A synopsis and discussion of "ontocubism"

[Joshs]

@j_j

As an organism in the world, I give a damn. I like “good” music rather than “bad” music, “real” friends rather than “phony” friends. Of course. I find any flight from this awareness of one’s being thrown into preference more of that alienation that I critique as empty talk, fumes from the seminary.

Of course, there’s a distinction between being thrown into preference and justifying that preference on the basis of a distinction between what is actual or authentic or real and what is phony or dishonest. I can prefer more fluid , integral and intimate engagement with the world than confusion and incoherence without having to deny that every other human being is motivated by this same preference and is doing the best they can to achieve this through the way they construe experience, and that our being thrown in preference can result in their embracing as authentic precisely what I construe as phony. As George Kelly wrote about the changing status of ideas across the history of science,

“I must still agree that it is important for the psychological researcher to see the efforts of man in the perspective of the centuries. To me the striking thing that is revealed in this perspective is the way yesterday’s alarming impulse becomes today’s enlivening insight, tomorrow’s repressive doctrine, and after that subsides into a petty superstition.

The apparent phoniness of petty superstition benefits from the luxury of hindsight. Meanwhile, today’s seemingly truly authentic and actual enlivening insight will eventually suffer the same fate of apparent phoniness in the face of the tomorrow’s discoveries.

@j_j

I don’t in the least read relativism as the tedious and hopeless pretense of apathy or neutrality.

Given that all of us are thrown into preference, even supposed neutrality and apathy are modes of preference.

@j_j

@Joshs

a new belief may improve upon the old by organizing experience in a way that anticipates new events more intimately, fluidly, and intricately than the old , even though it presents the world in a qualitatively different way.

I like this, but it more than familiar to me, and it’s basically a version of pragmatism

But it departs from James’s or Peirce’s pragmatism in being radically reflexive. The world which our construals attempt to anticipate optimally is altered by our attempts, making our previous efforts appear phony.

@j_j

you seem to be “pushing down” the tendency of philosophers or any kind of cultural critic to “push down” what they find inferior.

It’s not the identification of inferiority I’m pushing down , it’s the quesrioning of others’ motives-psychodynamics . We recognize that most children will not be able to grasp Quantum mechanics. We can see that as a kind of limitation and thus an inferiority of a sort, but we dont blame them or explain this on the basis of their motives or a conflict within their psyches. We usually have no need to call a child’s use of Lord of the Rings to ground their view of the physical world phony, because we don’t assume one part of their psyche knows better than another part. They are doing the best they can to makes sense of things.

We reserve the word phony for instances of a capriciousness or arbitrary suppression within the psyche of what someone at some level already knows. When we become angry or disappointed in others, something like this is at work. We say they knew better than to do what they did. But is the problem their phoniness, thoughtlessness or capriciousness, or our own failure to understand their limits of understanding as we would the child whose worldview is based on Lord of the Rings? Are we blaming them for our own inability to reconstrue their actions such that we are able to subsume their actions within a more workable perspective?

[j_j]

Hello ! Perhaps we met on my YT channel, and I invited you here ? Welcome.

@rgessays

i appreciate the attempt to map subjective experience, but rejecting an independent physical substrate and replacing it with a “forum” of entangled perspectives is an intellectual dodge. it’s elevating a biological hallucination to the level of ontology.

Just for context, my own view is really just a paraphrasing synthesis of my influences. It’s very close to the view of Mach and very close to the view of Einstein in at least one paper, namely Physics and Reality.

I’m not trying to argue from authority here. My point is that something like my view has been embraced by at least a few prominent physicists. To me this makes perfect sense. Genuine science is empirical science. Knowledge os only scientific if it survives contact with experience. Or we might say that science predicts and controls experience.

Is it a good idea to understand experience as “biological hallucination” ? I don’t think it is. We believe in the role of brains because we perceive the role of brains. The initially plausible case for representational realism evaporates, as soon as one notices that its “conclusion” is a negation of what was presented as “evidence” for that conclusion.

Basically the obvious relationships between how the world appears to a subject and the position and state of that subject’s nervous system gets misinterpreted in terms of an “internal stuff.”

From my POV, you are accidentally repeating a ghost story. To me there is only the world. My view is a variant of direct realism.

Your main objection is my rejection of a god’s POV. You might call this “objective reality,” but I don’t think you mean an unbiased reality, as if reality is a person who would make a good juror.

