Source regarding MP's direct realism:

When I perceive a thing such as a fireplace, it is not the concordance of its various
appearances that leads me to believe in the existence of the fireplace as the geometrical plan
and common signification of all of these perspectives. On the contrary, I perceive the thing
in its own clarity (PP 191).

The constancy of colour is merely an abstract moment of the constancy of things, and the
constancy of things is established upon the primordial consciousness of the world as the
horizon of all our experiences (PP 326)

Source regarding MP's disbelief in qualia and sense data:

At the outset of the study of perception, we find in language the notion of sensation, which seems immediate and obvious: I have a sensation of redness, of blueness, of hot or cold. It will, however, be seen that nothing could in fact be more confused, and that because they accepted it readily, traditional analyses missed the phenomenon of perception (PP50)

Pure sensation will be the experience of an undifferentiated, instantaneous, dotlike impact. It is unnecessary to show, since authors are agreed on it, that this notion corresponds to nothing in our experience, and that the most rudimentary factual perceptions that we are acquainted with, in creatures such as the ape or the hen, have a bearing on relationships and not on any absolute terms. (PP51)

IE, we don't experience qualia. Under what conditions could we experience a quale?

The pure quale would be given to us only if the world were a spectacle and one’s own body a mechanism with which some impartial mind made itself acquainted.3 Sense experience, on the other hand, invests the quality with vital value, grasping it first in its meaning for us, for that heavy mass which is our body, whence it comes about that it always involves a reference to the body (PP176).

If you take MP to be suggesting that either qualia or sense data are illusions — frank

I ain't. AFAIK he has a pretty realist take towards phenomena, but doesn't take a realist stance toward qualia and their 'experiential chunk' substrates. He has an issue with colour as a property of an experience, not with phenomena and colour.

We're probably going far too deep into what is essentially a complaint that the term 'sense-datum' has already been taken and can't, for weird reasons, be transported between theories, or between a theory and a more descriptive discussion, leading to a proliferation of terminology and an inability to define clearly where one ends and another begins. — Kenosha Kid

There will probably be 'analogues' of sense data in some indirect realist and some antirealist styles of thinking about perception. There probably won't be in direct perception accounts - embodied cognition/active inference (I think) tends to side with there not being any object like sense data. Dennett also isn't a sense data theorist. Ultimately that isn't because either way of rejecting sense data as a concept rejects the notion of brain states representing world states by some coupling process, it's that sense data as a concept itself stakes out a claim regarding the process that couples mind and world. If you have an entity like sense data or qualia kicking around in your perceptual theory, that will either say things about your theory or about how you view perceptual theories in general. It says things about the abstract lens through which you view perception.

leading to a proliferation of terminology and an inability to define clearly where one ends and another begins. — Kenosha Kid

Exactly. Using sense data as you've been doing contributes to the mess. Unless of course you're actually subscribing to or think in rough accord with sense data theories of perception. It seems to me that you think in sufficient accord with sense data theories that you're happy treating the concept as transportable between perceptual theories, as if what a 'sense datum' allegedly refers to is a theory neutral posit.

An example would be a more complete theory that can account for the existence or illusion of sense data and qualia. This would be as opposed to one that shows that such ideas are purely artefacts of bad stroky bearding. — Kenosha Kid

There's some phenomenology which does try to account for the illusion. You have MP's discussion of raw sensory data in Phenomenology of Perception, Heidegger's discussion of propositional as-structures in... Basic Problems or Logic the Question of Truth? Even Dennett's Cartesian Theatre concept takes aim at sense data, which is roughly the substrate that qualia predicate (sense data bears qualia), sense data is the video reel for the Cartesian Theatre.

Edit: I'm sure there's others!

I remember once using the word 'teleological' and my interlocutor dismissed me as a Jesuit. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. — Kenosha Kid

I can see why you'd find both equally ridiculous. I don't think this is as ridiculous though. If you're using the word sense data as a neutral term, but you're also referring to it as somehow a neutral entity between theories of perception which they're all concerned with, you're paying the price of distorting the idea to do so. Or alternatively, the price you pay is interpreting theories of perception in general as sense data theories.

