It's good to keep in mind that despite their having differing opinions on almost everything, professional philosophers are overwhelmingly realist with regard to the existence of the world around us. — Banno

I’ll go along with that, but it gets a bit tricky when we try to parse terms like ‘real’ and ‘exist’. For instance, Is the existence of the world absolutely or only relatively real?

Now, however, we must not fail to clarify expressly the
fundamental and essential distinction between transcendental­ phenomenological idealism versus that idealism against which realism battles as against its forsworn opponent. Above all: phenomenological idealism does not deny the actual existence of the real world (in the first place, that means nature), as if it maintained that the world were mere semblance, to which natural thinking and the positive sciences would be subject, though unwittingly. Its sole task and accomplishment is to clarify the sense of this world, precisely the sense in which everyone accepts it - and rightly so - as actually existing. That the world exists, that it is given as existing universe in uninterrupted experience which is constantly fusing into universal concordance, is entirely beyond doubt. But it is quite another matter to understand this indubitability which sustains life and positive science and to clarify the ground of its legitimacy.

In this regard, it is a fundamental of philosophy, according to the expositions in the text of the Ideas, that the continual prog­ression of experience in this form of universal concordance is a mere presumption, even if a legitimately valid one, and that consequently the non-existence of the world ever remains think­able, notwithstanding the fact that it was previously, and now still is, actually given in concordant experience. The result of the phenomenological sense-clarification of the mode of being of the real world, and of any conceivable real world at all, is that only the being of transcendental subjectivity has the sense of absolute being, that only it is "irrelative" (i.e., relative only to itself), whereas the real world indeed is but has an essential relativity to transcendental subjectivity, due,namely, to the fact that it can have its sense as being only as an intentional sense-formation of transcendental subjectivity. Natural life, and its natural world, finds, precisely herein, its limits (but is not for that reason subject to some kind of illusion) in that, living on in its "naturality," it has no motive to pass over into the transcendental attitude, to execute, therefore, by means of the phenomenological reduction, transcendental self-reflection.
(Husserl, Ideas II)

Up until the mid 20th century, Jews in the U.S. refused to integrate into social institutions such as country clubs, summer camps and Ivy league schools, and instead founded their own clubs, camps and even schools (Brandeis). Oh wait, that was because they were barred entry into those places.
— Joshs

How is that different from the situation for poor people who have been barred from even more places? In other words, the Jews haven't been the only ones facing that kind of predicament. So it's misleading to single them out, as if everyone else was having a great time — baker

Let me get this straight. You don’t want to single the jews out as the only recipients of discrimination. But you do want to single the jews out in the follow way:

“When one religion claims to have superior knowledge of "how things really are", this is an automatic declaration of war to all other religions.”

I think Nietzsche’s highly complex formulation of ressentiment, and its relation to historic judaism, is likely to be misconstrued on this forum as simply a blaming of the jews. I appreciate that Nietzsche’s larger concern in the Genealogy of Morals was not to single out some group for attack but to apply his notion of Will to power, as a
psychic battle among competing drives, not just to the history of morality but to the history of scientific truth.

I would suggest, though, that there are other ways of understanding the emergence of the morality of Good and Evil besides that of a weakness or sickness. This implies some sort of pathology or regression occurred in human history with respect to a prior period of a healthy Will to Power. Why not treat the rise of Judeo -Christian morality without the value judgement implied by ‘weakness of will’? It can be seen instead as a phase of a historical development or evolution, which made Nietzsche’s own philosophy possible.

magritte Here's the link to the very nicely formatted .pdf of the paper.

I was sceptical first up, but having started to read it, I'm coming around to it. — Wayfarer

I love how the the authors locate the ‘true’ meaning of human cultural products like art and literature in evolutionary adaptivity, a purpose only indirectly connected to the expressed or implicit motivation of the artist, but outside the bounds of their awareness. This true meaning grounds itself in an origin depicted as the universal lawfulness of empirical objectivity. The theological thinking of origin as the pure self-persistence of law is evident here, which is why Kierkegaard scholar Mark C Taylor embraced similar ideas in his 1999 book, The Moment of Complexity.

Stuart Kauffman’s extensive research and speculation are inspired by deeply held philosophical, metaphysical, and religious beliefs, which often stand in tension with his scientific investigations. His obvious rejection of the existence of a Judeo-Christian God cannot disguise the profound longing for unity and reconciliation that lies at the heart of his work. If Darwin and his followers are right when they claim that evolution is a matter of chance, human life would seem to be an accident. For Kauffman, such a vision renders life meaningless and makes it impossible to feel ‘at home in the universe.” If, however, there is an emergent order to things that lends evolution a discernible order and probable direction, life has a logic that makes human existence meaningful:

In this view of life, organisms are not merely tinkered-together contraptions, brico­lage, in Jacob’s phrase. Evolution is not merely “chance caught on the wing, ” in
Monod’s evocative image. The history of life captures the natural order, on which se­lection is privileged to act. If this idea is true, many features of organisms are not merely historical accidents, but also reflections of the profound order that evolution has further molded. If true, we are at home in the universe in ways not imagined since Darwin stood natural theology on its head with his blind watchmaker.
This order, or course, is neither the product of a purposeful designer nor pro­grammed from the beginning; rather, evolution is an inner teleonomic process in which order emerges spontaneously but not accidentally. “If I am right,” Kauffman hopefully declares, the motto of life is not ‘We the improbable, but We the expected’.

