If someone is born, there is already an assumption that they ought to be born for some reason. — schopenhauer1

Well you know I don't agree.

By the way, ever read William James's "Is Life Worth Living?" Worth a look.

it fits within a broader theme — schopenhauer1

Sure, and one way to describe that theme is, "I have pretty severe depression and am not receiving treatment."

I wouldn't actually presume to diagnose Cioran from his writings. I won't pretend literature is the same as confession. And I'm not saying that if it were a known fact that Cioran had depression we ought to dismiss him.

But I also don't like pretending there isn't an elephant in the room. Philosophical pessimism reasons its way to a worldview that comes naturally, without the need of argument, to those unfortunate souls who suffer from depression.

I also don't claim pessimism is unique in aligning with affective disposition in this way. I just don't think we have a good way to talk about these connections and the need is most obvious in a case like Cioran's.

the problem already existing — schopenhauer1

Not exactly.

The original quote could be read as a sort of paradox: if you wait until you have a reason to kill yourself, you'll have an experience bad enough that you want to kill yourself, therefore the smart move is to kill yourself for no reason, before things get bad. Quit while you're ahead.

This "argument" does not claim that you have a reason to kill yourself from the moment you're born. It doesn't even say that you are bound to have one someday. It only says that if you have one, you've already missed your chance not to, and of course that's true.

I'm not sure it bears analysing. Strikes me more as gallows humor, suggesting that life is itself kind of a sick joke.

It's a tricky issue. In a sense all of Nietzsche's genealogical analysis works this way, and we live in an age where the ad hominem argument has gained a certain authority. I'm not itching to go down either of those roads.

But here we are. Cioran's words are pretty nearly textbook indicators of depression. If he'd had a good therapist and maybe some meds, he might have sung a different tune. What are we to make of that?

It doesn't make what he wrote untrue, quite the contrary, but it does add some context. For the anti-natalist, all that matters is that he suffered, and therefore his parents should not have brought him into the world.

We could say, what if we made sure everyone with depression got excellent treatment? Well of course we all want that, but do we all want a future where everyone is permanently happy and just the same? That's horrifying. But for the anti-natalist only the promise of such a dystopia could justify procreation.

Not sure I want to go wandering through this particular fun house again, fascinating as it is. I just found it peculiar no one had remarked on the obvious, and it does raise difficult issues of what we think we're doing when we do philosophy.

I wouldn't say that all those who hold this view are depressed. Additionally, even if this was true, it would not mean that their ideas are without merit. — DA671

Should have added some context, was referring to the Cioran quote schop posted, for instance:

The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know where that elsewhere is. — E.M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

Does it matter to our discussions if Cioran had depression? If Thomas Ligotti has anhedonia? I don't think it settles any of the issues, but might serve as particularly salient reminder that eloquence is not a reliable indicator of truth.

And while I'm loath to say that every philosophy is really just autobiography, it might only be the "just" that I object to, for surely it is also that. And so it is for our responses. We read the work, and ask ourselves, is this true? Cioran's account may strike a chord if you have experienced depression, but if not?

I don't know if this is just an issue of methodology or of substance. I suspect James was onto something when he spoke of philosophical temperaments.

It does strike me as silly to ignore the issue entirely, and discuss dispassionately, intellectually what is obviously a record of suffering.

This sounds like depression. Intellectualized, articulate depression, but still depression.

Not only that, but he has considerable support among Christian fundamentalists despite being a womanizer, a liar and a cheat, a man obsessed with earthly wealth and prestige, and from New York City of all places! I remember when Mike Huckabee published a book that opened with a story about going to a fancy restaurant in New York and they didn't even know what grits are. 'Nuff said. "New York" used to be code for "everything wrong with America". You might as well say "Babylon". And then they turned out in droves to support the quintessential New Yorker.

The most convincing explanation I've heard is that what these Americans practice is in fact an heretical offshoot of Christianity that is essentially a cult of masculinity. (Josh Hawley's new book is Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. He got the memo.) Trump fits that bill, despite having nothing else in common with these folks. You would think the Access Hollywood tape all by itself would be disqualifying to conservative Christians, but it certainly wasn't to these folks. That needs explaining.

It is deeply peculiar that so much of the current posture of the GOP can be understood as anxiety among certain people about the place of men in a changing world.

Consider the die example: When the die lands on 'six', you can't distinguish whether this outcome is from the fair die or the loaded one. — Pierre-Normand

But there are two sources of randomness in this example, the die and the coin.

