Mathematically, an atom is a point. It has a location, a mass, a velocity, a charge, a spin. those are all numbers, no qualitative identity.
It’s not red, beautiful, or hairy
— T Clark

Red is a qualitative category , and so is color. I can perform a quantitative measurement of whether a color is red, by working within the qualitative category of color. I can quantitatively determine the hue, brightness or saturation of the red color by utilizing the qualitative categories of redness, hue, brightness and saturation.
Location, mass, velocity, change and spin are all qualities. Differences of degree within these qualitative wholes are quantitative. If I am trying to teach someone what one of these qualities means, I don’t simply present a set of numeric values. I offer a qualitative definition. What’s the difference between the meaning of 50 yards, 50 lbs, 50 mph and 50 Coulombs? That’s a qualitative distinction. If I want to teach someone how to measure quantitive increments pertaining to one of these qualities, then I introduce a technique of quantitative measurement adapted to the qualitative nature of the category I am measuring.

Numeric iteration (differences in degree) implies sameness in kind.
— Joshs

Sorry, I don’t know what this means — T Clark

When we count increments, we are counting increments of something. The something must remain identical over the course of the count, otherwise we would have to start the count over again every time this something morphs into something else. For instance, we can measure spatial displacement of a moving thing. If the thing which is moving suddenly disappears, dissolves or evaporates, then the something we were counting increments of has lost its qualitative identity as this spatially self-identical point. If we are measuring temperature, then the quality whose behavior we are calculating must remain identical as ‘temperature’ over the course of the iteration and not suddenly morph into color or sound.

Numbers are ideas, and ideas are not physical. Yet without math science couldn’t even get started — Wayfarer

Right, numbers pertain to quantity, and the physical pertains to both quality and quantity, difference in degree and difference in kind. If difference in degree is an idea, then so is difference in kind.

So, the world is made up of physical phenomena, but the characteristics of those phenomena are mathematical. Whatever the ding dong that means. — aT Clark

For something to have mathematical characteristics, it must have a qualitative identity which persists over time. Numeric iteration (differences in degree) implies sameness in kind.

To say “becoming” is prior to being still presupposes that becoming exists. — Esse Quam Videri

Only if we understand exist to mean ‘subsist in itself’. If instead we empathize the EX in exist, then existence means transit and esctasis rather than self-presencing.

To say “difference” is prior to identity still presupposes something that differs. — Esse Quam Videri

Only if we assume that there must be identities first (a‘something’ that either changes or stays the same) and differences secondarily.

To say “performativity” grounds intelligibility still presupposes that performativity is intelligible enough to ground anything. — Esse Quam Videri

Do meaning and intelligibility require a pre-existing ground , or does the exact repetition of a meaning destroy its intelligibility?

↪Joshs
We have no chance of getting to it if we continue to understand naturalism in terms of objectively causal processes which treat subjectivity as something added onto an objective world.
— Joshs

I mean, in truth, it was. There was once a time when consciousness didn't exist. Time passed. At some point, reality started experiencing itself. If "added" is not the right term (after all, who or what added it?), consciousness at least arose from an unconscious world. — hypericin

Let’s say we go with the idea that there was a time when consciousness didn’t exist. Is the only conceptual vocabulary available to us to describe the world prior to the appearance of conscious beings one which treats the natural in terms of objective causality? Let me start by suggesting that consciousness is not a matter of reality experiencing itself, as though to perceive is simply to stare at. Consciousness constructs, creates, becomes. To be aware of something is to produce it. Not in the sense of fabricating a world out of whole cloth, but in the sense that perceiving is acting upon, making a change in the world we are already a part of. So with consciousness, reality doesn’t experience itself, reality alters itself. Phenomenologists hold this view of the nature of consciousness, which is radically different from the conventional dualistic view of it implied by panpsychisms (that for a material thing to have consciousness is to be aware of itself).

Poststructuralists reject the idea that consciousness was always present in the world, but they agree with the phenomenologists that reality exists by altering itself, that no entity pre-exists its interactions within a configuration of elements. In other words, they reject a view of naturalism or materialism as objectively causal processes.

