Well, can the existence of others be used to prove my non-existence? Can my existence be used to prove your non-existence? The only person that exists is the one that does not know other people exist? — Eric Souza

I suggest that you exist because other people exist.

We share a language in which and as which we can wrestle with such issues.

I have a direct experience, that's an ultimate proof. Anything trying to prove it more or deny it it's simply a waste of time. — Eugen

Well I have direct (personal) experience of the 17 gods who created our world. Is that an 'ultimate proof' of my 17-god theology?

All of them with some success for the easy problem and 0 success on the hard problem. Again, the hard problem has been avoided and even denied, but ultimately it has remained untouched by materialism. — Eugen

The hard problem is understood by some precisely so that progress can't be made (so that nothing could count as progress.)

'I demand an objective explanation for stuff that only I have access to or am.'

I'd argue toward a philosophical explanation of consciousness. The word 'materialistic' tends to mislead people into equally useless assumptions (of ineffable stuff we can't be objective about).

And why were they tolerated before and not anymore? — ssu

That's a separate question, also worth looking into.

Still, you did not answer why black citizens of the USA should tolerate statues honoring CSA rebels who fought for the institution of slavery.

If consciousness is a private somethingness (some beetle in the box), then we can't even check whether we have the same (private) meaning 'in mind' when we use the word 'consciousness.'

If meaning is private, conversation is pointless.

If meaning (a kind of somethingness) is private and yet we are uncritically confident that mental experiences are the same for all, why is that?

Is it because other humans also have human faces? Because our public doings are carefully synchronized? Because humans respond complexly to their environment?

Is a dandelion "not conscious" because we have checked (forgetting for a moment that we can't even know what agreement would mean here, giving the assumptions being challenged)?

Or just because it doesn't respond to its environment (including other dandelions) in a sufficiently complex way?

But what if we zoom in and consider the complicated coding of its DNA? Aren't individual cells staggeringly complex?

I'm not claiming that plants are conscious (or that they aren't).

The issue is figuring out what we are even talking about.

I feel this is a good litmus test for whether they're genuinely interested in understanding it or are really just protecting some subscribed-to or private belief in magic. — Kenosha Kid

Like the cogito? The ghost in the machine?

But, to construct this post, you assumed an ontology and its epistemology. So, you are more primary and before those concepts. — Clay Stablein

What is this 'you' if not more language? Aren't 'you' assuming an ontology and an epistemology by assuming some ghost for whom the world is a spectacle?

Note that the ghost speaks English, and that 'meaning' (if we can talk about it sensibly at all) cannot be private.

Finally, you assumed that @Kenosha Kid was also this kind of ghost, even if you have no way of checking, given that these ghosts are invisible for scientific instruments, as usually understood.

I take no issue with the cogito. — Kenosha Kid

Maybe you should take issue, though, with this philosopher's phlogiston.

Returning to Wittgenstein's beetle in a box, none of the people in this scenario can be in error about there being something in the box - this somethingness is what the word "consciousness" refers to. As such "consciousness", the word, lacks details necessary to enable a precise conception of what it actually is. — TheMadFool

I don't disagree. It's just that this not-being-able-to-be-error is the problem. If we want to be 'rational' about consciousness, how can it also be something that we are never wrong about?

I don't deny this somethingness. I remember being awake all night waiting for an emergency dentist appointment for a tooth extraction.The pain was terrible and 'mine.'

But pain and the sense that 'there is a there there' seem to be outside of objectivity, at least inasmuch as they are private (in a 'purity' of their concepts which would put them 'under' or 'behind' social conventions.)

Do you find this "public" definition of consciousness deficient/incorrect/misleading — TheMadFool

I'd say that the 'precritical' public meaning works just fine for getting along in the world but leads to problems (like solipsism) if it is embraced as a foundation for the rest of philosophy.

Here's Aristotle:
*****************************************************************************************************************
Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images.
*****************************************************************************************************************

Is this not an excellent sketch of today's common sense? But Wittgenstein's beetle passage shows (with the rest of his work) that the supposed 'mental experiences' bear no weight.

