This is part of a series of short reflections on recent reading, presented in the spirit of Culture & Anarchy’s therapeutic approach to philosophy. All readers get a couple of freebies.

IN THE CLINIC THIS WEEK

1. China Miéville distressed by consciousness and Marxism

2. William James and Bertrand Russell in dialogue about Pragmatism

3. ⚿ Richard Rorty on trying to leave stale ideas behind in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity

4. ⚿ Albert Camus’s tragic persona in The Myth of Sisyphus

5. ⚿ Yours truly, growing up with the Tao Te Ching

1.

Courtesy of Erik Svensson, China Miéville came into the clinic this week, deeply disturbed by an idea he encountered on Reddit, that Marxist historical materialism might be threatened by the hard problem of consciousness.

Provisional diagnosis: mid-life crisis, fear of the world being intelligible and boring, craving for an Awakening experience.

Observations: Miéville presents as very learned, in both positive and negative senses of the word. He has an impressive command of the relevant literature, but he deploys his erudition mostly for affect, beginning with a potentially interesting question and then sprawling aimlessly, really to perform a Gish gallup that kicks up a series of vague, malign doubts about materialism without practical grounding or insight. The closest he comes to expressing an opinion of consequence is with some caricature fist-shaking at the obviousness of ‘what consciousness is like’ while deferring to theologians and cranks for a critique of empirical philosophy of mind.

Unlike many patients with a similar presentation, Miéville doesn’t bear an ill will towards materialism which he’s seeking to justify with philosophy. Rather, his motivation appears to be to generate disorientation for its own sake - materialism comes in for criticism purely because that was what previously felt safe to him. In a moment approaching self-awareness, he describes this non-rational source of his predicament, though he’s convinced that he was conveyed into it by reason:

For a long time I proceeded according to folk Marxism, on the vague, gestural sense that historical materialism was undergirded by metaphysical materialism … But it is not predicated on rigorous metaphysics … Once you become interested in consciousness, then things tend to go bump in the night.

There is of course a rhetorical flex in claiming not to like the implications of your own analysis, but to push on regardless, because facts, famously, don’t care about your feelings. With apologies, therefore, for any such seeming pose, I’ll allow that when I first realised I’d argued my way out of a metaphysically materialist theory of mind, my resulting shakenness reminded me of CS Lewis describing himself at the arrival of his Christian faith as ‘the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England’. Because such a position leads, as Richard Seymour has put it, to ‘alarming things’.

But one can recover from shocks, and thrive in their aftermath. Now, when I shake at the implications it is with excitement.

To recommend treatment, note the frisson that Miéville experiences in confusing himself - precisely because of how learned he is, to not understand something is his greatest delight, so it was inevitable that insoluble metaphysics should become his final resort.

Treatment Plan: Miéville motivates his longing for confusion with a child-like claim that everyone has a metaphysics whether they like it or not, so we all ought to get more sophisticated about it. Any response to this must be grounded in the understanding that materialism, as a humanist politics and social science, repudiates all metaphysical speculation as vacuous - ‘metaphysics’ can only describe the conditions of thought which are not themselves thinkable.

Miéville partly proves this in his own discussion of consciousness, as he shows that metaphysics facilitates all conceivable positions on the subject, yet makes no discernment between them. This should drive home a much more serious point: that metaphysics is not only philosophically naive, it’s politically suicidal, as it’s the Trojan horse by which status quo ideology will always find a way of justifying itself.

Philosophically adult and politically adept materialism has to be rooted in the understanding that all ideology obscures the reality of our physical existence, and we can only make progress if we refuse the demand to discover the ‘right’ way of thinking through theory, noticing that this is an appeal to anxiety rather than curiosity.

2.

When I was preparing this week’s discussion of the five stages of grief for Truth, I recalled some therapeutic remarks from Pragmatism by William James:

Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest. You know how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know what a great part in magic words have always played. If you have his name, or the formula of incantation that binds him, you can control the spirit, genie, afrite, or whatever the power may be. Solomon knew the names of all the spirits, and having their names, he held them subject to his will. So the universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-bringing word or name. That word names the universe’s principle, and to possess it is after a fashion to possess the universe itself. ‘God’, ‘Matter’, ‘Reason’, ‘the Absolute’, ‘Energy’ are so many solving names. You can rest when you have them. You are at the end of your metaphysical quest.

