Garrett,
Rather than trying to explain an article I don't have in hand, in terms of what I thought at that time. There won't really be a lot of change, but there will be some. A good starting point would be the "Magic Lantern", film projector simile. It relates "specious time" to physical time. "“Bouwsma began the conversation by briefly talking about Descartes’s Cogito, ergo sum. Wittgenstein responded by saying that the real question was “How did Descartes come to do this?” Bouwsma asked whether he meant to ask what led up to the cogito in Descartes’s own thought, to which Wittgenstein replied: ‘No. One must do this for oneself....I always think of it as like the cinema. You see before you the picture on the screen, but behind you is the operator, and he has a roll here on this side from which he is sending and another on that side into which he is sending. The present is the picture which is before the light, but the future is still on the roll to pass, and the past is on that roll. It’s gone through already. Now imagine that there is only the present. There is no future roll, and no past roll. and now imagine what language there could be in such a situation. One could just gape. This!’”
(Bouwsma, Wittgenstein: Conversations, 1949-1951, p. 13, 7 August
1949 in Wittgenstein on Mind and Language, David G. Stern, p. 140)
[Note that here, where one can just gape, one cannot point to individual items or types. The solipsist, such as Decartes, things that when he confines the world to only what HE knows, you can't bring in language which belongs to all. Note also that the image on the screen has no past and futere. In his terminology it has no "neighbors". The argument against private language is already present when he was speaking to the Vienna Circle, before he returned To Cambridge in 1928.]
If I describe a language, I am essentially describing something that belongs to physics. But how can a physical language describe the phenomenal? Isn’t it like this: a phenomenon [specious present] contains time, but isn’t in time?
Its form is time, but it has no place in time.
Whereas language unwinds in time.
Perhaps the whole difficulty stems from taking the time concept from time in physics and applying it to the course of immediate experience. . . . For ‘time’ has one meaning when regard it as the source of time, and another when we regard it as a picture preserved from a past event.
. . . .Both ways of talking are in order, and are equally legitimate, but cannot be mixed together. (p. 81 #49)
70. With our language we find ourselves, so to speak, in the domain of the film, not of the projected picture. And if I want to make music to accompany what is happening on the screen, whatever produces the music [language] must again happen in the sphere of the film. (Philosophical Remarks)"
You wrote: "The moral of this story is, I think, that as humans we must retain and fully utilize our power to mentally focus inward (towards the self) or outward (towards universality) as each new situation demands." At the time of the article I believed that Platonism was the confusion of specious time and physical time. Ig you get a chance to read how I read the Tractatus, now I see two parts of vulgar platonism [as distinguished from any actual writting of Plato himself. The first is that meanings are in the world, in the case of Plato, by participation, for Aristotle as the 'forms' of what exists. This is what an "essence", "nature", or in science, and abstraction. Our 'intelligence' was created with the ability bring these INTO the mental space. The second confusion, derived from the first is dualism, nearly always with one good partner and one subordinate that keeps trying to take over. What you wrote does not in itself say anything like this, but I am always suspicious of any thing that has a whiff of platonism or Plato. The problem is that from the early Greeks to the present, this whiff is in the air when we take our first breath. So in terms of the assumptions of Western culture, what you say is an excellent an logical conclusion. There is another viewpoint I see in Wittgenstein that is non-platonic [shown in the section on Rule Following explicitly] and and non-Cartesian [shown in the argument against private language.
"Wave without a shore" is a great metaphor. I truly believe that imagination and metaphor is the foundation of creative thinking, not only of the Great, such as Einstein [Imagination is more important than knowledge. but in the day to day activities of people who solve common problems and in the longer term change the language to fit our needs. The Magic Lantern metaphor is just one of the many Wittgenstein uses. [He is also acutely aware of the consequences to logic of letting the metaphor rule our thinking.]
You wrote "Your exploration of Present Experience struck me as a having a tight focus that called out for a wider frame. Basically, what is needed is inclusion of the evolutionary perspective. I keep thinking "Darwit, Darwit"." Not only do I entheusisticallly agree, The very code words I have used for other purposes have been "Eindarwitt" and "Wittdarein". The clearly indicate my heroes. Besides the obvious reasons for Einstein, another is what Wittgenstein wrote, "“In the ‘not being able to go outside of itself’ lies the similarity of my views and that of relativity theory.” (ts 213, 76, quoted in Hilmy, p. 140)"
Wittgenstein's concerning Darwinism is problematic for some but not for me. There are two things I know he said about Darwin. Leaving a zoo with a Catholic friend, he said that Darwin must be wrong! There is so much diversity. The other was when he said to some of his students arguing about Darwinism that can't we just say that it is a theory that may be proven correct, and leave it there. On the other hand there is much he says about 'nature' that would indicate he did not hold to a static view; this is even indicated by the fact that he does away with "essence", "natures" in language. Wittgenstein was very strict in his own logic, which he did not want to be confused with science. He was equally strict that Science adoes its homework. At the time, the mechanism of Evolutionary Theory, DNA, was not known. Before he dies of prostrate cancer in 1951, the mechanism had been found but probably had not reached his ears. I am sure he would have seen that it fit in will with his own thinking.
Probably few realized the momentous change Darwin to us. We swithed from the only way of explaing change as steps of degrading of Absolute Being to eventual chaos and nothingness. Evolution comes from below; from small and simple to larger and more complex natural selection and sexual selection. Language for Wittgenstein was obviously conventional, I am sure not the the older static meaning of the term, but in the dynamic of the USE and the NEEDS of the linguistic community. He said his way of thinking may only become useful in 100 years.
As for explanations of why brains have certain phenomena, that would be a long and winding road I feel I should bypass after such a lengthy commentary, too long. I do want to comminet on the rest of what you say, and I will.
Let me leave you with this thought of Wittgenstein which is pervasive and important in the Philosophical Investigation: We misundertand the role of the ideal.
PARR