Harry Frankfurt's notion of "second-order volitions" may not be very original, but it is advanced with exceptional clarity, which is something analytic philosophy has sometimes done much to improve. And of course, one needs a philosophy for one's own era. Plato could hardly speak to the nature of the modern state, consumerism, capitalism, and the educational system they foster the way Byung-Chul Han, C.S. Lewis, Mark Fisher, or Autumn Kern can. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What I’m interested in is the issue of originality, not with respect to capturing what is particular about one’s own era, but thematizing what is universally and transculturally true. Do you believe modern philosophers such as Hegel are not very original in this regard in comparison with their Greek and Medieval predecessors? Were pre-modern philosophers and theologians the originators and modern philosophers merely the clarifiers and cultural
particulizers?

Even if the origin of trolling is not malicious, it results in a breakdown in trust and in cynicism. — Colo Millz

I’m just skeptical about the idea that we can define ‘trolling’ as a thing, apart from the intersubjective dynamics between the alleged troller and the annoyed accuser. One person’s trolling is another’s critique. From one vantage, it is the troll which produces breakdown in trust and in cynicism. From another vantage, the troll
is merely an adaptive response to breakdown in trust and in cynicism.

It can also explain the particular shape/structure of one's existential crisis. That is, an existential crisis is not the same for everyone who describes themselves as having an "existential crisis". For example, an existential crisis will look different for someone with a Christian background, as opposed to someone with a Hindu background; and their respective solutions to those crises are going to be shaped differently as well. (For example, one can recognize whether a self-described atheist has a Christian or a Hindu background, even without mentioning anything about them having such a background.) — baker

Good points.

↪Joshs The point that interests me is his refutation of the ‘is/ought’ distinction. He phrases it in terms of relevance realisation This revolves around discerning relevance - perceiving what features of a situation could be important in each moment. It puts questions of value, importance, significance and the sacred at the center of the ‘salience landscape’ — Wayfarer

I’m all for dissolving the is/ought distinction, and I agree that Vervaeke challenges this distinction as it relates to the fact/value separation. But I wouldn’t say he dissolves the binary in the radical way that poststructuralists do. Evan Thompson’s comments illustrate the limits of this attempt:

“Nyanaponika juxtaposed descriptive claims about the mind with statements about how one should shape the mind and life, according to the Buddhist path. The second kind of statements are ethical injunctions based on value judgments. In philosophical terms, they are normative claims rather than descriptive ones. Science pursues disinterested explanatory knowledge of the mind, whereas Buddhism also seeks to shape the mind according to certain norms and goals. But this juxtaposition of the descriptive and normative aspects of the Buddhist viewpoint hides a problem, one that still haunts the Buddhism-science dialogue today. On one hand, bare attention—the method of the supposed Buddhist mind science—is said to reveal how the mind truly is. It's said to reveal the truth of the Buddhist doctrine of “no-self” or “nonself”, that there is no abiding self or soul and that the “mind is nothing beyond its cognizing function.”

The no-self doctrine isn't presented as an antecedent normative framework that tells us what ought to happen as a result of practicing bare attention, namely, that we should no longer identify with the mind as the self. Rather, bare attention is presented as disclosing the antecedent truth that there is no self. Bare attention is likened to a scientific procedure or instrument for observing and establishing how things are. On the other hand, mindfulness meditation is a practice that shapes the mind according to certain goals and norms, such as making the mind calmer and less impulsive. Nyanaponika writes that “Bare Attention slows down, or even stops, the transition from thought to action,” and “the plasticity and receptivity of the mind will grow considerably.”

How are these two ways of thinking about bare attention—as disinterested disclosure of how the mind truly is versus as shaping it according to a valued standard—supposed to be related? They seem to be in tension. To disclose something requires not changing it as you disclose it. To shape the mind is to change it. How can bare attention reveal the mind if it also changes it? Consider scientific observation compared to bare attention to one's own mental processes. Scientific observation, like meditation, is a practice and an acquired skill. You need to learn how to see through a microscope or a telescope. But these kinds of instruments are separate from the objects they provide access to, and they don't change them (except, perhaps, at the quantum scale).

Buddhist exceptionalists typically conflate the descriptive and normative aspects of Buddhist doctrines and meditation practices. For example, Sam Harris writes: “a person can embrace the Buddha's teaching, and even become a genuine Buddhist contemplative (and, one must presume, a buddha) without believing anything on insufficient evidence.” He thinks Buddhism is like science: “One starts with the hypothesis that using attention in the prescribed way (meditation), and engaging in or avoiding certain behaviors (ethics), will bear the promised result (wisdom and psychological well-being).” Harris makes it sound as if there is empirical, scientific evidence for the Buddha's normative teaching, including the ideal norm of buddhahood and the possibility of its attainment. I disagree. The concepts of nirvana (nirvana ) and awakening (bodhi ) aren't scientific concepts; they're soteriological ones. They aren't psychological constructs whose validity can be established through measurement. (Why I Am Not A Buddhist)

Vervaeke argues that normativity doesn’t need to be imported from a cosmic telos or moral law.
It’s implicit in our very capacity for rational, self-corrective cognition.

Our “is” — our biological and cognitive architecture — already entails competencies that can be exercised well or badly. “Ought” simply names the direction of self-correction toward more adequate realization of those competences. — Wayfarer

Vervaeke’s view fits squarely within the German Idealist tradition, especially Hegel, with Kantian roots, in his understanding of autonomous reason, freedom as self-determined alignment with rational norms and internalized moral standards. It doesn’t seem partially compatible with the existentialist move to deconstruct the metaphysics of rational subjectivity inaugurated by Kierkegaard. For him, faith involves a personal “leap” beyond reason, sometimes even against ethical universals. Vervaeke’s insistence on autonomous rational standards contrasts with Kierkegaard’s focus on faith as transcending rationality. We are responsible for what matters and how it matter to us, but this isn’t a ‘rational’ responsibility.

