Do you equate there coming to be a self-other distinction with someone realizing there is such a distinction? Because the argument doesn't make sense without this equation: after all, these 'vitality affects' you talk about are initially differentiated between self and other, just not within the confines of one individual's experience. That is, they don't all meld together in one big pot: if you hit one person, the other doesn't feel it.

Children may not have a notion of self versus other, or be conscious of the distinction between themselves and others, but this doesn't mean they aren't self-conscious before they're other-conscious. Young children are roughly solipsists, in the strong sense that they have experiences of themselves, and don't distinguish between this and experience of another precisely because their own experience encompasses everything for them: there is no notion that there could be any such thing outside of them until a theory of mind begins to develop as the result of socialization.

In other words, self-feeling only requires sentience; other-feeling requires socialization, which is predicated on sentience. The latter is derivative, and awareness of others always arises out of solipsism, not vice-versa (and I would argue, this process is extremely incomplete and shaky, such that large traces of solipsism remain even in the adult human – people are literally incapable of experiencing others as they do themselves).

And so this:

Importantly, these vitality effects do not find their locus in a 'self' but are simply experienced 'as such':

Taken one way is right (the infant doesn't make the distinction themselves, thinking that an experience is happening to them as opposed to someone else), but this doesn't serve your purpose, because this realization is not what's at issue. But taken another way, it's clearly wrong, since these experiences obviously aren't just 'experienced as such,' but are localized to particular bodies and do not bleed into each other. And it's this stronger false sense you would need to establish any interesting thesis.

Again, this cannot make sense unless you assume the self is a social construction and that having a self = coming to the realization of the self-other distinction as the result of being socialized. But this is exactly what is at issue.

I'd say SX is correct for exactly this reason. Children don't understand themselves to be experiences before the development of theory of mind. They are not aware experience, just (their own)sensations and things around them. They are aware of others before they even catch on there are such things as experiences. Children are concious of others before they make the distinction of self/other.

These coordination processes are those of if/then relationships: if 'I' move this shape like so, then such and such follows.
Nothing happens if I try and move the shape over there, however. Ipso: this shape is 'mine'. — StreetlightX

I don't think this can be right. The proprioceptive sense of the body comes on account of the actual sensations which belong to it, and are felt prior to any "if/then" kinds of inference. Proprioceptive and other 'inner sense": feelings as well as skin sensations would be immediately known not to belong to "shapes over there", I would say.

I may as well add a bit before the conversation moves on too far. First, to spell out my objection to your approach, @Metaphysician Undercover. According to your theory of appetites, it seems sexual hunger like regular hunger would be a mere signal of a deeper instinct towards sex, an instinct reflecting itself in sexual habits, and such a hunger would only arise when those habits were not engaged in sufficiently to satiate it. But you see the problem: Because sexual hunger has an external physical effect that is a necessary condition for the successful completion of the sexual act (in males at least) you can't in this case put the deeper instinct cart before the conscious compulsion horse without falling into obvious absurdity. In the case of regular hunger, the physical effects are almost purely internal and allow you to successfully complete the act as habit or on a whim, but that still doesn't efface the element of compulsion inherent in hunger without which it would not be what it is, i.e. the primary drive behind the act of eating. Of course, hunger comes in degrees which makes the compulsion at the level of instinct more or less an impingement on consciousness and more or less a pure compulsion in the sense of an irresistible urge. But in it's basic form, it just is the latter (ask any (other) animal). None of this is to deny our obvious ability to arrange our habits around times hunger is likely to arise, but there is no room for a categorical wedge between the conscious awareness of hunger and our reasons for eating.

What I am arguing against, is the idea that human beings, as well as other animals, are "aware" of inner feelings, like the urge to eat. I think that the fact that we refer to these as "instincts" demonstrates that we are not aware of such things. An instinct is something which motivates us which we are not aware of. — Metaphysician Undercover

Instincts may motivate us in ways we don't understand or that we can't fully trace, but they primarily do so by means of feelings and emotions of which we are aware. You just can't cut that link and retain a coherent depiction of the human condition.

