I think there's a legitimate and fundamental distinction to be made between beings and objects — Wayfarer

Sentient beings and objects, you mean. Which is like saying human beings aren't simply objects. Fine. Noted. Move on.

Just flypaper. Don't get stuck.

:up:

Which is like saying human beings aren't simply objects. — Xtrix

You'd be amazed how many people act like this is not so. The extreme case, which is useful for its clarity, is eliminative materialism, which explicitly denies that humans are anything other than objects.

A note from the Wiki entry on 'ontology':

Hierarchical ontologies are interested in the degree of fundamentality of the entities they posit. Their main goal is to figure out which entities are fundamental and how the non-fundamental entities depend on them. The concept of fundamentality is usually defined in terms of metaphysical grounding.[79] Fundamental entities are different from non-fundamental entities because they are not grounded in other entities.[74][80] For example, it is sometimes held that elementary particles are more fundamental than the macroscopic objects (like chairs and tables) they compose. This is a claim about the grounding-relation between microscopic and macroscopic objects. Schaffer's priority monism is a recent form of a hierarchical ontology. He holds that on the most fundamental level there exists only one thing: the world as a whole. This thesis does not deny our common-sense intuition that the distinct objects we encounter in our everyday affairs like cars or other people exist. It only denies that these objects have the most fundamental form of existence.[81] An example of a hierarchical ontology in continental philosophy comes from Nicolai Hartmann. He asserts that reality is made up of four levels: the inanimate, the biological, the psychological and the spiritual.[82] These levels form a hierarchy in the sense that the higher levels depend on the lower levels while the lower levels are indifferent to the higher levels.

I'm basically defending an hierarchical ontology, although I've not previously encountered Hartmann.

I see a mouse. You see a mouse. What is the different appearance I see, compared with the different appearance you see? Do I see if from the side, and you see if from the front? Why does this indicate we see a "different reality"? Why doesn't it merely indicate I'm seeing the mouse from the side, and you're seeing it from the front? — Ciceronianus

Why does there have to be an ‘it’ independent of my perspective and your perspective if we can reach agreement? Isnt that the usefulness of the idea of ‘same thing’ or ‘same world’? These concepts of perspective-independent things don’t do a damn thing for us unless they contribute to our getting along with each other and cooperating together. It’s not an identical world that allows us to do science and create complex culture, it’s an intimately reciprocal network of intersubjectivitely connected subjective worlds that accomplishes this.

Our differences arise from the fact that we live in the same world but have different desires, different thoughts, different resources which sometime conflict or provide some of us with advantages or disadvantages others don't possess in competing with one another for resources or opportunities existing in the same world we all inhabit. If we lived in different worlds, there would be no conflicts. If they conflict, how would they be different from one another? — Ciceronianus

If someone disappoints you, violates your moral
principles , rejects you, humiliates you , embraces political views you find dangerous and cruel, acts in seemingly irrational, incoherent or inappropriate ways, ‘same world’ means there are external sources of standards of rationality . ‘Same world’ provides the basis of norms of empirical correctness , which we can then use to determine individual rationality. Since everyone is experiencing this ‘same world ‘ , everyone has the opportunity to test their understandings of the facts of the world using this external existing ‘same’ world as the universal yardstick of truth. This leaves no room for the idea that the facts we perceive are determined by a larger network of values, so that , try as we might, we cannot get your sense of meaning of the facts to align precisely with mine.

The more complex and important the facts are, the deeper they penetrate into what is most vital to our being as social beings , the less your sense of meaning of the facts will align with mine. We’re not talking perceiving mice here, we’re talking political, spiritual, moral and philosophical ‘facts’. We’re talking about our core concept of ourselves, what we stand for, our sense of how those we care about perceive us. Even though those values and concepts that are most precious to who I am as a person belong to a world which is different for me that for every other person , our individual worlds are never completely separate from those of others. On the contrary, they are related at some level even among those from the most disparate cultures. And they can be very closely related indeed among lovers and friends. In fact, only when we recognize this perspectival basis of individual worlds, are we able to achieve a form of mutual
understanding, intimacy and empathy with others that is impossible when we begin from the assumption of a ‘same’ world.

