• BIV was meant to undermine realism


    It isn't a matter of producing the correct digits. Pi is a computable number. It's this property, it is a real consequence of the fact that Pi is transcendental. It literally puts a constraint on what is possible using a compass and straightedge.
  • BIV was meant to undermine realism


    So the idea is replace all experiences with exactly equivalent substitutes which come solely from stimulating the brain?

    Presumably this is automated to be real time. I can't conceive of a way of doing this, nor do I think it's possible. All that changes is that we are no longer software, but we are being stimulated by software in a manner which produces equivalent lives; in other words, it's a more convoluted way of doing exactly the same thing.

    Although I wonder if your floating point number example even works for the computer simulation. The precision only needs to be high enough to fool the naked human eye.

    It's more that the 'simulated universe' must have square-able circles in it. This isn't a perceptual property, it's a relational property of circles, squares and the transcendental nature of Pi.
  • BIV was meant to undermine realism


    Can you spell out why it wouldn't work for the brain-in-a-vat one? I really don't care about the demon.
  • BIV was meant to undermine realism
    I heard a nice argument about the impossibility of BIVs, daemons, Matrix style arguments etc etc. It points out that the mathematics we've managed to create is completely inconsistent with a universe which, fundamentally, works on floating point (or other possible finitary approximations of) arithmetic for real numbers.

    If the simulation was computed with floating point arithmetic, circles would be square-able through straightedge and compass, all numbers would be computable, irrational numbers would eventually having a repeating pattern of digits in their decimal representations and so on. Simulated universe => Computable universe => this. Not this => not computable universe => not simulated universe. One's modus ponens is another's tollens.*

    The first objection would be that 'numbers are not in an analogous category to physical objects in the simulated universe' - but why would it matter? They would have to be represented with adequate precision to stop the squaring of the circle - which is infinite precision - and is a constraint placed on the physical operations we are capable of doing with compass and straightedge by their innate, 'virtual', properties. We don't live in the kind of universe where a circle is square-able with compass and straight edge - so we don't live in a simulation with finite precision.

    Considering that the computer would have to be infinitely large (physically, not purely mathematically) to store every digit of Pi - to set it to the true value we have in this universe - I think we can rule out that we live in an infinitely large computer, too. So we don't live in a finitary or infinte computer simulation. Eliminate the disjunction and break free in either case (P or not-P is hard to dodge).
  • Need help with the proof of Barcan Formula


    Apologies for combativeness. Usually when people want a little help on some logic problem on here, especially from a new account, they just want a solution.
  • Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?
    Following up to @VagabondSpectre's study post.

    Imo the best part of the analysis is on P1109, where it actually looks at a log(hours):occupation interaction effect. Summary for those who don't want to go through the effort of reading the paper:

    The disparity between men and women is higher in jobs where the amount payed per hour scales with the amount of hours worked. As @Benkei and @charleton and @Agustino have alluded to, this may be attributable to a preference for women to work part time or alternatively factors that make women more likely to do so. The study is concordant with this:

    Another important result is that the impact of a birth on labor supply grows over time in an individual, fixed-effects estimation. A year after a first birth, women’s hours, conditional on working, are reduced by 17 percent and their participation by 13 percentage points. But three to four years later, hours decline by 24 percent and participation by 18 percentage points. Some MBA moms try to stay in the fast lane but ultimately find it is unworkable. The increased impact years after the first birth, moreover, is not due to the effect of additional births.

    Part-time work in the corporate sector is uncommon and part-timers are often self-employed (more than half are at 10 to 16 years out). Differences in career interruptions and hours worked by sex are not large, but the corporate and financial sectors impose heavy penalties on deviation from the norm. Some female MBAs with children, especially those with high earning husbands, find the trade-offs too steep and leave or engage in self-employment.

    Regardless of whether people think the remaining pay gap is entirely attributable to discrimination, or they do something stupid like say the entire thing is attributable to discrimination, I think it's very likely that promoting joint, paid, parental leave and paid paternity leave would reduce the worst excesses of this effect. At the very least it would remove some cases where people's careers will be stymied for the sin of wanting to start and take care of a family.

    Edit: could potentially be studied by looking at gender disparities in aforementioned target jobs in countries that have paid joint/paternity leave vs those who don't. Something to do if bored.
  • Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?


