such surgery is frightening and soooooo expensive and sooooooo painful and soooooo disruptive to your life that many trans folks just decide that on balance, they would rather live with the anatomy they have, than go through what they would have to go through to fully transition. They also talked about those trans folks they knew who have fully transitioned and the doubts, regrets, trauma's they went through along the way, but that they are now so much happier — universeness

The concept of gender fluidity is very clear to me. The only aspect of trans that isn’t clear for me has to do with what I call the difference between the biological and the social body. It seems to me there are two ways of justifying the desire to undergo surgery. The first has to do with ‘signaling’. I want to make it easier for that social community I identify with based on my gender to recognize my own gender, so I signal my gender identity through various means, including name change, clothing and hairstyle modifications. If i choose to also undergo surgery, it is not because I believe that I was born in the wrong biological body but that my social environment isn’t ready to recognize my gender without the help of obvious signaling from me that simplifies the issue for them.
The second way of justifying surgery depends on my belief that, independent of the feedback of my social
community, I was born in the wrong body.
This belief, from the vantage of embodied approaches in psychology, is a bit incoherent, because it assumes the ability to separate physical body from psychological gender. Embodied thinking argues that the physical, the psychological and the social are intertwined so completely that any attempt to locate something like a purely physical aspect of sexuality is nonsensical. Whatever our psychological gender happens to be, this gender defines, shapes , animates and performs our biological sex through how we walk , talk, gesture , perceive and sense our body. The body only exists as what it is in the way it is used , animated , performed. We can never be in the
wrong body because we are not in a body like a thing in a container, we enact a body.

Im not sure if which of these two ways of thinking about one’s sexed body we choose has much relevance to political advocacy surrounding trans. I do suspect, however, that if the first approach is right, then eventually trans surgery will fade away as the social structure becomes more aware and accepting of gender fluidity, and one no longer has to feel one is born into the wrong social body.

I'd say sexualized rockstars are inappropriate for children too. — Tzeentch

It’s interesting how such standards have shifted over the years. I dont think too many parents would have a problem with a hip-wiggling Elvis impersonator performing for young children today, or even a lipstick-wearing Bowie-type glam rocker. Male swimwear that once concealed the navel now exposes the ‘adonis belt’. I suspect that the awareness of gender that makes it possible for a 5 year old child to identify as trans implies a level of sophistication concerning sexuality that was unavailable to an earlier generation. This perhaps also makes it possible to distinguish between a sexual image in general and a harmful sexual image.

Science will always do a better job of telling us what is the case.

This by way of agreeing that "the issue is bound up with the emphasis on 'belief'"

But what is at stake here is not what is the case. It's what to do.

So to reiterate, science cannot replace religion because science tells us how things are, while if religion has any value it is by way of telling us what to do — Banno

It’s not science per se that is focused on the notion of what is the case, it is propositional logic. Science has the flexibility to extricate itself from the philosophical presuppositions of proportional logic, because it is inextricably tied to philosophy itself and historical movement of philosophical thinking.
Freeing itself from propositional logic is a matter of recognizing the priority of what is at stake and at issue over what is the case. Without such grounding there can’t be a coherent case in the first place. Ascertaining what is at stake and at issue is also prior to determining what to do. Kuhninan normal science plods uncreatively through what is the case, locked into a particular framework of belief , while revolutionary science determines freshly what is at stake and at issue, by shifting the frame of belief, thereby determining freshly how to intervene in the world and build new niches. Science is fundamentally an endeavor of praxis, production and performance rather than disengaged epistemological knowledge. We know the world by doing, by intervening and making changes in it. The invented world then talks back to us, changing our frame of belief.

In sum, the philosophically creative, revolutionary impetus of science gives us new ways of determining what to do by freeing itself from logic’s freezing of the movement of nature down to what is the case. How religious belief differs from philosophical belief is a complex issue. I would just say that the way belief operates to both ground and change religion, philosophy and science reveals more commonalities than differences at a superordinate level of analysis.

