Witt says they believe in something as possible but not here. I take the mirage to be created by the projection of the “mental” as imagined objects (by analogy), and I’ll grant to Joshs that they are “gripped” by the picture, and are “inclined” to say certain things as natural given their position once they have intellectually fortified it. But there is a why we have been chasing and I take it as the reason for picking objects as the analogy.

Their conviction comes by a secret they see that we don’t, like they “had discovered… new elements of the structure of the world”. But what makes them excited are the possibilities of an object, which are generalizable, complete, concrete, verifiable, substantial, etc. They become so compelled because there is nothing in the way of them projecting/imagining what they want: knowledge; an answer, a justification, a foundation, something of which they can be certain — Antony Nickles

If we are to associate desire, seen as ‘what we want’, with the ‘why’ which motivates our reasons, then what we desire isnt the same thing as this ‘why’ Rather, like our reasons, what we desire gets its intelligibility from within the why. If we think of this ’why’ as an overarching system expressing how reasons hang together, what Wittgenstein later calls a form of life, and which he is perhaps depicting incipiently here as a firmly held conviction, or that which ties tighter a wide range of convictions ( ‘this is what we do’), then why we desire what we desire cannot be located within the space of reasons, but prior (not in a chronological sense) to them.

If knowledge, an answer, a justification, a foundation, is what we want, then the larger system of intelligiblity is what makes these concepts intelligible. If knowledge-as-picture and foundations are grammatical illusions, the source of our being captivated by this illusion is not to be found in what we want but as this larger ‘why’ organizing the sense of our motives and reasons. It then would make no sense to trace the genesis of something like a form of life to what we desire and what our reasons are. We don’t want to be a solipsist or skeptic; we want what we want, and how we want it, WITHIN these illusory grammars. Is this consistent with your thinking here?

This makes sense, but I don’t think it contradicts what panwei has written. I think it makes sense too say, or at least consider, that the fact we care about each other is something that has evolutionary roots. — T Clark

It can have evolutionary roots in two ways . One way is that it is a gimmick, an arbitrary genetic contrivance whose value is indirect; that it is adaptive for the survival of the species. The second way is that the intrinsic dynamics of caring and social involvement function according the same same principles as evolutionary processes; not as an arbitrary gimmick that just so happens to further survival but
as what Piaget described as the fundamental organizing principle of life , the reciprocal relation between assimilation and accommodation in evolving living systems from a weaker to stronger structure. This limited the arbitrary gimmick aspect, as though we would stop caring about each other if evolution found a better way.
Another way to put it is that relevance and mattering are not inventions of evolution, but its basis.

This ought is not a choice
— Joshs

Well, OK. So if I were to say to someone, "You ought to ____ [filling in your description of what you call the intrinsic striving for self-expression]," that would be pointless, since they're doing it anyway? — J

They’re doing some ought, but it may not match your ought. Your ought may be taken as an invitation to view the situation from a different vantage. In psychological theory, the separating of is and ought translates into the difference between the person as a static object and the motives which push or pull them into behaving.
The ought is this ‘spark plug’ which is presumed to be needed to drive action. Psychological approaches like enactivism assume that we always already find ourselves thrown into action, so the ‘ought’ of motive doesn’t have to posited as a separate mechanism from the ‘is’ of being in the world. The issue isn’t how we get ourselves started but how we cope with the way we find ourselves thrown into situations , that is, the direction of motive.

The enactivists also argue that the social linguistic community is inseparably intertwined with the very notion of self; intersubjective factors already have an effect on our perception and understanding of the world and ourselves, even in the immediacy of our instrumental copings with the environment.

"X should be chosen because X is worthy (or worthwhile)," is simply not a tautology. Your claim that it is a tautology requires equivocation and a redefinition of "worth."

It should be easy enough to see this by simply noting that an argument over whether something has worth is not the same as an argument over whether some course of action should be taken. For instance, "The coffee should be chosen because the coffee should be chosen," is not the same as, "The coffee should be chosen because it tastes delicious," and yet 'tastes delicious' is itself here understood as a relevant form of worth. — Leontiskos

The way I’m reading ‘x should be chosen’ is that it implies a preference. The choice being recommended is preferable to the alternatives on some basis, and thus more worthy to be chosen than the alternatives on that same basis. One isn't making a blanket implication of the worth of the recommended choice, only that it is worthier than the alternatives on some basis. It’s hard to imagine a circumstance in which the utterance ‘the coffee should be chosen because the coffee should be chosen’ would be useful, except as a way of answering objections with ‘because I said so’, which isnt a denial that I deem the coffee preferable to (more worthy than) alternatives, but simply says ‘the reasons for my preference are none of your business and just do what I say’.

I agree with the thrust of your post, and I personally share the sentiment quoted above. But . . . suppose I don't? Suppose I don't see others as like myself, and am not interested in relating to them or expanding my sense of self. Are you arguing that I ought to? If not, what does this have to do with ethics and morality, with doing the right thing or pursuing the good or however one cares to phrase it — J

What I’m arguing is that ‘sense of self’ has nothing to do with the physical boundary that divides the outer layer of my skin from other persons. It has precisely to do with relatability and assimilability. I can be divided within my own ‘self’ just a much as I can be united with another person, depending on the relative success at achieving this integration. My personal desires and interests don’t come before this striving for self-integration; it is intrinsic to the very nature of desire. This ought is not a choice, it is the condition of possibility of intelligible experience.

I also share your idea about the origins of "ought." Essentially, this isn't a new idea—just a new perspective on an old instinct — Astorre

You’re right, the is-ought divide is not a new idea. So why not let some fresh air into the room by focusing on newer philosophies ( there are many of them) which dismantle the basis for the is-ought distinction?

