↪fishfry Exactly - and that's part of what of is so flagrant about this. The replication crisis is The Big Topic in psychological circles -& has been for a pretty long while at this point! It's not just that the approach is bad for the reasons in the OP - it's that those doing it can't plead ignorance. Everyone (in these circles) knows there is a crisis of replication - yet they're, many of them, still hacking the system for flashy results. — csalisbury

In my field, the phrase people openly use when talking about their data is “how can we spin this”? I am not making this up, I’ve had a conversation a few weeks ago at a conference with a poster presenter who used the words, “if we want to, we can spin the result like this”. It’s part of the discourse and it is understood that there is a storytelling(“spin”) aspect to it and nobody objects to this. Editors have more than once asked us to rewrite our paper so that our post-hoc findings can be re-cast as an a priori prediction; there is no sense that there’s anything wrong with that.

People who tell this kind of storytelling dominate the field, they dominate the funding and the job scene. If as a young student you are trying to do the right thing, you will not publish in top journals because your “story” is too ambiguous and tentative. People in these fields have no hesitation in making the strongest possible claim and then going beyond that. They publish in top journals, get the jobs and the research money. The honest student can’t compete. Once you have hundreds of articles to your name, it’s a winner take all situation. Fiske, in her interview yesterday, mentioned that she has some 300+ published articles; that’s the kind of number that gives you money when you want it, and where you want it, for whatever comedic project you come up with. So it is imperative that people are shocked into stopping this.

Disgruntled prof linked

Had a look about. Couldn't find it.

If it's not appeared after you've got 21 posts, there can be a delay in plushforums updating stuff - it could be that the permission to report posts is granted later than you making your 21st post. I'm telling you this because we've had some issues and anomalies before regarding how properties of post counts are queued on plush servers.

If you've still been unable to see the bar I highlighted in a day or so after you've made enough posts, either something I told you is wrong or something weird is going on with plush. I'd gamble that you'll get the functionality enabled quite soon after you've got enough posts, though. :smile:

I tried to use mod powers to fix it, it looks like the Twitter user changed their access permissions to non-public.

Or is this like Reddits philosophy subs where you only discuss academic philosophies and cant give a "up to standard" comment unless it refrences or explains existing philosophies that basically recycles information in some wierd elitist mentality. — Tiberiusmoon

We do have content standards, but the bar is much much lower; both in tone and content; than academic discussion. We want this to be a space where people can play around with ideas, sharpen their wits and rhetorical skill, and study stuff together.

This is a place where someone is wrong about something interesting on the internet. And that someone is often you (and me). It's also sometimes a place where you can ask academic questions or make academic arguments about philosophy and receive further academically grounded answers. But you can't count on it, and we don't require it.

I think the place would lose much of its charm if we enforced high standards for content - be reasonably polite, put a bit of effort into your grammar and spelling, try and be thoughtful, don't troll, try and stay on topic. Being knowledgeable about things is just gravy.

Usual stuff.

Reply to this post and then check again. You need >20 posts to get the functionality to show up.

I realise this is a multipost, but considering that "going off topic" isn't generally against the rules, I cleared the mod queue for the thread. I will leave up the exchanges that you used to summon me.

@Apollodorus - this thread is an earnest attempt to engage with the text of Plato's Phaedo, if you are unable or unwilling to do so, take it elsewhere. I invite people to flag posts in this thread that they believe are not strictly on topic and I (or someone else) will moderate them accordingly.

If you want to join in, do your best to make it textual. That's gonna hold for everyone.

Below the post you want to report, next to the time it was posted, you'll see a "...", click next to there and press the flag.

You can't get away with irreproducible results in physics, but you can in sociology. — fishfry

And medicine and biology and ecology and genetics and...

Which is exactly the reappearance of the stress of the past in the present as "inappropriate reactions" — unenlightened

I'm quite happy to characterise them as "inappropriate reactions", as it mixes up what counts as a need with the norms they are recognised by, and muddying the waters regarding that concept was my goal here.