Arguments are made of words, not otherwise ineffable what-it-was-like.

That's good for us, since objectivity depends on the publicity of meaning.

Aristotle's passage tries to save us from solipsism by assuming such mental experiences are common, but why would one think this if not because of social-linguistic conventions?

Indeed, these 'mental experiences' are caught up in such conventions, so there's something problematic in asserting or denying a 'consciousness' whose role in the game is to point at what can never be checked (in the 'purity' of its concept, as ineffable.)

I'm fascinated by the fact he predicted anti-matter because it 'fell out of the equations' but that its existence was only confirmed much later. That, to me, again, is more evidence of the power of reason, and it's certainly not simply a matter of language, seems to me. — Wayfarer

I will try to account for this from my POV.

To predict anti-matter is to voice an expectation that certain statements involving 'anti-matter' will become facts (to present a fact candidate).

Reason looks like a useful reification, but then that's what language does: it reifies, carves the 'One' into the many.

The problem is, that doesn't allow for anything other than language - no referent, nothing beyond words. — Wayfarer

Perhaps it doesn't allow for any thing (in its thingness) apart from language. If one casts language as the (intelligible) structure of the world, this is not to say that the world is just language.

It is perhaps to drop the notion of the chair-in-itself hidden somehow behind the chair we talk about.

The word qualia 'wants' to point at something 'outside' language (and so also outside objectivity).

We might think of language as the skeleton of the world and sensation/emotion as its flesh.

So I guess, at the end of the day, I'm still on the religious side of the ledger, although I rather hope more towards the gnostic end of that scale. — Wayfarer

I call myself an atheist as the least wrong summary, but a less wrong summary is referring to Sartor Resartus.

If I have a religion, it's something like philosophy...which is it to say perhaps endlessly a work-in-progress.

This is one of the insights that Barfield is known for. — Wayfarer

For me they live in the same world largely because they live together in as the language of that time and place. Language just is the intelligible structure of the world, I suggest, and the rational minds thought needed to grasp that structure are themselves 'more language.'

'Language speaks the subject' and the ego is an effect not of the world it gazes at but the world from which it emerges with/as an illusory sense of its isolation. Or that's an idea I like.

they're only perceptible to reason, but they're real. — Wayfarer

I'd say that they are reason and agree that they are real, and that the word real has not two meanings but rather too many meanings (as many as we want.)

The point of the essay was, in short, that what we refer to or think of when we use that name, is nearly always a social convention or collective idea comprising layers of meaning that have been built up over centuries. — Wayfarer

I suspect that thinking in general is like this. At our best we can think (in our inherited conventional language) against social conventions like meanings, but only by using them as we do so, else we would not be intelligible.

if we make an effort to avoid the point of view that leads to solipsisim and confine ourselves to common sense, there is little doubt — TheMadFool

True, but then that's just ignoring the issue, which is that a certain conception of consciousness threatens us with its solipsistic implications.

You mention common sense, or common meaning, or...meaning in common. That's it. Meaning is public, conventional.

Perhaps 'my' toothache is ineffably 'mine' or 'private' because 'around here' we don't ask people to prove they have a toothache.

The mind/consciousness, the common sense take on it, is what's missing in rocks and other non-sentient objects. — TheMadFool

I do know what you mean, more or less, so the issue is really just challenging this all-too-automatic take on it. If we zoom in on it, we see that it can't work the way it's supposed to, IMO.

I don't see how words can be evidence of mind/consciousness. — TheMadFool

What would be? And if there is no evidence and there even can't be evidence, why are you so sure about this mind/consciousness stuff?

How can it have any function at all in a rational/critical conversation?

One could make a similar point about denying this consciousness-stuff to rocks. What is being denied? What are we checking for and not finding?

But why? Why have any consistency to anything? Why not have a gravitational force that changes constantly or a conservation law that works "most" of the time. — Benj96

Great question. Have you looked at Hume's version?

I agree with others that patterns allow us to ask why in the first place.

At the same time, confessedly immersed in and dependent on our linguistic patterns, it still feels right to ask why, even if every answer may have a form that allows for the next why, perhaps the same why.