    There are a lot of ways to interpret the modelling results on page 1098, and is actually evidence for the claim that men and women in the same occupations in the same conditions of education and work hours still in the aggregate make less money. The last row of each coefficient batch: time,education,occupation in the modelling scenarios has a uniformly negative female coefficient (ignoring basic since it's essentially an 'intercept' to compute an adjusted rate).

    That's to say: women with the same circumstances are payed less than men. The paper goes on to say:

    The main takeaway (from the analysis discussed above) is that what is going on within occupations—even when there are 469 of them as in the case of the Census and ACS—is far more important to the gender gap in earnings than is the distribution of men and women by occupations. That is an extremely useful clue to what must be in the last chapter. If earnings gaps within occupations are more important than the distribution of individuals by occupations then looking at specific occupations should provide further evidence on how to equalize earnings by gender. Furthermore, it means that changing the gender mix of occupations will not do the trick.

    My bolding.

    Later on:

    What, then, is the cause of the remaining pay gap? Quite simply the gap exists
    because hours of work in many occupations are worth more when given at particular
    moments and when the hours are more continuous. That is, in many occupations earnings have a nonlinear relationship with respect to hours. A flexible schedule often comes at a high price, particularly in the corporate, financial, and legal worlds

    Summary: people who work more hours in general earn more than expected - long hours -> higher earning job, that kind of thing. Will post the rest later.
  • Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?


    Stuff on Norway, general pay gap is less than 27% - that was for a specific type of employment and I misquoted. P29 of this thing is the income comparisons.

    Stuff on the US with a breakdown by occupation.

    Michael's post earlier in the thread is this year's report on the topic for the UK.

    Should be noted that showing the pay gap exists in the aggregate doesn't contradict:
    (1) Some women are payed greater than or equal to men in mostly equivalent circumstances.
    (2) There are social disadvantages for men, too.

    Nor does it explain each instance of disparity.
  • Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?


    I doubt it. If all the nonsense with the "gap" vanishes, these reports will become just as worthless. So, no, I'm not going to be impressed by the amount of quantitative data anyone throws at me. Just because there is difference in numbers doesn't mean it's a gap :-} That's what I am addressing.

    The demographic data it's based on will still be the same in 20 years. IE, it will still be true of 2017. Studies have been done either looking back into the past - still a gender pay gap. Studies done at those times also find gender pay gaps. I really have no idea what you're talking about.

    A gap would exist if:

    I work in a factory making an x amount of components.
    You make the same amount of components in the same time.
    We get paid differently.

    Is exactly what happens - the pay gap remains when you control for work hours, tenure/experience and their interaction.
  • Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?


    Does it really take a tremendous genius to understand that companies treat their employees as investments, and have every right to do so? Does it really take so much to get that there are different values delivered to the company by each employee?

    It apparently takes a tremendous amount of genius to read an accessibly written government report which addresses your concerns quantitatively and then makes the opposite conclusion from the one you're drawing.
  • Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?


    No, I'm saying that when looked at from a societal level with the most comprehensive data available the wage gap is robust to controlling for occupation, experience, age and other socioeconomic factors. This includes experience/tenure, which is as close as you're going to get to an operationalisation of value added to a company by a worker. The article linked by Michael even has an effect in its equation (ctrl+f for 'interaction term') to account for this in the aggregate analysis (the second one I discussed in my first response to you).*

    Do you want to base your opinions on analyses done on the best data with fairly robust research methodologies? Or do you want to engage in the knee-jerk reactionary discourse you're so rightly criticising?

    *to account for this = to measure something like 'value added'
  • Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?


    Completely inconsistent standards of evidence. If you get to speculate like this without the data, so do those feminazi libtards.

    Edit: also, I already said, in cases where men and women have equal experience - men still tend to be payed more.
  • Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?


    No, don't know who that guy is. I do agree, however, that if other variables are included, then there is no gap. The point being that if someone says that women get paid less for doing the same job, it is far from truth for the simple fact that it is close to impossible to do the identical job when it comes to management, marketing, business etc.

    There are two methods in analysis discussed in it. Both include other factors, both still conclude a pay gap. I'm not sure how you obtained this interpretation of what I wrote, but I'll restate it:

    There are still unaccounted for differences between gender pay when including relevant social economic indicators.
    When directly comparing men in occupation X with women in occupation X, men tend to make more money.*

    *this goes for other socioeconomic factors too, age category X, experience category X...
  • Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?