But did you misunderstand me? All I meant was that when we talk about the effects of trauma, we are talking about past trauma, not present trauma. — unenlightened

I think trauma blurs the distinction between the past and the future. The past has a frustrated need in it, the future is lived to compensate. Perhaps that's where we're talking past each other.

Isn't there something violent in this whole schema of needs and tactics, and the rest? Who talks about people in terms of needs and tactics, like this? The R D Laing of Knots, the Eric Berne of Games People Play, the Gregory Bateson of Many Books, the Alan Watts of Many Lectures. — csalisbury

Yes. Heuristics regarding people quickly become idealisations. Applies as much to mysticism as therapy as psychology.

But then that's not the trauma we're talking about is it? — unenlightened

I don't think the boundary is that clear. To the extent you can displace/distract to preserve your ego/self defend, your needs and tactics have a fungibility. If I need to beat you because I can't bear my own shame... What distinguishes a need from a strongly held desire which is critical in maintaining one's self concept?

Well the theory, if I understand aright, is that you might need someone to to be subservient,{I'm not sure about that} but you cannot be so specifically dependent on my subservience. Choosing me is a tactic to fulfil the more general need. — unenlightened

The example Marshall gives is Mcdonalds. One needs food; one does not need a Big Mac; that's a tactic, {though they want you to think it's a need}. And anger is a tactic I employ to keep me away from Big Macs. — unenlightened

I guess this brings up what demarcates a need from a tactic. If I have a need for love and respect, is my
relationship with my romantic partner a tactic? Or can I have a need for my partner in specific?

I think there's an angle of attack on the problem with declaring that a need is a motivator for a tactic; aligning tactics with an attempt to actualise/satisfy a need. And that would tie into

Unmeetable needs never get met - by definition - and that I think indicates that they are not needs. — unenlightened

the idea that an unmeetable need is a grammatical mistake/inconceivable - since needs must have a tactic that could satisfy them, by the above anyway.

What would this taxonomy make of trauma? A frustrated, festering past need which no tactic could address in context, leading to a frustrated present need - or a shadow of one. The past need is still implicated as an anchor in the psyche. "I need them to stop (tormenting me)". I imagine that some of this turns on the distinction between a need and a tactic?

But give it a go, you might like it. — unenlightened

I've been trying to do similar language adjustments for a while, learning a more E-prime.mentalese "I am" talk translates to "I did" talk, "I should" talk translates to "I will" or "I want" talk, "never/always" talk -> "here/now" talk. "It is" goes to "It seems to me".

But how can needs be wrong? — unenlightened

I can need you to be subservient to me. I can need you to play a role which destroys you or others. I can codepend, I can confine, I can dominate. My ego can require thus.

You might say that this is not a need, but I wonder where the line is drawn, if "I need you to respect my intellect" counts, but "I need you to shut up and do what I say forever" isn't.

We are taught that retribution is redemptive? — unenlightened

Anger is useful in reclaiming oneself or one's voice against a slight, intrusion or violation. If a riot is the language of the unheard, anger is its intonation. Sometimes you need to be a jackal to rip apart a chain.

How can they be unmeetable? — unenlightened

You can need something which cannot be given. The modality of that cannot is practicality rather than abstract possibility - I might need flexible working hours, but my contract might say otherwise. Needs become unmeetable given a context.

Or a person, perhaps:

I'm sooo glad someone else 'gets it'. For me, it's like -of course, I already knew all this, but I couldn't quite bring it together so that it worked. — unenlightened

Perhaps some will not have the scope, introspective ability, insight, emotional integration, integration of self concept with behaviour, to see the peace giraffe speak would conjure into being. In other words, one must be in a place where they can make the choice not to be another's jackal.

Me? I'm sure I'm a jackal, I'm just not sure who I need to eat. Wolves reproduce wolves.