If consciousness arose from unconscious processes, we can in principle describe how this happened. The trouble is, unconscious reality only has a third person perspective, while consciousness only has a first person perspective. We simply lack the cognitive tools to cross this perspectival gap, as we have never crossed it before — hypericin

Both the phenomenologists and the poststructuralists argue that a third person perspective is a derived abstraction generated via intersubjective processes (and which was developed contingently at a certain point in cultural history), Reality prior to the advent of human consciousness has neither a third personal nor a first personal perspective. It has the multiple, continually changing perspectives of all of its interacting aspects. When conscious entities like ourselves study any of these aspects, we contribute to the alteration of the shifting patterns we interact with through our observations. As scientists, philosophers and poets we are a part of the cosmic dance, not passive onlookers.

If the order of the world is infinite and our models finite then there would be infinitely many ways to model its order truthfully, but also infinitely many ways to model it erroneously — Janus

Exactly. But not all at the same time. For long stretches of time, during normatively stable periods within a science or a culture, there is but one or a handful of related accepted ways to model truth and error. Since we always inhabit one of or another of these normative epochs, the world always makes sense to us in some way, according to some accepted scheme of rationality.

Ok. But, again, if there is no a priori intelligible order, why our conceptual maps work? — boundless

Think of an intelligible order as a scheme or system of rationality. Within that order or map, things work a certain way, according to certain criteria. We can determine correctness or incorrectness on the basis of the criteria that are dictated by the qualitative organization of the scheme of rationality. Think of a theoretical approach within physics, for instance. Not only does its scheme generate predictions which can be verified , but these predictions can be articulated mathematically to a remarkable precision.

This precision of prediction is what a rational
scheme buys us. But is there not also a downside to this precision? The quantitative accuracy of the map applies to the relations among its founding concepts, but those concepts themselves are qualities, not quantities, and cannot be derived quantitatively. As a result, the mathematical precision of the predicted relations sits along side aspects of the model which are arbitrary, such as the features of the world which are considered random in their behavior. Thus, the scheme works, but it works in a particular way, combining the precisely predictable with the arbitrary and random in a certain way. According to philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn, as theories change, the way in which the random or arbitrary relates to the precisely predictable is reconceptualized.

, in my opinion, even this kind of perspective can't given an account to explain why the empirical world - which I agree 'arises' from the interaction between the subject and the 'world' - appears to be intelligible. Are we merely going to say that it is a 'happy coincidence' that we can make conceptual models that work? Or is there a deeper reason that explain why they work — boundless

The challenge for these thinkers isnt just to explain why the world is intelligible, but why the meaning of its intelligibility (the qualitative organization of our schemes of rationality) changes continuously over long periods of time. The world is always intelligible to us i. some way or other, because we interact directly with it according to pattens of activity which have a certain stability to them. That is the definition of a living system. The world is intelligible ina certain sense to an amoeba in that the amoeba constitutes an organism-world ecosystem that maintains consistency through change.

Our human models of our world express constructed ecosystems of interactions. Each modification in our scientific knowledge constitutes a change in that built ecosystem. The point is there is no one correct map, model or scheme of rationality that mirrors the way the world is. Our knowledge is not a mirror of the world. It is an activity that continually modifies the nature of the world in ways that
are meaningful and recognizable to us. There is no intelligibility without a pragmatic refreshing of the sense of meaning of what is intelligible.

But what is that rock, really? Objectively, it does not appear as you see it. In reality, it, and all of reality, outside of human perception, it is a conglomeration of colourless particles and waves, a haze and maze of uncertainty that turns into certainty only when you observe it. (I have heard it described as wavelength collapse, but I don't know enough about it to comment.)

The grass is not really green. That's only the light that particular conglomeration of chemistry reflects to your eyes. Outside of perception, objective reality might be "there," but it has no definition or meaning. — Questioner

You’re taking the derived abstraction ( the empirical third-person account) and making it the basis for the actual phenomenological experience which constructed the abstraction in the first place.

We use the fruits of our experience-our perceptions and observations-to create models of the world, but then turn around and treat our experience as somehow less real than the models. Forgetting where our science comes from, we find ourselves wondering how anything like experience can exist at all.( The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience, by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson)

Science’s "blind spot" is ignoring lived human experience as the foundation of all knowledge, creating a disconnect that harms both our understanding and our relationship with the world.

