The psychology literature doesn't designate a name for this phenomenon, though there's plenty of research about it. Libet called last minute changes of intention 'the veto power'. Robert Reimer in this paper summarises it thus:

...agents are normally embodied in their own body with all its neural processes. However, this feeling of embodiment can also be interrupted if neural processes accompanying an earlier action intention cause a muscle contraction that does not conform with the agent’s current action intention. This non-conformity, in turn, is grounded in the delay of those neural processes that accompany the agent’s earlier action intention and the slowness of her current intention’s neural processes. — Robert Reimer

"Everything has a function or purpose and its essential nature is to grow and achieve its purpose." — Gnomon

This is to conflate two different ideas in Aristotle. What's usually translated as 'function' is 'ergon', the special nature of what is named, e.g. a knife cuts, humans engage in soul-based rational consideration. This is different to 'telos' or 'end', the purpose of an activity.

Not 'Fountain' - that thing is worth millions. But much art is thrown away and burnt too. Often art is only kept because it has a significant monetary value. — Tom Storm

Actually the original is lost. Duchamp made seventeen copies in the 1960's, each of which is worth a few bob.

There are others reading, thinking, and in some cases commenting. — Fooloso4

I agree. Your disagreements interest me even if I don't have the urge to chip in. To post in a forum is to post for an audience as well as the one you're responding to.

There can be popular art, which is different from show business. In prehistoric times I wrote for tv series and there was a concept of a kind of public service among the makers - these things we are creating are about 'issues' and 'relationships' that next day the audience will talk about at the water-cooler. But we were in it for the money too, and the audience size and share; I don't think that as a partial motivation precludes art, which an earlier poster suggested.

Take cartoons: I follow Matt in the 'Daly Telegraph' even though that's not my politics because I think his stuff consistently rises to the level of popular art.

Intention is surely involved in evaluation. I feel the makers of programs like American Idol have more cynical aims, but they too want to be talked about at the water-cooler and to make money.

The irreality of reality tv is interesting to me, where people begin to behave in accordance with rules they think are 'dramatic', derived from fiction, while portraying a version of themselves - the drama often deliberately whipped up behind the scenes, or before the cameras roll. This to me is mostly spectacle, entertainment that does not aspire to art, even though an individual artist might appear there.

I take Dennett as a textbook example of scientific materialism, which I think is impossible to reconcile with any 'sense of the sacred' — Wayfarer

I may have mentioned to you before that I am personally taken with Jane Bennett's notion of 'vibrant matter'. This doesn't contradict scientific materialism, exactly, but it claims a vitality in all things, a 'thing power', which we generally overlook as it requires us to be highly attentive to the ecology of any situation. (I think the idea descends from Latour) Her view decenters us from the human, but also from the merely atomic, as she explores the issues for instance of 'mood' and 'atmosphere'. According to her John Hopkins website 'She is currently working on notions of a creative cosmos, in ancient Greek thought and in classical Daoist philosophies'.

The way Wittgenstein leads with Augustine in PI rubs me the wrong way. It feels like he is setting up a caricature, both with respect to Augustine's thought and with respect to the tradition which went on to develop Augustine's thought. It looks like Wittgenstein read a few sentences of Augustine's most popular work (The Confessions) and then used this (caricature) as a point of departure or foil for his own approach. — Leontiskos

This is not however how Wittgenstein regarded Augustine at all. One witness reports that Witt thought the Confessions 'the most serious book ever written'.

It's also an unusual starting point in a work of 20th century philosophy.

Wittgenstein's writing leads less to aporia than to a change in gestalt, a reconsidering of the way in which something is to be understood. — Banno

There's an interesting recent essay by Michael Campbell here which argues for a parallelism between how Wertheimer developed gestalt thinking in education - how children for example make progress by developing new structured perspectives - and Wittgenstein's approach.

Among accountants it’s particularly used in the sense of a ‘going concern’ - one that is capable of going on in business. See this .

