None of what I have written depends on a dualistic notion of anything aside from the identification of powerful phenomenological experiences that cannot be dissolved under investigation, which is more in line with idealism than anything else. — darthbarracuda

Err....so nothing dualistic in your position because it is claiming the reality of "phenomenology" in terms of the idealistic?

OK.

Honestly whenever anyone argues against you you always either pull the science™ card or the dualism card without explaining anything else.... — darthbarracuda

Yeah. I never explain how my philosophical naturalism and pragmatism is quite different from Scientism, or reductionism, and other authorised forms of dualism....

It's quite annoying that no matter how many times I explain the difference, you keep jumping to one side or other of your good old dualism. Either my metaphysics is insufficiently phenomenological, or insufficiently material, for you.

To say that the PNC does not apply to bare potential, is the Hegelian conception, not the Aristotelian conception. — Metaphysician Undercover

And that was what I explained. Aristotle was talking about potential in a different sense at that point - crisply formed possibility rather than actual bare naked potential.

Although Aristotle elsewhere certainly got the point about Anaximander's apeiron and the impossibility of actual prime matter as already substantial being.

Under the Aristotelian conception, becoming is the middle, between being and not being. — Metaphysician Undercover

Can you provide citations that make that clear? I think the point was to avoid the idea that something could come from nothing in fact.

"Bare potential", such as prime matter is ruled out, as impossible, by the cosmological argument. — Metaphysician Undercover

Is this really Aristotle now - who offered a variety of analyses - or more the latter scholastic overlay?

I always see Aristotle as being more open-minded in summing up the various strands of thought as they existed in his time. Then church scholarship read into that the "authorised version" of the causal story that most suited itself.

If the pre-individual is a state of pure potentiality, then there is no reason for the thing which comes into being, to be the thing which it is. The principle of sufficient reason would not apply, there could be no actuality to cause that thing to be any particular thing, it would come into existence as any random thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

Exactly. But it is the feature rather than the bug. It brings back spontaneity or Peircean tychism back into the causal picture. The way individuation turns out can include a lot of accidents.

A river "must" have a fractal branched structure. But where it branches is then contingent. So individuation expresses some general constraint - like the second law of thermodynamics - but still, any actual river comes to incorporate a collection of historical contingencies.

In breaking symmetry in a general fashion - as the second law does when it comes to time having a dissipative direction - we can say individuation has a necessary form. With a river, it must be fractal as a Platonic-strength mathematical ideal. But then within that, there are a whole lot of further symmetry breakings that will occur at a fine-grain level which really doesn't matter. The river can fork at any moment in time with equal probability. That becomes a local accident. But it doesn't matter as the overall outcome is still fractal - in fact, that is how the precise pattern we call fractal arises.

So the principle of sufficient reason (with its focus on particular causes determining every particular effect) goes out of the window. It is replaced by a theory of general causes (or global constraints) and particular accidents (or local degrees of freedom).

If we could imagine a point, prior to the passing of any time, at which point no time has passed to create any sort of actual existence (no constraints), this would be pure potentiality; the possibility for absolutely anything. But assuming this point is unjustified and unwarranted. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's your view. I just gave the counter-view. Time in thermodynamics is an emergent constraint - the development of a generalised rate of dissipation that creates a background "dimension".

So time is already being rethought in this fashion as we do our best to leave behind classical Newtonian metaphysics. A thermal view of time is that it is a global regularity that emerges, against which localised departures can be measured.

That is why we can now measure the age of the universe in terms of its general temperature. The cosmic background radiation is spreading and cooling at a constant lightspeed rate. That then becomes the "time" against which local physical degrees can be measured in terms of being "hotter" or "slower".

Yeah, anti-supernatural naturalism has to be embedded in a metaphysics that founds it. A generalized naturalism, for which the supernatural is not coherent, can be presented as a description of human thinking. — Hoo

My position agrees fundamentally with Kojeve when he says: "Taken separately, the Subject and the Object are abstractions that have neither “objective reality” (Wirklichkeit) nor “empirical existence” (Dasein)."

But the difference is that I would say that the idea of the supernatural only arises within a naturalism lacking in sufficient generality. It is reductionist materialism - the claim that the real is just "observable matter" - which begets its equivalently strong "other" in the subjectivism and mentalism of the claim that there is then also the reality of the "immaterial observer".

So that was the point of Peircean pragmatism - to include observers in nature in a fully "material" fashion.

And now this new more fully generalised naturalism creates a foundational or ontological level distinction between matter and sign, or matter and symbol, instead of matter and mind.

It also fixes up a few basic problems in being at base an interactive perspective - a process philosophy - where matter and sign can be in causal interaction in unmysterious fashion. So you no longer have the dualism of matter and (epiphenomenal) mind, but an explicit way the two sides connect.

And even the "immaterial" aspect of sign is self-explained. The possibility of a symbol arises as material dimensionality gets maximally constrained. When the number of dimensions for action is shrunk towards the zero dimensions of a point, then a mark or sign is born - the mark or sign, the bare difference, that can now freely stand for anything. As a bit of information, it is no longer (or as little as possible) part of the material world, and so free to act as a part of a play of symbols.

So through semiosis - as a fully general naturalism - you lose "the mental" or "the observer" as a particular kind of realm standing in disjunction to "the material" or "the observables". And folk find it really hard to give up trying to explain the "other" to the material in terms of (equally substantial) notions of mentality, or experience, or dasein, or whatever.

But replacing mental substance/res cogitans/thinking and feeling stuff with a more abstract dualism - one of matter and sign - is what it would mean to actually start explaining the particularity of the observing human mind in cosmically generalised fashion.

So yes, there is still the third thing out of which either matter~mind, or matter~sign, must logically emerge - Hegel's geist or Peirce's firstness, maybe even Heidegger's dasein. But this primal ground can't be a form of pan-psychic proto-mind in standard idealist fashion. For matter and sign to be the sharp contrast that emerges, the primal ground has to be also talked about as itself a third kind of abstract.

In talking of geist, firstness, dasein, apeiron, vagueness, ungrund, ein soft, or whatever, we are trying to speak of the unspeakable - which is tricky, yet also do-able, in being now the "other" to the othered. The equally-abstractly described origin of the dialectic distinction.

Indeed this was kind of the point of this thread to begin with. From a phenomenological perspective, we don't seem to belong. We're aliens to the world. We're able to self-reflect. Existentialism 101. How the hell is the universe even capable of hosting something like us? — darthbarracuda

I've answered all this already. So you are simply returning me to your assertions rather than dealing with my arguments against them.