Universal contingency therefore parasitically depends on an unacknowledged necessity; the unconditioned ground of intelligibility. In other words, contingency only makes sense against the background of intelligibility and, therefore, cannot be absolutized — Esse Quam Videri

What if the ground of intelligibility is itself groundless, as Wittgenstein and Heidegger maintain? And what is a groundless ground? It is performativity itself, becoming before being, difference prior to identity, intra-action before self-presence.

This is the tip of a very large iceberg for your ‘mind=brain’ materialism: how something like a composition, a sentence, a formula can retain its identity across different versions and even different media. ‘The same and yet different’. — Wayfarer

I alluded to this above in deriving the idea of the identical third-personal empirical spatial object from the constructed first personal object.

What does an objective state of affairs look like?
— Joshs

We have no access to it. Everything constructed in the mind of the subject is by definition subjective. We have no choice but to believe our senses. — Questioner

Don’t we have access to it intersubjectively? Isnt objectivity intersubjective agreement? I interact with a rock, and in this way I don’t simply believe my senses , I construct my senses in line with my goal-oriented intentional activity. It’s not simply ‘seeing is believing’, it’s ‘believing is seeing’: as I interact with the rock my expectations co-determine what I see and how I see it. My subjective knowledge of the rock as object is the result of patterns of correlation that emerge from the responses of the rock to my movements in relation to it. I can reliably predict how the rock will respond to my engagement with it, such that I can think about it as a unified thing which persists as itself over time ( object permanence) , even when I pick it up and move it from place to place or hide it from view.

This first-personal process of objectivation already involves idealization and abstraction, but this object for me is not yet an empirically objective thing. I have to compare my perspective on the rock with that of other subjects, and through this intersubjective correlating, we come to a consensus on the idea of the rock, seen differently for each of us as individual subjects, as an empirically objective entity which is ‘identical’ for all. The third-personal empirically factual object is an abstraction derived from shared first personal accounts, but a scientifically useful one. This is Husserl’s phenomenological concept of the origin of objectivity. For him all third-person empirically objective accounts are subjective and relative, since they are abstracted from, without eliminating, first personal experience.

.... describes or does not describe an objective state of affairs — 180 Proof

What does an objective state of affairs look like?

... which is or is not how things are objectively (re: noumena)? — 180 Proof

One wouldn’t begin with pre-existing objects and then move from there to relations. One begins with configurations, which have subjective and objective aspects but are neither strictly subjective nor objective. Their objective aspect is what is relatively predictable and stable over time, their subjective aspect is the qualitatively transformative basis of their ongoing existence.

An order which makes intelligibility possible is not the same thing as an intelligible order, if intelligible order implies a fixed a priori form dictating a particular logic of intelligibility.
— Joshs

While I agree with the wording, my problem here is that I don't see how these kinds of accounts are plausible. They appear to give to the subject the entire 'responsibility' of the 'ordering' of the empirical world. In other words, for all practical purposes, an epistemic solipsism — boundless

For Husserl, the nature of the order on the basis of which events cohere is not fixed but, as you say, pragmatic. It is an order of associative similarity (not associative in Hume’s causal sense, but association by relevance to an intending subject). If you dont like the idea of a pragmatic ordering of the world depending on the notion of an a priori subject, you can find accounts which follow the phenomenologists in their deconstruction of the natural empirical attitude without relying on subjectivity as necessary ground. Such accounts can be found with Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, Karen Barad, Joseph Rouse and others. For these writers, we can remove human beings and livings things from the picture and show how materiality is agential or ‘subjective’ in itself, in that no object pre-exists its interaction with other elements within an already organized configuration of elements.

Consciousness does emerge from structural relations of non conscious entities, and consciousness is the precondition for identifying those relationships in the first place. This circularity results in the hard problem, but the hard problem, like all problems, is epistemic. We, as conscious beings, may face an insurmountable barrier in explaining consciousness itself. But from this apparent epistemic barrier it cannot be concluded that consciousness has no naturalistic explanation. Just that we might never get to it. — hypericin

We have no chance of getting to it if we continue to understand naturalism in terms of objectively causal processes which treat subjectivity as something added onto an objective world.

