I've read A Song of Ice and Fire, and have generally enjoyed the 'low fantasy' feel of it -- the actors in the world feel like they follow some sort of internal logic, and their motivations can be deduced, which you can't say for all fantasy. In other words, even if it's cheesy, it doesn't feel like a video game or transparently like one person, the author, is running the show for the sake of the plot. I'm worried that if time looping is introduced to the book series this way, that will all go out the window. Time travel is prime a shark-jumping tool, and once it's in there, all bets are off, because anything can or could have happened.

I'm not too fond of the show and thought the latest episode was really bad character death porn.

Then why is it possible to not strive for life? Why is it possible to meditate, enjoy aesthetics, commit suicide, etc? Surely these would also be objectifications of the Will? — darthbarracuda

No, these are (barring suicide, for Schop.) negations of the will, and they are only possible in beings whose willings have created very complex representational capacities that then end up causing the will to shoot itself in the foot. For example, in enjoying art, representation takes on a life of its own and starts to enjoy itself for its own sake, disentangling itself from the will. If there is an 'objectification' here, what's being objectified is in a way the will 'committing suicide.'

No offense but this is kind of a cop-out. If it's outside the laws, how can it act on them? — darthbarracuda

It doesn't act on them -- the laws are an objectification of it. It's 'behind' the laws, not on a par with them.

Why would the Will (to live) create something that would eventually lead to a rejection of the will to live? Why would it hasten its own demise? — darthbarracuda

It doesn't have reasons for what it does. Reasons belong to the phenomenal world, which it is prior to.

How does the Will live on itself without eventually running out of anything to feed on? Like an ouroboros, it cannot constantly eat itself. — darthbarracuda

Schop. believes that the Will will eventually destroy itself, because it will create creatures (us) whose powers of representation become advanced enough that we begin to understand what we're doing and voluntarily give up the self-defeating game, abnegating the will.

Unless of course the Will is outside of the laws of thermodynamics and energy conservation, in which case it just becomes a mystical metaphor with little actual explanatory power except for illuminating the human condition. — darthbarracuda

It is outside those laws and all physical laws, because those laws are just objectifications of it. It isn't a metaphor because it's more real and concretely known than any physical or represented thing.

If life did not exist, would there be any Will to self-cannibalize? Are we talking entropy here? — darthbarracuda

On the one hand yes, because there was a point at which life didn't exist. On the other hand, the will is 'the will to life.' Life seems to be the inevitable outcome of its striving, which Schop. explains by a bizarre proto-Darwinian mechanism of competition between forces.

Yeah, I know it works this way for Schop, I was speculatin' for myself there. — csalisbury

Okay. I'm not keen on panpsychism generally, sine it seems like a cop-out in the form of another retreat into the familiar or quasi-solipsism (I can only understand something else existing if it is 'like me'). I could be wrong though. I like the idea of mutual dependence, but in a way that I think we have trouble grasping -- we tend to think of interdependence in terms of an interlocking ecosystem that fits together in some larger picture. The difficult conceptual twist is to think of this dependence without any ecosystem or larger picture.

I don't quite understand though why the Will would create something that can seemingly oppose it because it suffers due to the Will. Is it just by accident that the Will creates beings that can suffer? Why does there seem to be exceptions to the Will? Not everything in the world is chaotic, random, or striving. I'm not sure why or how the Will would create a world that is not in its own nature. — darthbarracuda

A disturbing quote to this effect from Schop.: "...the will must live on itself, for there exists nothing beside it, and it is a hungry will." Schop's favored image of how the world works is one animal eating another. Since we are all objectifications of the same will, it is literally eating itself (and people in harming each other are aware in a vague and traumatic sense that they are harming themselves).

There's something irreducible here. I wonder if it's a 'will'/idea split all the way down. A kind of panpsychism that (like those escher hands someone posted above) always relies on something outside of consciousness, which in turn relies on it. I really don't know though — csalisbury

Not all the way down, no, Schop. is explicit that presentation is only applicable to sentient creatures, and is an outgrowth of will which is prior. It's also not quite a split, in that presentation just is the objectification of will (though confusingly, Schop. calls it also 'toto genere distinct' from it). As for what the will is like for non-sentient creatures, this is less clear. He speaks of a 'dull hunger' that drives ceaseless inanimate forces that compete against one another, like gravity. Clearly this is metaphorical -- there aren't any panpsychist suggestions to the effect that matter is literally hunger or feels a struggle. Yet in our own case, our knowledge of the will comes from things like hunger and sexual frustration. It seems from Schop's comments in Volume II that what this means is that though we have access to the thing in itself via our own case of willing, this is still through a sort of veil, which can never be entirely removed, and the thing in itself in its unity or entirety is closed off to us, and as in the Kantian tradition is totally inaccessible. We only get a sort of glimpse into its character by being one piece of it, a piece that can only reflect on itself through the veil of Maya.