So we don't simply observe our pangs of hunger we have to construct such an attntional state by way of learnt cultural concepts — apokrisis

I would say we mediate our response to our awareness of the biological state / drive through the filter of the assimilated social other. Or that our (human) awareness of the biological state is framed by the assimilated social other. So, we lose the pure element of compulsion but we don't efface the awareness of the primary drive.

I understand TGW to be claiming that first awareness is of the inner milieu and I would certainly agree with that.

But if you understand self-awareness to be a linguistically mediated event then of course we must be aware of others first in order to learn language. — John

The linguistic mediation is gradual and organizes but doesn't replace the drives of the inner milieu.

So introspection might be culturally mediated, but inner awareness certainly aint. — John

I'd put it that the cultural mediation is experienced as self-conscious introspection such that the inner awareness of drives is no longer all-consuming but still prods through in a kind of a symbiotic competition with said introspection.

I'd say SX is correct for exactly this reason. Children don't understand themselves to be experiences before the development of theory of mind. They are not aware experience, just (their own)sensations and things around them. They are aware of others before they even catch on there are such things as experiences. Children are concious of others before they make the distinction of self/other. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Yeah, it's the experience of the other internalized that fuels the development of the concept of self. Again, that doesn't mean children are not previously self-aware in the basic sense of being conscious of their drives. But that these drives are the substrate that when moulded into a (somewhat) coherent whole through the gradual internalization of the social world become what we call the "person" who is self-aware both of the drives in their remaining biological manifestations, and of the self as an observer of said drives and mediator of such.

there is no room for a categorical wedge between the conscious awareness of hunger and our reasons for eating. — Baden

This is a good way of putting it, and I'll add to the criticism above about a feeling-based account being incapable of thought: it's only passions that can possibly provide reasons, and thus allow for thinking (reasoning). Passions compel, which doesn't move the organism in the way gravity moves a stone, since the stone can't be compelled to do anything (it just does what it does), and thus has no reasons to do anything. Reasons are first and foremost so because in deliberation they are compelling: they are persuasive, the more viscerally the more they directly threaten us hedonically.

So a fully passionless being (a classical angel, say) has no reason to do anything, and so doesn't act except as an instrument of another's will.

his cannot make sense unless you assume the self is a social construction and that having a self = coming to the realization of the self-other distinction as the result of being socialized. But this is exactly what is at issue. — The Great Whatever

But I'm not saying that the self is a 'social' construction (any more than I'm saying the self is a 'biological' construction); I'd rather say that it is something like a 'substrate-neutral' production. It would undermine the entire point - to give a differential account of the self - if I were to simply shift the grounds from a primordial 'self-other' distinction to an equally duplicitous 'social-biological' distinction (so much for Apo's diarrhetic blather about reductionism). So I absolutely do not 'assume' that the self is a 'social-construction' - the only assumption I make is that it is absurd to make assumptions about the brute reality of a primordial self as though it were written in the stars.

As for the distinction between 'realization' and 'sentience', of course it's the issue. We're literally talking about self-awareness: the word isn't hyphenated for fun, it is literally awareness of self that we're talking about. How is it not a dancing-on-a-rooftop-with-bells-on petitio principii to say "young children have experiences of themselves, therefore, they experience themselves first"? I mean honestly, really?

So of course young children have experiences, but that those experiences are 'of themselves' is precisely what's in question: It is precisely the self 'in' those experiences which are differentially engendered though development. Moreover, your phenomenology is inside-out: children aren't 'solipsists' because "their own experience encompasses everything for them"; they don't yet know what counts as their 'own' experience: if they've no notion that anything could be 'outside' of them it's because the very limits of what counts as 'inside' have not sedimented in any strict way.

Moreover, one you 'start' with solipsism, there's no getting 'out': you can't work from the 'inside-out' in the outside's already 'in'.

I don't think this can be right. The proprioceptive sense of the body comes on account of the actual sensations which belong to it, and are felt prior to any "if/then" kinds of inference. Proprioceptive and other 'inner sense": feelings as well as skin sensations would be immediately known not to belong to "shapes over there", I would say.

