That survey is an interesting demonstration of the limits of classification. All those "anti-realisms" have the barest of connections to each other.
But I like the way it splits the bias toward how it is presented as a "consensus' depending upon how the thesis is put forward.

I agree that exploring Wittgenstein's thinking requires a separate discussion. But the "use of language" criteria is clearly important to Wittgenstein and it was in that sense that I asked about how the "I" was used by the different authors. In the spirit of Wittgenstein, that invites us to look at them side by side and seeing the differences. i was not proposing a variety of possible selves but noting how different were the conditions of discourse understood to be at work for each of them. You brought this perspective up and I have been trying to understand it in the context of this text.

I’m not sure where/if Descartes does make the claim about needing God; — Antony Nickles

What, then, do you make of the title: MEDITATION THREE: Concerning God, That He Exists?

If this work is an epistemology masquerading as a theology, then it seems incumbent upon those who hold to that view to explain the author's stated intent to establish one.

Only being able to perceive the infinite through a negation of the finite says we experience the finite and our imperfections

The infinite can only be conceived by means of the negation.
— Paine

Do you mean that the infinite is conceived by what is not infinite? If so, this is the opposite of what Descartes is claiming.

Is there some equivocation in the passage you cited:

For how would I understand that I [46] doubt and that I desire, that is, that I lack something and that I am not wholly perfect, unless there were some idea in me of a more perfect being, by comparison with which I might recognize my defects?
— ibid. page 45 — Fooloso4

Yes, I fell into the gap of that equivocation. I stand corrected. That his doubt is the condition through which he recognizes the lack of perfection is a kind of 'means of negation'. Ignorance, confusion, and uncertainty exist as sources of distress even when we don't compare them to something better.

There is a shift from the source of my ideas to the source of my existence. He argues that the source cannot be something less perfect than himself. For this reason he rejects his parents as the source of his existence. But surely he knows enough biology and animal husbandry to know that a more perfect offspring can come from less perfect parents. The source need not be something wholly perfect or even more perfect. — Fooloso4

I think this shift from the source of ideas to the source of existence suffers from some of the equivocation discussed above. The argument came from whether God made me, I made myself, or my parents did. The argument against me making myself is that I would have made a better me if I was that powerful and knew more. The parents did not create their nature any more than I did mine. Applying the argument that the 'perfect' only comes from the more 'perfect" does not help his case. The parents are not the reason he is a thinking substance. Nor do they continually constitute this substance through time.

The reason he doubts is because he desires to find something certain and indubitable. Recognizing that he has been deceived by his senses does not require the idea of a more perfect being, only the recognition that his senses have sometimes deceived him. — Fooloso4

The imperfection being experienced does not only come from the uncertainty of what is reported by the senses. The other modes of thinking have him wanting some events and wishing to avoid orhers where his lack of understanding and limited power to influence events gives him to see the 'thinking' substance as finite. The infinite can only be conceived by means of the negation.

If one wants to overcome this limitation in conceivability, by some sort of Anselmian trebuchet whereby that idea is also a derivative of the thinking substance, Descartes says that argument depends on being the source of one's existence:

From what source, then, do I derive my existence? Why, from myself, or from my parents, or from whatever other things there are that are less perfect than God. For nothing more perfect than God, or even as perfect as God, can be thought or imagined. But if I got my being from myself, I would not doubt, nor would I desire, nor would I lack anything at all. For I would have given myself all the perfections of which I have some idea; in so doing, I myself would be God! I must not think that the things I lack could perhaps be more difficult to acquire than the ones I have now. On the contrary, it is obvious that it would have been much more difficult for me (that is, a thing or substance that thinks) to emerge out of nothing than it would be to acquire the knowledge of many things about which I am ignorant (these items of {33} knowledge being merely accidents of that substance). Certainly, if I got this greater thing from myself, I would not have denied myself at least those things that can be had more easily. Nor would I have denied myself any of those other things that I perceive to be contained in the idea of God, for surely none of them seem to me more difficult to bring about. But if any of them were more difficult to bring about, they would certainly also seem more difficult to me, even if the remaining ones that I possess I got from myself, since it would be on account of them that I would experience that my power is limited. — ibid. page 50

That segues into the passage you quoted earlier about the pointillism of an existence that needs to be reconstituted every moment. This perspective makes this 'finite substance' a lot less grounded than the mortal soul pictured by Aristotle to be activated by a divine intellect. The 'natural light' is a flashlight compared to the cosmic lantern the old guys were using.

