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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And you’re first on the list.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's a fascinating point. — Tom Storm

I think you’re a natural-born Pragmatist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We need to add a third option.

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

Evan Thompson argues:

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

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

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

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

Does this mean something? — hypericin

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

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

Is this ever just about consciousness? — Tom Storm

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

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


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

No, it is not. — Number2018

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

So then it is the eternal return of the same.

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

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

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

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

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

Protevi writes:

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

( John Protevi)

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

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

I read Chalmers as breaking from the Cartesian theater where the duality of a first person being separated from the rest of the movie is the explanation itself. ..The question is not whether we are only physical beings but whether the methods to establish what is only physical will explain experience. Chalmers is introducing a duality that is recognized through the exclusion of a phenomena instead of accepting the necessity for an agency beyond phenomena. — Paine

I like Zahavi’s critique of Chalmers’ position:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not so obvious.

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

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

Science and technology became servant to money and forgot its original purpose. — TheMadMan

I was just curious if you thought that the pace of progress in science has slowed, apart from its relation to business.

What if this approach to the smaller and smaller is the problem of modernity with the advent of science and technology?
What if our alienation with the creative comes because we have sacrificed the holistic approach? — TheMadMan

By this do you mean we sacrifice innovation in philosophy to innovation in science and technology, or that progress in science and technology also suffer?

I am expressing this idea and I am looking for people who are ready to jump of this train of practice or people who have thought about this as well and whom have any insight into how this can be expanded. — obscurelaunting

Could you give a small list of the philosophers who you think represent the leading edge of ideas? This would provide a sense of when and where you think the innovation stalled.

According to Heidegger, the Being of entities can only be grasped in the present through the awareness that something appearing 'here and now' has the temporal structure of a 'making present' of something. So, it is only through temporality the meaning of Being can become articulated. Yet, in our current environment, the totality of pre-calculated and pre-programmed situations precisely targets the moment of 'here and now'.
There is no more future; it has already arrived as an overwhelming aggregate of pre-formed retentions. There is no past because it is separated from individual memory and "settled" in the collective digitalized network. Only the present remains, that is, the continuing time of perception, in which the perceiver cannot distinguish himself from the perceived. — Number2018

Is this from Baudrillard? Doesn’t sound like Deleuze. You seem to read Deleuze through a critical theory lens. Are you familiar with Todd May?

Then why do you consistently ignore my replies to you? — baker

Didn’t realize I was doing that. Usually when I don’t respond it’s because I dont have anything useful to add.

I also think that those comments in favour of heated conflict were based on a basic misunderstanding. Even if there are some people who enjoy that kind of thing, it doesn’t mean it always results in a productive debate, one that is worth anyone else’s while to join or to follow. In fact, abusiveness produces, at the very best, low quality debates that revolve around who misquoted whom, who took the other out of context, and so on. — Jamal

Of course hostility doesnt always produce a productive debate. If we are dealing with an opponent who is being ‘uncivil’ we have more than one option. Certainly we can simply end the discussion. This is a good idea if our opponent’s hostility triggers our own anger and defensiveness, leading us to assume they are incapable or unwilling to engage in logical argument.
Another option depends on our ability to resist having our buttons pushed by others’ attacks and instead recognizing their hostility as exasperation over a response they disagree with but don’t know how to effectively unpack. My last exchange with Bartricks is a case in point. I responded to his OP, my response frustrated and threatened him because he disagreed with it but couldnt break it down to points he could focus on calmly.
His obnoxious comment to my response ‘got my competitive juices flowing, not because he angered me, but because I saw beyond his anger to his exasperation, and saw that as a challenge to myself to formulate my arguments fully enough to give him an entry point into my reasoning. And that’s exactly what happened. He essentially acknowledged a point I was making, albeit reluctantly and in a backhanded way.

In sum, hostility on the part of someone I’m engaged in debate with get me motivated not because I want to ratchet up the ill feelings , but on the contrary, because it tells me there’s a large gap between their thinking and mine , and it’s a valuable challenge to me figure out how I might close this gap by building a bridge between their perspective and mine in a way that won’t trigger them. Usually when we focus on the other’s ‘incivility’ we have already decided that such a task is impossible , that our opponent is irrational, uninterested in learning from us , closed-minded. And we’re usually wrong.

I’ve debated with a majority of those who have been banned from this site, been insulted by most of them , and also achieved productive dialogue with each of them.

