Ah, here is where our opinions diverge sharply. I should mention quickly that I have edited my above post slightly—I had accidentally left out a few words at the beginning of the first paragraph. I don’t think it changes the thrust of my argument at all.
I have to tell you, I think you’re misapplying this whole “problem of perspective” thing. I agree that it exists, but I don’t think it’s as far reaching as you’re implying: if it were, it would be impossible for anyone to understand anything ever. We are able to understand some things, so, QED...
Reading back, I think you missed my point on this in my first comment, when I was talking about a reductio ad absurdum. Here’s the problem I see:
I’m walking along one day and I walk past a tree. I say to myself, “What’s that over there?” And then I interpret the experience from my perspective as Argency and guess, “It seems to be a tree.” But then I run into a problem—what does this experience of “seeming to see a tree” mean? I need some perspective from which to interpret it. And even if I successfully interpret it, what will the interpretation mean, and the interpretation of the interpretation, and so on ad infinitum?
Interpreted meanings are experiences themselves, so if we require our experiences to be interpreted from some perspective in order to be understood, we’ll end up with an infinite stack of interpretations and no meaning at the bottom. But we do experience meaning every day—when I walk past a tree I say, “look, a tree!” Any argument that implies otherwise must be absurd.
So we can conclude that not every piece of information requires interpretation from some perspective. Specifically, our own thoughts and experiences (which are actually physical events which happen in our brains) gain meaning by the way they interlock and relate to one another, and need not be interpreted by any homunculus in order to be understood by us, the thinkers. There’s no need for a universal perspective (no such thing exists) because we have our own perspective ready-made, and wrapped up in a neat little bundle of meat and bone.
This is why analytic philosophers so often despair while trying to talk to continental philosophers, I think. Sure, there’s no absolute, objective, universal meaning, and sure, meaning is entirely dependent on perspective, but we’re lucky enough to have a perspective from which to interpret things. Even luckier, each of our perspectives is similar enough that we can use a common language to translate our experiences between our slightly-differing perspectives.
So, ShiftedShapes said that “experience must exist”, which is right up there next to “cogito ergo sum”. I will agree that without context that assertion is meaningless, and I am willing to allow that maybe there is some mixed up perspective from which experience could be said not to exist. But ShiftedShapes is a human being, and was talking to other human beings, and there is undeniably an implied context here that this statement should be interpreted from within the perspective of thinking beings.
I don’t agree with SS either, though, because as I said, the existence of experiences is a hinge proposition of thinking beings. It isn’t possible to have a thinking being who doesn’t have experiences, so the existence of experiences is something that is part of our perspective, not something that is revealed by our perspective. So, here we can’t talk about certainty or uncertainty, correctness or incorrectness, because it isn’t possible to prove a system’s axioms from within that system. :)
Ah, here is where our opinions diverge sharply. I should mention quickly that I have edited my above post slightly—I had accidentally left out a few words at the beginning of the first paragraph. I don’t think it changes the thrust of my argument at all.
I have to tell you, I think you’re misapplying this whole “problem of perspective” thing. I agree that it exists, but I don’t think it’s as far reaching as you’re implying: if it were, it would be impossible for anyone to understand anything ever. We are able to understand some things, so, QED...
Reading back, I think you missed my point on this in my first comment, when I was talking about a reductio ad absurdum. Here’s the problem I see: I’m walking along one day and I walk past a tree. I say to myself, “What’s that over there?” And then I interpret the experience from my perspective as Argency and guess, “It seems to be a tree.” But then I run into a problem—what does this experience of “seeming to see a tree” mean? I need some perspective from which to interpret it. And even if I successfully interpret it, what will the interpretation mean, and the interpretation of the interpretation, and so on ad infinitum?
Interpreted meanings are experiences themselves, so if we require our experiences to be interpreted from some perspective in order to be understood, we’ll end up with an infinite stack of interpretations and no meaning at the bottom. But we do experience meaning every day—when I walk past a tree I say, “look, a tree!” Any argument that implies otherwise must be absurd.
So we can conclude that not every piece of information requires interpretation from some perspective. Specifically, our own thoughts and experiences (which are actually physical events which happen in our brains) gain meaning by the way they interlock and relate to one another, and need not be interpreted by any homunculus in order to be understood by us, the thinkers. There’s no need for a universal perspective (no such thing exists) because we have our own perspective ready-made, and wrapped up in a neat little bundle of meat and bone.
This is why analytic philosophers so often despair while trying to talk to continental philosophers, I think. Sure, there’s no absolute, objective, universal meaning, and sure, meaning is entirely dependent on perspective, but we’re lucky enough to have a perspective from which to interpret things. Even luckier, each of our perspectives is similar enough that we can use a common language to translate our experiences between our slightly-differing perspectives.
So, ShiftedShapes said that “experience must exist”, which is right up there next to “cogito ergo sum”. I will agree that without context that assertion is meaningless, and I am willing to allow that maybe there is some mixed up perspective from which experience could be said not to exist. But ShiftedShapes is a human being, and was talking to other human beings, and there is undeniably an implied context here that this statement should be interpreted from within the perspective of thinking beings.
I don’t agree with SS either, though, because as I said, the existence of experiences is a hinge proposition of thinking beings. It isn’t possible to have a thinking being who doesn’t have experiences, so the existence of experiences is something that is part of our perspective, not something that is revealed by our perspective. So, here we can’t talk about certainty or uncertainty, correctness or incorrectness, because it isn’t possible to prove a system’s axioms from within that system. :)