It is interesting that in arguing for an infinite idea he rejects the idea of an infinite regress of ideas. — Fooloso4

I think that shows Descartes agreeing with the Scholastics that an infinite series of causes must go back to what is not caused in the same way as our logos would order it: The unmoved mover blocking any view of what "self-causing" might be:

And although one idea can perhaps issue from another, nevertheless no infinite regress is permitted here; eventually some first idea must be reached whose cause is a sort of archetype that contains formally all the reality that is in the idea merely objectively. — ibid. page 42

.

To say that: how something will be deemed true, such as a royal succession or an apology; what makes up a “thought”—thoughtful, thought out; or tells what is essential to us about a “thing”—what kind of object anything is, Wittgenstein will say, PI #373, which is revealed by what he terms “grammar”: the terms of the possibilities of something, Id. #90. (As an aside, he just after characterizes this connection as “Theology as Grammar”, which I have never been able to figure out.)—to say that these “understandings” are innate, arise from my own nature, is to point to something within us, that we are born with, or into, as are Plato’s forms. My answer to this are the activities, practices, judgments, etc. which are ingrained into us, unreflected upon—what we would consider “natural”—as a member of a culture. — Antony Nickles

I don't understand how reference to "the activities, practices, judgments, etc. which are ingrained into us, unreflected upon" relates to the use of the "I" in Descartes' speech.

I have the same doubts about how this relates to Wittgenstein in the comment that I raised before and encounter a new one when you mention 'Theology as Grammer", Consider the different way thinking is being observed by the two philosophers. At the very least, would you not acknowledge a difference between the "I" that observes the thinking activity as an immediate event by Descartes and something like this from Wittgenstein?:

378. "Before I judge that two images which I have are the same, I must recognize them as the same." And when that has happened, how am I to know that the word "same" describes what I recognize? Only if I can express my recognition in some other way, and if it is possible for someone else to teach me that "same" is the correct word here.

For if I need a justification for using a word, it must also be one for someone else. — Wittgenstein, PI 378

From this perspective, Wittgenstein is bringing into doubt what Descartes does not question during his project.

Positing God as an innate idea, rather than being an escape from solipsism, further isolates him. — Fooloso4

That would be the case if the thinking activity is an unbroken circle. But the experience of being imperfect does not permit that:

Nor should I think that I do not perceive the infinite by means of a true idea, but only through a negation of the finite, just as I perceive rest and darkness by means of a negation of motion and light. On the contrary, I clearly understand that there is more reality in an infinite substance than there is in a finite one. Thus the perception of the infinite is somehow prior in me to the perception of the finite, that is, my perception of God is prior to my perception of myself. For how would I understand that I [46] doubt and that I desire, that is, that I lack something and that I am not wholly perfect, unless there were some idea in me of a more perfect being, by comparison with which I might recognize my defects? — ibid. page 45

The substance he can imagine providing to a stone or a lump of wax is not the same as how he can conceive of God's 'objective' reality.

That the comparison between the 'finite' and the 'infinite' requires the means of a negation is where doubt comes from. The experiment of the Meditation may provide a way out of solipsism, but it does not overcome the condition of being a doubting substance. That is why we have to crab forward by means of clear and distinct ideas.