I need this to be false because my anger is redemptive.
I need this to be a partial truth because sometimes I must force people to meet my needs.
I need this to be wrong because no one could meet those needs.
I need this to be wrong because my needs are wrong.

I don't really mind our pseudoscientific members and their writing. It's fun for me to feel all superior. On the other hand, allowing bad science a place to speak is not this forum's job. It's here to provide bad philosophy a place to speak. They come here because they get smacked down and banned on science forums. You actually have to know something real to write there. — T Clark

I tend to delete low effort obviously wrong ones for being low effort. I tend to leave decently written obviously wrong ones up. To my reckoning, we're not a space that formally punishes being factually wrong - it's the perniciousness of the falsehood that matters.

I will delete commonly known pseudoscience inspired topics without much mercy, though. Since they're about harmful disinformation.

Well the promise of political psychology is more complex than that. What the OP and the book in question is describing here is a trait-based framework where personal traits such as "authoritarian" or "cooperation" or "openness to change" or "cosmopolitanism", "introversion-extroversion", "agreeableness", "curiosity" and a potpourri of other traits (and in the case of the book in question, narcissism) can explain or predict a person's political orientation, attitudes, or policy preferences. This is bunk. — Maw

AFAIK open-ness has some discriminatory power regarding conservative political opinion (eg here), but that's a far cry from an individualist causal reading (trait open-ness and personality psych -> political belief).

It seems to me you're reacting against the latter, individualistic "mental traits determine political activity/ belief/affiliation" belief, and not necessarily the idea that political ideologies and psychometric quantities can covary.

KCA? Knowledge Commercialisation Australasia? — Banno

Probably Kalam Cosmological Argument.

Welcome!

I actually think we agree here (though I'm still shaky on the meaning/usage of 'pace.' I'd long taken it to mean 'contra, with respect' but have since seen it used in different ways elsewhere, so I may misunderstand you.) — csalisbury

It could be that my use of pace is shite. I used it and in read it as "in deference to", I never even googled the other "in deference to contrary opinion" thing! Sorry! I @'d you because I thought we would agree with each other.

Where else? By thinking and questioning, and by dialogue with others. It's not only reading, after all.

Otherwise I don't think I fully understood your argument here.

I do agree it's philosophical to ask about philosophy. No doubt about it. — Xtrix

I wouldn't call what I wrote an argument. It isn't a syllogism or a logical form, it's a rhetorical appeal to the alignment of philosophy with purposiveness in life.

It seems to me there are two ways to undermine philosophy as a whole: the naive way and the informed way. The naive way is where you "just don't see the point", the informed way is where philosophy as an abstract praxis has virtues/utility denied of it through argument or empirical observation by someone who's actually been committed to it. The naive way is is practiced by engineer stereotypes, the informed way has a few philosophical luminaries (those inspired by Buddhism, Diogenes, Wittgenstein...) associated with it.

But (pace @csalisbury), there's this tendency for everyone to sometimes engage in philosophical reflection. "Dialogue with others" - absolutely. How much is your life enriched by if you approach a conversation with someone philosophically? I mean you can learn so much, be changed so much, by the words of a stranger if you bring to the encounter any kind of framework or product of sustained understanding. I'm sure you'll have a catalogue of conversations that "you will (and now have) remembered for the rest of your life", how much of that comes with the philosophy? As a means of engagement with the world, being able to be moved by its form as well as its content, so to speak.

And perhaps that's recreational? I mean it doesn't give you a living wage most of the time, but it sustains you, no? It lets you keep going, it imbues the remainder of life with a significance and impact that it may not have had otherwise. It seems to me, if you've got the temperament, philosophy is very close to meaning of life stuff. And you know, it's not like "transferrable skills" is something that's value neutral. It seems to me if you have this kind of temperament, your friends will value you as a guide.

It seems to me very odd to me that insight into how norms/values/life is constructed, how things "hang together in the most general sense" (Sellars) is devalued. For lifers like us, perhaps, the doubt of its utility is just another instance of what we already do?

