A synopsis and discussion of "ontocubism"

Metaphysics & Epistemology
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Just wondering if the primary of being of objects in cubism could be the past rather than futural. Future comes to the beings whether like it or not. Beings don’t have choice to reject future. Moreover, beings don’t have idea what future will be like, when and after looking at the painting.

However, the past must be thought through, reflected, recollected, regenerated and nursed out into images, ideas, poems or stories, and emerges in the form of art like the painting of cubism.

Hence isn’t the image in the painting depicting the past in temporality? We need to match the image or idea with our past memories or historicity to make sense of it. We can’t quite make out the image with any events or images in the future, because we don’t have idea what future will turn out to.

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Why are there “points of view”? Are they the result of the abilities of a sufficiently complex physical brain? If so, A) do brains less complex than human have a pov, and B) must it be a biological brain, meaning no AI will have a pov?

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One chair. One you. But the being of the chair and of yourself is “fragmented.” If I’m there, then my “consciousness” of you is a “piece” of your “being.”

But “consciousness” is an attempt to point at “from-a-point-of-view-ness.” Nothing internal. So your being is not “in my head.” As “consciousness” (and not flesh-and-blood subject), “I” am the presence of a face of the world that includes a moment of your being ( you as flesh-and-blood subject ).

I could also say “consciousness does not exist.” Either rhetorical choice can lead to misunderstanding. Basically this is object splintered ontology.

I claim that this is basically already in Ayer’s LTL, which is pretty psychedelic for a positivist.

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For instance, we are discussing the same Wittgenstein.

My word for “sense” is “significance.” I doubt than any sign offers the same exact significance twice.

Consciousness might be the presence or quality of a sign, and this presence/quality includes its “significance.” And “it can have an indefinite multiplicity of senses depending on the context.”

Right. This is why we need discordant ontological perspectivism. Recall that I said we don’t have W and then also f_1(W), f_2(W),.... We do not need a “true” reality, a W.

Instead we have imperfectly entangled torrents of worlding. I may create “transcendent” objects ( a poem perhaps) that no other sentient creature ever perceives. I may perceive something that others try to percieve but cannot. I may be persuaded to reclassify that perception as an hallucination. Or maybe not. And so on.

This is where Habermas, Apel, Sellars, and other come in. I call ontology’s necessary object the forum.

If phenomenology aspires to “rationally” sketch the structure of all world-manifestation, then it presupposes ( tacitly if not explicitly) a shared world discussable in a shared language. This sharing need not be perfectly universal. Typically philosophers assume a universal human rationality. But it suffices, in my view, to assume a less global community.

For instance, you suggest that maybe assuming that we share a world is an unjustified assumption. But what can this lack of justification be if we don’t share language and rational norms ? Do you see how you presuppose a logic that binds us both ? But I have emphasized that we each appropriate these norms personally. No god’s eye view on logic. So I see myself as explaining why I personally think the forum is a safe assumption. Because to me it would be a performative contradiction to challenge or question in.

Kant’s desire for a proof of the external world was absurd. The possiblity of proof presupposes the essence of “externality” — the transcendence of “logic” as binding on each individual in the community.

I tend to see language as fundamentally intersubjective. I am “us” before I can be “me.” Even if my perception remains situated, it’s “mute” without a borrowed sign system.

I would prefer to use “consciousness” as a synonym of “being” or “presence.” A radically simple quasi-concept. A pointer to the “is-ness” of all that is.

I agree that we “automatically” experience an articulated world. We automatically “take” a seeing as the seeing of that old lamp. I prefer to just look at the empirical-psychological ego. “Constitution” is primarily a topic for psychology.

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I am fairly open to this chaos as a possibility. But the forum is the possibility of genuine conversation ( of ontology, science, etc.) So while I still believe in others who are conscious that share a world through language with me, I presuppose the forum.

We can vaguely imagine “torrents of worlding” to cease their entanglement. But I think we’d almost have to lose language itself. The sign radiates from “out there.” My own “internal monologue” is a chain of transcendent phonemes.

I can vaguely imagine states of massive uncanniness and detachment. Perhaps achieved with shrooms, DMT, long long periods of solitude. I mentioned above how Feuerbach influenced me with his concept of God. I could come to believe that I am a Neptunian disguised as an earthling via high-tech genetically engineered meatsuit, etc. Or “I” might feel more and more distance from the pronoun “I.”