So as I see it, it’s not just a matter of hurt feelings and thin skins, as those commentators seemed to imply. It’s about how enjoyable, productive, substantive, and welcoming a debate is. — Jamal

I don’t think one can separate the hurt feelings from the enjoyability and productiveness of a debate. I achieved enjoyable and productive debates with people that others here failed to do. My point is that this is not entirely a function of the incivility behavior of one participant in a debate. We have more power than we realize to produce something productive from it.

↪believenothing

What exactly are you being distracted from that you don't want to be distracted from? — punos

Participating in the OP he started?

this premise misses what Benjamin and Adorno have in common with postmodernist thinkers. They agree that we are impacted by the sublime that has always remained unthought and unrepresentable. — Number2018

Since for Kelly, time doesn’t double back on itself , and therefore no event repeats itself, even the most predictably intelligible experience introduces an absolutely new aspect. We never fully own what we know; otherness and alterity belongs to temporalization.
And yet, as Heidegger argues, events always mater to us, are relevant and significant. This is because a pre-understanding operates to make the world familiar to us at some level. This pre-understanding is that frame , that totality of relevance, that makes the world
recognizable to us even as it contributes a foreign element each moment.

I sincerely hope neither of us is bothered by this exchange. Im just goofing on ya a bit cuz you think Barticks was a worthwhile poster. You’re begging to be made fun of there, like the flat earther website that says they have members all around the globe — DingoJones

I’m just pissed off because I wasted half an hour writing a response to his ‘greatness’ OP and now he won’t answer it.

Note here how it’s commonalities of discourses that defined the orientation under which the theory was interpreted and integrated into personal contructs. The directionality of travel had already been established by the prevailing (sub)cultural context in a way the various groups of intellectuals were clearly not aware of; otherwise, they would have had the means to challenge their assumptions! — Baden

Aren’t we talking here about the relation between freedom and determinism, the fact that the freedom of our ideas is constrained by the limits of our construct system?

“… man can enslave himself with his own ideas and then win his freedom again by reconstruing his life. This is, in a measure, the theme upon which this book is based.

Ultimately a man sets the measure of his own freedom and his own bondage by the level at which he chooses to establish his convictions. The man who orders his life in terms of many special and inflexible convictions about temporary matters makes himself the victim of circumstances. Each little prior conviction that is not
open to review is a hostage he gives to fortune; it determines whether the events of tomorrow will bring happiness or misery. The man whose prior convictions encompass a broad perspective, and are cast in terms of principles rather than rules, has a much better chance of discovering those alternatives which will lead eventually to his emancipation.”

Can’t it be the case that we are aware of the framework though which we are interpreting events, but that awareness is not by itself enough to allow us or require us to dump that framework in favor of another? After all, reconstruing is hard and frightening work, and our current framework may be working perfectly well for us.

I would argue that we always know implicitly what that overarching framework is that guides our motives and understandings, even if not at a level we can verbalize. Think about how the construct is organized in a hierarchical manner. If we want to subsume someone else’s system we can start by finding out the contrast poles to key core constructs. For instance, loyalty will have a unique contrary pole that may differ significantly from what the term means for us. In this way every construct is linked to every other such that the superordinate level defines and constrains the subordinate. We mustn’t confuse our inability to articulate in words the contrast poles of our core constructs with their being invisible or unconscious to us.

Telling someone their most cherished values are imports from their culture is not seeing how they USE these constructs, and that their defense of the importance and logic of these constructs must be taken on its own terms. This logic is not parasitic on some social discursive logic external to them but is primary.

Besides, you like it when I call you an idiot. Gets your juice flowing, right? — DingoJones

Doesn’t bother me. Always nice to learn what buttons set someone off.

So he made coherent arguments
— Joshs

No, he didn't. — Banno

According to DG he did. Otherwise how would he know they were false?

The only reason he lasted as long as he did was because of idiots like you who thought they found a sparring part er rather than a troll with a personality disorder.
— DingoJones

[whisper]Hey Joshs, I don't think DJ likes you.[/whisper] — T Clark

Have you noticed that those most eager to jump on the
‘pummel Batricks’ bandwagon share some of his uncivil
tendencies? Maybe a bit of projection going on here? Just remember what goes around comes around.

His “interesting” ideas we're all based on the same basic fallacy he couldnt recognize. — DingoJones

So he made coherent arguments that you were convinced were always incorrect? Sounds like a typical TPL interchange.

The only reason he lasted as long as he did was because of idiots like you who thought they found a sparring part er rather than a troll with a personality disorder. — DingoJones

Never underestimate what you can learn from trolls with a personality disorder. Or what you can teach them.