that's def one way to look at. I don't know though. 'Essence' isn't sitting right with me. Not just for theoretical reasons.

Which philosophers claim to be p-zombies?

To put it another way: Kant and Schopenhauer's transcendental categories are indeed the necessary conditions for Kant and Schopenhauer's phenomenal flux, but then, couldn't this experience of flux be supervenient on earlier experiential forms?

The transcendental, as I understand it, refers to the (non-'existing') necessary logical/structural conditions for the possible existence of a certain class of entities/events (usually 'phenomena') Stepping outside of Schop, for a second, I don't see any a priori reason why transcendental conditions can't develop and change (unless one posits a single possible form of experience.)

Well, after thinking about this for a minute: the world-as-idea that Schopenhauer puts forth is (obviously) super Kantian and so, like Kant, sees space and time like a cartesian grid where every point is equivalent to any other.* This way of looking at space and time only developed very late and doesn't correspond all that well with actual human perception. It's a construction developed out of reflection and retroactively imposed. Maybe the answer is that space and time (the world-as-idea) develops along with everything else, in stages.

*I should mention I've never read the appendix criticizing Kant, only the main text of WWR Vol. 1 and The Fourfold Root (though that was probably 3 years ago now? It's faded quite a bit, as has much of WWR)

But again, I do not think this answers the question. How is it that representations come out of nowhere at "x" particular time? — schopenhauer1

Yeah, I don't have an answer for that ( primarily because I don't think they actually do come out of nowhere at x particular time) but I don't think Schopenhauer does either.

The best I can do is gesture toward that mobius-strip panpsychism I mentioned above. But I really don't know.

A disturbing quote to this effect from Schop.: "...the will must live on itself, for there exists nothing beside it, and it is a hungry will." Schop's favored image of how the world works is one animal eating another. Since we are all objectifications of the same will, it is literally eating itself (and people in harming each other are aware in a vague and traumatic sense that they are harming themselves). — tgw

Two of my friends used to have a running joke where they'd compete to come up with the worst Coors advertisements. One of them made this one:

noooooo :-#

Allow me to strategically salvage my point and say it seems as though Schopenhauer is internally conflicted about what, precisely, he means.

One possible way to solve this is to say that each micro-level change has an Idea but this is more of just a notion. I haven't fully developed it.

My understanding of the Schoplatonic ideas is that they're bound up intimately with capacity. To understand the 'idea' of something is not merely to contemplate its appearance or structure, but to know how it would act or react under different circumstances. This is why he has recourse to Malebranche's theory of occasional causality. It seems that microchanges in an organism wouldn't lead to a new Idea unless they reached a critical mass and changed the ways that organism would act in a given situation. (Perhaps the critical point in a phase transition would be a better metaphor than 'critical mass')

I like TGW's rainbow-over-a-storm metaphor. But it suggests the Ideas are concomitant with - yet of another order than - the phenomena. Schop's picture feels a little murkier.*

The force itself is a manifestation of will, and as such is not subject to the forms of the principle of sufficient reason, that is, it is groundless. It lies outside all time, is omnipresent, and seems as it were to wait constantly till the circumstances occur under which it can appear and take possession of a definite matter, supplanting the forces which have reigned in it till then. All time exists only for the phenomena of such a force, and is without significance for the force itself. Through thousands of years chemical forces slumber in matter till the contact with the reagents sets them free; then they appear; but time exists only for the phenomena, not for the forces themselves. For thousands of years galvanism slumbered in copper and zinc, and they lay quietly beside silver, which must be consumed in flame as soon as all three are brought together under the required conditions. Even in the organic kingdom we see a dry seed preserve the slumbering force through three thousand years, and when at last the favourable circumstances occur, grow up as a plant. — S

Here, he speaks as though there is always this otherworldly matrix of possible 'clashes' between forces (as well as of possible resolutions-through-subjugation-of-parts in higher ideas) and that these possibilities are actualized through the will's development in time.


