Is it even possible to really believe in a claim like the resurrection? Sure, people can say they believe it, they can recite prayers that say it, they can chant affirmations, and so on, but can they really, truly believe it?

Can you just decide to believe something? I've always been puzzled by people who convert because they marry someone of faith or something of the sort, seemingly just deciding they are going to be such and such now and are therefore going to start believing a very arbitrary set of truth claims.

For me, to try to believe it and to say I do would be to lie. I believe the earth is round because I'm convinced by the evidence, not because I decided to. And the evidence for resurrection is extremely weak. And resurrection violates everything else in our experience. I have a hard time believing that very many people really believe that it actually happened as a literal historical fact. Many want to believe it and say they do, sure. Many identify tribally as Christian and affirm the things that one affirms as part of a cultural practice. But do they really believe, like really really? I tend to think people would behave radically differently if they were to really take this stuff seriously.

I don't see how I could possibly come to really believe it. And I feel that to say the creed or something, for me, would be in bad faith, would be a lie. And especially with sacred things, I feel it is wrong to lie.

I suspect that most people who recite the creed don't really believe what they are saying, that they aren't even very conscious of what they are saying. It seems more like they are programming themselves to try to conform to some orthodoxy. It seems to be more about affirming group membership and conformity than actual belief.

I often hear religious people say something like, "We believe X, Y, and Z." This is really fascinating to me. I puzzle over what that means. I would never say that. I would only ever say, "I believe..." I had a friend who converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. Prior to that, when we would discuss things, he would say, "I think" or "I believe," but after conversion, he started saying, "We believe X." I felt like I was no longer talking to my friend, but rather to a memeplex or something. Part of his agency and personhood had been relinquished.

I've had several friends and relatives become new converts to a religion and frankly, it feels kind of like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, like each is less a human individual than they used to be, like my friend is gone, having been replaced by a set of doctrines and the authority of some religious leader or guru. You can't just hang out and have a conversation anymore. They are no longer free to think and consider things. Now they are just protectors and spreaders of the memeplex, and to question their belief is to attack the very foundation of their being. This is not a person in possession of an idea, but rather an idea in possession of a person. I find it rather disturbing.

I would argue that there are no real objects in the world. It is just a matter of how our brains carve things up, some of this determined by our evolutionary history, some by cultural practices. The boundaries we draw around things are not themselves part of the world itself.

I once read about Gilbert Ryle asking whether it makes sense to say that there are three things in the field, two cows and a pair of cows. This illustrates one aspect of the problem of objects.

I used to do a lot of rock climbing. I find it interesting how climbers will come to see certain features on a rock face as distinct objects. Climbers can "read" a wall. Certain kinds of holds sort of stand out as affordances, usually with names attached, such as hueco, crimp, undercling, jug, etc. Non-climbers might just see an expanse of stone. Are non-climbers failing to see real things that are really there, even apart from the practice of climbing? Similarly, we might see a "passage" in a forest. These affordances relate to our bodies and we might act on the world. They are projections of possibilities for future action.

What if you had no body? Would there be a "path" in a forest? Think about how an opening, an empty space, shows up to us as a region in which we can move freely, whereas solid material shows up as an obstacle. But what if you had no body? Would the world be like this at all? Constraint and freedom? Would anything show up as something to stand on, something to grab, something to throw, something to eat?

Notice that we even recognize things in the world such as a smile or a nod. Are these real objects?

What we see as objects are really just meanings for us that we have developed that facilitate our operation in the world. Different kinds of creatures might well carve up the world differently and see different objects in the same space.

I think it's fascinating how when you are in a more human-created space, there are many more clear objects. Consider walking into a Walmart. There are many products on shelves, with packaging and contents, with lids, with labels, with brand logos, with lists of ingredients. There are cash registers and screens and icons on the screens. There are people with articles of clothing. There are doors and carts, and so on. But in a natural environment free of human modification, things seem less distinct. Sure, if you prime yourself to see them, you will pick out individual rocks or branches or twigs or leaves or patches of moss or hills or waves. But these boundaries are less insistent. It is easier to relax into seeing it as one continuous whole. (But even then, the way you read it is very much related to how it is to be a human in such an environment. Water is refreshing. Air is clear and nice to breathe. The ground is for standing on.) If you are a geologist or a botanist or something, it might be harder to see it simply as a single landscape. But in a Walmart, it is very hard to see it this way. The objectness of the various products is very insistent. It seems that this is because it is much more related to human uses. But how would the inside of a Walmart appear to a tree?

Even in the forest, those modifications that humans make tend to stand out more starkly as objects, things like fire pits, cleared paths, bridges, and so on.

Clearly, things as they are in themselves, if that makes sense at all, are not as they are to us. If there is no relating the world to a body or a mind or something like that, what is it like? If we want to be "objective", we try to bracket ourselves out. But what would remain? I am not at all sure. It seems to me that maybe things only show up as such if you are something that stands in some relation to them and have purposes and possibilities of action. Otherwise, why carve up the world at all?

Without a need for carbohydrates, sugar isn't sweet. Sugar surely isn't, in itself, sweet, absent any tasting animal.

Why are drugs so alluring to some and growing in popularity amongst (quite a few) Americans? — Shawn

It is critically important to understand that there are many different kinds of drugs that do very, very different things. And people use them for many different reasons. Different people also use some of the same drugs for very different reasons.

I did a lot of exploration with psychedelics when I was younger. But I would never touch addictive hard "pleasure" drugs like heroin, meth, or cocaine. I have always known better than to go there. My use of psychedelics was mostly about a search, a drive to explore what's possible in consciousness, an attempt to better understand what I am and what the world is. It was also a kind of adventure. It was very much an expression of my curious nature to do that. Sure, sometimes it was also a way to puncture the boredom of mundane everyday life. Mostly though, I was trying to see further, both outside and inside, like using a telescope to look at the night sky or a microscope to look at what is to be found in a drop of pond water.

Psychedelics are very, very different from "pleasure" drugs. They can be terrifying at times, ecstatic at other times. They can be unpredictable. And they are generally not addictive. They can even be quite counter-addictive. They can lead you to even quit the other substances you are addicted to. For me, and I think for most, it wasn't about pleasure or escape. Quite the opposite. Psychedelics can make you profoundly uncomfortable. They can force you to look at things you'd rather avoid looking at. You are often confronted with your own shit in a big way. Many times, after coming down, I was "kissing the ground" so to speak, relieved to be back to the mundane.

I found out though that psychedelics are not without their dangers. I flew too close to the sun and got burned. And I have had some life struggles that I am not sure aren't partly a result of my use of psychedelics. It's hard to test the counterfactual though. I can't know how my life would have gone without them.

