he moves away from a focus on an (abstract) endpoint ( — Antony Nickles

I don’t see an abstract endpoint in Being and Time. Thinking Being fundamentally, primordially, is not stepping out of time and history , or beginning before history. Thinking Being thematic , making it a problem rather than a given , is historical through and through. This means that my thinking of Being exists. To exist is to surpass, to be is to be in transition.” “ex-sists, is an exiting from itself in the essence of its being, yet without abandoning itself.” Being isn’t a concept in history. It is history itself as historicizing.

pointing to more practical (ethical) ways of being, such as: our letting being draw us in, listening before jumping to naming/judging, and other approaches which may make the dead word alive again in our voice, our self able to be uncompleted. — Antony Nickles

What happens when we don’t let being draw us in, when we don’t listen before jumping to naming/ judging? Is the word dead then? Heidegger isn’t arguing that we break away from the pragmatic relation of heedful relevance the world has for us under such circumstances. It is impossible to do because a totality of relevance is always already implied and intrinsic to any experience, regardless of our mode of comportment toward the world. So it’s not a question of experiencing the world pragmatically or not , but of whether or not we are aware of this always underlying mattering.

“ Acts of directly taking something, having something, dealing with it “as something,” are so original that trying to understand anything without employing the “as” requires (if it's possible at all) a peculiar inversion of the natural order. Understanding something without the “as”—in a pure sensation, for example—can be carried out only “reductively,” by “pulling back” from an as-structured experience. And we must say: far from being primordial, we have to designate it as an artificially worked-up act. Most important, such an experience is per se possible only as the privation of an as-structured experience. It occurs only within an as-structured experience and by prescinding from the “as”— which is the same as admitting that as-structured experience is primary, since it is what one must first of all prescind from."(Logic,The Question)

maybe he misses the mark early on in taking Being as a replacement for a static self, as Marx does (or a reading of Marx does) in skipping over the revelation that we are produced (by means we may not control), to a belief that we can get to a point of being unproduced, rather than choosing or going against the means- — Antony Nickles

But we are not simply produced. Dasein projects a world that it can be surprised by. We don’t simply interject or internalize from an outside. Our own past projects a future that our present occurs into. What occurs occurs into an implying. This is what give Dasein its pragmatic self-intimacy , it’s ‘for the sake of- in order to’ .

maybe Heidegger's way to ethics is bringing historicity (temporality?) to our ontology to fight against dogmatism, — Antony Nickles

I agree here

the act, the fight, the considering--not "falling prey", getting "caught up", "cut off"--is of greater consequence than the knowledge of Being; that the explicit hides the implicit, as well as that intuition must become "tuition" — Antony Nickles

But the knowledge of being is always an existing , a transit , We always already understand Being in that we always are projecting ourselves into a future. Understanding is this forehaving that is affected by what it projects itself into.

reply="khaled;553477"]

Most interpretations of QM as far as I understand don’t have it be that electrons are “really somewhere” bumping into each other, but what is “really there” is quantum soup, until something takes a look, then it collapses, ontologically, to electrons bumping into each other — khaled

I don’t know what “constituted by a subject” means. We don’t decide where the electron appears, but without observation, there is no electron, just a quantum wave (or quantum soup as I like to call it). — khaled

Constituted by a subject means all we first perceive are
undetermined phenomena with no particular order or pattern to them , just sensations ( not yet colors or sounds , since these are already more advanced constructions), that never repeat themselves. Then we gradually come to see a flow of events , such as the changing perspectives of a visual scene , as interlocked , and we come to hypothesize these correlated events as aspects of a single self-same object. But it doesn’t become a stable ‘it’ for us until we correlate its changing appearances with the movement of our body in relation to it , how it changes predictably in response to the movement of our head, eyes , body. It only becomes an empirical object when we correlate our private experience of it with that of other persons, who have their own vantage on it. Then our own perspective of it changes to just an aspect of ‘the’ empirical object for all of us. As you can see, from this vantage there is. thing primordial about an electron . It is a highly complex concept.