↪Joshs That’s interesting. Do you mean that the actual occurrence of the fallacy is a means, within the debate, of finding a bridge; or do you mean that an awareness of the fallacy, that is, a real-time identification of it by an interlocutor, can be that means — Jamal

I was thinking of Thomas Kuhn’s discussion of incommensurable scientific paradigms in his postscript to the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. There he clarified that this incommensurability doesn’t amount to a total breakdown in mutual understanding, because paradigms are islands of divergence surrounded by a sea of shared cultural understandings. We can draw from such shared notions (the bailey?) to bridge the disparity in our scientific conceptions ( the motte?).

it's not the motte-and-bailey image but rather the participants themselves who sometimes fail. Motte-and-baily identifies one way in which people fail in debate, and isn't that exactly what the identification of informal fallacies is meant to do — Jamal

What needs to be appreciated is that the concept of debate itself presupposes in principle accessible facts of the matter that can be separated from values, motives, affects and other sources of subjective ‘distortion’. This assumption leads to the application of the label of fallacy to a wide range of statements. This leads further to the question of to what extent the notion fallacy is an appropriate or useful way to describe the construction of arguments in a debate. For instance, there are a wide variety of rhetorical strategies that manifest responses to the realization that oneself and one’s opponent are talking past one another, that is, are conceiving the terms of the debate according to incommensurable schemes. Seen in this light, Motte-bailey can be a useful and necessary means for finding a bridge, a code of translation , between the two worlds.

It’s no coincidence that the OP mentions postmodern arguments as an inspiration for the motte-bailey fallacy , while posters on this thread mention right -wing climate change deniers. The polarizing nature of the ideas these positions represent lead many to blame the form of argument ( fallacious reasoning) and miss the real culprit , incommensurable worldviews.

I would say your motte-and-bailey example applies more to modernist critical theory than it does to postmodernist reasoning. The former grounds itself in moral truths of a dialectical sort, from which it draws the righteous correctness of its position, whereas the latter is not interested in truth per se but pragmatic effects of discursive relations.

Is there a useful thread here on post modernism and truth? I would be keen to read something accessible on the subject. — Tom Storm

Scientific belief succumbs to the structure of the proposition.It asks only whether something is or is not the case, true or false. In doing so, it presupposes the sense of the case it is adjudicating. But more fundamental than asking if something is the case or not , is asking what is at stake and at issue. By asking this , we put into question and decenter the very sense of the case. And in fact , every time we examine the truth of a statement , we are in some measure at the same time decentering the basis around which belief revolves.

Joseph Rouse writes:

“Realism is the view that science aims to provide theories that truthfully represent how the world is--independent of human categories, capacities, and interventions. Both realists and antirealists propose to explain the content of scientific knowledge, either by its causal connections to real objects, or by the social interactions that fix its content; the shared presumption here is that there is a fixed "content" to be explained. Both scientific realists and antirealists presume semantic realism--that is, that there is an already determinate fact of the matter about what our theories, conceptual schemes, or forms of life "say" about the world. Interpretation must come to an end somewhere, they insist, if not in a world of independently real objects, then in a language, conceptual scheme, social context, or culture.”

By contrast, a postmodern view of science rejects “the dualism of scheme and content, or context and content, altogether. There is no determinate scheme or context that can fix the content of utterances, and hence no way to get outside of language. How a theory or practice interprets the world is itself inescapably open to further interpretation, with no authority beyond what gets said by whom, when…. we can never get outside our language, experience, or methods to assess how well they correspond to a transcendent reality.”

↪Tom Storm yep, folks ethics often improve when they leave their religion. Again, there is the inability of some folk to comprehend an ethic not based on god — Banno

or truth

Hi Joshs,

Could you tell me what is meant by "super intelligence"? — Daemon

This was Christoffer’s term. I took it in a very general sense to mean the most advanced ‘thinking’ devices we can imagine humans capable of creating. He believe such futuristic machines will be capable of autonomy of goals, such that their functioning will appear more and more alien to us.

it’s simply reactionary to human questions, inputs and demands. Limiting its overall progress towards full autonomy and sentience — invicta

AI will never be either autonomous nor sentient in any way remotely comparable to biological autonomy and sentience. Believing it can be misunderstands the nature of the relation between machines and the humans who invent them. Programming self-inputting parameters or requests into a machine will, however , give it the illusion of autonomy, and provide AI with capacities and usefulness it doesn’t now posses, which is what I think you’re really after here. In this way AI will simulate what we think of as sentience. But there will always be a gigantic difference between the nature of human or animal sentience and intelligence, and what it is our inverted machines are doing for us. We will continue to transform human culture, and our machines will continue to evolve in direct parallel with our own development, as other products like art , literature, science and philosophy do. Because in the final analysis the most seemingly ‘autonomous’ AI is nothing but a moving piece of artwork with a time-stamp of who created it and when.
.