Well since in Real Life here on planet Earth while physical systems are getting more and more complex, biological systems are rapidly becoming simpler and simpler. If current biological trends are extrapolated indefinitely, there will be a zoo, a corn field and an industrial feed lot.

It's erroneous on it's face. — LuckyR

I guess it depends in how you define complexity. For instance, how should we weigh decreasing bio-diversity against increases in human cultural and technological complexity?

↪mcdoodle
Do you think that there is an anti-Jewish bias in Europe stemming from pre-Holocaust ideas of Jewry that is not present in newer Western nation like the US? There are certainly hate groups everywhere but I am wondering if geography influences these trends — schopenhauer1

Europeans brought their prejudices with them when they emigrated to America. Not just anti-semitism ( there were many prominent anti-semites, such as Henry Ford and Charles Lindburgh) but anti-catholicism, and conflict among catholic ethnicities. My grandmother remembered seeing signs posting ‘No jews, catholic or dogs’.
Major cities like New York, Chicago and Boston were divided up into fiefdoms bounded by major streets and centered around local parishes. You ventured beyond your group’s neighborhood at the risk of a beating. This faded by the 1960’s ( with the exception of prejudice against people of color) with the flight to suburbia and the integration of public and private institutions.

I think the key tends mitigating against separatism
are urbanization, secularization, inter-marriage
and population diversification.

Could facing up to functions being somehow (somehow) first-order fundamental (with implications for internalism-externalism, organic-inorganic, selectpsychism - panpsychism) help face up to the 'aboutness' problem, in a way that's consistent with known physics? (somehow) — Danno

Enactivists like Evan Thompson abandon functionalism in favor of an integrated approach that also does away with qualia, input-output directionality, representationalism and computationalism. Enactivism makes ‘aboutness’ the central organizing principle of living systems in that living things are defined by their normative, goal-oriented interaction with an environment.

In the traditional functionalist conception, cognition is treated as fundamentally distinct from emotion. Cognitivist explanations focus on the abstract problem-solving characterization of cognitive tasks, the structure and content of symbolic representations, and the nature of the algorithms for manipulating the representations in order to solve a given problem. Cognitivism goes hand in hand with functionalism in the philosophy of mind, which in its extreme computational form holds that the embodiment of the organism is essentially irrelevant to the nature of the mind. It is the software, not the hardware, that matters most for mentality.

Cognitivism made meaning, in the sense of representational semantics, scientifically acceptable, but at the price of banishing consciousness from the science of the mind. (In fact, cognitivism inherited its consciousness taboo directly from behaviorism.) Mental processes, understood to be computations made by the brain using an inner symbolic language, were taken to be entirely nonconscious. Thus the connection between mind and meaning, on the one hand, and subjectivity and consciousness, on the other, was completely severed.

Information-processing models of the mind leave unexplained the autonomous organization proper to cognitive beings because they treat cognitive systems as heteronomous systems. These models characterize cognitive systems in terms of informational inputs and outputs instead of the operational closure of their constituent processes. As a result, they do not explain how certain processes actively generate and sustain an identity that also constitutes an intrinsically normative way of being in the world. Cognition or sense-making is the intentional and normative engagement of the system with its environment. One of the basic propositions of the enactive approach is that being autonomous is a necessary condition for a system to embody original intentionality and normativity. Unless the processes that make up a system constitute that system as an adaptive self-sustaining unity, there is no perspective or reference point for sense-making and hence no cognizing agent. Without autonomy (operational closure) there is no original meaning; there is only the derivative meaning attributed to certain processes by an outside observer.

↪Joshs
I know. Likewise, progressive American Christianity is fairly interfaith — frank

Would you agree that the varieties of contemporary anti-semitism expressed by the likes of Henry Ford, Heidegger, Hamas, Charles Lindburgh, Kanye West and Louis Farrakhan have less to do with the judaism of the middle ages than with their interpretation of the motives and practices of the modern world Jewish community?

The majority of Jews for the last 2000 years would say they adhered to their faith because the Torah explicitly condemns straying from the faith. For these Jews, other religions are not alternate paths to God. They're all paths to the Devil. The gods of other religions are false gods, and it's evil to worship them. There's nothing anti-Semitic about commenting on this. It's traditional Judaism. Look into it. — frank

Do you know anything about the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist denominations of Judaism? Within these theologies, there are no revealed truths, no miracles, only endless exegesis and interpretation. My father’s touchstone for his understanding of the application of jewish law was the Rationalism of Maimonides. Given that 90% of American jews adhere to one of these denominations rather than Orthodox Judaism ( what you call ‘traditional’ judaism’), your emphasis on strict adherence to law is foreign to the practice of the vast majority of American jews.

