It's totally another to see the film in a movie theatre with an audience howling in laughter during the mirror scene. I remember laughing in the car when going home — ssu

I had the same reaction to Night at the Opera. If you liked those you probably also loved the Court Jester (The Chalice with the Palace has the pellet with the poison. The vessel with the pestle has the Brew that is True. Or was that the Flagon with the Dragon?)

Good list.

I would add
Stagecoach
My Darling Clementine
The Wild Bunch
The Ballad of Cable Hogue
Butch Cassidy
( and so much more!)

Honorable mentions in various categories:

All About Eve
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane
American Graffiti
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Last Wave
Hair
The Hustler
Blow-Up
A Face in the Crowd
Fail-Safe
Invasion of the Body Snatchers(1956)
The Court Jester
Fantasia
The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr T
The Red Shoes
Flight of the Phoenix
Play Misty for Me
They Shoot Horses Don’t They
Manchurian Candidate
Andromeda Strain
Little Murders

there is hardly any effort whatsoever to make boys develop feminine traits. — Tzeentch

Social conservatives would argue that the past 50 years has seen a concerted push to de-masculine males. Men are told to “cry more” and “to let-go of their bottled-up emotions.”

“Whether the title of a piece is “The Stigma of Masculinity: Can Men Still Manly Without Feeling Ashamed?" or "How to Raise a Feminist Son" or "Re-Defining Masculinity,” the message is the same: There is something inherently wrong with boys, or at least in the way they have been raised in the past (and many are still); and we have to do something about it.“(Psychology Today)

Here ya go:

The Last Picture Show
Harold and Maude
Five Easy Pieces
Night of the Hunter
Citizen Kane
A Thousand Clowns
Rear Window
Who’s afraid of Virginia Wolff
The Conversation
Midnight Cowboy
Bonnie and Clyde
Blazing Saddles
Spellbound
Carnal Knowledge
Days of Wine and Roses
Straw Dogs
Klute
Almost Famous
Bullitt

1: "Social Persona"/Online identity: = Image woman is "forced to present". A "lie" that needs to be maintained.
2: Offline identity = Failed businesswoman. A truth that needs to be hidden.

Those personas/identities are obviously in conflict. They are both in one person. = Inner conflict — Baden

As I mentioned to MU, we lie to each other in situations where there is a lack of trust, intimacy and mutual understanding and often the lie is an attempt to prevent an even greater breakdown in being understood by others (being unfairly judged) . In the scenario of the women participating in online marketing schemes, there may be multiple motivations for lying. They are running a business, and showing signs of incompetence is not good from a sales standpoint. This is just good corporate strategizing.
Your argument is most relevant in regards to those social ties we believe we have more invested in emotionally.
We have to care about an other in a more intimate way than just as a sales client in order for our truth-telling or lies to play more than a superficial role with regard to our sense of identity. The fact that we can lie so easily and freely with our social media ‘friends’ is an indication that we know we have less at stake emotionally with them than we do with our closest companions.
It’s not so much that lies put up barriers between ourselves and those we lie to , but that the fact we feel we have to lie to them in the first place is a symptom of a gap in mutual understanding. We lie most easily in relationships that are dispensable.

But what about those who have not developed the skills to form deep , intimate connections with anyone, and are thus attracted to the superficial environment of social media? The argument can certainly be made that the social validation they receive keeps them tethered to an environment that makes establishing deep connections very difficult.

But what does the superficiality of the social media environment, and its consequent encouraging of deception, have to do with the inner conflict of identity?
Lying to people one is only cursorily invested in emotionally is not likely to cause any such internal strife. It would seem only self-deception is capable of that.

But self-deception may be a misnomer. I think such situations are more a matter of an inconsistent sense of self-identity rather than well-constituted identities fighting with each other. So here may be a bridge between your model of conflictual selves produced by technologies of consumer culture and what I’ve been saying about the superficiality of social media. Those individuals who are most vulnerable to suffering from prolonged exposure to social media are those who never developed a consistent sense of self-identity. They are the ones most susceptible to social media ‘addiction’, which runs the danger of preventing them from creating a core sense of personal integrity. Each encounter online introduces a different dynamic of interpersonal connection from the previous, and no one encounter allows one to establish a pattern of stable trust and shared deep concerns.

As to the connection between capitalist aims and a weakly integrated self-concept, I would suggest that social media technologies lend themselves more easily to the monetization of fragmented and superficial engagements than to deep and intimate relationships. Emotional pathology is an unintended consequence of this, just as the obesity epidemic is an unintended consequence of the food industry’s profit goals, and ruined lives are the unintended consequence of the gambling industry’s goals.

I believe we are fundamentally animalistic, so many of our base instincts involve putting up a deceptive shell or façade to create an appearance for others, which hides one's true feelings, emotions, ambitions and motivations…. through thousands and thousands of years of moral training, we learn to suppress some of these animalistic tendencies toward creating false fronts and deception, but these inclinations still exert a strong force through instinct. — Metaphysician Undercover

Is lying, deceiving, creating a false front animalistic, a base instinct? It’s true that animals and plants have evolved various strategies of deception, but this would seem to be quite different from human strategies. The difference as I see it is that our strategies are consciously planned, rather than evolutionary mechanisms concealed from our own awareness. We deceive for many specific reasons: to avoid hurting someone we care about (this relates to the moral training you mentioned), to protect our own ego from the feeling of shame and failure, to defend ourselves from enemies. What all these forms of planned deception have in common is that they depend on a gap in mutual understanding. We only feel the need to lie in circumstances where the truth will not be understood by the other the way we understand it.

The closer our friendship with another, the more we can avoid the necessity of lying about the core aspects of ourselves, because we know that other supports, trusts and understands us in ways that approach our own self-understanding. In sum, human deception belongs to the complex and sophisticated skills of social comprehension only humans are capable of. We can lie because we can do things other animals can’t: 1)we can abstractly represent the meaning of a situation (its truth) and our felt response to it.
2) we can deliberately manipulate this conceptual representation into a non-truth specifically and relevant tailored to how we want to influence the other.