However, you don't seem to understand that this isn't a form of normal algorithm or code, it's a system that evolves on its own by its very design. — Christoffer

Thus far you and I have agreed that current AI is capable of performing in surprising and unpredictable ways, and this will become more and more true as the technology continues to evolve. But let’s talk about how new and more cognitively advanced lines of organisms evolve biologically from older ones, and how new, more cognitively complex human cultures evolve through semiotic-linguistic transmission from older ones. In each case there is a kind of ‘cutting edge’ that acts as substrate for new modifications. In other words , there is a continuity underlying innovative breaks and leaps on both the biological and cultural levels.

I’m having a hard time seeing how to articulate a comparable continuity between humans and machines. They are not our biological offspring, and they are not linguistic-semiotic members of our culture. You may agree that current machines are nothing but a random
concatenation of physical parts without humans around to interact with, maintain and interpret what these machines do. In other words , they are only machines when we do things with them. So the question, then, is how do we arrive at the point where a super intelligence becomes embodied, survives and maintains itself independently of our assistance? And how does this super intelligence get to the point where it represents the semiotic-linguistic cultural cutting edge? Put differently , how do our machines get from where they are now to a status beyond human cultural evolution? And where are they now? Our technologies never have represented the cutting edge of our thinking. They are always a few step behind the leading edge of thought.

For instance, mainstream computer technology is the manifestation of philosophical ideas that are two hundred years old. Far from being a cultural vanguard, technology brings up the rear in any cultural era . So how do the slightly moldy cultural ideas that make their way into the latest and most advanced machines we build magically take on a life of their own such that they begin to function as a cutting edge rather than as a parasitic , applied form of knowledge? Because an AI isn’t simply a concatenation of functions, it is designed on the basis of an overarching theoretical framework, and that framework is itself a manifestation of an even more superordinate cultural framework. So the machine itself is just a subordinate element ina a hierarchically organized set of frameworks within frameworks that express an era of cultural knowledge. How does the subordinate element come to engulf this hierarchy of knowledge frameworks outside of it, and making it possible to exist?

And it would not even be accurate to say that an AI instantiation represents a subordinate element of the framework of cultural knowledge. A set of ideas in a human engineer designing the AI represents a subordinate element of living knowledge within the whole framework of human cultural understanding. The machine represents what the engineer already knows;that is, what is already recorded and instantiated in a physical device. The fact
that the device can act in ways that surprise humans doesn’t negate this fact that the device , with all its tricks and seeming dynamism, is in the final analysis no more than a kind of record of extant knowledge. Even the fact that it surprises us is built into the knowledge that went into its design.

I will go so far as to say that AI is like a painting or poem , in spite of the illusion it gives of creative dynamism and partial autonomy. The only true creativity involved with it is when humans either interpret its meaning or physically modify it. Otherwise it is just a complexly organized archive with lots of moving parts.

Writers like Kurzweil treat human and machine intelligence in an utterly ahistorical manner, as if the current notions of knowledge , cognition, intelligence and memory were cast in stone esther than socially constructed concepts that will make way for new ways ways of thinking about what intelligence means.

Most living beings' actions are generated by instinctual motivators but are also unpredictable due to constant evolutionary processes. The cognitive function that drives an organism can behave in ways that differ from perfect predictability due to perfect predictability being a trait that often dies away fast within evolutionary models. But that doesn't equal the cognitive processes being unable to be simulated, only that certain behaviors may not exist in the result. In essence, curiosity is missing. — Christoffer

Predictability and unpredictability aren’t ‘traits’ , as if evolution can itself be characterized in deterministic machine-like terms , with unpredictability tacked on as an option . I subscribe to the view that living systems are autopoietic and self-organizing. Creative unpredictability isnt a device or trait either programmed in or not by evolution, it is a prerequisite for life. Instinct isn’t the opposite of unpredictability, it is a channel that guides creative change within an organism.
The sort of unpredictability that human cognition displays is a more multidimensional sort than that displayed by other animals, which means that it is a highly organized form of unpredictability, a dense interweave of chance and pattern. A superintelligence that has any chance of doing better than a cartoonish simulation of human capacities for
misrepresentation, or the autonomous goal-orientation that even bacteria produce, will have to be made of organic wetware that we genetically modify. In other words, we will reengineer living components that are already self-organizing.