    Aye. I've seen a few where it's over 50% when I've looked into it, but wanted to be conservative with the maximum unexplained amount.
  • Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?
    My working hypothesis is that you've come to this from Jordan Peterson or a related video making an argument that the gender pay gap doesn't exist when including other variables.

    To say that it doesn't exist is more than a bit of an exaggeration. It absolutely does, robustly, but to varying degrees in different countries. Even a very equal one like Norway - men make 27 pence extra per pound of woman earnings. The pay gap also exists when you break it down by occupation - though the difference between male and female wages decreases when women and men are employed in equal proportion in a given job (or occupational category). This is to say that controlling for occupation still evinces a pay gap.

    If, however, you take the approach where median male earnings and female earnings on a yearly basis are linearly regressed upon a bunch of societal indicators - like occupation, work hours, age, time in current job - you'll probably see that occupation explains the most variance out of any predictor. At least this is how it breaks down in the UK. Nowhere near 100% of the variance (think, the trend of differences between women and men) is explained through the sum total of all predictors. UK analysis puts this somewhere between 30 and 50% of the variance. Which is to say, and Peterson is very fond of this formulation (when applied in other contexts) - at least 50% of the difference between men and women isn't explained by any socioeconomic factor other than gender!

    Edit: The first paragraph is absolutely the right analysis for discerning whether there are pay gaps within occupation. It also applies to age and job experience with the same conclusion, go figure.

    So, here is a factsheet, and I'll slip in an outright howler that Peterson's army of beta-male epigones seem to forget.
    (1) Men tend to make more than women.
    (2) Men tend to be in higher paying jobs than women.
    (3) Men still make more than women when controlling for occupation (or other socio-economic factors).
    (4) There is no personality test approaching common place enough to provide a society wide census of personality traits and earnings. Thus variation due to them cannot currently be modelled precisely in the population at large.

    If you want me to provide some references for the UK I can.
  • On anxiety.


    I don't think it's particularly ridiculous. People feel they have different amounts of control over the intrusive thoughts or delusional fantasies. There's an attempt to ascertain levels of perceived control in CBT and metacognitive therapy, too. The therapeutic questions usually being 'how could you act to diminish the effect of these intrusions on you?' and 'what circumstances bring these intrusive thoughts to you?'. An attempt to disarm them, not necessarily eliminate them.

    I see no reason based on what you said to throw away the distinctions between snake-oil salespeople, weird philosophical positions, delusions and intrusive thoughts. This isn't to say that in a different time, schizophrenics weren't (generally believed as) 'touched' by God or spirits and perhaps were afforded more formal respect by some. On the other hand, it's probably better that modern medicine isn't trying to treat autism with exorcism.
  • On anxiety.


    By the sounds of it it wasn't like an intellectualised belief like the kind you find on this forum, it was an intrusion that overwhelmed him sometimes. If someone held an intellectual position that contended that they were a robot - like generalising Descartes' comments about animals, or viewing a mind as 'software' in some sense, that would be a lot different from the belief of the bloke I spoke to.

    I think what matters is how the position is held, and in some cases how that belief integrates their believers into a society. Like the difference between imaginary friends telling you to burn things and divine beings telling you to burn things.
  • On anxiety.


    I brought it up because I spoke to a schizophrenic recently who had that delusion and it troubled him greatly. More generally, I brought that up to say that the way different people have function-impeding anxiety differs a lot.
  • On anxiety.


    I'm not interested in debating whether we're all robots in some unspecified sense which will inevitably retreat to a broader and more abstract sense until we're all living in the Matrix. We're certainly not like current robots that are made, even sophisticated learning ones are too highly constrained and task specific.

    Eliminative materialism = we are all robots is pretty specious too.
  • On anxiety.


    I don't understand the joke, sorry.
  • On anxiety.


    That also depends on the person's legal status. Someone can be put into psychiatric treatment involuntarily, at least in the countries I'm familiar with (UK,US,Norway). This usually includes psychotherapy.

    I see. The only cases I know of where a person does not have insight into their own pathology or disorder are unmedicated schizophrenics and psychopaths. Kind of nitpicking here; but, I don't think there are that many cases in general.

