“I predict your moral premise cannot be enforced therefore you shouldn't have it". I thought your moral premise was about preventing suffering? Don’t you think you need to take into account who you CAUSE to suffer by trying to prevent it?

Also note that "embracing and improving life" doesn't contradict antinatalism.”

How do you propose to embrace and improve life by stopping procreation if that leads to a disastrous decline in quality of life?

“ So what you're saying is that we ought procreate so that the future people can be used as a means to reduce/prevent the suffering of the already living?”

Most of the future people will also say that they are grateful they were born. So between them and the current generation who benefit from their birth, there’s a much larger consensus in favor of procreation than against it. You’ll have to convince people to be much more miserable if you want your movement to catch fire. That could very well happen, especially in rural
areas of Western countries, where suicide and addiction is rampant , and fewer men are marrying.


“Antinatalists seek to prevent all human suffering - regardless of whatever philosophical position the child would have ended up adopting.”
So you would run roughshod over the views of some of those those who you are claiming to help? Would you also try and prevent the suffering of masochists? Not all suffering is the same. I can understand to some extent you’re acting on behalf of preventing the kind of suffering that would lead someone to say that they regret having been born, that their suffering was so great that it wasn’t worth it, or that you’re prepared to accept the risk of preventing the births of those whose suffering would have been worth it along with those whose suffering would have led them to become anti-natalists. But if you’re trying to say that you’re lumping all suffering together as requiring your moral imperative my response is that you’re turning the concept of suffering into a meaningless term.

“This is another natalist trope.. that because people don't commit suicide all over the place, that must mean that because people don't commit suicide all over the place, that must mean that the decision to create another human who will suffer must be justified.”

My point isn’t that not killing oneself in and of itself means that one believes the decision to create another human who will suffer must be justified.” It is that I believe that most of them do believe it is justified, in spite of their misery, because they equate the gamble involved in a life starting and one continuing.

“"Not yet born", is a poetic turn of phrase - there is no referent for the term. I'm not speaking on behalf of anyone or anything (literally), which is precisely the point - nothing exists to suffer from lack of life.”

Just substitute ‘would have been born’ for ‘not yet born’.



You are speaking on behalf of that sliver of humanity that believes that we should not expose future generations to the risk of a suffering that would lead them to become anti-nataliats, and I distinguish this group from that group that believes that giving birth is exposing future generations to worthwhile suffering.

As I wrote to Schopenhauer, if you want to eliminate procreation this isn’t a zero-sum game because you’re trading off the potential suffering of the not yet born anti-natalist for the real suffering you would cause in many living people.

“A life starting and continuing are different. The choice itself of "Well, you just have to live this out or kill yourself" is an unfair choice, cold comfort really.”

You’re still not dealing with the central political issue. The only people you can put in your camp are those who support anti-natalism , not those who have suffered in their life but nonetheless believe life is worth living , and procreation also. So your mission can’t simply be to prevent suffering. It has to be to prevent the suffering of those who , when born, would grow up to believe they shouldn’t have been exposed to the risk of suffering. How large a group so you think this is?

is your goal the elimination of the human race? Because not procreating on a wide scale isnt a zero sum game. You’re trading the potential suffering of the not yet born for the real suffering youre causing for many people if you eliminate procreation.

“ Preventing suffering takes precedence over the creation of pleasure, especially when not creating 'good lives' does not harm the unborn. It's an unjustifiable risk to create life where it needn't have existed in the first place.“

This is your opinion. That’s what makes it a political issue, and why you have to honor the voices of those already living who say that preventing suffering does not take precedence over the creation of pleasure, and it is not an unjustified risk to create life. They are speaking from their own experience , just as you are. Why are you a better proxy for those not yet born than these other voices? Especially if they are the majority? Maybe your unhappy life gives you a skewed perspective.

One wonders why there are not more suicides. Many who don’t contemplate suicide have had much suffering in their life, and yet they view each new day as if they are potentially reborn, with a new chance at meaningful existence. Even though they know what great pain may lie ahead, they clearly don’t believe that choosing to be ‘born again’ into the next new day is an unjustifiable risk where they needn't ‘re-birth’ themselves into new life in the first place. They could choose preventing further suffering over the creation of pleasure , but they don’t. Why? Perhaps because even the suffering has meaning and value to them. If they feel this way about their own lives, maybe you can see why they feel the same about conceiving children.

Furthermore, isn’t choosing the benefit of the many over the suffering of the few the basis of modem legal systems and governance? Remember, the political issue here isn’t about preventing the birth of everyone who might suffer, it’s about preventiing the birth of those whose suffering would cause them to regret having been born and to support anti-natalism, and that I imagine is a small fraction of the population.

Having children benefits society in myriad ways, and leaves only a small fraction wishing they had never been born. If the measure of success of the anti-natalist movement ( if there is such a thing) is a cessation of reproduction, then let’s examine the consequences of this. It will lead over time to a progressive deterioration of the quality of life as populations dwindle
down to nothing. This in turn will cause wide-scale
suffering. If in this extreme hypothetical all of humanity wiped itself out ( not sure if this is the goal of anti-natalism) , eventually the species would re-appear, as evolution likes to repeat itself. So the cycle would have to continue over and over. This sounds to me like an awful lot of needless suffering. Let’s look at an alternative scenario: human ingenuity evolves more and more reliable ways to reduce suffering and promote happiness, and eventually figures out how to genetically engineer immortality, providing an alternative to procreation. This sounds to me like a more ethical program from the standpoint of preventing suffering than letting society dwindle to nothing just so it can eventually re-evolve and have to be tamped down over and over in spasms of cataclysmic suffering

I think the lesson here is you can try to quash life in the aim of preventing suffering, but life will
always re-emerge one way or another anyway, so really the only ethical direction is embracing and improving life.