And this is an object than no one actually sees. It is an abstraction, just as the personal object for me is an abstraction composed of a flow of events. We never actually attain the ‘object’ , not because the thing in itself is out there inaccessible to us, but because there never was a thing in itself, just the appearances that are construed by us in more and more complex and abstract ways through intersubjective science. This is what I mean by the electron being a construction. It is founded in our subjective constitution of objectness, coupled and elaborated by our intersubjective rendering of it as empirical object. Just as the empirical object is an abstraction, so is the space time within which such abstractions ‘move’ . Displacement in space only makes sense if we presume a self-identical object.

So it seems to me that qm doesn’t want to get rid of the ‘real’ space time grid and the concept of movement as displacement in space. It can’t do this because it still believes in the primordiality of the self-identical object , even if that object needs us to look at it in order for it to appear.

Sloppy use of terms. Not you, me.

against what is Heidegger arguing, and for what purpose? — Antony Nickles

This is a good question. Let me elaborate on this and then see if that helps us figure out what to do with the word ‘ethics’ in regard to Heideggerian Time.Heidegger lays out the ‘equiprimoridal’relationship between Temporality, Care , Attunement and Understanding , showing how all experiences disclose
themselves as belonging to Dasein via heedful circumspective relevance ( how they matter to us in our pragmatic functioning). Then he introduces various modes of comportment , and how they modify Dasein’s way of being in the world. He introduces the distinction between authentic and inauthentic models of comportment, and within the inauthentic he explains how average everydayness , propositional statements and empirical science emerges as impoverished modes of experiencing. For instance , about average everyday discourse he says that in the mode of average everydayness Dasein disguises, covers over, conceals, obscures its genuine self, a genuine understanding, an originary and primordial way of appropriating the matter, “getting to the heart of the matter,” primordially genuine relations of being toward the world, toward Mit-dasein, toward being-in itself. Similarly, he describes the objectivity characteristic of present to hand thinking as flattened, confused , leveled down , etc. This forms the basis of his later critique of technological thinking and Sartre’s humanism. So it seems that we see the ethical bound up Dasein’s tendency to fall
prey to the world , to get caught up in beings and lose sight of , and cut itself off from , the richer totality of relevance that underlies but is obscured by such modes. Perhaps one could say that if there is an ethical injunction for Heidegger it is to make explicit what is usually only implicit in one’s relation to time.

displaying the behaviorism of pragmatism and psychologism of the latter Wittgenstein. — Shawn

He wasnt strictly speaking a behaviorist though.

From Wittgenstein’s biography:


Those problems centred on the issue between those who assert and those who deny the existence of mental processes. Wittgenstein wanted to do neither; he wanted to show that both sides of the issue rest on a mistaken analogy:

“How does the philosophical problem about mental processes and states and about behaviourism arise? - The first step is the one that altogether escapes notice. We talk of processes and states and leave their nature undecided. Sometime perhaps we shall know more about them - we think. But that is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter. For we have a defmite concept of what it means to learn to know a process better. (The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent.) - And now the analogy which was to make us understand our thoughts falls to pieces. So we have to deny the yet uncomprehended process in the yet unexplored medium. And now it looks as if we had denied mental processes. And naturally we don't want to deny them.“

watched Fight Club a couple of nights ago and I enjoyed it a lot less than I did 20 years ago. I'd interpret the question "What is Fight Club like?" as meaning my current view on it, which isn't what it was like to me 20 years ago. "What it is like to watch Fight Club" isn't a thing; "What it is like for me to watch Fight Club" isn't even a thing. In fact, "What it was like for me to watch Fight Club the last time" isn't even *a* thing, it's lots and lots of events. — Kenosha Kid

Is the same true of the experience of a cup? Is there an intrinsic meaning of fight club , one that transcends time and context? Even for the author, screenwriter and actors? What about the physical recordings of the movie? Don’t they maintain their intrinsic self-sameness over time? But even so , their meaning must be experienced by a subject. Is my experience of the cup
the same as yours, or the same as my experience
of it a moment ago? Is the cup different than Fight Club? Is there an intrinsically self-identical object surviving the myriad changing perceptual experiences of it? This is what science tells us. It defines for us objects that move in space time that are what they are in themselves apart from their interaction with us, apart from the purposes they serve for us, apart from any of the varying contexts in which they appear for us. There is no doubt this way of describing the world has its uses, but can we then go back from the abstraction of the mathematical object to the original perceiving and claim to found the latter on the former? Or is the object in geometric space-time a useful but impoverished derivative of the acts of intentional constitution that produce such idealized abstractions as the mathematical object?

