The Ontological Tyranny

It is an art, in as far as it is aesthetic.
But it is not of the same order as music - to begin with it needs language, which is not only selective to culture but more importantly conceptual, therefore indirect, misleading. Music can not mislead - it is what it is, it does not signify something else than the experience of hearing it.

I think that Aristotle approached rhetoric as certain producers approach music as a product, making it so that it works on the absent minded listener. It is a low artform.

Actually I said that music is aesthetic without the aim of usefulness, aesthetics for aesthetics sake. Art. Art can be useful to a purpose, but if the purpose is prior to the sense of aesthetics, it doesn’t work.

Due to time constraints I can only respond briefly.

That is, no doubt, part of it.

I agree it’s systematic, and human but it is also objective, just as your statement above purports to be. As far as drawing away from its object, it wouldn’t work or would work less well if it did.

No disagreement here.

I don’t know about this. Got any examples?

Again, can provide examples. I may agree with you.

I agree with this.

That makes sense. The true nature would be the thing as it is in itself anyway. That may potentially inexhaustible anyway and therfore never fully disclosed.

I think there is recognition of perspective in quantum physics.

Hawking seems to recognize the limitations of objectivity in his formulation of MDR. No model is perfect or final. I think a realism which recognizes it’s limitations is at least as good as other world views.

Felix - no problem in being concise. I just have a lot of time on my hands and I take some comfort in the idea that philosophy requires unrestricted leisure…

I’m claiming that everything that is done to come to know scientific law is manipulation. Either only teleologically based selection of ones own perception and interpretation or that as well as manipulation of the observed matter.

I agree that I am doing the same (I am trying to establish fact), but not that I am objective. Just consciously subjective. A fact is a fact to someone, not to itself or to “existence itself”, neither of which seem to exist.

But it’s object is not objectivity, but control. More precisely: the the type of understanding that amounts in a certain kind of control over a certain kind of object: one of the ones that can be understood in strictly physical terms, literal objects.

“Existence” is not an object. Since “The Universe” and “Existence” are mutually inclusive, we can not understand the universe as an object either.

Still we try and scientists comes up with a lot of nifty inventions. We like our tools so much that we try not to observe that the laws we used to make them turn into fictions when we use the tools to look deeper.

Technology contradicts the subject matter. We are trying to catch a tiger with a pair of spectacles, sorry for the awkward metaphor - discrepancy between reach and expectation. What do we think we are studying? We can’t be seriously thinking that w’re studying anything but the context of our perspective.

Behavior training, weaponry, the state, banking, mass-production machines, wheels on rails, conception of past and future, nucleair fission and fusion, whiskey, cigarettes, strawberry-syrup, genetical engineered caviar, cars, digital chat-rooms… I think you probably misread me there.

Every racial region has at least one control oriented system of ontology. The question is what they seek to control. If I understand anything relevant at all, Western sciences most serious competitor pertaining to fields that are relevant to Westerners is the Oriental understanding of energy. This is experience-based. Man is used as the measure, we study the universe according to man, and man according to the universe so revealed. It is an honest feedback loop, and it works. Energy can be generated by intention breath and motion, and can be known and manipulated by introspection. Telepathy is extremely common to many, and know well to me, and many a science exists on how to exploit this. Voodoo, for example.

Of course this is all quackery if one is not a voodooist, but this does not mean that one cannot be voodooed into a depression, or astrologically understood and thereby successfully manipulated by the ones in control of this science.

We can either say that or that it doesn’t exist at all. We know that it is constantly suggested anew as perspectives are born.

Or - and this is the only possibility to redeem science without calling it subjective, the universe is actually created or coincidentally come to be shaped according to the measure of man, so that we may know it. But even if this is the case we would do best to study our own energy, experience and perspective to come to know the cosmos and it’s true laws. If the universe is formed in a way that can be understood by man, then we have been looking in the wrong direction when we were seeking objectivity.

What I’m saying here suggested by a lot of people these days, but nobody seems to know how to draw any consequences from this or make any scientific progress. I’ve been hearing this quantum-processor rumor for 15 years, but not recently anymore. I am curious - I think that we should be able to influence the processing telepathically. Or actually that this is unavoidable and that may be what’s causing the delay.

I applaud Hawkins realism. Of course he has to consider how useful a model is as well - this seems a reasonable compromise between intellectual clarity and usefulness.

Yes. It seems we can’t get around the possible contaminating effect of our own inquiries. Our speculation about a world free of our manipulation seems to be useful. So an objectivity that recognized it’s own tentativeness would pass the pragmatic test.

The problem is how to combine the perspective of a particular person inside the world with an objective view of the same world with such person and viewpoint included. While we do not wish to deny our own particular viewpoint, we are also aware that our particular POV is limited and we aspire to conceive of the world as a whole. This tendency has resulted in untenable metaphysics on the negative side, but it seems to be necessary as an impetus to truth seeking.

If that is true of scientific investigation per se, it doesn’t have true of scientific investigators or those who reflect on science. I’m not saying that science strictly defined is the only kind of knowledge or the only path to it.

