I'm just saying, the collaborative, benevolent, altruistic motivations are put on display because they are interpreted by others and perhaps oneself to mean that you are a good and kind person. Which gives status. — Judaka

I think it's useful to look into why we value objective truths. Roughly they are objective because they work for everyone. If I ramble on about my preferences, I'm likely to bore or annoy others. If, however, I speak of things accurately that are important to both of us, then I'm actually contributing. I am listened to and valued because the objectivity of my knowledge accords with the self-interest of my listeners.

More generally, I think enlightened self-interest explains much of morality. Don't do unto others what you don't want done to you. What we want to avoid is a war of all against all. We want to not be robbed and murdered, so we resist our own urges to rob and murder. And we cage people who do. Once we have peace and security, we find many of our highest pleasures in relationships. What we want from most strangers, though, is that they leave us alone.

From the posters I like the most to the ones I dislike the most, they all talk about what's best for everyone else. I don't know anyone who talks about things in other terms. — Judaka

This is what Spengler called 'ethical socialism' as a kind of default setting of our age. We unconsciously assume that there is one right way and that it is our duty to find and impose it. Secular thought is still 'religious' in terms of a default enlightenment humanism. Solomon wrote of the 'transcendental pretense.' This is basically the assumption of a universal humanity. Certain enlightenment philosophers took their experience of being human and understood it as the way of being human. We don't think of a plurality of ways of being scientific and rational. There is one rationality, one science, one humanity. I'm not against these assumptions, but it's interesting to bring them to consciousness.

America was founded during a time in history when individual rights were front and center, and Descartes' "I think therefore I am", and mind/body dualism, was encouraging a freedom of individual thought, separating and elevating humans to a realm seemingly above nature, theologically in an attempt to understand the mind of God. We lost sight of the importance of shared understanding. Everyone wants to be right, when no one is. The 'Medium' is always cloaked, unless we interact with each other through dialogue toward a shared understanding. This has all caused us to get further and further apart, encouraging divisiness, hatred, etc.. We are now dealing with screen infested, narcissistic demands, and less and less cooperation and dialogue. ..... I hope this explanation helps a little. This is 'ontological individualism'. — Mapping the Medium

What you call 'ontological individualism' has been criticized for quite a while in the continental tradition. The idea of a cloaked medium is also central in Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Both of these are some of my favorite philosophical themes.

I'm not sure that we've lost sight of the importance of mutual understanding. We may not be good at it, but popular culture sings its praises. Prejudice, intolerance, xenophobia...these are the sins of our time. For just that reason they themselves are tangled up in divisiveness.

And note that you yourself spoke of shame with respect to materialism and dualism. Aren't you one more person who wants to be right? And do you not link us to screens whose content you control? While some of your critics have been harsh, I haven't seen much dialogue on your part with the few who are open to conversation. Linking to off-site content as a substitute for composing posts looks like evangelism. Are you true to your own stated principles? Or are we witnessing a monologue about the virtue of dialogue?

Imagine your consciousness disassociating with your body, so that you can observe your body from a distance. From this point of view, "your" body is entirely not self.
The question is, why is this body associated at all with my self?
Why didn't this body become born without my consciousness. Why didn't I remain as nothing when this body came into being.
It would seem I was associated in some way with this body before it came into existence. Or else it would have been born without me. — Yohan

The natural response here seems to be that our networked brains create phenomenal selves that share a language. We learn to use the words 'I' and 'we' and 'consciousness.' Eventually we can imagine our thinking as detachable from our body, probably because our shared language is not dependent on any particular body. Most of our ideas are inherited. If we have fresh ideas, they can survive us. So the detachment of thinking-language from the body has some foundation, but it's hard to make sense of a detachment from all bodies.

That said, I still find consciousness strange when its familiarity temporarily recedes now and then.

Again, human reason always seeks the unconditioned, that which is the irrefutable, absolutely fundamental ground for all thought. Problem is, that involves infinite regress, for any answer promotes the possibility of an underlaying query as to why such should be the case. — Mww

I agree. To me this idea is accessible and convincing, yet I don't see it come up much on forums.

Thus, the question how far back in time can you go before getting to a place (in time) where you don’t exist is easily answered by the certainty of regular human reproductive mechanics: no childbirth, no you. — Mww

We can also consider linguistic convention, what is typically intended by 'me' or 'you.' One is born. One dies. As far as I can tell, all counter-intuitive theoretical and/or mystical talk is parasitic upon ordinary usage.

Thank you!
You are the first person here to logically and intelligently open a thoughtful and potentially fruitful discussion!
Your points are good ones, and I want to address them properly. Let me respond appropriately when the day finally dawns here and I am at my computer instead of my phone. Again, thank you. — Mapping the Medium

My pleasure. I like all of these issues, so it should be fun.

