Have you tried any psychedelics or achieved a deep meditative state? In other words, have you actually done anything that would result in the loss of your sense of self? — DingoJones

I do not refer to the self as "a sense of self" for reasons I have outlined such as its necessity in understanding sentences and perceiving etc.

I have done some mediation and I have been unconscious. In meditation I kept my self knowledge as the person trying to meditate, in unconsciousness I temporarily ceased to exist.

I don't see the point in trying to undermine the self. If you want to avoid negative thoughts and mental states you could try shifting your attention, medication, distraction and so on (even sedation/unconsciousness) but I see no reason to attack the self as if it were the main villain.

I don't think someone could be very functional having their self identity undermined as we see in cases of amnesia and dementia. It is useful to keep track of who you are and exhibit a consistent personality.

I think that there is a fundamental problem in claiming something doesn't exist that people have direct access to.

For example pain. If you are in pain you know you are and no theorizing is going stop you being in pain.

But as I outlined this is not the only problem with self because it is required for concepts, mental representations and knowledge etc.

It maybe true that an external reality exists but how can we describe it? Once we start to describe it we rely on individual perceivers.

But once you invoke this perspective you have selves. For example there have been many models of the atom. But if the atom exists independent of these models then they are mind dependent.

Where else can false beliefs exist?

No-self simply means no enduring changeless thing can exist. It applies equally to everything and not just the self. — praxis

What about the sun? The sun has existed for Billions of years. It may not be changeless but it is enduring as an identifiable entity.

However I don't think the self is an issue abut changes. I have never met anyone who thinks they have never changed.

I define the self as a perspective that of an a perceiver and experiencer.

However to if people randomly changed bodies and had memory lapses that would be very confusing. But there is enough continuity in a body and memory etc to maintain a self.

A basic point is how we could understand a sentence without a self.

A sentence can be quite long and so we have to process a sentence from the beginning to the end.

For example. "I went to the shop yesterday to buy some milk but they had sold out."

I think you have to be the same person from the beginning to the end of this sentence to process its meaning and then I see no reason why you should not be the same person from then on forward.

I accept Descartes "Cogito Ergo Sum" that thinking conforms your own existence.

However due to the inaccessibility of mental states to science they are an easy target for elimination.

If there is no god (and i acknowledge that possibility) then all of history is interpreted by flawed humans and flawed perspectives very often create even more or even worse flawed perspectives. — christian2017

History is an interesting case. Historians are supposed to look at primary sources such as diaries, photos and archaeology etc to draw conclusions.

We are expected to look at the evidence ourselves and decide upon it's validity. My beliefs about history are personal beliefs based on the persuasiveness of the evidence.

However, there are always conspiracy theorists and alternative historians to challenge majority beliefs.

instead we could all be a collective entity — Philosophical Script

In what sense? I only experience my own thoughts I have never experienced anyone else's inner life world.

Ironically the main proponents of no self are Buddhists yet they believe in reincarnation and people have questioned what then is being reincarnated.

But because Buddhism is compatible with atheism I think they have had an easier time with this inconsistency.

All sorts of physical trauma, even extremely severe can be fully recovered from. — Coben

I think it is hard to define what recovery from mental problems is. In a sense it will be subjective where someone accepts their current mental state as good enough.

But to recover I think we first need to appropriately assess the problem.

There have been some strange solutions to mental health problems where the cause was unexpected.

For example chronic constipation can lead to mental health problems (due a build up of toxins) and some depression is caused by conditions like ADHD and the person recovers by being given ADHD medication.

And we can do it. That is, we can imagine numerous events occurring simultaneously. — Bartricks

We can imagine events together that didn't happen simultaneously such as we can imagine three historical figure who were not alive at the same time but in our imagination they appear to us simultaneously.

It is like we are imposing a temporal structure on what we experience.

But how can we measure time without a perceiver and speculate about event order?

Can we then dismiss ALL events that are temporally simultaneous as having nothing to do with causation for the sole reason of an absence of spatial contiguity? — TheMadFool

It seems that for an event to cause another event the events have to become connected but with one event/object causing another event/object to alter.

It is hard to pin down what is an object and event and what is is dispositions and causal sphere.

It seems that we use induction to assert causal claims or to negotiate situations where we expect certain regularities for outcomes. If something is simultaneous but far away we are less likely to assert it as a cause.

I think the notion of regularities could replace the notion of cause where you don't assert a final causal explanation but assert a probabilistic outcome.