Similarly for all analyses that treat SB's situation as describable with two coin flips. We only have one.

The halfer position comes back to individuation, as you suggested some time ago. Roughly, the claim is that "this interview" (or "this tails interview" etc) is not a proper result of the coin toss, and has no probability. What SB ought to be asking herself is "Is this my only interview or one of two?" The chances for each of those are by definition 1 in 2.

I'm undecided.

I am reading Descartes as saying will is freedom of choice — Paine

I've been following the discussion (without rereading the text, else I'd contribute) and this is exactly what I've gotten from the quotes posted. Will is the capacity to choose.

Were I always to see clearly what is true and good, I would never deliberate about what is to be judged or chosen. — ibid. Fourth Meditation page 38

And this very specifically says "I would not deliberate" rather than saying, "I would have no choice." There is a tradition of equating sin with error, simply mistaking the bad for the good. But Lucifer chose, knowing full well he was choosing the bad. Descartes sees here, correctly it would seem, a power greater than which none can be conceived, in its own sphere far greater than the intellect is in the field of knowledge. You do not get to choose which options are open to you; you do not get to choose that all your goals be perfectly realized; you do not get to choose even to stick by your decisions and carry them out; but the power of choice itself stands unopposed.

Is there another external agency, that counters the Linear momentum of the initial Cause? In billiards, the pool shooter is the First Cause, and subsequent paths of the balls are the result of momentum & direction (vector) inputs. I suppose you could say that the perimeter of the table "prevents" the balls from exploring all paths in the universe. But the table is a man-made object, constructed with intent to prevent or constrain degrees of freedom. — Gnomon

I don't think we need to talk about intentionality, or not yet, or not this way.

Ask yourself how your approach would change if, instead of just saying the path of the billiard ball is a result, you said that the billiard ball is constrained to follow such a path.

If you can get yourself into a Humean frame of mind, and imagine that almost anything could happen when one billiard ball strikes another, then you are ready to see the resulting path as a narrowing of this possibility space, as a possibility left open by the various operative constraints.

And there's a sense in which such a view is frankly statistical, as Hume's was. (Other antecedents would be the ideal gas laws and statistical mechanics, the statistical framework for evolution by natural selection due to Fisher, etc.)

That's how I understand this approach, in broad strokes.

You make some very interesting points I missed:

But then for the global constraints to survive, this free generation of local actions must also be reconstructing rather than eroding that larger world that is allowing them to exist by not ruling them out. — apokrisis

And of course they might not. Sometimes there are runaway processes and you end up with Easter Island. Thus:

The right kind of limiting constraints must evolve to produce the right kind of constructive actions. That is, the ones that rebuild the system of constraints in some general, statistically robust, way. — apokrisis

Which might not happen in one go, because at this level in the hierarchy there is also construction and selection going on. From the lower level's point-of-view, if they erode the constraints that enabled them, they're in for a paradigm shift, as the kids say.

So causality broadly is a unity of opposites – the partnership of downward-acting constraints and upwardly-constructing degrees of freedom. The overall goal of this system's causality is to discover a persistent dynamical balance. — apokrisis

But there's only one system that's so well balanced that it's stable, right? Namely the heat death of the universe. Every system of constraints must allow slightly more freedom that it really ought to if it's to become stable, because in the very long run all such systems are temporary and must seed their own destruction. The whole purpose of these temporary solutions is to waste as much energy as possible and then fall apart, right?

But then, as Wallace Stevens observed, "Death is the mother of beauty."

Systems that fall apart too quickly to be much help burning off energy are replaced by more complex and robust systems, but on the other side of that curve there's less to work with as you slide downward toward oblivion and the systems are again less complex.

There's a sweet spot -- like how much a dissident can get past the censors, or how much an artist can challenge convention. In that zone, the whole thing produces wonders that are only possible because they are temporary.

"Degrees of freedom" cannot construct. — Metaphysician Undercover

If I may... Step 1 to understanding @apokrisis is to swap the idea of "causes" for the idea of "prevents".

Whatever has happened is not what was caused to happen; it's whatever was not prevented from happening. Certainly for evolution, this ought to be obvious: variation happens wherever and to whatever degree it can, and insofar as one variation gains predominance in the next generation, to that degree there is some new constraint -- and new options -- as we go around again. Related mechanisms, which is to say, similar behaviors, can be found in other sorts of systems, without evolution's particular twist involving replication.