Why must this non-space/time/causality be limited or manifested in this way, and not another? — schopenhauer1

As I understand it, Schop. would say this question is confused because asking why presupposes the techniques to be found in the phenomenal realm subject to the principle of sufficient reason. That is, seeking explanation is itself a means that the will has for manipulating its presentations to satisfy itself -- to ask why the will objectifies itself, and why in this way rather than that, is to make a category error, and not fully understand the import of the philosophy. Again, the Spirit blows where it pleases. I don't think this means the philosophy is insufficient or that it has nothing left to say at that point -- rather it dares to look at the very notion of explanation more penetratingly than most philosophers will allow, taking it as a genuine object of inquiry rather than being assumed. The level at which the will 'blows' one way rather than another isn't to be explained -- it's to be enacted and willingly changed in breaking free. The desire and attempt to explain is a kind of willing.

You were wrong -- those other people never got each other. That feeling of fundamental separation isn't special to you or anyone else. Talk to any person long enough, and it'll come around to that. Every single one. People who are social losers just express it more outwardly because they have no success and so no distractions.

If there is something people share, it's that.

Work me through " I think other people see basketballs and hoops when I play basketball with them" -> "I want people to be reducible to me." — csalisbury

The irony in your position is that you can't fathom other people existing unless they are like you, so much so that the idea that other people might be different form you in substantial ways makes you think of solipsism.

If you wanted to talk to someone about coercion and inter-affectivity they could, at any time, simply deny the existence of others. — csalisbury

I don't think this option is open, because the position being outlined here isn't compatible with solipsism. Solipsism is a transcendental position, which is against the spirit of the sort of 'outside' and blindness I'm talking about. This is something that it shares with realism, as many authors note. Ignorance, even systematic ignorance, is not the same as denial.

Love-proxies for the infant and basketball-robots - there doesn't have to be anyone but you tgw. — csalisbury

But there does, because as I said, I'm utterly dependent on what's beyond my control. What there doesn't have to be, and what you seem to want their to be, are other people on my terms -- that is, the 'not really other people' of the realist, other people who are reducible to me and have to be common to me.

Philosophy, in the socratic tradition, requires shared experience which renders possible the discussion and critique of various particular beliefs. You can't have a socratic dialogue if you don't have multiple people who understand the same language. There's no 'Republic' if Socrates and whats-is-name don't have that mutual understanding of being-wealthy which sparks the whole thing. — csalisbury

The Socratic tradition requires that ideas be tested internally on their own merits. If what you said were true, then the discussions had in the Theaetetus could not have happened, or to the audience would seem unintelligible. But they aren't.

Well. I can argue I'm the only conscious being in the world and there's no such thing as inter-affectivity and coercion and the blind fountain or any of that. How can you argue against that? — csalisbury

I don't think you can argue it. You can say it, which is not arguing it.

But what do you think, in your heart of hearts. When you were playing basketball with the other ppl, did they see a hoop, a basketball. What do you believe? — csalisbury

Nothing, really -- I'm checked out for the most part. I guess I have a kind of faith in my family members, the rest of it is hard to care about. Why have a belief? It can't change anything, not even action -- you'd have to behave the same way regardless, so who cares?

Part of philosophy as I see it, in the Socratic tradition, is a devaluing of belief.

That people can describe, in literature or reporting, similar experiences seems to me a good indicator we share similar experiences. — csalisbury

Why, though? Think about it.

I'm going to ask you again, point blank, do you think the other players saw hoops and basketballs? If you don't want to answer that, that's fine. But if you're not willing to share your actual beliefs, I don't think I can honestly engage you in this conversation. — csalisbury

I don't know. There's no point in denying it under any pubic circumstances, but I don't see how I could have any idea.

Definitely not. And? — csalisbury

What makes the basketball players so different from the symbiotes?

I'm going to ask you point blank: Those childhood memories of playing basketball - Do you think the other players saw a hoop, saw a basketball? Or was it just you? — csalisbury

How could I know? And what does it matter?

I think you're getting lost through fidelity to your theory. People play basketball together. They all see a hoop. They all see a basketball. Do you sincerely doubt this? (And please please please that these hoops and basketballs could be unsubstantial projections is implicit here) — csalisbury

Let's bracket the question for a moment and ask a more basic one. Instead of 'do they,' ask 'would they need to?' If not, then of course the fact that they play isn't necessarily evidence that they do.

Now ask, do symbiotic creatures need to see 'the same things' to interact, or even depend on each other to live? You can fee a squirrel an acorn -- does a squirrel see acorns?

For a basketball game to take place each participant has to illusion (makeshift verb) in a similar way. — csalisbury

No, I disagree. Getting people to move in a certain way doesn't require they have similar subjective experiences of that movement at all.

That's fine. In that case we externalize many things in very similar ways. — csalisbury

Again, I disagree. I think the extent of this similarity is exaggerated.

I don't see how anyone could ever coerce anyone else? — csalisbury

But that's precisely the point You don't see how. And you won't, because there is no common place for you to see in which it comes together. The lack of a thread manifests as the end of your passivity and so your ignorance.