With the latter belief , we are stuck with an explanation of others behavior that relies on arbitrary drives, motives and personality quirks that we can’t get beyond , such as that others have different desires, thoughts and resources( “Our differences arise from the fact that we live in the same world but have different desires, different thoughts”). There is no recognition here that the most important source of conflict is a differences in the way that people interpret socially relevant facts (different worldviews) completely independent of motive.

You ask “If they conflict, how would they be different from one another?”

The conflict between worldviews is two conflicts. That is , it is perceived as one kind of conflict from the first participant and another kind of conflict from the second participant. What makes it a conflict of worldviews is that the two parties can’t agree on the nature of the conflict. Each ascribes it to different set of ‘facts’. They talk past one another , as we see in today’s polarized political world. You would say they simply have different desires, and leave it at that. It’s a short distance from that conclusion to choosing one ‘desire’ over the other as more socially beneficial or moral or rational, and then suppressing the unwanted ‘desire’ or its products.

Realizing this can allow us to bridge the gap between worlds by construing the other’s way of understanding their world in their terms , from our own perspective. Failing to do this leaves us with only motive and intent-based ways of making sense of others, which drives us to punish, blame and condemn with no real insight. So the supposedly dependability and solidness of a ‘same world’ has the opposite effect of what one might think. Rather than allowing for mural understanding, it reifies disagreements by forcing the participants to blame each other’s motives as arbitrarily capricious, malevolent, irrational , lazy, thoughtless , and prevents the creation of a bridge between worldviews.

Not only do each of live in our own ‘world’ with respect to others, but from one moment to the next our own ‘world’ changes into a néw one. We need never notice this because the transformation of sense is subtle enough as to go unnoticed by us most of the time. Only after a long period might we look back at our prior self and find its interest and beliefs to be unrecognizable reprieve to who we are now. So each of us moves into a subtly different world every moment , and that means the gap between us and others is only a variation on the gap from
moment to moment between who we are now and who we were yesterday, how we understand our world today and how we did yesterday.

You've expressed this is a marvelously adroit fashion. Thanks.

+1 :100:

What makes it a conflict of worldviews is that the two parties can’t agree on the nature of the conflict. — Joshs

That's something like what Kuhn meant by the incommensurability of paradigms.

I agree with this from the OP:

The trouble in the West is really that of thinking. When we go to think about being, we (Westerners) have consistently done so as presence, but this way of thinking has lead to an objectification of the world, seen as "nature," as matter in motion, and so to materialism, scientism, and technological nihilism. In political and economic affairs, capitalism seems to be an outgrowth. — Xtrix

Which is similar to the point I've been trying to make. But the way that I put it is that secular-scientific thought tends to 'objectify' human beings, and in so doing looses what makes human beings different from any other object of rational analysis; that's the sense in which I'm saying that 'beings' are different from 'objects'. That 'objectification' is what finds its most dogmatic form in eliminative materialism - which is why the whole focus of the debate about the hard problem of consciousness is about the reality of 'the subject' in human experience (the subject being, of course, what eliminativism wants to eliminate.) That loss of the sense of the centrality of the subject is the kind of 'cultural amnesia' that I'm objecting to. Which is not idealise the subject but simply to emphasise the fact that even supposedly objective knowledge is always the attribute of a subject - as Joshs is also arguing, I believe.

//ps// which is why I believe the Heidegger adopted the term 'dasein' to compensate for the loss of that sense of being in modern lexicons. //

The sense of the 'subject' as correlated with human experince did not exist until Kant invented it a millennia and a half after Western philosophy got its start so the idea that it got 'lost' is as laughable as it is outright wrong. It is a product of the enlightenment mobilized against a feudal order for which the 'subject' was precisely what we today call the 'object' - as in, the subject of the autopsy. But in your well honed tradition of making up history from scratch, please do go on - these philosophical fairy tales and fictional histories are wonderfully inventive, if nothing else.