I emphasised earlier that it is not social-technologies in themselves that are problematic but their intersection with consumer culture whereby the manipulation of our instinctive desires for social validation is the logical outcome of the profit motive embedded therein, serving formal freedom (more opportunities to satisfy appetites) at the expense of freedom proper (in what I've described as effortful cognitive engagement). — Baden

As you have pointed out, there is much research pointing to a positive association between depression , loneliness and other emotional difficulties, and the amount of time spent on social media. The explanations I have seen , including yours, rely on one form or another of the idea that human beings are vulnerable to being conditioned to behave against our long-term interests due to the way our motivational system is structured. The typical mechanism offered is a drive-reinforcement process whereby genuine reality-testing is short-circuited by the salience and intensity of the immediate reward. This dovetails with addiction models which show that additive behaviors are self-perpetuating because the rewards are immediately felt whereas the disincentives are delayed.
I am wondering what we gain by adding to this picture an internal conflict between identities. Do we really need a Freudian-style psychodynamics to understand why social media makes many people feel isolated, depressed and anxious when more direct models would seem to do the job?

We will not, however, find the solution to the hard problem in our inefficiencies.

I do not understand "normative sense-making goals", but I'm not very interested in what it might mean. — GrahamJ

You should be if you want to understand feelings and the dissolution of the hard problem.

numbers (and the like) are unlike phenomenal objects, in that they're not composed of parts (strictly speaking that is only prime numbers) and they don't come into, or go out of, existence (i.e. they're not temporally delimited.) So they exist on a different level, or in a different sense, to objects, all of which are composed of parts and temporally delimited. — Wayfarer

And yet the concept of number would be incoherent without the prior construction of the concept of a multiplicity , which itself implies the concept of persisting self-identical empirical object.

Husserl, in Philosophy of Arithmetic, describes a scenario for the stages of development of the modern consort of number:

“Let us transport ourselves into the early stage of the development of a people. The repeated interest in sensible groups of objects the same in kind had already led to the apprehension of a certain analogy, and therewith of a shared characteristic founding it; and thus it had led to the concept of multiplicity, which at this level, of course, being much less abstract than on our own, restricted itself to multiplicities of homogeneous and sense per-ceptible contents. The drive to communicate concerning the events of practical life, in which determinate groups of such objects played a great role, led here (when circumstances were particularly favorable) more easily than in other areas to the thought of an imitation by sensible means of the things repre-sented.

This thought would be immediately suggested by the hands. These visibly prominent organs, which the individual chief-ly employed in both serious and playful activities, and which (depending upon the position of the fingers) presented varying sensible group formations (the clusters of fingers), must accord-ingly have come immediately to mind for the imitation and sym-bolization of corresponding groups of arbitrary other objects? Thus the "finger numbers" arose within sign language as the first number signs. Indeed we can very well claim still more: it is as a rule only on this path of the sense perceptible that a sharp differentiation and classification of the determinate number forms could first come about at all.

In a certain manner one of course already possessed the number concepts when the analogy of different groups equinu-merous to one another and to groups of fingers was grasped. But only through a constant back-reference from groups of the most various types to the finger groups, sharply distinct in sensible appearance, did the finger numbers rise to the level of Representatives of general concepts, of general characteristics of groups classified in terms of more and less. Without fear of paradox we can say: the concepts 1, 2, 3, ... as the species of the general concept of multiplicity, as specifications of the "how many," first came to a more determinate consciousness in the conceptual signification of number signs on the fingers.”

Anomalous Monism is only concerned with third-personal causal analysis of propositional attitudes, and so it isn't really relevant to the "hard problem". Rather, AM concerns the "soft problem" of inter-translating the public ontologies of scientific psychology and the physical sciences. — sime

Except that Davidson’s anomalous monism is a non-reductive physicalism, leaving open an explanatory gap between mental events and the physical properties they depend on.

“… a non-reductionist physicalist like Davidson does not claim that everything is physical; rather she claims that everything depends on the physical. She allows that there are mental properties at a higher level of complexity but mental properties supervene on physical properties at a micro-structural level. Hence, any alterations at the level of mental can be physically explained by some alterations at the level of micro structures.

The difference between a Davidsonian non-reductive physicalist and a Rortyan naturalistic pragmatist is that the former does not deny that there really are physical properties at the micro-structural level, because the efficiency of a physical vocabulary is a sufficient reason to extend its claims to ontology. In contrast, the latter thinks that Davidsonian "physical properties" and "the micro-structural level" are just theoretical suppositions that are meaningful only within a description or vocabulary. They think that it is sufficient for a denial of the existence of physical properties at the level of ontology, precisely because they are still description-dependent.” (ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM ELIMINATED:
RORTY AND DAVIDSON ON THE MIND-WORLD RELATION, Istvan Danka)

Cultural moral norms are a topic almost ignored by traditional moral philosophy as just a chaotic mess. Fortunately, science’s tools can sort through such messes to reveal underlying principles. And I am happy to say that these conclusions about what moral means ‘are’ are complimentary, not contradictory, to traditional moral philosophy’s investigations into moral ‘ends’. — Mark S

You may be familiar with a new breed of psychological and philosophical work on the origin of ethical values that divides the realm of subjective emotional sentiment from rational objectivity. Our ethical values arise from biologically evolved subjective feeling differing from culture to culture and era to era, which we can study and compare using an “evaluatively neutral” empirical naturalism at the same time that we maintain a relativistic stance on moral values. The resulting position is a mixture of objective rationalism and subjective relativism.
Even though moral values are dependent on subjectively relative emotional dispositions, it is possible to determine one moral position as being objectively better than another on the basis of non-moral meta-empirical values such as consistency, universalizability and effects on well-being.

It has been pointed out that such an empirical stance carries with it its own ethical baggage. That is to say, the supposed neutrality of objective scientific inquiry is itself grounded in pre-suppositions ( consistency, parsimony) that amount to ethical valuations Thus, science is as much in the business of determining ‘oughts’ as any other ethical stance.

It is disappointing that Evan Thompson does not mention reinforcement learning. Surely he would have mentioned it alongside connectionism if he knew about it, so I guess he didn't know about it. Yikes.

It seem to me that humans are fundamentally similar to reinforcement learning systems in what they are trying to achieve. In human terms you might say reinforcement learning is about learning how you should make decisions so as to maximise the amount of pleasure you experience in the long-term. (Could you choose to make decisions on some other basis?) — GrahamJ

Pleasure isnt such a simple concept from an enactivist perspective. What constitutes a reinforcement is not determinable independently of the normative sense-making goals of the organism.

