I did not say that depression is just a habit. It is very much a combination of factors, many of them beyond one's direct control. I don't know anything about "spontaneous remission"
I do think the "thought loop" does involve habits and it is one of the doors open to something new.

I did not say you can do it by simply willing it or doing it alone. But you can't do it without you. You are the only one who can introduce new habits.

Your model precludes helping yourself.
Unless the condition changes without your help, your model is part of the problem.

Your model does not permit an effective agent, it only defends a powerless one.

A lot of what keeps repeating are habits. As an agent, the only degree of freedom available is the introduction of new ones.

Let's talk about the thought loop. If you were to be an agent, isn't that what you would want to change?

It sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In any case, you are still employing a division between intention and "power." Now your agency is even more divided than in your first formulation.

Do you have any thoughts regarding my alternative?

I believe you intended to be replying to Athena, the initiator of this discussion.

If the intention is "undirected" because of a lack willpower, you are proposing a difference between the telos being sought and the energy or power necessary for it to become actual. I thought I was describing your model before offering an alternative.

Lacking "the willpower to get better" may not be a helpful way to frame the matter. It separates intention from agency in terms that are self defeating. The desire to change is resisted by the structure that keeps recurring. Something new has to be introduced for the structure to change. The new isn't a war upon the old, it replaces a portion of it.

I agree with M.J. Mahoney in his Constructive Psychotherapy where he says:

"Ongoing competitions in development are neither "won" nor "lost" in reference to allegedly absolute criteria. Some competitors (i.e., impulses of activity) selected to assume temporary positions in the "driver seat" of the body. The old patterns remain as contenders, and they may "win" occasional episodes of ascendancy in future situations. Old habits are not eliminated completely, but they can be displaced by new ones."

Just to make sure I am not hearing the question incorrectly, is the phrase " undirected intentionality" a part of some grammatical algebra that I am unaware of? I am pretty handy up to the middle of the twentieth century but it gets pretty hit and miss after that.

I don't know. I have read a lot of Nietzsche. Mostly by accident, really.
If you want to open up that side of things, maybe it deserves its own thread.

I think you are grouping things together to support a particular narrative. I do this too. The choice between being able to describe what is happening a certain way versus a desire to put oneself outside of the story has been the most consistent problem that keeps coming back up when there is something that I cannot get rid of. I am tired of the way I keep coming back into the story. But getting used to things seems to be a big part of what is going on.

So, I think the narrative that gets used most often is not compelling because it lacks something. It stands as a sign for a desire i am not the narrator for. Your fractured process is yours. Just like mine, nobody is interested in stealing it. As much as you do not like it, nobody is going to take it away.

That observation relates to the problem of turning kids into adults because some people think they know what that means and others do not. Being one of the latter category, I teach on that basis. And my kid sees that for what it is.

We are visible to other people and in many ways, their perceptions are correct.

Maybe one way to look at it is to consider how different psychologies are developed in specific schemes of causality and views of environment that place what develops through description in a context. That may be reductive or not, depending on the "world" assumed to be where certain properties are expressed.

Take Erik Erikson, for example. As a matter of modern parlance, he coined many of the ways "identities" are said to form. In that sense, he is more structuralist than the Freuds or Jung whose forms and descriptions of dynamics were more focused on what drove or energized a system. What having an "identity" means in each of those systems is more of a result than a perceived property.

At the other end of scale, the Skinner form of behaviorism does not include any of those expressions as being a description of what is happening. Strictly speaking, that endeavor is not a reduction of other meaning but a circumvention of them. Like taking a circle highway in a city to avoid all the intersections.

Another element outside of the science game is to see how personality is observed. A description by Flaubert, La Rochefoucauld, or Kierkegaard may brush by the same quality but you, the observer, would have to be the one who saw it in a certain moment of discovery.

