If we take this to extremes than one would imagine two phenomena or things: on one side is that which is in constant flux, changing so fast that it barely even could be said to assume any state for any given amount of time, it changes at the fastest/maximum rate possible.

A curiosity here is that the speed of light is fixed. And yet it is tha fastest rate at which something can "change" location (velocity). Could this mean there's some strange union between that which remains constant and that which changes the most rapidly? — Benj96

That’s not a curiosity, it’s built into the presuppositions of empiricism that make change subservient to identify. When we posit quantitative changes within a qualitative domain which is assumed as fixed throughout the changes in its components ( such as temperature or motion) , we are not really grappling in a fundamental way with the relation between identity and difference, stasis and change.

True change is qualitative change, a change in the sense of meaning of the category or concept (motion, temperature, mass) that we are using as a basis of measurement. Al” other changes amount to just slot rattling within a static and unchanging substrate. We force these static categories onto a world which is continually qualitatively changing beneath our sight.

The changes required, then, reduce to the fact that I do not actually think in the way that seems to me to be the case. Hence…..psychology on the one hand and cognitive neuroscience on the other. — Mww

Are you saying that cognitive neuroscience is misguided?
Today’s psychologists certainly seem to be sympathetic to Nietzsche’s views on the subject:

When I dissect the process expressed in the proposition ‘I think,' I get a whole set of bold claims that are difficult, perhaps impossible, to establish, – for instance, that I am the one who is thinking, that there must be something that is thinking in the first place, that thinking is an activity and the effect of a being who is considered the cause, that there is an ‘I,' and finally, that it has already been determined what is meant by thinking, – that I know what thinking is.”

The notion of the possibility of self makes no sense, insofar as the even the inception of it presupposes what is asked about — Mww

What changes would be required in your thinking about what the self is in order for the possibility of self to make sense? What if we imagined the self not as a metaphysical a priori but as a construction, just as the concept of a spatial object is a construction?

The weak version more modestly suggests that language influences thought and cognition but doesn't entirely determine it. It acknowledges that language plays a significant role in shaping our perceptions and understanding of the world, but also recognizes the influence of other factors such as culture, social context, and individual experiences — Wayfarer

If instead of defining language narrowly in terms of formal verbal concepts, we understand its basis in construing , and define construing as an ordinally organized system of discriminations we make on the basis of similarity and difference, then we can include basic perception along with conceptual thought as language-based. Then instead of claiming that it is only verbal langauge that shapes our understanding, we can recognize that the functionally integrated system of construals that acts to channel our ways of anticipating events is what shapes our expectations, and those of other animals , and that what verbal language adds is merely a more complex and condensed field of discriminations.

I see that such coexistence is not the case, under a certain set of preconditions. Consciousness of self as subject is very far from a cognition of self as object. — Mww

Would any notion of self be possible without the ability to experience self as object? That is to say, to recognize that there are other selves, of which the ‘I’ is just one more?

, an illusion happens at the level of perception, while a misinterpretation happens (obviously) at the level of interpretation — goremand

Many psychologists and philosophers today would argue that perception is interpretation all the way down.

No, it just says we're all self-centered. We are, but it's not an all-or-nothing condition — Vera Mont

What if we define ‘self’ in terms of self-consistency as a primary motive of behavior? This way, we can dump the dichotomy between selfish and selfless and instead see all behavior as self-centered. But in doing so we are not reverting back to Hobbes and modeling self as some kind of fortress behind whose walls we accumulate stuff and protect it from an outside. Instead, the drive for self-consistency is a drive to anticipate, to assimilate world on the basis of familiarity, recognizability, consistency with respect to our ongoing ways of understanding. This explains why we do ‘selfless’ things for those we relate closely with and act ‘selfishly’ toward those we are alienated from. No need for religious moralistic motives or reductionist biologistiic explanations positing ‘instinctive’ inclinations for altruism.