----------------

*FWIW I prefer TGW's metaphor which echoes a passage I've always liked from Deleuze's Logic of Sense:

"For if bodies with their states, qualities, and quantities, assume all the characteristics of substance and cause, conversely the characteristics of the Idea are relegated to the other side, that is to this impassive extra-Being which is sterile, inefficacious, and on the surface of things: the ideational or the incorporeal can never be anything other than an 'effect'[...]These effects are not bodies[...]They are not things and facts, but events. We can not say that they exist, but rather than they subsist or inhere (having this minimum of being which is appropriate to that which is not a thing, a nonexisting entity.) They are not substantives or adjectives but verbs. They are neither agents nor patients, but results of actions and passions. They are 'impassive' entities - impassive results. — Deleuze

Concretely: for a long time my driving-force was being interesting in conversation and making people laugh. It was like a social categorical imperative for me. I got more and more depressed to the point of a pretty bad breakdown and painfully, laboriously came to understand how that drive had prevented me from actually bonding with anyone. That changed my approach to living a whole lot. I used to abhor the concrete and the banal. Now that's mostly what I try to focus on (though it still feels very awkward). Like a brand new conatus almost. Or maybe I iust had more insight into what I actually needed.

I've never quite understood what Spinoza meant by perfection or reality. But I do agree that joy and sorrow are intimately related to our capacity to act. I guess I see crisis as requiring us to change something that was hitherto part of our essence, or at least somethig that was a central part of the way in which we'd been desiring. We can only return to joy if we change ourselves, I mean. This is my experience at least and I guess I'm weird enough it may differ from the experience of others. The language of winning in a battle against sorrow strikes me as a kind of resolute doubling down on one's identity which for me always seems to make things worse. Then again I'm somtimes bad at standing up for myself IRL.

Oh god not another Fallacy Hunter. Wiki pokedex in hand, scouring the plains of the internet for specimens in the wild. It's like playing soccer with someone who sees the game itself as a means to the distribution of red cards.

@Pneumenon I wonder if it comes down to temperament. I suffer from periodic irruptions of depression which usually aren't triggered by anything in particular, so I've struggled with neat and crisp theories of joy and sorrow. They just don't reflect my experience. I'm drawn more toward those accounts that emphasize spiritual and emotional crises whereby ones values and coordinates are reconfigured - I suppose you could call these synchronic rather than diachronic shifts. Spinoza seems to put a damper on this because he's installed a rigid structure that only allow for simple x-causes-joy, y-causes-sorrow accounts where events plays out deterministically in time while everything else in the metastructure remains the same.

I think @Agustino is right here and that Spinoza's system is a construction, borne of suffering, that wants to be seen as a deductive discovery. It feels a bit like an ark whose inhabitant pretends there was no crisis which led to its construction,to the point where he pretends there's not even any ocean, just an eternal encompassing structure.

Yeah, that's def the sense I got from you (hope it didn't sound like I was suggesting the opposite.) Would you be willing to share what he's articulated for you?

So this is the thing - I get what makes him historically interesting. And I give him plenty of kudos for his courage and iconoclasm. But all that stuff, for us, is a fait accompli . To read that kind of stuff now is to be preached to as the choir. It could be mildly pleasurable, I suppose. It seems extremely boring to me though. There's no challenge in it for us 21st century readers. I feel like the appeal has to go beyond that, to some ingenuity in the Ethics . I just can't find what it is.

Edit: so Pneumenon above has mentioned liking Spinoza because he feels like he's always agreed with him. I don't think there's anything wrong with that per se. It's a matter of whether someone articulates stuff you've felt but couldn't quite put into words vs someone just saying something you already agree with (and perhaps bolstering with facts or arguments). The former I'm into, but the latter feels hollow.

Most philosophers - those that you have mentioned - are interested in Spinoza, surprise surprise, not for ethical reasons, but rather for his metaphysics. They want to take over Spinozist metaphysics because it avoids the difficulties of substance dualism, and is a coherent backbone for explaining the whole of reality, which accords physical science a fitting place. Furthermore, it is largely immanent, which means that it can allow them to dispense with God and/or the transcendent. — Agustino

Is this really all the metaphysical interest boils down to? Because this is so boring. What's the stroke of genius that makes Spinozan immanence interesting?

The ethical stuff you cite, it doesn't sound all that different to me than some of the stoics. I can see the appeal, but not really the originality.

