As a sidenote, Minoans in Crete were writing for over 500 years by that time. They were not Greek, but they were to the Greeks what the Greeks were to the Romans. — Lionino

The Minoans were an amazing culture. Their art had a lightness and playfulness that was almost modern in character.

↪L'éléphant You could easily look up that the first piece of writing in Greek predates the first in Chinese by some 200 years — Lionino

This is what I found. Does it jibe with your sources?

The oldest Greek writing, syllabic signs scratched with a stylus on sun-dried clay, is that of the Linear B tablets found in Knossos, Pylos, and Mycenae… some of which may date from as far back as 1400 bce (the date is disputed) and some of which certainly date to 1200 bce.

The earliest examples of writing date to 7,000 BCE when Neolithic Period humans in China and elsewhere began producing glyphs and ideographics—symbols representing objects and ideas. Markings which some archaeologists have identified as examples of proto-writing first appeared in China in approximately 6600 BCE, evidence of which has been discovered at the Jiǎhú archaeological site in Henan, China. Pictograms have also been found in China dating from the 5th century BCE. Despite these very early examples of proto-writing, it was not until 1400 BCE that a near-complete writing system was developed in China.

↪Joshs Can you say some more about how Deleuze, Derrida and Heidegger put consciousness into question alongside subjectivity and objectivity? Does this come out of their critique of the binary/emphasis of pluralities? — Tom Storm

They see consciousness as relying on the idea of a persisting self-identity. An object is something that is placed before and represented to itself by a subject.

Non-dualism represents the absence of a distinction that seperates reality into subject-object, appearance-thing in itself, becoming-being, nothingness-somethingness, necessity-contingency etc. In short, binary distinctions created by our langauges and thoughts dissappear — Sirius

This doesnt seem to accomplish an overthrow of the split between subject and object, being and becoming so much as it it represents the opposite pole with respect to external realism. The latter, like with Daniel Dennett, simply ignores the subjective in favor of the objective, whereas the non-dualism you describe throws everything into a subjectivist basket. Radical non-dualisms like that of Deleuze, Derrida and Heidegger put consciousness into question alongside subjectivity and objectivity, rather than elevating consciousness to supreme status.

Motion is. Motion cannot be tracked as moving, unless something endures long enough to be moved. So the thing is as well. But before we jump to ask “what is this thing” we can remember, if the thing “is”, it is also consumed by motion again — Fire Ologist

Are you getting this from Heidegger? One question :
If we use the motion of an object as a metaphor for becoming, then do we also keep the fact that the nature of the object doesn’t change through the course of its movement? For instance, we assume that a qualitative concept like a frisbee persists in its identity throughout the progress of its spatial displacement over time. The becoming of the movement is a quantitative change, and the persistent being of the frisbee is a qualitative enduring as the same thing.

And without identifying anything, nothing happens — Fire Ologist

‘Das nichts nichtet’. Heidegger’s famous line that the nothing nothings means that truth happens in the nothing, which is another name for transcendence. Happening, the in-between, event, occurring, transit, difference, becoming are prior to identity.

I wonder if we forget our place if we don't sometimes remind ourselves of the middle.
— Fire Ologist
Yes, we are 'beings-in-media-res'. I prefer Jasper's notion of 'Existenz' as conditioned, or grounded, by what he calls the encompassing¹ or even better, more concrete, Spinoza's/Deleuze's 'radical immanence' (i.e. eternal and infinite substance² — 180 Proof

I was going to mention Deleuze’s Rhizomatics.

The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. It is not the One that becomes Two or even directly three, four, five, etc. It is not a multiple derived from the One, or to which One is added (n + 1). It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills.

And yet, here we are, existing out of context, notwithstanding the context of saying this. There is in this, some elusive and profound affirmation that has nothing do to with context, though as with all things, nothing stops it from being categorized — Astrophel

For Derrida an element of meaning, an ‘identity’, can only be what it is by relying on something absolutely foreign to it and outside of it. But this outside doesn’t sit alongside an inside of meaning but inhabits it , belongs to the inside itself.