Heidegger's insight is that philosophy is not initial--though Emerson's and Wittgenstein's admonition is to start (facing) correctly--nor is philosophy fundamental, but he urgently calls us to wait for it, it's secrets and discoveries, nonetheless. — Antony Nickles

Maybe you could elaborate what you mean by fundamental. Heidegger’s does make his brand of philosophy fundamental
ontologically , as the ground of Being.

“ Philosophy is universal phenomeno­logical ontology, beginning with a hermeneutic of Da-sein which, as an
analytic of existence, has made fast the guideline for all philosophical questioning at the point where it arises and to which it returns. Of course, this thesis must not be taken dogmatically, but as a formulation of the fundamental problem still "veiled": Can ontology be grounded ontologically or does it also need for this an ontic foundation, and which being must take over the function of this foundation?”(Being and Time)

Ok. So, what's understanding? Your entire post contains nothing about what understanding is despite beating around the bush for two paragraphs. :smile: — TheMadFool

I’ve spent the past two years writing about the ideas of five phenomenologists, each of which has their own account of understanding. But if I were to pick out what each of these accounts has in common, I would say that they all reject the notion that truth is correspondence with an independent reality. Instead, they agree
that the world never doubles back on itself, it is a process of incessant change. Since events are unique , only occur once and never double back on themselves , the world would be a ceaseless chaos if we weren’t able to discern ongoing pattens, themes and consistencies in this incessant flow. What the subject brings to experience is a way of anticipating events that replicate , (but never duplicate) , what has previously been experienced. This is what awareness does from the most primordial
level of perception on up to the most complex cognitions.
Understanding , then , is the meeting of our system of expectations with a new event that is successfully recognized on certain dimensions of similarity with respect to our anticipatory apparatus. This is different from understanding as representation because the event that we successfully construe has no independent existence apart from this meeting or intersection between anticipation and what appears to it. Even what invalidates out anticipations radically belongs to the scheme we bring to bear in interpreting it.

all (apart from other animal) knowledge is human knowledge and thus cannot, by definition, be said to be independent of the human, and that there can be no absolute sentient being-independent knowledge; we are entitled, indeed bound, to say that much. — Janus

This is a reasonable summary of neo-Kantianism , or representational realism. I’d really love your take on this paper , which critiques this approach from a phenomenological perspective:

https://www.academia.edu/34265366/Brain_Mind_World_Predictive_coding_neo_Kantianism_and_transcendental_idealism

Here’s a snippet:

“For Husserl, physical nature makes itself known in what appears perceptually. The very idea of defining the really real reality as the unknown cause of our experience, and to suggest that the investigated object is a mere sign of a distinct hidden object whose real nature must remain unknown and which can never be apprehended according to its own determinations, is for Husserl nothing but a piece of mythologizing (Husserl 1982: 122). Rather than defining objective reality as what is there in itself, rather than distinguishing how things are for us from how they are simpliciter in order then to insist that
the investigation of the latter is the truly important one, Husserl urges us to face up to the fact that our access to as well as the very nature of objectivity necessarily involves both subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Indeed, rather than being the antipode of objectivity, rather than constituting an obstacle and hindrance to scientific knowledge, (inter)subjectivity is for Husserl a necessary enabling condition.

