How do you see the new Republicans? — frank

Although I’m a liberal, I agree with Conservative commentators like David Brooks, Ross Douthat and David Frum that the Trumpist republicans are a sinking ship and are completely out of touch with new economic realities.

think the Republicans are the party of hardened pragmatists. — frank

Let me see if I understand you. You’re saying that the new, populist Trump -dominated Republican party, as opposed to the party of Bush and Reagan, is pragmatic?

There is no empathy to be had for people defending genocide, no matter how hard you'd like to pull on heart strings. — StreetlightX

The more I read your cartoonish takes on complex
political conflicts , the more I get the sense that you’re not talking about the large political world at all, but working out your own personal emotional issues.

like Joshs pathos-laden historical warbling. — StreetlightX

No wonder you don’t like psychology. You’re incapable of nuanced empathic insight.

The Israelis put a lot of effort into making life hard for the Palestinians who remained, apparently expecting them to give up and leave. — frank

They wouldn’t have expected them to give up and leave if they knew how to get along with them. The Israelis didn’t expect or want the tremendous diversity of non-Jewish ethnicities already living in Israel to get up and leave. So why the Palestinians?

I think the cultural clash was a recipe for disaster. A poor , traditionalist culture invaded by modern educated Europeans invariably ends up with the former losing power and autonomy, and produces a vicious cycle
of resentment and paranoia , and self-justifying overreaction on the part of those with the power. Would it have made a difference if the Jewish arrivants had been more enlightened? Today’s polarized political climate in the West suggest not. Lesser educated rural
traditionalists distrust and feel opposed by the growing urban multiculturalists. Ironically, these Trumpists side with Israel over the palestinians. Why, because nationalistic Enlightenment liberalism is the traditionalist in political idea they are familiar with.

But they weren't hostile at first. Wasn't it Jewish intolerance that started it? — frank

There were atrocities on both sides , which I think resulted from profound cultural differences and distrusts. Heres an interesting discussion on the reasons from the expulsion of palestinians after the war of independence.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_1948_Palestinian_exodus

And would we all one day turn into Chomsky's the world would be an incomparably better place. — StreetlightX

Chomsky’s the kind of guy who, if stuck on a desert island, would alienate the pragmatists, steal the conch
and form a cult of personality.

As American as Jim Crow & apple pie. Zionism = Manifest Destiny redux. ↪StreetlightX :up: — 180 Proof

It’s painful for me to read this. I’m not saying I completely disagree with it, but something is missing from the historical context. My father’s parents and grandparents lived in Palestine up until 1917 when the Ottoman occupation forced Jews to take up arms against the British, at which point they immigrated to the U.S., which prevented their extermination by the Nazis. They were among the waves of zionists coming from
Central Europe. As you may or may not know, there were a number of varieties of Zionism. Some believed in the Biblical injunction to return to Israel and rebuild the temple. The passover haggadah we read as children said and still says, as a prayer, ‘Next year in Jerusalem’.
Then there were the Zionists who were trying to escape the endless cycles of oppression and progrum , believing that only in a Jewish state could a Jew protect
themselves. Finally, there were socialist utopians with no religious affiliation who wanted to build a model community. I think there was a sincere if naive belief among those pioneers that a Jewish State could
also be a democracy that welcomed and was fair to all, Jew and non-Jew alike. I think this naivite led to incomprehension at the array of hostile Arab powers aimed at the destruction of this Jewish state. It also led to the delegitimization of the concerns of palestinians.

I get the impression you’re not happy with any existing state. That’s a dangerous place to be in from an emotional
health point of view. If you’re not careful
you’ll turn into a Chomsky.

Supposedly if they did, apartheid would have been OK, yes? — StreetlightX

You sound so naive. It’s not. a question of being ok, but of how groups respond to the rhetoric of the opposing side. It’s thing to commit an action of terrorism in the name of liberation , it’s another to produce a never ending stream of rhetoric that isn’t simply about freedom from oppression but about the illegitimacy of another whole population, even in the context of a hypothetical shared democratic state.

