Will be more precise, original post was too much of a splurge. It's an attempt to link Sellars' account that you've presented with the Myth of the Given thesis. At least, my understanding of both of them.

Is there still a linguistic function for whiteness and other abstract particulars? Do they still have some mechanism? I get the intuition that a complete de-substantialisation of all abstract particulars is a bit too strong, but I'm not sure Sellars is actually doing that from what you've written.

De-substantialisation might better be phrased as a closure of language use under any additional realization of language use. No other types of entities are generated or implicated from word use alone. This simultaneously undercuts concepts as abstract objects distinct from how they are used and transposes concepts as patterns of inherited language use.

Concepts aren't things, patterns in word use are, previous patterns promote words following other words causally - like discussing a topic and staying on topic. Nothing more is brought to bear on the word meanings other than their usage patterns - there's no instantiation from beyond speech except from what accompanies speech and remains unspoken.

What I'm interested in is do abstract objects still have some kind of function, or is it better interpreted as an abstracting process that somehow follows a real one. Also how do patterns of usage play a role in the theory - a 'pattern of usage' is a definite thing, 'patterns of usage' are not.

But ideally, I imagine, there is some kind of possible inheritance from a 'patterns of usage' to a 'pattern of usage'. The link between the two could be interpreted in a closed, 'flattened' way where 'patterns of usage' are only ever (negotiated, literally) demarcations between what can sensibly follow on from any given use of words and what cannot. The material basis of word use is what causes word to follow word, and this whole process - including the unspoken accompaniment which underpins words as contextualised islands of sense - loosely the 'meaning in the head' or the interpretation, or regularities in what regularities to apply... language is closed under this recursion and recombinant matching of what is part of use, and always-already part of use.

Or it could be interpreted in a 'bifurcated' way, where the play of abstract objects have their own distinct 'process' and constraints on sensible expression. Some kind of idealism or Platonism in the broad sense. If it's a 'subprocess' - this then names a game we play to organise and reference other games.

EG, when Devin Townsend screams 'Love is about control' as part of the song Love, it's quite clear what is conveyed, despite any metaphysical subtleties. We can also understand reifying word use dealing with abstract objects as concrete things. EG red implies coloured. No matter if this is a proxy for some other talk, the 'game of proxies' - of rule following for user interface specification to transpose into @csalisbury's analogy. I read you as suggesting Sellars has this flattened view, and there's some closure principle whereby words never 'summon' something beyond (like redness) into being through instantiation. This is a way of rendering language as a material process which is closed under operations of abstraction. Another analogy - a Kantian transcendental argument reveals something about (in broad terms) our mind because the kind of possibility dealt with is of impossibility to conceive otherwise. This is ok in some regards, but this can't play the role of a constraint on our minds, just a constraint on generation of concepts about it if done sensibly.

Sellars' arguments are conceptual themselves- so we have to be able to understand what is nominalised and why, and also what it would mean to speak contrariwise to this nominalism even when Sellars' account is true. Which means there should be some role for the dynamics of concepts to play - and I think this dynamism along with the flatness of language undercut the traditional role of the a-priori - you can't sneak up on language to get its back and take the a priori from behind, you're generating aspects of a priori by working through concepts philosophically, and this is just a special case of the closure of language use under abstractions of rule following. So arguments about conceptual dynamics are still conceptual dynamics, and take their cues from what patterns of language use have been about them before. So when Sellars says:

The history of philosophy is the lingua franca which makes communication between philosophers, at least of different points of view, possible. Philosophy without the history of philosophy if not empty or blind is at least dumb.

my bolding, I think Sellars' is giving an account of how a historical a-priori localises and is modified contextually. Background from Sparknotes' page on Foucault's 'The Archaeology of Knowledge' for those unfamiliar with the idea:

historical a priori - The positivities (see above) that constitute discursive formations and relations form a 'historical a priori, a level of historical language which other modes of analysis depend on but fail to address. Discourse functions at the level of 'things said;' thus, any analysis of the formal structure, hidden meaning, or psychological traces of discourse take the level of discourse itself for granted, as a kind of raw material that is difficult to recognize due to its operation at the level of existence itself. It is important to note that the historical a priori constituted by the positivity of discourse is not an a priori in the usual sense of a formal philosophical principle. Instead, the historical a priori is simply a feature of the level of discourse as opposed to other levels of analysis; it does not remain stable as a single principle with a single content, but rather shifts with the transformations of the positivities themselves.

and positivities:

positivity - In the chapter entitled 'Rarity, Exteriority, Accumulation' (see section eleven), Foucault begins to use the term 'positivity' to designate an approach to discourse that excludes anything lying beneath it or hidden within it. For archeology, discourse is to be described only on the level of its basic, operative existence, its existence as a set of emerging and transforming statements (and relations between statements). In this sense, archeology addresses only the 'positivities' of discourse. Further on, Foucault uses 'positivity' almost always in noun form, as a catch-all term for statements, discursive formations, or sub-formations like sciences; any one of these (or any set of relations between them) is a positivity

Is there still a linguistic function for whiteness and other abstract particulars? Do they still have some mechanism? I get the intuition that a complete de-substantialisation of all abstract particulars is a bit too strong, but I'm not sure Sellars is actually doing that from what you've written.