"The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence.”

The repetition of the same meaning intention one moment to the next is the fundamental origin of the contextual break, and our exposure to otherness. Iterability, as differance, would be an

"imperceptible difference. This exit from the identical into
the same remains very slight, weighs nothing itself...". “It is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition.” “Pure repetition, were it to change neither thing nor sign, carries with it an unlimited power of perversion and subversion.”

The repetition of this very slight difference dividing self-identity from itself produces a self and a world that returns to itself from its future the same differently, every moment. Is this what you mean by ‘existing out of context’?

Jacques Derrida, that annoying French deconstructionist that is so difficult to read, is intentionally annoying. He wants the reader to see, in his own way, this Taoist point in his analysis of the "difference and deference" of the structure of language and the basic idea is that language not only does not tell us "about" a world in any foundationally determinate way, but does not divide the world with its categories. The world is entirely "outside" of this, yet to say this at all obviously is an exercise in language — Astrophel

For Derrida language, understood in its broadest sense, is the text, and text means context. His famous dictum, there is nothing outside the text, doesnt mean nothing outside language understood as a formal symbol system, but nothing outside of some context or other. Put differently, there is no world outside language if we understand language as context.

Free will is a will that is free from determinants and constraints is the most accurate definition for free will — Truth Seeker

Would you say that free will is freedom to think what we want to think? If so , how do we make sense of this concept of wanting or desiring? We don’t usually think free will in terms of choosing that which we dont desire, but what makes what we desire such that freedom of will depends on it? I suggest that choosing what we desire is another way of talking about thoughts that come to us as recognizable , intelligible, useful, purposeful. Thoughts that come to us as arbitrary, nonsensical or confused are those we seem to consider not freely willed but those that impose themselves upon us randomly as alien to us . What’s interesting about this is that it is the chaotic thought which is truly free and random, oblivious to what we want, whereas the thought that seems purposeful and ‘chosen’ is the one that is constrained. Not by an outside agency, but constrained by our previous expectations and criteria of significance, relevance and meaningfulness. In other words, what we call free will is thoughts that are constrained by and consistent with our anticipations. Creativity wouldnt seem meaningful and valuable if this weren’t the case. It would be indistinguishable from incoherent and confused thinking. What we desire isn’t pure freedom, but a balance between constraint and novelty. Do we have this kind of freedom of will? I would say yes. In fact, this capability of innovating within normative patterns we share with all other living organisms.

give that the definition of the concept of IQ is itself fraught with contention
— Joshs

As much contention as there might, g-factor is still highly related to academic achievement — Lionino

My guess is they’re as much conflated as they are related. Intelligence tests are already achievement tests.

HD would be you sitting listening to facts and then being asked for your conclusion, and then you would offer up the reasons that you were pre-determined to offer and then you would offer your conclusion that was also pre-determined. This idea that you could have decided otherwise isn't part of HD. That's part of free will — Hanover

The presuppositions that guide HD and free-will advocates are not nearly as far apart as it might seem. In both cases a fundamentally arbitrary and socially non-relational basis of behavior is presumed. Each assume a way to determine correctness of action. The former ties it to scientific truth and the latter most often to divine moral truth.

↪Joshs How do you know that demons exist? — Truth Seeker

A demon is any arbitrary force or influence. Hard determinism is based on such demons.

We assign culpability to people who are not actually culpable.
— Truth Seeker

Why do we do that? — Hanover

Because there are many ways of understanding culpability. In its most general form, blame is pointing to the inner or outer demons capricously and arbitrarily pushing and pulling us in various, potentially nefarious directions. We blame these demons and seek to influence them in the aim of rehabilitating the person who has them, or to separate them from society. This form of culpability is perfectly compatible with hard determinism.