How about the idea that our individual hypotheses designed to anticipate events are validated or invalidated by the way those events transpire, with the catch being that the events we compare our hypotheses with are themselves derived from our constructions?
— Joshs

That sounds like denying there is a territory being mapped by our minds/brains, and to me it would seem a little silly to believe there is no territory being mapped, and yet also believe that you are something other than a figment of my imagination — wonderer1

It is denying that knowing is direct correspondence , representing or mirroring between knower and world. Scientific and other forms of knowing, far from being the epistemological representing of a reality independent of the knower, is the evolving construction of a niche. We are worldmakers rather than world-mirrorers, whose constructions are performances that pragmatically intervene in the world that we co-invent , changing it in ways that then talk back to us in a language responsive to how we have formulated our questions. This discursive account accords with the postmodern philosophy of science that Joseph Rouse espouses:

“…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. "The practice itself," however, already incorporates the material circumstances in and through which it is enacted. Practices are forms of discursive and practical niche construction in which organism and environment are formed and reformed together through an ongoing, mutually intra-active reconfiguration.”

Seems like a rather fatalistic view to think we can't know anything about reality independent of agreement with other people. Not to mention a little silly in light of the history of humans learning things, that we can to some degree look back and see. — wonderer1

How about the idea that our individual hypotheses designed to anticipate events are validated or invalidated by the way those events transpire, with the catch being that the events we compare our hypotheses with are themselves derived from our constructions? In other words, truth and falsity are relative to our constructed schemes, not some scheme-independent reality.

But the thing is, smoking is much less common now than it was 30 or 40 years ago.
— BC

I wonder if that has just been offset by vaping and now marijuana. That is, more alternatives. — Hanover

The key question is if rates of lung cancer are continuing to drop or whether they are starting to move in the wrong direction.

On the other hand affect without thought is not without significance, but is of no discursive significance. — Janus

If by discourse you mean language, isnt verbal discourse merely a formalized product of a more fundamental discursive process of inter-affection? And is there ever affect without thought? What is thinking if not construing on the basis of similarities and differences, and what is construing if not a way of being affected by events? Isnt the distinction between thought and feeling arbitrary and unjustified? When dispositions to act and acts themselves, being and becoming, feeling and intention, state and function, body and mind are treated as separately inhering states, then their relations are rendered secondary and arbitrary, requiring extrinsic causations to piece them together.

The question then is, what does affectivity "say" in the setting of being restored to its place?
— Astrophel

Affectivity alone does not say anything, it is just feeling — Janus

Reminds me of Heidegger's encapsulation of the long-standing Western attitude toward affect.

“Psychology, after all, has always distinguished between thinking, willing, and feeling. It is not by chance that it will always name feeling in the third, subordinate position. Feelings are the third class of lived experience. For naturally man is in the first place the rational living being.”

In opposition to this view, enactivists insist that cognitive and affective processes are closely interdependent, with affect, emotion and sensation functioning in multiple ways and at multiple levels to situate or attune the context of our conceptual dealings with the world , and that affective tonality is never absent from cognition. As Matthew Ratcliffe puts it, “moods are no longer a subjective window-dressing on privileged theoretical perspectives but a background that constitutes the sense of all intentionalities, whether theoretical or practical.”

Embodied theorists reverse the traditional scheme of prioritization of thought over feelings, by making affective inputs the condition of possibility of relevance and meaning in thought. It is through the feeling body that things show up as salient; an alteration in how the body feels is at the same time a shift in how the world appears and in how one relates to it.

As a solution, we are told that the mind cannot be reduced to matter, but if we introduce "form" into the equation, things are resolved. And this is where my total confusion begins.

If Jaworsky claims that it is logical to believe that a particle with 0 consciousness can form consciousness, how can he believe that a particle with 0 consciousness + form with 0 consciousness can create consciousness? — Eugen

For me the problem with Jaworsky’s model is the assumption that materiality, including such things as the nature of particles, can be separated from structural aspects, as if changes in structural organization don’t have any effect on what a particle is. As an example of an alternative to Jaworsky’s thinking, physicist and philosopher Karen Barad writes:

On my agential realist elaboration, phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of “observer” and “ob­served”; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting “components.” That is, phenomena are ontologically primitive relations—relations without preexisting relata. The notion of intra­-action (in contrast to the usual “interaction,” which presumes the prior existence of independent entities/relata) represents a profound conceptual shift. It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the “components” of phenomena become determinate and
that particular embodied concepts become meaningful.

Let me guess. That’s not the point of your issue with Jaworsky.

