It seems to be an algorithm that takes three reactions to Heidegger's language and reconfigures them to fit different contexts.

I have made several attempts to seriously study Heidegger over the years and lapsed into a coma each time. I object to a lot of his approach but now find myself wanting to defend him from the use of classifications he argued against.

Oh no! See the movie anyway. I implore you. I had to see it 3 times in the theater— a modern masterpiece on all levels. — Mikie

One thing about that movie I will never forget; Javier Bardem was entirely too good at playing his role.
I cannot watch him in other movies because I cannot unsee him from there.

Furthemore, Chalmers is part of a kind of new wave in 'consciousness studies' that is far more open to, shall we say, alternative philosophical models, than the diehards of analytical philosophy. — Wayfarer

I completely agree.

I don't mean to accuse you of losing sight of something but to suggest there is a gap between Husserl, for example, and Chalmers in regard to how the 'first person' is understood as the source of phenomena.

Chalmers is fighting for accepting methods of the first person as evidence in the face of the thinking/practice that has excluded them. Husserl is taking those experiences as given to him without qualification.

Heidegger is a voice of opposition to the 'scientism' he sees in society. Chalmers is militating against that view when he does not accept that science has nothing more to do with the matter of subjectivity.

Ah yes, the power of subtraction.

Like my old Sifu said while teaching martial arts:

"if you are genuinely interested in self-defense, try not being such an asshole."

Righto!
I have seen half of that list. I better get to work on the rest.

But we can't study the nature of being that way, because it's never something we're apart from or outside of (another insight from existentialism.) In the case of the actual 'experience of consciousness', we are at once the subject and the object of investigation, and so, not tractable to the powerful methods of the objective sciences that have been developed since the 17th century. — Wayfarer

I read Chalmers to be saying that consciousness could be investigated as a scientific phenomenon if the 'powerful methods' stopped insisting upon reducing it into a mechanism that excludes the need for a 'subject.'. Chalmers says the only way to avoid the problem is to include consciousness.as a fundamental property like mass, space, time, etcetera. To that extent, he is arguing against a 'scientism' that accepts the Descartes/Kant divisions as a final word on what can be investigated.

I understand the viewpoints stated by many in this thread that dismiss his framework as philosophically suspect. I just don't want to lose sight of what he thought he was doing as a point of departure.

My favorite from that album is Guinnivere:


It still feels like travelling from one place to another.

Yes, they are worthy.

Kubrick, Kurosawa, Bergman, Fellini, for sure. Some I didn't see listed by others:

The Last Picture Show
Solaris by Tarkovsky
Richard II, with Lawrence Olivier
Alexander Nevski and Ivan the Terrible by Eisenstein
Koyaanisqatsi
Lawrence of Arabia
Heart of Glass by Herzog
High Noon
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

In regard to my challenge to your 'grouping' idea as it relates to having an opinion, I considered your following remarks:

You've not yet provided any reason at all why the aggregated opinion of that particular group matters to us more than the opinion of any other group.

The aggregated views of {all the people who live within that border} has no meaning. It's just a random means of stratification unrelated to the opinion being aggregated.

The comments you cite say that there is no such thing as a Ukrainian identity, history, language and culture. I've also argued that there's no such thing as the will of the Ukrainians, or the motive of the Ukrainians. I've argued that no such thing exists because Ukraine (like all other countries) is an arbitrary line drawn by powerful people based on the amount of resources they had the power to control at the time. It does not in any way 'capture' some natural grouping of people all of whom think alike. It would be no more real then me taking a quick glance at the posts on religion here and announcing that "the belief of TPF is that there is a God".

Sure, but same goes for a load of people getting together to do anything. Run a marathon. Clear mines. Save lives in wars zones. There's nothing unique about getting together to fight a common enemy which creates some moral purpose which we then are under an obligations to respect. The Nazis got together for a common goal.

Yes? What connects the acceptance that there are motivations to fight back with somehow having to pretend those motivations are more politically important that the object of the most powerful nation on earth? The former is an argument about their mere existence, the latter is an argument about their importance in determining if western policy is morally acceptable.

