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.

What I wanna know is did he make the myum myum myum cookie monster voice when he did it? this could be the October surprise Republicans dream for if he didn’t say “myum myum cookies” while biting the babies

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

Elon Musk loves a fake presentation.

Yeah I thought that too, but it has strong epistemic/ontological implications. Kind of a mix imo

What’s epistemology? What is object/subject dualism? What is Gödel’s incompleteness theorem? Idk, I just know other people are stupid

Some of y’all have a piss poor education in humanities and it shows

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

Whelp looks like the ps4 will be my last Sony console, too bad

deleted by creator

If it makes you feel better to call me “idiotic” then I worry about you, because that is not the sort of thing that people say to each other when they are secure and confident in themselves. I only want to help educate people and challenge them to question the narrative that keeps us unable to change our living conditions. One of the things I would like to challenge is this tendency to otherise people who disagree with us. Its okay for people to have disagreements and lively debates to help each other see and educate. But if you’re not used to it it can be stressful and cause people to lash out, blame and name call. So I’m sorry if this has caused you stress. I have discussions like this all the time, and you might not really be used to it, or feel like I’m trying to make you look stupid with my response, which is why you retaliate by calling me idiotic. I’m not trying to do that.

Moving on from your subjective impression of my response, there are several things that I feel need to be addressed. One is your tendency to hate and blame “humanity” as if there aren’t incentive structures built into our political economic system. For one, capitalism is a system of forced competition, it pits people against each other, from the bottom to the top of the class hierarchy. This can cause people to behave in extremely self interested ways, when modern anthropology has demonstrated that we are innately social creatures, who are creative in nature. This idea that humans behave in self interested ways without any encouragement by the system that we need to interact with in order to live, is the result of alienation caused by capitalist social relations. This is a topic of incredible complexity and I don’t trust that you are acting in good faith in this discussion, however of you would like me to explain more I would be happy to. But to put it succinctly, misanthropy is no substitute for history.

Secondly, slavery is one form of production, feudal serfdom is another, capitalist exploitation is another, and socialism is yet another. The engine of all human history is our historical mode of production, which generates classes of humans that exist in conflict with one another. Markets are not capitalism. Mercantilism certainly predates capitalist primitive accumulation by hundreds of years, but mercantilism is not capitalism even if it served as a historical precursor. Markets do not create new value, value is created under capitalism when capitalists pay workers less to produce goods than what they can sell it for in a marketplace. Markets can exist in transitional stage socialism, and probably will, for a time at least. But the means of production will be controlled democratically by the workers, not individual capitalists. The thing that made capitalism historically progressive is that it socialized production. Rather than a single craftsman making something to sell on a market, capitalism industrialized the economy, breaking each step of the production process down so that many workers are used to mass produce one part or step in the production process. However the value of this production process is privately owned. This is an inherent contradiction. Socialism will also socialize production, but it will socialize the fruits of that production for common enrichment. This contradiction is what makes capitalism extremely wasteful and inefficient, despite it being more efficient than feudal forms of productive tithing, which was individual producers giving goods to their nobles. Please look up “anarchy in production” if you want to learn more.

Also capitalism isn’t able to meet human needs, it can only generate profit. If cancer medicine can be sold to some rich lady’s cat then it will be, whereas under socialism it would go to the people who actually need it, so that they can continue to be productive. Also a great deal of productive labor is unpaid – capitalist production would never be able to reimburse people for housework, despite it being a necessity for workers to remain healthy and continue to produce goods at their job. And before you say it, anthropologists and sociologists such as Silvia Federici have shown that at various historic times, housework was compensated for, just not necessarily with money (which is a stand in for value and merely allows for the slight of hand that makes these toxic social relations inherent to capitalism practically invisible to the individuated, alienated worker.)

And wrt the Soviet Union, if you would like to debate the conditions which created black markets, then I urge you to sharpen your pencil as I have studied the history of the fSU and other socialist experiments in great detail. Im not a youtube socialist, i have a decade of organizing experience and education, and surround myself with others who make that seem meagre. So don’t think you are going to be able to get away with flattening an entire 70 year history of a dynamic, productive albeit deeply flawed attempt at socialist productive social relations, with some hand waving. If anyone is guilty of magical thinking in this regards it is you, I’m afraid.

But please limit our discussion to one topic at a time, as pursuing too many threads will not resolve some of the misunderstandings you have about historical production and socialist experiments in the 20th century. A big reason I study these movements is to understand what mistakes were made, when and why, and who was partly responsible. Indeed I am not without criticisms of the fSU and many 20th century experiments, but I’m not satisfied to just take the word of the people who benefit most from this tragically unjust system, as you seem to be. I have more curiosity and discipline than that. I hope you can be persuaded to take it upon yourself to try to become educated in these matters, or at least be open to the actual history in all its complexity and contradiction, and not just the cliff notes version furnished by wealthy elites and their toadies in the media. Also please limit the insults. I won’t be goaded, you will not get off easy. I haven’t insulted you as I have no beef with you, I have beef with the system and the fact that you defend it is illustrative of your confusion, which is not your fault but the fault of centuries of concerted effort to obscure these relations and demonize the resources you might access to try and understand them better.

Then you have to join in the fight for those things and educate yourself. This world is not getting better, and the reason for that is the productive political economic system in which we live.

I have the same values and I am a Marxist communist. That means I work for political struggle with the systems that oppress and exploit to for improving conditions for all, and also work to try and educate workers about the class dynamics of this struggle, and the revolutionary potential of the working class.