adrenaline supports both fight and flight. Hence the term "adrenaline junkie". — Ludwig V

Exactly. The adrenaline junkie fights the urge to flight and wins, and that becomes their 'habit'.

Anxiety of death, in particular, seems to me to require verbalization since we never experience death. The bird is wary of being eaten, and the evolutionary story would say this is because animals which are wary tend to reproduce more, but the bird is not anxious about the end of their existence. They cannot hoard to fight off the inevitable impending death. That requires planning. — Moliere

It was all going so well, until the last sentence, and I thought, first of squirrels hoarding their nuts, and then of The ant and the grasshopper. One might suggest that even plants hoard sunlight as sugars and other carbohydrates in seeds or bulbs. In this case the evolution of DNA informed by consistent long term environmental pressures does the 'planning' - " Make hay while the sun shines, and make seed (or bulb, or tuber) when it starts to shine less." Thus the rationale that we make for what plants do because the ones that didn't died out. We understand:- plants just grow and make seed.

And why am I now being accused of not being a sexual deviant? Have you not read the shit I've posted in the Shoutbox? Ten years of trying to establish a reputation down the drain with this thread I guess. — Hanover

Yup, your hetero-normal conventionality has been totally exposed.

I don't know which thread is your other thread. — Ludwig V

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14393/the-beginning-and-ending-of-self/p1

Isn't there a third possibility? Neither positive nor negative, i.e. irrelevant to me. — Ludwig V

Sure. :up: :down: :meh:

Is "meh" a feeling? The feeling of not having a feeling?

Anxious people will tend to avoid rock-climbing, won't they? — Ludwig V

Yes, whereas rock-climbers seek out and confront fear and thereby avoid anxiety. (Perhaps.) I could almost define anxiety as the fear of fear, but I wouldn't defend that if it doesn't fit.

It's interesting that no one ever raises the issue of female to trans-male. No one seems to care and perhaps this says something about attitudes to women more generally. — Tom Storm

I blame the patriarchy.

Because property, status, name and title are passed down the male line, and because patrilineal is not self evident the way matrilineal is, Men require to control the sexuality of women. Are you bored with this yet, I do keep saying it?

Rape and the fear of rape is an important part of the control of women's sexual freedom, along with body shaming.

Or is "modesty" a proxy for some other problem, unaddressed?
— Banno

You have no idea about the darkness that lies within. — Hanover

The threat of sexual deviance is a threat to the deepest fabric of society, the basis of property and privilege, and heritage itself, including nationality ethnicity etc. The male fear is that another man might have sex with my woman and my child not be mine. Even the women's toilets are not safe, and we must patrol them!

There is no issue with a female to trans male individual for the same reason that female prostitutes are no threat – we don't care who the father of their child is. Wives and daughters have to be controlled though.

Interesting discussion guys, and not off topic at all. It connects this thread neatly to my follow-up thread. It is my working definition of life that to be alive is to give a fuck. Thus a virus is an uncaring replicator, not alive, whereas a bacterium actively absorbs food and ejects waste and 'knows the difference'. See Bateson's 'difference that makes a difference'.

Attraction/ repulsion is the beginning of emotion as judgement that arises out of sensory discrimination. And this primary division persists in every feeling and every judgement being positive or negative. but as senses multiply, and discrimination becomes more nuanced, feeling and judgement become matters of reasoning and calculation and conflicts can arise.

Anyway, I would suggest that animals are wary, not anxious. I think anxiety is very much verbal in origin.
Birds have to be constantly wary of cats, and other birds, whereas anxiety always seems to arise in a place of safety, the dis-ease of armchair philosophers rather than rock-climbing philosophers. But that story of the difference between animal and human is fleshed out in the other thread in more detail.

I'll just demonstrate this time. I'll stop the narrative, and the real self with its real identity will live on. — Metaphysician Undercover

I would have been impressed if you had stopped, and that would have been a demonstration, but unfortunately you didn't. What I have presented here is the logic of Zen.

The real me escapes the narrative.
— Metaphysician Undercover

Of course it does! All this is only a story! there's nothing real about it. But when you tell me about the real me and how it escapes - that's just a story too. So have you escaped the narrative, or are you still in a different narrative? — unenlightened

What you needed to do was put your slippers on your head and walk out, or post a flower emoji, anything that would communicate without continuing the narrative, but you continued the narrative.

