Quoting Zuboff: there are two ways of describing universalism, either there is only one person, or there are many persons and they are all you.
But we know it's not true there's only one person and we know other people are no me, so your so-called universalism doesn't make any sense.
If you're going to assume universalism is false in order to demonstrate that it doesn't make any sense, then I don't see the point of trying to convince you otherwise.
It's just obvious it's not what I did at all. I just started by making explicit what I believe is obvious to all of us and made the obvious inference. I'm quite sure anyone reading that would make up their own mind.
Meanwhile, you fail to address my point that it's obvious to all of us that we're ourselves and not other people.
What makes something my experience is its immediacy and subjective quality, not the physical substrate it occurs in.
What makes something literature is the quality of being a written artifact, not the physical substrate it occurs in.
As long as there is something having an experience that is immediate and subjective, that experience is mine and I am that thing.
As long as there is at least one written artifact in existence, that written artifact counts as literature.
This is not an argument for universalism, but a way of framing it in terms of something that is already familiar, already expressed in similar terms to the thing that is being argued for via other means.
That's definitely not a very helpful as a parallel. First, something having subjective experience is obviously not comparable to something being literature, so we are going to assume that wouldn't be your point here. And it seems to me that your point can only be that the relation between the characteristic of having subjective experience and all human beings is analogous to the relation between literature and all books. Yeah, sure, but that's just trivial. You could say that pretty much about any characteristic shared by many instances of things. I don't think you should feel I need that kind of clarification to understand your point.
I also think this is beside the point. Literature can be understood as a category, i.e. something which, unlike books, exists only within our minds, as part of our representation of the world out there. That's debatable but that's at least how we tend to think of it, simply because there's no universally accepted definition of literature. As such, literature is not analogous to subjective experience, which not only something we know exist as such, but which is one of the two things we really know exist. And I think any convincing argument for universalism would have to start from the very particular quality of subjective experience. You indeed start from that in the quote above but then you immediately drop the ball, switching to a lame argument based on the idea of category.
Now, this is your chance of easily convincing me and I'm handing this opportunity to you on a plate. The basic idea is that we can draw a straightforward and luminous analogy with space. Wherever we may be, we're somewhere in space, and we all say, "I'm here". That's completely analogous to saying, "It's me". And then, "there" is analogous to "you", "him", "them", "other people", etc. For example, "He is there" is analogous to "It's him"; "You are there" is analogous to "It's you"; etc.
Do agree with that so far?
If so, then tell me how you would express universalism using only this spatial terminology.
All of the words you used are token-reflexives. The same information can be conveyed without them. One could conceivably refer to people by name, including when the person talking is the one being referred to. The same goes for location. Instead of saying "here" and "there", just say where here and there actually are, irrespective of the location of the speaker, in absolute terms.
Sorry, but you'd need to think more carefully about that. I'm sure it's definitely not possible to name every one location with a specific name. We certainly give names to many places, New York, Paris, the Galaxy, the Universe and what not, but this leaves out most places, indeed I could say nearly all places! But that's somewhat beside the point.
The point, which you seem to have missed entirely, is that there is no such a thing as an "absolute location". Contrary to what you just asserted, we are unable to "
say where here and there actually are, irrespective of the location of the speaker, in absolute terms". All we can do is give "names" to "places". But giving a name to a place doesn't tell us anything about the location. It doesn't tell us where the place is in absolute terms.
So you'd need to take a closer look at what it is we do. Words like "here" and "there", as well as place names, as just our fall-back option, the best we can do, just to be able to function in this vast world. We're not anywhere near being able to identify the location of any place we know of, except perhaps the universe itself, if we could know that there's nothing else beyond what we think of as our universe.
So, what you are missing here is rather critical. Our use of words like "here" and "there", as well as names for people and places, has precisely nothing absolute to it. It's all relative. We call Paris "Paris", not because we know where it is in any absolute sense, we don't, but because it's good enough to distinguish it from, say, Reims, Bordeaux, Toulouse, or even New York. And words like "here" and "there" have the same characteristic as names for people and places in that they are all relative. Here is relative to there just as Paris is relative first to close-by places like Versailles and Nogent, and then far away places like New York and Moscow. We have to use maps to materialise where places are relative to each other. Nothing absolute in this system. Our brain is too small to use a system with absolute designations.
And so it is for persons. I easily identify myself, i.e. me as me, because it just looks and feels so different from what I can see and feel about other people. It's all relative. And if I couldn't make this distinction, I would be unable to identify myself as myself. Even though I would still have subjective experience.
I would be no one even though I would still have subjective experience. The myself would be completely lost. So, I, myself, me, is not subjective experience. Which shows neatly that universalism is not true.
And, in fact, I personally had once the subjective experience of being no none. And indeed, it didn't feel at all like being me. It didn't feel at all like being this thing that we normally call "me".
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You think I have failed to understand your point but you've been wrong all along in that, too.
Indeed, I already accepted, as a possibility, that bare consciousness might be exactly the same for all of us if we were to experience it. That in itself wouldn't be enough to infer that consciousness is therefore universal but this also I accepted at least as a possibility.
And then, if bare consciousness is indeed universal, i.e. if it's just one thing, not just identical things but the same one thing for all of us, I still wouldn't want to say that the experience of somebody else is me. Or that I experience somebody else as being me. No, the "I" refers, and can only refer, to myself, i.e. this particular and unique set of biographical data and immediate sensory data like my own smell and how I just feel today (good enough), and indeed whatever I'm thinking about right now. And all that is definitely nothing like being somebody else.
EB