And then you get to bring in those fun Sanskrit and Pali terms to placate it. — schopenhauer1

...although Schop himself used Greek terms some of the time, e.g. (I hope relevantly, I mainly know about Schop in relation to music not metaphysics):

the wise man always holds himself aloof from jubilation and sorrow, and no event disturbs his ἀταραξία [ataraxia]. — Schopenahuer, vol 1 p.88

But that's a problem with language itself. Not using such pronouns would lead to an extremely tedious interaction with it. Even if it was used as a marketing move from the tech companies in order to mystify these models more than they are, it's still problematic to interact with something that speaks like someone with psychological issues. — Christoffer

I am raising a philosophical point, though: what sort of creature or being or machine uses the first person singular? This is not merely a practical or marketing question.

Pragmatically speaking, I don't see why 'AI' can't find a vernacular-equivalent of Wikipedia, which doesn't use the first person. The interpolation of the first person is a deliberate strategy by AI-proponents, to advance the case for it that you among others make, in particular, to induce a kind of empathy.

Our entire language is dependent on using pronouns and identity to navigate a topic, so it's hard not to anthropomorphize the AI since our language is constantly pushing us in that direction. — Christoffer

The proponents and producers of large language models do, however, encourage this anthropomorphic process. GPT-x or Google bard refer to themselves as 'I'. I've had conversations with the Bard machine about this issue but it fudged the answer as to how that can be justified. To my mind the use of the word 'I' implies a human agent, or a fiction by a human agent pretending insight into another animal's thoughts. I reject the I-ness of AI.

Casa Mila, Gaudi. Curves :)

I think you again, strongly discount what Ligotti lays out here. — schopenhauer1

Well, I should read some more Ligotti, I agree. I am reflecting mainly on my own arc through life. When I was younger, Sartre and Camus excited me; and now I am older I am still 'committed' to a residue of existentialism. Indeed I continue to think that the sort of discourse we all engage in here on a forum like this is an important kind of commitment, to rational debate amid the rise of unreasoners.

But the notion that humans face a special kind of suffering leaves me cold. People eat another chicken for dinner that has been, out of sight, tortured throughout its short helpless life and, between chews, talk to each other about their profound suffering. They exchange messages on phones made by forced labour that they don't worry about, using rare metals whose mining causes great individual suffering and political strife where it is mined. They talk about wars in other places that their leaders are financing and arming where children die daily. If there is a calculus of suffering, the older I've got, the less I've come to count a generalised human anguish as important - though I still, myself, feel it - paradox remains.

Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.

I know this Schopenhauer quote well. But does it stand up to scrutiny? Is there an evidential basis for it? A priori I would have thought it more likely that the opposite holds: that intelligence enables a greater understanding of one's pain, which might in turn mitigate its emotional effects. Over the centuries, many generals and industrialists have justified the sufferings of their soldiery and workforces with this sort of view - as humans have in inflicting pain on the animals they kill for food and pleasure.

Ligotti and by extension you seem to me to be yearning for Grand Meanings. Why would there be such things? For a lifelong atheist like me these sound like the mere negation of a belief in a single god, or 'the unity of science' - some craving for an over-arching sense-making whojameflip, and a sense of grievous disappointment that it isn't to be found.

Perhaps there are only small meanings, built from small things: empirical discoveries in science that suggest bigger theories, striking works of art that suggest broader ways of thinking and feeling, profound personal experiences that seem to have big ramifications.

Out of such things it turns out that humans have a propensity to suffer, yes, and also a propensity to enjoy, and a propensity to understand and to investigate, and to know, love and hate, like and be indifferent to one another. These all emerge in the small scale and create a larger picture, often clearer to me in a Shakespeare play, say, or Beethoven, or children's art about a city, or a night of folk song, than in anything 'about' philosophy. Here I find value.

Martha Nussbaum is a highly-rated academic philosopher. I think her work is a good route in to thinking about emotion and philosophy.

I ask about despair: to what extent is it an emotional framework or a rational evaluation of suffering in life? — Jack Cummins

The Nussbaum approach is based on a broad view that these are not alternatives. Emotion on this view is how a thinking creature evaluates situations. Education about emotion, including self-education, is an essential element in how we learn to live well. There seems to me to be a connection between how I sometimes feel despair at the state of the world, and my attendance at demos, my membership of the green Party and my attempts to be kind to others (and, negatively, with how I sometimes have to bury my head in the sand and look for booze). I like Aristotle's view of ethics in relation to these problems: virtue involves recognising our emotions and working out how to express and channel them, which will in turn involve both emotional and rational attention. Self-appraisal of emotions contributes substantially to well-being.

