On the existence of first-person data ((”The epistemological problem regarding phenomenological, first-person approaches of ‘data generation’ is that if inconsistencies in two individual ‘data sets’ should appear, there is no way to settle the conflict.” p. 591)): “This conscious experience of jealousy shows me how much I love my husband!” “No, this emotional state is not love at all, it is a neurotic, bourgeois fear of loss!”

How we might describe the feeling of happiness if we had a true understanding of the mechanical process which produces our subjectivity and therefore lacked Wittgenstein’s Subjektgebrauch aka “subject use”: “The emotional layer of the phenomenal self-model currently activated by the brain of this organism is in a close-to-optimal state.”

This may seem like exhausting wankery, but on the whole the book is wigging me out.