Yeah, linguistics is a hot topic recently with the AI and aliens era risen to us, and conversing with us. But math is a fascinating subject too. They are all types of language in broad sense, and closely related subjects.
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Right. Or rather it’s “virtual” and experienced “personally.” But you lose your job if you don’t play along. Sort of like the value of money. A joint hallucination that props up the world.
“Against the flow” sounds especially fascinating. Like the knife hitting the target before it’s thrown ? In a certain sense ?
That makes rough sense to me. I would personally exclude nothing. Both physics and religious tradition ( seemingly opposed, at least for many) seem like valuable resources.
If we treat the past as a trace, we can notice that our past is not stable at all — it grounds the present in different ways. Our memory is unreliable and is constantly being rewritten. Power makes especially wide use of this. Physical media do not fix the past as a whole, but only the result of a certain gaze; and they too are interpreted, to some extent, arbitrarily. We are not very certain about the past, and nevertheless we act by relying on it.
I had a great professor who liked to stress math as a language, and I agree with him more and more. Ideally one could more easily move between disciplines as a student. I guess it depends on the school. I wish for instance that someone at my school was doing philosophy of math, in either the math or philosophy departments, but no such luck. I try to teach math now as a language for creativity.As I mentioned elsewhere, I teach students the primitive Markov language, which is extremely primitive and gets all of the syntax out of the way. Programs that do simple things have a brutal beauty and feel like achievements in a stubborn alien language.
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Yes indeed, and this is how I took Peirce. The past is a function of the future. Maybe it’s the theory of the big bang or the history of a people. Existence is “power on the way to something,” and the traces of “the past” appear as possibilities ahead of us. To put it roughly.
Those who worry about this “doubting of the absolute past” are (sort of funny ) worried about the future, where such thinking leads. For them too, the past matters through or as the future. Likewise people take “objective reality” very personally.
What it means “to be” is one of the key questions of philosophy. But it also includes the question of what it means “to have been.” Perhaps things are not so simple there.
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Oh I will always agree that things are not so simple. We only have a moment of vision at the cost of a moment of blindness. The “taking as simple” is the brief flight of an arrow.
What’s surprising to me here is something else: how can it be that completely unrelated people (except for this forum) simultaneously and consistently ponder the same/similar topics?
Returning to the topic, here’s how I see this resolution for myself.
When we proclaim the process and mutability of the world, we are first asked: “You assert change, but what exactly has changed?” Substantialists, by asking such questions, try to declare their approach invulnerable. When discussing differences, they always ask: “What exactly is different?”
I admit that it seems obvious that the sun is different every day, and the aforementioned questions also seem quite reasonable.
Whenever we discuss this ontological dilemma, we are forced to return to the premise “there is something.” But therein lies the main mystery: is “to be” a noun or a verb? (Let’s not talk about epistemology for now.)
Expanding on the answer to this question, I could write a whole page, but I don’t want to bore the reader with it all. However, I can offer you this intuition. Suppose that something (since we can grasp it) is 𝐴𝑡𝑥, which means an instantaneous slice of what exists at unit time X. Therefore, at some future moment in time, “this” will be 𝐴𝑡𝑥+1. Thus, the process of being can be expressed approximately like this (analytically):
𝐴𝑡𝑥 ≠ 𝐴𝑡𝑥+1
But then what is A?
First, in being itself, there is no A. (I realize this seems radical, and I understand that here I’ve begun to mix in epistemology.)
Secondly, 𝐴𝑡𝑥+1 is what 𝐴𝑡𝑥 became in the next instant.
But then why doesn’t the carrot become an oak tree? It’s simple, because changes occur based on the “held tension” that existed the moment before.
Well, I expect a barrage of criticism for oversimplifying.
Highly interesting stuff, and great to know. I also find problem of language extremely appealing topic in philosophy.
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Lately I see this as a fundamental topic for the tradition. From Parmenides to Heidegger and between and beyond.
Is there a “substance” believer in the thread ? I’m not sure. Perhaps some would count me as one, but then I’d think they weren’t understanding me. We’d have to trade more signs.
I’m suggesting that identity is “ideal,” on the model of Saussure’s sound-image which was emphatically not substance. I speculate that Plato ( who knows ?) might have been offering a generalization of Saussure way back when. In any case, his unwritten doctrine ( written by others anyway) is tantalizingly readable in a post-Derrida fashion.
Let us grant this for a moment. Is there “being itself” ? I don’t think it’s easy to wriggle out of talking about something. Do you not sort of echo Parmenides here ?
