But let's not go there. — Bitter Crank

No, let's go there.

I had social anxiety for years before I had a name for it. So I didn't know what was happening to me or whether I was normal. — Andrew4Handel

So how did you find out that was the name for it?

I'm chronically shy and misanthropic; Have I got it?

People who suddenly experience mental distress are often surprised because it was nothing like they imagined including skeptics of depression who have apologised profusely after for doubting the condition.

So these people seem to be failing to know mental states until they finally experience them. — Andrew4Handel

This is kind of straightforward. I know what a car crash is without having experienced one, but experiencing one is very different from knowing what it is.

But suppose I really have no idea what depression is, and then I get depressed. How do I even know that this feeling is depression and not something else? How do I even recognise my own beetle as a beetle?

If X is totally private, then it cannot be talked about at all, not even by its owner. But depression is not totally private. To the extent that we can talk about it, it is public, it is feelings and experiences, sure, but also characteristic behaviours and ways of talking. If you try to separate out the experiential aspect from the behavioural, then you cannot say anything about it at all.

Now this is not to say that people cannot hide their feelings rather than show them; tears of a clown and all that. But it is a bad habit to get into because in the end, you lose access to your own feelings and those of others, and live in an unreal emotional world.

You keep talking about what appears in consciousness (edge-detection) and saying that it is an non-conscious process. When I'm conscious - and only when I'm conscious, do I detect edges. — Harry Hindu

When I am conscious I detect edges. We agree about that much.
When I am conscious I can touch my nose with my thumb. I bet you can too. I do not, however think that my nose or my thumb is conscious, merely sensitive. Likewise, Ido not suppose that the visual process by which I detect edges in the visual field is itself conscious, merely sensitive to edge like variations in the visual field. That is all I am saying about edge detection.

Again, how do you know that the unconscious is willful and aware? In what way? — Harry Hindu

In the first instance, I am talking about what Freud meant by the unconscious, and that is why I have been at some pains to point out that the unconscious of Freudian is not the same thing as all the stuff that happens automatically, learned or innate. But many people think Freud was talking crap, so to them I would say the following.

Well I know that when I am asleep I am unconscious. And I also know that when I am asleep I have experiences, which I call dreams, in which I experience being active, having feelings and so on. It seems to follow that there is some form of awareness in me while I am unconscious. There are other indications too, but leave it at that for now.

On a YouTube video Stephen Pinker claimed we think in images. I know I think in words and live with a constant stream of language. How could Pinker know what I thought in? Considering he has no direct access to my mental states? Is he just going by analogy to his experience. — Andrew4Handel

He could ask you, and you could tell him.

Wittgenstein is the man for this conundrum. It's the beetle in the box. If you only have your beetle, and I only have my beetle, we cannot even disagree about what beetles are like. Pinker says thoughts are like pictures, and you say beetles are like words, and I say they are like flies buzzing. But there is no way of telling whether we are all looking at the same thing, and describing different aspects, or talking about completely different things, because we each only have our own case to look at.

But here we are, you, me, Pinker, and Wittgenstein, expressing our thoughts in words and perhaps in pictures too sometimes, maybe in bricks and mortar as well, why not? So thoughts are not private in that radical sense after all.

The idea that they're 'beers in fridge' is only a rhetorical device to illustrate the fact that 6-3=3 in a rather less boring manner. And that is something that is obviously know a priori - it's simply an example of a tautological truth. — Wayfarer

Then we agree. But your rhetoric serves to blur the distinction rather than clarify it. Change the example:

I put 2 rabbits in an empty hutch with some lettuce, and then see my friend take out 5 rabbits. I do not know that there are - 3 rabbits in the hutch, nor have I proved arithmetic wrong, I know they've been breeding. Experience tells me that rabbits multiply and beers only add and subtract.

If you think that amounts to 'an argument', then please, go and have another beer. — Wayfarer

These are not arguments, they are examples of explanations one might make if there turn out not to be 3 beers in the fridge. The point is that how many beers are in the fridge is not a priori, it is a contingent fact. What one would not do, however, unless one had had several too many beers, is claim that 6 - 3 = 4, because that is analytic.

you know there's 3 beers left prior to opening the fridge door. That's all 'a priori' refers to and it's what is called an apodictic truth, i.e. cannot plausibly be denied. The rest is blather. — Wayfarer

You're just wrong about this. How many beers are in the fridge is settled by opening the fridge and counting the beers, and the result of this experiment trumps any amount of mathematical and logical reasoning. If there turn out to be 4 beers, then one thought one knew but was mistaken. Perhaps Jesus passed by and turned the milk into beer, perhaps beers can breed, perhaps there was already a beer in the fridge, perhaps a wormhole opened and a beer fell through, or perhaps you miscounted the beers you put in, or the ones taken out, but anyway it is not analytic that there are 3 beers, nor a priori. It is a matter of fact, that might be otherwise.