Certainly some of the most amazing experiences of my life were on psychedelics. Some of the most horrible too. I had a three-day psychotic episode once after an LSD session. I've been very cautious about such drugs ever since. It is pretty disconcerting to discover how tenuous our grasp of "reality" really is.

Why are these drugs growing in popularity and acceptance? Many reasons. The Internet. Joe Rogan and his ultra-popular podcast. The interesting nature of the drugs themselves and growing knowledge of them, combined with the dying off of the old generations that were so frightened of them. Society is also slowly coming to realize that some of these drugs can have very positive impacts when used skillfully. They can facilitate the healing of trauma, for example, or death anxiety in terminal cancer patients.

Frankly, the effects are so interesting and powerful and so unlike what you could possibly expect prior to experiencing them, that I think people who have been there compared to people who haven't are qualitatively different in some sense. You're never quite the same afterward. You don't just see pretty patterns. It's the effects on the mind and your sense of self and what it means to be conscious and human that are most interesting. One person I know called those who have really been there "cracked eggs". I like that characterization. It implies that you are somehow both more aware/awake and also a little broken, never to be fully put back together in your safe enclosure again.

Psychedelics are not without danger. They are very powerful and can exacerbate or cause mental illness. They can also do some really, really wonderful things. I've experienced both aspects and feel ambivalent about them. I generally don't recommend them to people. If you are inclined to explore such territories, you will go there of your own accord. I suppose it's like scuba diving or mountaineering. There are amazing things to see, but some people drown or crash on the rocks. Others find much of value.

The point is perhaps to learn to embrace the pointlessness.

I don't understand how "I exist, but I should not exist" is a contradiction. The 'is' and the the 'ought' here are two different things. A contradiction takes the form "A AND NOT A". Since the 'is' and the 'ought' here are not the same, we have something of the form "A AND NOT B", which is not a contradiction.

If there is any kind of morality at all, it seems it needs to be possible that states of affairs can obtain that should not be. For example, a man is torturing a child. This shouldn't be! But it is! Not a contradiction. Happens all the time! There are all sorts of things that, if morality means anything, are the case in spite of their badness. If states of affairs that ought not exist simply cannot exist, by virtue of the 'ought not', then moral prescriptions would be pointless.

If it were the case that states of affairs that should not exist actually therefore cannot exist, then only what should be the case could be actually real. There would therefore be no evil at all in the world. Whatever happens, then, is proved to be good simply by virtue of its actuality.

The real issue that people should be considering here, and probably the point, is that the other people you relate to would not be real, would not have their own points of view, would not experience anything you do. Your actions would arguably have no real moral consequence. Your spouse, if you were to have one, would be an illusion, with nobody looking out at you from behind those eyes.

I wouldn't enter for this reason alone.

If, instead, every single human or animal entity would be "inhabited" like my own avatar, that might be a different story. But in that case, there is no guarantee things would go so perfectly.

I’ve always struggled to understand the appeal for mind altering substances. — Skalidris

I've always struggled to understand people who are not at all interested in altering their consciousness.

As Tom Waits said, "Reality is for people who can't handle drugs." :wink:

Drugs have long been a bit of an obsession of mine. I haven't used anything other than alcohol in moderation (and weed once in a great while in Colorado, where it's legal) for quite some time. But I did a lot of experimentation when I was young, particularly with psychedelics. I had some of the most interesting/beautiful experiences of my life, and some pretty terrible ones too! In addition to a few bad trips, I even had a psychotic episode that lasted three days following an LSD trip, during which I thought I was God and was doing all sorts of weird things. That was quite an educational experience, let me tell you! I had previously never appreciated how tenuous our grip on "reality" actually is. I would never have imagined that I could lose it like I did! Drugs, including psychedelics, are not benign. But even that psychosis was quite educational for me. I learned a lot about psychology. I also developed more empathy for people struggling with mental health issues.

It is interesting to bend your consciousness a bit. Certain things are revealed when you do that. What doesn't vary is hard to notice. It can be hard to even realize that your baseline consciousness is always already "colored" in some sense, and might be different from that of others. When you experience a variety of states, you can compare them, at least to a degree (It is always hard to remember just what it is like to be in other states, more so with states more unlike the baseline state). It becomes possible to appreciate that your baseline state is just a small point in a vast space of possible ways of being/experiencing.

Drugs are certainly problematic. But they have some virtues. And drugs shouldn't be treated as one monolithic class. The reasons for using them can vary quite a lot depending on the sort of drug you are talking about. People generally don't use ayahuasca for the same reasons they will drink a beer or two at dinner. Alcohol and psychedelics do vastly different things.

Alcohol is a pretty shitty drug as far as drugs go. It doesn't really deliver on its promises, and usually makes you feel worse in the long run. Only a little is nice. Just a little too much and it tends to be pretty unpleasant, and it can be hard to stop at just the right point. And, unlike some substances, it doesn't really offer a lot of insight. Regardless, I enjoy a beer or two now and then. I tend to be pretty uptight. It loosens me up a bit and helps me to take the edge off of all the things that normally are constantly worrying me. But the nice effects of a light buzz only last a short while, and after that passes, I feel slightly worse than I did before the beer.

It's nice sometimes to imbibe a small dose of oblivion to bring a little levity. Life can be a bit much! And not all of the problems of life can be solved, even if we face up to them soberly. Sometimes, I need a little help to just care a little less, to feel a little good for a little while despite how irreparably fucked up things actually are. I sometimes wish there were actually a much better drug than alcohol, one with all the positives and less of the negatives. But that would probably be dangerous!

One place I've found alcohol to be extremely helpful is on a long, long international flight! Unbearable without it, especially during the pandemic, all masked up the whole time, stuck in a tight space packed with people, where you can barely move for twelve hours straight. Alcohol really, really helps me get through that claustrophobic hell!

Some drugs aren't about escaping or feeling good at all. Some bring you right into contact with what you normally avoid and this can be quite uncomfortable.

Is it that people do not care, do not know or do not want to do anything about it? — FreeEmotion

Mostly, it is that it seems far away, and not quite real, and people are immersed in their own sets of concerns/pressures, and are themselves just trying their best to feel okay. Most are struggling on some level. And even if it is the case that people can send money to organizations that can effectively help, people feel helpless. When you just send money somewhere, it is hard to see that it actually does some good.