So conduct a poll. See what percentage of the population thinks it would have been better if they hadn’t been born, and whether there is too much pain for it to be worth being brought into this world. Let’s say 30% agree with anti-natalism and 70% say they felt the pain in their life was worth it and they are glad that they were born. So if you’re trying to make a proxy decision for the yet to be born, that poll should tell you that the odds are 70% you are not doing the yet to be born any favors. Most would be saying they don’t mind the pain and your decision ‘deprived’ them of life.

Meanwhile, you as the anti-natalist are very much alive, and while the decision you make not to bring a life into the world is designed to ‘prevent causing pain’ in another, it has a paradoxical effect. Because it at the same time is relieving your pain. That is , your decision on behalf of the yet to be born resolves a dilemma, problem or dissatisfaction within you. It eliminates or reduces your pain (felt on behalf of others). So your voting for ‘non-being’ enhances and
furthers the functioning of your cognitive system. One could say your decision against another’s birth is a kind of fecundity. You are after all a self-organizing complex system , and your vote on behalf of ‘non-being’ does what all personal choices do , it increases the complexity of your living system by resolving interruptions in its functioning and therefore transforming and strengthening itself further. Your vote for the other’s non-being was at the same time a vote for the affirmation and enhancement of your own life vector. This is why I think that the motive of not wanting to CAUSE suffering in others cannot be separated from the ELIMINATION of suffering in yourself. Not just because you would not be motivated
to do the former if it didnt also achieve the latter. But because the two are really one motivation.

My point isn’t that all supposedly altruistic acts are
really selfish. Benefiting others benefits ourselves because our personal and social welfare are inextricably intertwined. It’s that not wanting to cause suffering is in the service of life enhancement, even when couched in the confused terms of anti-natalism.

So while anti-natalists think the terms of the debate are about being versus non-being, they’re really about how best to move forward in life.

Reminds me of something Heidegger said:

Every questioning is a seeking. Every seeking takes its direction beforehand from what is sought. Questioning is a knowing search for beings in their thatness and whatness.... As questioning about, . . questioning has what it asks about. All asking about . . . is in some way an inquiring of... As a seeking, questioning needs prior guidance from what it seeks. The meaning of being must therefore already be available to us in a certain way.

“ The Other just is separate--it is our responsibility to bridge that gap through expression and understanding (where does Heidegger conflict with this?)”
Heidegger does not say the Other is separate . He
says that it is built into the very notion of self. The Other is already within me, as belonging to the very definition of self. Not a self that has to reach out to the other, but a same-other differential that precedes any notion of self relating to an external other. Self and other aren’t entities in relation. They are edges of a dimension of
change. Self is never a state , self is always a change in self. Thus the ‘I’ ‘ is’ as finding itself changed(Befindlichkeit). The self ‘is’ as expression , which is why he puts discourse as equiprimoridal with attunement and understanding. To render dasein as subject encountering object is to perform what Heidegger calls a present-to-hand
modification which distorts and flattens it into a propositional statement.

Here’s a summary of positions that I contrasted with George Kelly’s approach in my paper, Challenge to Embodied Intersubjectivity( google it if you like).

Trevor Butt (1998a) concurs with Merleau-Ponty that "sociality can be seen as more primitive for
humankind than individuality, when our status as body-subjects is appreciated and dualist ideas
are abandoned.”
By sociality, Butt means joint ownership of meaning, which he opposes to the cognitivist
presumption of a computer-like subject controlling their own thoughts.
Chiari(2015) adds: “In other words, it is possible to conceive 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.”

Along similar lines, but from a realist rather than postmodern perspective, Harry Procter has
proposed the heuristic of a ‘family construct system’, wherein relationship dynamics among the
individual members of a family function comparably to the elements
of an individual’s personal construct system.
Shaun Gallagher(2017), a writer embracing hermeneutic as well as Merleau-Ponty themes, offers
a co-conditioning model of sociality that accords with Butt’s depiction of construing as
intersubjective:

On ‘socially distributed cognition’, he writes:
“To the extent that the instituted narrative, even if formed over time by many individuals,
transcends those individuals and may persist beyond them, it may loop around to constrain or
dominate the group members or the group as a whole.”
“Collective (institutional, corporate) narratives often take on a life (an autonomy)
of their own and may come to oppose or undermine the intentions of the individual
members. Narrative practices in both extended institutional and collective structures and
practices can be positive in allowing us to see certain possibilities, but at the same time, they
can carry our cognitive processes and social interactions in specific directions and blind us
to other possibilities."

