What do you believe, tgw, did the other players see a hoop, a basketball?

I don't know. There's no point in denying it under any pubic circumstances, but I don't see how I could have any idea.

But what do you believe?

I edited my post above, earlier, after you may have already read it. It's possible you're the only one who experienced the game of basketball as a game of basketball, with hoops and balls. That people describe similar experiences - whether in literature or journalism - seems to me a good indicator we share similar experiences. Though, again, it's possible, I guess, that each soldier who fought in Normandy had a wildly different understanding of what was going on (one was fighting a mantis to protect his eggs, one was hiding Salvia in a gatorade bottle from an art-class substitute, one was skateboarding in an abandoned warehouse, one was storming a beach under heavy gunfire). And the words those soldiers used to recount wildly different private experiences, despite sounding similar, had nothing to do with a shared experience. Maybe. It's possible.

But what do you think, in your heart of hearts. When you were playing basketball with the other ppl, did they see a hoop, a basketball. What do you believe?

When you write on philosophy forums, do you think you're talking to other people who use the words you write in similar ways? Do you think you can communicate with them? If not, why do you do it?

What do you believe? Do the other players see a hoop, see a basketball?

How could I know? And what does it matter?

I'm going to ask you again, point blank, do you think the other players saw hoops and basketballs? If you don't want to answer that, that's fine. But if you're not willing to share your actual beliefs, I don't think I can honestly engage you in this conversation.

Let's bracket the question for a moment and ask a more basic one. Instead of 'do they,' ask 'would they need to?' If not, then of course the fact that they play isn't necessarily evidence that they do.

Yeah, maybe they don't. (Hopefully there's no reporter with a shit assignment who asks each one to describe what the basketball game was like afterward. The variances would be wild. Or I guess you could do that thing of maybe what I see as orange, you see as purple. Maybe what I experience as playing basketball, you experience as masturbating in the desert while v scary ghosts try to stop you bc unejaculated semen powers their memory-wars...But we both describe those different experiences using words like 'hoop' and 'basketball') I'm going to ask you point blank: Those childhood memories of playing basketball - Do you think the other players saw a hoop, saw a basketball? Or was it just you? Can you please honestly answer this question?

Now ask, do symbiotic creatures need to see 'the same things' to interact, or even depend on each other to live?

Definitely not. And?

I think the similarity is exaggerated

Yeah prob. But you can only exaggerate if there's something to exaggerate. Otherwise it's fabrication, not exaggeration.

I think you're getting lost through fidelity to your theory. People play basketball together. They all see a hoop. They all see a basketball. Do you sincerely doubt this? (And please please please that these hoops and basketballs could be unsubstantial projections is implicit here)

Well I agree that being coerced ultimately hinges on our unawareness of how we're being coerced.

What I want to say is this. For a basketball game to take place each participant has to illusion (makeshift verb) in a similar way. There's the ball, the hoop etc. This is a clear condition of possibility for a basketball game's taking place. If you want to claim that each player in a game doesn't have a very similar hoop or ball projection, I'm gonna say I straight up don't believe you believe that. Almost any cooperative endeavor necessitates our experiencing similar worlds which, (I labor this point only bc I feel you require me too) need not have independent ontological integrity, outside the pathe of the collaborators.

You make it quite clear that objects (not-objects, nobjects) are nothing but externalizing-processes which we use to try to escape our inner turmoil. That's fine. In that case we externalize many things in very similar ways.

I think this raises the interesting question of how this is possible. And I think the answer lies in the fact that the infant can't grow to project a robust world unless a world-projecting being lovingly inducts him into one.

@Agustino I kinda like 'lyin csalisbury,' it makes me feel like a old school gangster. I'm sorry that I misrepresented your willingness to admit error.

It seems like what you object to most about the serial killer is (1) he doesn't feel remorse and (2) his atrocities are senseless. I think (2) is scary because it bars us from doing what we normally do in the wake of trauma - tell a story that explains what happened. Explanation yields understanding which yields the sense of control that the trauma suspended. If you understand what happened you feel more able to prevent similar traumatizing irruptions in the future.