If bullshit marks a disregard for truth, trolling marks a disregard for dialogue itself - a symptom of a digital culture that values power more than understanding. — Colo Millz

I would counter that your post confuses cause with symptom by positing the motive for bullshit and trolling as the valuing of arbitrary power for its own sake. You don’t seem to allow that lying, bullshit and trolling may not be primarily intended to cause breakdown in understanding, but may arise as adaptive coping responses to such breakdown. The problem then would not be lying but the deterioration of trust that makes one believe lying is the only recourse. I find the accusation of ‘trolling’ to be most often used as a dismissive weapon to delegitimize the reasoning and justifications of those who we disagree with.

I'm mostly familiar with the notion of a "meaning crisis" through the usual suspects, Nietzsche and his successors, Dostoevsky and later Russian writers like Pelevin, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre (the slide into emotivism in ethics and aesthetics being a sort of special case of the meaning crisis thesis), William Stace, Bertrand Russell, the New Athiests, etc.

Pierre Hadot's approach to "spiritual exercises" and his focus on Epicureanism and Stoicism as more accessible to moderns, as well as the neo-stoic renaissance in the world of "tech culture" are also good concrete examples of the phenomena.

I would tend to agree with Charles Taylor though that the epistemic and metaphysical presuppositions that leave people "spun" open or closed to "transcendence" are themselves largely aesthetic (which is not to say unimportant; the idea that Beauty is of secondary importance is of course merely the presupposition of a particular sort of Enlightenment "world-view.") I think you can see this clearest in people from a solidly materialist atheist frame who nonetheless recoil from the difficulties of the "sheer mechanism" doctrines of the eliminativists and epiphenomenalists, and find themselves open to the notions of God in Spinoza, deflated versions of Hegel, or—most interesting to me—a sort of bizzaro-world reading of Neoplatonism where the One is a sort of "abstract principle" in the same sense that the law of gravity might be (suffice to say, I don't think this reading survives contact with the sources in question, which is why it is interesting that it arises at all, or why the material must be transformed as it is). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Am I right to surmise that for you the history of Western philosophy since at least Descartes amounts to little more than a reshuffling of older theological concepts, and that you would not feel particularly intellectually or spiritually deprived if you had not been exposed to modern philosophy?

I think it's obviously false that 99.99% of Trump's influential supporters are "traditionalists" however, since many in the camp I am referring to are outspoken transhumanists or post-humanists, who see custom and tradition simply as tools, and who want to move beyond humanity itself. Likewise, "tradition" in the American context normally refers to Protestantism, or at least Christianity, and yet these folks tend to refer to Christians as "Christcucks" or Christ as a "Jew on a stick" (if they are even that polite). — Count Timothy von Icarus

They are traditionalists relative to the kind of thinking that falls within the postmodern philosophical sphere. If one wants to be generous, one can point to Kierkegaard as the first postmodernist, or proto-postmodernist. By traditionalist I mean a perspective which is at least prior to Kierkegaard, Marx and Hegel. Please name specific figures associated with this alt-right trans or post-humanism (Curtis Yarvin, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel?) and I'll offer my take on where their philosophies belong on a historical spectrum. Elon Musk and Peter Theil’s advocacy of that old movement called ‘technocracy’ envisioning a rational, scientific society run by experts, can be traced back to the French Encyclopedists (Condorcet, Saint-Simon). Saint-Simon’s idea of a technocratic elite managing production and social welfare was revived almost verbatim by the 1930s technocracy movement.

↪Joshs I’m interested in your thoughts on this meaning crisis. Do you think that, if it exists, it’s because we’re in a transition period, still haunted by the old beliefs and struggling to adapt to new ways of understanding? What are projects like Vervaeke’s trying to accomplish? It feels to me like they’re trying to put the genie back in the bottle. But as someone who isn’t looking for his kind of answers, it’s perhaps easy for me to misread the material. — Tom Storm

Vervaeke’s’Meaning Crisis’ project stems from a personal crisis he experienced in his 20’s. He grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home, but rejected that faith as an adult. He embraced science instead, but found that it only described what is the case rather than how to live, what Aristotle called phronesis and Buddhist traditions call wisdom. He found the answer to his meaning crisis by combining cognitive science, wisdom traditions (Buddhism, Stoicism, Neoplatonism) and meditative practices. This is what he teaches others in his meaning crisis courses.

So is the world in a meaning crisis? I would say only those who find themselves adrift with respect to former belief systems. This does not include those who are happy with their traditional religious beliefs. But what about the majorities in Europe, the U.K., Australia and other places who consider themselves atheists? While Varvaeke is coming late to the game, Europe has had lots of practice, with atheism having become a popular alternative to faith decades ago. I imagine many of those who consider themselves post-theistic existentialists find meaning in what they choose to do. In my own case I became an atheist at age 15 and transitioned immediately from religious faith to finding meaning in creating my own purposes.

I found embodied cognitive science, and later phenomenology, to be very helpful here, since they deal both with questions of how one should live and what is the case. Still, there are many like Vervaeke who grew up relying on a rigid belief system and found themselves in existential crisis when they abandoned that faith and had nothing to replace it with. The craving to replace one totalizing purpose with another is one explanation for the attraction of cults, and Verveake’s project does have some cult-like characteristics.