However, it seems problematic to say that truth is completely relativized, even vis-á-vis introspection —that people cannot look back on past events and say "that was a bad decision," with any more validity than their thoughts at that given moment. It's not moral relativism that is at stake when practical reason is reduced to emotional claims, but a thoroughgoing relativism for all claims. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The world ‘relativism’ is a kind of misnomer, isn’t it?
Relative doesn’t have to mean arbitrary. It clearly doesn’t mean this when we are navigating through the reciprocally integrated elements of a system of relations. Within the bounds of our understanding of the nature of the relations between the components of the system, relativism can imply intricacy, intimacy, coherence and intelligibility. It is only when we compare two systems and deem their relation to be incommensurable and arbitrary that relativism dissolves relate into incoherence.

One could argue that the good relativism of intimate correlation only becomes the bad relativism
of arbitrariness and incoherence when we prematurely halt the progress in our understanding of the relatedness of aspects of the human world by forcing them to conform to a true ground or origin. This is the moment when meaningful relation becomes the arbitrariness of the unconditioned absolute. Emotivism is one form of absolutizing, since it treats affectivity as arbitrary beginning. But affectivity doesn’t have to be understood this way. It can instead be linked directly to sense-making , as the expression of the relative success or failure of inteliigibility. Thus, , when we say something felt good or bad, we don’t mean that we were overcome by a fleeting, random bit of meaningless information, but that the events we have been attempting to make sense of either fit neatly into our expectations or were discordant with respect to them.

My view would be that conceptions of truth are prephilosophical. They show up when your mechanic fails to have fixed your car, or when your child claims they didn't throw a rock you just saw them throw, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

To know whether the mechanic has fixed your car, you have to know how a car works, not necessarily the details of engine mechanics but how to operate it and the general
principles by which that machine runs. That relational system of knowledge belongs to a wider social network of functional relations that pertains not only to specific knowledge of the car , or motorized machines in general , but many other aspects of culture that ground the intelligibility of ecosystems within which we drive cars.
But this knowledge ecosystem is not its own ground. It is not arbitrary. It evolved from previous ecosystems and those from prior ecosystems of knowledge. The change from one to the next is neither arbitrary and random, nor is it fixed by conformity to pre-existing causal truths, which would be arbitrary also. Rather, the evolving changes in knowledge ecosystems are future oriented, aiming asymptotically at a kind of knowledge that sees all the elements of our world within intercorrelated
relations that are profoundly intimate. So the engine works or it doesn’t, but as our machines evolve with us , what it means to ‘work’ changes in ways that point towards this interconnectness. The capacity to understand the world in this way preceded us , but not the content. No pre-existing causal laws or substantive absolutes of any kind ground knowledge absolutely. This thinking would just keep us from arriving at the relational truths , which are neither invented out of whole cloth nor discovered as ready-made absolute grounds.

Understanding your child is like understanding your car. The superficially question is whether your child lied., but the evolving question is why he needed to lie, what breakdown in understanding made them feel they had to misrepresent their actions. They wanted to avoid punishment, and they will be punished because of a breakdown in the relationship. You make recourse to moral right and wrong, short-circuiting the relational possibilities of understanding by imposing an arbitrary truth.

↪Joshs IQ is between 57% and 73% heritable. What other vaguely defined concepts are vaguely heritable, and how vaguely heritable are they? — flannel jesus

If one begins with a concept that can be defined in different ways, such that there is no one I.Q. but myriad kinds on there is no overarching consensus, then what exactly it is that is being inherited is also going to suffer from lack of clarity.

That makes it more impressive. How many other vaguely-defined concepts do you know of that are very heritable? — flannel jesus

Only those that are vaguely heritable.

I do wonder what Nietzsche's impact will be going into the future. Will he be be like Plato or St. Augustine, a mainstay on introductory philosophy syllabi millennia later? Or will he be like Eriugena or Henry of Ghent, one of the "deep cuts" of an era, hardly lost to history, but also not a major name in the field? — Count Timothy von Icarus

If that becomes Nietzsche’s fate, then it will also be the fate of Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault , Deleuze and others whose work is closely tied to Nietzsche. It assumes that Nietzsche’s ideas didnt stand out amongst his contemporaries as either the culmination of an era (Heidegger said he was the last Metaphysician) or the beginning of a new era.

