The concern i had in response to un’s post - one i voiced a little too flippantly - was something like: self-consciousness coupled with a desire for authenticity makes all the world a game - and its a game thats like a trap, and the sorrow of it is that probably not everyones fallen prey to it, so that anything you can do to try to connect, from within the trap, to people outside it, will be expressed from within it, and pass silently by the people you want most to hear it. — csalisbury

The trap comes only when you never can take of the mask. Masks are everywhere; only certain types of people (including me) cant take em off. — csalisbury

Hello Sad, I'm Frightened. Two classic masks of that theatre for which 'all the world's a stage'.

ultimately we are alone — TimeLine

Hello Alone, I'm Frightened.

Ever been to a Quaker Meeting? A bunch of people still and silent together with intent. As if one needs a witness to be alone. As if to be sad or frightened or alone, one has to step out of it and name it as a witness to oneself. As if one is not real without a name.

Meet Authentic. Authentic, this is Sad, and Alone, and I'm Frightened. Unfortunately, Authentic does not know her own name, which makes conversation confusing at times. But she is beautiful, isn't she?

Yes, I thought the moderation was a little hasty. Your proposal was no worse than antinatalism, which seems perfectly acceptable here. If there was a singling out of one group, this was at least based on real behaviour, and real genetic and biological difference.

Having said that, it's a silly proposal that could not be implemented without horrors as bad as, or worse than, it seeks to cure. But perhaps a more open question on the ending of violence would be more interesting. An engineered de-aggressing virus is conceivable... I wonder what the morality of that is?

What gets me scared, or sad is: I don't think a lot of people are playing the game, or at least playing it to the point that they would immediately agree, like I did, that not playing the game is itself a way of playing the game. — csalisbury

I want to have a truth telling rule - "tell the truth". But here in the psycho-web, there is only telling, and never showing; nobody has to put their dick where their virtual mouth is. So the distinction between playing the game and playing another game cannot really be made, and there is a retreat to scientific citation to support generalisation.

Successful monogamy seems to me to involve a trading of excitement for security. — fart

How am I to understand this, for example? Is it a general fact about most relationships (see Funk and Gabble's excellent paper)? Is it a universal psychological fact, that applies to me, and denies the truth of what I have been saying about my own unsafe monogamous relationship, as wishful thinking? Or is it itself a rationalisation of a personal fear of the depth of a commitment?

Here is the real danger, I'd say; that one can live a whole lifetime according to such aphorisms without even beginning to find the substance of them. One can live as if either excitement or security were somehow available by arrangement of one's life, and as if one can ever know the road not taken.

But I have already objected to this binary thinking of Mars and Venus, as if one has to maintain a gender dichotomy for fear of latent homosexuality. Other planets are available.

Young? Lady? — T Clark

All ladies are forever young, and the details of their toilette are not a suitable topic of conversation unless like Hanover, it is the sincere expression of your love.

But to you, do you think buying a Valentine's Day card is a game if both find it a meaningful gesture that truly expresses love? — Hanover

Yes, almost always it is a game. I agree with your criterion of sincerity; if I buy a card to please, it is a manipulation, and therefore a game. Hallmark does not know how I feel, or when I feel it. So now that you know, your random flowers to TL would also be a manipulation, and if she is likeminded, unappreciated. You should have sent some earlier.

My point is that it's all a game. You haven't transcended the game playing just because you insist upon writing your own rules. — Hanover

How universal do you want to get? If every interaction is a game, then 'game' is just another word for 'interaction'. If one can never unmask, then a mask is just another word for a face.

All this reminds me of the Donald Davidson stance on these issues. His view (if I remember correctly) is that any human action is at root an event that can be described in two sorts of ways - one which subsumes it under the deterministic laws of nature, one which positions it in the rational realm of agency, and he kind of left things at that. I suppose I want to try to push things further, but maybe they cannot be. — MetaphysicsNow

Davidson is very congenial, isn't he? It might be worth considering how the appropriate description can change through time. A car crash that is my own fault, and within my control (I should have slowed down, but didn't) proceeds from that moment when I was in control, to one where I have lost control. Perhaps one can lose one's mind the way one loses control of a car, and the therapist is trying to deal with a slow-motion car-crash.

