I think one has to study Spinoza directly in order to better comprehend the nuances and depths of his conceptions which are not nearly as Anselmian (i.e. of Catholic scholasticism) as Copelston's mention of "the ontological argument" might suggest. — 180 Proof

In my reading of Spinoza, I was continually struck by how it opposed the views of Anselm.

Thinking of God is not something you could not conceive of without a lot of help but was rather the first thing that came to mind. Too easy because this God had all of the prejudices anyone had.

It does lend support for that claim.

It is interesting to me that the language in De Anima is more directed to recognizing different kinds of agency than coming to terms with a chain of causality. The distinctions being made about how the soul works are being measured by those who are ensouled: Change happens in this way in some situations but in other ways in others. A desire to be informed by our conditions, as well as they can be described at any time.

I feel your pain.
Oftentimes I have stood on the wrong side of the glass watching academics cavort freely with what I cannot afford.

It is a problem for science even if one does not aim to reduce consciousness into an epiphenomenon.

It seems to me that the looking at all reduction as a closure is also a closure. I read Aristotle as trying to open doors on his terms. The failing of the Scholastics was to read him as the answer to everything.

But if consciousness (active intellect) is deathless and everlasting then it does not emerge in an interaction, it is employed.

You say the active intellect is a "personal capacity", as if the ongoing controversies have been settled. As Joe Sachs points out:

... in Metaphysics, Book XII, ch.7-10. Aristotle again distinguishes between the active and passive intellects, but this time he equates the active intellect with the "unmoved mover" and God.
— Wikipedia, Active Intellect — Fooloso4

In addition to discussing where the activity emerges from, the agent intellect is presented as a limit to what can be called a 'personal capacity':

In separation it is just what it is, and this alone is immortal and eternal. (But we do not remember because this is unaffected, whereas the passive intellect is perishable, and without this nothing thinks. — Aristotle, De Anima, 430a18, translated by DW Hamlyn

The activity that brings our being into life is experienced through our thinking but not as something happening to us or a show we remember seeing. The activity that is immortal is not a personal dimension but is what allows all thinkers to think. What each of us experiences as thinking would not be possible without the agent. But that experience would also not be possible without the perishable individual. The perishable individual Aristotle is talking about lives in time:

Actual knowledge is identical with its object. But potential knowledge is prior in time in the individual, but not prior even in time in general; for all things that come to be are derived from that which is so actually. — ibid. 431a1

The things that come to be are either shaped by a process outside of them or sustained by an activity proper to their being. We particular individuals cannot know the Nous as itself, but we can distinguish between different types of potentiality:

It is clear that the object of perception makes that which can perceive actively so instead of potentially so; for it is not affected or altered. Hence this is a different form from movement; for movement is the activity of the incomplete, while activity proper is different, the activity of the complete. — ibid.431a4

From here, it is clear why Sachs says the formal cause is more than an intention like a plan to build a house before it is made.

After setting my previously expressed peevishness aside, I became curious about your thinking in terms of periods of time. Why is it an example of the Enlightenment instead of an expression of Scholastic philosophy?

Are you likening that to Russia hankering for Kiev without consulting them?

If your Chez is actually attacked, and you choose to fight the attackers, that could reasonably be called self-defense. As a concept, that is not co-extensive with the question of boundaries, but neither are the ideas mutually exclusive of each.

This embrace sounds like an obsession to harm oneself, using one kind of pain to distract from another.

It appears to be an inversion of the Bushido acceptance of death that frees you from fear and increases your ability to act. Your version seems uninterested in action, more like Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground.

I see that my questions about life did not interest you.

You have mapped the problem to your satisfaction.

I see/hear your challenge to the thesis of the OP. I agree with an element of it but also am trying to challenge your statements. Are we, perhaps, talking past each other?

I figure this sort of thing has always been difficult to talk about.

A "cause", is by your definition, outside of any stakeholders in how claims of right happen. That puts the Magna Carta and the American Civil Rights outside of whatever you have in mind.

The exclusion makes it hard to engage with your proposition.

There are many ways to hurt oneself and the compulsion to do so can take on a life of its own. But I don't want to compare your shadow with a darker one. Dostoevsky and Kafka can teach you enough about that.

I would rather ask you about what you enjoy. Does your work life completely bum you out or is there some portion that which is your art? And if you have that small portion, can you make it larger? Are you curious about what you do not know? Are you in love with anybody? If so, is it reciprocal?

These questions have kicked the ass of generations of mankind for time out of mind. I expect straight A's on those before considering your fascination with self-destruction.

I am disappointed by this remark.