I don't know if you know Martha Nussbaum's 'Emotions as judgments of value and importance'. I can't link it here but one can find a downloadable version among the paywalled versions. She argues for emotion to be recognised as a source of rational self-direction, albeit that it suffuses one's body and one's feelings with a sense that sometimes seems beyond rationality.

She is looking at emotions with an object: the emotional core of her article is her own grief at her mother's death. Sometimes it can seem as if emotions like 'despair' or 'hope' - which I don't think are quite opposites - are more generalised and lack 'an object', but I'm inclined to think that some reflection, if one is capable of reflection when distraught, say, does bring a focus on objects. I despair at my (in)ability to cope with a particular adversity. I hope for a positive sign from a fellow human being of sympathy.

Over the course of my life, I have tended to shift, when oppressed by dark moods, to thinking in this, object-focused way. I don't know if this is about me, or ageing.

But I've still got an existentialist heart. I and some of my leftie friends have, for instance, become more pessimistic about politics lately and some people express a generalised despondency. In this context I, oddly enough, take a kind of comfort in an existential view. I commit myself to at least attempting rational scrutiny of despair when I feel it in my heart. I remind myself of previous encounters with this feeling. This does lead to making the sense of despair 'about' a, or b, or x, or y. And that in turn leads to working out how to be quasi-Stoic about the specifics involved. I don't know if this is 'right', but it's certainly helpful to me.

No sympathy for Hamas or the people who voted them into power. They're getting their just desserts. — RogueAI

So, do we research who each of the dead voted for to determine our level of concern? — Echarmion

In the last election, in 2006, Hamas got 44.45% of the vote.

Just wondering- do you think there is a difference between an orca hunting in deliberative ways, or even playing games like toss the the human into the sea, and human levels of deliberation? I did not say that other animals can't deliberate, but that our being is of an existential one, whereby deliberation is our primary modus operendi. — schopenhauer1

Humans need s[e]lves for their being. They can't stand it. It does divide us from the rest of creation. We are aware that we are aware that we are aware, and that does make us a different kind of creature. — schopenhauer1

These are propositions I don't accept. The myth of our difference from other animals, especially the intelligent ones, is intertwined with our use and killing of them: it's important for us that they be Other. In the 20th century humans killed around 3 million whales for food and oil, mostly. So far we are still largely mystified by whale communication, though we utilise dolphin intelligence for military purposes.

Orcas hunt as a pod or group, their deliberation is mutual like much of ours, and I don't see the difference between their group activity and ours in the ways you're advocating or implying. There are many anecdotal stories of whale and dolphin suffering, especially in human captivity. We are ignorant of what it is like to be a dolphin or whale, so I don't see the basis for our claim to existential difference: their communication systems are so far largely impenetrable to us, though projects are currently under way to try to remedy our ignorance.

I think you'll find that Ray Brassier supports your pessimism, but disagrees with your differentiation between humans and other animals in the way you propose.

I think you misread the point here, and which is why it seems like it is normative and descriptive. Ligotti is being descriptive here, not counseling (in what I have so-far quoted). That is to say, unlike other animals, we are not "being" but having to make concerted efforts to "get caught up in being". It is not our natural mode, which is rather, a mode of deliberation. — schopenhauer1

I don't accept that non-human animals do not deliberate. In the last couple of decades a number of writers have outlined this argument. Here's a link for instance to a paper from last year: Stauffer says 'Humans are not the only animals capable of slow and thoughtful deliberation.' Orca hunting, corvid theory of mind, are other examples that demonstrate complex deliberative thought.

The more general point I am making is that you and Ligotti are in my view mistakenly describing action driven by the 'emotional' as somehow inaccurate and wrong. What is the case for that? It seems to me to privilege an imagined 'rationality' that in action can't be separated from emotion: the two are intertwined.