What are you , some kind of utopian idealist? I don’t know that Israel’s
form of democracy is that much different than what U.S. democracy started off as. Democracy evolves , you know.

So one side threatens and the other side , the one with the power, accomplishes. I lived in Israel for a year. I don’t think it’s possible for a state that identifies itself in nationalistic terms as a Jewish state can be a full fledged democracy. I think the difference between the Israeli form of democracy and the palestinian attempts at self-government is that in a self-defined Jewish state the arab citizens will always have second class status in spite of the rhetoric of equal rights under the law. In a palestinian state , Jews might have no status of citizenship .

And the state who is demonstrably - and so far successfully - committed to the annihilation of a population is Israel. — StreetlightX

As I recall, rhetoric concerned with annihilating a population, or ‘driving them into the sea’, has been heard for years from certain non-Jewish quarters within the Middle East. . I don’t recall such threats ever coming from Black South Africans toward the white population.

Interesting read. I notice
there is brief mention of a handful of philosophers. I mention this because whenever a philosopher offers a hermetically sealed set of concepts with its own idiosyncratic jargon there is the risk that they are reinventing the wheel without realizing it. That’s why bringing in the larger community of philosophers and situating your thinking in relation to theirs is helpful to your readers. It lets us know who you have read and who you haven’t, and how you interpret their ideas with respect to your own. As it stands I’m left to surmise that your thinking has resonances with Wittgenstein , Peirce and perhaps Levinas. You may want to elaborate on your reference to a God’s eye view of absolute
truth.

when we consider that we have a limited span of attention then technically every “new curiosity” is the abolishment of a previous one to a state of indifference or boredom or lack of desire to continue pursuing it. — Benj96

That’s the interesting thing about attention.It’s not just a neutral beam of light with a certain capacity to illuminate. Attention is an active interpreting. Attention only appears limited to the extent that what we are experiencing is fragmented into arbitrary disconnected meanings. But attention can seem almost unlimited when we are involved in progressively unfolding deeper and deeper layers of a phenomenon that we interpret as continuously unified and harmonious. Deep interested sustained engagement on a unified experience is more profound than curiosity, which , like a junkie , needs constant novelty, but isn’t able to make much out of what it captures in the moment.

This is what Heidegger had to say about curiosity( for those who are curious about Heidegger):

When curiosity has become free, it takes care to see not in order to understand what it sees, that is, to come to a being toward it, but only in order to see. It seeks novelty only to leap from it again to another nov­elty. The care of seeing is not concerned with comprehending and know­ingly being in the truth, but with possibilities of abandoning itself to the world. Thus curiosity is characterized by a specific not-staying with what is nearest. Consequently, it also does not seek the leisure of reflec­tive staying, but rather restlessness and excitement from continual nov­elty and changing encounters. In not-staying, curiosity makes sure of the constant possibility of distraction. Curiosity has nothing to do with the contemplation that wonders at being, thaumazein, it has no interest in wondering to the point of not understanding. Rather, it makes sure of
knowing, but just in order to have known. The two factors constitutive for curiosity, not-staying in the surrounding world taken care of and dis­traction by new. possibilities, are the basis of the third essential characteristics of this phenomenon, which we call never dwelling anywhere.
Curiosity is everywhere and nowhere. This mode of being-in-the-world reveals a new kind of being of everyday Da-sein, one in which it con­stantly uproots itself.”(Being and Time)

I also agree that extremes do tend to provoke a consequential reverse reaction - pivoting to the other extreme.

The question then seems to be “how does one stabilise themselves?” The so called “Goldilocks zone” of not too happy not too sad instead of a tumultuous rollercoaster of ups and downs.

Any thoughts? — Benj96

There is a tendency in psychological theorizing to reduce emotion and attitude to some sort of extraneous coloration or content that is added onto experience. Thus, curiosity or boredom are treated as inner substances, either evolutionarily selected for or socially conditioned or both.

