For what it’s worth, Grice says something like this too with his thing about “natural meaning” and “non-natural meaning”. He claims a kind of continuity between “clouds mean rain” and “‘clouds’ means clouds”. (Heidegger slips ‘signs’ and ‘symbols’ into that torturous discussion of phenomena and appearance, so we’re not far off.) — Srap Tasmaner

I haven't read Grice, is his work worth exploring? Off the top of the head the general difference I see between signs and symbols is that signs are pre-linguistic (mostly?) and non-arbitrary, while symbols are linguistic, or at least dependent on language, and arbitrary.

Interpreting is pretty much making us of. — Banno

Did you mean "making use of"?

Sure, but intentionality or "aboutness" is not restricted to linguistic practices or contexts; to make it all about language would be, in phenomenological terms, to be working from a metaphysics of presence; of the already-named.

The world as always already interpreted should not be conflated with the world as already named in my view. Meaning is not an artifact or "after-fact" of language; meaning is also pre-linguistic and is what makes language possible in the first place.



Thanks Josh, the way you encapsulated the distinction between Husserl's and Heidegger's approaches makes it clear. I haven't read much of Husserl, but I'll have to make it a priority

Are you claiming that the phenomenological account of being cannot be said? Or are you only interested in what can be said in terms of predicate logic?

Interesting, thanks. As I read that, Husserl seems to be saying that there is a primordial act of consciousness wherein something is first seen as something. Would you say this is still working within a metaphysics of presence, whereas Heidegger would say that the seeing as is derived from the pre-conscious pragmatic awareness of the ready-to-handedness of things?

Being isn't any-thing, including a "happening," including "becoming," including "change." It is very much like nothing. We interpret this "nothing," but that's all we can say about it. — Xtrix

I don't see being as separate from becoming; the only difference I could imagine would be to see it as becoming abstractly considered by putting the idea or sense of change aside. Do you understand being as changeless?

Who, as I said, got it from Husserl.

I'm not much interested in who said it first, so much as who said it best - the point is to be clear about what is being claimed. — Banno

Did you already say the idea came from Heidegger via Husserl? If so, my apologies I missed it. I'm not aware of that idea deriving from Husserl, but in any case it is abundantly clear in Heidegger.

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

Davidson phrased the same point in a less misleading way when he pointed out that the world is always, already, interpreted. — Banno

An idea which comes directly from Heidegger, in his treatment of hermeneutics and developed by Gadamer. Davidson may or may not have encountered the idea via Heidegger, but it at least was enunciated by the latter long before Davidson. I sometimes wonder whether some analytic philosophers have not claimed originality and got away with it because their fellow analytics are not familiar with the phenomenological tradition.

What would it mean for it to have a fixed identity? If we say
that it is composed of subatomic particles , do these particles have a fixed identity? Let’s say a quark exists for a millisecond. Does it have an identity that endures for this span of time? — Joshs

We cannot speak about things which are not identifiable as having an identity except in the minimal sense that to speak about them is already to posit an identity.

That's exactly the distinction I'm pointing to; I think what Blake is speaking about is being "outside of time". That state is "in an hour" precisely because it is not everlasting.

According to this interpretation that state might last for an hour, a day, a week or a lifetime, but it is not everlasting.

The crucial hermenuetic point is that Buddhism never posits any everlasting entity, thing, or object. — Wayfarer

Exactly, hence "eternity in an hour".

That seems to be very much open to interpretation to me.

The two words are related and each has it constellation of associations. Fictive has a greater constellation.

In any case you haven't addressed the point of my response which was that we don't simply imagine the things in the world in any way analogous to how we imagine the things of our literary fictions.

What if the object doesn’t crumble into pieces? Does it have an identity up till the time it crumbles? If the identity doesn’t lie in the thing , where does it lie? — Joshs

It is identifiable up until the time it crumbles. The idea that it "has" a fixed identity is an abstraction from its identifiability.

That's too cryptic for me; can you clarify?

It sounds trite compressed to a few lines but I think it makes an important point regardless. The point I take from it, is that the natural acceptance of the reality of the objects of perception has to be modulated by critical awareness of the role of our own faculties in arriving at such judgement. This is something like what I believe is meant by 'critical realism'. — Wayfarer

I have no argument with that. Note that, except in the somewhat confused second stage, there is a field. Sure, 'field' is just one possible name for it. It could be called "a stretch of grass", "a flat grassy area', "a habitat for plovers", but these are all synonymous with "field".