The only way to get closer to a shared understanding is through dialogue. — Mapping the Medium

Do you like Gadamer? This is a key idea in Truth and Method.

The more language is a living operation, the less we are aware of it. Thus it follows that from the forgetfulness of language that its real being consists in what is said in it. What is said in it constitutes the common world in which we live. … The real being of language is that into which we are taken up when we hear it — what is said.
...
In fact history does not belong to us but rather we to it. Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society, and state in which we live. The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror. The self awareness of the Individual is only a flickering in the closed circuit of historical life. That is why the prejudices of an individual are — much more than that individual's judgments — the historical reality of his being.
...
We cannot understand without wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be said. It would be an inadmissible abstraction to contend that we must first have achieved a contemporaneousness with the author or the original reader by means of a reconstruction of his historical horizon before we could begin to grasp the meaning of what is said. A kind of anticipation of meaning guides the effort to understand from the very beginning. — Gadamer

I was wondering how we find the philosophers or philosophy we engage with? Are we choosing it or are we hardwired? Can we really throw something aside and change horses, or be persuaded to change our perspective on those big questions by the arguments of others? Have you ever convinced someone to change their mind? — Brett

In my experience, people do change. But it takes time. People are deaf in the short term to exactly what they 'need' to hear. I mean in retrospect they will realize that their critics were right. But our big issue positions are like virtual selves that we must defend at almost all costs. So we just change one little part of our Neurathian raft at a time, so we don't drown.

We create ourselves in self indulgent ways, in ways we don’t have to pay for. — Brett

This is a good point. And while these forums are great, they also hide us from one another. So much of the truth is physical. Think of how quickly we judge people when we can see and hear them. Walking the walk comes into play here in regards to health, style, and comportment. If someone hasn't learned how to eat or to move their body in the world, it's not easily hidden. And comportment (body language) might say as much about the stand they take on their existence as their words. Of course knowing how someone spends their money and where they get it is hugely illuminating.

Discussions about philosophy usually take a self-help angle, they're posited as being beneficial and helpful to others. — Judaka

A person could argue that philosophy always has a political charge -that the philosopher is always trying to lead people.

I don't think we're like this because we're a benevolent species, I think it's perhaps because people instinctively or subconsciously see merit in being seen as a caring, dependable team player. — Judaka

But why would we want to be seen as team-players if there weren't some truth in it? We are very much social beings, but our current lifestyle emphasizes competition and clashing worldviews. So these days we are largely sewn together by money.

Does informed necessarily mean enlightened? Not in a spiritual sense but in knowing. — Brett

As I see it, being merely informed is to be shallow. Think of your favorite difficult philosopher. Imagine how a person is bound to misread or mishear an aphorism or summation out of context. The merely informed person has gazed at a thousand surfaces, and they can parrot a few key phrases without any real investment or understanding. Have you seen those bathroom books that offer the highlights of the books one is supposed to have read? Trivia, and trivialization. And even this complaint itself is subject to the same effect. The 'deep' thinker is one more cartoon. The idle talk of surfaces always already knows, has always already heard it. And yet hasn't really heard it, because 'it' cannot live on the surface. Curiosity glides from surface to surface, sure that it is consuming the essence.

We learn the fonts, the tones, the body language of experts.

I've wanted to look more into Peirce (having read only a few pragmatist essays), but his home-grown terminology has always made that difficult. I did look up synechism.
http://www.digitalpeirce.fee.unicamp.br/p-synesp.htm

Peirce claimed that "[a]ll communication from mind to mind is through continuity of being." (CP 7.572) With this insight "the barbaric conception of personal identity must be broadened" to include a dimension of social mind and social consciousness. Philosophy cannot start with a cogito or with sense impressions. It starts with a recognition that sensation is judgment; judgment is generalization, and generalization requires generality. The next step is to link generality with significance: — link

<and then this quote follows>

ll regularity affords scope for any multitude of variant particulars; so that the idea [of] continuity is an extension of the idea of regularity. Regularity implies generality; and generality is an intellectual relation essentially the same as significance, as is shown by the contention of the nominalists that all generals are names. Even if generals have a being independent of actual thought, their being consists in their being possible objects of thought whereby particulars can be thought. Now that which brings another thing before the mind is a representation; so that generality and regularity are essentially the same as significance. Thus, continuity, regularity, and significance are essentially the same idea with merely subsidiary differences. (CP 7.535) — Peirce

This reminds me of Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida. We we initially perceive is objects in a social context. I see perhaps a broom, which I know as 'something one sweeps the floor with.' And then regularity reminds me of iterability as ideality. Language is conventional. To speak or write intelligibly is to employ a code using words that can always be repeated and re-contextualized. They can function in my absence, and the letter I write may never arrive. So neither the sender or receiver grounds the meaning of the letter. One understands the letter. And one is anyone --a kind of structural unconscious that results from successful linguistic-cultural training. Drop a baby human in a community, and it will somehow absorb this 'structural unconscious.'
Then there's this:

There is a famous saying of Parmenides {esti gar einai, méden d' ouk einai}, "being is, and not_being is nothing." This sounds plausible; yet synechism flatly denies it, declaring that being is a matter of more or less, so as to merge insensibly into nothing. How this can be appears when we consider that to say that a thing is is to say that in the upshot of intellectual progress it will attain a permanent status in the realm of ideas. Now, as no experiential question can be answered with absolute certainty, so we never can have reason to think that any given idea will either become unshakably established or be forever exploded. But to say that neither of these two events will come to pass definitively is to say that the object has an imperfect and qualified existence. Surely, no reader will suppose that this principle is intended to apply only to some phenomena and not to others, __ only, for instance, to the little province of matter and not to the rest of the great empire of ideas. Nor must it be understood only of phenomena to the exclusion of their underlying substrates. Synechism certainly has no concern with any incognizable; but it will not admit a sharp sundering of phenomena from substrates. That which underlies a phenomenon and determines it, thereby is, itself, in a measure, a phenomenon.(CP 7.569) — Peirce

This reminds me of Hegel's phenomenology. The notion of the substrate is unstable. And 'no concern with any incognizable' is an abandonment of the thing-in-itself as a kind of useless appendix. FWIW, I've been admiring Locke lately. For those interested in Locke versus Kant, I recently found this by Tomida and was quite impressed: https://sites.google.com/site/diogenesphil/lk

One last point is the 'point at infinity' implied by Peirce, which is some ideal end of inquiry that never arrives. This infects being with time, in a good way. 'No finite thing has genuine existence.' Also, 'the truth is the whole.' So Peirce is like an American twist on Hegel in some ways.

Synechism, as a metaphysical theory, is the view that the universe exists as a continuous whole of all of its parts, with no part being fully separate, determined or determinate, and continues to increase in complexity and connectedness through semiosis and the operation of an irreducible and ubiquitous power of relational generality to mediate and unify substrates. — link

Granting some kind of truth to this, it doesn't free us from requiring more sober modes of thought. What we have here is perhaps a rationalizing articulation of the oceanic feeling. The increase in complexity suggests a kind of infinite progress. Instead of an end of history, we get endless ascension. Is this optimism a product of its time?

So this “world” is possibly something very primitive, acted out, or renewed, in a modern condition. Like a primitive language taking on a guise in a new world, taking us back to the primitive beings we were. — Brett

This reminds me of Vico's chaotic age and Joyce's Finnegans Wake. The order breaks down into a fertile chaos, a corpse and/or pile of manure. Or Yeats. 'The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.' What is it to be post-literate? It's not that we can't read. It's that it becomes harder to read in the same way. Instead of interpreting text with our imaginations, we all gaze at a single, overpowering screen. When I do go out (which is rare), I usually talk about TV shows and movies. I'd rather talk about books, but...

What the media, including the Internet, has done is allow the development of a universal unconsciousness, or maybe a universal consciousness (I’m not sure), that contains more ideas and beliefs, more signs than a single mind has so far had to cope with.
...
This “world” is made up elements like headlines and images, archetypal in their simplicity and delivered to us rapidly without real explanation or even meaning: the burning building, the car crash, the shootings, the tyrant, the armies, the warlords, the burning forests, the angry mob, the weeping woman, they’re mythical images that come and go like takeaways, eroded of meaning but still having a shadow. Through these images, weak as they might be, we interpret the world, or struggle with it.

But there is no world like that, where everything happens in one place at the same time, every second of the day, that goes with us wherever and whatever we do. — Brett

MacCluhan wrote of World City. T.S. Eliot wrote of Unreal City. Where do these images that haunt us from the billboards live? I like the word geist. What is this image-drenched and drama-drenched spirit of our times? As MacCluhan understood, we are forced to numb ourselves to cope with the overstimulation of our visual-imaginative organ. The eye is a mouth is a vagina. Ours is stuffed with images designed to seduce and threaten us. We get news we can't use, endless phantasmagoria.

Does this not connect to the ubiquity of conspiracy theories? Philosophers can even plausibly defend covering wars by watching TV, covering the dream of the war, covering its image for distant spectators who fund it almost unwittingly, numbed as they are by everything else on the news. The world is mediated by screens for us. What I know of non-local reality is determined by anthology of images chosen by others who are not disinterested in my response. At the same time, I can't simply play the victim. The screens are like nicotine, simultaneously stimulant and narcotic. I like to think that I'll eventually live some stripped down lifestyle away from the general madness, though my attachment to a woman makes this more complicated.