The above treatments of the social space as centered configuration makes individual behavior in
social situations the product of narrative norms, reciprocities, shared practices and social
constraints. The presupposition here is the belief that essentially the same social signs are
available to all who interrelate within a particular community, that there are such things as
non-person-specific meanings, originating in an impersonal expressive agency. I’m not
suggesting that joint activity implies a complete fusion of horizons amenable to a third-person
perspective, except perhaps in the case of Procter’s group construct system. Rather , the
first-personal stance becomes subordinated to a second-personal ‘we’, as “an inseparable system
in which the relationship precedes the individual psychologies.”

Let’s not misunderstand what I mean by making this distinction between a WITHIN-person
and a BETWEEN-person dynamic. The within-person dynamic is already a between in that it is a
thoroughgoing exposure to an outside, an alterity, an otherness. For Kelly and Heidegger, the
radically inseparable interaffecting between my history and new experience exposes me to the
world in an immediate, constant and thoroughgoing manner. I am not arguing that the meaning of
social cues is simply person-specific rather than located intersubjectively as an impersonal
expressive agency. Before there is a pre-reflective personal ‘I’ or interpersonal ‘we’, there is
already within what would be considered THE person a fully social site of simultaneously
subjective and objective process overtaking attempts to understand human action based on either
within-person constancies or between-person conditionings.

So, rather than a retreat from a thoroughgoing notion of sociality, Personal construct theory
would be a re-situating of the site of the social as a more originary and primordial grounding than
that of the over-determined abstractions represented by discursive intersubjectivities. Those
larger patterns of human belonging abstracted from local joint activity, which Merleau-Ponty’s
intercorporeal approach discerns in terms of cultural language practices, hide within themselves
a more primary patterning. While our experience as individuals is characterized by stable
relations of relative belonging or alienation with respect to other individuals and groups, the site
of this interactivity, whether we find ourselves in greater or lesser agreement with a world within
which we are enmeshed, has a character of peculiar within-person continuity. It also has a
character of relentless creative activity that undermines and overflows attempts to understand
human action based on between-person configurations or fields. We may identify to a greater or
lesser extent with various larger paradigmatic communities, delicately united by intertwining
values. But the contribution of each member of a community to the whole would not originate at
the level of spoken or bodily language interchange among voices; such constructs repress as
much as they reveal. Even in a community of five individuals in a room, I, as participant, can
perceive a locus of integrity undergirding the participation of each of the others to the responsive
conversation. To find common ground in a polarized political environment is not to find an
intersect among combatants, a centrifugal ground of commonality, but to find as many intersects
as there are participants. Each person perceives the basis of the commonality in the terms of their
own construct system.

In my dealings with other persons, I would be able to discern a thread of continuity organizing
their participation in dialogue with me, dictating the manner and extent to which I can be said to
influence their thinking and they mine. My thinking can not properly be seen as `determined' by
his response, and his ideas are not simply `shaped' by my contribution to our correspondence.
The extent to which I could be said to be embedded within a particular set of cultural practices
would be a function of how closely other persons I encounter resonate with my own ongoing
experiential process. I can only shape my action to fit socially legitimate goals or permitted
institutionalized forms to the extent that those goals or forms are already implicated in my
ongoing experiential movement. Even then, what is implicated for me is not `the' social forms, but
aspects hidden within these so-called forms which are unique to the organizational structure of my
construct system; what I perceive as socially `permitted' rhetorical argumentation is already
stylistically distinctive in relation to what other participants perceive as permitted. Each individual
who feels belonging to an extent in a larger ethico-political collectivity perceives that collectivity's
functions in a unique, but peculiarly coherent way relative to their own history, even when they
believe that in moving forward in life their behavior is guided by the constraints imposed by
essentially the `same' discursive conventions as the others in their community.

Eugene Gendlin, whose work is closely related to Heidegger’s, says “ The higher animals live quite complex lives without culture. Culture does not create; it elaborates. Then we live creatively much further with and after culture. To think that we are the creation of culture is not a view one can maintain if one senses ongoing bodily experiencing directly. Culture is crude and inhuman in comparison with what we find directly. The intricacy you are now living vastly exceeds what cultural forms have contributed to you. With focusing we discover that we are much more organized from the inside out. “

Public and private:
For many who follow Wittgenstein public requires other discursive partners. either present or internalized. Because the public is formulated this way, it leaves no alternative except a solipsistic, rationalist realm called the private, some space sealed off from
exposure to the outside , the other, alterity, sel-transformation, creativity, etc. What this binary completely misses is a notion of the social, alterity, otherness, sociality that begins at a more intimate site than that of discurisve conventions and language games between people. It misses the idea that a self, an ‘I’ , is alway already from moment to moment not only exposed to otherness and sociality, but changed by it whether one is ‘alone’ or with other people. The self is already a sequentially sel-transforming community. There is never a self-identical’I’ to return back to from moment to moment , because the very sense of this ‘I’ has been subtly changed by its being in the world. As Heidegger says, the self is a ‘between’ , not a private space.
The avoidance of solipsism is accomplished in a more radical fashion through this thinking than via the Wittgenstienian approach.

Which paper couldnt you ready? Was it the introductory one with abstracts from various other papers? You’ll see that the end of each abstract contains a link (that you have to type yourself) to the sites that offer the complete paper. Better to just google the name of each paper that you want to read and you can find it directly that way.