A big part of what has defined MAGA as against the W. Bush coalition is the outsized role played by the post-religious, post-modern "nu-right" or "alt-right." They tend to recognize something like a "meaning crisis" but are often themselves nihilists, hence the naked embrace of "might makes right" ideologies. Everything is just a sort of natural selection, etc. Hence, accelerationism coming into vogue among — Count Timothy von Icarus

You’re seriously going to try and pin MAGA on ‘post-modernism’? If by this term you’re just referring to a historical era that we all inhabit, then I suppose that’s innocuous enough, but it also doesn’t say anything about the wide variety of viewpoints that belong to our post
modern condition. If on the other hand you’re referring specifically to postmodernist philosophy, I’d make two points. First, about 99.99% of MAGA adherents are philosophical traditionalists and hew socially conservative. They not only would not consider themselves postmodernists but are vehemently opposed to anything they see as even tangentially connected with it (marxism, wokism, intersectionality, post-colonialism, gender and queer theory, relativism, critical theory). Second, theorists such as Nick Land, and movements such as accelerationism, have been tagged with the label ‘postmodern’ simply because some of them studied or mentioned in their work postmodern figures like Deleuze and Foucault. This does not mean that their own work is in any sense postmodern from a philosophical perspective. Ive read Nick Land. His own philosophical orientation is anti-postmodern and rooted in older, more reactionary traditions of thought. He reads postmodern writers like Nietzsche and Deleuze in ways which are directly opposed to a postmodern reading.

Witt even grants the line of inquiry into the “casual connections” of the brain. “Supposing we tried to construct a mind-model as a result of psychological investigations, a model which, as we should say, would explain the action of the mind…. We may find that such a mind-model would have to be very complicated and intricate in order to explain the observed mental activities….” (p.6)

But he does say that “the method of their solution is that of natural science” and that “this aspect of the mind does not interest us” which is related to one of two aspects of this lecture that I think is the hardest to wrap our heads around. This is just before saying that “For what struck us as being queer about thought and thinking was not at all that it had curious effects which we were not yet able to explain (causally). Our problem, in other words, was not a scientific one; but a muddle felt as a problem — Antony Nickles

My reading of this is the following: Witt isnt simply allowing for a peaceful division of labor, where science does its empirical work and philosophy diagnoses conceptual confusion. Instead, he’s diagnosing the impulse to construct “mind-models” as a grammatical temptation. Our very desire to “explain” thought as if it were a causal process is already the problem. Is this your interpretation too?

Do you think that full reflection is possible for a person who is inside a paradigm? — Astorre

The same processes that embed individuals within social paradigms shape the nature and direction of ‘reflection’. The split between the purely private and inner (reflection) and the socially constructed (paradigm) is artificial.

Horkheimer argues that in this transformation, reason has been stripped of its substantive and ethical content; it has become a tool for calculation, efficiency, and control. This marks the “eclipse” of reason—the point at which rationality itself becomes irrational, serving domination rather than enlightenment, and leaving modern civilization powerful in its techniques but impoverished in meaning and purpose.

This later becomes one of the main themes of Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of the Enlightenment. — Wayfarer

Kant and Hegel took the split between a mechanistic world and a representing subject and united the two on the basis of rational freedom of the Will. Schelling went further by eliminating mechanism from nature. But he retained the metaphysical unity of the willing subject. It seems that Horkheimer and Adorno do the same in grounding meaning in rational thought and rational thought in dialectical materialism. The metaphysical unity of reason doesn’t come into question until the irrational, the unconscious and the historical are given equal billing with rationality in the work of Kierkegaard, the hermeneuticists, phenomenologists and Nietzschean poststructuralists. Meaning as affect becomes the ground for meaning as reason. Kierkegaard is where that metaphysical project breaks down. He refuses the reconciliation between reason and the irrational, faith and knowledge, the finite and the infinite.

↪Ludwig V
To be clear, Bateson falls on the "psychology" side of what Wittgenstein is considering. And so does Chomsky. I don't mean to imply that their ideas are adequate responses to what Wittgenstein is trying to do. — Paine

George Lakoff’s embodied alternative to Chomsky’s innatism comes a bit closer to Wittgenstein.

Well, at lease since Parmenides, "nothing" certainly is a "philosophical issue", we agree on that.
— 180 Proof

Ha! Clever reply 180 Proof. — Philosophim

Das nicht nichtet.

I remember Chomsky saying something like, if W stays away from science, then science will have to return the favor.
— Paine
Well, one sharp put-down deserves another. But the map of academia is contested - what map isn't, particularly when it comes to border territory, where both sides have relevant expertise? We need both sides to recognize where territory is contested, not pretend that everything can be decisively settled. — Ludwig V

Yes, I think Wittgenstein (as well as Husserl, Heidegger and others employing phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches) would respond that it is only by keeping a distance from and bracketing the facts of science that one can see the sense of those facts differently. The fact that science has stayed away from the kind of philosophical clarification that Witt’s work represents is the reason for what Evan Thompson calls its ‘blind spot’ concerning its relation to the Lifeworld that generates it and makes it intelligible.

As for Hegel, I'd say that Will is the culminating synthesis of self-determining awareness that coincides with these 'wordless and indescribable existences.'
— Pantagruel

Huh, i thought that was the hallmark of shopenhauer. I suppose we would have to consult the german translation. — ProtagoranSocratist

You see the beginnings of that in Schelling’s “dark ground”, a pre-rational, primal force or will. It is the non-rational foundation that makes freedom, personality, and consciousness possible. Kierkegaard was influenced by this, and studied with Schelling, but went beyond Schelling’s and Schopenhauer’s Idealism of the Will with his existentialism.