I think it’s a mistake to understand feelings and attitudes as separable from our relations to situations. I don’t think the shift from curiosity to boredom is like equilibrating between two concentrations of a chemical. They are instead existential responses to our coping in situations.
Curiosity leads to boredom because no situation can continue to provide a renewal of interest without a certain exhaustion of challenge. This isn’t the fault of the depletion of an ‘inner’ substance but the way that situations change. Creativity has cycles to it , as we move through different phases of interest in aspects of our world. Without these textures and vissicitudes of momentum to our experience we wouldn’t be able to experience anything. The loss of interest in something is a necessary, meaningful part of the creativity cycle, just as important as curiosity. It is not an ‘internal’ weakness but a natural expression of changing experience of situations as we make our way through them.

How to find a ‘Goldilocks zone’? I think recognizing that experience is self-reflexive and any particular
comportment toward the world will eventually shift of its own accord due to the ever changing nature of experience itself is the best way to maintain a fluid approach to the world. Believing that whatever mood or attitude one is in now will be permanent can lead to a vicious cycle of stuckness. Children are prone to believing that whatever state they are in now will never change, and that leads to intense negative moods.

When I think of curiosity people a few images come to mind, namely;
Children - they seem to be boundless in what they can find interesting. I suppose this is because for them most things are novel experiences. They can be fascinated with a puddle, or some mud, or a ladybug climbing a piece of grass — Benj96

Children can also be relentlessly , impossibly bored. I have never been so bored as an adult as I was as a child. I think that’s no coincidence. Different moods and attitudes imply and are based on complementary ones.
Extreme elation is often followed by deep
depression, as seen with bipolar disorder.

Do things have value because they make us happy or do they make us happy because they have value? — TheMadFool

Everything we experience has value. We are sense-making creatures so what we experience matters to us in some way, whether it is boring or interesting, pleasant or unpleasant. I think the hedonic aspect of our valuations are a function of the relative assimilative coherence of what we experience in relation to our ongoing aims and goals. Hedonism isn’t some arbitrary mechanism shaped by evolution to tell us what we should like or not like, as if we would have no motivation without this ‘mechanism’. The ways in which we make sense of our world are inherently affective and hedonic

There is only one subjective experience in my universe - mine. — T Clark

Yes, but is this subjective experience not at the same time an objective experience? What I mean is this: I can think of myself in relation or opposition to other people. That’s a developed notion of self.But Husserl says, what if we bracket off our knowledge of ourselves as a human among other humans. Instead, imagine that other people, ourselves included, are reduced to unidentified phenomena. In that situation, what is left of your subjectivity as ‘yours’? Husserl says that there is still an ‘I’ but as mere center of activity. But one can still speak of a ‘ mine ness’ to experience, because all of my intnetional experiences of objects are correlated and assimilated to my previous experience in terms of
dimensions of similarity and difference. I guess what I’m saying is that you can construct and explain the basis of a whole world of nature, science and culture on the basis of what appears to a unique subjectivity. But this subjectivity , by virtue of being exposed every minute to changes in the objects it intends , is born anew in every new experience. So your very own unique subjectivity is always a slightly different subjectivity over time, The subject is changed by its objects.

Once you realize that the ‘you’ who experiences is always a slightly different ‘you’ , you can recognize other persons as having their own constantly changing subjectivity. If your own subjectivity is not a pure in-itself because of
its constant contamination from its world , then the barrier between your own subjectivity and that of other people no longer seems so impermeable.

. I guess I mean any observable or measurable act or response that can be used to infer an internal state. — T Clark

Doesn’t this destroy the subjectivity of consciousness, the very essence of awareness? From cognitive science there are suggestions for a ‘mutual enlightenment’, between 1st person subjective , second person intersubjective and third person empirical methods.

http://www.neurohumanitiestudies.eu/archivio/gallagher97.pdf

Evan Thompson wants to go back and forth between phenomenology , mindfulness practices and cognitive
neuroscience, believing that none of these by themselves will fully explain consciousness.

