:rofl:

I don't know man, it's kind of like sure, that's fine use cartoons if you want, no problem.

But then you have people complaining that these people need a "real flesh and blood relationship", when often porn is not made as a substitute for a relationship.

Yet if someone watches "real porn", it's exploitation - which it is - though it's not the only job that does this, by any means.

So, getting a real-life partner is the solution. I'm skeptical if this is the solution. Probably some kind of education on the topic is the best bet.

Do cars owe us anything or calculators or laptops or fans?

Until we can find a way to show that other people are actually conscious - as opposed to assuming (with good reason) that they are, I don't see the point is asking the same question to a computer.

It doesn't make sense.

The extent of usage and the nature of the porn viewed is probably of significant importance.

One cannot pretend that male horniness, especially when being a teenager or a young adult, is a very powerful force, so the market for such an audience exists in spades.

An interesting issue that arises is if it is possible to make such content showing a different side of sex which does not always reduce people (specifically women) to objects.

Murky area.

Oldboy :fire:

Better question would be why don't we make them? There are so many ways one can do something wrong (not limited to moral choices), but very few ways to make them right.

In no particular order:

Mulholland Drive
Pulp Fiction
Goodfellas
Airplane!
Oldboy (Korean version)
The Matrix
Dr. Strangelove
Lost in Translation
The Departed
Monty Python and the Holy Grail

I'm surely missing some, haven't seen a good movie in ages - novels tend to be just so much more fulfilling.

There's no scientific findings published by Nature that address mind independence. This is an assumption arising from your worldview. I've said this several times now. I'm not sure why it's unclear. — frank

I'm mostly talking about physics and aspects of astronomy. Not biology or stuff that's even more complex than that. I'd say that there are parts of astronomy that are arbitrary, sure. With physics, much less so.

From what I can see, most physicist take themselves to be talking about the world irrespective of our beliefs, desires, everyday concepts and so on.

Everything else becomes much muddier and more difficult very quickly. Which doesn't render it less valuable or interesting, but arbitrariness and our ways of thinking about them do enter much more clearly, imo.

I have the same worldview you do. I'm just clearer on the arbitrariness of it than I think you might be. — frank

That's quite possible. :)

I'm saying these are epistemological differences, not ontological ones.

I'll even grant the point about the alien.

Yes. My point was just that since it's incomplete, the claim you're making isn't really about science. It's a philosophical bias that's common during the time in which you live. — frank

What? We can use the James Webb, land on the moon, calculate the age of the universe and the distance of galaxies all on the basis of the little we do know. Is this not real knowledge of the universe even if the science is incomplete?

There's weight to scientific findings. You can't really borrow that weight to say there's a mind independent world.

To some extent it's a hinge proposition that there are mind independent things, but I don't know how much of your behavior really revolves around that hinge. I don't know how differently people behaved 5000 years ago. — frank

So is there mind-independence in your view, or no? Like, do you believe all these is to the world and the universe are our thoughts about it? That's perfectly fine if it is your view.

That's true, we don't know what 95% of the universe is made of, "only" 5% of it - which, given the species we are, is still a tremendous achievement.

Since the birth of modern science, with Galileo, Copernicus, Descartes and Newton we have been on a path of ever more precise identification of the structures of the universe: planets, asteroids, starts and so on.

Since Newton at least, physics has not been wrong, it has been improved. How far will that go? We don't know. Maybe we will stay stuck where we are, given practical limitations of technology and the vast distances involved between galaxies.

But if we are in black hole, then black holes exist, absent us. Planets do too. That doesn't depend on mind, though it was discovered by it. So planets and stars, are part of the ontology of Astronomy, subject to refinement, such as the case with Pluto.

Plato would say we forget most of the Soul's wisdom when we're born. There are all sorts of alternatives. There's nothing wrong with our present worldview. It works well for us. But there's no telling what people will believe in a thousand years. — frank

If we get that far. Yes, we don't know. But we are not too far from reaching the practical limitations I mentioned.

But that we create the manifest properties, when say, we look at images of James Webb, can only leave one in utter awe, at the power of our minds and the beauty they reveal (to us) about how the universe looks to us. So yes, we know very, very little. But not nothing, I wouldn't argue.

I have in mind post-Newtonian physics. They weren't proved wrong, they were shown to be inadequate to explain certain phenomena: the orbit of Neptune and a few other oddities.