If a basketball game can take place, one's metaphysical model has to be able to explain how that's possible, even if it's rare. — csalisbury

I don't think basketball games are rare, but I also don't think they're really interesting examples of intersubjectivity. You can play basketball superbly without caring much at all about your teammates as people or attributing much of an inner life to them.

If you want an account of the rarer cases, I've already started with what I said before -- about there being a kind of coercive feedback loop.

I still don't understand the video game example. It seems like a weird choice, given what I know of your view. In a video game, there's a graphical interface which is identical for all players. Various players provide input through their controller or keyboard, and this input can have no have effect on the inputs of other unless these inputs are mediated by that shared interface. This is the model you want to use? — csalisbury

Whether there's an interface doesn't matter. The point is that the players can coordinate on a game in such a way that they can't tell whether they are so coordinating (because they can't tell whether they're facing an AI or human). You have reactions that lead to inputs on both sides, but no real 'communication' or common space between the players that keeps this together. Just like English speakers can all articulate 'r' differently and never realize it, yet coordinate a language without having to sync up their mouths.

One player has to project another player passing the ball. — csalisbury

I don't know about that. I played basketball as a kid, and I never 'projected' anything when people passed to me. I more just knew how to move my body.

Or he can, through 'coercion'. But how can he 'coerce' his teammate unless his teammate projects him coercing (e.g., in this case, sees him pass the basketball? — csalisbury

He just needs to cause certain spasms in the teammate that prompt him to move, and he can do that by moving. In practice yes human players see each other, obviously -- but what I'm saying is this is an accidental feature of a game taking place. Insofar as the whole world is a game, very little of it is kept going in this way (cooperatively & with mutual understanding).

No angle with this question, just sincerely curious. Do you think connection and sympathy exist at all? — csalisbury

Yes, but they're exceptional. I think it happens when people, instead of blindly coercing each other, so to speak, look at each other and form a kind of coercive loop where they get an increasing intimacy of feedback. Human intimacy acts as a sort of drug, I don't know if its good or bad, some people go crazy without it, and almost everyone seems to get exhausted of it after a time. There's a kind of need to bring something alien into oneself, but it can't really work. It needs to hit a sweetspot of an alien thing hovering just out of reach, close enough to form this loop and so understand and respond to it, but not so close that you're just talking to yourself again or projecting. Trying to maintain this delicate balance gives people a sort of high that temporary alleviates their more neutral state of loneliness. But it ultimately aims at something impossible and so the high has to come down, sometimes painfully. Longtime friends who give each other space would be the ideal setup.

Do you think people can play a basketball game without awareness of each other? — csalisbury

Yes. That was the point of the AI fighting game example. All that you need is for two people to make the appropriate motions, and those motions can be triggered by private affections.

How do people affect each other if the 'blobs' don't intersect? I honestly don't understand how you reconcile nothin-but-pathe with this interaction. It seems unintelligible to me. — csalisbury

One coerces the other and it coerces reciprocally in turn. None of this requires awareness of what is going on with the other. An order emerges without any connection or sympathy.

For the players to play, they have to be in sync. — csalisbury

Don't symbiotic creatures have to be in sync? Yet they do what they do alone, without awareness of the other.

People's projections all seem incredibly tied to each other's in this case. For the players to play, they have to be in sync. For the audience to watch and understand, they all have to project something similar (they can talk to each other about this or that play) and be constrained by the actions and projections of those playing. — csalisbury

They affect each other and maybe they rely on each other in important ways, but that doesn't mean there's any common arena in which they meet, or that they have to realize this relationship is happening or take it to be such a relationship. You respond as you do the same way as you would if alone.

This is the point of the blind fountain, everything can be in perfect 'sync' while completely isolated (in fact, these two things go together).

Am I exquisitely attuned to the depths of any of those besides some friends and family? Not really. I think there's a substantial difference between that and practical solipsism. This is a move you make a lot. Either people are super-empaths deeply emotionally attuned to the plumbless depths of everyone or they're practical solipsists. Psychoanalysts call this way of thinking "splitting." — csalisbury

I think getting through the day doesn't really require treating other people with anything close to the humanity people are forced to grant themselves, and for the most part people don't do it.

Just to give a simple example, when people criticize their political opponents, they literally show an inability to attribute to them the intelligence, internal life, and human faculties that they attribute to themselves. The same goes for simple interactions on the street -- people have a kind of chronic inability to see someone who bumps into them as having the same fault as they do when they bump into someone else. I don't think I've made any ridiculous binary splits like you suggest. This is a perfectly ordinary observation.

I don't understand the point you're trying yo make about RTS AIs being hard to distinguish from human players. I'm asking you to explain, using your blob-model, how a basketball game works, which you still haven't done. — csalisbury

I don't really understand what you think needs explaining. There are a lot of levels at which you could describe a basketball game. Honestly, I don't even know all of the rules of basketball, so I would be bad at explaining it generally.

Actually, yes. There's a famous study by Rene Spitz, following infants raised in orphanages, who had their basic needs met, but who had minimal human contact. Nearly all of them were severely developmentally disabled. — csalisbury

That's interesting. It raises the question of what would happen if the relevant proxies for actual contact were introduced.