Husserl embraces a this-worldly conception of objectivity and reality and thereby dismisses the kind of skepticism that would argue that the way the world appears to us is compatible with the world really being completely different. “

In what sense could we be said to be not separate from, for example, galaxies which are yet to be discovered? This would only make sense conceptually if a universal or collective mind were posited in which all the things and events we call the universe are thoughts or imaginings that our own experiences, thoughts and imaginings are "mirroring". In this view the essence of things would be ideal and physicality itself a manifestation of this ideality. — Janus

We have to get away from the whole notion of understanding and truth as mirroring , correspondence , representation, adequation to ‘ what is’ independently of us. Instead, we have to conceive of knowing as production , enaction. We don’t discover the world, we enact it. Let’s take a step back from empirical observation and start from the model of an organism
interacting with an environment. The older forms of Darwinism made this essentially a one-way street. The organism adapts itself to the constraints of the environment it finds itself in. The environment , however , is considered as independent of the organism. This is consistent with the idea that knowledge is the mirroring of an independent world. Newer interpretations of Darwin reject this one-way approach, arguing instead that what constitutes an environment for a organism is determined by the normative aims of its own functioning. What constitutes an ‘object’ for a creature is a function of what emerges as useful and relevant in the context of the organisms goals. We need to look at the empirical objects that emerge for the scientist in this way, not as dead independent self-identical things, but as what emerges for us out of the environment that we create in relation to our goals and purposes. What we discover , such as a distant galaxy , isn’t a thing sitting out there waiting for us to find it, but a useful component of our schemes
of interaction with our world. We only see something f as what it is to the extent that it serves a purpose for us, no what it is in itself cannot be separated out from the function it serves. What the ancients observed weren’t galaxies or stars or planets in the 21at century sense , but what had meaning in relation to their very different purposes.

What wayfarer’s move does is turn the subject into a kind of object.
— Joshs

Please show me where I've done that. As far as I'm concerned that is what I've been arguing against. — Wayfarer

It sounds like your view of the subject is compatible with that of Zahavi and Michel Henry.

From a recent paper or mine :

“ Zahavi(2005) says he is among those phenomenologists who “deny that the type of self-consciousness entailed by phenomenal consciousness is intentionally structured, that is, a question of a subject–object relation”. “Any convincing theory of consciousness has to respect the difference between our consciousness of an object, and our consciousness of our own subjectivity, and must be able to explain the distinction between intentionality, which is characterized by a difference between the subject and the object of experience, and self-awareness, which implies some form of identity.”(Zahavi 2004)

While Zahavi finds inconsistent support in Husserl's work for his model of minimal ‘for-meness', Zahavi appreciates phenomenologist Michel Henry's unwavering insistence that pre-reflective self-awareness is a non-ecstatic and radical other to object consciousness.

Zahavi (1999) approvingly paraphrases Henry:

“Unless phenomenology were able to show that there is in fact a decisive and radical difference between the phenomenality of constituted objects and the phenomenality of constituting subjectivity, i.e., a radical difference between object-manifestation and self-manifestation, its entire project would be threatened.”

“Henry conceives of this self-affection as a purely interior and self-sufficient occurrence involving no difference, distance or mediation between that which affects and that which is affected. It is immediate, both in the sense that the self-affection takes place without being mediated by the world, but also in the sense that it is neither temporally delayed nor retentionally mediated. It is in short an event which is strictly non-horizontal and non- ecstatic.”

My argument is that construing the subjective dimension of experience as a pure self-identify turns it into precisely what Heidegger critiques as Cartesian substance and Husserl describes as res extentia, that a thing endure as itself over time. These are the pre-conditions for an object.

My problem is when people say that the observation, and observers, are different kinds of things from the things getting observed. I see no evidence for it and I a lot of problems that can arise. — khaled

I agree completely.

Our observation ontologically "creates" reality. That's just QM (at least the versions with collapse, MWI disagrees). — khaled

Yes, but does our observation create the content of that reality: the object and its properties? More specifically , is there a normative relation between the object observed and the subject observing it , such that the kbjsext can be understood as emerging as a variation on a subjectively constituted theme? This would be the organizing and constraining role of a paradigm in relation to what can appear as an empirical object. It seems to me that this kind of intrinsic constituting role for the subject in relation to what is ‘observed’ is missing from qm. Time,space , the content of the object with all its properties, don’t seem to be co-constituted by a subject , but independent of it.