There is no recognition here that the most important source of conflict is a differences in the way that people interpret socially relevant facts (different worldviews) completely independent of motive. — Joshs

Scenario 1. Two, let’s say, scholars disagree over the meaning of a text because they interpret it differently, despite having a shared interpretive framework, which they simply apply differently.
Scenario 2. Two scholars disagree over the meaning of a text because they interpret it differently because they use very different interpretative frameworks (maybe one’s a Marxist and the other a Freudian, like that).
Scenario 3. Two scholars disagree over the meaning of a text because they interpret it differently, despite having a shared interpretive framework, because they’re actually interpreting different editions of the text, and the words to be interpreted aren’t even 100% the same. We still refer to these alternatives as the ‘same’ book (don’t tell MU) even though they vary.
Scenario 4. 2 + 3, you get the idea.

When you drop in the word ‘interpretation’, you don’t mean to suggest something like scenario 1 or 2, but more like 3 or 4, right? Competing interpretations aren’t even of the same text, since there are no facts (like, say, the actual words of a specific edition of a text) to interpret.

One thing that feels off to me comes out in the idea of different editions of a text: the overlap between editions of some classic novel, say, is staggering. There may be a correction here, an emendation there, an addition or a deletion, but they are overwhelmingly the same. Davidson, among many others for different reasons, has made the same point, that people overwhelmingly agree about the world, and we fight over our differences against this backdrop of agreement.

Your talk of worlds makes them seem so separate. Don’t your world and my world have some things, many things, in common? It would be awfully surprising if they didn’t, given that we both speak English, live at the same time in the same part of the world, talk a lot about philosophy and psychology. Our individual worlds share some ‘sources’, it seems to me. We didn’t have to intersubjectively construct that commonality, since we filled our plates, at least partly, at the same cultural salad bar, and we took some of the same stuff. Is it ‘transformed’ once I make it part of my world, so that it’s not the same as what’s in your world?

I don’t believe there is a for-itself for Husserl, at least not one opposed to an in-itself. — Joshs

Agreed. He states that Intentionality is basically to be conscious direction. Consciousness cannot be directed as consciousness because that makes no sense. Consciousness can be directed at the concept of consciousness and at memories and possible futures.

As for Heidegger ‘dasein’ doesn’t mean anything as far as I can tell. In Being and Time all I found was a couple of points already made by Husserl articulated in a slightly better manner and a whole lot of fluff and needless explanation (as if he was talking to someone with little to no exposure to Husserl’s work).

Which is similar to the point I've been trying to make. But the way that I put it is that secular-scientific thought tends to 'objectify' human beings, and in so doing looses what makes human beings different from any other object of rational analysis; that's the sense in which I'm saying that 'beings' are different from 'objects'. — Wayfarer

I know. You're reserving "being" for human beings (or sentient beings). That's not the use in ontology or in this thread. Human beings are indeed different from other beings, and are intimately interconnected with the question of being. That beings become "objects" is a historical fact, one that really takes root in the modern era, starting with Descartes and reaching its apex in Kant. The res cogitans, the thinking (read: conscious) substance ('res') over and against the res extensa, the extended substance, is the mind/body issue and, later, the subject/object issue. The development of science out of natural philosophy takes it further.

All of this is worth exploring. But it doesn't get off the ground if you repeatedly refuse to understand the terminology, which you seem incapable of not doing.

They talk past one another , as we see in today’s polarized political world. — Joshs

One more thing along these lines.

There’s a heartbreaking story Tim Alberta did for The Atlantic about the chairman of the Michigan state house committee that investigated claims of fraud in the 2020 election, and then wrote the report saying it was all crap. This is a middle-aged Republican, farmer, church-goer, who now has friends who hate him. Despite knowing him and trusting him for decades, they believe some dickhead on Facebook rather than him. That takes some explaining. It’s not just ‘different worlds’ to me; one of them has had a toxin deliberately introduced into their system. Polarization in my country has a basis in diverging cultures, in our absurd inequality, but it was also engineered by people who benefit from it. How much of the difference between one person’s world and another’s is down to the choices someone (or many someones) made, perhaps neither of them?