By practical solipsists, then, you mean people who neither think about the vast complexity and deep humanity nor form deep connections with the people they interact with in passing? — csalisbury

Sure -- one way to think about it is that people's behavior wouldn't change that much if everyone in the background were replaced with robots that just passed by. There are a select few people that for any intent or purpose people endow with 'full humanity' on a daily basis, and even then seemingly not as much as they do for themselves. It's simply not relevant for affected action most of the time that other people are people rather than fixtures of the physical world like the sidewalk. The vast majority of person-person relations pass each other by totally unnoticed.

I also think that a large amount of people do not have anyone they treat as fully human, either due to psychological inability or resistance to it, or from simple lack of human contact or genuine relationships.

It seems to me that organisms who have no idea they're interacting with other organism is a poor metaphor for what goes on in a basketball game. — csalisbury

Is it though? Have you played online games? There's another human coordinating with you on the other end opponent or teammate, but without voice chat or someone sitting next to you it feels very little like a 'human presence,' and in advanced games it's hard to tell whether you're fighting an AI or a person absent this. I play a few fighting games and am familiar with the phenomenology -- I imagine something similar happens in FPSes and RTSes. Basketball games are different in that there are human bodies running around, maybe -- but that's just because body-robots are harder to make than fighting-game input robots. People display more 'quirks' and make more humanlike 'errors' in fighting games, and have a noticeable propensity for very top-level strategizing (and wild shifts in strategy) that computers generally don't in these games. But in many games, these differences just do not show through, and even as someone who plays a certain game a lot, in many instances I wouldn't be able to tell if I was playing another person or a very good AI.

Probably not. Babies (even newborns, even hours-old newborns) seem to need (expressive) faces. I think that suggests the baby needs something they experience as an emotional source, a bestower, not just a touch or soundwaves. I think you can have a sense of a source without quite having a theory of mind. — csalisbury

But experiencing something as an emotional source isn't the same as it being one. Put another way -- do you think all babies that grow up without being loved are developmentally disabled? Perhaps it makes life harder not to be loved from an early age, but this strikes me as an implausibly strong claim.

In a similar vein, the 'test' of a turning test is precisely whether it gives you the sense of someone 'there.' — csalisbury

The Turing test has already been passed by simulated psychologists that basically just ask back what you say to them. If that's all you need for the presence of someone being 'there,' then it's quite weak in the sense that it doesn't really require anyone being there. I think for the most part people live as practical solipsists in day to day life, and only attribute to others the bare minimum they need to interact with them, while in some sense being convinced they're the only real people. Or at least that's what their actions seem to suggest most of the time. The rest is taken care of by powerful psychological projection, and genuine sonder is a bit rarer (maybe it occurs with family members and close friends).

Right, but my sense is that this model begins to disintegrate as soon as you try to try to apply it to intersubjective situations, especially cooperative ones. So, for instance, could you give a sketch of how to extend your model to account for a professional basketball game (two teams playing and an audience)? — csalisbury

Again there's a question of whether you need a common model to show how interactions work. For example, does a symbiotic creature act any differently from a lone one? Probably not -- most have no idea that they interact with another organism or depend on it for survival at all, yet the symbiotic relationship works just fine. There is no transcendental 'glue' holding these things together. It's not that it works because of some commonality, but rather that on observation we see a commonality because it works.

Yeah, the proposition expressed can definitely be true, which you can see if you ascribe it to someone else, yourself in the past, suppose it, etc. But commitment to belief that attends assertion makes it a systematically bad thing to assert as a speech act. You can say it, but not as a stand-alone speech act, meaning the speech act and not the sentence is bad. It's a pragmatic problem, not a semantic one.

Does the above make sense? — Michael

That depends on what you mean by 'makes sense.' In lay terms when we talk about things not making sense, any number of theoretical analyses might be called for. It might not make sense because it's word salad, syntactically ill-formed, even if the semantic interpretation is recoverable ('Went the to store I'). It might not make sense because while syntactically well-formed and semantically interpretable, it conflicts with ingrained world knowledge ('the bus ate the children') or results in category errors ('blue is the smartest color').

As for as the intelligibility of your sentence, it doesn't seem to differ in kind from 'there is a cup and there isn't a cup.' Since this is a contradiction, whatever nonsensicality the agreement ascription has is likely reducible somehow to the nonsensicality of contradictions generally. What nonsensicality is that? It's syntactically and semantically well-formed, abut it conflicts not so much with world knowledge but with intensional or cross-world knowledge: due to the interpretation, any competent speaker will know that in any situation it expresses a falsehood. This is a kind of 'countersense' or 'absurdity,' but that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the sentence as a linguistic object. It might never be appropriately assertable in canonical speech contexts, where the point is to assert something true, and it'll never be true.

Likewise, why would any competent speaker ever agree to a contradiction? To agree with a proposition is to count it true on the presupposition that someone else does as well. But why count true what your semantic competence should tell you can never be true? There is nothing wrong with the sentence, but saying it will pretty much always be a bad idea.