We neither live in a simulation nor a ‘real’ universe, if ‘real’ here means an environment unaffected in its meaning by linguistic and material interactions among humans and between humans and that world. We co-construct the sense of the real through social interaction as well as via individual perspectival practices. The real is enacted, not passively observed.
— Joshs

And yet what you don't know can still kill you — jorndoe

If you absolutely don’t know it, it can’t do anything to you because it has no existence from your perspective. How you know something determines the way you construe what it does to you.

It has recently been shown, rather convincingly [for me, at least,] that we cannot distinguish between living in a simulation and living in a 'real' universe. — Torus34

We neither live in a simulation nor a ‘real’ universe, if ‘real’ here means an environment unaffected in its meaning by linguistic and material interactions among humans and between humans and that world. We co-construct the sense of the real through social interaction as well as via individual perspectival practices. The real is enacted, not passively observed.

unfortunately the forum itself is not moderated,
— Darkneos

This site is moderated — Ludwig V

I believe @Darkneous was talking about
https://forum.philosophynow.org/
which, however, is also moderated.

only young people like Nietzsche's final period best — Srap Tasmaner

Which writings would you place within Nietzsche’s final period?

Do you accept the realism of the enactivist/pragmatist as having properly gone beyond Kant now? What we experience of the world is the self-centred reality of its affordances — apokrisis

yes, I think that’s right.

Kantian Transcendental Idealism is an outgrowth of Christianity. Do you think that people shouldn't outgrow Christianity? — wonderer1

They should. And realism should outgrow Kantian Idealism. But most forms of realism in fact haven’t outgrown it. That’s what the author I quoted meant when he said that Kant “lays out the theoretical topography of the forms of realism that still frames our understanding of philosophical questions concerning reality.”

He goes on:

“ On the standard view, idealism and realism are incompatible philosophical theo­ries. For Kant, however, they are not. He rather claims that transcendental idealism and empirical realism form a unity, i.e., only in combination they demonstrate that objects of external perception are real: Transcendental idealists hold that the objects as we represent them in space and time are appearances and not things-in-them­selves. This, according to Kant, implies empirical realism, i.e., the view that the rep­resented objects of our spatio-temporal system of experience are real beings outside us. “

Relative to the OP’s assertion that “this forum might give the impression that idealism is more popular among philosophers than it actually is”, I would make the opposite claim concerning Kantian Idealism. It is more popular among allegedly anti-Idealist empirical realists than they realize.

I wonder if you can assist me to better understand the issue of how language does (or does not) map onto the world and what the significance of this matter might be for philosophy. I have done some modest reading in this space but am curious what others think.

If we suppose that there no realist notion of language, what is it that language does when we attempt to describe reality? (I've generally held that language is metaphorical, but then what?) — Tom Storm

I would say that language doesn’t simply represent, describe or map onto a pre-existing world, it maps out a way to go on. When we use a word , it forms a bridge between the memory of our previous usage and the new circumstance that it helps to create. To name something is to help bring it into existence as this freshly relevant event.

It I say there is a cat on the mat as a real fact, I hope to get away with offering that single word “cat” and thus by implication eliminating every other interpretation you might have had.

There is no tank, or armadillo, or Empire State Building, on the mat instead. You can be sure of that. An infinity of alternative realities are being dismissed by my plain speaking realism. But by the same token, all those unactualised realities now seem confusingly like “actual possibilities” — apokrisis

It seems to me that when I say there is a cat on the mat,
there is more that must be understood besides a fact of the matter; namely the sense of the matter itself. Is what I mean by cat and mat the same as what you understand them to mean? This is especially pertinent if you deny that there is a cat on the mat. We might have to investigate to what extent what I intend to convey is compatible with the way you are interpreting my utterance. In traditional logical conceptions of the meaning of words, when a person employs a concept they have simply embraced a set of objects and ignored all others, the way a dictionary does.
But this isn’t how people use words. The actual use of a world creates a distinction not between it and an indiscriminate infinity of alternative realities, but between it and contrasting meanings that are specifically RELEVANT to the context in which the word is being used.

This forum might give the impression that idealism is more popular among philosophers than it actually is. The Philpapers survey says:

External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?
Accept or lean toward: non-skeptical realism 760 / 931 (81.6%)
Other 86 / 931 (9.2%)
Accept or lean toward: skepticism 45 / 931 (4.8%)
Accept or lean toward: idealism 40 / 931 (4.3%) — wonderer1

One problem with this survey is that modern realism is itself an outgrowth of Kantian Transcendental Idealism.

