I don't think it's about a 'soul' -- all these things are based on contingent social privileges, but they are ones I don't realistically see changing any time soon, and in fact they seem to be getting further entrenched. Maybe they have some non-accidental grounding in biology, but that doesn't mean it's essential.

Mostly I try to read what people write when they aren't in public and so don't have to save face. That's why I like the internet so much. And I read a lot of feminist literature too.

You're right, I don't really have anecdotes, because I don't (and try not to) spend much time around women. Some people might think that you're in a worse position to judge with less personally at stake. but there's a flip side to that, being too personally invested can make you refuse to see what might be obvious to someone without that investment.

What things have you read on the internet though? You've made sweeping statements about women as a whole (even if that as-a-whole is contingent etc etc) and I'm trying to understand where you're coming from.

I'm actually kind of digging how two or three disparate threads are woven uncomfortably together right now. I would like nothing better than for this thread to spiral into a giant dissonant mess of overlapping conversations that would make Apokrisis too irritated to enjoy fractals.

It's a tricky thing. You mentioned, justifiably, that anecdotal 'I know a..." accounts don't mean much. I have a whole bundle of personal women-who-self-sacrificed anecdotes but these will, inevitably, be chalked up as exceptions, falsifications, romanticizations.

But the flip-side of that, is how do you defend the idea that women, for the most part, deeply hate men, without resorting yourself to anecdotes?

Does it come down to whoever can rally the most anecdotes for their cause?

Where does your insight into the female soul come from?

That's a fair point. But i was being for real about typing-on-a-phone, I'm outta this bar in 5 & will reapond when I'm back home (just down the street)

Damn can I take it back?

Yeah idk I was willing to meet you halfway until the men-are-the-putty-of-the-cracks-of-the-world thing. Maybe. That stuff psychoanalyzes itself tho imho

That's true but "i don't know a.." backgrounds do kinda matter. I get the sense you don't know many women.

lol my gf is a marine. But I'll respond in full when I'm back home. Typing on the phone takes forever.

I mean I guess it depends on what you mean by glass floor. Most women probably won't be left to die alone. Because people will pay to fuck them (whether they want to fuck or not. If they won't sell, someone will sell them.) Maybe this is a class thing though. I've spent some time in low-level mental health institutions. You hear some shit there. I guess an affluent man could fall more easily through the cracks than an affluent woman.

It's interesting you think it's an essential gender divide. Men by and large don't hit rock bottom either. For every man that fell on the ancient battlefield, a woman was raped and sold into slavery. Those are two different ways of being alone, sure, bit they're both v lonely. I pass homeless women every day on my walk to work. One of Beckett's loneliest monologues 'Not I" was inspired by an old homeless woman walking alone. Idk, I don't really buy your distinction and not bc I'm a white knight or w/e

I definitely agree there's an Essentially-Alone/Defending-the-Place-That's-Rightfully-Mine divide. It just hasn't fallen along gender lines in my experience. More along sheltered/not-sheltered lines. It may just be that we inhabit different social milieus. Your schema works when I think about my Waspy paternal grandparents and their circle. My grandpa was ironic, kinda Beckett with a heart and my grandmother was ultra-judgy. But I barely know that world anymore. You may be right in terms of academia too, I'm not sure. Most of the women I've been close too were dis-sheltered early on. I think girls, especially in troubled families, are less protected from the realities of what's happening to mom and dad and the family. But most of the ppl I know are middle class ppl on the margins (wannabe poets and musicians and artists) with little prospect of a Career. None really sheltered.

It feels a little like you're conflating fuck-yeah tumblr feminism with women as a whole. I don't like fuck-yeah tumblr feminism either.

If you ask a woman what she thinks being lonely is, and a man, prepare for very different answers.

I don't know, most of the women I've talked to describe it a lot like this:

They feel fundamentally alone, not at home in the world, and are hurt because deep down they have (and feel like they have) nothing.

The best way I can try to put it is this. Men suffer in feeling a kind of existential displacement. They feel fundamentally alone, not at home in the world, and are hurt because deep down they have (and feel like they have) nothing. The best way I can try to put it is this. Men suffer in feeling a kind of existential displacement.

Do you think it's possible that you associate this existential displacement with men because you discuss these issues mostly with men?

Women have social safety nets available to them that make them live in a sort of bubble, never really experiencing the worst life has to offer unless they are violently assaulted or something like that. Men on the other hand can often expect to experience how bad life is just in virtue of being regular men....That's not the kind of thing I'm going to say in public, ever (men also can't talk about their suffering, unless in service of women), but I think most of us 'know' this pretty deeply. Men are the 'blue collar' gender, women are the 'white collar' gender.

Huh, yeah, I'm not going to scold you out of political correctness or anything like that, what's true is true, but what you're saying doesn't align with my experience. (I'm particularly confused by the suggestion that men can't talk about their suffering.) Do you have any sisters or many close female friends?

it turns out that when people settle down and their material circumstances are taken care of, they stop having children, and a stable happy society tends toward a birth rate that's lower than replacement.

