So correct me if I'm wrong, you seem to be implying that the labourer sees his or her abstract job as a reflection of their abstract self. This is perhaps another type of category, that is, the way that the job must become part of his or her psychology. It must be part 'imaginary.' The job must allow the person to experience a 'fitting into' or 'at-homeness' in their identity, which means it must complete a hyperbola or a mirror image into itself.

Meaningful labor is not ALL that life offers, and I can imagine a scenario where someone doesn't find any "labor" (at least in the survival sense) meaningful. And that itself pushes back against this essentialist notion of "homo economicus".

Homo Economicus seems to be influenced by a close alignment of capitalism with Platonism, Epicureanism, and with Old Testament notions of faith, pleasure, and the good. For this reason, it's ideas always seem to be out of step with modern thinking; the only modern philosophy it understands is survivalist, or generally misinterpreted, existentialism. Really, capitalism is the only system that is 'good-driven.' That is, it is supposed to automatically align itself to a state of virtue and good. Goods are automatically driven to ideal balances of price versus supply to allocate resources with maximum efficiency to areas that humans 'like.' Businesses are supposed to be in balance with consumers so that they offer each other services and meaning to the cultural whole.

And this last intuitive part 'like' is the caveat. The whole thing runs on ideas of pleasure and not pleasures themselves. Modern Homo Economicus has abandoned the finite determinisms of the old philosophy in daily life and can't stand their simplicity, but nonetheless can't escape their determination of the self, which has proven critical to its necessity in the forms of advertising and the Debordian 'spectacular existence' it presents consumers with. Therefore you have two options: Embrace selfhood and allow the capitalist ideology to erode away the new philosophy (pretend), or continue into the dirty gutters of tending to it as it's servant (lose).

Thing that's important to point out is that Capitalism is a system based on reason. It is an idea, so its physical manifestations aren't essential in concrete forms.

Seems like closeted do-gooding to me. Why do you care about natalist solutions? Why not be a part of the problem instead? One must come to terms with the real lack of meaningful difference in order to ascribe to either. It’s a classic strategy: vacillate endlessly between complete cynicism and complete do-gooding in an effort to negate any real choice. It always ends up with a lazy survivalism as a cheap imitation of neutrality. This just-so-conveniently places the individual in a suspended irresponsibility.

What then is real labour when the economy is more about selling future debt? Well financial engineering and debt marketing are well paid occupations. And real work so far as the global debt industry is concerned.

I think where you have gone with this is interesting. It sounds like you are drawing a parallel between a collective shift towards a debt-based economy of negation and seeing this negation manifested down to to individual level. If so, in what way are you hinting at a negational quality of these jobs?

Not sure if this covers your concept of abstract jobs. But who exactly employed this spreadsheet content person and for what ostensible purpose? Did it help sell loans? Directly or indirectly?

The job is necessary, but is that plainly enough? Would you want to live in a state that was run by someone's imagination? I don't see how it's any better to live out the majority of your life in a job that is the product of someone's imagination; A kind of Cartesian Xanadu.

My advice- get out of the “production is the point of life” mentality. Of course this leads to Pessimism and AN, but I’ll meet you there with open arms when you get there :wink:

Pessimism and AN (I would think AN would be enough). It seems we have two options: lose or pretend, and you're saying I'm not pessimistic enough for choosing losing? We aren't talking about production as the point of life, but the other way around, the point of life is production. You can't escape the role economy plays in being and becoming by turning becoming into a finite separateness from being. This is the mistake of reductive existential ethos, for which I have low esteem.

When we enter into a discussion about “personal identity” – that is, whether or not it makes sense to say that a newborn baby at time t1 and space s1 can be the same person as a full-grown adult at time t2 and space s2 – we agree on the terms we are using (e.g., “same person,” “newborn baby,” “full-grown adult,” etc.).

If you choose to take a physics approach as above, does it make any sense to say the opposite, that T1 and S1 are in the same time and space metric as T2 and S2? Or did I open up the dialectic again, sorry I keep forgetting that it is a no-fly zone. By the way, I think it was more Fichte who presented this I=I identity question in terms of formal logic, and I am not sure if it was his exclusively either, but Hegel rounded it off nicely as well.

