philosophy

in light of supreme Court decision

The philosophy and psychology of why people have more of a problem with "preachiness" or "stridency" than they do with genocide.

This essay's also of interest to anyone learning more about double consciousness or the costs of autistic masking.

A modest first step will be to recognise that the eyeroll heuristic is deeply unreliable. The fact that some new norm strikes us as annoying, or that those advancing it strike us as self-righteous, preachy or otherwise offputting, tells us nothing about whether the norm is an improvement or not, whether it represents moral progress or moral backslide. The negative-experience of affective friction caused by the new norm isn’t evidence that the norm itself is bad or that we shouldn’t adopt it. Reactions involving awkwardness, irritation, even resentment are precisely what we should expect even in cases where old, unjust norms are being replaced with new, fairer ones. These feelings have their roots in norm psychology. And though they are very much a reflection of the genuine challenges of adapting to new and changing social environments, they are not sensitive to the merits of moral arguments or the moral value of different social norms. Far from it: our norm psychology helps us track and adapt to whatever norms happen to structure the social interactions in our communities and cultures. And, crucially, it does this regardless of whether those norms and conventions are just or unjust, harmful or beneficial, serious or silly.

i was going to quote the article text below but didn't want to deal with formatting. the sections 'becoming as ceaseless unrest' and 'becoming as quiescent result' in particular reminded me of Spiral Energy from Guren Lagann

edit: somehow didn't include the real URL originally, i swear i copy/pasted it in the first time... should be fixed now :(

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/cons-logic/ch03.htm

I think this is the passage he's highlighting:

“It will always remain a matter for astonishment how the Kantian philosophy knew that relation of thought to sensuous existence, where it halted, for a merely relative relation of bare appearance, and fully acknowledged and asserted a higher unity of the two in the Idea in general, and, for example, in the idea of an intuitive understanding; but yet stopped dead at this relative relation and at the assertion that the Notion is and remains utterly separated from reality;—so that it affirmed as truth what it pronounced to be finite knowledge, and declared to be superfluous, improper, and figments of thought that which it recognised as truth, and of which it established the definite notion” (26)

In logic, the Idea “becomes the creator of Nature.” (26)

Are most people here epiphenomenalists? Physicalists?

He was controversial, but he was in my opinion one of the best all-around living philosophers. He was enormously influential on my own thinking, as well as kind and patient every time I met him. Enormously influential, and a big loss to the discipline.

There is no philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage was taken on board without examination.

You play as Marx

A new humanity, a new seeing, a new thinking, a new loving: this is the promise of acid communism

My research focuses on panpsychism, neutral monism and liberal conceptions of physicalism (according to which the physical sciences reveal the structure, but not the full nature, of the physical). I am interested in how such views can respond to problems in philosophy of mind (such as the hard problem of consciousness and the problem of mental causation) and metaphysics more generally, especially the metaphysics of causation.

I’m also interested in Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory. This is one of the leading fundamental theories of consciousness in neuroscience, and it entails a form of panpsychism.

Bro he was going to give you the cake, no need to be so stabby

Credit: https://www.existentialcomics.com/

Credit: https://www.existentialcomics.com/

TL;DR: It’s good for:

• Questioning religion
• Coining concepts
• A jobs program for failed writers and mathematicians/scientists

Hans-Georg Moeller: My research focuses on Chinese and Comparative Philosophy (specifically Daoism) and on Social and Political Thought (specifically Social Systems Theory).

Google Scholar

He has a YouTube series on the history of media theory.

Maybe the last 500 years of Atlanticist colonialism has something to do with it.
And also maybe the CIA: Imperialist Propaganda and the Ideology of the Western Left Intelligentsia: From Anticommunism and Identity Politics to Democratic Illusions and Fascism

In this regard, the Frankfurt School under Horkheimer played a foundational role in the establishment of what is known as Western Marxism, and more specifically Cultural Marxism. Figures like Horkheimer and his lifelong collaborator Theodor Adorno not only rejected actually existing socialism, but they directly identified it with fascism by benightedly relying—very much like French theory—on the ideological category of totalitarianism. Embracing a highly intellectualized and melodramatic version of what would later become known as TINA (“There Is No Alternative”), they focused on the realm of bourgeois art and culture as perhaps the only potential site of salvation. This is because thinkers like Adorno and Horkheimer, with a few exceptions, were largely idealist in their theoretical practice: if meaningful social change was foreclosed in the practical world, deliverance was to be sought in the geistig—meaning intellectual and spiritual—realm of novel thought-forms and innovative bourgeois culture.

[…]

Finally, the evolution of the Frankfurt School into its second (Jürgen Habermas) and third generations (Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, and so on) did not alter in the least its anticommunist orientation. On the contrary, Habermas explicitly claimed that state socialism was bankrupt and argued for creating space within the capitalist system and its purportedly democratic institutions for the ideal of an inclusive “procedure of discursive will-formation.” The neo-Habermasians of the third generation have continued this orientation.

So basically the trolley is in the same and the same amount of people are tied to the tracks, but the lever has a wasp's nest built on it so you qould get stung id you pull the lever

so i've wondered for a long time about how leftists use the terms 'materialism' and 'idealism', and how it relates to those terms usage in broader philosophical discussions on epistemology.

i may be incorrect in my interpretations, but it seems to me that leftist uses of the term (even its usage in some of marx's writings, from what little i've read) are such that 'materialist' means 'understands that the material conditions of a society drive its development via dialectical processes' and that 'idealist' means 'focuses on artificial/socially constructed ethical or legal principles (such as 'freedom' and 'democracy' and 'rule of law' and 'free speech') rather than material conditions of society like quality of life, literacy, etc.'.

the broader philosophical definitions of these terms are slightly different, however.

epistemologically, a 'materialist' is someone who believes that we can (and do) directly apprehend the mind-independent external world. this is contrary to epistemological idealism, which argues that we can only ever know the contents of our own mind. we can use these contents to infer things about 'true reality' but can never truly verify them.

ontologically, materialism argues that all of reality can be described in terms of physics, or that all facts of the universe are causally dependent on or reducible to physical processes. this is again opposed to Idealism, which argues that existence is in some way irreducibly and fundamentally mental.

so my first question for you beautiful posters is, are my perceptions of these definitions and usages overall correct or incorrect? How exactly does Marx (or Engels or any other marxist philosopher) use these terms, and do they intend an epistemological, ontological, or other interpretation? am i missing something fundamental about the philosophical definitions or about the colloquial/leftist usage? What's the deal with that 'philosophy is pointless, the goal is to change the world' quote, is understanding reality not a benefit for efficiently manipulating it?

My next point, is that it seems to me like Marx and Engel's Dialectical Materialism, or at least the political program and methods of Socialism/Communism, are not necessarily at all incompatible with either philosophical Idealism or Materialism, in terms of epistemology or ontology. Neither is necessarily incompatible with basic empiricism, but is rather a difference in interpretation of what our empirical knowledge is. Whether reality is fundamentally mental or matter, it consists of opposing energies and dialectical processes that play out in our experience with the extrinsic appearance of physical matter. Whether the world is in the mind or 'really out there', our experiences of it are the same.

A bit ago i stumbled across this article that seemed to be making a similar point, a point i've never really seen made by anyone else before. I haven't read past the abstract yet, and It seems like someone random person's college dissertation or thesis or something so I'm probably not well read enough to interpret this without context, so i was wondering if anyone had seen any similar discourse? What would Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, or Mao say about this line of thought? is it a heresy against socialism, a useless detour into pointless philosophical questions that serve no practical purpose for the revolution, or is it something potentially useful in framing Marxism's relationship to epistemology and ontology?