• The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    Which naturally leads to something like hanaH's view that all of these uses and possible uses, even the ones we can't imagine now, have something in common: they are solutions to a coordination problem faced by living creatures like us.Srap Tasmaner


    Hi there ! I suppose I am suggesting something like that. At the very least I think considering the coordination problem of bodies helps free us from a largely refuted reference theory.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    That doesn't lead anywhere though. Because what am I supposed to make of what you or Witt say if your or his words have no referent at all?Olivier5

    Consider thou the vervet monkeys. One gives a particular cry, and the others take the appropriate evasive action with respect to the predator associated by that cry. Or consider that most of us stop at red lights. I don't care much about what-it's-like-for-you-to-see-a-red-light. I need you to stop.

    The attachment to concepts/forms is maybe related to the fantasy role of the philosopher as a scientist of these forms. Instead of looking at the changing world in its complexity, the philosopher can gaze directly at the objects of interest with an immaterial faculty. Abracadabra, an armchair science of the eternal essence of reality. I can't mock this project, because I'm trying to approximate it within mortal limitations.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    What happens to those handshakes, salutes and stop signs as we move from contextual situation to situation?Joshs

    Most of our skill with this stuff is "pre-articulate." We are not transparent to ourselves. Can a squirrel give an account of its squeaks and barks? Humans, to be fair, have something like self-referential grunts and purrs. We've cooked up a whole mentalistic metacognitive bag of tricks.

    The sense of meaning of handshakes , salutes and stops signs can be understood in an infinity of ways, depending on the way we are using these terms in the context of our dealings with others.Joshs

    Yes. It's a mad ocean out there, except that it's constrained by the needs of a social organism. This is why the interior monologue is something like the last as opposed to the first thing to consider. Start from monkeys and their cries as predators approach, not with Descartes running simulations in his head. Or start with the chemical emissions of even simpler organisms.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    Language does not exist external to its use by us in the world“Joshs
    :up:
    One might say that we got carried away with certain traditional abstractions until most of us could no longer see them as something like hypotheses that are only tempting if one doesn't look too closely.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    Witt is playing in the dark and probably at the wrong game. All words are "sensation words" when you think of it. They all code for an idea of a thing, for a type of things, i.e. for a concept, not directly for a thing. The word "apple" codes for the idea of apple.Olivier5

    It's just that pre-scientific, pre-philosophic assumption that he successfully challenges. To be clear, I'm not saying that worldly things are the actual/correct referent. I'm emphasizing the limitations of the any "referent approach" for understanding "meaning. "
  • An analysis of the shadows
    But why did you take that promise or threat seriously (assuming you did)?baker

    As a child, I tended to believe what the adults in authority said.

    And how personally was that promise or threat made? To you, by your name, or just in your "general direction"?baker

    I've been harassed by manic street preachers. I tend to ignore them, because I don't respect them enough to want to talk to them. I also consider 'that' kind of religious person to be 'beyond logic' (they aren't going to address objections but simply return to their vomit.) Recently, though, I couldn't avoid an especially eager fellow who spoke of the hellfire that awaits the unsaved. So his spiel was directed at me personally, as a stranger lost to the deceptions of science, dogmatic in my skepticism. He had a megaphone. I did not. This was also absurd and made him more ridiculous. He was posted up on the side of a popular path, where musicians also tend to post up (most of them pretty bad.) To me he looked like one more attention-hungry failed artist begging for scraps of recognition, but arrogantly. I'd bet he considered modern females to be whores, etc., especially when they do not hearken to his holy song.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    Joe stares off into the distance. Is he feeling guilty? How can you tell?frank

    Joe has a fever. Am I ready to diagnose his disease?

    In short, we need more info. Let's say that Joe was drunk-driving and that we know his wife is in the hospital with a concussion. We might be tempted to say "I bet he's ashamed of himself." To me it's a fuzzy empirical question. What kind of behavior patterns are described in terms of "guilt"?
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    A philosophy can have effects. In other words, imagining or postulating a philosophy (or a law) as an existing referent can be justified.Olivier5

    I think it's moderately justified. I'd say that my issue is pretending that such an hypothesis is exactly right, or that it's without problems. Sensation words, as Witt shows, have some serious problems, at least if we hope to found a theory of meaning on them.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    The law exists alright, even if it cannot be seen or put in a portrait.Olivier5