Short of subscribing to some myth of free-floating qualia, I simply don't see how this could be true. Proprioceptive sensing has precisely to do with our bodily asymmteries; we are weighty, fleshy bodies who have a centre of gravity which shift with our mass; moreover, in Lingis's terms, we are "polarized by vectors of forces, axes of stance and motility." We are postural beings, sensitive beings whose touch and movement is characterized by pressure, intensity, sharpness and texture, pleasure and heat: this is what it means to experience 'qualities'. This is how Stern puts it with respect to the child sucking her thumb (via Manning):

"When you suck your finger," Stern observes, "your finger gets sucked and not just generally sucked" There is no "the" finger-sucking that isn't inflected by the "how" of "a" sucking. "Which"? "This" one or "that. ... Depending on exactly how each event transpires and what else is present that may inflect it (a glance at a care­giver's face, the soft brush of a blanket on the cheek), each sucking in the series will take on its own unique vitality affect." In other words, the developmental trajectory of the infant individualizes it as 'an' infant, one who feels herself as such, a uniqueness that isn't simply brute and bound in some magical soul.

We are fleshly, weighty, differentially orientated, sensitive bodies of space and time, not free-floating, 0-dimentional 'feeling beings'.

--

Aghh, I think I accidentally hit 'edit' on your original post rather than reply and might have accidentally deleted some bits of it. I'm not sure :/

So of course young children have experiences, but that those experiences are 'of themselves' is precisely what's in question: It is precisely the self 'in' those experiences which are differentially engendered though development. — StreetlightX

Again, only if you assume the only way to be self-conscious is through introspection, of oneself as transcendent object.

Moreover, one you 'start' with solipsism, there's no getting 'out': you can't work from the 'inside-out' in the outside's already 'in'. — StreetlightX

I think the lack of escape form solipsism is a lived reality, though, and is mandated if you are serious about there being other people. Some sympathy for solipsism is inseparable from the belief in other minds: those who have most scorned solipsism traditionally have also been those who have taken other people least seriously.

Only, the opposite of that. Lingis's phrase remains the best: we are an involution of the sensuous.

Solipsism in this empirical form (as opposed to the Ayer/Wittgenstein transcendental form), if you like, just the admission that not all things are amenable to or discoverable by oneself: to complain that the gaps then can't be closed once you understand this is only to complain that there are other people. Nothing guarantees that everything is on level ground, and everything is discoverable to everything else on a single immanent playing field. The materialist might want to believe this, but their want is just that.

The appeal to magical souls and zero-dimensional beings is of course just rhetorical bluster. I think the real underlying impetus is the refusal to accept any idea of permanent closure or mystery, which must be equivalent to some deity or dualism so long as you're a materialist. But if you're not, this need not bother you, and you can indeed see the world as more complex than the materialist can ever allow, by recognizing that not even its notion as a common 'world' holds together in the first place. The insistence that we must know others in the same way as we know ourselves then just amounts to an insistence that there are not more things than are contained in our philosophy.

As for the question of why it should be that experiences amount to self-consciousness: again all feeling is a feeling of oneself. So long as the feeling is localized somewhere, it must be so phenomenologically: and thus all feeling is feeling as within that locality (and not in an abstract 'somewhere'). To insist that one has to retrospectively use these experiences to see oneself as a distant object is just to insist that the only experience is experience of something transcendent, which is belied by the fact that, as we've already established, all such experiences take place in a pre-intentional sensory medium.

Solipsism in this empirical form (as opposed to the Ayer/Wittgenstein transcendental form), if you like, just the admission that not all things are amenable to or discoverable by oneself: to complain that the gaps then can't be closed once you understand this is only to complain that there are other people. Nothing guarantees that everything is on level ground, and everything is discoverable to everything else on a single immanent playing field. The materialist might want to believe this, but their want is just that.