There’s something deliciously ironic about the fact that the pursuit of magic is a pursuit of power, yet pragmatism’s core thesis is that the meaning of our words is the power we get from them. It’s through bringing ourselves to see their real power more clearly that we’re able to give up the quest to summon Reality as well.

I also pulled up Russell’s criticism of James, which divided me. On the one hand, Russell was often an over-confident and simplistic thinker who made some facile objections to pragmatism, but his attitude is generous and I think worth singling out as an example to follow. In ‘William James’s conception of truth’, he writes:

“The history of philosophy,” as William James observes, “is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.” In dealing with a temperament of such charm as his, it is not pleasant to think of a “clash”; one does not willingly differ, or meet so much urbanity by churlish criticisms … William James, it must be admitted, is about as little pontifical as a philosopher well can be. And his complete absence of unction is most refreshing. “In this real world of sweat and dirt,” he says, “it seems to me that when a view of things is ‘noble’, that ought to count as a presumption against its truth and as a philosophic disqualification.” Accordingly his contentions are never supported by “fine writing”; he brings them into the market-place, and is not afraid to be homely, untechnical, and slangy. All this makes his books refreshing to read, and shows that they contain what he really lives by, not merely what he holds in his professional capacity.

3.

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Hello, dear readers. Before we get to the meat and potatoes, I have a couple of hors d’oeuvre about the growth and evolution of Culture & Anarchy.

Call for pitches

I gave up my full-time job in AI a few months ago, not only to get back to writing but to find ways of stimulating new kinds of philosophical conversation. For that reason, from September I’m going to be soliciting and accepting submissions for paid writing to feature on Culture & Anarchy.

Why? Partly because I’m crazy, and partly because I’ve benefited - albeit in a very small way - from an industry which has committed mass theft against writers and artists only to shove slop down our throats, and I want to give something back to creators who deserve better. I don’t have a huge budget - I am crazy, not rich - but it’s enough for another little experiment to express belief in human intelligence.

I’ll share criteria in a few weeks (don’t pitch me yet!), but I’ll be looking for work that addresses the major themes of the newsletter (such as how we make progress by embracing the contingency of our worldviews), with a focus on well-researched histories of ideas, close readings and recent book reviews (not so much personal takes on thought experiments and the like).

I’m particularly keen to support emerging voices with editorial guidance - as much as I want to bring certain kinds of writing into the world, I also want to help get the best out of people with collaborative creative practices.

Members Room

I mentioned in a Note recently that I’d become conflicted about using Notes on Substack (the twitter-like feed, for those that don’t know). On the one hand, it’s a great medium for fast-paced philosophical noodlings, but, on the other, it can be a drain on the newsletter.

Well, I’ll still be sharing short Notes but I’ll be making an adjustment: I often write things in the style of little philosophical dialogues, or quick reflections of a few hundred words, and these will now serve as bonus content for paid subscribers in a new Members area of the website - expect more dialogues, close readings of classic texts, book reviews, paper commentaries and so on. Major essays will still be available for free.

The themes that will come up in the Members Room will also come up in essays - the main benefit is a wider variety of formats, which can be extremely valuable if you’re learning about certain subjects. I love a well-argued, nicely structured academic monograph, but compared to Nietzsche’s aphorisms, say, or the miniature discourses of the Philosophical Investigations, or the fables of Zhuangzi? Papers are how you publicise, but poetry is how you learn.

If you’re a free subscriber and you know you’ll never be interested in any of this and would rather I didn’t turn up in your inbox every so often shaking my little tin cup, I’ve made the Members Room a ‘section’ of the newsletter, which means you can go to Substack, manage your Culture & Anarchy subscription, and opt out of all emails that have paid content (just deselect the Members Room). At least for the time being, I recommend not doing this, as the newsletter is still developing apace and you may change your mind in a few months!

Subscribe now

Well, that’s the news done, but it was all really preamble for a first little discourse for paid subscribers on relativism, touching on pragmatism and the private language argument. I also hint that relativists are all secretly Newtonians when we need to figure out how to become properly Einsteinian. Perhaps a topic to develop in an essay?

If there’s no truth, we’re all relativists.

