If “objective world” means “the world as God sees it,” then there is no objective world — unless “God” is the name of a sentient organism.
We very much have the shared or common world. Experience is “immediately” the shared-world for an organism situated within that same world.
The “being” of that organism is “fragmented” into “moments” whose own being is the “consciousness” of various organisms.
As weird as this sounds, it’s a mundane as you or me appearing for others in ways we never appear to ourselves. Our “physical” being is all the possible ways that we may be perceived and theorized, etc.
The future has priority here. I haven’t discussed that yet. But the future is not symmetrical with the past. The world is “oncoming” or “arriving.”
Harman is a speculative realist. What we share is an appreciation for Husserl and Heidegger. And I agree with his rich sense of objects.
But it’s my impression that he would completely reject understanding the sign “consciousness” as a synonym for “being” or “quality.”
We agree that objects never “exhaustively” show themselves. But I’m a phenomenalist. So approximately the world is the ongoing actuality and possibility of “experience.” Keep in mind that “experience” is just a pointer. In this theory, subjects are “emptied.” We might call them “ejects.” Even my toothache and “internal” monologue are features of the shared world.
Harman would, I think, emphasize some other kind of being than “consciousness.” He’s not ultra-clear on this point. But Meillassoux, his fellow speculative realist, challenges views like mine with the ancestral object. My response is basically Peirce’s. Empirical statements — including those “about the past” — are “really” about the future.
It cannot be denied that acritical inferences may refer to the Past in its capacity as past; but according to Pragmaticism, the conclusion of a Reasoning proper must refer to the Future.
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For its meaning refers to conduct, and since it is a reasoned conclusion must refer to deliberate conduct, which is controllable conduct. But the only controllable conduct is Future conduct.
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Thus, a belief that Christopher Columbus discovered America really refers to the Future.
In fact, I understood what you were trying to say, sensually, emotionally, and inexplicably, even after reading the first message. But expressing it analytically (without poetry) is much more difficult – a multitude of contradictions arise, and reconciling them results in a long text. This text itself ultimately turns out to be just another speculation…
I didn’t mean to offend you: in this sense, I like your statement, “Philosophy is honest poetry.” Therefore, I would like more honesty – hence the questions.
So far, I can’t say I’ve grasped your ideas analytically. If you have the opportunity, I would ask you to formalize it more.
I hear you, my friend. I’ve been working on this for about 2.5 years. For me, it’s relatively solidified. While I think it can be tuned endlessly, it’s basically congealed. The hard part is expressing it to others. We don’t read the same books, etc.
For context, I was strongly influenced by neopragmatism and philosophy of science. The problems of measurement and protocol statements were both motives. I used to be a representational realist — used to believe in consciousness or mindstuff — but I finally saw serious problems with that framing of our situation. Basically it’s accidentally dishonest. When I talk to people about things, I am talking about the qualitative thing of perception. Science is likewise about the familiar, qualitative world. Or no one would give a damn about it ? Husserl nails in this Ideas. Eddington was confused. Two tables ? Ridiculous. We use technology in this world.
You can call it speculation, but it is intended as an explication. As weird as some of it must sound, it’s aimed at describing how we share objects in mundane life.
It’s best probably if you ask questions, point out parts that don’t make sense. I could refer you to informal papers that I have written, but it’s probably better to just pursue the dialogue.
In terms of gut feeling, it’s simple. I am immediately faced with “reality.” There is no filter or picture. As “consciousness” rather than person, I am (the presence or quality of) a face of reality itself.
William James’ radical empiricism is close. Basically there’s an entire tradition that tries to circumvent dualism, rejecting “matter” as something hidden and “mind” as something internal.
Whitman and Emerson are adjacent writes in terms of a feeling for the world.
But I don’t like neutral monism. It’s better than other approaches that fret over the basic stuff of the world, but it’s still stuck in a fetishization of fundamental stuff.
Radical pluralism is better, and it agrees with how we actually live. Protons and puppies and promises and primes.
I would be happy to take a look at it if possible.
This is where problems arise. One says the world is a representation, another that it’s all a matrix, a third that it’s a divine creation, a fourth asserts realism.
All metaphysical authors have one thing in common: they all answer some ultimate question with “I just think so” or “I just believe in it.” This is only if they’re honest enough with themselves, since most philosophers don’t have the courage to admit it.
So it is with me. A certain picture of “being” forms in my mind. To describe my vision, I have to start from the very beginning, that is, with the ultimate question. But there’s no answer to the ultimate question, since nothing we know about sufficient proof applies there. So I ask myself: “What new thing am I trying to tell the world if I can’t answer the ultimate question?” And the answer is: more metaphysics. So how can I verify that this metaphysics is better than other metaphysics? Only more pragmatically: it should work better, predict better, and explain better. “Or maybe it should make us happier, not explain better?”…
And so on. You pick up a pen and sit over a piece of paper. After going through all the questions, the desire to write something disappears.
