I don’t think there is any absolute inside or outside, they are only relative attributes. I don’t perceive the chair as being inside my mind. That’s why I’m somewhat chary of the idea @Andy presented― that scientific investigation and understanding occurs within conscious experience.
I don’t think there could be a “shared perceptual object” unless there is an object that we all perceive that is not in itself dependent on perception, or unless our minds are connected in some way we cannot be aware of. Just looking at my perception and your perception the only way in which we can know they are of something the same, is by our behavior, including what we say, showing us that we do in fact perceive the same things. That is clear to me when I throw the ball for my dog, for example. For me there cannot be any doubt that he sees the ball―although given his apparently different visual organs, I would think he sees it as coloured differently.
The science of perception tells us that the processes which lead to seeing occur both outside and inside the body, but I don’t think it follows that the visual image of the chair is literally “inside my head”, unless my whole body and the environment are also inside my head. But then my head would also be inside my head which seems absurd. It seems we can never get a purchase on this such as to be able to make some definitive statement about the absolute relation of inside to outside, so perhaps it’s best to treat them as merely relational notions. Language is inevitably dualistic, while what it attempts to describe and explain is not, so the unflagging appearance of aporias in these kinds of dialogues is to be expected, I think.
For me, “perspectival” and “relational” are akin, if not synonymous. So 'what really happened" is always relational, processual. So, I don’t understand what really happened to be dependent just on perceptual relations, much less human perceptual relations. I admit I am influenced by the idea of pan-semiotics. I don’t see any forced dualism, but I do see a relaxed pluralism.
Don’t worry about tiring or annoying me―I’m not that old or irritable. Anyway, I like your questions―they seem to help me clarify my thoughts. I also enjoy your poetic ways of expression.
Respectfully, you use “within” here. As far as I understand @Andy, he likewise rejects the notion that consciousness is an “inside stuff.”
For me, there is only the shared world but only from “points of view.” The chair is there is definitely not inside my body or “mind” as a “container subject.”
It’s only certain wacky philosophers ( not you of course) who made the “it’s all inside the container subject” trope so popular, despite its complete alienation from experience. Of course “experience” is just “the world for Joe,” etc. Not “a picture of the world inside Joe as jar as consciousness/mediation stuff.”
I’m with you on the “obvious sharedness” of empirical objects. To me this sharedness is something we already deeply believe and experience non-theoretically. To try to “explain” it with a “aperspectival” objects is like trying to “prove” the possibility of proof. Indeed, this motivates my utter rejection of the “subject-as-jar” trope.
I think (?) you are trying to “explain” the “synchronization of monads.” My concern is that this “cedes too much” to the “monad as container” metaphor.
It’s as if you want to explain a shared-interpersonal chair in terms of a “second” shared-interpersonal chair. I grant that you grant that perceptions are themselves “real.” I would just say that perception is “lived” pre-theoretically precisely as the presence of shared empirical objects. That sanity itself is understood in these terms.
When others ( not you ) invoke the “physical chair” as the trans-empirical “cause” of the empirical chair, I see them as tangled up in a bad old metaphor. The physical chair is the empirical chair. Science is something that relatively hairless apes do in their umvelt, and it addresses their need to predict, control, and serenely contemplate this umvelt.
Thank you for the kind words ! That’s how I see good conversation also. I also lean toward a pansemiotic conception. Things are “generalized” signs.
Basically I no longer “believe in” the vague notion of “what actually happened,” as this phrase is typically used. I sincerely find it oxymoronic or non-empirical. Of course I care as much as anyone, I hope, about having “good beliefs.” Those beliefs aren’t primarily “just words” but the enacted strategies of fragile flesh in a dangerous world.
I see myself and other humans as animals who are shrewd and imaginative enough to understand other “rational” beings from far away. We already intensely relate to non-human animals on this planet, at least to some of them. The same ball might “be there” for a Neptunian very different than it is for me. Just as the same object is presumably far more there for a dog in an olfactory sense than it is for me. We also see this already between humans. So we tacitly already understand the variation in the manifestion of shared empirical objects.
I just no longer take seriously “the object for no organism.” From “no point of view.” Though I do take seriously science that tries to construct a relatively perspective independent “map” of the world. These maps are themselves empirical objects in the world, especially if one has pondered the philosophy of math and come down strongly against mathematical platonism as basically an empty echo.
@Andy does use the language of “within” and “outside”:
I don’t read him as saying that consciousness is an “inside stuff”, but “within consciousness” suggests to me a ‘container’ metaphor. That is a way of thinking I am wary of. And just to be clear I am not claiming that Andy is falling into a mistaken way of thinking just on account of the language he uses―it is so difficult to present any perspective without falling into seeming inconsistencies or incoherencies.