But you said you'd never even heard of the idea that Jews think they're superior to Gentiles. The fact that you haven't heard of it, and that it seems wrong to you, indicates that you are probably the end of the line for Jewishness in your family. — frank

I can’t speak to what the average jew in the biblical or medieval period said about gentiles, but I can speak from my own experience growing up in a Conservative jewish home, and living in Israel for a year with my family. I can tell you that no jew I’ve encountered, of any age, ever expressed such sentiments to me. Do religious jews believe their faith offers them a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics which is preferable to that of other religions? I would hope so. Otherwise, why bother to remain within the faith? But you seem to have a stronger notion of ‘superior’ in mind that you may have to spell out for me.

It was both. They weren't welcome in the court of the Czar, but they also abhorred the possibility of adulteration of their communities with foreign ways. So wherever they went, they had their own governments. They were more educated than the locals. They took roles as middle men.

Why exactly you find any of this to be insulting, I don't know — frank

Who said I found it insulting? This is what concerns me:

From Wikipedia:

1)aThe belief that Judaism is a racist religion which teaches its adherents to hate non-Jews by espousing the belief that they are not even human. This vicious anti-Semitic canard, frequently repeated by other Soviet writers and officials, is based upon the malicious notion that the "Chosen People" of the Torah and Talmud preaches "superiority over other peoples", as well as exclusivity. This was, of course, the principal theme of the notorious Tsarist Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

2) A trope found in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but dating to before that document, is that Jews are more loyal to world Jewry than to their own country. Since the establishment of the state of Israel, this trope has taken the form of accusations that Jewish citizens of other countries are more loyal to Israel than to their country of residence.

↪TiredThinker
Because they accepted their deals of surrender up to the point they were given places to be in a separate place. Your comparison sucks — Paine

Up until the mid 20th century, Jews in the U.S. refused to integrate into social institutions such as country clubs, summer camps and Ivy league schools, and instead founded their own clubs, camps and even schools (Brandeis). Oh wait, that was because they were barred entry into those places.

I have never heard this idea -- that Jews are superior to gentiles -- uttered by anyone. It doesn't make sense and I don't really care to entertain it.
— BitconnectCarlos

Nobody wants to entertain parts of their heritage that aren't attractive. — frank

How quaint. I had never heard this before either, and certainly not from jews. So I googled it and what I learned is that it is a long-standing prejudice, probably stemming from a misinterpretation of the phrase ‘chosen people’, or else a convenient application of that term to justify a sense that jews wield too much power in the world.

I've heard it many times. It's not polite to say it, though — baker

I’m betting you heard it from non-jews.

I do my best, but certain prejudices (cough, cough) can make that challenging.
— Joshs

Like what? — frank

Like the belief that jews “refuse to integrate into the society they live in, they set themselves apart.”

Many of the jews of Germany in the 1930’s considered themselves completely assimilated into German society. Boy did they get that wrong.

Is there anything particular about their lifestyles that is unappealing?
— TiredThinker
They refuse to integrate into the society they live in, they set themselves apart. — baker

I do my best, but certain prejudices (cough, cough) can make that challenging.

Science is enforced humility:

What is the core, immutable quality of science?

It's not formal publication, it's not peer review, it's not properly citing sources. It's not "the scientific method" (whatever that means). It's not replicability. It's not even Popperian falsificationism – the approach that admits we never exactly prove things, but only establish them as very likely by repeated failed attempts to disprove them.

Underlying all those things is something more fundamental. Humility. Everyone knows it's good to be able to admit when we've been wrong about something. We all like to see that quality in others. We all like to think that we possess it ourselves – although, needless to say, in our case it never comes up, because we don't make mistakes. And there's the rub. It goes very, very strongly against the grain for us to admit the possibility of error in our own work. That aversion is so strong that we need to take special measures to protect ourselves from it.

If science was merely a matter of increasing the sum of human knowledge, it would be enough for us all to note our thoughts on blogs and move on. But science that we can build on needs to be right. That means that when we're wrong – and we will be from time to time, unless we're doing terribly unambitious work – our wrong results need to be corrected. — wonderer1

I notice that only one form of humility was mentioned here, concerned with the epistemological issue of getting the facts right or wrong. But the notion of scientism has to do with lacking a different form of humility, closely linked with a spirit of audacity. This humility doesn’t concern science as truth or falsity but its continual becoming through revolutionary changes in paradigms, and the recognition that this is not a linear, inductive or deductive progress. it a kind of shift in faith and values. It require the appreciation of science’s close proximity to philosophy, the arts , and yes, even religion in this respect. Stridently scientistic arguments by the likes of Dan Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Sean Carroll suffer from a lack of humility in this department.

Here, what I am considering is cognitive meanings and scripts which are simply based on making life meaningful subjectively. — Jack Cummins

Do we ever actually think entities like cognitive scripts as neutral meanings abstracted away from affective valence and contextual significance? Or do we only perform such empirical objectivizations as an artificial act that conceals from itself its underlying structure?

