DishBrain is able to identify habits or tendencies in the "ball" and to develop matching habits or tendencies or propensities. For what purpose? In an earlier age, we might have heard this described as a manifestation of the death drive, the will to become mechanical, but maybe Freud was on the right track in seeing life as paradoxically trying always to reduce irritation and excitation, or to predict it well enough that it ceases to be experienced as surprise. (See, Isaac, I do listen. Did you know you're a closet Freudian?) — Srap Tasmaner

Freud’s understanding of life drew inspiration in part from physical models ( hydraulics, etc) in which equilibrium is static , and change within a psychic system requires an extraneous source of motivation in the form of the push or pull of instinctive drive.
In contrast, contemporary dynamical systems and autopoietic approaches assume that equilibration is not driven toward static balance but a dynamical tension characterized by incessant activity and change. That is, equilibration tends in the direction of an increasingly active, increasingly organized organism, rather than a drive toward mechanical equilibrium ( the death drive).

the brain cells did not "learn to play pong", they just avoided "a chaotic stream of white noise". It was the experimenters who turned this into a game. That is, the dishbrain had no intent to play pong. — Banno

The question is whether it might be possible to say that the brain cells were forming intentions of any sort.
The brain cells ‘avoiding a stream of white noise’ is reminiscent of the description of Skinner’s
rats as avoiding aversive stimulation. While
one can employ a reductive s-r level of explanation in the the case of Skinner’s animals, it is now assumed that much more is going on in between stimulus and response in animal reinforcement. The same may be the case with the dishbrain.

I don't see what "perfection" has to do with universals anyway. What would it mean for a universal tree to be "perfect"? — litewave

For a triangle perfection may be linked to ideal self-identical repetition of the pattern. For a line or angle to be perfect, it would have to conform to an iteration of an exact self-identical procedure.

Pathologically, when discussing our past selves or future selves with another ("But you promised!"), should we treat those selves as separate moral actors/agents? Do we disavow ourselves? — Ennui Elucidator

Derrida makes a distinction between situational, or conditional, forgiveness and what he calls ‘pure’ forgiveness. He explains that in ‘ordinary’ , conditional forgiveness,

“I forgive on the condition that the guilty one repents, mends his ways, asks forgiveness, and thus would be changed by a new obligation, and that from then on he would no longer be exactly the same as the one who was found to be culpable.... As soon as the victim ‘understands’ the criminal, as soon as she exchanges, speaks, agrees with him, the scene of reconciliation has commenced, and with it this ordinary forgiveness which is anything but pure forgiveness.

By contrast, pure forgiveness for Derrida is not an acknowledgment of apology and reconciliation, and is not in the name of redeeming the wrongdoer by welcoming their return to a normative rational order. It is instead an acknowledgment of the structural condition of possibility of the ‘evil’ act itself. Rather than an acceptance of the contrite other , pure forgiveness would be an acceptance of the necessary role of absolute alterity in the constitution of justice, honesty and intentional meaning in general.

“I must ask forgiveness for (the fact of ) being just. Because it is unjust to be just. I always betray someone to be just.”
“...existence, or consciousness, or the ‘‘I,’’ before any determined fault is at fault and in the process, consequently, of asking at least implicitly for forgiveness for the simple fact, finally, of being there.”
“It is not simply a moral, ethical, or religious experience, but simply in order to go on and to produce the synthesis that you need to be yourself, and to identify yourself through time, you have to forgive yourself constantly. Forgiveness then is part of the temporal constitution of the ego, self-forgiveness.
So from that point of view, yes and no, I forgive myself, I never forgive myself; it depends. We are a scene of multiple egos, persons. There is in me someone who is always ready to forgive and another who is absolutely merciless, and we are constantly fighting. Sometimes I can sleep, sometimes I cannot.”

It seems we agree that metaphysics does not have the special place in philosophy ascribed to it by ↪Pantagruel. — Banno

I’ll be damned, I think you’re right.