If I've read you and SEP right on the Myth of the Given, this is some kind of functionalism about predicates. Their meaning is some learned thing - a web of applications and mutually conditioning 'forms of life' and constituent habits - and not given in a relation between an abstract particular and a predicate. Severing predicate from abstract particular could be done with two emphases, I think. One is where you say abstract particular has no bearing on anything and is somewhat of a transcendental illusion (where words are seen as things, briefly), and one is where the abstract particular is not a transcendental illusion but is somewhere between a summary of information and just a representative of an equivalence class over predications.

I'd be interested if much philosophy was actually possible under the first case, or what it would consist in. On the one hand we have a rejection of predetermined significance undermining aprioristic reasoning - everything is only ever everything ceteris paribus -, on the other we have a constantly generated historical a-priori which accompanies all use of language. It's as if most reasoning proceeded on the basis of a bait and switch between learned stuff summarised and internalised and really existent abstractions. But it looks like a real relation between these two is denied? Dunno. I imagine this is similar to @apokrisis's perspective in some ways.

Correlation between two variables neither implies nor implies the negation of supervenience.

In a loose sense yes, in a mathematical sense no.

It's a constructed example of when you have two sequences of measurements, A and B. Whenever A changes, B changes. Whenever B changes, A changes. The sequences of measurements have no (0) correlation (the Cov calculation). So I don't think nonzero correlation (being correlated) is sufficient or necessary for any supervenience. So when I said earlier 'neural correlates' (like the kind you get in fMRI studies) are going to be observed instances of supervenience because they're observed instances of correlation between mind and brainstates... I was wrong.

But I think I was wrong for an interesting reason. Supervenience doesn't imply the presence of statistical correlation, and statistical correlation doesn't imply the presence of supervenience (this would need another demonstration, but empirically easy to find).

On second thoughts numerical correlation doesn't mean anything like A supervening on B.

Two sequences A,B.

A = (1,3)
B=(-1,2)
Cov(A,B)=(-1,1)(0.5,0.5)=-0.5+0.5=0

No A changes without B changes, no B changes without A changes, correlation 0. Odd.

Do you think correlation is sufficient for both directions?

Understood.

Can you give an example of what it would look like to start with what we already bloody know and then do good philosophy to it?

What're features of good approaches then?

Wiki's a real battleground on this.

You have enough evidence to make a comprehensive case for either side. The structure of the articles also encourages partisanship - the data on deaths, injuries etc aren't compared symmetrically within articles: you'll find Israel focussed and Palestine focussed articles but few attempts to synthesise them. So there are few comparative accounts of damages incurred by both sides. The best overview I've found is this one, but it omits estimation of indirect and economic effects of the war.

There's also a sustained ideological battleground on appropriate methodology for generating any of the statistics. So much effort is placed on methodology contestation there're good academic arguments for any partisan take, really. Also excellent arguments against any take. Informed discourse about it might as well be a discrete space, in which every person is infinitely far from reconciliation with any other viewpoint except one equivalent to their own - which is accepted as obvious without reflection.

The interpretation of Israel-Palestine might well be the best model of polarised discourse, so much so that it would be controversial to put it as an example of polarisation in the dictionary. :P

What I tell prospective students:

Prior to college and university, think hard whether you want to go or not. If not, try to learn some employable skill - obtain an apprenticeship or other vocational study. Research various disciplines. Go with any strong feeling of passion for a subject, irrelevant of what it is. Having a trained skill of any sort is generally better than not having one in terms of later employment prospects.

In absence of strong attachment to a single discipline but still desiring to go to college or university to study something, compare academic subjects to vocational ones, choose what best suits you and your prior qualifications. In absence of strong preference for a single subject but you still have a strong preference for a few subjects, find out as much as you can about them - including and especially transferrable skills. Email departments and ask for advice on studying in each of them and look for free introductory texts and videos on the internet.

If at this point the only thing impeding your pursuit of a strong passion is prior qualifications, do what you can to obtain sufficient qualifications to do what you like. Also if it's a university or college email them even if you're refused initial applications asking to apply for 'clearance' places.

An important part at this stage is to have a rough 'ideal outcome' for you given your current beliefs and preferences. Also attempt to think of things which would substantially impede your goal - and in this cases work out provisional 'hedged bets' - plans for when the ideal outcome is impeded. You're still quite young, and you have a lot of room to make mistakes.