To me the demystified reading of “objective reality” is just the world as an unbiased scientifically educated person understands it. I can pretty much get behind this, but not its tactily theological amplification, especially if that amplification involves the paradoxical re-categorization of experience as internal illusion. For this is just the scientistic version of an ancient conspiracy theory, namely Plato’s Cave.

Now the physicist, metaphysically transfigured, plays the role of the priest, mediating the divine for the unwashed and uninitiated.

[j_j]

@rgessays

you say you don’t need a fundamental stuff and reject physicalism for “radical pluralism.” but a promise, a horseshoe, and a bitter divorce do not exist on the same ontological baseline as entropy and gravity. treating them as if they do sanitizes reality. the universe wasn’t designed for the convenience of the human species.

I’d say it’s the other way around. Demoting normativity just saws off the legs of science. Basically you are trying to reason with me, make a case for your beliefs being more “rational” than mine. But that is part of the forum that I try to point out. There’s a tendency for thinkers to exclude their own inquiry from the object, but in this case that is absurd. For the point is to tell the whole story coherently. The telling of that story should account for the telling of that story. Democritus was great as a physicist but naive ontologically, for he didn’t even account for his own work, didn’t explain why his little opinion should be more than the usual raving, the usual wishful thinking, the usual do-it-yourself homebrew religion.

We can’t leap out of our human situation. Your beliefs, like mine, are human beliefs. I’m OK with us being apes that genuinely die. No afterlife. No god. Just apes trying to make the best of the world we find ourselves in.

From POV, you are fetishizing marks and noises that we use to predict and control things in our environment. How does a scientific theory exist, after all ? Words and symbols. And for me words and symbols are things in the world, not divine hieroglyphics with an immaterial meaning that sketches a hidden reality. No, these scientific marks and noises prove themselves in the qualitative world that we care about. You call our ordinary world “biological hallucination.” But it’s only in this practical world that science can prove itself as a good way to settle our beliefs. As I see it, you are the one sanitizing the situation, insisting on an finished “objective” truth rather than facing the actual situation, which involves ambiguity and risk.

I agree that the world wasn’t designed for our convenience. It’s tough down here for an evolved ape. But we did indeed evolve for just this world. So it’s more like we were made for the world and by the world. But we were made to be an especially creative species, and we have changed our environment significantly since we emerged.

But I’m more of a pessimist than an optimist. Still, I stick to my gallows humor. I’m glad to keep waking up so far.

[j_j]

@rgessays

what you call a “perspective” or the “streaming presence” of the world is just a controlled nightmare (controlled in terms of the laws of physics, not free will). a data compression artifact generated by the brain’s attention schema. this sense of “point-of-viewness” or a unified self interacting with other selves is just a simplified model the brain uses to track its own blind, predetermined processing. separation is an informational firewall between biological apertures. there is no true “between us” or shared forum. there is only one undivided is-ness experiencing itself. consciousness is the universe experiencing itself. the inner experience is fundamental. a fundamental substance so to speak.

If you really believed that, then presumably I am just some unreal character in your personal nightmare. So your story involves an immediate performative contradiction.

The “undivided is-ness” is actually fascinating, and I find this is Vedanta and Fasching. Perhaps you should have opened with that.

But personal selfhood is vividly experienced. I’m not incline to deny experience in the name of theory. That is the theological tendency that empirical science corrects. I suspect that you underestimate the sincerity of my “positivism” and of my utter rejection of idealism — if idealism is understood in terms of experience being representational inside stuff.

I actually sort of agree with the last part. But I would not call experience “inner.” Consciousness is rather the perspectival presence or being of shared objects. My “consciousness” is not inside-mind-stuff generated by the brain. It is just the world being there for me. This includes brains being there for me, the reflection of my face in the mirror being there for me, etc.

In a certain sense, there is no witness. The witness is given with the witnessed.. But “from-a-point-of-view-ness” is not inside but there as the quality of the object. The heads side of the coin shows and not the tails side. This is perceptually just “there.”

This is not offered as a metaphysical truth. But only as an option for making sense of our situation.

More exactly, I’m trying to sketch the tacit beliefs that we enact, whatever we like to say we believe. Look to what people do for their beliefs.

