Yeah, but what was he accused of, and why didn’t he stop?

We would not naturally seek chaos and suffering.

What about who you’d call the grandfather of Western philosophy, Socrates? Someone who, as the story goes, chose execution over fear and groundless obedience to the natural order of his day.

Instead of glorifying it within the philosophical discussion, we should understand that it is a problem.

I agree with your point here, but only with qualification. Did psychoanalysis ever characterize any 'illnesses,' or was it the individual themselves, psychiatry, and psychology that characterized it that way? It is unfortunate that our language has taken to calling personalities 'illnesses,' and 'problems' because they are obsessive (could also be viewed as fore-thinking), depressed (could also be viewed as introverted and inventive), or anxious (could also be viewed as meticulous or full of creative energy). True, taken to extremes these become obviously problematic for society and the individual in question, but even then thinking of things as illnesses or problems is only moderately helpful as a metaphor to overcome, but this is not to be taken in the literal sense in my view; that would only serve to externalize things with no real hope of ever gaining any real closure.

Aren't we both on the same page that the individual experiencing self-destruction should be treated as a real individual and not as a problem waiting to be solved by the man, or an ill person who could infect others with their disease?

Your question is, if I understand correctly, 'if self-destruction is the answer, then why bother to foster children at all?' The question I'm posing isn't so much focused on anthropology as much as sociology. I'm not saying that under any and all circumstances life is not really worth living, but only under the present asymptotic conditions; by asymptotic I mean the 'ultimate goal' that our present lifestyle tends to as we allow it more and more autonomy from ourselves. A concrete example might be climate change. Isn't it posited that without a third hand we will spiral into natural unpredictability with possibly dire results?

sort of an analogy for why is like your neighbour has invested in monopolizing the water supply with armed turrets, and you’re supposed to not care.

This reversal would permit the evolution of a life-style and of a political system which give priority to the protection, the maximum use , and the enjoyment of the one resource that is almost equally distributed among all people : personal energy under personal control.

There is a conflict of personal energy and control that it implies a person taken in their separateness from such a proposition. It sounds like a narrative that people come together and produce an aggregate change. Is that going to achieve the intended goal, or is it just another illusion of external machinery?

Democracy is literally extended from the Judaic tradition (All men are equal before God) and the Judaic tradition is about seeking redemption for the "sin" in man or as you put it a correction of a flaw in ourselves.

You mean the whole history of democratic-style decision-making all the way back to the ancient Athens and beyond, or do you just mean to draw a kind of plurality of the concept during its evolution?

What would cause such a thought?

In essence, the fundamental tendency of ourselves to look for true freedom. In this case, maybe a type of freedom from the boredom of choosing, boredom of self, and from the asymptotic value that outer life and its inner manifestations tend to lead to; the condition some of us call unhappiness.

Anti-Oedipus is an individual or a group that no longer functions in terms of beliefs and that comes to redeem mankind, as Nietzsche foresaw, not only from the ideals that weighed it down, " but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man.

It seems like fear is the ultimate currency that keeps people apart and separate. Fear of losing, losing control, or being sectioned away from normal existence. Fear also sections away, wins and dominates others, in such a way as to pass itself on through itself. You could say that it is a kind of fear that has being for itself, but not exactly rational being in itself.

Regarding number three, I have been thinking a lot lately about democracy. Don't you think that the ideal society would be undemocratic? Democracy is in a way a correction of a flaw in ourselves and our ability to cooperate and compromise with each other.

What I am talking about is a narrative. As an example, say you are a college student who upon starting your term meet friends with extreme views on institutional racism. When the topic comes up you mention your views towards admission processes in favour of 'blind' or non-compensatory techniques. In their eyes you become a racist, but maybe not to yourself. Meanwhile, their friends all agree and pretty soon everyone looks at you with disgust as if you are constantly thinking racist thoughts. Being constantly forced to operate within this environment, do you think you might start to take your difference from their view as an affirmation of it? Your belief that they are wrong transforms in what it was meant to be all along: a belief – instilled by your enemy – that you are different from them under the lines they themselves have demarcated.