That's the difference between ought and is. The receipt from the checkout is what is the case, the shopping list is what ought be the case. — Banno

It’s difficult for me to absorb the sense of this Humean distinction. My brain is clogged with too many sedimented layers of philosophy which have explicitly dismantled the entire framework on which the is-ought distinction is built. My thoughts bounce from enactivists like Evan Thompson and Francisco Varela to hermeneuticists like Dilthey and Gadamer, from poststructuralists like Deleuze and Foucault to phenomenologists like Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-ponty, from Wittgenstein, Putnam and Rorty, to Joseph Rouse and Karen Barad.

For instance, we have an intuitionthat killing is wrong because our minds can vaguely discern that the act of arbitrarily infringing upon life would be fundamentally detrimental to our adaptation to the environment and survival. Perhaps the moral system of human society is itself an adaptive tool formed under evolutionary pressures to promote group survival and reproduction. In other words, morality is a cultural apparatus that "serves the fundamental purpose." — panwei

This seems like a long and convoluted way to explain something that can be better explained in a much more direct way. We believe killing is wrong because we care about others. We care about others because we see them as like ourselves, which allows us to relate to them, learn from them, expand the boundaries of our sense of self. It’s not a question of what we can ‘get out of them’ for some narrowly conceived selfish purpose, but that they become a part of our own sense of self. The self is enriched and expanded to include others rather than simply treat them as objects for solipsistic purposes. Yes, we could argue that this furthers the survival of the species, but this is still looking at the notion of survival too narrowly and statically. What is being enhanced isnt the mere static survival of an object-a human, but the becoming and expansion of the self. Social bonds, friendship , love and cooperation dont just do the bidding of some prior “fundamental purpose” called evolutionary survival; they are its extension and redefinition. They are not just a means to some prior end. They are their own ends., their own fundamental purpose.

There are, however, some awkward phenomena. Akrasia (weakness of will) is one, and another is the phenomenon of protesting too much - where vehement denial of a truth betrays the denier's uneasy awareness the they are wrong. — Ludwig V

Psychologist George Kelly defined hostility as “the continued effort to extort validational evidence in favor of a type of social prediction which has already proved itself a failure.” Put simply, in hostility, events turn out differently than one had expected, and instead of revising one’s thinking, one tries to ‘force a round peg into a square hole.’

Showing examples of other senses (usages) for a phrase than the skeptic claims, is not in order to be right, but to make a point by basically saying, “see?” to show the conditions which would allow the skeptic's phrase to do what they want (to give it the necessary context, expectations, implications, logic, etc.)
— Antony Nickles
Yes. That's relieving the cramp. Though we need to think of someone suffering from cramp who doesn't want to be released from it. The cramp is our diagnosis. But movement can become restricted because it is never used. Perhaps that's better. — Ludwig V

This gets to the question of the relation between feeling-affect-desire and the ‘intellectual’ for Wittgenstein. There are a wide variety of interpretations to choose from among Wittgenstein scholars. My preference is to claim that the desire to stay on the path of illusion is not knowingly to do so. Desire only makes sense the way that true and false makes sense , within a form of life that gives both a desire and the criterion of truth their intelligibility. If what can be intelligibly desired takes place within a form of life that rests on a grammatical illusion, it is not as though desire first recognizes the illusion and then decides to ignore this knowledge. Rather , the desire can’t make it intelligible in the first place. It is not a s though desire knows the illusion as illusion and then decides to stay with the illusion, as though desire has a choice.

The philosophical problem is not a moral failing or an act of bad faith where the skeptic willfully chooses illusion over truth. Instead, the deep-seated desire for certainty or for a complete explanation is captured by a misleading grammatical picture.

The usual suspect tertiary sources on the web say he did not believe that consciousness originated outside the body. — T Clark

In earlier works , like Principles of Psychology, his approach was mainly materialistic. But toward the end of his career his thinking became more speculative. In the essay, he proposes that the idea that the brain transmits rather than produces consciousness is philosophically and scientifically conceivable, and perhaps better fits the facts than strict materialism.

He writes:

“Suppose that our brains are not productive, but transmissive organs, through which the material world affects the spiritual. Then the diminutions of consciousness which accompany brain lesions may not be due to the destruction of consciousness itself, but to the failure of its physical organs to transmit it properly.”

Authentic intelligence is generally seen as triadic, whereas computers are reductively dyadic. — Leontiskos

When we talk about how the mind really works, and then compare that to what a computer does, there’s a tendency to assume that what we are comparing are two kinds of processes taking place inside of objects, one of these objects being a brain and the other being a machine. But recent thinking in cognitive science argues that thinking doesn’t take place inside the head. The brain is embodied in a body, and the body is embedded in an environment, so mind is indissociably all of these. Cognitive nis not only embedded in a world, its is extended into this world.

That means that mind implies and includes the artifacts that we interact with, including language, the arts, music, our built environment as our constructed biological niche, our clothing and our technological tools. What this means is that our computers as information processing systems are not entities unto themselves , they are appendages and extensions of our thinking, just as a nest is to a bird or a web to a spider. A nest is only meaningfully a nest as the bird uses it for its purposes. Similarly, a computer has no existence outside of what we do with it and how we interpret what we do with it.