That IQ is significantly inheritable is a frequently reproduced finding of psychology — which is remarkable for a field that has so much trouble reproducing. — Lionino

That may not be as impressive as it sounds, give that the definition of the concept of IQ is itself fraught with contention.

Personally, Emotivism is the only reasonable position and O'Connor has rightly landed on it. — AmadeusD

Why not Perspectivism? That would involvement linking emotional processes with the successes and failures of situational sense-making. By that thinking, the feelings of happiness and sadness give us information concerning the relative capability of our perspectival knowledge system with respect to anticipating events in a coherent manner. It agrees with O’Connor that happiness doesn’t tell us anything universal about the content , moral or otherwise, of the events that produce it. But it takes happy-sad out of the category of the merely arbitrary, subjective and irrational, and instead ties emotions to not only personal sense-making , but interpersonal processes of anticipatory cognition. If our emotions are expressions of individual development in terms of knowledge construction, and the latter is inextricably tied to reciprocal interaction within a larger social community, then there can be a kind of universal evolution of moral understanding.

We have existence, ready-to-hand, present-at-hand and being. The last of these is common to the other three
— Ludwig V

Not really. Had Kant said “being” (instead of existence) is not a real predicate, Heidegger may have agreed — Arne

It’s true that for Heidegger, Being (as opposed to ontic beings) is not a predicate. And yet, there is no existence, no present to hand or ready to hand without Being.

From where I sit, the universe is completely indifferent (not hostile, I grant you) to my desires and emotions. — Ludwig V

I think the criteria of successful construing of the universe is the inverse of the direct realist slogan that the ‘facts don't care about our feelings'. The arbiter of validation is not the raw, independently existing facts of the world, but affectivity, in the sense that empirical truth and falsity is a function of whether and to what extent events are construed as consistent with our anticipations, which defines our purposes and values, and our knowing of this relative success or failure is synonymous with feelings such as anxiety, confusion and satisfaction. Validational evidence is just another way of describing the affectively felt assimilative coherence of the construed flow of events and therefore it is synonymous with feeling valence. Validated construing is neither a matter of forcing events into pre-determined cognitive slots, nor a matter of shaping our models of the world in conformity with the presumed independent facts of that world via the method of falsification. Rather, it is a matter of making and remaking a world; building, inhabiting, and being changed by our interactive relations with our constructed environment. It is our feelings which tell us whether we get it right or wrong, and by what criteria.

the way it "feels" to be conscious is a result of our delusional conscious perception. The accuracy that such a feeling has to convey information about what is truly happening inside is highly questionable. ie: accuracy of conscious perception should be treated with the same Kantian spectacles as with all other perceptions. This is the complaint against introspection on steroids — Malcolm Lett

Kant recognized that the fundamental organizing principles
making the material world intelligible to science are not located in materiality itself but are given beforehand. One can apply a Kantian approach to questions concerning the embodied nature of cognition and the organizing role of affectivity and subjective point of view in formulating empirical concepts about the world. Doing so leads to
the recognition that empirical knowledge of ‘materiality’ is inextricably tied to what ‘matters’ to an embodied organism
relative to its ways of interacting pragmatically in its physical and social environment. Subjective valuation and point of view cannot be split off from material facts; such ‘feeling’-based frames of reference define the qualitative meaning of our concepts. A fact, like a tool, is meaningless outside of what we want to do with it, what larger purposes and goals we are using it for. Every fact ( the definition of a point) can be understood within an indefinite array of potentially incommensurable accounts. Which account is true depends on what we are using the account for.

I’m not saying there are no real facts in the world. I’m saying that embodied human practices are crucial part of what it means to know the real world.