When one factors in this primary condition, your question:

Is it true that what is more perfect cannot arise from what is less perfect? We are told that the triangle we draw is never a perfect triangle. A perfect triangle would be one that does not contain any of the defects of the one the drawing is supposed to be a representative of. It is from imperfection that we get the idea of perfection. In more general terms, it is from absence, lack or want, from the desire to have more or be more, that we get the idea of completion and satisfaction, of perfection. — Fooloso4

is what Descartes is addressing when he says:

And although one idea can perhaps issue from another, nevertheless no infinite regress is permitted here; eventually some first idea must be reached whose cause is a sort of archetype that contains formally all the reality that is in the idea merely objectively. Thus it is clear, to me by the light of nature that the ideas that are in me are like images that can easily fail to match the perfection of the things from which they have been drawn, but which can contain nothing greater or more perfect. — Descartes, Third Meditation, translated by Donald A Cress, pg 28

the so-called hard problem specifically calls for a causal, IE physical, explanation. — Janus

Chalmer's language was more directed to reductive models. We don't know what is 'physical' but we can make models based upon what is observed. So, it is only a problem if it is interesting that consciousness has properties that other phenomena do not, as explored through scientific models.

There is a lot here to consider. I will address the issue of isolation here and think more before addressing who (or what) is the author of our thoughts (as understood by Descartes).

It is true that Descartes's experiment is a 'self-imposed isolation'. Saying that the conditions discovered or reasoned there are only applicable in the context of the experiment cancels its utility. If the purpose of the attempt is to establish grounds for science that is an improvement upon those provided by his predecessors, how do the results of this doubting change what people are doing?

Being somewhere between God and the world is related in the text to causes. From that point of view, asking about 'archetypes' is different from wondering where an idea comes from. With that sense of judgment in mind, I question whether Descartes is trying to escape solipsism as you described:

Positing God as an innate idea, rather than being an escape from solipsism, further isolates him. — Fooloso4

Not being able to "precisely demonstrate" immortality does sound like a lawyer's dodge but the argument for God's existence is based upon the untenable quality of the isolation Descartes is experimenting with:

Moreover, even though the reality that I am considering in my ideas is merely objective reality, I ought not on that account to suspect that there is no need for the same reality to be formally in the causes of these ideas, but that it suffices for it to be in them objectively. For just as the objective mode of being belongs to ideas by their very nature, so the formal mode of being belongs to the causes of ideas, at least to the first and preeminent ones, by their very nature. And although one idea can perhaps issue from another, nevertheless no infinite regress is permitted here; eventually some first idea must be reached whose cause is a sort of archetype that contains formally all the reality that is in the idea merely objectively. Thus it is clear, to me by the light of nature that the ideas that are in me are like images that can easily fail to match the perfection of the things from which they have been drawn, but which can contain nothing greater or more perfect. And the longer and more attentively I examine all these points, the more clearly and distinctly I know they are true. But what am I ultimately to conclude? If the objective reality of any of my ideas is found to be so great that I am certain that the same reality was not in me, either formally or eminently, and that therefore I myself cannot be the cause of the idea, then it necessarily follows that I am not alone in the world, but that something else, which is the cause of this idea, also exists. But if no such idea is found in me, I will have no argument whatsoever to make me certain of the existence of anything other than myself, for I have conscientiously reviewed all these arguments, and so far I have been unable to find any other. — Descartes, Third Meditation, translated by Donald A Cress, pg 28

From that starting point of what will allow him to escape his isolation, the existence of God provides a possibility that 'objective reality' does not.

It is similar to the 'ontological proof of God' in Anselm but has an important difference. It is not only that "I did not give this idea of God to myself" but I need the idea of God to accept what is given in experience.

How does 'stopping short of assuming' that constancy of the self pertain to Descartes being sure that he exists because he is thinking?

As you observed in a previous comment, there is a list of activities coming from the thinking. The Third Meditation begins with sorting out the different modes they appear within. I take your point that there is an uncertainty expressed about the continuance of his existence. But there does not seem to be any doubt expressed about whether the different modes all come from his 'thinking substance'. It is through this unity he is attempting to rearrange the First Principles he is meditating upon.