There's no reason to think our limited model is the real thing. — fishfry

I like this attitude, but we can ask if the real thing functions here as more than our expectation that we'll have to live in a different model. What I am thinking of here is the 'total model' of culture-world and not just mathematical physics.

There's a forest somewhere, and in that forest are trees, and one of those trees has branches and leaves, and on one of those leaves there's a caterpillar. The caterpillar knows when it's night and when it's day. It knows to go toward what it likes to eat; and away from what likes to eat it. It knows, deep in its DNA, that someday it will ascend to become a beautiful butterfly.

In short: That caterpillar has a metaphysics. — fishfry

Good stuff!

One, there could be higher levels of awareness and intelligence out there that are to us as we are to a caterpillar on a leaf. — fishfry

While I agree, I am fascinated by this analogy. This 'higher level intelligence' seems to have to exist for us (for our limited understanding) as a vague promise of more.

To really grasp what we mean by higher intelligence, it seems we'd have to already possess it.

One might say that we are hyper-cultural animals. It's not just that some things are forbidden while others are encourage.

Our very ability to think (even as anguished individuals) depends on us having 'absorbed' a supremely sophisticated system of communicative conventions (along with various bodily conventions including skills with tools, how close to stand to others, and so on).

...all constructs of our humanity, a superior platform of existence that has interwoven morality into existence, tossing aside the most primal hedonistic natures... — Roberto

If I read you correctly, this 'superior platform of existence' is what I mean by culture. The last phrase reminds me of Freud's vision of civilization and its (necessary) discontents.

If society is the 'redeemed form of man,' then we society types still suffer and delight in some nasty dreams, brought to you by the 'it' (the old Adam.)

There was a thread recently about AI generated poetry, and the point I made there is that poems are generally designed to evoke feelings and/or experiences. — Janus

I agree, but we can imagine that Shakespeare was a p-zombie. Or that ten thousand monkeys got lucky on typewriters. The text is the text.

Even if AI never ends up giving us first-rate poetry, language already functions in its own space, like a machine, basically independent of its ghostly sources.

The difficulty here, for William James, is that, unlike the body, used here as a stand-in for the physical aspect of life, the mind/consciousness doesn't leave behind a footprint à la fossils which [mind] archaeologists can dig up , study, and prove William James right.

Now that I think of it, do fossils of ancient life, specifically those known to be truly primitive as in representing the first batch of living organisms to appear on earth, show any evidence of mental phenomena? — TheMadFool

What occurs to me is that 'mind/consciousness' seems to be implicitly defined as a footprintless ghost. Language must always be mere clothing, a mere sheet draped over this ghost.

But what if language is only a dead sheet because we insist that it 'must' be?

Can't our words here be footprints? Or --better --the feet themselves?

I found a pdf of Barfield's poetic diction. I am also fishing a quotes page. Here are some goodies.


*************************************************************************************************************
The obvious is the hardest thing of all to point out to anyone who has genuinely lost sight of it.
...
We can only cope with the dangers of language if we recognize that language is by nature magical and therefore highly dangerous.
...
If people say the world we perceive is a 'construct' of our brains, they are saying in effect, that it results from an inveterate habit of thought.
...
Before the scientific revolution, [man] did not feel himself isolated by his skin from the world outside to quite the same extent that we do.
...
Therefore it is only people living in the same period and, broadly speaking, in the same community, who inhabit the same world. People living in other periods, or even at the same period but in a totally different community, do not inhabit the same world about which they have different ideas, they inhabit different worlds altogether.
*************************************************************************************************************

The first quote echoes Heraclitus. Others remind me of Wittgenstein.

To me it seems that sharing a language is sharing a world (if imperfectly, given that the world is a self-writing poem-in-progress, with our help.)

Sure, go ahead. — Noble Dust

Really I'm repeating an old idea, that identity is a 'fiction' (or useful hypothesis).

I'm fairly Wittgensteinian when it comes to meaning, so I think meaning is 'public' and 'between us' rather than 'inside' --despite relating to the natural-by-custom intuitions otherwise.

So identity is a kind of enacted largely linguistic pattern, unified by custom and a proper name.