What I want is a unified world view be it subjective or objective. What I get is an interplay of the two, popping back and forth like the gestalt of a visual optical illusion. As unsatisfactory as this may be, it seems to be the only way I can take into account my entire field of sensibility and understanding without foreclosing in extreme subjectivism or objectivism.

I don’t know much about your examples but I get your general point. The arts, music and literature are modes of rationality and knowledge, broadly speaking as well.

Right and that is valuable as a goal if nothing else.

Right we don’t have an adequate anthropology yet.

What I’m saying here suggested by a lot of people these days, but nobody seems to know how to draw any consequences from this or make any scientific progress. I’ve been hearing this quantum-processor rumor for 15 years, but not recently anymore. I am curious - I think that we should be able to influence the processing telepathically. Or actually that this is unavoidable and that may be what’s causing the delay.

It seems that the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics i.e. that objective reality, independent of any observer, doesn’t really exist, led to postmodern belief that theory isn’t concerned with what is but solely with what we can say about it.

Yes. Regardless of their theoretical preferences, reasonable people often end up at some form of pragmatism.

It seems we have found a lot of common ground. I would isolate this as the central issue:

Indeed, so that’s what philosophy should be looking at. Let me rephrase the above:

IF the universe as a part of which man exists, happens to be of a nature that allows man to understand it completely, this says precisely as much about man as it does about the universe.
In order to attain such knowledge then, man can only expect to find it by studying his own cognitive power directly, as irreducible, and not to reduce the powers to products of these powers. Products such as conceptions of cognition-as-resulting-from things man has conceptualized by his cognition.

The above scenario applies equally if the universe does not happen to be of a nature that allows man to understand it completely. In either case, what man can know about the universe is determined by the limits of his cognitive powers. What should be studied to advance knowledge of thought, and indirectly scientific conception, is the limits of cognition as cognition, not as chemistry of the brain. Logic is so far the only terrain where the west has found a solid grip on this matter. But we would be stupid to think of this as the only form in which cognition can be modelled.

What I want to do is think the horizon of my own understanding. From the subjective side “I” seem to be at once free and finite. From a more objective view I am embedded the very world I seek to know as it is in itself. What I am able to understand depends on the relation between myself and the rest of it. My capacity for understanding seems to be only partial because it depends on my constitution. Much of the way the world is may be constitutionally beyond my reach. I may be "self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference” as Hofstadler put it. But I could just as well be contained in a world at least some of which I may conceiving objectively as it is. If one of these ways are the case for all people on this planet, other intelligent beings with a different POV might presumably be in the position tell us how we are actually contained in the world.

We may perceive some of it trans-subjectively, that is not to say objectively. Objective understanding is hermetically sealed off from actuality, since we simply are built to interpret. No other perspective could provide us with objective understanding as this would imply that none of our subjective, bodily faculties of forming knowledge conceptions would be at work in creating this understanding. What we understand is necessarily a function of what we are. The more we are alike, the more we will understand in the same way.

Calling what we understand objective is to assume that all possible intelligences necessarily understand the way we do, if they would not be blind. This is indeed the assumption of science.

They are in the position to give us ideas, to influence our personal interpretation of our being-in-the-world. That is all, I think. We all choose different models in the end, fitted to what we are.
I think that the “ultimate truth” as far as truth gets ultimate is to be seen if we observe the model of reality a given person develops to the backdrop of what we know of his life. In studying how subjectivity gives rise to notions of objectivity. In this sense we can also understand science. Disinterested subjectivity gives rise to mechanistic objectivity. A very particular, even odd perspective rises from it, powerful enough to annihilate the planet, not even close to powerful enough to explain the conditions of its own arising. It’s just a technique, and an interpretation of the world aimed to make it accessible to that technique.

Right trans-subjective agreement is a putative means of achieving greater objectivity. But I think trans-subjective view intends to point beyond itself toward ultimate objectivity.

Yeah, it’s the view from everywhere or nowhere.

Perhaps ultimate objectivity “exists” only as the black background in a gestalt with every actual POV with which it is contrasted. As such the ulitimate is contentless. Even so it is phenomenologically like an encompassing ground or abyss from which known model or theory emerges. If nothing else, awareness of the ultimate in this sense shows up the limitations of every would-be totalizing model or theory.

I still say that it points to greater subjectivity, away from objectivity. Precisely because it points.

I’d say the view from a specifically human perspective, but understood as if it is from everywhere.
Thus, misunderstood, which means misleading us as to what it points out.

I think the model or theory emerges in the interplay between subjective desire to control, and the suggestion of an objectivity that may provide means to control. What is brought forward from the black backdrop (the unknown - the non-subjective) is that specific aspect of whatever may exist that answers to our subjective angle.

Jacob–OK. So is your position that the objective way of looking at things is hypothetical or speculative and that it is a subset of our inescapable subjectivity?

I think that the perspective is very real, but that it follows in all of its conditions from what we are capable of isolating.

It is nothing we should be calling objective, but rather a set of increasingly stable notions bound to deeply subjective conditions. Consider for example the imagination necessary to picture Earth orbiting the sun. How could a knowledge requiring imagination be objective?

