A synopsis and discussion of "ontocubism"

Metaphysics & Epistemology
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Of course people believe different things. I think that you and I agree that the dead do not experience the world. The world is no longer “there” for the dead.

We also associate this vanishing of the world with the destruction of the brain. So somehow the flesh just “is” at the center of a world from the sensory-affective-historical POV of that flesh. To me it’s just a fact to be honest about. The shared world comes with a “for-me-ness” that is strangely connected to a dying organism.

Some people need a theological “explanation” of this, but I just don’t. I do need knowledge to navigate my environment, including the social/cultural aspect of that environment.

Personally, I avoid metaphysics. “The philosopher does not believe.” I am only trying to report the basic situation as I excavate it, as I become honest about how I actually live in the world.

In my life, I take living human bodies to “have the same world I do from another perspective.” I don’t pretend to prove or justify this. Instead I present it as something that I take for granted when I speak to people about the world we share. It is absurd to try to “prove” this, because proof is a social concept.

Basically philosophy and science are meaningless anyway if others don’t share the world with me. Of course I enact ( and here verbalize) a strong certainty that they do. So I mention this as a theoretical point. The forum ( the world being “there” for members of a community who talk about it ) is radically presupposed by sincere speech.

To me we need only be honest about what we are doing. That obliterates all kinds of pseudo-problems. But it’s not easy. And it’s an infinite task, more of a direction than a location.

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In my opinion, no. But Heidegger was very aware that most people do understand the sign “being” that way.

One way to try and get it is to be “shocked” that there is a world in the first place.

It is not how the world happens to be that matters here. It is the brute fact that there “is” a world here.

We might also talk about the “is-ness” of things. The horseshoe is “there.” This “thereness” of the horseshoe is a not general concept.

The word “concept” is itself often a mystification. Words are things in the world. They sound like something, look like something. They are “significant.” Pure internal thoughtstuff is a ghost story that we have been stuffed with as children of this particular post-theistic culture.

We both like Bjork. When you listen to one of her songs, that sound is just “there.” We can only talk about it because it is there in the first place to talk about. It is there “as” its quality for the ear and in terms of feeling.

“Being” is a noun, but in the case of Heidegger and Fasching, this noun is “abused” or used in a strange way to “point out that the world is there.”

This “world that is there” is not some conceptual theoretical “objective reality” but everything, your entire existence.

Basically people are such practical primates that we rush to explain things and go “blind” or “numb” to those things just being there.

I also suggest that people expect philosophy to function as religion. They want a story that makes them feel at home in the world. They want an “explanation” that is usually just a myth. They “turn their noses up” at “basis” or “soil” of their existence, and even at the fundamental soil, which is the “being” of the world. Instead they wring their hands over ideological attitudes about categories. “Physical” or “mental” or “spiritual” or “secular.” So the whole discourse is just grinding out polemics for the pulpit.

Facing death also helps, because it can force you to realize that the world is not only there but there for you. But only for a little while. It’s terrifying to be faced one-and-one with death and not reach for an “ontotheology” that understands the world in terms of a particular sacred entity ( a creator god, for instance) that “explains” all others.

The “problem” is that this sacred entity is “just another thing that is there.” The brute presence of all things and all events is “beneath all explanation.” And it’s not obvious how to pay the rent with it. We are busy, practical animals. Moreover we are suspicious. We don’t want to sound silly or weird.

Then there’s the problem with Heidegger’s reputation. But this was never about Heidegger as a person. Other thinkers made the same point. Heidegger happened to bring it into the mainstream. So it’s “branded” by a guy who did some stupid things. That’s one reason I often mention Fasching and Sartre. Even Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet, was completely aware of the ontological difference. Arguably so was Parmenides.

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I completely agree. While I of course enjoy explaining my perspective on the world, I don’t expect you or anyone to take my word for it. I just try to point at what I find in the world from over here. Maybe you will find something like that over there. Maybe no.

I wouldn’t point at things that I didn’t consider valuable. So of course I hope that my pointings succeed. I also hope that others will point things out for me. That’s why I have "wasted my life " ( a joke ) on foolosophy, reading and writing it. Really I do more than think about philosophy, but it has occupied a good chunk of my finite time in this world.