But if an adequate explanation of an outburst is impossible, then we can at least find some solace in the source of that outburst being as horrified as we are. His or her horror would signal an impulse to stave off any repetition of what transpired. Evil wouldn't be an infinite wellspring but an abberration which recoils from itself and self-corrects.

The serial killer offers neither palliative. He's a mute black hole which is unreachable. (The scariest version of Satan I can imagine is an old man (or young child) in an enclosed chamber, totally still, eyes wide open, transmitting evil into the world, but unreachable through language, almost insentient). He's an ineradicable black hole in those meaning/explanation-generating stories which make us feel safe and in control. Torture isn't about reforming such a person. It's a last resort in a control-crisis, a way of turning that black hole into an object over which we have total power.

The response to infidelity without remorse is similar. It's a panic response to the realization that love is never guaranteed and can always withdraw, no matter how perfectly you strive to deserve it. The desire to punish is an impotent wish to scare love so it will never leave us again.

The thing is, you can torture as many serial killers and punish as many adulterers as you want. But that won't stem the problem. The world itself is a ceaseless and remorseless generator of senseless violence. Serial killers, if you like, are 'places' in which being reveals itself utterly denuded. (Tho the sacred does the same, in a different register.)

Yeah, but I'm not really looking for an account of intimacy rn. I'm still trying to understand how intersubjectivity (or inter-affectivity) works at all. This is the thread I'm really interested in -->

csal: how can he 'coerce' his teammate unless his teammate projects him coercing?
tgw: He just needs to cause certain spasms in the teammate that prompt him to move, and he can do that by moving.

I'm still trying to reconcile this with the idea of each person being their own blob of pathe which never intersects with the blobs of others. Their pathe have nothing in common. How can his pathe cause spasms in my pathe? The video game metaphor is still very confusing to me -video games relies on inputs and shared interface. Since you don't want anything shared, I guess you need to have each user to input directly into the other's pathe. How?

How about something like a local, immanently generated, field of resonance which 'attunes' pathe to one another? If everyone's in a locked room with no window (for the 'window' is an illusory there-ing which (pretends it) externalizes the purely internal), I don't see how anyone could ever coerce anyone else?

Yes because there is something highly aggravating about doing a wrong and then not admitting it. But I have proposed torture in this thread for the worst crimes (probably 0.0001% of all crimes) - NOT for adultery for that matter. So again, you are a LIAR. — Agustino

They don't even see it is wrong. This is absolutely terrible, absolutely! At least in the past, because they feared it, they knew it was wrong. Now they don't. Many act as if it's their RIGHT to commit adultery if they don't like it anymore. That's just insane (not to mention uncaring, selfish, and virtually all the other vices). There's very few things more reprehensible than such an answer, and it deserves the same kind of punishment that a psychopath who kills and rapes a young girl, and then mercilessly feels proud and unapologetic of it in front of her family in court deserves.Such people deserve torture, and gnashing of teeth until they beg for mercy (in other words until they repent and feel sorry for what they have done). Same category of sin - the murdering rapist and the self-righteous adulterer — Agustino

I would respond to your other points, but I've been sufficiently shamed and must withdraw to nurse my wounds.

Longtime friends who give each other space would be the ideal setup.

I've felt this same way for a while. I think good marriages are this (though they're probably rare.) I've had this fantasy for a while of coming into money somehow and buying a big house and building cottages around it where all my friends (and me) can stay. Everyone has their own cottage. The house itself would be the 'public' place where people go when they want to hang out with others.

Whether there's an interface doesn't matter....You have reactions that lead to inputs on both sides, but no real 'communication' or common space between the players that keeps this together.

The interface doesn't matter? Can you imagine a fighting game without a graphical interface? I mean, I've gotten good enough at a few video games to understand you can reach a kind of flow where you may be totally unaware of e.g. Ryu's headband because you're so immersed in the rhythm and intricacies of the fight itself. But if the screen (and the shared graphic interface) dies, the game's over.