Edit to add: The last sentence refers to the full title of the work: The Meditations Concerning First Philosophy.

As practiced amongst the Scholastics, this 'being first' is related to Aristotle saying:

But if there is some immovable substance, this [that is, theological philosophy] will be prior and will be primary philosophy, and it will be universal in this way, namely, because it is primary. And it will belong to it to get a theoretical grasp on being qua being, both what it is and the things that belong to it qua being. — Aristotle. Metaphysics, 1026a25, translated by CDC Reeve

I think Descartes is asking us to accept that the self is a thing despite not being imaginable or described the way other things are.

But I would not express that thought as equivalent to you adding: "The self cannot be pictured because it is not a body." What a soul is, in relation to bodies, has been discussed for centuries before this work.

Descartes is arguing that this focus has missed the mark. The "always there" I pointed to refers to the "thinking thing" being there when we pay attention to it.

I think the language is more forceful than that on this point. We are intimately familiar with the "I" but don't "know" it for some reason. The French version says it this way:

Mais néanmoins il me semble encore et je ne puis m’empêcher de croire que les choses
corporelles, dont les images se forment par la pensée, qui tombent sous les sens, et que les
sens mêmes examinent, ne soient beaucoup plus distinctement connues que cette je ne sais
quelle partie de moi-même qui ne tombe point sous l’imagination: quoi-qu’en effet cela
soit bien étrange de dire que je connoisse et comprenne plus distinctement des choses dont
l’existence me paroît douteuse, qui me sont inconnues et qui ne m’appartiennent point,
que celles de la vérité desquelles je suis persuadé, qui me sont connues, et qui
appartiennent à ma propre nature, en un mot que moi-même — Descartes, Second Meditation,

The tight connection between 'not knowing' and being 'unimaginable' is sort of a concession to Aristotle saying, "thinking requires the use of images." Descartes certainly uses a lot of images in his writings. But I read him to say that the activity that convinces him that he exists is prior to what Aristotle describes.

So, maybe not a mystery as much as a gap that is easily overlooked.

Seeing the act of thinking as a list of activities does not reflect the problem of description that I commented upon upthread. By speaking of an 'indescribable part of myself which cannot be pictured by the imagination', it seems to me that Descartes is pointing at something that is always there but is not understood.

In the Third Meditation, Descartes says he needs the existence of God to find grounds for its relation to all of his activities. That seems the opposite approach of Wittgenstein, who describes our use of language to show what it is for us.

I was agreeing with your stating that Descartes was a departure from Aristotle's model of perception and knowledge of the world but was thinking that Descartes was not sharply separating the domain of Reason as Kant did from the nature of things as they are in themselves. I take Descartes' enthusiasm as a scientist as evidence for this. There is also the search, as you have underscored, for the Archimedean point of leverage.

As you suggested, upthread, the Sixth Meditation has Descartes returning to the world able to trust in many of the elements he questioned previously.

But he is afraid he will only exist for now, while he is thinking; as if he is not always thinking, that it is a particular act, separate from his internal dialogue or awareness — Antony Nickles

That continuity of thinking is clearly central to the meditation and a source of concern. I don't understand what you mean by saying it is "separate from his internal dialogue or awareness."

I think Descartes is linking those activities together.

I did not mean to put words in your mouth. I hear what you are saying about the limits of definitive statements. I am wondering how that activity is specific to a problem we are having now seen side by side with people having the problem at other times.

The article assumes a divide between language and the study of what exists which ignores how the problem of language has always been central to the concerns of philosophers.

In Plato's Cratylus, there is the conclusion that names are not natural products but the result of a lot of talking. In Phaedrus, the introduction ot text is said to leave out an important dimension of live dialogue. The validity of arguments throughout the dialogues generates more questions than they answer.

Aristotle's development of logic and how it collides with the processes he wants to understand in 'the world of the becoming' is the central task of his Metaphysics. A lot of his style of criticism involves having statements cancel each other out.

Hegel's Logic is, in one sense, a grammar. It is like Aristotle's Metaphysics in the way it specifies the use of words.