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I agree. He is fascinating. Wrote no books. So we get only “aspects” of Socrates, what others took him to be. How did Socrates manifest to Socrates ?

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I agree here to. I might say that it frees us from little puzzles so that we can wrestle with bigger and better puzzles. But more than that I see it as an intensification of the sense of being alive. We become more autonomous and creative. We go off alone in the woods, but then we come back and report what we found on our path through the darkness.

Intensity, creativity, freedom, sincerity, independence. Arguably achieved largely through courage and curiosity.

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I see genuine overlap not only between Heidegger and Peirce but also between Heidegger and Hobbes. You might say that I am trying to translate Heidegger into a visceral English that fits the content. Trivially my appropriation is situated. While Heidegger is a crucial influence, I hold myself responsible only to my own experience and the experience of those who read and hear me.

Here’s a great passage from Hobbes:

Deliberation— When in the mind of man, Appetites and Aversions, Hopes and Feares, concerning one and the same thing, arise alternately; and divers good and evill consequences of the doing, or omitting the thing propounded, come successively into our thoughts; so that sometimes we have an Appetite to it, sometimes an Aversion from it; sometimes Hope to be able to do it; sometimes Despaire, or Feare to attempt it; the whole sum of Desires, Aversions, Hopes and Feares, continued till the thing be either done, or thought impossible, is that we call DELIBERATION.

Note the centrality of passion and time. The future looms large here. How will things turn out as a function of the choices I make ? The oncoming future is my concern. The world is “significant” for me in terms of its quality. Some of that quality is “good.” I move toward it. Some of that quality is “bad.” I swerve away from it.

Therefore of things past, there is no Deliberation; because manifestly impossible to be changed: nor of things known to be impossible, or thought so; because men know, or think such Deliberation vaine. But of things impossible, which we think possible, we may Deliberate; not knowing it is in vain. And it is called DELIBERATION; because it is a putting an end to the Liberty we had of doing, or omitting, according to our own Appetite, or Aversion.

This alternate succession of Appetites, Aversions, Hopes and Feares is no less in other living Creatures than in Man; and therefore Beasts also Deliberate.

Every Deliberation is then sayd to End when that whereof they Deliberate, is either done, or thought impossible; because till then wee retain the liberty of doing, or omitting, according to our Appetite, or Aversion.

This anticipates Peirce. The “past” can be read as a pointing at what we have been thrown into. The “past” is what we do not control. The “past” is a negation of our freedom.

We experience a sense of the irrevocability of our decisions. Life doesn’t come with a rewind button.

Inquiry is deciding on conduct that we take to partially determine the future. It is the adjustment of prejudicial and expectant comportment directed toward a partial “steering” of the oncoming “quality” of the world.

I decide to put on my seat belt, because I remember films of those who were thrown through their windshields. I do not want that to happen to me. I reduce the (subjective) probability of that happening to me. I swerve from what I take to be oncoming suffering.

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I thank @Andy and @Wayfarer for inspiring me to look more into Heisenberg’s philosophy. I found a forward by Bitbol on a book about this here.

I react to some quotes.

For, according to Kant, synthesis represents “the act of putting different representations with one another, and of comprising their manifoldness in one cognition” and it is the resulting unity of phenomena in one cognition that plays the role of an object.

As I see this, we enact this synthesis automatically, primarily as “one” does, but presumably within the vague constraints of our biology. Culture is like “software” constrained by biological “hardware.”

Is this a synthesis of re-presentations ? Yes and no. Because I perceive the “same” object yet again, automatically synthesizing two or more perceptions, the presentation of the object now is indeed a re-presentation.

But is my perception a mediating representation as a not-the-object internal mind-stuff icon that is between me and the “true” object ? Does the perceived object block my view of the true object ?

My own TLDR answer is “no.” A perception is not a second internal object that hides the true object from me. The “user interface icon” story tells me that the icon is my friend. It “translates” the true object into the right kind of second internal object. Trapped in the pineal gland, I at least get an icon on my personal private screen that helps me steer my meatbot through a “radically external world.”