Just like English speakers can all articulate 'r' differently and never realize it, yet coordinate a language without having to sync up their mouths.

Yeah, as long as there's some shared experience everyone's in on and wants to talk about, the differences in 'r' articulations are lost. But the thing is that coordination requires something shared, even if its only a directedness.

I don't know about that. I played basketball as a kid, and I never 'projected' anything when people passed to me. I more just knew how to move my body.

Weird, I played basketball as a kid too and was always quite consciously aware of where the other players were and who had the ball etc. In terms of catching and throwing the ball, yeah, I just knew how to move my body. But that was always integrated with the conscious awareness of where others were. Maybe you were just a better basketball player than me. (Or maybe - though I hope not -this is that thing, again, where I try to use you terminology, in your sense, but all of a sudden you respond to those words as though you've never used them in special contexts)

Insofar as the whole world is a game, very little of it is kept going in this way (cooperatively & with mutual understanding).

If a basketball game can take place, one's metaphysical model has to be able to explain how that's possible, even if it's rare.

I'm beginning to think arguing with Agustino is a fool's errand. I don't think I've ever seen him change his stance based on input from others on a forum (a change of opinion has to be sanctified by a genius like Spinoza or Wittgenstein). He slices up posts as though they were bound and prostrate sinners, joyfully, vehemently eviscerating each cornered isolated point. You sometimes get the sense the big picture is less important than the systematic doling out of punishment to each fisked sentence, using whatever's at hand. There's a barely restrained sadistic anger coupled with omnipotent fantasies of brilliance (he said somewhere he felt 180 proof was almost at his level.) He says women who cheat shouldn't be surprised when they get their heads bashed in.I'm calling narcissistic personality disorder (of which there is a common religious/moral variant) with psychopathic tendencies (everyone knows the stereotype of the serial killer obsessed with punishing the sinful wanton woman. It's worth noting the occasion for this thread was his comparison of adulterative unrepentant women to unrepentant murderers over on the LBGT thread. "Do you understand what you did was wrong now!?") I recommend preemptive torture as a curative. (Or at least a safe and consensual S&M partnership to redirect and release.)

an order arises without connection and sympathy

No angle with this question, just sincerely curious. Do you think connection and sympathy exist at all?

Yes. That was the point of the AI fighting game example. All that you need is for two people to make the appropriate motions, and those motions can be triggered by private affections.

I still don't understand the video game example. It seems like a weird choice, given what I know of your view. In a video game, there's a graphical interface which is identical for all players. Various players provide input through their controller or keyboard, and this input can have no have effect on the inputs of other unless these inputs are mediated by that shared interface. This is the model you want to use?

To take a very simple, concrete moment of a basketball game. One player passes the ball to his teammate. One player has to project another player passing the ball. But the player passing the ball, in his own blob, can have no effect on the projections - or blob -of the other. Or he can, through 'coercion'. But how can he 'coerce' his teammate unless his teammate projects him coercing (e.g., in this case, sees him pass the basketball?

They affect each other and maybe they rely on each other in important ways, but that doesn't mean there's any common arena in which they meet, or that they have to realize this relationship is happening or take it to be such a relationship. You respond as you do the same way as you would if alone.

How do people affect each other if the 'blobs' don't intersect? I honestly don't understand how you reconcile nothin-but-pathe with this interaction. It seems unintelligible to me.

Don't symbiotic creatures have to be in sync? Yet they do what they do alone, without awareness of the other.

Do you think people can play a basketball game without awareness of each other?

Well, you made the claim that basically everyone is a practical solipsist almost all of the time. I don't see the demonization and dehumanization of one's enemies (which is a sad thing but something different) or reacting irrationally to getting bumped into on the sidewalk as particularly compelling evidence for pervasive practical solipsism, but maybe we're just tuned to different frequencies.

Yeah, basketball, like many sports, can get byzantine, so let's suppose a simplified version. You work with your teammates to throw a basketball into a hoop and against the other team to make sure they don't the same.