I could go on in this vein but want to avoid becoming tiresome.

As a result, I think the 'history of philosophy' view that we are in a place is dubious.

.

Contrary to Aristotle, Descartes claims that we do not see things is (in?) the world, but rather representations in the mind. — Fooloso4

Aristotle had a version of that separation. Descartes kicked off the consequent discussion of what was "mind independent." Maybe the thinking here is not a determination as it is often portrayed to be.

So, what do you think about it? Maybe you could quote what was particularly meaningful to you.

That he imagines cannot be doubted, but what he imagines can be. He says that imagination is related to the nature of body, but also that to imagine is to think. — Fooloso4

I think the 'imagination being related to the nature of the body' comes from Aristotle/Aquinas saying images come from senses interacting with material things and that thinking is analogous to that process because thinking requires images.

Descartes is opposing that analogy by saying our intellect is a process that we experience more intimately than its objects: After including all the various activities as kinds of thinking, he says:

I cannot keep myself from believing that corporeal things, images of which are formed by thought and which the senses themselves examine are much more distinctly known than that indescribable part of myself which cannot be pictured by the imagination. Yet it would truly be very strange to say that I know and comprehend more distinctly things whose existence seems doubtful to me, that are unknown to me, and which belong to me, than those of whose truth I am persuade, which are known to me, and which belong to my real nature--to say, in a word, that I know better than myself. But I see well what is the trouble: my mind is a vagabond who likes to wander and is not yet able to stay within the strict bounds of truth. — Second Meditation, pg 29, emphasis mine

Not being able to describe this 'real nature' must be one of the reasons why the mind is easily attracted by things that can be.

The ego is an idea. Right? — frank

That nicely cues the work of the Third Meditation, where ideas are defined in the context of the "thinker." Giorgo Agamben makes some interesting observations about the grammar of pronouns and their indeterminate nature that may throw light on how Descartes distinguishes the 'thinking subject' from the 'I' as an object:

We should pay attention to the specific condition of the utterance:it is the very act of producing an utter, not the text of the uttered....
This act is the work of the speaker who set langue into motion. The relation between the speaker and the langue determines the linguistic character of the utterance. (Benveniste 2, pl 80)

The sphere of the utterance thus includes that which in every speech act, refers exclusively to its taking place, to its instance, independently and prior to what is said meant in it. Pronouns and the other indicators of the utterance, before they designate real objects, indicate precisely that language takes place. In this way, still prior to the world of meaning, they permit the reference to the very event of language, the only context in which something can only be signified. — Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death, The Place of Negativity, pg 17

I think that captures some of the 'living instance to instance' quality in the passage Fooloso4 quoted above:

For a life-span can be divided into countless parts, each completely independent of the others, so that from my existing at one time it doesn’t follow that I exist at later times, unless some cause keeps me in existence – one might say that it creates me afresh at each moment.

I get that a lot.

Let me try this from a different direction. Your OP asserts that people are incarcerated because the system has a faulty idea of why people do things. What change would help ameliorate that mistake?

This is confusing:

The law is a primary determinant of human conduct according to our legalistic society, NOT according to me and my understanding of how a human act originates. It is not actually possible for given law to be determinative of a human act. — quintillus

If we can agree that compliance with the law is not, or at least is more complicated, than various legal systems that have emerged to respond to crime, are you saying that enforcement of the law cancels the obligation of responsibility upon which it is based?

An aspect of 'information' theory that I am not sure fits with your dichotomy is the emergence of cybernetic processes and system theories. That does make it a part of the 'realist' camp but does not necessarily render the components by which we build models 'commensurate' in contrast to the "incommensurability of information" you ascribe to the post-modernist.

Maybe approaches like biosemiotics are not as 'totalizing' as they may appear because the grammar projected upon them may be a good use of metaphor but is not like logic as 'rules of thinking' in many other ways.