I like the “held tension” approach. In what being is there tension ?
It sounds to me, in a good way, like a denial of the punctiform now. Earlier I discussed Zeno’s arrow. I don’t think Zeno was dense, as often portrayed. He constructed a vivid situation perhaps that others would unpeel for the concealed point of that arrow.
If you are curious, this is basically what I shared with students, had them write programs in or with, though I used an even simpler version, where no applicable instruction meant program halt.
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So what are these instants ? Infinitesimals ? Or tiny but positive piece of time ?
Okay, if we can assume for a moment that there is no A, then let’s move on.
I’ll jump to another topic now, but it’s important.
Let’s take a critical look at positive dialectics. It’s been done before me, and there’s nothing original about it. But here’s what’s interesting: by resolving any antinomies, we restore wholeness by discarding differences. Why do we do this? Because “returning to the whole” is restoring to the world the unity it was originally deprived of (and we, being part of it, merely reproduce what is due)? Or because it’s a kind of cognitive construct, a convenient way for us to understand this world in order to conserve energy?
What’s interesting is something else: secular thought, “having killed God,” nevertheless proclaimed a kind of unity of power—like the “Big Bang.” But was there a Big Bang or a “single source of being,” and we only see the consequences of disintegration?
What if being didn’t originate from a single source? What if there are no entities or ideals? What if all of this is still happening right now?
Then we don’t need to know “in what being the tension exists.” We only need to register that tension.
I’ve probably mixed a lot of things together in one brief message, but I think you’ll find it easy to read.
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You will laugh, but I am one step away from saying that moments also do not exist in themselves except in the mind.
If we are looking into motives, as psychologists or biologists, then those are good answers. From a pragmatist POV, inquiry scratches an itch, modifies comportment toward the oncoming ( “settles belief.”)
But perhaps you are leaving out the joy in banging these signs against one another to see what happens. Organisms like us “vent our power” you might say by playing with fire in a festival spirit.
I largely agree with you. I think we can read Plato and Heraclitus as doing just that — doing phenomenology rather than offering a useful causal story or a narrative that orients a people. Being is time is a kind of “tension,” a stretching of the now.
“The (same old ) sun is new each day.”
Why do people crave a single source ? Big bang or God or whatever ? I suspect it’s a desire for a coherent story, and it’s easier to work with a single source. Ontotheology. But Plato’s unwritten doctrine offers us a reading of the world as continual collision. This collision doesn’t “reduce” to either “factor.” And the factors are only separable in theory, in terms of a “bastard discourse.”
Am I using Plato toward my own future ? Sure. As Kojeve used Hegel and so on. But I also think that later philosophers tend to cast previous philosophers as cruder than they were, which is forgivable, especially when accidental.
For me that’s tricky, because I don’t think of consciousness or mind as something “inside” that represents the world. All experience is already reality itself, though it’s not all equally relevant to others or even to myself.
But a Kantian postulation of the X beyond our representing minds makes a sort of half-sense at least as timeless.
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I hope you’ve added a few logs to your fire of thought.
Then here’s my question: the same questions resonate in the minds of completely unrelated people. How can this be explained?
In the context of what I wrote above, one could say that both of these people grasped a common tension in existence that “echoes” in different directions of co-eventual development (roughly speaking, like everyone in a large hall hearing jazz at the same time). Do you have a version of this through the Existence or the Ideal?
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This is an important note. I admit I haven’t studied this properly. Now I have something to do!
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I think of signs as marks and noises in the world, as perceptual objects basically. These objects “radiate” a significance that is largely a function their perceivers’ history. For me to grasp the sign as something between us, it has to be “transcendent.” I know, more or less explicitly, that “you out there” are on the other side of the sign. The sign’s “radiance” is therefore largely darkness.
I take the sign, like the saxophone in the large hall, to show “many faces” to many perceivers. The public object is an ideal manifold of these faces, which is more open than closed, since future manifestations are included. So the object is “between us” as an “ideal” position in the space of reasons.
Note that I don’t accept a “physical” reality to function as a substrate. The concept of the physical is an “effect of signs.” The “genuine” “matter” is more like Feuerbach’s, which is to say sensation and feeling as they “overflow” the categories. If the world is articulated in terms of “discrete ideality” ( which is not mental), then the (non-)stuff of this sensory-affective component is what is articulated.
Isn’t your “ideal” simply a dialectical patch for a problem you can’t solve?
(This isn’t a criticism, but an idea for reflection.)