    Impaired insight is most common in schizophrenics, yes. But it generalises to most psychotic conditions. In fact, it's possible to have a caveat put onto a diagnosis of a usually psychotic condition that the person has insight - and thus doesn't have to be treated, legally, as a psychotic! (I'm one of these people). In some senses insight is the distinction between suffering psychosis and exhibiting related symptoms.

    Regardless, CBT still uses behavioural therapy as a component. So does the related and more abstract metacognitive therapy, which resembles your description of CBT more than CBT does. Someone doesn't need to know why crowds are scary and track their anxious response analytically to do CBT, but they do in metacognitive approaches.
  • On anxiety.


    Insight has a legal/technical definition, it means the subject recognises their pathologies. Someone who believes they're Jesus sincerely does not have insight, someone who experiences intrusive fantasies of being Jesus but knows they're completely unfounded does. With social anxiety, someone who knows that being in a crowd is generally ok and non-threatening would have insight into their condition, someone who didn't might not.
  • On anxiety.


    That really depends on whether the subject has insight or not. If they have insight - they'll already know that their beliefs about crowds being threatening are usually unfounded. Regardless, the part where the subject actually goes out and does things which give a middle finger to their disease is a necessary part.
  • On anxiety.


    CBT isn't just a set of thought exercises. It's literally cognitive-behavioural therapy. You are given mental exercises as well as actual activities that are aimed at making whatever disorder you have bugger off.

    EG, someone with social anxiety is questioned on how being in a crowd makes them feel. They say they have extreme anxiety in a crowd and feel very threatened. The therapist asks them if they know what they find threatening about it. If they know or don't, they could be asked to, say - sit outside a coffee shop and listen in to passing conversations. If they have a narrative about what makes them threatened about it, or they have a repeating pattern of thought about it, they will be given exercises to interrupt the mechanisms that make it repeat, as well as being given activities to expose them to and reduce the perceived risk of being present in crowds.
  • On anxiety.


    No disorders are treated with pure intellection, you have to do stuff that makes the disease bugger off as well as think stuff that makes the disease bugger off - and both of those things help the other.
  • On anxiety.


    What does pure belief mean? I don't think mental disorders are just epistemic states...
  • On anxiety.
    Examples in my posts are not hypothetical btw, I've had a lot of experience with mentally ill people.
  • On anxiety.


    It is about ascertaining the seed of the anxiety and not the strategies to cope such as mindfulness or meditation or even medication; if we return back to when you mentioned that there are a number of factors that form our identity and perceptions of the external world including our developmental and social environment, a person could form something like Body Dysmorphic Disorder or Depersonalisation and become obsessed with intrusive and negative thoughts to a point that they are incapable of functioning correctly and even in the process isolate or withdraw themselves that ignites ongoing anxiety. It is about ascertaining causes and not about strategies to deal with it - which is merely a temporary solution - such as telling yourself to be strong or ignore it.

    Ascertaining 'the causes' is a bit misleading, as what started the anxiety and what keeps it going ontically aren't necessarily what structures anxiety and its necessary features ontologically. It may be that an anxious person can address their issues by eschewing the inappropriate application of some norms to their lives, or it may be that they can lessen the harsh distinction between their real and ideal selves based on inauthentic adherence to those norms.

    There are people who develop schizophrenia and anxiety through persecution fantasies largely from hereditary predisposition, it would be strange to equate self administered or clinical psychotherapy with biogenetic intervention, no? The 'root causes' are not necessarily the things that keep the disorder going - and all the things that keep the disorder going are not necessarily all the things that keep their sufferer from functionality. There's even a relevant distinction between root causes, mechanisms of sustenance, and manifest symptoms. EG: it's possible to work long term at an office without the symptoms of PTSD based on a boating accident impeding day to day function or drastically reducing overall life satisfaction, despite clinically still suffering from the disorder.