So when we say that the mind works differently than a computer, we are comparing two different ways of interacting with our environment. If we understand the working of our computers ‘diadically’ and the working of our minds ‘triadically’, in both cases we are talking about the working of our minds. We should say, then, that the one way of using our minds is more limited than the other, but not less ‘authentic’ or more ‘artificial’. Artifice and niche construction IS what the authentic mind does. The engineer ( or Sam Altman) who claims that their invented a.i. device thinks just like a human is correct in that the device works according to principles that they believe also describe how the mind works.

As our self-understanding evolves, we will continually raise the bar on what it means for our devices to ‘think like us’. In a way, they always has thought like us, being nothing more that appendages which express our own models and theories of how we think. But as this thinking evolves , the nature of the machines we build will evolve along with it.

Some scientists are exploring panpsychism as a potential solution to the hard problem of consciousness, which questions how physical matter can give rise to subjective experience.
— Gnomon

The link you provided doesn’t really identify any scientists who support panpsychism, although it does identify some philosophers. Can you name some scientists who do?

discussion of a controversial philosophical concept
— Gnomon

This is not a philosophical question at all—it’s a scientific one. Does our consciousness result from signals coming from outside our bodies? — T Clark

William James might have begged to differ with you. In his essay ‘Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine’, he raises the question whether consciousness might depend on, or even originate from, sources “outside” the brain, but James does so in a way that deliberately blurs the boundaries between psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience.

I mentioned that I beleive we will soon enter a lost decade for the stock market. My thesis is that a closer look at ‘lost decades’ reveals them to tie together economics, domestic and international politics, technological rhythms, and counter- culture in general. What do Coolidge, Hoover and the Weimar republic have in common, or Roosevelt and Hitler? What do the Iranian Revolution, Thatcher, Reagan, hippie counterculture, Steve Jobs and the fall of the Soviet Union have in common? What do Trump, Le Pen, Orban, Farage, Brexit, Truss, Netanyahu and Putin have in common?

They have in common the fact that culture develops via eras consisting of phases of cycles marking incipient innovation, stabilization of that innovation, complacency, backsliding ( see Hyman Minsky on the ‘Minsky cycle and Minsky moment’) and destabilization reflecting transition to a new era of innovation. For instance, the progressive era between 1900 and 1920 stabilized the innovating industrial economy through trust busting and the formation of a Treaury, but complacency and backsliding ( tariffs, anti-immigration) froze its gains into place between 1920 and 1932, while the economy was innovating into a phase (assembly- line mass production) where a more aggressive labor-focused progressivism (and elimination of tariffs) was necessary.

The new deal in the U.S. jumped immediately into this new era, whereas the transition to social democracy in Europe required an initial bout of backsliding into fascism. This labor-focused safety net became complacent and clogged with red tape by the time of Johnson and Nixon, and needed to become more flexible and supportive of new technology with the advent of the digital revolution. The neo-liberal philosophical underpinnings of this revolution are exemplified by the hippie persona of Steve Jobs, born about 10 years later than most of the hippie community.

The hippie tech genius was to bundle together a multitute of algorithmically fixed packets of information ( Leary’s consciousness expansion opening up new circuits of reality). This transformation wasn’t reflected politically until the transition from Carter to Reagan (and Thatcher). This neo-liberal libertarian move eventually became complacent under Clinton (first baby boomer) and Bush II, and needed to be supplemented by a new safety net, this time focused not on welfare for labor but for corporations, in the formation of rock-bottom interest rates, tax cuts and Q.E. This took place under Obama, Trump I and Biden, where it began to reach a peak of complacency in parallel with stagnating tech corporations.

And it is now becoming in need of supplementation and reform as the welfare-for-corporations model reaches its extreme with Trump’s backsliding into extreme corporate welfare protectionism, walling business and American culture off from anything alien. Excessive immigration has led to mass deportations, uncontrolled free trade has led to tariffs. The new tech era arising from the ashes of the current one will be more liberal and communitarian than libertarian in its inspiration, focused less on algorithmic data training than on integrating data frames with qualitatively different human perspectives. Instead of bundling together multitudes of arbitrary , fixed packets of information, which is all that today’s A.I. does, it will insert reciprocal causation into its fixed algorithmic causation.

Like Jobs in the 1970’s and the hippie counterculture ( and Edison, Ford, Tesla and the Transcendental-Romantic movement of the 19th century), it will be exemplified by those belatedly tapping into today’s counterculture of progressive wokeness. Trump is clearing the decks, dismantling the old political structures, leaving a vacuum out of which the new generation of ‘woke’ techies and progressives can erect a supplement to corporate-welfare neo-liberalism. Look for this tech revolution to emerge around 2035.

The technological language of this new business liberalism will be that of complex dynamical systems theory, which is already used in reservoir computing. This will bring tech into the world of Hegelian dialectics, the front doorstep of wokism.

Sexual orientation has nothing to do with gender. It is biological. It is not 'gender orientation'. It is 'sexual orientation — Philosophim

Now we’re getting somewhere. How do you imagine a brain mechanism works to produce sexual orientation? Any hypotheses? What I am arguing is that such a brain mechanism shapes and organizes how we process affective and perceptual information, giving each of us a perceptual -affective style which is both biological and subject to cultural shaping, and shapes much, much more that sexual orientation. Put differently, sexual orientation is one among many results of a brain filter which gives us a certain sex-based style of perceiving . Think of it as akin to Chomsky’s transformational grammar. Just as he theorized a brain module which filters , processes and organizes language into patterns which can be assessed statistically, I am arguing that your brian mechanism for sexual orientation is such a module , and that you’re missing the organized, patterned way in which experience is filtered and processed by this biological module when you look at biological sex-based behavior reductively.