. It could also be asked if there are aspects of pleasure and happiness which are overrides by goals of purpose and meaning. — Jack Cummins

Heidegger wrote that we always bring a pre-understanding to our engagement with the world. This allows things to show up for us within a certain interpetiveness. He added that this pre-understanding is attuned. That is to say, our understanding includes within itself our affective comportment toward the world, a way in which things matter to us. We are always in a particular disposition of mood, which makes us value things in a certain way. Pleasure, happiness and desire are not separate processes in relation to understanding, rationality, meaning , purpose and values. Mood is not a subjective coloration added to reason. It is its compass and gives it its sense and purpose.

↪Joshs comes at the issue from some imagined, internal, solipsistic position. "What are the minimum requirements for finding our way about?" Well, being able to find your way about! As ↪baker points out, you are already embedded in a community, so much so that your attempts to imagine yourself apart from the world carry the world with them. Basically, Joshs, you can't build the private language you need in order to formulate your solipsism. — Banno

There can also be a kind of solipsism, or rather, essentialism, built into assumptions about how a community embeds individuals. That’s why I asked about your minimum requirements. Perhaps I should ask what the minimum requirements are to be able to speak of a community. During the period when I am alone writing in my room, I suggest two things are the case. First, I bring to my writing my history as an embedded member of an interpersonal community. Second, over the course of my writing I am capable of thinking beyond the conventions of that history and that community. The language I use to accomplish this is not private because at first it draws from the resources of that remembered community. And as I continue writing I draw from my ‘self’, or more properly, community of selves, to transform the sense and vocabulary of my language relative to my starting point. So I draw from both an inter and intra-personal community to produce a language that exceeds cultural conventions, all the while avoiding the solipsism of a self-identical self and the essentialism of a strictly interpersonally defined notion of community.

↪Joshs Are you suggesting that self-awareness precedes awareness of the environment? — baker

I’m saying that self and environment reciprocally produce each other.

Your default notions of who you really are are not your own, but inherited from the society/culture you grew up in. So you cannot define your starting point, as that has been done by others already — baker

Society is an abstraction, an average derived from individual perspectives. It is true that each perspectival view is shaped and reshaped by its participation in its culture, but this just means that the way I change in response to that constant social exposure maintains its own integrity and uniqueness with respect to the way others within that same culture are changes by their interactions within it. In this way, each of us stand apart from our culture at the same time that we belong to it.

At some "personal defining juncture" however you choose to define yourself anew, possibly in contradistinction with your old, inherited idea of "who you really are", that new definition is still going to be in relation to your old one. So it seems that one cannot actually chose one's identity. — baker

Just because my new self is defined in reaction against my old self doesn’t mean that that new me doesn’t comprise its own identity.

More broadly, we understand - more or less - what being oneself is in the normal circumstances of growing old, forgetting, being injured and so on. But remove the body and the context in which all this makes sense drops out as well. In philosophical terms, the language game has been over-extended to the point where it needs to be radically rebuilt; we no longer have the capacity to find our way about.

So we make stuff up.

But there is nothing that makes the stuff we make up right or wrong. — Banno

What are the minimum requirements for finding our way about? What if I imagine myself as having memory, which includes my history as a body growing up in a conventional world, and the ability to learn. In addition, I have the ability to think but not to perceive an outside world. I am like a writer locked in a room with their private contemplations. Am I then just making stuff up? Is there anything generated within my thinking that can make that thinking right or wrong, that can validate or invalidate my expectations concerning the future directions of my contemplations?

Not at all, unless we wish to suggest that we come from some other place than the universe.
Answering where we came from we can answer what and who we are and where we're going. — baker

Where did the concept of ‘universe’ come from?What is the history of its etymology? When was the word first used and in what context? In what ways did our use of it change over time? These are questions that must precede the naive assumption of universe as a purely given reality.

How important do you think it is that all people must do this? based on my op question:
Do you think that preparing people for such, would do more harm than good? — universeness

This is a psychotherapeutic question. It’s like the difference between progressive desensitization to overcome a phobia vs exposing yourself to the frightening event without any prior preparation. The first method can moderate or eliminate the terror, the second can amplify it.

t do you have any suggestions as to how we all might better deal with the notions of horror/terror/fright, when they are used to manipulate us in such powerful ways? — universeness

Sure, deepen and widen your perspective on the issues that are liable to trigger such emotions. In particular, immerse yourself in the perspectives of those who perpetrate acts that elicit these feelings, so that they become more intelligible and predicable to you.

On an opinion-swapping Philosophy Forum, when amateur philosophers pretend to pontificate on material Physics, they are doing Science without the Matter, and Math without the Numbers — Gnomon

I would never weigh in on the content of empirical assertions by physicists and characterize my opinions as philosophical. I can only claim a philosophical stance when I remain neutral in this regard, that is, when I am careful not to offer any opinion on the veracity of facts generated within physics, and instead focus on the pre-empirical presuppositions grounding the way questions are posed in physics.