    Does the token "law" refer to the concept of law or the law itself? If it's the concept, do you think any two people have exactly the same concept in mind? Or does "law" attach to some Platonic form in some immaterial realm? If in the world, where exactly is the law in the public world? I might say that it's scattered among ways of doing things, documents, buildings. And I also think that modifications in the brain "record" or "represent" our skill with using the word "law" in ways I haven't looked into. So the referent theory is not completely absurd here, but it seems far from obvious what that referent is supposed to be.
  • Is personal Gnosis legitimate wisdom?
    Why should we gossip about our feelings? I'm not that interested in the feelings of others nor do I wish to state mine exorbitantly.GraveItty

    One can endlessly debate about the wonders and achievements of science but it's just one view amongst others.GraveItty

    If it's all just opinion, then why aren't we just gossiping about preferences and hunches here? I don't think all opinions are equally accurate or useful. It's absurd to have to say so, since in practical life we constantly evaluate claims for their trustworthiness. Counting to see how many babies survive childhood or looking at how long the average human lives in time and place are not esoteric metrics. For me the scientific approach is something like refined common sense, which is to say a kind of basis we have in common. It's not some strange flower. Germ theory was inspired by a microscope, by seeing anthrax germs and hypothesizing them as a cause of disease...then testing that hypothesis. Ultimately we gained more control of nature, fending off a serious threat.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    Irrelevant red herring. Computers too have "bodies".TheMadFool

    They don't have bodies (yet) that inspire us to change the grammar of "understand." We don't talk as if rocks or clouds can think or understand because they don't fit into a pattern (to put it crudely.)
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    We're merely manipulating the symbol "consciousness" according to English grammar and the rules of inference (logic) - very much like a computer. In a certain sense then we've regressed...from semantics (our crown jewel) to syntax (mindless computing).TheMadFool

    I don't think so. Grammar in this context is not some fixed, formal thing but involves the entire world as we know it and live in it. For us, words don't just have relationships with other words but with everything else. Brains are also not deterministic (if I understand QM correctly), while (non-quantum) computers are designed to be as deterministic as possible.

    It's true that letting go of the ghost in the machine might feel like a regression to some, but the alternative is not mindless computation but "mindful" computation at the level of the species, out there in the world, including not just our talking and marking but everything else we do. It's as if the traditional view crams all meaning into a quasi-mystical immaterial substance hidden somehow in the brain, while the opposing view finds meaning "distributed" across organisms and their environment, without denying that something (training, experience, skill) is stored and updated locally in the brain. A good metaphor is a modern OS that's regularly updated, except in our case it's open source all the way.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    Plus the signs of guilt or shame are often not in the things you do, but what you don't do.frank

    But not doing something is just as observable. It's not about denying the interior. It's about looking at stuff we can uncontroversially measure, record, etc. It's also about plausible theories about the foundation or possibility of meaning. The immaterial referent theory just doesn't make sense.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    It also failed because of reasons linked to economy of means: there are too many concepts to allocate one specific sign to each of them.Olivier5

    I agree with you about why phonetic languages are relatively advantageous. I suppose I'm just stressing a certain skepticism about a framework in which tokens are pictured to have a one-to-one relationship with concepts. While it's easy to think of a drawing of a cow as a symbol for the concept cow, as soon as we get to more abstract concepts (like law or justice), the framework breaks down. One could think that the concept of law is actually definite and that we just can't picture it, or one could doubt that there is some fixed and complete concept or form of justice in some kind of mental realm in the first place. We learn to use the word "concept" in various practical situations, but I think it's like "law" and "justice." It doesn't have a referent, or at least I find such a claim problematic.

    I don't see how it does. If you go and see a doctor about your pain in the neck, he will inspect your neck and maybe find something objectively wrong with it.Olivier5

    But that's just it. "Pain" gets its "meaning" from objective things like a doctor examining its "location." One can imagine sensation words as black holes that are only visible by the effect they have on the visible.
    So the highest god is written down as an eye floating over a throne.Olivier5

    Very cool & suggestive. Transcendent knowledge? Distance from everything, like the view from a mountain that looks without fear and sees the big picture?
  • Is personal Gnosis legitimate wisdom?
    (Why do you think religious/spiritual people tend to affiliate themselves with right-wing political options?)baker

