If I thematize the noise, then the noise itself is transcendent. But I am more likely the thematize the source of the noise, which is the car. I might tell someone on the phone that “some jerk is polluting the neighborhood with stupid noise.” The object, as transcendent, is between-us in the space of reasons.
I definitely like the concision achieved by philosophical physicists. Mach, Schroedinger, Einstein, and now I’m learning about Wheeler and Rovelli.
I currently still see early Heidegger as doing something that physicists are unlikely to do, which is describing the “contexture” of existence. One of the big issues for me is meaning. What is meaning ? I think Heidegger, Husserl, Derrida, and others are great at getting us beyond a naive dualistic understanding of signs as carriers of immaterial content. Sellars is also helpful.
The last couple of pages of this article may be of interest to you. I see Wheeler as wrestling with the same issue that Leibniz was wrestling with in his Monadology – how do monads combine?
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The last entry Wheeler ever wrote was in 2006, age 95, nearing death, his life now bookended by questions. It consisted of a single sentence, left behind for the community: “Hope produces space and time?”
One can read this in terms of the hope that drives communication.
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STUDENT: Where is the barrier between solipsism and objective reality in a physical theory?
WHEELER: The Los Angeles girl locked from babyhood to age 13 (when neighbors found out and called the police) in an attic room, given food but never spoken to, had by that time lost the power, not merely to speak, but even to think. There is not a word we utter, a concept we use, an idea we form, that does not directly or indirectly depend on the larger community for its existence. “Meaning”—and what else is “objective reality” if it is not meaning?—“is the joint product of those who communicate.”
Einstein: world “out there independent of any observer.”
Solipsism: “I’m the only observer who ever counts.”
“Meaning circuit”: Meaning, reality, both tied to existence of community.
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I’m going to have to get some books on Wheeler. I’m already a fan of bits and computer science. Awesome to see how free he was as a theorist.
I take this to be one of Heidegger’s central points also. Wittgenstein, less eager to offer clear theses, also seems to find meaning in the world and between us in terms of signs as objects in the world.
In passing, the “emptied subject” makes more sense when we understand meaning this way.
The problem with math platonism is that it insists on a “pure meaning stuff.” So it thinks of signs spatially as containers hiding an immaterial content. But Heidegger, for instance, understands meaning as fundamentally temporal-historical. Bakhtin is also great on this.
Saussure also stressed that language actually structures the conceptual space itself. The sound space and concept space are simultaneously differentiated. More signs == richer reality.
Peirce :“We think only in signs.”
Indeed, we might even say that objects are generalized signs.
Nice point here too:
“I confess that sometimes I do take 100 percent seriously the idea that the world is a figment of the imagination and, other times, that the world does exist out there independent of us. However, I subscribe wholeheartedly to those words of Leibniz: ‘This world may be a phantasm and existence may be merely a dream. But,’ he went on to say, ‘this dream or phantasm to me is real enough if using reason well we are never deceived by it.’”
A bit like “the real is rational and the rational is the real.”
Any relevant quotes from Sellars?
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Here are some nice passages from a paper:
Section 1 explores Sellars’s analysis of semantic statements. This analysis comprises a negative and a positive thesis. The negative thesis rejects the idea that a semantic statement describes a relation between a linguistic and a non-linguistic entity. The positive thesis claims that semantic statements should be understood as classifying linguistic expressions in terms of the functional role they play in a language. This yields answers to two central metasemantic questions, related to the metaphysics of semantic values and the theory of meaning (as specified above). …
Section 2 examines Sellars’s account of the grounds of semantic facts. In Sellars’s view, our non-intentional yet non-accidental ‘pattern-governed behavior’ is treated as grounding both the functional role and, by extension, the meaning of linguistic expressions. Such behavior is manifest in three forms: language-entry transitions, intralinguistic transitions (or inferences), and language-exit transitions. By giving a naturalistic account of these three types of uniformities in language users, Sellars answers the basic metasemantic question regarding which facts ground the semantic facts expressed by semantic statements.
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Sellars’s central idea is that the meaning not only of logical expressions but of all linguistic expressions ought to be understood non-relationally. He argues that the function of semantic discourse is to convey information about the functional role that an expression plays in a larger system (a language). Meaning statements like (S) classify linguistic expressions by identifying their functional role with that of an already familiar expression.