No, if there is truth but it isn’t absolute, then we’re all relativists. If there’s no truth, there’s no foothold for relativism.

Get rid of truth, get rid of disharmony.

Get rid of truth? But you still call things ‘true’. And how? Because you have standards, and things are true relative to standards.

If I’m in the habit of saying P, what I mean by “P is true” is just “P is something I’d say.”

You’ll surely not want to say that P is made true relative to a habit of saying P, or we’d make things true by saying them. That’s not relativity, that’s anarchy.

“P is true” means more than “I’d say P.” How do you judge whether P is something you’d say? How do you know to say P instead of ¬P?

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Logos spermatikos

A little over ten years ago, I lived through a personal crisis that changed my life. I’m not generally an autobiographical writer, so I won’t say any more than that Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations were a light in the dark.

After reading them many times over, I wanted to distil them into something I could recite from memory, once in the morning and once at night.

Little by little, the practice changed the way I engage with the world and, here, I want to share the text with you in case you might find it useful or inspiring, even just as an introduction to stoicism.

Ten years on, I still call Aurelius’s lessons to mind, though I no longer think of myself as a stoic. That’s another story, though - you can say if it’s one you want to hear, but let’s not sully Aurelius’s beautiful reflections with a critique of stoicism in general.

The text is essentially a thematically-grouped collage - not exact quotations sentence by sentence, but all Aurelius’s words and phrases. The English vocabulary is that of Robin Hard’s translation for Oxford World’s Classics.

Of course, any short summary of the Meditations will emphasise some things and not others. I meant for the paraphrase to be wide-ranging but not exhaustive, so if there are things that are important to you which are absent, share them!

I

I live only in this fleeting moment of time, the rest of my life either already lived or lying in an unknowable future.

The space of my existence is a small thing, lived on a small corner of the earth, where even the most enduring fame is swept into oblivion.

Though the universe is orderly, my substance is a flux, my senses dull, the fabric of my body subject to corruption and my soul full of dream and delusion.

Everything that belongs to me is a stream in flow, my life a brief stay in a foreign land.

II

Let philosophy serve as my escort and guide.

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A huge amount of my writing is informed by Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, which were incredibly important in showing just how many philosophical problems are pseudo-problems generated by linguistic confusion.

I’ve talked about many of the practical consequences of this in some of my essays - like how to understand the use theory of meaning and the implications for the philosophy of consciousness - but, from time to time, I also write shorter reflections in the manner of the Investigations themselves.

This page is a repository for such remarks, updated occasionally over time.

1.

One story goes that the world consists of human-independent objects - ones which are manifest to us, like tables and chairs and flowers and fire - but there’s some sort of difficulty with language latching onto them. We see these things, but we can’t refer to them directly (as if sticking name labels on them) because the social aspect of language is just a bit weird.

Note that this is not about such objects being physically fundamental, it’s just about there being emergent objects at all, which appear to us as objects that we feel like we name but technically don’t.

So (the story continues), Wittgenstein’s use theory of meaning says that we come at the problem sideways, grasping onto objects via our practical intentions towards them. ‘Table’ arises at the intersection of all sorts of practical intentions, sure - it’s the thing we sit at and eat at and argue at and so on - but once we’ve got that intersection, we’ve got the table itself, trapped like a rabbit in a net.

But this story encapsulates the very reifying impulse which Wittgenstein wanted to undermine. It follows him to the edge of the abyss, looks down, then chickens out. The whole point of the use theory of meaning is that there’s nothing in the net.

“What do you mean, when we see the table right there in front of us and speak about it, even if indirectly?” Because language doesn’t start with words gripping onto things we see, it starts with what we see.

Already as we speechlessly interact with the world, we’re constructing the conceptual limits of language. The table as we see it is already a bundle of practical intentions - we see it as that which we could sit at and eat at etc. - and if we could somehow strip away all of our personal motives, there would be no neutral residue of an ‘object’ left to name.

The ‘meaning’ in the ‘use theory of meaning’ ranges over our entire way of life, not just the sounds we make with our mouths. It says that you don’t live in a world of objects, you live in a world of actions, and every attempt to separate language from knowledge collapses as just another language game.