While I think Bitbol is right to reject reductive materialism, right to expose the limits of objectification, and right to insist on the primacy of lived experience, I don’t think Bitbol is successful in dissolving the ontological question and, therefore, simply ends up leaving it unanswered. In my opinion, this results from a refusal to move from phenomenological critique to a positive, critically grounded account of being and truth. It mistakes the dissolution of bad metaphysics for the end of metaphysics itself. — Esse Quam Videri

I agree with your assessment of Bitbol, and I believe you can find a “positive, critically grounded account of being and truth” in phenomenologists like Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger “.

My problem, however, is this. If we are so 'constrained' by our own perspective and we can't make statements about the 'things in themselves' - i.e. metaphysical statements - the problem I notice is that the apparent intelligibility of the world as we experience it remains unexplained. Yes, following the 'broadly' Kantian tradition that Bitbol supports, it seems to me that we are compelled to say that intelligibility should be explained in terms of the capacity of our mind to 'order' experience, to 'give it a form'.

However, the problem is that even the most radical follower of this tradition must acknowledge that the possibility of such an 'ordering' - unless one is also prepared to say that the whole 'form'/'order' of the empirical world is a contrived self-deception or a totally furtuitous event - it is rooted on some property of 'what is outside of experience' that makes it possible. But to me this implies that the 'things in themselves' have, indeed, an intelligible order at least in principle. — boundless

An order which makes intelligibility possible is not the same thing as an intelligible order, if intelligible order implies a fixed a priori form dictating a particular logic of intelligibility.
One doesn’t have to assume such an epistemological a priori, as Bitbol does. Within the phenomenological tradition, there are more radical approaches than Bitbol’s, including those of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Husserl. For them, the intelligibility of the empirical world is contingent and relative. For Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, the embodied subject is a center of activity. The subject dictates no specific a priori content to the experience of the world. Its formal role is to organize events on the basis of the relational structure of time.

One could say then that without the subject there is no time to produce the glue which makes the objectively real possible. The formal structure of time is not to be understood as ‘inside‘ the subject, however. It requires the exposure of the subject to a world, and therefore there is no subject prior to a world. There are no things in themselves, whether those things are objects outside the subject or an inner realm inside the subject. The subject has no interior since it is not an in-itself but the exposure to a world. It is also not a fixed perspective but the empty capability of generating perspectives.

My main point was that there is no incoherence or inconsistency in thinking that the physical world existed prior to the advent of consciousness. Science informs us that it did. The fact that such judgement is only possible where there is consciousness (and language for that matter) I see as a mere truism. What do you think? — Janus

Both Husserl and Heidegger make a radical claim that is hard for most to swallow: Husserl argues that transcendental consciousness does not emerge at some point in the empirical history of the world along with living things. It doesnt precede the world either. Rather, it is co-determinative of history. Heidegger makes a similar argument about Being. One doesn’t have to accept their claims about consciousness or Being in order to embrace their rethinking of the basis of empirical science, causality and objectivity away from physicalism.

Are you more partial to Husserl's approach? — Tom Storm

Yes, for Husserl every fact we know about ourselves and the world is the product of social construction, and therefore contingent and relative, except for the tripartite structure of time consciousness itself (retention-impression-protention).

↪Banno
Chemical treatments for mental illness seem to show that consciousness is not primary. Though I think the issue really comes down to the way we talk rather than what we know about the world. — frank

The fact that chemical treatments are far from guaranteed to work, and work differently in different persons, indicates that objective materiality abstracted away from the interaction of the world with subjectivity is also not primary. What is primary is the indissociable interaction between the subjective and objective poles of experience, and this is the lesson phenomenology is trying to teach.

Bitbol’s alternative is not a metaphysical theory but a reframing: a return to the primacy of lived experience as the ground of all knowledge, including scientific knowledge. Far from undermining science, this reorientation clarifies its proper domain. Physics, biology, and neuroscience describe the structural, relational, and functional aspects of the world-as-object; they do not, and need not, account for the presence of the world-as-experienced. As such, consciousness is not something over and above the world, nor something inside it. It is the condition for there being a world at — Wayfarer

This summary of phenomenology is general enough to accommodate the different varieties offered by the likes of Husserl, Scheler, Henry, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (but not Heidegger). Having said that, I think Bitbol’s interpretation of phenomenology owes more to Michel Henry than to Husserl. Like Henry, Bitbol’s focus is on consciousness in Kantian terms as immanent structural conditions of possibility for an individual subject, whereas for Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and enactivists like Varela and Thompson exposure to intersubjectivity is equi-primordial with subjectivity. Bitbol treats social influences as secondary to the transcendental or structural conditions of intelligibility, whereas Husserl treats intersubjectivity as co-original with subjectivity. The transcendental ego is always already a transcendental-collective ego, insofar as the world it constitutes is already populated by others and the meaning of objects is co-constituted through shared experience.