Edit: how would you describe a theory of perception which didn't use sense data or qualia in terms of sense data and qualia?

And to mine it shouldn't be until the thing we mean by it is ruled out. All it means is having to come up with new terminology to describe the same thing in order to avoid association with particular theories, when the thing being referred to isn't necessarily different. — Kenosha Kid

I don't need to have a stroky beard theory about it as well: the question is can I refer to it in my experience, and the answer would seem to be 'yes'. — Kenosha Kid

That's the thing though, a theory which uses sense data is necessarily different from one which doesn't. Same with qualia.

"I don't believe in qualia or sense data at all"
"What plays the role in your theory though?"
"Nothing at all, even the use of the words is wrong-headed"
"Still useful to talk about, since I believe in "the same things" as you".

It's useful to talk about sense data when you're talking about sense data theories. If you're talking about a theory which doesn't have sense data in it, there's no use for it. It would be like labelling oxygen and phlogiston as phlogiston because they describe 'the same thing'. At the very least, it requires a reader charitably reinterpret what you write whenever you write it.

Which is actually complicated by the other things you write suggesting you do really believe in some sense data theory!

Which I'm thinking is frustrating to you, sorry, but I'm afraid I'm like that with almost everything. I rarely find theories something to pledge allegiance to, even quantum theory (my old field). When I do, it's based on lots of things (empirical evidence, acceptability of postulates, minimalisation of postulates, rigour of derivations), but we're discussing a field with a lot of unknowns. I prefer to talk about and around the knowns than die on a particular hill. — Kenosha Kid

The lack of definiteness isn't frustrating for me actually. I'm coming at it from the same angle - to my mind even thinking in terms of sense data is quite close to choosing a hill to die on, but without knowing that you've chosen to die on it! I'm gesturing towards one of those 'risk of unexamined presuppositions' arguments. If anything using the concept of sense data lends a non-neutral characterisation to things.

Anyone can come up with a 'stroky beard dipshit theory' about, say, eggs. It doesn't follow that eggs are not to be talked about. — Kenosha Kid

:up:

There's also the possibility that sense data don't exist. And a more pernicious possibility that thinking in terms of sense data makes it difficult to compare and contrast rival accounts. Not all accounts of perception have something like sense data in them, and talking in those terms might shroud out equally plausible theories.

It’s just really not clear to me how neuroscience has changed the philosophical landscape here. — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

I get this suspicion too, not that I know much about the philosophical intuitions of neuroscientists.

What is new is the word ‘model’. I haven’t read the literature, but around here it seems to be considered self-evident what a model is. — Srap Tasmaner

I think everyone who uses it here treats it, self evidently, in a different manner. For me a model is a mapping of one set of values - the target - to another set of values - the modelled values which somehow presents information about them. Changes in the target should be tracked by changes in the modelled values (A changes correlate with B changes).

To my understanding, when people talk about 'the model', they are imagining that the world consists of set values (so called 'hidden states' or 'external states') which determine its behaviour, and the body models those hidden states to mine useful information out of the environment. There is ambiguity in the use of the word 'model' because sometimes people go interchangeably between the model as the relationship between the hidden states and the modelled values and the model as just the modelled values.

EG, my left foot has a current average temperature (hidden state), which is 'inferred' into a feeling of warmth or coldness (modelled value) through the model, though the warmth or coldness is coloured by considerations of too hot or too cold etc.

I don't think the overall approach talked about is so new philosophically, regarding embodied perception etc. Gibson made similar points in 1979 ("Ecological Approach to Visual Perception"), Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger before that. The discussion about models and representations is even older.

On forum too, the debates cover similar ground about perceptual intermediaries and direct and indirect perception most of the time. IMO the science theory is a terrain of debate in the same way as phenomenology can be the terrain of debate.

I've yet to see anything from the neuroscience discussions alone that are decisive regarding direct vs indirect realism one way or another, though I think @Kenosha Kid, @Isaac, @Banno you and I tend to have this debate in the shadow of the question: "does embodied cognition + active perception tend to favour direct or indirect realism and how?", and the science we end up discussing together might as well be a specific account of embodied cognition + active perception as far as that inference is concerned.