. A rule of thumb: metaphysics is about what is the case, ethics, about what ought be the case. — Banno

In the wake of the dissolution of the fact-value and analytic-synthetic distinctions, Putnam argues that the “is” cannot be understood outside of epistemic values, which are related to ethical valuation.

“The concern that is obviously connected with the values that guide us in choosing between hypotheses (coherence, simplicity, preservation of past doctrine, and the like) is the concern with "right description of the world”.
“…if these episternic values do enable us to correctly describe the world (or to describe more correctly than any alternative set of epistemic values would lead us to do), that is something we see through the lenses of those very values. It does not mean that those values admit an "external" justification.”( The Collapse of the Fact-Value Distinction)

Ain’t logic the foundation of maths? Along with counting? Maths is the logic of relations tied to counting - a general theory about causal theories and a general theory about quantifying variables. It is the holism of the local and global, suitably broken down into a working method — apokrisis

Not just any kind of logic , but a certain formal logic connected with certain assumptions about the nature of the object justifying such notions as the fundamental distinction between kind and degree , quantity and quality.

Metaphysics is more what is the case that what to do about it. — Banno

Metaphysics is both about what is and what ought to be. Form projects expectation. This anticipative aspect of the transcendental is the basis of the
‘ought’. Empirical discovery as well as ethical prescription has their condition of possibility in the normative ‘ought’ of an already opened up space of possibility.

I would say metaphysics as an inquiry into fundamental being is in rude health. Especially to the degree that we have developed a mathematical holism which can see into what isn't even in principle "visible". — apokrisis

If this holism is grounded in mathematics , then in order for one to be uncovering its metaphysical basis one would need to ‘ground’ this mathematics in a more originary thinking which is no longer , or not yet, mathematical.

But besides that, what's the point of metaphysics if it doesn't make a difference to what you do? Metaphysics is in the end only a tool for doing ethics. — Banno

One can just as well say that ethics is a tool
for doing metaphysics. More accurately, each pre-supposes the other. Metaphysics is what puts the ‘ought’ in ethics.

please find me:
- a pyramid, in the fashion of burial place of pharaohs, complete with sarcophagi and mummies and mummified remains of food items in proper containers, freely found in nature formed by other than man;
- a nuclear power station, that generates electricity, with all its intricacies in its design, freely found in nature other than created by man; — god must be atheist

Please find me a natural object that is not throughly the product of conventional schemes of language that incorporate such cultural features as how we understand the use of our measuring devices. As our linguistic, material and technological interactive engagements with our world change, so does the meaning of the ‘nature’ we observe.

↪Joshs Interesting. Thanks. I kind of missed any exposure to science too, so there's no hope for me — Tom Storm

I consider personality theory and models of psychopathology to count as science. They had more impact on me than any other science.

As someone who is here mainly to see what he may have missed in not reading philosophy what do you think you have gained from all this reading? What were or are you looking for? If it's awareness... what does that mean in practice? — Tom Storm

If your main exposure to science has been through physics and chemistry , then I would suggest that that there are two generations of philosophical theory that have moved beyond the limits of these sciences. Put differently. these philosophers have peered into their crystal ball and produced sketches of what future sciences will look like. On the other hand, if your acquaintance with science extends beyond physics to include the new extended synthesis in biology, predictive processing and enactive , embodied approaches in cognitive science, the. I’d say that you’re not missing much by avoiding philosophy. There’s only a small handful of philosophers who have ventured into territory beyond these newer sciences, and most of them consider themselves to be scientists as well as philosophers.

I had thought that creativesoul was claiming that there were other species who were capable of symbolic langauge, though, which would be something else altogether. — Janus

Did you mean something different than this?

“Evidence that an animal is capable of some degree of symbolic, human language processing supports the argument that the animal's consciousness is to some degree human-like.”


One can , of course, distinguish between ‘capacity for’ and natural use of symbolic language. Bonobos have been shown to have this capacity, but only demonstrate it in artificially induced situations prompted by humans.

Only humans, as far as is known, are capable of symbolic language and linguistically mediated thought. — Janus

I agree with Joseph Rouse’s take on the homologies between humans and other animals with respect to language.