Maybe one day we'll reach a point where everyone is settled down and all their material needs are met and they'll stop having kids altogether rather than reaching some equilbrium. I guess? It seems unlikely to me. And it also seems utterly unrelated to the pain of the antinatalists you mention. Why specifically cite the impoverished, the destitute etc when it seems like the key to antinatalism's success is being happy and well-off? Most antinatalists, imo, want their pain recognized.That's what it's about.

and they are mostly male...

I've noticed this too. What do you make of that? Wouldn't it make since that women who are downtrodden, unemployed, socially unskilled etc. would be equally antinatalist and pessimistic?

My reproach to the antinatalists and pessimists isn't that they're wrong, necessarily, but that denying 'the river' can only be a pose, even if sincerely meant. The river doesn't care etc. People will always have babies. It really fucking sucks to drown, but making sure to disapprove of the river while drowning isn't worth much.

This makes sense to me!

It's hard to be an antinatalist when your friends are all having kids though :’(

Do you mean to say that many pessimistic philosophers think that people should suffer, or that many pessimistic philosophers are wedded to their own dogma that people suffer more than they enjoy, and to their attendant dogma that therefore life is shit? — John

No, I think most pessimistic philosophers begin as sincere sensitive souls, who truly wish that things were different. But this kind of pessimism easily devolves (or calcifies) into a narcissism of suffering, of striking the pose of the the Saint in Agony. It's worth noting that Beckett, Cioran & Schopenhauer all had exquisitely maintained hair. I've mentioned that before, I think, here or on the other forum and I've also mentioned my favorite anecdote - Cioran's letter to someone or other about seeing Beckett on a park bench and being just bowled over with envy for how deeply he appeared to be in despair. Susan Sontag, apropos of Cioran, describes the pessimistic style as often veering dangerously close to a 'coquettishness of the void.' . One becomes invested in one's pose and routine, which begins earnestly, but which becomes a well-oiled machine that runs on examples and aestheticizations of suffering. To quote Beckett: ''I must have got embroiled in a kind of inverted spiral, I mean one the coils of which, instead of widening more and more, grew narrower and narrower and finally, given the kind of space in which I was supposed to evolve, would come to an end for lack of room"

(btw, re: Mother Theresa, "I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people." This is, for sure, perverse.)

The notion 'qualia' is itself not a naturally occurring, ordinary everyday idea, but an artificially produced, extraordinary philosophical idea, probably incomprehensible to, and certainly not spontaneously entertained by, most people. — John

Over on the other forum, somebody once characterized the invention of qualia (qua concept) as a dialectical response to eliminative materialism. Seems right. All that's really important about qualia is that, whoa, we actually do have qualitative experience which wouldn't be worth pointing out, because everyone knows that, unless someone started truculently denying it. Arguing with such a person, on their terms, is a fool's errand (like arguing with a solipsist) and can lead to desperate attempts to characterize consciousness in a way such a person might find palatable (though of course, they never do, and never will.) That's the real problem with qualia - that so many philosophers clumsily try to fit consciousness into a mould that doesn't make sense. Most objections to qualia are objections to the reification of consciousness, the idea of qualia as individual things. Obviously problems crop up when you use the language of substantives for something that's more like a verb (or adverb.) That's why the blue sky example misses the point, as Michael pointed out.

(By the by, much of what passes, in Dennett, or Churchland for the denial of consciousness is really the denial of a simple, unified, substantial soul. Dennett loves railing on the Cartesian theater. And that's well and good, but consciousness has been distinguished from a substantial soul for a long time, in many ways (one obvious touchstone here is Kant's antinomy re: the soul's substantiality which, for him, has nothing to do with the transcendental unity of apperception.) It's kind of the perfect sleight of hand. Conscious qualitative experience=Cartesian theater. Argue against the cartesian theater. Pretend you've thereby KO'd conscious qualitative experience. )

Yeah, I mean I'm not all that interested in taking this convo from the top. The disagreements at that level are vast, insuperable, built of other disagreements. You think ppl share no world, I think they do. Idk, I guess we just have different approaches. I don't think, at this point, we can benefit much from one another.

Could you cite some quotes from Dennett supporting this idea you're attributing to him?

Leaving aside our awareness of our awareness, we assume a gap between our awareness and "the" obscure totality."

I'm confused by the use of 'totality' as well as the scare-quoted definite article. Why not just 'obscurity?'

ha, I almost quoted that bit as well. The handbrake metaphor is perfect. I still drive with the handbrake on most days, to be honest. The notion that the transition from (a) to (b) comes from without seems very similar to the Christian concept of grace. Which means it brings with it Grace's attendant paradox - how can one open oneself to the gift, to grace, without already having grace?

No, only claiming that those who claim they don't have minds, don't have minds

Yeah, but it's a funny idea

How can you be conscious of qualia enough to 'get the myth' without being conscious?

How would you define qualia?

What's the phenomenon which Dennett interprets one way and qualia-supporters another?

