[Wittrs] Re: On Ownership and Privacy
- From: "Cayuse" <z.z7@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 15 Aug 2009 19:44:01 +0100
Kirby wrote:
> It's fine to impute an owner to an experience of pain if you can
> think of a use case that makes sense i.e. "this is *my* pain".
Sure. This involves imagining "me" to be an object in the world, and of
identifying that particular object as the one associated with the experience of
pain. But I go back to PI 398, LW's analogy of the "visual room" in contrast to
"the material room in which I sit", or rather in which it is imagined that this
"me" sits, since this "me" is absent from the actual vision. When that process
of imagining subsides, the idea of a "me" subsides with it. In this case the
pain has no owner, no experiencer, no knower.
Kirby wrote:
> The goal here is to think something like: this experience (of a
> pain in my arm, for example), is not at the other end of some
> pointer (like a stick), with the word "pain" doing the pointing,
> but rather that the "flow of sense" depends on the whole
> spectrum of events in a non-redundant manner, i.e. even though
> we have that "map" (sheet music telling us "the future") in some
> sense, the analogy with real maps breaks down at the limit
> ("limit" starting to sound more like TLP here).
>
> It's all a map, there is no territory (or it's all territory, no map).
>
> This idea of "language on the one hand, what it means on the
> other" is what we're hoping to counter. There's the flow of sense,
> but there's no poking one's head outside the flow (subject-object
> breaks down as a grammar before we get there i.e. we just get a
> lot of meaningless wheel spinning, as a musician tries to make
> music about music (such as I'm doing here).
I think the connection with the TLP holds good. I like your turn of phrase
"there's no poking one's head outside the flow" (though there is no head to
poke outside of it), and your point that "subject-object breaks down as grammar
before we get there" is what is most interesting about this whole issue.
Similarly for the public-private distinction. The upshot is that I think we can
legitimately speak of private states (as part of that language game in the
imagined scenario of "me" as an object in the world), but what LW calls the
"visual room" takes the notion of "private states" to a limit at which it is
even absurd to refer to it as a "private state". As you say, we just get a lot
of meaningless wheel spinning.
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