If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting a gap between us and reality in its nakedness? — sign

I am not sure about that. Whatever purposes it may serve compared to other theories, Hegel has a gap in time between ideas starting and becoming other things through a process. On that basis, he is militating against anybody like you or me saying what that all amounts to. Now, there are many of his critics who observe he did not apply some of those conditions to himself. He argues for a kind of acceptance that is not consonant with his own expressions of a completed world.

I am less interested in his conclusions on where it all going and more interested in the conditions he brought into view that were not discussed before he troubled us.

Your points are well taken in regards to how Hegel's work stands in relation to others.

I just want to emphasize that he brought in a dynamic that was new at the time and is still new. Not just from the point of view of a theory but as a way to perceive events.

I am less inclined to see his challenge from the point of view as a narrative than as a set of conditions I may or may not be able to accept at all.

I think Hegel brought in many ways to have a problem that others avoided but is less a provider of solutions than he is a source for new problems.

Apart from cribbing metaphysics from ancients and contemporaries, he introduced the dynamic of different people colliding in real time as the closest our experiences get to let us know what built consciousness. Maybe it takes a certain kind of structure to talk about that sort of thing. How ever the activity of reason is seen as the theater of the real, it is missing the mark to read that structure as an explanation for what is happening. Why go on about the necessity for a process if a thinker can cut to the chase and just tell you stuff.

Put in another way, this is the beginning of what we struggle with as psychology. Events are formative but it is difficult to accept that as a ground and say anything helpful afterwards.

Ah yes, the gap between us and the absolute is taken as the absolute itself! And of course such thinkers don't acknowledge the intelligibility of their own discourse which establishes the absolute impossibility of the absolute. It occurs to me that rejections of absolute knowledge just make our finite knowledge in its plurality absolute. It is all the absolute we can hope for and therefore the functioning absolute. — sign

This observation may or not be helpful but neither Aristotle nor Plato dismissed or declared victory over Cratylus and his arguments. They, in their various fashions, were holding out for it not being the last word.

A point of comparison would be the times both of those writers excluded some points of view as matters they hoped would never come up again.

As far as I can tell this is the same old grasping of 'internal' and 'external' experiences in the same causal network. Is it any deeper than saying that opiates makes the pain go away? — sign

It is deeper. I am not convinced by the argument but it is interesting. If the relationship between epistemology and ontology is problematic in the thesis, maybe it is troublesome outside of it.

I can describe the theory as a reduction but am I reducing other things to do it? The theory appears to be completely uninterested in helping me answer that question. The silence of Cratylus, perhaps.

In regards to the Heidegger approach to contending points of view on the matter of experience, I prefer Sartre who noted that not all of our experiences of awareness require the "Ego." That view is less entangled with what we mean by meaning and how objects are what they are in relation to being an object.

No, I'm not saying that at all. Some matter is obviously mind on my view. I'm a physicalist, an identity theorist. — Terrapin Station


Well we probably can find more agreement than you think, then. I have the sense that you understand me to be saying some more outlandish than is the case. The German idealists were identity theorists (maybe in a different way than you), and I think they were on to something. The problem may largely be about jargon and background. — sign

If I have learned one thing from following this discussion, It is that the "identity theory" Terrapin Station is espousing is decidedly not a child of any German Idealist. First of all, there are no "phenomena" because that term implies a separation between the spectator and the show that the theory is trying to disappear.

It is that quality that prompted me to try earlier in my previous comments to understand what the difference between epistemology and ontology means in the context of the theory. Since it has consequences for epistemology, I am not sure if the status of ontology is not a product of epistemic circularity. Or another way to put it, a problem of tautology that leads to a stopping point. It reminds me
of Aristotle's description of Cratylus:

"But the reason why these thinkers held this opinion is that while they were inquiring into the truth of that which is, they thought, ‘that which is’ was identical with the sensible world; in this, however, there is largely present the nature of the indeterminate—of that which exists in the peculiar sense which we have explained; and therefore, while they speak plausibly, they do not say what is true (for it is fitting to put the matter so rather than as Epicharmus put it against Xenophanes). And again, because they saw that all this world of nature is in movement and that about that which changes no true statement can be made, they said that of course, regarding that which everywhere in every respect is changing, nothing could truly be affirmed. It was this belief that blossomed into the most extreme of the views above mentioned, that of the professed Heracliteans, such as was held by Cratylus, who finally did not think it right to say anything but only moved his finger, and criticized Heraclitus for saying that it is impossible to step twice into the same river; for he thought one could not do it even once."