People also, I think, sadly, though they probably won't admit it to themselves, are a little bit glad to see bad things happening elsewhere, to other people, far away where it can't touch them. Comparatively, it makes them feel a little better about their own lot. It's like the Tool song: Vicarious

Surely you've watched something terrible on the news with someone else and have said something along the lines of, "That's terrible!", while at the same time feeling a subtle lift, a little thrill that you wouldn't dare acknowledge. And then you went about your day, cracked a beer, or whatever. I bet we've all done it.

We even get something, I think, out of looking at the bad things in the world and watching ourselves being concerned about it. It can be a kind of little performance we do for ourselves, so that we might consider ourselves good people, worthy of love ourselves. I remember Victor Frankl talking about this, how we cry for others and then cry a little extra for ourselves, while patting ourselves on the back for being such compassionate people. We probably also unconsciously perform our caring for others, so that they might see us as good people.

It's also a little hard to take it all in, to really appreciate what's going on around the world. It's hard to carry the weight of the world's suffering on your shoulders. Naturally, much of the time, we just want to shut it all out and pretend that this cute puppy in front of us is all there is.

For me, in my darker moments, there is also sometimes just the feeling that this is just how the world is. There is just a sense of looking at all the suffering out there, seeing it also in my own life in various forms, and just feeling depressed, just wanting to go to sleep and not see it anymore. There is a paralysis. Addressing it can seem like trying to mop up the ocean.

People are also suspicious, sometimes for bad reasons, sometimes for good reasons, of anyone asking for money. Even if they want to help, they aren't sure how best to do so or even how to find out how to best help. And they don't have a lot of spare time.

Epiphenomenalism
— petrichor

Oh come now that can't be a word. — Outlander

It most certainly is! :smile: I am not sure if you are joking. In case you aren't:Epiphenomenalism

On a broader point, your current premises of "feeling pain" being different than "responding to stimuli" is lacking in merit. And that's a charitable view at best. — Outlander

One is subjective and the other is objective. Perhaps they are two sides of a coin. Still, they are worth distinguishing.

You could conceivably be incapable of pain and still retract your hand from a hot stove, no?

I voted for '1' as the closest fit. I'm not too sure about the "epiphenomenal" part, though. I think all causes are physical and I think consciousness both evolved and is causal (or at least the neuronal processes associated with consciousness are). — Janus

If you think consciousness (I read subjectivity) is real and is causal, and also that all causes are physical (I read objective), what does this mean? Isn't all the behavior fully accounted for by the low-level, non-conscious physical causes? Doesn't any appeal to any conscious causes amount to overdetermination?

Right. Brain tissue is metabolically expensive and it doesn't make sense in evolutionary terms that neurology supporting non-causal consciousness would evolve. — wonderer1

It's so much simpler than that. How can anything that doesn't make any difference make a difference to survival? Obviously, for something to be selected for, it has to make some kind of objective difference. The idea that epiphenomenal consciousness could be selected for is just flat out incoherent.

Imagine that we have two sets of dominoes. One set is a zombie set, and has nothing subjective at all going on. Impacts are not felt. We then also have a second set that has phenomenal properties. There is something it is like for the dominoes themselves to experience the falling and colliding. But imagine that these two sets are objectively identical in all ways. All their physical properties are the same. In other words, the "consciousness" of the dominoes that feel is epiphenomenal. If we didn't know which set was which, how could we find out? There would be no possible way to arrange the dominoes such that their pattern of falling would reveal which set is the set with phenomenal properties.

Now imagine that there are two versions of you, one with epiphenomenal consciousness and one that is a zombie. Since the consciousness makes no difference to behavior, there would be no way to tell which is conscious. And if the two were to talk about consciousness, this talk would have nothing to do with any actual consciousness, as it is clearly independent of it and caused by something other than any actual presence of consciousness.

Clearly, with an epiphenomenon, there is nothing for the evolutionary process to work with.

Second, and I suspect this is the real issue, are emergent properties (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/) and your use of `cause'. You can say that fluid dynamics caused a tornado, and that a tornado caused some damage. Or you could say the fluid dynamics caused the damage. People won't mind if you're talking about tornados. I think that many of the scientists you're criticising would say that consciousness is emergent like a tornado. — GrahamJ

It seems to me that in the case of tornados, these are only different levels of description of the same thing. Or you could say that this is an example of weak emergence. If you look at all the small-scale goings-on, and then zoom out to see the larger happening constituted by the small-scale stuff, it isn't very surprising. You can see how these small things, when put together in this way, add up to this larger thing. And it makes sense practically to talk about it at this higher level, as one big thing. Also, both the high level description of the tornado and low-level description of the movements of molecules are objective/third-person and quantitative.

In the case of consciousness, if all we were confronted with were large-scale behavior, and not with any subjective inner life, I think it could be argued that the two cases are analogous, even though the degree of complexity of human behavior is vastly higher than that of a tornado. But when we find ourselves conscious, not just with complex behavior, having also a first-person perspective and qualitative experiences, and we are told that this simply "emerges" from a special way of arranging bits of matter that in themselves have nothing even remotely like subjectivity, this seems vastly more surprising and harder to see how it could work. I don't think it is analogous at all.

With consciousness, it is like there is a whole other "side" to things. The entity in question is no longer just an object. It is something for itself. In the tornado case, you are going from small objects to a larger object. Pretty straightforward. In the case of consciousness, you are going from small objects to a subject. Not so straightforward.

One is a case of weak emergence, or simply different levels of description, and the other is a case, if of emergence, of strong emergence, which is much harder to justify.

Experience is undeniable, yes. But unconscious billiard balls can experience impacts, and unconscious computers can experience changes in state or configuration, analogous to our messier brain shivers. — bongo fury

When people normally use the word experience when saying something like "billiard balls experience impacts", I don't think they are implying at all that they believe that balls literally have subjective experiences of the impacts. The word is used figuratively, or in a different sense. It is like saying that an electron is "excited". To equate the two senses of experience is a mistake. Do you believe that billiard balls experience impacts in the same sense that football players experience impacts? In other words, do billiard balls feel their impacts? Is there something-it-is-like for them to exchange kinetic energy?

Your understanding of consciousness is a mess.
One thing is consciousness, another one is the self-consciousness. Read a bit more about the topic... — Raul

Is this directed at me? This comes across as rather hostile. If I am not misreading your tone, why do feel that way?

I am very much aware of the difference between consciousness as I've chosen to define it for the purposes of the poll, and self-consciousness. I defined it explicitly in the way I did specifically because I think many people have in mind some kind of self-representation when they use the word consciousness, or even just a behavioral disposition. I wanted to avoid confusion and the talking past one another that often happens in discussions of consciousness.