It doesn't surprise me you and unenlightened are engaged. You clearly have been getting together privately to discuss ways of driving me crazy by completely ignoring what I'm saying. — T Clark

Alas, in my dotage I have confused you with the perfidious @frank, and you have become innocently swept up in my hostile environment. My humblest apologies, and please ignore my last few comments to you which I unreservedly withdraw. No wonder you have been perplexed!

But please, I am not responsible for @Timeline's coquettish improprieties, and our contacts, such as they are, have at all times been both public and well chaperoned. Young ladies are sometimes prone to flights of fancy, which should not be taken seriously, or repeated as if they are factual.

This is a little perplexing. — T Clark

Why is it perplexing? You ask a fairly personal intimate and specific question, and then are bored with the answer. Let's talk honestly - well actually let's not bother. That's not irony, it's a feeble manipulation.

Problem is, this thread feels corrupted to me. — T Clark

As others have said, it is exposing, and corruption is exposed along with other stuff.

________________________________________________________________________________________

I am quite surprised that people want to be safe in relationships - like having a pet with benefits. Or a discussion forum where we talk about the weather. For better or for worse, life on the line, climbing the mountains, is a relationship, and there is only safety is the grave. Which ones not mean I am not cautious about who I throw caution to the wind with.

It wasn't me, and anyway it was an accident.

That's not the kind of thing I'm talking about, the kind that damages relationships can kill love. Not some sort of sacred fear. — T Clark

I'm all done for now. — T Clark

Well this is what I'm talking about. You ask an intimate question, seem to want an honest relationship, and when you get a response, walk out. It's a very small thing here, of no importance. But let's not dismiss it as mere spirituality.

I am suggesting that intimacy demands honesty, and honesty involves vulnerability. There might be a love that is invulnerable, that we could call spiritual, but whenever you are offered it, it is almost invariably not that, but bullshit. Normally, I offer you a little piece of my heart, trusting you that far, and fearing that you are not trust-worthy. And as you have proved the latter, I retreat, as you see, into abstraction.

It's not the fear that kills love, it's the running away.

Well, I am nearly invulnerable on this site, but still I can be hurt by those whose opinions I respect, to just that extent that I am committed to my posts.

But how is it for you?

Yes.

And as you didn't ask, I am also afraid of her. It's part of the electricity of life; we can hurt each other, and we sometimes do. I call it vulnerability.

It is my observation that relations between men and women are strongly affected by fear. — T Clark

“Aslan is a lion- the Lion, the great Lion." "Ooh" said Susan. "I'd thought he was a man. Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion"..."Safe?" said Mr Beaver ..."Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.” — C.S. Lewis

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Shall we say then, that a relationship without fear is a relationship without investment or commitment - a complacent relationship?

For me, it is important that I have teeth to chew my steaks, so I overcome my fear of the dentist. Notice that the fear is of the dentist, and the fear is overcome by means of the importance. The importance is a rational principle which renders the fear as irrational. — Metaphysician Undercover

One of my mother's wedding presents was to have all her teeth extracted and replaced by lovely new rot-proof dentures. This was quite common at the time and probably considered rational - solve the problem once and for all. I call it rationality gone mad. Again you want to call one side 'important', but you can manage without teeth - people do. Desire to eat steaks is not rational, as opposed to irrational fear of toothache. I'd say that what is rational at any one time depends on the state of one's teeth. One day, it might become rational to give up on steak.

Yes indeed. It is like clutter in the house; it takes over. But then cleaning and tidying can also take over. I don't think there is a rational answer on one side and an irrational one on the other. I don't think will power can find the right balance between tolerating some mess and keeping some order.
There was a nice program on the box, where they sent OCD cleaners and tidyers to help OCD hoarders and livers in squalor. They helped each other to find some balance. There is a strong sense in which OCD simply is a loss of balance, which is a loss of freedom - hence the 'compulsive'.