as predicted you didn't answer the question I posed re whether you believe that immaterial or disembodied consciousness is possible.
— Janus

I see it like this: you are still very much under the sway of post-Cartesian dualism. Accordingly you habitually interpret what I write, and what Bitbol is saying, against that perspective. The world, for you, remains divided between res extensa, measurable by science, and res cogitans, thinking substance. Bitbol doesn't make any metaphysical posits about 'immaterial mind' or anything of the kind. But you will think that to question one is to assert the other. Hence the assertion of an 'immaterial or disembodied consciousness', which is the only possibility this schema allows. Whereas, the point of phenomenology is to call this apparent division into question at its very root. But again, you will say this is a dodge or a non-answering of the question. — Wayfarer

I think you did a great job of articulating the divide between your approach to consciousness and the distinctions Janus is relying on. Before one can decide which position is preferable, yours or his, it is necessary to be able to effectively summarize each position from within its own logic. You have done a reasonable job of representing the Cartesian position as pitting external, objectively causal stuff against inner subjective feeling. Janus, by contrast, is imposing that same logic onto his representation of your position rather than capturing how the logic differs.

My criticism was going to Wayfarer's assessment of phenomenology. Phenomenology is a philosophical approach, not a position on the nature of consciousness. — frank

I would hope that any thoroughgoing philosophy would stake a position on the nature of consciousness, and phenomenology as introduced by Husserl certainly does that.

The evolutionary advantage of love seems obvious, considering we are a social species. Attachment to our kith and kin better ensured we all survived. But what of hate? We see so much of it, in the current political turmoil darkening the world. What is the evolutionary advantage of hate — Questioner

We could take a complex dynamical systems approach instead of an evolutionary one. The result might look like this:
Both living and non-living phenomena can be placed on a single line depicting a history of the evolution of complexity. What is common to both organic and inorganic forms is a play between the temporary equilibration of organized structures and their disequilibrium on the way to the formation of a higher, more stable structural organization. At the level of living organisms, this play manifests itself as the oscillation between the ongoing stable functioning of a creature in its enviroment and the interruption of it goal-directed activity. As Piaget wrote:
“ Need is the expression of a totality momentarily incomplete and tending toward reconstituting itself.”

At the level of conscious awareness in humans, love and hate express the play of equilibrated and disequilibrated functioning. We love what enhances and reinforces the stability of our goal-directed activities and hate what threatens to interrupt them. Fundamentally then, while the awareness of love and hate emerge through the evolution of consciousness, the primordial origins of the play of love and hate predate biological evolution. We find ourselves thrown into relatively stablizing or destabilizing experience just as inorganic processes constantly cycle through organizing or disorganizing phases. It would make no sense to say that love and hate are arbitrary evolutionary adaptations, as though in some other part of the universe there are creatures who evolved differently, such that they are devoid of the experience of love and hate, or they love to hate and hate to love.

we do judge communities to be morally mistaken and traditions to be ethically distorted, and we do speak meaningfully of moral progress against communal consensus. Fallibilism is socially mediated, but not socially grounded. — Esse Quam Videri

Is this ‘we’ actually speaking from some transcultural vantage, a view from nowhere? Or do we merely convince ourselves we are, donning the grab of sovereign authority while demanding conformity to our own particularized perspective on what is ethically right and true?

