The Ontological Tyranny

You’re still positing something extra, though. When all we know are interpretations, why suppose, why “intuit” that there must be some-thing behind them? On a different forum, Sauwelios proposed the following line of reasoning (toward a different end, an end we disagreed on, as it were; but it will serve its purpose here as well):

This problematic finds its roots back in Lockean epistemology. Locke proposed the “veil of ideas” separating man from objects-in-themselves, for all man has are his ideas of those objects and so can never hope to access them directly. Locke, a confused philosopher if ever there was one, initially questioned whether we had any reason to suppose the existence of these objects behind our ideas of them at all, but eventually appealed to God’s benevolent grace to conclude that these objects do, in fact, exist.

The point is, we have no reason to suppose the existence of something behind our interpretations – perhaps all there is is further interpretation. To claim that definitionally speaking, the term “interpretation” implies “something to be interpreted” recalls, of course, Nietzsche’s criticism that our philosophy finds its footing in an age-old faith in grammar.

Indeed, I do imply this. However, I am making no claim to fact; just the opposite, actually. I am proposing that all there is is interpretation. This too, then, is interpretation! For how could it be anything besides?

But surely we can’t so radically re-conceptualize the way we understand the world (that it is interpretation, and nothing besides) while still holding onto that out-dated definition of reality. Philosophy need not weigh itself down with word games: grammar enjoys no privileged claim to the world itself.

With respect, that particular criticism backstep but thorough fling doing or climb.

“Interpretation” is not my choice of words, or the Realist’s choice of words, but yours/Sauwelios’s. Pick another one, an intransitive verb, at least so you can’t be accused of appropriating the propriety of objects grammatically to your argument because it would sound weak without it. “Interpret” describes an action that a subject performs on an object. That’s not my rigid fascination with grammar, it’s just how the word is always used. There are plenty of sensory actions that a subject can do without any reference to an external world - dream, say, or hallucinate. But interpret gives that comforting ring of being grounded in something, doesn’t it?

My take on it is that it’s misphilosophising, the grammar more reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s fly-in-the-flybottle than any claims of Nietzsche.

Stronger: philosophy must rid itself of word games wherever it can. And I believe that a word game is what this is, ambiguity and metaphor covering the weaknesses in the argument and a Brave Nietzschean Disrespect for Grammar covering the ambiguity and metaphor.

According to Occam’s razor everything should be made as simple as possible. But as Einstein noted, not simpler. Your proposition that all there is interpretation is too simple for adequate understanding of the situation. It is, in fact, a self-defeating tautology. If all is interpretation, then interpretation can say nothing definitive about the all. You can’t help but refer to an objective world you seek to deny. Ironic that you would accuse me of word games when that is what you seem to be stuck in. You unwittingly demonstrate that objective reference is indispensible to conceptualization.

In all honestly, Jakob, these posts were the result of me coming on here when I should have known better. While what I posted was the result of things I think about when sober, I have an unfortunate habit of bring them out at the worst time, in the worst possible places (I apologize to without music for even attempting to take this string totally off subject), in the worse possible shape to express it.

I sometimes wish I could find a way to hook a breathalyzer up to my computer and develop some programming skills in order set up an application that, once activated, will for a given amount of time prompt one every hour to blow, then once a certain BAC level is read, firewall out all access to social networking pages. I would appropriately call it The Face Saver.

But I really appreciate your willingness to turn my moments of silliness and embarrassment into something of some worth. In my own defense, given your generosity and that of the others who mercifully choose to ignore it, even sober, the affection I feel for you guys (as sloppily as it gets expressed in my more ecstatic moments) does not seem totally beyond reason.

That said, what I’m really glad to see is that are other people who recognize the emergence of some malignant thing that seems to be taking over our system. I came up with the concept of The Beast in the semi-facetious manner of recognizing how silly it was for our Christians to stand in most powerful country in the world and act as if the prophecied Beast could only emerge “over there”. It’s also based on the concept of systematic imperatives and the tendency of social systems to gravitate toward things that supports its needs even if those things work against the needs of the individual members of that system. It generally finds its most obvious expression through the higher ranking beneficiaries. The joke for me was if there ever was a candidate for this Beast, it would be the very system these Christians were embracing.