Also, bringing in reaction and self-caused - nothing to do with it at all. In fact, I never talked about self-caused or sui-generis creation...

No? So you think the cause of being lies outside itself? Interesting, wouldn't have guessed it

Creation | Torturing a serial killer
Creative | Destructive
Self-Caused | Response

Think about this for a second.

Non-being, you say, doesn't exist. There is nothing to destroy.

Good/being, you say, are defined on their own terms. Whence their primacy. Evil and non-being are only defined by reference to good. If we think of creation in terms of triumph or retribution, then we are thinking of good and being as being dependent on evil and non-being, which they require in order to triumph over.

In your metaphor, being does not have primacy, as you've defined it. This metaphor doesn't work man, I'm sorry. The metaphor rewrites everything you claim is important about being/good in terms of its opposite.

Creation is destructive of non-Being on a metaphorical level. That's what primacy or triumph of Being over non-Being means.

Well, all I can do is say, one last time, A destructive response is the probably the worst metaphor I can imagine for a creative self-caused act, because everything about the two is antithetical. I guess that doesn't seem to bother you, but I still have no idea how you think it works as a metaphor. But, hey, I guess there's nowhere to go from here.

Okay. I'm not keen on panpsychism generally, sine it seems like a cop-out in the form of another retreat into the familiar or quasi-solipsism (I can only understand something else existing if it is 'like me').

Yeah, when I try to think about panpsychism, I try to think of it by analogy to the onset of (certain) psychoactive drugs: adjacent moments, though different, are at least mutually intelligible. But the final state, the peak, is so unlike the beginning as to be unintelligible from its vantage. Again this is only a crudge analogy, because the difference between different 'levels' of consciousness would probably be much more dramatic.

The difficult conceptual twist is to think of this dependence without any ecosystem or larger picture.

I agree, (though i think ecosystem-like patterns crop up, for a time. There's just no great chain of being, no super-ecosystem. I wish I understood set theory better because it seems to offer some good metaphors.)

I still don't get it Agustino. You appear to be using 'primacy' in two very different senses. In one sense, apropos of being and creation, you assert that being (and good) has 'primacy' because we can only have a sense of non-being (or of evil) through comparison to being (or good.)

In the case of torturing an serial killer, an evil act elicits a response. The only sort of primacy, here, is a primacy of strength. Once, again, this simply does not work work as a metaphor for creation. This is what you're saying: A destructive response is a renactment of a creative self-caused act

Not all the way down, no, Schop. is explicit that presentation is only applicable to sentient creatures, and is an outgrowth of will which is prior. It's also not quite a split, in that presentation just is the objectification of will (though confusingly, Schop. calls it also 'toto genere distinct' from it)

Yeah, I know it works this way for Schop, I was speculatin' for myself there.

No more than me saying the sun is a golden ball does violence to it by suggesting you can play soccer with the sun...

Well, 'golden ball' is a good - if boring - metaphor, because the sun is both (roughly) golden and spherical. A black cube, for instance, is not a good metaphor for the sun. While metaphors, quite obviously, are not Identical stand-ins, they need to share something essential with the thing they're a metaphor for (etymologically, they need to transport some sort of meaning.) Your serial-killer-cum-creation metaphor seems to be of the 'black cube' sort. I can't see how a retributive response is a good metaphor for sui-generis creation. Can you explain how your metaphor works and why it's a good metaphor?

No that's almost the opposite of where I'm going with this. Naturally, there couldn't be a moment before creation. That's the point. It's the metaphor of triumph itself which relies on something preceding creation that must be triumphed over.

Serial-Killer-torture-as-metaphor-for-creation-as-metaphor-for-primacy-of-being does violence both to this:

1. Goodness is the standard of itself and of the bad.
: In other words we start from knowing the good, and then, only in comparison, discover the bad. — Agustino

& this

Pure Being has no opposite (non-Being doesn't exist)
: results from an understanding of Being and non-Being — Agustino

It may be 'just a metaphor' but, as a metaphor, it suggests a view of being and good antithetical to the one you profess to propose.