[j_j]

@rgessays

the “forum” relies on the illusion of the shared present moment and the illusion of the main character. physical evidence, from general relativity to neuroscience, shows neither exists in the way we feel they do. to ignore this for the sake of “cubist” metaphors is to project a false comfort (denial), human narrative onto a blind, indifferent, entropic geometry. accepting the cold, unyielding physical substrate requires courageous clarity, but it’s the intellectually honest foundation.

No scientific theory can “show” anything unless we can have rational conversation. From your POV, we are all caught in private illusions. So science is just illusion like the rest. It’s a romantic nihilistic vision, what you offer. I am personally quite fond of romantic nihilistic visions, but I also like them coherent.

[j_j]

@Joshs

We reserve the word phony for instances of a capriciousness or arbitrary suppression within the psyche of what someone at some level already knows. When we become angry or disappointed in others, something like this is at work. We say they knew better than to do what they did. But is the problem their phoniness, thoughtlessness or capriciousness, or our own failure to understand their limits of understanding as we would the child whose worldview is based on Lord of the Rings? Are we blaming them for our own inability to reconstrue their actions such that we are able to subsume their actions within a more workable perspective?

I readily will agree with you that genuine anger is not advisable here. We probably largely agree on how to treat people in ordinary practical life.

Perhaps my strategic use of literary devices — within this atypical social situation — is not signifying for you as it does for me.

Lesser philosophical rivals are necessary as foils. If no one is relatively mystified or inauthentic, then no one is relatively demystified or authentic. Stronger philosophical rivals are just as necessary. I might recognize the other as a genuine peer. I don’t mean “peer” in the simple human sense of someone I respect as a person. I mean “peer” in the sense of another “poet” on the scene, whose work surprises and intrigues me, whose work I could not do myself. Our crucial influences — “the mighty dead” — are a strange kind of “paternal” rival. They teach us what the artform is. But, as Bloom saw, we either manage a swerve with purchase or we fail to become “genuine” poets ourselves. As you may guess, by “genuine poet” I mean someone who invents a gesture with force within the inherited context.

I joke about arrogance, but I agree with Eliot.

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not onesided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.

To appropriate the tradition is to “tarry with the negative” in the sense of self-mutilation. As I see it, the weak poet is genuinely arrogant in the sense of being “deaf” to well-aimed objections to his explication or theory. The deaf will be forgotten, because they fail to compress, to transcend and include.

Such short-term persona-preserving narcissism is not accused here in typically moralistic terms. Instead it’s bad a long-term strategy, in terms of what I might call the latent goal of such a poet. We might express this goal as well-earned or legitimate prestige. Of course aesthetic judgements, in my view, are situated. In blurry terms, we want to be recognized by those we recognize. As public life shows, plenty of people are comfortable with being misunderstood or even despised by those who don’t count for them. I’m not celebrating this. Factionalism is odious.

On the other hand, I don’t see my fellow philosophers as innocent flowers. They are rivals in a prestige and attention economy. Poetry advances one funeral at a time. The old dog isn’t interested in new tricks. Those invested in concrete conversations can’t help but feel personal like or dislike for the other person. Such bias is almost impossible to leap over. But I think the best long-term strategy is to self-mutilate and assimilate, even if we can’t resist concealing the dishonor of receiving a gift.

I was trying in my previous post to draw you into consideration of this aspect of social situation. I suspect that you are also ambitious, and to me that’s a good thing. I think it’s illuminating to read philosophy as one who is also serious about writing it, and at a high enough level that it’s not only a study aid.

For me the appropriation accidentally become more than study as I saw neglected connections between prominent thinkers and neglected thinkers. I took and take myself to have have stumbled onto something newsworthy, but only for a ideal community that I may have to create, strangely by directing signs at that community-to-come. Yet it’s also primarily a footnote. But a good footnote is good enough.

[j_j]

@Joshs

But it departs from James’s or Peirce’s pragmatism in being radically reflexive. The world which our construals attempt to anticipate optimally is altered by our attempts, making our previous efforts appear phony.

I give James and Peirce more credit than that. My passing use of “phony” is aimed at theories that don’t much non-theoretical conduct. The “phony” theory is “alienated.”

Lately I connect positivistic phenomenology to psycho-analysis. I have to drag my tacit enacted beliefs into the "light, " if I happen to be invested in a honest description of our basic situation that refrains from speculative indulgence. Typically the “alienated” theorist is self-blind. For instance, the normativity of science, which is crucial, is declared by such a theorist to be “unreal.” Yet they are ethically passionate about their theory. They try to project a genuine authority, enacting the “reality” of the very normativity that they refuse to acknowledge theoretically.