As far as emotion is concerned, it’s not a question of abandoning what it stands for. Rather , it is about integrating it with cognition in a more compete way than is currently being done. Here is the complete version of a paper of mine that addresses this precise issue. The title is : A phenomenological critique of existential
feeling.

https://philpapers.org/rec/SOFAPC-2

Here’s my take on anti-natalism. I begin from a psychological analysis of the concept of choice, freedom and will. To choose anything, or to have one’s choice thwarted, implies desire, want, goal-directedness, purposiveness Such purposiveness in turn implies a system, field
or gestalt, a pattern of interaction with the world. I like Piaget’s way of defining need in relation to such a behavioral system. He says that Need is the expression of a totality momentarily incomplete and tending toward reconstituting itself. So that which we choose furthers our goals and that which takes away our freedom is that which acts as an obstacle to our achieving our goals.

Note that, unlike older notions of pleasure as being connected to a state of quiescence and absence of activity, constructivist and enactivist notions of fulfillment of need and desire make them synonymous with an increase in organizational coherence. Desire is an active notion, pertaining to a system
of sense making that aims toward an ever more harmonious balance between differentiation and integration.,what Piaget called progressive equilibration.

At any rate, from this perspective , suicide is a life-affirming desire in that, in aiming for the cessation of pain, it desires the elimination of that which obstructs and interrupts goal-directed ness. It may sound strange to suggest that wanting to off yourself is life-affirming , but dreaming of or craving nothingness is aiming only at a change. The idea of pure nothingness in itself is incoherent.

When we think about death or pure nothing we are thinking of an active comparison, a transformation, a differential. As soon as we take away what we compare the nothingness to, nothingness itself
vanishes. In order for us to think of nothingness, we must continually re-think an active change from
one state to another. So pure absence of being has no meaning in itself for us. All we can ever experience, care about, desire, etc, is the continutiy of our cognitive functioning and the overcoming of obstacles to that continuity.

In this context, what would it mean to wish to have never been born?It would be similar to wishing suicide, the desire to overcome an obstacle to the goal-directed integrity of thinking.

Again, we’re not actually imagining non- being, even though we think that’s what we’re doing when we dream about how nice it would be not to ever have been born. The ‘niceness’ or ‘ relief’ or peace we associate with non-being is peaceful in same way that any other change in thinking is peaceful, by moving past an interruption in active goal-oriented cognitive activity.

Desire knows nothing of non-being, only different forms of movement of thought.

So what does it mean, then, to claim
that our freedom of choice has been taken away by being born. ? We
certainly didn’t have a choice in the matter, did we?

But keep in mind that ‘freedom of choice’ requires a thwarting of willing and desiring, an interruption of or obstacle to our goals by the actions of another. In other words , violation of freedom of choice is an event that takes place within a functioning cognitive system. But what if that event takes place (conceiving a child) before the system in question has come into existence?

It would be pointing out the obvious to state that ‘I’ am not the one whose freedom of choice was thwarted by someone’s else choosing to have me be born, ‘I’ had no say in the matter since there was no ‘I’ at that point. The particular ‘I’ who had no say in being born also had no say in any of the events that took place since the beginning of the universe up till the moment of their conception. But none of those events affected ‘me’ , neither benefiting ‘me’ nor violating
my right to choose, since there was as yet no ‘me’ to have desires that could be thwarted.

The key point is that anti-natalism confuses elimination of pain with absence of being. You don’t take away MY pain by not having me be born in the first place. You only take away MY pain by giving me the choice of removing an obstacle that is interrupting my ongoing self-functioning. If I choose suicide, I havent chosen ‘non-being ‘ , since that notion has no meaning in itself. I have only chosen that way of thinking which reduces pain, provides a sense of relief , and so ENHANCES my functioning.

A being can continue to be itself differently. Ain’t that what self-organization implies? A being that continues to be itself over time not identically , but through a system of interactions with an outside. It conserves its manner of functioning by assimilating the world to itself and accommodating or adjusting its functioning to the novelties of that outside.

Interesting. I did t know this about Lacan. Will have to investigate further.

“The individual (feelings, intention, cause) does not change the senses of words. They may use a word (concept) in its different senses, but they are not "changing" anything about the workings of that concept.”

You know , of course, that the way a color appears to us changes in relation to many factors, such as the color of the background it appears against, the level of illumination, etc. Is there some veridical
color that these changes are
distortions of, or is it better tto recognize that perceptions in general appear against a bodily interactive field that is never identical from one point of time to the next? Are not perceptions forms of language themselves? If two people have slightly different perceptions of the ‘same’ color they are both looking at , is this a ‘misunderstanding’? Do we communicate with others despite such ‘misunderstandings’ or because of them? That is, perhaps the notion that there is such a thing as an unchanging word use is a derived abstraction, rather than the fundamental case. Husserl pointed out that objectivity is the result of intersubjective correlations. We convince ourselves that what is in fact only similar from one person to the next in our understanding of social conventions like words is identically shared between people.

I think what John Shotter said about science is true of word concepts.

“ although two scientists might not differ at all in
doing calculations, making predictions, and in pro-
viding explanations when working with scientific
formulae, differences could still occur between them
in the connections and relations they sense as exist-
ing within the phenomena of their inquiries. But
these would only show up, notes Hanson (1958) in
the different directions their new inquiries would
take, “in ‘frontier’ thinking – where the direction of
new inquiry has regularly to be redetermined”
(p.118).”