I am confident that Thompson is familiar with concepts of reinforcement learning, but it is too far removed from
the enactivist model he champions for him to bother with it. If you are interested in a comparison of reinforcement learning approaches with enactivist ones, here’s one link you can check out.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.04535.pdf

Once you accept the reality, that stimulus can affect a person, and have a real affect on one's thinking or feeling, without that person even noticing oneself to be affected, then you'll understand what I am talking about. — Metaphysician Undercover

Subliminal advertising is a technique that has been explored by marketers from time to time. Some image or text ( or audio stimulus) is displayed on a screen too
quickly for the viewer to be consciously aware of. The idea is that they wil nevertheless be influenced by this information that bypasses consciousness. Almost all the research shows that it doesn’t work. Why not? Because how likely we are to remember and be affected by a stimulus is a function of its relevance and meaningfulness to us. This is the principle behind memory enhancement techniques like the pegword method. We normally have a hard time remembering a random list of words ( like grocery items). But when we associate each word with an image which is already of significance to us we will recall it more easily. The more emotionally salient that image is(bizarre, humorous , erotic, etc). the better. Better yet is linking the list of arbitrary items together in a relevant and meaningful way , such as by associating each item with an object that one sees along a familiar route to work or around the house. We are bombarded with sensations all the time knocking at the door of consciousness, and yet we don’t notice the vast majority of this stimulation. It has to make itself relevant to our current concerns in order for us to pay attention to it. If it is not salient enough for us to care about it , then it will not be able to significantly affect our behavior, beliefs, attitudes.

Salience and expectations drive what we pay attention to and what we make of what we pay attention to, and the more conscious these are, the more they will have an effect on our thinking.

You mentioned Heidegger earlier. As you know , he argues that we always have a pre-understanding of the world that we project forward into new experience. We dont see simply stimuli but meaningful perceptions.

“”Initially" we never hear noises and complexes of sound, but the creaking wagon, the motorcycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the crackling fire. It requires a very artificial and complicated attitude in order to "hear" a "pure noise." The fact that we initially hear motorcycles and wagons is, however, the phenomenal proof that Da-sein, as being-in-the world, always already maintains itself together with innerworldly things at hand and initially not at all with "sensations" whose chaos would first have to be formed to provide the springboard from which the subject jumps off finally to land in a "world." Essentially understanding, Dasein is initially together with what is understood.”( Being and Time)

Here’s a neuroscientific way of thinking about this:

Evan Thompson explains:
“…traditional neuroscience has tried to map brain organization onto a hierarchical, input-output processing model in which the sensory end is taken as the starting point. Perception is described as proceeding through a series of feedforward or bottom-up processing stages, and top-down influences are equated with back-projections or feedback from higher to lower areas. Freeman aptly describes this view as the "passivist-cognitivist view" of the brain. From an enactive viewpoint, things look rather different. Brain processes are recursive, reentrant, and self-activating, and do not start or stop anywhere. Instead of treating perception as a later stage of sensation and taking the sensory receptors as the starting point for analysis, the enactive approach treats perception and emotion as dependent aspects of intentional action, and takes the brain's self-generated, endogenous activity as the starting point for neurobiological analysis. This activity arises far from the sensors—in the frontal lobes, limbic system, or temporal and associative cortices—and reflects the organism's overall protentional set—its states of expectancy, preparation, affective tone, attention, and so on. These states are necessarily active at the same time as the sensory inflow.

“Whereas a passivist-cognitivist view would describe such states as acting in a top-down manner on sensory processing, from an enactive perspective top down and bottom up are heuristic terms for what in reality is a large-scale network that integrates incoming and endogenous activities on the basis of its own internally established reference points. Hence, from an enactive viewpoint, we need to look to this large-scale dynamic network in order to understand how emotion and intentional action emerge through self-organizing neural activity.”

I don't think these differences result in "a relativism" though, since care, fairness, loyalty, authority and sanctity are arguably generally admired, while harm, cheating, betrayal, subversion and degradation are generally deprecated, in most if not all human societies, for very pragmatic, but I think also aesthetic, and even compassionate, reasons.

Authority and sanctity are the principles which I think allow of the greatest range of interpretations and thus of some relativism.

I don't see human morality as inherently different to the kinds of normative behaviors that can be observed in social animal communities. — Janus

Hilary Putnam makes the argument that if the basis of our valuative, ethical judgements is an evolutionary adaptation shared by other animals then it is as though we are computers programmed by a fool ( selection pressure) operating subject to the constraints imposed by a moron ( nature). Those theorists, like Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Prinz, who believe that the basis of our ethical values is biological and therefore relative, find a way out of this problem by distinguishing between biological and rational faculties.

According to Prinz, even though moral values are dependent on subjectively relative emotional dispositions, it is possible to determine one moral position as being objectively better than another on the basis of non-moral meta-empirical values such as consistency, universalizability and effects on well-being. Prinz's dualist split between empirical objectivism and moral-emotive relativism thereby upholds ethical correctness as the identification of breakdowns of rational objectivity that take the form of cognitive biases , distortions and errors of judgement. For instance, Prinz(2011) suggests that “Hitler's actions were partially based on false beliefs, rather than values”.

This is what I meant by a metaphysical a priori basis of ethical judgement, as opposed to a subjective, biologically-based grounding. Putnam says “One cannot discover laws of nature unless one brings to nature a set of a priori prejudices which is not hopelessly wrong.” And those prejudices cannot themselves be a product of blind evolution.

He concludes “Without the cognitive values of coherence, simplicity, and instrumental efficacy we have no world and no facts, not even facts about what relative to what. And these cognitive values, I claim, are simply a part of our holistic conception of human flourishing. Bereft of the old realist idea of truth as "correspondence" and of the positivist idea of justification as fixed by public "criteria," we are left with the necessity of seeing our search for better conceptions of rationality as an intentional activity which, like every activity that rises above the mere following of inclination or obsession, is guided by our idea of the good.
If coherence and simplicity are values, and if we cannot deny with out falling into total self-refuting subjectivism that they are objective (notwithstanding their "softness," the lack of well-defined "criteria," and so forth), then the classic argument against the objectivity of ethical values is totally undercut.”

As one who appreciates and practices later Wittgenstein philosophy, I am particularly suspicious of 1 and 2. And 3 looks like a pill for what some may say is a medication to treat “Wittgensteinian brainwashing”. — Richard B

Yes, I was thinking something similar. Fine begins the essay with “ The concept of essence has played an important role in the history and development of philosophy; and in no branch of the discipline is its importance more manifest than in metaphysics.”

The key elements of his paper, essence, identity and property, are precisely what the later Wittgenstein shows to be confused concepts.