Still don't. There's no such thing as a Ukrainian identity. Ukrainians identify in all sorts of different, occasionally completely incompatible ways. That's why there was a civil war going on before this invasion.

Of course Ukraine does not have its own history, language and culture. It's an arbitrary line on a map, it's absurd to think it somehow contains a natural grouping of language, history and culture.

Tell me, how did the people who determined where the line should be ensure that it encompassed such a natural grouping? Were studies done, where polls taken? Because as I recall learning it, it was some politicians in a negotiating room that drew the line. Did Lenin consult ethnographers in 1922? Did Krushchev cede Crimea because his anthropologists insisted the 'culture' there belonged to Ukraine?

No country's boundaries are carefully drawn around natural breaks in culture and language. It's one of the reasons we have so many fucking wars.

In this case, you'd be blind to ignore the fact that the Russian-speaking population in the east of Ukraine have a different language to the rest, the suppression of which was instrumental in the pre-2022 war. — Isaac

After all that, it is difficult to process:

We're not talking about what opinion 'do' so I don't see the relevance of this. we're talking about the moral weight one ought give the aggregated opinion of a certain grouping. — Isaac

Just out of idle curiosity, what is a "vague wife"? I've known a few people whose normal state was "vague". — BC

I get why the summary says that but it does not reflect a careful reading of the book. With the possible exception of the son, all the characters operate in a fixated manner. The characters who are easily understood are the committed nazis. The diffuse presentation of others makes it difficult to separate a coping strategy from a clear thought of resistance. Suspicion becomes more than a thought and switches the tracks one travels upon.

We are good people, aren't we? — BC

The best of all possible people. Oh wait, a collection of soil has formed on the road outside. I will take my broom and........

.

The scale is a significant difference. They are not the same event. I do challenge the idea that the difference was the result of a "weak moral anchor."

Hannah Arendt is on to something when she distinguishes religious hatred from antisemitism because of the way the latter developed through an international community. The story of punishing a group that is identified as the cause of one's misfortune changes into one of a People rising up against their oppressors. The story of the Russian Revolution is similar in seeing the fight as liberating themselves from the previous winners of the world order.

This way of becoming who you are through destruction has a different character than taking the confidence of one's superiority to be reason enough to rule over others. The Japanese didn't claim the Chinese were stopping them from being who they were. They liked the fruits of empire and hoped to like it even more. They weren't remaking the structure of their society at the same time.

That's what I was getting at. The particular kind of immorality that created the Holocaust, for instance, could it have been related to a weak moral anchor? — frank

Killing Jews was a crowd pleaser well before the Enlightenment. The Crusades had people doing it at home as well as abroad. For example: The Pogroms of 1189 and 1190

If you are thinking of a Nietzschean narrative of nihilism from loss of faith, it is interesting to consider the intellectuals who were drawn to Naziism as a rejection of modern values that exclude a 'spiritual' life:

In April 1933, Heidegger took on the rectorship of Freiburg University, and joined the Nazi Party with great public fanfare the following month. He supported a political revolution which, he believed, by teaching the Germans discipline and an “instinct for the ultimate”, would prepare the way for a “deeper … spiritual” revolution. What this was really about, he insisted, was that “exposed to the most extreme questionableness of its own existence, this people [should] will … to be a spiritual people”. If the Party did not “sacrifice itself as a transitional phenomenon”, he grandly declared, but instead pretended to be “complete, eternal truth dropped from heaven”, it was “an aberration and a folly”.

The Notebooks document Heidegger’s increasingly bitter realization that Hitler and his chief ideologue Rosenberg wanted nothing to do with this idealism: Germanness, to them, was a matter of race and territory, not of spiritual destiny. — Judith Wolfe

As on many other topics, Heidegger was a poor student of Nietzsche. Fred could tell creatures apart from the sounds they made and the odors they out gassed.

And anomie? — BC

That is an interesting question.
The first thought that pops into my head is the movie The Last Picture Show.


Perhaps more closely related to the topic at hand would be Walter Kempowski's novel All for Nothing. It tells a story of the Germans losing the war in a way that reproduces the condition that made it possible. Don't read near bedtime.