For instance, the SEP quote fdrake posted — we already knew that was wrong, at least since Sellars, long before the advent of modern neuroscience. And Sellars is to some degree filling out Quine’s argument in “Two Dogmas”. All of this is either the shadow of Kant cast over analytic philosophy or re-invention of Kant. People just didn’t want to believe that Empiricism had died, so it had to be killed over and over and over again. (Point number one: this attachment to the idea of empiricism is worth thinking about.) If the neuroscientists tell us that we have no conscious access to any such ‘data’ and that by the time there’s something we can be aware of, it’s been scrubbed, munged, filtered, processed and modeled — yeah, we knew that already. — Srap Tasmaner

I agree with this a lot. If there's a philosophical contribution for the neuroscience here, it's that it gives a model (hur hur) of how these filtering steps are achieved and how the filtering steps relate to each other. So, in my imagination at least, it's more possible to rule out conjectures because of the 'hows'.

It also seems to me that philosophy has a problem tolerating useful words associated with outdated theories. "Sense data" being another example. Becoming apoplectic at its employment just means having to invent more crap terminology for data we receive via our senses, all because some stroky beard dipshit said incorrect things about it. — Kenosha Kid

Let me help you by becoming apoplectic. Perhaps it isn't all because people are attributing beliefs to you based on past uses of the word, perhaps it's also because how you talk about perception makes it plausible to attribute those beliefs to you.

From what I've read of your posts on perception, it's quite difficult to distinguish what you've expressed from a sense datum flavour 'representational realist' who nevertheless has a very strong Kantian (non-representational) bent ("the external world is a hypothesis"). There's rather a lot of ambiguity which can be pivoted upon in that mixture. It's also quite difficult to tell if you're a direct or indirect representational realist (is seeing an object being in a representation relationship with that object - direct - or is it being in a relationship with a representation of that object - indirect) from how you argue.

In that regard, it's quite difficult (for me) to distinguish what your views are from the 'stroky beard dipshit views' about sense data. I take it on some amount of faith that you don't believe in them in the standard sense (copied from SEP).

In perceiving, we are directly and immediately aware of a sense datum.
This awareness occurs by a relation of direct mental acquaintance with a datum.
Sense data have the properties that they appear to have.
These properties are determinate; in vision, we experience determinate shapes, sizes, and colors.
Our awareness of such properties of sense data does not involve the affirmation or conception of any object beyond the datum.
These properties are known to us with certainty (and perhaps infallibly).
Sense data are private; a datum is apprehended by only one person.
Sense data are distinct from the act of sensing, or the act by which we are aware of them.

But yeah, never managed to understand how your view is distinct from a vanilla indirect realism with qualia thrown in, even though I've seen you disavow the usual term meanings.

This is where things are currently at

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2017/12/30/240317.full.pdf

We need a kind of AI to 'learn' the translation as we go, without this in between step, there's nothing... yet. — Isaac

Cheers.

It seems a bit of a stretch to me to say the brain effectively contains images from the methods in the study. But thanks for presenting it. I think my grumblings would derail the thread. Nevertheless I've put them in this hidden box.

:up:

Edited.

No, this is a misrepresentation. Kenosha Kid is not suggesting that we're 'looking' at images of flowers, the 'looking' is the name we give to the entire process. What @Kenosha Kid is referring to is our responses. Speech, action, emotional responses, strategies, and more complex mental reactions. These all result from the perception of the flower, not the flower. — Isaac

@Kenosha Kid

@Andrew M

I think we all had the "does separating out experience from perception create a perceptual intermediary + invite the Cartesian theatre criticism" discussion before. Somewhere around page 30 here. @Jack Cummins may find the discussion of the article in that thread's OP useful.

We're already not a million miles away from being able to directly decode the neural signal leaving that area into an actual computer image. — Isaac

When you say decode, do you mean with loss? If so, what would be lost?

I am sure that if magick were a feature of current society it would be regulated, just as everyhing else, but it brings its own special problems. First we would need to know if the use of magick is detectable.