I don't buy this idea of relativity. It is compassion or its lack that determines whether one can see whether others are flourishing or not. — Janus

You are a moral realist. What remains to be determined is whether your universalism concerning this aspect of human nature grounds itself on an evolutionarily adaptive instinct or a metaphysical a priori. If the former , do you agree with psychologists like Jonathan Haidt that there are a number of innate moral foundations? He specifies at least 5:

Care/harm
Fairness/cheating
Loyalty/betrayal
Authority/subversion
Sanctity/degradation.

But the catch is that while each of us has all of these , we have them in differing concentrations. The result is a relativism and political polarization over values.

I think this is very simply wrong. There are conditions under which all people will either be happy or unhappy. No one wants to be a slave, for example,

I doubt anyone is really happy when being exploited by others, or for that matter, when exploiting others. There is undoubtedly a basellne human nature which g — Janus

Maybe no one wants to be a slave, and the concept of slavery is today universally condemned as morally wrong, but that is a recent development. For most of human history slavery was common and accepted , and I wager that if you were to ask slaves in periods of history when slavery was widely present if they believed that there were situations under which they themselves would be morally just in owning a slave they would say yes.
Many slave owners sincerely believed slavery was not only just but benefitted the slave. So the idea that slavery is immoral and abusive exploitation that prevents overall
human flourishing is not a universal of history or human nature, but a contingent product of modern culture. I agree that humans have always desired ‘flourishing’ but this is like saying we want what we want.
What flourishing or exploitation means is relative to a value system, and value systems change. I think what evolves is our ability to relate to the ways of others different from ourselves and this allows flourishing to be shared more widely among different segments of culture.

For my money enactivist approaches in cognitive psychology do a better job of this than the alternatives, via a monism that avoids the kind of idealism championed by Wayfarer, Kastrup, Hoffman, Kant and others.
— Joshs

Thankyou for my inclusion in such exalted company :up: — Wayfarer

And you’re first on the list.

But I don’t want to get pigeon-holed theoretically. Yes, for my purposes, it suits me to present a theory that tries to walk a middle line between metaphysical notions of an ultimately “true” self and postmodern notions of decentred subjects in a flux of necessarily competitive agencies: I need some comprehensible notion of self to make my case and I also want to stay grounded in a solid social scientific context. So, my aim is to put forward a coherent grounds for making an argument, not to take theoretical sides for the sake of a theoretical discussion. There either is a problem or there isn’t. If there is, the job is to put forward a theory that explains it in a self-consistent manner. That doesn’t preclude it being done otherwise. — Baden

But it seems to me that not only what the dimensions, magnitude and form of the problem are , but whether there is seen to be a problem at all, is determined by the theoretical framework we embrace. In other words, the theory comes first, not after a problem has been identified. For instance, Zizek believes the modern world is sick, due to the hegemonic dominance of Capitalism. In this thinking he is joined by most of the members of the Frankfurt school. The sickness they see in the world is inseparable from their reliance on the notion of alienated subjectivity.

I think Habermas was among the first to break away from this pessimistic stance. His communicative action theory, although retaining the notion of subjectivity, saw discourse as motivated in the direction of rational agreement rather than domination and deception.

From the vantage of poststructuralist thinking, which deconstructs subjectivity, the problem of the alienated capitalist subject vanishes and in its place emerges a pluralism of strategies for ensuring that new openings or ‘lines of flight’ are created within discursive structures (economic, social, technological).

Sure, this is a way of looking at selves through the lens of the social, from which perspective we are social atoms in a discursive flux. We are grounded in physical bodies too though. So, there’s always a spectrum from “individuality’ to “social”. A — Baden

When it comes to the biological body, things have changed since Marcuse’s Freudian-influenced concept of libido. Within enactivist approach in psychology, which share features with poststructuralism, the relation between individual and social is less a spectrum than an inseparable, reciprocal interaction. Body, mind and world form one system. There is a functional autonomy to the self of the organism , but not in Freud’s sense of an interior psychodynamic structure. When you read today about the psyche being ‘embodied and ‘embedded’ , this indicates that , as Shaun Gallagher writes “objective (social and cultural) factors already have an effect on our perception and understanding of the world, even in the immediacy of our embodied and instrumental copings with the environment.”

That's a fascinating point. — Tom Storm

I think you’re a natural-born Pragmatist.

the person must learn how to detect influencing stimulus prior to being able to choose which stimuli to accept. And this is such an extremely difficult task that even the most highly trained philosophers do not develop an enviable capacity. — Metaphysician Undercover

There is no such thing as a ‘stimulus’ in some
objective sense, as if there were packets of generic meaning floating around the universe just waiting to invade our psyches like a virus. What constitutes a stimulus for you is different than what constitutes one for me, even if we are in the same room at the same time. We are not passive Lockean blank slates being impressed upon by the external Givens, as Skinner had it, but active construers and interpreters while still in the womb.

. The lie migrates from the interpersonal to the intrapersonal. When we are forced to wear a mask, we tend to confabulate personal agency into a process of being dominated. We become the mask in the process of imagining ourselves separate from it. The inner lie, the gap we create between our personal narrative and our true social position allows the mask to remain and operate. And the more effective the lie, the better it may operate. — Baden

This view seems to rely on agency as knowledge. But this misses the pragmatic nature of interpersonal relations, which have to do primarily not with epistemological knowing but with partially shared discursive practices. My agency is expressed and defined in terms of how, through social interchange, I continually establish and re-establish what is at stake and at issue for me in partially shared
circumstances of interchange with others. Personal
agency can never be determined apart from the social embedded practices which form it, but neither can agency disappear into or simply be ‘dominated’ by social discursive structures, since practices are never completely shared. Each participant subtly redefines what is at issue in the ‘dominant’ performances of the group.

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

I agree that Kastrup and Hoffman have points of disagreement with Kantian Idealism. Kastrup, as I read him, is closer to Hegel , and even more so to Schelling. This is still a fair distance from the phenomenological form of idealism that motivates much enactivist thinking.

This suggests that the origin of the explanatory gap is theoretical, if only the wrong theory wasn't chosen there wouldn't be one.. I can't see how this is so. One of these two propositions must be shown to be false to resolve the hard problem:

1. The existence of mental events is conditional on the right kinds of physical events taking place. (note that this does not imply epiphenomenalism).

2. We can't conceive how physical events can engender mental events, as an exhaustive inventory of physical events does not seem to imply mental events.