“Elisabeth Lloyd (2004) shows that the fortuitous success of the bonobo Kanzi in acquiring a rudimentary linguistic capacity has changed the terms in which these issues should be addressed (Savage-Rumbaugh, Shanker, and Taylor 1998). Kanzi inadvertently participated in experi­ments on language acquisition because his mother was a research sub­ject, and he was too young to be separated from her. While his mother struggled with the experimental protocol, Kanzi did much better despite not being initially targeted for instruction. Eventually, Kanzi acquired not only a substantial vocabulary of symbols but also the ability to produce novel, intelligible syntactic recombinations. The experiment­ers plausibly characterized his eventual linguistic capacities as in some respects comparable to those of a thirty-month-old normal human child. The interpretation of these data is controversial (see Pinker 1994,Savage-Rumbaugh, Shanker, and Taylor 1998; Lloyd 2004; Bickerton 2009), but I follow Lloyd in her insistence that Kanzi’s achievement shows that the neurological capacity for linguistic understanding is ho­mologous between humans and bonobos and probably extends further to common ancestors.

…the capacity for producing and consuming linguistic expressions is not uniquely human and did not emerge as a novel capacity in the Homo lineage. Other species in the primate lineage who share this ca­pacity have nevertheless not developed language on their own, even in rudimentary forms, despite having the neurological basis for produc­ing and understanding symbolic expressions with syntactic structure.
This capacity for linguistic expression and understanding has only been expressed in experimental settings that bring other apes into contact with an analogue to human language adapted to their perceptual and expressive abilities. This fact strongly suggests either a lack of selection pressure in other lineages for linguistic communication or substantial barriers to the realization of this latent capacity.”

He provides evidence that Bohr was an entity realist
— Joshs

Could you explain what that means? — frank

"entity realism" asserts the real existence of unobserved entities.

“Entity realists think that when we accept a theory we have warrant for believing that the objects and events spoken of in nonobservational theoretical terms really do exist as the unobserved causes of observed phenomena; whereas antirealists hold that acceptance of a theory justifies no such belief.”

It says that and also speculates on “a direct Kantian influence on Bohr”. So it is suggesting both.
— Joshs

Didn't exactly demonstrate that, did it? — frank

I’ve been reading NIELS BOHR'S CONCEPT OF REALITY by Henry J Folse. He provides evidence that Bohr was an entity realist , a position that seems to represent a pre-Kantian form of realism.

“Natural phenomena, as experienced through the medium of our senses, often appear to be extremely variable and unstable. To explain this, it has been assumed, since early times, that the phenomena arise from the combined action and interplay of a large number of minute particles, the socalled atoms, which are themselves unchangeable and stable, but which, owing to their smallness, escape immediate perception. Quite apart from the fundamental question of whether we are justified in demanding visualizable pictures in fields which lie outside of the reach of our senses, the atomic theory was originally of necessity of a hypothetical character; and, since it was believed that a direct insight into the world of atoms would, from the very nature of the matter, never be possible, one had to assume that the atomic theory would always retain this character. However, what has happened in so many other fields has happened also here; because of the development of observational technique, the limit of possible observations has continually been shifted.

We need only think of the insight into the structure of the universe which we have gained by the aid of the telescope and the spectroscope, or of the knowledge of the finer structure of organisms which we owe to the microscope. Similarly, the extraordinary development in the methods of experimental physics has made known to us a large number of phenomena which in a direct way inform us of the motions of atoms and of their number. We are aware even of phenomena which with certainty may be assumed to arise from the action of a single atom. However, at the same time as every doubt regarding the reality of atoms has been removed and as we have gained a detailed knowledge of the inner structure of atoms, we have been reminded in an instructive manner of the natural limitations of our forms of perception.”
( Niels Bohr 1929)

That quote isn't saying that Bohr was influenced by Kant. It's just saying people have noticed parallels — frank

It says that and also speculates on “a direct Kantian influence on Bohr”. So it is suggesting both. And I would suggest that those quoted believe the parallels between Kant and Bohr are close enough that it really doesn’t matter whether Bohr ever read Kant. The point is that these authors believe there is strong overlap in their ideas. You apparently disagree.

