I think your initial response (similar to mine) is elitism, which is just to say good taste. But kids don't like black coffee, and people who are only literate in the average way can't (yet) enjoy the better stuff. So for them it's dense obscure and useless.

Is there a place for the weak stuff, the coffee drowned in sugar and nondairy creamer ? I think there 'must' be, for this stuff 'is' the who of everyday beingthere. It's the generic or default 'softwhere' or identity of a generation. If a bot didn't write that article, a bot could have. Proximally and for the most part, we are bots. Kant quotes Leibniz on this in his anthropology. We are disturbed by others' repetition of themselves and failure to learn because they begin to seem mechanical and inhuman to us. My programming is a nightmare from which I, a bot, am trying to awake.

Can it be done better ? That seems like a great goal for introductions to thinkers. I adore philosophical novelists like Kundera and Hesse. That's one approach.

Just to be clear, I think antinatalism is profound. It questions existence itself. It looks down on this great stage of fools like a god.

We can't escape justification being unfounded. — schopenhauer1

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Just to be clear, I'm saying that we just already have an 'irrational' or 'unjustifiable' urge to expand...and to find and demand justifications as part of that. We are building a god just now more explicitly than ever: artificial intelligence. This is Nietzsche's overman, even. For Moloch demands a tower. Anything that does not replicate and self-assert and exploit its environment gets shouldered out. Complexity increases. We climb the entropy gradient, the death of the sun.

But we are highly cooperative / communicative, so that the tribe is itself a larger organism. To me the question is how it's even possible for life to question its own value. How did 'Moloch' allow this to happen ? In other words, how did 'game theoretical' pressures not 'filter out' such fantasies in us of own extinction ? Does this connect to the age of empires ? Is antinatalism related to intertribal violence? A generalization and radicalization of genocide ? Is radical questioning in general justified in the long run (statistically), despite dangerous philosophical byproducts, because of related technical innovations ?

How does the 'demon' known as the will-to-live manage to question and sabotage itself ? Or to seem to ?

At this moment, people have already expressed their opinion in unanimity. — Eugen

I'm glad if you found what you are looking for, and I appreciate your politeness.

Thanks!

Emerson believed that we grew in partial circles which we had to close in order to form each version of our self. — Antony Nickles

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Good image!

But fearing life is actually fearing things like decisions, rejection, responsibility, commitment and consequences, etc. — Tom Storm

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Also injury, disease, and violence. In general: suffering including humiliation and loss of power.

Mental is just a label we place on properties produced by specific physical processes in the brain. — Nickolasgaspar

I think we are largely on the same side on this issue, but I'd say let's not forget that 'mental' is a great word in ordinary talk, same with 'physical.' As I see it, the problem is assuming some kind of a dualism and then 'deriving' some limitation of science. Dualistic assumptions lead trivially to the socalled limits of science. But such assumptions are never justified or even clarified.

Following upon this, there is one respect in which brutes show real wisdom when compared with us — Schopenhauer

This is also the advice of 'Solomon.' And Whitman is nice on this:
************************
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

***********************
All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not: as is the good, so is the sinner; and he that sweareth, as he that feareth an oath. This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that there is one event unto all: yea, also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead.
https://biblehub.com/kjv/ecclesiastes/9.htm

Has anyone ever had the feeling of a sort of emptiness or ennui? — schopenhauer1

Ecclesiastes.

I don't think Solomon actually wrote it, but it's a nice story. The king who has tasted all pleasure and all knowledge can see through to the void behind it.

Survival, comfort, entertainment, repeat. — schopenhauer1

Also expansion and conquest, a forward march without a definite destination. To more go and to more go and to more go.

So it could be that the technology you reference is reading that pre-conscious decision-making, not consciousness itself. — Michael

My central point is that 'metaphysical' consciousness is semantically indeterminate and even paradoxical. The famous beetles and boxes passage suggests why. 'Consciousness' refers to a box that could contain anything or nothing. Or it says what it should not be able to say.

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A great friend or spouse is simply one of the treasures to be had on this little sojourn into the darkness.

The skeptic who questions the existence of other minds might argue that such an assumption is unreasonable. — Michael

Just to be clear, I'm not talking about this kind of skepticism. Instead I'd carefully distinguish between ordinary language that involves consciousness and philosophers' less sensible dualism.

I'd say that your interior monologue is still bodily. Technology is being developed that can read your thoughts by little motions in the throat, etc.