I can understand your blob model when imagining people doing things on their own. In a basketball game, it seems very clear to me that it's necessary at every moment for the participants' projections to be in sync in very specific ways. And the projections of the audience, who can't foresee the course of the game in advance, seem entirely reliant on the projections of the basketball players, who, along with the ball are the game.

People's projections all seem incredibly tied to each other's in this case. For the players to play, they have to be in sync. For the audience to watch and understand, they all have to project something similar (they can talk to each other about this or that play) and be constrained by the actions and projections of those playing.

I'm assuming the 'blobs' of one person, for you, don't connect to the blobs of other people. So, like, what's going on?

Nota Bene: Saying that one need not suppose a common space or a 'transcendental glue' isn't an answer, but a restriction on what the answer can be.

I'm not sure how interesting it is that you could replace people in the crowd with robots and no one would notice. I'd notice if you replaced my coworkers, my bartender, my family, my friends, my barber etc. etc. Am I exquisitely attuned to the depths of any of those besides some friends and family? Not really. I think there's a substantial difference between that and practical solipsism. This is a move you make a lot. Either people are super-empaths deeply emotionally attuned to the plumbless depths of everyone or they're practical solipsists. Psychoanalysts call this way of thinking "splitting."

I don't understand the point you're trying to make about RTS AIs being hard to distinguish from human players. I'm asking you to explain, using your blob-model, how a basketball game works, which you still haven't done.

do you think all babies that grow up without being loved are developmentally disabled? Perhaps it makes life harder not to be loved from an early age, but this strikes me as an implausibly strong claim.

Actually, yes. There's a famous study by Rene Spitz, following infants raised in orphanages, who had their basic needs met, but had minimal human contact. Nearly all of them were severely developmentally disabled.

I think for the most part people live as practical solipsists in day to day life, and only attribute to others the bare minimum they need to interact with them

By practical solipsists, then, you mean people who neither think about the vast complexity and deep humanity nor form deep connections with the people they interact with in passing?

Again there's a question of whether you need a common model to show how interactions work. For example, does a symbiotic creature act any differently from a lone one? Probably not -- most have no idea that they interact with another organism or depend on it for survival at all, yet the symbiotic relationship works just fine. There is no transcendental 'glue' holding these things together. It's not that it works because of some commonality, but rather that on observation we see a commonality because it works.

It seems to me that an organism that has no idea its interacting with other organisms is a poor metaphor for what goes on in a basketball game. But that's fine if there's no 'transcendental glue' holding everything together. I'm not asking you which ways of thinking about a basketball game are bad. I'm asking you to provide your own account

Could you maturate a child appropriately in a simulacrum of the appropriate heat and sound?

Probably not. Babies (even newborns, even hours-old newborns) seem to need (expressive) faces. I think that suggests the baby needs something they experience as an emotional source, a bestower, not just a touch or soundwaves. I think you can have a sense of a source without quite having a theory of mind.

So, then I guess the question would be whether you could maturate a child appropriately in a simulacrum of appropriate heat, sound, and faciality. Maybe with really sophisticated technology and a lot of research? (My hunch is it would take a lot of work to learn all the nuances babies are aware of, just as we're only recently begun to understand the nuances of how the infant appreciaties the maternal face)But, I think that, even in this case, it would remain a (very primitive) I-thou relationship. Or, perhaps more accurately a [jumble of pain/pleasure/hunger/fear/love/]-thou relationship. In a similar vein, the 'test' of a turning test is precisely whether it gives you the sense of someone 'there.'

As I said, the model just reflects one person.

Right, but my sense is that this model begins to disintegrate as soon as you try to try to apply it to intersubjective situations, especially cooperative ones. So, for instance, could you give a sketch of how to extend your model to account for a professional basketball game (two teams playing and an audience)?

Off to work, but, quickly, I edited my above post to point out that infant's needs involve affection, not simply food. You may disagree but you've got an uphill battle against just about every developmental psychologist out there. They need love coming from somewhere else.