Right, I think this passage highlights the point where we diverge, and that’s okay. I don’t think there is, outside of language, a shared chair unless there is a real independent-of-the human process which appears to all of us reliably as a chair. You don’t have to agree of course, but I don’t see this as entailing any “second chair”. There is, in my understanding, only one chair―the chair we can all see and touch and sit in, and I don’t think that chair depends on any or all of us for its existence.
Of course for the purposes of living, there is no need for this explanation. But this explanation is also the implicit assumption of just about everyone I think. It is called, somewhat pejoratively, naive realism, and naive realism is the naive assumption that the real chair appears just like how everyone sees it. Of course I don’t subscribe to that view, because something that is not being seen self-evidently doesn’t look like anything. So, the realism I susbscribe to is more along the lines of Ontic Structural Realism or Rovelli’s or Whitehead’s relational realism.
Anyway it seems I’ve repeated my thoughts on this often enough for you to be able to get where I’m coming from, and of course it’s fine if we have different views. As I said before I think all views are approximate, although of course I think some are more proximal to reality than others.
Good points ! I hear you. Basically we also try to meet people in the middle, so it’s even charitable to lean on the old framework even as one criticizes it.
I hear you. And it’s fine that we happy to diverge here. But, for clarity, I think the chair is independent of the entire human species. I would also say that it’s unity is ideal. Joe might furiously deny that such a chair exists in the first place. This is why I speak of “discordant” ontological perspectivism. We have to mostly share objects to “feel ourselves in a single world together.” But this sharing need not be and really clearly isn’t perfectly harmonious.
For me “consciousness” really is a synonym for being itself. This will suggest “idealism” for some, but that’s why I go out of my way to emphasize radical pluralism and “super-direct realism.” As consciousness I am the “aspects” or “moments” of objects, not their internal images. The world itself “comes in pieces” like this. Those pieces only “ideally” (“hopefully”, “we are trying”) fit together.
Although this is not idealism, it is extremely divergent from views that build themselves on a singular “objective reality.” It only makes whatever sense it does make in the context of a radical rethinking of time. But this is how I understand early Heidegger. Dasein ( there-being) is not in time but (a) time itself. As “consciousness” I am “presence(ing) of world.” This is how I understand Fasching and Honderich. Bluoin’s approach to Husserl as an “ontological phenomenalist” is also equivalent. I think I can claim Pierce also, but he’s a very rich philosopher. The case I make for claiming Peirce is primarily based on his radical understanding or de-understanding of the “past.”
I am more of a naive realist than an indirect realist, but personally I don’t think we can over-emphasize time. I claim that we “live in the future.” Even in pragmatic terms, I suggest that “real” is glued to what we in fact count on. I may believe ( with my legs and wallet ) that so-and-so is a “true” or “real” friend. I may count on, scheme in terms of, this “friend.” And then everything goes to hell. I mean “scheme” in a non-pejorative sense. My expectation that the object will function for me, when and as I need it to, as I steer the oncoming future, is more important than any particular perception.
I should probably further “pragmatize” the primacy of perception. Pleasure and pain. Long term plans. We are the “far seeing” ape. We navigate the world as a temporal depth. The “future” is what we can still fix or adjust. Hence prediction and control, with prediction primarily relevant as a means for control. Even the quest for coherent can be understood as an attempt to control experience, to steer the future away from “bad feels” and toward “good feels.”
So my “umvelt is reality” is “anti-serene” in that it insists that this realm of trouble is what is most real, the center. Then scientific images are just tools. On the other hand, we want to meet others in a “high place.” So the sociality of “rationality” works against a brutally selfish tendency. The battle is between “only me” and “me and the others just as much.” I would personally contrast this contrast with “for a biased organism” and “beyond all organism care whatsoever.”
I really appreciate that we can diverge in such a polite manner. This is the ideal. I see my own approach to philosophy to some degree as a research project. Like “it might be fun to really work out this underserved starting point and see what happens.” The more exciting details are “gravy.” But I speak even my practical self with “nothing is more real than other people.”
It’s a great question. Wittgenstein is notoriously difficlut to interpret, and I’m no Wittgenstein scholar, but I’ll go out on a limb on this one.
