I've noticed a sudden influx of posts in more than one forum which are peculiarly Existentialist in flavour. …There is a sudden flood of posts by Sartrean Existentialists who are experiencing philosophical menopause — alan1000

This sounds more like Deleuzian poststructuralism than Sartrean Existentialism

What do you mean "lowly?" All I want Zettel to do is respond to my comments before he gets banned. — T Clark

That shouldn’t take long. Just keep disagreeing with him. I’ll grab some popcorn.

...lack of intellectual integrity. — Zettel

That’ll teach you to tangle with a superior mind, lowly varmint.

This is not to say you are not entitled to your feelings; it is to say that your feelings do not describe "what is", only "what is to you". Big difference. — Zettel

Maybe not as big as one might think.

“The success of science cannot be anything but a puzzle as long as we view concepts and objects as radically independent; that is, as long as we think of "the world" as an entity that has a fixed nature, determined once and for all, independently of our framework of concepts." “So much about the identity relations between different categories of mathematical objects is conventional, that the picture of ourselves a describing a bunch of objects that are there "anyway" is in trouble from the start.”(Hilary Putnam)

I'm very much interested in this topic and I'm sympathetic to your views so I hope we can discuss it further but I would like to finish to read Oliver Curry’s Morality as Cooperation
— neomac

I'm glad to hear of your interest! Proposing the potential relevance of the science of morality to questions in moral philosophy and practical ethics can be a lonely business on philosophy websites. — Mark S

The problem I have with Oliver Curry’s scientific model
of moral cooperation is the same problem I have with his embrace of a Popperian approach to philosophy of science. Curry believes his approach bypasses philosophy by using Popperian science to treat moral questions. However , rival views of the role of science (Kuhn, Feyerabend, Rouse, Rorty) reveal Popperian science (as Curry calls his approach) as stuffed with philosophical presuppositions that lead to a reductive treatment of human motives. For instance , the concept of innate modules directing cooperative as well as competitive behavior is disputed by enactivist neuropsychological perspectives, which argue that organisms are self-organized on the basis of normative goals of sense-making that originate in neither a bottom-up nor top-down manner. Curry’s reductive evolutionism slights the inseparable reciprocal interaction between embodiment and interpersonal relations in the determination of moral issues in favor of a one-way determinism.

↪Zettel We cannot know everything, so at some point in our quest for knowledge we will reach a point in which we will have to use that which we know to talk about that which we don't, and to talk about ways to explore that which we don't know. In my opinion, that's metaphysics; a tool formed from verified knowledge to probe the unknown. — Daniel

I dont think of metaphysics so much as speculation reaching beyond what we know as fact, but as the plumbing underneath our verified knowledge, its foundation and condition of possibility. We cannot know empirical facts with any greater certainty than we can the metaphysical foundation grounding this knowledge. It is that which we cannot doubt even when all else is in question.

Unsupported and unsupportable metaphysical doctrines have gone nowhere despite tedious frequentation for more than three millennia…. Three thousand years of metaphysics has yet to issue a single knowledge claim. Not one. So how is metaphysics "philosophy"? — Zettel

To sum up your view, the history of metaphysics is an exercise in going in circles , while the history of science is a progress toward the truth. This is because the methods of scientific inquiry give it a privileged access to knowledge of reality. Its methods target the subjective perspective on experience as a source of distortion to be minimized as much as possible in order to achieve consensually valid objective truths about the world. Metaphysics, on the other hand, concerns itself primarily with subjective perspective. Philosophy is only legitimate to the extent that it hitches its wagons to science’s methods of empirical falsifiability.

I’m wondering if your knowledge of philosophy is comprehensive enough to summarize some of the alternatives to this view of the respective roles of science vs metaphysics that have been available for at least 150 years. I could start with the claim that your notion of science as falsifiability , which you may have gotten from Popper, owes much to Kant’s metaphysical position. In other words, the very concept of empirical falsifiability , which only took root recently as the view of how science advanced, is a metaphysical proposition.

If anything, maybe we're kind of in agreement here; just that my idea of art form arcs doesn't seem to have taken hold with you or others (maybe it's crap, or maybe others haven't seen it yet). — Noble Dust

I do agree with you about art form arcs. Classical music’s arc can arguably be said to have ended with the experiments of Schoenberg and Cage, and Jazz’s dissolution may have been symbolized by Miles Davis’s embrace of Jame Brown and his move into jazz-rock fusion. The art critic Arthur Danto famously declared that after Warhol’s Brillo box exhibit philosophically interesting art was no longer possible.