And quickly, regarding Deleuze, I think its important to extend the same charity to the metaphors of others that we extend to our own. Deleuze explicitly addresses your concern about space. I agree that the Deleuze quote is hard to understand, it's got something of the avant garde manifesto about it. But I think he's saying a lot of the same things you are. And he's probably saying some things you're not, and you're probably saying some things he isn't. But, then, that's what it's like reading or talking to anyone, even those whom you have a lot in common with.

And I certainly don't mean to suggest that we get to escape the 'ultimate loneliness,' only to suggest that the pain of that ultimate loneliness derives from a memory of connection, and that the experience of it usually involves others. Cioran & Thoreau write for the public, the anchorite looks to God, you post here etc.

From my understanding, a lot of serial killers and sociopath had really awful painful childhoods. They began with torture. It seems like the actual reaction to intense physical or emotional pain isn't increased empathy but a kind of spiritual and emotional disembowelment which makes one even more detached. Have you been in intense pain before, Agustino? In my experience, intense pain is all-consuming. You can't think about anything except the pain, much less other people.

Do you think it would also be just for the perpetrators to be raped, as they themselves raped?

I like the 'blind fountain' concept. It reminds me a lot of Deleuze's 'rhizome'

A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles[...] A rhizome has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature[...] Puppet strings, as a rhizome or multiplicity, are tied not to the supposed will of an artist or puppeteer but to a multiplicity of nerve fibers, which form another puppet in other dimensions connected to the first: "Call the strings or rods that move the puppet the weave. It might be objected that its multiplicity resides in the person of the actor, who projects it into the text. Granted; but the actor’s nerve fibers in turn form a weave. And they fall through the gray matter, the grid, into the undifferentiated [...]The wisdom of the plants: even when they have roots, there is always an outside where they form a rhizome with something else-with the wind, an animal, human beings[...]a rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model. It is a stranger to any idea of genetic axis or deep structure[...]A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo[...]The tree imposes the verb "to be," but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, "and . . . and . . . and. . ."[...]American literature, and already English literature, manifest this rhizomatic direction to an even greater extent; they know how to move between things, establish a logic of the AND, overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings. They know how to practice pragmatics. The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle.- A Thousand Plateaus — Deleuze

I do think that you can do away with a 'common arena' but still have 'connection.' I think back to my improv days or of my yearly xmas gathering with friends, where we go to a rural camp and drink and 'shoot the shit' and everyone kind of syncs to a rhythm of joking and telling stories. Jam sessions or Jazz. In these settings each person's contribution becomes a source for someone else's -and all according to an immanently generated rhythm.

I don't think we're born alone. Or at least - we're born always looking toward someone else. Usually Mom takes the role. It's true that there may be no one to fill the role. But then the baby dies. Importantly, this is not just about being burped or getting fed. Infants need a kind of subjective source of affection - they need to mother's face, mirroring etc. Being able to be alone comes much later, if we survive infancy. And even then the way we're alone always involves someone else.

Anyway, this is what I was getting at with the 'transitional object.' The model as presented in your picture is utterly solipsistic. But the actual human infant depends on the pre-existing projections of someone else in order to themselves project. And so forth all the way down.

I think the difference is a first-person/third-person thing.

If you say 'there is a cup,' under normal cup-being-there circumstances, you mean 'there is a cup.' You generally don't mean 'I think there is a cup' unless you're also engaged in second order reflections on your own beliefs, on the nature of knowledge, etc.

If someone asks you if they can go to the kitchen and get some water, there's an obvious difference in meaning between saying 'there's a cup' and 'I think there's a cup.'

If someone observing from afar - who has no interest in the situation, who doesn't need a cup or need to know whether there's a cup for any personal reasons - were to describe what's happening when a person says 'there's a cup,' they might then say something like oh 'he thinks there's a cup.' Though even then, they'd only say that if they were analyzing the statement in a certain way.

I also agree with Agustino that "I agree there is a cup" is different than saying 'there is a cup.' That's because the addition of "I agree" makes it performative. To say "I agree that x" is to enact that agreement. Of course it would be nonsense to say 'I agree that x' and 'not-x'. It would also be nonsensical to say both 'whales eat krill' & 'whales don't exist.' But 'whales eat krill' and 'whales exist' don't mean the same thing. Something can logically entail something else, such that the falsity of the latter guarantees the falsity of the former, but that doesn't mean they're the same thing.

