A synopsis and discussion of "ontocubism"

Metaphysics & Epistemology
264

But “brains” are just icons on the user interface. Why would you believe in brains ? You say that experience is a nightmare–dream-illusion and then argue for this thesis by appealing to features of that illusion.

Your “4-D Crystal” is a beautiful philosopher’s god. Sincerely. As a metaphor with a certain resonance, I can appreciate it.

Of course. Your vision is a version of what I have critiqued for years. Basically you imagine a system of “private illusory worlds” that are all “enclosed” by a “true” or “substrate” reality.

If I was developing your theory, I would call the crystal C and then each “illusory microcosm” f_i(C), where this f_i(C) denotes the projection of C that is “for” subject i. The “true world” as “4D crystal” squirts “information” through f_i to generate the “illusion” of so-and-so #i.

I note that you have failed to answer several of my criticisms. A scientific model is a model (a marks and noises analogy ) of/for our “illusions.”. Your “4D Crystal” needs to predict and control this “illusion” to be science rather than “theology” in the sense of metaphysics that solves a spiritual problem for you.

Empirical science needs a community of perceivers who can validate or check empirical claims. Science as warranted belief doesn’t make sense without the “forum.” You either at least tacitly invoke rational norms or you are just another drunk at the bar spouting your daydreams as cosmic “truths.”

265

You call what is “right there” an “illusion” in the name of a system of marks and techniques that is also right there, also part of the illusion. Presumably you are tacitly enjoying the ecstasies of mathematical platonism. It is the “immaterial eternal meaning” of these marks and noises that is the “truth.” But then we have the ghost without its sheet. Metaphysics is ghost stories for people unsatisfied by Christianity, etc.

266

I’m not offended. I’ve interacted with hundreds of personalities on forums like these. Of course they see themselves as morally superior to me. Of course any bias is on my side rather than theirs. “Tales of ordinary madness.” The collision of fever dream evangelists. Welcome to the jungle.

They are pure reason incarnate, a spark of divine freedom, unsheathed avatars of intellect unalloyed. I, unfortunately, am a self-deluding monkey. The conspiracy theorist is frustrated by the skepticism of the old man who has seen all of this before, who “insanely” insists on the reality of chairs and tables and the people in his life. This old man is also deluded enough to believe that conversations are real, that others and their signs themselves are present before him — also that it’s his wife that he kisses and his cat that he pets. Lately he even ventured to suggest that “the smell of piss is real.”

Just to be clear, I am not offended and I don’t want to offend. I’m glad you showed up here. I hope you stick around.

267

Though we disagree, I’m glad that @rgessays has joined us here.

Here’s another summary of “situation research.”

I see a thread running through phenomenology, positivism, and psychoanalysis. Phenomenology can be read as a more honest — because more empirical — positivism. But we do not want a “science” of “essences.” We do want to sniff out, foreground, and “confess” the basic structure of the world.

The “for-me-ness” or “for-someone-ness” of the world is one of its primary characteristics. This has inspired many to postulate qualia, mediating icons, etc. “Because for-me-ness, experience is not world but icon.”

The theme of psychoanalytic self-knowledge is important if and when we care about whether our theories — verbal beliefs — have anything to do with our enacted beliefs — our non-verbal conduct. But really I’d include also our non-theoretical verbal conduct.

The ethical-aesthetic motive here is doing as you say. The “alienation” of some philosophy is the gulf between theoretical saying and non-theoretical doing. I claim, within the game, that perceptions are “inside my head.” But then I drive on a busy highway, swerving away from “illusions” that threaten to crush me. I don’t treat the manifestation of the 18-wheeler as a little picture in my head.

I also talk to others. I assume that “physical objects” are also “there” for them. I assume that they can hear my words, that my words “signify” for them. Of course we can dig into the details of all this forever. But we won’t bother to do so until we notice our own comportment.