People do not act, especially if badly, on the basis of what is permitted by law. So the following proposes a factor not observed in criminal behavior:

Current pre-reflectively free jurisprudentially-oriented legislators and magistrates, mistakenly, destructively, require all persons to determine themselves to act, or not, on the basis of given language of prohibitive law, - whereby said language of law it is, in fact, ontologically impossible to originate either human action or, inaction. — quintillus

You have placed the law before actions where it is always behind. People do bad things and other people try to stop it from dissolving whatever arrangement made in order to minimize the damage.

I apologize for my comparison. I should have left it as what I disagreed with.

The law, as practiced in the United States, sharply differentiates the criminal from civic disputes. So, the attempts to prevent criminal behavior, whether rightly or wrongly, conceived, is separated from the issue of rights of claims made by competing parities.

Against Oliver Wendell Holmes, your argument sounds like an AI generated device.

I take you as saying that Descartes is creating the role of the deceiver so that it won’t be thought he is speaking ill of God (if God was claimed to be the deceiver). And so, perhaps, our sin (doubt, uncertainty) does not blemish the perfection of God’s creation — Antony Nickles

One twist in this narrative is how the good God has permitted demons to exist and some quantum of ecclesiastical authority comes from protecting the flock by kicking the bad sheep out. The correlation between what you believed and your personal outcome was closely linked. Overcoming trials of temptation by evil entities was interwoven into the fabric of every garment.

While this experience was built on Paul's view of a view of a world where the Kingdom of Heaven would replace the one expected to pass away, the early theologians drew from the Greek tradition to legitimize their view against a received understanding of nature and divinity. The breathless anticipation of Paul morphed into the two cities of Augustine. Aristotle eventually was integrated into an acceptable view of nature with the constant caveat that Revelation preceded anything it had to say.

But then you have Galileo being charged with being a heretic for challenging what was stolen from the candy store in the first place. The genius of Descartes is that he did not simply take away something of value but offered a replacement.

Ray Brassier, from that collection of essays, The Speculative Turn, you posted in the other thread, calls for a relationship between the extremes that seeks to avoid the either/or between 'ontology' and 'epistemology.' It is interesting to see him included in the collection because he has a bone to pick with all the other views presented. The lovely rhetorical hit on 'post-modernism' aside, this chapter neatly captures one problem balancing the points of view:

18. However, in the absence of any understanding of the relationship between ‘meanings’ and things meant—the issue at the heart of the epistemological problematic which Latour dismisses but which has preoccupied an entire philosophical tradition from Frege through Sellars and up to their contemporary heirs—the claim that nothing is metaphorical is ultimately indistinguishable from the claim that everything is metaphorical. The metaphysical difference between words and things, concepts and objects, vanishes along with the distinction between representation and reality: ‘It is not possible to distinguish for long between those actants that are going to play the role of “words” and those that will play the role of “things”’. In dismissing the epistemological obligation to explain what meaning is and how it relates to things that are not meanings, Latour, like all postmodernists—his own protestations to the contrary notwithstanding—reduces everything to meaning, since the difference between‘words’ and ‘things’ turns out to be no more than a functional difference subsumed by the concept of ‘actant’—that is to say, it is a merely nominal difference encompassed by the metaphysical function now ascribed to the metaphor ‘actant’. Since for Latour the latter encompasses everything from hydroelectric powerplants to tooth fairies, it follows that every possible difference between powerplants and fairies—i.e. differences in the mechanisms through which they affect and are affected by other entities, whether those mechanisms are currently conceivable or not—is supposed to be unproblematically accounted for by this single conceptual metaphor. — Ray Brassier

I was trying to say how I thought Aristotle framed the questions. i don't want to hijack the thread to address your more general question on that basis. I will ponder how to address it in the context of the OP.

Those techniques may speak to the Aristotelian register of 'things happening for the most part' but does not treat them as a particular being which is treated as primary to all other qualifications.

Perfection is not something outside of a context. If you are a pretty good woodworker, you could be better if you did some things differently. Some of that is getting some events under more control. Some of that is accepting a process that one permits rather than planning. What is that element? The artist cannot get in front of the art.