The Copenhagen interpretation (especially John von Neumann's view) is not Kant. There is no thing in itself. There is no determinate thing prior to wave function collapse, and we have a clear idea of the math that describes what's there prior to collapse. — frank

The authors of the Copenhagen Interpretation weren’t simply duplicating Kant, but theyr were strongly influenced by him:


”Many philosophers and physicists have recognized a strong kinship between Kant and Bohr’s
thinking or a direct Kantian influence on Bohr. In the thirties C.F. von Weizsäcker and Grete Hermann
attempt to understand complementarity in the light of neo-Kantian ideas. As von Weizsäcker puts it many
years later, “The alliance between Kantians and physicists was premature in Kant’s time, and still is; in Bohr, we begin to perceive its possibility”. A series of modern scholars (Folse 1985; Honner 1982, 1987; Faye
1991; Kaiser 1992; Chevalley 1994; Pringe 2009; Cuffaro 2010; Bitbol 2013, 2017; and Kauark-Leite 2017)
has also emphasized the Kantian parallels. Although these scholars find common themes, they also disagree
to what extent Kantian or neo-Kantian ideas can be used as spectacles through which we may vision Bohr’s
understanding of quantum mechanics. On the other hand, Cuffaro (2010) holds that any proper
“interpretation of Bohr should start with Kant”, and that “complementarity follows naturally from a broadly
Kantian epistemological framework.”
(Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics)


“After discussions with Weizsäcker and Hermann in Leipzig in the 1930s, Heisenberg attempted to ground his interpretation of quantum mechanics on what might be termed a 'practical' transformation of Kantian philosophy. Taking as his starting point, Bohr's doctrine of the indispensability of classical concepts, Heisenberg argued that concepts such as space, time and causality can be regarded as 'practically a priori', in so far as they remain the conditions for the possibility of experience and even of 'objective reality', though they are not universal and necessary in a strictly Kantian sense.”(Heisenberg and the Transformation of Kantian Philosophy)

Just to clarify, in terms of our folk notions of reality, QM goes far beyond saying that things work differently on a small scale. QM suggests that there is no distinct reality outside measurement events (which don't require consciousness, but human activity is a kind of measurement.)

So when you say physicists are realists, that doesn't necessarily answer the OP. If the OP had some sort of Newtonian picture of the world, then the answer is yes, QM says that a fair portion of that absolute realm is not real. — frank

There is no single ‘folk’ notion of reality any more than there is a single philosophical or scientific notion of it. There are so many variants of realism that different philosophers adhere to that it is possible to accommodate QM within one or more of them. It is true that the most traditional conceptions of the real can be ruled out by QM ( naive realism) but then we reach some difficult territory.

As far as the quotes in the OP making what is observed dependent on the existence of the observer, this shows an assimilation of Kant’s work on noumenon and phenomenon , concept and sensation, and the inaccessibility of the thing in itself. But embracing Kantianism only rules out older conceptions of the real , like Newton’s. This is why one can find a hodgepodge of realism and anti-realism within a single account of QM.

The world works differently at different scales. Why would we think that wouldn't be true. Different metaphysical regimes apply at different scales. That's the thing about metaphysics - there's not just one appropriate view of reality. The philosophical lesson of QM is that what works at human scale doesn't work at all at nano-scale — T Clark

There are ways of accommodating within a a single metaphysics the situation in physics that the world appears to work differently at different scales. For instance, one can argue, as the followers of Quine do , that facts and value systems ( accounts of the world) are inextricably bound together. Thus, it is not just the human and nano scales of physical description that can’t be fully integrated. It is also the myriad descriptions of reality within the various subsegments of the biological and social sciences. Whatever we study within one approach responds also to other theories and procedures, but with
different new precision. Since it responds to various systems, it cannot be how one system renders it.