The gist of it is that -- particularly considering the time-scales and populations involved -- whatever can happen, will. And "can" here is glossed as "not prevented by some (generally top-down) constraint", and keeping in mind how change gets locked in, at least to some degree and at least temporarily, so we're never talking about everything conceivable happening, but only what is a genuine possibility under current conditions.

In this sense, yes indeed, degrees of freedom construct. It's their job.

(Pretty close, apo?)

In April 2014, he hired Hunter Biden. — Relativist

So what's the story on this? How much do we actually know?

The two explanations that spring to mind are both bad: (1) he was hired in an attempt to co-op VP Joe Biden ("Why come after us? We can be a very good friend to you..."); (2) he was hired as a sort of human shield ("You can come after us, but then your son is in the crosshairs too...").

No doubt Hunter was well-paid, but is there any evidence that either of these plausible intentions were realized?

Trouble is, even if VP Biden didn't back off, that's not necessarily evidence that he didn't personally make a deal with Burisma, or make one through his son: he might have made a deal and then broken it. Criminals often count on being able to get away with that sort of thing. (Which, according to Goodfellas, is why the mob existed, cops for people who couldn't go to the cops.)

If VP Biden were corrupt, it's hard to believe he'd want to advertise it by getting his son a job with the crook whose money he was taking. But that's not much of a defense, and sometimes people are dumb.

Here's one more unsupported theory: Zlochevsky was attempting to put a respectable sheen on his company, but misunderstood how status works in the US. "How can we be bad guys? We have a Biden on our board. His father is an important man, so we are respectable." Hunter Biden, as the child of a celebrity (albeit a political one), is not inherently respectable and untouchable; he's right out of central casting as a someone headed for big-time scandal. Americans, for all kinds of reasons, love to put the children of the famous through the ringer.

To me, it looks like Hunter and his Yale buddies Archer and (though less in this case) Heinz were just engaging in the typical eating-all-the-cookies behavior of elites. They don't have to be purposefully corrupt because opportunities to take more and more just keep coming their way. (Cf. Bush, George W.) He's far from the only guy in America with a history of addiction and infidelity, who might still be decent at whatever job he holds at the moment -- but he also happens to be 90th percentile.

A couple links:
Washington Post
Reuters

It appears he did file them separately, took them with him, and disputed with NARA over them. — NOS4A2

He also turned over at least fifteen boxes of material to the Archives in the first go round. Why did he do that if they were all personal records? The NARA discovered material with classification markings in these boxes and alerted the Justice Department, and yadda yadda yadda here we are.

There's still Congress, of course, but it's true there is some tension here, insofar as most of the executive branch was created by legislation, and that means the President is responsible for carrying out the will of Congress in many areas. He has other powers specifically enumerated in the constitution that do not derive from Congress, and all of this will obviously continue to be a matter of debate and litigation.

Personally I think the PRA is an excellent reminder that we do not have a monarch, but only a President, and he is subject to the rule of law like everyone else.

That's very helpful. Answers one of my questions.

Barr is a longtime proponent of the unitary executive theory of nearly unfettered presidential authority over the executive branch of the U.S. government. — wiki

If anyone would think the President has the sort of unchecked authority you think he has, it would be Bill Barr, and evidently he does not think so.

Remember that the main point of the PRA was to prevent a President from destroying documents.

Trump regularly shredded "both sensitive and mundane" papers while at the White House, at Mar-a-Lago, and on Air Force One,[11][12] despite repeated admonishments from at least two of his chiefs of staff and from White House counsel.[11] His aides had developed special practices and protocols early in his presidency to retrieve the piles of torn paper and attempt to tape documents back together with the help of staffers from the Office of the Staff Secretary or the Oval Office Operations team.[11][13] — wiki

If all he had to do to legitimate such behavior was designate it as a personal rather than a presidential record, the law would serve no purpose at all. Evidently Bill Barr does not believe that, nor did Trump's staff or counsel think that.

Maybe Congress did inadvertently leave such a loophole, and maybe no attorney or official who ever considered such matters noticed. I consider that unlikely, but we'll see. For now, the theory that the President can do whatever he likes with any document is akin to the theory that the Vice President can refuse to certify the votes of duly appointed Electors.

17. Pursuant to Executive Order 13526, information classified at any level could be lawfully accessed only by persons determined by an appropriate United States government official to be eligible for access to classified information and who had signed an approved non-disclosure agreement, who received a security clearance, and who had a “need-to-know” the classified information. After his presidency, TRUMP was not authorized to possess or retain classified documents. — Paragraph 17 of the indictment

We'll see. Presumably the federal grand jury and Smith see the law somewhat differently, or they would not have bothered indicting him.