And what about matters like love? The call to be perfect in love is not about technique. One knows when they are fucking it up in pursuit of whatever. It seems unlikely that awareness is based upon some projected success or failure.

Aristotle's essences would be ones where we could determine by human standards of induction the essential form of a substance that determines what that substance is. He does not seem to hold the notion that there are some attributes which are hidden or withdrawn as far as I've seen. — schopenhauer1

Yes, the passage is an objection to Plato's version of Forms. I read it also to say there is a great distance between our grouping by kinds and whatever activity is producing these different beings.

My approval of Grant given earlier in the thread is that he puts the Aristotelian argument that there can be no science of accidents in a particular light. Accidents are obviously the source of actual outcomes, but we do not have a science for it. Is that a problem of overwhelming complexity or the order of the universe coming to some kind of limit?

I am not sure how this lines up with the argument between Harmon and Whitehead but is my attempt to answer what seemed closest to your request for an analogue in the text of Aristotle.

This seems pretty similar to Aristotle's substance, except that Aristotle didn't have an idea of a "hiddenness". He seemed pretty concerned with their "essence" which is something that I believe can be known, and thus not hidden. But if anyone else has ideas of how this ties to Aristotle, let me know. — schopenhauer1

We encounter the 'essences' each time we come upon a particular being. But there is a tension between this condition and the 'universals' needed to inquire into causes:

But perhaps the universal, while it cannot be substance in the way in which the essence is, can yet be present in it—for example, as the animal is present in the human and the horse. Well then, clearly there is some account of it. And it makes no difference even if it is not the account of everything in the substance. For this [universal] will not be any the less the substance of something, as the human is of the human in whom it is present. And so the same result will again follow, since it (for example, the animal) will be the substance of that in which it is present as something special to it. Further, it is both impossible and absurd for the this (that is, the substance)—if it is composed of something—not to be composed of substances or of the this something but of a quality. For then non-substance (that is, the quality) will be prior to substance (that is, to the this). Which is just what is impossible. For neither in account nor in time nor in knowledge can the attributes be prior to the substance. For then they will also be separable. — Aristotle. Metaphysics, 1038b15, translated by CDC Reeve

From this perspective, the 'essence' is hiding in plain sight.

The crux of what I see is that Descartes is demonizing the inherent fallibility of our human condition. — Antony Nickles

I don't think this captures the significance of Descartes using the motif of an evil demon during his experiment upon himself. In a time when people were executed for witchcraft, demanding that a 'good' god would not deliberately deceive us separates the realm of the created from the problem of sin.

On one hand, Descartes is couching his argument in a way to avoid the fate of Galileo. On the other hand, he is challenging the Christian appropriation of the cosmos as performed by Augustine, Aquinas, and the like.

That part is more like Kant arguing against superstition than Hume musing about causes between billiard games.

Why the fear of "anthropomorphism"? — Moliere

My impression from reading the essays so far is that it is not so much a general rejection of anthropomorphism but a response to Heidegger signaling the end of metaphysics. Thus Badiou's remark in the first essay:

I have difficulty in understanding Laruelle [laughs] especially regarding the question of the Real. The strength of philosophy is its decisions in regards to the Real. In a sense Laruelle is too much like Heidegger, in critiquing a kind great forgetting, of what is lost in the grasp of decision, what Heidegger called thinking. Beyond this, and not to judge a thinker only by his earliest work, his most recent work has a religious dimension. When you say something is purely in the historical existence of philosophy
the proposition is a failure. It becomes religious. There is a logical constraint when you say we most go beyond philosophy. This is why, in the end, Heidegger said only a god can save us. Ultimately, I do not see an opposition between being qua being (as multiplicity) and the Real, not at all. The Real can be decided except for the event which is always in relation to a particular world. — Badiou

I guess this can be seen as support for something like Spinoza's criticism of anthropomorphism. but I read it more as a challenge to whether 'post-modernism' is a thing.