I think that this sort of confession is neccesary for a healthy and resilient mind, be it to a therapist, to a yogi or guru, a wiseman/woman, a parent or friend, or to a clergy member.

We ought not lose the importance of this. — Benj96

I agree with all that you said. I've especially benefited from close friendships where there's enough trust to be radically honest.

2) we have first-person experience — Michael

I think the problem is here. It's not clear what is meant.

You say we have first person experience, but (private) first person experience cannot be used to give 'first person experience' a definite content.

Imagine replacing this premise with 'we all have a metaphysical lockbox that only we can see and look into.' How can that be a public (rational) premise ? How could one be sure of what was referenced ? Without merely assuming some strange and elusive entity that is essentially the same in all of us ?

Excerpt of another old 'meditation' ...
... human extinction; ineluctable nothingness – the radical contingency of the species, its fossils & histories, and our bloodied parade of civilizations – an echo of sighs & moans, laughter & screams fading even now and forever into oblivion. Music is made of silence, which merely interrupts with sudden soundscapes, each piece (i.e. an ephemeral world) ending like raindrops in the ocean. It's terrible knowing, feeling bone deep, that everything and everyone [ ... ] one day very soon in the cosmic scheme of things will be utterly forgotten as if all of it, all of us, had never existed. — 180 Proof

Ah yes, a beautiful description of that abyss that terrorized me that night. We usually (if lucky?) find ourselves absorbed in the play of life ('falling immersion').

This reminds me of Ecclesiastes but more vivid. Which is not to say the KJV isn't a masterpiece.

***
There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.

But what am I picturing when thought content is separate from thinking? — Richard B

I suggest a structuralist approach. Imagine a game that is basically Chess but every piece is carved differently and has a different name. Translating the bishop token (its 'content') would just be pointing out the piece that does the 'same thing' (plays the same role) in the other game.

I think the answer is, the symbolic form changes, but the meaning is constant. Same with number: we can invent all kinds of symbolic systems and relationships, but the meaning of '7' must remain invariant. That is what *I* think 'platonism' is intuiting, although I accept it's very much a minority view. — Wayfarer

We pretty much agree here. I imagine that's the point of forms. Even Saussure talked of form. But equivalence classes do the same job with less commitment. The container metaphor is too spatial, in my view. Or maybe it's fine but we need more approaches. We tend to think when translating that we are unwrapping and rewrapping a Content instead of searching for a tool that does the same job.

(And there must be some other good metaphors out there besides just these.)

He believed that language is a system of symbols that can be used to express these thought contents, which are themselves independent of any particular language.' — Wayfarer

I think Frege was right about that (relative) independence. The sameenough idea can be put in lots of sentences in the same language or in some other language.

The sentences are containers metaphor has its advantages, but perhaps it can lead us astray if we forget other possibilities. Equivalence classes look to be a more neutral approach.

I think this is the idea behind confession, confess to one's mistakes, be forgiven, and move forward, released from guilt and shame. — Metaphysician Undercover

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Right. And it also frees others to speak honestly.

I think it's connected to what teachers sometimes say: there are no stupid questions. The point is of course that one learns by expressing difficulties and having them addressed and not by concealing one's ignorance or confusion.

"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." Your boy recognized the importance of the unknowable, so at least that much can be said in his favour. — Janus

That's a great quote. I think it's about the radical contingency (?) of the world, the thereness of the there. To it's more like what Sartre called beneath all explanation.
**********

The experience that we need in order to understand logic is not that something or other is the state of things, but that something is: that, however, is not experience.

...

To say 'I wonder at such and such being the case' has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case. In this sense one can wonder at the existence of, say, a house when one sees it and has not visited it for a long time and has imagined that it had been pulled down in the meantime. But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing. I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it's clouded. But that's not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is. One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. But then it's just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.

Here's a Derrida quote that gets at the heart of it, at something like our soul myth, a perfect selfoverhearing of pure information or thought. The mind is mouth and ear at once.
***********
The voice is heard ( understood ) ­... closest to the self as the absolute effacement of the signifier: pure auto-affection that necessarily has the form of time and which does not borrow from outside of itself, in the world or in "reality," any accessory signifier, any substance of expression foreign to its own spontaneity. It is the unique experience of the signified producing itself spontaneously, from within the self, and nevertheless, as signified concept, in the element of ideality or universality. The unworldly character of this substance of expression is constitutive of this ideality. This experience of the effacement of the signifier in the voice is not merely one illusion among many ---since it is the condition of the very idea of truth... Within the closure of this experience, the word [mot] is lived as the elementary and undecomposable unity of the signified and the voice, of the concept and a transparent substance of expression. This experience is considered in its greatest purity --- and at the same time in the condition of its possibility --- as the experience of "being." The word "being," or at any rate the words designating the sense of being in different languages, is, with some others, an "originary word," the transcendental word assuring the possibility of being-word to all other words. As such, it is precomprehended in all language and...only this precomprehension would permit the opening of the question of the sense of being in general...Heidegger reminds us constantly that the sense of being is neither the word "being" nor the concept of being. But as that sense is nothing outside of language and the language of words, it is tied, if not to a particular word or to a particular system of language..., at least to the possibility of the word in general. And to the possibility of its irreducible simplicity...
*******
Of Gram

