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.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4842538

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4840505

*Forgive any formatting as I'm on mobile.

As I read in themes, I'm currently focusing on philosophy to try and understand it, see where I fit in the world and also reconstruct my own atheist/nihilistic worldview.

I just got done with Existentialist Cafe and got a really nice overview of all the main players in the Existentialist camp but want to finally take the leap into nihilism and absurdism proper. I've read The Stranger and Myth of Sisyphus and like Camus a lot so far but also wanna tackle Satre, Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty eventually but wonder if I need to read Husserl and specifically Heidegger and Nietzche since they are controversial because of their politics. Would I be able to get away with just reading synopses of their work? I do currently have Being and Time in my list of books to get.

Also, aside from Nietzche, who else should I read regarding nihilism? I'm currently working through The Trouble with Being Born by Cioran and wanna find some more by him but also have The Antidote by Burkeman and Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Ligotti in my backlog. I did read The Book by Alan Watts the other day and though it felt like reading my stoned friend's wild ramblings on society and how we exist in it, some coherent stuff did come through. But I don't know if it was what I was after. I did appreciate it for introducing me to some concepts like ego and self but maybe I should have saved it for another day?

Sidenote but I'm planning on moving back and force between philosophy and socialist theory so socialist philosphers are also welcome. Generally I'm open to all suggestions.

Thanks in advance!

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.

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.

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.

Once upon a time there were some guys who watched tv like ALL the time.

One day one of them went outside.

He was like, "Yo guys, you should go outside, check it out" but his mates were like "nah"

First, apologies if this should go in a different community, it just seemed like this probably made the most sense-mods please move it if it should be someone else.

So I've been seeing my new therapist for a couple of months now, and overall I do like him/seems like a good fit. He recently asked if I had ever done meditation/mindfulness etc, as he wanted to do more than just being 99% similar to a friend you would just air your greivances/problems/thoughts out loud which sometimes therapy feels like, which I also like as I do appreciate actually tactics/methods of improvement and such.

Anyways, he sent me a free trial of Waking Up, which unbeknown to me is created by Sam Harris. Like most here, I am not a fan of him at all, but I figured I'd at least check out the app. There's a 28 day "intro" course which is basically teaching you the principles of meditation/mindfulness, and I'm about halfway through and so far I would say I've benefited from it. I mentioned my concerns to my therapist, who understood my concerns (I know my therapist is pro palestine based on my ramblings/rants about the situation, so he's not a full blown Sam Harris fan/neoliberal etc) and he suggested that as long as it seems to be working for me I should stick with it, and did point out that if there is any legitimate background/knowledge that Sam Harris does know it would be meditation more so than his fraudulent neuroscience/political activities/"expertise".

I've personally kind of for now been like "as long as one of his lessons doesn't obviously show his flawed thinking/views outside of meditation I'll stick with it for now" since I have no idea if there's better resources/alternatives out there, but does anyone have thoughts/suggestions of better resources/apps and what not?

Thanks!

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Lately I’m running into more and more situations where I am forced to patronize a private company in the course of doing a transaction with my government. For example, a government office stops accepting cash payment for something (e.g. a public parking permit). Residents cannot pay for the permit unless they enter the marketplace and do business with a private bank. From there, the bank might force you to have a mobile phone (yes, this is common in Europe for example).

Example 2:

Some gov offices require the general public to call them or email them because they no longer have an open office that can be visited in person. Of course calling means subscribing to phone service (payphones no longer exist). To send an email, I can theoretically connect a laptop to a library network and use my own mail server to send it, but most gov offices block email that comes from IP that Google/SpamHaus/whoever does not approve, thus forcing you to subscribe to a private sector service in order to do a public transaction. At the same time, snail-mail is increasingly under threat & fax is already ½ dead.

Example 3:

A public university in Denmark refuses access to some parts of the school’s information systems unless you provide a GSM number so they can do a 2FA SMS. If a student opposes connecting to GSM networks due to the huge attack surface and privacy risks, they are simply excluded from systems with that limitation & their right to a public education is hindered. The school library e-books are being bogarted by Cloudflare’s walled garden, where a private company restricts access to the books based on factors like your IP address & browser.

Example 4:

Twitter decides who may microblog to their public representatives.

So where are my people?

So, I’m bothered by this because most private companies demonstrate untrustworthyness & incompetence. I think I should be able to disconnect and access all public services with minimal reliance on the private sector. IMO the lack of that option is injustice. There is an immeasurably huge amount of garbage tech on the web subjecting people to CAPTCHAs, intrusive ads, dysfunctional javascript, dark patterns, etc. Society has proven inability to counter that and it will keep getting worse. I think the ONLY real fix is to have a right to be offline. The power to say:

*“the gov wants to push this broken reCAPTCHA that forces me to feed a surveillance capitalist

no thanks. Give me an offline private-sector-free way to do this transaction”*

There is substantial chatter in the #fedi about all the shit tech being pushed on us & countless little tricks and hacks to try to sidestep it. But there is almost no chatter about the real high-level solution which would encompass two rights:

1. a right to be free from the private sector marketplace; and
2. the right to be offline

Of course there could only be very recent philosophers who would think of the right to be offline. But I wonder if any philosophers in history have published anything influential as far as the right to not be forced into the private sector marketplace. By that, I don’t mean anti-capitalism (of course that’s well covered).. but I mean given the premise is that you’re trapped inside a capitalist system, there would likely be bodies of philosophy aligned with rights/powers to boycott.

(update) The famous Leary quote “Turn on, tune in, drop out” seems to be kind of consistent in an abstract way. Not necessarily as far as the ideology but in inspiring action.