Well let's have a little go at this. Language works by means of distinctions: beer is distinguished from not-beer, otherwise we don't know what we are talking about when we say "beer". and that would be a tragedy, because it is a useful and important distinction, even if it becomes blurry at the barleywine edges.
One of the distinctions that philosophers find useful and important is between the word and the thing, sometimes called the signifier and the signified. The convention is that when one wants to talk about the word "beer", one puts it in quotes, and when one wants to talk about the drink beer, one does not. Thus there is a clear difference, beer is a nourishing drink, whereas "beer" is a word.

So now, philosophers of beer can discuss the defining (necessary and sufficient) features of beer, What makes something beer and not a rabbit? Cue much talk of hops, barley malt, fermentation, and the amount of froth on top. Does it have to be liquid, or is a frozen beer still a beer? Are the yeasty dregs at the bottom of the barrel beer? All this talk is talk about what the word "beer" means, about what counts as beer, we are trying to sharpen up those blurry edges of the distinction between beer and not-beer.

So it is the case that(P1.) Fosters is not beer, but the recycled piss of inebriated Australians, and this is a matter of fact, given our shared understanding of what "beer" means. And this is what we call synthetic proposition, because it turns out that Australians also make proper beer that they do not export, but wisely drink themselves.

However, it is based on not only the facts of the case, but also the analytic proposition that (P2.) the recycled piss of inebriated Australians is not beer. This is analytic, because it is not about beer, but about "beer". The facts of the case - that Fosters call their drink "beer", are not decisive, because to most philosophers of beer that is simply an abuse of language.

So you put six beers in the fridge and see someone take three of them out. You don't know there's three left until you open the fridge door and verify it by looking. — Wayfarer

One of the beers might have been pregnant.

using art as a language to express a political message tends to be a one-sided conversation. — Noble Dust

If your name's Banksy, that's because it is unanswerable, but in this case, it looks as if a political art work has been answered with another. The first artist seems to have conceded the point by resorting to lawyers.

I'm with the unimpressed pigeon.

None of these things happen when we are unconscious. Edge detection never happens when we are asleep, or otherwise unconscious. — Harry Hindu

I'm not sure where you are getting your certainty about what happens when we are unconscious. But never mind that. But you are continuing to disagree with me about a distinction I have made without understanding it. Edge detection is non-conscious, I am saying, like a brick is non-conscious. 'We' may or may not be conscious of a brick from time to time, in the background or the foreground. Part of the process of seeing a brick is detecting its edges, but 'detecting the edges' does not itself see anything, nor does the brick;I see the brick by amongst other things, detecting its edges. All of which, I don't think we disagree much about.

But then I want to talk about the Freudian unconscious, which is not so-called because it is like the brick or the automatic process of edge-detection. On the contrary, it is active, wilful, aware. But it is called the unconscious because the 'I' or 'we' that pontificates is unaware of its existence and active influence. This is the controversial bit.

So this is why Freud was interested in dreams, because when 'we' are unconscious, the unconscious is still awake and active.

Oops. Kinda cute though.

that is not unrelated to the book I mentioned a few days back, The Heretical Imperative, about the requirement to decide one's own spiritual path. — Wayfarer

It's not unrelated to this, too:

I'll tell you a secret.
Something they don't teach you in your temple.
The Gods envy us.
They envy us because we're mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed.
You will never be lovelier than you are now.
We will never be here again. — Homer

Yes. It is a small point intended to clarify that redundant does not mean without function as might be inferred from the constant use of 'true' in examples. One might say that 'is false' has a 'not' function which is an important operator and clearly not redundant in the 'eliminable without loss of meaning' sense that applies to 'is true'. It is a point made to the thread rather than a criticism of redundancy theory.

I'm not sure what your point is here. That states of mind affect the brain is surely even less of an issue that that they affect the immune system? As you know, I rate the psychiatric community somewhat lower on the evolutionary scale than witchcraft, and it surprises me that they have the decency to be ashamed.

A note on redundancy.