You wrote that laws are not products of communities. My question: then by whom or what? — tim wood

Make the analogy of the free market system. Companies make products like staplers. The reason the company made the stapler was because it was cost-effective. The stapler was also a product of itself, in the sense that the market organized itself such that it was rational to produce it instead of other products. Consumers also observe and say, "We consumers made it such that we had enough staplers." They engaged in day-to-day activities of buying staplers and other products for their purposes. The company itself was guided by our collective unconscious and thus was it really a rational actor? Were we really rational actors when we bought staplers because of the abstraction of use value? Examining the power structure reveals its rationality, but does not contain the essence.

If we want to know: how do we organize power structures to produce staplers, we realize the lack of necessity in caring at all about all the abstraction surrounding the product. It is easier to only focus on the seeing and feeling of it and it's quality of being, ignoring that quality. The question of 'by whom or what?' has presupposed a power structure, and is incapable of really seeing the essence of the philosophical question i.e.: the part we don't 'need to see.'

(Laws are...) Recognized, acknowledged, established and perhaps sometimes institutionalized instead of created. And if laws not a product of communities, then from whom or what?

Is your question a philosophical one, or a matter of how one should act right now in reference to some dynamic of the moment i.e. a question of power? I ask this because if you want to make an image you can get ChatGPT to do it, or if you desire art you perhaps need to think outside the box. 'ChatGPT creates images' would be a correct statement, but does ChatGPT create art? This is the major problem with the empirical method.

Do you mean "ideality" instead of "non-ideality"? I hear the cry of a good thought trying to get out of your sentence, but I cannot hear it clearly enough to understand it. Clarify? — tim wood

I did in fact mean non-ideality, but you could also substitute ideality if that fits better. To further elaborate, squirrels dig up nuts in order to survive; they do this without questioning it. If a squirrel was somehow convinced by us that it could steal nuts from your pantry instead it would likely experience no problem of conscience in doing it. Substitute man for squirrel, man does the same. It makes more sense to him to steal than to do the thing that genuinely leads to his survival and happiness, because his story is told from the inside as well as the outside; his existence is idea just as much as it is necessity.

Should we obey the law? Why should we obey the law? What laws should we obey? Quick and easy answers are yes, for the good of all and everything, all of them. Live long enough and it’s not that simple.

Seems like the real question is: 'Should we obey a law that is not enforced?' There is no option to not obey a law that is enforced.

What is law? An imperative established by the community. As such, either an expression of reason/rationality or of arbitrary power; i.e., either just or unjust.

I would argue that norms and customs are created by communities, while laws are not. Did you sign a social contract ("I hereby agree not to commit theft, extortion, etc.")? A real state doesn't need to do this, the individual is already a genus of the state. However, it is an idealism to think of ourselves as being the 'parts of the whole,' in summation, which means that we must live in a just and fair democracy. Our idealizations as an individual organ of the whole allow us to subvert it.

Those who fight against the law in order to attain their own ends are simply living out their own will that involves their self-determination, whereas those who fight against the law in order to change it attempt to change the state itself. However, organization into states is not a consequence of human civilization, it is also itself a sign that individuals have a will, not just for their own gain, but to ultimately reflect their reality as more than just parts of a whole, by transcending what they can do by themselves.

To put it another way, often in my life I have seen the 'prisoner's dilemma.' i.e. two prisoners who can either cooperate or betray each other for their own gain, which would lead to a less than ideal result for both persons. This is a type of allegory for the concept of actualization itself, something we often forget in our rationalizations. People often feel the need to become instruments of non-ideality. There is an imperative to live life that often gets confused with the universal idea of living life.

This isn't meant to be rude - It's most to illustrate that, given my opinion of Hegelian thinking (and my position that it can be shown to be nonsensical) we're not going to get far :P

No worries, there is no rude in TPF; Only banned, apparently.

"the truth of what was" makes no sense here

That was actually a typo, which has now been fixed. Thanks for catching that.

As to the rest of your post, it seems to rely on Hegelian concepts that I find totally incoherent

When you go to find a trajectory, you still rely on Newtonian mechanics. Is it wrong to rely on things that are sturdy and well-built?

