Maybe a more interesting question: do you think philosophy should be describing how natural processes work in general? Or does it merely use descriptions of natural processes to facilitate interpretations? And is the philosophical discourse circumscribed by those kind of analyses/interpretations metaphysics?

If you think it's within the ambit of philosophy to do the former, there's a lot of people that disagree with you. If you don't think the former's it's within the ambit of philosophy, there's a lot of people that disagree with you.

If you think either are relevant, you're in disagreement with Heidegger's idea of metaphysics. If you do metaphysics in broadly the same vein as Heidegger but use natural processes to inform your metaphysics, you're doing a Merleau Ponty and subverting Heidegger's methodology in an interesting way.

None of this is arbitrary, it's all well motivated theory. No matter where you situate yourself you'll draw boundaries of relevance somewhere. The position where all philosophy seems arbitrary and pointless is still a metaphilosophical position, and as the former post illustrates, to do philosophy is to do metaphilosophy; and it should be obvious that metaphilosophy is philosophical, right?

I think it's a pretty banal point. Whether something seems like a relevant philosophical question depends a lot on from what standpoint you're doing philosophy. Have a short list of examples.

Wittgenstein thought he dissolved all (or most) philosophical problems with his Tractatus.

Husserl thought he refuted the need to answer the skeptic with his phenomenological reduction.

Heidegger thought he dissolved Cartesian views on mind and even subjects as traditionally understood.

Strawson accuses Dennet of spouting 'learned nonsense'.

Dialethic logic as Priest presents it makes a lot less sense if you take Prior's approach to the Liar.

Stove's refutation of 'worst argument in the world' alleges to refute all idealism and contained problematics.

Laruelle plays trumps with most of philosophy saying it can't think of the real without reducing it to a philosophical abstraction.

All of these people have some idea of what it means to do philosophy; what it means to address and formulate philosophical problems; and whether some of those formulations are even possible, necessarily false or even nonsense masquerading as sense. It's a very, very common 'move' to reframe most of philosophy in the way you do philosophy.

So this thread is a reattempt at 'Problems and Sense'* from @StreetlightX I reckon. Like Last Week Tonight getting people to have eloquent opinions about privacy and surveillance by priming them with 'the government can see your dick pics'.

*Edit: Problematic Natures and Philosophical Questions

I don't agree with the first bit. In my book perspectives accompany frames; occupying a frame is characterised by how you navigate in and out of it; moving in and out of it in any way changes the other frames; I think of it like relative motion. Though, the usual way people occupy frames constrains variation in their own frame changes by a delimitation of how the other frames are embedded perspectivally into each other. Most don't matter, some matter a lot, sometimes we're surprised by something that didn't matter becoming something (or already was something) that matters a lot.

Big D decisions are aligned with stuff already mattering a lot or stuff coming to matter a lot. First's a perturbation in stance on stuff in general; like a personality or value system, it's an island of sense demarcating what's nonsense. So it looks intrinsic, and is intrinsic to a frame for most intents and purposes. The first one is also usually accompanied by some combination of volition, permission and dedication; I choose to quit smoking as a frame (big D) every time I refuse a fag (little d). Another way of putting it is it's the conditions that naturally accompany the frame. Big D decisions in the context of little e events.

Then you get that second type, big D decisions associated with big E events. Those don't happen very often. In early Heidegger's dreams authenticity is aligned with impossibly choosing your big D and big E. In Badiou's it's events leaving subjectivities behind; the impossible for X forcing itself upon X in the big D decision of accommodating or resisting it.

Edit; so I think of people and values as somewhat multithreaded or parallelised, people generally live in the context of big D decisions living little e events consistent with them. Sometimes catastrophe or joyous novelty happens and you get a fuckoff big E to fuck with your D. What counts as a big E makes sense in the context of a big D.

Edit2: in the context of the thread, this has a lot to do with Badiou's 'fidelity to the event', when events are problems. You let that problem restructure stuff to reveal the problem's essential nature, then address it. What's the essential nature? I guess some highly active frame making waves of nonsense drown people sleeping on the beach in their islands of sense.