Underlying ethical principles, since this is a philosophy forum:

Don't accept reasonable risks you couldn't bear the anxiety of living under. Also, don't avoid an opportunity if it has an incredibly small chance of a painful loss - everything has at least an incredibly small chance of a painful loss, that's something you have to get used to. The idea of a 'happy life' and 'perfect job' are unrealistic, what matters is whether you are content enough and you are working towards achieving any long term goals.

Note - generally you don't have to devote your entire life to something to be good enough at it, just a high enough proportion of the time to it to satisfy your passion and drives. Unless your aspirations and passions are to be the best at something, keep something of yourself in reserve to develop other avenues - love, friends, hobbies - of life.

Also note - not being career driven is fine. If your goals are more family oriented or, more generally, are organised around something which is not easily monetised - find something you can do that supports your pursuit of those goals and you can feel ok doing.

Where does the distinction between what can be shared and what cannot be shared come from? Is there any way to tell if a thing can be shared other than sharing it?

Demonstrably we don't think we're that bad. We don't shut up.

It's a forum of hobbyists with the occasional but very rare philosophy academic gracing us with their patience. And thus it's nice place to have your brain poked.

I think how good you see it as, or how useful you find it, really depends on how you use the forum in pursuit of the hobby. In that regard it's a reliable place to find someone who disagrees with you on something to discuss interminably and hysterically. But also a less reliable place to have an in depth discussion with on any philosophical doctrine or problem. Except maybe Wittgenstein or Heidegger, considering how many fans of each are here. Some knowledge of the former helps with understanding lots of the attitudes present here towards philosophy - which is ironic in itself I suppose.

As a platform for developing your own ideas, I find that I've learned more discussing something in a context here rather than my usual discussion with my own post it notes in books. Not that there's going to be too much of an increase in quality from my schizoid ramblings in the margins.

Also happy April Fools.

Well I finished the book today. Breaking it down point by point and then expanding on each of them on here was very time consuming. I'll write up chapter summaries and criticisms over the next while, and try to ape the style because Debord absolutely encourages (not figuratively, he literally asks for it) damning critique while borrowing his voice.

Very condensed summaries for the first few chapters are as follows.

Chapter 1 - essentially a phenomenology of the spectacle, looking at how it structures experiences and how that enstructurating is related to a Marxian conception of the economy. The major theoretical highlight, in my view, is some notion of equivalence between:

(1) the passivity of consumption
(2) the alienation of people from each-other
(3) the alienation of people from themselves
(4) the coupling of 1,2,3 reproducing 1,2,3
(5) the equivalence of (4) with the valorisation -the generation of social necessity- of passive consumption.

It's kind of a knot, the spectacle as a social process which delimits the social and then projects that delimitation to people in general. The equivalence being a kind of coimplication - if (1) is occuring it requires and induces (2) etc. That the spectacle as a process does something very strange to all the different ways time is measured when considering 1->3 as ways people spend time (time as a commodity) comes back in chapter 5 and 6.

Chapter 2 - looking at how the spectacle is implicit in the commodity form, it's a Marx reference heavy chapter. Debord is drawing out the social and economic implications of the commodification of everything. To reference a recent discussion with @StreetlightX, it's an interpretation of commodification as substrate independent. Debord doesn't put it this way, but a central point is that space of possibilities for being an entrepreneur is essentially limitless, since commodity production also contains the production of desire for those commodities. Separation of commodities into discretized units within production (congealed lumps of human labour) induces the 'successive' character of the spectacle.

It is a series of events which has forgotten their generating time expenditures (actions). This discretisation - the simplification of time as time expenditure within a work day links back to chapter 1 and creates a space for the analysis of social and spectacular time in chapters 5 and 6 respectively.e substrate independence of commodification also plays a role in chapter 7, in which substrate independence is generalized to production process independence - providing a partial account of why it was so easy for capitalism to flourish in countries that sustained powerful workers movements after the movements died.

Chapter 3 -
is largely a tirade on the spectacle as a primary generator of false consciousness. In delimiting what is socially permitted, it simultaneously monopolizes the conceptual scheme for public expression. There is a kind of 'social democracy of images' which comes to dominate every aspect of our social lives. This is quite neatly expressed, IMO, through these lyrics from Bomb the Music Industry's 'All Ages Shows', which I'll reference again later:

All of my work was done
I turned the TV on and I forgot that I can turn it off

We live up on the top
They leave the door unlocked
So just come in
I don't need to buzz you up
And I never go anywhere

as a primary generator of false consciousness, it also structures how opinions change over time - the analogy of an externally generated conceptual scheme for social life is useful again here. This structuring of opinions over time is also an annihilation of history, in the sense that the spectacle delimits what is and is not part of the current narrative; modes of expression have their conditions of possibility in the conceptual scheme of their presentation. Thus, the spectacle is a 'chatter of the ruling class to itself'.