CRT is dangerous because it holds a special status as being academic, which gives it an air of credibility. After a few decades since its conception it now finds itself in the highest echelons of politics and business and entertainment. — NOS4A2

The only way to effectively challenge CRT is to either show how it deviates from valuable
ideas in Critical theory, or critique the foundational
ideas of critical theory. The right wing lumps CRT together with Marxism , Critical theory and post-modernism. Their attempts to attack it in this sweeping way will fail , I believe, because we’re moving into a post-marxist era where the best concepts from Marx, Critical theory and post-modernism are usurping Enlightenment liberalism as the new ground of political
thought.

Are you familiar with any of the writings in Critical theory of Continental authors like Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse or Habermas? I’m wondering if your concerns are restricted to critical race theory or if they extend to Critical theory in general.

I don't think there is any mystery of consciousness. Consciousness is a behavior. — T Clark

How does one define behavior, as change in space-time of an observed object? Is there a notion of behavior joe that cannot be defined in terms of movement of an object in space? Is change of the sense of a meaning a behavior?

The following are all available free here:

https://ku-dk.academia.edu/DanZahavi

Zhavi: We in Me or Me in We? Collective Intentionality and Selfhood. March 2021 Journal of
Social Ontology

Zahavi: Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective.2005

Zahavi: ‘Is the Self a Social Construct’, Inquiry, Vol. 52, No. 6, 551–573,

Zahavi Consciousness and (minimal) selfhood: Getting clearer on for-me-ness and mineness
U. Kriegel (ed.): The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness.
Oxford University Press, 2019

Heidegger discards the idea of a world independent of the Dasein’s projective structure.
— Joshs

I'm not sure he does. Hegel seems to in most people's reading of him, but I don't think he is a pure idealist, nor Heidegger. I've never heard of Heidegger being an idealist before to be honest — Gregory

I’m not sure what you mean by a pure idealist. You mean like Berkeley? Is Kant a pure idealist in your view? At any rate, Heidegger isnt saying that there is nothing but Dasein’s projective structure. He’s saying that one cannot separate the world from the subject.

“To say that the world is subjective is to say that it belongs to the Dasein so far as this being is in
the mode of being-in-the-world. The world is something which the “subject” “projects outward as it were, from within itself. But are we permitted to speak here of an inner and an outer? What can this projection mean? Obviously not that the world is a piece of myself in the sense of some other thing present in me as in a thing and that I throw the world out of this subject thing in order to catch hold of the other things with it. Instead, the Dasein itself is as such already projected. So far as the Dasein exists a world is cast-forth with the Dasein’s being. To exist means, among other things, to cast-forth a world, and in fact in such a way that with the thrownness of this projection, with the factical existence of a Dasein, extant entities are always already uncovered.”

The issue for this thread would be, do you think animals recognize experience as an issue for them or would they take it as a given that is nothing that raises "reflection" in such an animal? — Manuel

I’m not sure if ‘recognizing experience as an issue’ is a thing. That is , some special capacity of thought above and beyond good old fashion reflection. I do think higher animals reflect, so I don’t think however you want to characterize what it is people
do when they reflect on experience as their own belongs to some special capacity only humans posses. We’ve been down this anthrocentric road before. It wasn’t long ago that supposedly only humans had emotions, language, culture, cognition or tool use.
We now are beginning to learn that other animals have all kinds of complex cognitive abilities, including self-recognition and empathy.

Just pointing to the progression... that'll do me. — Banno

If it truly is a linear progression then, yes, it makes sense to describe science as in the ‘solving’ business. But as far as I can see , with a linear causal
model of progress you end up with what you started with Kind of like ‘solving’ physics with a unified model of everything and thereby predicting all future events
on your computer. It solves everything and nothing at the same time. I do like a concept of prediction that jettisons the linear causal baggage though.