From Plato down to Kant and on to the logical positivists, the feeling of a Form or of a thing-in-itself or of a sense impression is just your monkey brain sifting and separating the environment into opportunities for action. It doesn’t find objects as if they’re already there, it constructs them as a memory of past experience, each one a theory of its own behaviour projected onto existence.

Take away the behaviour and you take away the world.

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This is part of a series of short reflections on recent reading, presented in the spirit of Culture & Anarchy’s therapeutic approach to philosophy. All readers get a couple of freebies.

IN THE CLINIC THIS WEEK

1. Ted Chiang on the non-consciousness of AI

2. Being troubled in Rorty and His Critics

3. ⚿ Justin Smith-Ruiu on pragmatism and religion in The Hinternet

1.

A couple of weeks ago, The Atlantic published this great article by Ted Chiang on the absurdity of the idea that language models might be conscious.

Chiang offers a serious interrogation of what it would mean to treat such models as moral entities and there’s a lot in his piece that invites discussion in terms of practical ethics. The philosopher who instead responds by saying “what about the logical arguments for computational functionalism?!” does nothing but prove how philosophy of mind has made itself irrelevant to modern life.

Actually, that’s not quite true - philosophy of mind was irrelevant 10 years ago, but with the advent of language models, its pseudo-problems are now convenient props for pseudoscience.

Every so often, ideas from the ivory tower become unexpectedly embroiled in politics and it behoves us to start wondering whether apparently cute thought experiments are not so innocent.

Functionalism is most often presented as a harmless intellectual exercise but, implicitly, it alienates us from the real sources of our agency by attributing it to non-physical abstractions. That has political ramifications which philosophy is responsible for and the tone Chiang strikes is completely appropriate.

2.

Digging around some reviews of Richard Rorty, I came across this remark from Martin Gustafsson:

I believe the dissatisfaction of some of Rorty’s critics stems at least partly from their sensing that in his philosophy, problem and method pass one another by. No one who is really troubled by a philosophical difficulty can experience a replacement of vocabulary as a solution. Rather, such a person will feel that his problem is swept under the rug - that to forget about a problem is not to solve it. This raises the worry that Rorty’s methodology presupposes what it is intended to achieve: his revisionist approach can seem thoroughly appealing only to someone who is already fed up with the sort of questions Rorty wants us to stop asking.

Your classic analytic philosopher will think “yeah, this is why Rorty was wrong.” Your classic therapeutic philosopher will think “yeah, this is why Rorty was right.”

I think Gustafsson is probably correct about Rorty’s reception, but misses the point that this is how all philosophy works.

We enjoy the pretence that rational argumentation delivers us from one position to another, like waves pushing a boat along, but there’s little truth to this.

Arguments are mostly attempts to express positions we already hold, or to construct them in media res - they’re theories of how we got to where we are, or retellings of language we met along the way; a scaffold for thought, perhaps, but not its substance.

To give a starker example, consider the kind of ethical language you find in the stoic writings of Seneca, Epictetus and Aurelius. Much of it is extraordinarily insightful and useful, but it also reads like utter presumptuous garbage to a person who’s in the midst of profound suffering and is not ready - as a matter of their whole constitution - to think like that.

One does not become stoic by reading stoic reflections as if the end of suffering is the consequent of a modus ponens. Philosophical thought is a thin linguistic film that sits atop the rest of one’s physical being, and, in a sense, you only finally understand an argument when you’ve already been convinced by the world of what it says (this is perhaps Davidson’s collapse of meaning and truth writ large).

Rorty’s brilliance, as usual, was simply being honest about this. Those who see his philosophy as a sweeping of problems under the rug are like depressives who avoid therapy because it asks you to meet rumination with mindfulness instead of more rumination.

3.

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So you’ve chosen philosophy? Or philosophy has chosen you?

Perhaps you’re the ascetic type. Perhaps, for you, a turnstile in logic1 is like a turnstile in a monk’s garden - all you want to do is tend to your proof trees in peace, ideally keeping your hands clean.

Or maybe you’re a little more scholastic. Did you read something, or listen to someone, and catch a glimpse of the Truth, and now you want to get to work in the scriptorium, writing treatises to tell everyone what you know?

Then again, you might not plan on spending much time in the monastery at all - you might want to get out into the world to educate people about the human condition and inspire them towards change.