A recent (Oct 13) on-line essay by someone called Lincoln Michel, titled, The Vocabulary of fear, describes the difference between horror and terror as:
“Terror is the feeling of dread and apprehension at the possibility of something frightening, while horror is the shock and repulsion of seeing the frightening thing. “ — universeness

Like a lot of approaches to affect, emotion and mood, this definition doesn’t get beyond circularity. Terror and horror are related responses to a frightening event. But what is fright in itself, apart from the obvious fact that it is produced by something one is afraid of, something perceived as harmful or dangerous, something that makes us want to run away from it? Positing an evolutionary mechanism is not much more illuminating, since it just ignores the experiential
structure of fear in favor of a arbitrary reductionist causality.

A fundamental point about the category of affects which includes fear, anxiety, terror and horror that needs to be brought out is that these emotions result from an interpretive assessment of events. Specifically, we become afraid when an impending event threatens us with the chaos of comprehensibility. It isnt the potential of physical damage in itself that we fear for its own sake , but our lack of predictive control over the implications of this harm.
For this reason fear, terror and horror are relative to our preparedness for making sense of a situation.

Philosophy as physics without the maths. — Banno

:100:

However, if we can choose which life (or which portion of a life) we experience, then we do have free will—we are free to select in advance what we shall experience — Art48

We don’t choose a whole life or even a portion of it. What we choose is a scheme of understanding that we place over events in order to try and make sense of things. Those schemes dont tell the events how to affect us, they act as wagers that events will unfold in a way that bares a reasonable resemblance to how our schemes anticipate their unfolding ( the most important of these events being the behavior of other people) . If the flow of events validates our constructions of them by being relatively consistent with our expectations, then our schemes has staying power, and avail us of intimate connection with others.

Nevertheless, we are always having to make adjustments to our schemes, sometimes only minor repairs but other times major overhauls when we find ourselves in the midst of an emotional crisis. Despair, confusion and massive anxiety are all signs that our scheme is no longer working for us and we are faced with a major reorganization of our constructs. The only way forward from here involves much experimentation and trial and error until we arrive at a new construction that does a better job of making sense of things. We change the past only by reinterpreting it, and meet the future halfway by anticipating it. Time travel will produce little benefit for us unless we are prepared to reconstrue what we experience.

Someone who experiences a horrible life is akin to someone who chooses to watch a horror movie. — Art48

We choose to watch horror movies not to suffer, but rather to learn from the events of the film from a safe distance in order to gain a measure of mastery over our fears. For most people, what makes their lives rewarding or horrible is closely tied to how they manage to understand and relate to the behavior of people who matter to them over the course of their lives. Our most fundamental sense of who we are is dependent not just on how we see others, but on our reading of how we are seen through the eyes of others. Our choice of schemes of understanding is crucial here. If our framework does a poor job of seeing the world from others’ perspectives, then we will constantly suffer from anger, alienation, blame and poor self-regard.

I don't think the primary motivation has to do with "happiness," per say. The whole premise of the Experience Machine is the it will make you happy, and yet people turn it down. I suspect that people are skeptical of the Machine because it means being heavily determined by that which lies outside us. It lies outside us and we have no way to learn about it.

It's a lack of freedom then, not a lack of pleasure or happiness. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I am linking norm-based goals, purposes and motives with anticipatory sense-making, and the latter with pleasure and happiness. Happiness is just another way of talking about successful anticipatory sense-making in relation to prior schemes of expectation, even though we still tend to think of our emotions as arbitrary drives cut off from reason. This sense-making is our overarching motivation in life.

it also seems that states of affairs must precede knowledge of them. If I am to know I am mad, I have to be mad; if we are to discover a new superconductor, it needs to be able to act as a superconductor. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why not think of ‘knowledge of’ states of affairs as a kind of interaction with the world that co-produces what it represents? Our questions about the world are always loaded questions, projecting our presuppositions into states of affairs. And the answers the world gives us are responses to those loaded questions, communicated within the grammar of our formulations. Whether those states of affairs validate or disappoint our expectations is a function of their role within the intersubjective discourse of science, including the way our apparatuses of measurement define and organize phenomena.

Honestly, I'm surprised no one has proffered up: "if it tells you how to do everything you want and satisfies inquiry then it is telling you the truth." You could simply object to the supposition that it really lies to you. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I thought that’s what I had done by arguing that if the knowledge the book imparted to you proved its value through your successful anticipation of many subsequent events in your life, then it is true for you. But notice that my reply deconstructs the Cartesian metaphysical assumptions embedded in your hypothetical about the ‘real’ and the ‘true’, the simulated and the actual. Rather than thinking these notions in terms of correspondence between subject and independently real objects, it defines the truth and the real on the basis of the ongoing success of our construals of the world in making sense of, predicting and ordering, in a harmonious and coherent way, the continually changing nature of the flow of new experience.

how do we ever know when we've reached bedrock?