The alienated philosopher, my rhetorical target, is a human being immersed in a chess game who identifies himself with the pieces on the board. He forgets his larger self, immersed in a single aspect of his personality. To me it’s wrong to accuse this immersion as if it sinful or false. Some people will find themselves repulsed or disappointed by this immersion. For others, this immersion in “grand metaphysics” is why foolosophy is fascinating in the first place.

A critical phenomenology may even read as “anti-philosophy.” But philosophy is a coin with two faces. It has always included anti-philosophy. The revolution becomes the institution. The liberating metaphor becomes an invisible presupposition.

The chess board is also a good metaphor for the monological “meaning mysticism” that dominates alienated philosophy. The equivalent of God’s Dictionary is presupposed. The metaphysician needs signs to work in a particular way for their project to make sense. To work without God’s Dictionary of Eternal Essences is to have to talk to people, to have no Divine Logic at one’s back.

The phenomenologist hopes to unearth structures in the face that reality shows him that are also there in the face that reality shows others.

But signs are things in the world, perceptual objects given in “aspects” or “moments” ( perceptions) like other perceptual objects. We may all agree that the word “consciousness” was said but then also agree that no one understands what the others are trying to say about consciousness.

Philosophy is enacted as a super-science. Meta-physics is a Higher physics. Is this hyper-physics a deductive science, churning out theorems ? Or is it a trans-empirical science, where armchair introspection is an exploration of “mostly hidden levels” of reality ?

Note that hermeneutical phenomenology aspires to “uncover.” It’s not absurd to try to illuminate or excavate what is otherwise overlooked.

To me the method is atheistic. But I don’t see theism as ruled out. If everyone agrees that God is there for them, then God is like an old red couch in the living room. Just taken for granted as there for all.

Maybe Joe understands himself to have had a visionary experience. Is Joe’s experience “unreal” ? That’s outside the scope of the project.

To me situation research is research into the basic universal situation. What does the general person enact ? What is the static form of the flowing world ?

@Joshs might tell me that there is no static form. But then he has just given me one. I’m sort of razzing you friend. I want my philosophy to be as temporal as possible, while not ceasing to potentially matter to other people, including those unborn. If I chain signs together as valuable and “valid not just for me,” then I am paraphrasing or rekindling the “gnosis.” Or I understand myself to do this if I happen to find the thread from Heraclitus and Plato to Heidegger.

I confess my belief in the continuity of the flickering “gnosis” that is never expressed the same way twice. It is not therefore a perfectly constant gnosis. A “same enough realization” or cluster of realizations is remembered and forgotten. But for me this is not “spiritual” in the optimistic sense or in terms of a flight from mortal life as a body in the world. The movement is downward ( Freud, Blake, Nietzsche, etc. ) toward an affirmation and investigation of life as dying singing flesh in the world. Whitman is a great poet of the spirit of this gnosis, but so is the pessimist Schopenhauer, though I don’t like coca-cola in my bourbon. So I imagine a distilled and filtered Schopenhauer, with the gallows humor of Beckett.

This last part is more context than core. I think that situation research ( dialogical positivism ) makes more sense for someone who doesn’t expect soul-saving from explicative or “scientific” philosophy.

Obviously “philosophy” is aimed at all kinds of life projects. This is just one way to aim that sign.

268

That sounds like the ontic view of the world. Would it correct?

Ontologically I used to think the world is largely unknown to us. It is mute, hidden and detached from us. We are thrown to the world, and keep asking questions to the world, but the world is reticent and disinterested in us. All it does is giving us shelter, food and water to survive.

There are a few different definitions on the world in Heidegger. What would be your definition of the world, and from ontocubism?

269

For me, ontology is something like an inquiry into beings in general. What is an object ? What can we say about all objects ? And what is being ? How can we best understand this strange word “being” ?

I’d say that I was offering an ontological sketch of our situation. Because I relate the sign “consciousness” to the sign “being,” I had to carefully explain the strangeness of sharing the same world and yet “having” that world in a “for me” fashion. Existence is “our world” but “for me.” Or our-world-from-my-body’s-POV.

