Ego Formation - lydgate/mindmeld GitHub Wiki

Fundamentally I am interested in the Private Language Argument because if Wittgenstein is right, and that thought is emergent from social use of language, rather than preceding it, then this suggests that culture can be way "weirder" and possibly more transmissible than it could if Locke/Fodor are right.

This relates to Cecilia Heyes' Cognitive Gadgets, in which she argues that although some things are hard-wired, much is not (even seemingly basic things like imitation).

Heyes relates to Jaynes' argument that the modern Freudian ego is not the only attractor. There are other possibilities. But culture is highly transmissible. So the ego, if it is a cultural construction, might be contagious.

If selfhood is transmissible, suffering itself may be transmissible (suffering being linked to the illusion of the self, as in Buddhism) and therefore the Edenic accounts in many philosophies are literally true: there was a time before suffering.

As for "Intersubjective space" or Intersubjectivity, apparently Husserl was the first to write about this, in the Cartesian Meditations. I thought of it as "interpersonal" in a conversation with Roman.

The idea is that I neither reject that there is any objective reality, nor that there are private subjective mental spaces; I just deny that anything interesting happens there. But I do have my doubts about whether we have much apprehension of objective reality outside of the interpersonal frameworks which dominate our minds (rightfully, since I think that language and thinking must have been primarily social? but we'd need to think about non-Sapiens hominins I guess; there's also a possibility that Neanderthals had bigger brains and retained bigger brains for longer because they were less social... I need to think about this more). This last bit makes me an idealist I think.