    By focusing on the authenticity, the actuality of why it exists in the first place, one would need to acknowledge and articulate that temporal influence because meaning is formed by our interpretation of our experiences and if our interpretations of our perceptions is a result of learned behaviour given to us and if we have not yet learned how to articulate our autonomous understanding of these experience,

    On the contrary, the autonomous articulations of symptom causes for anxious subjects can be anything from 'they really are persecuting me' to 'if I don't worry all the time something bad will happen', or 'my house will burn down if I don't go home and check the gas'. Being earnest about pathological behaviour and mental states is probably required to enter into a therapeutic relationship with yourself or another, but its negation - delusion or lack of insight depending on the specifics - are epistemic properties of a sufferer and their capacity for articulating their symptoms, not ontological ones. IE, the ontology of Dasein is silent on them.

    Further, the kind of therapy that aides a sufferer in producing any narrative around their symptoms and the disorder's causes is a specific therapeutic style and loses some its relevance when the sufferer either has the complete incapacity to develop such narratives or already has great skill in doing so. Self articulation in the minimal sense of ascertaining your needs and desires and how they are impeded by the disease - and how these impositions are reinforced through your thoughts and behaviour is definitely helpful, and is usually a part of treatment plans for such disorders. But they are a starting point; addressing the lack of a self affirming narrative is not necessarily removing a root cause.

    This is also ignoring the relevance of pathologies being ego-syntonic or ego-dystonic, ego-syontic pathologies can be part of a person's ideal self - truly, authentically - and no amount of discussion without concomitant behavioural intervention is likely to produce recovery.

    tl;dr: there're a few reasons why clinicians don't throw Being and Time and Basic Problems at patients. Not that it always stops them.

    tl;dr2: exercise: derive why a person continues to suffer from a persistent delusion they are a robot using only existential hermeneutics of the general experiential character of humans. No one will freakin' be able to do this.
  • On anxiety.


    And that rumination, preocupation and obsession are treated as part of psychotherapy for anxious disorders doesn't dissuade you that they often have pathological forms?
  • On anxiety.
    The point though, is that the so-called "anxious fantasies" are probably not caused by the anxiety at all, but by the underlying co-morbid condition. The anxiety is probably just a symptom, like fever is a symptom of some illnesses, and swelling is a symptom of some physical injuries. In some cases, the symptom itself, swelling, fever, or anxiety, becomes a problem on its own, needing to be dealt with, but in many cases these symptoms are just the body's natural reaction to the underlying illness, and the proper procedure is to identify and treat that underlying illness, not the symptoms.

    Nonsense MU.

    Turner, Beidel, and Stanley (1992, p 265, as cited in (15)) reviewed the literature on obsession and worry and outlined five main similarities concluding that obsession and worry (1) both occur in non-clinical and clinical populations (2), have a similar form and content in nonclinical and clinical populations, (3) occur in greater frequency and with greater perceptions of uncontrollability in clinical compared to non-clinical samples, (4) are both associated with adverse mood and (5) appear to have some shared vulnerability. Finally, although they are distinct experiences, pathological worry and obsession may share notable similarities in their underlying vulnerability and maintenance (14), and researches reported significant correlations between measures of obsessions and worry (16, 17).

    Rumination is another intrusive thought that is defined as “repetitive and passive thinking about one’s symptoms of depression and the possible causes and consequences of these symptoms” (18). Rumination has been implicated in OCD and GAD (generalised anxiety disorder) (2). The associations between obsessional thoughts, worry and rumination that are related to both disorders may suggest that these cognitive symptoms derive from a common underlying mechanism. Therefore, while obsessional thoughts, preservative worry and rumination are all distinct in terms of content and form, they might be exacerbated by a common cognitive vulnerability (2).

    See here for less technical bollocks and a much briefer overview. Rumination, preoccupation, obsession, frequent disturbing and uncontrollable intrusive thoughts are a cluster of incredibly common - near universal - pathological thought patterns in anxious disorders. Far from being isolable from anxiety, they are one of the core constituents and present themselves as a commonality between these disorders and their tightly correlated comorbids.
  • On anxiety.
    There's a lot of crapping on clinical psychology in this thread. At the very least it should be given respect as a catalogue of symptoms, even if you don't agree that derived treatment plans are successful.
  • On anxiety.


    I don't agree that anxiety necessarily diminishes a person's agency. This depends on one's approach to anxiety. As I described to Agustino, a healthy response to anxiety would increase one's agency. Therefore it is only in cases of unhealthy response that the individual spirals downward as you describe.