For instance clairvoyance or mind reading might contravene rights to privacy if practices, but if it can be done undetected we will have a problem with reinforcing norms against practicing it. I guess there will be information campagns informing the clairvoyant about how to practice their skill ethically. If it can be detected the authorities might well outlaw the practice of magic and reserve it for professionals who have had an education in its use, but ban it for everyone else. — Tobias

MISUSE OF MAGIC
The Galifar Code of Justice includes strict guidelines for the use of magic, as laid down by the Arcane Congress in ages past. These include the following:
Use of any spell that can inflict physical harm on another being—from magic missile to finger of death—is considered to be armed assault. This includes spells that permanently incapacitate a target, such as flesh to stone. Careless use of fire magic is treated especially harshly, due to the significant threat of property damage. If a summon spell conjures a dangerous creature that harms another person, the conjurer is liable for the actions of the beast.
Spells that incapacitate a target—such as sleep— are treated as simple assault.
Spells that tamper with the thoughts of another being—charm person, suggestion, fear—are considered to be a form of fraud.
There are also a few more obscure laws. House Ghallanda has the sole right to make use of heroes’ feast or Leomund’s secure shelter within the city limits. Rope trick and Leomund’s tiny hut can only be used in private rooms. Knock can only be used by or on behalf of the legal owner of the locked item.
The problem with magical crimes is that the burden of proof falls on the accuser. Can she prove that she was charmed? The Blackened Book only investigates high-profile cases that have resulted in major damages. Otherwise, if spell use cannot be proven, the crime is not prosecuted. The forces of the law are authorized to use any form of magic in pursuit of their duties.

Tobias is a plant for the council of Sharn confirmed.

Simmer down please.

So breakfast need not include Paris. — Banno

What stops Santa Claus existing if people talk that way? — fdrake

Quite happy with "Santa Claus exists in Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer", seems a stretch to go from that to "Santa Claus exists", no? Former has a context, latter doesn't*. If that's the only sense of exist which matters, context decides what exists.

It's been a while since you brought out the Snark. Maybe you were conjuring them into existence. :grin:

*Edit: Well, I imagine it must have a context, but it's fuzzy and broad. If I'm thinking about whether Santa really exists as a kid, I'm thinking toward that context. And we all know what context it is. Just hard to spell it out.

Things don't appear because we so choose. — Banno

But our thinking doesn't make it so. Things don't appear because we so choose. All that is happening here is the choice of topic. — Banno

Which we? Particular speakers or the linguistic activity in which they are embedded?

Can you spell out the distinction between these two claims:
( 1 ) People determine what exists.
( 2 ) The linguistic community determines what exists.

Purpose or context choose the domain - therefore purpose and context choose what exists? — fdrake

Preferably within the confines of the assumption that people determine the linguistic community. If you decide to go down the avenue that the linguistic community's language items (speech acts, utterances, writing...) are created "in contact with" reality ("always-already" interpretation), how does that contact place constraints on what exists? What stops Santa Claus existing if people talk that way?

Yes, same meaning I'm employing. We're quite surprise-a-philic if anything. — Kenosha Kid

In article:

One question that thus arises concerns the relation between all this talk about surprise minimization in the informational sense, and surprise minimization from the point of view of an intelligent agent. Perhaps it is too obvious to be worth stating, but we should also bear in mind that the two are remarkably distinct. One way to see this is to reflect that the state of the brain that most thoroughly – across all the time scales of adaptation – minimizes informational surprise may, at times, be a state that corresponds to a very surprising event or percept as far as the agent herself is concerned. For example, if I perceive a pink elephant in the middle of the room, that percept must itself be the one that – taking all those time scales (i.e., experience) into account – most effectively minimizes the long-term average of surprise about such data, conditioned on a model (again, in the inclusive sense of model). We should thus remind ourselves that even surprise relative to our best model can be tolerated, as evidenced by surprisingness to the conscious agent who may often – though not too often on pain of death – find herself in quite surprising and unexpected situations.

The affective state of surprise isn't what's intended by surprise minimisation. Worth keeping in mind it's a technical term in the underlying theory.

Do you see a problem with that? — Banno

I see a problem with the implied claim that people choose what exists, yes!