But I like your approach. Simply because you (as it seemed to me) are a cheerful person. I like the approaches of cheerful people, and I dislike the approaches of bores (like Schopenhauer or Adorno).
The cubism paintings like above Girl with a Mandolin is abstractly conceptualised image of the object. The object doesn’t exist in the real world. Hence it is a concept or idea rather than pictorial image.
Ipso facto it doesn’t match with any particular object in the real world, hence it could be classed as forms in platonic sense.
Prima facie, we cannot say the Girl with a Mandolin reminds us of someone such as some famous popular celebrities or one of my ex-girl friends.
Omnes scimus that it is a female human playing a musical instrument. Hence it cannot be “pieces” of the genuine empirical being of objects.
For a form or idea of female in general playing the musical instrument like that, we as spectator must bring our own particular object (ex-girl friends, partners or favorite popular musicians) from our memories or imagination to match to the figure in the painting.
Spectators of visual arts are the receivers or container of the visual art object to be able to see, reason and infer to be able to nurse out relevant or resonating particular objects from their own past experiences or imagination for their own synthesis with the art.
I wonder if we can gain a better foothold on this view by simplifying it to the extreme. Let’s say that I am the only object in “your world” and you are the only object in “my world.” We would in a sense entail each other. Your world and my world would not be two separate worlds but a single world having two faces. If we were to speak of relations then we would have to speak of internal relations and not of external relations. What consequences might we infer from this model, and how would they scale up to a world having countless faces?
How do you feel about the idea that consciousness is a byproduct ?
From what you say, there’s only the environment creating consciousness ? What translates the environment ? To many or most creatures the translation is different.
I’m with you here, but please note that I do not pretend to offer the “truth.” Or to know what “truth” is supposed to mean. “True” is handy for expressing beliefs. The rest is mystification. But here of course I only express my own belief, decorating it with what I believe are its advantages — not denying myself some spicy rhetoric along the way.
Truthmakers don’t even make sense in the context of ontological perspectivism. Instead we have the trusty “seeing is believing.” Perceptions convince people. Or so I believe. And I believe that “seeing is believing” or “the primacy of the perceptual” gets inflated so that “truthmakers” are imagined for abstract claims. Is ontological perspectivism true ? It’s a nonsense question, applied to a post-truth way of framing our basic situation. Of course some beliefs will get you killed. Even if I think we can get everything important done with the single concept of belief (explain how we share objects, can do science), beliefs matter, in the same way they have always mattered.
For me it connects to Plato and Heraclitus. Objects can only show a piece of themselves by hiding all of their other pieces. In this sense, objects hide behind themselves. This is their temporal depth.
“On those stepping into the same river other and other waters flow.” I cannot “instantaneously” consume “all” of the river. The river transcends me and the river transcends now. In my view, the identity of the river is “ideal.” Indeed, the river is a unity. The “idea” of the river “gives” it or “is” its temporal depth, which is also its intersubjective depth. How does the river show itself to the lady from Neptune, who has no eyes but something we call “sonar” as the best metaphor we can manage ?
To paraphrase Heidegger and Harman, time shows by hiding. I see the tails side of the coin by not-seeing the heads side.
Using a canvas, cubist painters can “cheat time.” Yet I can still only see one aspect of their painting at a time. That painting, as a spatial object, is subject to the same “law” — that it be “infinite” in the sense of overflowing with aspects or moments that it “holds in reserve.” The primary being of objects is futural. The object is more absent than present, more not-yet than now. Yet the object itself is given — always partially — not in but even as perception.
Yes, I agree. That sort of works into my point. You and I may experience a painting very differently, given our different background, our varying eyesight, and so on. “Deep” art has temporal depth and requires appropriation, which is never finished. The deeper the art is, the more we keep finding more in it.
So I lean toward young Wittgenstein and the dying Gertrude Stein. There is no question. At least I don’t feel a dominant question. To me explanation links entities to entities. That’s it. So the presence of the world in the first place — in its totality — is fundamentally inexplicable. If God did it, what explains God ? And so on.
The question is not to be found. It’s instead a lyrical cry of wonder. Or perhaps of terror. But that’s just me. I don’t expect anyone to just take my word for it.
I don’t love the word “verify” because it alludes to truth. But I think people use trial and error. I see us ( with Gadamer ) as “constituted by prejudice.” In other words, we are piles of scars. Anyone who can read me right now is already a knot of prejudicial comportment on two legs. Inquiry is the curious or ( more often ) frustrated adjustment of this prejudicial comportment. We might call this a transformation of habits, but the body itself is of course transformed, even destroyed. People stop doing things when it hurts. They do them again when it feels good. To oversimplify. And I allow for “high” versions of pain and pleasure, such as spiritual torments and erotic ecstasies. Or erotic torments and spiritual ecstasies. Can’t remember.