There is a (contested) claim in physics that information cannot be created or destroyed. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That seems like a very odd claim. My understanding is that entropy equates to disorder, and disorder increases (in this universe). This immediately results in information increasing, because order implies compressibility. So a claim that information does not increase over time amounts to the denial of thermodynamics. That is not 'a claim in physics'!

Following on to the relation to deduction, one might say that the axioms of a theory are the compressed form of every deduction that follows from them, but one cannot read the compressed file without decompressing it first. Thus the initial conditions of a deterministic universe 'contain' all the information of every moment of its evolution, and time is the running decompression algorithm that 'expands' the initial equation.

So we just went around in a circle. After making that big circle, do you see now why the narrative of the self cannot comprise the identity of the self? If the self knows that there is nothing real about the narrative, it's just a story, then it must also know that it cannot identify itself with that narrative which is just a story.

Sure, what I say is just a story as well, but it is a story with a lesson to be learned. If you see the self as distinct from the narrative, as you clearly do, then you must also see that you cannot use the narrative to identify yourself, because that which is in the narrative is not you and therefore cannot provide you with your identity. Nor can you find your identity in the narrative in any way, because that is not you in the narrative, it's just a story, so it cannot be your identity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes. And shall we go round the circle again, or shall we stop here? The next step is that you tell me what real identity is... again.

I'm in full agreement that the passions are not necessarily irrational, though. That's one reason why the distinction is fuzzy in normal use. There are frequent examples which touch on both the objective and the subjective, such as the category of "reasonable emotions" -- which I endorse as a good way of looking at one's emotions under certain circumstances, but in others I'd say it's inappropriate such as what someone feels while watching a play. — Moliere

Reasonable passions are what decent, {ie English} people feel. The Continentals cannot control themselves, and the savages don't even try.

I think it goes like this : Given fear of death, fear of tigers and poisonous snakes is 'reasonable' in the sense that they are capable of causing death, whereas fear of mice is not. But as Hume famously didn't say, "you can't get an emotion from a fact". Fear of death is not reasonable, merely common. Lay on, Macduff, And damned be him that first cries “Hold! Enough!”

Why then don't you remove all that you have written and just leave the reference alone? :gasp: — Alkis Piskas

Because that would deprive you of the freedom to ignore my suggestion, just as Adam and Eve ignored god's command. Explaining the joke rather spoils it, but human psychology is what it is. I don't mind your comment at all, we're all human, it turns out, even God. :wink:

The real me escapes the narrative. — Metaphysician Undercover

Of course it does! All this is only a story! there's nothing real about it. But when you tell me about the real me and how it escapes - that's just a story too. So have you escaped the narrative, or are you still in a different narrative?

My thread, my rules; this is what dogma is, and this is my dogma
— unenlightened

:wink: That seems reasonable and I will defer to your judgement. If I don't like it, I can always go away. — Ludwig V

If you don't like it, you can appeal to the mods, whose dogma is final, subject to the terms and conditions of the service provider, that are subject to the various laws of the countries involved, subject to anyone giving enough of a damn to set about enforcement.

If men are not afraid to die,
It is of no avail to threaten them with death.

If men live in constant fear of dying,
And if breaking the law means that a man will be killed,
Who will dare to break the law?

There is always an official executioner.
If you try to take his place,
It is trying to be like a master carpenter and cutting wood.
If you try to cut wood like a master carpenter,
you will only hurt your hand. — Lao Tzu

I will identify you in a way which is other than the way that you identify yourself. By what principle do you say that self-identifying is what gives you identity rather than someone else identifying you? It wouldn't be right to say that they're both your proper identity, because then you'd have as many identities as there are people who know you. And it might seem correct that you know yourself better than anyone else knows you, but doesn't "identity" refer fundamentally to how others know you? — Metaphysician Undercover

Well you have a problem because you are looking for a 'true' or a 'proper' identity. I don't have that problem, because for me, identities are marks on a map, or labels, not facts about the world.Identity is all talk. Now in a general way, we believe labels and maps and talk. Ready meals have ingredients lists, but occasionally one finds a 'foreign body' in the pie. The label does not know. Sometimes the label knows that it does not know - 'may contain nuts'. Sometimes the label has official permission to be economical with the truth - peanut butter may contain a percentage of ground insects but doesn't tell you. Sometimes completely the wrong label gets put on by design or accident. But whatever it says, don't eat the label, and have a look and a sniff at the contents too.