They are his documents. — NOS4A2

Enacted November 4, 1978,[4] the PRA changed the legal ownership of the President's official records from private to public ... The Presidential Records Act was enacted in 1978 after President Richard Nixon sought to destroy records relating to his presidential tenure upon his resignation in 1974. The law superseded the policy in effect during Nixon’s tenure that a president’s records were considered private property, making clear that presidential records are owned by the public. — wiki

I'm not sure whether any of the documents in question count as presidential records, rather than some other type of government document, but it seems that if they are, then they are not his, as a matter of law.

I don't believe he was indicted for stealing documents, but for retaining them, hiding them, and lying about having them.

there’s nothing added by saying they have a character of this kind or that, which could only be attributed to that which exists anyway. — Mww

Do you want to take another swing at this? It sounds like you said predicating F of x says nothing about x because you can only predicate F of x if x exists. That's nonsensical. Of course x has to exist, but predicating is still predicating. --- I wasn't really thinking about predication, but now I just don't know what you mean.

How would we know the thing is only partially revealed? — Mww

Now that's a funny thing. You may choose to phrase it more carefully than I will, but the overall shape of that Kantian position is that something is revealed to us but something at the same time is concealed, namely how the thing is in itself rather than for us.

(Loads more, but I don't want to take on all of Kant all at once!)

It looks to me like you are trying to carve nature where there are no joints. — wonderer1

The boundary between an organism and its environment is surely salient though, and an organism works hard to preserve that boundary.

A house, by comparison, does not work to ensure its inside remains separated from its outside.

I'm pretty sure I remember an interview in which Hodding Carter suggested that classification is often abused. I think the example he gave was the Carter administration withdrawing support from maybe El Salvador (?) but not until they had secured a deal with Israel to fill the gap. And that deal was classified, not because America would be at risk were the details known, but because it would be embarrassing to the administration which was claiming to have a foreign policy focused on human rights. Carter suggested that every administration he was familiar with had classified documents they would merely be embarrassed to have made public.

That said, Jack Smith and his team included enough detail in the indictment to make it clear that there was genuinely sensitive information involved here, that this was not just a sort of "legal technicality" -- something like, sure these documents were pointlessly classified (by your own administration) and don't contain anything genuinely secret, but we don't like you so we're prosecuting you anyway. Not the situation, as far as we can tell.

And if I understand correctly, the Espionage Act predates our modern system of classification, and so applies even to unclassified documents if they contain sensitive material related to national security. Classification would function here primarily as an indicator that a document contains such material, but classification per se is not necessary. There are documents you would be prohibited from sharing even if they had been declassified. Is that your understanding?

That's fine. It's not what I wanted to talk about anyway. But leaving the example aside, which was meant to function almost as an analogy, the point remains: in saying that there are somethings that appear to us, or that give rise to impressions on our sensorium, whatever, we are saying something about those things, that they have this character of revealing or being revealed, and showing themselves to us is a potential or capacity of such things.

To imagine something is to imagine it revealed to you, or as it would be if it were, or to imagine it somewhat revealed and still somewhat concealed.

You can say that an object's concealment from us can be recast as a limitation of ours, that we cannot see through walls, say, and leave it that. But what of the object that is revealed to us, at least partially? Is it illuminated only by the light of our minds? Or does it participate in our perception of it, by showing itself in such a way that we can perceive it?

Does he? It's as simple as him saying "this is mine" and all the rules about handling and disclosure are out the window? I find that implausible, but if you have a cite, I'm ready to be educated.

It was my impression that some of these documents are considered property of the United States government, hence the issue being their "retention" and the requests from the archivist being for him to "return" them. You ask someone to return a thing when they have it but it's not theirs.

I wonder what jury selection is going to look like, in Florida of all places. Jury nullification is surely a serious concern for the prosecutors.

his personal records

It's just not the case that all the documents at issue are his personal records.

I'll have more time to look at your response tonight. A couple quick notes:

Can you explain why the payoff tables you've come up with are unsatisfactory to you? — Pierre-Normand

The fundamental problem is that your stake changes depending on which outcome you bet on. I know when I first looked at this five years ago, I ran into problems determining the true odds: you'd get an event that's 1:2 paying off like it was 1:3. Sleeping Beauty doesn't even out when you bias the coin.

But I'll look at it again.