    I wanted to add the clinical dimension of anxiety to the discussion, please read my posts in that light. Someone who is mentally healthy deals with anxiety as a mood or as a response to stressors. Someone who has anxiety disorder has a much different, but related in some ways, experience of anxiety.

    The dimension of fantasy is something which is very common in people with anxiety disorder. People without anxiety disorder typically do not have anxious fantasies of the same sort. People with it need to learn to cope with the anxious fantasies as part of learning a 'healthy response' towards anxiety.

    The reason I brought in co-morbid conditions is that they matter a lot from the perspective of how to deal with anxiety. The things you would do to steel yourself against an anxious fantasy that you are a robot (believed sincerely with no insight) are a lot different from more generic paralysing fantasies of failure and self harm, which differs again from someone being transported back to their trauma if they have PTSD and anxiety. It makes a big difference in how the problems should be (and are) addressed.



    Anxiety is an emotional and physical reaction where the authentic self is trying to communicate to the inauthentic self; becoming aware of why one has anxiety is really just unfolding and articulating something you already know but could not put words to it. It is not to abandon otherness, neither is it to deny it - free-will and determinism are not mutually exclusive - but to put it simply, authenticity is to interpret one's experience both past and present as one genuinely would want to and not through the lens given to them either from childhood or society.

    It's entirely possible that 'one's ideal self' still has anxious coping mechanisms - in these cases anxious behaviour can be egosyntonic. Someone who relies upon their anxious behaviour to obtain their version of normalcy and safety - 'what would happen if I wasn't worrying all the time?- is a lot different from someone who experiences their anxiety intrusively - intrusions from normativity (like 'das man') or from obsessive fantasies (which have no Heideggerian analogue). If an anxious person experiences their anxious coping mechanisms and general anxious behaviours as something bad to be worked on, it's egodystonic and approached differently. This is to say whether anxiety (or subsets of anxious behaviours) is part of the 'real' or 'ideal' self depends on the person!

    As I said to MU above, treat my posts as descriptions of clinical anxiety and based on it, not from people who have lower levels of anxiety, or from the usual anxiety mentally healthy people get.
  • On anxiety.


    The analogy with the moth describes the predisposition of a highly anxious subject to fret, and the fretting diminishes their agency in a cyclical and sometimes recursive manner. It was supposed to evoke the following cycle: anxiety diminishes a person's agency; as their agency diminishes, the diminishment is internalised and becomes a spur towards anxious behaviour (including thought) and further disempowerment. It is more difficult to fight anxiety the more severe it is. The more anxious you are, the more prone to anxiety reinforcing behaviours you are. The more anxious you are, the more you are drawn to anxiety. This is both a trap and a site of resistance.

    I find this very agreeable, but it seems to open up a division between the particular and the general. The "day to day contexts" refers to the particular occurrences of anxiety. What is implied is that we cannot turn inward to find a general principle for dealing with anxiety, we must deal with the uniqueness and particularities of each instance of anxiety. This may indicate something important about anxiety. It may itself be, a function of how we relate to the uniqueness of the situations which we find ourselves in, and our inability to negotiate these particularities through the application of general principles. Of course this would be to say something general about anxiety, which would be a turning back toward negating the premise...

    I like this description of anxiety, it avoids the bad connotations handed to it by modern medicine (if a child expresses symptoms of ADHT, then medicate it). Here, Heidegger claims that anxiety is what brings truth to light. This is probably due to the relationship between anxiety and the unknown, which I have been discussing with TimeLIne. Approaching the unknown is what produces anxiety and this produces the will to think. Thinking is what brings truth.

    Turning inward has its place in diminishing the pathological coping strategies that attend anxiety, this should be accompanied with behavioural changes. Particularity can be troubling for more than essentially epistemic reasons, it can trouble an anxious subject through modal ones too. Anxious fantasies typically are not just failures of knowledge or familiarity, they are threatening possibilities given more emotive or evidential significance than they are due. They can also take the character of the truly fantastic: looking at a knife and intrusively imagining, or even feeling a shadow of, its potential for you to jam it into your eye socket.