To be sure, I think Hegel was an eloquent idiot. But that doesn't affect the lack of coherence here.

It sounds like you are embracing the inherent contradictoriness, so you have already made some coherence out of it. Why is coherence such a great thing when we are talking about coherence itself?

I am wondering if having “personal identity” is simply part of what it is to be human. This, despite the fact that a newborn baby human looks nothing like its later iteration as a full-grown adult. This, despite the fact that an adult human does not consist of the same cells as it did as a baby human. This, despite the fact that we can find no unchanged “essence” or “mind” or “soul” anywhere.

Interestingly, the etymology of 'identity' according to Oxford is Ultimately from Latin idem (neuter) "the same". The question seems to be casting a doubt on the I=I identity. Taking the Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis approach, as I am partial to, we inevitably find that:

I does equal I, I find myself in continuity and cannot escape my identity, even when others are not around.

I does not equal I, my identity depends on others for its determination.

The finitude of I becomes visible, and approaches the truth of what we began with, and we experience the circular idea and its universality.

An explanation of self that disregards its own dialectical form discards the soul and its inner life as trivial.

This, despite the fact that we can find no unchanged “essence” or “mind” or “soul” anywhere.

Most people I encounter are turned off by the power of soul, not the soul. A type of soul self-conception, which is absurd to a philosopher. In consumerist life, every action taken is poised to represent that you have no soul; doesn't that bother you just as a principle, notwithstanding your skeptical eye to its reality?

@AmadeusD I think we are all a little neurospicy.

Interesting about the terracotta photography. You should share the photos. The online format is infinite availability, so you can always locate what you intended to look for. This is helpful, but I think it presents a difficulty as a universal idea in itself, because it places creativity wholly in the aesthetic, or outer, which is something foreign to it. To feel genuine, a creative work needs access to the inner, or at least to sublate the purely aesthetic.

The electronic versions of a book are dynamic: As long as one is in contact with the Internet (devices, cables, wifi, electricity, signals, etc.) the book and the distributor are connected and monitored.

It may sound mystical, but printed books have a fate component that I enjoy. It was that book you found in the bargain bin with the cover that looked interesting that set a whole sequence of life-altering events in motion. In a certain Tolkenian way, the books have a way of seeking you out. There are so few surprises left in life that can match the feeling of life making sense.

A book is an economically efficient distribution bundle of articles, i.e. chapters, that may -- or may not even --be closely related. With the advent of the internet, it has become equally efficient, if not more, to publish just the individual articles online. Hence, the very reason for bundling them has disappeared.

This being said, the word-symbol in book form has a quality of being a part of a greater unity that is just not present in the Internet. Words on the Internet are just a part of the Internet, which is not a unity but a network of differences. For this reason, I think books have a referential and authoritarian quality that the Internet does not have. The Internet makes understanding 'easy' in a way books can't, because they can never pass over their authority, and thus Internet discourse tends to reduce synthetic histories to the level of an individualized symbol. Undermining of authority becomes a substantial notion, a pretext for knowing itself.

To be brief: if one is studying books and thinking about them, is he looking forward or backwards, and in which direction is he living his life? And if the books themselves are determinant, we can ask if the books themselves are forward-looking or back?

...My own tentative answer is that books look backwards...

There are many mixed messages in this post, but in part your question concerns the obsolescence of books as a medium; and yes, they do seem to be becoming progressively more obsolete. It's sort of a novelty now, like a glimpse of a famed painting on one's phone. One can fast-track through philosophy on YouTube in a few weeks without reading a word, and any philosopher here probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference; you don't need to go to uni to fast-track STEM either, this can be FT'd in a short time.

It's sort of sad that we look upon this external world of ours with such a jealous eye, and lie to ourselves about what we really want. Is that really about books? If we lie, what is it we really want? The one that is shining and glimmering in the beautiful morning. The one that eliminates all unknown unknowns and settles on the dirty ground like a snowflake. And of course, there is no denying it, it is like fate itself; the towering will and all it's untimely representations. A snowflake can break apart in the air, or it can fall onto the ground totally untouched. What does it matter which one it becomes?