Do you agree that scientism was also a factor? — frank

I think of it more along the lines of John Keegan in his A History of Warfare. Advances in technology has long been a part of why certain methods succeeded but figuring out how to become more lethal with what you have got is not only about the tools used. He has a great account of how deadly the use of the Phalanx was against less organized forces.
Keegan speaks of nuclear weapons as a sort of lethality that conditions people in a way not experienced previously. The pursuit of the lethal leads to a standing wave where there is no progress beyond it. If 'scientism' is a factor from that point of view, it is no different from all the efforts to make better tools to kill from time out of mind.

Regarding ennui, young people get bored where they live confined by certain structures and the allure of fighting in another place has always been more attractive than doing chores for some of them..

Machine guns. Bombs and Missiles. Industrial Project Management. Mass Media. The shrinking of the world as a shared space. Ennui.

You translated my phrasing into other words with your question. I will think about the best way to answer.

It is presumptuous to assert that the ideas are coherent outside of the context of human thought and experience. On the other hand, it is also presumptuous to claim that such a domain of experience is a process that is going on in a fashion self-sufficient enough to have no relationship to this "arrangement."

I am not able to pull together a report to something able to answer the question of 'being qua being.' Looking at various ways of talking about it are interesting. But pursuing some of those while losing interest in others does not seem to me like choosing a favorite.

The act of selection is one of the elements under review.

So I tread water in what I think is the Socratic fashion; There is some arrangement that is the source of what is experienced: I am ill-equipped to say what that might be.

I have no idea what this means, — Isaac

It is a description that shows the result of only considering "groups" of individuals and their opinions to adequately represent people living together in a particular society. All the different ways people work, judge themselves, mate, educate children, and govern themselves are not simply an aggregate of their opinions.

Opinions, by themselves, do not do anything.

Nor does it need to. I'm making a moral argument. Moral arguments are about the way things ought to be, not about the way things are. — Isaac

You present the absence of Ukrainian agency as a fact, authorizing the removal of their voice from any moral calculus. You champion Mearsheimer's theory of International Relations as the best explanation of the events unfolding in Ukraine. You discount previous behavior by Russia as indicative of anything happening in this conflict.

All of your 'moral' arguments are made upon the basis of what you have argued to be happening.

The expression: 'absolute power corrupts absolutely.' was made by Lord Acton to strictly refer to those who took advantage of their place in society to prey upon others below them.

I don't know where insecurity comes into the picture.

As to the question of martyrdom and guilt, escape from the cave is escape from the city. Socrates was a citizen of the city in the double sense of place or Chora. — Fooloso4

Your account of the Chora presented in the Timaeus reminds me of a passage in the Theaetetus:

Socrates: Evils, Theodorus, can never be done away with, for the good must always come from the contrary; nor have they any place in the divine world, but they must needs haunt this region of our mortal nature. — Theaetetus, 176a, translated by Cornford

The translation does not fully capture the Greek in regard to 'place' (topos):

τὴν δὲ θνητὴν φύσιν καὶ τόνδε τὸν τόπον περιπολεῖ ἐξ ἀνάγκης.

The word περιπολεῖ is to wander around an area the way a vagrant or a military patrol might do.

The ἀνάγκης is the same 'necessity' that required starting over again in Timaeus.

It's not that there's no polities. One could create any such grouping - {all dog owners} - for example. It's... — Isaac

The word 'polity' does not mean a grouping by means of a shared property. The first meaning given in the OED is: "Civil organization (as a condition); civil order." It comes from the Ancient Greek: polis. The Republic by Plato is titled: Politeia. A better translation than the 'Res Publica' of Latin would be 'What makes a City. The City refers to a place. Different places have different polities.

Polities obviously include formally articulated forms of governance. But they cannot be recognized 'as a condition' without placing them alongside other institutions, both those formally established and those preserved through custom. Who gets to do what varies greatly. Perhaps any discussion of polity requires the context of history. Conditions in a Hindu caste society are much different than a community in the Iroquois nation, for example. Participation and exclusion take place in the context of polity.

