Fuuuuck no.

Put a ring on it immediately.

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.

Oh enshittification is coming for Windows. In the future. Like it hasn’t happened yet or wasn’t the first and worst of these companies for it to come for. But something that hasn’t happened yet, not in the past. Interesting.

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

Increased interest rates make it more expensive for businesses to borrow money. This causes them to tighten up expenses to remain profitable which means cutting hours and laying people off. The more people that are unemployed, the lower wages become.

Inflation is caused by companies raising prices in response to higher revenues. Forcing people into unemployment stops that by taking money out of circulation, it just sits in accounts as capital, rather than being used to pay wages

Everything is mint flavored

No, I think they should make price controls on goods and raise the minimum to $30 per hour

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

well im not a philosophy professor, and ive done my level best to explain basic humanities concepts to you. its funny because i used to make these exact same arguments that you are, and my understanding was incomplete, as it still is. i hope you dont have it figured out as much as you think you do, because then you’ll likely not grow as a person. In any case I’ve made long arguments as well as I can make them. Thanks for the discussion

But your problems with my explanation depend on a view of reality that is completely divorced from history. Your conditions for realness depend on the existence of a real physical object and reject socially contingent objects, which is your right, but this is an example of an epistemological crisis: I insist that things that are socially real are real; you deny their existence, also denying the existence of law, value, many things that our society depends on. If you pick out parts of my argument that you don’t like and act like the points that I did make just don’t exist, then you are making your argument based on willful ignorance. But besides that, if your standard for what is real differs from mine we cant even have a debate, we just talk past each other smugly assuring ourselves that we are correct because our opponent is just like stupid or something. Maybe you think I’m stupid, I don’t think you’re stupid. My point is you can’t just deny the existence of things that are real in every way but physically. If a huge proportion of people in a society believe that something is real it is the same as that thing being empirically real. You can’t just throw away thousands of years of history because it disagrees with your narrow definition of objectivity. Or I guess you can, none is stopping you, but don’t pretend its consistent with reality.

Maybe god exists, maybe it doesnt, maybe god is just nature, but religion exists which would be the same as if god exists

I’ll try to be a little less obtuse. I thought better about getting into this in the shitpost comm, and since I’m getting massacred my first impulse was probably correct. But I’m a huge nerd, cant help it.

So I guess I don’t know what you mean by epistemologically consistent. As a general rule of epistemology, people can have different, incompatible epistemologies, which basically renders communication impossible, since the participants use different models to determine what is true. This uh happens a lot since people think the way that they determine truth is the “right” one. Even my attempt to adapt different ways of thinking to different situations has limits, since I’m never going to subscribe to like flat earth theory. Not all epistemologies are equally valid or rigorous. Arithmetic is highly rigorous, whereas flat earth has a low bar for proof. Also I’ll argue that the validity of various theories of knowledge are historically contingent. Empiricism isn’t just “more true” than religion because it is more rigorous; in fact the hermetic tradition was extremely rigorous and scientific, but because they viewed “god” as indistinguishable from nature, they could synthesize religion and empirical science without contradiction. Their scientific inquiry was a sacred religious ritual where god learned about its own physical body (nature) through the consciousness of the scientist which was a part of the consciousness of god. This kind of monism is completely foreign to us, yet Isaac Newton was a Hermetic whose theories are still highly relevant and rigorous. But if a scientist publicly expressed these views to the academy they’d be deemed an eccentric, if not a crank of the highest order.

The second part of your question is more straightforward. How would the world change if god didn’t exist the way I described, as being socially real? There’d be no churches, no religious art, no pilgrimages that attract tens of millions each year. There’d be no recognizable European medieval period. Tens or hundreds of millions of people wouldn’t donate their time or money to the church. Which like, wouldn’t that be fucking awesome? no indigenous “schools” no religious colonialism/imperialism.

But all these followers aren’t lying in order to trick you into thinking god exists. They feel god, they experience god through their institutions, rituals, art, monuments, and yes, crimes. This exactly is the limit of pure Empiricism, it forces you to completely disregard subjectivity, or relegate it to a lower order of “realness” than a physical object. A stone in the middle of a lake will have little effect on the outside world outside of its extremely local circumstances; but a religious belief can have deadly implications for millions if it becomes the policy of a government. Laws, money are socially real, determined by their existence on paper, are upheld by sophisticated social constructs that reach into our minds and our behavior. But again, is a law not “real”? Of course it is. Try to break one in front of a cop and find out how real it is.