Unless our imagination was given to us from God as an instrument that has nothing to do with our own animal, conditioned functions of survival, but is objective, a magic window of Truth, we could not think of any product of it as unconditioned, objective.

However:

-science is a consistent reality within the sphere of human imagination.
-science grants us certain powers of manipulation.

Therefore:

-the type of power which science grants us is inextricably linked to our imagination.
-the the aspects of nature over which science grants us control, are the aspects that have formed our imagination.

Well, take what Locke called the primary and secondary qualities of any object. Secondary qualities change according to POV. But what about primary qualities? A square is square even from points of view where it does look square. How can we conclude otherwise than that a square is a square independently of any subject’s view of it? That is the very definition of objectivity. One to one correspondence between a priori geometric intuition and things as they are would seem to have survival value. The neural structures that are the bases of forms of thought by which we understand experience may have been hard-wired into us by natural selection.

Right! That seems to be a primary form of imagination/conception. The form most consistent with applicability, hence what we would be tempted to call the most objective. I agree that these conceptions seem to be hardwired in us, and that in as far as we are the standard, they objectively exist. Whenever Kant talks of a priori intuitions I am thinking of such basic geometry, of which duality (from wich logic is derived) is one aspect.

Here it becomes possible to conceive of thought that is more objective to man than logic - thought that is more fundamentally consistent with the human mind.

I added the word “more” before “fundamentally” in the last sentence - we can surely move beyond geometry too, surely also geometrical conceptions arise from certain conditions. But understanding logic as secondary to ‘geometrical intuitions’ seems to be a step closer to the root of our cognitive consciousness, which should enable a level up of control over our environment.

Before we automatically think control in terms of technology, deeper understanding may disclose a different type of control, and a different type of conception of “environment”.

So the apriori categories of thought in so far as they are not conditioned by language, may be based on neural structures. If so, it seems a way toward understanding the objective psyche [a Jungian term] would be to integrate the findings of neuro-cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and structural linguistics like Steven Pinker is doing.

I would group linguistics under geometry.
Try to understand our conception of grammar by explaining it in terms of our conception of form.

I’ll work on that. Meanwhile, I’m curious, what’s the significance of the Song of Solomon quotation in your signature line for you?

For me that phrase has to do with sacrificing the subjective in favor of the objective. I feel that western man is in such a position, if ‘vineyard(s)’ means ‘world’ or ‘reality’ - he subscribes to an image of the world which is per definition not his, and the notion of which therefore takes away from his own world.

I adopted the phrase at the surprising realization that I actually have the power to explain existence in terms that make sense to me, terms that actually (here, now, in relevant terms) make sense. I’ve for long faithfully believed in science as “the truth out there” as most of us do, until this valuation-concept dawned on me.

[size=85]The “objective” science of functionality (totally subjective to the specific condition that objectifies it) is deathly, and Nietzsche painstakingly made the first step to another type of science, a “philosophy of the future”. We should be keeping two things closely in mind: the will to power as the scientific formulation for what drives and keeps the world moving, and willing as valuing. Value and power are closely related concepts and this relation has not been fully understood in philosophy so far. The reason for this failure to understand becomes apparent in this thread, as philosophers hark back to a Darwinistic model, where repetition of successful function, “nature as law”, is emphasized, instead of nature as a constant experimenting, to which success and procreation, and consequently also “natural law”, are contingent. [source-thread][/size]

This made of science a comprehensible product, useful and true in its own context but quite random outside of it. Something by nature obedient instead of commanding - a revaluation that is steering me toward my own vineyard.

I was also just admiring the poetry of Solomon. It is remarkably exuberant compared to the dusty image the Jewish God has acquired.

Hegel extensively dealt with the things discussed here, and pointed to similar conclusions as I have arrived at… or so it seems. I was just reading in Phenomenology of the Spirit:

[size=90]“This unconditioned universal, which is now the true object of consciousness, is still just an object for it; consciousness has not yet grasped the Notion of an unconditioned as Notion. It is essential to distinguish the two: for consciousness, the object has returned into itself from its relation to an other and has thus become Notion in principle; but consciousness is not for itself the Notion, and consequently does not recognize itself in that reflected object. For us, this object has developed through the movement of consciousness in such a way that consciousness is involved in that development, and the reflection is the same on both sides, or, there is only one reflection. But since in this movement consciousness has for its content merely the objective essence and not consciousness as such, the result must have an objective significance for consciousness; consciousness still shrinks away from what has emerged, and takes it as the essence in the objective sense.” [A. III][/size]
“the reflection is the same on both sides, or, there is only one reflection.”

This reflection is what I have proposed to be recognizable as basic geometry. In a manner of speaking, the screen between the subject and object, the mediator between consciousness and its product (of which it is itself is a product) - the “magic mirror” through which “raw” existence / energy appears to itself as form, being(s).

Interesting application of the verse. My impression is that thought has been trending more and more towards the subjective for several centuries. It may be the result of a rapidly changing society where individuals are atomized and consequently there sem to be less judgments that hold good in the same way for everybody. Realization of our subjectivity has not cured us of our disasterous attempt to overcome our dependence on nature.