Although I often feel refreshed at the use of formal logic for philosophical purposes, doing this mechanically runs the risk of risk of losing sight of the general philosophical project. The technocentric post-industrial mental complex treats the use of all advancement as extensions of our robotic limbs. This ideological view makes it an absurdity to do work for nothing. That – I think – runs against the grain of its main premise of philosophy that allows us to escape this cell by re-awakening ourselves to the contingencies of ideas and precepts.

Does knowing we had five apples, added ten, and now have fifteen apples really get us very far towards a topography of vision, symbol, quantity, extension, existence, etc.?

And yet, something like visible light can 'travel' several hundreds of thousands of miles through a vacuum as a potential, never touching matter as we know it, finally reaching our retinas or photographic equipment only to affect us with the sights and images we call reality. I find that challenging to grasp with the classical intuition. There seems to be a new and different type of intuition being formed there. A physical effect emerging from the self-reflexive nature attributed to the potential. I think it really breaks down the divide there a lot. For instance, is kinetic energy something that exists in the sense of being 'out there,' when we look more deeply into it and find there are a number of potentials being fulfilled and unfulfilled based on how it is being observed? It's almost like the physical world is affected by a sort of creativity.

I think it's a deeply human trait to be attracted to crisis. Somewhere deep within I take enjoyment out of analyzing, imagining, and even sometimes producing scenarios where life is at stake. And when I open up the crises, they don't seem fearful at all but very small, whereas when I run away from them they seem big enough to follow and squash me.

To go without crises means to fully overcome mother nature, and achieve some type of philoso-scientific utopia. By that I mean a place where humanity could gain control over outer and inner nature. But why wait on a state that we see very far off and only existing in imagination when there are real states of harmony with nature that we have experienced and know can be achieved?

I think overpopulation is the solution to the two other – and most other – problems. How to do it ethically is the real problem. How can climate change exist when there aren't enough human beings to consume the energy to cause it? How can corruption affect us all when we exist in smaller and more localized groups? How can there be shortage of work when one knows how to exploit natures fruit oneself? In mother nature's eyes, strife is the way to ascend, and excess comfort and ease the way to descend.

The ego seems to be the self's tendency to apply a degree of value on itself.

I think psychoanalysis focuses on childhood for good reason. This is the point in life where our outer reality and inner being are most undifferentiated with a priori determinations. I heard that when very young children play the game, 'peekaboo' they find it stimulating partly due to their having not fully found the belief that when something is out of sight that it still exists. It is here that the differentiation between anxiety and fear with excitement and desire find their most free play of equality and contrast. I think as we grow older we grow to develop more complexity in what fear and anxiety mean to us, but they still contain the traces of this equality and contrast. When we most need to explain and defend our fears, the mind returns to this undefined place in an attempt to free itself from external stimuli that no longer meet its structural demands.

I imagine inspiration of a drug like a confrontation between mammals. One mammal destroys the other and gets hurt in the process. Nothing can be made of the hurt out of itself, but the hurt stays in the animal’s memory as essential to itself. Like a pointer that points to a state of disarray.

I don't think so. I think they had a project for a new way of socioeconomic life.

Was there ever a call out directly for radical change? Besides, what’s so radical about the working class controlling their path in collective will power? We consider that normal today in the form of guilds, unionization, labour parties, and practically nobody dares call themselves a Marxist.

TCM was less than a hundred pages long and it didn’t contain the itinerary for socioeconomic life in detail, but set forth the types of ideas that life would be built upon; how capitalism could revitalize itself from the core identity. I’m not an expert on Marx so someone can please correct me if I’m wrong, but the subject of Communist government did not represent a large portion of Marx’s work.

By this you mean the slowly evaporating working class will more and more make their values the subject of social exclusion and stigma?

I’m not totally clear about where antinatalism fits into all this. Do you mean a Marxist would find it immoral to raise children under a system so contrary to their version of social good? It’s not clear if Marx had ever claimed to have created a blueprint for a good world; could you define this good you claim Marxists are looking for?