The consistent internal icon theorist confesses that my perception of the meatbot in the mirror is actually another icon. The “radically external world” is the output of a delicate inference. “Presumably” there is something like the perceived meatbot out there in this inferred external world.

Brains as perceived are also internal icons. “Presumably” something like perceived brains is responsible for the translation of external world events into events on the icon screen like perceived meatbots and perceived brains.

I hope I’ve made a case that representation as internal mediation is at least a daring hypothesis and far from obviously plausible.

On the other hand, we can and do thematize individual perceptions. The signs we use to discuss them are not used like the signs we use to discuss the perceived objects.

Mach understood this. He used the neutral term “element” for a portion of what we might call the “phenomenal field.”

In my view, we are not automatically talking about a neutral monism here. We are not necessarily talking about a single “pre-stuff” that all things are made of.

I think the best reading of this “neutrality” is pragmatic. If I am doing psychology or am just testing someone’s vision, then I thematize the isolated perception. When I ask Joe what he sees, I am interested in Joe’s eyes or brain and not the Joe-perceived object. You might say that I take the object for granted here as not my focus. Joe is my focus. I am synthesizing Joe’s perceptual reports in the pragmatic context of understanding Joe’s nervous system in relation to the world.

But the same Joe might be recording a measurement. Now what Joe sees is taken to tell us about the seen object. I take for granted that Joe is a “generic” observer. I want Joe to be generic in the sense of relatively unbiased. I look at the object through Joe. Joe’s report functions for us as a “quasi-perception.” The cry “is” the eagle to the degree that we enact this copula. We believe the eyewitness about the color of the defendant’s car, and this convinces us to find him guilty, aware of the mandated death sentence. We put a man to death because of a sound some witness made in the courtroom.

Yet the cry is not “literally” the eagle, and the perception is not “literally” the object. I read this “literality” in terms of the neutrality mentioned above.

The “phenomenal field” ( “worldface” ) is structured by what Gadamer calls “linguisticality.” The “elements” are “neutral” because we rapidly transform our sense of what is relevant. The quality that “was” the rose is now an entity for psychology rather than the florist.

Now for the issue of “monism.” I go back to Plato. We can think of the phenomenal field as an articulated qualitative continuum. We might want to use “quality” for the “basic stuff” that is always already interpreted categorically. The “neutrality” of this “quality” is just our skill at swiftly reorganizing the “field of quality” in response to changes in that “field.”

But we don’t want to reify this quality. You might say that we already have, simply by pointing at it with a noun. Of course I think the use of a noun tends to make this pointing difficult. The quality is “there” and basically it just “is.” This “is-ness” is not a stuff but the is-ness of any and every kind of stuff.

This “stuff” is part of our “linguistically.” The world is always already “intelligible.” Objects are “generalized signs” in the sense of automatic “syntheses” of perceptions that can be isolated but usually are not isolated. The reification of “isness” or “quality” is tempting here. In practical life we worry about how different kinds of things are related. So ontology is approached like a cosmic chemistry.

Talk of “being” or “quality” comes off like talk of the “water” that Thales said everything is “made of.” But in this case we are digging below the “made of” framework. To me we are digging for a deep and stupidly simple structure, which is basically already in Kant, and can be traced back much further if we read Plato and Heraclitus phenomenologically.

The object “as such” is a temporal interpersonal synthesis. The “unity” of the object is “discrete” or “digital.” The object “counts as one.” But the object is there as that particular unity in terms of “quality.”

So the world is (a coherent system ) of interpersonal chunks of quality with temporal depth. Note that I am including my usual use of “presence” in the use of “quality” here.

The object is “there” as this “chunked quality.”

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Possibly related (but possibly not), I came across a drawing by Mach given here. This reminds me of W’s comments in the TLP about “the microcosm.” And on a related note, a book about Avenarius here.

AI precis of the book:

Based on the article from Mind journal, here is a precis of Dr. Friedrich Carstanjen’s exposition of Richard Avenarius’s theory of Empiriocriticism.