    The line between fantasy and reality in those imaginings can be blurred if the subject has anxiety co-morbid with post traumatic stress disorder. In these cases, the every-day can often become a reminiscence of the traumatic. Which if anything is a case of defective generality in thought and action consuming the particularities of life, epistemically anyway. It is the application of the general to the particular which is inauthentic in this case; calcification over crystallisation. A post-traumatic anxious subject's throat may close if they have nearly drowned (when triggered), or they may feel terrible, isolating cold due to an injury obtained from hiking in mountains (when triggered). What abstract story should we tell to exorcise the ghosts raping them? What words alone could suffice? None.

    Those of particularly low self worth who have punishment fantasies may find their particularity oppressive - as they are the exceptions to the rules afforded to others. Particularity can be just as stymying as generality. Authenticity is an ally neither of the particular nor the general in the abstract, it is a way a person can learn to set the two in relation and act ('dwell') within it.

    Further complications arise from schizophrenic co-morbidity. What generalised principle of action or law of thought leads someone to believe their friends and family have been replaced by dopplegangers overnight? That there is a conspiracy to observe them and control their activities? That they might be a robot or an ambassador to an alien civilisation? How can these fantasies be categorised in accordance with the trauma of the world when now there are many? How can there be many and still one, if the subject has insight? The phenomenological world and the principles of abstraction and grounding that derived it quake if the subject deriving them is pathological.

    As I just suggested to fdrake, death, finitude, uniqueness, and individuality, are all properties of the everydayness of the particular. And this is the inauthentic. When we recognize the abstracted principles by which we act, as the authentic, this encourages us to conform. Conformation is a requirement to understand the vast realm of abstracted principles, and since this is recognized as authentic the will to conform flourishes.

    Living in accordance with principles being equated with authenticity and therapeutic release of anxious symptoms is a bit too strong. To recover from anxiety is to change the range and nature of permissible activity in your life; expand what you do, contract your abuses; to be forgiving and understanding of yourself and your impact on others, to afford yourself whatever choices allow you to accommodate to life again, and to bend but not break when life pushes back.

    An intellectually consistent and driven life is not a necessity for the treatment of anxiety and the promotion of agency - sometimes resistance and recovery means that you washed your clothes, showered and ate within the last two days.
  • On anxiety.


    A phenomenological account of anxiety with no mention of personality, specific moods, a person's social history, their environment, their identity, their sexuality, their desires or even their body is insufficiently rich to account for an affective disorder with somatic components.

    Authenticity itself is a behavioural-mental* property of a generalised ontological everyman, again with no development of formal structures for moods, social history, specific environment, relationships, gender, identity, sex, bodies... Even language and expression are essentially 'imperative otherness' - intrusive normativity - for an anxious person in Heidegger. A thou shalt and a call to guilt. Outside of his hermeneutic circle, they are also a means of self empowerment with an end of, at least, basic functionality.

    If anxiety is given an adequate account in Heidegger it must be only in a restricted and formal sense. An 'unease within the categories (existentialia)' which 'brings the truth to light (aletheia and essentia)'. This is the sense that anxiety operates within Heidegger's thought. It is not an affective/somatic condition.

    Anxiety is an affective/somatic condition, as well as a mood or sub-personality. There is no sufficiently rich notion of anxiety, affective/somatic impairment (no bodies, no passions) in Heidegger to begin to deal with mental health conditions. Perhaps it is more convincing if you haven't engaged long term with people who have severe medical anxiety. In lower anxiety people where, truly, anxiety assails them as a mood among others. Even when they give the mood special status in their worldview for how significant it is to them.

    *Please don't misinterpret me as reading Heidegger as a Cartesian.
  • On anxiety.


    I like him otherwise, mostly!
  • On anxiety.


    I think it is more fear and this fear is divided into two; fear of the known - something physical - and fear of the unknown, something we cannot consciously ascertain and so we experience an emptiness that we cannot control. I am attempting to interpret your suggestion using Heidegger's angst, which is to become aware of ourselves and in doing so we become aware of our separateness, of being independent, alienated and such individuality is frightening because we are compelled to identify with the external world using our own perceptions. That would mean that everything that we once were, the perceptions, the ideas, the opinions, are not concrete because they are not actually our own, which means that our identity is not our own and we would need to start from a clean slate, start creating our own language. It is first-person experience and such intentionality enables our mental acts to be directed outwardly to the external world (rather than inwardly by the external world through others).