But I reiterate that genuine anger is absurd here. The situation — eventually — is comical. In the upside-down world of alienated theory, “realism” is a conspiracy theory that declares perceptual objects to be internal hallucinations, etc. Sure, a representational realism will glue on an “objective reality” that beams “pure information” to the simulation generator, etc. I still parody this particular piece of alienation out of habit, but really I’m pretty bored with it.

I note also that all that I share here is within the project.

I note that Peirce made a great move when he wrote that “we think only in signs.” This gets the crowbar in.

[j_j]

@Joshs

It’s not the identification of inferiority I’m pushing down , it’s the quesrioning of others’ motives-psychodynamics .

It’s hypothesizing, but also just a rhetorical device. Can I count the number of times that a scientistic theorist has “debunked” me via a shoddy projection of sentimental fear of nihilistic machine-code Trooth ? I used to run that gimmick myself. Like the spiritualistic theorist will invoke the fear of God. Two versions of the fear of “God.” I am deaf not because their story has holes in it but because I am biased. Well of course I am biased. We all are. The annoying feature of such reasoning is the asymmetry. The other is a slave of psychgological causality. I am a spark of pure freedom and shimmering self-caused rationality, etc. Both of these camps presuppose the “theomaterialism” of an obscured truthmaker. They don’t see that they are “two slides of the seem coin.”

People reason in these emotional terms. An imminent critique is not debugging software. Instead you grab the levers of that particular person. You might do this just to defend yourself, to teach caution to the hyenas. Or you might understand the other as able to appropriate a new way to peel the old banana.

But I don’t pretend to purvey truth. Not everyone likes banana in the first place. So it’s an unpredictable swapmeet, where the rule is perhaps nothing to exchange.

[j_j]

@Joshs

The only way I can know if they are receptive to my alternative is to see whether they respond to my invitation with interest and excitement or with rejection. If they are utterly unreceptive, then it is likely that the best way for them to move forward in their thinking is through that very approach (physicalism , ghosts, gods or metaphysical truth) we reject for ourselves.

I just want to emphasize that I agree with this completely in the typical interpersonal context. It’s not only kind but selfishly prudent.

If there was a “truth” to purvey, then it’d be better to hide it and restrict access. That’s a dark joke about human nature. The envelope is the letter.

[j_j]

@Corvus

“Zeit” in Being-in-the-world cannot be reduced into “now” (presence), because it is the “zeit” towards the future.

Hence it is not about word math, but rather, trying to focus and be faithful to the tradition of the concepts handed down in the history.

I agree. Perhaps you missed my suggestion that the future is “more real” than the past.

To be faithful is good — and it’s not easy. To me it’s obvious that we don’t want to be uncritical slaves to the vocalizations of yesteryear. The tradition proves itself to us. It opens up to our genuine curiosity and our holding it to the test of our own experience.

[Corvus]

@j_j

The world “gives itself” to a creature who cares about things. The world is “there for me” primarily as the “environment” in which I solve problems.

Isn’t the world largely hidden from us? When I go away to other parts of the country, the world I was perceiving disappears. Hence the world I was perceiving was a presence, which transforms into absence, as I leave the space.

As I arrive to a new location of the world, a new world appears as presence. I explore the newness of the new world in presence, which was absent from me all my past life. Now it has become a presence, which will disappear into absence as I leave there too.

However, I cannot leave from my own self. I travel hundreds miles, and it is still in me. It follows me wherever I go. It never fails to be in me.

In that sense it is Being-in-the-world as opposed to “presence”. Being endures time and space, and keeps existing as a being until such a time comes when the being transforms into nonbeing.

At this point a question arises inquiring if nonbeing exists. Nonbeing cannot be absence, because it doesn’t return to being, whereas absence can change back to presence. We don’t know whether the nonbeing becomes part of the world where it originated from, or it comes back to another being waiting to be thrown into the world again. What does “ontocubism” say about this?

[Corvus]

@j_j

Perhaps you missed my suggestion that the future is “more real” than the past.

Not sure if I missed it. It is rather I believe the past is more real than the future. Because the future is still not here. The past had been and gone, and I know what it was.