Is this what you meant when you referred to the ant scaring the grasshopper? When the problem is perceived as important, this import acts to scare up the nerve, the will power to proceed with restraint. — Metaphysician Undercover

I was thinking of my own fear of dentists. I go, stressed and fearful, because I have rationalised that the discomfort of wild toothache is far worse that the pain and humiliation the dentist inflicts. Or how health scares can make people give up smoking. But for X, the comfort of ritual has very little cost, so rationally, it is an effective palliative and should be indulged, even though it is a mere placebo. Just as I like to grow flowers, though they have little use. It is not rational, but there is no stronger reason not to.

This is the idea that I think is wrong, and what I was trying to steer us away from, the idea that there is ever a direct and necessary relationship between the decision and the act. It doesn't matter if you decide the night before, or in the morning just prior to the act, the decision never necessitates the act, as there is always the possibility that you will not do what you've decided to do. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think this is just a dispute about terminology.

That's what I think, having or not having will power is a matter of character, and if it's not an inherited feature it must be cultured at a very young age. Impulsively indulging and stubbornly following one's plan which has been shown to be foolish, are both, opposing examples of lack of will power. — Metaphysician Undercover

And this may be too, but it seems to me that you are defining will power as doing what is right and not accounting for ill-will. And this is problematic for X. We know, by hypothesis, that X's rituals are pointless, but X is conflicted about that. His will is divided, and he does not know whether it is right to be cautious and follow his superstition or right to resist it.

But choice is not the resolution of the problem in this instance. That's the issue, choice is more like the cause of the problem. The conscious mind, (being represented as the ant), makes a choice which the acting body, (being represented as the grasshopper), for some reason or other cannot uphold. — Metaphysician Undercover

In this example, I think it makes more sense to talk about evening and morning than mind and body, because the conflict is more clearly delineated. There is a sense that the body makes coffee in the morning before the mind has got it's act together, but I'd rather talk about time.

In a hotel, if I order breakfast in bed, I order it in the evening, and get whatever I ordered last night in the morning. So the choice in the evening is the decision. But at home, the choice in the evening is not the decision, because that happens in the morning when I go get my breakfast, just as it would at the hotel if I came down for breakfast.

The act of ordering, or the act of cooking is the decision and that resolves the problem one way or the other. One might say 'the decision acts'. The choice in the evening at home is not decisive, but is a plan of action that I decide to follow or ignore in the morning. I think this coincides with the attitude of Alcoholics Anonymous - 'one day at a time'. Every day perhaps, every minute, the decision to abstain or relapse now has to be made, and prior commitments to oneself or to another are only a factor that might influence the decision, as might prior habits.

Rather than neurobabble, one might talk in an old-fashioned way about character, as something that is both the condition one is in and that which is developed by the decisions one makes. If I am inclined to be too impulsive, or on the other side too rigid, perhaps I can resist the tendency sometimes, and perhaps I cannot at others.

But isn't having or not having will-power also a matter of character? And what of X, obsessively following the rules of his existence; is it his stubborn will that insists on following his plan even when it is shown to be foolish, or is he impulsively indulging against the plan to change the plan?

I do not make choices or decisions in my sleep, but the sleeping me is one and the same person as the wakened me. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sure you are, and sure the ant is the grasshopper, and the morning person is the evening person. And also not the the same. People are conflicted, and though one can rightly say that both sides of the conflict are the same person, one can also, and more usefully say that they are not. If there is no conflict, one is single-minded, and there is no choice. Juice is the best for breakfast - inevitably I have juice. It is only when there is a conflict, juice has virtues, and coffee has other virtues, that there is a choice. Choice is the resolution of conflict.

Yes, but the subjectivity of playing the game of what call you not, is removed from the analysis in game theory. — Posty McPostface

I don't think it is at all, it is assumed from the beginning without question.