Haven't you seen similar villain narratives, where a social group hints that it wants your evil to legitimate their good? One would be surprised at what any person can become when they are immersed in a set of such opposing ideas.

I am arguing that proper leftists are so deluded with their ideological obsession that they are willing to consciously ignore the unmistakably recognizable contradictions ...so much so that almost every position they occupy appears dishonest and false.

I get what you're saying, and I have encountered such type of thinking, but don't see any evidence that it is answerable solely to a liberal mindset. How can you tell that their coincidence is not related to some common factor? Or maybe you are just defining these faults to be Leftism. Furthermore, can the political dividing lines you are drawing not equally incite individuals to take on those roles knowingly in order to prove their difference from your side, as per some similar ethical idea they wish to abide by that belongs to the other's domain?

The problem here involves a socio-political orientation that is wrought with contradictions. Namely that it criticizes western civilization for being this incredible monolithic structure of oppression, while fighting that very oppression with uniquely Western ideals like equal rights and social progress.

Okay so you’re talking about hypocrites basically. I still don’t see what this has to do with democratic or liberal politics besides some incidental particularity or correlation of the present day.

I didn't come up with that, I'm just trying to keep up with how leftists think. It was a famous wise Leftist that wrote…

Good quote. It seems as if your concern is with an abstract idea of freedom, but it’s halfway to inappropriately becoming about politics. You’re defining a difference, ‘I do not believe this (set of notions), and there is a group who has this ethos.’ Then adding, ‘Therefore, if you subscribe to this ethos you are a part of this group.’ It is a logical fallacy that you are likely used to seeing used against you, as it is the ‘old way’ of doing business. Just be clear that this is business and not much more.

These are people who have a strong commitment to collectivism and egalitarianism. In recent times, the left has taken on an adversarial disposition towards the liberal principles of freedom and progress.

I think you have cheated here. You have used the word ‘Leftist’ to contain an admixture of subject and predicates. It is no longer descriptive word, but has become the grounds for the tautology of ‘X are the problem, because they are people with this problem. All you have accomplished is put a name to a bunch of integrated predicates, which does not help describe who you’re talking about or what the problem is.

However, I don’t mean to diminish your concerns, because they are still real and valid. But doing this makes your argument about cultural power as opposed to knowledge or wisdom, and it is thus not really philosophy. I mean, after all, who does not believe in collectivism and egalitarianism? We must be more descriptive of the subjects involved, what the problem is, and then and only then can there be any meaningful analysis.

Is “Western Civilization”, the very foundation self-criticism regarding ideas like universal rights, due process, and Western philosophy itself unfairly and unthinkingly maligned by educators and leftists for some kind of relativism or one-way version of rights?

Who are these leftists, and why is their devotion to one of four two-dimensional directions make them an enemy?

If sea levels rise and catastrophic weather events continue, think of all the money that will be spent repairing infrastructure, relocating climate refugees, and in efforts to make new use of land. That means a massive number of Asians, Africans, Central and South Americans will be forced to relocate to your country and there will be much less tenable space inside it to share. This is because many of the worlds cities will become unlivable, and the least repairable will be those in third world countries. That is what the current models predict will happen if global warming is allowed to continue.

Why do humans want to escape their mind and avoid reality?

Why would a being that is characteristically good and strong do something weak and bad? Among the other animals, we have the ability to engage with the internal contradiction of strength and weakness in the 'will.' The reason why your question promotes such internal division is that it doesn't include the question, 'Is the good an act of virtue exclusive of will and the aim of an ideal life?'

As an example, consider yourself in a class of those who admire physical strength and agility. You might think it virtuous to train every day and become the strongest imaginable. If you realized that aim, both friends and enemies would have to follow your example and you would foster a society where everyone is strong. It is now harder to survive, and life seems to incur only pain. But that pain of losing out could also be a good, and maybe didn't even realize you had that to start with.