I’m in the chapel with the choir, myself. I wasn’t always a philosopher but I would listen to myself talk and I couldn’t stand the dissonance in what I was saying - philosophy is what let me bring things into greater harmony.

As different as we all are, what we philosophers have in common is a respect for rational argument - a belief in the power of language to lead us out of error. But, on reflection, is this not a little peculiar? For is language not itself also the source of all our error?

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Laozi lauded compassion, frugality and humility as virtues.1

Confucius, benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom and trustworthiness.2

The Buddha, loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity.3

Plato, prudence, justice, courage and temperance.4

Aristotle, the golden mean.5 Diogenes, self-sufficiency.6 St. Paul, faith, hope and love.7

All good efforts. All, for my money, a little wide of the mark. For if there were to be just one cardinal virtue, all of these presuppose it: patience.

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News just in!

Hit me!

Space and time aren’t absolute! There’s no such thing as fundamental simultaneity - everything has to be understood with respect to a reference frame!

Oh wow! That’s bonkers! I don’t think I can imagine it very intuitively but I can follow the logical arguments to understand that it must be true.

Even better - it makes good predictions!

Nice! Well done then!

News just in!

Go on!

Photons behave like a particle and a wave at the same time!

Oh wow, that’s really hard to wrap my head around! But it’s unavoidable to explain observations?

No question of it!

Well, let’s use it in our description of the world! We wouldn’t want to do anything silly, like posit two separate fundamental ontologies of particles and waves which interact by an inscrutable supernatural mechanism.

Oh my god, I love your crazy jokes!

:3

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Yin

Nietzsche (though he was not the only one) noticed that “every concept arises from the equation of unequal things”:1 no two leaves are the same, no two stones, no two people, yet we talk of ‘leaves’, ‘stones’ and ‘people’.

There’s also an opposing tendency: we can equate any two things we like, so every contrast arises from a division of things we could equate - knives with guns are weapons, knives without guns are cutlery.

We understand the world by imposing contrasts that are not inherent to it: subject and object, mind and matter, facts and values, rights and responsibilities, reason and emotion, science and philosophy.

Understanding is like climbing a tree: you have to grip with two hands, left and right. You don’t climb first with one hand and then the other, you always climb with both, one pushing as the other pulls.

The more useful a contrast becomes for us, the more apt we are to think that its parts can be separated from each other, and that we did not impose it ourselves but rather received it from the world.

Nietzsche: “this awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exists in nature the ‘leaf’: the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, coloured, curled and painted.”

But there is no ‘leaf’ other than in the boundary between the leaf and non-leaf. Every concept contains its own negation, and so what any concept means in itself is simply: nothing.

To climb a tree, you have to pull with one hand and push with the other. If you try to pull without a push, or push without a pull, you stop moving.

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Boy, I sure love science!

Pah!

Excuse me?

I said “pah!”

OK… Why?

I heard you say that you love science. You’re a scientist, are you?

Yes! It’s really interesting!

But does science justify your love of it?

Wait, what?

It’s a perfectly innocent question! I’m just curious - does science justify your love of science?

Well, science just describes how things are. I don’t think it compels me to love it. So, I guess not.

So your love of science must come from somewhere outside science.

Clearly.

And where is that?

I’m not sure I’ve ever thought about it to be honest. I’m just out in the field, doing what I love.

Oh dear! Haven’t you ever stopped to wonder whether the things you love are good for you?

Of course, but science doesn’t seem that bad.

All the same, don’t you want to be reassured that your love of science is good with some sort of rational justification for doing it?

I guess that would be nice! But where would such a thing come from?

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While Mary the colour scientist is in her room, she learns all the physical facts about redness but NOTHING ELSE.

All the physical facts?

Yes.

OK, so she experiences redness before she leaves the room.

Nooo!! You have to assume the conclusion that redness is not physical!!

You know that’s cheating, right?

OK, let me step back. I’m just saying that she can’t experience redness from reading about its physical basis, so she’s going to be missing knowledge of what it’s like.

At the start, you didn’t say that she learns all the physical facts by reading - you just said she learns all the physical facts.

What difference does that make? All the physical facts can be written about in books!