I would argue that a moral claim is simply an affirmation or denial of value that one is prepared to be wrong about, in contrast to other moral utterances that merely express feelings, preferences, loyalties, power moves, identity markers, etc. Given this definition, the making of moral claims does not seem to be incompatible with the rejection of axiomatic moral foundations, and results in fallibilism rather than nihilism with regard to moral truth — Esse Quam Videri

Fallibilism, being prepared to be wrong, does of course require a normative framework within which the criteria of moral correctness are intelligible. Anti-foundationalism doesnt deny such normative foundations for our preferences, values and claims, it denies that there is some meta-foundation for fallibilism beyond contingent normative communities. Fallibilism functions within particular normative communities, not between or beyond them.

sexual orientation is not a processing issue, its an innate brain function. The problem of course is that we don't yet quite have the brain issues for sexual orientation down in heterosexual brains. So at this point its a lot of guess work. The only thing we can say for certain is that gay men are not females in male bodies. They are males with a sexual orientation towards the same sex. — Philosophim

The possibility I am suggesting is that innate brain functions include the organization of processing. You indicated that innate brain functions may dictate who we are sexually attracted to. In other words, an important aspect of psychological behavior is somehow organized biologically. You don’t know how the brain does this, but you believe the ways in which the such inborn functions affect sexual behavior is limited to sexual attraction. Are you open to the possibility that more than just this one facet of sexual behavior is traceable to brain wiring? That perhaps a whole host of behaviors originate this way, and are connected on the basis of a single mechanism? And that the reason many see only sexual attraction as associated with innate brain wiring is that it is the most tangible and identifiable sexual
behavior? Others point to aggression, perceptual processing, voice modulation, gait, posture and many other subtle aspects of behavior as being shaped and organized by the same innate brain structure that dictates who we are attracted to.

Why are we trying to ignore the fact that the average ("straight") male brain simply has poorer self control over lust and primal impulse and tends to be more violent. Why are we trying to spin that as a positive thing? It's not. Sure, it's the unfortunate majority, it's "normal".

Males whose brains tend to have more in common with females than the average male sounds superior in just about every way. How does that have anything to do with sexual preference? — Outlander

Philosophim allows for the possibility that sexual preference may be connected with a brain region which differs between males and females, but he doesn’t believe there are any other behaviors associated with biological sex and their associated brain structures. This is why he believes that the concept of gender is completely socially constructed. I am countering his approach with a model which connects the brain region he is talking about with functional properties uniting a wide range of behaviors, including sexual preference, aggression, perceptual of color, sound and touch, aspects of vocalization , posture and gait. I believe that sexual preference and aggressiveness are linked, and originate in the affect-perceptual organizing function of this brain region. I call this constellation of affective-perceptual-behavioral tendencies gender. Sexual preference cannot be understood without seeing how it derives from the holistic organizational capabilities of this brain region. In making this claim I am not denying the contribution of socio-cultural factors. The biological and the social are inextricably intertwined with regard to gender behavior.

As of yet, there is no brain evidence of gender… we actually have brain evidence that indicates a difference between male gay men and straight men. While nothing is conclusive, it’s been noted that some areas of the brain that are normally associated with women are more like women in gay male brains. Does that mean you're a female in a man’s body? I would never insult or imply such homophobic tripe. — Philosophim

What DOES the possibility of a brain similarity between gay men and women mean to you? Do you think the region of the brain which differs between straight men and women is responsible for behavioral differences between the sexes? And if not, what do you suppose is the function of that sex-related brain region?

I think we are just as hard-wired not to care as any out-group or disparaged tribe will demonstrate — Tom Storm

One could say we’re hard-wired to care whether things make sense to us. If we can’t make sense of out-groups, then that care takes the form of threat, the drive for self-protection and the circling of the wagons around our in-group.

As I pointed out in my first post to you, the issue is that liberalism provides no grounds for the preservation of the realm (and your example of martial law is but a single, more extreme, example of this). Combine this with the common liberal view that that which cannot be justified by liberalism is "very problematic," and you arrive at a remarkably deep level of political incoherence — Leontiskos

Given your dissatisfaction with liberalism, has there ever been an established political system in the world you can point to as your preferred alternative, or is this an ideal yet to be realized?

Schizophrenics are not upset because the world wont conform to their delusion - it is the delusion which supports the upset. I am not running together being trans and being schizophrenic, though they share aspects. I am merely trying to make it clear that taking the afflicted at their world is a problem. A big problem.
— AmadeusD

Ah, but you have introduced the words "delusion" and "afflicted" - signaling a prejudice that does not accurately describe the transgender experience — Questioner

It is a fact that some people are deluded. It is also a fact that some people are afflicted by delusion. There is absolutely nothing prejudiced about observing these facts — AmadeusD

Delusion as false belief doesn’t necessarily describe the schizophrenic experience either. Thus the need for the ‘hearing voices’ movement.

