Well, we are talking about it, so we are already in a relation we may be trying to establish exists absent us.
So, it’s tricky. But in principle, I could imagine something existing without anything else. But then one could say that this something is something relative to something else.
The bare minimum seems to be something and nothing. Not something full stop.
The priority question dissolves when you follow what existence requires.
To exist is to make a difference, yet making a difference is not reflexive. It requires a distinct relatum. You cannot make a difference only to yourself without that difference distinguishing nothing, which collapses into no distinction at all.
The moment anything exists, it exists toward something other than itself. That directedness, the structural requirement that difference-making have a relatum, is what relation is.
The Yoneda intuition is right, but it goes all the way down — not just to objects defined by their relations, but to existence itself being relational in its most primitive operation.
I’m drifting towards the conclusion that Moderate Ontic Structual Realism (MOSR) is a kind of clinging to the last vestige of substance ontology.
Take the example of two electrons in initial states that are sufficiently decohered for them to be considered unentangled. They can be modeled by two separate nodes in the relational network represented by two distinct 2D Hilbert spaces.
Now consider their interaction whereupon they become entangled. They are now modeled by a single rank-4 tensor in Hilbert space.
If the mathematical structure changes from two separate spaces to a single space, why do we still insist on thinking of them as two distinct objects (nodes)? There is only one relational structure – the two distinct objects have disappeared – so in what sense do they still exist?
Isn’t MOSR trying to force ‘things’ back into a structure that has explicitly removed their ‘thingness’? Sneaking the object back into consideration to save our substance-based intuition? A comfort zone for those that aren’t yet ready to embrace Radical OSR?
After looking up prapanca, I agree. I just quote analogous Wittgenstein quotes in another thread:
For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed.
The riddle does not exist.
We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.
The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem.
The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—but it would be the only strictly correct method.
One thing that leaped out for me about Avanarius was his recognition of what I call “the forum.” If there is science, then there is also the “stage” of “space of assembly” that makes it both meaningful ( communicable) and relevant.
The two presuppositions of empiriocriticism are the empiriocritical axiom of the contents of cognition and the axiom of the forms of cognition. The first axiom states that the cognitive contents of all philosophical views of the world are merely modifications of the original assumption that every human being initially assumes himself to be confronted with an environment and with other human beings who make assertions and are dependent on the environment. The second axiom holds that scientific knowledge does not possess any forms and means essentially different from those of prescientific knowledge and that all the forms and means of knowledge in the special sciences are extensions of the prescientific (Kritik der reinen Erfahrung , Vol. I, Preface).
The point of departure for his investigations was the “natural” assumption of a “principal coordination” between self and environment, in consequence of which each individual finds himself facing both an environment with various component parts and other individuals who make assertions about this environment which also express a “finding.”
When I went back and read the founding texts, I was impressed. I didn’t do so for a long time, because I was put off by the caricature that that stole and ran with their flag. Ayer’s LTL is a little masterpiece. He adopts and even improves J. S. Mill’s excellent “phenomenalism,” which IMO is misunderstood when remembered at all. As I see it, he was simply “explicating” the concept of an empirical/physical object. But people project their indirect realism on thinkers like him and think he’s a “subjective idealist.” Which is way off. It’s like people don’t want the empirical object to be plausibly restored. More seriously, I see technology itself as heavily pragmatically constrained. We live as “phenomenalists” in “the primacy of perception.” But many, when they theorize, forget what they know. Or, better, they have not made the explicit to themselves as usefully conscious presuppositions the presuppositions that they enact “blindly.”
Or, another way to put it, and I mix in Mach here, is that we have a single nexus of concepts that get their meaning largely as inferentialism specifies. I tell the judge that he should go easy on me, because I only crashed into the telephone poll because I saw a purple angel because of a side effect of a drug my doctor prescribed to me. We have the normative, the mental, the physical all together in the wider forum-normative context of one person explaining (partially justifying ) their doings to another. The doctor would presumable defend the prescription in terms of published descriptions of experiments confirming the drug’s safety.
