My own thought experiment is of thinking about how life would have been if I had not existed. It involves eliminating oneself from every aspect and incident in which one has ever partaken in. I wonder about how different life would have been without me for my family, friends and in all respects..How would life have been different for others without my existence in causal chains? — Jack Cummins

I've thought of this, too. I gave up, mostly because I was overwhelmed by the complexity. It starts with your birth. If you're not there, then, for example, the day of the hospital personal that were on duty that day might have been different. How? Who knows. And it goes on: you enter a packed subway train and take up space, people organising around you. Maybe that got people to talk who would otherwise not have been next to each other? In summary, most of the consequences of me being around likely have nothing at all to do with what I value about myself (either positively or negatively). Stories tend to go the route of things would have been better or worse, but really things would likely have been just wildly different. (For example, going back to my birth: If I hadn't been conceived, then my mother wouldn't have been pregnant during the nine prior months. Someone else might have been conceived during that time, and that in turn would likely throw off the entire rhythm of the world such that it would have been very unlikely that my little sister would have been born, simply because sex at a different time would entail different ovum/sperm combinations....).

My hunch is this: if you hadn't been born, you'd be entirely irrelevent, since the world in which your relevant comes into being with you. Ultimately, the comparison between world-with-you and world-without-you is far to complex and includes a lot of stuff we find incidental rather than significant to us. The question just stopped mattering to me the moment I realised a ceteris-paribus hypothesis is untenable.

Not sure you get what I mean, but that really was a switch for me. I'm here and that is it. Any world without me is either unimaginable or implausible, due to the limits of cognition.

If an exact duplicate is made so both original and duplicate exist, are both originals? I don't see how that can be. — Patterner

I think the very concept of original and duplicate breaks down entirely. — flannel jesus

Can you explain what you mean? — Patterner

Human sense-making arises out of our daily praxis: selective attention and all that. Our terms cluster around that, too. We think in terms of original and copy, because the technology is hypothetical, and we go by our daily praxis. If you want to guess (and guess is the best we can manage, I think) what our intutions would be were to live in a society where duplication technology is possible, you need to radically question your immediate intution.

I see at least two issues:

Social responsibility:

We have the new situation where two people share the same dispostion to act on top of the same memories. Up to the point of the copying event there was only one person. After that event there are two people, both of which share the same personal connection to the same singular past. Under our present original/duplicate concept, only the original really does have that connection, while the duplicate only thinks he has that. Do you think this makes for sustainable social organisation? The thing is that, I think, different events pull in different directions:

A married man duplicates himself. Is the duplicate married?
A murderer murders a man. Is the duplicate responsible for the murder?
A person who owes me a dollar is duplicated. Who owes me a doller, and how many do I get back?

There are a million of these situation that all influence each other. What do rights and duties to you have? Does the original-duplicate distinction remain practically relevant equally across all domains? What sort of social conflict can we expect. Would the "duplicate" status enshrine itself as a new minority, for example?

Note that however this is going to organise, people are going to try to game the system, and that in itself will influence how the system evolves. And at some point the last person who was born into a duplicate-technology-free society will be history, and everyone will take it as unquestioned routine that duplicates exists.

The Relationship between the scanned data, the continuous person, and the assembled person:

If we understand the data well enough to temper with it, there will be potential applications. For example, if the duplication technology scans the space that's the person and reassembles that space one for one, it would often reassemble more than just the person. Relevant here is medical stuff: it would reassemble stuff like food being in the process of being digested, air in the lungs, parasites, pace makers, etc. Everything. Some of those things are part of the person, some not - some (such as oxygen in the air and nutrients in the fodd) will soon be part of the person, and so on.

Now imagine I have cancer; I make a duplicate but edit out the cancer. I can now be jealous of my cancer-free person. There is what is theoretically possible; there is what people would do; and there is what people would then feel about what it is that people will do. There's going to be a new normal at some point, but it's hard to see what that is.

The cancer example from the previous example shows a soical-psychological difference, I think, between the teleporter case and the duplication case, as in the teleporter case only one, the assembled person, remains - thus jealousy is impossible, and data-tampering might be viewed, by some at least, as a less risky procedure than an operation. But if you retain your cancer and the copy doesn't? It gets even weirder, depending on the person: for example, if the duplicated person is altruistically inclined, the copy might feel guilty for not having cancer, while the original might be happy for the person, and they both might have a good laugh at the absurdity of the sitution, since they also share that ironic distance to what they consider real.

We can have what-if relationships to our alters (whether we're the original or the copy doesn't matter) in a way we can have to no-one else, not even identical twins (since they don't share a first-person history up to a duplication event).

***

I was born in the seventies, and as a kid I was naturally drawn to SF. So I've been thinking about this almost all my life. The more prominent source of the transporter question for people is probably Star Trek, and I certainly watched that. But the transporter never seemed very interesting to me; it felt like a convenience device, both on cool-tech aspect and the story beats ("evil Kirk" was more fun that plausible, so I didn't really switch on my brain for that, not even as a kid).

For me, the SF source of the transporter is actually the 1958 version of The Fly. (I'm fairly sure me talking about parasites and half-digested food above comes ultimately from that first impetus: the difference what you think of as yourself, vs what a machine would. This was much more interesting to me than anything Star Trek did. That, and I was also an animal nerd as a kid.)

My understanding is that in English this dativ form only remains to point out (identify) the (indirect) object, such as “I gave them flowers”, but nowadays in English we would normally say “I gave flowers to them”. — Antony Nickles

Pretty much. Outside of that it only survives in specific idoms, such as "Woe is me," which I've seen native speakers miscorrect to "Woe is I" (which shows that the dativ is ailing).

As for what you'd normally say, while I can't offer a native speaker's intuition, my impression is that people put the important information at the end of the sentence, so it'd be "I gave them flowers," if the focus is on what you gave them, and "I gave flowers to them," if the focus is on who you gave the flowers to (whom you gave the flowers... <-- this usage seems in sharp decline, which must irk the no-preposition-at-the-end-of-a-sentence crowd).

Someone told me Russian speech pervasively pictures properties as external things, impinging on the subject, where in German, the speaker owns the properties, so instead of the cold is upon me, it's I have cold. Do you think that influences the respective philosophies? Germanic languages conjure a huge inner landscape. — frank

As a native speaker of German, I'm unsure what difference they articulated here. It certainly doesn't work for "cold", as "I'm cold," is most commonly "Mir ist kalt," which translates to "Me is cold," where "me" is the dativ case, as in "Give ME the book." This is far closer to "cold is upon me" than "I have cold."

There are certainly "I have" constructions, such as "Ich habe Hunger," ("I have hunger") or "Ich habe Angst" ("I have fear"). In some cases, alternatives are equally common, as in "Ich bin hungrig," ("I am hungry.")

None of this conjures any kind of inner landscape for me (but that's something that might emerge as meaningful in direct language comparison).

n is not the same for everyone. — unenlightened

Ah, yes, of course. I missed that (thought of it in another context, but somehow didn't make the connection on the practical front). Thanks.

And so everyone, whatever colour their eyes (because no one knows their own eye colour), is waiting to see if after n nights (where n is the number of blue eyed people they see) the blue eyed people leave, and if they don't, they can conclude they also have blue eyes, and if they do then they conclude they have eyes of some other colour. — unenlightened

Yes, that's all perfectly clear to me. What's not clear to me, for example, is why they can't skip forward to day n. I know they can't, but it makes no sense other than in purely logical terms. That's what I find so nuts about this riddle. There's a rift between logic and experience here I don't know how to bridge.

Here's what they know:

A blue-eyed person knows there are either 99 or 100 blue-eyed people.
A brown-eyed person knows there are either 100 or 101 blue-eyed people.

No-one knows the number of eye-clolours, but they do know it's either 2 (the ones they can see), or 3 (if their own isn't among the ones they can see). Therefore:

A blue-eyed person knows there's:
(a) 99 blue-eyed people and 101 brown-eyed people (and their eye-colour is brown)
(b) 100 blue-eyed people and 100 brown-eyed people (and their eye-colour is blue)
(c) 99 blue-eyed people, 100 brown-eyed people, and themselves (with a unique, unknown eye-colour)

If (a) and (b) were the only options, Michael's rule would work from a logical point of view, but (c) messes up things, here. We know that [# of blue]+[# of brown]=200; they don't: [# of blue]+[# of brown] could be 199.

So what changes when the Guru tells them something they already know?

That's the problem. There's a wedge between a logical sequence and an empirical reality I find hard to reconcile:

See, the catch is this: If an islander sees no blue-eyed person, then all other islanders see exactly one person with blue eyes. So all of the logic here is counterfactual: you don't really have to go see if someone leaves; you know nobody will. But at the same time, this logic spins forward until Day 99 or Day 100, depending on wether the person is blue-eyed or brown-eyed (unbeknowest to themselves), and then it's supposed to work in the world we live in. How?

It's the event on Day 100 of all blue-eyed people leaving that tips the brown-eyed people off that they're not blue-eyed (but not that they're brown-eyed). All that hinges on the fact that systematically brown-eyed people see more blue-eyed people than blue-eyed people do, and thus their set-off point is later. And their set-off point is only later, because the Guru talked about blue-eyed people.

The important fact seems to me this:

Every Islander knows that blue-eyed people see one fewer blue eyed person than non-blue eyed people.

If there had been 100 blue-eyed people, 90 brown-eyed people, and 10 green-eyed people, they'd still have had to wait 99 days before making the decision, because both brown-eyed and green-eyed people form the relevant group of people whose eyes aren't blue.

If there had been 20 blue-eyed people and 180, the game would be over much sooner if blue-eyed people were "seen" by the guru, or much later if brow-eyed people were "seen".

It's obvious to me, matemathically, that the announcement matters. I just don't know how to interpret this in pragmatical terms. It's baffling.

1) Consciousness is fundamental, not emergent from the physical.*

2) Therefore, something non-physical is also at work.

3) There's no reason to think matter everywhere in the universe that is arranged like us would not have the same subjective experience that we have.

4) The non-physical aspect of reality that gives us our subjective experience is doing the same everywhere in the universe. — Patterner

Haven't been on here for a few days, so I just now saw this. I'm looking at this argument, and I don't see how you can argue this while holding that consciousness is fundamental.