You remark of a human absorption in flow states, like other animals':

But this is a distraction. It is not natural, but like a kite, where we have to choose to get "caught up" in something to take our minds to the flow state. — schopenhauer1

It seems odd to me to regard this as 'not natural' when you've ascribed it as being like inside other animals' minds, where it presumably is 'natural'. I went back to your quotation of Ligotti in an old thread where he talks about

...laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own... — Ligotti

Interestingly this is the opposite of how Aristotle in the Nichomachean Ethics counsels us to live. He explores what are common emotions and considers how to cultivate what he sees as those promoting eudaimonia/well-being, and how to limit the negative emotions. This is, as he sees it, a virtuous education or an education in virtue: we apply rationality to our emotional lives. Rationality is not the opposite of the emotional, these aspects of us need to work in concert

But Ligotti and perhaps you seem to claim that emotions are 'inaccurate', arbitrary'. For me, emotions - informed by rationality - are what guide us to the true, accurate, right, good. A 'flow state', to which I have committed myself by rational deliberation about my emotional life, is a way of living well.

I stand corrected on the nature of Nynorsk.

Happy Christmas!

But when we comes to things that are killing us in real time, such as microplastics and hormones in food, they stay really quiet because it is not a topic covered by the BBC or New York Times. — Lionino

This is false. The NY Times is always banging on about microplastics, as in this Opinion essay earlier in the year: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/opinion/microplastics-health-environment.html

Hormones in food is more of a BBC thing. https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/junk_food_brain

The United Nations said in 1989 that the Earth would be underwater if we did not stop climate change by 2000, and yet the Netherlands (negative altitude) will still be afloat in 2024. — Lionino

The article to which you linked explained that one non-scientist official said something like this, but it's a popular misconception that he said or even implied that the underwater events would happen 'by 2000', and the predicted underwater events would affect very specific places, like Bangladesh.

A man-made object like a chair seems more about social notions like "use" and "intention", and indeed seems more subjective. — schopenhauer1

Even a chair can be tricksy, though, here's a Picasso sculpture of a chair:

a voice echoes outside the face rather than within it. I’ve observed enough brains to conclude neither words nor speakers exist in them, or anywhere else in the biology. — NOS4A2

Articulation and hearing of what's spoken happen in and through human bodies, though. (Just as writing and reading does) Language, although we often refer to it in the abstract, is grounded in the biological, surely?

(In passing; one's own voice echoes inside the head rather than outside it, which is why one's own voice sounds odd when heard, externally, from a recording, because normally one hears through one's bones)

Words/symbols are just one unit we define to divide up the language. It's hard to parse 'more than', or indeed 'less than' here. Speaking, writing, listening, reading are acts. We mostly make sense to each other by engaging in these actions, using spoken or written signs. From semaphore upwards, a sign tends to stand for something other than itself, as well as being itself.

Whatever happens in a person's imagination is secondary to the exchange of talk or writing, and different people will learn to assimilate and reflect on it differently.

I start to wonder if written language has musicality or not, or if it is just monotonous... — javi2541997

Written language certainly has style. For me it has a musicality, but that may be my bias: when I developed my creative writing, I did prose and drama-writing more or less at the same time. I think that has resulted in the spoken word influencing how I write. I find a lot of academic writing pointlessly stuffy and long-winded, but a danger of writing more directly is that academics can think you're just stupid :)

One difficulty in learning from Fosse, as regards philosophical writing, is that silences and pauses are subtle and illuminating in fiction or memoir, but unwise in writing about thought.

He started to feel more confident and comfortable writing drama thanks to the use of 'pauses', because he interpreted this as a silent language. Do you agree? How do you improvise pauses in your room or wherever you do this? — javi2541997

If I may also reply to this...I think Fosse is also referring to the musicality of spoken language. In music every pause, and its length, are carefully considered. In 'drama' in the widest sense, pauses provide and transform meaning. In comedy, for instance, timing is everything. The saddest exchanges can be made funny to an audience with the right pauses.

I've written quite a lot of drama and feel the craft side of Fosse's remarks are on the mark. I began writing believing that eloquence was in the vanguard of my aims; but with experience I realised that the eloquence of prose sometimes/often is ineffective in drama, and the pause, alongside the rhythm of speech and interchange, matter keenly.