“… “Critique of pure Reason” is the founding document of realism… Kant not only invents the now common philosophical term ‘realism’. He also lays out the theoretical topography of the forms of realism that still frames our understanding of philosophical questions concerning reality.” (Dietmar Heidemann)

There are of course other forms of Idealism than Kant’s, so you might want to specify what you have in mind.

Nietzsche had his own theories how the world functions. I think his extremely cynical views represent biologism. Or that the world becomes "fatally" ordered or disordered through the battle of strong and weak ones. — waarala

Deleuze, Foucault and Heidegger were profoundly sly influenced by Nietzsche’s ideas. None of them would label his views biologism. Instead, in their readinga he offers an overturning of Platonic metaphysics by placing difference as prior to identity.

But forgery and fakery are only possible if there is an original - so how does this all work? — Tom Storm

Why not forgery and fakery all the way down? As Nietzsche asks:

“Why shouldn't the world that is relevant to us – be a fiction? And if someone asks: “But doesn't fiction belong with an author?” – couldn't we shoot back: “Why? Doesn't this ‘belonging' belong, perhaps, to fiction as well? Aren't we allowed to be a bit ironic with the subject, as we are with the predicate and object? Shouldn't philosophers rise above the belief in grammar? With all due respect to governesses, isn't it about time philosophy renounced governess-beliefs?” – The world with which we are concerned is false, i.e., is not fact but fable and approximation on the basis of a meager sum of observations; it is "in flux," as something in a state of becoming, as a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for--there is no "truth" (1901/1967 Will to Power.)

Overturning Platonism, then, means denying the primacy of original over copy, of model over image; glorifying the reign of simulacra and reflections.” (Difference and Repetition)
— Joshs

That's an interesting call to arms but I guess it's hard for most of us to apprehend how we can do this? Is it an act of will? Pardon my literalism but in glorifying the reign of simulacra, does my Picasso print become equal to the one hanging in the museum — Tom Storm

It’s not as act of will , it’s an act of insight, understanding that there is no such thing as an original. It’s only as a contrivance, a sleight of hand, an illusion that we refer contingent particulars back to propositional or axiomatic forms, universals, foundations. Ever see Orson Wells’ film ‘F for Fake’?

Lloyd Gleeson, who is one of the leading academics in this area, says in his most recent book Platonism vs Naturalism, that Platonism is philosophy, in that it delineates the specific questions and subject matter unique to philosophy as distinct from natural science. I don't expect that will win anyone over, though ;-) (See Edward Feser, Join the Ur-Platonist Alliance!) — Wayfarer

I’m with Deleuze here:

“The whole of Platon­ism is dominated by the idea of drawing a distinction between 'the thing itself' and the simulacra. Difference is not thought in itself but re­lated to a ground, subordinated to the same and subject to mediation in mythic form. Overturning Platonism, then, means denying the primacy of original over copy, of model over image; glorifying the reign of simulacra and reflections.” (Difference and Repetition)

Are you arguing for some kind of moral relativism? Do you hold that "Women must be submissive to men" and "Homosexuality is evil" are norms some societies can morally advocate and enforce or what?

I can make sense of why men would selfishly cooperate to impose moral norms such as "women must be submissive to men". That is easy to understand. But making sense of it in terms of why they did it has nothing to do with its morality. — Mark S

Oh yeah, I’m a super-duper moral relativist. Which doesn’t mean I don’t believe that there isnt some sort of progress in moral behavior. What it means is that I don’t think that moral progress should be thought of in terms of the yardstick of conformity to any universal norms, whether religious, social or biological in origin. “ Women must be submissive to men” and “Homosexuality is evil” are immoral to the same extent as Newtonian physics, Lamarckism biology or Skinnerian psychology are considered inadequate explanations of the empirical phenomena they attempt to organize in comparison with more recent theories.

I suggest that labeling behavior as selfish or lazy is precisely failing to make sense of another’s motives. It’s a substitute for doing due diligence in understanding how things seemed to the person at the same that they acted.

"Women must be submissive to men" and "Homosexuality is evil" are common parts of traditional moralism. Now I can explain why people thought they were moral but since they contradict morality's function of solving the cooperation/exploitation dilemma, I know they are immoral. — Mark S

Did you come from a religious background by any chance? You don’t see the link between your wrapping this narrative in the cloak of science and religious norms of conduct?