The true representation of the modern will is normally not thought of as something that instills the simple and universally categorical without thought. The modern will needs thought not only to define itself but in order to reach its real aims. I think Aristotle was one of the first to arrive at that conclusion.

Well sure. "What" counts as the most basic existing phenomenological agent and why are the relevant questions I am asking.

So you are interested in right. What right we grant such an agent, and what constitutes right to such an agent. We are talking about agreement between humans about what’s like us, and what’s not like us. The only way to know ‘what it’s like,’ would be to define said quality based on human experience and determine if it is there or not. There is no way to tell if we have actually captured any sort of moral ‘what it’s likeness.’ That would be the kind of knowledge that actually means something.

I have great trepidation about what would happen if people really thought they knew ‘what it’s like’ to be another being. Namely because there is no a way for a computer program to truly know it’s own errors in the sense that humans do. It entails actuality.

Can you elaborate? If a sponge reacts to its environment, this is a behavior. But most don't think it's conscious or has feeling associated with it. A snail might react to light perhaps this is purely behavior or perhaps there is a "feeling" associated. At what point is the divide?

The problem here is we are utilizing and extending the word 'Consciousness' synchronically to mean more than it means diachronically. It is now an umbrella term that means the whole lot of subjectivity, spirit, existence, autonomy, intelligence, right, citizenship, etc. It's used as if to suggest that because something is conscious it deserves to be treated with essential rights. We respect the lives of humans more than animals and sponges, because of factors extending beyond the idea that they have consciousness. It is just for the very reason that one cannot tell what beings are conscious agents except by certain cues, and that's really all we mean when we use the word; it is a word for a phenomenological agent by definition.

Panpsychism means that there is some sort of experiential-ness to matter/energy at some level (where these "occasions of experience" inhere or at what level is a different story).

Which we now consider common sense. Unless you take the view that the activity of matter depends on or is directed by it, which is another story. To suggest otherwise would be as homunculus as you can possibly get. That there is a little man with the controls inside who is seeing existence unfiltered, and he decides whether or not to think or consider things independently, and is thus controlled by another homunculus ad infinitum as far as I understand the concept.

I am not proposing it, everyone more or less already uses this category. It would be ridiculous to suggest your experience of reality was true and unfiltered projection of an exterior world. That green was in the leaf is sort of silly, no?

So I was asking the serious question:
How many behaviors makes a feeling? And no one cared about that, and it's crucial.

Having a behaviour implies an observational objective, but observation is also a competing objective in itself. And homunculus returns.

OK, are you singling me out now for not getting homunculus funkulus? I think I should be forgiven for said transgression.

Not sure what you’re getting at here. And the humunculus references are not helping.

What is PanMaterialism? I Googled it and found nothing.

"The contention that science reveals a perfectly objective ‘reality’ is more theological than scientific"

What these viewpoints have in common is a propensity to stop short at an end. To exist within an idea and to know it from within. I feel as though giving religion and science a name was a bad idea. They have become a red herring in philosophy.

I more or less agree, full scale materialism is a bit ridiculous. It sounds like what you are really concerned with is existence itself. When we consider everything from inside a rational structure, do we always have a blind spot?

It seems like your plan is to beat materialism in kind with a material notion of spirit, a consciousness that is essentially the antiquated form of spirit itself, as the divine inside a divine subject. It is the idea of Jesus Christ, the embodiment of the divine in human form. And this whole thing seems caught in this post-Christian paradigm. In it we are constantly avoiding a notion of spirit while still operating within it.

Or maybe this higher level consciousness rests in empty actuality.

I hold that there is no such thing as two words that mean the same thing.

The purpose of the question was to ask you, 'do you consider consciousness to be something explainable via the scientific method, or something also actual and not explainable.' From your offence to my earlier posts about lack of explainability I assumed you would immediately choose the AI program, but maybe I was wrong in that judgement.