Does the choice of theory as described here impact either? — hypericin

We need to add a third option.

3. The existence of mental events is conditional on the right kinds of natural events taking place, but to understand how this naturalist account unites the mental and the non-mental, we have to jettison physicalism.

Evan Thompson argues:

“One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.

One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism. From the phenomenological perspective explored here, however — but also from the perspective of pragmatism à la Charles Saunders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, as well as its contemporary inheritors such as Hilary Putnam (1999) — this transcendental or metaphysical realist position is the paradigm of a nonsensical or incoherent metaphysical viewpoint, for (among other problems) it fails to acknowledge its own reflexive dependence on the intersubjectivity and reciprocal empathy of the human life-world.

…we can see historically how the concept of nature as physical being got constructed in an objectivist way, while at the same time we can begin to conceive of the possibility of a different kind of construction that would be post-physicalist and post-dualist–that is, beyond the divide between the “mental” (understood as not conceptually involving the physical) and the “physical” (understood as not conceptually involving the mental).”

Its role is not as an internal agent or ho-munculus that issues commands, but as an order parameter that or-ganizes and regulates dynamic activity. Freeman and Varela thus agree that consciousness is neurally embodied as a global dynamic activity pattern that organizes activity throughout the brain.”
— Joshs

Does this mean something? — hypericin

Yes, and to understand this you might start by googling ‘Enactivism’. Then I recommend The Embodied Mind by Varela, Thompson and Rosch and Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of Mind, by Evan Thompson.

Why does it matter? Is it mainly down to the role each perspective plays in supporting a contested ontology? Either 1) a physicalist monism (therefore keeping atheism safe from woo OR 2) an ontological dualism allowing for more traditional forms of Western theism OR 3) a non-physicalist monism (idealism), mysticism and the East? 4)?

Is this ever just about consciousness? — Tom Storm

I agree with you that if the only options were 1 though 3 this topic would not be very interesting to me. A 4th option , on the other hand, offers an empirically articulated model of brain, mind , body and environment and their interaction that allows is to understand many aspects of psychological functioning in a more satisfying way than option 1, 2 or 3.
I don’t care so much about whether we end up with a monistic or dualistic, a physicalist or idealist explanation. What interests me is how we can most effectively and harmoniously makes sense of phenomena such as memory, emotion, mood, perception, empathy, depression, ptsd, autism, language and social interaction.
For my money enactivist approaches in cognitive psychology do a better job of this than the alternatives, via a monism that avoids the kind of idealism championed by Wayfarer, Kastrup,, Hoffman, Kant and others.

↪Number2018
For Foucault, Baudelaire aspires to overcome "the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent' character of modernity and recapture 'something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it.'…At the heart of the present is an instant of the intensive novelty. The newest replaces the new so that the endless repetition re-establishes the ongoing eternity.
— Number2018


This is Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same
— Joshs

No, it is not. — Number2018

Mark the singularity of events. . . . Grasp their return. . . . Define their lacuna point, the moment they did not take place. (Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’). Through the figure of Baudelaire, Foucault re-affirms the reality of the Nietzsche’s Dionysian aesthetic existence.
— Number2018

So then it is the eternal return of the same.

Heidegger’s account of Nietzsche’s eternal return is entirely different from Foucault and Deleuze’s interpretations. — Number2018

I’m aware of that. I think Heidegger’s thinking goes beyond Foucault’s , Deleuze’s and Nietzsche’s. Since Foucault and Deleuze remain in close proximity to Nietzsche they misread Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche. But rather than pursuing what I think separates Heidegger from Foucault and Deleuze ( which I would be happy to do in another thread) , I want to understand better how you are reading Deleuze. There are a wide variety of often incompatible interpretations of his work. I can’t tell which interpretation you align with merely from your quotes of him and your adoption of his jargon.

I would like to know how you are using his jargon, and to do that I think we will need to expand the conversation to include other disciplines.

I want to begin with a hypothesis and see what your reaction is. I hypothesize that , of the many readings of Deleuze , you resonate with those that I find in writers like Massumi , Protevi and Delanda. I want to focus on Protevi in particular, who I think reads Deleuze from a vantage close to the modernism of critical theory writers like Adorno.

Protevi crosses disciplines , moving between philosophy, anthropology, psychology and evolutionary biology. I’m hoping you can follow him into these areas so I can get a better sense of where you actually stand on Deleuze, on which Deleuze is your Deleuze.

Protevi writes:

“What Deleuze brings to the table is a wide-ranging materialist ontology, so that we can use the same basic concepts of self-organizing systems in both natural and social registers. This enables me to couple the “politic” to the “body,” to connect the social and the somatic. Basically, Deleuze lets us go “above” and “below” the subject; “above” to politics, and “below” to biology.

Cognitive science, even the 4EA schools, is still beholden to two unexamined presuppositions: first, that the unit of analysis is an abstract subject, "the" subject, one that is supposedly not marked in its development by social practices, such as gendering, that influence affective cognition, and second, that culture is a repository of positive, problem-solving aids that enable "the" subject.”


To summarize Protevi’s position, he believes subjectivities are influences from above by invasions from the social sphere and below by affect programs:

"Zahavi (2005) and Gallagher (2005), among others, distinguish agency and ownership of bodily actions. Ownership is the sense that my body is doing the action, while agency is the sense that I am in control of the action, that the action is willed. Both are aspects of subjectivity, though they may well be a matter of pre-reflective self-awareness rather than full-fledged objectifying self­-consciousness . But alongside subjectivity we need also to notice emergent assemblages that skip subjectivity and directly conjoin larger groups and the somatic. To follow this line of thought, let us accept that, in addition to non-subjective body control by reflexes, we can treat basic emotions as
modular “affect programs” (Griffiths 1997) that run the body’s hardware in the absence of conscious control. As with reflexes, ownership and agency are only retrospectively felt, at least in severe cases of rage in which the person “wakes up” to see the results of the destruction committed while he or she was in the grips of the rage. In this way we see two elements we need to take into account besides the notion of subjective agency: (1) that there is another sense of “agent” as non­subjective controller of bodily action, either reflex or basic emotion, and (2) that in some cases the military unit and non-subjective reflexes and basic emotions are intertwined in such a way as to bypass the soldiers’ subjectivity qua controlled intentional action. In these cases the practical agent of the act of killing is not the individual person or subject, but the emergent assemblage of military unit and non-subjective reflex or equally non-subjective “affect program.”