Chapters 4 to the end resist condensed summary, they're concerned with the transformation of 'the historical subject of revolution' and how it relates to the prefigured 'temporality of the spectacle' and the spatiality of global commodity production. Debord takes Soviet Russia's political climate as an early model of spectacular production (brief analogy - think of the show trials as a series of images imposed on the Russian proletariat delimiting the sphere of legitimate political activity), then looks at the distinctions between Marxian 'linear time of revolutions' - in which history culminates deterministically, the 'linear time' of the ruling class and how it constrains and develops the spectacle and concept of history at work in a populace.

A suggestive hyper-condensed summary might be: we react to the 'generators' of social life and history is indexed to the salient events which are presented, which has a useful resonance ideological state apparatuses; only the spectacle is not spatiotemporally localised, it is a generator of social temporality and a reflection of the disgust capitalist production has to geographical boundaries. The subject of history, in terms of how it is refracted by and projected into the spectacle, becomes the satiated consumer, abstracted from all of their history. From my notes:

The historical subject of bureaucracy underwent a transformation to the corporation. Thus the geographic limits placed on the domain of any specific ideology was gently destroyed through the universality of international market competition and its corresponding laws. The working class, those subordinated to this now delocalized corporate power, was thus abstracted away from its geographic localisations and is now a silent witness to its determinations in the distributed network of negotiations and trade constituting global markets.

Then, the phenomenology in chapters 1->4 of the worker's time expenditure culminates in a description of the conditioned 'cyclical' (really cylindrical) time of the work action/day/month/year. Lastly how the spectacle penetrates and structures the remaining time (helpful analogy - TV schedules as organizers of proletarian leisure time relativizing its expenditure to the continuous time of image production). Then there's a big but sympathetic fuck you to art which I don't understand as anything but a leftist intellectual insistence on the transformative nature of 'real revolutionary art' on populaces.

The final chapter invites the reader to produce a critical conception of what is universal in humankind, what new organisations will facilitate resistance to the terrifying power in coupled imperialism and global markets? What remains of humanity when the historical subject is a legal person rather than a person? Debord invites us to think carefully - what new practices can return humanity to humanity? How do we act politically in an age where politics has been separated from its people? Where 'what is to be done' is a maxim to make the headlines...

Edit: I forgot to include the second set of lyrics from the song. They're apposite in describing the temporality induced by working life under the spectacle:

In a trashed room in 1996
A fourteen year old punk and in a flash I'm my parents
And we'll never know love, 'cause I was too busy talking to my Green Day posters
They never said nothing to me...

Can you stay here?
Can we blast the Descendents?
Can we turn our phones off and get lost in The Simpsons?
I feel inches away from getting swallowed by darkness
And I know that you're tired, but can you draw back the curtains for me?

Ah that's good, I thought I killed the thread. Thank you necromancers.

I think this is the first time I've wholeheartedly agreed with you on something. Commenting so that we both have it on the record.

I tried having sex with a man once. I say having sex with a man, it was definitely more 'try'. The thing I found most surprising about it all was that I could enjoy giving pleasure but not receiving it in that circumstance. I tried to go in without prejudices, and had fantasized about similar things before, my partner was skilled but accepting and tolerant of mistakes. I was still bored. Not disgusted, bored. To paraphrase the fanfic Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality's Voldemort - indifference is a deeper antipathy than disgust.

Regardless of agreeing with you completely, there's still an element of surprise and self discovery in sex; I think it's a pretty large element of it - of shaping and understanding the desires of everyone involved. The conceptual apparatus surrounding it is of being surprised by discovered desires and methods of expressing them - expression understood in a (in general polyadic hur hur) relational sense of involved agents. Desire understood in its more general sense than mere 'sexual whim' (as if that's the only reason you can want to have sex with your partner).

In this sense, I think the relation of sexual novelty and desire is a conceptual opposite of novelty and desire in advertising, but also opposite of stoic contempt for the 'things indifferent and transient'. 'Humbling' yourself in terms of reaction/enaction towards your partner(s) and your own emergent desires is a manner of being shaped by the actions and delighting in the transience of it all. This then shapes how you have sex in the future and think about sex (and sex's role in relationships) in general. A model of learning in which nature puts reason to the work of desire. Poor wretch, willingly slave for a moment to a paltry girl, I find myself more free than I started.

Ah, I have a deaf ear for things like that. Sorry. Will think about it.

I have a spare chicken around here somewhere. ;)

Why would we need a clear definition of living or nonliving to study evolution?

Regardless:

At some point you'll probably come to the realization that philosophy doesn't have to begin with the definition of terms in most circumstances (try reading Sam26's exegesis of Wittgenstein thread if you are unfamiliar with both, it's excellent). Regardless, whether an organism is alive (or is an organism) doesn't matter for any question relating to how evolution works and specifically what it works on. That evolution operates on a far broader set of processes than 'living' ones isn't something that comes from an analysis of the term 'is alive', it comes from studying how evolution works and what it works on.