Its as though I hand you an intricately patterned glass sculpture, and you throw it on the ground and shatter it into a thousand fragments. You then study those fragments individually and look for statistical patterns in the arbitrary behavior of each fragment to explain the nature of the sculpture’s overall pattern. That’s how Skinner studied language before Chomsky came along. You look at fragments of a pattern and , without recognizing what organized those fragments into the patten in the first place, treat them as independent. Here we have sexual orientation. There we have aggression. Elsewhere there are myriad other behaviors, each of which is seemingly arbitrary and unconnected to a larger originating processing module which could tie them all together on the basis of a single organizing principle. We the. apply our statistics to this assumed random and arbitrary pile of behavioral fragments. What we get out of this is what we put into it: people randomly falling into social roles and behaviors.

I expect that, just like the Dot-Com bubble, the AI bubble is likely to burst. — Pierre-Normand

I agree A.I. is a bubble, but I think the situation in the market today is more like the late 1960’s than the late ‘90’s. The dot.com era was the beginning of a tech revolution, and now, almost 30 years later, I think we’re nearing the end of that same era. Similarly, the industrial revolution, which was still in its formative years at we entered the 20th century, was long in the tooth by the 1960’s. In the late ‘60’s, just as today, the market was buoyed by well-established tech companies ( Kodak, Xerox, G.E., IBM, GM and Ford) which formed part of the Nifty Fifty, the ‘60’s version of today’s Magnificent Seven. And , like today’s tech companies, the companies of the Nifty Fifty were solid dividend-producing, profit-making entities. Also like today’s high-flying companies, they had become fat, lazy and complacent, focusing more on pleasing shareholders, walling themselves off from competition and getting government favors than creative nimbleness and innovation. This process of internal decay has recently been called ‘enshitification’ ( examples of it include Google’s once praised but now almost unusable search engine). In contrast to both the mature 1960’s tech companies and those of today, the young dot.com firms made no profits and offered no dividends , so their stock valuations were based entirely on speculation.

Some argue that today’s a.i. has inaugurated a tech revolution, but I suggest that, for all its seemingly dazzling capabilities, it represents the tail end of the previous tech era rather than a fresh revolution. I think we’re about 10 years away from that next tech era, and just as with the stale and complacent companies of the late ‘60’s, a bubble has formed driven by lazy expectations drawn from two previous decades of innovation and stock performance rather than accurate assessment of future profit potential. And just like the late ‘60’s , we are likely on our way to a long transition period till the next wave of tech innovation is launched in some 20-something’s garage. Until then I think we will see a lost decade for the market.

Animal research shows that sex hormones organize and activate the brain systems underlying many sex-typical behaviors, such as mating motivation, aggression and territorial behavior, empathy or affiliative tendencies and caregiving.
— Joshs

That is biological expectation, not gender. — Philosophim

You seem to be making two points . First, that the aspects of social behavior which are purely cultural and those which are due to biological factors are cleanly discernible through observation. Second, that practically none of what are considered feminine or masculine social behaviors in humans are related to the pre-natal effects of sex hormones on brain function.

I agree that biological and social factors go into a person's behavior in relation to their sex. Biological patterns of behavior are sex behaviors, not gender behaviors. Social factors are gender behaviors, not sex behaviors. — Philosophim

Using gay men as an example, I consider examples of such sexual behaviors as having a feminine voice, throwing like a girl, gestures, postures and ways of walking which appear feminine, being predominantly sexually attracted to other males, choosing professions which tend to be more associated with women, etc. Do any of these behaviors by themselves indicate a biologically-produced sex disposition? No, it is the larger pattern that points to a sex-associated behavioral style. Are professions and behaviors which used to be categorized rigidly by gender now in the process of dissolving their rigid categorical boundaries? Yes, absolutely. Do the very definitions of the masculine and the feminine change over time? Indeed they do.

But this doesn’t mean that when a gay child says that they have known they were gay as long as they can remember, that they didn’t choose to be gay, that they didn’t learn to be gay by absorbing it from their culture, that they are talking about gender as opposed to sex. And when they say that what it means to be gay for them is much wider than simply who they are sexually attracted to, that what ‘others’ them with respect to their males peers are a wide range of ‘feminized’ behaviors they may despise and certainly have no control over, what they are referring to is predominantly sex-based rather than culture-based ‘gender’.

Sex - Expected social behavior based on biology. It is statistically more likely for men to be aggressive — Philosophim

What biological mechanisms make men more likely to be aggressive than women? Would you say it’s the same mechanisms that produce myriad sex-based social behavioral differences between males and females in other species? What do you make of animal findings showing that hormonal exposure can “feminize” or “masculinize” neural circuits? For instance, certain brain regions, such as the hypothalamus, bed nucleus of the stria terminalis and amygdala, show sex-related patterns that are influenced by hormones.

Animal research shows that sex hormones organize and activate the brain systems underlying many sex-typical behaviors, such as mating motivation, aggression and territorial behavior, empathy or affiliative tendencies and caregiving. In songbirds, estrogen exposure in males can alter or reduce song patterns that are normally testosterone-driven. In some cases, it can alter vocalizations to produce simpler songs or calls more typical of females. In mammals, male parental behavior, such as grooming or caring for pups, can increase when estrogen is introduced. Female maternal behavior can be enhanced by estrogens and progesterone in combination.

Some studies in humans have shown that prenatal exposure to sex hormones influences later interests, play preferences, and some aspects of sexual orientation. Some neuroimaging and postmortem studies suggest that in transgender individuals, the structure or activity of brain regions sensitive to sex hormones may more closely resemble the gender they identify with than their sex assigned at birth.