Precis of Richard Avenarius and His General Theory of Knowledge, Empiriocriticism

This article, written shortly after Avenarius’s death in 1896, provides a comprehensive overview of his ambitious philosophical system, Empiriocriticism. Presented as a “general theory of knowledge” and “human norms,” the system aims to transcend the traditional disputes of philosophy (like Realism vs. Idealism) by establishing a purely descriptive and universally valid foundation for all human thought and action, grounded in the natural sciences.

1. The Foundational Principle: “Pure Experience”
Avenarius rejects both dogmatic empiricism (which fails to define “experience”) and Kantian criticism (which pre-judges its possibility). Empiriocriticism begins by accepting everything that an individual states as experience, without initial prejudice. Its goal is then to critically investigate this raw material to determine what constitutes universally valid experience. This “purely speculative” inquiry focuses on the universal form of knowledge, not its specific content.

2. The Starting Point: The “Natural Concept of the World”
To avoid dogmatic assumptions, Avenarius establishes a minimal, “purely local” presupposition: every individual finds themselves within an environment alongside other individuals who make statements about that environment. This “essential coordination” of the individual (the “central term”) and the environment (the “counter-term”) is inseparable and fundamental; one cannot be conceived without the other.

3. The Central Theory: The “Vital Series”
Avenarius constructs a physiological-psychological framework to describe all thought and action. He posits a “System C” (the central nervous system) which strives for a state of “vital maintenance maximum.” Life is a series of oscillations around this ideal point.

  • Vital-Difference & Vital-Series (First Order): A change in the individual’s state (e.g., a familiar increase in nourishment) creates a “vital-difference.” This is counteracted by a corresponding, familiar increase in work (e.g., daily stimuli), forming a “vital-series of the first order.” This describes our habitual, unthinking life.
  • Vital-Series (Higher Order): When a novel or unfamiliar variation of work occurs (e.g., receiving bad news), a “vital-difference of a higher order” arises. This necessitates a series of complex “compensating adjustments” within System C to annul the disturbance and return towards equilibrium. This series accounts for all conscious thought, problem-solving, and action.

4. The Functional Relation of Thought and Body
Crucially, Avenarius avoids metaphysical causality or parallelism. He describes the relationship between physiological processes (changes in System C) and statements (E-values) as a purely “logical functional-relation.” When one changes, the other changes concomitantly. He deliberately discards the concepts of “soul,” “consciousness,” or “will” as explanatory principles, treating them not as a denial (like Materialism) but as a methodological necessity to begin without unprovable hypotheses. All our “psychical” values (thoughts, perceptions) are E-values dependent on, but not caused by, these physiological changes.

5. Assigning E-Values to Physiological Changes
Avenarius systematically links broad categories of human statements to specific characteristics of the change-process in System C:

  • Form: Determines statements about sensory quality (e.g., “blue,” “warm”).
  • Magnitude: Determines statements of intensity (“strong,” “weak”).
  • Direction: Determines statements of pleasure and pain.
  • Relevance: Determines general emotional moods and feelings.
  • Familiarity: Determines our core epistemological statements about what is “real,” “known,” and “certain.”

6. Resolving the “Inner” and “Outer” World Dichotomy
Avenarius’s ultimate goal is to restore a unified view of the world. He argues that the perceived divide between the “inner” (psychical) and “outer” (physical) is an artificial construction resulting from a false “introjection”—the erroneous belief that a soul or consciousness is enclosed within the body, receiving impressions from the outside.

In his view, a statement like “I have a perception of blue” is a series of signs. The sign “blue” describes the environmental object (the R-value, like aether vibrations). The sign “perception” describes the same unified event but from the relative point of view of the individual’s relation to it (the change in System C). They are not two separate worlds but different ways of characterising the same, inseparable process of experience. The question of an object “in-itself” is meaningless, as an object is always defined by its relation to a subject within the essential coordination.

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I have seen that drawing and of course I love it. That picture is worth a thousand words.

I want to further develop the fusion of our horizons ( Gadamer). I think your use of “microcosm” is what I mean by “worldface” and other expressions.

“Pure realism” expresses the absolute immediacy of reality. The witness is given with the witnessed.

