind-stuff or matter-stuff, for reasons we've touched on.

While I try to approach all of this critically, a classic line occurs to me here:

***
In the beginning was the Word...

To make more definite my 'openness to panpsychism,' I'll emphasize my interest in λόγος (logos), which is to say (roughly) language, which reduces neither to the 'mental' nor the 'physical', while it glues us all together and allows this sentence to somehow outlive me.

You might say that my 'spirituality' is connected to taking the apparently mundane less for granted.

In other words, ordinary life is freaky and mysterious, if we are just philosophically adventurous enough and not too weighed down with the usual worldly burdens.

I've been reading Sartor Resartus, and there's a passage that illustrates what I am talking about, which I will share here for you and anyone else following our chat. This is from a chapter or section called Natural Supernaturalism.

****
Again, could anything be more miraculous than an actual authentic Ghost? The English Johnson longed, all his life, to see one; but could not, though he went to Cock Lane, and thence to the church-vaults, and tapped on coffins. Foolish Doctor! Did he never, with the mind's eye as well as with the body's, look round him into that full tide of human Life he so loved; did he never so much as look into Himself? The good Doctor was a Ghost, as actual and authentic as heart could wish; well-nigh a million of Ghosts were travelling the streets by his side. Once more I say, sweep away the illusion of Time; compress the threescore years into three minutes: what else was he, what else are we? Are we not Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into air and Invisibility? This is no metaphor, it is a simple scientific fact: we start out of Nothingness, take figure, and are Apparitions; round us, as round the veriest spectre, is Eternity; and to Eternity minutes are as years and aeons. Come there not tones of Love and Faith, as from celestial harp-strings, like the Song of beatified Souls? And again, do not we squeak and gibber (in our discordant, screech-owlish debatings and recriminatings); and glide bodeful, and feeble, and fearful; or uproar (poltern), and revel in our mad Dance of the Dead,—till the scent of the morning air summons us to our still Home; and dreamy Night becomes awake and Day? Where now is Alexander of Macedon: does the steel Host, that yelled in fierce battle-shouts at Issus and Arbela, remain behind him; or have they all vanished utterly, even as perturbed Goblins must? Napoleon too, and his Moscow Retreats and Austerlitz Campaigns! Was it all other than the veriest Spectre-hunt; which has now, with its howling tumult that made Night hideous, flitted away?—Ghosts! There are nigh a thousand million walking the Earth openly at noontide; some half-hundred have vanished from it, some half-hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch ticks once."

"O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts! These Limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life-blood with its burning Passion? They are dust and shadow; a Shadow-system gathered round our ME: wherein, through some moments or years, the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the Flesh. That warrior on his strong war-horse, fire flashes through his eyes; force dwells in his arm and heart: but warrior and war-horse are a vision; a revealed Force, nothing more. Stately they tread the Earth, as if it were a firm substance: fool! the Earth is but a film; it cracks in twain, and warrior and war-horse sink beyond plummet's sounding. Plummet's? Fantasy herself will not follow them. A little while ago, they were not; a little while, and they are not, their very ashes are not."

"So has it been from the beginning, so will it be to the end. Generation after generation takes to itself the Form of a Body; and forth issuing from Cimmerian Night, on Heaven's mission APPEARS. What Force and Fire is in each he expends: one grinding in the mill of Industry; one hunter-like climbing the giddy Alpine heights of Science; one madly dashed in pieces on the rocks of Strife, in war with his fellow:—and then the Heaven-sent is recalled; his earthly Vesture falls away, and soon even to Sense becomes a vanished Shadow. Thus, like some wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does this mysterious MANKIND thunder and flame, in long-drawn, quick-succeeding grandeur, through the unknown Deep. Thus, like a God-created, fire-breathing Spirit-host, we emerge from the Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge again into the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up, in our passage: can the Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist Spirits which have reality and are alive? On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is stamped in; the last Rear of the host will read traces of the earliest Van. But whence?—O Heaven whither? Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to God.

Truth is acquired through conscious experience, which is our sole gateway to reality, but the truth is already there within reality itself. — IP060903

That is a natural/common view, but leave it to philosophers to sniff out the problems with it.

Somehow we are supposed to get from non-linguistic 'pure thought' to non-linguistic 'pure world.'