2. I give you the freedom to define consciousness exactly as you like. — Eugen

But humans can't do that for one another. Or it wouldn't be interesting. Concepts are essentially/ideally public. If you correct me, you help prove my point.

I asked you to clarify what you meant to bring you in to my approach. That's all I can offer. To me this is not like a chess problem. It's as deep as the problems of meaning and being.

Wonder in spite of "fear" – the shock of 'appearing and disappearing' – may spark deliberative reflections; absent wonder, however, I think "fear" itself just reinforces superstitions. — 180 Proof

Excellent point! Reminds me of Sheldon Solomon's team's work. Reminders of destruction seem to influence people to cling more tightly to their wider 'tribal' identifications. As far as I can make out, this is basically what spirituality is, so it's just a matter of how sublimated or elevated or expansive those identifications are.

But I do remember a wild night with [various substances] that threw me into total death terror. I managed with the help of philosophy and myth to steer that terror into overflowing love. I had to forgive/accept my own death, experience myself a straw dog, rusty pipe, melting candle. Very strange to veer from terror into ecstatic joy. I might have scrawled god is love is death. But I sobered up. I don't think mortals can stay in such extreme states for long. Hardware won't allow it.

One could maybe define terror as fear intense enough to shatter the ego.

The elements of a set are logically prior to the set — Art48

I'm not so sure. Perhaps a platonist would consider all of the entities of set theory to be timeless. It'd merely be our presentation of them which would require first the source set and then the equivalence classes.



Consider a novel that written that's been translated into 20 languages. Somehow the original text and all who know the original language are removed (taken by aliens to Jupiter, for instance.) So now we have 20 'translations' which contain the 'same' idea. Do we think perfect translation is possible ? Is a perfect paraphrase in the same language even possible ? Or are we not dealing with a sameenoughness ?

The only course of action is this to acknowledge that they were made, why they were made, and plan/intend to never make the same one again. To learn. — Benj96

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This reminds me of a Nietzschean theme of the higher originating from the lower. We start as crazy little savages and slowly and painfully become creatures capable of making and sometimes even keeping promises, include those we make to ourselves.

I think the Christian idea of confession of sin is probably worth assimilating. I remember a mathematician with a website who foregrounded all the famous theorems and ideas which he did not understand. Beautiful, risky humility.

Thanks!

"How does brain function necessitate consciousness? What is it about brain function that means it can't happen without consciousness also happening?" — bert1

Hi. If consciousness is understood as an immaterial ghost in the machine which is invisible to all scientific instruments, we'd have no way to verify that consciousness ever happened along with brain function -- except possibly in our own case, though even here there are semantic issues.

What can we safely claim here ? There are living people who tend to have brains and tend to be taken as conscious in the everyday sense. But they are given general anesthetic for certain surgeries, and we bury them when they are dead because we don't think they will mind -- are no longer 'conscious.'

Descartes helped get people thinking there was an immaterial stuff haunting their skull, because they could think without making much noise. But it's not as private as you and I would like to be in there...

https://news.mit.edu/2018/computer-system-transcribes-words-users-speak-silently-0404

I don't see why more and more powerful models couldn't get better and better at predicting this or that person's next speech act (including muffled/concealed speech in the throat or even the brain.)

Thanks!

What we need is to study and gather more knowledge and construct more detailed models. — Nickolasgaspar

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And discuss concepts !

The blind spot is a great subject of study. It is grounded in the Upaniṣadic philosophy, 'the eye cannot see itself.' Google The Blind Spot, Michel Bitbol. — Wayfarer

As I see it, you would talk of blind spots, if you knew what I was getting at.

You say 'the eye cannot see itself.' You assume simultaneously that there is a singular way of seeing which cannot catch itself seeing. Yet, typically at least, this seeing is understood in terms of a radical privacy that should make such ambitious theorizing impossible.

