• Benj96Accepted Answer
    2.2k
    If they believe that, they should be able to explain it then. Can youAlkis Piskas

    I already did. You're conversing with a sentient object currently. Humans are physical objects with awareness. What proof of that do you need exactly, outside of common sense?
  • Benj96
    2.2k
    oh :( I'm sorry if I'm not getting it. I could be being super obtuse rn. Don't want you to feel like you're talking to a wall.

    Perhaps explain it further/elaborate, if you want? I am not completely closed off to new insight I just haven't understood where you're coming from thus far. That could be my fault, admittedly.

    All I was saying is that, some parts of the universe are objects, and of that category some objects (seem to me) to demonstrate conscious awareness.

    How could conscious awareness be removed from existent things? So that no objects are aware/have the capability for sentience?
  • Alkis Piskas
    2.1k

    No, I'm not feeling like that. (That's why smileys exist! :smile:)
    It's only that we have radically different views on the subject and I can't see any use of going on ...
    No problem, though.
  • NOS4A2
    8.3k


    It is questionable to what extent others can be viewed as objects, because it is partly about external reality. Even one's own body, or parts, such as hands can be regarded as objects in the sense of being able to view their existence in the outer, material world.

    Part of the importance of viewing others as subjects rather than simply as objects is recognising their values and meanings. It is the issue of people being ends rather than being seen as means. I remember going to see a careers officer just after I left school and during discussion he said to me, 'By now you should have got to the stage of just seeing other people as objects, like chairs and tables'. I simply didn't know what to say, to a careers officer who had such a philosophy approach...

    The brute fact is that we are objects, not unlike tables and chairs. Human history, I think, has yet to come to terms with this. We have continually refused to place any value on the object itself. It’s ugly, it excretes foul substances and smells, it engages in lewd and shameful activities, it ages and deteriorates. So we posit a subject, a soul, or some other thing untethered from all this so that we can easily find value in it. In so doing we have made holy everything we are not, at the expense and slander of everything we are.
  • Janus
    15.4k


    Subjects and objects are collective representations; artefacts of dualistic thinking. Once this is realized there is no ontological puzzle to be solved, but rather a kind of mesmeruzation to be transcended; a "bewitchment" by means of language in Wittgensteinean terms.

    That said, becoming free from this, or perhaps more accurately, realizing that we are always already free from it, is not merely an intellectual matter, but involves a basic shift in orientation and concern.
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