The tunnel that gets us there is language.

Yet truths are made of language. Justifying claims happens within language. Even the stuff that is not supposed to be language is made of language to the degree that we can talk about it (include it in our justifications.)

So maybe an inherited picture is misleading us.

Maybe language isn't a tunnel.

Maybe ineffable mind-stuff and ineffable world-stuff can't function as explanations.

But then of course they can't, they are ineffable.

We argue from what we can agree on. We assent to certain simple propositions (facts).

This hardly clears up all of the world's confusions, but maybe it at least brings in some fresh confusion.
(Well not that fresh, really, but that's relative to one's exposure.)

Are you familiar with Spinoza he was a jew rejected by the jews. — turkeyMan

Yes, somewhat, and also with thinkers influenced by Spinoza.

That theology i was speaking of is common to some Christians. I am a christian. — turkeyMan

I was raised Christian. Lots of the thinkers I have read have tried to transform Christianity into something new (more compatible with science and critical thinking, basically.)

This can be charitably described as taking the incarnation more seriously than more traditional Christians take it. (In other words, God is really and only down here with us -- as us.)

I am not trying to proselytize, and the philosophers who think this way will also emphasize that it's metaphorical or symbolic (perhaps also emphasizing that human cognition is largely metaphorical and symbolic.)

And that we are entirely ignorant of the means by which we arrived, where we have arrived at (beyond appearances), or any purposes, or end to which it occurred, or was carried out. — Punshhh

I like this. Even if we can figure out ten milliion useful things, embrace countless narratives, it's seems valuable to remember the darkness as we philosophize. As you say appearances. We ghosts see only apparitions.

The truth of the matter is only half observable, only half of it is accessible to the limited position of that being, or the society as a whole. — Punshhh

This also speaks to me. 'Limited position' is good. We might also talk of finite personalities, blossoming in soils they did not choose, adapted to that soil, dreaming that what has been is necessarily what will be.

It may be useful when philosophy is trying to describe the being, the one who is doing the describing and the hearing of the description, to tabulate mind, ego, personality, body, world. But as you say they are imposed distinctions. — Punshhh

Ah, utility. The language we learn as children with all of its distinctions is that dark soil that makes our partial vision possible while it makes a perfect vision impossible. I mean that 'our' distinctions are not the only distinctions possible, which we strangely discover by means of 'our' distinctions, the ones we did not choose.

We work hard to obtain a little knowledge of our ignorance.

If we take the correspondence theory of truth, then truth is by definition objective, as it is what is in concordance with the objective world. If we take coherence theory or coherentism, that truth is simply what is concordant or what coheres with a set of beliefs or propositions, then truth is subjective. — IP060903

I think it's best to let objective be a nice synonym of unbiased.

If we are objective journalists, then we will stick to the the facts. What are facts? I think they are like sentences we'd all agree on if we were there at the happening. 'Matthew punched Mark.'

Then an interpretation would be linguistic icing on the fact. 'Matthew punched Mark because he's upset about his mother's cancer.' This is a possibly controversial statement that builds on something less controversial.

How would we argue for such an interpretation? We'd presumably weave some facts together so that they cohere and make that interpretation more plausible. "Matthew just came from the hospital, and I heard Mark make a cancer joke close enough for Matthew to hear him." Or something can go wrong: "Wait a minute! I know Jack, and he would never joke about cancer like that."

Note that a fact is just language. We can speculate about the relationship (if any) between language and non-linguistic world stuff (if such stuff even makes sense.) If we do so, I imagine we'll weave facts together in order to try get an interpretation taken as a new fact.

We can also speculate endlessly about just what language is.

Also, I wouldn't call language simply objective or subjective. We call individual statements more or less biased. On the fact-interpretation continuum, facts are objective while contentious interpretations are subjective.

I claim no originality. Some of the thinkers I like attribute at least a green version of this view to Kant. It can be summed up as the epistemological primary of facts (and therefore of uncontroversial language, as opposed to world-stuff or mind-stuff that we are tempted to use instead.)

"The world is all that is the case." Of course we are always still deciding what is still the case, so we might say that the world is a work-in-progress.