I don't see how it could ever be denied that our faculties play a role in arriving at such judgements, If we had no senses we could experience nothing and make no judgements, I believe you could take a person from every culture and bring them together in a (very large) field and, assuming that translation difficulties could be overcome, they would all agree that they were in a field. Even the pygmy from the Congo who has never left the forest would agree that she was in a place of no trees (assuming for the sake of argument that we are talking about a treeless field).

Yes, as Peirce said: "Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts".

Can you provide some quotes that are unequivocal about the Buddhist idea of eternity? Then we can see whether they might be open to interpretation.

We can say that ‘something’ is there to act as affordances or constraint on our accounts, but we can’t identify it as a field , since that’s already an account. — Joshs

But we can all agree, no matter what our interests might be, that it is a field. That commonality seems to be more than a mere account.

I mean, the horror of the realization that nobody will ever love or value me nearly as much as they do themselves. That in the end, myself, my life, and my hopes don't mean a shit to anybody else...that to them, I am just an object to be used in the achievement of their ends, and am otherwise utterly expendable. — Michael Zwingli

Do you care about anyone other than yourself? Even if not, do you allow that others may feel differently?

:up: It's about ten to fifteen years since I read it, I think, and I've too much on my reading list to consider reading it again right now, so I look forward to your pearls of wisdom!

Though of course we don't actually "see" potential uses; we consider that what we see may, in the future, be used in certain ways. — Ciceronianus

True, we don't literally see the potential uses or possibilities there. But I think it is fair to say that, even unreflectively, these possibilities colour and change the way we see things. And these pragmatic orientations to things are more primordial than the analytical view which sees things as merely present objects standing in front of us in all their ontic brutishness, to be simply stared at so to speak.

I agree. The three see the field as different kinds of "affordance" (Gibson). This has commonalities with with Heidegger's 'ready-to-hand' mode of being.

Further to that, when we look at, or stand in, a field, we all have our unique associations and about such experiences we could even write poems that would all be very different. Or set twenty people to paint or draw the field and see how different the works are.

I agree nothing is decisive; we don't want to make too much or too little of the sameness or too much or too little of the differences.

'The deathless' is an apt synonym for 'eternal joy' and is plainly spelled out as the fullfilment of Buddhist life. — Wayfarer

The salient question is as to what is meant by "eternal joy".

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

William Blake from 'Auguries of Innocence'

Three guys looking at a field. One is a real estate developer, one a cattle farmer, and one a geologist. Even though they're looking at the same scene, they all see different things, because they're looking at it from different perspectives. That's an analogy for the sense in which 'the world' is, for us, a construction, 'vorstellung' in Schopenhauer. Having insight into how we construct it is what wisdom is, according to him. — Wayfarer

The three guys are looking at a field, it's not that they are in the same spot and one sees a field, another a mountain and the third a river. "They're looking at the same scene"—your words. They see "different things" only in that they see different potential uses, or things to discover, or to be gained, there. The field is there; we didn't "construct it".

My belief, along the lines of Kant's phenomenon and noumenon, is that all understanding we have of complex objects in the world is fictive, whether "unicorns", "tables" or "multiverses". — RussellA

Previously you used the term 'fictional', which means imagined, now you have changed to 'fictive' which has different, although related, connotations, for me at least. (Perhaps I should look them up in the fictionary). As far as I know Kant does not claim that our understandings of empirical objects are either fictional or fictive, and I'm really not sure what you are trying to get at.

However, even if our understanding of complex objects in the world is fictive, this is independent of the question as to whether such complex objects as unicorns, tables and multiverses actually exist as facts in the world. — RussellA

So are you claiming that facts are ficts, and that the difference between tables and unicorns is that one is a fict or fact in the world and the other a fict or fact in an imagined world or something like that? Is the world also fictive for you?

(As an aside, there is a philosopher, Markus Gabriel, for whom the world does not exist, since to exist is to exist in a world; or as he terms it "field of sense", and the world does not exist in a world, else there would be an infinite regress. 'The world; is just a placeholder for the sum of all possible fields of sense for Gabriel, if I have understood him correctly).

LOL, I'm not being "huffy". And I'm not saying the terms cannot be synonymous, in fact I'm saying they can and should be. I'm advocating a distinction between metaphysical as a synonym for metaempirical., and metaphysical as a synonym for supernatural, that's all.