Related, I’m personally no longer attracted to neutral monism, which I see as the highest on-the-way-out stage of “ingredient ontology.” So I think of neutrality in terms of flexibility. Here’s Mach, with a little context given first :
A common and popular way of thinking and speaking is to contrast " appearance " with " reality." A pencil held in front of us in the air is seen by us as straight; dip it into the water, and we see it crooked. In the latter case we say that the pencil appears crooked, but is in reality straight. But what justifies us in declaring one fact rather than another to be the reality, and degrading the other to the level of appearance ? In both cases we have to do with facts which present us with different combinations of the elements, combinations which in the two cases are differently conditioned. Precisely because of its environment the pencil dipped in water is optically crooked; but it is tactually and metrically straight. An image in a concave or flat mirror is only visible, whereas under other and ordinary circumstances a tangible body as well corresponds to the visible image. A bright surface is brighter beside a dark surface than beside one brighter than itself. To be sure, our expectation is deceived when, not paying sufficient attention to the conditions, and substituting for one another different cases of the combination, we fall into the natural error of expecting what we are accustomed to, although the case may be an unusual one. The facts are not to blame for that. In these cases, to speak of " appearance " may have a practical meaning, but cannot have a scientific meaning. Similarly, the question which is often asked, whether the world is real or whether we merely dream it, is devoid of all scientific meaning. Even the wildest dream is a fact as much as any other. If our dreams were more regular, more connected, more stable, they would also have more practical importance for us. In our waking hours the relations of the elements to one another are immensely amplified in comparison with what they were in our dreams. We recognise the dream for what it is. When the process is reversed, the field of psychic vision is narrowed; the contrast is almost entirely lacking. Where there is no contrast, the distinction between dream and waking, between appearance and reality, is quite otiose and worthless.
The popular notion of an antithesis between appearance and reality has exercised a very powerful influence on scientific and philosophical thought. We see this, for example, in Plato’s pregnant and poetical fiction of the Cave, in which, with our backs turned towards the fire, we observe merely the shadows of what passes (Republic, vii. 1). But this conception was not thought out to its final consequences, with the result that it has had an unfortunate influence on our ideas about the universe. The universe, of which nevertheless we are a part, became completely separated from us, and was removed an infinite distance away.
Thus the great gulf between physical and psychological research persists only when we acquiesce in our habitual stereotyped conceptions. A colour is a physical object as soon as we consider its dependence, for instance, upon its luminous source, upon other colours, upon temperatures, upon spaces, and so forth. When we consider, however, its dependence upon the retina (the elements K L M. . .), it is a psychological object, a sensation. Not the subject matter, but the direction of our investigation, is different in the two domains.
I agree. Wittgenstein surely read Mach and may have read Avenarius, so he is known to have credited various philosophical physicists as influences.
But we know how he felt about giving credit in detail:
How far my efforts agree with those of other philosophers I will not decide. Indeed what I have here written makes no claim to novelty in points of detail; and therefore I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by another.
Speaking of which, the “most brilliant part” of The Analysis of Sensations is hard to chew but “made everything click for me.” I had read Wittgenstein and James, but Mach made the case in his brain-twisting way and it hit me.
It starts like this ( I won’t quote it all here) :
Not only the relation of bodies to the ego, but the ego itself also, gives rise to similar pseudo - problems, the character of which may be briefly indicated as follows:
Let us denote the above-mentioned elements by the letters A B C . . ., X L M . . ., a, b, c . . . Let those complexes of colours, sounds, and so forth, commonly called bodies, be denoted, for the sake of clearness, by A B C . .; the complex, known as our own body, which is a part of the former complexes distinguished by certain peculiarities, may be called K L M . . .; the complex composed of volitions, memory-images, and the rest, we shall represent by a b c . . . Usually, now, the complex a , c . . . K L M. . ., as making up the ego, is opposed to the complex A B C . . ., as making up the world of physical objects; sometimes also, a b c . . . is viewed as ego, and K L M . . . A B C . . . as world of physical objects…
I’d be interested to learn how you unpack this. Speaking for myself, I don’t like to see James’ radical empiricism described as neutral monism (this was a name coined by Bertrand Russell much later) since the word ‘monism’ re-implicates substance ontology, which James was at pains to reject.
I looked into the Mach quote you gave at the end of your last post. It looks to me that Mach is taking Hume’s bundle theory to its logical limit and saying that it doesn’t matter which way you choose to cut the cake, the bottom line is that all there is are temporarily stable bundles of experiences.
I find this highly reminiscent of James’ pure experience, with the reservation I made previously – that James isn’t quite radical enough.
Yes, I think that is very close to what I’m struggling with.
When I keep following “why?” questions backwards, it often feels like an infinite regress, and eventually I start wondering whether the structure of the question itself has to be examined.