One more point: many people say that currently the rich people become richer, the poor become poorer, and the middle class disappears.

It seems to me that the language used to allow greater equality among sectors of society at a certain point ironically became simultaneously both a prison and tool of that power struggle in it's own right. It's just more slop for the pigs to fuel the idea that our soul is on it's way to meet us somewhere else, but it's always standing us up when we get there. The best you get is to feel good about what you have and rest comfortable it's more than someone else has; this is the main comfort of the purely natural way of life.

There is no pure-reason explanation for suffering. If you insist anyway, you will fight against the absurd until you give up and call the suicide prevention hotline.

I feel like this hotline makes ends meet solely off of TPF members.

I'm a moral anti-realist, so any conception of good or evil outside of preferences is simply someone trying to push their values upon another.

So what’s the point of having morals at all, or just so discussing them philosophically? What are they accomplishing without a collective realization?

I'm not sure what you define as morality, but I've described what I define it is in many of my comments. If our definitions disagree then we're simply having seperate conversations with a joint term.

We should draw some distinction within this whole that we are calling 'morality' that is known intuitively in the world as multiple separate things. For instance, we have:

Decision-Making: Difficult decisions where one must decide what is the 'right' thing to do based on some type of rationality (i.e. trolley problem). This rationality is normally informed and guided by our moral reason and the below four categories, but not necessarily so.
Ethical Lifestyle: All the actions taken as an agent in the broader 'universal' world. i.e. "Ethos is a Greek word meaning 'character' that is used to describe the guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize a community, nation, or ideology" - Wikipedia
Morality: The faculty of mediation of the actualization and rationalization of the Ethical Lifestyle, usually but not characteristically done by the individual qua reason. Employed when the Ethical Lifestyle does not reflect the underlying universal will and calls on that will to be categorically altered in a manner that is for itself. Ex. Kant's Moral Metaphysics.
Conscience: The Moral as it is represented by individuals, and their propensity to represent it as their own determination. This need not be in keeping with good or virtuous behaviour, but it includes the 'programming,' as it were, of the individual to act in conjunction with Ethical Lifestyle and Morality. Modern philosophers often conflate this with the Ethical Lifestyle with the aim of redirecting it to moral or individualistic ends (i.e. morals are just 'social programming' and nothing more).

As per my earlier post, what is the relationship between morality taken in this context and punishment? Can an individual ever be guided by conscience that is not correct?

Morals refer to a good and a bad, and these are in no manner the exclusive product of our own imagining, they are also real and they affect us via moral reason and individual conscience. It follows that whether decisions and morality are deemed correct does not correspond to anything characteristically objective or subjective except in unphilosophical form as a kind naturalistic conscience.

Someone can freely do evil disguised as morality, essentially pawning off their individual interest as the universal will. To me this sounds a lot like your Ethical Egoism, but I'm sure there is more to it and would be glad to hear you explain it in more detail. However, it is important to me to keep these four above categories separate. They aren't the only categories, but it is helpful not to think of them as interchangeable.

Morality can only be defined in relation to a certain set of values. You could do any action and if it is in accordance with your values then it is moral by definition.

Who is using the summarizing faculty of what these values are, and why can’t they determine the values to suit whatever whim or grounds they wish to justify any individual benefit? This view is purely idealistic, it assumes the values are fully knowable and concrete in order to gain distance from them (they’re ‘just values’ and nothing more) and subsequently equalize all values to however one wishes, which is not morality.

No, experience is not a principle. The sensory inputs entering your eyes, and the preference for orange juice over apple juice are not conceptual ideas, but are natural values we hold and so can be used to ground an ethical egoist morality.

What would you say if knowing that you would choose to like orange juice, you instead chose to like apple juice. Does experience dictate that my choice is not true, and if so how would you tell the difference? What if instead of orange juice and apple juice we were talking about murdering someone who is, in our view, hated and despised by everyone? If you chose to murder this person, instead of following the everyday rule, could you still be moral so long as you got away with it?