[Corvus]

@j_j

To me it’s obvious that we don’t want to be uncritical slaves to the vocalizations of yesteryear. The tradition proves itself to us.

Of course we don’t want follow all traditions. Some traditions are cool to follow. Impractical and unintelligible traditions can be ditched into the bin.

The past and future are all in now, and we are perceiving them all together at present. They are just the labels in the perception.

Without present, there is nothing. The dead are the beings deprived of the present. The deads had their pasts, but they have no present and no possibility of future. The livings are the ones whom we can share the present, and heading towards to the future. In that sense, we are time-in-the-world too. Time and being are identical in their ontological nature. Hence I believe Heidegger wrote Sein & Zeit.

[j_j]

@Corvus

Isn’t the world largely hidden from us?

The world is primarily hidden. Darkness is the rule, light is the exception.

The river of Heraclitus that I can step in is only a moment of the river. “Most” of the river is absent.

The great painting shows me only one of billions of its “faces.”

Existence is the prejudicial disclosure of the world, which is to say the merely partial disclosure.

But I share objects with other people. I am dimly aware of the many other “faces” of objects. I am dimly aware of this receding fringe of the object that is more in darkness than light.

The “transcendence” of the object is its “going beyond” the “here and now for me.”

The object is present as mostly absent.

I say the word “mother.” I make a dying noise in the air. But you hear me say the word “mother.” It’s all right there, in that example. In my view, this is the gist of Heraclitus and Plato, this basic, familiar structure.

My fugitive vocalization “participates” in the “transcendence” of the “ideal” static character that makes the sound a saying of a transcendent word.

This is why I connect Saussure to Plato. We can use Saussure’s approach to the word more generally in an approach to the structure of objects in general. In this sense, objects are “generalized signs.”

I see the flash of my kitten running by. That seen flash is just an ephemeral moment of the kitten, but the kitten was really there in that moment, only very partially. My “taking” the flash as the flash of the kitten is the “registering” of the “transcendent significance” of that brief perceptual flickering.

[j_j]

@Corvus

Not sure if I missed it. It is rather I believe the past is more real than the future. Because the future is still not here. The past had been and gone, and I know what it was.

I am basically talking about the structure of every “now.”

What is the structure of your now ? Is reality “on-the-way” ? Is experience the presence of the becoming of the world ? Its transformation ? And I suggest that our experience ( the world from our POV ) is structure by our care. We want to get X, because it makes us happy or helps us get something that makes us happy. We want to avoid Y, because it hurts or contributes toward the arrival of something that hurts.

[j_j]

@Corvus

n that sense, we are time-in-the-world too. Time and being are identical in their ontological nature. Hence I believe Heidegger wrote Sein & Zeit.

I agree. So it’s a question of unpacking this. How is time the same as being ?

I see myself as have been trying to spell this out in many but not all of my posts.

The aphorism is something like: consciousness is time is being. But these are just signs that point in this or that context.

[Corvus]

@j_j

The aphorism is something like: consciousness is time is being. But these are just signs that point in this or that context.

Being is conscious of time. Being is time is consciousness. Makes sense. To understand the aphorism, one must read Heidegger suppose.

[j_j]

@Corvus

Being is conscious of time. Being is time is consciousness. Makes sense. To understand the aphorism, one must read Heidegger suppose.

I’d unpack it this way. Your existence as a whole is the presence of a streaming of the world itself, but it is the world from the POV of the body you call yours.

This world is “articulated” in terms of objects that you share with others. These “shared” objects are “logically transcendent.” The object is present as “more than here and now and for me.” The object as such has “temporal depth.”

Time is implicit in the “transcendence” or “logical between-us-ness” of every object.

[j_j]

@rgessays

einstein formalized the block universe where time does not stream. the distinction between past, present, and future is an illusion (the future is already “there”). he was a strict realist, not a phenomenalist. invoking him to defend a fluid, subject-centered reality fundamentally misrepresents his ontology.

I’m pretty careful about only paraphrasing primary texts. If I haven’t read the paper myself, I try to resist the urge to belch forth my hunch.

I believe I stressed that I was only speaking of his position in a particular paper. Here’s some of that paper.

Our psychological experience contains, in colorful succession, sense experiences, memory pictures of them, images, and feelings. In contrast to psychology, physics treats directly only of sense experiences and of the “understanding” of their connection; but even the concept of the “real external world” of everyday thinking rests exclusively on sense impressions.