It may be that the attempt to locate an absolute beginning already presupposes distinctions and relations at the level of the question itself.
I have a suspicion that this is what dependent origination is telling us – we keep looking for “somewhere to stand” or “something to stand on” (some substantive underpinning) and there isn’t any. It’s not even “turtles all the way down.”
“Śūnyatā” (emptiness), perhaps 
This may not come across very clearly, but I’ve been wondering whether it might be possible to describe dependent origination and emptiness across Western philosophy, physics, and mathematics — and perhaps even eventually move beyond them somehow (though I still have no clear image of what that would mean).
Sure. For me, “radical” pluralism ( my current position) just understands categories like “mental” or “physical” as merely pragmatic. This is opposed to “ingredient ontology,” which is the largely presupposed mission of saying what reality is “really” or “ultimately” made of. To me “all is mind” and “all is matter” both come off mostly as culture-war fluff.
What I call “ingredient ontology” is what monisms and dualisms have in common, which is an assumption that we are supposed to decide what reality is “made of.” For some, promises are less real than protons. For others, the reverse. For me, it’s a bad framing in the first place. I do insist on an “irreducible” normativity, but only because there is no science without it.
I found a passage where James is clumsy on this issue.
My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff ‘pure experience,’ the knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter.
This does sound like neutral monism. What James didn’t have in his toolkit here was the ontological difference. Radical pluralism gels beautifully with a de-reification of “being.” All kinds of things are “present,” and they are frequently being recategorized.
In the same essay, James is doing solid negative work:
I believe that ‘consciousness,’ when once it has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles.
He seems to want to deny the utility of the concept, but he accidentally hints at the ontological difference.
I agree. All cake-cuttings are ( merely) pragmatic.
I agree that James isn’t quite radical enough. Anything residue of ingredient-speak or substance-mongering is disappointing. But we can step into the same river twice, because the “substance” of the object is “logical” or socially enacted. For instance, I respond to the “same” Andy as I did last time.
“All is hebel.” Even the concept of hebel is hebel.
I’m with you, I think, on dependent origination, which to me is an engulfing holism.
Substance metaphysics is very deeply rooted in Western thinking, beginning with Aristotle 23 centuries ago. Then the Catholic Church recruited the idea in their attempt to maintain the doctrine of the Trinity against the Arians 17 centuries ago.
The Medieval Scholastics had trouble upholding the idea when the Nominalists argued that substance-based thinking is a linguistically-induced misconception, but it never really went away.
And then Descartes exhumed it in a form that still reverberates today. Sir John Eccles, the Australian neurophysiologist and philosopher (died 1997), held a view very close to Cartesian dualism.
Western philosophers like James, Bergson, and Whitehead argued against substance-thinking. @j_j has also brought up Mach and Avenarius. But their voices seem to have been drowned out, possibly because of the onslaught of the mechanistic picture encouraged by the successes of the scientific enterprise from the time of Laplace.
Quantum mechanics looks like it’s forcing a re-think though, so that’s probably a good attack vector to employ in any modern attempt to set the record straight.
But our use of language continually reinforces substance-thinking, so it’s an uphill struggle. Maybe that’s another attack vector. Wittgenstein comes to mind, but he’s so abstruse that interpretation becomes a problem.
I agree – I think of it as an approach to non-dualism. Advaita Vedanta, but without the insistence on the substantialist notion of Brahman. Plotinus’s Nous (divine intellect, the “all-in-all”), but without the over-arching unity of the One.
Yes. Nondualism. To me that’s a key component of Wittgenstein’s early work. But Douglas Harding’s rhetorical strategy is nice. I’m not a big fan of the guru flavor of his career, but credit where credit is due.
Are we face-to-face at this moment, or is it not rather—from your point of view—face-to-noface? Are you not, as first-person, right there where you are in your chair headless, faceless? … We are surely face-to-noface, completely asymmetrical in our relationship … Now, isn’t it very odd that we should overlook this simple truth of what it’s like where we are.
Compare this with Wittgenstein:
The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing…Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be noted. You say that this case is altogether like that of the eye and the field of sight. But you do not really see the eye. And from nothing in the field of sight can it be concluded that it is seen from an eye.
To me it seems that “from-a-point-of-view-ness” is fundamental, “goes all of the way down.” The mistake that many philosophers make, as I see it, is to “infer” from this “from-a-point-of-view-ness” that what is manifest is not the object itself but a “representative” of the object, usually “internal,” while the “true object” is “external.”