“A little more detail on the notion of a “rage agent” might be helpful at this point. Extreme cases of rage produce a modular agent or “affect program” that replaces the subject. Affect programs are emotional responses that are “complex, coordinated, and automated … unfold[ing] in this coordinated fashion without the need for conscious direction” (Griffiths 1997: 77). They are more than reflexes, but they are triggered well before any cortical processing can take place (though later cortical appraisals can dampen or accelerate the affect program).
In the berserker rage, the subject is overwhelmed by a chemical flood that triggers an evolutionarily primitive module which functions as an agent which runs the body’s hardware in its place.”"The vast majority of soldiers cannot kill in cold blood and need to kill in a desubjectified state, e.g., in reflexes, rages and panics.”

In the same way that Protevi treats bodily-affective aspects of behavior in terms of the non­intentional, unconscious influence of near-reflexive internal modular programs on a conscious subject , he models social influence via classical and operant forms of conditioning impinging upon the subject from ‘above the level of’ the subject’s normative aims. “….operant conditioning ….triggers an unconscious, automatic “read and react” mode in which soldiers fire individually on whatever human-shaped targets appear in their range of vision. Not a berserker rage, but a conditioned reflex. Here, the subject is bypassed by direct access of the military machine to reflexes embedded in the spinal cord of the soldier – as clear an instance of political physiology as one could imagine.”(Protevi 2004)

"Soldiers are acculturated to dehumanize the enemy by a series of racial slurs. This acculturation is especially powerful when accomplished through rhythmic chanting while running, for such entrainment weakens personal identity to produce a group subject". "Desensitization is merely an enabling factor for the role of classical and operant conditioning in modern training.

In addition to the affective aspect of heightened desensitization, simulation training constitutes a new cognitive group subject. The instant decision of “shoot / no shoot” is solicited by the presence or absence of key traits in the gestalt of the situation. Such instant decisions are more than reflexes, but operate at the very edge of the conscious awareness of the soldiers and involve complex subpersonal processes of threat perception (Correll et al 2006). In addition to this attenuation of individual agency, cutting-edge communication technology now allows soldiers to network together in real time. With this networking we see an extended / distributed cognition culminating in “topsight” for a commander who often doesn’t “command” in the sense of micro-manage but who observes and intervenes at critical points (Arquilla and Rondfeldt 2000: 22). In other words, contemporary team-building applications through real-time networking are a cybernetic application of video games that goes above the level of the subject (Fletcher 1999). In affective entrainment, instant decision-making, and cognitive “topsight” the soldiers produced by rhythmic chanting and intensive simulation training are nodes within a cybernetic organism, the fighting group, which maintains its functional integrity and tactical effectiveness by real-time communication technology. It’s the emergent group with the distributed decisions of the soldiers that is the cyborg here, operating at the thresholds of the individual subjectivities of the soldiers“

Do you agree with Protevi that this analysis of the ‘above’ into the political and the ‘below’ into the biological is compatible with Deleuze?

Joshs, what are your own thoughts about rational egotism and how facilitating it is dependent on governments? — Shawn

I would say that rational egotism is a cultural ‘meme’ that is widely shared within a society rather than being forced upon people in a top-down fashion. Governments are just as much reacting to demands of citizens for police protection from their selfish neighbors as they are foisting police-state tactics upon a passive citizenry. It’s a reciprocal feedback loop.

The more powerful the online conditioning, the more resolute and actively engaged we are with extremes of identities (again, online experiences tend to push us to the extremes because of competition for social capital) but also the more potential for inner conflict in less homogenous social capital environments. Paradoxically then, the very resoluteness of one identity can lead to a more generalised irresoluteness of the self. — Baden

Previously on this thread, I contrasted your analysis of the relation between the self, identity and social conditioning with writers such as George Kelly. That may have muddled the point I was trying to get at rather than clarifying it. Kelly’s terminology can lend itself to an interpretation of his approach as wedded to the idea of a solipsistic Cartesian subject immune from social influence and conditioning, which feeds into your thesis that ideologies of identity , as Kelly’s might appear to be, “obscure their own function, which is to serve the social at the expense of the self.” In other words, Kelly’s seeming self-creating subject is an unwitting tool of dominating social forces.

Because I chose Kelly to make my point, I think my reservations about your thesis were obscured.

Im going to try and restate those reservations. It seems to me that the philosophical resources you draw from (post-Marxist Frankfurt school critical theory, among others) to form your concepts of self, identity, the social and their interconnections, remain too attached to the concept of the bounded subject even as they critique metaphysical notions of the self. Your aim is to rescue a notion of subjective unity from its dispersion and fragmentation by social forces. Personal development depends on finding a way to resist the irresoluteness of online identities.

I think the philosophical approaches that offer the most effective and direct critique of this way of thinking fall into the postmodern camp of poststructuralism ( Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze). The social constructionist work of Ken Gergen also belongs to this larger thinking.

While there is significant overlap between the postmodern and the critical theoretic vantages concerning the importance of social practices in shaping individual thought and feeling, for writers like Gergen subjectivity is an effect of discursive interchange. He conceives the relationship between two or more persons not in terms of "interacting" individuals, but of elements of an inseparable system in which the relationship precedes the individual psychologies. The ‘I’ through-and -through is a socially created construct. The social can no longer be thought of in opposition to the individual. This means that forces of domination are not possessed by individuals , groups , institutions , corporations, governments, media centers. They flow through, within and between subjectivities , in this way constantly creating and recreating individuals and groups through dialogical interchange.

Gergen writes “Successful bonding calls for a transformation in narrative. The “I” as the center of the story must gradually be replaced by the “we.”

You write that technology-fueled cultural trends encourage “multiple and fractured identity formation, the creation of self-conflictual selves”, which limits “our ability to narrativize a coherent and unified self in a meaningful social context.”

For Gergen the goal is not to carve out a self-narrative that distinguishes the individual in some way from the social context it interacts with, but “to coordinate our actions within the common scenarios of our culture.”
In other words, the relational bond is a dance co-created by a ‘we’, not an interaction between internally unified selves. Loneliness and isolation would be symptoms of a dance whose shared unfolding is uncoordinated , not the failure to produce coherent selves participating in the dance.