Eh I feel like you're trying to play into me saying I'm a poet. — Noble Dust

Actually I want to convince you that you are a poem.

'Noble dust' is a nice name, btw, so maybe I am half way there.

I found a Barfield quote that speaks to me:

Yeah, I'll have to read more.
******
Language has preserved for us the inner, living history of man's soul. It reveals the evolution of consciousness.

I don't know what it means that "they are interpretations of us having (in some ways) separate bodies". — Noble Dust

Why do we put bodies in separate graves, under individualized headstones? Why is the rule or custom one soul per body? Why not some other number? Or an undetermined number?

I'm not complaining and hopefully not insane but just trying to point out what is 'too' obvious, which is the dominance of the concept/custom of the isolated soul or mind.

Starting from this dead poem, we get all kinds of philosophy that takes it for granted. Again, I'm not objecting, but only pointing at dominant dead poetry that functions as a context for live poetry. I mean complex debates about the relationship of an internal world (if any) and an external (if any) and their complex relationship (if any.)

Where are all the debates about how many egos per skull?

Why not 'we think therefore we are'? How did Descartes know there was only one of him in there, if his body (assumed singular) might be an illusion?

Habits of interpretation are (mis-)taken for bedrock, for super-facts, for the screen on which a world is projected.

Awesome. So I rescued my metaphor a little bit? (I'll check out Barfield.)

I also found one more passage that I was looking for (really digging Carlyle at the moment):

*******************************************************************************************************************
Language is called the Garment of Thought: however, it should rather be, Language is the Flesh-Garment, the Body, of Thought. I said that Imagination wove this Flesh-Garment; and does not she? Metaphors are her stuff: examine Language; what, if you except some few primitive elements (of natural sound), what is it all but Metaphors, recognized as such, or no longer recognized; still fluid and florid, or now solid-grown and colorless? If those same primitive elements are the osseous fixtures in the Flesh-Garment, Language,—then are Metaphors its muscles and tissues and living integuments. An unmetaphorical style you shall in vain seek for: is not your very Attention a Stretching-to? The difference lies here: some styles are lean, adust, wiry, the muscle itself seems osseous; some are even quite pallid, hunger-bitten and dead-looking; while others again glow in the flush of health and vigorous self-growth, sometimes (as in my own case) not without an apoplectic tendency.

It's not poetic to say that subjects, egos, or minds, or poets are poems themselves. — Noble Dust

I will try to rescue the metaphor. The intelligibility or structure of mundane reality is dead poetry, or at least on its death bed. Even 'poet' is a dead metaphor.

***

Notable enough too, here as elsewhere, wilt thou find the potency of Names; which indeed are but one kind of such custom-woven, wonder-hiding Garments. Witchcraft, and all manner of Spectre-work, and Demonology, we have now named Madness, and Diseases of the Nerves. Seldom reflecting that still the new question comes upon us: What is Madness, what are Nerves?
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1051/1051-h/1051-h.htm#link2HCH0024

Not sure what you mean. — Noble Dust

I mean that 'subjects' or 'egos' or 'minds' or 'poets' are themselves 'poems.' They are interpretations of us having (in some ways) separate bodies.

If one thinks of concepts as neither physical nor mental but rather as caught up in or rather as social conventions, then one has a kind of 'meaning field' that can't be reduced to something more elemental --- though philosophers love to try!

The 'space of reasons' is perhaps a better term, though this over-emphasizes epistemology perhaps while neglecting of other poetic effects (in particular, invention.)

Interesting. Do you connect Λόγος to the concept of "Kairos" at all? — Noble Dust

For me time in general is hugely tied up with Λόγος, given that language evolves while also 'remembering.'

As far as Kairos goes (I have seen the word used by other thinkers but haven't used it myself), what comes to mind is saying the right thing for that moment.

I am thinking of the temporal context: Individual words aren't really bearers of meaning, as far as I can tell. Only the total historical context determines meaning (inasmuch as it can be determined.)

More locally, I think of the way that meaning 'plays over' a sentence as we anticipate the completion of a thought. In musical terms, a certain pitch gets its meaning from its context.