You know, the "evening person", and the "morning person" are one and the same person don't you? The ant surveys the future, while the grasshopper acts at the present, but they are one and the same person. This is why it is necessary to assume the division between intellect and will, which I referred to. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well it becomes necessary to assume the division of your second sentence when you have assumed the unity of your first sentence. The former is an act of identification which the ant makes and the grasshopper does not. Which kind of illustrates that they are not one and the same, just as their opposed decision/choices does.

What this demonstrates is that deciding to do something, what we call "choosing" something, is not the same as actually willing oneself to do it. There is a division here, between choice and willing, which allows you to choose something (not to have coffee), but then not proceed with your choice (to end up actually having coffee). This disconnect between rational choice and the motivator for action is why breaking bad habits is so difficult. The rational choice comes from somewhere other than where the motivator for action comes from, and a further capacity must enable the individual to exercise control over the motivator, because it is not the rational choice itself which exercises control. That further capacity is "will power". — Metaphysician Undercover

I see it differently. I can decide in the evening not to have coffee in the morning because the decision is theoretical and so, cheap - it requires no action and incurs no cost, it is a declaration of intent by the evening person who does not want coffee anyway, because it is nearly bedtime. It is the morning person who has to fulfil the declared intent and incur the cost, or not. The evening ant tries to decide for the morning grasshopper, and the elixir of willpower isn't even on the menu. If the evening ant can sufficiently scare the morning grasshopper about the dire consequences for his heart of coffee, then we call that 'willpower' and 'rationality', and feel smug about it.

It's like coming home and finding your doppleganger in the bathroom. — fdrake

Great image! But also using your towel, and demanding to know what the fuck you are doing barging into his bathroom.

And then...

Poor as the birds but to give their songs away
Gathering possessions 'round to make a bright array
Dark was the night, praise God the open door
I ain't got no home in this world anymore
I ain't got no home in this world anymore
I ain't got no home in this world anymore
Farewell sorrow, praise God the open door
I ain't got no home in this world any more. — Robin Williamson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvVNcttXoX8

All kinds of things determine what actions I can choose between, including the number of limbs I have at my disposal, but X's point is that the entire element of choice is nullified by physiological abnormality. — MetaphysicsNow

Ok, then just as I say I cannot choose to walk because I lack legs, X says he cannot choose to refrain from his rituals because he lacks something or has something that prevents it. Now we might want to call it 'reason', or 'honesty', or 'willpower' that he lacks, or we might want to call it 'global anxiety' or 'OCD', or something else, that he has. But he wants to be free of ritual and is not.

So I have to choose what to have to drink in the morning from a menu of tea, coffee, juice, water or nothing. I invariably choose coffee, but do not claim that I want to choose tea but cannot, because if I chose tea my wife would die of shock. I have to choose, and in choosing I have to believe that I am free to choose what I want. And then we do not call my consistent choices 'compulsive'.
But suppose my wife (or my therapist) convinces me that I ought to give up coffee, then I am conflicted; I love to drink coffee in the mornings, but I want not to drink coffee because bla bla. Every evening, I decide to have juice tomorrow, and every morning, I have coffee again. The bla bla reasons not to drink coffee are convincing, but do not make me want to drink no coffee, and to choose is to believe I can make the choice of what I want.
In order to stop drinking coffee, I need either to stop wanting coffee, or take it off the menu. If I come to believe that terrible things will happen if I drink coffee, it will be off the menu, and I cannot choose it. Or if I come to believe that I don't really like coffee, but have just got into a silly habit to look grown up or something, I will choose something else.

X is not saying 'that the entire element of choice is nullified by physiological abnormality'. 'I can go out whenever I want', he says, 'but I have to check the front door three times and not step on the cracks.' Those options are off the menu, because something terrible would happen, and thus it is not a choice but a compulsion.

Since there's so much talk about games people play, how does game theory factor into this discussion if at all? — Posty McPostface

Call the game 'analysis', or 'theorising', or 'psychology'. It's a game people play of theorising the games people play, that involves the analysis of what is a person. It requires that we can distinguish a person from a player. Sometimes I play this game, and sometimes I play another game, and the sense of being a person is that the same something plays this game and that game.