Metaphysics 4.5

I think some of the reason why Spinoza is not included in most of the current discussions of the idea of will, free or otherwise, comes from him challenging the assumptions that his contemporaries and thinkers in the past made without much examination. His rejection of "God" being an agent that can do anything he wants is directly tied to the limits he sees in human agency. Humans act toward ends. To apply this principle to God is a projection of our conditions and principles of action on to the Creator.

Whether one agrees with his approach or not, his theism reveals how other thinkers' theisms are influencing the conversation. Maybe the idea of determinism is not self evident since it is posterior to different models of causality.

I agree with your comments regarding devices and intelligence. I was only adding the observation that as tools, they do work that was only done by "intellects" before their use. The element of simulation works in two directions. Some machines imitate life and some life imitates machines.

Descartes looks out of his bathroom window and wonders if a passerby is an automaton....

There is something about a story where we want something to be true. Or what is happening.
And maybe we didn't know that was a desire before the telling.
It is hard to put the cart before the horse.
But that is another story......

I want to add to my previous reply that I have grown uncomfortable with my description that the "ontological" turns into the "epistemological" in regard identity theory. The theory does not explain how things are known.
I am back to what I was asking before about the limits of what is being explained. The epistemology involved is how to approach what has been proposed. If I take my starting point that brains are what causes mental events, it is like the big bang theory, what happened to cause brains? Why did they develop the way did?
I can ask those questions while having no doubt that my brain is a player.

Regarding the Epstein article, the use of "algorithm" stands out for me. When we make rules to help calculation, that is not the same as understanding why those rules can be relied upon to be produce the correct answer. Manipulating an abacus with rigor provides reliable results. The abacus is not a part of checking if it works.

On the other hand, the computer is one hell of an abacus. It does not show us a new way to understand but it does provide a different way of thinking about rules that may not have occurred to us otherwise.

In another register, coding reminds me of text as a tool and how Plato noted that reliance upon the latter, as beneficial as it may be, came at a loss of living in memory as the only way to keep the past alive.

Trade offs.

The emphasis placed upon isolating a "moral agent" from other causes to prove alternative possibilities is not the only possible approach.

So, for instance, Spinoza rejects the idea of humans having an agency outside of natural causes but nonetheless states they have responsibility for their condition and have influence upon our existence as a consequence. It doesn't parse well without reading the rest first but here goes:

"If men were born free, they would form no conception of good and evil as long as they were free.
Proof.--- I said that he is free who is led by reason alone. He, therefore, who is born free has only adequate ideas and accordingly has no conception of evil (Coroll., Prop 64, Part 4.) and consequentially (for good and evil are correlative) none of good."
Ethics, Prop, 68, Book 4.

From this point of view, the alternatives are possible through understanding and not from making any particular outcome that appears from "new" causes.

I don't think that physicalism is an instrumental theory but rather what's really the case ontologically. — Terrapin Station

Yes, I understand that is the theory. And it fits in with the Nominalist rejection of universals you ascribe to. But as identity theory refines itself through different iterations to more precisely perform the reduction it calls for, it starts to look more like an epistemology geared to solve problems on the basis of a finite set of assumptions. The ontology is asserted but not in relation to anything not assumed at the beginning.

How ever you wish to address that observation, it occurs to me that this element is a source of much talking past each other on this thread.

Making it all physical is interesting but will that lead to a theory where the difference between first and third person is illuminated? — Valentinus


I don't know, but in my view, the goal isn't to lead to a theory. The goal is to have accurate views about what is. If an accurate view about what is doesn't lead to a theory, but an inaccurate view does, that doesn't make the inaccurate view better.