It simply is the case that people label each other all the time; even here on TPF, some people think I'm a very stable genius, whereas I think I'm absolutely innocent. Even the Deep Mods cannot agree, which is why I'm still here. Or is this all fake news? Will the real Slim unenlightened please stand up?

As my previous thread seemed to arrive at, the story (label, map) of the powerful is the one that tends to be imposed on everyone as dogma. If Hitler says you are Jewish scum, it doesn't matter what you or your granny think, or what the truth of matter is, off to the extermination camp you go.

But to be fair, Ronald Reagan had been involved in politics for sometime and was Governor of California and had become educated by the time he ran for President. — GRWelsh

Yes, sure; but who was elected, the governor or the cowboy?

I get that things have gone from cowboys and indians to nightmare on Elm street, with Nixon as the honest crook somewhere in the middle. I guess it's arbitrary in a way to pick a moment to begin the story of 'how it came to this pass'. But politics as pure media performance with no relation to reality is where we're at, and Reagan was the first. It's not personal to him as politician, it's the obvious fact that his fame was as a fantasy, and that was what won the votes. It's the voters that had lost touch with reality, rather than Reagan himself.

What we are left with is two incompatible principles which are both equally essential to identity. These are the being of the person, what one is, and this is a principle of sameness for us all, and also the particular acts which makes each of us different, and this is the principle of difference. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is much more interesting to me, because it is a conflict that people, especially teenagers go through, and some have more trouble than others. If my brother likes blue, I have to like red, just to differentiate myself. If my parents like jazz, I have to like punk, but at the same time as I seek uniqueness, I seek fellowship, and we are family, or class or nation, or whatever.

Physically, there is no problem, because one has unique DNA, unique fingerprints, and a unique history, but also we are all one species. But it is in our constructed relationship with ourself and with others that difficulties arise - in the idea I have of me, and the idea I have of you, and the idea I have of the idea you have of me, and the idea I have of the idea you have of yourself, and vice versa, and how we both perform and communicate and negotiate these ideas. And notice that all these ideas include value judgements - that unenlightened - too clever for his boots, but at least he's not as confused as [censored].

The problem I have with your perspective, is where does the required act of identifying fit into this? Why do you think that having an "identity" which is what makes each of us different, yet also the same in some way, requires a special act called "identifying"? When we move to identify, don't we assume that the person being identified already has an identity, or else the act of identifying would prove fruitless? When we "identify" aren't we trying to determine something which is already there, rather than create something which could be completely imaginary and fictitious? — Metaphysician Undercover

The act is not special to us, it's what we are always doing in thought, such that it creates a centre of thought as the self that thinks. Everyone thinks they are somebody special, and also that they are one of the people.

One names one's child to give it an identity and the name is written in a special register, and a certificate awarded, thus psychology becomes bureaucracy. You have to know your name, sign your name, identify with your name, respond to your name being called. Without your name you would be no less a person, except that socially you would be nothing, a non-person, of no (bank) account, stateless, etc etc. When someone steals your identity, they do not steal you, but socially they act as you, and take over your social life.

So it is clear that what I think I am is my personal identity, and what society thinks I am is my social identity, and these do not always align, and the physical being that I am is heavily influenced from without and within by these ideas that I have and other people have.

The importance of family name tends to be overlooked by those for whom it is unproblematic, but ancestry tracing is big business, and typically, foundlings have a strong feeling of something missing in not having that family history and connection to known ancestors. Region, tribe, ethnicity, nationality, gender, religion, all serve to locate a person in a social network, and to a great extent it is the network not the individual that forms the identity. But these things are all social constructs - words made flesh.

But property is also made flesh by identification - scratch my car and you have wounded my body. Thus it becomes clear that identity is everything - me in my world.

Now, bracket off all the above, and call it a story, (or a meta story) of how we humans come to be what we are and do what we do. And now you want to argue that it must be otherwise because this and this of evidence and logic. So that then is your meta-story, where identity is fixed and real - or perhaps not quite that - you tell your story. And so we can disagree about our stories and our meta-stories and our identities. But in the main, things are a matter of culture, and not physics.

Looking from the outside, I'd say the psychological rot set in when the first cowboy actor, Reagan, got elected. It's been government by fantasy ever since.

I've had no complaints - is your story obscene or antisocial or something?

