/lit/ - Literature

>>22356891
I'll be the one person in this thread to actually answer the question. It's not about consciousness, it's about the presence of experience in a particular subject (as opposed to any other). It's not "what is consciousness?" but "why is *this* experience the one that is present?"

Read Valberg. Pic related is one of the few book-length works devoted to the question. He takes it further by exploring the puzzles that a consideration of the problem raises and their consequences for our ordinary intuitions about the self and its relation to the world. I think it is no exaggeration to call it one of the three seminal works of 21st-century philosophy. The writing is also deeply personal. The other books on this are Caspar Hare's "On Myself and Other Less Important Subjects" and Mark Johnston's "Surviving Death" which in some respects is an attempt to grapple with the implications of Valberg's work.

Nagel, Wittgenstein, and Zeno Vendler attempt to wrap their heads around this but not on a scale approaching the vast synthetic treatment that Valberg provides.

>>16548519
Yeah, he's right. At least he's one of the few who have made an attempt to articulate what this problem is and shed some light on it. Every conclusion he draws seems to stem necessarily from the fact that THIS experience is present and not any other (though of course as he points out there is nothing metaphysically impossible about the notion that other experiences have been present to me or will be present again: nagel's "fantasy of reincarnation without memory"). The vertiginous question is frankly one of the few philosophical problems that should really matter to us, since it seems to strike us all as puzzling at some point in our lives, even to those who lack the conceptual apparatus to articulate it. How many of us have asked at some point "why am I me?"

If you want to delve even deeper into this, read pic related. Valberg and Hare are tackling the same problem, though what they take to be the true nature of "present" experience differs substantially. But Valberg also leans hard into the solipsism postulate. It's a pluralistic kind of solipsism though, only one experience is present, yes, but everyone can say that for themselves. Still, this means your death is THE death, and when your world ends THE world ends. We are all truly alone. Spooky stuff

>>16535966
The transcendental subject contains within it the totality of the world and every other subject. Your death is thus THE death, and this is the only sense in which solipsism can be true.

I think it's a transcendental limit and that by drawing out the subject matter of the world makes us aware that only one experience is present.

>>16343447

>>16303581

>>16182832
>>16185033

Some kind of naturalistic metempsychosis is probably, amazingly, unbelievably true. Though you would never know it and it arises from transcendental considerations about the presence of experience in a subject

>>16090244
Now read this and realize that he was speaking to an even deeper problem

One of the three most profound works of philosophy written in the 21st century and one of its main subjects is death. You are so lucky

>>16020413
No, since empiricism taken to its logical extreme is FAPP solipsism a la Berkeley.

That said, there are weaker formulations of solipsism that emerge from the consideration that only one experience (the one corresponding to the questioner) is present and that this naturally leads us to conclude that one experience is preeminent and contains all others.

>>15989396
You are an idiot if you can't grasp that fear of death is positional, in that it obviously strikes you when you're alive, and afflicts those who enjoy life and would like to keep living. The idea of confrontation with absolute nothingness is scary because it's inconceivable and because it's eternal.

>>15988862
The epicurean lives life by embracing death, but there's a largely untapped metaphysical component to this line of thinking. Wittgenstein picked up on this when he said that death is not an event in life and that we do not live to experience it. Eternity is atemporal and not of infinite temporal duration. Early Wittgenstein, being a transcendental idealist, claims that the death of the subject is the end not just of the subject's world but THE world simpliciter. Death annihilates the subject and, as the presence of experience in the subject contains all others, annihilates the world. The incomprehensibility of death reveals the truth of solipsism.

>>15882262
forgot my pic

>>15073055
Indeed, what could it?

>>14957047
>>14957066
Deals directly with the question of the first-person presence of experience

Genuinely impossible to grasp unless you've intuited the specific problems discussed in this book before

>>14315254

Accept it as a truth that you already know and acknowledge in everyday life.

Has nothing to do with the desirability or ethics of death, but pic related is a very interesting discussion of an overlooked problem in transcendental approaches towards the nature of death and its relationship to solipsism as something analagous to the connection between dreaming and waking life.

But of course!

>>13041489
read the real deal. How could you read that book and not go directly to this?