The appeal to magical souls and zero-dimensional beings is of course just rhetorical bluster. I think the real underlying impetus is the refusal to accept any idea of permanent closure or mystery, which must be equivalent to some deity or dualism so long as you're a materialist. But if you're not, this need not bother you, and you can indeed see the world as more complex than the materialist can ever allow, by recognizing that not even its notion as a common 'world' holds together in the first place. The insistence that we must know others in the same way as we know ourselves then just amounts to an insistence that there are not more things than are contained in our philosophy. — The Great Whatever

An apologia for woo if there ever was one.

As for the question of why it should be that experiences amount to self-consciousness: again all feeling is a feeling of oneself. — The Great Whatever

Dancing-on-a-rooftop-with-bells-on...

Dancing-on-a-rooftop-with-bells-on... — StreetlightX

I'm not sure how the Morris is relevant here, but it's part of my heritage, so I'll join the dance.

It seems to me that to be self-aware is to be aware of (or to make) a distinction, self/not-self in experience. In which case, to be aware but not self-aware consists of not making that distinction, rather than not having one side or the other as experiences.

So a new-born has an instinctive reaction to a brush on the cheek of turning their head to that side and attempting to suck. It experiences, I think it is sensible to say, both the brush on the cheek, and the turning of the head, but does not distinguish one as external stimulus and the other as internal response.

... all feeling is a feeling of oneself. — The Great Whatever

So I agree with this in a certain sense, (it is the cheek that feels brushed, the head that turns) but it misleads, because if all feeling is a feeling of oneself, then one is simply not making the distinction that allows one to say it.

It seems to me that to be self-aware is to be aware of (or to make) a distinction, self/not-self in experience. In which case, to be aware but not self-aware consists of not making that distinction, rather than not having one side or the other as experiences. — unenlightened

And, no one has put forward any argument to explain how, once "awareness" is attained, what exactly restricts its focus. If you are aware of something, then what mechanism prevents you becoming aware of something else?

It seems preposterous to propose that "awareness" - a property that we find it difficult to even describe - contains some detailed internal structure in which certain entities can be switched on or off.

But you see the problem: Because sexual hunger has an external physical effect that is a necessary condition for the successful completion of the sexual act (in males at least) you can't in this case put the deeper instinct cart before the conscious compulsion horse without falling into obvious absurdity. — Baden

No, I don't see a problem here. The successful completion of eating requires an external physical object just as much as the sex act. That is the point of my argument, eating is the result of an awareness of external objects, not the result of an awareness of an internal hunger. Sex is the same.

We cannot deny the role of the external object here. When we eat there is a particular external object which is eaten, and in the sex act, there is also an external source of tactile stimulation. So, we can start from the fact that a particular object is the object of desire because it is particular objects (persons in the sex act) which end up satisfying the desire.

TGW has reduced this desire for a particular, to a general desire, called "hunger". Now we have the general hunger for food, and the general hunger for sex, two distinct generalized appetites. The claim is that the general appetite produces the appetite for the particular. I have no problem with this, so I'll allow it, with reservations as to how we describe "appetite". Right now, it is defined as hunger, and desire. Where TGW makes the mistake is in the unjustified premise that the desire, or appetite, is the result of, or "is" itself, a pain of deficiency, or privation. This premise cannot be verified by induction, because the evidence does not support it. People continue to eat, therefore they have the desire to eat when there is no such privation. And with respect to sex, the same is true, unless you define "lack of privation" as having sex all the time, people continue to desire sex when there is no real privation.

The conclusion is that the desire for food, or sex, "appetite", is not a deficiency or privation, nor is it caused by a deficiency or privation, this is TGW's false premise, which is unsupported by the evidence. Therefore we must look to something else, to describe this desire, as the cause of desire, or appetite. Desire itself is internal, and without an object of desire, it is complete emptiness, void, nothingness. We cannot describe it as a feeling of privation or deficiency because that has been demonstrated as the false premise. So this emptiness, void, nothingness, can only be described as desire if it is related to an object. Therefore desire, appetite, is this void nothingness in relation to an object. It can only become a deficiency or privation when it is related to an object. Then in relation to this object, the object of desire, there is a deficiency or privation.