If you structure the sentence with 'agree' only taking scope over the first conjunct, I agree [there is a cup], and (but) there isn't a cup, then the result is a Moorean paradox, in the sense that it causes no contradiction but is systematically infelicitous to assert. That there is no semantic problem here can be seen from the fact that such things can be supposed, attributed to other people, attributed to oneself in the past, or put in antecedents of conditionals:

-Suppose I agree there's a cup, but there isn't one.
-You agree there is a cup, but there isn't one.
-I agreed there was a cup, but there wasn't one.
-If I agree there is a cup but there isn't one, then I'm wrong.

It's only when it's stated in the first person present that a problem arises:

#I agree there is a cup, but there isn't one.

This shows that the issue is a pragmatic one governing norms of assertion. You commit to believing what you assert, and agreement commits to belief. So you're stating there isn't a cup, which commits you to believing that, but then saying that you agree there is one, which entails you believe the opposite of what you just committed to. This problem doesn't arise in the other contexts above.

An infant might need certain stimulations associated with genuine affection -- whether or not any genuine affection has to be behind them is a different matter. Could you maturate a child appropriately in a simulacrum of the appropriate heat and sound? I don't know, but it's hard for me to see why the giver of affection is relevant to that, rather than the result of the giving, which might be provided by other means.

I don't think we're born alone. Or at least - we're born always looking toward someone else. Usually Mom takes the role. It's true that there may be no one to fill the role. But then the baby dies. Being able to be alone comes much later, if we survive infancy. And even then the way we're alone always involves someone else. — csalisbury

People are more or less born solipsists, and have to develop a theory of mind -- I'm not sure that an infant is ever 'looking toward someone else' in anything more than the banal sense that it needs someone else to take care of it, or in the sense that as soon as it's born it's already maturating toward the development of a theory of mind. As autism becomes increasingly severe, you can see what it looks like to remain more and more in that solipsistic state, and never to get a grasp on the theory of mind.

The idea that we're all alone in the end I take to be one of the major competing literary outlooks on life that's been around probably as long as people have, not something radical or new. The realization of one's loneliness and the unsatisfactoriness of other people is a major driving force in literature & mythology, and some modern Western takes on it can be found as sub-themes in e.g. Heart of Darkness or The Awakening. I mention all this just as a point of reference to where I'm coming from -- I see this as a kind of informal existential tradition (that Schop. would surely fit into).

Anyway this is what I was getting at with the 'transitional object.' The model as presented in your picture is utterly solipsistic. But the actual human infant depends on the pre-existing projections of someone else in order to project. And so forth all the way down. — csalisbury

As I said, the model just reflects one person. And that person doesn't suffer the 'outside,' because they're only passive w.r.t. themselves. They can coerce other people, but can't feel them. I think the feeling of other people being there is a kind of halfway state, where your coercive actions receive enough passive feedback that you get a kind of pleasant loop going, and that's person-to-person interaction (mutual coercion). The pleasure of being around someone else is the pleasure of something being alien enough that it can coerce you, but not so alien that it can't respond to your coercive tendencies in ways you can reciprocate. But all that doesn't mean you get free of the 'ultimate' loneliness, which isn't a coherent thing to ask for -- to assimilate the other person entirely would just be to talk to yourself again, which isn't what you want, and so you have to be alone in order for there to be 'other' people, contra the naive realist who sees other people as things like rocks that you directly see (and so everything is 'public').

I agree there is a dependence there, even a radical dependence, and we're utterly passive with respect to our own creation (we're creatures, ens creata in the Christian sense). The fallacy I see with traditional notions of this dependence is that it assumes this dependence requires some kind of meaningful connection or shared world. On the contrary, it's what makes everyone alone. And trying to bridge that gap by being around other people is seductive, but ultimately always unsatisfying, like everything else in life.

That Deleuze quote is hard to understand. All I'd say is the notion of 'outside' I mean isn't really comparable to a plant's nourishment being physically outside of it. 'Between' also makes me uncomfortable, because it seems to propose a single space.

But I sometimes feel like you take the more severe approach of suggesting not only that you don't know, but that we can't, in principle know - and that it any case it doesn't matter. — csalisbury

I do, this is the ancient opposition between skepticism, which suspends belief regarding a possibility, and negative dogmatism, which pronounces negatively on a possibility. I'm not a skeptic, I think there are things we know, and other things I'm willing to pronounce aren't known or knowable.

I suppose that's fair. I thought it would be better to try to work things out according to the immanent logic of your account, because you tend to be immediately dismissive of anything else. — csalisbury

I barely ever talk about this stuff, and not to anyone I know. I have philosophical fatigue. Important things can't be shared anyway, and philosophy at this level has no rigor, and is just a bunch of arguments from incredulity and mythologizing. I'd mostly rather practice than argue, which is why religion starts to be more interesting.

When there is a criticism that attempts to engage with the position itself (which is the only kind of criticism there is in my view -- all criticism is internal), I try to go with it, but I'm having trouble seeing the problems.