Darth: Subjective, qualitative experiences.

But this is to say that some people interpret qualitative experience as qualitative experience (which is not an interpretation) and that others interpret qualitative experiences as non-existent, even as phenomenon (which would mean there would be nothing to interpret at all, rendering the very idea of interpretation nonsensical.)

The analogy to religion doesn't work so well. What we interpret when we interpret religion (qua phenomenon, with ourselves at a distance) is human behavior, speech, texts. If Dennett's giving an interpretation of qualitative experience, as you say, then he's already conceded the point. (Now Dennett does want to interpret qualitative experience in a way similar to the interpretation of religion. Hence his goofy 'heterophenomenological method.' But this means evaulating claims about qualia based only on third person accounts, on the accounts of others or self-as-other. Just the way a p-zombie would go about handling the problem, since for him qualitative experience is necessarily always somewhere else, somewhere other.)

[the human] must harness these same capabilities to create a cozy psychological shelter away from this threat. — Darth

I more or less agree with this (I don't think it all comes down to death though. I think shame and guilt do yeoman's work as well. I'm also a bit wary of 'cozy' since some people appear to find adequate shelter only in the expansive) But doesn't it seem, then, like self-esteem is simply a means to this end? It seems like shelter(space/home/sphere)-making is the primary source of human activity and self-esteem is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of shelter-making.

I agree, and can only see 3 avenues out: panpsychism, some revamped noumenal theory (though I don't know exactly what that would look like) or mysticism. Or some combination of the 3.

But why do people want to feel worthy or significant?

This quote in particular really resonated with me: "When anyone throws him-or herself into denial and lives it for an extended period of time, he or she can no longer tell when he or she is denying. When they lie to themselves, they erode their capacity for discrimination and discernment. They cannot identify their purposes in their conscious realized choices. (Recall that we began with conscious realized choices.) They cannot distinguish qualities in their own comportment. We say, a free and lucid person can declare his or her own priorities. A person who is captive must deny their own priorities, then have those priorities spewed in the open when they fall apart."

I've fallen apart once or twice and that's exactly what happens, - your priorities spew out into the open. It's horrifying. And then you look back over the last few years and see all the ways in which those priorities were operative, as if working through you, while you concocted a narrative - for yourself as much as for others - which concealed what was actually happening. Invariably, in periods leading to 'breakdowns,' I had been trying to maintain a faux-stoic self-image of someone who had no real needs.

So he seems dead on, on this point.

Oh yeah, I think it's definitely true, for Schopenhauer, that (re)presentations depend on (re)presenting organisms. In that bit I quoted from WWR in the OP, he's pretty explicit about that. But he also doesn't seem to really care about the paradoxes.

Yes, but you mention this as analogous to qualia. What's the phenomenon which Dennett interprets one way and qualia-supporters another?

I read about half and, while I mostly agreed and liked the ideas (a bit like a down-to-earth gloss of Being and Time ) it just feels so lonely. It has that sense of coffee (or speed) fueled all-nighters spent trying to put it all together.

I did read the article, which was lucid, but I wasn't sure how it tied in with the last few posts here.

The phenomenon is the same, the interpretation is different. — darth

hmmmmmm

lol I think it'd make a good Time cover story. "Could your children be having 'Experiences'?

Not just a little, but unabashedly psychoanalytical. Institutions (including, natch, academic ones) attract certain tendencies and then reinforce them. Vast echo chambers that not only confirm your beliefs but make it difficult to network or get tenure without doubling down.

(+ are you not making the same appeal to individual eccentricity by positing the existence of p-zombie types? As in "I don't think an entire cultural or professional tendency can be reduced to individual p-zombiehood, unless this is somehow common to a large number of philosophers" )

I think the answer is probably more like: people who rail against qualia
(1) have rigid self-images of being v serious, no-bullshit ppl (like more refined, socially respected, versions of those ppl who put darwin-jesus-fish stickers on their car)
(2) prob have a past of traumatic humiliation which they've tried to overcome via mastery of abstract language-games, to the point where they have trouble admitting there's anything outside the game. And so
(3) have a need - prob largely unconscious - to attack others who undermine the self-sufficient enclosure of their game.

Well it's obviously false that the majority of mainstream analytic philosophers profess to be p-zombies. But I see your point. I guess it's more that they move the goalposts.

One thing Dennett does a lot is give proust-if-proust-were-really-shitty sketches of e.g. watching the light play across the floor of his study. Or listening to some classical piece. (You almost expect him to nostalgically recount the twilight splendor of 18th century Versailles. When Dennett tries to prove he 'gets' the 'myth,' he always strives to be refined and delicate. Like Chaplin's tramp trying to appear a gentleman.) If he were really a p-zombie, the whole thing becomes almost a tragically beautiful pinocchio story. He's doing his best! 'Perhaps being conscious is like this? Is this not what it's like to see light? To hear music? See, I'm real!' Except I guess it would be a pinocchio story where pinocchio wants to be just real enough to prove that real boys are puppets too.