I use the crossout to indicate that “ultimately” there is no witness. Of course there is the empirical self as an object in the world, a “synthesis of perceptions” like other objects. The “worldface” is largely determined in relation to this empirical ego. What is “just there” visually is in front of the eyes of the empirical ego. This intense relationship is of course what inspires the theory of an inside picturing consciousness stuff.

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I love that last line of the AI precis – surely this must be the root of the relativism that is at the core of Mach’s positivism, following through to Heisenberg’s ‘reconstruction’ of physics given in his 1925 Umdeutung paper (discarding the concept-laden planetary model of the atom in favor of an interpretation based solely on the empirical data from atomic line spectra).

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And this, of course, goes back to Avenarius and the role of the CNS (I don’t know if you caught the late addition to the post you were replying to).

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I love this. It is exactly how I understand phenomenology. Which I also call “dialogical positivism” or “absolute empiricism.” Many names for an attitude.

We are trying to excavate this form. We have to dig through inherited theoretical prejudices. I see Heidegger as basically just putting one layer on top of what is already in empiriocriticism. Basically we are using signs to do this “pre-search” into the “form” of all knowledge. I might frame this in terms of what the concept of knowledge as relatively warranted belief “needs” in order to make sense. What is latent in the concept of knowledge or science ?

Pragmatism is a huge help here because it points to non-verbal conduct in the face of the oncoming future as our basic situation. So we dig under what we only say about knowledge and look to “knowledge in action” as visceral conduct in the present directed at influencing the future.

To circumvent inherited theoretical biases, we start fresh. Everything is “real.” The pragmatic honorific use of “real” is important, but it also encodes bias.

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And this is surely none other than dependent origination (the Buddhist doctrine that Nagarjuna turned into a philosophy).

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Here is one of several versions that I’ve come across of what I current call “the forum.” Basically knowledge makes no sense without sign-traders sharing an environment that matters to them.

I find Saussure and Heidegger so important because they dig into the character or nature of these signs. Somehow these signs “store” knowledge. There “significance” is systematic and – - more importantly — “binds time.”

I can read Avenarius and pick up where he left off. I can study Maxwell’s equations at school. The signs somehow “store the cognitive labor of the dead.”

But, crucially, they are also qualitative perceptual objects in the environment. We have to perceive them and “process their significance” as animals with individual histories that pre-determine the way that signify for us as individuals. This is maybe the most interesting kind of “prejudicial disclosure,” because the way that humans super-charge these signs with time-binding significance seems distinctively human, like our super-power.

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Yes. I totally agree. And this is how I read Mach — and (my) Plato.

We “take” the “element” as a “perception” to do psychology. I might explain myself in terms of an “hallucination.” This category has a pragmatic significance in the game of praise and blame that is a crucial part of the training of a primate into “being a person responsible for what he did yesterday.” The “person” is another time-binding “virtual”/“convention” synthesis of “quality.”

The object is a “system of its moments.” The “moment” is a “face” of the object more or less explicitly relative to the perceiver.

To me it makes sense that all “presence” has “quality.” Something is “there” by “being blue” or “being painful” or “being stinky.” Presence “is” quality, but quality is always “chunked.”

Heidegger insisted that “being” is always and only the being of particular entities. Of course people tend to hear “being” as the name of a mysterious entity. When really it’s an almost helpless pointing to entities in general just “being there.”

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Of course I am completely with Avenarius here.

But I read “erroneous” here as synonymous with “less coherent, less economical.”

To me it seems that ontoperspectivism or the “immediacy of worldface” demystifies the sign “true” by reading it as only an indicator of situated or organism-local belief.

Once I “basically understood” Mach, I was temporarily troubled by the question of how “my” thesis — stolen from influences — could be “true.”

It finally occurred to me that the typical use of “truth” basically presupposed a dualism of belief versus truth. Of course Rorty helped me here, but he was not decisive on this particular issue.

