Tamminen wrote: ↑June 2nd, 2019, 12:47 pmThere is a radical difference between my view and materialism. Materialists, like Consul, claim that the world without subjects is logically possible. But it is not. Matter is an essential component of the structure of reality, but as we both seem to think, the subject is the key of all existence. The world is the subject's world.
There is no such one thing as
the subject. There are
many subjects; so if the "the world is the subject's world," then the number of worlds is the same as the number of subjects.
Anyway, what exactly is "the subject's world"?
Do you mean a subject's natural or sociocultural
Lebenswelt (life-world/habitat) or
Umwelt (surrounding world/environment)?
Do you mean a
subject's perceptual field? Well, there's a distinction between
my objective perceptual field, which consists of all external, nonmental/physical
objects of my perception, and
my subjective perceptual field, which consists of all internal, mental/experiential
contents of my perception, i.e. of all my sensations (sense-data/-impressions). The latter depends on me, but the former doesn't,
because my objective perceptual field doesn't depend for its being on being an object of my perception.
———
"The subjective visual field has to be sharply distinguished from the objective visual field. The former is an intentional presentation of the latter.
The objective visual field is ontologically public and objective, a third-person set of objects and states of affairs that are identified relative to a particular perceiver and his or her point of view. So right now, the objective visual field for me consists of all the objects and states of affairs that I can see under these lighting conditions in my present physiological and psychological state and from this point of view. The subjective visual field is ontologically private, a first-person set of experiences that go on entirely in the head.
In the objective visual field, everything is seen or can be seen; in the subjective visual field, nothing is seen nor can be seen.
My objective visual field is defined as the set of objects and states of affairs that are visible from my point of view under these conditions. My subjective visual field, on the other hand, is ontologically subjective, and it exists entirely in my brain. Thoe most important thing to re-emphasize is that in the subjective visual field, nothing is seen. This is not because the entities in the subjective visual field are invisible, but rather because their existence is the seeing of objects in the objective visual field. One thing you cannot see when you see anything is your seeing of that thing. And this holds whether or not the case is a good case or a bad case, whether it is veridical or hallucinatory, because in the hallucinatory case you do not see anything. And, in particular, you do not see the hallucinatory seeing. To think otherwise, to think that the entities in the subjective visual field are themselves seen, is to commit the Bad Argument. It is, as I have argued earlier, the disaster from which a large number of the disasters of Western philosophy over the past four centuries result.
I actually believe that if this point had been appreciated, not just about vision but about perception in general, from the seventeenth century on, the entire history of Western philosophy would have been different. Many truly appalling mistakes—from Descartes' Representative Theory of Perception all the way through to Kant's Transcendental Idealism and beyond—would have been avoided if everybody understood you cannot see or otherwise perceive anything in the subjective perceptual field."
(Searle, John R.
Seeing Things As They Are: A Theory of Perception. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. pp. 106-7)