Still, things change. The hippies then for the rights of free spirit, the woke dipshits now for the pathologically stupid over-sensitivity regarding Ms. Green M&M’s wearin’ thigh-high boots. — Mww

Further!

“Know any 1970 rock songs that duplicate the sounds
of 1946?”

Crawling King Snake first recorded in 1941 by Big Joe Williams in 1941, and by the Doors in 1971. I believe many other examples can be found. I think you are over-simplifying and ignoring the revolution in innovative possibilities brought about by the electrification of instruments and the invention of the synthesizer. — Janus

Good point . Early 20th century Delta blues is an important influence for much late 60’s rock(Led Zeppelin, the Stones, Mayall’s Blues Breakers, Electric Flag, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, Jethro Tull, 10 Years After), so they did plenty of covers of old blues songs. But the blues is just one influence in rock, alongside jazz, folk , country , gospel, Indian raga and classical.
What made this era of rock music so innovative was the way it synthesized all these elements together. The result was something quite new, even when the music was unplugged.One can hear all these influences swirling around an unelectrified Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan song. On the same Doors album with Crawling King Snake was the song L.A. woman. How many styles of music can you recognize squeezed into this tune, and how unlike anything from the 40’s or 50’s?

Yes, sometimes changes are not for the better. I know people who can't stand the post OK Computer Radiohead (a band I think have been at least as innovative as the Beatles). — Janus

You think there was as much change in song structure over the course of Radiohead’s career as there was from Love Me Do to I Am The Walrus? Alrighty.

As for Dudley Moore, I really liked the original "Bedazzled" with Peter Cook as the devil. Didn't like Arthur or 10. What else was he in? — T Clark

Those are the main ones I can think of, although do you remember his small but hilarious role in Foul Play as a pathetically horny conductor? Bedazzled was brilliant,btw.

so we watched The Milagro Beanfield War instead, which was produced and directed by Redford and is damn near perfect — Vera Mont

As was his Ordinary People, in my opinion. He gets slighted as an actor because he tended to shy away from dark or complicated characters, but I thought he was brilliant in films like Downhill Racer and The Candidate.

Let's see, who would I include?... Bill Murray, Nicholas Cage, Woody Allen, Jim Carrey, Tom Hanks, John Cusack, Monty Python guys.... Ok, my favorite comedies: — T Clark

Dudley Moore seems to fit in with this crowd.

I see you left out Judd Apatow and work by his crew (Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Paul Rudd, Jason Segal, Jay Baruchel)

I figured his films deserve mention given that they have had a dominating influence on American comedy the past 20 years

Knocked-Up
40 year old Virgin
This is 40
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Get Him to the Greek
Trainwreck
The King of Staten Island
Bridesmaids
The Dewey Cox Story

think our perception of originality in music (or whatever art form) is often just a projection unto the external world of our own experience of being exposed to new music. As we age, new music or art seems less original because it doesn't match our past seminal experiences of newness. We tend to chase that first "hit" of a perception-altering musical or artistic experience in the same way an addict chases that first high. This leads to this sense of disillusionment that characterizes your commentary, I think. — Noble Dust

This is certainly true, but let me make some arguments in favor of something else at work these days as well. In my own case , I keep coming back to music that was written between 1965 and 1973. Is this because this is what I was listening to during that key period of my adolescence? Yes and no. At age 18, when all my peers were playing disco, punk or proto-New Wave, I was starting to go back in time to the heart of the folk-rock and psychedelic eras. This was music I couldn’t tolerate when it first came out. I was too young and it was too strange for me. 90% of the music from that period I discovered for the first time decades after it was recorded, and half of that in the last few years thanks to the Psychedelic Jukebox online station.

I have plenty of favorites in rock, and some hip hop, from the 80’s, 90’s and 2000’s,( Radiohead, Modest Mouse, Amy Winehouse, Neutral Milk Motel) but to my ears they haven’t departed radically enough from the music that created the rock genre in the 60’s.
( I knew we were in trouble when Nirvana released their cover of ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ in 1994, which I initially assumed they wrote, and then heard how close it was to David Bowie’s original version from 1970, 24 years earlier. Know any 1970 rock songs that duplicate the sounds of 1946?)