“ Alternative approaches develop separate webs of precise findings. Precision develops within each
web, but they are not consistent with each other
Quine rightly saw that the order of nature cannot be just one of these "webs." Although they can be internally consistent, they cannot be reconciled. Even if they could be, we know in advance that more of them will soon form. Since we know it in advance, we can assert it in advance:
Nature ..... can respond with surprising and precise detail, but differently to different approaches.
The responsive order provides a "reality" to check against. We can check each approach (procedure, performance, set of experiments, measurements) against the feedback of an equally precise "reality." But there is no way in which we could "check" so as to decide between these "realities.” Eugene Gendlin, The Responsive Order )

Notice that the concept of fact-value inseparability is a unitary metaphysical conception describing a situation of multiple accounts. You will find that almost all philosophers treat metaphysics as a way to synthetically unify disparate accounts at the most general level of thought.

If you search for "real" in your Schaum's Outline of Quantum Mechanics you will find nothing, save mentions of the real number system. "reality" is in the domain of speculation by both experts and quantum mysticists. — jgill

On the other hand, among those physicists who are aquatinted with philosophical accounts of realism and anti-realism, most consider themselves philosophical realists.

Human nature more than ever has become more and more susceptible to degrees of corruption that has become so widespread in current society as to be normalised, go uncriticised and go unchecked.

And it’s not just the base vileness of most human beings to be nasty to each other that is the problem it’s the platform to do so in this ever increasing fragmented society. — Deus

If we were to populate an entire planet with clones of you, people who not only share the moral philosophy in your OP but follow its implications to the letter, channeling only their most noble instincts in dealing with others and assiduously avoiding what they define as corruption and vileness, what would be the result? I suggest it would be similar to the world that you describe. When we try to hold others to normative primciples of right and wrong, when we understand human behavior in terms of a universal framework of ethics, we will have no effective means of making sense of ways of seeing the world very different from ours , and we will be forced to condemn rather than sympathize with behaviors that don’t fit our norms. In this way, our moral righteousness is part of the problem rather than the solution. As Ken Gergen wrote:

“We do not suffer from an absence of morality in the world. Rather, in important respects we suffer from its plenitude.”

Is your first thought aware of itself? Or is your second thought a reflection on your first thought (as mine is).

My feeling is that thought distracts awareness away from the present into the labyrinth of thought — unenlightened

There is an assumption common to meditative practice and cognitive science that one can make a distinction between a pre-reflective and a reflective form of awareness , and a distinction between attention and what what one attends to. But if reflecting on one’s consciousness is distorting, then so is the ‘pre-reflective’ experience of awareness. Any form of consciousness or awareness is an awareness of something other than itself. There is no self to be aware of except a self that arrives to us from the world every moment as a changed self. To turn back to oneself, to turn ‘inward’ in order to examine the being of consciousness is a being exposed to an outside. Studying consciousness is studying g self-transformation, and this means participating in the transformation rather than standing outside of it.

But would you agree that someone like Nietzsche or Kierkegaard , who spent their whole lives with no recognition of their ideas, benefited from the guidance of those ideas as much in isolation as they would have if the ideas had formed the basis of a community paradigm?
— Joshs

You tell me. In what way did they benefit in their isolation? In what way would they have profited more if everyone else had joined them in applying the same existential analysis?

I have so little interest in them that I simply couldn’t even guess. I never saw anything of pragmatic use, although perhaps you mean how their writings function as romantic spectacle or popular entertainment? — apokrisis

Substitute a thinker you find relevant and see how you might answer the question.

↪Joshs You mean can paradigm shifting genius exist? Sure, why not?

But paradigm shifting means bringing the community with you. Otherwise nothing has happened — apokrisis

I guess technically a paradigm requires a partially shared set of practices among a community, so a lone genius is not the originator of a paradigm until they are no longer alone. But what does it mean to say that nothing has happened? Certainly nothing has happened for anyone but the lone innovator. But would you agree that someone like Nietzsche or Kierkegaard , who spent their whole lives with no recognition of their ideas, benefited from the guidance of those ideas as much in isolation as they would have if the ideas had formed the basis of a community paradigm?