This is what is so difficult to stomach about it. Once your legal system caught up with you and punishment took effect, you would only then actualize your immorality; it is your freedom to do so, and this is part of the underlying principle. However, for the brief period of time in between when you committed the act and when you were punished, there wouldn't be any distinction. This is the missing link in the subjective portrait of the Ethical, where all perspectives become levelled towards indistinction. This view forgets everything in the heat of a moment, and in the process loses track of the concrete.

This has clearly been sitting in your vinyl collection for some decades just to prove this point.

Your friend says they ate at one or two bad sushi restaurants, so they hate sushi. They won't eat it, and turn down every offer. You can even show them a piece of the best-of-the-best and their idea will prevent them from considering it good enough.

Is it possible to have a healthy economy which is 'steady state'? Not expanding and not shrinking?

The question is exclusively about capitalism, and whether or not capitalism can be rationally organized, right? I think what makes capitalism so interesting is that it runs on ideology. That is, the main driver of the value that presents itself is not 'in itself,' but 'for itself.' It is pure idea, and thus it is the only form of economic organization that seemingly has agency of its own. The agency is driven by a need to justify its existence and so it is really difficult, I think, for it to 'believe,' or rely on 'faith.' If it encounters a problem, then that problem must take the form of a realistic threat to its continued agency as capital, not so much the continued agency of the players that fulfill it with their activity.

Perhaps philosophy (similar to religion), is cosplay fantasy, to give reality a more interesting sense to it, and nothing more than this sensibility.

Philosophy, like other fields is bogged down by egoism. There are too many who idealize their devices and powers, and ignore the past with it's genealogy and independence in hopes of total domination of the present. The intended goal of mankind is one person or a small group that can reproduce themselves; the enlightened ones. Whereas the ordinary reach our eventual elimination. The supreme medium as message of Internet consumption is the condensation of mankind into perfect individuals in their perfect spontaneity, shining in brilliance.

What is this impulse in philosophy for an aesthetic view? What does it matter if the aesthetic view exists? Why are some people drawn to it and some not?

It's romanticism, the psychological rest state of the perfect individual is boredom. The 'aesthetic' is just an attempt to intervene with ourselves, which is also doomed to failure.

People today do not usually want their idols destroyed completely, but want to assuage their disappointment in a person with a phrase, but this meaning has drifted from the original story.

Firstly, welcome to the forum. Secondly, I agree. Especially the point that idol worship seems to carry along with it a type of ego-repression. The worshipper venerates the idol, and assigns feelings of elation and subsequent inner guilt and/or disappointment symbolic meaning as co-narratives; they have almost become metonymical with the idea of the idol. This is probably why the term 'idol' has generally been used negatively. The same way some take pleasure in violent or aggressive behaviour, I think these contradiction-narratives allows us to experience the missing antithesis in our daily lives. To experience a simulacrum of spiritual life through a return to childhood ego-narratives, while still appearing in the apparent form of rational necessity. It is the basic form of religion itself, only represented as purely incoherent content.

See, I don't believe that 'innocence' exists. It's a myth. We aren't born blank slates, white paper without a mark, the product of an immaculate conception.

But it’s an idea, so its non-existence is purely consequential of the fact that you don’t believe in it; it’s not like the belief just survives in society on its own by feeding on cattle at night, it must be earned. That’s like saying friendship or love don’t exist because there are no transcendent or complex relationships anymore, only superficiality.

During earlier times women and children were <thought> to be innocent.

I mean we are afflicted and conflicted from birth by desires, wishes, urges, fears, and WILL which prevents us from ever approaching innocence.

On one hand you’re calling innocence a trait of a person in isolation from their outer world, and on the other you claim it is beyond them because of factors (desires, urges, fears) that are largely conditioned upon them from outside. This is perhaps the difference showing itself a bit.

No, but why is satisfying your desires such a worthy business? More importantly, how does one know when their desires have been satiated in order to confirm agency?

Becoming a person in one's own right diminishes innocence.

I would normally distinguish between thinking of yourself as a person in their own right and being or becoming a person in its own right. You seem to call them the same thing. During earlier times women, for instance, were innocent. Would you consider women like Emily Brontë, diminished 'in her own right' in lieu of never having climbed tall mountains or gone on bestial sexual escapades?