TCM was producing a superstructure from the aims and premises of capitalism; in some ways refining it. ‘Buy local,’ ‘return of analog,’ the need for nations to become economically self-reliant, and the need for stability in the meaning of currency are some examples of social phenomena that intersect with Marx’s ideas, but they have mostly been subversive ideas.

We have a future that is somewhat bleak for those who are emotionally invested in consciously building this superstructure. However, I don’t think it’s solely a personified reality-authoring that Marx and Engels had in mind. It is also a type of refinement of existing attitudes and values to their ideological core.

Insofar as society has changed since Marx, there are no real ‘Marxists’ as far as people who build on his work exactly as it was. We are interpreting and modifying in accordance with modern life. But there are ways to act out his thought other than nationally.

Anything ending with ‘ism’ that was generated by popular culture and isn’t a coherent body of thought, is just a name given to some sort of excessive or exaggerated belief (positivism, deteriorationism, etc.). If there’s no coherence, you don’t have a true ‘ism.’ Where is the rationality in antinatalism?

The goal of life is survival and happiness. Some people define their survival is such a way that they choose their death in sacrifice.

How is it possible that life itself could have a goal, when it has no interests, desires, or appetites of its own?

But does it matter if they don't score high in math, logic, and language??

Tests are all about making definitive expectations and having them met. They don't truly provide or reveal knowledge so much as they allow us to see our ideal image and to make it real. This double-meaning is part of the word 'test' itself, like 'testing for bacteria,' 'testing for covid19,' 'testing for intellect,' etc.

Though I'm no Schopenhauer expert, he seemed to philosophize without reference to rational spirit. I hold this as key to Schopenhauer's idea of boredom. Where in the rational spirit there is no problem in the state of 'emptiness,' from an existential-material viewpoint there is no escape from the problems associated with it. Anyone from this existential-materialist point of view will inevitably come to the conclusion that the human condition is essentially corrupt by nature. There is still no serious counter-argument.

Schopenhauer's more cynical material is intelligible due to its lack of any reference to absolute idealism. This is where it can trigger a defense mechanism for many who claim 'there is no boredom,' because relatively speaking, there isn't. However, if you would see things from Schopenhauer's reference frame you would see a totally different picture. Essential to his reference frame is: the concept of individuality, the holistic validity of an intellectualizing will, and the absence of any factors of this universal intellectualizing will lying external or extraneous to the ideas and concepts of its consciousness.

'Absolute idealism' is a little oxymoronic, and also difficult to swallow; especially at the cusp of the industrial revolution more and more coming to rely on the cynicism of a boundless and unforgiving drive toward capital growth; the "cracking the omelette," so to speak that intrinsically counters this form of idealism. I think his point of view fits in well into this schema. Can a rationalizing spirit also experience pain and boredom without material activity? Of course, but in actuality it will oppose it. Because Schopenhauer affirmed his existence was amongst a will not to oppose, it was reasonable to have taken such a viewpoint for itself.

Well not to be semantic, but in what sense do you use the word ‘question’? Part of the inner soul searching of religion is questioning oneself and one’s life choices.

What you may mean by ‘questioning’ is a sense of liberality to doubt, dissolution, and/or dissent that is avoided in many religions. This appears to me a rational structure to the pursuit of truth. In knowledge too, we seek to avoid excess egotism and arrogance in favour of diplomacy and clear vision (albeit at risk of inversion) as a path toward objectivity.

This type of structure of unquestionability can be found everywhere. It’s essentially the structure of keeping something from dissolving away. It amounts to the particular form of religion and differs in its defining character. Is there a universal issue here, or is it just a problem that religion hands itself down in non-conscious form that bothers you? Or maybe the particulars of individual interpretation...

Literally the opposite. — javi2541997

Sure maybe, but don't you find this impulse to question everything stems from a desire to know truth in your individuality? Is that so different from what God-lovers do? Looking at some parts of the Bible, it seems to come from a place of sound reason in the sense that excessive forms like greed, gluttony, lust, deception, and pride do tend to be self-destructive. That isn't a long road from Aristotle's golden mean. What we do in philosophy will inevitably involve religion since both have the intended effect of directing followers to more reasonable and rational ways of thinking. In ideality both aim to produce a love of wisdom that enriches the self and leads to a higher mental state.