It is one thing to challenge a point of view and another to ask for shared judgement in your register.

Isaac has repeatedly argued that Ukrainians are not enough of a self-identified group to say they are making a decision to act in self-defense together toward a common enemy. So anything you might refer to as "moral" on those grounds witl have to be excluded in order to be considered.

Best of luck.

I wanted to point out that Bateson's statement goes beyond your observation regarding us being social animals. If the image of a Cartesian self is a mind stuck in a particular body is at one end of the scale, Bateson is looking at mind at the opposite end that excludes anthropomorphic models of an activity.

A certain stripe of 'physicalist' and 'meta-physicalist' needs the Cartesian end in order to claim title to a contested real estate. That fades away pretty quickly when one leaves the pool of Narcissus. That is why I responded to your post about Nietzsche to wonder about the uses of 'laws of nature'. They require a formal introduction to any party they are invited to.

Humans evolved as cooperative social creatures. Like many other mammals, we are born with certain moral emotions , such as the protection of our young and the ability to experience pain at the suffering of others in our group. Sacrificing oneself for the protection of others is seen in other animals. Anthropologists hypothesize that conscience evolved in order to protect tribes from the violence of alpha males. Even behaviors which on the surface appear unadaptive, such as suicide or homicide, are driven by a combination of such moral emotions.

It is not the self strictly defined as a body, that our biologically evolved motivational processes are designed to preserve. Rather, it is social systems ( friendship, marriage, family, clan) that sustain us and that we are primed to defend. — Joshs

In regards to the boundaries of 'self', it is interesting to consider Bateson's view on the 'unit of evolutionary' change:

Let us start from the evolutionary side. It is now empirically clear that Darwinian evolutionary theory contained a very great error in its identification of the unit of survival under natural selection. The unit which was believed to be crucial and around which the theory was set up was either the breeding individual or the family line or the subspecies or some similar homogeneous set of conspecifics. Now I suggest that the last hundred years have demonstrated empirically that if an organism or aggregate of organisms sets to work with a focus on its own survival and thinks that is the way to select its adaptive moves, its "progress" ends up with a destroyed environment. If the organism ends up destroying its environment, it has in fact destroyed itself. And we may very easily see this process carried to its ultimate reductio ad absurdum in the next twenty years. The unit of survival is not the breeding organism, or the family line, or the society.

The old unit has already been partly corrected by the population geneticists. They have insisted that the evolutionary unit is, in fact, not homogeneous. A wild population of any species consists always of individuals whose genetic constitution varies widely. In other words, potentiality and readiness for change is already built into the survival unit. The heterogeneity of the wild population is already one-half of that trial-and-error system which is necessary for dealing with environment.

The artificially homogenized populations of man's domestic animals and plants are scarcely fit for survival.

And today a further correction of the unit is necessary. The flexible environment must also be included along with the flexible organism because, as I have already said, the organism which destroys its environment destroys itself. The unit of survival is a flexible organism-in-its-environment. — Gregory Bateson, Form, Substance, Difference

While this is not the same as Nietzsche's view of nature, perhaps it touches upon Nietzsche's dislike of the 'survival of the fittest' model because it did not express the superfluity or over-abundance of life.

Isn't this 'actively cultivating suffering' a fetish indistinguishable from other possible fascinations?

Why does the human want to live a happy life instead of a miserable one if they lead to the same end? — MojaveMan

Because it is more fun.

Agreed. I read De Anima as a continuation of that thought. Our life is this life too.

This provides nothing to the discussion. Only contempt.
I bet you are capable of more than that.

I figure what Sachs is asking is whether you can have your cake and eat it too in the matter of life "being wholes" or the result of a fundamental process that was set up to permit those beings. In that regard, Aristotle is starting with a connection rather than having to presuppose one.

One of the topics constantly haggled over in the Groundhog Day cycle of arguments that has been this OP for a year concerns the credibility of evidence. You clearly favor one side of the arguments.

Characterizing all challenges to that view as coming from unquestioning slaves to a narrative is a well-honed rhetorical device. Pardon me if I lapse into a coma when it is used yet again.

Skinner did not deny it existed, he said it did not cause change.

I only brought it up because you mentioned it. The theory is as dumb as a bag of rocks.