So I resolved this dissonance in a Machian way. What we have is the transformation of belief. My current belief is the “structure” of the world-for-me now. The adjustment of my belief is the adjustment of world-for-me. I think it’s best to think of belief in a deep sense here that is largely comportment and the way the world shows up in a felt way as dangerous here and safe there, etc. Verbalized belief is often even “dishonest” ( self-alienated) in that the organism’s verbal beliefs “clash” with its enacted beliefs ( non-verbal conduct).

Since we are both “relativists,” I expect you to get what I am saying here. “Beliefs” are expressed through signs ( vocalization and mark-making) and other conduct. Beliefs are “tools” that sometimes function in a “representational way” as “quasi-perceptions” for their hearers/readers.

In short, “seeing is believing.” But that’s a psychology of belief that emphasizes the primacy of perception as an influence on our conduct.

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Yes, that makes sense. I think you find this “systematicity” also in Hegel, Saussure, and even in Brandom.

Individual signs don’t have much life. It’s when we get to assertions that we hold one another responsible for that things get interesting. And here we always have concepts working together.

And we expectantly understand non-sign objects in terms of their relationships with other objects. And of course in terms of relationships with sign objects.

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I think Gettier took the correspondence theory of truth as an axiom for his criticism of JTB, but not necessarily as his own position, and you seem to be saying that the distinction between truth and belief is resolved by the coherence theory of truth. Do I read you right?

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Not quite. I think (?) my view is more radical than that.

I have an anti-theory of truth. We should ditch the word altogether in the theoretical context. We don’t need it.

We can understand knowledge as relatively warranted belief. That suffices.

I completely reject — these days anyway — the weird and murky definition of belief as “taking to be true.”

This is a mystification of our use of “true” to indicate & discuss belief. Note that this assertion only makes sense in its own terms as an expression of belief — of how the situation shows up for me currently.

Belief is “absolutely fundamental.” I walk a certain way. The person over there looks scary. The “affective” and “expectant” structure of my environment-for-me is “articulated” by my belief. My own habitual manner of approaching this or that kind of object is my “sub-verbal” belief or “visceral belief.” For instance, I enact wordlessly with my body the assumption that physical objects are “also there for others.”

I also “hear spoken words” to have this “meaning” rather than that “meaning.” I am affected differently by the same signs than other perceivers are affected. But not too differently when it comes to practical signs. Practical life is the sturdy center. We can’t afford to mess up here. We get locked away, murdered. We starve in the woods, lost, unable to read a map.

When it comes to parsing Mach’s or Heidegger’s signs, things are much trickier. What is nonsense or outrage to Joe is insight and revelation for James.

I’d then add that we seek the coherence of our beliefs. This is just another way of saying that we make sense of our environment. Brandom investigates the coherence norm that dominates verbal belief.

He goes into immense detail, but the gist is that I can disagree with you but I am not allowed to disagree with myself. He finds this in Kant’s “transcendental unity of apperception.” Basically “I” maintain and update an ideally coherent “story” about the world. “I” have to “prune” this system. I add new beliefs to it. I need to keep it relatively harmonious.

As Brandom sees it – and I agree — we already enact these norms governing assertions before we make them theoretically explicit to ourselves. So we were reacting to “valid inferences” before we had phrases like “valid inference.” Our “non-verbal conduct” was “excavated” or “dragged up” into the “space of reasons” that these assertions made up able to discuss as a “space of reasons.” Brandom’s work is itself a supreme example of his very topic. His Making It Explicit is a making explicit that philosophy is a making it explicit.
Explication is basically positivism, tho Brandom isn’t waving that label.

“Existence is prejudicial disclosure” includes all this. This “prejudice” is our “pre-interpretation” of the world, mostly potently as what we cannot question, because we experience it as the object. This is a big part of Heidegger/Gadamer. Existence is “thrown projection.” But my reading is emphatically pragmaticist. I try to come up with evocative paraphrases in English.

Maybe I want to paraphrase Heidegger with the vividness in English of Hobbes.

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But isn’t this just a case of elevating a word above its ordinary language use and inadvertently considering it to have metaphysical import (W’s PI)? And if it is then shouldn’t we leave it alone in ordinary language (not that we have a choice)? Or is it more a case of “It ain’t what we don’t know that causes all the trouble… it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so” (commonly attributed to Mark Twain)?