The rest, if you accept the nihilistic determinism of your life then you are free to prescribe meaning beyond being bored or uncomfortable. — Risk

As tempting as this sounds, I don't think humans prescribe their own meaning. To me it's more plausible to understand even the project of prescribing one's own meaning as 'forced' on us through a sort of seduction.

The 'joyful nihilist' is one more role we can find ourselves playing and defending, because it grabbed us in a way that other roles just didn't.

I think it has everywhere to go as it is not bounded by a systematic framework of restrictions or isolated thinking. Always looking for a critique though so please fire away! — Risk

Since you invite critique, your ideology is that of the consumer at the spiritual mall. I don't critique it from the outside as a stranger. In some ways this is also self-critique.

I'm just saying something like...it's one more ideology, this joyful nihilism.

@schopenhauer1 dwells only on the bad stuff, but he makes some good points.

It's kind of top-level ideological or merely ideal unboundedness. As bodies caught in the machine of the world (both social and physical), such ideal infinity quietly depends on the smooth functioning of all kinds of boring mundane things (boring to our p0m0 trickster.)

Kierkegaard wrote about it.

****
The aesthetic stage of existence is characterized by the following: immersion in sensuous experience; valorization of possibility over actuality; egotism; fragmentation of the subject of experience; nihilistic wielding of irony and scepticism; and flight from boredom.
****
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/#Aesth

I'm not religious like K, but the guy is fascinating.

I offer this critique, and at the same time I think playing with ideas is one of the best aspects of human existence. We could probably both critique together a spirit of seriousness that never loses itself in the play.

Here's a quote from the gospel of Thomas, which I offer not as a religious person but instead as a passage that can be read in defense of the 'fragmentation of the subject of experience.' For me the clothes represent our serious personalities that we take so seriously.

*****
His disciples said, "When will you appear to us, and when will we see you?"

Jesus said, "When you strip without being ashamed, and you take your clothes and put them under your feet like little children and trample them, then [you] will see the son of the living one and you will not be afraid."

That is a fascinating theology that I haven't seen before.

Another view is just that we humans taken together in our environment are God, which would also explain God's justified depression.

People who have held this view liked to think that we (as God) were figuring out how to do better. God (through and as us) would be a work-in-progress, largely through our shared language.

From this perspective, both you and me would be little pieces of God, developing God's self-knowledge through conversations like these.

Personally I'm inclined to think that it's all here in this world.

At the same time, we don't know this world all that well yet. We might not know ourselves that well yet.

This sort of argument strategy you are using, if it was taken serious by a court or an authority figure could basically make nothing matter in terms of right and wrong. — turkeyMan

Note that I am only trying to demonstrate the problems with precritical thinking about consciousness by showing what such thinking implies.

I don't think my own view implies a nihilism of some sort. Indeed, my view is that all speakers of English (for instance) are profoundly connected just by sharing that language.

The larger idea here is that society is primary, and that man is an especially social animal who is made possible as an interesting individual by his membership in a community.

As far as determinism goes, I don't think a scientific worldview implies philosophical determinism. From what I understand, there is still some controversy on this delicate issue.

Personally I am OK with determinism or its absence.

Even if my actions are all in principle determined, I do not know what I am going to do yet, and I am forced to live with the burden of decision whether or not it is illusory (forgetting for a moment all of the ambiguities here.)

whether we were drastically different, it wouldn't change the premise of William James's quote — turkeyMan

Let's extend the point I'm trying to make. If the meaning of the James quote was originally 'in' the 'mind' of William James, then neither you nor I could ever make it our own.

If meaning is private, then there's no necessary connection between what James meant and what you take him to have meant.

How are sentences supposed to connect to immaterial mind-stuff?

Instead of using mind-stuff to explain language, it might be better to consider language as an explanation for the questionable hypothesis of mind-stuff. (I'm not saying we are all p-zombies, in case there is any confusion.)

If we go this route (as I think we should), we do not want to fall back into assuming that language is 'really mental.'

Basically you would be arguing that one of us quite possibly has a drastically different degree of feeling or awareness? — turkeyMan

In a way, yes, but the issue is not so much whether in fact we are radically different on the inside but instead that we can in principle never know one way or the other.

The counter-intuitive idea I'm getting it is that linguistic conventions are 'prior' to so-called minds. Granting that we both have internal monologues, the temptation is to leap from this internal monologue to an immaterial substance.