Awareness cannot be, in the primary sense, an awareness of one' s internal deficiencies or privations, because these are all instances of emptiness, nothingness, and there is no deficiency except in relation to something else. So there is nothing there, in the internal, to be aware of. It is when the nothingness of the internal is placed in relation to external objects, and the self becomes aware of the external objects, that the general appetite for objects is formed. Then deficiency is apprehended.

But in it's basic form, it just is the latter (ask any (other) animal). None of this is to deny our obvious ability to arrange our habits around times hunger is likely to arise, but there is no room for a categorical wedge between the conscious awareness of hunger and our reasons for eating. — Baden

It is not the "awareness of hunger" which is at issue here, it is how "hunger" is defined. I describe hunger as an appetite, the desire to eat. This is necessarily directed toward external objects, therefore hunger is a feeling which is based in an awareness of external objects. TGW describes hunger as a feeling resulting from an internal deficiency. TGW's description is not consistent with the evidence.

Instincts may motivate us in ways we don't understand or that we can't fully trace, but they primarily do so by means of feelings and emotions of which we are aware. You just can't cut that link and retain a coherent depiction of the human condition. — Baden

I am not out to deny that we are aware of feelings and emotions, what I am saying is that these feelings and emotions are themselves based in an awareness of things external.

This is a good way of putting it, and I'll add to the criticism above about a feeling-based account being incapable of thought: it's only passions that can possibly provide reasons, and thus allow for thinking (reasoning). Passions compel, which doesn't move the organism in the way gravity moves a stone, since the stone can't be compelled to do anything (it just does what it does), and thus has no reasons to do anything. — The Great Whatever

I am not at all disputing the fact that passions compel, nor that we are aware of passions and their ability to compel. What I dispute is your characterization of passions. I believe that passion requires necessarily the awareness of an external object. There is no passion without an awareness of an external object. So despite the fact that passion is an internal feeling, it is consequent upon the awareness of the external object. You have declared that we become aware of passions or desires before we become aware of external objects, but this is impossible if passion and desire require an awareness of external objects.

An apologia for woo if there ever was one. — StreetlightX

How so?

I'd put it that the cultural mediation is experienced as self-conscious introspection such that the inner awareness of drives is no longer all-consuming but still prods through in a kind of a symbiotic competition with said introspection. — Baden

This seems fair enough to me. I think it comes down to whether you think the primary awareness of the inner milieu counts as self-awareness, as distinct from the reflexive self-awareness brought about by cultural/ symbolic mediation.

I mean this primary self-awareness is what the 'higher' animals would most reasonably be thought to enjoy, isn't it? That said, some social mediation of self-awareness would seem to be possible with higher social animals, but not certainly not symbolic mediation, if they don't possess the capacity for symbolic language.

You have two realms, the known/unknown and the unknowable. The latter is an apology for woo because if something is unknowable, it's always a mystery without significance in experience. If we try to examine the unknowable, all we can say is there is a "mystery" or "nothing can be known"--i.e. "Wooooooo wooooooo, something happened but there is nothing to say or know."

Immaterialism is the argument for woo. That which is not equal on the knowable plane amounts to the assertion of a mystery force which is without significance or meaning in experience, not even something which extends beyond a description. Woo/Immaterialism is a contradiction with any philosophy which locates meaning in experience, even idealists such as Berkeley.

If the world is defined by the meaning of experiences, how can there be an unknowable? To suggest there is such a thing is to claim there is a world outside experiences.

So, any position that denies we do or can know everything is woo?

Short of subscribing to some myth of free-floating qualia, I simply don't see how this could be true. Proprioceptive sensing has precisely to do with our bodily asymmteries; we are weighty, fleshy bodies who have a centre of gravity which shift with our mass; — StreetlightX

We are fleshly, weighty, differentially orientated, sensitive bodies of space and time, not free-floating, 0-dimentional 'feeling beings'. — StreetlightX

I'm not sure we are disagreeing about anything significant here: I don't deny that from the point of view of our discursive understanding of bodies and environments there are prior 'external' forces operating that we would think cause the infant to feel her "fleshly weightiness" but I think until a conception of outside forces and entities is developed it would all be felt as 'me' or 'mine', all 'inside'. The sense of the term "inside" in this context should not be thought as one side of a dichotomy but as an expression of what I imagine would be a sensation of complete immersion, a kind of 'oceanic' feeling, if you like. We can only imagine what it must be like for an infant, what it was like for each one of us; on the other hand why should an intuitive sense of that primary experience not remain with us?