But, per Hegel's more fallibilist system, maybe the point is in going beyond the given. In never settling. All questioning is itself, "moments in the Absolute," after all. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Bedrock isn’t defined by what is independently ‘real’ in itself, apart from us, but by what makes sense to us in as harmonious a way as possible relative to our ways of construing the world. This bedrock of anticipatory understanding is an endless struggle, because the goal is nether out there in the world nor inside of us, but in the reciprocally re-adjusting coordination between the two.
The point of desire and freedom is not settling for the pain and suffering of meaning incoherence and confusion. Of course, we only ever ‘settle’ for such conditions of being when we believe that the alternative forms of construing available to us would make the world appear even more incoherent to us. On the other hand, we generally settle for whatever guide for proceeding through life allows us to make sense of it in an open-endedly harmonious and robustly flexible way ( a way that WORKS pragmatically in our lives). And why shouldn’t we, since a flexible approach is a creative approach that has built into it the continual possibilities of self-reinvention?

"You wake up in a lab, in a new body. The doctors tell you that you had voluntarily plugged into a machine that would simulate a life for you, a better life. All your friends and family, those are part of the simulation. They wake you up every 10 years and ask you if you are satisfied and if you want to go back, then wipe the memory of waking from your mind if you do go back."

The question is, do you wake up to the "real world," or go back. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The reason most choose to wake up is that they buy into the matrix metaphysics of a Cartesian ‘real’ world. If reality is assumed to be some independent thing in itself, then surely our ‘simulated’ happiness is a cheap knock-off of the real thing, depriving us of a richer, deeper, more meaningful quality of experience. This is how most of is were taught to think about the real and the true. It doesn’t occur to us that experience is neither invented (simulation) nor discovered (empirically true reality), but an inextricable dance between the two. The creepiness of your hypothetical does not derive from the power of science but from the power of a certain pervasive mythos of science.

Is there anything more you can say about this process? What do you think is the connection between one person making a book 'work' and another not? Is it a mixture of factors like socialisation, values and personality? Are our anticipatory selves (for want of a better term) built and rebuilt by our ongoing relationship to the world and how we are socialised? — Tom Storm

Our social environment certainly provides opportunities we can draw upon, as well as constraints limiting what we can make of our world, but I think most of what affords or constrains creative movement is located on the subjective side of the self-world hinge.

This book will answer any questions you ask of it to your satisfaction. It can tell you how to do things that you want to do well enough to get them done, and it will also explain phenomena to you such that you are happy with the explanations — Count Timothy von Icarus

Will it satisfactorily answer questions like: ‘Is there a god? What is the meaning of life? How do I achieve happiness in life?’ If so, then it isn’t just a book you’re taking about, it’s my interaction with unfolding events in response to what I read. A book may say any number of things I initially find wonderful and revelatory, but it will have no effect on my life until I put this knowledge to the test in terms of determining how well it allows to me to anticipate events over time. Only that will determine their relative truth or falsity for me. Knowledge isnt static factoids, it is a way of navigating through life in a fashion that makes the unfolding flow of events coherent, consistent, familiar, integral.It is events as they confirm or disappoint my expectations which decide the relative validity of my conceptions, not the in-itself content of a book What one is exposed to in a book is only a small ingredient, a starting point or catalyst , for that process. If a ‘lying’ book inspires me to make sense of actual experience in the world in a way that is useful and predictive for me, then that book was my source of bonified truth.

That is, even if his system made him really happy, if reason then convinces him that it wasn't true, that there was indeed a higher good he had missed, then he'd want the higher good. He might feel conflicted about it, many philosophers have felt conflicted about having to abandon cherished positions, but there is a powerful way in which reason is able to bowl over and reorder all our desires.

A good example might be the person who loses their faith. Their highest goal was previously to please God. They organized their life around this, spending hours in prayer each day. And yet they no longer believe in God and so no longer think "pleasing God" is truly a good. Now, no matter how much all their other desires might want to lead them back into a "fool's paradise," here they are, in the crisis of faith. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What’s important to point out here is the distinction between determining that one’s previous belief is not true, and happening upon a new value system. In the former case, one goes from belief to doubt within the same value system. In the latter case, one can continue to hold one’s previous belief to be true within the context of the old value system that makes it intelligible. But now one has constructed a new value system that offers a new compass of belief and doubt within a new arrangement of intelligibility that is not simply more true than the previously believed truth. Rather , it is akin to changing the subject, transforming how the phenomena matter to one. It can’t simply be said that the new system is ‘better’ than the previous, as if one could use the same criteria of relevance and ‘goodness’ as the old system to compare it to the new one. This doesnt mean that the old and new frameworks are utterly incommensurable. One could argue that both are true, both offer valid and useful ways of going on in the world, but that one prefer one over the other on the basis of aesthetic considerations. or that the old model did its job so effectively that its technologies put one into different environmental circumstances that require a new model to navigate. The point is that the criteria of goodness and truth change as a result of the way that each value system alters our relationship with our world. The fact that knowledge is the construction of a biological niche means that we are always in the process of reevaluating what is at stake and at issue in conceptual normativity, which is both different and more fundamental than issues of belief and doubt.