…three persons-in-one deity, which includes God's Son, who is nonetheless begotten not made, one in being with the Father, born of a virgin, both God and man, who was cruelly killed for our salvation, descended into Hell, then resurrected, etc. — Ciceronianus

I think I saw that movie. It was part of Halloween month.

A quick Google search reveals that several authors have applied Gadamer's hermeneutics to theology, making your statements seem extraordinary — Colo Millz

What can i say, I’m an extraordinary person. Any author can take a philosophical position in a theological direction. Gadamer didn’t object to theologians making use of hermeneutical interpretation as long they didnt attempt to treat it as a method grounded in a theological foundation. The fusion of horizons he described can only include such foundational theological tropes as revelation and grace if these are stripped of their authoritative god’s eye grounding and treated instead as horizons located entirely within the contingency of historically mediated, linguistically conditioned, open-ended discursive practices.

In Gadamer's dialogical reasoning Caputo purifies theology from triumphalism and anthropocentrism, but Genesis rescues Caputo’s view from nihilism by affirming that our animality is beloved and called. Humanity is both animal and imago Dei: the creature through whom matter becomes self-aware, responsible, and capable of love. Evolution tells the story of our becoming; Genesis names the meaning of that story. Caputo shows what we are; Genesis shows what we are for. — Colo Millz

This is taking Gadamer in a theological direction he was careful to avoid. Rather than self-awareness as teleological purpose, the meaning of hermeneutic discourse is in the process itself.

we should be wary of reducing the human to "mere" animality. The human is animal, but also the being who understands, who plays, and who participates in meaning — Colo Millz

Those poor animals. We humans are so frantically desperate to clutch at whatever we can convince ourselves will separate us from other species (only humans as are self-aware! Only humans are rational animals! Only humans have language, use tools, have culture, engage in play behavior, feel emotion!). I suggest whatever such categorical distinctions we might come up will eventually prove unjustifiable, and we will have to live with the idea that our differences with other creatures are as much a matter of degree as of kind.

Witt says they believe in something as possible but not here. I take the mirage to be created by the projection of the “mental” as imagined objects (by analogy), and I’ll grant to Joshs that they are “gripped” by the picture, and are “inclined” to say certain things as natural given their position once they have intellectually fortified it. But there is a why we have been chasing and I take it as the reason for picking objects as the analogy.

Their conviction comes by a secret they see that we don’t, like they “had discovered… new elements of the structure of the world”. But what makes them excited are the possibilities of an object, which are generalizable, complete, concrete, verifiable, substantial, etc. They become so compelled because there is nothing in the way of them projecting/imagining what they want: knowledge; an answer, a justification, a foundation, something of which they can be certain — Antony Nickles

If we are to associate desire, seen as ‘what we want’, with the ‘why’ which motivates our reasons, then what we desire isnt the same thing as this ‘why’ Rather, like our reasons, what we desire gets its intelligibility from within the why. If we think of this ’why’ as an overarching system expressing how reasons hang together, what Wittgenstein later calls a form of life, and which he is perhaps depicting incipiently here as a firmly held conviction, or that which ties tighter a wide range of convictions ( ‘this is what we do’), then why we desire what we desire cannot be located within the space of reasons, but prior (not in a chronological sense) to them.

If knowledge, an answer, a justification, a foundation, is what we want, then the larger system of intelligiblity is what makes these concepts intelligible. If knowledge-as-picture and foundations are grammatical illusions, the source of our being captivated by this illusion is not to be found in what we want but as this larger ‘why’ organizing the sense of our motives and reasons. It then would make no sense to trace the genesis of something like a form of life to what we desire and what our reasons are. We don’t want to be a solipsist or skeptic; we want what we want, and how we want it, WITHIN these illusory grammars. Is this consistent with your thinking here?

This makes sense, but I don’t think it contradicts what panwei has written. I think it makes sense too say, or at least consider, that the fact we care about each other is something that has evolutionary roots. — T Clark

It can have evolutionary roots in two ways . One way is that it is a gimmick, an arbitrary genetic contrivance whose value is indirect; that it is adaptive for the survival of the species. The second way is that the intrinsic dynamics of caring and social involvement function according the same same principles as evolutionary processes; not as an arbitrary gimmick that just so happens to further survival but
as what Piaget described as the fundamental organizing principle of life , the reciprocal relation between assimilation and accommodation in evolving living systems from a weaker to stronger structure. This limited the arbitrary gimmick aspect, as though we would stop caring about each other if evolution found a better way.
Another way to put it is that relevance and mattering are not inventions of evolution, but its basis.

This ought is not a choice
— Joshs

Well, OK. So if I were to say to someone, "You ought to ____ [filling in your description of what you call the intrinsic striving for self-expression]," that would be pointless, since they're doing it anyway? — J

They’re doing some ought, but it may not match your ought. Your ought may be taken as an invitation to view the situation from a different vantage. In psychological theory, the separating of is and ought translates into the difference between the person as a static object and the motives which push or pull them into behaving.
The ought is this ‘spark plug’ which is presumed to be needed to drive action. Psychological approaches like enactivism assume that we always already find ourselves thrown into action, so the ‘ought’ of motive doesn’t have to posited as a separate mechanism from the ‘is’ of being in the world. The issue isn’t how we get ourselves started but how we cope with the way we find ourselves thrown into situations , that is, the direction of motive.