I think it comes down to whether you think the primary awareness of the inner milieu counts as self-awareness, as distinct from the reflexive self-awareness brought about by cultural/ symbolic mediation. — John

That's right. There is a self in primary awareness, but it is "off-stage" as the animal's awareness is of the world (as that which is not "self"). So the awareness is purely extrospective in being the view from a self.

The question then is where internal sensations like pangs or hunger or lust may play into this. Are they parts of the "field of sensation" - part of the animal's umwelt - and so in that sense, the animal is seeing "into its self"?

The animal sees the lump of meat. And the animal sees its hunger. And then in unseen fashion, the animal decides the connection that links the two (which could be meat first, then hunger, or hunger first, then the meat).

We can see that talking this way, it is all starting to break down. There is something essentially wrong in treating inner and outer sensation in this fashion - as if they were all just different varieties of the general thing that is qualia.

You paint the situation in interesting ways here. I guess it comes down to the felt difference between the experience of hunger and the experience of meat. The meat is to-be-acquired, the hunger is to-be-acted-upon. In that sense they are different qualities or kinds of experience, but I am not sure it would be right to say there is a "general thing that is qualia".

Perhaps because the hunger is a kind of 'inner prompting' that exists in itself when the body is at rest and the meat as something to be acquired is elusive and uncertain and requires the effort of bodily exertion and stealth, even animals may feel the 'outer-directedness' of the desire to get the food as feeling distinct from the 'inner-promptingness' of the hunger itself. Perhaps it is these very kinds of animal feeling that form the basis of our conceptually elaborated distinctions.

The meat is to-be-acquired, the hunger is to-be-acted-upon. In that sense they are different qualities or kinds of experience, but I am not sure it would be right to say there is a "general thing that is qualia". — John

My argument is that the generality of qualia is the socially constructed idea here and so due to linguistic self-awareness (the speaking which can talk about selves and their states).

So the meat that is to-be-acquired and the hunger that is to-be-acted-upon nicely points out the directionality, the fundamental embodiness, that is primary awareness. The view points from the self to the world, leaving the self outside what it sees.

That is why we call hunger a drive. It is the source of the action rather than the satisfaction. And in culturally-constructed self-awareness, we are meant to now start paying critical attention to the sources of our actions. And here we start to distinguish "pangs" that stand for this concept of "the hunger drive, the cause of eating behaviour".

We check in with ourselves and see if the stomach rumbles. Then we note those autonomic sensations and say to ourselves, see, we are actually hungry. We can sense ourselves in ways that betoken that idea.

Or else we might just be sitting down to eat out of clock-watching habit. If we ask ourselves do we really feel hungry, we might remember feeling nothing much before heading to the kitchen, but then the scent and sight of the food triggers "pangs" - the stomach reflexively gets ready with its surge of gastic juices, the mouth runs with saliva ahead of what it knows is about to happen. If we check in, all the boxes of our sensory definition of "hunger" are getting ticked.

So even if the drive to action is some social habit - the very human thing of stopping to eat because that is what the clock tells us to do - we still psychologise the whole affair and say, we eat because we felt hungry.

Perhaps because the hunger is a kind of 'inner prompting' that exists in itself when the body is at rest and the meat as something to be acquired is elusive and uncertain and requires the effort of bodily exertion and stealth, even animals may feel the 'outer-directedness' of the desire to get the food as feeling distinct from the 'inner-promptingness' of the hunger itself. Perhaps it is these very kinds of animal feeling that form the basis of our conceptually elaborated distinctions. — John

It is not as if there are no internal sensations to speak of. Our bodies are suffused with receptors. But then as SX points out, our embodied sense of self is still very much a plastic construction. We can feel a rubber hand as an extension of ourselves. The "mirror neuron" research is wildly overplayed as the neuro-reductionist secret of human self-awareness, but it does also show how we can empathetically feel the actions or reactions of others as if they were literally part of our "selves".