You can see this applied in psychology by learning about Terror Management Theory and the psychoanalytic/humanistic theories of Rank and Becker. — darthbarracuda

Yes, you can certainly make a case that there is a socially constructed fear of death because there is also the precondition of a socially constructed sense of self. Culture must react in some way to the sharpness of failing to exist, after leading to a sharp notion of being a self in existence (in a soul-like fashion).

The question then is what metaphysically is the correct way to respond - responding in terms of notions of souls and other traditional social mythology not being a very naturalistic/scientific way of framing the issues.

So again, we are back to the same situation. I defend a naturalistic/scientific ontology. You seem to take the other road - the romantic, dualistic, idealistic path. For you, the organic whole that is the world is divided ontically into brute material objects and sensuous being. And from that broken duality, all kinds of confusion flows.

This is the root of Simondon's (and Deleuze's) critique of Hegelian dialectics, which, according to both, begins from individuals and then tries to think their becoming through negation, rather than beginning with the process of ontogenesis, and inscribing negation 'positiviely' within that process. — StreetlightX

That was Peirce's switch on Hegel too. First the bare potential - the vagueness as that to which the PNC does not apply - and then its symmetry-breaking dichotomisation and eventual transformation into the stable regularity of a habit.

Simondon says this clearly here...

It is never a step or a stage, and individuation is not synthesis, a return to unity, but rather the being passing out of step with itself, through the potentialization of the incompatibilities of its preindividual center." — Simondon

...so stability is what open-endedly arises when a symmetry-breaking goes as far as it can go in producing the hierarchically organised state of being an asymmetry - a local~global distinction such as represented by a figure marking a ground, an event disturbing a context.

So individuation is a process of coming into being. And it is shaped by the emergent limits of what is possible. The figure or event is possible in being the least like, the furtherest away, from its "other" of the ground, the context. And thus - departing from usual mechanistic thinking - the ground and the context are also coming into being via the production of the figure or event. The symmetry-breaking is a deep one in making a potential duality or asymmetry an explicit or actually present division.

Compare Deleuze: "Difference is not the negative; on the contrary, non-being is Difference.... — Deleuze

Compared to Simondon, this seems a lot of blather.

For Simondon - and this is his revolutionary contribution to philosophy - one ought to think of individuation not from the perspective of the individual, but from the perspective of the process which gave rise to it. — StreetlightX

But revolutionary? Metaphysics started this way with Anaximander. Process thinking just got over-written by mechanical thinking - the metaphysics of technology replaced that of biology.

Unity (characteristic of the individuated being and of identity), which authorizes the use of the principle of the excluded middle, cannot be applied to the preindividual being... — Simondon

[Aristotle] insisted that the law of non-contradiction ought to be upheld, and defined the category of potential, in which the law of excluded middle was to be excepted. Hegel offered another understanding of becoming, in which the law of non-contradiction becomes inapplicable. These are two distinct understandings of "becoming", which appear quite different. — Metaphysician Undercover

Peirce employed a triadic logic where the failure of the PNC was definitional of vagueness, and the failure of the LEM was definitional of generality.

So we can sort out things this way.

The pre-individual is the state of pure potentiality where the PNC does not apply - as Hegel and Peirce and Anaximander all agree. Before a symmetry is broken, the two poles of contrary or dialectical being that the breaking will reveal, are not in existence, just in a state of potentiality. So the PNC does not (yet) apply.

The LEM of course also doesn't apply. But the LEM is a stronger constraint. The PNC is a constraint on vagueness, and the LEM a constraint on generality - the constraint that then produces the individual or the particular. So to keep things rigorous, one should only worry about the PNC in defining the pre-individual.

Then we do get the breaking of symmetry which is the dichotomous transformation or phase transition that produces the crisply local and global - the individuated particularity of the event or figure seen against the asymmetric or orthogonal backdrop which is the now also revealed generality of the ground or context.

And here is where the LEM comes into play in more Aristotelean fashion.

The specific example Aristotle used was the problem of the future contingent - who would win the battle tomorrow. The LEM fails to apply to such "potentialities". But this is now potential in a quite different sense - the well-formed and substantial sense of a crisp possibility. We now already live in a world mechanical and organised enough that it offers concrete bifurcations in advance of anything happening. The context is such that the world is going to have to make a choice - even if it has a contingent nature.

So there will be a battle. Two navies are already heading towards an enagement. And there will be a winner. Again, all the grounds for a conflict followed by a resolution are crisply developed and set in place. Thus the LEM doesn't apply right yet, but it soon enough must.

Thus before the battle, only the general statements apply. There will be a battle. There will be a winner. The particular statement that X won, and not Y, fails until the crisp possibility has become actualised.

This Aristotelean way of thinking led him to put being before becoming (and MU to put material cause before final cause). But it is not a wrong way of thinking so long as it is realised that it is logic as applied to a world already crisply individuated and so already constrained to an ensemble of crisp possibilities.

However the modern problem is that the whole of existence is understood as having this character. The world is a state of affairs, an ensemble of trajectories. The symmetry is already broken, now all the rest is a playing out of a deterministic collection of parts thus unleashed to have their chaotic pattern of collisions.

But in talking about the pre-individuated, Simondon is picking up on the deeper notion of Apeiron or vagueness - the ground that is not yet even a ground as individuation is what dichotomously must produce its own ground as part of its deal.

Logically, this is a very difficult and complex concept. That is why it no doubt keeps getting discovered, forgotten and re-discovered. What would be revolutionary would be if the realisation stuck for once. :)

such problems are existential, i.e. structurally unremovable from life, i.e. a necessary condition for life as we know it. — darthbarracuda

Yes, they are part of the structure of life. We both agree that. But I say necessary for a reason, while you claim it to be an unreasonable fact.

I ask how you can talk about "life" when you don't even seem to believe in life's naturalism in this regard. The logic of your position requires you to argue that life is unnatural in some deep fashion. I'm waiting for you to resolve that paradox.

Deconstructing our experiences doesn't just dissolve them away. — darthbarracuda

My argument is that we would be simply replacing one construction with another in switching out your ridiculously negative construction for a more balanced view of existence.

I don't know, you're setting the precedent here. I mean, we can a more cordial discussion, or we can descend into useless name-calling. — darthbarracuda

The core issue seems to be that you treat phenomenology as brute fact - we can't help what we feel - whereas I say scientific naturalism supports the position that what we feel is controllable on many levels. So if a feeling is a problem, it is also a problem that can be tackled. Or at least solution seeking becomes the first natural response.