So far as we know, spacetime has not been shown to be wrong, but it has not been able to be combined with quantum theory, which has also not been shown wrong.

When I say revisions, I have more in mind what kind of stuff may lie beneath quantum theory, or what is it that combines General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics.

I don't think these theories will be shown to be wrong (as was the case with Newton's theories), but obviously incomplete.

All I'm saying is that I don't think the universe depended on us for it to happen, it just is, and we manage to capture a little bit about it.

The alternative is that we created everything, including the world and that all we know are our ideas and nothing else. That's an extreme form of Berkelyianism.

So you think the stuff physics describes wouldn't exist if we were absent? That is, there would be no such thing as an age of the universe, nor would there be things we call planets (after we arise and call them this) and events that led us to our evolving?

How do we account for these facts?

Sure, I do think something existed prior to us. We know a few facts about it - not too too much, but not trivial information either.

Ok, so we have the same meaning of terms. So what's extra mental, like, if you look outside your window or go woods or something - what's extra mental in this environment?

Again, I don't know how you can know this. Two, they might be much more monocultural than us and find the diversity striking, obscene, confusing. I see no reason to rule that out. Also, there might be tendencies within sentient species and that sentient species might recognize a similar vast diversity to the one that they have in their own species.
One of the current trends in anthropology is called the ontological turn. They have realized that categories have been projected onto other cultures and that anthropogists actually need to work on their own categories much more completely because they are not able to conceptualize what they are encountering. Their categories fail, but don't seem to. There are seeds of the change in older anthropology but this issue has become central. For example the descriptions of animism have been presented in categories that match the Western models, even if they deviate from them. Anthropologists have realized that they need to, often, create new categories, more or less black box ontology to even describe the other culture's beliefs and categories. And the focus is on ontology. Not just epistemological issues of how to understand what they mean. — Bylaw

The alternative would be to say that the only intelligent species that could develop, must be like us in almost all respects - that seems to me quite unlikely.

I think the issue here is the scope of what you take ontology to be. I take ontology to be about the world - what's in the world. It's not what we take there to be in the world. Different forms of animism, or ways of thinking about time or relationships or ways to think about the identity of objects and community, are not things about the world, these are things we postulate on the world, hence epistemic. Epistemology is not limited to questions of, how do we know what we do? It also includes what we believe there is in the world, and in this respect, most of us have been quite wrong (literally wrong - not applicable to the world, but still valuable) for thousands of years.

So I take epistemology to be quite broader than issues concerning justification. And I try to make ontology about the world - this includes physics, for instance aspects of chemistry and perhaps biology. Anything beyond that would be closer to a "folk psychology" - a term I deeply dislike, because it makes it sound not serious, when it is very serious and important. Nevertheless, that's how the issue looks like to me.

I don't understand. What is extra mental, when we look at the world?

No, culture has nothing to do with my view.

Realism assumes that the world is just so, irrespective of whether or not it is observed. It may be a sound methodological assumption but it doesn't take into account the role of the observing mind in the establishment of scale, duration, perspective, and so on. — Wayfarer

I mean, there are many, many versions of realism. The realism I think holds up is something akin to Russell's "epistemic structural realism": the notion that science captures only the structures of things in the universe, without telling us about its "internal constitution", to borrow Locke's phrase. It's a view which wouldn't deviate much from Kantianism.

which we can be confident will remain just so even in the absence of an observer. But even that imagined absence is a mental construct. There is an implied viewpoint in all such calculations. — Wayfarer

I can't deny that, because it's true. It is a mental construct, but something about mathematics, mediated by mind, when applied to certain aspects of the universe, tells us something that is not mental "only". If it were mental only, we would not be able to do Astronomy or tell how old the Earth is and so forth.

This is all mediated by mind, but there are glimmers that we are seeing something extra-mental. Having a degree of confidence is the best we can do, given the circumstances.

We're used to thinking of what is real as 'out there', independent of us, separate from us, but in saying that, we don't acknowledge the fact that reality comprises the assimilation of perceptions with judgements synthesised into the experience-of-the-world. — Wayfarer

No disagreement. By saying that math tells us something about the world absent us, I'm only echoing what Russell says, which you often quote. It's because we know so little about the world that we turn to math, it's not because we know a lot about it.