The Speculative Turn essays certainly represent very different views. It seems that much of the conversation concerns the logic of terms and what are actual unities versus arbitrary suppositions. This example by Grant makes sense to me:

Clearly, then, the problem stems from the mutual abstraction of becoming and
thing, a problem whose solution Plato already foreshadowed in coining the principle of immanence in the form of ‘the becoming of being [genesis eis ousian]’ (Philebus 26d8): it cannot be other-than-being that becomes, or becoming would not be at all. In the present context, this means: ‘the mark of all being is power’. Powers are inseparable from their products; if no products, then there were no powers, but not the reverse. It is neither the case that things ground powers, nor the converse; rather, powers unground the ultimacy attributed to substantial being and necessitate, therefore, rather than eliminate, the becomings of objects. Powers accordingly are natural history, in the precise sense that powers are not simply formally or logically inseparable from what they do, but are what they do, and compose being in its becoming. The thoroughgoing contingency of natural production undermines, I would claim, any account of permanently actual substantial forms precisely because such contingents entail the actuality not simply of abstractly separable forms, but of the powers that sculpt them. This is where
Harman’s retooling of vicarious causation will become the focus for discussion, but which must take place elsewhere. — Hart, Mining Conditions, a response to Harman, pg 48

This question relates to the scientific method used in the discussion of linguistics in the Chomsky thread and how to distinguish the "innate" from the 'environment."

"Whatever I have accepted until now as most true has come to me through my senses. But occasionally I have found that they have deceived me, and it is unwise to trust completely those who have deceived us even once. -- Descartes — frank

The reference to personal betrayal is interesting here. A loss of trust questioning the good faith of the interlocutor. The relationship is in peril before the trial has begun. The setting reminds me of Dante who discovers he is lost "midway through life's journey." The failure to find one's way threatens madness.

The fusion certainly did not come up in the Third Meditation when Descartes was saying his parents did not cause his 'thinking substance':

Finally, concerning my parents, from whom it seems that I derive my birth, even if all that I could ever have believed of them should be true, that would not imply that it is they who conserve me, nor even that they made and produced me in so far as I am a thinking being, there is no relation between the bodily activity by which I have been accustomed to believe I was engendered and the production of a thinking substance. The most that they can have contributed to my birth is that they have produced certain arrangements in the matter within which I have so far believed that the real I, that is my mind, is enclosed. Thus the existence of my parents is no objection to the argument, and we must necessarily conclude from the mere fact that I exist and that I have an idea of a supremely perfect God is very clearly demonstrated. — ibid. page 40

The 'ghost in the machine' register comes up when discussing a perfect God. It is not used when discussing the world he can explore. He has used the crisis of his doubt to separate a particular cosmic order from God as a matter of belief. Disagreeing with Aristotle's astronomy should not be treated as heresy.

Thinking, is not a proof for someone that s/he is aware of being alive, i.e. that s/he exists. In fact, the contrary may be true: when my mind is absorbed by thinking, I kind of stop being alive. — Alkis Piskas

After Descartes concludes that he is not being deceived by the creator of his experience, he can learn from nature. He says that thinking is not confined to abstract pondering:

Nature also teaches me by these feelings of pain, hunger, thirst, and so on that I am not only residing in my body, as a pilot in his ship, but furthermore, that I am intimately connected with it, and that the mixture is so blended, as it were, that something like a single whole is produced. For if that were not the case, when my body is wounded I would not therefore feel pain, I, who am only a thinking being; but I would perceive that wound by the understanding alone, as a pilot perceives by sight if something in his vessel is broken. And when my body needs food or drink, I would simply know the fact itself, instead of receiving notice of it by having confused feelings of hunger and thirst. For actually all these feelings of hunger, thirst, pain, and so on are nothing else but certain confused modes of thinking, which have their origin in and depend upon the union and apparent fusion of the mind with the body. — Descartes, Meditation 6, pg 81, translated by L.J Lefleur