Whither the Beginning?

Wittgenstein said: "It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not try to go further back"

But where is the beginning? Language and behavior? Experience? The primordial world?

There cannot be language and behavior without experience. (is that supposed to be a substantive hypothesis?) There cannot be experience without a primordial world (i.e. a world that is mind-independent). But we cannot talk about (or describe) the world without taking the world as we experience it as a given. But then we are not talking about a primordial world at all...

Here we have found a philosopher's Gordian knot.

It might be best to begin with what we say and do. Nevertheless, it is tempting to take the world as we experience it to be the beginning for all we say and do. And yet there is something enlightening in going beyond that. Or further back.

But all the while we must not forget that the mind is part of the world (i.e. not independent of it). The world as we experience it is mind-dependent, and that is all we can describe. The primordial world is mind-independent, and cannot be described. But isn't the mind part of the primordial world? Mustn't it be? (This question contains a conceptual error, but there is something correct about it).

Yet all the while there is only one world, not two. There is no beginning — we cannot go "further back" because there is no logical way to order our conceptions here. We must jump right in, and wrestle with this Gordian knot.

Method

What? Am I saying that there is no single method for doing philosophy? No, I am saying that there is no systematic method for arriving at a philosophical explanation.

Purpose and Value

Teleological thinking (that things have a purpose) is a useful heuristic, and a related view is that certain things have intrinsic value. Both are psychological phenomena that should not be taken too seriously, and both can be harmful when they impinge upon an autonomous agent (an entity having perceptions, beliefs, desires, and the ability to act on them).

Purpose and value come into the world with agency, they do not precede it.

Coinage

Non-Descriptive Realism: realism about the mind-independent world as a whole (there is one way the world is in-itself), combined with conceptual relativism (there are multiple empirically equivalent descriptions that can be given of it).