Exchanges on The Shared Environment: Preferences
@gilmans-calculations: "I’m curious about the epistemology of other people’s preferences. How do we get to know the magnitude of their desires, in order to weigh them up relative to other other people’s preferences and our own, when they are totally internal and private to them, like Wittgenstein’s beetle in a box?"
I think the notion of Wittgenstein's private language is perhaps a fundament of the shared environment. From my perspective, if we are all stuck with these bodies of ours, these generators of personal language, then we must come to know our personal language before we can even consider ourselves as members of the shared environment, let alone other individuals. In coming to know our personal language, we give word to what was theretofore the thoughtless unconscious activities of our biology. The more we can understand ourselves—the influence of our body over our mind—the more capable we are of communicating ourselves and determining a comportment which contrasts intelligibly with the shared environment inline with our preferences of self. We, along with ourselves and our experiences, inform our own relative measure of the shared environment. If we have no measure to speak of, how are we to determine what is in accordance with the shared environment as opposed to ourselves alone. Without a measure, how could we even suggest ourselves, let alone others, to be intelligible? Our proof is in our personal understanding of self and, in this understanding, our ability to reason with the other.
So, regarding the “beetle in the box” problem, in this case, the beetle in the box does not matter if no one wishes to speak of the beetle which they have in their box. If someone does wish to socialize their own personal experience of their beetle, this is understood to be a discussion of a personal nature first and, unless otherwise constituted within the shared environment, a shared nature last. That is, it is entirely a personal preference first (to socialize the contents of one’s own box) that places no implications upon another’s box or the “beetle” which purportedly resides within it.
In this sense, the shared environment is one which is willed through those who reside within it. The individual must come to know their own self for the sake of the shared environment, which should be considered a place of the greatest common preference first and the least common preference last.
Thanks for the question, @gilmans-calculations. Happy to discuss further any thoughts, ideas or questions you've got on the subject.