What about the interior self, emphasized by theologians and philosophers throughout history, what was the basis for that? Doesn't the word philosophy itself mean something like, 'love of wisdom?' The philosophically liberated and wise self is pretty much your version of Jesus Christ. It it fully rendered and unquestioned.

LOL, seriously though. Something massive leaving creates a void that creates a vaccuum.

If they're off base, they will fail the exam.

All hail the mighty examination, the true judger of all...

Doesn't this super-materialism just look like Christianity with the crust cut off?

The elephant in the room is what exactly you mean by 'dogma.' Looking at the definition online this came up:

a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true. (Oxford Dictionary)

So when we say that religions claim things to be 'incontrovertibly true,' what does that mean? If I say, "Jesus died for our sins," am I claiming that there was a person named Jesus who really died and it was because of a group of people around him, or is the 'truth' of this statement something beyond the pure material representation? In my observation many Christians seem to have the view that accepting the statement as true without having individuals making this distinction is not considered a problem; this generalization characterizes it to us as dogmatic. But in reality, it's just not feasible to have such a massive number of people truly making this distinction. That's a product of its form, not just its content. Is there any reason to believe the apparatus of traditional philosophical inquiry you call 'true inquiry' would not take the same form if it were widely studied?

Don't we see the same scene in philosophy when we allow freshmen to study Plato and give them a pat on the back even when they're totally off base? We see a light at the end of the tunnel, just as the religious people we snuff our noses at do.

Is ordinary life not also a type of true inquiry? Not to sound offensive, but your zeal for true inquiry sounds a lot like a form of dogma. Why do you need this true inquiry?

Ideas and concepts lead to actions, beliefs, notions. Don't you think so?

As much as we hate to admit it, I think we in philosophy rely on dogmatism to the same extent that any religions we can name do. Even the idea that there are philosophically enlightened individuals and non-enlightened ones presupposes a philosophical system. So any system by nature has individuals who aren't going to think about its concepts and ideas in their consciousness; does that make them lesser human beings? Personally, I believe that to be narcissistic, and Christians are right to avoid it because it goes against their teaching. Expecting everyone to be a philosophically free thinker is like expecting everyone to know how to calculate the electric field of a dipole or to know all the Latin names of all the plants in their home town; ironically, such an ideal system wouldn't function properly in actuality.

Question: Why do we want children?

Why could mean 'for what...' and it can mean 'what is the reason for...' It's like the movements of a mechanism; the parts don't solely have to have a final cause and there is no necessity for reason. Another question you could ask, 'Does it seem rational to realize having children?'

Then there is a natural power that exerts itself on the human body to procreate. From this point of view the question presents itself, 'Is nature good in its own right?' Then there are a whole bunch of other questions about what it means to be an individual with freedoms and liberties. So all in all it has basically every difficult question in one, but possibly every answer in one.

A few things seem clear to me about this:

- There are no organisms on Earth that could sustain unlimited population growth.
- Given human ingenuity, there are lessening limits on human population growth.
- There is currently no gauge between economic growth and population growth. We don't know for sure that capitalism doesn't rely on either population or technological growth for economic survival.
- It is not possible to state population as an unequivocal cause of the enviroinmental problems, global pandemics, and abstract bipolarization of socio-economic life that most individuals call current issues of the day.
- It is pretty easy to see how a coordinated reduction in reliance on population growth and technology in developed nations, in its ideality, would solve the three aforementioned problems.

Is it possible to have a thriving capitalist economy without population and technological growth? Is it possible for human beings to be held in equilibrium in their number and technological capability by nothing but their own collective volition? There is one main difficulty with the 'let it sort itself out' approach: if our socio-economic system is contingent on growth in population and technology then when natural limiting factors arise there will be individuals who are interested in acting against movement in the direction of harmony. If those individuals also had most of the power, then it would mean disproportionately large scale suffering compared to the relative ease of few.

"What exactly does it mean?" (What does that mean more precisely?)
"How do we know that it is so?" (How do you know that?)