Failing to understand why people’s attempts to get along with others fall short of your standards can lead you in one of two directions. You can either experiment with your construction of the puzzling and seemingly ‘immoral’ behavior of a group or individual until you come up with a more effective way to understand why it represented the best moral thinking for therm at the time, or you can blame them for your inability to make sense of their actions , slap a label of immorality on it and try and knock some sense into them. One can do this just as easily within a scientific as a religious justification. Instead of blaming the evil intent of an autonomously free willing subject, we blame forces outside of the control of the person, either inner demons like biological drives, instincts, incentives, or we blame social forces.

Ten people can enthusiastically agree on the importance of cooperation and the need to avoid exploitation, and yet each of them will construe the sense of these concepts in different ways, and your universalistic template for cooperation flattens and conceals those different senses. As a result, the behavior of some of those ten people may very well appear immoral to you.

What's your essential perspective on moral 'foundations'? — Tom Storm

I believe that moral reasoning originates in the individual’s attempts to make sense of their experiences of social relations, and at the core of this is the aim to anticipate behavior. Guilt is a key element of moral feeling, and the personal construction of guilt involves the assessment that we are responsible for a breach of intimacy or trust with another person or group. Culturally normative standard of morality are abstractions derived from these personal assessments. The belief in universal moral foundations is one way to try to explain how individuals end up alienated from others, but it is a kind of approach that makes morality dependent on blame, finger-pointing, the notion of culpability and reprehensiveness. I think this is an inadequate way of understanding behavior thar deviates from our expectations. One can have a morality devoid of blame , culpability and punishment, a morality not aimed at achieving conformity to norms but instead an ‘audacious’ ought that helps us to reconstrue what we cannot deny.

My central point has been that moral norms for bad cooperation are bad because they exploit others such as "women must be submissive to men" and "homosexuality is evil". It is bad cooperation because it acts opposite to the function of morality - solving cooperation/exploitation problems. Bad cooperation creates cooperation problems rather than solving them.

Harming children would usually be included under exploitation as bad behavior. For example, harming children to benefit others.

But if harming children is merely a side effect of having no moral regard for children, we can agree that is evil, but the reasons for being evil might better be found in traditional moral philosophy. Science tells us important things about morality but cannot tell us everything about morality. — Mark S

Does that satisfy you or does it seem to you that it is just repackaging traditional moralism in new garb, as if there is such a thing as “ universal morality” , or that claiming that evolution wires us to be cooperative doesn’t just push back the question posed by social norms into the lap of biology.
For one thing, it passes the buck on the question of why we desire to cooperate with each other. It’s because “Evolution told us to”.

The only person presuming that science tells us what we imperatively ought to do (the only person committing the naturalistic fallacy) is you. You alone are making this error.

I have repeatedly emphasized that this science, like the rest of science, can only supply instrumental oughts and is silent on ultimate goals. — Mark S

Apparently Hilary Putnam also makes this ‘error’. Putnam makes the argument that if the basis of our valuative, ethical judgements is an evolutionary adaptation shared by other animals then it is as though we are computers programmed by a fool ( selection pressure) operating subject to the constraints imposed by a moron (nature). Putnam says “One cannot discover laws of nature unless one brings to nature a set of a priori prejudices which is not hopelessly wrong.” And those prejudices cannot themselves be a product of blind evolution.

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

y. We might be able to connect him with the science of 2070. — frank

Could be.

What an astounding assertion. Do they have any predictions about which century this update will be downloaded? — frank

Astounding? Not when it comes to biology, neuroscience or cognitive science

The newer naturalized models are already out there.Lynn Margulis’ work on symbiosis and the new synthesis updates biological thinking, and as far as physics is concerned, writers like Karen Barad, a physicist and philosopher, and Michel Bitbol, interpret quantum field theory in terms that move away from the old naturalism.

There's a problem with trying to go from Merleau-Ponty to any of the hard sciences. There's just no bridge from his observations about what we can and can't separate, and biology, or its scientific mother, physics. Science starts with a methodological naturalism where analysis is built-in. There's no roo — frank

Science starts from whatever metaphysics informs it at the time, which is why there is no such thing as ‘science’ as some specific methodology that encompasses all eras of empiricism. If there is no bridge between science and Mwrleau-Ponty, it is because the particular brand of naturalism that a science is in thrall to makes no room for Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. Varela, Thompson, Gallagher, Petitot and others claim phenomenology can be naturalized
once we transform and update our thinking about scientific naturalism so as to accommodate it.