I guess I don't understand what you're trying to do. I was just curious why you settled on those options. — Tom Storm

Among other things, I wanted to see if anyone here believes in the evolution of epiphenomenal consciousness. I am curious to hear what thoughts such person might have about how these positions can be compatible, since it doesn't make sense to me. I get the feeling from much popular science-oriented journalism that my poll option one is a common position among academics. But I am not sure if it really is.

The sort of hard materialists that deny consciousness at all seem to escape this problem, at the cost of denying what seems obvious and immediately verifiable, namely that there is experience.

Naturalists in general are usually committed to the full causal closure of the physical, with full reduction usually being assumed to be possible. If someone with such commitments nevertheless believes in consciousness, this would seem to force them to accept epiphenomenalism. And yet talk in such circles is common about how consciousness evolved, how brains "produce" it, and so on. This seems problematic and I am curious about it. I wonder how much they have thought about the compatibility of these positions.

And beyond the problem of the evolution by natural selection of a trait that makes no difference, there is the problem of our talking about it. How does a reference to it come to be present in our behavior? If X contains information about Y, it usually seems necessary that Y has had some kind of causal role in influencing the state of X.

I honestly find myself deeply puzzled about the seeming fact that I am conscious and that I am able to form thoughts about my subjectivity and qualitative experience, and talk about it. And I don't think I am talking nonsense when I claim that I have experience. But it seems like this should be impossible!

I would have voted for the first option:

We are conscious, epiphenomenalism is true, and consciousness evolved by natural selection.
— petrichor

...except that I see epiphenomenalism as based on simplistic thinking. My view is similar to the view Peter Tse expresses in this abstract. (unfortunately a wall of text) — wonderer1

Thanks for the link! When I saw that, I recognized Tse's ideas as something I encountered some years ago but forgot about. I'll have read it again soon. Perhaps the answer to my following question is in the linked material. What are your thoughts on the compatibility of epiphenomenalism and the evolution of consciousness by natural selection? It seems obvious, at least on the surface, that if consciousness were not somehow causally efficacious, it couldn't possibly make any difference to behavior, and therefore could not be selected for. Isn't that the basic claim of epiphenomenalism, that consciousness makes no difference to behavior? How then could it be advantageous to an organism?

I have often gotten the impression, which is maybe mistaken, that many in the scientific community basically take this position, that consciousness is real, that everything that happens in the brain is fully accounted for by low-level pre-conscious physical causes (and therefore epiphenomenalism must be true), and yet that consciousness evolved by natural selection. This has always seemed to me to be a problematic combination of incompatible beliefs. It makes me suspect that people haven't thought it all through sufficiently. But maybe I am missing something. Maybe, for one thing, they just don't even have in mind the same thing I do when talking about consciousness.

What do you think? Is epiphenomenalism compatible with the idea that subjectivity evolved?

What about you? — Patterner

I am genuinely puzzled about the matter of consciousness and mental causation. I tend to think that it is obvious that I am conscious. I have a hard time with eliminativism or illusionism. I can't imagine how, if there is actually no experience, there could be a situation where it nevertheless seems that there is an experience. Who is fooled? All seeming, it seems to me, presupposes experience and an experiencer.

I also tend to think it's obvious that my consciousness somehow has an effect on my behavior. After all, I talk about it! I even tend to think it is obvious that I have free will. However, when I try to understand and analyze these matters rationally, I find myself confronted with all kinds of interesting and seemingly insoluble problems and puzzles no matter what position I consider.

It seems far easier to disprove free will than to support it rationally or scientifically. But my intuition strongly conflicts with what my reasoning urges me to believe. I often wonder if all the options we humans have thus far imagined are far from the mark. I am not sure we even clearly understand what we are talking about.

I lean toward taking consciousness and free will seriously. However, I am honestly baffled. I think a good dose of epistemic humility is warranted here. I am a dumb primate after all! But I vote, provisionally, for option four. I believe there is something to the claim that I am conscious. And I think that my ability to even think about it means that it somehow influences the evolution of my brain state, and thus isn't epiphenomenal. If epiphenomenalism were true, it seems to me, our talking about it would be inexplicable.

I also tend to think that consciousness, or some kind of proto-consciousness, is as deeply situated in the ontological strata as matter, and exists in some sense prior to biology, and so didn't evolve. Perhaps the subjective and objective are two sides of a coin and arise together as a relation between two parts of reality. Maybe they are not different substances, but rather two aspects of an internal relation in something that itself is prior to relations at all. Neutral monism?

Complex forms of cognition that have adaptive advantage are another matter. Those surely evolved. Perhaps the having of a sense of self, or self-reference, or a self-model is something that evolved. But I have a hard time seeing how basic experientiality, first-person-ness, that there is something it is like to be, could have evolved in a world that prior to such a magical event, was completely objective only and altogether lacking in subjectivity and perspective, a world completely "there" but never "here".

What many people, probably many cognitive scientists included, seem to mean when they use the word consciousness is likely mostly a kind of responsiveness to stimuli, a kind of modeling of world and self, a high level of information integration, a characteristically agentic form of behavior. I don't believe anything like that exists prior to biology. But I take seriously the idea that there there might well be a kind of experiential aspect or interiority to everything. The evolutionary process shaped what was there already. It didn't create anything fundamentally new. I don't find arguments for strong emergence compelling. And I think it is a hard case to make that the first-person perspective is an example of a weakly emergent phenomena. If it is somehow "produced" by arranging otherwise completely "dead" matter in a special way, this is very surprising and seems like a miracle.

What is your position that doesn't fit any of the options? It seems to me that these five options should cover all positions. There are only four possible combinations of answers for two yes/no questions. I have three yes/no questions, but if you say no to consciousness, the other two questions are pointless. I don't see how there could be any other options.

Consciousness?
If yes:
Causally efficacious?
Evolved?

As for IIT, I guess you would say we are conscious and consciousness did not evolve. I am not sure whether IIT proponents would argue that consciousness is epiphenomenal or not. Either it is or it isn't. What third option would there be?

Emergentists could select any of the first four options.

Idealism is compatible with option 4. "Not all" does not exclude "none".

I should have written the options differently, but I can't edit them now. For option two, read "all causes are physical" as basically equivalent to "epiphenomenalism is true". For options three and four, "not all causes are physical" can be also be taken as "epiphenomenalism is not true".

