[Wittrs] Re: When is "brain talk" really dualism?
- From: "swmaerske" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 03 Sep 2009 18:09:58 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Cayuse" <z.z7@...> wrote:
>
> Stuart wrote:
> > Cayuse wrote:
> >> Stuart wrote:
> >>> Cayuse wrote:
> >>>> Moreover, when we look at the world, there is no "looker"
> >>>> in that world (LW's "visual room" example: "I can as little
> >>>> own it as I can walk about it, or look at it, or point to it").
> >>>
> >>> Note his use of "I" in the text you cite. Could he have said
> >>> this without such a term (an "I" or equivalent)? Would he have
> >>> wanted to or thought he could in his later phase, after having
> >>> given up the ideal language approach he took from Russell?
> >>
> >> Language is an inappropriate tool for addressing this issue.
> >
> > You have said that in the past and I have told you I don't agree
> > so once again you are falling back on declaration, not argument.
> > I have said that on my view language requires special handling
> > in such cases and have given my reasons for that claim.
>
>
> Language is a process that goes on between certain objects in the world,
> namely people, and has utility in that respect in terms of how people
> negotiate the world. It is pushed beyond that utility when employed to
> address the conceived totality referred to as "subjective experience". No
> special handling will lend any application to language employed in this
> manner.
>
As far as I can see language is organic -- always growing and changing. There
are limits but not fixed limits as they ebb and flow with the ebb and flow of
our experiences. We are constantly evolving and devising new words as our
experiences change.
My reference to mental phenomena (including subjective experience) is a
reference to an arena in which there are no shared observables. (You can't
share my subjective experiences and I can't share yours.) Since language is
publicly grounded it is used for, and is generally about, what we can share.
However there are more ways of sharing than just by sharing observations. Thus
we can and do talk about the phenomena of our mental lives all the time. (We
speak of feeling emotional distress, of physical discomforts in our chests, of
visualizing this or that, of remembering thing, etc.) But because there are no
shared observables we must mediate such references to these kinds of things
with various special linguistic techniques. Sometimes we add gestures to our
words (I point at my chest and make a fist to indicate a particular sensatio)
or create specialized words with applications that are limited to only a few of
us (we develop various ways of speaking among small groups of us). Sometimes we
use metaphor or other poetic terms, too. And sometimes, to make a point, we
recount a narrative intended to evoke in our hearer what we feel.
My point is that there is no basis at all for thinking that "subjective
experience" can only refer to something that has no linguistic dimension at
all, such as your "all" or "the microcosm" you've cited for us in the TLP.
Indeed, such an idea does lack all linguistic dimension how can you even
imagine you can reference it as the "all" or "the microcosm" or, indeed, as
anything else here?
Isn't this whole discussion a contradiction in terms from your point of view?
And if so, what's the point of going on about it?
>
> > However, insofar as you consider it "an inappropriate tool" as
> > you put it, why do you insist on using it?
>
> I use it to offer my opinion concerning all the nonsense that is in vogue now
> about the "scientific study of consciousness".
>
But all you do is add to what you want to call nonsense because you are 1)
talking about something scientists aren't talking about (because you're
confusing their notion with yours) and 2) producing words about something
(what?) which you have already told us no words can capture.
>
> > As my old roshi would have said, stop thinking, just go and sit.
>
> Precisely. So too for all those that jabber on about the "scientific study of
> consciousness".
>
I'm sorry Cayise but it seems to me you are way out to sea on this. There is no
"scientific study of consciousness". It is the "scientific study of brains"
that is at issue and how they do what they do, i.e., how they produce
consciousness. Consciousness is a phenomenon in the world but it is the causal
mechanisms of it that are of scientific interest, not some study of
consciousness in abstraction.
As to jabbering, well perhaps we should ask whether it is more jabber-like to
go on and on about something which we are in agreement is not amenable to
language (and thus going on and on about) or to consider the causal mechanisms
of consciousness and the possibilities of understanding how it comes about and
just what it is as a phenomenon in the world.
>
> >> It may be possible to say what one wants to say about it in a
> >> more precise manner, but the cost of such an approach is to
> >> become more cryptic. That is the choice -- adopt common
> >> speech in the hope of being understood, or lose hope of being
> >> understood. Hume says that when he looks inside himself he
> >> can find no self. To criticize his comment on grounds of being
> >> self-contradictory is to be so shallow as to miss his point.
> >
> > I did not criticize his comments did I? In fact, I've argued that he
> > makes a very valid and important point. The self is nothing but an
> > amalgam of many different mental features. In a certain sense it
> > is an illusion.
>
> I used Hume's comment as an example of how the use of common speech makes
> this idea sound inconsistent. And I do so in order to show that I don't
> accept your argument that LW's use of common speech indicates that he is not
> addressing this issue.
>
I know you don't accept it but you haven't shown why it doesn't work as I say.
Certainly all the later work of Wittgenstein tends to confirm his own
self-avowed rejection of the earlier ideas he had promulgated in the Tractatus
and, more, we see no evidence of his repeating those ideas or making the same
kinds of arguments in the later work. He said he took a different tack and all
the evidence of his later work supports that. Moreover his own contemporaries
understood him as doing that (except maybe for Popper who never seemed to have
grasped Wittgenstein's shift and continued to hammer at the TLP long after
Wittgenstein had moved away from it).
So what's the case you can make on your side of the ledger?
>
> > But who is fooled by the illusion? Here is where we see language,
> > which is inherently public in its genesis and deployment as
> > Wittgenstein noted, breaking down. So here we come to a kind of
> > halt. What we now proceed to do with Hume's useful insight depends
> > on us. Do we do as he did and simply decide we can know nothing
> > for certain at all (here he misses the later Wittgensteinian insight
> > about language) and just proceed in the world as we ordinarily
> > do for lack of choice to do otherwise, or do we become idealists
> > (a la Berkely and the Buddhists), or do we seek reconciliation of the
> > two competing intuitions of reality a la Kant, to preserve both the
> > idealist
> > insights and the facts of a real world which we cannot get away from?
>
> We gain relief from the drive to provide an explanatory account of
> consciousness. "The philosopher's treatment of a question is like the
> treatment of an illness." (PI 255)
>
Ah yes, but Wittgenstein was referring to a different illness than you have
taken him to have had in mind. He was, by repeated pronouncements to this
effect, speaking of our tendency to confuse ourselves by allowing our
linguistic usages to stray from their natural homes. He was speaking of
philosophical problems really having the form of puzzles that we make for
ourselves when we forget how our words really work and stray into metaphysical
type issues.
See what I said elsewhere about the meanings of a word like "certainty".
At bottom he was saying that the purpose of philosophy is not to add new
knowledge or develop and argue for new pictures of how everything is. It was to
get clear about things we already know (even if we don't realize we do) and
this is done by looking at our actual linguistic and other practices and
seeing, thereby, that our philosophical problems have arisen from
misapplications of language.
Once we see this, he proposed, the puzzling aspects melt away. The "problem" is
dissolved and we can stop tearing our hair out in the search for solutions. The
solution is really dissolution and the outcome is an end to confusion and the
mind boggling that comes from our efforts to claw our way out of something that
isn't even there.
Your approach, like the one he abandoned, depends on building complex ladders
to nothing and thinking that when you have got there you can simply kick the
ladders away. A pretty metaphor but, as Wittgenstein eventually saw, a mistaken
one since it is really just another variant of building complex metaphysical
edifices on nothing at all.
SWM
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