Was Socrates meaning to say that you must either work or die, and if you don't work and aren't a sufficiently contributing member of society, then you are as good as dead? — Dagny

I read that passage to say that we make our decisions upon information we either regard or do not regard as important. How will we make that judgement? We decide all kinds of things without knowing the answer.

Would it be fair to say that keeping the conversation within the bounds of the text makes the argument strictly theological in contradistinction to a philosophy of religion approach?

For instance, would you include the arguments between Luther and Erasmus on this subject?

What if the text was read without the assumptions you claim are the only ones possible? Salvation is not a board game.

I didn't say "You can't find an idea in a brain" though. You can find an idea in a brain, but from a third person perspective, it's not going to be the same as it is from a first-person perspective. — Terrapin Station

This difference is why theories of perception and understanding ever appeared. However much it can or cannot be said that things ultimately are one kind of thing or another, the ontology is only helpful as a way to understand the difference. Making it all physical is interesting but will that lead to a theory where the difference between first and third person is illuminated? To say nothing about that tricky second person.

My reasons are mostly what you gave.
I am certainly running into some of my own fallibility. I already regret saying some things the way I did.

My work life is very far from this sort of thing so I am trying to keep the ember from going dark.
I have spent years closely reading some works but there are many perspectives I am only marginally aware of, if at all, in others.

This modern terminology of distinguishing various theories from each other that is the lingua franca on the forum has been a trip for me. The practice makes me nervous, not the disputations involved but the unspoken agreements.

Enough about me.

However, that said, a comparison of the two works might still be interesting in its own right, even if one accepts the objective of each is significantly different from the other. — Mentalusion

That is an excellent point. They both take the viewpoint of the "city" as a whole. They both see different "arts" and their relationship with each other producing different kinds of life for the citizens.

My two cents:

Although many other matters are addressed in the Republic, I think its purpose never strays from answering Glaucon when he asks:

But the case for justice, to prove that it is better than injustice, I have never yet heard stated by any as I desire to hear it. What I desire to is an encomium on justice in and by itself. And I think I am most likely to get that from you."
358d

The discussion of the city begins with:

"I will tell you, I said. There is a justice of one man, we say, and I suppose, also of an entire city?
Assuredly, said he.
Is not the not the city larger than the man?
It is larger, he said.
Then, perhaps, there would be more justice in the larger object, and more easy to apprehend. If it please you, then, let us look for the quality in states, and then only examine it also in the individual, looking for the likeness of the greater in the form of the less.
I think that is a good suggestion, he said.
If, then, said I , our argument should observe the origin of the state, we should see also the origin of justice and injustice in it?
It may be, said he."
368e

It is good to keep this framework in mind while considering the "ideal city" as the discussion is also about the other kinds and where they came from. Also observe that while Socrates does stay with his plan to consider the nature of the state before taking up the nature of the individual, he will also proceed to use the comparison the other way to make his argument on the way.

Yes, that is what I am trying to argue.
But I had not thought of panpsychism as something that could further muddy the waters.
What a tangled web we weave.

I am having trouble separating your claims from your questions. You state that, "motivation behind altruistic action is personal gain" and also ask "does selfish intention taint altruistic action?"

I am also having trouble with accepting as a premise that "intention is considered an action." As a matter of parts of speech, intention qualifies an action. I am willing to hear other ways of listening to the idea but I don't know what it means to assume it.

It is standing in for rain which is a noun.

The sentence is ostensive, pointing at the rain. As a matter of grammar that would separate agent and action, the rain is raining.

It.

But that's what I was saying. In other words someone could parse "intellect" as "mind" — Terrapin Station

I was responding to the discussion of whether the Cartesian duality of mind/body was the same or not as the Aristotelian distinction between form and matter. So, yes "intellect" can be parsed as "mind" but the difference between usages is important regarding how perception is said to happen. I quoted from Aristotle in response to the wiki article to make the difference sharper.

Aristotle is closer to your statement that physical things are "directly" perceived than Descartes in that the difference between the one who perceives and the object perceived are not presented as fundamentally different kinds of beings. While it is noted that "it is not the stone which is in the soul, but its form", the stone is not less real as a consequence.