Now the images appear on television, on the side of a bus, on a pack of cigarettes or your child’s t-shirt. — Brett

Do you know Berger? Ways of Seeing? This video gets right to your point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jTUebm73IY

Something you didn't mention but I find important is all the erotic imagery we swim in. We are given women who are perfectly desirable and yet radically untouchable. These sirens call to us from an impossible dimension, generating a kind of thirst that isn't simply lust. Once only those with access to rare oil paintings could enjoy (?) such soft porn. Now the image is cheaper than water. On one of my walks lately, I saw perfectly beautiful young woman getting her picture taken. I'm sure the pictures were great. What is this project of being captured as a glamorous, desirable object? A plenitude. Death and the maiden...and I, the 'philosopher' much older than her, was of course death --engaged in the dynamic-dying project of articulating this strange world. Plato's idea is for the eye , a visual form. The photo freezes a moment of perfect beauty, which a person can claim if not exactly be, since being is time is motion. The book, however, plays that role for the philosopher (Death). [If you'll allow that wandering at the end.]

What a refreshing post. — Brett

Thank you for your kind response. Of course I enjoyed all of your posts in this thread, and these inspired me to contribute.

In what form should we try to grasp this reality, what language? Or is there a new language to be learned, a new mental state required to move into the future? — Brett

I personally don't see an opening toward something radically new. I do like what we are doing right now, though, which is something like clarifying our shared situation (and shared alienation, I think.)

It’s like something’s happening and we can’t grasp it, we have no experience to fall back on. All we see is the world fed to us in old images: jackboots, martyrs, apocalyptic cities, tyrants, storm clouds, angry men and weeping women. Tired, cliched images empty of meaning, a B- grade movie. And worse, we try to make meaning out of those hackneyed images. — Brett

That's a poetic way to put it, and I agree. I think this relates to what Heidegger meant by 'curiosity' and the banalization in 'idle talk.' But I am also reminded of the book I am currently reading, The History of Materialism by Lange and his approving portrait of Epikuros (as he spells it.) Humanity has weathered this kind of pluralistic, spectacular decadence before ---but this time the technology makes it less and less escapable. The screens that drown us become necessary for paying the bills. In the US, many of the decent jobs involve extending the spectacle (machine learning and website construction.) It's we who are becoming atoms and void. Alienation is medicalized and treated with pills.

Have you looked into The Society of the Spectacle ?

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
...
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
...
This is the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society by “intangible as well as tangible things,” which reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence.
...
The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role. Being a star means specializing in the seemingly lived; the star is the object of identification with the shallow seeming life that has to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations which are actually lived. Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living and viewing society unfettered, free to express themselves globally. They embody the inaccessible result of social labor by dramatizing its by-products magically projected above it as its goal: power and vacations, decision and consumption, which are the beginning and end of an undiscussed process.
...
The consumption celebrity superficially represents different types of personality and shows each of these types having equal access to the totality of consumption and finding similar happiness there. — Debord

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsHtSPub3w8

I like the idea of calling this thing “AI”, it makes some sense, gives it some form we can comprehend. It’s not as we imagined (how slow we are); some robotic, computerised creature, but something far more sophisticated, and invisible. — Brett

I agree here, too. It is invisible. What is ontically closest is ontologically farthest. It's the water in which we swim, a contingent development dimly conceived as necessity itself. It needs no ideological support, having become a habit of interpretation. I think AI is a good metaphor.

What I’m thinking of is the idea that we’ve created something, a runaway virus, that’s escaped our control, almost like an A.I. that’s turned on us. — Brett

I think I know what you mean. We can contemplate a system of 7.8 billion human beings, which means 7.8 billion networked brains. Not only does technology give us simultaneous global awareness of all the news that AI finds fit to print, which forces this complexity on our awareness, but we grapple also with the necessary mystery of technologies that no one can hope to find time to understand. Of course we have experts in this or that field, but the short human lifespan and accelerating technical progress prevents any single mind from grasping human technical knowledge in its fullness. Philosophy looks in this context like a strategy of grasping illuminations of essence that must remain abstract and general.

It doesn’t share the same objectives or sense of ethics. It’s contrary to everything we are. — Brett

As I see it, the motives involved are still ours. Yet the system has a kind of life of its own. Consider how distant most of us in the first-world are from food production. Most of us work for abstract 'video game points' in our bank account, which we can then take to the grocery store, the landlord, and the mall Amazon. Most of us were born into a world where this was the norm, nature itself. Another norm is the use of 4000 pound fossil-fuel-burning vehicles to get everywhere. And there is no frontier. Everything is always already owned. Those 'points' are realer than anything else, one might say, simply because all of us believe that all of us believe in them.