Numbers are universal. Opinions are not. Meaning if we talk about the number 5 we don’t tend to disagree about which number 5 we are talking about nor do we disagree about what ‘about’ or what ‘or’ we’re referring to - we don’t even tend inspect the notion that there could be any difference.

Human beings are indeed different from other beings, and are intimately interconnected with the question of being. That beings become "objects" is a historical fact, one that really takes root in the modern era, starting with Descartes and reaching its apex in Kant. The res cogitans, the thinking (read: conscious) substance ('res') over and against the res extensa, the extended substance, is the mind/body issue and, later, the subject/object issue. The development of science out of natural philosophy takes it further. — Xtrix

:up: Well said.

Ah, Dickheads on Facebook, the new Salem witch trials...

the chairman of the Michigan state house committee that investigated claims of fraud in the 2020 election, and then wrote the report saying it was all crap. This is a middle-aged Republican, farmer, church-goer, who now has friends who hate him. Despite knowing him and trusting him for decades, they believe some dickhead on Facebook rather than him. That takes some explaining. It’s not just ‘different worlds’ to me; one of them has had a toxin deliberately introduced into their system. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, lies matter, and one disposes of the concept of truth at one's own risk... Deception, toxicity, con jobs are different from just having an opinion. They are attempts at abusing people. There is a difference between unwittingly wrong and consciously evil.

“Unless phenomenology were able to show that there is in fact a decisive and radical difference between the phenomenality of constituted objects and the phenomenality of constituting subjectivity, i.e., a radical difference between object-manifestation and self-manifestation, its entire project would be threatened.”
--- Zahavi 2004 — Joshs

There is a book about that on my reading list: I and Thou by Martin Buber. Which apparently explains that we can engage in two types of relationships: with objects and with subjects. The distinction has little to do with the thing in itself we relate to, as one can treat things as subjects or people as objects. It's about whether the relation is closed, instrumental or rather is an open-ended dialogue.

:up:

Hi Proof. You've heard of this guy, Buber? You're the only one who reads here, in my experience.

Not only do each of live in our own ‘world’ with respect to others, but from one moment to the next our own ‘world’ changes into a néw one. — Joshs

If I understand you correctly, then, you're speaking metaphorically when you claim we each live in different worlds. If that's so, well and good, but I'd prefer not to, as I think it merely leads to confusion in these circumstances, and can be misleading.

I don't think of myself as independent from the world, or apart from it. I think we're all part of the world (or universe, if you prefer). That means, to me, that I'm not "independent" from the world. I'm inseparable from it. Nor is it "independent" from me if that means that I'm separate from it. I'm not somewhere outside the world. I'd say you're not, either, nor is anything or anyone else.

Because we're parts of the world, our lives are a series of interactions with the rest of the world.

If someone disappoints you, violates your moral
principles , rejects you, humiliates you , embraces political views you find dangerous and cruel, acts in seemingly irrational, incoherent or inappropriate ways, ‘same world’ means there are external sources of standards of rationality . ‘Same world’ provides the basis of norms of empirical correctness , which we can then use to determine individual rationality. Since everyone is experiencing this ‘same world ‘ , everyone has the opportunity to test their understandings of the facts of the world using this external existing ‘same’ world as the universal yardstick of truth. This leaves no room for the idea that the facts we perceive are determined by a larger network of values, so that , try as we might, we cannot get your sense of meaning of the facts to align precisely with mine. — Joshs

I'd say it's incorrect to speak of "external sources" because nothing is external to us in any significant sense. We don't find standards somewhere "outside" of us. What we think, do, value, feel, all takes place in the universe. Our thoughts, values, conduct, feelings, desires, etc., are parts of the universe and are interrelated with it as they arise from living in the world as a part of it. So are our cultures. We don't find anything in the world (considered as separate from us); we discover things about the rest of the world and discover things about ourselves and others.