Imagine you were able to develop a scientific model of consciousness that was so effective, you would put all the world's psychiatrists out of business. So you were forced to choose one. What would you choose? Ignore the factor of putting them out of a job for now, and assume they would easily find other jobs.

Of course we might throw up our hands and just say that God wants some people to be autistic, schizophrenic, bipolar, etc. I find considering scientifically informed speculation to be of vastly greater practical and humanistic value.

So do you thereby think applying the scientific method to an individual by a scientifically informed individual is superior to being psychoanalyzed by a psychiatrist? Would you prefer mental diagnosis made by an AI algorithm, as is currently being performed with some success, as opposed to another human? Which do you think will understand your condition of life better?

You're right, I am not that informed on scientific explanations of consciousness, as opposed to scientific inquiry pertaining to consciousness, because I think there is no point in explaining it scientifically with speculations instead of observations. By all means please prove me wrong by demonstrating the ways in which there is.

The first thing an organism has to do - any organism - is to establish a boundary between itself and the environment. What organic processes then do is all directed by the organism maintaining itself and continuing to exist. I’m considering the idea that this constitutes the beginning of of subjective awareness

You have already posited the subject as existing in the line 'the organism has to establish a boundary...' So the subject is then object, since all these boundaries begin to become established by objective means, as in fertilization from cells created through biological processes. It sounds like you are including the idea of Becoming as referenced by @Gnomon if I am not correct. Care to elaborate?

Yeah sure, but you aren't hu-mansplaining consciousness, are you? I have no problems with rigorous scientific inquiry.

Because it's fundamental to what organisms are. It's the specific difference between even very simple organisms, and inorganic matter.

Could you clarify, are you saying subjectivity is fundamental to what organisms are or what is fundamental to what organisms are is subjectivity? In other words, are you simply defining what is fundamental to organisms as subjectivity or stating that what organisms are has the fundamental quality of subjectivity?

What about the subject that observes the subject and equates its subjectivity? I take it we are conveying a fully self-consciously anthropomorphic view of subjectivity. Flies having less subjectivty, humans the most, diatoms none, etc.

Not sure what you are accusing me of here. But here is an article discussing the scientific propositions (at a high level for a broad audience, but based on harder scientific studies)

Thanks for sharing, it's an interesting article with a stupid title. But I find this some and what @wonderer1 is saying extremely interesting. What is the point of explaining consciousness? It is a fruitless and useless exercise in vain-glory. Sometimes it feels like the whole point of it is to supply a vehicle for a vain attempt at proclaiming the nature of reality as deterministic; essentially the cinders of post-christian abstraction. Keep in mind, I'm not talking about you specifically here. Just saying so because it is seeming like this is maybe is coming off more trollish than socratic at this point. For instance, what was the meaning of juxtasposing this specific article into our conversation after the line below?

You are leveraging this Darwinian outlook to claim a hypothesis that it rests on simple content has already been fulfilled.

The kind of consciousness I am talking about wouldn't necessitate "rationality" but some sort of "awareness" of the environment, something akin to a "point of view" or "something it is like to be something".

So you agree in the claim an identity of consciousness=subjectivity, so we are back again to 1600's Descartes philosophy.

There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all.

I agree, but where does the grounds come in to elevate the subject to such ultimate precedence? After all, once consciousness becomes subjective it begins to posit a Cartesian subject, and thus the tables are turned and the scientific explanation is really explaining the manifestations of the subject and leaving out the objective.

I see no reason why not to extend the concept of consciousness to ordinary objects like a rock or a waterfall that are not even able to move themselves. They still constitute subjects in the sense that cues of existence come from conscious perception and are described by the same internal concept of cohesion (ie: having internal self-representing qualities). Why is there nothing of consciousness in a rock? Because we define consciousness by the negation of our determination of a rock, neglecting its real essential continuation to ourselves. Because we seek imagination over analysis.

My challenge is to understand what this fundamental difference between the two is.