As far as prediction and control goes, to me that’s science. We need science. We don’t need philosophy. But I like philosophy for getting a grip on what science is — and also on what philosophy is.
As I see it, representational realism is popular but nobody believes it. Nobody lives it. But that’s OK. It’s a game. We can afford to give terrible accounts of science as long as we in fact trust technology that works in the qualitative lifeworld. I pretend to think I am trapped in a user interface, but I take the pills the doctor gives me. I jump out of the way of the oncoming truck. My spicy theory is secretly boring. It’s really just an explication of how we share objects in the world, which turns out to be weird at first. Even outrageous. Really I wish my work were more original, but I’m just a popularizer of stuff that is centuries old.
So I think the way I handle relations is in terms of “moments” or “aspects.”
I will work with your minimal world. Technically it doesn’t “count” here because for me ( and perhaps for you ) the future is primary, fundamental. Being is time is consciousness. But let’s freeze this world anyway, with that disclaimer.
My face would have “all of its being” not in but as your “consciousness.” And the reverse. As you likely know, Douglas Harding writes about “face versus no-face” for this situation. When I face and see the other, it is their face that is present rather than mine. I am “headless.” I am just the presence of their face. My head is “the world from my perspective.” Harding basically echoes Wittgenstein’s TLP.
How to scale up the world ? So I think we live in that scaled-up world. I can’t count the number of objects ( including perceivers ) or even the number of perceivers. And without truth ( without a divine point of view) even our estimates may vary. I really don’t know (have strong warranted-to-me beliefs about ) which entities are conscious. Some I treat as conscious ( the usual suspects). I’d get very angry at someone abusing a dog, etc.
But the object O would be something like \bigcup m_i, where the m_i are of course the moments of O. The moments are primarily futural, so there’s something fishy in offering this notation. I mentioned Brouwer’s choice sequences before. We need time in mathematics, for those who believe the future is real and the past is in-progress.
I see “normal relations” as innocent objects in the world. We might talk of equivalence classes of marks and noises that play the same role.
Well that’s the popular view. My view is that there is no “mind stuff.” But of course we “experience” the world. So I don’t think in terms of a “physical stuff” that is “other than” experienced physical objects. My “consciousness” is pieces of the objects in the world. Ernst Mach is probably the most accessible of my primary influences.
Let me try to summarize. Basically my “entire existence” or “all of my experience” is a streaming face or filthy naked torrent of the world itself. A raging river of world.
I use the word “consciousness” for the “being there” of the world. The “presence” or the “quality” of the world. What is visually manifest in before my eyes. My body is at the center of the world, wherever I try to go. I can’t escape the center. The world “gathers around” my sense organs. And I take the situation of others to be the same. Each existence is a “face” or “side” of reality itself.
Now for practical reasons we call some things “inside” and some things “outside.” But my daydream is something that “happens to me.” It is part of the world, even though others don’t want to hear about it. We mostly occupy ourselves with conspicuously public sensory objects that we call “physical.”
To me that’s all that “physical” means. A sensory object that I take to be also for others. My “consciousness” of the physical object is its being or quality (in relation to what I call “me.”) My consciousness “is” the object from a point of view at that moment.
The “ontological difference” ( as I use it ) is the difference between being and things that are. Being is not a thing. “Being” is a noun. But this weird noun is an attempt to point at the “it-is-there-ness” of the world.
As I see it, you are conscious because my world is there for you. Of course it’s your world too. The same world is there for us both, but from different bodily perspectives.
I think “consciousness” is the same. It’s a noun that weirdly points not at a thing but at the “just being there” of things.
Yet weirdly organisms like humans develop from zygotes and at some point we recognize them as conscious. Likewise people die, and we think that their “consciousness” is gone ( because their brain is dead, etc.)
I would phrase this as the world beginning to be there for the baby and ceasing to be there for the dying person. So consciousness/being has a strange relationship with flesh. A living human body is a “site” for a “streaming of the world itself,” but from the point of view of that body.
As I see it, I don’t have any great answers to cosmic questions. All I see myself doing is spelling out the way we share the world. This is the way that currently makes the most sense to me.
Recently, while talking to a philosopher, I declared that I was seeking truth.
But is that really true, and am I truly seeking truth? Perhaps I’m seeking a convenient interpretation? Or perhaps an inconvenient interpretation?
To be honest, I don’t know what truth is. I don’t know its criteria.
But it seems to me that when (if) I encounter it, I’ll certainly recognize it: I’ll know that it is indeed truth (I hope). Meanwhile, while I’m “walking the road to Damascus,” it would be nice to have some fun along the way.
So don’t offer me truth in the context of what I’ve just said.
It’s not for me to judge the truth or falsity of what you’ve proposed: there are guys with thick lenses for that, who know what such-and-such a philosopher wrote on such-and-such a page.
But I’m interested in what you’re proposing. At the very least, it’s anti-substantialism without processualism.