The enactivists also argue that the social linguistic community is inseparably intertwined with the very notion of self; intersubjective factors already have an effect on our perception and understanding of the world and ourselves, even in the immediacy of our instrumental copings with the environment.

"X should be chosen because X is worthy (or worthwhile)," is simply not a tautology. Your claim that it is a tautology requires equivocation and a redefinition of "worth."

It should be easy enough to see this by simply noting that an argument over whether something has worth is not the same as an argument over whether some course of action should be taken. For instance, "The coffee should be chosen because the coffee should be chosen," is not the same as, "The coffee should be chosen because it tastes delicious," and yet 'tastes delicious' is itself here understood as a relevant form of worth. — Leontiskos

The way I’m reading ‘x should be chosen’ is that it implies a preference. The choice being recommended is preferable to the alternatives on some basis, and thus more worthy to be chosen than the alternatives on that same basis. One isn't making a blanket implication of the worth of the recommended choice, only that it is worthier than the alternatives on some basis. It’s hard to imagine a circumstance in which the utterance ‘the coffee should be chosen because the coffee should be chosen’ would be useful, except as a way of answering objections with ‘because I said so’, which isnt a denial that I deem the coffee preferable to (more worthy than) alternatives, but simply says ‘the reasons for my preference are none of your business and just do what I say’.

I agree with the thrust of your post, and I personally share the sentiment quoted above. But . . . suppose I don't? Suppose I don't see others as like myself, and am not interested in relating to them or expanding my sense of self. Are you arguing that I ought to? If not, what does this have to do with ethics and morality, with doing the right thing or pursuing the good or however one cares to phrase it — J

What I’m arguing is that ‘sense of self’ has nothing to do with the physical boundary that divides the outer layer of my skin from other persons. It has precisely to do with relatability and assimilability. I can be divided within my own ‘self’ just a much as I can be united with another person, depending on the relative success at achieving this integration. My personal desires and interests don’t come before this striving for self-integration; it is intrinsic to the very nature of desire. This ought is not a choice, it is the condition of possibility of intelligible experience.

I also share your idea about the origins of "ought." Essentially, this isn't a new idea—just a new perspective on an old instinct — Astorre

You’re right, the is-ought divide is not a new idea. So why not let some fresh air into the room by focusing on newer philosophies ( there are many of them) which dismantle the basis for the is-ought distinction?

That's the difference between ought and is. The receipt from the checkout is what is the case, the shopping list is what ought be the case. — Banno

It’s difficult for me to absorb the sense of this Humean distinction. My brain is clogged with too many sedimented layers of philosophy which have explicitly dismantled the entire framework on which the is-ought distinction is built. My thoughts bounce from enactivists like Evan Thompson and Francisco Varela to hermeneuticists like Dilthey and Gadamer, from poststructuralists like Deleuze and Foucault to phenomenologists like Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-ponty, from Wittgenstein, Putnam and Rorty, to Joseph Rouse and Karen Barad.

For instance, we have an intuitionthat killing is wrong because our minds can vaguely discern that the act of arbitrarily infringing upon life would be fundamentally detrimental to our adaptation to the environment and survival. Perhaps the moral system of human society is itself an adaptive tool formed under evolutionary pressures to promote group survival and reproduction. In other words, morality is a cultural apparatus that "serves the fundamental purpose." — panwei

This seems like a long and convoluted way to explain something that can be better explained in a much more direct way. We believe killing is wrong because we care about others. We care about others because we see them as like ourselves, which allows us to relate to them, learn from them, expand the boundaries of our sense of self. It’s not a question of what we can ‘get out of them’ for some narrowly conceived selfish purpose, but that they become a part of our own sense of self. The self is enriched and expanded to include others rather than simply treat them as objects for solipsistic purposes. Yes, we could argue that this furthers the survival of the species, but this is still looking at the notion of survival too narrowly and statically. What is being enhanced isnt the mere static survival of an object-a human, but the becoming and expansion of the self. Social bonds, friendship , love and cooperation dont just do the bidding of some prior “fundamental purpose” called evolutionary survival; they are its extension and redefinition. They are not just a means to some prior end. They are their own ends., their own fundamental purpose.

There are, however, some awkward phenomena. Akrasia (weakness of will) is one, and another is the phenomenon of protesting too much - where vehement denial of a truth betrays the denier's uneasy awareness the they are wrong. — Ludwig V

Psychologist George Kelly defined hostility as “the continued effort to extort validational evidence in favor of a type of social prediction which has already proved itself a failure.” Put simply, in hostility, events turn out differently than one had expected, and instead of revising one’s thinking, one tries to ‘force a round peg into a square hole.’

Showing examples of other senses (usages) for a phrase than the skeptic claims, is not in order to be right, but to make a point by basically saying, “see?” to show the conditions which would allow the skeptic's phrase to do what they want (to give it the necessary context, expectations, implications, logic, etc.)
— Antony Nickles
Yes. That's relieving the cramp. Though we need to think of someone suffering from cramp who doesn't want to be released from it. The cramp is our diagnosis. But movement can become restricted because it is never used. Perhaps that's better. — Ludwig V

This gets to the question of the relation between feeling-affect-desire and the ‘intellectual’ for Wittgenstein. There are a wide variety of interpretations to choose from among Wittgenstein scholars. My preference is to claim that the desire to stay on the path of illusion is not knowingly to do so. Desire only makes sense the way that true and false makes sense , within a form of life that gives both a desire and the criterion of truth their intelligibility. If what can be intelligibly desired takes place within a form of life that rests on a grammatical illusion, it is not as though desire first recognizes the illusion and then decides to ignore this knowledge. Rather , the desire can’t make it intelligible in the first place. It is not a s though desire knows the illusion as illusion and then decides to stay with the illusion, as though desire has a choice.