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Two types of deflationary magic

On the pseudo-problem of consciousness, you could call me a ‘grammatical illusionist’: following a certain reading of Wittgenstein, I believe we only think we have introspective knowledge of our experiential states because of misleading properties of language, but we really have no ability to ‘attend to the quality of experience’, and we can grasp this by understanding how language works.

In the most radical terms in which this idea can be stated, we’re only conscious of the world, we’re not conscious of our own consciousness, so we can’t even identify the thing that is supposed to be at issue and must simply put questions about it to bed. Cogito, ergo sum sent us all on a wild goose chase when it separated thought from thinker.

Wittgenstein said that?! Wittgenstein said that.

Grammatical illusionism is similar to, but importantly different from, mainstream illusionism (MI) of your Keith Frankish variety in three main ways:

1. MI allows for some notion of introspective awareness and it argues about its phenomenology, rather than deflating the idea of introspection altogether.

2. Wittgenstein basically recovered for analytic philosophy the elimination of the self that had already been recognised in some Eastern philosophies, but because of (1), MI hasn’t grappled with the full importance of illusory selfhood.

3. Because of (1) and (2), MI tends to argue on grounds of epistemology and neuroscience, whereas the Wittgensteinian finds it more effective to recommend a battery of therapeutic reflections on language.

Similar to some sections in the Philosophical Investigations, this page contains a growing collection of reflections that I think are effective for unravelling the intuition that we are selves that experience experience.

Exercises

1.

Touch a finger with a thumb. That feeling - where do you feel it? In your finger or somewhere else?

If it’s not in your finger, it surely can’t be in your brain because you can’t feel your brain. It’d have to be in your mind, and then we’re off to the races.

But hold on. Touch a finger on your left hand. Then on the right. Left, right, left, right. The sensation moves in space. But it’s your hands that are spatial objects, so isn’t that where the feeling is?

No, no, no. The feeling is of my hands in my mind.

‘In’ is a difficult word. It can mean ‘contained in’ but it can also mean ‘part of’, like the weave ‘in’ a fabric. The sensation of your hands is not contained inside your mind, it’s part of your mind.

Put another way: consciousness is not a container of awareness within which experiences happen, consciousness is a field of awareness where experiences are changes in the structure of the field.

Take a piece of string. Tie a knot in it. The knot is not something added to the string. The string has just changed shape and now there’s a knot.

The same with the feeling in your fingers. The feeling is a change in the form of your mind. And the form of your mind changes along with changes in the form of your body - you push against a finger, your mind changes shape.

Some of our conundrums are the result of the textbook image of the brain as the seat of consciousness. If you think you are inside your skull, of course there must be a little cinematographer in there putting on a show made of non-physical images.

But you are not so imprisoned. You’re a whole distributed nervous system in direct contact with the world. Touch your fingers together, look at them, feel where the sensation is. It’s not in one part of you, finger or mind, it’s a knot in the shape of your consciousness where your finger is.

2.

Imagine you have a coloured piece of card in front of you. You have to answer the question: is it red? The question is only about your perception of the card, not the card’s physical properties.

How do you go about answering? Obviously, you have to judge whether the card seems red to you. But there’s a dilemma in how we interpret what this means.

By one horn of the dilemma, to be asked “is it red?” and to answer “it seems red” is to evade the question because I could follow up by asking “but does it seeming red agree with whether it’s actually red?” If there’s then a further fact about your perception which is independent of how things seem, there’s no way for you to know about it, so either you can’t know whether the card is red, or it was a mistake to interpret the question as a matter of belief.

By the other horn of the dilemma, we might say that there’s no meaningful difference between “it is red” and “it seems red” - there’s a grammatical difference but, logically, if something seems red, it just is red to you. So you answer “it’s red.” But then if I ask, “and how do you know it’s red?” you can’t answer “I know it’s red because it seems red,” as we just agreed that “it is red” and “it seems red” say the same thing. So you don’t know that it’s red by some method of introspection (‘looking and seeing the redness’), you just feel like saying it’s red.

This reveals that it’s incoherent to talk of ‘knowing’ one’s experiential ‘content’. What such knowledge talk does is secretly presume the Cartesian theatre, where there’s a knower-of-experience separate from experience itself. The fundamental mistake in this is trying to have the first- and third-person points of view at the same time, and qualia pop out as the result of that contradiction.

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