Ok the subject determines the ontology of the object. This isn't very revolutionary since QM. — khaled

QM modifies the terms of realism but stays within its bounds. Phenomenology argues that the subject is not separate from the object. What wayfarer’s move does is turn the subject into a kind of object. Phenomenology doesn’t begin from a subject looking at an object. Rather, it begins from indissociable interaction wherein each moment of experience is an intentional act composed of a subjective and objective pole. Neither exists by itself and each reciprocally determines the other.

Here’s a critique of representational realism from a phenomenological vantage:

https://www.academia.edu/34265366/Brain_Mind_World_Predictive_coding_neo_Kantianism_and_transcendental_idealism

I’m trying to tease out the contribution of the subject not just to the appearance of the object but to the essense of the object.

Bitbol should appeal to Joshs also. — Wayfarer

I do like Bitbol

Would you care to summarise that horrifying quote? I'm not reading it, for fear of burning the porridge. — Banno

Sorry for the length , but I couldn’t possibly say it better than Zahavi and Putnam.

There is no "object of experience". The configuration IS the experience. That's my view. — khaled

Is the appearance of the configuration unique to each subject or can the configuration be described as existing as what it is independently of any given observer?

most people are still entrenched in the mind/body dualism that it generated. It was Kant who saw through that and worked out a way past it. — Wayfarer

I wouldn’t say he worked his way past it so much as pushed it to its limit. It took phenomenology to get past dualism.

yes I agree

I think that science studies beings, not Being or Time in their most real sense — Gregory

Yes, Heidegger believed that science is unable to make explicit the presuppositions governing it.

The opposition between realism and idealism is one of the many ways in which philosophical myth building leas on astray.

There's just the world, and included in it are our reactions to it. — Banno

I don’t think Karl Popper would agree with you here. He was heavily influenced by Kant in his philosophy of science. He would want to say that the influence of Kantian idealism on notions of the relation between the subject and the world led to a change from naive or metaphysical realism to forms of positivism.
Beyond Popper and Kant , phenomenology recognized that pointing to a world out there that we simply react to is an incoherent way of thinking. Each change in our account of this world carved up its particulars differently.

One of my favorite quotes on the relation between subject and object:

“Knowledge is taken to consist in a faithful mirroring of a mind-independent reality. It is taken to be of a reality which exists independently of that knowledge, and indeed independently of any thought and experience (Williams 2005, 48). If we want to know true reality, we should aim at describing the way the world is, not just independently of its being believed to be that way, but independently of all the ways in which it happens to present itself to us human beings. An absolute conception would be a dehumanized conception, a conception from which all traces of ourselves had been removed. Nothing would remain that would indicate whose conception it is, how those who form or possess that conception experience the world, and when or where they find themselves in it. It would be as impersonal, impartial, and objective a picture of the world as we could possibly achieve (Stroud 2000, 30). How are we supposed to reach this conception? Metaphysical realism assumes that everyday experience combines subjective and objective features and that we can reach an objective picture of what the world is really like by stripping away the subjective. It consequently argues that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between the properties things have “in themselves” and the properties which are “projected by us”. Whereas the world of appearance, the world as it is for us in daily life, combines subjective and objective features, science captures the objective world, the world as it is in itself. But to think that science can provide us with an absolute description of reality, that is, a description from a view from nowhere; to think that science is the only road to metaphysical truth, and that science simply mirrors the way in which Nature classifies itself, is – according to Putnam – illusory. It is an illusion to think that the notions of “object” or “reality” or “world” have any sense outside of and independently of our conceptual schemes (Putnam 1992, 120). Putnam is not denying that there are “external facts”; he even thinks that we can say what they are; but as he writes, “what we cannot say – because it makes no sense – is what the facts are independent of all conceptual choices” (Putnam 1987, 33). We cannot hold all our current beliefs about the world up against the world and somehow measure the degree of correspondence between the two. It is, in other words, nonsensical to suggest that we should try to peel our perceptions and beliefs off the world, as it were, in order to compare them in some direct way with what they are about (Stroud 2000, 27). This is not to say that our conceptual schemes create the world, but as Putnam writes, they don't just mirror it either (Putnam 1978, 1). Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned (Putnam 1990, 28, 1981, 54, 1987, 77)

Dam Zahavi on Putnam

Idealism is the converse of realism, not materialism. — Banno

I thought materialism was a form
of realism

And ducks are a form of non-ducks. — Banno

and flippancy makes my balls itch.