The philosophical problem is not a moral failing or an act of bad faith where the skeptic willfully chooses illusion over truth. Instead, the deep-seated desire for certainty or for a complete explanation is captured by a misleading grammatical picture.

The usual suspect tertiary sources on the web say he did not believe that consciousness originated outside the body. — T Clark

In earlier works , like Principles of Psychology, his approach was mainly materialistic. But toward the end of his career his thinking became more speculative. In the essay, he proposes that the idea that the brain transmits rather than produces consciousness is philosophically and scientifically conceivable, and perhaps better fits the facts than strict materialism.

He writes:

“Suppose that our brains are not productive, but transmissive organs, through which the material world affects the spiritual. Then the diminutions of consciousness which accompany brain lesions may not be due to the destruction of consciousness itself, but to the failure of its physical organs to transmit it properly.”

Authentic intelligence is generally seen as triadic, whereas computers are reductively dyadic. — Leontiskos

When we talk about how the mind really works, and then compare that to what a computer does, there’s a tendency to assume that what we are comparing are two kinds of processes taking place inside of objects, one of these objects being a brain and the other being a machine. But recent thinking in cognitive science argues that thinking doesn’t take place inside the head. The brain is embodied in a body, and the body is embedded in an environment, so mind is indissociably all of these. Cognitive nis not only embedded in a world, its is extended into this world.

That means that mind implies and includes the artifacts that we interact with, including language, the arts, music, our built environment as our constructed biological niche, our clothing and our technological tools. What this means is that our computers as information processing systems are not entities unto themselves , they are appendages and extensions of our thinking, just as a nest is to a bird or a web to a spider. A nest is only meaningfully a nest as the bird uses it for its purposes. Similarly, a computer has no existence outside of what we do with it and how we interpret what we do with it.

So when we say that the mind works differently than a computer, we are comparing two different ways of interacting with our environment. If we understand the working of our computers ‘diadically’ and the working of our minds ‘triadically’, in both cases we are talking about the working of our minds. We should say, then, that the one way of using our minds is more limited than the other, but not less ‘authentic’ or more ‘artificial’. Artifice and niche construction IS what the authentic mind does. The engineer ( or Sam Altman) who claims that their invented a.i. device thinks just like a human is correct in that the device works according to principles that they believe also describe how the mind works.

As our self-understanding evolves, we will continually raise the bar on what it means for our devices to ‘think like us’. In a way, they always has thought like us, being nothing more that appendages which express our own models and theories of how we think. But as this thinking evolves , the nature of the machines we build will evolve along with it.

Some scientists are exploring panpsychism as a potential solution to the hard problem of consciousness, which questions how physical matter can give rise to subjective experience.
— Gnomon

The link you provided doesn’t really identify any scientists who support panpsychism, although it does identify some philosophers. Can you name some scientists who do?

discussion of a controversial philosophical concept
— Gnomon

This is not a philosophical question at all—it’s a scientific one. Does our consciousness result from signals coming from outside our bodies? — T Clark

William James might have begged to differ with you. In his essay ‘Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine’, he raises the question whether consciousness might depend on, or even originate from, sources “outside” the brain, but James does so in a way that deliberately blurs the boundaries between psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience.

I mentioned that I beleive we will soon enter a lost decade for the stock market. My thesis is that a closer look at ‘lost decades’ reveals them to tie together economics, domestic and international politics, technological rhythms, and counter- culture in general. What do Coolidge, Hoover and the Weimar republic have in common, or Roosevelt and Hitler? What do the Iranian Revolution, Thatcher, Reagan, hippie counterculture, Steve Jobs and the fall of the Soviet Union have in common? What do Trump, Le Pen, Orban, Farage, Brexit, Truss, Netanyahu and Putin have in common?

They have in common the fact that culture develops via eras consisting of phases of cycles marking incipient innovation, stabilization of that innovation, complacency, backsliding ( see Hyman Minsky on the ‘Minsky cycle and Minsky moment’) and destabilization reflecting transition to a new era of innovation. For instance, the progressive era between 1900 and 1920 stabilized the innovating industrial economy through trust busting and the formation of a Treaury, but complacency and backsliding ( tariffs, anti-immigration) froze its gains into place between 1920 and 1932, while the economy was innovating into a phase (assembly- line mass production) where a more aggressive labor-focused progressivism (and elimination of tariffs) was necessary.

The new deal in the U.S. jumped immediately into this new era, whereas the transition to social democracy in Europe required an initial bout of backsliding into fascism. This labor-focused safety net became complacent and clogged with red tape by the time of Johnson and Nixon, and needed to become more flexible and supportive of new technology with the advent of the digital revolution. The neo-liberal philosophical underpinnings of this revolution are exemplified by the hippie persona of Steve Jobs, born about 10 years later than most of the hippie community.

The hippie tech genius was to bundle together a multitute of algorithmically fixed packets of information ( Leary’s consciousness expansion opening up new circuits of reality). This transformation wasn’t reflected politically until the transition from Carter to Reagan (and Thatcher). This neo-liberal libertarian move eventually became complacent under Clinton (first baby boomer) and Bush II, and needed to be supplemented by a new safety net, this time focused not on welfare for labor but for corporations, in the formation of rock-bottom interest rates, tax cuts and Q.E. This took place under Obama, Trump I and Biden, where it began to reach a peak of complacency in parallel with stagnating tech corporations.