Welcome to red state and blue state America.
— Joshs
That rift was never about morality or justice. — Vera Mont

That rift is about, among other things, differing views of what is moral and just.

. The person who commits a wrongful act is subject to judgment by his society; it's not up to him to decide whether he's ill or damaged or evil or in error. — Vera Mont

We are all ill, damaged, evil and in error as judged by the perspective of those who are unable to relate the justifications of our actions, as seen from our own perspective, to their own perspective and form of life. If we are fortunate , after enduring enough ‘correction’, we can come to realize that our accusers don’t really belong to our own ‘society’ and we may join up with those who do relate to our way of thinking. Welcome to red state and blue state America.

It might be possible to approach harmful actions from a perspective other than assigning guilt. We might look at the person who committed a harmful act as damaged and in need of repair. Or we might consider whether that individual is able to make some kind of restitution and win forgiveness from the victim. We might look at justice from the First Nations' POV:
The purpose of a justice system in an Aboriginal society is to restore the peace and equilibrium within the community, and to reconcile the accused with his or her own conscience and with the individual or family who has been wronged. — Vera Mont

Concepts like forgiveness depend on the prior assessment of blame and guilt. Who says the person who does harm is ‘damaged’ and in need of ‘repair’? I’m guessing it’s not the person who committed the ‘wrongful’ act.

↪Truth Seeker What's the alternative to determinism to you? Is it just some degree of randomness sprinkled in? Like some visions of quantum mechanics suggest? — flannel jesus

It seems to me that determinism and randomness presuppose each other. That’s why proponents of determinism, like Martha Nussbaum and Daniel Dennett support blame and punishment. Dteeminism has arbitrariness built into it, and arbitrariness justifies blameful
justice. We don’t punish evil souls, we reshape capricious, wayward behaviors.

Some people cannot help themselves but do what they do, regardless of whether hard determinism is true or not. But we should also not help ourselves against jailing those that pose a threat to us. It might just be that socially and psychologically stressing over a serial killer, ultimately over the question of "Why did you do that?", might be as pointless as asking the hurricane "Why did you destroy my house?" — Lionino

I think it’s the most important question there is. But we’re so overwhelmed by the effort to answer it that we throw up our hands and fall back on a concept of blame. We blame the free willing autonomous subject. Or we blame the social milieu. Or we blame genetics and biology. Or we blame determinism. What blame fails to do is come up with an explanation of behavior that avoids pinning it on arbitrary internal ( spiritual will, biological impulse, the id) or external (society, mother and father) demons, conditionings and influences. We fail to understand ‘blameful’ behavior in terms of motivations that not only are justified by the standards of the person who initiated it, but by our own standards of sense-making.

Ah, you mean as in Kierkegaard's Repetition, as opposed to the "recollection". But in the liberated "moment," we are still bound to that which is there to be liberated, and this is as cultural, bound, that is, in the sense that there is nothing else "there" in the possibilities. — Astrophel

Not for Heidegger. He defines primordial anxiety as dissociating oneself from one’s familiar world, rendering beings as a whole meaningless, irrelevant and insignificant, so as to simultaneously open up new possibilities of acting and being. The self continually comes to itself, and ex-ists, from out ahead of itself. It is not the human will that creates this transformation, but time itself.

Truth, as the clearing and concealing of what is, happens in being composed, as a poet composes a poem. All art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of what is, is, as such, essentially poetry. The nature of art, on which both the art work and the artist depend, is the setting-itself-into­-work of truth. It is due to art's poetic nature that, in the midst of what is, art breaks open an open place, in whose openness everything is other than usual. By virtue of the projected sketch set into the work of the unconcealedness of what is, which casts itself toward us, everything ordinary and hitherto existing becomes an unbeing. This unbeing has lost the capacity to give and keep being as measure.” (Origin of the Work of Art)

Interestingly, there are a preponderance of congenitally blind people with autism. Autism has been considered by some to involve symptoms that are the opposite of schizophrenia, and this has led to the thinking that to reduce schizophrenic cognition, make them more like autistics.This has led some researchers to speculate that congenital blindness predisposes toward styles of cognitive processing that encourages autism and suppresses schizophrenia.