This central element of life in society is not recognized by your statement:

The aggregated views of {all the people who live within that border} has no meaning. — Isaac

This atomizes the participation of each individual in their location to the point that they are not in a place. It is like a theater filled with a hundred Descartes who have nothing to do with the other Descartes sitting next to them.

I grant that if one takes this condition as a premise, any sense of a shared space becomes arbitrary. But nothing you have presented demonstrates that people actually live like that.

What role does science play from that perspective?

I think that for Godel, the matter of valid forms of demonstration was paramount. Aristotle certainly was concerned with the matter but also saw first principles as being a proper fit for what was to be inquired into. Some natural things had particular differences that required different primary points of departure. There were other qualities they all shared.

There is substantial debate amongst ancient scholars regarding such a distinction in Aristotle's text. MELINA G. MOUZALA gives a nice summary of the issue.

My impression is that Aristotle was not trying to provide the last word on these matters.

To some extent (currently in dispute), the desire to find out how Nature works is the desire to learn something beyond the aim of accounts given merely to tell a story.

When you say: "There isn't any phenomenal aspect to the third person account, that is to ignore the role of paying attention to phenomena has in moving toward that prize of objectivity. One can recognize the difference without pitting them against each other in a zero-sum game.

He is taking aim from the balcony, not rebutting your thesis.

I carry an umbrella in case it rains.

I quoted you and tried to make sense of it. I am not trying to put words in your mouth.

If one rejects any kind of "thinking alike" in forming polities, that doesn't explain how such polities come into being. Saying: "I've argued that no such thing exists because Ukraine (like all other countries) is an arbitrary line drawn by powerful people" does not explain it by itself. There is more to life in society than saying where its boundaries are.

There is a gap between two things you are saying. If you find this observation to be moronic, ignore it.
And if you do so, I will return the favor.

Jeff Beck.

What I want to know, is if our collective goals are wholesome or unwholesome towards one another. — Benj96

I don't understand how your thought experiment connects this question to the results you express interest in. The proposal suggests we are experiencing the immediate result of such decisions.

That sounds more like a thesis than a poll of other people's experiences/opinions.

Was that an instance of a Richardean paradox?

It seems odd then that you would want to say the notion lacked any mechanism. It seems even a cursory glance at any sociology or psychology textbook would provide you with a dozen such mechanisms without having to lift a finger. — Isaac

I was trying to figure out how your view of society worked. You declare the self-identification of persons as participants in a group to be meaningless in regard to the polity they find themselves within:

I've also argued that there's no such thing as the will of the Ukrainians, or the motive of the Ukrainians. I've argued that no such thing exists because Ukraine (like all other countries) is an arbitrary line drawn by powerful people based on the amount of resources they had the power to control at the time. It does not in any way 'capture' some natural grouping of people all of whom think alike. — Isaac

This line you draw between the appearance of a will and the forces actually driving events is not a self-evident fact. It is a part of a theory you are using to interpret events.

I agree. The emphasis has been on what can be confirmed by shared and repeatable experiences. The point Chalmers is making about the use of reductive means to discover functions is echoed by the early cheerleader of modern science, Francis Bacon:

But my course and method, as I have often clearly stated and would wish to state again, is this--not to extract works from works or experiments from experiments (as an empiric), but from works and experiments to extract causes and axioms, and again from those causes and axioms new works and experiments, as a legitimate interpreter of nature. — Francis Bacon, The New Organon, Book 1, 67

It is from the dialogue of Plato named Parmenides. Here is the bit about time:

Does the one also partake of time? And is it and does it become older and younger than itself and others, and again, neither younger nor older than itself and others, by virtue of participation in time?

How do you mean?
If one is, being must be predicated of it?
Yes.
But to be (einai) is only participation of being in present time, and to have been is the participation of being at a past time, and to be about to be is the participation of being at a future time?

Very true.
Then the one, since it partakes of being, partakes of time?
Certainly.
And is not time always moving forward?
Yes.
Then the one is always becoming older than itself, since it moves forward in time?

Certainly.
And do you remember that the older becomes older than that which becomes younger?

I remember.
Then since the one becomes older than itself, it becomes younger at the same time?