To cut to the chase, we don't understand what understanding is. — TheMadFool

The video errs in claiming that we don’t know what such things as understanding or consciousness or language are. We do know, but according to a large variety of often conflicting schemes. Physics , psychology and philosophy are very different fields of study, but not because physics is more ‘certain’. Just because it uses a vocabulary of mathematical certainty and natural law doesn’t mean that its ‘certainties’ don’t change their sense along with the presuppositions underlying the theories. The various theories of consciousness are all useful in their own way, but serve different purposes. The ones that are usedul for researchers in a.i. or neuroscience may not be useful for clinical psychologists or philosophers of mind.

That’s not to say that there cannot be an overarching theory of language or consciousness to address the various concerns of subdisciplines, but such a theory should never be expected to be ‘certain’ any more
than Newtonian physics simply remains frozen and unchanged over time.
I think the accounts of consciousness, language and emotion that I prefer can account for what computers do as well as tell us why they can’t do what humans and other animals do.

I’d reverse that. Neuroscience always operates at a delay with respect to more abstract psychological subfields. When cognitive science came on the scene neuroscience continued to rely on stimulus response models. When first generation cognitivism made way for embodied enactive approaches, neuroscience held onto computational, representationalist thinking( see predictive coding theory , for instance ). There have been a few exceptions , like Antonio Damasio, but in general if you want to know where neuroscience will be in 10 years just follow today’s philosophers of mind.

t I believe language is simply a way of capturing sensory data (5 senses) and/or superimposing data sets so obtained and averaging them as it were to extract patterns from them. In both cases, words, nothing more than auditory/visual/tactile symbols, are assinged either to individual sense datum or to the pattern observed in them — TheMadFool

This is an adequate model if youre programming a computer , because computers don’t have to understand what is programmed into them. We do. What you described is merely computation . Computers aren’t capable of affective, goal-oriented relevance, which is essential to the understanding of language.

To do neuroscience, you have to be able to make predictions, and to develop theory you have to have some of those predictions be reliable. This makes it the only player in Explanation Town, — Kenosha Kid

Are you then making the argument that the most satisfying explanations of aspects of behavior such as cognition, motivation, affectivity, empathy and perception is being offered by neuroscientists rather than , for instance, philosophers of mind , clinical psychologists or phenomenological philosophers?

I'm reminded of people typing on computers connected to the internet that science cannot possibly work...
— Kenosha Kid

Those guys.....deserving of little mention and even less respect. — Mww

Could you humor me and mention some names?

equally a mistake to think this is a theory about the structure, or explaination, of our being in relation to time — Antony Nickles

It would certainly be a mistake to think this is a theory about being in relation to time understood in any conventional sense. It is a theory about Being understood as temporality. This notion of time presupposes Attunement , Care and Understanding. Put differently , if one comprehends what Heidegger is getting at with temporality , then one is grasping the ethical thrust of Heidegger’s philosophy. Temporality is in itself already an ethics

Thoughts are, let's just say, immortal, they survive the Grim Reaper's menacing scythe. — TheMadFool

This is the issue that Derrida went on and on about.
Spoken and written language, and all other sorts of gestures and markings which intend meaning, exemplify bound idealities.Even as it is designed to be immortal, repeatable as the same apart from any actual occurrences made at some point, the SENSE of a spoken or inscribed utterance, what it means or desires to say, is always tied to the contingencies of empirical circumstance. Language is designed to transmit intact the pure meaning of a thought. But it is also the nature of language that it be expressed. And because it must be expressed it must expose itself to interpretation and new context.

Do you suppose that’s where Sartre’s famous dictum ‘Hell is other people’ came
from?

his personal real world relationships with some of those involved in the conflict. And he was generally the sanest and most mature of the lot of us. — Foghorn

I wonder if his friends, the ones involved in the conflict, are infuriated by his impartiality.

why do we so often deliberately seek out the experience of being driven crazy? — Foghorn

For the same reason we like thrill rides and horror movies, so we can learn how to cope better with the demons and threats that we already know are out there’s, are always in the back of our mind and infiltrate our dreams nightly.