Edit3: underlying some of this is me working through thinking about the body, affects and sensations as aligned with e's rather than d's.

Should probably phrase this in terms of occupying a frame, decision's as much part of the unfolding of things in general as it is a social and symbolic thing.

Eh. Looks like frames all the way down to me. Wouldn't be so many philosophies of the event otherwise. I don't think you can escape the regress that's ultimately truncated through what you do; that's what it means to make your mark.

Picking a frame is choosing a line of flight.

Philosophy also has this strange thing where asking questions makes other questions disappear.

p-hacking isn't really like that. The damndest thing about it is that it's almost always well motivated. If you have a dataset trying to study some frontier phenomenon you're going to explore it with as many models and quantification procedures that make sense as you can; you're also going to throw a lot of scientific hypotheses and statistical sub-hypotheses at it.

The danger in p-hacking isn't an inherent feature of the p-value (which was originally proposed as an exploratory tool with no thresholding values like 0.05), it arises more from the incentives for researchers to find sexy publishable conclusions from small datasets and too much confidence in pilot studies.

So, it's not really that it's cynical (most of the time), it's just the way people treat statistical analyses; like they're literally taught p<0.05 = publishable result; and are made to by the publish or perish sexy things doctrine. Rather than pre-registered replication studies and data analysis/dataset sharing after anonymising - this robustification of science isn't incentivised at all.

So to link it back to the OP: a lot of the problems in philosophy probably also come back to asking the wrong questions. But it isn't like the wrong questions are often asked with an agenda, it's stumbling around the garden of forking paths without a map; that map's probably some knowledge of philosophical history surrounding the problem and reading it's a series creative leaps of rationality.

There are times when you just gotta hack things together then see if it works after. Even when someone has blazed the trail in front of you they don't leave all the signposts. Sometimes you have to make your own, revealing the location you marked by putting a sign along the way.

This indeterminacy actually shows up as a methodological problem in stats, called researcher degrees of freedom.

Influential figures make their own precursors.

In the critics' vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. — Borges, Kafka and his Precursors

strsplit might be a good start.

Look up regular expressions in R. It has a lot of text processing power.

What's the dilemma?

Strange. Will remember to avoid that route in the future.

Fair enough! It looked a lot like .docx -> pdf.

I was thinking about how you wrote things. Unless you have a tiny word limit, you could spend more time demonstrating your understanding. Why do your trace plots show convergence? Why did you choose Gibbs sampling over other MCMC methods? Why did you use simple linear regression rather than multilinear regression etc...

Edit: from the style of it, it doesn't seem to be an executive summary style assignment, is why I'm including these things.

Edit2: also learn Latex. It's a lot better for formatting mathematics.

Aye. It's good to be able to speak both languages, sometimes as a matter of historical contingency or innate affinity something can be much easier in Bayes than otherwise (spatiotemporal modelling with gaussian variables for the former and 'pooling' of categorical effects for the latter). Regardless, frequentist methods (also including empirical Bayes) are more generally accepted outside of statistics and are a vital part of paper publication rituals.

UCL has a huge dataset from US census data with income and ethnic composition variables over some of the years in your study - if it's possible to aggregate the two together you could ask some really interesting exploratory questions.

I'd link to it but I can't remember where I found it. Probably on the machine learning repository.

I don't agree with the lacking belief definition of atheism. If something lacks belief in god, it is an atheist. Rocks lack belief in god, they lack all beliefs, so all rocks are atheists; that makes little to no sense.

I think atheism is believing in the negation of the claim 'god exists', IE 'god does not exist', rather than being like the rock. An atheist isn't someone who hasn't encountered the idea of God, they're someone who rejects belief in that idea. Note that this isn't speaking about knowledge of god.