The Hearing Voices Movement (HVM) takes a deliberately revisionary and, in some respects, deflationary position on the concept of delusion. Rather than treating delusions as inherently pathological false beliefs that arise from a diseased mind, the movement largely reframes them as meaningful interpretations of experience that emerge in particular social, emotional, and biographical contexts. This does not mean that the HVM denies the reality of distress, suffering, or impairment, but it does challenge the epistemic authority traditionally granted to psychiatric judgments about truth, falsity, and rationality.

In mainstream psychiatry, a delusion is typically defined by three features: it is a belief that is false, held with strong conviction, and resistant to counterevidence, and it is taken to be a direct symptom of mental illness. The Hearing Voices Movement explicitly resists this framing. From its perspective, the key problem with the concept of delusion is not merely clinical but philosophical and political: it collapses questions of meaning into questions of error, and questions of difference into questions of defect.

An emotional – arbitrary – "justification" for e.g. betrayal or cruelty or rape. Lazy. :mask: — 180 Proof

Feelings are far from arbitrary. They’re appraisals of situations which inform us of our relative preparedness to cope with , anticipate and make sense of them. That is, affect reports the significance and salience of events , why they matter to us. Without them, words like betrayal, cruelty and rape are ethically meaningless.

So for you, trans identities are real and grounded aspects of personhood, not merely self-chosen labels or socially scripted performances. So on this view, gender names something like a unified affective-perceptual-behavioral style that arises from early brain development and is later shaped, though not created, by culture? A trans person is not inventing a story out of a set of disconnected traits, but is recognising a deep pattern in how they experience themselves and the world. Does this come close to a form of essentialism? Any other tweaks to this account? — Tom Storm

I would say trans identities CAN be real and grounded aspects of personhood, but that doesn’t rule out someone inventing a theatrical role for themselves or others and calling it ‘trans’. But that person is not likely to claim that they have felt that way about themselves as long as they can remember, nor would they likely be able to articulate their gender in terms of a unified constellation of features. Their self-depiction would sound more like the fragmented, socially conditioned description of gendered-based behavior that Amadeus and Philosophim have put forth.

We're better off without his pseudo-intellectual bigotry — RogueAI

Yes, one must be selective about the stripe of pseudo-intellectual moralism one chooses to associate with.

But, if you ask any cisgender male or female, they will tell you what it feels like to be a woman or a man. — Questioner

We should ask Philosophim this question. I’ll bet you a twinkie he insists that there is nothing a priori it feels like to be a man or a woman, because these feelings are merely the result of arbitrary social conditioning, and the only feelings that aren’t socially imposed have to do with how a male body (not mind) feels different from a female body. (Btw, I edited and expanded my previous response)

Gender is most assuredly not a "prejudice — Questioner

In previous discussions on this issue with Philosophim, I used an argument similar to the one you have used to define a notion of psychological gender as pertaining to a constellation of behaviors unified on the basis of brain schemas originating in the womb. This is a Kantian (or neo-Kantian) idea, except that rather than arguing for a metaphysical basis for categories of mind, biologically-based categories of psychological gender arise naturally.
Many people are uncomfortable with the idea that innate brain schemes organize the processing of incoming stimuli such as to form a gender affective-perceptual ‘style’. Of course such a style, whether we label it with terms such as masculine, feminine or something other, is inseparably intertwined with cultural influences, but this doesnt negate the fact that we arrive into the world armed already with gender-based stylistic proclivities prior to our exposure to social influence.

Those who oppose such a notion simply don’t see any overarching categorical pattern uniting the myriad behaviors and perceptions people report as belonging to their experience of their gender as individuals or as belonging to a group. Becuase these patterns are invisible to them, the only explanation of the concept of gender that can make sense to them is that each individual behavior that anyone claims is gender- related is arbitrarily invented in one’s imagination or is learned from others. The components of the category of ‘gender’, then, have no necessary connection to each other, only the claim by those who say gender is a core part of their being that some arbitrary concatenation of independent behaviors is a thing called their gender.

So does it make any practical difference whether we think of gender in terms of a unified affective-perceptual-behavioral style or a disconnected collection
of arbitrary behaviors that some just happens to call their gender? It made an enormous difference to me growing up gay knowing that my gayness meant much more than simply who I was sexually attracted to, and there was a community of other gay men who, like me, had been forced to become painfully aware of all the ways in which they didnt fit in with their hetero male peers. The recognition of what we shared as gay men , despite our many individual differences in its expression, was extremely empowering.