1) Okay.
2) What "therefore"? If consciousness is fundamental and not emergent then something non-physical is at work, sure. And that something... surely is consciousness? This seems circular?
3) That seems to be upside down to me. Again, it's true, but only because to have the experience we do is fundamental, and it involves being arranged like we are. Again circular?
4) I reality gives us our experience, then reality (whatever that is) is fundamental. I suppose I might have been implying from the beginning that - if consciounsess is fundamental - then reality isn't. It's consciousness that arranges reality.

That is, unless, you've rowed back on your definition, and consciouness isn't subjective experience, but something weird that gives us our experience. But then you have no definition.

What am I missing?

We don't have a clue as to how consciousness could emerge from the physical. It's like asking how we could build a house out of liquid water. Worse, in fact, because at least houses and water are both physical things. — Patterner

Yeah, we don't have a clue what consciousness even is apart from our experiences. In fact, even the "our" is an assumption here. I think it's at its very core a perspective problem, but I don't want to argue this here (as I'm not actually a panpsychist, just sympathetic to the idea.)

What do you have in mind by "consciouness being fundamental doesn't imply everything being conscious"? What is the alternative? — Patterner

Fundamental =/= Omnipresent

If CON = Present, CON = Fundamental
If CON =/= Present, N/A

Also, I think the term "everything" is problematic in the sense that what appears to us as a unit may not be conscious, and what is conscious may not appear to us as a unit. Thus "everything" is necessarily undefined in this thread. The best we can do is permutate whatever units make sense to us and assume that every permutation is potentially conscious even if viewed as a unit it doesn't creat sense for us. (So, for example, not only I am conscious, but every hair on my head is, too. Not only every hair on my head, but every random (to me) pair of hairs on my head; every random (to me) set of three hairs... and so on. All those consciousnesses fan out as a reality each and overlap. (The "potential" here isn't a potential in the sense of a "potential energy"; it's just a measure of our ignorance.)

For any unit to be conscious as a unit, it must be a unit processing energy. Arrangements of particles must mean something other than the arrangements of particles that they are, and they must be processing that information. So DNA, the beginning of life, is also the beginning of groups of particles that are conscious as a unit. — Patterner

It now seems like you're not actually saying "everything" is conscious. That's perfectly fine, since consciouness being fundamental doesn't imply everything being conscious. It just feels... different from what I read you saying before (partly due to the rock example, no doubt).

Sorry, I just don't understand your idea. — Patterner

Don't worry. It's a thought experiment I developed for myself to make sense of an intuition I have. And the thought experiment failed to achieve that goal, so far, but I still get back to it from time to time. If you don't have that intuition, it must seem like even more nonsense than it seems to me. But I do think there's some opportunity here to figure out... our disconnect?

I think the following might be elements of my intuition:

There is one world, and it is what is.

Within that world there is consciousness, at least mine. Probably more. How many there are is a fact that is not available to me.

Things that appear to me as a unit may or may not be conscious.

There may be "things" that don't appear to me as a unit that are conscious. They would be units in themselves, but not for me.

If that is the case, then consciousnesses might be an aspect of the world-that-is-what-it-is that internally devides it into differening units. That might be what "a reality" is. Thus: a reality is one way to organise the world-that-is-what-it-is and it differes from other ways the world could be organised. The nodes that organise the world into realities would be consciounesses.

Some ways to interally organise the world-that-is-what-it-is are compatible with each other, and some are not. That means what units are "real" depends on what consciouness constitutes a reality.

That leaves us with the putative globe-as-unit in my thought experiment: partly part of a butterfly, partly part of a flower... etc. could be a real thing if we posit a putative way to internally organise the world-that-is-what-it-is such that this globe needs to stay a unit. We need to also posit a consciouness that makes sense of this. (As with your theory, "makes sense" would not be a mental event here; it would just be a mode of organisation. What's a real unit for one consciousness, is not necessarily a real unit for another. Mutual compatibility between consciousnesses and thus realities would depend, possibly among other things, on overlap of "real units".)

I haven't quite figured out what to do with "the world-that-is-what-it-is". Logic tells me that, since it is the thing to be organised, it is in itself unorganised and thus has no consciouness and isn't real. This is a major area where I short circuit my thinking.

In the end, it's just something that keeps my mind busy when I'm bored. None of this seems practically relevant to me. And most of it is probably nonsense, but it should be able to serve as a signpost to how my mind works.

I'm not sure "subjective experience" works as a definition, mostly because this uproots what "experience" means: you sometimes express sympathy for "felt experience", then you say that a rock "experiences being a rock," but also that rock has no feelings. There's a muddle here that's nearly impossible to deal with if your intuition is foreign to the concept.

I'm actually sypmapthetic towards the concept of panpsychism, but I've never been able to make it work. I think if consciousness is fundamental but not mental, then it would have to do more with... perspectivity? It's an organising principle. For example:

A human being is a unit. — Patterner

If consicousness is emrgent than we would say that a human being being a unit is a necessary precondition for it to be conscious; but if we posit that consciousness is fundamental then we might examine the idea that a human being is a unit, because it is conscious. Consciousness organises the world flow into units. The difference between a human being with mental events and a rock without mental events might be that human beings don't only form themselves as units, but also other things around them, while rocks only form themselves as units (if rocks have consciousness, and their being a unit isn't just an artifact of human consciousness).

Basically, what would count as a rock's consciousness would be independent from human category-making. For example, a human breaks a rock. What now? Two consciousnesses where previously there was one? One consciousness as broken rock? Both? Is the world flow constantly splintering off and merging consciousnesses? Does really everything have a concsiousness (regardless of whether it's comprehensible as a unit to a human mind)?

Quite long ago now, I've come up with a thought experience. Imagine you come across a butterfly sitting on a flower. To you there's a butterfly, a flower, stuff around that that's neiter... all that is intuitive and comprehensible. Now imagine an invisible globe, such that part of the butterfly and flower is in the globe, and part of it is outside of it. That is less intuitive, but due to maths we can imagine it. Now imagine the butterfly taking off and flying away. And now find some sort of mathmatics that allows to recalculate the entire universe such that whatever was within the imagined invisible globe stays a unit. I think that's impossible (from a human perspective), but if we imagine it possible, surely the result would be entirely incomprehensible. However, if the contents of the globe were conscious than there would be an experience that would make this cohere, however incomprehensible this would be to us. And yet it would be the very same world flow that contains our consciousnesses, too.

I never got far with this thought experiment, to be honest. But to me, if consciousness is fundamental, then - in this way - either we cannot tell what counts as a unit with regards to consciousness, or we need to accept that there a plenty of incomprehensible units as consciousness, or we would have to find a way to transcend human consciousness while at the same time retaining enough to be able to compare.

It's a muddle I can't resolve, which keeps me from buying into panpsychism (and also keeps me from ruling it out).

Great book to read on this subject: Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever. — J

Thanks for the recommendation. This looks very interesting.

It's almost embarrassing to use the same word, "technique", to describe what an excellent producer does, and what a genius musician does. — J

The opposite is true often enough, too, though. If we stay with the Beatles, take Strawberry Fields Forever, whose original recording sees two versions in different keys spliced together to end up with the weird effect. So if that weird microtonality is part of the appeal, it's the production that should get the credit, not John Lennon (if I don't misremember the story, or fell for a biased one).

I think one of the major questions here is what role spontaneity plays in art. Technique as a tool, vs. technique as a yardstick: this is what I want to achieve, vs. this is how it's done. Singing slightly off-key: do I like the effect or do I automatically assume a skill malus? Current production techniques seem to have made snapping things to pitch and beat via software routine: it's not bad that you can do it. Correcting a "mistake" to save an otherwise greate take isn't so bad. But a routine rule-setting can get rid of a lot of expression. It's not rare that I was surprised how good a singer an artist was during an interview, when I was always sort of bored of their songs on the radio.

But then again, taste in music, at least, seems to be something you acquire early in life: and if a singer's slightly off-key, whether you hear expression at all, or just a mistake might be at least in part influenced by your listenting history early in life, when you absorbed what music is.

Recording technology has, I think, muddled the earlier difference between composition and performance. What we tend to have from classical composers, for example, are scores. There's a piece written by Chopin, or Liszt, or Bach... We all know the composer. And then there are the performances: who do we know? Usually, it's going to be famous singers or soloists. Or orchestras. But the music of the recording age, the difference seems to get less important. We know the recording and associate it with an artist. With Jazz, and I'm no expert, you seem to have standards that everyone plays in addition to their own compositions. There's a lot of emphasis on improvisation, I think because of all the standards? Because of recordings, you no longer needed to rely on live performances. When did we get the concept of a recording artist? I'm not entirely sure. We've had it by the fifties, certainly. It goes hand in hand with concepts like "live performance" or "cover version".

What you as a listener pay attention will have to change with how you relate to the piece of the music, and that's different if you think of what you're hearing as an instantiation of a score, or as a variation from a score which you think of as the default. And that in turn is often also influenced by stuff like technology, or distribution. For example, in an age where scores dominate, and the performances also have an influence the reputation of the composer (who is the "star"), accuracy will be important. But if what you judge is a reproducable recording, individual expression might grow more important than accuracy.

But then if technology allows for routinisation of accuracy, and software is routinely used to snap music to pitch and beat, then maybe expression takes the backseat again? Time will tell; I don't think the routine use of the technology is old enough yet to judge the effect.

In short, it's probably best to see art as a social institution, within which individual taste has a role to play, as has percieved "good taste", which isn't so much an experience as an expectation. Basically, there's the aesthetic experience you have, the aesthetic expierence you feel you should have, and the myriad minuscle ways in which you rebel against this internalised expectation, or lie to yourself about your experience to be the cool kid, or, or, or... Basically, I think even the aesthetic experience you're aware of is already a complex composite and not independent of the way the social institution you might title "music" propagates. Your aesthetic experience is part of and permeated by the flux.

I've found that my intuitions on these two words tend not to pan out, but here they are anyway:

I'm thinking of empathy as being experiental and sympathy as being judgemental:

For example: If I see you in pain, can't bear it, and leave, I'm being overwhelmed by an empathic response and not driven by a sympathetic response to help. Similarly, I can care deeply about another person's pain without having the faintest clue what that pain is about; you have a sympathetic response, but not an empathetic one.

