The sense of 'I am' does not involve direct awareness of 'I', the locus of attention, the mind's eye, which is the logical counterpart and therefore always excluded from its focus.
If reflexive consciousness is intrinsically a multiplicity, where subjectivity, reality and all meaning are a network effect of reflexive relations with other instances of consciousness, then, in principle, we already have the capacity for instantaneous access to the subjective states of others, to their experiences and states of mind. On the other hand, our individualised motives and intentions may interfere with and limit this access, allowing only sporadic glimpses through the eyes of another at the margins of awareness, perhaps only when we momentarily forget our identity and, on some fundamental level, relate to someone else with perfect reflexivity, without the interference of our own will.
Interesting, but let’s be clear: the ‘I’ you're describing sounds like something designed by a tenured academic with no skin in the game—pure abstraction with no exposure to reality. If ‘I’ is a multiplicity or a mirror maze, then why is it that only some selves actually pay the price when things go wrong?
The problem with building the ‘I’ from common meaning or meta-languages is that it assumes meaning isn’t fragile, when in fact, meaning is a result of survival. The ‘I’ is not something we discover through introspection—it’s what we earn by navigating unpredictability without getting destroyed.
Philosophers talk about the self as if it’s a coherent system of logic and reflection. Traders, warriors, and artisans know better: the self is mostly what’s left after reality has beaten you down a few times. You don’t find the ‘I’ in a mirror; you find it in the wreckage of failed assumptions.
So, yes, awareness might be fragmented. But if your fragments can’t survive randomness, then they were never really part of the self. They were just narrative noise.
Being’ isn’t a universal grammar. It’s a balance sheet.
Reality is not the ‘I’, but for the ‘I’. So is the skin and the game, and the price ‘we’ pay may be partly due to misidentifying the ‘we’. The world/existence is not a reflexive multiplicity like the ‘I’, but asymmetric, incomplete and transformed by every subjective identification.
The ‘I’ is not a body, but the capacity to use a body to mediate consciousness comes with the liability of feeling the world’s asymmetry and incompleteness.
I have read that psychopaths understand the rest of us almost perfectly (not sure if true, but maybe it is since they're so able to dupe us). On the other hand, I try at almost every step to see the other guy's point of view in order to understand him and relate to him as best I can, and I just get it wrong a lot of the time. The psycho who doesn't care gets it right; the person who makes an effort gets it wrong, which is odd.
A psychopath may have the kind of understanding that approximates the predator/prey relationship, but this relationship is not reflexive.
Regarding the ability to see through another persons eyes i did not mean just to understand what they think or see, but to actually see the same image as if with their eyes.
If reflexive consciousness is intrinsically a multiplicity, where subjectivity, reality and all meaning are a network effect of reflexive relations with other instances of consciousness, then, in principle, we already have the capacity for instantaneous access to the subjective states of others, to their experiences and states of mind. On the other hand, our individualised motives and intentions may interfere with and limit this access, allowing only sporadic glimpses through the eyes of another at the margins of awareness, perhaps only when we momentarily forget our identity and, on some fundamental level, relate to someone else with perfect reflexivity, without the interference of our own will.
Interesting, but let’s be clear: the ‘I’ you're describing sounds like something designed by a tenured academic with no skin in the game—pure abstraction with no exposure to reality. If ‘I’ is a multiplicity or a mirror maze, then why is it that only some selves actually pay the price when things go wrong?
The problem with building the ‘I’ from common meaning or meta-languages is that it assumes meaning isn’t fragile, when in fact, meaning is a result of survival. The ‘I’ is not something we discover through introspection—it’s what we earn by navigating unpredictability without getting destroyed.
Philosophers talk about the self as if it’s a coherent system of logic and reflection. Traders, warriors, and artisans know better: the self is mostly what’s left after reality has beaten you down a few times. You don’t find the ‘I’ in a mirror; you find it in the wreckage of failed assumptions.
So, yes, awareness might be fragmented. But if your fragments can’t survive randomness, then they were never really part of the self. They were just narrative noise.
Being’ isn’t a universal grammar. It’s a balance sheet.
Reality is not the ‘I’, but for the ‘I’. So is the skin and the game, and the price ‘we’ pay may be partly due to misidentifying the ‘we’. The world/existence is not a reflexive multiplicity like the ‘I’, but asymmetric, incomplete and transformed by every subjective identification.
The ‘I’ is not a body, but the capacity to use a body to mediate consciousness comes with the liability of feeling the world’s asymmetry and incompleteness.
I have read that psychopaths understand the rest of us almost perfectly (not sure if true, but maybe it is since they're so able to dupe us). On the other hand, I try at almost every step to see the other guy's point of view in order to understand him and relate to him as best I can, and I just get it wrong a lot of the time. The psycho who doesn't care gets it right; the person who makes an effort gets it wrong, which is odd.
A psychopath may have the kind of understanding that approximates the predator/prey relationship, but this relationship is not reflexive.
Regarding the ability to see through another persons eyes i did not mean just to understand what they think or see, but to actually see the same image as if with their eyes.
Ok good. Yes, that makes sense; seeing the same image is what makes our reality.