No rush at all Janus, it's all a fun exercise for the sake of thinking about how you view these things, which often helps me think more clearly too. I'll reply when you finish, which needn't be today, nor tomorrow, that way we don't break up the conversation. :up:

The ontological diversity is enormous. — Bylaw

That's the thing, I think you are describing epistemic differences, not ontological ones. Differences in the way we approach our views of the world, it's not a difference in the world itself. To put is simply, take a baby from anywhere in the world - your pick: place it in the most "far removed" culture you can think of in terms of beliefs and practices from the babies original culture, and that baby will grow up with the beliefs
of the "far removed" culture.

Let the baby grow, bring it back to it's birthplace - let it stay there a few months, maybe longer, they will be able to understand the differences quite well. It may initially seem like that person is experiencing "two different worlds", but it's not literally true. If it were, we wouldn't be able to do translation, or talk to each other in different languages, for instance.

I've been fluent in my wife's language for 21 years. I live in her country. The languages are quite close. The cultures are quite close. I've worked with communciation in a diverse set of roles and have been used professionally for crosscultural communication roles also, and not just between her culture and mine, but there also.

And still we discover differences and confusions, some having to do with identity and and perception, to this day. Not the man woman stuff (though with that also), but cultural models. Throw me in with an Amazonian tribe with a still living shamanic tradition...and we'd be having to come back again and again to basic ontological investigations to undertand each other. — Bylaw

I'm not denying these things - they are big differences in terms of how we view the world, that doesn't take away from my original claim: it's all within the human species.

Since we can't know anything "above" our species, so to speak, these differences will look (and feel) like substantial differences to us, we can't help feeling that way. But a more intelligent being would look at us as if we are the same species, with minor variations in behavior.

So I think our only point of potential disagreement is one of ontology vs epistemology. I think you're claims aim to be ontological, I think they are epistemological.

intelligent symbolic creature would think in terms of identity, materiality, multiplicity, diversity, number, form, pattern, similarity, difference and so on — Janus

I don't know. I think that identity makes sense as does similarity and of course, number, but materiality or form are a bit more dubious. I don't see why a thinking being must have these specific terms: some are more plausible than others.

On the other hand nouns, for example, denote entities of various kinds, and I think that grammar reflects the logic of experience. The obvious ostensible difference is that numbers can be used to calculate, but language can also be used to deduce. Things may not be as straightforward as they seem and there's maybe a huge subject there to inquire into. — Janus

I'm not clear on that. You can say that we use nouns to loosely denote what, say, a city or a house is, or who is a teacher or a plumber - but I don't see a necessity. I don't see why, say, a city would have to be a part of the cognitive architecture of another creature. A house? Maybe - at least territory, based on examples we see here on Earth.

We can say the world consists in a multiplicity of things or in a number of things; is there a difference in the two statements? We can talk about specific numbers. I guess. — Janus

Take a look out your window, or next time you're out in a park, with plenty of trees and bushes around. Ask yourself, "how many objects are there here?" It soon becomes evident that we have a problem, we have a multiplicity of objects, but do we know how many?

Is a tree necessarily the root along with the trunk up to the stem and then the leaves? Do we count the leaves as one object or one by one? What about the branches, how many are there? I don't think you'll get a clear cut answer.

I'm not quite sure what you mean here. — Janus

The universe is 13.7 billion years old. Even when we all die, that fact will remain. That's the age of the universe, before we arose (maybe new theories will change this estimate or render it obsolete).

The Sun is 93 million miles away from Earth, the distance remains a fact, irrespective of us.

Now the colour of the sun, us seeing it rising in the East and setting in the West, the warmth we feel form it, and so on, these things will not hold up, absent us.

Even the range of deities is enormous, I mean in terms of kind. You have people ridden by gods. You have cultures where assemblages and networks replace out subjects and objects and they are not the same kinds of 'things' — Bylaw

What the god(s) command may be quite different, say requiring sacrifice of some kind, maybe even murder in certain cults or we can metaphorically speak of Westen culture under the guise of the god of money.

Although the commands and rules may be different, the resultant actions and moral intuitions will be shared by all human beings. Any person can understand what it means to be exploited, even if they don't work in a factory setting.

You mention animism which is radically different from both the secular West and the religious West. You have very different ideas about causation. You have cultures where dreams are considered more real than waking life. — Bylaw

I'm not denying there are differences between cultures, and to us as a species, they do look radically different. It's kind of like when we look at a whole range of dogs, we tend to notice they are different in terms of skill, sociability, loyalty and so forth. At the end of the day though, they are dogs - one species.