To oversimplify, to paraphrase is to pair a phrase. Two sentences express the “same idea” if they are sufficiently interchangeable, such that their difference makes no (practical) difference in a particular context. There is no need for an “idea stuff” that is carried by sentences. Sellars’ approach explains the temptation to speak of “immaterial” meaning stuff.
Likewise “red” plays a role in English that “rot” plays in German.
So the “meaning” is there in the use. It’s there in our trading of signs as we also manipulate and deal with other objects in the world. It’s more “between us” than “inside my head.”
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This “last entry” of a 95 year old genius is sticking to me.
Sometimes I call objects “ideal manifolds.” What is ideality ? In this case, it’s that toward which we strive. I see a thing in the world over here, a stone or a theorem, and I hope and trust that it’s also there for you over there. Spatially separated, we both share in the being of the thing.
But I also read that Wheeler scribbled something down years ago. In that moment of inscription, Wheeler shared with others in the future what he had gathered from years of thinking. Obviously this fragment is but a tiny piece of that large thinking. To some it might be sentimental indulgence.
But that tendency to disconnect the desire to share from objects as they “really” are is deaf to the ideality of precisely this “really.” I ought to recognize “truth” for telling me what is “real.”
OK, but I also want to focus on Wheeler’s inscription as “toward” a future reader, leaping out of the moment of its inscription to live somehow in an indeterminate future.
It’s easy to forget the “drive” or “hope” or “ethos” that makes science science. How does a good theory (a “discovered truth”) continue to exist year after year ? What is ( scientific) meaning ? Of course we can also emphasize the perception is situated and qualitative. Together these points point at “the hard problem of the physical.” WTF is a physical object ? How do we share objects ? Our practical know-how makes this question optional for the incurious.
But I digress. The hope of science is the hope of sharing in meaning with others at different places and different times. We need to measure space and time to make this conversation more precise.
Below Mach basically shares his “religion” with us.
The primary fact is not the ego, but the elements (sensations). What was said on p. 21 as to the term " sensation " must be borne in mind. The elements constitute the I. s have the sensation green, signifies that the element green occurs in a given complex of other elements (sensations, memories). When I cease to have the sensation green, when I die, then the elements no longer occur in the ordinary, familiar association. That is all. Only an ideal mental-economical unity, not a real unity, has ceased to exist. The ego is not a definite, unalterable, sharply bounded unity. None of these attributes are important; for all vary even within the sphere of individual life; in fact their alteration is even sought after by the individual. Continuity alone is important. This view accords admirably with the position which Weismann has reached by biological investigations. (“Zur Frage der Unsterblichkeit der Einzelligen,” Biolog Centralbl., Vol. IV., Nos. 21, 22; compare especially pages 654 and 655, where the scission of the individual into two equal halves is spoken of.) But continuity is only a means of preparing and conserving what is contained in the ego. This content, and not the ego, is the principal thing. This content, however, is not confined to the individual. With the exception of some insignificant and valueless personal memories, it remains presented in others even after the death of the individual. The elements that make up the consciousness of a given individual are firmly connected with one another, but with those of another individual they are only feebly connected, and the connexion is only casually apparent. Contents of consciousness, however, that are of universal significance, break through these limits of the individual, and, attached of course to individuals again, can enjoy a continued existence of an impersonal, superpersonal kind, independently of the personality by means of which they were developed. To contribute to this is the greatest happiness of the artist, the scientist, the inventor, the social reformer, etc.
The ego must be given up. It is partly the perception of this fact, partly the fear of it, that has given rise to the many extravagances of pessimism and optimism, and to numerous religious, ascetic, and philosophical absurdities. In the long run we shall not be able to close our eyes to this simple truth, which is the immediate outcome of psychological analysis. We shall then no longer place so high a value upon the ego, which even during the individual life greatly changes, and which, in sleep or during absorption in some idea, just in our very happiest moments, may be partially or wholly absent. We shall then be willing to renounce individual immortality,’ and not place more value upon the subsidiary elements than upon the principal ones. In this way we shall arrive at a freer and more enlightened view of life, which will preclude the disregard of other egos and the overestimation of our own.