The point of all this is that you have this assertion of the primacy of good, but all you seem to talk about is retribution and retributive metaphors. There's a disconnect here.

No it doesn't make sense at all, literal or metaphorical. A reaction is a bad metaphor for an absolute creation.

Yeah, but then it's a really terrible metaphor which doesn't make sense.

Being has primacy over non-Being as I have stated. Myths of creation imply this primacy of Being over non-Being. — Agustino

Yeah, but what I'm saying is, if you're right, and being has primacy over non-being, then the torture of a serial killer doesn't make any sense at all as a 're-enactment of creation'. The serial killer's evil acts are what solicit retribution. To attribute this kind of retributive triumph to 'creation' is to imagine creation as a response to an evil which it overcomes. If this is what creation is like, than evil would necessarily precede (or, at the very least, be coeval with) good, which you have clearly stated is not the case.

It kind of leads to an implicit answer of contingency. There seems to be something contingent in the world of Ideas, but then this introduces an idea of radical contingency not radical Will behind things, or at least, it would seem so to me. Why must this non-space/time/causality be limited or manifested in this way, and not another? Will just automatically creates this and only this type of world of Idea with a space/time/casuality — schopenhauer1

Yes yes yes. That's my other stumbling block with Schop's account. When consciousness bloomed into being, it would have to have bloomed already-situated within a certain 'world' (used in the broadest possible sense.)

There's something irreducible here. I wonder if it's a 'will'/idea split all the way down. A kind of panpsychism that (like those escher hands someone posted above) always relies on something outside of consciousness, which in turn relies on it. I really don't know though

I sort of had trouble understanding his explanation of how an illusion of world-as-idea does not need to be explained

He's gestured toward an explanation in that we gain a modicum of mastery over our pathe by instrumentally externalizing them. He's also gestured toward an emotional/traumatic explanation of externalization as a way of evading our inner turmoil. But these are just gestures and, though I have a lot of sympathy for these ways of looking at things, I don't think such broad indications constitute adequate explanations.

I don't know if you've read all of this thread, but I cited a study in which infants deprived of human contact are severely developmentally disabled. They seem to have trouble mastering their pathe. That's why I think the caregiver-infant relationship is a good place to begin investigating how the world-as-idea comes about (for an individual at least.)

(FWIW My way of approaching the issues of world-generation stems philosophically from a base of Kant, Hedeigger, Deleuze & Zizek, but more specifically from my current engagement with the work of (the contemporary german philosopher) Peter Sloterdijk. I admire Schop's lucidity, elegance & eloquence but I personally get more from Kant+Schelling, where, crudely, the former is world-as-idea and the latter is world-as-will. I like Hegel a lot too, but he takes a lot of effort, and I've barely scratched the surface. My approach stems experientially from my current participation in transference-based therapy, where transference is purposefully triggered in the purpose of dismantling it in order to create a shared space)

The delusion that we can do something which wipes past injustice from the world is the only way he can avoid the glare of the nasty truth: we cannot do anything about injustice; when injustice occurs, the moment is spoiled forever and nothing can fix it.

Yeah, Agustino's marriage of retributive justice and enlightenment philosophy baffles to me to no end.

Yes but would you disagree that your limitless 'black hole' is a threat to society that society must eliminate by assuming control over it?

No, I wouldn't disagree. And we can have control over him or her by putting them in a maximum security prison. I think torture is a turn-of-the-screw (pun intended) that stems from psychological - not social - needs. Even if we have control of the serial killer, just the fact that he's still there, man, how chilling. Even killing him doesn't quite do the trick. But by torturing him, we (delusionally) feel as though we can transmute the senseless and uncontrollable into the eminently controlled. Just like the hero gets a victorious rush cutting a single head of a hydra.

There can be no "senseless violence" without first there BEING something. So the creative act of existence is prior to the evil "senseless violence" that happens always after this fact

Crushing the serial killer re-enacts the moment of Creation - the triumph (or primacy) of Being over non-Being, hence the catharsis that is derived from it.

I'm having trouble reconciling these two quotes. How can crushing senseless evil be a re-enactment of the moment of creation if there could be no evil before creation? If the moment of creation was a triumph over something else, which elicited its wrath, then what it triumphed over would have to precede creation. (Idk if you've read Schelling, but if you want some fascinating discussion of the paradoxes of evil and creation, he's your guy.)