Evolution gave rise to life's precursors, the living emerged from the nonliving at some point. Some point before the mechanisms of heredity in genes (have to come from somewhere) and cell organelles (have to come from somewhere). Our mechanisms of heredity also evolved...

No matter how you slice the terms, evolution still works on things like replicating salts acting as condensation nucleii trapped in fatty vesicles - selecting for things like membrane permeability and molecular stability of molecules that enact (better and more prolifically, more efficiently, less deleterious - don't burst the bubble!) vesicle formation, it worked on them before the symbiosis of mitochondria occurred, before eukaryotes and archea split (why else would they split if evolution was not active?). If you want to make 'being alive' necessary for 'can evolve' as a matter of definition, fine, bite the bullet of the consequences that there are living software programs in some labs at this moment.

Also note that this is a matter of definition irrelevant to studying the conceptual structure and real properties of evolution.



One of the reasons thinking of the nonliving as continuous in some senses with the living, to my mind at least, is that evolutionary thinking methodologically refutes some kind of pure aprioristic thinking - the idea of a categorical distinction existing a-priori in some realm of ideas is a lot different from thinking with the immanent genesis of such a distinction (and basing your thinking around tracking the conceptual structure of the genesis).

In this thread: people draw purely semantic distinctions which capture nothing relevant about evolution, despite a wealth of literature being available on evolution as a generalized action of selection in a space of reproductive constraints. Of which the various sorts of fitness in genetics are but one (and don't suffice for a complete characterization of evolution at any rate). Evolutionary algorithms in systems design has been a thing since before the turn of the millennium.

Speaking evolutionary language with too much of a platonic accent: evolutionary trajectories are in part generated by instantiations of* fitness functions coupled to reproductive variation (like selection), in part generated by contingent patterns which emerged in the evolutionary heritage of a reproducing unit (like fixation/deletion in genetic drift and heredity in general), and in part generated by the whole process's reflexivity (coevolution and evolution of evolvability). There are probably lots of bits I missed out.

Evolution is already severed from the living, as it operates on the population** rather than the individual, in this sense evolution is already an abiotic process. More precisely, it is indifferent to its substrate - be they early salts congealing themselves into enclosed units that spawn more condensation nucleii, those selfsame vesicles near thermal vents making use of the energy in their environment to adapt quicker and viral condensation/replication strategies, those thermodynamic pioneers who had the first vestiges of auto-catalysis in salts and amino acid precursors, or their eventual codification into replicating machines with functional components... Only the last step, always the last step, is life as we have ever observed it.

Evolution, as a generative process, has forever begun in the nonliving.

Been busy with other abstract things competing for my attention. I wanted to leave this here for future comment. What would Debord think of messages like this?

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It's deductively valid to conclude that no ticket will win when you have evaluated whether each and every ticket wins or does not win, and all evaluate as not win. IE P1,P2,...,Pn derives P1 & P2 & ... & Pm when and only when m is less than or equal to n. IE, when each each ticket has been observed and evaluated as not winning (also a purely technical thing with the indices on the left and right of the sequent, must pick out the same tickets). If there are unobserved tickets, that makes m>n and it's no longer a deductively valid inference.

If there are unobserved tickets - or equivalently if the subject does not know the set of observed tickets is an exhaustive set containing a winner - the subject reasons differently. In the cases where the subject has no reason to believe there's not exactly one winner in all the tickets or they are given a subset of tickets they can evaluate how likely the subset is to contain any number of winners if they also know the probabilities that each ticket wins.

Ensuring that there is exactly one winner requires giving out the entire set of tickets and that the entire set of tickets contains one winner.

How the subject can reason depends heavily on their beliefs about the lottery and whether those beliefs are true; also whether the subject is equipped with the reasoning tools to evaluate probabilities in general. If the subject knows the mathematical structure of the lottery and their sub-sample of tickets they can assign probabilities. If they don't, they can't.

Note that the belief that 'I'll never win' is deduced from knowledge of the lottery's structure. A set of true enough empirical/contingent facts about the lottery set up and their mathematical implications. Rather than requiring the purchase of many tickets to furnish the belief with evidence.

I think it's resolved by breaking it into 2 cases. The cases being A) where someone knows that a given selection is the entire selection of tickets and it contains 1 and only 1 winner and B) where they don't know at least one of these things. If someone is justified in believing the entire selection is present then they're justified in believing it contains the winner. If they don't know, the strength of their belief should probably depend on the state of their knowledge regarding total number of tickets and the number in the batch (under the assumption that the reasoner knows how to reason probabilistically).