It seems to me that what we tend to mean by free will is not that our actions are not determined (random), but rather that, free from external determination to at least some degree, I determine my actions. And importantly, this determination is made consciously. This seems to require that antecedent physical causes (or perhaps any causes) do not fully determine which choices I will make. And at the same time, my actions are not random. They are not non-determined (sorry for the double-negative!). I determine them. So in some sense, it seems, the physical causal chain must be broken right "behind" me. It almost seems to require that I am something extra-physical that injects itself into the causal chain. And I must be to some extent causa sui. It also seems to require that I am in some sense an individual that is somewhat independent of the world.

If there are only chains of causes, where what we call people at a given moment are just links in that causal chain that precedes them, it seems that there are no true agents or individual selves in any real sense at all. It then isn't I who cause my actions, but whatever causes external to me that determined my state just prior to my "acting".

Consider some hypothetical world, a world I would call deterministic because it follows these principles: it obeys certain laws/rules/regularities, such that an outcome follows directly from previous states, these laws/rules/regulations do not change and that they are unbreakable. This is like our universe, governed by regularity, but what I'd like to ask is to consider an alternative foundation—that is, instead of a world where the bedrock objects are (for example) elementary particles which follow forces described by the laws of physics, consider that the bedrock objects are agents, and the laws that govern them describe how these agents make choices. — Jerry

What are these agents? What does it mean to be an agent? What is agency? This world that is an unbroken causal chain, of which these "agents" are just a part, with the causes just flowing through them, seems to me just a matter of using different words to describe what others would describe as a causally-closed physical world without any real agents.

A puppet seems to be acting. We get the sense of an agent when the illusion works. But because the actions are being determined from the outside, because the puppet isn't free, isn't self-determined to some extent, it is a mistake to regard it as a real agent. If everything I do is determined by causes I had nothing to do with, that existed prior to me, then I am really powerless. I am like the puppet. And I am neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy. There is really only the larger flow of energy, the great chain of causation, the universe itself unfolding as it must. My own 'I' too, as a separate self, is then just an illusion.

I think it is interesting how it seems to be necessary to consider consciousness when thinking about free will. It is hard to see how you could freely choose your actions while not at all conscious. Furthermore, if all of our actions are determined by low-level physical causes prior to our consciousness, it is hard to see how we could be anything but epiphenomenally conscious. And in that case, all of our behavioral references to consciousness in our thought and behavior could not in fact have anything to do with any real consciousness that we might have. When we talk about being conscious then, we are talking nonsense. How would we even know if we are epiphenomenally conscious? How could any phenomenal event cause a brain state to contain information about it if it is causally inefficacious?

I am tempted to think that if we are to believe that we are not talking nonsense when we talk about our consciousness, and that we are not mistaken in our belief that we are conscious, we must then also have something that suspiciously resembles a condition for free will. If there is a real center of agency, it is that which is conscious. Or it is the consciousness itself. And it must be able somehow to consciously determine behavior to at least some small degree in a way that isn't fully accounted for by prior non-conscious physical causes. This consciousness must be partly the cause of the behavior.

I cannot conceive of how this could work, but then again I am completely baffled by most basic things like time, space, materiality at all, existence at all, and so on. My inability to conceive of how it could work or how it could be is no argument against it being the case. I am, after all, a dumb primate. Nevertheless, it at least seems clear to me that I am conscious and that if this isn't nonsense, the experiential aspect of me must also, in its very experientiality, be somehow able to inject some evidence of its existence into the shape of my brain states and behavior if I am to be able to think and talk about it. My consciousness must be a cause in itself, not fully determined by non-conscious antecedent physical causes, that acts in the world.

Perhaps we could define free will more simply as conscious causation.

I've long felt that I can rationally disprove free will rather easily. And I find it extremely difficult if not impossible to rationally justify a belief in free will. But the sense that I am freely determining my actions is so strong that it leads me to be skeptical of my ability to think about it properly. It makes me doubt that I can decide what is the case simply by seeing what rational arguments I can come up with for or against. All my musings then I must take with a grain of salt and a healthy dose of epistemic humility.

It has always seemed to me that when talking about the self, it is important to get clear about the difference between the subject, or that which is experiencing, and the content of experience. A story one tells oneself about oneself, or any conception or representation of oneself one might have, is not the subject, but rather content. It is a structure of thought, not the one that experiences having a thought.

What Descartes was saying, in my understanding, was that whatever I am thinking can be false, but I myself cannot be nonexistent and yet believe that I am. Whatever story I tell myself or that appears in my mind can be erroneous. Its claims might not correspond to reality. But I myself, the thinker itself, that which experiences having such possibly erroneous thoughts, cannot be an illusion. Everything I see might be a hallucination, including my own reflection in the mirror, but I myself, the subject, cannot be an illusion. Even if I am deceived, I am having an experience, and so I am. I might be wrong about my form, but I as long as there is experience, however false, there is an experiencer. It is inconceivable that a nonexistent entity might be fooled in any way whatsoever, and that includes being misled to believe that it exists.

A stage magician can lead an audience to believe all sorts of false things. But one thing the magician cannot do is convince a nonexistent audience that it is there watching the show.

So there are two things that people seem to be talking about when talking about the self. Communication often fails because people think they are talking about the same thing when they are not. One is the subject of experience. The other is some kind of structure of self-representation, or a form of experience. One is awareness, the other is content. One is seer, one is scene/seen. It is important to make clear what we are bringing into question then when we question the self. Is it the subject itself, or the self-idea?

Energy and matter are different forms of the same thing. E=mc^2

How do you make sense of a person resisting their impulses? I don't know about you, but I often find conflict and disagreement and tension in myself, different aspects of myself competing for dominance. Sometimes one part wins. Other times another part.

There have been times in my life when I was trying hard to get super-fit and lean to maximize my rock climbing performance. I had this distinct feeling that there was a part of myself that was almost like a dog begging for food, whining at me, and I had to forcefully and firmly say no to it. And that part would feel kind of wounded and neglected. It really felt like the two parts of myself were like an overly stern master or father and an appetite-driven dog or child or something. When I was resisting food and taking cold showers and running hard and working out with strong self-discipline, it was as though this executive part of me was dominant and I was identifying with and feeling myself to be this part primarily. At other times, when I was more lax and indulgent, it was like I was the dog, happily raiding the food bin, with the master nowhere to be seen.

It seems to me that if you believe that what you are is basically a brain/body in an environment, it isn't hard to see the brain as a multitude with different networks and tendencies and regions perhaps even having different goals. I tend to think that we are not nearly as unitary as people normally think. Our brain activation patterns are much different in different contexts and in different modes.

But some people might believe that a human being is fundamentally a soul inhabiting a brain/body, and by extension, a world, and being a soul, a human is thus fundamentally a singular, eternally distinct entity, a monad. I don't subscribe to this view, but even then, it seems to me that you could characterize your relation to your body or some aspect of it as one of master and slave. In that case, it would seem better for the soul to master the body rather than the reverse.