This is the opposite complaint about new music than what one typically hears from people that can’t relate to it. My parents were a perfect example. They never got rock music, not from Elvis up through the Beatles and beyond. To them it was all noise , as prominent critics of their generation would say ( like comedian Steve Allen). They literally couldn’t hear any structure , melody or complexity in any of it. It was like a foreign language they couldn’t translate. Critics of hip hop also claim it ‘isn’t real music.’( Keith Richards said that, and he should know better).

It’s obvious that the rock music of 1969 , especially the most edgy and challenging, when compared to music from 20 years earlier, is strikingly different. And compared with music from 50 years earlier, it sounds like from a different planet. But let’s compare the edgiest music from 1969 with 2019, 50 years later. I wager that I can find some relatively obscure rock from 1969 that a young listener today may think was written in 2019( the music of the art band The United States of America comes to mind).

How many of the multiple comments on youtube 1960’s songs saying they wish they were alive in that era, that the music was much better then, come from people younger than 30? An awful lot I think. Can you imagine any teens in 1969 pining for the music of 1919, or even 1949? Maybe a tiny handful of eccentrics.

Can you imagine a movie like Yesterday being made in 1969? What band from 1919 would the main character be able to channel that would create a sensation in 1969, as the Beatles did in that movie? Why could
Ed Sheehan’s character so easily admit the superiority of that music over his own, 50 years later? Its not that the Beatles were some freakish anomaly that only comes along once a century. Those of us who know the music of that era can come up with a dozen bands equally as good as the Beatles. It was not the Beatles that were great, it was the era, the environment of frenetic experimentation, that produced greatness.

I have 2 nieces in their teens and both of them told me that a lot of their favorite music is from the 1970’s and ‘80’s ( Queen, Fleetwood Mac, Billy Joel. Yech), and they are far from alone in their generation.

No, something else is going on here beside the rootedness of old-timers to what they grew up with.

I don't buy the idea that music and the arts in general are stagnating because everything has already been done,
— Janus

And first nations Australians dance the same dance they have done for the last forty thousand years!

Long live stagnation! — Banno

The pace of cultural change is an accelerative curve. If one lives in a culture which belongs to the slower changing portion of that trajectory it is not as if there is no change at all taking place. One creates to express, and expression always innovates. We in the 21st century belong to a much faster moving period of that curve. One doesn't produce art in a calculated fashion to ‘keep up’ with some externally defined criterion of innovation, one keeps up with oneself, that is , one’s personal shifts in outlook and feeling. If one happens to live in a time and place ( such as San Francisco in 1967) and happens to be a pop musician, one’s personal outlook as reflected in the music one writes may very well capture a revolution in progress, simultaneously in one’s own head and in the insanely speeding-up world around one. It just so happened that a particular drug, LSD, helped to catalyze a profound reorientation toward almost every aspect of the world, and one can hear this in the music of that era. For those who are Beatles fans, you are hearing explosive change in every note of the songs on Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sergeant Pepper , the White Album, Abbey Road and Let it Be, as well as in the musical transformations from one album to the next.

Now we are in a slower moving time for music. You can hear this in the songs. They are less ecstatic , less confident , less intense, less explosive, less viola art , less purely experimental. For a public that is not in a revolutionary mood , this music may sound just fine, and feel perfectly fitting. The older music may appear naive, utopian. And yet it is now considered classic by younger as well as older generations. That because music that comes out of the midst of social revolution packs so much into every note. This gives it a staying power that music from our more staid times will not have.

I don't buy the idea that music and the arts in general are stagnating because everything has already been done, or we're not coming up with revolutionary worldviews The idea that there must be a continual evolution of new forms in art and music grows out of a simplistic view of quality in the arts being a matter of originality. Authenticity is more to the point; meaning finding your own voice or vision rather than imitating or comparing yourself with others. There is not endless scope for formal originality, but there is endless scope for authenticity. — Janus

I dont think authenticity and originality can be separated. One doesn't have the urge to create unless what one is conjuring expresses something new for them, something they have not already experienced elsewhere. I think Heidegger had it right. Authenticity is tapping into the source of innovation rather than relying on the conventionally determined. Great art takes you someplace new , allows you to feel things in a fresh way, offers a new aesthetic vocabulary. Not just in relation to what came before , but within the bounds of its own essence.