Nietzsche suggested we could understand the “mechanistic world as a kind of life of the drives”. — Joshs

I was thinking about that while reading the essay offered upthread by Fooloso4: The Battle of the Gods and the Giants by Joe Sachs. Nietzsche's objection to laws of nature was not a rejection of natural causes but a protest against how they are imagined. It is interesting to hear Sachs make a parallel observation regarding Aristotle's understanding of nature:

When Aristotle says that nature acts for ends, he explains this by saying that the end is the form. Things have natures because they are formed into wholes. The claim is not that these natural wholes have purposes but that they are purposes. Every being is an end in itself, and the word telos, that we translate as end, means completion. When we try to judge Aristotle's claim that nature acts for ends, we tend to confuse ourselves in two ways. First, we imagine that it must mean something deliberates and has
purposes. Second and worse, we begin with our mathematically conceived universe, and can't find anything in it that looks like a directedness toward ends. But Aristotle indicates that it is just because ends are present in nature that a physicist cannot be a mathematician. We have seen that even change of place becomes impossible in mathematical space. But there are three other kinds of motion, from which the mathematician is even more hopelessly cut off, without which activity for the sake of ends would be impossible. Things in the world are born, develop, and grow. Genuine wholes, which are not random heaps, must be able to come into being, take on the qualities appropriate to their natures, and
achieve a size at which they are complete. But mathematical objects can at most be combined, separated, and rearranged. If we have first committed ourselves to a view of the world as being extended lumps in a void, there is no way to get wholes or ends back into the world. That means in turn that the question of ends has to come first, before one permits any choice to be made that empties the world of possibilities. — Joe Sachs

This is not what Nietzsche is saying exactly in his objection to metaphysics nor is he rejecting modern methods, but it is another way to ask what laws of nature refer to in our picture of a caused world.

One year into a war instigated and prolonged by the United States. — Mikie

Sounds pretty certain.

I think it shows how reading a lot of philosophy books is probably a complete waste of time for most people. — Mikie

Is very contemptuous.

It can be taken away from you at a moment's notice.

Preparation for death makes sense if you believe what you do now will change a future outcome. But that cannot be a certainty but only a belief. If you do not believe that is the case, there is nothing to prepare for.

We do not prepare for what is certain, we prepare for what we anticipate, a meal this evening, a hot date tomorrow, the stone wall I will build next week, the writing I hope to understand in a year's time. Etcetera.

To accept it will happen is to stop being preoccupied with it. The clock is ticking. This is the part of the show where you are alive. Don't waste it on fear.

Anyway— how disappointing it is that the majority in this thread refuse to question the Western narrative, even if it appears to them 99.9% obvious and certain. Given this is a philosophy forum and all. — Mikie

The issue is 99.9% obvious and certain for you. Any disagreement could only be ventured upon by complete morons.

It is rare to see a point of view so convincingly presented.

Skinner certainly "underplayed the role of inner experience." He denied that it caused any outcomes. But it is not a 'determinism' because it is possible to change the environment that produces behavior.

Vygotsky saw the development of the individual as dialogical process. The capability is a cause that is interwoven with experience but not an agent that exists independently as a Cartesian ego before experience occurs.

It is interesting how there are no Europeans in your summary.

Pardon me. I was contrasting the minimum of what was acknowledged as you described it with the grand scope of possibilities discussed afterwards by Descartes.

I read Descartes' "Cogito" as demonstrating nothing more than this: 'when doubting, one cannot doubt that one is doubting' (i.e. I thnk, therefore thinking exists.) :chin: — 180 Proof

So, more of a closet one is stuck within than a theater with a show.

When considering Behaviorism, I think it is helpful to decouple what Descartes claims from how he proceeds. The mind/body distinction he develops happens because of the conversation he is having with himself. Developmental Psychology diverged in many different directions because of different ideas about personal agency and whether this talking to oneself was central to the events or a byproduct of some kind. That is a different starting point than wondering whether a given self can 'introspect'.

In that regard, the antithesis of Skinner is not given by the likes of William James but from LS Vygotsky. Vygotsky looked at how children talking to themselves changed in relation to being able to talk with others. Vygotsky did call for methods other than introspection to investigate the phenomena. But the limits of 'self-reporting' was a discovery made during the investigation, not information as Skinner assumed was the case before making his claims.

Me too.

I was responding to your summary of the article.

You said:

His article argues that functionality can't be explained by examining the physiology of the CNS. Whether or not this is true has no bearing in whether a theory of consciousness is possible. — frank

You assert this as a self evident fact. It is not self evident to me. Chalmers went to some effort to argue otherwise. Thus my quote from his initial essay.

You are dodging the challenge to your challenge in relation to reduction in regard to you saying, "whether a theory of consciousness is possible."

Why does it have no bearing when the question of what can be reduced to a function is the center of both enquiries?

Yes. How do you see that against the background of the essay presented by DF Polis?