My philosopher's god would be philosophy itself, — Pfhorrest

That's my philosopher's god too, more or less.

but it would be bad philosophy to call philosophy itself God, and I wouldn't abuse my god that way, so... — Pfhorrest

Maybe it's bad philosophy out proper context, but given that philosophers tend to accept as real only what they can justify philosophically (rationally), the metaphor isn't so bad.

Do you mean a mystic god is poetry, metaphor, etc? I may be misreading you. — Noble Dust

At first I meant that talk of the philosopher's god was poetry, but given the proposed primacy of Λόγος also expressed, yes: the mystic's god is poetry-in-progress.

The concept of the poet is one more poem here, as is the (self-referential here) concept of poetry.

It's debatable whether there's an outer physical world. It's not debatable there's an "inner" mental world that is composed of sensations and noemata. — RogueAI

While I do understand where you are coming from --and while I do understand that in ordinary language terms that 'consciousness exists' -- I also think that a certain inherited interpretation of consciousness obscures important aspects of it.

When you say that 'it's not debatable,' I actually agree. But that is precisely the problem!

If consciousness is radically private, we are wasting our time talking about it. We don't can't even know if we mean the same thing by the word 'consciousness.'

We can throw way words like 'meaning' too as grunts that can't be checked for whatever 'meaning' is supposed to mean in our new isolation.

Now, are you going to say this inner/mental world isn't part of "the world"? — RogueAI

On the contrary, I am saying that the inner/mental world is actually 'in' the world, between us as language users. 'The world makes the self possible.'

As you reason with yourself and compose a response to this post, entertain the thought that you are using a borrowed, alien language to do so, because I claim that you are.

But we humans are the aliens, and the world is significant for us as social animals who have developed a complex system of interaction that involves sentences, handshakes, salutes, flags, etc.

Maybe there are toothaches, but the meaning of the word 'toothache' is 'out there' between us.

It seems to me that critical thinking is generally supposed to be grounded on experience that we can all agree upon. — Janus

I basically agree, so I'm really just pointing out that 'experience' is somewhat superfluous here, precisely because it is 'invisible.'

Moreover, let's do a thought experiment and pretend that Isaac Newton was a p-zombie. Is his work any less valid? What silly talk about p-zombies does for us is show that certain 'ghosts' (contact with 'experience' or the 'physical') are doing no work, bearing no weight.

To me it seems that experience is playing the role of the given, but note that we don't put experience (the what-it-was-like) in an argument. We can and do report experience. A witness can testify.

This is why I suggest that facts are primary, while realizing that philosophers have many theories about what makes a fact a fact (including 'experience', the 'physical', etc.)

critical thinking is generally supposed to be grounded on experience that we can all agree upon. — Janus

I suggest that you put 'facts' where 'experience' is.

On the God issue, I think it's helpful to clarify (however roughly) between a God that interferes in the
world and perhaps the afterworld and a philosopher's or mystic's God that involves gnosis, ecstasy, etc.

I don't personally believe in the first kind of God. The year 2020 is not helping, and humans tend to get lost in their fantasies.

As far as the second kind goes, I have enjoyed and do enjoy my own version of it. To me it's going to be poetry, metaphor, myth, symbol, art. That's not necessarily a demotion, since human beings live and die for these things.

They are 'mortal' - perishable, imperfect, and transient. Whereas the archetypal forms subsist in the One and are apprehended by Nous: while they do not exist they provide the basis for all existing things by creating the pattern, the ratio, whereby particular things are formed (which is made explicit in Plotinus). They are real, above and beyond the existence of wordly things; but they don't actually exist. They don't need to exist; things do the hard work of existence. — Wayfarer

In general I relate to this. At the same time, I would frame it in terms of language or Λόγος. There are patterns in the world. The 'same' river doesn't have the 'same' water, but rivers are still 'made' of water.

The 'One' is (for me) 'just' the old Λόγος, and the 'mind' that is supposed to gaze on form is itself another pattern in that Λόγος. It is a useful pattern, but upon close examination we see that the individual 'mind' is an 'effect' of language, an emanation of the 'One.'