A great piece of music introduces you to a landscape , and then takes you on an adventure where this landscape constantly changes. Looking at a history of art book not only allows you to appreciate each creation in isolation , but tells a story of exciting innovations of seeing and feeling from one period to the next. An essential element of the power of Renaissance or Romantic or Modernist art is the energy, confidence and sense of elation you are invited to share with the artist over their discovery of a way of depicting feeling that their predecessors couldn’t grasp. The freshness of the discovery is embedded within the art itself. This is why the endless recycling of a style of painting produces increasingly weary, played-out emotions. The works become more and more mannered, self-conscious, calculated.

For me good cinema is art - mise-en-scène - composition, framing, lighting, art direction, cinematography, editing, when artfully considered are the reward of watching. I don't consider these gimmicks - I consider them the reason for sitting still, like I am silently regarding a Rembrandt. — Tom Storm

What do you think of Peter Greenaway? His films are among the most painterly I’ve seen.

I recall reading that one of the things that drove Coltrane to his early death from heart attack was the requirement to keep creating something entirely new. Jazz at the time was in a period of frenetic evolution, with a handful of supremely talented individuals constantly trying to come up with the next big thing. Maybe the quest for novelty is one of the faces of the 'creative destruction' that characterises modern culture. — Wayfarer

Many pop artists fight against the opposite pressure. The public expects endless regurgitation of the old product and style , while the artist is hell-bent on leaving their recent success behind them and following their muse into new territory. The music industry’s idea of the ‘next big thing’ is what stays within the formula of the previous big thing and they recoil in horror at true originality.

Musical artistry can exist independently from the music industry. Musical artists like myself who still have day jobs can still create authentic music and share it with a few people. — Noble Dust

If your authentic music is great music, you don’t think it can find its way to a large audience? I do. I think we dont hear great breakthrough music on the order of the first ragtime , swing, bebop, rocknroll,psychedelia, punk or hip hop not because of the ‘industry’ but because it isn't being written. The industry isnt the bad guy here. We all are. Revolutionary thoughts and feelings simply aren’t in the air these days. Too many old people living longer and too few births leads to creative stagnation in the culture.

Writing and making music overlaps with but is not the same thing as entertainment. There may be original music we have never heard because it lacks what is regarded as entertainment value. Making music and listening to or purchasing music are not the same. — Fooloso4

This prompts the question, why does an art form fail to speak to an audience? It can do so if it is lacking in originality, if it is considered boringly predictable and familiar. But why does an original work fail to connect? We assume this is becausethe public isn’t ready for it , they can’t relate to the ideas and feelings it expresses. But the interconnectedness of society makes it impossible for an individual’s outlook to be positioned completely outside of the rest of culture. This is why audiences eventually come around to music they considered unrelatable initially. But why was it artists from Bach and Mozart , to Ellington , Coltrane , Hendrix and Dylan connected immediately with an audience of some size? Where they not original enough?

↪T Clark Also check out McCabe and Mrs. Miller and The Great Silence — Maw

Great score by Leonard Cohen in that first one. What did you think of Brewster McCloud?

Maybe consider this. I heard your argument being presented in similar terms 40 years ago; 30 years ago; 20 years ago... — Tom Storm

Maybe they were right, and the phenomenon has gotten progressively worse. If you google cultural
stagnation, you will find dozens of articles on how the sciences are not producing new breakthroughs like they used to, and 1970 is cited as a key demarcation point. Some focus on quantum physics and the decline in innovation the field. Much is being written about how the digital revolution pales in comparison with the industrial revolution in its contribution to increase in standard
of living. Even those in silicon valley , such as Peter Thiel, agree with this assessment. Others have noticed the same trend in philosophy , literature and poetry.

“Hollywood movies are boring. Television is boring. Pop music is boring. The art world is boring. Broadway is boring. Books from big publishing are boring,”(W.David Marx)

With the amount of data being provided by apps like Spotify and iTunes, along with the development of auto tune, it seems these days that song writing has become ever more of a formula/algorithm and singers are more often selected based on their physical attraction/charm or social standing rather than their raw singing ability. Is musical originality dying? Artists certainly are not as rare as they used to be. — Benj96

If it is, I don’t think that formulaic songwriting is the cause so much as a symptom of a decline in originality. If you want to see originality in popular music, you have to find it in the culture more generally. Exciting new trends in the arts are made possible by the fact that a segment of culture has come upon a fork in the road and stumbled on a new world, and then writes or sings or paints about it. Everyone seems to be stuck on the same old path at the moment. It’s fashionable to blame capitalism for this stagnation but this misses the point.