    Anxiety has a transgressive character in Heidegger - transporting a person into a state in which normal categories of thought and the normative structures enmeshing them loosen and fray as a person ties themselves in knots over their capacity for decision. It's a useful segue for him in Being and Time between the inhibiting realm of everydayness and normal functioning to action that concerns the person and their own status as a living human; made finite by an engagement with death; which is always apparently a person's own death. The predilections specific to anxiety are glossed over and, rather quickly, amalgamated in and subordinated to the proper metaphysical study of finitude and its underlying temporal structures in human life.

    The phenomenological segue from the everyday and the inauthentic to the specific and authentic only has a superficial resemblance to actual anxious thought and effective strategies to anxiety's resolution. To be sure, anxious thought is typically scattered and fleeting. It fears failure and disappointment as a moth flees a bulb. It obsesses over death through fascination with disempowered and afflicted fantasies. The maxim to realise your finitude and use it to shape your decisions falls on all too willing ears.

    An anxious person realises their finitude, they are consumed by it.
    An anxious person uses it to shape their decisions, they are paralysed by it.

    If someone's anxiety has the character that reading over-long pastiches to 'carpe diem' can dismiss it and help them orient their lives - they are not an anxious person, or maybe they were but are now nearly-not. The intervention that changes an anxious person's life for the better is neither an engagement with finitude nor an engagement with their ownmost desires, it is an engagement with their anxiety itself in the contexts, boring day to day contexts, that it arises. An anxious person faces anxiety in a manner that flees from their ownmost being incessantly, and it is only through grappling with the every day and finding place in it that they begin, anew, to hone their ownmost being; to gain the capacity to flourish once more.

    To recover and mitigate its effects is to accommodate yourself to your environment, to challenge those parts of it which are disabling, and to promote those bits which allow you to flourish. Far from 'fleeing into the world', as Heidegger would have it, this is the pattern of recovery.

    tl;dr: too much authenticity, not enough eudaimonia
  • Three Categories and Seven Systems of Metaphysics


    "Conceptually incorrect and empirically wrong" lol
  • On the law of non-contradiction
    Four arguments on the topic or undermining the topic:

    On the topic:

    Mapping true and false onto the two horns of the principle of excluded middle is a way of begging the question for this demonstration of the LNC.

    LNC is right or wrong.
    (1) To be right is equivalent to being true.
    (2) To be wrong is equivalent to being false.
    (3) The principle of excluded middle is true.
    (4) The negation of the principle of excluded middle is wrong
    (5) The negation of the principle of excluded middle is false.
    (6) Introduce theorem: De Morgan's Law.
    (7) LNC is right (from 5, , P or not-P iff not(P and not-P) through 6.)

    IE, in order to prove LNC, its negation is assumed by equating 'something is either right and wrong' with the negation of the principle of excluded middle's falsehood (which is itself the LNC).

    Undermining the topic:

    Uselessness of formal logic in terms of proposition evaluation in most contexts

    Looking at real arguments in real circumstances; to be true or false is less important than other valuations (useful, right enough, justified, approximately correct, legal, virtuous, probably true, probably false etc...). Informal logic and argument strategies are broader than the strictures of formal logic, even in mathematics. Many interesting philosophical arguments are difficult or impossible to formalise - transcendental deduction and its phenomenological and dialectical derivatives are a prime example in philosophy. If you doubt this, try and take the derivation of the categories in The Critique of Pure Reason and accurately render its propositions and inference rules in first or a higher order predicate logic.**

    Differences in formal logic systems

    Intuitionism (provability logics, not (P or not-P) is no longer equivalent to the LNC since double negation elimination no longer is allowed) and paraconsistency (LNC not just false, principle of explosion false) are viable logics. The capacity for other logics to be adopted which don't stress the LNC in the same way or don't include it at all to be developed means it must be possible to think about the LNC without it being self evidently true, no?

    Formal logic's material implication is an impoverished form of 'following on from' in an argument

    Who cares about the LNC when it won't do anything to help you evaluate counterfactual arguments, imperatives and can't even deal with what a semicolon or a colon can do in discursive english. Human inference forms are far richer than the semantic equivalence between deduction and material implication in propositional and predicate logics imply. Even mathematical logic requires a richer notion (see your thread on the incompleteness theorems)...

    **: I tried this, it is madness. It's difficult to individuate propositions in the first place, and the steps between them follow in a modal sense rather than a material conditional.