It is my understanding that young infants have to learn the difference between what is part of them and what is outside. — T Clark

“...this traditional hypothesis which takes
the infant’s experience to be initially impersonal and anonymous has been rejected
unequivocally by dominant positions in contemporary developmental psychology. On the basis of numerous experimental data it is now assumed that the infant already from birth begins to experience itself, and that it never passes through a period of total self/other nondifferentiation. As both Stern, Neisser and Butterworth have argued, there is no symbiotic-like phase, and thereexists no systematic and pervasive confusion between the child’s experience of self and other, nor between the child’s experience of the other and of the world.” Dan Zahavi

‘Can someone name a single solved scientific problem?’.
— Joshs

...he typed on his laptop... — Banno

which used to be a typewriter , and before that pen and paper , and before that a feather quill , and before
that a stone tablet. Did each invention solve the same
problem or create a new problem to solve? Wasn’t it Steve Jobs who said he made products that people didn’t even realize they needed?

We know that we have some kind of knowledge, and this fact is puzzling, why do we have this thing, experience? I doubt animals get near that, as it would also require language and much else, which is not to deny in the least the amazing capacities animals have in there own right. — Manuel

I don’t agree with Zahavi’s version of a pre-reflective self-awareness. He calls it ‘for-meness’ and deems it a self-identify of self , an ongoing feeling that accompanies all my intentional experiences. So I sense the coldness of the refrigerator and I ask sense how it feels for me. To me the issue of a sense of self isn’t a pure self-identity separate from but accompanying all my experiences of objects. I think it has to do with the relative integrity and internal coherence of my moment to moment changes in experience. In other words , self is a structural feature of the relation between my anticipative projecting and the objects that occur into that anticipation.
I think this is relevant not just for humans but other animals too. It deals with the issue of functional autonomy of a self-organizing system. A functionally autonomous cognizer is governed by internal norms which pre-select how it perceives its environment. I think the at normative projecting gives the experienced its sense of a relative self identity over time.

But isn't the problem with self-awareness that it goes a step beyond experience ("mere" consciousness)? — Manuel

There has been a fair amount of work in recent years on what has been called a pre-reflective form of minimal self-awareness. Dan Zahavi has made this his central focus, but there is growing concensus that all experience presupposes some primitive sense of self. Infants have been shown to differentiate self from others.

by affirming the propositions "Empirical facts are dependent on subjective organization," and "Empirical facts are a product of subjective organization," I have somehow contradicted myself? — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I didn’t mean that you contradicted yourself. I meant that your position may contradict an enactivist or postmodern account of subjectivity.

Most, if not all the properties associated with an object (as we experience it) are perceptually constructed and cannot belong to an object in itself independent of perception. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I’m not sure whether you mean this in a Kantian sense or a postmodern sense. Kant recognizes that there is no direct apprehension of a world, and that is what our interpretive faculties are for. But he believes that our empirical interpretations and theories strive to approximate a presumed objective world.

The enactivista believe , by contrast, that our empirical models are not an attempt to adequately represent a pre-existing external world , but the production of a world. We invent worlds to pragmatically interact with. Some of these worlds are more useful to us than others in relation to our needs and goals.

there is one modern problem that has been solved actually, substance dualism, the view that Descartes argued for. — Manuel

The understanding of philosophy or science that believes that either of them are in the business of ‘solving ‘ problems’ is a problem for me.
Solution implies for me the idea of thought as the mirror of nature. To me nature isn’t a static ‘out there’, it is a becoming that our inquiries contribute to. We don’t mirror the world, we produce worlds. I think the purpose of knowledge is to clear the ground for the asking of more interesting questions.

Since the human mind is incapable of accessing reality in any substantive way, people make-up all kinds of non-sense that changes, changes, changes with the winds that blow in every direction. — synthesis

You just gave a good description of science, which claims to ‘solve’ a problem and then refashions itself over and over to ‘solve’ again. Except the so-called progress of science is less about solving a previous problem than of asking a different question.