There seems to be another factor implicit in your two questions. What are you referring to by 'meaning'? This could be a reference to personal significance (ex: "The gesture meant so much to me") or to a known system of affects (ex: To fall means to momentarily lose footing and accelerate by gravity), or possibly something else. Your second question, "how do we know that this is so" suggests that your are limiting your scope to an accepted perspective or an finite apparatus. Is true knowledge really a process at all? Certainly we can say there is a process for attaining and validating facts, but I'm not convinced in the necessity of a such a repetitious process for finding knowledge.

1. Definitions
2. Justifications

Might I suggest a third term, 'Significance/Relevance'? Is it enough to know without questioning why that entity wishes to know? Why, for instance, should we give equal weight to a discussion about philosophy and a discussion about the infinity of supernatural and ungrounded things? If we did, we would not have enough time to investigate anything in real depth.

I believe the fundamental nature of the problem is the misapplication of technology, and that, applying the right technologies we could sustain a large human population indefinitely.

While what you say may be true, is all we concern ourselves with in life mere sustenance? What about the quality of life and stability of the solution?

On one hand we have a technological solution that is:

1) Quicker to implement at first, but may be so complex that no unlearned individual could well understand its methodology.
2) Will require constant oversight, innovation, and adjustment by specialist and engineers.
3) May fulfill immediate needs but possibly not subtextual needs such as love, belonging, sense of purpose.
4) May compile itself with further issues, such as issues relating to finitude of energy resources and the environment.
5) In a massive population individuals will feel more insignificant and isolated. Crime and exploitation of governing systems is more likely.

Then you have another solution – reduction of the human population – that:

1) Takes longer to implement but is exceedingly simple in concept so that almost anyone could understand it.
2) Requires individual intervention.
3) Could possibly be more difficult to implement, but this is not really measurable until after the fact.

Then the pros of the tech solution:

1) Allows us to go on with our casual lives without much more individual intervention.
2) Larger population probably equals more technological innovation.
3) Do not need to get involved in extensive government reach over individual activities.
3) May be able to colonize other planets, though this is kind of a pipe dream at this point.

Then the pros of the reducing the population solution:

1) No longer any concerns about environment. Will probably repair environmental/geological damage.
2) Less competition for the pleasures of life; a generally easier and simpler life.
3) Less 'group-thinking,' as in the reduction of personal responsibility. Individuals will feel a greater sense of citizenship and belonging.
4) Smaller population probably equals more cultural innovation (art, philosophy, etc).
5) Less need for oversight, except in the sense of keeping the population in a globally decreasing state.

It seems exceedingly easier to imagine more pros and less cons for the depopulation solution, and the pros seem better and cons less aversive, but maybe that's because I already have that solution in mind. Perhaps you could elaborate on how you might lay it out differently.

Words and mathematical symbols often form separate spheres of meaning despite their basis on comparable activities of the mind. Symbols in mathematics are used less frequently as a social language than their alphabetic counterparts. We tend to think of verbal languages as fulfilling social needs and mathematical symbols as fulfilling contingent personal needs, because writing down symbols in mathematics can help us to conceptualize certain kinds of relationships more effectively than verbal ones can. Those symbols tend to take on a life of their own, eventually through habitual usage becoming fixed in their personal-narrative meaning.

At the heart of it, it sounds like the question is about the absolute linguistic unit versus the relational. We find that 'equals' has a meaning in the mathematical community that is more intentionally defined than the one in our casual usage. Do we hold fast to those meanings and furtively ignore their linguistic significance in favour of reproducing completeness, or accept the synchronic meaning freely as separate and referential to a mathematically absolute definition? I think in any feedback system we have to understand there is an underlying dicrete-ness to its idealization; that – excluding special cases – something can be determined as one thing and simultaneously negate another, not solely in a formal sense but also in terms of content.

When we perceive we can negate as well as posit; create something that cannot have being at the same time we imagine some other aspect of it as 'being there.' In our outer world there is thought to be one set of physical laws that negate others, but there could be other physical laws present not meeting certain conditions of sensibility.

I digress...

It is interesting, but it would be all the more interesting if it weren't soaked in the whole Oedipus Complex of removing the artist (father) in substitution for the viewer (surrogate). It gets tiring...

