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He elaborates his theory of mind with the assistance of opaque concepts such as “sentition” and “ipsundrum”. Sentition is “a privatised expressive activity”, whereby the sensation of the redness of a tomato, for example, means nothing other than for you to observe your own active “redding”… As for the ipsundrum, this is the seed of the self, analogous to illusory or impossible objects such as the Penrose triangle, which somehow generates the illusion of a world out there corresponding to a me “in here”, though it still has to be “‘seen’ by an internal observer”. It is, we are told, a “mathematical object”, “a complex pattern of dynamic activity in neural circuits”… Consciousness is “the set of brain events that occur when the subject observes, from a certain privileged position, his own ipsundrum which is the integral of the activity in a special kind of feedback loop.
New Statesman - A mind of one’s own
“[Kraus’] language mysticism may be taken to imply that the perfect satire is a work in which no way changes the statements that are being satirized, but simply shows them in a light which illuminates their inherent hypocrisy.”
Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin- Wittgenstein’s Vienna