This is certainly a popular position. It seems to be somewhat Sam Harris' position in The Moral Landscape when he argues that morality and values can be objectively understood and grounded in science rather than relying solely on religious or subjective beliefs. The core idea being that "human well-being (desires)" should be the benchmark for evaluating moral principles, and that scientific inquiry can help identify objective moral truths. Skinner has a similar position — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is not Nietzsche’s position, though. Scientific inquiry involves the establishment of a discursively normative value system, a regional ontology, which produces the criteria for empirical ‘ oughts’ (what is valid or invalid, true or false, within a particular paradigmatic configuration). What does it mean to ground values in a system (science) whose very intelligibility is based on those values?

In this, all three also seem close to Hume, who argued that, “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them [by figuring out how to get what our appetites want.]" — Count Timothy von Icarus

When Nietzsche talks about drives, affects and values, what he has in mind is not ‘blind’ passion alien to reason, but configurative patterns that prescribe ways of anticipatively interacting with the world. For Nietzsche, what our drives want is to be able to assimilate the world according to the schematics they lay out. Reason and logic are developments of this schematics. What is reasonable is what is relevant, and what is relevant is what matters, an affective criterion.

Nietzsche's whole revaluation of all values collapses into petty hedonism if we know or suspect some sort of higher good -- a good we ourselves recognize or fear we fail to recognize -- but then continue on in our current mode of being "because it's easier" or "good enough." This is exactly the sort of behavior Nietzsche spends a lot of time attacking — Count Timothy von Icarus

The aim of the revaluation of all values is not to settle on some final or ultimate value system ( a higher good) but to stay in tune with the act of value posting itself as a means of not getting stuck in any particular value system. One could say that the ‘highest good’ is the continual movement from one normative conception of the good to another. Notice that this highest good is devoid of value content in itself.

Would we plug into the machine?

Tough question. A common concern I've heard here is that, if you plug into the machine, all the people you know and care for miss out on you. Thus, choosing the machine is precluded because of what it does to others. This could be fixed by supposing that, per your choice, everyone goes into the machine. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Machines don’t produce value, they are devoid of meaning in themselves. What they achieve is only understandable by reference to meaningful desires and purposes that must be accessed independently of the meaninglessly calculative functioning of the machine in itself.

Reason is obviously crucial to promoting both knowledge and freedom. And, because we can always question more, always go beyond our initial beliefs and desires, it doesn't seem to me that reason can be merely another desire. Doubt is not a desire. Further, reason is able to apprehend the abstract ideal of "the best" and search for it. In this, it seeks to transcend what it currently is and become more in an outwards search. This is, in important ways, an overcoming of desire, not simply a form of it. It is true that it is a desire for truth, but it's a desire grounded in what is beyond us, in a way other desires are not — Count Timothy von Icarus

Doubt derives its intelligibility from within a system
of desire-values. The kind of reason-based questioning you’re advocating doesn’t go beyond a value system, it is in service of one. We must not only go beyond our previous beliefs, but also beyond the norms within those beliefs have their sense as true or false, certain or doubtful. In short we must change the way things matter to us.

Surely, science isn't "the pursuit of truth" but "the pursuit of truth under a particular set of circumstances", and these circumstances are what we call science… . To do science, one must ensure that their question is specific, and aspires for an answer that is specific, measurable, testable/verifiable and repeatable — Judaka

I think the key term here is ‘measurable’. Specifiability, verifiability and repeatability are not exclusive to science, but the requirement that the objects of study be mathematizable has long been considered to be a prerequisite for empirical investigation.

If we conceptualize the universe as a single process, as opposed to a set of discrete objects, does this dissolve some key questions over free will at determinism?

This seems to be the case to me if we also allow that the "laws of nature" are not external forces that cause the universe to evolve in such and such a way, but are rather merely descriptions of the intrinsic properties of the universe. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Maybe I’ve been enclosed in my particular philosophical bubble for too long, but when I see a fundamental inquiry into the nature of things begin from “the universe” as its starting point, I can’t help but associate it with notions like flying spaghetti monster. Shouldn’t concepts like universe be left as later constructions rather than as starting suppositions for basic philosophical questions?

The point isn't that we become free in supporting the society we already have, or even the society we want to have, but that we become free in supporting the evolution of the society that produces the most freedom. And since individuals' freedom is deeply interrelated, this means freedom for all. This, IMO, has sort of been lost in modern philosophy. There is way too much focus on fighting conformity, cutting against the grain, etc. Sure, that's important, but it cannot be an ends in itself. In Nietzsche, it is an ends in itself and in this it becomes a self defeating ideology if applied at the social level. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Shaun Gallagher, in his latest book Action and Interaction, has a chapter on justice which incorporates ideas from Hegel, Frankfurt and Honneth, while giving more emphasis to its basis in intersubjectivity.