So there are two models in play. And in mine, getting completely rid of suffering, pain, anxiety and other negative signals is self-evidently an unnatural desire. What is natural is obviously behaviour that seeks to minimise the signal. But you would still want to be able to feel it as a possibility.

You on the other hand are taking an abstracted, cosmological and dualistic approach where "bad feelings" stand alone as concrete "mental things". Pain is just pain in an uncontextual, Platonic ideal, way. That is the basis on which you could even want to rule it out as a class of being by fiat.

Pain is a bad thing because it can grow to any scale and become the worst thing in existence. So even the most marginal forms of pain - like unease or boredom - need to be banished too. Hence your continual resort to slippery slope argumentation. One minute we are suffering a papercut or aching neck, the next thing we know, it is going to be genital electrodes and the Holocaust.

So we have two quite different metaphysics in play. And where I lose patience is when you claim that your ontology is also founded on scientific naturalism. Just be honest. It is not.

You have avoided dealing with my arguments against your simple-minded phenomenalism. It is basic to my position that phenomenology - as an introspective level of awareness - is a socially constructed linguistic habit. And all you say in reply is that you can't see the point in talking about social constructionism (as it is indeed "pointless" in within your mind-stuff paradigm).

Likewise you have not dealt with my claim that a natural evolutionary understanding of the brain would see it as a problem solving organ. The importance of that is this is what makes it necessary to be able to evaluate alternative actions in terms of - broadly speaking - reward and punishment. So to imagine a world without punishment is to make being a problem solver impossible.

Thus in my view pain is both necessary and controllable. The existence of pain is mostly not a big deal because there is a bigger game that should be going on - the one of living a life. If you focus on that, pain can be put in its proper perspective.

But you are arguing for some simplistic calculus where pain should not exist, and so from that premise, life should not exist. Yet it is an unnatural claim to treat pain as if its degrees of difference make no difference. And as if it is not controllable in practice.

So your position relies on a number of socially constructed delusions. The obviousness of that is why one would ask what it is exactly that you are psychologically shielding yourself from?

Yes, you don't like the tables being turned in that fashion. You want to be the one calling the rest of us self-deluded and unable to see the truth of existence. But there you go.

This does not change the fact that torture can occur beyond human interaction. — darthbarracuda

Only if you change torture's definition.

Yes, indeed if I had the choice I don't think I would condone abiogenesis. — darthbarracuda

Could it get any more laughable?

Let me know when you are ready to deal with nature in terms of what is natural rather than imagining yourself sitting at God's right hand, tugging his sleeve as He is doing his creating, and murmuring: "Do you really think this last little DNA thing is wise?".

Telling a person who is being tortured that it's just a bunch of signals in their brain meant to solve problems does nothing to help them. — darthbarracuda

But treating torture as an issue that can be tackled via social institutions is pragmatic - of much more use in real life than telling the same torture victim that "yes, you are right, life is shit for everyone from the get-go, so don't think you are anything special in the fact you have electrodes attached to your gonads right at this moment."

So stop straw-manning my position.

This is quite literally Zapffe's claim: we are both over and under evolved. We have an over-developed intellect and an under-developed signal mechanism. — darthbarracuda

I can't help it if you are wedded to extreme simplicity. All I can do is point out the structural complexity of my own position. I am careful to separate the biology of the "under-developed signal mechanism" from the sociology of the "over-developed intellect" so as not to make these kinds of basic ontological blunders.

There is nothing socially constructed or linguistic about torture. There is nothing socially constructed or linguistic about boredom or repetition. Telling someone that they aren't actually experiencing any "qualitative" experience a la qualia is not only asinine but insulting. — darthbarracuda

Or instead, it means you don't understand psychology well enough to understand what is meant by social constructionism.

And once again we have you diagnosing pessimists as being "unnatural" or "pathological", as if they are some sort of oddity in the universe. No, we are part of the universe, and therefore it stands that the universe is capable of producing these kinds of ideas. — darthbarracuda

The only kind of universe that can produce these kinds of ideas is one where life has become so generally safe and easy on the whole that the self-indulgent have to pathologise the very fact of their own existence.

Why is there a need for problem-solving in the first place? What is so great and special about life, other than the pleasure you experience? If you accept that it's pleasure that makes a life good, then you have to, on pain of contradiction, accept that it is pain that makes a life bad. — darthbarracuda

Even if you want to be supremely simplistic in this fashion, that still makes it a problem to solve.

The rub of pessimism is that there is no way to solve this problem. Suicide doesn't solve the problem, it just eliminates it. — darthbarracuda

Exactly. Suicide solves something in the case of an already imminent painful death. But generally, solving the problem involves getting a life and learning to stop whining.

Pessimism is so histrionic that nothing can fix its psychic state. Time would have to be wound back to its beginning and existence itself annihilated to make things right.

Emos wondered why people laughed at them. It wasn't only the bad haircuts and wristbands meant to signal "potential cutter here".

Absurd, the reason Lovecraft is so famous is because he made such provocative observations. — darthbarracuda

Great. But I was trying to turn this discussion away from romantic histrionics towards science-backed naturalism.

As I said, show me that the brain isn't evolved for problem-solving. And that being so, it then follows we have to evaluate biological signals of pleasure and pain in that light.

In any case this does not matter very much considering the main focal point - phenomenology - is still being pushed aside. — darthbarracuda

Well hardly. My point is that phenomenology at the level we are discussing it is socially constructed and linguistic. That is the human condition.

The question then is whether culture is integrated with biology - whether as humans we are still essentially pragmatic problem-solvers and that is the basis for any philosophising? Or instead, there is your alternative hypothesis - the rather romantic and Freudian one - that the ego is culturally manufactured as some kind of self-deceptive bulwark against the death instinct, or some such garbled rubbish. If only we could shed the scales from our eyes and see existence as bad from the get-go, you wail - because for some it ends in torture and holocaust, even if you seem to have a life that only stretches as far as boredom, anxiety and some mild discontent.

Your argument is akin to telling a person who is afraid of heights that "it's just a chemical reaction" - that doesn't change anything. — darthbarracuda

Well again hardly. As a semiotician, I would say it is just a symbolic reaction - a state of interpretance.

It is natural to have some fear of heights if you don't want to fall. What is pathological in problem-solving terms is to become so overcome by the very idea of the possibility of falling that it takes over your entire life. Or what would be ridiculous as a philosophy would be to construct a whole ethics around the possibility that someone somewhere may fall in a really bad way, while ignoring the converse fact that mostly people manage to stand in a world that is well-organised - by a problem-solving attitude.