It’s a subject I hope to discuss more, if not on this string, then on another.

Thanks again, guys.

I would also note Neitzche’s distaste for those whose will to power finds expression through conformity.

But your point here about the hegemony involved hits the nail right on the head. It’s what interests me most and it’s why I find Semiology such an important tool. It was what I was getting at in The Semiology of Rock and Country.

But, once again, I really don’t want to hijack WM’s string here. I will try to start another one based on it.

We use the same word for a table, or object. The object is there and the known coresponding word, but still we do not know what the reality of the object is – we do not know fully what it is. The word that exists in thought as an idea, having no physical or concrete existence, is what is interpreted.

How can anybody say anything about the ‘state of not knowing?’ We have necessarily to use words. Can we use words without indulging in abstract concepts. We can. But that doesn’t mean that it’s a non-verbal conceptualization. That’s a funny thing – there is no such thing as non-verbal conceptualization at all.

I understand without-music to be saying that there is no object, only interpretation. I agree we don’t fully know the object, we don’t know a thing as it is in itself. All we can know is phenomena which we interpret via concepts.

We must infer the extent to which our thoughts correspond to things by our observations of phenonmena. We can acknowledge that we don’t know everything about anything. An object may be nothing more than an object of inquiry.

There must be an object upon which light falls so as to produce an image on the retina which, when stimulated, transfers signals to the brain. There must be things around you for there to be a "you’ as a reference point, as a subject in relation to the objects.

Yet, ‘you’, the subject, has no existence without knowing (via interpretation of something in memory) what the signals are. Like being blind from birth and suddenly being able to pick up the signals – everything would be an incomprehensible occurence incapable of being perceived by the mind. So, in a way, you could say the objects around you do not exist, until you, as the subject, as a reference point come into existence. But your existence in this scheme will not occur until a ‘you’ can project its knowledge (recognition) onto the things around it.

OK

OK

I don’t follow this. It seems a subject could exist and might observe the signals without knowing what they are.

Again, the blind person might hear the signals and not know what they were.

Just because objects don’t exist for me, it doesn’t follow that they don’t exist independently.

It seems to me you are conflating existence with knowledge of existence. Knowledge of something depends on it’s existence. But, something might existence independent of knowledge of it. If not, everything would have to be invented. Nothing new could ever be discovered.

What if he has a goal? Then he will not be “restless” but active and not wander but move.
These are not bad things - according to my personal valuation. And I do not think that everyone should agree with me.

I only agree with this if ‘being at peace’ means an active state of increase, of exploration, of building-creating, with at root the impulse to play (which is the undiluted form of activity).

Life itself is an assimilative process. Homeostasis is an activity, a continuum of attainment. If one wants passive peace, there’s always death.

I have to try hard, but I think so. Your thoughts seem highly transcendental. A poetic approach may be a possibility.

I disagree. I think that it has done quite a few people a great lot of good, and indeed a hard to justify amount of people unbearable misery. But, man has not yet been a whole. We have not even thought about beginning to try to understand the world as a whole. Nobody up until now has known enough.

"I imagine a future thinker, in whom the european-american restlessness is connected with the hundredfold inherited asiatic contemplativeness: such a combination brings the riddle of the world to a solution. For the time being the observing free spirits have their mission: they all throw out the barriers,that stand in the way of a melting together of humanity [Verschmelzung der Menschen]: Religions, states, monarchic instincts to wealth- and poverty-illusions, health- and race-prejudices - "

• Friedrich Nietzsche, Summer 1876

There is a critical distinction between the liveliness of harmony and the lifelessness of peace.
By obtaining the right meanings and therefore the right goals, one can arrange for the momentum of self-harmony (harmony inside and harmony surrounding) yet the peace is merely the lack of conflict, not the lack of motivation, action, and liveliness.
All Joy is by the perception of progress toward that goal.