The coin toss result determines the Tuesday awakening, while the Monday awakening is independent of it. — Pierre-Normand

I think the Halfer position is roughly that there are only two outcomes: a single interview conducted in one sitting, and a double interview spread out over two sittings. Those outcomes are equivalent to the two possible outcomes of the coin toss. (If you have an even-numbered population to work with, you can just do away with the coin altogether.)

What is the Thirder equivalent? If there are three outcomes, they cannot be equivalent to the two outcomes of the coin toss.

To get back to two, you have to add in [heads & Tuesday], and then split by sequence, like Halfers -- only now it's heads = awake-asleep, tails = awake-awake -- or by day, as you do here, heads = asleep, tails = awake, for Tuesday only.

That sounds plausible, but it's not what we want. Heads is not equivalent to asleep because you're awakened on Monday. More importantly, awake is not equivalent to tails.

We don't even have to get into issues about days and indexicals to have problems. (I like "first interview" and "second interview", but it doesn't matter here.)

You’re hinting at a limitation regarding the object (it doesn’t cooperate hence doesn’t appear) but I would rather think the limitation is in us, in that our physiology limits what can appear to us, re: only a specific range of wavelengths of light for visual appearances, etc., and also limits the effect that which can appear, has. — Mww

Let's stick with that example for a moment. What difference would our physiology make if objects didn't absorb and reflect and radiate certain wavelengths of light? If there weren't light for objects to do this with? Are you suggesting that color perception in us is an entirely "internal" matter, having nothing to do with the objects we perceive as colored? Nothing to do with light?

So there is no self, and there is no world. These are modelling constructs. What there is instead is a running habit of discrimination where we are continually dividing our phenomenal existence along those lines. — apokrisis

So the "owner" of the model is constructed by the model's very functioning -- it's not some pre-existing thing that then adds to itself a model by which it distinguishes itself from its environment. The running model is that distinction, and without it -- or at death -- there is no self to "have" such a model.

And we can call this a "holistic" approach to -- I guess "experience" as a big vague catchall? Or maybe just "life"? Something like this goes on anywhere an organism maintains its organization as a going concern, yes? It's just that not all organisms develop the additional capacity to "monitor" (non-homuncularly) this constructed self to some degree.

It all sounds broadly Heideggerian to me. ;-)

athletes who transitioned long after puberty, in some cases just a year or so before competing — Judaka

Has happened, sure, but I was genuinely surprised when I looked at Wikipedia how many associations have really gotten in the weeds with this issue, and a lot of them no longer allow this, even if they did in the past. Nothing is universal across all sports in all nations, but it appears to me that in mid-2023, there are in most cases considerable hoops for a trans woman to jump through before she can compete in women's sports. Having gone through puberty as a male is in itself permanently disqualifying for a surprising number of sports.

The FBI, the DOJ, are some of the most corrupt institutions ever created. — NOS4A2

Two questions, in all seriousness:

(1) Is your low opinion of the FBI and the DOJ independent of their performance in matters related to Trump? If you already had good reason to distrust them, or to distrust them with respect to certain sorts of issues, and if matters related to Trump presented such issues, then indeed you might infer that their actions with regard to Trump are suspicious. Is that your view, and if so what were your separate reasons for considering the FBI and the DOJ so corrupt?

(2) Many people would decline to give much weight to the accusations of someone's political opponents -- in Trump's case, Democrats, certain Republicans. That's understandable. But as I understand it, you consider the FBI, the DOJ, and the mainstream media also to be, at least in effect, Trump's political opponents, and thus similarly untrustworthy. Some people consider these institutions neutral, and thus trustworthy sources of truth. -- Within obvious limits! Institutions are big, have a lot of moving parts and involve a lot of different agendas, so we're not talking about perfection here, just overall, in-the-long-run sort of truth. --- Organizations like Reuters, the Associated Press, they seem to many people, me among them, to be by and large nonpartisan, impartial sources, if imperfect. But not to you, so what source of bad news about Trump would you trust? And, as with my first question, do you have independent reasons for finding that source trustworthy, and if so what?

There is a wrinkle here: sometimes people find bad news more trustworthy if its source is unexpected -- for a politician, for instance, if his long-time allies are the ones bringing the bad news, that might carry particular weight, not because they're neutral but because they were known not to be. In this case, however, only a small fraction of Republicans are likely to care what someone like Bill Barr says, because by saying it, he simply becomes an opponent of former President Trump and thus untrustworthy, however high their opinion of Bill Barr may have been before. It's just possible that there will come a time when a great number (and eventually nearly all) of Trump's high-profile allies and defenders lose faith -- as I recall, it took many months for Republicans in Congress to turn on Nixon after the Watergate hearings -- but since that's somewhat unlikely, my second question is hoping for a source you consider neutral and thus trustworthy, independent of any issues related to Trump.