Agree with you. I'm more into overturning. — Tom Storm

Everyone has a soft spot for a particular type of movie. The movies which had the biggest impact on my life were made between 1965 and 1973. These were the films which tapped into the social revolution of that era. It didn’t last very long. By 1976 most of the big changes in outlook had already taken place, and in my opinion movies since that time have gotten progressively more timid and constricted in their scope. For a short period of time a window opened and everything we thought was true was up for grabs. The great films in the decades since that time draw from that inspiration without pushing us far enough beyond it.

↪Joshs I generally dislike westerns, especially those priggish productions by John Ford. But I loved Deadwood the series and I like Once Upon A Time in The West. I think it's the Italians who got what Westerns should be, the dust, the filth, the sound editing... — Tom Storm

I tend to agree with you about the older Westerns. They upheld the moral values of the times, which the 60’s did their best to overturn. That’s why I’m a big fan of the anti-Western, and Sergio Leone’s films with Clint Eastwood were among the first of these. Anti-Westerns turn the tables on the standard view of the hero as establishment figure. The rebellious anti-establishment outlaw becomes the new hero.

Woody Allen:
Manhattan
Midnight in Paris
Take the Money and Run
Everybody Says I Love You
Annie Hall - my favorite scene — T Clark

No list of classic Woody Allen comedies is complete without Sleeper.

It's totally another to see the film in a movie theatre with an audience howling in laughter during the mirror scene. I remember laughing in the car when going home — ssu

I had the same reaction to Night at the Opera. If you liked those you probably also loved the Court Jester (The Chalice with the Palace has the pellet with the poison. The vessel with the pestle has the Brew that is True. Or was that the Flagon with the Dragon?)

Good list.

I would add
Stagecoach
My Darling Clementine
The Wild Bunch
The Ballad of Cable Hogue
Butch Cassidy
( and so much more!)

Honorable mentions in various categories:

All About Eve
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane
American Graffiti
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Last Wave
Hair
The Hustler
Blow-Up
A Face in the Crowd
Fail-Safe
Invasion of the Body Snatchers(1956)
The Court Jester
Fantasia
The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr T
The Red Shoes
Flight of the Phoenix
Play Misty for Me
They Shoot Horses Don’t They
Manchurian Candidate
Andromeda Strain
Little Murders

there is hardly any effort whatsoever to make boys develop feminine traits. — Tzeentch

Social conservatives would argue that the past 50 years has seen a concerted push to de-masculine males. Men are told to “cry more” and “to let-go of their bottled-up emotions.”

“Whether the title of a piece is “The Stigma of Masculinity: Can Men Still Manly Without Feeling Ashamed?" or "How to Raise a Feminist Son" or "Re-Defining Masculinity,” the message is the same: There is something inherently wrong with boys, or at least in the way they have been raised in the past (and many are still); and we have to do something about it.“(Psychology Today)

Here ya go:

The Last Picture Show
Harold and Maude
Five Easy Pieces
Night of the Hunter
Citizen Kane
A Thousand Clowns
Rear Window
Who’s afraid of Virginia Wolff
The Conversation
Midnight Cowboy
Bonnie and Clyde
Blazing Saddles
Spellbound
Carnal Knowledge
Days of Wine and Roses
Straw Dogs
Klute
Almost Famous
Bullitt

1: "Social Persona"/Online identity: = Image woman is "forced to present". A "lie" that needs to be maintained.
2: Offline identity = Failed businesswoman. A truth that needs to be hidden.

Those personas/identities are obviously in conflict. They are both in one person. = Inner conflict — Baden

As I mentioned to MU, we lie to each other in situations where there is a lack of trust, intimacy and mutual understanding and often the lie is an attempt to prevent an even greater breakdown in being understood by others (being unfairly judged) . In the scenario of the women participating in online marketing schemes, there may be multiple motivations for lying. They are running a business, and showing signs of incompetence is not good from a sales standpoint. This is just good corporate strategizing.
Your argument is most relevant in regards to those social ties we believe we have more invested in emotionally.
We have to care about an other in a more intimate way than just as a sales client in order for our truth-telling or lies to play more than a superficial role with regard to our sense of identity. The fact that we can lie so easily and freely with our social media ‘friends’ is an indication that we know we have less at stake emotionally with them than we do with our closest companions.
It’s not so much that lies put up barriers between ourselves and those we lie to , but that the fact we feel we have to lie to them in the first place is a symptom of a gap in mutual understanding. We lie most easily in relationships that are dispensable.