Lottery examples reveal the difficulty. Given that there are a million lottery tickets and that exactly one of them must win, it is plausible (though not obvious) that for any particular lottery ticket, I am justified in believing that it will lose. So I am justified in believing that ticket one will lose, that ticket two will lose, and so forth, for every ticket. But if I know that there are a million tickets, and I am justified in believing each of a million claims to the effect that ticket n will lose and I can correctly deduce from these claims that no ticket will win, then by closure I would be justified in concluding that no ticket will win, which by hypothesis is false.

P(at least one ticket wins) = 1
P(any particular ticket does not win)=very high

Keep multiplying 'very highs' together, they're all <1, and you end up with 'very low' - IE, take enough tickets and you can become very confident that your selection of tickets contains the winner.

Trying to map probabilistic reasoning, which in some respects is an uncountably infinite valued logic, onto a set with two values 'is justified' or 'is not justified' corresponding to probability thresholds doesn't really represent anything about our reasoning. This kind of logic always has difficulties dealing with iterated disjunction and conjunction. If you take many 'very certain' things together conjunctively (they all must happen), you end up with 'very uncertain', if you take many 'very uncertain' things together disjunctively (at least 1 must happen) you get something 'very certain'.

You are justified in believing any particular ticket loses, you are not justified in believing the entire sample of tickets loses; especially if it's set up a priori that there is always and only 1 winner.

Always and only 1 winner is the same as 'if you take them all, the probability that you take the winner is 1', if there isn't an 'all' then the probability that a sample of size n contains the winner is a function of n and the probability of winning the bet for each ticket (under the usual equiprobability assumptions this is obtained by the cumulative distribution function of the binomial distribution with n trials up to k successes with ticket winning probability p).

@Banno,@Sam26

I think it's likely that animal minds are capable of similar activity and directed mind-states to humans in a lot of respects.

Animals typically have much reduced episodic memory capabilities when compared to humans, so it is likely that an animal's 'self concept' isn't sufficiently stable across time to coagulate experiences into an interwoven network of memories which involve them as an agent which has expressible beliefs. Put another way, cognitive heuristics and methods of thinking in animals are more limited.

Humans also learn a much broader variety of cognitive heuristics and exploratory tools than most animals - things like representational heuristics of quantitative aspects of phenomena which I'll reference if anyone actually cares. There's also the capacity to allow a representative to stand in for an object or abstract object/memory in general, the manifestation of a semiotic freedom @apokrisis usually brings up. This latter capacity, along with the reality of animal cognition and substantial family resemblances between the flesh of our forms of life and theirs' vouchsafe the possibility for sense in this endeavour.

Animals can learn complicated tasks; dealing with chains of events and experiment with causes. If animal belief is seen as something close to a category error, there is still the problem of providing an analytic framework that gives animals a sufficiently rich and temporally extended mode of being for complex problem solving and experimentation with an environment.

A start of this approach is the idea of ecological affordances, in which the functions of familiar aspects of the environment are habitually endowed to them through an interplay of memory and exploratory tools; this occurs largely involuntarily when functioning in its usual way, and is part of our perceptual post-processing too (and can also be trained in humans, will give examples if anyone cares).

That there is a discourse about animal ability to do this, and forms of life studying animal cognition should serve as a Wittgensteinian demonstration that such practices need not be thrown away with the supposedly disavowed ladder - conspicuous in its absence but here behaving as if it was always-already discarded, and not simply chosen to be as such.

44. The spectacle is a permanent opium war which aims to make people identify goods with commodities and satisfaction with survival that increases according to its own laws. But if consumable survival is something which must always increase, this is because it continues to contain privation. If there is nothing beyond increasing survival, if there is no point where it might stop growing, this is not because it is beyond privation, but because it is enriched privation.

Difficult to interpret without an appeal to the logic of dialectic. We have growth internalising its own negation (privation) and expanding while/due to manifesting the negation with transformed character. Maybe an undialectical heresy of interpretation could be:

"Economic growth sustains itself to the extent that it incorporates the creation of new desires and needs", run away positive feedback. It's usually possible to transpose the description of dialectical transformations into cybernetic ones by attempting to characterise the material factors the internalised negation/opposition expands over and how they function as a dual condition of possibility and continual source of actualisation. In this case, economic growth is coupled with the commodification of everything. We have the commodification of social potentials through advertising and the opportunity costs of omitted adverts; and thus growth is efficiently coupled to the generation of advertising marks.

Wars are usually voluntary in some sense too, they're chosen. The spectacle isn't volitional though. Reading war figuratively to give something superlative to the description.