Positive psychology is about recognising that reaching higher levels of mind is a collaborative enterprise. Team work. A collectively developing community of minds — apokrisis

To what extent, if at all, can one talk about an individual way of thinking that enters into territory not trod by others in the surrounding community? This would not be to say that an individual perspective is not formed through reciprocal interaction within the community , but that it is more than a node in a reciprocal network. It can exceed to some extent the culture it is shaped by. When Peirce introduced his ideas in the mid 1800’s , were they only a variation within a larger network, or did they play a leading role in transforming the network?

Everyone becoming their own world is another way of saying the same thing.

And when plurality is taken to its own logical extreme, it becomes wokism. We see the hard, fixed and eternal becoming the enforced collective norm that tolerates no diversity when it comes to its diversity. — apokrisis

Wokism is mostly Marxist and pre-Marxist dialectics. Modernist emancipatory dialectics is what postmodernism rejected.

I'm talking about those in power, whether in an organization or the whole country. — L'éléphant

Do you ever wonder how different things might look to you if you were the one in power?

Semiosis is the explanation for how such "first person" points of view arise as part of the information economy of a dissipation-driven enterprise. Meaning and value is what emerges as a result of that thermally embodied modelling process. — apokrisis

Peirce already takes us into another world where nothing is eternal and fixed, all is co-emergent and developmental. — apokrisis

What about the formal basis of such concepts as semiosis, code, information and thermal dissipation? Is there not an assumed irreducible ground for them , a formal content of some sort that is not itself co-emergent but is instead the condition of possibility of co-emergence?

The self can seem to exist as it own hard centre of value and meaning. Otherwise how else would Romanticism and PoMo find their claims to metaphysical legitimacy? — apokrisis

Doesn’t seem to be much use among postmodernists for the depiction of self as a “its own hard center of value and meaning.” Hardness and centers are hard to come by in their writing. Decentering difference is the watchword. Genes and thermodynamic processes exist for a postmodern writer like Deleuze, but a difference in degree does not exist without simultaneously being a difference in kind. Is this thinking consistent with a Peircean grounding of codes, information and thermal dissipation processes?

There are few who view themselves as explicitly immoral. There is always a way to rationalize. But this fact does not impact the legitimacy of our own judgements of them. — hypericin

The legitimacy of our own judgments goes only as far as the normative framework we buy into, within which the others actions appear immoral. But such normative
frameworks specify a certain way of interpreting the meaning of situations( the so-called objective facts), and do not take into account that the facts may appear very different from a different normative interpretive framework . This is because for many moral systems there is assumed to be only one meta-normative framework. As a result , we end up assuming that the other understands the facts just as we do , and it is their intent that is to blame. We say they ‘rationalize’ to themselves or to us, which is another way of saying they know what they do and why they do it , and they are lying about this. By confusing ‘immoral’ intent with a different interpretive understanding of the world, we justify our condemnation , punishment and even violence against them, but we never succeed in understanding how differently their world looked to them than to us.

Joshs You have to understand that greedy individuals do not try to hide the fact. Arrogance comes with greed. Love of power and wealth with no cap is displayed amongst them. It is understood. But for good PR, of course, they're going to say they're building communities and wealth for everybody. — L'éléphant

Some have extolled the message that greed is good. What they mean by that is the ability to accumulate wealth is associated with creativity and innovation that benefits society. They are praising the productive powers of self-interest and would insist that this is the only reliable way to produce wealth that makes its way to an entire nation. I don’t personally support this neo-liberal view, but they believe it is an eminently moral position rather than a form of destructive selfishness.

You ask rhetorical questions without giving hints as to what I should be contemplating here — Deus

You should be contemplating the correlation between level of cultural development and what we call ‘morality’.Cultural development brings with it greater insights into how others unlike ourselves see the world , and this allows us to engage with them in ways that are less violent, hostile and punitive. In other words , in more ‘moral’ ways. Once we have achieved a certain level of development , we turn around and accuse others who haven’t arrived there yet of being ‘immoral,

Many serial killers grow up in home environments very different from our own , and this can produce a kind of social intelligence that has profound gaps.