A theoretically "smarter" - in terms of having more powerful cognitive capacities than we do, would look at people at consider us as we consider other creatures, we are by and large the same, but the differences we see between us, look considerable.

So the fact that some cultures take dreams to be more real than a culture which doesn't focus on dreams isn't as drastic as it looks, in my opinion.

Between human beings? Maybe, but the differences are superficial. Like some tribes may believe in an extreme form of animism, while another tribe believes in one true God. But the general themes are not too different: the good, evil, the bountiful, the beautiful and so on, with different specifications.

Between species, the differences are quite pronounced. They likely have very different ontologies, although lacking language, it would be impossible to say what form such an ontology may look like.

That other animals see things differently than us doesn't seem relevant to my point that it seems reasonable to think that any symbolic-language competent species would form concepts of multiplicity, identity and the other examples I gave. — Janus

With a sample of one, it's hard to say. Some things may be the same, others not. The identity we ascribe say, to bodies of water, or trees, could be quite different - they may conceptualize such things to encompass far more (or less) than we do. It's a reasonable possibility.

I mean, having an intelligent symbolic creature like us, possessing exactly the same cognitive framework would be pretty wild. Which doesn't imply that it would be impossible.

Why should we think that numbers must be somewhere? As to why they work so well in physics, who knows? How could we ever know the answer to a question like that? We do know that nature appears to possess quantity and multiplicity, but does that say anything about nature beyond how it appears to us? — Janus

Are they nowhere? Language is in us, that's true. Numbers too, otherwise, we wouldn't know about them. The difference here being that math applies to the nature of things - physics, chemistry and so forth - which suggests strong elements of mind independence. We can't say the same thing about language use, I don't think.

Multiplicity and numbers are different, though they have some elements in common.

As to nature, agreed: nothing beyond what it appear to us, of course. Attaching to mind independent aspects of the world, does not imply something being beyond us, it implies mind independence.

Let's take a few examples. Take a dog for instance, most of the time, they don't pass the "mirror test" of self-awareness, which implies (but does not prove) that they either lack a distinct sense of identity, or the identity they have, is rather different than ours.

Or take the example of the mantis shrimp, they have 16 light cones, as opposed to our three. This suggests they see many, many more colours than what we could even imagine. And it's hard to attribute to them, say, the same capacity of multiplicity we have. Whereas we take a tree to be one object, a mantis shrimp, lacking concepts (most likely), might see several objects.

The point is not so much that math isn't human based, it's that it attaches itself to the universe, in a way language does not - the words we use are arbitrary, the numbers we use, though we can change the symbol 3 to "III", give us the same answer.

And we don't even need to apply numbers to the universe, we can use them "by themselves" to solve a problem internal to math.

The biggest issue is, where are the numbers? And why do they work so well in physics?

Sure - to the extent you describe it, I think that's on track.

But I think we should be cautious in thinking that because they share these similarities, that they are more or less the same thing. Like a mathematician, who doesn't speak Japanese, will perfectly well understand the formula of another mathematician who is Japanese.

What math describes - to the extremely limited sense I understand this - is related to structures of rather simple things. The structure can become quite complex, but easy compared to the complexity of virtually any object in the perceived human world.

Language on the other hand, is used for all sorts of things, "communication" being one among the many things it is used for.

Then there's also the issue of representation. We represent the objects in the world in a human way, knowing of no other way to represent things.

It's not at all clear that mathematics is a representation which would significantly vary from species to species. It could, but I'd be quite skeptical.

I'm not getting notifications for your posts. Weird.

I mean, you are speaking about objects, things in the world. Mathematics is rather different, I wouldn't say it's an object in any sense of that word. I mean, where are the numbers? Nobody can point them out in the sense an ordinary object could be pointed out, or maybe even a particle or atom.

2+2 and much, much more difficult formulations are still true, absent anything else. Though of course, to make this explicit, you need a conscious agent.

I'll check that article out, thanks for sharing.

Empiricism goes out the window if empiricism is construed as implying "publicly observable phenomena". But if you include experience in empiricism, as one must, if any empiricism is going to make any sense at all, then it remains as a method of investigation.

I agree with what you say about math being independent but requiring a mind to comprehend it. Mathematics is extremely strange and may be one of the reasons why Plato required knowledge of geometry to enter his academy, aside from its timeless otherwordly nature.

But math doesn't depend on objects.

Absolutely. And that it doesn't seem to depend on the universe, somehow. Utterly baffling.