There is a lot of "New Age" thinking that would seek to use the "observer problem" as justification for the notion that mind is, in some way apparently no one is able to coherently imagine, the foundation of reality.

That is a supernaturalist view, or an anti-naturalist view, if you prefer; it is the idea that there is a higher realm of mind or spirit that gives rise to what we, "down here", understand as a physical reality.

Nicely framed, James.

:cool:

:I also have a fairly restless mind. I think one phase of meditation consists in not distracting yourself from that restlessness or just giving into to it; which seems to amount to the same thing.

That's an interesting possibility. But then even regarding our accepted theories, if they can never be verified, for example if the theory that curvature of spacetime by mass, which we cannot observe, is responsible for gravitational effects, we are not justified in saying that relativity theory is true, but just that it works. But we do tend to think that it must be either true or false that spacetime is curved and that that curvature is responsible for observed gravitational effects.

Quantum mechanics, like any physical theory, comes equipped with many metaphysical assumptions and implications. The line between metaphysics and physics is often blurry, but as a rough guide, one can think of a theory's metaphysics as those foundational assumptions made in its interpretation that are not usually directly tested in experiment.

If by metaphysical all that is meant is ' something not directly observable", which might be better termed 'metaempirical' then fine. — Janus

Discussion would be much better if you bothered to read what I wrote, rather than jumping to stupid conclusions about what I'm saying.

You have been reading to much Nazi material- - - lol!! — boagie

And you are presenting unargued assertions coupled with a lack of imagination.

How can we talk about "multiverses" when multiverses are unknowable ? — RussellA

We can talk about the multiverse because it is imaginable. I'm not sure whether you are referring to the cosmological hypothesis that our universe may be one "bubble" of spacetime among an infinitely numerous array of others, or the MWI explanation of the collapse of the wave function.

It doesn't matter anyway because either is imaginable as a possibility, but both would seem to be impossible to confirm or dis-confirm. The question is whether, since we cannot know the truth regarding these speculations, we should think they therefore cannot be true or false.

You say they are fictional, but we don't know that, because that would be to know that they don't exist. You could say that they might as well be fictional, since they cannot exist for us.

If this is to be argument by definition, then I’m happy with the usual position that metaphysics is an inquiry into the nature and causes of being, Then as a debate, transcendence vs immanence is one of its familiar organising dichotomies, — apokrisis

It's not so much argument by definition as it is a recognition that physics is not concerned with the transcendent (whatever that might be thought to be). Whatever physics is concerned with it is based on what has been observed or hypothesized based on the math. I don't see how "transcendence vs immanence" is relevant to debates about interpretations of QM.

Yes. I already practice walking meditation sometimes, and I also often practice working meditation. Ideally I should be in a meditative state during any activity. Not really possible when reading or watching TV, though. Profoundly absorbed states are possible when listening to music.

What I meant was that compared to sex with someone you love it is boring. Personally I never found meditation boring, just mentally and physically difficult. I practiced over a long period and experienced profoundly altered states at times. I've also experienced altered states via psilocybin, mescaline, LSD, Salvia divinorum and DMT. I'm more interested now in learning to let go of attachments and desires, hence why I said I'm going to go back to meditation practice.

They certainly ought to constrain what would be considered credible.

Like after Darwin, you might quarrel about how humans arose from apes. But no longer do you need to worry about the mechanics of turning ribs into first wombs. — apokrisis

All I was saying is that however we might interpret QM the interpretation is a physical, not a metaphysical one, at least in the sense of not positing something transcendent at work. If by metaphysical all that is meant is ' something not directly observable", which might be better termed 'metaempirical' then fine.

I'm not saying that metaphysical interpretations are not possible, but they are not inevitable and nor are they, as far as I am aware, mainstream in the physics community. If there were infinite parallel worlds, those worlds would be physical, and if it is down to the "observer effect", the observer does not have to be understood to be in any way non-physical. As to the latter, if I understand correctly, it's also the case that the 'decoherence' interpretation employs a much broader notion of observer than would tally with the common notion (i.e. the term 'observer' is not confined to humans, higher animals, or even to animals).

True, but what it means is still (for physicists at least) in the physical context.

I understand; I meditated daily for about 18 years (with a few missed days and short lapses of practice). My biggest problem was not that I found it boring, but that my legs would get very bad pins and needles. I'm thinking of going back to it, but maybe I'll try a chair.