It's also a pretty lazy rhetorical strategy, there's a belief about lack of belief that it's somehow the default position about god; so any claim about god suffers a burden of proof. This isn't really necessary, knowledge whether substantive or demarcational always requires some speech in the court of reason. I'd prefer it if atheists owned their rejection of god as a metaphysical and practical choice rather than painting themselves as still part of a prelapsarian nature before encounter with the idea of god.

Would be nice if you incorporated the age groups from the data directly with a normal random effect, also an age group / shooting site interaction is unmodelled variation in the data, so that's a limitation you could improve on if you're bored. For the latter an uninformative prior probably wouldn't behave so well due to the amount of data; but that's a whole can of worms you might not want to get into for a project. These are probably out with the scope of the module, though.

Over all it looks good. I would've liked to see a small discussion of what data you think you'd need to start drawing tentative qualitative conclusions about the effect of changing the ownership age. If you're dealing with these evidence based policy type questions, ideally you'd be consulted before the data was collected, so it's nice to have an idea of what you'd need to be of use to the policymaker.

Robert looks like 'Robert from Margot's perspective', I can imagine a parallel story where Robert's struggles against the weight of tropes and expectations is portrayed instead and isn't ultimately simplified in the way the story simplifies him. As if he was the image in Margot's head.

The weirdest part about it for me was that it affirms the 'nice guys are feminine and thus undesireable' narrative in how it juxtapose's Robert's ugliness with inappropriate 'femininity'. Because when you touch a guy's dick and he makes a happy noise it better damn well not be too high pitched, especially if he's a hambeast.

It's a bit more interesting to also read Margot's simultaneous disgust and obscene fantasy as part of Margot's entrapment in social norms, not just her capitulations to Robert. She seems aware that that's what she's doing.

She was starting to think that she understood him—how sensitive he was, how easily he could be wounded—and that made her feel closer to him, and also powerful, because once she knew how to hurt him she also knew how he could be soothed. She asked him lots of questions about the movies he liked, and she spoke self-deprecatingly about the movies at the artsy theatre that she found boring or incomprehensible; she told him about how much her older co-workers intimidated her, and how she sometimes worried that she wasn’t smart enough to form her own opinions on anything. The effect of this on him was palpable and immediate, and she felt as if she were petting a large, skittish animal, like a horse or a bear, skillfully coaxing it to eat from her hand

When they’d finished that round of drinks, she said, boldly, “Should we get out of here, then?,” and he seemed briefly hurt, as if he thought she was cutting the date short, but she took his hand and pulled him up, and the look on his face when he realized what she was saying, and the obedient way he trailed her out of the bar, gave her that elastic-band snap again, as did, oddly, the fact that his palm was slick beneath hers.

her disgust is really the only thing genuine, except how she reflexively frames her desires narratively even during sex:

The way he looked at her then was like an exaggerated version of the expression she’d seen on the faces of all the guys she’d been naked with, not that there were that many—six in total, Robert made seven. He looked stunned and stupid with pleasure, like a milk-drunk baby, and she thought that maybe this was what she loved most about sex—a guy revealed like that. Robert showed her more open need than any of the others, even though he was older, and must have seen more breasts, more bodies, than they had—but maybe that was part of it for him, the fact that he was older, and she was young.

As they kissed, she found herself carried away by a fantasy of such pure ego that she could hardly admit even to herself that she was having it. Look at this beautiful girl, she imagined him thinking. She’s so perfect, her body is perfect, everything about her is perfect, she’s only twenty years old, her skin is flawless, I want her so badly, I want her more than I’ve ever wanted anyone else, I want her so bad I might die.

The whole thing is just Age Gap Romance twisted with subverted Beast and Beauty by finally affirming the monstrosity of the beast (Robert). Add a pinch of subverted Single Woman Seeks Good Man by making it an explicitly internalised motivating narrative for Margot, in contrast to what she actually wants, and you're done.

It's not really the discourse of the university if it's primarily a means of engaging in a hobby is it. Unless you're gonna go to the extent that all knowledge as a social system is forceful negation of what it deems untrue as well as a logical one. I think on here knowledge isn't really stratified outside of groups of people that care about each others' ideas, and so the forceful negation/appropriation of residual desire takes the character of a clique rather than dominion of the entire site; there's no totalising element to link it back to unified suppressed mastery.

Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy or philpapers this ain't.

I actually didn't think of bumming. Thank you for the insertion.

Work gets busier, no headspace left to read. Still working through Debt by David Graeber.

The best gifts your partner gives you are ones which are deeply unpleasant to receive. When they're on the side of the best version of you rather than the deeply flawed one you always are. When they remind you that the flaws are acceptable, so long as their mitigation is attempted. When they give you a little nudge to overcome the barriers such flaws put in the way.

That's much more relationship glue than bought goods, but presents can serve as expressions of love in the sense of deeply felt affection or ritual significance. It's really just a question of how comfortable you and your partner are of using such bizarre social norms, under the aspect of eternity, to signify shared feelings. Put another way, it's a question of how you and your partner feel about using norms to express feelings for each other. We do that all the time while speaking, a gift can be as much a signifier as a good, and as much a compliment as giving praise.

An ex of mine thought Valentine's day was very strange, so I gave her a bunch of roses with a tube of bacon flavoured lubricant gaffer taped to the side of the bouquet. She enjoyed that it was a symbolic representation of the strangeness. Neither of us enjoyed the bacon flavoured lubricant though.

Don't know what you mean. Is it intended as a joke or as a criticism or both?

I don't think it was his viewpoints that actually got him banned. Sure, they were pretty tiresome a lot of the time, but this is a philosophy forum. Most people will be tiresome to you most of the time. It was that he produced very low quality posts to defend his viewpoints, often dismissive one liners in response to detailed commentary, explication or rebuttal.

I think one of the things which contributed to it was his habit of treating any ideological enemy - which was pretty much everyone who disagreed with him on the specifics of anything he said - as an uncritical scientistic mouthpiece. This is little more than posturing, signalling your position and the stupidity of anyone who disagrees with you.

The bar's set a bit higher than how he behaved. If he put more effort into arguing and less into posturing he'd probably have avoided the ban.

@frank

Frank: I realise that you decided to avoid mentioning T because you wanted to avoid a shit-storm. Nevertheless it makes sense that T responded strongly with an insult, considering that what you wrote was easily interpretable as a thinly veiled insult to him, his wife and their marriage.

T Clark: I know that you were very insulted by Frank and felt the need to defend yourself/wife/relationship. A better approach than responding with insults might've been explaining why the interpretation was wrong.

It'd be a shame if the thread devolved into shit-posts. I'm surprised it hasn't already to be honest, considering how personal most of the details are. Chin up, dealing with the otherness in yourself hard.

Remembered one my mother told me when I was a teenager:

If you can't be good be careful, if you can't be careful tie a knot in it.

You'd probably get more insight by asking the person who said it, rather than inviting us to talk about it.

Thanks! You never actually offended me by the way. Not that it felt particularly safe to engage with you in that way, but I didn't feel particularly at risk either since I've had similar conversations before. I felt a little bit like a tour guide. But also like a mirror, I never felt like you were actually talking to me, only me in the abstract or a projection.

Well I'm glad going into the role of the bully was helpful. The brutality of my delivery was probably game like, a facsimile of approaching such things with integrity (both senses). I'm interested though, and want to admire my hair in the mirror, what did you find disturbing about it?

Then there is The Analyst, a character in a script but also there are analysts who commensurate with said script and select it as an operative script, thereby acting the part of analyst -- creating and analyzing a dewey decimal system of the library. The Analyst can see all, for The Analyst has perused the library and knows where to look. But, as you say, this borrows from the body of all of us librarians - which the person who plays the analyst is also one such body, but in the playing of the role can forget that there is a body in a library reading scripts and playing. — Moliere