How should a psychotherapist proceed in understanding what their client means in their use of word concepts if not by attempting to discover the idiosyncratic ways in which such concepts are interrelated with a personal system
of meanings for that client?

Each of us lives in slightly different worlds, and we manage to communicate not by eliminating this fact but by accommodating to it. Most of the time the general nature of our social dealings masks these inter-individual differences in interpretation of word concepts. But when situations come up that expose these pre-existing differences , we are stunned to find that our neighbor voted for so and so, or ascribed to
such and such conspiracy theory. We then say they distorted , misread, misinterpreted the ‘true’ meaning of the concepts because we assumed that ...how did you put it?... “ they are not "changing" anything about the workings of that concept.”

Can two people, sharing the ‘same’ context of use, still end up with slightly different sense of meaning of a word? Does not a single individual, alone, in using the ‘same’ word over and over, end up slightly changing the sense of meaning of that word ever so slightly from day to day?
Does such a claim necessarily belong to a solipsist, idealist or rationalist thinking, or can there be a more
immediate and intimate site of the social than that of identically ‘shared’discursive. meaning arising from the the ‘same’ social milieu?

“ though I don't think this is the place for this discussion, facts do exist apart from us.” I suspect that everything relevant to this discussion and the disagreement between us rests on whether one is a realist or a radical
constructivist. I don’t think anything I say about the relationship between self and other , affect and intention, or the basis of norms and practices would be coherent to you if you believe it makes any sense to talk about a world independent of out construals of it , that our models correspond to. Yes, the world that I perceive offers accordances and constraints, as Jj Gibson points out(I can make up any old world I want to, but only certain construal will work, will be pragmatically useful in relation to my own goals and prior understanding. The affordance s and constraints emerge in relation to my ongoing cognitive
processes, not independently of them. On the other hand , if you can support Kuhn and Feyerabend against Popper on the theory-dependence of fact, and the enactivists on the basis of knowledge in structural coupling between embodied system and environment, then there are points of agreement between us.

Here’s more on my position concerning how the social basis of language should be understood. If you glance at the paper , you’ll notice that I locate my position to the ‘left’ of social constructionism. If you are a metaphysical realist , then your position is to the ‘right’ of social constructionism. I think that’s a huge gap to cross in discussion.

https://www.academia.edu/1342908/Embodied_Perception_Redefining_the_Social

Lets move away from physics and biology for a moment , and concentrate on human behavior. This is where different notions of self-organization , and the radically temporal view I'm proposing, distinguish themselves from each other most clearly. The autopoietic model of Varela and Maturana considers itself to be an embodied approach to consciousness. By this they mean that body and mind interact in an inseparable manner, such that consciousness at all levels is unthinkable without bodily feedback.

Varela(1999a) says the solid self is an illusion. Instead, "...lots of simple agents having simple properties may be brought together, even in a haphazard way, to give rise to what appears to an observer as a purposeful and integrated whole".

Ratcliffe, another writer in the enactive embodied cognitive tradition, says emotion and embodiment are “‘incorporated as essential components in cognition”, but emotion and cognition are clearly not identical; “...emotions and moods are not explicitly cognitive but neither are they independent of
cognition”(Ratcliffe 2002, p.299). They originate as bodily sensations structuring cognition from
outside of it. Emotion and cognition can 'conflict' and emotion can “override cognitive
judgement”(p.299).

It seems that for Varela and Ratcliffe , intention is a capacity for manipulating objects of thought, but
emotion, as conditioning valuative valence, provides the criteria for such processing. He is
apparently not able to find the resources strictly within what he thinks of as intentional thought to
de-center thinking processes, because he treats cognition as tending to form temporarily
self-perpetuating narratives which can distort or keep out contradictory input from the world. So
he relies on the body, in the form of emotion cues, to come to the rescue and bring the stalled
cognitive apparatus back in touch with a dynamically changing world. The mechanism of
emotion is assumed to intervene in order to infuse a stagnant narrative with a new direction and
meaning.

Ratcliffe(2002) asserts: “Without emotional responses, one is not uprooted from a coherent
interpretation of events...”(p.306). Although these emotion cues are claimed to be inseparably
linked with conceptual processes, this linkage amounts to more of a concatenation between
pre-existing states than a more radical indissociability. This may be due to the belief that feeling
originates developmentally within the individual independently from cognition, as action
readiness circuits that, Panksepp(1998) claims, are “completely biological and affective but...,
through innumerable sensory-perceptual interactions with our environments, [become]
inextricably mixed with learning and world events”(p.303).

Ratcliffe shares with other contemporary accounts of affect and emotion
what I call the ‘adaptationist’ presumption that meaning is shaped in a semi-arbitrary way by
inputs which come to influence it from a pre-existing outside. I don’t think Ratcliffe’s model of
affectivity has abandoned the naturalist pre-suppositions animating Damasio’s (2000) claim:
“...as a result of powerful learning mechanisms such as conditioning, emotions of all shades
eventually help connect homeostatic regulation and survival values to numerous events and
objects in our autobiographical experience”(p.54). According to this thinking, physiological
processes of feeling adapt and co-ordinate with a partially independent cogitative environment,
authorizing adaptationism as a causal explanation of origins.
Viewed as an adaptation, emotion is linked to a milieu outside of itself (cognition) and with
which the logic of the bond is indirect, partially arbitrary in the sense that it is capable of being
made irrational, as is supposedly the case with nonadaptive mutations. There is a partial
independence assumed between the participant aspects of reciprocally adaptive interactions. The
cobbling can be uncobbled unilaterally. Emotion can aid reason, but can also be dysfunctional.