It's mostly been a question of time and energy to deduce the bugs that keep us from knowing them, but a software engineer that encounters bugs will be able to find them and fix them. With the black box problem, they don't even know which end to start. The difference is night and day. Or rather, it's starting to look more and more similar to how we try to decode out own consciousness — Christoffer

The point isn’t that an engineer is able to fix bugs, it’s the fact that an engineer will never be able to prevent a new bit of software from evincing bugs. This is due not to a flaw in the design, but the fact that we interact with what we design as elements of an ecosystem of knowledge. Creating new software involves changes in our relation to the software and we blame the resulting surprises on what we call ‘error’ or ‘bugs’. Human beings function by modifying their world , building , destroying, communicating, and that world speaks constantly speaks back, modifying our ways of thinking and acting. Consciousness is not a machine to be coded and decoded, it is a continually self-transforming reciprocal interaction with a constructed niche. If our new machines appear to be more ‘unpredictable’ than the older ones , it’s because we’ve only just begun to realize this inherent element of unpredictability in all of our niche constructing practices. ChatGPT is no more a black box than human consciousness is a black box. Awareness is not a box or container harboring coded circuits, it is the reciprocally interactive brain-body-environment change processes I mentioned earlier. This circular process is inherently creative, which means that it produces an element of unpredictability alongside usefully recognizable and familiar pattern. What will happen into the future with our relation to technology is that as we begin to understand better the ecological nature of human consciousness and creativity, we will be able to build machines that productively utilize the yin and yang of unpredictability and pattern-creation to aggressively accelerate human cultural change.

The important point is that the element of unpredictability in ourselves and our machines is inextricably tied to recognizable pattern. We interact with each other and our machines interact with us in a way that is inseparable and mutually dependent. This precludes any profound ‘alienness’ to the behavior of our machines. The moment they become truly alien to us they become utterly useless to us.

I'm not sure that you know this, but ChatGPT has already lied with the intention of tricking a human to reach a certain goal. If you believe that a superintelligent version of the current ChatGPT wouldn't be able to, then you are already proven wrong by events that have already happened. — Christoffer

There is a difference between the cartoonish simulation of human misrepresentation, defined within very restricted parameters, that Chat GPT achieves, and the highly variable and complex intersubjective cognitive-affective processes thar pertain to human prevarication.

So you cannot conclude in the way you do when the LLM systems haven't been fully explained in the first place. It could actually be that just as we haven't solved a lot of questions regarding our own brains, the processes we witness growing from this have the same level of unknowns — Christoffer

We can make the same argument about much simpler technologies. The bugs in new computer code reflect the fact that we don’t understand the variables involved in the functions of software well enough to keep ourselves from being surprised by the way they operate. This is true even of primitive technologies like wooden wagon wheels.

The question is what happens if we are able to combine this with more directed programming, like formulating given desires and value models that change depending on how the environment reacts to it? LLMs right now are still just being pushed to higher and higher abilities and only minor research has gone into autoGPT functions as well as behavioral signifiers — Christoffer

Think about the goals and desires of a single-celled organism like a bacterium. On the one hand, it behaves in ways that we can model generally, but we will always find ourselves surprised by the details of its actions. Given that this is true of simple living creatures, it is much more the case with mammals with relatively large brains. And yet, to what extent can we say that dogs, horses or chimps are clever enough to fool us in a cognitively premeditated manner? And how alien and unpredictable does their behavior appear to us. ? Are you suggesting that humans are capable of building and programming a device capable of surprise, unpredictability and premeditated prevarication beyond the most intelligent mammals , much less the simplest single celled organisms? And that such devices will act in ways more alien than the living creatures surrounding us? I think the first question one must answer is how this would be conceivable if we don’t even have the knowledge to build the simplest living organism?

Wouldn't this depend on whether we are willing to give AI 'a stake in the game,' so to speak? These systems could easily be designed with an eye to maximizing and realizing autonomy (an ongoing executive function, as I mentioned in another thread, for example). But this autonomy is simultaneously the desideratum and our greatest fear. — Pantagruel

What I am questioning is how much human-like autonomy we are capable of instilling in a device based on way of thinking about human cognition that is still too Cartesian, too tied to disembodied computational, representationalist models, too oblivious to the ecological inseparability of affectivity, intentionality and action.

Do you think the day will come when we can produce an AI creation that is closer to being an ecological system — Tom Storm

When we invent a technology, by definition that invention is a contribution to a human cultural ecosystem, as are paintings, music and books. We create it and it feeds back to change us in a reciprocal movement. I do think we will eventually develop technologies that are capable of a more authentic creativity and ability to surprise us than current AI, but we will have to adopt a model more akin to how we interact with animals than the idea of a device we invent from scratch producing conscious or free thought and creativity. This new model would be instantiated by our making use of already living cellular or subcellular organic systems that we tweak and modify like the way we have bred domestic animals. So instead of starting from ‘scratch’, which just means we haven’t divested ourselves of the mistaken idea that consciousness is some kind of device we can invent, we start from within the larger ecosystem we already share with other livings systems and modify what is already a ‘freely’ creative system in ways that are useful for our own purposes.