Haven't had a lot of time this weekend for this, but I did read a decent amount of the article, which is a fairly comprehensive critique of the aspect of the theory it deals with, which I hadn't been aware of. And I read a few other bits and pieces too. So, looks like they took philosophy, tried to make it science and ended up with—largely—pseudoscience. There's political wish fulfilment written all over the quality/quantity notion, for example. Oh, "leaps!". How convenient. Just what we need. And Stalin's diamat seems to mix in some self-serving political elements with quantity and quality relations becoming a metaphor and justification for (although maybe I'm reading too much into it) the fierce social stratification he imposed (the nomanklatura represent a leap in quality, so it's only natural they should get all the good stuff, and so on—came across a quote for that, but can't find it at the minute). Anyway, as a theory, it falls down on testability, precision, logical consistency, and parsimony at least. I don't know though from what I've read if Debord was mostly just paying lip service to it or what?

I don't know Debord's position on it. My intuition is similar to yours - it's pseudoscientific claptrap at best, authoritarian newspeak at worst. If the typologies of Marxism on wiki are reliable in providing broad strokes distinctions, the Marxism of the Situationist movement was very critical of Mao and Stalin and considered itself even more left! I'm just hoping that there's nothing which can't be translated out of the diamat accent...

43. Whereas in the primitive phase of capitalist accumulation, “political economy sees in the proletarian only the worker” who must receive the minimum indispensable for the conservation of his labor power, without ever seeing him “in his leisure and humanity,” these ideas of the ruling class are reversed as soon as the production of commodities reaches a level of abundance which requires a surplus of collaboration from the worker. This worker, suddenly redeemed from the total contempt which is clearly shown him by all the varieties of organization and supervision of production, finds himself every day, outside of production and in the guise of a consumer, seemingly treated as an adult, with zealous politeness. At this point the humanism of the commodity takes charge of the worker’s “leisure and humanity,” simply because now political economy can and must dominate these spheres as political economy. Thus the “perfected denial of man” has taken charge of the totality of human existence.

Debord's fleshing out this generalised commodification again - tracing out the transformation of the proletarian into the consumer. I think it's worth pausing here and reflecting on what extra is added by thinking of a proletarian as a consumer rather than as a proletarian tout court.

First, C-M-C' doesn't change insofar as the proletarians will still have to sell their wage labour to partake in the expanded sphere of commodities. But someone whose typical 'moment' in the circulation of capital is M-C-M' is still a consumer 'in his leisure and humanity'. On the level of ideology, there is a lessened distinction between the proletarian and the bourgeoise. The 'humanism of the commodity' is probably referring to the commodities (and the subdomain of image objects with its privileged status) and their relations mediating all of social life.

I don't think this is too much of an exaggeration, and there's certainly a sense in which it's true. Socialising where I live is almost always organised around an activity requiring money expenditure - movies, potlucks, smoking etc for raw consumption, skiing and other activities for closer personal bonds -. There are not that many opportunities to socialise if you're bookish even working at a university. My friends in Britain report similar things, socialising is mediated by the 'social event' - which typically also generates hyper-commodified image objects (on social media) and subjectivises people to make these objects 'in their leisure and humanity'. While it is socially necessary to organise around commodities in the broad sense - this is the kernel of commodity fetishism in the old sense -, we voluntarily - in most senses - organise ourselves on social media and live a kind of 'shadow life' therein. Without this 'shadow life' we are reclusive social subjects, despite social media offering new forms of isolation and widespread commodification in the previously discussed senses.

The humanism of the commodity also has a vacuous sense as a personal brand, in which a person's personality itself is transformed into a use value and its dark mirror, exchange value.

42. The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life. Not only is the relation to the commodity visible but it is all one sees: the world one sees is its world. Modern economic production extends its dictatorship extensively and intensively. In the least industrialized places, its reign is already attested by a few star commodities and by the imperialist domination imposed by regions which are ahead in the development of productivity. In the advanced regions, social space is invaded by a continuous superimposition of geological layers of commodities. At this point in the “second industrial revolution,” alienated consumption becomes for the masses a duty supplementary to alienated production. It is all the sold labor of a society which globally becomes the total commodity for which the cycle must be continued. For this to be done, the total commodity has to return as a fragment to the fragmented individual, absolutely separated from the productive forces operating as a whole. Thus it is here that the specialized science of domination must in turn specialize: it fragments itself into sociology, psychotechnics, cybernetics, semiology, etc., watching over the self-regulation of every level of the process.

I don't think this is saying much new, other than giving a preliminary account of the qualitative nature of commodities. They're 'everywhere' and 'deep structured' in the sense that commodity requirements are a turtles all the way down kind of thing. When all is commodified, each social need no matter how obscure must be addressed with (and constituted by) a regime of commodities. There's a strengthening of the 'relations between people become relations between things' you find in the fetishism of commodities in Marx to 'relations between all things (in a broad sense) become relations between commodities' - an intensification identified with the building of capital. The 'geological layers of commodities' is interesting, I'd like to call it something like the 'fractalization of desire and production', in which commodities take on the character of a corpuscle of embodied desires, layers of advertising and identity-signalling at the same time as the real production of commodities becomes spatially dispersed. And of course these new layers of commodities need their own characteristic science - but I don't really think it's fair to dismiss entire disciplines as sciences of domination. Unless it's meant in something close to the formal sense of techne in Heidegger.

