If the framework of mind itself is such that how we interact in the world is only as we ever could have interacted, folks react to that in differenty ways. But if the reactions are in turn only as they ever could have been…
Well, how exactly does the mind wrap itself around that?
Nothing would seem to be more fundamental than finally figuring out if mind is just matter interacting…mechanically?
But how would that be accomplished if it is presumed that any efforts to establish it are themselves only as they ever could have been.
This may well be something that I never fully understand. The preponderance of human behaviors/interactions do not involve conflicting value judges. Instead, they revolve around conscious minds choosing particular goals/objectives and then coming up with behaviors that must be chosen in order to accomplish the task.
If you are pregnant and don’t want to be then you can choose to have an abortion. At least in most parts of the world. This is applicable to the conscious minds of all women in this situation. The “angst” part only comes about when others react [subjectively] to what the mind must choose in order to stop the pregnancy.
And usually, only for the one who’s the target of these reactions. Most of us understand that these kinds of friction exist between people, but as spectators only hearing about it from afar, not really having close relations to the people involved, it’s hard to feel angst.
And the implication here is that angst itself is situated existentially out in a particular world construed from a particular point of view. The philosopher might note that in reacting to the same unwanted pregnancy different individuals feel more or less angst. But: is there a way to determine the extent to which all rational men and women ought to feel angst? How is that not largely the embodiment of dasein?
But “understanding” here pertains to either agreeing with or not agreeing with the definition and the meaning given to the words used in the analysis/argument itself.
Ah ha! So, for example, you wouldn’t be able to begin to understand my subjectivism unless I explained to you what I mean by terms like “consciousness”, “experience”, “qualia”, etc., and the only way to render an adequate definition of these terms is to tie them into concrete examples in the real world.
Basically, yes. Imagine following someone around who embraces subjectivism as you do. Eventually, he/she becomes entangled in a prong #2 context. It is then that I would probe the extent to which subjectivism might be construed as more or less relevant to the manner in which I react: entangled as I am in my dilemma. My frame of mind here almost always revolves around the question “how ought one to live?” when the choices being made by particular inidviduals come into conflict.
When it comes to my actual philosophy of consciousness, I begin by tying what we know about the brain to subjective experience. As the focus, at this point, becomes subjective experience itself, there is very little, short of its neurological counterpart, I can point to in the concrete world to say: here is an example of a subjective experience. Nevertheless, I make the assumption that when I talk about something like the taste of wine, my readers will know what I’m talking about. It’s true that their experience might be different from mine, but not so different as to disagree that it tastes bitter, or that children probably wouldn’t like it, or that it’s similar to the taste of champagne. So I make the assumption that I can talk about our common subjective experiences to the point that I can draw some implications from the way the experience feels and people will, in general, know where I’m coming from.
My own interest here would be more in regard to the distinctions that can be made between subjective experiences that are more or less rooted objectively in a particular reality and our reactions to them which may well not be. For example, the experience of drinking a glass of wine overlaps considerably for all of us. As opposed to the experience of, say, being employed to pick the grapes to make the wine. Far fewer of us ever had that experience. But it is in this regard that prong #2 contexts emerge. And that revolves around certain political and economic prejudices regarding the wages being paid and the conditions of employment and all of the contention that swirls around immigration issues.
How then would being or not being a subjectivst come into play here?
But given a series of concrete examples, you can then infer the abstract or general template of his philosophy? Sort of an inductive method rather than a deductive one? No wonder you shy away from metaphysics.
I still come back to this:
1] encompass a philosophy of mind, of consciousness, of choice, of behavior
2] note a particular context in which your mind, your consciousness, your choice, your behavior came into conflict with another
3] how are the two connected
4] how is your mind not entangled in my own dilemma above
I’m not sure whether this is a yes or a no to my question. Seems more like a set of instructions/questions you’re asking others to observe in order to help you understand their views.
Whether we move from the general to the specific or the specific to the general there still seems to be a crucial distinction to be made between probing the reality of abortion as a medical procedure and probing it as a moral quandary. Whether in the abstract or pertaining to an actual real time abortion.
“Consciousness” either makes a smooth transition from one to the other, or mind itself is matter of a whole different sort. That’s what I focus on. The difference between mind as it relates to that which we can all be in agreement about and minds that come into conflict when the parts revolving around either/ore become entangled in the parts revolving around is/ought.
The move from 1) to 2) seems kind of odd: it’s like asking one to encompass a theory of how the body works, and then to note a time when his body came into conflict with another (say in a war, for example). How would his theory about his body change what happens when it gets shot by bullets?
It may be that a language is not available that will allow us to finally close the gap when we have disagreements regarding something as fundamental as the nature of mind itself.
As for the body in war, there are any number of things that medical science can predict/conclude pertaining to particular contexts. Again, where I reconfigure the beam is in the direction of that which is said to constitute a “just war”. Ought America to have invaded Iraq? The trauma inflicted on hundreds of thousands of bodies as a result of that choice is not much in dispute. You either lose your legs to an IED or you don’t.
I suppose you might mean to ask: how would he explain in terms of his theory what happens to his body when it gets hit by bullets, in which case I guess you’re asking me to describe what happens when I enter into conflict with another in terms of my theory of consciousness. Is that what you mean?
More or less.
You came into conflict with others before you became a subjectivist.
You come into conflict with others after you became a subjectivist.
So, for all practical purposes, what’s the difference?