But what about those who have not developed the skills to form deep , intimate connections with anyone, and are thus attracted to the superficial environment of social media? The argument can certainly be made that the social validation they receive keeps them tethered to an environment that makes establishing deep connections very difficult.

But what does the superficiality of the social media environment, and its consequent encouraging of deception, have to do with the inner conflict of identity?
Lying to people one is only cursorily invested in emotionally is not likely to cause any such internal strife. It would seem only self-deception is capable of that.

But self-deception may be a misnomer. I think such situations are more a matter of an inconsistent sense of self-identity rather than well-constituted identities fighting with each other. So here may be a bridge between your model of conflictual selves produced by technologies of consumer culture and what I’ve been saying about the superficiality of social media. Those individuals who are most vulnerable to suffering from prolonged exposure to social media are those who never developed a consistent sense of self-identity. They are the ones most susceptible to social media ‘addiction’, which runs the danger of preventing them from creating a core sense of personal integrity. Each encounter online introduces a different dynamic of interpersonal connection from the previous, and no one encounter allows one to establish a pattern of stable trust and shared deep concerns.

As to the connection between capitalist aims and a weakly integrated self-concept, I would suggest that social media technologies lend themselves more easily to the monetization of fragmented and superficial engagements than to deep and intimate relationships. Emotional pathology is an unintended consequence of this, just as the obesity epidemic is an unintended consequence of the food industry’s profit goals, and ruined lives are the unintended consequence of the gambling industry’s goals.

I believe we are fundamentally animalistic, so many of our base instincts involve putting up a deceptive shell or façade to create an appearance for others, which hides one's true feelings, emotions, ambitions and motivations…. through thousands and thousands of years of moral training, we learn to suppress some of these animalistic tendencies toward creating false fronts and deception, but these inclinations still exert a strong force through instinct. — Metaphysician Undercover

Is lying, deceiving, creating a false front animalistic, a base instinct? It’s true that animals and plants have evolved various strategies of deception, but this would seem to be quite different from human strategies. The difference as I see it is that our strategies are consciously planned, rather than evolutionary mechanisms concealed from our own awareness. We deceive for many specific reasons: to avoid hurting someone we care about (this relates to the moral training you mentioned), to protect our own ego from the feeling of shame and failure, to defend ourselves from enemies. What all these forms of planned deception have in common is that they depend on a gap in mutual understanding. We only feel the need to lie in circumstances where the truth will not be understood by the other the way we understand it.

The closer our friendship with another, the more we can avoid the necessity of lying about the core aspects of ourselves, because we know that other supports, trusts and understands us in ways that approach our own self-understanding. In sum, human deception belongs to the complex and sophisticated skills of social comprehension only humans are capable of. We can lie because we can do things other animals can’t: 1)we can abstractly represent the meaning of a situation (its truth) and our felt response to it.
2) we can deliberately manipulate this conceptual representation into a non-truth specifically and relevant tailored to how we want to influence the other.

I emphasised earlier that it is not social-technologies in themselves that are problematic but their intersection with consumer culture whereby the manipulation of our instinctive desires for social validation is the logical outcome of the profit motive embedded therein, serving formal freedom (more opportunities to satisfy appetites) at the expense of freedom proper (in what I've described as effortful cognitive engagement). — Baden

As you have pointed out, there is much research pointing to a positive association between depression , loneliness and other emotional difficulties, and the amount of time spent on social media. The explanations I have seen , including yours, rely on one form or another of the idea that human beings are vulnerable to being conditioned to behave against our long-term interests due to the way our motivational system is structured. The typical mechanism offered is a drive-reinforcement process whereby genuine reality-testing is short-circuited by the salience and intensity of the immediate reward. This dovetails with addiction models which show that additive behaviors are self-perpetuating because the rewards are immediately felt whereas the disincentives are delayed.
I am wondering what we gain by adding to this picture an internal conflict between identities. Do we really need a Freudian-style psychodynamics to understand why social media makes many people feel isolated, depressed and anxious when more direct models would seem to do the job?

We will not, however, find the solution to the hard problem in our inefficiencies.

I do not understand "normative sense-making goals", but I'm not very interested in what it might mean. — GrahamJ

You should be if you want to understand feelings and the dissolution of the hard problem.

numbers (and the like) are unlike phenomenal objects, in that they're not composed of parts (strictly speaking that is only prime numbers) and they don't come into, or go out of, existence (i.e. they're not temporally delimited.) So they exist on a different level, or in a different sense, to objects, all of which are composed of parts and temporally delimited. — Wayfarer

And yet the concept of number would be incoherent without the prior construction of the concept of a multiplicity , which itself implies the concept of persisting self-identical empirical object.