I recognize that gendered behavior in humans is strongly influenced by social-cultural processes which are absent in other species, but aren’t you contradicting yourself when you assert that, on the one hand:

1) “Expected social behavior is based on biology. It is statistically more likely for men to be aggressive” ,

and on the other hand:

2)It is cognitive dissonace for factions within the trans activist community to argue that ‘gender is sex' while also redefining the term to allow 'not sex' into it as well.

Why is it cognitive dissonance when some trans activists claim that both biological and social factors are involved in sexually-related social behavior but not when you make the same claim?

the skeptic is “cramped” by the forced analogy (the two senses), from which he creates the picture, but this doesn’t explain why first choose “objects” to analogize, which is the matter at hand. And you’ve given no textual evidence for putting things back to front as you have done—I need more to see the logic. — Antony Nickles

While Wittgenstein does use "wants" and "dissatisfaction," the therapeutic effect of his philosophy, the complete dissolution of the problem once the grammar is clarified, shows that the confusion is linguistic. If the cause were a deep-seated fear, simply showing the proper use of 'know' wouldn't eliminate the fear. It eliminates the problem, thus proving the problem was linguistic, not psychological.
It is as the sense-making of grammatical use that meaning shows up as how things matter to us. This mattering can be described as a logic of sense or a logic of affect-feeling-emotion. What is important is that we not try to fix such terms categorically. Anything that we might be tempted to place within the category of ‘affect’ , such as mood, feeling, desire, emotion or motive, has its existence only in how it works within the mattering of word use.

Shared interests and desires that give rise to reasons are the raw material of sense-making, and it is when the grammar becomes misleading that our interests become the fuel for illusion and intellectual disquiet. For instance, it’s not the interest in securing certainty which produces illusion, it’s when their interest is capture by a misleading picture that ‘desire for certainty ‘ miscarries.

t our human interests are reflected in (and part of) the logic of our practices. It is finding out why we predetermine and/or limit what criteria (interests) are valid and important that we have realized is at the heart of what we are investigating here. Also, as I mentioned to Ludwig V here, I see the motivations and responses as also creating actual logical errors leading to philosophical misunderstandings, able to be resolved through philosophy. — Antony Nickles

I think Witt understands motives as he understands meaning in general, as neither emanating from the subjective nor from the objective side , but as arising out of the interaction. Our interests are enacted in situations, out of which things strike us as funny , sad, boring or interesting in any unlimited variety of ways . When Wittgenstein uses terms like "dissatisfaction," "wants," and "wishes’ with respect to grammatical illusions, the want or wish is an expression of the intellectual disquiet caused by the grammatical picture. The picture's power is what causes the desire, rather than a pre-existing desire creating or contributing to the tendency to create grammatical illusions. In this sense, Wittgenstein treats motive similarly to the way Heidegger understands motivation.

One cannot construct being-in-the-world from willing, wishing, urge, and propensity as psychical acts. The desire for this conversation is determined by the task I have before me. This is the motive, the "for the sake of which". The determining factor is not an urge or a drive, driving and urging me from behind, but something standing before me, a task I am involved in, something I am charged with.”(Heidegger, Zollikon)

Progressives, by contrast, contend that such reforms required transcending traditional authority through appeals to abstract reason, universal rights, and moral equality that often conflicted with inherited norms. For them, tradition frequently entrenches power and prejudice, and genuine moral progress demands critical rupture, not deference. — Colo Millz

You’re referring only to a subset of progressives, those at the conservative end of the progressive spectrum. You’ve left out those who subscribe to philosophical positions which put into question notions like abstract reason, universal rights, moral equality and timeless, objective truth. Follow the lineage from Hazoni to MacIntyre to Juergen Habermas to Charles Taylor to Richard Rorty.

Perhaps in claiming that only what the solipsist sees/feels, etc. is real (as if “alive”), they are thus “destroying” the world (by cutting it off/“killing” it), before it disappoints them.

the Berkeleyan move… [of] giving oneself a world before retreating from it.
— Paine

Where Ludwig V’s mind goes to the world we create in lieu of the thing-in-itself, my thought went to the related but opposite side where we imagine (“give” ourselves, as I take @Paine to put it) a ‘real’ world, but then we manufacture the idea of a (“peculiar” Witt says) mechanism, say, of ‘perception’, that only allows us an ‘appearance’ of that world, letting us “retreat” to arms length behind knowledge (or a lack of it), to avoid risking our hands getting dirty (to account for the mistakes we would make in a way that gives us a feeling of control). — Antony Nickles

When I ask myself how Wittgenstein understands the motivation associated with seeing the world as a solipsist, realist or idealist, I’m led to the terms he often uses; being ‘captivated’or ‘tempted’ by a picture. The impression I get is that it is the bewitching grammar of language itself that motivates our confusions, not something that could be misread as an inner psychological motive, like a desire to avoid disappointment, a desire for control or to avoid getting our hands dirty. Solipsism is the result of an intellectual cramp, not a psychological flaw

What i like about him is the ambiguity and multi-faceted dimension of his writing. I don't like the prospect of turning his writing into a self-help authority. — ProtagoranSocratist

What I like about Nietzsche is that I am able to discern in his work a substantive, radical and quite focused philosophical stance. There is ambiguity in any philosopher. For me what is most admirable about him is not the ambiguous aspects, but the aspects the philosophers I most admire are in general agreement about, such as the meaning of concepts like eternal return and will to power. I can’t imagine a powerful philosophy which doesn't help one makes sense of one’s world and oneself. In that respect all good philosophy is ‘self-help’ . No one understood that better than Nietzsche, who believed that all philosophy was autobiography, and whose philosophical insights rescued him from desperate sickness back to health time after time.