Figured it's worth pointing out on the Forum sometimes. Let's not get caught up in abstract thought at the expense of everything else. — Xtrix

I think it's a pretty philosophical thing to feel like philosophy is insufficient. If it's, as @Judaka says, recreational - it can be an art, like conceptual sculpture, art criticism, a combat sport... Religious figures, spiritualists aren't feeling like their studies and rituals are worthless. Us? We read, it can change how we see things. Where else are you going to learn what you learn by practicing philosophy?

This has veered way off the OP. Which was for people to discuss what they think there is. — Manuel

:up:

I'll try and recontextualize.

Response to @Isaac:

Yes, I think that's true - in that it's missing from a neurological account. But that would be a matter of translation wouldn't it? — Isaac

Translation + stress testing of the bridge translation builds. Like Barret's work on emotion - to a large extent a sustained attack on the idea that we should think of emotions as distinct, inherent natural kind categories which our brains simulate, and replacing that view with something more like emotions are an inflection/contextualisation of a state of arousal (how intense is the body+mind's state) and valence (how pleasant/unpleasant is the state). EG rage would be high arousal and unpleasant, but so would terror, and the difference is context.

The question the folk psychologist should be asking of the neuroscientist in that context is more like "but what does that mean for me?".

Yes. And the inverse question induced by the translation; said the neuroscientist to the folk theorist - does this make any difference on a day to day basis? Does this make a difference therapeutically?

The accusation would be "You've not translated that", rather than "you've not accounted for something".

I think that's true, the difference between "translation" and "accounting" I imagine comes from the overall framing of the issue that someone has, though.

Recontextualisation of issue:

I think perhaps the dispute is related to an ontology induced by existential commitments of activities talked about earlier. One way of framing the issue is that if people behave as if there were a thing, and that behaviour wouldn't work as it does without it functioning as if there were a thing, does it make sense to say that thing exists in some sense?

There are persuasive arguments for that - if something behaves as if a model of it were true, then the model can be treated as real/held to be true/is true. Like F=ma or something like that. If the system involved works in accordance with F=ma, F=ma is true for it. So that system's behaviour generates a commitment to that it acts in accord with that description of it.

What would the difference be for something like: "celeriac makes my partner feel sick", giving the behavioural inference "they would not buy something with celeriac in it", that being true, and thus my partner's feeling sick acts explanatorily like the m in F=ma does?

It seems like a hard needle to thread; the pragmatic utility and predictive ability of those commitments vs things like "feeling sick" having a dubious place in the scientific image.

@David Pearce

Hey, I have another question, are there any aspects of the current homo sapiens that you would identify as already transhuman?

Sometimes in other forums, philosophy of mind sections are literally only about neuroscience. It should then be called brain philosophy, which is fine. But so far as I can see, current brain science says very, very, very little about the mind. Which is strange, admittedly. Still, if we "reduce" mind to brain, we lose out on almost everything. — Manuel

What would an answer to that request be like? I mean how would you know you've had such an answer. I could say - your occipital cortex starts a chain of neural firings which, on average, lead to reports consitent with what we describe as 'seeing a tree'. Why isn't that an answer, what's missing? — Isaac

Maybe one part of "what's missing" is regarding the scope of useful condensations of the information. On a day to day basis you don't have access to someone's brain, but you do have access to someone's behaviour.

That raises the question of how to admit the utility of folk psychology heuristics without making them the be all and end all of one's philosophy of mind. So, whatever symmetry there is between brain events and psychological/intentional events can surely be leveraged both ways without reducing either domain to the other in all contexts? Two examples:

EG 1: if I associate a class of behaviours (say tunnel vision in panic attacks) with a class of brain events (decreased correlation of emotional processing flows with cognitive flows and disruption of function of the visual cortex), I can still use some folksy descriptors of tunnel vision "extreme focus on one thing, significance of mild threats elevated, misclassification of events into threats" even if "focus", "significance", "threats" and "misclassification" are really somewhere between metaphors and models. Even if the models are wrong, they're still useful (Tukey Box).