It was intelligible before the picture. What I'm objecting to is what appears to me a reluctance to apply your model to concrete examples in good faith by arbitrarily precluding certain language and metaphors that you yourself have recourse to. — csalisbury

Well, I think the metaphors can be dropped once you get it. Once you see, it's not like you need to keep rehearsing the metaphors in your head. Work in metaphor happens on the frontier of your understanding -- I don't have metaphors for water and people, they're just part of my life, and every metaphor happens in terms of something I don't have a metaphor for.

If the tension in the metaphors bothers you, you can replace the 'object' that 'grows' with 'purported object' or 'projection' (as in, a projection on a screen of an image, which insofar as one takes it to be a thing other than such an image is not what it purports to be). But talking that way all the time gets tiring.

What's the blind fountain? — csalisbury

The blind fountain is the closest thing I entertain to a metaphysical model of the universe. The basic idea is that all action is coercive, so that we're all solely passive with respect to ourselves (we have no control, except indirectly through coercion of others), but solely active with respect to others (we do not feel what they feel, their 'passions'). So there is no 'world' in that things are fundamentally split with respect to the active/passive distinction, and there is no place in which all these things come together. Everyone/thing is simultaneously completely alone and utterly dependent on an unknown 'outside.' The condition of our being 'together' is the condition of our being 'alone.' So there is no source of things, no transcendental root or laws, just endless fractured coercion, with everything being a 'source' with respect to everything else, and no common arena in which it all takes place. This allows for the possibility of genuine novelty and the ultimate impotence of all explanation.

I also think the structure effectively acts to perpetually exacerbate and propagate endless suffering, but that's more of a religious flourish.

"One ought not X and there is no rule against X" appears to be a contradiction — Michael

No it doesn't.

I don't need a correct account to see yours is wrong.

It's possible you ought not to do something, even if there's no rule against it. It's also possible you ought to do something even though there is a rule against it. So your account can't be right.

That one ought not X is that X is against the rules — Michael

No.

The problem for me is that the model is very bad at explaining the constraints -especially intersubjective constraints - on how the pathe can form, of itself, worlds and processes. — csalisbury

John 3:8:

"The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit."

I have ideas about this, but they're very difficult to put into words. I don't know if I've ever talked to you about the blind fountain, but that is the idea I'm focused on developing. There is an 'explanation,' but it's not of the sort that most would be willing to accept, and it goes along with a kind of epistemic humility, even isolation and loneliness.

On the one hand, I don't think it's a shortcoming of an account to say 'I don't know how it works' if that is the correct thing to say. The purpose of good epistemology is not to make up stories about what we know, but to give an accurate account of what and how we know. There are some points on which I think a skepticism or even a negative dogmatism in the vein of the Cyrenaics is in order. But that doesn't mean we just don't talk about it. It's important to enrich and flesh out these new metaphors.

My approach has beena faux-naif attempt to ask questions that draw out these limitations. And the response is generally a host of qualifications that actually contradict this model. But when I try to highlight that this is happening you assume I must not understand your basic framework and reiterate it using exactly the same language your qualifications would forbid. — csalisbury

Well if your questions are allowed to be naif why can't my answers be? I can only give back what I get. If you have things you really want to ask, really ask them then.

To take just one example: you stated admantly that pathe do *not* generate objects. & now, in your language, both identity and the world 'grow out' out of the pathe. — csalisbury

Does the picture not make that intelligible?

Think of it like the cave, again. There are two ways to answer 'where does the urn I see come from?' You can play along and say it comes from the light behind, or you can say 'let me stop you there, because there's no urn.' I don't see any tension in speaking in these two ways, just different registers. If you want me to go permanently into the 'esoteric' register (the exoteric/esoteric split is a big part of Christianity) I can do that, but then you have to be charitable and not give commonsense objections like 'so what, there's no acorns? do you really believe that?' and so on.

Would a picture help?



The blob is the mess of pathe (though you can never really visually represent these things instead of living them). It shifts and turns and takes many shapes. Among the shapes it takes are the shape of a face and a tree, stand-ins for one's self identity as subject and for the external world. Both grown out of the same pathetic source, and both are in fact never separated from it; they are simply the feelings coagulating into a certain shape or quality. The philosopher zooms in on their interaction as if with a little box, and sees them as standing separately and coming into contact, ignoring the existence of pathe altogether (and insisting that their reintroduction is a kind of 'dualism' or 'supernaturalism' outside the sphere of the one world -- ontological monism). Life as lived includes not just what is outside of the philosopher's box, but also what is in it, and it is those shapes -- the projection of the tree is made up of colors and lights and tickling on the skin and all these very familiar sensations and neuroses.

The philosophical desire is one to externalize by pretending that there are no pathe, just the box. Of course, you can't really do this -- they've never been separated from the feeling to begin with, but are only playing at it.

Note that the whole blob, including the face and tree, are not a sort of universal pathos-ether, either -- this is all just one person, if you like. The mask and the tree get held up in opposition though they are both actually 'the same' thing, placed opposite one another, one projected away from the other (even though in fact there is no separation). Obsession with this structure comes from being unable to bear oneself and a demand for escape. Notice that the projection is then only a manifestation of these feelings, but that there is nothing, no center, in control of them or choosing what to form where. And an object is never actually successfully created -- and there is no other third thing, 'the illusion,' to be explained.

