2009/7/23 Brent Meeker <meeke...@dslextreme.com>:
> I'm not sure I can even parse this paragraph. An "I" that is reflexive is one
> that refers to itself. So what is RITSIAR can refer to itself. So it
> implicitly entails a unity to refer to. Our is the unity the unity of
> perception, i.e. all my perceptions cohere so they are "mine". They
> constitute
> a world being present to "me" from "my" point of view.
Yes, more or less, so far as it goes. But my use of the term
'reflexive' was an attempt to characterise relationship with respect
to something that can be in 'relation' only with itself because it
exists uniquely. Consequently the relation of this unity to itself
can be conceived only as self-encounter - or what I referred to as the
paradox of the part and the whole, which we discussed before. The "I"
of RITSIAR appears as a global self-reference of which 1-persons are
subsets. If this is solipsism, then it is the solipsism of the whole,
not the part, as I have previously remarked in this list. I suspect
that the difficulty in 'parsing' results from my attempts to
punctiliously restrict my claims to no more or less than what this
implies, but this seems often to produce the opposite response.
Sorry.
> 'Reflexive' because it is unique;
>
> Why would being unique imply it can refer to itself - or whatever "reflexive"
> means in this context ("unconscious reaction"?)?
See above.
>> 'personal' because it is the superset out of which 'persons' (subsets)
>> emerge; 'present' because - given that such 1-persons self-assert
>> 'presently'
> Does everything RITSIAR "self-assert"? I understand asserting proposition,
> i.e.
> assigning a value "true" to it. I don't understand "self-assert".
Yes, sorry to just spring this mode of speaking on you. I'm trying to
say that we always and only discover the 1-person through its
present-tense assertion (in the sense of personal 'assertiveness') of
itself. Perhaps this is analogous to Heidegger's idea of 'throwness'.
I'm just trying to say that whatever is RITSIAR must have these
characteristics of being personal and present 'entirely through its
own efforts'. I was trying to give a philosophically minimalistic
justification of these terms in order that I could use them
consistently at later stages of discourse. I hope we can iron this
out through debate.
> - the background from which they can be said, for certain
>> purposes, to distinguish themselves a fortiori constitutes a more
>> inclusive 'presence'.
>
> ???
As the part, so the whole. The 1-person subsists in the presence
(presentness?) of the unity from which it is temporarily
distinguished. The idea of bare presence I'm using here is intended
to support intuitions of the atemporal and aspatial - i.e. being at a
level prior to the orderings of time and space through
differentiation.
> Of course one can't know a falsehood. Or are you saying we can't know
> anything
> but ourselves (a step toward solipism). Or are you saying we can only know
> what
> we are through introspection (reflection)?
>
As so often I get the feeling that it would be so much easier to
communicate if we were all in the same room! Anyway, yes, I'm saying
precisely that we can't know anything but ourselves, because knowing
ourselves is indivisible from being ourselves. Therefore we know only
what is constituted by our own way-of-being. Any other approach,
AFAICS, inevitably leads straight to an infinite regress of
'observers' (sorry again about the scare quotes, but this denotes my
questioning of the ordinary use of the terms). So let's be clear: I'm
claiming that 'knowing' is nothing more or less than all the
'ways-of-being'; individual knowledge, specifically, is a way-of-being
differentiated from the whole. We may think of perception and action
arising indivisibly in the form of self-encounter at the 'boundaries'
established foundationally by differentiation: our detailed
self-intimacy comprising complexes of such encounters.
In summary, I'm saying that 'existence' (all the foregoing stems from
my being asked to say what I meant by this term) equates to a
personally present self-intimacy, and 1-person existence is a subset
of this (hence avoiding solipsism at the level of the individual, but
embracing it at the level of the whole). And I'm also saying that
everything that exists does so in this way *only*: all other notions
of 'existence' are parasitic on these intuitions, including - IMHO -
COMP and other platonic schemas. This is no doubt quite a large claim
(though I think it's implied, and sometimes explicit, in all the
metaphysical systems I've referred to - and others) but I'd be happy
to attempt to defend it in any specific instance: indeed, this is the
purpose of my taking pains to establish these foundational points of
departure.
>
> To many scare quotes.
>
I know, and as I've already said, I'm sorry. If we were in the same
room, perhaps we could just waggle our fingers. The point of this
whole exposition is to ground notions of existence and reality in a
set of intuitions that are RITSIAR all the way through. I feel from
your comments that you take this to be unnecessary and perhaps even
wrong-headed, but to me it seems inescapable. I am seeking
consequently to collapse at their foundations all divisibility between
knowing and being, and between perceiving, intending and acting (I've
left the scare quotes out this time, but inevitable these terms often
carry associations that are extraneous to my meaning here). The need
for these moves seems to me inescapable in resolving the mind-body
paradoxes and dispelling the phantoms and monstrosities (unconscious
zombies, epiphenomenalism, observers distinct from observations,
purely abstract worlds etc) that emerge from them. The terminology,
however, remains elusive.
David
>
> David Nyman wrote:
>> 2009/7/23 Brent Meeker <meeke...@dslextreme.com>:
>>
>>> If I understand you correctly, this is similar to the explication of "I" by
>>> Thomas Metzinger in his book "The Ego Tunnel". He expresses it as the self
>>> being transparent. We look *through* it but not *at* it, and necessarily
>>> so.
>>
>> Well, I haven't read it, but yes, what I've been saying certainly implies
>> this.