I'm not disputing that Fosse also means something more portentous in talking about silence, but I think the baseline is a craft-based one.

I'm not sure what you mean by them feeling dodgy? — Christoffer

I'm sorry, 'dodgy' is too vague a word for my problems with qualia and emergence. I mean, both terms seem to me to cover too many, likely disparate, phenomena. In covering them they do give us indications of where thinking might go, but I doubt that any one idea is that comprehensive. That is, I accept the needs for explanatory terms which qualia and emergence are trying to fulfil, but they seem too all-embracing and thinly-justified.

Broadly I'm a pluralist. I think the search for the unity of science is a fool's errand, and these terms are, to simplify, trying to occupy spaces where the unity can't hold, or science lacks plausible claims (as it does for instance in much of social life). I like Nancy Cartwright's view of the philosophy of science, derived from years of working with and observing scientists: that scientific findings are often quite narrow, confined to very specific controlled circumstances, and that we vastly over-extrapolate from them.

...religious belief skew and distorts an honest perspective of reality, especially collective reality. And so by that distortion the individual will always have trouble navigating reality as it truly is and will always end up in either internal or external conflict with others in a collective society. In order to find harmony, religious belief needs to be excluded. — Christoffer

To me this demonstrates an excess of respect for a science-derived view of 'reality' and a deficit of respect for religion. To say to the religious, I respect much of what you achieve but your beliefs are bollox: how is that dialogue going to work? What's the word 'honest' doing in there? Do you think all those neuroscientific researchers whose work turns out to be unreplicable were 'honest'? Do you think people who dedicate themselves to a religious life are 'dishonest'? Where, more generally, do the ideas of 'harmony' and the 'collective' derive from, and why can't there be equal dialogue about them between the religious and irreligious?

Can mind drive matter or are we simply another type of matter driving matter in perfect accordance with entropic processes? On a large enough scale, does not the complexity of the entire human race only just become another set of a system based on universal principles forming complex outcomes? — Christoffer

I'm an atheist but more sympathetic to religion than you. I don't quite know why.

From a historical perspective, to me the contrast between religion and science is overdone. Religious stories once claimed an over-arching importance, including a dominion over natural enquiry. But with the emergence (sic) of natural philosophy, it still remained and remains possible to be a good scientist and a religious believer, or so it seems to me. Many sects hang on to myths as if they were factually-based, so you have to choose your sect, and dissent sometimes from the mainstream, but science-as-metaphysics has its myths too. (Years ago a version of this forum had a poster who kept banging on about the difference between metaphysical naturalism and methodological naturalism, and the importance of this insight has stuck with me)

I've been studying philosophy academically in later life, and I confess, after lots more reading, that the notions of qualia and emergence feel dodgy. They come over like vague and sometimes slippery notions that are struggling to explain what happens beyond the limits of materially-based rational enquiry.

The thing is, they are attempting to do that because many people, including me, feel that something is missing, or not accounted for, in the elaborate networks of contemporary science. One way forward is to embrace other views as science: I think ecology makes that step. J J Gibson's ecological psychology, for instance, still has more potential to develop, once we see systems and potential systems in a wide view.

Ecology begins to imagine other creatures and indeed other non-creature elements in our world as agents. I don't know if you know 'Vibrant Matter' by Jane Bennett, which is an attempt to recover some out-of-fashion ideas about vitality in an ecological context. I read it full of optimism but finished it worried it was all a bit fuzzy-wuzzy, and I need to read it again.

And panpsychism.

And then there's the science of placebos, as an interesting example: placebos work. What's going on when they do and don't work? What is our analysis missing? Something in the very nature of our sociality, I'd say.

there is a big difference between the spoken and the written language, or between the spoken and the literary language. The spoken language is often a monological communication of a message that something should be like this or like that... The literary language is never like that – it doesn’t inform, it is meaning rather than communication, it has its own existence. — javi2541997-quoting-Fosse

I'm just reading Fosse's Trilogy (in English translation). We should be clear on the context: Norwegians have mainly written in Bokmål, and Fosse is a pioneer in writing instead in Nynorsk, a largely spoken, and a minority-use, language. So what he has done is to make his version of a vernacular language into a literary language. To me, at least in Trilogy, this has the effect of making the language almost incantatory, and often deliberately repetitive in the way people normally speak, but contrary to the way people normally write.