Paris doesn't exist in {eggs, Bacon}. Hence we might introduce the predicate "...is meat", the member of which is bacon; and conclude that Paris is not a meat; and "..."is breakfast", the members of which are both eggs and bacon, and conclude that Paris is not a breakfast. — Banno

I agree. The second there is a purpose or context which influences the truth conditions of E!, it should not be interpreted outside of it. E!, in what domain? Purpose or context choose the domain - therefore purpose and context choose what exists?

In {Eggs, Bacon}

~E!(Paris)

Paris doesn't exist in any sense?

:up:

In that view it is not that a perception is an object that bears properties like a flower bears properties, but that it is an object that bears properties instead of a flower that bears properties. — Janus

Doesn't it depend on the representation relationship? I guess I don't really want to get into it in too much depth. Spelled out my view about perceptual intermediaries here.

So to you direct realists think that the flower is the perception of the flower. — Banno

It's easy to read that way if you're tacitly assuming a perception is an object that bears properties like a flower bears properties.

The function f(n) = 2*n for any input n generates every even number. It generates infinitely many of them. Putting in n=1 gives you f(1)=2*1=2, putting n=2 gives you f(2) = 2*2=4 etc. But you'll never find an odd number in that list. If you put in "all" the starting numbers:

{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,...}

into f, you get:

{2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16,...}

All the even numbers. Both lists are infinite. But the latter list (the even numbers) doesn't contain any odd numbers:

{1,3,5,7,9,11,..}

Odd numbers infinite, even numbers infinite, no overlap. Being infinite doesn't give you a guarantee like that I think.

So yes, not every single number hits the stack but as long as the sequence continuously generates a new number, it is bound to? — Benkei

I don't see any reason why it should. Can you spell it out for me please?

EDIT: I guess my question is what constitutes mathematical proof. And why does my example not work as an (inductive) mathematical proof? — Benkei

A mathematical proof for a target statement is a series of statements which logically/deductively show that statement. It can't show something 'like' the target statement, or even make the target statement almost certainly true, it has to show that the target statement is true. The standard is pedantically high.

Like trying to pass "It's red" implies "It's coloured" as a maths proof... Someone could interject "Only if you assume all red things are coloured". All the background knowledge that goes into the proof in principle should be able to be turned into formal math statements, even something as banal as "It's red implies it's coloured".

We know dividing by two will always yield either an odd or even number. Once in a while (for larger numbers), we also hit a number that if we divide by 2 we can keep doing that until we reach 1. That series could be infinitely long. So regardless of the number we start with, if we keep going through the two steps of the Collatz sequence we will hit such a number that we can continue to divide by 2 until we reach 1 — Benkei

The argument there seems to be because there's an infinitely long sequence that hits a number that 2 divides arbitrarily many times; call it "the stack"; that every other sequence must hit the stack. It makes some amount of sense as a conjecture, but there's no proof that a number hits the stack. That the stack is arbitrarily large provides no guarantee for the claim that every sequence hits it is true - there are lots of infinite subsets of the natural numbers, like the even numbers, and there being an infinity of them (even the same size of infinity as the naturals) doesn't entail there are no odd numbers. Even an infinity of sequences hitting your stack, and your stack being infinitely large, doesn't entail that every single number hits the stack right? All it takes is one.

One cringes to hear scientists cooing over the universe or any part thereof like schoolgirls over-heated by their first crush. — _db

Is there any more substance to this than "scientists getting all TED talk gooey over the image of nature they have in their heads is a bit cringe?". I mean, it's a bit cringe for me, but that's only because I'm close enough to being it...

A bitcoin is brought into existence when a particular computer calculation is completed. There's a "list" of these that all of the computers "mining" bitcoins are working through. Mining a bitcoin is running these calculations.

Mining a bitcoin is done on a computer.
The process that the computer needs to do to mine a bitcoin keeps getting longer.
The process can be done quicker the more computers you have.
The process can be done quicker the harder you run each computer.
Running lots of computers very hard is the quickest way to get bitcoins.
Running lots of computers very hard uses a lot of electricity.