I agree wholeheartedly about those empathetic conversations. I live for those.

Yeah, this just another chapter in a discussion TGW & I have been having for years which might account for the feeling of an inside language. I agree that there's a lot - a whooole lot - of personal experiences more or less impossible to convey to others. But I think there are shared things, otherwise we couldn't interact with one another in the ways we do.

TGW has a model or metaphor of being which I understand as something like a churning stew of passions (TGW uses the term 'pathe.')Pathe always have a 'mineness.' I only experience my pathe. Over time these pathe are painstakingly, and largely unsconsciously, molded into the 'world' phenomenologists speak of. The 'world' I experience (think also of Schop's world-as-idea subjected to the PSR) is nothing but my molded passions and as such has no reality of its own. Its kind of an iceberg-tip that many people forget relies on an iceberg base. I think this is mostly good but that it's difficult to get from this to people sharing - to limited extents - worlds. I think the answer is that the world-forming of our passions is largely sculpted by others, and that this begins with the infant-caregiver relationship.

At this point TGW seems to me to be avoiding the problematic of the shared by saying its possible - in principle - that that when people do stuff like play basketball not all of them actually see balls and hoops. They are in "sync" but, in their own experience, are doing wildly different activities. I agree that this is perhaps possible in principle but have trouble taking it seriously, in the same way I have trouble taking solipsism seriously.

Oh, I agree, though it took me a while to understand that. I went through a thing of reading everything David Foster Wallace wrote (except for Broom of The System, which was boring to me.) And then talking to other people about DFW. And that drove it all home.

But sometimes people do get each other, briefly, and that comes from collaboration. And, sure, even getting-each-other, in these situations, contains a distance. As you say, this allows for novelty.

But as lonely as all the basketball players may be, they still see basketballs and hoops.

For me this isn't the goal (everyone is the same and we all see the exact same things so there is no loneliness), but a starting point. This makes me interested in understanding how people come to share, briefly, certain environments. Or how they're able to engage in each other in conflict.

It's worth saying that from childhood to high school, the idea of my being like other people was incomprehensible. I always struggled to interact. I had plenty of friends but really only felt comfortable with them when we were playing video games or something like that. It got worse in high school where I used hallucinogens and experienced periodic bouts of non-hallucinogen related derealization and depersonalization. I wrote a lot of short stories then, and in my early twenties, about enclosed worlds where people behaved according to strange rules, and in dialogue made strange associations - all of which was meant to suggest their having some dark but inaccessible understanding, but never showing quite what that was. Have you ever seen that movie Dogtooth? College was difficult because so many of my classmates were wealthy upper-middle class types who seemed to get each other and how to interact with each other in a way I never could.

That there exist insurmountable gaps between people was an emotional axiom for me long before it became a philosophical one, which it remains. It's precisely that giant gulf between everyone that makes the ability to share things so interesting.

For those of you who are drawn to Spinoza, would you be willing to share what makes him so attractive? I just can't get into him, I don't know what it is. Deleuze is one of my faves and he raves about Spinoza. Continental philosophers love him, scientists love him, historians love him, even analytic philosophers seem partial. But idk I just don't get it.

Hence the purpose of it is to preserve the sacredness of the Justice system and of society - without it, a severe threat exists, which manifests through the behaviour and actions of the serial killer which threaten the security and stability of our society. Hence why I emphasised that it is almost a transcendental problem - nothing else matters for society BUT destroying such a threat.

You could put the serial killer in maximum security, or kill him if you like. He can't hurt anyone then. What your proposed remorse-yielding torture does, on the other hand, is transubstantiate the limitless 'black hole' of senseless evil into a determined, limited object over which we can exert absolute control.

you must certainly think love is a feeling, whereas I think love is a movement of the will

Well, I think part of love is a feeling. I think love is very complex and made up of all sorts of things - memory, respect, dedication, empathy, trust, frustration, fear etc. Will's a big part of, but I would disagree that love simply is a movement of the will.