↪praxis sure, but with preaching, it's always about what the person means: the Nietzsche morality he was using to replace christian thinking is pretty far from clear- — ProtagoranSocratist

Let’s say for the sake of argument that Nietzsche-interpreters like Deleuze and Focault are right in seeing the direction of the ethical for Nietzsche not within a particular content of belief, nor any particular rule or principle of conduct, but as continual creative self-transformation and self-invention. Would this be appealing to you?

What was being argued was that the research required to put together an idea is tedious and outsourceable, and that what one should do is outsource that research, take the pre-made idea from the LLM-assistant, and "get on with the task of developing the idea to see if it works." Maybe try responding to that? — Leontiskos

By ‘getting on with developing the pre-made idea’ , do you mean simple intellectual theft? That would indeed be nasty, but I’m trying to make a distinction between stealing and proper use of an a.i. To use a pre-made idea properly, whether it comes from an a.i. or primary-secondary human source, is to read it with the aim of interpreting and modifying its sense in the direction of one’s own developing thesis, not blindly plugging the text into one’s work. When one submits a draft to an editor, this is precisely what one does with the ‘pre-made’ reviewers’ recommendations and critiques. Ideas can only be outsourced when one does not filter them critically through one’s own perspective.

If we may equate skepticism with doubt, then…
— Joshs
Yes, that's a good reply. One might want to argue about whether it is conclusive on its own. But that wasn't quite what I was talking about. It was, rather, Wittgenstein's comments about "our real need" or the what motivates, for example, the sceptic. Why would anyone say that they were the only person in existence? I think we need to tease out what, exactly, that means? — Ludwig V

You were right to point out that in the context of the reading, the kind of certainty that scepticism is a response to is that associated with knowledge of a picture. And yet the sceptic isnt able to dissolve the confusion arising from the separation of meaning from expression. For the sceptic , the idealist cant know what they claim to know. But an examination of the grammar of a solipsist statement like ‘it is only I who see’ reveals not whether something can or cannot be meant, but HOW it is meant, thereby avoiding both idealist certainty and scepticism.

A small contribution from me. Scepticism is often explained as a desire for certainty, but if certainty is an unattainable ideal, perhaps we should think of it as being, not the desire for certainty, but the fear of it, as some inflexible that hems us in. — Ludwig V

If we may equate skepticism with doubt, then…

“A doubt that doubted everything would not be a doubt” “The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.”
(On Certainty)

With frequent posters, it is pretty obvious that they are suddenly generating slabs of text above their usual pay grade. This is bad as they aren't doing any thinking themselves and so not learning, only point scoring or being lazy. But if the argument is good, you can still just respond. And if it annoys, you can just ignore or show the finger. — apokrisis

On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if over time we find that we can recognize the difference between those who use a.i. properly and those who shun it en toto, with those using it to enrich and critic their arguments putting forth more substantive and balanced posts than those who avoid it entirely. Perhaps at a certain point t we’ll
have to ban human users who don’t take advantage of a.i. to edit and strengthen their arguments.

before LLMs it used to be a tedious job to put together an idea that required research, since the required sources might be diverse and difficult to find. The task of searching and cross-referencing was, I believe, not valuable in itself except from some misguided Protestant point of view. Now, an LLM can find and connect these sources, allowing you to get on with the task of developing the idea to see if it works.
— Jamal

I don't think this is right. It separates the thinking of an idea from the having of an idea, which doesn't make much sense. If the research necessary to ground a thesis is too "tedious," then the thesis is not something one can put forth with integrity. — Leontiskos

My definition of tedious research is busywork, made necessary not because it is an intrinsic component of creative thought, but because it is an interruption of creative thinking, like composing prior to the advent of word processing, that our technologies haven’t yet figured out a way to free us from. Should we argue that if we can’t make our way to a physical volume of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and instead use the shortcut of an online search, then the thesis we are attempting to elaborate is not being put forth with integrity?

There are primary sources, there are secondary sources, there are search engines, and then there is the LLM. Consulting a secondary source and consulting an LLM are not the same thing.

It is worth noting that those who keep arguing in favor of LLMs seem to need to make use of falsehoods, and especially false equivalences. — Leontiskos

If one is using a.i. properly (and to me that’s the real issue here, not whether to use it at all), then the difference between consulting a secondary source and consulting an llm is the following:
After locating a secondary source one merely jots down the reference and that’s the end of it. When one locates an argument from an llm that one finds valuable, one decides if the argument is something one can either defend in one’s own terms, or should be backed up with a direct quote from either a secondary or primary source. This can then be achieved with a quick prompt to the llm, and finding a reference for the quote. The fact that proper use of a.i. leaves one with the choice between incorporating arguments one can easily defend and elaborate on based on one’s own understanding of the subject, and connecting those arguments back to verifiable quotes, means that the danger of falsehood doesn’t come up at all.

To say nothing of how dangerous it is to allow oneself to be distracted while out hiking. — baker

Now you sound like my brother. Keep in mind I live in the Midwest , not the Rockies. There are no vicious or poisonous beasts here ( except for Republicans) , just small tracts of forest preserve with a road no more than a few minutes away.

↪Joshs Why??
I mean, why not focus on one thing at a time?
It mars the hike to do something else while on the hike. — baker

You sound like my hiking friend. I used to do all my philosophy research and writing at home or in a library. But such things as unlimited cellular data, air pods and pdf audio readers freed me to use the great outdoors as my library. I’ve always needed to pace in order to generate ideas, and I’m a lot more productive out here than couped up facing 4 walls. Did you know Nietzsche composed his work while walking 7-10 miles a day? And Heidegger did his thinking walking around a farm in Freiburg.