Husserl, in Philosophy of Arithmetic, describes a scenario for the stages of development of the modern consort of number:

“Let us transport ourselves into the early stage of the development of a people. The repeated interest in sensible groups of objects the same in kind had already led to the apprehension of a certain analogy, and therewith of a shared characteristic founding it; and thus it had led to the concept of multiplicity, which at this level, of course, being much less abstract than on our own, restricted itself to multiplicities of homogeneous and sense per-ceptible contents. The drive to communicate concerning the events of practical life, in which determinate groups of such objects played a great role, led here (when circumstances were particularly favorable) more easily than in other areas to the thought of an imitation by sensible means of the things repre-sented.

This thought would be immediately suggested by the hands. These visibly prominent organs, which the individual chief-ly employed in both serious and playful activities, and which (depending upon the position of the fingers) presented varying sensible group formations (the clusters of fingers), must accord-ingly have come immediately to mind for the imitation and sym-bolization of corresponding groups of arbitrary other objects? Thus the "finger numbers" arose within sign language as the first number signs. Indeed we can very well claim still more: it is as a rule only on this path of the sense perceptible that a sharp differentiation and classification of the determinate number forms could first come about at all.

In a certain manner one of course already possessed the number concepts when the analogy of different groups equinu-merous to one another and to groups of fingers was grasped. But only through a constant back-reference from groups of the most various types to the finger groups, sharply distinct in sensible appearance, did the finger numbers rise to the level of Representatives of general concepts, of general characteristics of groups classified in terms of more and less. Without fear of paradox we can say: the concepts 1, 2, 3, ... as the species of the general concept of multiplicity, as specifications of the "how many," first came to a more determinate consciousness in the conceptual signification of number signs on the fingers.”

Anomalous Monism is only concerned with third-personal causal analysis of propositional attitudes, and so it isn't really relevant to the "hard problem". Rather, AM concerns the "soft problem" of inter-translating the public ontologies of scientific psychology and the physical sciences. — sime

Except that Davidson’s anomalous monism is a non-reductive physicalism, leaving open an explanatory gap between mental events and the physical properties they depend on.

“… a non-reductionist physicalist like Davidson does not claim that everything is physical; rather she claims that everything depends on the physical. She allows that there are mental properties at a higher level of complexity but mental properties supervene on physical properties at a micro-structural level. Hence, any alterations at the level of mental can be physically explained by some alterations at the level of micro structures.

The difference between a Davidsonian non-reductive physicalist and a Rortyan naturalistic pragmatist is that the former does not deny that there really are physical properties at the micro-structural level, because the efficiency of a physical vocabulary is a sufficient reason to extend its claims to ontology. In contrast, the latter thinks that Davidsonian "physical properties" and "the micro-structural level" are just theoretical suppositions that are meaningful only within a description or vocabulary. They think that it is sufficient for a denial of the existence of physical properties at the level of ontology, precisely because they are still description-dependent.” (ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM ELIMINATED:
RORTY AND DAVIDSON ON THE MIND-WORLD RELATION, Istvan Danka)

Cultural moral norms are a topic almost ignored by traditional moral philosophy as just a chaotic mess. Fortunately, science’s tools can sort through such messes to reveal underlying principles. And I am happy to say that these conclusions about what moral means ‘are’ are complimentary, not contradictory, to traditional moral philosophy’s investigations into moral ‘ends’. — Mark S

You may be familiar with a new breed of psychological and philosophical work on the origin of ethical values that divides the realm of subjective emotional sentiment from rational objectivity. Our ethical values arise from biologically evolved subjective feeling differing from culture to culture and era to era, which we can study and compare using an “evaluatively neutral” empirical naturalism at the same time that we maintain a relativistic stance on moral values. The resulting position is a mixture of objective rationalism and subjective relativism.
Even though moral values are dependent on subjectively relative emotional dispositions, it is possible to determine one moral position as being objectively better than another on the basis of non-moral meta-empirical values such as consistency, universalizability and effects on well-being.

It has been pointed out that such an empirical stance carries with it its own ethical baggage. That is to say, the supposed neutrality of objective scientific inquiry is itself grounded in pre-suppositions ( consistency, parsimony) that amount to ethical valuations Thus, science is as much in the business of determining ‘oughts’ as any other ethical stance.