While "It is true that it is raining" means no more than "It is raining", falsehood does not work the same way at all.

"It is false that it is raining" means "it is not raining".

Truth may be redundant, but falsehood is not.

Can I take a moment to elucidate the nature of the placebo effect? There are boundaries.

One cannot proverbially by taking thought add an inch to one's stature. One cannot by taking thought persuade the horse to win or the roulette wheel to come up red. One can affect subjective symptoms such as pain, but this is unsurprising even to the most material of materialists.

So what is left that might be controversial or significant for metaphysics? As far as I know, and the biomedics will correct me, we are left with the immune system and the hormonal system. Is there a great mystery? Lots of little mysteries for sure, but we know that anxiety produces stress hormones and such like, which affects blood pressure adrenalin levels and so on.

Because I am a hugely respected philosopher, and you can absolutely trust my benevolence and intellectual rigour, You will feel relieved and relaxed on reading this post. You will feel more healthy, more calm and more energised, and your physician will be able to see the benefits to you physically.

I don't see any distinction between "unconscious" and "non-conscious". — Harry Hindu

Let me see if I can show it to you, because it is significant. When you look at the screen, various processes occur that interpret the scene, most of which happen automatically. There is, for example, an 'edge detection' process that identifies shapes that form letters; these are combined into words, and sentences and the significance is grasped. Most of this, most of the time is non-conscious automatic processing, rather like one's fingernails growing, such that one is aware of the screen 'speaking' and not much else - Unenlightened replies to Harry Hindu.

And like one's fingernails, or your average brick, these processes are not unconscious but non-conscious. One would only say that a brick was unconscious if there was some sense in which it might be conscious - if it might wake up.

By contrast, the unconscious is an awareness that is shut off from consciousness, almost as if there were another person in one's head (this is a crude and perhaps inaccurate characterisation). "It" is also living one's life, interfering in one's actions often antagonistic to one's conscious desires and intents.

When this separation is well sealed, one does not notice anything at all; it is when there is the beginnings of an invasion of consciousness by the unconscious that one starts to 'hear voices', 'act out of character' and the like.

One can usefully say that the purpose of X is Y, and perhaps that the purpose of Y is Z. But if one is not to go on forever, or round in a circle, then one has to reach a terminus. One might say that life is good in, of, and for, itself, and is not for some external purpose. Or one might say that everything is without ultimate purpose. Or one might find the terminus not in life but in 'God's will', or some such.

Anyway, 'nothing' is not the only possibility.

I muddied the waters, perhaps, by trying to broaden the notion of the unconscious to include what you have referred to as the 'non-conscious' elements of perception. The reason for that is that I think they're closely related - that Freud's definition is simply one aspect of a much larger subject, which is the influence or presence of unconscious or non-conscious factors in day to day awareness. — Wayfarer

I understand, it's an interesting topic. Quite a good example of the non-conscious is the automatic visual processing that an artist has to learn laboriously not to do in order to render what is presented to the eye rather than what is 'understood ' by the eye. This sort of learning as well as the reverse, of competences becoming unconscious that you mentioned, indicates that there is no fixed line between conscious and non-conscious, and I think the same applies to the unconscious.

But the op is very much about unconscious desires, and that is where it becomes seemingly impossible to make sense of things without positing a division of awareness. Here I have to openly acknowledge the inevitable circularity of explanation which must run along the lines of - ego resists the idea that it is incomplete, that it is influenced by desires of which it is unaware because it is dangerous to its own stability to be aware of them. And this too, ego is unaware of. But the claim is that this is not a psycho-pathological condition confined to the minority of lunatics of one sort or another, but rather the universal human condition, the enlightened excepted, possibly.

It is this circularity that later made Freud so discredited in academia, but to me it is a necessary feature of any sophisticated psychology that it applies itself to both its adherents and its opponents; that division mirroring the internal psychic division.

How dare you get on with your life and ignore us for so long! But we'll forgive you, because we're so filo sophical.

So you are saying it is aware, but the self is not self aware of the awareness? lol — ernestm

Not sure what you are claiming I'm saying that is so funny. But never mind. Freud claims that the 'unconscious' speaks and acts. It speaks in 'Freudian slips', for example. So yes, the unconscious is aware, but the conscious is unaware of it and unaware of its (the unconconscious') awareness. It has desires, it wills. This is the fundament of Freudian theory, that human awareness is divided.

the ego being the only part of which that the self can be aware, — ernestm

The ego is the self that is aware of itself, sure. The self that the self that is aware of itself is not aware of is the unconscious, but the unconscious is not unaware; it responds to the environment - and part of its environment is the conscious self.