EG 2, if I learn my partner "hates garlic", that gives me some of their behavioural tendencies and lets me incorporate that into how I treat them. If I'm a hard reductionist or eliminativist or one of those brands, that doesn't stop me from believing "my partner hates garlic" in whatever metaphorical/analogical register mental events lay (to be later mapped to neural ones) and acting upon it.

What's frustrating is when despite the enormous progress in physics, specifically in the quantum domain, we learn almost nothing about manifest reality. It's better than nothing though. — Manuel

Aye! I think much of "manifest reality" isn't physical strictly speaking; as in you don't gain too much knowledge about a social institution from the thought that its office buildings are made of atoms. Much comes from the arrangement and interaction of things. I think there's more stuff in the scientific image than physics, eg the social sciences, neuroscience, genetics, engineering, anthropology. The widespread focus on physics as the discipline of knowledge that deals with fundamental reality seems pretty weird to me!

This is an ontological judgement and, as such, it's already working within a defined ontological framework. — T Clark

I agree!

Not to be all meta and all. That's the problem with, one of the problems with, ontology. Where do you stand?

I don't think it's a problem, it's a cost of doing business.

Yeah, I'd like to avoid commitment ontologies actually. What I think there is may change as I learn new things or change. — Manuel

:up:

Inferring what exists from what we do seems backwards to me. Like "If you wanna know what exists, look at what people do!". But like... I wanna change what I do based on what I think. I'm sure the two can be reciprocally interrogated - what people do, what there is. And perhaps that inference, from practice to commitment, is a very sophisticated move in such a reciprocally determining game, but it doesn't tell you anything the original practice doesn't.

You made some comments about the manifest and scientific image, in those terms commitment ontologies feed the manifest image into an ontology, whereas it seems philosophy when it's working well can be a bridge between the scientific and manifest image as well as a handmaiden in both domains.

To be clear, I think Foucault is fine and Deleuze is quite creative, though I still think that some of the observations made by Sokal and Bricmont merit a reply. Deleuze is instrumental, for example, in the novels of Michael Cisco, who is totally unique and mind expanding. But I can't extend being charitable to Derrida or Lacan. I know others will strongly disagree, but it's just not for me. — Manuel

:up:

I know the feel. I feel that way about Lacan too!

@Olivier5

If you're just gonna mock our guest, you'll be deleted.

I'm assuming The Ontology of Tuber Roots was discussed by some Deleuzian? :lol: One has to keep one's eye's open for the Paris Postmodernists, they come up with the fanciest of ideas. — Manuel

Yes! And I found it ridiculous even though I love Deleuze. I find shitting on Deleuze from afar distasteful, what I found distasteful about the seminar - though it is wonderfully Deleuzian in form - was that Deleuze's metaphysics was being taken as simultaneously a metaphor and an explicans for tuber root branching processes.

It does. I'm far from confident in what I'm saying, I'm just trying things out. So let me pose to you the following question, given that all of this depends on the "starting point", what would you leave out in your system? As an example that could frame the conversation, how would you deal with fictitious entities like Frodo or Santa Claus? — Manuel

I wouldn't want to say Frodo doesn't exist, because we're speaking about them. I think Frodo exists as a fictitious entity. I think that works because people believe in Frodo, and don't seem confused over whether the Lord of the Rings is real etc. I like Austin's analysis here (the pragmatic distinction between existence and reality). As a rule of thumb I don't like "exists" I prefer "exists as", specifying the mode in which something exists.

I also wouldn't want to say "Frodo exists" in most contexts. Because then it sounds like "Frodo is real", and that's just delusional.

I think Santa Claus is quite different from Frodo, Santa Claus is embedded in the rituals of social custom in a way Frodo just isn't. Parents invest in convincing their children that Santa Claus exists, they don't with Frodo. They exist quite differently.