Serial Killers, and rapists of the like I mentioned above aren't most people. Most people would also regret killing someone and the like. Serial killers don't. What makes you think they'll act like most people? Scientifically you CANNOT draw this conclusion, there's not enough evidence, nor theory to support such a hypothesis. — Agustino

I want to make sure I'm understanding your line of thought here. Torture won't make most people feel genuine remorse, just an urgent need to stop the pain. But since serial killers aren't like most people, and don't feel remorse for satisfying their heinous desires and easing their torturous pain, then.....maybe, unlike other people, under torture they'll feel genuine remorse instead of merely wanting to stop the pain?

Just ribbing you about the adultery thing. Obviously, I think such a person should be tortured brutally. Preferably on national television. With Slayer performing live. Xtreme Justice (brought you to by mountain dew.)

I don't think it's a shortcoming of an account to say 'I don't know how it works' if that is the correct thing to say. The purpose of good epistemology is not to make up stories about what we know, but to give an accurate account of what and how we know [...] But that doesn't mean we just don't talk about it. It's important to enrich and flesh out these new metaphors. — tgw

I agree. I also think it's good to hypothesize and say 'maybe it's like this' and then see how well the hypothesis stands up to scrutiny. But I sometimes feel like you take the more severe approach of suggesting not only that you don't know, but that we can't, in principle know - and that it any case it doesn't matter.

Well if your questions are allowed to be naif why can't my answers be? I can only give back what I get. If you have things you really want to ask, really ask them then. — tgw

I suppose that's fair. I thought it would be better to try to work things out according to the immanent logic of your account, because you tend to be immediately dismissive of anything else.

Does the picture not make that intelligible?

no no no, of course the picture makes it intelligible. It was intelligible before the picture. What I'm objecting to is what appears to me a reluctance to apply your model to concrete examples in good faith by arbitrarily precluding certain language and metaphors that you yourself have recourse to.


What's the blind fountain?

What about porn conventions, are they allowed?

How'd the deception affect the relationship?

His crime doesn't sound all that horrendous to me. Now, if he had been married when he pulled this stunt, well that'd be another matter.

but I would leave the porn sites free though — Agustino

What kinds of porn are allowed in your republic?
Are porn stars in your republic allowed to be married?

Ever been cheated on?

Yeah, tbh, I totally understand - and have understood - this model. And it admittedly had an elegance-in-its-inelegance - i think of it as a tgw version of the holy trinity. It has its own self-contained inner logic and the proper response to nonbelievers is a reiteration of how it works. The problem for me is that the model is very bad at explaining the constraints -especially intersubjective constraints - on how the pathe can form, of itself, worlds and processes. My approach has beena faux-naif attempt to ask questions that draw out these limitations. And the response is generally a host of qualifications that actually contradict this model. But when I try to highlight that this is happening you assume I must not understand your basic framework and reiterate it using exactly the same language your qualifications would forbid.

To take just one example: you stated admantly that pathe do *not* generate objects. & now, in your language, both identity and the world 'grow out' out of the pathe. When I try to ask pertinent questions, you immediately split semantic hairs. But if I try to meet you on that plain, I learn quickly that these are just metaphors and ways of talking that give out eventually.

Let me a bit cheeky and say that this reminds me a lot of how realists talk about the 'real world' when confronted with its limitations.

I also think you might think I'm trying to reinstate a naive idea of the cosmos as already-there. I'm not. I'm with you half the way. Your model strikes me as kind of island of the lotus eaters. A pleasant stop that denies anything outside of it and offers a promise of release (here you might say no no no the pathe are agonizing brute facts whether there's world or not. But the kingdom of god is always just offstage). If I argue vehemently against you, it's because I'm arguing also against the part of me that wants to deny in order to salvage the elsewhere. How's that for solipsism

Ok, thanks, that's what I was looking for - the wherefore of your vehemence. I agree that intimacy and loyalty are important and ought be cultivated.I think we probably disagree on the effect lgbt parades have on those values, but I don't want to argue about it now.