It's hard to imagine a possible world in which this wouldn't be the case, we can change the symbol "2" to "II" or something else, but it's still a mathematical fact.

Not that I take you to be saying the opposite, but, the ontology of math is pretty crazy.

Hey James, nice to see you around again! :victory:

This conception itself comes from Newton and Liebnitz' religious intuitions, but is now perhaps more associated with militant atheism than religion. The thing is, this supposes the existent of eternal Platonic laws, something that seems at odds with physicalism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It's tricky. I mean we can say that Newton and Leibniz were wrong in terms of specifics, though oddly now physics may be giving Leibniz the edge in terms of considering what constitutes the universe, Leibniz did not think atoms exist or if they did, were fundamental.

The ontology of mathematics. Can it be said that 2+2=4 was true prior to the universe and after its predicted collapse? That's difficult, but, the truth of this claim appears to be independent of the universe.

But I agree generally, that such views are at odds with mainstream physicalism.

I'm also not sure that idealism necessarily opens the door to the supernatural anymore than physicalism. There are plenty of naturalist flavors of idealism. Idealism simply entails that mentation is fundemental. The natural sciences can still be said to describe all that can be known about that mentation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You said it: "naturalist flavors" of idealism, but in general, idealism can also be used by Deepak Chopra, or some current guru-of-the-moment in India, where they seem to appear with frequency. In that respect, these idealists are liable to say incoherent things.

I don't know of any spiritualist or mystic who would call themselves a materialist.

But if you stick to naturalistic idealism, then yes, claims made would be much more sober.

Existence is just a fact of life - reasons why don't apply, in terms of looking for a justification for it. According to the evidence we have - which is quite different from the optimal evidence there may be, for creatures with a higher cognitive faculty than us - we are here because the laws or habits of the universe so happened to combine in a way that we arose.

Ethics I know not, these are so little understood, which shouldn't be surprising given that we are likely the only animals to have such a thing - there may be hints that other higher mammals have the barest of glimpses of such a phenomena. I think that it is in our best interest to take ethics seriously, given that existence is so rare in the universe - maybe unique. So we should treasure what we have, each other, and the humanist legacy.

I am liable to change some of my views, according to new evidence. In terms of epistemic-metaphysics, that's much more difficult and would need a very strong argument from dissuading me that rationalistic idealism - a la Descartes, Cudworth and Chomsky - is false. It could happen, but as of today, I think it's unlikely.

You didn't ask in your post the title of your OP. In which case, I currently think Raymond Tallis view is correct: I'm an ontological agnostic. I do not know what kind of things exist or do not exist in the world, absent the sciences, which say little on this topic. An ontology based on physics leaves an awful lot out.

Yes, I think the topic of humility is one that should be re-visited again, especially in philosophy. It's really quite remarkable he could draw such arguments so soon after Newton's legendary work.

I think his arguments are, more often than not, persuasive, sober and thoughtful. I'm going to open a discussion group to talk about 3 chapters in the book.

In any case, good idea to re-read him. :up:

It is well worth the effort, there is a treasure trove of useful and insightful stuff in it. And even in areas in which one might disagree with him, there is food for thought.

If you're stuck or need help in one section, let me know, I'm happy to help.

That took. a. long. time.

Should've been finished much sooner, but attention issues and all. Just finished Locke's Essay for a second time. Majestic and a true classic. I will forever be a fan.

Now onto Leibniz' New Essays.

As for novels, finished reading Higashino's latest novel am now reading Tales from the Gas Station by Jack Townsend.

Wrong thread.

Indeed. I guess idealists Like Kastrup would say that physicalism is itself a kind illusion and the universe is entirely mentation - material objects are what mental processes look like when seen from a particular perspective. Sometimes this strikes me as just the opposite of Dennett - instead of consciousness being a type of illusory phenomenon, the body is the illusion. — Tom Storm

Ahh, Dennett. I'm not a fan of his views at all and in fact, seem to rather distort very elementary experience, so let's use someone else, if you don't mind.

Let's take, say, Rovelli, who says calls himself a physicalist, and he tends to allow for physicalism to encompass quite a lot.

The consequences of idealism vs materialism make little difference in practice to how one lives it would seem to me, except that idealism makes room for a reboot of the idea of the supernatural. — Tom Storm

I think you are on to something here. Though I don't see why one couldn't be a physicalist and allow for God to be physical and be agnostic about things like real intuitions (if they exist) and similar phenomena. Though they may be less likely to argue for this.