Our existence is "fundamentally futural." But in "the moment" (what looks to me like Heidegger's version of nunc stans) one is still bound to finitude: "So neither must we take the fallenness of Dasein as a ‘fall’ from a purer and higher ‘primal status’. Not only do we lack any experience of this ontically, but ontologically we lack any possibilities or clues for Interpreting it. (p. 336 Stambough). There is nothing of a singular primordiality in this analytic. I read this to say that truly novel possibilities are simply bad metaphysics based on extravagant thinking about presence at hand (like Descartes of the Christian God — Astrophel

By finitude, Heidegger, like Derrida, Deleuze and Nietzsche, doesn’t mean we are hemmed in by cultural norms or our past. On the contrary, finitude is the eternal return of the different and the unique. It is not our past that produces our finitude, it is the utter individuality of our future. Fallneness is not a fall from some purer, higher status because the futural finitude of temporality functions implicitly even within fallnness.

Yes, all. Including organisms and plants. They all perceive and react to their environment. Because they all want to survive. And multiply. — Alkis Piskas

Enactivist approaches argue that perception and reaction are not sufficient for consciousness. What is required is a self-organizing and self-correcting anticipative purposiveness. Living systems are normatively oriented, defining their environment in relation to their ongoing functioning. Consciousness is intrinsically affective , and affectivity arises out of the organisms’s ability recognize what is better or worse for it in relation to how it is functioning. It’s purposes and aims cannot be reduced to simple ‘survival’ or ‘multiplication’ but the survival of a normative way of functioning.

Heidegger, later on, affirmed the value of gelassenheit, the yielding to the openness allowing the world to "speak," if you will. A very important move, I think, for even if one's thoughts are constructs of historical possibilities, there is in this openness things that are alien to this. And language may gather around this and discover a new "primordiality — Astrophel

He confirmed it early on, too, but he said that people misread Being and Time. For H. , both early and late, one’s thoughts project historical possibilities from ahead of oneself. History comes from the future, not the past.

All of the comments you direct towards me are respectful and on point. — Arne

:starstruck:

"Art is beauty. Beauty takes many forms beyond the stereotypical and expected ie. a flower or a warm summer's day. — Outlander

For a different view of art:

Art critic Sister Wendy Beckett once said that before Picasso, painters took it for granted that their job was to produce works of beauty. What else is art to do, after all? It was only after Picasso—specifically, after 1907's “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,” with its squatting French prostitutes with faces like grotesque African masks—that painters realized they were not bound to beauty, that beauty was not a fate but, in a way, a limitation. Picasso showed that ugliness too could be the subject of great art, that artists could capture ugliness without rendering it beautiful, and this forever changed the course of culture. Like all truly deep assumptions, this one about beauty had hardly seemed like an assumption at all. It had seemed rather like an unquestionable, inescapable truth—until someone questioned it and thereby escaped it. What had seemed self-evident came to be seen as a self-imposed restriction. How much of the world, how much ugliness, how much mundanity had artists been ignoring? How much more could they now capture? This was perhaps the question of twentieth century art, with its depictions of hideous slaughter, its sliced-up cow carcasses, its snow shovels and urinals and soup cans, paint splotches and blank canvases.
(Lee Braver)

↪AmadeusD Thanks. Yes, some Nietzscheans can be gauche and insufferable. — Tom Storm

You’ll notice Amadeus was speaking not just of his followers, but of Nietzsche himself. Perhaps one can say of many of Nietzsche’s followers as well as of his more shrill detractors that they are gauche and insufferable in their inability to read him well.

Heidegger doesn't seem to say a lot about freedom and Being
— Corvus

No, he does not speak directly in terms of freedom. However, authentic Being-one's-Self is a choice. Please see Being and Time at 312-313 — Arne

In being-ahead-of-oneself as the being toward one's ownmost potentiality-of-being lies the existential and ontological condition of the possibility of being free for authentic existentiell possibilities.

