Unless you can connect the two maybe you should focus on his ideas. — Joshs

Someone's ideas for how society ought to be directed do not deserve consideration if one is a degenerate in a moral and financial sense.

Unfortunately, we gave it consideration, and unseen misery (and stupidity) followed.

My first reaction on seeing the term motonormativity was probably to roll my eyes, since it's a fashion-conscious coinage in line with heteronormativity and neuronormativity. — Jamal

If my eyes could roll anymore they would return to their original position. None of those words are properly formed — so I comfortably say they are not real words —, and I am sure the people who coined them don't have even their mother tongue mastered. Just a consequence of living in the age where scientists don't need to have language skills.

But the concept that is being captured is important, of course.

Sometimes you need to put a name on something to make it real — Jamal

I remember seeing the casual use of 'car-centric' or variations often.

There is one side insisting that red is the experience that we have of red and the other side that red is the thing that causes the experience, for several pages now.

Is arguing about semantics that interesting?

This misplaces the negations, acting as if the second negates the first when the opposite is true. — Leontiskos

Both negate each other (double negation).

Are you not equivocating between language speakers and non-language speakers? — Leontiskos

Are you? You are asking about whether random people would understand A→B as "no A without B". Without context, not even I would understand A→B as "no A without B". In mathematics t=a→b means that t goes from a to b, nothing to do with material implication.

The goal is to conserve the logical properties when we put the propositions into English, not to telepathically communicate with laymen.

To think that the English entails whatever the logic entails is to beg the question and assume that the English perfectly maps the logic. — Leontiskos

This is the goal and it has to entail it. Otherwise logic is pointless and cannot be applied.

(A→B),¬B |= ¬A
¬A |= (A→B) — Leontiskos

They are not the same thing

What absurdities does it lead to? — Leontiskos

¬(A→B) |= A∧¬B

It is not the case that if A then B.
Therefore A and not-B.

It is not the case that if Socrates is a dolphin then he is strong.
Therefore Socrates is a dolphin and he is not strong.

A without B.
Therefore A and not-B.

Socrates is a dolphin without him being strong.
Therefore Socrates is a dolphin and not strong.

C↔¬A, C |= (A→B) — Leontiskos

That is explosive for any B:
C↔¬A, C |= (A→(B∧¬B))
C↔¬A, C |= (A→¬A)
C↔¬A, C |= (A→W)

Relevant quote from the SEP's article's very first sentence:

Karl Marx (1818–1883) is often treated as a revolutionary, an activist rather than a philosopher, whose works inspired the foundation of many communist regimes in the twentieth century.

While the IEP has articles about every philosopher you might think of, there is none for Marx, while there is one for socialism.

It is appropriate. A journalist, political thinker, (terrible) economist surely, but philosopher? Hardly. Even calling him a historian is strange, at least for what is understood today with 'historian'. An ideologue and sociologist first and foremost.

Soviet communists were really sincere about their intentions of improving the life of every individual — Shawn

Which is why they raped and killed the Romanov family (including a sickly 13-year-old boy), then starved millions of Ukranians to death, and then later after beating Germany in WW2 they raped hundreds of thousands of German women?

Marx as well was a drunkard who had an illegitimate child with his maid, whom his best friend Engels had to take fatherhood of, his best friend who constantly had to give Marx money because he couldn't bother to support his own family. Not to speak of Marx's poems where he claims to have struck a deal with Satan.

But somehow supporters of this lunacy have the same right of vote as normal people.

Relevant:

The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The "thing in itself" (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors. To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one. One can imagine a man who is totally deaf and has never had a sensation of sound and music. Perhaps such a person will gaze with astonishment at Chladni's sound figures; perhaps he will discover their causes in the vibrations of the string and will now swear that he must know what men mean by "sound". — Friedrich Nietzsche – On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

I agree with your post overall, but I think that, despite perhaps both still private, colour and shape are not in the same category. I explained why in this post https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/923995

The ‘historical inevitability’ of this course is therefore expressly restricted to the countries of Western Europe. — Marx 1881

This "historical inevitability" refers to the "expropriation of the agricultural producer", not to the proposed progression of society from primitivism to communism. Related but not the same.