I think the fungibility of being a character in a script, commensuration with scripts, and being a script in its own right is something pretty unique to the Analyst script. (Almost) All the scripts have to be put on a level playing field in order for the Analyst to work as it does. Since It clusters them into meaningful islands of relevance (commensuration over scripts) borrowing operations from them (commensuration to a script) to push on the boundaries of those isles and shape them for the terrain (as provided by the librarian's adoption of the role, proclivities from histories). It meets the librarian in their shared activity of fumbling towards the next unwritten. The embedded interplay of
[ (script<->librarian)<-world] terminates and orients us to that world, adding a librarian->world relationship to that composite through enacting the role. The interplay of all these things is being the Analyst, including (librarian<-world) as the present unwritten/unexpressed and (librarian->world) as accommodating to what was not already determined (scripted).

Contrast this to the similar role of the Agony Aunt, which requires [(script<->librarian)<-external agent] to advise. Or the Flirt, which is [(script<->librarian)<-external agent] to seduce. Only the Analyst problematises itself, in some senses it is the discourse of problematisation, which is spoken mostly in other voices merged with the silence beneath them. Which is to say

[(script<->librarian)<-analyst]->analyst

is within its scope, a picture of the hall of mirrors generated in the thread.

The arrows are supposed to convey the direction of the relationships without specifying their nature. The brackets are supposed to convey a unity of the contained terms.

Echoing your concerns, I hope this makes some kind of sense. It's difficult to find words this far back in the library.

A response, though, is just a response from you to me. It's something I listen to, rather than analyse. It is not a script, but what you are saying to me -- to interpret it in the frame of the script is to forget that the script lies on the shelf, rather than who you are.

I think this makes some sense. At least, the sense I made of it was trying to play about with the analogy of shelf and script to see if it compares well to the sense you made of it. Then I decided to expand on the analogy because it was inspiring, difficult to look away from like my doppleganger.

I think you see it something like, there's a vast library of scripts available for each person, people can play about with the scripts and commensurate themselves with them by playing along with a selection; always their selection in regardless of how agency is attributed according to a script. These two things; commensuration with scripts and selection of operative scripts; are rendered equivalent through actions. In this respect, people are the librarians of this vast library, a personality is simultaneously a pagination of each book and a library classification system (like Dewey Decimal) of the scripts.

Generalising:

In this library, somewhere near the back, there are scripts for 'commensuration with scripts'. The Analyst lives somewhere in there, so does The Histrionic. Both of these are genre demarcated like the selection in a book shop, little tags above the scripts given by the general pagination/classification system which keeps the library in order. However, some of the subsections when selected have their own way of paginating and classifying the whole library. The Analyst has to do this, exploring the terrain again before deciding what kind of map to draw; which scripts are chosen (again, indifferent to agency) to navigate the terrain.

Perhaps, when the librarians have sufficiently similar scripts and the Analyst would tell them the terrain has the same landmarks, this is what is meant by following a rule and what gives such an amorphous denotation retrospective definiteness. The Analyst would also tell them that there's nothing of which they couldn't, in principle, speak because making way for the sense of things is always-already a pagination and classification system for the Analyst. The Analyst doesn't notice he does this while finding the scripts which have already made sense of things. One of the Analyst's principle tricks is forgetting that he's commensurated with the librarian itself, which is how he appears to edit the other scripts. Another way of saying it, nonsense is anathema to the Analyst, which is funny, as it's how he makes sense of things. He reaches underneath the shelves, finding fragments of scripts in the direction of the unwritten. Forgetting, as a matter of necessity, that it is the librarian who lends his body for such navigation.

His is only an intellectual joy, a reappropriated ecstasy, felt only in the hole behind the librarian's eyes. Feeling so strongly is quite remarkable for something which never quite exists.

I was of the impression that the priming of interpreting responses as scripts was the thing which set the self recursive meta-scaffolding off to begin with. I'm not sure what created the priming in the thread though.

Wouldn't they know better than the script?