We should distinguish the ability see 'see outside' a set of potential experiences as per @BC (NO! I will not eat that food, etc.) and 'seeing inside' (food eating is not questioned). 'Seeing outside' requires negating things in their existence. It coincides with 'having the answer' rather than 'asking the question.' Because the innocent, by definition in the manner earlier described, doesn't already have the answers to formal questions of life and behaviour. Thus, the manner of acquiring knowledge from convention and traditional wisdom can be supplanted by mere needs and desires. This parallels philosophical corruption by wealth, comforts, and sensual pleasures.

Thank you.

My argument to support the provocative title of this discussion is: AI is indeed intelligent in that it is able to find patterns in huge amounts of data but there is no way AI could reach to judgements like we humans can.

AI operates under a totally different set of motivations from real intelligence, and thereby is intelligence separated from particularity. It's like an anthropomorphic idea of human intelligence, hence the 'artificial' part. At a certain point, we must decide: is the expediency we are seeking also the idea of expediency? Which is more expedient, the factory that produces artwork as artificial production or the artist themself?

You allude to the corruption problem in general. To that I reply that reason must not just be found, but earned. And not just kept, but preserved.

The key idea is culturally a safe-zone was created where we differentiated wise and innocents, who are innocent of ‘evil’ because they don’t know it. The main thing isn’t what this process appears to be, and how it is used by consciousness, but it’s overall purpose as an objective thing in our civil world.

What do we need to do other than convince the innocent they are not capable or prepared to accept the whole truth of something. In a sense the intention is to prepare the subject for that ‘wisdom.’ And being conditioned by that preparation trains us in the discipline of philosophy and teaches us of its necessity. To understand, we use isolation and/or deconstruction, or decay.

Wisdom means "the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment".

Your description of why you are interested in philosophy matches almost exactly with your definition of love of wisdom that is its etymology. I personally don’t agree this captures the essence of the idea of wisdom, but for one person, sure.

Hasn’t this understanding of wisdom, and the accompanying tendency that it is good, done you any good? Or perhaps you dislike certain people’s wisdoms you believe are false, finding that the name has lended a false credibility? The belief of it as learned and experienced qualities to you makes them arbitrary?

“us”? I mean it’s great that we want to know:

the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence,

But why? And don’t just give me a vague “because we’re curious!” That’s like asking an alcoholic why they drink and getting “it tastes good.”

I don't like the terms innocence and wisdom; they're way too loaded to mean much.

And yet you find yourself on a philosophy forum, the word generally means 'love or pursuit of wisdom.' And we will happily watch reruns of Family Matters, but find innocence to be a dirty word...

Wisdom is the only word that really matters in philosophy, it's literally in the name.

Simultaneously, he or she has found the abstract notion of the self in language and it's essential quality of negation. Need I remind you that it is a philosophical idea that perpetuates it, they develop the idea of the self. Animals have this same notion, but it does not take the form of thinking for animals. What has happened is that an idea has being actualized in the child. But just because it is actual, doesn't make it deterministic.

In a similar vain, we have the idea of childhood innocence. It is a cultural idea, but that doesn't make it any less actual. And the main thesis of preserving innocence hinges on avoiding exposure to certain ideas and not allowing them to be actualized in the child because the effects are known to be negative to the subject and society. By preserving this transitional state, the innocent becomes more suggestible, because more content grows in the unconscious that isn't finding expression and actualization. I would argue that this process trains the user in desiring ideation and expression.

I guess you might call it the creative spark or the philosophical insight or the religious zeal or so forth. But I believe this process forms a positive idea in the innocent.

Experience impels us forward into the world. We find rich and interesting details in experience and we want more rich and interesting experiences. Curiosity, you know.

If you're saying that innocence means, in part, being open to rich and interesting experiences, then we are in full agreement. But certain experiences qualitatively bring about the loss of innocence and the development of wisdom. So innocence is simply a moment of wisdom, because the gain does not occur without the openness to it. To put it another way, someone who never stands outside the idea of the pursuit of philosophical wisdom can't actualize it. The actualization of wisdom and its attainment are two ways of saying the same thing.