And most EU countries have shrinking middle-classes as well, following years of neoliberal policies. — Benkei

:rofl:

"West" is the codeword for the culturally and historically confused. English speakers like to use "West" to connect themselves to Europe while knowing nothing of European history and having little to no European culture. People from the Middle East and India will blame any perceived social degeneration on this phantasmagorical "West" because Onlyfans or whatever. Leftists will lump whatever countries they can conveniently call evil as the "West", ignoring that Finland and Ireland were the colonised and not the colonisers for all their history, and that the countries they hate brought modernity and technology to the conquered land without wiping out the native populations, something that happened seldom in history. Serbians will just equate "West" to NATO. Is the West the big non-existing boogeyman of the 21st century?

:grin:
I invite you to prove your claim.

Exactly. Which is why China's jump from feudalism into socialism without first becoming a full-fledged capitalist State is a complete blow against the Marxist theorists who put forth that ambitious theory of historical progression.

He is one of those rare cases of a person being wrong about so much and still becoming a major figure. It comes as no surprise then that the ideas, when implemented, led to disaster and mass misery.

Not just the man himself but the accolytes. The Marxist interpretation of sociopolitical progression from primitivism to communism was proven wrong as soon as China went from feudalism straight to socialism, to then become the strange authoritarian state capitalism with ZEEs that we see today.

Just give it a bit more time. — Tarskian

"Two more weeks, trust the plan!"

You will find no other philosophy so reviled, misunderstood, and scorned, yet still true. — schopenhauer1

Hallmark belief of a religious cult.

But what do you think ? — kindred

By definition a utopian society is impossible, otherwise it is not utopian anymore. But that doesn't make for an interesting argument. If you want to argue instead that an idyllic, harmonious society is impossible, carry on.

Akshualy, the formula is $E=\sqrt{m^{2}c^{4}+p^{2}c^{2}}$, not $E=mc^{2}$. You can also see Pythagoras' there.

Can I make up new Chinese words even though I don't speak Chinese? — Count Timothy von Icarus

People who don't speak Greek make up "Greek words" all the time :razz:

I forgot to reply to this post.

If you asked everyone to classify a set of objects into chairs and not chairs, there would be disagreements precisely for this reason. "chair" has no single definition and so refering to it is not referring to a universal. — Ourora Aureis

Yes, that is a valid and good point. That is specially clear with redness. There is disagreement, often even within a single person, about what objects really instantiate 'redness'.

I remember reading a reply to that some time ago, but I can't remember it. Since I don't wanna put words in the mouths of some philosophers, I will say what I think the platonist would reply:

If we look at a wolf, and because of blurry sight or just ignorance of species, we identify it instead as a coyote, it does not mean that the wolf does not belong to its species. Likewise, a misidentification of the instantiation of a universal for another does not mean that the particular is not of its universal, but instead we misattribute its reality due to a mistake of our mind. That is the platonist position, the universal exists and it instanties itself in objects regardless if we are there to see it correctly or incorrectly or not. Not only that, but the object is imperfect in respect to its universal and, depending on how imperfect, it might hinder our capacity of identifying it as such. It is the nominalist that will make away with categories if an intelligent mind, expressing itself in language, decides so.

If a definition has no particular reason to apply to a word, then by definition its arbitrary — Ourora Aureis

Did you mean to say something else? Definitions typically are inbuilt in words or otherwise at least give them meaning, they don't apply to them. Definitions may apply to things, like the definition of 'white' or 'slim fit' applies to my pants. But 'colour above infrared' doesn't apply to 'red', one is the other.

If you mean instead that a definition/concept has no reason to apply to a thing, well, that is another argument, so you can let me know. But that is somewhat the counterargument that I gave to Chesterton, defending Wells, in my second post on this thread.

Also, be careful not to make a circular argument for universals — Ourora Aureis

I don't think I am :razz:

Jacques Derrida introduced the concept of deconstruction, which is an interesting idea opposing these ideas if your interested and havent heard about it. — Ourora Aureis

Check out this article, I read it some years ago and enjoyed it. If you do read it, let me know what you think https://thedangerousmaybe.medium.com/the-deconstruction-of-identity-derrida-and-the-first-law-of-logic-3a6246c42eb

You can highlight a text and a button should appear over it that you can click to quote the text. You can also press the arrow to reply to a post without quoting anything from it.