1. What is it that you have always been attempting and by what means?
2. What are others attempting and by what means?

By learning those, one can then harmonize both inside and out.
That which remains in Self-Harmony, cannot perish.
Nothing can die until if fails to try.

I think so too.

I distinguish two things where you see one:

1. stability / homeostasis / an “okay” state of being - this occurs almost by all means
2. positively good feeling - this occurs only with very specific means - often it doesn’t happen at all. Such speficic means, a particularily intricate activities valued by others of the same kind to create memetic change and thereby a following, tribes can come to exist because of a unique derivation in DNA of one specimen. (Shaman!)

such leads nature astray, which simply means creating different conditions - more radical differences than linearily progressive development of adaptability to environment account for.

You have no way of knowing what is there without knowledge. We invent a ‘reality’ and imposed that on the next generation and so on.

Have you ever heard the term "reality?’ I’m sure you have and have questions about it. if you had never heard of the term, then there would be no knowledge of it and questions about it would never arise.

Could you have invented a ‘reality?’ Perhaps … and if you told me your version of it and claimed that is what it is where would that put me if I believed you? But that is not reality. If one cannot discover reality, then that puts him in a state of not knowing continually. From then on If you are really interested in finding reality, what has to dawn on you is that your very questioning mechanism is born out of the answers that you already have. Otherwise there can’t be any question.

I think it is odd that this sentence is contructed in the second person plural. How can someone who believes this talk about ‘we’ since everyone else is outside him or her and thus interpretations. They are a part of we which is ding an sich for that person making the assertion.

Not only are you referring to them as if they exist, but you are making assertions about their epistemology, the limits of what they can know.

Model Dependent Realism admits there is no theory-independent concept of reality. Our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the world. When one scientist corroborates the findings another, and those findings support of a tested model, then it strengthens confidence that the model more closely corresponds to reality. We can never know with 100 percent certainty the true nature of that reality. But, even when two models appear to be equally supported by observations, over time we may be able to make more precise observations that show which model more closely matches reality. As Hawking and Mlodinow point out in “The Grand Design”, a model is good if it meets four criteria:

It’s elegant;
It contains few arbitrary or adjustable elements;
It agrees with and explains all existing observations;
and it makes detailed predictions about future observations that can disprove or falsify the model if they are not borne out.

We select the best models based on their validity, reliability, predictability, and perceived match to reality. Even though there is no POV outside of our brains, we are justified in believing in reality, and that we can come closer to knowing it through science even though our models aren’t perfect.

Dramatic leaps of faith here… there is a reality to correspond to, this reality has a nature, this nature is “true”… and at the same time, it is hidden to us, who are supposed to be experiencing it! It would be absurd if it wasn’t science.

All we can know is that a working scientific model creates a reality.

Subjective valuation, negation of objectivity, of “reality”

Because we must be certain that we understand everything about something before we can accept that it exists

Clause: since this never actually happens, existing observations that do not agree with it must be swept under the rug, interpreted as not actually existing because, they aren’t fitting…

Pertaining strictly to observations of occurrences of which the favored model allows interpretation

But it has to be the reality that we want to be real, the reality over which we can exert the maximum control. Our measure of control over reality determines what is its “true nature”.

No matter of couse that this reality perishes under our attempts to understand it. Reality is just not significant to reality.

I think the idea that we are going to come up with a perfect system or intellectual construct that makes everything hum along like a fine-tuned machine is a form of Sartrean Bad Faith. Given the volitility of of what we choose to do as individuals within a system, there is no way we could possibly hope to control all this with the same precision of mathematics. There are just too many variables involved.

So you’re probably right in suggesting that our best bet would be to accept things as is (to find peace with ourselves) as compared to thinking “things would be better if”.