According to a long-standing Western tradition, affect, feeling and emotion are connected with movement , action, dynamism, motivation and change. Affect is supposedly instantaneous, non-mediated experience. It has been said that ‘raw' or primitive feeling is bodily-physiological, pre-reflective and non-conceptual, contentless hedonic valuation, innate, qualitative, passive, a surge, glow, twinge, energy, spark, something we are overcome by. Opposed to such ‘bodily’, dynamical events are seemingly flat, static entities referred to by such terms as mentation , rationality, theorization, propositionality, objectivity, calculation, cognition, conceptualization and perception

The radically temporal approaches of Derrida, Heidegger, Gendlin and Kelly reject this adaptionist view of the relation between feeling and intention-cognition. They begin from a different motivational principle than that of causal interaction between little bodies(neurons, particles, etc). They dont begin from the notion of 'body' or 'object' at all,, but from something more primitive and fundamental than a body or object. Their argument is that treated body and mind as a system of reciprocally causal elements leads to a notion of human behavior that is at the same time too polarizing and too arbitrary.

In Gendlin’s model, the awareness and intending of something is a single differential crossing between one’s implicit past and what occurs into it, rather than a neutral bridge between separate entities: “the usual flat "is" and the separated "of" are replaced by a single implying-occurring pattern.”

“The currently underlying conceptual system leads us to assume that what exists is always something that can be presented before us. So there are always two, what exists and also us, the before whom. Contact with anything real is assumed to be by perception. Perception (or even more narrowly, sensation) is supposed to be the beginning. Perception involves a split between a here and a there. We sense here what is over there. Perception involves an inside and an outside; we sense in here in the body what is out there, outside, ‘external’ to us. I call this the ‘perceptual split’. The here-there generates a gap, the space between the here and the there. This space is supposed to contain everything that exists. To ‘exist’ means to fill some part of that ‘external’ space."

How does treating body and mind as a system of reciprocally causal elements lead to a notion of human behavior that is at the same time too polarizing and too arbitrary?

Such views lead to the idea that individual behavior is pushed and pulled this way and that in arbitrary ways by internal bodily feeling and social cues, practices, norms.

Kelly(1955) says: “You can say [a person] is what he is because of his cultural context. This is to say that the environment assigns him his role, makes him good or bad by contrast, appropriates him to itself, and, indeed, his whole existence makes sense only in terms of his relationship to the times and the culture. This is not my belief...”

Kelly (1955) opposes personal construct theory to perspectives which see a person “helplessly suspended in his culture, and is swept along with the tides of social change”.

Attunement is the way we are affected by the world from moment to moment. We find ourselves alwasy already attuned in some way or other with respect to what we encounter in the world(hesistant, fearful, apprehensive, confident, etc). Heidegger defines understanding as also fundamental to all experiencing. by understand he means that from moment to moment the world appears familiar to us in some way or other. We project forward into what we expeieince a context of meaning that interprets what we are encountering, even if we have never seen that precise thing before. So we are alwasy already oriented in a certain way toward the new by the way that we anticapate forward from past experieince . Attunement (how we are affected by what we encounter) and understanding (how we anticipatively project forward a prior interpretive context of meaning and significance into every encounter), are equally implied in every experience we have of the world.

I read some of Niel Thiese's work after you mentioned him. His notion of self-organization differs from the phenomenological approaches in a number of ways. First of all, his model is idealist, resting on Platonic assumptions concerning the origin of mathematics as well as subjectivity. The authors I mention all reject idealism in favor of a radical subjective-objective interactionaism. In addition, Thiese embraces the notion of qualia , which they also strongly reject.
Thiese attempts to meld a certain interpretaion of Buddhist thinking with complexity and dynamical systems approaches, without putting into question objectively casual pre-suppositions of physics. You say time is change, but this notion presupposes, like the physical view of time, that change is what happens to things, that events occur IN time ,as if time is an indedendent axis placed upon events or objects that subsist in themselves first and then interact. For Heidegger, a moment of time is not a punctual 'now' point."Of course, the question of "being-in-
time" is exciting, but it was also raised prematurely. The question is
exciting specifically with regard to natural science, especially with the
advent of Einstein's theory of relativity, which established the opinion
that traditional philosophical doctrine concerning time has been shaken
to the core through the theory of physics. However, this widely held
opinion is fundamentally wrong. The theory of relativity in physics does
not deal with what time is but deals only with how time, in the sense of
a now-sequence, can be measured. [It asks] whether there is an absolute
measurement of time, or whether all measurement is necessarily relative,
that is, conditioned.* The question of the theory of relativity could not
be discussed at all unless the supposition of time as the succession of
a sequence of nows were presupposed beforehand. If the doctrine of
time, held since Aristotle, were to become untenable, then the very
possibility of physics would be ruled out. [The fact that] physics, with
its horizon of measuring time, deals not only with irreversible events,
but also with reversible ones and that the direction of time is reversible
attests specifically to the fact that in physics time is nothing else than the
succession of a sequence of nows. This is maintained in such a decisive
manner that even the sense of direction in the sequence can become
a matter of indifference."