    The question was not for me, but a possible answer is the centrality of a prophet/sage and his texts in most religions (monarchy-patriarchy happens to be baked in to many of them.) If one opens up a religion to democratic control and individual rights, the result is something like the US Constitution. (It's as if the mainstream way of being, with its religious tolerance, is an exploded religion of little anarchists who tolerate only minimal control of their spiritual activities --each their own king and pope on a little island in archipelago, with money as the ocean that connects them.)
  • Is personal Gnosis legitimate wisdom?
    My approach to religion/spirituality was all about finding The Truth, the How Things Really Are (and at first, my quest was conceptualized as trying to answer the question "Which religion is the right one?"). I was sure that once I'd figure out what The Truth is, everything else would fall into place.baker

    I can relate to this. To me that's more a mark of the philosopher or scientist. Anyway, I was also attracted to religion as a kind of ultimate science of reality.
  • Is personal Gnosis legitimate wisdom?
    The world is more open and bleeding than it used to be. We try to improve things every day, but it seems to get worse every day.GraveItty

    The world has got much better in the last few centuries. Yeah, we still have problems, and, as evolved bags of slow-burning water stilts, there's no reason to expect some final tranquillity, some state of the world where we can no longer see room for improvement. We can, if we please, gossip about our feelings. But if we aren't just comparing feelings, we should discuss a metric for the state of the world. For example, Pinker uses various stats to argue that it is improved. One can of course object to his or any framework, criterion, or metric. It's up for endless debate and revision.
  • Is personal Gnosis legitimate wisdom?
    translated as nous (preserved in vernacular English as uncommon common sense, 'she has nous, that one'.) It is nous which 'sees what truly is', and it is that which is associated with the immortal aspect of the being.Wayfarer

    It's a beautiful system-myth-theory. The eternal is immaterial and intelligible. Or the intelligible is immaterial and eternal. Or the immaterial is eternal and intelligible. How do mortal beings connect to something immortal? Through some hidden immortal and immaterial part of themselves.

    I think we can more concretely say that language and what it accumulates (concepts) is that which is relatively immortal. This is where human communication so far surpasses that of the other animals we invent a special non-biological organ for ourselves. If, however, this organ is immaterial and private, we really can't be rational or scientific about it. I'm not saying that mind is only brain and behavior, but it makes sense that we'd prioritize those aspects of the concept in rational-scientific investigations. Even in ordinary life, it makes sense to look at how people actually act as opposed to how they merely describe themselves.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    Just as computers, not even AI, we, with respect to private experiences, are simply manipulating symbols.TheMadFool

    Don't forget that we have bodies! We also chew food, turn steering wheels, scrub cast iron pans. Even our symbols are physical, something our bodies do. We vibrate the air with our lungs and mouth. We smear liquids on solids. We salute, wave, bow.

    As for words further reducing to "integers and floats", even with humans they reduce to something similar - action potentials in neurons and their synapses.TheMadFool

    Yes, and it's strange. Is there magic in the meat? Or would something else work? Does something else already work? And we just can't recognize it? Maybe it hasn't been to this planet yet. I don't think we know what "consciousness" means anymore than our ability to use it for practical purposes (or something like that, perhaps an overstatement.)
  • Is personal Gnosis legitimate wisdom?
    .
    Your word "enlightened" sometimes says way too much. It can conjure all kinds of attributes (especially in the insecure or jealous mind) that simply are not possessed by one who has come to know something that cannot be articulated.James Riley

    Insecurity and jealousy may play a role, but so does embarrassment at a lack of tact or humility. You mention the 'look' in your post. I get that. Call it charisma or comportment or whatever. It does the real work. If someone with charisma uses a grand word (enlightenment, transcendence, etc.), then one is more likely to believe, admire and perhaps envy. If one without charisma uses the grand word, it contributes to an association of grand words with those who don't even cut it in the usual way. This is where I relate to @baker and the idea that religion should be exclusive or difficult, not something a person needs you to believe. That need is evidence against the salesmen being in on something great. Need is base. Need is ordinary. Don't cast pearls before swine, right? But that cuts in every direction (bigger than spirituality). There's a time and place for laying down the intricate stuff, the slippery stuff.