Not my circus not my monkeys — skyblack

It’s possible that it seems to you that a vacuous ‘addiction to conflict’ motivated the arguments precisely because you were not invested in the topic. If you think about topics where your ‘circus and monkeys ‘ were at stake , would you attribute such motives to yourself?

Ok, here’s my take: We’re not addicted to conflict, we’re addicted to sense-making, and it drives us crazy when someone spouts off with an opinion that sounds completely outrageous to us. And nonsense that affects people’s lives, which falls into the general category of politics, drives us the most crazy , and draws us deepest down the rabbit hole.

I think the stated topic was most likely a prop, which served to help us hide our conflict addiction from ourselves. — Foghorn

I agree the topic was a prop, but not because it was hiding ‘conflict addiction’( why do non-political topics on this site normally not generate the same heat?). The middle east was a proxy for issues much closer to home, having to do with our relationships with people in our own communities.

How does participation in a meaningless activity demonstrate compassion for victims? — Foghorn

If those involved in the discussion considered it meaningless they would not have reacted so strongly to each other.

none of us in that thread are in a position to challenge those committing the atrocities, however we might have defined them. — Foghorn

If we believe the person we are engaged in an argument with thousands of miles away harbors the same reprehensible views as those who are committing the atrocities , then the two become inseparable in our minds. We put ourselves in a position to challenge those committing the atrocities precisely by winning the argument against the commenter who we see as complicit.

he was joking

The difference between the middle east discussion and a general philosophical thread is that the former thread applied philosophical and political theory to a real world situation in which people are suffering and in which some commenters have a lot invested emotionally. Some participants identify strongly with what they see as victims of moral or even criminal immorality and cruelty, and they see their opponents on the thread as proxies for the perpetrators of these wrongs. To lose an argument is to let an atrocity go unchallenged. Other participants may not have been emotionally invested in one side or other in the Middle East but instead perceived the moral wrong being committed as intolerant bullying by politically obsessed commenters.
The ‘conflict addiction’ in all cases comes down to a compulsion to address a perceived injustice.

An idealist or skeptic can at least hold the materialist model as a useful if often unreliable tool, without falling into traps like claiming qualia isn't real, based solely on data received as qualia, while transmitting said argument to others solely through means that they will experience as qualia. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It sounds to me like qualia is serving a function for the idealist much like materialism is for the empiricist. In both cases we have the claim for an intrinsically real object ( qualia or material thing) whose pure self -identity can be located independently of its interactions with an outside.

It would be useful for Jack Torrance. Maybe for a QAnon member? — frank

So your facts are real and QAnon’a
facts are fake? You might be surprised to discover what a vast web of interpretive plumbing your ‘facts’ sit on top of , and how subjective that deep foundation is.

Unless someone considers themselves eliminitavists, which I think is just crazy. — Manuel

An eliminativist , like Dennett for instance , is also relying on a form of idealism.


From Rorty:
“ Dennett wants to say that it is as silly to ask whether beliefs are real as to ask whether his lost sock center is real. I quite agree, but not for Dennett's reasons. My reason is that it is silly to ask whether anything is real - as opposed to asking whether it is useful to talk about, spatially locatable, spatially divisible, tangible, visible, easily identified, made out of atoms, good to eat, and so on. Reality is a wheel that plays no part in any mechanism, once we have adopted the natural ontological attitude. So is the decision to be, or not be, "a realist about" something. So is the decision about what position to occupy on the spectrum that Dennett describes (with Fodor's industrial-strength realism at one end and what he calls, alas, "Rorty's milder-than-mild irrealism" at the other). Dennett should, on my view, drop his claim to have found "a mild and intermediate sort of realism" - the juste milieu along this spectrum. He should instead dismiss this spectrum as one of those things it is not useful to talk about - one of those metaphors that, like those which make up the image of the Cartesian Theater, looked promising but turned out to be more trouble than it was worth.”