I had to do this to describe objects in general. As heraclitus saw, “everything flows.” No moment is ever exactly repeated. The world is a “river” or a “fire.” On the other hand, the world is obviously also full of familiar enduring objects that I talk about with others. The world has “structure.” The world is “articulated.”

How does a thing thing ? The second “thing” is used as a verb. To put it playfully, the being of a thing is a thinging. The world worlds and things thing.

My “same” wife never manifests in the same way twice. I perceive her face now as the face of my dear wife. So there is “past and future” in the now. I don’t meet the world without memory or expectation. I live in a world with things that show other “faces” to other people that they never show to me.

Indeed, as you mention, as individuals we only see a tiny piece of the world personally. But we have a sense of the “infinity” of reality. For Leibniz, you could even zoom in on reality forever and always find more detail. He had a “fractal” sense of reality.

Being “is” time, for one reason, because objects only show “moments” of “pieces” of themselves. Music is a great example. Music cannot be squeezed into the now. To hear the beginning of the tune is to not-hear the end. In general, objects as “transcendent” and “also for others” are never completely present. Indeed, they are more absent than present.

Being “is” time also because existence is structured by care. I chase this, flee from that. I build something grand. I write my will. I rush when I read the clock and see that I am “late” for work. The “anyone” lives by the public clock. The “time of day” is significant.

Finally, there’s physis ( arising/departing) and kinesis. Basically this is the “motion” or “flux” of reality. Things comes and go. Reality cannot give itself all at once. Truth as aletheia is revelation, a revealing that always also conceals. The sky’s being clear sunny and blue is the sky’s not being cloudy and gray. Determinate being involves negation or non-being, at least tacitly.

I try to point at all of this when I call an object a “system of faces.” It can only show one “face” at a “time.” So these “faces” are also “moments.”

But I recognize a “moment” of my wife as my enduring transcendent wife. I recognize a unique sound as the saying of an ancient word like “mother.”

I’m trying to point at the “collision” of the unrepeatable and the “repeatable character” it indicates. The waters of the river are ever new, but they are the waters of that same old river.

1 Like
270

I was just reading The Concept of Time today, first draft of B&T. But I’ll use my words. The world is where you find yourself. It’s especially the practical world. As I see it, Heidegger is trying to point at the pre-theoretical world. I might see that somebody better change the litter in cat’s litter box. Or that the dishes need to be washed. Or I see my Dutch army jacket that I got an antique mall, and look forward to a cold enough day to wear it. Or I register something from the mailbox as more stupid junkmail. Or I see that I missed 3 calls from my wife and worry about her and try to call her back. The world is the “total context” of your care-driven doings.

The world is the world that we care about, that is usually mostly familiar. When I drive in my own neighborhood, I “know my way around.” I take familiar shortcuts. Sometimes we find ourselves away from the familiar, like a child in the big house of rarely visited aunt, uncharacteristically a little afraid of the dark silence that surrounds her.

When I was a kid —maybe 10 years old — I once found myself alone before a sparkling cascade of water running down slaterock— weirdly on Easter Sunday — and the beauty of it probably contributed toward my “realizing that everything existed.” The creek was “there.” The world was “there.” This being-there-ness wasn’t a stuff that was there in the world. No. I was shocked that “there was” a world in the first place. A state of wonder. This is the ontological difference vividly experienced, though I didn’t have fancy words for it then. “The world is.” That is stupidly idiotically simple and yet “profound” – a noticing of the fundamental “miracle” of the world. Though here “miracle” is used in a nonreligious way.

1 Like
271

I have the same book. It is a very short book and half of it is in German, making the actual content even more brief.

The first sentence of the book is startling. I am stuck at the first sentence. What does it mean? It needs some interpretation.

“If time finds its meaning in eternity, then it must be understood starting from eternity.” - 1E, The Concept of Time, Heidegger.

1 Like
272

I think you have the lecture with the same title. I have that one too. That lecture is called the “ur-B&T” rather than “the first draft.” Both books are great, but I highly recommend the one I was talking about, if you can find it cheap somewhere.