The analyst is also such a script. Including it as a script among many is what sets off the vertigo. Everything said is starved of expression but simultaneously too much. The role of the analyst is the usual affective standpoint posts here come from; creating a schism between what's read then reacted to and what's identified with. To play the game of the analyst here is, partly, to see yourself amongst the impersonal ideas the analyst judges from a distance; and so people playing the game find their voice stolen from them by identifying with themselves as another impersonal idea; as one among many.

Encountering yourself within the play of signs in the thread is to hold yourself in suspension; as public property; which destroys the impersonality we usually afford to the role by affirming it as a property of ourselves.

It's like coming home and finding your doppleganger in the bathroom.

@TimeLine

His aggression helped relieve his misery and strengthened his relations with his girlfriend who joined in following his slanders; he made it out like I was chasing him, and he would ask me to come into work early or lure me in other ways so that he can pretend to others that we had some secret thing going on while protecting himself by constantly talking about his girlfriend. He had a secret. He really wanted me despite having a partner and so he was at risk of being caught; he used it to his advantage and got her involved instead.

This sounds pretty familiar. I had a friend (guy) who sexually assaulted another friend (girl), there were a lot of witnesses, but the guy denied doing it repeatedly, he couldn't handle that he'd done it because it just doesn't square with his identity. So he made an elaborate story up and got his friends involved over it. Ironically, because of the way our social group was composed, the people who asserted that the guy had sexually assaulted the girl were stigmatised.

Sounds pretty similar, in terms of the mental states of the aggressor. Girl's life was a lot better when she never had to see the guy again, stopped feeling like she needed to apologise or redeem him, and stopped feeling sullied; and equating the thing which removes the sullying with the redemption of the guy. I'm imagining that you're in a similar situation to the girl. I don't have a freakin' clue why you feel like you need to redeem him, and I imagine it would help a lot if you stopped.

You would not act if you felt nothing and so you are imagining weakness as a tool to act in as much as thinking there are threats and insults that are prompting the necessity to retaliate and thus an apriori right as you say; you would believe anything that would enable you to act and all this is prompted by your own emotional volatility. You intentionally seek the vulnerable because - as cowards do - you are assured control over the situation, because being vulnerable implies a lack of control and aggression is a way of rehabilitating those vulnerable sensations within.

Yeah, the way I used weakness in the previous posts is probably a retrojection. A better summary might be that targets are contemptible. Or perhaps they become contemptible because of the series of decisions to victimise them. At that point it makes sense to brand them with weakness, since they're victimised. That will get fed back into the bullying feedback loop, something like 'your responses are over-reactions and will be met with understandable scorn', to reference a previous comment to @Hanover. I'm pretty sure that the target has to respond in a certain way to make themselves a tempting victim for continued psychological assault. This isn't to blame them, it's to say that only certain responses would be a turn on.

you would believe anything that would enable you to act and all this is prompted by your own emotional volatility. You intentionally seek the vulnerable because - as cowards do - you are assured control over the situation, because being vulnerable implies a lack of control and aggression is a way of rehabilitating those vulnerable sensations within.

Certainly sometimes I've profited from others' vulnerabilities. I used to do palmistry (cold reading) as a hobby, one of the things I noticed was that the more traumatic the details exposed during the reading, the more accurate the reading would be remembered. Further, the less I said new things and the more I rephrased what they said provocatively, the more accurate a reading it was remembered as. Put these two together, and there was a big satisfying payoff whenever I was able to get a punter to relive something horrible; then they'd remember it like I'd seen into their soul.

I'm actually very emotionally stable. Most of my friends think of me as a rock. Furthermore, even if they're very mentally resilient they usually want to talk to me about their problems. Hell, they even find it helpful, and I get a lot of satisfaction from it. Generally, what I do if I sense that someone's currently suffering from some vulnerability or insecurity is ask them if they're suffering from it in a low-key way, then try to help them with it if I can. People trust me and I've very rarely abused that trust.