Well imagine an instance where you are in a restaurant job, say a dishwasher. Your manager judges your performance based on the dishes you can wash in given time. The manager realizes they cannot judge you specifically based on the result alone, but must watch you to make sure you are doing it right.

They see you fumbling with dishes, observe your behaviour to be agitated, and see that you do not wash nearly as many dishes as your coworkers. They thus judge your performance to be poor in this job. While this sounds like a purely mechanical act of measurement we might also look closer at the grounds for judgement and find holes. Were there distractions, what is this individual's past experience like, how fast do they learn, are there any other ways they contribute to the company, etc.

These other factors are attenuated because the story of the evaluation is in emulation of nature in the belief that in order for the company to operate as a business and succeed it must provide quality and quantity of output. We made a snapshot of this person (or the 'plot') and applied a cultural schematic of what they should be able to correct in themselves versus what they should not be. That scheme is not synthetic, but rather analytic, and thus does not derive from pure principles that can be laid out.

That dishwashers are judged in this way should comply with our practical rationality and our reason. However, the quality and quantity of the judgement is done internally and so is the necessity for it – in itself. Thus the whole process is a type of story that is for itself: a reproduction of our structures of belief and feeling. And the awareness of the process and its internal contradiction is what is brought down upon the individual who can truly perform at nothing.

A performance is in some ways like a story, a telling of narrative or a viewpoint on a system of space and time. The structure of evaluation – or the basis for translation from quality into quantity – is like the plot of the story or the events we see on its exterior. The story includes our quest: to find an individual with pattern discernment and problem solving from which we cast a narrative that sets the groundwork for how this quest will be represented and embodied. The quest is a test of our right to be an individual in society and an act of the individual itself.

A musical performer, for instance, who can play the right notes at the right time tells us they have developed a concentration and ability to succeed. That they have accomplished the quest which was either directed at or involved ticket-buyers signifies an aspect in ourselves we wish to emulate: the accomplishment. Comparing one musical performer to another ingrains our value determinations into fixed quantitative measures from which we decide the specific ingredients that will characterize this ideal.

In my view, performance – like art – is a reflection of society. In the business world this often means comparing against a certified copy and finding quantitative results, which shows how it reflects that side of social life. Partly shared by itself and us, the reflection has its guiding principle in will-power. If the story involves the plot of shedding individuals who are unfit to be citizens of the nation, as in the individual who cannot perform at anything, that quest can still be accomplished without immoral or unethical rules in the form of suffering.

And the justification for rules is that there needs to be a standard of measure. If you're being evaluated, they have to have a written guideline on what they're measuring so that, not only they could see whether you're a good fit to the company, or they need to put you on performance improvement plan, or just outright fire you.

There is a meaning in which the performance merely states whether or not someone's action met with what they were expected to do by another individual or collective. In the above sense it states that a result was not met and lays no further claim to why, but the word is commonly directed at an individual as a form of criticism. So on what grounds is performance laid against someone and under what justification do we say someone has a performance problem that is their own, and not just one that exists somewhere directed at something?

There is a sense in which performance means not just a binary yes or no, but instead a whole spectrum of different degrees. This implies a transition from quality to quantity that relies on some firm basis that includes some content that is characteristic to it. In the arts we can talk about a concert performance or a ballet performance not having any certified good copy in which to compare it with to see how closely it aligns, and yet we still talk about good and bad performance. Sometimes we're discussing an expressed expectation or even the expectation not being fulfilled, like a magic show.

I'm interested to know would you say in response to the hypothetical situation where someone were poor in performance everywhere they went. If they tried as much as possible to correct it themselves on some grounds they would turn around and say, "This is not my fault." As far as the expectation/reward scenario goes it doesn't seem like this person would ever be qualified to say this; only the authority would have that power.

When we say someone is underperforming or not performing at all, it means that that individual is not meeting the expectations set forth by the institution – be it the academia, workplace, or competition. It is hard for some people to accept this because it restricts creativity and it is a direct assault to the individuality.

I might ask what are the expectations based upon? I imagine you mean that the answer to the question lies is in the following line,

I cannot stress this enough, the justification for rules lies in feasibility and optimization.