I am seeking the person who is playing the game of seeking the person, by playing the game of seeking the person who is playing the game of seeking the person, by playing the game of ...

I'm trying, but it keeps sort of slipping away — csalisbury

Unsurprisingly, I end up lost in the game, and perhaps it is tempting to conclude that the person is the persona, and there is nothing behind the mask, nothing playing the game but the game characters.

Because even if I play the game of not playing the game, I am still playing the game; it is just another persona. And yet the sense that I am not the mask I wear, the game I play, persists - it is an experience, but it is unanalysable.

Let's make a rule - one that is unbreakable: whereof one cannot analyse, thereof one must not analyse.
Call it 'the mystical', and allow that though it cannot be defined it can be manifested, (manifested through the relations of masks in the game, as the unsaid indications 'between the lines').

But the ant being a grasshopper eludes me. Care to say a little more on that? — Moliere

Consider anorexia. It's the most dangerous form of obsession to the individual, and it's obsessive self-control. No one is an ant or a grasshopper, everyone resides in the conflict. The urge to indulge (in eating, in this case or in ritual in X's case) is the grasshopper, and the urge to control is the ant. Ritual controls anxiety, anorexia controls appetite. There is always the controller, and the controlled resisting it.

The anorexic feels in control, but their controlling is out of control. The ant is a grasshopper.

But most everyone can see the evils of indulgence, and almost none see the greater evil of indulging in self-control. No one seems to notice that with mastery over the environment, we have lost control of the environment, and that the same thing happens psychologically, because our behaviour in relation to the world is a projection of the inner conflict. "You can control yourself, you must control yourself" is the mantra of the divided mind, oft recited to other divided minds.

If OCD is beyond X's control because X's ritualistic behaviour is determined by physiologically abnormal conditions, then by consistency of reasoning all behaviour (not just X's) is determined by physiology.
If all behaviour is determined by physiology, no one has any control over any of their actions. — MetaphysicsNow

So if my use of a wheelchair is determined by my lack of legs, no one has any control over any of their actions?

I tell Baden I accidently had sex with his stupid fucking dog last night thinking it was his mom
— Hanover

Hang on, if you were banging my dog, who—or what—was I banging? :grimace: — Baden

The Aristocrats.

What exactly is dishonest in the scenario you posited? In what way is the patient lying to himself? — Moliere

The lie is that X's behaviour is not within his control. — MetaphysicsNow

As usual, it's a question of identity; who is X? We philosopher-therapists identify X as a being extended through time that has short-term and long-term interests, and point out that his therapeutic self-calming rituals are consuming his life. But this identity theory is in conflict with the immediacy of anxiety, an identity that imposes itself on him. but not on us.

This conflicted identity, known to poets as the Ant and the Grasshopper, afflicts us all, and one can lose one's life as the ant always looking to the future just as well as one can lose it by taking no thought for tomorrow as the grasshopper. But it is not the case that X is really an ant or really a grasshopper; nor is it the case that ants are honest and moral, and grasshoppers are feckless liars.

Control is an interesting concept. It depends on feedback and cannot be complete. Ants control, and grasshoppers are free. But behaviour modifies physiology, and hence there is habit and addiction on both sides. Grasshoppers suffer from OCD because they are really ants, whereas ants suffer from an excess of control -anorexia, for example - because they are really grasshoppers.

What is required, I would say, is that the passion to overcome fear is stronger than the fear. Reason will serve both. So again there is no sense in trying to contradict the patient's claim which is confirmed by his action.

X's habit is to allay his fears with ritual, and it has the effect of strengthening the fear in the long term as it allays it in the short. Perhaps he does not fully understand this, and then reason can clarify, but as he has (I presume) put himself in the position of patient, it seems that his reason has already set him on the road of looking for some other support for the resolution of the conflict he is in. He needs the therapist to hold his hand and lend him some strength, not tell him he is being unreasonable. Because, as he says, he already knows that and it doesn't help.