I understand the early Wittgentein (the Wittgenstein of the TLP) to be saying that the limits of “my world” (the microcosm) coincide with the limits of “my language,” so what the solipsist wants to say about “my world” is right, but it can’t be expressed in language because the subject isn’t IN the world. He objectifies the subject as a kind of “skilful means” for showing why the subject can’t be objectified. The strategy is to commit to the error in order to expose it – to express the subject in language (propositions) in order to show that it can’t be expressed in language (precisely because it is not IN the world). The TLP is a surgical cut – it commits to a logical error to expose it and excise it.
The later Wittgenstein (the Wittgenstein of the PI) is less charitable about the solipsist. I understand him to be saying that the unreflective acceptance of the picture that our subject-predicate grammar inculcates – the picture of the subject as an object – is what enables the misguided question of solipsism. Language is an activity with public criteria of correctness, but the subject-predicate structure of language is being imposed on “the microcosm” and turning the self into a substance amidst other substances. The PI is a pathology report – it dissolves a grammatical confusion.
I think we can also approach this with help from Bakhtin.
A private language is absurd, yes, but this does not imply the exaggerated opposite. We tacitly know that the same words don’t mean the same thing to different people. An individual can have a breakthrough, which is initially private. They start hearing an old word in a new way. They “think solipsism all the way out” and grasp the subject as “pure perspective” and not a container of what is perceived. Or Heidegger or Sartre grasps that “being” can’t refer to stuff, if one really wants to say what is is.
Subjectivity all the way down is also no subject at all. People get tangled when they stop half way, bifurcating the world.
Yes, it’s a difficult issue to discuss. The phrase “contents of consciousness” leads us astray. I’m more inclined to see them as the constituents of CE, and CE (given our recent exchange on the TLP) as the “microcosm.” The subject is not something “in” the microcosm that can step outside the microcosm in order to test it from an independent epistemic vantage point.
@j_j astutely brings up Leibniz’ “windowless” monads. Each monad is a microcosm, but Leibniz’ mistake was to interpret each monad as a distinct substance (after the Cartesian tradition, but as a criticism of it). Leibniz had to then account for the synchronization of monads (the question that you and I both find pressing) and came up with the idea of a “pre-established harmony.” In other words, “God did it,” but not in the sense of an intervention – his is the non-interventionist theology of Deism. Whitehead took Leibniz’ monadology and purged it of substance metaphysics to yield his own process metaphysics.
Whitehead argues that scientific materialism takes “bits of matter” – simply located, inert, passive, externally related substances – and treats them as “the most real things.” But (he argues) these “bits” are themselves abstractions constructed from the full concreteness of actual experience. This is an example of his “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” For Whitehead, the truly concrete thing is not a point in space with no internal life – it is an “actual occasion of experience” (AOE) – a momentary event of experience that is internally related to other AOEs.
The concrete is “right there” but “snowed over” by inherited theory. This weirdly takes us back to anamnesis , but in this case we are remembering our mostly automatic non-theoretical “flow” in the shared world. Where was “I” when I was immersed in driving ? My existence “was” the driving, the steering wheel, “my” hands, the road, the other cars. All flowing and structured by care. Whose care ? “Mine,” but the vanishing subject lives that care “out there in the objects” that threaten and promise.
I’m not sure why you mention indirect realism here. And I don’t know what you mean by saying you don’t think we can over-emphasize time.
I can sort of get a feel of what it seems you might be getting at with most of the rest, but to be honest it remains pretty obscure to me. Is what you say meant to represent what we (or you?) actually experience or is it just a flight of the imagination, a kind of riffing, a free-from flow of associations?
This at least I think is right, but I’m not sure that I’m interpreting it the way you meant it. Human life is certainly a “realm of trouble”, that much seems undeniable.
I think this is true. We all operate more or less unreflectively in a culturally inherited paradigm that consists in a whole host of more or less unexamined attitudes and orientations. As Hegel says, absent self-examination, we live wholly under the aegis of tutelage.
It’s still not clear to me what is meant by “my language”. And it seems odd to say that the subject is not “in the world”. Contrast this with Heidegger’s idea that dasein is “being-in-the -world”. I cannot help seeing this notion of the self as ‘not being in the world’ as ‘self-as-container’ and of course I can see how the idea makes sense from a certain abstractive perspective
Is not the idea of the subject not being in the world precisely the opposite of objectifying the subject, though?. It seems we can look at it one way (the solipsistic way) and say the subject contains, encloses the world, and we can look at it another way and say that the subject is just one of many in the world. I think primordially we experience ourselves as being in the world alonsgide others, both human and non-human, sentient and non-sentient. I’m purposively leaving aside any complication that might derive from considering the idea that the animistic view might have prevailed early on in the human psyche.