In regards to your position of "direct perception", I don't see it framed as a difference between ideas and matter but conflicting models of causality. The model for the mind and the model for the rocks have to converge in this direct perception that you refer to. How does that work now that you have thrown out previous attempts at the question? I am not asking a rhetorical question. It is what I cannot understand when you present your position to be a physicalist and a nominalist.

Nothing the Russians made possible is separate from interested parties in the U.S.A.. The same goes for leverage exerted by China. What Trump conceals is exactly who the benefactors of such arrangements may be. And he does it while pretending to be opposed to them.
Pretty slick side show.

It doesn't necessarily mean that you have learned rules or that rules have been stipulated in some way prior to the learning of the game. — Sam26

Would it be too simple to observe that we check our grammar by trying out phrases and knowing they are wrong or right without checking on the basis of another authority?

Or at least this is the hope of the suicidal person, that they become nothing or return to nothingness, the same nothingness that existed before they were born. That's the rationale as far as I can tell of a suicidal person. To become nothing. — Wallows

You are projecting a purpose where it may not be. Consider changing the focus from one of motivation influenced by a desire to achieve a particular result to just looking at the agency itself. To be the one who acts in a certain way is what fascinates many killers.
So what is happening with a person who is going through this fixation will make one intervention smarter than another but the persuasion is not happening on the level of disqualifying a rationale.
I have had some close encounters with this thing with some family members and close friends and my experience is not a part of learning something like how to draw or shoot arrows. I know less everyday.

Aristotle's conception
Aristotle gives his most substantial account of the passive intellect (nous pathetikos) in De Anima (On the Soul), Book III, chapter 4. In Aristotle's philosophy of mind, the passive intellect "is what it is by becoming all things."[1] By this Aristotle means that the passive intellect can potentially become anything by receiving that thing's intelligible form. The active intellect (nous poietikos) is then required to illuminate the passive intellect to make the potential knowledge into knowledge in act, in the same way that light makes potential colors into actual colors. The analysis of this distinction is very brief, which has led to dispute as to what it means.

There is no doubt there are a lot of disputes about what Aristotle is exactly saying but the writer is being a poor reader by not putting the question in the context of what Aristotle said quite clearly elsewhere in the book:

431b20. "Now summing up what has been said about the soul, let us say again that the soul is in a way all existing things; for existing things are either objects of perception or objects of thoughts, and knowledge is in a way the objects of knowlege and perception the objects of perception. How this is so we must inquire."
431b24. "Knowledge and perception are divided to correspond to their objects, the potential to the potential, the actual to the actual. In the soul that which can perceive and that which can know are potentially these things, the one the object of knowledge, the other the object of perception. These must be either the things in themselves or their forms. Not the things in themselves; for it is not the stone which is in the soul, but its form. Hence the soul is as the hand is; for the hand is a tool of tools, and the intellect is a form of forms and sense a form of objects of perception."

De Anima, Chapter 8, translated by D.W. Hamlyn.

So In Aristotle, there is passive and active intellect (which someone could easily parse as mind in a nonphysical sense) and passive and active material states (which someone could easily parse as material/physical stuff in the contemporary sense). — Terrapin Station

In regards to De Anima, that parsing would be incorrect as the "mind" is on both sides of the intellectual perception. That is why understanding is "the being becoming what it is" before the one who understands.
Cartesian duality only has the mind on one side; There is the one who knows and the known thing that is not the one who knows.

TheHedoMinimalist has a good list.

Thinking about it as a continuation of the Stoicism thread, it occurs to me that suicide controls an outcome but the life in question doesn't belong to the agent that would end it. I don't own my life. I don't own anything after it is done. I fear my death and it has brought me great anxiety thinking about it at some points in my life. But I won't be the one to experience the loss except perhaps at the moment it happens. The fixation on that moment has no relation to the thinking about when I am gone. The experience of that moment will be mine but that experience does not own the moment when it is over.