Do you see abuse as inevitable that you must ask about fragility and resilience to abuse? — TheMadFool

I think the problem is that failing to treat past abuse properly can lead to more abuse. So to prevent abuse we need tackle current abuse and it's aftermath.

I think you can become mentally resilient by being cared for properly. I do agree with the concept of prevention over cure.

But because there are people who have been abused or are being abused I think that we need too assess the damage as accurately as possible.

I don't think that claiming something is art can make it art because that would be the equivalent of granting magical powers to the statement.

For example I can't make a dog a cat by claiming that the dog is a cat.

In this sense you can say nothing is art if there is no consensus. But based on what humans have identified as art for their long history then I think statistically something does not qualify for the label art if it is far removed from examples related to the majority usage of the word art.

I think you could analyse the history of art and examine what kind if things have been considered art and how widely an example diverges from the prominent model.

For example if you have an apple pie and someone makes something with beef and calls it an apple pie you can say this is not sufficiently like 99.9% of of apple pies to qualify as an apple pie.

I think if you call everything art then you make the term meaningless or useless.

Then add in the dimension of money making.

In relation to all this my older brother died recently. He had a terrible long illness. I feel now he is dead he is no longer suffering but also that he is released from the concerns of this realty/world and hopefully somewhere better.

I suppose it is preferable that your personal timeline does not coincide with to many horrid events.

I am interested in power relations and how one person becomes more significant or influential than another. Can you escape your now and enter a wider more influential sphere interacting more influentially with reality?

History is an interesting narrative of causal importance and influence where you measure yourself against legends but when you die these things fall out of significance. But we are led to believe that certain temporal events have more importance and value.

In this sense I suppose I am adding a dimension of ideology and power relations to accounts of time where time is described in a kind of biased way.

I am thinking about causal explanations, the arrow of time and temporally organised histories.

How does relativity effect the accounts of WW2 for instance?

I don't understand "backward" causation but I feel the future cannot cause the past.but also that "now" cannot cause things happening simultaneously. I could not have done X at location C because I was at location B.

I am thinking about this from a personal phenomenological standpoint about how many things that are happening around me that I am not involved in as If they are somewhere completely different and almost irrelevant to me. For example think of isolated tribes in the pacific and Indian ocean or Amazon that may have been totally unaffected by WW2. It does seem like a fractured narrative of time.

However individual conscious is a particular dominant location. I suppose the opposite view is the Gods eye view of absolute time and a clockwork universe completely determined. There seems to be a tension between the subjective and the determined.

I would imagine that at one instance the whole of reality is in a certain state.

But now tends to be experienced from a first person perspective. It seems to be the subjective observer that is at the centre of a time measurement.

I like Alice Millers work.

Her website had testimony from people about the effects of being hit as a child from people who were hit regularly to people who were hit once. They were good at articulating how negative it was for them for them and how there was no positive outcome.

But a lot of people still support hitting children going against all the evidence from psychological studies on its negative effects.

So there is this situation where what counts as abuse is refuted and if people don't class a behaviour as abuse they are likely to keep repeating it. But it seems to be such a long process to prove to others what abuse and dysfunction is.

. One might get closest to a definition of mental health in terms of being (appropriately) responsive to the environment, at which point, you can infer that current society is on this measure profoundly sick, and deep personal unhappiness and alienation is a sign of mental health. — unenlightened

I like this idea. Does this mean that mental health involves the individual and society/environment?

I studied some person centered/individual psychology and some social psychology but the two fields did not seem to meet. Mental health services seem person centered.

I suppose the whole field of mental health needs reevaluating. Psychology has lots of branches that claim to be incompatible but when I did my degree I argued that the fields are compatible but describe different aspect of psychology. A little bit of each perspective can be true such as the unconscious vs the humanist and the cognitive versus critical social psychology etc

to be able to live with oneself is the happiness goal, and that I would say is more or less achievable in most cases, with the caveat that one cannot maintain a separation between the person and the trauma, so that to be healed is to become someone else, or in old-fashioned language to be 'born again', which is first to die - psychologically. — unenlightened

I don't know if there is a true self which might have been suppressed by abuse and trauma. Being yourself can lead to being rejected. It is a kind of dance and compromise.

But can happiness be achieved by simply having basic needs met? Most cases of depression I have met seem to be caused by events but some people say they had a very supportive childhood but still became depressed.

In a difficult society can close friends and family protect against other dysfunction and stress?