Can you explain some more how you think, or think Wittgenstein thinks, that thinking of the subject as object enables the “misguided question of solipsism”? As I said above it seems to me that case that thinking of the subject as container of the world would tend more to generate the solipsistic view.
I have long thought that Leibniz disagreed with Spinoza, and held a belief in a personal God. But of course it’s possible that he was being cautious not to anger the authorities with expressions of views that might have seemed heretical, as Spinoza did. I’m referring here to the latter’s being excommunicated by the Jewish elders.
What you say about Whitehead seems right. I also understand him to reject substance ontology. I think he was a realist about the things we encounter in the world, but that he saw them as congeries of process rather than substances.
As I understand Whitehead it is hi God that enables the internal relatedness of occasions of experience, and this does seem somewhat along the lines of a Leibnizian “master monad”. On the other hand I never really understood the need for such a God in Whitehead’s system due to what I understand to be his realism regarding processes.
Quick reply as it’s way past my bed time. And I have to emphasise that I’m not a Wittgenstein scholar so please continue to be wary.
My interpretation of Wittgenstein’s early view is that the logical form of language coincides with the logical form of the world, and it is this correspondence that permits language to mirror the world. The perfect language (the aspiration of the TLP) would be the perfect mirror. The metaphysical subject is NOT something that has a view of the world “from the inside” as it were.
So the correspondence of these two logical forms is what the phrase “I alone understand” is pointing at: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (TLP 5.6) and “I am my world. (The microcosm)” (TLP 5.63). “The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world” (TLP 5.632). So the subject is the boundary beyond which its “own language” cannot function.
This is quite different to Wittgenstein’s later view of language in the PI.
The inference is “bad” — from this/my POV — because it forgets or ignores (1).
Earnest participation in conversation presupposes the exchanged signs as public or “for both of us” empirical objects. It is a performative contradiction to earnestly assert any thesis that implies the impossibility of communication.
As I see it, the idea of a “true reality” tempts thinkers toward a dualism of perception versus “true physical reality” on the one hand, and toward a “belief versus truth” on the other.
My comment on the centrality of time is inspired by Peirce, Mach, and Heidegger. Let us consider the issue of “truth.” I can be “wrong” or “mistaken” because my expectation leads me into trouble or pain. I modify my beliefs, because the future arrives to surprise me. I now call my old belief “true” and my former belief “false.” To me this use of “true” and “false” involves nothing deep. Belief is fundamental. Expectation is fundamental. “True” is a handy sign for discussing visceral expectation ( belief.)
Many thinkers leap from (1) to a vague postulation of “objective reality” understood as “reality from no point of view” or “reality from an ideal point of view that is moreover a realized ideal.” But this violates (2).
You might not want to agree with me on (2). Fair enough ! This is my “positivism” or “empiricism” or “operationalism.” I don’t pretend that I ever achieve a “final” grip on the signs I use, but I try to avoid using signs where my grip is conspicuously greasy. I personally primarily understand “the world I share with others” in terms of the mundane empirical/perceptual world, which is always “from a POV.”
Another related issue: how does “the” year of 1953 exist ? Or how does “the” past exist ? I put quotes around “the” because I am indeed putting in question the taken-for-granted concept of an “absolute” past. I recall that you only asserted a relative past, just to be clear.
Following Peirce, I am saying that I no longer assume a math-inspired symmetry between my past and my future. If I consider the enduring “shape” of the “now,” the “past” and the “future” are “here now” in very different fashions.
Precisely ! Solipsism is the absurd position that results when “from-a-point-of-view-ness” is not taken as “absolute” or “fundamental.”
Indirect realism is solipsism with “objective reality” glued on, rather uselessly. There is talk of “truth” but the practice of making a case for this or that belief, most importantly when the belief is not merely verbal. Even people who verbally believe in “objective reality” have to settle for responding to their own perspectival experience and the signs of other also-perspectival experiencers.
Not at all. Not at all. My so-called “consciousness” is largely the “presence” or “being” of public empirical objects. Experience is “immediately” shared-world-from-POV. IMV, we don’t need ( and I can’t make sense of ) an “objective reality” in the sense of “shared world from no POV.” And then “shared world from God’s POV” is too theological for my taste. I live and die the world “from over here” or “from a perspective.” I take others to be in the same situation. I don’t pretend to prove this, and I try to eschew speculation altogether. I report the basic structure of my own existence and check with others to see if my words point or not in their case. I don’t think “true” has a deep meaning. But I try to move toward more coherence and fewer unpleasant surprises.
