Fuuuuck no.

Great discussion, thanks for sharing your perspectives and sources as well! Good luck on your inquiries!

Formally as in have had a university publish books and articles that I’ve written on it? No, I’m afraid I have very little university education, I’m largely self-educated. I support people having the opportunity to go to college, but my life just didn’t work out like that. I’m all libraries, discussions, book sales, book clubs, writing and IRL political organizing. I’ve had some articles published but most of my writing is in notebooks.

I won’t bore you with bio details, but after sort of rejecting Harris’s vulgar determinism, I eventually discovered Rick Roderick’s lectures on Philosophy and Human Values. The video quality is pretty old, but as a survey of western Philosophy course, I found this extremely useful and compelling. His course on Neitzsche is also very good. His course on 20th century philosophy, its first episode, Masters of Suspicion is a passionate defense of the self, free will, as well as the validity of exploring these questions.

I’m currently pulling on a thread where I am spending a lot of time thinking about Theses on Feuerbach by Karl Marx, the short but famous formulation wherein Marx “turns Hegel on his head.” Feuerbach’s formulation of God that begins the process of turning Hegel’s logic against Hegel’s own conclusions, established god as the embodiment of humans own best qualities, and externalizing them as an unreachable other, and how it functions as a tool of repression and intellectual domination finds some common ground with Harris’s antireligious atheism. But this thread leads us closer to a kind of humanism, whereas Harris’s atheism leads us further away from it. Its like atheism’s main disagreement with religion is that it believes that science and industry should be mechanism that alienates us from our selves and each other, not the church. Personally, I would prefer not to be alienated from myself or from other people by any extrinsic mechanism of repression; I’d rather throw it off entirely.

Okay, I apologize I went back and read your first post which said something like “the self doesn’t exist is a fun concept to play with” when I was pretty sure you had said just “the self doesnt exist.” I’m sitting here trying to find the thread that connects “the self doesn’t exist” with your seeming acknowledgement of every aspect of it.

I agree its useful to test “wrong conclusions” for the reasons you state. You end up constructing consistent logic justifying it, and can witness for yourself where the reasoning goes wrong, and can speculate as to why. I think it makes relating to people convinced by faulty logic and conclusions easier to relate to, as well as gives you a hint to where their reasoning is off and you cans start to argue against it

But what is experience, how can you find experience without a self doing the experiencing? I’m not trying to put it on you but it is consistent with your logic, as I understand it

Famously, Kant stripped away all his preconceptions and could prove only the subjective (I think therefore I am), whereas you seem to deny everyone their subjectivity, even your own. In any case since you’re interested in these questions, I assume then you’ll reach a better understanding of these questions, just keep studying and growing on your own terms (which is contradictory to your own thesis, but the whole is always defined by contradiction.)

Well I disagree that “we can’t find it”. I think the inability to find the self is a result of the limitations of empiricism, whereas dialectical and materialist analysis has no problem locating the self within the changing relationships that define the individual, history and nature in context of each other.

And this is what empiricism really fails at: its great at defining an object, defining the parameters that constitute it, and isolating it as a subject of study, but absolutely falls short at being able to identify the relationships between “things” or the historic circumstances that give rise to them.

As observers, an over-reliance on one theory of knowledge, or epistemology, verges on the kind of ideological blindness usually associated with fringe fundamentalism. We wouldnt us a ratchet to hammer a nail, why would we insist that a single epistemic “tool” is the only one that is capable of determining truth?

Honestly I probably agreed with you more some years ago before reading Sam Harris’s Free Will, which was so bad it set me on a very different path of inquiry.

But the self can be shown to exist, unless you deny the existence of subjectivity. this leads to hard determinism, what you referred to as no free will.

The productive, creative process itself, the drive to learn and be curious, to investigate, all of this leads to the conclusion that 1. There is some kind of greater will guiding us or 2. Humans have the ability to make determinations based on their experiences, and choose certain actions based on those experiences.

I’ve seen the deterministic argument that free will is an illusion caused by a chain of circumstances, but I don’t buy it. I think that the view that free will is an illusion is itself a logical error: the result of a dependence of the tendency of dualism to try and turn everything into objects, rather than seeing each object within its relationships, coming together to form a totality. This tendency leads to vulgar empiricism and positivist views. These views always obscure social relationships, which are real, measurable and predictions can be made based on them.

The “I’m so deep I’m a nihilist” trope has got to go. Every TV show or movie where there is some supposedly hyper intelligent character, they always have the most vile, garbage philosophy.

The Book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnneman. Weird self help name, but its a book on biases, research which Kahnneman won the nobel prize. Once I started questioning my preconceptions it completely changed my whole perspective on the world. Its like that list of fallacies that you study in philo 101, but they’re not like dialogical fallacies they appear in our own thinking. And “experts” are more likely to get fooled in their own fields of research than laypeople when asked trick questions

Only if you look at things a certain way. There’s real danger to believing that you lack actual subjectivity, its like reverse solipsism, and is basically the worst version of doomerism.

If you look at things dialectically and Materialistically, subjectivity can’t be avoided

Everything is mint flavored

The ball was red, like a red rubber ball. The person was sort of indistinct from the neck up, it was more like my view was focused on the ball itself and didn’t see a face, but it was a man, wearing a white shirt and dark tie, and dark pants. The ball was about the size of a baseball, wasn’t completely smooth and shiny, sort of a matte with a slight grippy texture. Table was square, wood, like a medium brown color. The ball rolled off the table and bounced a few times.