If both know what each other are talking about, why is one talking as if he takes 'physics' to mean the facts of physics and the other as if he takes 'physics' to mean the academic field? Is it a performance that is going over my head?

It seems that we could simply specify what we mean [...], rather than getting hung up on linguistics. — Dan

If this happened more often here, half of the discussions would never happen.

He is talking about the field of physics, not the laws of physics.

Uncountably many subspaces. There are uncountably many dimensions that a vector space may have, yes.

if someone claims that an essential change like this has taken place, don't we just tell them, "We don't consider people to swap their consciousness, they are born with one and die with that same consciousness"? Are these theories and claims falsifiable? — Leontiskos

Perhaps my statement was too wrong. Theorems (statements) about a concept must follow the concept's definition, lest we are talking about something else. Within the definition that consciousness is something that starts at birth and ends at death, if a body would happen to die and be somehow reanimated, that would imply they have a different soul now. Maybe that is a problem.

A number of folks seem to think that if you get cloned then die, you don't stop experiencing. — Leontiskos

Well, their view is problematic. If you get cloned and don't die the two bodies share the same consciousness then?

For example, on this view, it appears to be possible for two future persons to be psychologically continuous with a presently existing person. Can one really become two? In response to this problem, some commentators have suggested that, although our beliefs, memories, and intentions are of utmost importance to us, they are not necessary for our identity, our persistence through time. — IEP

Since this conclusion violates the transitivity of identity (which states that if an X is identical with a Y, and the Y is identical with a Z, then the X must be identical with the Z), personal identity relations cannot consist in direct memory connections. — IEP

It violates the tansitivity of identity.

Well as I understand it there are clearly documented cases of people coming back from brain death, — Leontiskos

I didn't know that. I looked into an article, and also found a definition of brain stem death:

"Brain stem death is where a person no longer has any brain stem functions, and has permanently lost the potential for consciousness"

Also "The tendency to asystole in BD can be transient and is attributable more to systemic factors than to absence of brain function per se. If BD is to be equated with death, it must be on some basis more plausible than loss of somatic integrative unity."

So it seems there is some disagreement on "brain death" happening. Not sure what to make of it yet.

Your argument must be something like <The only (second-person) evidence of consciousness is bodily movement; after death there is no bodily movement; therefore after death there is no consciousness>. This sort of argument is only objectionable in the case where we have an extremely high standard of proof a la Descartes, which we perhaps do in this thread. This sort of argument is probable but not certain. — Leontiskos

That is fine. I didn't think we had to accomodate for after-life. For that purpose we could refine the definition to: Consciousness then (or the soul etc) would start at birth or whenever we wanna say we first become conscious (mirror test?) and presumably ends in death.

So a larger amount of memory loss than being unable to recognize family members? — Leontiskos

I was proposing an accidental change in the soul, not an essential one. Not recognising family memberes is also an accidental change. An essential change would amount to swapping the soul for another one. I think that is implied from the definition of essence.

This whole thing is reminiscent of the Cartesian move that, "We of course have good reason to believe that X, but do we also have the fullness of certitude?" What standard of proof is being imposed, here? Are we trying to jump over the fence or over the moon? — Leontiskos

As I will say below, the fence is good. Your proposal that it is the standard view amounts to me to simply accepting things because it feels better that way — dogmatism. I am exploring the reasons why we must think otherwise. I also think that your 1-2-3 arguments comes with an issue.

1. We are not perduring.
2. We are perduring, but we don't know it.
3. We are perduring, but we know it.

You will say that 2 is false, but that is circular. We are trying to find out whether we last or not, appealing to knowledge of it ties it in a circle. I want to find out, do we really know these things?

Your trilemma ought to be rephrased instead to "We are being destroyed and recreated, but we can't know it". Then we have something that is epistemically the same as "We are not being destroyed and recreated". But if we can't know whether we are being destroyed and recreated, we can't know otherwise too, so we can't know if we last and the conclusion of the discussion is agnosticism.

Otherwise, there are two possibilities:

1. We persist through time and we can come to reasonably believe that.
2. We don't persist through time and we can come to reasonably believe that we don't.