Anyway, I suspect our seeming disagreement here might be mostly a matter of how we use language and what concepts/stories/metaphors we use to try to make sense of ourselves. Talking about parts of a person being master and slave is somewhat figurative. That said, I would argue that if something has parts, if it has a shape or form at all, it isn't an indivisible single or simple. You can, for the sake of convenience, draw a line around this collection of parts and treat it as one singular thing. But the fact remains that it is divisible. Even a perfect circle is divisible. A clump of clay is divisible. If something has form at all, there are internal relations.

Also, as mentions, split-brain patients provide an interesting situation to consider. In some cases, it seems that each hemisphere has its own distinct identity.

In my misspent youth, I experimented with a variety of psychoactive chemicals. Occasionally, I experienced bizarre situations where my mind fragmented into different parts in radical dissociative states and then came back together as the effects of the drug wore off. I remember once having a fearful thought about my safety as the effects kicked in, and I sort of inwardly asked this seemingly intelligent space around me what would happen to me if I were to die. As I fully transitioned to the new state, it was as if I was no longer the person who asked the question. I was now the one who had been asked. Even then, this space that I now found myself as became fragmented into several beings who were conferring, talking about the guy who took the drug and trying to decide if his question made any sense. It was like there were several separated perspectives. I/we/they interpreted the question in such a way that led me/us/them to ask, "Can he fall out of this?" The answer was this: "No, a window we have on the world simply closes." And from this strange space, there was an image in some part of it of a small opening through which could be seen, from the point of view of a human, a lower torso and legs, with feet up on the coffee table (this was the view from my eyes). There was a sense that if he were to die, this opening would simply close forever, and I/we would simply not see the world from that point of view any longer.

It was strange to observe what happened as the drug wore off. It was as if these separated parts reintegrated and I then remembered the experience from each of the several perspectives, as if I was them all along, and so as remembered, it felt like I was all of them at once. But I suspect that during the dissociation, there was no such integration. I imagine it might be like that if multiple humans were to somehow join and integrate their brains. They might merge into a single entity that would remember the lives prior from all of the perspectives. It such an entity were to remember a conversation that happened between all of the members, it would remember the conversation from multiple angles at once and integrate them. The only way to experience the memories would be with this integration and comparison present. It wouldn't remember the experiences as they were when they happened, as that would require being once again isolated as one of the individuals at a time. So it might seem to you, if you were this entity, that you were all of the members all along.

In observing my dream states and hypnagogic and hypnopompic states, I have sometimes witnessed the transition from "unconsciousness" to "consciousness" or the reverse as being like a gathering up and concentration of dissociated parts or smeared-out-mind or a relaxation or dropping of such a concentration or integration, like water spilling out of a cup into the ocean.

I suspect that even in waking states, we are not as integrated and consistently "ourselves" as we think.

The idea of self-tyranny or slavery to one’s thoughts and desires is an odd one because one cannot be a slave to himself, both master and slave at the same time. — NOS4A2

It only seems like a problem if you think of yourself as a perfect, indivisible mereological simple, as a single thing that has no parts. But if you are a complex entity, you can certainly have different parts that come into conflict. One part could be enslaved by another part. It's hard, for example, to imagine that someone with Tourette Syndrome is as free of irresistible impulses to blurt things out as someone without the condition.

I think it is useful to think of an addict as being in some sense the slave of their cravings. Perhaps it is possible for them to resist their particular drug, but certainly not as easy as it is for someone not an addict.

What is undesirable, it seems to me, is for a person to be a slave to their baser impulses, the lower gaining dominance over the higher.

Regarding Hume's argument against miracles (and other claims of non-supernatural but ultra-extraordinary things), I am reminded of this scene from Joan of Arc:

https://youtu.be/9M1-PfFx1hU?si=W4Uq2jSpqdiGrVQc

That might be right! The fact remains that we don't have any evidence for any life other than this line we are a part of. The discovery of a second line somewhere would be big news.

The basic probability principle underlying Hume's argument against miracles is just a part of good general epistemological hygiene whether you are dealing claims of supernatural miracles or other unusual circumstances. If you think you've won the lottery, chances are you haven't. Check your ticket again. Check your eyes too. Concluding, based on very little information, that a light you are seeing is an alien craft is like jumping to the conclusion that you have a winning lottery ticket before you've even looked at it. It would be cool if it were so, but chances are, it isn't.

Except extraterrestrials visiting earth wouldn't be a miracle. There's no violation of a law of nature. Why should we prima facie think alien visitation is a low probability event? — RogueAI

Life is rare, intelligent life rarer, technological civilization rarer still, and interstellar travel is really, really hard.

Consider that even on this planet, where the conditions are so ideal for life, as far as we know, life has only occurred once. There are not multiple trees of life. Everything alive here is related and has a common ancestor. You would think that if life had a strong tendency to occur where conditions favor it, we'd see another line. Who knows though, maybe all the life related to us just outcompeted and outcompetes anything else and obliterates any evidence of it.

We have yet to see a single bit of strong evidence for any life beyond earth. And we've been looking hard. No truly interesting signals, nothing.

If alien visitation were not a low probability event, we'd see more clear evidence for its occurrence. Clearly, deceit among people is a common occurrence. Spaceships visiting from other star systems are not known to be even possible.

Whether or not it fits the definition of a miracle as a supernatural event is beside the point. The point is that it is always more likely that you are dealing with a typical event than that you are dealing with an extraordinary event. You should bet on it being the typical case. If you see a light in the sky, chances are overwhelming that it's not an alien.

I think Mick West has done a solid job of explaining the UAP videos. His work doesn't get enough attention. I remember smacking myself in the forehead when I saw him explain that one triangle UFO video as bokeh. Of course that's what it is! And his gimbal analysis of one of the other famous videos is probably right.

Gimbal Analysis
Bokeh UFO

As for eye witnesses, well, people are fallible, even pilots, and humans have a pretty strong tendency to want to believe in something beyond the mundane reality we see every day, myself included. There are incentives to deceive and to self-deceive.

I'll go with Hume's argument against miracles on this. Think of it in probabilistic terms. What is more likely to be true? That someone is deceived? Or that the object in question is a literal alien spacecraft? We know that people being deceived and deceiving is a very common occurrence. But extraterrestrial intelligent beings visiting earth isn't something we have strong evidence for having ever occurred. You'd be wise to bet in any case that the more typical case is happening.