So it's easy to dismiss all of what I'm saying here by telling me to "grow up" or "man up" but that's all it is - easy. — darthbarracuda

Yep. It is easy. Your whole position is built on catastrophising. I'm just waiting for you to make an argument that brains are not meant for problem-solving and so require some way to tell whether they are getting hotter or colder on that score.

How can it make sense for suffering not to exist for a mind that has to be able to make its mind up?

And sure, if such a mind decides the solution to its problems is suicide, that makes sense. A rational society supports voluntary euthanasia for terminal illness.

But I return to my point - the one that supports me saying "man up". Problem solving is meant to consider all its options. So show me the bit where your philosophy is doing that. In what way is it constuctive to become so obsessed by the very worst things that can happen - especially when you personally claim your life is quite content.

Well, I mean I doubt most other animals have existential crises like we do. But certainly they have instincts that keep them from doing things that would destroy them. Like Lovecraft said, the first experience was fear. We don't get to decide whether or not life is to be continued - we are forced by our more primal instincts to continue whether we like it or not. — darthbarracuda

Nope. Not getting much sense of science there. Lovecraft? :)

LOL, go read the neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger and his associates over at the ASSC. — darthbarracuda

I've read him. I don't find him particularly insightful as he conflates the issues of biologically evolved consciousness and culturally evolved self-regulatory awareness.

And my argument is that this smart brain evolved this tendency in order to trick its captive self-model into continuing to exist. — darthbarracuda

Good lordy. What did you say about bubbles and psychological science? Do you believe animals have to be protected in some way from their existential dread and the constant temptation of suicide?

The phenomenal self-model is the brain's way of enslaving itself. — darthbarracuda

Get back to me when you can link such lurid claims to real neuroscience.

UN is one of the fundamental misconceptions of inductivism. It is a principle in that no one has ever been able to properly formulate, beyond vague notions such as "the future will resemble the past" or "the seen resembles the unseen". Your suggestion that it might be formulated "the regularities of experience are universal regularities"? — tom

It is hard to know what you are driving at but science is comfortable with the cosmological principle for good reason.

Why do we need to give people problems? — darthbarracuda

Who is this "we"? Are you thinking of some malign god?

If you are going to claim your view is science-backed, it is going to have to be naturalistic. And so we can contrast two hypotheses here.

My argument is that brains evolved for problem solving. Pleasure and pain must exist to mark out the symbolised limits of that. We have to actually get feedback on whether we are getting hotter or colder in our problem solving. And nothing about such signalling is simple. For instance, a smart brain must be able to trade-off the short-term pain vs the long-term gain, and vice versa. Hence stuff like endorphins to help you keep climbing through the suffering.

Your argument is something about pain or suffering having phenomenal existence as a class of qualia. Somehow you treat situated feelings as if they were cosmic abstracta. Having thus separated them from reality, you can weigh their "existence" in isolation.

Welcome to Platonism, goodbye to realism, naturalism, science and commonsense.

Eventually I think you will come to the same conclusion that I have and realize that life is not meant to be fair, balanced, or comfortable. — darthbarracuda

Right. It is instead a goal that has to be worked at.

But we seem a long way now from your original thesis that the very possibility of a nasty paper cut is sufficient reason to unwish the entirety of existence.

I know a lot more than you do, apparently — darthbarracuda

No, suffering is not intrinsic to having fun, — darthbarracuda

And yet pain, stress and suffering can cause the release of endorphins, serotonin and adrenaline - which feel pretty good. So you are not respecting the complexity of the neuroscience.

Zapffe was a prolific mountaineer, who climbed mountains because he thought it was the most pointless thing to do. — darthbarracuda

Sure, he might have said it was as pointless as life. But still, he did it. And so there must have been some point to it. And thus also some point to life.

Note I'm not defending sports or climbing particularly. They are rather self-indulgent pursuits of course. The issue is instead that they show that suffering is intrinsic to having fun.

Climbing a mountain is as optional an activity as it gets. So it is not as though we have to go through the pain because life leaves us with no choice. Instead it must be the case that when modern life removes all real hardships and dangers, we - or at least a lot of us - go in active search of such risks. They make us feel more alive - being a natural part of the psychology of living.

So I am waiting for you to account for that with your narrow pessimism.

That's how you solve an existential crisis in the usual way, isn't it? Surround yourself with your comforts and securities and distract yourself for long enough that you eventually forget what was bothering you. — darthbarracuda

People usually solve their existential crises by growing up and getting stuck into life.

I agree of course that there is plenty to criticise about the way life is supposed to be lived in the modern consumer society, lost in romanticism and hedonism.

But to have that grown-up conversation, you have to be already past needy pessimism.

No...it's not. Get out of your bubble and read some psychology, and none of that positive psychology bullshit. — darthbarracuda

What do you know about psychology or positive psychology? Get out of your own bubble.

Now of course Auschwitz is an extreme example, — darthbarracuda

That is why your argument is weak. You have to jump to unrepresentative extremes to make your case.

Your whole approach is flawed in trying to reduce human existence to some calculus of joy and anguish weighed on a set of scales. A life is a construction in which happiness and pain are useful signals. We need to focus on the nature of that construction - it's good or bad - rather than on the signals. This is because the signals themselves will be interpreted quite differently, depending on the kind of life being constructed.

I mean why is a rough sport like rugby so enjoyable. Why would anyone punish themselves climbing a mountain. How does suffering of this kind become the most fondly remembered aspects of a life?

Or for a more ordinary kind of basic hard work, who would have kids, a garden or a farm. These are tough gigs. Yet also what make life the most worthwhile.

Now you will just repeat your mantra that I am talking about exactly the self-delusion which you - in all your superiority - have the better sense to see through.

But bullshit my friend. Pessimism is a rationalisation for a failure to engage with existence in constructive fashion.

Unlike what you claim here, I actually have scientific data to support my views. I'm not just going to ignore an entire sector of inquiry because you personally don't like it. — darthbarracuda

You have a flawed thesis. You think the point of life is not to feel the slightest discomfort, rather than to actually live it and make something of it.

All the science stands against you there - from biology through neuroscience, sociology and psychology.

Your case hinges on a mentality you have chosen to construct - one where you have got into the negative habit of focusing on the very worst possible outcomes and treating them as the sole determinants of your existence.

It's learned helplessness dressed up as "philosophy".