My intuition is, for example, incompatible with @bert1's distinction between cognitive empathy and affective empathy. To me (intuitively), cognitive empathy isn't empathy at all. It's just a form of problem solving: If I see you cry and it makes me want to laugh because I enjoy that sort of vista I do not have an empathetic response, but I certainly undertand that you're miserable. I might even figure out what you're upset about, and how. So, for example, "cognitive empathy" + "sympathy" would be just sympathy + trying to figure out why as an external problem. You've learned to "read the cue cards", but there's nothing inside to replicate the experience (which is what I'd say enables empathy).

It's my experience that my intuition often leads to such incompatibilites, and thus they just might be off base. Alternatively, there might be a way to resolve the incompatibilities somehow?

Second, there seems to be a logical possibility of having an "empathetic response" that "fails", is inadquate to what the target person actually feels. And I'm unsure whether my intuition would allow for that - i.e. I'm dithering on this. My intuition might have internal contradictions.

It's an interesting thread, and I'll continue reading.

If believing a false belief, such as "Ice cream is good, and it's so good that anyone who says otherwise probably hasn't figured out the truth of it's goodness" makes a person happy, and it doesn't hurt anyone, including themself, then by the hedonic metric that belief is not only acceptable, but good. — Moliere

Anyone-who-says-otherwise clauses tend to have the potential to hurt someone down the road. (Aside: My first thought: "Why can't they just enjoy ice cream?" My second thought: "It's possible the believe makes someone happy precisely because they don't like icecream." Beliefs and their consequences are a messy, messy topic.)

Ahh ok, that's fair. A slightly stronger version that I would use is all. Fully makes sense of what you're saying though, thank you. — AmadeusD

Oh, good. I wasn't sure I'm making sense. For me, there's this intuitive substratus, and then there's the attempt to explain myself. Sometimes I notice myself talking myself into a corner as I speak. Online, that'd be me deleting a post and starting afresh. In real time? It's rather frustrating for the listener.

Not quite - I don't think gender and sex are rule-bound. They vary almost interdependently but this is no rule - a mere observation. Does that resolve that tension? — AmadeusD

Just to make sure we're on a page: I'm thinking of rules here as "regularities to be observed" rather than "instructions to be followed". And I think only the former can be "objective", though the existance of the latter can be objective in terms of the former. (And we have to be vigilant to tell the two apart since social processes braid the two together in its genesis: theories about what's going on influence behaviour influence theories about what's going on...)

This says to me you want to conclude that gender is analogous to sex? I understand that's not what you're saying but it seems so intensely difficult to accept that there's some biological connection without equating the two. What could apply to one, and vary independently in the other? — AmadeusD

I thought the claim I was making here was pretty weak, actually. What I mean is merely that I assume (theorietically, without justification) that what we look at as the "diffence between sexes" will be significant in any society, and people being people, they will always "mythologise" beyond the difference. Not individually, but simply by virtue of living together and accounting for differences with as little friction as possible. So either you have more than two gender category (as organised in daily praxis, as opposed to ideologised in particular discourse), or you have tried and true methods of dismissing the minorities (e.g. considering them deluded).

Again, this is a baseless assumption, as in the real world we can't isolate "societies" (the best we get is really isolated tribes in inaccessible locales such as rainforests, but even they are likely to have some minimal contact). I just need some sort of narrative to think about this.

And all the distinctions I'm making are purely analytic. In real life it's all braided together. My very basic attitude to life is: if something seems clear, you've probably not yet run into troubles. (This is halfway between a slogan and a joke; but it *is* based on a practical attitude.)

I'm also a fairly staunch relativist. I see understanding others as a balancing act: you need to take yourself back to some degree to understand others, but if you take yourself back too far you end up in a place where you no longer understand *anything*. There's no perfect balance, but there's a "useful range". Gender, and this is an impression from experience this time rather than a theoretic assumption, tends to be so deeply rooted in ones daily praxis that it's hard to understand people who have problems here. It's not that you don't see things from their place, you literally don't know the place can exist. I've been interested in this topic since the 1980ies (and I'm born in 1971), and I'm still not sure what it's all about. But it doesn't feel like it has less substance than the male-female distinction. It just feels less familiar.

The above doesn't change anything about a strict delineation between child and adult, which we have along two metrics:

1. Age of majority;
2. Having experienced puberty.

Both are objective measures of an adult. The subsequent behaviours and presentations don't alter that. Does this make sense? If so, read across to sex. — AmadeusD

It makes some sort of sense, but I'd need time to let this settle. Off the top of my head, this is already "within the braid", though. Puberty isn't social, but age of majority certainly is. That is 1. is already part of behaviours and presentation, given that age of majority is reliant on concepts such as birthdays in a way that the onset of puberty isn't (though social organisation might "sculpt" the body in some ways - nutrition, avarage rate of bodily movement, etc. - which in turn might influence the avarage age of onset - again, not an expert here, but I think I've heard some things about this?).

Unless you mean something different from the legal concept? (Note the difference between a rigid date placed on birthdays, or coming of age ceremonies based on people becoming impatient if the kid's "not ready yet, when s/he should be?)

My impression is that we both likes our things clear cut, you manage to have them that way, and I don't. We might live our lives differently because of that. Partly a personality difference? Maybe.

I think this is an unfortunate way to proceed. — AmadeusD

It's not a way to proceed. It's preparation work to make sense of the world.

I want to know what that is, before assessing it in situ of another discussion (I realise you've resiled from that, and do not hold you to it - just being clear about any comments that might betray this) — AmadeusD

Yeah, I'm sympathetic to wanting to know. Which is why I venture out of the shadows in such a thread in the first place. Going back to the above, I don't know how to proceed. I'm at a loss. The result is that I do nothing but add my two cents. My intuitive response is to let transwomen into women's bathrooms and transmen into men's bathrooms, but I'm not married to that. I'm not worried about people thinking this should not be allowed. It's a difficult topic that needs to be sussed out - one way or another. But I dislike the insistance that if we do allow that we're "letting men into women's bathrooms" - not because on some level that's not a valid way to present the facts, but because it tends to signal a not-my-problem attitude that's going to be more of a problem than a "no" to the bathroom issue can ever be. Where people have no motivation to take trans people seriously no laws are going to matter.

They are requesting access to a protected space - being the target of the protective measure (i.e male, in this argument anyway). — AmadeusD

Also, they *have* no protected space being at risk from cis people of either gender. Again, it's not about the bathroom issue. It's that the discourse around them currently tends towards taking them less seriously again. I expected that. It's not a surprise. The backlash was always going to come.

Anecdote alert: when a trans person you've known online only (across the pond, so to speak) suddenly disappears online, I'm worried in a different way. (I always worry. I worry too much. I guess that makes me an expert in the intricacies of worrying?) Drastic change in presence unheard of years; no public announcement. Luckily, nothing bad happened (according to someone closer to her, whom I also only know online). I won't be specific about this. I don't talk about other people when they're not around, beyond the most general of terms.

This seems quite clearly wrong, unless what you mean by gender is "immature and potentially misinformed prior concepts of sex" which is what I think actually is the case. — AmadeusD

This is probably a thread of its own. You say later that:

The concept of gender refers to behaviour and presentation. — AmadeusD

And under that concept there's probably no way to make sense of what I said. I'm not quite sure how to be concise here: I think of gender as a socially organised way to order sexual behaviour through our daily praxis. That's probably not making much sense for now. There's a nature-vs.-nurture aspect here, complicating things, too - but basically it's impossible to think about sex outside of gendered concepts. That includes science, as science is social activity. (It's not that important to follow up on this here, and I'd rather not, since this goes in a different direction, but my influences here come from sociology - Husserl-inspired theories [Alfred Schütz, Berger/Luckmann], as well as a little of Mannheim's total ideology. For what it's worth, I think the current confusion follows on from post-Derridan post-structuralism - which mostly left me confused and I don't think there's much influence here - I think I stopped with Saussure...)

I can't quite disagree, but I cannot see an avenue to assent to this. Male and female are categories that are not violated. They are useful inherently. I cannot understand a discussion about "trans" that doesn't include the grounding what you're on the "other side" of. That would be sex, no? — AmadeusD

They're useful inherently for most people:

They rarely vary independently, but they do in an incredible minority of cases (exception for rule, i suggest). — AmadeusD

You talk about exceptions for a rule. But if the occurance of exceptions is also rule bound, then you're not going find the rules of the exception while focussing on the binary. The key here is attention. We're not going to find the rules that govern those exceptions. Not because they can't be found that way, but because habitual thought patterns have led us past them for centuries. I don't think we can't; I think we won't. And I think the problem is socially re-inforced complacency: it's not our problem. Unless we're trans.

If there are no biological markers somewhere around sex that regulate those exceptions... how can we tell? If there are, listening to trans people and what they're paying attention to should be interesting.

Of course, right now, it's fashionable to be "trans". High motivation (comparitively to earlier times) to look into it, but also more noise to sift through. It's frustrating.

His position is that if we were to abolish gender (insane) cis people (i hate that term, btw. Just people) would lose so much of what they are unaware constitutes their identity with the loss of words like 'man' and 'woman'. — AmadeusD

I'd sort of agree with your lecturer, provided this doesn't lead to a political program. It's impossible to abolish gender, I think, since the combination of biological differences and living together in groups will always lead to some sort of gender distinction. However, I do think there's a lot of unaware stuff going on in gender identity. A practical repetition that doesn't even need to be put into words; something you only really run into if you don't fit (say, if you're trans).

Which is why I said "whithout much of a gender identity" rather than "without any gender identity". I walk into the male toilets without a second thought, for once. Socially speaking, I'm unreflected male as much as I'm unreflected cis. I think being trans means that you can't be "unreflected" anything in terms of gender, because the system that would fit you has not socially developed. I see only two possibilities: you must reflect on your gender, or you must find some other area to put your problems in.

So:

it is a subversive transition from "your gender" to "your chosen gender" or some similarly opaque and unhelpful line. — AmadeusD

How else would they put this? I'm fairly pessimistic, though, so I think I agree it's unhelpful. People aren't going to understand them without a way to approach them or disproportionate effort. If we'd encapsulate them in a social category, the need to actually understand would probably lessen. Of course, then we'd likely have a new trans-people-are-like-this problem. Humans tend towards stereotypes.

Not unreasonable, but not your problem. — AmadeusD

Not much of a problem to be honest. I brought it up as markers of gender identity in a social negotiation context. To what extent I am a man is mostly a fun puzzle I don't take seriously. It passes the time. I can deal with mishaps. But the way they happen do shed light on how I connect with gender.