And that is the discussion. The knowledge claim depends on the metaphysical claim, not the other way around.

but what about sleep? Usually when we sleep we lose consciousness, along with the experiential and psychological continuity. — Leontiskos

If there is a loud noise, we wake up. We dream during sleep. So there is some conscious activity there, even if at a lower level. For example, when we are relaxing at a beach, staring at the cloudless sky, there is much less conscious activity than if we were engaging in engineering work at a live production line.

You define the soul in terms of consciousness, and in those cases a dramatic and permanent change in consciousness occurs. — Leontiskos

Because "dramatic" is arbitrary, and most changes are permanent, often changing out opinion on a movie is permanent, yet we are not dying. How dramatic does it have to be for us to die? Arbitrary.

Do we have the highest degree of certitude that the soul perdures, such that it could overcome the most extreme version of Pyrrhonism? No, I don't think so. — Leontiskos

I don't think extreme Pyrrhonism can be defeated, only overcome. Which is why the title of the thread is Reasons for believing (aka arguments), not proof. A poor reason to believe that the soul perdures is better than no reason at all.

Thanks but I think you meant to tag @Count Timothy von Icarus

Being older?? I was born in 1938, retired in 2000 — Wallace Murphree

Don't pay mind.

Interesting question. Usually, the dimension of a vector space is countable, but it can be finite or infinite.

A vector space of any given dimension, for example, with dimension π has a countable dimension of... exactly π. But under my definition we will have uncountably many subspaces of R2 that are not subspaces of R1, for example.

The definition that I propose, is actually not particularly new. It is quite close to thinking about thinking:

Overgaard, Gilbert & Burwood 2013, pp. 36–37, 43, What Is Philosophy?
Nuttall 2013, p. 12, 1. The Nature of Philosophy — Tarskian

Me if I abused philosophical literature, searched for the first thing that somewhat agreed with my sophomoric redefinition, didn't read the rest, and decided to quote it even though the person being quoted would disagree with me.

"Thinking about thinking" and "statements about other statements" are notions that are very close to each other. — Tarskian

Yet they are not the same thing at all.

That is why I have personally never treated and will never treat philosophy or mathematics as more than just hobbies. — Tarskian

Of course, you can't do either of them at all.

Kant did not. — Tarskian

Now you pretend to know Kant, rich :lol:

Actually, yes, I think they would. People tend to understand that arrows signify directionality, in the sense of starting point → destination. — Leontiskos

Fine, your opinion against mine.

Sure: 2% of people might interpret it as, "No A without B," but that doesn't make for a very good translation. — Leontiskos

"2% of the population might interpret 龍 as 'dragon', but that doesn't make for a very good translation". You see how that doesn't work?

"No A without B in the domain of A-B pairs." — Leontiskos

That is already implied by the phrase.

It is saying there is no A, if there is no B. From A→B, ¬B, we infer ¬A — (A→B),¬B|=¬A. From A→B, C, we infer nothing about A because the value of B hasn't been declared. From A→B, C, ¬B, we infer ¬A, because C doesn't interfere — (A→B),¬B, C|=¬A.

C only says something if there is a relationship between B and C.

I think you took my "everything else is allowed" to mean literally everything else (C), but I meant "every other values of A and B".

If the idea here is, "It's not necessarily a good translation, but it's the best we have," then I would ask why it is better than the standard, "If A then B"? — Leontiskos

Yes, because it doesn't lead to absurds in English.

To sum it up, both shape and colour are experiences that I have and presumably that others have too. We use those words to communicate. There are some necessary synthetic a priori statements that we can make about square objects and round objects, some of those facts have consequences, such as how it rolls and so on. When it comes to the colour red, there aren't any necessary synthetic a priori statements we can make about it, are there? It seems that any synthetic statement about red has to be contigent.

Edit: my usage of "necessary synthetic a priori" might be unfortunate. I am trying to express the idea in some known philosophical jargon. The bottomline is that there must be something in common about different minds' experience of some shapes, otherwise communication would break down, while in the case of colours there doesn't seem to be any such necessity. The "necessary synthetic a priori" there is what I think is the reason behind such distinction.

I'll trust you if you say you do, but I don't — Hanover

Sometimes I find that some people really do. Some people seem to have a language-dominated thinking, while others don't. Some don't have an inner monologue, some don't have a mind's eye, some have both and others none. Perhaps there is a real psychological difference at play. Nevertheless, I still cannot conceive that someone would see me red with an angry face and have to subvocalise "He is angry" before forming that belief — it seems evolutionarily impossible too.

