I think you are forgetting the context of the discussion, which is preserving ways of life. In that context, the past is very much a foreign country. Of course the past influences the present (though in an ambiguous way, as I would argue elsewhere), but you cannot use that fact, which is admitted by every sane person, to preserve ways of life as they existed in the past.

There is a formal argument that collective decision making as such is impossible. I linked you to a page explaining why. I suggest you go through it. As for cultures, I explained the reason why I think it is not possible to preserve holistic ways of life with the full signification that they carried in the past. As a liberal, albeit an immoral one, I am not in favor of forcibly wiping out cultures either, so I don't understand the argumentative relevance of your example.

(Edit: For example, you can force the members of your society to outwardly conform to certain modes of your conduct, but even then, what you will miss is the element of spontaneous self-expression that those actions stood for in the past. The same actions that once represented freedom will now be an expression of arbitrary tyranny. What is the proof of this? Simply that in the past, people naturally acted in ways that you now require an totalitarian police state to enforce. Without totalitarianism, people would no longer act in those ways.

Since you are powerless to force people to naturally act in the ways you want them to, you will necessarily lose the signification that actions stand for even as you play the puppet master and force others to dance to your tune like marionettes. This is why naturally experienced cultural signification is impossible to save for posterity. The past is a foreign country, and it must necessarily be one.)

(Edit: This may not be clear from what I said above, but when I say I am a "liberal", what I mean is that I want citizens to have equal opportunities in all respects that are unrelated to skill. This necessarily involves wealth redistribution, since a certain level of poverty takes away such opportunities, and so on. The purpose of this plan is to make citizens responsible for their own successes and failures, and that is the meaning of freedom.)

It is not a matter of faith. As I have explained, fair evaluation is a presupposition in our use of the word "knowledge". When we call something "knowledge", we are thereby insisting that it can pass a test of fair evaluation under ideal conditions.

I don't think experience as such is knowledge. Experience enters into knowledge when it is organized into proportional tables that can pass tests of fair evaluation:

1. Suppose you feel that X is the case. This by itself does not constitute knowledge that X is the case. I think we can all agree on this much. If that were not true, then everything I said would constitute knowledge because I felt that everything I said is true.

2. But suppose you feel pain. Does that constitute knowledge that you feel pain? I would argue that only to the extent that it is represented in the tables I mentioned above. Suppose a little kid says, "Ow, that hurt!" and an older kid tells him, "That's not real pain. Wait till you go through XYZ." I think there is an element of truth to that answer when interpreted literally, and here's why:

The little kid's experience counts as knowledge insofar as it is represented in a table of his past experiences. The older kid's answer says that once more experience has been accumulated, the past experience will be dwarfed to such an extent that it will no longer pass a fair test asking the question, "Is this experience really pain?" In this way, both sentences carry a degree of contextual accuracy.

As for the argument I gave, it makes perfect sense to me. Perhaps it would be helpful to point out specific objections, since the "doesn't make sense" line can be applied to literally any argument. For example: "Calling experience knowledge doesn't make sense" is not a proper counterargument to your claim, etc.

I don't believe that it is possible to preserve culture because culture doesn't exist in a vacuum. Cultures are necessarily in a state of competition. Ways of life that outperform others will filter into less active societies as we've seen throughout history.

It is not possible to empower the working class for the following reason: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/economics/#5.2

Regarding life as such, I don't believe in the existence of such a thing:

1. Science no longer believes in vital principles or vital energies. Therefore, that kind of life doesn't exist.

2. As for life in the sense of "everything", I believe in the Godelian chain of argumentation that there is no universal set. So life in the sense of totality doesn't exist either.

This is why I think that word should be analyzed into the distinct entities referred to as "life". I tried to answer the question in the case of two popular definitions of "life" I see floating around.

: Thanks. I want precise criticisms of my assertions because I'm trying to eliminate inaccuracies and make the theory as generally applicable as possible. For example, since my statements are not incompatible with physics in principle, in what specific way could the theory interfere with an accurate understanding of causality?

I want my philosophy to sincerely reflect the aspiration to express something universal about the human condition from my particular point of view. I don't want it to become a dogmatic assertion about my authentic self-expression that no one has the right to criticize, or a universal dogmatism that everyone must accept regardless of the circumstances.

Thanks, everyone.

: Well, if we are sticking with Lacan's terminology, "enjoyment", as opposed to "pleasure", corresponds to what feels like the Real, the essential constitutive substance of one's way of life. In that way, it seems to me that the desire to enjoy is very close to what people seem to want when they say they want to express themselves more authentically. The problem is that when whole societies devote themselves to living out what feels to them like their collective self-expression, rational observers not altogether inaccurately describe such people as fascists, cultists, or if they are very civilized, then relatively decent fundamentalists like the Amish and other peoples who live off the land for psychologically similar reasons. Those are the kinds of people who forego "pleasure" to "enjoy" themselves exclusively.

: That is a possibility. Nothing I said is incompatible with physics as we understand it today, but we can't be too careful about loss of accuracy in our understanding. I'm trying to come up with a subtler set of distinctions. For example, I tried using the idea of pre-commitment to courses of action in order to render nebulous futures determinate, but I'm prone to distraction. So the state of this theory is more of a sad reflection of my personal failings than a faithful depiction of the nature of the world, and it is intended to be understood as such.