In short, I am reluctant to rule out any kind of experience. All experience is immediately “real” in the larger sense of “real” as “having quality or presence.”

But I still suggest that the forum is presupposed when we do “come back down” to being a person among persons.

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Yes. This is beautiful. I never really tried to think of the situation as a graph before. Though it makes sense. We probably want a directed graph. I can see without being seen. Let’s use this notation: seeing \to seen. If some objects are non-sentient, then arrows will come into them but not out from them.

We could add time to the graph. The graph evolves continuously even. You know the physics better than me. I imagine it gets messier with Einstein as opposed to Newton. I guess each node will have to have its own local time.

Yes. Difficult to shake ! I tarried at “neutral monism” until it finally clicked that only radical pluralism really gets it.

I don’t think Mach was really a neutral monist. Neutrality means “flexible” or “categorized according to the moments explanatory needs.”

Fasching’s work on “being as presence” helped, and of course Heidegger’s understanding of existence as disclosure or “time itself,” which shows by hiding and hides by showing.

I don’t think we’ve talked much about “quality.” This terms is an attempt to point out how things are there. The “sound” of the music. The “pain” of the stubbed toe. Existence is a streaming fluctuation of “quality.” Plato’s “chora” looks to me like an attempt to point at this “bastard” (pseudo-)concept.

Please feel invited to share your thoughts on this here !

Weirdly, historical subjects tend to “evolve” or become richer — by accelerating the decay or entropy of their environment. So we have a trade-off here, something like order being transferred from non-signs to signs.

Can we explain how things "got wound up in the first place " ? A tall order. Keep me posted on your progress ! It’s not officially part of my explicative project, but it’s fascinating.

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67

I don’t think that works.

Correct. My theory is “dark” and emphasizes darkness and blindness. My “living past” is happening now as the way in which I charge into the future. Existence is prejudicial comportment. An hungry animal walks north rather than south. I meet a strange new person or book as my own “compacted” past that is here now. Or even more exactly just up ahead. As I make sense of things, their significance is “on the way” or “oncoming.” My past is “real” only as the way the future is oncoming.

In the first draft of Being of Time,

So this is a problem that Heidegger obsessed over. How exactly does the past exist for us ? Why do we study history ? We are harried creatures living in the world now with others, and together we look at artifacts and read old books. We are strange primates. I suggest that we “study the past” as part of meeting the future. Or enacting that future, bending and scraping what is here now into what “should” be here.

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For me that’s more of a scientific question or a metaphysical question. It’s a damned good question, but a dialogical positivist doesn’t need to answer it.

I see positivism/phenomenology as just “spelling out” what is already given, what we take for granted. What do I already vaguely mean when I say that my mom is "conscious "? Well, the world is there for her. So it’s not a stuff in her brain that is there for me. It’s stranger than that. It’s my world from another perspective. I claim that we enact a belief in this “strong” understanding of consciousness.

My mom is weirdly there for me as the world being there for someone else. She is a human that I can see, and a “sight” that I can appeal to, imagine via my own “sight.”

I don’t know if brains are needed. I can’t prove (in an absolute sense ) that the world is there for this or that entity. I am open-minded on this issue. I’m sure that dogs and cats and so on are conscious. Insects ? Don’t know. Computers ? Maybe. Though I have never seen a computer yet that “seems conscious” to me.

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Is there a point of view from which this fragmentation could be observed?

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Yes. Yours and mine.

Let me support this claim. You wrote the post above expecting it to become “present to me” in its “significance.” You can’t read as me, but you presuppose the “transcendence” or “also for others” of the signs you sent.

Or maybe my wife and I read the same novel. Sharing objects in the mundane way “presupposes” ( I claim) an tacit understanding of objects as “ideal manifolds” of their “fugitive showings.” ( I remember that you liked that phrase, so it’s back! )

But the answer is “no” if you mean a “omniscient narrator” — for I can’t make sense of “vision” that isn’t enabled by “blindness.” Like the back of a mirror. To “have” this aspect in its singular quality is to “not have” the other faces of the object. Each face hides all of the others. The object is nothing more than these faces, but faces are primarily futural. The object is primarily on-the-way.