My claim is that a “perception” of an object is a genuine “piece” of that object, which we might call a “moment” or “aspect” of that thing. Aspects or moments are “qualitative.” Not only a sensory sense but also in an aesthetic sense. The object is “nothing but” the “synthesis” or “unity” of its “actual” and “possible” moments. The bones of this are already in Mill, but Husserl contributes the vital aspect metaphor.
Note that this means that we “are” ( as phenomenal streams of “experience” ) the aspects of objects. In another sense, as consciousness, we are the presence or quality of aspects of objects. We could continue toward a richer description and speak of aspects of situations, and so on.
A quote from James in this direction.
Let him begin with a perceptual experience, the ‘presentation,’ so called, of a physical object, his actual field of vision, the room he sits in, with the book he is reading as its centre; and let him for the present treat this complex object in the commonsense way as being ‘really’ what it seems to be, namely, a collection of physical things cut out from an environing world of other physical things with which these physical things have actual or potential relations. Now at the same time it is just those self-same things which his mind, as we say, perceives; and the whole philosophy of perception from Democritus’s time downwards has just been one long wrangle over the paradox that what is evidently one reality should be in two places at once, both in outer space and in a person’s mind. ‘Representative’ theories of perception avoid the logical paradox, but on the other hand they violate the reader’s sense of life, which knows no intervening mental image but seems to see the room and the book immediately just as they physically exist.
The puzzle of how the one identical room can be in two places is at bottom just the puzzle of how one identical point can be on two lines. It can, if it be situated at their intersection; and similarly, if the ‘pure experience’ of the room were a place of intersection of two processes, which connected it with different groups of associates respectively, it could be counted twice over, as belonging to either group, and spoken of loosely as existing in two places, although it would remain all the time a numerically single thing.
As James hints, the problem is the invention of “outer space” and “in a person’s mind,” which philosophers uncritically inherit.
It’s not so clear that Ludwig kept this somewhat solipsistic view into the time of the Investigations. There was a move from the self as the boarder of the world, as expressed here, to an illusion concurrent with how we talk about and thereby understand the world. He came to see how we are embedded in a shared social reality.
So the focus here on the “perception” of one individual is quite misleading.
I prefer that we call it “pure realism.”
As I read his “pure realism,” the empirical self is “delivered over” to the world entirely. Aall that remains of the “metaphysical subject” is the “from-a-point-of-view-ness” implicit in the manifestation of the world, which we might call its “form” or even its “limit.” I see one side of the coin or the other, not both at once, depending on where my eye, another seeable thing in the world, happens to be in relation to the coin.
I can only disagree with you on this point. One can simply evade the issue of perspective, and many do, but empirical objects, if genuinely empirical, are perceived objects. And perceptions are “perspectival,” as Husserl, for instance, was great at illustrating. But Leibniz was no slouch on this issue.
I personally give equal weight to our embeddedness in social reality. But so did J. S. Mill. An empirical object is “not just a hallucination” because “Anyone” can see it. As Einstein puts it, sounding like Mill or Mach :
In contrast to psychology, physics treats directly only of sense experiences and of the “understanding” of their connection. But even the concept of the "real external world " of everyday thinking rests exclusively on sense impressions. Now we must first remark that the differentiation between sense impressions and representations is not possible; or, at least it is not possible with absolute certainty.
In my view, it is an “empirical finding” that “dreams are private.” Or that we have “interior” monologues. If some new technology reliably repeats our “interior monologue,” what then ? Only a stubborn dualist “knows” this is “logically impossible.” (I don’t see you as a dualist, just to be clear.) I learn from others what they can see of what I can see. Even my belief that “no one can see the world through my eyes” is not to me an analytic statement. I report what I currently believe, which is to say how the world currently shows itself to me. I don’t assume that others will “get what I’m saying,” though I speak in the hope that others will, at least occasionally.
It’s not at all clear to me what that all might be about. it certainly wasn’t reassuring.
Perhaps you won’t make anything of this either, but I’ll quote from PI to demonstrate that Wittgenstein wasn’t “above” the strange issue of perspectival perception.