That's not to deny the utility of instrumentalism. But it doesn't make the instrumental approach better for anything other than making successful predictions or for applications for practical matters, just in case the instrumental approach in question can do this. It's important in those cases not to reify the instrumental theory, and it's important to not theory worship. Both of those things are big dangers, because there are personality types that are both attracted to instrumental theories and that tend to reify and worship them. (The personality type best suited to being an engineer is one of the prime examples.) — Terrapin Station

The correspondence between mental states and physical conditions ties them together in such a way that their causes are not to be separated into different kinds of existence. For the purposes of studying the physical as the cause of those states, it is an eminent example of operational assignment of meaning as per Bridgeman.

However far it can proceed on that basis, the theory goes forward on being able to explain itself against objections to its claims. The success or failure of the correspondence does not inform other ways of talking about substances because those meanings are not germane to the project as given.

While the theory revokes the use of other kinds of explanation, it does not refute them as something proven by deduction. Aren't you in danger of "reifying the instrumental" by using it in this fashion?

The limits you argue for remind me of Kant's rhetoric in the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics.

Don't be sorry. Life is short.

I am trying to represent a point of view I don't hear in yours. That is all. Maybe I am wrong. But I would only know an argument was taking my point of view seriously if I saw it in the rebuttal.

So, therefore and so forth.

I can.

But I don't feel like an equal partner in this conversation.

None of my challenges are worth taking up but yours are given to you by whatever you see is not provided by my explanations.

I am not that harsh even to myself. Which is saying something.

What if you were in a situation where the propositions ran out?

What if what happens calls you out because whatever you prepared for or not is shown in awful relief to be just a story compared to other stories?

I have had my perceptions cancelled in real time by suddenly becoming aware of what I had not been aware of before the cancellation.

So, what do you mean by "can be deflated into a less ambiguous proposition?" Presuming, for the moment we are talking about the same things.

You asking for a better map. When you run into the mountains, a topographical map is helpful. Maybe I won't just walk due north.

There is a divide that is fundamental to the map/territory thing that I sense you are not willing to embrace.

Maybe you could answer questions too.

If a map is important, and not just a poster on the wall, you want to travel to another place.

You have to leave one place to go to another.

That doesn't answer the question of how the process works because I can only apply that sort of explanation for things under my control or for things I am pretending I can control.

On the contrary.
The need for separation gives birth to the book.

That map of the world is held by you. I didn't say you came up with all of it. On the other hand, no map handed to you is free of your design.

The point I am trying to make is not about finding the author. You asked for a distinction. Does it suffice?

You can hold the map in your hands. You can put a compass on it so that you point yourself in alignment with with the arrows on the map. It is a set of operations within your control.

When you start walking, you might find the map is not quite right, bears may attack you without warning, there was no mention of the swamp you will have to circumvent.

If you survive, you might want to make a new map.

And if there is a map, there is a territory.
I am interested in how techniques become mixed up with descriptions of what is happening.
In my work, a map is given to me and I have to make another one on top of it to make it "real."
It is like a book one has read carefully, every part is connected to the other parts.

Suppose we have a memory of something.

Ontologically speaking, where does that memory refer to? — Wallows

The use of "where" in relation to "refer to" puzzles me. The ordinary use is to connect one term or idea to another. Something like: When I speak of heartless cretins, I am referring to my employers."
The use of "where" is kind of a poetic repurposing or transposition of that syntax.

The first thought I had was of the use of "memory palaces", techniques to keep what is remembered in a structure that facilitates retrieval or reuse. Short term memories turn into long term memories by either training or strong emotion (and maybe for other reasons).

I don't know how much an observation of of the sort I just made is ontological versus other kinds of "logic."

Joking aside, the helplessness is not just about what awful things happened to you and me but a reflection upon a ground. Getting an angle upon it, as it were.

Understood.