"If you ask a physicist, he
will tell you that the pure now-sequence is the authentic, true time. What
we call datability and significance are regarded as subjective vagueness,
if not sentimentalism. He says this because time measured physically can
be calculated "objectively" at any time. This calculation is "objectively"
binding. (Here, "objective" merely means "for anyone," and indeed only
for anyone who can submit himself to the physicist's way of representing
nature. For an African tribesman, such time would be absolute nonsense.)
The presupposition or supposition of such an assertion by a physicist
is that physics as a science is the authoritative form of knowledge and
that only through the knowledge of physics can one gain a rigorous,
scientific knowledge. Hidden behind [this presupposition] is a specific interpretation
of science along with the science's claim that a specific form
of viewing nature should be authoritative for every kind of knowledge.
[The scientist has not asked] what this idea of science itself is founded
upon nor what it presupposes. For instance, if we talk about time with
a physicist sworn in favor of his science, there is no basis whatsoever to
talk about these phenomena in an unbiased way.:

“ Objective significance is a different animal. Take for example a battery-operated watch on somebody's wrist. The battery matters for without it the watch won't run.”

Yes, but this statement must be thought by someone. It doesn’t rest in some eternal space of fact. When it is thought, it is thought with certain aims and purposes in mind, and arises within a certain context. There is always a reason why it should occur to someone at a certain point in time that a watch needs a battery to run , and that reason pertains to their concerns at that point in time. The particular felt significance the fact has to them cannot be separated from the fact itself. The way a word concept matters to us not only colors but co-defines the very sense of the word. Wittgenstein shows how the use of a word in activity with others determines its meaning. That implies affective as well
as ‘rational’ sense. If I think of something that doesn’t matter to me, it’s not mattering is still an attitude I take toward it , a way in which it affects me.

Do you make a distinction between feeling and emotion? Feeling is another way of talking about the way something appears to me , the fact that any concept is understood from someone’s point of view. Awareness always implies a ‘mineness’ to experience. In this sense, feeling isn’t an irrational or a-rational ‘seasoning’ added to rational thought. It is what orients meaning. Feeling is much more than simply good and bad valence.

Many recent theories of self-organization, at least those aligned with enactivism and autopoeisis, assert that the activity of the self-organic system stands in a relation of reciprocal creation with its environment. That means that it’s environment is just as much formed by the functions of the system as that system is shaped by three environment. So a consciousness is not simply the passive recipient of stimuli from a supposedly independently existing world , but enacts that world through its functioning. It co-invents the meaning of the ‘radio signals’.

It wouldn’t hurt to bring in Heidegger’s notion of befindlichkeit, which has variously been translated as attunement , mood, affect and feeling. Heidegger says there is no and can be no experience that is not affective, because affect is the way that the world matters to us. Thus there is no split between what is supposedly rational and what is affective. Things always matter to us, are relevant to us, are what we care about in some fashion or other. Of course , for many theorists following Heidegger emotions are the ‘reason any matters to us’ not because it is some evolutionarily mechanism added on to a supposed separate cognition apparatus or process, but because it is pre-supposed in any notion of experiencing.

Even those who don’t go as far as Heidegger in integrating affect and cognition argue that affect is indispensable:

The emotion theorist Matthew Ratcliffe says :

“ “...affect binds us to things, making them relevant and ‘lighting up' aspects of the world in such a way as to call forth actions and thoughts. Without the world-structuring orientation that they provide, we are disoriented, cut off from the world, which no longer solicits thoughts and actions and is consequently devoid of value. In effect, [William] James is saying that our very sense of reality is constituted by world-orienting feelings that bind us to things .” (Ratcliffe 2005)

“ The absence of emotion comprises a state of cognitive and behavioural paralysis rather than fully functional cognition, stripped of ‘mere' affect. A phenomenology without affect is a phenomenology that guts the world of all its significance. The experienced world is ordinarily enriched by the feelings that we sew into it, that imbue it with value and light it up as an arena of cognitive and behavioural possibilities. So cognition without affect is not, according to James, in any sense complete. It is an extreme privation that strips the world of alll meaning.”

Chalmers retains core reductionist assumptions in his approach.

From Zahavi:

“ 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 typicallyproceeded
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.” (Intentionality and phenomenality
A phenomenological take on the hard problem)

It will have accomplished a vast amount. A huge range of behavioral phenomena, cognitive as well as affective , are now badly understood due to the lingering reductive bias among psychologists . For just a few examples of what can be gained by abandonment of reductionism, look at the research by Gallagher, Ratcliffe and Zahavi on schizophrenia, autism, empathy, depression, grief, ptsd,

Unless a discourse is able to derive physical causation as an abstracted modification of a more primary hermeneutic process, it fill fail to come to grips with the origin of the hard problem, as your link demonstrates. Starting from causative relations between objects and then trying to explain consciousness on top of this IS the problem

A non-dualist explanation has been arrived at, taking various various forms, but as far as I know by only a handful of writers, which includes Heidegger, Derrida, George Kelly, Eugene Gendlin, Husserl and Merleau-Pontus. I might put constructivists like Piaget and Von Glasersfeld on this list also.