Patient X accepts that this rationalisation is irrational, and that there are no empirical or a priori grounds which connect his repetetive behaviour to any kind of catastrophic event.
When challenged as to why he continues to carry out the behaviour given this acceptance, patient X claims that his mental illness is just like diabetes and just as diabetes cannot be cured by reason, neither can his OCD.

Could patient X be right about that? — MetaphysicsNow

You just described the situation that heis right about that, so why do you ask - it seems irrational of you. It is very similar to a phobia, X is frightened of not repeating the way one might be frightened of spiders, and the cure is not rational argument but facing the fear and desensitising it through actual contact. Reason is the slave of passion, not the master.

More triples.

Man, Nature, God <=> Philosophy, Psychology, Religion <=> mind, body, spirit <=>Good, evil, Judgement.

You may not like this much, but I think it is worth going into a bit. Religion is the form of expression that externalises the analyst, the master, and allows the conflicted relation to develop. Adam and Eve is a story told by God, as the story of the bully and the victim is a story told by the therapist.

But you are familiar with the patriarchal trinity. Allow me to introduce the Old Religion.

The triple Goddess has the aspects Maiden, Mother, and Crone, and her colours are white, red and black, respectively. Birth, life, and death, geddit? We males worship her in the aspect of the maiden, The White Goddess, for obvious reasons, and this gives us a limited view. However, there are in the remnants of mythology hints of a genuine second order reflexivity, unlike the cycling we indulge in here whereby each post of analysis is made an object of analysis by the the next.

It would require a high priestess to explicate in the unlikely event of her being willing, so I will simply note that the muses and fates are ninefold, thus there is in the poet's relation to his muse, or a man's relation to his love, though it is but one aspect of three, still the same triple played out within it - attraction, fulfilment, rejection.

Those who are constitutionally unable to use the religious to momentarily dethrone the analyst, might have recourse to poetry, and I suppose it is the patriarchal poet who writes this, expressing something of his sense of loss, and rage against the tyranny of the analyst. But I do commend to you the Robert Graves linked here; at the least, it outlines a better game to play.

All hail the eternal psychological triangle.

Two horses and a charioteer - Plato.
Id, superego and ego - Freud.
Child, parent, adult - Berne.

Identity is division, as what I am and what I am not. And to reflect upon that is to externalise it again, creating the third as analyst/observer.

I relate to being tough on the outside and gentle on the inside. — syntax

If I point out that this is the primary characterisation of Cancerians in astrology, it is with the intent to disrupt the relation - as being too comfortable, too universal. Rather as "a good sense of humour" is. But that is an aside; I want more to draw attention to the triple nature - "I" relates to "my outside" and "my inside".

The violence for me is more or less internally sublimated in critical thought. — syntax

Hang on, I thought you were gentle inside? But no...

It's all pretty twisted, because this 'fierceness' of thought is trying to strip away false personality in one sense (get to simple mammalian love and joyful embodiment as 'true' Christianity and Tao) and attain a kind of ('masculine') statue-like invulnerably. — syntax

What you relate is the opposite of what you relate to; you relate being hard on the inside but perform it gently on the outside.

I'm sorry to pick on you, it's only that you were conveniently at the end of the thread when I came to it -nothing personal. What I want to get to through this triple nature of psychology is something that has been both demonstrated and expressed in the thread, that a psychological theory is always itself analysable psychologically through a meta-theory, or through itself. The transactions of a a thread on transactional analysis are being analysed. Curiously, or not, this does not require a fourth element, but merely takes the superior position of adult/analyst/observer/ charioteer, to comment on the interactions of the participants, just as I am doing here. Personally, I don't much like Berne, his theory is just an emasculated version of Freud, with the gloss of capitalist universalism as rational, or perhaps irrational self-interest.

There is no end, and thus no real progress to analysis, and by analysis, I mean to include neuro-behaviourisms etc as much as the psychoanalytic tradition. There is a continuous stepping out of oneself to look at the division created by stepping out of oneself. I prefer to stay with this gentle violence overflowing from inside to outside.

