On Sep 29, 2009, at 5:29 PM, Cayuse wrote:
CJ wrote:One problem with "reality" is that we are tempted to include 'ourselves' the supposed "subject" within "reality" and then once we position ourselves within this reality, the question of "experience","into us from the the outside" and in particular, causative experiencefrom outside us, somewhere out there in that presumed reality that becomes available to us, so that it impacts somewhere inside us,where we are positioned sufficiently within that reality to be subjectto its laws of causation.This is close to my view, but for the question that occurs to me in respect of /what it is/ that is "tempted to include the supposed 'subject' within 'reality'."Is it the "supposed subject" that is so tempted?
Once we accept the notion of "reality" it is difficult for us to imagine otherwise, i.e. to imagine that "we" who are said to know and to speak can be anywhere else but in its midst. And so, to paraphrase Wittgenstein "we are certain that we must be there in reality not because we "know" in any compelling Cartesian way but simply because we can't imagine otherwise.
The problem is not one of gullibility or lackadaisical nature of mankind but akin to the problems we encounter when we discuss numbers. It is a problem of how we "speak"of things in general, I believe, when we try to be smart. This is the question that Wittgenstein has himself raised of the relation between th eye and the visual field.
The question of "zero" and its role in relation to the other numbers is very much the same problem. While "reality" is the analog, for the purposes of this discussion of infinity...of everything that is, if you like, and of the "all that the eye can see"........although the notion of "reality" that we tend to use is a simple and primitive analog of the infinite---- akin to that which prevailed prior to Cantor----since there are many orders of reality, just as there are infinitely many integers, infinitely many rationals, infinitely many reals, and so on, but we never speak in terms of orders of reality......just "reality, per se"
Once we accept the idea of "reality" as "everything there is", It then somehow seems appropriate (or tempting) to simply throw zero in with the other numbers and to identify as an integer, a rational number, a real number, and so on. But don't we know that there is something special about "zero" that is different and that simply placing it along a spectrum of integers in any discussion does not do it justice, and is not quite enough (without clarification).
This may not seem convincing to you. To me it is like unraveling the dreamwork in which our Western world expresses itself and which results in its "ways of speaking".........