Exactly ! I totally agree. This is (1). The world is shared. The objects there for me are also there for others, but “from their POV” and therefore perhaps differently. And this is “ideal” or “typical.” In some cases, others don’t “see” what I “see.” The dialogue fails. So the “harmony” of the shared world is not without dissonance and disappointment.
I don’t follow Whithead into his need for a concept of God, but I think it’s a mistake to attribute the internal relations in his philosophy to his concept of God. Leibniz’s monads are not connected by any kind of relations (neither external nor internal). Instead, they are synchronized by virtue of a “pre-established harmony” mediated by God. This is not the case with Whitehead’s AOEs – a concrescing AOE is directly internally related to the AOEs that it is prehendeding. This doesn’t require a God or a dominant monad.
I find Whitehead’s ontology tortuous, but I think he found it necessary to follow out the eradication of substance metaphysics thoroughly, and that’s where it led. My own understanding of it is quite superficial. He was responding to Leibniz’ monadology, but what was Leibniz responding to? I don’t think it was just Descartes’ substance dualism.
Leibniz was in contact with Jesuit missionaries in China. It’s a push, but I think it possible that those missionaries had encountered a Chinese branch of Buddhism called Huayan Buddhism, purportedly founded by Fa T’sang (Fazang) in the seventh century CE. Fazang is famous for his analogy of the “Net of Indra” depicting reality as consisting of a collection of jewels wherein every jewel reflected every other jewel. Sounds suspiciously like Leibniz’ monadology, but with internal relations instead of a God. And that, in turn, sounds suspiciously like Whitehead’s ontology.
So it could be the case that Leibniz took Fazang’s analogy and Christianized it for his own cultural backdrop, and Whitehead took Leibniz’ monadology and de-Christianized it for a cultural backdrop in which Christianity was beginning to lose its stranglehold.
To regard the self (the metaphysical subject) as a container is to objectify the self, which is the very mistake that Wittgenstein is trying to lead us out of. Others have made the same point, as I point out in another thread.
I think this is the “false starting point” (subject as just another object in the world) that Wittgenstein is trying to jolt us out of. It is also the false start that Mait Edey is calling into question in the post linked above.
As you say, “thinking of the subject as container of the world would tend more to generate the solipsistic view,” – i.e. “thinking of the subject as object” (a container) "enables the ‘misguided question of solipsism.’ ”
I interpret the Wittgenstein of the TLP to be telling us that the unexamined impression that we begin with – that the subject is nothing more than an object in the world – is a logical error. Instead, there is a metaphysical subject that is a limit of the world. But it is not a container – the world doesn’t need to be “held together” in that way.
The Wittgenstein of the PI is telling us that he was wrong to think that way in the TLP. He was “bewitched by language,” and he now considers the problem to be that of a grammatical confusion. We mistakenly model the structure of reality on the structure of our subject-predicate form of language, so we unthinkingly concoct the idea of a metaphysical subject and confer upon it a substantial existence.
But you should be wary of taking my interpretation as valid. It is likely contaminated by other views that I’ve encountered along the way.
It’s a fair while since I looked into Whitehead’s philosophy, but I remeber thinking that for Whitehead God is the source of order and creativity in the world, the mind of the world or the “world-soul”. If this is right then it would seem that that would count as God enabling an internal relatedness of occasions of experience. God, in this view seems to be our “co-experiencer”.
On the other hand I haven’t read Whitehead as an idealist, along the lines of Berkeley, where things in the world are, if I am not mistaken, ‘thought’ into existence by God. If this is right, then Whitehead would count as a realist and even a materialist, where what is real are physical processes (all of which are understood to be :occasions of experience" however attenuated.. Then I think “why the need for God?”.
So, I don’t see the rejection of ontology as necessarily leading to a need for God. And if God is not “The Substance” as in Spinoza then what could he be, as immanence, but something like the 'master process" of which all other processes are constituents?
As to your tie-in with Hua-Yen Buddhism, I read a book many years ago titled: A.N.Whitehead;s Process Metaphysics and Hua-Yen Buddhism on Interpenetration by Steve Odin, which I still have somewhere on my shelves I think. I can’t remember whether Leibniz was cited in that work as having possibly encountered Hua-Yen, but I think it is uncontroversial that Whitehead was influenced by Leibniz’ Monadology.
The reason I don’t think Whitehead needs God is the same as the reason that Spinoza’s God is thought as identical to nature, and not at all a personal deity with any of the standard theological attributes. Einstein apparently said that if he accepted a God it would be Spinoza’s God. And since Spinoza equated God with “natura naturans” (translated as nature naturing) as opposed to “natura naturata” (translated as “nature natured”) Einstein’s equation of God with the laws of nature seems to make sense.