Ok you finally discovered that arguments cannot help us choose the right/correct premises [lol - cs] (and by the way, this wouldn't be the way I'd state the argument, it's a strawman of my position but regardless), and some other practice is needed. This is good, but all I'll say for now is that it equally applies to your position!

What position? Darth put forth the argument that allowing transgendered individuals to use bathrooms historically designated for those who were born as the opposite sex would create physical danger for the latter. He also put forth an implicit argument that gay parades are only justified instrumentally, as ways to combat existing prejudice. That's what I was responding to.

Of course you can infer that I'm probably pro gay-parade (which I am, though I personally don't enjoy parades, because they manage to be loud and boring at the same time) but my position has nothing to do with the arguments, which I'm approaching on their own terms. As to the bad argument equally applying to a pro-gay parade position - well, obviously. Any position has the potential to be poorly defended with bad arguments of that type. That's why I don't make those kinds of arguments to defend my positions.

Now, your problem with gay pride parades appears to be two-part. First, in some yet-to-be-explained way, they contribute to a burgeoning social evil that threatens social order. Second, they're part of a concerted campaign to make cisgendered heterosexuality a minority position. Can you expand on these fears in more concrete terms?

Sex ought to be a private, not a public affair, simply because over-sexualisation, and sexual obsession are socially and personally harmful. — agustino

Yeah, 'obsession' over anything is harmful.& I've never met anyone as obsessed with sexual mores as you :P

"collective projection" is not the same thing as harmonious totality. I'm with you on emergence vs top-down. In any case projection, as you describe it, is an individual's non-generative formation of not-world out of pathe which is analgous to psychological projection in that its used as a crutch except that it can't be explained as the individual non-generatively-projecting as a way to satisfy its needs bc they're not omipotent. I still have no idea what projection means. I know you think the world is an illusion but that's about it.

Darth said he was against LGBT parades in places where people were LGBT-friendly, implicitly suggesting that the purpose of LGBT parades is to fight entrenched prejudices. My analogies were in response to that line of thought. Obviously these analogies don't hold up as well against someone who's against LGBT parades because they're against LGBT values. Your argument is that LGBT parades are bad because LGBT values are bad. It's an argument in form but all it boils down to is that you don't like hypersexualization, your opinion.

Things that affirm LGBT values are bad
LGBT parades affirm LGBT values.
Therefore LGBT parades are bad.

lol

Stating that one deals with private matters and one deals with public matters is simply to state, once more, that you don't like LGBT values. LGBT values, as I'm sure you aware, include being able to express one's sexual identity publically without fear of recrimination. That's like the core value.

So, again, I'm not sure what the substance of your post is other that you don't like gay parades and people who have the gall to not want to be shamed for wearing short dresses. You're certainly free to have that opinion, but if you want to persuade others to share it, you have to do more than simply express it.

What I'm trying to understand is how you reconcile the non-omnipotence of the subject(ed) with the inescapable subject-object (subject - objecting-of-the-there) overtones of 'projection.' You've agreed that we're quite constrained in how we can project. I think these constraints are the interesting point. The 'object' upon which the infant projects the non-object of security is, in your words, a 'reflection' of other projections working themselves out. So, too, it must be for the mother who gives the baby the blanket or the bear. And so forth all the way down. If one wants to stick with the term 'projection', it seems that projection is always social (or at least intimate) and that each individual's 'projections' are a share in a collective projection.

If you like, to be under an illusion or delusion is to be involved in this kind of unhealthy, unhappy, or self-defeating conviction or practice. — The Great Whatever

In my experience those practices or convictions which lead most to unhealthy, unhappy or self-defeating modes of existence are those that hamper one's ability to connect to others. You often cite fear of the inner by creating an outer. I think it's just as easy to be scared of the outer.