This implies there is an objective standard to being a woman/man. If "adult human female" isn't it, the entire conversation collapses in on itself. Another weirdo type line, imo. Fwiw, "adult human X" is perfectly sufficient, conceptually. — AmadeusD

There is an objective standard, but it's in constant flux. Let's take our eyes of gender for now and just look at adult. "Adult" is usually connected with both age and behaviour. An adult can behave childishly without being a child, but an adult can "fail to grow up". Etc. Also, this are all things I've improvised from within a social context. How many years have passed since my birth is pretty much a fact. Beyond that there's an ongoing repetition of imperfectly internalised norms you can be wrong about. But being wrong about something that's in flux... adds to a gauge that might lead to social change if the gauge doesn't empty (pardon the video game language; it comes naturally to me).

So:

Is it posssible you could elaborate here? I get the intuition i would agree, if I understood. — AmadeusD

I start with the assumption that there are trans people; i.e. they arise out of contexts that don't give them the information that trans people exist and still end up seeing themselves that way. Whatever that means isn't clear. Whether that's a single grouping or convergent symptoms isn't clear. But this happens in significant albeit low numbers.

Next, we can find out that trans is a thing and name it "trans" and try to figure out what that is. Experts can do that: anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, biologists, etc. We get terms that are used in a variety of systematic ways, sometimes incompatible with each other, but experts usually know about this (as they demonstrate when they fight for academic resources).

Then the terms bleed out into "the wild", where they propagate unsystematically. I don't want to go into it too much here, because that's a whole wild topic of its own, but now you have a lot of people calling themselves trans who might never have "figured it this out for themselves". A man who would like to go out in public in womens clothes certainly engages in cross-gendered behaviour, ("cross" being the English word for "trans"), but that doesn't make for a trans person by itself. They overgeneralise.

Overgeneralisations, IMO, are part and parcel of the identity game. I *am* this. I will fight for the right to be this. And so on. The identity game tends to reinforce gendered behaviour, here, as someone who's gender-identity is contested will often seek refuge in hyper-gendered behaviour to make their "chosen gender" more accessible. The fall-out is two-fold:

If you're really trans you might feel pressured into gendered behaviour you don't really want to engage in (voice lessons are common example... or were a couple of years ago). "I guess I have to wear a dress now."

Meanwhile, the guy who simply wants to wear dresses might try to justify that (maybe to themselves) with "I am trans". This assumes a positively marked social category, and with the right political leanings...

The problem here is this: it's hard, and maybe (currently?) impossible to tell the difference from the outside, when all you have is what they do and say.

I have a hard time siding with an extreme minority which can totally reasonably be characterized as mentally aberrant, on issues that, for the majority, amount to safety issues (i have provided ample evidence for this throughout the thread). — AmadeusD

I'm not contesting the evidence you've cited - mostly because to do that I'd have to go to the source; other than the biology paper, I'd at least somewhat be qualified to read them. And I also don't really want to talk about whether or not trans people ought to be allowed in this or that bathroom. It's just that the acutal "safety issue" seems to be secondary to the general discourse around this (especially, since the safety of trans people is usually secondary for people who argue safety). There's an unease around the gender topic that needs to go before any law change might be useful. I'd not be surprised if trans people allowed into "their" bathrooms still choose to avoid public bathrooms, as these places aren't seen as safe. Under this theory, your numbers could be a transition problem (e.g. some of the trans people who do take advantage of the law might be the "vengeful" kind). This is why, ideally, an attitude change would have to come first. But then an attitude change isn't going to come without actual contact. And given that being trans is rare to begin with...

It's all a muddle for me. My sympathies are with the minority, here, though more with the regular person than with the activist. There's something there, I think, we don't quite understand enough.

Fwiw, by 'weirdos' I mean people who willingly try to convince others to enjoy their cognitive dissonance and accept clearly contradictory positions (either this, or people who do not think there are reasonable structures to be found in the world whcih we can describe. I find both weird and unhelpful. I avoid both kinds of people whenever I can). — AmadeusD

I'm reading this and rubbing my chin trying to figure out what positions are clearly contradictory. It's messy to begin with. Me, I'm generally uncomfortable with activitsts of any kind, but I also recognise that they're often necessary for social change. Here's my position on the trans issue:

I think "being trans" is a thing.

If "being trans" is a thing, then it's definitely a gender-thing.

It might be, in addition, a sex thing. Or, a variety of disparate sex-constellations could give rise to similar symptoms.

I think the way we think about sex is inherently gendered; male/female are both sex categories and gender categories, but they are sex categories in part because they were gender categories first. We could have devided the field differently. As long as we're talking about reproduction, there's fairly little leeway. But the trans-issue is not primarily related to reproduction (as a gender issue).

I find the trans/cis distinction useful. It must start as a gender issue, and we'd need to approach the underlying sex-issue (including if there is one in the first place) in a way similar to the reproduction issue. Sticking to the reproduction-derived male-female typology might inhibit our ability to ask the right questions. Abandoning the male-female binary while researching the trans-issue may be useful; that doesn't imply also abandonding the male-female binary while researching reproduction.

I'm no biologist, and I have trouble understanding some of the more complicated issues. I tried reading papers a couple of years ago... I don't speak biology; it was slow and inconclusive. On top of this, the trans-issue is highly political, so my default attitude towards such papers is one of cautious distrust: I expect wishful-thinking on the activist side and not-my-problem-complacency on the conservative side. I imagine there are middle-of-the-road researches, but I don't know who they are. So I don't trust my intuitions on the topic, and I don't trust my ability to figure out which experts to trust.

Given a minor background in sociology (academic degree, but decades ago and not my job ever since), I'm a little better at reading gender studies. Unfortunately, that just means I can be more specific about my distrust. I'd need to go read the actual studies, and then think through the theories that underly them, and then... I'd simply be exhausted and still not have made up my mind.

Once the dust settles we might get a clearer look of the issue at hand. Part of me fears though that, once the dust settles, we'll go back to not caring much - meaning we might just not look. I'm hoping for positive left-over substratus, but the current backlash doesn't seem to justify that hope. It's like running with a rubber band; either the rubber band breaks and you fall flat on your face, or the you lose strength and the backlash smashes your back into the wall.

The difference between sex and gender is also intuitively clear to me: I have no problem calling myself male - that's a fact. But I can't call myself a "man" with a straight face. The term feels more like a social imposition than something I identify with. Note that "man" isn't only a gender term; it's also an age term. Am I more comfortable with "boy" than "man"? Peter-Pan Syndrome? Maybe. It's also clear to me, that I'm definitely not a girl/woman; that's just intuitively off the table. I take this to mean that I'm "cis male" without much of an gender identity.

When I say I don't have much of a gender identity, what I mean is that, unless the topic comes up, I don't think of myself in terms of gender at all. That can lead to me not making connections that I'm socially supposed to make. An example: I was working at a market research institute, when the boss of a different department needed to have some tables moved (for a group discussion, I think). She enlisted the help of "strong men". Now the department I was in was mostly women, so most people who responded to the call were women, like my friend and colleague, who said something like, "Hey, you come, too." Not only did I not respond to the flattery, I didn't even realise it was supposed to be gendered flattery to make the (few) men in the room feel good about helping. I just thought I'm not strong, so I'm not going to be much help. (I only later learned that we were to move tables, and they weren't that heavy. And most of the table movers ended up women, anyway.) There are also times I got in trouble for being gender insensitive - that is not being able to see myself as a man and thus making (mostly) women uncomfortable with my presence, or something I said. So while I find the trans condition hard to understand (I asked clarification question, at the end of the which the only thing that was clear is that I didn't understand), I also find it hard to understand why the man-woman gender differentiation matters as much as it does. I don't, here, mean an intellectual understanding; more an instinctive understunding. Meaning: I get by well enough when I pay attention; not so much when I relax.

As for the concrete trans issues, say the bathroom issue - my sympathies tend to lie with your avarage trans person who just wants to live a comfortable life like anyone else. Public bathrooms are a source of stress, and that won't change, not immediately at least, even if they're legally allowed in the bathroom of their "choice". Most of the discussions around the topic tend to focus on the lone toilet goer, but what if a transwoman vistis the bathroom with their cis-woman friends? (Something I've heard of once, concretely: being dragged to the toilet by their cis-woman friends, as the transwoman would have preferred to wait until she got home.) So what about insider vetting? It's not the laws, here, I'm primarily concerned with: it's the daily life that structures around them. The szenarios we imagine reveal our preconceptions. If you'd focus on the actual life-paths, things might look different.

This was meant to be a short post that makes things clearer about where I come from. It's certainly not a short post, but it should make clear that the issue to me inherently messy, which puts me in clear opposition to people who think: men here, women there, trans people deluded. To be sure, I started out saying that I think that "being trans" is a thing; that implies (in my world view) that this is something you can be wrong about. So I do think there are people who are wrong about being women, but their being wrong about being a women is secondary to them being wrong about being trans.

A four-spot grid works well enough for me, for now, definitely when it comes to gender.

But that simply kicks the can back into a situation we were already in. — AmadeusD

Yeah, what did I think making that post? It's never been the facts that are at issue.

What is unreasonable is to simply defer to 'grey area' instead of figuring out the best uses of words for our purposes. — AmadeusD

Which I don't think I do:

So, disambiguating gender has been done extremely well, by almost everyone but weirdos. — AmadeusD

And that's, I think, where the disjunct is: We're likely not agreeing who counts as "weirdo". I really don't think I should have made the post. I simply don't have the stamina to suss this out. Certainly not now. I'm tired.

There's male, female, and what else? Various disorders where the person has characteristics of both sexes? That's not really a third sex though. — RogueAI

It is not really purely male or purely female either, is it? So we have to make room for these people in our society, our laws and our thinking? — prothero

It is and we don’t. — Malcolm Parry

I've been interested in the biology of sex since the 1980ies, but I'm really bad at understanding biology. However, reading about biology from biologists, I did get the impression that the way we abstract from biological sex is cultural. So the "fact" that there are men and women is a gendered abstraction that biologists sometimes find useful and sometimes don't. Biological facts are biological facts, but the biological categories we use to make sense of biological facts are theory-bound and often reflect what we're interested in. Sex is sex, but the way we research sex is - in part - gendered.