The fixation upon suicide is like the fear of death in its mistaken belief that one's life belongs to oneself but is a violation in the way fear is not. When overwhelmed with fear, we lose control of what preserves our lives and become too weak to be responsible for what nourishes it. With suicide, one agent wants to dominate the rest at the expense of life itself. That is why so many instances of suicide are combined with an orgy of violence against others, either in the form of actual mayhem or psychological torture of survivors. In the framework of an immortal life, the reason the suicide is not saved is that the act of domination causes irreparable damage to the soul. In a framework of virtues as understood by the Stoics and the ancient Greeks, when the will to dominate is not balanced by other ends, the result is hubris which tends to ruin the person and those in the immediate vicinity.

What "psychiatry says" needs to be heard together with other forms of psychology, including clinicians who are not doctors in the way psychiatrists are trained to be. The very terms of diagnosis found in the DSM are not "physical" in the way other problems of the body are described. At the very least, evidence in regard to what is wrong involves engagement with the person and what they say. It is not an MRI.

There are lively disputes in the profession how to establish good models. I linked to the most far flung global example to suggest how steamy it gets when you get close to actual cases. But that background lets me point out that most institutions use teams where different kinds of evidence are considered before deciding upon treatment.

It seems to me that consciousness plays different roles in different dreams. Many dreams are like experiencing a play where the desire to be immersed in the narrative is in conflict with varying levels of understanding that the scene is "artificial." I often "wake" up when I can no longer suspend disbelief, as the expression goes.
Dreams where I become aroused often "wake" me up enough to ruin the initial seduction. That kind of experience makes me wonder if most of our memories of dreams pivot upon something going wrong.
I am curious about how often dreams are devoted to sequences of decisions. Making decisions is certainly a big element of being conscious in actual life. My working life consists of 75% of my energy being directed to solving problems. How much that percentage shrinks or grows directly affects how much of my dreaming becomes another place where it happens. Sometimes, the distance between the illusions and remembered facts grows too small and leads to insomnia because it just becomes thinking about real problems. On the other hand, that boundary is where I often have figured a way out that I had failed to do in full waking life.
And that brings me to something else that seems to happen so often in dreams, one finds oneself with a daunting set of circumstances and the decision you take makes it worse. And there is a "consciousness" that the game is rigged.
So, I am certain that these experiences point to something true but I am unable to turn the observations into a story or a dream, if you will.

You can download many of his books from this site: Memory of the World library. A fellow member of this forum showed me the library. It is an awesome resource.

I recommend Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality as works that directly address your interests.

Thank you for the warm welcome.

So, are you saying that courage and understanding are the proper responses towards Strife? How does one not indulge in too much indifference, then? — Wallows

I am not saying what is a proper response. That is your problem given only to you as it is given to me as my problem. We all have these peculiar assignments, given to each of us. Our attempts to sort these elements out either lead to some kind of policy for ourselves or not.

The courage part is accepting those conditions and not waiting for better ones.

A central theme in those "manuals" is that passion clouds perception of what is going on. Both Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus struggled with those around them. The indifference that was proposed was done in the face of others who were invested in their demise or denigration. They are making a connection between courage and understanding.
Or put another way, the stoic response assumes the ever present influence of Strife.

More of a drive by shooting than a hijack.
Maybe you could start a thread on what you want people to focus on.

Well, it will be difficult to explain how Illich may be germane to the discussion if I am the only one who has read him. He discusses methods of education and its role in validating personal authority in our society. He agrees with your emphasis upon humans being needed. He also agrees that technology is a critical part of what is going on.
But his narrative of what is happening and why is much different from yours.
Why read me when you could read him to explain?

So if we're defining things so that it's impossible to learn anything solely via ostension, why would we even ask the question in the first place re whether it's possible to learn a language via ostension? — Terrapin Station

That observation wasn't brought up as a definition. Why anybody would ask the question is because there are experiences with language that do not seem to be about agreeing upon definitions before the talking begins. There is that language game but there are others.

I disagree that the emphasis on technology is solely driven by the prerogatives of warfare. I appreciate you fleshing out what that argument entails for our future as a society. I agree that we need to re-evaluate our future. Who we are to do that and what it requires is a question that goes in many directions.
Have you read Ivan Illich? He is someone who is speaking to your concerns about education from a different direction. I don't think he is the last word on anything but he does bring up the problems in a manner that reveals their deep complexity in a world so invested upon techniques of industry.