I am a deep thinker and cannot understand why love is so important. I keep shipwrecking relationships because I cannot seem to show or express love or my true self. How do you love? I have struggled my whole life with this. Why is it (love) so important if you never grew up with the sincerity and genuineness of it in the household. Please explain. — Danny

It's really quite simple. One's identity is formed from the relationships one has, and obviously, the earliest relationships set the tone. Growing up without genuine love and affection, one inevitably forms an identity as 'unlovable'. If I am unlovable, but I am desperate to be loved, then I have to perform, I have to fake being lovable, which means I fake loving, because everyone loves to be loved.

It doesn't work very well, because the reality of neediness always intrudes itself into the performance. I cannot express my true self, because I am unlovable, but that means that my relationships are always false, and the other, if they love, loves my false self, and not the real one. So I am never satisfied with the love I receive, because it is not 'for me', but for the mask I wear. My need for love is not met.

And so my childhood experience of being unlovable is confirmed by every relationship that I have, and the harder I try (to fake it), the worse it is. No book or insightful post is going to solve this problem, because books are even more incapable of love than I myself am.

"Hi there. I am greedy for love, desperate for love, but incapable of loving anyone, because I have never been loved. I am trying to be genuine here, but in actual relationships, I am incapable even of that, but will pretend to be other than I am. This will mean that I cannot accept your love, even if you give it, because I have not even let you see the real me. So I will come to resent and despise you for being so foolish as to have a relationship with me, and even more for having a relationship with the false me."

This is the kind of profile one does not see on dating sites; if folks were honest, something like this would be the norm, and I hope it is clear that honesty is the prerequisite for love. You might like to have a listen to some Gabor Mate, here's a sample:

Hume is unique among philosophers in being more understandable himself than through any of his commentators. Just read Hume. Not that there's any shortage of folks discussing him.

And here's a little sideshow.

Now it's my turn to accuse you of being confused. Specifically, you seem to be confusing a motive with an intention. — Thorongil

My intention is to build a house, my motive is to house someone. Or it might be just that i enjoy mixing cement, and the whole housing thing is an excuse and self-deception. So I might think I am unselfish when I am selfish.

I might just want sex, or I might just want a child, or I might want another to enjoy this wonderful life. I might be deceiving myself or I might not.

But you want to rule something out, and you have no argument for it.

Yes, but if the action cannot be compassionate then the motive cannot be either. In the case of procreation, because the action cannot be compassionate, for the reason that the cause of the action doesn't exist, then the motive cannot be compassion, even if the procreator claims it to be. — Thorongil

You're floundering. Actions are actions, and are motivated by selfishness or compassion. The cause of the action is the motive, and the motive is an imagined consequence. So if I am motivated to build a house, it is a house that does not exist until I build it, and this is the case whether I build it for you or for myself. The house does not cause me to build it, on the contrary, the lack of house is the cause. I imagine a house.

Now I have just imagined you in need of housing, and I do not need you to be in any condition at all to do that. That's the thing about imagination, that it is not constrained by reality. Likewise, I might imagine a gloriously happy, grateful daughter, and I simply refuse to allow you to constrain my imagination. And for her - the imaginary her - I propose to suffer the indignity of procreation and the nightmare of childrearing - ugh!

Right, I get this. There is no confusion. I have spoken of procreation, the action. — Thorongil

And the action can have the motive of creating a new person that does not yet exist, for one's own sake or for theirs. It is an imaginary person, but motives are always imaginations, whether of eggs or kids, whether selfish or unselfish.

you cannot do anything to what which doesn't exist. — Thorongil

I think I can. And the law agrees that I can make a trust fund to benefit my unborn grandchildren. And I can plant a tree whose shade I will never sit under for those unborn who will.

Indeed there is a whole strain of intergenerational ethics that proposes that we have obligations to the future, not to fuck up the climate, for instance.

I think you are confusing motivation, which is always future directed to that which is not yet, with the cause of action, which must be already in existence. My motive must already exist as an impulse, but its object can perfectly well not exist, indeed if it did already exist, it could not function as a motive. I feed the chickens for the sake of the eggs which they have not yet laid.