What part of the psyche doesn't fit with epiphenomenalism? I mean, when does freedom of the will become necessary to understanding? — frank

↪Joshs A few things struck me as odd. Why does epiphenomenalism "threaten"?
So what if
the aspect of phenomenality cannot be all that significant
— Joshs
? Are we supposed to reason towards what elevates our self esteem and makes us feel good? Rather than towards the truth? — hypericin

Epiphenomenalism asserts that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, which they have no effect on. It can also apply to a distinction between conscious subjective awareness and subpersonal, computational cognition. The former has been assumed as epiphenomenal with respect to the latter by computational approaches in cognitive psychology.

As Evan Thompson explains, “The mind was divided into two radically different regions, with an unbridgeable chasm between them—the subjective mental states of the person and the subpersonal cognitive routines implemented in the brain. The radically nonconscious, subpersonal region, the so-called cognitive un-conscious, is where the action of thought really happens; personal awareness has access merely to a few results or epiphenomenal mani-festations of subpersonal processing.

This radical separation of cognitive processes from consciousness created a peculiar "explanatory gap" in scientific theorizing about the mind. Cartesian dualism had long ago created an explanatory gap between mind and matter, consciousness and nature. Cognitivism, far from closing this gap, perpetuated it in a materialist form by opening a new gap between subpersonal, computational cognition and subjective mental phenomena. Simply put, cognitivism offered no account whatsoever of mentality in the sense of subjective experience. Some theorists even went so far as to claim that subjectivity and consciousness do not fall within the province of cognitive science.”

Enactivist approaches to cognition informed by phenomenological philosophy reject this ‘mind-mind’
split.

“The theory of autopoiesis and developmental systems theory to-gether provide a different view of the organism. Autopoietic systems (and autonomous systems generally) are unified networks of many in-terdependent processes. Organisms are accordingly not the sort of sys-tems that have atomistic traits as their proper parts; such traits are the products of theoretical abstraction.

Awareness, according to this model, far from being epiphenomenal, plays an important causal role. Its role is not as an internal agent or ho-munculus that issues commands, but as an order parameter that or-ganizes and regulates dynamic activity. Freeman and Varela thus agree that consciousness is neurally embodied as a global dynamic activity pattern that organizes activity throughout the brain.”

The libertarian concept ignores two facts: any (not just human, but all other) social structure in living beings is built hierarchically. If you get away from hierarchy(**), you destroy social structure. 2. social structure in human societies is more protective and accommodating for an individual than living outside a social structure. — god must be atheist

The Dawn of Everything , a book by anarchist anthropologist David Graeber and archeologist David Wengrow, claims that the above received wisdom is wrong. Their arguments have created quite a stir in anthropological circles.

“Human society, in this view, is founded on the collective repression of our baser instincts, which becomes all the more necessary when humans are living in large numbers in the same place. The modern-day Hobbesian, then, would argue that, yes, we did live most of our evolutionary history in tiny bands, who could get along mainly because they shared a common interest in the survival of their offspring (‘parental investment’, as evolutionary biologists call it). But even these were in no sense founded on equality. There was always, in this version, some ‘alpha-male’ leader.

Hierarchy and domination, and cynical self-interest, have always been the basis of human society. It’s just that, collectively, we have learned it’s to our advantage to prioritize our long-term interests over our short-term instincts; or, better, to create laws that force us to confine our worst impulses to socially useful areas like the economy, while forbidding them everywhere else.
As the reader can probably detect from our tone, we don’t much like the choice between these two alternatives. Our objections can be classified into three broad categories. As accounts of the general course of human history, they:

1. simply aren’t true;
2. have dire political implications;
3. make the past needlessly

This book is an attempt to begin to tell another, more hopeful and more interesting story; one which, at the same time, takes better account of what the last few decades of research have taught us. Partly, this is a matter of bringing together evidence that has accumulated in archaeology, anthropology and kindred disciplines; evidence that points towards a completely new account of how human societies developed over roughly the last 30,000 years. Almost all of this research goes against the familiar narrative, but too often the most remarkable discoveries remain confined to the work of specialists, or have to be teased out by reading between the lines of scientific publications.

To give just a sense of how different the emerging picture is: it is clear now that human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small, egalitarian bands. On the contrary, the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory. Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step towards inequality. In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies. And far from setting class
differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines, with no need for authoritarian rulers, ambitious warrior-politicians, or even bossy administrators. Information bearing on such issues has been pouring in from every quarter of the globe. As a result, researchers around the world have also been examining ethnographic and historical material in a new light.”

Is it true that for the majority of homo sapiens existence, we got along without having police officers or laws governing our behavior? I raise this because libertarians sometimes quip this fact as justification for limited government in regulating our behavior. — Shawn

A popular thread in anarchist thinking today is that humans are evolutionarily adapted for pro-social behavior, and the Hobbesian assumption that we need social controls and policing to restrain our natural tendency for selfish brutishness needs to be modified.

“These thick conceptions converged on an idea of culturally induced rational control of brutal, recalcitrant, and at best tamable emotions. And the accounts of an essentially violent emotional constitution held in check by culturally induced top-down cognitive structures leave us with a pessimism that forecloses many political reforms based on positive and bottom-up care and cooperation capacities, labeling them as idealistic fantasies.

Despite that history, I think a philosophical intervention to reclaim human nature is worth the risk. For one thing, past efforts to destroy the above-sketched concept because of its abusive consequences and replace it with social constructivism have left those sympathetic to the constructivist position open to charges of adopting a naïve and politically motivated reliance on cultural anthropology at the expense of evolutionary biology.

But we don't have to give up on the life sciences to distance ourselves from the old notion of human nature, and to rescue quite a bit of what made social constructivism appealing, namely deep cultural variability. There are live debates at the intersection of biological, evolutionary, and cultural anthropology that put the above longstanding assumptions about human nature in question.

Prosociality or other-directed care and cooperation, even at a cost to the agent, is our evolutionary heritage; it is an adaptation; it helped our ancestors and can help us if we let it. It was and is so wide-spread as to have been, and continue to be, the oft-overlooked glue of society. It is the water the economistic fish doesn't notice.1

It's rational egoism that depends on extreme social conditions. What distinguishes classical liberalism from neoliberalism is that the latter has given up the former's notion of a natural “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange” and has devoted itself to the construction of institutions that produce rational egoist behavior via artificially imposed scarcity.