At the same time, isn’t our trying part of it all? Would it really be better if we just quit trying?

Approaching 50, I come up against this question a lot. You get tired and wonder:

Why am I even doing this? Why is it that important?

Apologies for the lack of responses: I’m on a short vacation and won’t be able to dedicate any significant kind of time to this forum until I return in a week. Until then, I’ll try to make the odd post. I’d also like to state here, definitively, that I am far from dogmatic regarding any of the views I express: I am still in my undergraduate years, and my posts here reflect my experimental development of a positive philosophy. That said, I’d like to take this post to briefly revise the view I expressed regarding interpretation and reality. This is addressed, then, primarily to Only_Humean: I appreciate your counters to my sloppy points.

I believe, at bottom (which is, to be sure, only as far as we can see; for we suppose the limits of our vision to be the island’s shore), the world is a fluid, constant play of appearances, a theater of change. To locate “things” behind the appearances is to take them as signs for something more basic – to read these signs, to induce from them. This is the task of metaphysics: it is a reading of the apparent as if it were sign. But no two signs are the same; no two snowflakes, no two grains of sand can ever be identical, and so the metaphysical concept “being/thing” is but one more appeal to Platonism. To suppose that the infinity of different snowflakes are but different appearances for the “thing”, snowflake, is to locate a uniform essence behind all appearances to the contrary. Indeed, logic itself depends upon such suppositions. In Human, All Too Human 11, Nietzsche declares that “logic… .rests on assumptions that do not correspond
to anything in the real world, e.g., on the assumption of the equality of things, the identity of the same thing at different points in time.” Reality, then (and again, supposing that the boundaries of our “sight” are more than just human limitations) is a thingless, formless chaotic flux, a ceaseless play of appearances. To such chaos, truth is nothing, logic unintelligible, language senseless. All truth, all logic, then, can apply only to the world we’ve invented for ourselves: the world of unified “things” and fixed “beings”. Such a world, however, is nothing if not false. But since to such chaos, truth is meaningless, any attempt to characterize the flux is but interpretation – indeed, to speak of it at all is to interpret. And so: what does it mean to say that his Dionysian monster of formlessness, of ceaseless change and becoming is real, is reality? What can it mean?

To begin: logical axioms like the law of non-contradiction and self-identity cannot be said to apply, nor can conceptual thinking even begin to. Thus: is it any-thing at all? No. Then it cannot be real.

In short: if we cannot speak of this flux of becoming in terms of true and false, if any attempt to speak of it at all is necessarily to interpret, then my position that there is no reality behind interpretation should be slightly clearer.

In that process we will find that there is no problem with our present life. For thought there seems to be one because it makes comparisons. But for the comparisons that thought makes there is no problem with our life as it is; and there is no other life. It is precisely our thought of a better state that prevents us from coming to terms with our life as it is.

After all, there is nothing that can be done. But we can’t accept that, because the instrument that we use for that trying is the thinking, and the thinking can’t accept that because it has always gotten results for us.

An individual is what he is because of all the things that thinking has produced for him, and that have cost much time and effort. Therefore, there’s also the assumption that every result achieved by means of thinking necessarily requires time. And it is this principle that shifts the whole business away from him and says: ‘this situation is hopeless, I need time’, because time has helped to reach results in all the previous situations.

To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence. You are blessed with that intelligence; nobody need give it to you; nobody can take it away from you. To be an individual and to be yourself you don’t have to do a thing. But to be something other than yourself you have to do a lot.

Whatever pursuit is being indulged in, somewhere along the line it has to be realized that it is not leading anywhere. As long as there is a want of something, whatever it takes to achieve it will be done. That want has to be clear. What is wanted? Is to be at peace wanted? That is an impossible goal because everything being done to be at peace is what is destroying the peace that is already there. The movement of thought has been set in motion which is destroying the peace that is there. It’s difficult to understand that all that is being done is the impediment, is the one thing that is disturbing the harmony, the peace that is already there in you.