I note what Wheeler, as described in the article, was not greedy for credit. He seems to have been a beautiful peron.
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The last section of the Mach quote is very Buddhistic.
Wheeler was wise enough to wait until his reputation in theoretical physics had been well established before going public on the real issues that had driven him most of his life: Whence existence? and Whence the quantum? So it was in his later years that he revealed himself to be something of a maverick. He was a student of Bohr in his early years, and Bohr was himself something of a maverick (successfully arguing against none other than Einstein about metaphysical realism). And Wheeler was mentor to Richard Feynman – another maverick.
These mavericks are the theorists that connect with philosophy, and the establishment are encouraged to “shut up and multiply.”
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Shrewd man ! We live in age of culture war, where it is safer to shut up and calculate.
For you and others, I’d thought I’d share a brilliant summary by Braver, that shows philosophy’s discovery of the self-excited circuit.
But this is precisely Kant’s mistake, according to Hegel, Kant’s greatest successor and critic. If we really can’t get out of our heads, then what exactly is this outside we’re talking about? That outside too must be inside if we are discussing it intelligibly, even just to say that it exists and is unreachably outside. Kant’s subjective idealism turns into Hegel’s objective or absolute idealism when thought through all the way. Kant shouldn’t feel bad about this; according to Hegel, everyone turns into Hegel when thought through all the way. Kant says that we cannot help but use our concepts in thinking and talking about the world, and that keeps us from ever truly thinking or talking about the world in-itself. But then, Hegel responds, this world in-itself is something we are thinking of too. Reality-in-itself is, necessarily, in-itself-for-us; indeed, all in-itself ’s can only be for-us by Kant’s own reasoning, so there is nothing we are cut off from by our thoughts for in thinking something we are connected to it. Our thoughts cannot achieve escape velocity from the orbit of our concepts and vocabularies to touch on something genuinely apart from them. Even just saying that it is separate pulls it back into the gravitational well of our minds. Wittgenstein was right: that which we cannot talk about, we must pass over in silence, despite the fact that he himself, like most, went on about it at some length.
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Hegel of course does not keep silent about it either, but he doesn’t have to— that’s because the very meaning of reality changes if we think this through. Without the contrast of an in-itself, the qualification “for-us” loses its traditional meaning. If we can’t use our concepts to refer to something radically apart from these concepts, then the distinction collapses and the contrasting terms lose the meaning they had when they were used to contrast with each other. Nietzsche says it best, as usual: “The true world—we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.” The true world begins as transcendent, becomes a fable, and then turns imminent. We are not left with an imminent world, though, since imminence itself conceptually requires the contrast with transcendence. The world we experience simply is the world, full stop.
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This restores Parmenides’ Thinkability Restriction but now made coherent because we have gotten rid of its illicit unthinkable side. Hegel’s formulation of the idea is: the real is rational and the rational is real. This is not the joining of thought and reality like two halves of a locket, so much as realizing that what we thought was one-half is actually the whole, so no matching is needed or even possible. Others share a similar view. Early Heidegger makes the same move when he argues that “only as phenomenology, is ontology possible” because “our investigation… asks about Being itself in so far as Being enters into the intelligibility of Dasein.” Merleau-Ponty makes the point nicely when he says, “we must not, therefore, wonder whether we really perceive a world, we must instead say: the world is what we perceive.” I call this The Principle of Phenomenological Ontology.
Braver ends on this informally “realistic” note:
This view, which I am calling Transgressive Realism, combines the best of Kant and Hegel, as an Aufhebung should. With Kant, we insist on our finitude, the smallness of our reach before the vast ocean of the real; with Hegel, we accept the further consequence of finitude that we cannot speak of what is completely beyond us with no possibility of access. On my reconstruction, Kierkegaard accepts Hegel’s Phenomenological Ontology which restricts us to what we encounter, but he combines this with a version of Kant’s Humility, so that what we encounter can transcend and transgress our best understanding. Transgressive Realism preserves a transcendent against Hegel’s absorption of all reality into rationality. But unlike Kant’s noumenon, this beyond makes contact with us, thus accommodating Hegel’s Phenomenological Ontology. The Beyond makes contact not through our concepts but by violating them, making them tremble and us fear. Indeed, our most vivid encounters are precisely when our preconceptions are shattered by recalcitrant, shocking experiences, when we run across things we just don’t understand. And this is a realism because the world’s independence is vividly demonstrated by the radical alienness of what we experience.