I just struggle with the concept that my thoughts may not be my thoughts. Not in the sense that they belong to someone else, but that what I appear to think, I'm in fact not. — Kranky

Let's look more closely at this use of possession as exemplified in "my thoughts." The property of ownership is bound up with other people recognizing your claims. If you are sure that you have a right to something and nobody around agrees, that really sucks. The whole world is literally against you on that score. On the other hand, if all the ways you claimed other peoples' space was met with only nods of the head, you would have good reason to believe you are the king of everything. There are a number of ways one can see ourselves reflected in various ranges of isolation and communication. As a matter of everyday experience, we do better in one situation and worse in others

That is why it is hard for me to understand what you want when the act of reaching out to others disproves your premise. Not from anything that is said in response but from you, asking for stuff.

This concept of self, outside temporal causality, is also beyond human comprehension. — Elrondo

I am curious which part of Sartre you are drawing that representation.
In Transcendence of the Ego, there is a source prior to the Cogito but it is not presented as outside of temporal causality. Quite the opposite of that, actually.
Also, regarding that book's reference to the self being beyond comprehension, it is presented more as a limit of personal experience than as a Kantian type of limit to any further understanding.
Sartre is pointing toward a boundary between the conscious and the unconscious. One cannot directly experience the unconscious by the way they are defined as separate. But it is not beyond perception as a reflection of other people.

Well, for myself, I never listened to Krishnamurti as a giver of direction. I was galvanized by his question of whether I had thought anything on my own. And his follow up question of how I would be able to tell if it was my thought.
I never got past that lesson. If I had, maybe I would view his words in another way. But as it is, I am still working on the first assignment.

The possibility comes from our experience with ourselves as what cannot be gotten away from. We keep showing up in every movie. I am trying get some space between that experience and any particular "thought" or "belief" that refers to it.
Let me express my observation in a different way. If the skeptic is to question if they know what they are in the habit of thinking as known, why accept the proposition that their experience of themselves as a conscious person is information about their existence that is more "real" than something else? How did we learn to compare things? Is that also "given" in that primary experience of being stuck with ourselves?
Not that I can tell. Your results may vary.

Where did it come from? — creativesoul

Big question, probably requiring more than one discipline to address.

It can be observed that solipsism, the Cartesian thinker, etcetera, all start with the experience of oneself as the beginning of knowledge because that experience is what is given to oneself by default. They equate the immediacy of that necessity with a datum as used in the context of their understanding of the world. The idea being that, if there is a map and a territory, this immediacy is the one location that can be declared impossible to get wrong.

The isolation being imagined is only possible becaue they transpose a use of language that can only arise in the intercourse of life into a conversation where it has no referent.

The absence becomes a pin in the map.

One can approach the matter of "identification" from a number of ways. I am fond of the following from Zhuangzi:

" Kai-shi then replied, "I have heard my master say that they who skillfully nourish their life are like shepherds who whip up the sheep they see lagging behind." "What did he mean?" asked the duke. The reply was, "In Lu, there was a Shan Bao, who lived among the rocks, and drank only water. He would not share with the people in their toils and the benefits springing from them, and although he was now in his seventieth year, he had still the complexion of a child. Unfortunately, he encountered a hungry tiger, which killed and ate him. There was also a Zhang Yi, who hung up a screen at his lofty door, and to whom all the people hurried (to pay their respects). In his fortieth year he fell ill of a fever and died. (Of these two men), Bao nourished his inner man, and a tiger ate his outer, while Yi nourished his outer man, and disease attacked his inner. Both of them neglected whipping up their lagging sheep."

It was based on our values and we no longer know what those values were. — Athena

While I share your dissatisfaction with the shallow quality of many of our present forms of life, I don't think it is only about leaving one kind of education system for another or agree that all the changes in our society are a mistake.

Athens and the beginning of U.S had the good and the bad bound up with each other. The institution of slavery was the most obvious evil but there were many others not always easy to describe. "Ages of Gold" throw long shadows.

