Amateur Ideas; Critique of General Philosophical Notions
The claims and ideas presented herein are very underdeveloped and potentially subject to invalidation of the logical consistency of the framework. They are presented informally, and even then, not in the standard way of explicitly listing out premises and conclusions, but rather, like an informal set of essays.
I share this because I would very much like to hear what others generally think of the core concepts and relations to them as well as to gain peer-review of the claims. There may be some definitions, but they are largely intuitive, informal, and imprecise.
The rhythm of the ideas follows this route: First, I begin by pointing out my view of the apparent cognitive transcendence of the mind and what I believe it means to transcend the mind. Second, I dissolve my initial claims about transcendence, noting how some metaphysical notions such as transcendence may be objectively meaningless in a shared semantic way. This is designed explicitly like this, and not in a way that is contradictory, as I aim to try to clarify what I mean by listing out my early views and why I hold the current views. Overall, I hope the ideas aren't too ambiguous, unclear, long, or overly abstract.
Here goes:
First Part
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I adopt the view that the concept of externality relative to a framework means to be able to extend the notions within the framework as objects in their own rights, that one can meaningfully argue about the devices used for thought itself within that framework without necessarily using the concepts themselves to think about them. This means that an external world, if there is such a thing, is comprehensible if one can meaningfully objectify the mind in the sense that one may regard the mind not as that which produces the active observation of things, but rather, as that object that can be analyzed. This indeed leads to logical paradoxes, especially regress and self-reference, as one reflecting on the mind as an object implies one reflects on that which is doing the reflection, thereby leading to logical regress and self-reference, as one can simply state from analysing that which does the analysing the statement "My mind's analyses are false," which leads to self-reference, particularly the Liar's paradox, and even though this example is relatively simple, it still, hopefully, clarifies the resulting logical paradoxes.
I view it that externality of the mind, then, is the mind's incomplete objectification of itself. For clarity, the mind cannot totally objectify itself because any attempt to do so requires knowledge of the mind, and any such knowledge is attained from within the mind, thereby again leading to logical regress. This regress implies that either the mind cannot completely make itself an independent thing to be observed. Since the mind cannot actively observe itself totally without influencing the act of self-observation, the mind possibly observes simulations of what the mind appears to be within memories of what the mind actively was prior to self-observation. Overall, this means that complete self-knowledge is impossible logically.
Second Part
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Herein, I establish the definition of the phenomenon of active, immediate, pre-reflective conceptual thinking of how something appears to the mind. Primary apprehension is defined as the subconscious pre-reflective, clarity of what something is to the mind. This is, I think at least, close to Husserl's definition of the pre-reflective thinking. It is subconscious because it is pre-reflective, meaning it determines what something's essential meaning, or meaning-in-itself is to the mind. A phenomenon may be described as an instance of primary apprehension of a something unexplainable by virtue of pure logic. Furthermore, I define objectively shared meaning to be a universal apprehension of the immediate seeing of what a thing is in the way it appears to one's mind.
Here, I reject the view that terms such as "transcendence", "objectivity", and "externality" to be objectively shared meaningfully, as I think subjects merely formulate labels(such as transcendence) mapping onto experienced phenomenon, thinking of them to be timeless, fixed, and totally capturing references for the essence of a phenomenon, yet I believe this not to be the case, as I think labels do not capture the essence of what a thing is, but are standalone words describing the behaviour of a subjective phenomenon. In this view, the reflective person merely maps a label onto an experienced primary apprehension and assumes it truly captures what that thing is in its essence. For example, transcendence, in my view, has no objectively shared fixed meaning because firstly, any label cannot truly capture the essence of the thing because there is no proof of the consistency of the essence being attributed with the thing subjectively and because there is no proof or disproof that one's essence is another's, and whether that is even meaningful, and secondly, because the label is objectively semantically empty in the sense that in an assumed shared context, since the label tries to establish a fixed definition for a phenomenon, it merely provides a definition that utilizes how the subject perceives what the label should in essence mean, and by extension, what the definition of the label in complex enough terms means. I mean that the label merely produces a shared syntax that is objective, but its essence is found nowhere because it is meaningful to the subject by how it maps onto a phenomenon in the present conscious perception of what the label maps onto.
For the best clarity I could think of that best approximates, at least what I interpret, what I'm trying to get at is Wittgenstein's Beetle box thought experiment.
I think this is largely why some philosophical problems are actually just pseudo-problems, in that they're byproducts of miscommunication in language. One example is that of the question "What is transcendence in its essential form?" This, to me, is not meaningful objectively in the way that it merely serves as a label for something that cannot be captured in terms of labels, and thereby it is meaningful only to the subject as the subject understands, subjectively, what transcendence is in terms of assigning active apprehension to the label.
Lastly, my view that notions such as transcendence are objectively semantically empty undermines my arguments in a specific way: Since there is no universally fixed meaning of what objectivity is, my arguments are merely my subjective clarifications of how I experience the phenomenon.
I admit some parts have assertions, some do not logically follow from other statements, and such, but I'm really merely a person who often suffers from large problems in trying to express their ideas effectively and precisely, and often experience what I call secondary apprehension, which is the occasional seeing of a structure, whether illusionary or insightful, because it's more a feeling, or simply intuition if you will, which is very hard to try to approximate in terms of language from my experience, which is why the reader will definitely not get what I'm trying to say fully, but that's alright, as somewhat ironically that's what the framework sort of predicts.
Overall, I hope the ideas are not very nonsensical and should hopefully be somewhat understandable by some.