(1)Believing too firmly in the absoluteness of things can both keep at bay the outer and others. Whether one cites the One, God or Nature, the idea persists that there is some higher power which keeps everything in its place. This externalization of meaning and creative power makes actual intimacy difficult.

(2) But intelligent people start to see the cracks. (Or rather intelligent, disappointed people do.) But how does this play out? There's the old-testament prophetic route, where one gets obsessed with the eventual destruction of the cities, like a man who knows the bridge is compromised and awaits the train that will bring it down, like the trumpet that will bring down Jericho. In social-intimate terms, this is definitely alienating. But there's also the possibility of salvaging a crackless inside by riding the via negativa to another place. The cracks are thereby prevented from letting the outside in because. The 'world' turns out not to live up to the ideal we thought it did, so one discards it, instead of discarding the ideal.

(3) Accept that things are fragile and that we create them together. Interesting avenues of exploration: Attachment theory, the psycho-genesis of cities and villages, the mutation of myths and religions (which Sloterdjik rightly calls technologies of immunity) etc.

If your jam is shaming sluts, I guess that's how it is. Hope you get some good shaming in this week.

But why would I - or anyone - care at all whether you're for or against hypersexualization? (Plus, I think everyone on here is already well aware you got a thing about sex) All your post is is a loud declaration of your stance. The idea is to make arguments. Sorry Agustino, but you're not interesting enough for your opinions to be inherently interesting.

Movies aren't necessary. Nor are proms. Nor are the Olympics. Nor are fishing trips. etc. I'm not sure what relevance 'necessity' has at all. So many movies are over the top. So are many proms. So are many Olympic opening ceremonies. So is people's valorization of fishing (have you seen how many t-shirts and books and w/e are devoted to the sanctity of the fishing-trip?) I get annoyed with people thinking they're inherently special and valuable too, but you see that shit everywhere.

Can you explain in concrete terms what you mean by 'separation of the sexes'? Or are you referring to bathrooms alone? I kind of doubt fear of rape was the primary reason for having a mens room and a women's room. Maybe I'm wrong. It certainly doesn't strike me as the obvious common sense explanation for the segregation though.

Do you think we should have men and women's elevators? Why or why not?

The Henry book sounds interesting. I'll see if I can track a copy down. Impenetrable is ok.

As to the squirrel. Well, maybe it doesn't project an acorn per se. That's probably true. Regardless, our projected/illusory world is shared. The man can pick up and move the acorn and it'll fuck up the squirrel's shit. Interaction with - and through - each others 'projections' is possible.

The accumulated 'projections' exceed the particular desires of individuals to such an extent - well, it's almost like an ant colony. Any particular ant is mindlessly following pheremone trails. Viewed in the light of the whole, though, it's helping to build a nest, although no individual ant has any idea of the process its taking part in. There's a kind of objectivity build out of the blindness of individual subjectivities pursuing their own ends.

again, projection isn't a kind of generative power, nor is there an omnipotent self. That there are certain objects is already a reflection of the way these projections work themselves out.

I still don't get what you mean by projection. If it isn't a 'generative' power, why call it 'projection' at all? To project is to be the cause of what's projected. What qualities of projections, literal or psychological, do you see in the process you're trying to describe? You talked about objects (object-ing) being like psychological projection, resulting from our trying to externalize our inner agony. Except now you're saying that no individual can actually do that? Do the subjects merely watch an Other's projections, projections of the kingdom of god, projections which so entrance, that the subjects can't help but subconsciously affirm the show? But then why did you being up individual psychological projection before? I'm not being cute, I really don't understand how 'projection' is being put to work here.

So, the teddy bear - the infant projects but it doesn't project this object, exactly, because this object reflects how other projections are already at work?

Q: Why do infants, empirically, need a static object to project onto?
A: Well, those 'objects' are already the results of prior projections.
Q: Why does the infant need the static result of prior projections to project onto?

As to the main point: men have ample opportunity to be alone with women in all sorts of places. Bathrooms are super public and anyone could walk in at any time. I don't think they're a prime rape spot tbh. (If you wanna bring up that dude who attacked that girl recently in a bathroom, go for it).