If we think our experience is 'for-us', this is always already a case of presuming our limited access. This presumption is based on a (Cartesian) belief in the infallibility of introspection, that what thoughts and concepts and perception are is somehow transparent to us, so that we can understand what it means for something to exist for us, but cannot possibly understand what it means for something to exist 'in itself'
This seems like a cognitive-sci-phi talking point misplaced. I don't disagree that we can be mistaken during introspection, but I don't see what bearing our introspective fallibility has on our capacity to understand objects as they'd be outside human perspective. — csalisbury
All I want to emphasize is that we all know just as well what it means for the tree to be there on the other side of the hill when no one is looking at it as we know what it means for the tree to be there in front of us when we are looking at it. — John
(Fwiw, your view strikes me as Heidegger in Fregean Clothing) — csalisbury
As regard the question whether red objects still would exist in our universe if we became extinct, or never came about, the answer is simply yes. Bus then this is just a simple counterfactual modal claim similar to the claim about currently unobserved or far away red objects. It still refers to *our* universe and *our* concept of redness. — PN
[Meillassoux speaking as a hypothetical correlationist] It is not difficult to conceive the status of the un-witnessed in the context of a datum which must be essentially considered as lacunary. All that is required in order to re-insert this type of occurrence within the correlationist framework is to introduce a counter-factual such as the following: had there been a witness, then this occurrence would have been perceived in such and such a fashion. This counterfactual works just as well for the falling of a vase in an empty house as for a cosmic or ancestral event, however far removed....
...[Meillassoux speaking as himself]The objection against idealism based on the distal occurrence is in fact identical with the one based on the ancient occurrence, and both are equivalent versions (temporal or spatial) of what could be called 'the objection from the un-witnessed', or from the 'un-perceived'. And the correlationist is certainly right about one thing - that the argument from the un-perceived is in fact trivia and poses no threat to correlationism. But the argument from the arche-fossil is in no way equivalent to such an objection, because the ancestral does not designate an ancient event - it designates an event anterior to terrestrial life and hence anterior to givenness itself...
....Let us be perfectly clear on this point. The reason why the traditional objection from the un-witnessed occurrence - it being a matter of indifference whether the latter is spatial or temporal - poses no danger to correlationism is because this objection bears upon an event occurring when there is already givenness. Indeed, this is precisely why the objection can be spatial as well as temporal. For when I speak of an event that is distant in space, this event cannot but be contemporaneous with the consciousness presently envisaging it. Consequently, an objection bearing on something that is unperceived in space necessarily invokes an event and a consciousness which are considered as synchronic. This is why the event that is un-witnessed in space is essentially recuperable as one mode of lacunary givenness among others - it is recuperable as an in-apparent given which does not endanger the logic of correlation. But the ancestral does not designate an absence in the given, and for givenness, but rather an absence of givenness as such. And this is precisely what the example of the spatially unperceived remains incapable of capturing - only a specific type of temporal reality is capable of capturing it; one which is not ancient in any vague sense, nor some sort of lacuna in that which is temporally given, but which must rather be identified with that which is prior to givenness in its entirety. It is not the world such as givenness deploys its lacunary presentation, but the world as it deploys itself when nothing is given, whether fully or lacunarily. Once this has been acknowledged, then one must concede that the ancestral poses a challenge to correlationism which is of an entirely different order than that of the unperceived, viz., how to conceive of a time in which the given as such passes from non-being into being?. Not a time which is given in a lacunary fashion, but a time wherein one passes from the lacuna of all givenness to the effectivity of a lacunary givenness...
...So the challenge is therefore the following: to understand how science can think a world wherein spatio-temporal givenness itself came into being within a time and a space which preceded every variety of givenness. — Meillassoux
But the world as idea, with which alone we are here concerned, only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time. Thus time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time. Since, however, it is the most universal form of the knowable, in which all phenomena are united together through causality, time, with its infinity of past and future, is present in the beginning of knowledge. The phenomenon which fills the first present must at once be known as causally bound up with and dependent upon a sequence of phenomena which stretches infinitely into the past, and this past it self is just as truly conditioned by this first present, as conversely the present is by the past. Accordingly the past out of which the first present arises, is, like it, dependent upon the knowing subject, without which it is nothing. It necessarily happens, however, that this first present does not manifest itself as the first, that is, as having no past for its parent, but as being the beginning of time. It manifests itself rather as the consequence of the past, according to the principle of existence in time. In the same way, the phenomena which fill this first present appear as the effects of earlier phenomena which filled the past, in accordance with the law of causality. Those who like mythological interpretations may take the birth of Kronos (χρόνος), the youngest of the Titans, as a symbol of the moment here referred to at which time appears, though, indeed it has no beginning; for with him, since he ate his father, the crude productions of heaven and earth cease, raid the races of gods and men appear upon the scene. — Schopenhauer
This seems like a cognitive-sci-phi talking point misplaced. I don't disagree that we can be mistaken during introspection, but I don't see what bearing our introspective fallibility has on our capacity to understand objects as they'd be outside human perspective. — "csalisbury
(2) "Worldless" experiences (of the sort TGW often likes to discuss.) — csalisbury
Thanks for your reply csalisbury. I did read After Finitude, but it was at least five years ago. However I still remember thinking that his notion that, for example, the situation vis a vis prehuman or "ancestral" entities is really different in principle from that of entities that are currently merely extremely distant to us in space or distant within 'human' time doesn't make sense.
I mean if we say that humans have been around for 1 million years, just for argument's sake, would it follow from Meillasoux' standpoint that objects more than 1 million light year's distant enjoy a different ontological status, because the light we are receiving from them was emitted prior to the advent of humans, compared to objects less than a million light year's distant? — John
You're leaving out a fifth option: the it-in-itself is nothing. A feature which has no element to describe or phenomenological manifestation to talk about. Something humans can understand perfectly well because there is nothing more to say about it. A logical feature which isn't more than "the thing itself' and so does not manifest as any sort of chainlink (which we might describe as steel, strong, long, grey, etc. etc., ) between the objects and language/experience. — TheWillowOfDarkness
But is there some point, the advent of givenness say, where the 'distance as time ' ceases to be problematic?
Of course we could never know when that change in ontological status occurred or how we could possibly make sense of it. That's essentially the problem I see with Meillasoux' 'ancestrality' issue — John
Bluntly: our understanding of things would remain 'correlationist' since those scales and perspectives are, indeed, for-us. (Spatial or temporal) 'Perspectives' and their accompanying scales can only be introduced metaphorically into a conception of a sentience-less world. (I know some latch onto the theory of relativity to try to show how perspectives are indeed part of space-time itself, but I take it we both understand the misunderstanding at play here and can safely pass it over.) — csalisbury
The phenomenon which fills the first present must at once be known as causally bound up with and dependent upon a sequence of phenomena which stretches infinitely into the past, and this past it self is just as truly conditioned by this first present, as conversely the present is by the past — Schopenhauer
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