Aristotle: Associated with the term "peripatetic" for his habit of walking around while lecturing and thinking.

Søren Kierkegaard: Believed walking was a way to find a state of well-being and walk away from burdens and illness, stating, "I have walked myself into my best thoughts".

"Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. Even if one were to walk for one's health and it were constantly one station ahead-I would still say: Walk!
Besides, it is also apparent that in walking one constantly gets as close to well-being as possible, even if one does not quite reach it—but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Health and salvation can be found only in motion... if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right."

Friedrich Nietzsche: A dedicated walker who believed thoughts not formed while walking were less trustworthy. He spent significant time hiking in the Swiss mountains to write and think, finding that walking facilitated his thought process.

Henry David Thoreau: Argued that walking in nature, even enduring discomfort like getting dirty or tired, builds toughness of character that makes one more resilient to future hardships.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Used walking as a way to think, particularly during solitary mountain walks.

Immanuel Kant: Had a very structured walking routine, marching through his hometown at the exact same time every day as a way to escape the compulsion of his own thoughts.

If the telos of TPF is helped by LLM-use, then LLMs should be encouraged. The vastness and power of the technology makes a neutral stance impossible. But the key question is this: What is the telos of TPF?

…If someone comes to TPF and manages to discreetly use AI to look smart, to win arguments, to satisfy their ego, then perhaps, "They have their reward." They are using philosophy and TPF to get something that is not actually in accord with the nature of philosophy. They are the person Socrates criticizes for being obsessed with cosmetics rather than gymnastics; who wants their body to look healthy without being healthy. — Leontiskos

I tend to think that a very small percentage of those who a.i. have that aim in mind. Can you think of a telos for this forum which includes a.i. but not in a way that needs to be characterized as ‘cosmetic’ or ‘machine-like’? I know more pay attention to the fact that I am using a machine when I consult a.i. than when I use the world-processing features of my iphone to type this. It’s not the machine I am beholden to when I expose myself to the ideas it delivers up, it’s the human thinkers it puts me in touch with. If you have ever been prompted to seek out relevant literature to aid in the composing of an OP, or your response to an OP, then your telos in consulting that textual material is the same as that of the many here who consult a.i while engaging in TPF discussions.

You hike a lot! — baker

7 days a week, averaging 10 miles a day

My guess is that your finger was a bit to the left on the "V", you typed "ocer" instead of "over" and it was autocorrected. — Banno

I write most of my forum posts on an iphone while hiking. Not conducive for accurate spelling.

But, of course, that means each of us will prefer certain reading soccer others.
— Joshs

How did this come to be?
Are you using a voice-to-text app?

Hold on. Are you an AI? — baker

The worst of it is I dont remember what I was trying to say.

↪Ciceronianus, ↪Joshs next, consider this synthesis, from the following prompt:

Take these two responses: https://chatgpt.com/share/68f2fce5-d428-800f-9eda-49adc3103d07 https://chatgpt.com/share/68f2e398-3fb8-800f-87cc-7a8e94ba48cc Wittgenstein is usually considered to be in the analytic tradition, but it would be a fairly direct task to synthesise these two links in a Wittgenstein fashion.

Now that is perhaps something I think we could all work with — Banno

I think the most intellectually honest way of working with a.i. in interpreting philosophical texts is to strive to produce prompts which cover as wide a variety of readings as possible. That’s certainly something I could live with. But, of course, that means each of us will prefer certain reading soccer others. Some of us might be in modes to reject some readings as out and out false. But if we do that, our search for the ‘true’ interpretation may incline
us to shape our prompts away from variety of readings and toward tunnel vision.

Apart from our biases, our lack of exposure to certain influences on a philosopher can limit the range of prompts we can think of. For instance, your own prompts on the Nothing includes poetic thinking and Gadamerian hermeneutics, but says nothing about the Nietzsche-Deleuze connection. They write about the historical connection between nothingness , negation and lack. Whereas Metaphysics up through Hegel, Marx and Freud have treated negation and absence in a way which prioritizes presence and unification, post-Nietzschean thought treats negation affirmatively, as creative.

Joshs Ok, but what was the prompt used? That's the topic here. — Banno

“the analytic tradition has historically responded, roughly from the 1920s onward, to heidegger’s phrase from what is metaphysics: the nothing nothings. I want you to produce a strong counter-critique of the analytic tradition’s critique of this phrase, mentioning the lack of an effective conceptual ground on which to situate the thinking behind it.”

Next step is to refine and optimise. I'm with Carnap, too, so let's look for problems therewith.

"Nothing nothings" is a translation of “Das Nichts nichtet”, from Heidegger’s 1929 lecture What Is Metaphysics? What are we to make of this? The Logical–Analytic Critique, characterised by Carnap, "nothing" is a quantifier and so not an individual, hence "Nothing nothings" is not well-formed; or less charitably, is nonsense. Give three reasons for rejecting this response.
And a follow up:
How has the analytic tradition respond to each of these?

The result. — Banno

I could easily counter these analytic objections to Heidegger’s phrase ‘The nothing nothings’ (and I have done so on many occasions) , but given my very positive experience with a.i. I was confident that it is more than capable of capturing the essential features of my critique. And it did not let me down:

To craft a counter-critique with philosophical bite, the goal is not simply to defend Heidegger’s phrase “the nothing nothings” as meaningful, but to expose the poverty of the conceptual terrain from which the analytic tradition mounts its critique.