Your question was, as I understood it, that you get how we can doubt the redness of the ball is part of the ball but we can't doubt the roundness is part of the ball.

Is that a correct restatement? — Hanover

If we really wanted, we could really doubt anything. I am okay with that. My post was specifically in reply to your disagreement to separating properties in different categories.

I used the example of the ball to highlight that, while colour may be completely in our heads and each person has a different experience and no problem ensues in communication because the experiences are consistent between one another, the shape of something might also be in our head, but the fact that we are able to tell each other to grab an object by its corners without issues at least gives us reason to think that, though the experience is in our head, the experience of different people as to the shape of something seems to be the same.

If it were different, and one person saw a ball where one saw a cube, communication would break down, as we can't possibly imagine how to grab a ball by its corners.

This commonality of experience, shown by effective and reliable communication, seems to suggest that there are outside objects that produce the same experience to different minds. There is nothing prima facie however that suggests a commonality of experience of colours, I at least can't think of anything. So it seems that there is merit to the idea of colours being a property in a way that shape is not and vice versa.

Why must there be a direct link from what is "out there" to what is in your experience when it comes to touch but not vision. — Hanover

To restate the post above, I wouldn't say there must be direct link, but that it is not spurious to divide this link (direct or indirect) into different categories — be them secondary/primary property or another division.

If it is, my response is to ask what you're relying upon other than your senses to distinguish primary qualities (the roundness) from secondary ones (the redness). — Hanover

Also to restate it, we could say we are also relying on some necessary a priori synthetic propositions (a ball has no corners).

Would anyone interpret — Leontiskos

Would anyone interpret A→B as A implies B if they weren't taught about symbolic logic, like 99% of the world? If you showed them the truth table of A→B, I can quite see it that at least some 1 in every 50 people would interpret it as no A without B.

Sorry, this whole Benjamin thing is too confusing for me to keep up.

The formula (A→B) cannot be used in all semantic instances of "if A then B". — Relativist

Because, among other reasons, there is a causal sense to "if A, B", and logic is not talking about causation or Hume. Besides, when we speak of causation, the antecedent is always true, but that is not the case in material implication.

But the mapping to semantics is critical. — Relativist

Thank you, this is what I have been trying to highlight.

You imply that the non-upper...blah blah class suffers a certain way implying other classes don't — schopenhauer1

No, not at all. You can only reread my post until you stop seeing statements that are not there, it is clearly written, but I know it is not gonna happen.

It's actually the opposite of acceptance. — schopenhauer1

Sure I should have said resignation towards suffering instead of acceptance.

suffering is necessary for happiness — schopenhauer1

Many psychologists would agree with that. It is not sadism.

Glad to know you solved the problems of suffering with the gym, brah. — schopenhauer1

Yes, it worked for a bunch of people and keeps working every year. Be honest, do you exercise?

You didn't have to post that image twice, by the way.

Ah yes, YOU are the arbiter of what people should be feeling about life. — schopenhauer1

Most people are not depressed or miserable despite having far worse lives than you, so it is you who thinks yourself an arbiter.

You are arguing as if you are in the Lounge. This thread should be merged into the antinatalism containment thread, because that is what it is.

That second premise(¬B) is superfluous to the conclusion (A). — Relativist

I know.

But the logic conclusion says otherwise. — Relativist

You ran into the same problem as me in another thread 20 pages ago, which made me make this thread. That problem is in this very thread's OP. The problem is that:

¬(A→B) = It is not the case that ("all bluebirds fly" implies "Fred is a duck") — Relativist

is not true.

Daniel's answer seems to falsify «not A without B» without falsifying A→B. — Leontiskos

I didn't really understand the Taleb-Nephlim dialogue but Daniel is just saying A but without saying anything about the value of B.

I was thinking of ¬¬(A→B)↔¬(A∧¬B). This is not the same as your interpretation of "Not A without B." — Leontiskos

¬(A∧¬B) is also no A without B. It says that A=1, B=0 is false.



Yes, very correct, not (A without B) is ugly and in English doesn't mean anything, so that is why I was writing not A without B. But no A without B is better as well.