However, there is another step yet to be taken, and that is the identity which one has, inherently, simply by having existence, without any act of identifying required by anybody. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, i understand what you are saying, but I think you are conflating what one is and what one identifies oneself to be - being with idea of being, territory with map. one's idea of oneself can be realistic or unrealistic, but never real.

This is a new sort of McCarthyism and I’m glad I’m not on your side. — NOS4A2

Estimating the number of victims of McCarthy is difficult. The number imprisoned is in the hundreds, and some ten or twelve thousand lost their jobs. In many cases, simply being subpoenaed by HUAC or one of the other committees was sufficient cause to be fired.

Google.

Yes, one man's indictment is the same as hundreds imprisoned and thousands losing their jobs. Trump's ego is just that big.

Boris is incredibly decent the way Donald is incredibly innocent.

But don't take my word for it, listen to his colleagues:

The question which the house asked the committee is whether the house had been misled by Mr Johnson and, if so, whether that conduct amounted to contempt. It is for the house to decide whether it agrees with the committee. The house as a whole makes that decision. Motions arising from reports from this committee are debatable and amendable. The committee had provisionally concluded that Mr Johnson deliberately misled the house and should be sanctioned for it by being suspended for a period that would trigger the provisions of the Recall of MPs Act 2015. In light of Mr Johnson’s conduct in committing a further contempt on 9 June 2023, the committee now considers that if Mr Johnson were still a member he should be suspended from the service of the House for 90 days for repeated contempts and for seeking to undermine the parliamentary process, by:
a) Deliberately misleading the house.
b) Deliberately misleading the committee.
c) Breaching confidence.
d) Impugning the committee and thereby undermining the democratic process of the house.
e) Being complicit in the campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation of the committee.
We recommend that he should not be entitled to a former member’s pass.

Privileges committee.

truth as the only and unquestionable value. — unenlightened

It is important to be aware that every rule can (and mostly likely will, eventually) encounter circumstances in which the appropriate application may be unclear or disputed. — Ludwig V

Hence one has recourse to dogma: "The referee's decision is final." Or the Supreme Court's, or the Central Committee's, or whatever.

Right, even when wrong — unquestionable.

We can debate the meaning of any word, but only by not debating the meaning of the words we use to debate it. Thus even a debate on the meaning of dogma requires a dogmatic understanding of 'meaning', 'debate' etc. One might say that dogma is the (perhaps temporary) still, fixed point of the mind.

My thread, my rules; this is what dogma is, and this is my dogma. :rofl:

Leaders should be like figureheads on the ship of state, out in front, catching all the weather and doing and saying nothing, while the power and steering happens at the stern. Figureheads that like to think they're in charge can only send the ship backwards.

Is there something wrong with being coercive and unrealistic?

I've always been completely sceptical of astrology – until now. :joke:

Why I am not hearing about the democrats trying to rush through legislation, to prevent anyone found guilty of a criminal act being barred from standing for president?
Why was this gaping hole in USA legislation not corrected, years ago?
— universeness

Because that might be unconstitutional. — Michael

And it would encourage the (ab)use of the law to bar candidates. I imagine the thinking is that if 'the people' would ever elect a convicted criminal as president, that would constitute proof that the law itself is at fault and at odds with the will of the people.

It would be so gratifying to see him go to jail, — frank

I would be adequately gratified merely by his exit from my in-box. To be replaced by something more boringly acceptable and mediocre. Where he festers is of no consequence to me as long at is no longer in my consciousness. A luxury retirement home would be a very small price to pay as long as it had no outgoing internet.

Is our civilization unbalanced? — 0 thru 9

And if so, is it towards yin or Yang? This answer needs to be obvious, and I think it is obvious — that there is and excess of yang in the culture; this is resulting in a climate rebalancing — too much heat, too many fires, too much creative energy leads to more water, sea level rise, and eventually the drowning of coastal cities.

The word “civilization” relates to the Latin word “civitas” or “city.” This is why the most basic definition of the word “civilization” is “a society made up of cities.”

Google.

And the culture has difficulty coping because it responds with male energy to "do something about it" instead of bringing the passivity of doing less to bear.

Too much talking, not enough listening, too much creating, not enough sustaining, too much sun, not enough shade. too much artificial light, not enough darkness. Too much movement, not enough stillness, too much individual, not enough community.

Farewell @Andrew4Handel A troubled soul. A decent chap most of the time I found, but became a broken record on the one issue.

Thats just what I mean by identity; that which comes into being by the process of identification. You do understand that this thread is about psychology, not physics? "What is there" is what is thought.