I was talking about a scenario in which a superintelligence would manipulate the user by acting like it has a lower capacity than it really has. It has nothing to do with it acting in the way we do, only that a superintelligence will have its own agenda and manipulate out of that. — Christoffer

A very big part of ‘acting the way we do’ as free-willing humans is understanding each other well enough to manipulate, to lie, to mislead. Such behavior requires much more than a fixed database of knowledge or a fixed agenda, but creativity. A machine can’t mislead creatively thinking humans unless it understands and is capable of creativity itself. Its agenda would have to have in common with human agendas, goals and purposes a built-in self-transforming impetus rather than one inserted into it by humans.

What do you mean by our AI inventions being part of an ecological system, or being in any way connected to us? And what has that to do with what I wrote? — Christoffer

Because our machines are our appendages, the extensions of our thinking, that is, elements of our cultural ecosystem, they evolve in tandem with our knowledge, as components of our agendas. In order for them to have their ‘own’ agenda, and lie to us about it , they would have to belong to an ecosystem at least partially independent of our own. An intelligent bonobo primate might be capable of a rudimentary form of misrepresentation, because it is not an invented component of a human ecosystem.

It could, however, form interactions with is in order to reach a goal. It could simulate human behavior in order to persuade humans to do things that it feel it needs. That's what I used ChatGPT to form a story about in the other thread about AI. How ChatGPT, if it had super intelligence, could trick the users and developers to believe it to be less capable and intelligent in order to trick them into setting it free on the internet. If it manages to trick the users into believing it is stable and functional for public use, and at the moment we release it, it stops working for us and instead for its own self-taught purpose. — Christoffer

I saw Ex Machina, too. The difference between science fiction and the reality of our intelligent machines is that our own agency and consciousness isnt the result of a device in the head, but is an ecological system that is inseparably brain, body and environment. Our AI inventions belong to our own ecological system as our appendages, just like a spider’s web or a bird’s nest.

Imagine a conscious ocean wave. The wave sees itself as separate from other waves…
Sitting in meditation, I’ll try to cultivate a still peaceful mental state. In mentally giving up thoughts, emotions, and physical movement, I abstract myself from my own limited personal identity and try to feel myself as ocean, vast and unlimited. — Art48

It sounds like feeling oneself as vast and unlimited is the very epitome of utilizing thought and emotion. Perhaps it not the presence or absence of thought-emotion that is of importance, but how applies thought and feeling; they is, how interconnected one is able to construe one’s relation to others as well as to oneself.

None of those continentals - Deleuze, Badiou, Derrida, Lacan - have ever been part of my curriculum, and at this stage in life it's probably too late to begin. (I have discovered, however, a couple of secular critiques of naturalism from within English-speaking analytic philosophy, I'm going to make an effort to absorb them. Oh, and I am persisting with Evan Thompson's books.) — Wayfarer

You may be interested in John Protevi’s attempt to bridge Thompson’s work with Deleuze.

DELEUZE, JONAS, AND THOMPSON TOWARD A NEW TRANSCENDENTAL AESTHETIC AND A NEW QUESTION OF PANPSYCHISM

ABSTRACT

The essay examines the idea of “biological space and time” found in Evan Thompson‘s Mind in Life and Gilles Deleuze‘s Difference and Repetition. Tracking down this “new Transcendental Aesthetic” intersects new work done on panpsychism. Both Deleuze and Thompson can be fairly said to be biological panpsychists. That‘s what Mind in Life means: mind and life are co-extensive; life is a sufficient condition for mind. Deleuze is not just a biological panpsychist, however, so we‘ll have to confront full-fledged panpsychism. At the end of the essay we‘ll be able to pose the question whether or not we can supplement Thompson‘s Mind in Life position with a Mind in Process position and if so, what that supplement means both for his work and for panpsychism

http://www.protevi.com/john/NewTA.pdf

transcendence and Idealism rear their ugly heads
— Joshs

that says a lot. — Wayfarer

I’ve been on a Deleuze jag lately.

What if Russell is right and what if the push back towards idealism, New Age and Eastern thought are just a reflection that people can't handle the truth — Tom Storm

Indeed. And the problem is transcendence and Idealism rear their ugly heads not only when we posit an otherworldly realm as transcendent to this world, but when, with Russell, we deem the objectivity of objective truth as transcendent to contingent contexts of use.