Now we must first remark that the differentiation between sense impressions and images is not possible; or, at least it is not possible with absolute certainty. With the discussion of this problem, which affects also the notion of reality, we will not concern ourselves but we shall take the existence of sense experiences as given, that is to say, as psychic experiences of a special kind.

I believe that the first step in the setting of a “real external world” is the formation of the concept of bodily objects and of bodily objects of various kinds. Out of the multitude of our sense experiences we take, mentally and arbitrarily, certain repeatedly occurring complexes of sense impressions (partly in conjunction with sense impressions which are interpreted as signs for sense experiences of others), and we correlate to them a concept–the concept of the bodily object. Considered logically this concept is not identical with the totality of sense impressions referred to; but it is a free creation of the human (or animal) mind. On the other hand, this concept owes its meaning and its justification exclusively to the totality of the sense impressions which we associate with it.
…
The aim of science is, on the one hand, a comprehension, as complete as possible, of the connection between the sense experiences in their totality, and, on the other hand, the accomplishment of this aim by the use of a minimum of primary concepts and relations. (Seeking, as far as possible, logical unity in the world picture, i.e., paucity in logical elements.)

Science uses the totality of the primary concepts, i.e., concepts directly connected with sense experiences, and propositions connecting them. In its first stage of development, science does not contain anything else. Our everyday thinking is satisfied on the whole with this level. Such a state of affairs cannot, however, satisfy a spirit which is really scientifically minded; because the totality of concepts and relations obtained in this manner is utterly lacking in logical unity. In order to supplement this deficiency, one invents a system poorer in concepts and relations, a system retaining the primary concepts and relations of the “first layer” as logically derived concepts and relations. This new “secondary system” pays for its higher logical unity by having elementary concepts (concepts of the second layer), which are no longer directly connected with complexes of sense experiences. Further striving for logical unity brings us to a tertiary system, still poorer in concepts and relations, for the deduction of the concepts and relations of the secondary (and so indirectly of the primary) layer. Thus the story goes on until we have arrived at a system of the greatest conceivable unity, and of the greatest poverty of concepts of the logical foundations, which is still compatible with the observations made by our senses.

I don’t think E could be much clearer here, and this demystified approach to physical objects was even relatively common at the time. As I see it, we happen to live in a moment of spiritual-political unrest, so “drunk” theories are more prominent.

[j_j]

@rgessays

acknowledging the self as a biological hallucination generated by the brain does not negate the physical existence of the brain itself. the user interface is not the hardware. the transmission of physical signals between biological apertures does not constitute an ontological “between-us-ness.” it is just localized, deterministic information processing.

Basically this is dualism. You seem to posit “reality-in-itself” as a system of “private hallucinated worlds.” Or “internal user interfaces.” This is the reheated “veil of perception” framework. It’s an old ghost story, vaguely dependent on the Christian notion of a soul that haunts the body.

It’s harmless. Because you act on the primacy of perception, you can afford to theoretically “pretend” that you are merely acting within a “video game.”

I wouldn’t say that your belief is “false” in the sense of failing to “mirror the way things really are.” I eschew that approach as unwieldy and life-alienated.

Presumably you must see yourself as “inferring” this “truth” about “the external world” from within your private nightmare chamber. So you use your own personal hallucination of rational norms without remembering to to put these in question. A quietest skepticism might make the most sense if such a belief were sincere ( enacted ) and not merely theoretical — chosen like an opening in a game of Chess with words.

You speak with a humorous confidence about the same “external or true world” that you project away from yourself and all others. From within your bottomless dream, you pronounce on the what lives outside of that dream.

Presumably you understand us both to be bound more or less by the same rational norms. Yet you reduce normativity to hallucination. You saw off the branch on which you perch to sing your song.

Presumably you understand the brain to generate this user-interface, but brains — according to your account — are part of this user-interface.

Representational realism tends to morph into reheated Locke in order to cling to any plausibility at all. Some of the “hallucination of the object” — its “primary properties” — are “also real.” The “hallucination” happens to “get things right” when it comes to these “primary qualities.” But, according to your account, there’s no way to check such a claim.

I’m not an instrumentalist ( tho I think it’s a worthy position ), but it seems to me that a representational realist might be tempted to settle for instrumentalism. If reality is always mediated by “hallucination” or “interface,” then our theories can only be validation in terms of their pragmatic success within the “cave.”