Now I suspect you will argue around this via Popper. But I wonder if the assumption UN isn't going to be hiding somewhere. I like the notion that the mind is an expectation machine and that violations of expectation in particular come to our attention. We expect the future to resemble the past — Hoo

I would say rather that we expect the past to be a constraint on future freedoms. The past can lock the free flow of events into restricted possibility.

Both Popper and Peirce took a propensity view of probability in this fashion. It has the advantage of recognising chance and spontaneity (or vagueness) as ontically real. And hence the determinism of existence is balanced by indertiminsm.

So far as logic goes, that makes induction more realistic and fundamental than deduction. Deduction depends on ontic determinism. But induction is happy to talk about the development of propensities which only constrain the space of the future possible and don't absolutely determine if t.

The claim that consciousness is a curse is not really a philosophy of biology claim. It's definitely more poetic although this does not necessarily take away its force, and it's fundamentally sourced from a reflection on the human condition than a reflection on a specific biological feature. — darthbarracuda

Again, my point is that you start from the histrionic and personal position that suffering, in any degree, is an unbearable fact. But most people just don't think that do they? Life has it ups and downs but that doesn't make life not worth living.

So yes. It may be poetic - in being histrionic. But if we want to talk realistically about the place of suffering in human conscious existence, then we need some solid backdrop against which to make some judgement.

You are failing to convince me either on phenomenological or material grounds that there is a general issue as opposed to a personal issue.

I never said it had to be bliss in this case, although I might question why we ought to settle for less (the mediocre). The point is that I think generally life is far worse than mediocre and we're not willing to face this immediately accessible fact. As Ligotti said, life is malignantly useless. — darthbarracuda

So what is your argument against settling for average outcomes? Why would that be mediocre rather contented?

Again, an exaggerated notion of what you deem acceptable distorts every part of your exposition.

Our "telos", or end-point (not the functional point) is death. A tool's function may be to drill holes or hammer nails, but ultimately its final destination is with it breaking and being tossed out. — darthbarracuda

This is silly. Things with a telos in this fashion can't get worn out unless they are used to achieve things. So you could say living and dying without properly living is certainly a waste of a life. Thus the end point of a drill's existence or a person's existence would have to be judged in terms of the negentropy created as well as the entropy spent.

Claiming we grow and flourish during life does not change this fact, and claiming that death is not psychologically problematic is laughably absurd - on the contrary, death is exactly why we have culture, religion, political parties and the family unit as well as a host of other reassuring fictions, such as entertainment or pop-science. — darthbarracuda

Your position relies on constant exaggeration. Mostly we have all those things to deal with the realities of life. To claim they are "exactly" fictions to hide death is more argument by histrionics.

Pessimism is generally less concerned with the lack of meaning than existentialism is. It's more of the combination of the lack of meaning + the inevitable and structurally inherent pain in life that makes life problematic. The abstract notion of the lack of meaning is actually relatively unimportant here, — darthbarracuda

I accept that. But that also makes pessimism less interesting here in being less a metaphysical issue and more a practical one - unless it is actually then related to the philosophy of biology.

what if you're actually right and I never agree with you and live my life in a less-than-positive state - wouldn't that be a tragedy? — darthbarracuda

But my position is not that life is bliss. Things being less than positive is not uncommon. We all know that. However what is histrionic is to then call it all a tragedy.

As soon as a person is born, they are in a state of decay, or being-towards-death. When we live, we are in a state of defense even if we don't realize it. Defending against threats. And ultimately forgetting that we lose in the end. — darthbarracuda

But that is hardly true. We spend a long time growing before we start decaying. So again your position - to the degree it has to depend on these kinds of histrionic claims - is unconvincing.

Therefore a key aspect of pessimistic literature is the disillusionment with the world, the idea that there is nothing here for us, that we have been deceived this whole time. — darthbarracuda

But it was bad metaphysics that did the deceiving - the idea that individual lives must have cosmic or divine significance.

And it is still bad metaphysics to jump to the other extreme of complaining of existence as a complete state of generalised contingency, brute fact, and cosmic insignificance.

Modern understanding confirms life and mind as special in being - in the cosmological sense - very highly developed in terms of complexity, or negentropic organisation. We are at the centre of creation in that way.

And a proper analysis of the human condition ought to respect that objective truth. Which is why the almost instinctive reply to the Pessimist is start paying more attention to the biological and social context that is actually psychologically forming you.

Stop thinking simply, start thinking in terms of reality's complexity if you want to talk accurately about what is true or right.

Instead of "vague" I would use the term "uncertain" — darthbarracuda

That's fine. Just give me the technical definition that would make this an important distinction here in your view.

Is it that your claim is the crisp possibility (like your fear of torture) can't be in anyway unthought or defused once experienced? I'm dubious of that as a psychological fact. I see it as the development of a psychological habit, and habits can be forgotten or at least be unlearned in ways which eventually render them vaguer.

To say that pessimists should suck it up is then, from the perspective of a pessimist, akin to telling a domestic abuse victim to love their spouse. — darthbarracuda

I guess that the other point of view is that when you see a pessimist wallowing in learned helplessness, refusing sensible life advice because of some cosmological world view, then it is natural to lose patience.

If you want to construct a philosophy that naturalises a state which is down to your neurobiology or/and your circumstances - things you could take action on - then really the case is that the door stands open and you are refusing to leave the clutches of the very monster you have constructed

As I say, true existentialism would instead lead towards vagueness or a state of mindless neutrality - the kind of mind state that Eastern mysticism often advertises as its major benefit.

I think this analysis of the horse is the other side of the question, which I've neglected. We need x and y before we can postulate necessity. And perhaps we can view x and y as unstable systems of constraints. Change one entity in the same and you change them all. — Hoo

Remember also that deduction is simply a calculus of constraints. Take one premise, combine it with another, logic tells you what is necessarily the new more specified state of constraint. So deduction is the crisp addition and subtraction of identified or separable constraints. It's a maths of constraint.

And my point is that instability is the necessary flip side of this presumption of stable necessities in life. Instability stands for raw possibility. The world could be anything - if it were not regulated.

So it is not constraint that is unstable. It is fundamental instability (ie: vagueness or Apeiron) that creates some kind of "stuff" for constraints to act upon.

In nature, constraints are in reality more holistic and non-separable. Quantum physics confirms the radical metaphysical truth of this. But still we can mechanically imagine reality in terms of a composition or accumulation of separable constraints. And it is that epistemic vision of existence that standard logic - as a formal calculus of constraints - underwrites. We can imagine reality as a hierarchy of constraints that traps possibility into a particular state of substantial being.