I did have therapist suggest that I create new social circle to give the support family can't. But I feel you cannot replace possibly essential family relationships to become secure again (at least in my experience).

I suppose that the basic point is why would you not expect abuse to cause damage?

Unfortunately we have adages like "Sticks and stones may break my bones
But words will never harm me."

This encapsulates the idea that physical harm is the only significant harm.

Thanks. I didn't know about that thread. There are some good links on it. I don't know if this one should be merged.

My question I suppose is can you recover from mental trauma if you compare it to physical trauma and realise how some physical trauma is irreversible.
A problem is defining what a normal functioning healthy human is.

Some people live for a long time whilst never feeling good. For example the previous worlds oldest lady said she had never been happy and thought life was a curse from God.

If you feel unhappy but live a long time can you be described as healthy? So we could differentiate between physical and mental resilience.

I certainly feel there are very few adequate treatments for abuse and neglect victims and mental disorders. But is there a sufficient model for what is really a healthy human and healthy psyche? In one sense it is a battle against society. If society is causing or based on dysfunction it is hard to make it the solution.

That is not how it works. A person with brain problems can provide feedback whilst in that state.

I am going to look into the work of Havi Carel more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havi_Carel

I found out she has an incurable but slow acting illness that influenced her choice of philosophy topic.

But there are lots of different illnesses and also disabilities some of which are illnesses that give people different perceptions of reality.

Cognitive neuroscience has been heavily based on neurological disorders, brain lesions and brain injures. Disorder and absence can show what constitutes normality.

It leaves the question as to whether mania - madness - itself can produce anything of real worth. At the moment it seems to me that can only be in a negative sense, the words and pictures - the works - produced by madness being ultimately a kind of accident, and of only incidental or accidental value. — tim wood

The role of illness in creativity is hard to assess. Most people experience some illness and adversity in their life. How can we prove or disprove that it was influential in their creativity?

When thing that illness disease and hardship creates is innovation to overcome these things. I don't know how much academia/philosophy/science/art etc would exist if we were content all the time?

I have not come across a cure for depression and similar conditions that suggests we should think more in depths as opposed to things like altering thoughts, mindfulness meditation and looking for positives/CBT.

It’s true that disease, illness and pain are keen reminders of our mortality, but to push it a little further, they should remind you that you are a body, as fragile as you are finite. — NOS4A2

I am not sure whether I am just a body or a body and a mind. But physical illness does make the body dominate the mind.

Ironically though strong bodily sensations are strong mental sensations. For example you can have a leg cut of under anesthetic and feel nothing. You have to be conscious to be aware of a body.

But if all we are is a finite body then what is the point of philosophy If we can't transcend our body and finitude? Questions will end temporally.

I think knowledge and concepts are mental representations not external things. Symbolic? So I think they must die with us if our mind dies with our body and we can no longer symbolise reality.

I agree

It is futile to keep on creating more children. They will all die and our species will probably go extinct in the long term.

It might tell us that most peoples auditory systems respond in genralizable way to certain sounds.

It might indicate similar subjective experiences.

Scientific theories change so there might not be any absolute facts in science. But what I am referring to in particular I suppose is facts about events.

So for example. Say I had eggs for breakfast. That is a fact.When I tell you about it it seems plausible and you believe me. You would need a good reason not to believe me.

What seems strange to me is that it seems my knowledge of this fact seems to suggest other people should believe it because I know it's a fact and you have know good reason to doubt me.

I am skeptical about peoples claims abut gods but I have heard a lot of them and I don't know whether they are simply outright lying or misrepresenting an experience but I don't immediately dismiss all personal testimony like this. Some religious people will try and convert you and make you believe based on experiences they claim to have.

It seems hard to know if your own beliefs are valid I suppose. But only believing our own personal experiences seems problematic.

Altruism [moral]. Care for another without reciprocity or extrinsic benefit (i.e. utility). Suffering [fact] is a visceral appeal for help to which (most) fellow sufferers, ceteris paribus, involuntarily respond. Choice begins with how, not with whether or not, to help; sympathy (or it's absence) is dispositional and/or conditioned [moral fact]. And eusociality is the (highly correlative, or self-reinforcing) consequence - gossamer-thin veneer though it may be. — 180 Proof

I think the way you have phrased this is obscurantist.

Altruism is only moral if you accept the premise that altruism is moral.

Caring for one person is not the same as caring for everyone. Nazis sacrificed their lives for the Nazi ideology and the Übermensch.

Suffering is mostly tolerated and ignored. Professing a desire to end suffering is not the same as actually reducing suffering.