Not long ago, I rewatched HBO’s Chernobyl. It’s a great show with a haunting numinous soundtrack. I watched it as a phenomenalist noticing the brutal “transcendence” of radioactivity. It was real through its ambiguous and surprising manifestations.
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I caught a reference to Braver in one of your other posts (in the Plato’s Timaeus thread) and began reading Braver there. He could be a “way in” for me.
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Awesome. I think he has the good sense to come off as a genial William James when paraphrasing the sticky continentals.
Missed this the first time. Yes, yes indeed. And I lean toward reading Buddha as a philosopher, basically a positivist, who chose to focus on the problem of suffering. Spengler reads Buddha as a “late” figure, like Epicurus, stripping down what he inherited to its bones. For Spengler, cultures “dies” into civilization. The “civilized” person is a creature of rootless intellect. The person with “culture” isn’t bothered with certain questions. In “hellenistic” philosophy and buddhism we see the theme of individual “salvation,” achieved by the individual and not through an institution.
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What would be a positivist interpretation of the ‘Four Noble Truths’ of the Buddha? That all existence is marked by suffering, and that suffering has a cause, namely thirsting or craving. Is that something that Mach would have addressed?
You’re introducing a whole new perspective on this issue that opens a door into another universe. We’re both atheists, you and I, and one of the attractions of Buddhism for me is that it is an atheistic religion (though the Tibetans syncretized it with their the gods of their own native religion Bon).
The three issues that have grown together in my mind are Buddhism’s dependent origination, Hinduism’s Advaita Vedanta, and quantum mechanics. Hence Nagaruna (sunyata, emptiness), William James (pure experience), and Wheeler (it-from-bit, self-excited circuit).
A.I. cautions me that the issues are entirely different – one soteriological (addressing the problem of suffering in human life), one philosophical (addressing the mind-body problem), and one addressing problems that only became evident in physics around 1900 (discovery of the quantum of action). But I don’t think they can be separated like that, or at least that this separation is superficial. To me they are like vistas from three different mountain tops down onto the same valley.
Buddhists are inclined to regard the Buddha more as a physician than a philosopher (it was Nagarjuna that re-started Buddhism and pointed it down a more philosophical road). There is an aphorism that Buddha claimed the philosopher is like somebody pierced by an arrow who refuses to allow the arrow to be removed until he knows everything about the archer that loosed it, and about the poison it is tipped with.
I’m inclined to see the Buddha as somebody who saw that Brahminism was rooted in something significant but had lost its way, and from his own first-hand experience (his awakening whilst meditating under a fig tree) tried to reinstate the significant part – that salvation is personal not institutional.
And I can’t help seeing Christianity through the same lens. Judaism had become institutionalized and corrupt, but in the scriptures we find Jesus saying “the Kingdom of God is within you.” The Romans, being very practical overlords, used religion to insert a layer of command and control between the individual and their God(s).
With the discovery of the Gnostic Gospels (Oxyrhincus 1890, and Nag Hammadi 1945) we find a very different picture of early Christianity than that painted by the early Catholic Church. Mostly supernatural nonsense as was often ascribed to hero figures at that time (such as in the account of the life of Apollonius of Tyana), but there are some gems. The most significant of these is the Gospel of Thomas, which reads like a collection of Zen koans.
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So do you also think the Buddha can be described as a positivist?
That wasn’t directed at philosophers as such (although there are Mahāyāna polemics that are). It was directed at anyone who asks certain kinds of questions - such as whether the universe is eternal or whether the Buddha continues to exist after death. There are lists of such questions which vary in length according to different schools of Buddhism. They’re described as ‘undetermined questions’.
One thing we ought to get clear on is that empiricist philosophers generally mean by ‘experience’ that which can be verified by sense experience - what can be seen, felt, touched etc including by instruments. James’ ‘radical empiricism’ is different to that but it is not typical of empiricism generally.