Now, if you include talk about ghosts and astrology, then I don't think that neither idealist nor physicalists (in as much as one can form a coherent distinction) would defend such view that much.

In so far as you believe than enactivism is the correct approach to these issues, can it be said that it is "a fair distance" from it.

But if one takes a kind of idealism to be true - say a variety of innatist idealism -then one could argue that enactivism is a fair distance away from it.

But that in turn depends on the strand of enactivism being elaborated, I would assume. And then there would remain only a difference in emphasis between one view and another.

To be fair, there are important differences between say, Kant, Hoffman and Kastrup. Sure, they could be called "idealists", but that's a bit like saying that Strawson and Dennett are both materialists, which they are, but vastly different in what the word entails.

These are perhaps heuristics, but they need not signal agreement in terms of entailment.



I know it was aimed at me at all, but I cannot resist making but some comments, as your post is quite useful.

1) I think there are many hard questions, we just happen to live in a time in which one problem appears to be the central focus of attention, and not others, which were "hard problems" that were never solved, but accepted: the nature of motion, for instance.

2) Yes - a category error. Eliminitavism like Dennett or Churchland is cute, but fruitless.

What's the difference between a physicalist monism and a non-physical one? Is consciousness not physical? Or alternatively, if consciousness is not physical, why isn't the rest of the universe non-physical? There seems to be a lot of "empty space" - very far removed from any ordinary notions of physical stuff we have in everyday life.

Not to mention "dark matter" and "dark energy", which constitute a combined 95% of the universe - the vast majority. Is that physical or not? What consequences follow from proclaiming one term instead of another one?

The substantial issue here, I think, is that of mind independence or no mind-independence...

No, I read your OP and skimmed a bit from others, but little - I prefer to go in "new", as it were. Now you've added plenty of context and renders the notion more clearly, so thanks for that it is useful.

The issue here isn't to poke holes into an account - that can be done in almost any post concerning issues as large and complex as human relations and psychology, what we can do is provide some tools that help clarify some of the problems at hand.

We only have a data set of one here, ours, and the way its changed over time. So the question of the inevitability of such dilemmas necessarily arising need not follow. Given the results you point out, one can even question if this society should be deemed "advanced".

It's correct to point out how social media plays an important role in the identity crisis we currently face. Though this is merely a new phase of an old playbook, going back to the early 20th century, with the advent of PR and how companies realized how easy it was to manipulate people into consumers.

So we've had a consumer identity forced onto people that carry with them certain patterns of behavior that signal what makes for a proper "man" or "woman" and what a typical person of each gender should aspire to in each respective subfield.

Again, what strikes me is the degree of specificity in which gender has become an object of obsession. I don't quite understand why this topic is of such importance to many young people.

I'd guess that it depends on how hard-wired the pessimism is on that particular person. If it's not too deep, then surely Sisyphus could simply go up the mountain and enjoy the view and forget about the bolder for a while.

If it's more deep-seated, you still have options, but they're drastically reduced. Which further feeds into the whole pessimistic scenario. It has its own logic and lived experience can be a very powerful force in terms of how deeply felt such feelings are held.

That was a bit dense, read it twice and only have a vague idea of what you may be talking about - you certainly put a lot of thought behind it, that I can't deny. So I'll try to take something out of it, that I find useful, maybe even in a form of a question:

I think you are correct that how our current socio-economic society is structured fosters a sense of isolation while at the same time fomenting an image of "individuality", in which we falsely or misleadingly only show those aspects of ourselves we want to show - and then feel like shit in real life, when we cannot live up to the standards of the fiction(s) we have created for ourselves.

I think it would help to give a simple example of what you take an identity to be. Are you talking about what it means to be a modern woman or a father figure or what? If we want to create a sphere which we call "identity" and try to separate from it other aspects, work, for instance, then we need a more clear idea of what an identity is.

What I do see is a kind of mini-crisis in the topic of gender-identity, which is somewhat curious, in the sense that this out of all things is the topic of discussion, instead of something else.

Potential solutions? They say that genuine human connection helps with such things - in so far as these connections are truly genuine and not fulling in some box of things that one needs to do, which don't advance anything.

But why is identity specifically a problem? I agree it is, but it's curious that it's what's the cause of so many discussions. Clearing up what an identity is even more, could help I suspect.