This still seems like the postulation of necessity. Horsesmust be within specific constraints. Our postulates become more specific. But how does one avoid a "If x then y" as a premise from which y can be deduced in the context of x? — Hoo

It is the postulation of necessity. But it allows also for the role played by possibility or contingency. And also distinguishes between epistemic and ontic models of formal and final cause.

So horse becomes nothing but a state of constraint. It is constraints all the way down. But now we must realise how out of pure epistemic blinkeredness, we often class accidental constraints along with the actually naturally necessary. Or indeed, vice versa.

Is a horse still a horse if it is made out of pottery, and created in a factory rather than born of a mare?

Accidents and necessities may be considered quite differently when switching between a mechanical and organic notion of explanation. There may still be postulations and deductions, but within quite contrasting frameworks of thought.

What really matters is that you come to see what will change your life and take you away from holding worldviews — John

This is perhaps the true existential crisis - when there seems no hope of a worldview at all.

The Pessimist is taking comforting refuge in a concrete belief there is no such hope. A life can be built around that. But what if even the absence of such hope can't be known for certain? What if that is as radically unsure?

So there is another big step beyond the self-comfort of Pessimism where instead of confronting the void, we are in confrontation with the vague. ;)

I would suggest a more organic and less mechanical notion of explanation.

Things are explained by pointing to the constraints that bound possibility. This view has the advantage of starting with the idea that anything could be the case. But then limits arise for various reasons to specify what actually is. And yet in so bounding possibility, possibility still remains.

If nature makes a horse, it could be any colour, any size. If the horse is in fact white, or dwarf, then these are further constraints on possibility that explain why this colour and not that, why this size and not some other.

Then of course Aristotle came up with four kinds of "becauses". We can say a horse is what it is because of the specific constraints in terms of what it is made of, how it came to be made, for what reason it was made, and with what design it was made.

So specificity in the world arises from the extent to which there are constraints impinging on naked possibility. And explanation just has to account for those constraints to the degree it epistemically matters. Our own conception of a horse can be vague or more definite - depending on the demands of the situation, the degree to which we need to care.

A donkey is at least horse-like from some angles. Is this really a Lipizzaner stallion if it is not grey?

So what is necessary and what is accidental when it comes to explanations? Confusion arises because we tend to mix up epistemology and ontology.

There is the question of what it would take for us to create "a horse". Then the separate question of how a horse arises in nature - a question which has to include the one of is there "a mind" at work such as to care about sufficiently meeting some set of causal conditions. Is nature really specifying some constraints in terms of formal and final cause, or even material and efficient cause. When it comes to the existence of "a horse" - either as genus or individual - what is actually necessary and what is merely accident (ie: unconstrained possibility).

So an organic approach steps back far enough not to simply assume nature shares our highly epistemic and self-interested approach to forming explanations. We always end up thinking about explanation in terms of how could we replicate or control nature as if it were a machine or device that we wanted to craft. And from there a huge number of familiar philosophical confusions flow.

MU wants to cut the link between sexual hunger and sex. But without the physical manifestation of the sexual hunger, you cannot complete the sex act. — Baden

It mostly all boils down to bad phrasing most likely - we simply lack good language for describing these things in philosophically rigorous way.

But don't we routinely make the joke that men think with their cocks. When it throbs, it is showing it has a mind of its own. So who is feeling the sexual hunger here and acting on it? Your penis-self or your brain-self?

Anyway, I felt MU did pull out a critical point in showing that we can eat out of socialised habit rather than felt desire. And that looked to strike to the heart of whatever it is that TGW might be saying - whatever that really was.

When I said external physical effect (in males) I meant an erection, which is required to complete the act of sex. And sexual hunger is what causes the erection. — Baden

Isn't this just a projection of an overly mechanistic model of causality on to the reality of the situation?

Where is the hunger beyond the throbbing of your penis? Does it really make sense to say a mental event is the cause of the physical event rather than that the mental event is an awareness of that physical event?

Or better yet - given you likely have no causal theory to connect mental and physical events in the first place - we start again all over and build accounts of experience/reality on a more generic causal foundation (like semiosis).

The meat is to-be-acquired, the hunger is to-be-acted-upon. In that sense they are different qualities or kinds of experience, but I am not sure it would be right to say there is a "general thing that is qualia". — John

My argument is that the generality of qualia is the socially constructed idea here and so due to linguistic self-awareness (the speaking which can talk about selves and their states).

So the meat that is to-be-acquired and the hunger that is to-be-acted-upon nicely points out the directionality, the fundamental embodiness, that is primary awareness. The view points from the self to the world, leaving the self outside what it sees.

That is why we call hunger a drive. It is the source of the action rather than the satisfaction. And in culturally-constructed self-awareness, we are meant to now start paying critical attention to the sources of our actions. And here we start to distinguish "pangs" that stand for this concept of "the hunger drive, the cause of eating behaviour".

We check in with ourselves and see if the stomach rumbles. Then we note those autonomic sensations and say to ourselves, see, we are actually hungry. We can sense ourselves in ways that betoken that idea.

Or else we might just be sitting down to eat out of clock-watching habit. If we ask ourselves do we really feel hungry, we might remember feeling nothing much before heading to the kitchen, but then the scent and sight of the food triggers "pangs" - the stomach reflexively gets ready with its surge of gastic juices, the mouth runs with saliva ahead of what it knows is about to happen. If we check in, all the boxes of our sensory definition of "hunger" are getting ticked.

So even if the drive to action is some social habit - the very human thing of stopping to eat because that is what the clock tells us to do - we still psychologise the whole affair and say, we eat because we felt hungry.

Perhaps because the hunger is a kind of 'inner prompting' that exists in itself when the body is at rest and the meat as something to be acquired is elusive and uncertain and requires the effort of bodily exertion and stealth, even animals may feel the 'outer-directedness' of the desire to get the food as feeling distinct from the 'inner-promptingness' of the hunger itself. Perhaps it is these very kinds of animal feeling that form the basis of our conceptually elaborated distinctions. — John

It is not as if there are no internal sensations to speak of. Our bodies are suffused with receptors. But then as SX points out, our embodied sense of self is still very much a plastic construction. We can feel a rubber hand as an extension of ourselves. The "mirror neuron" research is wildly overplayed as the neuro-reductionist secret of human self-awareness, but it does also show how we can empathetically feel the actions or reactions of others as if they were literally part of our "selves".

So yes, primary awareness has structure. It is divided into promptings versus their satisfactions. There is a self that is a collection of promptings and the world that is its satisfactions (and frustrations).