Rather the problem with infidelity is that it is a DECEPTION

There are lots of kinds of deception, but infidelity appears to be particularly irksome for you. So I don't think the deception aspect in-and-of-itself is what gets your goat. I'd pose that the reason this particular deception is so painful, especially without remorse, is that the person disgracing and dishonoring you is the same one you've grown to trust with your most powerful feelings.

I disagree with this. You have a very technological interpretation of the world. My interpretation and worldview is poetic, and for me, sub specie aeternitatis, good triumphs. There can be no "senseless violence" without first there BEING something. So the creative act of existence is prior to the evil "senseless violence" that happens always after this fact. That is why, sub specie aeternitatis, and logically speaking, evil can never be primary - rather good always is. And this further exacerbates the problem of the serial killer. We feel it as a threat not only to society, but to the nature of the whole of existence!

I'm not sure what you mean by my interpretation of the world being technological? There are many types of poetry and in many of them good does not always triumph. I think I have a gallery of competing poetic worldviews (and a few scientific ones). Sometimes they harmonize and stay a while as hybrids, sometimes they clash and I feel an emotional or philosophical drive to try to work it out.

Creation doesn't strike me as inherently good. I think you'd have to unpack your reasoning a bit. And if, sub specie aeternitas, good always triumphs, then how can there be such a thing as an actual threat to the nature of the whole of existence?

What's troubling to me is that you can't conceive of sharing without it becoming engulfment - and this to the point where you can't give a straight answer about whether you actually believe other people see basketball and hoops.

That the other people see hoops and basketballs hardly means we are basically the same people. There's all sorts of distance between us in a million ways. But when we play basketball we still see basketballs and hoops.

Work me through " I think other people see basketballs and hoops when I play basketball with them" -> "I want people to be reducible to me."

I don't think this option is open, because the position being outlined here isn't compatible with solipsism. Solipsism is a transcendental position, which is against the spirit of the sort of 'outside' and blindness I'm talking about. This is something that it shares with realism, as many authors note. Ignorance, even systematic ignorance, is not the same as denial.....But there does [have to be others], because as I said, I'm utterly dependent on what's beyond my control.

Sure there's your pathe blob over which you have little control. And there's no one else with pathe blobs.

[quote}The Socratic tradition requires that ideas be tested internally on their own merits. If what you said were true, then the discussions had in the Theaetetus could not have happened, or to the audience would seem unintelligible. But they aren't. [/quote]
That they're able to collaboratively test arguments on their internal merits at all, requires that they be able to communicate.

I don't think you can argue it. You can say it, which is not arguing it.

I wanted to know how it's possible for a basketball game to take place, where different players see the same ball, the same hoop. You have a hard time saying whether you believe different players see balls and hoops. You believe people sometimes play basketball with one another but you can't quite go the whole hog of thinking they all experience hoops and basketballs.

If you wanted to talk to someone about coercion and inter-affectivity they could, at any time, simply deny the existence of others. You could lay down sophisticated theories of intersubjectivity to which they can reply, 'oh that's all very true, that's exactly how i'm able to (quite unconsciously, naturally) to create the sense of there being other people.' Love-proxies for the infant and basketball-robots - there doesn't have to be anyone but you tgw. Your move that maybe people don't all see a basketball and a hoop when they play basketball is the same thing as the solipsist's move that all people are his projections. If you need proof, I guess we can really laboriously go through the drama of you explaining your theory of intersubjectivity to me while I pretend to be a solipsist.

A solipsist is boring because (barring mental illness) he pretends to deny what he in truth believes - that there are others - in order to defend a theory. Your hand-wringing over basketball is boring in exactly the same way.

Philosophy, in the socratic tradition, requires shared experience which renders possible the discussion and critique of various particular beliefs. You can't have a socratic dialogue if you don't have multiple people who understand the same language. There's no 'Republic' if Socrates and whats-is-name don't have that mutual understanding of being-wealthy which sparks the whole thing.

I don't believe you believe the other players didn't see the ball, the hoop. You can say that's beside the point. Well. I can argue I'm the only conscious being in the world and there's no such thing as inter-affectivity and coercion and the blind fountain or any of that. How can you argue against that?