1) Change exists
2) A single substance, let's call this the first substance, cannot undergo a change
3) This means that we need another substance, let's call this the second substance, to cause a change in the first substance
4) The second substance must have the ability to experience and cause
5) The second substance must be changeless
6) The second substance, I call it the mind, is immortal since it is changeless

Nonsense.

Thanks for the effort that you put into your post but I can't connect your reply to the example I brought up in my post, I agree that subjective consistency doesn't suggest objective existence but I feel like my example wasn't really addressed.

I think this is simply incorrect. — Leontiskos

Why? Because you think that «not A without B» doesn't tell us anything about the rest? It is supposed to be thought as Venn diagram, and if it is not the case that A without B, everything else is the case. It works for me to think of it as such.

(2) is false. — Leontiskos

Only if you think A→B does not stand for Not A without B.

Put differently, we can know from «not A without B» that ¬A is not disallowed, but we cannot know that the statement is made true by ¬A. — Leontiskos

I said 'allowed' there to simply mean true no matter the truth value of the other variable. If ¬A is not disallowed, it means it is true. ¬A is simply A is false or 0. Not A without B means that A=1,B=0 is false, therefore every other combination of the values of the variables gives us true. Since A=0 in the case that ¬A, not A without B is true, and so is A→B.

Forms relating to ¬¬(A→B):

"Not(A without B)"
"Not A without B"
"No A without B" — Leontiskos

By double negation ¬¬(A→B) is simply not A without B. The same as A→B: we can't have A without having B. While ¬(A→B) is simply A without B. So ¬¬(A→B) naturally is not A without B.

No, your conclusion (A is true) is not valid — Relativist

It is:

You can infer A from ¬(A→B) by De Morgan.
¬(A→B)
¬(¬A∨B) (definition of material implication)
¬¬A∧¬B (de Morgan)
A∧¬B (double negation) — Lionino

not only in its understanding of suffering but also in its attempt to trivialize the profound and universal nature of human dissatisfaction — schopenhauer1

Human dissatisfaction is not trivialised; on the contrary, it is ennobled.

while the so-called "mundane" sufferings of the middle class are mere role-play, is a gross misrepresentation of the human condition. — schopenhauer1

I never said that the suffering of the middle class is mundane or role-play.

To begin with, the notion that suffering is somehow confined to the middle class or that it’s a "middle class thing" is absurd and dangerously misleading. — schopenhauer1

I never said suffering is confined to the middle-class. First you imply that I believe the suffering of the middle class is role-play, now that I think only the middle-class suffers. You are inputting two contradictory positions to me.

The idea that the working class doesn’t suffer, or suffers less than those in more privileged positions, is not only false but also a harmful stereotype. — schopenhauer1

I never said that either.

Schopenhauer’s philosophy of pessimism lays bare the reality that life is a series of unfulfilled desires, where satisfaction is always fleeting, and suffering is inherent in existence itself. — schopenhauer1

Schopenhauer's pessimism teaches us to accept the reality of suffering in life — one can think of Buddhism's magga. We can take the acceptance of suffering in life one step further and use suffering instead as a weapon.

they often get twisted into a macho, tough-guy narrative that ignores the deeper, — schopenhauer1

Ok? That is just ad hominem and complaining, not arguing. If the tough guy is thriving in a fulfilling life, does the "deeper, more pervasive suffering" really exist universally or is it a psychological consequence of wallowing in pessimism?

The argument also makes the mistake of trivializing the struggles of those who suffer in less dramatic or visible ways. — schopenhauer1

Not at al. You are arguing against a strawman. A struggle may be completely private and yet empower the individual immensely.

these experiences are not mere role-play — schopenhauer1

Good job simply restating your position. Naturally, I think you are wrong, and I think that those people should go lift heavy weights.

In reality, suffering often leaves people scarred, disillusioned, and deeply affected. — schopenhauer1

Yes, and those strenghten you. Some instances of suffering are of course excessive, and an individual may have all the rights to be depressed, but I don't think that most people lead lives that justify that. And, in fact, promoting that as something to be accepted and not overcome simply demotivates others from taking their open wounds and scarring them by making them think that the wound was too great when in reality it was not.

The idea that suffering is a test to be passed, rather than a fundamental part of existence — schopenhauer1

How about a fundamental test of existence?