We can hope that we've turned the corner in appreciating post-disaster prosociality. The comparison of media coverage of Hurricane Harvey with that of Hurricane Katrina is striking, notably, the lack of initial credence to subsequently proven false “security” fears – anarchy in the streets, food riots, "looting," sexual predation – that delayed and militarized the US response to Katrina [Protevi 2009; Tierney et al 2006]. The people of New Orleans had not "descended into anarchy" but “were their own first responders" (CNN 2010; Rodriguez et al, 2006). It's a kind of litmus test: when you think of Katrina, do you think of Kropotkin or of Hobbes? What was needed was technical support for already operating rescue efforts, as well as logistical support for the relief phase; there was very little need to securitize the situation.

So, far from showing a Hobbesian nightmare of atomized or gang predation in the wake of the failure of the state, prosocial behavior in disasters shows the fragility of the atomization practice of contemporary Western society. It's not that the state is needed to keep a precarious social contract together so that otherwise “naturally” atomic individuals will not prey upon each other; it's that the state is needed to enforce policies that produce rational egoists by artificial scarcity that forecloses the prosocial behavior that would otherwise emerge and that does in fact emerge in disasters.”

( John Protevi)

↪Joshs
I'm a hard determinist, so I don't share that concern. — frank

Hard determinism has worked well for the natural sciences , but it isn’t such a great fit for elucidating psychological processes such as intentionality, mental illness, motivation, affectivity, empathy and learning.

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. ..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. — Paine

I like Zahavi’s critique of Chalmers’ position:

“Chalmers's discussion of the hard problem has identified and labeled an aspect of consciousness that cannot be ignored. However, his way of defining and distinguishing the hard problem from the easy problems seems in many ways indebted to the very reductionism that he is out to oppose. If one thinks that cognition and intentionality is basically a matter of information processing and causal co-variation that could in principle just as well go on in a mindless computer–or to use Chalmers' own favored example, in an experienceless zombie–then one is left with the impression that all that is really distinctive about consciousness is its qualitative or phenomenal aspect. But this seems to suggest that with the exception of some evanescent qualia everything about consciousness including intentionality can be explained in reductive (computational or neural) terms; and in this case, epiphenomenalism threatens.

To put it differently, Chalmers's distinction between the hard and the easy problems of consciousness shares a common feature with many other recent analytical attempts to defend consciousness against the onslaught of reductionism: They all grant far too much to the other side. Reductionism has typically proceeded with a classical divide and rule strategy. There are basically two sides to consciousness: Intentionality and phenomenality. We don't currently know how to reduce the latter aspect, so let us separate the two sides, and concentrate on the first. If we then succeed in explaining intentionality reductively, the aspect of phenomenality cannot be all that significant. Many non-reductive materialists have uncritically adopted the very same strategy. They have marginalized subjectivity by identifying it with epiphenomenal qualia and have then claimed that it is this aspect which eludes reductionism.

But is this partition really acceptable, are we really dealing with two separate problems, or is experience and intentionality on the contrary intimately connected? Is it really possible to investigate intentionality properly without taking experience, the first-person perspective, semantics, etc., into account? And vice versa, is it possible to understand the nature of subjectivity and experience if we ignore intentionality. Or do we not then run the risk of reinstating a Cartesian subject-world dualism that ignores everything captured by the phrase “being-in-the-world”?”

For Foucault, Baudelaire aspires to overcome "the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent' character of modernity and recapture 'something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it.'…At the heart of the present is an instant of the intensive novelty. The newest replaces the new so that the endless repetition re-establishes the ongoing eternity. — Number2018

This is Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same, which Heidegger depicted thusly:

“The "momentary" character of creation is the essence of actual, actuating eternity, which achieves its greatest breadth and keenest edge as the moment of eternity in the return of the same. The recoining of what becomes into being-will to power in its supreme configuration-is in its most profound essence something that occurs in the "glance of an eye" as eternal recurrence of the same. The will to power, as constitution of being, is as it is solely on the basis of the way to be which Nietzsche projects for being as a whole: Will to power, in its essence and according to its inner possibility, is eternal recurrence of the same.”

the Cartesian-Newtonian disambiguation of natural philosophy from metaphysics-theology. Disputes nevertheless persists.

Some (A) prioritize the latter over (or at the expense of) the former; some (B) prioritize the former over (or at the expense of) the latter; and some (C) do not prioritize either treating them as "non-overlapping magisteria". I think one's preference – A, B, or C – mostly depends on how one mis/reads (the) history of science & history of philosophy. — 180 Proof

You forgot option D- both natural philosophy and philosophy proper deal in metaphysical presuppositions, the former implicitly and the later explicitly, and in recent centuries neither is interested in the supernatural.

I'll go out on a limb here, given my lack of detailed knowledge - It strikes me that philosophy was much more entangled with science back in the 17th century. It is less so now. — T Clark

I would say that physics was much closer to the cutting edge of philosophy in the 17th century than it is now. Today’s philosophy is entangled with the social , and in particular , the psychological sciences, and more distantly related to physics.

If our sciences have evolved, it’s because our philosophies have evolved.
— Joshs

I don't see that. I think the argument could be made it's the other way around, i.e. changes in scientific knowledge lead to change in philosophies. I'm not sure where I come down on that. — T Clark

The argument could be made, but I dont see a lot of evidence for it. Newton was the first scientist to express Cartesian ideas, but he came along 100 years after Descartes. One can find strong consonances between the groundbreaking work of Kant and scientific thought, but none of this appeared till many decades after Kant. The same is true of Hegel and the sciences. Today’s work in the cognitive sciences expresses many ideas consistent with the American Pragmatism and phenomenology. But it took them 100 years to catch up.

The problem in demonstrating this is that many don’t understand the history of philosophy , and the philosophical underpinnings of science, well enough to compare the two form of thought.

Philosophy has more to do with how we interact with the world than it does with the details of the world itself. The human ways of interacting with reality haven't really changed that much in the last 3,000 years. Technology has changed, but not human nature. — T Clark

If technology has evolved, it is because our sciences have evolved. If our sciences have evolved, it’s because our philosophies have evolved. None of these fields
of endeavor ( and that includes the arts, literature, music , politics) can be disentangled from the others in terms of reciprocal influence and dependence.

The nature of human nature is to endlessly overcome itself, so in this sense human nature has not changed.

Obviously the progress of science and technology is going forward. I'm simply adding that its primary focus is not on general human needs but the needs of the market. — TheMadMan

It’s not so obvious.

“We should be living in a golden age of creativity in science and technology. We know more about the universe and ourselves than we did in any other period in history, and with easy access to superior research tools, our pace of discovery should be accelerating. But, as I wrote in the first edition of this newsletter, America is running out of new ideas.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/01/academia-research-scientific-papers-progress/672694/