- The essential thing about private experience is really not that each person possesses his own exemplar, but that nobody knows whether other people also have this or something else. The assumption would thus be possible—though unverifiable—that one section of mankind had one sensation of red and another section another. 273. What am I to say about the word “red”?—that it means something ‘confronting us all’ and that everyone should really have another word, besides this one, to mean his own sensation of red? Or is it like this: the word “red” means something known to everyone; and in addition, for each person, it means something known only to him? (Or perhaps rather: it refers to something known only to him.) 274. Of course, saying that the word “red” “refers to” instead of “means” something private does not help us in the least to grasp its function; but it is the more psychologically apt expression for a particular experience in doing philosophy. It is as if when I uttered the word I cast a sidelong glance at the private sensation, as it were in order to say to myself: I know all right what I mean by it.
The concept of “sensations” as “internal psychical stuff” like “qualia” is indeed problematic. Instead of talking about gazing on “redness-for-me-itself,” it’s arguably less confusing to talk about looking at a ripe tomato. Does the tomato “show itself” to others as it does to me ? I can’t see it through their eyes, but we all call it “red.”
Above he suggests ( reasonably ) both the “public” concept of red, which is something like the equivalence class of things that “one calls red” and the “private” concept of red, which is what things that I call “red” have in common “qualitatively.” Only with a development of self-consciousness do we get the “private” concept.
- If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word “pain” means—must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly? Now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case!——Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a “beetle”. No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle.—Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing.—But suppose the word “beetle” had a use in these people’s language?—If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty.—No, one can ‘divide through’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is. That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of ‘object and designation’ the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant.
Let us grant that “pain” as “internal spectacle” is problematic. Can we do something analogous which is more charitable ? Let’s say we’ve never been punched in the nose, but we infer that it is unpleasant because people avoid it, resent it, punish it, etc. I finally get punched in the nose myself, and it “hurts.” I think most of us vaguely project “what it felt like for me to punched in the nose” on others. Why not ? If we all tend to avoid getting punched in the nose ? On the other hand, it’s very different, for me, and I assume for you, if it’s you and not me getting punched in the nose. We might agree on the fact that “Joey got punched in the nose.” But that fact has a “different empirical face” for Joey than it does for me. Note that my witnessing Joey take the punch involves my own “private” “visual sensations,” though I much prefer to speak in terms of the empirical aspect of the situation itself. I didn’t see visual sensations. I saw Joey take one on the snout.
In this case, we don’t want to “divide through,” for the removal of all “private sensation” is the removal of the empirical event itself, resulting in philosophers’ nonsense in the other direction. Of course “sensation” is a misleading term these days, when so many are eager to be told that their life is an illusion. The “point” of the use of words like “sensation” by empiricists is to acknowledge and think through the “perspectivity” or “happens-to-me-ness” of perception.
One difficulty here may be that the question of existence cannot easily be separated from the conditions under which anything becomes intelligible as existing at all.
To think something as existing already seems to involve some form of determinacy: distinction, identity, relation, or inferential placement. A completely relationless ‘existence’ risks becoming indistinguishable from indeterminacy itself, since nothing could be said, inferred, differentiated, or recognised about it.
This does not necessarily mean that relations are ontologically prior to being in an absolute sense. But it may suggest that relation is transcendental with respect to intelligibility — that is, a condition under which existence can become thinkable or determinate for thought.
In that sense, the question may not simply be ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’, but also: under what conditions does ‘something’ become intelligible as something at all?
Immanuel Kant proposed that we are unable to imagine things “in themselves” ( noumena ) beyond the frameworks of our perception: space, time, causality. Such a pure the existence without relation is essentially beyond the reach of human logic.
To represent anything is to put it in these relations. So if you attempt to imagine “existence without relations” you attempt to think something outside of time and space and of all connections. This is what Kant calls a noumenon, a thing as it is in itself.
But noumena, according to Kant, are unfathomable and absurd in any particular sense. As soon as you commence to consider of their existence, your mind is forced to impose relations upon it. So you have some sense of being without relationship, but you can’t really visualize it.
In this respect, the absolute existence without connections is beyond the limit of human thought and logic.
That is exactly the point I’ve been thinking about.
I sometimes wonder whether, insofar as the human brain itself is a neural network, our descriptions of the world inevitably converge toward relation. When we keep asking “why?” again and again, the question itself seems to converge toward relational structure.
Perhaps all we can ever do is glimpse the vicinity of that limit, without ever fully stepping outside it.
In that sense, I feel that the Buddha’s silence and Wittgenstein’s silence may both have been the correct attitude. And I think I also understand why the later Heidegger moved toward poetry rather than systematic philosophy.