So yes, primary awareness has structure. It is divided into promptings versus their satisfactions. There is a self that is a collection of promptings and the world that is its satisfactions (and frustrations).

But human self-awareness is a whole new level of experience-structuring. We now represent to ourselves our promptings as a class of things in themselves. We say "I" ate the meat because I was "hungry". We no longer just eat the meat without further thought. We can provide a socially acceptable justification in ways that imply we have the further thing of willed controlled over our own desires.

No, I don't see a problem here. The successful completion of eating requires an external physical object just as much as the sex act. That is the point of my argument, eating is the result of an awareness of external objects, not the result of an awareness of an internal hunger. Sex is the same.

We cannot deny the role of the external object here. When we eat there is a particular external object which is eaten, and in the sex act, there is also an external source of tactile stimulation. So, we can start from the fact that a particular object is the object of desire because it is particular objects (persons in the sex act) which end up satisfying the desire. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'll go through the rest of your response later, but I wanted to address this because you've misunderstood what I meant. When I said external physical effect (in males) I meant an erection, which is required to complete the act of sex. And sexual hunger is what causes the erection.

When I said external physical effect (in males) I meant an erection, which is required to complete the act of sex. And sexual hunger is what causes the erection. — Baden

Isn't this just a projection of an overly mechanistic model of causality on to the reality of the situation?

Where is the hunger beyond the throbbing of your penis? Does it really make sense to say a mental event is the cause of the physical event rather than that the mental event is an awareness of that physical event?

Or better yet - given you likely have no causal theory to connect mental and physical events in the first place - we start again all over and build accounts of experience/reality on a more generic causal foundation (like semiosis).

Badly phrased maybe, but the crux of the argument is not about the sexual hunger causing the erection, it's about the internal event, the sexual hunger, of which we are aware, motivating the action of sex.

As in:

That is the point of my argument, eating is the result of an awareness of external objects, not the result of an awareness of an internal hunger. Sex is the same. — Metaphysician Undercover

MU wants to cut the link between sexual hunger and sex. But without the physical manifestation of the sexual hunger, you cannot complete the sex act.

MU wants to cut the link between sexual hunger and sex. But without the physical manifestation of the sexual hunger, you cannot complete the sex act. — Baden

It mostly all boils down to bad phrasing most likely - we simply lack good language for describing these things in philosophically rigorous way.

But don't we routinely make the joke that men think with their cocks. When it throbs, it is showing it has a mind of its own. So who is feeling the sexual hunger here and acting on it? Your penis-self or your brain-self?

Anyway, I felt MU did pull out a critical point in showing that we can eat out of socialised habit rather than felt desire. And that looked to strike to the heart of whatever it is that TGW might be saying - whatever that really was.

Because I think it's utterly ridiculous - and I'm not just being polemic, I really find it completely incredulous - that when we can show the grounds for something like self-feeling, when we not only can provide accounts for, but actually test the ways in which the sense of self is a variable, differential production (which doesn't, by the way, make it artifice - all of reality is a production), that one can just throw one's hands up in the air, ignore the plethora of arguments for and evidence of, and just hearken back to some romantic ideal of the self as a free-floating affective ephemera (and really, what exactly is wrong with this characterization? How is it 'just' rhetorical bluster? Tell me why you don't think this).

As far as I take it, the charge that 'oh you just don't like mystery' is literally no different to what proponents of UFOs, ghosts and shamanism would say. It's the perpetual fallback of every mystic and peddler of crystal healing from time immemorial and sides with an ideology of ignorance that is both ethically and politically compromised. I mean OK, this sounds harsh - it is harsh - but that's just honestly the level at which I see these sorts of claims about subjectivity and self-consciousness operating. Perhaps we're just ships in the night, perhaps you think this is incredulous, but I guess at some point the spade's just turned.