The kind of moral fact we need is the kind that would resolve the debate as to whether abortion is immoral. I don't think you could claim abortion is altruistic. I agree that it is a fact that people are altruistic but not that it is a moral fact.

I think the pleasure/harm dichotomy is not a moral issue. We usually don't consider natural disasters as having a moral dimension or natural harms. We don't consider all pleasures moral.

.. pointless, or arbitrary, because everything you/we say or value is pointless, or arbitrary, according nihilism. Nihilism about nihilism refutes itself. Thus, merely a self-serving(?) fiction (or crutch). — 180 Proof

Nihilism about everything might be self refuting but nihilism about morality isn't.

However I do not think the meaning of words and other symbols is the kind of meaning being refuted by nihilists. Saying "this sentences is meaningless" refutes itself. But saying life is meaningless is not saying the same thing.

I pointed out the issue of moral hypocrisy. People who claim to want to reduce suffering and pin their colours on that mast but are not helping.

I don't think that people who criticize modern morality should have to accept the current ideologies or be silent.

I don't endorse the notion of progress either.

You can be a moral nihilist and oppose society and critique society never having any need to endorse it or prop it up.

It is not a futile critique but it is clearly going to be distasteful to people who endorse a notion of moral progress. And whom in my opinion are complacent.

We are all still alive so doesn't seem like we have failed to me? — Mark Dennis

But some people are not and are still suffering from failed moral ideals.

My issue is that failed moral ideologies are propping up a deeply problematic society.

I honestly don't feel like you or others have effectively refuted my claims enough for me to believe the universe is absent value or meaning — Mark Dennis

I am not claiming this.

I am claiming that our moral systems have failed. And that this failure is being ignored because people are still relying on questionable moral ideas.

Evidently you know nothing about adaptive pragmatism — Mark Dennis

Like everyone else in the world.

You are criticizing my position based on an elusive stance that a handful of people in the world hold.

Most people I have meet claim to want to minimize suffering. I am pointing out that they claim that but fail to take the necessary actions.

My opening post was not criticizing the minority positions that you are now espousing because these are not the moral ideas running societies.

I suppose the retort must be "Actions speak louder than word" Are people actually behaving in a way consistent with their moral claims?

I think utilitarian ideas do face real and serious problems.

If like I mentioned earlier a Doctor about to cure cancer and save thousands of lives needs a heart transplant then it would really maximize the good to kill an innocent and healthy person because that really would maximize overall well being.

But hardly anyone would think that was acceptable meaning humans are not true utilitarians. So a lot of moral positions people claim to support are never followed honestly or consistently.

I think the problem for moral progress is that moral attitudes have come and gone and reappeared.

There were always societies without slavery, societies with limited sexism and societies where homosexuality wasn't frowned upon. The 20th century with all its progress was one of the most barbaric.

So I am not sure that there are any new enlightened moral values. Likewise we will look back on our own values as wrong in the future.

Another old ethical issue is antinatalism which has been held by diverse groups including the Cathars throughout history and so is nothing new.

Here is an example of moral absurdity.

Someone rescues baby Hitler from drowning an is deemed a local hero and admirable person. She inadvertently sentences millions of people to death.

Someone else is a twisted pedophile and murders young Hitler and is considered a monster but inadvertently saves the lives of millions.

The point here is that you need to know what the real ramifications of your morality are not just label certain actions and beliefs desirable or undesirable.

And utilitarian and consequentialist views often lead to absurdities if really applied consistently.

If you want to get at the true meat of the matter from you perspective; you need to ask yourself what Meaning and Meaningless mean and question their very nature. Then ask if anything has meaning and ask if anything is meaningless. — Mark Dennis

This would be a huge topic in itself.

The meaning of words is different than meaningfulness.

I can say a sentence like "The purple giraffe lived on the moon and was fed cucumber sandwiches"

You can create a mental image of this and understand the individual words without thinking it is something that could happen. So it is not meaningful as in having real. world import.

However I think moral claims don't seem to even reach this level of meaning. The word "Good" (or value) in isolation has positive connotations when it is not even attached to anything" Moral nihilism claims that good and bad don't mean anything or refer to anything concrete.

You can be agnostic about meaning and think that there is possibly some innate meaning in reality but speculating about some deeper meaningfulness and value does not mean you have found it can justify morality by this speculation.

No one is trying to claim authority with their moral views and observations, they are all guides — Mark Dennis

Guides for what?