But they both seem to be part of social customs, and they're both not real... So perhaps in some umbrella term way they both exist as social constructs!

I get the point, that "impossibility of experimental science" doesn't make sense. But would the things discussed in such titles eventually lead to mental entities, concepts or what? Taken as titles, only one word in the title speaks of entities "tuber roots", as I understand them. — Manuel

I think perhaps you're focussing on the paper title statements and what entities they quantify over and whether the nouns in them have referents . That's one way of interpreting existential commitment (a Quinean way), and you can find what someone's committed to from what statements they make ("to be is to be the value of a bound variable"). Another way is to imagine what must be the case for someone to act how they do, believe what they do, irrespective of the propositional form of the statement. Like when someone says "I do" in a wedding, that entails a host of things exist in a myriad of ways - like a partner, wedding as a social custom, romantic relationships, courtship, contracts, rituals... But none of those are quantified over in the text of the speech act.

That's fair. But would a framework of yours try to do away with certain postulates, or would you try to keep as many things as possible? — Manuel

I don't think it's possible to answer that question generically? If you're doing ontology, and how you frame things / your conceptual approach is a driver of the answers you get to ontological questions, there's no higher court to evaluate it in. If you stake yourself on a claim, you're already going to start interpreting things one way rather than another. EG, what could possibly decide whether it's better to say:

Well, we can speak of God, but he needn't exist: he'd be a fictitious entity for an atheist and the Supreme Being for a believer. Thus we could retain God in a manifest ontology, i.e. at least a mental construction. — Manuel

God doesn't exist vs God does exist but only as a social construct vs God does exist but only as an idea?

That's the kind of thing that depends on the weather and starting point, right? Questioning the question is utmost importance with ontology.

Your answer is true, on a person by person basis. My initial reaction would be that of being careful not to do away with things, unless we can show such things to be of no use, which is admittedly a very broad goal. It would be nice to reach some agreement on this area, but it's extremely difficult, given how different we all are. — Manuel

Yes. I'm not trying to come at this from a place of radical relativism regarding what there is; the "things themselves" are suggestive. And you can't fiat reality away. It's more than the things themselves strongly underdetermine how they are interpreted; so a large part of ontology is finding an appropriate angle of attack on what you're making an ontology of.

EG, imagine these parody paper titles:

Mereological nihilism and the impossibility of community action
The Rhizomatic Ontology Of Tuber Roots (this one's actually got real seminars on it, fuck)
Kant and the Impossibility of Experimental Science
The Irrelevance of Belief to Human Decision Making: propositional content from Aristotle to Gadamer.

The angle of attack on "what is there" strongly influences what is concluded about it. And that doesn't stop there being wrong answers, better answers, worse answers, irrelevant questions...

I don't know if my general metaphysical tastes matter so much; systems (assemblage theory stuff), how questions, frameworks around how questions, questioning the question, emphasis on locality rather than architectonics...

But that's my approximation. So, on to the easy question: what is there? — Manuel

My own answer: systems.

But it's funny isn't it, everyone is compelled to agree with the Quine quote, but it leaves so much out. Two philosophers could presumably agree on every aspect of how the mind, say, works in practice, but disagree on whether it exists. The question leaves out all the interesting bits; the speculative/conjectural/provisional how answers, and the frames of interpretation of how things are.

It seems to me "What is there?" is an extremely limited question, it leaves out why someone would assent to one thing existing and not another; the "quibbling over cases" constitutive of the quote's construal of ontology is actually driven by a different subject matter; the hows, the frames. The latter, IMO, is the appropriate level of discourse for ontology.

Bascially, who cares whether we say it exists or not, how it works is the important thing. EG, does someone who believes God exists as a social construct and myth disagree with a hardline atheist on the appropriate ontology for God?

Doctrinally, "What is there?" is answered by "How we imagine what there is".