I've been looking online, right now, for examples of what biologists have to say about the topic, and surprisingly the most interesting (to me) yield comes from a Quora page, as an answer to a question about biological sex, which confusingly uses the word "gender" and thus also gives rise to the expected reactions. A few biologists do talk about sex, though. A selective sample (usually not the entire post):

Link

James McInnes:

I can tell you that we distinguish between anatomical sex and genetic sex. I believe that there are 12 viable combinations of sex chromosomes in humans; XX and XY are the most common, of course, but we see XO, XXX, XXY, XXXY, XXYY and some more rare combinations. Most of the time the presence of the Y chromosome produces an anatomically male phenotype, but, as luck would have it, some people with a Y chromosome are insensitive to androgens or have a deletion in the SRY gene and they have a female phenotype despite the Y chromosome.

There are also people born chimeric, the product of early fusion of two different fertilized eggs, who develop with some tissues from one cell line, and other tissues from the other. Sometimes they are XX/XY chimeras and parts of their anatomy develop as male and parts female. They can have distinct male and female genitalia.

That brings us to phenotypic / anatomical sex. Most clinical records minimally accept 4 designations: male, female, intersex, and ambiguous. Often times there will be a cytogenetic description if the person is not XX or XY, and there’s a code if they are androgen resistant XY female. I’ve seen these in clinical trial data records I’ve worked with in the past and it still catches me by surprise when I see it.

In summary, biology recognizes that gender is psychology, not biology. Biology recognizes that there are more that two sexes (3–15, depending on the classification scheme used).

Comment: I'm curious about the "classification schemes". Everything else sounds familiar, and is the stuff I sort of understand on the whole, but not in detail. One of the things I never properly understood is the difference between "intersex" and "ambigous". The language here gets very biological, and I'd need to dive deeper here than I'm willing. I'm content to know that biologists (some? most? all?) understand the difference.

Rik Wouters:

I’m not very well informed about what sexes are defined right now, but it surely doesn’t take a lot of effort to convince me of the existence of an xth sex. The only issue is how to define a sex and that will determine the number of sexes in existence. Limiting the total number to 2, however, unavoidably causes difficulties that can be prevented. The number needs to be higher than that. How high depends on what’s most practical and intuitive to work with.

Comment: Non-expert with a practical intuition of how many categories are useful.

Quinn Copeland:

Understand that humans, like all other organisms , function primarily to to pass on their genes, and for us that means a pairing between a male and female. That is the only way it can be done in vivo, naturally.

There’s no other combination that allows the passing of genes.

Comment: Male/female binary, with deviation being defined strictly in terms of "passing on of genes".

Oliver Caspari:

If you look at the great big hump in the centre of the bell curve, there’s no problem because all of these tend to point you in the same direction for a given individual. But as you move closer to the long tails of the normal distribution, expect to be surprised.

Comment: Statistical distribution.

Adriana Heguy:

Sex determination is also very, very complex and in biology, you can find pretty much all kinds of modality: some binary, some non-binary, including non-reproducing forms such as worker or soldier ants, and also parthenogenesis. Many environmental factors affect sex determination, too. And I’m talking just about sex, not gender.

[...]

As a professional biologist, I’m not surprised by people who feel that their gender does not match their biological, chromosomal, or anatomical sex, or by people who don’t feel that they are of either gender, or who feel they are both genders at once. What would be surprising from a biological point of view is if this did not happen, given that biology is messy and complex, and there are hardly any hard and fast rules.

Comments: Left out paragraphs talking about gender. This sort of response is, in my enteriely anecdotal experience, pretty common with non-human biologists, and less common though not by much with human biologists. Take that with a grain of salt; I'm unaware of any studies on the topic, so I have nothing to corroborate.

Make of this what you will. My own take on this is that even when a stark biological binary is useful, it's strictly centered on reproduction with very limited validity outside of this topic. Even then, it stops at "male" and "female" - and I'm not sure how we would relate reproductive systems to individuals. "Man" and "Woman" are terms meant to describe individuals, and that's a step up the abstraction ladder from the only clear binary that is useful. In effect, "man" and "woman" are gender terms, not sex terms, and that's what we care about. Any appeal to biology feels like an appeal to authority, rather than an appeal to biological sexual facts.

So, yeah, I'm on the whole with prothero here: It's not really purely male and purely female; it's a matter of how you classify stuff. I'm curious about trans biology (we might learn more), and insisting on a binary + deviance might hinder us getting a clear view of field. Facts are meaningless without theory.

Are they phenomenological questions, though? — J

Think of it in terms of intentionality, then. When you get the flash, what you focus on is influenced by relevance horizon. You don't just focus decontexualiedly on your grandfather's face, for example, which you could, even if the specific look you'd flash in were compatible with that scene. You place yourself into a context with your grandfather, etc.

Meanwhile, imagining a snark has a different sense of focus. As I said, you could flash in a significant moment that involves a snark, and would be memory, but you didn't.

The intentionality of the "perceiving" act is different. The difference between "a memory" and "an imagination" (viewed wholistically as an act) is in the detials: what you focus on, whether or not you place yourself in the memory, and perhaps other things I'm not thinking of now.

The context of this thread abstracts from both in some way, and I think that causes problems, because the difference doesn't necessarily lie in the intentionality of the content; it might lie in the intentionality of the act of "remembering" or "imagining". The reason "imagining a snark" is an "imagination" and not a "memory" is because the act of imagining excludes from your relevance horizon things that would make it a memory. The reason I'd "diving down" is that most of the relevance horizon is pre-consciously given in your day-to-day praxis and only surfaces if problematic.

But could you say more about why "no 'memory' could manifest"? Do you mean we require the palette-style of remembering in order to have the other, more specific type that satisfies a) and b)? — J

I'm not sure what you mean by pallette-style. As you live your life, you select details to comit to memory and you do that by integrating them into your memory flow. If we focus on the flash, for it to be - in that moment - a memory of you walking with your grandfather, you obviously need to remember your grandfather. But that's not what I'm talking about. For example, you could forget you ever had a grandfather but still remember the scene. The memory would manifest differently (walking with someone else - substitution; who was I walking with - puzzle...). But for the flash to surface at all something needs to be there to trigger this under the intentionality of a remembering act. Some impetus. And you can remember you remembered that scene and try to remember it again. It's complicated. But if you remember you remembered something you reinforce the memory as memory in the ongoing praxis of your life. It needn't be coherent, and it certainly needn't be conscious. But it needs to be there.

A memory being (a) true and (b) autobiographical is part of the intentionality of the act of remembering, but not of the actual memory - neither the flash, nor its more substantial substratus. It's more of a success-condition, which you can check with other sources (such as photographs, or even other memories), or - probably in the vast majority of cases - just assume.

And memories aren't static. Under certain circumstances you can "remember" having hunted a snark - and it would be a memory, even if it never happened or couldn't ever have happened. The circumstances have a rather high barrier, is all.

If I suddenly get an image of my grandfather walking beside me in Manhattan, I know it's a purported memory. And if I get an image of a snark, I'm quite sure it isn't. At the risk of repeating myself, I ask again: How do I know these things? (And see below for some explication about what I mean by "how".) — J

I've let this settle for a while, because I wasn't sure how to answer this. I don't think you've addressed the more important part of my post: and that's what is "a memory" vs. "memory".

"A sudden flash of your grandfather walking beside you in Manhatten," can be identified as a memory, sure, but even if it is: is this what the memory amounts to? Is that all of it? What about it is memory, and what about it is imagination, and what about the broader topical memory isn't actuallised in the flash?

Do you remember, generally, walking beside your Grandfather in Manhatten, even if it's not actualised in your consciousness? Isn't that "flash" an outgrowth of a greater structure that's your internal sense of autobiography? The flash is the mushroom to your fungal memory?

Do you see what I mean?

Given this, if you get an image of a snark, that would also be some kind of memory, given that you're not making up snarks on the spot. But it's not located in your biography, as it would have been if you'd gotten flash of reading Lewis Carrol. You remember stuff that doesn't manifest as "a memory". If you didn't, no "memory" could manifest.

But I am constantly being bombarded with unbidden mental images, randomly, and often triggered by things I'm barely aware of. Far from unusual, it's much more common for me than deliberately seeking out some memory, or expecting one. — J

This is difficult. I think there's a twofold meaning involved here: memory vs. imagination as a psychological function, and remembering vs. imagining as an action. You can't remember stuff without involving the psychological function of "imagination", and you can't imagine stuff without the psychological function of "remembering". For instance, if I tell you to imagine a starfish, you'll need to remember what one looks like, or you won't be successful. And if I tell you to remember a starfish, you need to be able to "imagine" a past situation (since it's not here right now). Now if what you're doing is "associating" (or something), situations might occur in which it becomes relevant whether the content of the association "really occured, was experienced, etc." or not. And it's going to be hard to figure this out precisely because the psychological functions of imagination and memory are both going to be involved to some degree or other. Embellished memory? Memory-inspired vision?

How you can tell will differ depending on why this distinction matters. If it doesn't matter situationally, you're likely dealing with some sort of reification or other, and the cunfusion's going to be chronic.

A common example would be a composer composing a piece of music and then finding out it sounds like something else. Accidental similarity? Unconscious plagiarism? Note that this distinction makes sense in a particular social context. A lot if the lawsuits I've heard about, for example, I find... silly. I hear the similarity, but in most cases being caught up in western music theory promotes certain similarities. For example, an organ run in Webber's Phantom of the Opera, and Rick Wakeman's instumental Ischariot sound very much the same; but they're basically just walking up and down a scale in half-steps. I imagine you could find similar movements earlier (Bruckner maybe?). Yet, if this goes to court a decision is forced. And to the extent that institution "court" is supposed to be meaningful, a decision should also be meaningful, and (partly) because of that the distinction between "memory" and "imagination" becomes relevant. And the composer might ask themselves, "did I get it from there?" So:

Is a sudden, unbidden image a memory or an imagination? It's probably to some degree both. Can you figure out a ratio? What's the expected certainty you can reach? And is the effort needed proportional to the situational importance of the distinction? The result will never amount to more than a provisional classification, though.