If one wants to stick with the term 'projection', it seems that projection is always social (or at least intimate) and that each individual's 'projections' are a share in a collective projection. — csalisbury

I doubt it. I think the extent to which the world is shared is exaggerated, and it's done so in part because we're free to project our own way of seeing things onto everyone else, and people basically live like solipsists, believing everyone to see things as they do, and responding to apparent disparities with frustration, violence, denial, accusations of moral or intellectual deficiency, etc.

I'm attracted to the idea that there need be no top-down organization in order for a mechanism to work: there doesn't have to be a unifying condition to make the world 'function,' just as nobody commands oceans or planets or marketplaces. It's possible for an interaction to emerge (that among humans mostly takes the form of coercion) from bits and pieces that do not see each other and don't have much to do with each other on their own terms. Order is always forced to arise out of accidents, but that order is also not that powerful.

There's a linguistic metaphor for this that I'm fond of, which is that in American English there's actually no common articulation for 'r'. Rather, individual speakers have a wide variety of private articulations, yet nonetheless that /r/ phoneme enters the public language because all of these converge on a single psychological sound-cateogry despite the differences in articulation. The naive philosopher is like someone who demands that because the sound has a certain role, obviously it must have some common or shared source. But this is just not true. Whatever 'works,' works (or doesn't). The naive philosopher has it backwards. And without linguistic research, we would have gone on being forever unaware that we weren't even mouthing the same thing -- we had beetles in our mouths.

I think it's just as easy to be scared of the outer. — csalisbury

Maybe, but I don't think other people are 'outer' in quite the way the realist would have it.

(1)Believing too firmly in the absoluteness of things can both keep at bay the outer and others. Whether one cites the One, God or Nature, the idea persists that there is some higher power which keeps everything in its place. This externalization of meaning and creative power makes actual intimacy difficult.

(2) But intelligent people start to see the cracks. (Or rather intelligent, disappointed people do.) But how does this play out? There's the old-testament prophetic route, where one gets obsessed with the eventual destruction of the cities, like a man who knows the bridge is compromised and awaits the train that will bring it down, like the trumpet that will bring down Jericho. In social-intimate terms, this is definitely alienating. But there's also the possibility of salvaging a crackless inside by riding the via negativa to another place. The cracks are thereby prevented from letting the outside in because. The 'world' turns out not to live up to the ideal we thought it did, so one discards it, instead of discarding the ideal.

(3) Accept that things are fragile and that we create them together. Interesting avenues of exploration: Attachment theory, the psycho-genesis of cities and villages, the mutation of myths and religions (which Sloterdjik rightly calls technologies of immunity) etc. — csalisbury

I don't really deal in 'solutions' or 'ways forward' because I think it's pointless. Life isn't some puzzle with a best way of living it, and it doesn't really have any questions that it asks and need to be answered. It's really not my concern what you decide to take on board as a result of these musings. I don't think what an individual person decides to do or believe matters much.

As to the squirrel. Well, maybe it doesn't project an acorn per se. That's probably true. Regardless, our projected/illusory world is shared. The man can pick up and move the acorn and it'll fuck up the squirrel's shit. Interaction with - and through - each others 'projections' is possible. — csalisbury

But if you admit the squirrel projects no acorn, then this way of putting it is infelicitous. We don't tamper with the squirrel's projection by moving an acorn. We tamper with the squirrel, sure. But the acorn is a kind of human heuristic, not a shared one.

I agree there is a shared space in the sense that we are capable of coercing each other.

The accumulated 'projections' exceed the particular desires of individuals to such an extent - well, it's almost like an ant colony. Any particular ant is mindlessly following pheremone trails. Viewed in the light of the whole, though, it's helping to build a nest, although no individual ant has any idea of the process its taking part in. There's a kind of objectivity build out of the blindness of individual subjectivities pursuing their own ends. — csalisbury

That's true, but I don't know if I'd call it objectivity, which has certain overtones, like being an object for a subject, recognizable as something reachable at the far end of perception of an intellect. The extent to which it's objective is the extent to which we have no control over it.

I still don't get what you mean by projection. If it isn't a 'generative' power, why call it 'projection' at all? To project is to be the cause of what's projected. What qualities of projections, literal or psychological, do you see in the process you're trying to describe? You talked about objects (object-ing) being like psychological projection, resulting from our trying to externalize our inner agony. Except now you're saying that no individual can actually do that? Do the subjects merely watch an Other's projections, projections of the kingdom of god, projections which so entrance, that the subjects can't help but subconsciously affirm the show? But then why did you being up individual psychological projection before? I'm not being cute, I really don't understand how 'projection' is being put to work here. — csalisbury

When you project your unpleasant qualities onto another person, do you create a person with those qualities? Do you create anything? It would seem no. Same thing with the stuffed animal.

Q: Why do infants, empirically, need a static object to project onto? — csalisbury

They don't. They (children, maybe not infants) can create imaginary friends. Personal deities or spirits probably also have served a similar function at many points.