Some examples:
Physics, psychology, linguistics, mathematics, logic, chemistry, biology... — Banno

Except that the op could just as well have been ‘Can someone name a single solved scientific problem?’.
Converting natural philosophy into physics didnt ‘solve’ anything. It just changed the language and methods.
I’m not sure what ‘solved’ is supposed to mean with regard to empirical paradigms unless
one believes that there is a way things ‘really are’ and we’re just mirroring nature with our theories. Science offers practical ways of interacting with the world in relation to our goals.

Is there a contradiction entailed somewhere by my affirming of those propositions? — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Yes, I think there is. Your model maintains a fact-value distinction that can’t justify itself, according to analytically trained philosophers like Quine, Putnam and Rorty. All facts get their sense via larger valuative schemes within which they are ensconced. It is incoherent to talk about facts or sense data that is what it is independent of the perceiver.

“Contrary to popular opinion and many philosophical epistemologies, knowledge does not involve the union or synthesis of an already existing subject and an independent object.” Mark Taylor

Subjectivity doesn’t just organize and categorize data from an presumed independent world. The subject co-creates the object.

What do you think modern phenomenology discards from Hegel or Kant? — Gregory

Kant believed that there was an objective world independent of the subject that the subject could come to know more and more perfectly as an asymptotic vector. Heidegger discards the idea of a world independent of the Dasein’s projective structure. Kant believes there were a priori categories of mind that allow us to organize experience via space time and causality. Heidegger rejected the idea of innate categories of perception. Kant also asserted the categorical imperative pertaining to moral values. Heidegger rejected this notion.

Then of course there is the argument that physicalism is itself a form of dualism.
— Joshs

How so? I thought physicalism is the belief that everything, including mind and all non-physical phenomena such as qualia, can be explained via physical phenomena and without recourse to any non-physical mechanisms. — fishfry

Physicalism thinks it leaves dualism behind, when in fact it simply ignores the subjective dimension of experience that is built into , but hidden within, the very assumptions of physicalism.

You may find this from philosopher Evan Thompson interesting. He adheres to the Enactivist approach in psychology.

“...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)."

“Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. The hard problem is the conceptual and metaphysical problem of how to bridge this apparent gap. There are many critical things that can be said about the hard problem (see Thompson&Varela, forthcoming), but what I wish to point out here is that it depends for its very formulation on the premise that the embodied mind as a natural entity exists ‘out there' independently of how we configure or constitute it as an object of knowledge through our reciprocal empathic understanding of one other as experiencing subjects. 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.

Another way to make this point, one which is phenomenological, but also resonates with William James's thought (see Taylor, 1996), is to assert the primacy of the personalistic perspective over the naturalistic perspective. By this I mean that our relating to the world, including when we do science, always takes place within a matrix whose fundamental structure is I-You-It (this is reflected in linguistic communication: I am speaking to You about It) (Patocka, 1998, pp. 9–10). The hard problem gives epistemological and ontological precedence to the impersonal, seeing it as the foundation, but this puts an excessive emphasis on the third-person in the primordial structure of I–You–It in human understanding. What this extreme emphasis fails to take into account is that the mind as a scientific object has to be constituted as such from the personalistic perspective in the empathic co-determination of self and other. The upshot of this line of thought with respect to the hard problem is that this problem should not be made the foundational problem for consciousness studies. The problem cannot be ‘How do we go from mind-independent nature to subjectivity and consciousness?' because, to use the language of yet another philosophical tradition, that of Madhyamika Buddhism (Wallace, this volume), natural objects and properties are not intrinsically identifiable (svalaksana); they are identifiable only in relation to the ‘conceptual imputations' of intersubjective experience.“

If you think that Husserl provided additional development of the ideas of Kant and Hegel, feel free to post something on it here. I am much more familiar with his student Heidegger — Gregory

Do you think that Heidegger provided additional development of the ideas of Kant and Hegel? More specifically, did he simply add to what they said or did he transform their ideas through a critique of them? I think both Husserl and Heidegger left behind certain metaphysics assumptions of Kant and Hegel.

The dualist believes there is "something else" beyond the physical. — fishfry

Then of course there is the argument that physicalism is itself a form of dualism.