Basically, cognitive activity is always going to involve more than one cognitive function, and confusion may occur when we use the same word for the activity as for the function; such as memory in general, and "a memory", or "remembering". You can create an analytic category but should be careful not to reify it beyond it's situational occurance. If you do treat a sudden unbidden image as either an image or memory that treating it as such will become part of what constitutes its status - and it's a status which can be contested by others, and that being contested is something you can anticipate, and that anticipation can feed into your classification and further behaviour... If you treat something as a memory and it turns out things didn't happen like this in some detail or at all, what you'll have is a "false memory" - because of the way your treat it. All the while, it is what it is. You can always sidestep the issue and call unbidden images with a defined trigger an "association", and you might be happier for it. One can get trapped in dichotomies of ones own making.

If you don't mind my asking into it some more: Has this created problems for you in your interactions with people, or does your brain come up with workarounds that facilitate communication? — J

I've never had problems with this, other than minor stuff (like the meditation technique I mentioned not working on me; also creative writing exercises... nothing that I couldn't interpret in terms of other failures). I mean, I grew up for 40 to 45 years without realising there was this difference. Even now I'm not completely sure (fairly sure, but not completely) that I actually have aphantasia. It's just that I see myself so much in diagnosed people's accounts, and a lot of little stuff makes sense.

Communication isn't a problem. I don't think a workaround is even necessary: the most relevant topics would be visualisation related; we'd certainly not have been on the same page - but the problem is to figure that out, and that's hard when we end up in a "successful" social situation (such that both of us "get what we want"). I think (and thought so even before I heard of aphantasia) that successful communication is better understood in terms of situational compatibility of individual meanings than in terms of similarity of the individual meanings involved. So if a communicative situation ends satisfactorily, you're not going to realise in what way meanings the people involved hold are different - people are just going to assume similarity (I certainly did).

I'm sort of bad at spacial perception; in intelligence tests I was always tremendously slowed down during those "wheels-and-levers" tests. Not sure if this is related to aphantasia in some way. It's certainly not a necessary consequence, but I did hear that people with aphantasia have trouble rotating 3D objects in their mind, so maybe? I'm certainly bad at stuff like reading maps, and fitting in furniture (I need to measure when it's obivous to anyone else that stuff will fit or not).

I'm perfectly fine the way I am; I never felt anything was lacking. Come to think of it, back after leaving school there was a year where I had three instances of a sudden shift in perception. It went along with some sort of shock, but no re-orientation was necessary. Different but the same. It was weird and fascinating. Some neural anomaly, I suppose?

The first was rain, all of a sudden I saw it more in geometrical terms. The next instance was the face of a former teacher; this one was close to making a functional difference: I'm not sure I'd have recognised him if he'd looked like that to me in the first place - but it switched mid-situation. A sudden shock, a moment of confusion, but I adjusted quickly. The last was darkness in my own house (I'm light sensitive so I tend to not switch on the light if I know a place very well). This is the only one I have absolutely no concept for - I don't understand the difference in terms of anything.

It was just those three instances, and all within one year. I've never had anything like this before or since, and I still don't know what that was. But it served as a quite nice illustration for myself of what it is like to "see things differently". Literally, too.

I'm fascinated, and rather appalled, by what it must be like to be an aphantasiac. Is it a bit like being asked to translate something into a language you don't speak? — J

For most of my life I thought "mind's eye" stuff was some sort of metaphor. I was in my fourties when I first heard about aphantasia and by extension learned that other people can have visual experiences in various degrees of vividness (up to "hyperphantasia"). I have "visual concepts"; I know what my mum looks like when she's not there, but I can't summon an image. I can sometimes conjur "microflashes"; very short images, like the flash of a camera. It's not worth the effort.

In terms of visual experience, a memory of something is very distinct from something I imagine. If I remember what something looks like I trigger a "visual concept". It's non-linguistic; it just sits there in the mind - something once seen, but unavailable to anything vision-like. When I imagine something, and you ask me for details, I make them up on the spot, one after another. In retrospect, I know realise how those meditation techniques where they have you lie down in darkness and someone narrates something are supposed to work. I always thought it was strange that I was supposed to relax and they made me work. I thought I was just slow. It never occured to me that others might just have visual experience to go along with the narration.

***

After reading this thread, I'm wondering if we're not seeing memories too much in terms of... computers? Something stored; something retrieved. Or the metaphor of storage to begin with: the warehouse of the mind. I think memories are more integrated than that in the daily praxis. A memore of an event that's no accurate is still a memory: it's continuous with how you see things, and you'll have to deal with an error to go on. Sometimes people my deliberately not check up on a memory, so they can go on the way things are. But where do these misrememberings come from; if you remember a detail wrong, is that some sort of imagination? What if the problem was your perception in that moment: that is it's not your memory that's wrong - as it's accurate to what you've experienced - but it's your experience that wasn't accurate to the moment. I think you peel back the layers you might end up with "elementary particles" that inform everything you do. I'm too confused right now to think further down that lane, as there would be no memory without imagination, and no imagination without memory - but it feels like I'm transgressing "tiers" here, and I can't quite make it out.

Maybe we could try to approach this from the negative: what's the difference between not being able to imagine something, and not being able to remember something?

For me, what I expect to be lacking with a memory is a good deal more specific than what I'm lacking when I'm trying to imagine something. A gap in the memory is usually surrounded by other memories: there's something very specific that's not there. Meanwhile not being able to imagine something indicates a lack of experience - it's more fuzzy. It feels like the difference between closing in on something, vs. casting out for something.

This is difficult to express. I have aphantasia; I don't get mental images at all. Yet, I can imagine, say, my mother's face. I can't imagine a face I only "know" from a description you give me at all (I can try to draw it and approach it from there). Maybe like this: a memory is something living in my mind, while something imagined is a lattice of details cohering through the act of active focus. The memory recedes into the background; the imagination disappears (but might leave traces as a memory of something I imagined).

I'm not happy with this. It doesn't seem quite plausible, but I can't figure out the exact flaw. I have this vague sense of a memory being bottom-up, while imagination being top-down. A memory starts off from a unique experience, while my imagination works more by getting rid of more and more options until something more or less unique comes out. The gaps in what I'm not paying attention to are literally blank when imagining something; they don't come with a sense of "forgetting" - they come with a sense of "filling in".

My point is asking why faith #1 is at all worth having without #2? — Hanover

Or conversly, is it possible to have faith#2 without faith#1? A sort of practical faith that's not very concerned with the source? Just a deep-rooted sense of "this is the way"? As an atheist who grew up among lots of atheist-accepting, ecumene-favouring Christians, I've often wondered how important "faith in the existence of God" is. Faith in the guidance seemed more in evidence in the people around me (and I wonder if this "in-evidence" is a result of selctive intention, or maybe incomplete interpretation).

I may well be underestimating the importance of a "personal God", though. That does come up. I wonder if it's possible to follow the guidance with deep conviction, while, say, holding some sort of ironic distance towards the "God exists" discourse, as whatever you say on that issue feels... inadequate. It sometimes feels like that (not with my parents, but I've met people who gave me the impression).

I don't find this an easy topic.

[Aside: I originally typed "discurse" rather than "discourse". I almost want to believe in Freudian slips.]

A --> Eat cheese. Reason: It tastes good. The eater hasn't the freedom to deactivate this reason.

B --> Lose weight: Reason: The latest fashion dictates that slim bodies look better. The fashion follower hasn't the freedom to deactivate this reason. — Quk

I've read C, but I'm stopping here for a reason. I'm not convinced an analytic combination of desire/will creates a fine-enough tool to look at the situation. There are a couple of dimension here I'd like to address, unsystematically for now:

1. Trigger. A sudden craving for cheese vs. seeing a piece of cheese and wanting to eat it. The object triggers the situational instance of will/desire, vs. something else (some association? a random firing of neurons?) triggers the will/desire. The target is ideal if not present, and specific if present (but also ideal, because to recognise cheese as cheese is to have expectations for a category that overlays the instance). It's far easier not to eat cheese if there isn't any and you'd have to go to the fridge/shop etc to get it. [Aesop's Fox and Grapes is instructive here.]

2. Complexity of what you call "reason" here: "tastes good" seems less complex than fashion dictates. But where there's complexity, I'd need analytic categories to account for components. Would a conflation of desire and will make things clearer or cause confusion (note that this might differ from person to person, since people have different thought habits).

3. What you call reason seems to split up into two modes: legitimisation and motivation. Even "tastes good" can be some sort of legitimisation; if you're eating cheese out of habit and have no real other reason you might want to convince yourself of liking the taste more than you actually do. If you were to kick the habit and then go back to eating cheese later, you might find you no longer like it (I'm speaking from experience, though not with cheese). A question here is: was I ever motivated by taste, or was this an easy-to-understand and not-too-implausible rationalisation for an indecipherable bundle. In any case, the vector (a pretty good choice of word, thanks for that) of the desire does point towards cheese.

So given that, what's the advantages/disadvantages of having one category or two, here? My own position so far is that I'd intuitively like to keep them separate for now (call this a weak instance of "desire/will"), so I'm biased. But this particular question (dis/advantages) is an open one with no concrete answers or even models in my mind. Still thinking.

(Part of the background context is that I consider "free will" both an unimportant and vague concept, so I don't usually think about it, and I never bring it up of my own accord.)

The generalising person has more options, no? — bert1

My earlier post was whimsical and silly, and I sort of wish I hadn't made it, but there is a point hidden away in there and it concerns this:

We make distinctions and attach our desires to them. So it's not necessarily true that, from the perspective of the person in question, that they have more options. It depends on the categories that are meaningful to them. Maybe they just like "cake": their options would be equivalent, while the "texture" of their desire would be less rich, if that makes sense.

There was a second point, too, but it was even more implied:

What's the relationship between desire and will? Do they have the same target, or is will the result of a synthesis of bundles of conflicting desires? So when you reply to Patterner thus:

This universe consists of a cake shop, three cakes, and four people. What else is there to do? — bert1

I would say, taking the desires (known or unknown) of the other three people into account can be part of the will (as some sort of social desire: the desire to be looked upon well, the desire to see others happy, etc.). If you want to bracket the social element, that's fine, but you depending on what you think will is you might have gotten rid of the opportunity to see the whole picture. The question is: if we focus simply on the desire for cake, did we get rid of "will"? Does will emerge from the conflict of desires as some sort of synthesised compound?

I've set it up that way I guess! This universe consists of a cake shop, three cakes, and four people. What else is there to do? If Pete chooses not to buy a cake, he's not Particular Pete any more, he's Absolute Pete. — bert1

Your set-up is confusing, though. If Pete were to decide to buy an Eccles 2 cake, would he be General Pete or Universal Pete. Would he know?