We optimize, but the structures we are optimizing are ultimately for us. OK Jimmy then gets an 'F' in gym class because he fails to catch the ball. Someone might say that catching the ball is a structure optimized for us to perfect our visual and spatial sense in the best way possible (according to experts). This system maximizes happiness. It is the optimal solution to the differential equation of what will cause the least suffering.

So we judge the 'form' to be 'completed' in the performance on the most optimal distributed quantification of quality. The system is judged in a preliminary state, and is left to determine itself in a replication of that state until it is deemed unfit to work. Performance is a type of lottery system of morality. He/she who is raised in the appropriate way, with the correct genetics, at the right time, and under the right conditions to satisfy this equation is levered up to a luxurious life and those who draw the failing ticket drop down to the lower ranks.

Then if it is so determined, isn't performance itself a sort of arbitrary quality since it is so categorically determined by contingencies of a subject's life? One might help themselves to a certain extent, but it is ideal that certain individuals live a tormented existence by their inability to perform at everything because they do not and cannot have the facility to change themselves to satisfy the equation? This I suppose is based on a type of social emulation of nature.

A certain activity comes with a checklist that defines the performance of someone/something that's executing that actvity.

So in your view, it is only a matter of quantities of reflecting certain qualities. Individuals fall in line with these qualities to varying degrees, such as are outlined either expressly or implicitly in their upbringing and through concepts presented to them as normal in family life. For instance, performance in education is measured in the quantity of how well someone can remember certain ideas, how deeply they understand them, and how appropriately they can apply them, each is given a certain alphabetical value A, B, C, D, E, F according to the quantity they have been assigned. All is fixed and deterministic.

This is all well and good for the 'how' of performance evaluation, which we would be safe to expect to be fixed and determined in some way, but it leaves the what and why unanswered. Form seems to dissolve when it is exposed to the light, so we naturally avoid exposing its underlying mechanics. But when imposing such a rigid quantification as we do in our daily lives ("I don't enjoy this or that performer, I performed poorly at work/school/sport") it seems to imply a certain order that begs for justification. For example, a child who despite their best efforts tries to get good grades in the end is still given a failing mark for bad performance. What form are they failing to master, is it the form of academia or the form of the subject that they are trying to learn?

If it is the latter, then would it be unreasonable to suggest that given the near unlimited forms that subjects can take that there might be another form better suited to each failing student, which is merely overlooked by others for convenience? Or are we to conceptualize a world where the forms are more or less arbitrary, and people should take them as a symbol of the vocation and class they have been assigned by society?

I think there are two overlooked qualities of greatness: First it is preceded by equal greatness of criticism and culture. Second, it is ever willing to be overturned and succeeded.

If you’re searching for pride and vainglory you likely won’t be met with an audience who can share your mission. If you had no interest in anything greater to come, how could your work defend its purpose?

Subject to correction, I think Kant's argument might run thus: if your intentions are good, then your virtue is intact, consequences notwithstanding. On the other hand, if consequences are your measure and you do not achieve them, then you got nothing.

I might add a minor correction, though I more or less agree, that I've heard the Kantian 'method' being to choose based on the best intention, which is a tad misleading. I think it would be more clear to think about it in the reverse sense as choosing with the attempt to surpass immediate interest and consequence rather than positing intention versus consequence. What turns out to be the moral act, or in our colloquial language the intention, will not depend solely on the view of the immediate consequences, but on how well it will fulfill the universal freedom of the individual.

The whole idea of using the Metaphysic of Morals to conduct one's behaviour and judgement in a mechanistic fashion is sort of like trying to cook using the chemical reactions in a chemistry textbook; better than nothing though I guess. It would be nice if this distinction were more clear, as for instance some take Kant's view as a sort of contradiction to Mill or other writers. Comparing them is certainly possible, but when extended too far it's like apples to oranges.

Didn't Kant say that the consequences of an action are not morally relevant to virtue?

I'm not saying your interpretation of Kant is wrong and I admit that I'm not sure where you got this line, is it a direct quote? Analyzing it, it is also a little ambiguous with regards to context, what came before and after and what section was it in? Virtue and morality aren't the same thing, in my view virtue is the integrity to do the most moral action when it is the most difficult and fruitless to do so. So in a sense, the consequences aren't morally relevant because in Kant's view moral universals are not drawn as a direct result of our base interest and subjectivity.