Since you're still a committed Thirder, here's what bothers me:

(1) When a coin is tossed it has only two proper outcomes. (No leaners, no edges, and the usual ceteris paribus.) SB, upon being awakened, finds herself in one of three possible situations. But that doesn't work. A coin toss cannot, by itself, engender three distinct situations for her to be in. For instance, "for all she knows," this is her second tails interview; but there is no way to go from the coin toss directly to the second tails interview. Not without passing through the first interview. So SB's intuition that three things can happen to her requires there to be some other determinant of her situation; what is that other factor?

(2) The setup confounds wagering arguments. That won't matter much to a lot of people, but it's uncomfortable. Annoying. Ramsey used Dutch book arguments from the beginning, and despite their limitations they can be clarifying. Each time I've tried to construct a sane payoff table I've failed. I've wondered lately if there might be a conditional wager that comes out rational, but I can work up enough hope of success to bother. Partial beliefs, within suitable limits, ought to be expressible as wagers, but not in this case, and that blows.

probably would've been if people weren't afraid to speak against this movement — Judaka

Before crowning some trans activists as secret monarchs of the world, it might be worth glancing over Wikipedia's article about the issue in sports. Things have happened you may disagree with, other things you agree with, but it should be pretty clear that sports associations have not universally rolled over when someone is mean to them on Twitter. It's complicated. The rules rule-makers are coming up with are complicated, and many associations are on their second or third attempt at this point. Of course trans activists have some influence, but that doesn't mean everyone is just following their orders or something.

Things-in-themselves can be inferred the possibility of sensations in general a priori. The thing as it appears, and from which sensation is given, makes the non-existence of that particular thing-in-itself impossible, re:

“…. For, otherwise, we should require to affirm the existence of an appearance, without something that appears—which would be absurd….”

Transcendental analysis of the conditions for human knowledge doesn’t care about ontology; all that is represented exists necessarily, all we will ever know empirically is given from representations, therefore all empirical knowledge presupposes extant things. — Mww

But there's something else, and it's right there in your quote. (Is that Kant?)

What we know about the somethings the existence of which we infer from the possibility of experience, is that they are the sorts of things that can appear, and, in particular, can appear to us. That deduction works both ways: Kant had the idea that we can treat the objects of perception and knowledge as conforming to us, rather than us conforming our minds to them, and that's fine, but it also means that those objects must cooperate, must be capable of cooperating, of appearing to us, of revealing themselves to us or being revealed to us. Not as they are "in themselves", of course, but we know better than to expect that; but if things appear for us, then they must be things that can do that, and do.

There is moment here, of elevating epistemology to first philosophy, and leaving ontology as, at most, the matter of what is only formally posited by the theory of knowledge. I'm not convinced that works out. Look at what is posited. It is not the empty place-holder it was supposed to be, but is rich with its own structure of revealing and concealing, without which the formal description of knowledge hangs in the air.

law does not, cannot, precipitate any human act whatsoever; which is why all our jails are wholly overcrowded, i.e., the requiring law which the prisoners supposedly broke is not, cannot, be determinative of human action...but the convicting judge thinks the law determines him, and, that it must necessarily determine, by its stolid requirement, the other fellow too... — quintillus

You don't need Sartre for this. Compare:

Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. — Thoreau

It was not my intention to misrepresent your views.

Have a nice day.

Self starts where the world leaves off, and vice versa. — apokrisis

That's convincing as it stands, certainly, but could you say something about D'Amasio? I've only just started the book, but the summary is that not everything has a mind, and not every mind has a self, that "self" is a particular sort of process found in some minds but not others. He's talking about self-consciousness, the kind of self you can be aware of and introspect, I believe. Jibes with your general approach or heading in some other direction?

Here's one more ridiculous comparison to clarify the difference between Where am I? and What am I? (if it's even relevant to Sleeping Beauty): the Chomsky-Foucault debate. Chomsky wants to know how we got here and what we can do about it, and all he needs is reason, plenty of careful analysis. Foucault, steeped in the hermeneutics of suspicion, doesn't believe there is a neutral faculty of reason which could deploy a battery of neutral concepts like "justice" as if they were not compromised, even tainted, by history and capital. Chomsky's concern is that we don't understand where we are and how we got here, Foucault's that we don't understand what we are and what we're doing.