If this is the aim of your work, an excellent topic. You are onto something here...

That right there is the essence of the origins of the hard problem of consciousness.

This speculation is where a problem of logical extension is occurring. The essence of consciousness may or may not include other components than simple rationality and functional neural networks; if a computer program could read it's own code, would it totally understand from that it's own place in the world as a computer program? You are leveraging this Darwinian outlook to claim a hypothesis that it rests on simple content has already been fulfilled. It has now become ideology and is no longer the scientific inquiry front that it was formerly impersonating. It works because you have made no scientific assumptions, but have included ontological ones instead, that do not affect the structure of the synthetic propositions outlined.

In the end, doesn't the sponge have just as much to do with consciousness and mentality? Of course the sponge can't have a point of view, if what you mean by that is a mental 'map' of its own conscious life. But I might suggest that the sponge still could be said to have concrete being 'for itself.' Even in terms of its atomic structure, if you want to dabble in the scientific, it is built in such a way as to cohere itself and have a unified being that is continually representing its essential qualities. I might go as far as saying that it might not be possible to talk about mind or spirituality without considering matter not purely in content but also as a whole.

So, in trying to evaluate that premise, we're immediately thrust into a self-reflexive loop that is also highly abstract. (I would have said "form without content," though you characterize it the opposite way.)

Yes, exactly. In evaluating the premise – based on the idea that it is part of one functional philosophical system among many equally valid and having this constitute its grounding – lends it to an abstract domain of objectivity.

I'm not sure whether, or why, this detracts from the argumentative weight of any one particular premise, or whether the "system" aspect is important here. I do see that it highlights a foundational problem about argumentation, and if that's mainly what you mean, it's a good point.

A philosophical system of any real value can't be self-objectifying in this way without falling into a lull of blind subjectivity of no serious use. I consider it a mistake to take the work of Kant, Hume, etc. as complete philosophical systems that are equally true and valid, while we play the neutral subject observing their writing as an interplay of conflicting logic.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like the question you are asking is something close to, 'Does the idea of a philosophical system detract from the argumentative weight of a premise?' My answer to that would be 'yes,' because the premise in that case becomes the idea of the premise in itself. It now has been given the character of a content that is devoid of form.

when you also claim veracity for the premises, you’ve moved from rational argument to reasonable claim, to making a plausible case that could be countered by an equally plausible alternative.

So in your view ‘reasonable claim’ inherently involves a claim that can be countered. Is this really characteristic of it being reasonable, or only of it being a claim? If it were characteristic of reasonableness, then why does it necessitate multiple valid viewpoints? If that were the case, reason would be reference to pure subjectivity and thus not reason at all, no?

The role of psychology is yet a different matter.

Different from what?

So let me re-pose the problem in two ways. First, notice that when an important question receives competing reasonable answers in philosophy, there’s almost certainly a meta-question involved. That question focuses on what are the correct or convincing ways to argue rationally on that topic.

And why does this take the form of a question, when none of those concerned are interested in looking for a truth that they are not already in possession of?

Second... is it possible that the often frustrating morass of competing “reasonable” claims might be a revealing wake-up call about rationality itself, and its role in philosophy? How far could such a critique be taken?

This seems to be falling into the trap of considering reason to be purely objective. 'Competing reason' is an oxymoron. In my experience, competing claims are 80% a concern of psychology and 20% rationality at best... and that goes for philosophical argumentation too.

It could be argued that reason in contemporary culture lacks the kind of lodestar that was formerly provided by religion. After all, it was suppose to provide the summum bonum, the reason for all reasons. But then religion seems itself to have demolished that ideal, when viewed through the history of religious conflict in Western culture.

How do you mean it has been demolished, by what/whom?

I think you ought to narrow down a little more what you are referring to by 'self.' We can talk about self as a representation, a logical function, or even the notion of reflection itself. For instance, does this implied subject need to be made aware that it is a self in order to deserve the name?