But human self-awareness is a whole new level of experience-structuring. We now represent to ourselves our promptings as a class of things in themselves. We say "I" ate the meat because I was "hungry". We no longer just eat the meat without further thought. We can provide a socially acceptable justification in ways that imply we have the further thing of willed controlled over our own desires.

No, the point is that such axioms result from a description of what is, reality, not from dichotomous reasoning. — Metaphysician Undercover

Empirical claims about "what is" - the kinds of things people say as a result of common experience of the world - were the departure point for Ancient Greek metaphysical inquiry.

So in the world, we see all kinds of objects and non-objects. Is a cloud an object? Is the wind an object? Is a river an object?

Reason is then applied to the question - the unexamined assumption. So the starting point is only self-evident in the sense no one has really thought to question it systematically. It is only axiomatic in being acted upon without being philosophically considered.

Therefore "boundary" is to be read as a property of objects, not as dichotomous to objects. — Metaphysician Undercover

And I accounted for the conditions under which it can be considered a property of an object - if the object has the semiotic power to define its own boundaries. Otherwise the boundary is probably an idea that we ourselves impose on an unbounded nature. It is only us who might be concerned about identifying the true source of the nile or deciding whether some bump on a landscape is a hill or a mountain.

So the question is where do we get this idea of a continuous boundary. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well what bounded objects did you have in mind as an example? Let's see how necessary continuity might be to that idea of it being an object.

The ideal of boundless must be described in a self-evident way to become an axiom. — Metaphysician Undercover

Like the axiom of vagueness you mean? Surely you can see how it arises automatically via a dichotomy with the ideal of the crisp. To be absolutely crisp would be to absolutely lacking in vagueness. And thus, transitively, the same must apply in the other direction.

So if you can tell me about boundedness in any absolute fashion, you will be also telling me about absolute unboundedness as its logical corollary.

And if you can't give that kind of crisp definition of a boundary, then - again logically - your idea of a boundary is rather vague and lacking in metaphysical-strength axiomisation.

I think it comes down to whether you think the primary awareness of the inner milieu counts as self-awareness, as distinct from the reflexive self-awareness brought about by cultural/ symbolic mediation. — John

That's right. There is a self in primary awareness, but it is "off-stage" as the animal's awareness is of the world (as that which is not "self"). So the awareness is purely extrospective in being the view from a self.

The question then is where internal sensations like pangs or hunger or lust may play into this. Are they parts of the "field of sensation" - part of the animal's umwelt - and so in that sense, the animal is seeing "into its self"?

The animal sees the lump of meat. And the animal sees its hunger. And then in unseen fashion, the animal decides the connection that links the two (which could be meat first, then hunger, or hunger first, then the meat).

We can see that talking this way, it is all starting to break down. There is something essentially wrong in treating inner and outer sensation in this fashion - as if they were all just different varieties of the general thing that is qualia.

You are contradicting your proposed axiom though. The axiom was that boundaries are continuous. I objected, saying that this is not self-evident. How does proposing two types of boundaries, continuous and non-continuous, help to solve the issue? — Metaphysician Undercover

Sorry, I thought it was the axiom you had proposed. But instead your self-evident axiom is that objects are bounded.

So still my answer would be the same. Metaphysical-strength axioms seem self-evident when they result from dichotomous reasoning. If a pair of possibilities are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive, then in being the mutual limits on such possibility, and in exhausting all other possibilities, they would have the status of necessity.

And that has long been accepted of the continuous~discrete. Together they are as far as you could go in making a contrast between the connected and the disconnected, the integrated and the differentiated, the related and the isolated, etc.

But then as I say, my own take is that dichotomies only do produce ideal limits. And limits are boundaries in marking where reality ceases to be some thing. Which in the metaphysical case, is where reality ceases itself to exist. And so while reality might approach the ideal of either the discrete or continuous with asymptotic closeness, it can never actually arrive exactly there because the boundaries are not part of existence. They mark (in our minds) the limit, so the exact point where the business of existing has halted.

So now we could talk the same way about your own proposed dichotomy here - objects and boundaries. You can see how it is actually parasitic on the continuous~discrete as a metaphysical axiom. We can imagine the discrete, individuated, differentiated, isolated thing which is an object because we can imagine the complementary thing of it having a continuous, unbroken, integrated, related boundary - a boundary which is a global limit on the object in marking the point where all its discrete being suddenly stops.

So yes. The idea of a bounded object seems pretty convincing. But boundaries in reality are often pretty vague. Or if crisp, designed in fact to be leaky.

Any river or coastline is a pretty vague boundary. Tides and floods shift the margin between water and land continually. Tracing a river to its source in some clutter of springs and tributaries is always a contentious affair.

On the other hand, country borders, cell membranes, and other semiotic lines drawn across the world, are not just leaky, they are designed to be porous - porous in a way that is regulated. A border or membrane is a boundary which has to have holes so as to allow the object - the nation or organism - to make the right kind of material transactions to continue to persist as the kind of objects that they are.

So the idea of a bounded object is a crisp metaphysical ideal that in reality only really exists in this fashion.

Even a rock has vague bounds as an object. It is always subject to erosion. And at what point exactly - with metaphysical-strength or Platonic perfection - is some silicon or iron atom crossing the boundary from being part of the solid rock to part of its history of eroded material? Or is the mud on the rock, part of the rock as "an object"? If not, why not?

And then where an object in fact has the power to self-define its own boundaries (when it is an organism), or when it is an artifact (like a nation or a plastic cup) where it is us who imposes some idea of a definition, then really any boundary is a constraint imposed on material vagueness. It is regulation of erosive or dissipative processes designed to reconstruct what the world would generally aim to deconstruct over time.

So on the one hand, we can easily imagine a world of bounded objects. We can axiomatise a metaphysical dichotomy in that fashion - one that is built up from ancient debates about the continuous and the discrete, the one and the many, to arrive at an atomistic conception of bounded objects.

But then when that axiomatised conception is put to the emprical test, we find that reality is different. It has a further developmental dimension to it. Reality is founded more on flux than stasis. The Universe is one vast sea of erosion. And now - metaphysically - its ultimate other must be the counter-move of regulative habit. Boundaries are really constraints on dissipative freedom - or vagueness. Boundaries are the semiotic information that form up stable object-ness in a fundamentally unstable world.

I'd rather say instead that both self and other are derivative notions which become (roughly) sedimented into place based on a variety of developmental factors, both biological and social. — StreetlightX

Yep. A dichotomisation that arises to structure the "bloomiing, buzzing, confusion".