For all of them subject and object are not causally related entities but merely poles of interaction. They derive material causation from a more primary form
of motivation(Being, intending, construing).

Close behind this group, and eminently more satisfying than Chalmers,would be pragmatists like Dewey and Rorty, post-structuraliats following Nietzsche, 4Ea enaxtivists like Gallagher, Ratcliffe and Fuchs, auto-poietic models from Varela and Thompson, and constructivist hermeneteutics following Gadamer.

Can we "imagine a place without time"? Is the imagining a process that unfolds sequentially? That's time. "Would any events occur?" An event is a difference made, a coming into presence of something from out of a past.. That implies time. "Can memories form?" Formation is creation, which is temporal. "Or do all possible events occur simultaneously?" At the same time? Why is time built into the structure of the word simultaneous? Because there is still an unfolding implied.
Einstein's shunting aside of time is now increasingly recognized as an attempt to abstract out of physics what may in fact be the key to its understanding (See Prigogine, Smolen ,etc).

Piaget wrote that the nature of nature was to overcome itself, the point being that from Piaget's point of view there is no dichotomy between the aims of humanity and those of nature. There is no divide at all. We are nothihg but a further development of the aims of nature itself as self-transformation. Nature is artifice through and through.

I think a conceptual ‘God’ is a useful reference in discussions of teleology - in many ways it keeps us from assuming that we’ve already figured it all out. — Possibility

You could just substitute for God a 'radical otherness' to assure that experience doesn't become captured within a prefigured organizing frame. Even when God is no longer thought as a being or a personality, God as the name for a teleological movement can still end up as a metaphysical totalization of being. Hegel does this with his idea of dialectical becoming, and I suspect that something similar is being offered by Gnomon.

our Science is just beginning to wrest control of the laws of nature, in order to impose our collective Will on the foundations of reality, and to erect a super-structure of ideality, of human teleology. — Gnomon

I wonder if the the metaphors of violence, competition and force here are unconscious. Sounds vaguely fascist to me. I think removing the divine shtick and leaving the self-organizing teleology could help fix this.

There are competing interpretations within ancient contemplative traditions of what happens during non-rem sleep. Some have argued that there is no thinking going on, whereas others schools have claimed that one maintains an awareness even during non-rem sleep. The philosopher of mind and cognitive neuroscientist Evan Thompson favors the view that awareness persists through deep sleep and he has devised some fascinating studies to demonstrate this.

Dreamless Sleep, the Embodied Mind,and Consciousness The Relevance of a Classical Indian Debate to Cognitive Science

The parts of a body are of course only parts in the abstract. They are separated arbirtarily from the whole in which they function. The organism is fundamentally integrated body-environmental interaction. not a collection of parts first with assigned functions and then a whole. The fact that each aspect of organismic-environmental processes mutually implies each other process allows us to see how it is that the behavior of a bacterium or bird or dog is the expression of this gestalt organization. At every moment a creature is behaving in a way that is at the same time the expression of its current form of self-organization and an implying beyond itself, pointing to a next step.

The purpose of any particular human is whatever , at any given moment, its behavior, as a totaling of all its integrated processes, is pointing toward. Put differently, in the same fashion that one can dissect the organism into parts and talk about their 'use' or 'purpose' in relation to the aims of the organism as a whole, one can talk about one's motives, desires , purposes as a psychological entity in such terms.
That is why one is alwasy in a state of desire, which is to say, that one is oriented in a certain disposition to think and act as a function of one's current organism-environmental posture, and that one is at the same time implying ahead of or beyond that posture, .Psychological functioning, as all organismic functioning, is for self-overcoming. Human purpose is a constantly changing self-organized implying ahead of itself. To look for reasons and purposes beyond or above (God) this temporally self-transforming body-environment interaction is to unknowingly affirm it.

The phenomenologists argue that the notion of objectivity is constituted via intersubjective relations, which makes objectivity always relative to a social field.The 'other' is not predicable, it affects me as something alien, foreign to my previous experieince. At the same time, it is not utterly independent of my history . There is something familiar or recognizable in even the most surprising experience.This does not make it predictable but neither does it make it random in a mathemtical sense.

Husserl says"
“We do not say that in the unity of the stream of my lived experiences each lived experience is necessary, necessarily conditioned by the lived experiences which precede it and are co-lived. If we say that every lived experience of an act is motivated, that relations of motivation are intertwined in it, this is not to imply that every meaning-intending is one "in consequence of." When I become aware of a thing, the thesis contained in the perception is not always a thesis "in consequence of": e.g., when I see the night sky lit up by a meteor shower or hear quite unexpectedly the crack of a whip.”

Derrida deconstucted the modern empirical notion of the random alongside its opposite,determinism, in order to show that this binary presupposes certain underlying metaphysical assumptions about the nature of reality in terms of 'objectivity, physicalism, naturalism, etc.
In Derrida's thinking(not just Derrida but also the phenomenologists, including Heidegger, there is neither randomness or determinism but codependent subjective-objective relationaltiy

Is there evidence that they reliably make money over longer periods of time?

Show him a Picasso first. He'll have better luck with that. Or one of Trump's tweets.