And it is now becoming in need of supplementation and reform as the welfare-for-corporations model reaches its extreme with Trump’s backsliding into extreme corporate welfare protectionism, walling business and American culture off from anything alien. Excessive immigration has led to mass deportations, uncontrolled free trade has led to tariffs. The new tech era arising from the ashes of the current one will be more liberal and communitarian than libertarian in its inspiration, focused less on algorithmic data training than on integrating data frames with qualitatively different human perspectives. Instead of bundling together multitudes of arbitrary , fixed packets of information, which is all that today’s A.I. does, it will insert reciprocal causation into its fixed algorithmic causation.

Like Jobs in the 1970’s and the hippie counterculture ( and Edison, Ford, Tesla and the Transcendental-Romantic movement of the 19th century), it will be exemplified by those belatedly tapping into today’s counterculture of progressive wokeness. Trump is clearing the decks, dismantling the old political structures, leaving a vacuum out of which the new generation of ‘woke’ techies and progressives can erect a supplement to corporate-welfare neo-liberalism. Look for this tech revolution to emerge around 2035.

The technological language of this new business liberalism will be that of complex dynamical systems theory, which is already used in reservoir computing. This will bring tech into the world of Hegelian dialectics, the front doorstep of wokism.

Sexual orientation has nothing to do with gender. It is biological. It is not 'gender orientation'. It is 'sexual orientation — Philosophim

Now we’re getting somewhere. How do you imagine a brain mechanism works to produce sexual orientation? Any hypotheses? What I am arguing is that such a brain mechanism shapes and organizes how we process affective and perceptual information, giving each of us a perceptual -affective style which is both biological and subject to cultural shaping, and shapes much, much more that sexual orientation. Put differently, sexual orientation is one among many results of a brain filter which gives us a certain sex-based style of perceiving . Think of it as akin to Chomsky’s transformational grammar. Just as he theorized a brain module which filters , processes and organizes language into patterns which can be assessed statistically, I am arguing that your brian mechanism for sexual orientation is such a module , and that you’re missing the organized, patterned way in which experience is filtered and processed by this biological module when you look at biological sex-based behavior reductively.

Its as though I hand you an intricately patterned glass sculpture, and you throw it on the ground and shatter it into a thousand fragments. You then study those fragments individually and look for statistical patterns in the arbitrary behavior of each fragment to explain the nature of the sculpture’s overall pattern. That’s how Skinner studied language before Chomsky came along. You look at fragments of a pattern and , without recognizing what organized those fragments into the patten in the first place, treat them as independent. Here we have sexual orientation. There we have aggression. Elsewhere there are myriad other behaviors, each of which is seemingly arbitrary and unconnected to a larger originating processing module which could tie them all together on the basis of a single organizing principle. We the. apply our statistics to this assumed random and arbitrary pile of behavioral fragments. What we get out of this is what we put into it: people randomly falling into social roles and behaviors.

I expect that, just like the Dot-Com bubble, the AI bubble is likely to burst. — Pierre-Normand

I agree A.I. is a bubble, but I think the situation in the market today is more like the late 1960’s than the late ‘90’s. The dot.com era was the beginning of a tech revolution, and now, almost 30 years later, I think we’re nearing the end of that same era. Similarly, the industrial revolution, which was still in its formative years at we entered the 20th century, was long in the tooth by the 1960’s. In the late ‘60’s, just as today, the market was buoyed by well-established tech companies ( Kodak, Xerox, G.E., IBM, GM and Ford) which formed part of the Nifty Fifty, the ‘60’s version of today’s Magnificent Seven. And , like today’s tech companies, the companies of the Nifty Fifty were solid dividend-producing, profit-making entities. Also like today’s high-flying companies, they had become fat, lazy and complacent, focusing more on pleasing shareholders, walling themselves off from competition and getting government favors than creative nimbleness and innovation. This process of internal decay has recently been called ‘enshitification’ ( examples of it include Google’s once praised but now almost unusable search engine). In contrast to both the mature 1960’s tech companies and those of today, the young dot.com firms made no profits and offered no dividends , so their stock valuations were based entirely on speculation.

Some argue that today’s a.i. has inaugurated a tech revolution, but I suggest that, for all its seemingly dazzling capabilities, it represents the tail end of the previous tech era rather than a fresh revolution. I think we’re about 10 years away from that next tech era, and just as with the stale and complacent companies of the late ‘60’s, a bubble has formed driven by lazy expectations drawn from two previous decades of innovation and stock performance rather than accurate assessment of future profit potential. And just like the late ‘60’s , we are likely on our way to a long transition period till the next wave of tech innovation is launched in some 20-something’s garage. Until then I think we will see a lost decade for the market.

Animal research shows that sex hormones organize and activate the brain systems underlying many sex-typical behaviors, such as mating motivation, aggression and territorial behavior, empathy or affiliative tendencies and caregiving.
— Joshs

That is biological expectation, not gender. — Philosophim

You seem to be making two points . First, that the aspects of social behavior which are purely cultural and those which are due to biological factors are cleanly discernible through observation. Second, that practically none of what are considered feminine or masculine social behaviors in humans are related to the pre-natal effects of sex hormones on brain function.