@Baden

Have you had time to study 'dialectical materialism'? If so - what did you find out about it?

Baudrillard!

Which philosopher-come-madman made this impassioned defence of the full extent of natural law:

Might one so regard Nature's gentlest unions, the ones she most insistently
prescribes to us and counsels most warmly? Eugénie, a moment of reason: how, after the vast afflictions our planet sometime knew, how was the human species otherwise able to perpetuate itself, if not through incest? Of which we find, do we not, the example and the proof itself in the books Christianity respects most highly. By what other means could Adam's family and that of Noah have been preserved? Sift, examine universal custom: everywhere you will detect incest authorized, considered a wise law and proper to cement familial ties. If, in a word, love is born of resemblance, where may it be more perfect than between brother and sister, between father and daughter? An ill-founded policy, one produced by the fear lest certain families become too powerful, bans incest from our midst; but let us not abuse ourselves to the point of mistaking for natural law what is dictated to us only by interest or ambition; let us delve into our hearts: 'tis always there I send our pedantic moralists; let us but question this sacred organ and we will notice that nothing is more exquisite than carnal connection within the family; let us cease to be blind with what concerns a brother's feelings for his sister, a father's for his daughter: in vain does one or the other disguise them behind a mask of legitimate tenderness: the most violent love is the unique sentiment ablaze in them, the only one Nature has deposited in their hearts. Hence, let us double, triple these delicious incests, fearlessly multiply them, and let us believe that the more straitly the object of our desires does belong to us, the greater charm shall there be in enjoying it. — ???

That's certainly an element of it. If it was constrained to social forces - a statement of some genealogical-historical method - the ideas that 'conceptually contrary ideas give rise to oppositional social forces' and 'conflicts in the sphere of the economy give rise to oppositional social forces and conceptually contrary concepts' seem reasonably close to capturing its use with less jargon. But then you have diamat people ranting about dialectics like Hegelian ideals and about melting wax/boiling water.

I'd like to interpret it as a kind of proxy language for discussing social change, and hopefully there won't be too much that I miss.

It's one of the Marxian left's chief causes of circular firing lines. Rather, it names the space for unsubstantiated and endless theoretical disagreement. Depending on your organisation, you can be publicly shamed for being 'undialectical' or having 'one-sided materialism'. It's a stupid heritage to deal with.

A friend of mine pointed out something pretty cool. It might be possible to take the commodification of everything as a methodological posit and look at spectacular commodities (image objects) in economic terms. He then applied this to Jordan Peterson's explosive growth, searching for analogies to Amazon, and looked at it in terms of supply and demand. I have cool friends.

Oh, sorry. Carry on then. :D

What side of this Fundamental Duality are hermaphroditic molluscs on?

I will use my tyrannical post modern devouring mother archetype powers to suggest that you read them at some point.

@StreetlightX

Do you have any opinions on dialectical materialism? I'm not particularly keen on it and shunted @Baden the way of an analytical Marxist eviscerating the quality/quantity dialectic. Do you have any suggestions for a less critical introduction?

41. The commodity’s domination was at first exerted over the economy in an occult manner; the economy itself, the material basis of social life, remained unperceived and not understood, like the familiar which is not necessarily known. In a society where the concrete commodity is rare or unusual, money, apparently dominant, presents itself as an emissary armed with full powers who speaks in the name of an unknown force. With the industrial revolution, the division of labor in manufactures, and mass production for the world market, the commodity appears in fact as a power which comes to occupy social life. It is then that political economy takes shape, as the dominant science and the science of domination.

This is picking up on the financialization of capital as prefigured in 40. There's a sketch from one of the episodes of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle (which I looked for and couldn't find) which manages to get a huge laugh from saying: "remember... things? stuff that actually has a material existence" during one of his many satirical observational comedy routines. I think there's a general sense of 'how abstract things are' which this highlights and plays on, which is interpreted by Debord as being produced from/indicative of the operation of the spectacle.

I think this is another time to appeal to the good regulator principle. Political economy as a subject is producing economic models which, irrelevant of their veracity, are used to shape economic doctrine. Usually through think-tanks, rather than having politician-economist-philosophers. Those who influence politics through it are rarely in the news for people who're so influential; it's probably quite accurate to say political economy as practiced in think-tanks is the hidden dialogue of the ruling class, a 'science of domination and the dominant science'. I have a personal frustration here since even when the UK government produces an economic manuscript they don't provide anonymised or summary forms of the data for independent verification and analysis. It's pretty undemocratic, as the think tanks almost certainly have access to the data and thus can paint us reasonably informed citizens as unqualified to comment by fiat. Despite it being very likely that there would be considerable demand for productions dealing with the data in a government independent, scientific way.