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Time is measured by the passing of higher frequency periodic events (clock ticks), so for nodes that share a clock in an undistorted manner, there is a shared rate of flow. But if the structure grows two limbs in such a way that the clock rate relation gets distorted (e.g. one in a strong gravitational field, the other in free space) then yes, different rates of flow that will only be recognized when a relation is established that removes the distortion. Then the two limbs would be forced to re-synchronize, but with a discrepancy in how much time has passed since they separated. This is consistent with general relativity. When the GPS satellite network was first installed, these discrepancies were troublesome and the system had to be modified to take them into account.

Did you ever reconcile radical pluralism with non-duality?

This is part of the profound mystery – why or how the cosmos began in such a special state of low entropy. At risk of sounding too much like a Wheeler obsessive, I suspect the way he proposes the cosmos constructs its own history in what Rovelli calls “thermal time” might have something to do with it. So back to the future… from where I stand our concern with the future seems like a very human concern, and not so significant for the theoretical physicist who wants to reverse-engineer the cosmos from what we can learn of its present state.

Physicists tend to steer clear of philosophical issues, preferring to adopt a “shut up and calculate” approach. Very pragmatic, but turning a blind eye to metaphysics runs contrary to human instincts so I suspect they do that so they can get on with “doing their day job.” Wheeler was an outstanding exception.

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Indeed, my friend ! They are two sides of the same coin. I feel very clear on this particular issue. I think we have very close views on consciousness/being/presence, so I’m a little surprised at this question. But maybe we understand “nondual” differently ?

I’ll try to sketch a brief case. Forgive me if I bore you with stuff that is old hat for you. I don’t know exactly where we differ.

As I see it, really grasping the ontological difference points one directly at radical pluralism. Categories are merely pragmatic, endlessly revisable and tentative, and do not have ontological depth.

Neutral monism still has one foot in the mud of “stuff ontology.” It overcomes the absurdity of rep realism. It sees the “entanglement” of the so called “inner” and “outer.” But it still understands ontology as the assertion of what things are “really” made of.

But being is not an entity, not a stuff. Though “being” is a noun and an entity, this sign is used by some philosophers to point at the “presence” of the many things that are present.

In terms of nonduality, I read “you are that” in terms of consciousness as the being of things of the world. My “consciousness” is not interal mind stuff but the presence or being of worldly objects ( including or in terms of their “from-a-point-of-view-ness”.) As “consciousness” I am the being/quality of a face of the world.

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73

Fair enough ! So my own position aims at an unmitigated empiricism. The world shows itself to me in the “shape” of the “stream of experience” of a motivated organism within that world. This is the “raw data.” The world is given as motivated, future-oriented, care-structured experience.

But human organisms can develop a tradition that “filters” this data, toward prediction and control. Of course I recognize a pure theoretical motive. A desire to know the object in its purity, if possible. This is how I sometimes feel about math. Gazing on the stars that don’t care about us, the primes that don’t care about us. An icy beauty.

So I imagine (?) that you ultimately hope for a physical theory ? That would also make intuitive sense ?

What is the thinking these days on what — if anything —preceded the big bang ? I remember talk about the “beginning of time itself,” but I’ve always been skeptical about mathematical/physics time being identified with the “experiential” time.

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I remember being impressed with this practical application of GR. It proves itself in the lifeworld. We “need” GR for our satellites. It is not only poetry.

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The Nagel/Bat thread got me thinking about this… according to James’s pluralism, I can’t know how it is to be a bat because the bat’s experience is permanently inaccessible to me – not because of a linguistic error, but because my stream of experience and the bat’s stream of experience are fundamentally separate realities. But according to Lewis, the constraint Nagel identifies is not a gap in ontology but rather a gap in our capacities. We can’t know how it is to be a bat for the same reason we can’t wiggle our ears or echolocate – we lack the specific physical machinery (the neural structures) to execute the ability. So it sounds like Nagel and Lewis agree that we can’t know how it is to be a bat, but Lewis disagrees with Nagel’s conclusion that physicalism fails to account for consciousness (the “how it is” or “what it is like”). Lewis is saying it’s a pseudo-problem (I’m just “thinking out loud” here so not expecting engagement). I guess nondualism would agree with Lewis, but I don’t think that’s where Lewis is coming from.

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Ontocubism is an objective splintered ontology. Your “stream” includes a moment of the an apple. My stream includes a different moment of the same apple.