It's possible your recent comment has been deleted — David Pearce

Strange... I wonder what problem they had with it. — Olivier5

I deleted it because I couldn't tell if you (Olivier5) meant it in good humour or not. Since David seems to have taken it in good humour I guess it's fine!

So far, it seems to me Damasio gives primacy to the body, whilst Spinoza's parallelism doesn't. — Eugen

If you're used to reductive or emergentist physicalisms, Spinoza's parallelism will seem unintuitive, and like it doesn't give "primacy to the body". But...

In historical context, Spinoza forcing a continuity/parallel between the mind and the body was enough of a departure from the doxa+theology of his time to get him branded an atheist and a heretic, and since then he's been seen as a particularly hard line determinist - on the side of the question (roughly): how could a person act if what thus happened was not determined?

For instance, men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are conditioned. Their idea of freedom, therefore, is simply their ignorance of any cause for their actions. As for their saying that human actions depend on the will, this is a mere phrase without any idea to correspond thereto. What the will is, and how it moves the body, they none of them know; those who boast of such knowledge, and feign dwellings and habitations for the soul, are wont to provoke either laughter or disgust. So, again, when we look at the sun, we imagine that it is distant from us about two hundred feet; this error does not lie solely in this fancy, but in the fact that, while we thus imagine, we do not know the sun's true distance or the cause of the fancy. For although we afterwards learn, that the sun is distant from us more than six hundred of the earth's diameters, we none the less shall fancy it to be near; for we do not imagine the sun as near us, because we are ignorant of its true distance, but because the modification of our body involves the essence of the sun, in so far as our said body is affected thereby. — Spinoza, Ethics, Part II, Prop XXXV, Note

Though I can see why you'd think that Spinoza doesn't give "primacy to the body", since Spinoza has mind as a distinct attribute, and that he does not reduce the mental to (emergent properties of aggregates of) the physical. Even though in his historical context, he gave an unprecedented primacy to the body!

For me it is simple. In order to take Spinoza seriously, he has to offer: 1. a logical and coherent explanation for how it is possible that from a God without qualia and will to reach qualia and will; 2. a coherent explanation for how it is possible for something complex (man) to be conscious and something less complex not to possess consciousness, then I can take these metaphysics seriously. — Eugen

(1) I don't really want to go down the rabbit hole for "qualia", which similarly to before is a concept anathema to Spinoza. This would be another debate where you're coming at Spinoza very obliquely and thus glance off his ideas rather than sticking in them.

(2) I already showed you that mind as composition thing earlier, and mind as idea of the body. If you want a scientific answer to that question; ie, a mechanically detailed answer to "how does consciousness emerge from matter?" (nevermind "how does consciousness emerge from the human body?" ... ), you're not going to find it in Spinoza.

And I very much doubt you will find an answer in other philosophers either! If you've put this barrier up against Spinoza, I'd advise you to apply the same barrier to other philosophers who have anything to say about philosophy of mind and see who remains. As a filter for meaningful content, I doubt it would let much (any?) hitherto published philosophy through. Whether that's because philosophy sucks or because the filter works like trying to press oranges to get apple juice, I'll leave up to you to.

The belief that the law must conform to an "assumed standard" of some kind, and isn't the law if it does not, ignores the law; it doesn't explain it. It leads to a fundamental ignorance of the nature of the law and its operation. — Ciceronianus the White

If necessary conformity between the law and some natural right is required for a law to be a law, that seems easily violated by differences in laws over legal systems. If it's only legal in one country to drink when aged over 18, and legal in another to drink only when aged over 19, whether an 18 year old can legally drink depends upon the country. Thus if the first reflects natural rights, the second must not, if the second reflects natural rights, the first must not, alternatively neither reflects natural rights, and thus there's a law which does not conform to them.

But necessary conformity seems a very strong requirement; for manifestly what people consider legal they often consider moral, and manifestly what people consider moral they think ought to be legal. The boundary between what generates legal systems and what generates moral evaluations seems much less clear.