Some considerations. First of all, the physical world doesn't seem to be continuous or infinitely divisible. Most physicists these days seem pretty sure of the Planck length and Planck time as a limit. There is the holographic principle, the Bekenstein bound, and all that. There are some good philosophical arguments that the world is discrete or not infinitely divisible that I wont get into here.

However, if matter were infinitely divisible and continuous, and for example, you had two perfect spheres touching, it seems to me that true touching would involve a point on one sphere and a point on the other occupying the same exact space. There must be zero distance between the two points, after all. Can two points with zero distance between them occupy different points in space? I don't think so.

But it seems that a whole different picture of what space and matter are has been emerging in this last century. Things like particles might not even be truly distinct objects, but rather something like excitations of a field, or waves, or some such. And waves can certainly "occupy the same space". Actually, it seems problematic to think of waves in the same medium as separate things. What would it mean for two ripples in a pond to "touch"? You might think of them as simply passing through one another, temporarily adding up, or some such. But are they really separate things, or is that just how our minds like to carve up the world?

When talking about touching, since we are dealing with distance, we are talking about space, so the nature of space or spacetime is important. I find recent thinking in loop quantum gravity, in ER=EPR, in Stephen Wolfram's causal graph, and so on, very interesting, where space isn't thought of as a big openness, an emptiness that contains things. Rather, it is a sort of network of discrete, entangled nodes that are simply connected or entangled in a certain order, with everything we call matter or empty space or whatever just amounting to certain local topological arrangements of these nodes, some of which can be knot-like or whatever, some of which can propagate like cellular automata.

Supposing something like this the above is true, what then is the touching of two material objects? I suppose it is somewhat similar to thinking about waves in a medium. What seem like two different configurations of two material objects in space, one with a distance between them and another with adjacency, are really just two different arrangements of a single network. But what then does it mean for two of these "particles" of space to be connected in the network? They are entangled. But what does that really mean? I'm not really sure. What even are the nodes and how do they interact? Are they ultimately really separate things?

I guess when we talk about different macroscale objects touching, it is just a useful-for-us way of thinking about things and carving up a world that, in-itself, perhaps isn't carved up at all. It is a high layer of abstraction, like using icons in a computer application that are like packages of nested command hierarchies of ever-simpler and more fundamental operations that would be too cumbersome to think about directly at the level of transistors and memory registers.

But you might also just think about touching as causation, or information propagation, or even as chains of contingency or layers of dependency in some sense. There has long been a suspicion, probably a pretty good one, that causation can only propagate locally, by "contact action". Scientists and philosophers have been wise, I think, to be suspicious of "spooky action-at-a-distance".

Newton was really uncomfortable with the fact that his law of gravity had nothing to say about the mechanism of this incomprehensible situation of one body seemingly influencing another across a large distance without touching. Einstein restored locality with the realization that gravity is local after all, since an object simply distorts the space it is immediately in, and then the effect propagates as warping of spacetime from one part of space to each adjacent part, and only affects the distant object indirectly when the warping reaches it and begins to affect it. It is like a wave propagating adjacently, part-to-part, in a rope rather than action-at-a-distance across a true emptiness. Space or spacetime, in this case, is "something" itself, with its own degrees of freedom.

Yes, I hear you asking about entanglement, which seems to be action-at-a-distance. But is it really? Causal influence usually seems to involve an interaction that carries information. You can't send information nonlocally with entanglement. It is simply a correlation that isn't fully understood, as of yet. In some interpretations, there isn't any nonlocal influence.

To be touched is to be influenced, to be acted upon, to be changed by something, to gain information about that something, for something of that thing to enter into you, to become part of you, for some aspect of your present state to have been partly determined by the former state of that thing, like the kinetic energy in one billiard ball passing into another. If things can be changed by other things that they "touch", can they really be thought of as truly separate and distinct in the first place? It seems to require them to be kind of permeable and ultimately without true boundaries.

And then consider that for a photon, since it travels at the speed of light, and since length contracts, approaching zero, as you approach that speed, there is no distance. It is as if the electron dropping to a lower energy level and emitting a photon, or a packet of energy, and the "distant" electron absorbing it and jumping to a higher level are, from the photon's perspective, "touching", the two electrons having zero distance between them, as if there really isn't any photon at all, but rather just the a quantum of energy passing from one electron to another in the same place. Maybe the two electrons aren't even separate in the final analysis.

In the end, it might be best to just give up on the idea that there are any separate things in the first place. Even the space particles are probably just the way in which, incomprehensibly to me, the One, whatever it is, relates itself to itself in some mind-blowing hall-of-mirrors explosion of apparent form. Wheeler and Feynman famously speculated about the one-electron universe. Maybe it goes deeper than that.

Some in the physics community, like Nima Arkani-Hamed, are starting to talk about spacetime as emergent from something deeper. If distance isn't fundamental, then what? Can we even talk about distinct entities that could be said to touch or not touch?

One problem I see with such a view is that photons do seem to travel through the intervening space between the initial and terminal electron. If that was not the case, I don't know how gravitational lensing could be explained.

Closer to home we can consider shadows. From our frame of reference it takes eight minutes for light
to travel from the Sun to the Earth. Yet our shadows on the ground move 'instantaneously' when we move. If it was "a matter of the two electrons on either end just interacting and transferring a quantum of energy from one to the other, how would the electron on the Sun know which electron on the Earth to interact with, such that shadows appear as they do when we are walking along? — wonderer1

I see what you are saying! But spacetime, and the way things are arranged "in it", even without such distortions, always presents such issues. Why, for example, if I aim a laser pointer at my ceiling from inside the house, do the photons never make it to outer space? To be sure, spacetime, whatever it is, and how things are ordered, has something to do with determining which things interact with which other things. Gravitational lensing is a warping of that, so I would expect it to have an impact.

I don't know what it all ultimately means, but I find it incredibly fascinating that for light, there is no distance, and that combined with the fact that we can't confirm the existence of photons actually mid-flight. If, from a photons frame, there is no distance between its source and its destination, that means that these are in some sense, from some frame of reference, touching, no? So is there actually a photon at all from its own perspective? From one perspective, it looks like there is a gap. From another, it looks like there is no gap.

I'm just thinking that maybe because we flatlanders insist on modeling these things in terms of familiar objects like thrown rocks, we might fail to make the imaginative leap to some radically different way of understanding what is going on.