As much as it's tempting to paint me black all over, a person who is constantly predatory and looking to be cruel, I'm a lot more compartmentalised than that. I imagine most people who have been bullies are compartmentalised in this way. It'd be difficult to maintain a positive self image if there weren't some extenuating circumstances or means of forgetting. Most people have done (or neglected) things that are difficult to square with their sense of identity. And, pace @unenlightened, you have to find a convenient fault-line to elide (both senses simultaneously) to have an identity to begin with. Example, you can be a workplace bully and a great partner at the same time; and not in the Screwtape sense of praying for your partner's soul every evening after you've assaulted them.

How is that any different from bullies like yourself that seemingly think you have a right to ridicule?

Hm. I suppose this is part of blaming the victim for how they're treated. Responsibility's absolved from me because they deserve it, or are somehow asking for it. I don't actually think there's much reason for it, at least when I've done it. It's like identifying as a cat playing with the baby bird, pushing it around on the ground until its legs buckle, wings snap and it eventually bleeds out. That I could catch someone in a moment of weakness that I created legitimated feasting on the all the horror and inner torment I caused. It was certainly fun.

Really though, I can think of three types of bullies:

(1) ones like the unthinking cat pouncing on weakness out of nothing but childish predatory instincts.
(2)Those who are aware that what they were doing was wrong, but that they didn't care for one reason or another.
(3) And those who are convinced that what they are doing (or did) is justified.

All three have the capacity to be rooted in something deeply psychological or traumatic. Or perhaps they aren't. At times I've been (2) and (3), and oscillated between them depending on how self-righteous I felt. The three have distinct but overlapping means of dehumanisation.

(1) thinks of it as somewhat a-priori, a given right. The target's concerns cannot be relevant no matter what.
(2) thinks of it as permissible, something with extenuating circumstances (at least for the bully). It is permissible since it's a bit of fun, not serious, sustained gentle ribbing of a 'friend' on an exposed ribcage. Disavowing their own actions also disavows the target.
(3) thinks of their actions as a matter of moral necessity or necessary for their identity to persist as is (those two things are usually the same in my experience of people). they're exacting vengeance for some perceived slight, or some personal symbolism the victim has to them.

Your problem person sounds like a particularly nasty mix of (1) and (3), and that's a lost cause. Someone who's right no matter what they do and an asshole at the same time. Their actions are in a continued state of exception and never aggregated into their persistent sense of identity. You are a thorn, they are pulling it out. You are a crawling ant, they will destroy you without a thought.

They're probably never going to integrate a recognition of their cruelty towards you into their identity, just like I'm not going to listen to one of the ants infesting my house when I crush them. The house must be in order, and of all the opinions I'd listen to, why would I listen to the ones I've already decided are whining noises?

That is not the kind of person to martyr yourself to for any apparently philosophical ideal.

Why is it that if you don't like something or someone - which is normal - that you feel justified to act out as though seeking a social means to enable reasons for behaving badly? There is clearly an ego here but also a sense of entitlement that stems from a lack of empathy.

The justifications only arose when passions inspired them to. If I really felt what I was doing was ok, or ok enough I kept doing it without looking at any reasons associated with it. It was its own end, so the victim is just a means.

And this all quickly becomes a rabbit-hole. It leads to a more fundamental question: do we decide what things are? Or do we come to understand what things are? Or is this latter question simply unfathomable?

We can decide what things are, in some sense, but that doesn't mean reality has to care about the decision. This is the old separation between thought and being, or in a modern form facts and things. Language isn't how things are even though it can capture how things are, to greater or lesser extents depending on the use.

Sustaining this difference is a mark of materialism. That is, simultaneously asserting the indifference of reality to thought but also that reality differentiates thoughts and embeds this indifference relationally in our conduct. Thought aimed at knowledge is the place where the in-itself of our actions meets the for-us of language; resistance felt is inspiration gained.

More succinctly, what is irreconcilable can be bracketed, or used as inspiration for mutual growth and development of intimacy. The latter strategy is costly but worthwhile, the former strategy is cheap but lazy. Most decisions made regarding others are cheap but lazy, and necessarily so, no one can sustain such dizzying chaos as self-negation for interpersonal attunement long term.