My intuition is that restricitions are what makes any particular will descernible as will. So if Absolute Abdul has no preference at all, in what way could we say there's will? He's certainly free to chose between four equal opportunities - but the choice doesn't matter. There's no will here, only randomness.

Your set-up feels like one of those logical puzzles: the optimal outcome is:

Pete: EC1
Geraldine: EC2
Ursula: IF
Abdul: None

But viewed like that, both freedom and will appear to be a social-distribution category. But your categories don't say anything about the social dimension. It's just sort of implied in the three-cakes/four-people set up.

For example, Absolute Abdul could choose Eccles Cake 1, as the social dimension is not part of the "Absolute" modifier, and thus undefinied. Your set-up doesn't tell me what happens if Particular Pete, General Geraldine and Absolute Abdul all choose Eccles Cake 1. I suppose the Universe terminates in an error?

Honestly Dawnstorm, I tried very hard in the other thread. — James Dean Conroy

I know and appreciate this.

I see there's a disconnect here... — James Dean Conroy

It appears to run deep. I'll slink back into the shadows and continue reading.

...from the standpoint of life itself. — James Dean Conroy

I believe it's this that's giving me trouble connecting. I feel like there's some sort of reification going on.

I can accept a descriptive system that says "life is bad" selects itself out, at least for the sake of argument, or testing a logical system (as far as I'm capable; I'm not a trained philosopher). My problem is that at that point I lose sight of the relavance of "value only exists because of life".

Evaluating is something living things do; if they don't affirm, they're selected out. An evolutionary perspective. Fine. The problem comes when you raise value to a perspective beyond the individual. What even is this level? It's not selection in the sense of population figues: it's not like suicidal people or pessimists are different species.

For example: social insects often sacrifice a massive amount of life for the sake of the "queen". From an evolutionary standpoint that makes sense. In terms of human societies, this could mean that evaluating life as bad on the individual level could be affirming life (e.g. a few suicides reduce conflict for limited resources). I simply cannot see the connection between a living thing's perspective and the "standpoint of life itself".

This isn't a criticism of your position, btw, it's meant to illustrate an item I have trouble with. I can't play your game if I don't understand the rules, so to speak.

I wouldn’t always call faith itself irrational, — Tom Storm

So what do we mean with "irrational", here?

I can see three related but distinct meanings:

(a) If you thought about it rationally, you'd come to a different conclusion.
(b) Rational thought cannot help here; the subject matter is meaningfully decided in different ways
(c) Rational thought isn't involved in the genesis of the belief

For example, I think, if a Christian fideist would use the word "irrational", they might appeal to (b) above.

Thoughts?

The point is you don’t need faith that planes fly; the empirical evidence of their capabilities is so strong that to doubt this would be irrational. — Tom Storm

Similarly, there's evidence that planes sometimes crash. How many people check statistics to make an informed decision? So what's rational here? Your motivation? The act when analysed later?

I don't think you're wrong here; I just think that emphasising rationality like that feels wrong. So:

Theists often say to atheists, “You guys live by faith too—every time you fly.” I wouldn’t have thought to compare those two ideas myself.

I raised it because it seems like an equivocation. — Tom Storm

Yes, I know. The version I'm familiar with is "...that the ceiling won't crash down on you." Same thing.

If this is an equivocation, I think, it's one that arises when theists and atheist meet on the topic of God, and that situation isn't an ideal frame, because the ideal self-image of both parties tends to remain implied. I think it needs to be put on the table.

The discussion has nothing to do with how anyone feels while on a plane or if one may crash. — Tom Storm

Yes, I know. But I think that including this could maybe tease out what the evangelist means when he says you have faith, too. If I have faith that a plane won't crash, but I find myself in a plane that does crash: how does he think I would behave? Denial? The plane doesn't crash, I'll be fine. Confusion? "My plane, my plane, why have you forsaken me?" A faith that isn't tested in a situation of crisis doesn't seem to amount to much, so invoking a crisis situation (and one I'm fully aware of when I board a plane) might help understand where their coming from - at least in a way that insisting on your rationality won't.

So:

We are comparing faith in God with a reasonable expectation of successful airplane flight and, particualry, the role of evidence in both. — Tom Storm

Yes, but it's divvied up as "theists have faith in God," and "atheists have faith that planes won't crash". So rather than insisting on me having "reasonable expectations", I'd rather question if theists don't also have "faith that planes won't crash" in the sense that atheist do. If they're honest interlocutors you could maybe tease out if they'd use the word on themselves, or if "faith in God" somehow supersedes here and makes a difference. If you make the comparison uncritically, you're ending up with a lopsided comparison.

Or differently put: is there a difference in reasonable expactions of succesful airplane flight between theists and atheists? If no, whey invoke the comparison. If yes, what is it? Can they explain, or is it an intuitive half-understood thing.

Basically, you're comparing a circumstance that only has a place in the self-image of one of you with a situation that, I would imagine, has a place in the self-image of both (that is both theists and atheists can imagine themselves in a crashing plane, but only theists can imagine themselves believing in God.)

If it turns out that the theist, once contemplating this, thinks what you really have faith in isn't "flying" but, say, "luck" (anything closer to the abstraction level of "faith in God") then it seems to me that the evidence-question could take the backseat, and it's really about different modes of ordering and interpreting experience.

My background is in sociology — Tom Storm

This is just an aside: I've got a degree in sociology, but have been out of the loop for 25 to 30 years, now, but the theoretical background that fit me the most back then would have been Anthony Giddens' structuration theory. If you're familiar with this, I'm probably leaning towards looking at a conflict situation from the point of view of routine and a personal need for ontological security. Where do your time-space paths intersect, and where do they diverge? What motivates the comparison here for either of you? Do you generally leave these situations with predictable outcomes? A typical social situation with typical outcome for both parties. Rarely any surprise. A game of metaphysical ping pong.

So, at the risk of becoming boring, if I trust that a plane will fly me somewhere safely because of empirical evidence that they do, almost without fail, would it be fair to call this 'faith' in flying? How does this compare to faith that God is a real? — Tom Storm

I feel the framing is geared towards conflict from the get go. We're invited to emphasise the difference. What, in ongoing social praxis, does it even mean to "trust that a plane will fly me somewhere safely"? That's certainly the expectation I have when I get on a plane, but it's rarely topical in the moment. I don't worry that the plane will crash: I get on it, and then, if I don't plummet with it, I get off it again.

Similarly, the focus on "faith that god is real" seems off, too. That's just the point of departure for atheists, but that's usually not what faith is about for Christians (at least not those I know, most of whom are Roman Catholic). Faith in God comes with a sense of being taken care of, I feel. God knows what's best. So, in the context of flying, if I get on a plane, and I have faith in God, that's going to cover both landing safely (thanks), and crashing (if that's the divine plan...). So as an atheist, I know that planes can crash, and I know that planes can crash with me in them, so if I am in a plane that crashes I have no more resources. If it becomes clear that the plane will not land safely, the only way is down. A theist may have a slightly better time in the last moments, via praying.

So what are we comparing here to begin with? I'm aware that this is a common talking point of apologists. See? I have faith, too. But there's something very real I don't have here. What, despite being frightened, would an apologist expect of me while in a crashing plane? What do I invoke? That - I think - is what we'd need to target. "Bad luck?" "Cursing the neglectful maintanence staff? The suits who don't want to invest?" What sort of narrative do they think we have here?

Clearly, both theists and atheists don't expect to crash when they get on a plane, and clearly both can find themselves in a crashing plane, and not quite as clearly but still somewhat transparently, both know that they can find themselves in a crashing plane before they get on. When the expectation isn't met, then what? If faith in God has an effect in such a situation, what do I have in its place, and what is its effect? What would the apologist expect here?

For me, it'd likely be a mix of fear and air sickness; I wouldn't be surprised if airsickness would be at the forefront of my mind ("Air sickness sucks, but at least it won't last long," is also a type of humour that I can see asserting itself in such a situation.)

Here, however, we enter philosophical territory, starting with the scare-quotes around "based"! Why the quotes? Do you mean to question whether there is a true basis for moral behavior, apart from social upbringing and norms? — J

Sort of. Talking about the morality of social groupings rather than the morality of a person has had my hyper-aware of the metaphor I use. A base is something you build on. A person's morality has its base in the earliest learning process. Here "base" is adequate. But I view the morality of a social grouping more like a flow, metaphorically a river maybe, and under that perspective each person turns into a spring that feeds into a river (and those rivers run together - I wonder if, given enough time, I can extend the metaphor to include the sea?). But even that is a problem, because the flow is bi-directional, as people is all that there are: you learn, imperfectly, from your parents, but by the time you grow up you've made it your own. So the flow-metaphor isn't quite right either... Basically, I just got confused by the metaphors we use.

but say more about the chicken/egg aspect. — J

You take your morality from society and in turn become part of the morality-distribution-sytem of a society. From a simple-to-complex point of view, what you want has to come first, but by the time you're developed enough to want things, you've also already aquired some of the morality of your parents. Then transfer this to a historical point of view: was there ever a "first" moment, really? How far back can we go and still recognise morality in an interaction? When does an I-want-this-and-you-want-this-and-we-can't-both-have-it situation gain moral overtones? When do we have something to pass on to the next generation? It's hard to imagine a morally "naive" situation. And it's hard to imagine a grouping who *didn't* learn morality from their parents' generation, given they necessarily live at the same time (or babies don't survive). It's hard to imagine a first moral generation.

Interestingly, I think this is right -- finding a basis for ethical values does indeed do these things -- but at the same time it can't settle the question. Because . . . if we accept all this and find that our anxiety is indeed quelled, and our routine preserved, we may still find ourselves asking, "But is this enough? Is this what 'doing good' really means?" That the question can be meaningfully asked at all seems to put it in a different category from, say, "OK, I've demonstrated the Pythagorean theorem, but is that enough? Do I really understand what a right triangle is?" I'd say that question was meaningless, but the ethical question doesn't seem to be like that. — J

Yes, it's a piece of the puzzle, and I'm unsure how it fits. What I've not been addressing much is the social aspect. You acquire your moral values while growing up: you construct them out of observations when people punish or praise, when people pay attention to you and ignore you, and so on. There are rules or rules of thumb you know. You learn the when and where and who of it. People get divvied up into insiders and outsiders. And so on.