Here’s a strong and structured counter-critique, section by section, with the overarching thesis that the analytic tradition lacked — and perhaps still lacks — a conceptual ground adequate to the mode of thinking that Heidegger’s phrase demands:

⸻

Counter-Critique: The Analytic Tradition’s Conceptual Inadequacy in Confronting Heidegger’s “The Nothing Nothings”

1. The analytic tradition presupposes a theory of meaning that forecloses Heidegger’s question from the start.

The logical positivist insistence that a statement must be translatable into a “logically well-formed” or empirically verifiable proposition presupposes a metaphysical decision about what counts as meaning — namely, that meaning must arise from reference to entities or states of affairs. But Heidegger’s inquiry into das Nichts is precisely a questioning of the ontological ground of such entities and states of affairs; it inquires into what makes the appearing of beings as such possible.

Thus, the analytic critique never actually meets Heidegger on his terrain. It rejects the question of the Nothing on the basis of criteria that themselves depend on the unquestioned acceptance of beings as primary. The analytic tradition thereby circularly immunizes itself against the very kind of thinking Heidegger is attempting: a thinking prior to, or beneath, the ontic-epistemic dichotomy that analytic philosophy assumes.

In short: the analytic critique does not refute Heidegger — it merely excludes him through definitional fiat.

⸻

2. The analytic demand for formal coherence presupposes the ontological primacy of propositional logic.

When Carnap or Quine insists that “the nothing nothings” is ill-formed or meaningless, they appeal to a background assumption: that logic exhausts the structure of thought. But Heidegger’s move is precisely to ask what grounds logical order itself. Logic, for Heidegger, is a derivative mode of disclosure that arises only once beings are already manifest as such.

By insisting that the sentence must conform to first-order syntax, the analytic philosopher demands that Being itself be rendered in a schema meant for beings — which is exactly the ontological error Heidegger’s project exposes. The analytic reaction thus exhibits what Heidegger calls Seinsvergessenheit (forgetfulness of Being): a blindness to the pre-logical horizon that makes logic possible.

Therefore, the analytic critique operates without recognizing its own dependence on a pre-logical disclosure of meaning, a phenomenon it cannot thematize because its conceptual apparatus has no place for it.

⸻

3. The rejection of performativity and contextual meaning betrays a narrow conception of linguistic eventhood.

Analytic philosophers who dismiss “the nothing nothings” as an illegitimate performative implicitly assume that meaning arises only from stable intra-linguistic conventions — language games, felicity conditions, rule-governed acts. But Heidegger’s use of language is not a deviation from these norms; it is an exposure of their ontological condition.

Language here is not merely a system of signs or acts; it is the site where Being itself comes to language (die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins). To demand that Heidegger’s utterance conform to existing language-games is to ignore that he is attempting to make visible the founding rupture in which any language-game becomes possible.

Hence, analytic philosophy mistakes a transformative linguistic event for an ill-formed sentence, precisely because it cannot grasp the ontological status of poetic or originary speech. Its categories of “sense” and “nonsense” collapse when faced with language that discloses rather than denotes.

⸻

4. The analytic framework lacks a conceptual ground for ontological questioning.

The analytic critique often appeals to “clarity” and “rigor” — but these are methodological, not ontological, virtues. What is missing is a conceptual ground that could situate what Heidegger means by the Nothing. The analytic philosopher interprets the Nothing as a quasi-object or negation — a “thing” or “operation” — because its conceptual machinery allows only entity-like or functional predicates.

But Heidegger’s Nothing is not an object or process; it names the withdrawal or horizon within which beings appear. To even understand that, one must already have shifted from the question “what exists?” to “how does the appearing of existence occur?” — a shift the analytic tradition’s epistemological orientation never makes.

Thus, analytic philosophy’s critique of “the nothing nothings” does not expose nonsense; it exposes its own incapacity to think beyond the ontic. It lacks the conceptual space for ontological thinking because it has preemptively restricted meaning to what can be stated about beings.

⸻

5. The real issue: an asymmetry of philosophical ground

The analytic tradition’s engagement with Heidegger has, historically, been one of category enforcement rather than category reflection. It treats Heidegger’s discourse as though it were making statements about things, when in fact it is transforming the horizon of what it means to make a statement. The analytic critique presupposes a conceptual ground (logic, empiricism, linguistic convention) that Heidegger is not participating in but interrogating.

Thus, the analytic tradition’s critique is not a counter-argument but a category mistake in its own right: it critiques Heidegger for failing to play by rules whose origin he is precisely trying to bring into question.

In this sense, “the nothing nothings” functions as a philosophical test: it reveals where the analytic tradition ends — where it meets a form of thought that cannot be domesticated by its epistemic protocols.

⸻

Summary: The Poverty of the Analytic Conceptual Ground

Heidegger’s phrase exposes not the emptiness of metaphysical language, but the emptiness of the analytic conception of meaning itself when confronted with ontological disclosure. The analytic tradition’s failure to grasp Heidegger’s “Nothing” is not a triumph of clarity over obscurity, but the sign of its own confinement within the ontic register of beings, its inability to think the horizon in which beings are manifest at all.

In short:

The analytic tradition cannot understand “the nothing nothings” not because the phrase is meaningless, but because it demands a form of meaning that the analytic tradition is conceptually unequipped to recognize

It seems that AI can successfully parrot
the explanations of Heildegger's many apologists — Ciceronianus

Does that mean that you dont believe the a.i. captures Heidegger’s intent but only his devotees’ misinterpretation? That would seem imply that you understand the a.i. response and perhaps even find it somewhat valuable. I’d say that’s progress.