Now tell me: How would you go about teaching [insert name of American reality tv celebrity] how to feel shame? — baker

I know it wasn't directed at me, but it's an interesting question. If you want to make someone feel shame, you need to remove them from whatever context gives them validation and tether obtaining validation to some external source (system, person) which has tangible power over them. If they (believe they) can satisfy their needs outside of the system, they can't be educated into shame. Make them feel like they aren't who they think they are, or make them feel like they aren't who they believe they should be.

To amplify it, you also need to make it so that they can't 'walk away' from the experience or contextualise the experience in a manner which is egosyntonic - it has to be inescapable and destructive to their current sense of self. No tears on camera for money. Teach them that those tears are theirs and it's dangerous if people even see them. Shame is something that must be hidden.

You also need to tie it to a validation loop, so that the only way that they get any validation is doing something contrary to who they are comfortable being. Shame is something that drives you to mutilate your sense of self further, you'll contort yourself away from it.

If they can't imagine what it's like to be in that position - they have deeper problems than an inability to feel shame. They'd need to be taught to empathise again first. And for that, nothing beats having a loved one suffer + caretaking responsibility for them in a manner that conflicts with your life priorities!

Make them suffer until they're capable of imagining what it's like. Then make them acknowledge their part in it. I would be surprised if shame lead inexorably to consumption or other escapisms - can lead to action or wallowing too. Or stasis, it need not be acted upon relevantly if it's deflected or otherwise neutralised (sublimated into lifestyle choices or whatever).

(PS: If any would be dictator is reading this, please consider me for the position of reeducation camp systems architect.)

So, did you can him for signalling that he was Marco, or for being Marco? — Michael Zwingli

Signalling that he was Marco and behaving like Marco. If we weren't currently being bombarded by Marco sockpuppets, I would not have banned them.

Will he be summarily re-banned based upon the original banning, or does TPF offer the possibility of redemption?

We've offered redemption before when contacted, but only once. The poster had built up quite a lot of good posts and was generally very nice, then they went off on someone with every prejudicial and sexual profanity under the sun on an off day, then they asked to get back in. We let them. They've been fine since.

Send him a PM. If they are invested and believe it was a mistake... Might consider it. Otherwise, doing something indistinguishable from impersonating a banned member who is currently sockpuppetting up the site on a 1 week old account - that's a suicide by mod.

I banned him for saying something to signal he was Marco.

We find ourselves at the notorious ‘end of history’ trumpeted by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the “idea that history had reached a ‘terminal beach’ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche’s most prescient pages are those in which he describes the ‘oversaturation of an age with history’. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism’, in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering’, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.

I forgot that bit.

Mark Fisher cuts through the crap surrounding the idea:

Fukuyama’s position is in some ways a mirror image of Fredric Jameson’s. Jameson famously claimed that postmodernism is the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’. He argued that the failure of the future was constitutive of a postmodern cultural scene which, as he correctly prophesied, would become dominated by pastiche and revivalism. Given that Jameson has made a convincing case for the relationship between postmodern culture and certain tendencies in consumer (or post-Fordist) capitalism, it could appear that there is no need for the concept of capitalist realism at all. In some ways, this is true. What I’m calling capitalist realism can be subsumed under the rubric of postmodernism as theorized by Jameson. Yet, despite Jameson’s heroic work of clarification, postmodernism remains a hugely contested term, its meanings, appropriately but unhelpfully, unsettled and multiple. More importantly, I would want to argue that some of the processes which Jameson described and analyzed have now become so aggravated and chronic that they have gone through a change in kind.

Ultimately, there are three reasons that I prefer the term capitalist realism to postmodernism. In the 1980s, when Jameson first advanced his thesis about postmodernism, there were still, in name at least“pervasive, sense of exhaustion, of cultural and political sterility. In the 80s, ‘Really Existing Socialism’ still persisted, albeit in its final phase of collapse. In Britain, the fault lines of class antagonism were fully exposed in an event like the Miners’ Strike of 1984-1985, and the defeat of the miners was an important moment in the development of capitalist realism, at least as significant in its symbolic dimension as in its practical effects. The closure of pits was defended precisely on the grounds that keeping them open was not ‘economically realistic’, and the miners were cast in the role of the last actors in a doomed proletarian romance. The 80s were the period when capitalist realism was fought for and established, when Margaret Thatcher’s doctrine that ‘there is no alternative’ – as succinct a slogan of capitalist realism as you could hope for – became a brutally self-fulfilling prophecy.