It isn't necessary to think of each person as living in their own worlds to explain disagreements. Those can be explained by various things, all a part of the world, which relate to living as parts of the world. The environment or culture in which we live will influence our way of thinking, our values, our desires, etc. So will our education, our social status. There's nothing special about this; it's the natural result of being a living organism that's a human being.

We do quite a few things based on understandings about the rest of the world successfully. Sometimes, we're unsuccessful. Lack of success doesn't mean that we don't or can't know anything about the world of which we're a part.

Davidson, among many others for different reasons, has made the same point, that people overwhelmingly agree about the world, and we fight over our differences against this backdrop of agreement. — Srap Tasmaner

Davidson wasn’t ever able to shake off a ‘same world’ realism , as Rorty showed. Do you think a fight between a rightwing supporter of Trump and a far left supporter of critical race theory occurs against the backdrop of overwhelming agreement about the world? Do you think that Descartes and Derrida, or Aquinas and Kierkegaard would view their philosophical disagreements against a backdrop of overwhelming agreement about the world?
If I show you an optical illusion where the picture of the old woman becomes a young woman with a gestalt shift of perception, are the details of the world of the first picture in overwhelming agreement with the details of the world of the second picture? Notice that what constitutes a line or a nose or a leg in the first picture becomes something different in the second picture.Let’s say that, no matter now hard we try, I can only see the old woman and you can only see the young woman. If we stand very close to the image, we seem to be in overwhelming agreement on what we’re seeing, a bunch of abstract colors and lines. But the greater the breadth of perspective , the more divergent our worlds become.

Of the words tho at you wrote me and that I am
reading now , the simpler , more concrete words ( the , will produce the greatest agreement between my construal and what you intended. As the words become more abstract , and as I move from
individual word to the the larger context of the sentence and the even larger content of the paragraph , overwhelming agreement morphs into an reading that is increasingly disparate from what you had in mind , which can be demonstrated by the questions that will
flow back and forth between us over the sense of the ideas. So do we determine sameness of ‘ world’ on the basis of subordinate details and simple words , and conclude because we seem to agree on these that we live in an overwhelmingly same world, or do we determine the sameness of this world in the basis of the most superordinate concepts and values that each of us make use of to make determinations of meaning?

I guess it depends on whether you buy into the idea that each of us do in fact organize our interpretation of events in this hierarchical, functionally unified manner.

Your talk of worlds makes them seem so separate. — Srap Tasmaner

People are already profoundly separated fro each other
according to the ‘same world’ thesis. Their separation is a function of arbitrary desire, value, will. My notion of individual worlds sees the interrelationships among them to be much more intimate than is possible with a ‘same world’ view which rests on the capriciousness of iintent and desire.

Our individual worlds share some ‘sources’, it seems to me. We didn’t have to intersubjectively construct that commonality, since we filled our plates, at least partly, at the same cultural salad bar, and we took some of the same stuff. — Srap Tasmaner

We have to subjectively construct the objects as well as intersubjectively construct them. The sources are never the same , only similar. A ‘ spatial object’ is constructed by me out of a flow of constantly changing senses of what appears, and those changing sense never repeat themselves as the same. I convince myself
that this flow is emanating form a self-identical
object because I fill in from expectation and memory what I don’t actually see in front of me. The empirical
object that is the same for all of us is constructed in a similar manner , by a coordination of multiple perspectives of multiple participants. We turn what are similar worlds into the ‘same’ world in this way, by an idealization. So the point is that when we reach agreement on the basis of ‘sameness’ , it is more primordially a question of similarity.

As for Heidegger ‘dasein’ doesn’t mean anything as far as I can tell. — I like sushi

Dasein is inextricably linked to his model
of temporality. Do you see how his model of time differs from Husserl’s internal time consciousness? For
one thing Husserl says that retention holds
the just past in front of us as aril part of the present. Heidegger days the past, as the having been , is created by the present. It is a past already changed by the present.

