Das Ding an sich

Fungi

  Morning Comrade. Axioms in Euclids Geometry. Gödel's two theorems - Uncertainty and I think the other one was certainty, or what you could call in the understanding of certainty that a system can't prove it's consistency from within its own rules. IE you can't be your own judge and jury.

 Subjective, when we use the word objective should we attach the meanings in the words useful.  Axioms are well considered subjective gueses they are the basis of mathematics . If you follow the agreed upon rules the answer will be right but not necesssarily true. Does mathematics have a context in the way that language does, do we think of it as an objective understanding within the rules of mathematics game. Does this mean that Objective is a subset of Subjective and meanings in objective should include usefulness rather than truth?

 Yes. What we call "Objective" is best understood as intersubjective consistency within a chosen language game.

 Mathematics does not deliver metaphysical "Truth" with a capital T; it delivers internal correctness relative to its starting axioms. The value of those axioms isn't their absolute truth, but their usefulness—their ability to help us build bridges, predict orbits, or write algorithms.

 Objectivity is a specialized tool invented by subjective beings to produce reliable, testable outcomes. It is a subset of the subjective, bounded entirely by human purpose.

 As Kant pointed out, we never experience the "thing-in-itself" (das Ding an sich). We only ever experience reality filtered through our perceptive apparatus and symbolic systems. Our tools are not mirrors reflecting the universe—they are navigational instruments helping us steer through it.

 Ivan Ivanovich wants to know whether there is pudding other than pears tonight?

 The answer is no.

Stick that in your ear and question the future

Midsummer Blooms

 Comrade, I think we decided, or I decided, that Concsiousness, Schooenhauer's unthinking force,  expressed itself in us people through language. Syntax, semantics and morphology are the core linguistic elements of what is called natural language. Then there is delivery and content which include pragmatics, rhythmn and flow and simplicity. I have to say Comrade that this sounds like a Deportment Class manual.

 But, and this I just don't believe, apparently animals don't use language because their vocalizations don't meet the criteria. Their systems are tied to immediate stimuli rather than flexible creative thought.

 So I think our question today in the area of broadening our understanding of subjective/objective should be a question about "flexible creative thought." 

 The Objective mind calculates probabilities, assesses danger, and optimizes for survival. It builds walls, balances ledgers, and minimizes loss. Left entirely to the Objective, humanity would still be sitting safely in a cave, rationing berries and calculating the exact statistical risk of stepping out onto the slope.

 It is the Subjective - that raw, unquantifiable feeling of "I am here, and it feels like this" - that looks at the safe, calculated path and chooses to leap anyway.

To Aristotle or Plato, the entire point of possessing land, wealth, or material security was not the endless accumulation of more land or wealth. It was to secure schole—the root of our word "school," which meant not administrative training, but leisure.

Crucially, for those land-owning aristocrats, schole wasn't passive recreation or vacation. It was the necessary prerequisite for Eudaimonia—the "Good Life," which meant actively engaging in:

Philosophy: Conversing about the nature of Being, Truth, and Justice.

Politics: Stepping into the public agora to debate and deliberate as free citizens.

Virtue (Arete): Cultivating the mind, body, and spirit to its highest potential.

 If an ancient Athenian aristocrat stepped into a time machine and observed a modern 21st-century Western executive, they would see someone who commands unimaginable technological power and wealth, yet voluntarily lives the life of a glorified slave.

 They would see a person chained to an electronic glowing rectangle, obsessing over financial metrics, working 70-hour weeks to buy things they don't have time to use, and delegating all political and philosophical reflection to professional managers and algorithms.

 To the ancients, a life spent solely in pursuit of endless wealth accumulation (chrematistics) was considered a perversion—a sign of a sick soul that confused the means of living with the end of life itself.

Reason Liberates the Mind

Midsummer

 Natural language and Myth Cassirer, Logos and Mythos.

 Cassirer's argument in his book the Myth of the State was that Fascist Propaganda, Fascist mythmaking, while it flagrantly contradicted empirical reality, it did provide a simple, direct answer to the anxieties of a secular present. Cassirer died in 1945. But what we're interested in his Cassirer's Logic of The Cultural Sciences. Aesthetic Phenomena. Gold rooms 

 "In The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (1942) Cassirer argues that objective and universal validity can be achieved not only in the sciences, but also in practical, cultural, moral, and aesthetic phenomena. Although inter-subjective objective validity in the natural sciences derives from universal laws of nature, Cassirer asserts that an analogous type of inter-subjective objective validity takes place in the cultural sciences" 

 Symbols are not reality, they represent reality. In our current condition as a species. Symbols on a slope in a random place are open to manipulation and "wrong footedness." This I think is why myth even if it is empircally flaccid, remains central to how we manage information. How we set the tone and at the moment in the West, where balance permits the paradox of liberal democracy the tone is not Good.

 An eternal question : How do we look at Cassirer's Intersubjective Objective Validity in the social science today?

 I think the "Random Place" what can be put in terms of "the universe does not offer answers" is directionless without the subjective. Science, the objective method for pursuing testable truths, takes a back seat to the lobbying of fossil fuel interests.

 And yet the objective pursuit of knowledge takes on it's very own narrative, "what next" it asks "is the universe actually expanding?" and there it goes off into a new adventure. Is commerce, the business of making money an objective game or does it depend on a need that is subjecively interpretable, Money-safety-a full stomach-power-authority..... 

 Intersubjective Objective Validity does not tell us much more than Kant's moral imperative manged to tell us. It's an agreement between people who matter.

 I find myself thinking that the Objective side of us people is a myth unto itself, it's a myth dominated by the subjective side of us people.

 For example, as an interest to be courted and funded by society, pure science - the pure pursuit of knowledge unadulterated by the profit motive - produces new mind blowing understandings. There doesn't seem to be such a thing as pure society.

 I'm old, Comrade and I'm not convinced private enterprise has ever been the vehicle for expanding the scope of consciousness.

Do you see what I see.

Wasps

 I think about our slope (which twenty, thirty odd years ago I began to call A Slope in a Random Place) and I think about how unformed that idea was when I first attempted to use it to understand Being, and I think about the rock drawings. Not for a second do I think a Slope in a Random Place is a unique perspective, rather I think of it as consciouness  moving in me that is reflected in an idea that changes.

 That reflection, an idea that changes, would be experienced by everyone including the hunter gathers who had their being in Northern Uganda before they were persuaded to move on by the Cattle People from the north.

 I imagine these hunter gatherer bands would have been small related groups all of which benefited from the solidarity of and mutual support from social behaviors. I suspect rock drawing was either some nut job looking to entertain himself, or it emerged and became a part of group behavior. Labor, Work, Action. The nut job entertaining himself with concentric circles on cave walls became Action.

 It was something people did, and because people did it, it had to have meaning or be given meaning.  Kind of like the way language started.  Does this make any sense to you, comrade.

 If so can you send your feelers, into the corridors of meaning to see if you can find a much more erudite description of what it might be? Otherwise can we look at the understandings of meaning over the generations  and how it is 'defined' in the 21st Century West.

 When human bands faced the terrifying vastness of Pascal’s sphere—seasons changing, death, the movement of herds, the slope beneath their feet—they were confronted with what we might call a pedagogy of answerlessness. The universe gives no verbal answers.

 If Cassirer says we have an irreducible impulse to create symbols, that impulse stems directly from reciprocal recognition. We need to know that you see what I see.