Secondly, postmodernism involved some relationship to modernism. Jameson’s work on postmodernism began with an interrogation of the idea, cherished by the likes of Adorno, that modernism possessed revolutionary potentials by virtue of its formal innovations alone. What Jameson saw happening instead was the incorporation of modernist motifs into popular culture“(suddenly, for example, Surrealist techniques would appear in advertising). At the same time as particular modernist forms were absorbed and commodified, modernism’s credos – its supposed belief in elitism and its monological, top-down model of culture – were challenged and rejected in the name of ‘difference’, ‘diversity’ and ‘multiplicity’. Capitalist realism no longer stages this kind of confrontation with modernism. On the contrary, it takes the vanquishing of modernism for granted: modernism is now something that can periodically return, but only as a frozen aesthetic style, never as an ideal for living.

Thirdly, a whole generation has passed since the collapse of the Berlin Wall. In the 1960s and 1970s, capitalism had to face the problem of how to contain and absorb energies from outside. It now, in fact, has the opposite problem; having all-too successfully incorporated externality, how can it function without an outside it can colonize and appropriate? For most people under twenty in Europe and North America, the lack of alternatives to capitalism is no longer even an issue. Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable. Jameson used to report in horror about the ways that capitalism had seeped into the very unconscious; now, the fact that capitalism has colonized the dreaming life of the population is so taken for granted that it is no longer worthy of comment. It would be dangerous and misleading to imagine that the near past was some prelapsarian state rife with political potentials, so it’s as well to remember the role that commodification played in the production of culture throughout the twentieth century. Yet the old struggle between detournement and recuperation, between subversion and incorporation, seems to have been played out. What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture. — Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? - Mark Fisher

( 1 ) Omnipresent cultural nostalgia treadmill.
( 2 ) Death of the political imaginary.
( 3 ) Listening to "Build Me Up Buttercup" in the queue in Asda for the 52nd consecutive year while buying New And Improved frozen pizza.

So it's less a death or end of the world, it's a period of self reproducing stasis in how the political north appears and feels like to inhabit. Maybe the political south has a different "same shit different day" but with different shit.

But I feel like there's a changed media and communication environment that actually accounts for the timidity of governments insofar as they are alot more reactive (in a short term, polls-driven way) to next-day press releases and 24 hour news cycles in a way that they weren't before. I don't know that this is the only reason, but isolating reasons why governments have become so leadership averse would be the next important step in examining this phenomenon. Old mate Kevin is definitely on to something, I think, when he blames Murdoch for absolutely ruining the feedback process of governments and their constituents. dk, maybe the actual report does have more on that and they just didn't have time to get into it in the podcast. — StreetlightX

Heard along a grapevine that the influence of Murdoch in German politics is noticeable on a county by county basis - does your constituency tend to consume Murdoch media? Then PR will be a dumpster fire. Anecdotal recount of an anecdote, though. Guess it's everywhere.

I think I just have a higher tolerance for strange people with strange views. — Noble Dust

Speaking as a person who has spent an inordinate amount of time earnestly studying Time Cube (intro vid), I don't think this is a question of bizarre idea tolerance. Would you want to go on a philosophy site if it looked like a "my weird poorly written pet theory" site? I mean there's place for both of them - but I think we try to be the former and not the latter.

I think if we don't enforce a minimal bar on that stuff, it goes the way of reactive weirdness, and the discussion that keeps the community going and attractive turns into a freakshow; nice to look at from a distance.

Is perception paraconsistent?

For anyone that kept being torn between them, what criteria did you decide between definition and theory?

Mine was; the sentence should be a definition, if it unambiguously equates a word with an object or process or otherwise sets out how a word is typically to be used, I'll call it a definition. If it's doing anything else, I'll call it a theory.

There was a lot of ambiguity in which was which for me; as I didn't know how to draw a line between setting out a typical use of words and setting out a connection/claim between a word (like sentience) and a property (integrated information). I imagine in general there isn't one - at least, the latter can do the former.

"Call those oogyboogles which exceed the blimblam threshold pumps".