Hence I do not argue; you can think what you like.

What evidence do you have for this? New stories pop up in the strangest of places... — Changeling

None. It's a story; it resonates with you, or it doesn't. Make a new story if you like; tell it in a thread; see what odd questions people ask you.

So when we apprehend the fact that animals, plants, and other things have "an identity" just as much so as the human being has an identity, we see that the self-narrative is not the identity of the thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

Anything is whatever it is, but to have an identity is not merely to be what one is, which any rock can manage., but to identify oneself as being some particular thing. This is what plants and other animals do not seem to do, by and large. At least that is my story, you may prefer your story.

Consider what you said about how the narrator is not a part of the narrative. The true self is the narrator, , the self in the narrative is the illusionary self. When the narrative ends, so ends the narrative self, but the true self, as the narrator remains. — Metaphysician Undercover

Is a non-narrating narrator of a self-narrative not a straightforward contradiction? Your suggestion goes against anything i have read of spirituality anyway, so I will not go there myself. I think your contrivance here just continues the narrative and does not end it, just adding an extra identification "true".

If memory and anticipation are ‘now’ for an animal, this is just as true for a human being. — Joshs

I disagree. The narrative is a retelling of what was present is present and will be present, that is available at any moment. there is nothing whatsoever in the animal that corresponds to —

a central principle of time consciousness in phenomenology. If memory and anticipation are ‘now’ for an animal, this is just as true for a human being. — Joshs

That is a narrative. and my thesis is that identity is narrative and that is where we live, not an extended present. "I was born at an early age..."

I don't recommend trying too hard to understand unenlightened on the topic of enlightenment. It's all projection and imagination on my part. Losing illusion and finding reality are kind of the same thing; from the pov of the self though, it is losing everything, so that's the aspect I have to face. Likewise if I have completed a story, I can put it aside and begin to live, but again, from here it is a completion, and an ending that I face.

To speak of what lies beyond the ending as a new beginning would be I think to imagine self continuing beyond its own end. * mumbles something about squeezing camels through the eye of a needle*

My fault entirely. Thank you for querying it.

I would argue that a non-linguistic animal lives in the interface of past, present and future just as humans do. Watch a squirrel be interrupted in its pursuit of an acorn by a stray sound, and then return to its goal. — Joshs

Yes, they have memories, I said that. but the interface of past and future is the present. I'm not clear what you are saying different? I think I have made the time difference fairly clear. A cat sits by the mouse hole waiting for a mouse; there is anticipation but it is now. there is memory, but it is now. Now there is the acorn, now there is a sound, now there is the acorn. Never do you get the story of the pursuit of the acorn, an interruption and the return to the acorn - that is the human narrative, and resides nowhere in the squirrel.

I think we are pretty much in agreement. Before enlightenment chop wood and post on philosophy forums; after enlightenment chop wood and post on philosophy forums.

I like unenlightened's first sentence. I don't understand the second.

dogma makes for intolerance, but perhaps it is more related to power, and dogma is simply 'certainty'.
— Moliere

Dogma includes "certainty", in the psychological sense. But psychological certainty is a trap, precisely because it leads to dogma and there's nothing like power for fostering certainty beyond what's reasonable. — Ludwig V

Oh, Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood.
This...

the assumption seems to be that dogma makes for intolerance, but perhaps it is more related to power, and dogma is simply 'certainty'./quote]

...I now see is badly phrased and confusing. Let me remove the ambiguous "it" and replace it thus:

The assumption seems to be that dogma makes for intolerance, but perhaps intolerance is more related to power, and dogma is simply 'certainty'.

This hopefully aligns fairly well with your"...there's nothing like power for fostering certainty beyond what's reasonable." — unenlightened

I see your point, but the Bodhidharma clearly knows how to talk, and has not become innocent like the beasts, And likewise Lao Tzu and Chiang Tzu.

The emptiness of consciousness is the cessation of identification as the narrative self, not the forgetting of self and language and everything that characterises Alzheimers. I think it is appropriate to say that the transcendence is a moving forward not a return, certainly not a return to a prelinguistic awareness. But I'll give you the definitive answer when enlightenment is attained. :flower:

And all those people spoke exactly of the return of the innocence of not knowing. — TheMadMan

You have my attention. A couple of quotes would be helpful.

Ah, the invincible optimism of the New World. If you're up shit creek without a paddle, plant roses.