>>
>>> This paradox arises in quantum cosmogony. The universe (or multiverse)
>>> evolves
>>> as the rotation of a single ray in Hilbert space. But relativistic horizons
>>> separate different local projections so that we see decohered, classical
>>> objects
>>> (and we are such objects). At least that's the speculation - there is both
>>> unity and diversity: different aspects of the wave-function of the universe
>>> which is unknowable.
>>
>> Yes, the wave function indeed expresses just such 'paradoxical
>> partness in wholeness'.
>>
>>> You make the self fundamental, but is it so. Maybe the self is a
>>> mathematical
>>> construct or a statistical ensemble or experiences. RITSIAR may not be
>>> real in
>>> the ontology of the best theory.
>>
>> No, I emphatically do not make 'the self' fundamental. In fact,
>> taking my lead from Plotinus, Vedanta et al, I would deny the
>> existence or necessity of any such independent existent as 'the self'.
>> The "I" that I take to be real in RITSIAR is the reflexive "I" of the
>> 'personally present' unity.
>
> I'm not sure I can even parse this paragraph. An "I" that is reflexive is one
> that refers to itself. So what is RITSIAR can refer to itself. So it
> implicitly entails a unity to refer to. Our is the unity the unity of
> perception, i.e. all my perceptions cohere so they are "mine". They
> constitute
> a world being present to "me" from "my" point of view.
>
> 'Reflexive' because it is unique;
>
> Why would being unique imply it can refer to itself - or whatever "reflexive"
> means in this context ("unconscious reaction"?)?
>
>> 'personal' because it is the superset out of which 'persons' (subsets)
>> emerge; 'present' because - given that such 1-persons self-assert
>> 'presently'
>
> Does everything RITSIAR "self-assert"? I understand asserting proposition,
> i.e.
> assigning a value "true" to it. I don't understand "self-assert".
>
> - the background from which they can be said, for certain
>> purposes, to distinguish themselves a fortiori constitutes a more
>> inclusive 'presence'.
>
> ???
>
>
>>Hence I claim that 'the best theory' -
>> whatever else it encompasses - can't help but be ontologically
>> RITSIAR.
>>
>>> But that's where I would appeal to two different senses of "basic". Basic
>>> to
>>> epistemology is perception/intuition/experience/cognition. But based on
>>> that
>>> knowledge one may develop theory in which the ontology is different.
>>
>> No, I emphatically think not. This is the point of my 'collapse' of
>> epistemology and ontology. My claim is that 'knowing' and 'being' are
>> cognates - more specifically, 'knowing' is a 'way-of-being'. We can
>> only know - reflexively - what we are and we can't know what we
>> aren't.
>
> Of course one can't know a falsehood. Or are you saying we can't know
> anything
> but ourselves (a step toward solipism). Or are you saying we can only know
> what
> we are through introspection (reflection)?
>
>>AFAICS this is the only way to avoiding the otherwise
>> infinite regress between 'observer' and 'observed'. Furthermore,
>> through the intuition or insight that 'ways-of-being' are equivalent
>> to instances of 'self-motivated-relativisation' of the One, we situate
>> 'causal closure' inescapably in an indivisible unity of reflexive
>> 'perception' and 'action'. The consequence of this of course is 'no
>> brains without minds, and vice-versa'. These are the minimal
>> requirements, IMO, of any foundational ontology capable of going on to
>> account for a 'mind' or 'body' that is RITSIAR - as opposed to being
>> the kind of 'Cheshire Cat' or 'arm's length' abstraction that can't
>> help conjuring 'philosophical zombie worlds' and other such
>> monstrosities.
>
> To many scare quotes.
>
>>
>>> Physics gains knowledge from physicists looking at records and instrument
>>> readings. But
>>> the theory built on this knowledge is in terms of elementary particles and
>>> fields. The positivists wanted to build physics on an ontology of
>>> perceptions
>>> and instrument readings, but it was not at all fruitful and has been
>>> abandoned.
>>
>> The trouble here, I'm convinced, is the attempt to ground the argument
>> at a level of analysis that is already much too 'sophisticated' - what
>> one author recently called an 'adultocentric' viewpoint. What I'm
>> trying to do by contrast is to base my foundational theorising solely
>> on what a 'philosophical neonate' would be able - or need - to lay
>> claim to: IOW, the simplest and most irreducible logical
>> pre-requisites necessary to justify the 'appearances' that our later
>> theorising will rely on.
>>
>>> You are concerned that RITSIAR can't be recovered if it's not asserted in
>>> the
>>> beginning, but the alternative is that the ontology of the world is real in
>>> a
>>> different sense than you are real, i.e. "you" are not really real.
>>
>> Well, if the 'real' ontology of the world isn't foundationally
>> 'present' and 'personal', I have a hard time seeing how "I" could ever
>> be. You see, "I" don't need to be 'really real' in the sense I think
>> you mean; but I *do* need to be *as* real - 'real' in the same sense -
>> as the background from which "I" emerge. RITSIAR cuts both ways: "I"
>> am also 'real in the sense the world is real' (RITSTWIR? No - I can't
>> take any more acronymical realities!) So I can't be any *more*
>> 'present' or 'personal' than this background is, nor can I 'know' any
>> more or any differently than is constituted by my 'way-of-being' in
>> terms of this selfsame foundational reality.
>
> You are asserting monism. But the One, the ur-stuff, is ineffable/unknowable.
> So when we place ourselves in the world it is by making distinctions within
> the
> unity. To become distinct from the background (the One) is what it means to
> be
> RITSIAR. Right?
>
> Brent
>
> >
>
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