So he has found a unique way of carving out a form of language that is familiar to others, yet unfamiliar as written-and-literary.

It seems to me that in prose and drama, Fosse is arguing that he tries to escape himself into a way of writing which nevertheless, in a Bakhtinian way, has meaning only in multi-voiced dialogue between the writer and the reader. (He specifically contrasts poetry as a form whose meaning tends to refer only to itself)

His approach is very much about fiction. I'm not convinced that what he says can refer back to the sort of writing we do here, on a forum, about philosophy, where we are attempting dialogue relating to a previously-known set of ideas and writings. But it holds to this extent, that as soon as one writes, an identity sprouts up on the page, me-as-writer, who uses words in ways that sometimes surprise me.

So with the morality of truth must also come the morality of fairness, and equality. — unenlightened

In my 20's I worked as an aid and welfare rights adviser. I realised with some alarm that many of the most positive and entrepreneurial of the poor people I was trying to help would do well - would benefit their families, themselves and society as a whole - to lie, as long as they were cunning and bold enough not to be found out. Welfare systems mostly impose a very high marginal tax rate on those earning small amounts of money: that's why small-scale builders and helpers of all kinds ask you for cash, so they don't have to declare it. It's one reason why I'm for a basic universal income: it promotes honesty.

Likewise, if you're a member of a category that those in authority discriminate against, honesty is of doubtful value. Those in authority may despise you for it, your fellows will judge you naive at best, and you're more likely to end up in trouble/jail/humiliation.

joint attention — schopenhauer1

Starting from Tomasello you are rather assuming there is just one account of joint/shared attention. But there are a number of philosphical options. Among armchair folk, that is.

There is a more individualistic approach from Michael Bratman, who's written a book about it. For him a shared intention can be adequately represented as a combination of individual intentions to do the same thing, more or less. This doesn't require a conceptual leap in the justification of language to the sort of 'cooperative' purposes Tomasello assumes, or regards himself as uncovering.

The cooperative approach favoured by Tomasello was pioneered by Margaret Gilbert, whose work was neglected for a long time then was re-examined. Her classic example is about walking together: her emphasis is that there is a 'collective' intention involved that can't be filleted out into individuals' intention to undertake a joint project. She argues that this is because certain extra obligations arise through joint action.

I'm abbreviating here, obvs.

There is a substantial literature that has evolved from these ideas over the last 30 years.

The relation with empiricism seems to me more complicated than you're saying. Researchers go to a prescribed portion of the world already armed with ideas, looking to confirm or refute them; the ideas come from the armchair or from previous researchers. Certainly for instance Gilbert and Searle's speculations long preceded Tomasello's work in the field (though I really like his fieldwork too, I'm a cooperative-minded person). And Chomsky's initial arguments in the 1960's were taken by some as justifying *not* engaging in certain kinds of empirical linguistic research, since variation between people and their languages was not relevant to his overarching theory: the philosophical presumption dictates what empirical research you undertake, and the reasons for it.

Are Plato's dialogues the first that deserve to be taken seriously? What does it mean to take a written work seriously? The playfulness of Plato's works has often been noted. Can a work be both playful and serious? — Fooloso4

Something of the same applies to the Symposium: after a profound debate on the nature of eros-love, the whole thing ends in confusion, a great deal of wine-drinking and some participants forgetting altogether what was discussed :)

To me the 'erotic' emphasis is entwined in the Symposium with female imagery, the desire to beget, and pregnancy. These features make it startling: Socrates does not quote himself on love, he develops a dialogue-within-a-dialogue in which the woman Diotima explains love's nature to him, and thence, through him, to his male companions. So the centrality of eros, even where it focuses initially on male-to-male desire (as apparently some of the Greek verbs do, in a way that's disguised by English translation), is built on eros as an expression of a craving to beget - to become pregnant with knowledge of the good and the beautiful. Personally I really like the image of pregnancy-with-the-good, which seems to segue from being a metaphor to a kind of true state, though there's lots of scholarly debate about the image.