I think I see your point that we're not thinking in terms of checks and balances, Kant made a distinction between thinking morally in terms of interest, much more generally stated here as consequence, and from a place of reason. The example Kant gave still stands: if we do things like borrow money or pirate videos online, we set a moral precedent that sacrifices our ability to determine the universal otherwise through the only practical means we have: action. We have willed an influence that there be lesser moral objection from our place in borrowing money or pirating videos as we chose to do, because in so doing we have authorized it in the only sphere in which we have control: our own conduct.

I think the criticism is a common one, but at the end of the day Kant did not choose judgement and practice for subject matter, the aim seemed to be intended to be definitive and illuminating. Let's not forget that the work characterizes morals as a product of the societies of which they are a part, and perpetuated by the will of each member as they act in the universality of the whole. By universality, do we mean a pure logical syllogism that is always true for all, or a kind of synthetic system that is transitory and engulfed in partial subjectivity? I guess that's where the division here seems to be that differentiates this phrase from the Golden Rule. The G.R. would have everyone act according to what they had always known and believed were the right thing, but this phrase of Kant's – that in writing meant was only as a guide to a more complex analysis – seems to ask, given the opportunity to influence what we perceive as the right thing, what would we select?

You make a valid point. It was improper to present my idea as if it was valid outright that a continual limbo in adolescence was resistant to reproduction. What I really meant was a perspective in which is posited a state of continued 'unreadiness' for the rites and challenges of cultural life. Take the action-film world as an example, where there is a screen that metaphorically separates the action from the viewer. The viewer observes characters enlarged on the screen both formally and literally as they did when they were but a helpless child. In scenes of intense action, the movements of the plot and dialogue act as if to inform them of changes as if they were both a part of the action and yet a completely passive observer; included and yet not quite at the stage where they truly feel themselves to be part of the story. This form is ideal for experiencing empathy, understanding, and sympathy but is not about doing, controlling, and mastering.

I can only say that the film-head is most susceptible to envy and a certain confusion of ego that stands in the way of them reaching a state of mind that would be deemed 'mature' by traditional society. That's just one example, but we could generate others about the medium of the video game, and the internet and reach similar conclusions. Doing it is so easy because these are not only technological extensions of the arm or leg in the McLuhan sense, but of the mind and even – if you would go so far – the desires and the soul. Reliance on this form of experiencing reality naturally conflicts with the development of rational and mature choice and self-discipline in whatever that used to mean to adults of past generations. The world of choice is continually presented as a being outside the capability of the viewer, who is allowed to indulge in ephemerally watching chaos happen, in contrast to our accepted idea of adulthood as a clear-headed, in-control, and stable lifestyle.

We can already observe a type of indirect attempt in humans in overdeveloped areas to mediate their own drive to reproduce. There is a growing fixation on the immature - self-focus, consumerism, indulgence in infantile narrative fantasies – in distinction to the traditional rites of passage which increase the individuals civil worth: strength, honour, valiance, citizenship. Game-like fantasies with auto-erotic pay-offs, visual narrative voyeurism and its childlike helplessness, and internet obsessions that concentrate on ingraining the former restrict the mind to its single desires and contain our minds within social spheres that in the near past have been associated with childhood and adolescence. Reproduction is the ultimate contradiction to this state, in it the individual must act almost solely in the immediate interests of another.

Furthermore, observe the increase in morally gestured ways of life and dogmatic viewpoints. They come with a tendency to view the gain of others as of high importance and self-interest as comparatively meager. This too meets with a distinction with what we would call the 'perfect mate' in the natural world. Disease, however brutal and horrible, is a means by which population control in the world can be exerted. That we now deal with increasingly self-engineered strains of this new coronavirus that has grown strong through activities we call our own vices – mass carbon-guzzling travel, fertility-driven activities such as clubs, bars, and events – shows us to such an extent that this performs a function in reducing populations when they are overly extended.