But any way, even if there is a relationship between the unconscious, this doesn't mean it has desires, intentions, and beliefs. — Marty

Interesting language here; id is 'it' as distinct/opposed from/to ego 'I'. That is to say that the unconscious is other than myself - the self I am conscious of.

I want to lose weight, but it wants to eat. I want to be calm and reasonable, but it wants to bite babies... Have you ever found yourself in an internal conflict? (This is no form of argument, but an appeal to relate talk to experience.)

I think there has been some confusion in this thread between non-conscious and unconscious. Stuff you don't have to think about, and stuff you have no access to is not 'the' unconscious of Freud. He is talking about a division of awareness. 'It' is a foreigner disrupting your life and frustrating your ambitions. 'It' is the inner arsehole.

The issue is to decrease the lure for young lads to engage in criminal activity that brings in a handsome profit. — Question

Yes. That was my point; that even amongst young lads, profit is a very much a minority consideration. Excitement, rebellion, revenge for perceived wrongs, and plain aggression and hatred are more significant motives in most cases. In other words, the analysis is completely inadequate, Nobel prize notwithstanding.

Murder, rape, littering, speeding, drug-taking, are not in general motivated by maximising utility.This analysis might work for psychopathic economists committing economic crimes, but it has little application to the rest of us.

My arse. Without a functioning arse, one is obliged to talk shit. It's really not worth arguing whether a chair without legs is better or worse than one without a seat; it is completeness that makes it worth anything.

In the USA, there is alot of denial about what 'equality" actually means as the founders intended. Originally the statement was that we are CREATED equal in accordance of the laws of nature and God. — ernestm

I thought it was specifically dignity and rights. But I am a mere foreigner, correct me.

Modern political theory places national self interest (national happiness) above the moral intent which rules suggest — Cavacava

Well not entirely. Even Trump sometimes blinks at the gassing of foreigners; though as a theory it stinks. But if things were as they ought to be, the world would be a very different place.

you can't really be 'right' in music. — rohan

And being right is a very very attractive thing.

Nah. Rules are what the collective does, and then the first rule should be that the rules apply to everyone equally. Justice as the foundation of society. Counting happinesses is a nonsense from start to finish. As if five glasses of wine are necessarily better than three. One each is good, wouldn't you say? Then if there's any left, we might offer a top up.

A problem for utilitarianism. — Cavacava

I'm more than happy to make problems for it. X-)

When you try to measure the immeasurable, or compare the incomparable, confusion results. When one gets old, things stop working properly, and start hurting more or less all the time. Such suffering does not preclude happiness, and great happiness does not preclude unhappiness at the same time. How can one be happy at the state of the world? Yet how can one be unhappy at the sight of the cherry blossom? One can be carefree, yet careful and caring, all at once; they go together, or else things fall apart, and one ends up with the misery of indifference.

Who is this "we" you speak of? — jamalrob

Nice people.

Not you of course.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/alone-through-iran-1144-miles-of-trust#/

One of the best justifications for violence is that the other chap is more violent, and has to be stopped. If I wanted to find out who was more violent as a culture, I would count the corpses, and then count the weapon production.

As to non-lethal violence, I can remember being beaten as a child by the authorities of the avowedly Christian school. That's both primary and secondary school. And wasn't there just a word from the Russian leader, very cosy with the Russian Orthodox church, to the effect that wives should be grateful for being beaten because it makes them more likely to bear sons?

We don't do that any more. Or at least we do not do it with the sanction of parliament, God and tradition any more. But don't get too holier than thou about this, we still justify a deal of violence, but mainly a long way from here, in those benighted heathen countries where they know no better, in the hope that our enlightened attitude will flow through the bombs and devastation.

I wouldn't know about that. I heard it from this Jesus guy, but I never examined his tackle.

If everyone was actually equal, there would be no great virtue in treating them so. One does not need the existence of equity in order to believe in it, quite the reverse. There was this old story about the unequal distribution of talents, to the effect that what is meaningful is what you do with what you've got...

Some claim that our outrageous military expenditures were actually an economic weapon against the USSR, as the latter bankrupted itself trying to keep pace with our spending, thereby hastening its downfall. — Arkady

And some claim that the new Russia is a staunch ally, so that ended well.