It is disappointing that Evan Thompson does not mention reinforcement learning. Surely he would have mentioned it alongside connectionism if he knew about it, so I guess he didn't know about it. Yikes.

It seem to me that humans are fundamentally similar to reinforcement learning systems in what they are trying to achieve. In human terms you might say reinforcement learning is about learning how you should make decisions so as to maximise the amount of pleasure you experience in the long-term. (Could you choose to make decisions on some other basis?) — GrahamJ

Pleasure isnt such a simple concept from an enactivist perspective. What constitutes a reinforcement is not determinable independently of the normative sense-making goals of the organism.

I am confident that Thompson is familiar with concepts of reinforcement learning, but it is too far removed from
the enactivist model he champions for him to bother with it. If you are interested in a comparison of reinforcement learning approaches with enactivist ones, here’s one link you can check out.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.04535.pdf

Once you accept the reality, that stimulus can affect a person, and have a real affect on one's thinking or feeling, without that person even noticing oneself to be affected, then you'll understand what I am talking about. — Metaphysician Undercover

Subliminal advertising is a technique that has been explored by marketers from time to time. Some image or text ( or audio stimulus) is displayed on a screen too
quickly for the viewer to be consciously aware of. The idea is that they wil nevertheless be influenced by this information that bypasses consciousness. Almost all the research shows that it doesn’t work. Why not? Because how likely we are to remember and be affected by a stimulus is a function of its relevance and meaningfulness to us. This is the principle behind memory enhancement techniques like the pegword method. We normally have a hard time remembering a random list of words ( like grocery items). But when we associate each word with an image which is already of significance to us we will recall it more easily. The more emotionally salient that image is(bizarre, humorous , erotic, etc). the better. Better yet is linking the list of arbitrary items together in a relevant and meaningful way , such as by associating each item with an object that one sees along a familiar route to work or around the house. We are bombarded with sensations all the time knocking at the door of consciousness, and yet we don’t notice the vast majority of this stimulation. It has to make itself relevant to our current concerns in order for us to pay attention to it. If it is not salient enough for us to care about it , then it will not be able to significantly affect our behavior, beliefs, attitudes.

Salience and expectations drive what we pay attention to and what we make of what we pay attention to, and the more conscious these are, the more they will have an effect on our thinking.

You mentioned Heidegger earlier. As you know , he argues that we always have a pre-understanding of the world that we project forward into new experience. We dont see simply stimuli but meaningful perceptions.

“”Initially" we never hear noises and complexes of sound, but the creaking wagon, the motorcycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the crackling fire. It requires a very artificial and complicated attitude in order to "hear" a "pure noise." The fact that we initially hear motorcycles and wagons is, however, the phenomenal proof that Da-sein, as being-in-the world, always already maintains itself together with innerworldly things at hand and initially not at all with "sensations" whose chaos would first have to be formed to provide the springboard from which the subject jumps off finally to land in a "world." Essentially understanding, Dasein is initially together with what is understood.”( Being and Time)

Here’s a neuroscientific way of thinking about this:

Evan Thompson explains:
“…traditional neuroscience has tried to map brain organization onto a hierarchical, input-output processing model in which the sensory end is taken as the starting point. Perception is described as proceeding through a series of feedforward or bottom-up processing stages, and top-down influences are equated with back-projections or feedback from higher to lower areas. Freeman aptly describes this view as the "passivist-cognitivist view" of the brain. From an enactive viewpoint, things look rather different. Brain processes are recursive, reentrant, and self-activating, and do not start or stop anywhere. Instead of treating perception as a later stage of sensation and taking the sensory receptors as the starting point for analysis, the enactive approach treats perception and emotion as dependent aspects of intentional action, and takes the brain's self-generated, endogenous activity as the starting point for neurobiological analysis. This activity arises far from the sensors—in the frontal lobes, limbic system, or temporal and associative cortices—and reflects the organism's overall protentional set—its states of expectancy, preparation, affective tone, attention, and so on. These states are necessarily active at the same time as the sensory inflow.

“Whereas a passivist-cognitivist view would describe such states as acting in a top-down manner on sensory processing, from an enactive perspective top down and bottom up are heuristic terms for what in reality is a large-scale network that integrates incoming and endogenous activities on the basis of its own internally established reference points. Hence, from an enactive viewpoint, we need to look to this large-scale dynamic network in order to understand how emotion and intentional action emerge through self-organizing neural activity.”