For one who believed the law were a matter of convention irrelevant of morality, it seems they would have a challenge to explain (or argue against) the general concordance of, say, the "Thou shalt nots" with laws over legal systems.

Is Eugen a bot? — 180 Proof

I don't think so? Combination of (1) English is second language (2) isn't used to arguing on forums (3) isn't used to Spinoza (4) is coming at this from a distant vantage point seem to explain it to me. It seems Eugen's also responding to prompts in context and reasoning with analogies, both of which are hard for bots.

So indeed my questions aren't the best, but I'm making progress. — Eugen

:up:

Not your fault, again. The practice of responding to a very detailed post with a single question is a time honoured internet tradition, and I tend to interpret it as either trolling or otherwise a style of bad faith engagement. If you didn't intend it like that, I apologise for assuming that you did.

While I have a lot of patience for earnest inquiry, I do demand that you engage with what I wrote.

Do those complex individual parts contain consciousness? — Eugen

No. Does cycling (consciousness) contain a bike (ideas)? Note, I didn't write involve a bike, I wrote contain a bike. Ideas are not "thinking things", which seems to be a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for human consciousness.

Then we can say that consciousness is in fact the result of a complex interaction of minds — Eugen

The mind is an idea of the body. Consciousness isn't a complex interaction of minds. It seems you want one of these to be true, and you assume one must be true:

(1) Consciousness derives from an interaction of physical things and no other type of thing
(2) Consciousness derives from an interaction of mental things and no other type of thing

And in seeing that the exegesis so far has denied (1) (since mind and body are separated aspects of the human mode), you inferred that (2) must be a claim that Spinoza is committed to. However, I believe both (1) and (2) are strictly false for Spinoza, because of the plurality of aspects of modes. Why? This is because the modes have the dual aspects of thought and extension (an infinity of others too maybe), which renders the italicised "and no other type of thing" qualifiers false.

When talking about contingent entities and events: the modes interact, substance does the bookwork of making sure like only conditions like and that the reflection between the attributes of those modes holds up. The "bookwork" there was already done an eternity ago, as that principle of reflection by which the correspondence is assured is thrown into what it means to be a mode. (@180 Proof, requesting sanity check).

One kind of extended body, however, is significantly more complex than any others in its composition and in its dispositions to act and be acted upon. That complexity is reflected in its corresponding idea. The body in question is the human body; and its corresponding idea is the human mind or soul. The human mind, then, like any other idea, is simply one particular mode of God’s attribute, thought. Whatever happens in the body is reflected or expressed in the mind. In this way, the mind perceives, more or less obscurely, what is taking place in its body. And through its body’s interactions with other bodies, the mind is aware of what is happening in the physical world around it. But the human mind no more interacts with its body than any mode of thought interacts with a mode of extension.

One of the pressing questions in seventeenth-century philosophy, and perhaps the most celebrated legacy of Descartes’s dualism, is the problem of how two radically different substances such as mind and body enter into a union in a human being and cause effects in each other. How can the extended body causally engage the unextended mind, which is incapable of contact or motion, and “move” it, that is, cause mental effects such as pains, sensations and perceptions? And how can an immaterial thing like a mind or soul, which does not have motion, put a body (the human body) into motion? Spinoza, in effect, denies that the human being is a union of two substances. The human mind and the human body are two different expressions—under thought and under extension—of one and the same thing: the person. And because there is no causal interaction between the mind and the body, the so-called mind-body problem does not, technically speaking, arise. — SEP, article on Baruch Spinoza

Link here.

, taken individually, are not conscious. In a word, complexity makes the difference between a stone and a man. So there is a threshold between unconscious and consciousness determined by pure complexity.

The inference of the existence of a thresh-hold is something you've brought to the table. Through some argument like: "individual ideas aren't conscious, a sufficient aggregate of ideas are conscious, therefore there is a thresh-hold of complexity"; notice that this is your argument, and it isn't a textual reference.