Overall, your counterargument (starting from the second paragraph) seems to be that suffering exists across all social classes. Well, obviously. However my post is not about social class, it just used one as an example. Beyond that, there is no counterargument but a restatement of your position by "No, those people are actually sad because life really really sucks" and "Schopenhauer refutes that" — and perhaps he does, but you didn't.

Nah, I actually answered that line of thinking quite handily. ;). — schopenhauer1

I think you have an established conclusion that you want to achieve no matter what.

An Aristotelian substance could almost be defined as something which is known to perdure, in the sense that it self-subsists. As this thread shows, Descartes' "substance" cannot be known to perdure and is explicitly claimed not to self-subsist, and is therefore not a substance in the classical sense. — Leontiskos

Well, in a way you could say Descartes' substance is defined as something to perdure. The matter then is whether that substance (1) exists or a substance (2) that has the definition of a substance (1) except perdurance.

I think it is a false premise to associate Cartesian dualism with hylemorphism — Leontiskos

Surely, very distinct.

I have more experience with its perdurance than with the combustibility of wood. — Leontiskos

The contention is exactly on that.

for the classically Aristotelian view of the soul is different from both, and does not posit that the soul is "findable in a snapshot of time and space." — Leontiskos

Ok, I will study that eventually.

There's plenty of evidence. — Sam26

:razz: Alright, give one.

We can't physically sense quantum fields, but we have inferred their existence based on theoretical models that have great explanatory power and scope. — Relativist

Well, of course, which we get through physical sensors that display information through light on a screen to your eyes.

Well, you haven't nailed down what you mean by 'soul'. — Leontiskos

The subject that experiences the "eternal here".

What then would be an example of a soul that has changed non-accidentally, and to a large extent? — Leontiskos

To change a soul essentially would be to swap souls. We don't consider people to swap their consciousness, they are born with one and die with that same consciousness.

and to a large extent? — Leontiskos

Brain-washing or memory loss.

"What if, without your knowing it, your soul is being annihilated and recreated at each moment?" — Leontiskos

I don't start paragraphs with quotation marks; "your soul" here tells me that we are not thinking of the same thing. I will explain in another way.

If you die, you stop experiencing.
If you get cloned then die, you stop experiencing, but someone else with the same genes as you keeps living.
You know the famous philosophical problem about teleportation:

If all your atoms are dissolved and then [are sent] over to another place at nearly speed of light, then reassembled, did you die and went to eternal sleep and what is created a perfect copy of you? Or is it you and you simply lost consciousness for an instant? — Lionino

Some say you died, others say you kept living.
If it is the case that we die, we stop experiencing, and someone else with the same genes and memories as us keeps living.
If the soul is constantly annihilated and another one spawns in its place, the idea is that we are living only for a fraction of time, to then die and be replaced by a clone that will start living right after us, to then die again and be replaced too.
There is a difference between dying and keeping living, just like there is a difference between dying after being teleported or keep living.

then how does this tell us that the experienced pattern at birth is connected to the same chain as the experienced pattern at death? — Leontiskos

Perhaps because, if there is no experience that happens at a point in time, but only experiences that happen through time, we cannot separate one experience from the other. And the continuity between those experiences is indeed the psychological continuity, which is allowed by the spatio-temporal continuity of brain states.

Why not say that it ends at dementia, or coma, or brain-death? — Leontiskos

Quotation mark!, "death" there stands for brain-death. I think the word 'death' itself is typically meant as brain-death (¿is there another kind?). Coma may be seen neurologically as a long and/or deep sleep. Dementia is a fast decrease of mental elements, leading ultimately to brain death:

the union of many mental elements which grow (or decrease, in the case of dementia) — Lionino

.

Why not say that it goes beyond death? — Leontiskos

No evidence of consciousness after brain-death.

Why not, for that matter, say that it ends at a stroke that turns out not to be deadly? Or the day you have a religious experience? Or trip on LSD? — Leontiskos

Because there is nothing about these facts that would make us think we are actually dying in that moment if one doesn't subscribe to empty individualism. Meaning: if we are closed individualists in a substance metaphysics, choosing those scenarios as the moment of the death of a consciousness is arbitrary and perhaps straight up wrong.