Where we perhaps disagree is that I think you understand some of these patterns to exist independently of human beings. To me that's uncheckable and even hard to parse.

If one sees language, as I do, in terms of social conventions, then the Λόγος is completely incarnate. There is no river without water, and the dove can't fly in a vacuum.

Hence why I bring up those embarrasing discussions about 'mathematical fictionalism' and 'the indispensability argument for mathematics'. The reality of number is an inconvenient truth for naturalism. — Wayfarer

As I currently see it, there are two sides of the same coin, and that coin is the myth of the given. Somehow the grand edifice of critical thinking is supposed to be erected on one of two versions of the ineffable, either private intellectual intuition or private sensation-emotion.

Both of these ineffable 'givens' are supposed to make sentences true somehow, and they are tempting inherited interpretations for the objectivity that we palpably have. There are constraints on any math worth talking about, and we tend to call something a fact rather than an interpretation the more it sticks to familiar, 'physical' objects.

"Surely some kind of objects are responsible for objectivity." Yet those postulated foundational objects are 'defined' so that they can't be checked --stuff that's left when no one is around to witness it, stuff that only 'I' can see, etc.

In fact, I suggest, we reason from uncontroversial propositions (facts) toward less controversial propositions ( fact candidates or interpretations). This does leave facts 'ungrounded' in a certain sense, but such groundlessness may be necessary or 'natural.'

From my perspective, the ineffably 'mental' and ineffably 'physical' are in the same leaky boat. It's not really a practical problem, though, and that's why one can be a 'bad' philosopher and good scientist or good mystic, etc.

In other words, philosophers (the kind I am being at the moment) are fussy florists.

I am not of the opinion that science cannot explain consciousness: the exact opposite....

Consciousness is a good example. Lumping materialists and physicalists together for the sake of argument, the conflict is between consciousness being a physical state or process and it being unphysical, i.e. undetectable and not a "thing" existing in space. The justification for the latter is typically the above fallacy: science has not explained consciousness --> science cannot explain consciousness --> consciousness is unphysical. — Kenosha Kid

Maybe science can explain talk about so-called consciousness. Is there a science of ghosts?

'Consciousness is not physical.'

"Consciousness is physical.'

Aren't both these statements problematic?

Is 'physical' just a synonym for the shit we can be objective about? Except that it leaves out mathematics?

Atoms, mortgages, real numbers....we can speak objectively about all of them.

For context, I'm a science-loving atheist. I am coming from a quasi-Wittgensteinian place, and I am also impressed by Sellars, quoted below.

****
Antecedent to epistemology, Sellars’s treatment of semantics essentially constitutes a denial of what can be called a semantic given—the idea that some of our terms or concepts, independently of their occurrence in formal and material inferences, derive their meaning directly from confrontation with a particular (kind of) object or experience.
****

My sensation awareness and memory are not invisible to me. — Kenosha Kid

In the everyday sense of those words, of course. The point is to challenge an inherited way of talking and thinking about 'consciousness.'

That this reassuring consensus requires words, it does not follow that I needed the words to 'not be spoken to by God'. — Kenosha Kid

I think you are taking too much for granted here. You could only be spoken to by God if you have been trained into knowing a language --the same language that would allow you to interpret yourself (your 'experience') as a human being (as a self) talked to by some kind of god.

I'm not denying some kind of extra-linguistic reality. There's just maybe not much we can say about it. We reason from facts (already language).

A p-zombie could write a great work of science or philosophy.

Objectivity does not depend on contact with mysterious objects, be they sense-data or intellectual intuitions.

It happens in public, in language.

I do not contest that I need language about sensation to understand your sensations. I contest that I do not need it to have my own. — Kenosha Kid

In the usual sense, sure, but you can't prove you aren't a p-zombie. I don't think you are, but the concept of the p-zombie is useful for thinking about epistemology.

Your private sensations (if they exist, whatever they are) can play no role in themselves. On the other hand, public speech acts including words like 'sensation' are epistemologically significant.

What do you make of the following famous passage?

https://web.stanford.edu/~paulsko/Wittgenstein293.html