Our perceptions are sufficiently synchronized for us to enact “the forum.” Too much discordance and we would not believe in a forum — that we share the world and a sign system with others — and would not be able to perform the institution of responsible and relatively rational personhood.

How do we know that streams are separate ? Perhaps you will agree that there is something empirical here. A person may believe that they “were that bat” for a moment. “I saw through the bats eyes.” Is this logically impossible ? Maybe not. And sci fi plays with transferring memory and identity. Who is this “I” that speaks " The body ? Or some time-binding tendency w/ a clump of memories ? Locke frets over this.

I can’t prove that others are conscious at all, that they share objects. But proof only makes sense in the first place with these assumptions. So the theory of the forum is equivalent to the possibility of genuine conversation.

Does the plurality of “personal worlds” trouble you in terms of pluralism ? Our situation is strange, yet we mostly take it for granted. Every object “shattered” into moments that never “touch” or repeat ?

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I haven’t read Lewis. Should I ?

FWIW, the theory I present here can be defended as an attempt to “save physical objects” from philosophers. As long as “what it is like” is “scrubbed away” from objects, we are left with mathematical residues, which are themselves empirical objects , so the scrubbing becomes absurd here.

Hence my tired claim that scientistic conceptions of the physical are often idealistic Pythagoreanism. The “meaning stuff” of mathematical signs is “physical”. Say what ?

Perhaps I should glance at that Lewis paper.

Having checked : identity theory, mind == brain, etc. As far I can make out, the issue is missed entirely. The god’s POV is taken for granted.

I think (?) we agree on this issue. The mundane pre-theoretical object is there “through or as” its sensory “quality.” It’s a relatively public possibility of perception, but also caught in the causal nexus with other such objects. The genuine physical object is familiar. We are surrounded by them. A list of measurements is itself a different physical object. We use systems of marks and noises to push these objects to where we want them to be. And predict when they will do this or that.

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Plato says all our knowledge comes from the past. Our knowledge is nothing but recollection of the past. So we are not studying them. We are recollecting them.

To understand the cubism painting above, we need to reflect, recollect our past trying to pick out what objects we have experienced in our past matches the shape and colour of the painting. Without that process, the abstract painting looks empty and blank.

We don’t know future unless we are psychic or fortune teller. :slight_smile:

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“Philosophy remembers the future.”

I take Plato to have used a great metaphor for repeatable insights. The “gnosis” is experienced as “remembering.” In less dramatic terms, when I “understand” Heidegger or Plato then I “am” Heidegger or Plato reborn. Not on the level of detail, but on the level of what they loved most, what their signs pointed at. Their signs still function for us, still point forward, into the future, as possibilities that we can develop in ourselves.

Yes, but this reflection is directed “forward” in an act of making sense. The Heidegger/Gadamer point is that the past has its “life” in this sense-making.

But we have strong beliefs about the future anyway. Hume pointed out that we enact a blind faith in the uniformity of nature.

For instance, I think it’s safe to say that you think predicting the future will remain impossible tomorrow, right ? But that’s you predicting the future in terms of a tacitly presupposed “constant structure of the world.”

You didn’t say that we can’t predict the future now but maybe later. Instead I took you to say that we will never be able to predict the future. So I agree and yet point out that we in fact constantly enact expectations, whether we want to or not.

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We don’t know the detailed future. but we could roughly foretell it. The point is that future is always foretold by the past and now. In science, they collect the data from the past, and then predict the future.

So past is always affecting us, whether we like it or not. We are all here because we started our life as beings in the past, and it is continuing to the present.

We can tell the future to some extent, but not in great detail.
If Ontocubism is a perspective ontology understanding and deciphering the world, then it looks like it would base its criteria, foundation and methodology from the past experience and events for its account on the present and future.

The Girl playing Mandolin painting doesn’t seem to be telling a lot about future. It seems frozen in the image at present and telling us some mysterious stories about the past. It looks as if there are lots of space in the canvas which is needing to be filled with our own stories and characters regenerated from the past.

Having said that, all futural events will become present, and passed onto the past in due course. From the point of the distant future, the immediate future would be the past.

From Plato’s point view, we are recollecting all our knowledge from the past. Would it imply that we must have lived in the past, and have been reappearing into the world? So maybe past future and present are all in the world of forms?

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