> On Jun 27, 2025, at 7:31, Marcus Daniels <mar...@snoutfarm.com> wrote: > > Dave writes: > > < My 'mysticism', like my hallucinogenic experience, is nothing more than a > source of what I consider to be "real" data and a supply of fascinating > questions—never answers. > > > Not clear why something that supposedly cannot be captured by mere language > keeps getting pitched as a real and intersubjective thing via language.
I am much less bothered by this _in principle_, since I generally hold the two premises: 1. Language is a collection of signals _within_ a system, that are part of coordinating states among people; it doesn’t follow that language should “contain” or “capture” anything that works as a model “of” the system, in the way I would want formalism to have a mappability to phenomena in anything I consider science. Often language-in-general will have some mutual information with something closer to a model, but that is partly luck and not uniform. Languages that do have those mappable qualities tend to be more bespoke, because they were under heavy pressure to do that job, which is somewhat different from the background social/material criteria for the great majority of language (though scientific language and sense can both, I would argue, be seen to grow out of their counterparts that have some presence in the broader bulk of language and commonsense); and 2. The term “reality” is a problem in general. It is still too close to its origins in the hand-me-down umbrella term from common usage, which gets it accepted and used with a fluency that belies its evasive and indefinite character. I would put it, in most instances of usage, in the category I call “placeholder terms”. They enable the rest of discourse to proceed, because something is needed in those slots, but that doesn’t mean they necessarily carry very good meanings on their own. To the extent that “reality” has a central tendency of meaning, it seems (to me) to be around the notion of “since we are always trying to economize on attention, which things are safest to turn your back on, in the expectation that they will still be there and not bite you in the meantime?” So for a language-term to be suggesting that it is trying to coordinate a state, with some somewhat reflexive situation-statement acknowleding that it does not have a model of the state, together with the state itself’s being so loosely handled that it is not clear when the people really are coordinated or how they would decide on that, I can certainly see this kind of pattern as an ordinary occurrence. Even if some intersubjectivity would be reasonable to expect, in view of our vast overlapping constitution shared by all being people, primates, mammals, and so on. I do like the idea that this is just a version of the normal confusion, for things not understood very well (like, quite badly), and that one could find ways to do better. Eric
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