Others help to identify a continuity for me. A few years ago I signed deeds giving 'power of attorney' to two old friends if I become unable to look after my own affairs. To sign such a deed says, I imagine a future where someone - identified by others whom I love as me - needs care. I am old enough to know people of my sort who have lost their sense of who they are, so I recognise the future me might regard these 'two old friends' when they eventually interfere in my life as mysterious kind, or indeed unkind, strangers. All the same, I trust them, here and now and pledged for the future, provided of course they're still compos mentis themselves, to know 'who I am'.

Socio-politically, the problem of personal identity hit a crisis around 1900. Before then you could travel across a hill, or ocean, and just become someone else - unless you were unlucky enough to meet someone from a past life in your new present one.

But around 1900 states began to want to identify 'persistent criminals' and 'immigrants' as having a certain set of characteristics. Passports slowly became more common. Fingerprints emerged as a scientifically dodgy solution, although the Bertillon system in France was much more reliable.

Just, broadly, to emphasise: the problem of continuity of identity is often one for others: I am not the same as I used to be. But 'others' can in this context include versions of oneself at other times. I, in the present, still hold 'myself' responsible responsible for a reprehensible thing 'I' did in 1978: but it cannot be made good by the present I, only acknowledged and, perhaps, entered as a debit on a ledger where moral credits are also claimed.

All your concerns target moral nihilism, not moral anti-realism. The former is a subspecies of the latter.

As a moral subjectivist, I have no problem valuing things and having adhering to moral principles and codes--they just don't correspond to moral facts. — Bob Ross

Maybe we should listen to the ghost of Nelson Goodman and argue for moral irrealism: that there are incompatible different versions of value systems, and in any given context at least one of them needs to be taken so seriously as to be called 'moral'.

Anyhow, IMO teleology seems alive and well, it's just been naturalized and given the name "function," or gets framed in terms of "constraint." I see nothing wrong with this. There is definitely a sense in which "eyes are for seeing." If eyes didn't see, we wouldn't have them.

But it's useful to distinguish between teleological explanations that appear to invoke first person experience and volition versus ones that simply focus on the appearance or likellyhood of an end state given the characteristics of that end state. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Interestingly enough Aristotle does distinguish telos from ergon, which is usually translated as 'function'; and furthermore, in defining ergon, he does seem to equivocate between the activity involved and the end-product. Thus the ergon of a sculptor is a sculpture - the product of doing 'well'; whereas the ergon of the eye is seeing - the process of visually apprehending 'well'.

The ergon of a human being in this context is eudaimonia, living 'well' in the sense of 'good' living.

I wonder if this distinction might illuminate the machine/organism distinction. Both machine and organism may have ergon/function, but the telos is a feature of the living 'purposive' being, even if the telos is no more than Darwin's survival to reproduce.

Ken, I've been coming here for quite a few years. I'd say: Why not join quietly and make a few comments, get the hang of how things are done, as you would with any new (to you) group of people? Why shout?

This argument doesn't get off the ground unless you explain what you think is meant by intelligence, let alone what justifies giant leaps like...

If our subordinate parts - organs, tissues, cells -- are our collective subconscious — ken2esq

As for references to Freud, I personally am deeply interested in him. This summer I went to his old apartment and consulting rooms in Vienna at Berggasse 19 and was awed just to be there. But you'd have to put some work in, to relate his views about the subconcscious to your speculations about 'intelligence', even to a Freud-fan.

Why are so many clinging to a tribe, instead of their own comprehension of the good? — Athena

Perhaps though the question is askew? To many it will make perfect sense to 'cling' to a tribe as that is their notion of a good, and a more powerful one that an abstract 'comprehension'.

In this sense I feel the contrast in the original question is misplaced. If we consider the Scandinavian body politic, for instance, where social democracy remains strong, mutuality is a powerful element in what binds people together. Max Weber is in this respect an interesting figure. He was in one sense a Kantian promulgating the notion of the enlightenment autonomous individual; but his foundational work in establishing sociology as a discipline, and his political beliefs in the benefits of (some kinds of) partisanship place the individual clearly at the nexus of social networks.