I’m not discouraging folks from probing into the ontological – and, perhaps, teleological – nature of Existence and Reality itself. Nor in exploring the part that “consciousness” plays in it. Instead, my own fascination revolves around the parts where the world of either/or becomes entangled in the world of is/ought. How ought one to live in this world?
Or is even that just another manifestation of the either/or world?
Would it be fair to say then that your interest in metaphysics lies along a specific branch–the metaphysics of morality and its relation to the world of either/or–but that the crux of the problem is the same as that found in all other branches of metaphysics: that finding certainty in the insights one arrives at remains indefinitely elusive? (This sounds like just another way of phrasing your dilemma.) It’s just that unlike questions of consciousness, being, transcendentalism, questions of morality and how that is practiced in the world of either/or is of tantamount importance, and so it tends to compel one to take it seriously?
Here it would seem to come down to one’s understanding of the word “metaphysics”.
In the dictionary:
Philosophy.
- concerned with abstract thought or subjects, as existence, causality, or truth.
- concerned with first principles and ultimate grounds, as being, time, or substance.
In other words, with things that some speak of as “ontological” or “teleological”. To wit: understanding conflicting human behaviors in the context of grasping the very nature of Reality or Existence itself.
And given that none of us really grasp this [aside from what I construe to be the intellectual/scholastic quacks like James S. Saint who more or less claim to] we are left to fend for ourselves when in fact our behaviors do come into conflict over value judgments.
But whether or not you understand how the dots and their connections fit into metaphysics has no bearing on the fact that other people will have their own metaphysical beliefs and values–whether you agree with them or not, whether one can be certain about them or not–and those metaphysical beliefs will determine (at least partially) their behavior–their behavior towards you when they enter into conflict with you, and what triggers them to enter into conflict with you. You don’t need to know how you the dots are connected in order to investigate and understand other people’s metaphysics.
Yes, that’s how it works “in reality”. It is what men and women believe to be true that motivates their behaviors. And it is their behaviors that have consequence. And in fact the consequences are real whether what those who precipitated them believe is true or not.
There are many who genuinely believe in Trump’s political agenda. There are many who genuinely believe in Clinton’s. And depending on who is elected there may well be any number of dramatic consequences. But: the consequences that some embrace others will loathe.
And they will do so without a thought being given to the dilemma that impales me.
The individual mind of a child is fabricated to reflect the reality of the world of adults. Still, some of what the child is taught is true for all, while other things are rooted considerably more in particular moral and political narratives/agendas.
From my frame of mind, these beliefs are less false than they are not true objectively.
No fact of the matter, in other words. That’s something like what I believe but not quite. My take on the invention of truths is based on relativism–it’s true (there is a fact of the matter) for a particular individual.
But pertaining to particular matters there are facts applicable to all of us. And though some [as subjects] may not accept them it doesn’t make the facts go away. And since there are facts there is a greater likelihood of persuading the skeptics of their existence.
With value judgments however there are merely subjective interpretations of what the facts mean vis a vis the choices we make. There do not appear to be choices able to be disclosed as in fact the obligation of all reasonal/virtuous men and women to pursue.
Nope, I can’t wrap my head around this at all. I have no idea how something like this could be anything other than an “intellectual contraption”. With the God of the Christians, Moslems and Jews, I can at least imagine Him as an “entity” “up there” in “Heaven”. But your God here is a complete cypher to me: “a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure.”
My God is the universe–plain and simple–I’m a patheist. I think sans God, you would probably understand the concept of knowledge existing in the minds of intelligent beings, and that it follows from this that such knowledge also exists in the universe. So I would think the problematic part is: how is God the universe?
With Christianity [and other such denominations], God can be captured in a world of words. A scripture is concocted and God becomes the embodiment of it. And then there is the part about before and after the grave.
But how do we do the same with “the universe”? The only way that I can grapple with it is to imagine a wholly determined world in sync with the immutable laws of matter.
But then we’re still stuck there with this:
- why something and not nothing at all
- why this something and not some other something
And does the “the universe” really have anything substantive to say about our moral and political agendas?
For cosmologists there is no equivalent of the 10 Commandments or of Heaven and Hell. There would seem to be just the brute facticity of it all in what may well be an essentially absurd and meaningless existence.
The reason this is cryptic to you is (partly) because I haven’t layed out all the gory details of my philosophy, just some of the conclusions I’ve come to. This is why I wrote a book.
It’s cryptic to me because I am not able [palpably] to grasp it relating to that which is of interest to me philosophically. And what might tempt me to read the book is something in it that persuades me otherwise.
Then it is not likely that you will ever convey to someone like me how your conception of God is applicable to the world that we live and interact in.
Yet I always come back to pondering what “on earth” something like this might possibly mean pertaining to a particular context out in a particular world. “Completely exposed” how?
That’s answered in what follows: “That is, for example, when you look at an apple, not only do you see that it exists, but what you see of it (and what you experience of it in general–through sensory perception, thoughts, emotions, everything) is all there is to the apple.”
Yes, and then you eat the apple and are “completely exposed” to that. But the apple was poisoned by someone who wanted you dead and you are “completely exposed” to that. The contexts here are virtually infinite. And who gets to say what it means to be “completely exposed” to something in which value judgments do come to collide. Or in probing what it means to have an identity.
How are we “completely exposed” in the voting booth when choosing between Trump and Clinton?
In other words, when do we reach the point where that cannot actually be pinned down with any precision? Where it becomes almost entirely a subjective frame of mind that “here and now” you find applicable to one and only one conscious “I”?