I think this is expressed in the biggest difference between Heidegger and Husserl. Husserl says intended objects of perception don’t bring into play the entire history of our experiencing as a unified whole, but they do for Heidegger’s

How much of the difference between one person’s world and another’s is down to the choices someone (or many someones) made, perhaps neither of them? — Srap Tasmaner

I’d say very little. This is a temptation. we are drawn to when we cannot rethink
how on earth someone could
possibly seriously brice something f without being brainwashed, irrational or pathological.

It’s not just ‘different worlds’ to me; one of them has had a toxin deliberately introduced into their system. — Srap Tasmaner

Toxin is an other name for brain washing , conditioning , irrationality , etc.

But the way that I put it is that secular-scientific thought tends to 'objectify' human beings, and in so doing looses what makes human beings different from any other object of rational analysis; that's the sense in which I'm saying that 'beings' are different from 'objects'.
....
which is why I believe the Heidegger adopted the term 'dasein' to compensate for the loss of that sense of being in modern lexicons. — Wayfarer

Heidegger calls "Dasein" an "existential title" - it is an objectivized form of the subject with strong connotations to Hegel. It is literally a "being there" and at it's core a reflection.

Heidegger calls "Dasein" an "existential title" - it is an objectivized form of the subject with strong connotations to Hegel. It is literally a "being there" and at it's core a reflection. — Heiko

There is nothing objectivized about Dasein. It is not an. object or a subject. It is between the two as transition. ‘Being there’ isn’t a stasis or state or object, it is a becoming. Dasein doesn’t ‘reflect’ back to itself as a pre-existing subject, it It is always beyond or ahead of itself.

Dasein doesn’t ‘reflect’ back to itself as a pre-existing subject, it It is always beyond or ahead of itself. — Joshs

Which was to be shown. The subject reflects on itself as Dasein, therefor the reflection is never appropriate.

The subject reflects on itself as Dasein, — Heiko

Let’s talk about what a subject is for Heidegger or for you, so we can see what exactly is going on in this structure of ‘reflection’. How do you think the concept of reflection differs for Heidegger from the ordinary understanding of it , or from a Kantian understanding of it?

How do you think the concept of reflection differs for Heidegger from the ordinary understanding of it , or from a Kantian understanding of it? — Joshs

The reflective element is embedded to Dasein as it bears the concept of self. It is the "being that I am". Therefor it is "seiend" or ontic. Heidegger did not put forth any further ground-laying designations but continues to analyze the "way it is". If that is not a reflection, then what is?

". If that is not a reflection, then what is? — Heiko

Reflection is considered to be a turning back of consciousness to draw an experience from memory in order to examine it. It is generally distinguished from intentional acts that deal with present objects rather than objects from memory. So how does Heidegger’s ‘reflection’ differ from this model? First of all , Heidegger doesn’t make such a distinction between remembering and experiencing something new. All experiencing is of something new. That being the case , when Dasein turns ‘back’ to itself , it is not encountering a previously existing self that it then examines. Instead, it is experiencing something utterly fresh and new. One could say that it gets its sense of ‘self’ always from a new experience of its world.

“The Dasein does not need a special kind of observation, nor does it need to conduct a sort of espionage on the ego in order to have the self; rather, as the Dasein gives itself over immediately and passionately to the world itself, its own self is reflected to it from things.”

Reflection is considered to be a turning back of consciousness to draw an experience from memory in order to examine it. — Joshs

Or it can be what you see in a mirror. For me reflection is more like self-description, self-observation or anything where you are "your own object". You cannot write about yourself without reflecting.

It is generally distinguished from intentional acts that deal with present objects rather than objects from memory. — Joshs

If you put aside the mirror....

“The Dasein does not need a special kind of observation, nor does it need to conduct a sort of espionage on the ego in order to have the self; rather, as the Dasein gives itself over immediately and passionately to the world itself, its own self is reflected to it from things.” — Joshs

So, which things, do you think, told Heidegger that about his Dasein?