    When one enlightened subject meets the other, there is really no need to engage because there is nothing to say, even if it could be articulated.James Riley

    I think there's a non-fancy non-explicitly-spiritual version of this that happens all the time. Two people meet and hopefully recognize one another as cool, noble, attuned, graceful, poised, legit, whatever. If forced to do so, either can squeeze out reasons for their general approval, but the decision for all its complexity and speed is automatic. (I'd break it down into two positive categories. The easier standard is a decent person I can trust and be friendly with, not exciting but fine. The harder standard is that of the peer I can learn from, who will keep me on my toes. Very exciting. One conversation with them is worth a month of small talk. )
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    .
    Computers allegedly can't comprehend i.e. they're semantically-challenged but that's in the sign-referent sense. If meaning is use, computers and AI do understand words; they are, after all, using words.TheMadFool

    If computers become able to socialize as well as humans, I suspect that the grammar of 'understand' will shift to include them. Given our 'meat chauvinism,' a human-like body as in Ex Machina would accelerate this process. Current AI that's designed to chat is trained on mountains of our own human chatter, scraped from the internet. Unfortunately such programs are only exposed to the relationship of words to other words as opposed to words and the world (for now, last I checked.) Or you can say the world of such a being is nothing but words (which further reduces to integers and floats.)
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    I’m not trying to talk about beetles in boxes, I’m trying to show that a reading of Wittgenstein that consists of behavioral linkages between arbitrary signs relies on a beetle in box picture.Joshs
    I don't see it. The signs aren't arbitrary but inherited (unless you just mean Saussure stuff). I am thrown into a world of handshakes, salutes, and stop signs which are on the same "plane" as ice cream, parachutes, and mustaches. I thrive by acting on correlations prudently (sifting out "causation" or the more reliable ones.)

    I and my fellow humans need the bodies of other animals or plants to eat, a safe place to sleep, physical affection, etc. Our genius as a species seems to be teamwork. Some hunt while others weave and watch the babies. Or some calculate while other operate.

    The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.

    The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.
    https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a2

    Do you think the bodies of organisms like us (or organisms in general) can coordinate their activities without some kind of physical interaction? (We can get into the niceties of "physical"if you like, but this is yet another case of "John knows French."). Note that I do not say "transmit thoughts," as tempting and habitual as that might be. I may absent-mindedly lapse into mentalistic language, but I'm gesturing toward an especially materialistic/behaviorist approach.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    On the contrary, it is the notion of ‘body’ and materiality’ as causal conditioning agents that presupposes an occult interior.Joshs

    Is it not a triviality that many concepts come in pairs? Like physical/mental, outside/inside, public/private? I think you are wandering away from the original context.

    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.

    To me you keep wanting to talk about what's in the box.

    I guess the question I have is. are you aware of this split amount Wittgenstein interpreters, can you articulate what it consists of , and which camp do you prefer?Joshs

    I'll say that I've read plenty of philosophers' interpretations of Wittgenstein, which surely contributed to my own view (itself never fixed and complete), and leave it there. The topic is The Essence of Wittgenstein. Let's stay focused?
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    If you read Wittgenstein through Ryle , that may explain our disagreement.Joshs

    I read all of them through all of them, when I can manage it (all of them that I've gotten around to, that is, and within the limits of memory & interest.)
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    A living being - whether a human being or an animal being - could not have any relation to another being as such without this alterity in time, without, that is, memory, anticipation, this strange sense (I hesitate to call it knowledge) that every now, every instant is radically other and nevertheless in the same form of the now.Joshs

    I like Derrida, but this is still just talk about the occult interior. In this context it doesn't seem relevant. What you make of my prioritizing bodies in the world, using signals to work together? "Sign" might already be misleading here inasmuch as we tend to think of the sign as the envelope of a letter.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    For Intended meaning to be present to itself it must come back to itself , and in doing so, it already means something other than what it intended.Joshs

    For me it's not even there to begin with, not when it comes to the grand terms. (I can more or less intend to say thank you and accidentally say you're welcome.) It's as if even our complicated metaphysical statements are still just complex animal sounds, merely determinate enough in their "meaning."