1 Like
273

Keep in mind that he is giving a lecture to theologians.

If time finds its meaning in eternity, but it doesn’t.

This way of posing the question is fine, provided that we have the aforementioned point of departure at our disposal, that is, that we are acquainted with eternity and adequately understand it.
…
The philosopher does not believe. If the philosopher asks about time, then he has resolved to understand time in terms of time…

Here’s a nice passage from later in the lecture:

If I take out my watch, then the first thing I say is: ‘Now it is nine o’clock; thirty minutes since that occurred. In three hours it will be twelve.’

What is this now, the time now as I look at my watch? Now, as I do this; now, as the light here goes out, for instance. What is the now? Is the now at my disposal? Am I the now? Is every other person the now? Then time would indeed be I myself, and every other person would be time. And in our being with one another we would be time - everyone and no one. Am I the now, or only the one who is saying this? With or without any explicit clock? Now, in the evenings, in the mornings, tonight, today: Here we hit upon a clock that human existence has always assumed, the natural clock of the alternation of day and night. What is involved in the fact that human existence has already procured a clock prior to all pocket-watches and sundials? Do I dispose over the Being of time, and do I also mean myself in the now? Am I myself the now and my existence time? Or is it ultimately time itself that procures for itself the clock in us?

Another killer passage:

The end of my Dasein, my death, is not some point at which a sequence of events suddenly breaks off, but a possibility which Dasein knows of in this or that way: the most extreme possibility of itself, which it can seize and appropriate as standing before it. Dasein has in itself the possibility of meeting with its death as the most extreme possibility of itself. This most extreme possibility of Being has the character of a standing-before in certainty, and this certainty for its part is characterized by an utter indeterminacy.

Here’s my take. The death that Heidegger is interested in the possibility of death. I “live out my time” with a sense of my death lurking around some corner. Death is “here now” as the way I experience the time as having a vague end that I can only vaguely understand as the possibility of the annihilation of all of my not-yet-lived possibilities. Death is the oncoming end of my self as a creature who “can” or “might” do. I “have” done this or that, but I live in and as what I might do. I might become unable to do or be anything at all. Indeed, I am sure that this my singular existence cannot last forever.

I am sure that I will die, but I don’t know how and when. In another text, Heidegger addresses the exception of suicide. The suicide does know when and how. But that’s an exceptional case, and Heidegger is far more concerned with really living in the face of death than leaping into oblivion. Suicide weirdly escapes death as possibility, death as oncoming.

1 Like
274

Yes, it is “The Concept of Time” translated by W. McNeill, English-German Edition.

I have ordered another book titled “History of the Concept of Time”, and waiting for it to arrive.

But your recommended book looks good.

1 Like
275

To me eternity is a concept, and time is consiousness. I would rather think of eternity as a concept stemmed out from time, rather than find time in eternity.

Because my concept of eternity lasts about 5 seconds, whereas time as my consciousness lasts my life time.

More on the other part later.

1 Like
277

That is a great one too ! Translated by Kiesel, who wrote the excellent The Genesis of Being and Time. The book you ordered starts with an excellent rundown of Husserl.

1 Like
278

Yes, my friend. I am with you on that !

1 Like
279

I’d approach it this way. “Being” points to what is “just” the being of particular beings.

Things “are.” Things come and go. But all the ever different events and things are “there.” What they have in common is this “partial passing presence.”

“Eternity” is “only” a mark or sign. So is “time.” But the sign “time” can be taken as a pointer to the ongoing “disclosure” of the world which is always also just as much a concealing. Showing is hiding, vision is blindness. Two sides of one coin.

Consciousness as time is being is this torrent or river of showing/hiding. The world is there “in the shape of” the “experience” of a passionate situated organism that is trying to understand its world. This is how one can read the strange aphorism “being is ontology.” Being is the presence(-ing) of visceral sense-making.

But this is another way to emphasize the specificity of the world’s revelation. This “side” of the thing is different from that “side.” The “positive presence” of this side is the tacitly negative absence of the other. The end of the tune is the not-beginning of the tune.