Gallagher writes:

“Justice, like autonomy, is relational. I cannot be just or unjust on my own. So an action is just or unjust only in the way it fits into the arrangements of intersubjective and social interactions.” “Justice consists in those arrangements that maximize compound, relational autonomy in our practices.” The autonomy of the interaction itself depends on maintaining the autonomy of both individuals. Justice (like friendship) involves fostering this plurality of autonomies (this compound autonomy); it is a positive arrangement that instantiates or maintains some degree of compound relational autonomy.”“Accordingly, although one can still talk of individuals who engage in the interaction, a full account of such interaction is not reducible to mechanisms at work in the individuals qua individuals.”

A key aspect of justice is the recognition of the other:

“As reflected in the definition of interaction, in interactional dynamics recognition depends on autonomy and is undermined by reification; that is, treating the other as an object observed from a third-person perspective. At the same time, individual autonomy diminishes without social interaction; and interaction doesn't exist if the autonomy of any of the participants is denied. Interaction, autonomy, and recognition dissipate in cases of slavery, torture, or terrorism.”
“ As the enactivist approach makes clear, a participant in interaction with another person is called to respond if the interaction is to continue. My response to the other, in the primary instance, just is my engaging in interaction with her—by responding positively or negatively with action to her action. Although research on primary intersubjectivity provides a detailed model of elementary responsivity, it may also be useful to consider Levinas's analysis of the face-to-face relation in order to explicate what this research tells us.” “…according to Levinas, the face-to-face relation primarily registers in an ethical order: the other, in her alterity, is such that she makes an ethical demand on me, to which I am obligated to respond…In contrast to Heidegger who might speak about a system of involvements that constitute the pragmatic world (characteristic of secondary intersubjectivity), Levinas describes a direct embodied encounter with the other.…the failure to enact that transcendence [recognizing the alterity of the other], as when we simply objectify or reify the other person, is also a possibility of relational contingency.”

I believe instead that the ethical dilemma we face is not that of recognition vs reification, self-transcendence vs self-interest, the arbitrary conservative thrust of the lure of the familiar vs the compassionate embrace of otherness. When we seem to fail to recognize and maintain the other‘s autonomy this is not a retreat into self but, on the contrary, an experiencing of otherness which is too other to be intelligible. For Gallagher justice is maintaining the autonomy of the other, as if one first glimpses this autonomy and then decides not to honor it. But the other's autonomy can only exist for me to the extent that I can integrate it intelligibly within my way of life, which is itself the ongoing production of a collaborative community. The failure to coordinate harmoniously among competing realtional intelligibilites results in the appearance of injustice, as though there were an intention on the part of one of the parties not to recognize an aspect of the other.

However, it is not autonomous content that we strive to maximize, but intelligible process, and intelligibility is ontologically prior to the actions of an autonomous subject who recognizes or fails to recognize others. When there is disagreement between the victim and the alleged perpetrator about whether an injustice has indeed been committed, who determines, and how is it determined, that someone is closing off another's affordance space and eliminating their autonomy? If it is intelligible ways of going on that are being protected, then from the vantage of the ‘perpetrator', what is being excluded, closed off and eliminated is not a particular content (the other's affordances) , in the service of reifying one's own autonomy. On the contrary, the aim is to exclude from a system of practices that which would render it nonsensical and deprive it of coherent meaning. In other words, from the vantage of the so-called perpetrator, the practices of exclusion and elimination are in the service of rendering justice by preventing the degradation of meaningful autonomy in general.

As Ken Gergen(1995) states:

“... groups whose actions are coordinated around given constructions of reality risk their traditions by exposing them to the ravages of the outliers. That is, from their perspective, efforts must be made to protect the boundaries of understanding, to prevent the signifiers from escaping into the free-standing environment where meaning is decried or dissipated. In this sense, unfair or exclusionary practices are not frequently so from the standpoint of the actors. Rather, they may seem altogether fair, just and essential to sustain valued ideals against the infidels at the gates.”

As far as I know, Deleuze never applies the term community regarding his theory of desire. For him, the concept of ‘a society of selves and a society of desires that manifest a relative ongoing thematic unity' would display a return to a process of identification, — Number2018

No, he uses words like collectivity, collection, mass, population, multiplicity, a band, a peopling, a group.
I’m aware that the plane of immanence is a virtual dimension on which conceptual personae and concepts are created via connective synthesis, inclusive disjunction and conjunctions of intensities. Concepts subsist of relations between heterogenous series rather than unification by identity or representation. I’m sure we can agree on the distinction between the smooth and the striated, the molecular and the molar, the rhizomatic and the arborescent, the body without organs and the clothed body, the virtual and the actual, the subject group and the subjected group.

Nevertheless , the reason I use the expression ‘thematic unity’ is that concepts on a plane of immanence resonate, “and the philosophy that creates them always introduces a powerful Whole that, while remaining open, is not fragmented: an unlimited One-Al, an "Onnitudo" that includes all the concepts on one and the same plane.” The plane of immanence is diagrammatic and fractal, making possible a point of view and problematic field that produces , via linkages between heterogeneities, a sort of non-totalizing thematic distinguishing the concepts of one philosopher from another.
“In the end, does not every great philosopher lay out a new plane of immanence, introduce a new substance of being and draw up a new image of thought, so that there could not be two great philosophers on the same plane?”