It wouldn't be surprising if in the near future there were a return to the melancholy ways of art and thought, seeing as these too create a sense of nobility and suffering that would reduce our will to expand and indulge in a vice-focused life. I think we are at a turning point where the larger sphere of humanity is uncertain of its chosen path: do we embrace artificiality or aim to strike a more moderate lifestyle? This will be a gesture of a greater natural process where humanity is prompted if it really wishes to survive. Ironically, that too is the focus of much of our recent discourse in philosophy.

In my view, value isn't solely in the subjective content of the person-object relation, but it is – partly – this subjective process itself in form. Because it is not only the positive content of gold, silver, or people stacking bricks alone that creates wealth, but their negation. If you eliminate the negation of the understood content you wind up in an entangled ideological web of relationship of exploiter to exploited, and value doesn't hold to remain exploitative in structure.

If, for example, we take brick stacking to create value as in each brick is worth x quantity, and we create value in this way alone, we are in a position of hierarchicalism where the structure is to find the fastest way to destroy the value system by determining an optimization process of stacking the most bricks; it was in fact the relation of the brick stacking to factors outside itself that played a role in the original survival of that value system.

In the mammalian world, we think of the sex organs as compensation for the destruction of the total organism. Machines are much less liable to become dis-integrated the way biological material is. In the same sense that they extend our permanence we extend their temporal finitude. Machines look to us for their 'real selves,' where we look to them for our superficial selves; I don't think they can ever extricate themselves from us, because there is this unity and causality between them and us.

I’m trying not to label or define anyone, though when we hold this discussion we gravitate into certain roles and this conversation is a long standing one. Actually I interpreted your position as closer to the opposite camp, with all this talk about spreading love of wisdom you seem describe the system more like a self-regulating machine. You responded to baker’s traditionalism-rich musing about prancing about and showing off as humorous.

There is visible business-oriented knowledge to be exploited in the average academic learned person, a growing price tag, harder competition, and a greater role in social and political life. This narrative is validated by those who appeal to the intellectual progress of an elite for whom they are expendable. For examples look to the many techno-fear narratives in the arts and in the media. Like the backlash against Facebook and Twitter and the techno-apocalypse and dystopia narratives being told in the arts. They reflect the fears of individuals who see this progress as assertion of power that threatens to compromise fundamental rights and liberties. A fear of a type of material deterministic world where their freedom will be reduced and their happiness in the present transformed into a debt to the future.

Does the working class really want learned AI techs to replace the drudgery of their work lives? Probably not if they have any sense…. Will it still happen? Almost certainly. The system of exchange of goods for access is symbolic of an inevitable progress, a peg in a larger movement in time and is a cultural gesture towards its completion.

It is more interesting about how this discussion inevitable turns into a conflict for power between one who sees this long standing institution of the university from a higher moral ground and another with an equally extreme materialist mindset. My criticism of the system is that it is currently tending to produce an unbalanced number of materialist thinkers, in my view, paralleling the dualism between its organization in pre/post enlightenment culture to its current form where it is actively stripping itself of these morals and values; what will we have left other than some type of extreme materialism?

Is there any room for free will and a type of transcendence of the learning self in the materialist schema? Whenever anyone explains it to me it usually just comes off as some kind of individual-driven fixation of curiosity and/or semi-religious symbolism of the knowledge as a type of higher spiritual power.

My personal inclination is to say that might vs right may be rational but it’s not reasonable. That’s based on thinking that for the subject it is perfectly rational; one can live their life by this and succeed perfectly well in society and life. But once we start to blend it with something more objective it reveals the poor foundation upon which it is built.

Taken as moral law, this would lead to some pretty dark types of behaviour: executions, prejudice, anything would be fair game because the weak deserve their punishment according to (3). In an objective way, things would be lost though they may not seem that way to the subjects themselves. But it is unfair to have one group who doesn’t care being at an advantage because they care and another being at a disadvantage because they do care. This is where it goes into the existential question of, “When is a moral life worth living?”

If someone knows themselves and chooses freely to be immoral, then they simply get the circumstance they choose. Morality wasn’t made to enslave people, but rather to be a way of life that was considered by antique thinkers to be the most reasonable way to live. But reasonable could mean other things too. I think we just tend to have certain presets because of our historical development that way, and it’s perfectly rational to want to defend them.