We also get this in Saussure’s abstract conception of language as a system of differences without positive elements. Actual language has “positive” elements, particular sounds actually in use. But structurally speaking the sounds don’t matter.

It doesn’t matter how the king in Chess is shaped. The “essence” is how we treat whatever shape we choose in relation to the other shapes, to which the same point applies.. But I can’t play chess unless whatever shapes I happen to choose are distinguishable. Here we see why “difference” has been presented a grand ontological concept. To say “mother” is to not-say “water.” Interesting that Sartre called his opus Being and Nothingness.

I think the celebration of difference as a central concept is justified, but I don’t want to be as recklessly playful as Derrida, for instance, when I talk about it. I want to ground everything in life. Everything should ideally be checkable. In fact, people have to want to look at life in the first place. My current take is that stupid honesty is more important in foolosophy than clever posing. The “good” philosopher is a “fool.” He feels and confesses to himself that he doesn’t yet have a grip on this or that. People get stuck philosophically, stop growing, because they are insensitive to their own incoherence. They don’t tarry with the negative. They cling to a doctrine that is alienated from who they mostly are, etc. Hence the surprising importance of Freud, for instance. Of course I don’t mean Freud as “final truth teller” whose theories are law. I mean the basic sense that the self is a dark forest, that self-knowledge is painful and difficult, if potentially life enriching.

1 Like
280

Gotta add this quote from Hobbes, an insufficiently celebrated influence.

Continual Successe in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth, that is to say, continual prospering, is that men call FELICITY; I mean the Felicity of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual Tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because Life itself is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Feare, no more than without Sense.

We get the care structure of existence here in terms of “desire and fear.” Life is “motion.”

281

I found some new words for “pure” ontocubism.

The world is chunks of quality.

An object is a chunk of quality with temporal depth.

The chunky or discrete component is the “unity” or “gathering” of quality.

image
image460×387 52.9 KB

Look at the handwritten image of a “zero” in the top left corner. It is there as “colorshape.” I assume that you were able to “focus” on it, to “foreground” it. It was there as a thing.

It is at least a singular something.

I assume that you are “conscious.” What I mean that the “quality” of that something is “there.” I might add that it is there “for you,” but your eyes are not what we might call your “visual field.” I’d prefer to just say the world from the perspective of your body.

That something is also recognized as a “zero.” That numeral “lives the role” of something that “transcends” the specificity of its quality. We see others numerals to the left, each with a specific quality. Yet we are trained to “look at the role” and ignore the differences that make no practical difference.

The cry is the eagle. The numeral is the number. Or rather we enact this copula, usually. The woman gives me her number. So we say. Her number. But “literally” she handed me marks, uttered a chain of noises. “Literally” she gave me a numeral. But the “life” and “point” of a numeral is its quality-transcending role.

This tempts us toward mathematical platonism. “Numbers are immaterial.” What is “materiality” ? Generally, “material” is understood a category. Not “quality that is there” but a category.

“Numbers are immaterial” suggests that the relatively stable pragmatic role of numerals is “immaterial.” But “pragmatic” points us to stuff we care about.

For instance, what is the “goodness” of music ? The sound is “there” for us. We like it. Math is used to implement error-correcting codes on compact discs. Minor scratches don’t necessarily reduce the quality at all. The internet infrastructure allowing you to read this likewise uses error-correcting codes.

Your landlord wants “1000” dollars at the beginning of every month, and that’s if you are lucky. The number as stable role for singular numerals is “lives” not in but as the transformation of articulated or “chunked” quality.

But “quality” is not a magic word. It is a signifier, which is a “role” for scribbles as chunks of visual quality or noises as chunks of sonic quality.

A primate in your environment finds a fascinating basic structure. Really this primate scanned the marks in books, and this active reading affected the way his environment was “there” for him. He saw that a dominant way of interpreting the situation was “in the way” of this new interpretation. For him, some chunks of quality (or more exactly roles for these chunks ) began to “signify” differently.