The truth is that Experience is trained by both association and dissociation, and that psychology must be writ both in synthetic and in analytic terms. Our original sensible totals are, on the one hand, subdivided by discriminative attention, and, on the other, united with other totals, - either through the agency of our own movements, carrying our senses from one part of space to another, or because new objects come successively and replace those by which we were at first impressed. The 'simple impression' of Hume, the 'simple idea' of Locke are both abstractions, never realized in experience.
...
The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space.

William James - Principles of Psychology (1890)

For example, the child developmental psychologist Daniel Stern notes the basic 'awareness' in infants probably takes the form of what he refers to as 'vitality affects', which are kinds of 'life-feelings', or life-qualities': "These elusive qualities are better captured by dynamic, kinetic terms, such as ‘surging’, ‘fading away’, ‘fleeting’, ‘explosive’, crescendo’, ‘decrescendo’, ‘bursting’, ‘drawn out’, and so on. These qualities of experience are most certainly sensible to infants and of great daily, even momentary, importance." — StreetlightX

This is a good way to put it because it shows how early on there would just be a disembodied response. Raw sensory change would wash through the circuits like noise. The newborn would not be distinguishing between the changes caused by its actions vs the changes caused by a changing world. Either way, the same energy would be washing through with the direction not yet telling of a difference,

That aside, the crucial thing is that vitality affects become differentiated into self and other by processes of symmetry breaking, as it were. The infant learns to be a 'self' - or rather learns to 'locate' these (trans-personal) affects within a self - by means of coming to grips with the regularities of bodily coordination which break the symmetry between self and other. — StreetlightX

Agreed. But that is an animal embodied level of self. And Stern is of course alert to the later Vygotskian development of the linguistically-distanced self.

So this is where I think your account so far halts too soon.

A dotted line makes a non-continuous boundary. — Metaphysician Undercover

Wouldn't it be leaky or .... vague?

We simply assume that boundaries are continuous, as a mathematical type of axiom, an ideal which has not been justified. Then the boundaries which are shown to us do not fulfill the qualifications of the ideal, so we deny that they are boundaries. Now the ideal boundary must be justified as a true example, or it should be dismissed as not properly representing the boundaries which we know of. — Metaphysician Undercover

That just puts us back dealing with dichotomies as I routinely argue. We can have the ideal or axiomatic notion of a continuous boundary because we also have the ideal/axiomatic notion of what would be the most leaky possible boundary - one that is discrete instead of continuous, all holes and no bounds like a sieve.

So we have two true notions - the unbroken and the broken. And we can then measure anything in the real world by how close or far it is from those bounding ideal limits.

Dotted lines of course usually mean "tear here" so they are suggestions left for you to complete. The would be exactly halfway between unbroken and broken in that sense.

Oh look, I mentioned the words 'mirror neurons' so I'm an arch-reductionist who must disagree with everything you just said. — StreetlightX

How do you live in the real world with such thin skin? But yes, you are being neuro-reductionist in your OP by going along with the idea that the evolution of the critical differences concerning the human mind are all biological mechanism rather than sociocultural, language-enabled, habits.

You might of course in fact agree with me on that further point. But it would be up to you say. Put your man pants on and give it a go.

No discussion of .... mirror neurons, etc. — StreetlightX

Speaking of shit sandwiches, that's a doozy from neuro-reductionism.

Sure, "mirror neurons" tell us something about embodied consciousness - the active construction of a self/world distinction. But introspective or self-conscious level awareness is a learnt cultural habit based on having the language skills to direct attention in a third person fashion.

Instead of simply being plugged in the world like an animal, we can distance ourselves from ourselves by forming an intervening habit of self-representation. "This is me in here having my thoughts, feelings and perceptions."

Putting a cherry on MU's shit sandwich isn't going to make it any more edible. — Baden

But I would have thought you would agree that TGW has been peddling the shit sandwich here.

The Vygotskian view is that it is indeed correct that introspective awareness is not a natural biological feature of brains/minds, but instead a socially and language scaffolded reflexive habit.

So we don't simply observe our pangs of hunger, we have to construct such an attentional state by way of learnt cultural concepts.

Of course there is something "in there" to be found. I've just checked in with my stomach and it tells me that although another part of me knows its lunchtime, it could take it or leave it another few hours. Yet I know from experience that as soon as I find something tasty leftover in the fridge, the gastric juices will start to flow and hunger pangs - being exactly that preparatory autonomic response - will appear.

So in a real sense, introspective awareness or self-consciousness does take the long way round to get there. It is a culturally evolved habit of thought that I need to master, a set of exterior concepts that I need to learn to apply in the right socially-approved way.

And in Philosophy of Mind, we all have to learn to introspect in a way that makes "qualia" seem a true thing. It's part of the induction process to be part of the club. People will laugh at you if you claim not to get the ineffability of the colour red, the smell of a rose, a pang of hunger, or the taste of a shit sandwich dressed with a cherry.

Indeed, I don't have sex out of sexual hunger, I do it out of habit. My sexual hunger only kicks in when that mechanism that compels me to have sex fails. Of course, the only problem with this is that my lack of sexual hunger means I can never perform, so I never actually end up having sex. Weird. — Baden

Maybe what's weird is these kinds of mechanical accounts of mentality - hunger or whatever as bare qualia.

If you are forever constructing local observables in this fashion, you will forever be failing to deal with the phantasmal thing that is the "self" - the supposed observer.

That is why if you are going to talk about a construct like "hunger", it would have to break with the notion of it being just "the pangs I experience right here and now". What is hunger when it is stretched out over the kind of temporal span of a habit? Is it a concept rather than a percept now? Is it some very dilute version of the much more occasionally intense thing?

What TGW actually wants to argue is as usual quite opaque. He evades close questioning. But the problems with any kind of qualia-based account of mentality are pretty self-evident. It simply shows how strong a grip a mechanical notion of causality has on the popular imagination.

So, as a philosophical axiom, we cannot just pick any axiom, it must be self-evident. We have evidence that objects are bounded, and "object" may be defined in such a way that an object is necessarily bounded, so we could pick an axiom such as "objects are bounded".

With respect to continuity though, as I stated earlier in the thread, that some aspect of reality is continuous, is implied through observations of reality, and inductive reason. Since it is implied, that some aspect of reality is continuous, this is not self-evident, we cannot pick continuity as an axiom. The assumption of continuity must be justified. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well self-evident is always going to be a suspect claim.

But anyway, are bounds not self-evidently continuous? So if there are (discrete) objects, then continuity is also an aspect of your axiom of object boundedness?