It’s something that Mach understood, as indicated by the very human and insightful little comments that decorate the first chapter of The Analysis of Sensations.
I’ll share a few parallels below.
And how, Bhikkhus, does a bhikkhu live observing mind? 'Here Bhikkhus, a bhikkhu knows the mind with lust, as being with lust; the mind without lust, as being without lust; the mind with hate, as being with hate; the mind without hate, as being without hate; the mind with ignorance, as being with ignorance; the mind without ignorance, as being without ignorance; the shrunken state of mind as the shrunken state; the distracted state of mind as the distracted state; the developed state of mind as the developed state; the undeveloped state of mind as the undeveloped state; the state of mind with some other mental state superior to it, as being the state with something mentally superior to it; the state of mind with no other mental state superior to it, as being the state with nothing mentally superior to it; the concentrated state of mind as the concentrated state; the unconcentrated state of mind as the unconcentrated state; the liberated state of mind as the liberated state; and the unliberated state of mind as the unliberated state. ‘He lives in this way observing the mind internally, or externally, or internally and externally. He lives observing origination-factors in mind or dissolution factors in mind or origination-and-dissolution-factors in mind. Or his mindfulness is established to the extent necessary just for knowledge and awareness that mind exists, and he lives unattached, and clings to naught in the world. Thus, Bhikkhus, a bhikkhu lives observing mind.’
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Here, Bhikkhus, a bhikku thinks: Thus is material form; it arises in this way ; and it disappears in this way. Thus is feeling; it arises in this way ; and it disappears in this way. Thus is perception; it arises in this way ; and it disappears in this way. Thus are mental formations; they arise in this way ; and they disappear in this way. Thus is consciousness; it arises in this way ; and it disappears in this way. 'Thus he lives contemplating mental objects internally, etc. . . . In this way, Bhikkhus, a bhikkhu lives contemplating the five aggregates of clinging as mental objects.
Thus, perceptions, presentations, volitions, and emotions, in short the whole inner and outer world, are put together, in combinations of varying evanescence and permanence, out of a small number of homogeneous elements. Usually, these elements are called sensations. But as vestiges of a one-sided theory inhere in that term, we prefer to speak simply of elements, as we have already done. The aim of all research is to ascertain the mode of connexion of these elements.
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That in this complex of elements, which fundamentally is only one, the boundaries of bodies and of the ego do not admit of being established in a manner definite and sufficient for all cases, has already been remarked. To bring together elements that are most intimately connected with pleasure and pain into one ideal mental-economical unity, the ego; this is a task of the highest importance for the intellect working in the service of the pain-avoiding, pleasure-seeking will. The delimitation of the ego, therefore, is instinctively effected, is rendered familiar, and possibly becomes fixed through heredity. Owing to their high practical importance, not only for the individual, but for the entire species, the composites " ego " and " body " instinctively make good their claims, and assert themselves with elementary force. In special cases, however, in which practical ends are not concerned, but where knowledge is an end in itself, the delimitation in question may prove to be insufficient, obstructive, and untenable.
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Similarly, class-consciousness, class-prejudice, the feeling of nationality, and even the narrowest-minded local patriotism may have a high importance, for certain purposes. But such attitudes will not be shared by the broad-minded investigator, at least not in moments of research. All such egoistic views are adequate only for practical purposes. Of course, even the investigator may succumb to habit. Trifling pedantries and nonsensical discussions; the cunning appropriation of others’ thoughts, with perfidious silence as to the sources; when the word of recognition must be given, the difficulty of swallowing one’s defeat, and the too common eagerness at the same time to set the opponent’s achievement in a false light: all this abundantly shows that the scientist and scholar have also the battle of existence to fight, that the ways even of science still lead to the mouth, and that the pure impulse towards knowledge is still an ideal in our present social conditions.