Certainly.
Thus, then, the one becomes older as well as younger than itself?
Yes.
And it is older (is it not?) when in becoming, it gets to the point of time. between "was" and "will be," which is "now": for surely in going from the past to the future, it cannot skip the present?

No.
And when it arrives at the present it stops from becoming older, and no longer becomes, but is older, for if it went on it would never be reached by the present, for it is the nature of that which goes on, to touch both the present and the future, letting go the present and seizing the future, while in process of becoming between them.

True.
But that which is becoming cannot skip the present; when it reaches the present it ceases to become, and is then whatever it may happen to be becoming.

Clearly.
And so the one, when in becoming older it reaches the present, ceases to become, and is then older.

Certainly.
And it is older than that than which it was becoming older, and it was becoming older than itself.

Yes.
And that which is older is older than that which is younger?
True.
Then the one is younger than itself, when in becoming older it reaches the present?

Certainly.
But the present is always present with the one during all its being; for whenever it is it is always now.

Certainly.
Then the one always both is and becomes older and younger than itself?

Truly.
And is it or does it become a longer time than itself or an equal time with itself?

An equal time.
But if it becomes or is for an equal time with itself, it is of the same age with itself?

Of course.
And that which is of the same age, is neither older nor younger?
No.
The one, then, becoming and being the same time with itself, neither is nor becomes older or younger than itself?

I should say not.
And what are its relations to other things? Is it or does it become older or younger than they?

I cannot tell you.

That means ∞∞ time has elapsed and the now we find ourselves experiencing is the termination of this particular infinity — Agent Smith

But Parmenides said: "Then the one always both is and becomes older and younger than itself?"

Aristotle was too busy looking at how creatures lived to get stuck in that bottle.

That is an interesting analogy. I read Chalmers as breaking from the Cartesian theater where the duality of a first person being separated from the rest of the movie is the explanation itself.:

With experience, on the other hand, physical explanation of the functions is not in question. The key is instead the conceptual point that the explanation of functions does not suffice for the explanation of experience. This basic conceptual point is not something that further neuroscientific investigation will affect. In a similar way, experience is disanalogous to the élan vital. The vital spirit was put forward as an explanatory posit, in order to explain the relevant functions, and could therefore be discarded when those functions were explained without it. Experience is not an explanatory posit but an explanandum in its own right, and so is not a candidate for this sort of elimination. — Chalmers, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness

The question is not whether we are only physical beings but whether the methods to establish what is only physical will explain experience. Chalmers is introducing a duality that is recognized through the exclusion of a phenomena instead of accepting the necessity for an agency beyond phenomena.

To that point, we don't know enough to say what consciousness does to understand how it may relate to the specific event of being a 'first' person. Compare this circumspection to the boldness of Identity Theory where that aspect of the 'physical' self is the first order of business.

I've also argued that there's no such thing as the will of the Ukrainians, or the motive of the Ukrainians. I've argued that no such thing exists because Ukraine (like all other countries) is an arbitrary line drawn by powerful people based on the amount of resources they had the power to control at the time. — Isaac

In other words: "the willingness to fight a common enemy is merely an illusion." Fighting people who kill your friends and neighbors may look and feel like a shared purpose but in reality, it is merely the struggle by elites to control people and territory.

It is an interesting theory of social organization. But it does not include a self-evident mechanism for how the coercion is brought to bear. Is there some kind of fear of anarchy as depicted by Hobbes? Repression of instincts ala Freud? Or more like the class struggle discussed by Marx? It certainly rules out a view of 'natural' society put forward by Locke.

Where have I said that? — Isaac

Still don't. There's no such thing as a Ukrainian identity. Ukrainians identify in all sorts of different, occasionally completely incompatible ways. That's why there was a civil war going on before this invasion.

Exactly. The reason why so many in this discussion cannot seem to get their heads around viewing this in any other grouping than by nationality.

Of course Ukraine does not have its own history, language and culture. It's an arbitrary line on a map, it's absurd to think it somehow contains a natural grouping of language, history and culture. — Issac

These are the moves you have repeated for hundreds of pages.

Memories are fleeting, as mortal as we are.