All these decisions were automatic when reading the prompt, it’s what I saw.

I’ve just become aware of aphantasia myself, I have a few family members who have it apparently. I was talking to my BIL about it the other day, I was saying how I’m a big fan of reading, but I mostly read nonfiction. He said he doesn’t read much, mostly biographies, but fiction doesn’t do much for him because he can’t picture anything in his head. I can picture everything in great detail when I read fiction. Its interesting because our minds work very differently

Send it Here!

Quantum computing. It might be a real thing but it’ll go through a grift phase first.

Another one will be environmental carbon capture, like pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. This one would be easier to fake but might not get traction for longer since the ideological superstructure in our society is already built up so that it is hard for a political crisis to emerge due to global climate concerns. Even though climate change is worsening, and whole cities are being destroyed by hurricanes, the debate is still pretty stabilized. However since this grift will end up being sold as a commercial solution to a political problem, the grift will probably come from a larger player like Lockheed or Boeing, which would necessitate investing in the most evil companies in existence. Still you never know, Tesla stayed afloat for years without making a working product by selling carbon credits issued by the government to other car companies, so you might be able to bootstrap this one

It is extremely bad

This is extremely brave

Dude Looks Like a Lady by Aerosmith

Yeah I can tell you have some experience in political spaces, most people online lose their cool talking politics, but you’re just firmly stating your position. Which I disagree with, and that’s okay! I disagree with people inside my own orgs all the time, sometimes loudly! The fact is its a very complicated system. And power is deeply entrenched. There’s nothing to be gained for the org that’s too “radical” to engage in mainstream politics, every city has a group or two like this. They can even have very good politics and analysis but you have to be able to build power, and frankly its just easier to talk a big game and collect dues payments or donations.

It seems to me that you’re at least a progressive, as you are reform minded and that’s great! That basically puts us on the same side of systematic injustice. There might be some issues we couldn’t reconcile but in my experience it doesn’t necessarily mean we couldn’t work together or even end up on the same side of a protest. Despite my polemics, I’m a through and through humanist. But I’m deeply skeptical of parliamentary democracy, not to the degree where I discourage voting, but I’m more concerned with educating workers and regular people than the politicians. I’m proud of the educational work we’ve been able to accomplish in the last year alone; it wasn’t long ago that democratic leaders were calling support for Palestinians a Russian misinformation campaign, now its one of the most pressing issues for the international working class. Not saying “we did that,” but we did our part in boosting the signal and cutting through the noise.

Anyway I very strongly do not believe lobbyists are necessary to democracy and I work to try and create a world where they wouldn’t be (although that’s not exactly the highest on our list of priorities, god knows.) But in the world as it exists today, these structures exist and that’s just a fact. I believe the work I contribute to is a necessary part of a healthy democracy, and you’re a reasonable person who believes that lobbying work is an important part of the system.

Today, the system needs us both to work together and part of that is having lively discussions and educating one another. Maybe some piece of what you said will stay with me or serve as a reminder some time in the future, and maybe the reverse also. We don’t have to be won over to each other’s ideas for them to have an effect. And we got all these other people contributing to the discussion as well. That’s pretty cool to me. So yeah we have a difference of opinion, but we are both coming from a place of education and experience, trying to solve the same problems from different ends of the same dynamic system. At least I hope that’s what’s going on here.

Thanks for the discussion, I appreciate you.

I volunteer with a few (American) political organizations and have connections to politicians and organizations. we have people who we elect democratically who are highly educated, highly motivated, and politically plugged in who talk with politicians all over the world all the time! We are in coalition with an elected politician who is a member of the Irish Daìl, which is like their house of reps, every day we talk with him and ask him questions, and his organization and ours trade information, ideas, articles, book recommendations, you name it. We’ve sent delegates to Cuba to meet with the President, and groups who oppose his government. Weve sent peoole all over the country and the world for political work and ive gotten to have some amazing experiences participating just a little bit in this kind of work. If people won’t talk to us we hold rallys and protests and make them talk to us. Similar to how you described, we pay dues, publish magazines and even participate in national and international debates. Our members have been on tv, podcasts, YouTube, and we are working toward creating our own. And that’s just one of the orgs I’m in, another has members in congress, and its not the GOP or the Dems.

So sorry, no, you’re wrong. Even if there are (purely hypothetical) cases where the system you are describing does work for people, there is no accountability to the people and it really only works to keep professional operators in Washington speaking on behalf of their own interests and the interests of the orgs that pay them. I know good people who are lobbyists, who lobby to do good things. But their position is in no way a political necessity. Grassroots bottom up politics is not only possible its the only way to have real democracy. The top down structures you advocate for only create and reproduce the conditions of exploitation, poverty, immiseration and war. Sorry friend, but I just dont buy it.

i wish that people had as vivid of imagination when thinking of ways to build a mass movement to fix the problems with our deeply dysfunctional “democracy” designed by and for the benefit of the wealthy 1%, as they did when trying to find excuses as to why every single part of said political system is totally irreplaceable and in fact is functioning perfectly within the best system possible.

A better world is possible, but it is up to us to change it.