At the same (just to be clear) I am also against the idea that the word is 'just physical.' I think that meaning exists, but I don't think meaning makes sense as some privately held immaterial substance.

Here is an Aristotle quote that sums up the common sense that I am questioning.

****
Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images.
****

I say that I am questioning it, but really I am just working through the ideas of various philosophers, including perhaps Heraclitus. Here are some quotes that can at least be read in the context of me suggesting that meaning is public.

****
They are estranged from that with which they have most constant intercourse.
...
Thought is common to all.
...
To the soul, belongs the self-multiplying Logos.
...
So we must follow the common, yet though my Word is common, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own.
****

There are things we know that exist (mind(s), thoughts, ideas, sensations), and reality is made of this mental stuff. Since materialism posits the (unproveable) existence of non-mental stuff, it's far less parsimonious. — RogueAI

I suggest that it's our precritical linguistic habits that make it 'obvious' that ideas and sensations exist. I don't dispute that in some sense they do. 'Ideas' and 'sensations' are words that we know how to use, and they help us get along in the world.

To me the philosophical task is not simply deciding that 'mind' alone (or 'matter' alone) is 'real', but rather figuring out what all of our babble about such things is supposed to mean in the first place.

If the OP replaces 'consciousness' with signalling or communication, then perhaps the trouble vanishes.

I also checked out a biosemiosis paper linked to by @apokrisis and found what I could understand of it quite fascinating.

It seems that (perhaps) life has always been a coder.

Where we should perhaps be wary is in the unwary collapse of language into consciousness and of objectivity into objects.

if you and i have consciousness, that would prove right there that it is not a solipsistic theory. — turkeyMan

I realize you are already rethinking your position, but let me respond a little more here.

As far as I can tell, the usual conception of consciousness features it precisely as something undetectable, unverifiable--in principle.

It leads to an 'epistemological apocalypse.'

We tend to shrug off solipsists as too silly to bother with, but they are actually a useful symptom of an otherwise unnoticed useless man-in-the-street metaphysics.

I really haven't given panpsychism much thought, and my leaning is more towards Freud's 'religion of science.'

But I like the idea of facts (as relatively uncontroversial propositions) as something like 'epistemological atoms.' "The world is all that is the case."

I don't think language can be reduced either to consciousness or its other (the physical, etc.) Distinctions like mental/physical occur within language or are language, whatever language is.

This might sound like linguistic idealism, but that is just to assume/insist that language is 'mental.'

Anyway, panpsychism is secondary to my interest in facts as (perhaps) epistemologically primary --- and neither mental or physical.

I don't have the expertise to judge Freud as a psychologist, but I do enjoy reading him as a philosopher. His explores the religious resistance to science in the text below (and also only joked about the religion of science in letters.)

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/freud.htm

In regards to the last question, if you and i have consciousness, that would prove right there that it is not a solipsistic theory. — turkeyMan

I think you are missing my point. How do you know what I even mean by 'consciousness'? If, that is, the meaning of the word is supposed to live 'in' a consciousness supposed private and inaccessible?

I'm open to panpsychism, which I offer for context, and I don't think your feelings are hurt. In my experience, though, consciousness is a sensitive issue, connected as it is with religion and in generala hiding place from critical thinking.

Let's say that I grant that you are not a p-zombie or a bot, what does that mean? Even if I use those words, how could you know what those words mean to me in the privacy of my hypothetical mind?

Is consciousness an implicitly solipsistic theory?

The more philosophy I study, the more complicated the supposedly simple concept of consciousness becomes.

I suggest that instead of arguing from dimly understood concepts and our intuitions about them, we first or also figure out what we are even talking about.

Many people (without giving it much thought, which is the problem) vaguely conceive of consciousness in a way that makes it impossible --by definition -- to investigate said consciousness.

If consciousness is radically private, then there is literally nothing to say about it.

While I don't take p-zombies seriously as a practical matter, I think the idea of the p-zombie is quite valuable in clarifying what is meant by consciousness -- or for clarifying how confused we tend to be about it when it comes to serious, critical thinking.

At least our lack of clarity becomes clearer, in other words.

If we do pretend to be philosophers and think critically, then we should maybe even expect our feelings to be hurt in the process.