If everyone has a box that no one can look in, that's already saying to much, unless the box has a visible outside. The methodological solipsist violates his method with his first statement about the eye or the mind.

I think this happens to easily to us because thinking is not essentially the function of a single mind but rather of tribal linguistic software that runs on individual brains. We are so wired to communicate that we can't remember to be methodological solipsists for 5 seconds.

Whereas what modern science has tended to do is to declare that 'the subject' is completely separate from the external realm, and that meaning and quality (qualia) only inhere in the internal or subjective dimension of thought, thereby devoiding the 'real' world of meaning and purpose. — Wayfarer

As I understand it, the subject is deindividualized but not dematerialized. Science itself doesn't need qualia or direct experience. Consensus suffices. Popper makes a great point about the problems of using direct experience. Here's a paraphrase.

Statements can be justified only by other statements, and therefore testing comes to an end, not in the establishment of a correlation between propositional content and observable reality, as empiricism would hold, but by means of the conventional, inter-subjective acceptance of the truth of certain basic statements by the research community.

The acceptance of basic statements is compared by Popper to trial by jury: the verdict of the jury will be an agreement in accordance with the prevailing legal code and on the basis of the evidence presented, and is analogous to the acceptance of a basic statement by the research community

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/#BasiStatFalsConv

Sellars also makes a case against the assumption of something absolutely Given (like pure redness?) which cannot be questioned.

how then can you say the world existed before humans, if it's a collective construct? — Wayfarer

I do think there is indeed some strangeness here in 'the ancestral realm.'

Meillassoux argues that post-Kantian philosophy is dominated by what he calls "correlationism", the theory that humans cannot exist without the world nor the world without humans.[6] In Meillassoux's view, this theory allows philosophy to avoid the problem of how to describe the world as it really is independent of human knowledge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quentin_Meillassoux

For me, the world is not our construct. We who see the world are in and of the world. I claim that there is an unbreakable unity of us and language and the shared world. Heidegger loved his hyphens for just this reason. We can focus on this or that aspect, but all our equiprimordial. (It's one concept, perhaps, when unfolded.)

I claim that philosophy presupposes being-with-others-in-the-world-with-language as its condition of intelligibility.

Anyway, though Meillassoux has found something like a glitch in the matrix, I still don't see how to compute a phrase like "describe the world as it really is independent of human knowledge." Any such description would be an attempt at human knowledge. So it looks to me like a glorified round square. But I admit it's a hard thing to make sense of.

Have you given Robert Brandom's work much of a look ? He offers the best theory of the self that I can think of.

In short, the self is something like a self-referential system of concepts that is stretched out temporally by its responsibility for the coherence of its claims. This includes things like integrating the implications of one's current beliefs into that system when those implications become obvious (which can take time.) Each self is a like a player in a game of coherent expansion with pruning. A belief that's not 'forbidden' for you might be 'forbidden' to me because it contradictions something else that I have claimed and you have not.

The idea is that the philosophical context is itself made explicit. It's what we have been doing all along, scorekeeping coherence.

It's much simpler than that: we don't understand how matter can think. We simply lack an intuition of how the stuff we see in the world, could, in certain combination, lead to experience. — Manuel

We are in a strange situation. I'll give you that. But we do attribute thoughts and sensations to certain animals, and we do tend to agree that their nervous systems make this possible.

I think it's natural to ask whether silicon will work if the proper organization of signals is achieved. But work how ? I don't think we know very well what we mean by 'consciousness' in a metaphysical context. Nor do we know what we mean by 'things as they are independent of human inquiry.' It's as if we are taking a flexibly blurry practical distinction and stretching it into a dualistic metaphysics.

.

If you take a less functional perspective, you might need there to be a ( 6 ):

( 6 ) What it feels like to be in a state of reflexive, ongoing, intentional, historicising, projective, story telling and unitary affective states. What is it like. — fdrake

Great post in general. Responding to what we might both see as the crux, this tricky number 6.

As I see it, there's a weird logical blind spot in the hard problem of consciousness singular. There's a covert assumption that there's one way that it feels like to be or tell such a story. But those who believe in something like a 'pure mentality' (and its shadow, the thing-in-itself) tend to take theirs radically private. Why don't they all have their own personal hard problem of consciousness ? I think Wittgenstein has already answered this, but I also think his beetle analogy and other hints are not so easy to grok.

most of us are on the lookout for the gems amidst the dross. — Tom Storm

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