    Ryle suggests that ‘John knows French’ is a warrant which gives us the right to infer that John understands what he reads in Le Monde or that he is communicating successfully when telephoning in French. Immediately on specifying what we are entitled to do with the inference ticket ‘John knows French’, Ryle admits that the examples of what would satisfy the sentence are too precise, for

    [w]e should not withdraw our statement that he knows French on finding that he did not respond pertinently when asleep, absentminded, drunk, or in a panic; or on finding that he did not correctly translate highly technical treatises. We expect no more than that he will ordinarily cope pretty well with the majority of ordinary French-using and French-following tasks. ‘Knows French’ is a vague expression and, for most purposes, none the less useful for being vague. (1949a, 119)
    https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ryle/

    I think this point can be applied pretty much everywhere. When we say that someone "knows French," we don't have some fixed and complete content in mind. It's more like turning a doorknob. The tongue shapes air pushed by the lungs so that it can grasped (reacted to) as a familiar token. (Same with "meaning is use" or "God is love.") Barfing up that string of tokens is like a wave or a handshake, except for being more informative in the sense of more efficient and flexible for coordinating action in the world.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    But do not these group habits and conventions themselves originate as person, context and perspective based?Joshs

    To me this is drifting in the wrong direction, from the unhidden back to the hidden, from public doings back to the pseudo-explanatory entities of the metaphysicians. We can't be rational or scientific about junk that is unknowable in principle (grammatically).
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    Not the solipsism of a closed system but a continuous exposure to and being affected by an outside.Joshs

    Just to be clear, I'm aiming for something like the opposite of solipsism, insisting on the material (or sensual, if you like) nature of communication. We can't synchronize our behavior without at least indirect bodily interaction. Our nervous systems aren't omnipresent or telepathic.

    My starting point is bodies together in a "material" world that need to work together. That's my path into Wittgenstein or perhaps my path on the way back.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    And as soon as we repeat a meaning we subject it to contextual alteration, which destroys the purity of its intended sense.Joshs

    I agree that we alter context as we speak. Is the intended sense ever fully present? This is the heart of Derrida for me. We never know exactly what we are talking about. The river nymph maintains her cruel virginity, is never quite possessed.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    What about the idea that my talking and thinking and sensing to myself is already a form of sociality that submits my sensations and thoughts to contextual
    alteration?
    Joshs

    Note that a closed system is not a dead system. Yes, we can talk and act when we are alone in ways that end up changing the way we talk and act around others. But unwitnessed actions (including speech acts) don't change signaling conventions/habits directly. (Unless telepathy or something?)
  • Is personal Gnosis legitimate wisdom?
    Platonism believed that we're a fusion of soul and body. A lot of people will say it's 'bronze age mythology'. But my view is that all of those ancient texts are symnbolically or allegorically conveying truths about the human condition, as you go on to acknowledge.Wayfarer

    Sure. One might say that the soul is no more of a fiction than the liver. In both cases we are looking a human being in terms of parts that we ourselves delineate. The individual organism might also be viewed as a kind of fictional organ of the species.

    One of the things that interest me is our deeply-held tradition that each body "contains" or "manifests" or "incarnates" exactly one soul. I suspect this is related to imposing upon a body a responsibility for its actions. "The soul is the prison of the body." (Or, better, the most trainable part of the body.)
  • Is personal Gnosis legitimate wisdom?
    How many times my mum said that! "So it goes". That's just the way it is. And we can do nothing about it.GraveItty

    I don't think leather ybags of firewater on a couple of stalks have evolved so that every moment of their brief lives is a pleasure. If you like, the world is open sore. But it's less open and bleeding than it used to be. And we can and are trying to improve things every day (well some of us, sometimes.)
  • Is personal Gnosis legitimate wisdom?
    I believed that through meditation, a state of insight would spontaneously arise which would melt away all my negative tendencies and weaknesses.Wayfarer
    For me it wasn't metaphysics, but spiritual pursuits I also hoped for a great transformation of that kind. Now I just accept that I should settle for piecemeal improvement.

    Early on, I did have a real conversion experience, which I interpreted in a Buddhist framework (mainly through this book.) I formally took refuge in 2007. But in the long run I found are some hindrances that are very hard to overcome. This sense culminated in late 2017 when I gave some talks at a couple of Buddhist centres. I'm quite well-versed in the subject and can talk intelligibly about it. But I felt like a phony, speaking from the position of being dharma teacher. When I was describing the paramitas (Mahāyāna virtues) I realised how conspicuously lacking I was in them. And I went to a Buddhist youth organisation conference around that time, and sadly realised that I thought a lot of well-intentioned Buddhists were also phony.Wayfarer