So there is a faultline in the human psyche that just isn't properly realised even within mainstream psychology and cognitive neuroscience. It is only in sociology and anthropology does this extra level of situatedness simply seem the bleeding obvious — apokrisis

Could you given an example from the work of a specific sociologist or anthropologist illustrating this extra level of situatedness missing from mainstream psychology? Can you think of any non-mainstream approaches in psychology that realize this faultline? What about embodied enactivist accounts that, following Merleau-Ponty, make intersubjectivity primary? For instance, Shaun Gallagher writes:

“…intersubjective (social and cultural) factors already have an effect on our perception and understanding of the world, even in the immediacy of our embodied and instrumental copings with the environment.”

I can think of no examples of metaphysics becoming science. — Janus

Metaphysics becomes science in the same way poetry becomes music or literature becomes dance, through a shift in modality of expression.

If consciousness is strictly a bodily function, we'd have to explain how it is that the body doesn't adapt, but the mind does — frank

You haven’t mentioned affect, emotion, feeling and mood. These are considered bodily by embodied approaches to cognition, and there is no consciousness that is devoid of affect. “Cognition is constrained, enabled and structured by a background of emotion-perception correlations, that manifest themselves as a changing background of implicit representations of body states.”(Ratcliffe 2002)

t the interface of past and future is the present. I'm not clear what you are saying different? I think I have made the time difference fairly clear. A cat sits by the mouse hole waiting for a mouse; there is anticipation but it is now. there is memory, but it is now. Now there is the acorn, now there is a sound, now there is the acorn. Never do you get the story of the pursuit of the acorn, an interruption and the return to the acorn - that is the human narrative, and resides nowhere in the squirrel. — unenlightened

The interface of past and future is past, present and future together as an indissociable structural unity . If you try and split off the present from retention and protention, the present vanishes. There is never just this acorn right now in this moment for the squirrel. The present acorn is only what it is right now in the context of what it just was and what the squirrel expects it to be. This reaching into the past and future is inseparable from the immediate ‘now’, and makes it possible for living systems to be goal-driven anticipative sense-makers. This is a central principle of time consciousness in phenomenology. If memory and anticipation are ‘now’ for an animal, this is just as true for a human being.

A non-linguistic animal cannot form a narrative identity; they learn things - not to eat the yellow snow, but they never form the identity "I don't like yellow snow", they just avoid it when they see it. So they do not live in time, psychologically. they are always just here and now, with whatever they know, which is nothing of themselves — unenlightened

I would argue that a non-linguistic animal lives in the interface of past, present and future just as humans do. Watch a squirrel be interrupted in its pursuit of an acorn by a stray sound, and then return to its goal. This reorientation is only possible because animals interpret the present though a richly integrated web of memories that project expectations for the future The present ‘now’ is the interaction between this remembered history and anticipations that point to the future. It’s not that animals live more in the ‘now’ than humans, but the reinterpreted and reconstructed past out of which their anticipations deposit their ‘now’ is less complexly organized than in humans. But this is not solely due to linguistic narratives. Pre-linguistic infants are also goal-oriented anticipatory sense-makers. As far as self -knowledge is concerned, the self is just an ongoing correlation of events taking place in time. The idea of self as identity is just a construct, useful
for different purposes in different situations. For instance, correlating the changes in the position of perceived objects
in relation to the movement of one’s body produces the construct of self as body , as zero point of interactions with an environment A hawk has this pragmatic construct of self as bodily zero point. This allows it to maneuver so precisely in flight.

Here, Butler does not refer back to Foucault’s discursive formation of socially constructed shared pattern of thinking and behaving. Instead, she implicitly invokes the decisive role of the global digital medium. Accordingly, as Deleuze points out in ‘The Postscript of control society,’ we should discern the bits and flows of data that make up dividuals and data banks, always passing beneath the individual. The newest techniques of power permeate the patterns of desires, ideas, and imaginations that constitute our subjectivity and agency — Number2018

That’s interesting, thanks. So you think that Deleuze is in closer accord with Butler on this matter than he is with Foucault?