I agree that biological and social factors go into a person's behavior in relation to their sex. Biological patterns of behavior are sex behaviors, not gender behaviors. Social factors are gender behaviors, not sex behaviors. — Philosophim

Using gay men as an example, I consider examples of such sexual behaviors as having a feminine voice, throwing like a girl, gestures, postures and ways of walking which appear feminine, being predominantly sexually attracted to other males, choosing professions which tend to be more associated with women, etc. Do any of these behaviors by themselves indicate a biologically-produced sex disposition? No, it is the larger pattern that points to a sex-associated behavioral style. Are professions and behaviors which used to be categorized rigidly by gender now in the process of dissolving their rigid categorical boundaries? Yes, absolutely. Do the very definitions of the masculine and the feminine change over time? Indeed they do.

But this doesn’t mean that when a gay child says that they have known they were gay as long as they can remember, that they didn’t choose to be gay, that they didn’t learn to be gay by absorbing it from their culture, that they are talking about gender as opposed to sex. And when they say that what it means to be gay for them is much wider than simply who they are sexually attracted to, that what ‘others’ them with respect to their males peers are a wide range of ‘feminized’ behaviors they may despise and certainly have no control over, what they are referring to is predominantly sex-based rather than culture-based ‘gender’.

Sex - Expected social behavior based on biology. It is statistically more likely for men to be aggressive — Philosophim

What biological mechanisms make men more likely to be aggressive than women? Would you say it’s the same mechanisms that produce myriad sex-based social behavioral differences between males and females in other species? What do you make of animal findings showing that hormonal exposure can “feminize” or “masculinize” neural circuits? For instance, certain brain regions, such as the hypothalamus, bed nucleus of the stria terminalis and amygdala, show sex-related patterns that are influenced by hormones.

Animal research shows that sex hormones organize and activate the brain systems underlying many sex-typical behaviors, such as mating motivation, aggression and territorial behavior, empathy or affiliative tendencies and caregiving. In songbirds, estrogen exposure in males can alter or reduce song patterns that are normally testosterone-driven. In some cases, it can alter vocalizations to produce simpler songs or calls more typical of females. In mammals, male parental behavior, such as grooming or caring for pups, can increase when estrogen is introduced. Female maternal behavior can be enhanced by estrogens and progesterone in combination.

Some studies in humans have shown that prenatal exposure to sex hormones influences later interests, play preferences, and some aspects of sexual orientation. Some neuroimaging and postmortem studies suggest that in transgender individuals, the structure or activity of brain regions sensitive to sex hormones may more closely resemble the gender they identify with than their sex assigned at birth.

I recognize that gendered behavior in humans is strongly influenced by social-cultural processes which are absent in other species, but aren’t you contradicting yourself when you assert that, on the one hand:

1) “Expected social behavior is based on biology. It is statistically more likely for men to be aggressive” ,

and on the other hand:

2)It is cognitive dissonace for factions within the trans activist community to argue that ‘gender is sex' while also redefining the term to allow 'not sex' into it as well.

Why is it cognitive dissonance when some trans activists claim that both biological and social factors are involved in sexually-related social behavior but not when you make the same claim?

the skeptic is “cramped” by the forced analogy (the two senses), from which he creates the picture, but this doesn’t explain why first choose “objects” to analogize, which is the matter at hand. And you’ve given no textual evidence for putting things back to front as you have done—I need more to see the logic. — Antony Nickles

While Wittgenstein does use "wants" and "dissatisfaction," the therapeutic effect of his philosophy, the complete dissolution of the problem once the grammar is clarified, shows that the confusion is linguistic. If the cause were a deep-seated fear, simply showing the proper use of 'know' wouldn't eliminate the fear. It eliminates the problem, thus proving the problem was linguistic, not psychological.
It is as the sense-making of grammatical use that meaning shows up as how things matter to us. This mattering can be described as a logic of sense or a logic of affect-feeling-emotion. What is important is that we not try to fix such terms categorically. Anything that we might be tempted to place within the category of ‘affect’ , such as mood, feeling, desire, emotion or motive, has its existence only in how it works within the mattering of word use.

Shared interests and desires that give rise to reasons are the raw material of sense-making, and it is when the grammar becomes misleading that our interests become the fuel for illusion and intellectual disquiet. For instance, it’s not the interest in securing certainty which produces illusion, it’s when their interest is capture by a misleading picture that ‘desire for certainty ‘ miscarries.

t our human interests are reflected in (and part of) the logic of our practices. It is finding out why we predetermine and/or limit what criteria (interests) are valid and important that we have realized is at the heart of what we are investigating here. Also, as I mentioned to Ludwig V here, I see the motivations and responses as also creating actual logical errors leading to philosophical misunderstandings, able to be resolved through philosophy. — Antony Nickles

I think Witt understands motives as he understands meaning in general, as neither emanating from the subjective nor from the objective side , but as arising out of the interaction. Our interests are enacted in situations, out of which things strike us as funny , sad, boring or interesting in any unlimited variety of ways . When Wittgenstein uses terms like "dissatisfaction," "wants," and "wishes’ with respect to grammatical illusions, the want or wish is an expression of the intellectual disquiet caused by the grammatical picture. The picture's power is what causes the desire, rather than a pre-existing desire creating or contributing to the tendency to create grammatical illusions. In this sense, Wittgenstein treats motive similarly to the way Heidegger understands motivation.

One cannot construct being-in-the-world from willing, wishing, urge, and propensity as psychical acts. The desire for this conversation is determined by the task I have before me. This is the motive, the "for the sake of which". The determining factor is not an urge or a drive, driving and urging me from behind, but something standing before me, a task I am involved in, something I am charged with.”(Heidegger, Zollikon)