An insider can explain local morals to an outsider:

a) purely discriptive: This is how we do it here.
b) prescriptive, territorial: This is how we do it here; I will not tolerate deviance.
c) prescriptive, superiority: This is how it's done, but you barbarians don't know this.
d) prescriptive, universalist: This is how it's done; it's obvious; since you do it differently, you're evil.
e) prescriptive, exceptionalist: This is how we do it, because we're special.
And so on.

These sort of differences in attitude make a difference in how morals spread and change. Morals are socially "alive" - what we do is... "cell activity"? That is whenever we invoke a local moral, we interpret it in this specific interpretation, have an attitude towards its validity, feel it's biographical relevance more or less strongly, etc. All the while we evaluate how it turns out, etc. Our actions, attitudes, etc. are part of the social life flow of morals. In terms of moral conflicts, we go from intrapersonal to interpersonal. Interpersonal can occur within a sub-culture, within a culture but between subcultures, between cultures and so on. Intrapersonal conflicts can be the result of conflicts between two subcultures, both of which the person in question identifies with. Being part of multiple subcultures that don't overlap often can allow to "regionalise": if you wish for a superregional right in that case, you need to "climb up the abstraction ladder" - find a principle that accounts for both.

The result is that there are sentences like "murder is wrong," that say nothing at all if not interpreted. You'll rarely find people saying "yeah I murdered him; but I did so in self-defence," you'll hear "yeah, I killed him, but it wasn't murder, it was self-defense." The shared abstraction could be something like "some killing is wrong." This can be a problem when traditional values clash with more widely accepted values (and often enshrined in law). Think "honour killings", as an example.

Within any sort of social conflict, any act or utterance is taking a stance (or refusing to, or hesitating to...). Anxiety, in this context, will adversly affect your "power to influence the outcome". So I'd expect people who are more certain to contribute more to the moral landscape, by sheer force of conviction.

Basically, I view morality as a process, and what it's "based" on is a bit chicken/egg.

What we want to know is, what happens when an ethical choice arises that forces us to scrutinize our normal patterns of comfort and legitimization? Is the only tool at our disposal yet another look at the question of comfort? Or can I bypass how I may personally feel (again, taking "feel" in its broadest sense, to include like, prefer, etc.), ask for reasons, and let the comfort chips fall where they may? — J

This is extremely difficult to think through without an example; and I'm not even sure what would count as an example.

My hunch is that scrutinising your normal patterns of comfort is one of most uncomfortable things you can do in a moral context. You threaten your self image; you threaten your sense of the-way-things-are. Different people may have different tolarance level over all, and intra-personally the tolerance levels may vary by topic. "Asking for reasons" works because of this: you'd rather sacrifice some comfort-at-issue than the comfort-of-knowing-what-you-do-is-right. "Asking for reasons" quells existential anxiety (provided you find acceptable answers). You believe in God, you believe in rationality, you believe that people are basically good... anything to preserve the modicum of routine you need.

Does using my Nagel-derived concept, above, help any? I think the key point is that altruism takes the other person's situation, all by itself, without any appeal to how the altruist feels, as a reason for action. You may well believe that such a thing is impossible, of course, depending on what role you give reasons in ethical deliberation. If they wouldn't be reasons without some corresponding motivating feelings, then my and Nagel's account wouldn't fly for you. — J

I'm unfamiliar with Nagel's position on altruism, so I just read some summeries and skimmed others. First, I note that every commenter seems to have different takeaway (which makes it harder for me to grasp), and to top it off the most detailed, text-adjecent summary I read was in German, so I don't what the appropriate words in English are (and anyway, it was fairly long, so I just skimmed it, but it's definitely interesting at the very least).

What I got out of it is quite akin to us being social animals: to realise the other is a person is to realise that I am a person, the realisation of which is unpersonal and objective, and so the motivation towards altruism isn't direct (like say hunger) but derived from abstracted facts. Not sure how close this is to Nagel's postion; as I said I just skimmed it, and the specifics were very convoluted and in some parts hard to understand (especially on a skim).

To this I say, this feels to be... off topic? Let me backtrack to another question you asked, at that point, because I think it's relevant:

Could you say more, though, about why you construe "like" to involve a feeling? Is this based on usage, or are you analyzing what "like" would have to mean, in order for it to say something meaningful? — J

"Like" to me expresses an emotional attachment. It doesn't just involve feeling, it is feeling something. I think the problem comes with isolating as "feelings" spurts of our emotional flow we recognise, but that's almost certainly describing feelings by reference to exceptional states. Instead of, say, "happiness" we should look at "comfort". This is a sort of baseline that renders you able to act. You notice comfort only in transitional stages, if it's an ongoing state it becomes part of the background until disrupted. But it's important to the upkeep of routine.

This is, for example, a huge problem for social justice movements: to even be understood you need to make people realise what it is like to live in constant discomfort. And then, to be actionable, a majority needs to give up part of their comfort to accommodate a minorty. How do you motivate something like this on a huge scale, when it's easy to maintain comfort by simple dismissal (say of "being trans" as confused).

So, for example, I don't much like vanilla ice cream; I don't dislike it, but there are almost always alternatives I prefer. As I talk about this on here, I'm not in a position where I have access to icecream, so it's not situationally relevant. It's still true, as a general matter of fact, about me. It's also a trivial fact, so if you were to tell me that, no, I do actually like vanilla ice cream, I'm mistaken, I'd be puzzled, but I wouldn't experience any huge change in my emotional state. There's no disruption in the general comfort level - that'd be even true if I were currently uncomfortable somehow. However, if you were then to insist on this fact, and make a bigger deal out of it than I ever could, I'd likely get uncomfortable with this conversation. So while me liking or not liking vanilla ice cream would be involved here, it'd be very marginally - I'd be uncomfortable with this situation. However, the presence of "vanilla ice cream" as topic could create an association such that I'd further on experience a modicum of discomfort when faced with vanilla ice cream, that would re-inforce and worsen my reaction to vanilla ice cream, and to the extent that I'm unaware of this, you may now be right, and I'm actually mistaken in some small part, at least under one consideration: an underappreciate amount of dislike towards vanilla ice cream has little to do with its properties.

So, yeah, if emotivists say that every action is directly motived by an isolatable and easily categorisable desire, and Nagel says that isn't so, then I'm with Nagel. Beyond that, I haven't thought my intuitions through enough to say one way or another how feelings factor in. But take them away, away you're left with... what? Instructions? Elaborate if-then decision trees?

So:

I think the key point is that altruism takes the other person's situation, all by itself, without any appeal to how the altruist feels, as a reason for action. — J

I wouldn't expect an appeal during the carrying out of the situation, not as a default. That comes in later, when others ask why you did something, and then the most likely reply is going to be "because he needed X" or some such. It's inefficient to observe yourself too much; but neverless any action necessarily integrates into your daily comfort flow - only exceptional or challenged decision get the appeal treatment, and the appeal is usually going to be targeted towards what flies. This is not to say that people are insincere; they need to be comfortable either with their justifications or their duplicity (or whatever I'm not thinking of right now). Acts, justifications, social sanctioning... all feedback and modify your comfort flow such that they may make future actions more or less likely. But the comfort-flow itself is just there: it's not usually available for legitimisation or reflexion. Especially in routine situation your comfort level will usually remain an unacknowledged necessary condition of making value judgements. It might come up during a crisis (too strong a word; I'm thinking of any break of routine here, no matter how big or small) or when challenged - but often a set of social macros (any ethical position you might name) will obscure it even then.

Again, and this is important, I'm trying to explain my intuition. I haven't thought this through to my satisfaction (and probably never will, since I'm hard to satisfy).

Let's say that's a description of "genuine altruism." Would your view entail that such a person couldn't actually exist -- or at best would be in denial about what they were feeling? — J

I have trouble answering this question for two reasons: (a) I'm not quite sure I understand your model (more later), and (b) I'm not exactly sure what my view amounts in philosophical terms (here I've been role-playing myself as rational choice theorist, while earlier in this thread I've been roleplaying myself as emotivist).

So let me try:

I might derive no pleasure whatsoever from doing something altruistic that I believe it's my responsibility to do. — J

This seems to seperate the motivation from the deed in some way. I think you'd need to elaborate on the how more here: for example, I can do something that helps you, but out of purely instrumental considerations. Is this altruism? My instinct would be to say "no", but under a social contract model, all altruism could be described like that, so it's not quite off the table. Do you see my confusion here?

The second thing is that the emphasis on duty makes it seem like morals as rule-following. This does sort of clash with my view: people who accept a duty do so either because they're forced to, or because they internalised their "position" in society. If you "believe its your responsibility" it's likely the latter.

And third, it feels like you view "it's ultimately feelings" as feelings being the envisioned pay off. That's not the only role they have. Feelings are supposed to underly *any* value; therefore also any attachment to duty or responsibility you might have.

But in the wider, quality-of-my-life sense, trying to do this sort of thing is "what I like." — J

I can't read this line without seeing feelings front and center: "quality of my life"? "What I like"? Take feelings away and liking stuff is impossible, and quality of life becomes irrelevant to your praxis.

Do you maybe instinctively translate feelings to something like the Freudian id? I envision something more like a structuring personality principle that underlies it all. More like a constant flow that only makes itself known when there's turbulence.

I like it because I believe it's morally right. It accords with my values. — J

This to me has no meaning outside specific theories. "Morally right" is a variable that has different content in different theories; different theories craft different formulae for it; and some theories have little use for it at all (maybe as a macro further out). Since I'm not quite sure where you're coming from, this is something I suspend my interpretation on when reading, until I have a better grasp and can make educated guesses.

Let's say that's a description of "genuine altruism." Would your view entail that such a person couldn't actually exist -- or at best would be in denial about what they were feeling? — J

So now: do you have a better grasp why I don't quite understand your description? If I'm unsure what "genuine altruism" is, I can't judge whether it "actually exists". For better or worse:

I believe there are people who feel good when making others feel good. I believe there are people who feel good about doing their duty, which includes making other people feel good. I believe this can but needn't occur in the same person. The label "genuine altruism" is an intrusion here: it doesn't order the field, but adds a semantic problem I can do without. I'm open to the possibility that I'm missing something, but if I'm missing something here it's likely because it's not usually within my relevance horizon, and thus to see it would require painstaking bottom-up construction with many false starts. Or alternatively an epiphany.

I hope I haven't made things worse.