As a non-Kantian on the matter of gender. Philosophim would say that my awareness of my gayness as a gender was either concocted in my head by piecing together arbitrary fragments of behavior to force a narrative out of them , or forced on my via my unconscious exposure to some outside arbitrary narrative. In either case, I caused myself all that suffering for no good reason other than my own whims.

A recent New Yorker article exposed neurologist Oliver Sacks as a fabulist (and apparently a sexual abuser), putting into doubt his famous case studies — NOS4A2

First of all, neither the recent New Yorker article nor any other reputable publication has accused Oliver Sacks of sexual abuse. There is no documented allegation, charge, or credible claim in the historical record that Sacks sexually abused patients or anyone else. So who is the fabulist here?

Secondly, Sacks’ most famous account was captured in the book , and later film, Awakenings. It was about a group of patients in a state of dormancy for years as a result of the Great flu epistemic. who were briefly ‘brought back to life’ with the use of L-dopa. There is hard medical documentation that something like Sacks’s awakenings happened. There are contemporaneous medical reports, Sacks’s own clinical papers and the later neurology literature documenting the trials and typical outcomes.The characters depicted in the book were fictionalized for dramatic effect, which Sacks readily acknowledged, but this doesn’t invalidate the claim of the book that a kind of small miracle took place.

As to the title of the OP, The Man Who Never Mistook his Wife for a Hat, there really was a patient who persistently misidentified his wife as a hat. The way Sack tells that story combines a mixture of clinical observation and literary shaping.

The patient was a music teacher suffering from a severe visual agnosia. Dr. P. could see clearly in a basic optical sense, but he could not integrate visual information into coherent wholes. Faces, objects, and scenes failed to appear to him as unified meaningful entities. He identified people by voice, clothing, or movement, and objects by isolated features rather than by form.

Within that clinical framework, the famous moment of reaching for his wife’s head as though it were a hat is not implausible, nor is it contradicted by what we know about visual agnosia. Patients with this condition can and do misidentify objects in striking, sometimes bizarre ways because the perceptual system that normally binds features into “things” is compromised. From a neurological standpoint, nothing in that incident requires fabrication to make sense.

What later critics and the recent New Yorker discussion complicate is not whether Dr. P. existed or whether he had profound perceptual deficits, but how literally we should read that scene as a verbatim, isolated, camera-ready moment. Whether that exact gesture occurred precisely as written, or whether it condensed multiple confusions into one memorable scene, is something Sacks himself would likely have regarded as beside the point.

The New Yorker piece never claims that everything Oliver Sacks wrote about his patients is false or purely fictional. What it does is discuss previously unpublished journal entries in which Sacks admits to altering or embellishing aspects of patient experiences in his writing to make their stories clearer or more dramatic in the service of empathy or narrative power. It frames his case studies as blending observation with his own emotional, autobiographical perspective, rather than being strictly objective clinical reports. This is something I always was aware of in reading his work, and for me it enhanced the power of his accounts compared with a dry and sterile clinical description.

Some advice: Don’t slip into the extreme tendency of worshipping your heroes as ethically pure and you won’t be catapulted into the opposite extreme of discarding everything they accomplished. It also helps not to make up slanderous accusations about their sexual behavior.

So a relativist can definitely hold moral positions. It's just not about whether the position is right or wrong. It's about who you expect to agree and who you expect to disagree, and how important the position is when measured against the trouble you're likely to run into. Whatever you decide is going to be influenced by culture, but it's also going to influence culture. You're part of the ongoing process of righting and wronging of human activity. — Dawnstorm

I like what you say here. What do you think about relativism with respect to science? There is a kind of morality associated with it, not just in the sense that the proper application of science can be debated, but that the notion of scientific truth rests on valuative criteria. Some argue in the same breath that morals are culturally contingent and relative but that scientific objectivity is not. They can thus claim that some of Hitler’s views can at the same time be judged as morally relative but empirically incorrect.

I’ve never understood deontology. I think Kant would consider me morally rotten. — Tom Storm

I love it. You’re absolutely right. From the vantage of the OP Kant is the enemy.