Does subjectivity have a future?

[apperception]

I think Heidegger's challenge still stands. What he's asking isn't all that controversial. It's something like, "Is human experience a kind of computation of the mind on basic inputs?" He doesn't ask that question explicitly, but that's the position he's challenging all throughout the first part of Being and TimeIt's not a wild question. There'

Comments

[springheel_jack]

Julian Jaynes, who is a maniac but interesting (or maybe was; I don't remember if he's still alive), says (or said) that the development of subjectivity post-dates the development of civilization. And its loss may ante-date the end of civilization.

[apperception]

Julian Jaynes is a maniac. I read his book when I was in college. (Won't type the title since doing so would give me carpal tunnel.) It wasn't assigned for a class or anything, I was just taking a lot of acid. He's wrong but probably on to something. There's likely a social dimension to subjectivity (what Jaynes calls "consciousness"). Jaynes' focus is on language-I remember that whole weird distinction between metaphrand and metaphriar-and obviously language is social even if he doesn't say it. But machines are social, too. I'm reading George Dyson's book right now, Darwin Among the Machines, and he argues that what made 50s and 60s claims about AI premature is that these machines weren't social. They were only about as intelligent as bacteria, too, but he sees the social dimension as just as important as the raw floating point operations these things can do. And Dreyfus is probably right that there has to be some embodied, behavioral dimension for there to be anything like our own experience, so you need machines that

[internalogic]

wow.

you're an athlete.

[leafofgrass]

First, let me say how much it saddens me you won't be joining us in the ranks. Though you may be better off for it and academia qua academia is a rather useless enterprise in the long run, people who are capable of re-envisioning or putting in proper perspective the difficulties we face in philosophy tend to be somewhat rare. Anyhow

[apperception]

Is it possible for us to understand the meaningfulness of our experience outside of concepts like consciousness and subjectivity?

No. What you're asking is for "our" experience to make sense outside of any sense of "mineness". Kant had this right when he said any representation must be my representation in order to be a representation. (This was the analytical argument. The synthetic argument is questionable.) Sartre was also on the right track when he argued that every awareness contains within itself a non-thetic awareness, or a non-thematic self-grasping. It's entirely obscure what one grasps in such a self-grasping, but it's there