With the factical existence of Da-sein, beings are also already encountered. That such beings are discovered in the There of its own existence is not under the control of
Da-sein. Only what, in which direction, to what extent, and how it actually discovers and discloses is a matter of freedom, although always within the limits of its thrownness. (Being and Time)

Simon Critchley wrote that philosophy was the great spreader of doubt and despair because nothing survives inquiry. But I disagree. Like the Hindu's jnana yoga, philosophy is a liberation from tthe presumption of knowing — Astrophel

Heidegger determined the span of history from Anaximander to Nietzsche as being beholden to the guiding question of philosophy, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing’? This guiding question was based on a thinking of being as objective presence, and truth as correctness. Heidegger wanted to replace the guiding question with the basic question, ‘how does be-ing essentially occur’? This thinking no longer opposes subject to object , existence to nothingness, truth to untruth.

And why do you think scientists are telling you what you think so frequently?
— flannel jesus
Because they want to have control over people.
It's a standard mode of operation for people anyway; scientists have just elevated it to a whole new level, much like religion/spirituality — baker

Are you talking about the influence of positivism on science? Not all approaches in science are positivistic. There are postmodern sciences, for instance.

I've been in several, disparate 'gay' and 'queer' communities. I fucking hate them. I detest everything I went through trying to be friends with those people. Any opinion that didn't align with the group was grounds for not just ostracization but attempts to belittle me in my work life, family life and other social endeavours. It was harrowing, and disgusting (in two specific examples, anyhow). One of my children was put through essentially a Struggle Session in an attempt to have them tell their school that i was an unfit parent. And this is a common experience. — AmadeusD

Was the group’s push for you to conform an example of ‘hive-mind’? Let’s start with the motivation behind trying to force or convince someone to conform to one’s own ways of thinking. I suggest this is the structure of anger and blame , which underlie most concepts of justice. If you meet someone and share with them your views of gender or gayness or whatever, and they are outraged and disappointed by your thinking, they have convinced themselves that you are willfully disregarding their needs or suffering. The anger they feel impels them to try and get you to ‘mend your ways’ , to ‘get with the program’, to think more ‘ethically’ or righteously. Because they believe that your beliefs are irrational, arbitrary, or selfish, they justify their judgmental attitude toward you. They basically have thought themselves into a corner. If they are unable to see the world through your eyes, you become a danger to them.

What’s true of an individual can be true of a whole community united around shared values. I dont believe in the concept of hive-mind, brain-washing or mindless conformity. People don’t blindly introject ideas from others. The interpretive nature of cognition makes this impossible. We can only assimilate ideas from others that make sense to us in relation to the way we construe the world, and everyone’s construction system is unique to them to some extent. If a group all seems to believe the same things and share the same values, it is not because they are being blindly led by the hive-mind, but because they have gravitated to that group based on the fact that they have, as individuals, already arrived at that way of thinking. I have never met any group that thinks in lock-step, regardless of how much the leadership tries to define and enforce a party line.

Once you dig beneath the surface , you’ll find all sorts of splits in ideology among members of the same group. My impression is that you have strong convictions and values yourself, and that there are issues where you blame others for their moral failings as seen from your perspective. You wouldn’t be a part of the legal profession unless you believed in a concept of justice that is able to determine guilt and innocence. So you yourself belong to a community with that shared value, and when you declare someone guilty of something, you are imposing those community values on that person. So what makes you different from that gay community who tried to impose their values on you?

You emphasize your individuality and your not fitting into any group. But all the views you have expressed on this forum fit into a familiar slot in terms of a philosophical and cultural background they draw from. So as much as you may want to think of yourself as an outsider and non-conformist, your ways of thinking express a cultural
worldview shared by many others, a worldview that finds ways to impose itself on others, or at least uses itself as a standard on the basis of which to judge others.