He also understood that he was “stuck using the usual tribal signs.” Language is inherited like the law. He had no choice but to use old words in strange new ways. Of course he understood that “philosophers” had been doing this from the beginning. He didn’t even believe in “pure meaning.” His own claims were chains of signs out there in the world. But he could reliably “pair-a-phrase” this or that particular expression. The “idea” was a “role” that the singular expressions “participated in.”

He knew that it would all sound “mystical.” Maybe calling the world “chunks of quality” would set the right tone ? “Turds of quality” would be too DADA, too irreverent.

He understood that many saw “philosophy” as a higher physics. “Chunks of quality” must be something like neutrinos or maybe a theory of internal psychical entities. Because chains of marks and noises “contain” an “immaterial meaning” that mirrors or fails to mirror a “true material stuff.”

At the very least, the “philosopher” proves something in an absolute communal Logic. So this dude must be bringing a “theorem.” “Philosophy” is “math.” But he knew that it wasn’t math, unless “math” was understood more socially and realistically. In the old informal sense of “realistic,” which weirdly “philosophers” often but not always disliked.

He reflected earlier, while making more of his famous home-made kefir, that “formal indication” is itself a formal indication.

So it’s all about “pointing.” But “pointing” is a “pointing.” He depended on the curiosity and charity of his fellow primates.

282

I used to think time could be just simple perception of changes in the world or motions. But recently I am not sure about it.

It seems making sense to think being is living and existing in its own time frame. The time frame of a being starts with its own birth and being dies when the time frame comes to the end.

So, does it mean time is unique to each being’s existence and time frame? You have your own time frame, and I have mine, which are all running separately?

How about the world itself. Does the world have time, which is running on its own time frame? But I don’t see how it can be the case, because the world has no consciousness, and it cannot perceive its own time. The objects exist and events takes place in the world, but does it require the world time frame? Or the events have their own time frame?

All beings definitely face possible death. Is death being due to time running out? Or is it the work of the physical and biological wear out living through the duration of the life span of bodies?

1 Like
283

This was confusing at times, but now I see “Being” as a general concept of all beings existing, and “a being” as a particular existence. So a being would be an instantiation of “Being”. Would it be correct? Is it what Heidegger refers to?

I think we share the idea and methodology in philosophy, although there are parts we don’t quite agree, and interpret not the same way. But that is natural situation for any individual when it comes to ideas. Read history of philosophy, and we notice there is no two philosophers who thought and said same thing on the world, human existence, and mind.

Socrates comes to mind. He was the father of philosophy, revolutionary in his own times.

We are all trapped in our bodies and in little brain, but philosophizing via discourse and dialogues seem to be freeing us from the forest of puzzles and wonders on the world, life and mind, just like the artists freeing themselves via creating and imagining.

1 Like
284

Exactly. We institute a “public time” that becomes very important to us. We use this “public clock time” to predict and control our environment. But this tends to hide a “deeper” understanding of time from us, that the time that we “are.”

In one sense, we are primates. But the world is “there” for us and structured by our primate concerns. The world is “mine” because it is from the point of view of my dying primate flesh. Other can’t die for me. But others also can’t read books for me.

Of course we can discuss books. So what I mean is that the “signs shine just for me.” I have no choice but to make my own sense of the world I find myself in. I may do this by believing whatever They tell me, in all of its fuzziness. In fact, we have no choice but to start this way. Even when we think for ourselves, we use inherited phrases to do so. We never leap over all of the prejudice that we are. Subjectivity is bias. To be me is precisely for the world to shine in one way rather than another. But we can adjust this prejudice, change the shine of the world, and then try to share it with others, but only through signs that show different “faces” to different sign-slinging primates.

Philosophers are hard to understand because they use familiar signs in an unfamiliar way. Less autonomous people primarily outsource their situated judgments. Looking back, I see my own progress mostly in terms of being honest with myself that my current beliefs didn’t quite gel as much as I wanted them to. To cling to a fixed idea against this dissonance is to temporarily fail at being a foolosopher.

1 Like