Because I think it's utterly ridiculous - and I'm not just being polemic, I really find it completely incredulous - that when we can show the grounds for something like self-feeling, when we not only can provide accounts for, but actually test the ways in which the sense of self is a variable, differential production (which doesn't, by the way, make it artifice - all of reality is a production), that one can just throw one's hands up in the air, ignore the plethora of arguments for and evidence of, and just hearken back to some romantic ideal of the self as a free-floating affective ephemera (and really, what exactly is wrong with this characterization? How is it 'just' rhetorical bluster? Tell why you don't think this). — StreetlightX

But I've never claimed it wasn't a 'production,' whatever that might mean. My claim was simply that people are separated in such a way as not to brook, ultimately, complete understanding of one another, and a kind of soft, empirical solipsism prevails, because there is no universal place in which everything comes together and no one world that can be explained by a single field of interacting mechanisms. There are, in other words, gaps that can't be filled. Whether consciousness is a 'production' or not is a separate issue from this: one might think it is, or is not. I tend to think it is, but in such a way that eludes understanding – not for mystical or brute reasons, but for quite principled ones I've tried to outline here. If you think about the notion that we know ourselves in the same way as we know others, really think about it, I'm not sure how you'll be able to maintain it with intellectual honesty. For one thing, if it were true, it'd sure be hard to tell which one of these external things we were!

I also think you're overvaluing the epistemic import of science, but maybe that would take us too far afield.

As far as I take it, the charge that 'oh you just don't like mystery' is literally no different to what proponents of UFOs, ghosts and shamanism would say. It's the perpetual fallback of every mystic and peddler of crystal healing from time immemorial and sides with an ideology of ignorance that both ethically and politically compromised. I mean OK, this sounds harsh - it is harsh - but that's just honestly the level at which I see these sorts of claims about subjectivity and self-consciousness operating. Perhaps we're just ships in the night, perhaps you think this is incredulous, but I guess at some point the spade's just turned. — StreetlightX

So, am I right in characterizing your position as something like the following:

-Your position evokes some notion of mystery

-People who believe in UFOs and shamanism invoke some notion of mystery

-Therefore, your position is like positions (such as believing in UFOs and shamanism) to a significant enough extent that it is worth dismissing out of hand on pre-rational grounds, these grounds presumably being something like, 'do not brook what does not allow of explanation (possibly on some circumscribed ground within my philosophical school)?'

If this is not a fair characterization, what is wrong with it? If it is, in what way is 'oh you just don't like mystery' not a completely fair assessment of it?

I'm not sure that, even if I were to fall on your rhetorical sword, I'd be that offended – there are worse epithets than 'shaman,' and I've never been much of a 'true believer' in the sort of implicit positivism that seems to be the underlying appeal here. And I don't feel the sting of the moral/political charges that come with it either – the names don't hurt me, because I don't in my heart of hearts actually believe I'm guilty of anything untoward or unenlightened. If you do, then okay: I don't begrudge the believers their own beliefs, but only ask that they leave me alone in unbelief.

Where is the hunger beyond the throbbing of your penis? Does it really make sense to say a mental event is the cause of the physical event rather than that the mental event is an awareness of that physical event? — apokrisis

The interesting point here is that the penis per se, is not throbbing for anything in particular. So I would say sexual desire is something far more complex than the mere throb of the knob (sorry, couldn't resist a bit of schoolboy humour O:)).

I think the ethic of explanation is interesting. There is a tendency for a certain kind of mind to become upset, even enraged, at the idea that there is something that cannot be explained, and more than this, explained to them. The need to see others as within one's grasp just as surely as oneself is has ties to the deep need to dominate others. I'm not saying this is what drives your dissatisfaction personally: only that you are participating at least in some respect in a tradition fueled by this drive. Whatever criticisms are made up after the fact to support this libidinal dissatisfaction (all who don't allow my eyes to be everywhere are just crypto-magicians, and retrogrades to boot, and so on), it does not answer the fundamental question: 'why do I seek to explain everything? Why am I so disturbed, and upset, at the notion that this cannot be? And why do I take it as an a priori working assumption that everything is, in principle, already amenable to the inquiry of my mind?