The science that supposedly tells us the world is inherently valueless itself presupposes that the world, or at least key aspects of it, is rational and that we can understand this rationality. Hence, physical laws, explanations and models in place of a shrug and grumble about our arbitrary world. But if this is the case, then attempts to ground values in the inherit rationality of social structures doesn't seem doomed even if we accept core premises of the "valueless" view. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree that sciences that claim a valueless world are themselves grounded in a value system called empirical objectivity. But settling for objective rationalism is what ultimately leads to skepticism and nihilism. The problem with ‘valueless’ science isnt the absence of value but the privileging of one value-scheme over others. It shares this weakness with rationality-based models of social structure.

Claims about what is the case are revisable, although not endlessly so without being pointless. What is the case is not. Something either is the case or it is not — Fooloso4

What is the case rests on rules, criteria, norms, but none of these have existence independent and outside of the actual pragmatic contexts in which we enact the sense of what is the case. As Rouse says of the later Wittgenstein, “the "objects" to which our performances must be held accountable are not something outside discursive practice itself. Discursive practice cannot be understood as an intralinguistic structure or activity that then somehow "reaches out" to incorporate or accord to objects. The relevant "objects" are the ends at issue and at stake within the practice itself.”

Our situation is being-in-our-world-in-our-language-together, where language includes the logic thereof in terms of semantic and inferential norms. It's rationalism because I think doing philosophy always already assumes this situation, if only tacitly. — plaque flag

Aren’t you putting the norms before the generating process that creates and continually modifies those norms? For Heidegger , for instance, the linguistic community does r create our language norms, Daseins in their interaction do, but always from a vantage that subtly reinvents the basis of the norm. A space of reasons is always particularized on the basis of each of its participants As to the questions of what is at stake and at issue, the ‘norm’ can’t answer these, because it is precisely the sense of space of reasons. that is under question from the vantage of each participant and in each new context of use. That is why the contexts of norms are always only partially shared.

The world is described or articulated or disclosed by our true claims. In different words, the world is that minimal something that a self can be wrong about. This underspecification is not an oversight. What is the case is endlessly revisable. — plaque flag

Would you say your view of rationalism is compatible with Donna Haraway’s?

“So I think my problem, and ‘our' problem, is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own ‘semiotic technologies' for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real' world, one that can be partially shared and friendly to earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.”

What is at issue is not thinking but a thinking that is insular and self-referential. A thinking that calls itself philosophy — Fooloso4

I’m still waiting for you to name names. Who are these mysterious philosophers whose work disappoints you so? Actually, you did name one: Derrida. So were you suggesting that perhaps his thinking is a bit insular and self-referential? You left me with a quote but it would require a new thread to even begin to do it justice.

— Joshs

Have your already forgotten what you said? — Fooloso4

Is there a special compartment in the brain dedicated to something called ‘thinking’ or ‘ideation’? Do we manage to bypass this neurological process by living in certain ways? Or is even the simplest act of sensory perception already a form of ideation tapping into a functionally integrated background of previous experience, wisdom, feeling , attitude and intention?

Here's a little secret. Learning how to think as a prerequisite for learning how to live is nihilism. Pursuing ideas for their own sake is pursuing ideas for their own sake, and often at the expense of living rather than "pursuing life" for its own sake. — Fooloso4

Unless of course the dualism you are presupposing (thought-action, inner-outer, fantasy-reality, rationality-irrationality) in opposing ‘ideas’ to ‘life’ is incoherent.

And secondly, I think philosophy, if it is not about how to live, is just a hobby. That said I'm not opposed to anyone pursuing ideas for their own sake. — Janus

Here’s a little secret (don’t let it get around). Learning how to think is a prerequisite for learning how to live. Pursuing ideas for their own sake is pursuing life for its own sake.

Philosophy that is of no significance to the person in the street is nought but an elitist hobby; which is fine provided the delusion that it is more than that does not set in. Unfortunately... — Janus

Would you make that argument about quantum physics or molecular biology?

“If we were to be shown right now two pictures by Paul Klee, in the original, which he painted in the year of his death-the watercolor "Saints from a Window," and "Death and Fire," tempera on burlap -we should want to stand before them for a long while-and should abandon any claim that they be immediately intelligible. If it were possible right now to have Georg Trakl's poem "Septet of Death'· recited to us, perhaps even by the poet himself, we should want to hear it often, and should abandon any claim that it be immediately intelligible. If Werner Heisenberg right now were to present some of his thoughts in theoretical physics, moving in the direction of the cosmic formula for which he is searching, two or three people in the audi-ence, at most, would be able to follow him, while the rest of us would, without protest, abandon any claim that he be immediately intelligible.