Maybe giving it form is part of what makes it intelligible. Substance and form = hylo~morphe. — Wayfarer

That's what I'm suggesting. The separation of language (for instance) into substance and form happens within language.

It's the same with 'mental' and 'physical,' a related interdependent pair of concepts.

treated as a subjective construction, a kind of social construct. — Wayfarer

Ah, but social constructs are not subjective ('based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions.'). The social is the transpersonal or impersonal.

Even if one wants to explain social conventions in terms of something else (Platonic realms), it's the social realm that is given or factual.

Claims about grasping set theory with the inner eye are basically 'defined' to be uncheckable.

To be clear, I don't think we are all p-zombies, and I think there is something like mathematical intuition, but the more we rely on vague intuitions the less we are being philosophers.

Intuitively the earth does not move, for instance.

I agree about the dove trying to fly without air, I see a causal world in which mind is embedded. There being a common thread on which they both hang in incarnation. — Punshhh

I like incarnation as a metaphor. 'In itself' the 'mental' and the 'physical' are one, or something like that. We impose useful distinctions and forget we have done so, it seems to me.

I agree also that symbols are the glue that holds us together. If you want to know an ego, figure out what symbols it incarnates (they incarnate).

What I'm saying is that anything of that kind can be written in any number of languages — Wayfarer

Oh, I understand that, and this is perhaps why 'meaning' has the use it does in our language, to get at what all translations share. Translate comes from 'carry-across,' and comes with the notion of an X (language independent meaning) that is being carried from one 'vehicle' to another.

Such translations can be uncontroversial (function as facts.) In other cases, we have translators' prefaces explaining why a perfect translation is impossible.

The question remains, though. What is this language independent meaning? We never see it naked. It's always in the clothes of this or that medium or language.

If we want to reason about such things (be scientific), we can't appeal to uncheckable intuitions or private mental experience.

While the color issue is mundane, it connects to talk about the experience of gnosis and enlightenment or God ---and therefore to the OP.

Do we infer that there is only one kind of gnosis simply because a single noun is used in different contexts?

If this word is 'anchored' by or 'defined' as a pointer to private mental experience, then perhaps there are billiions of kinds of gnosis (or actually trillions, since surely our personal concepts of gnosis evolve with experience and reading.)

I'm trying to point out that grounding language in private mental experience leads to an epistemological apocalypse.

Hume:
***
Thus, not only our reason fails us in the discovery of the ultimate connexion of causes and effects, but even after experience has inform’d us of their constant conjunction, ’tis impossible for us to satisfy ourselves by our reason, why we shou’d extend that experience beyond those particular instances, which have fallen under our observation.
***
Maybe it was impossible then and is impossible now, but will it remain impossible? It seems that some notion of reason is held fixed here and projected into the future.

So we have yet another version of the structure of all possible experience, seemingly a deeply metaphysical concept, conquering the future from the present.

When reading a history of anti-realism, I kept coming upon similar metaphysical investments in the most outwardly anti-metaphysical thinkers.

If it doesn't conquer time (articulate timeless structure), it's almost not philosophy.

I suppose I must resign and leave it to the philosophers grapple with it. — Wheatley

I say don't resign. It's one of the greatest hits of philosophy.

I'm pretty sure David Hume invalidated metaphysics 300 years ago. — Wheatley

I think Hume did serious damage, but he did so metaphysically.

What does his problem of induction depend on in order to remain relevant? Maintain its force?

When can one define metaphysics? — Shawn

I second the notion that time --- or rather its negation --- is of the essence here. To me it's something like the science of the eternal. For instance, what is the structure of all possible experience? Tell me now, metaphysics, what the future holds, what the past held, if only in outline.

I just wanted to add a thought related the inverted spectrum scenario. If 'my' red is not 'your red, it doesn't matter as long as we both agree that 'roses are red.'

Perhaps the spectrum from fact to interpretation is the spectrum from uncontroversial propositions toward more controversial propositions that depend on the less controversial.

I don't see how a solid epistemology can fit with direct perception models, whether what are perceived are universals or sense data.

If there are 'epistemological atoms' (here is where we agree), they seem to be something like uncontroversial judgments (facts), which are only intelligible as part of a living language.