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When I cease to have the sensation green, when I die, then the elements no longer occur in the ordinary, familiar association. That is all. Only an ideal mental-economical unity, not a real unity, has ceased to exist. The ego is not a definite, unalterable, sharply bounded unity. None of these attributes are important; for all vary even within the sphere of individual life; in fact their alteration is even sought after by the individual. Continuity alone is important … But continuity is only a means of preparing and conserving what is contained in the ego. This content, and not the ego, is the principal thing. This content, however, is not confined to the individual. With the exception of some insignificant and valueless personal memories, it remains presented in others even after the death of the individual. The elements that make up the consciousness of a given individual are firmly connected with one another, but with those of another individual they are only feebly connected, and the connexion is only casually apparent.
…
Contents of consciousness, however, that are of universal significance, break through these limits of the individual, and, attached of course to individuals again, can enjoy a continued existence of an impersonal, superpersonal kind, independently of the personality by means of which they were developed. To contribute to this is the greatest happiness of the artist, the scientist, the inventor, the social reformer, etc.
'When the Enlightenment-factor of the Investigation of mental objects is present, the bhikkhu knows: “The Enlightenment-factor of the Investigation of mental objects is in me”; when the Enlightenment-factor of the Investigation of mental objects is absent, he knows: “The Enlightenment-factor of the Investigation of mental objects is not in me”; and he knows how the non-arisen Enlightenment-factor of the Investigation of mental objects arises and how perfection in the development of the arisen Enlightenment-factor of the Investigation of mental objects comes to be.
The ego must be given up. It is partly the perception of this fact, partly the fear of it, that has given rise to the many extravagances of pessimism and optimism, and to numerous religious, ascetic, and philosophical absurdities. In the long run we shall not be able to close our eyes to this simple truth, which is the immediate outcome of psychological analysis. We shall then no longer place so high a value upon the ego, which even during the individual life greatly changes, and which, in sleep or during absorption in some idea, just in our very happiest moments, may be partially or wholly absent. We shall then be willing to renounce individual immortality,’ and not place more value upon the subsidiary elements than upon the principal ones.
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If a knowledge of the connexion of the elements (sensations) does not suffice us, and we ask, Who possesses this connexion of sensations, Who experiences it ? then we have succumbed to the old habit of subsuming every element (every sensation) under some unanalysed complex, and we are falling back imperceptibly upon an older, lower, and more limited point of view.
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When I speak of the sensations of another person, those sensations are, of course, not exhibited in my optical or physical space; they are mentally added, and I conceive them causally, not spatially, attached to the brain observed, or rather, functionally presented. When I speak of my own sensations, these sensations do not exist spatially in my head, but rather my “head” shares with them the same spatial field, as was explained above.
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If we regard the ego as a real unity, we become involved in the following dilemma: either we must set over against the ego a world of unknowable entities (which would be quite idle and purposeless), or we must regard the whole world, the egos of other people included, as comprised in our own ego (a proposition to which it is difficult to yield serious assent).
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But if we take the ego simply as a practical unity, put together for purposes of provisional survey, or as a more strongly cohering group of elements, less strongly connected with other groups of this kind, questions like those above discussed will not arise, and research will have an unobstructed future.
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In his philosophical notes Lichtenberg says: " We become conscious of certain presentations that are not dependent upon us; of others that we at least think are dependent upon us. Where is the border-line? We know only the existence of our sensations, presentations, and thoughts. We should say, It thinks, just as we say, It lightens. It is going too far to say cogito, if we translate cogito by I think. The assumption, or postulation, of the ego is a mere practical necessity." Though the method by which Lichtenberg arrived at this result is somewhat different from ours, we must nevertheless give our full assent to his conclusion.
When he reflects unwisely in this way, one of the six false views arises in him: 1. I have a Self: this view arises in him as true and real. 2. I have no Self: this view arises in him as true and real. 3. By Self I perceive Self: this view arises in him as true and real. 4. By Self I perceive non-self: this view arises in him as true and real. 5. By non-self I perceive Self: this view arises in him as true and real. 6. Or a wrong view arises in him as follows: This my Self, which speaks and feels, which experiences the fruits of good and bad actions now here and now there, this Self is permanent, stable, everlasting, unchanging, remaining the same for ever and ever.
Now obviously Mach was a physicist and philosopher and not a professional spiritual leader, but he strikes me as pretty damned enlightened in a more universal secular sense of the word, a sense that I prefer.
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