Photons travel the whole distance between point A and point B. This can easily be proven just by intercepting them at any point between A and B, Point C. Then try to intercept them at the same time in a different place along the same line, point D. There is nothing to intercept at the point furthermost from the source because it was already blocked. — Sir2u

But really, operationally, if you try to "intercept" a photon that was "on its way" to something else, whatever you insert in what would presumably have been its path is in fact its final destination. You can't sort of watch it along its way. If you detect a photon, your detection device is its final destination, period. Perhaps there is just a handshake between that distant electron that dropped to a lower energy level and the electron in your measuring device that jumped to a higher one, and which electron interacted with whichever other one just had something do with how things are related. Sure, you can "partially intercept" a beam of light. But such a beam is really a bunch of discrete events, each of which is a single photon. And you can't watch any single photon flying. Some photons from point A were detected at point B. Some of those from point A were detected at point C. That's all.

If you are a proper verificationist and don't want to make claims about things that cannot be operationally verified, you can't say that photons actually cross distances, that they are at some point in time definitely located between their source and destination. This is simply unverifiable and speculative and part of one particular model. The claim cannot be tested. Maybe tomorrow we'll have a different model that explains the connection between the loss of energy at one location and the gain at another using a different illustrative picture than little flying particles.

It still isn't clear what is "really" going on with quantum interactions. We have many different interpretations. Some involve strange retrocausative elements and interesting transactions across time and space. Who knows?

It's fun to think about!

I don't pretend to really understand it, but if I am not misinformed, as @jgill pointed out, from the standpoint of the ship, as you approach the speed of light, the distance traversed approaches zero and the time to cross it also approaches zero. It takes a million years for light to cross a gap of a million light years only for an observer stationary with respect to it. For the photon, no distance and no time.

https://phys.org/news/2014-05-does-light-experience-time.html#:~:text=From%20the%20perspective%20of%20a,doesn't%20experience%20distance%20either.

As an aside, I've often wondered if this reveals something very interesting and radical about the physical world. Maybe photons flying through space in the way we imagine a ball going through space isn't a thing at all. You can't observe a photon in flight, "from the side", so to speak. If you detect it, or there is a scattering event, its flight is over, no? It has been absorbed or converted to another form of energy. When we see a ball from the side of its path, we are receiving photons that are traveling directly to our retina from the ball. We only have evidence about the ball indirectly. We don't "see across a gap" nonlocally, even though phenomenologically, that's the way it feels to us when we watch a ball in flight. It feels like we are directly aware of something at a distance from us. We have a sense of the space in between. But this is just the phenomenology. In actuality it seems, all information is gained locally by direct contact, regardless of the means of detection. It is all touch in the end. A single photon mid-flight, untouched, is something that has never been observed. The existence of such cannot be verified.

If, from the photon's perspective, there is zero distance between its origin and destination, maybe in some sense, rather than there being an actual photon crossing a distance, it is rather a matter of the two electrons on either end just interacting and transferring a quantum of energy from one to the other. One loses an energy level and the other gains one, maybe like a billiard ball transferring its energy to another ball. How it is determined which electron will interact with which other one halfway "across" the universe though is beyond me! It makes me wonder if we really understand what is going on with space and time at all. The model of a photon as a thing that passes through space works as a model, but maybe thinking about it like that gives the wrong intuition about what is actually happening.

Interesting also that photons are massless, no?

This is just fun speculation and I am probably confused with my inadequate physics education!

I'll stick with Hume on this story for now:

When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened.... If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.

One possibility occurred to me. Do you think the US government might be motivated to disinform here in order to make its enemies think it might have some super-sophisticated technology derived from alien craft? There is, after all, a war going on in which the use of nukes is being constantly threatened, where we are approaching a critical point. It seems that in a fight, it's always useful to lead your enemies to believe you have more than you actually do.

In any case, I don't think government people, even those with high levels of clearance, are immune to wanting to believe in such things, misinterpreting or misunderstanding things, a desire for attention or an audience for something like book sales, or even mental illness.

I really like Mick West's analyses of the many UFO videos and whatnot. Really solid stuff.

A couple of books that I read that would be of interest to anyone participating in this thread are Peter Pomerantsev's This Is Not Propaganda, Adventures in the War Against Reality and his Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, The Surreal Heart of the New Russia. Both are very good and very well-written! They offer insight as well as entertainment! The former book is probably more important given recent events though.

Your whole comment... — Jackson

Thank you!

Hume's critique of identity is that everything is relational. — Jackson

Yes! Even in QM, as Rovelli points out, basically what it means to have a property is to be measured, which means to be interacted with, to be encountered. Or, as in Madhyamaka philosophy, nothing has "own-being". All things instead co-arise interdependently.

Also, as for appropriation, it is a good and important thing for various entities to learn from and incorporate aspects of one another, no? What if we were to stop doing this? I can't think of any cultural form or technology or whatever that doesn't have some appropriation in its background. Should Russians not have computers? What culture first painted? Should the rest of the world leave painting alone? We use arabic numerals and algebra. Bad?

Sometimes we are better able to see others than we are able to clearly see ourselves. It is like a brick on a wall able to see the wall across the street, but unable to see itself.

Also, relationship is important. I am something different to my brother than I am to myself, something else again to my wife, something else again to my pet, to my boss, to my food animals, and so on. You might argue that we are largely relational, not really being anything in ourselves.

A man doesn't generally know what it is to be encountered as a woman. A woman must tell him. There is something to be said about men that is for women to tell. There are things about women that men can see well that women have a hard time seeing, and vice versa.

I have recently spent some time overseas and am getting ready to move there to live with my wife. As I learn more about this foreign culture, integrating some of it, inhabiting it to some small degree, I become better able to see what it is to be American, what American values are, and so on. Also, I am able to see many things about my wife's culture that she doesn't readily see.

Things are revealed by comparison, by relation, by difference.

What we constantly are is the background we cannot see, like the water the fish swims in that the fish is unaware of.

It makes perfect sense for someone of one identity to make portraits of another.

Personally, I like asking others what they see in me. I get insights into myself otherwise unavailable to me.

We have inadequate models of ourseleves. We don't actually really deeply know ourselves. We cannot contain ourselves. It isn't necessarily the case that we are in the best position to explain ourselves.

In my experience, it seems hard for people to psychoanalyze themselves. We are too embedded in our own shit, too invested in our own defense mechanisms, and so on. Everyone knows the good psychologist who can't solve or even see her own problems.

Observations made from the inside and from the outside are both useful and interesting.

I am curious what you all think. Suppose Ukraine, when Russia had its forces on the border threatening, would have committed formally to neutrality and to never join NATO. Would that have been the end of it? Suppose they would have then continued to develop their oil and gas interests in competition with Russia and furthering their development as a modern, Western-style capitalist democracy. Would Russia just leave everyone in the region alone?