The good and the are all tangled together today in our time as well. The rise of "nationalist" hate groups is not just about failures to communicate values, although it certainly is also about that. The growing number of people who embrace the normalcy of diversity is a real threat to certain other peoples' form of life. Those "other people" kept relatively quiet when they figured the game would always be rigged in their favor.

I also want to reiterate how our education and means of production are involved with each other. Expressed another way, the way we work and what is taught are bound up with each other. A significant change in one is talking about a significant change in the other.

Hopefully, something smarter than the speculator in you will take over command at that moment.

Or if your prefer the thought from a dead French guy:

"Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils; but present evils triumph over it.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld, Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims

Anyone who has studied anything can easily see that. — hks

But then you could just also be overly sensitive — hks

These are good examples of employing references to a person in lieu of addressing their arguments or requests on their own grounds.

They are also examples of arguing on the basis of authority in so far as the removal of such authority from your interlocutor dispenses with their claims without having to do so oneself. This quality is exemplified by the following:

I don't need to give it my best shot. Aquinas has already done so. Have you heard of him perhaps? — hks

Look, I don't want fill up these pages with meta-dialogue. I will say no more about this.
Have the last word, if it pleases you.

Peace out.

The manner in which a physical state is said to produce a mental state is where the two models diverge.
There is the general distinction between form and matter, where the principle of action is said to be from the form itself. Socrates is constantly saying things like: "Physic does the work of the physician and carpentering does the work of the carpenter"

There is also the context which the attunement of the musical instrument appears, namely whether the soul is immortal or not:

"The body is held together at a certain tension between the extremes of hot and cold, and dry and wet, and so on, and our soul is a temperament or adjustment of these same extremes, when they are combined in just the right proportion. Well, if the soul is really an adjustment, obviously as soon as the tension of our body is lowered or increased beyond the proper point, the soul must be destroyed, divine though it is---just like any other adjustment, either in music or in any product of the arts, although in each cease the physical remains last considerably longer until they are burned up or rot away. Find us answer to this argument, if someone insists the that the soul, being a temperament of physical constituents is the first thing to be destroyed by what we call death." Phaedo 86 b

To argue that mental states are irreducible attributes of brain states is to stand on this side of the argument. When the brain dies, so does the soul. One of Socrates' argument for immortality is to see "mental states" as not being dependent upon corporeal premises:

"Well, said Socrates, this does not harmonize with your view. Make up your mind which theory you prefer----that learning is recollection, or that soul is an attunement." Phaedo 93 c

The rest of the arguments, including the one I quoted initially, are directed against the analogy of attunement as what a soul does. Adding "brain states" to one of the elements being controlled by the soul is putting the possibility of mind as coming from two sources that have been framed to be incompatible by definition.

When I said I was comfortable with the "physical" model, I didn't mean to say that it was the last word or explained everything. I am saying it is consistent with its own premises. I am objecting to overlaying this model upon Socrates' because the action doesn't give itself enough problems. It dismisses what it doesn't want to include and includes new things without their introduction requiring any work. I am not dismissing the difficulty of seeing mental states as physical and something else at the same time. This approach looks too easy to me.

Let's assume a brain state is physical and that a mental state is non-physical. — Metaphysician Undercover

I can assume those things but that is exactly what I am trying not to do. I am comfortable with considering the world where all mental states are attributes of physical states. It hurts my brain to imagine how I get from that frame of reference to a position where I can say what is "non-physical."

Now, try to reduce the non-physical mental state to some further non-physical source, like the soul, like Socrates does, claiming that the non-physical soul is required to produce the physical brain state. — Metaphysician Undercover

Socrates didn't know about brain states. His observation that the soul contends with other parts of a single life during its experience does not make those other parts not "life". The heart beaten by Odysseus is alive along with whatever is hitting it to get the heart on board with a larger plan.

Seeing this transposition of agency in the context of what Socrates was saying with a schema outside of his assumptions makes me wonder if there is a better way to approach the subject.

Yes.
As per your suggestion, I am trying to focus on the first seven remarks