Q: Why does the infant need the static result of prior projections to project onto? — csalisbury

Although they don't, it can help -- after all, these projections are not actually things like the person takes them to be, but complexes of pathe (including the feel or need for them to be 'outer'), and feeling a certain way can engender feeling another way.

Even if there's nothing 'there,' there is absolutely a process of 'there-ing' and 'object-ing.' (& you got Husserl and intentionality even with ideas ). But a need for substantiality isn't where I was going. — csalisbury

Yes, and there are some thinkers in the Western traditions that describe this process. The most complete account is found in Henry's Essence of Manifestation, which is unfortunately practically impenetrable.

I see this not ultimately as a kind of generation of objects, but as a kind of spiritual-psychological engrossment in a certain way of thinking, as alienated form oneself, and trying to place one's own pathe outside.

What is the relation between the acorn-projection of the squirrel and the acorn-projection of the man? — csalisbury

A squirrel, presumably, does not project acorns at all.

Why do kids need transitional objects given by parents? why don't they just project their frustrations as objects on their own? — csalisbury

Because, again, projection isn't a kind of generative power, nor is there an omnipotent self. That there are certain objects is already a reflection of the way these projections work themselves out.

But I still don't really understand how you conceptualize 'the light behind.' — csalisbury

This enters into mythopoetic or religious territory. I take it to be roughly the Kingdom of God in the Gnostic tradition.

But when pressed on how that works, you're quick to clarify that it's not as though there's some subject who creates a world if out there, which it 'bears'. " it doesn't act as a transcendental condition." Except that's exactly how you describe it. The sleight-of-hand is to say that there are 'illusions' not 'objects.' But then the subject becomes precisely a transcendental bearer of a world of 'illusions.' — csalisbury

Not at all. Some philosophical prejudice may lead you to believe that's what's required, but there's no necessity to it. I think you're engaging in some weird wordplay here, acting as if an 'illusion' is some separate sort of substantial thing that also needs ontological explication (or else your criticism of Dennett makes no sense). Rather, an illusion is nothing, in the sense that what one takes to be 'there' by some criteria is not, on those very criteria. There's no other thing, the illusion, that is now there instead. If you like, an illusion is just the very act of falling for it -- it's not as if I thought I was perceiving one thing, an object, but rather I was perceiving another, an illusion. Rather, the illusion is itself that there is an object.

If you like, to be under an illusion or delusion is to be involved in this kind of unhealthy, unhappy, or self-defeating conviction or practice.

A legitimate question might then be, 'why do I engage in these unhappy and self-defeating convictions? Why am I under an illusion?' That's a very complex question, and I think it can only be answered, like with good psychotherapy, by unweaving the illusion itself and seeing its source on its own terms. Is there a surefire way to do this? I don't know: I think some people are probably more constitutionally prone to or capable of it than others. But philosophy and religion can help, in babysteps. The proof is always in the pudding. In saying these things I don't so much see myself as defending some thesis to you, but rather explicating something that I live with and 'understand' in the way that I understand how to walk or what it's like to be alive. It's these sorts of lived practices that are deeper ingrained than debate that religion attends to.

Though of course, we engage in philosophy too because it unweaves sophisms on their own terms. And I do think there is some Western philosophy that is rationally helpful at this juncture, and that includes in particular the Cyrenaics, Schopenhauer, and Henry. The way in which the frustrations 'become' an object has to be seen -- but it can be seen because it's happening to you all the time. It's like realizing that you're upside down.

This is still confusing to me. Classical psychological projection makes already-existing others bearers of the feelings we can't deal with harboring ourselves. — csalisbury

I would say that in psychological projection we see others that aren't there. We think we're seeing someone else, but we don't engage with them in any sense -- they might as well not be there at all. There is no 'real person,' only a fantasy of what that person should be, a reflection of one's own frustrations.

A stuffed animal - any 'transitional object - exists prior to a child's projections. The very syntax of 'we project our desires onto something else' suggests a subject and an object upon which the subject can unburden its agonies. "there is no animal or creature 'there.'" Except, of course, that there is. The stuffed animal doesn't, in itself, contain those things we project upon it. But, for some reason, having a static object really helps us organize us those confused feelings. — csalisbury

All metaphors give out somewhere. There's a disanalogy in that of course I'm saying the cotton facsimile of a creature is itself not 'there' either. But the important thing to see is that the animal is not there on the terms the child thinks it is. That is, there is no animal at all. Likewise, the world purports to be something 'there' - but it isn't. Is there 'something' there? Maybe, but it is not what it is supposed to be, doesn't live up to its own terms.

This seems diametrically opposed to the idea of world and self as co-constituting, which you've nominally espoused. — csalisbury

The world and self are not co-constituting because there is no world to constitute. If we have our prisoners in the cave, and they ask us what the origin of all the objects they're seeing are, we can answer either by saying that they come from reflections of the light behind them -- or we can answer by saying, they don't come from anywhere because you aren't seeing any objects to begin with.