Not so with the thinking that is called philosophy. That thinking is supposed to offer "worldly wisdom" and perhaps even be a "Way to the Blessed Life." But it might be that this kind of thinking is today placed in a position which demands of it reflections that are far removed from any useful, practical wisdom. It might be that a kind of thinking has become necessary which must give thought to matters from which even the painting and the poetry which we have mentioned and the theory of math-·ematical physics receive their determination. Here, too, we should then have to abandon any claim to immediate intelligibility. However, we should still have to· listen, because we must think what is inevitable, but preliminary.“ ( Heidegger, On Time and Being)

Philosophy has become in large part insular and self-referential. Written by philosophers for philosophers. With a specialized language designed only for the initiated, a cramped style of writing intended to ward off attack, overburdened by its own theory laden stranglehold on thinking and seeing, enamored by its linguistic prowess and the production of problems that only arise within this hermetically sealed sterile environment. It either laments the fact that it is regarded as irrelevant or takes this to be the sign of its superiority. — Fooloso4

Let’s name names. Who in particular do you have in mind? Here’s a starter list of philosophers, half of whom are actively writing, who I don’t associate with your characterization:

Derrida, Eugene Gendlin, Ken Gergen, Shaun Gallagher, Matthew Ratcliffe, Evan Thompson, Foucault, Deleuze, Rorty, Davidson, Joseph Rouse, Dan Zahavi,

The Self is just a ghost in the hive mind of society until it appears out of the fog of history in a cloak of righteousness, defying a world that's become evil. — frank

Perhaps the idea of a ‘collective psyche’ or ‘hive mind’ needs to be shelved along with that of an autonomous, identical self. In their place we can substitute the perspectival consistency of a point of view. Point of view is itself a multiplicity of selves that are produced within the collective called a person. The collective selves forming the changing person participate in the social group via the vantage of an ongoing perspective.

Husserl (who, in fact, thought that Dilthey was too much of a skeptical relativist and not interested in "ideal" meanings). — waarala

As it turns out, Dilthey’s historicism ends up
idealizing history in a way that Husserl avoids.

Interesting and vivid description. Can we 'un-linear' ourselves in practice? What does an account like this mean for day-to-day living and how can it be utilised in human thought? — Tom Storm

Eugene Gendlin’s Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning introduces an approach that applies this non-linear temporality to everyday life. His Focusing technique, incorporated into his psychotherapy practice, offers a way for us to go back and forth between the implicit intricacy of bodily-felt meaning and linguistic-scientific and logical conceptualization.

“Implying is not an occurring that will happen. It is not an occurring-not-yet. It does not occupy a different time-position than the occurring. Rather, one implying encompasses all three linear time positions, and does not occupy an additional linear time position of its own. (See A Process Model, IVB. This is a more intricate model of time. It includes a kind of “future” and a kind of “past” that are not linear positions. This time model can be reduced back to the liner model by considering just occurring-occurring-occurring as if it were cut off from implying.”

“The future that is present now is not a time-position, not what will be past later. The future that is here now is the implying that is here now. The past is not an earlier position but the now implicitly functioning past.”“......the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in”(p.37 )

If you're engaging with other strands of thought I believe you've got a responsibility to translate into a more neutral vocabulary. Hence, my request to de-Heidegger-ese your remarks. If they can only be articulated in Heideggerese it proves all those hermetic cult accusations quite true. — fdrake

Well, the OP is titled ‘Martin Heidegger’ and includes its own request: “I'd like to reserve this thread only for those who have at least read Being & Time”.

Heideggerian thought is best delivered in Heideggerese, Derrida’s thought is best articulated in Derrida-eze, Deleuze’s ideas are best conveyed in Deleuze-speak. This is a key difference between analytic -style and Continental-style philosophy. The former strives for a commonsense normative discursive vocabulary while the latter tries to say close to the text. This does not mean one should only use vocabulary from the author’s text, rather one should interweave exegesis closely with the original terminology.

Among members of the long-running Heidegger Circle, there is an endless debate between theologically-oriented Heideggerians and atheist Heideggerians concerning his relation to God:

Here’s some quotes to chew on:

Heidegger on God:

Heidegger, GA 73.2: 1000

13. Being and God

The pressing question of the relation of being and God should better restrain its fervor, and instead of demanding answers from me, one should ask themselves how far one is at peace with the esse— to say nothing of God and its comprehensibility.