And an example of this is...what? — L'éléphant

I would argue that every time you use the word ‘greed’ to describe another you are failing to see how they legitimately justify their actions based on their perspective and personal history. For instance, ‘greedy’ CEO’s see the world through the value of what they produce. It is what they know best and that biases them in favor of rewarding themselves and building an ever more powerful empire that seems to them to be a gift to mankind. ‘Greed’ is really a kind of tunnel vision

My point is that intellect and morality are not intrinsically linked.

The misuse of high IQ for example has produced some of the US most prolific serial killers. — Deus

I.Q. is not the measure of social intelligence you need in order to see the correlation between what we call
morality and intellectual development. Ever notice how so many of the practices we label immoral are associated with older, traditionalistic cultures?

Good point. It is greed that is one of the big factors of the rationalised and unrationised aspects of ego — Deus

Unless of course labels like ‘greed’ are our attempts to blame others for our failure to understand situations that seem justified from the ‘greedy’ one’s vantage.

↪Deus Serial killing is not "misuse of high IQ"; that's psychpathy (or antisocial sociopathy) — 180 Proof

Nice label, but is there really any coherence in its definition other than people doing things that seem to be in severe violation of social norms? It seems mainly to serve as rationalization of the assumption that there is such a thing as an objectively determinable definition of suffering. See , there must be because of the existence of individuals who are allegedly constitutionally incapable of empathizing with others suffering.

Our consciousness is the sum of all four levels of semiosis or self~world making. And each level imposes its own mechanistic kind of measurements on the world — apokrisis

You have offered a story of genesis , unfolding from the physical to the biological to the social. The detailed twists and turns of the structural innovations at each level are contingent and relative , but there are non-relative , non-contingent meta-principles common to all levels, forming their condition of possibility. These would seem to be transcendental , but not in a strictly Kantian sense. What they do have in common with Kant is that they are objective formal principles. The implication is that personal experience , any kind of history and subjective time will forever be guided by a specific unchanging normative meta-frame. Is this right?

How have you established that you have have a fair interpretation of his choices/situation?
— Tom Storm

What we have is the public, actionable discourse, The stuff philosophy doesn't do. — Banno

Not sure what you mean here. I would say that my determination of my friend’s perspective and motivation is a process of trying on for size different ways of construing his actions , and seeing how well each of these templates can anticipate and make sense of his future behavior. The aim is to be able to fluidly ‘dance’ with him discursively so that my surprise at what he does or says is minimized, and I can constructively contribute to his needs. a

How have you established that you have have a fair interpretation of his choices/situation? Is self-medication a reaction to suffering, a form of suffering or something else in your view? — Tom Storm

He had been sober for about 5 years after a long bout with alcohol and was trying to complete a graduate program in psychology, while aiming to transition to female gender. He was thrown out of the program for failing to compete certoa. requirements and this led him back to drinking. But I could see the tremendous anxiety he battled with while he was sober, on a daily basis. There were all sorts of signs that life was becoming too much for him to cope with without assistance.

m

I have noticed that people who are homeless often have chronic and severe depression - it often presents after becoming homeless (but may also sometimes be a cause of homelessness) and i generally see it as part of the suffering intrinsic to many people's experience of living homeless.

that 'stalled creativity' or frozenness seems to eat people alive and I certainly recognise this in the lives of many folk I have worked with (and colleagues, but that's another story). — Tom Storm

Would you agree, from your experience, that what shatters people’s lives is the loss of the sense of connection with others, of having worth, of being held in esteem, more than material deprivation or physical illness? This is really at the heart of what I mean by ‘ ‘creativity’. For most people, what gives them their sense of being creatively vital is knowing that they belong, that they have a purpose that touches the lives of others. A family can be homeless, and for the children the homelessness may not have much meaning. Instead, what they will care about is the bond with their parents. If they have that , their physical situation will be less relevant. Even for the parents, the most painful aspect of being homeless may not be the material deprivation as much as the wound to their sense of worth and dignity, the trauma of failure.