    I respect the honesty, and I can relate to the sense of being a phony when talking about virtue from a position of mastery. Anything that has to be said in this regard is already suspect perhaps. The life should say it.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    And so stop signs and toothaches do not "get their 'meaning' " in the same way, much less necessarily "from what happens outside us".Antony Nickles

    We can't currently agree here it seems. "Toothaches" and "God" and "justice" and "truth" are, in my view, tokens, just like the cries of the vervet monkey, albeit caught up in a far more complicated system. It might be helpful here to think of individual social organisms as relatively closed systems that signal one another "materially" (as opposed to a telepathy of rarefied concept-stuff.) As I see it, the point is synchronized behavior. So looking inside a single organism for meaning seems misguided, though one might naturally inquire how the sign system is "stored" as it is learned, etc.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    Also certain greetings famously have no reference, like "Helo".Olivier5

    I almost mentioned that one myself. Consider also if, and, never, false, ...
    Coming back to picturing words... That's how writing was invented originally.Olivier5

    Actually I've read about some of this. Derrida talks about this stuff. Writing tends to be cast as a dead thing, as opposed to speech which is living. But, as you mention, speech is not so pure in relation to writing. In both cases we have repeatable tokens. In both cases we can quote in new contexts.
  • Is personal Gnosis legitimate wisdom?
    No, those are just the torments of Tantalus. All those "goodies" might indeed seem like they are at your fingertips -- but when you reach for them, you can never reach them, or they disappear altogether.baker

    Spiritual types tend to say that they have the real thing while others are fakes. To secular outsiders this is one of the turn-offs of the spiritual hustle. In the end many of us just don't think there's any secret worth bothering too much about.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    if I say "abracadabra" a flower will bloom or a rabbit will vanish or or a person will get sick. It is therefore a use of words beyond reference as well,Olivier5
    :up:
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    I enjoy the conversation.

    Only here I'm trying to show that the point is not to replace the internal referent with an external one, as if the problem was just the assumption of an internal thing, and not that the grammar of sensations is entirely different even than public behavior.Antony Nickles

    IMV the grammar of sensations is public behavior though. Toothaches and stopsigns both get their "meaning" (if we insist on taking such a concept seriously) from what happens outside us, in between us.

    Yes, but to say we "don't just happen to usually use the words that way" is to simply flip to the other side of the same (generalized) coin, instead of seeing that sensations have their own logic that is entirely different, rather than simply the negation of the internal referent.Antony Nickles

    To be clear, I'm emphasizing that we inherit our participation in the communication system, are trained into it. We learn to follow the line implied by the pointing finger. I was trained into English, and we can look and see how English has evolved, how the "same" words gained and lost various uses. We can compare this to the "same" Yield sign being treated differently on average by drivers over time. Aphoristically, the life of the sign is in the world. I take Witt to say that we should look & see how signs function publicly. Nothing is hidden.
  • Is personal Gnosis legitimate wisdom?
    But I live in this world. And have to make the best of it. I think it's a pity though that so much culture and nature is gone. Though material culture has never been richer.GraveItty

    So it goes, the pretty and the ugly. We have the leisure to worry about forests we will mostly never see (I also care about these forests and the biosphere.) A richer material culture is theoretically more capable of benevolent intervention.

    Digression? An asteroid may one day be nuked that would otherwise cause a great extinction event, so that wicked humanity, rapist of the environs, ends up a hero after all, thanks to its promethean-technological arrogance and eagerness.
  • Is personal Gnosis legitimate wisdom?
    Never been a Hobbes fan. From that period, I'm more with the Cambridge Platonists, not that I'm overly familiar with them.Wayfarer

    Sure. But the issue is what kind of experience spirituality is understood to offer. I'm asking about intensity and duration. And I'm also interested in the intensity and duration of angst, ennui, the sense of meaningless. We are bags of water and fire on stilts. Of course mood will fluctuate, so I'm interested in something like the average, as well as the highs and lows. A good life involves frequent satisfactions (very much including the pleasures of romantic love and/or friendship) without too much misery. If a well-fed, relatively secure person is still troubled by dissatisfaction, anxiety, or anhedonia, ... then religion might help, but so might other therapies. Religious freedom means we get to experiment and hopefully find something that works. Personally I'm no longer interested in that kind of therapy, though sacred texts do have value as manifestations and comment upon human nature.