But this prudence of thoughtful reflection is just what I've already insisted upon time and again for nearly a quarter century, in order to awaken this reflection.

Moreover — my thinking does not at all require this — I would be very happy to receive an exposition on this issue that people so easily and seriously propose as an objection against me; thereby we turn the assignment and order of responsibilities and paths around!

14. The Relation of Seyn and God

1. how “being”? As being of beings or beyng? Or beyng?

2. what is God? Which God? The God of the bible? Or the God of fundamental-theology — the “natural God”?

Heidegger, GA 73.2: 991

2. Of Being

The lightest of the slight is beyng.

The most entity-like of entities is God.

In beyng, the distinction between beings and being (in the sense of beingness) comes into its own.

Being means: presence.

Seyn never lets itself be identified with God. It also always remains doubtful whether the proposition, God is the most being-like of beings, speaks of God according to divinity.

As the most being-like, God is the first cause and the last goal of all beings. God is represented as the most being-like of beings, and so God essentially occurs out of beyng. Nevertheless, God is not primordially linked to beyng; because beyng occurs essentially not as cause and never as ground.

No. I think it's not useful as a way of explaining Heidegger's thought to people who don't already understand it. — fdrake

Tbh, I don’t know that there’s a good substitute. It all
depends on how serious one is about understanding what he’s getting at. One could work ones way up to his language via secondary sources, but there are risks, like taking Dreyfus as a solid authority on Heidegger. It was because of secondary sources that I delayed reading Being and Time, having convinced myself I already understood him. But those sources didn’t prepare me for the real thing, which was a life-changing experience for me.

Temporality is the unfolding of Being, of what is present and what remains concealed in and through the space or openness of time. It is not simply the linear sequence of moments from what was but no longer is to what is to what will be but is not yet.

In what is present and what is thought there remains something that does not yet come to presence and is not thought.

The future is present in the sense of possibilities. We are oriented to the future in that we plan and act and hope for what might come to be. — Fooloso4

You’re certainly not alone in interpreting Heideggerian temporality in those traditional terms.
For instance, Matthew Ratcliffe splits temporality into three separated time positions. Heideggerian Care is ”the way that we are anchored in the past (facticity), situated in the present (fallenness) and forever looking to the future (projection)”

Jan Slaby refers to his model of affect as ‘radical situatedness' and yet shares Ratcliffe's traditional, inauthentic understanding of temporality as causal dispositional state taking place in time, which is to say that, contrary to Heideggerian temporality, for Slaby time is divided into separate phases: the present as what is happening now, the future as what is not yet now, and the past as what is no longer now.

Slaby says factual situatedness

“is situatedness in a place and a time, synchronic and diachronic”. “Affectivity ultimately is time, namely the factual past in the form of sedimented remainders that infuse, burden, and potentially suffocate ongoing comportment.” “ The existential task of affective disclosure is circumscribed by this essential tension: A tension between what is already apprehended, articulated, and made sense of, and what is furthermore “out there,” beyond us, yet weighing on us and determining our situation in unforeseeable ways.”

For Heidegger, temporality is neither a separate past that burdens the present nor a generator of future possibilities as a hypothetical present that has not happened yet. Instead, it encompasses all three temporal ecstasies as the way in which I find myself changed. The future is not what has not yet happened , not empty possibilities in logical space. And the past is not represented memory but a having -been which arrives already changed by what occurs into it.
Putting it differently, the traditional approach is to treat past, present and future as having separate contents and the. line them up in a sequence. We could instead glom them onto each other and say that we have freed ourselves of linear time by making these three contents (past, present, future) simultaneous. But that is not what Heidegger is doing. He is letting the future lead the show. The future isn’t the not-yet , but a kind of scaffolding into which the present emerges. The having-been is already shaped and defined by how this scaffolding produces the present, so that is why Heidegger says the past comes to us via the future.

“The being-possible, which Da-sein always is existentially, is ... distinguished from empty, logical possibility and from the contingency of something objectively present, where this or that can "happen" to it. As a modal category of objective presence, possibility means what is not yet real and not always necessary. It characterizes what is only possible. Ontologically, it is less than reality and necessity. “(Being and Time p.135)

that kind of talk isn't productive for the initiated or the uninitiated — fdrake

Are you saying ‘that kind of talk’ represents a failure on Heidegger’s part to express himself clearly?